All Our Wrong Todays(72)

The gist of it is, in the aftermath of the disaster on July 11, 1965, all seventeen survivors were quarantined in the same hospital—I know, so awkward—because there was a pretty legitimate fear they’d been mortally poisoned with a marrow-blackening dose of radiation. But they were all clean, radiation-free.

I’m not sure how to tell Lionel that everyone in that room, including him and Ursula and Jerome, would’ve been dead within a few months if I hadn’t altered the timeline. He’s obviously stacked a lot on the belief that his experiment should’ve transformed the world, but it’s divorced from the fact of their horrific deaths. Theirs was not a fifty-year love triangle. It was an unknown, long-buried secret on which statues to his greatness were erected. Literally—there’s a gigantic statue of Lionel Goettreider at the spot in San Francisco where his ashes were dispersed, holding a replica of the original Goettreider Engine that emits its own shimmering whorl.

Following everyone’s safe discharge from the hospital—Jerome’s arm was cleanly cauterized by the energy plume that seared it off—there was an inquest into the disaster. Overseen by the federal government, it was intensely political and fraught. In July 1965, the US ground war in Vietnam was only four months old and President Johnson was about to announce he was sending 125,000 troops over there, along with more than doubling the draft. He was heavily invested in the “space race” with Russia and achieving President Kennedy’s goal of landing astronauts on the moon by the end of the decade. The federal government needed a US population aflutter with wide-eyed wonder at American scientific know-how. If word got out that a minor experiment in an esoteric niche field of research had come within seconds of destroying half the continent, that would’ve been really, really bad for a man who was trying to hold the country together with his bare hands as it wobbled on the razor’s edge of a total freak-out. President Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act into law only a year before—hardly an uncontroversial move. A near cataclysm on American soil that would’ve made Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like a firecracker going off in an empty parking lot, particularly one funded by the US government itself, was not politically viable.

So, a deal was made. Everyone would shut the hell up about it, forever. Jerome was the wildest card in the deck, what with the amputated arm, but he had a bureaucrat’s soul, and a series of rapid career advancements kept him quiet. Plus, he knew it was what Ursula wanted. The other fourteen observers were likewise rewarded for their silence with a well-greased professional track. None of them paid income tax ever again.

And Lionel Goettreider was asked to leave the United States of America and never come back. He had immigrated to the US following the Second World War, as America trawled the planet’s ocean of scientific minds to draw all the best brains into its borders. Now he was tossed back out to sea.

Two days after the accident, Lionel snuck into the wrecked lab and salvaged the Engine, substituting it with a lookalike precursor model, fixed the previously undetected radiation surge that should’ve killed them all, and switched it on. He never turned it off again.

He was supposed to go back to Denmark but instead he went in the other direction, loaded the operating Engine onto a ship, and sailed with it from San Francisco to Hong Kong.

And there, in near total isolation, Lionel Goettreider invented the future.





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Lionel’s being all coy about why we’re going back to his warehouse in Chai Wan—I’m sure you’ve already figured it out, but I’m trying to lean into the whole suspense thing, so I’ll defer to his taste for drama.

We get stuck in traffic jammed by a prodemocracy demonstration, creeping forward at a pace that drives Wen to sputter a flurry of Cantonese expletives, the front windshield flecked with outraged spittle.

When Lionel moved to Hong Kong, he had a goal in mind. A goal so technologically advanced as to be absurd. There were countless innovations that had to happen to even get him to the point where he could create testable theoretical models of his goal, let alone construct an actual prototype to fail and improve and fail and improve and fail and improve, and no one else was equipped to do it because no one else had what he had: a working Goettreider Engine. A source of unlimited clean fuel to power anything he could build.

Obviously this Lionel Goettreider did not make his revolutionary power source available to the world at large. This Lionel didn’t have the incentive of assured martyrdom sweeping his future like a lighthouse beam as his body caved in on itself due to acute radiation poisoning from his own defective device. This Lionel was rescued from nobility by impotent resentment at the unfair hand dealt to him in his very moment of triumph. It was the vanity of genius I recognize so well from my father.

That was the really messed-up thing about being stuck in traffic with Lionel Goettreider—he reminded me a lot of my father. Not my dad from here, the dotty but warm and careful man who wilted in my mother’s shadow. My real father.

Once Lionel arrived in Hong Kong, he invented . . . everything. When he needed to alter the trajectory of global technology, he’d set up a shell company to quietly sell one of his inventions in exchange for cash, stock, and zero credit. Through his front companies, he developed secret, one-sided relationships with the titans of the manufacturing and technology industries. His work is everywhere in the modern world. It is the modern world. A ubiquitous thread in the fabric of civilization. He is the anonymous polymath wizard behind the curtain of everyday life.