Now, Then, and Everywhen (Chronos Origins)

by Rysa Walker

  “Oh. Right. Believe it or not, I’d kind of forgotten about that. I don’t have her number, though. Can you send it?”

  “That won’t be necessary. She’s actually on her way over. That’s why I called—well, one reason I called.”

  “What was the other one?”

  “Because I was just thinking about that cute little twitch you do with your mouth when you’re annoyed. Like just now when I said Lorena was coming over. And the fact that you blush when I give you even the tiniest compliment.”

  I feel my face growing warm. “Stop! You did that on purpose.”

  He nods, grinning.

  “And you make it sound as if I dislike Lorena, which is absolutely not true. It’s just that I was trying to concentrate . . . and . . .” I stop for a moment, debating whether I really want to give voice to my suspicions yet. But I need a sounding board.

  I give Jack a general summary and then say, “So now I’m wondering if Coleman didn’t just go back to when a book was written and swipe the work. Then he returns to the future where the writer is long dead and publishes it.”

  Jack doesn’t look convinced, which is fair, because I’m not really convinced, either.

  “It seems contrived,” he says. “And risky. You’d never know if you had the only copy. The writer might have notes, might reconstruct . . .”

  “Which could have led to the three plagiarism complaints.”

  “True,” he admits. “But if Coleman was actually doing something like this, I’d think there would have been way more than three lawsuits, don’t you?”

  Jarvis chimes in to tell me that someone is approaching the door. “Should I say you’re not in, mistress?”

  “Mistress?” Jack snorts.

  “It’s a historical reference. From these comics my dad liked. There was a character named Jarvis, and he was a butler before he was a computer, and . . . Would you please stop grinning like that?”

  “Should I tell them you’re not in?” Jarvis repeats.

  “No. I’m coming.” I say goodbye to Jack, who is still grinning, and head downstairs.

  When I open the door, Lorena is on the front porch. A baby girl, who looks to be about ten months old, is slung across her hip. The baby has Lorena’s round face and RJ’s eyes. She’s gnawing on the canvas strap of her carrier and looks like she needs a nap.

  “Lorena. Come in. I’m sorry I missed your calls. I was trying to get a bit of work done, and—”

  She holds up one hand. “It’s okay. Some discussions are better handled in person, and I had to leave early to pick up Yun Hee anyway. Two of her teeth are coming in and she’s extra cranky.”

  I smile at the baby. She doesn’t smile back—just looks up at me with those big gray eyes and continues her assault on the makeshift teether.

  Lorena isn’t smiling, either. She’s not exactly a super cheery person, and she probably didn’t sleep well if the baby is teething, but it doesn’t take a genius to deduce that something is bothering her. She wouldn’t be here otherwise.

  “Would you like some tea? Or coffee?”

  “Dear God, yes. Coffee would be wonderful.”

  The food unit is old, but it makes decent coffee. By the time we’re seated in the kitchen with cups in front of us, Yun Hee is nodding off against her mom’s shoulder. Lorena adjusts the baby’s weight and then looks at me directly.

  “We need to discuss your lab results.”

  I nod. That was really the only reason she would be here. But I’m hit by a sudden fear that she’s found some deadly heretofore undiscovered virus lurking in my genome.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that you’re genetically enhanced?” she asks.

  “Because . . . I’m not. Oh, wait. I had a slightly higher risk of retinoblastoma. So, they did this very routine procedure when I was a baby. Could that—”

  “No,” Lorena says. “I’m talking about germ-line engineering. I ran a whole genome sequence—basically mapping your entire DNA—and there were some . . . inconsistencies. Not the kind that would show up under a cursory scan. These appear to be traits you inherited. Some from your mother’s side and some from your father’s.”

  “What sort of traits?”

  “There’s evidence of enhancement on more than a dozen markers.”

  “Neither of my parents were enhanced, Lorena. My father was born in Ireland, and they were party to the very first round of international agreements on restricting genetic alterations. So was the African Union, where my mother was born. The AU had firsthand experience with genetic targeting a decade before her birth. They wanted that technology locked down tight.”

  I try to keep my voice level, but this isn’t a charge that you toss around lightly. In fact, it’s the kind of accusation that can ruin lives and livelihoods, even if you manage to prove your innocence.

  Plus, I know it’s not true.

  Both of my parents were born after the heyday of genetic enhancement, after scientists began trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle. Advanced nations gradually loosened restrictions on in-vitro genetic alteration during the 2020s. The first exceptions were to correct potentially fatal congenital abnormalities. By the 2040s, however, most nations had legalized genetic tweaks to bring offspring to the “norm.” There were protests from those who argued that such programs were ableist and elitist, but even those who were ideologically opposed to alteration often found an excuse when it came to giving their own offspring an extra advantage.

  The baseline shifted upward rather quickly. It was an open secret that those with enough money could get a clinic to define average or even slightly above-average intelligence as a “developmental problem.” For a few thousand more, a clinic might be willing to change nose size, eye color, predisposition to obesity, and maybe toss in musical talent or eidetic memory as a bonus. And those whose parents couldn’t afford the procedure at all slipped further behind, and the gap between rich and poor widened.

  Those who were wealthy enough to afford the best clinics had fewer problems, but the middle class, those who scraped together their meager savings to pay for a boost at the smaller, less experienced clinics, faced a higher rate of infant and even maternal mortality. Since the procedure was still illegal, they couldn’t sue when things went wrong. Often what went “wrong” wasn’t even noticeable until later in life, when they realized that tweaking one section of the brain could have cascading (and often catastrophic) effects on the other sections. Suicide rates were very high as that first enhanced generation reached adulthood.

  Things came to a head with a series of biological attacks in the early 2070s. The most serious occurred when the Akan deployed a biological weapon against a neighboring country. Many were killed, and others were rendered sterile. Those who were attacked in this fashion fought back, mostly with conventional weapons, and the United Nations was eventually pulled in for peacekeeping.

  The silver lining to the conflict was that it produced a spate of international and regional organizations and treaties aimed at preventing something like that from ever happening again and caused a social backlash against rampant genetic engineering. Several of the people leading the charge were enhanced who recognized the unfairness, but it was largely a bottom-up revolution.

  Mandatory testing began in 2094. Those who refused testing were treated, for the purpose of classification, as enhanced. The only legal exemptions were for members of a handful of religions that don’t allow blood or tissue to be taken from the body. Enhanced individuals are not allowed into more prestigious academic programs. Some firms refuse to hire them on principle.

  In recent years, the enhanced have begun to fight the law, claiming that the blame lies with their parents or grandparents for altering their genetic makeup in the first place. They argue—with some justification—that they are being unfairly penalized for something over which they have no control and cannot change.

  On the other side, the masses contend that this is a perfectly legitimate way to level a playing
field that has been tilted in favor of the wealthy for generations. Even before genetic enhancement was available, the rich passed their benefits along to their offspring through private schools and college funds, while the poor struggled in underfunded public schools and spent much of their lives paying off university debt.

  Lawsuits continue to this day, with enhanced individuals suing the various schools that deny them entry and the geneticists who altered them. Quite a few have sued their own families, and there are cases of parents ending up in prison for breaking the laws on genetic enhancement.

  Slowly, the pendulum has begun to shift back toward the enhanced and their families, who usually have money to fund lawsuits. Several landmark decisions have been handed down in the past decade in courts around the world, holding that genetic enhancements purchased—whether legally or illegally—by one generation cannot be used to discriminate against their descendants. Requirements that parents correct for any inherited enhancements at the embryonic stage are increasingly dismissed as posing an undue risk and burden.

  But the bottom line for the past forty years has been this: If you are enhanced, you can still get an education. You can get a decent job. Some doors, however, will be closed to you. Some advantages, like scholarships and merit promotions, will be weighted in favor of those who are not enhanced.

  I’ve always agreed with these rules. I still do. The enhancement gives an advantage. You don’t get to double-dip.

  My department at Georgetown believes in those rules, too. Even with the promise of access to my great-grandfather’s papers, I’m technically a foreign student. Had my passport and birth certificate not both shown that I am genetically unaltered, I probably wouldn’t be here. I certainly wouldn’t have a tuition waiver. That kind of benefit is only available if you can show that you had the native talent and work ethic to get into the program without any sort of enhancement—or, in my case, some of that and a fat bribe in the form of the papers of a famous great-grandfather for their archives.

  I passed the official screening at birth. Plus, I’ve been to doctors in several different countries. So have my parents. You’d think if they were concerned about our status, they’d have passed on that information before I went off to undergrad. My dad might have tried to shelter me as a kid from something like this, but he would have told me once I reached adulthood. So this has to be a mistake, or else a really, really bad joke on Lorena’s part.

  I take a deep breath to rein in my anger and keep my voice down in deference to the baby in Lorena’s lap, who looks miserable and is on the verge of falling asleep. “My parents were not enhanced. They were tested. I was tested. And I have papers to prove it.”

  “I’m willing to accept that you didn’t know they were enhanced, okay? You’d have been crazy to let me take that blood sample if you knew. And, theoretically, these could be alterations that your parents themselves inherited, although some of these enhancements weren’t available until the late twenty-first century. A few of them . . .” She shakes her head.

  “What?”

  “A few of them aren’t like anything I’ve ever seen, okay?” She taps her comm-band and the sequencing results appear in front of us.

  I’m not a geneticist, but I can see the red flags—the literal red flags—on the report.

  “It’s possible that your previous tests didn’t detect this if they were performed at a smaller clinic. This isn’t the type of thing that a normal blood scan would detect. I’d think that your initial testing, though, would have turned this up, not to mention the more thorough scan they’d have performed on both of your parents before they were allowed to conceive. But . . . your family has, or at least had, money, right? Wealthy people have been bribing officials since the dawn of bureaucracy. A few thousand credits to the guy running the premarital or neonatal tests, a few thousand more to the family doctor, and no one has to know. You just teach your kid to tone it down. Miss a few questions on purpose. Maybe lose a chess match or settle for second place in track and field.”

  “My family always encouraged me to do my very best.” I don’t mention the fact that this was truer of my dad and Nora. Mom, on the other hand, has always been more inclined to discourage my competitive side.

  “There’s really no mistaking the results,” Lorena says. “That’s why I took the sample in the first place. I mean something had to be different about you if you can operate that device the rest of us can’t.”

  “Different doesn’t necessarily mean enhanced.”

  “No,” she admits. “But the evidence is solid. Maybe you need to have a talk with your parents? Or your grandparents, since they’d have been the ones to order the procedures.”

  “What do you think they had enhanced?”

  She gives me an uncomfortable look. “It might be easier to explain what wasn’t enhanced. Okay, no. That’s overstating things, but . . .”

  “Are we talking about physical attributes? Or—”

  “Yes, but also intellectual. Areas that deal with memory and language aptitude. And some stuff that looks . . . well, not natural. I can’t even identify it.”

  I sit there silently for a long time, staring at the report with the stupid red flags. “Do you understand what this means for me?”

  “Of course, I do. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I haven’t told anyone. But you need to recognize that this could become an issue. Georgetown wouldn’t have let you into the program if they’d had this information, and . . . they’re my employer, Madi.”

  “So you’re going to turn me in.”

  “No,” she says, looking miserable. “Not if I can avoid it. I deleted the data as soon as I transferred it to my comm-band. And then I purposefully screwed up a few other tests for my work project. Told my supervisor that we’d gotten some sort of contamination in the samples. That I had to throw out a set of results.”

  I feel bad for being angry now. She’s taking a big risk, especially when she has a family to support.

  “Thank you.”

  She shrugs. “Errors like that happen sometimes. Maybe they won’t look too closely. But your genetic alterations are almost certainly the reason you can use that CHRONOS device. And whether we move forward on this time-travel thing or not . . . I doubt this is something you’re going to be able to keep hidden indefinitely.”

  FROM THE DIARY OF KATHERINE SHAW

  Personal Journal 10262304

  We fought again last night. It was the same fight we always have, with only slight variations. I’m tempted to record it next time, and then I can just play it on the holoscreen anytime Saul decides that he needs yet another Game night at the Club, even though he promised that he’d only go two nights a week when we applied for shared quarters.

  He always says that I can come, too, but I know he doesn’t really want me there. If he loses, he always blames me, saying that I’m a distraction. And I have no desire to spend three nights a week in the company of Morgen Campbell or his dog, who snarls every time I walk past. Campbell is loathsome and lecherous. He delights in making snide sexual innuendos, either about my relationship with Saul, or worse, Saul’s relationships before we were together. I don’t believe half of what he says, and Saul assures me that I’m right in dismissing the old man’s comments. “He’s just trying to rile you up,” Saul said after the last time I went. “He likes to see you get angry. If you’re going to let him bother you like that, you should just stay home. Or take up a hobby. Make some friends.”

  Of course, if I do hang out with friends, male or female, Saul gets jealous. He’s only happy if I’m sitting at home, waiting patiently for him to return.

  Saul says The Game is his only relaxation—which, as his partner, I find rather insulting, since it’s not an activity we share. Two sessions a week isn’t enough to keep him in top form, he claims, and he’s tired of Campbell winning. I swear the man is addicted, although I’m not sure whether it’s to The Game itself or to his rivalry with Campbell.

  He says he loves
me but if I’m going to be this clingy, this possessive, maybe he should apply for separate quarters. Of course, he knows I don’t want that, and so he has the upper hand. That’s why he started the fight, so that he could push me into agreeing to three nights a week.

  Yes, I’m angry at myself for giving in. But I held firm on three nights a week. And no sneaking off for a minisession in the afternoons. If he needs more time than that, then he can just move in with Campbell and his nasty-tempered, gassy old Doberman.

  ∞9∞

  TYSON

  SCRUM ROOM, CHRONOS HQ

  WASHINGTON, EC

  OCTOBER 27, 2304

  “Training sessions usually take precedence on the jump calendar when there’s a conflict, don’t they?” Saul glances at the others around the long table. His eyes pause a bit longer on Angelo—the short, slightly overweight man in charge—and the three other jump-committee members.

  There are fourteen active agents at today’s scrum, in addition to Angelo and three members of the jump committee. All fourteen of us are, in some fashion, specialists in anglophone countries during the modern era. Modern is defined as anything between 1850 and 2160, with the latter year being the firm cutoff for any sort of in-person observation. There are similar meetings held for other regions and time periods. I’m fairly lucky in that my work is strictly modern and Anglo, at least so far. Rich’s research has taken him to Brazil and the African Union in the past year, and he’s done at least one jump to the late 1700s, so he occasionally has three or four of these torture sessions in each two-week block.

  Our team meetings are a bit larger than most. Medieval, which is anything between 1450 and 1849, has half as many historians, and there are only a smattering of ancient specialists. CHRONOS has always had a pretty strong bias toward US history, given that both the technology and the organization began in the United States. There’s also a pretty sizable bias toward the modern era, since it’s easier to blend in and there are fairly decent historical records, including photographs and video, that we can study during the six years we’re in classroom training. Or at least that’s the usual explanation. Personally, I think it’s at least as much due to the fact that most agents prefer traveling to eras where there are basic amenities like toilets, showers, and food you don’t have to kill yourself.