The Time Traveler's Almanac

The scientific jargon exiting smoothly from the mouth of a child could have been comic. But I had goose bumps. She didn’t appear to be repeating something she’d memorised.

“Each batch of ten yielded on average four viable blastocytes. They implanted those in womb donors. Two-thirds of them took. Most of those went to full term and were delivered. Had to be C-sections, of course. Our huge skulls presented too much of a risk for our birth mothers. We were usually four years old before we were strong enough to lift our own heads, and that was with a lot of physiotherapy. They treated us really well; best education, kept us fully informed from the start of what they wanted from us.”

“Which was?” I whisper, terrified to hear the answer.

“Wait. You said you would.” She continues her story. “Any of us could back out if we wanted to. Ours is a society that you would probably find strange, but we do have moral codes. Any of us who didn’t want to make the journey could opt to undergo surgical procedures to correct some of the physical changes. Bones and muscles would lengthen, and they would reach puberty normally and thereafter age like regular people. They’ll never achieve full adult height, and there’ll always be something a little bit odd about their features, but it probably won’t be so bad.

“But a few of us were excited by the idea, the crazy, wonderful idea, and we decided to go through with it. They waited until we were age thirteen for us to confirm our choice. In many cultures, that used to be the age when you were allowed to begin making adult decisions.”

“You’re ten, Kamla.”

“I’m twenty-three, though my body won’t start producing adult sex hormones for another fifty years. I won’t attain my full growth till I’m in my early hundreds. I can expect—”

“You’re delusional,” I whisper.

“I’m from your future,” she says. God. The child’s been watching too many B-movies. She continues, “They wanted to send us here and back as full adults, but do you have any idea what the freight costs would have been? The insurance? Arts grants are hard to get in my world, too. The gallery had to scale the budget way back.”

“Gallery?”

“National gallery. Hush. Let me talk. They sent small people instead. Clones of the originals, with their personalities superimposed onto our own. They sent back children who weren’t children.”

I start the car. I’m taking her back home right now. She needs help; therapy, or something. The sky’s beginning to brighten. She doesn’t try to stop me this time.

Glumly, she goes on. “The weird thing is, even though this body isn’t interested in adult sex, I remember what it was like, remember enjoying it. It’s those implanted memories from my original.”

I’m edging past the speed limit in my hurry to get her back to her parents. I make myself slow down a little.

“Those of us living in extremely conservative or extremely poor places are having a difficult time. We stay in touch with them by email and cell phone, and we have our own closed Facebook group, but not all of us have access to computer technology. We’ve never been able to figure out what happened to Kemi. Some of us were never adopted, had to make our own way as street kids. Never old enough to be granted adult freedoms. So many lost. This fucking project better have been worth it.”

I decide to keep her talking. “What project, Kamla?”

“It’s so hard to pretend you don’t have an adult brain! Do you know what it’s like turning in schoolwork that’s at a grade-five level, when we all have PhDs in our heads? We figured that one of us would crack, but we hoped it’d be later, when we’d reached what your world would consider the age of majority.”

We’re cruising past a newspaper box. I look through its plastic window to see the headline: “I’m From the Future,” Says Bobble-Headed Boy. Ah. One of our more erudite news organs.

Oh, Christ. They all have this delusion. All the DGS kids. For a crazy half-second, I find myself wondering whether Sunil and Babette can return Kamla to the adoption centre. And I’m guiltily grateful that Russ, as far as we can tell, is normal.

“Human beings, we’re becoming increasingly post-human,” Kamla says. She’s staring at the headline, too. “Things change so quickly. Total technological upheaval of society every five to eight years. Difficult to keep up, to connect amongst the generations. By the time your Russ is a teenager, you probably won’t understand his world at all.”

She’s hit on the thing that really scares me about kids. This brave new world that Cecelia and I are trying to make for our son? For the generations to follow us? We won’t know how to live in it.

Kamla says, “Art helps us know how to do change. That’s made it very valuable to us.”

“Thank heaven for that,” I say, humouring her. “Maybe I’d like your world.”