Departure (17 page)

IF I HAD A QUID FOR EVERY TIME
I've woken up sore, alone, and in the dark in the last six days . . . I close my eyes, hoping for a little more rest. Sleep comes quickly.

THE SECOND AWAKENING'S MUCH BETTER.
At least I can discern the pain's focal point this go-round: my left shoulder.

In the dim light I run my fingers across my shoulder, feeling for the source of the hurt. I stop on a round metal device, cool to the touch. Its tiny tendrils dig into my flesh. I instinctively scratch at the edges, trying to pry it free. It's no use; the little metal insect is dug in too tight.

My eyes have adjusted a bit, and I take in my confines, which seem like a coffin at first. There's a ceiling a few feet above and dark walls on three sides. I can just make out a dim light to my right. I'm in a cubby, just big enough for my body, on an incredibly comfortable mattress.

I push up, but pain explodes in my abdomen, races up my chest, and slams me back into the bed.

My fingers reach for the pain, gently, afraid to ignite it again. My journal—it's pressed against my stomach, against the hurt. No, it's on the outside. The Alice Carter notebook is closest to my bruised abdomen and ribs. Running my hand down the journal's hard cover, I find the silver spider dug into it. The sharp legs reach deep inside, almost to the back cover, like a staple through a stacked sheaf of papers, but not quite deep enough to get through and wrap around. The journal stopped the first shot at the park outside Titan Hall, and that's probably a very good thing.

I hold the small book up and flip it open. The last, unpierced pages are blank. I set it aside and move to Alice Carter. She's survived unharmed, and I realize that I'm happy about that. I'd choose her over the journal any day—I'm not sure I want to know any more about myself. The first walk down Future Memory Lane was jarring enough.

The bed vibrates slightly, then shakes a little more violently. It reminds me . . . of turbulence, and at first all I can think of is Flight 305. Then it's gone, and I can breathe again.

I swing my feet out of the bunk, onto the floor. Faint light rises from below, illuminating the space. Three double bunks are arranged in a U-shape. Both of the others on the bottom level are occupied, but the row above is empty. They look almost like sleeping quarters on a military ship (I once ghostwrote the autobiography of a British admiral; many ship tours were involved). Maybe I'm aboard the airship I last saw at Titan Hall. The more I think about my situation, I realize it has to be. I lean forward to look at the other bunks. Yul lies to the right. He's alive and asleep. But the bag he has vigilantly guarded since the crash is missing. Sabrina occupies the other bunk, and I'm relieved to feel a faint pulse in her neck as well.

The double doors directly ahead slide open, flooding the room with blinding light. I hold my right arm up, squinting, barely able to make out a suited figure. It taps a panel, and darkness overtakes me.

THE PAIN'S GONE WHEN I
wake up, and so is everything else: the cramped bunk, the metal burr in my shoulder, my journal and notebook—and
my tattered clothes. I feel a little self-conscious as I sit up in a massive bed, inspecting the tight, layered white garments someone has dressed me in.

The room I'm in is spacious, spotlessly clean. Across from the bed, there's a desk against a long wall. To my right, a wide window looks out on the sea. A glass door opens to a glittering bathroom. Beyond the bathroom, another door, solid wood, presumably leads out of the room. It feels like a posh hotel.

I stare out the window for a moment, searching for clues about where I might be. All I can see is a featureless expanse of blue ocean all the way to the horizon, punctuated only by whitecaps on the surface and birds in the air. My first thought is that I'm on a huge ship, but I don't sense any motion.

The outer door hisses open when I approach, revealing a long corridor and similar wooden doors. I step to the first, but can't open it. Panicked, I move back to my own. To my relief, it opens. Must be keyed to me somehow.

What to do? Stay and wait, or make a go for it? The stay-and-wait option is unappealing, but hey, the make-a-go approach hasn't exactly worked lately either.

I march to the metallic door at the end of the corridor and pause anxiously. It parts, revealing a wider hall that runs perpendicular with a different character: that of an office building. No. A hospital. Still not right—something in between.

In contrast to the first wing's carpeted floors and wood-paneled walls and doors, this space is all tile, glass, and concrete, clean and clinical. A series of glass doors lines the walls, and to my surprise, a door on my side of the hall to the far right swings open.

I inhale, unable to move.

Two people in white coats stride out quickly, purposefully, fully engaged in their conversation. They turn right, away from me, toward the end of the hall, but their words still carry in the high-ceilinged space.

“Is there a backup plan if they can't make it work?”

“Not really, besides weathering the attack.”

“So that's a no.”

They exit through sliding doors at the end of the hall, letting in a warm gust of wind with a salty tang.

I venture closer to the nearest glass door and peer in. The room is empty—a lab, similar to what you might find at a university. High tables with black tops and sinks cover the space. Glass cabinets line the windowless walls.

Two silver tables on casters lie just inside the door, each with a zipped body bag on top.

I push through the swinging glass door into the lab, closing the distance quickly to the body bags. A device that looks like an air pump sits at the foot. I pull the zipper of the first one back. A plume of frigid, foggy air rises. When it clears, I'm staring down at Yul. I stagger back, panting.

God.

I zip the bag shut. I'm pretty sure of what I'll find in the next, but unable to stop myself, I rush to it and pull the zipper down just enough . . . Sabrina. Also motionless. Dead.

Outside the lab, I hear the double doors at the end of the corridor open.

Without taking the time to zip up Sabrina's bag, I run to the other side of the lab and duck, crouching behind the farthest table.

Footsteps echo, drawing close.

In my mind, I can see the fog rising from Sabrina's body bag like smoke from a signal fire, screaming, “Hey, she's in here.” Instead, I hear real voices in the corridor.

“The access log says she just exited her room.”

“Should have posted someone by the door.”

I don't dare look. When I hear them enter the residential wing, I bound up, out of the lab, and down the corridor, pausing only for the doors, which seem to take forever to open.

The area outside is a vast concrete promenade that looks straight down into an endless canyon, a wide river flowing through the center. Why is this so familiar?

I can't tear my eyes away from the drop-off. We must be a thousand feet up. . . .

I
have
seen this place. From another angle, from a sandy beach—in
Titan Hall. This is the Gibraltar Dam, and that means we must be in the mini-city at the center of the dam. One side looks out on the sea, as my room did. This side towers over the valley the Titans created between Europe and Africa.

The doors open behind me.

“Harper! Stop!”

I know that voice. But . . . it's impossible. I turn anyway, not believing my eyes.

It can't be
.

FOR A MOMENT, THE ONLY SOUND IN THE
small room is the low hum of the incinerator to my left. Then the droning cranks louder as the plastic-wrapped body on the conveyor belt reaches the device. The buzzing is a subtle yet vivid reminder that these people are dissecting the passengers of Flight 305 as if they were lab rats and discarding their bodies unceremoniously. My mind rifles through possibilities, plans of action, how Grayson and I can escape this sprawling tent complex at Heathrow.

My clone stands there, his hands up. On the floor, Grayson and the stranger who chased us from the lab wing release each other, both staring from one Nick Stone to the other.

“It's over, Nick,” my doppelgänger says.

“What are you?”

“I'm you.”

“How?”

“We'll get to that—”

“Let's get to it now.” I raise the handgun slightly so he can see it.

He smiles, his expression reflective. “Sorry, I'd almost forgotten what I was like at thirty-six. That was over a hundred and thirty years ago for me.”

He's almost 170 years old? He doesn't look a day older than I do.

“You want answers, here and now, right, Nick?” my clone says.

“I'd say we deserve some answers.”

“You certainly do.” He gestures toward the rows of body bags behind him, through the steel double doors. “But this is a biological hazard zone. We can't talk here.”

“What kind of biological hazard?”

“A plague, the likes of which you can't imagine—an extinction-level force we've been fighting for seventy-six years. Unsuccessfully, until six days ago.”

“That's why you brought us here? To fight your plague?”

“That's only half the reason we brought you here. You're here to help us cure the plague in our world and ensure it never occurs in yours. We can save both our worlds, Nick, but I need your help. We still have a very powerful enemy standing in our way, and the clock is ticking. I can't tell you how happy I was when I found out that you had come here. That was very smart.”

He bends over and picks up his helmet. “I'm going to leave the way you came in. If you want to help us, I'll be in the closest ship outside. You don't need that gun—no one here is going to harm you—but you're more than welcome to keep it if it makes you feel safer.” He turns to Grayson. “And there's someone who's very eager to see you: your father.”

THERE ISN'T MUCH DEBATE ABOUT
what to do. If these . . . people wanted Grayson and me dead, we wouldn't still be alive. We need answers, and medical care, and food. This seems like the only place to start.

Inside the ship, after I've gotten the suit off and some dry clothes on, the future version of myself and I sit down at a small wooden table in a narrow conference room. There are no windows to the outside, but a wide interior window looks out on a sitting area where Oliver Norton Shaw and Grayson sit in navy club chairs, leaning forward,
talking, smiling, both crying. The older Shaw looks the same age as he did in the simulations at Titan Hall, mid-sixties.

“Oliver hasn't seen his son in seventy-six years. I can't tell you how happy this makes him. It's been a long time since any of us around here were happy. We've been . . . hanging on.”

“For us to arrive?”

“For any hope.”

“Let's back up. I want to take it from the top—but first, what should I call you?”

“Nicholas,” my future self says. “I haven't gone by Nick for some time. So, from the top. Give me a minute to collect my thoughts. No one talks about the past around here.” He grins somberly. “We all lived through it. It's not a pleasant subject.”

“I imagine. I saw London.”

“London got the best of it. Most places were much worse. But . . . the beginning. The Titan Foundation. In some sense, you're the only person on this planet who truly understands the origins of the foundation, how I felt back then. Lost. Confused. All the things I thought I wanted in life no longer made me happy. In fact, I didn't feel anything, and that scared me the most. More money. Better parties. A growing contact list. Yet every day, life felt a little less interesting, like I was watching it happen to someone else. Every passing day felt emptier than the last. Medication didn't help. My only hope was to make a change. A drastic one. Joining with Oliver, starting the Titan Foundation, was that change. A big, scary goal. I was willing to try anything, just to see if it revealed a clue about what might make me feel alive again.”

This is even more jarring than the monologue in Titan Hall. These are my darkest thoughts, the secrets I've kept, the fears about what my life would become if I didn't turn things around. Truths this deep are impossible to fake. This guy knows me. He
is
me. He pauses, letting me process his words, and when I give a slight nod, he continues.

“How far did you get in Titan Hall?”

“To the second chamber. The Gibraltar Dam.”

“Okay. So you know about Q-net, Podway, and Orbital Dynamics. The opening of the Gibraltar Dam is when things got . . . more
complicated. The press and history books called it our great mistake, the Titan Blunder.

“The dam opened in 2054, on the thirty-ninth anniversary of the Titan Foundation's birth. It was the marvel of the world, a political and technical triumph that would carve out a new nation—Atlantis. We believed it would usher in a new era. Here was a new country, stretching from Israel to the Strait of Gibraltar, from Athens to Alexandria, from Rome to the ruins of ancient Carthage, a nation at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. A nation that could unite the world. It was our crowning achievement: a microcosm that could demonstrate the potential of human civilization. We wanted it to be the ultimate example of what a peaceful, prosperous society could be, and we wanted to export that way of life north, south, east, and west, across the globe.

“The world rejoiced. The jobs from the building and opening of Atlantis pulled Europe out of a prolonged recession. Atlantis was a new world, a sort of New America at the heart of the Old World, and from around the globe it attracted hardworking, determined immigrants hoping to make a better life for themselves and their families.

“The first orbital ring, Titan Alpha, had been completed five years before, and settlers were arriving there every month, populating the first permanent human colony in space. The Podway was spreading around the world, linking us physically. Q-net was ubiquitous by this point, making free high-speed Internet a reality everywhere. These four initiatives—the Titan Marvels, as they were called—were little more than ideas when I brought them to Oliver at our first meeting.

“There were one hundred Titans when Atlantis opened in 2054. In thirty-nine years, that small group had radically transformed the world. And there was one last marvel, a secret project we thought would have more impact than any other.

“The last marvel is one Oliver was already working on when we met. Did Sabrina tell you about her research?”

“Only that it was related to progeria syndrome.”

“Exactly. Sabrina had one sibling, a younger brother. He died of progeria when she was in her teens. She dedicated her life to finding a cure. Oliver had been funding her research for several years when
we first met in 2015, though he had little interest in progeria. His deal with Sabrina was simple: he agreed to fund her research until she found a cure, provided she would then turn her attention to a project he was keenly interested in.”

I think I see where this is going, but can't quite believe it yet.

“People who've had a lifetime of success think differently from other people. They assume they'll succeed. They plan for their success. This was certainly the case with Oliver Norton Shaw.”

I can't help but glance out the conference room window at Shaw, who would have been in his sixties in 2015, and is almost two hundred years old today.

My suspicion grows.

“At our second meeting Shaw posed a simple question: What if we're successful? What if Q-net, Podway, the orbital colonies, and Atlantis become a reality? What then? How can we ensure that the march of innovation continues? The inevitable answer was: establish the right culture and recruit the right people at the Titan Foundation. But that's risky. Cultures can change. You can't count on great minds in every generation. One lost generation might destroy everything we were building.

“But what if the world's best and brightest never died? What if the one hundred Titans lived forever? Imagine a world in which Aristotle, Newton, Einstein, Shakespeare, Jefferson, and Washington had never died—imagine what their innovation and continued leadership could have done for humanity. Shaw envisioned such a world, a new Renaissance with no end.

“Sabrina found the cure for progeria in 2021. She completed her anti-aging therapy in 2044. Shaw, who was in his early nineties then, eagerly volunteered to be the test patient for her therapy. It worked, and we administered it to all the Titans in the following years. Shortly before the opening of Atlantis each of us underwent surgery, returning to our physical state at the moment we became Titans. We did so more for the shock value at the unveiling than for our own vanity, though there was some of that.

“At the opening of the Gibraltar Dam and Atlantis we all walked onstage, revealing our fifth and final marvel: Titanship itself. It was
our vision for redefining the core of human existence. Our proposition was simple: Dedicate your life to making the world a better place, and if you reach high enough, if you work hard enough, if you inspire one of the one hundred Titans to give up their place, you will become a Titan yourself, immortal, frozen in time from the day you earn that status. We envisioned it as a meritocracy of the world's best and brightest.
Dream big, work hard, live forever
—that's the promise we held out to the world that day. Never again would humanity's greatest works be left unfinished. Never again would our mortal limits claim a mind before its time.

“In the years after 2054, if you asked any child, anywhere in the world, what she wanted to be when she grew up, she wouldn't say an astronaut or president. She'd say, ‘A Titan.'”

If I weren't staring at the proof, I probably wouldn't believe it. Incredible. They actually did it—immortality. They transcended
death
. I shake my head. “I don't understand. You said this was your blunder?”

“Our blunder wasn't the innovation, the immortality therapy itself.

“Our blunder was not accounting for human nature.”

“Human nature?”

“We didn't know it at the time, but we had set ourselves on a collision course, started the countdown to a war that would destroy our world.

“The first few Titans inducted in the years after 2054 were mostly scientists and researchers, replacements of a sort. Most of the original hundred Titans had been innovators in their fields, people like Sabrina and Yul. They chose younger versions of themselves, people who could make further advances in their field, carry the torch with new energy.”

“The original Titans allowed themselves to be replaced? Gave up immortality?”

“Not at first. But as the years passed and they watched their friends and family die one by one, they changed, became withdrawn. They focused on their work, but they found that there, too, their energy and passion had run its natural course. The ideas they thought might
await them in eternity weren't there, just a new kind of loneliness they never knew existed. Many began to see immortality as only a tool—a way to prolong a life unfinished. It turns out change—fresh blood—will always be required for progress, and they sought out the best and brightest to carry on.

“Conferring Titanship required a majority vote of the Titans, with the nominating Titan abstaining—fifty votes out of ninety-nine. For almost two decades the elections were uneventful, the politicking and negotiations done in private.

“In 2071, however, we faced a crisis, and Oliver was at the center of it. By this time Grayson Shaw was eighty-eight, and in extremely poor health. He'd already had two liver transplants, and the doctors said his days were numbered. Grayson was Oliver's one true regret, and Oliver had begun to talk about him more and more, to lament not what he had done in life, but what he'd left undone. Giving Grayson one more shot at life became Oliver's obsession. He nominated him for Titanship, but behind closed doors, it became clear early on that the vote was doomed. Oliver called in favors, demanded this one last act as payment for all he had done. He and I cajoled, threatened, and bribed, but the Titans wouldn't budge. They saw making Grayson Shaw a Titan as the ultimate mistake, an error that would forever poison the well. They had been sold on the idea of a meritocracy. They believed that choosing only the worthy was the sole way the world would accept Titan immortality. The Titans were probably right, yet Oliver persisted, as he always did. Persistence had been the secret to our success, and we weren't about to give up without a fight. We had remade the world, after all, so getting fifty people to agree to something seemed easy.” He shakes his head and looks away. “We were very wrong.”

“About?”

“Human nature, once again. People will fight to the death to save their own lives, but they'll wage war to preserve their way of life for future generations. To our fellow Titans, it wasn't a single Titanship at stake, it was the Titan way of life, their vision for the future. Grayson's election endangered their entire belief system.”

“And it didn't yours?”

“Very much so—but I also saw it as an opportunity, and was willing to lend my weight. I'd met someone, you see, someone very near death. Like Oliver, I was terrified, utterly unwilling to face life without her. I had made my own proposal to save her, but it was defeated as well. Oliver and I were desperate to save our loved ones, and we made a fateful decision: to steal the immortality therapy. It was the most heavily guarded technology in the world, but we had access—in fact, we were probably the only people in the world who could pull it off. We succeeded, but again we failed to account for one thing.”