In the summer of 1967, my life changed forever. I was three months into my second tour on the Beagle when I began noticing a change in Lin. She was more distant, avoiding me. We had been dating (such as it was on board a submarine) for about six months. I cornered her, wouldn’t let her deny something was wrong, and finally got the answer out of her: she was pregnant.
I was overjoyed. And terrified. I believe people who had a difficult childhood are more averse to having children. That was certainly the case for Lin and for me. If biology hadn’t intervened, who knows where life might have led us. But it did, and I will never regret that. We moved back to London, into a flat in Belgravia that was owned by a member of the Citium (who rented it to us for a song). We got married in a small ceremony a month later. Yuri was my best man. Father and Mother were there, as were Lin’s father and mother.
On a snowy night in March, our son, Andrew, was born. We both felt that our lives changed in an instant. From then on, nothing was more important than him. The doctors called his condition “amelia,” a birth defect in which one or more limbs are missing. In Andrew’s case, his left arm below the elbow was missing. Lin was crushed. No matter what I said, she felt responsible. She blamed her genes and her behavior: conceiving a child on a nuclear submarine where radiation may have caused the condition.
I could never bring myself to use the words “genetic defect,” but to Lin, the answer clearly lay in genetics. After that, the Looking Glass took on a whole new meaning for her. Drive became obsession. She talked about a world where no mother would see her child born with a defect, where no child would have to face the world at a disadvantage or endure daily ridicule from his peers.
His condition most certainly didn’t change our love for him. Andrew was a smart kid (which I believe he got from his mother) and adventurous to a fault (perhaps my contribution). He was brave and curious and never backed down.
Changes were afoot within the Citium. The experiments were growing in scale, and that required increasing amounts of money. So new members were recruited: billionaires, financiers, people with their hands on the levers of government research spending. They were all cut from the same cloth: people who believed the world was on the brink of catastrophe.
The influx of new members was a turning point for the organization, a Rubicon crossed unceremoniously. On the surface, things remained the same. Dozens of Citium cells were conducting Looking Glass research, and the members met every quarter at a conference we called our conclave. But behind the scenes, the organization was fraying. Each member increasingly thought that their own Looking Glass project was the sole solution for humanity’s problems—and jockeyed for the funds they needed to make their vision a reality.
In 1972, I became head of Citium Security, a new organization dedicated to securing the cells and keeping our secrets. Only four of us, me and three of the Citium’s oldest members, knew the full breadth of the Citium. We were creating a monster.
At home, life had settled into a pattern. I was gone a good bit, but when I was home, I spent every spare minute with Lin and Andrew. He was growing up so quickly. We welcomed a daughter in 1973. We named her Madison—my mother’s maiden name. Andrew was the most dedicated older brother I’ve ever seen; he may have been even more protective than Orville Hughes had been in that orphanage in London after the war.
Lin worked herself to exhaustion. I worried about her, but the subject of how much she worked was a non-starter, so I gave up arguing about it. In marriage, as in war, some battles are unwinnable.
Our second daughter was born in 1977. We named her Peyton—Lin’s paternal grandmother’s maiden name. On the whole, she was more serious than Madison, and more inquisitive. She had the same curiosity and passion for adventure as Andrew.
I spent countless hours on planes and trains wondering what the three of them would be like when they grew up. And what sort of world they’d live in.
Then, at the Citium’s Winter Conclave in Geneva in 1983, the unthinkable happened. A cell unveiled a plan for the Looking Glass—a functioning device that would accomplish our dream of securing humanity. The scale and cost of the project was incredible. Much of the science was still theoretical then (but has been proven since), but it was a working solution. War. Famine. Disease. Climate change. Meteor impacts. Cosmic events. Extraterrestrial interference. Artificial intelligence. The Looking Glass proposed that night at the lavish home overlooking Lake Geneva would protect us from all those threats—and many more. Even more impressive, it had the potential to unravel the great mystery the Citium had pursued since its founding: the purpose of humanity—the very nature of the universe and human existence itself. The scientists who proposed the Looking Glass saw it as the next step in the march of human experience, our inevitable destiny.
Not everyone was convinced.
The group of rational, even-tempered scientists I had come to know turned savage that night. The debate began as a spirited discussion and ended in screaming. I finally realized that we had been playing a zero-sum game. At the end of the Looking Glass project, there would be only one winner; only one device would be built. All other projects would be shuttered, the funds funneled to the winning project. And whoever controlled that device would have a power never before seen on Earth. Indeed, they would control the entire human race.
The night ended in a stalemate. Members made threats. Some said they would quit the organization and continue their research on their own, starting a new kind of arms race. Others threatened to expose the entire project; if their solution wasn’t chosen, they would prevent anyone else from succeeding. Scientists, like all humans, can be very vindictive.