Sammy laughed. Scott found that to be a good sound. Sammy was adjusting to life as a humanoid quickly. Much moreso than Scott had anticipated.
Scott said to Sammy, “Beam us back home, my friend.”.
“Booting up now. It’ll be a few minutes before we’re powered-up.”
“Roger that.”
At the mountain facility, Akila was sitting on a stool by a lab table, her ankle swelling. Sammy had gotten an ice pack from the kitchen, but it was doing little good.
Sammy, once again seated in the computer alcove, looked over his shoulder at her and said, “As soon as I get the okay from Scott, we’ll put you in a regen field, and get those ankle bones to mend. Should only take a couple hours.”
“You would do that for me?” she said. “Even after we invaded your home?”
Jeff stood in the middle of the room, not daring to actually touch anything. He was still powered-up, and he was not quite sure how to power-down. He didn’t know the limit of his own strength, and didn’t want to break anything.
“We’re the good guys, Akila,” Sammy said. “We’re really not your enemy. What happened to your world was an accident. We thought we were saving lives by taking out that giant asteroid, or whatever it was. It never occurred to us, despite my photonic brain and Scott’s over-the-top IQ, that we might be wiping even more lives out of existence.”
Akila and Sammy had compared notes regarding the alternate Earth. Akila now understood how much her Earth had been altered, and that the home she knew now was no longer there. As for the apocalyptic world she and Hasani had visited briefly, Sammy could only speculate. When it came to alternate realities, the speculations could be infinite.
Chloe was sitting at the lab table across from Akila, drinking a Coke. “All we knew was what we were told. Quentin Jeffries painted a pretty convincing picture of just how dangerous you people all were. But he was wrong, and Mandy is clearly out of her mind. I see that now. I’m so sorry for what I did to you, Mister Sammy.”
Shortly after Mandy and the others had beamed out, Sammy had begun rebooting. A fail safe Scott had built in that Chloe had not found. Within a few seconds, he was again conscious.
“Please,” Sammy said. “No harm, no foul. And it’s just Sammy. No mister. Which brings to mind,” he turned to Jeff, “I’ve been thinking about taking a last name. One of the really good ball players of the past eras was Sad Sam Jones. How about that?”
“You want us to call you Sad Sam?” Jeff said.
“Actually, hearing it that way, perhaps not.” He glanced at a digital readout on the computer console. “Teleportation field now at forty-two percent.”
“I could just zip out there and get them all, you know. Have everybody back here in just a few seconds.”
“Not powered-up like you are. Zeta energy would interfere with your teleportation power. That’s probably why Akila’s friend Hasani had such trouble trying to stabilize a teleportation field of his own when they were escaping.”
“All right,” Jeff said, trying to wrap his mind around everything he had been bombarded with over the past couple of days. “Let me see if I have this right. I was born with the same abilities as my father.”
“So it would seem. Even inutero, you were generating extremely strong zeta energy. And please, remember, you are powered-up to a fairly high degree right now. Speak carefully and easily, so you won’t blow out anyone’s eardrums.”
Chloe said, “Zeta energy is what gives Jake his strength, and stuff?”
“Precisely. And Jeff, when you were a newborn, which was just a few months ago by our time, Scott planted a small device in your head. It emitted a continuous pulse preventing you from powering-up. For your own safety as well as ours.”
Chloe said, “That was the tech I found in your head.”
Jeff nodded. It was all making sense. “When it was disabled, the powering-up process started. But” he looked at Sammy, “why’d it start up on its own?”
“According to Jake, controlling the powering-up process is something of a learned skill. He can help you with that once he’s back.”
“I have another meta ability, too. The ability to bend time and travel through it, and also to teleport from one place to another.”
“Three abilities?” Chloe said. “That’s practically unheard of. Strength, teleportation and time travel.”
Sammy said, “One ability, actually. The zeta energy is not the result of the genesis gene. It’s the result of a DNA mutation caused when Scott’s zeta generator blew up. Jake was caught in the blast and his DNA was altered, apparently right down to its foundation. You inherited this from him, Jeff. Your father isn’t actually a meta-human, at least per Scott’s definition, because he doesn’t have the genesis gene. As for your other abilities, I don’t believe what you do is actually teleporting. I hypothesize you’re actually bending time and reality, removing yourself effectively from one location and landing in another, a microsecond later. A true teleporter would be able to transform the mass of his body to energy, beam it to another location, and then reassemble it. The reason I hypothesize this is because of the sudden influx of tachyon energy when you went from Boston to this complex. Tachyon energy wouldn’t be present in true teleportation. The same might be true of Hasani’s ability.”
Jeff said, “Teleporting sounds kinda like what April can do.”
“In effect, yes. But with her, it’s sort of a by-product of her ability to transform into pure quantum energy.”
“So, if I want to use my ability again, I’ll have to make sure I’m fully powered-down. I won’t be able to use them both at the same time. I kind of wonder if instead of removing that implant, maybe Scott can just adjust it so I can turn it off and on at will. It’d be kind’a nice to have a sort of fail safe.”
Sammy nodded thoughtfully. “I’m sure that could be arranged. We can discuss it with Scott once he’s back.”
Chloe said, “My head is spinning. I mean, I’ve been around meta-humans for years. I mean, hell, I am one. But you guys study this like, what, scientists?”
Sammy shrugged. “In essence, this is what we are.”
“Okay,” Jeff said. “That crazy woman who was with Chloe. What did you say her name was? Mandy Waid?”
Akila said, “And the other is Hasani. A friend from my own world. From before the timeline was altered.”
Chloe said, “Mandy claimed Scott Tempest had taken her baby from her, and one of the things she wanted to do here was get it back.”
Jeff said, “But there’s no baby here.”
Sammy glanced again at the digital readout. 68%. “I believe the baby she was looking for, Jeff, is you.”
Jeff said, “Come again?”
“Keep in mind, by our perspective you were an infant until yesterday. You beamed out as an infant and then beamed back seconds later the age you are now.”
Chloe said, “My head is really spinning now.”
But realization suddenly struck Jeff. It suddenly all made perfect sense to him. “She’s my mother.”
Sammy nodded. “I’m afraid so. Yes. I was hoping to let Jake tell you.”
“Son-of-a-bitch.”
Sammy said, “I’m hoping you can help us find her. Her mental condition seems to be extremely erratic. I’m concerned she might hurt someone. But I haven’t been able to find a trail. When they beamed out, the tachyon energy seemed to just spread out, and then dissipate. Maybe once Jake has got you powered-down enough, you’ll be able to help us trail them.”
“I doubt it. When they beamed out, I doubt the one with her, that friend of Akila’s, had time to set a destination. Supposing his power works like mine, and it sounds like it does, then he probably would have just been sucked into the time stream wake from when he beamed in.”
“The...what did you call it? Time stream wake?”
“Yeah. When you part the threads of time, which is what you do when you time-travel, you create a sort of wake. Without even trying, you can step back
into time and then slide back along it to your beginning point. It’s how I found you guys. But you don’t leave much of a trail when you do it.”
“That’s fascinating. How did you discover this?”
Jeff shrugged. “You gotta realize, to me this is nothing more than what it would be like for one of you to walk along in the mud, take a step, and then look back and watch your footprint fill with water. It’s as simple as that. Just something I do.”
“So,” Chloe said, “if your zeta energy messed up your ability to time-travel..,”
“Exactly,” Sammy said. “It would have had at least some sort of detrimental affect on Hasani’s attempt to pull you all out of here. That’s why he could only beam himself and Ms. Waid and the flame thrower out.”
Akila said, “Do you think they are still alive?”
“Difficult to say for certain.”
Jeff said, “The threads of time can be so gentle in a way, and beautiful. Multi-colored in ways you can’t even imagine. They bend and flow and sway. But you step into them wrong, they can rip you to shreds.”
Akila closed her eyes and shook her head. “Poor Hasani. On my world we were part of a team that was, in some ways, not dissimilar to your own. He and I went on many missions together. He risked his life for me more than once.”
Chloe said, “So were you two, like, an item?”
Akila looked at her with confusion. The meta-human called Nate had telepathically given her English, but she still had a little trouble with idioms.
Chloe rolled her eyes. “Were you ever, like, you know, a couple?”
Akila smiled. “An item. That’s clever. No, we were more like brother and sister. For the most part.”
“Too bad. He was hot.”
“But now its all gone. The world I knew. My home. In a way, Hasani is my only tie to the world I knew.”
“If he’s still alive,” Sammy said, “we’ll find him.”
Jeff said, “So I’ve found my father. And even though she didn’t know it, I found my mother. It kind’a sucks she’s as crazy as it is.”
Chloe said, “At least you know who your mother is.”
EPILOGE
ONE
Actually, it was Nate who located Hasani. Nate could suddenly feel the presence of another meta-human with energy similar to Jeff’s. Quentin Jeffries had gone to Mother and Snake to join their community, as he had nowhere else to go, so he and Snake went with Nate and found Hasani under the Boston Bridge. Hasani was lying face down in some long, brown grass. Snake turned him over, and felt his neck for a pulse.
He said, in his sandpaper voice, “He’s still alive.”
Jake and his son Jeff were with them, as Snake had told Nate to give Jake and Scott a psychic call the moment they found Hasani. Jake was in his blue and black battle suit, and Jeff was also in battle suit, complete with his own wristband. His suit was red, and he had requested no black stripe.
“He needs a hospital,” Jake said.
“And how do we explain this to the doctors?” Snake looked up at him with his reptilian eyes. “Tell them it was a time-travel accident? We have some medics among us, and Mother has healing abilities. We’ll take care of him.”
Jake had brought along a stretcher. They lifted Hasani onto it.
“I feel so responsible,” Quentin said. “If not for me this would not have happened. And there is no sign of Mandy at all.”
“Maybe that’s for the best,” Snake said.
Jake shook his head. “I’m not so sure. If she has developed an ability, and is as dangerous with it as she appears to be, then I’d feel better knowing where she is.”
“I can’t believe it,” Jeff said. “My own mother, one of the most dangerous people in the world.”
Though Jake was Jeff’s father, Snake had been Jeff’s teacher and a father figure to him for most of Jeff’s life. It was Snake who placed a hand on Jeff’s shoulder and said, “She’s not well, Jeff. That’s not her fault. Maybe, when we find her, we can get her some help. And keep in mind, she loved you enough to risk everything to go back to that facility and try to find you.”
“Was it love? Or was it insanity?”
“Sometimes there’s not much difference.”
Jake looked at Snake and gave him an approving nod. The more Jake got to know Snake, the more he found he liked him.
Jeff said, “I’m not sure I really understand.”
“None of us ever really do.” Snake grabbed one end of the stretcher. “Come on. Let’s get this man back to Mother.”
TWO
They stood in the hospital room, looking at the hole in the wall. Scott, April, and Rick. Sammy was connected with them remotely from the mountain complex.
Scott said, “Sammy, you getting this?”
“Yes,” Sammy’s voice came from an audio field surrounding them.
They were standing in the room that had belonged to Peter LaSalle. The patient was now gone. The hospital staff had heard a loud crash, which had shaken the entire floor, and come running in. They found LaSalle gone. Half of the wall was gone with him.
A few days earlier, LaSalle had gained consciousness, and had requested a laptop and Internet access. The hospital staff had seen no reason to say no. For the next two days, he sat in his bed surfing the web. He had seemed harmless, or so they thought.
“He broke out through the wall,” Scott said.
Standing beside him was a man in a white lab coat. Maybe forty-five years old, his hair combed back and away from his face. A stethoscope dangled from around his neck. “I don’t see how that could be possible. I mean, he had been comatose until just thirty-eight hours ago.”
“Regardless, doctor, the patient is gone. And that gaping hole in your wall was his point of exit.”
“Do you think he just smashed through it and, I don’t know, jumped out?”
Scott nodded. “That’s exactly what I think he did.”
“We’re on the top floor. That’s fifteen floors down.”
“It might sound incredulous to you, doctor, but we live with a man and his son who could make this jump with almost no effort. We’re confronted with the impossible every day.”
“Well, I’m not. I guess I find all of this a little hard to get used to.”
April said, “That’s why we thought the government was being reckless in admitting him to a facility like this. They should have called us in.”
Scott stepped toward the hole and looked to the ground below. A car was parked down there, and it looked like it had been turned into a metallic pancake. “You can see plainly where he landed.”
Rick said, “So, now what?”
April shrugged. “I guess we could look at his computer.”
The laptop was still on the bed. It had somehow not been disturbed at all when LaSalle left the building. The machine was open, and its screen saver was on. The words SCOTT TEMPEST – READ THIS were scrolling by.
Rick said, “Looks like LaSalle left you a message.”
Scott tapped the space bar, and a Word doc came to life on the screen.
SCOTT TEMPEST,
AS YOU READ THIS, YOU CAN BE ASSURED I AM LONG GONE. ANY EFFORT TO FIND ME WILL BE A WASTE OF ENERGY ON YOUR PART.
April said, “Who wrote that for him? I mean, he’s not awfully bright.”
Rick chuckled. “I wasn’t even sure he knew how to read and write.”
They read on.
A MISTAKE OF YOURS WAS THAT YOU DID NOT KNOW HOW MY ABILITY WORKS. A MISTAKE LIKE THIS CAN BE CRUCIAL, AND AS A RESULT, I ONCE AGAIN HAVE MY FREEDOM. HOWEVER, THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT THIS TIME. NO LONGER WILL I BE THE STOOGE THAT I WAS. INCREDIBLY STRONG, AND YET UNABLE TO THINK MY WAY OUT OF A PAPER BAG. THE ‘POWER MAN’ THAT CONFRONTED JAKE CALDER A YEAR AGO IS NO MORE.
YOU SEE, TEMPEST, MY ABILITY IS NOT REALLY ENHANCED STRENGTH AND STAMINA. YES, I AM BLESSED WITH BOTH, BUT THEY ARE MERELY THE RESULT. A BY-PRODUCT, IF YOU WILL. MY ABILITY IS THAT WHEN I EXPERIENCE SEVERE TRAUMA, MY BODY REACTS BY BECOMING
STRONG ENOUGH TO EASILY RESIST SUCH TRAUMA IN THE FUTURE. NOT TO BORE YOU WITH A WOE-IS-ME STORY, BUT WHEN I WAS A CHILD MY STEP-FATHER LIKED TO USE ME AS A PUNCHING BAG. EACH TIME HE HIT ME, I GREW STRONGER AND WITH INCREASED STAMINA. FINALLY, BY AGE 12, I WAS MUCH MORE PHYSICALLY FORMIDABLE THAN HE, AND HE SUFFERED THE CONSEQUENCES. MAY HE REST IN PEACE. WHEN MANDY WAID ATTACKED ME, PHASING THROUGH MY SKULL WITH HER HANDS TO PHYSICALLY TRAUMATIZE MY BRAIN, ALL SHE SUCCEEDED IN DOING WAS TO EXPONETIALLY INCREASE MY BRAIN FUNCTIONS. I MAY NOT BE QUITE ON AN INTELLECTUAL PAR WITH YOU, BOY GENIUS, BUT I AM PROBABLY NOW SECOND ONLY TO YOU.
IN CASE YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT MANDY’S POWER, WELL, I’LL LET YOU FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THAT ON YOUR OWN. I HAVE BEEN AS INFORMATIVE AS I INTEND TO BE FOR THIS DAY.
FAREWELL. UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN. AND BELIEVE ME, WE WILL.
And that was where it ended.
“Well,” Scott said. “This certainly gives us something to think about, doesn’t it?”
THREE
She walked along the dusty shoulder of a two-lane highway. The black top was old and cracked from years of frost in the winter and the harsh sun of summer. The morning sun hung over the horizon, and there were no clouds overhead. The day would turn out hot and dusty, but at this early hour the wind brought with it a chill. Such was the weather here on a remote road in the reaches of rural Kansas.
She wore jeans and a sweatshirt, items she had stolen from a clothes line in a nameless small town a few miles behind her. Over the clothes she wore a long, corduroy coat that fell almost to her ankles, like something from the seventies. In an attempt to keep the dust out of her hair, she had tied her hair into a braid and wrapped it tightly about her head and pulled a baseball cap down over it. The hat was a faded royal blue and bore the stylized white, letters KC on its front. The Kansas City Royals, or whoever. Not that she was a particular fan of sports, but the hat had been left carelessly on a front porch and now was hers. Over her hands was a pair of scratched up work gloves.
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