Departure (18 page)

“Human nature.”

“Exactly. The downside of employing thieves is—”

“They steal.”

“Precisely. The loot in this case was the most valuable object in the history of the world. The thieves we'd hired never showed up at the meeting point, and a week later, nations around the world announced that they had developed their own immortality therapy. Chaos ensued. Nations had long seen the Titan Foundation as the greatest threat to their continued existence. When Atlantis opened, they thought it would eventually become the first global nation-state, reducing all other governments to local authorities. They were probably right. They saw all the Titan Marvels, including Q-Net, Podway, and especially immortality, as eroding their ability to maintain power over their populations. And now they held out immortality to their citizenry, with different nations defining varying criteria for eligibility. Where they expected a new wave of nationalism and loyalty, anarchy erupted. Some populations begged for immortality to be made widely available; others demanded that it be permanently banned. Everyone blamed the Titans for the upheaval. Millions died in the unrest, including the great love of my life. Grayson Shaw died of complications of liver failure three weeks after the chaos began. The Titans convened, and we searched for an answer. We announced to the world that we would provide a solution, asked them to believe and have faith, promised that help was on the way. To some extent, we did feel responsible. But we couldn't have predicted what happened next: a pandemic.”

“Pandemic? How?”

“A mutation. The immortality therapy Sabrina created changed somehow. The therapy uses a retrovirus to alter the genes that control aging. That retrovirus mutated in the wild, or maybe someone altered it, by accident or on purpose. We figure private labs and government facilities were doing a lot of work on the virus in the weeks after it was stolen. This mutated retrovirus was deadly. Instead of turning off the genes that control aging, it sent them into overdrive, causing a cascade of rapid aging. It was almost like the victims had a severe case of progeria, with adult onset. Those infected died quickly, some within hours, some in days, in a few weeks in rare cases.

“The casualty reports started coming in the day after our big announcement of a solution. It was a trickle at first, nothing that even made major news outlets. A couple of people died in Europe, four in America, half a dozen in Japan. Then it exploded around the world. People were dying in droves, all after aging rapidly.

“Sabrina was terrified. We all were. She worked day and night, pushing herself to the brink. Ten days after the first cases, half the entire human population was dead.”

“How could it spread so quickly?”

“That was the question. What we discovered far too late was that the retrovirus could exist benignly in virtually any animal host. Every animal on earth is a host for countless viruses. Viruses exist to replicate, to spread their DNA, so they actually don't want to harm their host; they want to exist undetected, replicating. And that's exactly what this virus did. It was everywhere. Birds, fish, land animals, they were all carriers, and none of them were harmed . . . except for humans. We were the only host in which the virus caused death, but it didn't harm humans at first. It lay dormant for days, then struck at once, quickly, killing without warning. I remember the horror on the day we learned that the entire human population was already infected, that there was no chance of containment or stopping the outbreak.”

My mind flashes back to the bodies I saw in the tents outside. The faces. Now I understand why I didn't recognize them. I'd seen those people before, at the crash site, but they looked much younger then. It's like they had aged decades during my trip to Stonehenge and back.

“The passengers from my flight, they're infected, too.”

“Yes. The virus is airborne. You were all exposed the second you crash-landed.”

“The virus still exists? Seventy-six years after the outbreak?”

“Eradicating it is impossible. It's everywhere. We'd have to treat every animal on Earth. That's impossible.”

I turn the revelation over in my head, trying to understand the implications. And I wonder, what will happen to me? Will I suffer the same fate as the bodies out there? My doppelgänger continues on before I get a chance to ask.

“The virus, however, was about to become the least of our problems. Everyone thought the outbreak was the Titans' solution: killing the population. Governments launched their dying armies against us, hoping we would capitulate and turn over a cure. We were immune to the condition, presumably because we had been given the pure form of the therapy, and that sealed the case against us. They killed sixty-two of us in the Titan War. We went into hiding, but we didn't have to hide long. Forty days after the first cases, every person on the face of the planet—except for the remaining thirty-eight Titans—was dead.”

The graffiti in London, at Titan Hall—it all makes sense now. Every person on the planet dead? The magnitude of the revelation is overwhelming. In the cramped conference room, I sit stunned.

My words come out a whisper. “What do you want from us?”

“Your help. For the last seventy-six years, I and the remaining Titans have dedicated every waking hour to bringing your plane here. You and the rest of the passengers of Flight 305 are humanity's only chance for survival.”

NO PRESSURE. JUST THE HUMAN RACE'S ONLY CHANCE
at survival. For the last six days, I've had my hands full just trying to keep a hundred people alive, and it looks like I've failed at that. I ask Nicholas the obvious question: “What does that mean?”

“As I said, the retrovirus that triggers rapid aging is ubiquitous on the planet. We have no hope of eradicating it, but there is a solution: a vaccine.”

“You have a vaccine?”

“Sabrina, for all her faults, is sublimely intelligent. Within a year of the outbreak she had created a vaccine she thought was viable, though all she had to go on were computer models.”

It doesn't make sense. The Titans are immune to the virus, and everyone is dead. What good is a vaccine? The answer seems just out of reach, but Nicholas speaks before I can, as if he's reading my mind.

“A vaccine is our only chance of survival. We can't eliminate the virus from the environment—we can only vaccinate the remaining humans who haven't been exposed.”

“Wait—I thought you said everyone on the planet except for the Titans died.”

“Everyone
on the planet
did die.”

The genius of the plan hits me like a gust of cold air. “The orbital colony.”

“Exactly. For the last seventy-six years the five thousand inhabitants of Titan Alpha have been waiting for the day when they can return home and reclaim Earth. The children up there right now are the second generation who've been born looking not up at the stars but down at the ground, at a land they've never set foot on, a new frontier they've been told will someday be their home, as it was their ancestors'.”

“Incredible.”

“Those five thousand colonists are humanity's last chance to repopulate the planet.”

I shake my head, trying to put it together. “Then I don't understand why we're here. You have them. You have a vaccine.”

“A vaccine we weren't one hundred percent sure would work. Imagine the colonists' position. They have three life rafts—three vessels on which to send people down. But who do you choose? We felt the vaccine would be effective, but we weren't certain. They asked us what our backup plan was, if the vaccine didn't work for the people sent down on the first two rafts. What if we had only one raft left? What then?”

“You couldn't risk it at that point.”

“That's right. We'd have to get more trial subjects somehow.”

“Interesting.”
Trial subjects
. I turn the words over in my mind, afraid of what he'll say next.

“The question became, if the worst happened, how could we get human test subjects who hadn't been exposed to the Titan Virus? As I said, Sabrina survived the Titan War, and so did Yul. Their two minds were the keys to our plan, in our time and yours. Yul devised a solution that we all thought was crazy. To us the exercise was academic, an effort to show the colonists we'd exhausted all alternatives, rational and irrational.”

“Q-net.”

“He told you?”

“Only that he had received messages claiming to be from the future.”

“It took our Yul three years to create a modified version of the Q-net that could communicate with the past. When it worked, we were all shocked. The first moment he could possibly contact was 2015, just before your flight, when the first Q-net prototype became operational. In the course of our Yul's research, he had determined that altering the quantum states of the particles in the past would actually create a copy of our universe. He theorized that after the moment of contact, there would be two timelines: yours, in which the future after 2015 is uncertain, and ours, where everything's already happened up to 2147, where we are right now. That created a moral dilemma for us, which I'll get to in a minute. The next part of Yul's plan was a quantum experiment on a much larger scale. Yul thought that with enough power, he could dilate the existing link between our universes, making it big enough for something to pass through.”

“Big enough for, say, a 777.”

“Exactly that size. In fact, that was about all we could manage with the electricity generated from the Gibraltar Dam. But it's all we needed. Yul believed he could build the endpoints for this quantum bridge within a few years, but it proved to be far more complicated than the Q-net alterations. It took him sixty-seven years. When we were ready, Yul sent the schematic for the device back to himself in 2015. He also sent directions for
your
Yul to pass to Sabrina.”

I see it now, the last piece, the answer to why some of the passengers died of old age, and others didn't. “The vaccine.”

“Correct. We knew who would be on Flight 305, and we told the Sabrina in 2015 that she needed to carry out a series of experiments outside the lab, making sure that the vaccine reached the passengers well before they boarded the flight. We assured her it was related to her progeria research, and it probably looked that way to her. There were two groups: control and experimental.”

This seems like as good a time as any to ask whether I'm doomed to die of a plague in which I age rapidly and perish in days. “Am I . . . which group—”

“Relax. You were in the experimental group. You received the vaccine before takeoff,” my clone says casually, as if I'm worrying about a nagging cold.

“How exactly—”

“Did we administer it? You really want to know?”

“Actually, no.” That would probably just freak me out.

“After the experimental group was vaccinated, the last piece was for Yul and Sabrina to board the plane with Yul's device. That brings you up to the point right before things went very wrong during the flight.”

“Very wrong, as in a plane crash.”

“That was unintended, and extremely unfortunate. It was however, only a consequence of a larger problem. As I mentioned, the Titans had a moral dilemma. In creating your separate timeline, we had created a world destined to repeat our mistake, in which every person on Earth, save for our thirty-eight, would perish.

“Oliver and I still felt responsible for the fall of our world, and we couldn't bear to see your world suffer the consequences of another of our well-intentioned experiments. We arrived at a very simple solution. Your plane would land at Heathrow, where we'd evaluate the passengers. If the vaccine worked, roughly half, a hundred and twenty or so in the experimental group, would live. That would tell us if we had a viable vaccine. We confirmed that our vaccine works from survivor autopsies yesterday. For Oliver and me, the next step was clear: do nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Our plan was simple: let your plane and the survivors remain here in 2147. In your world, in 2015, Flight 305 would simply vanish over the Atlantic, never to be found. And that disappearance would save the lives of over nine billion people roughly fifty-six years later.”

It never occurred to me. “Because of who was on the plane. Sabrina, Yul, and me.”

“And Grayson. We had an incredible opportunity: a flight where the key people involved in the Titan Foundation and in our great mistake could be taken out of your timeline, ensuring the catastrophe never happened. To us, the loss of two hundred and thirty-four lives
from your world for the safety of billions was a simple choice. There was only one problem: Yul and Sabrina.”

“I don't follow.”

“They wouldn't hear of allowing the passengers of Flight 305 to stay. They argued that removing those two hundred and thirty-four passengers from your timeline could have unintended consequences, create a far worse catastrophe that might strike the next year, or in ten years. Philosophically, they believe that changing another universe is a dangerous game. If the quantum bridge between our worlds remained open, someone from your universe might eventually find it and make their way here when they needed something from us, which could be perilous. They advocated noninterference, reasoning that if interfering with another universe was a viable survival tactic, we would have already been visited many, many times.”

“Fascinating. You compromised, then?”

“You've had some experience with Yul and Sabrina by now?”

“A bit.”

“Then you know that compromise isn't their style. Oliver and I had no choice. Yul and Sabrina controlled the science, which was the key to the plan. Our only option was to sit and wait. Yul designed the quantum bridge so that it could be reset, removing all traces of Flight 305 from our timeline and restoring it to yours. In 2015 it would be as though our experiment never happened, as if your plane had stayed on course and landed at Heathrow as planned. He intended to reset the bridge right after we had verified the vaccine's efficacy here in 2147.

“Oliver and I couldn't allow that to happen. Shortly after Flight 305 crossed the bridge into our time, we struck. We made our move here at Heathrow, attempting to take control of the quantum device on our end. The Titans were split. About twenty were loyal to us, and believed in trying to save both worlds. Yul and Sabrina's group made up the other eighteen. Yul tried to reset the quantum bridge when he found out we were trying to take control.”

“That caused the turbulence, the crash.”

“Yes. After that, we had no idea where your plane was, or if it had even survived at all. We thought maybe it had broken up in midair or
crashed in the Atlantic or possibly on land. But that wasn't our biggest challenge at that point. We were fighting for our lives.”

“That's what this has been about: the airships, the battles. It's a Titan civil war.”

“Yes. In the battle here at Heathrow, half of the remaining Titans perished, including our Yul and Sabrina. The surviving members of their faction began frantically searching for your plane. It's their only play.”

“I don't follow.”

“Both factions have been doing their best to find and recover the passengers—to determine whether the vaccine is viable so we can bring the colonists home. But their faction has been looking for two passengers in particular: Yul and Sabrina.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Yul truly is brilliant. And somewhat untrusting, as perhaps you've seen.”

“I have.”

“He designed the quantum bridge so that only he could operate it, hoping to ensure his survival. The other faction escaped with the device, which was very unfortunate. They've taken it back to Titan City, at the center of the Gibraltar Dam. Their plan was to capture the Yul from your timeline, so he can operate the device, resetting the quantum bridge. And they need Sabrina for a futile experiment.”

“Yul and Sabrina were with us, outside Titan Hall, at the battle.”

“Yes. The others took them. Along with a woman.”

My mind flashes to the scene in the burning green park, to Harper falling after the shot. “Harper Lane.”

“Yes. The biographer. So this is it, Nick. Right now Yul is in Titan City, working on the quantum bridge, trying to figure out his future self's notes—seventy years of research, crammed into a few days. If he's successful, and the bridge is reset, you and everyone from Flight 305 will disappear from this world and return to your timeline with no memory of the crash, as if none of this ever happened. In the coming days you'll establish the Titan Foundation with Oliver Norton Shaw, and in fifty-six years you'll watch the entire rest of the planet die. That's what the other faction wants. That's what the Yul and
Sabrina of my time wanted to do. And I believe their younger selves will agree to finish their work.”

Nicholas stands and moves away from me, giving me space. This is what he's been working up to.

“Here's the decision you have to make, Nick. If we capture the device and stop Yul from resetting the quantum bridge, you'll be trapped here in 2147. You and the other passengers of Flight 305 will never go home. But the people you left, everyone in 2015, they'll have a chance of surviving.” He holds my eyes. “What's your call, Nick? Are you in?”

“If I say no?”

Nicholas shakes his head. “Then you walk out of here unharmed.”

What a call to make. My decision will determine the fate of my world and his. Nicholas needs me. He can't take Titan City alone, and perhaps a few of the other passengers will follow me. The whole thing turns on what I say next.

Faces flash through my mind, the people I might never see again in 2015: my sixty-one-year-old mother, smiling up at me in her light-filled sewing room; my sister, holding her firstborn child, a daughter named Naomi; my three college roommates, drinking and laughing in the ski lodge we rent every year in Park City. I'll never see any of them again. They'll attend my funeral and move on with their lives. But their children will have a chance to grow up, and so will their children's children. Then I see other faces: the passengers of Flight 305 I've come to know in the past week. But there's really only one face for me in this group, one person I can't get out of my mind.

I wonder, if we're successful—if we can stop Yul from sending us back to 2015—what my life will be like here in 2147, in this desolate world, alone. Or maybe not alone. Either way, I'll be starting over. In some sense, that's what I wanted to do before Flight 305 took off six days ago, to try something new. Maybe this is fate, a blessing somehow. Maybe, through this bizarre set of circumstances, I've wound up in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Even if the right time is 2147.

Nicholas waits by the long window, glancing from me to Oliver and Grayson Shaw, no doubt having a similar conversation on
the other side of the window. Despite the enormity of the stakes, he seems completely calm.

“I think you already know what I'm going to say, don't you?”

“I do,” he says. “I know what I would say. That's why I was so glad when you showed up. There are only twelve of us left, Nick, and we could really use your help. We're about to make an assault on the most advanced, secure structure on Earth. The Titans built the Gibraltar Dam to last an eternity and the city at its center to endure just as long. Bringing it down is our last chance to save both our worlds.”