Infinity has done the math. And she’s convinced there’s one final problem to overcome before she can have the future she wants.
The obstacle to her dreams is, of course, herself. Because she’s irreparably broken.
Two pivotal moments in her personal timeline stand out. The first is when Leo went with the team to rescue her from Rook. The second is when the team went to the bad future, and Leo was lost on the return trip thanks to Adam’s wish for a normal life.
But that created a paradox. The bad future only emerged if Leo hadn’t gone to rescue her in time. But she as a person only emerged if he did.
She’d tried to solve this in the past by duplicating herself. But it always went weirdly wrong, yielding the twin sisters Aria and Summer, or Aria disappearing and only Summer remaining.
This time she had a trump card. Nono Rodriguez was the one person who could interfere with the two inflection points she’d chosen. The Poppet System she’d acquired from Doctor Chin’s clone subordinate allowed her to equip Nono to do the infiltration of Rook Industries. How she did it was immaterial, and the fact that any Nono could get the job helped the timeline’s stability immeasurably.
This stability would let her put into place the experiment she’d devised to keep the good and bad timelines balanced. Someone from within Rook had warned the Menagerie that the company had captured Pneuma. Nono was equipped with a radioactive device - a cage for Schrödinger’s Cat. At the right moment, if the device showed red, interfere with the whistleblower. If the device showed green, do nothing and let events play out. Red for bad, green for good. The superposition of possibilities meant that both good and bad futures stayed in play.
The second part of the order was to get to school, where Leo and Adam were attending classes, just before the Rossum robot got there. For this part, Nono’s task was even easier. She had to pretend to be endangered by the robot.
Leo’s mental calculus in the moment had been fragile. Infinity knew the only reason he hadn’t destroyed a Rossum robot out of rage was Adam’s proximity. Having his lab partner there and endangered would push Leo over the edge.
It was so simple. For Infinity’s future to have a chance, she just had to get Leo to kill Summer.