I stepped inside. The floor was covered with straw, which felt soft under my shoes. I walked around a stack of hay bales and came out into the open area of the barn. There were three people there… and two aliens.
Oh, my God. They were real…
I froze. My heart raced out of control. I wanted to run, but there was nowhere to go, other than to die running across an empty desert. I felt desperate. I shouted, “Is Dr. Cora Frost here?” There was only one woman. Either she was Cora Frost, or I had made a terrible mistake getting in that van and coming over here.
The woman said, “I’m Dr. Frost. Who are you?”
I said, “I’m your daughter, Jade Whitaker. I need your help.”
She literally rolled her eyes. She said, “Are you stalking me? I have no legal connection to you. I’ve received your text messages. I was ignoring them on purpose.”
At that moment, it felt like my abdomen was going to rip wide open. I grabbed my side and screamed bloody murder. The pain had gotten progressively worse. It was now unbearable.
One of the aliens placed her hand on my mother’s shoulder. In a gentle female voice, she said, “Wait. She really is in trouble.”
She walked over to me, this tall green creature with enormous black eyes, and said, “I can help you. I’m a doctor. Do you mind if I touch your stomach, to see what’s wrong?”
In too much pain to speak, I shook my head no. I meant: I don’t mind. If that had been interpreted to mean the opposite, I would have shook my head yes. Tears streamed down my face.
Apparently, the creature knew what I meant. She placed her hands on my abdomen.
Images flew up into the air in front of me. No one else seemed to notice them. There was a doll-like baby, only partially formed, with hair down to its knees. A beating heart stopped beating. Women were giving birth to green-skinned babies; nurses kept taking them away. Black people and one of the aliens hung from a tree, nooses tightened around their necks. Dogs snarled, barked, bared monstrous teeth. I saw windswept lands and rising seas. People begging for food. There was a spaceship hurtling through an explosion of light.
The alien said, “I’m going to focus. Do the same. Tell me what you see.” Her fingers felt warm and comforting against my stomach.
All the images disappeared except two: the partially formed doll baby, straggly hair flowing like a mop down to its knees, and a beating heart which stopped beating. I described what I saw.
The alien said, “That’s what’s inside of you. It’s a vestigial twin.”
What?
When I didn’t answer out loud, she said, “Your mother… Dr. Frost… had been pregnant with twins. The other twin became absorbed into your body while you were both forming inside the womb. It’s been there since before you were born. It’s been growing, even though its brain isn’t formed. The cells have just kept multiplying. It has to come out or you will die. It’s on your ovary.”
I felt extraordinarily dizzy. I said, “I’m going to faint.”
The alien said, “You’ll be OK. I’m a medical doctor. We have a surgical room inside our spaceship. I can remove the twin right now with techniques more advanced than any other you have access to. You’ll have a better outcome. You could do us a huge favor as payment. You saw images of dying lands, am I right?”
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.”