Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels
Page 414
I explained my symptoms. She asked me to lie down. I had been told to put the gown on so that it opened in front. Folding the right side of it back, she pressed on my abdomen. I didn’t mean to, but I let out a horrible scream. The pain had been unleashed. I kept moaning. I rolled over and pulled my legs up to my chin.
Dr. Rutherford said, “Let me get an ultrasound of the area.” She sounded serious.
A technician rolled in the ultrasound machine and waited until I could straighten my body. I begged him not to press too hard.
He applied cold gel to the wand. I held my breath as he moved it around.
Glancing at the monitor, I saw a weird shape, but I had no idea what it meant. Was this normal? Abnormal? If so, what was it?
The technician gave me no clue. He looked at the screen, moved the instrument over the area, took lots of pictures, then left.
When the doctor came back, she had a serious look on her face. She said, “Why don’t you get dressed and then meet me in my office?” She wasn’t smiling.
I peeled off the crackly gown, got dressed and found my way to her office.
Dr. Rutherford’s eyes were filled with concern. She said, “There’s something on your ovary, Jade.”
The memories of my mom’s illness washed over me like a tsunami. I put my face in my hands and wept. I had cancer, I just knew it.
Dr. Rutherford said, “I know this is scary, but we don’t know what it is. You’re young. It’s probably benign, whatever it is. I want you to see this specialist.” She handed me a slip of paper with the name and address of a gynecologic surgeon. She also gave me a prescription for pain medicine. She told me to take it as needed. I took both papers from her hand, feeling numb and in shock. She said, “We’ll call and make an appointment for you.”
They’d never made an appointment for me before. I knew I had cancer. I just knew it.
By the time I got home, I’d made up my mind. I was going to find my birth mother. It was now or never. I was going to fight this monster inside me with every treatment available. I wanted to know if I had a family history of cancer, if anyone had survived it and, if so, what treatment had worked for them.
The doctor’s office called. I had an appointment with the specialist the next day.
I texted Cora Frost again that night. It was a brief request: I’d really like to meet you. Thanks.
The next day, I went to the specialist. Another tech, a young woman with black-framed glasses, used a fancier ultrasound that produced more detailed images. She clicked, marked places on the images, saved pictures. Then I met with the specialist, Dr. Barbara Moulton.
I had some kind of growth. They couldn’t be sure what it was until they did surgery.
Surgery! My life hadn’t even started. I finally had my first real job. And I was going to die.
I asked to put the surgery off for two weeks. Dr. Moulton scheduled the surgery for me at the reception desk. She said, “The nurse will give you the instructions for how to prepare and where to show up. You’ll need someone to drive you.” With a warm look in her eyes, she said, “Try not to worry too much. At your age, whatever we find will most likely be benign. You’ll feel better after it’s removed.”
I thanked her, took the instruction sheet from the nurse and went to my car to cry. On my way home, I knew exactly what I would do next: schedule a plane flight to Roswell. What did I have to lose?
Part III
Paloma
10
I had worked hard to get to this point. Graduated first in my class from the academy. Trained four additional years to become a time traveler on both the Anthropology and Medical teams.
I’d had all the blood work and other medical tests done. I’d pushed myself hard in physical training. I’d been on twenty BTTMs, the Brief Time Travel Missions in which we get into a pod and travel backward or forward a few seconds, later a few minutes and eventually a few hours.
The first missions backward were very odd. There were several times in which I’d landed back at a moment when I’d made a mistake. Of course, I wanted to fix it; but I knew that doing so would violate the Law of Noninterference, so I didn’t. The law had been made by the original Time Travel Council soon after time travel was invented. No one knew if it was necessary or not, but it was made on the basis of the multiverse theory that states there are many parallel universes in which every choice we’ve ever even thought about making is a reality. If we were to actually go back in time and change something we’d done, it could have unknown consequences for everything else in that time stream. The strongest example is if a person were to go back to a time before they were born and kill their parent, would they ever be born? If they were never born, what would happen to them? Would they suddenly disappear? And what about all the people whose lives they’d touched?
The law had been amended in 3020 after the mission of Xavier Blake and Ian Redding, two time travelers on the Anthropology team. They had gone back in time to World War I in order to study the first instance of war that had affected so many countries and people, it was viewed as a planet-wide war. They thought they had their coordinates set to an Italian city not yet involved in the fighting, but they landed instead in the middle of a battle that had never been covered in the history books or any historical papers.
Their time travel pod had landed directly in front of a FIAT 2000 tank. They popped their door open and Xavier stepped out. He was immediately shot and killed.
Ian worked fast, grabbing Xavier’s body and setting the controls for immediate return back home.
All time travel was canceled for a while until the scientific community could come up with guidelines for what to do in instances like this where there are two competing dangers to the integrity of the multiverse. In one instance, fighting back to save one’s life and killing someone from a past time period could change reality. On the other hand, if someone from a time period before the human gene pool was altered to create people with green skin captured one of us, that would definitely change history. Part of any mission is for us to stay hidden from all but a few people we feel we can trust by observing them before approaching them. No dead bodies are to be left behind. Of course, there have been accidents. The Roswell UFO Incident and several Area 51 incidents remain warnings in the textbooks we study.
The amendment to the original law basically states that in the event that a time traveler needs to save their own life or the life of a fellow traveler or needs to bring back the dead body of a traveler, they are to use their judgment regarding the Law of Noninterference. In other words, if they need to expose themselves to people from whom they would normally hide or if they need to kill a person from the past, it’s basically a case of let the multiverse be damned, we’ll take our chances.
The test that was the hardest for me is when I was sent back in time to right before my father’s death. We all had to do this. It was part of our training—to go back to a moment of intense loss or tragedy in our personal lives, to simply observe and do nothing. My father died from cancer, most likely caused by the aggression stimulant AgStim, one of the drugs designed to combat the overly calm disposition of modern people. The same mutations that scientists had made to the human genome hundreds of years earlier to allow our bodies to conduct partial photosynthesis, in order to reduce our need for food from a planet increasingly unable to supply enough for everyone to thrive, had a few side effects: green skin, greater passivity than previous generations, and increased empathy to the point where we could share thoughts. We were still animals. We continued to exhibit aggressive behavior and experience a wide range of negative emotions—anger, jealousy, hate—but none of that was particularly intense and we weren’t usually motivated to sustain it for too long. But some situations and jobs require aggression over longer periods of time. My father was a bit of a creative dreamer. He was a painter who discovered that AgStim allowed him to work longer hours. The longer hours he worked, the more paintings he could sell and the more our quality of life improved.
The Time Travel Administration (TTA) sent me back to three different points in time when I could have interfered with the timeline leading directly to my father’s death. The first mission took me back to the moment when he first decided to try AgStim. I was nine years old. AgStim was being heralded as a breakthrough invention in brain enhancement. The commercials that flickered across our virtual reality eyesets, the huge black lenses we popped over our eyes for direct neural access to the Information Hub, told us that AgStim was the invention that would advance the human race forward, just as the Photosynthesis Experiment had done for previous generations.
My dad came home from his art studio telling us that his doctor had prescribed AgStim for him because he’d been feeling tired. I asked him, “So, you’ll have more energy, Dad?”
He said, “That’s what they say. I should feel ten years younger and have the energy of a hummingbird drone.”
I’d run off to paint him a picture in which my dad was a hummingbird drone zipping around his office with a paintbrush poking out of the top like an antenna. My dad loved the picture. He took it to work and hung it in his studio the next day, my simple kid’s picture hanging next to the professional paintings he sold.
The TTA sent me back there. I had to be extremely careful not to let my family see me. I was to slip into the house through the back door and listen to the conversation from the kitchen. I’d remembered my mother wasn’t home that day and the younger me would be chatting with my dad and then off in my room painting the picture.
I wanted more than anything to walk in and explain the dangers of AgStim to my father and warn him about his future. When it was time to leave, I hopped into my pod with tears streaming down my face.
The next moment I was sent back to was a time when I was a teenager and my dad asked me to take his prescription to the pharmacy. His eyes had lost their shine and his hands were shaking.
I wanted to stop the adolescent me from filling the prescription, but I held back.
The most difficult mission of all, however, was when TTA sent me back in time to my father’s hospital deathbed disguised as a nurse.
I could have saved him. He didn’t die from AgStim itself. He would have survived, after going through enhanced withdrawal where his body would be monitored and replenished with everything it needed. They were about to begin the process when the computer malfunctioned and mixed a deadly combination of drugs that would be poured into an IV bag and delivered through a tube into his veins.
TTA put me through rigorous virtual reality training in which I relived this moment over and over again, and then relived it once more in a modified scene. I watched myself refill his water pitcher and chat with him as the other nurse hung the bag filled with poisonous liquid and started the drip. I watched my father’s body tremble and stiffen in a series of seizures. I watched him die within the large black contact lenses that obscured the rest of the world and made this my only reality. I was monitored the entire time. If I took off the lenses or ordered the program to stop running inside them, I would never become a time traveler. I had to pass this test.
The final test was going back in time to that same moment with a virtual reality headset over my face, the split-screen type that allows a doctor to see reality in one section and medical information in another, so that my father wouldn’t recognize me. I was to take his vital signs through medical instruments in the headset while the nurse hung the bag and started the drip. I was to say nothing unless asked a question. I was to change nothing in that instance of time. I was to leave the room shortly after my dad began seizuring. I was in no way allowed to help or report the problem to hospital personnel.
After surviving the incident and returning to the present time, I was debriefed. And then I was treated to the ritual that made all of this easier: two solid days of raucous partying and drinking with fellow trainees. Everyone got four days off following any of our Time Travel Missions: two for partying, two for recovering. It was, I believe, a ritual for reintegrating us back into our present time and having those of us who would be traveling through time on a regular basis bond as a group. Once we became full-fledged time travelers, we’d have clubs for that. It was important for us to realize how much we would need those and how much we should turn to them for support.
After I completed my training as a time traveler on both the Anthropology and Medical teams, I received my first real mission. Training started with a series of classes. The first explained the goal of the mission.
I woke up early, showered and dressed. Looking in the mirror, I liked what I saw. My skin had a healthy green color, none of the gray tinge I’d noticed after my final training mission. The luster had returned to my eyes, which were now bright green. The top of my head was green and smooth, no longer riddled with the rash I’d developed from the neoskin helmet. Next mission, I’d be wearing one of the older models, since I seemed to be allergic to the new ones.
Walking across the TTA grounds, I thought how lucky I was. This place was beautiful and uplifting. Trees towered over white concrete buildings. Flowers in a wide variety of colors filled numerous gardens. Fountains tossed water up into the air and statues stood in the midst of them. A rich forest completely surrounded the campus, bathing it in the perfume of trees. Food was plentiful here, as were vitamins and other health enhancements. The latest in medical advancements and human-machine interfaces were available to us. Our teachers and trainers were all highly qualified.
I had started thinking about whether or not I’d like to get an interface. My best friend, a time traveler in the History division, had recently had a chip implanted in her brain that would allow her to see historical events unfold as she read about them. It was a step beyond the VR eyesets or contact lenses, more immersive.
I passed a few mechanical engineers with robotic arms that allowed them to work more efficiently on the time travel pods and the TTA’s infrastructure. One bowed their head to say hello.
When I finally arrived at the instructional building, I sighed with happiness. Looking up at the tall white building in the shadow of living, breathing trees, sunlight forming a sparkling pool on the ground in front of it, I thought how long my journey had been to this point where I’d be given an actual mission.
I stepped from the quiet campus into a hallway bustling with recent graduates, everyone on their way to find out where they’d be going and the purpose of their assignment.
I found my classroom and got seated just a few minutes before the instructor entered the room and introduced herself. She was short, had green freckles and one of the latest fashion enhancements: long blue hair implants. She looked like someone from the past when human beings still had hair. That kind of thing was totally impractical for time travelers or astronauts, but it was perfectly fine for teachers. I kind of liked the look. It was starting to grow on me.
Folding her hands, she looked around the classroom. She smiled and said, “What a fine group of time travelers we have here! Welcome to Mission Instruction. I’m Dr. Raelynn Molyneux. Here’s how you spell it…” With a printing stick in her hand, she shined her name in the air, in bold yellow letters against a black background. A few heads nodded as they took pictures with their contact lenses.
She said, “I’m going to explain your mission this way: downloads into your contact lenses followed by instruction. You’ll need to turn off all tune-out devices in your implants or contact lenses right now in order to experience the entire lesson. I’ll tell you when to turn them back on.”
We saw footage of what was happening in other parts of the world and a history lesson on scientists saving our planet through genetic manipulation in the past. There were hints that so
mething similar would need to be done again.
I got chills partway through the lesson. What kind of manipulation were they talking about doing this time? The transition was never easy.
We saw video that had been preserved from the past: footage of raging storms and massive fires and floods. It was from the epoch labeled the Near Apocalypse by historians. To those who had lived in those times, it must have seemed like the actual Apocalypse, the coming of the end times.
A family stood in front of a burned house. The bottom section—made from wooden beams, as trees were abundant enough to do that back then—was charred and disintegrating. The interior was a pile of ash. Whatever the family had owned, all the things they had purchased and collected and treasured, had been turned to gray ash. A woman was holding up a few photographs and crying. She said to the reporter, “These are the only photos we found. All the rest were destroyed. This is all I have left of my kids’ childhoods.” The reporter asked, “Are your children OK?” Wiping tears from her face, the woman said, “Yes, thank God. Really, we’re incredibly blessed. We’re very lucky.”
From a different time and place, that sounded so odd. That woman and her family were some of the unluckiest people on the planet. Faced with overwhelming tragedy, human beings have the unique talent of only comparing it with worse tragedies, rather than with better, happier times. It’s a survival mechanism. We feel that we’re lucky, rather than cursed. We convince ourselves that our luck will only increase in the future. It helps us move forward. And for those who get stuck, we’ve invented all kinds of medicines and more recently, implants. Unfortunately, all of this dulls the potential impact that tragedy has for teaching us important lessons. The human race never seems to learn from all of its mistakes.
The reporter explained that one hundred and twelve homes in that family’s area had been destroyed by a forest fire that came down from the mountains and raged on for two weeks before firefighters got it under control. He said that luckily the fire was now completely out and families were returning to look for anything that remained of their home and belongings.