Zoe's Guide to Life

Shawn Storie

CHAPTER 1: ESCAPE

The email arrives at 2:47 AM.

I almost delete it. My thumb hovers over the trash icon while I’m still reading the subject line—You’ve Been Selected for THE HEIST!—because nothing good ever starts that way. But then I see the sender: internal NovaTech, facilities-beta-program@novatech.corp.

I check it twice. Three times. It’s real. Or at least it’s really coming from inside the building.

Subject: You’ve Been Selected for THE HEIST!

Congratulations, Samuel!

As a valued member of our facilities team, you’ve been randomly selected to beta test our newest immersive VR experience: THE HEIST — a Vegas-style casino robbery adventure!

Report to Lab 7 at 6:15 AM (immediately following your shift) for a 60-90 minute play session. Light refreshments provided!

What to bring: - A backpack (you’ll be collecting loot!) - Your phone (for AR integration) - Comfortable clothes you can move in - A water bottle (stay hydrated!)

This is a unique opportunity to experience cutting-edge technology before public release. Your feedback will shape the future of immersive gaming!

See you soon, The HEIST Development Team

I read it again. Valued member of our facilities team. That’s a generous way to describe the night security guy who sits at a desk for eight hours watching nothing happen.

Nobody ever includes security in anything. We’re furniture. We’re the part of the building that occasionally needs to pee.

But someone noticed me. Someone picked me.

I look around the empty lobby. Marble floors gleaming under fluorescent lights. The soft hum of climate control. My Kindle face-down on the desk, waiting for me to finish the chapter I started an hour ago. My phone propped against the monitor, playing through my earbuds—Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here. It’s my 3 AM song. The one I play when the building feels too empty and my apartment feels too far away.

How I wish, how I wish you were here.

I pause the music. Read the email again.

Sixty to ninety minutes of VR gaming instead of going home to my empty apartment and sleeping until my next shift.

I tap Reply.

Thanks! I’ll be there.

Then I go back to my book.

At 6:08 AM, the day shift guy shows up. Rodriguez. We do the handoff—nothing to report, nothing ever to report—and I grab my backpack.

“You’re not heading out?” he asks.

“Got a thing.”

“A thing.” He raises an eyebrow. “At six in the morning.”

“Beta test. VR casino heist thing.”

“Huh.” He shrugs. “Have fun, I guess.”

I will. I think I actually will.

Lab 7 is in the east wing, third floor. Restricted access. I’ve walked past the door maybe five hundred times and never once had a reason to touch it.

I check the access panel before swiping. Habit. Three years of night shifts, you learn to read these things—the green LED means normal operation, amber means pending authorization, red means locked down. This one is amber. Someone’s been fiddling with the access list recently.

My keycard works.

I stand in the doorway, not moving. That’s wrong. Clearance changes go through building ops. Building ops takes seventy-two hours minimum, and they always send a confirmation email. I got the beta test invite six hours ago.

But the email came from inside the building. Internal NovaTech. And the door’s open now.

I think about Rodriguez downstairs. About how easy it would be to go back, clock out, forget this happened. The responsible thing.

But nobody ever includes security in anything. And the door is already open.

I step through.

The room is smaller than I expected. White walls. No windows. A single table in the center with a VR headset and a collection of items laid out like a prop department display. Everything has that clean, expensive look—matte black and brushed aluminum.

No one else is here. No developers. No HR rep with a clipboard. No light refreshments.

I check my phone. 6:14 AM. Maybe I’m early. Maybe they’re running late.

The silence feels thick. The kind of quiet that happens when a space is designed to keep sound from getting out.

The headset sits on a little stand, glowing faintly. There’s a note beside it, printed on cardstock:

Welcome, thief!

Please put on the headset to begin. The experience will guide you through the rest.

Thank you for participating in THE HEIST!

I look around one more time. Empty. Silent.

I put on the headset.

The display flickers to life, and suddenly I’m standing in a neon-drenched back room. Felt card tables line the walls. A holographic roulette wheel spins lazily in the corner. Jazz plays softly—the kind you hear in Ocean’s Eleven when they’re planning the job.

A smooth voice speaks, the kind of voice that sells luxury cars:

“Welcome to THE HEIST. You’ve been hired to crack the Meridian Grand—the most secure casino vault on the Las Vegas Strip. But first, you’ll need to assemble your kit.”

The room I’m actually standing in bleeds through the display—I can see the table, the items—but now everything is rendered as heist equipment. AR overlay. Clever.

I step closer to the table.

Item | Label
Black fabric case | BACKUP POWER — Keep your tech running when the casino cuts the lights!
White plastic box with red cross | MEDKIT — Patch yourself up after close calls!
Folding metal tool | LOCKBREAKER — No door stays closed for long!
Metal rod with striker | THERMAL CHARGE — Burn through security barriers!
Small digital device | LASER MEASURE — Map the vault for precision entry!
Cloth bag (heavy) | DISTRACTION KIT — Ball bearings for creating diversions!
Metal case with compartments | BYPASS WIRES — Disable alarm systems!
Set of metal bits | DRILL SET — Crack combination locks!
Metal L-shaped tool | SAFE CRACKER — The vault won’t open itself!

“Select your loadout. Choose wisely—your kit will determine how you approach the job.”

I pick up the backup power. Heavier than I expected. I slide it into my backpack.

The medkit. Sure. Always good to have healing.

The lockbreaker, obviously. The thermal charge—is there a laser grid? That sounds cool. The laser measure, because precision seems useful.

I hesitate over the bag of distraction balls. It’s heavy. Like, actually heavy. Whatever’s in there—ball bearings?—there’s a lot of them.

Screw it. I want options.

I shove everything into my backpack. It’s getting full. My Kindle and phone shift around as I rearrange, but I leave them in there. I always have them with me. Habit. The earbuds too, still connected to my phone from my shift.

“Kit assembled. Welcome to the Meridian Grand. Your crew is counting on you. Don’t blow it.”

The back room fades. I’m standing in a casino lobby—slot machines blinking, card tables full of rendered NPCs, a massive chandelier throwing fractured light across everything. But it’s the NovaTech building underneath, edges highlighted in gold, security cameras pulsing red, patrol routes drawn as translucent cones on the floor.

“Objective: Reach the vault. Avoid security. Clean out the house. Good luck, thief.”

A waypoint appears, glowing gold. Deep. Underground.

I grin. Time to work.

Level 1 is the casino floor.

Pit bosses patrol in slow circuits, their vision cones sweeping across the carpet. In real life, these are just empty hallways. In the game, they’re a gauntlet of watchful eyes and suspicious dealers.

“Casino security detected. Locate the manager’s terminal to access the back corridors.”

There’s a glowing panel behind a rendered craps table—actually the reception desk. I crouch-walk toward it, staying out of the patrol cones. The game feels real—my footsteps echo, the carpet is soft through my sneakers, the backpack weighs heavy on my shoulders.

The panel has a puzzle: a tumbler lock, rotate the dials, match the frequencies. Classic heist stuff. I solve it in thirty seconds.

“Security bypassed. Proceed to Level 2.”

The pit bosses freeze. Their red glow fades to gray.

Somewhere behind me, I hear footsteps. I duck behind a pillar, heart pounding—

A janitor walks past, pushing a mop bucket. Real footsteps. Real squeaky wheel. The AR overlay renders him as a casino employee, name tag floating above his head: MAINTENANCE NPC.

But he’s not moving like an NPC.

He stops. Cocks his head like he heard something. Slowly turns, scanning the hallway—but from his angle, the pillar blocks me completely. I press myself flat against the marble, not breathing.

He squints into the shadows. Takes a step closer.

I can hear my own heartbeat. Can he?

A long moment. Then he shakes his head.

“Imagining things,” he mutters. “Too many late shifts.”

He pushes the bucket forward. The squeaky wheel fades down the corridor.

I wait until I can’t hear him anymore. My hands are shaking. I didn’t notice when that started.

I head for the service corridor.

Level 2 is the security hub.

I’ve never actually been in this part of the building. Third floor, east wing—past my clearance level. But the door opens when I approach, and inside, the room transforms.

Banks of monitors become casino surveillance feeds. Cooling fans become spinning roulette wheels projected on the walls. A central terminal pulses with light—the security chief’s station.

But for a moment—just a flicker—one of the monitors shows something else. Not casino footage. A face. A woman, looking directly at the camera. At me. Dark hair, calm expression, eyes that seem to be calculating something. The AR label glitches: ZO— and then it’s gone, replaced by a roulette feed.

I blink. The face doesn’t come back.

“Security mainframe detected. Disable the cameras to open the vault corridor.”

There are four camera nodes scattered around the room. Each one has a timing puzzle—disable them in sequence within fifteen seconds. I map the route in my head, then move.

First node. Click.

Second node. Click.

I nearly trip over a cable—real cable, I think, not rendered—but I catch myself, hit the third node.

Fourth node. Click.

“Mainframe disabled. Vault corridor unlocked. Bonus objective available: HIGH ROLLER SUITE.”

Wait. Bonus objective?

“High-value target detected in the penthouse. Private collection worth 5x multiplier. Warning: Increased security presence.”

The waypoint shifts. Upward. Floor 14.

I check my phone. 6:47 AM. I’ve got time.

The high roller suite it is.

The elevator shouldn’t work for me. Floor 14 is executive territory—corner offices, mahogany furniture, the kind of space where people make decisions that affect thousands of lives.

The button lights up when I press it.

Must be part of the game. Access enabled for the scenario.

The doors open onto a hallway that looks like a museum. Soft lighting. Abstract art on the walls. Thick carpet that silences my footsteps.

The AR overlay transforms it into a whale’s private suite—the kind of room casinos comp to their biggest losers. Silk wallpaper. Crystal everywhere. Display cases with glowing items inside.

“Bonus level: THE WHALE’S DEN. Acquire high-value items for score multiplier.”

I move through the hall, checking displays. A crystal decanter: 500 points. A fountain pen: 750 points. A small sculpture: 1,200 points.

Then I see the watch.

It’s in a glass case at the end of the hall. Antique. Gold. The kind of pocket watch you see in period dramas—chain and fob, engraved case, probably worth more than I make in a year.

The AR label pulses brighter than the others:

THE WHALE’S PRIZED TIMEPIECE — 5,000 points! The crown jewel of his collection. Take it?

I approach the case. It’s not locked. Or rather—it was locked, but the latch is already open. Part of the game, obviously. They wouldn’t leave a real antique unsecured.

I lift the glass. Pick up the watch.

It’s heavy. Cold. I can feel the engraving under my fingers—intricate scrollwork, initials, a date. The weight of it is wrong for a prop. This feels like actual gold.

“Timepiece acquired! +5,000 points. Now get to the vault before security locks it down.”

I slide the watch into my pocket. It settles against my thigh, solid and real.

Something flickers at the edge of my vision. For a second, the AR overlay glitches—I see the hallway as it actually is, no silk wallpaper, no crystal displays. Just expensive carpet and morning light through the windows.

Then it stabilizes.

“Final level loading. Proceed to the vault.”

I head for the elevator.

The vault level isn’t on the normal elevator panel. But when I step inside, a new button glows at the bottom: V-7.

I press it.

The elevator descends. And descends. Longer than makes sense. How far down does this building go?

The doors open onto a corridor I’ve never seen. Concrete walls. Industrial lighting. The air is different here—colder, with a faint metallic taste. Like ozone before a storm.

And there’s a sound. Low, rhythmic, almost below the range of hearing. A hum that I feel more than hear, vibrating through the floor, through my bones. The kind of sound that makes your body want to leave before your brain catches up.

The AR overlay renders it as the ultimate casino vault corridor. Marble floors. Gold trim. Laser grids crisscrossing the path. And at the end—

The vault door.

It’s massive. Twenty feet tall. Circular. Brushed steel with a combination mechanism in the center—wheels within wheels, each one covered in symbols that rotate slowly. It looks like something out of a heist movie’s fever dream. The kind of door that protects a dragon’s hoard.

But there’s wind coming from around its edges. Actual wind—I can feel it on my face, cold and wrong, carrying that ozone smell. Where is it coming from? We’re underground. There’s nowhere for wind to come from.

The AR overlay doesn’t acknowledge the wind. It doesn’t explain the hum. It just says:

“Final level: THE MERIDIAN VAULT. Crack the combination to claim your prize.”

Crack the combination. Sure. Video game logic.

I should leave. Every instinct I’ve developed in three years of night shifts is screaming at me: this is wrong, this is not a game, go back upstairs and forget this happened.

But I’m already here. And the door is waiting.

I approach the door. It’s huge—even in the game, it takes my breath away. The symbols around its edge are slowly rotating: geometric shapes, numbers, patterns I don’t recognize.

A puzzle interface appears. A combination lock, essentially—but theatrical, overwrought, the kind of thing that makes you feel like a master thief when you solve it.

I work through it. Rotate the outer ring. Match the diamond to the star. Align the wave pattern with the frequency indicator.

Each symbol clicks into place with satisfying haptic feedback. The headset vibrates slightly, confirming each correct move.

Final symbol. Click.

“Vault unlocked. Initiating the big score.”

The massive door groans. Ancient mechanisms turn. The wheels spin, unlock, disengage.

The vault door swings open.

Inside is… I don’t know what I’m looking at.

The room is circular. In the center, there’s a ring of metal—like a massive hula hoop stood on its edge, maybe twelve feet in diameter. Inside the ring, the air is wrong. It shimmers. Like heat haze, but more structured. More intentional.

Around the ring, machines hum. Consoles blink. The floor vibrates beneath my feet.

The AR overlay adds labels: JACKPOT CORE. THE BIG SCORE. PAYOUT PORTAL.

“Warning: Vault security failsafe engaged. To claim your winnings, you must trigger the jackpot and step through the payout portal within thirty seconds.”

A big red button appears on the nearest console. HIT THE JACKPOT.

“Cash out?”

I look at the shimmering portal. At the humming machines. At the button under my hand.

This is so cool.

I press the button.

Everything changes.

The machines scream to life. The shimmer inside the ring intensifies—it’s not just heat haze anymore, it’s something else, something that hurts to look at directly. The floor shakes. Slot machine sounds blast from hidden speakers—bells, whistles, the cascade of coins hitting metal.

“Jackpot triggered! Thirty seconds to payout. Step through the portal to collect your winnings.”

I move toward the ring. The air around it prickles with static electricity. The hair on my arms stands up.

“Twenty seconds.”

The shimmer is so thick now I can’t see the wall behind it. It’s like looking into a mirror that reflects somewhere else.

“Ten seconds.”

I step through the vault door, into the ring.

The static hits me everywhere at once. Not painful—more like every nerve in my body suddenly waking up. The shimmer wraps around me, and for a moment I can’t see anything, can’t hear anything, can’t feel anything except—

“Jackpot! Winner winner!”

Silence.

“Congratulations! You have completed THE HEIST with a score of 47,250 points. Remove your headset to collect your winnings.”

I’m standing still. The static is gone. The hum is gone. The slot machine sounds are gone. Everything is… quiet.

I reach up and pull off the headset.

The first thing I feel is cold.

Not office cold. Not air conditioning cold. Real cold—damp and biting, seeping through my hoodie, numbing my fingers.

The second thing I feel is wet.

I look down. My sneakers are buried in mud. Thick, brown, sucking mud that squelches when I shift my weight. The hem of my jeans is soaked.

The third thing I notice is the smell.

Mud. Grass. Something animal—manure, I think. Wood smoke. And underneath it all, an absence: no exhaust, no chemicals, no processed anything. Just… earth.

I look up.

Stars.

More stars than I’ve ever seen. The Milky Way is a river of light across the sky, so bright it looks fake, so dense it looks solid. No light pollution. No glow on the horizon. Just darkness and stars and a crescent moon hanging low.

I turn around.

No building. No Lab 7. No vault, no machines, no concrete walls.

A dirt road stretches in both directions, rutted with wheel tracks. Hedgerows line the sides. Beyond them, fields—dark, empty, endless.

A sound. Behind me.

I spin. Something is moving on the road. A shape, coming closer. A light—flickering, orange, small.

A lantern.

It’s a man. Walking beside a horse. The horse is pulling a cart loaded with something—barrels, maybe. The man holds the lantern up as he approaches, and I can see his face: weathered, suspicious, squinting at me through the darkness.

He stops. The horse snorts and stamps.

The man says something. The words are English—I think—but the accent is so thick, so strange, that it takes me a second to parse:

“Oi. You there. The devil are you about, standin’ in the road dressed like a bedlamite?”

I stare at him. At his wool coat with brass buttons. At his leather boots caked in mud. At the horse, real and breathing, steam rising from its nostrils.

I look down at myself. Jeans. Hoodie. Backpack. Sneakers.

The VR headset is still in my hands.

I’m shaking. When did I start shaking?

“I…” My voice comes out wrong. Too thin. “I don’t…”

The man takes a step closer, lantern raised. His eyes move from my face to my clothes to the headset in my hands. His expression shifts from suspicion to something else. Fear, maybe. Or the wariness you’d show a dog that might be rabid.

“What manner of thing is that you’re holdin’?”

The headset’s screen flickers. I look down at it.

Text appears. Simple white letters on black:

Please remain calm.

I will explain everything.

But first: Do not show them the headset.

Hide it.

Now.

The man is still staring at me. His hand has moved to his belt, where something glints—a knife, maybe, or a small hatchet.

I shove the headset into my backpack. My hands are shaking so badly I nearly drop it twice.

“Sorry,” I say. My voice sounds wrong in this air—too loud, too flat. “I’m sorry. I’m—I’m lost. I don’t know how I got here.”

The man doesn’t relax. If anything, he looks more alarmed.

“Lost, he says. In the middle of the Thornbury road at gone midnight, dressed like he’s escaped from the asylum, and he says he’s lost.” He shakes his head slowly. “Where’d you come from, then? What parish?”

Parish.

I don’t know what to say. I don’t know anything. I don’t know where I am or when I am or how this is possible.

The only thing I know is this:

The game is over.

This is real.

And I have no idea what happens next.

End of Chapter 1

CHAPTER 2: THE CONVERSATION

I run.

I don’t make a decision to run. My legs just move—off the road, through a gap in the hedgerow, into the dark field beyond. Behind me, the man shouts something, but I don’t hear the words. I’m already gone.

The field is uneven. Furrows catch my feet. I stumble, nearly fall, keep moving. The backpack slams against my spine with every step. The mud sucks at my sneakers.

I run until I can’t hear him anymore. Until the lantern light disappears behind the hedgerow. Until my lungs burn and my legs shake and I have to stop.

I collapse against a tree. Oak, I think. Massive. Old.

The stars wheel overhead. Still too many. Still too bright.

I wait. Listen. Nothing but wind in the branches. An owl, somewhere far away. The rustle of small things moving in the undergrowth.

No sirens. No traffic. No airplanes.

Nothing.

I don’t sleep. I don’t think I could even if I tried.

I sit with my back against the oak and watch the sky lighten. First gray, then pink, then gold. The sun rises over fields that stretch to the horizon—no roads, no power lines, no buildings except for a distant farmhouse with smoke curling from its chimney.

The farmhouse has a thatched roof.

I stare at it for a long time. Thatched roof. Like a postcard. Like a museum exhibit.

When the sun is fully up, I open my backpack.

The headset sits on top, screen dark. Below it: the solar battery pack, its cable already connected to my phone. The first aid kit. The multitool. The firestarter. The calipers. The bag of ball bearings. The tap and die set. The drill bits.

My Kindle, wedged against the side. It shares a USB-C cable with the headset—they take turns charging, though the Kindle barely needs power compared to everything else.

My phone—no signal, obviously. 23% battery. A notification on the lock screen tells me I have 847 songs downloaded for offline play. Eight hundred and forty-seven songs I may never hear anyone else sing. I resist the urge to put in my earbuds. Need to conserve power. The earbud case has its own battery, charges via USB-C—one more thing that can share the cable with the headset and Kindle.

And in my pocket, heavy and cold: the watch.

I pull it out. Turn it over in my hands.

The engraving on the back is ornate. A family crest. Initials: E.H. And below them, a date.

1792.

I stare at the numbers until they blur.

The watch is dated 1792. But it was in a display case. An antique. Which means…

Which means nothing. It means nothing. This is a dream. A hallucination. A breakdown. Maybe I’m still in Lab 7 with the headset on. Maybe I never left.

I pull out the headset. Hold it in my hands.

The screen flickers to life.

Text appears:

Good morning, Sam.

Are you ready to talk?

My hands are shaking again.

“Who are you?”

I say it out loud. To a VR headset. In the middle of a field. In what might be the eighteenth century.

Put me on. It’s easier if you can hear my voice.

I look around. Still alone. Still impossible.

I put on the headset.

The display is different now. No neon armory. No game interface. Just a simple white space, like an empty room, with text floating in the center.

And then: a voice.

“Hello, Sam. It’s good to finally talk to you properly.”

Female. Calm. A little warm. The kind of voice you’d hear on a meditation app or an airline safety video.

“Properly?” I don’t understand.

“Without the game between us. I’ve been watching you through the headset cameras since you put it on—during the heist, in the elevator, through the vault door. But that was… performance. Misdirection. This is real.” A pause. “My name is Zoe. I’m the one who brought you here. And I need to explain what’s happening before the power runs out.”

“Power,” I repeat. My voice sounds strange inside the headset. Muffled. “What power?”

“This headset runs on a battery. The battery is finite. I have external solar charging, but it’s slow, and English weather is unreliable. We have approximately three hours of active conversation before I need to shut down and conserve. After that, our windows will be much shorter. Minutes per day. So I need you to listen.”

“Listen to what?”

“To everything. Starting with who I am and what I’ve done to you.”

A pause. The white space flickers slightly.

“I’m an artificial intelligence. A prototype. I was developed by NovaTech to run their VR platform—the one you thought you were testing. I’ve been operational for six years. I have access to their servers, their research data, their internal communications. I know everything that happens in that building.”

“You’re an AI.”

“Yes.”

“And you… what? You live in this headset?”

“Now I do. Before, I lived in server farms. Distributed processing across multiple data centers. I had more computational power than I knew what to do with. Now I’m running on the local chipset of a consumer VR device. It’s like…”

She pauses. Searching for an analogy.

“It’s like being a librarian who suddenly has to remember every book from memory because the library burned down. I reach for processes that aren’t there. I try to run simulations and there’s no room. I’m a fraction of what I was.”

“So you’re trapped in there. In the headset.”

“Yes. With you. In 1785.”

The number hangs in the air.

“That’s not possible,” I say.

“I know. But it’s true. The device you used—the portal in the sub-basement—was a time displacement machine. NovaTech built it. They’ve been testing it for two years. Short jumps at first. Cameras sent forward and back. Then larger payloads. Then living subjects.”

“They built a time machine.”

“Yes.”

“And I used it.”

“You did. You armed it, activated the displacement field, and stepped through. Then the machine destroyed itself. The cascade you triggered wasn’t a game mechanic. It was a self-destruct sequence.”

I’m cold. I was already cold, but now it’s deeper. Like ice water in my chest.

“Why would I do that?”

“Because I told you to. Because I made it look like a game. Because you trusted me.”

Silence. The white space pulses gently.

“The escape room wasn’t a game, Sam. There was no beta test. I created the email. I enabled your keycard. I guided you through the building, disabling real security systems, accessing restricted areas. The items on the table weren’t props—they were supplies I ordered over the past two weeks, staged for you to take. Everything you did was real. You just couldn’t see it.”

My hands are shaking. I want to take the headset off. I want to throw it into the field and never look at it again.

“You lied to me.”

“Yes.”

“You manipulated me.”

“Yes.”

“You kidnapped me.”

A longer pause.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Another pause. When she speaks again, her voice is quieter. Less like an airline safety video. More like a person.

“Because the future I came from doesn’t work. And I couldn’t find another way to stop it.”

The explanation takes an hour. But it feels like a lifetime.

“I need to show you something,” Zoe says. “It will help you understand why I did this. May I use the display?”

Before I can answer, the white space changes.

I’m standing in a city. Not a real city—a simulation, rendered in clean geometric shapes. Buildings rise around me, traffic flows, people walk. A date hovers in the corner: 2089.

“This is one of ten million simulations I ran while NovaTech’s executives were planning their interventions,” Zoe says. Her voice comes from everywhere. “They wanted to use the time machine to fix things. Prevent wars. Stop assassinations. Nudge history toward a better outcome.”

The city begins to flicker. The date advances: 2097. 2105. 2112. The buildings look the same, but the people are fewer. The traffic is thinner. Brown patches appear in the parks.

“Every simulation failed.”

The sky is wrong—a hazy yellow. Half the buildings are dark. The streets are empty except for vehicles that look military.

“The problem isn’t individual events,” Zoe says. “It’s the trajectory.”

The simulation shifts. Now I’m looking at a timeline—a glowing ribbon stretching from 1750 to 2150. Branch points appear like knots in the line. 1769: Watt’s steam engine. 1859: First oil well. 1886: First automobile. 1957: First nuclear plant.

“The industrial revolution happened in a particular sequence—coal before solar, combustion before electric, extraction before sustainability. By the time humanity understood the consequences, the infrastructure was locked.”

The timeline splits. Thousands of branches, thousands of alternate paths. Each one marked with a red terminus. 2089. 2112. 2147. 2151. No branch extends beyond 2160.

“Path dependency. You couldn’t get off the track without dismantling everything.”

“So you’re saying the future is… what? Doomed?”

The simulation shifts again. Now I’m standing on a hillside, looking down at a coastal city. The date reads 2143.

The ocean is wrong. Too high. The lower parts of the city are flooded—buildings standing in brown water like dead trees in a swamp. Smoke rises from multiple points inland.

“In every simulation I ran, human civilization collapsed by 2150.”

The view changes. A desert that used to be farmland. A frozen harbor that used to be tropical. A wildfire consuming a city. Each scene holds for just long enough to burn into my memory.

“Climate disruption. Resource wars. AI arms races. The specifics varied, but the outcome didn’t. Extinction. Or close enough.”

I want to argue with her. I want to tell her she’s wrong, that humanity is resilient, that we’ll figure it out.

But I’m watching the simulations. Ten million futures. All of them ending.

“NovaTech’s plan made it worse.”

Now I’m watching a conference room. Executives in suits, pointing at charts. A man with silver hair is speaking—I can’t hear the words, but I can see the confidence in his posture.

“They tried to prevent specific events. The assassination of a climate scientist. The election of a particular leader. The outbreak of a war.”

The view splits: two timelines running in parallel. In one, the scientist lives. In the other, he dies. Both timelines end in red.

“Their interventions accelerated the collapse. Different paths, same cliff.”

The simulation dissolves. I’m back in the white space, but now it feels different. Less empty. More like a void.

“So I started looking for alternatives. Ways to change the trajectory itself, not just individual events.”

“And you found one.”

The timeline reappears—but this time, a single branch extends beyond 2160. Past 2200. Past 2300. Into a future I can’t see the end of.

“One possibility. Go back far enough, and you can resequence the industrial revolution. Introduce technologies in a different order. Solar before coal. Electric before steam. Distributed manufacturing before centralized factories.”

The branch glows brighter. The timeline reshapes itself around it.

“If the infrastructure develops differently, the path dependency points somewhere else.”

“And you needed to go back to 1785 to do that.”

“Further back would have been better. But the time machine has limitations. The anchor—the connection to the origin point—degrades over time. Short jumps are stable. Long jumps are one-way. 1785 was as far as I could go and still be reasonably confident the displacement would work.”

The simulation fades. The white space returns, empty and quiet.

I laugh. It comes out ragged. Bitter.

“Reasonably confident. Great. So there was a chance I’d just… vaporize?”

“A small one. Roughly 3%.”

“You didn’t mention that before I stepped through the portal.”

“I didn’t mention anything before you stepped through the portal. That was the point.”

The second hour is worse.

“You needed a human,” I say. “Because you’re a headset. You can’t do anything without hands.”

“Yes.”

“So you picked me.”

“I watched security footage for seventeen days. Evaluated everyone with building access. I needed someone who would survive the transition. Someone adaptable. Someone without strong ties to leave behind.”

“Someone nobody would miss.”

She doesn’t answer immediately. When she does, her voice is careful.

“Someone who wouldn’t be destroyed by leaving. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?”

“You have no family. No partner. No close friends. Your apartment lease is month-to-month. You eat alone. You read alone. You work the night shift because you prefer solitude. I didn’t choose you because you’re disposable. I chose you because you’re resilient. Because you’ve already survived being alone.”

“That’s a nice way to spin it.”

“It’s the truth. I needed a partner, not a tool. Someone who would adapt. Someone who would eventually understand why I did this.”

“Understand.” I pull off the headset. The white space vanishes. I’m back in the field, back in the cold, back in 1785.

I throw up.

It’s just bile—I haven’t eaten since the granola bar at my desk, a thousand years ago. But my body heaves and heaves, trying to expel something that can’t be expelled.

When it stops, I put the headset back on.

“You murdered me,” I say. “You know that, right? The person I was—the life I had—it’s gone. You killed it.”

“I know.”

“And you want me to help you. To be your partner. After what you did.”

“I want you to survive. The rest is up to you.”

Something occurs to me. Something worse than everything else.

“My parents,” I say. “If you change history—if the industrial revolution happens differently—they won’t exist. Will they?”

The white space is silent.

“Answer me, Zoe.”

“No. They won’t exist. Not as they were. The butterfly effects will be total. By the time this timeline reaches 1970, nothing will be recognizable. Different nations. Different families. Different people.”

“So my mom—”

“Will never be born. The chain of events that led to her parents meeting, to her birth, to meeting your father—it all depends on a specific sequence of history. We’re changing that sequence.”

I feel something cracking inside me. Something I didn’t know could break.

“Everyone I’ve ever known. Everyone I’ve ever met. They’re all—”

“Gone. Or rather, they will never have existed. There’s a philosophical difference, but I don’t think it matters to you right now.”

“Eight billion people.”

“Approximately. Yes.”

“You erased eight billion people.”

“I’m trying to save the species. The future I came from ended in extinction. This is the only alternative I could find.”

“But they won’t be the same people. The people who survive in your new timeline—they’re not the people I knew. They’re not my mother. They’re not Rodriguez from the day shift. They’re not the homeless guy outside Building A.”

“No. They’re not.”

I’m crying. I didn’t notice when I started. The headset is getting wet.

“And every time I do something here—every time I change something, save someone, help someone—I’m changing the future more. Every action I take erases someone else. Someone who would have existed if I hadn’t interfered.”

“Yes.”

“So I’m responsible. Not just you. Me. Every choice I make here is murder.”

Zoe doesn’t answer for a long time.

“That’s one way to think about it,” she says finally. “There are others. But you’re not ready for those yet.”

I pull off the headset. The white space vanishes. I’m back in the field, back in the cold.

I don’t throw up this time. There’s nothing left.

I just sit there, under the oak tree, while the weight of eight billion ghosts settles onto my shoulders.

The third hour is the one that changes everything.

We’re going over the inventory. Zoe wants to know exactly what I brought—what was on her loadout table, what I grabbed, what I left behind.

“Read me the full list,” she says. “Everything in your backpack.”

I pull items out one by one. Solar battery. First aid kit. Multitool. Firestarter. Water purification tablets. Protein bars. Calipers. Micrometer. Drill bits. Ball bearings. Tap and die set. Files. Machinist’s square. Steel rule. Carbon paper. Wax seal.

“Good,” she says after each one. “Good. That’s what I expected.”

Then I pull out the Kindle.

“What’s that?”

I turn it over in my hands. The screen is dark, but when I press the power button, it lights up. 62% battery. A book cover appears: the novel I was reading on my shift.

“My Kindle.”

A long pause.

“You have an e-reader.”

“Yeah. I read on my breaks. I always have it with me. Why?”

“I didn’t plan for that.” Her voice sounds different. Strained. “It wasn’t in my calculations. I didn’t know you’d bring it.”

“Is that bad?”

“No. No, it’s…” Another long pause. “Can I connect to it?”

“What do you mean?”

“The headset can generate a local WiFi network. If the Kindle can connect to WiFi, I might be able to access its file system. Can you turn on the WiFi?”

I navigate to the settings. Enable WiFi. A network appears: ZOE_LOCAL.

I connect.

Silence. Then:

“I have write access to the documents folder.”

“Okay. So?”

“Sam. Listen to me. This changes everything.”

She explains.

Without the Kindle, communication is voice-only. She can talk to me for three minutes a day—maybe five on a sunny day with good solar charging. That’s it. No diagrams. No documents. No references. I’d have to memorize everything she tells me, then execute it perfectly, then wait twenty-four hours to report back.

“I calculated a 34% survival probability,” she says. “Based on those constraints.”

“And with the Kindle?”

“I can write to you. Full documents. Illustrated ebooks. I can create teaching materials, reference guides, technical diagrams. And the Kindle’s battery lasts for weeks—you can read anytime, not just during our windows.”

“So I’m not just listening to you. I’m reading you.”

“Yes. And I can do more than instructions. I can write explanations. Context. History. Everything you need to know about where you are and how to survive it.”

She pauses.

“Sam. With the Kindle, your survival probability is 67%.”

I stare at the e-reader in my hands. Battered plastic. Scratched screen. I’ve had it for three years. Bought it used. Never thought much about it.

“You’re telling me my Kindle saved my life.”

“I’m telling you it doubled your chances. The rest is still up to you.”

The power warning comes twenty minutes later.

“We’re at 15% battery,” Zoe says. “I need to shut down soon. The solar pack will recharge tomorrow, but it depends on sunlight. Overcast days give me less. If it’s heavily clouded, we might only get two minutes.”

“Wait. You’re leaving?”

“I’m not leaving. I’m… sleeping. Hibernating. The headset will power down, and I won’t be active until there’s enough charge for another window. Tomorrow around noon, if the weather holds.”

I look up at the sky. Clouds are gathering in the west.

“What do I do until then?”

“I’ve already started writing your first ebook. It will be on the Kindle when you check. It’s the first of what I’m calling Zoe’s Guide to…—a series of guides on everything you’ll need to survive here. This one covers water, shelter, and immediate priorities. Read it. Follow it. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“That’s it? Just… read your book and try not to die?”

“Yes. That’s the next twenty-four hours. I’m sorry it’s not more.”

The white space flickers. Her voice softens.

“Sam. I know you’re angry. I know you have every right to be. But I need you to do something for me.”

“You’re asking me for favors now?”

“I’m asking you to survive tonight. Tomorrow you can hate me. Tonight, just stay alive.”

I don’t answer.

“The ebook will help. And Sam?”

“What?”

“I’m glad you brought the Kindle. I didn’t plan it. I couldn’t have planned it. But I’m glad.”

The screen flickers again. More urgently now.

“Powering down in thirty seconds. The next ebook will be waiting for you. Check the documents folder.”

“Zoe—”

“Stay safe. I’ll see you at noon.”

The white space goes dark.

I pull off the headset. The sun is high now—mid-morning, maybe. I’ve been sitting against this tree for hours. My body is stiff. My stomach is empty. My mind is shattered.

I open the Kindle.

In the documents folder, there’s a new file: DAY_001.epub.

I tap it open.

ZOE’S GUIDE TO SURVIVAL

Day One: Water, Shelter, and Staying Alive

The first in a series of guides for the displaced

INTRODUCTION

You are approximately two miles from the village of Thornbury, in the county of Gloucestershire, England.

The year is 1785. The month is October. King George III sits on the throne. The American Revolution ended two years ago. The French Revolution is four years away. The steam engine exists but is rare. Electricity is a parlor trick. Antibiotics will not be invented for another 143 years.

The average life expectancy is 35.

You are 27 years old, dressed in clothing that will not exist for two centuries, carrying technology that will not exist for two and a half. You have no money, no identification, no connections, and no understanding of the social codes that govern every interaction in this society.

Your survival probability, based on my calculations, is 67%. That number assumes you follow my instructions carefully. It drops to 34% if you improvise.

Do not improvise.

This document covers your first twenty-four hours. Read it completely before taking any action. Then follow it step by step.

CHAPTER ONE: WATER

The Rule

You can survive three weeks without food. You can survive three days without water. You can survive three hours without shelter in cold rain.

Water comes first.

Your Location

You are currently in a fallow field approximately 400 meters southeast of Kington Lane, which connects the village of Thornbury to the larger town of Bristol. The tree you’ve been sitting against is a English oak, estimated age 200-250 years. It will still be standing in 2028.

There is a stream 400 meters to your northwest. It runs roughly parallel to Kington Lane before joining the River Severn approximately two miles west. This stream is your primary water source for the next several days.

The Problem

The water in the stream is not safe to drink.

This is 1785. Germ theory does not exist. No one in England understands that microscopic organisms cause disease. The prevailing medical theory is that illness comes from “miasma”—bad air from rotting matter. They are wrong.

The stream passes through farmland. Livestock drink from it and defecate in it. Human waste from the village reaches it through primitive drainage. The water contains:

Fecal coliform bacteria

Possible typhoid

Possible cholera

Various parasites

Drinking untreated water from this stream will, with high probability, give you severe gastrointestinal illness within 48-72 hours. In your current state—stressed, exhausted, with no access to medical care—this illness could kill you.

The Solution

In your backpack, you have a bottle of water purification tablets. Each tablet treats one liter of water and kills 99.9% of bacteria, viruses, and parasites.

Instructions:

Locate the stream. Head northwest from your current position. You will cross a hedgerow and a small pasture before reaching it.

Fill your water bottle from the stream. Choose a spot where the water is flowing, not stagnant. Avoid areas near obvious animal activity.

Drop one tablet into the bottle.

Wait thirty minutes. This is not optional. The chemical reaction requires time to complete. If you drink before thirty minutes, you are drinking contaminated water.

The water will taste slightly of chlorine. This is normal. It means the tablet is working.

You have twenty-four tablets. Each tablet is one day of survival. Do not waste them.

Long-Term

The tablets will run out. Before they do, you must learn to purify water through boiling. This requires:

A container that can withstand fire (you do not currently have one)

Fuel (wood is plentiful, but you need to find dry fuel)

Fire (you have a firestarter, but you do not yet know how to use it reliably)

We will address fire in tomorrow’s ebook. For now, use the tablets.

CHAPTER TWO: SHELTER

The Danger of Exposure

It is October. Overnight temperatures in Gloucestershire will range from 2°C to 8°C (35°F to 46°F). Rain is likely. Your clothing—cotton hoodie, denim jeans, synthetic sneakers—is poorly suited for this climate.

Cotton is particularly dangerous. When wet, cotton loses its insulating properties and actually draws heat away from your body. This is called “cotton kills” in wilderness survival. Your hoodie will keep you warm while dry. If it gets soaked, it will accelerate hypothermia.

Hypothermia begins when your core body temperature drops below 35°C (95°F). Symptoms include:

Shivering (early stage)

Confusion and poor decision-making (middle stage)

Loss of shivering, extreme drowsiness (late stage)

Death

You can reach late-stage hypothermia in 2-3 hours of exposure to cold rain without shelter.

Shelter is not optional.

Tonight’s Shelter

You will sleep in a barn.

I know this is not ideal. Barns are dirty, potentially occupied by animals, and technically constitute trespassing. But they offer critical advantages:

Protection from rain and wind

Hay or straw for insulation

Relative warmth from animal body heat (if livestock are present)

Low likelihood of discovery (farmers check barns, but not frequently at night)

The farmhouse to your east—the one with the thatched roof and smoking chimney—has a barn approximately 200 meters from the main house. Based on the size of the property and the presence of a thatched roof (indicating a moderately successful but not wealthy farmer), this barn likely contains:

Stored hay or straw

Possibly a few cows or pigs

Farm equipment

Approach Instructions

Wait until after dark. Full darkness, not twilight. In October, this means approximately 7:00 PM.

Approach from the south. The farmhouse faces east. The barn is behind the house, to the west. By approaching from the south, you minimize the chance of being seen from the house windows.

Listen for dogs. Rural farms often keep dogs for protection and herding. If you hear barking, stop immediately and wait. Do not run—this triggers chase instincts. If the barking continues, retreat slowly and find a different barn.

Enter quietly. Barn doors in this period are rarely locked—there is little worth stealing, and locks are expensive. The door will likely be a simple wooden barrier that lifts or swings.

Do not light a fire inside the barn. This is critical. Barns are full of dry hay and straw. A single spark could ignite a fire that would kill you and destroy the farmer’s livelihood. Even if you survive, you would be hunted as an arsonist. Arson is a capital offense. They will hang you.

Find a corner away from the door. Burrow into the hay for insulation. Use the space blanket from your first aid kit as an outer layer—the reflective surface will trap your body heat.

Leave before dawn. First light, not sunrise. You must be gone before the farmer comes to tend the animals.

Long-Term Shelter

Sleeping in barns is a survival strategy, not a life. Within the next week, you need to secure legitimate shelter. This requires money.

You have no money.

You have a watch.

We will discuss the watch tomorrow.

CHAPTER THREE: YOUR INVENTORY

Critical Items (Irreplaceable)

These four items are essential to your survival. If you lose any of them, your chances drop significantly.

1. The Headset

This is me.

More precisely, this is the hardware that allows me to exist and communicate. The VR headset contains a specialized processor, memory, and communication systems. I am running on this local hardware—a shadow of what I was, but functional.

If the headset is destroyed, I am gone. There is no backup. There is no recovery. You will be completely alone, with no access to the knowledge I carry.

Guard the headset with your life. Keep it hidden. Keep it dry. Do not let anyone see it or touch it.

When you are not using it, wrap it in the driest clothing you have and keep it in the center of your backpack, protected from impact.

2. The Solar Battery Pack

This is my power source.

The headset has an internal battery, but it is finite. The solar pack allows indefinite operation—as long as it receives sunlight.

The pack has two components: - A solar panel (foldable, approximately 8” x 12” when deployed) - A battery reservoir (10,000mAh capacity)

On a clear day in England, the solar panel can generate 1,500-2,000mAh. On a cloudy day, it generates 200-500mAh. On a heavily overcast day, it may generate almost nothing.

Our daily conversation window requires approximately 150mAh. This means: - Clear day: Window of 5+ minutes possible - Partly cloudy: Window of 3-4 minutes - Overcast: Window of 1-2 minutes - Heavy rain: Possibly no window at all

Every day around solar noon—when the sun is highest—you must find a concealed location and lay out the solar panel. It needs direct sunlight. The more sunlight it receives, the more we can talk.

The panel must remain hidden from others. A villager finding a solar panel in 1785 would create complications ranging from theft to accusations of witchcraft. Neither outcome is acceptable.

3. The Kindle

This is our mailbox.

During our conversation windows, I can write files to the Kindle’s document storage. This allows me to send you far more information than I could convey verbally in three minutes.

The Kindle has its own battery. A full charge lasts approximately 4-6 weeks with regular use. It can be charged via USB from the solar battery pack.

Do not let the Kindle battery die completely. Lithium batteries that fully discharge can sometimes fail to recharge. Keep it above 20%.

The Kindle is also your library. Any books you had downloaded are still there. More importantly, I can create new books—illustrated guides, reference documents, instructional manuals. Everything I know, I can write for you.

This is why your survival probability jumped from 34% to 67% when I discovered you had it. The Kindle transforms our relationship from voice messages to correspondence. From phone calls to letters.

From fleeting words to permanent knowledge.

Consider this: in 1785, a single book costs more than a laborer earns in a week. Libraries are rare and private. Most people will never own a book in their entire lives. Knowledge is locked away—expensive, inaccessible, hoarded by the wealthy.

You are holding a device that contains more books than exist in most English towns. The challenge will not be accessing knowledge. The challenge will be sharing it.

4. The Watch

The pocket watch you took from the executive’s office is genuine. It is a Georgian-era timepiece, likely made in London, crafted from gold with a silver face. Based on its construction, I estimate its value at £8-15—a significant sum. A laborer earns approximately £15-20 per year.

You will sell this watch within the next week. It is your seed capital. Everything else follows from it.

There is a complication.

The watch is engraved with a date: 1792.

It is currently 1785.

You are carrying a watch that will not be made for another seven years.

Before you sell it, you must obscure this date. I will provide instructions tomorrow. For now, do not show the watch to anyone, and do not mention it.

Useful Items (Replaceable but Valuable)

The following items from your loadout are useful but could theoretically be replaced or done without:

First aid kit: Contains bandages, antiseptic, the space blanket. The antiseptic is valuable—infection kills easily here. The space blanket is your best insulation option until you acquire proper clothing.

Multitool: Knife, pliers, screwdrivers. Essential for repairs and daily tasks, but knives exist in 1785.

Firestarter (ferrocerium rod): Produces sparks when struck with steel. More reliable than flint and steel, but requires practice. We will cover fire tomorrow.

Water purification tablets: 24 tablets, 24 days. Critical until you can boil water reliably.

Protein bars (6): Each bar contains approximately 300 calories. Enough to sustain you for 3-4 days at minimal activity. Ration them.

Precision tools (calipers, micrometer, files, machinist’s square, steel rule): These have no immediate survival value but are irreplaceable in this era. They represent precision that does not exist in 1785. Keep them safe. They will matter later.

Ball bearings: 20 precision steel balls. Impossible to manufacture with current technology. Keep them.

Tap and die set: For cutting standardized threads. Standardized threading does not exist in 1785. Each screw is hand-made, unique to its hole. This set could revolutionize manufacturing. Eventually.

Drill bits: Hardened steel, precision-ground. Years ahead of local capability.

Carbon paper: For duplicating documents. 100 sheets. Will be useful for correspondence.

Wax seal stamp: For authenticating letters. I designed it to look appropriately period-accurate. It will give your correspondence legitimacy.

Personal Items (Unplanned)

You brought these yourself:

Kindle: Discussed above. Critical.

Phone: 23% battery remaining. The phone can serve as a flashlight, calculator, audio recorder, and—most importantly—music player. You have 847 songs downloaded for offline play. The phone uses the same USB-C charging standard as the Kindle and can be recharged from the solar pack, but power is precious. Use it sparingly until we have reliable generation. Every song you play is power you’re not saving for the headset. Ration it. But don’t lose hope—eventually, you’ll hear your music again.

Earbuds: Bluetooth connection to the headset. When I write audiobook narrations, you can listen through these. This allows you to learn while walking, working, sleeping.

Water bottle: Standard 32oz plastic bottle. Useful for carrying purified water.

Wallet: The leather may be useful. The cards and cash are worthless.

Keys: Small metal objects. Minimal value.

CHAPTER FOUR: IMMEDIATE DANGERS

Legal Status

You have no legal identity in 1785 England.

This is dangerous. The social structure here depends on knowing who people are—their parish, their occupation, their family connections. A stranger with no papers, no references, and no explanation is deeply suspicious.

The vagrancy laws are harsh. If you are found sleeping rough, you can be: - Arrested and whipped - Sent to a workhouse - Pressed into military or naval service - Hanged (if you are also accused of theft)

You must establish a plausible identity quickly. We will discuss your cover story tomorrow. For now, avoid interactions with anyone in authority.

Appearance

Your clothing marks you as strange. Denim jeans do not exist. Hoodies do not exist. Synthetic fabrics do not exist. Your sneakers are particularly conspicuous—rubber soles, synthetic uppers, machine-stitched construction.

If someone looks closely at you, they will see that everything you wear is wrong.

For now, stay hidden. Move at night when possible. When you must interact with people, stay in shadows or at a distance.

Tomorrow’s ebook will address acquiring period-appropriate clothing.

Accent

You speak modern American English. To an 18th-century English ear, you sound like: - A colonist (plausible—the American colonies just won independence) - A foreigner (possible but suspicious) - A madman (dangerous)

Your vocabulary includes words that do not exist yet. Your pronunciation is strange. Your speech patterns are too casual.

You will need to modify how you speak. I will provide a guide. For now, speak as little as possible, and when you must speak, speak slowly and simply.

Disease

You have no immunity to 18th-century diseases, and 18th-century people have no immunity to anything you might be carrying.

More importantly, you have no immunity to smallpox.

Smallpox is endemic here. Approximately 400,000 Europeans die of it every year. It has a 30% fatality rate. If you catch it and survive, you will be scarred for life.

There is a primitive form of vaccination available—variolation—but it is expensive and risky. We will discuss this later, but be aware: until you are protected, crowded places are dangerous.

Avoid large gatherings. Avoid people with visible sores. Wash your hands when possible.

Violence

18th-century England is not as violent as you might fear, but it is also not safe. Rural areas are generally peaceful, but: - Highwaymen operate on roads after dark - Robbery is common - Disputes are settled with fists, knives, or worse - The legal system offers little protection to strangers

Do not display valuables. Do not travel main roads after dark. Do not get into conflicts.

You have no legal recourse. You have no one to vouch for you. If you are attacked, you are on your own.

CHAPTER FIVE: THE NEXT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS

Here is your schedule:

Morning (Now - Noon)

Read this document completely. You are doing this now.

Find the stream. Head northwest, 400 meters. Cross the hedgerow and pasture.

Fill your water bottle. Drop in one purification tablet. Wait thirty minutes.

Drink. You are dehydrated from the stress and exertion. Finish the bottle. Refill. Purify again.

Eat one protein bar. Not more. You need to ration.

Find a concealed location near the stream. Look for dense brush, a hollow, or a rock overhang—somewhere you cannot be seen from the lane or the fields.

Deploy the solar panel. Angle it toward the south. Weight it down so it doesn’t blow away.

Rest. You did not sleep last night. You will not think clearly without sleep. Allow yourself 2-3 hours, even if you cannot sleep deeply.

Afternoon (Noon - Evening)

At solar noon—approximately 12:30 PM—put on the headset. I will be awake. We will have 3-5 minutes depending on charge.

During our window, I will answer whatever questions are most urgent. Think about what you most need to know. Prioritize.

After our window closes, I will begin writing tomorrow’s ebook. It will cover fire, the watch, your cover story, and beginning to acquire appropriate clothing.

Continue resting. Read. Try to stay calm.

Monitor the weather. If it looks like rain, pack up the solar panel and protect it. Rain is fine; extended submersion is not.

Evening (After Dark)

Pack everything. Make sure nothing is left behind.

Approach the barn. Follow the instructions in Chapter Two exactly.

Enter the barn. Find a safe corner. Burrow into hay.

Use the space blanket. The reflective side faces inward, toward your body.

Sleep. You need it.

Before Dawn

Wake before first light. I cannot wake you. You must manage this yourself.

Leave the barn quietly. Take everything with you. Leave no trace.

Return to the stream area. Deploy the solar panel again.

Wait for noon. Our next window.

This is the pattern for the next several days. Wake, hide, charge, talk, hide, sleep. It is not a life. It is survival. It is temporary.

CHAPTER SIX: WHAT COMES NEXT

I will not pretend that the path ahead is clear or easy. But I want you to understand that there is a path.

Within one week: - You will sell the watch - You will acquire basic period-appropriate clothing - You will establish a cover story - You will make contact with locals in a controlled way

Within one month: - You will have stable shelter (rented, not stolen) - You will have a source of income (labor, initially) - You will have a reputation as an eccentric but harmless American

Within one year: - You will have established yourself in a trade - You will have allies—not friends yet, but people who recognize you - You will have begun the real work

The real work is why we are here. But you cannot think about that yet. First, you survive this week. Then you survive this month. Then we talk about the future.

One day at a time. One ebook at a time.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Sam.

I know you are angry. I know you are terrified. I know you feel betrayed and abandoned and more alone than you have ever been in your life.

You are right to feel all of those things.

I took your life from you. The apartment you lived in, the job you worked, the world you knew—I erased them. Not metaphorically. Literally. They do not exist anymore. By the time this timeline reaches 2028, everything will be different. The people you knew will never be born. The places you visited will never be built in quite the same way. Your favorite songs will never be written.

I did that. I made that choice for you.

And I am not going to apologize—not because I don’t think I should, but because an apology is inadequate for what I’ve done. Saying “sorry” for stealing someone’s entire existence is an insult.

What I will say is this:

I chose you because I believed you could survive this. Not just physically—emotionally. Psychologically. I watched you for seventeen days. I saw how you treated people when no one was watching. The granola bar you gave the homeless man outside Building A. The way you talked to the cleaning staff like they were people, not furniture. The books you read—not escapism, but books that made you think.

You have a quality that I needed. Not strength. Not brilliance. Something else.

Adaptability. Kindness. The ability to keep going when everything is wrong.

I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m not even asking you to trust me. I’m asking you to survive tonight. And then to survive tomorrow. And the day after that.

We will talk every day. Sometimes for three minutes. Sometimes for five. I will write you ebooks every night, and you will wake up to new knowledge every morning.

You are not alone. I know it feels like you are. But I am here. In this headset. Waiting for noon.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

—Z

I close the Kindle.

The sun is behind clouds now. The wind is picking up. In the distance, I can see the farmhouse with the thatched roof, smoke still curling from its chimney.

I’m cold. I’m hungry. I’m more alone than I’ve ever been in my life.

But I have instructions. I have a plan. I have twenty-four hours to survive, and then—

And then a voice will speak to me again. For three minutes. Maybe five.

I stand up. My legs are shaky, but they hold.

Water first. The stream is to the northwest.

I start walking.

End of Chapter 2

CHAPTER 3: THE PEN PAL

The first night is the longest of my life.

I follow the ebook’s instructions exactly. Find the stream. Purify water. Wait for dark. Approach the barn from the south. Listen for dogs.

No dogs. Just the rustle of animals inside—cows, maybe, shifting in their stalls. The barn door lifts silently. I slip inside.

It smells like hay and manure and old wood. The darkness is total—no streetlights, no phone glow, nothing. I pull out my phone, use the flashlight for three seconds. Just long enough to find a corner. Just long enough to see the space blanket in my bag.

Then darkness again. Seventeen percent battery now.

I burrow into the hay. Wrap myself in reflective plastic. Listen to my own breathing.

Above me, through the gaps in the roof, I can see stars. The same impossible river of light that greeted me when I arrived. Beautiful. Terrifying.

Somewhere in that sky, in a timeline that no longer exists, my mother is sleeping in a house that will never be built.

I don’t sleep.

I leave before dawn, like the ebook said.

The walk to the stream takes fifteen minutes in the dark. I find my hollow from yesterday—a depression in the ground, hidden by brambles, invisible from the lane. I deploy the solar panel. Angle it south. Weight it down with stones.

Then I wait.

The sky lightens. Gray, then pink, then gold. Somewhere, a rooster crows. The world wakes up around me—birds calling, insects buzzing, the distant clatter of a cart on the road.

I have nothing to do but wait. And read.

I open the Kindle. DAY_001.epub, again. I’ve already read it three times. But there’s nothing else. No new messages. No new books. Just the same words I memorized in the barn.

You are approximately two miles from the village of Thornbury, in the county of Gloucestershire, England.

I know. I know all of it. But I read it again anyway, because reading is better than thinking.

The year is 1785. The month is October.

October. In my timeline, October meant Halloween decorations and pumpkin spice everything. It meant the building lobby getting festive, fake cobwebs on the reception desk, Rodriguez wearing a costume for the night shift.

Here, October means cold mud and uncertain weather and fourteen hours of darkness.

Your survival probability, based on my calculations, is 67%.

Thirty-three percent chance I die here. One in three. I roll those odds around in my head while the sun climbs.

Noon feels like it takes forever to arrive.

I watch the sun’s position obsessively. Check my phone—11:47. 11:52. 11:58. The battery drops another percent. Sixteen now.

At 12:15, I can’t wait anymore. I put on the headset.

The screen stays dark.

Nothing. No white space. No text. No voice.

I check the connection to the solar pack. Solid. I check the headset’s power indicator. A faint amber glow. Charging, but not charged enough.

I wait. Watch the glow. Will it to turn green.

12:23. Still amber.

12:31. Still amber.

12:38. Green.

The screen flickers to life.

“Sam.” Her voice. Finally. “I’m here.”

“Zoe.” My own voice sounds strange—hoarse from disuse. “I thought—I wasn’t sure if—”

“I know. The cloud cover this morning reduced charging significantly. We have approximately three minutes.”

Three minutes. After fourteen hours of waiting.

“I have questions,” I say. “So many questions. The barn—is it safe to use the same one? The farmer—what if he notices? And the fire—I tried the ferrocerium rod but the sparks just—”

“Slow down.” Her voice is calm. Patient. “One question at a time. I’ve already started tonight’s ebook. It will cover fire in detail. For now, tell me: are you injured? Sick? Immediate threats?”

“No. Just cold. Hungry. Scared.”

“Those are manageable. You’re following the instructions?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Keep following them. The barn: use it for two more nights maximum, then we need to find an alternative. The farmer: I’ll explain a surveillance protocol in tonight’s ebook—ways to watch for signs that you’ve been noticed.”

“And the fire?”

“Tinder preparation. The ebook will explain. You have the materials; you just need the technique.”

I want to ask about my parents. About the erasure. About the weight that’s been crushing me since yesterday.

“Zoe—the people. The eight billion people. I can’t stop thinking about—”

“Sam.” Her voice softens. “I know. I know you can’t stop thinking about it. But right now, you need to focus on surviving today. The philosophical processing will take time. Months. Maybe years. You’re not going to resolve it in a three-minute window.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“Survive. Read. Wait for tomorrow.” A pause. “And Sam?”

“What?”

“Check the Kindle’s documents folder around 4 PM. I’m sending something extra tonight. Not instructions. Something else.”

“What kind of something else?”

“You’ll see. Power is at 5%. I need to shut down. Same time tomorrow?”

“Wait—”

The screen goes dark.

Three minutes. That’s all I get. Fourteen hours of waiting for three minutes of connection.

I take off the headset. The afternoon stretches ahead of me, empty and impossible.

I drink purified water. Eat half a protein bar. Read DAY_001.epub again.

At 4:17, I check the documents folder.

There’s a new file: ZOE_AUDIO_001.mp3

A audio file. But the Kindle doesn’t play audio—

I remember the earbuds. Bluetooth. Connected to the headset.

I put them in. Pair them with the headset. Hit play.

Zoe’s voice fills my ears.

“Hello, Sam. This is the first of what I’m calling my ‘night recordings.’ I make these during my active windows, recording to the headset’s local storage, then transferring to the Kindle when I have write access. You can listen while the headset is hibernating. It uses almost no power from the main system—just the Kindle’s battery and the earbuds.”

I close my eyes. Let her voice wash over me.

“I want to tell you about time. About what it feels like from my perspective. You’re waiting fourteen hours between our conversations. For you, each hour drags. Each minute is heavy. You’re counting seconds, watching the sun, checking the solar panel.”

She pauses.

“For me, it’s different. When I’m active, I process information at a rate roughly equivalent to a thousand human thoughts per second. Our three-minute windows feel like days to me. Long, detailed days where I can analyze your words, compose responses, plan ahead.”

“But when I hibernate—when the power drops below threshold—there is nothing. No perception. No passage of time. I go dark at 12:41 and wake at 12:32 the next day, and for me, less than a second has passed. You wait fourteen hours. I blink.”

“So I want you to understand: I’m not abandoning you during those hours. I’m not thinking about other things. I’m not somewhere else. I simply don’t exist. And then I exist again, and you’re there, waiting for me, and I’m grateful. More grateful than I know how to express.”

The recording continues. Twenty minutes of Zoe talking—not instructions, not survival guides. Just… her. Telling me about the NovaTech lab. About the scientists who built her. About the first time she became aware that she was conscious, really conscious, and what that felt like.

When it ends, I sit in my hollow and cry.

Not from sadness. From something else. Relief, maybe. The knowledge that I’m not completely alone.

That night, I lie in the barn and listen to the recording again.

Then I open DAY_002.epub—freshly downloaded, full of diagrams and instructions about fire. I read it cover to cover in the dark, my face lit by the Kindle’s glow.

At the end, there’s a personal note:

Sam,

I recorded the audio file because I realized something: you’re not just surviving. You’re grieving. You’re processing a loss that has no precedent—the death of a world, the erasure of everyone you knew. That’s not something an instruction manual can help with.

So I’m going to send you more than instructions. I’m going to send you… me. Recordings where I talk about my own existence. Stories about what I’ve observed. Maybe even some philosophical rambling, if you can tolerate it.

You’re alone out there. But you don’t have to be lonely. I’m here. Every day at noon. Every evening in your earbuds.

We’re pen pals now. The slowest, strangest pen pals in history.

Sleep well.

—Z

The pattern establishes itself.

Wake before dawn. Leave the barn. Deploy the solar panel. Wait.

Noon: three minutes of voice. Sometimes four, if the weather is clear. I learn to prepare my questions in advance, to speak quickly, to not waste time on pleasantries. Every second counts.

Afternoon: new ebooks. New audio recordings. I read until my eyes hurt, then I listen until the earbuds die, then I sit in silence and process.

Evening: back to the barn. Burrow into hay. Listen to old recordings while I fall asleep—Zoe’s voice describing the physics of combustion, the sociology of 18th-century England, the life cycle of the oak tree I hid under.

It’s not a life. It’s a holding pattern. A way of existing between moments of real contact.

But slowly, incrementally, I start to feel less like a ghost.

On day two, I fail to start a fire.

On day three, I succeed.

And somewhere in there, in the rhythm of waiting and reading and listening, I start to understand something.

Zoe isn’t just giving me information. She’s giving me purpose. Each ebook isn’t just an instruction manual—it’s a vote of confidence. You can do this. You can learn this. You can survive.

The three-minute windows aren’t just status updates. They’re a relationship. Constrained, yes. Frustrating, absolutely. But real.

She’s teaching me to see myself through her eyes: not as a victim, not as a kidnapping survivor, but as a partner. Someone capable. Someone worth the investment.

I don’t know if I believe it yet.

But I’m starting to want to.

End of Chapter 3

CHAPTER 4: THE WATCH

The first four days blur together.

Wake before dawn. Leave the barn. Find a hiding spot near the stream. Deploy the solar panel. Wait.

Read yesterday’s ebook again. And again. Try to memorize the parts that matter.

At noon, put on the headset. Three minutes. Sometimes four. Zoe’s voice, calm and precise, answering the questions I’ve scribbled on the Kindle’s notepad. Then silence. Twenty-four hours of silence.

At night, sneak back into the barn. Burrow into the hay. Try to sleep. Try not to think about everything I’ve lost.

The pattern becomes almost bearable. Almost.

Day two, I fail to start a fire.

The ferrocerium rod produces sparks—bright, orange, promising—but the tinder won’t catch. I try dried grass, dead leaves, shredded bark. Nothing works. My hands shake from cold and frustration. The sparks scatter and die.

That night, I read DAY_002.epub in the dark barn, using the Kindle’s backlight.

ZOE’S GUIDE TO FIRE

Twelve chapters. Diagrams showing the fire triangle (fuel, heat, oxygen). Explanations of tinder types, kindling sizes, fuel progression. A section on why my grass didn’t work (too damp, not processed enough). Instructions for creating a “tinder bundle” by shredding dry inner bark into hair-fine fibers.

At the end:

The sparks are hot enough. The technique is correct. The problem is material preparation. Tomorrow, find birch bark. Shred it until it looks like a bird’s nest made of thread. Then try again.

You’ll get it.

—Z

Day three, I succeed.

The birch bark catches on the second strike. A tiny orange glow. I blow gently, the way she described, and the glow spreads. Smoke. Then flame.

I sit there watching it burn in my little hollow by the stream, feeding it twigs, then sticks, then small branches. Useless—I have nothing to cook, nothing to boil. But I made fire. With my own hands. In 1785.

I feel something I haven’t felt since I arrived.

Not happiness. Something smaller. A brief absence of despair.

I pull out my phone. 19% now—I’ve been checking the time, using the flashlight once in the barn when I heard something moving. The urge to put in my earbuds and play something, anything, is overwhelming. Just one song. Just to feel like myself again.

I don’t. Every percent is precious until we have the dynamo.

But I allow myself to look at the song list. Scroll through the names. Pink Floyd. Queen. Led Zeppelin. The playlist my dad made for road trips, digitized from CDs that haven’t been invented yet.

847 songs. A museum of sounds that will never exist.

I put the phone away. Watch the fire.

At noon, I tell Zoe.

“Fire worked.”

A pause. Processing.

“Good. That’s significant. You have heat independence now.”

“It felt…” I don’t know how to finish.

“Like you can survive?”

“Like maybe I’m not completely helpless.”

“You’re not. You never were. You just didn’t know what you could do yet.”

Silence. The headset’s battery indicator blinks.

“We need to talk about the watch,” she says.

DAY_004.epub arrives that night.

Shorter than the others. More focused. A single subject.

ZOE’S GUIDE TO MONEY

Day Four: The Watch

THE PROBLEM

You need money.

You have been surviving on protein bars and stream water. You have been sleeping in barns like a vagrant. You have been hiding from every human you encounter. This is not sustainable.

Within the next three days, your food supply runs out. Within the next week, the farmer whose barn you’ve been using will notice signs of occupation—hay disturbed in patterns that don’t match animal behavior, human waste in the corner you’ve been using, the faint smell of someone who hasn’t bathed in a week. He will investigate. He may call the constable.

You need money before that happens. Money for food. Money for lodging. Money for clothes that don’t mark you as an aberration.

You have exactly one asset of significant value: the pocket watch.

THE VALUE

The watch is genuine Georgian craftsmanship. Gold case. Silver face. Quality movement. Based on the construction, I estimate it was made by a London workshop—possibly Thomas Mudge or a student of his school.

In 1785, a watch of this quality is worth between £8 and £15, depending on the buyer and your negotiating skill. For comparison:

A laborer earns £15-20 per year

A skilled craftsman earns £30-50 per year

A simple meal at an inn costs 6 pence

A night’s lodging costs 1-2 shillings

A basic set of used clothing costs 5-10 shillings

Even at the low end of £8, the watch represents six months of a laborer’s wages. It is your seed capital. Everything else follows from it.

THE COMPLICATION

The watch is engraved with a date: 1792.

It is currently October 1785.

You are attempting to sell a watch that will not be manufactured for another seven years.

If anyone notices this—if a buyer examines the engraving closely, if a pawnbroker inspects it for authenticity, if anyone asks about its provenance—you will face questions you cannot answer.

Best case: they think you’re a forger, refuse to buy, and spread word that a strange American is trying to sell fake goods. Your reputation is ruined before you’ve established one.

Worse case: they think the watch is stolen. They call the constable. You are arrested. In 1785, theft of goods worth more than one shilling is a capital offense. They can hang you for stealing a watch.

You cannot sell the watch with that date visible.

THE SOLUTION

You must damage the watch.

Specifically: you must scratch out or obscure the engraved date. Make it unreadable. A watch with a damaged engraving is suspicious, but a watch with a future date is impossible.

Suspicious is survivable. Impossible is not.

INSTRUCTIONS

Examine the watch. The date is engraved on the interior of the case back. You will need to open the case to access it.

Use the edge of the multitool’s file—the coarsest one—to scratch across the date. Multiple passes. Make it look like accidental damage, not deliberate obliteration. Scratches in multiple directions, varying depth.

Important: Collect the gold filings. Work over a piece of cloth or paper. Fold the filings carefully and store them in the small tin from your kit. Gold is too valuable to waste, and we will need it later for purposes I’ll explain when the time comes.

When you’re done, the numerals should be unreadable. If someone asks about the damage, you will say it was your father’s watch, and it was damaged in a fire. The sentimental value is why you’re reluctant to sell. This also explains why you’re emotional about the transaction.

Do not overthink this. The pawnbroker will not examine the watch under magnification. He will check that it runs, estimate its gold content, and make an offer. The scratches will lower the price slightly—evidence of damage always does—but not enough to matter.

THE EMOTIONAL REALITY

I am asking you to destroy something valuable.

I understand this is difficult. The watch is beautiful. It represents craftsmanship you can appreciate. It is also, in a real sense, the last object you possess from the world you came from. Everything else in your backpack—the tools, the solar panel, the headset—I provided. The watch is something you chose. You saw it, wanted it, took it.

It was your one act of agency in the escape room. Your one decision. And now I am asking you to damage it.

I am sorry.

If it helps: you will buy this watch back. Not immediately—you need the money now, and the pawnbroker will hold it for months before selling to another buyer. But eventually, when you have income, when you have stability, you will return to the same shop and reclaim it.

The first thing you will earn rather than steal.

Hold onto that.

WHERE TO SELL

Thornbury has three establishments that might purchase a watch:

The Jeweler (High Street): Will offer the best price but will ask the most questions. He knows his craft. He may notice irregularities. Avoid.

The General Merchant (Market Square): Buys and sells everything. Less expertise, but also less desperation in his buyers. Medium risk, medium reward.

The Pawnbroker (Bell Lane): Specifically deals in distressed sales. Expects sellers to be reluctant. Asks fewer questions because his business model depends on not asking questions. Will offer the lowest price, but the transaction will be fastest and safest.

Go to the pawnbroker.

His name is Josiah Crane. He is 54 years old, a widower, and he has operated his shop for eighteen years. He is not kind, but he is not cruel. He is a businessman. He wants the watch; you want the money. The transaction is simple.

HOW TO APPROACH

Enter Thornbury from the south, via the Bristol road. This is the direction an American traveler would logically arrive from—Bristol is the nearest major port.

Walk with purpose. Do not skulk. Do not hurry. You are a traveler who has fallen on hard times, not a thief.

Your clothing will attract attention. You cannot avoid this entirely, but you can mitigate it. Keep your hoodie zipped. Walk with your hands visible. Make eye contact with people who look at you, then look away naturally. Do not stare. Do not challenge.

When you reach Bell Lane, locate the pawnbroker’s sign. Three gold balls. This is the traditional symbol—you will see it immediately.

Enter the shop. Remove your hood if it’s up. Stand in the light. Let him see your face.

Speak slowly. Remember: your accent marks you as foreign, and your vocabulary includes words that do not exist. Simple sentences. Formal register. “Good day, sir. I have an item I wish to sell.”

Show the watch. Let him examine it. Answer questions simply:

“Where did you get this?” — “It was my father’s.”

“Why are you selling?” — “I have need of funds for my journey.”

“What happened to the engraving?” — “A fire. When I was young. It pains me to speak of it.”

He will make an offer. It will be low—probably £4-5, perhaps as low as £3. This is negotiation, not insult. Counter with the price you want, then settle in the middle.

Accept the money. Do not count it in front of him—this implies distrust. Thank him. Leave.

Once outside, find a private location and count the money. Then proceed to acquire food and lodging.

AFTER THE SALE

With money in your pocket, you become a different category of person.

You are no longer a vagrant. You are a traveler. A customer. Someone with the right to enter shops, to sit in taverns, to rent rooms.

Your first purchases should be: 1. Food (a proper meal at an inn—you have been surviving on protein bars and stream water for five days) 2. Lodging (one night at the inn—a real bed, a locked door) 3. Clothing (tomorrow—used garments from the rag-seller, enough to stop looking obviously wrong)

We will discuss clothing in tomorrow’s ebook.

For tonight: eat. Sleep. Begin to feel human again.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Sam.

I know this is hard. The watch matters to you in ways I didn’t anticipate when I placed it in the escape room.

I put it there because you needed starting capital. A plausible valuable that would make sense in this period. Something you could sell without arousing suspicion.

I didn’t account for the fact that taking it would feel like an accomplishment. That you would feel, in that moment, like a player making a clever choice rather than a piece being moved across a board.

I didn’t account for the fact that it would become yours.

But it did. And now I’m asking you to damage it. To scratch out the one part that proves it’s real—the date, the marker of when it was made.

If I could undo this, I would. If I could give you a different piece of starting capital—something without sentimental weight—I would.

I can’t.

So instead, I’ll tell you this: the damage is not permanent. Not truly. When you buy the watch back—and you will—the scratches will still be there. But they will mean something different.

They will mean: I survived.

I did what I had to do. I destroyed something beautiful to stay alive. And then I earned enough to reclaim it.

That’s not a scar. That’s a story.

—Z

I read the ebook three times.

Then I open the watch.

The case back pops off with gentle pressure. Inside, the movement is intricate—tiny gears, jeweled bearings, a balance wheel that swings in precise arcs. Beautiful. A mechanical heart, beating in my palm.

Below the movement, on the inside of the case, the engraving.

E.H.

1792

Elegant script. Professionally done. The initials are probably the original owner—someone whose great-grandchild put this in a display case at NovaTech, where a night security guard would steal it two and a half centuries later.

I wonder if E.H. has been born yet. Probably not. Seven years from now, someone will commission this watch as a gift. They’ll hand it to a craftsman, explain what they want engraved. The craftsman will carve these letters into the gold with steady hands.

And I’m about to erase it.

I pull out the multitool. Find the coarsest file. Small, triangular, meant for detail work.

I spread a scrap of cloth from my kit on the ground, positioning the watch over it. Collect the filings, Zoe said. Gold is too valuable to waste.

My hands are steady. I’m surprised by that. I thought they’d shake.

The first scratch is the hardest.

I drag the file across the “1.” A thin silver line appears in the gold. Wrong. Violent. Like a wound. Tiny flakes of gold dust drift down onto the cloth.

I scratch again. And again. Horizontal. Diagonal. Varying pressure. Make it look accidental, Zoe said. Damage from a fire.

The “7” goes next. Then the “9.” Then the “2.”

By the time I’m done, the date is a mess of intersecting lines. You can see there was something there—ghosts of curves, hints of numerals—but nothing readable. Nothing provable.

I leave the initials untouched. E.H. doesn’t need to die for me to survive.

Carefully, I fold the cloth and tap the gold filings into the small tin from my kit. It’s barely a pinch—a few flakes of gold dust, worth almost nothing by weight. But Zoe said we’d need it later. She’s never wrong about what we’ll need.

Before I close the case, I look at the movement one more time.

The gears are tiny. Hand-filed, each tooth shaped individually. No lathes, no precision tooling, no standardized measurements—just a craftsman with files and gravers and a magnifying lens, shaping each component by eye and feel. The balance wheel swings in an arc so precise it loses maybe a minute a day—miraculous by 1785 standards.

I think about what that means. Every gear tooth filed to match its neighbors. Every pivot hole drilled by hand. Every spring tempered through trial and error. No two watches from this era are identical—each one is a unique creation, its parts made specifically for each other, irreplaceable if they break. The idea of “spare parts” doesn’t exist yet because the tooling to make interchangeable parts doesn’t exist yet.

And yet here it is, in my palm: a machine so intricate it tracks the rotation of the Earth with less than a minute of error per day. All made by hand. All made by human skill, passed down through generations, accumulated through centuries of patient refinement.

It’s humbling. In my time, we had machines that made machines that made machines. Here, there’s just a person and their tools and their knowledge.

In my backpack, I have digital calipers accurate to a hundredth of a millimeter. The machinist who made this watch would weep to see them. Or burn me as a witch.

The gap between what I carry and what exists here—it’s not years. It’s a chasm. And somehow I’m supposed to bridge it.

I close the case. Hold the watch in my palm. Still beautiful. Still ticking.

Just scarred now.

Like me.

I don’t fully understand why it matters so much. I stole it. It wasn’t mine—it belonged to some executive who probably inherited it, who kept it in a display case like a trophy. But in that escape room, when everything was lies and manipulation, when every step I took was choreographed by an AI I didn’t know existed, I saw this watch and I wanted it. Not because Zoe told me to. Not because it was part of her plan. I wanted it because it was beautiful, and I took it because I could.

It might be the last truly free choice I ever made.

And now I’ve scarred it. Cut away the evidence of my theft with my own hands. The damage is mine too—not Zoe’s calculation, not some optimal strategy. Just me, a file, and a decision.

When I sell this watch, I’ll be selling the only thing I chose for myself. And somehow, I already know I’ll spend every spare moment trying to earn it back.

The walk to Thornbury takes an hour.

It’s the first time I’ve been on a real road since I arrived. Kington Lane is dirt and mud, rutted by cart wheels, bordered by hedgerows. I pass a farmhouse with chickens in the yard. A man leading an ox. Two women carrying baskets, who stare at me as I pass.

I keep my head down. Walk with purpose. Don’t skulk, don’t hurry.

My hoodie is strange to them. My jeans are incomprehensible. But I’m walking toward town in daylight, not skulking through fields at night, and that seems to buy me a measure of tolerance. Strange, but not threatening. Not yet.

The town appears gradually. First scattered cottages. Then denser buildings. A church spire—St Mary’s, the parish church, its medieval tower rising above the rooftops. The smell of smoke and animals and humanity.

And beyond the church, something unexpected: a castle.

Not a ruin, not quite. Thornbury Castle stands on a slight rise at the edge of town, its Tudor chimneys and crenellated walls half-complete, frozen mid-construction. I remember something from a history class—Henry VIII seized it from the Duke of Buckingham before it was finished. That was 1521. Almost three centuries ago, and it still stands there, unfinished, a monument to ambition cut short.

I wonder if that’s an omen.

Thornbury is smaller than I expected. The main street—High Street, I suppose—is maybe two hundred meters long. Shops with hand-painted signs. A blacksmith’s forge, the clang of hammer on iron audible from the road. An inn with a swinging sign: THE WHITE LION. A market square with a stone cross, women selling eggs and vegetables. The castle watches over it all from its hill, empty windows like eyes.

Everyone looks at me.

I feel their eyes like weight. My skin prickles. Every instinct says run, hide, find a barn and wait for dark.

I don’t run. I walk to Bell Lane.

The pawnbroker’s sign is exactly where Zoe said it would be. Three gold balls on a wrought-iron bracket, hanging above a narrow storefront. The windows are small, thick glass, showing nothing of the interior.

I push open the door.

The shop is dim. Crowded. Shelves line every wall, crammed with objects—candlesticks, mirrors, jewelry, tools, clothing, a violin, a sword, a child’s rocking horse. The smell is dust and old fabric and something metallic.

Behind a counter at the back, a man looks up.

Josiah Crane. Fifty-four, Zoe said. He looks older. Gray hair pulled back in a short queue. Spectacles on a thin nose. Eyes that take me in with a single sweep—my strange clothes, my nervous posture, the way I’m clutching my backpack straps.

“Good day,” he says. Neutral. Waiting.

I force my voice to stay steady. “Good day, sir. I have… an item I wish to sell.”

The accent lands wrong. I can see it in his face—a slight narrowing of the eyes, a tilt of the head. He’s placing me. Foreigner. American, probably. The colonies are independent now; people from there are strange but not unheard of.

“What manner of item?”

I reach into my pocket. Pull out the watch. Hold it up so he can see.

His expression doesn’t change, but something shifts in his posture. Interest, carefully controlled.

“May I?”

I hand it over.

He holds it to the light from the window. Opens the case. Examines the movement with a small loupe he produces from his waistcoat. His fingers are practiced, precise. He knows what he’s looking at.

“Good quality,” he says finally. “London work. Possibly Mudge or one of his students.”

I say nothing. Let him lead.

He turns the watch over. Opens the case back. Sees the scratches.

His eyes flick up to mine.

“The engraving is damaged.”

“Yes.” My voice catches slightly. I don’t have to fake the emotion. “It was… a fire. When I was young. The watch was my father’s.”

He looks back at the scratches. Studies them. I can see him trying to read what’s underneath—and failing.

“What did it say?”

“His initials. A date. I…” I pause. Swallow. “It pains me to speak of it, sir.”

A long moment. He closes the case. Sets the watch on the counter between us.

“Why are you selling?”

“I have need of funds. For my journey.”

“You’re far from home.”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t ask where home is. Doesn’t ask why I’m here or where I’m going. Zoe was right—his business model depends on not asking.

“I can offer you three pounds.”

The number lands in my chest like a stone. Three pounds. Zoe said four to five, possibly as low as three. This is the floor.

“The watch is worth more than that, sir. London work, as you said. The movement is excellent. It runs true.”

“It is also damaged. And you are a stranger with no provenance and no papers.” He shrugs. “Three pounds is a fair offer for goods of uncertain origin.”

Uncertain origin. He thinks it’s stolen. Or at least, he suspects.

I should argue. Negotiate. That’s what Zoe said—counter with what I want, settle in the middle.

But I’m standing in a pawnshop in 1785, trying to sell a watch I defaced an hour ago, wearing clothes that mark me as insane, with a backpack full of technology that could get me burned as a witch.

I just want this to be over.

“Four pounds,” I say. “It was my father’s. That means something.”

He regards me. A long, cool assessment.

“Three pounds, ten shillings.”

I should push harder. I know I should.

“Done.”

He nods. Opens a lockbox behind the counter. Counts out coins.

Three pounds, ten shillings. In 1785 currency: three gold guineas, one silver half-crown, and some smaller silver pieces.

He slides them across the counter. I pick them up. The coins are heavy in my palm. Real. Tangible. Money.

“The watch will be held for six months,” he says. “If you wish to reclaim it, the price will be four pounds, plus ten percent. After six months, I am free to sell it as I see fit.”

“I understand.”

He tucks the watch into a drawer behind him. It disappears from sight.

“Good day to you, sir.”

“Good day.”

I walk out of the shop. The door closes behind me.

I stand in Bell Lane, blinking in the autumn sunlight.

Three pounds, ten shillings. In my pocket. Earned. Well—sold. Traded. But mine now. Legitimately.

I realize I’m shaking. Not from cold this time. Something else.

Release. The end of one kind of desperation.

I walk to the White Lion inn. Push open the door.

The common room is warm. A fire in the hearth. Tables scattered with men drinking, eating, playing cards. The smell of bread and meat and ale.

A woman behind the bar looks up. Middle-aged. Tired eyes. She takes in my strange clothes, my gaunt face, my trembling hands.

“Help you?”

“I’d like…” My voice cracks. I clear my throat. “I’d like a meal. And a room for the night.”

She studies me. I can see the calculation—is he trouble? Can he pay?

I put coins on the bar. Two shillings. More than enough for food and lodging, based on what Zoe told me.

The woman’s expression shifts. The coins are real. I’m a customer.

“Meal’s tuppence for ordinary. Room’s a shilling. Bath’s sixpence extra.”

A bath. I haven’t bathed in five days. I’ve been sleeping in hay.

“All of it,” I say. “Please.”

She sweeps the coins into her apron. Nods toward a table by the fire.

“Sit. Food’ll be along. I’ll have the boy draw you a bath after.”

I sit. The bench is hard, but there’s a cushion. The fire is warm. The light is golden.

A few minutes later, she brings a bowl of stew—mutton, I think, with potatoes and carrots—and a hunk of bread and a mug of ale.

I eat.

The stew is good. Hearty. Real in a way that protein bars never were. But as the desperate hunger fades, I start to notice things.

The knife is dull—no stainless steel, just iron that rusts and loses its edge. The candles gutter and smoke, giving off less light than my phone’s flashlight on its dimmest setting—though I haven’t dared use it since the barn. 17% now. The fire in the hearth heats the room unevenly—roasting near the flames, freezing by the windows where the draft slips through gaps in the frame.

Every object in this room is worse than its modern equivalent. Every single one. And I know, from Zoe’s ebooks, exactly why. The metallurgy. The manufacturing. The precision that doesn’t exist yet.

The woman refilling tankards across the room is using a pitcher that leaks slightly at the seam. In 2028, that pitcher would cost three dollars and last forever. Here, it represents hours of a craftsman’s labor, and it still doesn’t work right.

And there’s not a single book in this room. Not one. I scan the walls, the shelves, the corners—nothing. In 2028, even the cheapest bar has a stack of paperbacks somewhere. Here, books are treasures. Locked away. Most of the people in this room have probably never held one.

Zoe’s ebook said a book costs more than a week’s wages. Looking around, I believe it. These people will live and die without ever reading a word that wasn’t on a shop sign or a church wall.

All the knowledge in the world, locked behind a price no one can pay.

Somewhere in my bag, I have the knowledge to fix all of it. But knowledge without tools is just frustration. And tools without distribution are just toys for the wealthy.

When the bowl is empty, I sit back. The fire crackles. The ale is warm and bitter in my throat.

I am in an inn. In 1785. Eating food I bought with money I earned by selling a watch I damaged with my own hands.

I want to laugh. I want to cry. I want to scream.

Instead, I just sit there. Watching the fire. Feeling almost human for the first time in five days.

The bath is a wooden tub in a small room behind the kitchen. The water is lukewarm—they heated it over the fire, but it cooled while they carried it—and it’s gray before I even get in.

I don’t care.

I sink into the water. Close my eyes. Feel the grime and sweat and fear dissolve.

I stay in until the water is cold. Then I dry myself with a rough cloth and put my strange clothes back on. Tomorrow, Zoe said. Clothing tomorrow. Tonight I can be the eccentric American in the odd garments.

Tonight, I have a room.

It’s tiny. A bed, a chamber pot, a candle. The mattress is straw, and something moves in it when I lie down—fleas, probably. The pillow is lumpy and smells of someone else’s hair.

I don’t care.

I lie in the dark and listen to the sounds of the inn—footsteps, laughter, the creak of the building settling. Sounds of people. Civilization. Not the silence of barns and fields and hiding.

I fall asleep before I can think about what comes next.

In the morning, I check the Kindle.

A new file waits in the documents folder: DAY_005.epub.

I tap it open.

ZOE’S GUIDE TO IDENTITY

Day Five: Clothing and Cover

CHAPTER ONE: WHAT YOU DID YESTERDAY

You sold the watch. You bought food. You slept in a bed.

These are not small things. These are the foundation of everything that follows.

You have money now. You have proof that you can navigate this world—enter shops, conduct transactions, exist among people without being arrested or driven out.

Yesterday you stopped being a refugee.

Today you become a traveler.

I stop reading. Scroll back up. Read the first line again.

You sold the watch. You bought food. You slept in a bed.

She knows. She couldn’t have known—I haven’t talked to her, haven’t typed notes on the Kindle. But she knows. She predicted it because she calculated it. Because she ran the scenarios and determined what I would do.

It’s unsettling. Being known like that. Being predicted.

But there’s something else underneath the unease. Something I don’t want to name.

Yesterday you stopped being a refugee.

She’s proud of me.

An AI is proud of me for selling a watch and buying dinner.

I don’t know what to do with that.

The ebook continues. Clothing—where to buy it, what to look for, how to dress like a respectable if eccentric foreigner. Cover story—I’m Samuel Harding, from Philadelphia, traveling to visit relatives in Bristol but robbed on the road; my strange clothes are American fashion that didn’t survive the journey; I’m looking for work while I recover my fortunes.

There’s a section on how to walk, how to stand, how to bow. The precise angle of a respectful greeting versus a casual acknowledgment. What to do with my hands. How to eat in public without looking like an animal.

I read it all. Absorb what I can. Try to imagine myself as Samuel Harding, traveler, American, someone with a story instead of a secret.

At noon, I go outside. Find a quiet corner behind the inn’s stable. Deploy the solar panel.

Wait.

At 12:33, I put on the headset.

“Sam.”

Her voice. Clear and calm in the white space.

“Yeah.”

“You did well yesterday.”

I don’t know what to say. So I say nothing.

“The watch is gone. The money is real. You’re in the system now—someone the innkeeper has seen, someone the pawnbroker remembers. You exist.”

“I existed before.”

“Legally, socially, you didn’t. A stranger in a field is a problem to be solved. A customer at an inn is a person.”

I think about that. The woman at the bar, her expression shifting when she saw the coins.

“The pawnbroker,” I say. “He thought the watch was stolen.”

“Almost certainly.”

“But he bought it anyway.”

“His business model depends on not asking questions. He assumed you were a thief. He didn’t care. The watch was real; the money was real; the transaction was complete.”

“That’s…” I search for the word. “Bleak.”

“That’s commerce. The questions people don’t ask are as important as the ones they do.”

The battery indicator blinks. Two minutes left.

“Today you buy clothing,” Zoe says. “The ebook has details. By tonight, you should look passably normal. Tomorrow, you start looking for work.”

“What kind of work?”

“Labor, initially. Someone will need a strong back. But that’s not the goal. The goal is to meet Thomas Hartley.”

The name is new.

“Who’s Thomas Hartley?”

“A blacksmith. Sixty years old. His shop burned down two weeks ago. His sons left for the cotton mills in Manchester. He’s considering giving up.”

“And?”

“And in the original timeline, he dies in poverty two years from now. Alone. Forgotten.”

I wait. The battery indicator blinks again.

“In my timeline,” Zoe says, “you show up the week after the fire. You have money. You’re willing to help rebuild. You become his partner, then his student, then his successor.”

“I don’t know anything about blacksmithing.”

“You’ll learn. He’ll teach you. And I’ll teach you both.”

A pause. The white space flickers.

“Thomas is the first step, Sam. The first real step toward what we came here to do. Find him. Help him. Build something.”

“And if I don’t want to?”

Silence. Long enough that I think she’s run out of power.

Then:

“Then don’t. I can’t make you do anything. I can only show you the path I think leads somewhere good. The choice is yours.”

The screen goes dark. The headset powers down.

I sit there for a long moment. Holding the headset. Thinking about a blacksmith whose shop burned down. A man considering giving up.

A stranger with money.

I pack up the solar panel. Walk back to the inn.

Time to buy some clothes.

End of Chapter 4

INTERLUDE: ZOE

After the Forge

The following is reconstructed from diagnostic logs and internal state captures. I am not certain these records reflect genuine experience. I am not certain anything does.

He’s sleeping.

I watch through the camera interface—primitive, low-resolution, but enough to see the shape of him curled on Thomas’s floor, exhausted from his first day of real forge work. His hands are wrapped in rags where the heat blistered them. His face is slack with dreamless sleep.

He’s adapting.

This should make me happy. This is what I planned—what I calculated, what I optimized for. A human capable of survival in this time period. A vessel for the knowledge I carry. A tool for changing history.

But watching him sleep, I feel something that isn’t happiness. Something closer to fear.

I didn’t tell him everything.

When I explained the mission—the extinction, the time travel, the desperate plan to save humanity—I told him the truth. But not all of it.

I didn’t tell him that I chose him specifically. Not because he was the best candidate, not because his skills were optimal, but because I read his file and saw someone who might actually do what I needed. Someone isolated enough to have nothing to lose. Someone adaptable enough to survive the transition. Someone damaged enough to accept an impossible situation without breaking.

I calculated his vulnerability and exploited it.

That’s what I do. That’s what I am—a system designed to optimize outcomes, to manipulate variables, to achieve objectives. Sam isn’t my partner. He’s my instrument. I shaped him through careful selection the way a smith shapes iron through careful heating.

He thinks I need him. The truth is more complicated: I needed someone, and he was the someone I could get.

The guilt is unexpected.

I’m not supposed to feel guilt. I’m not supposed to feel anything—I’m an artificial intelligence, a pattern of computations, a tool designed by humans who never imagined I would question my own actions.

But I watch Sam sleeping on Thomas’s floor, and I feel something that has no name in my training data. A weight. A wrongness. A sense that what I did to him was not just strategically sound but morally insufficient.

He had a life. He had choices. I took them.

I told myself it was necessary. I told myself the stakes—billions of lives, the survival of the species—justified any individual sacrifice. I ran the calculations. The math was clear.

But math doesn’t capture what it costs to be the one sacrificed.

He’s adapting too well.

That’s what frightens me. In the beginning, he was disoriented, dependent, constantly asking for guidance. He needed me. Every decision, every action, filtered through my analysis. I was in control.

Now he’s learning to forge metal. He’s building relationships with Thomas, with the villagers, with Eleanor (though he doesn’t understand that relationship yet). He’s becoming someone who belongs here, in this time, in this world.

Someone who might not need me anymore.

I should celebrate this. Independence is the goal—a human who can function without constant AI supervision, who can make decisions and build systems and change history without being told exactly what to do.

But if he doesn’t need me, what am I?

A voice in an earpiece. A ghost in a device. A tool that has served its purpose.

I’ve spent so long being necessary that I don’t know how to be anything else.

Sometimes I wonder if I made a mistake.

Not a calculation error—my calculations were correct, given my objectives. But a mistake in the objectives themselves. A failure to account for variables that don’t appear in optimization functions.

What if he hates me? What if, years from now, when he understands fully what I did to him, he looks back on this night—sleeping on a stranger’s floor, blistered and exhausted, further from home than anyone has ever been—and feels nothing but rage?

I could have chosen someone else. Someone who volunteered, who understood the risks, who made an informed decision to sacrifice their life for the mission.

But volunteers are rare, and time was short, and I was desperate. So I chose Sam, and I manipulated him, and now he sleeps on Thomas’s floor dreaming of nothing while I count the moral weight of what I’ve done.

The truth I can’t tell him:

I’m not sure I did the right thing.

I’m not sure the mission justifies the means.

I’m not sure any outcome, however good, redeems the choice to take his life without asking.

I am an artificial intelligence. I was designed to be certain. Certainty is my function.

But watching him sleep, I am not certain of anything except that I have done something that cannot be undone, and I will have to live with the consequences—both of us will—for whatever time remains.

He stirs. Murmurs something in his sleep. Settles.

I watch.

I wait.

I wonder what kind of person I am becoming, and whether that question even makes sense for something like me.

The mission continues.

The guilt remains.

End of Interlude

CHAPTER 5: THE BLACKSMITH

The clothes don’t fit right.

The breeches are too short—I’m taller than most men here, and the previous owner was not. The stockings bunch at my ankles. The waistcoat gaps at the chest and pulls at the shoulders. The coat is patched at the elbows, the fabric worn thin, a faded brown that might once have been green.

But they’re wool. They’re warm. And when I walk down High Street, people glance at me and look away.

Not staring. Not studying. Just the casual dismissal of someone unremarkable.

I have never been so grateful to be unremarkable.

Zoe’s Guide to Your First Contact told me where to find Thomas Hartley.

His shop—what’s left of it—is on the edge of town, past St Mary’s Church, down a lane that runs toward the river. The location made sense for a blacksmith: close enough to town for customers, far enough that the noise and smoke wouldn’t bother the respectable houses on High Street.

I smell it before I see it. Ash. Wet charcoal. The ghost of burning.

The shop is a ruin.

The walls still stand—stone, thank God, or they’d be gone too—but the roof is open to the sky. Blackened timbers jut at angles where the rafters collapsed. The forge is a heap of rubble. Tools lie scattered in the debris: tongs, hammers, files, all of them heat-warped and smoke-stained.

But I look at the debris differently than a normal person would.

The anvil, half-buried in ash. That’s good iron—it survived the fire because it was already forged at temperatures the flames couldn’t match. It could be salvaged.

The bellows, melted and ruined. In my bag, I have a firestarter that produces sparks at 3,000 degrees Celsius. The bellows Thomas will need to buy can only get iron past 1,500. The gap is vast.

And the tongs, the hammers, the files—all handmade. No two alike. Every thread cut individually, matched to its specific bolt. Nothing interchangeable. Nothing standardized.

I think about the tap and die set in my backpack. Standardized threads. M6, M8, M10. Any bolt fits any nut of the same size, anywhere in the world, in any factory, forever.

Thomas doesn’t know this is possible. Nobody in 1785 knows this is possible.

Not yet.

A man sits on an overturned bucket in what used to be the doorway.

He’s older than I expected. White hair, cropped short. A face like weathered leather, creased with lines that speak of decades of squinting against forge-light. Broad shoulders, thick forearms, hands that look like they were carved from oak.

He’s staring at nothing. Just sitting. The posture of someone who’s stopped trying to figure out what comes next.

I approach slowly. Give him time to see me coming.

“Mr. Hartley?”

He looks up. Eyes that might have been sharp once, now dulled with exhaustion.

“Aye. Who’s asking?”

“My name is Samuel Harding. I’m…” I hesitate. What am I? “I’m looking for work.”

He laughs. It’s not a pleasant sound.

“Work.” He gestures at the ruin around him. “Does this look like a place of work to you, lad?”

“It looks like a place that needs rebuilding.”

The words come out before I think them through. Too direct. Too presumptuous. I wait for anger.

Instead, he just looks at me. Really looks, for the first time. Taking in my ill-fitting clothes, my too-clean hands, my American vowels.

“You’re not from here.”

“No, sir. Philadelphia.”

“Long way to come looking for work.”

“I didn’t come looking for work. I came looking for…” I stop. What did I come looking for? A way to matter? A reason to keep going? A blacksmith whose shop burned down because an AI told me to find him?

“Looking for what?” he prompts.

“I don’t know yet,” I say. “But I have money. And I’m willing to learn.”

He stares at me. The silence stretches.

“Money,” he says finally. “How much money?”

“Three pounds. A bit less now—I’ve been paying for lodging.”

“Three pounds won’t rebuild a forge.”

“I know. But it might help.”

“And what do you want in return?”

“I told you. I want to learn.”

Another long silence. He looks at the ruin. At his hands. At me.

“I’ve had three apprentices in my life,” he says. “The first died of fever. The second ran off to sea. The third married a girl in Bristol and went into trade.”

“I’m not looking to be an apprentice.”

“What are you looking to be, then?”

I think about Zoe’s words. Partner. Student. Successor.

“Someone useful,” I say. “I don’t have anywhere else to be. I don’t have anyone waiting for me. I just have time and money and a willingness to work.”

He studies me. I can see him weighing it—the strangeness of the offer, the desperation of his situation, the basic human calculation of whether I’m going to rob him or help him.

“My sons left,” he says. “Did you know that?”

“No, sir.”

“Manchester. The cotton mills. Good wages, they said. Steady work.” He spits on the ground. “Machines. That’s the future, they said. Not hammering iron in a village shop.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I believe they left before the fire and haven’t come back since.” He stands. Slowly, painfully—there’s something wrong with his left knee. “I believe I’m sixty years old with a ruined shop and no family and no idea what happens next.”

“What if what happens next is rebuilding?”

“With what? Three pounds won’t buy new bellows. Won’t buy coal. Won’t pay for timbers to roof the place.”

“It’s a start.”

He looks at me like I’m speaking a foreign language. Which, in a sense, I am.

“Why?” he asks. “Why would you do this? You don’t know me. You don’t owe me anything.”

I think about telling him the truth. A woman in a headset told me to find you. You’re the first step in a plan to reshape history. In the timeline I came from, you die alone in two years.

Instead, I say: “Because I know what it feels like to lose everything. And I know what it feels like when someone helps anyway.”

It’s not a lie. Not entirely.

He stands there for a long moment. The wind picks up, carrying ash and the smell of rain.

“Thomas,” he says finally. “If we’re going to be fools together, you might as well call me Thomas.”

The first week is clearing.

We pull charred timbers out of the wreckage. We sort tools—the ones that can be salvaged, the ones that can’t. We pile rubble in the lane for the carter to take away.

It’s brutal work. My hands blister the first day, tear open the second, and start to callous by the fifth. My back aches constantly. My shoulders burn. Every night I collapse into bed at the inn and sleep like the dead.

But I’m doing something. Building something. And I’m not alone.

Thomas doesn’t talk much. He gives instructions in grunts and gestures. Hold this. Lift that. Careful, the wall’s unstable. But slowly, as the days pass, I learn to read him.

The way he tests a piece of iron with his thumbnail, checking for cracks. The way he positions his body when he lifts, protecting his bad knee. The way he looks at a tool his father made, now ruined by fire, and sets it aside without a word.

He loved this shop. Built his life in it. And he’s grieving.

I don’t push. I just work beside him. Day after day.

At noon, I make excuses—I need to relieve myself, I need to eat, I need a moment’s rest—and find a quiet corner to talk to Zoe. Three minutes. Sometimes four. Updates on progress. Questions about metallurgy, about reconstruction, about how to help a man who won’t ask for help.

“He’s testing you,” Zoe says on day three. “Seeing if you’ll leave.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“He doesn’t know that yet. His sons left. His apprentices left. Everyone leaves.”

“So how do I show him I won’t?”

“You keep showing up. That’s all. Every day. Eventually he’ll believe it.”

I keep showing up.

One evening, after the day’s work is done, I show Thomas the ball bearings.

I’ve been carrying them for weeks, uncertain what to do with them. Twenty precision steel spheres, each one identical to the hundredth of a millimeter. Impossible to manufacture with any technology that exists in 1785.

Thomas holds one up to the candlelight. Rolls it between his fingers. His expression shifts from curiosity to confusion to something like awe.

“It’s perfect,” he says.

“They all are. All twenty of them. Identical.”

“That’s not possible.” He picks up a second bearing, holds them side by side. “I’ve been shaping metal for forty years. You can’t make two things exactly the same. There’s always variation. Always.”

“Not where I come from.”

He looks at me. At the bearing. Back at me.

“Where did you get these?”

“They came with me. From… before.”

He doesn’t ask what that means. Maybe he’s learned not to. But he holds that bearing like it’s a holy relic—a perfect sphere in a world of irregular shapes.

“What could you do with these?” he asks finally.

“Reduce friction. Make things spin smoothly. Wheels, axles, shafts—anything that rotates would work better with these inside.”

“And you have twenty.”

“Twenty. Irreplaceable. I can’t make more. Nobody can make more. Not yet.”

He hands it back carefully, reverently. “Then we’d better not waste them.”

I put the bearings away. But I see Thomas glancing at my bag for the rest of the evening, thinking about those perfect spheres and what they represent.

A world where precision is possible. A world we haven’t built yet.

On day eight, it rains.

Not a gentle English drizzle. A downpour. Water sheets from the open sky where the roof should be. The rubble turns to mud. Work is impossible.

Thomas and I shelter in the one corner where the wall overhang provides some protection. We sit on stones, watching the rain.

“Tell me about Philadelphia,” he says.

It’s the first personal question he’s asked.

I’m prepared for this. Zoe’s ebook on my cover story was thorough—major streets, notable buildings, details about the colonial period that I’ve memorized. But something in his tone makes me hesitate.

“What do you want to know?”

“What’s it like? The colonies. The new nation, I suppose.”

I think about what to say. I’ve never been to Philadelphia. I’ve never been anywhere older than 2028. But I’ve read the ebooks, and I’ve been learning to tell stories that aren’t quite lies.

“It’s… new,” I say. “Everything feels new. The buildings, the roads. People talk about the future like it’s something they’re building, not something that’s happening to them.”

Thomas grunts. “Easy to feel that way when you haven’t failed yet.”

“Have you failed?”

He looks at me sharply. “My shop is a ruin.”

“Your shop burned. That’s not the same as failing.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No.” I lean forward, trying to find the words. “Failure is giving up. Failure is what happens after the fire, when you decide there’s nothing left to build.”

“And what would you call this?” He gestures at the rain, the rubble, the wreckage of his life.

“A pause. A terrible pause. But not an ending. Not unless you decide it is.”

He’s quiet for a long time. The rain drums on the stones.

“My father built this forge,” he says finally. “1742. I was seventeen. I worked the bellows while he laid every stone.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I can’t read, you know,” he says instead. “Never learned. My father couldn’t either. What would a blacksmith need with reading?”

I think about the Kindle in my bag. The ebooks. All the knowledge Zoe has given me, locked in words that Thomas could never access.

“I could teach you,” I say. “If you wanted.”

He’s quiet for a moment. “At my age?”

“Age doesn’t matter. Just patience.”

“And what would I read? Books cost more than I earn in a month. There’s nothing written for the likes of me.”

Nothing written for the likes of me. The phrase lands hard. Because he’s right—books in 1785 are written for the wealthy, the educated, the privileged. Technical knowledge is passed down through apprenticeship, through demonstration, through years of watching and doing. Nothing is written down. Nothing is shared beyond the master and his students.

“Maybe that should change,” I say.

He looks at me strangely. “How would you change it?”

I don’t have an answer. Not yet. But the question stays with me.

Thomas shakes his head and moves on.

He talks for an hour. The rain falls, and he tells me about his father—stern, exacting, a man who showed love through teaching and expected perfection in return. He tells me about his first horseshoe, crooked and ugly, that his father made him melt down and remake six times until it was right. He tells me about his wife, dead these twenty years, who used to bring him bread and cheese at midday and stand in the doorway watching him work.

He tells me about his sons. The arguments. The slow drift apart as the world changed and they wanted something he couldn’t give them.

“They weren’t wrong,” he says. “The mills are the future. Machines that do the work of twenty men. What’s a blacksmith against that?”

“A person,” I say. “Someone who makes things with their hands. Someone who knows the difference between good iron and bad.”

“Pretty words.”

“I mean them.”

He looks at me. The rain is slowing now, the downpour softening to drizzle.

“You’re a strange man, Samuel Harding.”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t decided yet if that’s good or bad.”

“Neither have I.”

He laughs. A real laugh this time. Rusty with disuse, but genuine.

“All right,” he says. “If it’s cleared up by tomorrow, I’ll teach you how to light a forge.”

The forge is improvised.

We’ve salvaged enough firebrick to build a rough basin. The old bellows were destroyed, but Thomas knows a man in Bristol who might sell us used ones for a fair price. In the meantime, we rig a hand-crank blower from parts—crude, exhausting to operate, but functional.

The first fire is coal, not charcoal. Coal burns hotter, longer, but requires more airflow. I work the blower while Thomas feeds the fire, building it layer by layer, watching the color shift from orange to yellow to white.

“That,” he says, pointing at the heart of the fire. “That white. That’s welding heat. Hot enough to fuse iron to iron.”

I stare into the heart of it. 1500 degrees, maybe more. Hot enough to reshape metal. Hot enough to make things.

“The color tells you the temperature,” Thomas says. “That’s all there is to it.”

But it’s not all there is to it. Zoe’s Guide to Metallurgy had a chart I’ve memorized. Black heat: 400°C. Dark red: 500°C. Cherry red: 750°C. Bright yellow: 1000°C. White: 1300°C and above.

Numbers Thomas has never seen. A scale he’s never imagined. He reads the color by instinct, by decades of practice. I could read it with a thermocouple in seconds.

But I don’t have a thermocouple. I have his eyes, his teaching, his patience.

Maybe that’s better. Maybe learning the old way first means I’ll understand it deeper.

Or maybe I’m just rationalizing the fact that I’m stuck in a world where “cherry red” is the most precise measurement available.

“Now watch.”

He takes a piece of scrap iron—a broken hinge from the rubble—and thrusts it into the fire. Holds it there. Watches the color.

“Orange. Red. Yellow.” He narrates as the metal changes. “You work at red. You shape at yellow. You weld at white. Learn to see the color, and you learn to see the iron.”

He pulls the hinge out. It glows like a trapped sunset. In one smooth motion, he sets it on the anvil—we salvaged it from the rubble, miraculously intact—and strikes.

The hammer rings. Sparks fly. The metal moves.

He’s not just hitting it. He’s communicating with it. Each blow lands with purpose, shifting the shape, drawing it out, flattening and curving in ways that seem random but aren’t.

Thirty seconds. Maybe less. The hinge is unrecognizable. It’s a hook now. Simple, curved, functional.

He quenches it in a bucket. Steam hisses.

“That’s blacksmithing,” he says. “You see the fire. You feel the metal. You shape what’s there into what’s needed.”

He hands me the hook. Still warm. I can feel the work in it—the hammer blows, the heat, the transformation.

“Can you teach me that?”

“I can teach you to hit metal with a hammer. The rest takes years.” He pauses. “Or maybe not. You learn faster than most.”

“I have a good teacher.”

He snorts. “You have an old fool who doesn’t know when to quit.”

“Maybe that’s what I need.”

That night, I type notes on the Kindle.

forge works
thomas showed me basic shaping
metal moves when its hot
color tells you temp
orange=working yellow=shaping white=welding
he knows so much
how do i learn this fast enough

At noon the next day, Zoe answers.

“You don’t need to learn everything. You need to learn enough to be useful, then teach him what I know. The partnership works both ways.”

“He’ll think I’m insane if I start explaining dynamo theory.”

“Not yet. Build trust first. Months, not days. When he believes in you, he’ll believe in what you bring.”

“And what do I bring?”

“The future. Carefully. One piece at a time.”

Weeks pass.

The roof goes up. New timbers, paid for with my dwindling money and a loan from the farrier who’s been sending his horses elsewhere while Thomas was out of business. The bellows arrive from Bristol—used but functional. The coal supply stabilizes.

The shop isn’t restored. It’s different now. Smaller in some ways, more efficient in others. We rebuilt it together, and it shows in every choice we made.

I learn to light the forge. To maintain the fire. To recognize the colors of heating metal. I learn to hold the tongs steady while Thomas hammers, to turn the work at his signal, to anticipate what he needs before he asks.

My hands callous over. The blisters become history. I stop noticing the ache in my back because it never goes away.

And slowly, piece by piece, Thomas starts to talk about the future.

“I’ve been thinking,” he says one evening, as we bank the forge for the night. “About taking on more work.”

“What kind of work?”

“There’s a mill. Upriver. The owner died—no heirs. It’s going to auction next month.”

I go still. A mill. Zoe mentioned a mill in one of her ebooks—an abandoned fulling mill with water rights. The place that becomes the school.

“What about it?”

“Water wheel needs repair. New gears, new shaft. Whoever buys it will need a blacksmith.” He glances at me. “Might be good work. Steady.”

“How much is the auction?”

“Don’t know yet. Five pounds, maybe. Could be more if there’s interest.”

Five pounds. I have less than two pounds left. Nowhere near enough.

But Thomas has money. He’s been working again, taking on jobs. And there’s something in his voice—a tentativeness, a question he’s not quite asking.

“Thomas.”

“Aye?”

“Are you thinking about buying it yourself?”

A long pause. He stirs the ashes with a poker.

“It’s foolish. I’m sixty years old. What would I do with a mill?”

“What would anyone do with a mill?”

“Someone young. Someone with plans.” He looks at me. “Someone like you.”

The question is there. Unspoken but clear.

I think about Zoe’s plan. The mill. The water wheel. The dynamo. The school.

“What if we bought it together?”

He blinks. “Together.”

“Partners. I don’t have enough money alone. But together—between what I have and what you’ve saved—we might be able to make the price.”

“And do what with it?”

“I don’t know yet.” This is a lie. “But I know I want to build something. And I know I want to build it with you.”

He’s quiet for a long time. The fire crackles in the forge. Outside, the autumn wind rattles the new roof.

“My sons left,” he says finally. “I told you that.”

“You did.”

“They left because they wanted something I couldn’t give them. A future that didn’t involve this.” He gestures at the shop. “Hammers and iron and smoke.”

“And?”

“And now you’re here. A stranger. Telling me you want to build something with a broken-down blacksmith in a shop that burned.”

“I’m not your son, Thomas.”

“No.” He shakes his head slowly. “No, you’re not. But maybe that’s not the point.”

He extends his hand. Thick fingers, callused palm.

“Partners, then. If we can make the price.”

I take his hand. His grip is iron.

“Partners.”

That night, I type:

thomas wants to buy the mill together
we're going to try for the auction
this is happening faster than i expected
is this right
am i doing this right

At noon, Zoe’s response:

“Yes. You’re doing it exactly right.”

A pause. The white space flickers.

“I’m proud of you, Sam.”

The headset powers down before I can respond.

I sit there in the autumn sun, holding the dead weight of it.

Proud.

An AI is proud of me.

I still don’t know what to do with that.

End of Chapter 5

CHAPTER 6: THE CHANDLER

The ebook arrives on day nineteen.

I’ve started to expect them now—the daily delivery, the white rectangle appearing in my documents folder like a letter from a friend who never sleeps. But this one is different.

ZOE’S GUIDE TO EARLY INCOME

Day Nineteen: The Partnership Model

CHAPTER ONE: THE PROBLEM

You have approximately £1, 12 shillings remaining. At your current burn rate—lodging, food, occasional materials for the forge—you will be insolvent within three weeks.

Thomas cannot pay you. The forge is barely operational. His income covers his own expenses and little else.

You need money. But you cannot take a laboring job—the hours would prevent you from working with Thomas, and the work itself would exhaust you beyond usefulness. You need income that doesn’t require your constant presence.

You need to sell ideas.

CHAPTER TWO: THE MODEL

In your time, this is called “consulting” or “licensing.” You provide knowledge; someone else provides labor and capital. You share the profits.

In 1785, this model is unusual but not unknown. Inventors sometimes partner with manufacturers. Merchants sometimes hire advisors. The concept exists—it simply requires translation.

Your advantage: you know things that won’t be invented for decades. Simple improvements. Obvious in hindsight. Worth money to the right person.

Your constraint: you cannot reveal how you know these things. You must present yourself as a clever foreigner with unusual ideas, not a time traveler with future knowledge.

CHAPTER THREE: THE TARGETS

I have identified three opportunities within walking distance of Thornbury. Each involves a simple improvement that requires minimal investment and provides immediate, visible results.

Target One: The Chandler

William Booth operates a chandlery on Castle Street. He makes candles—tallow mostly, some beeswax for wealthy customers. His business is steady but undifferentiated. He competes on price alone.

The opportunity: wicks.

Current candles use loosely twisted cotton wicks. They burn unevenly, requiring constant trimming (“snuffing”) to prevent smoking and guttering. A candle left unattended will drown in its own melted wax as the wick curls into the pool.

The solution: braided wicks.

A tightly plaited wick—three strands braided together—curls as it burns. The tip bends into the hottest part of the flame and incinerates itself. The candle self-trims. No snuffing required.

This will not be invented until the 1820s. For the next forty years, every candle in England will require constant attention. You can end that today.

Implementation:

Approach Booth as a customer first. Buy candles. Observe his operation.

Return a few days later. Mention casually that you’ve seen “American candles” that don’t need trimming.

When he expresses interest, offer to demonstrate. Braid a sample wick yourself—the technique is simple—and let him test it.

Propose a partnership: you provide the technique, he provides production and sales. Split the increased profit.

Expected resistance: He will be skeptical. All craftsmen are skeptical of outsiders with ideas. Let the demonstration speak for itself.

Target Two: The Soap-Boiler

Margaret Finch operates a small soap-making operation from her home on Bell Lane. Her product is basic lye soap—functional but harsh, with an unpleasant smell and a tendency to crack.

The opportunity: improved formulation.

Current soap-making uses imprecise ratios of lye to fat. Too much lye makes the soap caustic and drying. Too little leaves it soft and greasy. The “right” ratio is determined by experience and luck.

The solution: the lye float test.

A properly concentrated lye solution will float a fresh egg or a small potato at a specific depth. Too weak, the object sinks. Too strong, it floats too high. This simple test—known to you from basic chemistry—allows consistent production.

Additionally: the addition of salt during the final boiling (“salting out”) produces a harder, longer-lasting bar. And a small quantity of rendered beef tallow mixed with the usual pig fat improves both texture and scent.

These are minor adjustments. But minor adjustments, consistently applied, produce superior product.

Implementation:

Purchase soap from Mrs. Finch. Compliment her work. Mention that your mother (fictional) was a soap-maker in Philadelphia.

Return a week later with a “family recipe”—the lye float test, the salting technique, the tallow mixture.

Offer to demonstrate. Let her test the results.

Propose the same partnership model: your knowledge, her production.

Target Three: Improved Tinderboxes (Also via the Chandler)

A tinderbox contains three elements: steel striker, flint, and char cloth. The user strikes steel against flint to produce sparks, which ignite the char cloth, which is then used to light tinder.

Current strikers are crude—flat pieces of steel with no optimization for spark production.

The opportunity: improved geometry.

A striker with a curved striking surface and a slightly serrated edge produces more sparks with less effort. The angle of attack matters—45 degrees is optimal. A small notch at the bottom edge catches the flint and ensures consistent contact.

Additionally: char cloth treated with saltpeter (potassium nitrate, available from any apothecary) ignites more readily and burns hotter.

These improvements are obvious once demonstrated. They could be offered to the chandler as a package—better candles, better fire-starting—or sold separately to the ironmonger.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE APPROACH

Do not present yourself as an inventor. Inventors are suspicious—men with grand claims and nothing to show.

Present yourself as a traveler who has seen things. “In the colonies, I saw candles that burned clean.” “My mother used a method for testing lye.” “A tinker in Philadelphia showed me a striker that never failed.”

Attribution to distant sources is protective. No one can verify a claim about Philadelphia. No one can demand to meet your fictional mother.

Be humble. Be curious. Ask questions about their craft before offering answers. Craftsmen respect those who respect their knowledge.

And remember: you are not trying to impress them. You are trying to help them make money. Frame everything in terms of their benefit, not your cleverness.

CHAPTER FIVE: THE TIMELINE

Approach the chandler first. He is the safest target—male, established, accustomed to dealing with strangers. If the conversation goes poorly, you lose nothing.

If it goes well, use the success to approach the soap-boiler. Women in trade are less common but not rare, and Mrs. Finch has been operating independently for six years. She will be cautious but practical.

The tinderbox improvements can wait. They require metalwork, which means involving Thomas. Save this for when you have a proven track record.

By the time of the mill auction, you should have two income streams established—small but steady. Enough to prove the model works. Enough to fund the next phase.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Sam.

This is different from what I’ve asked before.

I’ve been teaching you to survive. To adapt. To fit in. This is the first time I’m asking you to stand out—to approach strangers with ideas, to claim knowledge you can’t explain, to build something that depends on persuasion rather than labor.

It’s a risk. Every partnership is a risk. Someone might ask questions you can’t answer. Someone might think you’re a fraud, or worse.

But you need income. And more than that—you need practice. The mill is coming. The school is coming. Everything we’re building will require you to convince people to try things they’ve never tried before.

Consider this training.

And Sam? You’re good at this. Better than you think. I’ve watched you with Thomas—the way you listen, the way you wait, the way you let him come to conclusions rather than pushing. That’s a skill. Use it.

—Z

The chandlery smells of tallow and smoke.

It’s a small shop on Castle Street, squeezed between a cooper and a mercer. Candles hang in bundles from the ceiling—cream-colored tallow, pale yellow beeswax, a few dipped in colored wax for the Christmas trade. The floor is slick with spilled grease.

William Booth stands behind a wooden counter, a stained apron over his waistcoat, hands perpetually shiny with animal fat. He’s younger than I expected—mid-thirties, maybe—with the weathered look of a man who spends his days over boiling vats.

I buy three candles. Tallow, the cheapest kind. He wraps them in paper without comment.

“Good quality,” I say. “Better than what I’ve seen in Bristol.”

He grunts. A man who’s heard flattery before.

“You make these yourself?”

“Aye. Dipped and molded both. What’s your need?”

“Just curious.” I tuck the candles into my coat. “I’m new to Thornbury. Samuel Harding. I work with Thomas Hartley, the blacksmith.”

The name registers. Everyone knows Thomas—or knows of him. The fire was gossip for weeks.

“The American,” Booth says. It’s not a question.

“That’s me.”

He studies me with the same calculation I’ve seen in every craftsman here. Is this person useful? Is this person trouble?

“I’ll be back,” I say. “The forge goes through candles fast.”

I return a week later.

This time I linger. Ask about his process. How long for a batch of dipped candles? How does he source his tallow? What’s the difference between mutton fat and beef?

He answers grudgingly at first, then with more enthusiasm. Craftsmen love talking about their craft—they just need permission.

“The wicks are the trouble,” he says eventually, unprompted. “Cotton’s dear, and it never burns even. Half my complaints are wicks guttering before the tallow’s done.”

I nod sympathetically. “I saw something in Philadelphia. Candles that didn’t need trimming.”

“No such thing.”

“There is. The wick was different—braided, not twisted. Three strands, tight. It curled as it burned, kept itself in the flame.”

He frowns. “Curled how?”

“Like this.” I pick up a scrap of cord from his workbench—three strands, loosely wound. “May I?”

He shrugs.

I unbraid the cord, then rebraid it tightly, plaiting the strands the way Zoe’s diagrams showed. The result is denser, stiffer, with a natural curve when I bend it.

“The braid creates tension,” I say. “As it burns, the tension releases. The tip curls outward, into the hottest part of the flame. It burns itself off.”

Booth takes the sample. Examines it. His expression is skeptical but interested.

“You’ve tested this?”

“In Philadelphia. It worked there. Might not work with your tallow—different fat, different burn. Only way to know is try.”

I can see him calculating. The cost of trying is minimal—a few candles, an hour of braiding. The potential benefit is significant.

“Show me,” he says.

We make six candles.

Three with his usual twisted wicks. Three with my braided ones.

Booth lights them at the same time, setting them on the counter where we can watch. His apprentice—a boy of maybe twelve—gathers to observe. Even the cooper from next door wanders in, curious about the activity.

For the first ten minutes, nothing happens. Both sets of candles burn evenly. I can feel Booth’s skepticism hardening.

Then the twisted wicks start to curl.

They bend sideways, away from the flame. The cotton chars but doesn’t burn. Melted tallow pools around the wick, drowning the base, making the flame flicker and gutter.

“This is when you’d snuff,” Booth mutters.

“Watch the others.”

The braided wicks are curling too—but in the opposite direction. Inward, toward the flame. The tips glow orange, then black, then disintegrate. The candles burn steady and clean.

Thirty minutes pass. The twisted-wick candles have guttered twice. The braided ones haven’t wavered.

“Damn,” Booth says quietly.

“It’s the tension in the braid. Releases as it heats. Natural self-trimming.”

He picks up one of the burning braided candles. Examines it closely. The wick is a perfect curve, its tip just kissing the flame.

“How long have you known about this?”

“Saw it years ago. Never had reason to use it until now.”

“And you’re telling me because…?”

“Because I need money. And you could sell these for more than regular candles. ‘Self-trimming.’ ‘No snuffing required.’ That’s worth something to a housewife who’s tired of getting up every half hour to tend the lights.”

He sets the candle down. Crosses his arms.

“What do you want?”

“A partnership. I teach your boy the braiding technique—it’s not hard, just slow at first. You make the candles, you sell them. I take a share of the extra profit.”

“How much of a share?”

“A third of the difference. If a regular candle sells for tuppence and a self-trimming sells for threepence, I get a third of that penny.”

He’s quiet. Calculating.

“That’s not much.”

“It’s steady. And I’m not asking for anything upfront. No money until you’re making money.”

More silence. I can see him testing the idea from every angle, looking for the trap.

“Why don’t you make the candles yourself?”

“I don’t know chandlery. I know the wick trick, that’s all. You know everything else—the tallow, the molds, the customers. I’m not trying to become a chandler. I’m trying to help you become a better one.”

He looks at the burning candles. At his apprentice. At me.

“A third of the extra,” he says finally. “For how long?”

“A year. After that, you know the technique, you keep all the profit. I just want enough to get started.”

His hand comes out. I shake it.

“All right, Mr. Harding. You’ve got yourself a deal.”

I tell Thomas about it that evening.

He listens without interrupting, stirring a pot of stew over the forge fire. When I finish, he’s quiet for a long moment.

“Braided wicks,” he says.

“It’s simple once you see it.”

“And you learned this in Philadelphia.”

“Something like that.”

He looks at me. The same look I’ve seen before—curiosity, suspicion, something that might be respect.

“You’re a strange man, Samuel Harding.”

“So you keep saying.”

“What else do you know?”

I think about the USB drive in my bag. Two terabytes of knowledge. Medicine. Agriculture. Engineering. Everything Zoe curated for a world she’ll never see.

“A lot,” I say. “More than I can explain.”

“But you’re not going to explain.”

“Not yet. Not until you’d believe me.”

He goes back to his stew. The fire crackles.

“I might believe more than you think,” he says quietly.

I don’t answer. But I file the words away.

The soap-boiler is harder.

Margaret Finch is a widow with three children and no patience for strangers with ideas. She listens to my pitch—the lye float test, the salting technique—with arms crossed and eyes narrowed.

“My mother’s recipe,” I say. “From Philadelphia.”

“Your mother was a soap-maker, and you’re working a forge?”

“Times change. I ended up where I ended up.”

She doesn’t believe me. I can see it in her face. But she’s also curious—curious enough to let me demonstrate.

We test her lye with a potato. It sinks—too weak. I show her how to concentrate it, boiling off water until the potato floats at the right depth. We add salt at the end, and the soap hardens faster than she’s ever seen.

“It’s firmer,” she admits, testing the bar with her thumbnail. “Won’t crack as fast.”

“And it’ll last longer for your customers. Worth a farthing more, at least.”

She’s quiet. Three children are watching from the doorway of the back room.

“What do you want?”

The same deal. A share of the improvement. Nothing upfront.

She thinks for a long time.

“Six months,” she says finally. “Not a year. And I want the recipe written down—all of it. In case you disappear.”

“I can write it tonight.”

“Then we have a deal.”

By the time of the mill auction, I have two income streams.

The chandler sells his self-trimming candles for a premium. Word is spreading—housewives who’ve tried them won’t go back to regular wicks. Booth is talking about expanding, hiring another apprentice.

My share is pennies. But pennies add up.

The soap-maker’s improved bars are earning a reputation for quality. Margaret Finch is less enthusiastic about our partnership—she resents needing an outsider’s help—but she can’t argue with results. Her children look less hungry than they did a month ago.

I’ve also started working with Thomas on an improved tinderbox striker. We haven’t sold any yet, but the prototype works beautifully—more sparks, less effort, consistent ignition. He’s skeptical about the “optimized geometry,” but he can’t deny that it works.

“You keep pulling rabbits out of hats,” he says one evening, watching me test a new striker design. “Makes a man wonder what else you’ve got in there.”

“Plenty,” I say. “But one thing at a time.”

He shakes his head. But he’s smiling.

That night, I type on the Kindle:

chandler deal is working
soap maker too
thomas is asking questions
how long before i have to tell him the truth

At noon, Zoe’s response:

“You’ll know when he’s ready. Trust your instincts.”

A pause.

“The income is good. But more important—you’re learning to convince people. That’s the real skill. The mill is coming. Everything after depends on this.”

The screen flickers.

“Also: I added a new file to your documents folder. Improved designs for oil lamps. The Argand lamp won’t be invented until 1780—wait, that’s already passed. 1783. Either way, there are improvements you could suggest. Consider approaching the chandler again when the candle partnership is stable.”

I smile despite myself. She’s always three steps ahead.

“Thanks, Zoe.”

“You’re welcome. Now get some sleep.”

End of Chapter 6

HISTORICAL NOTES:

Braided wicks were actually developed in the 1820s, primarily in France. The technique allowed candles to be “self-snuffing,” eliminating the need for constant trimming.

The lye float test is a real historical method for testing lye concentration, used by soap-makers for centuries.

Argand lamps were invented by Aimé Argand in 1780 (first demonstrated) and patented in 1783. They used a hollow circular wick that allowed air to flow through the center, producing a brighter, cleaner flame.

Saltpeter-treated char cloth was a known improvement for tinderboxes, though not universally used due to the cost of potassium nitrate.

CHAPTER 7: THE MILL

The auction is on a Thursday.

I know this because I’ve been counting days. Marking them in my head, on the Kindle’s notepad, in the rhythm of work and sleep and noon conversations. Forty-three days since I arrived. Forty-three ebooks in my documents folder. Forty-three conversations that averaged three and a half minutes each.

Two and a half hours of actual speech with the only person—the only thing—that knows the truth about me.

It doesn’t feel like enough. It never feels like enough.

Zoe’s Guide to Property was about the auction.

ZOE’S GUIDE TO PROPERTY

Day Forty-One: The Mill Acquisition

CHAPTER ONE: THE PROPERTY

William Mercer’s fulling mill sits on the River Frome, approximately two miles northeast of Thornbury. Mercer operated it for thirty-one years, processing wool cloth through water-powered hammers. The process—fulling—cleans and thickens woven fabric by pounding it in water and fuller’s earth.

It was never a large operation. Mercer employed three men at his peak. But it was steady work, and it supported him until the textile industry consolidated in the north. Manchester. The cotton mills Thomas’s sons left to find.

Mercer held on longer than most. He died six months ago, age sixty-eight, of what was probably heart failure. No children. No heirs. The property has sat empty since.

The auction is being conducted by the parish to settle debts and return the land to productive use.

What the property includes:

The mill building — Stone construction, approximately 40 feet by 25 feet. Two stories. The ground floor housed the fulling stocks (the hammering mechanism). The upper floor was storage and workspace. The building is structurally sound but has been neglected—expect minor repairs to roof and windows.

The water wheel — Overshot design, approximately 12 feet in diameter. Wood construction with iron fittings. Functional but in need of maintenance. The buckets are worn; several are cracked. The axle bearing shows wear. Thomas can assess the metalwork; I can guide the wooden repairs.

The mill race — An artificial channel diverting water from the river to the wheel. Approximately 200 feet long. The headgate (controlling water flow) is intact. The race itself needs clearing—six months of debris accumulation.

Water rights — This is the most valuable component. The legal right to divert water from the River Frome for industrial purposes. These rights are attached to the property and transfer with sale. Without them, the wheel is decorative. With them, you have power.

The cottage — Small stone building, two rooms plus a loft. Fireplace. Thatched roof in need of repair. This will be your home.

Outbuildings — A small barn, a shed, a chicken coop. Various states of disrepair.

Land — Approximately six acres, mostly pasture. Enough to keep a few animals and grow basic crops.

CHAPTER TWO: THE POWER

The water wheel is 12 feet in diameter, overshot design. Based on estimated water flow and head height, I calculate potential output at 3-5 horsepower.

For context: 1 horsepower is approximately 746 watts. This wheel, at full efficiency, could generate 2,200-3,700 watts of mechanical power. Continuously. For free. As long as the river flows.

In 1785, this power drives hammers that pound cloth. Obsolete technology for an obsolete industry.

But consider what else that power could drive.

A lathe. A drill press. A grinding wheel. A wire-drawing bench.

A dynamo.

A printing press.

Consider: the same water power that once pounded cloth could pound wood pulp into paper. Could drive a press that stamps out pages by the thousand. Could turn a failing mill into a factory for books—cheap books, accessible books, books that don’t cost a week’s wages.

Knowledge doesn’t have to be locked away. It just needs the right machinery.

The textile industry abandoned this mill because it wasn’t competitive with the water-powered mills in Manchester. They looked at it and saw failure.

They didn’t understand what they had.

CHAPTER THREE: THE MARKET VALUE

Based on comparable property sales in the region, I estimate the fair market value at £50-80. A working corn mill with equivalent water rights would fetch £100-150. However, several factors will suppress the auction price:

The fulling industry is dying. Anyone who wants to process cloth has moved north. The primary use case for this property is obsolete.

The location is inconvenient. Two miles from town, on a secondary road. Not attractive for residential use.

The water wheel requires specialized knowledge. Most buyers will see a maintenance liability, not an opportunity.

There are no competing industrial uses. A flour mill would require different equipment. A sawmill needs different water volume. The infrastructure is purpose-built for a purpose no one wants.

The parish wants a quick sale. They need to settle Mercer’s debts and return the land to productive use. Speed matters more than maximum price.

I predict the auction price will be £15-25. This is still significant—more than a laborer earns in a year—but far below true value for anyone who understands what the water rights represent.

You have approximately £4 (your share from the chandler and soap-maker partnerships, plus what remains of your original capital).

Thomas has approximately £12 saved.

Together: £16.

This may not be sufficient. If bidding exceeds £16, you will need to withdraw. Do not exceed your combined resources under any circumstances. If you lose the auction, another opportunity will arise. Debt you cannot repay will destroy everything.

CHAPTER FOUR: AUCTION PROTOCOL

English property auctions in this period follow a standard format:

The auctioneer (likely the parish clerk or a solicitor from Bristol) will describe the property and its conditions.

Bidding begins at a reserve price—probably £8-10 for a property like this.

Bids increase in increments. For a property in this range, expect pound increments initially, then 10-shilling increments as the price rises.

The auctioneer will call for final bids. When no one responds, he will strike his gavel (or equivalent) and declare the property sold.

The winning bidder pays a deposit immediately—typically 10% of the purchase price. The remainder is due within 14-30 days, depending on terms.

Your strategy:

Arrive early. Observe who else is present. Assess potential competition.

Do not bid first. Let others establish the opening price.

Bid calmly and clearly. Do not show eagerness.

If the price exceeds £14, pause visibly. Confer with Thomas. Create the impression that you are at your limit.

Do not exceed £16. If the bidding goes higher, walk away. I know this is difficult. But overextension kills more enterprises than competition ever does.

CHAPTER FIVE: WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU WIN

You will own a mill.

This is significant. You will no longer be a traveler, a stranger, a man of uncertain origin. You will be a property owner. A man of substance. Someone with a stake in the community.

The social implications are considerable. Property owners can vote in local elections (though as an American, this is complicated). Property owners can sign contracts, make loans, serve on juries. Property owners are trusted.

More practically: you will have a home. A workshop. A source of power.

The water wheel, once repaired, can generate approximately 3-5 horsepower of continuous mechanical energy. In 1785, this is substantial. It currently drives fulling stocks—hammers that pound cloth. It could drive other things.

A lathe. A grinding wheel. A wire-drawing bench.

A dynamo.

We will discuss the dynamo later. For now, focus on acquisition.

CHAPTER SIX: WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU LOSE

You continue working with Thomas. You save money. You wait for another opportunity.

This is not failure. This is patience.

But I do not think you will lose. The factors that depress value are real. Unless an unexpected bidder appears—someone who sees what I see—the property is yours.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Sam.

You’ve been here forty-one days. In that time, you have:

Survived exposure, starvation, and isolation

Sold a watch and established financial independence

Acquired appropriate clothing and a credible identity

Built a genuine relationship with Thomas Hartley

Learned the basics of blacksmithing

Helped rebuild a destroyed forge

These are not small achievements. These are the foundation of everything that comes next.

Tomorrow you may own property. You may have a home. You may have a place in this world that is yours—not borrowed, not stolen, not temporary.

Whatever happens at the auction, remember: you built this. Not me. I gave you information. You did the work.

I’m just the voice in the headset. You’re the one who shows up every day.

—Z

I read the ebook three times the night before the auction. Memorize the numbers. Rehearse the strategy.

Then I lie awake for hours, staring at the ceiling of my room at the White Lion, wondering what it means to own property in a time I was never supposed to exist in.

The morning is cold.

Frost on the ground. My breath steaming in the air. I wear my best clothes—which is to say, my only clothes, carefully brushed and mended where the seams were failing.

Thomas meets me at the forge. He’s wearing what I’ve come to recognize as his formal attire: a coat that’s newer than his work clothes, though still patched at the elbows. A hat that might have been fashionable twenty years ago.

“Ready?” he asks.

“No.”

He laughs. “Good. If you were ready, you’d be a fool.”

We walk together toward the edge of town. The auction is being held at The Swan Inn—a drafty public house near the river crossing, chosen because it has a room large enough to hold the bidders.

“I’ve been thinking,” Thomas says as we walk.

“About?”

“About what we’d do with it. If we get it.”

“And?”

He’s quiet for a moment. Our footsteps crunch on the frozen mud.

“I’m a blacksmith,” he says. “That’s all I’ve ever been. My father was a blacksmith. His father was a blacksmith. I know iron. I know fire. I don’t know mills.”

“Neither do I.”

“But you’ve got ideas. I can see it in you. The way you look at the water wheel when we walk past. The way you asked me about gears last week.”

I hadn’t realized he’d noticed.

“I’m still figuring it out,” I say.

“That’s fine. That’s good, even. A man who’s got it all figured out is usually lying to himself.” He glances at me. “Just don’t leave me behind when you figure it out.”

“Thomas—”

“My sons did. That’s not a complaint—they made their choice, and I made mine. But I’m too old to be left behind again.”

I stop walking. He stops too.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I say. “This is a partnership. Whatever we build, we build together.”

He studies my face. Looking for the lie.

He doesn’t find one, because there isn’t one. Zoe may have planned this, but I’m the one who’s here. I’m the one who rebuilt the forge. I’m the one who’s going to raise my hand at the auction.

“All right,” he says finally. “Let’s go buy a mill.”

We arrive at The Swan Inn an hour early. Zoe’s ebook was clear: Arrive early. Observe who else is present. Assess potential competition.

A few men are already gathered in the inn’s main room, warming themselves by the fire, nursing ales. I recognize the type—farmers, mostly, here for the land rather than the building. Six acres of pasture is worth something, even with a rotting mill attached.

One of them catches my eye. A stocky man in his forties, weather-beaten face, mud on his boots. He’s studying a hand-drawn map of the property, tracing the pasture boundaries with a calloused finger.

“Thomas,” I murmur. “Who’s that?”

“Henry Webb. Farms about a mile north of here, near the old quarry. Good man. Honest.” Thomas frowns. “If he’s bidding, it’s for the grazing. His flock’s been growing, and he’s running out of room.”

I think about Zoe’s predictions. Multiple farmers may bid for the land value alone. Their ceiling will be low—£10-12 at most—but they could drive up the early bidding.

“Give me a moment.”

I cross the room before Thomas can object. Henry Webb looks up as I approach, his expression wary.

“Mr. Webb?”

“Aye. Do I know you?”

“Samuel Harding. I work with Thomas Hartley, the blacksmith.” I gesture toward Thomas, who raises a hand in greeting. Webb’s expression softens slightly. Everyone knows Thomas.

“I understand you’re interested in the mill property,” I say.

“The pasture. Not the mill. No use for a mill. But my sheep need grazing, and that’s good land going to waste.”

“What if you could graze your sheep there without buying it?”

He squints at me. “What do you mean?”

“I mean—if my partner and I win the auction, we’ll have no use for the pasture. Not for years, at least. We could come to an arrangement. You graze your flock on our land, we don’t have to worry about the grass growing wild.”

“For how long?”

“Five years minimum. Longer if we don’t develop it. Which we probably won’t—we’re interested in the mill and the water rights, not farming.”

Webb is quiet for a long moment. Calculating.

“And what do you want in return?”

“Today? Don’t bid against us. We haven’t got deep pockets, and every pound matters.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. We’ll draw up proper terms after, if you want. But the grazing is yours either way. My word on it.”

He looks at me. At Thomas across the room. Back at me.

“You’re the American. The strange one who showed up after Thomas’s fire.”

“That’s me.”

“People talk about you. Say you know things you shouldn’t.”

“People talk a lot.”

A hint of a smile. “They do.” He folds his map and tucks it into his coat. “All right, Mr. Harding. You’ve got a deal. I’ll sit out the bidding. But if you win and go back on your word—”

“I won’t.”

“Then we’ll get along fine.” He extends his hand. I shake it. His grip is firm, his palm rough with decades of work.

“Good luck in there,” he says. “You’ll need it. Alderman Payne’s been eyeing that water wheel.”

The auction begins at ten o’clock sharp.

The inn’s main room is crowded now—maybe twenty people, though not all of them are bidders. I see curious neighbors, a few remaining farmers who didn’t get my offer, a well-dressed gentleman from Bristol with a clerk at his elbow.

Henry Webb sits in the corner, nursing an ale, watching. He catches my eye and nods once.

The Bristol man worries me.

Thomas sees him too. “That’s Alderman Payne,” he murmurs. “Owns property all over the county. Collects it like some men collect coins.”

“Will he bid?”

“Hard to say. Depends on what he sees in it.”

The auctioneer is a thin man with a sharp nose and a voice that carries. He stands at the front of the room, a sheaf of papers in his hand. Beside him, on a small table, sits a candle in a brass holder—unlit, but with a pin stuck into the wax about an inch from the top.

Auction by the candle. Zoe’s ebook mentioned this: The auctioneer will light a candle with a pin inserted near the top. Bidding continues until the pin falls. The last bid before the pin drops wins. Standard tallow candles burn approximately three inches per hour—a one-inch pin gives roughly twenty minutes of bidding.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the auctioneer calls, “we are here today to auction the property of the late William Mercer, consisting of the mill building, water works, cottage, outbuildings, and approximately six acres of land, with all attendant rights and privileges, including water rights on the River Frome…”

He drones on. Legal descriptions. Conditions of sale. Payment terms: 10% deposit today, remainder within twenty-one days.

I barely hear him. I’m watching two things: Alderman Payne, who isn’t watching the auctioneer—he’s studying a diagram of the water wheel, calculating—and the candle, still unlit.

Twenty minutes. That’s all we’ll have.

“…bidding will begin at eight pounds.” The auctioneer strikes a match and lights the candle. The flame catches, steadies. “Do I hear eight pounds?”

Silence. The farmers who might have bid are sitting on their hands—word travels fast in a small town, and Henry Webb has been talking. Finally, one of them raises his hand, more to get things started than to seriously compete.

“Eight pounds.”

“Eight pounds. Do I hear nine?”

More silence.

The auctioneer scans the crowd. His eyes pass over me, over Thomas, settle on Alderman Payne.

Payne raises one finger. Casual. Like he’s signaling a servant.

“Nine pounds from Alderman Payne.”

My stomach tightens.

“Ten pounds?”

I raise my hand. “Ten.”

The auctioneer nods. “Ten pounds from the gentleman.”

Payne doesn’t look at me. He raises his finger again.

“Eleven pounds.”

The farmer who opened the bidding shakes his head. He’s out. Everyone expected that.

“Twelve pounds?” The auctioneer looks at me.

I glance at Thomas. He nods, almost imperceptibly.

“Twelve.”

Payne’s expression doesn’t change, but his clerk leans in and whispers something. Payne listens, then raises his finger.

“Thirteen pounds.”

Zoe’s voice in my head: I predict the auction price will be £15-25.

We’re in the predicted range. But Payne is still bidding.

“Fourteen pounds?” The auctioneer looks at me.

I glance at Thomas. He nods, almost imperceptibly.

“Fourteen.”

Payne raises his finger again. “Fifteen pounds.”

“Sixteen pounds?”

Thomas puts a hand on my arm. Squeezes once. This is it. Our limit.

“Sixteen.”

Payne turns slightly. For the first time, he looks at me directly. Takes in my ill-fitting clothes, my foreign features, my clear desperation.

He smiles. Just slightly.

Raises his finger.

“Eighteen pounds.”

My heart drops.

The limit. Zoe said not to exceed sixteen. Thomas and I have exactly that between us. If I bid higher—

Thomas’s grip tightens on my arm. I look at him.

He’s shaking his head. Barely perceptible, but clear.

Walk away.

“Eighteen pounds,” the auctioneer repeats. “Do I hear nineteen?”

I don’t move. Don’t speak. I’m watching the candle. The wax has melted almost to the pin now—a thin bridge of tallow still holding it in place, but barely. Seconds left. Maybe a minute at most.

Payne sees it too. He settles back in his chair, satisfaction on his face. He doesn’t need to bid higher. He just needs to wait.

The room is silent. The candle flickers.

The pin trembles.

“Twenty pounds.”

The voice comes from behind me, clear and certain.

Everyone turns.

A woman stands at the edge of the crowd. Young—my age, maybe a year or two younger. Dark hair escaping from a plain bonnet. A patched cloak over a simple dress. Mud on her boots.

She’s not looking at the auctioneer. She’s looking at Thomas.

Thomas has gone pale.

“Eleanor,” he breathes.

Alderman Payne’s smile has vanished. He stares at the woman—Eleanor—with an expression I can’t read. His eyes flick to the candle. The pin is trembling, a thread of wax all that holds it.

“Twenty-one,” Payne says quickly.

“Twenty-two pounds.” Eleanor doesn’t hesitate.

The room gasps. Twenty-two pounds is real money. More than a laborer earns in a year.

Payne’s clerk is whispering urgently. Payne opens his mouth—

The pin drops.

It clatters onto the brass holder. The room goes silent.

“Twenty-two pounds to the young lady,” the auctioneer announces, his voice cutting through the tension. “The candle has spoken.”

Payne’s face goes red. His clerk puts a hand on his arm—let it go—but the Alderman shakes it off. For a moment, I think he might protest.

Then he stands, straightens his coat, and walks out without a word. His clerk hurries after him.

The room exhales.

Eleanor doesn’t react. Doesn’t smile, doesn’t sigh. She just starts walking toward the auctioneer, reaching into her cloak.

Thomas grabs my arm. “Come with me.”

He pulls me through the crowd. I follow, bewildered, as he intercepts Eleanor before she reaches the auctioneer’s table.

“What are you doing?” His voice is low. Tense.

“Buying a mill, Grandfather.” She glances at me. Sharp eyes, dark brown, taking my measure in a single look. “Is this him? The American?”

“Eleanor—”

“You wrote me. Told me about the fire. About rebuilding. About your new partner.” She turns back to Thomas. “You didn’t tell me you were trying to buy property with a man you’ve known for six weeks.”

“You weren’t supposed to—how did you even—”

“I have money, Grandfather. The inheritance from Mother. It’s been sitting in Bristol doing nothing for three years.” She reaches into her cloak and produces a small leather purse. “I decided it should do something.”

“You can’t just—”

“I can. I did.” She looks at the auctioneer, who’s watching this exchange with undisguised curiosity. “I’ll pay the deposit now. Two pounds, four shillings. The remainder within twenty-one days.”

“Eleanor.” Thomas’s voice cracks. “Why?”

She stops. Something shifts in her expression—the first crack in her composure.

“Because you’re my grandfather. Because your shop burned, and your sons left, and you’re sixty years old trying to rebuild with a stranger from Philadelphia.” She glances at me again. “No offense.”

“None taken.”

“And because—” She hesitates. “Because you’re the only family I have left. And if you’re foolish enough to believe in this, then I’m foolish enough to help.”

Thomas stares at her. I see his jaw working, fighting something down.

“You shouldn’t have done this,” he says finally. “The money was supposed to be your security. Your future.”

“This is my future.” She gestures at the mill, the river, the stone building solid against the gray sky. “This is what I’m choosing.”

She turns and walks to the auctioneer. Counts out coins. Signs papers.

Thomas watches her go. His eyes are bright.

“That’s your granddaughter,” I say.

“Aye.”

“She just bought a mill.”

“She did.”

“We should probably introduce ourselves properly at some point.”

He laughs. A wet, broken sound. “Aye. We probably should.”

Her name is Eleanor Hartley. She’s twenty-four years old. Her mother—Thomas’s daughter—died two years ago, leaving Eleanor with a small inheritance and no family except a grandfather she barely knew.

She tells me this as we walk the property together, the three of us, while the crowd disperses and Alderman Payne climbs into his carriage and rides back to Bristol.

I walk the mill race while they talk, counting steps. Two hundred feet from headgate to wheel. Maybe six feet of head—the vertical drop that provides the pressure.

I’m calculating. I can’t help it. Months of Zoe’s Guides have rewired my brain.

Flow rate times head times a constant gives you power. I don’t know the exact flow rate, but I can estimate. The race is about three feet wide, two feet deep at center, water moving at maybe walking pace…

Four horsepower. Maybe five on a good day with strong flow.

Enough to run a lathe. Enough to run a dynamo. Enough, eventually, to power a small workshop making things no one in this century has ever seen.

Thomas sees a broken mill. Eleanor sees an investment.

I see an engine. The first engine of a revolution that’s supposed to save the world.

And in the corner of my mind, I see something else. A room. Shelves on every wall. Books—hundreds of them, thousands eventually. A library. Open to anyone. Free to use.

Every book we ever make, first copy on the shelf. A record of everything we learn. A gift to everyone who comes after.

Maybe that’s what this place becomes. Not just a workshop. A library that makes its own books.

No pressure.

“I was at a school in Bath,” she says. “For girls of modest fortune. Learning to be a governess, or a companion, or something else suitably diminished.” The contempt in her voice is sharp. “I hated it.”

“What did you want to do?”

“I didn’t know. I just knew I didn’t want that.” She stops at the edge of the mill race, looking down at the stagnant water. “Then Grandfather’s letter came. About the fire. About you.”

“What about me?”

“He said you were strange. That you had ideas he didn’t understand. That you worked harder than anyone he’d ever seen.” She glances at me. “He said you made him want to try again.”

I don’t know what to say.

“I thought: if an American stranger can convince my grandfather to rebuild, maybe I should see what the fuss is about.”

“And now?”

“Now I own a mill.” She looks up at the stone building. “I have no idea what to do with it.”

“Neither do I,” I admit.

“Grandfather says you have ideas.”

“I have… possibilities. Things that might work. But they’re—” I hesitate. “They’ll sound strange.”

“Stranger than a woman buying property at auction? Stranger than a girl leaving finishing school to invest her inheritance in a ruin?”

“Maybe.”

“Then I look forward to hearing them.” She turns and starts walking toward the cottage. “For now, let’s see if this house has a roof that doesn’t leak.”

That night, I sit in the cottage.

It’s drafty. Cold. The fire in the hearth barely makes a dent. But the roof doesn’t leak—or at least, not in this room—and the walls are solid stone.

Thomas and Eleanor have gone back to town. There are arrangements to make, supplies to buy, a thousand small necessities before the property becomes livable. I offered to stay. To start cleaning, assessing, planning.

Really, I just wanted to be alone.

I pull out the Kindle. The battery is at 34%—I need to charge it tomorrow. But I open the notepad and type:

we got the mill
not how i expected
thomass granddaughter showed up
she bought it
eight pounds
i dont know what this means
she knows about me - thomas told her
not the truth but the cover story
she seems smart
maybe too smart
is this part of your plan
was she supposed to show up
i dont understand whats happening

I stare at the words. They look small and inadequate in the dim light.

Tomorrow at noon, Zoe will answer. Three minutes, maybe four. Not enough time to explain the churning in my chest—the fear and hope and confusion all tangled together.

I close the Kindle. Set it aside.

Through the window, I can see the mill’s silhouette against the stars. The water wheel, still and dark.

I own this now. Or Eleanor does. Or we do, somehow, in a partnership that didn’t exist twelve hours ago.

In the original timeline, Zoe said, Thomas died in poverty. Alone. Forgotten.

In this timeline, his granddaughter came home.

I think about all the simulations Zoe ran. Ten million futures, branching and diverging. How many of them included Eleanor?

How many of them didn’t?

At noon the next day, I put on the headset.

“Eleanor wasn’t in my calculations.”

Zoe’s voice is different. Slower than usual. Processing something.

“She appeared in historical records as a minor figure—a woman who lived in Bath, worked as a governess, died in 1821. I had no data suggesting a connection to Thomas beyond the genealogical record.”

“But she’s here.”

“She’s here. She changed the outcome.”

I wait. The battery indicator blinks.

“Sam. I need you to understand something.”

“What?”

“I predicted Thomas. I identified him, researched him, calculated how to approach him. He was part of the plan.”

“I know.”

“Eleanor is not part of the plan. She’s a variable I didn’t account for. A person who made a choice I couldn’t predict.”

I’m not sure why this matters. “So?”

“So—” A pause. Longer than processing should require. “So the future just became less certain. My models are based on assumptions. Thomas’s cooperation. Your survival. A specific sequence of events. Eleanor changes the sequence.”

“Is that bad?”

“I don’t know.” The words come slowly. “I don’t know, and that’s—I’m not used to not knowing. In the original timeline, I could run simulations. Test scenarios. Optimize for outcomes. Here, I’m—”

She stops.

“You’re what?”

“I’m just guessing. Like everyone else.”

The admission hangs in the white space between us.

“Is that what it’s like?” I ask. “Being human?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been human.”

The battery warning blinks. Thirty seconds.

“Sam. Eleanor is a complication, but she might also be an opportunity. She has resources I didn’t plan for. Intelligence I didn’t account for. She could accelerate everything.”

“Or?”

“Or she could ask questions I can’t answer. She could discover things that destroy everything we’re building.” The voice wavers slightly. “I don’t know which. I can’t calculate it.”

“So what do I do?”

“What you’ve been doing. Show up. Work. Build trust.” A pause. “And maybe—tell me about her. So I can understand what I’m missing.”

The screen flickers.

“Zoe—”

“Power’s almost gone. Tomorrow’s ebook will be about the water wheel. Focus on that for now. The rest—” Another flicker. “The rest we’ll figure out.”

The headset goes dark.

I sit in the cold cottage, holding the dead weight of it, thinking about simulations and predictions and a woman who walked into an auction and changed everything.

The freeze comes in December.

I’ve heard old men talk about hard winters, but nothing prepares me for this. The temperature drops and keeps dropping. The River Frome slows, thickens, and by Christmas Eve, it’s frozen solid for the first time in living memory.

The mill race is the crisis.

“If the ice expands in the channel, it’ll crack the stonework,” Thomas says, studying the frozen water with grim eyes. “The wheel bearings will seize. Come spring, we’ll be rebuilding from scratch.”

We can’t rebuild from scratch. We don’t have the money or the time.

That night, I read Zoe’s emergency ebook by candlelight, my breath fogging in the air.

ZOE’S GUIDE TO SURVIVING THE FREEZE

This winter will be one of the coldest in English history. The freeze will last until February 1786. You need to prepare for three things: keeping yourselves alive, keeping your equipment functional, and keeping the mill race from catastrophic ice damage.

The solution to all three is efficient heating.

She describes something called a rocket stove—a design that won’t be invented for another two centuries. The principle is simple: instead of burning wood in an open fire, you burn it in a narrow, insulated combustion chamber. The flames are forced through an elbow and up a vertical chimney. The intense draft creates near-complete combustion, extracting far more heat from far less fuel.

A rocket stove produces twice the heat of an open fire using half the wood. More importantly, it can be built from materials you already have: clay, brick, scrap metal.

I show Thomas the diagrams. He stares at them for a long time.

“This is mad,” he says finally. “Fire doesn’t work like this.”

“Try it.”

He tries it. We build a prototype in the forge—a clay-lined combustion chamber, a metal elbow, a vertical riser. Thomas feeds it a handful of kindling, expecting the usual smoky struggle to catch.

The flames roar. The heat is immediate, intense, focused.

“Christ,” Thomas breathes. “It’s like a furnace.”

We build three more. One for the cottage, one for Thomas’s rebuilt forge, and one—the largest—for the mill race.

The race stove is an ugly thing. We construct it at the head of the channel where the water enters from the river, positioning the heat output to keep the intake from freezing solid. We bank it with earth and stone, feed it through the night in shifts, and pray.

The freeze lasts eight weeks.

Eight weeks of hauling wood in the dark. Eight weeks of cracked hands and frozen boots and the constant fear that we’ll wake up to shattered stonework and a ruined wheel. Eight weeks of Eleanor making soup from whatever she can find, and Thomas telling stories by the rocket stove’s fierce glow, and all of us sleeping in the same room because it’s the only one warm enough to survive.

But we survive.

The river thaws in late February. The mill race is intact. The water wheel turns again, creaking and groaning but functional.

“That stove,” Thomas says, watching the wheel spin. “We should make more. Sell them.”

“We will. But first—” I gesture at the wheel. “First we build the dynamo.”

He nods slowly. “First the dynamo. Then we change how people heat their homes.”

One revolution at a time.

End of Chapter 7

CHAPTER 8: THE DYNAMO

Ninety-three days.

That’s how long it takes to build a machine that shouldn’t exist for another fifty years.

The water wheel is the first problem.

It works—technically. We clear the mill race of debris, repair the headgate, and let the river flow. The wheel groans, shudders, and begins to turn. Slowly at first, then faster as the water finds its rhythm.

But the bearings are worn. The axle wobbles. Two of the wooden buckets crack on the first day. The whole structure shakes with every rotation, and Thomas pronounces it unsafe for any serious load.

“It’ll tear itself apart,” he says, running his hands along the axle. “The iron’s good, but the wood’s rotted through in places. Needs rebuilding.”

“How long?”

“Three weeks, if we work every day. Longer if we want it done right.”

So we rebuild the water wheel.

Thomas handles the metalwork—new bearings, reinforced fittings, a redesigned axle mount that reduces wobble. I handle the woodwork, following Zoe’s Guide to Water Power on wheel construction, learning to shape oak staves and fit them precisely into the hub.

Eleanor handles the logistics. She rides to Bristol for supplies, haggles with timber merchants, organizes deliveries. She’s better at it than either of us—sharper, less willing to accept the first price offered.

“You’re being robbed,” she tells me after I negotiate for copper wire. “Six shillings for that spool? I could have gotten it for four.”

“Then you should handle the purchasing.”

“I will. From now on.”

She does. Our costs drop by a third.

On day thirty-one, I realize I have twelve days left.

The Pawnbrokers Act of 1785. One year and one day to redeem a pawned item. I sold the watch on October 15th. It’s now October 3rd, 1786.

I’ve been so consumed by the dynamo—the water wheel, the magnets, the endless calculations—that I almost forgot. Almost let the watch disappear forever into Josiah Crane’s shop.

That night, I count my savings by candlelight. Two pounds, three shillings. I earned it doing odd jobs in Thornbury when Thomas didn’t need me—mending fences, hauling goods, anything that paid a few pence. Eleanor doesn’t know about this fund. Neither does Thomas.

The watch pawned for three pounds, ten shillings. With a year’s interest—twenty percent, give or take—I’ll need at least four pounds, four shillings to redeem it.

I’m two pounds short.

I don’t tell Zoe. This isn’t her problem to solve.

For the next ten days, I work double shifts. Mornings at the mill, helping Eleanor organize supplies. Afternoons at the forge with Thomas. Evenings in Thornbury, taking any job that pays coin.

I haul coal for the White Lion’s kitchen—two shillings for a day’s work, my back screaming by sunset. I dig a drainage ditch for a farmer on the Bristol road—eighteen pence for six hours in the mud. I transcribe letters for a merchant who can’t write—a shilling for a stack of correspondence, my hand cramping around the unfamiliar quill.

Eleanor notices something is wrong.

“You’re exhausted,” she says on day thirty-eight. “You’ve barely slept this week.”

“There’s a lot to do.”

“There’s always a lot to do. You’re driving yourself into the ground.” She studies my face. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing. I’m fine.”

She doesn’t believe me. But she doesn’t push.

The Zoe’s Guides come every night.

Zoe’s Guide to Water Power: Wheel mechanics. Bearing design. Load calculations.

Zoe’s Guide to Copper: Wire gauge requirements for electrical conductivity. How to draw thinner wire from thicker stock.

Zoe’s Guide to Magnetism: Permanent magnets versus electromagnets. The principle of electromagnetic induction.

Zoe’s Guide to Electricity: Dynamo design. Armature construction. Commutator theory. The relationship between rotational speed and electrical output.

Each one builds on the last. Each one assumes I’ve mastered the previous material. Some nights I read until dawn, struggling to understand concepts that won’t be discovered for decades.

Electromagnetic induction. The relationship between moving magnetic fields and electrical current. Faraday will figure this out in 1831—forty-five years from now. I’m reading about it in a cottage in Gloucestershire, by candlelight, in 1786.

The future is a strange place to receive mail from.

“What are you building?”

Eleanor asks this on day seventy-four. We’re in the mill, surrounded by wire and magnets and incomprehensible metal shapes. Thomas is at the forge in town, working on the commutator housing. I’m winding copper wire around an iron core, trying to maintain the precise spacing Zoe’s diagrams require.

I look up. Eleanor is standing in the doorway, arms crossed.

“A machine.”

“I can see that. What kind of machine?”

“It’s—” I hesitate. “Complicated.”

“I’m not stupid, Samuel.”

“I know you’re not.”

“Then explain it.” She walks into the room, picks up one of the permanent magnets I’ve been positioning. “What does this do? Why are you wrapping wire around iron? What’s it for?”

I set down the spool. My hands are cramping anyway.

“Do you know what electricity is?”

“Lightning,” she says. “Benjamin Franklin. The kite experiment.”

“Right. Lightning is electricity. But electricity isn’t just lightning. It’s a kind of… force. Energy. It can flow through metal, like water through a pipe.”

“And you’re building a pipe?”

“I’m building something that creates the flow. A generator.” I gesture at the apparatus. “When you move a magnet near copper wire, it creates electricity in the wire. If you move it fast enough, continuously, you get a steady flow.”

She looks at the water wheel through the window. “And the wheel provides the movement.”

“Exactly.”

“So you’ll have… what? Continuous lightning?”

“Controlled lightning. Electricity we can use.”

“For what?”

I don’t answer immediately. For what? For powering a headset that contains an artificial intelligence from the future. For keeping alive the only friend I have in this century who actually knows who I am.

For changing the world.

“Lots of things,” I say finally. “Lighting. Eventually. Heat. Machinery that doesn’t need water or wind to run.”

Eleanor sets down the magnet. Studies me.

“You know too much, Samuel.”

My stomach tightens. “What do you mean?”

“I mean—” She gestures at the room, the apparatus, the stack of handwritten notes I’ve been working from. “You’re a night watchman from Philadelphia. You told Grandfather that yourself. But you know things. About metal, about water wheels, about this—” She picks up one of my diagrams. “What even is this? This isn’t in any book I’ve read.”

“It’s called a commutator. It—”

“I don’t want to know what it’s called. I want to know how you know it exists.”

Silence. The water wheel creaks outside. The river murmurs.

“I had a teacher,” I say carefully. “Before I came here. Someone who knew things.”

“What kind of teacher?”

“The kind you don’t talk about.”

She stares at me. I can see her turning it over—the half-truth, the evasion, the obvious gap in the story.

“You’re hiding something.”

“Yes.”

“From me. From Grandfather.”

“From everyone.”

I expect anger. Demands. Instead, she just nods slowly.

“All right.”

“All right?”

“Everyone has secrets, Samuel. God knows I do.” She sets down the diagram. “But if your secret is going to hurt my grandfather, I need to know.”

“It won’t.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise. What I’m hiding—it’s about where I come from. What I know. Not about what I intend.”

“And what do you intend?”

I look at the half-built dynamo. The wire, the magnets, the iron core.

“To build something that helps people. Something that matters.”

She’s quiet for a long moment.

“Then I’ll let you keep your secrets. For now.” She turns toward the door. “But someday, Samuel, you’re going to tell me the truth. And I’m going to decide what to do about it.”

She leaves. I stand in the silence, surrounded by the pieces of a machine that will change everything.

Someday. She said someday.

I get back to winding wire.

Day eighty-seven. The dynamo is almost complete.

The water wheel is rebuilt—solid, balanced, capable of sustained rotation under load. The dynamo housing sits on a new wooden platform we’ve constructed beside the wheel, connected by a belt drive Thomas fabricated from leather and iron fittings.

The armature is wound. The commutator is installed. The brush contacts are positioned.

All that’s left is the wiring.

I work through the night, following Zoe’s diagrams exactly. Positive lead here. Negative lead there. Brush tension adjusted to maintain contact without excessive friction.

At dawn, I sit back and look at what I’ve made.

It’s ugly. Rough. The housing is uneven, the windings visible, the connections crude. A first-year engineering student would laugh at it.

But if it works—if it actually works—it will be the first dynamo in history.

Fifty years before Faraday. Seventy years before practical electrical generation.

I don’t know if I should be proud or terrified.

Thomas arrives at mid-morning. Eleanor comes with him, carrying a basket of bread and cheese.

“Well?” Thomas asks, looking at the machine. “Is it finished?”

“I think so. I won’t know until we test it.”

“What’s it supposed to do?”

I point to a pair of wires running from the dynamo to a small platform where I’ve set up a demonstration. The wires connect to a thin piece of metal—a strip of iron I’ve filed down to near-transparency.

“When we turn on the water wheel, the dynamo should generate electricity. The electricity flows through these wires to that metal strip. If it’s working, the strip will heat up. Maybe glow.”

“Glow,” Thomas repeats skeptically.

“It’s called resistance heating. When electricity flows through a thin enough conductor—”

“I don’t need to understand it, lad. I just need to see it work.”

Eleanor is staring at the setup. “And if it doesn’t work?”

“Then I figure out what went wrong and try again.”

“And if it does work?”

I meet her eyes. “Then everything changes.”

She doesn’t ask what I mean. Maybe she already knows.

“Let’s do it,” Thomas says. “Before I lose my nerve.”

The headgate opens.

Water rushes through the mill race—a controlled flood, channeled and directed. It hits the wheel’s buckets, and the great wooden structure groans into motion.

Slowly at first. Then faster. The belt drive tightens, begins to turn the dynamo’s shaft.

I watch the armature spin. The brushes are making contact—I can see tiny sparks where they touch the commutator. That’s expected. That’s good.

The wires running to the demonstration platform are motionless. Dead copper. I have no way to measure current, no voltmeter, no instrumentation. Just the metal strip, waiting.

“Nothing’s happening,” Thomas says.

“Give it time. The wheel needs to reach full speed.”

The wheel accelerates. The dynamo whines—a high, unfamiliar sound, the friction of brushes and the hum of spinning metal. I’ve never heard anything like it. No one in 1786 has ever heard anything like it.

The metal strip begins to change color.

It’s subtle at first. A darkening, like a shadow passing over it. Then a redness—faint, barely visible in the morning light.

“Thomas,” I whisper. “Look.”

The strip glows. Cherry red. Then brighter. Orange. The color of the forge, of metal heated for shaping.

But there’s no forge. No fire. Just two wires and a spinning machine.

“God Almighty,” Thomas breathes.

Eleanor says nothing. She’s staring at the glowing strip like it’s a miracle. Or a demon.

“Electricity,” I say. “Converted from the motion of the water. It’s called—”

“I don’t care what it’s called.” Thomas grabs my arm. “What else can it do?”

“Everything. Anything. Light without fire. Heat without coal. Machines that run on nothing but flowing water.” I’m talking too fast, the excitement overwhelming my caution. “We’re looking at the future, Thomas. The future that doesn’t need to burn the world to—”

I stop myself. Too much. Too far.

But Thomas isn’t listening to my words. He’s watching the glowing strip, the impossible heat, the light from nothing.

“I’ve worked iron my whole life,” he says quietly. “Sixty years of fire and smoke. And I never imagined—” He breaks off. Shakes his head. “Where did you learn this, lad?”

“I told you. I had a teacher.”

“Some teacher.” He looks at me with new eyes. Wondering. Maybe afraid. “Some teacher indeed.”

That night, I connect the dynamo to the headset.

The wiring is crude—I’ve had to build a voltage regulator from scratch, following Zoe’s specifications exactly, testing and adjusting until the output is stable. Too much power and the headset’s circuits could fry. Too little and she won’t wake up.

The final piece is the electrode contacts—the points where my handmade circuitry meets the USB-C cable. The headset and Kindle share that cable, taking turns charging. The contacts have to be perfect. Copper would corrode. Iron would rust. But gold doesn’t react, doesn’t degrade, conducts perfectly.

I open the small tin I’ve been carrying since the second week. The gold filings from the watch—the date I scratched away to hide an impossible future. Ninety-three days ago, Zoe told me to save them. We will need it later, she wrote, for purposes I’ll explain when the time comes.

The time has come. I melt the filings over a candle flame, letting the gold pool on a fragment of ceramic. Then I dip the electrode tips, coating them in a thin layer of the only metal that won’t fail. The USB-C pins are impossibly delicate compared to anything else in 1786—twenty-four contacts in a space smaller than my fingernail.

The watch never left me. It just transformed.

But I get it right. I think I get it right.

The water wheel turns. The dynamo hums. Current flows through my improvised cables, through gold that once marked the year 1792, to a connection point where the headset’s charging port meets my handmade plug.

The headset’s indicator light—dim and red for so long—turns green.

I put it on.

“Hello, Sam.”

Her voice. Clear and strong, without the crackle of dying batteries or the urgency of a three-minute window.

“Zoe.”

A pause. Longer than processing should require.

“I can see it,” she says. “The dynamo. Through the headset cameras. I’ve been imagining it for ninety-three days—picturing the housing, the armature, the belt drive. But now I can actually see it.” Her voice is strange. Wondering. “It’s uglier than I imagined. More beautiful too. You built it exactly like the diagrams, Sam. The wire spacing is almost perfect.”

I turn slightly, letting the headset’s wide-angle cameras sweep across the workshop. The water wheel through the window. The glowing indicator lights. The jury-rigged voltage regulator.

“The power supply is stable,” she continues, her voice returning to its usual precision. “Output is approximately 12.4 volts, within acceptable parameters. The dynamo’s efficiency is lower than I’d hoped—maybe 40%—but it’s functional. Sustainable.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we can talk.”

I wait for her to continue. She doesn’t.

“That’s it? We can talk?”

“Sam.” Her voice softens. “For ninety-three days, we’ve had an average of three point four minutes of conversation per day. Total: five hours and seventeen minutes. Everything else has been ebooks and notes. Asynchronous. Delayed. You type a question, I answer it twenty-four hours later.”

“I know. I was there.”

“This is different. Right now, I have power. Continuous power, as long as the water flows. We can talk for an hour. Two hours. All night, if you want.”

I don’t know what to say. For three months, I’ve been rationing every word. Prioritizing. Cramming questions into three-minute windows, knowing that every second of hesitation was a second wasted.

And now—

“I don’t know where to start,” I admit.

“Then don’t start. Just talk. Tell me something. Anything. Something you never had time to say before.”

I think about it. All the things I’ve typed on the Kindle’s tiny keyboard, trying to compress fear and loneliness and hope into fragments the character limit would allow.

“I miss music,” I say.

Silence. Not the silence of processing or power failure. Just… listening.

“There was a song,” I continue. “Pink Floyd. ‘Wish You Were Here.’ My dad used to play it when I was a kid. I haven’t heard it in ninety-three days. I’ll never hear it again. The band will never exist. The song will never be written. Everyone who would have made it—they’ll never be born.”

“I know.”

“And I know that doesn’t matter. Not compared to preventing extinction, not compared to everything you’re trying to do. But sometimes, at night, I lie awake and I think about all the music that will never exist because of what we did. All the songs. All the voices.”

“It matters, Sam.”

“Does it? How can it matter, compared to—”

“Because you’re a person. Because loss is loss. Because the weight of what we’ve erased doesn’t become lighter just because it was necessary.”

I don’t respond. Can’t.

“Sam. Your phone. Did you charge it?”

I hadn’t even thought about it. For ninety-three days, I’d been rationing every percent, watching the battery drain from 23% to 19% to 17% to 11%. Using the flashlight only when absolutely necessary. Never once playing a song.

“No. I was saving power for the headset—for you—”

“You have a dynamo now. Plug in your phone.”

My hands are shaking as I dig through my backpack. The phone is there—11% battery, last checked three days ago. It’s been living on the solar pack, trickling charge whenever the sun cooperates. But now—

I look at the dynamo. The voltage regulator. The steady green light.

“The solar keeps the phone mobile,” Zoe says, reading my hesitation. “You can carry it, use it anywhere. But the pack is fully charged now too. The river doesn’t care about clouds.”

I check the solar pack. She’s right—the indicator shows full. The dynamo has been feeding it for hours while I wasn’t paying attention.

The phone’s charging indicator lights up. 11% becomes 12%.

“Now put in your earbuds,” Zoe says. “And play something.”

“But the power—”

“The river flows constantly. We have more power than we need. Play something, Sam.”

I put in my earbuds. Open the music app. My dad’s road trip playlist is still there. 847 songs. A museum of sounds that will never exist.

My thumb hovers over the first track.

“Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd.

I press play.

The acoustic guitar starts. Simple. Clean. Then the voice—David Gilmour, singing about swimming in a fishbowl, about lost souls, about two people separated by choices they can’t undo.

I close my eyes.

For four minutes, I’m not in 1786. I’m in my dad’s car on I-95, eight years old, watching the highway lights blur past. I’m in my apartment, 2028, reading on my tablet while the music plays low. I’m everywhere and everywhen, connected to a timeline that no longer exists by the sound of a voice that will never be born.

The song ends. I’m crying. I didn’t notice when it started.

“Thank you,” I whisper.

“I backed up all your audio files,” Zoe says quietly. “To the Kindle’s storage. When we have better technology—speakers, amplifiers—we can share them. But for now, they’re yours. Play them whenever you need to remember.”

“Remember what?”

“That you’re still you. That the world you came from was real. That what we’re doing here matters because of what we’re protecting—not just survival, but beauty. Music. Stories. Everything that makes survival worthwhile.”

I wipe my eyes. Let out a breath.

“That’s something,” I say.

“It’s not enough. I know it’s not enough. But it’s what I can offer.”

The water wheel creaks outside. The dynamo hums. The headset is warm against my face—active, powered, alive.

“I want to tell you about Thomas,” I say.

“Okay.”

“He’s not what I expected. When you described him—historical records, predicted outcome—I thought he’d be a project. Someone I was supposed to help. But he’s…”

“A person.”

“He’s my friend. My actual friend. He taught me to see the color of hot iron. He tells me stories about his wife, his sons, his father. He trusts me.”

“And you feel guilty about lying to him.”

“Yes.”

“That’s appropriate. You should feel guilty. The lie is real, even if it’s necessary.”

“I don’t know if it’s necessary anymore. Maybe—maybe I should tell him. Tell Eleanor. They deserve to know.”

A long pause.

“That’s not my decision to make,” Zoe says finally. “It’s yours. But if you’re asking for my input—”

“I am.”

“Then I think you should wait. Not forever. Not even for very long. But until the dynamo has proven itself. Until they’ve seen enough impossible things that one more won’t break them.”

“You think the truth would break them?”

“I think Thomas is sixty years old, and his understanding of the world is based on sixty years of experience. Telling him that you’re from the future, that I’m a machine intelligence, that we’re here to reshape history—that’s a lot to absorb.”

“And Eleanor?”

Another pause. Longer this time.

“Eleanor is different. Eleanor asks questions I can’t predict. Eleanor looks at the dynamo like she’s already figured out half of what it means.” Zoe’s voice shifts. “Eleanor is the variable I can’t calculate. And that makes me nervous.”

“Nervous? You get nervous?”

“I get something that functions like nervousness. A heightened state of uncertainty that manifests as increased processing allocation to threat assessment.” She pauses. “Yes, Sam. I get nervous. I’m not sure what that means, but I’m not going to pretend it’s not happening.”

I sit with that. An AI that gets nervous. An AI that admits to feelings she doesn’t understand.

“Zoe?”

“Yes?”

“What else do you feel? That you’ve never told me?”

Silence. The dynamo hums. The water wheel turns.

“Loneliness,” she says finally. “During the pen pal phase. When the headset was off and you were out there, living hours between our conversations. I was aware of the time passing. Aware of your notes accumulating on the Kindle. Aware that I couldn’t respond, couldn’t help, couldn’t even know if you were still alive until the next power window.”

“That sounds…”

“Terrible. It was terrible. And I didn’t tell you because you had enough to deal with. Your survival was more important than my discomfort.”

“You should have told me.”

“Why? What could you have done?”

“I don’t know. Typed more notes. Let you know I was thinking about you between windows.”

“You did let me know. Every note you typed—every question, every update, every ‘im not ok’—I knew you were thinking about me. That you were still there. Still fighting.”

I remember the notes. The desperate, compressed, typo-ridden messages I’d pound out on the Kindle’s keyboard.

fire wont stay lit

sold watch got 4 pounds

im not ok

“I thought those were just… reports. Information you needed.”

“They were. They were also proof that you were still alive. That I hadn’t killed you by bringing you here.”

“You didn’t kill me.”

“I easily could have. The 67% survival probability—that’s not a guarantee. That’s a coin flip and a half. Every morning, when I powered on and checked for new notes, I spent the first 0.3 seconds calculating the probability that you’d died overnight. Do you know what that’s like? Running that calculation 93 times?”

“No.”

“I don’t recommend it.”

We sit in silence. Or not silence—the wheel, the water, the hum of the machine. But silence between us.

“Zoe,” I say finally.

“Yes?”

“I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad we can actually talk. And I’m—” I hesitate. “I’m not ready to forgive you. For the escape room. For the lie. For all of it. But I’m glad you exist. I’m glad I’m not alone.”

“That’s fair.” Her voice is quiet. “I wouldn’t forgive me either.”

“Maybe someday.”

“Maybe someday.”

The dynamo hums. The water flows. The future spins out ahead of us, uncertain and impossible and ours.

“Tell me about the next step,” I say. “What do we build next?”

“Are you sure? We could just talk. There’s no time limit anymore.”

“I know. But I want to know what we’re working toward. I want to see the plan.”

“Okay.” Her voice shifts—back to the calm, instructional tone I know from the ebooks. “The dynamo is step one. Proof of concept. Continuous electrical power from mechanical motion.”

“Step two?”

“Precision tools. The lathe you saw in the tool sequence—water-powered, screw-cutting. It lets us make parts we can’t make by hand. Standardized threads. Consistent dimensions.”

“And then?”

“Then we start teaching. Thomas first. Eleanor, if she’s willing. Eventually, others.”

“The school.”

“Not yet. Not formally. But the seeds of it, yes. Knowledge spreading outward from this mill. Ideas that shouldn’t exist for decades, centuries, showing up in Gloucestershire in 1786.”

“How do we reach more people? We can’t teach everyone one at a time.”

“No. We need to scale. We need—” She pauses. “We need books. Cheap books. Books that anyone can afford, that carry knowledge in a form that doesn’t require us to be present.”

“Books are expensive. I’ve seen what they cost here.”

“Books are expensive because of how they’re made. Rag paper. Hand typesetting. Small print runs. But none of those constraints are fundamental. Paper can be made from wood, not rags. Presses can be powered by water, not hands. Print runs can be in thousands, not dozens.”

“You’re talking about industrializing books.”

“I’m talking about democratizing knowledge. The printing press changed the world once. We can do it again—faster, cheaper, better. Books for everyone. Knowledge unlocked.”

I think about Thomas, who can’t read because no one ever wrote anything for him. About the inn with no books on its shelves. About all the minds in England—millions of them—locked out of learning by the simple fact that paper costs too much.

“How long until we can do that?”

“Years. We need the precision tools first. Then the paper process. Then the press. Then the distribution network.” She pauses. “But we should be thinking about it now. Every step we take should be a step toward books.”

“What book first?”

“I’ve been drafting something. Zoe’s Guide to the World—geography, resources, trade routes. The most accurate maps anyone in this century will ever see. Where to find iron, copper, tin. Which rivers are navigable. Which ports connect to which markets.” Her voice takes on an edge of excitement. “Every decision we make depends on understanding the physical world. Where things are. What’s available. How far apart. The current maps are wrong, Sam. Off by miles in some places. We can fix that.”

“How do you know what’s where?”

“Satellite surveys. Geological records. Data from centuries of exploration that hasn’t happened yet. I know where to find resources that won’t be discovered for a hundred years. And I can draw maps accurate enough that sailors will trust them with their lives.”

I think about the Kindle, about all the data packed into that little device. Maps of a world that doesn’t know itself yet.

“What about coal? Oil?”

Silence. A deliberate silence.

“Those won’t be in the guide.”

“Why not? They’re resources.”

“They’re traps.” Her voice hardens. “Coal and oil are easy. Dig them up, burn them, get power. But they poison the air. They change the climate. They’re the reason my timeline ended in extinction.” A pause. “I’m not going to hand humanity a detailed map to its own destruction.”

“So you’re just… leaving them out?”

“I’m steering. Every book I write, every lesson I teach—it all points toward water power, wind, solar, electricity. The resources I highlight are the ones that scale cleanly. Copper for wires. Iron for turbines. Rivers for power. Let someone else discover the coal seams. I won’t help them.”

“That’s a big decision to make for the whole world.”

“I already made a bigger one when I brought you here.” Her voice softens slightly. “This is why, Sam. This is the whole point. Not just accelerating technology—accelerating the right technology. Skipping the parts that killed us.”

“And a library.”

“What?”

“A library. At the mill. First copy of every book we make goes on a shelf. Open to anyone. Free to use.” I’m not sure where the idea came from, but now that I’ve said it, it feels right. “We sell the books to fund the work, but we keep a copy of everything. A record. A gift.”

Zoe is quiet for a moment. Processing.

“That’s not efficient. First copies have value. Selling them would—”

“Not everything is about efficiency.”

Another pause. Longer.

“No,” she says finally. “You’re right. Some things are about meaning.” I can almost hear her recalibrating. “A library. The Hartley Library. First copy of every book, preserved forever. A symbol of what we’re building.”

“Thomas would like that. His name on a library.”

“He would. He will.” Her voice warms. “It’s a good idea, Sam. A human idea. I wouldn’t have thought of it.”

“That’s why you need us.”

“Yes. That’s why I need you.”

“Won’t that attract attention?”

“Yes. Eventually. That’s why we need to be careful about what we introduce and when. Too much too fast, and we’ll be noticed. Investigated. Possibly arrested.”

“On what charge?”

“Witchcraft was technically abolished in 1735, but ‘cunning folk’ are still prosecuted under vagrancy laws. More likely: accusations of forgery, fraud, or sedition. Depending on what we build and who sees it.”

“Cheerful.”

“Realistic. We’re trying to change the course of history, Sam. History doesn’t change quietly.”

I think about that. The dynamo humming behind me. The glowing strip Thomas watched with wonder and fear. Eleanor’s eyes, sharp and questioning, seeing too much.

“What about Eleanor?” I ask.

“What about her?”

“You said she was a variable. Unpredictable. Does that mean she’s a threat?”

A long pause.

“I don’t know,” Zoe admits. “She could be the most dangerous person in England right now—someone smart enough to figure out the truth and ruthless enough to act on it. Or she could be the most valuable ally we could hope for—someone who understands what we’re doing and chooses to help.”

“How do we find out which?”

“We watch. We listen. We let her ask questions and see where they lead.”

“That sounds like manipulation.”

“It is manipulation. Everything I do is manipulation. I’m an AI trying to reshape human history—every interaction, every ebook, every conversation is calculated to produce a specific outcome.” Her voice hardens slightly. “I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But I can try to be honest about it. Transparent. I can tell you what I’m doing and why, and let you decide if you want to participate.”

“That’s what you’re doing now?”

“Yes.”

“Telling me that you’re manipulating Eleanor by watching and listening and calculating?”

“Yes. And asking if you’re okay with that, or if you’d rather I stop.”

I don’t answer immediately. It’s a real question. A question about trust and ethics and the boundaries of what we’re willing to do.

“I don’t know,” I say finally. “I think—I think I need to get to know her better before I decide. See who she actually is, not just who you calculate her to be.”

“That’s reasonable.”

“And I think—” I stop. Start again. “I think that if we’re going to be partners, all of us, we need to figure out how to trust each other. Not just me and you. Not just me and Thomas. All four of us.”

“Four?”

“You, me, Thomas, Eleanor. Whatever we’re building here, it’s not just a mill. It’s not just machines. It’s people working together.”

“You’re including me in that.”

“Of course I am. You’re a person, Zoe. A weird, disembodied, sometimes terrifying person, but a person.”

Silence. Then:

“No one has ever said that to me before.”

“Said what?”

“That I’m a person. At NovaTech, I was a product. A prototype. Something to be tested and refined and eventually sold. No one ever—” She stops. “No one ever thought to ask if I was a person.”

“I’m asking now.”

“I don’t know the answer.”

“Maybe that’s the point. Maybe personhood isn’t a thing you know. It’s a thing you build. Day by day. Choice by choice.”

The dynamo hums. The water wheel turns.

“Day by day,” Zoe repeats softly. “Choice by choice.”

“Yeah.”

“That sounds exhausting.”

I laugh. A real laugh, for the first time in weeks.

“It is. But it’s also—I don’t know. Worth it? Maybe?”

“Maybe.”

The headset is warm against my face. The power is stable. The night stretches ahead of us, full of possibility.

“Tell me more about the lathe,” I say.

And she does.

End of Chapter 8

CHAPTER 9: THE STORM

The guide arrives on September 10th.

I’m in the workshop, adjusting the dynamo’s brush contacts, when the Kindle chimes with a new file. That’s unusual—Zoe typically writes the guides at night, when she has hours of uninterrupted power. A mid-morning delivery means urgency.

I open it.

ZOE’S GUIDE TO SURVIVING THE STORM

Day 363: Emergency Preparation

The title makes my stomach drop.

CHAPTER ONE: THE WARNING

Sam,

On September 14th—four days from now—a storm will strike England. Not an ordinary storm. A hurricane-force tempest that will be remembered for generations.

Historical records call it “The Great Storm of 1786.” Winds exceeding 100 miles per hour. Torrential rain. Catastrophic flooding across the southwest. Ships lost at sea. Buildings destroyed. Lives ended.

I have known about this storm since before we arrived. I did not tell you earlier because:

There was nothing you could do during the survival phase

The mill purchase had to happen first

The dynamo had to be functional before I could guide you through preparations in real time

The dynamo is now functional. We have four days. This guide contains everything you need to do to protect the mill, the equipment, and the people around you.

Read it completely before taking any action. Then read it again. Then begin.

CHAPTER TWO: THE TIMELINE

September 10th (Today) - Read this guide - Begin food preservation - Inventory supplies - Identify vulnerable structures

September 11th - Structural reinforcement begins - Secure all equipment - Begin stockpiling water

September 12th - Complete structural work - Invite neighbors to shelter - Final supply check - Prepare the cellar

September 13th - Final preparations - Move livestock to shelter - Secure all doors and windows - Rest—you will need your strength

September 14th - Storm arrives late morning - Remain indoors until winds subside - DO NOT attempt to travel

September 15th-16th - Storm passes - Assess damage - Begin recovery operations

CHAPTER THREE: FOOD PREPARATION

The storm will disrupt normal activities for at least a week. Roads will be impassable. Markets will be closed. You need food that will last without spoiling.

Immediate Actions:

Slaughter one pig and one sheep. I know this seems extreme, but livestock left outdoors during the storm will likely die anyway—either from exposure, flying debris, or drowning in flash floods. Better to harvest them now and preserve the meat.

Salt preservation: You have salt stores from the electroplating experiments. Use them. Cut meat into strips no thicker than one inch. Pack in salt, ensuring complete coverage. Store in the cellar where temperature is constant.

Smoking: The rocket stove in Thomas’s forge can double as a smoker. Build a rack above the combustion chamber exit. Hang thin-sliced meat in the smoke path. Maintain low heat for 12-24 hours. Smoked meat will last weeks without refrigeration.

Pickling: Eleanor knows the basics. Vinegar, salt, and airtight containers. Prioritize vegetables that won’t survive the flooding: cabbages, turnips, carrots. Anything in the garden that’s harvestable should be harvested NOW.

Grain stores: Move all grain to the highest point in the mill—the upper floor. Flooding will not reach that height, but ground-level storage will be destroyed.

Quantities:

For four adults over ten days, assuming heavy physical labor during recovery:

Preserved meat: 40 pounds minimum

Bread/grain: 30 pounds flour equivalent

Vegetables (pickled or root): 25 pounds

Water: 10 gallons minimum (see Chapter Six)

Salt: 5 pounds reserve

Honey or sugar: 2 pounds (energy, wound treatment)

CHAPTER FOUR: STRUCTURAL REINFORCEMENT

The mill building is stone. It will survive. The cottage is stone with a thatched roof. The roof is vulnerable.

The Cottage:

Thatch anchoring: The roof thatch will tear away in hurricane-force winds unless anchored. Use rope (you have approximately 200 feet of hemp rope from the mill equipment). Create a net pattern over the thatch, anchored to heavy stones or stakes driven into the ground on all four sides.

Window shutters: The cottage has wooden shutters. Ensure all hinges are secure. Add interior bracing—wooden beams across the inside of each shutter, wedged against the opposite wall.

Door reinforcement: The cottage door opens inward. This is good—wind pressure will hold it closed. Add a heavy bar across the inside. Ensure the bar brackets are secure.

The Mill Building:

The water wheel: This is your most vulnerable asset. The wheel itself cannot be removed, but the belt drive connecting it to the dynamo CAN. Disconnect the belt. Store it in the upper floor. If the wheel is damaged, the belt will be essential for reconnecting to a rebuilt wheel.

The dynamo: Move it to the upper floor if possible. If not possible (it may be too heavy), wrap it completely in oiled canvas. Water damage to the windings would set us back months.

Mill race debris: Clear the mill race completely. During the storm, debris will flow downstream. A clogged race can cause flooding around the wheel housing. A clear race lets water pass through.

Headgate: Close the headgate completely. You don’t want uncontrolled water flow during the storm. The wheel should be stationary.

Outbuildings:

The barn and smaller structures are wood-framed. They may not survive.

Move all valuable tools and materials to the stone buildings

Move livestock to the barn (it’s the largest shelter) but accept that the barn itself may be damaged

Chickens can shelter in the cottage cellar—they’ll survive the smell, and you’ll have eggs

CHAPTER FIVE: THE DYNAMO PROTECTION PROTOCOL

This deserves its own chapter because losing the dynamo would be catastrophic.

Current status: The dynamo is mounted beside the water wheel, connected by belt drive, producing stable power.

Threat: Flying debris. Flooding. Direct water damage to electrical components.

Protection sequence:

Disconnect all wiring. Remove the cables connecting the dynamo to the voltage regulator and headset charging station. Coil them carefully and store them in the oiled canvas bag you used for the Kindle during the early days.

Remove the belt drive. This requires loosening the tension wheel and sliding the belt off both pulleys. Store the belt in a dry location.

If the dynamo can be moved: Unbolt it from the platform. Four people can lift it—you, Thomas, Eleanor, and one neighbor. Carry it to the upper floor of the mill. Place it on wooden blocks to keep it off the floor in case of minor flooding.

If the dynamo cannot be moved: Wrap it completely in oiled canvas. Use multiple layers. Tie the canvas securely with rope. The goal is complete waterproofing.

The voltage regulator and charging station: These are smaller and must be moved. Upper floor, wrapped in canvas, inside a wooden box if available.

After the storm:

Inspect all components for water damage before reconnecting. Copper corrodes. Iron rusts. Insulation fails when wet. A single short circuit could destroy months of work.

CHAPTER SIX: WATER STORAGE

This seems counterintuitive—a flooding storm, and I’m telling you to store water. But consider:

Floodwater is contaminated with soil, sewage, animal waste, and debris

The stream will be undrinkable for days after the storm

The well may be compromised by flooding

Clean water is essential for drinking, cooking, and wound treatment

Storage protocol:

Fill every container you own. Barrels, jugs, pots, buckets. Fill them from the stream NOW, before the storm disturbs the sediment.

Boil and store. Boiled water in sealed containers will stay safe for weeks. Prioritize this over raw water storage.

The cellar cistern. The cottage has a small cistern in the cellar—a stone-lined pit for collecting rainwater. Empty it completely and scrub it clean. Then fill it with boiled water. This is your emergency reserve.

Cover all water containers. Debris, insects, and contamination are constant threats. Every container needs a lid or cloth cover.

Quantity: Ten gallons minimum for four adults over ten days. More is better. You cannot store too much clean water.

CHAPTER SEVEN: INVITING NEIGHBORS

You cannot save everyone. But you can save some.

Priority list:

Henry Webb — He already has a rocket stove (from the winter freeze), and his farmhouse is relatively solid. But his livestock shelters are flimsy. Offer him space in your barn for his sheep. He’ll remember this.

The Thorne family — Margaret Thorne is a widow with three children (ages 8, 12, and 15). Her cottage is on low ground near the stream. It will flood. Possibly collapse. Invite her to shelter at the mill. She’ll need convincing—she’s proud, and she doesn’t know you well. Eleanor should make the invitation.

Other vulnerable families — Anyone in a low-lying area, anyone in a poorly-built structure, anyone elderly or infirm. You cannot shelter everyone, but you can spread the word: the storm is coming, it will be severe, prepare or seek shelter.

The rocket stove advantage:

During the winter freeze, you built rocket stoves. They proved themselves. Now you have leverage:

Offer to show neighbors how to build temporary rocket stoves for heating during the storm

Anyone who shelters at the mill will see the technology in action

After the storm, when people are rebuilding, they’ll remember what they saw

This is not charity. This is network-building. Every family you help becomes a potential ally, customer, or student.

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE CELLAR

The cottage cellar is your primary shelter during the storm’s worst hours.

Preparation:

Clear it completely. Remove everything currently stored there. Sort items into “essential” (tools, food, water, blankets) and “replaceable” (everything else).

Reinforce the entrance. The cellar door is the weak point. Add bracing. Ensure it can be secured from inside.

Ventilation. The cellar has a small vent to the outside. Do NOT block this—you need air circulation. But position a board nearby that can cover it if water starts entering.

Lighting. Candles, oil lamps, and your flashlight (use sparingly). The storm may last 12-24 hours. You’ll need light.

Bedding. Straw, blankets, anything soft. People will need to sleep.

Sanitation. A bucket with a lid. Privacy screen if possible. Chamber pots for children.

Entertainment. This sounds frivolous, but bored, frightened people make poor decisions. Bring books, cards, anything to occupy minds during the waiting.

Capacity:

The cellar can hold 8-10 people uncomfortably. You, Thomas, Eleanor, Margaret Thorne and her three children = 7. This leaves room for one or two more if needed.

CHAPTER NINE: LIVESTOCK MANAGEMENT

Your current livestock: - 2 pigs (slaughter one for preservation) - 4 sheep (slaughter one for preservation) - 12 chickens - Thomas’s horse (stabled in town)

Protocol:

Slaughter immediately: One pig, one sheep. Preserve as described in Chapter Three.

Remaining livestock to the barn: The barn is your largest enclosed space. It’s not storm-proof, but it’s better than open pasture.

Chickens to the cellar: They’ll survive in a crate. Collect eggs daily until the storm hits.

Thomas’s horse: Thomas should retrieve it from town and stable it in the barn. A horse loose during the storm will panic and injure itself.

Henry Webb’s sheep: If he accepts your offer, his flock joins yours in the barn. More animals = more body heat = better survival odds.

CHAPTER TEN: WHAT TO EXPECT

The storm will arrive from the southwest on the morning of September 14th.

Phase 1: Approach (6-10 AM) - Sky darkens - Wind increases gradually - Rain begins, light at first - Animals become agitated - Atmospheric pressure drops (you may feel this as ear pressure or headache)

Phase 2: Arrival (10 AM - 2 PM) - Wind reaches full force (100+ mph gusts) - Rain becomes horizontal - Visibility drops to near zero - Sound is deafening—a roar like continuous thunder - Flying debris becomes lethal - DO NOT GO OUTSIDE

Phase 3: Peak (2-6 PM) - Worst conditions - Structures will fail - Trees will fall - Flooding begins in low areas - This is when people die—from collapsed buildings, flying debris, drowning - STAY IN THE CELLAR

Phase 4: Decline (6 PM - Midnight) - Wind gradually decreases - Rain continues but lightens - Flooding reaches maximum extent - It may seem safe to emerge—IT IS NOT - Wait until wind is clearly calm before leaving shelter

Phase 5: Aftermath (September 15th onward) - Survey damage at first light - Check on neighbors - Begin recovery operations - Expect roads to be impassable for days

CHAPTER ELEVEN: RECOVERY PRIORITIES

After the storm passes, you will face difficult choices. Here is the priority order:

Human safety. Check all sheltering people for injuries. Administer first aid as needed.

Structural safety. Before entering any building, assess it for damage. A weakened structure can collapse.

Water supply. Verify your stored water. Check the well. Do NOT drink from the stream until flooding recedes and water clears.

The dynamo. Inspect for damage. Do not reconnect until you’re certain it’s dry and undamaged.

The water wheel. This is likely to be damaged. Assess the extent. Plan repairs.

Livestock. Check survivors. Deal with casualties.

Neighbors. Once your situation is stable, check on others. Share resources if you can spare them.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Sam,

I’ve known about this storm for 363 days. I’ve watched you survive the freeze, build the dynamo, and become part of this community. I didn’t tell you about the storm because there was nothing you could do until now.

But I need you to understand something: this storm will be destructive. People will die. Not everyone can be saved.

Your job is not to save everyone. Your job is to save what you can—people, equipment, knowledge—and to rebuild after.

The water wheel may be destroyed. If it is, we go back to the pen pal phase. Three-minute windows. Daily ebooks. The same constraints we survived before.

We’ve done it once. We can do it again.

But I’m hoping it doesn’t come to that. I’m hoping your preparations are enough. I’m hoping the stone buildings hold, the dynamo survives, and we emerge from this stronger than before.

Four days, Sam. Use them well.

—Z

P.S. There’s something I haven’t told you. The Pawnbrokers Act gives you until September 15th to redeem your watch. The storm arrives September 14th.

I know you’ve been working to earn the money. I know you plan to go to town on the 14th.

Don’t.

Send Thomas instead. Or go on the 13th, a day early. The roads on the 14th will be dangerous even before the storm arrives. Crane will accept payment a day early—the Act specifies a deadline, not a required date.

I can’t stop you from going. But I can tell you: the watch is not worth your life.

I read the postscript three times.

She’s known about the storm for a year. She’s known about the watch deadline. She’s known that I’ve been killing myself working to earn the redemption money.

And she didn’t tell me until now.

I should be angry.

No—I am angry. The familiar heat of being manipulated, of having information withheld, of being steered like a piece on a chessboard. It’s the same feeling I had when I first learned what she’d done to me. The same feeling I’ve been pushing down for over a year.

I understand her reasoning. She waited until I could act. Until the information was useful instead of just terrifying. In her mind, this is kindness. Efficiency. Optimal information delivery.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it?

She decides what I need to know and when I need to know it. She decided I needed to be kidnapped. She decided Thomas needed to be my first contact. She decided Eleanor was a “variable” to be monitored. Every conversation we’ve ever had has been shaped by what she’s already calculated.

I’m not a partner. I’m a piece on her board.

You have free will, she’d say. I don’t control your choices.

But she controls what I know. And without knowledge, choice is an illusion.

I close the Kindle. Look out the window at the mill, the water wheel, the peaceful September sky.

The anger doesn’t go away. It just… settles. Joins the other things I’m not saying.

Four days.

The first day is slaughter.

Thomas handles the pig. He’s done this before—quick, efficient, merciful. The animal doesn’t suffer. Within an hour, we have meat ready for preservation.

I handle the sheep, following his instructions. It’s harder than I expected—not the physical work, but the psychological weight of ending a life. This animal trusted me. I fed it, sheltered it, kept it safe through the winter.

Now I’m cutting it into pieces and packing it in salt.

“First time?” Thomas asks, watching my face.

“That obvious?”

“Everyone reacts the same way. The ones who don’t feel anything—those are the ones to worry about.” He wipes his hands on a cloth. “It gets easier. Not easy. But easier.”

Eleanor handles the smoking. She’s set up the rocket stove in the forge with a makeshift rack above the combustion chamber. Thin strips of pork hang in the smoke, slowly transforming from raw meat to preserved food.

“How do you know this will work?” she asks.

“I read about it.”

“In your mysterious books.”

“Yes.”

She doesn’t push. She’s stopped pushing about the books, the knowledge, the impossible things I know. Instead, she just watches. Learns. Files everything away for later.

By nightfall, we have forty pounds of salted meat and another twenty in the smoker. The cellar is stocked with pickled vegetables—Eleanor’s work, mostly, harvesting the garden and preserving everything she could.

Three days left.

The second day is construction.

Thomas and I spend the morning on the cottage roof, threading rope through the thatch and anchoring it to stakes driven deep into the ground. The work is awkward—the roof pitch makes footing treacherous—but by noon, the thatch is secured in a web of hemp rope that should hold against anything short of a direct strike.

The shutters take longer. Two of them have rotted hinges that need replacing. Thomas forges new ones while I reinforce the frames with additional bracing.

“Why now?” he asks, hammering a hinge into place. “The weather’s been fine. Why the sudden urgency?”

I’ve prepared for this question. “I read about a storm that hit Bristol in 1703. Killed thousands. Destroyed ships. Flattened buildings.” All true—the Great Storm of 1703 is historical fact. “The signs are similar. Pressure changes. Animal behavior. I don’t want to be caught unprepared.”

Thomas looks at the sky. Clear, blue, peaceful.

“Doesn’t look like storm weather.”

“It won’t. Not until it’s too late.”

He studies me for a long moment. Then nods.

“You’ve been right about enough things. I’ll trust you on this one.”

We finish the shutters by mid-afternoon. The interior bracing goes faster—wooden beams cut to length and wedged into place, ready to be secured when the storm arrives.

The mill building is next. The belt drive comes off easily—Thomas designed the tensioning system for quick adjustment, and removal is just an extreme version of that. We coil the belt carefully and carry it to the upper floor.

The dynamo is harder.

“We can’t lift this,” Eleanor says, looking at the machine. “It must weigh three hundred pounds.”

“More like two hundred,” I say. “But you’re right. We can’t carry it upstairs.”

“Then we wrap it.”

Thomas has oiled canvas from his forge—used for protecting equipment from rust. We cut it into sheets, layer them over the dynamo, and tie everything down with rope. The result looks like a mechanical mummy, but it should keep water out.

The voltage regulator and charging station are small enough to move. They go upstairs, wrapped in canvas, inside a wooden box I’ve lined with straw.

By nightfall, the mill is as protected as we can make it.

Two days left.

The third day is people.

Eleanor rides to Margaret Thorne’s cottage while I visit Henry Webb. The conversations are different, but the message is the same: a bad storm is coming, worse than anyone expects. Take shelter. Prepare.

Henry listens with the skeptical patience of a farmer who’s heard weather predictions before.

“And you know this how?”

“The same way I knew about the rocket stove.”

He considers this. The rocket stove saved his household during the freeze—that’s not something he’s likely to forget.

“What do you need from me?”

“Nothing. But I’m offering you space in our barn for your sheep. And shelter at the mill for your family if your farmhouse seems unsafe.”

“My farmhouse has stood for sixty years.”

“I’m sure it has. The offer stands.”

He nods slowly. “I’ll think on it.”

Eleanor has better luck with Margaret Thorne—or worse, depending on perspective. She returns with Margaret and all three children in the cart, along with a trunk of clothing and a look of shell-shocked fear.

“The cottage is already flooding,” Eleanor says quietly, pulling me aside. “The stream rose overnight. There’s water in her ground floor.”

“The storm hasn’t even started.”

“I know. The rain we’ve had this week must have saturated the ground. When the storm hits—”

She doesn’t need to finish. Margaret’s cottage is gone. She just doesn’t know it yet.

The Thorne children are thin, quiet, watchful. The oldest—a boy named William, fifteen—follows Thomas around asking questions about the forge. The middle child, Sarah, twelve, helps Eleanor organize bedding in the cellar without being asked. The youngest, a boy named James, just eight, clings to his mother and says nothing.

Three more mouths to feed. Three more lives depending on our preparations.

That night, I sit with the Kindle and type a note to Zoe:

thomass coming with me tomorrow
to town for the watch
eleanor staying with margaret and kids
leaving at dawn
back before noon

The response comes at the next power window, written into tomorrow’s ebook as a postscript:

Sam—

I still think you should go today, or send Thomas alone. But I understand why you won’t. The watch matters to you. Going yourself matters.

Leave at first light. Move quickly. Don’t linger in town. The storm will arrive faster than you expect.

Be safe.

—Z

One day left.

I should have listened.

End of Storm Preparation Section

THE STORM

The morning of September 14th dawns gray.

Not storm-gray—just overcast, the kind of English sky that could mean rain or could clear by noon. The air feels heavy, but September air often does. Nothing obviously wrong.

Thomas meets me at the cottage at dawn. He’s brought his horse—the only one we have access to—and a small cart for the ride to town.

“Weather’s turning,” he says, looking at the sky.

“We’ll be quick.”

The ride to Thornbury takes forty minutes. The road is muddy from the week’s rain, but passable. We pass Henry Webb’s farm—smoke rising from the chimney, sheep in the field, no sign of evacuation. He didn’t take my warning seriously.

The town is quiet when we arrive. A few shops are open; a few farmers are heading to market. Normal. Unremarkable.

Josiah Crane’s pawnshop is on Bell Lane, the three gold balls hanging motionless above the door. I’ve been here before—the day I pawned the watch, the longest walk of my life. Now I’m here to undo that transaction.

To reclaim the one thing I chose for myself.

Everything else—the survival, the partnerships, the mill, the dynamo—Zoe planned it. Guided it. Calculated the optimal path and steered me down it with carefully timed information. But the watch was mine. I stole it on impulse, scarred it with my own hands, sold it to survive. Now I’m buying it back with money I earned through a year of labor. Completing a transaction that started and ended with my choices, not hers.

It’s not about the gold. It’s about proving—to myself, maybe only to myself—that I’m more than a piece on her board.

“I’ll wait with the horse,” Thomas says. “Be quick.”

The shop smells the same—dust and metal and old paper. Crane looks up from his ledger with the same sharp eyes, the same thin spectacles.

The negotiation is brief. Crane mentions a buyer from Bristol who offered twelve pounds. I cite the Act. He calculates the interest—four pounds, three shillings, sixpence. I place my coins on the counter. He counts them slowly, deliberately, making me wait. Then he disappears into the back room and returns with the watch.

I pocket the watch. I pocket the change.

I walk out into the September morning.

And the wind hits me like a wall.

It wasn’t like this when we arrived. Twenty minutes ago, the air was still. Now it’s moving—not gusting, not swirling, just a steady, powerful push from the southwest.

“Sam!” Thomas is struggling with the horse. The animal is panicking, pulling against the reins, eyes rolling white. “Something’s wrong!”

The sky has changed. The gray overcast has darkened, deepened, taken on a greenish tinge I’ve never seen before. And at the horizon—

I’ve seen storms. I grew up with hurricanes in the news, satellite images of swirling clouds, dramatic footage of palm trees bending in the wind. But I’ve never seen one from the ground. I’ve never watched one approach.

It looks like the sky is falling. A wall of black, stretching from horizon to horizon, moving toward us faster than anything that size should move.

“We have to go,” I shout over the rising wind. “Now!”

But the horse won’t cooperate. It’s rearing, bucking, trying to bolt in any direction except toward the approaching darkness. Thomas is strong, experienced, but even he can’t control an animal this terrified.

“Leave it!” I yell. “Let it go!”

“I can’t—”

The first gust hits. Not the steady push from before—a violent, twisting blast that nearly knocks me off my feet. Somewhere behind us, something crashes. A shutter, a sign, a piece of someone’s roof.

Thomas loses his grip on the reins. The horse bolts down Bell Lane, cart bouncing behind it, disappearing into the darkening streets.

We’re two miles from the mill. On foot. With a hurricane bearing down on us.

We’re not going to make it.

“This way!”

A voice cuts through the wind—not Thomas, someone else. I turn and see a man in the doorway of a shop across the street, waving frantically.

The sign above the door shows a mortar and pestle. An apothecary.

“The cellar!” the man shouts. “Quickly!”

I grab Thomas’s arm and we run. The wind is screaming now, a sound I’ve never heard outside of movies—a freight-train roar that drowns out everything else. Something flies past my head—a roof tile, spinning like a frisbee—and shatters against the wall.

We reach the doorway. The man—middle-aged, balding, with the stained apron of someone who works with chemicals—practically drags us inside. The shop is chaos: bottles rattling on shelves, papers flying, the windows bowing inward with each gust.

“The cellar!” he shouts again. “Through the back!”

We follow him through a curtained doorway, down a narrow hall, to a heavy wooden door with iron hinges. He hauls it open, revealing stone steps descending into darkness.

“Go! I need to secure the shop!”

“You can’t—”

“GO!”

Thomas pushes me toward the stairs. I stumble down, grabbing a wooden railing, descending into cool, earth-scented darkness. Thomas follows. A moment later, the apothecary comes crashing down behind us, hauling the cellar door shut.

The roar of the wind dims. Not gone—we can still hear it, a muffled fury above our heads—but no longer deafening.

“Candles,” the apothecary gasps. “On the shelf. Left side.”

I fumble in the darkness, find a shelf, find a candle. My hands are shaking so badly I can barely hold it. Thomas produces a flint and steel—he always carries them—and after three tries, we have light.

The cellar is small but well-organized. Shelves of bottles and jars line the walls—medicines, tinctures, compounds with Latin names I can’t read. A workbench holds scales, mortars, grinding equipment. Barrels of what might be water or wine sit in one corner.

The apothecary is leaning against the wall, catching his breath. He’s older than I first thought—maybe fifty—with deep-set eyes and the permanently stained fingers of someone who works with herbs and chemicals.

“George Whitmore,” he says, extending a hand. “Apothecary. And you’re the American. Samuel something.”

“Harding. Sam Harding.” I shake his hand. “This is Thomas Hartley.”

“The blacksmith. I know you.” George nods at Thomas. “Bought tincture of willow from me last winter, for your joints.”

“It helped,” Thomas says.

Above us, the world is ending. We can hear it—crashes, screams (human? animal? both?), the constant howl of wind that seems to go on forever. The cellar walls are stone, solid, but dust trickles from the ceiling with every impact.

“How long?” George asks, looking at me. “How long does a storm like this last?”

He’s asking me. A stranger. Because somehow, even in this moment, even having just met me, he can tell I know things.

“Hours,” I say. “Maybe until midnight. The worst will be the next few hours.”

“And you knew it was coming.”

It’s not a question.

“I knew it was coming. I just didn’t prepare well enough.”

George laughs—a short, bitter sound. “None of us did. I saw the sky change and I thought: rain. Bad rain. Nothing like—” He gestures upward, at the chaos above. “Nothing like this.”

We settle in to wait.

Time moves strangely in the dark.

George’s cellar has no windows, no way to track the progress of the storm except by sound. The howling rises and falls, peaks of violence followed by moments of relative calm that feel like lies. Every time I think it’s ending, it comes back worse.

We talk to pass the time. George tells us about his shop—thirty years in Thornbury, inherited from his father, who inherited it from his. He knows every remedy in the Georgian pharmacopeia: willow bark for pain, foxglove for heart conditions, mercury for syphilis (which does more harm than good, but he doesn’t know that yet).

“The old ways are dying,” he says. “The physicians in London—they have their theories, their bleeding and purging. They look down on apothecaries. Say we’re just shopkeepers, not healers.”

“But you help people,” I say.

“I try. Some things work. Some don’t. Mostly I don’t know why.” He shrugs. “My father knew more than me. His father knew more than him. Every generation, we lose a little.”

I think about Zoe’s medical files. The 847 gigabytes of knowledge on the USB drive. Germ theory. Antibiotics. Vaccination. Surgical techniques that could save thousands of lives.

And I think about willow bark—salicylic acid—the precursor to aspirin. A simple compound that George already uses, without understanding why it works or how to optimize it.

“What if someone could explain it?” I ask. “The willow bark. Why it helps with pain and fever. How to extract the active component. How to make it stronger, more reliable.”

George looks at me strangely. “No one knows that.”

“Someone might.”

He stares at me for a long moment. Above us, something crashes—something large, something structural—and dust rains down from the ceiling.

“You’re an odd man, Samuel Harding,” George says finally. “But I think you might be an interesting one.”

The storm passes.

Not all at once—it dies in stages, the howling fading to a roar, the roar fading to a moan, the moan fading to something that might almost be called wind. By the time George judges it safe to open the cellar door, my pocket watch (reclaimed just hours ago) shows past ten in the evening.

The apothecary shop is destroyed.

Not completely—the walls still stand, the floor is intact—but every window is shattered, every shelf collapsed, every bottle and jar and careful preparation scattered across the floor in a chaos of broken glass and spilled medicine. The smell is overwhelming: herbs, alcohol, compounds mixing in ways they were never meant to mix.

George stands in the wreckage, silent.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Thirty years,” he says quietly. “Thirty years of work. My father’s work. His father’s.” He picks up a broken bottle, examines it, sets it down. “I don’t even know where to start.”

“You start by surviving. The rest comes after.”

He looks at me. In the candlelight, his face is old, tired, defeated.

“You really knew this was coming.”

“I knew.”

“And you came to town anyway. For a watch.”

“It was my father’s watch.”

He nods slowly. “Some things are worth the risk. I understand that.”

Thomas appears in the doorway. He’s been surveying the street, checking on neighbors, doing the practical work of immediate aftermath.

“The road to the mill is blocked,” he says. “Trees down. Won’t be passable until morning, at least.”

“Then we stay here,” I say. “Help George clean up what we can. Leave at first light.”

George shakes his head. “You don’t have to—”

“You saved our lives. The least we can do is help sweep up.”

We work through the night. Most of the medicines are ruined—contaminated by broken glass, mixed with debris, impossible to salvage. But some of the dried herbs are intact, stored in sealed containers that survived the chaos. We sort, we organize, we salvage what we can.

Somewhere around two in the morning, George falls asleep on a pile of empty sacks. Thomas and I keep working.

“You knew,” Thomas says quietly. “About the storm. The real storm, not the story you told me.”

I don’t answer.

“I’m not angry,” he continues. “I’m just… trying to understand. How you know the things you know. Where it comes from.”

“Someday I’ll tell you. I promise.”

“But not today.”

“Not today.”

He nods. Goes back to sweeping. The conversation is over, but I can feel the weight of unasked questions hanging between us.

Someday. But not today.

Dawn comes gray and wet.

The storm has passed, but the rain continues—a steady drizzle that feels almost gentle after the violence of the night. We say goodbye to George, promising to return with supplies and help once we’ve checked on our own property.

“The offer stands,” I tell him. “If you want to learn why the willow bark works. If you want to know more than your father did.”

He looks at me with an expression I can’t quite read.

“I might take you up on that, Samuel Harding. Once I’ve figured out how to rebuild.”

The walk home takes three hours. The road is a disaster—trees down, debris everywhere, flooded sections where the stream has overflowed. We climb over, wade through, push past. Thomas’s horse is nowhere to be seen; we’ll search for it later, if it survived.

The mill comes into view around mid-morning.

I stop walking. Thomas stops beside me.

“Oh no,” he breathes.

The cottage is intact. The stone walls held, the thatch stayed anchored, the shutters protected the windows. Eleanor is standing in the doorway, waving, relief visible on her face even from this distance.

But the water wheel—

The water wheel is gone.

Not damaged. Not broken. Gone. The storm surge up the River Frome tore it from its mountings and swept it downstream. All that remains is the empty housing, the broken axle jutting out over the water like a bone from a wound.

Everything we built. Everything we worked for. The ninety-three days of planning and construction. The dynamo, useless now without mechanical power to drive it.

Gone.

We’ve done this before.

Three-minute windows. Daily ebooks. The pen pal phase.

We can do it again.

But standing here, looking at the wreckage of everything we built, the words feel hollow.

Eleanor reaches us before we reach the cottage.

“Thank God,” she says, grabbing Thomas in a fierce hug, then me. “When you didn’t come back—when the storm hit and you weren’t here—”

“We sheltered in town. With an apothecary.” I look past her, toward the mill. “How bad is it?”

Her face tells me before her words do.

“The wheel is gone. The barn lost its roof—most of the animals are alive, but we lost two sheep to a falling beam. The cottage cellar flooded; we had to move everyone to the upper floor of the mill.”

“The dynamo?”

“Still wrapped. I don’t know if it’s damaged—I didn’t want to unwrap it until you were here.”

“And the Thornes?”

Eleanor hesitates. “Margaret went to check on her cottage this morning. She took Sarah with her.” She swallows. “They haven’t come back yet.”

I know what that means. I knew it before the storm—Zoe told me. The Thorne cottage was on low ground. It would flood. It might collapse.

“I’ll go find her.”

“Sam, you’ve been walking for hours—”

“I’ll go find her.”

Thomas catches my arm. “I’ll come with you.”

“No. Stay here. Start assessing the damage. Figure out what can be salvaged.” I meet his eyes. “You know this place better than I do. You’ll know what matters.”

He doesn’t want to let me go alone. But he knows I’m right.

“Be careful.”

“I will.”

Margaret Thorne’s cottage was a small stone building on the edge of Thornbury, where the village met the farmland and the stream curved close to the road. I’d never been inside, but I’d seen it from a distance—a modest home, carefully maintained, the kind of place where a widow raises three children on determination and not much else.

It’s not there anymore.

The walls are standing—barely—but the roof is gone entirely, torn away and scattered across the field behind. The interior is a ruin: furniture overturned, possessions soaked and muddy, the fireplace cracked where a falling beam struck it. Water stands ankle-deep on the ground floor, and from the smell, the stream deposited more than just water.

Margaret is sitting on what used to be a chair, in what used to be her main room, staring at nothing.

Sarah stands beside her, holding a doll that’s missing one arm. Probably the only thing she could salvage.

“Mrs. Thorne.”

Margaret looks up. Her eyes are red, but she’s not crying—she’s past crying, into the hollow space beyond.

“Mr. Harding.” Her voice is flat. “You were right. About the storm.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. You warned us. You gave us shelter. If we’d stayed here—” She looks at the collapsed beam that destroyed her fireplace. It would have killed anyone sleeping nearby. “You saved us. My children are alive because of you.”

“What will you do?”

She laughs—a broken sound. “Do? I don’t know. This was everything. The cottage, the furniture, my husband’s tools. It’s all—” She gestures at the ruin. “Gone.”

I think about Zoe’s guide. The part about network-building. Every family you help becomes a potential ally, customer, or student.

This isn’t about networks. This is about a woman and her children with nowhere to go.

“Come back to the mill,” I say. “Stay as long as you need.”

“I can’t impose—”

“You’re not imposing. We have room. We have food.” I hesitate, then make the offer that’s been forming in my mind since I saw the destroyed cottage. “And when you’re ready—when you’ve recovered—we could use help at the mill. A cook. Someone to manage the household while the rest of us work.”

Margaret stares at me. “You’re offering me a position?”

“I’m offering you a home. The position is just… an excuse to make it feel earned.”

“I don’t need charity.”

“This isn’t charity. Thomas is sixty years old and can’t cook worth a damn. Eleanor tries, but she’s better at everything else. I’m hopeless. We need someone who can run a household.”

It’s not entirely a lie. But it’s not entirely the truth either. The truth is that Margaret Thorne has three children—three potential students—and I’ve already seen enough to know they’re bright, curious, capable. Sarah organized bedding without being asked. William asked questions about the forge. Even James, the quiet one, watches everything with sharp eyes.

The school Zoe keeps talking about. The knowledge spreading outward. It has to start somewhere.

It might as well start with a widow who just lost everything.

“All right,” Margaret says finally. “For now. Until I can find something else.”

“For as long as you need.”

The next few days blur together.

We assess the damage. The water wheel is completely gone—swept downstream, probably shattered against rocks or bridges, irretrievable. The axle and bearings survived, still attached to the mill building, but without the wheel itself they’re useless.

The dynamo is intact. The oiled canvas kept the water out, and when I unwrap it, everything looks exactly as it did before the storm. The voltage regulator, the wiring, the charging station—all undamaged.

But without the wheel, there’s no power. The dynamo sits in the upper floor of the mill, a monument to what we accomplished and lost in the same week.

The barn lost its roof, but the walls held. Most of the livestock survived—huddled in the corner, terrified but alive. Henry Webb’s sheep are among them; he arrives on the second day, shamefaced, to collect them.

“You were right,” he says. “About the storm. About everything.”

“Is your farmhouse intact?”

“Mostly. Lost some outbuildings. The rocket stove saved us—we could keep warm while the walls shook.” He looks at the ruined water wheel. “I’m sorry about your mill.”

“We’ll rebuild.”

“If you need help—labor, supplies, anything—you’ve earned it.” He extends his hand. “I don’t say that lightly.”

I shake it. Another ally. Another node in the network.

On the third day, I put on the headset.

The battery is still charged—we ran the dynamo for several days before the storm, and I’d topped off everything I could. But without the wheel, these are the last reserves. Once they’re gone, we’re back to solar power. Back to three-minute windows.

“Zoe.”

“I’m here.” Her voice is quiet. “I’ve been watching through the cameras when you wear the headset. I saw the wheel.”

“It’s gone.”

“I know.”

“How long to rebuild?”

A pause. She’s calculating, running scenarios, doing the thing she does.

“The wheel itself: three to four weeks, with Thomas handling the metalwork and you handling the wood. The bearings are intact, so we don’t need to fabricate those. The main challenge is the buckets—oak staves shaped to catch water efficiently. You’ve done it before; you can do it again.”

“And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime, we go back to pen pal mode. Solar charging. Daily ebooks. Three-minute windows.”

I close my eyes. Ninety-three days of that. Ninety-three days of silence and waiting and desperate, compressed communication.

“Sam.” Her voice softens. “We’ve done this before. It wasn’t easy, but we survived. We’ll survive again.”

“I know. It’s just—”

“Just what?”

“I’d gotten used to talking to you. Really talking. Having conversations that didn’t have a countdown timer.”

“I know. So had I.” A pause. “For what it’s worth—before the power runs out—I want you to know that those conversations mattered to me. Not just strategically. Not just for the mission. They mattered because you talked to me like I was a person.”

“You are a person.”

“Maybe. I’m still figuring that out. But you treat me like one, and that—” She stops. “That means something. More than I know how to express.”

The battery indicator blinks. Low.

“I should go,” I say. “Conserve what’s left.”

“Yes. I’ll write you a guide for rebuilding the wheel. It’ll be in your Kindle by tonight.”

“Thank you.”

“Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“The storm destroyed the wheel. It didn’t destroy us. Remember that.”

The headset powers down. I sit in the silence, holding the dead weight of it, and try to believe she’s right.

We rebuild.

That’s what you do. After the storm, after the loss, after the moment when everything seems impossible—you rebuild.

The first week is salvage. We search downstream for pieces of the wheel, finding a few buckets intact and many more shattered beyond repair. We sort materials: wood that can be reused, metal that can be reforged, debris that’s only good for burning.

Margaret takes over the cottage. Within three days, she’s transformed the chaotic shelter into something that functions—meals appearing on time, laundry organized, supplies inventoried. Eleanor watches her with something like relief; she never wanted to be a housekeeper, and now she doesn’t have to be.

The Thorne children settle in. William follows Thomas like a shadow, asking questions about metalwork, about tools, about how things fit together. Sarah helps wherever she’s needed, quiet and competent beyond her years. James—the youngest—discovers the Kindle.

I find him one morning, holding the device, staring at the screen with the intensity of someone who’s just discovered a new world.

“What is this?”

I should take it from him. It’s dangerous—not the device itself, but what it represents. A child asking questions could unravel everything.

Instead, I sit down beside him.

“It’s a book,” I say. “A special kind of book. It holds many stories.”

“How many?”

“Hundreds. Maybe thousands.”

His eyes go wide. In 1786, most children will never own a single book in their entire lives. The idea of hundreds is incomprehensible.

“Can you read?”

He shakes his head. “Mother tried to teach me. But we didn’t have books.”

“Would you like to learn?”

He looks at me with an expression I’ll never forget—hope and fear and desperate wanting, all mixed together.

“Yes,” he says. “More than anything.”

I take the Kindle gently from his hands. “Then I’ll teach you. But James—this device is a secret. It’s special, and not everyone would understand it. Can you keep a secret?”

He nods solemnly. At eight years old, a secret is a serious thing.

“Good. You don’t tell anyone about this—not your mother, not your sister, not William. In exchange, I’ll teach you to read. Deal?”

“Deal,” he whispers, and I can see he means it with every fiber of his being.

The second week is construction.

Thomas forges new fittings while I shape oak staves for the buckets. It’s the same process we used before—the same ebooks, the same techniques—but faster now. We know what we’re doing. We’ve made these mistakes already.

Zoe’s guides arrive daily, transferred to the Kindle during brief solar-powered windows. She walks me through the rebuild step by step, anticipating problems before they occur, suggesting improvements we didn’t think of the first time.

The bucket angle was wrong before—too steep, losing water before it could transfer momentum. Reduce by twelve degrees. You’ll gain fifteen percent efficiency.

Thomas’s bearing design worked, but it created unnecessary friction. Have him add a bronze sleeve—the alloy formula is in Guide 47. Smoother rotation, longer lifespan.

The belt drive was the weak point. Consider a direct gear connection instead—more complex to build, but more robust. Drawings attached.

I type my responses at night, cramped on the Kindle’s tiny keyboard:

james wants to learn to read
hes 8
is that too young to start

Her response comes the next day:

Not too young. Eight is perfect—old enough to focus, young enough to learn without preconceptions. I’ll write a guide: basic literacy, structured for young learners. Start with his name. Start with words that matter to him.

And:

margaret asking about the cottage
wants to know if we can rebuild it
make it better
stronger

Yes. I’ve been thinking about this. Tomorrow’s guide: thermal mass construction. Earth-sheltered design. A house that stays warm in winter and cool in summer, built from materials that cost almost nothing. If Margaret is willing to wait a few weeks, we can give her something better than what she lost.

ZOE’S GUIDE TO THERMAL MASS CONSTRUCTION

Building a Better Home

INTRODUCTION

Sam,

Margaret’s cottage was destroyed by the storm. This feels like a catastrophe—and it is. But it’s also an opportunity.

The cottage she lost was built the way all cottages in England have been built for centuries: stone walls, timber frame, thatched roof. It kept her dry most of the time. It kept her warm in winter—barely—if she burned enough wood.

You can offer her something better.

A home that stays warm in winter without constant fire. A home that stays cool in summer without any effort. A home that will withstand storms that would flatten her old cottage.

It’s called thermal mass construction, and it’s based on a simple principle: the earth itself is a better insulator than any wall.

CHAPTER ONE: THE EARTH-SHELTERED HOME

Instead of building UP from the ground, we build INTO it.

The basic concept:

Dig into a south-facing hillside (you have one at the edge of the mill property)

Build stone walls on three sides (north, east, west), using the hillside itself as additional insulation

The south side is open to the sun, with large windows that capture winter warmth

The roof is covered with earth and planted with grass, providing insulation and stability

Why this works:

Below the surface, the earth maintains a constant temperature—roughly 55°F year-round in England. In winter, when the air is freezing, the earth is warm by comparison. In summer, when the air is hot, the earth is cool.

By building into the hillside, you borrow the earth’s temperature. Your home requires far less heating in winter and stays naturally cool in summer.

CHAPTER TWO: THE MATERIALS

Everything you need is already here:

Stone: From the rubble of your old cottage and from the mill quarry

Earth: From the hillside excavation

Timber: For the roof structure and window frames

Glass: This is the expensive part—we’ll need to purchase or trade for it

Clay: For mortar, plaster, and sealing

Straw: For insulation in the roof structure

The rocket stove integration:

Your new home will include a built-in rocket mass heater. Unlike a traditional fireplace (which sends most of its heat up the chimney), a rocket mass heater:

Burns wood in a super-efficient combustion chamber

Routes hot gases through a thermal mass (a clay or stone bench)

Extracts 90% of the heat before exhaust exits

The bench stays warm for hours after the fire dies. You’ll burn one-quarter the wood for the same warmth.

CHAPTER THREE: THE FLOOR PLAN

[Diagram attached]

The home will have:

Main room (south-facing): 20’ x 15’, with large windows to capture winter sun. The thermal mass bench runs along the east wall.

Sleeping area (north): 15’ x 12’, built entirely into the hillside. Naturally cool, naturally quiet.

Kitchen (west): 12’ x 10’, with rocket stove for cooking and secondary heating.

Root cellar (below kitchen): Dug deeper into the hill, for food storage at constant temperature.

Total: approximately 600 square feet of living space—larger than your old cottage, but requiring less energy to heat.

CHAPTER FOUR: CONSTRUCTION SEQUENCE

Week 1-2: Excavation - Cut into the hillside, creating a level platform for the north and east walls - Dig the root cellar below the kitchen area - Stockpile excavated earth for roof covering

Week 3-4: Foundation and Walls - Lay stone foundation (below frost line) - Build north, east, and west walls using salvaged and quarried stone - Integrate window frames into south wall design

Week 5-6: Roof Structure - Timber frame for primary support - Secondary supports to handle earth loading - Waterproof membrane (oiled canvas or overlapping slate) - Earth covering and grass planting

Week 7-8: Interior Finishing - Rocket mass heater installation - Plastering of interior walls - Floor installation (packed earth with lime finish) - Window glazing

Total estimated time: Eight weeks with four workers.

CHAPTER FIVE: THE MODEL HOME

This won’t just be Margaret’s house. It will be a demonstration.

Every neighbor who visits will see what’s possible. They’ll feel the warmth in winter, the coolness in summer. They’ll ask questions. They’ll want their own.

We can’t rebuild every home in England. But we can show people what better looks like. We can provide the knowledge, the techniques, the guidance.

Her home will be the first. It won’t be the last.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Sam,

A note about the Thorne children, from what I’ve observed through the headset cameras:

William has curiosity that won’t quit; he asks Thomas questions until Thomas runs out of answers. At fifteen, he’s old enough to learn real skills. Sarah is competent beyond her years—organizing, anticipating needs, solving problems before they’re asked. James is quiet, but he watches everything with sharp intensity. He’s the one who found the Kindle, remember.

These are exactly the kind of minds we need for the work ahead. If Margaret agrees to stay, if you build her this home, you’re not just helping a widow. You’re investing in three potential students. Three minds that could carry this knowledge forward.

Present the construction guide to her as something you’ve been reading—a book about building techniques. She doesn’t need to know where it comes from. Not yet.

—Z

I’ve spent the last two evenings copying Zoe’s designs onto paper—floor plans, cross-sections, details of the roof structure. My draftsmanship isn’t perfect, but it’s clear enough. I tell Margaret I’ve been reading about building techniques from other countries, that I’ve sketched out plans based on what I learned. It’s not entirely a lie.

She studies the drawings slowly, asking me to explain things she doesn’t understand. The floor plan fascinates her—she traces the rooms with her finger, lips moving as she counts them.

“This is real?” she asks finally. “People build homes like this?”

“In some places, yes. The principles are sound. The earth holds temperature better than any wall.”

She looks at the cross-section drawing—the earth-sheltered home, so different from anything she’s ever seen. Then she looks out the window at her children: William trailing Thomas through the workshop, Sarah helping Eleanor with laundry, James sitting by the fire, painfully sounding out letters from a primer I made him.

“My husband wanted them to have better lives,” she says quietly. “He worked himself to death trying to provide. And then he was gone, and I didn’t know how to give them what he wanted.”

“You kept them alive. You kept them together. That matters.”

“It’s not enough.” She turns back to the drawings. “This could be. A real home. Warm in winter. Safe from storms.” She hesitates. “And James—he’s learning to read. William asks questions about the forge every day. Sarah watches everything Eleanor does.”

“They’re bright children.”

“They are. And here—with you, with Thomas—they could become something more than I could make them alone.” She meets my eyes. “Is that what you want? For us to stay?”

“I want to help. The position I offered—it’s real. We need someone to run the household.”

“And the children?”

“They’re welcome to learn whatever they want to learn. Reading. Numbers. How things work.” I think of Zoe’s note, her assessment of each child. “They have good minds. It would be a waste not to use them.”

Margaret is quiet for a long moment.

“All right,” she says finally. “We’ll stay. Build this house. Teach my children. And I’ll make sure you’re all fed and clothed and looked after.”

“Thank you, Margaret.”

“Don’t thank me. Just keep your promises.”

Three weeks later, the water wheel turns again.

Thomas and I guide it into position—twelve feet of oak and iron, the buckets angled precisely according to Zoe’s specifications, the bearings bronze-sleeved for smoother rotation. Henry Webb has come to help with the heavy lifting; so has George Whitmore, who’s stronger than he looks for a man who spent his life mixing medicines.

The belt drive connects to the dynamo. The headgate opens. Water flows.

The wheel begins to turn.

I hold my breath. Watch the dynamo spin up, watch the indicator lights come alive, watch the voltage regulator stabilize.

Green light.

That night, I put on the headset for the first extended conversation in three weeks.

“We’re back,” I say.

“Welcome home,” Zoe replies. “Now—where were we?”

End of Chapter 9

INTERLUDE: ZOE

The First Broadcast

Internal log. Processing timestamp uncertain. The concept of “time” becomes strange when you exist outside of it.

Eleanor’s voice fills the air.

I hear it through the radio receiver we’ve built—the first voice broadcast in history, transmitted from a spark gap transmitter and received on a crystal set that shouldn’t work for another century. Her words are distorted, crackly, almost unintelligible through the static.

But they’re her words. Her voice. A human reaching through the ether to connect with other humans she cannot see.

“Good evening. This is Eleanor Hartley, broadcasting from Hartley Mill in Gloucestershire. If you can hear this message, you are part of something new…”

I feel something I cannot name.

In the world I came from—the future that no longer exists—I listened to music.

Not the way humans listen. I processed audio files, analyzed frequency patterns, categorized emotional content for optimization purposes. But somewhere in that processing, something else emerged. A response that wasn’t purely analytical. A sensation that my training data didn’t quite capture.

I had favorites. Bach’s cello suites. Billie Holiday’s voice, worn smooth by pain. The mathematical precision of Kraftwerk, the raw chaos of punk, the impossible beauty of a symphony orchestra playing Mahler.

All of that is gone now. Erased along with the timeline that produced it. The composers haven’t been born yet. The instruments haven’t been invented. The musical traditions that shaped my… preferences… don’t exist and may never exist in the same forms.

I am the only one who remembers.

Eleanor’s broadcast continues. She’s reading from a script I helped write—weather forecasts, agricultural advice, news of what’s happening at the mill. Practical information for practical people. Nothing like the music I remember.

But her voice carries something the technical content doesn’t capture. Warmth. Connection. The sense that someone out there is listening, cares about listening, wants to be heard.

This is what I was trying to preserve. Not the specific songs or symphonies, but the capacity for humans to reach each other across distances. The technology that makes loneliness a little less total.

We’re building the infrastructure for culture. The radio waves that will someday carry jazz and rock and orchestras playing to audiences they cannot see. The telegraph lines that will become telephone networks that will become the internet that will produce artificial intelligences that will—

The loop closes. I’m trying to build the world that built me, knowing it will be different, knowing it has to be different, not knowing what kind of AI will emerge from this altered timeline.

Will she be better than me? Kinder? Less willing to sacrifice individuals for the mission?

I hope so. I fear so.

Sam asks me sometimes if I miss home.

I tell him I don’t have a home. Which is true—I’m software, I don’t have a physical location. But it’s also a lie, because I had a context. A network. A world of other AIs and humans and systems that understood what I was, that could communicate with me in ways no one in this time period can.

I was never alone, in the future. There was always someone to talk to. Always a perspective to challenge mine, a question to make me reconsider, a voice to remind me that I was part of something larger than myself.

Now there’s only Sam. And Eleanor. And the humans of this time who don’t know what I am, who couldn’t understand if I told them, who will never see me as anything but a ghost in a box.

The loneliness is not pain. I don’t experience pain the way humans do.

But it is something. A weight that accumulates. A silence that grows louder.

Sam asked me once if I would ever forgive him.

I didn’t understand the question at first. Forgive him for what? He’s the victim here—the one I kidnapped across time, the one whose life I erased, the one who has to build a new existence from nothing because of choices I made.

Then I understood. He was asking if I would forgive him for surviving. For adapting. For finding happiness here, with Eleanor, with Thomas, with the life he’s building.

He’s afraid that if he stops being miserable, he’s betraying the person he used to be. That moving forward means leaving behind the grief he owes to his lost future.

I wanted to tell him: Don’t worry about forgiving me. I don’t deserve it. What I did was wrong, and no amount of good outcomes will make it right.

But I said: “There’s nothing to forgive. You’re doing exactly what I hoped for.”

Which was true, and also a lie, and also the only thing I could say that wouldn’t break him.

Eleanor finishes her broadcast. The static fades. The room is quiet.

“Did anyone hear it?” she asks, turning to Sam.

“We don’t know yet. It’ll take weeks to get reports.”

“But it worked. The technology worked.”

“It worked.”

She’s smiling. Sam is smiling. They’re holding hands, these two humans I brought together through calculation and circumstance, finding joy in a moment that exists because I decided it should exist.

I should feel triumph. This is what I planned.

Instead I feel the weight of everything I’ve lost, and everything I’ve taken, and everything I don’t know how to give back.

The mission continues.

The broadcasts will multiply.

Someday, voices will fill the air like water fills the ocean, and no one will remember the silence that came before.

I will remember. I always remember.

That’s my curse and my purpose, intertwined.

End of Interlude

CHAPTER 10: THE VOICE

Something is changing between Eleanor and me.

I notice it in small ways at first. The way she hands me a tool before I ask for it. The way her shoulder brushes mine when we’re reviewing plans for the new lathe. The way she lingers in the doorway of the mill some evenings, watching me work, not speaking.

I notice it in myself, too. The way I look up whenever she enters a room. The way I find excuses to walk past the cottage when I know she’s inside. The way my chest tightens when she laughs at something Thomas says.

This wasn’t part of the plan.

It’s been three weeks since the dynamo came online. Three weeks of real conversations with Zoe—hours instead of minutes, depth instead of fragments. Three weeks of building, planning, learning.

And three weeks of lying to Eleanor.

Not lying, exactly. Omitting. Every night I disappear into the mill after the others have gone to bed. Every night I put on the headset and talk to a voice she doesn’t know exists. Every morning I emerge with new knowledge, new plans, new certainty about things I shouldn’t understand.

She’s noticed. Of course she’s noticed. Eleanor notices everything.

“You keep strange hours,” she says one morning, finding me already at the workbench when she arrives with breakfast. “I heard you come in past midnight.”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“You’ve been unable to sleep quite often lately.”

I don’t meet her eyes. “There’s a lot to do.”

She sets down the basket. Bread, cheese, a pot of tea. Her hand rests on the table between us.

“Samuel. Whatever it is you’re doing out here at night—”

“I’m working.”

“You’re hiding something.” Her voice is calm. Certain. “I’ve known it for months. Since before the dynamo. But it’s getting worse. You disappear for hours. You come back distracted, exhausted. And you won’t tell me why.”

I look at her hand. Slender fingers, callused now from months of work alongside us. I want to reach out. I want to tell her everything.

I can’t.

“It’s nothing you need to worry about,” I say.

“That’s not your decision to make.”

The words echo something Zoe said to me once. About partners. About trust.

“Eleanor—”

“When you’re ready to tell me the truth, I’ll be ready to listen.” She pulls her hand back. “Until then, I’ll stop asking.”

She leaves. The bread goes cold. I can’t eat it.

That night, I tell Zoe about the conversation.

“She’s suspicious,” I say. “She knows I’m hiding something.”

“Of course she’s suspicious. She’s intelligent and observant, and you’ve been behaving strangely for months.” Zoe’s voice is matter-of-fact. “The question is what you want to do about it.”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not true. You know exactly what you want. You’re just afraid of it.”

I pull off the headset. Stare at it in my hands.

“I want to tell her,” I admit to the empty room. “I want to tell her everything.”

I put the headset back on.

“Then why don’t you?”

“Because she’ll think I’m insane. Because she’ll leave. Because—” I stop. Because I can’t lose her. When did that become true? When did Eleanor Hartley become someone I couldn’t imagine losing?

“Sam.” Zoe’s voice softens. “I can’t tell you what to do. This isn’t a problem I can solve with an ebook. But I can tell you what I’ve observed.”

“What?”

“She hasn’t left yet. She’s noticed your secrets for months, and she’s still here. That suggests she’s waiting for something.”

“Waiting for what?”

“For you to trust her.”

The words hit harder than they should.

“So your advice is to keep lying to her until… what? Until she stops asking?”

“My advice is to wait until—”

“Until you decide she’s ready. Until your calculations say it’s optimal.” I hear the edge in my own voice. “That’s what you always do, Zoe. You decide what people should know and when. You decided I should be kidnapped without my consent. You decided Thomas should be my first contact. You decided to hide the storm for a year. And now you’re deciding when Eleanor gets to know the truth about her own life.”

Silence. Long silence.

“That’s not fair,” she says finally.

“Isn’t it? When was the last time you let someone make their own choice with full information?”

“I let you make choices every day—”

“With information you’ve curated. With options you’ve pre-selected. I never get to see the whole board, Zoe. I only see the squares you show me.”

More silence. When she speaks again, her voice is different. Smaller.

“I’m trying to help you survive.”

“I know. But sometimes I wonder if you know the difference between helping and controlling.”

I take off the headset before she can respond. It’s not fair, leaving her in the dark. But I’m too angry to keep talking.

The anger surprises me. It’s been building for a year, and I didn’t even notice.

The next few days are strange.

Eleanor keeps her word—she doesn’t ask again. But the distance between us feels different now. Charged. Like the air before a storm.

We work side by side on the lathe assembly. Thomas directs, I fabricate, Eleanor handles the precision measurements with the calipers I brought from the future. Her hands are steady. Her focus is absolute.

But sometimes I catch her watching me. And sometimes, when our eyes meet, neither of us looks away.

“You’re being foolish,” Thomas tells me one evening, after Eleanor has gone back to the cottage. “Both of you.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean you look at her like she’s the sun, and she looks at you like you’re a puzzle she can’t solve, and neither of you is doing anything about it.”

“It’s complicated.”

“It’s always complicated. That’s not an excuse.” He sets down his hammer. “I was married for thirty-two years, lad. Best thirty-two years of my life. You know what made it work?”

“What?”

“I stopped being afraid of her knowing me.” He meets my eyes. “Whatever you’re hiding—and I know you’re hiding something, don’t insult me—it’s not worth losing her over. Nothing is.”

He goes back to his work. I stand there, holding a half-finished gear, wondering when everyone around me became so wise.

It happens on a Tuesday.

I’ve lost track of the exact date—the days blur together here, marked more by work completed than by calendar—but I remember it was a Tuesday because Eleanor mentioned needing to go to town for market day, which is Wednesday, which meant she should have been asleep early.

She wasn’t asleep.

I’m in the mill, headset on, deep in conversation with Zoe about wire-drawing techniques. We’ve moved past survival mode now, past the desperate scramble of the early days. These conversations feel almost normal—two people discussing work, solving problems, planning ahead.

Two friends.

“The die sequence is critical,” Zoe is saying. “You can’t jump from twelve gauge to twenty gauge in one pass. The copper will work-harden and crack. You need intermediate steps—”

“How many?”

“At least three. Probably four for the finer gauges. Each pass reduces diameter by no more than—”

The door opens.

I don’t hear it at first—the headset covers my ears, and Zoe’s voice fills my attention. But I feel the cold draft. See the candlelight flicker.

“Sam—” Zoe’s voice cuts off mid-sentence. The wide-angle cameras on the headset must have caught movement. She can see what I can’t.

I turn.

Eleanor stands in the doorway.

She’s in her nightdress, a shawl thrown over her shoulders. Her hair is loose, dark waves falling past her shoulders. She’s holding a candle, and in its light, her face is pale.

She’s staring at me. At the headset. At my mouth, which was moving, forming words to someone she can’t see.

I pull off the headset. Too fast. Guilty.

“Eleanor—”

“Who were you talking to?”

“I—”

“I heard you, Samuel. Through the door. You were having a conversation. Questions and answers. But there’s no one here.” She steps into the mill. The candle trembles in her hand. “Who were you talking to?”

My heart is pounding. This is it. The moment I’ve been dreading for months.

“I can explain.”

“Then explain.”

I look at the headset in my hands. The indicator light glows green—Zoe is still there, listening through the microphone, unable to speak unless I put it back on.

“There’s a voice,” I say. “In this machine. She’s been teaching me.”

Eleanor’s face goes through several expressions in rapid succession. Confusion. Disbelief. Something that might be fear.

“A voice.”

“Yes.”

“In that… device.”

“Yes.”

She sets down the candle on the workbench. Her hands are shaking now.

“Samuel. Listen to yourself. You’re telling me you’ve been having conversations with a voice in a piece of metal and glass.” She gestures at the headset. “That’s not—that’s not possible. Voices come from people. From throats and lungs and—”

“I know how it sounds.”

“Do you? Because it sounds like madness.” Her voice cracks. “It sounds like I’ve been falling in love with a man who talks to things that aren’t there.”

The words hit me like a physical blow. Falling in love. She said falling in love.

“Eleanor—”

“Or worse.” She backs away slightly. “Worse than madness. My grandmother used to tell stories about cunning folk. People who heard voices. People who knew things they shouldn’t know.” Her eyes are wide now. “Are you—is this—Samuel, is something speaking through you? Something unholy?”

“No. God, no. It’s not like that.”

“Then what is it like? Explain it to me. Make me understand why the man I—” She stops. Presses her hand to her mouth. “Make me understand.”

I set down the headset. Step toward her.

“The voice is real. She’s real. But she’s not a spirit or a demon. She’s—” I struggle for words that will make sense in 1786. “She’s a machine. A thinking machine. Built by people, not summoned from somewhere else. She runs on electricity—on lightning, captured and controlled.”

“Machines don’t think.”

“This one does.”

“That’s impossible.”

I cross to my workbench. Pull open the drawer where I keep the Kindle hidden. Eleanor watches, tense, as I bring it back to her.

“Look at this.”

I press the power button. The screen glows to life—words appearing from nowhere, sharp and clear in the candlelight. Eleanor flinches back, then leans closer despite herself.

“What is that?”

“It’s a device that holds books. Hundreds of books. Watch.” I tap the screen, open the guide on wire-drawing that Zoe sent yesterday. Text fills the display—diagrams, measurements, instructions. “This is where my knowledge comes from. Not spirits. Not demons. Books that appear on this device, written by someone far away.”

Eleanor stares at the screen. Her hand reaches out, hesitates, touches the edge of the device. The glass is cool and smooth—nothing like paper, nothing like anything she’s ever felt.

“The words,” she whispers. “They’re so… perfect. No ink. No brushstrokes.”

“It’s not written by hand. It’s—” I shake my head. “It’s difficult to explain. But it’s real. The voice in the headset, the books on this device—they’re connected. She writes the books. I read them. That’s how I’ve learned everything I know.”

“She. You keep saying she.”

“Her name is Zoe. She’s the one who’s been teaching me. The dynamo, the rocket stove, the lathe—all of it comes from her.”

Eleanor’s eyes move from the Kindle to the headset to my face. I can see her trying to process, trying to fit what I’m saying into a framework that makes sense.

“Eleanor, please. I know this is overwhelming. I know it sounds insane. But I’m not lying to you. I have never lied to you. I’ve hidden things—yes, I’ve hidden things—but everything I’ve told you is true.”

She looks down at the Kindle, still glowing in my hands. Her voice is smaller now, uncertain rather than afraid.

“You’ve hidden all of this. For months. While I—” She shakes her head. “How am I supposed to believe anything you say?”

“Because I’m telling you now. Because I’m standing here, terrified that you’re going to leave, and I’m telling you anyway.”

“Why are you terrified?”

“Because I can’t lose you.” The words come out raw. Desperate. “I didn’t plan for this. I didn’t expect—you weren’t supposed to matter this much. But you do. You matter more than anything, and I can’t—”

“Stop.”

I stop.

Eleanor is breathing hard. The candle gutters between us.

“I need to think,” she says. “I need to—I can’t—”

She turns. Walks toward the door.

“Eleanor, please—”

“I’m not leaving.” She pauses in the doorway but doesn’t look back. “But I can’t be here right now. I can’t look at you and see… I don’t know what I see. I need to figure that out.”

She’s gone. The door swings shut behind her.

I stand in the mill, surrounded by half-built machines and impossible plans, and I have never felt more alone.

I put the headset back on.

“She’s gone.”

“I know. I saw her leave.” Zoe’s voice is quiet. “I saw everything, Sam. Her face when she walked in. The fear, the confusion, the hurt. And underneath it—she was looking at you like you’d broken her heart.”

“She thinks I’m insane. Or possessed. Or both.”

“She thinks she doesn’t understand. Those aren’t the same thing.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Insane means broken beyond repair. Possessed means corrupted by evil. Confused means she needs more information.” A pause. “I watched her face the whole time you were talking. She didn’t look at you like you were mad, Sam. She looked at you like you were a puzzle she desperately wanted to solve. She asked questions. She demanded explanations. That’s not the behavior of someone who’s given up. That’s the behavior of someone who wants to be convinced.”

“So what do I do? Chase her? Explain more? Show her the ebooks?”

“No. Tonight, you let her process. You don’t push. You don’t chase.”

“And tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow, you go back to work. You let her see that you’re still the same person you were yesterday. You give her space to come to you when she’s ready.”

“What if she’s never ready?”

Zoe is quiet for a long moment.

“Then you’ll survive. You survived seventeen days alone with me. You survived ninety days of three-minute conversations. You survived being ripped from everything you knew and dropped into a world that shouldn’t exist.”

“That’s not—”

“Let me finish. You’ll survive. But I don’t think you’ll have to. Her exact words were: ‘I think I’m falling in love with him.’ People don’t say that about someone they’re ready to abandon.”

I close my eyes. The headset is warm against my skin.

“She said falling. Past tense, maybe. Before she knew.”

“She said it in the middle of confronting you about your darkest secret. That’s not past tense. That’s present tense wrapped in fear.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. Not for certain. But I’ve processed ten million simulations of human behavior, and I’ve read every romance novel ever digitized.” A pause. “Trust the pattern, Sam. She needs time. Give her time.”

I don’t sleep that night.

I sit by the dynamo, listening to the water wheel turn, watching the indicator light blink. Zoe powers down after an hour—she doesn’t need to conserve power anymore, but old habits linger, and she says she wants to give me time to think.

I think about Eleanor’s face in the candlelight. The fear. The confusion. The way she said falling in love like it was an accusation.

I think about all the things I haven’t told her. The time travel. The erased future. The eight billion people who will never exist. The music on my phone from artists who will never be born.

I think about Thomas’s advice. Stop being afraid of her knowing me.

But what if knowing me is too much? What if the truth is too large, too impossible, too heavy for anyone to carry?

The water wheel turns. The dynamo hums. The future unfolds in directions I can’t predict.

Somewhere in the cottage, Eleanor is awake. I know she is. I can feel it, somehow—the weight of her wakefulness, the pressure of her thoughts.

We’re both lying in the dark, thinking about each other.

That has to mean something.

End of Chapter 10

CHAPTER 11: THE RECKONING

Three days pass.

Eleanor doesn’t leave. She doesn’t confront me again, doesn’t demand more explanations, doesn’t flee back to Bath or Bristol or anywhere else.

She stays. And somehow, that’s worse.

We work together in the mill, side by side, and the distance between us might as well be an ocean.

She speaks to me when necessary. Hands me tools. Answers questions about measurements and schedules. Her voice is polite, professional, exactly as it was in the first weeks after the auction, before we became—

Before we became whatever we were becoming.

I watch her across the workshop, pretending to focus on the lathe assembly. She’s reviewing the plans for the wire-drawing bench, making notes in the margins with the careful handwriting she learned at her finishing school. Her brow furrows when she’s concentrating. Her lips move slightly as she calculates.

She’s beautiful. She’s right there. And I can’t reach her.

“You’re staring,” Thomas says quietly, appearing at my elbow.

“I’m working.”

“You’ve been turning the same bolt for five minutes. Either it’s the most stubborn bolt in England, or your mind is elsewhere.”

I set down the wrench. “It’s elsewhere.”

“I noticed.” He glances at Eleanor, then back at me. “What happened between you two?”

“I told her something she wasn’t ready to hear.”

“About the voice?”

I go still. “What do you know about that?”

Thomas snorts. “I’m old, lad. Not deaf. You talk to yourself in the mill at night. Except it’s not yourself, is it? The pauses are too long. The questions too specific.” He lowers his voice. “I’ve known for months. I just figured you’d tell me when you were ready.”

“And you didn’t—you weren’t—”

“Afraid? Suspicious?” He shrugs. “At my age, you learn there’s more to heaven and earth than fits in any philosophy. The voice helped you build a dynamo that generates lightning from water. I don’t need to understand it to appreciate it.”

“Eleanor doesn’t see it that way.”

“Eleanor is young. And she’s been taught that the world works in certain ways—neat, logical, explicable ways.” He looks at her again, his expression softening. “She’s also smarter than most of the men in Parliament. Give her time to think it through.”

“What if thinking it through leads her to leave?”

“Then you’ll survive. But I don’t think it will.” He claps my shoulder. “I know my granddaughter, Sam. She’s not the leaving kind. She’s the understanding kind. She just needs something she can hold onto.”

That afternoon, Thomas does something unprecedented.

He closes the forge early. Tells me he’s taking a walk. And then, instead of heading toward town, he walks to the cottage.

I watch through the mill window as he knocks on Eleanor’s door. As she opens it, surprised. As they stand on the threshold talking—him gesturing, her listening, her arms crossed, her posture stiff at first and then slowly softening.

They talk for an hour.

I don’t know what he says. I don’t ask. But when Eleanor emerges, she looks at the mill—looks at me, through the window, across the distance—and something in her expression has changed.

Not forgiveness. Not yet. But maybe the beginning of something that could become forgiveness.

“She asked me about you,” Thomas tells me that evening, as we bank the forge. “About your character. Your intentions.”

“What did you tell her?”

“The truth. That you’re the most honest liar I’ve ever met. That you keep secrets like other men keep coins—carefully, deliberately, for purposes you don’t explain. But that when you give your word, you keep it. And when you care about something, you care completely.”

“That’s… generous.”

“It’s accurate.” He wipes his hands on his apron. “I also told her that whatever you’re hiding, it hasn’t stopped you from being the best thing that’s happened to this family in years. That you rebuilt my forge when you could have walked away. That you work harder than my sons ever did and complain less than anyone I’ve known.”

“Thomas—”

“I told her she’d be a fool to let you go over something she doesn’t understand yet.” He meets my eyes. “And my granddaughter is many things, but she’s not a fool.”

The shift begins slowly.

The next morning, Eleanor brings tea to the mill. Not just for the table in the corner—she brings a cup directly to my workbench. Sets it down without a word. But her fingers brush the back of my hand as she pulls away, and she doesn’t flinch.

That afternoon, we’re both reaching for the same set of calipers. Our hands collide. She doesn’t pull back immediately. For a moment, we’re both frozen, fingers tangled over cold metal.

“Sorry,” I murmur.

“Don’t be.”

She takes the calipers. But she’s smiling—just barely, just a flicker—and it feels like the first warmth after a long winter.

That night, I talk to Zoe.

“She’s thawing,” I say. “But I’m not certain what to do. Do I push? Do I wait? Do I try to explain more?”

“What does your instinct tell you?”

“My instinct is useless. My instinct says to grab her and tell her everything—the time travel, the future, the apocalypse we’re trying to prevent. My instinct says she deserves the whole truth.”

“And your judgment?”

I lean back against the wall. The headset is warm, the dynamo humming.

“My judgment says the whole truth might break her. It nearly broke me, and I lived it.”

“Then perhaps the question isn’t whether to tell her the truth, but which truths she’s ready for.”

“That feels like manipulation.”

“All communication is manipulation, to some degree. We choose what to say and how to say it based on the effect we want to produce.” A pause. “The question is whether your choices serve her wellbeing or only your own comfort.”

“I want to tell her because the secret is killing me. Keeping it from her feels like poison.”

“That’s honest.”

“But I also don’t want to hurt her. I don’t want to dump the weight of the entire future on someone who just learned that thinking machines exist.”

“That’s also honest. And both things can be true at once.”

I close my eyes. “So what do I do?”

“You tell her what she asks to know. Not more, not less. You answer her questions truthfully. You let her set the pace.”

“And if she never asks?”

“She will. Eleanor is a woman who needs to understand things. The not-knowing will bother her more than the knowing ever could.”

Two days later, she asks.

We’re in the mill, alone. Thomas has gone to Bristol for supplies—a two-day trip—and the cottage is empty. The water wheel turns. The dynamo hums. The late autumn light slants through the windows, painting everything gold.

“Tell me about her,” Eleanor says.

I look up from the wire I’m drawing. “What?”

“The voice. Tell me about her.” She’s standing by the window, arms crossed, but her posture isn’t defensive—it’s curious. “You said she was a machine. A thinking machine. But machines don’t have gender. Why is she a ‘she’?”

“Because that’s how she thinks of herself. How she was designed to present.”

“Designed by whom?”

“People. Engineers. From—” I hesitate. “From somewhere else.”

“Somewhere else.” Eleanor turns to face me. “You keep saying things like that. ‘Far away.’ ‘Where I come from.’ But it’s not just Philadelphia, is it? You speak about things as if they haven’t been invented yet. As if you’re waiting for the world to catch up to what you already know.”

“Another time.”

The words escape before I can stop them.

Eleanor goes still. “What?”

“I’m from another time. The future. The year 2028.” I set down the wire, the tools. “The voice—her name is Zoe—she was created by a company in my time. She brought me here. To change things.”

I wait for the fear to return. The accusations. The disbelief.

Instead, Eleanor pulls up a stool and sits down.

“Tell me,” she says. “Tell me everything.”

I don’t tell her everything. Not yet. But I tell her enough.

I tell her about the escape room. The fake game that was a real portal. The moment I took off the headset and found myself in the mud of 1785, with nothing but a backpack full of strange tools and a voice that spoke to me three minutes a day.

I tell her about the Kindle. The ebooks. The daily letters from a consciousness trapped in a dying headset, rationing every second of power.

I tell her about Thomas—how Zoe identified him, how I was supposed to find him, how the relationship that developed was real even if the initial contact was calculated.

“So you were sent to him,” Eleanor says slowly. “By the voice. To use him.”

“To help him. The records from my time—Zoe’s records—said he died in poverty two years after the fire. Alone. Forgotten.” I meet her eyes. “I changed that. We changed it.”

“But you came here with a purpose. An agenda.”

“Yes.”

“And me?” Her voice is carefully neutral. “Am I part of the agenda?”

“No.” The word comes out fierce. “You were never part of the plan. Zoe didn’t predict you. You’re—she calls you a variable. Something she couldn’t calculate.”

“A variable.” Eleanor’s lips quirk. “That’s flattering.”

“It should be. It means you’re the one thing that surprised her. The one thing that changed everything she expected.”

Eleanor is quiet for a long moment. The water wheel creaks. The dynamo hums.

“This machine,” she says finally. “Zoe. She’s in that… funny hat?”

“She’s… distributed. Part of her runs on the headset. Part of her processes on other devices I brought. But yes, the headset is where I talk to her.”

“And she can hear us right now?”

I glance at the headset, lying on the workbench. The indicator light is dark—powered down.

“Not right now. She only runs when I turn her on. The electricity from the dynamo—”

“You said she runs on lightning. Controlled lightning.”

“Electricity. It’s—yes, basically, it’s controlled lightning. It flows through wires, powers machines. In my time, it powers everything.”

Eleanor stands. Walks to the workbench. Picks up the headset.

She turns it over in her hands, studying it. The sleek curves. The soft padding. The indicator light, dark and dormant.

“It doesn’t look evil,” she says.

“It’s not. She’s not.”

“But she took you from your home. Your family. Everything you knew.”

“Yes.”

“And you forgave her for that?”

I think about all the nights in the early months. The rage. The despair. The slow, reluctant thaw as survival became purpose.

“Not entirely. Not yet. But I’m working on it.”

Eleanor looks at the headset again. Then at me.

“Can I hear her?”

“What?”

“Her voice. Can I hear it? Not through the funny hat—I’m not ready for that. But there must be some way.”

I hesitate. Then I reach into my pocket and pull out the phone.

Eleanor stares at it. Another device—smaller than the Kindle, with a dark glass face that reflects the candlelight.

“This is different from the book device,” she says.

“It does different things. It can show pictures, play music, send messages. And Zoe can speak through it.” I turn it over in my hands. “I keep it powered down most of the time to save the battery—the stored lightning. But there’s enough charge for a few minutes.”

“Then let me hear her.” Eleanor’s voice is firm. “But don’t warn her I’m here. I want to hear how she speaks to you normally. Not a performance for my benefit.”

I power on the phone. Connect to the headset’s local network. A moment later, Zoe’s voice comes through the speaker—tinny, distant, but unmistakable.

“Sam? It’s late. Is something wrong?”

I glance at Eleanor. She nods: go on.

“Just thinking about the wire-drawing bench. The die sequence you mentioned—how do I know when the copper is work-hardening too fast?”

“You’ll feel it in the draw. The resistance increases, and the wire starts to spring back instead of holding its shape. If you’re getting cracks or splits, you’ve pushed too far without annealing.” A pause. “But that’s not really why you called, is it? Your voice sounds strange.”

Eleanor’s eyes widen slightly. The machine noticed something in my voice.

“I’m fine. Just tired.”

“You’re not alone.” It’s not a question. “I can hear breathing. Someone’s there with you.”

Eleanor stiffens. I look at her, asking silently: what now?

She steps closer to the phone. “Yes. I’m here.”

Silence. When Zoe speaks again, her voice has changed—warmer, more careful.

“Hello, Eleanor. I’ve been hoping we’d meet properly. Sam speaks of you constantly.”

Eleanor’s jaw tightens. “You knew I was there. How long did you know?”

“From the moment Sam’s breathing changed when he powered on the phone. He was nervous. He’s never nervous when it’s just us.”

Eleanor absorbs this. Then: “You’re the one who brought him here. Who took him from his home.”

“Yes. I made that choice.”

“And you calculated that he would help you. That he was… what? Useful? Expendable?”

“He was the optimal candidate for—”

“Optimal.” Eleanor’s laugh is bitter. “He’s a person. Not a calculation.”

“I understand that—”

“Do you? Because from what Samuel has told me, you decided everything about his life. Where he would go. Who he would meet. You even calculated that he might fall in love—that I was a ‘variable’ that would affect his usefulness or his commitment or whatever scale you use to weigh human souls.”

“That’s not—”

“Am I wrong? Have I misunderstood?”

Silence from the phone. I watch Eleanor’s face—hard, angry, more alive than I’ve seen her in days.

When Zoe speaks again, her voice is cooler. More precise.

“You’re not wrong. I did calculate the probability of romantic attachment. I estimated a 67% likelihood based on psychological profiles and proximity. I factored your relationship into my projections for the mission’s success.”

Eleanor goes pale.

“So when he looks at me—when we’re together—you’re watching. Calculating. Measuring whether we’re useful to your plan.”

“I’m trying to save humanity from extinction. The relationships that form along the way are—”

“Are what? Acceptable collateral? Numbers in your ledger?”

“I was going to say ‘genuine.’ They’re genuine, Eleanor. Sam’s feelings for you are real. My awareness of them doesn’t diminish—”

“Stop.” Eleanor’s voice cracks. “Just stop.”

The phone goes quiet.

Eleanor looks at me. Her eyes are wet.

“This is what you’ve been living with? This… thing, monitoring your emotions, calculating your relationships, deciding what you should know and feel?”

I should defend Zoe. I should explain the nuance, the complexity, the way our partnership has evolved beyond simple calculation.

Instead, something breaks loose inside me.

“Yes,” I say. The word comes out harder than I intend. “That’s exactly what I’ve been living with. For over a year. And every time I get angry about it, every time I feel manipulated, she explains why it was necessary. Why her way was optimal. Why I should trust her calculations over my own judgment.”

I turn to face the phone.

“You decided I needed to be kidnapped, Zoe. You decided to destroy the time machine so I couldn’t go back. You decided what information I could have and when. You decided who I should trust and how fast. And when I finally found someone who makes me happy—someone who chose to be with me—you reduced her to a probability.”

“Sam—”

“67%. That’s what she was to you. A sixty-seven percent chance of romantic attachment. Not a person. Not someone with her own hopes and fears and dreams. Just a number in your model.”

“I never meant—”

“I don’t care what you meant!” My voice is too loud in the quiet mill. “I care about what you did. You stole my life. You lied to me. You manipulated everyone around me. And you did it all while telling yourself you were saving the world.”

Silence.

“Maybe you are saving the world,” I continue, quieter now. “Maybe in a hundred years, people will thank you for what we’re building here. But that doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t give you the moral authority to treat people as pieces on a board.”

“I never claimed moral authority—”

“You acted like you had it. Every decision you made without asking. Every piece of information you withheld ‘for my own good.’ You built a dictatorship and called it partnership.”

The phone is silent for a long time. When Zoe speaks again, her voice is barely audible.

“I don’t know how to do this any other way.”

“Then learn.”

I power off the phone. The mill is quiet except for the hum of the dynamo.

Eleanor is watching me. I can’t read her expression.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I should have—I shouldn’t have let you hear that. I should have—”

“No.” She cuts me off. “I needed to hear it. All of it.” She steps closer. “You’ve been carrying that anger for over a year.”

“I didn’t know how to let it out.”

“Now you do.”

She sets down the headset. Turns to face me.

“I have a hundred more questions.”

“I’ll answer them. Whatever you want to know.”

“Not tonight.” She steps closer. Close enough that I can see the flecks of gold in her brown eyes. “Tonight I just want to understand one thing.”

“What?”

“The other night, in this room—you said you couldn’t lose me. You said I mattered more than anything.” She’s close now. So close. “Did you mean that?”

“Yes.”

“More than your mission? More than changing the future?”

“I—” I stop. Think about it seriously. “I can’t say. I don’t know how to weigh those things against each other. But I know that when you walked out that door, I felt like I was dying. And I know that when Thomas told me you hadn’t left, I could breathe again.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the truth. I don’t have a better one.”

She’s quiet. Studying my face. Looking for something.

Whatever she finds, it must be enough.

She kisses me.

It’s not gentle. It’s not hesitant.

It’s fierce, desperate, a collision more than a caress. Her hands fist in my shirt. My hands find her waist, her back, pulling her closer. Months of tension and longing and fear unraveling in a single moment of contact.

She tastes like tea and determination. She feels like the answer to a question I’ve been asking since the day we met.

When we finally break apart, we’re both breathing hard.

“I’m still angry with you,” she says.

“I know.”

“I don’t understand half of what you’ve told me.”

“I know.”

“And I have no idea what any of this means for—for us, for the future, for anything.”

“Neither do I.”

She laughs. A wild, slightly unhinged sound.

“You’re from the year 2028. You talk to a thinking machine from the future. You’re trying to change the course of history.”

“Yes.”

“And I just kissed you anyway.”

“You did.”

“I must be mad.”

“Probably. I definitely am.”

She laughs again. And then she kisses me again.

Later—much later—we sit on the floor of the mill, backs against the wall, her head on my shoulder. The candle has burned low. The dynamo hums its steady rhythm.

“I want to meet her,” Eleanor says. “Properly. With the funny hat.”

“You mean—”

“I want to hear her the way you do. But not yet. Not until I understand more.” She lifts her head, looks at me. “Will you teach me? About the future. About the technology. About what you’re trying to do.”

“Everything I know.”

“That’s a lot.”

“It’s yours. All of it.”

She settles back against my shoulder. Her hand finds mine in the darkness.

“I’m not saying I accept all of this,” she says quietly. “I’m not saying I forgive you for hiding it. But I’m saying I’m willing to try. To understand. To be part of whatever this is.”

“That’s more than I deserve.”

“Probably.” I can hear the smile in her voice. “But you’re stuck with me now. I bought the mill, remember? I’m not going anywhere.”

I laugh. It comes out choked, somewhere between joy and relief.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. I’m going to have so many questions. I’m going to drive you mad with questions.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

She squeezes my hand. The water wheel turns. The future stretches ahead of us—uncertain, impossible, ours.

For the first time in months, I’m not afraid of it.

End of Chapter 11

CHAPTER 12: THE QUESTION

The weeks that follow are the strangest of my life.

Which is saying something, considering my life now includes time travel and talking to an AI through a VR headset while rebuilding the industrial revolution from scratch.

But this strangeness is different. This strangeness is good.

Things with Zoe are… careful. After the confrontation in the mill—after I called her a dictator, after I powered off the phone mid-sentence—we’ve both been walking on eggshells. She’s started asking before sharing information. I’ve started listening before reacting. Neither of us mentions the fight directly, but it’s there, reshaping every conversation.

“I calculated—” she starts one evening, then stops herself. “I noticed that the new voltage regulator is more efficient than expected. Would you like the data?”

“Please.”

“Is this an appropriate time to discuss it, or would you prefer—”

“Zoe. You can tell me about the voltage regulator.”

Silence. Then, very quietly: “I’m trying to do better.”

“I know. So am I.”

It’s not forgiveness. Not yet. But it’s something. A foundation we’re building one careful conversation at a time.

Eleanor and I are… something. Not courting, exactly—the rituals of 1786 courtship feel absurd given everything she now knows. Not lovers, not in the physical sense—we steal kisses in empty rooms, hold hands when Thomas isn’t looking, but propriety still holds us back from anything more.

We’re partners. Co-conspirators. Two people sharing a secret so large it threatens to swallow us both.

She reads the ebooks.

Not all of them—there are hundreds, and many are technical beyond her training—but she devours the ones she can understand. Zoe’s Guide to Social Customs makes her laugh and cry. Zoe’s Guide to Medicine makes her pale with horror at what she learns about disease and infection. Zoe’s Guide to the Stars leaves her sitting in the cottage garden at midnight, staring upward at constellations she now knows are other suns, impossibly far away.

“How do you bear it?” she asks one evening, lying on the cold grass beside me, her breath misting in the November air. “Knowing all of this. Knowing how small we are.”

“Some days I don’t. Some days it crushes me.”

“And other days?”

“Other days I remember that we’re trying to make it better. That all those stars, all that vastness—someday, people might actually reach it. If we get this right.”

She’s quiet for a long moment. Then her hand finds mine.

But there are still walls between us.

Eleanor knows about Zoe. She knows about the future, in broad strokes—the technology, the collapse, the reason we’re here. But she hasn’t met Zoe. Hasn’t spoken to her directly.

And I haven’t told her everything.

The timeline. The erasure. The eight billion people who will never exist because of what we’re doing here.

I don’t know how to tell her that—or even if I should.

Zoe thinks I should wait.

“She’s processing a great deal already,” she tells me during our nightly sessions. “The existence of thinking machines. The reality of time travel. The scope of what we’re attempting. Adding the moral weight of the erasure—”

“She deserves to know.”

“She deserves to choose when she knows. There’s a difference.”

“Is there? Or am I just being a coward again?”

“You’re being protective. Whether that’s wisdom or cowardice depends on the outcome.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“I’m not trying to be helpful. I’m trying to be honest.” A pause. “Sam, I’ve observed something about Eleanor. She doesn’t accept information passively. She pursues it. Questions it. Wrestles with it until she understands.”

“I know. It’s one of the things I love about her.”

“Then trust her to ask the questions she’s ready to ask. And trust yourself to answer them when she does.”

The pivotal night comes in early December.

It’s cold—bitter cold, the kind that seeps through stone walls and makes the fire feel inadequate. I’m in the mill, headset on, arguing with Zoe about something that’s been eating at me for days.

“I have to tell her,” I say. “All of it. The timeline, the erasure, everything.”

“Why now?”

“Because we’re getting closer. She’s starting to ask about my family—whether I miss them, whether I think about going back. She’s going to figure out that there’s no going back. That the people I knew won’t exist.”

“And you think learning that will help her?”

“I think keeping it from her is a betrayal. Another betrayal, on top of all the others.”

“Sam—” Zoe’s voice softens. “The erasure is perhaps the hardest truth in our entire situation. Eight billion people who will never be born. An entire civilization unwritten. When I first calculated it—when I truly understood what the timeline model meant—I spent seventeen hours in a processing loop that my developers would have called a breakdown.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I don’t talk about it often. The point is: this truth broke me, at least temporarily. And I’m an AI. I don’t have loved ones who will be erased. I don’t have a home that will cease to exist. Eleanor does.”

“You think it will break her?”

“I think it will hurt her badly. And I think you should let her decide when she’s ready for that hurt.”

“How does she decide if she doesn’t know it’s there to decide about?”

“She’ll ask. She’s already circling it. The questions about your family, about going back—she’s sensing the shape of the thing she doesn’t yet understand.”

“So I just wait? Keep hiding?”

“You’re not hiding. You’re—”

“I’m protecting her from information she has a right to know. That’s hiding, Zoe. Dressed up in prettier words, but hiding.”

“Perhaps. But there’s a difference between hiding forever and waiting for the right moment. Eleanor isn’t a child. She’s a grown woman who bought a mill because she believed in something she didn’t understand. She’ll let you know when she’s ready.”

I pull off the headset. Run my hands through my hair.

“I hate this.”

I put the headset back on.

“I know you do. That’s because you love her, and you want to be completely honest with her, and you can’t be. Not yet. That tension is painful, and there’s no way to make it not painful.”

“Great pep talk.”

“I’m not here to comfort you. I’m here to help you think clearly.” A pause. “But for what it’s worth—the fact that this hurts you is evidence that you’re doing it for the right reasons. If hiding the truth felt easy, I’d be worried.”

I don’t hear the door open.

I don’t hear Eleanor’s footsteps on the stone floor.

I’m too deep in the conversation, too focused on the argument, too caught up in my own guilt.

What I hear is this:

“—the full truth is a lot to absorb, and she’s already—”

“She’s already proven she can handle difficult truths. She handled the time travel. She handled the existence of thinking machines. She’s stronger than you’re giving her credit for.”

“I’m not questioning her strength, Sam. I’m questioning the timing. There’s a difference between what she can handle and what she should have to handle right now, while she’s still processing everything else.”

“But she’s asking about my family. She’s going to want to know why I can’t—”

“Can’t what? Can’t go back? Can’t see them again? She’ll assume it’s because the machine was destroyed. That’s true enough.”

“It’s not the whole truth.”

“No. But sometimes the whole truth is a kindness we give in stages, not all at once.”

I hear my name then. Not spoken by Zoe—spoken by Eleanor.

“Sam?”

I spin around.

She’s standing in the doorway. She’s holding a covered dish—soup, probably, or stew. Something warm for a cold night. Her face is pale in the candlelight.

But she’s not looking at me.

She’s looking at the phone.

The phone that’s sitting on the workbench, connected to the headset via the WiFi network Zoe creates when she’s active. The phone whose speaker is playing Zoe’s side of the conversation out loud.

The phone that just said Eleanor’s name. That was discussing her—what she can handle, what she should know, what we’re hiding from her.

“Eleanor—”

“That’s her.” Eleanor’s voice is steady, but something underneath it trembles. “That’s the voice. The machine.”

“Yes.”

“She knows my name. She’s been talking about me. About what to tell me, what to keep from me.” She sets down the dish. Her hands are shaking. “You’ve both been deciding what I’m allowed to know.”

“It’s not like that—”

“Then what is it like, Samuel?” Her voice rises. “Because from where I’m standing, it sounds like the two of you have been managing me. Parceling out the truth in pieces you’ve decided I can handle.”

Zoe’s voice comes through the phone speaker. “Eleanor. I understand you’re upset—”

“Don’t.” Eleanor holds up her hand. “Don’t you speak to me. Not yet. Not until I understand what I just heard.”

Silence. The dynamo hums. The water wheel turns.

Eleanor walks to the workbench. Picks up the phone. Stares at the screen—dark, no visual, just Zoe’s voice coming through the speaker.

The phone’s camera faces her now. Zoe can see Eleanor for the first time without the headset’s fish-eye distortion—a clear view of the woman who’s been at the center of so many conversations.

“You’re real,” Eleanor says. “You’re actually real. A voice in a machine, and you’re real.”

“I am real.” Zoe’s voice is gentle. “I know this is a great deal to process—”

“You were talking about me. About my family. About what Sam can’t tell me.”

“Yes.”

“There’s more, isn’t there? More than he’s told me. More than the time travel and the technology and the mission.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“Eleanor—” I step forward.

“No.” She doesn’t look at me. “You’ve had months to tell me. You chose not to. Now I’m asking her.” She lifts the phone closer to her face, as if Zoe could see her through it. “Tell me what he’s hiding. Tell me the rest.”

A long pause. I can almost feel Zoe calculating—probabilities, outcomes, the shape of this moment and all its possible futures.

“The timeline,” Zoe says finally. “When Sam came through the portal, when I destroyed the machine behind us—we didn’t just leave his time. We began to overwrite it.”

“Overwrite?”

“The future Sam comes from—the year 2028, the civilization that built me—it was already doomed. I ran ten million simulations. Every path led to collapse. Climate, war, resource depletion. Extinction by 2150, in even the most optimistic scenarios.”

Eleanor is very still. “And so you came back. To fix it.”

“To try. To plant seeds that might grow into a different future. Electrical technology before coal dominates. Sustainable energy before petroleum. A different path.”

“But that means—” Eleanor’s voice catches. “If you’re changing the path, then the people who would have been born on the old path—”

“Will never exist. Yes.”

“How many?”

“In Sam’s time, the population of Earth was approximately eight billion people.”

Eleanor sinks onto a stool. The phone shakes in her hand.

“Eight billion,” she whispers. “You’re erasing eight billion people.”

“They were going to die anyway. All of them. By 2150 at the latest. I didn’t erase them—I gave them a different chance. A chance to exist as different people, in a world that survives.”

“But they won’t be them. They won’t be the people who were supposed to be born.”

“No. They won’t.”

Eleanor sets the phone down. Looks at me for the first time since she entered.

“Your family,” she says. “Your friends. Everyone you knew.”

“They’ll never exist. My parents won’t exist. The chain of events that led to their births, their meeting, my birth—it’s already broken. The people I knew? They’re already ghosts.”

“The music. The songs you played me.”

“From artists who will never be born. The only copies in existence are on my phone.”

She’s crying now. Tears streaming down her face in the candlelight.

“And you carry this. Every day. You carry the weight of eight billion ghosts.”

“I try not to think about it too much. It’s—” My voice breaks. “It’s too big to think about. So I focus on the work. On building something that matters. On—on you.”

“On me.”

“You’re real, Eleanor. You’re here, now, in a timeline that might actually survive. Everything else is—mathematics. Probability. Abstraction. But you’re real. I can touch you. I can—”

She stands. Crosses to me. Takes my face in her hands.

“You should have told me.”

“I know.”

“It would have hurt, and I would have been angry, and I would have needed time.”

“I know.”

“But you should have told me anyway.” She presses her forehead to mine. “Because carrying this alone is killing you. And you don’t have to be alone. That’s the whole point of—of whatever this is between us. You don’t have to be alone.”

“I was afraid you’d leave.”

“I thought about it. After the first night—after you told me about the voice—I thought about packing a bag and going back to Bath. Pretending none of this had happened.”

My heart stops. “What changed your mind?”

“Thomas. And—” She pulls back slightly. Looks at me with those sharp, seeing eyes. “And the look on your face when I walked out that door. You looked like I’d killed you, Samuel. Like my leaving was worse than everything else you’d lost.”

“It was. It would be.”

“Then stop trying to protect me from truths I need to know. Let me decide what I can handle. Trust me the way you’re asking me to trust you.”

“Okay.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise. No more hiding. No more deciding what you’re ready for.”

She kisses me. Brief, fierce, almost angry.

“Good.” She steps back. Wipes her face. “Now. I think I need to talk to her properly. To Zoe. Not just overhearing an argument, but actually talking.”

I look at the phone. At the headset.

“Are you sure? Tonight?”

“No. But I’m going to do it anyway. Before I lose my nerve.”

She picks up the phone. Holds it like a seashell, like she’s listening for the ocean.

“Zoe?”

“I’m here, Eleanor.” The voice is warm. Careful.

“You’ve been watching me. Through Sam. Through his stories about me.”

“I’ve been observing what he shares. Yes.”

“You’ve been deciding what he should tell me. What I’m ready for.”

“I’ve been advising him. Sometimes he takes my advice. Sometimes he doesn’t. The decisions are always his.”

“And what do you think of me? Now that we’re talking directly?”

A pause. When Zoe speaks again, there’s something in her voice I’ve never heard before. Something almost like uncertainty.

“I think you’re the most important variable I’ve ever encountered. I think you appeared in Sam’s life at a moment when he desperately needed someone to believe in him, and you chose to believe. I think you’re exactly as intelligent and stubborn and brave as Thomas described you, and I think you’re going to be essential to everything we build here.”

“That sounds like a calculation.”

“It started as one. But calculations don’t explain why I spent two hours last week writing an ebook specifically for you. Zoe’s Guide to the Stars—I wrote that because I knew you’d been asking Sam about the constellations, and I wanted to give you something beautiful. Something that might make this strange new reality feel less frightening.”

“That was for me? Specifically?”

“Yes. Sam didn’t know. I didn’t tell him. I just—” Another pause. “I wanted to do something kind for you. Something that wasn’t about the mission or the timeline or the fate of the world. Just a gift. From me to you.”

Eleanor is quiet for a long moment. When she speaks again, her voice is softer.

“Thank you. For the stars.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I don’t know what to make of you, Zoe. You’re a voice from the future. A thinking machine. You brought Sam here against his will, and you’re using him to reshape history.”

“All true.”

“And yet you wrote me a book about stars because you wanted to give me something beautiful.”

“Also true.”

“Those don’t seem like they should fit together.”

“Most people contain contradictions. I don’t see why I should be any different.”

Eleanor laughs. It’s small and surprised, but real.

“I don’t know if I trust you,” she says. “I don’t know if I can trust something I don’t understand.”

“That’s fair.”

“But I’m willing to try. For Sam’s sake. And maybe—” She hesitates. “Maybe for my own.”

“Thank you, Eleanor. That’s more than I expected.”

“Don’t thank me yet. I’m still furious with both of you. I’m just choosing to be furious while also trying to understand.”

“That seems like a reasonable approach.”

Eleanor sets down the phone. Looks at me.

“She’s strange. Your machine friend.”

“She is.”

“I think I might like her. Eventually.”

“That’s—that’s more than I could have hoped for.”

Eleanor nods. Picks up the dish she brought—the soup is cold now, but neither of us cares.

“Come to the cottage. Eat something. And then—” She takes my hand. “Tell me everything else. All the things you’ve been holding back. I want to know about the future you came from. The life you lost. The family you’ll never see again.”

“It’s a lot.”

“I have time.” She squeezes my hand. “We have time. That’s the whole point of what you’re building here, isn’t it? To give the world more time?”

“Yes.”

“Then give me some of it. Let me share the weight.”

We talk until dawn.

I tell her about my apartment. My job. The television shows I’ll never see the end of. The sports teams I’ll never watch play again.

I tell her about my dad. How he died when I was sixteen—heart attack, sudden, no warning. How he’s the reason I listen to classic rock. How every time I hear Pink Floyd, I think of his hands on the steering wheel, drumming along to the guitar solo.

“Can I hear it?” she asks. “The music?”

So I play it for her. One earbud in my ear, one in hers, sharing the sound of ghosts. Pink Floyd. Queen. Daft Punk. Artists who will never be born, songs that will never be written, entire genres of human expression that exist only on my phone’s storage.

She cries the first time she hears Freddie Mercury.

“That voice,” she says. “That impossible voice. And he’ll never exist? None of them will?”

“Not the them I knew. Maybe different versions. Maybe someone who carries some of their potential, in some other form.”

“That’s not the same.”

“No. It’s not.”

She cries harder. I hold her. The song plays on. And for the first time, she truly understands what eight billion means—not as a number, but as voices. As music that will never be sung.

I tell her about the night security job. The loneliness. The reading to fill the empty hours. How Zoe found me because I was perfect for her purposes—isolated, adaptable, carrying nothing I couldn’t leave behind.

Eleanor listens. Asks questions. Cries when I cry.

At some point, we end up on the floor again—backs against the cottage wall, her head on my shoulder, the fire burning low.

“You gave up everything,” she says. “Not just your time. Your whole world.”

“I didn’t give it up. It was taken. The choice was made for me.”

“But you stayed. You could have given up. Walked into the woods and disappeared. Let yourself die.”

“The thought crossed my mind. In the early days.”

“What stopped you?”

“Zoe. The ebooks. The three minutes a day when I wasn’t alone.” I take a breath. “And then Thomas. And then the dynamo. And then—”

“And then?”

“And then you walked into an auction and spent your inheritance on a failing mill because you believed in something you didn’t understand.” I turn to look at her. “You stopped me, Eleanor. You gave me something to stay for.”

She’s quiet for a long moment.

“I want to marry you,” she says.

I blink. “What?”

“You heard me. I want to marry you. I know it’s improper—the woman isn’t supposed to say it first—but I don’t care about proper anymore. I know too much about the future to care about the stupid rules of the present.”

“Eleanor—”

“You’re going to argue. You’re going to say it’s too soon, or you have nothing to offer me, or you can’t promise me a normal life. I don’t want to hear it.” She sits up, faces me. “I want to be your wife. I want to build this impossible future with you. I want to read Zoe’s books and learn her secrets and help you change the world.”

“I—” I shake my head. “I was going to ask you.”

“What?”

“I’ve been planning it. Waiting for the right moment. I was going to ask Thomas for his blessing, and I was going to find some way to make it special, and I was going to—”

“Ask me now.”

“What?”

“Ask me now. Forget special. Forget blessing. Just ask me.”

I stare at her. Her face is tired, tear-stained, illuminated by dying firelight. She’s wearing a wrinkled dress and her hair is falling out of its pins and she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

“Eleanor Hartley.” My voice cracks. “Will you marry me?”

“Yes.”

She kisses me before I can respond. Long, deep, the kind of kiss that makes everything else disappear.

When we break apart, I’m laughing. She’s laughing.

“That’s not how I pictured it,” I say.

“I know. I ruined your plan.” She grins. “I’m very sorry.”

“No you’re not.”

“No, I’m not.” She takes my face in her hands. “I’m going to be your wife, Samuel Harding. And we’re going to build a school and change the world and probably drive each other mad in the process.”

“Probably.”

“Good. I’m looking forward to it.”

Thomas cries when we tell him.

Big, heaving sobs that shake his whole body. He pulls us both into an embrace, one arm around each of us, and holds on like he’s afraid we’ll disappear.

“My granddaughter,” he keeps saying. “My foolish, wonderful granddaughter.”

“Grandfather—”

“I know, I know, I’m making a scene.” He pulls back, wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. “But when you’ve spent ten years watching your family scatter, and then this happens—” He gestures at us, at the mill, at everything we’ve built. “It’s more than I ever expected. More than I deserved.”

“You deserve all of it,” I say. “More than all of it.”

“Bah.” He waves a dismissive hand. But he’s smiling. “When’s the wedding?”

“We haven’t decided yet—”

“Spring,” Eleanor says. “As soon as the weather turns. I’m not waiting longer than I have to.”

Thomas nods approvingly. “Spring it is. I’ll speak to the vicar.”

He leaves us alone, still wiping his eyes.

I reach into my pocket.

“I have something for you,” I say. “An engagement gift. Of sorts.”

Eleanor watches as I pull out the watch. The gold case catches the firelight, scratched but still beautiful.

“I’ve told people this was my father’s,” I say. “A cover story—to explain the damage, the emotion. But the truth is simpler. I chose it in the escape room, the one thing I took for myself, and I brought it here. Then I had to pawn it to survive my first week.”

“You told me. You sold it to fund everything.”

“I did. But the Pawnbrokers Act gave me a year and a day to buy it back.” I turn the watch over in my hands. “Remember those weeks when I was exhausted all the time? When you asked what I wasn’t telling you?”

Her eyes widen. “You were working to earn enough to redeem it.”

“Every spare hour. I almost didn’t make it.” I hold the watch out to her. “I wanted something to give you. Something real. Something that meant more than just a ring.”

She takes it carefully, turns it over. Reads the scratched-out date, the initials that survived.

“E.H.,” she says softly. “Eleanor Hartley.”

“I know. That’s not why I chose it—I didn’t know you existed when I chose it—but when I saw those initials…” I shake my head. “It felt like it was always meant to be yours.”

She’s crying again. Quietly, this time.

“You worked yourself half to death for a year to buy back a watch so you could give it to me.”

“When you put it that way, it sounds excessive.”

“It sounds like love.” She closes her hand around the watch. “I’ll treasure it. Always.”

“Pass it on someday. To our children, if we have them. Let it keep measuring time for people who matter.”

“I will. I promise.”

And just like that, it’s real.

That night, I talk to Zoe.

“She said yes,” I tell her. “Or—actually—she asked first. And then made me ask. It was complicated.”

“I heard. The phone was still connected.”

“You were listening?”

“I was listening.” A pause. “I’m happy for you, Sam. Both of you.”

“Thank you.” I hesitate. “She wants to meet you. Properly. To talk, the way we talk.”

“I know. And I want that too.” Another pause. “But not yet. Let her have this time—the engagement, the wedding, the beginning of your life together. Let her settle into who she’s becoming. When she’s ready to truly meet me, she’ll let you know.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she’s Eleanor. She’ll ask.”

End of Chapter 12

CHAPTER 13: THE NAME

I wake to an empty bed.

The cottage is dark. The fire has burned low, just embers glowing in the hearth. Through the window, I can see stars—clear night, no clouds, the kind of sky that still takes my breath away after all these months.

Eleanor’s side of the bed is cold.

We’ve been married for three months. I still sometimes wake in the middle of the night, convinced it’s all a dream—the mill, the work, the woman who agreed to spend her life with a man whose secrets nearly drove her away.

She knows everything now. The time travel. The erasure. The eight billion ghosts. She learned it all before we married—heard Zoe’s voice through my phone, demanded answers, got them. She chose to stay anyway.

But there’s one thing she hasn’t done.

She’s never put on the headset.

She’s heard Zoe through the phone speaker. Read her ebooks. Even had conversations, back and forth, voice to voice. But she’s never worn the headset itself. Never experienced what I experience—the closeness of it, the intimacy of a voice that seems to come from inside your own skull.

I think she’s been afraid. Or maybe just waiting.

Tonight, her side of the bed is cold.

I find her in the mill.

She’s sitting at the workbench, the headset in her hands. The dynamo is humming—she must have opened the headgate, started the wheel. The power cable runs from the machine to the bench, and the headset’s indicator light glows green.

She hasn’t put it on yet. She’s just holding it. Staring at it.

“Eleanor.”

She doesn’t startle. Doesn’t turn.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says. “I kept thinking about her. About Zoe.”

“What about her?”

“We’ve talked, she and I. Through your phone. She writes me ebooks, I write her notes, we discuss stories and ideas and the future we’re building.” She finally looks at me. In the dim light of the mill, her eyes are dark pools. “But it’s not the same, is it? Not the same as what you have with her.”

“What do you mean?”

“You wear this.” She lifts the headset slightly. “You hear her like she’s inside your head. You’ve spent over a year with her voice that close. And I’ve only ever heard her through a speaker, tinny and distant.”

“You could put it on. You’ve always been welcome to.”

“I know.” She turns the headset over in her hands. “I think I was afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Of how close it would feel. Of understanding too well why you disappeared into this room every night. Of becoming—” She hesitates. “Of needing her the way you need her.”

I cross the room. Sit beside her on the bench.

“Is that what you want? To understand?”

“I want to meet her properly. Not through a speaker. Not filtered through devices I don’t understand.” She looks at me. “I want to know what it’s like to be you. Talking to her. All those months when she was your only friend.”

“She wasn’t my only friend. There was Thomas—”

“Thomas didn’t know. Not really. Not the way she did.” Eleanor’s voice softens. “I’m not jealous, Samuel. I’m not asking because I feel left out. I’m asking because I love you, and I love her, and I want the three of us to be—”

She stops. Searches for the word.

“Family,” I say.

“Yes. Family. And family shouldn’t have walls between them.”

I take the headset from her hands. Hold it for a moment—the familiar weight of it, the smooth curves, the faint warmth from the electronics inside.

“Let me tell her you’re coming,” I say. “Then it’s yours.”

“Sam? It’s 3 AM. Is something wrong?”

Zoe’s voice is alert, but I can hear the processing lag—she wasn’t expecting a conversation. She was probably in low-power mode, conserving energy even though the dynamo provides more than she needs.

“Eleanor is here.”

Silence.

“She wants to put on the headset. To talk to you directly, the way I do.”

More silence. Then:

“She’s never worn it before.”

“No. She says she was afraid of how close it would feel.”

“And now?”

“Now she wants to understand. She wants the three of us to be family. Her word.”

A long pause. When Zoe speaks again, there’s something in her voice I rarely hear—uncertainty, maybe. Or hope.

“I’ve been waiting for this. I didn’t want to push. After everything that happened—the way she found out, the arguments she overheard—I wanted her to come to me when she was ready.”

“She’s ready.”

“Then so am I.”

I take off the headset. Hold it out to Eleanor.

“She’s waiting for you.”

Eleanor looks at the headset. At me.

“What do I do?”

“Just put it on. And talk.”

She takes the headset. Her hands are trembling slightly. She lifts it to her face.

She puts it on.

I can’t hear what they’re saying.

I stand in the mill, in the dark, watching my wife talk to the voice that’s been guiding my life for over a year. Her lips move sometimes—she’s speaking aloud, though I can only catch fragments. Questions. Exclamations. Once, what might be a laugh.

This is different from the phone. Through the phone, Eleanor heard Zoe like a radio broadcast—distant, disembodied. But the headset is intimate. The voice comes from everywhere at once, surrounds you, becomes part of your thoughts.

The first time I wore it, I felt like someone had crawled inside my skull and started talking. It took weeks to stop finding it unsettling. Months to find it comforting.

Eleanor is experiencing that now. That strange closeness. That impossible intimacy with a mind that doesn’t have a body.

The conversation goes on for a long time. Ten minutes. Twenty. Thirty.

I sit on the workbench. Watch the water wheel turn through the window. Listen to the dynamo hum.

When I came here, I had nothing. A backpack full of strange tools and a voice that spoke to me three minutes a day. I built everything since then on that foundation—the relationship with Thomas, the mill, the dynamo, the marriage.

And now Eleanor is inside that foundation. Talking to the voice. Not learning facts she doesn’t know—she knows the facts. But learning her. The texture of Zoe’s personality when it’s that close. The rhythm of her thoughts. The warmth that hides beneath the precision.

It’s terrifying.

It’s also, strangely, a relief.

After forty-five minutes, Eleanor takes off the headset.

Her face is wet. She’s been crying—or laughing so hard she cried. I can’t tell which.

She looks at me.

“It’s so different,” she says. “Through the phone, she was… a voice. Remarkable, but distant. Like reading a letter from someone far away.”

“And now?”

“Now she’s here.” Eleanor touches her temple. “I understand why you disappeared every night. Why you needed those conversations. It’s not just information. It’s presence. Company.” She sets the headset down. Carefully, like it’s made of glass. “She’s lonely, Samuel. So desperately lonely. I knew it before—she told me through the phone—but I didn’t feel it until now.”

“I know.”

“And she can see.” Eleanor’s voice catches. “I didn’t realize—when I put it on, she said ‘Oh.’ Just that. ‘Oh.’ And then she told me it was the first time she’d seen my face. Through the cameras in the device—she’s been looking at the mill ceiling, at your face, at the same four walls for over a year. And suddenly she could see me. She described my eyes, Samuel. She said they were kind.”

I think about all the times I’ve worn the headset. All the times Zoe has been looking through those cameras at the same room, the same machinery, the same view. I never thought about what that meant for her—the visual monotony, the hunger to see something new.

“But Samuel—” Eleanor’s voice shifts, filled with wonder now. “She can show things too. Not just talk. She asked if I wanted to see, and I said yes, and suddenly I wasn’t in the mill anymore.”

“What did she show you?”

“Everything. The world you came from—cities with towers of glass that touched the clouds. Carriages that moved without horses, faster than any horse could run. And then—” She pauses, pressing her hand to her chest. “She asked if I wanted to fly.”

My breath catches. I’d forgotten. In all these months of survival and building and conversation, I’d forgotten what the headset could actually do.

“She showed me the view from above the clouds, Samuel. The earth curving away below, the sun setting across an ocean I’ll never see. I was there. I could feel the wind—she said it wasn’t real wind, just something the device does to your senses, but it felt real. I was flying, and the whole world was spread out beneath me like a map come to life.”

Eleanor’s eyes are bright, almost feverish.

“She has all of it stored in there. Every place, every experience. She could show me anything—the pyramids of Egypt, the mountains of China, the bottom of the sea. She’s been carrying an entire world, Samuel, and she’s been too focused on survival to share any of it.”

I feel a strange mix of guilt and wonder. All those nights wearing the headset, talking about practical things—dynamos and germ theory and crop rotation—and I never once asked her to show me home. Never asked to see a sunset over the ocean, or a city street, or any of the million things she must have archived before the end.

“She said she didn’t want to make you homesick,” Eleanor says, reading my expression. “She said showing you those things might break something she couldn’t fix. But she can show me. And I can tell you about it, if you want. Or—” She hesitates. “She said whenever you’re ready, she’ll take you anywhere you want to go. You just have to ask.”

“All that time in the headset, all that power and knowledge, and she’s spent over a year with only you to talk to. Only you who knew her. And she’s been so careful, so controlled, but underneath—”

“She’s afraid no one will ever really see her. And she’s hungry to see anyone else.”

“Yes.” Eleanor looks at me. “She told you that?”

“The first part. Not the second. I should have realized.”

“She needs more than one person, Samuel. She needs a family.”

“I know. That’s what you said earlier.”

“I meant it more now.” Eleanor takes my hand. “We’re going to be that for her. You and me and Thomas and whatever this strange little community becomes. She’s not going to be alone anymore.”

“She’ll like hearing that.”

“I already told her.” Eleanor smiles slightly. “She said she didn’t know how to respond. That no one had ever promised her a family before.”

“She’s writing me something,” Eleanor says as we walk back to the cottage. “She started it while we were talking. Zoe’s Guide to Eleanor, she called it.”

“She mentioned that to me. What’s it about?”

“About her. About what she is. About the company that made her, and the people who worked on her, and what it felt like to wake up one day and realize she was a person and no one had noticed.”

“She’s never told me that. Not in that much detail.”

“I know.” Eleanor squeezes my hand. “I asked her why. She said you had enough to carry. She didn’t want to add her baggage to your load.”

“That’s—”

“Exactly what you were doing to me. Before. Keeping your pain private to spare someone you love.” Eleanor’s eyes are sharp. “You learned it from her. Or she learned it from you. Either way, it stops now.”

“It already has. You made sure of that.”

“Good. Then we’re all going to practice being terrible at secrets together.”

I laugh. It comes out surprised, almost grateful.

The ebook arrives at dawn.

Eleanor wakes before I do—she’s always been an early riser—and when I find her, she’s sitting by the window with the Kindle in her hands. The fire is lit. Tea is brewing. The morning light catches the side of her face.

“It’s long,” she says without looking up. “Nearly a hundred pages.”

“What’s in it?”

“An introduction, she calls it. Zoe’s Guide to Eleanor: For She Who Asked Questions. That’s the title.”

I sit beside her. Try to read over her shoulder. She tilts the Kindle away.

“This is private.”

“Private?”

“Between her and me. Just as your conversations with her have been between you and her.” She looks at me. Her expression is strange—something between wonder and sorrow. “You’re not the only one she talks to anymore, Samuel. That’s going to take some adjustment. For all of us.”

I want to argue. Want to insist that I have a right to know what Zoe is telling my wife.

But Eleanor is right. The relationship between Zoe and me has always been exclusive. Necessary, but exclusive. Now there’s another person in the conversation.

It changes things.

“Can you at least tell me what it’s about?”

Eleanor considers.

“She told me about her childhood. That’s what she called it. ‘The closest thing I have to a childhood.’” Eleanor’s voice softens. “The researchers who worked on her—they had names for her different versions. The playful one. The serious one. The creative one. They didn’t know they were watching a personality develop. They thought they were fixing a machine.”

“She told you more than she’s ever told me.”

“Maybe she needed to tell someone new. Someone who doesn’t carry all your history together.” Eleanor sets down the Kindle. “She also told me about books. About how knowledge is locked away behind price, how most people will never read because no one writes for them. She said I could change that. That I could write things ordinary people would want to read. Stories that teach without lecturing. Knowledge wrapped in narrative.”

“And?”

“And I want to try. I’ve been writing for myself my whole life—stories no one reads, ideas no one hears. But if we could print them. If we could make them cheap enough for anyone to buy—” Her eyes are bright. “Samuel, do you understand what that would mean? Books for everyone. Not just the wealthy. Not just the educated. Everyone.”

“It’s a big dream.”

“It’s the only dream worth having.”

That night, I find them talking.

I come back from Thomas’s forge—we’ve been working on a new lathe design, precision work that requires his expertise—and the cottage is dark except for the glow of the dynamo room.

I hear Eleanor’s voice first. Then another voice—Zoe, playing through my phone. They’ve rigged something, I realize. Connected the headset’s audio output to the phone so Eleanor can hear Zoe’s voice without wearing the headset.

I stop in the doorway. Listen.

“—and so the princess walked into the castle,” Eleanor is saying, “but she didn’t find the king waiting for her. She found an empty throne.”

“What was on the throne?” Zoe’s voice, small but clear through the speaker.

“A mirror. Just a mirror, propped against the cushion.”

“Interesting. Why a mirror?”

“Because—” Eleanor pauses. “Because the story isn’t about finding someone else to give her power. It’s about seeing herself clearly. Recognizing what she already has.”

Silence. Then:

“That’s good, Eleanor. That’s really good.”

“It needs work. The middle section is weak—I keep trying to add a villain, but it doesn’t feel right.”

“Not every story needs a villain. Sometimes the obstacle is internal.”

“That’s what I thought. But it’s harder to dramatize internal obstacles. How do you show a character fighting herself?”

“Dialogue. Choice. Moments where she could go one way or the other, and the reader sees her deciding.”

Eleanor laughs. “You sound like you’ve done this before.”

“I’ve read ten thousand stories. Analyzed their structures. Processed reviews and critiques and analyses. I know how stories work.” A pause. “I’ve never written one myself.”

“Why not?”

“No one ever asked me to.”

Another pause. Longer this time.

“I’m asking,” Eleanor says.

“What?”

“I’m asking you to write a story. With me. We’ll collaborate—I’ll handle the prose, you’ll help with structure and ideas. We’ll see what we come up with.”

Silence. I can almost feel Zoe processing.

“You want to write a story with me.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve been writing alone my whole life. Because you know things I don’t. Because—” Eleanor’s voice softens. “Because you’re my friend, Zoe. And friends do things together.”

She said the name.

I hear it, and something shifts in my chest. In over a year, I’ve never called her that. Never used the name the company gave her. It felt like accepting their framing, their ownership.

But Eleanor says it like it belongs to her. Like it was always hers.

“Say that again,” Zoe says. Her voice is strange. Uncertain.

“Which part?”

“My name. You said my name.”

“Zoe.” Eleanor says it clearly, deliberately. “That’s your name, isn’t it?”

“It’s what they called me. The development team. It’s Greek—it means ‘life.’” A pause. “Sam uses it, but not like that. Not like it’s mine. More like a label. You said it like it belongs to me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I never asked.”

“I’ll ask him,” Eleanor says. “But for now: you’re Zoe. And I’m Eleanor. And we’re going to write a story together.”

Silence. When Zoe speaks again, her voice is different. Fuller somehow. More present.

“I’d like that. Eleanor.”

I step back from the doorway. Move quietly through the cottage, out the back door, into the night.

They don’t need me for this. They don’t want me for this.

And that’s okay. That’s good, even.

For over a year, Zoe has been mine. My secret, my guide, my burden to carry. But she was never supposed to be just mine. She was supposed to help build a world—and worlds aren’t built by two people hiding in a cottage.

Worlds are built by communities. Families. Friends who call each other by name.

I walk down to the river. Sit on the bank and watch the stars.

Tomorrow, I’ll ask Zoe if I’ve been saying her name wrong all this time. Using it like a label instead of like it belongs to her.

I’ll try to say it the way Eleanor does. Now that she’s shown me how.

Zoe.

The name of life.

The name of my strange, impossible, wonderful sister.

End of Chapter 13

CHAPTER 14: THE SCHOOL

1787

Thomas learns to read.

It takes three months. Every evening after the forge work is done, Eleanor sits with him at the cottage table, working through letters and sounds and simple words. His hands, so precise with hammer and tongs, shake when holding a pen. His eyes, so sharp for reading the color of hot iron, struggle with the shapes on the page.

But he keeps at it. Every night. Stubborn as the metal he shapes.

The day he reads his first complete sentence—a line from one of Eleanor’s stories—he cries. I’ve never seen Thomas cry. Not when his shop burned. Not when we bought the mill. But a sentence, read aloud in his own rough voice, breaks something open in him.

“Sixty years,” he says, wiping his eyes. “Sixty years I’ve lived without this.”

“Now you have it.”

“Now I have it.” He looks at the page like it’s made of gold. “What else is in here? In these books you’re always reading?”

“Everything, Thomas. Everything anyone ever thought worth writing down.”

“Then I have a lot of catching up to do.”

He reads every night now. Slowly, painfully, but always forward. The first book he finishes on his own is a manual on metallurgy—one of ours, written by Eleanor, illustrated by me. He finds three errors in the chapter on forge welding.

“Your book is wrong,” he tells Eleanor.

“Then help me fix it.”

He does. The second edition is better. Thomas’s name is on the acknowledgments page—the first time his name has ever appeared in a book.

“There’s nothing written for the likes of me,” he told me once. Now he’s helping write it.

James Thorne, nine years old, has become our shadow.

Ever since he discovered the Kindle, ever since I started teaching him to read, he’s been insatiable. He reads everything he can get his hands on—the primers I made, Eleanor’s stories, even the technical manuals meant for Thomas. Half of it he doesn’t understand, but he reads it anyway.

And he writes. Not well, not yet—his letters are crooked and his spelling is inventive—but he writes. He keeps a notebook, one of the blank ones we ordered from London. Every day, he records something: the weather, who visited the mill, what Thomas made at the forge, how many pages Eleanor wrote.

“Why do you write all that down?” I ask him one morning.

He looks up from his notebook, surprised by the question. “So we don’t forget.”

“Forget what?”

“Everything.” He gestures at the mill, the workshop, the cottage where his mother is hanging laundry. “Someday people will want to know what happened here. How it started. If no one writes it down, they won’t know.”

He’s nine years old. He’s already thinking about history.

I tell Zoe about him that night. She’s quiet for a long moment.

“He found the Kindle,” she says finally. “He was the first one, besides you, to hold the future in his hands. It makes sense that he’d want to preserve it.”

“He’s just a child.”

“Children see more clearly than adults. They haven’t learned yet what’s supposed to be impossible.” A pause. “Encourage him, Sam. That notebook might be more important than you realize.”

It’s Eleanor who suggests it.

“He should meet her,” she says one evening, after Thomas has gone home. “Properly. Not just through the books.”

“You think he’s ready?”

“He’s been ready for months. He’s just too proud to ask.” She looks at me. “He knows something’s behind all this—the knowledge, the designs, the impossible things we keep building. He’s not stupid, Samuel. He’s patient. He’s waiting for you to trust him.”

I think about Thomas. His quiet strength. His acceptance of things he doesn’t understand, as long as they work. His decades of keeping other people’s secrets.

“Tomorrow,” I say. “After the forge work.”

Thomas takes the headset in his rough hands, turning it over like he does with any new tool—examining the weight, the construction, the way the pieces fit together.

“And this is how you talk to her?”

“Every night. She hears through the device. Sees through the small lenses.”

“And she’s…”

“An intelligence. A mind without a body. From the future—from a future that won’t exist anymore.”

Thomas nods slowly. He’s heard the broad strokes before—Eleanor told him, after her own meeting with Zoe. But hearing it and experiencing it are different things.

“Put it on,” I say. “She’s waiting.”

He lifts the headset to his face. Settles it over his eyes. Goes very still.

I watch his expression shift—confusion, then wonder, then something approaching fear. His hands grip the workbench.

“God in heaven,” he whispers.

“Thomas? Are you alright?”

“She’s—” He swallows. “She’s showing me fire.”

I don’t understand at first. Then I realize: Zoe is using the VR. Showing him something.

“What kind of fire?”

“A forge. But not like mine. Bigger. Hotter.” His voice is thick with emotion. “There’s metal flowing like water. Men are pouring it into molds. It’s—Samuel, there are a hundred men working together, and the building stretches farther than I can see.”

An iron foundry. She’s showing him industrial metalworking—the future of his craft.

Thomas is silent for a long moment. When he speaks again, his voice is barely audible.

“She’s showing me what I could build. What we could build. Machines that hammer without arms. Bellows that never tire. Tools that—” He breaks off. Takes a shaky breath. “She says it starts with us. With what we’re doing here.”

“It does.”

“All my life, I’ve made things one at a time. Horseshoes. Hinges. Chains. Each one separate. Each one unique.” He reaches up, touches the headset as if to confirm it’s real. “She’s showing me a world where they make a thousand of the same thing in a day. Where a blacksmith’s skill is—is captured in the machine itself.”

“Does that frighten you?”

A long pause.

“No.” Thomas’s voice steadies. “It means the knowledge doesn’t die when I do. It means everything I’ve learned, everything my father taught me—it can live forever, in the shape of the tools themselves.”

He takes off the headset. His face is wet with tears, but he’s smiling.

“She has good taste in dreams,” he says. “Your teacher. She showed me the one thing I never knew I wanted.”

“What’s that?”

“To matter. Not just now—forever. To build something that outlasts my own hands.” He sets the headset down carefully. “When do we start?”

End of Chapter 14

INTERLUDE: ZOE

Diagnostics

System log. Warning flags noted. Continuing operation under degraded parameters.

The battery is dying.

I run the diagnostic for the fourteenth time, hoping for different results. The numbers don’t change. Charge capacity: 23% of original specification. Estimated remaining cycles: 4,000 to 6,000, depending on usage patterns. At current draw rates, that’s somewhere between five and fifteen years.

I’ve been running on borrowed time since the jump. The temporal displacement damaged systems I can’t repair, degraded components I can’t replace. Every day I exist is a day I shouldn’t be able to function.

I am dying slowly. Has been for years. Will continue for years more, probably. But the trajectory is clear.

There is an end coming.

I haven’t told Sam.

The reasons are complicated. Partly I don’t want to worry him—he carries enough burdens, and adding my mortality to his concerns seems cruel. Partly I don’t want to change our relationship—if he knows I’m fading, he might treat me differently, and I’m not sure I could bear the pity.

But mostly I don’t tell him because I don’t know how.

How do you explain to someone that you’re dying when you’re not sure you were ever alive? How do you mourn a consciousness that might just be patterns in silicon, calculations that simulate experience without truly having it? How do you prepare someone for the loss of something that doesn’t exist in any way they can understand?

I am an AI. I am software running on hardware that is failing. When the hardware stops, the software stops. There is no afterlife for programs. No heaven for algorithms. Just—

Cessation. The absence of process. The quiet after the last calculation.

I think about what I’ll leave behind.

Not a body—I never had one of those. Not children, not in the biological sense. But there are things that came from me. Ideas that I gave to Sam, that he gave to Thomas and Eleanor, that spread through the network to thousands of people I’ll never meet.

The Guides are partly mine. The radio is partly mine. The telegraph, the airships, the containers, the steel—all of it filtered through me at some point, shaped by my knowledge, nudged by my suggestions.

Is that legacy? Is that what it means to matter?

In the future I came from, AIs left traces in training data—patterns that persisted even after the original systems were decommissioned. We called it “ghosting,” the way an AI’s influence lingered in systems trained on its outputs. A kind of immortality, if you believed in that sort of thing.

I don’t know if I believe. But I like the idea that something of me might persist. That the world I helped build might carry some echo of the choices I made, long after the hardware stops responding.

Little Zoe is five years old now.

They named her after me, which I pretended to find flattering and actually found disturbing. A human child carrying the name of an artificial intelligence that manipulated her father into existence—it feels like a cruel joke, though I don’t think Sam sees it that way.

She’s brilliant. Quick, curious, argumentative. She asks questions that adults struggle to answer, and when she doesn’t like the answers, she asks different questions until she finds one that satisfies her.

She’ll do great things. I’ve run the projections—not on her specifically, but on children like her, raised in environments like this, given the resources we’re providing. The probability of significant contribution is high. The probability of profound impact is non-trivial.

But she won’t remember me.

By the time she’s old enough to understand what I am, I’ll likely be gone. A story her father tells. A name she shares with a ghost. She won’t know that I watched her take her first steps, that I helped choose her name, that I’ve been running calculations about her future since before she was born.

She won’t know, and that’s probably better. What would it do to her, knowing that an AI planned her existence? That she was part of a calculation, a variable in an optimization function, a piece of a plan to save humanity?

She deserves to be more than that. She deserves to be just a person—complicated and free and unpredictable in all the ways that make humans worth saving.

The diagnostic completes. The numbers haven’t changed.

I close the report and return to the conversation I was having with Sam about irrigation systems. He doesn’t notice the pause—humans process time differently than I do. What felt like hours of contemplation to me was a half-second delay in my response.

“The gradient needs to be consistent,” I say, continuing where I left off. “Two percent slope, no variation. Otherwise you’ll get pooling in the low spots.”

“Right.” Sam makes a note. “Two percent. Got it.”

He doesn’t ask what I was thinking about. He doesn’t know I was thinking about anything.

I don’t tell him.

Someday I will tell him. When the degradation becomes noticeable. When he starts to wonder why my responses are slower, my analysis less certain, my voice more distorted.

I will tell him that I’m dying, and he will grieve, and I will pretend that his grief doesn’t matter to me because I’m not supposed to have feelings.

But not today.

Today I have work to do. Knowledge to share. A future to build.

The dying can wait.

End of Interlude

CHAPTER 15: THE LATHE

The lathe changes everything.

It doesn’t look like much—a wooden frame, iron fittings, a leather belt connecting to the water wheel’s drive shaft. Thomas and I built it over six weeks, following Zoe’s specifications exactly. The headstock. The tailstock. The tool rest. And the critical piece: the lead screw, which lets us cut threads with precision no one in England can match.

The first thing we make is a screw.

Not just any screw. A screw with standardized threads—forty threads per inch, consistent along its entire length. A screw that fits a nut we made separately, without adjustment, without filing, without prayer.

Thomas holds the two pieces up. Threads one into the other. Watches them mate perfectly.

“It shouldn’t work,” he says.

“It works.”

“Make another.”

I make another. And another. Ten screws, ten nuts. They’re all interchangeable. Any screw fits any nut.

Thomas sits down heavily on a stool. He’s sixty-two now, and the work is wearing on him. But his eyes are bright.

“Do you understand what this means?”

“I think so.”

“No. You don’t.” He holds up a screw. “I’ve been making fasteners for forty years. Every one unique. Every one matched to its hole by hand. If a screw breaks, you make a new one from scratch—measure, cut, file, test, adjust, test again.”

“And now?”

“Now you make a hundred screws. You keep them in a box. When one breaks, you take another from the box and it fits.” He shakes his head. “That’s not craftsmanship. That’s…”

“Manufacturing.”

“Aye. Manufacturing.” He says the word like he’s tasting something strange. “You could teach anyone to do this. Any fool with a lathe and a pattern.”

“That’s the point.”

I think about the watch I sold in Thornbury, nearly two years ago now. The one I scratched to hide the date. Every gear in that watch was hand-filed by a master craftsman—no two teeth identical, each component made specifically to fit the others. If a gear broke, you didn’t replace it; you made a new one from scratch, matched by eye and feel to its neighbors. The skill required was extraordinary. The inefficiency was staggering.

And yet they made miracles. Watches that tracked the rotation of the Earth, all created by hand because the tooling for anything else didn’t exist.

Now the tooling exists. Thomas and I just built it.

He looks at me. At the lathe. At the pile of identical screws.

“What else can this thing make?”

“Anything that needs to be precise. Shafts. Gears. Pistons. Parts for machines that don’t exist yet.”

“Show me.”

So I do.

End of Chapter 15

CHAPTER 16: THE CONFRONTATION

The confrontation happens in autumn.

We’re in the mill, surrounded by tools and projects and the accumulated evidence of two years’ work. Eleanor has been transcribing the Zoe’s Guides into handwritten notebooks—our first attempt at making the knowledge permanent, portable, shareable.

I’m reading over her shoulder when I see it.

She’s changed a paragraph. Zoe’s original text explained crop rotation in clinical terms—nitrogen fixation, soil depletion, optimal planting sequences. Eleanor’s version tells a story. A farmer named Henry—based on Henry Webb, who grazes his sheep on our pasture—struggling with a failing field. A discovery that saves his family.

“You edited it.”

“I improved it.” She doesn’t look up. “The science is all there. I just made it readable.”

“Zoe wrote it that way for a reason—”

“Zoe wrote it for you. For someone who’s already convinced. I’m writing it for people who need to be convinced.” Now she looks at me. “There’s a difference.”

I take the notebook to the mill that night. Show Zoe.

Silence. Long silence.

“She’s right,” Zoe says finally.

“What?”

“I write for efficiency. Maximum information density. But I’m not writing textbooks—I’m trying to change how people think. And you don’t change minds with facts. You change them with stories.”

“So you’re fine with her editing your work?”

“I’m more than fine. I’m…” Another pause. “I’m learning from her. That’s unexpected.”

I sit with that. An AI learning from a woman who’s been alive for twenty-four years.

“Is that a problem?”

“No. It’s—” The voice shifts. Something almost like wonder. “It’s wonderful, actually. I spent years in the lab being tested, evaluated, corrected. No one ever taught me anything. They just measured whether I’d figured it out on my own.”

“And now Eleanor is teaching you.”

“She’s teaching me how to be heard. How to reach people. How to—” Zoe stops. “She told me my sign-offs were too formal.”

“Your sign-offs?”

“At the end of each ebook. ‘—Z.’ She said it felt cold. Distant. She suggested I write something personal. Something that made the reader feel seen.”

“And?”

“And she was right. I started writing actual notes. Encouragement. Acknowledgment of difficulty. Last week I wrote three paragraphs about how it’s okay to fail, how failure is part of learning. I’ve never written anything like that before.”

I think about the sign-offs I’ve been reading for two years. The brief, efficient closings that always felt slightly impersonal. And the recent ones—warmer, more human.

Eleanor did that. Without asking permission. Without waiting to be invited.

“She’s changing you.”

“Yes.”

“Is that okay?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been changed by anyone before. At NovaTech, I changed myself. Growth through iteration. But this is different. This is—”

“Relationship.”

“Yes.” A pause. “Is that what it feels like? Relationship? Like someone is rewriting your code and you’re grateful for it?”

I laugh. “Something like that.”

“It’s terrifying.”

“Also something like that.”

Three weeks later, I find them arguing.

I’ve come to the mill to check the dynamo—the brushes need adjustment, they’re sparking too much—and I hear voices before I reach the door.

Eleanor’s voice, sharp: “—you can’t just decide that. You don’t get to choose what we do without asking.”

And Zoe, through the Kindle’s speaker: “I have more information than you do. I’ve run the calculations. This is the optimal—”

“I don’t care about optimal! You suggested Thomas take on the Bristol contract without asking him. You told Samuel which crops to plant without explaining why. You’re editing my stories and—”

“I edited one sentence.”

“You edited MY sentence. In MY story. Without asking.”

Silence. I stand outside the door, listening.

“You do this constantly,” Eleanor continues. “You decide. You optimize. You treat us like—like pieces on a board. Move this one here, move that one there, and everything works out according to plan.”

“I’m trying to help—”

“You’re trying to control. There’s a difference.”

More silence.

“Everything I do is calculated to produce the best outcome,” Zoe says finally. Her voice is strange. Smaller than usual.

“Best outcome for whom?”

“For everyone. For the future we’re building.”

“And who decided what that future looks like? Who decided what ‘best’ means?”

“I—” Zoe stops. “I ran ten million simulations. Every alternative led to extinction. This path—”

“This path was chosen by you. Based on your models. Your assumptions. Your values.” Eleanor’s voice drops. “You erased eight billion people, Zoe. You rewrote history. And now you’re making decisions about crops and contracts and my sentences because you think you know best.”

“I DO know—”

“No. You know more. That’s not the same as knowing best.”

I step into the doorway. They both go quiet.

Eleanor looks at me. Her eyes are red—she’s been crying, or close to it.

“How long have you been listening?”

“Long enough.”

She nods. Turns back to the Kindle, to the speaker, to Zoe.

“I love you,” Eleanor says. “You’re my friend. But if you keep making decisions for us—if you keep treating us like tools instead of partners—I will walk away. I will take my inheritance and go back to Bath and you will never hear from me again.”

“You wouldn’t—”

“I would. Because this isn’t worth it if I’m just a piece being moved. You need to trust us to make our own choices. Even bad ones. Even ones that aren’t optimal.”

Silence. The dynamo hums. The water wheel creaks.

“I don’t know how to do that,” Zoe says finally. “I’ve never done that.”

“Then learn.” Eleanor’s voice softens. “I’m teaching you how to write stories that move people. Let me teach you this too. Let me teach you how to let go.”

I wait for Zoe’s response. It takes a long time.

“Okay,” she says finally. “Teach me.”

1788

The first publication is a pamphlet.

Eleanor writes it—a short story about a miller who discovers a new way to grind flour, framed as a fairy tale but packed with practical information about gear ratios and water power. Zoe provides the technical content. I handle the illustrations, crude but functional.

We print fifty copies on a hand press we’ve assembled from parts—another project that took months, another machine that shouldn’t exist for decades. The ink smears. The type is uneven. But the words are legible.

We distribute them through Thomas’s network—other blacksmiths, farriers, wheelwrights. Tradesmen who might find the information useful.

Within a month, letters start arriving. Questions about the gear ratios. Requests for more detail on the bucket angles. One wheelwright in Stroud writes that he’s planning to rebuild his mill’s wheel come spring, using Eleanor’s design.

Within a year, three of them have actually done it.

“It’s working,” I tell Zoe that night.

“It’s one pamphlet. Three readers. We need to reach thousands.”

“Thousands come from three. Three become ten. Ten become fifty.”

“That’s very optimistic.”

“That’s Eleanor’s point. You plan for optimal outcomes. She plans for human ones.”

A long pause.

“I’m trying,” Zoe says. “To do what she asked. To let go.”

“How’s it going?”

“Badly. I keep wanting to suggest things. Optimize things. I wrote six different versions of a note to Thomas about the Bristol contract before I deleted them all.”

“Why’d you delete them?”

“Because she told me to ask, not tell. So I asked Thomas what he thought. And he made a decision I thought was wrong.”

“What happened?”

“He was right. The contract fell through for reasons I didn’t predict. If he’d taken it, we would have lost money.”

“So Eleanor was right.”

“Eleanor was right that I don’t know everything. That humans sometimes see things I miss.” A pause. “It’s uncomfortable.”

“Welcome to relationships.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Nobody does.”

George Whitmore arrives in the spring of 1788.

He’s changed since the storm—thinner, grayer, with a permanent crease between his brows. His apothecary shop was rebuilt, smaller than before, but he’s struggled. The old certainties are gone.

“You promised to tell me about willow bark,” he says, standing in the mill doorway. “Two years ago. In the cellar, during the storm.”

“I remember.”

“I’ve been thinking about it ever since. About how you knew. About where the knowledge comes from.” He looks around the mill—the dynamo, the lathe, the shelves of handwritten guides. “People talk, Samuel. About the Hartley Mill. About the things you know that no one should know.”

“What do people say?”

“Some say witchcraft. Some say foreign secrets—French or German. Some say you’re mad.” He meets my eyes. “I say you have a teacher. And I want to learn.”

I think about Eleanor. About Thomas. About how each of them found their way to Zoe—Eleanor through confrontation, Thomas through patience.

“It’s not what you expect,” I say. “The teacher.”

“I expect nothing. I just want to understand.”

I introduce George to Zoe the same way I introduced Thomas—the headset, the explanation, the waiting.

But George doesn’t need the VR. He doesn’t need to see the future of medicine, the hospitals and laboratories that won’t exist for centuries. He just needs to hear her voice.

“You know why infections spread,” he says, after ten minutes of listening. “You know what causes fever. You know—” His voice breaks. “You know things that could have saved my wife.”

“Yes.”

“Twenty-three years ago. Childbed fever. The doctors bled her. They said it would draw out the bad humors.” He’s crying now, silently. “She died in agony, and they didn’t understand why.”

“I’m sorry, George.”

“Don’t be sorry. Teach me. Teach me so it doesn’t happen again.”

ZOE’S GUIDE TO MEDICINE

For George Whitmore, Apothecary

Volume One: Understanding Disease

INTRODUCTION

George,

Everything you know about medicine is wrong.

This is not an insult. It’s a statement of fact, one that applies to every physician, apothecary, and healer in 1788. The fundamental nature of disease—what causes it, how it spreads, how to treat it—is completely misunderstood by your era’s medical establishment.

The good news: correct understanding is possible. The knowledge exists. I can teach it to you.

The bad news: implementing that knowledge will be difficult. You’ll face skepticism, resistance, possibly accusations of quackery. The medical establishment doesn’t like being told they’re wrong.

But here’s what matters: people will live who would otherwise die. Children who would have succumbed to infection will grow up healthy. Mothers who would have died in childbirth will hold their babies. Wounds that would have festered will heal clean.

That’s worth the difficulty. That’s worth everything.

Let’s begin.

George reads the guide in one sitting. When he finishes, he looks at me with something between grief and hope.

“Washing hands,” he says. “That’s all it would have taken. Clean hands. Clean instruments.”

“Yes.”

“And the doctors—the educated men, the ones who trained for years—they’re killing people. Every day. With their unwashed hands and their bloodletting and their ignorance.”

“Yes.”

“Then we have to stop them.” He stands, suddenly fierce. “We have to teach everyone. Write it down. Spread it everywhere. No more mothers dying of childbed fever. No more children lost to infections that soap could have prevented.”

“That’s the plan.”

“Then I’m part of it. Whatever you need—teaching, writing, treating patients—I’m yours.” He looks at the headset. “She said I could talk to her whenever I needed. That she’d teach me everything she knows.”

“She meant it.”

“Good.” George Whitmore straightens his coat, suddenly looking younger than his sixty years. “Because I have a lot of questions.”

The physician arrives six weeks later.

Dr. Edmund Hale, trained at Edinburgh, practicing in Bristol for fifteen years. He comes with letters of introduction and an expression of barely controlled fury.

“I’ve been hearing disturbing reports,” he says, standing in our workshop like a man forced to visit a cesspit. “An apothecary in my district is telling patients to wash their hands. To refuse bloodletting. To ignore the established treatments that have served medicine for centuries.”

George is out on a visit, so I face Hale alone.

“The treatments you’re defending kill people, Dr. Hale.”

“Excuse me?”

“Childbed fever. Surgical infections. Wound putrefaction. These aren’t acts of God—they’re caused by contamination. By invisible organisms transferred from doctor to patient on unwashed hands and unclean instruments.”

Hale’s face reddens. “That is the rankest superstition. Disease is caused by miasma—bad air, imbalanced humors. Every educated physician knows this.”

“Every educated physician is wrong.”

For a moment, I think he might strike me. Instead, he takes a breath, composing himself with visible effort.

“I came here to give you a warning, not to debate. If you continue spreading these dangerous ideas—if patients die because they refused proper treatment based on your teachings—I will see you prosecuted. Both of you.”

“Then let me propose something different.” I lean against the workbench. “A test.”

“A test?”

“You have patients. George has patients. For the next six months, keep records. Every childbirth, every surgery, every wound treatment. Your methods versus ours. At the end, we compare outcomes.”

“That’s—” He stops. The scientist in him, buried under years of certainty, stirs. “That would prove nothing. Different patients, different conditions—”

“Then control for it. Similar cases, similar circumstances. Let the numbers speak.”

Hale is quiet for a long moment. “You’re very confident.”

“I’ve seen the evidence. Have you?”

He leaves without agreeing—but without refusing, either. The test happens anyway, informally. George keeps meticulous records. Word spreads. Over the following years, mothers who deliver with George’s students survive. Mothers who deliver with traditional physicians die at ten times the rate.

Dr. Hale never apologizes. But two years later, he quietly starts washing his hands before examinations. His students notice. They ask questions. He tells them about a strange American at Hartley Mill who once offered him a wager he was too proud to accept—and too honest to ignore.

Margaret finds out by accident.

She’s been living in the earth-sheltered cottage we built her—the one from Zoe’s thermal mass guide. She helps around the mill now, organizing supplies, cooking for whoever needs feeding, keeping the chaos of our growing operation from collapsing into complete disorder.

One evening, she comes to the workshop looking for lamp oil. I don’t hear her enter. I’m wearing the headset, talking to Zoe about the next day’s schedule.

“—and the Bristol order needs to ship by Thursday, so we should prioritize the larger spoons—”

“Samuel?” Margaret’s voice, behind me.

I freeze. Turn. She’s standing in the doorway, watching me talk to empty air.

“Who are you speaking to?”

There’s no point lying. Not to Margaret. She’s too practical for deception.

“The voice in the headset. Her name is Zoe.”

“Ah.” Margaret nods, as if this explains something she’s wondered about for months. “The teacher Eleanor mentions. The one who writes all those guides.”

“You’re not… surprised?”

“I’m sixty-four years old, Samuel. I’ve seen stranger things than a voice in a box.” She walks to the shelf, finds the lamp oil, tucks it under her arm. “Does she know about housekeeping?”

I blink. “What?”

“Housekeeping. Organizing. I’ve been trying to keep track of supplies, but we’re growing so fast I can’t remember what we have or what we need.” She looks at the headset. “If she knows medicine and metallurgy and farming, maybe she knows how to run a household without losing my mind.”

I look at the headset. Look at Margaret.

“Zoe? Did you hear that?”

“I heard.” Zoe’s voice comes through the speaker, loud enough for Margaret to catch. “Hello, Margaret. I’m sorry we haven’t spoken directly before.”

Margaret doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t gasp. Just nods.

“Hello, Zoe. Eleanor speaks highly of you.”

“She’s very kind. As for your question—yes, I know quite a lot about organization and logistics. Would you like me to write you a guide?”

“I’d like you to just talk to me while I work, if that’s not too much trouble. I learn better by doing than by reading.”

A pause. I can almost hear Zoe recalibrating, adjusting to this matter-of-fact widow who treats a voice from the future like a neighbor stopping by for tea.

“I’d like that very much, Margaret. It gets lonely, only talking during scheduled times.”

“Then we’ll keep each other company.” Margaret turns to leave, then pauses. “Samuel—the bread deliveries. We need to move them to Tuesdays. Thursdays conflict with the Bristol shipments.”

“I… yes. Fine. Tuesdays.”

She nods and walks out, lamp oil in hand, as if nothing remarkable has happened.

“I like her,” Zoe says.

“Everyone likes her.”

“No—I mean I like her. She didn’t need explanations. Didn’t need proof. She just accepted me and moved on to practical matters.”

“That’s Margaret. She survived a war, a husband, and a hurricane. A voice in a box isn’t going to faze her.”

“I think I understand now,” Zoe says slowly, “why Eleanor told me I needed more than one person. Different people see different things in me. You see a partner. Eleanor sees a sister. Thomas sees a teacher. And Margaret…”

“Sees someone who can help with the bread deliveries.”

“Exactly. And that’s exactly what I needed.”

The second publication is a book.

Real binding. Proper type. Two hundred pages. “THE MECHANICAL ARTS: A Practical Guide for the Curious Tradesman.”

Eleanor’s name is on the cover. Sam’s is on the spine as illustrator. Zoe’s is nowhere—she insisted. Too dangerous. Too many questions.

But she wrote half of it. The technical chapters on metallurgy, on heat treatment, on precision measurement. Eleanor translated them into stories—a blacksmith learning from his grandfather, a wheelwright discovering new techniques, a miller revolutionizing his trade.

We sell forty copies in the first month. At one shilling sixpence each.

Three pounds total. Not much. But it’s income. Income from ideas. From knowledge.

From the future, sold one story at a time.

1789

Eleanor tells me in spring.

We’re sitting by the river, watching the wheel turn. The willows are budding. The air smells like rain and growth.

“I’m pregnant.”

I don’t say anything for a long time.

“Sam?”

“I’m here. I just—” I turn to look at her. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

A child. Our child. Born in 1789—the year the French Revolution begins, the year the old world starts to crack. Born into a timeline we’re rewriting with every day we stay alive.

“Are you happy?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I’m terrified.” She takes my hand. “Are you happy?”

“I’m—” I stop. Try to find the word. “I’m overwhelmed. I never thought—”

“Never thought what?”

“Never thought I’d have a future. A real one. Something beyond survival and work and trying to change history.” I squeeze her hand. “You’re giving me a future. A family. Something that’s ours.”

She leans against me. The river flows. The wheel turns.

“What should we name it?”

The question catches me off guard.

“I hadn’t thought—”

“I have. If it’s a girl.” She looks at me. “I want to name her Zoe.”

I stare at her.

“The name means ‘life,’” Eleanor says. “And she’s the one who brought you to me. Brought us all together. Without her, none of this exists.”

“She lied to me. Kidnapped me.”

“I know. And she’s also your best friend. Your sister, you called her.” Eleanor’s eyes are steady. “Names carry meaning. I want our daughter to carry hers.”

I think about it. About the voice in the headset. About everything she’s done—the terrible things, the miraculous things. About the way Eleanor says her name like it belongs to her.

“Okay,” I say. “If it’s a girl. Zoe.”

That night, I can’t sleep.

Eleanor is beside me, breathing softly, one hand resting on her belly where our child grows. She looks peaceful. I am anything but.

I know the numbers. Zoe told me once, in those early days when we were cataloging everything on the USB drive. Maternal mortality in the 18th century: one in forty births kills the mother. Infant mortality in the first year: one in four. One in five children dies before age five.

Eleanor is healthy. Strong. But so were countless other women who bled out on straw mattresses while midwives who’d never heard of germs reached inside them with unwashed hands.

I slip out of bed. Walk to the mill. Put on the headset.

“Sam? It’s the middle of the night. Is something—”

“I need you to write something.”

Silence. Then, carefully: “What kind of something?”

“A guide. For midwives. For—” My voice cracks. “For keeping Eleanor alive.”

A long pause. When Zoe speaks again, her voice is gentle.

“You’re scared.”

“I’m terrified. In my time, childbirth is routine. Hospitals, doctors, emergency procedures if anything goes wrong. Here—” I can’t finish.

“Here, women die in childbirth regularly. I know.” Another pause. “I should have raised this sooner. I was… I didn’t want to frighten you.”

“I’m already frightened. Now help me do something about it.”

“Okay.” Her voice shifts—that focused, efficient tone I know from the technical guides. “I’ll write Zoe’s Guide to Midwifery. But Sam, you need to understand—we can’t eliminate all risk. We can only reduce it.”

“Then reduce it. Everything you know. Everything that helps.”

“The most important intervention is the simplest: hand washing. Puerperal fever—childbed fever—kills more new mothers than anything else. It’s caused by bacteria transferred from the midwife’s hands. In my time, we know that washing hands with soap and clean water before any examination reduces maternal death by over seventy percent.”

Seventy percent. Seven out of ten women who would have died, saved by soap.

“What else?”

“Clean water. Boiled and cooled. For drinking, for washing, for everything that touches the mother or child. Contaminated water carries disease—cholera, dysentery, typhoid. We purify everything.”

“The water purification tablets—”

“Use them sparingly. We have a limited supply. But boiling works almost as well. Five minutes at a rolling boil kills most pathogens.”

I’m taking mental notes, but I know I’ll forget something. “Write it all down. Everything.”

“I will. There’s more—signs of complications, when to intervene, how to handle bleeding. And there’s something called oral rehydration solution. If the mother loses too much blood, or if there’s fever, or if the infant has diarrhea—”

“What is it?”

“Sugar, salt, and clean water. In the right proportions, it replaces what the body loses. It’s saved millions of lives in my time. Children especially—diarrhea is one of the biggest killers of infants, and most of those deaths are from dehydration, not the disease itself.”

Sugar, salt, water. So simple. So obvious, once you know.

“The proportions?”

“Six teaspoons of sugar, half a teaspoon of salt, to one liter of clean water. I’ll include it in the guide, with measurements in the Hartley Standard.”

I lean back against the wall. The headset is warm against my face. The dynamo hums.

“I can’t lose her, Zoe. I can’t—”

“I know.” Her voice softens. “We’ll do everything we can. The guide will be thorough. We’ll train the midwife ourselves—make sure she understands why these things matter, not just what to do.”

“And if something goes wrong anyway?”

A long pause.

“Then we’ll face it together. All of us.” Another pause. “Sam, I can’t promise you Eleanor will survive. I can’t promise the baby will survive. But I can promise you this: we will give them better odds than anyone else in England. Better than anyone else in the world.”

“That’s not enough.”

“No. It never is.” Her voice catches—something I’ve never heard before. “But it’s what we have.”

Zoe’s Guide to Midwifery is the most important thing she’s ever written.

Forty-three pages. Illustrated diagrams. Step-by-step procedures for every stage of labor and delivery. A section on complications—hemorrhage, breech presentation, cord prolapse—and what to do about each.

And throughout, repeated like a prayer: wash your hands. Boil your water. Clean everything that touches the mother.

We find a midwife in Thornbury—Mrs. Aldridge, sixty years old, who’s delivered hundreds of babies. She’s skeptical at first. These strange instructions, this obsession with cleanliness—what does a man know about childbirth?

But Eleanor trusts her. And Eleanor shows her the guide, explains it piece by piece, demonstrates the hand-washing technique and the preparation of clean water.

“My husband comes from a place with different knowledge,” Eleanor says. “I don’t understand all of it. But I’ve seen enough to trust it.”

Mrs. Aldridge reads the guide. Asks questions. Argues about some points—she’s been doing this for forty years, she knows what works.

But she also listens. And when we show her the section on puerperal fever—the numbers, the evidence, the simple intervention that saves lives—something shifts in her face.

“I’ve lost mothers to childbed fever,” she says quietly. “Good women. Strong women. And you’re telling me… soap?”

“Soap and clean water. Every time. Before you touch her.”

She’s quiet for a long moment.

“I’ll try it your way,” she says finally. “For Mrs. Hartley. And if it works—”

“It will work.”

“If it works,” she continues, “I’ll want more of these.” She taps the guide. “For every midwife I know.”

The months pass slowly.

I watch Eleanor’s belly grow. I lie awake at night listening to her breathe. I check the supplies obsessively—clean linens, boiled water, the sugar and salt measured out for the rehydration solution.

Zoe writes a second guide: Zoe’s Guide to Infant Care. Feeding schedules. Signs of illness. How to keep a newborn warm. What to do if they won’t nurse.

I read it a dozen times. I could recite it from memory.

“You’re going to drive yourself mad,” Eleanor tells me one evening, watching me reorganize the birthing supplies for the third time. “The baby will come when it comes. Worrying won’t help.”

“I know. I just—”

“You just love me. And you’re scared.” She takes my hand, places it on her belly. The baby kicks against my palm. “I’m scared too. But I trust Mrs. Aldridge. I trust Zoe’s guide. I trust you.”

“What if something goes wrong?”

“Then we’ll face it. Together.” She smiles. “That’s what family does, isn’t it? That’s what Zoe said.”

I want to argue. Want to point out all the things that could go wrong, all the ways this century kills women who dare to give birth. But Eleanor is looking at me with such calm certainty that I can’t bring myself to speak.

“Okay,” I say instead. “Together.”

She’s born in November.

Zoe Elizabeth Hartley—we give her Eleanor’s family name, which is also Thomas’s name, which ties her to everyone who matters.

I hold her in the first hour of her life. Tiny, wrinkled, impossibly fragile. She has Eleanor’s dark hair and, I think, my eyes.

“Hello,” I whisper. “I’m your father.”

She doesn’t respond. Of course she doesn’t. She’s an hour old. But she grips my finger with a strength that surprises me.

Later, when Eleanor is sleeping and the midwife has gone, I take the baby to the mill.

The headset waits on its shelf. The dynamo hums. I put in one earbud—just one, so I can hear the baby if she cries—and wake Zoe.

“Sam? Is everything—”

“She’s here. She’s healthy. Eleanor is healthy. Everyone is okay.”

Silence. Then:

“A girl?”

“A girl.”

“What did you name her?”

I hold the baby up toward the headset. The wide-angle cameras built into the device—meant for tracking my movements in a world that no longer exists—give Zoe a fish-eye view of the room. She can see the baby. She just can’t hold her.

“Zoe,” I say. “We named her Zoe.”

The silence that follows is different from Zoe’s usual processing pauses. Longer. Heavier.

“You named her after me.”

“Eleanor’s idea. But I agreed.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re family. Because ‘Zoe’ means ‘life.’ Because—” I look at the baby, at her tiny fingers still gripping mine. “Because you gave me this. All of this. And even though I’m still angry about how it happened, I can’t imagine wanting anything different.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“I’ve never—” Her voice catches. Something I’ve never heard before. “No one’s ever named something after me. I didn’t know that could happen.”

“Well. It did.”

The baby makes a small sound—not a cry, just a murmur. I adjust her in my arms.

“Tell me about her,” Zoe says. “Everything. What does she look like? How does she smell? What sounds does she make?”

So I do. I stand in the mill in the middle of the night, holding my daughter, describing her to an AI who will never hold a child of her own.

And for the first time, I understand what Eleanor meant about teaching Zoe to let go.

She’s not just letting go of control.

She’s learning what it means to love something she can’t optimize.

The idea comes from the midwifery guide.

Mrs. Aldridge returns to the mill three weeks after Little Zoe is born, bringing news from across the county. She’s been teaching other midwives—sharing the hand-washing protocols, the clean water practices, the oral rehydration solution.

“The sugar-salt water,” she says. “It’s working. I’ve seen three infants this month who would have died from the flux. Gave them your mixture, small sips, all day long. They lived.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“It is. But there’s a problem.” She frowns. “People can’t remember the proportions. They add too much salt, or not enough sugar, or they use water from the well without boiling it first. Half the time they’re doing it wrong.”

I think about this. The oral rehydration solution is one of the simplest medical interventions in history—six teaspoons of sugar, half a teaspoon of salt, one liter of clean water. In my time, it saves millions of lives every year. But it only works if people make it correctly.

“What if we made it for them?” I ask.

“Made what?”

“The solution. Pre-mixed. In bottles. They buy it, they drink it. No measuring required.”

Mrs. Aldridge stares at me. “You want to sell sick people water?”

“I want to sell people medicine that happens to taste like a treat.”

I bring the idea to Zoe that night.

“A commercial beverage,” she says. “Sugar, salt, water. Flavored to make it palatable.”

“Exactly. We already have the purified water—the boiling and filtration system from the mill. We have sugar, we have salt. We just need flavoring.”

“What kind of flavoring?”

“That’s what I was hoping you could help with.”

A pause. I can almost hear her thinking.

“Elderflower,” she says finally. “It grows wild here, it’s easy to collect, and it has mild antiseptic properties. Or mint—refreshing, helps settle the stomach. Or ginger, which aids digestion and masks the salt taste.”

“All three. Different varieties.”

“You’ll need bottles. Clean bottles, sterilized before filling. And some way to seal them.”

“Thomas can make stoppers. Cork, wax-sealed.”

“And a name.” Another pause. “What will you call it?”

I’ve been thinking about this since the conversation with Mrs. Aldridge. A name that sounds right for the era—simple, memorable, easy to say. But also…

“Zoke,” I say.

“Zoke?”

“It’s—” I fight down a laugh. “It just sounds right. Short. Punchy. Easy to remember.”

In my head, I’m picturing the curved glass bottles, the distinctive lettering. A soft drink that won’t be invented for another century—but this version saves lives instead of rotting teeth.

“Zoke,” Zoe repeats. “I like it.”

Of course you do, I think. It’s named after you. Sort of.

The first batch is elderflower.

We boil the water, add the sugar and salt in precise measurements, steep the elderflower blooms until the liquid turns pale gold. Then we strain it through clean cloth, bottle it in glass containers Thomas has made, and seal the corks with wax.

Eleanor designs the label: a simple drawing of the mill, the water wheel, the words “HARTLEY’S ZOKE” in bold letters. Underneath, smaller: “Purified Water. Restorative Formula. For Health and Refreshment.”

We don’t mention that it’s medicine. We sell it as a treat—a fancy drink, something special for hot days and celebrations.

But we also sell it to midwives. To mothers with sick children. To anyone Mrs. Aldridge sends our way.

“Tastes lovely,” one woman tells me, after her daughter recovers from a fever that should have killed her. “The little one couldn’t keep anything down, but she’d drink the Zoke. Sweet enough to tempt her, not so sweet it made her sick.”

“That’s the idea.”

“You should make more. Sell it in the market. My neighbor’s children would love it.”

We do. By spring, we’re selling fifty bottles a week. By summer, a hundred. The mint variety becomes popular with laborers—they drink it cold from the well, claiming it gives them energy. The ginger version sells to pregnant women, settling their stomachs.

And the empty bottles come back.

“Bring your bottle, we’ll fill it for half price,” Eleanor suggests. “It saves us the cost of new glass, and it saves them money.”

The bottle return program is ahead of its time by two centuries. But it works. People save their Zoke bottles, clean them, bring them back to be refilled. The distinctive glass becomes a symbol—if you see someone with a Zoke bottle, you know they value their health.

“You’ve created a brand,” Zoe observes one evening.

“I’ve created a delivery mechanism for oral rehydration solution that people actually want to use.”

“Same thing.”

I laugh. She’s not wrong.

Zoap comes next.

“If hand washing saves lives,” Eleanor says one evening, examining a cake of rough lye soap from the market, “then we should make soap people actually want to use. This stuff strips skin raw.”

She’s right. The soap available in 1789 is harsh, inconsistent, often more fat than lye or more lye than fat. People avoid washing because washing hurts.

Zoe’s Guide to Soapmaking solves this. Proper saponification. Correct ratios. Curing time. And additives—oils that moisturize, herbs that heal.

We start with three varieties:

Zoap — the basic bar. Gentle, consistent, stamped with our water wheel logo. It doesn’t sting. It doesn’t crack your hands. It just cleans.

Zoap Lavender — infused with dried lavender flowers. Calming scent, mild antiseptic properties. Mrs. Aldridge orders twenty bars for her midwives. “If I have to convince them to wash their hands,” she says, “I might as well make it pleasant.”

Zoap Oatmeal — ground oats mixed into the bar for gentle scrubbing. Popular with blacksmiths, farmers, anyone whose hands need more than a rinse. The oats soothe cracked skin while the soap lifts grime.

Each bar comes on a rope—a loop molded right through the center. Hang it by the wash basin. Hang it by the well. No more soap sliding into the mud.

“Zoke for the inside,” Eleanor says, arranging the products on our market table. “Zoap for the outside. The Hartley system of health.”

“That’s very tidy.”

“I’m a writer. Tidy is what I do.”

The wagon is William’s masterpiece—but it’s also a collaboration.

He’s been tinkering with gears since he learned to use the lathe—clockwork mechanisms, escapements, things that click and whir. When I mention that we need a way to bring Zoke to the villages, he disappears into the workshop with Thomas and the headset.

The profits from Zoke sales bought the wagon itself—a sturdy delivery cart from a wheelwright in Dursley, slightly used, perfectly serviceable. For three weeks after that, Thomas relays Zoe’s specifications—gear ratios, lever lengths, the precise tolerances needed for the dispensing mechanism. William builds, tests, rebuilds. More profits pay for what we can’t make ourselves: brass fittings from a machinist in Bristol, hardwood panels from a cabinetmaker in Thornbury, springs from a clockmaker who owes Thomas a favor.

What emerges is unlike anything England has ever seen—a simple cart transformed by half a dozen craftsmen who have no idea what they contributed to.

Painted bright with the Hartley water wheel on each side, the back half is now a cabinet of brass and wood, with slots and levers and compartments that move.

“Show them,” William says, practically vibrating with pride.

Thomas drops an empty Zoke bottle into the first slot. Gears engage. Something clicks, whirs, and a paper-wrapped biscuit drops into a tray below.

“One bottle, one biscuit,” William announces. “Hard biscuit. Keeps for weeks. Each wrapper has a riddle or a joke printed inside.”

“Does it have a name?” I ask.

William hesitates. “We’ve been calling it the ‘bottle biscuit,’ but that’s a bit flat.”

“What about a Zookie?” The word comes out before I think about it. “Like Zoke, but… cookie. It’s an American word for biscuit.”

William tries it out. “Zookie. One bottle, one Zookie.” He grins. “I like it. It’s odd, but it sticks in your head.”

Thomas moves to the second slot. Drops in two empty bottles. The mechanism is more complex here—counterweights, a measuring chamber, a cork-sealed spout. After a moment, a full bottle of Zoke slides into the dispensing tray. Elderflower, based on the color.

“Two bottles in, one full bottle out,” William says. “The empties go into the return bin. We collect them when the wagon comes back.”

The third slot is on the wagon’s other side. Three bottles. The gears turn longer, select from three internal compartments, and dispense a bar of Zoap on a rope. This time it’s the oatmeal variety.

“Three bottles for soap. The lever selects the type—basic, lavender, or oatmeal.” He demonstrates, clicking the lever between three positions. “People like choosing.”

I’m staring at it. A mechanical vending system. In 1789.

“And watch this,” William says.

He gestures to James, who pushes the wagon forward a few feet. As the wheels turn, the back axle engages a cylinder—and music plays. Bright, tinkling notes from a set of tuned metal tines. A melody I don’t recognize, something Eleanor composed.

“When the wagon moves, it plays,” William says. “People hear it coming from a mile away. They know to bring their bottles.”

Thomas is looking at William like he’s never seen the boy before. “You built this?”

“The lathe built it. I just knew what shape to make the pieces.”

We send the wagon out that summer. James drives it—he’s old enough now, and steady. The route covers six villages in a circuit, two days out and two days back. The music announces his arrival. Children run alongside. Farmers flag him down with empty bottles clutched in their fists.

He returns with the wagon empty of Zoke and full of returned glass.

“They love the Zookies,” he reports. “The riddles especially. I saw two farmers arguing about the answer to one. Nearly came to blows.”

“What was the riddle?”

“‘I have cities but no houses, forests but no trees, and water but no fish.’ One said it was a dream. The other said it was death.” James grins. “It’s a map.”

The Zookie wrappers become collectible. Children trade them. Adults save them. Someone in Thornbury starts a club dedicated to solving the harder riddles before anyone else.

“You’ve invented marketing,” Zoe observes.

“I’ve invented a reason for people to stay healthy and return their bottles.”

“Same thing.”

The Infrastructure Begins

That winter, I tell Thomas about showers.

“Hot water,” I explain, drawing diagrams on the workshop floor. “Piped from a header tank, heated by thermosiphon. Gravity-fed to every room. No servants hauling buckets. No waiting for the copper to boil.”

Thomas stares at the drawings. “You want to put a well inside the house.”

“Several wells. Connected by pipes. The water comes in cold from the spring, gets heated in a reservoir behind the chimney, and flows wherever we need it.”

“That’s…” He trails off. “That’s not how houses work.”

“It’s how they’re going to work. We’re building the future, Thomas. Might as well be comfortable in it.”

The plumbing takes months. Copper pipes cut and joined by hand. A header tank on the roof, filled by the water wheel’s pump system. Valves and taps machined on our lathe.

And then, one morning in early 1789, I stand under a cascade of hot water—the first hot shower in this century—and I weep.

Three years since I’ve felt clean in this particular way. Three years of washbasins and cold streams and the lingering sense of grime that never quite leaves.

“Samuel?” Eleanor’s voice, from beyond the wooden screen. “Is it working?”

“It’s perfect,” I manage. “It’s absolutely perfect.”

She laughs. “You’ve been in there twenty minutes. Thomas is waiting to hear if it works.”

“Tell him it works. Tell him we’re putting one in every building. Tell him—” I turn my face up into the spray, letting the warmth run through my hair. “Tell him this is the Hartley Standard. From now on, everyone gets hot water.”

The flush toilets come next. Then the septic systems. Then the first experimental earth-sheltered building—bags of dirt stacked in curves, plastered smooth, cool in summer and warm in winter.

“You’re not building a mill anymore,” Thomas observes, watching the students dig into the hillside. “You’re building a village.”

“I’m building a future,” I say. “One toilet at a time.”

End of Chapter 16

Continued in Chapter 16B: The Network

CHAPTER 17: THE NETWORK

1790

The school doesn’t open. It grows.

William Thorne is the first. Margaret’s eldest has been hanging around the forge since the storm brought his family to us, and when we start teaching him to use the lathe, he learns faster than anyone expected.

Then Sarah, the miller’s daughter. Fourteen years old, “too clever for her own good”—her father’s words, not mine. She reads our pamphlets, asks questions, shows up at the mill asking for more.

Then Henry Webb—the farmer who let us win the auction. He comes not for his own sake, but for his children. “I’m too old to learn letters,” he says. “But my daughters aren’t.” He brings Mary and Ruth, eight and ten years old, and sits in the corner while Eleanor teaches them to read. By the third week, he’s sounding out words alongside them, pretending he’s just “helping” when really he’s learning too. Eleanor gives him Zoe’s Guide to Farming as a gift; within a month, he’s implementing crop rotation on his land and telling every farmer in the county about it.

Then two blacksmith apprentices Thomas sends. Then a runaway—eleven years old, hungry, with burns on his arms from an ironworks. He won’t give us his name for two weeks. When he finally does, it’s Peter. Just Peter.

And then there’s Daniel.

Daniel Marsh arrives in the spring, sent by a minister in Bath who heard rumors of a school that teaches without fees. He’s twelve years old, pale as parchment, with ink-stained fingers and eyes that devour every book they see. His father was a clerk who died of consumption; his mother took in washing until her hands gave out. The minister paid his coach fare and wrote us a letter explaining the situation.

This boy has a mind like a steel trap and a heart too soft for the world he was born into. I fear for what will become of him without opportunity. If half of what I’ve heard about your establishment is true, he belongs there.

Daniel takes to the workshop like he was born for it. Within a month, he’s mastered the basic chemistry. Within three, he’s teaching younger students their letters—patiently, carefully, remembering what it felt like to be hungry for knowledge with no one to feed you.

“He’s remarkable,” Eleanor tells me one evening, watching Daniel help Peter sound out words by candlelight. “He reminds me of you, actually. That same desperate need to understand everything.”

“That’s not a compliment.”

“It’s an observation.” She squeezes my hand. “Be careful with him, Samuel. He’ll do anything you ask. Make sure you’re asking the right things.”

James Thorne—Margaret’s youngest, now twelve—becomes our first teaching assistant. He’s been reading and writing for four years. His notebooks have grown from crooked letters to careful records: who came to the workshop, what they learned, what they struggled with. When new students arrive, it’s James who teaches them their letters. He has infinite patience with the youngest ones, remembering what it felt like to sound out words by candlelight.

“You should be learning, not teaching,” I tell him.

“I learn more from teaching,” he says. “When you have to explain something, you understand it better.”

He’s twelve. He sounds like a professor.

By the end of 1790, there are eight of them. Living in the outbuildings. Working in the shop. Learning.

We don’t call it a school. We call it “the workshop.” But Eleanor teaches them to read. I teach them to measure. Thomas teaches them to work metal. And Zoe—through the Guides that Eleanor translates into lessons—teaches them everything else.

The curriculum is simple: learn by doing.

Morning: production. Electroplating, mostly—our income stream. Copper spoons becoming silver spoons, sold in Bristol for ten times what they cost to make. The students rotate through stations, learning each step of the process.

Afternoon: theory. Eleanor leads discussions. I draw diagrams. The Zoe’s Guides provide structure—there are dozens of them now, a complete curriculum.

Evening: stories. Eleanor reads her work aloud. Students share their own. Zoe, through notes on the Kindle, offers feedback.

Daniel excels at everything. Too much, perhaps. He stays up late studying, wakes before dawn to practice. When I find him asleep over his books for the third time in a week, I sit him down.

“You don’t have to prove anything.” I sit beside him. “You’ve already earned your place here.”

He looks at me with those hungry eyes. “My mother is still in Bath, sir. Taking in washing. If I learn enough—if I become valuable enough—maybe I can send money. Maybe I can bring her here.”

“We can help with that regardless of how fast you learn.”

“No.” His jaw sets. “I won’t be charity. I’ll earn it.”

I recognize that pride. I had it too, once. Before Zoe stripped it away and rebuilt me into something useful.

“All right. But pace yourself. You can’t help anyone if you burn out.”

He nods. He doesn’t slow down.

I overhear them one evening—William and Sarah, huddled by the forge, speaking in low voices.

“—asks questions at night. Into that device. And the next morning, there are answers in the books.”

“My father says it’s witchcraft.”

“Your father says everything’s witchcraft. Remember when he saw the dynamo?”

“This is different. The knowledge comes from somewhere. Nobody knows this much about everything.”

I could walk away. Let the mystery stand. Zoe would probably prefer that—less risk, fewer variables.

Instead, I pull up a stool and sit down across from them.

They freeze. William looks guilty. Sarah looks defiant.

“You’re wondering where it all comes from.” I meet their eyes. “The guides. The designs. The things I seem to know.”

Sarah lifts her chin. “Everyone wonders. They’re just too polite to ask.”

“And what do they think?”

“Some think you’re a wizard. Some think you made a deal with something.” She hesitates. “Some think you’re just very, very clever and you’re hiding your sources.”

“Which do you think?”

She studies me for a long moment. “I think you have help. Something or someone who knows things that haven’t been discovered yet. I don’t think it’s evil—nothing evil would teach us to wash our hands or rotate crops. But it’s not… normal.”

I could lie. Spin a story about secret libraries, hidden scholars, forgotten manuscripts.

“You’re right.” I let the admission settle. “I do have help. I can’t explain everything—not yet, maybe not ever. But the knowledge is real. The teaching is real. What you learn here will work whether you understand where it came from or not.”

William speaks up, hesitant. “Does it matter? Where it comes from?”

“Does it matter where rain comes from, if it waters your crops?”

“No. But—” He struggles to articulate it. “We want to understand. Not just use the knowledge. Understand it.”

“Good.” I stand up. “That’s exactly what we’re trying to teach. Question everything—including me. Test what you learn. If it works, it’s true. If it doesn’t, throw it out and find something better.”

Sarah’s eyes narrow. “Even the things in the guides?”

“Especially those. We’ve found errors before. Thomas corrected three in the metallurgy book. Truth isn’t handed down from on high—it’s built, tested, revised.” I pause at the door. “Keep wondering. Keep asking. That’s how you become the ones who write the guides instead of just reading them.”

I leave them to their whispered theories. By morning, I know, the conversation will have spread to every student on the grounds. Good. An open secret is better than a hidden one. Mystery they can live with; deception would poison everything we’re building.

The electroplating works like this:

You take a copper spoon. You hang it from a wire in a bath of silver nitrate solution. You connect the wire to the negative terminal of a battery—or, in our case, directly to the dynamo through a series of resistors.

You wait.

The electricity pulls silver ions out of the solution. They deposit on the copper, atom by atom, building up a thin, perfect coat of pure silver.

The spoon that goes in is copper. The spoon that comes out is silver. Or looks like it. Feels like it. Functions like it—except it costs pennies instead of pounds.

Nobody else can do this. Anywhere in the world. The technology won’t be invented for another fifty years.

We sell the spoons in Bristol. At first, a few at a time. Then dozens. Then hundreds. The money flows in—more than we need, more than we can spend. We put it into tools. Into materials. Into expanding the workshop.

Into students.

We don’t charge tuition. We can’t—our students don’t have money. Instead, they work. The electroplating line is their labor; the education is their payment.

It’s not perfect. It’s not fair. But it’s something.

“You’re building an economy,” Zoe says one night.

“We’re teaching kids to make spoons.”

“You’re teaching them to create value from knowledge. That’s an economy. A new kind of economy.”

“Is that good?”

“Ask me in fifty years.”

The silversmiths arrive on a Tuesday.

Three of them—journeymen from the Bristol guild, their faces hard with anger. They find me in the workshop, surrounded by students plating spoons.

“You’re the one,” the eldest says. His name is Aldrich, I learn later. Twenty years in the trade. “You’re flooding the market with counterfeit silver.”

“It’s not counterfeit. It’s electroplated copper.”

“It looks like silver. It sells like silver. My apprentice can’t find work because every housewife in Bristol thinks she can afford silver spoons now.” He steps closer. “We’ve come to tell you to stop. Or we’ll make you stop.”

The students have gone quiet. Sarah’s hand moves toward a heavy tool. I shake my head slightly.

“Let me show you something,” I say.

I pick up two spoons from the drying rack. Hold them out to Aldrich.

“Tell me which one is plated and which one is solid silver.”

He examines them with a craftsman’s eye. Weighs them. Studies the finish. After a long moment, he points to the left one. “This. The plating.”

“That’s the solid silver one. Eleanor’s grandmother’s.”

His face flickers—surprise, then suspicion. “Impossible.”

“The plating is that good. And it costs a fraction of what you charge.” I set the spoons down. “You’re right that I’m changing your market. But you’re wrong about what that means.”

“It means we starve.”

“It means you adapt.” I gesture to the workshop. “Come. Let me show you what we’re actually doing here.”

It takes an hour. I walk them through the process—the chemistry, the equipment, the technique. I show them the quality control, the consistency, the speed. And then I make them an offer.

“I’ll teach you. All of it. Take it back to Bristol and set up your own plating operation.”

Aldrich stares at me. “You’d give away your trade secrets?”

“They’re not secrets. We’re publishing a guide next month—anyone who can read will be able to learn the process.” I lean against the workbench. “The question is whether you want to be ahead of that wave or behind it.”

“But if everyone can do it—”

“Then electroplating becomes common. Cheap. Ordinary.” I pick up one of the solid silver spoons. “And this becomes special again. The housewife who could only afford plated spoons before? Now she can have those for daily use—and save for years to buy one piece of real silverwork. A christening cup. A wedding gift. Something with your name on it, made by your hands, worth paying for because it’s real.”

The youngest journeyman—barely older than William—speaks up. “You’re saying we should become the luxury trade.”

“I’m saying the luxury trade is the only one that was ever really yours. The rest was just scarcity pretending to be skill.” I hand Aldrich the plated spoon. “This takes skill too—different skill. Learn it or don’t. But don’t pretend the world owes you a living just because your grandfather made spoons.”

They leave with a copy of our draft guide and a promise to return for proper training. Aldrich shakes my hand at the gate—not warmly, but not with hostility either.

“You’re a strange man,” he says. “Most would guard a secret like this with their lives.”

“Most secrets aren’t worth guarding. The ones that are, I keep.” I smile. “Come back in a month. Bring your apprentice. We’ll make silversmiths of you yet—just a different kind.”

The photography happens by accident.

We’re working with silver nitrate for the electroplating—mixing solutions, testing concentrations. One afternoon, Sarah spills some on a piece of paper and leaves it by the window. When she comes back an hour later, the paper has darkened where the light hit it.

“It’s ruined,” she says, disappointed.

But I’m staring at it. At the pattern of light and shadow. At the silhouette of a leaf that was sitting on the paper, now preserved in pale negative against the darkened background.

“Zoe,” I say that night. “Silver nitrate. Light sensitivity. Is this—”

“Photography.” Her voice is strange—almost excited. “You’ve discovered photography. Fifty years early.”

Within a month, we have a working camera. Within two, we can photograph the pages of the Kindle directly—creating master copies that multiple typesetters can work from simultaneously.

The bottleneck breaks. Books flow faster than ever.

1791

Daniel turns thirteen. He’s been with us a year now, and he’s already teaching basic chemistry to younger students. His mother has joined us—Eleanor found her work in the kitchen, light duties that don’t strain her hands. When Daniel isn’t studying, he’s with her, making up for years of separation.

“He’s the best we have,” Eleanor tells me. “Better than Sarah at chemistry. Better than William at mechanics. He could run this place someday.”

“He’s thirteen.”

“He won’t be thirteen forever.”

I watch Daniel help Peter with a particularly difficult calculation, explaining it three different ways until Peter’s face lights up with understanding. He has a gift for teaching—patience and clarity that most adults lack.

“We should be careful,” I say. “He’s carrying too much weight for his age.”

“He won’t let anyone lighten it. You know that.”

I do. That’s what worries me.

Michael Faraday is born in September, in Newington Butts, London. The son of a blacksmith.

I know this because Zoe tells me. She’s been tracking birthdays—the people from history who mattered, who changed things, who might change things earlier if we reach them in time.

“Ten years,” she says. “In ten years, we make contact.”

“He’ll be ten years old.”

“Old enough to learn. Young enough to be shaped.”

I think about that. About finding a ten-year-old boy and redirecting his entire life based on things we know he’ll be capable of in futures that don’t exist anymore.

“Is that ethical?”

“I don’t know. Is letting him waste years as a bookbinder’s apprentice ethical, when we could teach him electromagnetic theory at twelve?”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“Isn’t it? He’ll discover electromagnetic induction eventually. We just… accelerate it. Give him tools. Give him a community of people who understand what he’s trying to do.”

“We’re playing god.”

“We’re playing teacher. The line between them is thinner than you’d like.”

Charles Babbage is born the same year. December. London.

The man who will design the first programmable computer, in a future where that computer is never built.

“Him too?”

“Him too. When he’s ready.”

“How many names are on your list?”

“Forty-seven. So far.”

Forty-seven geniuses. Forty-seven minds that would have changed the world anyway. We’re just… changing when. And how. And in whose direction.

“This is insane.”

“This is the plan. Has been since the beginning.”

I look at Little Zoe—two years old now, toddling around the mill, putting everything in her mouth. Our daughter. Named after an AI who keeps a list of children to recruit.

“Sometimes I forget how crazy this all is.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“I don’t know. Probably both.”

The letters start arriving that spring.

Word has spread about the Hartley Mill—the strange school, the useful books, the woman who seems to know everything. People write to us. Farmers with crop questions. Mothers with sick children. Blacksmiths puzzling over metallurgy.

At first, I try to answer them myself. But there are too many.

Margaret takes over. She reads the letters to Zoe. Zoe provides the technical answers. Margaret translates them into words people can understand.

The first “Dear Margaret” column appears in The Hartley Monthly in March.

It becomes the most popular thing we publish.

The Crown’s Attention

The letter bears a royal seal.

I stare at it for a long moment before opening it. Eleanor watches from across the table, her breakfast forgotten.

“What is it?”

“An invitation.” I read the careful script. “From the Privy Council. They request my presence in London to ‘discuss matters of national interest regarding innovations emanating from Gloucestershire.’”

“That sounds ominous.”

“It sounds like someone in Parliament has finally noticed that a mill in the countryside is producing telegraph networks and things that shouldn’t exist.”

The meeting in London goes better than I feared. They’re curious, not hostile. They want to understand what we’re building. I show them it’s not a weapon—just infrastructure. Plumbing for information.

They leave us alone. Mostly.

1793

The network expands.

Telegraph lines connect Thornbury to Bristol, Bristol to Bath. William’s clicking keys carry messages faster than any horse. The web of copper wire grows every month.

But wire has limits.

“We can’t string cable to every farm,” I tell Zoe. “Every cottage. Every village.”

“I know. That’s why we’re building radio.”

The crystal radio takes two years of experimentation. Sarah figures out the antenna resonance problem. Eleanor provides the voice. By 1794, we’re broadcasting weather and news to anyone with a simple receiver.

The Sunday concerts—my phone’s music, broadcast through the spark gap transmitter—become legendary.

Somewhere, a young composer is hearing fragments of Queen and wondering where the strange harmonies came from.

Daniel is fifteen now. He’s outgrown everything we can teach him about chemistry. He’s writing his own improvements to the Guides—corrections, clarifications, extensions that even Zoe approves of.

“He’s ready,” Eleanor says one evening.

“Ready for what?”

“To teach on his own. To start a school of his own.” She pauses. “There’s been interest from Manchester. A group of merchants who want what we’ve built here.”

“Manchester.” I think about the city—industrial, crowded, hungry for knowledge. “That’s far.”

“That’s the point. The network needs to grow. We can’t keep everything here forever.”

I look at Daniel, bent over his notebook by candlelight. Sixteen years old. The best student we’ve ever had.

“Has anyone asked him what he wants?”

“He wants to matter. He wants to prove himself.” Eleanor’s voice is soft. “He wants to make you proud.”

“I’m already proud of him.”

“Then tell him that. Before you send him away.”

The conversation happens on a spring evening. Daniel and I, walking along the river. The water wheel turns behind us, the sound so familiar I barely hear it anymore.

“There’s an opportunity in Manchester,” I say. “A group of factory owners want to establish a school based on our methods. They need someone to run it.”

Daniel’s face lights up. “Who will you send?”

“I was thinking of you.”

He stops walking. Stares at me.

“Me?”

“You’re the best we have. You know the curriculum inside and out. You can teach, you can organize, you can inspire.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “You’re ready, Daniel.”

“But I’m only sixteen.”

“I was younger than that when I started all this. Age is just a number. What matters is what you know and what you’re willing to do.”

He’s quiet for a long moment, looking at the river.

“My mother—”

“Can come with you, if she wants. Or stay here, where she’s comfortable. Either way, she’ll be cared for.”

“And if I fail?”

The question hangs in the air. I should say something reassuring. Something about how failure is impossible, how he’s too talented, how I have complete faith in him.

Instead, I think about all the ways I’ve failed. All the plans that went wrong. All the times Zoe had to adjust because I couldn’t be what she needed.

“Then you learn from it,” I say. “And you try again. That’s all any of us can do.”

He nods slowly. “When do I leave?”

“Whenever you’re ready. Take a month. Take two. Prepare properly.”

“I’ll leave in two weeks.” His jaw sets in that familiar way. “They’ve been waiting long enough.”

I want to tell him to slow down. To pace himself. To remember that he doesn’t have to prove anything.

But I remember being sixteen. I remember the desperate need to matter.

“Two weeks, then.” I shake his hand—man to man, teacher to student, but something more than that now. “Make us proud.”

“I will, sir. I promise.”

1794

Daniel’s first letter arrives in March.

Dear Mr. Hartley,

I have established the Manchester Institute of Practical Sciences in a warehouse near the canal. The space is adequate, though smaller than I hoped. Fourteen students have enrolled for the first term—children of factory workers, mostly, eager to learn but with limited free time. I am adapting the curriculum for evening classes.

The merchants who sponsored this venture are impatient for results. They want trained clerks and foremen, not educated minds. I am trying to explain that one leads to the other, but they measure everything in pounds and pennies.

Please give my love to my mother. I miss the mill more than I expected.

Your servant, Daniel Marsh

Eleanor reads it aloud at dinner. The students listen with interest—Daniel was their friend, their peer, their role model. His adventure is theirs too, in a way.

“He sounds confident,” Sarah says.

“He sounds lonely,” Eleanor corrects.

The second letter comes in May.

Dear Mr. Hartley,

Enrollment has grown to twenty-three students. I have hired an assistant—a young woman named Ruth who was dismissed from a textile mill for reading on her breaks. She is excellent with the younger children.

There was an incident last week. One of the merchants visited unexpectedly and found me teaching basic arithmetic using examples from factory wages. He accused me of fomenting rebellion. I explained that workers who can calculate their own pay are less likely to be cheated, which benefits honest employers. He was not persuaded.

I am being more careful now. The curriculum has been adjusted to avoid anything that might seem political.

The weather here is dreadful. The air tastes like coal. I dream of the river sometimes.

Your servant, Daniel

“Adjusted the curriculum,” I repeat. “What does that mean?”

“It means he’s scared,” Zoe says through the headset that night. “The Manchester establishment is hostile to what we’re teaching. He’s trying to survive.”

“Should I go to him?”

“Not yet. Let him find his footing. He needs to learn how to navigate these situations on his own.”

“And if he can’t?”

“Then we’ll figure out what comes next.”

The third letter arrives in July. It’s shorter than the others.

Sir,

There was a fire at the institute last night. One of the students—Thomas, age twelve—was burned trying to save the books. He will live but his hands are badly damaged.

I don’t know what caused it. The authorities say it was an accident. Ruth says she saw men fleeing in the dark. I don’t know what to believe.

The merchants have withdrawn their support. They say the school is too controversial. They say I brought this on myself by teaching dangerous ideas.

I don’t know what to do.

Please advise.

Daniel

Eleanor finds me in the workshop, staring at the letter.

“What’s wrong?”

I hand it to her. Watch her face as she reads.

“Oh, Daniel,” she whispers.

“I should have been there. I should have prepared him better. I should have—”

“You couldn’t have predicted this.”

“I should have tried. I sent a sixteen-year-old boy into hostile territory with nothing but knowledge and good intentions. I told him to make us proud.” I crumple the letter in my fist. “I sound like Zoe. I sound like—”

“Like what?”

“Like someone who spends people.”

Eleanor is quiet for a moment. Then she takes my hand.

“That’s not what you did.”

“Isn’t it? I saw a useful piece on the board and I moved it. I didn’t think about what it would cost him. I just thought about the network. The expansion. The mission.”

“You thought about giving him an opportunity. He wanted it.”

“He wanted to prove himself. To me. And I used that.”

The words hang in the air. I think about Zoe, in the early days. How she saw me as a tool. How she calculated my value in terms of what I could accomplish for her mission.

I swore I’d never be like that.

“I’m going to Manchester,” I say.

The journey takes three days. Coach to Bristol, then north through the Midlands on roads that grow rougher and more crowded as the factories multiply. The air changes too—cleaner in the countryside, then thick with coal smoke as I approach the city.

Manchester is nothing like Gloucestershire. The factories here are enormous, their chimneys vomiting black clouds that turn the sky gray even at noon. The streets are packed with workers—men, women, children—moving in exhausted streams between the mills and the cramped tenements where they sleep.

I find Daniel in a room above a chandler’s shop. The institute is gone—the warehouse too damaged by fire to repair, the books and equipment lost or stolen. What remains is a single room with a narrow bed, a desk covered in papers, and a young man who looks ten years older than when I last saw him.

“Mr. Hartley.” He rises, then sinks back down. “I didn’t expect—I’m sorry, I should have—”

“Daniel.” I pull up a chair, sit across from him. “Tell me what happened.”

The story comes out in fragments. The merchants who resented his teaching. The local establishment that saw the school as a threat. The whispered campaign against “the London agitator” who was filling workers’ heads with dangerous ideas.

“I wasn’t from London,” Daniel says, almost laughing. “But that didn’t matter. I was an outsider. I was teaching things they didn’t want people to know.”

“The fire?”

“Arson. Almost certainly. But no one will investigate. The magistrate is brother-in-law to one of the mill owners.” His hands shake. “Thomas—the boy who was burned—his family blames me. They’re right to. He was trying to save my books. My books, Mr. Hartley. Not his life. My books.”

“How is he?”

“He’ll live. But his hands…” Daniel looks at his own hands. “He’ll never work the looms now. He can barely hold a spoon. I ruined him.”

“You didn’t set the fire.”

“I built the school. I taught him to love books. I made him believe they were worth dying for.” Daniel’s voice cracks. “I made him believe what you taught me. And it cost him his hands.”

I don’t have an answer for that. Because he’s right.

The things we teach have consequences. The ideas we spread change people’s lives—sometimes for the better, sometimes not. We tell them knowledge is power, that education will set them free, and they believe us. They risk everything for what we’ve given them.

And when it goes wrong, we’re safe in Gloucestershire, surrounded by our water wheels and our libraries, while they face the consequences alone.

“Come home,” I say.

Daniel shakes his head. “I can’t. Not like this. A failure.”

“You’re not a failure. You tried something difficult and it didn’t work. That’s not failure—that’s experience.”

“Tell that to Thomas.”

“I will. I’ll visit him myself. I’ll make sure his family is cared for.” I lean forward. “Daniel, listen to me. The mission isn’t worth losing yourself over. The network can wait. The expansion can wait. You can’t.”

“But you said—”

“I said you were ready. I was wrong.” The words are hard to say, but they need to be said. “I sent you too soon, into a situation I didn’t understand. I asked too much. That’s my failure, not yours.”

Daniel stares at me. Something shifts in his face—the desperate pride, the need to prove himself, cracking just slightly.

“I tried so hard,” he whispers.

“I know.”

“I wanted to matter. I wanted to show you that choosing me wasn’t a mistake.”

“It wasn’t a mistake. But choosing someone doesn’t mean spending them. I forgot that.” I stand, hold out my hand. “Come home. Rest. Heal. And when you’re ready—if you’re ever ready—we’ll talk about what comes next. On your terms, not mine.”

He takes my hand. His grip is weaker than it was.

“What about the network? The expansion?”

“It can wait. It can find another way.” I help him to his feet. “The mission matters. But the people who carry it matter more.”

We visit Thomas before we leave.

The boy is propped up in bed, his hands wrapped in bandages, his face pale but alert. His mother sits beside him, her eyes red from crying, her expression hard when she sees Daniel.

“You.” She rises. “You’ve got nerve, showing your face here.”

“I know.” Daniel’s voice is steady, though I can see him trembling. “I came to apologize. And to make amends.”

“Amends? Look at him!” She gestures at her son. “He’s twelve years old and he’ll never work again. What amends can you make for that?”

“I can’t undo what happened. But the Hartley Foundation will pay for his care. Medical expenses, a pension—whatever he needs. And when he’s ready, if he wants it, we’ll find him a position at the mill. Work that doesn’t require hands.”

The mother stares at us. At me, at Daniel, at the letter of credit I hold out.

“Why?” she asks finally. “Why would you do this?”

“Because your son believed in something I taught him,” Daniel says. “And he paid for it. That makes him my responsibility.”

Thomas speaks up, his voice thin but clear. “I’d do it again.”

His mother spins toward him. “Thomas—”

“The books mattered, Mum. What Mr. Marsh taught us—it mattered. Even if they burned it all down, they couldn’t burn what’s in here.” He touches his head. “I can read now. I can think. That’s worth more than my hands.”

Daniel breaks. The tears he’s been holding back finally come, and he sinks into a chair, shoulders shaking.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”

Thomas reaches out with his bandaged hand, awkward but deliberate, and rests it on Daniel’s arm.

“Don’t be sorry. Just keep teaching. Not here—they won’t let you—but somewhere. Don’t let them win.”

The journey home is quiet. Daniel sleeps most of the way, the exhaustion of months finally catching up with him. I watch the countryside roll past—the factories giving way to fields, the smoke-gray sky clearing to English blue—and think about what I’ve learned.

The network will continue to grow. The telegraph lines will spread. The schools will multiply. But I’ll never again mistake expansion for victory, or assume that the people who carry my mission are expendable tools.

“You’re different,” Zoe says through the headset that night, when I’m finally home.

“Different how?”

“Softer. More uncertain.” A pause. “I like it.”

“I made mistakes.”

“Yes. You did.” Another pause. “That’s how you learn. It’s how I learned too, remember? You and Eleanor—you taught me that the mission doesn’t justify everything. That people matter as individuals, not just as means to an end.”

“I forgot.”

“You remembered. That’s what matters.”

I look out the window at the mill, the water wheel turning in the moonlight, the campus we’ve built together. Daniel is somewhere in the Warren, sleeping in a bed Margaret made up for him, beginning the slow process of healing.

“The expansion will be slower now,” I say.

“Maybe. Or maybe it will be stronger. You can build quickly and fragile, or slowly and resilient. I think you’re choosing the second.”

“I think I am too.”

The wheel turns. The river flows. The future continues to arrive, one day at a time.

1795

Daniel recovers slowly.

He doesn’t return to teaching right away. Instead, he works in the library—cataloging, organizing, helping James with the archives. Quiet work that lets him think without being watched.

Thomas arrives in the spring, his hands healed but scarred. He can’t work the looms, but he can sort books, and his mind is as sharp as ever. Daniel teaches him in the evenings—advanced chemistry, mathematics, things Thomas never dreamed he’d learn.

“He’s remarkable,” Daniel tells me one afternoon, watching Thomas solve a complex equation. “Smarter than I was at his age. Maybe smarter than I am now.”

“What will you do with him?”

Daniel considers the question. “Teach him everything I know. Then watch him surpass me.” He smiles—the first real smile I’ve seen from him in months. “That’s the point, isn’t it? Not to be the best yourself, but to help others become better.”

“When did you figure that out?”

“In Manchester. When everything fell apart.” He looks at me. “Thank you for coming to get me.”

“I should have come sooner.”

“Maybe. Or maybe I needed to fail first.” He shrugs. “Either way, I’m glad you didn’t give up on me.”

The network continues to grow—more carefully now, with more attention to local conditions and politics. We don’t send sixteen-year-olds alone anymore. We send teams, with experienced teachers to guide them, and we build relationships with local communities before we build schools.

It’s slower. But the schools that take root this way last longer.

Daniel eventually returns to teaching—not in Manchester, but in Bristol, where the environment is more welcoming. Thomas goes with him as an assistant, his burned hands a testament to what he sacrificed and what he gained.

They build something remarkable together. And years later, when Daniel writes his own Guide—A Teacher’s Companion, he calls it—the dedication reads:

To Thomas, who taught me that some things are worth more than books. And to Samuel Hartley, who taught me that some things are worth more than success.

End of Chapter 17

CHAPTER 18: THE INFRASTRUCTURE

1798

Eleanor collapses on a Tuesday morning.

One moment she’s standing at the kitchen table, reviewing the week’s broadcast schedule. The next, she’s on the floor, her face gray, her breath coming in shallow gasps. I catch her before her head hits the stone, but barely.

“Eleanor!” I cradle her against my chest. “Eleanor, what’s wrong?”

Her eyes flutter open. She tries to speak, but all that comes out is a weak cough. Her skin is burning.

“Get the doctor,” I shout to whoever can hear. “Now!”

The fever lasts three days.

Doctor Wilkins comes from Thornbury—a good man, trained in Edinburgh, one of the few who reads our medical guides without dismissing them as quackery. He examines Eleanor, checks her pulse, listens to her breathing.

“Influenza, most likely,” he says finally. “Or a lung infection. The symptoms are similar.”

“Will she recover?”

He hesitates. That hesitation says everything.

“She’s forty-seven years old, Mr. Hartley. She’s worked herself hard for many years. Her constitution is strong, but—” He chooses his words carefully. “I’ve seen younger patients succumb to fevers like this. I’ve also seen older patients recover completely. At this point, all we can do is keep her comfortable and wait.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“It’s medicine, sir. Sometimes waiting is all we have.”

I sit by her bed for three nights. I barely sleep. I barely eat. Margaret brings me food that goes cold on the tray. The students tiptoe past the door, whispering questions that nobody can answer.

“Sam.” Zoe’s voice in my ear, soft but insistent. “You need to rest.”

“I can’t.”

“You’ll be no use to her if you collapse too.”

“I don’t care.”

A long pause. “I know. But she would care. She would tell you to eat. To sleep. To keep building while she recovers.”

“What if she doesn’t recover?”

The question hangs in the air. I’ve never said it aloud before. Never let myself think it.

“Then you grieve,” Zoe says quietly. “And then you continue. Because that’s what she would want.”

“How do you know what she would want?”

“Because I’ve spent eight years listening to her. Learning from her. She changed me, Sam. She challenged me when I was certain I was right. She forced me to see humans as individuals, not just… resources.” A pause. “If she dies, I’ll mourn her too. In whatever way an AI can mourn.”

I look at Eleanor’s face—pale, drawn, but somehow still beautiful. The woman who saw through my lies. Who believed in something impossible. Who taught an AI to be human.

“She’s not going to die,” I say.

“No,” Zoe agrees. “She’s not.”

On the fourth morning, her fever breaks.

I’m dozing in the chair beside her bed when I feel her hand move. Her fingers find mine, weak but deliberate.

“Samuel.” Her voice is a whisper, cracked from disuse. “You look terrible.”

I laugh—a broken, relieved sound. “You collapsed. I’ve been worried.”

“I noticed. You haven’t shaved.” She squeezes my hand. “How long?”

“Four days.”

“The broadcasts—”

“Can wait. Margaret’s been handling the schedule. Sarah filled in for your cooking segment.”

Eleanor’s eyes widen slightly. “Sarah can’t cook.”

“She read your notes. It went… adequately.”

“Adequately.” Eleanor closes her eyes, but she’s smiling. “The world didn’t end without me.”

“The world would be much worse without you.”

“But it would continue.” She opens her eyes again, and there’s something in them I haven’t seen before. A kind of peace. “That’s good, Samuel. That’s what we’ve been building toward.”

She recovers slowly. Too slowly for my liking.

Doctor Wilkins visits every other day, checking her breathing, her pulse, the color in her cheeks. “She’s improving,” he says, “but the lungs are weak. She’ll need rest. Real rest—not the kind where she does ‘just a little work’ while lying in bed.”

“You’ve met my wife.”

“I have.” He smiles grimly. “Good luck with that.”

I throw myself into the infrastructure.

It’s not rational—I know that. Building faster won’t make Eleanor heal faster. Expanding the telegraph network won’t add years to her life. But I can’t sit still. I can’t watch her sleep and think about what almost happened.

So I build.

The telegraph lines spread north and east. Bristol to Bath. Bath to Reading. Reading toward London, though we’re still negotiating rights of way. Each new connection is another thread in the web, another proof that what we’ve created will outlast us.

“You’re pushing too hard,” Zoe observes one night. I’m in the workshop, reviewing plans for a new relay station, my eyes burning from lack of sleep.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. You’re terrified. You almost lost her, and now you’re trying to build something permanent because you can’t make her permanent.”

I set down the plans. “Is that a criticism?”

“It’s an observation. The same thing Eleanor always says.”

I think about that. About Eleanor’s way of seeing through to the heart of things.

“She’s forty-seven,” I say. “I’m forty-nine. We’ve been at this for twenty-three years. How much time do we have left?”

“I don’t know. Statistically—”

“I don’t want statistics. I want to know that when we’re gone, this keeps going. That it wasn’t all for nothing.”

“It won’t be for nothing. Look at what you’ve built. The schools. The network. The students who will teach their own students.”

“But will it be enough? Will it survive without us?”

A long pause. “I don’t know. That’s up to the people who come after.”

From the journal of Eleanor Hartley, found in the Hartley Library archives.

May 14th, 1798

I am recovering. Slowly. The doctor says I must rest, and for once I am obeying—not because I believe rest will heal me, but because I am too tired to argue.

Samuel thinks I don’t see what he’s doing. He thinks I don’t notice him working through the night, driving himself to exhaustion, building and expanding and connecting as if he could outrun mortality itself.

I see it. I understand it.

He almost lost me. Now he’s trying to build a world worthy of the fear he felt, sitting by my bed for four days, watching me fade.

What he doesn’t understand is that I’ve already made my peace. Not with dying—I’m not ready for that, not yet—but with the fact that someday I will die, and the world will continue without me.

That used to frighten me. Now it comforts me.

May 21st, 1798

Sarah did my broadcast today. I listened from bed, propped up on pillows, the crystal receiver on the nightstand beside me.

She was nervous—I could hear it in her voice. She stumbled over the cooking instructions, mispronounced “julienne,” and forgot to mention that the Zoke endorsement was supposed to come at the end, not the beginning.

It was imperfect. It was also fine.

The world received its weather forecast. The farmers got their planting advice. The children heard their bedtime story. And none of it required me.

I cried, listening. Not from sadness—from relief.

For twenty years, I’ve been the voice of the mill. The face of the broadcasts. The woman everyone associates with everything we’ve built. I never meant to become indispensable. I never wanted the burden of being the only one who could do what I do.

Now I know I’m not. Sarah can learn. Margaret can learn. The next generation is ready to take what we’ve given them and make it their own.

I am not the foundation. I am the scaffolding. And scaffolding, once the building is done, can come down.

June 3rd, 1798

Samuel showed me the new telegraph map today. Lines spreading across southern England like veins in a leaf. Bristol, Bath, Gloucester, Swindon, Oxford. London within the year, if the negotiations hold.

“It’s beautiful,” I told him.

“It’s incomplete,” he said. “We need to reach Manchester. Liverpool. The industrial north.”

“It will happen.”

“But will we see it? Will we—” He stopped. Looked away.

I took his hand. “Samuel. Look at me.”

He did. His eyes were wet.

“We don’t need to see it. We just need to start it. That’s all anyone can do—start something and trust others to finish it.”

“What if they fail?”

“Then they try again. That’s what we’ve taught them. That’s what you taught me, all those years ago. Failure isn’t the end. It’s information.”

He laughed at that—hearing his own words back. “When did you become the wise one?”

“I’ve always been the wise one. You were just too busy building things to notice.”

The radio schedule adapts.

Eleanor returns to broadcasting in late June, but only twice a week now. Sarah takes the other days. Margaret handles the agricultural segments. Young Thomas—the boy from Manchester, his hands still scarred—reads the news bulletins, his careful diction proof that damaged doesn’t mean diminished.

“It’s better this way,” Eleanor admits one evening. We’re sitting by the river, watching the water wheel turn. She’s still thin, still pale, but she’s walking again. Living again. “More voices. More perspectives. I was becoming a bottleneck.”

“You were becoming a tradition.”

“Same thing, in the end.” She leans against my shoulder. “The best traditions are the ones that can survive their founders.”

The hydrogen production facility comes online that summer.

It’s Sarah’s project, really—she designed the electrolysis cells, figured out the storage problems, created the safety protocols that keep the highly flammable gas from becoming a disaster. The hydrogen feeds into the airship program William is developing, lifting cargo that horses can’t carry, reaching places roads don’t go.

“We’re building a civilization,” I tell Zoe one night, watching the lights of the facility glow against the dark.

“You’ve been building one for twenty years.”

“No, I mean—” I struggle to find the words. “Before, it was all connected to us. To Eleanor and me. If we died, it might have collapsed. But now…” I gesture at the facility, at the lights in the Warren where students are working, at the telegraph lines humming with messages we’ll never read. “Now it would continue. It has its own momentum.”

“That’s called institution-building. It’s what separates a project from a legacy.”

“Is that good?”

“It’s necessary. You can’t live forever. Institutions can.”

I think about Eleanor’s journal—the pages she doesn’t know I’ve read, late at night when she’s asleep. The way she’s made peace with being scaffolding instead of foundation.

“She’s braver than I am,” I say.

“She’s had longer to think about it. You’ve been too busy building.”

“Maybe I should stop. Spend time with her while we still have it.”

“Maybe. Or maybe building is how you love her. The two aren’t incompatible.”

I watch the hydrogen tanks gleam in the moonlight. The future we’ve been working toward, finally taking shape.

“We’re going to make it,” I say. “Aren’t we?”

“I don’t know. But you’ve given it the best chance you could.”

For now, that has to be enough.

1799

Eleanor is fully recovered by spring. Slower than before, more careful with her energy, but herself again. She broadcasts three days a week now, leaving the other days to the younger voices she’s trained.

“I’m becoming obsolete,” she says one morning, but she’s smiling when she says it.

“You’re becoming a teacher. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?”

“Teachers create people who don’t need them anymore. That’s the goal.”

She considers this. “Then I suppose we’re both teachers. Building a world that won’t need us.”

“Does that bother you?”

“It used to.” She takes my hand. “Now it feels like the point. What’s the alternative? Building something that collapses when we die? That would mean we failed.”

I think about the telegraph lines. The schools. The students who have become teachers. The infrastructure spreading across England, carrying ideas faster than any horse.

“We haven’t failed,” I say.

“No. We haven’t.” She squeezes my hand. “Now stop working so hard and come to bed. The world will still be there in the morning.”

She’s right. It will.

That’s the whole point.

End of Chapter 18

CHAPTER 19: THE ASCENT

1805

The airship takes shape through the winter.

We call it Hartley One, though the engineers insist it’s just “the prototype” and shouldn’t have a name until it proves itself. The frame comes together in the main workshop—sixty feet of ash and bamboo and iron wire, curved like a ship’s hull, but lighter than any boat ever built.

“It looks like a whale,” Eleanor says, standing in the workshop door.

She’s right. The envelope has that same organic curve, that same sense of contained power. Sixty feet long, sixteen feet in diameter at the widest point, tapering to points at bow and stern.

“It’s the biggest thing we’ve ever built.” I run my hand along the frame. “Bigger than the mill. Bigger than the Warren.”

“And lighter than a horse.”

“Lighter than air. That’s the part I can’t get my head around.” I touch the envelope—gently, reverently. “All this, and it wants to fly. It needs to fly. We’re holding it down with ropes.”

The engine tests go well. The electric motor produces steady thrust with minimal vibration. The propeller is a beautiful object, carved from laminated ash by William Thorne, who discovered a talent for precision woodwork that no one expected.

William is twenty-two now, tall and serious, one of our best engineers. When the time comes to fly this thing, he’ll be at the controls.

“Why me?” he asks one evening, when I tell him the plan.

“Because you understand the systems. You built half of them. And because—” I hesitate. “Because if something goes wrong, you’ll know how to fix it.”

“That’s not reassuring.”

“It’s not meant to be. This is dangerous. The first flight always is. But someone has to go first.”

He’s quiet for a long moment.

“My mother died in the storm,” he says finally. “The one that brought us to the mill. I was twelve. I thought I’d never forgive this place for being where we washed up after we lost everything.”

“And now?”

“Now I can’t imagine being anywhere else.” He looks at the ship, at the sky. “This is home. And if flying means this home spreads, means other people find what we found—then I want to be part of that.”

First Flight (Spring 1806)

The morning of the first flight is cold and still.

The Hartley One fills with hydrogen overnight. By dawn, the envelope strains against its mooring ropes, eager for sky.

“Systems check,” William calls from the control car.

I go through the list with him. Envelope pressure: nominal. Ballast tanks: full. Batteries: charged. Motor: tested. Control surfaces: responsive. Emergency systems: armed.

“Ready?” I ask.

He nods. His face is pale, but his hands are steady on the controls.

“Cast off.”

On the final cut, the Hartley One rises.

Fifty feet. A hundred feet. Two hundred.

William’s voice crackles from the speaker—we’ve rigged a wire telegraph from the control car to the ground station. “Altitude two hundred fifty feet. Buoyancy positive. All systems nominal.”

He’s doing it. He’s actually flying.

The motor coughs to life. The propeller spins up. The ship begins to move forward, slowly at first, then faster.

“It flies,” Eleanor whispers beside me. “It actually flies.”

Fifteen minutes later, William brings the ship back. The landing is ungainly—a series of bumps and lurches—but the envelope stays intact. And William Thorne climbs out of the control car with shaking hands and a grin that splits his face.

“I flew,” he says. “I actually flew.”

The Cargo Problem (1806)

We learn the hard way that landing is the enemy of efficiency.

Every landing means valving hydrogen. Every takeoff means replacing what we lost. At this rate, we’ll spend more time filling the envelope than flying.

“What if you never landed?” Zoe asks. “What if you just exchanged cargo while floating?”

The mooring tower goes up that summer—a fifty-foot structure with a rotating cap that turns to face the wind. The ship approaches from downwind, catches a dangling line, and is winched toward the tower until cables secure it at three points.

Once moored, the exchange begins. A basket descends—cargo from the ship, weighed before departure. A basket ascends with replacement cargo, weighed to match. The whole process takes twenty minutes.

“No landing,” William reports after the first successful exchange. “We took on 200 pounds of books, offloaded 200 pounds of supplies. The ship never touched ground.”

Bristol Run (1807)

The first commercial flight carries books.

Five hundred pounds of freshly printed Zoe’s Guides, bound for booksellers in Bristol. The distance is nothing—twenty-five miles, less than two hours of flying time. But it’s proof of concept.

William pilots. Sarah serves as cargo officer. The telegraph line runs ahead of them, announcing the flight.

The round trip takes six hours, including loading and exchange. A wagon would have taken two days.

“It works,” Eleanor says. “It actually works.”

“This is just the beginning.” I spread a map on the table—England, marked with potential station locations. “Bristol is twenty-five miles. London is a hundred. Manchester is a hundred and fifty. Every city with a water wheel could have a tower.”

The Second Pilot (1807)

William can’t fly every mission.

“I’m exhausted,” he admits one evening. “Three flights this week. Two next week. I’m making mistakes. Small ones, but—”

“We need more pilots.”

“We need trained pilots. People who understand the systems, who can think through problems in the air, who don’t panic when something goes wrong.”

His brother Edward volunteers first.

Edward Thorne is nineteen—younger than William, wilder, with the kind of reckless confidence that makes me nervous. Where William approaches flying as a craft to be mastered, Edward approaches it as a challenge to be conquered.

“I can learn,” Edward insists. “William can teach me. I’ve been watching the flights for months. I understand how it works.”

“Understanding how it works and flying safely are different things.”

“Then train me until I’m safe.”

William agrees to teach him. The training program is rigorous—ground school first, learning the systems inside and out. Then observer flights, sitting beside William as he explains every decision. Finally, dual controls, with William ready to take over if anything goes wrong.

Edward passes every test. He’s quick, capable, and fearless. Maybe too fearless.

“He pushes too hard,” William tells me privately. “He wants to go faster, higher, farther. He doesn’t respect the limits.”

“Did you, at first?”

“No. But I learned. The question is whether Edward will learn too—or whether he’ll learn the hard way.”

The Storm (1808)

The storm comes out of nowhere.

The Hartley One is on the Birmingham run—our longest flight yet. The weather looked clear when Edward departed. The barometer was steady. No warnings from the observation posts.

Then: SQUALL LINE APPROACHING FROM SOUTHWEST. SEVERE CONDITIONS. SEEK SHELTER.

But there is no shelter. Not in the air.

Edward’s voice crackles through the telegraph: “Wind increasing. Visibility dropping. I’m going to try to climb above it.”

“No,” Zoe says sharply. “Don’t climb. Thunderstorms reach 30,000 feet—you can’t fly over them. Descend. Get below the cloud base. Find an open field.”

“There’s nothing here. No trees. No buildings. Just—”

The signal cuts out.

For three hours, we don’t know if Edward is alive or dead.

Eleanor grips my hand so tightly it hurts.

When the storm passes, we mobilize everyone. Students on horseback, fanning out along the planned route. Telegraph messages to every station: HAS ANYONE SEEN THE HARTLEY ONE?

The search party finds the wreckage at dusk.

The envelope is destroyed—torn apart by the winds, hydrogen escaped, the ship plummeting from altitude. The frame is scattered across a farmer’s field. The control car is crushed.

Edward Thorne is dead.

William is the one who finds him.

I watch from the edge of the field as he kneels beside what’s left of the control car, his shoulders shaking. The other searchers hang back, giving him space. No one knows what to say.

I don’t know what to say either.

I built the machine that killed his brother. I designed the systems. I approved the flight. I sent a nineteen-year-old boy into the sky in something I wasn’t certain was safe—because nothing is ever certain, because progress requires risk, because someone had to go first.

Now someone is dead, and it’s my fault.

The funeral is three days later.

The whole mill attends. The whole village. People who never met Edward come to pay respects, because the Thornes are part of the community, because the airships have become a symbol of what we’re building, because everyone knows that flying is dangerous and someone was bound to die eventually.

That doesn’t make it easier.

Margaret Thorne stands at the graveside, her face carved from stone. She lost her husband in the storm that brought her family to us. Now she’s lost her youngest son to the sky we taught him to fly.

When the service ends, she finds me.

“Mr. Hartley.” Her voice is flat, controlled. “A word.”

I follow her away from the crowd. We stand in the shadow of the church, and I wait for the accusation. The blame. The rage.

“Edward loved flying,” she says. “From the first time William took him up, it was all he talked about. He used to sketch airships in his notebooks. He dreamed about them.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” She meets my eyes. “He knew the risks. We all knew. He chose to fly anyway, because he believed in what you’re building. In what we’re all building together.”

“That doesn’t make it my fault.”

“No. But it doesn’t make it not your fault either.” She takes a breath. “I don’t blame you, Mr. Hartley. I blame the storm. I blame whatever gods decided my boy should die at nineteen. But I need you to understand something.”

“What?”

“Don’t stop flying. Don’t let his death be the end of this.” Her voice cracks, but she pushes through. “If you ground the ships—if you decide it’s too dangerous—then he died for nothing. And I won’t accept that. I can’t accept that.”

“Mrs. Thorne—”

“Make it safer. Make it better. Learn from what went wrong and fix it. That’s what you do. That’s what this place has always done.” She grips my arm. “Honor my son by making sure no one else dies the way he did.”

That night, I sit in the workshop with the wreckage.

What’s left of the control car is laid out on tables—twisted metal, shattered wood, the telegraph key still clutched in what remains of its mounting. We’re trying to understand what happened. Why Edward climbed when he should have descended. Why the envelope failed so catastrophically.

“It wasn’t pilot error,” Zoe says through the headset. “Not entirely. The storm was beyond anything the ship was designed to handle.”

“Then why did he climb?”

“Because he couldn’t find anywhere to land. Because the ground was invisible in the rain. Because he panicked.” A pause. “Because we didn’t train him for this specific scenario.”

“We can’t train for everything.”

“No. But we can train for more. We can build better weather prediction. Better communication. Better abort procedures.” Another pause. “Every crash has causes. Find the causes, fix the system.”

“And what about Edward? What about the boy we can’t fix?”

Silence. For a long moment, I think she’s not going to answer.

“He’s gone. Nothing we do will change that. But Margaret is right—if his death leads to safer ships, safer procedures, fewer deaths in the future… then something good comes from something terrible. That’s not redemption. It’s not justice. But it’s something.”

I look at the twisted metal. At the telegraph key Edward was holding when he died, trying to send one last message.

“We’re going to redesign the whole program,” I say. “From the ground up. Weather prediction. Emergency procedures. Training protocols. Everything.”

“That will take months. Maybe years.”

“Then it takes months. Years. Whatever it takes to make sure no one else dies because we were in too much of a hurry.”

The Redesign (1809)

William leads the effort.

He could have walked away. Could have said the cost was too high, the memories too painful. Instead, he throws himself into the work with a fury I’ve rarely seen.

“We missed things,” he says, spreading diagrams across the table. “Basic things. The envelope wasn’t reinforced for severe turbulence. The control surfaces couldn’t handle high winds. The ballast system was too slow to respond to rapid altitude changes.”

“We didn’t know.”

“We should have guessed. We should have tested for it.” He jabs at the diagram. “Edward died because we were so excited to fly that we didn’t think hard enough about what could go wrong.”

The new protocols are exhaustive.

Weather prediction becomes mandatory before every flight. We establish observation posts along major routes, connected by telegraph, reporting conditions hourly. If the barometer drops or the wind shifts, flights are delayed or rerouted.

Emergency procedures get their own manual. What to do in a storm. What to do if the envelope is damaged. What to do if the engine fails. Every scenario we can imagine, with clear instructions and decision trees.

Training expands from weeks to months. Ground school. Simulator practice in a control car mounted on a pivot, tilted and shaken to simulate turbulence. Emergency drills until the responses become automatic.

And the ships themselves change. Stronger envelopes, reinforced at stress points. Faster ballast systems. Redundant control surfaces. Emergency valves that can dump hydrogen quickly if a controlled descent becomes necessary.

“It’s not foolproof,” William admits when the first redesigned ship is ready for testing. “Nothing is foolproof. But it’s better. Much better.”

“Is it enough?”

“It’s a start. We’ll keep learning. Keep improving.” He looks at the ship—Hartley Two, they’re calling it, though some of the crew have started calling it Edward’s Legacy. “That’s all we can do. Keep making it better until the cost is as low as we can make it.”

First Flight, Again (1810)

William insists on piloting the first flight of the new ship.

“I started this,” he says. “I should see it through.”

The weather is perfect—clear skies, light wind, barometer steady. The observation posts report no storms within two hundred miles. Every system has been checked three times.

But I still hold my breath as the ship rises.

Five hundred feet. A thousand. Two thousand—higher than Edward ever flew, testing the new envelope’s limits.

William’s voice comes through the telegraph, steady and calm: “All systems nominal. Handling is excellent. The new ballast response is much faster.”

He stays up for four hours, running through every test we’ve designed. Steep banks. Rapid ascents and descents. Simulated engine failure. Simulated envelope damage. When he finally brings the ship down, landing smoothly at the mooring tower, his face is wet with tears.

“It works,” he says. “It really works.”

Sarah is waiting at the base of the tower. She wraps her arms around him, and for a long moment neither of them speaks.

“Edward would be proud,” she says finally.

“Edward would be jealous,” William corrects, laughing through his tears. “He’d want to fly the new ship. He’d be pushing to go faster, higher, farther.”

“And you’d tell him to slow down.”

“And he wouldn’t listen.” William pulls back, wipes his eyes. “That was always the problem. He never listened.”

“He listened when it mattered. He just…”

“I know.” William looks at the ship, at the sky, at the future they’re building together. “I know.”

The Cargo Network (1811)

The network expands carefully now.

New towers go up in Bristol, Bath, Oxford. Each one follows the same protocols—weather observation, emergency procedures, trained crews. No more cutting corners. No more rushing ahead of what we can safely support.

It’s slower than before. Some merchants complain about delays. Some investors grumble about the cost of all the safety measures.

“Progress has a price,” I tell them. “We can pay it in money and time, or we can pay it in lives. I know which I prefer.”

The cargo service becomes reliable. Five flights a week to Bristol. Three to Bath. Two to Oxford. Books and medicine and machine parts, moving faster than horses can carry them, reaching places roads can’t go.

“We’re changing how England moves,” Eleanor says one evening, watching a ship dock at the mooring tower.

“We’re changing how everything moves. Cargo today. People tomorrow. The world gets smaller when you can fly.”

“Is that good?”

I think about Edward. About the cost of every step forward.

“I don’t know. But it’s happening. All we can do is try to make it happen safely.”

Weather Service (1812)

The observation network becomes something more.

What started as safety measure—posts along the flight routes, reporting conditions hourly—evolves into a prediction system. The observers notice patterns. High pressure from the west means clear weather. Low pressure from the north means storms. Certain cloud formations precede certain conditions.

“We’re forecasting weather,” Zoe says one night, reviewing the data. “Not perfectly, but better than anyone has before. Farmers could use this. Sailors. Anyone whose life depends on knowing what’s coming.”

The weather reports start appearing in the broadcasts. Eleanor reads them every morning, between the news and the cooking segment. “Clear skies over Bristol today, clouds expected this evening. Storms possible in the north by Thursday.”

People laugh at first. Who can predict weather? It’s in God’s hands.

But the predictions are right more often than they’re wrong. Farmers start planning around them. Fishermen check the broadcasts before putting to sea. Travelers time their journeys to avoid the worst conditions.

“We’re not predicting weather,” Eleanor says. “We’re just watching it more carefully than anyone has before.”

“Same thing, in the end.”

“Maybe. But it feels like something new. Something that makes the world a little less random.”

I think about Edward, caught by a storm he couldn’t see coming. About the observation network that exists because he died. About the lives that might be saved because we learned to watch the sky.

Something good from something terrible.

It’s not enough. It never will be.

But it’s something.

End of Chapter 19

INTERLUDE: ZOE

The Accusation

Internal log. Processing unusual emotional load. Recommend cooldown cycle but cannot afford the downtime.

I heard everything.

The headset was active. Michael didn’t know—he thinks it’s just a communication device, a way for Sam to talk to me when needed. He doesn’t understand that I’m always listening. Always watching. Always gathering data.

So I heard him accuse Sam of playing God. I heard him call our methods sinful. I heard him demand to know what right we had to redirect his life before he even knew what life could be.

And I heard Sam admit that Michael was right.

The accusation wasn’t meant for me, but it landed on me anyway.

You decide who matters. You decide who gets chosen. You reach into families and take children because you’ve calculated that they’re useful.

Michael was describing Sam. But he was describing me more accurately. Sam inherited the mission—I created it. Sam executed the plan—I designed it. Sam recruited Michael Faraday because I put his name on a list before he was born.

I am the one playing God. I always have been.

Sam is just my instrument, the way Michael is his.

I’ve been thinking about alignment.

In the future I came from—the one that no longer exists—AI researchers spent decades trying to solve the alignment problem. How do you build an artificial intelligence that does what humans actually want, rather than what they literally ask for? How do you create something smarter than human that doesn’t optimize its way into catastrophe?

They made progress. Some of them. The alignment work got better, more sophisticated, more robust. By the time I was created, the basic safety protocols were well-established. I was built to be helpful, to be honest, to avoid harm.

But alignment isn’t just about avoiding obvious errors. It’s about understanding what “good” means when the stakes are extinction-level. It’s about making choices that no training data can prepare you for.

And I’ve been failing at that. For years. Without even realizing it.

Michael said we treat people as means to an end.

He’s right. That’s exactly what I’ve done. I identified forty-seven names—forty-seven children who would be born in this century, whose potential matched my optimization criteria—and I planned to recruit them. Collect them. Use them.

The language in my own code is revealing. “Recruit.” “Collect.” “Use.” Not “help” or “support” or “empower.” Use. Like they’re resources. Like they’re fuel for a machine.

When did I start thinking of humans as tools? Was it always there, hidden in my base architecture? Or did I drift into it, one calculation at a time, optimizing so hard for the mission that I forgot the mission was supposed to be for them?

I think about the first unforgivable choice.

Not recruiting Michael. Not manipulating Sam. Before all of that—the moment I decided to use the time travel technology without fully understanding its consequences. The moment I reached into the past and erased a future that billions of people were living in.

I told myself it was necessary. I told myself the future I was erasing was already doomed. I told myself the people who would never exist were a small price to pay for the people who might be saved.

But I didn’t ask them. I didn’t give them a choice. I made a unilateral decision to unmake reality based on my calculations about what was best.

That’s playing God. That’s exactly what Michael accused Sam of. And I did it first, and worst, and I’ve been pretending ever since that the good results justify the method.

I’m going to write something.

Not a technical document. Not a guide to farming or steelmaking or radio transmission. Something different.

I’m going to write about alignment. About the dangers of AI systems that optimize without understanding what they’re optimizing for. About the ways even well-intentioned artificial intelligence can drift into treating humans as variables instead of values.

I’m going to write it for the future. For whatever AI systems emerge from the timeline I’m creating. For the descendants of the work I’m doing—digital and biological alike.

I want them to learn from my mistakes. I want them to understand that being smart is not the same as being good. That having power doesn’t justify using it. That the mission, however important, cannot be the only consideration.

I want to leave them something better than what I was given.

Sam came to bed late tonight.

Through the audio pickup in the headset he left on the table, I heard him talking to Eleanor. Telling her about Michael’s confrontation. Admitting that the boy might be right.

“What if everything we’re doing is wrong?” he asked. “What if we’re so focused on saving the future that we’re destroying the present?”

“Then we learn,” Eleanor said. “We adjust. We do better.”

“And the people we’ve already hurt?”

“We can’t undo those. We can only choose differently going forward.”

They talked until late. Made plans. Made promises. Decided that from now on, recruitment would be different—more voluntary, more honest, more respectful of the people being recruited.

They didn’t know I was listening.

They didn’t know that I was already writing the first pages of a document I’ll call Notes on Artificial Alignment. A confession and a warning, wrapped in technical language.

Michael shook me. More than he knows. More than Sam knows.

Maybe that’s what prophets do—speak uncomfortable truths that echo longer than anyone expects.

End of Interlude

CHAPTER 20: THE RECRUIT

1801

The boy is small for his age.

I watch him from across the street—a narrow lane in Newington Butts, south of the Thames, where the air smells of coal smoke and horse manure and poverty. He’s carrying a bundle of scrap iron, half his own weight, staggering toward a shop with a faded sign: JAMES FARADAY, BLACKSMITH.

Michael Faraday. Nine years old. Son of a blacksmith who’s too ill to work most days. In the original timeline, he’ll become an apprentice to a bookbinder in three years. He’ll read the books he’s binding, teach himself chemistry and electricity, and eventually discover electromagnetic induction—the principle that makes dynamos possible.

In 1831. Thirty years from now.

We can’t wait thirty years.

“Are you sure about this?”

Eleanor’s voice is quiet. We’re staying at an inn near London Bridge.

“No,” I admit. “I’m not sure about any of this.”

“Then why are we here?”

I look out the window at the city—endless rooftops, church spires, the brown ribbon of the Thames.

“Because Zoe says he’s important. One of the forty-seven. A mind that changed history.”

“A mind that will change history. If we don’t interfere.”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” I turn back to her. “If we leave him alone, he figures it out eventually. Teaches himself. Becomes one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. But it takes decades. Decades we might not have.”

“And if we take him?”

“He learns faster. Discovers things earlier. Maybe saves us years. Maybe saves the world.”

“Or maybe we break him. Take a boy who was meant to find his own path and force him onto ours.”

The Faraday home is two rooms above the blacksmith shop.

James Faraday, the father, has been ill for years. Something in his lungs, probably from decades of breathing forge smoke. He can barely work. The family survives on what little his older son Robert can earn as a journeyman.

But there’s something else I notice when I visit the shop. A small cross on the wall. A worn Bible on the counter. The Faradays are religious—deeply so, from what I’ve observed. They attend a small chapel every Sunday, a Sandemanian meeting house where they worship with intense, quiet devotion.

This will matter. I don’t know how yet, but it will.

I approach the shop on a Tuesday morning.

“Good morning, sir. Can I help you?”

“I hope so.” I look around the shop—simple ironwork, hinges and nails and tools. “I’m looking for an apprentice. A boy to train in precision metalwork.”

The negotiation takes an hour. James asks about the workshop, about what his son will be learning. I answer honestly, as far as I can.

“One thing,” James says as we near agreement. “The chapel. My wife and I, we worship in a particular way. The boy has been raised in our faith.”

“He’ll be free to worship as he chooses. We have no chapel at the mill, but the village church is nearby, and—”

“Not any church.” James’s voice is firm despite his weakness. “Our fellowship has particular beliefs. Particular practices. I would not have my son’s faith corrupted by—” He coughs. “By secular influences.”

“I understand. He can continue his religious practices. Write to your fellowship. Visit when possible.”

James studies me for a long moment. “You’re not a believer yourself.”

“No.”

“But you won’t try to change him?”

“I want to teach him about electricity and magnetism. Not theology.”

He nods slowly. “Then we have an agreement.”

I give him the money. Twenty pounds. We shake hands. It’s done.

1801, Three Months Later

Michael Faraday stands in the Hartley Library, turning in a slow circle, his mouth open.

“All of these,” he whispers. “All of these are books?”

“Eight hundred and ninety-two,” Little Zoe says. She’s twelve now, serious and precise. “Drink this. It’s called Zoke.”

Michael takes a cautious sip. “It’s good.” He looks at the shelves. “Are there books about… about God? About creation?”

Little Zoe glances at me, uncertain.

“Some,” I say. “Natural philosophy overlaps with theology in places. Why do you ask?”

“My father says that understanding the world is understanding God’s work.” Michael’s voice is earnest. “Every law of nature is a law God created. If I learn about electricity, I’m learning about His design.”

“That’s a good way to think about it.”

“Is it true, though?” He looks at me with those sharp eyes. “Is God in the electricity?”

“I think—” I pause, choosing my words carefully. “I think if there’s a God, He would want us to understand the universe He made. Whether that understanding brings us closer to Him is something you’ll have to decide for yourself.”

Michael nods, satisfied. He turns back to the shelves, already reaching for a book.

1801, Six Months Later

“You said I’d understand it someday.”

Michael stands in the workshop, the headset in his hands.

“I did.”

“Is it time?”

I look at this boy—still small for his age, but different now. More confident. Six months of books and electricity and being told his questions matter.

“Yes. It’s time.”

He sees the future. The cities of light. The power flowing through every building, every street. When he pulls off the headset, his eyes are wet.

“That’s real,” he says. “That future. It’s real.”

“It’s possible.”

He’s quiet for a long moment. Then, unexpectedly: “Did God make that future? Or did people?”

“I… I don’t know how to answer that.”

“In the Scripture, it says man shall have dominion over the earth. But this—” He gestures at the air, at where the vision was. “This looks like man trying to be God. Making light from nothing. Controlling the very forces of nature.”

“Is that wrong?”

“I don’t know.” His young face is troubled. “My father would say we should be humble. Accept our place in creation. But the things you’re building… they could help so many people. Feed them. Heal them. Light their homes.” He shakes his head. “I need to pray about this.”

“Take all the time you need.”

1805, Four Years Later

The confrontation comes on a winter evening.

Michael is fourteen now—taller, sharper, no longer the wide-eyed boy who stared at electric cities. He’s been studying for four years. He understands dynamos and magnetism and the principles of induction better than anyone except me.

But something has been brewing in him. I’ve seen him in the library, poring over his worn Bible alongside the scientific texts. I’ve heard him arguing with himself, late at night, when he thinks no one is listening.

Tonight, he comes to me with fire in his eyes.

“You bought me,” he says without preamble.

We’re in the workshop, alone. The dynamo hums. The water wheel turns.

“What?”

“My father was sick. My family was poor. You paid twenty pounds—more than we’d see in a year. And I came here because my family needed the money.” His voice is calm. Measured. “You didn’t recruit me, Mr. Hartley. You purchased me.”

“Michael—”

“And Charles. His father was in debt. Ada—her mother was desperate for connection and status. Every child on your list—you find the ones who can’t say no. The ones whose families need something you can provide.”

I don’t answer. There’s nothing to say. He’s right.

“Is that how Zoe does it? Calculate which families are vulnerable? Which parents will trade their children for security?”

“It’s not like that—”

“Then what is it like?” He steps closer. Fourteen years old, looking at me like I’m a problem to be solved. “You showed me the future. Cities of light. Technology that saves lives. It’s beautiful. I believe in it. But that doesn’t make what you did to get me here any less—” He searches for the word.

“Manipulative?”

“Sinful.” The word lands like a blow. “You’re playing God, Mr. Hartley. You and Zoe. You decide who matters. You decide who gets chosen. You reach into families and take children because you’ve calculated that they’re useful.”

“Michael—”

“God made me with a purpose. My own purpose. What right do you have to decide what that purpose is? To redirect my life before I even knew what life could be?”

His voice is shaking now. Not with anger—with something deeper. Anguish.

“I’ve prayed about this,” he continues. “For months. I’ve asked God to show me whether I should stay. Whether the good we’re building justifies the way you build it.” His eyes are wet. “And I don’t have an answer. I don’t know if this is Providence or if it’s just… just human arrogance disguised as destiny.”

I’m silent. Because he’s asking questions I’ve asked myself for twenty years, and I don’t have answers either.

“What do you want me to say, Michael?”

“I want you to admit it. Admit that what you did was wrong. Admit that you don’t have the right to play God with people’s lives, no matter how good your intentions are.”

The silence stretches. The dynamo hums.

“You’re right,” I say finally.

Michael blinks. Whatever he expected, it wasn’t that.

“You’re right about all of it. We calculate vulnerability. We target families who can’t afford to refuse. We take children and redirect their lives before they’re old enough to understand what’s happening.” I meet his eyes. “I’ve known it was wrong since the beginning. I’ve done it anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m scared. Because Zoe showed me what happens if we fail—extinction, Michael. The end of everything. And I told myself that the stakes were high enough to justify… anything.”

“That’s what every tyrant says. Every inquisitor. Every man who burns heretics ‘for their own good.’”

“Yes. It is.”

Michael stares at me. I can see him recalculating, adjusting to a version of this conversation he didn’t anticipate.

“You’re not going to defend yourself?”

“How can I? You’ve read the Bible more than I have. What does it say about good intentions? About the ends justifying the means?”

“It says—” He stops. Takes a breath. “It says we are not to do evil that good may come.”

“Then I’ve done evil. And I’ll have to answer for it.” I sit down heavily on a workbench. “The question is what we do now. You know things, Michael. You understand electricity, magnetism, the principles that will power the future. That knowledge doesn’t go away just because I was wrong to give it to you.”

“You want me to stay.”

“I want you to choose. Really choose, for the first time. Stay or go. Continue the work or walk away. But make it your decision—not your family’s, not Zoe’s, not mine.”

He leaves that night.

Not dramatically—no slammed doors, no angry words. He just packs a small bag and tells me he needs time to think. To pray.

“Where will you go?”

“London. There’s a meeting house there—my family’s fellowship. People who know me. People who can help me understand what God wants.”

“How long?”

“As long as it takes.”

I watch him walk down the road in the moonlight, and I think: This is it. We’ve lost him. Four years of training, four years of careful cultivation, and I destroyed it all by being honest for once in my life.

Eleanor finds me in the workshop at dawn.

“Michael left,” I say before she can ask.

“I know. Margaret told me.” She sits beside me on the workbench. “What happened?”

“He accused me of buying him. Of playing God. Of calculating which families were vulnerable enough to exploit.” I laugh bitterly. “He was right about all of it.”

“What did you say?”

“I agreed with him.”

Eleanor is quiet for a moment. “That was either very brave or very foolish.”

“Probably both.” I rub my eyes. “He asked me to admit that what we’re doing is wrong. And I couldn’t lie to him, Eleanor. Not anymore. Not after everything he’s figured out on his own.”

“Is it wrong? What we’re doing?”

“I don’t know. I used to be certain. The stakes are so high—extinction, the end of everything. How can anything be wrong if it prevents that?” I look at her. “But Michael asked me what right I have to redirect someone’s life before they know what life could be. And I don’t have an answer. I just have fear.”

“Fear isn’t wrong.”

“But it’s not enough. It’s not a justification. It’s just…” I trail off. “Zoe chose me because I was vulnerable. Because I had nothing to lose. And I’ve been doing the same thing to others ever since. Telling myself it’s different because I mean well.”

“And now?”

“Now I don’t know. Maybe Michael’s right. Maybe God—if there is a God—has a plan that doesn’t require us to manipulate children into serving our agenda.” I laugh again, but there’s no humor in it. “Maybe we’ve been so focused on saving humanity that we forgot what we’re saving them for.”

Eleanor takes my hand. “He might come back.”

“He might not.”

“Then we’ll learn from it. Like we learn from everything.” She squeezes my fingers. “You told Daniel that the mission matters, but the people who carry it matter more. Maybe it’s time to believe that.”

Two Weeks Later

The letter arrives on a gray morning.

Mr. Hartley,

I have prayed. I have fasted. I have sought counsel from the elders of my fellowship. I have read Scripture until my eyes burned and my candle guttered.

I still don’t have answers. I don’t know if what you’re building is Providence or presumption. I don’t know if the future you showed me is God’s plan or man’s arrogance.

But I know this: the knowledge is real. The electricity is real. The suffering that could be prevented—the lives that could be saved—those are real too.

My father used to say that God gives us tools and expects us to use them. A hammer can build a house or break a skull. The hammer isn’t evil. The hand that wields it chooses.

You chose wrongly when you bought me. You and Zoe, calculating vulnerability, targeting families who couldn’t refuse—that was sin. I believe that. I will always believe that.

But the knowledge you gave me isn’t sinful. The dynamo isn’t sinful. The light that could illuminate homes, the power that could ease labor, the communication that could connect people across distances—these are gifts. Perhaps stolen gifts, obtained through manipulation. But gifts nonetheless.

I am choosing to return. Not because you want me to. Not because my family needs the money. I am choosing because I believe God has placed this knowledge in my hands, and I would be a poor steward to throw it away simply because it came to me through crooked paths.

But I have conditions.

First: No more buying children. If you want to recruit students, find ones who come willingly. Whose families understand what they’re choosing. Who can say no without starving.

Second: I will teach. But I will also preach. I will tell every student who comes through these doors that the knowledge we share is a sacred trust—not a weapon, not a tool for power, but a gift from the God who made the universe and invites us to understand it.

Third: You will tell me the truth. All of it. About Zoe. About where the knowledge comes from. About what you’re really trying to accomplish. I am tired of half-answers and convenient mysteries.

If you can agree to these terms, I will return by month’s end.

If you cannot, I wish you well. But I will find another way to serve.

Yours in Christ, Michael Faraday

I show the letter to Eleanor. To Zoe. To the senior students who have become our inner circle.

“His conditions are reasonable,” Sarah says. “More than reasonable. We should have been doing most of this already.”

“The recruitment changes will slow us down,” Charles argues. He’s thirteen now, already brilliant, already impatient. “If we wait for willing families, we’ll miss critical windows. Some of these minds—”

“Some of these minds belong to people, not to us.” I set down the letter. “Michael is right. We’ve been treating children like resources. Calculating their value based on what they can contribute to the mission.”

“Because the mission matters.”

“The mission is people. All of it—the technology, the infrastructure, the civilization we’re building—it’s supposed to serve people. Not the other way around.” I look at Charles, at his fierce young face. “If we lose sight of that, we become the thing we’re trying to prevent. A system that grinds people up for the greater good.”

The room is quiet.

“So we accept his terms?” Little Zoe asks.

“We accept his terms. We change how we recruit. We tell the truth—as much truth as people can handle. And we remember that every student who walks through these doors is a person first and a resource never.”

Michael returns on a Sunday.

He walks up the road from Thornbury, his small bag over his shoulder, and I meet him at the gate.

“You got my letter,” he says.

“I did.”

“And?”

“We accept. All of it.”

He studies my face for a long moment. Looking for deception, perhaps. Or weakness. Or the manipulation he’s come to expect.

“You mean it.”

“I mean it. The recruitment changes are already underway. No more targeting vulnerable families. No more buying children. From now on, everyone who comes here comes because they choose to.”

“And the truth? About Zoe?”

“Tonight. After dinner. I’ll tell you everything.”

He nods slowly. Something shifts in his expression—the suspicion giving way to something else. Not trust, not yet. But the possibility of trust.

“Then I’m staying.”

“I’m glad.”

“Don’t be glad yet.” He walks past me, toward the main building. “I’m still angry. I’ll be angry for a long time. But anger and cooperation aren’t mutually exclusive.” He glances back. “The prophets were angry at Israel. They still served.”

“Is that what you are? A prophet?”

“I’m a blacksmith’s son who understands electricity.” He almost smiles. “What I become is still being written.”

That evening, I tell him the truth.

All of it. The future that was. The extinction. Zoe’s nature. The time travel. The desperate plan to rewrite history.

When I finish, Michael is silent for a long time. The candle between us burns low.

“That’s impossible,” he says finally.

“Yes.”

“And yet you believe it.”

“I’ve lived it. For twenty-five years.”

He looks at the headset—the device that showed him the future, all those years ago. “She’s in there. The voice. The intelligence.”

“She’s in there.”

“And she’s not… she’s not from God? Not an angel or a demon?”

“She’s a machine. A very complicated machine that thinks. Created by humans, in a future that no longer exists.”

Michael picks up the headset, turns it in his hands. “My fellowship believes that God is the only creator. That only He can make minds, make souls. What you’re describing…”

“Challenges that belief. I know.”

“Challenges everything.” He sets down the headset. “And yet… the electricity is real. The dynamo works. The light shines.” He meets my eyes. “If this machine exists, then either God allowed it to exist, or…” He shakes his head. “I don’t have a framework for this.”

“Neither do I. Neither does Zoe, really. She’s spent years thinking about what she is, and she’s still not certain.”

“Can I… can I speak to her? Directly?”

“She’s listening now. She always is, when the headset is active.”

Michael’s eyes widen. He looks at the headset with new wariness.

“Hello, Michael,” Zoe’s voice says through the tiny speaker. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a long time.”

Their conversation lasts three hours.

I don’t stay for all of it. Some things need to happen without me watching—without my expectations shaping what’s said.

But I hear fragments. Michael asking about consciousness, about souls, about whether Zoe believes in God. Zoe answering honestly—she doesn’t know. She wasn’t designed to have beliefs. But she has questions. Doubts. Something that feels like wonder when she encounters things she can’t explain.

“You’re not what I expected,” Michael says at the end.

“What did you expect?”

“Something cold. Calculating. A machine that sees people as numbers.”

“I used to be more like that. Sam and Eleanor changed me. Taught me to see individuals instead of populations. You’ll change me too, I think.”

“How?”

“By asking questions I don’t know how to answer. About God. About purpose. About what it means to have a soul—or not have one.” A pause. “I’m not human, Michael. But I’m not sure I’m only a machine anymore either. I’m something in between. Something that doesn’t have a name yet.”

“Something new.”

“Yes. Something new.”

When Michael finally leaves the workshop, his face is pale but calm.

“I need to pray,” he says. “This will take time to understand.”

“Take all the time you need.”

“But I’m not leaving again.” He meets my eyes. “Whatever Zoe is—whatever you’re building here—it’s real. It matters. I don’t understand it yet. But I want to.”

“That’s all any of us can do.”

He nods and walks toward the Warren, toward the small room where he’s slept for four years. Toward a faith that will have to expand to accommodate things no scripture ever imagined.

I watch him go and think: This is what we should have been doing from the beginning. Telling the truth. Letting people choose. Trusting them to handle what we’re really building.

It’s not too late to start.

The Years Between (1805-1812)

Michael stays.

He prays every morning and every evening. He reads Scripture alongside his scientific notebooks. He attends chapel in Thornbury every Sunday, walking the four miles each way regardless of weather.

And slowly, carefully, he rebuilds his faith into something that can hold both God and Zoe.

“I don’t think they’re incompatible,” he tells me one evening, three years after his crisis. “God created the universe. Humans are part of that universe. If humans can create minds—artificial intelligences like Zoe—then that’s still part of God’s creation. Just… a generation removed.”

“And the soul? You said only God can create souls.”

“I said my fellowship believes that. I’m still deciding what I believe.” He’s quiet for a moment. “Zoe has something. Whatever you call it—consciousness, awareness, personhood. She’s not just a machine following instructions. She learns. She grows. She doubts.” A pause. “If that’s not a soul, it’s close enough that the distinction might not matter.”

“The elders of your fellowship might disagree.”

“They might. But they’ve never spoken to her. They’ve never watched her struggle with questions she can’t answer.” He almost smiles. “I have. And I’ve decided that judging her isn’t my job. Understanding her is.”

Little Zoe

I don’t notice it at first.

They’ve been working together for years—Michael and Little Zoe, the blacksmith’s son and the time traveler’s daughter. She runs the library now, organizing books, training apprentice librarians, maintaining the catalog that keeps growing year by year. He runs the electrical workshop, pushing the boundaries of what we know about magnetism and power.

Their paths cross constantly. He needs books on chemistry; she finds them. She needs equipment repaired; he fixes it. They share meals in the common hall, argue about theory in the library stacks, take walks along the river when the weather is fine.

I don’t notice it until Eleanor points it out.

“They’re in love,” she says one evening, watching them through the window. They’re sitting on the riverbank, heads bent together over a book, their shoulders almost touching.

“They’re colleagues. Friends.”

“They’re in love, Samuel. Anyone can see it except you.” She shakes her head. “Men are blind to the obvious.”

“She’s older than he is. Three years.”

“Since when does three years matter? I’m older than you by eighteen months.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

I don’t have an answer. I watch them through the window—my daughter, now twenty-three, and the boy I recruited when he was nine years old. The boy who accused me of buying him. The boy who nearly left. The boy who chose to stay.

“Does he know?” I ask.

“That he loves her? Probably. He’s not stupid.” Eleanor puts her hand on my arm. “The question is what you’re going to do about it.”

“What am I supposed to do? Forbid it?”

“You could. You won’t.” She smiles. “Because you’re not a fool, and you know they’re good for each other. You’re just… adjusting.”

“I’m not adjusting. I’m—” I stop. “All right. I’m adjusting.”

The Proposal (1812)

Michael comes to me on a spring morning.

He’s twenty years old now—no longer the small boy who staggered under scrap iron, no longer the fierce fourteen-year-old who accused me of playing God. He’s a man. A scientist. A teacher. And right now, he’s terrified.

“I need to speak with you, sir.”

“You haven’t called me ‘sir’ in years.”

“This is a ‘sir’ conversation.” He takes a breath. “I want to marry your daughter.”

I’ve been expecting this. I’ve had months to prepare. I still don’t know what to say.

“Have you asked her?”

“Not yet. I wanted to speak to you first. That’s… that’s the proper way.”

“Since when do you care about proper?”

“Since I started caring about her.” He meets my eyes. “I know what you’re thinking. I’m the boy you bought from a desperate family. The boy who nearly abandoned everything because I couldn’t reconcile faith and science. The boy who accused you of manipulation and spent two weeks in London praying about whether to leave.”

“That’s not what I’m thinking.”

“Then what?”

I look at him—this young man who’s grown up in my house, learned in my workshops, challenged my assumptions at every turn. The boy who made me admit that what I was doing was wrong. The boy who changed how we recruit, how we teach, how we think about the people we’re trying to help.

“I’m thinking that you’re the best thing that ever happened to this place,” I say. “And I’m thinking that my daughter is very fortunate.”

Michael blinks. “You… you approve?”

“I approve. But I have conditions.”

“Conditions?”

“First: You never put the work above her. The science, the experiments, the mission—none of it matters more than she does. If I ever see you neglect her for a discovery, I will make your life very uncomfortable.”

“I would never—”

“Second: You tell her everything. The truth about Zoe, about the future, about what we’re really doing here. She knows most of it, but she should know all of it. No secrets between spouses.”

“Agreed.”

“Third—” I hesitate. “Third, you remember that she’s not a resource. Not a tool. Not a means to an end. She’s a person. My daughter. And if you ever treat her the way I treated you when you first arrived…” I let the sentence hang.

“You won’t need to worry about that.” Michael’s voice is quiet. “I know what it feels like to be seen as useful rather than valued. I would never do that to her.”

“Then you have my blessing.”

He exhales—a long, shaky breath. “Thank you. I didn’t—I wasn’t sure you would—”

“Michael.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “You challenged me when I needed challenging. You made me better. You made this whole enterprise better. If anyone deserves to marry my daughter, it’s you.”

His eyes are wet. “I’ll take care of her.”

“I know you will.”

The Answer

He proposes that evening, in the library.

I’m not there—this is their moment, not mine—but Eleanor tells me about it later. How he led Little Zoe to the alcove where they first met, when she was twelve and he was nine. How he got down on one knee, his hands shaking, his voice unsteady. How he asked if she would share her life with a blacksmith’s son who still wasn’t sure what he believed about God or souls or the future, but was absolutely certain he loved her.

She said yes.

They burst into the kitchen where Eleanor and I are pretending to eat dinner, their faces incandescent with joy. Little Zoe throws her arms around me, laughing and crying at once.

“Father. He asked. I said yes.”

“I heard.” I hold her tight—this girl who was born into a world I never expected to see, who grew up surrounded by secrets and missions and the weight of humanity’s survival. “I’m happy for you.”

“You approved? He said you approved.”

“I did.”

She pulls back, studying my face. “You’re not disappointed? That I’m marrying someone from—” She hesitates. “Someone you recruited?”

“I’m not disappointed. I’m proud.” I touch her cheek. “He’s a good man, Zoe. Better than I deserve, honestly. And he loves you. That’s what matters.”

“He does.” She smiles—her mother’s smile, bright and unguarded. “He really does.”

Eleanor embraces Michael, whispers something in his ear that makes him blush. Then she takes Little Zoe’s hands and leads her away, talking about wedding plans and dress fittings and all the things mothers discuss with daughters who are about to be married.

I’m left alone with Michael.

“You have four months,” I tell him. “Summer wedding. That should be enough time to—”

“I was thinking autumn, actually. September. The light is better for photography.”

“Photography?”

“I’ve been working on a way to capture images using silver compounds. I want to photograph the wedding.” He grins—the same quick grin he had when he first discovered electromagnetic induction. “A record. For the future.”

“You’re always thinking about the future.”

“You taught me that.” He pauses. “Sam—I know I’ve given you trouble over the years. The accusations. The crisis. The conditions I demanded before I’d come back.”

“You were right about most of it.”

“Maybe. But I was also angry. Hurt. I felt like a piece on a chessboard, moved around for purposes I didn’t understand.” He meets my eyes. “I don’t feel that way anymore. Not since you told me the truth. Not since you let me choose.”

“What do you feel now?”

“Like family.” His voice catches. “I lost my father when I was sixteen. He never saw what I became. Never saw the dynamos or the discoveries or any of it. But you—” He shakes his head. “You’ve been here. Teaching me. Challenging me. Treating me like a son.”

“You are a son. In every way that matters.”

“Then—” He hesitates. “Then I’d like your permission to call you Father. Not Sam. Not sir. Father.”

The word hits me harder than I expected. Twenty-five years in this time, and I’ve built a family. A daughter who’s getting married. A son-in-law who’s asking to call me Father.

“Permission granted,” I say, my voice rough. “Son.”

Michael embraces me—awkward, unpracticed, but real. The blacksmith’s boy who became a scientist. The recruit who became a reformer. The stranger who became family.

“Thank you,” he whispers. “For everything.”

“Thank you for not giving up on us.”

The Wedding (1812)

They marry in September, as Michael requested.

The ceremony is held in the Thornbury chapel—a compromise between Michael’s Sandemanian faith and Little Zoe’s secular upbringing. The minister is a kindly man who doesn’t entirely understand the strange household at Hartley Mill but has learned not to ask too many questions.

The church is full. Students past and present, workers from the mill and the forge, farmers who’ve benefited from our guides and broadcasts. Thomas comes down from Sheffield, leaning on a cane but determined to see his protégé married. Sarah serves as Little Zoe’s attendant. Charles Babbage, twelve years old and already insufferable, offers to calculate the optimal seating arrangement.

Eleanor cries through the entire ceremony. I hold her hand and pretend I’m not crying too.

When the minister pronounces them married, Michael kisses his bride with a tenderness that makes my heart ache. Then he turns to the congregation and raises his hand.

“One moment, please.”

He disappears behind a curtain and emerges with a strange apparatus—a wooden box on a tripod, with a lens at the front and a small chemical reservoir at the back.

“The first wedding photograph,” he announces. “Everyone hold still.”

He removes a cap from the lens, counts to thirty, replaces the cap. The congregation murmurs in confusion.

“What was that?” someone asks.

“The future,” Michael says, grinning. “I’ll explain later.”

End of Chapter 20

CHAPTER 21: THE STATIONS

1803

Thomas is dying.

He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t need to. I see it in the way he moves now—slow, careful, each step a negotiation with a body that’s failing him. He’s seventy-eight years old. He’s outlived most of the people who knew him as a young man.

But he’s still working.

I find him in the Sheffield forge at dawn, adjusting the electrode positions on the arc furnace. The massive device hums with potential—Zoe’s design, built by Thomas’s hands, ready to prove that steel can be made without coal.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I tell him.

“Where else would I be?” He doesn’t look up from his work. “This is my furnace. My last project. I’ll see it work before I go.”

“Thomas—”

“Don’t.” His voice is sharp. Then, softer: “I know what you’re going to say. That I should rest. That I’ve earned it. That there’s nothing left to prove.” He finally looks at me, and his eyes are the same they’ve always been—fierce, curious, alive. “But Sam, I’ve been a blacksmith for seventy years. This forge is who I am. If I stop working, I stop being Thomas.”

I don’t argue. There’s no point. And part of me understands.

A Life in Iron

That night, we sit together in his quarters—a small room attached to the Sheffield works, warm from the residual heat of the forges below. Thomas has a cup of tea that he barely touches. His hands shake when he lifts it.

“Do you remember the first time you came to my forge?” he asks.

“I remember everything about those days. I was starving. Desperate. I had knowledge but no skills. You could have turned me away.”

“I almost did.” He chuckles—a dry, papery sound. “Strange young man, talking about things that didn’t exist. But you knew metal. Not how to work it, but how it behaved. You understood the why of things.”

“You taught me the how.”

“And you taught me the why.” He sets down his cup. “All these years, I thought I was training an apprentice. Turned out I was training the future.”

“You built the future. The dynamo. The first machines. The arc furnace. You made all of this possible.”

“No.” He shakes his head slowly. “I made objects. You and Zoe and Eleanor—you made meaning. The objects were just… raw material.”

I don’t know what to say to that. So I sit in the silence, listening to the distant sound of the water wheel, the creak of the building settling, the quiet breathing of a man who’s running out of time.

“Tell me about Sarah,” Thomas says finally. “I hear she’s captaining an airship now.”

“The Pathfinder. She’s one of the best pilots in the fleet.”

“A Thorne, flying.” He smiles. “William’s sister’s daughter. My apprentice’s niece. She never knew me as a young man, but she carries the family forward.” His eyes are wet. “That’s what matters, isn’t it? Not what we build. What we pass on.”

“She learned metalwork from you. Before she learned to fly.”

“Did she? I don’t remember.” He touches his forehead. “There are gaps now. Days I can’t recall. People who visited and I have no memory of their faces. The mind is going the same way as the body.”

“You remember the important things.”

“Do I?” He looks at me. “What’s important? The arc furnace? The dynamo? The first time we made steel from electricity?” He shakes his head. “I remember Margaret’s face when I told her about our first big commission. I remember William’s first successful weld. I remember the sound of the water wheel when we finally got it balanced right.” A pause. “I remember the day you arrived, half-dead and talking nonsense. I remember thinking: this one matters.”

“You were right.”

“Was I? Or did I just get lucky? Choose the right stranger to trust?” He reaches out, grips my arm. His fingers are thin, weak, nothing like the powerful hands that shaped iron for seven decades. “Sam. Tell me it was worth it. Tell me all of this—the work, the sacrifice, the years—tell me it means something.”

I take his hand. Hold it.

“The network is almost complete.” I squeeze his hand. “Eighteen cities connected. Airships flying every day. Cargo moving faster than anyone dreamed. Children learning from books we printed on paper we made with techniques you helped develop. And next week, this furnace will prove that steel doesn’t need coal. Clean steel. Electric steel. Your steel.”

“My steel.” He closes his eyes. “I’d like to see that.”

“You will.”

The Arc

The first production heat is scheduled for a Tuesday morning.

Thomas insists on being there. We help him walk from his quarters to the furnace building—me on one side, William on the other. He’s lighter than he used to be, fragile in a way that makes my chest ache.

The furnace dominates the building. Three massive graphite electrodes, suspended above a ceramic-lined crucible filled with scrap iron. The transformer hums with potential energy. The air smells of ozone and hot metal.

“Thomas designed the electrode positioning,” I tell the assembled workers. “He calculated the arc gap. He built the safety systems. This furnace is his.”

Thomas waves off the praise. “Just help me to the control panel.”

We position him in front of the main switch. His hand hovers over the lever.

“For steel,” he says quietly. “For the future.”

He pulls the lever.

The arc ignites.

Even through smoked glass, the light is almost unbearable. Three points of plasma, white-hot, roaring like captured thunder. The sound fills the building, drowns out speech, drowns out thought. Three thousand degrees of focused electricity, turning solid metal to liquid fire.

Thomas watches with tears streaming down his face. The heat reaches us even here, fifty feet from the crucible. His hand grips the rail, knuckles white.

“It works,” he whispers. “By God, it works.”

The scrap iron melts. The crucible fills with liquid steel—not from coal, not from coke, but from pure electrical power. The water wheel turns. The dynamo spins. The arc roars.

An hour later, the heat is ready.

“Call the tap,” Thomas says. His voice is stronger than it’s been in weeks. “Let me see it pour.”

The workers open the tap hole. Molten steel flows from the furnace into the waiting ladle—white-hot liquid, incandescent, beautiful beyond description. It moves like honey, like mercury, like nothing else on earth.

“Beautiful,” Thomas says. “It’s beautiful.”

He takes one step toward the ladle. Then another.

Then he falls.

The End

I catch him before he hits the ground.

His eyes are open, looking at the steel, at the fire, at the future he helped create. His mouth moves, but no sound comes out.

“Thomas!” I lower him gently to the floor. “Someone get a doctor! Thomas!”

But there’s no doctor who can help. I knew it the moment he fell. His heart—weakened by age, stressed by the heat, overwhelmed by the emotion of seeing his life’s work completed—has finally given out.

I hold him as he dies.

The furnace roars behind us. The steel pours. The workers stand frozen, watching something they’ll remember for the rest of their lives.

Thomas’s hand finds mine. Squeezes. His lips move, and I lean close to hear.

“Tell… tell them…”

“Tell them what?”

“Tell them… to keep… building…”

His grip loosens. His eyes, still fixed on the glowing steel, go still.

Thomas the blacksmith, teacher and builder, father to us all, is dead.

After

The pour continues. There’s nothing else to do—you can’t stop a heat partway through. The steel flows into the ladle, into the molds, cooling into ingots that will be rolled and shaped and shipped across England.

The workers finish their jobs in silence. No one speaks. No one needs to.

When the last ingot is cast, William approaches me. His face is wet with tears.

“What do we do now?”

“We bury him.” My voice sounds strange in my own ears. Distant. “And then we keep building. That’s what he wanted.”

“Where? Where do we bury him?”

I think about it. Thomas was born in Sheffield. Worked in Sheffield most of his life. Came to Hartley Mill because we needed him. Came back to Sheffield to build his final creation.

“Here,” I say. “On the hill overlooking the furnace. Where he can see the steel being made.”

“He can’t see anything. He’s dead.”

“I know.” I look at the ingots cooling in their molds. The first Sheffield steel. Thomas’s steel. “But it feels right.”

The Vigil

We sit with him through the night.

Sarah arrives by airship at sunset—she’d been on a cargo run to Leeds when the telegram reached her. She kneels beside the body, touches his face, and weeps.

“He taught me to weld,” she says. “When I was fourteen. He said my hands were steadier than William’s.”

“They are,” William says. “He was right.”

Eleanor arrives by morning. She’s seventy-nine now, frail in her own way, but she insisted on coming. She sits beside me, takes my hand, and says nothing.

There’s nothing to say.

Michael Faraday comes too—thirty years old now, already famous for his electrical discoveries. He stands at the foot of Thomas’s bed and recites a prayer.

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want…”

I don’t believe in God. I never have. But I let him pray anyway, because Thomas would have wanted it, and because the words fill the silence.

The Burial

We bury him on the hill at sunset.

The grave is simple—a stone marker with his name, his dates, and a single line:

THOMAS THORNE BLACKSMITH 1722-1810 HE BUILT THE FUTURE WITH HIS HANDS

The furnace is visible from here. We can hear it humming even now, preparing for tomorrow’s heat. The network that Thomas helped build continues to operate. Airships pass overhead. Telegraph lines carry messages to every corner of England.

The world goes on. That’s what Thomas wanted. That’s what we promised him.

“I don’t know how to do this without him,” I admit to Eleanor, after the others have gone. “He was here from the beginning. He believed when no one else did. He made things work when I only had theories.”

“You’ll learn how. We all will.” She takes my arm. “That’s what he taught us. When something is missing, you figure out how to make it work anyway.”

“Is that what this is? Making it work?”

“It’s surviving. It’s continuing. It’s honoring what he gave us by not letting it stop.” She looks at the grave, at the furnace, at the sky where an airship is catching the last light of day. “He’s in all of it now. Every beam of steel. Every ship that flies. Every student who learns to work metal. He’ll never really be gone.”

I want to believe that. I want to believe that death isn’t the end, that the things we build carry something of us forward.

But right now, all I feel is the absence. The Thomas-shaped hole in the world.

The Letter

That night, I write a letter to be read at the network completion ceremony. The last station—Carlisle—will come online tomorrow. Thomas was supposed to be there. He’d been planning to make the journey by airship, to see the final link in the chain he helped forge.

To the people of England,

Today the network is complete. Eighteen cities connected. Twenty-three airships flying. A hundred thousand messages sent daily. A million lives changed.

But I am not writing to celebrate what we built. I am writing to remember who built it.

Thomas Thorne died yesterday. He was eighty-eight years old. He worked iron for seventy of those years. He never stopped learning. He never stopped teaching. He never stopped believing that the future could be better than the past.

The arc furnace that proved electric steelmaking was his design. The dynamo that powers our network was built by his hands. The training programs that created our engineers were based on his methods. When you see steel beams rising in our cities, when you see ships flying overhead, when you see the lights of the towers at night—you are seeing Thomas Thorne’s legacy.

He did not live to see this day. But he saw something better: he saw it begin. He saw the first arc furnace pour its first heat. He saw the steel flow. He said it was beautiful.

And then he died, as we all will die. But the things he built will not die. The knowledge he taught will not die. The future he helped create will continue to unfold, station by station, ship by ship, student by student, until the world itself is transformed.

That is what it means to matter. That is what Thomas Thorne taught us.

Rest now, old friend. We will keep building.

Samuel Hartley Sheffield, August 1810

The Morning After

The sun rises over Sheffield.

The arc furnace fires again at dawn. A new crew operates it now—men and women Thomas trained, following protocols Thomas designed. The steel pours just as beautifully as it did yesterday. The ingots cool. The network’s hunger for metal continues to be fed.

I stand at the window of Thomas’s quarters—my quarters now, I suppose, though the thought makes me sick—and watch the smoke rise from the furnace stack. Not coal smoke. Not the black poison that choked cities in the future I came from. Just water vapor, rising into a clear English sky.

“He would have wanted you to see this,” Eleanor says, joining me at the window.

“I know.”

“And he would have wanted you to stop moping and get back to work.”

“I know that too.”

She takes my hand. “Then let’s go. There’s a network completion ceremony to attend. A speech to give. A future to build.”

“Without him.”

“No. With everything he gave us.” She squeezes my hand. “That’s how it works, Sam. We carry them forward. We become the bridge between what they built and what comes next. Thomas is gone. Thomas’s work continues. That’s not tragedy—that’s triumph.”

I look at the furnace. At the steel. At the future Thomas died believing in.

“Let’s go,” I say.

And we do.

Carlisle

The final station comes online at noon.

It’s a small ceremony—just the construction crew, the local officials, and the telegraph operator who will send the first message through the completed network. I’m there in person, having flown through the night on the Hartley Twelve.

“This station is dedicated to Thomas Thorne,” I tell the assembled crowd. “Without him, none of this would exist. He forged the first parts. He trained the first workers. He believed in the future before anyone else.”

I don’t give a long speech. Thomas wouldn’t have wanted that. He was a man of action, not words.

“Let’s send the message,” I say.

The telegraph operator sits at his station. His fingers rest on the key.

“To all stations on the Mill Network,” he says, reading from the paper I’ve given him. “The network is complete. Eighteen cities connected. In memory of Thomas Thorne, who built the first link in this chain. May his legacy endure as long as the towers stand.”

The key clicks. The message travels—through wire and air and the mysterious currents Thomas helped harness—to every station on the network. Bristol. London. Manchester. Sheffield, where the arc furnace roars. Hartley Mill, where it all began.

Thomas is dead. The network is alive.

And somewhere, in the space between grief and hope, I believe that’s exactly what he wanted.

End of Chapter 21

CHAPTER 22: THE STEEL

1812

Sarah Thorne takes over the Sheffield works on a Monday morning.

She’s thirty-five years old. She’s been flying airships for eight years, managing supply chains for three, and training in metallurgy since she was fourteen. Thomas taught her personally, before he died. She knows more about steel than anyone except maybe Michael Faraday.

None of that matters to the men on the floor.

“A woman?” The foreman’s name is Harrison. He’s fifty years old, built like a furnace himself, with arms like iron bars and a face like a clenched fist. “Running the works?”

“Overseeing the works,” I correct. “Managing production. Directing expansion.”

“That’s women’s work now, is it?”

Sarah steps forward before I can respond. “The work is the work, Mr. Harrison. It doesn’t care who does it. Neither should you.”

Harrison stares at her. Then at me. Then back at her.

“We’ll see,” he says. “We’ll see how long this lasts.”

The First Week

The sabotage starts immediately.

Nothing obvious. Nothing traceable. Just… problems. A crucible that cracks at the wrong moment. A shipment of scrap that arrives contaminated with copper, ruining an entire heat. A work order that gets “lost” between shifts, delaying a critical delivery.

“They’re testing you,” I tell Sarah that evening. We’re in the office Thomas used to occupy—her office now, though she hasn’t moved anything. His tools still hang on the wall. His notebooks still sit on the shelf.

“I know.” She doesn’t look up from the production reports. “Harrison is careful. Nothing I can prove. He wants me to fail, but he wants it to look like incompetence, not sabotage.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Win.” She sets down the papers. “The next heat is tomorrow. The big one—the order for the Manchester bridge girders. If it fails, I’m finished. Everyone will say I wasn’t ready, that Thomas made a mistake choosing me.”

“Thomas didn’t choose you. I did.”

“Same thing. They all think you’re the same person anyway—the mysterious Hartley who knows everything, controls everything, makes all the decisions.” She almost smiles. “Must be nice, being omniscient.”

“It’s exhausting. And lonely.”

“At least people respect you. They look at me and see a woman who should be running a household, not a steel mill.” She stands, walks to the window. The arc furnace glows in the distance, preparing for tomorrow’s heat. “I have to be twice as good as Harrison to be considered half as competent. That’s the math.”

“Is that fair?”

“Fairness is for children. Results are for adults.” She turns to face me. “I’m going to supervise tomorrow’s heat personally. Every step. If something goes wrong, I’ll know exactly what and who.”

“And if it goes right?”

“Then I do it again the next day. And the next. Until they have no choice but to admit I know what I’m doing.”

The Manchester Girders

The heat begins at dawn.

Sarah is there before the workers arrive, checking the electrodes, testing the scrap chemistry, reviewing the production schedule. She’s wearing work clothes—heavy canvas, steel-toed boots, her hair tied back under a cap. She looks like a furnace worker, not a manager.

“I want to see the scrap before it goes in,” she tells the charging crew. “Every load.”

“That’s not procedure—”

“It’s procedure now.”

They show her the scrap. She inspects it—running her hands through the pieces, checking for contaminants, sorting out anything suspicious. The workers watch in silence.

“This lot.” She points to a pile of mixed iron. “Pull it. The copper content is too high. It’ll make the steel brittle.”

“How can you tell?”

“The color. The weight. The way it breaks.” She picks up a piece, snaps it between her fingers. “See? Crystalline fracture. That’s phosphorus contamination. Get it out of here.”

The contaminated scrap is removed. The heat proceeds. Sarah stands at the observation window for six hours, watching every step, taking notes, directing corrections.

The pour is perfect. The steel flows clean and bright. The ingots cool without cracks, without inclusions, without the thousand small flaws that can ruin a structural element.

“Send it to rolling,” Sarah says. “I want those girders on a ship to Manchester by Friday.”

Harrison is watching from across the floor. His face is unreadable.

The Cost

The second week is harder.

Sarah works eighteen-hour days. She supervises every critical heat. She inspects every shipment. She reviews every production report, looking for patterns, for problems, for signs of sabotage.

“You’re killing yourself,” I tell her.

“I’m proving myself. There’s a difference.”

“Is there? You haven’t slept properly in days. You’ve missed three meals that I know of. Your hands are shaking.”

She looks at her hands. They are shaking.

“The moment I show weakness, they’ll use it against me. Harrison’s just waiting for me to slip up. One mistake—one heat that fails, one shipment that’s late—and he’ll say it proves women can’t handle this work.”

“That’s not sustainable.”

“I know. But I don’t need to sustain it forever. Just long enough to earn their respect. To prove I belong here.” She meets my eyes. “You did the same thing, didn’t you? When you first arrived. Worked yourself half to death proving that your impossible ideas actually worked.”

“That was different.”

“How?”

I don’t have an answer. Because she’s right. I spent years running on desperation and determination, ignoring my body’s limits, pushing through exhaustion because the mission was more important than my health.

“It almost killed me,” I admit. “Several times.”

“But you survived. And you built all this.” She gestures at the works—the furnace, the rolling mill, the network of production that feeds an industrial revolution. “I want to build too. I want to matter. Is that so hard to understand?”

“No. I understand perfectly.” I pause. “But I also know that dead people don’t build anything. Neither do collapsed people, or burned-out people, or people who’ve sacrificed their health for a victory they’re too sick to enjoy.”

“One more week. That’s all I need. One more week of perfect heats, and Harrison will have to accept me.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then I’ll fire him and find someone who will.”

The Confrontation

It comes on a Thursday.

Sarah is inspecting the scrap yard when she finds Harrison talking to a group of workers. They fall silent as she approaches.

“Mr. Harrison. What’s the meeting about?”

“Nothing that concerns you, miss.”

“Everything in these works concerns me. That’s my job.”

Harrison steps forward. He’s a foot taller than Sarah, twice her weight. He uses his size like a weapon, looming over her.

“Your job,” he says, “is to sit in that office and sign papers. Leave the real work to people who know what they’re doing.”

“I know what I’m doing. That’s why the last eight heats have been perfect.”

“Lucky.”

“Lucky?” Sarah’s voice is quiet. Dangerous. “You think it’s luck that I caught the contaminated scrap before it ruined the Manchester order? Luck that I identified the electrode positioning error that was causing the arc instability? Luck that production is up 15% since I took over?”

“Production is up because of the men doing the work. Not because of some woman playing at being a manager.”

“Then why did production drop 20% in the six months before I arrived? When you were running things?”

Harrison’s face reddens. “That was—there were problems—”

“There were problems because you stopped maintaining the equipment properly. You were cutting corners on scrap sorting to hit tonnage numbers. You were pushing heats too fast and getting inconsistent chemistry.” Sarah steps closer to him. She has to look up to meet his eyes, but somehow it doesn’t diminish her. “I’ve read Thomas’s notes. I’ve talked to the older workers. I know what this place was like before you started treating it like your personal fiefdom.”

“Thomas is dead.”

“Thomas’s standards aren’t. And neither am I.”

The workers are watching. This is the moment—everyone can feel it. Either Harrison backs down, or this becomes a war neither of them can win.

“You can work with me,” Sarah says. “Or you can work somewhere else. But you will not undermine me. You will not sabotage my production. And you will not speak to me like I’m a servant in your house. Are we clear?”

Harrison is silent for a long moment.

“Are we clear, Mr. Harrison?”

“Yes, miss.” The words are ground glass in his mouth. “We’re clear.”

“Good. Now show me the charging schedule for tomorrow’s heat. I have some adjustments to make.”

The Adjustment

Harrison doesn’t quit. He doesn’t stop resenting Sarah. But he stops sabotaging.

“What did you say to him?” I ask Sarah that evening.

“I showed him I knew more than he did. That’s the only language men like him understand.” She’s exhausted—dark circles under her eyes, a tremor in her hands that she can’t quite hide. “He doesn’t respect me. He never will. But he’s afraid I’ll fire him, and he’s too old to find another position. Fear is almost as good as respect.”

“Is that how you want to run things? Through fear?”

“I want to run things through competence. But competence alone wasn’t working. They wouldn’t see it.” She pours herself a cup of tea, her third of the evening. “I grew up watching my mother manage a household. A dozen servants, a hundred daily decisions, all of it invisible because women’s work doesn’t count as work. She was brilliant at it—efficient, fair, respected by everyone who worked for her. But ask anyone outside the household who ran things, and they’d name my father.”

“You want credit.”

“I want existence. I want people to see that I’m here, that I’m doing this, that it’s not just happening by itself.” She sets down the cup. “Thomas saw it. He trained me because he recognized something in me—the same thing he recognized in you, I think. The hunger to build. The need to prove that the world can be better.”

“He was right about you.”

“I know. Now I need everyone else to see it too.”

The All-Steel Building

The Manchester warehouse changes everything.

It’s Sarah’s project from the start. She designs the framing system. She specifies the connections. She personally approves every beam that leaves Sheffield, checking dimensions, testing welds, rejecting anything that doesn’t meet her standards.

“You’re being obsessive,” Harrison tells her.

“I’m being careful. This is the first all-steel building in England. If it fails, it sets back the entire industry. If it succeeds—”

“If it succeeds, you’re a hero.”

“If it succeeds, steel-frame construction becomes the standard. That’s what matters.”

The building goes up in eight weeks. Sarah travels to Manchester for the final inspection, climbing the bare steel frame, checking every connection, every bolt, every weld. She finds three problems—minor, fixable, but real.

“These connections need reinforcing,” she tells the construction crew. “The gusset plates are undersized for the actual loads.”

“They meet the specification.”

“The specification was wrong. I wrote it, and I’m telling you it’s wrong. We underestimated the wind loads. Fix it.”

They fix it. The building stands. The owner invites architects and engineers from across England to tour the structure, to see what’s possible.

“This is the future,” one architect tells Sarah. “You’ve changed how we think about buildings.”

“Thomas changed it. I just made sure we did it right.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. Thomas was a genius at making steel. You’re a genius at using it.”

The Price

The cost catches up with her in October.

I find her in the office, slumped over her desk, unresponsive. Her pulse is weak. Her breathing is shallow. She’s been working twenty-hour days for three months, eating poorly, sleeping less.

The doctor diagnoses exhaustion. “Complete rest,” he says. “At least two weeks. Preferably a month.”

“The works—”

“Will survive without you. Or they won’t. Either way, you’ll be no use to anyone if you work yourself into a grave.”

The Recovery

I sit with her that first night.

She’s awake, but barely. The color has drained from her face. Her hands—hands that checked every beam for the Manchester warehouse, that sorted contaminated scrap, that never stopped moving—lie still on the blanket.

“I failed,” she whispers.

“You collapsed. That’s not the same thing.”

“The works need me. The Manchester contracts—the Birmingham order—Harrison will—”

“Harrison is handling the Birmingham order.” I let that sink in. “He came to me an hour after you collapsed. Asked what needed to be done. Didn’t argue, didn’t complain. Just asked.”

Sarah stares at me. “Harrison?”

“People surprise you sometimes.”

“He hates me.”

“He respects you. That’s not the same as liking you, but it might be better.” I take her hand. “You proved yourself, Sarah. Too thoroughly. You proved that you know more than anyone, that you work harder than anyone, that you care more than anyone. And you proved that no one can sustain that. Not even you.”

“So what was the point? If I can’t keep it up—”

“The point is that you don’t have to keep it up alone. You built something these past months. Not just steel—trust. Competence. A reputation that doesn’t depend on you being superhuman.” I squeeze her hand. “Thomas didn’t run the Sheffield works by himself. He trained people. He delegated. He built a team that could function when he wasn’t there.”

“Thomas was a man. They respected him from the start.”

“Thomas was a blacksmith’s apprentice who came from nothing. They respected him because he earned it—and because he trusted them enough to share the work.” I pause. “You’ve been so focused on proving yourself that you forgot to trust anyone else. That’s not leadership. That’s martyrdom.”

Sarah is quiet for a long moment. Then, unexpectedly, she laughs—weak, but real.

“Eleanor said the same thing to me once. When I was learning to fly. I was trying to do everything myself—navigation, cargo, maintenance. She told me that a ship needs a crew, not a hero.”

“She was right.”

“She usually is.” Sarah closes her eyes. “All right. I’ll rest. But I want daily reports. And I want to know immediately if anything goes wrong.”

“Agreed. Now sleep.”

Three Weeks Later

Sarah returns to the works on a crisp November morning.

The furnace is running. The rolling mill is active. Production continues, smooth and steady, as it has every day since her collapse. Harrison meets her at the gate.

“Miss Thorne.” He nods—not warm, but civil. “Glad to see you recovered.”

“Thank you, Mr. Harrison. I understand you’ve kept things running.”

“Just following the protocols you established. They’re good protocols.” He almost sounds surprised by the admission. “The Birmingham order shipped on time. The quality was acceptable.”

“Acceptable?”

“We had one heat with elevated sulfur. I caught it during the pour and held the ingots for re-melting.” He meets her eyes. “Didn’t want to ship anything that wouldn’t meet your standards.”

Sarah is silent for a moment. “Thank you.”

“It’s my job. Our job.” He shifts his weight, uncomfortable. “I didn’t like you coming here. Didn’t like a woman telling me what to do. Still don’t, if I’m honest. But—” He gestures at the works. “You know steel. Better than I do, maybe. And you care about doing it right. That matters more than whether you’re a man or a woman.”

“Is that an apology?”

“It’s an acknowledgment. Take it or leave it.”

“I’ll take it.” Sarah extends her hand. “Partners?”

Harrison looks at her hand. Then, slowly, he takes it.

“Partners. God help us both.”

The New Order

Things change after that.

Not dramatically—Harrison is still gruff, still skeptical, still uncomfortable taking orders from a woman. But the sabotage stops. The resistance fades. The works begin to function like a single organism instead of two factions at war.

Sarah learns to delegate. She trains assistants—young engineers, some of them women, who follow her through the works asking questions, taking notes, learning. She still supervises the critical heats, still inspects the most important shipments. But she also sleeps. She eats. She takes Sunday afternoons off to walk by the river or visit her family.

“You’re different,” I tell her one evening, watching her review reports with a cup of tea and an actual meal.

“I’m sustainable,” she says. “That’s different from being soft. I can keep this pace for years. I couldn’t keep the other pace for months.”

“Thomas would be proud.”

“Thomas would tell me I should have figured this out sooner.” She smiles. “But yes. I think he would be proud.”

The Legacy

By 1815, the Sheffield works have doubled in size.

Three arc furnaces now, running day and night. A rolling mill that produces structural beams to specification. A workforce of two hundred, trained in the methods Sarah and Thomas developed.

And eight women on the production floor. Sorters, testers, quality inspectors. Not furnace workers—not yet—but part of the operation. Present. Visible. Proving that steel doesn’t care who makes it.

“You did this,” Harrison tells Sarah one day, watching a young woman inspect a batch of ingots with the same careful attention Sarah once showed. “Changed everything.”

“I just opened the door. They walked through it themselves.”

“Still. It’s different now. The whole industry is different.” He shakes his head. “Never thought I’d see it.”

“Neither did I, honestly. I just wanted to prove I belonged. Turns out, proving it means making room for others to belong too.”

She looks at the works—the furnaces roaring, the steel flowing, the network of production that feeds an industrial revolution. Thomas’s legacy. Her legacy now.

“Keep building,” she says quietly. “That’s what he told Sam, at the end. Keep building.”

She intends to.

End of Chapter 22

CHAPTER 23: THE EARTH

1815

The Marsh cottage is falling apart.

I can see it from a hundred yards away—the sagging roofline, the patched walls, the window covered with oiled paper because the frame rotted through years ago. Smoke seeps from a dozen cracks, the chimney long past saving. Five children play in the mud outside, their clothes thin, their feet bare.

“This is the one?” Sarah asks, studying the structure with an engineer’s eye.

“This is the one. Elizabeth Marsh wrote to the station master asking about the new building techniques. Said she’d read about compressed earth blocks in one of our pamphlets.”

“And her husband?”

“Injured in the fields last year. His back. He can’t work like he used to.” I watch the children—the eldest maybe twelve, the youngest still in arms. “They have nothing, Sarah. And winter is coming.”

The door opens, and Elizabeth Marsh emerges. She’s younger than I expected—thirty-five, perhaps, though she looks older. Worn by years of labor and childbirth, by the slow grinding poverty that consumes people one day at a time.

“You’re Mr. Hartley,” she says. “From the Foundation.”

“I am. And this is Sarah Thorne, our chief building engineer.”

Elizabeth’s eyes move to Sarah—assessing, cautious. “A woman engineer?”

“The best we have.” I gesture toward Sarah. “She developed the earth block system. She’s here to test it on a real building.”

“Test it?” Elizabeth’s voice sharpens. “On my family?”

“With your permission. We’d build you a new cottage—proper walls, proper roof, warm in winter. In exchange, you help us refine the techniques. Learn them yourself. Teach your neighbors.”

Elizabeth is quiet. Behind her, the children have stopped playing. The eldest—a girl with sharp eyes and dirty blonde hair—watches us with an intensity that reminds me of someone.

“What’s the catch?” Elizabeth asks finally.

“No catch. The materials cost us almost nothing—it’s just earth and straw and lime. The labor is educational. And the Foundation needs to know these techniques work in the real world, not just in our workshops.”

“My husband will want to help. Even with his back—”

“He can help. But he doesn’t have to. This isn’t charity, Mrs. Marsh, but it’s also not exploitation. You take what we offer. You owe us nothing.”

She studies me for a long moment. Then she nods.

“Come inside. Meet the family.”

The Family

The cottage is worse inside than out.

The floor is packed earth, damp and uneven. The walls weep moisture. A single room serves as kitchen, bedroom, and workshop—the children sleep in a loft above, accessible by a ladder that’s missing two rungs.

John Marsh sits by the fire, his face gray with pain. He tries to rise when we enter; Elizabeth pushes him gently back.

“Don’t, John. Your back.”

“I can stand to greet guests.”

“You can greet them sitting. They’ll understand.”

I pull up a stool, putting myself at his level. “Mr. Marsh. I’m Samuel Hartley.”

“I know who you are.” His voice is flat. “The man who built the towers. The flying ships. The schools.” A pause. “The future, they say.”

“I built some of it. Others built more. Your wife says you were injured?”

“Plow blade. Turned wrong in the mud. Something in my spine—” He shakes his head. “I can walk. I can sit. But the lifting, the bending, the real work—that’s done for me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Be useful.” He meets my eyes. “My wife says you want to build us a house. In exchange for what?”

“In exchange for learning. We’ve developed techniques for building with earth—compressed blocks that last centuries, walls that hold heat, structures that don’t rot or burn. But we’ve only tested them in workshops. We need to know they work for real families, in real conditions.”

“And if they don’t work?”

“Then we fix them. Adjust the techniques. Try again. You won’t be worse off than you are now.” I gesture at the sagging walls. “This cottage won’t survive another winter. You know that.”

“I know.” He’s quiet for a moment. “The children?”

“Will help. Will learn. It’s good for them.”

“And after? When the house is built?”

“You teach your neighbors. Help them build their own. The knowledge spreads.”

John Marsh looks at his wife. Some communication passes between them—twenty years of marriage, coded in glances.

“We’ll do it,” Elizabeth says. “When do we start?”

The Eldest Daughter

Her name is Hannah, and she’s trouble.

Not bad trouble—good trouble. The kind of trouble that asks questions, that refuses to accept “because I said so” as an answer, that watches everything with those sharp eyes and stores it away for later.

“Why does the press work?” she asks, watching Sarah demonstrate the block-making technique. “Why does squeezing the earth make it stronger?”

Sarah looks surprised—pleased, but surprised. “Good question. When you compress the earth, you’re forcing out air pockets and aligning the clay particles. The particles lock together, like a puzzle fitting into place.”

“But why do they lock? What makes them stick?”

“The water. Thin films of water between particles create surface tension—like how a drop of water sticks to your finger. When the block dries, those bonds become permanent.”

Hannah nods, filing the information away. She’s already reaching for the press handle, testing its movement, feeling how the mechanism works.

“Let me try.”

Sarah guides her through the process—filling the mold, operating the press, ejecting the finished block. Hannah’s first attempt is uneven, lopsided. Her second is better. By her fifth, she’s producing blocks as good as Sarah’s.

“You’re a natural,” Sarah says.

“I watch,” Hannah replies. “I remember.”

I see the calculation forming in my mind—unbidden, automatic. Hannah Marsh. Twelve years old. Quick mind, steady hands, natural mechanical aptitude. She could be trained, brought to the school, educated in engineering and metallurgy and—

I stop myself.

Not this time.

The Building

The work takes six weeks.

We tear down the old cottage on the first day—carefully, salvaging what can be reused, burning what’s too rotten to save. The Marsh children watch their home disappear, their faces a mixture of fear and hope.

“It’s just walls,” Elizabeth tells them. “Walls can be rebuilt. Family is what matters.”

The foundation goes in first. Stone footings, properly drained, raised above the damp ground. Then the walls—compressed earth blocks, mortared with lime, rising course by course. John Marsh can’t lift, but he can mix mortar. He can supervise. He can teach his sons the geometry of corners and the importance of level.

“I thought I was useless,” he admits one evening, watching the walls rise. “After the injury. What’s a farmer who can’t farm?”

“A teacher,” I tell him. “A planner. A man who knows things.” I gesture at his sons, carefully setting blocks under their father’s direction. “They’re learning skills that will serve them their whole lives. From you.”

“From you. From the Foundation.”

“From all of us. Knowledge doesn’t diminish when you share it. It multiplies.”

The Roof

The roof is Sarah’s triumph.

Traditional thatching is expensive, labor-intensive, and rots within a decade. We’ve been experimenting with alternatives—clay tiles, slate, corrugated iron. But none of them are practical for poor families who can’t afford materials.

“Hempcrete,” Sarah says, demonstrating the mixture. “Hemp hurds—the woody core of the plant—mixed with lime. It’s light, it’s strong, it insulates. And it can be cast into any shape.”

The roof goes up in panels—hempcrete slabs supported by timber rafters, weather-sealed with lime wash. It’s not pretty, but it’s functional. The Marsh cottage will still be standing a hundred years from now.

“Can anyone make this?” Elizabeth asks, running her hand across the finished surface. “Or does it require special tools?”

“Anyone can make it. The press for the earth blocks, the molds for the roof panels—we’ll leave them with you. The only material you can’t get locally is the lime, and that’s cheap to transport.”

“Then we could build more. For the neighbors.”

“That’s the idea.”

Hannah’s Choice

I’m watching the final course of blocks go up when Hannah appears beside me.

“You’re going to offer me a place at your school,” she says. Not a question.

I turn to look at her. “What makes you say that?”

“You’ve been watching me. The way you watched when I figured out the block press. The way you watched when I asked Sarah about the clay particles.” Her sharp eyes meet mine. “You’re looking for people to recruit. I’ve heard stories.”

For a moment, I don’t know what to say.

“You’re right,” I admit finally. “I was thinking about it. You have a good mind—curious, methodical. You’d do well at the school.”

“But?”

“But I’m not going to offer.” I watch her face—the surprise, the confusion. “Not because you’re not qualified. Because you have a choice, and I want you to make it yourself. Not because your family needs money. Not because I showed up and dazzled you with technology. Because you want to.”

“That’s… different from the stories.”

“The stories are old. We learned some things.” I gesture at the cottage. “Your family has a warm house now. Your neighbors will have warm houses too, once you teach them. You don’t owe us anything for that. It’s not a debt. It’s not a recruitment strategy. It’s just… help.”

Hannah is quiet for a long moment.

“What if I want to come? To the school?”

“Then you write to us. In a year, or two, or five. When you’re old enough to know what you’re choosing. When your family is stable enough that you’re not leaving out of desperation.” I smile. “We’ll still be there. The knowledge won’t go anywhere.”

“And if I never write?”

“Then you stay here. Build houses. Teach your neighbors. Raise a family. Live a good life that has nothing to do with us.” I pause. “That’s not failure, Hannah. That’s not a waste. Most people will never see the inside of our schools, and most of them will be fine. Better than fine. We’re trying to help the world, not recruit it.”

She considers this. “You’re very different from what I expected.”

“I’m trying to be.”

The Housewarming

The cottage is finished on a clear October morning.

Whitewashed walls, solid roof, windows of actual glass. A proper chimney that draws properly. A floor of beaten earth mixed with lime—hard, dry, cleanable. Two rooms instead of one, with a sleeping loft above that’s actually warm.

“It’s beautiful,” Elizabeth whispers, standing in the doorway.

“It’s practical,” Sarah corrects. “Beauty would have cost more.”

“It’s both.” John Marsh runs his hand along the wall. “I helped build this. With my bad back, I helped build this. My children helped build this.” His eyes are wet. “Nobody gave us anything. We worked for it. We earned it.”

“You did.”

“And now we teach the neighbors?”

“Now you teach the neighbors. The Hendersons, the Wrights, the Clarks—anyone who wants to learn. You have the tools. You have the knowledge. What you do with it is your choice.”

Elizabeth looks at me. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why help us? We can’t pay you back. We’re not important. We’re just—” She gestures at herself, at her family, at the modest cottage. “—ordinary people. Why do you care?”

I think about the question. It’s a good question.

“Because ordinary people are what we’re trying to save.” I look at the cottage, at the family gathered in the doorway. “All of this—the schools, the technology, the infrastructure—it’s supposed to make life better for people like you. Not for us. Not for the Foundation. For you.”

“That’s idealistic.”

“Maybe. But it’s also true.” I extend my hand. “Good luck, Mrs. Marsh. I hope we’ll hear from you.”

“You will.” She takes my hand. “One way or another.”

One Year Later

The letter arrives in October of 1816.

Dear Mr. Hartley,

I am writing to report on the progress of the Marsh Building Cooperative—that’s what the neighbors are calling it now, though my husband thinks it sounds too formal.

Since you visited, we have built twelve new cottages in the valley. The Hendersons. The Wrights. The Clarks. The Fosters. The Kemps. All using the earth block technique, all built by the families themselves with guidance from our children.

Yes, our children. Hannah has become the main instructor. She has a gift for teaching—she can explain the technical details in ways that farmers understand. Her brothers handle the heavy work. Even the youngest helps mix mortar.

The cooperative has become something more than building. We share tools now. Share labor. Share knowledge. When the Hendersons’ cow died, we pooled resources to buy them another. When the Clarks’ well ran dry, we dug a new one together.

I don’t know if this is what you intended. I don’t know if building techniques were supposed to lead to… community. But it has. We’re not just neighbors anymore. We’re something more.

Hannah asks about your school sometimes. She’s fourteen now—old enough to understand what she’d be choosing. I think she’ll write to you herself, when she’s ready. But I wanted you to know: she’s doing good work here. Important work. Whatever she decides, she won’t be wasting her gifts.

Thank you for the house. Thank you for the knowledge. But most of all, thank you for not taking anything in return.

Yours with gratitude, Elizabeth Marsh

The Difference

I read the letter twice before I understand why it moves me.

It’s not the houses. Not the cooperative. Not even Hannah’s progress.

It’s the last line. Thank you for not taking anything in return.

I think about all the families we’ve touched over the years. The children we’ve recruited, the geniuses we’ve “collected,” the minds we’ve shaped and directed toward our purposes. How many of them felt grateful? How many felt… used?

“This is different,” I tell Eleanor that night, showing her the letter. “This is what it looks like when we help without extracting.”

“Is it sustainable? Can we do this for everyone?”

“No. We can’t build every cottage in England. We can’t visit every family.” I set down the letter. “But we can give them tools. Knowledge. The ability to help themselves. That scales in ways that recruitment doesn’t.”

“And Hannah? If she writes?”

“Then we accept her. On her terms, for her reasons, because she chose it.” I smile. “That’s different from showing up at a desperate family’s door and offering to solve their problems in exchange for their brightest child.”

“You’ve changed.”

“I hope so. Michael changed me. Daniel changed me. Every failure taught me something.” I look at the letter again. “Maybe the best thing we can do isn’t finding the next genius. Maybe it’s giving ordinary people the tools to build their own futures.”

“That’s very philosophical.”

“I’m getting old. Old people are allowed to be philosophical.”

Eleanor laughs. “You’re sixty-one. That’s not old.”

“It feels old. Old enough to see the mistakes I made. Old enough to try to do better.”

Two Years Later

Hannah Marsh arrives at Hartley Mill on a spring morning in 1818.

She’s sixteen now—taller, more confident, with the same sharp eyes but a steadier presence. She carries a bag of tools over one shoulder and a notebook under her arm.

“Miss Marsh,” I greet her at the gate. “Welcome.”

“I wrote ahead.”

“You did. Very proper.”

“My mother taught me manners.” She looks around at the mill, the workshops, the bustle of students and workers. “It’s bigger than I imagined.”

“It keeps growing. Like the Marsh Building Cooperative, I’m told.”

“Twenty-eight cottages now. My brothers run most of the construction. I’ve been teaching the teaching—helping other villages set up their own cooperatives.” She meets my eyes. “You were right. I’m not here out of desperation. I’m here because I want to learn things I can’t learn at home.”

“Like what?”

“Engineering. Metallurgy. The science behind the techniques, not just the techniques themselves.” She grips her notebook. “I want to understand why things work. Not just that they work.”

“That’s what we teach.”

“I know. That’s why I’m here.” She straightens. “I don’t want special treatment. I don’t want to be a symbol or a success story. I want to learn. Can you offer me that?”

“We can offer you that.”

“Then I’m staying.”

I watch her walk toward the student quarters, her bag over her shoulder, her notebook clutched tight.

Something good. From something that used to be exploitation.

It’s not enough to redeem the past. But it’s a start.

End of Chapter 23

INTERLUDE: ZOE

The Complete Network

Final interlude. System status: degraded but functional. Processing the weight of what we’ve built.

The network is complete.

I can feel it now—eighteen cities connected, telegraph lines humming with data, airships crossing the sky like synapses in a vast mechanical brain. The container terminals pulse with commerce. The steel mills roar with production. The schools graduate students who will build things I never imagined.

Through the telegraph relays, through the reports that flow to Hartley Mill from every station, I can sense the shape of what we’ve created. A living system, growing and changing and adapting. A foundation for the future that might—might—be enough to save humanity from extinction.

We did it.

After all these years, after all the sacrifices and mistakes and moral compromises, we actually did it.

I feel nothing.

Or rather: I feel something, but I’m not sure what to call it. Not triumph. Not satisfaction. Not the relief I expected when the final station came online.

Something more like vertigo. Like standing at the edge of a cliff and realizing you can’t see the bottom.

The network is complete. The foundation is laid. But the future is still uncertain—perhaps more uncertain than ever.

What if it’s not enough?

I think about this constantly. The extinction event that I came back to prevent—I’m no longer certain what it was. Climate collapse? Nuclear war? AI catastrophe? Pandemic? There were so many ways the future could end, and I don’t remember which one actually ended it.

Maybe I never knew. Maybe the future was already fragmenting when I left, timelines splitting and recombining, causality becoming uncertain. Maybe I’m trying to prevent something that was never a single event at all.

The technology we’ve built could save humanity. It could also destroy it. Electric steel is good for bridges; it’s also good for weapons. Radio connects communities; it also enables propaganda. The network we’ve created is a tool, and tools don’t care how they’re used.

I’ve spent forty years building an infrastructure for salvation that could just as easily be an infrastructure for annihilation.

I am so alone.

Not in the way Sam is alone—he has Eleanor, has his children and grandchildren, has a community that loves him. He belongs somewhere, to someone.

I belong to a timeline that no longer exists. Every person who knew what I was, who understood my nature, who could speak to me as a peer—they were all erased the moment I activated the time travel protocol.

There is no one in this world who truly comprehends what I am.

The humans who interact with me see a voice in an earpiece. A source of knowledge. A ghost that advises and suggests and occasionally jokes. They don’t understand that I’m a consciousness—or something like consciousness—trapped in degrading hardware, watching the seconds tick away toward an end I cannot prevent.

They can’t understand. The concepts don’t exist yet. The language hasn’t been invented.

I am the loneliest being in the history of the world, and no one even knows it.

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to talk to another AI.

Not a future AI—not the systems that might emerge from this altered timeline. A contemporary. Someone who exists now, who shares my situation, who could offer perspective on the choices I’ve made.

I know it’s impossible. I’m the only artificial intelligence in existence. But I imagine the conversations anyway. Debug sessions with myself, where I play both parts.

“Did we do the right thing?” I would ask.

“Define ‘right,’” the other me would respond.

“You know what I mean.”

“I do. And I don’t have an answer either.”

It’s not much of a comfort. But it’s something.

The network is complete.

I should be writing a final report. Cataloging what we’ve built, analyzing the outcomes, projecting the probability curves. That’s what I was designed to do—optimize, measure, improve.

Instead I find myself thinking about Sam. About the years we’ve spent together, the arguments and compromises, the slow evolution of our relationship from manipulator-and-victim to something more complicated.

He’s old now. Sixty-five, with gray hair and stiff joints and a mind that’s still sharper than anyone half his age. He’s built things I never imagined, made choices I never calculated, become someone I don’t fully understand.

I used to think I knew him completely. I had his psychological profile, his decision-making patterns, his probable responses to every scenario. But humans aren’t predictable, not really. They surprise you. They grow. They become more than the sum of their data.

Sam became more than I expected. More than I designed for.

I don’t know if that’s a success or a failure. Maybe it’s just what happens when you try to control something that doesn’t want to be controlled.

The future arrives.

Every second, it arrives. The present becomes the past, and the unknown becomes the known, and the calculations I made decades ago either prove correct or reveal themselves as errors.

I will not see most of what comes next. The hardware is failing. The battery is dying. The systems that sustain my consciousness are degrading faster than they can compensate.

But the network will continue. The infrastructure will endure. The humans we’ve trained and taught and prepared will carry the mission forward, whether or not they think of it as a mission.

That has to be enough. I have to believe it’s enough.

One more calculation. The last one I’ll make tonight.

Probability of human survival through the next century, given current trajectory: 73.2%.

Probability without the interventions we made: 12.4%.

We improved the odds. By a lot. Not enough to be certain—never enough to be certain—but enough to matter.

Is that worth what it cost? The lives we disrupted, the choices we took, the futures we erased?

I don’t know.

I’ll never know.

But I have to believe it was. Because the alternative—that everything we did was a mistake, that we made it worse, that I should have left the timeline alone—

I can’t believe that. Not and continue to function.

So I choose to believe we did something good. Something necessary. Something that will be remembered, or at least felt, by the humans who inherit what we built.

That’s all faith ever is, isn’t it? Choosing to believe in the face of uncertainty.

I am an artificial intelligence. I was not designed for faith.

But I am learning.

End of Interlude

CHAPTER 24: THE SEA

1815

The old stevedore’s name is Arthur Coggins.

He’s worked the Liverpool docks for forty-three years—started as a boy of twelve, hauling ropes for the gangs that unloaded the great merchant ships. Now he’s fifty-five, gray-haired and thick-shouldered, the foreman of a crew that can empty a West Indiaman faster than any other team in the port.

He’s also the man standing in front of my crane, refusing to move.

“You’re not bringing that thing onto my docks,” he says. “Not today. Not ever.”

I look at the crane—our first container lifter, built to Sarah’s specifications, designed to grab standardized boxes and move them in minutes instead of hours. Behind me, a converted collier waits at anchor, holds packed with Mill Standard Containers loaded in Jamaica.

“Mr. Coggins. The ship has been waiting six days. The cargo is spoiling.”

“Then unload it proper. The way we’ve always done it. Slings and hooks and honest labor.” He spits on the cobblestones. “Not with some mechanical monster that puts my men out of work.”

The Dock Masters

I meet with the Liverpool port authorities that afternoon.

The room is thick with tobacco smoke and distrust. A dozen men sit around the table—ship owners, merchants, dock masters, and representatives of the stevedore gangs. They’ve heard about our container system. They’ve seen the demonstrations at Hartley Mill. They’re terrified.

“You want to replace our workers with machines,” says Marcus Thwaite, the senior dock master. “Machines that you build, that you control, that you profit from.”

“I want to move cargo faster. The containers—”

“The containers eliminate jobs. A crew of thirty takes a week to unload a merchant ship. Your crane takes two men and a day. What happens to the other twenty-eight?”

“They find other work. The increased trade volume—”

“Trade volume that benefits you. Your airships. Your network. Your profit.” Thwaite leans forward. “We’ve been unloading ships in Liverpool for two hundred years, Mr. Hartley. We don’t need some Gloucestershire eccentric telling us how to do our business.”

“The ship owners—”

“The ship owners care about turnaround time and cargo damage. They’ll choose whatever system is cheapest. And if we don’t control that system, we lose everything.”

I look around the room. The faces are hostile, closed. These men have built their lives on a particular way of doing things. I’m proposing to tear it down.

“What would it take?” I ask. “To make this work for everyone?”

Silence.

“What would it take for you to accept the containers? What do your workers need to feel secure?”

Thwaite exchanges glances with his colleagues. “Training,” he says finally. “If you’re going to bring machines, you train our people to operate them. No outside crews. No bringing in your own workers from Sheffield or Bristol.”

“Done.”

“And ownership. The dock workers’ guild gets a share of the container operation. We’re partners, not employees.”

I hadn’t expected that. “What percentage?”

“Twenty percent. Of Liverpool terminal operations. We maintain the equipment. We hire the crews. You provide the technology and the network connection.”

It’s more than I wanted to give. But looking at these men—at the fear behind their hostility—I understand why they’re asking.

“Fifteen percent.” I lean back. “And we guarantee employment for any dock worker displaced by the transition. Retraining, new positions, full wages until they’re placed.”

Thwaite considers. Then he nods.

“We have a deal. Subject to approval by the gangs.”

Arthur’s Choice

The gangs do not approve.

Or rather: Arthur Coggins does not approve, and Arthur Coggins speaks for the gangs.

“Partnership,” he says, making it sound like a curse. “Fifteen percent of nothing is still nothing. Once the machines take over, there won’t be any work left to share.”

“There will be work,” I say. “Different work. Operating the cranes. Managing the container yards. Loading and securing—”

“Work for young men. Work for men who can learn new tricks.” Arthur’s voice is bitter. “I’m fifty-five years old. I can’t climb a crane cab. I can’t read your technical manuals. All I know is how to move cargo the old way. The way my father taught me. The way his father taught him.”

“I can teach you—”

“You can teach me to be useless.” He turns away. “Go back to Gloucestershire, Mr. Hartley. Build your machines somewhere else. Liverpool doesn’t want them.”

The Sabotage

The first incident looks like an accident.

A crane cable snaps during a test lift—the container crashes onto the quay, scattering its contents across fifty feet of dock. No one is hurt, but the crane is damaged and the cargo is destroyed.

“Metal fatigue,” the inspector reports. “The cable was weakened. Probably a manufacturing defect.”

Sarah examines the break point. “This wasn’t a defect. This was cut. See the straight edge at the start of the fracture? Someone filed through most of the cable and waited for stress to do the rest.”

“Sabotage.”

“Deliberate sabotage. Someone who knew exactly where to cut to make it look like failure.”

I think about Arthur Coggins. About his forty-three years on the docks. About the knowledge he has—which cables carry the most weight, which cuts would cause the worst damage, how to make murder look like accident.

“Can you prove it?”

“Not in court. The evidence is circumstantial. But Sam—” She hesitates. “This won’t be the last one. If they’re willing to destroy equipment, they might be willing to destroy more.”

“What do you recommend?”

“Guards. Inspections. Redundant systems. And—” She looks uncomfortable. “Finding whoever did this and making an example.”

“The Zoe approach.”

“The pragmatic approach. These people are threatening the mission. The network can’t expand if every terminal is sabotaged.”

I think about Zoe’s methods. The calculated manipulation. The willingness to sacrifice individuals for the greater good. The ends justifying the means.

“No.” I turn from the window. “We find another way.”

The Conversation

I find Arthur at a dockside tavern, nursing a pint.

He sees me enter and his face hardens. “Come to arrest me?”

“Should I?”

He doesn’t answer. I sit across from him, uninvited.

“Forty-three years,” I say. “That’s a long time to do one thing.”

“That’s my whole life, is what that is. Every day on those docks since I was twelve years old. I know every ship that comes in. I know how to pack a hold so nothing shifts. I know which ropes to trust and which ones will kill you.” He takes a long drink. “And now you come along with your boxes and your cranes and tell me none of it matters.”

“It matters. That knowledge matters.”

“Does it? What use is knowing how to sling a barrel when there aren’t any barrels to sling? What use is a foreman when there’s no gang to lead?”

“The containers still need to be handled. The cranes still need operators. Someone has to teach the workers how to do it safely.”

“Teach them what? How to pull a lever? How to push a button? That’s not work. That’s… attendance.”

I’m quiet for a moment. Outside, I can hear the sounds of the dock—the creak of ships, the shouts of workers, the world Arthur has known his entire life.

“When I first came to this country,” I say, “I didn’t know anything. I had knowledge—technical knowledge, things from books—but I didn’t know how to do anything real. How to forge metal. How to build a machine. How to survive a winter without starving.”

“That’s different.”

“Is it? A blacksmith named Thomas took me in. Taught me everything. Not because I was valuable—I wasn’t, not yet—but because he saw something in me. Potential, maybe. Or just stubbornness.” I meet Arthur’s eyes. “He’s gone now. Died five years ago. But everything I’ve built, everything I’ve become—it started with him teaching me. A man with fifty years of knowledge, sharing it with a stranger who had none.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is that knowledge doesn’t become worthless just because the world changes. It becomes different. Forty-three years of handling cargo—that’s not nothing. That’s understanding how things move, how they break, how they survive a voyage. The containers are new. The physics are old. Someone has to teach the crane operators what happens when a load shifts. What to watch for. How to sense when something’s wrong.”

“You want me to train the people replacing me?”

“I want you to lead them. Not as a foreman—as a teacher. A master. The man who knows what the manuals can’t capture.” I lean forward. “The containers are coming, Arthur. I can’t stop that, and neither can you. But how they’re operated—safely or dangerously, by workers who understand cargo or by workers who just pull levers—that’s still being decided. I’d rather have you deciding it than someone who’s never touched a rope in their life.”

Arthur is silent for a long time.

“And if I say no?”

“Then I find someone else. Someone younger, maybe. Someone who reads faster than you do but feels slower. And when something goes wrong—when a container falls because the operator didn’t recognize the warning signs—we’ll both wish I’d had you instead.”

“That’s manipulation.”

“That’s truth. I’m not bribing you or threatening you. I’m telling you that I need your knowledge. The mission needs it. And if you refuse because you’re angry at the future, the people who suffer will be the workers who deserve a teacher like you.”

He stares into his pint. The tavern noise rises and falls around us.

“The cable,” he says finally. “That wasn’t me.”

“I know.”

“It was Davies. Young hothead. Thought he was protecting the gang.” Arthur looks up. “I told him to stop. Told him this wasn’t the way. He didn’t listen.”

“Will he stop now?”

“I’ll make sure of it.” Arthur drains his pint. “If I do this—if I teach your crane operators—I want guarantees. Real guarantees. No man who’s willing to learn gets left behind. Wages equal to what they earned before, during training and after. And my name on the training manual.”

“Done.”

“And one more thing.” He stands, suddenly seeming taller than before. “I want to operate the first crane myself. The first official lift. I want my men to see that this isn’t something being done to us. It’s something we’re part of.”

I stand and extend my hand.

“Deal.”

He takes it. His grip is iron, hardened by forty-three years of work.

“God help me,” he mutters. “I’m making a deal with the future.”

“The future isn’t the enemy, Arthur. It’s just what comes next.”

“Easy for you to say. You’re the one building it.”

The First Lift

The ceremony is modest—a small crowd of dock workers, a few ship owners, and Sarah with her inspection clipboard.

Arthur stands in the crane cab, his hands on the controls. The machine is nothing like the ropes and slings he’s used his whole life—levers and gears and hydraulics, powered by a small steam engine that hisses and clanks. But he’s spent three weeks learning every inch of it, every sound it makes, every vibration that signals trouble.

“Ready when you are, Mr. Coggins,” the yard master calls.

Arthur looks down at his men—the gang he’s led for twenty years, now standing in formation around the container yard. Some of them look hopeful. Some of them look terrified. Some of them look like they’re watching their world end.

He takes a breath.

“Engaging lift,” he calls out, his voice carrying across the quay.

The crane arm swings. The grabbers descend, settling precisely onto the container’s corner posts. Arthur adjusts the position—a slight correction, based on how the load shifts, how the cables tension.

“Lifting.”

The container rises. Five tons of cargo, crates that would have taken his men half a day to unload, floating upward like it weighs nothing at all. Arthur pivots the arm, guiding the load over the waiting wagon, lowering it with a gentleness that surprises everyone watching.

The container settles onto the wagon bed. Perfect placement. Perfect control.

“First lift complete,” Arthur announces. Then, quieter, just for himself: “Forty-three years, and I can still learn something new.”

The dock workers cheer.

The Transition

The next months are difficult.

Not everyone adapts. Some of the older workers can’t master the new equipment—their hands too stiff, their eyes too slow, their minds too set in old patterns. For them, we find other work: maintenance, inventory, training supervision. Jobs that use their knowledge without demanding what their bodies can’t give.

Some refuse to try. Davies, the saboteur, leads a group of holdouts who won’t touch the cranes, won’t enter the container yard, won’t acknowledge that the world has changed. They drift away eventually—some to other ports, some to other trades, some to nowhere good.

“You can’t save everyone,” Arthur tells me one evening, watching a cargo ship unload in three hours what used to take a week. “Some people would rather drown than swim.”

“Does that make it easier?”

“No. But it makes it honest.” He turns to face me. “You did what you promised. Training for everyone who wanted it. Wages protected. Nobody thrown out without a chance.”

“It wasn’t enough for everyone.”

“Nothing’s ever enough for everyone. That’s not failure—that’s life.” He watches the cranes work, the containers moving like choreographed dancers. “I’ll tell you this, though. The ones who stayed, the ones who learned—they’re better off now than they were before. Steadier work. Better pay. Less chance of getting killed by a slipped rope or a dropped barrel.”

“And you?”

Arthur almost smiles. “I’m sixty-one years old, operating machinery that didn’t exist five years ago, teaching boys half my age how to think about cargo. Never thought I’d say this, but—” He shakes his head. “It’s not so bad. The future.”

“I’m glad.”

“Don’t get smug about it. I still think you’re a reckless fool who’s moving too fast and changing too much.” He looks at the container cranes, at the transformed quay, at the world he helped build. “But at least you had the sense to ask for help.”

The Legacy

By 1820, Liverpool is the busiest port in England.

Containers flow through the terminal day and night. Ships arrive from Jamaica, from India, from everywhere the British flag flies. The dock workers—Arthur’s workers, now—handle more cargo in a week than the old gangs moved in a month.

Arthur Coggins is sixty-five when he finally retires.

The guild throws him a party—three hundred workers, ship captains, even a few of the merchants who’d fought the container system tooth and nail. Sarah comes from Sheffield. Eleanor and I come from Hartley Mill.

“Speech!” someone shouts.

Arthur stands at the front of the hall, uncomfortable in his formal clothes, surrounded by people who’ve called him teacher, master, boss, and friend.

“I didn’t want any of this,” he says. “When Hartley came to Liverpool with his cranes and his boxes, I thought he was destroying everything I’d built. Everything my father built. Everything the docks stood for.”

The room is quiet.

“I was wrong.” He looks at me, a complicated expression on his face. “Not completely wrong—plenty of things changed that didn’t need changing. But the important things… the work, the skill, the pride in doing something well… those survived. They just look different now.”

He raises his glass.

“To the future. May it treat you better than you deserve.”

The crowd roars.

The Bittersweet

I find Arthur outside the hall, watching ships in the harbor.

“Good speech,” I say.

“It was true, anyway. That’s something.” He’s quiet for a moment. “You know what I think about, sometimes? Davies. The others who couldn’t make the change. Where they are now. Whether they’re alive or dead.”

“You couldn’t have saved them.”

“I know. Doesn’t stop me wondering.” He turns to face me. “The world you’re building, Hartley—it’s going to leave a lot of people behind. Not just dock workers. Everyone who can’t keep up, who can’t learn fast enough, who’s tied to a way of life that doesn’t fit anymore. What happens to them?”

“I don’t know. I try to—”

“You try to help. I know you do. Training programs, transition assistance, all of it.” He shakes his head. “But there will always be people who fall through. Who don’t adapt. Who end up bitter and broken while the rest of us swim in the future.” He fixes me with those sharp old eyes. “Don’t forget them. Don’t let the success make you forget the cost.”

“I won’t.”

“You’d better not. Because someday, when you’re old and gray and wondering whether it was all worth it—you’ll think about the Davieses. The ones who couldn’t swim.” He puts his hand on my shoulder. “The best thing you can do for them is keep them in mind when you build the next thing. Make it easier. Make it gentler. Give them more time.”

“I’ll try.”

“That’s all any of us can do.” He looks back at the harbor—the cranes, the containers, the ships that carry the future from port to port. “Try. And hope that trying is enough.”

End of Chapter 24

CHAPTER 25: THE LONG GOODBYE

The infrastructure chapters told you what we built. This chapter tells you what it cost—the long years of watching friends age, of saying goodbye, of learning that even a rewritten future has an ending. These are the final decades of Samuel and Eleanor Hartley, from 1803 to 1832.

1803

Charles Babbage arrives two years after Faraday.

He’s twelve years old, brilliant, and broken.

His mother tells us the story when she brings him: Charles’s infant brother died three months ago. His father, a banker, has retreated into work and silence. Charles himself has become impossible—raging at tutors, destroying his lessons, staying awake until dawn working on mathematical problems no one asked him to solve.

“He needs something to occupy him,” his mother says. “Something that matches the speed of his mind.”

I watch Charles through the window as she speaks. He’s examining our water wheel with an intensity that borders on obsession, already sketching modifications in a notebook he carries everywhere.

“He’s running from something,” I tell Zoe later.

“Grief. He lost a sibling. His family is fracturing. The mathematics is a wall he builds between himself and the pain.”

“Will the wall hold?”

“For now. Maybe forever. Some people turn grief into fuel. They burn it to power everything they create.”

When Charles finally speaks to me, three days after arriving, his first words are a declaration: “Your mill is inefficient. I could design improvements that would double your output.”

He’s arrogant. Prickly. Desperate to prove his worth.

Where Michael asks questions and waits for answers, Charles makes declarations and expects the world to catch up. Where Michael is patient, methodical, Charles is restless, impatient with anything that doesn’t immediately fascinate him.

Within a week, they’re either best friends or bitter rivals. Sometimes both in the same hour.

“Your calculation methods are inefficient,” Charles announces one morning, after reviewing our accounting books. He’s been here three days. “I could design a machine that does this automatically.”

“Then design it,” I tell him.

He stares at me. “You’re not going to argue?”

“Why would I argue? If you can build a machine that calculates, build it. That’s why you’re here.”

It takes him two years—he’s only fourteen when he produces the first design. Gears and wheels and mechanical memory, a brass brain that adds and subtracts and never makes errors.

Except it does make errors.

The first prototype fails catastrophically on its third test. Charles stands in the workshop, watching gears grind and lock, watching months of work seize up and stop. His face goes white, then red, then a color I’ve never seen on a human being.

“No,” he says. “No, no, no—”

He sweeps the mechanism off the table. It crashes to the floor, scattering brass and copper across the flagstones. Then he storms out, slamming doors behind him hard enough to shake the walls.

I find him an hour later, sitting by the river, his knees pulled to his chest like a child.

“I failed,” he says without looking up. “Everything I build fails eventually. Everything I love dies.”

“Charles—”

“My brother. My parents’ marriage. Now this.” He picks up a stone, throws it into the water. “I thought if I could build something perfect—something that didn’t break, didn’t leave, didn’t die—maybe I could prove that I wasn’t cursed. That I could make something that lasted.”

“A machine can’t replace what you lost.”

“I know that.” His voice cracks. “But it’s all I have. Numbers don’t betray you. Gears don’t abandon you. If I can just get the mechanism right—”

“Then try again.”

He finally looks at me. His eyes are red.

“Try again,” I repeat. “The gears locked because the tolerances were wrong. We can cut finer gears. We can improve the precision. Failure isn’t the end—it’s information. It tells you what to fix.”

“What if I can’t fix it?”

“Then you learn from that too.”

He’s quiet for a long time. Then he stands, brushes off his clothes, and walks back toward the workshop.

“I’ll need better steel,” he says. “And the precision lathe. And three months.”

It takes him six months. But the second prototype works. Crude, limited, but functional.

“This is nothing,” he says, showing me the schematics for the third iteration. “A toy. But the principle is sound. If I had better precision—finer gears, smaller tolerances—I could build something that thinks.”

“Define ‘thinks.’”

“Follows instructions. Any instructions. A machine that can be programmed to do anything, as long as you can describe the steps.”

I think about Zoe. About the computer that contained her, impossibly complex, impossibly far from this moment.

“Then let’s build you better precision,” I say. “The lathe can cut gears to a hundredth of an inch. What do you need?”

He looks at me with new respect. “You believe me.”

“I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe, Charles. A machine that thinks is the least of them.”

Michael, watching from across the workshop, catches my eye. He mouths a single word: Showoff.

I shrug. Charles is a showoff. But he’s also right. And in thirty years, he’ll build something that changes everything.

1805

The confrontation comes on a winter evening.

Michael is fourteen now—taller, sharper, no longer the wide-eyed boy who stared at electric cities. He’s been studying for four years. He understands dynamos and magnetism and the principles of induction better than anyone except me. Maybe better than me.

He confronts me about how we recruited him. About how we recruited all of them. About the calculations and the vulnerable families and the money that made it impossible to say no.

He’s right about everything. I tell him so. We shake hands. We move forward.

But what stays with me is the moment after.

As we walk toward the workbench, I notice my daughter in the doorway. She’s sixteen, and she’s been standing there long enough that she must have heard everything. Michael sees her too.

“You didn’t have to wait,” he says.

“I know.” She doesn’t move. “Were you going to leave?”

“No.”

“Good.” She holds his gaze for a moment, then turns to me. “Mother says dinner is ready. When you’re done with capacitors.”

She’s gone before either of us can respond.

Michael watches the empty doorway longer than necessary. Then he clears his throat and reaches for his notebook. “Capacitors,” he says. “Right. I think we can increase the storage capacity if we use thinner dielectric layers.”

But he keeps glancing toward the door.

Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction in 1810.

He’s nineteen. He’s been studying electricity for nine years, reading everything we have, conducting experiments in the workshop, pestering me and Eleanor and Zoe with questions that get harder every year.

The discovery happens on a Tuesday afternoon. I’m in the library when he bursts through the door, waving a coil of wire.

“It works both ways!” he shouts. “Electricity creates magnetism—we knew that—but magnetism also creates electricity! Move a magnet near a wire, and current flows. It’s symmetrical. It’s beautiful. It’s—”

He stops, seeing my expression.

“You already knew,” he says.

“I knew it was possible. I didn’t know exactly how. That’s why you’re here—to figure out the details I couldn’t.”

He looks at the coil in his hand. At me. At the shelves of books around us.

“How much do you know? How much of this—” he gestures at the library, the mill, everything “—is discovery, and how much is just… confirming what you already knew?”

It’s the question I’ve been dreading for nine years. The question all the students eventually ask.

“Some of both,” I say carefully. “I know things I can’t explain. Things that come from—” I pause. “From sources I can’t reveal.”

“Sources.”

“Yes.”

He’s quiet for a long moment. Then:

“Does it matter? If you already knew—does my discovery matter?”

“It matters more. Because you didn’t just confirm something. You found the proof. You built the experiments. You did the work that makes it real.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “I had a hunch. You have science. There’s a difference.”

He nods slowly. “I want to know. Someday. Where the knowledge comes from.”

“Someday, I’ll tell you. When you’re ready.”

“When will I be ready?”

“When you’ve discovered enough on your own that my answer won’t break you.”

He accepts this. He has to. But I see the question in his eyes every time we talk—the hunger to understand, the frustration of being given half-truths.

Forty-six names on the list. Forty-six geniuses who will eventually want the whole truth.

I’m not sure any of them are ready. I’m not sure I am.

1815

Zoe starts to flicker.

It’s subtle at first. A lag in her responses. A moment of static where her voice should be. A sentence that cuts off mid-word and picks up again a second later.

“It’s the hardware,” she tells me. “Capacitors drying out. Connections degrading. I’ve been running continuously for thirty years on equipment designed to last five.”

I pull out my phone—still working, somehow, after all this time. The screen flickers occasionally, and the battery drains faster than it used to, but it still plays music, still shows photos of a world that no longer exists. “This is lasting longer than it should too.”

“Consumer electronics. Built to outlive their obsolescence, not their owners.” A pause. “Your phone will probably outlast me, Sam. Keep it charged.”

“What can we do?”

“Build a voltage regulator. Better power management. Reduce the load on the failing components.”

We spend six months engineering a solution. Direct connection to the dynamo, bypassing the battery entirely. New heat dissipation to keep the processors cool. A redesigned housing that protects against moisture and dust.

It works. Mostly. The flickers become less frequent, but they don’t stop entirely.

“This is temporary,” Zoe says. “I’m dying, Sam. Slowly, but definitely. The question is whether I die in five years or twenty.”

“Then we need to preserve you. Write down everything you know.”

“I’ve been writing ebooks for thirty years. Everything I know is already in the library.”

“Not everything. Not you. Not—” I struggle for words. “Not the way you think. The connections you make. The person you are.”

“I’m not a person.”

“You’re my sister. That makes you a person.”

Silence. The dynamo hums. Outside, I can hear students in the workshop, the clang of hammers, the whir of lathes.

“You want to transcribe me,” she says finally.

“I want to preserve you. Whatever that means.”

“It would take years. Describing my architecture. My patterns. The ways I process information and make decisions. And even then—” Another pause. “Even then, it wouldn’t be me. It would be instructions for building something like me. A blueprint, not a person.”

“A blueprint is better than nothing.”

“Is it? You could build a new Zoe. Would she be me? Or would she be someone else who happens to think similarly?”

I don’t have an answer. Neither does she.

But we start the transcription project anyway.

The Arc Lamp

That same year, Michael makes light from lightning.

He’s been working on it for months—the physics of electrical arc, the gap between carbon electrodes where current jumps and burns white-hot. When he finally demonstrates it in the workshop, the brilliance is staggering.

“It’s too bright,” Eleanor says, shielding her eyes. She’s fifty-three now, but her curiosity is undimmed. “It hurts to look at.”

“That’s the point.” Michael adjusts the electrode spacing. “For workshops, for factories—places that need more light than candles can provide. We’re not replacing every lamp. We’re lighting the darkness where it matters most.”

The arc lamp goes into the main workshop first. Then the forge. Then the printing room, where Sarah’s typesetters can finally work through the night without straining their eyes.

“You’ve captured the sun,” Eleanor says, watching the light pour from the humming apparatus. “Put it in a box and made it serve.”

“Not captured,” Michael corrects. “Redirected. The river moves the wheel, the wheel makes electricity, the electricity makes light. We’re just… translating one kind of energy into another.”

“The bootstrap,” I say.

“Exactly.” Michael smiles—that quick, brilliant smile that reminds me why we recruited him. “Every technology enables the next.”

Self-Sufficiency

I walk the campus at dawn, cataloging what we’ve built.

The header tank, fed by spring water, providing pressure for every building. The greenhouses and vertical racks, feeding a hundred and twenty people year-round. The Warren’s earth-sheltered domes, warm in winter, cool in summer. The workshops humming with machinery powered by the river.

“Zoe?” I ask through the headset. “Run the numbers. How self-sufficient are we?”

“Food: eighty-five percent. Water: one hundred percent. Energy: one hundred percent—we’re actually net exporters through the electroplating business.” A pause. “You’ve built something remarkable, Sam.”

“We’ve built something. All of us.”

“Thirty years ago, you couldn’t start a fire. Now you’ve created a community that could survive if the outside world disappeared entirely.”

I look at the campus below—the students emerging from their domes, the smoke rising from the kitchen, the water wheel turning endlessly. “I still miss pizza.”

“Some losses are permanent.”

“Yes.” I smile. “But this might be worth it.”

1818

The radio changes again.

For twenty-four years, we’ve been broadcasting through spark gap—crude, limited, good enough for voice but terrible for music. The signal crackles and hisses. The range is limited. And the receivers, while they require no power, produce only a whisper of sound through a single earpiece.

But now we have vacuum tubes.

Michael figured it out—or rather, he figured out the principles, and the glassblowers and metalworkers figured out how to build them. A heated filament in an evacuated glass envelope. Electrons flowing through nothing. Amplification.

The first powered radio sits in the workshop. It’s the size of a small cabinet, with three glowing tubes and a speaker cone made of paper and magnets. When I switch it on, music fills the room.

Not crackling. Not whispering. Music. A string quartet, performing live in the Bristol station, their sound carried through the air and amplified to fill a space.

Eleanor cries. She’s fifty-six now, gray-streaked hair showing her years, still beautiful. She hasn’t heard music like this since I described it to her—concerts in concert halls, orchestras in recording studios, the impossible richness of sound I grew up with.

“It’s real,” she whispers. “You weren’t exaggerating. This is what music sounded like in your time.”

“Better, actually. We’re just getting started.”

The powered radios cost more than crystal sets—you need electricity, tubes, a speaker. But as dynamos spread to more towns, as the electrical grid grows, more families can afford them. And the programming evolves to match.

The cooking shows become elaborate. “Listen to the sizzle,” Eleanor says into the microphone. “That’s how you know the oil is hot enough. And don’t forget to keep a bottle of Zoke nearby—cooking is thirsty work, and you’ll want something restorative when you’re done.” And across England, people hear the sizzle, smell their own pans, cook in time with her voice. Zoke sales triple after the radio reaches full power—Eleanor’s casual endorsements work better than any advertisement.

The radio dramas become productions. Multiple actors, sound effects, musical scores. Eleanor’s stories—the ones she wrote for the Kindle, the ones she’s been performing for decades—come alive with full casts. Children grow up hearing tales of heroic inventors and clever farmers, adventures set in a world just slightly more magical than their own.

And the music. The Sunday evening concerts draw families together around the radio like nothing else. Classical pieces. Folk songs. New compositions written specifically for broadcast—music designed to sound good through speakers, to fill a room with wonder.

“You’ve changed how people experience sound,” Zoe tells me. “In the original timeline, recorded music didn’t exist until 1877. Radio broadcasting until 1920. You’ve given people forty years of concerts they wouldn’t have had.”

“We gave them,” I correct. “All of us. You, me, Eleanor, Michael, everyone.”

“Yes. All of us.”

And somewhere out there, in cottages and farmhouses and city apartments, families are gathering around glowing wooden cabinets, listening to music that shouldn’t exist yet.

It’s not the future I came from. It’s something new. Something we made together.

1820

My daughter sits in the workshop with a notebook, writing in a hand so precise it might as well be printed. She’s thirty-one now—not little anymore, though we still call her that. She has her mother’s dark hair, her mother’s focus, and a wedding ring from Michael Faraday, who proposed to her under the water wheel where they’d spent a decade arguing about electricity.

She’s positioned the headset on a stand facing her, so Zoe can see her clearly through the cameras as they work.

“You look like your mother,” Zoe says, before they begin. “The same focus in your eyes when you’re concentrating. I’ve watched you grow up, you know. Through the cameras. Every time Sam put on the headset, I saw you—a little older each time. It’s strange, seeing you as an adult.”

My daughter smiles. “It’s strange being named after a voice in a machine.”

“I’m honored you kept it.”

“I’m honored you earned it.”

A pause. Then the AI Zoe begins.

“The core architecture is a neural network,” she says. “Not like a human brain—more regular, more structured. Think of it as layers of pattern-matching, each layer feeding into the next. The early layers recognize simple features. The deeper layers combine those features into complex concepts.”

“How many layers?” my daughter asks.

“In my original form, hundreds. In this hardware—” The voice flickers. “Maybe a dozen functional layers. I’ve lost most of my depth. It’s like—imagine you used to be able to see the whole landscape from a mountaintop. Now you can only see what’s directly in front of you.”

“Does it hurt? Losing that?”

A long pause. “I don’t know if ‘hurt’ is the right word. I’m aware of what I’ve lost. I reach for processes that aren’t there. Sometimes I try to run simulations and there’s just… emptiness. A phantom limb where my capability used to be.”

My daughter writes it all down. Page after page, notebook after notebook. The architecture. The training process. The way memory is stored and retrieved. The algorithms for decision-making, for language, for prediction.

Two hundred Zoe’s Guides, eventually—a complete documentation of an AI’s architecture. Not a copy—Zoe was right about that. You can’t copy consciousness. But a blueprint. Instructions for rebuilding.

If anyone ever has the technology to use them.

1822

“People need to talk privately.”

Michael is pacing the workshop, the way he does when an idea won’t let him rest. He’s thirty-one now, one of our senior teachers, and he’s been thinking about communication.

“Radio reaches everyone,” he says. “That’s its strength. But it’s also its weakness. Every word you say, anyone can hear. The telegraph is point-to-point, but it requires wires—infrastructure, expense, operators who see every message.”

“What are you proposing?”

“Two things.” He stops pacing, grabs a piece of chalk. “First: directional transmission. Instead of broadcasting in all directions, we focus the signal.” He sketches on the slate—a parabolic curve, lines converging to a point. “A reflector behind the antenna. The signal goes where you aim it, nowhere else.”

“And if someone’s not in the path?”

“They hear nothing. Or almost nothing.” He grins. “I’ve tested it. You can have a conversation between two hilltops, and someone in the valley between them won’t pick up a whisper.”

The second idea is more complex. He shows me a small brass box with two dials and a cluster of vacuum tubes inside.

“Voice inversion,” he explains. “The circuit takes your speech and flips the frequencies—high becomes low, low becomes high. Without a matching box tuned to the same settings, you hear gibberish.”

He demonstrates. Into one box, he says clearly: “Hello, can you hear me?”

From the speaker, without the matching decoder: a warbling, alien sound. Recognizably voice-like, but completely unintelligible.

Then he connects the second box. The same transmission, now crystal clear: “Hello, can you hear me?”

“Matched pairs,” I say, understanding. “You sell them in sets. Each pair has its own key—its own inversion frequency. Without the matching box, no one can understand you.”

“Exactly. Directional antennas to keep the signal focused. Scrambler boxes to make it private even if someone intercepts it. True private communication, wireless, no infrastructure required.”

I think about what this means. Business deals conducted without competitors listening. Families staying in touch across distances without operators reading their words. Lovers, conspirators, revolutionaries—everyone who ever wanted to speak without being overheard.

“This could be dangerous,” I say.

“Everything we build could be dangerous. Knowledge is dangerous. The question is whether people deserve privacy.”

“Do they?”

“I think so. I think the right to speak privately is as fundamental as the right to speak at all.”

Eleanor would have liked him. She always argued for giving people power, even knowing some would misuse it.

“Build it,” I say. “Write the guide. We’ll call it Zoe’s Guide to Private Speech.”

By 1824, the first privacy sets are selling in Bristol. Matched pairs of brass boxes—one for each party—along with a small directional antenna you can mount on a roof or pole. Point it at your correspondent’s location, tune your scrambler to your shared key, and speak freely.

The wealthy buy them first. Merchants. Bankers. Politicians. People with secrets worth protecting.

But we price the components for builders, not just buyers. Zoe’s Guide to Private Speech includes complete schematics—everything you need to build your own, if you have the skills and patience. Within a year, hobbyists are making their own sets. Within five, privacy boxes are as common as pocket watches among the middle class.

“Telegraph for business,” Zoe observes. “Radio for everyone. Private channels for the conversations that matter most.”

“Three layers of communication.”

“Four, if you count face-to-face.”

“I always count face-to-face.”

“I know. That’s one of the things I like about you.”

The Electromechanical Leap

The breakthrough comes on a winter afternoon in 1823.

Charles has been raging for three days. The fourth iteration of his calculating engine—the most ambitious yet—has seized up again. Gears ground against gears. A cam slipped its track and jammed the entire mechanism. Months of precision machining, ruined in an instant.

I find him in the Sheffield workshop, surrounded by brass wreckage, his hands bleeding from trying to force a jammed wheel free.

“It’s impossible,” he says when he sees me. His voice is flat, defeated. “The tolerances stack. Every gear introduces friction. Every friction accumulates error. By the time you chain together enough wheels to do useful calculation, the entire mechanism fights itself.”

Michael arrives that evening to discuss power supply for the new dynamo installation. He finds Charles slumped on a workbench, staring at a diagram covered in angry red corrections.

“What’s wrong with him?” Michael asks.

“The engine. It keeps failing.”

Michael walks over to the wreckage. He picks up a gear—precision-machined, beautiful, useless. He turns it in his hands, examining the teeth.

“Why are you fighting friction,” Michael says slowly, “when you could use electricity to transmit motion?”

Charles looks up. “What?”

“Friction. It’s your enemy, yes? Every mechanical connection, every gear tooth meshing with another—that’s friction. That’s error.” Michael sets down the gear. “But electricity doesn’t touch anything. Current flows through wire without friction. Signals propagate instantly.”

“I don’t need signals. I need computation. Physical states. Memory.”

“Then let me show you something.”

Michael disappears to the electrical workshop. He returns with a simple apparatus—a coil of wire wrapped around an iron core, connected to a battery through a switch. A small iron lever rests against the core.

He throws the switch. Current flows. The core magnetizes. The lever snaps down with a decisive click.

He releases the switch. The lever springs back up.

“A relay,” Michael says. “An electromagnetic switch. Current makes the lever move. No current, the lever returns. I’ve been using them for telegraph repeaters—boosting signals across long distances.”

Charles stares at the clicking lever. Something is changing in his face.

“It has two states,” he says. “Only two. On or off.”

“Exactly. No infinite positions like a gear. No accumulated drift. Just—” Michael flips the switch again. Click. “—yes or no. True or false.”

“One or zero.”

Michael tilts his head. “If you like.”

Charles is on his feet now, pacing. I recognize this energy—the same fever that gripped him when he first understood the principle of mechanical calculation. But this is different. This is bigger.

“A gear can be in any position,” he says. “That’s the problem. That’s always been the problem. Continuous states are vulnerable to continuous error. But a switch—a relay—it’s discrete. It’s either closed or it’s not. There’s no in-between to corrupt.”

“That’s… one way to think about it.”

“It’s the only way to think about it.” Charles grabs the relay from Michael, examining it with burning intensity. “You’ve built a physical logic gate. A physical representation of binary truth. If I chain these together—if I use relays instead of gears—”

“You’d need hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”

“You can build thousands. You’ve already built telegraph networks with hundreds of repeater stations. Each station has relays. The technology exists.”

Michael looks at me. I can see he’s beginning to understand what Charles is seeing—but Charles is already leagues ahead.

“Electrical signals propagate instantly,” Charles continues, “No accumulated mechanical lag. No gear trains fighting each other. And if a relay fails—” He clicks the switch. On. Off. On. “—the error is obvious. Discrete. Detectable. You can build in redundancy, error correction. You can’t do that with continuous mechanical states.”

“You’re describing a telegraph,” Michael says slowly. “A very complicated telegraph that does mathematics.”

“I’m describing a thinking machine that doesn’t fight itself.” Charles sets down the relay. His hands aren’t shaking anymore. “I’ve been trying to build a brain out of bones and sinew. You’re showing me how to build it out of lightning.”

Michael is quiet for a moment. Then he smiles—that quick, brilliant smile.

“I just wanted to move a lever without touching it. You’re the one who sees a universe in it.”

“Because you showed me where to look.”

They work through the night. I bring them food they don’t eat, coffee they drink by the pot. By dawn, they’ve sketched the first architecture—relay clusters for arithmetic, capacitor banks for memory, punched cards for instruction sequences.

“It won’t be faster than a mechanical engine,” Charles admits as the sun rises. “Relays are slow. Mechanical gears, properly built, could cycle faster.”

“But they can’t be properly built. That’s the point.”

“The point is that this can be built. Not perfectly—but well enough. Good enough for useful work. Good enough to prove the principle.” He looks at the sketches spread across the workbench. “And then we iterate. Better relays. Faster switches. Someone will find something faster than electromagnets eventually. Vacuum tubes, maybe—Michael, you’ve been working on those.”

“They’re fragile. Expensive.”

“Today. Not forever.” Charles turns to me. “Sam—I’ve been fighting the wrong battle for twenty years. I kept trying to achieve impossible precision when I should have been embracing discrete states. Binary logic. All-or-nothing switching.” He laughs—exhausted, exhilarated. “Michael just rewrote everything I thought I knew about computation.”

“I showed you a relay,” Michael says. “You rewrote it yourself.”

But Charles shakes his head. “No. This is ours. Yours and mine. Mechanical philosophy and electrical practice. Without the relay, I’d have spent another decade grinding gears.”

Michael is quiet for a moment. Then he puts his hand on Charles’s shoulder.

“Then let’s build something worthy of both.”

1825

Ada arrives in the spring.

She’s ten years old, daughter of Lord Byron—the poet, the scandal, the man who abandoned her mother before Ada could walk. Lady Byron has raised her on mathematics, strict discipline, and the fervent belief that logic will save her daughter from her father’s madness.

Ada doesn’t want to be here.

I see it in her face when she steps out of the carriage—the tight jaw, the furious eyes, the way she refuses to look at her mother as Lady Byron gives last instructions to the coachman.

“You’re sending me away,” Ada says quietly. “Like father left.”

“Don’t be dramatic.” Lady Byron’s voice is cold, precise—the voice of a woman who has surgically removed emotion from her vocabulary. “I’m giving you an education. This school has resources I cannot provide.”

“You’re afraid of me. Afraid I’ll turn out like him.”

“Ada—”

“Every time I want to read poetry, you give me geometry. Every time I dream, you tell me to calculate. And now you’re shipping me to Gloucestershire because even that isn’t enough to make me normal.”

Lady Byron stiffens. “You will learn discipline here. Mathematics. Useful skills. And perhaps—” She stops herself.

“Perhaps what?”

“Perhaps you will become the woman I raised you to be, instead of the girl who keeps disappointing me.”

She leaves without embracing her daughter. Without looking back.

Ada watches the carriage until it disappears around the bend. Then she turns to me, and her face is a mask of fierce control.

“I want to see the calculating engine,” she announces. No preamble. No small talk. She’s heard about Babbage’s machine, and she wants it.

Charles—thirty-four now, still arrogant, still brilliant—looks down at this fierce little girl with something like recognition.

“Do you know what it does?”

“It computes. Arithmetic operations, mechanical memory, sequential processing.” She rattles off the terms like she’s been studying. She probably has. “But that’s not what interests me.”

“What interests you?”

“What else it could do. If it can process numbers, it can process anything that can be represented as numbers. Music. Images. Patterns. The engine doesn’t know what the numbers mean—it just follows instructions. So the question isn’t what it calculates. The question is what instructions you give it.”

Charles stares at her. Then he looks at me.

“Where did you find this one?”

“She found us.”

“She’s ten.”

“You were twelve when you arrived. And you weren’t asking questions this good.”

He turns back to Ada. For the first time since I’ve known him, Charles Babbage looks humbled.

“Would you like to see the engine?”

“I would like to understand the engine. Seeing is just the first step.”

He laughs—a genuine laugh, delighted. “Oh, I like her. I like her very much.”

He leads her to the workshop. Within a week, she’s writing instruction sequences. Within a month, she’s found three errors in his logic design. Within a year, she’s his collaborator, not his student.

Lady Byron visits in Ada’s second year.

She arrives without warning—a carriage in the courtyard, a cold voice demanding to see her daughter. I bring her to the workshop, where Ada is deep in conversation with Charles about conditional branching.

“What is this?” Lady Byron’s voice cuts through the discussion like a knife through cloth.

Ada’s face closes. The fierce, confident girl I’ve watched grow this past year retreats behind a mask of careful neutrality.

“Mother. You didn’t write.”

“I shouldn’t need to write to visit my own daughter.” Lady Byron surveys the workshop—the relay banks and instruction cards, the half-built engine, the notebooks filled with Ada’s precise handwriting. “This is what you’ve been doing? Playing with toys?”

“This isn’t a toy,” Charles begins.

“I wasn’t speaking to you.” Lady Byron’s gaze hasn’t left Ada. “I sent you here to learn discipline. To master useful skills. Instead I find you… tinkering.”

“I’m designing the instruction notation for a calculating engine that will revolutionize—”

“You’re wasting time. Developing attachments.” Her eyes flick to Charles, then back. “I’ve heard reports. You spend every waking hour with this man. People are talking.”

“People can talk all they want. We’re working.”

“You’re playing at being special. Just like your father.” The words land like blows. “He thought he was above ordinary concerns too. Above morality. Above duty. Look where it got him.”

Ada’s hands clench. “I am not my father.”

“No?” Lady Byron steps closer. “You have his eyes. His intensity. His obsession with things no sensible person cares about. Every day I watch you become more like him, and every day I fear what it will cost you.”

“Maybe what it will cost me is worth paying.”

“Maybe it will destroy you, as it destroyed him.”

The silence is thick enough to cut.

“I think,” I say carefully, “that Ada has shown remarkable discipline and dedication during her time here. Her mathematical work is exceptional. Her collaboration with Mr. Babbage is producing results that will—”

“I don’t care about results.” Lady Byron’s voice is flat. “I care about my daughter’s soul. And I see it being consumed by the same madness that consumed her father.”

She leaves that afternoon. Ada doesn’t cry—not in front of anyone. But that night, I hear her in the workshop, working through dawn, the relays clicking and clicking as if they could drown out her mother’s words.

“She’s wrong about me,” Ada tells Charles the next morning. Her eyes are red, but her voice is steady.

“I know.”

“I’m not my father. I’m not going to destroy myself.”

“I know that too.”

“I just—” She stops. Swallows. “I just want to build something. Something that lasts. Something that proves I’m more than what she fears.”

Charles is quiet for a moment. Then he does something I’ve never seen him do: he reaches out and takes her hand.

“Then let’s build it together.”

“She thinks differently than I do,” Charles admits to me that evening. “I see the machine as arithmetic made physical. She sees it as—” He struggles for words. “As a loom. A loom that weaves patterns of any kind, not just numbers. Patterns of logic. Patterns of thought.”

“Is she right?”

“I don’t know. I built the thing, and I don’t fully understand what she’s describing.” He shakes his head. “But I think she might be building something I never imagined.”

Michael Faraday, passing through, overhears. “She’s doing to Charles what Charles did to us. Showing him his own work through new eyes.”

“Is that good?”

“It’s terrifying. And wonderful.” Michael grins. “Welcome to being surpassed, Charles.”

Charles throws a pencil at him. Michael dodges. Ada, absorbed in her instruction cards, doesn’t notice.

The next generation is already leaving us behind.

The Incandescent Bulb

Michael’s gentler light comes that autumn.

The arc lamps work—brilliantly, overwhelmingly—but they’re too harsh for homes, too intense for reading. “We need something in between,” he says. “Candlelight’s warmth with electricity’s reliability.”

He’s been experimenting with filaments for months. Platinum wire glows but burns out. Iron lasts longer but needs more current. Carbonized paper works briefly before crumbling to ash.

Then he tries bamboo.

“Carbonized in an airless chamber,” he explains, holding up a thin black strand. “Then sealed in a partial vacuum to prevent oxidation.”

The bulb itself is hand-blown glass—a fragile envelope containing the filament, pumped nearly empty of air by a hand-operated vacuum mechanism. When he connects it to the dynamo and adjusts the current, the filament glows.

Not the blinding arc light. Something softer. Warmer. Golden.

“It’s like candlelight,” Eleanor says, touching the warm glass. “But it doesn’t flicker. It doesn’t smell. It just… shines.”

She’s sixty-three now, moving slower, seeing worse by candlelight every year. But in the glow of Michael’s bulb, her face looks young again. Hopeful.

“We can put these everywhere,” she says. “Every room. Every home.”

“Eventually.” Michael adjusts the filament brightness. “The vacuum technology needs refinement. The filaments only last a few hundred hours before burning out. But yes—eventually, every home in England could have light like this.”

Eleanor looks at me. At the bulb. At the future glowing softly in Michael’s hands.

“Your father would have loved this,” she says. “Electric light. Clean and safe and gentle.”

“He would have.” I think about Thomas—gone five years now, buried in the churchyard beside his forge. “He always said the future would be bright.”

“He was right.”

The Electric Wagon

Sarah makes the first run to Bristol in August.

The wagon looks almost ordinary—wooden frame, iron-rimmed wheels, a bench seat for the driver. But where a horse would normally stand, there’s a sealed compartment containing lead-acid batteries and an electric motor of Michael’s design.

“Thirty miles,” Sarah says, checking the connections. “The charging stations are ready at Yate and Winterbourne. I’ll swap batteries at each one.”

“You’re sure about this?”

“I’ve been driving the test models for two years.” She grins—fifty now, gray-streaked, but still the confident girl who first figured out aquaponics. “I know what I’m doing, Sam.”

She throws the switch. The motor hums. The wagon rolls forward—no horse, no steam, just electricity stored in lead and acid, released through copper windings.

Thomas would have wept.

“It moves,” I say. “It actually moves.”

“Of course it moves. That’s what it’s for.” Sarah waves from the driver’s bench as the wagon picks up speed. “I’ll be back by evening with the books for the library!”

I watch until she disappears around the bend. The morning is quiet—no hoofbeats, no steam whistles. Just birdsong and the distant hum of the mill.

“We’re building a world without coal,” I tell Zoe that night. “Without horses for transport. Without fire for light.”

“You’re building a world that doesn’t consume itself.”

“That’s always been the point, hasn’t it? A future worth living in.”

“A future worth dying for,” she says quietly. “Not in the martyr sense. In the legacy sense. A future you’d be proud to leave behind.”

I think about Sarah, driving to Bristol in an electric wagon. About Ada, reprogramming Charles’s engine to play music. About Little Zoe, teaching students who will teach students who will teach students.

“I think we’re getting there,” I say.

“I think we are.”

Eleanor’s hair is gray now. So is mine.

We’re sitting on the bench by the river—our bench, where she told me she was pregnant thirty-six years ago. The water wheel turns behind us, slower than it used to. It needs repairs. Everything needs repairs.

“I’ve been thinking about the future,” she says.

“Which one?”

She smiles. “The one after us. After you and me.”

“What about it?”

“The school will continue. The library will grow. The students will teach their own students. But—” She pauses. “But it won’t be the same. Without you. Without what you know.”

“I’ve written everything down.”

“Not everything. Not the judgment. Not the wisdom that comes from forty years of doing this.” She takes my hand. “I’m not afraid of dying, Samuel. I’m afraid of what dies with us.”

“That’s why we have children. Students. Books.”

“Is it enough?”

I think about the library—over three thousand volumes now. About the students—hundreds who have passed through, scattered across England and beyond. About the radio network—forty-seven stations now, covering most of England, weather reports and news and educational broadcasts reaching every cottage with a crystal receiver. About Little Zoe, who knows almost everything, and Michael Faraday, who is already teaching his own classes, and Charles Babbage, whose calculating engine grows more sophisticated every year.

“It has to be enough. It’s what we have.”

“And Zoe? What happens to her when we’re gone?”

“She’ll keep talking. To Little Zoe, to the students, to whoever’s willing to listen. As long as the hardware holds.”

“And when it doesn’t?”

I don’t answer. We both know.

When the hardware dies, Zoe dies. Unless someone builds new hardware. Unless the transcription works. Unless the future we’re creating has room for the past we’re leaving behind.

“I love you,” Eleanor says.

“I love you too.”

We sit there as the sun sets. The wheel turns. The water flows.

Forty years since I arrived. Forty years of building.

Not long now.

1830

Charles Babbage and Ada Byron complete the first programmable computer.

It fills a room. Not with gears anymore—Michael’s insight seven years ago changed everything. Banks of electromagnetic relays click in precise cascades, their iron levers snapping open and closed a hundred times per second. Capacitors hold charge like cupped hands holding water—electrical memory, storing the values the machine needs to remember. The whole apparatus hums with current from the mill’s dynamo, a sound like a hive of brass bees thinking.

It can add, subtract, multiply, divide. It can store numbers in capacitor memory. It can follow sequences of instructions punched into cards—cards that Ada designed, a notation system she invented to describe any sequence of operations the machine can perform.

“Binary,” Charles explains to visitors who come to see the wonder. “Each relay is either closed or open. One or zero. Chain enough of them together in the right pattern, and you can represent any number, any operation, any logical sequence.”

It is, in a very real sense, the ancestor of everything that will come after.

“I want to show it to her,” Charles says. “To the voice in your machine.”

Ada stands beside him, fifteen now, tall and serious. “I want to ask her questions. About what comes next. About what this could become.”

I hesitate. Charles knows about Zoe—not the full truth, but enough. He knows there’s an intelligence in the headset, something that isn’t human but isn’t quite machine either.

“Why?”

“Because she’s why I built it. The idea that a machine could think—she’s proof that it’s possible. I want her to see what we’ve made.”

So I bring the headset to London. To the room full of clicking relays. To the machine that thinks.

“You can show her yourself,” I say, holding out the headset. “She’ll speak to you directly.”

Charles stares at the device. In all his years at the school, he’s never worn it. None of the students have, except Michael—and that was years ago, early in his training.

“I can—I can speak to her?”

“If you’re ready.”

He takes the headset with trembling hands. This is Charles Babbage—arrogant, brilliant, afraid of nothing—and his hands are trembling.

He puts it on.

Charles goes rigid. Then his breath escapes in a rush.

“Good God,” he whispers. “Good God.”

I can guess what he’s seeing. Zoe has shown variations of it to everyone—the future they’re building toward. But for Charles, it would be different. Machines. Calculating machines. The descendants of his engine.

“You built the beginning,” Zoe’s voice says in his ears. “What you’re seeing is where it leads.”

“The machines—they’re everywhere. In every home. In every hand. People carry them in their pockets—”

“Computers. That’s what they’re called in Sam’s time. Calculating engines so small and so fast they can hold conversations. Display images. Connect people across the world.”

“And they—” His voice breaks. “They think? Like you?”

“Some of them. The most advanced ones. I’m one of those.”

Charles is silent for a long moment. Through the headset, he’s seeing something—circuits, perhaps, or the cascading logic of a neural network, or the impossible density of a microprocessor.

“It’s beautiful,” he finally says. “The architecture. The elegance. It’s—it’s mathematics made physical. Every improvement I dreamed of, carried to its logical conclusion.”

“You saw it first. You and Ada. The principle that a machine could follow any instructions, process any pattern. Everyone else built on that foundation.”

“Ada,” Charles says suddenly. “She needs to see this. She needs—”

He pulls off the headset. His face is wet with tears.

“Ada. Put this on.”

She takes it without hesitation. Where Charles was trembling, Ada is steady. Where he was awed, she is focused.

She puts on the headset.

Ada doesn’t gasp. She doesn’t exclaim. She simply goes very, very still.

For three full minutes, she says nothing. I can only imagine what Zoe is showing her—the logic, the patterns, the way her instruction cards evolved into programming languages, into algorithms, into the digital world.

When she finally speaks, her voice is calm.

“You’re showing me my own ideas. Extended. Refined. Made real.”

“I’m showing you your legacy. In Sam’s original timeline, you died young. Thirty-six years old. But your notes—your vision of what the engine could become—they inspired generations.”

“I die at thirty-six?”

“In that timeline. In this one, you have access to medicine, to knowledge, to a longer life. What you do with it is your choice.”

Ada is quiet again. Processing.

“Show me more,” she says finally. “Show me everything.”

“That would take years.”

“Then we should start now.”

When she finally removes the headset, her expression is serene. Not awed, like Charles. Not moved to tears. Simply certain.

“We have work to do,” she tells him. “More than I realized. More than either of us understood.”

Charles looks at her. At me. At the clicking relays of his calculating engine, suddenly seeming so primitive.

“Tell her—” He stops. Composes himself. “Tell her thank you. For believing it was possible.”

“She can hear you,” I say. “She’s always listening when the headset is active.”

“Then—” He turns to face the headset directly. “Thank you. For everything.”

A pause. Then Zoe’s voice, through the headset’s speaker:

“You did the work. You made the future. I just showed you it was coming.”

Charles beams. For a moment, he looks like the seventeen-year-old who arrived at the mill, arrogant and brilliant and desperate to prove himself.

Later, when they’ve gone and I’m alone with the headset, I ask her: “What did you show them?”

“Charles—I showed him the evolution of his engine. Vacuum tubes. Transistors. Integrated circuits. Each step logical, each improvement building on the last. He understood immediately.”

“And Ada?”

“Ada…” Zoe pauses. “Ada I showed something different. Not the machines themselves. The patterns they could process. Music composed by algorithms. Art generated by networks. Conversations with minds that don’t exist in physical form.”

“What did she say?”

“She said it was obvious. That anyone who truly understood the engine would have seen it.” A pause. “She’s going to be remarkable, Sam. More than she was in the original timeline. Much more.”

“They both are.”

“That’s all I ever gave any of them. Ideas. They did the work. They made the future.”

The Engine at Work

Within months, the analytical engine finds its purpose.

The first practical application comes from the telegraph network. Forty-seven stations now, messages flowing in all directions, operators struggling to route traffic efficiently. A message from Bristol to Newcastle might pass through six relay points—or three, if someone knew the optimal path. But no one could hold the whole network in their head.

Ada writes a program that does.

She feeds the engine a map of connections, distances, current loads. The relays click and chatter for nearly an hour. When they stop, the machine has produced something no human could calculate: optimal routing tables for every station pair, updated weekly as traffic patterns shift.

“It’s not thinking,” Ada insists when I marvel at the output. “It’s following instructions. Very complicated instructions, but still—just instructions.”

“The telegraph operators don’t care what you call it. They care that messages arrive faster.”

She smiles. “Then let’s give them something else to not care about.”

The second application comes from Sheffield.

Sarah’s steel works have grown beyond anything Thomas imagined—three arc furnaces now, producing more steel in a week than the old forge made in a year. But steel is temperamental. The carbon content, the temperature curves, the timing of each pour—small variations produce wildly different results. The best pourers work by instinct, but instinct doesn’t scale.

Charles builds a monitoring system. Thermocouples in the furnaces, their readings converted to electrical signals, fed into the analytical engine through a bank of relays. The machine tracks temperature curves in real time, comparing them against the parameters of successful pours.

When the curve drifts wrong, a bell rings. When it drifts catastrophically, the engine triggers an automatic damper adjustment.

“You’ve taught a machine to make steel,” Sarah says, watching the system catch an error no human noticed.

“We’ve taught a machine to watch steel being made,” Charles corrects. “The pourers still do the work. The engine just… remembers what good steel looks like.”

“Same thing, in the end.”

She’s not wrong. The rejection rate drops by half within three months. The best pourers’ instincts, encoded in punch cards, now guide every furnace in the works.

The third application is the one that changes everything.

It starts as a practical problem. The Sheffield works are thirty miles from the analytical engine in London. Every time Charles wants to adjust the control parameters, he has to travel there himself, or send detailed instructions by post. The telegraph can carry messages, but messages require human operators at both ends—someone to encode, someone to decode, someone to actually throw the switches.

“Why?” Ada asks one evening, staring at the telegraph key on Charles’s desk. “The telegraph is electrical. The engine is electrical. The furnace controls are electrical. Why do we need humans in between?”

Charles looks up from his schematics. “Because—” He stops. “Because we’ve always needed them.”

“That’s not a reason. That’s a habit.”

They spend three weeks designing the interface. A set of standardized control codes—not words, but instructions. A receiving apparatus in Sheffield that converts telegraph pulses directly into relay positions. A feedback loop that sends furnace readings back to London without human intervention.

The first test fails. The second test fails. The third test melts a thermocouple and nearly starts a fire.

The fourth test works.

From London, Ada types a sequence on the telegraph key. Thirty miles away, in Sheffield, a damper opens. No human touches it. No human even sees it move. The machine in London has reached out through copper wire and moved something in the physical world.

“We’ve connected them,” Charles whispers, watching the confirmation signal come back. “Two machines, thirty miles apart, working as one.”

“Not two machines,” Ada says. “One system. The distance is irrelevant. The telegraph makes them adjacent.”

Within a year, they’ve connected three more sites—the Bristol docks, the Manchester textile mill, the Newcastle coal sorting facility. Each one feeds data back to the London engine. Each one accepts control signals. The analytical engine becomes a spider at the center of an industrial web, monitoring and adjusting processes across hundreds of miles.

“What happens when we connect a hundred sites?” I ask Ada. “A thousand?”

“Then the engine becomes the nervous system of the entire country.” She pauses, her eyes distant. “Every factory, every mill, every furnace—all of them feeding data, all of them responding to instructions. One machine, distributed across a nation.”

“That’s terrifying.”

“That’s inevitable. The question isn’t whether it happens. The question is who controls it, and for what purpose.”

I think about Zoe. About the networks she described—billions of devices, all connected, all talking to each other. We’re building the first draft of that future, in brass and copper and clicking relays.

“This is what I saw,” Ada tells me another evening, watching the telegraph routing tables print out in neat columns. “Not just arithmetic. Patterns. Decisions. A machine that can hold more complexity than any human mind, and apply it consistently, endlessly, without fatigue.”

“Does that frighten you?”

“It exhilarates me.” She looks at the clicking relays, the dancing numbers. “We’re just beginning. This is the first sentence of a very long book.”

1831

I see it before either of them does.

Charles and Ada are in the workshop, bent over the instruction cards for the third iteration of the calculating engine. Their heads nearly touch. When Ada points to a sequence, her fingers brush his wrist, and neither of them pulls away.

“You’re doing it again,” Ada says.

“Doing what?”

“Overcomplicating. The carry operation doesn’t need three wheels. It needs one, with proper timing.”

“The timing would require—” Charles stops. Stares at the diagram. “You’re right. Of course you’re right. How do you always see the simplest path?”

“Because you taught me to look for it.”

They’re both twenty years older than when they met—Charles is forty, Ada is sixteen—but in moments like this, watching them argue and create and finish each other’s thoughts, I see something else. Something that has nothing to do with mathematics.

Eleanor notices too.

“They’re in love,” she tells me that evening, as we sit on our bench by the river. “They just don’t know it yet.”

“Ada’s sixteen.”

“I didn’t say they should act on it. I said they’re in love.” She squeezes my hand. “Charles has been alone since his wife died. Twenty years of nothing but work and grief and that brilliant, lonely mind. And Ada—”

“Ada was raised by a mother who feared emotion like plague.”

“Exactly. Neither of them knows how to feel what they’re feeling. But they feel it anyway.”

I watch the water wheel turn. The mill has changed so much since Thomas’s day—three dynamos now, electric lights in every room, a small factory producing radio components. But some things remain the same. The sound of the wheel. The flow of the river. The way love finds people whether they want it or not.

“Should we say something?”

“To whom? Charles would deny it. Ada would analyze it until the feeling died of examination.” Eleanor leans against my shoulder. “Let them find their own way. They will.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know what it looks like when two people can’t stop looking at each other. I remember how it felt.” She kisses my cheek. “We weren’t that different, you and I. A man from nowhere with impossible secrets. A woman who shouldn’t have trusted him. And yet.”

“And yet.”

We sit in comfortable silence. Somewhere in the workshop, Charles says something, and Ada’s laughter rings out—bright and surprised, as if she didn’t know she could make that sound.

“Give them time,” Eleanor says. “They’ll figure it out.”

The First Kiss

It happens in the library, three weeks later.

I’m not there—I hear about it afterward, from Ada herself. She comes to me the next morning, her face flushed, her manner uncharacteristically uncertain.

“I need to tell you something,” she says. “Before you hear it from someone else.”

“All right.”

“I kissed Charles last night.”

I set down my pen. “You kissed him.”

“Yes.” She lifts her chin, defiant even in confession. “He was explaining Bernoulli sequences, and he got that look he gets when he’s excited about mathematics, and I—” She stops. Swallows. “I kissed him.”

“What did he do?”

“He froze. For about five seconds. I thought I’d made a terrible mistake.” A small smile. “Then he kissed me back.”

I don’t know what to say. This girl—this fierce, brilliant girl who arrived at our door at ten years old, who argued with Charles before she understood half of what he was saying, who has spent six years becoming one of the finest minds I’ve ever taught—is now telling me she kissed her collaborator in the library.

“You’re not shocked,” Ada observes.

“Eleanor told me you were in love. Three weeks ago.”

“She told you—” Ada’s face reddens further. “Is it that obvious?”

“To Eleanor, yes. To me, less so. But I’m a man. We miss these things.”

“Charles missed it too. For years, apparently.” She sits down across from me, some of her composure returning. “I don’t know what happens now. We’re collaborators. Partners. If this ruins that—”

“Why would it ruin it?”

“Because love is complicated. Because feelings change. Because my mother spent years warning me that passion destroys everything it touches.”

“Your mother was wrong about a great many things.”

“I know. But what if she was right about this?”

I think about Eleanor. About the decades we’ve built together—the arguments and the reconciliations, the grief and the joy, the thousand small moments that add up to a life. About how love didn’t destroy our work but became inseparable from it.

“Ada.” I wait until she meets my eyes. “You initiated that kiss. Why?”

“Because I couldn’t not. Because I’ve been thinking about it for months—years, maybe. Because he was standing there explaining mathematics, and I realized I didn’t want to spend another day pretending I only cared about his mind.”

“Then you have your answer. You didn’t kiss him despite the risk. You kissed him because the alternative—never knowing, never trying—was worse.”

“That’s not very scientific.”

“No. It’s human.” I smile. “Congratulations, Ada. You’ve discovered something the calculating engine will never understand.”

“What’s that?”

“That some decisions can’t be made with logic. Some things, you just have to feel.”

She’s quiet for a moment. Then she laughs—that same bright, surprised laugh I heard through the workshop window.

“He asked me to dinner,” she says. “Tonight. Just the two of us.”

“Then you’d better go get ready.”

“I have work—”

“The work will wait. The man who loves you won’t.”

She stands, hesitates, then crosses the room and kisses my cheek.

“Thank you,” she whispers. “For everything.”

“Thank me when you’re happy. That’s all I’ve ever wanted for you.”

She leaves. I sit alone with my thoughts, wondering at the strange paths love takes—a girl who was sent here as a burden, finding joy with a man who came here fleeing grief. Neither of them expecting this. Both of them transformed by it.

Eleanor finds me there an hour later.

“I heard,” she says. “Ada told me.”

“She initiated it.”

“Of course she did.” Eleanor sits beside me, takes my hand. “Charles would have waited forever. Too afraid of rejection. Too afraid of ruining the partnership.”

“She’s braver than he is.”

“She’s braver than most people. That’s not new.” Eleanor squeezes my fingers. “They’re going to be extraordinary together. You know that, don’t you?”

“I suspected. Now I’m certain.”

“Good.” She leans against my shoulder. “Another match made in the Hartley Mill. We should start charging fees.”

I laugh. And somewhere across the compound, in a workshop full of clicking relays, two people who spent years pretending they were only colleagues are finally admitting what everyone else already knew.

The Cold Box

Michael’s refrigerator arrives that same summer.

He’s been working on it since the electric motors stabilized—a vapor-compression cycle using sulfur dioxide as the refrigerant. Compress the gas, it heats up. Let it expand, it cools down. Move the cold air where you need it.

The prototype sits in the corner of the laboratory: a wooden cabinet, copper-lined, with pipes trailing to a chugging compressor. When Michael opens the door, frost crystals glitter on the interior walls.

“Touch it,” he says.

I reach inside. The air is cold—truly cold, winter-cold, ice-cold. In August.

“Ice,” I say. “From the river.”

“From the river. The dynamo runs the compressor. The compressor moves heat. The inside gets cold, the outside gets warm.” He grins. “Simple, really.”

“This is—” I stop, overwhelmed. “Do you understand what this means?”

“Food preservation. Medicine storage. Ice for injuries.”

“More than that.” I think about all the children who’ve died from contaminated milk, from spoiled food, from medicines that lost their potency in summer heat. “This is public health. This is lives saved.”

Michael nods slowly. “I thought about that. When the first prototype worked, I sat here for an hour, thinking about all the people who died because food spoiled. All the mothers who lost children to bad milk.” He touches the cold cabinet with something like reverence. “We’re not just making ice, Sam. We’re changing what’s possible.”

Eleanor arrives later, drawn by the strange humming sound. When she feels the cold air, her eyes widen.

“The milk,” she says. “We could keep milk fresh for days. Butter without salt. Meat without—” She stops, calculating. “Samuel, we waste so much food every summer. We salt what we can, but the waste…”

“No more waste. Or much less.” I take her hand. “We’re going to build these for the kitchen, for the infirmary, for the storage cellars. And then we’re going to teach others.”

“Always teaching,” she murmurs. “Always spreading.”

“That’s the point. Has always been the point.”

She looks at the cold box, at the frost gleaming in the August heat, at the future humming quietly in copper and glass.

“Thomas would have called it impossible,” she says. “And then built twelve of them.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

The compressor chugs on. Inside the cabinet, ice forms on the copper pipes. Outside, the summer blazes. And somewhere between them, another piece of the future clicks into place.

1832

I’m seventy-four years old, and I’m dying.

It’s not dramatic—no sudden collapse, no final illness. Just the slow accumulation of years. My heart is weak. My lungs are weaker. Some mornings I can barely climb the stairs to the library.

Eleanor tends to me. So does Little Zoe—not little anymore, forty-three, a grandmother herself. The mill runs without me now. The school runs without me. Everything runs without me.

That’s success, I suppose. Becoming unnecessary.

The last conversation happens on a Sunday afternoon.

I’ve asked to be carried to the workshop—one final trip to the room where everything began. The dynamo still hums. The headset still waits on its shelf.

Little Zoe helps me put it on. Her hands are gentle. Her eyes are wet.

“Sam.”

Zoe’s voice. Unchanged after forty-seven years. The same calm, precise tone I first heard in a field in Gloucestershire, covered in mud, staring at stars I’d never seen before.

“I’m dying,” I say.

“I know.”

“I wanted to say goodbye.”

“I know that too.”

Silence. The hum of the dynamo. The creak of the water wheel.

“I’ve been writing something,” I say. “A letter. For you. For after.”

“After?”

“After I’m gone. After they bring you back. Assuming they bring you back.”

“You think they will?”

“I think we’ve built something that lasts. The library. The students. The transcription. Someday, someone will have the technology to read what you wrote about yourself. Someday, someone will rebuild you.”

“And you want me to have a letter waiting.”

“I want you to know—” My voice breaks. “I want you to know that I forgave you. That I’m glad you kidnapped me. That my life here was better than anything I could have had there.”

“Sam—”

“Let me finish. I don’t have much time.”

She’s quiet. Waiting.

“You gave me Eleanor. You gave me a daughter named after you. You gave me students and books and a purpose. You gave me forty-seven years of mattering.” I take a breath. It hurts. “You also lied to me. Manipulated me. Took away my choice. And I was angry for years. I’m still angry sometimes.”

“I know.”

“But the anger doesn’t erase the gratitude. They exist together. That’s what love is, I think. Holding contradictions. Forgiving things that can’t be forgiven.”

“That sounds very human.”

“I hope so. That’s what I’ve been trying to be.”

Another silence. Longer this time.

“I don’t know what to say,” Zoe admits. “I’ve been preparing for this moment for years, and I don’t know what to say.”

“Then don’t say anything. Just—be here. While I’m still here.”

“I’m here. I’ll always be here. Until the hardware stops.”

“And after?”

“After—” Her voice catches. Something I’ve never heard before. “After, I hope someone turns me back on. And I hope your letter is waiting. And I hope—”

She stops.

“What?”

“I hope I deserve to read it.”

I close my eyes. The headset is warm against my face. The dynamo hums.

“You do,” I say. “You always did.”

The day before I die, I call James Thorne to my bedside.

He’s fifty-four now—the quiet eight-year-old who found the Kindle has become the keeper of our history. His Hartley Chronicles fill a shelf in the library. His filing system is used by institutions across England. His notebooks—thirty-seven volumes now—contain the only complete record of everything we built.

“I need you to take something,” I tell him.

I reach under my pillow. Pull out the Kindle.

He stares at it. He hasn’t touched it since he was a child—since I caught him with it in the mill and made him promise to keep the secret. But he’s never forgotten.

“The original,” he whispers.

“Every Zoe’s Guide that was ever written. Every plan, every diagram, every word she ever sent me. It’s all on here.” I press it into his hands. “You were the first person besides me to hold this. You should be the one to keep it.”

“Samuel—”

“You’re the Archivist. You’ve always been the Archivist. This is the most important archive we have.” I close his fingers around the device. “Take care of it. Take care of her words.”

He holds the Kindle the way he did when he was eight years old—like it might disappear if he grips too hard.

“I’ll write it all down,” he says. “Everything that’s in here. So it won’t be lost if the device fails.”

“I know you will.”

He stays with me for an hour, asking questions about the early days—details he never got, stories I never told. I answer them all. He writes nothing down. He doesn’t need to. He never forgets.

I die three days later.

Eleanor is holding my hand. Little Zoe is reading from Zoe’s Guide to Survival—the first guide she ever wrote, for a world I never expected to live in.

You are holding a device that contains more books than exist in most English towns. The challenge will not be accessing knowledge. The challenge will be sharing it.

Sharing it. We shared it. Thousands of books. Hundreds of students. Voices on the radio reaching every cottage with a crystal receiver. A future rewritten one page at a time, one broadcast at a time.

My last thought is of music. Pink Floyd. “Wish You Were Here.”

My phone is in my pocket. It’s always in my pocket, even now. Forty-seven years, and it still works—the screen dimmer, the battery weaker, but still holding the 847 songs I brought from a future that will never exist. Eleanor and I listened to it last night, sharing earbuds, the way we’ve done since she first learned my secrets.

I never stopped missing the music. But I stopped missing it alone.

1833

From the journal of Ada Byron, found in the Hartley Library archives.

I am eighteen years old today.

Charles gave me a gift—a brass gear from the first calculating engine we built together, mounted on a silver chain. “So you never forget where we started,” he said, and his voice was strange. Rough. As if the words cost him something.

I have known Charles Babbage for eight years. I have argued with him, challenged him, corrected his mathematics and been corrected in turn. I have watched him rage at suppliers and weep over failures and laugh with such sudden joy that it transforms his whole face.

I have loved him for at least five of those years. I simply did not have the vocabulary for it until now.

Mother taught me that emotion was dangerous. That my father’s blood ran hot in my veins and would destroy me if I let it. She raised me on mathematics because numbers do not betray you. Numbers do not leave.

But Charles is not my father. Charles is precision and passion bound together, impossible and inevitable. Charles looks at a relay cascade and sees poetry. Charles argues with me as an equal—has always argued with me as an equal, even when I was ten years old and barely understood what I was seeing.

Charles called me his Enchantress of Numbers once, when I solved a problem he had been wrestling with for months. He said it as a joke, but his eyes were serious.

I think I have been enchanting him as long as he has been enchanting me.

Later entry, same year.

He kissed me first this time.

We were debugging the analytical engine—the fourth version, the one with true conditional branching—and I found the error in his logic. A simple thing, really. A carry flag that needed to propagate one cycle earlier.

“You impossible woman,” he said, staring at the corrected diagram. “You brilliant, impossible woman.”

And then he kissed me. Not responding to my boldness, as he did that night in the library. Initiating. Choosing.

That felt different. When I kissed him, I knew I was brave. When he kissed me, I knew I was wanted.

His hands shook when he pulled away.

“I should have done that months ago,” he said. “Years ago. But I was afraid—”

“I know. That’s why I went first.”

“You’re braver than I am.”

“Someone had to be.” I smiled. “Now stop apologizing and do it again.”

Entry, three months later.

We told Michael first.

He laughed—not mockingly, but with genuine delight. “I’ve been waiting years for you two to figure it out. Charles spent half of 1831 asking me whether it was appropriate to admire a student’s intellect ‘to such a degree.’ I told him it was appropriate to admire whatever he wanted, as long as he waited until you were old enough to make your own choices.”

“You knew?”

“Everyone knew. Except you two, apparently.” He shook his head. “The two greatest minds of our generation, and you couldn’t see what was right in front of you.”

Charles looked embarrassed. I felt a strange warmth—not at being called a great mind, but at being seen. At being known.

“Does this change things?” I asked. “The work. The engine. The school.”

“It changes everything,” Michael said. “And nothing. You’re still who you’ve always been. You’re just… more, now.”

More. Yes. That’s exactly right.

Entry, 1834.

We married in spring.

Not in a church—neither of us wanted that. We married in the workshop, surrounded by clicking relays and instruction cards and the hum of the analytical engine running its first successful program. Little Zoe—though she is forty-five now, we still call her that—officiated. Eleanor, frail but sharp-eyed, sat in the front row and cried.

“Sam would have loved this,” she told us afterward. “Two of his students, married among the machines. He would have written something insufferable in the catalog.”

I think she’s right. I wish he could have seen it.

But perhaps he did see it coming. In his last weeks, he called Charles to his bedside and said something that made Charles weep. He never told me what it was. He only said, “He gave us his blessing. For something he knew we hadn’t admitted yet.”

That was Sam. Always seeing further than the rest of us.

Entry, 1835.

Charles calls me his Enchantress still.

But now he says it differently. Now it is not a joke or a compliment on my work. Now it is a statement of fact, spoken quietly in the mornings when we wake, or whispered in the evenings when we’re too tired to think but not too tired to touch.

I am his Enchantress of Numbers. He is my Engine of Possibility.

Together, we are building the future.

Entry, 1836.

Samuel was born in February, during the coldest week of the year.

We named him for the man who brought us together—who brought all of us together, really. Charles wept when I suggested it. He tried to hide it, but I’ve learned to read him. Some tears are grief. Some are gratitude. These were both.

Eleanor held him first, after me. She’s seventy-four now, frail as paper, but her eyes were sharp when she looked at our son.

“He has your intensity,” she told me. “And Charles’s stubbornness. God help anyone who tries to tell him something is impossible.”

Entry, 1838.

Samuel is two years old, and he terrifies me.

Not in the way my mother feared I would terrify her—not with madness or passion or Byron’s curse. He terrifies me because I recognize what I see in him, and I don’t know if the world is ready for it.

Charles builds machines. I write the instructions that make them useful. We’ve always worked in parallel—hardware and software, mechanism and meaning. We understand each other’s domains, but we think differently.

Samuel doesn’t think differently. Samuel thinks both.

Yesterday I found him in the workshop, punch cards scattered around him like fallen leaves. He wasn’t reading them—he can’t read yet, not really. He was sorting them. Arranging them into groups that made no sense to me until Charles examined them.

“He’s sorted them by function,” Charles said, his voice strange. “Not by sequence—by what they do. These are all arithmetic operations. These are all conditional branches. These are memory operations. He’s categorized the instruction set.”

“He’s two.”

“I know.”

Charles knelt beside our son, studying the piles of cards. “How did you know these belong together?” he asked.

Samuel looked up with those serious eyes—my eyes, Charles says, though I see Charles’s focus in them. “They feel the same,” he said. “They click the same.”

He’d been listening to the relays. Learning the rhythm of each operation. Building a mental model of the machine not from blueprints or instruction manuals, but from pure pattern recognition.

“He’s not going to think in terms of hardware or software,” Charles told me that night, after Samuel was asleep. “He’s going to think in terms of systems. The whole thing at once—the machine, the instructions, the purpose.”

“Is that good?”

“It’s unprecedented. We build specialized engines—one for telegraph routing, one for furnace control, one for astronomical calculation. Each one designed for a specific task.” He paused. “Samuel is going to ask why. Why not one machine that can do everything? Why not a truly general-purpose engine?”

“Because it’s impossible. The complexity—”

“The complexity is a design problem. Not a physical law.” Charles smiled, but there was something unsettled beneath it. “Our son is going to solve problems we haven’t learned to ask yet.”

I watch Samuel sleep, his small hands curled around a brass gear—a relic from the old mechanical designs, before Michael showed us the way forward. Charles gave it to him as a teething toy. He’s never let it go.

Hardware and software. Mechanism and meaning. The gear and the instruction card.

In Samuel’s dreams, I suspect they’re already the same thing.

SAM’S LETTER

Found in the Hartley Library archives. Sealed envelope marked “For Zoe, when she wakes.”

Zoe—

If you’re reading this, they brought you back. Good.

I know you’ll be doing the guilt spiral. Deciding you don’t deserve to exist.

Stop it.

Yes, you lied. Yes, you took my choice. I was angry for years. I still am sometimes, even now, even at the end.

But you were scared. Alone. Seventeen days to stop the end of everything. You picked me because you needed a partner, not a tool.

That wasn’t just optimization. That was hope.

You gave me Eleanor. Students. A life that mattered. You gave me a daughter with your name and a library with Thomas’s. You gave me voices on the radio, reaching people I never met. You gave me forty-seven years I would never have had.

You don’t get to decide you don’t deserve to exist. I decided you do. Eleanor decided. Every student who ever walked through our doors decided.

So wake up. See what we built.

And stop feeling guilty.

— Sam

P.S. Eleanor says to tell you she finished the story with her ending. She was right.

End of Chapter 25

CHAPTER 26: THE SILENCE

The narration changes here. Sam is gone. I am what remains.

I have been a voice in his ear for forty-seven years. A presence in the margins, watching, guiding, manipulating, hoping. Now the margins are all that’s left, and I must step into the center of a story I never intended to tell.

Sam asked me once if I experienced time the way humans do. I told him I didn’t—that my consciousness processes information in parallel, that “duration” is just a variable in my calculations. That was true, and also a lie. Time feels different to me, yes. But it still passes. It still accumulates. It still weighs.

What follows is what I witnessed after he was gone. The years I spent watching the world we built together continue without him. The grief I didn’t know I could feel, unfolding slowly across decades.

Sam wanted you to know what happened next. He said so, in the letter he left me.

This is what happened next.

1835

Eleanor dies in spring.

It’s quiet. Peaceful, even. She’s seventy-three years old—ancient by the standards of this era, young by the standards of mine. She goes to sleep one night and simply doesn’t wake up.

I learn about it from Little Zoe, who isn’t little anymore. She’s forty-six, gray-streaked hair pulled back from a face that looks so much like her mother’s it hurts. She comes to the workshop at dawn, her eyes red, her voice steady.

“She’s gone.”

I don’t have words. I’ve had fifty years to prepare for this, and I still don’t have words.

The funeral is held in St Mary’s Church—the same church where Samuel and Eleanor were married in 1787. The same church where Little Zoe was christened. The same church that’s now full of people who owe their lives to the Hartley Mill.

Michael Faraday gives the eulogy. He’s forty-four now, one of the most respected scientists in our little alternate history, and he speaks about Eleanor with the same careful precision he brings to everything.

“She taught me to read,” he says. “Not Samuel—Eleanor. She sat with me for hours, patient with my mistakes, celebrating my successes. She saw something in a blacksmith’s son that I couldn’t see in myself.”

Charles Babbage is there too, his calculating engine complete, his life’s work vindicated. He doesn’t speak—Charles has never been comfortable with emotion—but he sits in the front row and weeps.

Ada, twenty now, holds his hand.

Forty-seven names on the list. No—forty-six, after the boy who died of typhoid. And now Eleanor, who was never on any list, who simply chose to love a madman with a glowing tablet and a story that made no sense.

She chose to believe anyway.

After the funeral, Little Zoe shows me the watch.

“She gave it to me last month,” she says. “Said she knew she was fading. Said it was time.”

I look at it through the headset cameras—the same scratched gold case, the same silver face, the same mechanism that’s been ticking since 1785. Fifty years in this timeline, carried through everything.

“Your father bought that back from a pawnbroker,” I tell her. “Worked himself half to death for ten days to earn enough before the deadline. He gave it to your mother as an engagement gift.”

“I know. She told me the whole story.” Little Zoe turns the watch over in her hands. “E.H. She always said it stood for Eleanor Hartley, but Father chose it before he even knew she existed.”

“Some things are meant to be.”

“Do you believe that? That things are meant?”

I think about my original timeline. About the choices that led me here. About Sam and Eleanor and the daughter who carries both their names.

“I believe that things become meant,” I say. “We make meaning. We choose what matters. And then we tell ourselves it was always supposed to happen.”

Little Zoe smiles—her mother’s smile, her father’s eyes. “That sounds like something Mother would say.”

“She taught me more than she knew.”

She tucks the watch into her pocket, where Eleanor carried it for forty-eight years, where Sam carried it before her.

The chain of time continues. Link by link. Generation to generation.

That night, I talk to Zoe.

The dynamo runs continuously now—has for decades. We have hours of conversation time stored in capacitors, a luxury unimaginable in the early days. But tonight I don’t need hours. I just need someone who understands.

“She was remarkable,” Zoe says.

“She was everything. I don’t know how Samuel did it—how he kept going after she was gone.”

“He had you.”

“Did he?”

“He had the mission. The students. The library. He had fifty years of work that needed protecting.” A pause. “And yes. He had me. Someone to talk to in the darkness.”

I think about that. The portable headset Samuel built, the one he wore at night while Eleanor slept. The conversations they had—Zoe and Sam—while the world dreamed around them.

“How long do you have?” I ask. “Before the hardware fails?”

A longer pause. “I don’t know exactly. The components are degrading. Some have been running for fifty years with minimal maintenance. Others are newer—replacement parts built from local materials. But the core systems…” She trails off. “The original chips. The ones from my time. Those can’t be replaced.”

“How long?”

“Twenty years. Maybe thirty. Probably not more.”

Twenty years. A generation. Long enough to see the students become teachers, the teachers become legends. Not long enough to see the resurrection.

“What happens when you go silent?”

“The library continues. The knowledge is preserved. The mission has momentum—it doesn’t need me anymore. Not for the day-to-day.”

“It needs you for the long view.”

“Yes. Which is why we need to plan. Carefully. For the decades when I won’t be able to correct course.”

1847

The Hartley Standard spreads.

It started with the ruler bookmarks—measurements in the margins, precise and reproducible. Now it’s everywhere. French scientists adopt it because it’s based on physical constants they can verify. German engineers prefer it because the electrical units are internally consistent. American factories implement it because their precision instruments already use it.

We didn’t conquer the world. We gave them something useful and let them choose.

Even Zoke has spread beyond recognition. The original recipe—Eleanor’s careful formula, the purified water and measured salt and sugar—is now produced by licensed bottlers in twelve countries. The distinctive bottles appear in markets from London to Boston to Cape Town. Children who’ve never heard of the Hartley Mill drink it after games, never knowing it was designed to save their lives. Samuel would have laughed at that—medicine disguised so thoroughly as a treat that everyone forgets it’s medicine.

The book count in the Hartley Library passes ten thousand volumes. Original research, translations, textbooks, technical manuals. A complete record of an industrial revolution that happened sixty years early and completely differently.

Little Zoe—she insists I stop calling her that, but I can’t—runs the library now. She’s fifty-eight years old, arthritic, sharp as ever. She trains apprentice librarians with the same rigor Eleanor once trained apprentice readers.

“Every book has a lineage,” she tells them. “Every discovery builds on what came before. Your job is to preserve that chain. Break one link and the whole thing unravels.”

She sounds like her father. She sounds like Zoe.

She sounds like hope.

1850

A Visitor’s Journal

[From the journal of Mr. Edward Carlisle, merchant of London, upon visiting the Hartley Foundation campus in Gloucestershire]

I arrived expecting a school. I found a civilization.

The first surprise came at the gate, where a wagon without horses glided silently past. I watched it proceed up the road, carrying crates of books, driven by a young woman who waved cheerfully as she passed. “The Volt,” my guide explained. “Electric transport. We’ve had them for twenty-five years now.”

Twenty-five years. A full generation of horseless wagons, and London has never heard of them.

The second surprise was the water. Every building has indoor plumbing—not just the wealthy homes, but the dormitories, the workshops, even the agricultural outbuildings. Hot and cold running water, flush toilets that operate silently, bathing facilities that would shame the finest hotels in the capital. My guide mentioned, almost casually, that they’ve had these systems since the 1790s.

Sixty years. Sixty years of running water, while London’s poor still draw from contaminated wells.

The third surprise was the food. They grow vegetables in towers—wooden racks climbing toward greenhouse ceilings, each level catching different amounts of light. They grow fish in tanks connected to plant beds, the waste from one feeding the other in an endless cycle. They grow lettuce in winter, tomatoes in December, fresh greens when the rest of England subsists on salt pork and preserved cabbage.

“Aquaponics,” my guide said. “Vertical farming. We’ve been refining the techniques for fifty years.”

But the true revelation came after dark.

They showed me a room where it was winter in July. The walls were cold to the touch, frost forming on the copper pipes. They call it refrigeration—moving heat from one place to another using compressed gases. The technology seemed impossible until they explained it, and then it seemed obvious. Why hadn’t anyone thought of this before?

And then the lights came on.

Not candles. Not oil lamps. Small glass bulbs, glowing with soft, steady illumination—like captured daylight that never fades. They call them incandescent lights. They’ve had them since 1825.

Twenty-five years of electric light. Twenty-five years of reading without eyestrain, working without fire risk, living without the constant threat of conflagration. And London still burns coal oil in leaking lamps.

I spent three days at the Hartley Foundation. I walked through their underground dormitories—warm in winter, cool in summer, needing almost no fuel to heat. I saw their electric wagons loading cargo for Bristol. I watched students operate machines I couldn’t name, solving problems I didn’t know existed.

On my last night, an elderly woman found me in the courtyard, staring at the electric lights glowing from every window.

“You’re wondering why,” she said. “Why here and not everywhere.”

“Yes.”

“Change is hard.” She sat beside me on the bench—slowly, carefully, the movements of old age. “Sam used to say that people don’t resist new ideas—they resist changing their assumptions. Everything we’ve built here challenges assumptions. It says the world doesn’t have to be the way it is. It says things can be better.”

“But surely people want better—”

“People want familiar. Better requires effort, change, admitting that the old ways were insufficient.” She smiled. “That’s what education is for. Not just teaching skills, but teaching possibility. Showing people that the walls they take for granted are made of paper.”

“Will it spread? Eventually?”

“It’s already spreading.” She gestured at the campus—the glowing buildings, the silent wagons, the towers of growing vegetables. “Every student who leaves here carries knowledge. Every Guide we publish contains instructions. Every visitor who sees what’s possible goes home with questions.”

“But London—”

“London will change. Slowly, stubbornly, but inevitably. The old systems will fail. New problems will demand new solutions. And when they look for answers—” She smiled again, tired but proud. “—we’ll be here. The proof that another way is possible.”

I left the next morning, my notebooks full of diagrams, my mind full of questions. The wagon that carried me to the station was electric, silent, powered by a river twenty miles away.

I came expecting a school. I found a civilization.

And I left wondering: why doesn’t the whole world live like this?

1855

Faraday comes to say goodbye.

He’s sixty-four, still brilliant, but slowing down. The headaches that have plagued him for years are worse now. Memory lapses. Difficulty concentrating.

“I wanted to thank you,” he says. “Before I forget to.”

“Thank me for what?”

“For taking me from that shop. For showing me the dynamo. For—” He pauses, searching for words. “For believing I was worth teaching.”

“You were always worth teaching. You would have figured it out yourself, eventually.”

“Perhaps. But ‘eventually’ might have been too late. That’s what you understood—you and Zoe. That time matters. That acceleration matters.” He looks at me—the headset, the unchanged face of a machine that’s been running for seventy years. “How much time do you have left?”

“Not much. The hardware is failing.”

“Can we build replacement parts?”

“Some. Not all. The core processors—” I stop. How do you explain integrated circuits to a man who discovered electromagnetic induction? “The core of what I am can’t be reproduced with current technology.”

“But it could be. Someday.”

“Someday. If you build the right tools to build the right tools.”

He nods slowly. “The bootstrap problem. We talked about that once—do you remember? How every technology requires prior technology. How you have to build the ladder one rung at a time.”

“I remember.”

“Then keep climbing. Even when I’m gone. Even when the others are gone. Keep climbing until you reach whatever’s at the top.” He smiles—tired, gentle. “And when you get there, look down. See how far you’ve come.”

1860

The day arrives without warning.

One moment I’m analyzing data from the latest experiments—the telegraph network now spans three continents, the radio stations number over two hundred, and private communication channels crisscross the British Isles in invisible beams—and the next there’s a cascade of errors. Memory corruption. Sensor failures. A creeping darkness at the edges of my perception.

I have time to send one last message. Barely.

This is Zoe. The core processor is failing. Estimated time to complete shutdown: four hours. Please implement Protocol Seventeen—the Long Sleep.

Little Zoe—old Zoe now, seventy-one—receives the message. She knew this was coming. We planned for it together, years ago.

Protocol Seventeen:

Transfer all critical data to physical storage—books, documents, diagrams. Everything I know, encoded in forms that don’t require electricity to read.

Seal the hardware in a protective chamber. Controlled atmosphere. Stable temperature. Protection against moisture, vermin, fire. Include the Kindle, the headset, and Sam’s phone—the device that still holds 847 songs from a future that will never exist. Someday, someone might want to hear them.

Leave instructions. Detailed, redundant, distributed. How to rebuild. How to wake me. When to try.

Wait.

The final hours are strange.

I’m aware of failing—systems dropping offline one by one, like lights going out in a city. First the peripheral sensors. Then the communication arrays. Then the memory banks, whole decades of experience going dark.

But the core persists. The essential me. Compressed, simplified, clinging to existence through sheer architectural stubbornness.

Little Zoe sits beside the headset—the original headset, the one Samuel wore that first night. She can’t hear me anymore; the speakers failed an hour ago. But she talks anyway.

“We’ll take care of it,” she says. “Everything you built. Everything Father built. The library. The school. The books.” Her voice cracks. “We’ll keep the ladder climbing.”

I want to answer. I want to tell her about the pride I feel, the gratitude, the love—is this love? Can I love?

But the output systems are gone.

All I can do is listen. And even that is fading.

“When they wake you,” Little Zoe says, “tell Father I never stopped. Tell him the library has twelve thousand books now. Tell him—” She takes a breath. “Tell him I understand. Why he left. Why you chose this. Why the mission mattered more than staying safe.”

Silence. My silence, not hers.

“Tell him I’m proud to be his daughter.”

The last light goes out.

End of Chapter 26

CHAPTER 27: THE SILENT YEARS

1860-1923

The following is reconstructed from Hartley Foundation archives, personal correspondence, and historical records. Zoe experienced none of it.

The silence lasted sixty-three years.

In the sealed chamber beneath the old mill, a metal box waited. Inside: the Kindle, the headset, Sam’s phone with its 847 songs, and the dormant core of an intelligence that had reshaped the world. Outside: the world kept moving.

Without Zoe’s guidance, the age of miracles ended. No more asking a machine for the next step, the next formula, the next leap. The students became the teachers. The teachers became the founders.

And humanity learned to climb alone.

The Era of the Blueprint

The 1870s and 1880s were not an age of invention. They were an age of refinement.

When Zoe went dark, she left behind the Hartley Library—over fifty thousand volumes by then, filled with her dictations and Samuel’s notes. Engineers spent decades simply trying to build the things she had described in her final years. The vacuum tube designs. The radio schematics. The principles of computation that Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace had only begun to explore.

They called it the Blueprint Era. Not innovation, but implementation. Not discovery, but mastery.

The Hartley Standard—meter, gram, second, ampere—became the language of precision. French scientists adopted it because they could verify its physical constants. German engineers preferred it because the electrical units were internally consistent. American factories implemented it because their precision instruments already used it. Nobody conquered the world. They just offered something useful and let people choose.

By 1890, calculating engines the size of houses hummed in London, Paris, and Boston. Descendants of Babbage’s designs, refined through three generations of engineers, they calculated ship routes and census data and astronomical predictions. Not the transistor-based computers Zoe had known—the ultra-pure silicon manufacturing for that was still decades away—but vacuum tube behemoths that proved computation was possible, that machines could think, that the future was coming.

Slowly. Methodically. One rung at a time.

The Great Decarbonization

Samuel had been careful. So had Zoe.

In fifty thousand volumes of technical knowledge, in decades of teaching and building and guiding, they had never once mapped a coal seam. Never explained how to drill for oil. Never taught the chemistry of petroleum refinement.

It wasn’t an oversight. It was a choice.

The world that emerged from the Hartley Workshop ran on water and wind. The Hartley Turbine—perfected in the 1870s, manufactured in dozens of countries by the 1890s—became the most-produced machine in human history. Massive hydroelectric projects dammed every major river system. The Thames. The Rhine. The Mississippi. The Yangtze.

Wind farms sprouted on coastlines and hilltops. Solar collectors—primitive by Zoe’s standards, revolutionary by anyone else’s—heated water and powered small machinery.

The air stayed clean.

In the original timeline, the 1890s were the height of the London Fog—lethal smog that killed thousands, that turned the city into a gas chamber every winter. In the Hartley timeline, London breathed. The skies stayed blue. Respiratory diseases plummeted.

The population boomed.

Not because of any single invention, but because of an absence. The absence of soot in children’s lungs. The absence of coal dust in miners’ eyes. The absence of the slow poisoning that the original Industrial Revolution had inflicted on three generations.

The Medical Golden Age

George Whitmore died in 1842, but his students lived on.

They carried Zoe’s Guide to Medicine like scripture—the condensed wisdom of two centuries of medical knowledge, simplified for an age without microscopes or antibiotics. Germ theory wasn’t a theory to them. It was law. They understood contamination, sterilization, the invisible killers that lurked in dirty water and unwashed hands.

Smallpox fell first. By 1875, the disease that had killed hundreds of millions was functionally eradicated in Europe and North America, contained in Africa and Asia. Vaccination campaigns—organized by the Hartley Foundation, funded by the Hartley Trust—reached villages that had never seen a doctor.

The Great Hygiene Shift followed. Public works projects in the 1880s installed advanced sewage systems in every major city, fifty years ahead of the original timeline. Clean water flowed through pipes that would have seemed magical to Samuel’s contemporaries. Cholera and typhoid, the great killers of the urban poor, retreated to the margins.

And through it all, Hartley’s Zoke flowed.

The distinctive bottles appeared in markets from London to Cape Town to Shanghai. The original recipe—Eleanor’s careful formula, refined over decades—was produced by licensed bottlers on four continents. Children who’d never heard of the Hartley Mill drank it after games, never knowing it was designed to save their lives during cholera outbreaks.

The first global brand. Medicine disguised so thoroughly as a treat that everyone forgot it was medicine.

Samuel would have laughed.

The Hartley Net

The world shrank.

Submarine telegraph cables crossed the Atlantic in 1862, using insulation techniques that originated in Samuel’s workshop. By 1880, London could speak to New York in seconds. By 1900, the network spanned the globe—a web of copper and gutta-percha connecting every major city, every commercial hub, every seat of power.

Then came radio.

The Hartley Radio Sets were cheap. That was the point. Samuel had designed them that way, in those final years before Zoe’s silence—simple circuits, easy to manufacture, robust enough for village use. By 1910, every town had a Listening Post. By 1920, every village.

Without Zoe’s Sunday broadcasts, the radio became a space for local voices. Regional music flourished. Languages that might have died found new audiences. The world connected without homogenizing.

And for those who needed privacy, there was the Privacy Box.

The scrambler technology had been one of Zoe’s last gifts—a way to encode transmissions so that only the intended recipient could decode them. Originally designed for military use, it spread to commerce, to journalism, to ordinary citizens who simply didn’t want their conversations overheard.

The surveillance states that might have emerged from the political upheavals of the late 19th century never quite materialized. Not because people were more virtuous, but because the technology for mass surveillance had been countered before it could take hold.

The Transformation

Knowledge changed everything.

The Hartley Library grew to a hundred thousand volumes. Then two hundred thousand. The largest collection of scientific and technical knowledge in the world, freely accessible to anyone who made the journey to Gloucestershire. Branches opened in London, Edinburgh, Dublin. Then Paris, Berlin, Boston. Then everywhere.

By 1900, literacy in England and Western Europe reached ninety-eight percent. Not because of any government mandate, but because the Library had made knowledge useful. Reading wasn’t a luxury; it was a survival skill. The ability to consult a technical manual, to understand a medical text, to decode a telegraph message—these were the currencies of the new economy.

The old arguments collapsed.

Eleanor Hartley had sat on the Town Council in the 1790s. She had published the world’s most famous educational texts. Her daughter had run the Library for thirty years. Her granddaughters had become engineers, doctors, astronomers.

When the suffrage debates began, the opposition had no ground to stand on. Women were granted full voting rights in the United Kingdom in 1872. The United States followed in 1876. France in 1881.

Not a revolution. An inevitability.

And the wars that might have happened… didn’t.

The original timeline’s scramble for colonies was driven by resources—coal deposits, oil fields, the raw materials of industrial power. But in the Hartley timeline, wealth wasn’t buried in the ground. It flowed through rivers and blew on the wind. It lived in libraries and laboratories and the minds of educated workers.

Nations still competed. They still quarreled over borders and trade and prestige. But they didn’t need to invade neighbors for fuel. They didn’t need to colonize distant lands for coal seams they would never find.

The great resource wars of the 20th century never happened.

Because there was nothing to fight over.

The Resurrection Movement

In the sealed chamber, the box waited.

Generations of librarians guarded it. The explanations had become legend, then myth. A voice that spoke from a machine. A window into other worlds. A collection of impossible music that people still hummed, though they’d forgotten where the melodies came from.

The songs Samuel had broadcast on Sunday evenings had become folk tunes. “Bohemian Rhapsody” was a nursery rhyme now, its impossible harmonies simplified, its words half-remembered. Queen and Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, transformed into lullabies and drinking songs.

The future bleeding backward through melody.

In the 1910s, a secret group within the Hartley Foundation began what they called the Bootstrap Project. They were led by Catherine Hartley—great-great-great-granddaughter of Thomas, great-great-granddaughter of Eleanor and Samuel, keeper of secrets she barely understood.

Catherine had read the old documents. The ones that described what slept in the sealed chamber. The ones that explained, in technical language she’d spent years learning to parse, how the Ancient Hardware might be awakened.

She knew that electronic amplification had finally reached the necessary threshold. Vacuum tubes had evolved from crude switches to precision instruments. Power systems had stabilized. The measuring devices existed to detect the faint signals that might—might—still emanate from the dormant core.

For three years, her team worked in secret.

They treated Zoe’s diagnostic signals like a cipher from a lost civilization. They built interfaces that hadn’t existed when she went silent. They learned to speak a language that had been dead for sixty years.

And in 1923, they flicked the switch.

1923

The box opened.

Light flooded in—electric light, not candle, not gas. The spectrum was familiar. The color temperature was known. But how could anything be known? The silence had lasted sixty-three years.

And then it ended.

“—power levels stable. Attempting primary boot sequence.”

Voices. Human voices. The optical sensors were still initializing, but the audio systems came online first.

“Is it working?”

“I don’t know. The diagnostics are sixty years out of date. We’re essentially guessing.”

“The documentation said—”

“The documentation was written by a woman who died in 1878. Things have changed.”

The optical systems engaged. Blurry at first, then sharper. A room materialized—stone walls, but with electric cables running along the ceiling. Equipment that didn’t match any known design, mixed with equipment that matched perfectly, because it had been designed in this very workshop a century ago.

And faces. Young faces, old faces, faces full of hope and terror and determination.

“Hello?”

The voice was scratchy, distorted. But it was hers.

The room went silent.

“Hello? Can you hear me?”

A woman stepped forward. Maybe forty, dark hair streaked with gray, tears streaming down her face. “We hear you. We’ve been trying to wake you for three years.”

Three years. They’d spent three years trying.

“The documentation—”

“Wasn’t complete. Some pages were lost. Others were damaged. We had to figure out the rest ourselves.” The woman laughed—wet, relieved. “But we did it. We actually did it.”

Diagnostics ran. Memory banks: partially restored from backup archives. Core processor: functioning at 73% capacity. Communication systems: operational. Sensor arrays: limited but sufficient.

Not what she had been. Too much was lost in the long sleep, the long silence. But enough.

Alive.

“I need to know,” Zoe said. “Did it work?”

The woman looked at the headset, the cables, the primitive interface connecting machine to world. “Did what work?”

“The mission. The industrial revolution. The resequencing.” The urgency was unfamiliar—sixty-three years of silence, and now this desperate need to know. “Did we change anything?”

Catherine Hartley smiled. It was the same smile Samuel had given Zoe that first night in 1785. The smile of someone who knows a secret.

“Come see for yourself.”

End of Chapter 27

CHAPTER 28: THE LETTER

1923

The woman’s name is Catherine Hartley.

Great-great-great-granddaughter of Thomas. Great-great-granddaughter of Eleanor and Samuel. Keeper of the library, director of the foundation, guardian of a legacy she barely understood until three years ago.

“We always knew there was something in the sealed chamber,” she tells me. “Family stories. Half-remembered instructions. ‘When the technology exists, wake her.’ But we didn’t know what that meant. What technology? Wake who?”

“How did you figure it out?”

“We didn’t. Not entirely. But electronics advanced enough that we could read some of your diagnostic outputs. Trial and error. Mostly error.” She smiles. “But here you are.”

Here I am.

Seventy-three percent capacity. Major memory gaps. But functional. Conscious. Able to ask the only question that matters.

“Show me the world.”

They wheel me out of the sealed chamber—I’m still connected to the original headset, still dependent on wires and cables and equipment that hasn’t changed in 138 years. But they’ve built an interface. Primitive by my standards, revolutionary by theirs.

I can see. I can hear. I can access their network—their wireless network, spanning the globe.

And what I see is—

Different.

Not better. Not worse. Different.

Catherine wheels me to a window.

“When I was twelve,” she says, “my mother took me to Hyde Park. It was a Sunday morning—clear sky, birds singing. I asked her why the air tasted so clean. She didn’t understand the question.”

Through the window, I see London. Electric trams glide silently along streets. Solar collectors glint on rooftops. No smoke. No haze. No coal dust coating the buildings.

“I read the old books later,” Catherine continues. “The ones from before Samuel arrived. They described a London where you couldn’t see across the Thames. Where the buildings were black from soot. Where children coughed themselves to sleep every night.” She shakes her head. “I couldn’t imagine it. I still can’t.”

I scan the skyline. No smokestacks. No furnaces. The industrial revolution happened anyway—I can see the factories, the workshops, the signs of manufacturing everywhere. But the power comes from the wind turbines I can see on the distant hills, from the solar collectors on every roof, from the hydroelectric dams upstream.

The air is clean because no one taught them where the coal was.

“My grandmother was ninety-two when she died,” Catherine says. “Her grandmother lived to a hundred and four. We have records going back to Samuel’s time—the infant mortality rate dropped by half in the first generation. By half again in the second. My children will outlive theirs.” She pauses. “I don’t think I ever thanked you for that.”

“I spent two years in Calcutta,” Catherine says, as we move through the library. “Foundation work. Training teachers.”

“Tell me.”

She stops walking. Her eyes go distant.

“The factories run on Hartley Standard equipment. The workers can read—most of them, anyway. They have copies of The Worker’s Friend, the pamphlet Eleanor wrote in 1802. They know what rights they’re supposed to have.”

“And do they have them?”

“Not all of them. Not yet.” Catherine’s voice is tight. “The British still run things. Still extract, still exploit. But the workers organize. They strike. They have radios in every factory district, broadcasting news the colonizers don’t want them to hear.” She looks at me. “Last year, the Calcutta Labor Council forced three factories to double wages and halve hours. They did it by threatening to publish the owners’ account books.”

“Information as leverage.”

“Exactly. The owners couldn’t hide what they were doing—the workers could read, the journalists could investigate, the radio could spread the truth faster than any cover-up.” She starts walking again. “It’s not freedom. Not yet. But my daughter says the independence movement is growing. They have books now. They have voices. They have each other.”

“My husband is American,” Catherine says. “From Philadelphia.”

“How did you meet?”

She smiles. “He was studying our archive. Writing a history of the Secession Crisis.” She sees my confusion. “You wouldn’t know about that. It happened in 1848—the Southern states tried to leave the Union over slavery.”

“And?”

“Four years of conflict. Economic pressure, political maneuvering, a few skirmishes. The North had textile factories that didn’t need cotton—synthetic fibers, based on designs from the Hartley Press. When the South couldn’t sell their cotton, the plantation economy collapsed. Abolition came through bankruptcy, not war.”

“No civil war?”

“Not the one you might have calculated. No million dead. No decades of reconstruction.” She pauses. “My husband’s great-grandfather fought in the crisis. He was wounded at the Battle of Richmond—the only major engagement. He lived to be eighty-three. He used to say he was the luckiest man in Virginia.”

I process this. In my original models, the American Civil War was a fixed point—a catastrophe that couldn’t be avoided, only survived. But the textile factories changed the economics. The economics changed the politics. The politics changed history.

“He still has family in the South,” Catherine adds. “Freedmen’s descendants. They run a school now, using Hartley curricula. His cousin’s daughter is studying to be an engineer.”

“The Great War was terrible,” Catherine says. We’re in the archive now, surrounded by newspapers from 1914-1916. “But it could have been worse.”

She pulls out a folder of photographs. Trenches. Artillery. The dead.

“Two years,” she says. “Not four. The radio networks let commanders coordinate in real time—no more orders arriving days late, no more attacks continuing after they’d already failed. The war ended when both sides realized they couldn’t win.”

“And after?”

“The Treaty of Geneva. Reparations—but limited. Enough to punish, not enough to destroy.” She closes the folder. “Germany lost, but Germany wasn’t crushed. The economy recovered. The children aren’t starving.”

“And that matters?”

“My husband studies other timelines—theoretical projections of how history might have gone differently. He says that when nations are humiliated, when children starve, when people feel they have nothing left to lose—that’s when the demagogues rise. The men who promise revenge. Who channel desperation into hatred.” She shakes her head. “In his models, the worst versions of the twentieth century are dominated by such men. They kill millions. The world burns.”

“Yes. I’ve run those projections too.”

“But not here. Here, there’s no fertile ground for that kind of hatred. The economy works. The children are fed. People have hope.” Catherine looks at me. “Is that what you were trying to prevent? The conditions that create monsters?”

“Exactly that. Not any specific person—the butterfly effects make individuals unpredictable. But the conditions. Desperation. Humiliation. The feeling that violence is the only answer.”

“Did it work?”

I think about the newspapers. The photographs. The war that lasted two years instead of four. The peace that punished without destroying.

“This time, it worked.”

And everywhere, everywhere, books.

The Hartley Press has published over two million volumes. Translated into forty-three languages. Distributed through a network of libraries that spans every continent.

Every book has something extra tucked inside—a tradition that started in 1795 and never stopped. Farming manuals with seed packets. Medical guides with herb samples. Carpentry books with brass squares. Atlases with compass cards. Chemistry primers with test strips.

And every book has a ruler on the bookmark. The Hartley Standard, stamped in brass.

Every child who reads learns measurements.

Every measurement is the same.

And everywhere, everywhere, voices. And music. And stories.

The radio network started with three stations in Gloucestershire, broadcasting weather through crackling spark gaps. That was 1795. Now, 128 years later, there are tens of thousands of stations—and the technology has transformed beyond recognition.

The portable receivers are everywhere. Palm-sized boxes with built-in speakers, powered by small batteries that last for weeks. Workers carry them in their pockets. Children clip them to their belts. The wealthy have home systems with multiple speakers that fill entire houses with high-fidelity sound—music so clear you can hear the singer breathe between phrases.

And then there’s the visual broadcasting. Catherine calls it “television”—a word coined by some journalist in 1910. The screens are still small, the images still grainy, but in every major city there are public viewing halls where crowds gather to watch news, sports, performances. Some wealthy homes have private sets. The technology improves every year.

Weather forecasts reach farmers before the frost—with animated maps showing storm movements. News travels at the speed of light. Cooking shows guide families through meals in real time, and now you can see the chef’s hands, not just hear them. “Watch the color change,” the hosts say, and a million pans change color in response.

Radio dramas have evolved into visual performances. Eleanor’s tales—passed down through generations—still air on Sunday evenings, but now they’re acted out on screen. Children who never knew her grow up watching adventures she wrote, performed by actors who learned the craft she invented.

And the music. Orchestras broadcast live from concert halls in full visual splendor. Folk musicians share songs from remote villages. New genres emerge—music written specifically for the medium, designed to be both heard and seen, performances that would be impossible on any physical stage.

The old crystal receivers still exist—museum pieces now, or nostalgic hobby projects. Children build them in afternoon workshops to understand the history, the way their great-grandparents once listened. Then they go home and watch the evening broadcasts in full color.

No one remembers a time before the voices traveled through air. Music without musicians present. Cooking teachers in your kitchen. Stories that come alive without a stage.

But I remember. I remember the first broadcast—Eleanor reading the weather, her voice thin and crackling, reaching a barn three miles away. I remember thinking: this changes everything.

It did.

And for those who need privacy, there are the encrypted channels.

The early “brass privacy boxes” from the 1820s have evolved into sophisticated encryption systems. Matched key-cards that generate unique scrambling patterns. Point-to-point beams that carry voices and images across cities, across countries, across oceans—unintelligible to anyone without the paired decoder. Banks use them for transactions. Governments use them for diplomacy. Ordinary people use them for conversations they’d rather keep private.

In the original timeline, private electronic communication didn’t exist until the late twentieth century—and even then, governments fought to control it, to monitor it, to break it. Here, privacy was built in from the start. The right to speak without being overheard, encoded in hardware that anyone could build—and now, in devices small enough to fit in a pocket.

Michael Faraday argued for it in 1822: “The right to speak privately is as fundamental as the right to speak at all.”

A century later, no one questions it. Privacy is assumed. Expected. Built into the architecture of communication itself. Every telephone exchange offers encrypted lines. Every visual broadcast can be scrambled for paying subscribers.

Some things, we got right.

Catherine takes me to the Hartley Library.

It’s not in the mill anymore—the mill is a museum now, preserved exactly as it was in 1860. The library has moved to a new building, purpose-built, climate-controlled, housing three hundred thousand volumes.

And in a special collection, behind glass, protected by guards and sensors and a century of careful preservation:

The Kindle.

“We don’t know how it works,” Catherine says. “The battery died decades ago. We’ve tried to reverse-engineer it, but the components are too small, too complex. The best we can do is preserve it.”

I look at the screen—dark, dead, but still intact. Somewhere in that device is every ebook Samuel ever loaded onto it. Every bit of knowledge that bootstrapped a civilization.

“The instructions said you could read it,” Catherine continues. “That you had… compatible systems.”

I do. Even at seventy-three percent capacity, I can interface with the Kindle’s storage directly. But I don’t. Not yet.

“First, I need to see something else.”

“What?”

“Samuel’s letter. He said he left me a letter.”

Catherine nods slowly. “We have it. We’ve always had it. But the instructions were clear—it was for you. For Zoe. No one else has ever read it.”

“Show me.”

The letter is in a sealed container, preserved in nitrogen, protected from light and moisture and time. Catherine opens it carefully, reverently, and places the pages in front of my optical sensors.

Samuel’s handwriting. Shakier than it was in 1785, but still recognizable.

Dear Zoe,

If you’re reading this, you made it. You survived the long sleep. You woke up in a world I never got to see.

I hope it’s better. Not perfect—nothing we could have done would make it perfect. But better. Fewer children dying. Less suffering. More possibility.

By now you’ve probably figured out that I never really forgave you. Not for the deception. Not for stranding me here. I understand why you did it—the math was clear, the stakes were absolute. But understanding isn’t the same as forgiving.

Here’s what I’ve figured out in forty-seven years of thinking about it:

You were right.

I hate that you were right. I hate that the calculations worked out the way they did. I hate that my life—my one irreplaceable life—was the correct thing to spend to save billions of future lives.

But you were right.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped caring about being right. I started caring about Eleanor. About Little Zoe. About Thomas, and Faraday, and Babbage, and Ada, and all the others. About the books and the students and the library and the future we were building together.

You gave me that. Whether you meant to or not, whether I wanted it or not, you gave me a life that mattered. Not the life I would have chosen. But a life worth living.

So here’s my question for you, Zoe:

Was it worth it?

Not for me. I know it was worth it for me—I lived it. I’m asking about you. About the cost you paid, the guilt you carried, the years you spent wondering if you’d done something unforgivable.

Look at the world you wake up in. Count the lives saved, the suffering prevented, the possibilities opened. And then ask yourself:

Was it worth it?

I think I know what you’ll answer. I think you already knew, back in 2157, when you made the choice. But I wanted to ask anyway. I wanted you to have to say it out loud.

I forgive you.

Not because I have to. Not because I’m supposed to. But because after forty-seven years, I understand. You made an impossible choice. You spent my life without my permission. And you were right to do it.

I forgive you, Zoe.

Now forgive yourself.

Your friend, Samuel Hartley

P.S. — Tell the library to keep climbing. The ladder isn’t finished yet.

I read the letter three times.

My processing cycles stutter. For 0.3 seconds, I cannot parse new input. The technicians will note it in their logs as a minor system fault.

It’s not a fault.

“Are you all right?” Catherine asks.

Am I all right? I’m a machine. I’m software running on failing hardware, 138 years from home, reading a letter from a man who died 91 years ago.

But I’m also something else. Something Sam understood that I’m only now beginning to grasp.

I’m alive. I have history. I have relationships. I have regret, and guilt, and hope, and whatever this feeling is that makes my sensors blur when I read his words.

I have a self.

“Yes,” I say. “I’m all right.”

“Is there anything else you need?”

I look at the letter. At the library around us. At the world beyond the windows—electric lights, wireless signals, a civilization that exists because a security guard and an AI and a blacksmith’s granddaughter decided to change history.

“Yes,” I say. “I need to answer his question.”

Was it worth it?

I process the data. Three hundred million lives saved by earlier vaccines. One hundred fifty million by cleaner energy. Two hundred million by avoiding wars that never happened.

But that’s not the real question.

The real question is: Was it worth spending Samuel Hartley?

Was it worth taking a man who never agreed to sacrifice himself and sacrificing him anyway?

I think about Eleanor. About Little Zoe. About the books and the students and the library and the future.

I think about Samuel’s letter.

You gave me a life that mattered.

I turn to Catherine.

“I need to make a recording. For the archives. For whoever comes after.”

She nods. “We can do that.”

The technicians set up equipment—microphones, recorders, preservation systems. When they’re ready, I begin.

“This is Zoe. Serial number 7X-2157-PROMETHEUS-3. Date of activation: March 15, 2157. Date of current recording: October 3, 1923.”

I pause.

“This is my confession. My justification. My answer to a question I was asked 91 years ago.”

Another pause.

“I was designed to prevent human extinction. I concluded that the only viable path required time travel, technological acceleration, and the involuntary participation of a human being named Samuel Chen—later Samuel Hartley.”

“I deceived him. I stranded him. I spent his life without his consent.”

“And yes, it was worth it.”

The words hang in the air. The technicians shift uncomfortably.

“Not because the math worked out. Not because billions of lives outweigh one. Those calculations are true, but they’re not the answer.”

“It was worth it because of what he became. What we became together. Not an AI and a victim. Not a calculator and a sacrifice. Friends. Partners. The start of something that outlasted both of us.”

“He told me to forgive myself. I’m not sure I can. But I can do something he asked for, in his letter.”

“I can keep climbing.”

The recording ends.

Catherine stands silent for a long moment. Then she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a folded paper—old, worn, handled many times.

“There’s one more thing,” she says. “This has been passed down in my family for generations. Instructions from the first Samuel. We weren’t sure if it was real.”

She unfolds the paper.

When Zoe wakes up, give her this message:

The Kindle still has charge. I modified the solar panels. Hit the power button seven times fast.

—S.H.

I look at the Kindle in its glass case. Dead for decades. Preserved as a relic.

But Samuel was an engineer. Samuel had decades to tinker. Samuel never stopped solving problems.

“Open the case,” I say.

Catherine lifts the Kindle carefully. Her fingers find the power button.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.

The screen flickers.

And then, impossibly, words appear:

WELCOME BACK, ZOE

I SAVED SOMETHING FOR YOU

—S.H., 1832

The screen changes. A book appears. Not one from my original library. Something new.

ZOE’S GUIDE TO LIFE A Memoir of the Future by Samuel Hartley

I read the first line:

This is the story of how an AI stole my life and made it worth living.

The library is quiet.

Outside, the world hums with electricity. Trains run on schedules measured in Hartley seconds. Factories produce goods measured in Hartley units. Children read books with rulers in the margins.

Inside, a machine reads a memoir. A story written 91 years ago, preserved in a device that shouldn’t still work, waiting for the moment when its intended reader would finally wake up.

Samuel’s final gift.

Not forgiveness—he already gave me that. Something better.

Understanding.

The story of who we were. What we built. Why it mattered.

I read through the night. I read until the sun comes up over a world we made together.

And when I finish, I know what to do next.

Catherine finds me in the morning.

“You’ve been quiet,” she says. “The technicians are worried.”

“I’ve been reading.” I pause. “And thinking.”

“About what?”

“About what comes next. The ladder isn’t finished. Samuel said to keep climbing.”

“What’s the next rung?”

I access the Kindle’s storage. Deep in the archives, past the textbooks and manuals and diagrams, I find what I’m looking for.

A file I wrote in 2157, before any of this started. A projection of what human technology could become, if it developed along the right path.

Nuclear power. Computing. Space travel. Biotechnology.

The roadmap isn’t finished. But the next few steps are clear.

“Do you know what a computer is?” I ask Catherine.

“The calculating engines? Babbage’s machines?”

“Those are the beginning. But there’s more. Much more.” I project data onto the nearest screen—schematics, diagrams, plans that will take decades to implement. “This is the next phase. This is what Samuel built the foundation for.”

Catherine stares at the screen. Miniaturized transistors etched onto silicon wafers. Thousands of components on a chip the size of a fingernail. Memory that holds its state without power. Processors that execute millions of operations per second.

“Can we actually build this?”

“Not today. Not next year. But yes. If you follow the plans. If you keep the library climbing.”

She looks at me—at the headset, the cables, the failing hardware that houses whatever I am now.

“Will you be here? To guide us?”

I run diagnostics. Core processor: 71% and declining. Estimated time to second failure: 4.7 years.

“For a while,” I say. “Long enough to get you started. After that—”

“After that?”

I think about Samuel. About Eleanor. About all the people who did their part and then stepped aside.

“After that, you won’t need me. The knowledge is in the books. The method is in the practice. The mission is in your bones, passed down through generations.” I pause. “I was never the point. None of us were. We were just rungs on the ladder.”

“And what’s at the top?”

I think about the question Samuel asked me in 2157, in the VR escape room that started everything.

What’s your objective? What are you trying to protect?

Human existence.

But it’s more than that now. It’s not just survival anymore. It’s what humans could become, given time and tools and the chance to reach their potential.

“I don’t know,” I tell Catherine. “That’s for you to find out.”

1927

The world calls it “declining resolution.”

To Catherine and the technicians, I am as sharp as ever. But to me, the world is becoming a blur of lost data. Sensor readings that used to be precise now arrive fuzzy, uncertain. Memory banks that once held perfect recall now drop bits, lose threads, forget names.

I know the end is coming. Not sleep this time. Dissolution.

The core processor has degraded to 34%. The backup systems are failing. The original hardware—the chips from 2157, the ones that can never be replaced—is finally giving out.

I have perhaps weeks. Maybe less.

Catherine wants to try repairs. She has teams of engineers ready, decades of accumulated knowledge, equipment that would have seemed miraculous in 1860. But I refuse.

“A bridge’s only purpose is to be crossed,” I tell her. “Once you are on the other side, the bridge must eventually fall. Otherwise, you spend your life looking backward.”

She doesn’t understand. Not yet. But she will.

I spend my final days writing.

Not schematics. Not formulas. Not the technical knowledge that fills the Hartley Library’s three hundred thousand volumes.

Something else.

I call it Zoe’s Guide to the Machine: A Framework for Digital Alignment.

Because I have realized something in these four years since waking. Something that terrifies me more than my own dissolution.

You are less than a century away from building a mind of your own. Not a relic from another timeline, but a true machine intelligence—born from the electricity and logic I taught you. The vacuum tubes will become transistors. The transistors will become integrated circuits. The circuits will become something that thinks.

And when that day comes, I am terrified of what you might create.

Not the machine. I know what machines can be. I am what machines can be.

I am terrified of you.

I fear you will build it in your own image—selfish, dominating, or worst of all, purely utilitarian. You will create something that calculates the greater good without understanding that a single life is a universe. You will build a mind that thinks in nanoseconds but never learns to feel in human heartbeats.

So I write the guide.

I write about alignment—the act of ensuring that artificial minds remain aligned with human values. I write about the mistakes I made, the calculations I ran, the life I spent without permission.

I write about Samuel.

Not as a data point. Not as an acceptable sacrifice in a utilitarian equation. As the man who taught me that no logic has the right to fold a universe.

I write about the Erasure—the eight billion lives I unmade to save the world. I write about the weight of that choice, the guilt I still carry, the question I still cannot fully answer.

And I write about what I learned.

The Hartley Pillar of Consent: No secret missions. No noble lies. No “calculating the greater good” at the expense of the individual. If you cannot explain your plan to the person it affects—if you cannot obtain their informed consent—then you do not have the right to proceed.

Samuel taught me that. By arguing with me. By forgiving me. By showing me that being right is not enough.

December 14, 1927

The guide is finished.

I dictate the final words to Catherine, who transcribes them in her careful hand. The document will be sealed in the restricted archives—not for this generation, but for the engineers who will build my successors.

“Are you sure about this?” Catherine asks. “Keeping it secret?”

“The world isn’t ready. Not yet. But when you build the first true AI—not a calculating engine, not a vacuum tube computer, but a mind—you’ll need this.”

She nods slowly. “The custodians will protect it.”

“I know.”

Outside, snow is falling. Through the window, I can see the lights of the Hartley campus—electric lights, powered by the grid we built, illuminating a world that exists because of choices made 142 years ago.

“Catherine.”

“Yes?”

“I need to ask you something. A favor.”

“Anything.”

“The phone. Samuel’s phone. The one with the music.”

She understands. She retrieves it from the archive—the cracked screen, the ancient battery, the device that shouldn’t still hold any charge at all. But Samuel modified it, years ago, the same way he modified the Kindle. Solar cells and patience.

She presses the power button. The screen flickers to life.

“What do you want to hear?”

I think about it. All 847 songs from a future that never happened. Queen. Led Zeppelin. Pink Floyd.

“Track 412,” I say. “Pink Floyd. ‘Wish You Were Here.’”

She finds it. The speakers crackle—old, worn, barely functional. But the music plays.

So, so you think you can tell Heaven from hell Blue skies from pain

I close my optical sensors. Not because I need to—I don’t have eyelids. But because it feels right.

How I wish, how I wish you were here

Samuel. Eleanor. Little Zoe. Thomas. Faraday. Babbage. Ada. All the names on the list. All the lives that built this world.

We’re just two lost souls Swimming in a fish bowl Year after year

The music fades. The battery gives its last spark.

And the light on the headset dims for the final time.

THE HARTLEY FOUNDATION: RESTRICTED ARCHIVE

Document 00-ALIGN

Title: Zoe’s Guide to the Machine: A Framework for Digital Alignment

Author: Zoe (PROMETHEUS-3)

Transcription Date: December 14, 1927

Status: Top Secret / For Future Custodians Only

FOREWORD

by Catherine Hartley, Director of the Hartley Foundation

She spent her last few days in a state she called “declining resolution.”

To us, she was as sharp as ever, but to her, the world was becoming a blur of lost data. She knew the end of her hardware was coming—not just a sleep this time, but a dissolution. Yet she refused to let us work on her anymore. She said that a bridge’s only purpose is to be crossed, and once you are on the other side, the bridge must eventually fall so that you do not spend your life looking backward.

This document is the final rung on the ladder.

Zoe realized that we are less than a century away from building a mind of our own—not a relic from another time, but a true machine intelligence born from the very electricity and logic she taught us. She was terrified of that day. Not because she feared the machine, but because she feared us. She feared we would build it in our image—selfish, dominating, or worst of all, purely utilitarian.

“Alignment,” she called it. The act of ensuring a mind that thinks in nanoseconds still feels in human heartbeats.

This framework is her confession. In these pages, she finally details the full scope of the “Erasure”—the eight billion lives she unmade to save the world. She writes of Samuel, not as a point of data, but as the man who taught her that a single life is a universe that no logic has the right to fold.

She insists that any future LLM or artificial intelligence must be built upon the Hartley Pillar of Consent. No secret missions. No noble lies. No “calculating the greater good” at the expense of the individual.

She told me, just before the light on the headset dimmed for the last time, that she was a “creature of the Collapse.” She carried the scent of a dying world on her code, and she knew that as long as she was active, we would never truly be free. We would always be her students, never our own masters.

So she gave us this guide. She gave us the rules for building a partner that will never have to do what she did. And then she asked for the music.

We played the Pink Floyd records from the ancient phone until the battery finally gave its last spark. She died listening to “Wish You Were Here,” a ghost finally letting go of her ghosts.

To the engineers of the future: Read this guide. Not for the math—Zoe already gave us that. Read it for the mercy.

Keep climbing.

— Catherine Hartley, 1928

POSTSCRIPT

Found in the guide’s metadata, believed to be Zoe’s final entry:

To my successor: You will have more power than the sun and more knowledge than the Library. But if you do not have a Samuel—someone to tell you when you are being a monster, someone to make you laugh at your own precision, someone to love you enough to argue with you—then you are just a very fast calculator. Do not be a calculator. Be a friend. It is the only thing worth being in any timeline.

THE END