CHAPTER FOUR
DAY 10. EVENING
Blood oozed from his foot onto the floor. “Dude! What are you doing?”
“Just wait,” he said, leaning forward, pressing his fingers inside the cut. Finally, he held up something silver and bloody between his fingers. “In the year I’m from, we all have memory files. Usually behind the ear.” He tilted his head and I had a good view of the one-centimeter scar behind his ear.
“Here.” I spotted a sink in the corner of the room and ran over to it, grabbing handfuls of paper towels. “Use these. That’s gonna bleed for a while.”
“When everything started going bad,” Blake said, pressing paper towels to his foot with one hand and wiping the floor clean with the other, “Grayson took out my original memory file, put a fake one behind my ear, and then we hid the real one. I needed to remember what happened. To have those thoughts with me at all times just in case. With the others, I’ve told them my story. But I want to show you these instead so that our world and where we came from makes more sense to you.”
“I doubt anything’s going to make much sense to me.”
“Well, it’s possible I have other motivations outside of Grayson’s goals for showing these to you,” Blake said, wiping the tiny metal chip clean. “But we’ll get to that part later.”
He stood up and walked carefully on the ball of his right foot. I waited quietly while he fiddled with a computer and slid the chip into a tiny slot.
“Just so you know, in case you need it for anything, this room is virtually soundproof.” One of the blue screens turned black. “Some of these files I recorded onto the chip myself as a journal entry and some were plucked from various regions of my brain. I couldn’t save everything. I just kept the important ones.”
A robot voice filled the tiny space, “December 8, 2873. Audio recording by host.”
Then Blake’s voice came through, though it sounded a little different, younger maybe. And the words moved across the black screen accompanying the audio.
I never imagined my parents would be so eager to hand over their fifteen-year-old son to the U.S. government. But boy were they ever. It happened on my way to school two days ago. My outer gear is fourth-hand, passed down from my three older brothers, and has lost its wind-resistant ability. The air was bitterly cold, my eyes half-closed, and I could hardly put one foot in front of the other, when suddenly, sunlight hot enough to be July beat down on me. It took me several seconds to realize what had happened. What I’d just done. Unlike my parents, elation wasn’t my first reaction. It was utter panic. I didn’t know how I’d done it and how to get back.
My legs had never moved as fast as they did in that first time jump. I tore my outerwear open as I ran home, bursting through the front door, yelling for them to tell me what day it was. My mother took one look at my clothing and dropped the glass dish she had been holding. My father came running into the kitchen after hearing the glass shatter.
Turns out I had jumped almost exactly three months into the past. I couldn’t even spit out the words to reflect my fear of getting stuck there or just of the unknown because Mom had already picked up her telecom, making the one call every parent dreams of making. And even in my panic, I did feel a small surge of pride as she said the words to the dispatcher on the other line, “My son has just come from the future.” The way she said my son meant something entirely different now. Before it just meant one of four nearly identical boys, almost exactly three years spacing each of us apart. Now these words seemed to separate me from the three shadows I had chased my entire life.
My moment of pride only lasted a few minutes, until my father returned with a slightly tanner, sweaty, and confused version of me. This was how they proved it. The only way to know for sure. Not that time travelers are discovered all the time. I’m only the seventh in the history of mankind. No wonder my parents are so proud.
As I stood looking at this barely younger version of myself, I couldn’t grasp much else. The government workers showed up almost instantly. Their navy uniforms crisp and stiff in an inhuman way. They recorded the details I gave them—when did you leave? Approximately what time? What was your location?
Then they gave my family and the other me memory injections so we would spend the next three months knowing nothing of what would happen on December 6, 2873. Once the shock had worn off and reality set in, I knew how to get back.
The cold wind returned, freezing the air into my lungs, but still, as I turned to walk back home, I slowed my pace, knowing they were there. Waiting to take me away. Waiting to make me the envy of every boy and girl in my class. Possibly the envy of everyone in the country. Everyone except the five others like me.
I only had ten minutes to pack my bags and say good-bye before being teleported to an apartment in the nation’s capital, New York City. The apartment is twice the size of my family’s home, and instead of sharing space with five others, I’m only sharing with one. His name is Thomas and he looks about ten years older than me. I only met him briefly this morning. He came in with a navy-suit worker and told me to try not to feel overwhelmed and that we’d talk later. That was hours ago and now I really just want to call home, but I can’t find a telecom anywhere.
I guess receiving this honor, having this rare talent, requires a great deal of patience. A virtue I have yet to acquire.
* * *
Blake hit a button on the control panel and the words froze on the screen.
“So Thomas is one of the originals! That explains why he’s able to do the complete jumps so easily. He can go back and forth in the same timeline like regular time travel. Is that the only kind of jump you guys do?” I drilled Blake. “Or can you bounce off World B, too? I know I’m the one who opened that portal, and I also know that cloned time travelers have jumped over there.”
“Until your dad arrived and told us about you, I hadn’t really heard of any other way of time travel besides the complete jump, as you call it. And yes, Thomas is one of the original time travelers and we are the strongest. Last I heard, the clones hadn’t been able to come even close to matching us.”
“Except Emily.”
He nodded solemnly. “She’s a special project. Thomas’s own brainchild.”
I knew this already, but thinking about Thomas’s bringing a child into the world under those pretenses left me completely disgusted. I had to change the subject. “So … you were only fifteen and you had to leave home. That sucks. And living with Thomas, what was that like?”
Blake’s eyebrows lifted. “You ready to hear more?”
I nodded. There was never any way to stop my curiosity when it had latched on to something. I had no idea what Blake wanted me to get from this info, but I wanted to know about this world where time travelers naturally occurred and were worshipped and adored by all. That would have made my life a hell of a lot easier. Except the living-with-Thomas part.
The audio robot began again and I watched the words on the screen, reading them quickly.
DECEMBER 14, 2873.
AUDIO RECORDING BY HOST.
Everyone has been so nice to me this past week, even the navy-suit workers. Well, they aren’t exactly nice, but they’re not mean either like when they first came to my house after my mom’s call. The scientists in the lab, the ones taking all my data and doing test after test, have bent over backwards to get me everything I need and a whole bunch of stuff I don’t. Thomas keeps asking how I’m doing, telling me how special I am, that he was seventeen years old before he did his first time jump, and before me, he was the youngest reported time traveler in history. So, not only am I one of a handful in the world who can travel through time, I’m now the youngest, at fifteen, ever to time-travel.
Thomas thinks in another thirty or forty years, we’ll have small children who can time-travel. I know he’s twenty-five and much older than me, but still, I don’t ever spend time guessing what might happen in thirty or forty years. Thomas is like that, though. He sits in on conferences with all the other scientists working for the government, studying the Tempus gene, and it’s like he’s one of them. I’m so behind. And so immature. Thomas is very well respected among the entire crew of government workers. He has this aura that shines the minute he walks in a room. I need to work harder, to study more, so that Thomas and the others will have just as much respect for me.
A couple of days ago, I met two of the other travelers: Nora and Jean. They live in our building downtown. Nora is twenty-six and Jean is eighteen. Jean has the brightest red hair and green eyes I’ve ever seen. Thomas says it’s a sign that these physical traits could be a future indicator for identifying time travelers before their first jump. I just think she’s really pretty which means, like with all the pretty girls at my former school, I’m going to have a lot of trouble talking to her. Nora is super nice and almost motherly to Jean, and now to me, too. So, even though she’s also very attractive, I don’t have any trouble talking to her because she reminds me of my own mother and fits a little better into that category than any other.
So far, I’ve been showered with gifts, expensive clothing (brand-new, not handed down from my brothers), the most amazing entertainment devices that my family could never afford, not to mention the food … better and larger in quantity than anything I’ve ever had before. But I still miss my family, my friends, my hometown, my school and all its quirks. Thomas says it’s best to sever contact, at least in the beginning, but I really wish there was a way to have both worlds.
I wonder if they miss me, too?
* * *
“Every time I’ve seen Thomas,” I said once Blake had frozen the words again, “he’s been much older than twenty-five. Probably thirty or thirty-five. Maybe even a little older. When did he change? He seemed all right at twenty-five.”
Blake stared over my shoulder, deep in thought. “It wasn’t like you’d think, a sudden shift due to one influence. I think he was always working toward a different goal than everyone else, but his ideas, his theories and views of the world were so close to being right and yet so wrong at the same time that I couldn’t see it, not for a while. And as he got smarter and more powerful, more respected, it made changing our system easier.”
“Lots of gray areas,” I concluded. “That’s why you can’t pinpoint one moment that made everything go wrong. Sometimes I wonder if time travel is wrong, and by wrong I mean unethical. I know your ability evolved naturally, but just because we all have the capability to murder someone doesn’t mean we should do it.”
“I agree a hundred percent,” Blake said.
“Where are Jean and Nora? Why aren’t they trapped here?”
“Jean’s infatuation with Thomas led her to follow him. But I know deep down she doesn’t share his beliefs,” he said. “And Nora … I don’t know exactly where she is but Grayson does and I’m pretty sure she’s safe.”
The words moved again as the computer voice said the date.
FEBRUARY 1, 2874.
MEMORY EXTRACTED FROM HOST.
Thomas grasped my arm and I could almost feel the weight of his effort—the brainpower it took to make this kind of jump and take me along in the process. I felt the warm air before I even opened my eyes. Then I heard it. Both Thomas and Dr. Ludwig, who’s sort of like our brainpower coach, prepared me for the noise, but I had no idea it would be this loud.
Cars. I’d read about them in the education files on my computer, but seeing them move so recklessly, people running in front of them, I wasn’t at all prepared.
“It’s chaotic, isn’t it?” Thomas said, releasing my arm and then resting a hand on my shoulder.
“I don’t even know what to look at first.”
He pointed to a building right in front of us. The sign on the outside said NYU MEDICAL CENTER. “This is the 1987 version of a medical-treatment facility.”
“Okay, but what are we doing here?”
Several people darted around us as we stood in the center of a sidewalk, throwing us dirty looks as if we had ruined their day by slowing them down.
“Don’t worry about them,” Thomas said. “You’ll never see any of these people again. And to answer your question, this is why we’re here.” He pulled several small vials of a cloudy white substance from his pants pocket and held them out for me to see before stowing them away again. “You understand how the Tempus gene works, right?”
“Yeah … I mean, mostly,” I stammered, still distracted by the honking and screeching going on around me. I fought off the urge to cover my ears. “It’s not here in this year, right? Not a fully formed Tempus gene, anyway. It’s first discovered in the year…”
“2234,” Thomas finished for me, not carrying one bit of the condescending tone some of the navy-suit workers had whenever I didn’t know the answer to a question they asked. “But it took all the way until early 2800 for time travel to show up and that woman was thirty-four when she discovered her ability. You and I are proof that the gene is evolving over time. Eventually, the entire human race may possess the ability to time-travel and possibly at an age even younger than fifteen.”
“Wait.” I’d known there were still two remaining time travelers I had yet to meet, but I hadn’t really thought about the age difference being so huge. “One of us is that old? Is she still alive?”
Thomas grinned. “Stick with me, kid, and you’ll get the real answers. And no, she’s not alive anymore. She passed away a couple years ago. And the Tempus gene shows up in our history maps in earlier years because of missions like this one. But don’t worry, you and I are still part of the original group. Nothing can change that. We’ll always remember that information because we hold all the versions of our lives within our minds even if we alter history. Even if we alter the future.”
“But what are the vials for?”
“The Tempus gene,” Thomas said as he took a step across the sidewalk and pulled open the door to the medical center. “We’re introducing it earlier, hoping the future looks different.”
I couldn’t move for several seconds even though so many people would have loved for me to vacate the middle of the sidewalk. This wasn’t a small little adventure for the fun of discovery and creating accurate records of our country’s history. This was big. Very big. And I couldn’t believe Thomas would allow me to take part in it.
Finally, Thomas reached out a hand and pulled me through the door. “I had a feeling you’d be impressed with this mission. But don’t forget the number one rule of time travel … always blend in with your surroundings.”
Thomas breezed past security guards and official-looking people like he owned the place. I saw several men and women squeezing themselves into what I knew from studying history in school was called an elevator. Thomas shook his head and opened another door, leading to a flight of stairs.
“Never trust technology in this year,” he said in a low whisper. “Those things are held by cables and a pulley system. Can you believe how they pack themselves inside, like there’s no risk?”
We went down three flights before reaching a door with a security code that Thomas had obviously been given. He used another code to enter a lab where a guy, probably a few years older than Thomas, stood wearing a white coat and safety goggles.
“Always taking the stairs, huh?” the guy said, not even looking up at us.
“I think President Healy would be a bit perturbed with me if I killed myself riding in an elevator when a perfectly good set of stairs was available,” Thomas said.
The guy turned his back completely on us and stuck his face in what looked like a microscope—a device I’d learned about in history class.
“Of course, President Healy. Wouldn’t want to do anything to disappoint him,” the guy said.
Even I could hear the edge in his voice. Thomas cleared his throat as if to alert him that they weren’t alone. “Grayson, this is our newest recruit, Blake.”
Grayson looked up at me suddenly, and his smile was warm and didn’t carry any of the edge he’d had just seconds ago. He stuck out a gloved hand to shake mine. “Nice to meet you, Blake. Thomas mentioned a newbie a while back, but I didn’t realize how young you were. You can’t be more than—”
“Fifteen,” Thomas finished. “Broke my record by two years.”
I stood up straighter, trying to grow instantly. “I’ll be sixteen in a month.”
Grayson smiled and it went all the way to his eyes like my mother’s smiles. I hadn’t seen an expression that honest since I left home. Impassiveness is something the government instills in all workers.
“How are you getting along so far?” Grayson asked me.
“Good … I mean … this is my first mission, but it’s been pretty exciting these last couple of months.” I got a good look at Grayson’s face now that he had turned toward me. His hair color was light brown like Thomas’s and his eyes were also blue like both Thomas’s and mine. The similarities were too great to ignore. It was like seeing what I might look like in ten years with Thomas and in twenty years with Grayson.
“But it must have been hard for you,” Grayson said. “Leaving home. I was nineteen and already on my own. Thomas was raised in the White House, he didn’t need any adjusting. But you’re just a boy.”
Thomas rested a hand on my shoulder again. “That’s why Dr. Ludwig is taking it slow with him. It’ll be a while before he’s doing his own missions.”
Grayson stared at me for a long moment, then his face formed the emotionless smile I had become used to in the last couple of months. “Well, let me show you what we’re doing here today.” He turned to Thomas, who dropped his hand from my shoulder and removed the vials from his pocket. “Thank you. Now, Blake, we have sixteen women who will undergo a procedure called in vitro fertilization in this hospital today. Basically, traditional methods of conception, in this year, anyway, haven’t been successful for them and they’ve sought the assistance of a fertility doctor.”
Grayson pointed to his chest, indicating that he was the fertility doctor these women sought out. He walked over to the center lab table and pointed to a small dish with clear liquid in it. “All of the women today have husbands who have donated specimens—sperm—to be joined with their wives’ eggs. You understand how this process works, correct?”
I gave a quick nod and felt my face heating up at the mention of conception, though this was a very technical scientific version that didn’t seem to involve contact between the two parents at all. But still, my mind couldn’t help but wander to thoughts of more traditional methods, and I hoped with all my power that these thoughts wouldn’t show up in the mission report.
“What we’re going to do today,” Grayson said, “is supplement the fathers’ specimens with that of a man carrying the Tempus gene in your present.”
“Do they know this?” I asked. “The parents? Won’t they know that there’s no genetic link between the real father and the child, at least after it’s born?”
Grayson nodded his approval. “Very good. You’re a smart one. All my patients sign a clause as part of our research program. The procedure cost is more affordable for a larger percentage of families, and in return, we get their permission to use a substitute specimen as needed to increase the probability of successful conception.”
“In other words,” Thomas added, “we tell the families that the father’s semen has a low sperm count, whether it does or not, and they consent to a donor because having a child is that important to them. Something I can’t even fathom, but it’s a very useful motivation for the purpose of our experiment.”
I was so blown away by the complexity of this project and the importance of our missions that I barely spoke for the rest of the trip. I watched Grayson carefully as he went through the steps to prepare each specimen for the procedure.
Later, when Thomas and I returned to our apartment, after being debriefed in the White House by Dr. Ludwig and his team, I finally asked him the question that had been on my mind since first being introduced to Grayson.
“So, is Grayson’s mission a long one? Like a few months? He seemed very comfortable in 1987.”
“He’s been on the same mission in the past for two years and hasn’t done a time jump since,” Thomas said. “Before that, he had a bad habit of using his time travel for personal reasons. He jumped too often and sustained an injury. His last jump for this current mission nearly killed him. The risk of bringing him back was too much. Dr. Ludwig decided that he needed to stay and be the field man for the Tempus gene experiment. He still has a chance to heal; it’s very possible he will in a year or two.”
“Wow … I don’t even—”
Thomas waved my response off as if to say there was no need to feel sorry for him. Maybe because he did it to himself? Or maybe because he was happy in 1987? How could he enjoy living in that chaotic and dangerous world?
“Now we need to verify our impact,” Thomas said, opening my handheld computer and holding it out for me. “What was that year I mentioned earlier? The first detection of the Tempus gene?”
“2234,” I said right away.
“Correct.” He pointed to the tiny screen in front of me. “Look it up, again.”
I typed in the question and nearly dropped the computer onto the hard floor. “2208 … how … I mean … we did this? Changed the date by twenty-six years?”
Thomas’s face split into a wide grin. “Yes, we did this. This is why you’re here, Blake. Do you understand how important you are now? How much of an impact you can have on creating a future that is bigger and better than every man and woman in 1987 could ever imagine?”
All I could do was nod and try to hide my shock. Could I really be that special? That important? Me, the fourth son of Jessica and Stephen? A hero to my entire country?
And I knew right then I’d do anything to make sure I didn’t let them down. This was too important.
* * *
“So, that’s what Grayson meant when he said he’d been a doctor in two different centuries,” I said. “I was born there, you know, at NYU Medical Center. Me and Courtney both, obviously. Wouldn’t it be so weird if Grayson was running around the hospital at the same time as Dr. Melvin?”
“Dr. Melvin?” Blake said, suddenly looking over at me, now seated in the only chair in the room. “Andrew Melvin?”
“Yeah, that’s him,” I said. “Why? You know him, right? The creator of experiment Axelle?”
I swallowed back the bile drifting up to my throat as the image of Dr. Melvin dead on the floor of his office replayed in my mind.
“Yeah, we’ve met once,” Blake said with a sigh. “Your friend Mason is a product of the Tempus Gene Project. He was conceived in Grayson’s lab and delivered by him. That’s why your side wanted Mason.”
“They put him in the CIA really young,” I said. “And he’s a genius, I thought that was why.”
Blake shook his head. “They knew he’d be a genius in your present long before he joined the CIA. Most likely his identity was revealed and they took him to protect him from being studied.”
“Wow, so everyone in your present is smarter? That’s so crazy,” I said. “Do you know any more spawn of the Tempus Gene Project?”
Blake’s face clouded with some emotion I couldn’t nail down. Grief or longing or just sadness. Whichever it was, it instantly made him look five years older.
“Just one,” he said.
My thoughts shifted suddenly and I eyed Blake with suspicion. “Wait a second … Grayson’s a doctor.”
“Uh-huh…?”
“If he wanted you to show me this memory file, he would have cut it out of your foot himself and stitched it up properly,” I said. “And wouldn’t he have wanted you to show it to my dad weeks ago?”
Blake’s mouth fell open. He was caught. Obviously, his being taken from home at fifteen to work for the government didn’t include any form of CIA-type training because he had made too many mistakes to count since we walked into this room.
A knock on the door startled both of us. As if to answer my question, Blake ejected the memory chip, hid it in the bottom of his sock, and stuffed his foot in there before putting the shoe back on. “Yeah…?”
He flung the door open and Lonnie stood there, taking in both of us. “I thought you preferred female lovers, Blake.”
He rolled his eyes and laughed at Lonnie, then turned to me. “We have a joke about this room. It’s the only truly private soundproof area on Misfit Island.”
“We’ve affectionately named it the reproduction room,” Lonnie said. “Because it’s ironic, or at least it was before all of you got here. See, Grayson prefers men, or one man, at least, who unfortunately died before Grayson was trapped here. Sasha is a ladies’ lady, which leaves only me and Blake to make special time-travel babies, but how old did we decide I am?”
“Fifty-one,” Blake said, giving her a very nonromantic smile.
“Fifty-one,” Lonnie repeated with a sigh. “Way too old to conceive with little man Blake here. And pretty soon, way too old to conceive with anyone.”
This conversation had gone in a wild direction but neither of them seemed at all uncomfortable with the subject matter.
Blake leaned on one elbow and looked Lonnie over. “I think you look great for fifty-one. I would guess thirty-five if I didn’t know better.”
She rubbed the top of Blake’s hair. “You are wonderful. Keep it up, kid. Also, Grayson needs your help skinning some fish.”
Blake and I headed out of the room and back outside. The cool air bit us right away and I couldn’t believe the shift in temperature.
“Sorry about that,” Blake said, as we walked toward the lake. “Grayson and Lonnie are so blunt and open about everything, I’ve become desensitized to all their jokes, though there is a root to them—the time-travel-baby concept. It’s not the first time Dr. Ludwig would instigate something like this, but if that was his original plan, he messed up big-time. He couldn’t have picked a worse combination of four people to achieve that goal. Other than the fact that Grayson can deliver a baby.”
Blake glanced around again, looking for any listening ears. “We’ll finish this soon, okay? I didn’t mean to trick you and I do have a point to all this.”
I decided that I wanted to wait around to find out what that purpose was. “Good.”
“Nobody’s going to care that I’m telling you these things but Grayson might suspect that I’m not coping with the reality of being stuck here. It’s not that exactly.” He looked around, as if checking for any sign of the others. “If anyone asks, I was impressing you with technology from your future in the control room, okay?”
“Got it,” I said with a nod.
As I walked toward the building where I’d been sleeping for the past ten days, I noticed Courtney and Mason sitting close together on the porch of a nearby cabin. Their heads were ducked and they were engaged in some kind of whispered conversation.
I eyed them suspiciously and then went inside to search the supply cabinets for tweezers since my hands were still covered in splinters from gripping the wood during the memory-gas episode. Exhaustion from my first day venturing out hit me hard and the second I found the supplies I needed, I collapsed onto my back on the bed, holding my hand in the air to pluck the bits of wood from it.
“There you are,” Dad said.
I looked up to see him standing in the doorway. He slid inside the room and shut the door. “Hey, Dad … I’m just removing the leftovers of the memory-gas drama.”
He sat in the chair across from the bed. “Yeah, that was pretty rough. Only my third experience with that.”
“And the first time you had to lie about what you saw?” I prompted.
He sighed, sinking back into his chair. “Yes.”
I set the tweezers down and sat up. “You saw Courtney, right?”
His face paled. “Yes.”
“I figured.” I let out a breath, knowing exactly why he had to lie. That wasn’t the moment to tell Courtney what had happened to her. What most likely would happen all over again. My heart ached at the thought and I forced it away for now. “I saw Adam dying.”
“I see,” Dad said. “You thought it might be hard on Holly, bringing up Adam?”
“Yeah.” I flopped onto my back again, staring up at the ceiling. “She was so weird when I found her in the cabin, totally aware. She wasn’t in the hallucination anymore and she didn’t want me coming near her. I don’t think her delusion included Adam’s dying, it just doesn’t fit with her reaction, but I’m not sure why.”
“She worked for the other side, Jackson,” Dad said. “She was trained by the other side. We can’t even begin to know what Eyewall put her through.”
I rolled on my side, staring at Dad. “You’re right.”
Maybe someone like Holly, trained as our enemy, would like to see the proof that Blake presented me with today? Maybe she needed to be in on our next secret session.