I’m not sure how to tell Lionel that everyone in that room, including him and Ursula and Jerome, would’ve been dead within a few months if I hadn’t altered the timeline. He’s obviously stacked a lot on the belief that his experiment should’ve transformed the world, but it’s divorced from the fact of their horrific deaths. Theirs was not a fifty-year love triangle. It was an unknown, long-buried secret on which statues to his greatness were erected. Literally—there’s a gigantic statue of Lionel Goettreider at the spot in San Francisco where his ashes were dispersed, holding a replica of the original Goettreider Engine that emits its own shimmering whorl.
Following everyone’s safe discharge from the hospital—Jerome’s arm was cleanly cauterized by the energy plume that seared it off—there was an inquest into the disaster. Overseen by the federal government, it was intensely political and fraught. In July 1965, the US ground war in Vietnam was only four months old and President Johnson was about to announce he was sending 125,000 troops over there, along with more than doubling the draft. He was heavily invested in the “space race” with Russia and achieving President Kennedy’s goal of landing astronauts on the moon by the end of the decade. The federal government needed a US population aflutter with wide-eyed wonder at American scientific know-how. If word got out that a minor experiment in an esoteric niche field of research had come within seconds of destroying half the continent, that would’ve been really, really bad for a man who was trying to hold the country together with his bare hands as it wobbled on the razor’s edge of a total freak-out. President Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act into law only a year before—hardly an uncontroversial move. A near cataclysm on American soil that would’ve made Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like a firecracker going off in an empty parking lot, particularly one funded by the US government itself, was not politically viable.
So, a deal was made. Everyone would shut the hell up about it, forever. Jerome was the wildest card in the deck, what with the amputated arm, but he had a bureaucrat’s soul, and a series of rapid career advancements kept him quiet. Plus, he knew it was what Ursula wanted. The other fourteen observers were likewise rewarded for their silence with a well-greased professional track. None of them paid income tax ever again.
And Lionel Goettreider was asked to leave the United States of America and never come back. He had immigrated to the US following the Second World War, as America trawled the planet’s ocean of scientific minds to draw all the best brains into its borders. Now he was tossed back out to sea.
Two days after the accident, Lionel snuck into the wrecked lab and salvaged the Engine, substituting it with a lookalike precursor model, fixed the previously undetected radiation surge that should’ve killed them all, and switched it on. He never turned it off again.
He was supposed to go back to Denmark but instead he went in the other direction, loaded the operating Engine onto a ship, and sailed with it from San Francisco to Hong Kong.
And there, in near total isolation, Lionel Goettreider invented the future.
108
Lionel’s being all coy about why we’re going back to his warehouse in Chai Wan—I’m sure you’ve already figured it out, but I’m trying to lean into the whole suspense thing, so I’ll defer to his taste for drama.
We get stuck in traffic jammed by a prodemocracy demonstration, creeping forward at a pace that drives Wen to sputter a flurry of Cantonese expletives, the front windshield flecked with outraged spittle.
When Lionel moved to Hong Kong, he had a goal in mind. A goal so technologically advanced as to be absurd. There were countless innovations that had to happen to even get him to the point where he could create testable theoretical models of his goal, let alone construct an actual prototype to fail and improve and fail and improve and fail and improve, and no one else was equipped to do it because no one else had what he had: a working Goettreider Engine. A source of unlimited clean fuel to power anything he could build.
Obviously this Lionel Goettreider did not make his revolutionary power source available to the world at large. This Lionel didn’t have the incentive of assured martyrdom sweeping his future like a lighthouse beam as his body caved in on itself due to acute radiation poisoning from his own defective device. This Lionel was rescued from nobility by impotent resentment at the unfair hand dealt to him in his very moment of triumph. It was the vanity of genius I recognize so well from my father.
That was the really messed-up thing about being stuck in traffic with Lionel Goettreider—he reminded me a lot of my father. Not my dad from here, the dotty but warm and careful man who wilted in my mother’s shadow. My real father.
Once Lionel arrived in Hong Kong, he invented . . . everything. When he needed to alter the trajectory of global technology, he’d set up a shell company to quietly sell one of his inventions in exchange for cash, stock, and zero credit. Through his front companies, he developed secret, one-sided relationships with the titans of the manufacturing and technology industries. His work is everywhere in the modern world. It is the modern world. A ubiquitous thread in the fabric of civilization. He is the anonymous polymath wizard behind the curtain of everyday life.
The sick thing is he didn’t even sell off his best stuff—it was all the things he didn’t need anymore because he’d already moved beyond them. Like how at his home there are no electrical cords, because Lionel invented wireless electricity fields more than two decades ago. Fifteen years ago he dropped electronics altogether and shifted into photonics, which he then replaced with experimental polaritonics five years later. He left humanity to cobble together modern civilization from his discards and trash.
The world I come from isn’t quite as lost as I thought. It turns out it was concealed in a little pocket of the planet, conceived and built and nurtured by Lionel Goettreider, and he was profoundly uninterested in sharing it with the rest of us.
109
It’s easy to be distracted by Lionel, the layers of ego, resentment, vanity, and expectation roiling and lunging and grappling for dominance in his tone. It’s like he wants my approval and my awe but also can’t help jabbing at me for taking so long to find him. I can sense this abyss of black terror under everything he says.
I know that terror because I felt it the last time I saw Penny—it’s the fear that what my brain is telling me isn’t real, that something fundamental is defective inside me, and that everything I think I know is an auroral lattice of self-justification erected to protect me from my own bad wiring. What if I’m a Goettreider Engine with a fatal flaw, but instead of power I generate florid delusions that poison me like a radiation leak?
The thing is, I miss Penny so much. I think about her constantly. I know I sound like a teenager with a newborn crush, but goddamn it, it’s hard to focus on anything except her. What we had was so unexpected and now that I don’t know if we’ll ever have more of it I feel doubled over with longing and loss.
I’m sitting in a super-car with the world’s smartest person, the key to everything I’ve been searching for, and he’s taking me to a covert lair full of secrets and mysteries and yet my mind can barely absorb any of it. My graceless disaster of a brain keeps abandoning the present to flit back to moments like the first time I kissed Penny, the precise pressure her lips exerted on mine in that initial contact between our mouths, the seesaw of our jaws as we found the right fit, her top lip, my top lip, her bottom lip, my bottom lip, the stubble on my chin rough on the soft skin of hers.