Changed Destinies

"Penetrating so many secrets we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it is, nonetheless, calmly licking its chops."

-H.L. Mencken, Minority Report.



Sam stared down at the body on the forest floor, illuminated in the light's of everyone's flashlights, her eyes widened in shock. Finally, she managed to shake her head, and looked up at Danny, who was still looking at the alien creature. "My God," she said, her voice laced with shock. "I never actually thought I'd see this in my lifetime."

"Neither did I," Jazz muttered from next to her.

"It nearly killed you?" Sam asked, her brain still processing that revelation, as both a burning sense of anger and hate at the creature on the ground, and a sense of sheer relief at the fact that he was still alive. Jazz and their parents didn't see it, but I was right near insane at the thought of never seeing him again. I don't think I could've controlled it for much longer. If he'd died- she shook her head. Not now, I'll talk to Danny about this in a bit but not before.

"Yeah," Danny said nodding. "It did. If Danni hadn't shot, I wouldn't have been here now."

"Danni?" Jazz said from next to her, her green eyes looking at the person between Danny and Valerie. "I don't believe I've had the pleasure of meeting you."

Her friend's words shocked her out of her stupor, and she turned and looked at Jazz. "Never? She's your cousin isn't she?"

Jazz looked from Danielle to Danny before turning to her, a look on her face that managed to be both confused and accusatory at the same time. "Cousin? I've never seen this young woman before in my life." She wheeled back to Danny. "Cousin?" Danny's blue eye had widened, and he was glancing back and forth between them as though he had been cornered by lions in a ravine.

"Okay," Valerie said suddenly, not missing the opportunity to glare at Danny herself. "Danny, why don't you and Sam go in the house and discuss this among yourselves, while I try to smooth things over out here and get this body squared away. Okay, good," she muttered a little too quickly.

"I agree," Danny said quickly before reaching out and grabbing Sam and began tugging on her to go with him. What is going on here she thought even as she allowed herself to be dragged out of the forest, across the field, and into the house. As soon as she heard the door slammed shut behind her, Danny put his hands on her lips. "I'll tell you everything."

Ten minutes later, Sam found herself pacing the living room, her flight suit half-open to reveal the plain black shirt underneath it as the ramifications of everything that had happened washed over her. "So, let me be sure I read you correctly. Danni's actually a clone of you created by Vlad as part of his attempt to have you as his perfect son."

Danny nodded. "Yes, she is."

"Yet, she's apparently a fully functional female, and not just a male with androgen insensitivity syndrome, with her own ovaries and complement of eggs."

"That's what her contact confirmed," Danny said. "But-,"

"That's impossible." Sam finished for him. Really impossible. There's really only one possible explanation for her existence if that's true, but I don't want to think about.

"You know there's only one possible explanation for her existence right? It's not like Vlad and his collaborators managed to magically construct a compatible X-chromosome from scratch. Granted, between your parents and Vlad, human technology leapt forward five hundred years since the Asteroid Crisis over a year ago, but we can't do that."

"I don't like it anymore than you," Danny said, getting up and walking over to her. He put his hand on her shoulder. "But it's what it boils down to." Sam nodded. Danny's genetic material had to have been combined with someone else's to make her. Somewhere out there, Danni had a mother.

"Are you all right?" Danny asked, "the last I saw of you, you had been punched to the floor and were being worked over with a shock stick."

"I'm fine. After you left, I came too, pulled myself off the floor, called Jazz, and we got up to the shipyard your parents have been building in orbit. The surveillance records of the Guys in White base near Oakbrook Terrace indicated that a heavy transport had left about twenty-five minutes after you were taken. We tracked it to a Guys in White airfield, near Moriarty in the Albuquerque area. We were tracking another transport leaving for Las Cruces when the surveillance package on my Speeder crapped out on me, so I had to return to FentonWorks orbital for a new one, by the time I'd gotten back, the window of opportunity for me to pick you up soon after they let you off failed and I had to go over the entire area with a fine toothed comb. The only reason we landed where we did was because Jazz picked up an unknown contact in the area, and we went to investigate on the off-chance it was a GIW transport possibly carrying you." She shook her head, anger and shame burning through her like a brand. "I'm sorry, if we'd been any sooner-,"

"You wouldn't have been able to stop what happened to us, Sam."

"That's just it, I was going to try," she said, her voice as hard as flint. "I would've snuck in, got you guys out, anything."

Danny shook his head. "Even if you'd somehow managed to get in without being undetected," he said, his shock plain on her voice, "you still probably would've been too late, all you would've ended up doing was getting caught, and you would have been lucky to get out of federal pen before you were thirty, or killed."

Sam shook her head. "I would've had to try. I couldn't leave you at the mercy of those…people, knowing what they're capable of, and not knowing if I would see you alive again." Her voice shook, at the thought of them being poked and prodded, at what they could've done to him. "No matter the cost to myself, I would've had to try."

"Oh, Sam," Danny said, his face transmuting to sadness as he walked over to her and pulled her into his arms, "my dear Sam."

Sam laid her head against his chest, wrapping her arms around him, as she finally felt the fear, anger, and sadness that anyone in her line of work learned to keep control of until the crisis was over finally fade.

What's done is done. All we have to do is move on from here, both with Danny, Valerie, and Danni's powers and the alien corpse in the forest.

The door opened slightly and Danni's head peaked around the corner. Her eyes glanced over the two of them and she asked, "I'm sorry, am I interrupting anything?"

"No, of course not," Danny said. "What is it?"

"We've got the alien and its weapon loaded into the Speeder. It's time to go."

Danny untangled from her. "I believe it is then."

"What do you want to do about this place?"

Danny looked around him, nodding slightly. "Pull the foreclosure notice off the door. Sam, once we've dropped off the body I want you and Jazz to come back. There's a supply cache hidden behind a door in the basement. Empty it and come back, both because Danni's going to need new clothes if she's going to be staying with us full time and because we can't just leave all those guns lying around. Once that's taken care of, I have half a mind to buy this place. It's nice."

"What's in it?"

"Everything from canned and dried foods to clothes to several types of guns and ammunition, including Ecto-Rifles."

Sam's eyes widened. "Who lived here? I mean who gets all that stuff and doesn't take it with them when they pull out?"

"Maybe our alien had something to do with it. Not that we'll ever find out, at least from him."

The room suddenly felt as though it had become very cold, despite the fire still coming from the hearth. Sam turned to the fire burning in the hearth. His species could've taken them, this is New Mexico after all. First the Roswell crash than that reputed landing at Holloman, it is ground zero for anything creepy and weird.

Danni looked at the fire in the fireplace. "I'll get that before we go. If you're going to buy it, we can't have it up in flames five minutes after we leave now can we?" She grabbed the pail of water next to the fireplace and dumped it on the fire, plunging the whole place in darkness.

------

Samantha lay awake in the bed in her guest quarters onboard the FentonWorks orbital shipyard, for the past six months the home of both Jack and Maddie and FentonWork's research and manufacturing facilities. Looking around the bare, Spartan room, she idly wished that the room had a window, but windows on a space station were limited to the observation decks only. While the current generation of shielding technologies had successfully managed to reduce the radiation that always came in from space until it was hardly more than the radiation one encountered in his or her lifetime, it was still best not to have too many windows to let cosmic rays in. She wished she was lying back in their bed at what she and Danny still called FentonWorks, where she'd been living the past six months. Having heard of their role in saving the planet, the local state judge had contacted a then-sixteen-year-old Sam and her friends who'd been at Antarctica, and quietly made it clear to them that she would waive the age requirement, and allow for them to appeal for emancipation. They had. She'd still lived with her parents for six months, but Danny's parents had, in true nerd fashion, opted to live at the FentonWorks shipyard full-time, along with their ghost research facilities. They'd promptly cleared out six months ago and left Danny the old red brick house, and let her move in with their tacit approval.

She sighed , a dark feeling stealing over her as her mind cycled back to the information Maddie had told her. Half of each DNA strand in his body had been made up of ordinary DNA and the other half of ectoplasm-based nucleic acid. Since human cells couldn't manufacture ectoplasm, the ectoplasm reproduced in each cell division by processes biologists still didn't fully understand. Once the components of ENA that "fooled" Danny's cells into thinking they were normal had been d amaged, their repair functions took over and all the ENA in his body was excised and replaced with normal DNA. They were fully human, all of them.

She was interrupted from her bleak musings by a knock on her door. Sitting up in her bed, she called. "Who is it?"

"Danny."

"It's unlocked."

The door opened and closed, and she turned to view Danny. He was standing in front of her, dressed in a green shirt and blue pants, yet there was a haunted look in those piercing blue eyes, as if a piece of his soul had been torn out of him. Despite herself her eyes were still drawn to that shock of white hair extending from his forehead back.

"Before you ask," Danny said. "They hit us with some sort of energy blast yes. While similar to ghost portal energies, it is different though, and it's lingering in our cell membranes. The tests my mom ran indicate that, in a very specific way, counteracts the energies of the ghost portals built by both my parents and Vlad."

"Meaning you can't get your powers back."

Danny nodded before sliding into the bed next to her. Sam reclined back down and felt Danny's arms wrap around her waist. Sam leaned into him ,eager to just relax in his arms for even a few moments.

"What are we going to do?" Sam finally asked.

"I don't know," Danny said, "they're still working on that alien though." She heard him breath behind her. "This is bad, being powerless at a time like this. I mean, what if there are more of them? What if that was a scout and this is the beginning of an invasion."

"How can we be so sure that they're all hostile? For all we know, the one that attacked you was their species' version of a gangbanger."

"Though alien gangbangers landing on planets to kill and rob random humans just strikes me as…bad science fiction, which, admittedly, our lives are looking like now. I mean, we live on a space station with artificial gravity and we have mining and science outposts on the Moon and Mars when a year ago we hadn't even been back to the moon since Apollo. Which, while awesome, still feels like science fiction even though we're living it."

"What are your parents going to do?"

"Finish the necropsy, tell us the results, and then contact the Department of Defense to turn the body and all the data over to them. Presumably they'll take it from there. The freighter Euphrates is carrying my father home from Mars, and should be in by end of day tomorrow; he'll help Tucker with the analysis of the scythe weapon, which if his results are accurate is also some sort of energy weapon."

Sam nodded. While the concept of battling hostile space aliens for the survival of humanity appealed to science fiction and videogame lovers like Danny and her, the fact remained that there were only six of them, and they were experienced fighting ghosts, not aliens. God, a sentence like that would've gotten you laughed at or committed not that long ago, she shook her head. What an age we live in.

As if on cue, the phone hanging from the wall next to her bed rang out. Sam gave an annoyed sigh, wishing that cell phones weren't prohibited aboard space stations.

"Sam," she said quickly.

"Sam," Maddie said, a tone of worry on her voice. "If Danny's there with you now, put him on. It's about Danielle."

Five minutes later, the two of them stepped into Jack and Maddie's quarters. The room was richly furnished, with a Persian style rug on the floor, a large sofa against one wall and a King-sized bed against the other wall. The sofa however, was already occupied, with Danielle sitting at the far end, wearing a red shirt and blue jeans, and drinking, judging by the smell, a cup of coffee.

"Should you really be drinking that at eleven at night?" Danny asked pointedly.

"I can't sleep anyway," she said, "not for this."

Considering that the only way she can possibly be a fully functioning female human and be derived from Danny's DNA was if Danny's sperm had been combined with an egg, this is worth losing some sleep. That and she shot an alien.

"The necropsy's finished, all I have to do is get the data ready," Maddie said suddenly from behind them, and Sam turned to view Madeline Fenton closing the study door behind her. The slim, fortyish redhead, walked over to her desk and set down a manila folder. Instead of opening it however, she crossed over to Danielle and pulled her into a hug. Caught, in a sudden bear hug, Danny's …daughter, stiffened for a moment before returning the hug.

"I never got a chance to thank you earlier," Madeline said. "For saving my son."

Danielle pulled out of the hug and gave her a regarding nod. "No problem."

Maddie nodded back and turned her attention back to the manila folder on her desk. "From our limited DNA selection, we can safely say that the woman who "donated" her genes to Danielle isn't from anyone we have on file."

Which would by default include Valerie and I, Sam thought, relieved both in the fact that she wasn't the one that was violated, and that it removed much of any awkwardness that would clamp down on having a good relationship with Danielle. They'd had her DNA sample on file since her and Tucker's near-fatal bout with Ecto-Acne, and Valerie's DNA had long ago been sampled and sequenced in their attempt to find out how her suit worked.

All this proves is that some other poor woman had been violated, and her DNA used to create Danielle, which means...

"Now," Madeline said. "I can give you a pretty good idea of where your mother's ancestors came from. All humans are divided into haplogroups, genetic mutations that serve as markers of early human migration. They are what is used both for genetic genealogy purposes, and used successfully to trace the origins of all living human beings back to East Africa, both on their father's side and their mother's side. The Most Recent Common Ancestor of all human beings on their mother's side is referred to as Mitochondrial Eve, because her existence had been reconstructed tracing the chain of haplogroups in mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed down through the mother via the X chromosome. She lived in what is today southern Ethiopia one hundred and ninety thousand years ago. The most recent common ancestor on the male side is known as, in keeping with the Biblical metaphor, Y-chromosomal Adam or just Y-Adam, as his existence was determined by tracing the haplotype's back on the Y-chromosome. Now, males can receive both the mitochondrial and y-chromosome tests, while females, due to having no y-chromosome, can only receive the mitochondrial DNA testing. Now, with mitochondrial DNA we're chiefly interested in the two hypervariable region, where the rate of mutation has been shown to be up to one hundred times that of the nuclear genome, and because it's so short, it can be scanned quickly for the information we need. Here's the rough map of the migration history of our Jane Doe's female ancestors from Mitochondrial Eve until today."

She opened up the manila folder and laid out a sheet of paper with a map of the world printed in black and white on it. Her eyes widened, as it felt like her heart was trying to climb out of her throat. Emanating out from the black dot labeled "Mitochondrial Eve," it passed down and into Kenya before crossing through Uganda into the Democratic Republic of Congo. It then deviated sharply, heading north into South Sudan and into southern Egypt before abruptly crossing the Red Sea into the Arabian Peninsula. From there it arced and curved into Jordan, through Iraqi Kurdistan and into northern Iran. It then crossed Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan into Mongolia, before deviating sharply again and crossing the vast expanse of Russia up into Siberia, crossing the now gone Bearing land bridge into Alaska. Once in North America it crossed from Alaska, down through Canada, crossing the length of the contiguous United States, crossed the Mexican border and terminated roughly in north central Mexico.

"Well," Danielle said, surprisingly calmly. "We know she's most likely Hispanic, which doesn't exactly narrow things down of course."

Sam stood there, rooted. Paulina. Paulina's the mother, the feeling had been accompanied by a shocked numbness entering her. She shook her head. No, this map doesn't prove anything, millions of people share this migratory history and this haplogroup, it's not necessarily her.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Paulina Ortega was torn from the warmth embrace of sleep by what felt like something nudging on her arm. Paulina's eyes fluttered open and closed. They felt like they'd been stuffed with grit and were being dragged down b lead weights. "Polly, wake up," a familiar voice said suddenly, cutting through the haze? Starr? What are you doing here? Then she remembered: Paulina's parents had allowed her to stay over with her while they were out-of-town on vacation. Her eyes flew open. In the half-light of the moon coming through her window, she saw her friend. The tall, leggy girl with long blonde hair was kneeling next to her, her green pupils contracted, breathing heavily in obvious fear.

"What's wro-," only to feel Starr's hand clamp itself over her mouth.

"Shush-up," her friend said harshly in a low voice. "There are…creatures outside. Not ghost, not human."

"What do you mean?"

"Peek out the window," Starr said softly. "Don't let them see you." Paulina, her own anxiety level rising at Starr's tone, threw her covers aside, dropped to the floor, and half-crouched, walked to the window.

She pulled aside the covers, and her blood ran cold.

There, in the rural area outside of town where her parents lived, in her parents vegetable garden, six humanoid figures stood in a tight group in. In the cloudless night, the full moon illuminated everything. They were tall, six feet tall, and had gray skin. One of the creatures whose face she could see moved its head, and its eyes shown in moonlight. They were dressed in dark robes, albeit with their hoods pulled down, and every one of them was carrying a wicked looking scythes, the moon's light reflecting off their blade.

She yanked her head out of the window. "What the hell are those?"

"I don't know. Have you called the police?"

"No."

"Why not?"

Starr looked at her as if she were crazy. "For all we know they could have a small ship out there, monitoring this house for any signals. If we call anyone they could turn us into a smoking crater while we were still waiting for someone to pick up."

Paulina sighed. Damn it, she's right. She shook her head, an idea occurring to her. "Our respective families taught us how to shoot," she whispered. "The gun cabinet is in my parent's room across the hall, the access code to get in is my birthday."

"You think they'll attack?"

"Can we take the chance they won't? They're out there for a reason."

Starr nodded, then dashed across the room. Stopping for a moment, she grabbed the duffel bag next to the door and disappeared into the darkness.

Paulina peaked out the window. The group of…well she could only describe them as aliens were still standing out there.

No one's going to believe this, she thought to herself. Unless. She moved over to her drawer, and pulled it out to reveal a small video camera. Turning it on, she placed it as surreptitiously as she could in the windowsill right when the door behind her creaked.

She wheeled around, her heart pounding in her ears, only to relax slightly to see Starr stealing back into the room. Moving over to her, she reached into the duffel bag and pulled out both of her father's shotguns, handing one to her before pulling out two FN Five-Seven pistols.

"They're both loaded," she said as she handed her a sidearm before handing her more clips and shells.

"Good thinking."

She looked down into her yard. They were still there.

"They outnumber us three to one," Paulina pointed out.

"They outnumber us three to one yes, but they have bladed weapons," Starr pointed out. "We have guns. That saying about not bringing a knife to a gunfight holds true for scythes as well, Polly."

"I know." Paulina nodded. "And besides if they knew we were here, they'd probably have blown us away by now from any ship they have."

"They know we're here," Starr said shaking her head. "I mean they must have space travel, which means they must have sensor technology, like infrared cameras, that can see in this house, and see the two large heat blooms named Starr Corner and Paulina Ortega. They know we're here, they probably just don't want to draw attention to themselves by blowing a house away."

Paulina opened her mouth to say something, but a low rumbling sound reverberating through the house interrupted her. A bright light shined through the window, illuminating the entire room in a harsh bright light.

"What are they doing out there? Then she heard the unmistakable sound of something landing on the ground outside. She looked out it, and her eyes widened. A ship had landed out there, roughly the same size as a Speeder but a darker gray and more trapezoidal, and the aliens were slowly filing into it, scythes slung over their shoulders in parade position as they filed aboard. The door closed, and the rumbling filled the air again as the ship took off once more.

Paulina and Starr watched as the ship, glowing brightly lifted itself off that ground and moved up into the sky, its running lights receding before it finally disappeared amongst the stars. Paulina stood there, staring up into the sky, a shocked numbness flooding her, not truly focused on anything as her mind struggled to wrap itself around what it just saw. Finally her mind snapped out of it when she saw Starr reach across her field of vision and switch her camera off before removing it from the windowsill.

Shaking herself out of her stupor, her mind still reeling, she finally managed to ask, "What do you think we should do?"

"Talk to Danny Fenton," Starr said immediately. "He may not be the Ghost Boy, but he's the next best thing when it comes to that sort of thing."

Paulina was reminded of his leadership role during the raid to rescue their parents a few years back. He'd done his job well, before inexplicably disappearing right before Danny Phantom showed up to finish the job. Come to think of it, she thought, he always disappears right before he shows up. She was rather uncomfortably reminded of Clark Kent's paper-thin disguise as Superman. Maybe he-she shook her head. No. Couldn't be. She shook her head. At any rate, she's right. Besides, I've been a jerk to him for years.

"Do you think he'll even talk to me," Paulina asked, "I've been an asshole to him since we were twelve. That's a lot to forgive., even if you regret it, which we, which I, do."

A smile appeared on Starr's face. "We've come a long way, since Antarctica, you know? Our parents are, frankly, astonished that we're not still the same, petty, materialistic loons we were even a year ago. Then again, I suppose the fact that we nearly died along with our entire race does that to people."

Paulina nodded, that was part of what had caused her to reevaluate her life, but not all of it. She looked out her window, thinking about what had just transpired in the yard behind her. She knew, she didn't know why, but she knew that the second she took her footage to Danny, that her life would change again, forever, that she'd be tested as she'd never been tested before, perhaps to the very limit of her humanity. That, she wouldn't just turn this over to Danny and run, her own nature wouldn't allow that. What was it my abuela said, growth requires risk? Well, this is a pretty big risk I'm about to undertake, but this is a pivotal moment in human history, and if I'm going to play any part in how we handle it, I need to step up to the plate.

Paulina sighed, and said the words that would irretrievably bind Starr and her into Danny's circle of friends beyond all hope of reversal. "Let's get dressed and go see Danny."