1.1  ·  Electric Blue

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.