by Ryan Schow
Netty turned off the stove, and said, “I’ll be right back.”
“That’s it?” her mother yelled at her back as she left. “I tell you I’m pregnant and you just walk away without comment?”
“Oh, I have a comment,” she barked back.
When she returned to the kitchen and the almost burnt eggs, Netty handed her mother two sticks, both the same white with the same pink plus signs. Talk about going from zero to sober in a half second or less.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” her mother said in her native tongue, her face ashen and still.
Netty said nothing.
“Well,” her mother said in a resigned voice, “it looks like we’re going to be bloated cows together.”
“When dad finds out, he’s going to kill you, and your little boy-toy, too.”
Her mother started to cry, then laugh, and pretty soon they were both watery eyed and crazy, and giggling like a pair of deranged loons.
The Vast Nothingness
1
Jake Teller, man of my dreams, the hot AF looking twenty-something, future father of my not born and not-going-to-happen baby, it turns out he’s a senior citizen in a genetically modified body and he’s wanting to know what the hell I was doing at his wife’s birth.
“Dying,” I tell him.
“So you know my mother-in-law?”
“I saved her from being experimented on, but it turns out she was already pregnant with genetically modified triplets, so I really never saved her from anything. It was like…it was like I gave her a vacation from the tank.”
“Who are you, in this whole thing?” he wants to know. He’s looking at me while I’m flying down the highway and he’s saying, “How do you fit in to all this?”
“Forget that mundane shit for a second,” I say, my impatience flaring, “and please tell me when the hell time travel became possible!”
He takes a breath. I know he doesn’t want to switch subjects, but when it comes to either time travel or why I have the friends I have, time travel is going to win out.
“Nineteen sixty-eight.”
“What?!?! Nineteen sixty-eight? That’s like, almost fifty years ago!”
“We’re talking about the US Government,” he says. “Your garden variety state-of-the-art discoveries, they are hidden from the public until they’re either no longer of value or they can be monetized or completely discredited. Everyone knows this.”
“Yes, but did you forget that the government is totally inept?”
“That’s what you think,” he says.
“They can’t even balance a budget and you’re telling me they invented time travel?”
“Not Congress, or the Senate, or even the President. This was a DARPA project, well, ARPA actually. It was called Project Pegasus.”
“DARPA?”
“The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Back then it was just ARPA, but in seventy-two they changed their direction and their focus to military defense. They’re basically a government funded think-tank based out of Arlington, Virginia and they worked on black budget projects like teleportation, telepathy, remote viewing and, of course, time travel. Recently they mapped the human brain for integration with robot technologies, and their focus in this time is more about transhumanism and how it relates to quality of life and life extension, which is a big thing when I’m from. Basically, my wife is one of the first of that new wave of technologies.”
“So Holland, is he related to DARPA?”
“No. But his ideas come from the same school of thought. Relating to time travel, much of what was done was off the books because a lot of it wasn’t legal or ethical. They used kids as well as adults as test subjects. Then, when some of the participants began speaking out about it, protectors of the program focused their efforts on discrediting everything. They put out massive disinformation campaigns, threatened and slandered the whistle blowers, found a way to label all of those who believed conspiracy theorists. You know how it is, that shitty racket. But it works. Anyway, it’s still illegal in my time, unless you have a license, which only the top one percent of the top one percent have. Hell, half the general populous still doesn’t believe time travel is even possible, let alone manipulated and used, that’s how hush-hush all of this is.”
“Naturally,” I say with my own brand of sarcasm.
I’m weaving in and out of cars with the navigation telling me I have one hundred feet left before the exit. I swerve over two lanes, cut off a big rig and fly into the exit going way too fast. Jake’s holding on to the “oh shit” handle looking a little peaked. We come to a brief stop before turning right, and then I honk and bully my way through traffic, making a big enough opening to punch through.
“Like anything else,” Jake continues, talking a bit slower, “those in power crave an unfair advantage. Time travel is basically the tool the elite used to further separate themselves from the masses. For example, imagine I travel to this time, buy shares in Google, then travel forward to 2031 when Google’s shares reach their peak value. When I liquidate all my shares, avoiding the stock’s predestined decline and stabilization, I walk away from it all as a multi-billionaire. But a billion dollars in the future, it isn’t enough. You need more. So from there I diversify and invest in more stable markets, then return to my base timeline where time and compounding interest has allowed my billions to become hundreds of trillions, and low and behold, I’m old money and set for the next ten lifetimes.”
“That’s seriously shady,” I say.
Flashing lights in the rear view mirror grab my attention. My heart stops, then starts back up when I see it’s an ambulance headed in the same direction and not the cops. No biggie, I tell myself. It’s too far behind for me to worry about.
“The elite think of it more as securing their bloodline’s future than being shady.”
“So are you buying Google stock then?”
Grabbing the handle, looking scared, he’s nearly speechless as we skate through a red light. “Already have,” he says. “Jesus Christ you can drive.”
“Told you,” I say.
At this point I don’t want to look at him because he just admitted to cheating the system using time travel. I want to look at him because he’s so damn handsome, but I refuse to because what he did, it’s morally wrong. Not to say I’m perfect, but I don’t cheat like that. Then again, I can’t really blame him. I mean, if you could go back in time and have everything wouldn’t you? I guess maybe I would. It’s sort of how I became a millionaire, cheating Holland. Dang, I can’t help thinking we’re more alike than I imagined. But not in a good way.
“Where do you go to school?” he asks.
“Just started at Astor Academy,” I say.
He’s not teaching at Astor anymore, so it’s safe for me to say that. Sort of. I’m not sure if he’ll suspect the truth, but I’m sure as hell not going to tell him I was Abby. The douchebag shot me in the face, plus he all but confessed to using time travel, as a side gig, to make trillions for his future self, should his current self survive the day.
“That’s what you’re learning there, is it not?” he asks. “To find that edge and capitalize on it? To understand the rules so as to break them better and not get caught? Traveling into the past, it’s the cleanest way to amass wealth and power and not get caught. That’s why there are only a handful of people who have these technologies in their possession.”
“So you’re one of the top one percent of the top one percent? Is that it?”
“Oh, hell no. Not yet, anyway.”
“Then—”
“I stole the time travel devices from some uppity snob I was working for.”
I signal, make a hard left, wince as my wheels come way too close to the curb. When the car is roaring straight again, from his pant’s pocket, Jake withdraws a small marble bag, empties the contents into his cupped palm. The smaller-than-normal looking marbles, they appear to be made of some strange, soft looking glass. Inside them, ba
nds of color seem to be glowing. At a stop light I’m forced to stop at, I take one of the marbles and inspect it closer. The glowing part of the sphere, it isn’t a trick of light as much as there is some sort of organic coding inside.
“So, what?—you just…hold the…marbles?”
“Each marble, as you call it—we call them devices—designates how far back in time you want to go. They’re created to cover up to fifty year time increments that will go back as far as a thousand years. Think of them like monetary denominations where the currency isn’t money but time.”
“Have you ever gone back that far? A thousand years?”
“No. Just to now. That’s why there are so many devices left to choose from.”
“How do they work?” I ask.
“You swallow them.”
“So you swallow the…device, and then what?”
“It basically creates an organic bond with your body, with your cerebral cortex. You then close your eyes and in your mind appears a ‘dashboard’ you use to mentally program your time coordinates, up to the designated denomination of time. The contents of the device then open up a wormhole that sucks you into the space-time continuum, while at the same time preserving the integrity of your molecules during said travel. When you reach your preordained destination, the device remains dormant inside you until you need it to plan and execute your next jump. To gain access to the dashboard, you merely recite the access-sequence code and the dashboard appears.”
“Wow,” I say, pulling into the hospital parking lot. “So does it hurt?”
“When the tidal gravity pushes and pulls at you, it feels like you’re being ripped in half. So, yes it hurts,” he replies. “It hurts like a son of a bitch.”
2
We’re looking for a parking place with minutes to spare. Cutting in front of a hideous looking Hyundai SUV who lays on the horn for like forever, I get us a spot up front. Whatevs. I park and kill the engine and we both jump out, flip off the driver still sitting on the horn and sprint inside the hospital.
Jake heads into the ER, cutting in line in front of everyone, and says, “I’m sorry, but this is an emergency.” The irritated lady tells him everything is an emergency in the ER and to wait like everyone else, but he refuses, throws a fit and finally gets his way.
It’s totally embarrassing.
And at this point, I wonder if I even want him anymore.
We head to the floor where he is being born and he walks past a nurse who points him in the right direction. Hurrying past all kinds of people in various states of distress, we turn down a largely empty hallway and see a series of doors. He pokes his head in one room, then the next, then another where he apologizes while getting yelled at by a man and a woman. Just then, a trio of doctors leave a room ahead and Jake says, “Is that the Hamilton baby?”
One of the nurses says, “Are you family?”
“I am,” he says. Then: “I’m William’s brother.”
“You can step in if you want,” she says.
“No, we’ll wait,” I say, looking hard at Jake who is now looking manic and even more insane than ever.
“Everything okay, sir?” the nurse asks, holding back.
“I…I just haven’t seen, well I haven’t seen my brother in more than a decade. So I’m a little bit nervous.”
The nurse smiles, and says, “Births have a way of bringing family together,” and then she leaves us standing alone in the cold, sterile looking hallway.
“Hamilton?” I say.
“James Hamilton. That’s my real name. William is my father.”
Just then the door opens and a man staggers out on unsteady legs. His face is pasty white and on its way to green. He has that look like he’s battling nausea. He bends and curls against a single dry heave, then manages to hold it down. I move to his side, forever the caregiver.
“Never could stomach the sight of blood,” he says, looking embarrassed as he’s pulling a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his mouth.
Jake can’t do anything but stare at this man who is supposedly his father.
“Supposed to be in there with my wife, enjoying the experience of our first child, but all I can think about his him…coming out of her…and all that—”
He dry heaves again and I put my hand on his back, fully realizing I’m soothing Jake’s father just after his mother gave birth to Jake, whose real name is James. I frown at Jake and, instead of seeing this Adonis teacher whom I gave my virginity to, whom I’ve fantasized about building a life with, I see a sixty-something man masquerading as a twenty-something deity in sheep’s clothing sleeping with teenagers and talking about saving his infant wife from immanent death. At this point, I think I need medication. No, at this point, I would just about kill to have my own time travel machine so I could leave this entire timeline.
Jake’s father, who is neither good looking nor ugly, he coughs a couple of times, then he blows his nose into his hanky, tucks it away and pulls out a smart phone and says, “Gotta get me a few pictures. She’ll kill me if we don’t have pictures.”
“Are you happy?” Jake says, stopping the man with the question as he is returning to the birthing room.
“More than you know,” he replies with a weak smile, and then he slips into the room.
“See?” I ask. “You’re safe. Like I said, I never told anyone.”
“I know, but it’s better to be safe than—”
Just then a pale, delicate looking man in a black suit, black shirt and pitch black tie with perfectly styled black hair rounds the corner looking way out of place. Like he’s up to no good. Is he FBI? CIA? Is he a mortician? Gosh damn, there’s something off about him. The minute he sees Jake, his unusually bright eyes flash wide and he stops in his tracks. There’s only fifteen feet between us. It could be miles or inches, depending on what he’s about to do. One thing is for sure, though, he’s why Jake is here.
Why I’m here.
Jake must have reacted because, lightening fast, the man in the suit pulls from his jacket something silvery and sharp looking and throws it at Jake, who ducks away from the tumbling object fast enough for it to spin by and sink right into my fucking face.
My head snaps back, the blade of some high-tech knife buried deep into my cheek bone. The thorny, electric burn that sears my face feels like I’m being electrocuted to death. My head starts to shake and smoke. My left eye socket catches fire. My hands shoot out, grabbing for the blade, then pause at the feel of the flesh and bone of my face rotting fast. OMG, whatever’s in this knife, it…it’s literally eating my skull!
“Jake,” I try to say, but the electric current is smashing my bones together, locking them against each other the way lockjaw drives your mouth shut so hard your muscles are trapped in this constant state of flex.
Jake slips a similar looking knife from inside his sleeve, then throws it down the hallway where it drives into the man’s throat down to the hilt. He staggers backwards, his shaking hands reaching blindly for the knife, then stopping, then falling away. His head is sizzling from the jaw up and turning electric blue beneath an incredible heat. His face is suddenly lost in an explosive cone of fire. The flame sparks, flares, then fizzles fast, and then everything about his face turns black and ashy. He drops to his knees, then topples over sideways, dead.
Jake quickly turns and pulls the blade out of my face, but the pain doesn’t stop. I want to cup my cheek, but I can’t. Is it doing to me what it did to the man in the suit? The flames on my face go out, and the loosening of my muscles is a positive sign.
Fifteen feet down the hallway, my attacker’s skull caves like collapsed ash, the soot of him wasting away on the hallway floor, no longer flesh and bone, no longer anything. His neck and shoulders begin to disintegrate, too, like kicked dirt, or a sand sculpture crumbling. All that remains is what’s left of him from half his shoulders down.
“You okay?” Jake asks, examining my face.
“Go,” I say, still suffering a few pops
and spasms in my cheek. “Hide it before someone sees!” It, not him. It.
Jake drags the body into one of the empty rooms he found when he was searching for his parents’ room, but not before a female doctor pushing a young boy on a gurney round the corner and see the headless corpse.
They doctor faints; the young boy in the bed begins to cry. Acting on instinct alone, I lift my hand to the boy and say, “Sleep,” and he does. I do this just as Jake is closing the exam room door behind him. The doctor—who fell but didn’t hit her head—it takes her a minute to recover, but she’s finally coming around.
“You think she’ll be okay?” Jake asks.
“Yep,” I reply, moving closer. The moment the doctor wakes up and looks around, I am there, standing above her.
“Who are you?” she asks, looking up at me as she uses the gurney to try pulling herself to her feet. I give her a hand, help her up.
Standing eye to eye, plowing deep into her mind, I say to her subconscious, “Remember to forget,” and then I push the memories of what just happened out of her head.
She blinks rapidly a few times, looks around dazed, then says, “What happened?”
“You fainted,” I tell her. “This is your patient.” She looks at the blonde boy, still asleep, then gets the gurney in motion and heads on her way, like she’s been brainwashed so thoroughly nothing is left but primary speech and motor functions.
“What the heck was that?” Jake asks.
“I wiped her memory,” I tell him. Jake stares at my face, mesmerized, and looking for signs of the wound. There are no signs. Even the residual tremors are gone. Which means the rate of speed by which I’m healing is rapidly intensifying. And without the bloody evacuation process that plagued me before Dulce.
Whatever I am, I’m starting to like it.
“How did you survive that?” he asks, incredulous. “No one survives that!” I give a non-committal shrug.
“I’ve got active white blood cells,” I say and this elicits an eye roll from him.