Penelope insisted she would immediately terminate. There was hardly anything to even terminate—one lousy cell. A ten-second procedure administered by a pharmaceutical drone could wipe her clean of any trace of me.
Irrelevant. Protocol is protocol. This is time travel. The human body is so complex, so thorny, the instruments so finely tuned, the energies at play so powerful—it’s all too complicated, too dangerous, too important. Even if Penelope terminated right away, her body had already undergone minute but detectable biological changes. Her system would have to be cleansed of the toxins used to end the pregnancy. They’d have to run diagnostics and correlate the new medical scans with the old ones to ensure this trillion-dollar mission couldn’t be thrown off track by something unexpected.
You know, unexpected like the lead chrononaut having unprotected sex with the idiot son of the genius who came up with the whole idea and convinced multiple corporate, governmental, and scientific interests to invest vast sums in his grand plan.
Even if they could delay for the two months it would take to confirm Penelope was mission ready—it wasn’t going to happen. This was both a publicly and privately financed initiative. Full transparency was mandated. My father couldn’t hide this from his investors. Nobody would approve Penelope after a lapse in judgment like this.
No, for Penelope, it was over. She would never go back in time.
The whole point of having a backup team is to ensure mission continuity. If anything happened that required a primary team member to be removed from duty, a contingency associate was trained, vetted, scanned, and ready to step in.
Penelope was no longer on the primary team. And I was her contingency associate. Which meant, according to protocol, I would take her place on the mission.
31
I don’t remember Penelope attacking me. I just remember the look on her face. I’d fantasized she might fall in love with me, but the only thing in her eyes was hate, ice-cold, white-hot. She screamed that I’d done this on purpose. That I wanted her place on the mission. That this was some sick plan and they couldn’t let me get away with it.
Is it weird that I was kind of flattered? That she thought I was cunning enough to concoct such a brilliantly sordid scheme. Did that mean she was, like, impressed with me and eventually some sort of emotional alchemy could spin hatred into love? We made a whole new life together and even if it was an accident there had to be something meaningful and connective in that literal bond . . . right?
The fact that I was having these inane thoughts while Penelope tried to beat me to death with her bare hands and the medical technicians flailed about trying to restrain her was ample evidence that I was not cunning enough to concoct, let alone execute, a plan like seducing and impregnating her so I could supplant her on the mission.
Didn’t she understand that I could care less about the mission? I hated time travel. It was my father’s obsession, not mine. I’d only stuck around as an understudy to be near her. I guess neither of us really knew the other.
Biology doesn’t require soul mates to do its business.
Security rushed in, pulled Penelope off of me, and carried her out of the room. The medical technicians swarmed over my minor abrasions with their skin-regeneration lamps, and as I sat there, my eyes caught a screen on the wall. The image showed a fuzzy-edged circle with a slight dimple on top.
It was the cell inside Penelope. Our cell.
32
Penelope and I sat in my father’s office as she explained to him, using indelicate clinical terms, what had happened last night, the steps she would take to resolve it, and why she was absolutely still the most qualified person to lead the mission team.
Hearing the person you slept with the night before describe the whole experience to your father while you sit there like a scolded child was horrifically uncomfortable, but much worse was morbidly witnessing Penelope try to turn the humiliating situation around. The veneer of calm rationality in which she’d somehow veiled herself since getting hauled out of the medical center kicking and yelling by the security team ten minutes earlier was so painfully brittle it was hard to be in the same room as her.
It was a remarkable turn of events, considering that eleven minutes ago all I wanted in the world was to be in the same room as her, any room, anywhere.
My father listened, his back to us, staring out the wall of windows that overlooked the main platform where the Chrono-Spatial Transport Apparatus—the time machine—sat. The big clock was almost out of numbers, forty-seven minutes until the moment my father had announced with such fanfare one year ago. A crowd of technicians stood around awkwardly waiting for instructions when they should’ve been running final preparations for mission launch.
I remember thinking how bullshit the whole thing was. I knew for a fact my father designed the apparatus so it could be operated by just one person. The technicians were all for show. So the investors felt they got their money’s worth. Sure, each person on the platform had a specific task, but all functions were automated. When the calculations are this precise, human intervention is a hazard. The plan was always for my father to run the control interface himself. He was the only one he trusted to do it right.
These are the things you think about when your future is coming apart right in front of you.
My father interrupted Penelope’s scattershot monologue. He said he understood her point of view but it didn’t matter. Chrononauts required lucid judgment under intense pressure, where even a seemingly inconsequential lapse could have cataclysmic results. The simple fact that she could make such a disastrous personal error on this of all days terminated her involvement. She couldn’t be trusted, he said. She was not trustworthy.
Rattled, Penelope said it was very convenient I’d be taking her place—his own son. At which point my father looked just, like, completely disgusted. He said there was no way he’d send me on the mission. The experiment was now on indefinite hold.
Today was the day my father had been working toward for three decades.
I didn’t even say anything. But I guess the expression on my face was enough to set him off. After thirty-two years of cool disinterest, I felt the heat of his anger. As a kid, all I wanted was for him to care enough to get mad, but now his genuine rage just washed over me. His eyes had a watery quality I’d never noticed before. His skin was paunchier under the chin. His voice went up an octave when he yelled and it kind of undercut the thunder of his fury.
The gist of what he said is he wished I was never born.
That everything would’ve been better if I didn’t exist. Listless, aimless, useless, my life had no value. Worse, I’d ruined the lives of my betters. Namely, him and to a much lesser extent Penelope. That my mother was lucky she died before the true immensity of my failure was revealed.
All of a sudden it sunk in—my father thought that what I did with Penelope was all about him. An act of patricidal aggression. Penelope Weschler was his anointed one, our mission leader, the chrononaut to whom all others were compared and found wanting, and the night before the experiment that’s supposed to cement his scientific legacy not only do I have sex with her but I get her pregnant. Like I was claiming her.
To be honest, I’d never considered that there might be a thorny root of vengeance burrowed deep inside my longing and desire. No, that was too messed up even for me. So I was totally goddamn outraged. Like, of course my arrogant, egocentric, cheerless father would try to take this from me and make it his. Maybe we find the most offense in the truths we can’t admit.
I decided it was time to ask the fundamental question of my life.
“Why did you even have me?”
“Because I had work to do,” my father said, “and your mother was lonely.”