Jillian counted back on her fingers. “We were born in April. March. February. January. December. November. October. September. August. July?”
“Let’s check from June to August, the year before we were born, just to be sure,” Louise said. “I don’t know how exact that nine-month thing is. People are always talking about premature babies.”
There were only a dozen possible batches.
“I would have thought there would be more,” Jillian said. “How are they staying in business?”
“The success rate of the first implant is high for Dad’s clinic. It’s at seventy percent. The leftovers are stored and used only if the first implant fails, or basically just thirty percent of the clients.”
Jillian scanned the dozen listings. “It only shows which embryos were accessed. It doesn’t give who pulled them and how they were used.”
“Just give me a minute.” Louise checked through the other databases. “Billing includes embryo batch numbers. That way the company can keep track of who gets what without worrying about confidentiality. Since our parents didn’t pay, our batch number will be the only one that doesn’t have a matching invoice. There.”
“First, who are our genetic donors?” Jillian chased the information through the databases. “They’re the ones we have to be careful around since they probably think we’re their kids and we’re most definitely not! Huh. What does ‘the estate of’ mean?”
“How should I know?” Louise was digging through the storage records, trying to find out how many embryos had been stored, what had been taken out, and what remained.
“Ah!” Jillian made the sound of discovery. “Estate means it belongs to dead people.”
“Our donors are dead?”
“It looks like it.”
“Maybe that’s what Dad meant by ‘they have children and lose them in some way.’ It’s not our donors that Mom and Dad are worried about, but our donors’ parents.”
“Oh my God! Lou! Our sperm donor was Leonardo DaVinci Dufae.”
“You’re kidding!” Louise leaned over to stare at Jillian’s screen.
Dufae was the most well-known inventor of their time. He invented a hyperphase gate that the Chinese built in orbit. They intended to use it to jump colonists to a planet around another star. If it had worked as expected, Dufae probably would have remained obscure. What made him famous was the fact that the gate malfunctioned in a spectacular fashion.
Every time the gate was turned on, Pittsburgh disappeared off Earth and traveled to Elfhome, the world of elves. Luckily, every time the gate was turned off, Pittsburgh returned. Basically, the Chinese had turned a major American city into a giant interdimensional yo-yo.
Earth was nearly plunged into global warfare over whether or not the gate should continue to operate. The biggest problem was that Dufae had died before the gate’s first activation. Other scientists couldn’t figure out how his gate worked, so they couldn’t simply tweak his design to something less inconvenient. No one really wanted to break contact with Elfhome completely. After a great deal of heated negotiations, an awkward schedule of turning the gate on and off, or Startups and Shutdowns, was established.
“That is so cool!” Louise whispered. “But he’s been dead for forever. Maybe before Mom and Dad were even born!”
“Lou,” Jillian whispered. “Leonardo DaVinci Dufae is our father.”
“He was just a sperm donor and he’s dead,” Louise pointed out again. “Who donated the egg? His wife?”
The egg donor was Esme Shenske. They didn’t recognize the name, but the Internet did. She was the captain of the third colony ship, the Dahe Hao. The holographic star-field ceiling, complete with astronomy lessons, suddenly made sense.
“Wow. Our donors are famous,” Jillian said.
“Were famous. He’s dead and she’s at Alpha Centauri or someplace like that. What the hell happened to our older sisters? Did they go to Alpha Centauri with her?”
After some digging they found that the first batch of embryos had been inserted into April Geiselman of Pittsburgh exactly nine months prior to Esme Shenske leaving the Solar System.
“That means our older sisters are eighteen next month,” Louise said. “But where are they? Did Esme take them with her? Or did they stay in Pittsburgh with Geiselman?”
“I’m looking,” Jillian said. “What about our baby sisters?”
Louise checked and found that there were indeed more embryos in storage. There was a recent date on their records. She frowned and checked the code for it. “Oh no, they’ve been flagged for disposal. The company sent out a letter last month to inform the estate that if they didn’t respond, the embryos would be thrown away. No one has responded to the letter. We have six months to save them.”
3: Mundane Monday
“I think we’re lucky that our male genetic donor is dead,” Jillian whispered in art class the next day.
Louise glanced automatically to Jillian’s tablet to see what had triggered the comment. Her twin had multiple newspaper web pages up, all featuring a Boston murder case. According to the headlines, the killer’s name was John Wright, who had beaten his wife, Ada, to death. “What?”
“Leonardo DaVinci Dufae had one sister. Ada Lovelace Dufae. She married John Wright and had one son, Orville Wright.”
Louise snickered at the names. “Wow, the Dufaes have a twisted sense of humor when naming children.” DaVinci had been a scientist as well as an artist. Ada Lovelace had worked with Charles Babbage on the prototype of the computer. Orville Wright had invented airplanes with his brother, Wilbur.
“Yes, obviously our grandfather hated being Tim No Middle Name Dufae.”
“I wonder what they would have called us.”
Jillian squinted a moment. “The mind boggles. The Wright brothers are the only sibling pair of inventors that leap to mind. But Orville is our cousin, not our brother.”
“You can be Wilbur. I’ll be Jane Goodall.”
“I’ll be Marie Curie, merci beaucoup. You should be Maria Goeppert Mayer, since we’re already Mayers.”
“Marie? Maria? We have a hard enough time with people telling us apart. I’d rather be Jane Goodall.”
“Okay, monkey girl.”
“Okay, Wil-burr.” Louise giggled.
She winced as Miss Gray raised her voice. Gage was causing problems again. He really needed to be on some kind of ADHD medicine.
Jillian sighed. “I can’t find out what happened to Orville after his mother was killed.”
“Oh.” The headlines made sense now; their Aunt Ada had been murdered by her husband. “How old is he?”
“He was ten when his mother died.” Jillian pulled up a picture of a boy that looked eerily like Louise now that her hair was boy-short. His dark eyes were haunted; they spoke to her of unimaginable horrors. “He saw it happen. He’s twenty-two now. Wherever he is. Trying to find out anything about him is getting me spammed with hits on the airplane inventor. Our stupid grandfather!”
Jillian fell silent, focused on creating a more accurate genetic family tree than the one that hung over their fireplace at home. Ironically both were equally bare. Orville was their only cousin by blood or birth. Their “Aunt Kitty” was a girl that their Grandma Johnson took under her wing but never formally adopted.
Louise tapped the icon in the corner of her tablet to check on their art teacher Miss Gray, who liked to roam while her students sketched. Making eye contact would warn her that the twins weren’t working on the assignment. Normally not a good thing, but since they were hacking various computer systems, it could be catastrophic if they were caught. Louise had a monitoring application that tracked the tablet that Miss Gray usually carried during class, but sometimes she put it down. The program showed that Miss Gray was in motion on the other side of the art classroom.