29
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 doppelg?nger 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 a hundred and seventy 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. “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 wasn’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. Bigger exits. 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 fortieth 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 forty 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.”
“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 2014, 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.
“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 2014, and is over two hundred years old today.
“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. 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 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 all chose younger versions of themselves, people who could make further advances in their field, carry the torch with new energy. 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 only 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 saw it as an opportunity. I’d met someone, 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 desperate 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. ”
“Human nature.”
“Exactly. The downside of employing thieves is—”
“They steal.”
“Precisely. The loot in this case was the most valuable object in the history of the world. They never showed up at the meeting point, and a week later, nations around the world announced that they had developed their own immortality therapy. Chaos ensued. Nations had long seen the Titan Foundation as the greatest threat to their continued existence. When Atlantis opened, they thought it would eventually become the first global nation-state, reducing all other governments to local authorities. They were probably right. They saw all the Titan Marvels, including Q-Net, Podway, and especially immortality, as eroding their ability to maintain power over their populations. And now they held out immortality to their citizenry, with different nations defining varying criteria for eligibility. Where they expected a new wave of nationalism and loyalty, anarchy erupted. Some populations begged for immortality to be made widely available; others demanded that it be permanently banned. Everyone blamed the Titans for the upheaval. Millions died in the unrest, including the great love of my life. Grayson Shaw died of complications of liver failure three weeks after the chaos began. The Titans convened, and we searched for an answer. We announced to the world that we would provide a solution, asked them to believe and have faith, promised that help was on the way. To some extent, we did feel responsible. But we couldn’t have predicted what happened next: a pandemic.”
“Pandemic? How?”
“A mutation. The immortality therapy Sabrina created changed somehow. The therapy uses a retrovirus to alter the genes that control aging. That retrovirus mutated in the wild, or maybe someone altered it, by accident or on purpose. We figure private labs and government facilities were doing a lot of work on the virus in the weeks after it was stolen. This mutated retrovirus was deadly. Instead of turning the genes that control aging off, it sent them into overdrive, causing a cascade of rapid aging. It was almost like the victims had a severe case of progeria, with adult onset. Those infected died quickly, some within hours, some in days, in a few weeks in rare cases.
“The casualty reports started coming in the day after our big announcement of a solution. It was a trickle at first, nothing that even made major news outlets. A couple of people died in Europe, four in America, half a dozen in Japan. Then it exploded around the world. People were dying in droves, all after aging rapidly.
“Sabrina was terrified. We all were. She worked day and night, pushing herself to the brink. Ten days after the first cases, half the entire human population was dead.”
“How could it spread so quickly?”
“That was the question. What we discovered far too late was that the retrovirus could exist benignly in virtually any animal host. Every animal on earth is a host for countless viruses. Viruses exist to replicate, to spread their DNA, so they actually don’t want to harm their host; they want to exist undetected, replicating. And that’s exactly what this virus did. It was everywhere. Birds, fish, land animals, they were all carriers, and none of them were harmed, except for humans. We were the only host in which the virus caused death, but it didn’t harm humans at first. It lay dormant for days, then struck at once, quickly, killing without warning. I remember the horror on the day we learned that the entire human population was already infected, that there was no chance of containment or stopping the outbreak.”
My mind flashes back to the bodies I saw in the tents outside. The faces. Now I understand why I didn’t recognize them. I’d seen those people before, at the crash site, but they looked much younger then. It’s like they had aged decades during my trip to Stonehenge and back.
“The passengers from my flight, they’re infected too.”
“Yes. The virus is airborne. You were all exposed the second you crash-landed.”
“The virus still exists? Seventy-six years after the outbreak?”
“Eradicating it is impossible. It’s everywhere. We’d have to treat every animal on Earth. That’s impossible.”
I turn the revelation over in my head, trying to understand the implications. And I wonder, what will happen to me? Will I suffer the same fate as the bodies out there? My doppelg?nger continues on before I get a chance to ask.
“The virus, however, was about to become the least of our problems. Everyone thought the outbreak was the Titans’ solution: killing the population. Governments launched their dying armies against us, hoping we would capitulate and turn over a cure. We were immune to the condition, presumably because we had been given the pure form of the therapy, and that sealed the case against us. They killed sixty-two of us in the Titan War. We went into hiding, but we didn’t have to hide long. Forty days after the first cases, every person on the face of the planet—except for the remaining thirty-eight Titans—was dead.”
The graffiti in London, at Titan Hall—it all makes sense now. Every person on the planet dead? The magnitude of the revelation is overwhelming. In the cramped conference room, I sit stunned.
My words come out a whisper. “What do you want from us?”
“Your help. For the last seventy-six years, I and the remaining Titans have dedicated every waking hour to bringing your plane here. You and the rest of the passengers of Flight 305 are humanity’s only chance for survival.”