Adeline glanced at a real-time quote of the S&P 500 on the monitor on her desk. The index was trading around 700. It had lost about half of its value from its recent peak. It didn’t have much more to lose, but Adeline couldn’t tell her mother that. And it answered some of how her parents would find themselves in such bad financial shape before Sam joined Absolom.

  The correct answer to her mother’s question was to stay the course and stay invested in low-cost index funds and high-quality companies with long-term growth potential. Instead, Adeline said, “I don’t know. I’m not much of an investor.”

  Much as she wanted to, she couldn’t change the past.

  Her job was to ensure everything happened as it had.

  *

  If Adeline could use one word to describe her life in Santa Barbara, it would have been “quiet.” She lived on a quiet street, in a small, quiet-looking house, and she herself was quiet (most of the time). She exercised, and she studied, and she went to art galleries and a few bookstore readings for her favorite authors—and not much else.

  She was preparing for the future. She was also dreading it.

  In the summer of 2014, she drove her new Toyota Camry for two hours down to Beverly Hills, to the office of a plastic surgeon whose work no one knew about but everyone saw on TV almost daily.

  He sat on a round rolling stool, wearing a white coat, his hands pressed together as if he was about to pray.

  “Tell me, Daniele: what would you like to change about your appearance?”

  “My face.”

  “And why is that?”

  “It’s not quite right for my future.”

  *

  After recuperating from the cosmetic surgery, Adeline drove up to Stanford for the first time since leaving.

  It was her birthday, and she wanted to ride by her old house.

  The streets were quiet in the Crescent Park neighborhood of Palo Alto, where her family lived. Her parents had bought the modest home shortly after she had arrived in the world. Adeline now knew they had used the money from stock sales to make a down payment. The timing was wrong on the stock dispositions, but the house was a good investment.

  In front of the Spanish Revival home were letters in the yard that read HAPPY 6th BIRTHDAY.

  People were streaming into the backyard, carrying presents and smiling. Adeline recognized the group entering through the wooden gate. It was Elliott, his wife, and their only child, a son named Charlie, who had just turned fourteen that summer. He was wearing a high school letter jacket and stood two inches taller than his father.

  Adeline didn’t dare go in. But she vividly remembered one scene from the party, the one that was about to occur. Beyond that gate, her younger self was standing with two of her new friends from kindergarten. She was wearing a floral dress her mother had made for her.

  Approaching were three girls that lived nearby who also went to Adeline’s school. For the past two weeks, the group of girls had heckled her mercilessly about her, in their words, “homemade hobo clothes.” Looking back now, Adeline figured it was simply the stress of starting school that made the girls lash out. Adeline had been an easy target. Her clothes looked different. So they picked on her. But that ended on her birthday.

  Charlie walked up, carrying her wrapped present. Within the hour, she would discover that it was a small speaker and microphone that could be tuned to different voice effects. Shortly after unwrapping it, she would overhear her father in the kitchen, opening a beer and handing it to Elliott as he said, “Seriously, dude, what did I ever do to you?” Adeline had loved that little singing machine. Her parents had likely popped champagne the night it broke (as she cried in her room).

  But there was to be no crying at the party—or on the way home from school after that—because the teasing about her “homemade hobo clothes” came to an end when Charlie handed her the gift and looked her up and down.

  “Adeline, love the dress. Where’d you get it?”

  Young Adeline had turned her head to the mean girls as she proudly said, “My mom made it.”

  The memory made Adeline laugh, how large that event had seemed back then. Charlie was a football star, a high school heartthrob, and about the hottest thing on the block at the time. They hadn’t been as close as siblings, more like cousins, and Adeline had never been more thankful than that moment.

  The memory also brought a stab of remorse for what was going to happen to him.

  *

  Back in Santa Barbara, Adeline began the next phase of building the future. That began with San Andreas Capital.

  She registered the domain name sanandreas.cc (she figured using the cc domain extension emphasized the firm’s tagline: compassionate capital).

  She put the word out that she was looking to make investments in early-stage private companies, but she didn’t wait for pitches to arrive over the transom. She went after the companies she knew San Andreas had invested in. She also avoided start-ups that were too high profile, even though she knew they would succeed. She still needed to stay under the radar.

  Her first meeting was with a Korean biotech company called Syntran. The CEO was perhaps ten years older than Adeline. Her name was Hana Kim, and she had been born in Korea, educated in the US, and returned to her native land to earn an MD, PhD, and start a company with a lot of promise—and a huge need for capital.

  The woman sat in the conference room of the small office in Santa Barbara, a slide with statistics displayed on the projection screen behind her.

  “This year, in 2014, the number of people waiting for an organ transplant reached an all-time high at 124,000. But the number of people waiting isn’t why Syntran is in business. We’re in business because of the number of people who die in the US every day while waiting for a transplant. That number is seventeen. We’re in business because we want it to be zero: here in the United States and around the world. We’re going to make that a reality by providing synthetic, transplantable organs.”

  Adeline liked the CEO. She didn’t much like the company’s valuation or the terms attached to the preferred stock being offered, but she accepted it. As Warren Buffett had once said, it was better to get a piece of a great company at a good price than a good company at a great price. She sensed that Syntran was a great company.

  The price she could live with.

  Increasingly, what she couldn’t live with was the loneliness of her existence. In a way, she felt like her father must have in the Triassic: alone, stranded in time.

  That Christmas, as she stared at the fake tree in the bay window of her small home, she decided that she would remedy that in 2015. She couldn’t stand being alone anymore. She knew Absolom would be founded in three years, but she didn’t have three more years of solitude in her.

  It was time to get out. Even if it broke the future.

  FIFTY-ONE

  In January of 2015, Adeline flew to San Francisco to attend a start-up pitch competition. A small contribution to the event had bought a sponsorship for San Andreas Capital and an invite to the finals and the happy hour networking session after.

  The event took place on a Saturday night, in a hotel ballroom, with a large stage and a screen almost as large. The energy was electric, a mix of nerves and hopes and a feeling like futures could turn on the success or failure of these moments.

  The audience included start-up founders and investors and students, and a smattering of bloggers. The geek factor was high in the crowd. Most in attendance would rather talk about the future and extremely obscure details of their work than themselves. Adeline felt strangely at home.

  One presentation midway through the night impressed her more than the others. For its founder’s style more than the company’s substance—which she knew little about.

  The company was called speedio, and the founder and CEO was standing on the stage, hands held out, his voice monotone.

  “Hi, everyone. We’re speedio.”

  On the projector screen, a picture appeared of a thin, toned man walking on a beach wearing nothing but a Speedo.

  The presenter faked a pained expression. “No, not that kind of Speedo. Speed-i-o. As in speed.io—your website’s only hope of survival.”

  The image changed to a picture of Keanu Reeves on a bus, leaning over Sandra Bullock, who was driving.

  “Since I know you pack of animals have the attention span of a rabid squirrel on meth, I’m going to lead with this: if your website drops below a certain speed, your whole business blows up—like Sandra Bullock’s bus in an amazing movie that we’re going to pretend has no sequel.”

  On the screen, the image changed to a bar graph.

  The presenter shrugged. “I hook you with memes. I close you with graphs. Here’s what this one means: it’s the bounce rate on the average home page on the web. For pages that take two seconds to load, on average, 9.6 percent of visitors bounce—or leave. If your page takes four seconds to load, you’ve lost 17.1 percent. Six seconds.”

  He inhaled sharply.

  “I don’t like to even think about this fact, but I will use it to get your money. At six seconds, 27.4 percent of visitors roll out. Gone. Poof. Probably for good. There’s very likely an Angelina Jolie, Nicolas Cage, Gone in Sixty Seconds joke in there somewhere but I’m too lazy to dig for it, and I’m already seeing some glassy eyes, which means that, sadly—and ironically—the presentation for a company that speeds up information delivery isn’t going fast enough.”

  That brought a bout of laughter from the crowd and sent the guy clicking forward a few slides. “If you’ve got technical questions, hit me up in the Q and A. I’m here for you. For now, let’s just keep it simple: we speed up websites. Fast websites keep their audience and make money. Slow ones—well, no one knows what happens to slow web sites because no one knows about them. We have a free tier for small websites, and we charge for large sites. We’re generating revenue, and we need money to scale ’cause it turns out making your website really fast takes a ton of servers and almost as many coders wearing very huge headphones and drinking very skinny Red Bulls.”

  The next slide showed headshots of the company’s founders.

  “Here’s the requisite ‘our team is awesome’ slide with credentials that prove we’re legit enough to date your rescue dog.”

  The image changed to bar graphs and years written under them. “And finally, our total addressable market is huge. As in, the whole internet needs to go faster, and we get paid to do that.”

  The final slide was a picture of a black man sitting at a very old computer terminal. Adeline didn’t understand it. Apparently, some others didn’t either.

  “For those of you meme ignoramuses out there, this is Richard Pryor in the movie Superman III, which taught us everything we need to know about high finance: if you take fractions of a penny a bunch of times, you get a whole bunch of pennies and eventually dimes, dollars, and gold-pressed latinum, ladies and gentlemen. That’s what we do—we make a very, very small amount of money every time we make a web page load faster. Thus, the Superman III business model. And with that, I cordially, unabashedly, while making eye contact, invite you to deposit your cash money into my Speedo.”

  The last line brought a wave of laughter and applause. As the questions began, Adeline decided that the CEO of speedio was smart and funny and probably a little overconfident and all the things she had been missing in her life. His name was Nathan Hill, and Adeline didn’t know if he was part of Daniele’s past, but she decided that he was going to be part of her future, even if it broke causality, because she couldn’t take being alone anymore.

  For that reason, she sat through the Q and A, unsure what some of the questions meant.

  “So,” a venture capitalist in the front row said, “I get how you speed up static assets—images, flash video, Java applets—but how are you handling dynamically generated pages? Say, an ASP.NET web form, for example. The ViewState is going to be different for potentially every visitor.”

  “Yes and no,” Nathan said. “Even for a web form, the vast majority of the page is static—we can compress that. Same for the ViewState even. Have you ever seen some of the names on these .net controls? Like, what are the developers thinking? It’s like a haiku poem or something. We take a name like txtLastNameGrandParent1 and change it to c18—assuming it’s the eighteenth web control on the page. That’s like twenty bytes saved right there. We change the name back when we post the form data to the originating server for server-side processing. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you save twenty characters for every control on the page, those bytes add up, like fractions of a penny in Superman III.”

  After the event, Adeline approached him at the bar.

  “Hi.”

  Nathan stooped to read her name tag. “Daniele Danneros. San Andreas Capital. Not familiar, but nice to meet you.”

  She gripped his hand. “Likewise.” She stared into his eyes. “I’m interested.”

  “Okay. Wow. Nice. What size investments does your fund typically make?”

  “I’m not interested in investing.”

  *

  They had dinner the next night in a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant that had excellent chips and even better margaritas. About halfway through, Nathan dropped some of his bravado—but not all—and Adeline got to know the real him, the one he hid from the people at work and the venture capitalists on the phone.

  For the two of them, from then on, being together was effortless. Adeline thought one of the reasons their relationship worked was that it never got serious enough to interfere with either of their true passions. For Nathan, it was his company. For Adeline, it was the future. Those two things were, sadly, the main attractions in each of their lives.

  But the relationship was enough to help Adeline hang on, until the fall of 2018, when an alert popped up on her computer. It was a notification for a video she had been waiting ten years to see—a video that would start it all.

  She clicked the link and sat back as it played on YouTube.

  In the clip, Elliott was standing on a stage with a picture of a spiderweb behind him.

  “Thirty years ago, scientists at CERN invented a web that changed the world. That web we all know today. We surf it on our phones and tablets and computers. But there’s another web waiting to be discovered, one far more important. It connects to you and me and every atom in this room. The web I’m talking about is, like the World Wide Web, unseen and extremely powerful. This web is a quantum mesh created by entanglement. And it’s going to change the world. Even more than the last web.”

  *

  Adeline waited two days before she sent her email.

  Dear Dr. Lucas,

  I saw your lecture on the quantum web at CERN. It’s fascinating. In fact, I think your theories could be applied to create a technology with incredible potential.

  I’m the founder and managing partner at an early-stage venture capital fund. We’re small, but we have extensive capability—and capital to deploy.

  At your earliest convenience, I’d like to discuss the possibilities.

  Daniele Danneros

  FIFTY-TWO

  In their first phone call, Elliott was resistant to Adeline’s suggestion that his ideas on quantum entanglement could be commercialized. But Adeline was persistent.

  She sent an email the following day.

  Dear Dr. Lucas,

  Thank you for taking the time to talk with me. I know my ideas might seem far-fetched, but I assure you, we can make them a reality. You wouldn’t be expected to toil on them alone. You can pick your team. And you are certainly not expected to take any risk. That’s why firms like San Andreas exist. We know you have a comfortable teaching position and a well-respected lab at Stanford. If you decide to pursue Absolom, rest assured, there will be funding to compensate you for the risk and help you recruit the best and brightest to make this revolutionary technology a reality.

  Imagine this: if we can make instantaneous transportation of parcels from one point to another, anywhere in the world, affordable and accessible, we will change human society. I assure you that it’s possible. In time.

  All I ask is that you keep an open mind and call me back if you reconsider.

  - Daniele

  Emailing Elliott made Adeline think of Charlie. She opened a window and did a search for him. She remembered the shape of what had happened, but not the details. An article on Palo Alto Online filled in those details.

  Charlie had been a passenger in the car when it was wrecked late on a Saturday night. The driver died. Charlie’s right leg was shattered in two places, and two of his vertebrae were fractured. He had been a rising senior that summer before the crash—with a full athletic scholarship to USC. The injury had instantly ended his football career. There were doubts about whether he would ever walk again unaided. The college had agreed to honor the scholarship, but Charlie never made it there.

  Adeline remembered some of what happened next. She was too young then to have heard the full details—whether it was the pain medications he took for his injuries or the trauma of having his future changed in an instant—but it led him down a dark, spiraling path from which he never returned.

  Adeline understood a little of that now—how a life could change in the blink of an eye. She knew there was even more pain ahead for Charlie. And for her.

  *

  When Nathan had texted and invited Adeline up to Mountain View, she knew something was up.

  At their favorite Vietnamese restaurant, he slid a small velvet box across the table. Adeline swallowed and stared at it like it was a venomous snake.

  “Relax,” he said. “It’s not what you think. Well, it sort of is, but—look, just open it.”

  Inside, Adeline found two very large diamond earrings. Diamond earrings she hadn’t seen in ten years—since she had sold them at a jewelry store the first day she arrived in the past.