Lost in Time(86)

“We should get the licensing fee up front,” Hiro said. “The Supreme Court will surely rule it cruel and unusual. I favor a no-return policy.”

Constance still had her eyes closed. She was wavering on the stool. Adeline thought she was going to pass out. Instead, she pitched forward, opened her mouth, and emptied the contents of her stomach on the metal table.





FIFTY-SEVEN


That night, when Adeline went to visit her mother, Sam opened the door.

“How did it go today?” he asked.

“Some of the ideas didn’t go over well.”

“What ideas?”

She motioned him to the study, pulled the pocket door closed behind them, and told him the plan for Absolom.

He began chewing his thumbnail. “In a million years, I wouldn’t have thought of that.”

“Well, what do you think of it?”

“I’m not sure. I guess life in exile is preferable to death.” He thought a moment. “Well, I guess that depends on the prisoner. But maybe that’s part of justice: they don’t get to choose their future.”

Adeline moved to the door, but Sam spoke again. “What did the others think?”

“The reactions were… mixed.”

In the living room, Adeline found her younger counterpart slouched on the sofa, earbuds in, staring at her phone. Adeline remembered those days. Her father had forbidden her from going out. He wanted the family to be together. She had thought it was ridiculous, that he was overreacting.

Ryan was building a LEGO robot on the dining table.

In the sewing room, Adeline found her mother sitting in a large light-blue recliner with her eyes closed. The chair was stained in a dozen places where milk and spit-up and other baby fluids had leaked on it from her and her brother.

If Adeline hadn’t been certain of the date, she might have thought her mother had already passed. Instead, she waited for her eyes to open, not daring to wake her.

“Hi,” her mother said, exhaling slowly.

“Hi.”

“Must have fallen asleep. I’m so tired all the time. In fact, I don’t think I can sew tonight.”

Adeline glanced over at the fabric printed with the photomosaic, the batting, and the backing. They had only finished one of the quilts.

“I’ll sew,” Adeline said. “You can read.”

Her mother smiled. It was a sad, reflective expression. “Too tired to read.”

That almost broke Adeline. But she held it together. “I’ll play an audiobook from my phone. And we’ll finish this together.”

As the story unfolded, Adeline sat at the sewing machine and knit the photos of her family together, and her mother sat back in the chair, listening, drifting in and out of sleep.

*

At home, Adeline sat on the couch, feeling more alone than she ever had.

She felt as if the present was slipping away. And the future was rushing forward like an asteroid about to strike her world.

She opened her email and found a cryptic message there from the company she had hired to build the software that searched historical photos, trying to find evidence that Absolom Two had been used before to alter the past.

TESSERACT is done. When should we install?

Adeline typed a quick reply:

ASAP

She tapped the calendar app and stared at the countdowns she had programmed: Charlie: 9 Days Mom: 14 Days Nora: 2,190 Days Dad: 2,256 Days The death dates were closing in.

*

The next day, a team came to Adeline’s house to install the Tesseract array.

At the office, the Absolom Six met in the lab, which had been cleaned since Constance’s accident.

“Where should we start?” Hiro said. “I’ll just say that I don’t have any new ideas.”

“I think we should vote on the idea presented,” Constance said. “I’ll start. I vote no.”

“This isn’t a democracy,” Elliott said. “It’s a company. A company that has made a very large investment in a product that seems to have one use—and it isn’t ours to use, only to offer to governments around the world. I think whether we make that offer should be Daniele’s decision. Her decision alone. It was her money. Frankly, she’s the only reason any of us are here. Or Absolom, for that matter. It was her idea in the first place.”

“I’ve thought about it some,” Sam said. “To be honest, I’m not really thinking clearly right now. I don’t know what the right answer is. What I do know is that I don’t want to vote. You can call that punting or whatever you like, but I just don’t want to make a big decision right now.”

“Then we should delay this,” Constance said.

“Well,” Elliott said, “that’s nice in theory, but what do we tell the eighty-three people working here? You’re laid off until we figure out what to do with our useless transporter box? We’ll call you back when we get in the mood to decide.”

Hiro spoke before the argument could escalate. “I don’t want to vote either. I took this job to get out of debt and because I liked the science. What happens with Absolom is your call, Dani.”

Adeline glanced at Nora, who was studying her hands, which were laid out flat on the table.

“Nora?” she prompted.

The woman spoke slowly, as if the words hurt coming out. “I think there are bad people in this world. People who can’t be rehabilitated. People who only know how to take from others. I want to live in a world where those people don’t exist, but we don’t live in that world yet. Whether it’s our place to do something about that, I don’t know. What I do know is that I don’t want to vote about this either.”