“Are you working for Aether now?” I ask him, taking a step forward.
“What? No.” Adam looks shocked. “I was recruited by Aether for this research project just like you guys were. That’s it. I don’t know anything else.”
Chris grabs the front of Adam’s shirt and drags him close. “You’re working for them, aren’t you? Double-crossing us!”
“I’m not! I’m not working for Aether. I swear it!”
I don’t know what to do, whether I should interfere or not. Until now I’ve always stuck up for Adam, but now I have my doubts too. And I can’t ignore the fact that he isn’t like the rest of us. He wasn’t recruited out of foster care. We still don’t know why he’s really here.
A librarian approaches us. “Please keep your voices down.” She looks back and forth between Chris and Adam, eyebrows raised. Chris lets go of Adam’s shirt, and they both take a step back. The librarian eyes them for one tense moment and then leaves.
“Just wait,” Adam says to us, and then he looks like he’s squinting. “Maybe if I show you this—”
A video blares to life inside my head and I jump. It sits in a corner of my vision, a little box over the world I can see.
“What the hell is this?” Chris asks.
“Just watch.”
There’s an image of Adam, but an older version of him, maybe in his forties. He’s standing at a podium giving a speech, while an announcer talks. “On next week’s episode of Celebrity Profiles: Adam O’Neill. Billionaire genius…or mad scientist?”
A logo for the show flashes on the screen with the subtitle underneath. The video then shows a clip of Adam in a lab coat, looking a few years older than he does now and grinning at the camera.
“Adam O’Neill changed the world when he developed the cure for cancer at the young age of twenty-eight,” the announcer continues.
I want to pause the video and ask if this is real, but it keeps switching clips—to Adam accepting an award, to images of him in hospitals standing next to people with bald heads, to shots of him shaking hands with government leaders. Everyone is smiling, crying, and hugging. No wonder the girl at Smartgear looked at him with such awe—Adam is a freaking saint.
“Once the drug became available to the public, Adam O’Neill’s cure quickly decreased the rate of cancer deaths to two percent worldwide. It was hailed as a miracle, as a gift from God, and he became one of the youngest people to win a Nobel Prize for this ground-breaking discovery. And as head of the new pharmaceutical division of Aether Corporation, Dr. O’Neill later went on to develop other drugs and technologies to combat Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.”
The video switches to some other scientist with a thick beard. “Adam O’Neill is without a doubt the most influential scientist of the last fifty years.”
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.”