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  Dedication

  For my father, who knew I could be anyone.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Six Years from Now

  Part II

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Ten Years from Now

  Part III

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Twenty Years from Now

  Part IV

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for Charles Soule

  Also by Charles Soule

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  A FARM, THIRTY-FOUR MILES SOUTHWEST OF ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN

  NOW

  “TODAY, YOU CHANGE THE WORLD,” GABRIELLE WHITE SAID, OUT loud, to no one but herself.

  She said this, out loud, to herself almost every day.

  Someday it would be true. Maybe today. You never knew.

  She walked the well-worn path from house to barn, through the side yard and its overgrown grass that was one unmown week, at most, from transitioning to meadow status.

  It was evening, almost six, but the sun was still high in the sky—thank Michigan’s position on the western edge of the time zone. Enough time for several hours of work before it got dark, and then maybe some rest before the baby woke up.

  The bank-style barn loomed ahead, rust-colored and peeling, built into a hillside with an arched gambrel roof above two levels that once, long ago, housed a dairy-farm operation. The thing was ancient, and terrible for the purpose to which she’d put it, but it was on her property. So, rent-free, which outweighed pretty much everything else.

  The main entrance, the wagon door, a huge ten-by-ten sliding panel hanging from rollers at its upper edge, was closed and locked. A smaller, human-sized entrance was set into the barn’s face, to the left of the big slider, also locked. She paused there for a moment after inserting her key.

  “Today, Gabby,” she said. “Believe it.”

  Odors of small animals in small enclosures rose up to greet her as she entered the barn. A flipped switch, and light bloomed overhead from LED bulbs dangling from wires. With it, the sound of mice and rats and rabbits stirring in their cages at the unexpected dawn. Apparatus gleamed: a high-intensity laser, cables running from it to a computer station, and aluminum tables and medical equipment and shelves of research material.

  Her lab. Built to her specifications, an instrument designed and fine-tuned and redesigned and retuned for more than a year, using borrowed money on bad terms—but all she could get.

  She moved to her primary workstation and powered up the system, the on switch for the laser rig flipping upward with a thick metallic chnk she always found satisfying. A little hum, slowly cycling upward. The system would take a bit to be ready to run, which was good.

  Gabby needed some time to center herself.

  Paul had come home late. That wasn’t the arrangement, although he did it all the time. Ten minutes here, fifteen minutes there—it was clear he didn’t see it as significant, barely a transgression at all. Then again, he didn’t stay home all day with the baby, burning up his energy on caregiving—not that she minded, of course, she loved Kat, her little kitten, she did, but every hour with her brought an almost physical sensation of the dissolution of her focus, her ability to dive deep into the place where inspiration waited. Every single day had to be a masterpiece of mental resource allocation, a careful husbanding of intellectual reserves until the moment she could steal away to the barn to do her work.

  So ten minutes here, fifteen minutes there . . . it mattered. It was like telling a marathon runner in sight of the finish line, Hey, lucky you, we’ve decided to make it twenty-seven miles this time. No big deal, right?

  But she really believed Paul didn’t do it on purpose, and fighting about it would just waste time she’d rather spend in the lab. They’d already had the big fight, the one that mattered, and that was why he was staying out in the guesthouse for a while. Whether that would last, she didn’t know, but that’s where things were now.

  She was just changing Kat when she heard Paul’s car drive up, the aging sedan that would have been replaced ages ago but for the financial realities of a family comprised of academics—one employed, one not—and an eleven-month-old baby girl. The car wore its just-over-a-decade of operational life and six-figure mileage decently well, but it made Gabrielle feel a little sad every time she looked at it, a little angry. Unfulfilled expectations in the shape of a 2008 Camry.

  They’d exchanged hellos and pleasantries once he came into the kitchen, as between a first-shift factory worker giving way to a late-shift colleague, and then Gabrielle had changed her clothes, putting on her armor, her good-luck outfit: Doc Martens, black jeans with threadbare knees, and a black Bad Brains T-shirt. The shirt always made her laugh—gallows humor, considering what she did for a living. She liked the band, but she loved the gag.

  There she was, all black from head to toe, tiny and tough. She laced up her boots and headed to the barn.

  Today was a big day. Possibly the last day. Her last chance.

  The funding was essentially gone, and while she had made progress in her research, the breakthrough she’d been hoping for had (thus far) failed to materialize. She had changed no games. Nothing she’d achieved would justify another injection of cash from Hendricks Capital. They specialized in high-risk investments all over the state—long-shot research projects and hugely speculative start-ups saturated with the stink of vaporware—but there was high risk and there was just . . . stupid. Irresponsible. Throwing good money after bad. They’d funded her for a year and change, and unless she could demonstrate some strong results, that’s all she was likely to get.

  Now, the project wasn’t a complete waste. Gabby had learned some things, broken some ground. She had enough to publish, assuming Hendricks let her do that, considering they owned the research. Maybe a journal article in Cortex, or Cognition, or even, dare to dream, Trends in Cognitive Science. She could add her discoveries to the great scientific gestalt. Someday, another, better-funded scientist might use her findings as foundational research that let them achieve the true goal. But no more than that.

  Gabrielle White: literally a footnote.

  Unless . . . today.

  Gabby had spent every minute of working time she could scrape up during the past week reviewing, planning, praying, considering ways to reconfigure the gear to maximize the chances of a result that could buy her more funding, more time, from Hendricks. She broke her ideas apart, rebuilt them, tried to find a new approach—a magical, brilliant insight that would synthesize everything she’d learned in
to a shining whole that would revolutionize the science of the mind.

  That was how it was supposed to work. Archimedes in his bathtub, Newton under his apple tree. Every good scientist deserved a eureka moment.

  And she was a good scientist. She held a degree in cognitive science from the University of Michigan’s Weinberg Institute and a medical degree from the Feinberg School at Northwestern, plus a mostly complete residency in neurology back at U of M’s hospital system. All of that obtained after crushing amounts of work, sacrifices by her family and community, grants and scholarships and student loans so enormous she didn’t think about them very often, much the way you didn’t spend much time considering asteroids on a collision course with the planet.

  Gabby tapped a few keys on the workstation’s laptop, and her Strong Science playlist kicked off—up-tempo, big drums, big guitars. Not too loud, just enough to get her energy up. She walked along the row of cages resting on a series of lab tables against the wall, looking in at the small, befuddled mammals peering back at her. Some were burrowed in under the wood shavings and paper strips that served as their beds, others were peering up at her, and a few were not doing much of anything at all.

  Wilbur, Gabby thought, pulling on a pair of bite-proof Kevlar gloves. She lifted the creature from his cage—a fine example of Rattus norvegicus, a classic white lab rat. She could have skipped the gloves. Poor Wilbur was lethargic, barely awake, as far as she could tell. Barely alive, was the sad truth. Beta-amyloid plaque in his brain was rapidly eroding his neurons’ ability to function, just as it did in human Alzheimer’s patients.

  Once, though, Wilbur had been a spectacular specimen, able to navigate mazes in record time and, more important, remember the pathways when reintroduced weeks later to a maze he’d already learned. As rats went, Wilbur was a bit of a genius—until she’d introduced the plaque-causing bacteria to his system. Now, the poor thing was lucky if he remembered to eat.

  Gabby walked back across the lab to the laser rig, where a small, dark metal tube rested on an angled table. She slid open the access panel and strapped the gently squirming Wilbur down inside, then sealed it up again. The tube was just a small, dark tunnel, covered in sensors, engineered so that the only light that could enter was the light she allowed.

  Gabrielle moved over to the computer console near the apparatus and entered the final sequence she’d designed—the product of all her work over the past year and change, refined into this one, last experiment. She went over it for errors, sent a few trial runs through the simulator to make sure she hadn’t missed anything, and checked to make sure the laser was fully charged. It was.

  She tapped the space bar on her laptop, paused the music. Time to focus.

  A framed picture of the Kitten sat on the workstation’s desk. Her beautiful, tiny girl, with a blueberry in her hand and the ghosts of blueberries past smeared over her cheeks, smiling like she’d never felt so happy in her life. That smile echoed through Gabby’s heart. She made sure it was always the last thing she saw before she ran an experiment, a final little infusion of optimism.

  She looked at it now.

  Baby, blueberry, smile, echo, and Gabby activated the system.

  The mounting arm for the laser whirred to life, the business end moving forward to neatly insert itself into the tube containing Wilbur the rat. The hum of the apparatus spun up to a higher degree as it prepared to fire a class-four, thousand-megawatt argon laser—chosen for its tight blue-green wavelength that could most easily pass through the eyes and into the brain beyond.

  The nervous system’s internal communication network was built on electricity and power and energy; one of Gabby’s favorite moments in all her many years of education was the point when she realized the brain spoke a language of light.

  The entirety of her research program was based around the idea that she might learn to speak that language. Or, if not the language, one specific sentence that could, in theory, cure Alzheimer’s disease.

  The brain had something like an immune system housed in specialized neurons: microglial cells. Those cells possessed in their tool kit the ability to scrub away the beta-amyloid plaque that destroyed function in an Alzheimer’s-riddled brain. The problem was that an Alzheimer’s brain lost the ability to trigger those cells to the degree necessary to save itself. It forgot how to speak its own language.

  Gabby was trying to find the sentence that would tell a brain, in the language of light, to power up the microglials and put them to work. To paraphrase: “Brain, heal thyself.” The laser was her voice. With it, she could initiate resonance patterns within the neurons, gamma waves washing back and forth at specific intervals, an approximation of speaking in light.

  Her process was crude: like mashing random letters on a keyboard and hoping to generate something readable. So far, only minor outcomes, shadows of true progress. But every experiment was an opportunity to learn little pieces of how the brain spoke to itself, and slowly, slowly, Gabby had found a few words, developed a little grammar.

  It wasn’t much. The Kitten had a bigger vocabulary than Gabby’s system did. But she’d aggregated all that knowledge into this final test, and she thought she had a good chance of getting a strong result. After all, today could be the day. You never knew.

  The laser fired, and Gabrielle leaned forward. Data scrolled across her screen, all systems nominal, nothing unexpected, gamma waves washing through Wilbur’s brain in irregular spikes, not the serene curves she’d been hoping for.

  She closed her eyes.

  So. Today was not the day, and there were no more days.

  Hendricks Capital had given her a hell of a lot of money, but her process wasn’t cheap. The lab’s equipment sucked up enormous amounts of power; each firing of the primary laser consumed four figures’ worth of electricity. It added up, cash evaporating over the past year like beads of water thrown on a hot skillet. In fact, this final run had vaporized the very last of her funding, and she’d spent it on . . . well, nothing. Nothing at all.

  She was broke, she’d failed, and who was Gabrielle White? No revolutionary. She would have to change her daily mantra. Now, forever, always: Remember when you thought you could change the world?

  Gabby wanted to scream.

  So she did.

  She reached out to the power regulators and, without hesitation or regret, pushed them all the way up. To eleven, as it were. The apparatus’ hum whipped up into a brutal, stinging whine, then cycled even higher into a shriek. Gabby knew she was running through the rest of her allotted electricity at a ridiculous rate—throwing money on a fire. She didn’t care.

  Light began to pulse from the end of Wilbur’s tunnel, which was wrong. The system was designed to seal, to ensure that only the subject in the tube was affected by the laser and, not for nothing, to protect the eyes of any hapless researcher standing nearby. If she could see light, something was wrong.

  Possibly, spiking the power had caused vibrations that had shaken the laser loose from the tube; it didn’t really matter. What mattered was this: the experiment, the final test, was a failure on a basic level. The seal wasn’t tight, so she had no way to guarantee that her neural stimulation system was the sole reason for any increase in cognitive ability for Wilbur. Honestly, it was unlikely she’d get a positive result in any case, but that wasn’t the point. It was bad science. Her last chance, and she’d screwed it up. The cherry atop twelve months of failure sundae.

  But . . . something.

  The system was still running the sequence she’d entered, flickering through patterns that shifted in millisecond-long intervals. Whatever mishap had created the gap between the nozzle and the subject tube, the opening had to be tiny, maybe just a pinpoint. It was working like a camera obscura, projecting the lights all around the barn, spinning and dancing across the walls, ceiling and floor.

  Beautiful.

  Gabby tapped a few keys on her control board, and the overheads went out. Her gear was now providing the only illuminatio
n in the barn. The lights danced over the arched roof and the support beams like a planetarium laser show, its soundtrack the pulsing whine of the apparatus.

  Gabrielle watched, delighted despite everything.

  She wished someone else were there, maybe even Paul, because what was the point of seeing something lovely if the only other beings that saw it were Alzheimer’s-afflicted rats?

  A little glint at the corner of her vision—light reflecting off the framed photo next to her laptop.

  The Kitten, Gabby thought. Oh, Kat would love/

  She was back inside the house, upstairs, holding her baby, looking right into her eyes. She looked into them and saw her own.

  The shade they shared was nothing special—dark brown, sometimes deepening to near black, depending on the light—but it wasn’t the color. It was the life. The bright desire to see, to know, to wrest understanding from everything there was to understand. She had it, and so did her daughter.

  The first time Gabrielle had seen this reflection in and of herself, a rush of emotion had flooded through her—a bucket of joy upended above her head. A recognition that someone else out there saw the world as she did, or at least a hope. She would never have thought it would matter so much, the idea that she wasn’t alone in her world and the way she perceived it and what she wanted from it—but it did.

  The Kitten was dangling over her crib, held gently in Gabby’s hands, a smile lighting up her chubby infant face.

  So . . . either she had just lifted the baby up from her crib, or she was placing her gently back down after a feeding or a diaper change or perhaps just a few minutes of holding, of connection.

  Gabby had absolutely no idea which it was. She couldn’t remember. In fact, she couldn’t remember leaving the barn to walk back to the house. She couldn’t remember coming upstairs to the baby’s room. She couldn’t remember anything at all after the barn.

  The barn . . . and the lights.

  This was wrong. It was completely wrong.

  Gabrielle’s hands clenched, and the baby’s eyes—her big eyes, in the little face—widened in surprise.

  Gabby’s hands. Were they, in fact, hers? They were thicker, larger than they should be. . . . Whose hands were they, then? That was a question.