Chapter 39: The Gears of Fate
New York CityThe West Side
"Excuse me — do you know where Central Perk is?"
"Central Perk?"
"Yeah, the coffee shop. You know it?"
"Never heard of it."
Adam's expression flattened.
The Columbia interview had gone smoothly. Really smoothly, actually — better than he'd expected. Walking out of the building into the New York afternoon with the particular lightness of someone who'd done something difficult and done it well, he'd decided to spend the evening exploring.
The obvious starting point was the coffee shop from Friends. He'd done the research: Greenwich Village, West Side, adjacent to Central Park. He walked the neighborhood for forty minutes asking locals.
Nobody knew it.
Either the place wasn't famous yet, or the specific group of six people who would make it famous hadn't all found each other. Either way, it wasn't here in a form he could locate.
He let it go. The Friends universe ran on its own timeline.
"Okay," he said to himself. "MacLaren's."
The bar from How I Met Your Mother was a different angle. He asked a few people, got pointed a few blocks east, and found a bar that matched the description well enough. He walked in, went to the bar, and addressed the bartender.
"Do you know a guy named Barney Stinson?"
"No."
"Ted Mosby?"
The bartender looked at him. "No."
"Lily? Marshall?"
"Are you over twenty-one, sir?"
Adam walked back out onto the sidewalk.
The drinking age in New York was twenty-one and he was eighteen, which was one problem. The larger problem was that none of the main cast of his parents' love story apparently existed in recognizable form yet. Barney Stinson, if he was out there somewhere, would be memorable enough that any bartender who'd served him would have an opinion. The absence of recognition meant either the characters hadn't materialized in this world yet, or they were still several years away from becoming the people he knew.
It was 1992. They'd have been college-aged at best.
He was walking back toward his hotel, mildly deflated, when someone pressed a flyer into his hand.
He looked at it.
Two words: SUIT UP.
Adam laughed out loud, alone on a New York sidewalk, which earned him a look from a passing couple.
They exist, he thought. Just not yet.
He folded the flyer and put it in his jacket pocket. The city had its own timeline, its own pace, and the people he was looking for were somewhere in it — just not fully formed yet into the versions he recognized. That was fine. He'd be back.
He headed to his hotel to get some sleep and figure out tomorrow's plan for pushing past the intelligence threshold that had been sitting at 138 for too long.
Several blocks away, a young man with a full beard, a small braid, and a large duffel bag over his shoulder was moving through the same street with the specific posture of someone who had recently been thoroughly humiliated and was still figuring out what to do about it.
His name was Barney.
He'd had a plan — volunteer work in Nicaragua, a flight booked with the woman he'd been in love with for years. Shannon. His person, he'd thought.
Shannon had, it turned out, a different perspective. There had been a man in a suit. The man had approached Barney at the coffee shop where they both worked, tried to high-five him for no reason, and Barney had felt vaguely sorry for him — a guy who clearly didn't understand how love worked, relying on expensive clothes and surface confidence instead of something real.
Then Shannon had left with the man in the suit.
Then she'd appeared with him in front of Barney to make sure he understood what had happened.
He'd made a video. He wasn't proud of the video.
He was wandering now, duffel over his shoulder, trying to figure out what kind of person he was going to be on the other side of this, when someone handed him a flyer.
He looked at it.
SUIT UP.
He stood on the sidewalk for a long moment.
What did the man in the suit have that he didn't?
The suit.
That was it. That was the whole answer.
He walked into the nearest men's clothing store, flyer in hand.
What came out forty minutes later was a different person. The braid was gone. The beard was gone. He'd borrowed a razor from the store manager. The suit was fitted, the tie was straight, the shoes were new.
He stood in front of the mirror and looked at himself.
The man looking back had made a decision about who he was going to be.
Somewhere across the city, in a hotel room, Adam was reviewing his stat panel and planning his next move.
Neither of them knew the other existed.
The gears, quietly, had begun to turn.
End of Chapter 39
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