Quinn wiped his brow, as he finished tightening the final cap nut on the machine. They didn’t have a name for this device, it was just ‘The Machine.’ It wasn’t like it would have much function once it was used, though he figured it might be a good idea to store it in case something like this ever happened again. But, what were the odds of that?
He surveyed their collective effort. The bulk of it was a seven foot long chamber, four feet in height, and divided in two, and two feet wide, capped by a door at one end, and a number of coils and circuit boards at the other.
The idea was to open a wormhole at the top of the chamber into the same dimension, with the exit displaced two feet down, and using the Quantum Leap Accelerator tech provided by Sam and Ziggy to leap one of the Maggies through, pulling her into the bottom half of the chamber. That was the theory, anyway.
They’d gone over the calculations time and time again, each trying to find potential problems, and it all seemed sound. But seeing it built and real made Quinn’s stomach turn over. They were really going to shut Maggie into this thing and turn it on, weren’t they?
“Mister Mallory! How goes it?” came the markedly cheerful voice of Professor Arturo. Quinn rubbed a rag over his hands, clearing off the grease as he gave the Professor a troubled smile.
“Well, it’s built. Just gotta be tested…”
“Wonderful! I shall look forward to seeing one of these wormholes.” Arturo put an approving hand on his shoulder, and Quinn couldn’t help but feel reassured. The older Arturo had become something of a father figure during their travels, and this validation brought him right back; especially knowing how hard it was to get a kind word out of the Professor at all.
As Arturo assessed the machine, a grin crept onto his face. His eyes twinkled as he walked around it.
“This project has renewed my faith in the future of our species,” he quipped. “I can’t say I’ve felt quite this giddy since I was a boy.”
Quinn watched him studying each bolt, each panel, each control.
“Marvellous,” he murmured, and rubbed his hands together. “May I do the honours?”
Quinn held up a finger. “Hang on, before you fire it up…”
He crossed to a table, and grabbed his trusty spacetime distortion detector. He turned it on, and held up the wand. It hummed faintly.
“Okay, give it some juice.”
Arturo moved to the main controls, and checked the computer panel built in, before tapping on the keyboard.
“I’ll try it at ten per cent initially,” he said, before pulling the main lever.
The machine hummed with electricity, and a weak undulating blue light filled the chamber. Immediately, the detector began to click, and Quinn brought the wand close. The clicks were strong, stable, and evenly paced.
“Okay, great,” Quinn said. “Try fifty per cent power.”
The Professor typed at the computer, and the light grew, along with the pace of the clicks on the detector.
“Okay, looking good,” Quinn said, feeling much better about his odds of saving both Maggies now. “Alright, we’ll get everyone in the room to see the hundred per cent test. I’m sure Sam’ll want to be here for that.”
Arturo powered down the device.
“Before you do…” he said, pursing his lips. “My initial purpose for coming in here was to have a short tête-à-tête with you.”
Quinn gave a knowing nod. “Let me guess: you want to talk about the future, and how to stop things from messing up because you know too much.” He had been planning on making time for this, too.
“Most astute, Mister Mallory.”
“That is really the big question mark in all this,” Quinn admitted. “And I know that if we use Sam – uh, Doctor Beckett – as an example, we know that some things can be changed, but it’s never as outrageous as the last couple of weeks have been. There’s going to have to be a balance between making sure the timeline brings me back to this moment, and helping my friends and family.”
“Yes, you’ve saddled me with quite a burden,” Arturo mused. “If you have the time in the next few days, perhaps you might like to write me a list of notes. Things that must happen in the future, unavoidable things, and things I am able to alter. If that cockamamie computer in the future I’ve been hearing about can assist with that, it would be all the better.”
“I’ll talk to Sam,” Quinn said, rubbing his chin.
Yes, he could certainly write up notes. As long as they didn’t get into the wrong hands. One thing he knew for sure, however, was that Professor Maximillian Arturo would never be the same, after all of this.
“Thank you, my boy,” Arturo said with a jovial smile, and turned away. “I’ll fetch our colleagues.”
Quinn, realising the other thing he wanted to talk about, grabbed his arm. “Wait…”
Arturo looked back at his uneasy face.
“About your son…”
Arturo’s cheerful expression faded. “What happens to him?”
“I don’t know; that’s the problem,” Quinn said. “All I know is that you had one, and he wasn’t in your life any longer when I knew you. I just don’t want you to… push him away, you know? If you don’t have to.”
Quinn kicked the floor with his shoe.
“I don’t know what happened between the two of you: you never talked about it. In fact, you never even told me his name. I don’t know if I can fix anything just by telling you this, but I thought you should know.”
Arturo’s eyes were unfocused, as he considered Quinn’s words. Quinn was glad to see him taking it seriously, knowing it seemed to be a touchy subject.
“I see. Very well. I shall think more on this later.” He headed for the door, considerably less spirited than he had been.
Quinn figured that was as much as he could ask for. Now that he knew the potential future, it was up to him. A lot would be up to him, wouldn’t it?
* * *
“Hey Maggie, it’s time.”
Rembrandt gave her a big smile as Maggie pulled the eye mask up. She squinted in the light, and Remy took her hand, helping her up. She was so pale, and there were dark rings around her eyes. He wondered what kind of funky stuff was happening in her body at that moment.
“I’m so nervous, I feel like I might throw up,” she remarked, to Rembrandt’s disdain.
“Well, try to avoid my shoes, if you don’t mind,” he said, trying to keep the mood light. She responded with a ghost of a smile.
He escorted her to the door, where the two Sams were waiting to play paramedic. They each took an arm over their even-height shoulders, and walked her down the hall.
As the taxi drove them to the university, in the silence of the early morning hours, Maggie rested her head on her uncle’s chest, looking sicker by the minute. Rembrandt wondered if it was the nerves, or whatever crazy thing was going on inside.
“How you doing there, Maggie?” he asked, voice shaking.
“I’m conscious,” she muttered. “That’s about all I’ve got going for me right now.”
Sam gently brushed hair off her face.
“We’re almost there,” he said. “You’re gonna be just fine, I promise. Don’t you go giving up, okay? Either one of you, in there.”
John watched with wide, terrified eyes, and Rembrandt wondered how much experience he had with patients at this point. He noticed he was keeping a firm grip on her hand, and he wondered if it was for her comfort, or his.
Quinn met them at the rear of the sciences building, with a stretcher. Maggie was loaded onto it, and the Sams carried her the rest of the way. Rembrandt followed them, after paying the fare, and finally witnessed the machine that they’d all been talking about.
He gave a low whistle at the thing, though he had no idea what he was looking at. The first clue came when they opened one end and slid Maggie in like she was a pizza going in an oven.
He glanced at Colin, who was standing by, holding the detector thing Quinn had built.
“She safe in there, Farm Boy?”
Colin shrugged. “Just as safe as she is outside it, at this point.”
Rembrandt didn’t find that very comforting.
Quinn and the Professor were standing by the controls, looking grave, and Michael Mallory was peering into the ‘oven’ at Maggie, who had both hands clutched around her temples and eyes, and wore a tight grimace.
Rembrandt approached the other side.
“Hang in there, Maggie!” He called out.
“Sorry man, I don’t think she can hear,” Quinn said, as he typed on a keyboard.
There was a moment of eerie calm, as everyone present, save for Maggie, exchanged looks in silence.
“We gonna do this?” Quinn asked, his eyes on Sam, whose attention was on another part of the room.
“Hang on, Al’s getting the final go-ahead from Ziggy,” he said.
After a few seconds, he turned to Quinn. “Go for it.”
Quinn tapped a command into the computer, and nodded to the Professor, who pulled the lever.
Inside the ‘oven,’ Maggie was drowned out by a bright blue, which lit up the room. Everyone looked away from the light, and Rembrandt’s eyes moved back to Quinn, who was concentrating on the computer screen intensely.
Quinn gestured to the Professor, and he brought the lever back to its ‘off’ position.
As the light subsided, Rembrandt could see two figures, one where there had just been an empty space before.
“It worked…” came the weak voice of John, as Sam rushed over to the machine, and pulled open the door.
He pulled out the Maggie on the top first, onto a waiting bed that had been adjusted to the correct height. She was unconscious, and he took her pulse.
John brought a lower bed to retrieve the second Maggie, and started by throwing a blanket in over her. That’s when Rembrandt realised that the Maggie on the bottom level was entirely unclothed. Now that he saw it, it seemed entirely obvious that there was only one set of clothes on her, but he hadn’t thought of it up to this point.
With both Maggies on beds, it was obvious to everyone that both were out for the count. But was that good or bad? Rembrandt looked at the faces around him in an effort to find a clue.
Sam, ever the professional doctor, was fussing over the pair, checking vital signs. His remarkably neutral expression could only be described as ‘concentrating hard.’
John, on the other hand, looked stressed, and was taking cues from Sam for what to do.
Colin looked about as bewildered as Rembrandt felt, but he approached each Maggie and ran the wand of the detector over them. At each Maggie’s feet, there was no response, but as he reached their heads, it was clicking like mad.
Rembrandt turned his attention to Quinn, who was rushing over after seeing this response from the detector.
“Why is it doing that?!”
Sam looked up at him. “Watch this…”
He opened one Maggie’s right eye, and John did the same on the other Maggie.
Sam shined a light in her eye, and the pupil shrunk in response. Then he nodded towards the other Maggie, whose pupil had become similarly small.
“Same response, as if she had the light shone in her eye, too…” John said shakily.
“What does that mean?” Rembrandt asked.
“Strong distortion was detected in the region of the brain,” Quinn murmured, looking deep in thought.
“We’ll need to run some more tests, but you’re on to something; I believe it’s neurological,” Sam said. “I think their brains might still be… entangled, somehow. Behaving as one.”
“Can we fix it?” Rembrandt’s heart was pounding.
Sam looked at him, brow deeply furrowed. “I don’t know. At 1978 levels of neuroscience technology… I just don’t know.”