All Our Wrong Todays(95)
“Yeah,” she says, “that’s not what I meant by complicated.”
“Okay,” I say.
“I’m pregnant,” says Penny.
“Like with a baby?” I say.
“Yeah. Pregnant like with a baby.”
“It’s funny,” I say, “because I just single-handedly saved the space-time continuum, human civilization, and reality itself, and yet this is the best thing that’s happened all day.”
Penny stares out the window. The sun is already half swallowed by the horizon, the hot disk melting into the cool sea—going, going, gone.
“I should’ve been there when you found out,” I say.
“You were pretty busy saving the world.”
“Reality itself,” I say.
“Don’t let it go to your head,” she says. “Nobody outside of this room even knows it happened. In fact, all you really did was not screw up reality even more than you did last time. So, maybe let’s ease up on the time-traveling savior thing.”
“You know, in another reality I’m this, like, badass apocalyptic warrior.”
“Do you want to keep it?” she says.
“I’ve never wanted anything more,” I say.
“I kind of feel the same,” Penny says.
“Penny, I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too. And don’t say for what. Because, trust me, I doubted you to my core. I had some shitty, vengeful, dark thoughts about you. And it’s hard to wipe them all away and act like they never happened. But I’d like to try.”
“Me too,” I say.
I’m nearly done telling this story and I’m still nowhere near strong enough a writer to convey what it feels like to kiss the straight-up uncontested love of my life after fifty-one years, so I’ll try to keep it simple—it feels really good.
Here’s what Penny doesn’t say. What she’ll never say. What we’ll never discuss, not once, not ever. She doesn’t know exactly when we conceived our baby. We were newly infatuated and casual about the whens and wheres of our intimacy. It could’ve been one of two or three or four occasions. And it could’ve been that time with John. Genetically, it’s irrelevant. Psychologically, I have no idea. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s something wonderful that came out of something awful. Maybe that’s a self-serving way to frame it. Maybe I’m an asshole for even thinking that the fleeting, elusive moment of conception of something as momentous and everyday as the beginning of a human life could have any influence at all on who our child will be. Maybe I should just shut the hell up and enjoy it. Maybe I will.
135
This is how the future starts.
My dad will exhaustively explore the technical specifications of the Goettreider Engine and what he finds will blow his mind. Even though, you know, I already told him what it can do. The difference between his possibly psychotic son’s suspect delusions and the actual machine emitting zettajoules of clean energy will turn out to be unsurprisingly vast. My dad will feel we have a responsibility to announce it to the world as soon as possible, since it’s one of the great scientific breakthroughs of human history.
As a group, we will decide on a more judicious approach.
We will form a company. Me, Penny, Greta, my mom, and my dad will share 50.1 percent, so 10.02 percent each, and Lionel will take 49.9 percent, which will transfer to Emma the day Jerome dies. Even though Lionel will want nothing more than to assert his paternity, he will respect Ursula’s wishes that her husband never know the truth. At least not for sure.
Greta will argue that the world in which Lionel graciously made the Engine open-source technology for anyone with the wherewithal to build one is a world long gone. With corporate control and political corruption five decades more entrenched in global civilization, we will have to handle the introduction of this epochal technology with a lot more care than the other Lionel did on his deathbed back in 1965.
Greta’s been reading a lot since her previous company was taken from her due to her excess of self-entitled superiority and lack of business acumen, qualities she’s been working very hard to reverse. She’s particularly taken by a French philosopher named Paul Virilio, who writes about the Accident—the idea that every time you introduce a new technology, you also introduce the accident of that technology, so you have a responsibility to anticipate not just the good it can do but also the bad it can wreak, not just the glory but also the ruin.
I’ve mentioned this notion before, but where I come from it was otherwise attributed. Maybe no idea is ever lost. Maybe it just waits somewhere in the swirl for somebody else to think it.
Lionel’s warehouse is equipped to mass-produce Engines and we start doing that immediately. All the components are in place, but of course we don’t want any catastrophic malfunctions. They’ll have to be flawless right away. Fortunately, Lionel had a long time to perfect them.
My dad will use the manufacturing and testing period to write a book, his first since his much-maligned, pun-embellished time-travel primer—which he’ll be delighted to discover Lionel actually read, and they will spend many late nights caught up in arcane, impenetrable discussions about both the theoretical science and its practical applications. The book will be about Lionel, his life, his work, how the Engine came to be, and what it means for the world. He’ll leave out a few key personal details. We’d like to change the world without hurting anyone. It will be among the bestselling biographies ever published. There will be very few puns.