The first time I saw him, he was just a boy, a pale, thin, big-eyed child in dangerous territory, breaking the Truce and caring nothing for it. My first impulse was to scare him into running home before he started a war, until I saw the look in his eyes. He had seen things. So I spoke to him and learned that he too had spoken with the dead. The Dharma people didn't do that. Clearly the Island had marked this boy out as one of its own, which meant I had a responsibility. I sent him home, because we could not at that time afford a war with the Dharma invaders, but I promised him he would be one of us one day.

I thought about him often over the next few years. I wondered what the Island had in store for him, why Jacob had never told me about him, not that Jacob had ever told me everything, though I think he liked carrying on conversations with me, the ignorant Islander. As I came into conflict more and more with Charles Widmore, who didn't like to listen to anyone but himself, I thought about Ben more and more. A hundred years of living with people will give you a certain insight into them, and I saw in Ben the greatest intellect ever to come to the Island from Outside. This boy could lead. He could do better than Charles, who had a tendency to alienate people with his overbearing arrogance. What else had he been sent to me for than to provide a replacement for Charles?

My second encounter with him only seemed to confirm it. Two of the strange Dharma members brought him to me for help. When I say strange, I mean they were strange even for Dharma folk. Time travelers, they claimed to be, and certain it was that they had knowledge unexplainable any other way. With the Dharma Initiative but not of it, they seemed to me, like Ben himself, who lay unconscious and bleeding in the man's arms. They had absolute trust that I could help him, and why? Because they knew from the future that I had? Perhaps this boy was even more significant to the Island than I had thought.

And so the reasons and justifications spiral round each other. All the circumstances confirmed themselves, because I wanted them to.

Some part of my judgment told me not to take the boy into the Temple. No one, not even I, knew much about the Temple, why it was there, what that force was inside it that changed people. Ben had a kind of veiled but sweet innocence in his eyes, and the Temple would take that away from him. But he was meant to be one of us, and I was willing to defy his father, the whole Dharma Initiative, Charles, and possibly even Jacob to save his life and help him become what I was so sure he was meant to be.

I will not discuss here what the Temple—the force inside the Temple—did to him. I know he did not remember later, and it will remain unremembered. I will say only that when he opened his eyes long afterward, there was understanding in them there had not been before, more than a boy of twelve or so ought to have. He has always since then had the most intimate knowledge and understanding of the Island, sometimes more so even than I. But he did not remember anything that had happened recently. He did not remember being shot, nor being brought to us, nor the temple. All he remembered was me, our previous meeting, and for a time he thought it was that day and that I had actually taken him back to our camp the first time we met. He had only a hazy recollection of the few years that had passed.

I judged it best that he should stay with us for a short time, for the times were strange. I was pulled one direction and another by the time travelers, Charles, and Eloise and finally, oddly, found myself helping the man who had shot Ben find a nuclear bomb on the say-so of a man who never changed, like me, and whom Eloise murdered, only to learn he was her time-traveling son with whom she was currently pregnant. It was all very confusing, and despite my many years and long association with Jacob, I did not understand any of it. I am not a physicist; indeed it is only in my recent years off the Island that I have learned what physics is.

Charles, who had seen what the Temple did to Ben and finally recognized that he belonged to us, agreed to watch over him while Eloise and I performed our task, and when we returned, we took Ben and all the rest of our people and withdrew as far as possible from Dharma territory. They were going to detonate a nuclear bomb. I knew as well as anyone, thanks to the military incursions twenty years before, that this would extinguish us all. Was this not precisely why we had killed the military team who brought the bomb? Protect the Island was the overriding purpose. So why had I helped? The only answer I can give is that the Island knew what it was doing.

Obviously, since I am writing this, it did not extinguish us all. Probably the only person who can explain why was an odd, nervous young man Eloise killed, her own child. I knew him as a small boy and never failed to be in awe of his intellect. I can only speculate that the bomb did not totally destroy the Island because it had been dropped directly into a pocket of electromagnetic energy of the sort that riddled the Island. The Island seems to have a kind of sentience, and these pockets seem to be part of it, as they are part of its ability to move through time. Nevertheless, all these wise words don't mean I have the slightest idea what I'm talking about. I understand the Island on a visceral level that is not often translated into intellectual lucidity.

We did not die. We lived through a period of turmoil when the Island shook and some kinds of plants died and others did not, when new kinds of animals most of us had never seen before ran loose from Dharma cages (Ben and Charles said they were called polar bears and rabbits). Of two people Charles sent to spy on Dharma activity, one died of some horrific disease, and the other found that a missing toe had grown back. Our Island was changing, and we could only hold on and hope we weren't the ones who died.

Ben was the only one who seemed to thrive in the turmoil. Or maybe it was only being with us that made him thrive. He took to our outdoor life as if he had been born a woodsman, he absorbed our learning and lore about the Island and took the story about Jacob with clear-eyed and yet simple trust. In short, he was one of us, perhaps the best of us, and, naturally, he rebelled when I told him he had to go home when only a month had passed.

The Island had settled down. The sky had stopped periodically going purple, the plants had stopped dying, and no one else Charles sent to spy died. Soon the enemy would have a chance to remember that one of their children had been kidnapped. I told him all this, and eventually he accepted it, and then I told him the real reason I was sending him back.

"We need a man in their camp who can tell us what's going on."

His eyes shone. He was a twelve-year-old boy, after all. "Like a spy? A secret agent?"

"Exactly. You have to act exactly like one of them, Ben. You have to be glad to be there and relieved to have escaped from us. Do you understand?"

He nodded.

"You have a brilliant mind," I told him. "Study well, and maybe they will allow you to join one of their stations and learn its secrets."

He shook his head with a small, curious smile. "Oh, no," he said. "I'm going to become a workman, like my dad."

I stared at him. I knew full well how much he hated his father. He grinned at me.

"Workmen go everywhere, Richard. They see everything. They go wherever something needs fixed or cleaned, and everything always needs fixed or cleaned. I will have the secrets of all the stations, not just one."

I was pleased with his foresight and clear decision making. "We're going to have to make it look like this time has been bad for you, but not so bad they're going to want to come after us. Do you understand what I mean?"

"You mean you're going to have to beat me up."

"Yes. I'm sorry."

He rolled his eyes at me. "Richard, I've been beat up before, and it was never for a good cause. A good cause is worth anything."

He'd stopped being afraid. We'd done that for him, at least, though there was a certain hardness in his lack of fear that had never been there before.

It was his idea to space it out over several days so it would look like it had been ongoing. The first day I punched him in the mouth and gave him a split lip, and he laughed at me. The next day I slapped him so hard it left bruises on his cheeks that were yellow by the next day. The third day I took a sharp stone and carefully gave him a ragged cut on his forehead, as if he'd been knocked down, and he didn't flinch. On the fourth day he judged the preliminary work sufficient and quietly let me beat him up. Not too badly, just enough to make his running scared through the jungle and falling into the some Dharma station look authentic. He said his father would go on a rampage ("No one's allowed to beat me up but him") but that probably no one would listen to him because he was just a janitor.

"And," he said mischievously, "he'll feel so bad about all this that he won't hit me for maybe a month. So really you're doing me a favor."

Favor or not, I did it without sentimentality, and then when I had sent him off into the jungle, I went away and was sick.