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“Are you working for Aether now?” I ask hi 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 Ada for the us!”
“I’ for Aether I swear it!”
I don’t knohat to do, whether I should interfere or not Until now I’ve always stuck up for Adanore the fact that he isn’t like the rest of us He wasn’t recruited out of foster care We still don’t knohy he’s really here
A librarian approaches us “Please keep your voices down” She looks back and forth between Chris and Adao of Adam’s shirt, and they both take a step back The librarian eyes them for one tense moment and then leaves
“Just wait,” Ada “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 ie of Adam, but an older version of hi a speech, while an announcer talks “On next week’s episode of Celebrity Profiles: Adao for the show flashes on the screen with the subtitle underneath The video then shows a clip of Ada a few years older than he does now and grinning at the caed 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 Ada next to people with bald heads, to shots of hi, crying, and hugging No wonder the girl at S saint
“Once the drug became available to the public, Adam O’Neill’s cure quickly decreased the rate of cancer deaths to two percent ide It was hailed as a est 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 hite hair and paper-thin wrinkled skin “Adae 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 ide,” the announcer says “His discoveries have changed the face of modern medicine But who is he really?”
Theoff into space, his expression haunted Another clip shows hi 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 fa?”
“His experirown…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 rue of an older Ada at a desk with his head in his hands “With rumors of an alcohol proble to wonder if Adam O’Neill is an eccentric hero…or a mad scientist It’s all revealed on the next Celebrity Profiles”