The first day in May - prologue

It started on May 1st.

In a hospital, in Seattle, in the middle of the night, a baby girl lay in her bassinet playing with her toes. She was quiet and had a smile on her face. Her name was Sheryl in honor of her mother’s mother. The doctors declared Sheryl a normal healthy newborn and they were right except that now she floated in the air two inches off the bassinet's mattress.

There were nine hundred and fifty-six floating babies born that year. 

Mysteriously, all babies were in the United States, in famous places as New York City, Los Angeles, Nashville, and little known places as Forney, Texas and Beach City, Ohio.

The Parents, while changing diapers, discovered their beloved babies floating mid-air. An alarm ensued.

The parents called their doctors, who called the University hospitals, who called the Center for Disease Control, who called the Army, who called the President, who called Congress, who, having no one to call, set up an Oversight Committee.

Fear, inspired by X-Men movies, that mutant babies would grow up to enslave the remainder of humanity, gripped the Congressional Oversight Committee. The Committee, via the Army, assembled a team of scientists, and doctors to find an explanation.

Years of testing, scans of all kinds, X-rays, MRIs, DNA analysis, cold fusion gravity detectors, astronaut training centrifuges, reveal nothing extraordinary about Sheryl. Lacking results, one scientist joked about doing a genealogical trace. When pressured by a 60 Minutes TV reporter for answers, the chief scientist, a woman who would later become the president of MIT, blurted out that even genealogy research, as far as one can get from the scientific process, was under way.

A mad scramble ensued to make this off-hand remark true. A famous Harvard professor, the one credited with the first TV show tracing the ancestry of celebrities, was hired.

Genealogy research revealed that all nine hundred and fifty-six babies had a male ancestor who served in the same American Infantry Unit in World War I, at Neuve-Chapelle in France, a place where unconfirmed history claims nerve gas was used by the German Army.

The scientists and doctors were shocked.

The doctors and scientists developed a theory that the effects of the unknown nerve gas used over one hundred years earlier and somehow passed through the generations was now triggering the birth of floating babies.

On Sheryl’s fifth birthday, another May 1st, the Congressional Oversight Committee issued a report.