3.1  ·  A Paradigm Shift

Sherri had gone through this many times, but it was always disorienting. The feeling of electricity, the loss of awareness of her surroundings, and then something completely different snapping into focus. Her mind blanking. Her stomach dropping as she tried to figure out where she was. The anxiety.

But, it was getting easier. Every time, a little more of her memory was retained, a little less feeling of seasickness.

Point One: What are you doing?

She found herself in the middle of drinking from a disposable coffee cup. She half choked on the liquid, and stifled her cough, as she pulled the cup from her lips. She looked down to see her free hand holding the handle of a baby stroller. Okay, she was pushing a stroller. She placed her cup into the holder that she spotted on the side.

Point Two: Is there anyone here with you? Are they expecting anything of you?

Besides the most likely inhabitant of the stroller, which she couldn’t see due to the shade, she glanced around herself to see a woman just beside her. She was looking at Sherri, amused.

She couldn’t quite pick it, but the woman, who was quite young, with short auburn hair and brown eyes, seemed vaguely familiar to her.

“You alright?” asked the woman.

Sherri breathed out. “Yeah, just went down the wrong pipe,” she said, and pulled back the shade of the stroller.

Inside, a toddler slept. A boy, somewhere between two and three years old, she guessed.

This could be trouble.

The last thing she needed was the accusing eyes of a toddler that saw an imposter instead of his Mommy. She pulled the shade forward again.

Point Three: What are your surroundings? Anything unusual? Scan for time period indicators.

She was on a sidewalk, certainly, beside a paved road. Cars passed by as normal. She studied them for a moment. The models were a mixture of eighties and nineties, with an occasional beat up seventies model. The newest car she spotted was a 1996 Ford Taurus.

Okay, so the earliest it can be is ’96.

“You coming, Steph?” The woman who’d been beside her had advanced along the pavement by a good twenty feet, and was looking back expectantly.

Point Four: Who are you?

‘Steph’ was a start. Most likely, she was called Stephanie. So she was almost certainly a woman, which she’d suspected by her feminine cut jeans and shirt, but she knew not to make any assumptions. Confirmation was key when dealing with unknown dimensions. She also noticed a wedding band on her finger.

As for the stroller, it was likely, but not definite, that this child was hers.

Married woman named Steph, with a small child. She could work with that.

She pushed the stroller, catching up to the waiting woman.

“Sorry, I was a little lost in thought.” She smiled at the woman, who gave her a quick look of concern.

“Is something wrong? You can talk to me.”

Point Five: Find your allies and draw out information.

“Oh, it’s nothing. I just had a brain fart and completely forgot what we’re doing,” Sherri said, laughing off the contrived memory lapse. “I thought I was done with the baby brain, but once in a while…”

The woman gave her a momentary squint with confusion, which shifted into worry.

“We’re just… going back to your place. And if you forgot that, it’s probably for the best that we are! I think you need to get out of the sun.”

“Yeah, I feel a little faint. Let’s go.”

She let the other woman lead her to the correct house, which was only a few blocks away. She recognised the architecture and landscape as distinctly San Francisco, which was quite the relief, since she’d spent the last twenty years living there. Less to figure out about the environment, leaving her more time to work out what she was doing here.

As they reached the stoop leading up to the Italianate terrace, Sherri’s companion, who she still hadn’t figured out the name of, helped her lift the stroller up to the door.

Sherri rummaged through her enormous handbag, looking for the front door keys, before finding them nestled under a couple of spare diapers.

She studied the bundle of keys for a moment, before picking out the most likely match to the keyhole. The door clicked open on the first attempt, and she found herself filling with pride over her good guess.

The woman with her helped her pull the stroller all the way in the door, and Sherri resumed pushing it towards what she could see was a living room, accented by a large bay window that overlooked the street.

“Better let him sleep in there a little longer,” she said, praying that the little boy wouldn’t wake up while she wasn’t alone.

She scanned the room for identifiers: photographs, bills, trinkets, and of course, mirrors.

A full-length mirror just happened to be on one wall, and she peered in, giving herself a once-over, under the guise of fixing her hair.

The woman looking back at her looked quite young; perhaps early or mid twenties. She had long blonde hair, pinned into a half ponytail. There was a light layer of makeup on her face, and her emerald eyes sparkled in the light.

It was after finally seeing her reflection that she noticed the pinboard filled with photos just inside the kitchen doorway.

Her heart caught in her chest as she recognised a man in a large portion of the photos.

We finally got a lock?

It was about damn time. This was what she’d been working up to all these years. Finally, all her training was going to pay off. Assuming they got the right one, of course…

Concealing her excitement, she casually sat down on the couch, next to the woman to whom she really needed to put a name.

“Feeling better?” asked the woman, and Sherri nodded.

“Yeah, maybe,” she said.

Point Six: Get some alone time.

She forced a yawn. “Man, I could use a nap.”

“Cory been keeping you up all hours?” the woman asked. Sherri nodded, taking note of the boy’s name. The woman smiled. “Well, that’s alright. Go, get some sleep. I’ll keep an eye on the little guy.”

“Really?”

“Uh… yeah, that’s what I’m paid for, isn’t it?”

Okay, she’s either a babysitter or a nanny.

“Uh, right, right.”

She got to her feet, and strolled towards the staircase she’d spotted upon entry to this house.

She briefly looked back. “Thanks,” she said to the woman, before hurrying up the steps.

As she rounded the corner from the staircase to the upstairs hall, she jumped as a figure awaited her. The surprise turned to relief as she saw who it was.

Tall, mid-forties, brown hair with a fleck of white at the front. The small flashing device in his hand. The giddy grin on his face.

This was the man she’d first met in 1978, under the strangest of circumstances. Not quite her Uncle Sam, but an alternate version, with whom she’d forged a unique relationship over the past twenty years. The version of Doctor Sam Beckett who she called by his middle name, John.

“Sherri! Guess what?” he said, the energy of his gestures matching the excitement on his face. “I think this is it! Everything we’ve been working towards. You made it.”

Sherri passed through the hologram, and continued down the hall.

“I’ve got company downstairs, so I can’t celebrate with you right now,” she explained in a low voice, as she checked each doorway for the master bedroom. “Just tell me what I need to know.”

John drew his excited eyes away from her, and to his handlink, and he gave it a couple of taps.

“The year is… 1996. Wednesday, June twelfth, to be exact. Your name is Stephanie, you have a two-year-old son named Cory, and you’re married to our target.”

Sherri entered the bedroom, which was to the front of the house, with a continuation of the bay window from the living room below it. She closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed, as John phased through behind her.

“I already knew most of that. Who’s the babysitter? Her face is familiar to me.”

“Babysitter… let’s see…” John studied the device for another moment, which emitted a whirring sound. “Oh, you have a live-in nanny. That’s convenient. Her name is… Wade Welles.”

“How do I know that name?” Sherri wracked her brain.

“Maybe ’cause it’s in here.” He reached over to an unseen surface, and grasped an object which, upon contact with his hand, appeared to Sherri as part of the hologram. An old notebook with yellowing pages. “It’s not the same one, of course…”

Sherri tried to form a clear picture of who Wade was, but all she could recall was that she had a strong connection to the people she had met all those years ago.

“If you don’t remember, don’t worry about it,” he said, placing the book back. “The main thing is what we’re here to do. You remember that, right?”

Sherri nodded. One of many mantras she drilled into her memory for weeks, months, years, before her first leap.

“I’ve never once forgotten. It would be pretty weird if I did, right at the very moment I actually needed to remember.”

“Well, stranger things have happened,” John chuckled. “Remember that time you had to win a kickboxing tournament and you completely forgot your twelve years of training in exactly that?”

Sherri cringed. “Yeah, that was… not ideal. But my recall has increased every leap since.”

“Forgetting things must be a pain,” he said with a shrug. “I wouldn’t know.”

She glared at him, then made the decision to get back to the mission at hand.

“So anyway, you got a track on him? Where is he now?”

John’s irreverent expression gave way to intense focus, as his fingers danced over the handlink. The device was about the size of a cell phone, and had an advanced touch screen interface. A large crack was down the centre of the glass, owing to its occasional slippage from his grasp while performing dramatic gestures when he got worked up – which was often.

“He’s off-world right now, but Higgins thinks he’ll be showing up at fifteen hundred hours, give or take twenty minutes.”

Sherri glanced down at her wrist, where a watch told her it was already three. “So, now then?”

John followed her gaze. “Oh, yeah. Hold on.”

He held up the handlink, and turned in a slow circle before stopping as he faced away from the window.

“Detecting some vortex traces in this direction…” he pointed it downward, still studying the screen. “Elevation… subterranean.”

“Basement?” Sherri asked.

“Most likely,” he said, tapping on the screen. “Okay, I have a lock on the wormhole. Should be opening up here in the next three minutes.”

Sherri stood, and padded to the stairs. In an effort to avoid Wade and Cory, she tiptoed to the bottom, and made a U-turn, scanning for a door to the basement.

“Over here,” John said, having blinked himself downstairs. He pointed to a door against one of the inner walls, before phasing through the door into the room. She followed him, and shut the door behind her as she pulled on the cord dangling in front of her. The light flickered on, illuminating an extensive laboratory.

This is definitely it.

She exchanged a glance with John.

“Incoming…” he said, peering down the stairs. She waited just a few seconds, before the swirling blue vortex appeared, kicking up dust. A well-dressed man tumbled out of the gateway, and onto the floor, before standing and brushing himself off.

Sherri watched John appear beside the man. He circled him, scanning him with the handlink.

“It’s a match. This is definitely the Quinn Mallory we’ve been looking for.”