Misplaced My mother came into the world in the year 2136. Father always said Mother was born in the wrong time: too late to explore the world, too late to dance among the stars. I don’t remember her well. Her face is never the same in my mind. “Mother” brings to mind a strange infusion of too-clean flowers — like roses sprayed with antiseptic. Sometimes, I think remember bright light curtained by long dark hair, her heartbeat under my baby ear. They say I lost her too young. Once, when Father thought I wasn’t listening, he murmured, “I wonder if we ever had her at all. She belonged to the stars.” We live in a universe where the time-space continuum is constantly manipulated. It is no longer an issue of understanding it. It has been harnessed. To hear Father tell it, Mother had a love-hate relationship with that. She loved her job in the government, traveling through time and space. But she hated the constrains. She hated how everything had been defined years ago, how it was so structured now. Don’t track in dirt or germs from the past, or the future. Make sure you can pass off authentically for the period you’re traveling to. Everything had to be registered, had to be for a purpose. Just in case people created paradoxes in time — god forbid the people in power die before they were born. “She just wanted to learn.” Father said, begging me to understand. Her thrills came from her barely-legal trips. And it was on one of these trips... Well, she never came back. So, I grew up on my father’s knee as I’d always done. It sounds cruel, but I barely miss her. Where I am concerned, she left when I was seven, and just never came back. Father... Father was a classic stay-at-home dad: forever tinkering with stuff when he wasn’t taking care of me. Sometimes, the two went together. I took apart my first timekeeper at age four. Mother came home to me playing in the eye of the hurricane, pieces of metal, glass, scattered around me. She exploded. “She could have cut herself!” Father only bowed his head and apologized. Then he gave me another more complex timekeeper to dismantle the next day. It’s one of my few memories of her presence. Father though... Sometimes his eyes would go unfocused, occasionally fill with tears. “You’re your mother’s daughter.” He would say, tugging a lock of my long black hair, when I came home from the Academy, clamoring about “what if”s. It made me smile, at first, to be compared to the woman he loved. But as the years wore past, the words ate at me. When I graduated, top of my class. When I took the Empire’s scholarship to study science and space. When I signed on to work for the Empire as a researcher-explorer. I was decidedly not like my mother, I argued with myself. I chose research not purely for knowledge but to better the world. I worked for the establishment, not skirting in the grey areas to fulfill my own needs. I had no issue with regulations. Still, I held my tongue. Let my father muse my hair. Smiled back tightly. Stayed with him, in the same old whitewashed tired house Mother left us in, even when offer after offer came. To see the stars. To go to another set of worlds. I would not, could not be her. I could not leave him. If Father knew anything, he said nothing, as he watched me sign my flying rights away and leash myself to a desk in the Capital — it was seconds away by teleportation. Then I found her files. It surfaced in the re-digitization. Every few years, the Empire upgrades the system, and we re-digitize files, making sure they don’t slip through the cracks. By pure chance, my mother’s files dropped into my lap. “C. R. Willis. 2157 — the United States of America, North America, Earth, 1938.” It had escaped re-digitization: it hadn't be updated since it was filed twenty years ago. Mother had been fifteen, the year before she had me. I felt like a stone was sinking in my gut, welding my feet to the ground. My stomach roiled. It was one of her grey files, I was certain. Mother would be talented enough prevent anyone but her to notice them. It would have slipped through the cracks for decades. Unless it fell into my hands. Then her blood protections would fail. Absently, I opened the file with a wave of my hand. Another swipe had the privacy set to me only, if Mother’s protections hadn’t already taken care of that. The words I read seemed to run in circles through my mind. “Willis arrived during The War of Worlds episode... Tracked down Area 51... Accosted by Martians... Landed in ice-cream... Morphed... Little Green Men... Possess ability to take on qualities... Limited time before effect... Permanent... Human possession... Willis compromised...” By rote, my hands rose to move in familiar patterns. Diagonal swipe across, then up for close and lock to me only. A wave to dismiss the privacy. Quick swipe down with index finger for shut down and clock out. The ride home through the teleportation tube stretched on for eons, as my thoughts scrambled for purchase like butterflies in a girl's stomach before her first date. I scarcely remember the walk from transport room to my father's den. Then his face was before mine, forehead creased as his mouth formed words my mind could not find wherewithal to comprehend. Wordlessly, I handed him the file and watched, ever silent, as he formed the gestures to open it. The pallor and landscape of his face was interesting to watch, the coldly detached researcher in me thought. His dark skin gradually paled, attaining a sallow cast. The lines around his eyes and mouth tightened, forming steeper hills, deeper valleys. Finally, he closed the file and knelt before me — funny, when had I sat down? "Is it true?" I heard my voice plaintively beg. Father took my hands. Distantly, I wonder if I should even call him Father, if I should recoil from his touch. He uttered the word that devastated my understanding of the world: "Yes." It was one of Mother's first high-level assignments, to travel back to the beginnings of space travel in the modern world. She was sent back through time and space to 1938, when Martians were said to have invaded Earth. "Ever curious, your mother snuck into the fabled Area 51 and camped there in wait." Father said. "I don't know how my comrades and I came to be there. I don't remember." Father shook his head, as though to clear the cobwebs from his memory. "But we found ourselves in the apartment block your mother had found refuge in." To hear him tell it, he and his fellows had explored the foreign place. It was warm, too warm. So they delved into the freezer. "We found this strange cold substance. It was green, flecked with dark brown." He described, eyes lighting up. "It was like those moisturizers your mother used to put, only minty not floral." "Ice-cream." I answered the unspoken question. "Yes!" Father's grin quickly faded. "But it reacted to some of us, fused with our skin..." Just as a man opened the freezer, took out the box and began eating. "I was scooped up with this strange silver thing and brought up to a giant cavern..." He shuddered. "The next I knew, I was a human, an Earthling." Translation: he was eaten and fused with the human, to wear that human's skin. "I woke to your mother's face." His eyes softened. "She cradled a handful of my tiny comrades in her hands." She told him later, after she heard his story, that they were all she could save from the US government. Some escaped, leaving their mark on Earth 'Little Green Men'. It took all her guile to get them to leave Father alone too. "She felt I couldn't be left behind." Father said. "Left in 1938, with no one who would believe me. So she brought me back." The Empire had been horrified. What course of history had my mother changed? And to bring a person back... The technicality that it was an alien in a human's body just made things worse. "They ordered Mars annihilated." Father's voice dropped low. "They couldn't risk an entire race invading, possessing everyone. Your mother was heartbroken she caused the death of my people. I always told her I don't remember them anyway, it's alright. But she bore that guilt." It was maybe the same guilt that made her protect him. She fought to have custody of Father like a mother does for her child, as much as it sounds like an Oedipus complex. She took him under her wing, swore to humanize and civilize him. For most part, she succeeded in molding him into a perfect man. Her perfect man. They married within months, and I was born a scant few months later. Me, a child from 2158 and 1938. A child of a human and a Martian-in-human-clothing. A child who, by all rules of space and time, shouldn't exist. "Who am I?" I whispered. "You're our daughter. Mine and your mother's." Father replied gently. His fingers brushed my cheeks — huh, I hadn't noticed my tears. He picked me up like I was a child, gently rocking me as my hold on my emotions broke. Maybe Mother had been born in the wrong time. But Father was in the wrong planet and body. And I was... I was existing when I shouldn't be. Us all misplaced atoms of the universe. Maybe that's why we had been put together to begin with.