Lost in Time(87)

*

That afternoon, Adeline sent the first emails that would begin the negotiations with governments around the world to license Absolom.

*

The next day, Adeline and Nora were the only two of the Absolom Six who came to work. She supposed it made sense: Sam and Elliott were dealing with their own troubles. Hiro was off gambling—at a private game operating outside the lockdowns. Adeline wondered if the stress of yesterday’s discussion had set him off or if perhaps he simply didn’t see the point in working on Absolom anymore—he probably sensed that the work was mostly over. Constance was at home, receiving a treatment.

Adeline looked up when Nora walked into her office.

“I know what you need.”

“What?” Adeline asked.

“Distraction.”

“You’ve got that right.”

“My house. Tonight. Seven o’clock.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“It’s a surprise.”

An hour after Nora left, Adeline got a text on her phone. It was from the Tesseract server in her home. It was nondescript, only two words: NEW MATCH

Adeline hadn’t expected a match so soon. She was still gathering data sources. Tesseract was currently only operating on publicly available images and videos.

She raced home, to the server room with its double-locked door, and sat at the terminal, where she launched the results viewer application.

She was unprepared for what she saw.

The image on the screen was Adeline’s face, in black and white. She looked older than she did now, but not much older. She was standing on a sidewalk—what was left of it—wearing a thick black trench coat and a fur hat. Behind her was a crumbling ruin of a bombed-out building. Snow covered the street, and in the middle of it was a crashed Luftwaffe bomber plane.

The caption under the photo read:

Stalingrad

November 2nd, 1942





FIFTY-EIGHT


Adeline couldn’t get the image of herself standing in the street in the midst of the Battle of Stalingrad out of her mind.

Nora must have seen the stress on her face when she opened the door that night.

“What’s wrong?”

“Just… a lot on my mind.”

Nora nodded, probably assuming the anguish was associated with the Absolom decision Adeline had made.

Nora’s surprise, as it turned out, was an escape room—one that she had built in her garage from a plan she had found online (and items delivered to her home). It was a grand gesture, one that Adeline knew had taken a lot of time and effort. Nora had done it all for Adeline, to help take her mind off of the Absolom decision and the stress they were all going through.

It was such a Nora thing to do: kind and thoughtful and warm as a crackling fire on a fall night.

The escape room centered around a closed-door murder mystery with a ticking clock. The parallels to Adeline’s own life couldn’t have been more striking: the murder in her future was Nora’s, and Adeline, despite her investigations in the future and the past, could only see one possible killer: herself.

Worst of all, she didn’t know why in the world she would ever kill Nora Thomas. But no one else fit.

Unlike the escape room in Nora’s garage, the clues weren’t clear. Try as she might, Adeline couldn’t see any of the others as the killer. And she knew her father would have to be framed for it—if the future was to be preserved. Breaking causality would end the universe.

When they had escaped back into Nora’s home from the garage, Nora said, “You hated it.”

“I didn’t. It was a great idea. I’m just… distracted.”

“Too distracted to be distracted?”

Adeline laughed. “I guess so. That’s bad, isn’t it?”

“It is. You need a vacation.”

“Maybe.”

“They’re lifting the lockdowns. We’ll be able to travel soon.”

But Adeline couldn’t take a vacation. She needed to be in Palo Alto for what was going to happen next. She had lived through it once. She dreading it happening again.

*

A week later, Adeline got the first responses to her requests for virtual meetings with government officials in the US, China, and India. They were interested in Absolom, as she knew they would be.

*

That night, Adeline sensed a change in the air at her childhood home. Her younger counterpart didn’t look annoyed. She looked scared.

Her father moved through the house almost in a daze, as if in denial. Or maybe the stress of it had exhausted him that much.

Adeline reached out and pulled him into a hug. His arms felt lifeless hanging on her back.

In the sewing room, Adeline found her mother in the plush rocking chair, eyes half open.

In the weeks before, Adeline had clung to this time with her mother. What she saw now made her wish for the opposite: an end to her mother’s suffering. That was an inflection point she couldn’t appreciate in her younger years. But it hit her now like the force of a train.

Slowly, her arm shaking, her mother reached down and moved the rocker to a sitting position. Her voice came like a sheet of construction paper being crumpled up.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” Adeline whispered.

“Are you all right?”