Marilyn Peake - The Other

I blinked to decrease my empathy. The pain the woman was experiencing was almost too much to bear. I had to ratchet down my mirroring response in order to protect my own health and emotional stability.

In my own time period, pain control implants in the brain are accessed as needed to control pain. But back here in this more primitive era, medication was used to manage pain. Some of the genetically modified babies were being born with insignificantly developed lungs and other problems. A medical decision had been made to avoid giving these mothers any pain medication that might affect their baby’s lung function or ability to survive the birth process. Natalie Jenkins was one of these women.

As Dr. Reynolds studied the monitor, his bushy gray eyebrows slanted downward with concern. He stood up to address the laboring woman. He said, “We’re going to push on your stomach, Natalie. Your baby is trying to turn himself around. We don’t want this to become a breech birth. Do you understand?”

Her voice was weak and shaky as she replied with one word: “Yes.”

Dr. Reynolds told the nurses: “Call Angelina. STAT.”

A nurse pressed a call button on the wall. Speaking into the intercom system, she said, “We need two more nurses in here. STAT. Possible breech.”

Almost immediately, two nurses wearing the same kind of protective gear we had on entered the room. They applied cold compresses to the woman’s forehead and held her hand while the other two nurses pressed on the woman’s stomach, trying to keep the baby from turning around and presenting his feet to the birth canal.

Waylon and I busied ourselves helping out in ways that wouldn’t change the outcome of history in this particular situation.

The woman let out a series of bloodcurdling screams every time someone pressed on her stomach.

It was odd to see what these people looked like close-up. I’d viewed photos, of course, but this was my first time seeing the actual earlier version of human beings in person. In the room, there were the four nurses covered from head to toe in personal protective gear, so they didn’t look much different than Waylon and me at that particular moment. But the laboring mother had light tan skin and the doctor had dark brown skin. Their eyes were brown. They had hair on top of their heads, the woman long brown hair and the doctor short curly gray hair. Everyone had arch-shaped hair above their eyes. The doctor had a thick growth of hair on his upper lip and shaved hair on his cheeks, chin and neck. We don’t have facial hair or any type of body hair. It isn’t necessary, so our genetics dispensed with it.

The woman screamed and moaned in agony. Despite the best efforts of the medical team, the baby continued to turn completely around until it was obvious that this was going to be a breech birth.

The obstetrician gave sharp orders for everyone to prepare for C-section. Natalie was put under anesthesia, her stomach cut open and the baby delivered.

I teared up. I hadn’t expected to feel so emotional.

I was witnessing the birth of one of the very first babies of our kind anywhere in the universe. This was the beginning of a new era.

The infant was tiny: only four pounds six ounces. He was pale green and covered in mucus and blood. The paleness is true of all newborns, as the pigment comes in later. No one knows exactly how green a child’s skin will be until later in its first year of life. The eventual shade has absolutely no connection to the strength of the photosynthetic process.

After the delivery, Waylon and I were to go to the baby nursery and peer through the window at the newborns.

It was a bit overwhelming, standing there observing the first generation of photosynthetic children. They were absolutely beautiful with their soft green skin and baby blue eyes.

All the mothers had been told their babies died in childbirth. Natalie had been told that her son died when the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and strangled him. The baby had been whisked away before she woke from anesthesia.

I wasn’t there for that part.

It seemed unusually cruel. Prejudice based on skin color was so extreme back then, scientists believed the only way to protect the first generation of green children was to raise them in total isolation on a secret island far from the rest of civilization. No one outside the scientific community, not even their birth mothers, were to know that they existed.

Our first mission had been designed to show us the beginning of our kind. It was meant to show us what we were time traveling for: to protect the entire future of the human race from extinction.

The next mission was meant to make an indelible impression on us, to teach us that we needed to be extremely careful. We were TTA time travelers. We’d be time traveling until we were too old to continue. However, in every instance where we journeyed backward to eras before our kind came into existence, we were going to be viewed as aberrations. There was no limit of aggression in people’s genes back then. Anyone perceived as too different, as strange, became a threat that unleashed dangerous levels of aggression, often leading to violence and murder. This happened even in circumstances where an unusual person was believed to have extraordinary powers. In the case of the albinos of East Africa, for example, people wanted to own parts of them for magical potions. Their skin was pure white. Personally, I could barely tell the difference between the albinos and people with pale skin. Many of the pale people were featured in fashion magazines of the time, and yet albinos were considered freaks. The message was drummed into our heads: If albinos were freaks, anyone with green skin would be considered subhuman at best, non-human at worst. Once you were deemed non-human, anything could be done to you. If we were caught by the wrong people, we’d most certainly be tortured, mutilated and killed.

The location of the mission to which Waylon and I would be assigned was the landmass that had been named the United States of America, also referred to as the U.S.A. or U.S., shortly after their Civil War of 1861 to 1865. Other teams would be going to East Africa and other parts of the world where they’d learn the same lesson as us.

Waylon and I would be traveling back in time to the state of Mississippi in the southern U.S. We were to show up a few days before the hanging of several people with dark brown skin. We were to see up close the kind of thing that could happen to us if we weren’t careful. We were also supposed to use our empathy to figure out if we could reveal ourselves to anyone in this particular moment of time and, if so, to do it. On future trips, we’d be interacting with people in medical procedures designed to get their DNA. None of this was to be done by force. We’d need to make them our allies working toward a common cause. We’d need their cooperation.

This second trip back in time was as difficult as the first. Once again, we traveled through many locations where our ship folded space-time to make coordinates from one era touch those from another era, so that our pod could hop across. Nausea was so bad this time, I feared I’d throw up. So many sights and sounds and languages flooded my mind, I could barely stay oriented as to where I was and what I was supposed to do. I made myself concentrate on the letters TTA —to remind myself that I was on a mission from there, that that’s the place where I had a deep, ongoing connection. I was just passing through the other points in space-time.

Finally, we landed. The instruments and outside cameras showed that we had ended up exactly where we had planned: in an isolated forest next to a lake. Back then, it was much easier to find uninhabited areas right next to settled ones. There was a lot of wild land where people weren’t as likely to show up and discover our pod. We turned on the camouflage cover, so that no one would see it from a distance.