Hey! It looks like you're new here. You might want to check out the introduction.
Organised by
RogerDodger
Word limit
2000–8000
Unique Haplogroup
I was thirty-one years old when I found out I wasn’t related to my parents.
It had seemed like a fun idea at the time, taking samples from my parents and myself and running them through the new sequencer we bought. It used to be that something like that would be exorbitantly expensive, but nowadays, with the new sequencers, you can do it overnight. And so, I did; we had three extra slots, and for a lark I stuck in my family. The next morning, I ran them, and found out I was hugely divergent – more than 1%.
For a lot of people, this would come as a profound shock. But for me, it never really seemed to matter all that much – your family is who raised you, not who created you. I guess a lot of people don’t see it that way, judging by all the folks who desperately search for their birth parents on bad daytime television shows, or trawl through government records in hopes of reuniting with their “real” family.
I can’t say it wasn’t surprising from an intellectual standpoint, though. It isn’t like I don’t resemble my relatives – blue eyes from my father, blonde hair from my mother, tall like both of them. I fit into my family just fine, and you could look at me and my cousins and say, “Yeah, I could see them as being related.” I thought for a moment that I might be the son of one of my cousins who had multiple children out of wedlock, but that idea almost instantly went away when I remembered that I would still be at least somewhat related.
My parents were much more bothered than I was. I wasn’t adopted – my mother had given birth to a baby with white hair in a hospital down in Stanford on my supposed birthday, and they had brought me home shortly thereafter. The only possible explanation was some sort of mix-up at the hospital, like something straight out of a movie.
I wasn’t too bothered about it at the time, and while my parents momentarily entertained visions of suing the hospital – it isn’t like hospitals don’t have money – we decided in the end it just wasn’t worth it. Maybe if we had, we would have figured out what was going on sooner.
I was thirty-six years old when I found out I wasn’t related to anyone.
The Human Family Tree project was very ambitious – and clever. For a nominal fee, they offered to sequence your DNA and warn you of any known disease alleles. In exchange, they added you to their big database of everyone, that you could pay a fee to search – and a larger fee if you wanted additional information. There was a big stink in Congress over whether or not it was legal or not, but the project made it clear that the project would be done overseas if it wasn’t done here – and, let’s face it, there’s no way they could stop it.
The cost was way lower than previous offers had been – it was only like $20 for the basic package, and they offered it to free to families making under $30,000 per year. Of course, I didn’t even remotely qualify for the free level, and I’d already gotten a copy of my whole genome, but I figured I might actually figure out who my family was, if my birth parents submitted their genomes as well, or if I had any brothers or sisters.
I got a call a month later.
When they analyze your relatedness to other human beings, one of the first things they look at what haplogroups you belong to – specifically, ones on your X and Y chromosomes. In case you’re not up on your genetic terminology, a haplogroup is basically a set of mutations that, together, indicate a common line of descent. Having some of those mutations, but not others, indicates at what point your DNA branched off from other people’s DNA. Part of the point of the project was to characterize the various haplogroups, but some were already pretty well established by that point – the sex chromosomes and your mitochondrial DNA, all of which don’t change very much over time. Because the Y-chromosome in particular doesn’t do much mixing with the X-chromosome, you can use large sections of it to trace back your patrilineal lineage all the way to the first guy in your line.
Or at least, you’re supposed to.
According to previous research, the last common universal male ancestor of all living male human beings – the guy whose Y chromosome ended up in everyone – lived about 300,000 years ago.
But my DNA was wrong. Parts of it showed what looked like modern haplogroups – specifically R1b, a group common to western Europe and North Africa – but it had a huge number of exotic sections which were entirely different, and several SNPs common to all members of R1b were completely gone. That sort of thing could happen with extreme DNA damage, such as from exposure to radiation or a virus, but on retesting, my DNA came out the same way. Whatever it was, I was that way all the way through, and I didn’t have any major health problems as a result, indicating it was probably natural.
It wasn’t the only weird thing – all of my chromosomes showed numerous unique anomalies. Genetic engineering was considered at first, but I was way too old for that – no one was doing human genetic engineering back in the 1980s, and certainly nothing like this. It was like I came out of no known population group, and while in some regards I looked like someone out of a modern-day Eurasian group, there were deviations and mutations in my genome which corresponded to no one else on Earth.
I mentioned before that I’d seen a 1% deviation in my DNA, and hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but tiny deviations in your genetic code actually represent huge expanses of time. Humans and chimpanzees, for instance, share over 98% of their DNA. Running a phylogenetic tree with me in it put me with humans, but only so far – I was further away from them than I was from Neanderthal and Denisovians, even though I had some obviously Neanderthal DNA as well. The only reasonable explanation was that there was another, yet undiscovered archaic hominid group, and somehow my family – whoever they were – were significant deviants from the human norm, the descendants of some ancient parallel family line that interbred with anatomically modern humans at some point in the recent past and left behind no trace, other than myself.
Of course, they wanted to run my whole family, but I had to explain to them that I didn’t really have a biological one – I didn’t know who my biological parents were, due to the mixup at the hospital. But now it was a big deal – I was a huge news story. The press went wild with stories speculating about my origins, and naturally, the cryptozoological people all decided I was clearly Bigfoot. It probably wasn’t nice of me to offer to introduce them to my relatives out in the Cascades before introducing them to my friends in gorilla outfits, but it bought me a laugh and got them to leave me alone.
Not that it didn’t stop the Weekly World News from putting me on the front page of their website for like, two months. It was a great photo, though.
Stanford, unfortunately, wasn’t much help; while a lawsuit quickly granted access to a lot of their medical records, there were no obvious hints of a mixup. One would think that a Francisco Lopez would not be a baby who would be likely to be mixed up with a white-haired child, but the researchers dug into everyone anyway in hopes of finding my birth parents, who had likely been saddled with my parents’ own biological child. It wasn’t easy going through records from the decades before electronic recordkeeping became omnipresent, and it wasn’t easy tracking down people based on names and addresses from nearly a half-century before, but in the end they managed to find most of them while acting as my own sort of free private investigators.
Unfortunately, the whole thing turned up nothing – not one case of a child who could have been my parents’, nor of anyone who showed similarly anomalous DNA.
I was forty-four years old when the Internet found my father.
The conflict between privacy and openness on the Web was largely settled by the early 2030s; the pattern recognition software had gotten so ubiquitous, and Internet connections so fast, that attempts at banning or restricting such technology met with widespread derision, combined with pictures tracking the whereabouts of the critic on the previous day with cats (or worse) shopped onto their head in every image. Free People Foundation v Jerome Tyrant ended the debate, when the Free People Foundation successfully argued before the Supreme Court that their facial recognition software, trained on the faces of criminal mugshots for the purpose of identifying potential robbers and shoplifters in surveillance cameras, was not a violation of anyone’s rights. From that point, every picture ever was fair game, and websites sprang up documenting every single appearance of any person from cradle to grave (literally, in some cases), sorted by location and year. While the incredible volume of digital photos from the 21st century made up the overwhelming bulk of the database, a number of historical photographs and newspaper clippings made up many of the older entries.
Many of the older records constituted rather amusing errors – the database was convinced that Paul Mounet and Keannu Reeves were the same person – it also contained more intriguing data points, such as confusing children at times for their parents or grandparents. It was quite the surprise when my own face showed up in the database dated to the year of my birth, attributed to a tall, blonde-haired, blue-eyed man in the background of a photograph taken in Palo Alto, California carrying what looked to be a wrapped-up baby.
He didn’t look remarkable, but then, neither do I; really, apart from the long hair and nondescript t-shirt and jeans he might have bought anywhere, he looked a lot like me, down to having a few days’ worth of beard growth due to poor shaving habits. I spent the next few days off and on searching through the online database, looking at photos around Palo Alto and the San Francisco Bay Area for any sign of him, but found nothing.
I had just about given up when I received a phone call telling me that my father had died – his Parkinson’s had finally caught up with him. Heading off home for a rather somber family reunion with my brother and his family wasn’t much fun, but while we were home, we ended up deciding to digitize my mom and dad’s old photo album, and I found my father again, in the background of three photographs of “me” swaddled up on the day of my birth.
Watching.
I was fifty-eight years old when I found out I wasn’t aging.
It was the 40 year reunion of my graduation from high school and all my old friends were in attendance. And I do mean old.
That’s a bit cruel, to be fair – with average life expectancy pushing ninety, sixty was the new forty, and most people don’t look too weathered by that point. Still, more than a few of them were a good deal fatter than I remembered – turns out that people who used to play soccer or run track-and-field can put on a lot of weight when they get sedentary nerd desk-jobs translating Japanese games or doing architecture. We were missing more than a few of my old friends – one of my oldest friends hadn’t even made it to our tenth anniversary of graduating together – but most of them were there.
And it was inescapable that I looked more like their children than I did like them.
It had been avoidable ten years before, or at the twenty-fifth anniversary – most of their kids were still kids, or at best teenagers at the time, and no one had been lining up next to the old fogeys. But with some of their kids as grown adults, it was inevitable that one of them would eventually ask me who my parents were.
This brought a lot of ribbing from my friends. I seem to remember the common theme being that the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot still managed to keep showing up when people’s cell phone batteries were dead, meaning they must be at least 200 years old, so I probably had a ways to go. But I spent the rest of the night looking at everyone else, and realizing just how far off I was. Sure, some people age more slowly than others – my (adoptive) mother never really shriveled up in the way my dad did, even as she outlived my grandmother – but the reality was that, looking at the photographs of us standing next to our parents at graduation, all my friends looked like their parents did, if a bit fatter, while I looked the same as I did in our group photo from our 15th reunion.
I was seventy years old when I retired from my job and went back to college for my PhD.
Retiring when you look as young as I did certainly raised a few eyebrows, but after a few stories about this awesome cosmetic surgeon I went to high school with, most of my coworkers bought it well enough. And I figured that with freshly minted college diplomas, no one would ask too closely about my high school diploma, or my original undergraduate degree. Of course, most colleges aren’t exactly looking for people of retirement age to go back to school, but with the increasing blurring of the lines between education for fun and education for profit, it wasn’t that unusual.
Still, I can’t pretend that I didn’t stick out. Picking up degrees in two disparate fields – electrical engineering and genetic engineering – is hardly a normal thing to do, and while I could have potentially educated myself on the subject, going back after fifty years out of school, tough as it was, really forced me to focus on what mattered.
In my final year, I legally changed my name, started dyeing my hair, and got a pair of custom brown contacts instead of glasses. Peppering the Internet with photographs of myself using my new name and style, I managed to forge for myself a new identity, disconnected from my previous name. I kept writing books as “the Bigfoot guy”, but I gradually let them taper off, until people began to wonder just where I had gone. Most of them figured I’d retired off to some tropical paradise and given up on doing stuff, an idea I was just fine perpetuating.
Meanwhile, I went to work.
I was a hundred and twenty-five years old when I founded my own company.
Years of experimentation had yielded great returns, with the genes for good health, high intelligence, clear skin, slow aging, and numerous other benefits being identified in humans. The wealthy benefitted more than anyone – only they were able to afford to travel to random islands in the Caribbean and undergo expensive experimental treatments on their offspring. A lot of the companies were fly-by-night operations, but somehow, I always seemed to end up in the best ones – or, more accurately, I always made the ones I was in the best. Lawsuits and raids by American law enforcement were a way of life for years, but curiously, the lead scientist always seemed to mysteriously escape with all the money, almost as if he had friends in Congress who weren’t eager to have their own trips exposed.
It wasn’t until the twenty-second century had well and truly set in and the first generation of “designer babies” had grown up that Congress finally bowed to the inevitable. The growth of inequity between the haves and the have nots had continued to grow as society increasingly drove those who could not successfully complete college further and further to the fringes of the workforce, but a generation of super-babies being born to those who could afford my services and those of my shadier compatriots had finally resulted in a real threat to the middle class. Returning to America with a vaguely Hispanic name, a dark tan, and a moustache, I worked to push a bill through Congress which legalized the practice and subsidized poorer families in receiving the treatment for the procedure. By that time, it had been very streamlined, and adding a few traits to appear like the parents over a generally optimized frame had been my modus operendi for quite some time, and the practice was eminently affordable with governmental aid.
LifeWorks quickly became one of the largest companies in America, offering treatment and genetic consulting to millions of families, while I lurked in the background, accumulating money for my own pet projects.
I was a hundred-and-seventy-three years old when they proved the Novikov self-consistency principle.
High-energy physics had continued apace, and while I never formally studied it, I had kept up with it even over the century I had spent out of school and donated large sums of money to the cause of the advancement of science. Teams had continued to grow, and high-energy physics programs came to consume ever more enormous amounts of money to build larger and larger particle accelerators. The imaginatively named Colossal Quark Collider – a callback to the now venerable Large Hadron Collider – was built under North Dakota largely on the back of profits from human genetic engineering. With the population growing increasingly elite, science jobs were at an all-time high as society worked to find new ways to employ a population which increasingly was working not on solving the basic necessities of life, but pushing the boundaries of what humans were capable of.
The energy needs were enormous, but after many years of laborious experimentation, it was discovered that space-time could in fact be bent back on itself and create time loops, resulting in materials from the present finding themselves in the past. The process was expensive and unstable, but after several years of work, they finally managed to set up the classic billiard balls experiment in order to test whether causality existed.
A billiards table was set up, and a billiard ball was struck by a pool cue, sending it forward to be looped in the front of the table. The loop terminated a second before at right angles to the original path of the billiard ball, in hopes of knocking the original ball off its course. Should the billiard ball be able to knock itself off its path, it would create a paradox, indicating either that time could be changed retroactively, or that all worlds – including our own – were parallel universes, with time travel only capable of travelling across dimensions, not within time in our own world.
Or it would destroy the universe, but the scientists were fairly sure that it wouldn’t, given the energies involved. Nevertheless, they all wore goggles, just in case.
As one of the primary contributors to their experiments, I was called in to witness the procedure. And try as they might, they were unable to create a paradox. The loop simply refused to form… until they adjusted the apparatus, such that the ball knocked itself only slightly off course, in such a way as to do the same when it looped.
I immediately hired half the staff for my own personal project.
I was a hundred and eighty-eight years old when I was born, naked and squalling in an artificial womb.
By then, I had given up on my various disguises, mostly staying out of the public eye, though the appearance of my face in the background of pictures with my employees or out shopping in supermarkets got the conspiracy sites roiling. The lack of a death certificate for me was a matter of public record, and rumors ran rampant about just what I had been up to for the last hundred years, and where LifeWorks had dug me up from, with only a few of the more alert members recognizing the whole of my life’s work.
I have to admit, it felt good to take credit for that theory anonymously, though it may have involved a bit more Bigfoot than the real story did.
Wrapping myself up in swaddling clothes, and with a wallet with counterfeit currency of the era and a non-descript antique t-shirt and faded jeans bought just for the occasion, I stepped into the loop.
I was a newborn when I was laid in a nursery by my father after bribing a nurse with ten thousand dollars, and my brother was wrapped up and taken away.
It had seemed like a fun idea at the time, taking samples from my parents and myself and running them through the new sequencer we bought. It used to be that something like that would be exorbitantly expensive, but nowadays, with the new sequencers, you can do it overnight. And so, I did; we had three extra slots, and for a lark I stuck in my family. The next morning, I ran them, and found out I was hugely divergent – more than 1%.
For a lot of people, this would come as a profound shock. But for me, it never really seemed to matter all that much – your family is who raised you, not who created you. I guess a lot of people don’t see it that way, judging by all the folks who desperately search for their birth parents on bad daytime television shows, or trawl through government records in hopes of reuniting with their “real” family.
I can’t say it wasn’t surprising from an intellectual standpoint, though. It isn’t like I don’t resemble my relatives – blue eyes from my father, blonde hair from my mother, tall like both of them. I fit into my family just fine, and you could look at me and my cousins and say, “Yeah, I could see them as being related.” I thought for a moment that I might be the son of one of my cousins who had multiple children out of wedlock, but that idea almost instantly went away when I remembered that I would still be at least somewhat related.
My parents were much more bothered than I was. I wasn’t adopted – my mother had given birth to a baby with white hair in a hospital down in Stanford on my supposed birthday, and they had brought me home shortly thereafter. The only possible explanation was some sort of mix-up at the hospital, like something straight out of a movie.
I wasn’t too bothered about it at the time, and while my parents momentarily entertained visions of suing the hospital – it isn’t like hospitals don’t have money – we decided in the end it just wasn’t worth it. Maybe if we had, we would have figured out what was going on sooner.
I was thirty-six years old when I found out I wasn’t related to anyone.
The Human Family Tree project was very ambitious – and clever. For a nominal fee, they offered to sequence your DNA and warn you of any known disease alleles. In exchange, they added you to their big database of everyone, that you could pay a fee to search – and a larger fee if you wanted additional information. There was a big stink in Congress over whether or not it was legal or not, but the project made it clear that the project would be done overseas if it wasn’t done here – and, let’s face it, there’s no way they could stop it.
The cost was way lower than previous offers had been – it was only like $20 for the basic package, and they offered it to free to families making under $30,000 per year. Of course, I didn’t even remotely qualify for the free level, and I’d already gotten a copy of my whole genome, but I figured I might actually figure out who my family was, if my birth parents submitted their genomes as well, or if I had any brothers or sisters.
I got a call a month later.
When they analyze your relatedness to other human beings, one of the first things they look at what haplogroups you belong to – specifically, ones on your X and Y chromosomes. In case you’re not up on your genetic terminology, a haplogroup is basically a set of mutations that, together, indicate a common line of descent. Having some of those mutations, but not others, indicates at what point your DNA branched off from other people’s DNA. Part of the point of the project was to characterize the various haplogroups, but some were already pretty well established by that point – the sex chromosomes and your mitochondrial DNA, all of which don’t change very much over time. Because the Y-chromosome in particular doesn’t do much mixing with the X-chromosome, you can use large sections of it to trace back your patrilineal lineage all the way to the first guy in your line.
Or at least, you’re supposed to.
According to previous research, the last common universal male ancestor of all living male human beings – the guy whose Y chromosome ended up in everyone – lived about 300,000 years ago.
But my DNA was wrong. Parts of it showed what looked like modern haplogroups – specifically R1b, a group common to western Europe and North Africa – but it had a huge number of exotic sections which were entirely different, and several SNPs common to all members of R1b were completely gone. That sort of thing could happen with extreme DNA damage, such as from exposure to radiation or a virus, but on retesting, my DNA came out the same way. Whatever it was, I was that way all the way through, and I didn’t have any major health problems as a result, indicating it was probably natural.
It wasn’t the only weird thing – all of my chromosomes showed numerous unique anomalies. Genetic engineering was considered at first, but I was way too old for that – no one was doing human genetic engineering back in the 1980s, and certainly nothing like this. It was like I came out of no known population group, and while in some regards I looked like someone out of a modern-day Eurasian group, there were deviations and mutations in my genome which corresponded to no one else on Earth.
I mentioned before that I’d seen a 1% deviation in my DNA, and hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but tiny deviations in your genetic code actually represent huge expanses of time. Humans and chimpanzees, for instance, share over 98% of their DNA. Running a phylogenetic tree with me in it put me with humans, but only so far – I was further away from them than I was from Neanderthal and Denisovians, even though I had some obviously Neanderthal DNA as well. The only reasonable explanation was that there was another, yet undiscovered archaic hominid group, and somehow my family – whoever they were – were significant deviants from the human norm, the descendants of some ancient parallel family line that interbred with anatomically modern humans at some point in the recent past and left behind no trace, other than myself.
Of course, they wanted to run my whole family, but I had to explain to them that I didn’t really have a biological one – I didn’t know who my biological parents were, due to the mixup at the hospital. But now it was a big deal – I was a huge news story. The press went wild with stories speculating about my origins, and naturally, the cryptozoological people all decided I was clearly Bigfoot. It probably wasn’t nice of me to offer to introduce them to my relatives out in the Cascades before introducing them to my friends in gorilla outfits, but it bought me a laugh and got them to leave me alone.
Not that it didn’t stop the Weekly World News from putting me on the front page of their website for like, two months. It was a great photo, though.
Stanford, unfortunately, wasn’t much help; while a lawsuit quickly granted access to a lot of their medical records, there were no obvious hints of a mixup. One would think that a Francisco Lopez would not be a baby who would be likely to be mixed up with a white-haired child, but the researchers dug into everyone anyway in hopes of finding my birth parents, who had likely been saddled with my parents’ own biological child. It wasn’t easy going through records from the decades before electronic recordkeeping became omnipresent, and it wasn’t easy tracking down people based on names and addresses from nearly a half-century before, but in the end they managed to find most of them while acting as my own sort of free private investigators.
Unfortunately, the whole thing turned up nothing – not one case of a child who could have been my parents’, nor of anyone who showed similarly anomalous DNA.
I was forty-four years old when the Internet found my father.
The conflict between privacy and openness on the Web was largely settled by the early 2030s; the pattern recognition software had gotten so ubiquitous, and Internet connections so fast, that attempts at banning or restricting such technology met with widespread derision, combined with pictures tracking the whereabouts of the critic on the previous day with cats (or worse) shopped onto their head in every image. Free People Foundation v Jerome Tyrant ended the debate, when the Free People Foundation successfully argued before the Supreme Court that their facial recognition software, trained on the faces of criminal mugshots for the purpose of identifying potential robbers and shoplifters in surveillance cameras, was not a violation of anyone’s rights. From that point, every picture ever was fair game, and websites sprang up documenting every single appearance of any person from cradle to grave (literally, in some cases), sorted by location and year. While the incredible volume of digital photos from the 21st century made up the overwhelming bulk of the database, a number of historical photographs and newspaper clippings made up many of the older entries.
Many of the older records constituted rather amusing errors – the database was convinced that Paul Mounet and Keannu Reeves were the same person – it also contained more intriguing data points, such as confusing children at times for their parents or grandparents. It was quite the surprise when my own face showed up in the database dated to the year of my birth, attributed to a tall, blonde-haired, blue-eyed man in the background of a photograph taken in Palo Alto, California carrying what looked to be a wrapped-up baby.
He didn’t look remarkable, but then, neither do I; really, apart from the long hair and nondescript t-shirt and jeans he might have bought anywhere, he looked a lot like me, down to having a few days’ worth of beard growth due to poor shaving habits. I spent the next few days off and on searching through the online database, looking at photos around Palo Alto and the San Francisco Bay Area for any sign of him, but found nothing.
I had just about given up when I received a phone call telling me that my father had died – his Parkinson’s had finally caught up with him. Heading off home for a rather somber family reunion with my brother and his family wasn’t much fun, but while we were home, we ended up deciding to digitize my mom and dad’s old photo album, and I found my father again, in the background of three photographs of “me” swaddled up on the day of my birth.
Watching.
I was fifty-eight years old when I found out I wasn’t aging.
It was the 40 year reunion of my graduation from high school and all my old friends were in attendance. And I do mean old.
That’s a bit cruel, to be fair – with average life expectancy pushing ninety, sixty was the new forty, and most people don’t look too weathered by that point. Still, more than a few of them were a good deal fatter than I remembered – turns out that people who used to play soccer or run track-and-field can put on a lot of weight when they get sedentary nerd desk-jobs translating Japanese games or doing architecture. We were missing more than a few of my old friends – one of my oldest friends hadn’t even made it to our tenth anniversary of graduating together – but most of them were there.
And it was inescapable that I looked more like their children than I did like them.
It had been avoidable ten years before, or at the twenty-fifth anniversary – most of their kids were still kids, or at best teenagers at the time, and no one had been lining up next to the old fogeys. But with some of their kids as grown adults, it was inevitable that one of them would eventually ask me who my parents were.
This brought a lot of ribbing from my friends. I seem to remember the common theme being that the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot still managed to keep showing up when people’s cell phone batteries were dead, meaning they must be at least 200 years old, so I probably had a ways to go. But I spent the rest of the night looking at everyone else, and realizing just how far off I was. Sure, some people age more slowly than others – my (adoptive) mother never really shriveled up in the way my dad did, even as she outlived my grandmother – but the reality was that, looking at the photographs of us standing next to our parents at graduation, all my friends looked like their parents did, if a bit fatter, while I looked the same as I did in our group photo from our 15th reunion.
I was seventy years old when I retired from my job and went back to college for my PhD.
Retiring when you look as young as I did certainly raised a few eyebrows, but after a few stories about this awesome cosmetic surgeon I went to high school with, most of my coworkers bought it well enough. And I figured that with freshly minted college diplomas, no one would ask too closely about my high school diploma, or my original undergraduate degree. Of course, most colleges aren’t exactly looking for people of retirement age to go back to school, but with the increasing blurring of the lines between education for fun and education for profit, it wasn’t that unusual.
Still, I can’t pretend that I didn’t stick out. Picking up degrees in two disparate fields – electrical engineering and genetic engineering – is hardly a normal thing to do, and while I could have potentially educated myself on the subject, going back after fifty years out of school, tough as it was, really forced me to focus on what mattered.
In my final year, I legally changed my name, started dyeing my hair, and got a pair of custom brown contacts instead of glasses. Peppering the Internet with photographs of myself using my new name and style, I managed to forge for myself a new identity, disconnected from my previous name. I kept writing books as “the Bigfoot guy”, but I gradually let them taper off, until people began to wonder just where I had gone. Most of them figured I’d retired off to some tropical paradise and given up on doing stuff, an idea I was just fine perpetuating.
Meanwhile, I went to work.
I was a hundred and twenty-five years old when I founded my own company.
Years of experimentation had yielded great returns, with the genes for good health, high intelligence, clear skin, slow aging, and numerous other benefits being identified in humans. The wealthy benefitted more than anyone – only they were able to afford to travel to random islands in the Caribbean and undergo expensive experimental treatments on their offspring. A lot of the companies were fly-by-night operations, but somehow, I always seemed to end up in the best ones – or, more accurately, I always made the ones I was in the best. Lawsuits and raids by American law enforcement were a way of life for years, but curiously, the lead scientist always seemed to mysteriously escape with all the money, almost as if he had friends in Congress who weren’t eager to have their own trips exposed.
It wasn’t until the twenty-second century had well and truly set in and the first generation of “designer babies” had grown up that Congress finally bowed to the inevitable. The growth of inequity between the haves and the have nots had continued to grow as society increasingly drove those who could not successfully complete college further and further to the fringes of the workforce, but a generation of super-babies being born to those who could afford my services and those of my shadier compatriots had finally resulted in a real threat to the middle class. Returning to America with a vaguely Hispanic name, a dark tan, and a moustache, I worked to push a bill through Congress which legalized the practice and subsidized poorer families in receiving the treatment for the procedure. By that time, it had been very streamlined, and adding a few traits to appear like the parents over a generally optimized frame had been my modus operendi for quite some time, and the practice was eminently affordable with governmental aid.
LifeWorks quickly became one of the largest companies in America, offering treatment and genetic consulting to millions of families, while I lurked in the background, accumulating money for my own pet projects.
I was a hundred-and-seventy-three years old when they proved the Novikov self-consistency principle.
High-energy physics had continued apace, and while I never formally studied it, I had kept up with it even over the century I had spent out of school and donated large sums of money to the cause of the advancement of science. Teams had continued to grow, and high-energy physics programs came to consume ever more enormous amounts of money to build larger and larger particle accelerators. The imaginatively named Colossal Quark Collider – a callback to the now venerable Large Hadron Collider – was built under North Dakota largely on the back of profits from human genetic engineering. With the population growing increasingly elite, science jobs were at an all-time high as society worked to find new ways to employ a population which increasingly was working not on solving the basic necessities of life, but pushing the boundaries of what humans were capable of.
The energy needs were enormous, but after many years of laborious experimentation, it was discovered that space-time could in fact be bent back on itself and create time loops, resulting in materials from the present finding themselves in the past. The process was expensive and unstable, but after several years of work, they finally managed to set up the classic billiard balls experiment in order to test whether causality existed.
A billiards table was set up, and a billiard ball was struck by a pool cue, sending it forward to be looped in the front of the table. The loop terminated a second before at right angles to the original path of the billiard ball, in hopes of knocking the original ball off its course. Should the billiard ball be able to knock itself off its path, it would create a paradox, indicating either that time could be changed retroactively, or that all worlds – including our own – were parallel universes, with time travel only capable of travelling across dimensions, not within time in our own world.
Or it would destroy the universe, but the scientists were fairly sure that it wouldn’t, given the energies involved. Nevertheless, they all wore goggles, just in case.
As one of the primary contributors to their experiments, I was called in to witness the procedure. And try as they might, they were unable to create a paradox. The loop simply refused to form… until they adjusted the apparatus, such that the ball knocked itself only slightly off course, in such a way as to do the same when it looped.
I immediately hired half the staff for my own personal project.
I was a hundred and eighty-eight years old when I was born, naked and squalling in an artificial womb.
By then, I had given up on my various disguises, mostly staying out of the public eye, though the appearance of my face in the background of pictures with my employees or out shopping in supermarkets got the conspiracy sites roiling. The lack of a death certificate for me was a matter of public record, and rumors ran rampant about just what I had been up to for the last hundred years, and where LifeWorks had dug me up from, with only a few of the more alert members recognizing the whole of my life’s work.
I have to admit, it felt good to take credit for that theory anonymously, though it may have involved a bit more Bigfoot than the real story did.
Wrapping myself up in swaddling clothes, and with a wallet with counterfeit currency of the era and a non-descript antique t-shirt and faded jeans bought just for the occasion, I stepped into the loop.
I was a newborn when I was laid in a nursery by my father after bribing a nurse with ten thousand dollars, and my brother was wrapped up and taken away.