It cuts away to an older woman with white hair and paper-thin wrinkled skin. “Adam O’Neill saved my life. I had stage four cancer and only had months to live when his treatment became available.” She dips her head for a moment and comes up with tears in her eyes. “And I’ve been cancer-free for eighteen years.”

“Adam O’Neill is celebrated as a hero worldwide,” the announcer says. “His discoveries have changed the face of modern medicine. But who is he really?”

The music darkens, and the screen switches to Adam staring off into space, his expression haunted. Another clip shows him rushing away from the press and into his car. “How much do we really know about this billionaire hero?”

A man in a suit speaks to the camera. “Adam O’Neill has never been married. He has no close friends or family. He’s almost never seen in public. What is he hiding?”

“His experiments have grown…erratic,” says a woman in a lab coat with an upturned nose. Underneath her name, it says she works for some company called Pharmateka, which I’ve never heard of. “There are rumors he’s an alcoholic.”

The video switches back to an image of an older Adam, sitting at a desk with his head in his hands. “With rumors of an alcohol problem and a dark secret in his past, the world is beginning to wonder if Adam O’Neill is an eccentric hero…or a mad scientist. It’s all revealed on the next Celebrity Profiles.”

The video vanishes, and for a second all I can do is blink as my focus returns to the room around me. “You…cured cancer?” I ask. “And won a Nobel Prize?”

Adam slowly nods. “It seems I did.”

“Great,” Trent mutters. “We’re dead and this guy becomes a freaking billionaire.”

Chris crosses his arms, glaring at Adam. “And he works for Aether Corporation in the future.”

“Future-Adam is a hero,” Zoe says. “I can’t believe he’d have anything to do with our deaths.”

Trent shrugs. “I don’t know…They said he had a dark secret.”

Zoe rolls her eyes. “Those shows always say that kind of stuff.”

“He might be a hero then, but that doesn’t mean he is now,” Chris says.

“But if Future-Adams works for Aether, why wasn’t anyone at the research facility?” Trent asks.

“Maybe…” Adam sucks in a breath. “Maybe we should talk to my future self.”

“No way,” says Trent. “I’m not causing a temporal paradox or whatever that was called.”

Adam adjusts his glasses, his lips pressed into a thin line. “Aether said we’d suffer brain damage if we learned about our futures and that hasn’t happened. Maybe the paradox thing was a lie too.”

“I don’t know,” Chris says. “Looking into your future is one thing…actually meeting yourself is another.”