All Our Wrong Todays(19)

I know it’s adorable and sad that I thought it could be the start of a relationship.

She told me about her childhood, her astronaut training, her failure, her depression, her sexually irrational phase. All the things I’ve told you about her are what she told me about herself that night. At the time, I was spellbound. If she was sharing these intimate personal revelations, I had to mean something to her.

Now it seems more likely that telling me all of that was a direct example of Penelope’s brutal self-sabotaging streak. I mean, I was her boss’s son. Her boss’s son, who everyone knew was a screw-up. Sleeping with me, confiding her problems, staying up half the night when she was due at the lab first thing in the morning to be launched on a trillion-dollar experimental time-travel mission—I was too head over heels to appreciate what was really going on.

And the truth is, I still don’t care. Even after everything that happened . . . I loved her. I don’t think that justifies my subsequent actions. But it explains them.

At one point, so late at night it was early morning, Penelope told me why she decided to trade space for time and become a chrononaut.

“I spent my whole life trying to be the best astronaut there ever was,” she said, “and all I’ll be remembered for is a cautionary case study in safe abort procedures. I was depressed about that for a long time. Until one day it hit me. It doesn’t matter if you’re the best, as long as you’re the first.”

Of course I understood. It was the lesson I’d learned at age twelve—your mistakes, your wounds, your compromises, your failure and pain and rot, it all blows away like dead leaves if you get to be first.





29


At some point I fell asleep wrapped up in Penelope and at some point she unwrapped herself and slipped away. For once, I wasn’t late for work. The place was aflutter with activity. A crowd of scientific, corporate, and government overseers checked their communications devices at fifteen-second intervals. Today was the culmination of my father’s life—humanity’s first mission back in time.

Everything was ready to go. All that was left were the routine medical checks to ensure the primary chrononaut team was fit for duty. But since they’d been testing them every morning for the past month, what could possibly have changed since yesterday?

I walked into the medical center, trying to appear nonchalant as my eyes darted around searching for Penelope and wondering what the look on her face would be when she saw me. It felt like the rest of my life would pivot on that initial expression, before any emotional barriers locked down her nonverbal reactions. I wanted to see her before she saw me, so I’d catch whatever flashed across her face—excitement, regret, embarrassment, hope, love.

I’m such an idiot.

I guess that’s the problem when you’re used to waking up into your own dreams. It makes it easy to mistake romantic delusion for reality.

I did see Penelope first. She was surrounded by a jittery cluster of medical technicians. The room was weirdly hushed, like after snow falls or when someone’s launched into the sucking vacuum of outer space. No one spoke. They just waited for Penelope to say something while staring anywhere but at her. The only one looking right at her was me. And when she saw me, it was nothing I expected.

She looked grim. Nobody had looked at me that way, that grim, since I was twelve years old, my mother at the front door of Robin Swelter’s home nineteen days after I’d run away.

And then Penelope Weschler did something inconceivable. She burst into tears.





30


She was pregnant.

Not by much. Fertilization had barely occurred. My most ambitious spermatozoon had bonded with her secondary oocyte somewhere in the outer third of her uterine tube. At this point, six hours in, the zygote hadn’t even cleaved once. It was still a single-celled organism. Mitosis was around eighteen hours away. Twenty-three of my chromosomes and twenty-three of her chromosomes had coiled together into a cleavage spindle, migrating to opposite ends of the microscopic globule pulsing inside her. Human life doesn’t get any more provisional.

There are about 37,000,000,000,000 cells in the human body. Not counting microorganisms in your digestive tract. Thirty-seven trillion cells comprised of your specific DNA. At that moment, six hours after I ejaculated inside her vaginal canal like a fucking moron, unnamed Weschler-Barren zygote was only one cell—36,999,999,999,999 to go before it was anything you might legally name.

I mean, you lose 30,000 to 40,000 skin cells every hour, almost 1,000,000 per day, eight pounds of yourself a year, a flurry of dead cells peeling off and floating away.

What’s one cell in all that?

Enough to end Penelope’s career as a chrononaut.

It didn’t matter that the zygote—our zygote—was a unicellular organism. It modified her genetic composition in an untenable way. The purpose of the daily medical scans was to model out a hyperaccurate predictive map for all physiological cycles in the chrononaut team. Even one extra cell deformed that predictive map and corrupted Penelope’s unique DNA matrix.

Penelope insisted she would immediately terminate. There was hardly anything to even terminate—one lousy cell. A ten-second procedure administered by a pharmaceutical drone could wipe her clean of any trace of me.

Irrelevant. Protocol is protocol. This is time travel. The human body is so complex, so thorny, the instruments so finely tuned, the energies at play so powerful—it’s all too complicated, too dangerous, too important. Even if Penelope terminated right away, her body had already undergone minute but detectable biological changes. Her system would have to be cleansed of the toxins used to end the pregnancy. They’d have to run diagnostics and correlate the new medical scans with the old ones to ensure this trillion-dollar mission couldn’t be thrown off track by something unexpected.