A Sliders / Quantum Leap Crossover Fan Fic
by Ashe P. Kirk
Full Transcript (26.3k words)
Maggie blinked, startled. She was in a room with a flat blue colour all around her that seemed to glow, and yet barely illuminated her. She was standing stationary, there in the middle of this blank space. This was definitely not where she had been a moment ago, while she was hurtling through a vortex on her way to see what the next Earth would hold in store. She certainly didn’t remember leaving the wormhole. Was she stuck in between worlds?
Did something happen while I was in there? A lightning strike, maybe?
She remembered Quinn recounting to her a story of a time lightning struck the wormhole, long before she joined the team. Somehow he’d been displaced onto the ‘astral plane.’ Was she there now?
She looked down at herself. She wore a strange white jumpsuit that felt revealing somehow, despite it covering most of her body. Not what she’d been wearing when she entered. Had she lost consciousness and been taken somewhere?
“Hello?” She called out, her voice shaky and a pitch or two higher than she’d intended. “Anyone?”
“Oh, that’s a relief.”
Maggie spun around toward the older male voice, and spotted an open door, which she was sure hadn’t been there before. In the doorway was a somewhat short-stature man with a flamboyant green suit and an unusually shaped, colourful device in his hand.
He was the kind of man that would have been handsome twenty years ago, but now looked like forty years of cigars and booze had caught up with him.
But, the strangest thing about this man, for Maggie, was that she recognised him.
“Ziggy was reporting some out-there readings; I thought we might not find someone here,” he said, seemingly more to himself than to her, while striding into the room. The door shut automatically behind him.
“Admiral Calavicci…?” She said tentatively, and became more sure that it was him as his jaw dropped and the colour drained from his face.
“How do you–?”
Maggie cringed. He didn’t recognise her. Whatever Earth she was on, maybe they never met.
She carefully formulated her reply.
“Uh, my uncle talks about you all the time. Sam Beckett. You know him, right?”
Al looked quite shaken at this.
“Your Uncle?! Ohhhh boy.”
He tapped the device in his hand a few times and it made some odd whirring noises.
“Dammit Ziggy! Tch, useless.” He whacked the device on its side, and composed himself, looking up at her.
“Looks like I have to ask you what your name is, since our billion dollar supercomputer seems to be a little confused about it.”
Maggie raised an eyebrow, before supplying her name: “Maggie Beckett.”
Al looked at her for a moment before biting his lip and turning around.
“Okay, so you are her, and yet this hunka junk–”
He waved the device in the air.
“–is telling me that Maggie Beckett is still in her own time. Useless pile o’ Lego bricks.”
He gave one more whack to the front of it with the heel of his hand.
Maggie had no idea what he was talking about, but she wasn’t going to just let this guy monologue at her.
She grabbed his arm and turned him back around.
“Admiral, listen to me. I need to get back to my friends. I don’t know what this place is but I can’t stay here, got it?”
Al grimaced as he met her eye.
“We’re… going to have to get back to you on that one,” he said with some trepidation.
He broke free of her now loosened grasp, and headed towards the door. He stopped just before he got to it, and added, “Oh, and yeah… it’s, uh, nice to see you again, Maggie.”
He pressed a button on the device, and the door slid open. He walked out of it.
“Welcome to the Waiting Room. Sorry.”
And the door shut, just as Maggie made a move to run for it.
She made a huff as she found herself, once again, alone here.
* * *
Sam opened his eyes. Was it over? It certainly felt over, once he came to a tumbling halt against this brick wall.
That was definitely not normal.
He’d seen someone leap before; blue electrical energy surrounding them as they disappeared from one place and moved to another. Sure, that was all well and good. But the blue electrical energy he’d just experienced was something else altogether.
It was some kind of… tunnel?
He pulled himself up to his feet, and turned away from the wall, only to find himself trapped. Three men were with him in what appeared to be a jail cell – one in a larger room that was devoid of any other people except the four of them. It reminded Sam of a small town police lockup, but there was normally someone around to guard it.
Then again, the group of them just seemed to fall in here out of nowhere, and there was nobody around to be guarded before that.
“Man. Can’t believe we skipped right to the jail cell this time,” said the oldest of the four; a black man with emotive eyes. He was standing at the bars, looking out at the empty room.
“Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars…” muttered one of the other two men, a man Sam guessed to be late twenties, white, brown hair. He had a pair of striking eyebrows set against blue eyes, perhaps as striking as Sam’s own, if he remembered his own face correctly.
The third man bore a close resemblance to the one beside him. A little taller, a little more gangling, but, Sam thought, they could easily be brothers.
They all seemed to know each other, and didn’t seem too surprised about what had just happened to them.
Sam had to find out more information. Or, at the very least, find a reflection to see whose face he was wearing this time.
He glanced around the cell, hunting for a reflective surface.
No good.
“Oh, that landing got me good,” said the older man. Sam looked at him to see he was inspecting a gash he’d evidently just discovered on his knee.
Sam instinctively rushed over to him, and started to assess the wound.
“Hmm, it’s not serious, but it may leave a scar if left without sutures. We’ll need to watch it for infection. Anyone got a rag, or somethin’ I can use to apply pressure?”
The brother who hadn’t yet spoken pulled off his jacket, and with a great pull, ripped it open. After a moment of tearing, he handed Sam a newly created rag.
“Here,” he simply said, smiling kindly. Sam took it and got to work on the wound.
“Thanks,” he replied, and continued to wish he had names for these faces.
He met eyes with the man he was treating and smiled. The man gave her a lopsided grin.
“Thanks, Doctor Beckett.”
This made Sam freeze in place.
“Wh-what?” he stuttered, completely off-guard.
The man raised his eyebrows. “Well, I never seen you treat a wound so professionally like this. You been readin’ first aid books in your downtime?”
This statement gave Sam three precious scraps of information.
First, he had not in fact leaped into himself. Second, this group of people seemed to be no stranger to situations like this, and being hurt. And finally, third: it seemed whoever this person was he’d leaped into, had the name Beckett. Now, if only he could find a mirror.
“Sam, we got a teensy little problem.”
The familiar voice of Al was both a relief and a source of anxiety. But with nowhere to speak with the hologram privately, Sam was in a tight spot.
He did his best to surreptitiously look up at Al, who was standing in the hall just outside the cell.
He quickly completed his work on the wound, and stood, leaning against the bars to listen to his friend.
Al looked at the three people sharing Sam’s cell.
“Who the hell are they?”
Sam furrowed his brow.
“Aren’t you meant to tell me?” he whispered through gritted teeth.
“Hmm?” The man who’d made the Monopoly reference was looking up from inspecting some kind of handheld device that reminded Sam of a remote control crossed with Al’s handlink.
“Nothing,” he replied, but didn’t take his eyes off the device. What was it?
“That’s what I’m trying to say, Sam,” Al continued, “Ziggy can’t understand what you’re doing here when all her records are telling us the person you leaped into isn’t standing in this cell right now. In fact, nobody is supposed to be here.”
“Oh boy,” said Sam, with an exasperated huff.
I’m flying blind.
Sam couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but he was certain it must be related to that blue tunnel somehow.
“Uh, guys,” said the man holding the device, “we got a teensy little problem.”
Sam turned to Al, and shared a bewildered look.
Upon turning back towards the cell, the man was holding the device up for the rest to see. The display on it was reading 00:00:00:00 and flashing.
“Did we miss the slide window?!” said the black man, alarmed.
“I don’t know, but it should start counting up if we do that, and it’s just stuck on zero like… a VCR without the time set. This is not good.”
Al walked through the bars and into the cell, and took a peek at the faces of each of Sam’s apparent cellmates.
“Listen, Sam, I’m gonna go back to the waiting room and interrogate Maggie. She must have some idea of what was going on here.”
At the name, Sam met Al’s eye with both recognition and shock. He mouthed: ‘Maggie Beckett?’
Al grimaced, and confirmed: “Maggie Beckett – you got it. Sit tight, Sam. We’ll get to the bottom of this, okay?”
The Imaging Chamber doorway opened, and Al disappeared into it, leaving Sam to figure out this situation alone for now.
“Hunka junk!”
Sam’s eyes flickered to the man holding the device, and he smacked it on the side in a way Sam was all too familiar with.
“If this stupid thing wasn’t coded in ancient hieroglyphs, I may have half a chance of figuring out what’s gone wrong.”
“Hieroglyphs?” enquired Sam.
“Yeah, ‘Egyptian World’ didn’t do things by halves.”
Sam found himself itching to reveal his identity and help them. He knew ancient Egyptian inside and out; or at least he did, before the ‘swiss cheesing’ of his memory. But his niece Maggie definitely did not.
He thought about his niece. Tom’s one and only daughter. Spoiled rotten. Grew up to be a cop. Sheriff of some small town, if he remembered correctly.
He glanced around at the jail: exactly the sort of quiet, small town jailhouse Maggie might work in or around.
In his head, he began formulating a case to present to Al when he came back. He would beg to be allowed to come clean. The fact that Ziggy didn’t anticipate their presence meant that these people were not meant to be here. They weren’t part of the original history either. Could they, too, be time travellers, who figured out some way to move about time without displacing people?
But then, it didn’t seem like any of these people fully understood the device they were using. Who built it?
Come on, Al.
Maggie paced. How could she think? Sleep? Stuck in this blue void?
Here’s what she knew: on her Earth, Admiral Albert Calavicci was a friend and colleague of her uncle, Sam Beckett. She’d met them both in limited capacities, but not for a while now. This version of the Admiral hadn’t initially recognised her, but after getting her name it seemed to click.
So, she figured, this world couldn’t have been dramatically different to hers. Perhaps in this dimension, her uncle worked for the sliding program, and she wound up here as a prisoner after their incoming wormhole was traced.
Though it didn’t explain why she had no memory of getting here. She didn’t wake up, she was already standing when she found herself here. Something was fishy.
The sound of the door sliding open brought her to attention, and there he was again. Al the Admiral.
“Sir, I need to know that my friends are alright. Please.”
“Maggie, they’re fine, I promise. But who are these friends of yours?”
Maggie looked, pleading, at him.
“I don’t want to put them in danger.”
“Maggie,” Al said, “I need to know their names and where they came from. I promise you, this can only help.”
Maggie eyed him.
“You’re a reasonable guy, right?” She asked. “Why don’t we tell each other what we know? An open exchange of information?”
Al looked like he was having an internal struggle.
“Maggie, we run a highly classified, Top Secret facility here. I can’t divulge any sensitive information. Orders from the top.”
Maggie scowled.
“Well it’s a good thing I have Top Secret clearance, then. Tell me.”
Al tapped his hand device, and raised an eyebrow.
“Says here you’re the Sheriff of Madera County, California. Not exactly the kind of clearance you get in the top brass, sweetheart.”
Maggie’s jaw dropped.
“You’re kidding? I never joined the military?”
“You say that like you didn’t know,” said Al, giving her an odd look.
Maggie sighed, exasperated.
“Okay, listen. Al. Can I call you Al?”
“Sure, it’s my name.”
“Good. Al. Where I come from, I was involved in high level government research, exploring travel between parallel Earths.”
She watched Al’s mouth drift open as he hurriedly tapped on his device.
“Whatever records you have on Maggie Beckett from this Earth are irrelevant. I’m not her.”
She crossed her arms, and steeled her gaze.
“That’s all you get for free. You want info on my friends, you gotta give me something.”
Al shifted uncomfortably, seeming to search for his next words. Then, he finally let his shoulders sag.
“You know, you’re just as much of a pain as your uncle,” he said.
“Tell me where I am.”
“New Mexico.” He was starting to wither under her gaze.
“Gonna need more than that.”
“Then, you may be better off asking when you are,” Al said. “For you, it’s May second, 1999, right?”
Maggie squinted. “It’s hard to keep track of the date sometimes, but that sounds right.”
Al continued: “Well, the actual date today is November sixteenth, 2002. But your friends are still in 1999.”
Maggie wished she had somewhere to sit down.
“I time travelled?”
Al pointed to her. “Bingo.”
Maggie felt her head swimming.
“No, but, that means they must be long gone. I’m stuck here?”
She felt her throat constricting with panic. “Oh god, I’m gonna be sick.”
She leaned over, and felt blackness closing around the edges of her vision.
“This is why we don’t tend to give up this information to the people he switches with,” Al said, attempting to hold her up by the arm as she hyperventilated.
Maggie caught that word.
“Switches?” she said, looking up.
Al nodded. “Your uncle travels in time by… kinda swapping places with a person in history. We call it ‘leaping.’ He lives their life for a little while, helps ’em out, and they wait in here for an equal length of time, until they leap back after he’s done what he needs to do.”
Maggie felt her heart start to slow down as she absorbed this. She could still make it back before the slide. Right? But there was a perhaps more pressing question she had right now.
“How can someone who isn’t me, be living my life?”
Al appeared to struggle for an explanation.
“Uh, well, everyone just sort of sees him as you. To them, he looks just like you. Might be acting a little funny, but people tend to brush it off.”
“Yeah? Well there have been a couple of times I’ve ‘acted a little funny’ and it’s never gone well for me.”
She hoped one of the boys would notice an impostor, at least this time around.
Al placed a hand under her chin, pointing her face to his. He was smiling, but it was bitter. Maggie didn’t like feeling this vulnerable.
“I told you what you wanted, Maggie. Now give me the names of your buddies.”
* * *
“Hello!” Sam called out into the empty jail. He turned back to his apparent colleagues. “It just doesn’t make sense that nobody’s here.”
The other three were sitting around the device, looking over it. Sam desperately wanted to look at it himself, but he just didn’t want to risk revealing himself just yet. Not until he had more information.
“Well,” said the taller of the brothers, “Perhaps we’re in a world where crime has become so rare they don’t need their jails any longer.”
There it was again. A reference to a ‘world,’ as though this wasn’t the only ‘world’ that they knew. Something was bubbling up deep in Sam’s vague memories, but he just couldn’t reach it.
The shorter brother chimed in: “Oh great, that could mean nobody’s coming for us, and we’re stuck here until we starve to death.”
The older man put his head in his hands.
“I can’t go out like this, man!”
The tall brother moved to comfort him. “Well, that isn’t written in stone.”
Gesturing to the knee wound, he added: “It is possible you could die from sepsis first.”
“Always a great comfort, ain’t you Colin,” the older man remarked, shaking his head.
Colin.
Sam’s ears perked up as he heard the Imaging Chamber door sliding open. He looked around and saw Al taking a nervous puff of his cigar.
He gave his hologram friend a pleading stare.
“Sam, the Maggie I got in the Waiting Room claims to be from a parallel Earth,” Al said, with a deep furrow in his brow, as he looked down at the handlink.
That caught Sam’s attention. He watched his friend closely, as he walked over to the older black man, pointing with his cigar.
“This guy’s name is Rembrandt Brown. Ziggy has him as a washed up Motown singer. But, if he’s from a parallel universe, then, who knows.”
He pointed towards the shorter brother.
“This guy’s Quinn Mallory. Seems to take after you in the brains department. Was on his way to a Masters in physics, and poof! – suddenly disappears, leaving behind some video tapes showing some kind of freaky looking portal he said he was going to jump into. Guess he really did it, huh? Travelled to another Earth?”
Sam was having trouble keeping a poker face. He brought his hand to his mouth and tried to mask his look of excitement. He felt that memory he’d been struggling for finally break free, and he grabbed onto it.
“Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky Bridge…” he muttered, and grinned, impressed by this young guy sitting next to an exposed toilet in a jail cell. It mustn’t have been easy to build something like that on his own.
Al pointed at the man Sam had just found out was named Colin.
“She told me this guy was named Colin Mallory, but Ziggy’s got nothin’. Meant to be Quinn’s younger brother, but he’s an only child as far as Ziggy knows.”
Of course.
These parallel worlds were each threads of timeline divergence. In some, Quinn might have a sibling, and in others, his parents may have split up or decided not to have another child. Infinite possibilities.
Sam guessed he must have caused his fair share of divergences merely by leaping in, and Ziggy had a limited, zoomed-in view of this fractal of variations in events from which she calculated her odds and was able to record changes in history.
Al moved to his side now.
“As for the Maggie we got in the Waiting Room, she says where she comes from, she was in a military program working on this alternate world stuff.”
Sam met his eye, intrigued.
“That’s as much as she’s given up. She’s been prying information about us outta me in exchange.”
Sam turned away from his cellmates and leaned into the bars.
“I want to tell them, Al,” he muttered.
Al stepped through the bars to face Sam.
“What are you, nuts?”
He prepared to make his argument, but before he could say anything, the sound of a big metal door bursting open caused Sam, and everyone else, to turn towards it.
“What the hell are you people doing in here?!”
It was a woman’s voice. Sam craned his neck to see who it could be. And when she came into view, he nearly fell over in surprise.
It was Sheriff Maggie Beckett.
Sam’s first thought was that he had to hide. He’d leaped into some alternate Maggie, and here was the real one, about to come face to face with herself.
He crouched, making eye contact with Quinn, whose gaze was shifting between him and the Sheriff, looking more amused than startled or worried. Maybe even relieved.
“Maggie, chill. Your double could be our ticket out of this cage,” said Rembrandt quietly.
Sam didn’t know about that, but he knew for sure that there was nowhere he could hide. So he returned to his standing position, as Sheriff Maggie reached the cell.
She stopped dead as she spotted him.
Here it comes…
“Uncle Sam…?”
Sam fell against the cell bars, weak at the knees. She couldn’t… surely?
“No, no, no,” Al said, looking about the same level of shocked as Sam felt.
“Oh my god, what–” Sheriff Maggie walked up to him, her surprise appearing to devolve into anger.
“You’ve been missing four years and you show up like some kind of reverse Houdini, locked in a cell of my jail? Is this some kind of joke?”
“I’m sorry, who’s ‘Uncle Sam?’ Other than the guy on the recruitment poster?” said Rembrandt, face screwed up in confusion. The other two were equally stunned.
“Him.” Maggie pointed at Sam, who felt himself shrinking. “He’s my uncle. And you three are…?”
“Do something, Sam…” Al urged.
Yeah, thanks Al. Always helpful advice.
“Uhh, how ’bout you get us outta here and we can… talk?” Sam said to Maggie, before giving a red-faced grimace to the three cellmates.
“I have some explaining to do.”
* * *
The Sheriff’s office was a spartan affair. It didn’t seem like Maggie cared much for this room. No photos on the desk. No knickknacks. Even the chairs were uncomfortable.
Sam wondered if she was doing okay.
His former cellmates were sitting silently, staring at Sam. Waiting for him to explain himself.
Maggie was seated at her desk, her face betraying her emotion over the discovery that Sam was alive. Though she wore a poker face, her eyes were glimmering with salty water.
Al was in the corner of the room, pacing.
“I don’t like this, Sam. It was one thing for you to tell those guys, but this Maggie is part of the original history.”
Sam looked at him directly.
“And what else am I supposed to do at this point, Al? The jig is up!” He spat.
As he knew would happen, the others in the room were looking from him, to the corner of the room they saw as empty, in confusion.
He turned to Maggie.
“You know my friend Al, right?”
She nodded. “The Admiral?”
“Yeah. Well, he’s standing right there.” He pointed to the corner. Al looked back at him with narrowed eyes.
“It’s not important why I can see him and you can’t, but… if you see me talkin’ to myself, that’s why.”
He turned to the dimension hoppers.
“And you guys. You see me as another Maggie, but I’m not. My name is Sam Beckett.” He let that sink in momentarily, before continuing.
“I promise your Maggie is safe, but she’s… with Al.”
Quinn straightened up. “On the astral plane?”
Sam tilted his head. “Astral-? No, she’s in the future.”
Rembrandt stood up, looking a little fed up.
“The future? Ohh, I think I need some air.”
He left the room, shaking his head.
“Oh my god, you really did it?” Sheriff Maggie said. “You time travelled? I knew about your theory, but the military was all hush-hush about the work you were doing with them.”
Sam met her eye proudly. “Yeah. I did it.”
“If I may…” Colin interjected. “Just why do you look like Maggie to us? And why does she not see you as Maggie?”
Sam thought for a moment.
“Well, my method of time travel involves switching places with someone, but the process kind of warps reality around me, projecting the image of the original person. On the other end, the person back in my time looks like me. Only, we don’t see that unless we look in a mirror.”
In his periphery, Sam noticed Quinn leaning in, transfixed.
“As for Maggie, well it must have something to do with the fact she’s the one I’m meant to look like, right? But I can’t say this kind of thing has ever happened before, so I can only speculate.”
Maggie rubbed her eyes.
“It does kinda sting my eyes to look at you. It’s like they don’t want to focus on you.”
Sam raised his eyebrows.
“Really? Huh.”
“Can I try something?” Quinn asked, standing from his chair. His voice was filled with a sort of excited curiosity. He raided Maggie’s pen holder and grabbed a Sharpie. He gestured for Sam to stand, and he obliged, not quite knowing where this was going.
“How tall would you say you are?”
“Uh, maybe a hair under six feet? Why?”
“Maggie’s way shorter,” he said, and pushed Sam against the wall before marking where the top of his head was. He then moved Sam away from the wall and stared at it for a moment, before gesturing to Maggie.
“Come on, stand here.”
Sam saw what he was doing now, and couldn’t help but smile as Maggie stood well under the mark on the wall.
“Nobody’s ever done this before,” he remarked to Al, almost laughing.
“This is spinning me out,” said Quinn, standing Maggie and Sam next to one another against the mark on the wall. He rubbed his eyes.
“Yikes. Whatever effect is going on here does not want me to look at this. I’m getting spots in my eyes.”
He turned to Colin, who’d already come up behind him.
“You seeing this?”
Colin nodded, squinting.
“It’s like the feeling you get looking at the sun.”
He broke away from his gaze and blinked several times.
Sam noticed Al also being affected by whatever this was.
“You two should probably step away from the wall now,” was all he could say as he rubbed his eyes.
Then, Ziggy made that moaning sound on his handlink that tended to denote an urgent message. Al looked down at it.
“About damn time, Ziggy.” He looked up. “Sam, we finally got a read on who you’re meant to help.”
Sam crossed to him.
“It’s gotta be her, right?” He said, gesturing to Maggie, who was looking at him inquisitively.
“Ninety-seven per cent. Looks like she’s going to disappear in three days, Sam. Presumed dead.”
Sam looked back at his niece, a knot forming in his stomach. Quinn was standing next to her, looking at him with a mischievous smirk.
“Sam, I wanna see just how a six foot man fits into a size six woman’s shirt and jeans.”
Sam felt himself going red.
“Like I said, spacetime gets warped around me. The clothing of whoever I leap into just sort of conforms to my body. Why do you need to know?”
“Because nothing feels as good to me as figuring out something nobody’s figured out before.”
With this, Quinn flashed a wide grin. It was an infectious one, and Sam felt moved to reciprocate, even though he was deeply worried about his niece.
“You make a good point there. I know the feeling.”
The door of the office opened, and Rembrandt came in, holding a cup of water.
“So,” he said, pausing for a sip, “Can’t help but notice it’s night out there, and we have to find a place to stay.”
Maggie sat on her desk, arms crossed.
“Guess you could crash at my place tonight, if a couple of you don’t mind the couch.”
She raised a finger. “Just remember, I’m the law around here, so no funny business.”
Sam met her eye, and he could tell she was having trouble keeping a straight face. After all this, how could she?
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.
As Sam and the others sat in Maggie’s living room, recounting tales of their adventures in space and time, Maggie cooked a meal for the unexpected guests. Sam had offered to help, but she’d insisted he relax.
Sam felt envious of Quinn and his friends, who could always remember what they were doing the day before. His stories kept coming out vague and disjointed, when he encountered unexpected holes in his memory. As a guy who’d spent most of his life remembering everything he ever looked at, the gaps were all that more frustrating to him.
“Dinner’s on,” called Maggie, and the group got up. Sam noticed just how hungry he was. How long had they been in that cell? Five, six hours, maybe?
In the kitchen, the table was set out with five bowls of spaghetti.
Just spaghetti. Naked, untopped pasta.
Everyone sat in front of a bowl. Maggie began to eat, before catching the eye of Rembrandt. She lowered her fork.
“Not to be ungrateful, Maggie,” the singer said slowly, “but you got any… I don’t know, sauce or seasoning of some kind for this?”
Maggie responded with a sheepish look. “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting guests. I usually order some Chinese or just eat some chips.”
She got up, and raided her pantry, which Sam could now see was near empty.
She grabbed a bottle of ketchup, and a salt shaker. She placed them on the table.
“This is all I have.”
Rembrandt cringed at the choice. He grabbed the ketchup bottle and squeezed some over the spaghetti.
Sam couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
“You getting enough vitamins, Maggie? Sounds like you don’t have a complete diet.”
Maggie stared into her bowl, poking at it with her fork. “I’m fine. No need to go all doctor on me.”
Rembrandt looked at him with a smirk. “Don’t tell me you’re a medical doctor too.”
Sam simply gave a shrug in reply and returned his gaze to Maggie. On entering Maggie’s home, Sam had observed that it didn’t feel very homely, and she was still living out of boxes. Like her office, her home just felt cold. And now he knew how she was eating; she didn’t seem to be comfortable in her life. Perhaps depressed, perhaps something else was bothering her.
The sliding door sound of the Imaging Chamber caught his ear.
“Sam, suspect numero uno for the disappearance is Maggie’s recent ex, William–”
“Colbert,” finished Sam. “Billy.”
The eyes at the table rose to look at him. He corrected himself.
“How’s Billy taking the divorce?”
Maggie twirled her fork, looking uncomfortable.
“Not good. He knows to keep away from me, of course; you don’t mess with the Sheriff. But he does border on harassment from time to time. Still, it’s better than when I was in the same house with him.”
She looked pained, and Sam wondered what he did to her behind closed doors.
Al interrupted: “He’s gotta be the culprit. Maybe he finally snaps and kills her, then has to cover up the crime.”
Yeah, maybe.
“He’s remained the prime suspect in the case for three years,” Al continued, “but they got bupkis on him.”
Sam had to figure out the best way to play this. Should he keep his cards close to his chest, risking less timeline flux and giving Ziggy a better opportunity to calculate the best course of action? Or should he just tell them all the truth, and hope that knowing about it could undo what was supposed to happen? There were significant advantages and disadvantages to either option.
Well, he had a couple of days. There was no harm in keeping it to himself for now and sleeping on the decision.
What he could do tonight, was take a look at the timer.
He glanced up at Al, then excused himself from the table.
“Where’s your bathroom?” He asked Maggie.
“Down the hall, last door on the right.”
“Thanks.”
In his periphery, he sensed Al following him to the bathroom, and when he got in there, he finally turned to him.
“Al, do you think the Maggie I leaped into ever knew a Billy?”
“Maybe? She knew a me. Recognised me as soon as she saw me. Seems like her world could be similar enough.”
He poked his head through the wall in the direction of the others, and then back. “Good to see you finally engaging in some secrecy, Sam.”
“I haven’t decided what I’m gonna do about this, that’s all. Don’t be surprised if I end up spilling the beans.”
“I gotta be honest, Sam: Ziggy’s threatening the silent treatment.”
“Humph,” he scoffed. “She would do that. Well, she hasn’t been much help this leap anyway, so she can sulk as much as she likes.”
Al made a sour face. “Now I know how a marriage counsellor feels. Not that I’d ever need to see one of them.”
Sam wondered, momentarily, why he’d feel the need to add that caveat. But the thought gave way to more important things.
“Al, listen: go back to Maggie, ask her if she has any insight into Billy. I need to know more about the guy. What he’s capable of.”
Al tapped on his handlink and the Imaging Chamber door opened behind him.
“Alright Sam. But she’s a pain in the butt to get any information out of, you know.”
“You should just tell her what’s going on here. She’ll find out when she leaps back anyway.”
“Yeah, well you try discussing forbidden topics while Ziggy’s lurking, waiting to give you an earful.”
He stepped into the doorway.
“Oh, to hell with Ziggy!” Sam snapped, before finding himself grinning sheepishly as he realised what he’d just said. He was thankful the computer couldn’t actually hear him here.
Al cringed at Sam as the door closed, and Sam realised that he’d already made up his mind about what to do next.
* * *
Maggie was reclining on a bed as Al entered the Waiting Room. She looked up to see him gawking at all the creature comforts she’d managed to get Ziggy to spit out of the walls for her: The bathroom, the vending machine, the armchair, and the bed on which she lay now.
“Jeez, you really made yourself at home,” he remarked, seemingly impressed. “Most people don’t figure out the voice commands.”
“You really should have all this stuff accessible from the get-go,” she chided. “How many people have just stood in here for days, without any stimulation, thinking they’d been abducted by aliens, Al?”
Al gave her a cynical laugh. “We did used to have a table, but the reflection tended to freak people out.”
Maggie looked toward the bathroom, where she had been able to access a mirror. “I admit, that is pretty strange. Good thing you prepared me for it. You probably should do that for everyone that comes here instead of clamming up; you probably traumatise people, you know.”
“Alright, precious,” Al said, narrowing his eyes and sounding like he’d had about enough of her telling him how to do his job. This only proved to make her feel good about having done it.
“So, what do you need to know this time?” Maggie asked, finally sitting up and planting her feet on the floor. He had only come in here when he needed information so far, so it was a safe bet that he was back for more.
“What do you know about a guy named Billy Colbert?”
Maggie’s face crinkled up as she heard the name.
My high school boyfriend?
“That’s very left-field. Yeah, I knew a Billy Colbert, a long time ago, back in Fresno. What about him?”
“The, uh, version of you we have on this Earth married him and finally broke it off in ’99.”
Maggie found herself recoiling from the thought.
“God, poor her.” She thought back to her time dating him. Rationed out his affection toward her, while expecting her to give him every spare moment of her life. It was stifling.
“I broke up with him when I was seventeen, after I caught him making out with Harriet Smyth. Then one day he gave her a shiner, and he got expelled. Neither of us ever saw him again, think he got sent to a school upstate. Dodged a bullet there.”
“So he is a bad guy!”
“I sure wouldn’t trust him.”
She watched him type furiously into his little flashing gadget, and it reminded Maggie that there was a ticking clock.
“Okay, now you throw me a bone,” she coaxed. “Can you find out how much time is left on our timer?”
“You mean that TV remote that’s been flashing zero all day?”
Maggie blanched. “Flashing zero?!”
Al shrugged. “Sam’s probably going to help fix it. Don’t worry about it. Between him and this Quinn guy, they’ll work it out.”
Maggie laughed nervously. “Yeah, and as soon as I start talking about physics, he’s going to know it isn’t me.”
“Oh, uh… they all already know. Turns out the other you saw right through the aura and now they’re all trading stories.”
Maggie sighed in relief. That was one obstacle surmounted.
He added, wryly: “It’s all very heartwarming. And it’s completely messing up history. Ziggy’s never gonna let me forget about this one.”
Maggie smirked. “For a computer, she’s awfully vindictive. Wanted an apology out of me for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Wait, she actually spoke to you?”
Maggie nodded. “Yes, and she’s not very user-friendly.”
“I resent that remark,” interjected the AI from the speakers hidden somewhere in the ceiling.
“Oh, you’re back,” said Maggie, unable to hide her annoyance. “Great.”
“I never left.”
Al shook his head, and addressed the ceiling. “Look, I know we’re all on edge, but we’re going to help Maggie, and Sam’s gonna leap out, historical record or not, okay? We just need to keep her protected a few days. That’s all.”
He met Maggie’s eye, and it threw him off.
“Uh, I mean the other Maggie.”
“What’s going to happen to her?”
Al looked like he was about to answer, but was preempted by Ziggy.
“Al,” she called out in a sing-song manner. This was enough for him to shut his mouth, and head for the door.
Maggie groaned, and laid back down on the bed.
“I can’t change history, what’s the use in keeping me in the dark?” she muttered, only half hoping Ziggy would hear.
“Oh, did I hear that you want it dark?” Ziggy said, and Maggie could detect a malicious streak in her voice that indicated she’d heard what Maggie said perfectly well. “Very well, Maggie. Good night.”
And the ambient light in the room blinked out, leaving Maggie in pitch darkness. She scowled. Maybe it hadn’t been the best idea to antagonise the one keeping her in relative comfort. But, at least she might be able to get some shuteye.
“Good night, Ziggy,” she said bitterly.
At the kitchen table, the timer’s components were spread out, as Sam and Quinn studied them. Sam noted that it was nearing eleven at night. He supposed they would have to wrap it up for the night soon.
The hieroglyphs seemed, to Sam, to be an unusual reconfiguration of the original ancient Egyptian writings, which he assumed were owing to the fact that the language must have evolved somewhat on this world Quinn had described to him, where western culture had absorbed Egyptian, rather than primarily Greco-Roman, elements. He could still understand it to a point, but it was going to be tricky.
He’d learned about the origins of this timer: made to escape from some kind of tomb. They’d acquired it when they let their own timer elapse, thinking Quinn was dead.
Sam thought back to Colin’s comment about Quinn being lucky; it seemed true. How unlikely was it that they’d find such a thing? He wondered if God or Fate or Time or that guy in the diner named Al was taking care of them, too.
The sound of an impact in the doorway startled him out of his thoughts, and he looked up to see Maggie carrying a dusty computer chassis into the room.
“Here. Had to dig it out of my boxes. Hope it’s good enough,” she said as she placed it on the kitchen bench. “I’ll go get the monitor.”
“Thanks Maggie,” Quinn said, and immediately set to plugging it into the wall. Sam found himself wishing for Ziggy at this point, because an old Windows 95 computer like this would take years to process something that would take her seconds.
The thought of calling Project Quantum Leap floated into his mind. If he could prove who he was, they’d be willing to help. But then, how was he expected to get to New Mexico when he had a job to do here? Still, Ziggy’s processing power would come in handy right about now. He could encrypt the data and send it electronically to them, so she could crunch some numbers.
But first, he had to load that data onto this old computer.
“This old bucket of bolts is going to slow us down,” he said grimly. Quinn looked at him with an amused smirk.
“I’ve worked with much worse. The computers on this Earth seem pretty advanced compared to where I came from. For one, you’ve got more than 64 megs of RAM.”
Sam shuddered at the thought of such little memory, and he recalled Quinn’s origins.
Oh, right, this guy built a machine that opened a path to other universes, using consumer grade electrical components, in his basement.
Sam wondered what he could do with the resources that Sam had used to build Project Quantum Leap. Not that he could remember what half of those resources were. Still, Sam himself was pretty used to working on the fly without much at his disposal, nowadays.
The idea of contacting his compound wouldn’t leave him, and simmered away in the back of his mind.
He looked down at the circuit boards and other components, stroking his chin. This all seemed much more familiar to him than he would have expected, and he couldn’t pinpoint why. But, he figured, it was better to recognise it than to have a complete memory lapse and not be able to help.
Maggie came in, struggling to carry the bulky 17-inch CRT monitor, and Sam rushed over to help her. He took it out of her arms, and was easily able to carry it the rest of the way, as Quinn watched with interest.
“Your arms go around it so much more easily than hers,” he remarked, still apparently trying to figure out how his eyes could see two of the same person having such a different experience of carrying the same object.
Sam leaned over to plug in the monitor to the wall, and moved to plug the VGA cable into the chassis.
“I need to get both your fingerprints,” Quinn continued, lost in his curiosity.
“Wouldn’t you rather get this timer fixed?” Sam said, with some amusement. Not that he wasn’t also interested in finding out more about his leaps, but some things did take priority over such investigations.
“Hey, we’ll need breaks. I can do both.”
Sam simply shrugged.
Maggie smiled at the two scientists, a smile Sam thought was more token than genuine, before making her exit from the room.
Quinn crossed his arms, looking from the computer to the disassembled timer.
“I think we’re going to need some more wires to get this thing set up right. I hope this town has a good electronics store.”
He looked around the kitchen at the appliances. “Or I can take apart some of these…”
“You should probably get Maggie’s permission before you start destroying her stuff.”
Sam had to admire his ingenuity, nonetheless.
Quinn flashed him a grin, but it quickly faded as Sam could tell there was something on Quinn’s mind.
“You said before that every time you, uh, ‘leap,’ there’s a reason behind it. You have to fix something that went wrong, or help someone, right?”
Sam nodded. He could see where this was going.
“So what are you here for? Is it to help us, or to help her?” Quinn gestured with his head towards where Maggie had last been seen.
Sam hesitated. It had never crossed his mind that he could be there to help them. But that was always a possibility.
He licked his lips before admitting: “All I know is that she’s going to disappear in a few days.”
Quinn took a moment to process this. “Well, with all four of us, we can have eyes on her all the time.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Sam agreed. “But we can’t just deter whoever’s going to take her, because they might try again when we’re gone. We’ll need to be covert so we can catch the guy red-handed.”
He glanced out the door to make sure Maggie wasn’t in earshot.
“I might need to take her place for a few days.”
Quinn nodded. “Know much about being a Sheriff?”
“A little. I’ve been one before,” he said, and then it hit him that it didn’t turn out well for Abigail’s father. “Of course… he did die in a fire right after I leaped out.”
Quinn looked at him with wide eyes. “Alright then…” he said, nervous. “Well, please don’t do that again.”
* * *
Sam was half asleep in Maggie’s guest bedroom when he heard a loud banging on the front door. He leapt out of bed, adrenaline flowing.
“Maggie!” cried a man’s voice, muffled behind the door.
Sam hurried into the living room, where the door was. On the couch and floor, Quinn and Rembrandt were scrambling to their feet. Colin had already turned on the lamp by the couch, and was striding towards the door with a stony expression.
The voice behind the door continued: “Maggie, why won’t you talk to me!”
More pounding on the door.
Colin peered through the peephole, and looked back to the others.
“Is this Billy?” he asked.
Sam nodded, recognising the voice. “I think so. And he sounds drunk.”
Maggie appeared in the hall, finally roused from the commotion.
“Don’t let him in,” was all she said. Sam moved to her and took her arm.
“You should hide,” he told her. “I’ll handle it.”
She looked into his eyes for a moment, defiant, but then conceded, and moved into her bedroom, closing the door.
Sam crossed to the door, which was taking quite the beating.
“Billy, go home!” He called through the door. “Or I’ll be forced to arrest you for being drunk and disorderly.”
He looked back at the others, shrugging.
“Maggie, please! I just wanna talk! You owe me that!”
“I owe you nothing. Get out of here!”
A moment of silence passed, and then a huge thud came on the door. Sam thought it may have been a kick.
“Billy, if you leave right this second, I won’t charge you with attempted break-and-enter. But if you keep going, I will have no choice.”
“Screw you, Maggie! You can’t hide behind that badge forever!”
Through the peephole, Sam watched Billy stumble away, though not before kicking over Maggie’s mailbox.
“Destruction of property,” Sam mumbled.
Well, that sure raises the odds of him being the culprit.
Sam turned, and met Quinn’s eye. They shared a moment of grave understanding.
He crossed to the hall, and went into Maggie’s room, where he found her on the bed, hugging her knees.
He sat on the end of the bed.
“Does this happen often?”
Maggie sighed. “Only after he goes drinking with his buddies. I think they must egg him on.”
Sam sighed. He was still reluctant to tell her about her fate, but he could still try his plan.
“Maybe you should go stay at a motel for a few days. I’ll step in and pose as you.”
“What good would that do?” she asked, her brow furrowed.
“I just have a bad feeling about Billy. Maybe I can figure out some way to get him to leave you alone. I think that’s why I’m here.”
He took her hand.
“Those three guys out there,” he nodded toward the living room, “they really care about their Maggie. I think you could stay with Rembrandt and Colin. They can protect you. Meanwhile, I’ll play Sheriff and work with Quinn on the timer in my downtime.”
“I’m not a child any more, Uncle Sam,” she said, irritation lacing her words, “I’m a grown woman with police training. I don’t need to be protected.”
Sam cringed. He thought she might resist in this way.
“I know. I’m not going to deny you’re clearly a capable person.”
He shifted his position so that he was cross-legged on the end of the bed, facing her.
“Do you know where your name comes from? Why your Dad called you Maggie?”
Maggie thought for a moment, then shook her head.
“Yeah, he never told me either, but I know,” he said with a sad smile.
“When your Dad was fighting in Nam, he met a photojournalist called Maggie Dawson. Out on a mission, she was killed, while your Dad was saved.”
He drew a sharp breath as the memories came back to him.
“I know about it because I was there. Her death was… well, it was because of me.”
“But you never went to Vietnam,” Maggie said, struggling to understand.
He put a hand on her knee.
“I was there alright, though nobody knew it was me. And I saved my brother’s – your Dad’s – life. At the cost of hers.”
She looked at him, pale as a sheet.
“You’re here today because she died. And I could never forgive myself if I had a chance to save you and failed.”
Maggie took this information in quietly.
Finally, she made eye contact with him, and spoke plainly.
“What do you know about the future, Sam? About me?”
Sam sighed. He should have known she’d figure it out, just as Quinn had.
“You’re going to go missing.”
Maggie barely had a reaction.
“I see,” was all she said in reply.
The morning sun was just peeking into the kitchen window as Sam dialled the interstate number on Maggie’s wall phone.
It rang for half a second before connecting. Sam smiled as he heard Ziggy’s voice on the line.
“State your access authorisation, please,” she said.
“Uh, Department of Defence Umbra clearance number 004-002-02-016. But that may have been reset due to potential compromisation, a couple of days ago – if I remember correctly – in which case, the new number will be 038-002-33-283.”
He smiled. “It’s me, Ziggy. Sam.”
“Please wait…” Ziggy’s voice said.
A moment went by, and then, a new voice: “Hello? Who is this?”
“Gooshie? I haven’t heard your voice in so long.”
“You don’t sound like… the undisclosed individual whose number you cited.” Gooshie was straining not to divulge information.
“I know, I know. But it’s really me, buddy. I’m in a leap right now. Only, I’m a future version of myself calling you.”
“Uh… wow, okay. Where are you right now? Ziggy says this call is coming from California.”
“I’ve leaped into my niece, Maggie, in Madera County. That’s whose voice you’re hearing right now.” He didn’t bother explaining the unnecessary detail that it was a different Maggie.
“If I’m thinking of the correct date, I think the present me should have leaped out of that guy who saw the UFO a couple days ago – and that’s why the clearance number had to be reset, because I gave it up under the truth serum those spooks gave me. I don’t know whether the reset’s been done by this point in the timeline, though.”
“Oh boy,” Gooshie said. “It’s not a good idea for you to be contacting us, Doctor Beckett… as delightful as it is that you have.”
“I know, I know. I could change the future. But believe me, Gooshie, this is no ordinary leap. Listen, can you put Ziggy on for me? I have an important job for her.”
“Uh, well, here’s the thing, Sam…”
Sam’s palm shot to his forehead as he recalled what happened next in his timeline back in ’99.
“Oh, she’s all out of sorts because of Alia, isn’t she? Damn, bad timing.”
“Yeah, we’re in crisis mode right now,” confirmed Gooshie.
He punched the counter, but a realisation dawned on him as he rubbed his knuckles.
“Listen, sometime today or tomorrow I’m gonna SFTP some data over. Ziggy’ll be able to decode the encryption on it just fine. Just tell her it’s a side project. But here’s the fun part: she has a few years to do it. Just have Al pass on the data when you sync up with me in November 2002, okay?”
“Okay, Sam. I’ll tell her to expect it.”
“Thank you, Gooshie.”
Sam hesitated in ending the call. “Listen… tell everyone…”
“I know, Sam. I will.”
“See you round, pal.”
He was just hanging up the phone when Quinn wandered in, rubbing his eyes.
“Who were you talking to?”
“I was callin’ home. My hybrid supercomputer should be able to crunch a few numbers on a scale of magnitude faster than this old thing,” he said, knocking on the case of the PC.
“Supercomputer?” Quinn sounded intrigued.
“We call her Ziggy. She’s my pride and joy, when she’s not driving me crazy.”
“Sounds like you’re talking about a person.”
“I’m sure she’d be insulted by the comparison,” Sam replied, with a laugh.
Quinn crossed the room, looking at him with mischief. Sam had an inkling of what was going on in his head.
He reached into his pocket, and pulled out a tape measure.
“Oh god, what now?” Sam moaned, as Quinn swung the tape over him and started measuring his waist.
“Sorry man, it’s for science,” he said, as Sam shifted uncomfortably.
Quinn laughed as he read the measurement.
“Twenty-five inches. A little low for a 6 foot man, right?”
Sam felt his face burning as Quinn giggled.
“Yeah, yeah. Laugh it up. Like to see you pull off these jeans.”
“I wish I could see your real appearance,” Quinn mused. “I wonder if I could build some sort of reality lens so I could see through the spacetime distortion.”
“Another time, maybe,” said Sam, gesturing towards the timer pieces. “We have something more important to do.”
Quinn’s excitement waned, and he nodded solemnly. “Yeah, you’re right. Who knows if we’ll even make the window at this rate, but the sooner we finish, the more likely it is we will.”
He turned to Sam. “But aren’t you gonna be doing the Sheriff thing?”
Sam nodded. “Yeah, I’ll have to. The others can take Maggie to a motel to keep watch on her, and I’ll help you with this when I can. While I’m out on patrol, you work on getting it rigged up to the computer, okay?”
Quinn gave a mock salute.
“Sure thing.”
* * *
Sam placed his palm on the car panel, and Higgins sprung to life.
“Higgins, open driver’s side door,” he said. The car chimed, as it had done yesterday, and the door popped open. He got in, and was starting the car when Al popped into the passenger seat, looking at him with a piercing stare. Sam regarded him nervously.
“You made a phone call to the facility on the third of May, 1999, sounding just like your niece.” he said, to which Sam gave him a ghost of a shrug.
“Do you realise how weird it is to have my own history changed in the middle of you altering it like that, Sam? I have two memories now, one of you never having called, and one of you calling.”
“Sorry, Al. The former one should fade after I leap out, right?”
“As of right now, Ziggy both does and doesn’t have the data you said you were gonna send her, which she says means you haven’t sent it yet, but you will sometime tonight, with a 98.2 per cent probability.”
He took a long, troubled puff on his cigar.
“Only Ziggy could hold those two opposing truths and not blow a circuit.”
“Guess we should’ve called her Schrödinger,” he said with a chuckle, but Al merely met his joke with an exasperated shake of his head.
“That was the name of Quinn Mallory’s cat,” he finally said.
Of course it was.
“Civilian jaywalking at eleven o’clock, Sheriff,” Higgins stated. Sam looked over to see some guy walking on the side of the road, causing no real issue.
“Okay Higgins. Ignore, please?”
“Handprint authorisation required to disregard observed crime in progress.”
Sam rolled his eyes, and provided the handprint, making incredulous eye contact with Al.
“Authorisation accepted. Incident report recorded in log.”
“Jeez, what a killjoy,” Al remarked.
“This is really what Maggie has to put up with every day?” Sam shook his head in disbelief. “No wonder she’s miserable.”
He looked at his friend. “I feel like I’m not just here to stop her from disappearing, you know? What if she needs a change in her life? You’ve seen the way she lives; she’s not eating right, she’s living out of moving boxes after two months, she takes no pride in her work. What does Ziggy think of that?”
“Sam, Ziggy’s barely calculating anything right now. She keeps saying she’s blinded to it ’cause of all this hokum with the parallel Earths and you being in the wrong Maggie.”
“Well, maybe talk to our guest in the Waiting Room again. How would she feel if she were in this situation?”
Al looked at him with a sigh. “Do I have to?”
“Al,” Sam pleaded.
“Alright already,” Al sulked.
“And get Verbena to help, alright?”
Al nodded, and pressed a button on the handlink, causing him to vanish from the car.
And so, he was alone again with Higgins.
Maggie wiped the sweat from her brow as she completed her twenty-eighth lap of the Waiting Room. With nothing better to do, she’d figured she might as well get in some cardio. Even if the jumpsuit she was stuck wearing didn’t have any support - she’d been making do with one arm wrapped around her chest as she ran.
“Water, please.”
A drinking fountain slid out from the wall next to where the vending machine was, and she hurried to it to hydrate herself.
While she drank, her ears picked up the now familiar sound of the door sliding open. She turned to see Al entering, accompanied by another woman unfamiliar to Maggie.
“Back for more?” She asked him, straightening her back, and crossing her arms, then moving her gaze to the unknown woman. “Who’s she?”
“Maggie, this is Doctor Beeks, our staff psychiatrist.”
The doctor nodded towards her, and extended a hand. Maggie shook it, suspicious.
“What are you doing here? Think I need some counselling or something?”
She narrowed her eyes, but saw nothing untoward in this doctor, who was looking at her with seemingly genuine kindness.
“Not unless you want some,” she said, smiling faintly. “A pleasure to meet you, Ms. Beckett.”
“Maggie’s fine. So why are you here?” She looked at Al with a cynical raised eyebrow. “Need to press me for more info again?”
Al looked sheepish, and she knew she was right.
“We’re looking for some insight into the mental state and needs of…” The doctor trailed off.
“Your counterpart,” Al finished.
Maggie threw her hands in the air. “How should I know? I’ve lived a very different life to her. Something I’ve surely made abundantly clear by now.”
“Well, you’re the closest thing we’ve got to understanding her,” said Doctor Beeks.
Maggie thought carefully. While it was true that her doubles sometimes thought like her, she’d seen enough of them to know how large the discrepancy could be. Still, she figured, she’d just need to put herself in the shoes of a version of her that stayed with Billy and somehow managed to not enter into the military. What might have happened with her father that would have made him less of a tyrant?
Finally, she replied. “Sure, I’m willing to help… for the right price. What can you offer me?”
Al and the doctor looked at each other for a moment. Then, Al took a deep, shaky breath, and Maggie just knew he was going to come out with something good.
“I can show you your friends. Not for very long, because the power cost is astronomical, and frankly we don’t need that kind of electric bill. You’ll be able to see and hear them, but they won’t see or hear you. Sam will, if he’s there.”
Yes, finally, a deal worth making.
Maggie grinned. “Deal.”
She moved to the armchair, and sat cross-legged on it.
“Okay, fill me in on everything you know about the other me, and I’ll see what I can do.”
* * *
It was after dark when Sam got back to Maggie’s house. Being this town’s Sheriff was certainly one of the duller gigs of his leaping career. Nothing but intervening in petty disagreements, speeding tickets, and stacks of paperwork - and nobody to talk to but a computer with no personality.
He was glad to be back to work with Quinn, who’d now jury-rigged the circuit boards of the device to a serial port in the computer and was busily scrolling through lines of hieroglyphs.
“Took me three hours to code up a driver to recognise this thing,” he said as Sam entered the kitchen.
Sam observed his work with admiration.
“You did great,” he said, patting the kid on the back.
Quinn stepped away from the display.
“Well, it’s your turn to shine now, because I have no idea what any of this says.”
Sam pulled up a stool, and let his eyes drift over the hieroglyphs.
“Okay, this is good. I’ll set up a simple Rosetta Stone lookup table based on what I understand of each symbol, then send it off to Ziggy who can use that to translate it all into a code that we should both be able to work with. She’ll probably take it upon herself to improve the code as well, knowing her.”
“I really appreciate this,” he said.
An hour later, Sam was absorbed in the code, writing notes on a notepad, when he felt eyes on him from behind. He paused, and turned around to see Quinn pointing some kind of machine at him. It was a hastily constructed contraption, but Sam could see it was some form of scanning device, not unlike an EMF meter or Geiger counter, he thought. In one hand, a meter, and in the other, connected by a wire, was some kind of wand that he was waving around. There was an electrical hum coming from it.
“What is that?” he asked, squinting.
“It’s a spacetime distortion detector I threw together today. I’m trying to get it tuned in to the reality warp around you. You keep doing what you’re doing. When it starts making a clicking noise it should be working. At least, I think so.”
“You did that in a few hours?!” Sam stared at him in disbelief. If it had taken him three hours just to set up the driver, he couldn’t have had much time left over to do this.
“Well, I’m pretty used to working to tight deadlines,” he said, downplaying this incredible feat.
“Jeez, and there I was filling out parking tickets, while you were doing all this,” he lamented.
“Life of a Sheriff isn’t very glamorous, huh?”
Sam laughed. “I’m sure it’s great… if you like to power trip over people just minding their business.”
“There’s something I’ve been a victim of on more than one occasion,” Quinn said, still playing with the dials on his device. “It’s amazing how many times I’ve been arrested without knowing I’d done anything wrong, or even for trying to help someone.”
The machine started clicking, and Quinn gave a victorious laugh.
“Bingo!”
He drew the wand closer to Sam, and the clicking noise became louder and more frequent. He drew it away, and it subsided. He smiled triumphantly.
Sam stood, and gave Quinn an approving pat on the arm. “Don’t suppose you’d consider staying here and workin’ at the Project?”
Quinn seemed to mull it over for a hot second, then shook his head. “I’m looking for my parents. Won’t do me any good to stop here.”
Sam nodded in understanding. He’d do the same.
“If you want, I can draw up schematics for this machine and you can send it to your supercomputer. Might come in handy for you some day.”
“I’d like that.”
Sam turned back to the computer to continue his translation work, but no sooner than he had, did he hear the Imaging Chamber door. Sighing, he turned back around to see Al.
“You talk to Maggie?” he asked his friend, and he felt Quinn’s attention shift to him.
“Oh, is that your hologram buddy?” asked Quinn.
“I never said he was a hologram…”
“Well, what else is he gonna be?” Quinn’s eyes danced. “A ghost? Fairy? You already said he was in the future, so I just figured maybe he was a holographic projection tuned into your brain waves or something.”
“Lucky guess,” Sam said with a grin.
He looked back at Al, who he was startled to see holding the hand of Maggie, decked out in the white Waiting Room jumpsuit. She was looking at Quinn with an emotional expression.
“Hey Quinn,” she said to him, but he couldn’t see, nor hear, it. She looked in Sam’s direction. “Hey there, Uncle.”
“You’re gonna have to relay the message,” said Al. Sam nodded.
“Quinn,” Sam said, grabbing the arm of the man, “Al’s got Maggie with him. She just said ‘hey.’”
Quinn’s eyes widened. “Where?”
Sam pointed to the corner of the room where the two stood, and Quinn looked towards that spot.
“Hey, Maggie. Hope they’re treating you okay in the future.”
“Well, it’s comfortable enough, as far as prisons go,” Maggie said
“She says it’s comfortable, but she views it as a prison,” relayed Sam.
“Where are the others?” She asked.
“I can answer that one,” said Al. “They’re off in a motel with the other Maggie. I’ll show you them tomorrow.”
“Okay, then. Quinn, I want you to know that if you have to slide without me, that’s okay. I’ll make do alone.”
“Maggie, I couldn’t let that happen,” Sam replied directly.
“What did she say?” Quinn asked.
“She’s telling you to go without her if I don’t leap out before your timer hits zero.”
Quinn shook his head. “Not a chance. I don’t know about the others, but I’m not going to just abandon you. I’ll build a new sliding machine if I have to. Don’t worry about it.”
Sam watched Maggie’s expression melt into relieved gratitude. He smiled; these two really cared for one another.
Al glanced at the handlink. “Okay, Ziggy’s telling me I have twenty seconds until I need to let go of your hand or we get an outage. Any final words?”
“Just… tell him I’m sorry for arguing with him so much about the densitrometry circuit.”
Al nodded, and let go of her hand, causing her to disappear from Sam’s sight.
“She says sorry for arguing with you about the densitrometry circuit,” he parroted, and smirked at the comment.
Quinn stood quiet for a moment, smiling. “She’s right, though. It needs some work.”
“Well then, guess you’re lucky you have me,” Sam said, before spinning back around on his stool to complete his work.
The very moment Sam uploaded the timer data to Project Quantum Leap, Al burst into the Imaging Chamber, carrying a hefty stack of dot matrix printer paper.
“Well, Sam, congratulations, you have twelve thousand lines of code to transcribe, and I have to sit here holding it for you, so you better be quick about it,” Al deadpanned.
He took a hold of the first page, and let the stack drop, allowing the pile of perforated pages to concertina from his hand to the floor.
“Ziggy said she made some improvements for efficiency and cut the line count down twenty per cent. So at least there’s three thou you can skip.”
Sam flushed, and turned to Quinn who was soldering something at the kitchen table.
“I got the code.”
Quinn looked back. “Great! Let’s see it.”
Sam scratched his head, embarrassed.
“Well, it only exists in the future, so I have to copy it out line by line from Al’s hard copy.”
Quinn blanched. “How long do you think that’s gonna take?”
“Maybe eight, ten hours? Assuming I don’t get a cramp in my hands.”
“Oh boy,” Quinn said.
You said it.
“It’s alright, I didn’t need to sleep tonight,” Sam said with a wry smile.
“You definitely owe me one,” Al said. “I had a hot date planned with Beth, you know.”
“Sorry,” Sam said, beginning to type. Fortunately, his fingers were plenty nimble from a lifetime of piano playing followed by years of contributing to Ziggy’s programming. His fingers danced across the keys, and within a minute had almost completed the first page.
Over his shoulder, Quinn watched the code being written on the screen with interest.
“I’ll spot you for errors,” he said.
“Thanks.”
After a few more minutes watching the code appear, Quinn let out a low whistle.
“Either your computer added in new functions, or I knew way less about that timer than I thought.”
He pointed to a subroutine on the screen.
“That’s some kind of safety protocol I’ve never seen before.”
Sam looked at it for a moment. Then he resumed copying the code as he spoke:
“Oh yeah, you definitely want that. Prevents you from becoming un-anchored in spacetime. That could have some disastrous effects, if there’s an overload of energy in your wormhole. Of course, there tend to be other effects that can occur, but un-anchoring is by far the most dangerous. That was one of our most important developments when we were designing our system. Have you really been… ‘sliding’… without this?”
“I didn’t know that could happen…”
“Better safe than sorry, huh?”
In the reflection of the monitor, Sam watched Quinn nod, hanging over the shoulder of Maggie.
“Well, thank Ziggy for that.”
* * *
Rembrandt puffed as he finally reached the top of the stairs. He headed to the door of the motel room, arms loaded up with bags of takeout. Sheriff Maggie had encouraged him to try the Chinese place where she usually got her dinners, and he had to admit the food smelled amazing.
The wound on his knee from the slide in was stinging, and he hoped that meant it was healing rather than becoming infected. He figured he would need to go see ‘Doctor Beckett’ again to make sure.
He hoped Colin and Maggie were a little less bored now than when he’d left them; they had been looking pretty damn under-stimulated, watching some old western movie on the crappy television. Colin had been pointing out the inaccuracies, while Maggie seemed to be driven up the wall by his commentary.
He fumbled for the key in his pocket, but as he reached the door, he observed that it was ajar. This made his heart skip a beat.
Alarmed, he pushed the door open and cried out as he saw the scene in front of him. Takeout boxes tumbled to the floor.
Sprawled on the bed lay a prone Colin, blood matted in his hair.
“Colin!” cried Remy, rushing to him. He turned Colin over and checked for a pulse. “Colin, wake up, man!”
Colin groaned, and reached to the back of his head. “It hurts…”
“Colin, where’s Maggie?!”
“I… I don’t know,” he said, appearing to have trouble focusing his eyes.
“Did you see who hit you?”
Colin carefully sat up, then hunched over, head between his knees.
“No… the, the last thing I remember I was coming out of the… um, bathroom. I heard her scream.”
With that, he vomited all over his feet.
“Oh man, you need a doctor.”
He grabbed a hold of the phone by the bed and moved to dial 911, but then spotted the slip of paper with Maggie’s home number, and decided that might be a better option. He could get a doctor and report back to Quinn at the same time.
As he finished dialling, he straightened, and watched his friend struggling to keep his equilibrium.
“Hello?” Quinn’s voice was a relief to Remy.
“Q-ball, we need both of you. Maggie’s gone, and Colin’s hurt.”
“Oh no… we’ll be right there, Remy.”
And as quickly as that, the phone call was over.
Remy returned to Colin’s side, carefully avoiding the bile on the floor, and held onto him.
“Hey, you gotta stay awake, okay?”
Colin’s response was a groggy moan. Rembrandt wiped nervous sweat from his forehead, and inspected the back of Colin’s head, but it was difficult to see through his hair. Besides, a head injury was much more than what could be seen on the outside.
He felt Colin starting to slump over, and he gripped onto the man as best he could. “Stay with me, man. Help’s coming.”
“Did Billy know…?” Colin mumbled.
“That we were here?”
Rembrandt sighed. “I don’t know. We’ve been real careful, but there’s always a chance he saw her when we were bringing her here, or maybe he knows someone who works here that saw her.”
Through the open door, Rembrandt heard a car come to a screeching halt in the parking lot, then came the familiar chime of Higgins opening the squad car doors. Remy stayed on the bed, holding Colin up, as Sam and Quinn hurried up the stairs.
Finally, they reached the door. Rembrandt looked away from Sam, with the knowledge that he looked like Maggie, but wasn’t her, a little too much for him at this moment.
“Oh man, what happened?!” Quinn said as he stepped over the stray noodles and vomit on the floor.
“We don’t know. I found him like this when I came back from the restaurant,” Rembrandt explained, though he felt that it wasn’t at all helpful.
Sam had approached Colin, and was checking his eye reactions.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” He asked, holding two fingers in front of his eyes.
Colin, eyes dull, seemed to look through the fingers. “Uhh… four?”
“Damn,” he said, and peered around to the wound. “Rembrandt, find me a clean cloth and dampen it for me. Quinn, I think I saw an ice chest out there, see if you can get some.”
Quinn dashed back out of the room, and Rembrandt hurried to the bathroom, where he grabbed a washcloth, and ran it under the tap for a moment.
He passed it to Sam, who started using it to clean the wound.
“The bleeding seems to have stopped, but there is definitely internal damage, concussion at least. Stack some pillows at the head of the bed. I’m gonna get him to lie down on his side. When I get the ice we can apply some to help with the swelling. But unfortunately, we are going to need an ambulance. So once you’ve got the bed done, can you call 911?”
“Sure. And I think I saw a first aid kit in the closet,” Rembrandt offered as he started arranging pillows.
“Okay, great. That’ll help.”
“I thought people with head injuries shouldn’t fall asleep?” Remy wondered, looking at the pillows.
Sam shook his head. “Only if nobody’s around to help. Passing out alone won’t cause him to deteriorate, it’s the lack of medical care and monitoring of his vital signs that would make it a problem.”
Quinn walked back in the room with a bag of ice.
“Good job, Quinn. Grab a towel or washcloth and wrap up a handful of cubes.”
Quinn obliged, heading into the bathroom.
Rembrandt had completed his work on the bed, and moved to the phone to call an ambulance.
It really spun him out that this stranger who looked like Maggie was so ice cool in a crisis. If anyone had to swap bodies with her, he was glad it was this guy who seemed to be good at just about everything.
He gave the details to the 911 operator, and assured the dispatcher that Colin was getting first aid from someone who knew what they were doing.
Colin was now lying on the bed, with Quinn holding the makeshift ice pack to just above the wound, avoiding the actual laceration in case of pain.
“Hold on, bro,” he murmured.
Sam was pulling the first aid kit out, and rifling through it. He pulled out some gauze and disinfectant swabs, and crossed to treat Colin, who seemed to have lost consciousness.
Remy took this opportunity to step outside and take a breather. He felt terrible; he’d been entrusted with guarding Maggie, making sure nothing happened. And, at that, he couldn’t have failed harder.
He slammed a fist onto the railing, and realised that some of Colin’s blood was still on his hands. He looked at it with guilt, and went back into the motel room to wash up.
Sam paced in the hospital waiting room, mind racing. He was confident Colin would be alright now, but Maggie on the other hand, he had no clue.
His only lead was Billy, but how could he, looking just like Maggie, simply show up and accuse him of kidnapping her?
He felt powerless; how could he so much as file a missing person’s report on himself?
The sound of Al’s entry broke him out of his thoughts, and he met the eye of his friend, eyes pleading. He couldn’t talk to him right now, in front of all these people in the room, so he headed for the door, hoping the night outside was devoid of onlookers.
“Sam,” Al began, following him, “Beeks finally gave me her report on Maggie’s psychological profile.”
Sam exited the doors and retreated around a corner.
“It’s too late, Al. She’s already been taken. I thought you said that wasn’t due to happen yet.”
“No, listen, Sam. Using the limited data she’s got, Ziggy calculates that Billy’s only got a 24.8 per cent chance of being the culprit.” Al looked back at Sam with the kind of grave expression he only reserved for very serious moments.
“What?” Sam said, incredulous. “But he almost busted down her door. Who else could it be?”
“Well,” he said, grimacing, and whacking the side of the handlink, “Based on Verbena’s report, which is based on the other Maggie’s insight, there’s a 72.6 per cent chance that Maggie went missing… on purpose.”
Sam felt the blood draining from his cheeks.
“I knew she wasn’t doing well, but…”
“The good news is, the Maggie in the Waiting Room thinks your Maggie plans to start a new life somewhere. Ziggy gives it a 93.2 per cent chance that if she did run away, she’s still alive in our time.”
Sam rubbed his chin. This was… certainly a curve ball.
“And because I’m here still looking like Maggie,” Sam deduced, “that’s why the historical records are saying she doesn’t disappear for a couple more days.”
“You got it. The last time Maggie was seen alive, according to our records, is Saturday morning. That’s the morning after tomorrow.”
“And that also means Quinn and the others are due to leave some time shortly after that.” He ran his fingers through his hair with a groan. “I have to get back to the code transcription, so the timer’s ready for the slide.”
Dammit.
“Look on the bright side,” said Al, “you have some friends who can pick up the slack for you, right?”
Sam nodded. Colin was out of commission, he’d need rest. Quinn didn’t have to watch him for typos, though it would make things faster. Rembrandt would be available to help. Slowly, a plan started to form in his mind.
“Okay, I’ll have to talk to them.”
* * *
It was well after midnight when the four of them arrived back from the hospital. Colin had been released, once Sam had convinced the doctors he could provide adequate care at home. He’d have to wake him every few hours just to check his symptoms, but he’d already planned on staying up all night to do the code, so that wasn’t a problem. He was going to be a wreck later, but it couldn’t wait.
Sam started brewing coffee, while Colin was walked unsteadily to the couch by his two companions.
Sam could overhear some of their conversation as he scooped the ground coffee into the filter, and filled the tank of the machine.
“If he’s here to make sure Maggie doesn’t run away, then we need to find her fast, before she makes it out of town,” Quinn said.
“That’s if she hasn’t split already,” Rembrandt replied. “And what if he’s not here for that at all, and it was to help with the timer?”
“Oh right, he’d end up right here with his niece just to let her disappear? Doubt it.”
“Big guy upstairs works in mysterious ways, you know. All of this has helped us get our timer fixed, right? Even the Maggie part, since we’re at her house, usin’ her computer for it.”
This seemed to silence Quinn.
It also made Sam wonder if Rembrandt was right. Maybe forcing Maggie to stay against her wishes was the wrong thing. And what would stop her going as soon as he leaped away? He’d need to convince her to stay, but he could see she hated being here. What could he possibly say to her?
On the other hand, the 72.6 per cent figure Ziggy had given was not nearly high enough to give up on finding her.
He activated the coffee machine, and headed to the living room.
Colin was sitting up, apparently feeling a little better, though he had a dazed expression that suggested he might not be much for conversation at this time.
“I need one or both of you to go pay Billy a visit,” Sam said, gaze shifting between Quinn and Rembrandt. “He’s the only other lead we’ve got right now. I’d do it, but it would be a bit strange to be asking him about the whereabouts of… myself.”
Rembrandt nodded. “Sure thing, I’ll go.”
Quinn placed his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I’ll go with you. Two against one is better odds.”
Sam smiled at them. “Thanks, fellas.”
He looked toward the front door. “I’ll go get Higgins to give up his address. Hopefully there’s a security override so you can take the car…”
He exited the house and made a beeline for the squad car.
He placed his hand on it, and got Higgins to let him in. As he slid into the seat, he nearly had a heart attack when he found Al in the passenger seat waiting for him.
“Whoa!” he exclaimed. “Don’t do that when I’m on edge about potential kidnappers.”
“Sorry, yeesh,” he said. “Look, Ziggy’s looked into the Higgins program; I’ve got some shortcuts for you.”
“Oh, good. Tell her I’m sorry for doubting her usefulness earlier.”
She’d definitely earned her keep by now, even if her predictions were on the fritz.
“Place your hand on the scanner and hold it there for ten seconds,” he instructed, reading from the handlink. Sam did so.
A chime rang out in the car.
“Okay, that means admin mode’s been activated. Tell it to add two new operators, and go get Sam Junior and One Hit Wonder over there.”
Sam raised an amused eyebrow at these new nicknames.
“Higgins, add two new operators.”
“New User mode. Please place hand on activation panel.”
“Quinn! Rembrandt!”
The two came out of the house, and he beckoned them over, as he rose out of the car seat.
Sam gestured to the seat. “One of you sit there and place your hand on the panel.”
They exchanged a glance, and Rembrandt took the initiative.
He put his palm on the panel, and Higgins chimed again.
“New handprint recorded. Name?”
Rembrandt gave a nervous look at Sam, who nodded expectantly.
“Uh, Rembrandt Brown.”
“Rembrandt Brown, social security number 987-65-4323.” Higgins barked. “Confirm identity?”
“Uhhh yes?” he said, and Sam couldn’t tell whether or not that was a lie.
“Authorization recorded. Welcome, Rembrandt. Second user, please place hand on activation panel.”
Rembrandt jumped out of the car, and Quinn replaced him, putting his hand on the panel.
“New handprint recorded. Name?”
“Quinn Mallory…”
“Quinn Mallory, social security number 000-45-6844. Reported missing in 1995. Confirm identity?”
Quinn went white, and Sam quickly jostled him out of the car.
“Uh, cancel, cancel.”
“User canceled. Approve user: ‘Rembrandt Brown?’”
“Yes.”
“Handprint confirmation required.”
Sam placed his hand on the panel again. Finally, a new chime sounded.
“User confirmed.”
Sam sighed.
“Okay, well, Rembrandt, the car’s all yours,” he said with a grimace.
Quinn was shifting on his feet. “I hope that didn’t report anything to the authorities about my whereabouts.”
“Don’t worry kid,” Al said, as if Quinn could hear, “it was counted as a mistake and stricken from the record.”
“It’s fine,” explained Sam.
He stepped away from the car, allowing the two friends to get in.
“Good luck,” he told them, as Rembrandt commanded Higgins to open the passenger side. Quinn gave a resolute nod to Sam before climbing in.
He watched the car pull away, revealing Al standing where the passenger seat had been a moment ago. He was holding the stack of papers.
“Back to work,” he said grimly.
“Higgins,” Rembrandt said hesitantly, “can I get the address of Billy Colbert please…”
He glanced at Quinn, who was looking back with pursed lips.
“Name not found in current county,” Higgins stated, emotionless. “Search elsewhere?”
“No, no. Uh… can I get the address of William Colbert?”
“William Jefferson Colbert resides at: Four. Hundred. Nine. West Sixth Street. Confirm GPS Navigation.”
“Uh, yes.”
And so, Higgins directed them to the house. Remy was a bit stressed with how slow Higgins was to tell him when to turn, but the streets were quiet enough for it not to be an issue, since it was the early hours of a Friday morning.
Finally, they pulled up, and climbed out of the squad car into the crisp night air.
“How do you think he’ll take us showing up at one in the morning?” Quinn said, scratching his head.
Remy shook his head. “Don’t know, but if he’s got Maggie we can’t wait til the sun’s up.”
Quinn gave him a pensive look. “Yeah. But, you don’t think he does have her, do you?”
Rembrandt folded his arms. “There’s barely a chance he knew we were stayin’ at the motel, you know? And it was awful convenient that Colin didn’t see who hit him.”
“You think Maggie would be capable of hitting Colin in the head like that?”
Remy could tell he wasn’t talking about her physical capability. But this Maggie didn’t know Colin from a bar of soap, and the Maggie they knew had changed a lot since their first encounter when she’d held them at gunpoint.
“The Maggie we first met? Sure.”
Quinn looked thoughtful. “Hmm. I guess you’re right.”
The pair headed for the door. It was a nicer house than Maggie’s, and Remy figured it must have been the home Billy and Maggie were living in as a married couple.
He got the better house, but he still won’t leave her alone. Slimeball.
He glanced around as Quinn pressed the doorbell button, followed by a couple of knocks.
Moments passed. Rembrandt was about to try knocking harder, when a noise behind the door stopped him.
The door swung open, and Billy looked at them through confused, groggy eyes. It seemed clear he’d just awoken from sleep.
“Who the hell are you?” he grumbled.
Remy exchanged a glance with Quinn.
“We’re here on behalf of Maggie,” Remy said, suddenly unsure of what they were even supposed to say right now.
“Oh god, I did something stupid when I was drunk, didn’t I?” Billy said, palm on his forehead. He looked from one man to the other. “It musta been bad, but bad enough for her to sick some goons on me in the middle of the night?”
“We’re not goons…” Quinn said, indignant.
“Look man, we need to ask you some questions,” Rembrandt said finally, and gestured towards the squad car in the hopes of making the two of them seem less random.
“You’re cops?” Billy said, eyeing their plain clothes.
“I’m Detective Mallory, and this is my colleague Detective Brown,” Quinn said, improvising, and making nervous eye contact with Rembrandt.
“We, uh, didn’t have time to put on suits,” Remy said, feeling his cheeks burn.
“You know the longer you wait to find a missing person, the lower the chances of finding them alive,” Quinn said.
“Whoa, whoa,” Billy said, holding up his hands. “Who’s missing?”
“Maggie’s missing,” Rembrandt said, trying his best to sound threatening. “And you were tryin’ to bust her door in just last night.”
Billy was sweating now. “Man, I don’t even remember doing that. I was wasted. I swear I haven’t seen her since.”
“What else don’t you remember, I wonder?” Quinn said, raising his eyebrows.
“Look, I swear. If something happened to Maggie, I’d wanna catch whoever did it too. I’ll even let you in my house to search without a warrant. I didn’t do squat. You’ll find nothing but empty whiskey bottles.”
Remy and Quinn exchanged a glance, and pushed past Billy to conduct this consensual search.
“I’m serious,” Billy said, “I wouldn’t do something like this, swear to God. I still love that bitch.”
“Yeah, sure sounds like you care a lot,” said Remy flatly, rolling his eyes, and turning on the ceiling lights of the living room as Quinn started inspecting.
* * *
Sam didn’t know how long he’d been typing at this point, but he knew his hands were aching like they used to get when he’d been practising his piano for hours as a kid.
Al was looking completely bored, and half asleep. He was sitting on a chair he’d hauled into the Imaging Chamber, and he had the finished pages slung over his shoulder. It was hard to tell how far Sam was into the transcription; the pile on the floor was certainly smaller than it had been at the start, but it was still thick. He didn’t want to think about how much longer this would take. Quinn would need to help him check it for mistakes, which would mean going through every line over again. At least his photographic memory would make it easy for him to spot discrepancies, he figured. Then again, there were so many lines that were near identical, and he was getting quite fatigued.
He rubbed his eyes for a moment, before continuing his work.
Behind him, he heard feet shuffling. A quick glance told him Colin was up and about.
“Hi there,” he said, pausing his typing, and turning to meet Colin’s eye. “How are you feeling now?”
“Better,” he said with a tilt of his head that suggested he was still assessing. He fingered the bandage around his head. “This thing is tight.”
Sam stood. “Want me to loosen it for you?”
Colin nodded, and Sam gestured for him to sit on one of the stools beside him. He did so, facing towards Al, who was yawning.
“What are you lookin’ at, kid?” Al said with a glare, as if Colin could see him.
Then, Sam jumped as Colin answered: “N-nothing…”
Al and Sam looked at each other, startled, then to Colin.
“You can see me?” Al stiffened, suddenly looking quite vulnerable. The paper rustled as he shifted in his seat.
Sam stood, moving to Colin’s side, and watched Colin squinting at Al.
“A little…” Colin said, and rubbed his eyes. “You’re like a… a ghost. Are you Al?”
“Yeah, that’s him,” Sam said, marvelling.
Colin reached out to Al, and passed his hand through him. “So I’m not seeing things, you’re really there?”
“He is,” Sam confirmed, and stroked his chin. “Usually he can only be seen by animals, very young children, and people with some mental disorders that have rewired their brains.”
“This isn’t the first time I’ve seen an apparition like this,” Colin said thoughtfully, and looked up at Sam. “Does that mean I have a mental disorder?”
Sam shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m not a psychiatrist. But you do have a concussion…”
Al urgently tapped on his handlink. After a couple of chirps from Ziggy, he looked up at Sam.
“Ziggy says the head trauma may have caused his neurons to temporarily rearrange. Either that or, it knocked something loose that was already there.”
Sam remembered what he was doing, and moved to loosen the bandage.
As he did, Colin grunted.
“Oh, did I hurt you?”
“No… it’s just, he’s gone. When you loosened it… he went away.”
Sam met Al’s eye with surprise. He tightened the bandage again.
“Ouch. Yeah, I see him again. Tighten it more.”
Sam pulled the bandage as tight as he could, and Colin winced.
“Oh, it’s like the more painful it is, the better I can see him,” he said. “Uh… can you just put it back to how it was before?”
Sam obliged. “Are you sure you don’t want it loosened more? If it hurts, I–”
“No, I still want to see him. It didn’t hurt so much.”
Sam nodded. “Well, I guess you two can have a chat while I work.”
Al thought for a moment. “Hey, how ’bout I get Maggie in here? I promised her I’d let her see you anyway.”
Colin grinned. “You can do that?”
“You bet your skinny butt I can,” he said, and tapped on the handlink.
He talked into it: “Gooshie, would you escort our guest in here for me?”
* * *
Maggie was fast asleep when a short man with rancid breath tapped on her shoulder. Alarmed, she scrambled into a defensive position.
“Sorry, ma’am,” the man said with an apprehensive stutter. “Admiral Calavicci asked me to come get you… so you can see your friend.”
Maggie lowered her guard at this.
“Right now?”
The man nodded, his eyes apologetic. “He says you’ll see when you get there. I don’t know anything about it, but please… come.”
Maggie nodded. “Who are you, anyway?”
“Uh, call me Gooshie. I’m just the programmer.”
He pressed a button on a wrist device, and the door opened.
“Programmer? Don’t tell me you made Ziggy.”
“I had a part in it, yes,” he said, looking proud of himself. This made Maggie rethink the snarky comment she had lined up.
“Well, she sure is… something,” was all she could bring herself to say.
“Yes, she sure is,” Gooshie said wistfully, as he escorted her towards the Imaging Chamber.
As she walked through the corridors, she passed a few strangers who were all staring at her. Some were watching her to see if she made a break for it, but others were looking at her with interest.
It struck her that she had no clue what time of day it was.
“What time is it?”
“’Bout eight at night,” Gooshie said.
“Jeez, doesn’t anyone here have lives outside this place?”
“Oh yeah,” he replied. “But the time of day where Sam is could be any time, so a lot of us just kind of spend most of our time here, in case we’re needed.”
Maggie was reminded of Quinn, who’d admitted fairly recently to feeling restless during vacation time. Maggie just nodded in response to Gooshie’s explanation; she wasn’t in a position to judge, since her boredom in the Waiting Room was making her absolutely stir-crazy.
The Imaging Chamber door slid open with a mechanical whoosh, and Maggie stepped inside. Al was sitting in the white abyss, on a chair, seemingly buried in computer paper. It made her giggle to see the strange sight, and he turned around with a raised eyebrow. She could see he was quite tired.
“Good, you’re here,” he said, and held out his hand. She excitedly grabbed it, and watched the scene flicker into view. The same kitchen she’d visited before, with Sam tapping at a keyboard, and Colin, a bandage on his head… making eye contact with her.
“Maggie!” He said, with a big smile. Maggie glanced down at Al.
“I thought you said they couldn’t see me?”
“Seems I can after this knock to the cranium,” Colin said, pointing at the back of his head. His gaze shifted back and forth between her and Al, and he made a pointing motion. “I can see you a lot more clearly than him…”
“Really?” Sam said, though he was still engaged in his typing. Maggie wondered how he could have a split attention like that.
Al tapped at his handheld device, and Maggie watched as it flickered with colourful lights and made a whirring sound.
Al spoke slowly as he parsed the words: “Ziggy says the… matching quantum energy attached to you two means that Maggie will naturally be more… too…”
He knocked on the top of the gadget. “Tuned in to your brain waves. I don’t get it, but that’s why she’s the supercomputer and I’m the handsome mug with a cigar.”
“It’s great to see you, Colin,” Maggie said. “Just wish I could give you a hug.”
“Probably wouldn’t be the best for my headache,” Colin said, giving her a pained smile, “but the feeling’s mutual.”
Al’s device gave a chirp, and he sighed. “Gonna have to let go, Ziggy says the power drain’s too high.”
Maggie groaned. “This is such a tease!”
Al let her hand drop, and the world faded from view. She crossed her arms.
She noticed Al was listening intently to something, his brow furrowed in confusion.
“What?! That’s impossible!” he said, incredulous.
“What is it?” asked Maggie. Al looked up at her, eyes wide.
“He says he still sees you.”
By the time Quinn and Rembrandt returned to Maggie’s house, everyone was completely exhausted. Sunrise was upon them, and the two would-be detectives had turned up nothing.
Sam was still typing furiously through the cramping in his tendons. He was so close. Just a handful of pages. He had to wake up Al every few minutes to get him to hitch up the next batch of pages. Each time, Sam would apologise while Al groaned and grumbled.
The only one who’d had a good sleep was Colin. Despite being able to see Maggie even without her touching Al, he’d eventually had to watch her leave the Imaging Chamber, at which point he turned in for the night. Maggie hadn’t been able to see him back, so it was a disjointed conversation.
Sam was intrigued by this turn of events, but he didn’t have much of an opportunity to puzzle it out, given the task at hand.
There just wasn’t enough time. Soon enough he’d need to sleep, and that would leave him with well under a day to sort all of this out. If Maggie really did run away, and it was certainly looking that way, who was to even say where she was now? She could have been in Mexico by now.
Sam felt his fingers slowing down, and he was catching some mistakes due to his fatigue. He hoped he was noticing all of them.
He stood, stretching. He cracked his knuckles and gave his body a shake.
Come on, just a little longer.
He rubbed his eyes, feeling a yawn overtake him. He slapped himself in the cheek, in a pitiful attempt to raise his adrenaline, then sat back down.
Quinn came into the kitchen and made a beeline for the coffee maker, which was still warming a pot Sam had brewed earlier.
“What are we up to?” Quinn asked, stifling a yawn of his own.
“Really close, but it’ll still need to be checked over for typos.” His voice was hoarse and he didn’t have the energy to make it sound very friendly.
Quinn sidled up to him, carrying his freshly poured mug.
“Any other surprises I should know about in there?” He asked, squinting at the screen.
Sam thought for a moment. “Well, the densitrometry algorithms have been improved; no water, no toxic atmospheres, no crash landings into brick walls inside jail cells like this time around. And I’m getting down to the most recent data.”
He pointed at some lines. “These are coordinates for recent wormhole locations. Ziggy’s provided a more sophisticated database for them.”
He pointed at one that had caught his eye. “This one with the extra formula after it, what is that?”
“That’s an equation to avoid the Slide Cage my father set up; it’s kind of a trap set up to protect their world. I’d thought these coordinates were to my parents’ home world, but it turned out not to be.”
Quinn pointed to a number in the code. “I was told to change this to a nine, instead of the original seven. I think if I change it back, I should be able to get to the right world.”
“Well, let’s do it,” Sam said, and changed the figure, before scrolling back to his most recent line, and glancing at the page hanging from Al’s sleeping shoulder. “Looks like we’re getting to the timestamp for the next slide window…”
Sam looked at it. “Okay, so number of seconds from the base 0 time recorded about forty-five pages up…”
His head flooded with calculations. “Yeah, that’s gonna be Saturday at 10:14am. Right in line with Al’s last recorded sighting of Maggie… or me, as it were.”
Quinn looked pensive. “So it’s got the window time, but the display was flashing zero?”
“Whether Ziggy calculated the window time, or the timer already had that figure, I’m not sure…” Sam said, mind racing. “Either way, it doesn’t explain why it malfunctioned in the first place.”
He looked up at Quinn. “In my line of work, things tend to happen for reasons outside my control. Maybe your timer went funny because of my presence, or maybe…”
“Whatever’s been giving you these cosmic assignments did it? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?” Quinn was sceptical. “Are you saying you did show up here to help us with something?”
Sam gave a non-committal shrug. “You said it, not me.” He changed the subject. “Anyway, once we check this over and load it back onto the timer, we’ll see what happens. My prediction is, it should be working more efficiently than ever, with improved safety functions.”
He began typing again, and a moment later felt Quinn’s hand on his shoulder.
“I really appreciate this,” he said warmly. “We never have slides where we get this kind of help. There are always ulterior motives.”
“My only ulterior motive is wanting to get out of Maggie before you all gotta leave.”
“Well in that case, I do hope you were here to help us.”
Sam gave a sad smile back. “Honestly, I think maybe I was. But that doesn’t mean I’m not also here for my Maggie. If I don’t leap out when we’re done here, that’ll be the obvious loose end.”
He turned to Al, and saw that there was just two pages left on the floor.
“Al!” he said, waking up the sleeping Observer. “Al, we’re at the end! Pull up the last pages and we’ll be done in ten minutes.”
Al gave a relieved moan. “Sam, that is music to my ears,” he said, and revealed the pages.
* * *
It was midday when Quinn and Sam finally finished reviewing the code, and were satisfied it was error-free.
Quinn refused to go to bed until the timer was ready to go, however, and Sam was just as determined, so the two continued even as they felt dead on their feet.
As the code slowly loaded onto the timer, the two had a moment to relax.
“Is Al still here?” Quinn enquired.
Sam laughed. “Nope. He got out of here the moment I was finished needing the hard copy. I’m sure he’s now sleeping soundly in his bed at home.”
“It’s fascinating the way your leaps run on a parallel timeline to your future time.”
Sam chuckled. The ever-curious kid couldn’t stop trying to puzzle out the intricacies of his leaps.
“It’s simple quantum space-time entanglement. It works based on the aging of my body and my experience of time, which occurs foremost in my present, but takes place on a relative time scale when I’ve leaped into the past.”
He yawned. “I’d show you the math, but I don’t think I’m up for it right now.”
The computer gave a chime to indicate the transfer was complete.
Quinn jumped up, and started picking up pieces of the timer to re-assemble. Sam moved to the computer and exited out of the application. He stretched and rubbed his pained fingers and wrists, then noticed Colin entering the kitchen, seeming to be quite chipper.
“Good–” he began, then checked the wall clock, “–afternoon. How are we doing?”
“Almost there, bro,” Quinn said, his eyes tired, but lit up all the same. “And what about you? Are you doing okay?”
Colin rubbed the back of his head. “It doesn’t hurt so much now.”
Sam wondered if that meant his sixth sense would be fading. Well, that was perhaps for the best.
Quinn delicately put the pieces together, pausing to rub his eyes a few times.
It wasn’t often that Sam was able to use multiple doctorates during his leaps, but it seemed he got lucky this time.
Well, maybe not luck.
It seemed as though this was exactly what God or Fate or Time or whoever had put him here for, knowing that Quinn would need him to assist. It couldn’t be a coincidence that one of the “sliders” in this tight-knit group was an alternate version of his own niece, nor that one of them was a physics genius.
But still, there was his niece, off somewhere trying to find a new start for herself, and there were still no leads on where she might be.
Sam found himself wobbling on his feet, and he clutched the kitchen bench to keep steady.
He felt like his mind was chasing its own tail, running over the same ground again and again and not getting anywhere. It must have been the exhaustion.
“Moment of truth,” said Quinn, as he finished screwing on the back of the timer. He pressed a button on the side, and the timer sprang to life.
On the display, a merciful 00:21:49:09 showed, and it was counting down as it should have been.
“You did it!” Colin said, triumphant, and patted both men on the backs.
“I’m not so sure we did anything that should have changed the display, but I’m glad it’s working now,” Quinn said, his brow furrowed, as he inspected the timer.
“It’s one of life’s mysteries,” Sam said, wishing he had a better explanation. The thing he hated most about dealing with an unknowable force was the ‘unknowable’ part.
The three headed into the living room to tell Rembrandt the good news. The singer was rolling over on the couch, and his sleepy eyes caught sight of Quinn holding the timer.
“Holy smokes, it’s working?”
“This side of twenty-two hours, we slide,” said Quinn, sounding relieved.
“And… what about Maggie? She coming with?” His eyes were set on Sam, who looked back with uncertainty.
“I’m sorry, I don’t control the leaps. All I can do is work to do what I think is my purpose, then I go. Which means if I don’t leap soon, then I’m still here for a reason.”
He yawned.
“But what I have to do now is go to bed. Good night.”
Quinn nodded in agreement, then turned to his friends.
“Maybe you guys could go ask around town, see if anyone’s seen or spoken to Maggie since we last saw her.”
Colin and Rembrandt nodded.
Quinn went into the guest room to sleep, while Sam went to Maggie’s bedroom. And he was asleep before he hit the pillow.
Sam awakened to the feeling of suffocation. His eyes shot open to a room bathed in a brilliant orange; the late afternoon sun was pouring in the window. But that was the least of his concerns right now. Something was covering his mouth.
His eyes scanned the room, and stopped as he saw Maggie, clad in her Sheriff’s uniform. It wasn’t his reflection… it was her. She’d come back!
He wanted to say something, but something was in his mouth, between his teeth. Some kind of a cloth. But why?
He moved to lift his hands to his mouth, only to find them secured in handcuffs behind his back.
Oh boy.
“Hey, uncle,” whispered Maggie. She looked determined, but her voice was shaky and full of remorse. “I’m sorry about this, I really am. But I need you to come with me.”
He sat up, and shook his head.
“Mm-mm,” he said, and made a move to get up. But that plan was scrapped as soon as he saw Maggie holding her gun on him.
“You don’t have a choice.”
She nodded towards the window, which was fully open.
“Out there, quietly.”
Sam pleaded with his eyes.
“You want me to do to you what I did with Colin?”
Sam felt his eyes widen, and he shook his head.
“Then go.”
He stood, and moved to the window. With his hands behind his back, all he could do was slither out of there like some kind of slug. He made a banging noise as his legs hit the upper window frame.
“I said quietly,” she hissed at him. He couldn’t answer, so he just looked back at her, hoping his apology would be clear in his expression.
She followed him out of the window much more gracefully, and pulled him up by the cuff chain. He looked at her through narrow, betrayed, eyes.
“Come with me, shut up, and stick to the shadows,” she murmured into his ear.
“Mm-hmm,” he said, not knowing what else to do. If anyone saw them walking together, he was quite sure they’d be a little alarmed about Maggie holding her doppelgänger hostage. He didn’t know how anyone would explain that one.
He just wished he wasn’t gagged, so he could talk to her. He needed to know what was going through her head. What did she want with him?
If only he wasn’t still tired, he might be able to puzzle this out.
As the sun went down, Sam’s hopes of making it out of this one faded with the daylight.
* * *
Quinn stretched as he looked at the clock at his bedside. It was 10 at night. He’d slept a good long time, then. He felt much better, though waking up in the dark was off-putting for his body clock.
Besides feeling a little off-kilter from the disorganised sleep – a feeling that brought him back to his college days – he otherwise felt in good spirits, knowing what he’d accomplished yesterday. There was just this final matter of Sam.
He hobbled to the door of the guest room, and as he approached it, he heard spirited conversation.
He wandered into the living room, seeing Colin and Rembrandt talking with Sam.
“Hey, Q-ball!” Remy said, as he caught his eye, “Maggie’s back!”
“She is?” Quinn looked around the room for the second Maggie, and lowered one eyebrow in confusion when it was clear that only one was here.
“Sam leaped out,” said Colin, a big grin plastered over his face.
“R-really?!” Quinn wasn’t sure how to process this. Their Maggie had really returned? But that meant Sam was gone for good. Nonetheless, this was great!
He walked over to the couch, where Maggie sat.
“It’s really you?”
She stood up and gave him a hug. “Yeah, it really is.”
Quinn didn’t know why he still felt uneasy about this, but he broke away from the embrace and went into the kitchen to grab his new toy.
He picked up the spacetime distortion detector and flipped the switch, before returning to the living room and moving the wand over Maggie.
No clicking sound.
The unease that was snaked around his stomach slowly released. Maggie… really was back? He felt his mouth drifting open. A relieved laugh escaped him.
“Thank god,” he said, and resumed the hug he’d cut short. “What was the future like?”
“I don’t really remember anything,” she said, her eyes squinting as she tried to think.
“Oh right, Sam said something about memories being like swiss cheese…”
“Yeah,” said Maggie, “That’s exactly right. I remember something vague about my uncle, and time travel, but that’s it.”
“How long is that meant to last?” Colin asked, looking at Quinn.
“I… I didn’t think to ask,” Quinn said, wishing he’d pressed for more information. He wondered what else Maggie had forgotten.
“I’m sure it’ll come back with time,” Maggie said, brushing off the concerns. “Anyway, how long ’til we get out of here?”
“We’ve got about twelve hours now,” replied Quinn, finding himself finally able to start relaxing.
Maggie sighed, and sat back down on the couch. “Alright. I guess that’s enough time for a good sleep.”
“I don’t get it, though,” Quinn mused, “Is the other Maggie just… gone now? Where’d she go? And why?”
Maggie shrugged, nonchalant. “She probably hated this dump and desperately wanted to get out of this boring old town. It’s what I’d do.”
She brought a knee up to her chin. “She’s a big girl; it’s her choice, right?”
“If she wanted to disappear that bad, she coulda just asked.” Rembrandt said thoughtfully. “We could have taken her with us.”
Maggie looked at him wide-eyed for a moment, before adjusting her gaze into a cynical smirk. “You think you can deal with two of me?”
At this, Rembrandt laughed. “Maybe not.”
Quinn pressed his lips together, thinking about two of the same person sharing a vortex.
“Have we ever had doubles together in the vortex before? I wonder if it’s safe.”
He thought a moment. He could see potential issues arising if the vortex was destabilised or experienced an energy surge. Not predictable, given what data he had. If only Sam was still here to ask.
* * *
Sam could feel a spider crawling on his foot. It tickled, but his tense anxiety was eclipsing his urge to laugh from the sensation.
He jerked his leg, and the spider fell from him.
He was in pitch darkness, so he had no idea what other creepy crawlies might be here in this tool shed.
He could feel a stinging sensation on his shin; he’d grazed it at some point while being manhandled into the shed. He hoped that it wasn’t bleeding much, or that it wasn’t dirty, but there was no way to tell at the current light levels.
He didn’t know where Maggie had taken him - it was a part of town he hadn’t been to. It was in the backyard of a house he didn’t know. He did see the number on the house, though: 409.
He couldn’t call for help, as he was still gagged. The handcuffs were secured around a brace on the wall. His mouth was dry and he was very thirsty.
Maggie’s plan had become clear to him as he had been sitting here in the dark. She was going to take the other Maggie’s place, and she was going to leave this life behind forever. It was so obvious, now that he really thought about it. What better way to drop off the face of the Earth?
But what of Sam? There was nothing in the historical record about him being found; at least, not last he’d heard from Ziggy.
As if on cue, he heard the Imaging Chamber door’s familiar noise.
“Sam, Ziggy’s freakin’ out, and… Sam? Where are you, I can’t see a thing!”
Sam banged a hand against the tin wall.
“Mm-mmm!” he grunted.
“Sam? Oh jeez, what happened?!”
Sam could just make out Al’s silhouette in the extremely low ambient light, with the flashing handlink being the only thing standing out in the darkness. Unfortunately, being a hologram, it was not casting any light into Sam’s prison.
“Mmm mmm mm…” Sam moaned, in an irritated way. He couldn’t speak words, but he could at least put across his feelings in some small way.
“Okay, okay, no need for such filthy language, Sam,” Al joked, seemingly in an attempt to relax him. Sam rolled his eyes.
“Look, Ziggy says that guy Billy is now found to have Maggie’s blood in his back shed, which is enough to get him arrested and put on trial for her disappearance. I can’t tell you the results of that trial, ’cause it’s still ongoing in our time.”
Al stepped through the wall for a moment, and then returned.
“This is the shed, Sam!”
“Nn mm Mmm-mmm,” Sam said furiously, which was meant to be: ‘it was Maggie.’
“I dunno what you’re tryin’ to tell me. We gotta get that gag out of your mouth.”
“Mm-hm!”
“And somehow we gotta alert someone to where you are.”
“Mm-hmm!!” Sam nodded.
Go back to the house, Al. Try and get Colin’s attention.
That’s what he wanted to say, if he’d been able.
“Gnn-nnn!” That was the closest to ‘Colin’ he was going to get with this thing in his mouth.
“Sit tight, Sam. I’m gonna go look at what’s happening at Maggie’s place. Ziggy! Centre me at the house!”
He pushed a button on the handlink, and blinked away, leaving Sam back in stifling darkness.
He started pounding on the walls of the shed, hoping desperately that someone would hear.
“Mmm!” he cried at the top of his lungs. “Mm-mm-mm mm!”
Come on, someone hear me. Please.
But nobody came.
“Get this stupid infomercial off,” Maggie barked at Colin, who was nursing the TV remote.
Colin glanced at her, scratching under his head bandage. “But look at the way those knives are gliding through the tomatoes!”
It wasn’t that he needed a set of chef’s knives, but he was impressed with their engineering all the same. He could watch this fellow slice vegetables all night long.
Maggie put her face in her hands. “Surely there’s something better on.”
“At one in the morning?” Quinn challenged, eyebrows raised.
All four of them were up late due to their messed up sleep the day before. Colin was the most rested, of course, and he felt great. Even his head wasn’t pounding any longer.
Colin smoothly threw the remote to Maggie. “Why don’t you find something, then.”
She picked it up with a crinkle of her nose, and started flipping through the channels.
After a minute, she settled on an old Star Trek original series rerun.
“At least Captain Kirk isn’t trying to sell us anything,” she said, setting down the remote.
“Only the hope of a better tomorrow,” Rembrandt said wistfully, beside her.
Colin leaned back against the head of the couch, and bumped a little harder against the headrest than he’d intended.
Ow, I shouldn’t have done that.
As the throbbing waves moved over his head, with each wave came a split second of… something. A voice?
He squinted, and looked around. Nothing.
Trying not to raise attention to himself, he brought his hand behind his head and applied a little pressure to his wound, and listened.
“Hey!”
Okay, that was definitely a voice. A gruff, male voice, not unlike…
He pressed harder, and a surge of pain flooded the back of his head. Colin winced, but kept up the pressure.
“Can you hear me? Sam’s in trouble!”
He turned around, and as the pain subsided he caught the vague impression of Al, wearing a bright red shirt and fedora, and then it faded from view. Colin felt his heart catch in his chest. He’d thought Al was long gone.
Alarmed, he rose from his seat. The others looked up at him curiously.
“Uhh, I’m just gonna go to the bathroom,” he lied, and hurried down the hall.
Closing the bathroom door, he breathed for a moment.
Okay.
Last time he had seen Al, it had not been a hallucination, and he had a way to verify that fact. But now there was no Sam to tell him he wasn’t just seeing and hearing things.
Colin moved to the mirror, and undid the bandage, only to wrap it back around his head as tightly as he could.
It was highly unpleasant, but, as if summoned, Al’s ghostly shape passed through the wall and into the bathroom. Colin looked at him, anxious.
“What are you still doing here?” He spoke low and seriously.
“The Maggie you have in there isn’t the one you think.” Al’s voice was soft and distorted, but he could make out the words. “Sam’s still here, and he’s in trouble!”
Colin felt his face drain of colour. “What? So the Maggie in there is…”
“She’s the one who clocked you on the dome!” Al mimed swinging a baseball bat, and Colin blinked as he imagined the invisible weapon striking his head.
Colin drew a sharp breath. “Where is Sam now?”
Al moved to respond, but suddenly, Colin couldn’t hear his voice.
“Wait…” he said, and pushed into his wound with his fingers. It hurt, but Al’s audibility did not return. And, in fact, Al’s figure faded out to nothing.
“Al… ugh,” Colin said, “I can’t see or hear you any longer. If you answered me, it didn’t get through.”
Colin paced, frustrated that his brain would choose right this moment to return to health.
If only there was a way to verify Al was really here. He stopped.
Of course…
“Al, if you’re still here, don’t move. I’m going to try something.”
He left the bathroom, and wandered back into the living room as casually as he could muster.
Walking behind the couch, where Maggie and Rembrandt sat together, he passed to an armchair where Quinn was sitting.
Hoping Maggie wasn’t sensing his nervous energy, he tapped his brother on the shoulder, and beckoned him toward the kitchen, eyes wide and jaw set.
Quinn met his eye, and immediately picked up on Colin’s silent signals. He got up quietly and followed his brother into the kitchen.
As he entered, Colin spun around with a finger to his lips.
“What is it?” Quinn whispered.
“Grab that detector you built and meet me in the bathroom. But do not let Maggie see what you’re doing. Don’t trust her.”
Quinn, trusting his brother, was entirely willing to follow this plan, and nodded, grabbing the machine from the table.
“Give it a sec before you go after me, so it’s not as suspicious.”
He turned and left the kitchen, and headed toward the bathroom once more, sneaking behind Maggie and hoping she wasn’t going to spot him. She didn’t, thankfully, and he awaited his brother in the bathroom once more.
“Al,” he whispered, “stay with me… I’m getting Quinn on board to help.”
Then, he heard Maggie out in the living room.
“Hey, whatcha doing?” She asked what Colin assumed to be Quinn.
“Oh, you know. Think I’ll go round the house and see if there’s any residual distortion from the leap.”
Maggie didn’t say anything more, so Colin hoped she was satisfied with that response.
And then Quinn joined him in the bathroom.
“What’s this about, man?” He whispered.
“Did Sam tell you what happened to me earlier?”
Quinn looked at him blankly. A wave of surprise spread over Colin. He would have thought that was worth mentioning. Then again, Sam and Quinn had had other things on their mind.
“Okay, well, never mind that, just turn that thing on, okay?”
Quinn looked at him, puzzled, and then did as he asked, switching on the spacetime distortion detector.
Immediately it started clicking slowly, and Colin grabbed the wand and waved it where he’d last seen Al. Click-click-click-click. He brought it away, and the noise subsided. He couldn’t afford Maggie hearing.
“Al is there,” Colin explained.
Quinn was looking at him silently, stunned. His eyebrows were so high he thought they’d disappear under his hair.
“Okay, you’ve got my attention, bro. What’s goin’ on?”
“I think Maggie isn’t… our Maggie. It’s the double. And she’s done something with Sam.”
Quinn paced the small room. “For Sam’s hologram, which is linked to his brain waves, to still be present here, then he must still be here. And the Maggie out there isn’t reacting to the detector, because…”
He locked eyes with Colin. “Shoot. You’re right.”
“My concussion somehow caused me to be able to see and hear Al, but as I’m recovering, that ability has faded. I got enough from him to know that Sam’s in trouble somewhere, but I don’t know where.”
He made two fists in frustration.
“Hit me again. Same spot.”
Quinn looked at Colin with incredulity. “I’m not doing that.”
“It’s the only way.”
He turned around and ripped off the bandage. “Do it.”
He closed his eyes and braced for impact. But all he felt was Quinn’s hand on his shoulder.
“Bro. I’m not putting you back in hospital. There must be some other way, Colin. We just need to think.”
Colin turned back around, sighing.
“Okay, okay. I’d better get out of here before Maggie starts asking questions.”
* * *
Maggie stood in the shower, eyes shut, letting the spray pound down on her. The water running over her was so hot that it almost scalded her. She’d turned up the heat like this on purpose… at least being pelted by skin-meltingly hot water was some stimulation, unlike the mind-numbing nothing she experienced most of the time in this place. She was just so bored. She was tired of all this blue. She felt like that guy from that song.
“Maggie, pardon the interruption, but I need your attention at your earliest convenience.” The booming woman’s voice came at her from all sides.
Maggie’s eyes popped open at Ziggy’s comment, and she suddenly felt very naked.
She slid the tempered glass door aside and grabbed a towel with one hand, while turning off the shower with the other. Did computers care about naked people? Did Ziggy see her, or Sam’s, naked body?
Why was this bothering her so much? Surely Ziggy was unfazed by some human nudity. She was a machine, not a person. A snarky, petty machine, but a machine all the same.
“H-hey there Ziggy,” she said to the computer in the walls, “is it ‘annoy the prisoner’ time already?”
Wrapping the towel around her body, she stepped out of the shower recess.
“I’ve been observing something of a predicament on Doctor Beckett’s leap. I calculate with 79.91 per cent certainty that, with your help, the problem will be rectified.”
Maggie started rubbing her hair with another towel. “What’s in it for me?”
“With your help, there’s a 62.3 per cent probability that Sam will leap out and you’ll be returned to your friends before their timer reaches zero. This probability ticks down by 0.13 per cent for each second you wait to accept my request. It’s now 61.91 per cent.”
Maggie was stunned into immobility for just a moment, and then grabbed her jumpsuit, quickly putting it on.
“What do you need from me?”
As the sun rose and the morning people started stirring, Quinn and Colin were sitting, haggard, in the living room. They hadn’t slept, instead opting to try and puzzle out where Sam could be. And time was running short.
Maggie was asleep in her bedroom, and Rembrandt, oblivious to all the problems, was sleeping soundly in the guest room. The brothers had deliberately claimed the couch and floor this time, so they could stick together and try and figure it out.
But, nope. Colin was very close to being ready to get beaten in the head again. Who knew what kind of danger Sam was in; and by extension, Maggie?
He yawned and stood from the couch, beginning to pace.
Quinn was holding the timer. It had three hours and twenty minutes remaining.
“We need to do something,” Colin muttered.
Quinn looked at him with sad eyes. “This might be a small town, but it’s not so small that we can find someone who’s deliberately been hidden.”
“Come on, let’s stop beating around the bush. Just hit me.”
“I don’t think you realise how serious head injuries are, man.”
Colin set his jaw. This was his choice.
“I’m willing to take the risk. Please. If you don’t, I’ll do it myself.”
“Colin…”
He moved to the wall, facing away from it, and leaned over, gearing up to smack the back of his head as he straightened.
“Stop, Colin.”
He braced himself, eyes on the floor under him. A deep breath in.
Then he saw a pair of ghostly feet come into view.
Huh?
He looked up.
“M-Maggie?!”
There she was, a semi-transparent hologram, one hand holding the vaguest outline of Al, as if she was giving him the ability to be seen rather than the previous time he’d seen them together.
Behind them, Quinn rose from the couch.
“What is it?”
Colin reached out his hand, and Maggie reached hers out in return, face full of relief. The two hands passed through each other.
She was talking. He couldn’t hear a thing.
“Maggie, I can see you but… whatever you’re saying, I can’t hear it.”
Maggie seemed to moan in frustration, before putting her palm to her forehead.
“You see Maggie there?” Quinn said. Colin nodded.
Quinn grabbed his detector, and flipped it on. As he drew the wand near where Maggie and Al stood, it started clicking like mad.
Maggie was looking towards Al’s shadowy shape, as if listening, then she nodded. She pointed towards the front door, and gestured for them to go.
Colin nodded. “I think she wants to lead us to Sam.”
This statement was confirmed by Maggie nodding vigorously.
Quinn strapped the detector to his body, and pocketed the timer.
“Can’t let the Sheriff get her hands on this. Okay, let’s go.”
As they left the house, the hologram blinked away from the living room, and into the road. She pointed to the left, and the brothers followed her directions.
* * *
Sam was in pain. He wasn’t in a comfortable position at all. The way he was cuffed to the wall made it impossible for him to maintain any kind of position without something starting to lose circulation. At present, it was his left arm. He shook it, trying to get the blood moving.
He’d been shaking creatures off him all night – he was pretty sure there was a scorpion or two in this shed – though, now that the sun seemed to have risen, they were starting to leave him alone. Now he just had to worry about the shed turning into an oven under the hot desert sun, and roasting him like a side of beef.
He hadn’t heard from Al in a while. Last he’d seen of him, he’d said that he and Ziggy had a plan to get Colin’s attention. But he hadn’t been back since. He felt a little abandoned, but there was no way Al was just going to let him languish here alone. There must have been a good reason he hadn’t shown yet.
Then, he heard it: the faintest sound of talking, muffled, somewhere outside.
He went back to pounding on the wall of the shed, doing his best to mimic morse code.
Knock-knock-knock. Thump, thump, thump. Knock-knock-knock.
The voices came closer, and Sam began to make out the words.
“I swear! She isn’t here! I don’t know what that noise was, okay!”
That was definitely Billy. Talking to who?
“Relax, would you?”
Quinn.
He slammed his fists on the shed.
“He’s definitely in there!”
Colin.
“I mean… she.”
Beside him, Al suddenly appeared, smiling widely. “It was touch-and-go, but we did it, Sam.”
The shed door swung open, bathing Sam in bright morning light. He squinted, and waved awkwardly at the three figures that his eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to seeing through the blinding glare.
“Maggie?!” Billy was beside himself. “I swear, I don’t know how she got here. I had nothing to do with it, you gotta believe me!”
“Let’s take out the gag and let her confirm that for us,” Quinn said, bending down to help Sam. As he wrestled with the gag, he whispered in his ear: “Looks like that concussion saved your life, huh?”
Sam let out a deep breath, as the cloth finally was pulled from between his teeth.
“Oh boy.”
Colin was working on the handcuffs, trying to pick the lock with something he’d pulled out of a Swiss army knife.
“Are you alright?” Quinn asked him.
Sam nodded. “A little dehydrated, but I’ll be okay.”
He really did need water. His voice was hoarse and his mouth felt like all the moisture had vacated, probably absorbed by the gag.
“Maggie, tell them I didn’t do this…”
“Calm down, Billy. We know it wasn’t you,” Colin piped up.
“Y-you do?”
“Yes,” Quinn confirmed, seeming to be putting on an act for Billy. “We have… a suspect that we’re pursuing. Someone who apparently tried to frame you.”
Billy seemed to relax now.
Sam looked him in the eye. “Don’t get me wrong, Billy. You need to keep your nose clean. But you’re not going down for this.”
As the handcuffs finally slid off, he rubbed his raw wrists, and stood, coming eye to eye with Billy.
“Now, if you want to be helpful… go get me a glass of water. Or maybe several.”
He nodded, and ran up the dusty yard, to his house.
Having gotten rid of him, Sam turned to the brothers, and Al.
“Thanks, guys. I was about to be baked.”
He glanced up towards the sky, where the sun was starting to really beat down.
“It was a close one,” Colin said, “Although I could see Maggie, eventually she faded to nothing, and we had to use Quinn’s detector to bring us the rest of the way.”
“The kid’s damned resourceful,” Al added, and then turned to an unseen person. “Alright, you need to go back to the Waiting Room. Sam could leap any time and you need to be in there when he does.”
He kept his eyes on the invisible Maggie for a moment.
“Yeah, I’ll tell him. See you round, kiddo.”
Sam heard the Imaging Chamber door open and close.
Al trained his eyes on Sam. “She says she’s glad she could help you, and she’s sorry for bickering with Ziggy.”
Sam chuckled at this. “Who hasn’t?”
“We need to get back to Remy,” Quinn said, meeting Sam’s eye. “He’s alone with the other Maggie right now. And only we have a half hour on the timer…”
Sam felt his teeth clench. They’d better go now.
Billy had emerged with a large bottle filled with water, and Sam grabbed it as he hobbled as best he could to the street.
“We had to come here on foot because of how we were tracking you,” Quinn said, “but we should be able to get a taxi from here.”
Sam pulled the bottle from his lips. “Billy, go call us a cab, would you?”
Billy, still flustered, nodded and headed back into the house.
Colin and Quinn supported Sam as they reached the kerb in front of the house.
“You’re definitely heavier than Maggie,” Quinn said, but it didn’t have the curious wonder of the previous times he’d made this kind of observation. Sam suspected he was a little too worn out at this point.
Just as they sat down on the kerb to wait for the taxi, a vehicle pulled up in front of them, and Sam’s heart skipped a beat.
Maggie flung the door of her squad car open, and pointed her gun towards them. She was sweaty and her face was desperate.
“Higgins, open back door, driver’s side.”
The door swung open with a chime. Sam could make out, in the front passenger’s seat, the figure of Rembrandt, who appeared to be handcuffed into his seat. He looked at Quinn and Colin with wild eyes.
“Get the hell in,” Maggie commanded. “I won’t ask twice.”
“What are you going to do now?” Rembrandt asked his captor.
Maggie’s face was betraying her desperation. Rembrandt felt some pity for the lady, but it was far overshadowed by her increasingly unhinged actions.
The timer was on the dashboard; Maggie had confiscated it as Quinn had entered the car. If only he wasn’t cuffed, he could reach it. So tantalisingly close.
“You’re taking me with you, or I’m going alone,” she stated matter-of-factly. “I don’t care which, but I’m leaving.”
“Is it really that bad here, Maggie?” Sam said, looking at her with the level of pity that Rembrandt couldn’t muster. “So bad that you’d do all this just to escape?”
Maggie drove on in silence for a moment.
“Yeah. It’s that bad.” She glanced at her uncle in the rear-view mirror, and Rembrandt saw her wince as she saw the reflection that suggested she was looking at her double. “Did you know Dad hasn’t spoken to me since I was twenty-four?”
“I… no, I didn’t know that.”
“Never forgave me for refusing to enlist,” she continued. “And then every day since, my life has just proved him right. I should have joined the air force, ended up an adventurer like these guys’s Maggie. Instead I got stuck with an abusive husband and a job I hate.”
She wiped sweat off her forehead.
“Then my uncle, the famous super-genius quantum physicist, disappears, and then reappears the very week I’m planning to run away, along with a bunch of people who have the perfect method to get me out of here. What was I supposed to think? I took it as a sign.”
“But then we were assigned to watch you day and night and make sure you stayed put,” Rembrandt interjected. Maggie’s eyes darted to him, before returning to the road.
“Yeah.”
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,” Sam said. “I should have just asked you what you wanted instead of assuming I was here to keep you living this life.”
Rembrandt glanced at the timer. Fifteen minutes.
“You know Billy’s going to be blamed for your disappearance, right?” Quinn said, impatient.
“Good.”
“Maggie, you know that isn’t right,” Sam said, his voice wavering. “He may be a lot of terrible things, but he’s not a murderer. Let him take the rap for the things he actually did.”
“And who’s going to be around to testify against him?”
Sam went quiet.
Rembrandt shifted in his seat to face Maggie better.
“Did you know that our Maggie doesn’t have a Dad, or an uncle, or even her own Earth anymore? Her whole life was destroyed. Husband murdered. Nearly everyone she ever knew, irradiated to death by a pulsar.”
Maggie didn’t respond, but seemed to be paling.
“She has a tough outer skin, but underneath she’s vulnerable and it affects her way more than she lets on. But she wouldn’t let the wrong person take the fall.”
“Are you sure?” Maggie asked, eyebrow raised.
“Don’t get me wrong, she holds a grudge like nobody’s business. She’s reached the limits of her empathy on more than one occasion. So she fell back on us to help with that. And since she’s been dependin’ on us, she’s really unlocked a part of herself that she had closed off before.”
Maggie scowled. “Well, lucky her, having friends who care about her.”
“Is that all you need?” Sam asked. “Because I care about you, Maggie. So much.”
Maggie was blinking back tears now. “Then why did you leave?”
Sam gazed at her for a minute, before finally looking down at his feet.
“Maggie, before I started leaping, you didn’t exist.”
This made Maggie, and everyone else, silent. Remy could only guess what that actually meant, but it seemed Maggie understood.
Several minutes passed, and Maggie finally pulled into her driveway.
“You… remember me not… existing?” she finally said.
“Not really,” admitted Sam, “I just remember saving your Dad’s life. And knowing that he wouldn’t have survived if I hadn’t been there.”
“And while I was growing up, and you came to visit… do you remember that?”
“A lot of it’s come back to me since I’ve been here. Remember I used to sing to you, when you were a kid?”
Maggie nodded. “Que será, será, right?”
Sam smiled. “That’s it.”
Maggie smiled bitterly. “Humph. Whatever will be, will be.”
She picked up the timer. One minute was remaining until the slide window.
“Let’s test that theory.”
Rembrandt looked to the back seat, glancing between Quinn and Colin.
Sam became frantic. “I haven’t leaped yet. Al…”
Rembrandt watched him make eye contact with the invisible guy in the future. He was getting more and more terrified.
He looked to the faces of his fellow prisoners.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. His eyes were welling up.
For that matter, so were Rembrandt’s.
“Tell Maggie I’m gonna come back, okay? We’re going to find her again.” Sam said to the hologram.
Maggie pointed the timer ahead, and activated the wormhole, which opened just beyond the hood of the car. Then she slammed her foot on the accelerator.
The last thing any of them saw as they entered was a blinding flash of blue light.
* * *
The car landed smoothly on a paved urban street, and Maggie slammed the brakes.
“What… what did I do?” she said, hardly able to understand what just happened. She was so sure just a moment ago that this was what she wanted, but now… something was making her heart pound and her stomach do back flips, and it wasn’t the bumpy ride.
She peered into the rear view mirror, and at her uncle in the back seat. Then, with a feeling of faintness, she realised that instead of seeing her double in the mirror, she was seeing Sam’s own reflection.
She turned, and saw that Quinn and Colin were both staring at Sam, mouths open.
“Uncle Sam… I don’t think you’re me any more.”
Sam leaned forward, positioning himself to see his own reflection in the mirror. With a shallow breath, he murmured: “Oh boy…”
Maggie spun back around and pressed her hand to the handprint panel. Her heart would not stop racing.
“Higgins, open all doors… and handcuffs.”
With a chime, the doors sprung open, and Rembrandt found himself free of the cuffs that restricted his hands. Maggie didn’t know why she’d just done this. She supposed she was… free now, right? There was no further need for her friends.
Friends?
As everyone got out of the car, Maggie remained, just staring forward, white-knuckling the steering wheel.
Rembrandt leaned into the car before he left, and snatched the timer from her lap. She didn’t even try to retain control of it. Somehow, she felt relieved that he had it now.
“I think we’re in San Fran, so if you need our help, we’ll be at the Dominion Hotel. If not… have a nice life, I guess.”
His voice was cold. Colder than it had been when he’d been holding out hope of his Maggie returning.
But…
Sam had appeared by her side, just by the door.
“Maggie…”
She looked up at him, terrified.
“I feel… weird…”
She turned and watched Quinn, Rembrandt, and Colin walking away. A panic gripped her, watching them go.
Don’t leave me behind…
She jumped out of the car, and ran full pelt towards them, leaving Sam to run after her.
“Wait!”
The sliders turned to see her pursuit, and looked at her, each one of them regarding her with a level of contempt.
“Please… let me come with you…”
Why was she grovelling at their feet? She was free, wasn’t she? And yet…
Quinn exchanged glances with the other two, then crossed his arms. “Why should we help you after all you’ve done?”
For some reason, this hit her even harder than Remy’s harsh words, and the feeling of absolute heartache surprised her. But what came out of her mouth next surprised her even more.
“Because I don’t want to be left behind like Wade…”
Who?
She stopped and looked, bewildered, at the sidewalk beneath her.
“I… don’t know why I said that…”
She glanced back up at Quinn, who was glaring at her with an apprehensive furrowed brow. Her gaze drifted to Rembrandt and Colin, who were both just as astonished.
She sensed Sam approaching from behind. She stepped back into him and leaned on him, her legs feeling weak.
“Are you okay?” asked Sam. She shook her head.
“My head hurts and my heart is beating a mile a minute…”
Quinn’s frosty demeanour melted away, and he pulled her arm over his shoulder.
“Come on…”
He helped her to a seat at a nearby bus stop. She collapsed into it, feeling her head swimming.
“What’s happening to me?”
Quinn looked her up and down, studying, then grabbed the wand of the device he still had strapped to his body.
“I have a theory… and I hope I’m wrong.”
He switched on the detector, and moved the wand towards her. The clicking was like a jackhammer, and Maggie felt the urge to jump away from it.
“Well that’s discouraging…” Quinn said under his breath, and made eye contact with Sam, who was equally alarmed.
“What? What is it?” Maggie demanded.
Quinn, a deep sadness in his eyes, sat down beside her and held her hand.
“The only way you could have known about Wade is if… some part of you is the Maggie we know.”
“She… may be occupying the same body as you,” Sam added, with an expression that matched Quinn’s in pity.
“Oh…” was all Maggie could say.