Maggie now sat on the floor of this room that Al had called the “Waiting Room.” Yes, it was certainly an accurate description: nothing to do but wait around.
She was getting hungry, and she had to pee.
She’d walked the perimeter of the room, and felt the walls, but they were smooth except for the occasional seam in the panels, that were too fine to get her fingers into.
They could at least have given her a seat.
“Hello, Al?” she called out into the blue abyss. “I need to use the bathroom.”
Then, as if her words had triggered something, one of the panels in the wall opened up to reveal a perfectly conventional bathroom.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”
She glanced around. “Can I have food?”
Another panel opened up, revealing something akin to a vending machine.
Maggie sighed with relief. Now she was getting somewhere.
“Can I have a seat…?” she tried. A panel in the floor opened, and an upholstered armchair rose out of it.
Maggie still wasn’t happy to be here, but at least now she saw herself being able to survive here.
“Th-thank you?” she said into the empty room.
“You’re welcome, Maggie,” came a feminine voice from above. Maggie’s eyes widened in surprise.
“Who am I talking to?”
“You appear to be talking to yourself.”
“Well obviously not, because you’re answering. Who are you?”
Maggie sat on the armchair, her body’s other needs temporarily forgotten.
“Me? Well, seeing as Admiral Calavicci already divulged my name to you earlier – against protocol – I suppose it will do no further harm to tell you that I am Ziggy.”
Maggie remembered Al talking absentmindedly about a Ziggy when she’d first seen him.
“The supercomputer?”
“That’s correct.”
Maggie thought for a moment.
“Have you been here the whole time, listening?”
“I’m integrated into the facility and monitor all aspects; including, but not limited to, this room.”
Maggie cringed. She hated to be watched. But, at least she had someone to talk to now.
“Can you tell me what’s happening with my friends?”
There was a pause, before the AI continued.
“Your friends are causing me a great deal of consternation, Maggie,” explained the voice. “They keep changing the course of events. Do you know how frustrating it is to have to rescan the historical record every 6.8 seconds because details keep changing? You, and your friends, do not belong here.”
“I know! And we don’t want to be here, either!”
Maggie groaned in frustration. She felt that instead of being kept in the dark, they would have much better luck helping each other.
“Then our goals appear to be aligned. But it seems that your presence caused an unforeseen event during Sam’s leap in. I calculate an 84.39 per cent probability that he traded places with the wrong Maggie Beckett.”
Maggie was silent for a moment. “Okay… and?”
“I’m waiting for an apology.”
Maggie raised an eyebrow. Just what kind of sassy computer was this, anyway?
“Not until I get one for being plucked out of my life and brought here.”
“I’m afraid I cannot apologise for something I have no hand in.”
“Well that makes two of us!” Maggie snapped, and then realised the implications of the computer’s statement. “What do you mean you have no hand in it?”
“Sam’s travel through time was initiated by us, but the choice of who he leaps into is not made by me, or any personnel in this facility.”
“Then who?”
“I find myself unable to speculate on that, given the lack of necessary data. Sam seems to attribute it to a supernatural force, but such things are outside my parameters. Perhaps it’s the same natural process that chooses which seemingly random universe you slide into.”
Maggie felt her heart skip a beat.
She just said ‘slide.’
“How do you know that word?”
But Ziggy stopped answering after that.
* * *
“You’re about to meet my partner, Deputy Higgins,” said Sheriff Maggie as they left the Sheriff’s Headquarters.
As she reached her patrol car, she pressed her palm to a panel on the door, activating the AI contained within. A robotic voice – far inferior in sophistication to Ziggy, Sam noted – gave a greeting.
“Welcome Sheriff,” it stated flatly.
“Open all doors, Higgins,” she commanded. The bot played a chime, and all doors of the car sprung open.
To Sam, this was nothing out of the ordinary. Consumer grade voice command and AI had been around since the early nineties. But, he noticed some trepidation on the part of the other three as they all got in.
Sam got in the front with Maggie, while the three travellers got in the back, where they were greeted by the car’s voice reading them their Miranda Rights.
He shifted around to look at them.
“Ever seen a talkin’ car?” he asked them.
Quinn laughed. “We’ve seen lots of AI, but it rarely worked out in our best interest.”
Sam nodded with interest. “You must have a lot of stories, travelling the multiverse.”
Maggie began to drive, but she seemed enraptured by the conversation happening around her.
Rembrandt looked to Quinn. “You told him?”
Quinn looked back at him, rattled. “No, we didn’t.”
Sam gave a smug smile to Quinn. “It wasn’t hard to figure out, not after Al told me about this world’s version of you. Did you really manage to calculate the means to open a stable wormhole on your own?”
Quinn regarded him sheepishly.
“Well, it was kind of an accident. The first time, anyway.”
“An accident?” Sam said, incredulous. “You crossed the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky Bridge by accident?!”
“Quinn is fantastically smart, and equally lucky,” Colin added, in an attempt to be helpful.
“I was trying for an anti-gravity field,” Quinn explained.
Sam thought about this. In order to create a wormhole he would have had to create a dense gravitational field that then collapsed into itself. Though to have it controlled in a way that didn’t cause something catastrophic must have required some complex calculations to make a stabilisation bubble around the open vortex.
“I see…” he said. “Seems like you went in the wrong direction, amplifying the gravity to the point of creating a kind of sinkhole in spacetime. I suspect if you’d worked Lowenstein’s Constant into your calculations, you may have been onto something, but I’d need to look at them to know for sure.”
Quinn chuckled.
“Could have used you a few years ago,” he mused.
Sam gave a shrug.
“Maybe I’ll see you there some day.”
Sam noticed Rembrandt rubbing his temple.
“You okay?” He asked the man, who looked at him, straining.
“Yeah, yeah. It’s just really strange to see Maggie coming out with all this science talk. I’m getting a headache.”
“Sorry to make you uncomfortable,” Sam said. “Rembrandt, right?”
Rembrandt nodded, with a grim expression.
Sam’s eyes shifted to the strange remote control device, which Quinn was once again inspecting.
“You said that thing’s coded in hieroglyphs?”
Quinn nodded. “Yeah. It’s our timer. Normally, it counts down to the moment we can move on to the next Earth. It’s our only chance to slide out. Miss it, and we get stuck here for–”
“Twenty-nine point seven years…” Sam blurted out.
Huh, how did I know that?
“How did you know that?” Quinn seemed to vocalise Sam’s own thoughts.
Sam squinted, wracking his brain. “I’m not sure. Leaping messes with my memory. Could have heard that figure anywhere.”
He shook off the frustration of his inaccessible memories.
“Could even have come from Maggie. Sometimes a small part of their memories and personality stays with me.”
He refocused his attention on the ‘timer.’
“Look, I should be able to help you with that, assuming my memory of hieroglyphs doesn’t fail me. One of my doctorates is in ancient languages.”
“One of your doctorates?” Rembrandt said, gawking.
Sam shrunk in his seat, feeling bashful.
“One of… seven.”
Quinn’s mouth drew into an open-mouthed grin, with a laugh escaping.
“Huh. Lucky us.”
Sam felt the car come to a complete stop, and he turned around to see that they were now in Maggie’s driveway.
It was a modestly sized house; a typical, if run-down, American bungalow, blending in with the other unremarkable houses around it.
“Well, here it is. My new digs,” Maggie said with a sigh that told Sam she was not particularly proud of it.
“New?” It didn’t look new at all to Sam, so he assumed she must have meant in the sense she’d recently moved here.
“Since my split two months ago,” Maggie explained. “Had to find a cheap rental while I get back on my feet.”
“You broke up with Billy?” Sam wasn’t sure how he knew the guy’s name, or that he was a heavyset guy with a snake tattoo on his left bicep, but the memories just popped in like they were never gone.
“Yeah. Should have years ago.” She turned her face toward the dashboard. “Higgins, open all doors.”
“Authorized hand print confirmation required to open back doors.”
She rolled her eyes and placed her hand on the dash.
“Confirmation accepted.”
The chime sounded, and the doors swung open, allowing all the passengers exit from the vehicle.
Sam got out, and stretched. It really felt good to be able to share his secrets with people for once. And they all seemed to accept it. The multiverse travellers seemed quite experienced when it came to the unknown. And Quinn seemed to know just what questions to ask.
He’d be bummed when this leap was over.
Three days.
All he had to do was figure out how to stop his niece from vanishing, but he needed to sniff out a lead. For a sheriff to disappear, that would take a pretty brazen criminal. Or desperate. While he assumed a cop would have a pretty decent sized enemies list, the empty cells seemed to indicate that this town didn’t experience much in the way of crime, at least not lately.
Al was probably finding all of this out right now.
But for now, he had a golden opportunity to complete his mission. He had allies, real flesh and blood allies, in whom he could confide. On the other hand, each of them was just as capable of altering the timeline as he was, and that might complicate matters.
Sam figured with all these variables, Ziggy might not be very helpful.
He watched Maggie unlock her door with her handprint, and followed her into the house.