The Children Who Time Lost (39 page)

“But where is it?” Doug said. “Here in the states?”

“Perhaps.”

Doug hit the top of the SUV with his fists. “What do you mean
perhaps
? Aren’t you supposed to be this double agent who can help us? How can you not know what operates the portals you helped build?”

Curtis placed his chin on his palm. “Look, there’s something you need to know.” He stared out the window for a moment and then faced us again. “All of this—our species coming to Earth, the infertility, time travel—all of it is because of one man. One human man.”

“What do you mean?” Doug said. “Who?”

“No one really knows. Only a handful of Shriniks know his true identity. He could be anyone. We just know him as the Orchestrator.”

“The Orchestrator?” I said.

Curtis nodded.

“But you’ve never seen him?” Michael said. “Or know what he looks like?”

Curtis nodded again.

“Then how do you know he exists?” I said.

“Because he’s the reason I’m here.”

I frowned. “I don’t understand. Your people sent you here for him? Why? And I thought you came to fix the portal and collect something valuable.”

Curtis frowned and leaned back in his seat. “Just bear with me. I’ll explain everything.” He cleared his throat. “The legend states that when the Orchestrator was just a kid, he was the reason my species started coming to Earth in vast numbers. I couldn’t tell you how old he was exactly, but from what I’ve heard, he was around thirteen.”

“When was this?” Doug asked.

“Again, I don’t know too much. I’m only quoting urban legends I’ve heard about him.” He ruffled his hair. “Anyway, the story goes that a Shrinik saved him from a car crash that killed his parents. At the time, our people couldn’t stay on Earth for long, because our bodies couldn’t adapt to your atmosphere, but the Shrinik couple who saved him stayed. They raised the boy in the forest like their own son, and the boy loved them despite what they looked like. At the time, Shriniks couldn’t take on the form of humans.

“Both Shriniks eventually died, but before they did, they placed the boy in the charge of the male Shrinik’s brother, who came to Earth to look after him with his own family.”

“How?” Doug said.

Curtis gave him a bewildered look.

“How did your kind get to Earth back then?”

“Spaceships. We’ve been here for a long time. The tropical storms you’ve had for the last fifty years dating to 2013—earthquakes, meteor showers—we’ve always used them to sneak onto Earth. But we died after prolonged exposure to your atmosphere.”

“And the crater in the Nevada desert,” I said. “That was definitely you, right?”

“As I said, one of our spaceships.”

“Go on,” Michael said. “What happened after the other Shriniks came to look after the boy?”

“Well they couldn’t stay for long, but they all grew very fond of the boy. They remained hidden and sent the boy back to society, where a Texan family fostered him. But he didn’t go too far and was back before long. He became an adopted Shrinik. One of us in human skin. I don’t really know much after that, but after time travel was invented in the future, a number of influential Shriniks went back to the year 2010. By this time, he was a man, but his identity was only known by a select few. It is said that he grew to be a brilliant scientist who studied at the best universities.”

“2010,” I said. “That was … That was three years ago—from now, obviously. This time line.”

Curtis nodded. “That’s correct. Right now, the Orchestrator’s work for my people is probably still in the early stages.”

Michael lifted his hand. “Go on.”

“They told him their future plans. And he agreed to help them.”

“And what was their plan?” I said.

“Some people from my time say they just wanted to share the Earth with your type. They believed the Orchestrator could help us stay on Earth for longer and maybe take on human form. But there were others who thought they only wanted to see Earth destroyed.”

“What do you think?” Michael said.

“I couldn’t tell you if they were planning for the war in 2086 when they first came looking for the Orchestrator in 2010 or if they really wanted peace. You have to remember that the war might have happened in a different time tangent. We might have been at peace with each other when they first traveled back to see the Orchestrator. But going back and forth in time might have changed things, eventually leading to war. Anyway, whatever their reasons were, the Orchestrator agreed to help them. They took him to the future with them to work with the better technology there. Of course, having unlimited funds didn’t hurt either. The Orchestrator spent a number of months in the future and then returned to 2010 and started work. His task was to make Shriniks look human from birth. After many failed experiments, he succeeded on the twelfth of January, 2013. He helped deliver the first Shrinik in human skin.”

My eyes widened. “How?”

“Science,” Curtis said.

We all looked at him without speaking.

“Consider the DNA molecules of you humans,” he said. “It replicates pretty flawlessly because of the cellular proofreading that takes place. We were the same as you, perfect replication of our own DNA. In order to become more like humans, we needed to introduce flaws, errors in the DNA replication to make each one different. Only that way would our evolution happen.” He cleared his throat. “Think back to when your world first began. Back then, DNA replication was filled with flaws. That’s how your species generally evolved. The Orchestrator couldn’t alter our DNA in the future. It was too perfect. But right now, in this time period, he can. And after succeeding with babies, doing the same with adults wasn’t too difficult.”

I frowned. “But wouldn’t it have made sense if he went way farther in the past?”

Curtis shook his head. “The technology wasn’t ready until around 2010. And on our home planet—”

“Adononis, right?” I said.

Curtis nodded. “On Adononis, what would seem like eighty years for you was more like a thousand for us, so sending our children back to this time was perfectly fine.”

We were silent again.

“It was a monumental feat. The DNA was a near-perfect match for humans. The Shriniks were amazed. Adults and children were able to take human form. It was brilliant. But the newborn babies died some weeks after returning to the future. They still couldn’t acclimatize them to Earth’s atmosphere. Attempts to create more babies were unsuccessful, but that wasn’t the case in the future as the significance of what the Orchestrator achieved grew over time. But according to rumors, they needed him to keep working on it for that to be so. So whenever they could, they sent babies back from the future.”

“So what you’re saying,” Michael said, “is that the Shriniks sent the babies that the Orchestrator’s work helped create back to the past so they could be born in the first place.”

Curtis frowned. “If the rumors are to be believed, yes.”

I mussed my hair. “Time travel is just crazy.”

Doug sniggered. “I won’t argue with that.”

“So the spaceship that crashed,” I said. “Was that really an accident? I mean, it crashing through the portal and all?”

Curtis nodded. “That was a result of time travel gone bad.”

“What does that mean?” I said.

“My people created time travel for one purpose, to alter our DNA so we could live on Earth, but unfortunately, the policing wasn’t perfect. We had a number of rogue travelers who made unauthorized trips back and forth. At the moment, we only know of three, but no one’s been able to capture them.” He reached into his pocket and showed us passport-style photos of three men. One had a round face and a bald head. The other two had narrow faces and dark hair.

“Brian Jacobs, Paul Franks and Ben Parson. They changed the time tangents significantly, to the point that this reality is probably a fifth version of what you would have experienced if time travel were never invented. The meteor crashing here was one of those anomalies. Unfortunately, we couldn’t figure out why it happened, so we decided to hide the truth.”

I faced the road and stared at the sky. What was real? Which timeline was I living? Did Dylan even still exist, or was he now just a memory?

“It sounds like most of your people just want peace,” Doug said.

I turned and faced them again.

“That is correct,” Curtis said. “But there are also those who want war.”

“But how can we stop them?” I said.

“There’s only one way. We must put an end to time travel altogether.”

We sat in silence. I saw Michael frowning. “What about the infertility?” he said. “What really happened there?”

Curtis grimaced. “That was another example of rogue time travel. The initial intent was to experiment on humans with a drug that could significantly alter the reproductive gene in our attempts to modify our DNA. But somehow the time tangent changed, and in this reality the drug was weaponized and led to infertility. The Lotto was our way to make up for that.”

I faced Michael. “That’s probably why they approached you.”

Michael nodded.

Curtis frowned at Michael. “You?”

“Yes. I helped develop Crixanipam.”

Curtis’ eyes widened. “Why?”

Michael shook his head and looked at the floor. “I didn’t know what it was, but the government said they destroyed everything we synthesized.”

“But someone else worked on it with him,” I said. “Someone from the future.” I pulled my phone out and searched for Jarrod’s picture. I showed it to Curtis. “Do you know this man?”

Curtis frowned. “I have seen him a number of times. He’s a senior figure in the time-travel program.”

“So he’s in 2086 as well?”

Curtis nodded.

God, who the hell is Jarrod?
“Is he human?”

Curtis frowned. “Come to think of it, no one really knows. A few of the people in my unit think he’s one of the rogue travelers and one of the main people pushing the agenda of all-out war with the humans. But, of course, we can’t prove any of this.”

I squeezed my head.
What if…
“What if it’s him?”

They all looked at me.

“This mysterious man you’ve been talking about, the Orchestrator—what if it’s Jarrod? I mean he’s got to be the one who gave them the drugs. Maybe he’s been in on it with them all along.”

“I don’t buy that for a second,” Michael said. “The man I knew couldn’t pull something that big off.”

“I agree,” Curtis said. “This man, Jarrod, may well be in cahoots with the rogue travelers or could even be one himself, but I doubt he’s the Orchestrator. He’s too much in the spotlight to be. But if what you say about the drug is true, he’ll probably soon start helping to pollute your water supply with Crixanipam. Infertility will arrive in less than three years.”

“But how do you know it’s not the Orchestrator who would do that?” I said.

“They will never get him directly involved in something like that. Too risky.”

“What if we stopped Jarrod?” Doug said. “What then?”

“Queue in another time-tangent change,” Curtis said.

None of us spoke.

“We have to be careful of what we let play out and what we don’t,” Curtis said. “Don’t you think I wished I wasn’t fighting a war with my kind? But that’s the time line I’m in, and there’s nothing I can do about it. The key to all this is the Orchestrator. Odds are, he knows who all the rogue travelers are and is most likely playing everyone, including the humans. When you find out what his plans are, then you’ll know what you’re up against.” He looked at me. “He’s also the key to finding your son.”

We all sat in silence for a while, the traffic on the highway all I could hear. I turned around after and stared at Curtis. His eyes were closed, but his fidgeting told me he was still awake. “Why did they wait till 2022 before introducing the Lotto?”

Curtis shifted in his seat and opened his eyes. He looked irritated. “They had to allow some time before introducing time travel. They’d also given up on reversing the effects of the drug by then, even with the knowledge and technology from the future.”

“So when were we able to give birth again?” I said.

“Well after your pregnancy, there were a number of isolated incidents, but they were all associated with tons of experimental drugs. It wasn’t until 2065 that there was another natural birth. A few more followed within months, but it was only a handful of people and nowhere near enough to say that the infertility problem had gone away.

“Scientists didn’t know what had changed, either. There was no actual explanation. By 2108, childbirth returned at a large scale, similar to how it is today. It was only then the world declared that the global infertility crisis was over, but there was still no actual explanation on how it was reversed. There was no cure, so to speak. That’s why we couldn’t use time travel to return to the point infertility began, to stop it from growing.”

The flat silence told me that everyone, like me, was digesting everything Curtis said. How could the people of the future not know what stopped the infertility? Or were the Shriniks lying about that to the governments? But that wasn’t the main question stuck in my mind. I waved and caught Curtis’ attention once more. “The children sent back with the winners—were they all human?” I held my breath, afraid of his answer. In an instant, his words could shatter my hopes of Dylan’s being a normal boy. My son.

Curtis shifted his gaze from me and looked out the window. “As far as I know, human babies were sent back, yes.”

“As far as you know?”

“As I said earlier, there have been rumors that some might have been Shriniks, but that has never been proven. There is one case I know of where Shriniks did come back instead of humans. You see, my people still needed to acclimatize the children to the atmosphere so they could live full lives on Earth, here and in the future. One of the things the Orchestrator discovered was that Shrinik infants in human form needed human mothers. They needed love, care and everything else normal children would get from their birth mothers. Their survival during the early stages of the experiments depended on small things like that. They thought of kidnapping some but instead decided to use the first Lotto win as a test run.”