What… what just happened?
There had been a flash of blue, that much Maggie remembered. But she couldn’t for the life of her remember what she had been doing before that. But now, she seemed to be emerging from the Ladies Room of a diner, with slightly dripping hands.
As the door behind her swung shut, she wiped her hands on her… jeans. Jeans and a blouse with blue floral embroidery over the chest. She knew these clothes.
When was I wearing this outfit before?
A brief image of the inside of a jail cell flashed in her mind, but she couldn’t connect it to anything.
She looked across the vacant diner, and saw another figure, standing just inside the entrance, illuminated from behind by sunlight. Another woman, in a law enforcement uniform.
“Oh, boy…” said Sheriff Maggie as the two locked eyes.
A flood of information entered Maggie’s head as she recognised her double. The slide. The leap. The fusion. The god-awful headache. And the machine.
Uncle Sam and Quinn were trying to…
She ran across the otherwise empty room, towards Sheriff Maggie, whose hands grappled for a wall as she threatened to fall over in her confusion.
“Did they separate us?” Maggie asked, frantic. She gingerly raised a hand and touched her double on the shoulder, trying to decide if she was real.
“I don’t know, we seem pretty separate to me,” Sheriff Maggie said, as she narrowed her eyes. “But where the hell are we?”
Maggie turned around, taking in the environment. “It just looks like some diner, but I don’t know how we could have got here. It might not be… reality. Maybe it’s another dream?”
“Maybe they made a mistake, and we… leaped.”
They stared at one another for a moment, letting the implications dawn on them.
* * *
Sam stared daggers at Al as he smacked the side of his handlink for the seventh time.
“What’s taking so long?” Sam demanded. He stole a glance at his younger double, who seemed to be in a state of shock.
He’s actually got a reason to freeze under pressure, unlike Ziggy.
Al said something in Italian that must have been a curse.
“Sorry, Sam. Ziggy’s taking her sweet damn time correcting for the parallel universe’s minuscule difference in… temporary…”
He squinted at the handlink. “Temporal… constants.”
Sam rubbed his forehead. “This wasn’t meant to happen. All of our checking, and double checking, and triple checking, and it still went wrong.”
Al gave him a sympathetic look. “I know, Sam, but even Ziggy can’t account for every variable there could be. That’s why the retrieval program never worked.”
“That never worked because…” Sam trailed off, looking downward, as he thought of the reasons why he thought it never worked.
Because it wasn’t meant to.
Because the higher power that was doing all this, whether Al the Bartender, or something else, didn’t want him to go home. Because he chose to keep going.
The handlink squawked, and Al studied the readouts.
“Oh, come on Ziggy, you bucket of bolts!” he cried in sheer frustration. “She says there ‘should have been’ a clean separation, and has zero theories on why they still seem to be sharing a mind. Cazzo!”
Sam felt his tense shoulders sag in defeat.
Even Ziggy can’t account for every variable. The words echoed through his mind.
The only other variable he could think of was, once again, fate. Was there anything they could do now, or was it all up to the big guy upstairs? Or maybe, it was up to the Maggies themselves.
He turned to John, who was still staring into space. “Let’s keep them comfortable…” he said.
He would keep thinking.
* * *
“If we leaped, why are we in our regular clothes?” Maggie said, gesturing to Sheriff Maggie’s uniform. “Shouldn’t we be in some random peoples’ clothes?”
Sheriff Maggie shrugged. “I don’t know how it’s meant to work. Should we find a mirror, or-?”
Behind the diner’s counter, a door creaked open. Both Maggies turned their attention to it, and watched a man emerge: tall, slim, and all too familiar.
“Colin?”
This version of Colin wore an apron around his waist, and a hair net on his head. He looked preoccupied, but glanced up at the mention of his name. He looked at the two Maggies without recognition.
“Whoa,” he said as he looked between the identical Maggies. “I’m seeing double. Can I help you ladies?”
Maggie approached the counter, cautious. It wasn’t like she hadn’t met a double of Colin before, but this whole situation was just too surreal.
She felt Sheriff Maggie following closely behind her, and as she leaned on the counter, her ‘twin’ sat on a stool. She checked her pockets for money, and found a twenty dollar bill.
Might as well go with it, right?
“Uh, sure. Can I get a black coffee, please,” she said, and looked over at Sheriff Maggie, waving the money. “Want anything?”
Sheriff Maggie raised a sceptical eyebrow. “Make it two,” she mumbled.
Colin nodded, and grabbed a coffee pot from the warmer, effortlessly pouring the cups of coffee. Not that it was hard to pour coffee into a cup, but Maggie observed a kind of familiarity with the placement of everything behind the counter that suggested he’d worked here for some time. He presented the cups in front of both Maggies.
“So… twins, huh?” he commented, before closing his eyes with a cringe. “Wow, that sounded really dumb, didn’t it? Of course you’re twins, you look exactly the same. And I bet people always make stupid remarks like that to you.”
His cheeks were pink, and Maggie chuckled at this Colin, whose speech patterns were quite a lot different to the one she knew. “Sure, I guess,” she lied.
Maggie felt the need to probe more out of this Colin, if only to help her gauge what the hell was happening to her.
This was a distinct Colin double to the one she’d encountered on the world where he was the son of a TV exec, and acted absolutely nothing like ‘Farm Boy’ Colin. This one was more of a regular guy, but he did remind her in some ways of the Colin she knew.
“So, how did you know my name?” he asked, as he started refilling the coffee maker.
Maggie’s mind raced to find an excuse that wouldn’t be off-putting, but Sheriff Maggie seemed already prepared to answer. She placed her coffee cup in its saucer, and leaned forward.
“Our friend told us you worked here. Name’s Quinn.”
Maggie shot her double a glare, and Sheriff Maggie just shrugged.
“You knew my brother?” Colin said, surprised.
Past tense…
“Knew?” Maggie asked. “What happened to him?”
Colin shut the top of the coffee machine, and turned to them. He looked troubled.
“Quinn disappeared a few months ago.” His eyes moved to his hands, as he grabbed a rag and started wiping the counter. “Didn’t you hear?”
This conversation wasn’t answering Maggie’s questions, but raising further ones. Still, now she was invested.
“He did? Do you know anything about what could have happened?”
Colin’s face fell. “Yeah, I know what happened. But you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
He focused his attention on his cleaning.
“Try me,” Maggie pressed.
Colin shook his head. “I don’t even know who you are.”
“My name’s Maggie. Maggie Beckett. And this is my… sister… Sherri.”
Sheriff Maggie shot her a dirty look, and Maggie returned it with a surreptitious wink.
“Beckett, huh?” Colin looked up at her. “Any relation to Doctor Beckett at Cal U?”
Maggie nearly choked on her coffee.
“Yeah, he’s our uncle,” Sheriff Maggie said, and Maggie wished she wouldn’t keep bluffing on assumptions. Was it some Sheriff interrogation thing she was doing, or what?
“Oh, is that how you met Quinn?” Colin said. “Doctor B taught both of us, but I never got quite as chummy with him as Quinn did.”
This was an interesting twist. Maggie had to wonder what would have caused this universe’s Uncle Sam to start teaching at Quinn’s university; assuming this was a parallel universe, rather than some kind of dream, or pocket dimension.
What he said next surprised her even more.
“He saved my Dad from being hit by a car when I was a kid. He was Quinn’s hero.” Colin smiled as he recalled.
Well, that definitely sounded like something he’d do, assuming he’d had such foreknowledge. Maggie felt her stomach filling with butterflies as she thought about it.
“Did Professor Arturo teach you, too?” Sheriff Maggie probed.
“Yeah, he taught Quinn advanced physics.” Colin said, and a faraway look moved over his face. “He and Quinn both…”
“Jumped into the wormhole?” Sheriff Maggie finished. Colin’s eyes went wide as they focused on her.
Stop talking!
“How did you…” Colin’s voice shook.
Sheriff Maggie sipped her coffee, maintaining uncomfortable eye contact with Colin. Now it was Maggie’s turn to think fast.
“Quinn mentioned something about wormholes to us the last time we saw him. Sherri here was making a leap of logic.”
Colin threw his rag to the sink, and sighed. “Well, good guess.”
“You didn’t go with?” Sheriff Maggie continued.
Colin leaned against the frame of the door he’d come from, folding his arms. “No, I was terrified. And can you blame me? He never came back. None of them did.”
Colin had tears glistening in his eyes now.
“I’d like to think they’re still out there, somewhere.”
Maggie smiled at him. “They are, I promise.”
She looked at Sheriff Maggie, who was silently sipping her coffee, looking pensive. Then she looked back at Colin, whose eyes were studying her, questioning.
Maggie didn’t know why, but she had a gut feeling there was something she had to do here. Maybe this was some kind of leap, after all.
“Have you talked to my uncle about what happened?”
Colin shook his head. “He went on leave after it happened. I haven’t seen him at all.”
Sheriff Maggie slid her empty cup and saucer toward him. “He’s the only one who’ll be able to help you find Quinn.”
As Colin opened his mouth to respond, the door of the diner jingled, and an older woman, aged somewhere in her forties, walked in. A woman whose features were unmistakable. Maggie was rendered speechless as the woman gave the three of them a broad smile.
“Ah, girls, I was hoping you’d be here,” she said, patting the Maggies on the shoulders in an all-too-familiar fashion. She leaned over to whisper in Sheriff Maggie’s ear, who went ghostly white as she conveyed whatever the message was.
Okay, surely this has to be a dream, now.
The woman looked up at Colin with a smile. “Can I get a black coffee?”
The woman, who looked just like an older version of Maggie, now approached her, and leaned to whisper in her ear.
“Just pretend I’m your Mom,” was all she said.