Chapter 2

It wasn't much after dawn the next day, but no one felt incredibly tired. Besides, after spending an important part of their lives having to get up in a hurry, almost everyone in the Shephard living room was used to early hours.

"All right," Jack said slowly. "Two things going forward. First, I'm leading the meeting, but that doesn't mean I'm back in charge. This may be an island related crisis, but as we all know, I was never that good in those scenarios then and I'm not sure I am now. There are people in this room who were far more qualified then and honestly still are. "

"Second, this is an open meeting. We're sharing information and any ideas we have. There are no bad ones. No matter how far-fetched."

"To get everybody up to speed, yesterday morning Isobel Stevens was interrogated and then assaulted by a man who called himself Matthew Abaddon. Everybody knows the guts of what he said and what he implied. I'm sure a lot of us, myself especially, hoped that he was just bluffing about what he knew. Unfortunately, that's not the case." Jack turned to Locke. "John?"

"As I mentioned when I came back from the island, I told all of you of an encounter I had with an orderly after a physical therapy session." Locke reminded them. "He said that I was a remarkable man, that what happened to me was a miracle, and what I needed was a walkabout. He never identified himself to me, and until now I had assumed he was another representative of the island." He took out the copy of the footage Jack had shared with them. "That man identified himself to Dr. Stevens as Matthew Abaddon. I'm certain of it."

None of this was quite a surprise, but Desmond and Penny, who hadn't heard this part of the story, wanted more details. "Did he tell you anything else?" Desmond asked.

"Understandably, when he suggested the idea I was not inclined to hear him out," Locke told them. "This doesn't mean I don't remember what he told me. He said that he went on a walkabout thinking he was one thing, and came back knowing he was another. Now it's obvious he never went on a walkabout, and was just saying as such in order to put me on the path to get me to Sydney, which in turn would lead me to Oceanic 815. There were a couple of things that stood out though. He used the same line on me that he used on Stevens: 'I get people where they need to be.'"

"You think that's, like, his catchphrase?" Hurley asked. "Or something that the Others use to identify themselves?"

"We didn't have code words," Juliet said, only half in jest. "Sometimes we spoke in Latin. Could mean he's not an Other."

"I never saw him on the island," Locke agreed. "Something else, something that bothers me now. He told me to go on that walkabout, and next time I see you, 'you'll owe me one.'" He looked at Jack. "Maybe this is his twisted way of collecting."

"Much as it was my default to blame this on you, I don't think is your fault," Jack tried to assure John. "Bad news, he knows where you live. He might want some kind of payback."

"Clearly this man calling himself Abaddon is a representative of someone who has interests involving the island," Sayid was taking on the role of soldier. "The question is who does he represent?"

"I might have an idea who he did work for," Penny told them. "When I was going through much of the backlog that my father hid from us, I did some research on the team he sent to the island to extract Ben Linus, and if necessary, kill everybody else. There were three names critical to that enterprise: Martin Keamy headed the mercenaries, Naomi Dorrit was in charge of recruit the crew and other representatives on the boat. Acting as go-between was a man named Matthew Abaddon."

"Well, the first two are dead," Jack said carefully. "What happened to Abaddon?"

"He was still acting as a second-in-command to my father even after you came back to civilization," Penny told them. "But a few days before you and your friends brought my father to justice, Abaddon disappeared without a trace."

"You know what they say about bad pennies," Claire said sadly.

"But your father has been in prison for the last year and a half," Juliet reminded them.

"There any chance he could still be running his enterprises from there?" Sun interjected.

"The thought has crossed my mind more than once," Penny admitted.

Charles Widmore had been convicted of conspiracy, financial malfeasance and corporate espionage a little more than a year. Given the times they lived in, he still would likely have spent less than two years in minimum security if it hadn't been more the testimony of his daughter. She had made it very clear what a ruthless, vindictive and horrible man her father had been to him and the man she loved and that if he were given even a taste of leniency, he would show no remorse or restraint in doing so again.

As a result Widmore went to the British equivalent of a Supermax. He was under twenty-four hour surveillance; he had no phone or computer privileges and was allowed no visitors. This would have assured everybody if they had no knowledge of where Widmore had spent most of his life, how there might still be people on it with loyalty to him, and that some of those people might still be around off the island. He might seem as helpless in prison as he would be on Devil's Island, but they all knew being stranded on an island didn't mean you couldn't have influence.

"Abaddon was able to get out of Seattle Grace without any footage of him," Jack said reluctantly. "That could just mean he made sure he had someone on the inside make sure there was no record of it. But then why leave the record of being there at all?"

"To avoid attracting the wrong sort of attention," James said thoughtfully. "Guy assaults a doctor in a hospital and gets away, just another random attack in this crazy world. Guy assaults a doctor in a hospital and there's no record of him getting out or getting in, there's no way the media doesn't descend on Seattle Grace and a lot of questions that no one wants asked start coming up."

"Really hard to argue with that logic," Kate said, looking in the distance. Jack had a feeling she was thinking of how she'd tried to see her mother and how all her precautions had still ended with her childhood sweetheart getting killed. He put his hand on her shoulder.

"So this guy Abaddon knows about the island. Question is who's he working for?" James seemed to be leaning more towards the leadership role or maybe it was just because, of all the Oceanics, he had the closest relationship with the people he was looking at.

"Your brother-in-law told me that you two have some information about some people who might be looking for the island," he asked Daniel and Charlotte.

Dan looked at his wife. "My wife and I both have a scientific background," he said in his cautious manner. "Which means we know better than to make outlandish hypotheses based on data we haven't analyzed. That being said, the two of us have learned a lot of things that affect the world you and your friends spent three months or more trying to understand. And given what we've learned, it's hard not to see the patterns."

"Um, would the two of you mind, like, dumbing it down a little?" Hurley asked.

"I'll start." Charlotte said. "My field is ancient African cultures, and I have a lot of connections in the field. A week before Dan and I got married I received a series of phone calls from a colleague of mine. She'd been on an archeological dig in the Eastern Sahara Desert when they found something that none of them could explain. I have to admit, if I hadn't met you I probably wouldn't have been able to make sense of it either."

"What was it?" Jin asked.

"In the middle of the desert, nearly ten miles from the nearest oasis, they found a skeleton of an unidentified animal. It took nearly ten days for the biological results to confirm it, and even then no one was able to believe because it had no rational explanation for being there."

"What did they find, a T-Rex?" Hurley asked.

"It would have actually made more sense if there was." Charlotte said. "It was too small for that anyway. No the classification was ursus maritimus."

Jack actually swore under his breath. None of the others knew the scientific name that Charlotte had just used, but they sure as hell knew what an 'ursus' stood for.

Walt, who'd been unusually quiet up until now, put it in to the words. "What was a polar bear doing in the middle of the desert?"

"No one can answer that question. That in itself would've led to an undue amount of publicity for this dig. The part that my friend withheld – and in fact spent a lot of time and lord knows how much money keeping out of the press – was the fact that this bear clearly couldn't have somehow wandered down to the Sahara when the entire land mass was a supercontinent."

Locke was pretty sure what he was going to hear next, but he still wanted Charlotte to confirm it. "And why were they so sure?"

Charlotte reached into her pocket. "Because the bear had a collar around its neck. I don't recognize the iconography around it, but I'm pretty all of us know the organization it belongs to."

She took out a photograph. Everyone – especially Kate and James – were pretty sure what they were going to see before Charlotte put it on the table. After all, they'd been kept in the same cages that had been used, decades earlier, for those same bears.

Jack looked at Juliet. "You ever get any explanation from anyone why the Dharma Initiative was studying polar bears in the first place?" he asked.

"You saw more bears than I did," Juliet told them truthfully. She turned to Dan and Charlotte, who were still playing catch-up. "The icon you're looking is for the Hydra."

"The one that was big enough for its own island but small enough that none of survivors knew it was there until they ended up being prisoners." Even knowing this part of this story, Charlotte was still having trouble being convinced.

"Hey, I didn't believe it until we tried to escape," Kate reminded them. "James told you how our cages 'worked?'"

Dan nodded. "Based on what he and Juliet told me, it sounds like the Dharma Initiative was trying a variation on a Skinner experiment. Perform a function correctly, you receive a reward. You do it incorrectly, you're punished. "

"Still not wild about the fact that it took me longer than a polar bear to figure out how the damn thing worked," James admitted.

"It was Tom. He enjoyed baiting you," Juliet reminded him. "I'm sure it took the bears at least three hours to figure it out."

"According to the films we all saw, the DeGroots were admirers of the work of B.F. Skinner," Locke decided to change the subject. "So I can understand why quite a few of the stations would follow that model. The difference was in at least a couple, they were doing a variation on people."

"Depending on how you look at it, either the Pearl or the Swan could've been one of those experiments," Desmond pointed out.

"This still doesn't answer the fundamental question," Michael said. "If anything, it makes it even more complicated. How did a polar bear get from an island to the Pacific to the middle of the Sahara? Because it sure as hell didn't get there on a submarine."

"There was a warp zone on the island." Hurley said. "You step on it; you end up in the desert." He must have seen how everybody was looking at him, because he said: "Hey, I'm open to suggestions."

"What does it say about our time there that we're actually considering it seriously?" Kate pointed out.

"I keep coming back to that station I was never able to find," Locke said thoughtfully. "The Orchid. The video said they were trying to manipulate time. Richard kept saying there was a way to 'move the island', which even I kept having trouble accepting. But even if you accept that's what the Dharma Initiative was trying to do, that's a long way from a polar bear in the Sahara."

"It's traditional to experiment on animals before humans," Daniel pointed out. "Beyond that I don't think we have to an answer to that particular question." He paused. "We might, however, know more about who's after you."

"What do you have to tell us?" Jack asked.

Dan turned to them. "Ever since I met Desmond, I've been trying to make sense of what happened to him after he turned the fail-safe key in the Swan. Because even after everything that happened, he's still not sure how to explain it."

"My theory at the time, if you could call it that, was that as I did so my life flashed before my eyes and I remembered a period just before everything went wrong." Desmond had already explained that part of it. "It seemed like I was remembering the biggest mistake in my life but with the sensation that I could change things. Daniel suggested that my exposure to the electromagnetism in the Swan may have been concentrated enough that my consciousness from 2004 actually did travel back to that period and my memories were accurate. The problem with either of those theories is that neither explains what Dan's mother was doing there and how she knew what I was going to do. Because the first time it happened, I broke Penny's heart on my own. I didn't need anyone's help." He squeezed his wife's hand in apology.

"Um, this story is already confusing," Jin told them. "I'm not sure how knowing this helps."

"It does when you know when it happened." Desmond said slowly. "Penny and I broke up on May 19, 1996."

"Still not following," Claire said.

"Because you don't have all the information. Neither did any of us until recently." Dan said. "When I graduated from Oxford as the youngest doctorate in history, my mother came to visit me. My memory may be fuzzy on a lot, but I'm certain of the date I broke my hold on her. May 20, 1996."

In the bizarre way their lives seemed to be working, the Oceanics were getting the picture. "In other words, your mother didn't come to England just to visit you." Jack said slowly.

"My mother never did anything without an ulterior motive, and she wasn't the kind of person who would handle one problem if she could solve two." Dan pointed out.

"Well, that explains…nothing," Sun said firmly. "Your mother had connection to the island. We all know that. A lot of people in the island seemed to know a lot about us. But if you're telling me that your mother knew where Desmond was going to be, what he was thinking, and that he had already done it, I'm not buying that at all."

"Well, this isn't going to make things much clearer," Penny told them. "After Dan told us this, I went back to the jewelry store where Desmond encountered Mrs. Hawking the first time…second time." She looked at her brother. "I must confess it's hard to keep up with this."

"Right there with you," Hurley said.

"The store was still there and I asked the owner if he'd always been here. Old Welshman said the place had been in his family for four generations. I told him that's where my husband had bought his engagement ring for me, and if I could thank the woman who sold to him." Penny looked at them. "He told me that no woman had worked at his shop since his grandmother's type. When I told him that it was in May of 1996, he mentioned that around then a woman in her sixties had shown and said that she represented a movie company that wanted to shoot some scenes there. Offered him ten thousand pounds for a week's work. Their only condition was that the family left the place for that time."

"Let me guess, the woman was your mother," James said to Dan.

"She never told him what the movie was. He never objected because the check cleared. And why wouldn't it?" Penny told them. "It was from Widmore Industries."

Juliet looked at Dan. "Is it possible your parents really objected to the idea of Desmond marrying into the family?"

"Considering all the effort they put in to make sure I ended up on that bloody rock for three years, the thought has crossed my mind more than once," Desmond admitted. "It still doesn't answer how his mother knew that I would end up on the island, everything I would do once I got there, and how I ended up back in that sodding ring store in the second place." He looked at Walt. "Sorry about the language."

"I hung out around Sawyer for two weeks; I heard worse," Walt said, shaking his head. "And honestly, we still haven't heard an explanation."

"And we still don't have one." Dan admitted. "Well, we do in a fashion, but certainly not one that makes much sense."

"You have heard some of the stories your in-laws have told you?" Jack asked Daniel. "Not making sense is the baseline of weird in our lives. "

Charlotte looked at Dan. "Don't say you weren't warned," Dan told them. "When Penny's people finished searching the church where James and Sayid saw my mother, they found a lot of ephemera there. They asked me to help go through it the few last months to see if there was anything else that might help explain what she might've been doing there. I wasn't much help. Until we found this."

Now Dan reached into his pocket and removed a leather-bound notebook. It looked like it was at least several years old. He opened it to the first page. "'No matter what Daniel, always remember love you. Mother.' Clearly this was supposed to be given to me. Except I never got it."

"And this is weird, why exactly?" Claire asked.

"You mean aside from the fact my mother was never sentimental?" Dan asked with some bitterness. He began to leave through the pages. "Let's start with the fact that this notebook is filled with equations, maps and random thoughts that is barely comprehensible. Which doesn't make sense, because it's all in my handwriting?"

"So this is a notebook meant for you that you never received but somehow spent years writing in," Jack looked even more puzzled. "What does it say about our lives that I almost followed that?"

"That's the most comprehensible part of the whole thing," Dan said. "Given the fact that I never finished my studies, I can only understand one page out of every five. And that's just the science part of it. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean."

He opened to a page in the middle of the book. It was legible because it was in block print, but it was just as incomprehensible as the equations on the other page. "IF ANYTHING GOES WRONG, DESMOND HUME WILL BE MY CONSTANT."

They all took this in. "Is this your handwriting?" It was the only thing Kate could think to ask.

"I think so," Dan said. "But I don't in regard to what. And that's one of the few statements that are clear cut. Most of the notebook refers to things that I wouldn't have known unless I'd spent years studying them. And the only reason I would've been studying them is if I knew about your island."

He took a deep breath. "John, does this look familiar?"

He opened to another page filled with equations. At the bottom was a circle made up of a spiral. At the end of the line was something that might have been mistaken for a flower.

Locke drew in his breath. "That was the icon on The Orchid orientation video," he said. "Is there any chance that you could be mistaken about who wrote this? Richard told me your mother spent a lot of her life on the island. Could this writing be hers?"

"I considered that possibility," Dan admitted. "But my mother's inscription bares no resemblance to almost anything else in this journal."

James looked back at Desmond and Penny. "You try to have this authenticated or analyzed? I know there's technology for it."

"We had some of the paper and ink analyzed," Penny told them. "And honestly, that raises even more questions. The notebook has a copyright stamp that indicates it was made around 1996 and the ink dates from that far back. But when they tested the paper, it was a lot older."

"How much older?" James asked.

"It's the strongest argument Dan's mother owned it. According to the yellowing of the paper, it's nearly thirty years old." Desmond told them.

"What the hell is going on?" Juliet asked.

"Oh nothing, "Dan said. "Just my mother seems to have been holding for her entire life a gift that she never gave to me but that I somehow spent a lifetime writing in about a place I never went too."

"Does anyone else's brain hurt trying to follow this?" Hurley asked.

Everybody raised their hands – including Dan and Charlotte.

"Is there anything in this notebook that might give us a hint as to what-"Sayid was at a rare loss for word – 'you' were studying?"

"I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to figure out what the hell is in here," Dan admitted. "I really think the only way to even comprehend what some of these equations might mean is to run them past someone who has a greater comprehension of the field. That's actually part of the reason Charlotte and I came here. There are some people in Cal Tech who might be able to make sense all of this."

"They could figure out the equations. I doubt they could make sense of it," Charlotte corrected. "

"May I see it?" Sayid asked. "I have a certain technical background. Maybe there are some things here I might be able to understand."

Dan handed him the notebook. "You sure about that, brutha?" Desmond asked. "This isn't fixing a computer or a camera in a Dharma station."

"As part of my military background, I had to study engineering for four months," Sayid told them. "There might be something I can read into this."

Dan didn't object. "Was there anything in there that wasn't scientific jargon?' Jin asked.

"You mean apart from the fact that this notebook seemed to have a record of what happened on the island in the 1970s and a certain amount about the future?" Dan asked casually.

Everyone reacted to this. "Way to bury the lead, Einstein," James couldn't help but say.

"How do you think I felt?" Daniel told them. "It's one thing to spend a fair amount of your life theorizing that time travel is possible; it's another to see empirical proof."

"You mean like when Jodie Foster got that message from outer space and she just stood there for a minute?" Hurley put together.

Quite a few of Hurley's friends looked a little harshly at him. Dan and Charlotte, however, were smiling wistfully. "I really loved that film," Charlotte said.

"Why do you think I rented it for our first movie night?" Dan shook it off. "That's actually the perfect simile. It's one thing to believe something; it's another to actually have evidence of it. And that journal clearly has proof of it."

Sayid was flipping through the pages. "I can understand why you're reluctant to share this," he said. "One of the things in this book is a notation of when Desmond planned to ask Penny to marry him the first time. " He looked at Desmond. "You asked her father's permission. Didn't that go out of style a century ago?"

"Our lives would be a lot simpler if the two of us had just eloped," Penny said.

"There's also the store you went to buy your ring," Sayid pointed out. He then flipped some more pages. "Does this mean anything to you?" he said, handing it to Daniel.

Dan nodded. "It's the frequency for a machine I was working on. To try and unstick a person's consciousness in time. I hadn't gotten to that point by the time I left Oxford, though."

"What about the island?" Locke asked Dan. "Is there anything about pertaining to our plane or any of us?"

Dan shook his head. "Believe me, I'd have led with that if there were anything in it pertaining to you," he told them. "The only person in this book who has any connection to you is Desmond."

"I'm not sure whether to be relieved or worried about that," Kate admitted.

"What else does this journal have to say about the Dharma Initiative?" Jack asked.

"That does have a lot of answers," Dan told them. "If anything, whoever wrote in this book seemed to have spent their lives trying to figure out what the Dharma people were up to. Because as John is well aware of, at least part of their work had to deal with some variation of manipulating energy in a way to manipulate time. And if this book is any indication of it, this book may explain in a very indirect fashion, why your plane ended up crashing."

Almost involuntarily, everyone looked at Locke. John had been very forthright about everything that had happened on the island, but he hadn't revealed who Jacob was or the lighthouse he had found to Dan or Charlotte yet.

"What makes you so sure?" he asked slowly.

"There's a record of events in what appears to be July of 1977. One morning, there was an evacuation of all non-essential personnel. Which is code for women and children," Dan said. "A few hours after that, drilling started in an area that was believed to contain a pocket of energy that they believed was nearly limitless." Dan looked at him. "I believe that what's being described her is what was euphemistically called 'The Incident' in the film strip describing the Swan."

Dan didn't need to even hint at what happened next. As a result of this 'incident', the Swan would be built over it. The vital part of which would be 'the button' whose sole purpose was to release that energy. On September 22, 2004, Desmond would fail to push that button and Oceanic 815 – whether it had been meant to be drawn to the island or not – would be torn apart and fall from the sky.

Juliet asked the first question that came to mind. "How sure are you that's your handwriting?"

"Pretty sure," Dan told them. "But as I didn't even know about the station until last year much less had no idea when it was built…"

"We're down the rabbit hole, aren't we," James said slowly. "Question is how deep does it go?"

"Perhaps even deeper than we expect," Sayid said slowly. He opened a page and showed it to Dan. "You're certain you didn't write this?"

"What didn't he write?" Jack asked.

"I don't pretend to have an understanding of most of the calculations here," Sayid told them. "But even the lowest level soldier would have no trouble recognizing what this is."

He put the notebook on the table between them. And it was clear he wasn't exaggerating. Even Hurley, whose total experience with the military was pretty much limited to Rambo, got the message loud and clear.

"You're telling us someone was going to nuke the island?" he asked Sayid.

"It's the layout of a hydrogen bomb, but I believe the principle is the same," he answered grimly.

"What the hell was an H-Bomb doing on the island in the first place?" Jack asked.

"Dharma folk must have brought one with them," James said that so quickly and with such certainty that everyone was kind of stunned. "The funding behind Dharma was by a munitions manufacturer named Alvar Hanso. How hard would it be for him to get a nuclear weapon?" He sensed everyone was looking at him, but James get going. "The hatch had an armory bigger than Charlton Heston's. From what you guys and my wife told me, so did every other station. That's not the mindset of people whose main code is peace, love and understanding."

"We're not saying you're wrong, James," Jin told him. "It's actually more rational than almost everything we discussed. Its just it's hard to understand why they'd bring something that destructive."

"Mutually Assured Destruction," Locke said musingly. "Whatever their true intentions might have been, Dharma was founded during the Cold War. If a man like Hanso was behind it, I can certainly see that kind of reasoning."

"It's classic military strategy even now," Sayid concurred.

"Kelvin always referred to your people as the Hostiles," Desmond said to Juliet. "That's not a term that you use when you're interested in diplomacy."

"But even if there was a nuclear weapon on the island, what did you want to do to it?" Walt asked.

"I don't understand the lion's share of the science here," Dan, like Locke before him, did not dismiss Walt's questions as childish. "And while detonating a nuclear device is dangerous under the most controlled of circumstance, on an island where so much unstable energy was around, I don't want to think what that might do."

Almost everyone in the group knew very well the after effects of Desmond's turning the failsafe key. Sayid had told them it had been basically been the equivalent of an electromagnetic pulse. Everyone knew the horrors of nuclear weapons. Put the two together –

"All of this is interesting, if not somewhat terrifying." Sayid closed the notebook and handed it back to Daniel, "but none of it explains how your mother got this notebook in the first place."

"The only think that occurs to be is utterly implausible," Dan told Sayid. "And that is, somehow, she managed to succeed where I could only theorize. "

"Time travel," Jack was trying not to sound like his old self. To be fair, this was a lot even for the most ardent believers in science to take in. "Even if we're allowing that Desmond somehow did it, which even he can't say for certain, it basically took a massive electromagnetic explosion to just go back and time. Once. What you're suggesting…"

"…is even implausible by the standards of the most lavish sci-fi writers," Charlotte admitted.

"Not unless the island had a Delorean on it somewhere," Hurley agreed.

"I admit it's implausible. Borderline crazy. But is it anymore insane than some of the things you've told us about?" Charlotte reminded them. "There were more things on your island that broke the laws of physics and you only spent three months there. Juliet and Desmond were there for three years, and by their own words, they only got a very limited explanation of what was happening. From what John told us, Dan's mother spent decades on the island. Isn't it at least possible she learned far more than any of us?"

Considering how much Ben Linus knew about the island, no one could really argue with that. Jack, however, decided to bring the discussion back to why they were all here in the first place.

"This is all valuable information. Probably stuff we could've used years ago," he said slowly. "But the thing is I'm not sure it solves the real problem of who Abaddon is working for and who's trying to find the island now."

"The thing is," Desmond said, "it actually does. Think about it. Ben's people, if he has any, would want to make sure the island wasn't found. My beloved father-in-law wants to find the island, but he's in prison and his people are scattered. There is, however, another group of people who have just as vested an interest in finding that bloody place. Mainly because they found it before, and they clearly don't know what happened to the last group of people they sent."

They all got it then, and in retrospect it was absurdly simple.

Juliet put it into words. "The Dharma Initiative clearly didn't learn their lesson the first time."