I’m nearly done telling this story and I’m still nowhere near strong enough a writer to convey what it feels like to kiss the straight-up uncontested love of my life after fifty-one years, so I’ll try to keep it simple—it feels really good.
Here’s what Penny doesn’t say. What she’ll never say. What we’ll never discuss, not once, not ever. She doesn’t know exactly when we conceived our baby. We were newly infatuated and casual about the whens and wheres of our intimacy. It could’ve been one of two or three or four occasions. And it could’ve been that time with John. Genetically, it’s irrelevant. Psychologically, I have no idea. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s something wonderful that came out of something awful. Maybe that’s a self-serving way to frame it. Maybe I’m an asshole for even thinking that the fleeting, elusive moment of conception of something as momentous and everyday as the beginning of a human life could have any influence at all on who our child will be. Maybe I should just shut the hell up and enjoy it. Maybe I will.
135
This is how the future starts.
My dad will exhaustively explore the technical specifications of the Goettreider Engine and what he finds will blow his mind. Even though, you know, I already told him what it can do. The difference between his possibly psychotic son’s suspect delusions and the actual machine emitting zettajoules of clean energy will turn out to be unsurprisingly vast. My dad will feel we have a responsibility to announce it to the world as soon as possible, since it’s one of the great scientific breakthroughs of human history.
As a group, we will decide on a more judicious approach.
We will form a company. Me, Penny, Greta, my mom, and my dad will share 50.1 percent, so 10.02 percent each, and Lionel will take 49.9 percent, which will transfer to Emma the day Jerome dies. Even though Lionel will want nothing more than to assert his paternity, he will respect Ursula’s wishes that her husband never know the truth. At least not for sure.
Greta will argue that the world in which Lionel graciously made the Engine open-source technology for anyone with the wherewithal to build one is a world long gone. With corporate control and political corruption five decades more entrenched in global civilization, we will have to handle the introduction of this epochal technology with a lot more care than the other Lionel did on his deathbed back in 1965.
Greta’s been reading a lot since her previous company was taken from her due to her excess of self-entitled superiority and lack of business acumen, qualities she’s been working very hard to reverse. She’s particularly taken by a French philosopher named Paul Virilio, who writes about the Accident—the idea that every time you introduce a new technology, you also introduce the accident of that technology, so you have a responsibility to anticipate not just the good it can do but also the bad it can wreak, not just the glory but also the ruin.
I’ve mentioned this notion before, but where I come from it was otherwise attributed. Maybe no idea is ever lost. Maybe it just waits somewhere in the swirl for somebody else to think it.
Lionel’s warehouse is equipped to mass-produce Engines and we start doing that immediately. All the components are in place, but of course we don’t want any catastrophic malfunctions. They’ll have to be flawless right away. Fortunately, Lionel had a long time to perfect them.
My dad will use the manufacturing and testing period to write a book, his first since his much-maligned, pun-embellished time-travel primer—which he’ll be delighted to discover Lionel actually read, and they will spend many late nights caught up in arcane, impenetrable discussions about both the theoretical science and its practical applications. The book will be about Lionel, his life, his work, how the Engine came to be, and what it means for the world. He’ll leave out a few key personal details. We’d like to change the world without hurting anyone. It will be among the bestselling biographies ever published. There will be very few puns.
The goal of the company will be to make the technology open-source, available to all for free. But Greta will convince us to be at least initially cautious. There are too many out there who will perceive what we’re doing as an existential threat. So we will have to take them off the board.
Greta will have a plan. She believes that money is arbitrary in that it has power only because people collectively grant it power, like a mass hallucination that’s come to life, a golem of infinite zeros. We will embrace that arbitrary power and use it—to buy up any company that could threaten us. This will require several trillion dollars. But a machine that produces unlimited energy is also a delivery system for unlimited wealth.
Greta will turn out to be a visionary bare-knuckle bruiser of a corporate CEO. As we prepare to launch the Engine, she will work out the kinks in her long-term strategy by delivering to market a steady flow of the designer trinkets with which Lionel equipped his home.
My mom’s interest in all of this will be political. She will have a simple outcome in mind—no more war, ever. She will see the Engine not in terms of unlimited energy or unlimited money, but as a machine for unlimited peace. She wants every person on the planet free to feel what she feels, curled up in an armchair on a sunny afternoon reading a novel written in another age—to have no cares. She will strive to turn this age into another age, a bad dream from which humanity finally woke up.
She will become our driving political operator. You might not think a career in academia would prepare her for that, but it turns out that academics are goddamn crazy and getting anything done in the university environment is so convoluted and asinine and theatrical that my mom will find actual politics to be kind of relaxing in comparison.
Lionel will have no interest in further involvement. He will care about only one thing—spending whatever time he can with Emma Francoeur. He will outlive Jerome by eighteen months and die with Emma at his bedside. I will never ask her how she feels about it all. She is very private and it will be none of my business anyway.
Lionel will live just long enough to hold his Nobel Prize.
Penny and I won’t have much of a role in any of this. We won’t want one. Penny will give birth to our child and we will raise him together. With our share of the Engine’s limitless financial resources, we will buy a building and tear it down and rebuild it. And then we will buy another building and tear it down and rebuild it. And we will do that again and again and again, for as long as the money keeps coming, which means forever.
I don’t believe I can ever be forgiven for erasing my friends from existence, but the best way I know to honor them is brick by brick by brick. Every time we pour the foundation of a new building, I will write the names of those I lost in the wet cement. Deisha. Asher. Xiao. Hester. Megan. Tabitha. Robin. Penelope.
We will remake the world, Penny and I, one building at a time. Penny likes things that she can touch and I will find I do as well. I will discover that what makes me happiest, beyond Penny and our child, is to make things. A building. A family. A life.
It won’t be fast, changing the world. But we have time.
136
As I’ve mentioned many times, I come from the world we were supposed to have. But lately I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Whether or not it’s true.