Adam's gaze turned frosty. “You need to develop the ability to think like your enemies, Will. If Arthur got the formula to reversing the ambrosia first, what would happen?”
“He’d have more children?” Will snorted. “Arthur's not the type to want more kids. He didn’t seem to want the one he had.”
Adam face tightened. “I agree, Will. Arthur would not take advantage of the approach himself. Do you suppose he’d make the knowledge public, allowing anyone who wanted the formula to take advantage of it?”
“Well, no, but…” Will stopped, thinking hard. “He wouldn’t let anyone use it, because he has those rules… unless he tricked them into taking it so that they’d get caught breaking a rule. He’d give it to someone thought a traitor, and let them break their oath without knowing it was possible, and then put them to death.”
“Much better,” Adam said, nodding with approval. “But that’s the easy part. What else might Arthur do with such a formula? You’re very, very close.”
Will thought further. And then it hit him. “He’d figure out a way to reverse the immortality, how to make that reversal permanent, so that his enemies would simply die off.”
“Exactly,” Adam whispered. “No need to let them commit the so-called crime of having children. Just reverse the immortality and let them die off slowly, painfully, withering away from old age. It’s what nearly happened to him, remember? And then, at the very end, he can gloat… or he can bribe them to be ever deeper on his side, as he gives them a gift that seemed forever lost. His power over such people would be even greater than it is now.”
Will shook his head. “I wish we’d gotten there before William and gotten the formula from Ambrose. But since we didn’t… I’m at least really happy that Arthur didn’t get it from Ambrose before he died.”
“I agree with your thinking there, Will,” Adam replied. “That's why I was the one who killed Ambrose.”
X
Dream
1787 A.D.
Will lost track of the heat of the day, the heavy wind that rolled through the forest clearing, warming the sweat on his back rather than cooling him. He didn’t hear the brief rustling of leaves before the dead wind calmed once more. He couldn’t hear anything other than Adam’s words reverberating within him, couldn’t feel anything other than pure rage against the man. Will roared, a scream of anguish, turned, and threw his fist at the nearest tree. The Energy-enhanced blow didn’t hurt him, but his fist was buried inside the trunk past his wrist.
Adam’s baffled voice reached him. “What on Earth are you doing, Will? Are you trying to call attention to yourself? That’s a pretty good way to do so.”
Will struggled, trying to pull his hand free without further damaging the tree. “Sorry, I’m a bit frustrated. It’s not every day that you learn your ally has killed a man who possessed information essential to your very existence. I’d like to think I’m taking it quite well.”
“Yes, very well,” Adam deadpanned, as Will yanked his hand from the trunk. The damage was so severe that the trunk cracked in half, and the upper half toppled toward the ground. “You’ve killed that poor tree. I’d hate to think of what you might do if you weren’t taking the news well. Would you, perhaps, tear every one of the trees in this grove out of the ground with your bare hands?”
Will snarled, grabbed the ten foot long section of tree, sat it on top of the lower section of the trunk, and dispatched nanos to hold the pieces together while he fed Energy into the joint, willing the tree trunk to reseal itself. “No, but I might kill you. Right after I fix this tree. It’s innocent, you know.”
“What’s the problem, Will?” Adam asked, watching Will’s efforts to reseal the tree with interest. “We just discussed the strategic issues with Arthur learning the secrets of ambrosia. He’ll never learn those secrets now. Why the anger?”
“You’re too quick kill to solve a problem, Adam,” Will snapped. “There are other ways to protect Ambrose’s secrets from Arthur. Your solution means that no one can learn those secrets. And that fact means two people very important to me might very well die—and if they die, so will I. So will Elizabeth.”
As he watched Adam’s face take on an interesting assortment of expressions, Will wondered when his trust would grow enough to share Hope’s real name. Or was that a bit of information as critical as the location of the Cavern?
“Look,” Adam said. “I don’t have any interest in you, Elizabeth, or anyone important to either of you, dying. But what you’re saying makes no sense. How is my killing of Ambrose—which hides his secrets from Arthur, which both of us agree is a good thing—how is that supposed to cause your death? Or Elizabeth’s?”
It was a fair question, and Will, knowing his own future and past, had never quite considered how he’d tell others about his origins. How he’d been born almost two hundred years into Adam’s future, trained in Energy and given a swarm of intelligent nanobots to command, and sent to the past to act as protector of the woman he’d marry when he was twenty-six years old. Yet if he and Hope didn’t figure out how to reverse the sterilization effects of the ambrosia, his children wouldn’t be born in this time cycle. They’d not be around to rescue Will from danger. Would others fill that role? He wasn’t sure. But without Josh (known in the future as Fil) and Angel, it wasn’t difficult to suspect they’d have trouble getting volunteers to travel in an untested time machine to rescue a pre-neophyte Will. Or send him back in time to rescue Hope from Arthur’s machinations and her likely death at his hands. She’d never leave the North Village, or find the ambrosia. Neither would he. And they’d all eventually cease to exist, because Hope had been protecting Will’s ancestors from death for centuries. If she wasn’t around, they’d die out as well.
So far, though, he was still here. So was Hope. He didn’t know yet if something had gone wrong, at least in the eyes of the future. Was this the sequence that had happened in every other time loop? Had Adam destroyed the village in the past, or had something happened to trigger him to do so this time? If they’d always gotten to Ambrose before Adam killed him off, in past cycles, were they already doomed? Would he live forever, watching the years tick by without seeing his children born when they were due? That would be his own form of hell on Earth. The ultimate punishment for failure.
Still, until he knew, he’d need to continue working on the assumption that every apparent failure was success in disguise. The future called for Adam to be a central figure, and Adam needed to trust the crazy story Will would need him to believe in order to play his part.
Will took a deep breath. “I know it doesn't make sense now, Adam. It will, though. At some point I’m going to ask you to do something for me, something for Elizabeth, something that will seem strange and impossible. And I can’t tell you now, not because I don’t trust you, but because you won’t believe me. You can’t believe me. Oh, your telepathy, your empathy… they'll tell you I’m stating the truth. Your mind will still scream out that I must be lying.”
Adam eyed him quizzically. “And now you’re making even less sense, Will. But you also seem to trust me. This request to help… I will most assuredly help you. And I’ll believe you. Why won't you tell me what it is? What could you possibly tell me that I wouldn’t believe? We’ve known each other for centuries, Will. We’ve teleported, read minds, flown. What could you possibly tell me that I wouldn’t believe?”
Will shrugged. “I suppose it’s because sometimes, even I don’t believe the truth. So I’ll tell you the story indirectly. Have you heard of John Adams or Thomas Jefferson?”
Adam considered, and then shook his head. “Should I have?”
“This new country, the United States of America, the one formed out of the former colonies? They're two of the men who've helped to bring it about.”
“Okay.” Adam was clearly uncertain as to why he was getting a lesson in human current events. “What of it?”
“We’ll meet here again in 1826. Men gathered here over the next fe
w months will create a new government for this country. In 1796, John Adams will be elected by the people as their leader, their President. Four years later, he will lose that job to Thomas Jefferson. And on July 4, 1826, Adams and Jefferson will both die, not long after seeing Adams' son become the sixth man elected to that same job.”
Adam’s eyes widened. “Your secret is that you’re able to predict the future? That would explain a lot.”
Will smiled. “I wouldn’t make that claim, Adam. Nor should you, until you see if what I say comes to pass. We'll talk again in about fifty years. If I’m right… well, we’ll see if you’ll be ready to hear what I need to tell you.”
Adam’s look changed to one of intrigue, and he nodded. “Okay. Since the last of your future events occurs on July 4, 1826… we’ll meet here in this city on July 5, 1826.”
Will nodded his agreement. “By the way, where’s Sebastian right now?”
“He's back in Watt. Why do you ask?”
“Just want to know what modes of transportation are open to me. Take care, Adam.”
Adam nodded, and Will teleported to the smaller submarine resting invisibly in the depths of the Schuylkill River.
He took several deep breaths, now that he was out of Adam's sight. He'd wanted to throttle the man, to scream at him and beat him at the word that he’d eliminated what now looked like the only means to the end he and Hope—and now others—so desperately sought. Ambrose had figured out the secret without the continually more advanced equipment the Alliance were creating, had never had robotic cameras smaller than human cells that could travel through the bloodstream to enable remote viewing of the cell-level changes wrought by Energy and ambrosia. Will wondered if, in retrospect, he wasn't moving farther away from the answer as the machines and technology advanced. He wondered if he should have focused on finding and talking to Ambrose centuries earlier, rather than working on his submarine. Had he been so confident in his ability to find the answer that he wouldn't even consider asking? It was a moot point now, thanks to Adam’s actions. Unless he built a time machine.
He considered what he’d need to ask Adam to do. Was it odd that he was putting his children’s very lives in the hands of a man whose most notable public actions were a mass execution, the murder of a man who’d figured out how to activate and deactivate aspects of a most amazing food, and for publicly shunning Will at a time when greater courage might have prevented a great deal?
He needed to think. In retrospect, that bafflement over his apparent choice of the guardian of his plan was what prevented him from telling Adam the truth. Perhaps he just needed more proof that it wasn’t a huge mistake.
The random comments from his time in the future suggested that he’d been out of the public, Aliomenti, and Alliance eyes starting in the mid-1990s, roughly corresponding to the time of his own birth. Perhaps the universe wouldn’t allow him to exist twice in the same era, or he’d died, or perhaps he’d just gone so deeply into hiding that no one knew he existed.
Yet, there was a curious line he recalled from the note sent to him by his children and Adam. Though both he and Hope had been missing for so long, they said that it had been him who’d teleported Hope and Josh to a hidden bunker, away from possible death at the hands of William the Assassin. To a degree, he now found the story rubbish; Hope was in no more danger from death at the hands of William than he was from the ants crawling around on the ground. Then he remembered the mob attack on Watt and sobered. Perhaps that line was in there to give him hope that he was still alive and able to provide that degree of help in 2030. Or it was their way of admitting that they didn’t know who’d performed that teleportation, and assumed it must have been him. Maybe Hope had saved them after all, but she’d not been around long enough afterwards to tell them that, or Hope had saved them and told them it was Will to keep him alive in their children’s minds. Regardless of the future reality, they were pleading with him from beyond his actual or virtual grave, begging him to survive, relying on his inherent instinct to save those he loved.
He’d hope for the best and plan for the worst. That meant he needed to trust others to ensure that everything on that fateful day happened exactly as it was supposed to happen, even if he wasn’t around to assist in any way.
They’d have to make sure that the time machine arrived in his basement with enough lead time to pull him away from danger. They’d need to allow the Assassin and the Hunters to carry out their plan and gain their forced entry into the neighborhood—he winced at the realization of the lives that had been lost in that invasion—and allow the Hunters to attack Young Will, allow the Assassin to gain entry to the home and set the fire. And they had to make sure that Josh and Angel came into the world. He had no idea how they’d pull it all off, coordinate all of the timing, ensure all of the research was completed as necessary. Who would find the cure? Who would build the time machine? Who would help Hope care for his children during his long absence from the world?
Perhaps his children had the answers, stored somewhere in his diary. But when he checked the scroll, it was blank. No words of encouragement, no answers to his most challenging questions.
Will sighed. At times, he wondered if he would have been better off if they’d let him travel through time without the infernal thing. In most cases, he was left to his own devices, provided only objective information. But he wasn’t given insight on why Adam acted the way he’d acted, for instance, nor told not to lose hope during his struggles to find the ambrosia cure.
He looked up through the clear surface of the miniature sub. The water here wasn’t deep enough to hide sunlight, and the absence of natural light told him that night had fallen. He'd been mulling over his long life and the unique, extraordinary challenges it brought him, for hours. It had seemed like only minutes.
After seizing the bag with the miniature cameras and microphones, Will teleported to the roof of Independence Hall. It was the safest place to make his initial entry, since there was little chance anyone would be watching or patrolling the roof at night. He was unlikely to be seen coalescing into existence out of thin air there. He reached his senses down into the main meeting room, searching, looking for any sign of human life. He found nothing. After developing an image of the meeting room in his mind, he cloaked and teleported into the dark space below.
Will had seen the room in paintings immortalizing the events that would unfold over the next several months. He set up faint Energy lights to give him better visibility. There were long wooden tables where the delegates would sit when not addressing the convention. He spotted candles everywhere, critical, as they would serve as the sole source of light after the windows were boarded up. He found inkwells for those taking notes for motions and seconds and other official business—and, eventually, the writing of the new Constitution that would govern the land. The room smelled musty now, even after the sun had dropped below the horizon and the worst heat of the day had lessened. He shuddered to think of the smells after months of passionate debate in a room sealed from the outside world.
Will positioned the microphones and cameras high on the walls, trying to determine the best locations to provide a complete view of the proceedings, speeches, and offhand comments until now lost to history. He was concerned about detection. While the devices were small, they weren’t small enough to be invisible, and if someone looked directly at them, they might notice enough to raise suspicions. Of course, none of them had reason to suspect the presence of secretive audio and video recording devices; such concepts would remain foreign to the general population for another century or two.
Satisfied, he returned to the submarine and tested the feeds as best he could in an empty room devoid of light. He sighed; it was another minor detail he'd not thought of. At least he'd planted the devices well in advance of the commencement of the convention; he'd have time to make adjustments if necessary. Exhausted mentally and emotionally from the events of the day, Will slept.
Will was one of those who woke f
rom a deep sleep, never remembering his dreams. Yet on this night, his dream was especially vivid. As he lay sleeping under the waters of the Schuylkill River, his mind traveled back to the strange island they’d named Atlantis. He’d woken there one night and nearly found himself underwater before they’d finished more permanent and flood proof sleeping quarters. The island’s strangest feature—filling with water during the ocean-driven floods before later draining quickly—was one he’d never spent sufficient time to explain while living there, and he’d never gone back afterward to solve the mystery.
Once more, he watched the ocean waters pour over the beaches and embankments, streaming the valley floor, the roar of the water drowned out by the reverberations of thunder. Once more, he watched the valley fill, until it became a giant lake within the ocean, with only a handful of small rock outcroppings peeking out from beneath the waters. His mind knew he should feel the power of the surging water; should sense the rumbling of the thunder and surge under his feet. He knew he should smell the storm and salty water, knew that he should even be choking down the spray of the surf.
But he felt nothing.
Will realized he had an opportunity. Whether this was a detailed reliving of a memory from centuries past, or some strange session of clairvoyance, he was in no physical danger from the water. He could watch this flood and drain sequence and learn the secret of the most puzzling mystery of the island. Could he do that if it was a dream, since he’d never seen where the water drained? Perhaps, in this state of calm, he’d see something in a memory that he’d not noticed previously.
Even in this dreamlike state, he wondered why it was happening. How could it possibly be important now, centuries after he’d last set foot on the island? Was it some strange psychological reminder of his failure to solve the mystery of ambrosia? He berated himself enough on that front while awake; losing restful sleep over it seemed like overkill.
Gradually, the rain stopped. The thunder and lightning moved off into the distance, locating their next targets. Water levels began to fall, slowly at first, and then more rapidly.
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