1
When Regina Whitaker wakes up with a hangover, she thinks, mainly, of getting a move on. She wants to go to battle, she wants to secure land and wealth, and she wants to be everybody’s hero. It never occurred to her that she might feel different if she wasn’t hungover, but it also never occurred to her what she was supposed to do at the end of the day if not drink a six pack of beer. You might even say that she was hard-wired this way—that rape, pillage, and plunder were a natural part of her existence. You might wonder, of course, how a woman can rape a man, but, as Regina learned when she was a teenager, young men don’t live in harmony with their sexual urges. They’re hard-wired, like Regina, too—whether they want to or not, their body is ready to sow oats—and wind up hitched, as soon as physically possible.
But this was the year 2025, and living like a predator was no longer an option—you had to be much more sophisticated than that. She had pills, however, that made it possible for her to travel around in time—including the future. The future, however, determined the past in the same way that the past determined the future, so you could only go as far into the future as you were going to live from the year 2025. The past wouldn’t recognize anything else. You could go back in the past—way back, if you wanted, because the entire past determined the future, whereas the entire future didn’t include you if you were dead—or, that is to say, you’d moved on from this existence.
You might think that you can go into the future and be separate from your body—but, in reality, you existed in your body at that time—you were just conscious of the fact that you weren’t yourself. You can’t go into the past without ending up in your former body, either. The only way you can go somewhere without ending up in your body is to travel back before you were born—and you hadn’t had a body yet.
The pills that Regina took were called risperidone—which is used to treat schizophrenia, and, so far as Regina knew, they didn’t send anybody back into the past except Regina. She liked traveling around, to some extent; it gave her something to do when she was hung over—she’d feed off the adrenaline of not knowing exactly where she was going to end up. She could control, to some extent, where she went by thinking about where she wanted to go when taking her risperidone. Furthermore, because she was alive in the future, she couldn’t be killed in the past—so it wasn’t uncommon for Regina to go to battle if she was especially hung over and suffering from some form of cabin fever. She got a hefty does of adrenaline that way—and she got to rape young men, which would often make her snap out of it—she’d still be hungover, but it wasn’t like she had ants crawling around in her back—making her tense.
It was possible to get pregnant in the past—but Regina took her birth control pills on the regular—just like her risperidone, which, she probably wouldn’t be able to take if she got pregnant. She did plan to get pregnant—and, she figured, raping some hapless Viking that didn’t want to leave his progeny to the elements—and, therefore, ended up getting raped—would make a suitable genetic specimen.