Wood Sprites

“If they stole our embryos. .” Louise stared at the maze of interlocking databases, all feeding information from one to another. They weren’t looking for a reported incident, but the lack of one. “Here. This database shows the date that the embryos are stored and the dates they were accessed. If we count nine months back from our birthday, we have a date range when our parents would have taken us.”

Jillian counted back on her fingers. “We were born in April. March. February. January. December. November. October. September. August. July?”

“Let’s check from June to August, the year before we were born, just to be sure,” Louise said. “I don’t know how exact that nine-month thing is. People are always talking about premature babies.”

There were only a dozen possible batches.

“I would have thought there would be more,” Jillian said. “How are they staying in business?”

“The success rate of the first implant is high for Dad’s clinic. It’s at seventy percent. The leftovers are stored and used only if the first implant fails, or basically just thirty percent of the clients.”

Jillian scanned the dozen listings. “It only shows which embryos were accessed. It doesn’t give who pulled them and how they were used.”

“Just give me a minute.” Louise checked through the other databases. “Billing includes embryo batch numbers. That way the company can keep track of who gets what without worrying about confidentiality. Since our parents didn’t pay, our batch number will be the only one that doesn’t have a matching invoice. There.”

“First, who are our genetic donors?” Jillian chased the information through the databases. “They’re the ones we have to be careful around since they probably think we’re their kids and we’re most definitely not! Huh. What does ‘the estate of’ mean?”

“How should I know?” Louise was digging through the storage records, trying to find out how many embryos had been stored, what had been taken out, and what remained.

“Ah!” Jillian made the sound of discovery. “Estate means it belongs to dead people.”

“Our donors are dead?”

“It looks like it.”

“Maybe that’s what Dad meant by ‘they have children and lose them in some way.’ It’s not our donors that Mom and Dad are worried about, but our donors’ parents.”

“Oh my God! Lou! Our sperm donor was Leonardo DaVinci Dufae.”

“You’re kidding!” Louise leaned over to stare at Jillian’s screen.

Dufae was the most well-known inventor of their time. He invented a hyperphase gate that the Chinese built in orbit. They intended to use it to jump colonists to a planet around another star. If it had worked as expected, Dufae probably would have remained obscure. What made him famous was the fact that the gate malfunctioned in a spectacular fashion.

Every time the gate was turned on, Pittsburgh disappeared off Earth and traveled to Elfhome, the world of elves. Luckily, every time the gate was turned off, Pittsburgh returned. Basically, the Chinese had turned a major American city into a giant interdimensional yo-yo.

Earth was nearly plunged into global warfare over whether or not the gate should continue to operate. The biggest problem was that Dufae had died before the gate’s first activation. Other scientists couldn’t figure out how his gate worked, so they couldn’t simply tweak his design to something less inconvenient. No one really wanted to break contact with Elfhome completely. After a great deal of heated negotiations, an awkward schedule of turning the gate on and off, or Startups and Shutdowns, was established.

“That is so cool!” Louise whispered. “But he’s been dead for forever. Maybe before Mom and Dad were even born!”

“Lou,” Jillian whispered. “Leonardo DaVinci Dufae is our father.”

“He was just a sperm donor and he’s dead,” Louise pointed out again. “Who donated the egg? His wife?”

The egg donor was Esme Shenske. They didn’t recognize the name, but the Internet did. She was the captain of the third colony ship, the Dahe Hao. The holographic star-field ceiling, complete with astronomy lessons, suddenly made sense.

“Wow. Our donors are famous,” Jillian said.

“Were famous. He’s dead and she’s at Alpha Centauri or someplace like that. What the hell happened to our older sisters? Did they go to Alpha Centauri with her?”

After some digging they found that the first batch of embryos had been inserted into April Geiselman of Pittsburgh exactly nine months prior to Esme Shenske leaving the Solar System.

“That means our older sisters are eighteen next month,” Louise said. “But where are they? Did Esme take them with her? Or did they stay in Pittsburgh with Geiselman?”

“I’m looking,” Jillian said. “What about our baby sisters?”