Page 5 of Time Traveling Space Bastards

I knew what I saw was real, but once I got older, I just assumed I was completely unimportant in terms of the entire galaxy and that they eventually figured out who the real Devouring Mother was and weren’t coming back.

And honestly, I hadn’t made it super easy for anyone to find me again. I changed my name, colored my hair blue, and I had absolutely zero social media presence. I didn’t expect to see anyone I’d ever met before I turned eighteen ever again.

But here they were, and they were still calling me the Devouring Mother. And they at least asked to hear my story, so they were going to get it, even the ugly parts.

“I was seven when you crash landed in our pool. My dad was a big Sci-fi geek. He introduced me to Star Trek when I was five. We started with the very first episode of the original season and we’d crash on the couch with a bowl of ice cream and watch an episode every night after dinner. He also wanted me to be well read, so he’d read me his favorite books before bed every night.

“They were going to some play and left me with a babysitter, but it was a neighbor who spent the entire time raiding their liquor cabinet and texting her boyfriend. She was passed out drunk when you made all that noise crashing into the pool, so I was the only one who saw it. We lived pretty far from the neighbors, so it wasn’t like the neighbors came running either.

“So, when my parents came home to find the babysitter drunk and me freezing by the pool and babbling about aliens, they thought I was just acting out. I was adamant about not coming back inside and fought pretty hard.

“My parents didn’t believe in gentle parenting, so I got my ass spanked pretty hard and they both thought all the Sci-Fi my dad exposed me to was to blame. So, that was the end of bonding with my dad over old Star Trek episodes and getting read to at night.

“They thought that would be the end of it, but I kept sneaking out to wait by the pool. They put locks on my door and started locking me in, and that was when they shipped me off to the first psychiatrist. At first, they thought I was just a kid with a big imagination, but I didn’t learn to play their game right away.

“I got into fights at school when the kids would bully me about the aliens. I never said I saw aliens again, but I insisted what I saw when I was seven was real. It was this whole-ass thing. Everything I said was a lie after that. I saw my neighbor cheating on his wife and everyone just assumed I was lying or hallucinating.

“I still didn’t learn, but some of the things I saw needed to be reported. I saw a man sneak into another neighbor’s window and woke my parents up. They accused me of lying again. The next day, I marched up to my neighbor’s daughter and demanded she tell the truth. I was only eleven. It could have been her boyfriend, or she wasn’t ready to talk about being assaulted, so she accused me of hallucinating the whole thing.

“That was about the time they started looking into medication and diagnoses. Shit kept happening that definitely needed the attention of adults. Keep in mind, I never said I saw aliens again, but I kept insisting what I saw the first time was true. There were some adults behaving badly, and they got away with it because everyone assumed I had schizophrenia and was just making it up.

“They’d put me on something and ask about the aliens and I wouldn’t say I made it up. Then, something would happen and they thought the medication wasn’t working, so they threw me in the hospital and changed it. The side effects were awful. Sometimes, I was just a zombie or completely flat, but sometimes, I got really sick. They put me on clozapine as a last resort and my white blood cell count got so low, I nearly died. That was when I stopped telling anyone anything, said I lied about the aliens, and put my plan in place to leave everyone behind as soon as I turned eighteen.”

“You changed your name, too,” Enix said. “There’s the name you were born with, the name you go by now, and the name on your writing. It made finding you very difficult.”

I threw up my hands.

“I don’t know how you know my books since no one reads them, but you wouldn’t have needed to link my birth name to Baxter Holmes if you’d just come back when you said you would.”

“It’s been twenty-one years for you, but it’s only been about three hours for us. One and a half to fix the craft, thirty minutes to program it to find you again, and then another hour waiting in your apartment. Time travel is tricky and so are time machines. You don’t always end up where you want to go. You end up where you need to be,” Torrek said.

“Time travel isn’t linear. It’s?—”

“Yes, I know. My parents basically banned anything Sci-fi in our house, but I snuck episodes of Dr. Who. I just assumed you found the real Devouring Mother and abandoned me.”

“No, we had it right the first time. You’re the Devouring Mother and who we were looking for. You’re also in terrible danger,” Kuka said.

Well, fuck.