A New World
Copyright© 2026 by Edward Douglass Patterson
Chapter 4: Alice’s Birth
Rob and Kim Reynolds’ home
Bethesda, Maryland, USA
Early morning of May 17, 1999
“Rob, wake up! It’s time. Ooh!” Kim had started to sit up, but she had lain back again.
“Heh!” He paused a moment as he looked over at his wife. Even in the near dark, he could see her going through another contraction. The baby would be early. “I’ll get Mom and Dad up, then I’ll get dressed.” He got up and headed towards the door.
“Hurry! She’s in a hurry, unlike the boys.” Kim got up and put on a robe and slippers. She went and sat in the chair next to her bag.
Rob returned. “Mom will be ready in a couple of minutes.” He went over and kissed Kim before he started to dress. “Your folks are going to miss this birth. I wonder if they’ll start the experiment with the windows or rush over to see their new granddaughter.
“Mom will check out the initial windows before she comes. After missing the birth, there is no need to rush.”
Rob laughed as he finished dressing. Grabbing the bag, he headed out the door.
Kim got up and headed for the door where she met Rob’s mother, Beth. “Alice Elizabeth is in a hurry,” Kim told her.
“Well, that is like your mother,” Beth knew her friend Alice’s temperament.
As she helped her daughter-in-law to the car, Beth’s thoughts were about meeting Kim’s mother, Alice, at the University of Edinburgh when she had been an exchange professor. Beth had been the hotshot female mathematics wiz. When she had gotten to Edinburgh, she found Alice, an undergraduate student, who pressed her and all the other professors there to keep up with her. She had been like a whirlwind going through graduate mathematics courses while still acing the undergraduate required courses. When she made up her mind to do something, there was no holding her back. Beth, the American exchange professor, had been the only woman there that came close to her level. They discussed mathematics, then men, and soon everything, as they became friends. Years later, Professor Dame Alice Farwell Maclaren did an exchange at SMU where Beth taught. She had brought her husband, Jess, and their teenage daughters, Marie and Kim. Rob had been smitten by Kim. She had not been the little girl that he remembered from earlier visits. Kim had been in love with him for years. They began a long-range romance though they held off getting married until Kim was out of medical school.
They entered the car and headed to Holy Cross Hospital. It was a fifteen-minute drive, but Kim was showing signs that they might not make it to the hospital. They made it, but the resident knowingly whisked Kim into a birthing room.
Once there, the urgency abated a little. Rob and Beth had started to relax. Maybe Doctor Linda Klemanski would be able to make it. Ten minutes later, the doctor arrived.
“Well, this girl isn’t as patient as her brothers,” Linda commented as she started to examine Kim. “She didn’t wait for your mother.”
“Mom’s here!” Kim replied between contractions.
Beth looked at Rob, who shrugged. Kim wasn’t one to make wild statements.
The doctor called for the nurses, and soon everyone was thinking only of the birth of little Alice Elizabeth.
Later, Beth followed Linda from the room. Linda turned to Beth and asked, “Where is Dame Alice? She didn’t miss her other grandchildren’s births.”
“She and Jess weren’t scheduled to leave until tomorrow. The boys were right on schedule, so they were expecting to have plenty of time.” There was a ringing from her pocket. “Excuse me.” “Hello. Marie! What’s wrong?” Pause. “NO!” A much longer pause. “We are at the hospital. Alice Elizabeth was just born. Yes, three days early. They are both fine.”
Linda was staring at Beth. Something was wrong.
“No, she was in labor, so she didn’t say anything about your mother dying. She did say that your mother was here. I don’t know. Doctor Klemanski is right here. I’ll discuss it with her. Go take care of your father. Give him our love.” She turned off the phone and looked at Linda.
“Alice was electrocuted. It was while Kim was in labor. Marie was expecting Kim to have sensed something. What did she mean by her mother was here?”
Linda was a little shocked by this also. She had met Dame Alice when Jason, Kim’s oldest son, was born. They had hit it off right away. Not the famous egghead that some might expect, but a loving grandmother who had a smile for everyone she met. Linda’s son, Jeff, had been trying to decide which graduate school to go to for his PhD in Mathematics. When Dame Alice had found this out, she had Jeff come over to the Kim’s house to talk with Beth and her. Jeff had said that the questioning that the two of them gave him about mathematics had brought out things that he hadn’t even known he had known. They had found out what he knew and then had found out what his interests were. MIT had been only a dream for Jeff, but with their encouragement and letters of recommendation, he had gotten a scholarship. After graduation, he had gotten a great job again with Dame Alice’s help.
“How did she get electrocuted?”
“She and Jess were working on the window.” Beth realized that Linda should not hear about the windows to another world. “Water and electricity. Marie said that she was killed instantly. Marie’s best friend Sue was the EMT that tried to revive her. How and when am I going to tell Kim?”
Linda had shaken her head. She had been amazed at how smart people could forget about mixing water and electricity. “I think you should wait a little while. Let Kim enjoy her new daughter a while before you tell her. Let us go and get something to eat before Kim sees us and we give it away.”
Later back in the birthing room, when Rob went to the bathroom, Kim looked down at her feeding daughter. “Mother, what happened? Why are you here?”
Later in the morning, Tom and Beth Reynolds were in the room with their new granddaughter and her parents. Beth’s cell phone rang. She saw that it was Marie. She grabbed Tom’s hand and they exited the room.
“Marie, how are you and your father holding up?” A pause. “That’s good to have a lot of family with you.” She paused. “Your father and grandmother will be here tomorrow. They need to talk to Kim and see baby Alice? What’s going on? Baby Alice is Alice. How could that be? Your grandmother will explain? Well, I haven’t felt it was time to tell you, sister, yet. She’s so happy, but she’s quiet, like she gets when she’s thinking hard. What flight are they arriving on? A private plane with your Uncle Will and his family. They’ll come right to the hospital. OK, we’ll be waiting for them. I hope Edna has a good story, because this is very hard to believe. We’ll give her your love. You’re all in our prayers.” Beth hung up and looked at her husband.
“They think Alice’s soul has gone to baby Alice. Jess and Alice’s mother, Edna, are flying over on a private jet with Will Maclaren and his family.”
“Yes, Andy said that his sister and Will would be picking up the shipment of power controllers after they attended the twins’ graduation. Ian had them use the jet.”
“It is nice to have a family jet.” Beth jokes.
“Oh, I think the family use is secondary; they want those controllers as fast as they can. They paid a fifty percent premium to get the rush order. TDI and S-I also put in additional orders. I’m going to have to go over to TDI when we get back and have Brad show me what they have working.” Brad was their daughter Lynn’s husband. His family owned Trail Drive Industries (TDI), which was one of the three companies building the AJ Power Generators. Tom thought about how the controllers for the generators had recently gotten him promoted to senior vice president at TI. They were the biggest product that Jess had licensed to TI. Little had the company realized just how big this controller would be. The same controller was also used in the windows generator. Rob had worked five months with Jess to get both functions in the same silicon. The TI board would be surprised when they found out what a little recoding would allow the controllers to do.
“What is this about Alice’s soul?”
“Marie says that when Dame Alice died right as Alice Elizabeth was born, that her soul went to Alice Elizabeth.” Beth said with a confused look on her face. “She says that her grandmother Edna knows what happened. That it isn’t the first time. She’s coming over to talk to Kim about it. Now I’ve got to tell Kim about her mother.”
They re-entered the room and closed the door behind them. Kim was staring at the baby. Beth walked over to Kim as Tom walked over to his son and put his arm around his shoulders. “Kim, your mother died early this morning. Marie is with your dad.”
“I know. Dad is using the work on the windows to mask his loss.” Kim glanced up from the baby.
Beth glanced at Tom, who raised an eyebrow. They had learned to accept that their daughter-in-law had a sense of knowing about her family. She knew when the boys got hurt even when she was at work. “Yes. He and your grandmother Edna will be here tomorrow. She has something to tell you.”
“About Alice.” Kim responded as she looked down at her daughter who was also her mother.
Rob was very confused. “Mom, what happened to Alice?”
Beth told them what Marie had told her: “They were checking out Alice’s calculation for the windows. Water from a lake poured through the window and electrocuted Alice. Jess was not affected. He shut off the power and hit the house alarm. The police and EMTs responded. They couldn’t revive her.”
“I think that they had a couple of successes before the one that killed her,” Kim commented. “I could feel the joy that they had at the first window and then a lesser one later. Then both of their shock. Dad’s fear and then grief. Mom had pain and then a sudden release. Then she was here.” She kisses her daughter. “Alice had felt like Mom all along. Like a faint echo. Now she is whole.”
Beth sat down on the edge of the bed. “This is a little confusing. Did it feel the same with the boys?”
Kim looked at her mother-in-law. “No, they were themselves from the start. Alice just seems to feel older. Like she has been here before.”
There was quiet for several minutes. Each tried to digest this news and put it into their personal perspective of the world.
Rob was the first to come out of it. He bent down and kissed his wife and then his daughter’s forehead. “If I didn’t know how you tracked the boys, I would have a harder time with this.”
Kim laughed. “You have been picking it up also. I think it’s a learnable skill. You sense me reacting and it cues you in to something that you are feeling. You learn that one feeling means hurt and another anger that one of the boys is feeling. I verbalize what I feel, like ‘Jason is hurt’ and you learn. You’re not as good as the boys but they had it from birth. You know how Jason can’t play hide and seek with the other kids. He knows where they are. He said that it’s like cheating if he plays.”
Tom looked amazed. “You can learn it.”
“Well, I don’t know if everybody can, but John also learned from Marie. That’s why we never played cards. You know too much from the others. Uncle Will told stories about how he’d play poker when he was in the service. He’d win a bunch of money and then lose it right back to the same people. He said it taught him how to track his men better. Aunt Leslie and her brothers had the ability when he met them.”
“I noticed that your mom, dad, and Will were real close when I first met them. They seemed to know what the other was doing.” Beth added.
Kim quickly glanced down at the baby before replying, “Yes, Mom said that Dad and Will had that growing up. She said that in some ways they were closer than she and Dad. Something about two sets of identical twins marrying and having sons born on the same day. There was more, but I could never get it out of her.”
“Well, it sounds like your grandmother Edna knows more and wants to talk to you.” Beth added.
Kim returned to staring at the baby, “Yes, I want to talk to her. She and Mom had secrets that they never would tell us.”
“Oh. Marie said that they had a present for you. Water wasn’t the only thing that came through the window. There was a fish also. They are bringing a piece for you to examine.”
“Other world DNA!” The announcement had broken Kim out of her obsession with the baby. She was much more alive as she considered what she would do. “I’ll have to go back to the lab early. Beth, can you stay through next week? I want to leave Alice in your care while I go into the lab. I think that Friday, no Thursday, that I could be ready. I need to talk to Linda about getting a release to go back to work.” Kim had been clearly excited. The concern that she had for her mother/daughter had now taken second place to her professional curiosity. She was a researcher at the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda. She had specialized in similarities in genes between species when getting her Doctor of Medicine. While her sister Marie had followed in the steps of her mother in mathematics, she had taken after her Aunt Marge, who did allergy research at the university hospital in Edinburgh.
“Of course, Kim.” Beth had been happy to see that her mother’s death was not upsetting her as much as she feared it would. If you knew the soul moved on at death, then maybe death was not such a dreaded thing.
“This is going to take a while to get used to.” Rob said as he took his daughter from Kim.
MME Gulfstream jet over the Atlantic Ocean
The morning of May 18, 1999
The plane leveled off as the pilot turned off the seat belt lights. Will pressed the “DO NOT DISTURB” button on the wall control panel. From his briefcase, he removed an electronic bug detector. As the head of MME security, he was very familiar with corporate espionage. He checked out the cabin and the lavatory, while the family stuck to small talk or got refreshments. The pilots, who were part of his security team, had checked the plane out beforehand, but he always did his own scan when the plans for the new worlds were to be discussed. Will felt the best way to protect the corporate executives, many of whom were his wife’s family, was to combine security and piloting. The pilots had been officers of the combat support squadron based at Townsville, where MME was headquartered. They had experience supporting the Australian Special Air Service Regiment (ASAS).
Will returned to his seat. “All clear. Edna. Jess. The pilots will stay in the cockpit. We are free to talk.”
“Edna, why don’t you start? Speak up so we all can hear.” He smiled at Edna. Her mother had been the midwife that helped deliver Jess and himself. Edna had been a young nurse that, though pregnant with Alice, had helped her mother with the deliveries. Their families had also been neighbors. Alice, Jess, and he had gone through school together. Alice had chosen Jess, the more studious of the two. He had been more into sports and outdoor things, though neither had excelled more than the other in either until they got to university, where they had gotten to choose what they studied. He had gone to Sandhurst, while Alice and Jess were at Edinburgh. On an SAS training assignment, he had met the Macphater brothers who were in the ASAS. They introduced him to their sister, Leslie. They had hit it off right. In her, he had found a mate such as Jess had with Alice.
“Well, two things that I want to tell you. One about Alice and one about you twins of different parents.” Edna said, looking at Jess and Will. “You are more alike than Brenda and Mary.” She smiled at the twins. “Alice and I often talked about how you two seemed to be copies of the same person. We never figured out what that meant. I remember when you two were born; Mother was insistent on marking both of you so that you wouldn’t be mixed up. She normally could just sense which twin was which. Your parents would like to play that game with people. They would dress the same and try to confuse people at parties. Mother and I could tell them apart without looking. After a couple of times, they quit trying to pull it on us. You never got the tags. Those birthmarks were enough while you were babies.” Jess and Will started to flush. “When you got older, your individual personalities had developed so that it was now obvious to us who was who.”
Leslie laughed at the look on Jess’s and Will’s faces. She knew about Will’s birthmark. She assumed that Jess’s was on the left side to go with his left-handedness. “Grandmother said something like that when she met Jess at our wedding. She remarked how they were spirits that had split in two. Her people have some beliefs that may fit in with what you have been saying.”
“Yes, they were one of the better sources that I found. I did a lot of research on this after Alice was born. I didn’t have anyone to explain things to me. I want to help Kim out with what I have learned and what I was able to get from Alice.”
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