The Great Altruist

by Z. D. Robinson

  James pondered the question and tried to think of a way to answer it so her young mind could understand. "There are a lot of reasons he might feel like he needs to hit you, but none of those reasons are good reasons," he assured the child. "A lot of people will try to make you feel bad about yourself, but you shouldn't listen to them. Even if you were being bad, no one has the right to hurt you like this."

  The little girl began to cry. James took his mother into his arms and embraced her, wanting so much to see only the best for her. He knew his efforts today were too small to matter, but he was glad he was finally getting a chance to make a difference. I’ll need to thank Genesis every day for the rest of my life for giving me this moment! he thought.

  "You need to promise yourself something, Becky," he said as he pulled his mother away and looked her in the eyes.

  "What?" said the little girl as she wiped away her tears.

  "You need to promise yourself that you will never let anyone hurt you. No one, no matter who it is, even your father, should ever make you feel bad about yourself. You are a beautiful girl and someday you will be a beautiful woman. Don't ever let anyone touch you like this again. And if someone does, you need to tell someone: me, the principal, the nurse, or even a policeman. Do you understand?"

  His mother nodded softly, still feeling somewhat ashamed.

  "Do you promise?" he asked again, this time softly.

  "I promise," she said.

  James smiled at his mother and let her go to her next class. As his mother left the classroom and walked down the hall, James closed the door and motioned for Genesis to come out of the drawer.

  "I would say that went pretty well!" she approved.

  "Thank you so much for this."

  "It was all my pleasure, James."

  “I love you,” he said.

  “And I, you,” she replied as she kissed his lips with hers.

  "So is it time to go home now?"

  "It is. It's time to let nature run its course."

  A moment later, they were gone.

  James opened his eyes and saw the bare ceiling of his bedroom. The joy of home was overwhelming.

  "Welcome home," Genesis said.

  He looked around the room as though it were unfamiliar. "How long were we gone? In my time?"

  "Only a few seconds. But a lot changed in that time."

  "It certainly has," he said. The changes of the past had filtered into the present. The walls were no longer plastered and caked with drawings and photo enlargements of Katherine. What else has changed? he thought.

  "I imagine you're anxious to see your family."

  "I am," he said. "Are my parents still married?"

  "Go and see," she said as she climbed into his shirt pocket.

  James walked downstairs to a quiet living room. This usually wasn’t a good sign, but suddenly he noticed all the family pictures on the wall that he never saw before. "So are they still together?"

  "Let me show you something."

  She grabbed a photo album from the bookshelf and thumbed through it, looking at the pictures go by as James looked on. Suddenly, the pages stopped turning and she pointed at one of the photographs. "There!" she said.

  James looked down at the picture. The photograph was of his mother's family: all of them – including her stepfather.

  "There he is! He's in the picture now. He wasn't there before." As he turned through the rest of the album, he spotted more pictures of his mother’s stepfather. "It worked! She never let anything happen because he’s here. He isn't a secret anymore."

  "It looks like you got to her."

  "But I'm still here. How is that possible?"

  "What happened with your mother and her stepfather didn't change who she married. It just changed how she viewed him and all the other men in her life."

  "How could their affair not affect me?"

  She winked. "Has it occurred to you that I could have known all of this before we ever met?"

  “Have you?”

  “No,” she said. “But if changing the past would have harmed a single hair on your head, I would never have let you speak to your parents.”

  "So they're still married. I did it! I saved them," he said proudly. “But how long it will last?" he wondered aloud.

  “That's going to be up to them.”

  “Can’t we go into the future and see what happens?”

  “Not anymore,” she said. “The future is too muddy and clouded to predict. To find out what happens to your family, I’m afraid you’re going to have to find out the old-fashioned way: wait.”

  “I wonder what my own life would have been if you hadn’t come along and showed me the truth about Katherine and how we weren’t right for each other.”

  “You discovered that on your own. And as for your future, when I first found you in the stream I tried to see what might become of you. You were alone and unhappy. It seemed to me that if that one mistake was fixed, you would finally be able to move forward and not be so focused on the past - yours or your parents’.”

  “How much did you know?”

  “Just enough to know I could help. And even that depended so much on you.”

  “And what about you?” he asked. “Where will you go now?”

  “I want to stay here, but that isn’t possible,” she answered.

  “Why not?”

  “Because we can’t be together.” She turned away from him and cried. When she first met Jadzia, she was all alone. And then she discovered her first sense of family with the girl who became like a sister. But Jadzia was dead. The same fate would befall James. Her travels across time and space revealed an important detail of her nature: she never aged, nor might she ever. Whatever family she established with the people she helped would be fraught with sorrow, as all of them would face their mortality, leaving her behind to watch. She thought, too, of the prospect of James ever finding a wife and building a family. The feelings she felt for him would never be realized as they could never have a normal relationship. If she stayed with him, he would be condemned to a life devoid of affection and normalcy. There was something different about James: as she contemplated staying with him, the knot in her stomach, the compulsion to continue her journey and help people, did not return. It was gone. “You deserve more than I can give you.”

  He watched her sob as she came to the inevitable conclusion he had already accepted when his heart first attached to the tiny girl he loved. “I want you to stay. This is my life to decide,” he said.

  She spun around and approached within inches of his face. “All my hard work will be negated if I stay! My purpose in coming to you was to help you fix a mistake so it wouldn’t hinder your future, not start a new mistake.”

  “How is asking the woman I love to stay with me a mistake?”

  “Because we can’t have a normal life together.” She backed away, her face expressionless as she raised her arms. “I love you.”

  James knew what she was about to do, but before he could utter a word, she was gone. He fell to his knees and wept. Genesis had left him.

  No sooner than she had disappeared, a firm knock came from the front door. James charged downstairs to open it and when he did, he saw Genesis standing in the doorway - the same size as any other woman, only now she was clothes in a beautiful summer dress.

  “So what do you think?” she said.

  “I think I'm in love with you,” he said.

  “I love you too.”

  He marveled over her appearance. She was just as gorgeous as she was when she was no taller than a flower. “How did this happen?” he asked. The thought of why she left him had faded from memory. It didn’t matter any longer. She was here.

  She stepped inside the kitchen door and wrapped her arms around James. She pulled him tight against her chest and kissed him hard and deep.

  He took her in his arms and embraced her tight. “It feels good to hold you like this,” he said.

  “And it feels good to be he
ld by you.”

  “So what happened?”

  “You mean, how did I become normal finally?” she said as she kissed him again. “Sorry, I can't help myself.”

  James smiled and kissed her back. “Yes, how did you get here like this?”

  “It's kind of a long story.”

  Chapter 8

  Genesis spent years honing the gifts of her proverbial father, the Nazi scientist who gave her all of her powers. After spending years traveling through time and searching for people in need of help, she eventually came across the man who she was about to leave forever. As she thought back to her life with Jadzia in the Canadian clearing, the first time and place she called home, the realization that a life with James could only end similarly told her that leaving him was the best thing to do. As she readied herself to jump into the stream and return to the ancient tree in her first memory, she etched the face of the man she loved into her mind and said: “I love you.”

  Somewhere deep in the forest where Genesis first awoke upon her release by her creator, a ball of blue light emerged among the branches. The tree creatures, great and small, scattered as Genesis appeared amidst the orb and the light dissipated.

  She fell to the ground; the knot in her stomach had returned with a vengeance and the tears she shed in James’s room, while still fresh, were replaced by new ones that streamed down her cheek as her knees hit the branch. She curled in a ball to relieve the pain but it only worsened with each passing second. She knew immediately her decision to leave James was the wrong one. Terrified, she rolled onto her back and tried to take a deep breath but she rolled off the branch and fell to the forest floor instead.

  In a panic, she stumbled to her feet and gathered what strength she could muster. Instantly, she leaped into the stream and then emerged a fraction of a second later.

  The pain in her stomach was gone, but she had no idea where she was. She lied face down on the floor of a large house, the floor made of wood and the house decorated in a manner unfamiliar to her. As she climbed to her feet, she imagined where - and when - she was. Just then, she heard a voice.

  “I always wondered when you’d make it here,” an old man with a German accent said. He hobbled on a cane to where she stood and stared out a large window overlooking a beautiful lake.

  She turned to face him. “Should I know you?” she asked nervously.

  “No,” he said, smiling, “you wouldn’t remember me. And not through any fault of your own. You weren’t meant to remember me. My name is Wolfgang.”

  “Are you meant to help me, then?”

  “Indeed,” he answered. “Please.” He gestured for her to come closer to him.

  She flew over to the desk where the man slowly sat in his chair and set his cane aside.

  “You’ve truly grown into a remarkable woman; so much confidence since we parted ways.”

  Wolfgang heard the crash of toys falling down the stairs. He looked around the corner and spotted his son down the hallway examining the broken toy. “Go to your room, Roger,” he said. The child obeyed and ran upstairs to his room. The door closed a moment later.

  “How do you know me?” she interrupted. “Where am I?”

  He chuckled at the question. “I made you, Genesis. And you don’t remember me because I programmed you not to.”

  “So,” she hesitated, “I’m a…machine?”

  “Not at all,” he assured her with a laugh. “You’re very human, but in a non-traditional way. You had no childbirth or parents like most people have. You were the culmination of years of experiments into making the world’s perfect soldier. The project failed, partly under the weight of its own absurdity, and partly because of sabotage…by me.”

  “Who were my real parents then?”

  “Your biological parents – and by that I mean the sperm and egg donors,” he said coarsely, “are unknown to everyone but those at the top of the project. Even Hitler didn’t know.”

  “Hitler?” she asked.

  “Everyone involved in the project is dead and any records left over were destroyed after you escaped. Few people alive know anything about you. I only know because I was presumed dead and, by the grace of God, managed to escape here - to South America.”

  “Why don’t I remember any of it?”

  “That’s complicated. The project was charged with producing the following: a human being comprised of only the core genetic material necessary for human function, but it was then modified to increase strength, reduce independence, and remove morality. Originally, you were not given a voice.

  “The human genome had not been discovered yet, but when we stumbled upon time-travel just before the war, Hitler wanted to know how to engineer his soldiers since breeding the perfect race wasn’t working. And so he commissioned doctors to find anything from the future that might help him toward that goal. In the course of our experiments, I learned a great deal about DNA that I never shared with my superiors. I am the one who saw to it to add the genes that made you who you are today: you are compelled to be selfless, loving, thoughtful, and kind. I even designed a mechanism that would cause you great abdominal pain if you resisted your true nature.

  "Your abilities, by the way, were a little concoction of my own doing. Your size, which I’m sure you’ve come to resent, was not meant to handicap you. I had to stall the other researchers for time so I could perfect the material that would make you virtually indestructible. Instead of making you a killing machine, I wanted to see someone who only wanted to help others. Call it my way of making amends for trusting a man like Hitler with my people’s most precious technology.”

  “Wait!” she exclaimed. “Where are you from?”

  “That isn’t important, my dear. I saw all the terrible things the Nazis did and it reminded me of my people in our infancy. The last thing they needed was another instrument of death. I imagine you’ve been wisely trying to help others since you left.”

  “I’m not sure how successful I was. I did try to prevent the war from ever happening at least.”

  “Well,” he said, “that would have been impossible, my dear. Preventing the war would have prevented your own creation.”

  She gasped. “So the reason so many people died was because of me?”

  "You mustn’t torture yourself with that idea. Besides, I’m sure you’ve done enough good in the time since. That has to count for something.”

  Genesis was suddenly plagued with regrets. “I could have done more.”

  “I’m sure we all could have. The last thirty-five years since the war have been intolerable as I look back on what I could have done. You’re different. You had no choice in the matter and have no reason to feel remorse. The abilities you have were meant to teach you an important lesson: that there is little use living in the past.”

  “Then I must not have learned much because all I’ve done was try to fix people’s mistakes from the past.”

  "If I could undo our experiments, I would,” he confessed. “But enough damage has been brought about by time-travel. Besides, the technology was lost when the war ended. As for you, I wanted to reverse what we did to you eventually, but there wasn’t time. The end of the war was approaching and I needed to protect you.”

  “Do you still know how to reverse it?”

  He smiled once again and said: “Yes.”

  She smiled back and waited patiently for his reply to her implied petition.

  “I assume you wish to return to some point in time and lead a normal life?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But how did I get here?”

  “Easily,” he said. “You had no other choice. When you left, I chose a time that was safe in Earth’s history for you upon your release. Your body was programmed to go to that point in time when triggered – in the first case it was triggered by anger and fear. Conversely, you finding me was a programmed affair too. I estimated a place I would likely be found if not captured or killed. I’ve been waiting on this lake house for you to return – and now y
ou have.”

  “But what triggered me to come here?”

  A wide grin crossed his face. “What else, Genesis? You fell in love, didn’t you?”

  She nodded excitedly.

  “Good,” he said. He stood up from the desk and walked to a bookshelf overflowing with papers. Beneath a pile of loose pages, he removed from the top shelf a small metal box with an antique lock on its outside hinge. “In here, you will find what you want.”

  He opened the box and removed a tiny syringe. “The drug in this needle will restore your entire DNA to normal and allow you the life you so much deserve.”