Outskirts Press, INC.

In 2554, the World is Coming to its End, unless an impossible mission through 600 years of time travel succeeds.

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CIPA EVVY SECOND PLACE SCIENCE FICTION AWARD

Maternal instinct knows no boundaries, including the nano-neural-net intravenously installed in Dannia Weston’s mind to repress her identity, allowing her to perform a mission 300 years before her time.

Transported to the year 1954, Dannia becomes a woman with a mid-twentieth century persona, college educated with an aptitude for mechanical invention. Due to her work during the war, she is employed by the U.S. government on a secret project. But what no one knows—including Dannia or those who sent her back to tinker with the mechanical past to reduce future pollution—is what might happen should she become emotionally involved in 1954.

The 2254 science team programmed the nano-net to prevent the possibility of pregnancy, but each person reacts to strong emotional stimuli differently, and using birth control not available in 1954 is out of the question.

When Dannia falls in love with Peter Hersh and becomes pregnant, her hormones erode a small section of the nano-chained network that stabilizes her new identity, triggering a mild memory rebirth…and threatening her mission and the fate of the world.

"If time travel is possible, why haven’t we been overrun by tourists from the future?”

Professor Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA - Cambridge - 20th - 21st century

“Truthfully, Professor Hawking? Why would we allow tourists from the future to muck up the past when your contemporaries had the task well in hand?"

Brigadier General Patrick F. Buckwalder, PhD, Primary Transportation Portal, Governor’s Island, Eastern North American District - 2241 C.E.

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"And you think she's pregnant?"

He nodded. "God help us all. We cannot leave her there with a child carrying her DNA, and we cannot bring the child back here carrying its father's DNA. The child would never survive the passage since we cannot travel forward in time even from then, by which I mean the child, if born, will be half from that time, so therefore all time after its birth did not exist for any established DNA of 1955 or earlier to travel to." He sounded almost miserable. "You would order the termination of a newborn?" Jessi cried, sounding as horrified as she felt.

"There is no precedent for this situation, Jessi," his face showed his reaction to her emotions, which gave her a glimpse of the real man sitting across the room. He looked as if he had been ordered to execute his own child and contemplated severe revenge to prevent it.

"Furthermore," he continued, "I am not allowed to terminate anyone without unanimous Council approval, and no one born at any time before ours can be um, removed, which presents us with an unprecedented conundrum."

"Have you considered the possibility that Dannia was supposed to bear this child in 1954 or even now? That its birth is vital somehow to our timeline too?"

Buckwalder frowned as if unsure he heard her correctly. "Are you suggesting some kind of divine plan? That somehow I selected her out of ten thousand possible women her age because my decision was directed by God or some Supreme Being?"

"I know it might sound farfetched to you, Patrick, but 'what ifs' are often considered in your field of endeavor, yes? What scientist worth his salary would start anywhere else when dealing with some theory no one before him conceived?" Jessi leaned back and turned her chair to look out the window, wishing she could see more of the flowered area of the garden.

"During the preparation, investigation, final preplanning stages of each operation, then yes. Otherwise, I cannot calculate in a 'what if' when the past and future of the world are at stake."

"There is also the possibility that if the child is not born, that might set off a worse paradox. Think about it before you explode on me. Since there is a strong possibility that she is pregnant, then we may assume the child will be born. Doesn't the simple fact that she's pregnant already tell you that whatever will happen has already been set in motion?"

"You mean if a paradox was set in motion by the actual act of consummation, it is now in effect, and preventing her pregnancy to progress full term to birth will cause a worse one by reversing it?" His voice actually rose in pitch as he spoke. He was still frowning, deep in thought, when he looked at her, but she did not even move a muscle.

"Damn," he muttered as if stunned by the probabilities. "Never had to consider anything like that."

Then, he seemed speechless a moment, and finally shook his head. "Okay, that's one I'll need dwell on and have my tech team run some simulations. If you are correct, then what changed and what would revert?"

"Whatever changed, if anything of earth shattering significance did, nothing looks feels, or is different as far as I can tell." She stopped and, as if realizing just how ludicrous her statement sounded, laughed and shook her head. "Of course, I would never know, now would I, Patrick?"

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July 25, 2255CE 12:06am: Primary Transportation Portal, Governor’s Island, Eastern North American District.

Jessi Turner stood looking into the garden outside the bow window in her office. She gasped wide-eyed when she saw a large oak tree bend almost in two. The trunk seemed to twist in a half-spiral, moaning as if the tree's cellulose fibers shredded and reassembled. Dozens of morning glory vines spun rapidly up from the torn earth around the tree's root collar and raced along the trunk, up into the highest branches, where thousands of large pink and large white blossoms exploded into existence. Butterflies and hummingbirds appeared as if a magician created them from thin air, and they gathered to feed as black and yellow bumblebees joined them, buzzing hungrily.

The howl of wind accompanying what she witnessed carried with it a flock of mockingbirds, birds believed extinct by the end of the second Chaos War.

The mockingbirds, landed in the now ancient and gnarled oak tree and began singing the same borrowed bird songs like a church choir while they hopped around peeking insects from around and beneath morning glory blossoms.

Jessi crossed herself, backed away from the window feeling breathless and awed, as if she had witnessed the true hand of God in action. She wanted to drop to her knees and pray, but did not dare look away for fear of missing whatever came next.

That was when she saw three large domestic orange cats strolling side by side across the path to the fountain in the center of Buckwalder's garden. Each stopped at the same time. Each placed their right front paw on the edge of the fountain's basin. Each lowered its head and drank from water still churning from time's commotion.

She felt the tears dripping off her chin before she knew she cried. Cats, for their Chaos Wars enemy, were a food delicacy and brought to the edge of extinction too.

But orange, she thought recalling the large orange male she had kept, or as she said at the time, kept her when she was a young teenager. She had named him Scooter after his ability to run from a standstill when a bird or lizard attracted his interest.

Wiping tears, she turned to her desk for a tissue and gasped. Sitting directly in the center of all her organized clutter was an engraved silver vase filled with yellow roses. In the center of the flowers, she saw one blue perfectly round Hydrangea blossom the size of both of her fists.

Jessi Turner dropped into her chair and stared as she wondered what Dannia named her child.