He applied cold gel to the wand. I held my breath as he moved it around.
Glancing at the monitor, I saw a weird shape, but I had no idea what it meant. Was this normal? Abnormal? If so, what was it?
The technician gave me no clue. He looked at the screen, moved the instrument over the area, took lots of pictures, then left.
When the doctor came back, she had a serious look on her face. She said, “Why don’t you get dressed and then meet me in my office?” She wasn’t smiling.
I peeled off the crackly gown, got dressed and found my way to her office.
Dr. Rutherford’s eyes were filled with concern. She said, “There’s something on your ovary, Jade.”
The memories of my mom’s illness washed over me like a tsunami. I put my face in my hands and wept. I had cancer, I just knew it.
Dr. Rutherford said, “I know this is scary, but we don’t know what it is. You’re young. It’s probably benign, whatever it is. I want you to see this specialist.” She handed me a slip of paper with the name and address of a gynecologic surgeon. She also gave me a prescription for pain medicine. She told me to take it as needed. I took both papers from her hand, feeling numb and in shock. She said, “We’ll call and make an appointment for you.”
They’d never made an appointment for me before. I knew I had cancer. I just knew it.
By the time I got home, I’d made up my mind. I was going to find my birth mother. It was now or never. I was going to fight this monster inside me with every treatment available. I wanted to know if I had a family history of cancer, if anyone had survived it and, if so, what treatment had worked for them.
The doctor’s office called. I had an appointment with the specialist the next day.
I texted Cora Frost again that night. It was a brief request: I’d really like to meet you. Thanks.
The next day, I went to the specialist. Another tech, a young woman with black-framed glasses, used a fancier ultrasound that produced more detailed images. She clicked, marked places on the images, saved pictures. Then I met with the specialist, Dr. Barbara Moulton.
I had some kind of growth. They couldn’t be sure what it was until they did surgery.
Surgery! My life hadn’t even started. I finally had my first real job. And I was going to die.
I asked to put the surgery off for two weeks. Dr. Moulton scheduled the surgery for me at the reception desk. She said, “The nurse will give you the instructions for how to prepare and where to show up. You’ll need someone to drive you.” With a warm look in her eyes, she said, “Try not to worry too much. At your age, whatever we find will most likely be benign. You’ll feel better after it’s removed.”
I thanked her, took the instruction sheet from the nurse and went to my car to cry. On my way home, I knew exactly what I would do next: schedule a plane flight to Roswell. What did I have to lose?
PART 3
Paloma
Chapter 10
I had worked hard to get to this point. Graduated first in my class from the academy. Trained four additional years to become a time traveler on both the Anthropology and Medical teams.
I’d had all the blood work and other medical tests done. I’d pushed myself hard in physical training. I’d been on twenty BTTMs, the Brief Time Travel Missions in which we get into a pod and travel backward or forward a few seconds, later a few minutes and eventually a few hours.
The first missions backward were very odd. There were several times in which I’d landed back at a moment when I’d made a mistake. Of course, I wanted to fix it; but I knew that doing so would violate the Law of Noninterference, so I didn’t. The law had been made by the original Time Travel Council soon after time travel was invented. No one knew if it was necessary or not, but it was made on the basis of the multiverse theory that states there are many parallel universes in which every choice we’ve ever even thought about making is a reality. If we were to actually go back in time and change something we’d done, it could have unknown consequences for everything else in that time stream. The strongest example is if a person were to go back to a time before they were born and kill their parent, would they ever be born? If they were never born, what would happen to them? Would they suddenly disappear? And what about all the people whose lives they’d touched?
The law had been amended in 3020 after the mission of Xavier Blake and Ian Redding, two time travelers on the Anthropology team. They had gone back in time to World War I in order to study the first instance of war that had affected so many countries and people, it was viewed as a planet-wide war. They thought they had their coordinates set to an Italian city not yet involved in the fighting, but they landed instead in the middle of a battle that had never been covered in the history books or any historical papers.
Their time travel pod had landed directly in front of a FIAT 2000 tank. They popped their door open and Xavier stepped out. He was immediately shot and killed.
Ian worked fast, grabbing Xavier’s body and setting the controls for immediate return back home.
All time travel was canceled for a while until the scientific community could come up with guidelines for what to do in instances like this where there are two competing dangers to the integrity of the multiverse. In one instance, fighting back to save one’s life and killing someone from a past time period could change reality. On the other hand, if someone from a time period before the human gene pool was altered to create people with green skin captured one of us, that would definitely change history. Part of any mission is for us to stay hidden from all but a few people we feel we can trust by observing them before approaching them. No dead bodies are to be left behind. Of course, there have been accidents. The Roswell UFO Incident and several Area 51 incidents remain warnings in the textbooks we study.
The amendment to the original law basically states that in the event that a time traveler needs to save their own life or the life of a fellow traveler or needs to bring back the dead body of a traveler, they are to use their judgment regarding the Law of Noninterference. In other words, if they need to expose themselves to people from whom they would normally hide or if they need to kill a person from the past, it’s basically a case of let the multiverse be damned, we’ll take our chances.
The test that was the hardest for me is when I was sent back in time to right before my father’s death. We all had to do this. It was part of our training—to go back to a moment of intense loss or tragedy in our personal lives, to simply observe and do nothing. My father died from cancer, most likely caused by the aggression stimulant AgStim, one of the drugs designed to combat the overly calm disposition of modern people. The same mutations that scientists had made to the human genome hundreds of years earlier to allow our bodies to conduct partial photosynthesis, in order to reduce our need for food from a planet increasingly unable to supply enough for everyone to thrive, had a few side effects: green skin, greater passivity than previous generations, and increased empathy to the point where we could share thoughts. We were still animals. We continued to exhibit aggressive behavior and experience a wide range of negative emotions—anger, jealousy, hate—but none of that was particularly intense and we weren’t usually motivated to sustain it for too long. But some situations and jobs require aggression over longer periods of time. My father was a bit of a creative dreamer. He was a painter who discovered that AgStim allowed him to work longer hours. The longer hours he worked, the more paintings he could sell and the more our quality of life improved.