Today was supposed to be a day unique in human history. And it was. It was the day my father was finally honest with me.
Listening to him rant, while the woman I loved sat there calculating how to turn this to her advantage, I felt like I was time traveling, back to every moment in my life when my father could’ve gotten angry at me, could’ve gotten anything at me. It was a glimpse at what it might have been like if I’d grown up with this father, the honest one, instead of the liar, the genius, the ghost.
The time I ran away from home for nineteen days, this is what I wanted. Instead, my mother made me a grilled cheese sandwich and refused to discuss any of it. My father wandered into the kitchen and, without even acknowledging I was back, picked up the sandwich, assuming it was for him, and trotted back to his study to eat it behind the heavy closed door. My mother cried and I held her and apologized over and over.
Eventually my father’s venom tapered off and Penelope tried to steer the conversation back to how crucial she could still be to the mission.
“You slept with my son,” my father said. “You’ll never be part of this or any other mission. Everyone will know what you did. It’s over for you.”
“This mission means everything to me,” Penelope said. “Please, Dr. Barren . . .”
“By all means, call me Victor,” he said. “Since you don’t work for me anymore.”
I don’t know if he was trying to hurt her or it was just that the outer halo of his anger for me was corrosive to all who ventured near, but something inside her switched off. She went numb, her face pale and loose, eyes glassy, opaque. She understood.
My father told her to submit a final report while he informed his investors that, due to an unfortunate personnel issue, the experiment was postponed until further notice.
He was really doing it. He was canceling the first mission back in time. The best day of my life followed by the worst day of my life. Everyone would know. Everyone would know about this forever.
Penelope left without another word. I stood to go too, but he said he wasn’t done with me yet. He wasn’t even mad anymore, like his last jab at Penelope expelled the poison and he could go back to being detached and superior. My father droned on, cataloguing the many cascading disappointments I’d subjected him to over the years—my unimpressive academic record, lack of personal interests, listless career track, inability to foster a single socially, culturally, or even politically meaningful relationship—and, honestly, I was surprised he remembered any of that stuff since he rarely even acknowledged I was in the same room with him.
And that’s when I realized something that made me just about explode.
Penelope wasn’t going to file a report. She had nothing left to say. She was going somewhere else and she was going there right now.
33
For all my father’s genius, he had no clue why I lunged for the door. He hadn’t figured out what Penelope was about to do.
I raced down the hall, twisting my ankle as I took a corner too fast, bounced off a wall hard enough to leave a bruise, and skittered down the stairs, my foot flaring hot with pain. I knew I was right because I heard that familiar basso profundo hum as soon as the door seal cracked open to the high-ceilinged room that housed the defusion spheres.
One of the spheres was active.
I was rooted to the floor, my mind as blank as it’s ever been. Maybe this was what Penelope felt like when she went to space. I heard people skid into the room behind me, technicians yelling at each other about how the security protocols were overridden. The alarms blared just like the day Penelope and I first saw each other naked. But that was the beginning of something and this was the end.
Penelope came out of the defusion sphere. Except the entry hatch was still closed. She walked right through it. Which is supposed to be impossible because the defusion sphere is constructed from a high-density compound that suppresses immateriality. Or at least it does within safe dosage parameters. Nobody’s ever seen what happens at unsafe dosage.
Which is why everybody went silent when she stepped out. Stepped through.
Penelope didn’t seem any different. She had that weird shimmer you get when you’re immaterial, like the intangible molecules on your outermost layer of skin can’t properly interact with the coherent molecules of the air around you. But other than that, she looked like she always did.
Except that nobody could touch her or grab her or pull her back into the defusion sphere. It didn’t matter how much anybody screamed or cried or begged her not to do this. It didn’t matter how much, in that moment, somebody might realize that everything he never knew he wanted was coming apart at the seams. It didn’t matter that at least one of the cells in the ghost that used to be her body was half someone else.
It didn’t matter because what I wanted was immaterial.
We could’ve done so many things. We could’ve brought a life into this world of wonders and that life could’ve changed us both, made us better, fixed the broken clocks inside our brains that wouldn’t let us be happy when happiness was within reach. It wasn’t just a who inside her. It was a where, a place both of us could’ve finally been free of the people we never meant to become because that’s the magic trick of creating life—it takes every bad decision you ever made and makes them necessary footsteps on the treacherous path that brought you home. For just a moment I had a home. It was the size of one cell but that was enough to fit in all I ever wanted.
I slumped to the floor and just stared at her. Penelope stared back.
She touched her stomach. I like to think that’s the moment she changed her mind and decided to have our baby and become a family.
But of course it was too late. Even if she wanted to run back into the defusion sphere and reverse the process, she couldn’t move anymore. She’d come unglued. Her neurons no longer able to fire to her muscles, her muscles no longer able to wrench her bones, her bones no longer bones at all, her heart, its heart, our baby’s heart, will never beat in what was no longer her womb.
She floated apart in front of me. They. They floated apart in front of me. Her hand on her stomach. Her eyes frozen in terror, regret, grief. Mine too.
I wanted to memorize every contour of her while she still held her form, but it was impossible to look away from her eyes. Her molecules drifted away, carried off in all directions, through the walls, the ceiling, the floor, until there was nothing left.
34
It’s not like everything in my world was perfect. People still got screwed up by anxiety and stress and off-kilter neural chemistry. Pharmaceutical use was rampant. So was status panic. Power still corrupted, infidelity still hurt, marriages still collapsed. Love went unrequited. Childhood could be a playground or a dungeon. Some people are just constitutionally bad in bed and no amount of interactive pornography can fix that.
But in the world built on the limitless energy of the Goettreider Engine, oil was irrelevant, basic resources were plentiful, and everyone had access to all manner of technological enhancements, major and minor. Not everyone chose to live in our global techno-utopia, and it wasn’t like countries never had tense disagreements and diplomatic posturing, but weaponry was so sophisticated and life so comfortable that there hadn’t been a real geopolitical conflict in three decades. What was there to fight about?
I’m sorry if that sounds wide-eyed or heavy-handed, but it is what it is.