Page 9 of Harbinger of Destiny

Feeling humiliated, Joshua scrambled to make a turn to drive out of the dealership’s lot. Apparently, driving a car wasn’t quite as easy as he’d expected it to be.

It took him the rest of the day to feel comfortable driving his new acquisition. By the time the sun set, he parked the car outside his apartment building. He went upstairs and took a shower, then headed out again, this time on foot. He’d had enough of driving for one day. It was time to seek out Amy.

5

THE UGLY DUCKLING

The Happy Grind coffee shop where, according to the historical records, Amy worked part-time was located a fifteen-minute walk away from Joshua’s studio. He didn’t know which shifts Amy worked, but he needed to check out the place anyway to get a feel for his surroundings so he could decide how to approach her.

The coffee shop was different from the others Joshua had frequented during his first week in 2025. Furnished with a mishmash of wooden chairs and tables, all of them rather antique looking, it exuded an air of an era long gone. On the walls hung old black-and-white photos of women and men, many of them autographed. Behind a counter, two employees were working. The man was restocking a refrigerator with bottled drinks, while the woman had her back turned and was busy cleaning out a coffee machine.

There were a few customers. A sign on the counter said Please order here. Joshua walked up to it, and the man approached from the other side.

“Evening, what can I get you?”

Joshua hadn’t even thought about what to order. His eyes fell on the large blackboard on the wall behind the counter, where a menu had been written in colored chalk.

“Uh, I’ll have an orange juice and…” He looked at the display of pastries. “…a blueberry muffin.”

“Right away.” The man turned to snatch a small bottle of juice from the fridge, then put a muffin on a plate, when his cell phone chimed. He glanced at it. “Excuse me for a moment.” He turned away, then addressed the woman cleaning the coffee machine. “Amy, please ring up this customer.” He pointed to his phone. “I’ve gotta take this call.”

“Sure, Mr. Mercola.” She wiped her hands on a towel, while the man left through a door marked Employees Only.

Joshua’s heart beat into his throat. This was Amy Brooks. He hadn’t expected to see her on his first visit to the coffee shop. He wasn’t prepared. Shit, had he even looked in the mirror before leaving his studio to see whether his hair wasn’t standing in all directions? Were his clothes clean?

Fuck, he hadn’t thought this through. The first impression was always the most important, and he hadn’t even given it a thought. But it was too late to fix it now. He had to make the best of it.

Joshua planted a big smile on his face, ready to meet Amy and charm her from the moment she laid eyes on him.

She turned and glanced up at him for a brief second, before starting to type something on the tablet that acted as the register.

Joshua’s smile froze on his lips. Shock coursed through him, paralyzing his body, while his heart raced uncontrollably. What the fuck? This couldn’t be Amy Brooks. Somebody had made a mistake. Maybe he’d heard wrong when the man had asked Amy to ring up his purchase. It had to be. He frantically searched for names that rhymed with Amy, but his mind was blank. Then his gaze fell on the nametag the young woman wore on her shirt. Amy B it said. What were the odds of two Amys working in the same small coffee shop and both their last names starting with a B? Only a fool would bet on those odds. And he was no fool.

“That’ll be $8.56.” She turned the tablet toward him and looked up.

He saw it more clearly then. And he saw the resemblance to the photos he’d seen of her when she was younger. This was Amy Brooks, no doubt. Her eyes were of an unusual green, something akin to a cat’s eyes, beautiful and mesmerizing. Her hair was dark, almost black, and looked like the most luxurious silk.

Joshua swallowed hard, unable to say or do anything. Anger churned up in him, and he recalled a moment during his one-week training at the Institute for Time Travel, where he’d been embarrassed in front of the entire group of time travelers.

* * *

Los Angeles, Friday, July 20, 2085

“We need you to travel back to before the outbreak of the virus,” Professor Henley said, “to find those women of childbearing age who according to the historical records, died from the disease. We need you to find them, befriend them, romance them—hence Romeos—and bring them to our time, to 2085, before they can get infected and become worthless to us. Questions before I go on?”

Many hands went up, including Joshua’s.

Professor Henley pointed to him. “You.” He glanced at the nametag. “Joshua Fletcher.”

“Why can we only bring back women who died during that pandemic? Wouldn’t we have a better choice if we widened our criteria? I mean, what if they’re all ugly?”

There was laughter behind him.

Professor Henley narrowed his eyes. “Because you want to return to the world you left, don’t you? You want to come back to this version of 2085, not another.”

The professor looked into the crowd, then sighed. “If you had listened to Mrs. Dorchester who explained quantum physics and the space time continuum to you, you wouldn’t be staring back at me like clueless fish.”

He paused for effect. “Well then. A refresher. If you were to pluck one random woman out from 2025 and transplant her to 2085, you will have changed the course of history. Imagine this woman was going to have a child, who then went on to make an important discovery in medicine, physics, chemistry, city planning, or even art. The absence of that person, that child and its descendants, would mean that our future, the world we live in right now, would become different. You will have created a new timeline, one in which your loved ones might not exist.”