Page 28 of Harbinger of Destiny

“But there’s nothing on your wrist,” she protested, still skeptical. “Is it implanted?”

He shook his head and grabbed his left wrist. The hologram disappeared, and he turned the palm of his right hand to her. In it lay a rigid gold-colored bracelet not wider than an inch. She stared at it in disbelief, then looked back at his wrist.

“But your skin is much darker than this… this holocom.” So why hadn’t she noticed this on his wrist before?

“That’s because it changes its color and texture to whatever my skin looks like. When my skin gets darker because I spend more time in the sun, the holocom changes with it.”

He put the holocom back on his wrist, and before her eyes, it adjusted to Joshua’s skin, and she couldn’t make it out anymore. As if it was invisible. She put her hand on it, but she couldn’t even feel a difference between Joshua’s skin and the holocom. She tapped on it, but the hologram didn’t pop up like it had before when he’d done it.

“It’s not working anymore.”

“It’s genetically encoded. Only my touch can activate it.” He tapped on his wrist once again, and the hologram popped up and hovered above his arm. “Will you let me tell you everything now?”

She nodded. She would listen to him, even though his claim was outlandish, but the electronic device on his arm intrigued her.

“Sit to my right so you can see the hologram better, and I’ll show you things while I tell you why I’m here.”

Joshua sat back down on the couch, and Amy took a seat next to him. He tapped on the images that hovered over his arm, and Amy realized that it looked very much like a computer screen, with icons for different programs.

“Let’s start with what brought me here,” he started and pointed to various headlines that spoke of a pandemic. “In the fall and winter of 2025, a virus will spread rapidly around the world. At first, the scientists thought it was just a bad form of a flu strain, but it was much worse. Over fifty million people died worldwide.”

Amy shrugged. “The flu kills vulnerable people every year. That’s nothing new.”

“But it wasn’t just a flu.” He tapped on another area of the holocom and a medical graphic appeared together with another headline. 2025 virus caused gene mutation leading to infertility in females.

Joshua looked at her. “In my time, ninety-nine percent of all women are infertile, because those women who were infected by the virus in 2025, but survived it, passed a mutated gene on to their offspring. By the time the geneticists figured out what had happened, it was already too late. Birthrates are practically at zero. The human race is going extinct.”

The claim sounded unbelievable, but the news reports and articles Joshua pulled up on his holocom, many of them dated in the 2070s and 2080s looked genuine. However, she knew that anything on the internet could be faked. “So you’re saying humans in the future are infertile and will die out?”

“Not all humans are infertile. Only women. The men don’t have the gene mutation. I can father children, but there are so few women left to repopulate the planet that the world governments came up with a solution: to bring women back from before the 2025 virus could infect them.”

She’d read enough sci-fi and time travel novels to know that there was a fundamental flaw in Joshua’s story. “But you can’t do that. If you take women out of this time and transplant them into yours—that is if you’re really from the future—then you’re changing the future, because—”

He lifted his hand. “I know, we would alter the past, which would alter the future I’m from, but that won’t be the case if we take women to 2085 who would have died during the pandemic, and therefore wouldn’t have had any significant effect on this timeline.”

Amy’s breath caught when she realized what this meant. “Are you saying… are you saying that…” She shook her head. She couldn’t even say the words.

“I’m sorry.” He tapped on something on the holocom, and several documents opened. “You’ll be infected in early October this year, and will die a week later.”

Amy stared at the death certificate that carried her name. Joshua swiped over the document and revealed a newspaper article that listed names of Los Angeles residents who’d died of the virus in the first two weeks of October 2025. When he zoomed in, one name caught her attention: her own.

“No.” She shook her head. “No. That can’t be.”

Joshua put his hand on her arm and squeezed it. “But you don’t have to die. Come to the future with me and you’ll have a long life, one where you’ll want for nothing. You’ll never have to worry about where your next meal will come from, or whether you have a place to stay. Everything will be taken care of for you.”

It sounded too good to be true. “This must be a mistake. Please tell me you’re joking. Tell me you’re playing a prank.” But one look into his eyes, and she knew he wasn’t lying to her.

She sniffled, her head spinning. But she needed to know more, needed to understand what she was getting herself into. “And you? How many women do you have to bring back?”

“Just one: you.”

“Why? You’ll need hundreds of thousands of women if you want to raise the birthrate.”

“That’s why I’m not the only one who travelled to the past. There are tens of thousands of young men like myself who’re taking this trip back all over the world. And the program is only just beginning. If it’s successful, more men will be sent back.”

She drew in a long breath, still trying to wrap her head around it all. “And you chose me?” She turned her face so he had to look at her scars. “Why me?” She gestured to his face. “You could do better than me.”

Joshua took her hands and pulled her to him. “Don’t say that.” He hesitated.