Total numbness would never be attainable, I realized. What lay before me was not as horrifying as the things that I had already seen, and yet the pain in my heart was still there. The sadness at witnessing it was still felt.

To call the landscape desolate would have been an understatement. It did not look like the movies though. In movies, landscapes like this would be gray and dingy. Instead, everything was bright and bathed in a healthy warm light. It was the light of the morning sun to the east. The rays of that sun were cast across the sky as it rose over the Pacific ocean. It was a beautiful sight in contrast to the destruction opposite of it.

I felt a tug at my sleeve, and looked down to the impatient girl who was the source of the gesture.

“Elijah, lets go.” she said, beginning to walk forward.

A cold fear filled my heart. That was another thing which I was beginning to realize was not going to vanish with experience or time. Sadness was sadness. Horror was horror. Fear was fear.

Besides, I was in legitimate danger, I had the right to be scared. Aileen had already stated in no uncertain terms that she would not, and possibly could not, use her time travel to put me back together if I died. It was one of her “rules”. We could not use time travel for non-study related purposes like saving lives. The number of ‘jumps’ she could take us on through time was limited, and she was unwilling to waste them on things like resurrections. “Are you sure it is alright? Is it safe? It may be safe for you Aileen but…” 

“I do not lie to you,” she replied. Her tone was not reassuring, but it was also not offended. In fact, she seemed indifferent. That was not unusual for Aileen. In her eyes though, blue and deep, I saw the assurance I needed. They were kind eyes.

Aileen was often unreadable aside from her eyes. They were sometimes a dark blue and deep like the ocean, and in other lights and at other times they were bright like the sky. They always seemed wide open, like the eyes of a baby or a child. In general, Aileen was quite childlike. She was barely four foot nine, and she was tiny beside my very average five foot ten height. When I had first encountered her, I had assumed she was just some strange child. I had also hit her with a car at the time though, and thus had neglected to stop and care very much about her appearance or age. I was just panicked, and afraid my life was over. She had just been some girl that I had accidentally hit. The funny thing about that was how right and how wrong I had been.

I took a step forward towards the ruined city in front of us. Mere days ago this city had been a thriving place. People had gone too and fro. Now it was a wasteland, and a chill ran down my spine as I thought about the possibility that I could be stepping on the dust of people’s bodies while walking through the charred and burned rubble. My fears were more or less confirmed when I saw a the charred remains of a corpse - not much more than a skeleton - laying in the middle of the street. I was surprised I could even recognize the street as a street, much less the corpse as a corpse.

Feelings of remorse and philosophical thoughts took a backseat to other worries for a moment, as memories of my last trip with Aileen took precedence in my mind. “Aileen, you will be conspicuous. They will think you are strange.”

“Why?” she said, confused. The girl looked over herself in a worried way.

Again, I was reminded of how childlike Aileen was. Even her mannerisms matched it in someways. It was like a child pretending to be an adult, rather than how an actual adult acted. Other aspects of her were not though. For example, when she spoke she spoke with clarity and a direct tone.

“You’re hair.” I noted. It was blonde. This had been appropriate for our time in Germany and during out escapade through a 19nth century America. Here however, it would not fit. “You will stand out.”

“Oh…” she said, running a hand through the long blonde locks. “I see. What color should it be? Will I also have to change my face? That is not enjoyable. I would rather not.”

“Your hair should be dark, black or dark brown. No your face is fine, I don’t want to get close to anybody anyway. I won’t look normal here either.” I replied, “Though I may pass a little more scrutiny than you.”

“You are human like them.” she said, and then went silent. It occurred to me that she expected me to finish whatever thought she had just spoken. This was a usual experience with Aileen, but one I had only begun to pick up on now that we were had been on a couple of adventures. She would say something, and then expect me to understand the rest of the thought from there, without context, explanation, or hints.

“Could you elaborate?”

“Everywhere we’ve gone, you have looked unusual. You are human, are you not? Is everyone like those people we saw before, who saw different people as not human? Do the people we meet not think you are human?”

The statement gave me an initial shock. My brain did not understand how to process it in the correct manner. After all, while I had thought about the notions of what makes a human a human quite a lot, in recent days especially, this particular trait of mine had never seemed to come into that question.

“Of - of course.” I replied hastily, stuttering over the words in confusion and shock. “You are not less human because of what you look like, or who you are, or where you are. None of that changes anything.”

“Then why do they identify you as different?” she asked. From anyone else, it would have been rude, but from Aileen it was as innocent as a two year old asking the question. Still, I reminded myself that she was anything but an innocent child. It was possible she already knew the answer to her question, and just wanted to hear mine. Of course, there was the other question - how was I supposed to explain that part Asian and part white people like me just weren’t very common only eighty years ago?

“Because people are not used to people like me yet. People in this time don’t uh, mix, as much as they do in my time. I do not look like the people here enough to fit in, so they will be suspicious. There are fewer people that look like me in this time.” I explained. In my mind I wanted to expound on the explanation even more, but by the way Aileen stared and twitched mildly - an expression I had learned about on the adventure before this one - I knew that she was unsatisfied with the amount of time it took me to communicate my message. The reality was that she needed much fewer words than a human, and simultaneously she needed far less simplification.

That was when I chided myself for the thought. Here I was, part insulted and part shocked by the question that she had asked me about fitting in with humanity, and I still had reservations about calling Aileen human. She had already expressed her desire to be seen as just that - a human like me, just a different species. It was hard for me though. She was just so different.

Perhaps for a moment, I felt empathy towards the crew of the bomber which had caused the destruction we were strolling through. Excuses of patriotism, a belief that this was the right thing, and more had probably run through their minds a millions times since they had committed this act. At the end though, had it been any of those that had allowed them to unleash atomic fire? Or had it just been that they were scared, and that they had thought of these people as different from them?

I reassured myself that Aileen didn’t scare me though, even if I didn’t quite believe it, and walked on. I tried to ignore it when her hair slowly started to darken to a raven black, and instead directed my eyes to the ruins around me, thinking of  a different topic.

“This is strange.” I said.

Aileen looked at me, not saying a word.

“We should be nowhere near ground zero, but the ground and the buildings are scorched. That…corpse, back there, was obviously a person that had burned to death. I knew the city was destroyed, but I had always though the outskirts of the city survived.”

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“This particle data is correct.” Aileen replied.

I knew that the data she was referring to was not the statement I had just made. Rather, this was a statement she made whenever I questioned the history that we would witness in our time traveling adventures.

“This is a secondary reaction.” she said, once more letting me fill in the thoughts she was omitting.

“I see. So I guess what you mean by that is this is the result of a fires that broke out after the bomb dropped. Not the initial blast.”

Aileen nodded, and then wandered down a side street covered in charred rubble. “Did your species discover nuclear fission through this event?”

“No,” I replied. I chose my next words with care. Aileen was not a judge of human kind, I reminded myself. She was not some terminator come back to end all of humanity. She was human. Her intent, at least her stated intent, was good. Aileen was a scholar. Also because of that, whether I liked it or not, I knew she would find the truth. Nothing I could do would change the outcome, except for perhaps telling the truth in a positive light.

“Why did this happen?” came the sudden question, interrupting my thoughts. I knew the question would come. Once she started asking questions, there would be follow-up questions, often sharp and quick questions that came before I was prepared to answer.

“There was a war. People were dying. Some people were afraid that more people would die if the war did not end soon. Some people wanted to test a new weapon. Others were just fighting. I am sure there were more reasons. All together, they wanted to end the war. This was how they did it.”

Aileen did not appear to be listening to me as I began to ramble. She was walking at a brisk pace, kicking up ash and dust with her feet as she walked. I tried to avoid breathing any of it in. Aileen had said we were protected, but I was still careful. A certain dread filled me as I looked into the distance and saw people moving among the rubble almost a mile away. They would not be so lucky, and did not know the dangers they were putting themselves in by digging around in the radioactive dust.

It occurred to me that I could see people across the rubble. The buildings that were still standing as burnt out husks were getting fewer and fewer. Everything now was flattened. Lucky for us, there were not many people nearby, and if we were getting closer to ground zero, then I knew that we would be seeing even less people soon. They would have noticed by now that the people who were around the middle of the blast zone were either all dead or dying.

“What is war? Could you explain it again?” Aileen asked.

“War is when people try to kill each other.” I said, noting that it was a new thing for her to ask twice about something. This was a question she had asked on our last adventure. Perhaps it interested her in particular. “Does your kind not have war?”

She stopped, kicking a little dust forward with the sudden halt of her feet, and turned around. There was a little smile on her face. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For the question.” she said. “I think you call the feeling ‘rude’. Yes, I was beginning to feel rude, asking many questions. This is a joint effort. We are studying each others species.”

I smiled and let a small chuckle escape me. I had forgotten that already. When we had started our adventures together, not long ago, she had been insistent on studying Homo Sapiens and I had given the ridiculous but fair condition that I would help her so long as I was allowed to study her species in return. She had agreed with joy, and I had forgotten that she liked to teach as much as learn.

“Well then, answer it.”

“Oh , right.” she said, “I’m sorry. I forgot I had to speak.”

“Yes, we don’t have telepathy like you.” I said, smirking.

“Telepathy is not the linking that my species uses.” Aileen replied. One would expect her tone to be dismissive, but it was just instructive. “No, we do not have war. Why do you?”

Once again I felt like I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Do I choose to keep the reputation of humanity alive, or do I tell what I believed to be the earnest truth? Would that truth even be right? I was talking to a being that had downloaded and erased much of the internet in a day. That was of course, after a lengthy fixation on men from Florida, among other things. The decision to toss it had been decided upon because I had proven that a large percentage of the data on it was false. If I broke her trust, then there was no telling what would happen. Perhaps I’d get stranded back in time if she just decided to jump ship and leave.

Furthermore, it was strange and difficult to explain these things. They were concepts every human being that I had ever known or lived around understood - save for babies or the mentally impaired. Yet here I stood, giving my defense for human kind while also explaining such simple and intuitive things about us.

“I do not know the answer.” I replied. It was the best bet to start with. That way, at least, I could cover my ass if I was wrong. Then, I began the rest of my explanation. “People are afraid of other people sometimes. They do not understand that we can all get along. Maybe we look different, or speak different languages. So they fight to settle differences like those. People hate each other because of their differences.”

“That does not match well with the data.” came the curt reply. “It is not hate. It is not fear. However, those emotions are part of it.”  

This felt a bit rude. She had just asked me, had she not? Now she was telling me I was wrong about my own species? “Well, how do you know that?” I asked.

Aileen skipped along for a moment, before picking up a small chip of brick.

“Why destroy a building, if you hate other human beings or are scared of them?”

It was, perhaps, the most instructive sentence she had ever spoken and yet it was also the most nonsensical. However, in the latter category the statement was facing an enormous amount of competition.

“I don’t understand how-” I began, but was interrupted.

“-you and I are alike.” she blurted out, cutting me off.

“What do you mean?” I asked, bewildered.

“You are different from other humans, because you were born later. Just like I am different from you because I was born later.” she explained, smiling. “You were scared of me because I was different, and you identified me as different because I was born later. You were also born later than these humans, and they see you as different because of that!”

It took me a moment to realize that she was referencing a different conversation from a couple minutes prior. I supposed that she had just put the two trains of thought together. Who was I kidding. This thought had been in her head for a while. She had just thought that this was the appropriate place in a normal human conversation to voice it.

“Did you mention this now because you thought it was the right time to mention it? Also, please, explain your thought process to me fully, don’t just blurt out a sentence and expect me to get it.”

Aileen nodded vigorously. “Yes, yes. I waited a short time to mention it, so it seemed like it came to me at the normal speed of a human realization, and I interrupted you to add effect. I also related it to a similar topic.”

“Wait, did you bring up this whole topic just to do that? The question about war again, did you ask that just for that purpose?”

Again, she nodded. She then spoke very fast. “Yes. But I also wanted to review known data and compare to current understanding. I also wanted to measure variance in your answer. There was significant variance, but that was expected.”

It was difficult to keep up with her talking speed, but I managed. At least she was being detailed with the answer.

“Well then, that is..a good job emulating our behaviour…However, most of the time we do not manipulate conversations so much. Also, jumping around in them like that is a bit strange. You should just talk, and if something like that happens, you say it. Obviously, for you it would be slowed down compared to how you are thinking, but that would be a good place to-”

A shout in Japanese suddenly rang out from behind me, and I turned to see two men standing with rifles leveled at us. I recognized the rifles as Arisaka’s.This was not because I was a firearms enthusiast or anything. I wasn’t even a history nerd. I was just some MIT biology dropout. However, I’d watched a youtube video on it in a late night study session. I’d failed the exam, and remembered nothing when the test came around, but I’d remembered what an Arisaka rifle was. Thank you internet.

The thought made me release an audible sigh. If only Aileen had just accepted the internet as fact and gone on I wouldn’t have been in this mess. I put up my hands, and Aileen emulated the motion. We’d been in this situation twice now, so it was good to see her understand what to do.

“Are we protected from bullets right now?” I whispered to her. She shook her head.

I thought frantically. I didn’t speak any Japanese at all, and the last time we had needed to speak a foreign language Aileen had built a translator over the course of a day or more to allow us the ability to converse. We didn’t have anything like that now. Why were the men even aiming at us? What had tipped them off to us being different?

Our clothes. I’d thought that our facial appearance would blend in well at a distance, and it probably had, but both of us were wearing modern clothes. This fact had slipped my mind. We were wearing jeans and T-shirts at that. I dared not open my mouth. If I did I would get us in worse trouble.

“It is ok.” Aileen said. To my surprise her tone was reassuring. “Both of them will die soon.”

“Oh goo- wait, no.” I whispered. “Explain, how will they die?”

“One of them has radiation poisoning, and will likely die in the next day or two. He is already weak. The other has a 95% chance of developing cancer in the next forty revolutions of this planet around your star. If we wait long enough, they will be disabled.” she said, wearing a satisfied grin.

This was it. Time travel or no, the me that existed was just going to end here. This was where I was going to die.