Marilyn Peake - The Other

I shook my head yes .

She said, “That is Earth where I come from. I’m not a creature from another planet. I’m a human being from the future. Our bodies are green because we now produce some of our own food inside our bodies through photosynthesis, just like plants.” She bent her head into her hands. Two black disks popped off her face. I felt completely freaked out. I thought those were her eyes! It turned out they were special AI lenses. She continued, “See. I have human eyes.” Her eyes were green and very human. She said, “We need to splice our genes once again. We’re in very big trouble. If we don’t get back some of the genetic material from your time period, the entire human race will die. Your twin would supply many stem cells. If we remove her from your body, may we take her with us? She won’t survive outside of you, but she could save the human race.”

I was stunned by all this. I blurted out a rather mundane question: “How do you know it’s a girl?”

She said, “Along with our photosynthetic genes came the side effect of having such extreme empathy we can read each other’s thoughts and feelings. That bothers most humans from your era. It scrambles their minds, and receiving images from our brains makes them feel like they’ve gone mad and are experiencing hallucinations. Your mother and you were both twins. You already know how to share thoughts with a similar mind. It’s why we can communicate with both of you. I know you have a girl twin inside you because I can see it.”

At that moment, pain gripped me so hard, I thought my stomach was going to tear open or my ovary explode. I said, “Yes! Just do it. Do the surgery. Take the twin.”

The other alien-like creature did something that made a UFO appear in a corner of the barn. This was all so surreal! These people looked like all the pictures I’d ever seen of aliens from outer space. Their ship looked like a typical UFO.

The woman who’d been talking to me took me by the hand. Her fingers were long and slender. She led me to a surgical room. I lay down on an operating room table. She gave me something to drink. That’s all I remember.

When I woke up, I felt amazing. I checked my stomach. A completely healed scar! In the future, doctors apparently know how to heal us quickly. That’s one thing future generations can look forward to.

I found that I’d been moved to a bed in a different room than the one where the surgery had been performed. The green woman stepped into the room, black lenses once again covering her eyes. She said, “You’re awake. Everything went great. There’s someone here to see you.” Before she left the room, she added, “By the way, my name’s Paloma.”

A few minutes later, Cora Frost walked into my recovery room. She said, “Maybe we can work together. Not very many people have seen what we’ve seen. I plan to write a book and I’m going to try to land a TV show. Are you interested?”

It wasn’t exactly a hug for a long-lost daughter, but I’d take whatever I could get. A green woman from the future had been much more of a mother to me than my own biological mother who was bound to me by blood and the era in which we lived. Paloma had comforted me and eased my pain. Hopefully, my relationship with my biological mother would grow over time.

Paloma returned. She asked, “Do you want to see what I removed from your body?”

I hadn’t expected that. I was shocked and frightened to look at it, but I said, “Sure.”

Once again, Paloma left the room. She came back carrying a jar filled with clear green liquid. Placing it on the bed next to me, she said, “This is the twin whose stem cells will save the future of the human race.”

I looked at the creature floating inside the jar. She was exactly like the scraggly doll image I’d seen in my mind, but with more detail. Crooked teeth and long stiff hair hung down from what looked like a leather stick. A shorter stick protruded from that one, perhaps a partially formed arm or leg. I tried to imagine her as a whole girl, as a sister I could have played and fought with, and grown into adulthood with.

An image entered my mind. I saw thousands of little green-skinned girls who all had my brown eyes. My twin sister’s brown eyes. We had thousands of siblings we would never know. For someone who had grown up as an only child and lost her mother so early into adulthood, the thought of such a large family seemed magical.

Paloma said, “Wait here.”

She left with the jar.

When she came back, she handed me and Cora what looked like transparent glass rocks—one for each of us. Encased within each were two long twisted hairs.

Paloma said, “My gift to both of you: relics to mark the connection between your generation and future generations.” To me, she said, “Two hairs from your sister’s head.” To Cora, she said, “Two hairs from your deceased twin’s head. Does she have a name?”

Cora said, “I had been torn between two names for Jade: Jade or Sapphire. I had a twin sister named Crystal whose death was extremely traumatic for me. I wanted to give my child a gem name, like hers. In memory of my sister. Jade’s twin should be named Sapphire.”

I thought of Max Davenport, my hoarder client. Death and loss devastate us all. We’re all hoarders deep down, tucking away artifacts to remind us of the people we’ve been close to and the people we’ve loved. My biological mother had named me after the twin sister she’d lost. I was in a way a walking, talking, breathing artifact from an earlier time in her life. I clutched the relic in my hand. Sapphire was a bridge between my past and my future. She was a bridge between the past and future of the entire human race.

I pictured a long line of people waiting to see the glass rock in my hand, long after I had died and left it behind. All the people had green skin. A metal plaque on the front of a clear box containing the stone said:

Relic of Sapphire Frost. To Cora Frost and her twin daughters, Sapphire and Jade, we owe the continued survival of the human race.

I learned something that day. You never know where you’ll find family. Sometimes it’s in the strangest place.

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The Other

© Copyright, 2017, Marilyn Peake

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

Book Cover Art by Tom Edwards:

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USA TODAY Bestselling Author Marilyn Peake writes in a variety of genres, mostly Science Fiction and Fantasy. She’s one of the contributing authors in Book: The Sequel, published by The Perseus Books Group, with one of her entries included in serialization at The Daily Beast . In addition, Marilyn has served as Editor of a number of anthologies. Her short stories have been published in seven anthologies and on the literary blog, Glass Cases .