“For cryin’ out loud, what were the odds of this happening again?”
The question was on all their minds as Rembrandt helped Quinn, fused with his double, to his feet, as the group prepared to slide out of Doctor Geiger’s creepy lab.
This guy had apparently somehow hijacked their wormhole, sending it to this place instead of to Quinn and Colin’s home world, while sending in one of Quinn’s alleged doubles – though he seemed nothing like Quinn at all – and caused them to merge into one very confused guy.
“Just be grateful for the upgrade on this thing,” Colin said, studying the timer in his hand. “I think the new safety protocols stabilised the wormhole enough to prevent something catastrophic when we were sliding in here…”
“How much more catastrophic can you get?” Maggie said, gesturing with her head towards Quinn, who looked like a completely different person.
What had once been a full head of loose, golden brown hair, was now mousy, and gelled to make it stick up, something their Quinn had never done, and Remy hoped would never do, as it looked pretty off. He kept thinking of a 30-year-old Bart Simpson when he looked at the guy. His blue eyes were now brown, and just every feature was off in some way. And that was to say nothing of his behaviour.
While Quinn’s speech patterns, personality and intellect shined through in short bursts, the guy they seemed stuck with the rest of the time was kind of a dope, and the mad scientist who did this had been claiming that the Q-ball they knew was destined to disappear if they didn’t act fast.
Given their experience with Maggie, Rembrandt didn’t know how this Doctor Geiger could possibly have known which one of the two was fated to remain, but then, there were a lot of things Rembrandt didn’t know. For example, where did Geiger go when Diana had shut down his magnetic field? He just sort of vanished in a way that looked pretty painful.
But, he supposed, there were other things to worry about right now than the fate of Doctor Frankenstein.
“Well, if we’re talking catastrophe, this ‘Combine’ thing was the most volatile thing I’ve ever seen,” Colin said to Maggie, gesturing around the room. “Merging a couple of Quinns would have been nothing compared to what we just averted.”
He looked down at the timer, which was in its last minute. “Anyway, we’ve gotta go.”
Maggie kept the guns in her hands pointed slightly to either side of the group of security guards and lab assistants, as she inched toward her friends. The security guard made a move to lunge, and she trained one of the pistols on him.
“Alright, let’s just continue being gentlemen here, shall we?” she said, and the large man backed away, palms open.
Rembrandt looked towards Diana Davis, the scientist who’d helped them stop Geiger’s plans… eventually, at the last minute. “We’re gonna go separate them. Are you coming?”
“You know how to do that?” she asked, incredulous.
“We ran into an almost identical situation like, two weeks ago… give or take twenty years,” Maggie explained, with a bitter laugh. “So, we just need to get back to the Earth we were on at the time, and use the machine we left there. Easy, right?”
She raised an eyebrow, giving Diana a wry smile. “Only thing is, it’s currently overrun by hostile non-human invaders who see human eyeballs as a delicacy.”
Diana’s eyes widened.
“In that case, I think I’ll take my chances with these guys,” she said, gesturing towards the security guard and scientists that were ostensibly her underlings – but importantly, they were human.
“Okay, have fun with that,” Colin said, dismissive, as he opened the wormhole. “Everyone else… let’s go. Remember, anything could be waiting for us. Keep on your toes, guys.”
The composite Quinn looked at him with a furrowed brow. “I don’t know why, but you sound really weird to me right now,” he said, as Rembrandt walked him, arm over shoulder, to the vortex.
“Oh yeah? Well, you look really weird,” Colin countered, before diving into the rippling portal.
* * *
The road was dusty and deserted as the sliders stumbled out of the vortex. Rembrandt had to admit that the landings were a lot smoother than they used to be, but he still managed to fall over and bang his knee – the same knee he’d cut open a while back – and it was still not entirely healed.
Quinn’s arm was still wrapped around him, and he rose to his feet with the added effort of another man’s weight.
“Okay man, you can let go of me now,” he said. Quinn obliged, and steadied himself as he glanced around.
“My god, what happened here?” he said, as he surveyed the abandoned buildings and cars.
“What, you don’t remember?” Rembrandt asked. “The Kromaggs, Q-ball. This is Earth Prime.”
Quinn rubbed his temple.
“Ease up, Remy,” Maggie interjected. “This happened to me, too. Everything got confused and jumbled around in my head.”
She placed a hand on Quinn’s shoulder. “Try not to think too hard. I know that’s hard for at least one of you in there, but it’ll make things less painful.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Quinn said with a frown, as Colin approached him from behind, running a hand over the gelled hair Quinn inherited from his double.
“I don’t think hair is meant to be this… vertical,” he commented with an irreverent smirk.
“Since when do you snark? You never used to snark…” Quinn said, knitting his brows. Rembrandt tilted his head at this comment.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “The two of you are always joshing each other like this.”
“It’s just brotherly banter,” Colin said. “I was trying to lighten the mood a little. I can stop if you really don’t like it, man.”
Quinn shook his head. “It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s that I feel like it shouldn’t be coming out of your mouth.”
Colin just shot him a puzzled look.
Quinn threw up his hands. “I don’t know, I can’t figure out why. Everything feels weird to me right now, so I’m probably talking crap. Let’s just get to where we’re going.”
He looked around for a moment, before grimacing. “I, uh… forget where that is.”
Rembrandt exchanged a sad glance with Maggie.
“We’re going to Cal U in San Francisco,” Colin said. “Only thing is, I have no idea where we landed. We could be anywhere in the timer radius, and every minute we’re out in the open increases our chances of being discovered. This sucks.”
Quinn stifled a laugh, causing everyone to glare at him.
“Sorry,” he said. “Like I said, it just sounds weird to hear you say something ‘sucks.’ It just doesn’t fit.”
Colin shook his head, bewildered. “I swear to god, this is just how I talk. Honest.”
Quinn looked quite troubled, as he rubbed a palm to his forehead, indicating the presence of a headache.
Rembrandt looked at him with pity. Besides looking like a whole other person, his mind was clearly seriously messed up in some dramatic way. With Maggie it had been mostly memory related, but Q-ball and his double weren’t even identical to start with, let alone their personalities being anything close to one another.
It seemed the other Quinn had lived a very different life to Q-ball, and Rembrandt wondered in what real sense they even were parallel doubles, beyond the name they seemed to share. Did the rest of them have doubles that looked different? The whole thing just raised too many philosophical questions. He suddenly wished he had the Professor to ask about this. He’d always seemed to have answers, even if Remy didn’t understand half of the words that came out of his over-educated British mouth.
Maggie ignored this tangent, and began striding towards a building that looked like it had once been a shopfront and offices.
“Focus, guys,” she said. “We need to keep off the streets, and check for clues.”
She stole a quick look back at Quinn. “Stop thinking so hard, you hear me?”
“Yes ma’am,” he replied weakly, and the three of them hurried after her.