Earth Prime
September 27, 1994
John leaned against the wall just outside the lecture hall, busily tapping at his handlink. Around him, students walked the corridors, largely ignoring his presence. Beside him, on the floor, was a briefcase.
Any minute now.
He looked up from the device and folded his arms, scanning the faces in the crowd. A fascinated smile crept to his face as he spotted his target.
Quinn strode towards him, wearing a cocky grin. He was dressed smarter than John was used to. John pocketed the handlink, and looked away as the 21-year-old approached. His eyes fell on John for just a moment, before flicking away without a hint of recognition.
Must be him.
As Nexus Quinn entered the lecture hall, letting the door swing shut behind him, John picked up his briefcase and sidled up to the door. Inside the hall, he could hear Quinn making a scene in front of Professor Arturo.
He ventured a peek through the window in the door. The room was littered with students watching the volley of insults, with varying levels of disbelief.
Nexus Quinn was bold, loud, and assertive – attributes also belonging to Arturo, which he didn’t appreciate having thrown back at him. John stifled a laugh. He couldn’t quite hear what the guy was saying, but Quinn’s account of what it may have been in the notebook was enough to know that the term ‘pompous windbag’ was used.
There was a short back-and-forth between Nexus Quinn and Arturo, and it sounded heated. Then, the door handle moved, and John manoeuvred himself into the doorway. Quinn walked right into him, and he let his briefcase slip from his hands, where it spilled out onto the floor.
“Oh! Sorry man,” Quinn said, and leaned over to recover the bag and papers.
Well, at least he’s not a total jerk.
John quickly passed the handlink over the distracted Quinn, until the display turned green. He pocketed the device, before Quinn handed him his briefcase. They exchanged eye contact for a moment, as Quinn seemed to be deciding whether or not he knew John, and then he strode away, towards the exit.
John leaned into the room, where Arturo met his eye, and he gave a quick wink. The red-faced Arturo’s seething expression softened, and he nodded back.
It was difficult to let Nexus Quinn go, knowing what was to come, but the double was an important part of the first Quinn’s origins, so there was little he could alter at this point. But now they at least had his unique quantum signature, and could use it to pinpoint his home dimension.
John hummed cheerfully as he entered his office, and sat down at his desk. He opened the top desk drawer and moved the false bottom out of it before placing a hand on the Higgins panel within. It lit up, and the chalkboard on the wall ever-so-slightly protruded forward. After putting his desk back into place, he moved to the board and pulled on the chalkboard ledge. The board swung open, and he climbed inside, pulling it shut behind him.
The elevator descended, as John tapped against the wall, still humming. When he reached the facility, and the doors slid open, he burst out with a giddy grin.
“Morning!” he called out to the room of his esteemed colleagues, who seemed not nearly as excited as he.
Deflated, he wandered into the control room, where Will Arturo tapped at a keyboard. The thirty-year-old son of the Professor had thick, dark hair down to his shoulders, and stubble.
“It’s the big day, Will,” he prompted. Will looked up at him through dark-ringed eyes.
“The big day where my Dad jumps in a vortex and may never return, you mean?”
John frowned, and felt very suddenly guilty about his chipper mood. “Yeah, I guess it is, huh?”
Will sighed, changing the subject. “You got the scan?”
John nodded. “Already in the data banks.”
“Great,” Will replied, giving him a weak smile through his sad eyes, before turning back to his computer. “I’ll set up the triangulation. Gotta warn you, it may be months – or even years – before Higgins zeroes in on the right Earth.”
“Well, we’ve got four years, tops,” John said, and gave Will a pat on the back. “There are only a handful of people I would count on to do this, you know.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he mumbled, as he began entering commands.
In his pocket, he felt his handlink vibrate. He pulled it out, and glanced at the screen.
Retrieval in 5 minutes.
He broke away from Will. “Excuse me, I’ve gotta see Sherri.”
He hurried deeper into the facility, through the Higgins mainframe, and into the Imaging Chamber.
As he stepped through the door, the hologram came into view.
“There you are.” Sherri sat on the lid of a toilet, in a hotel bathroom, looking displeased. “There’s a sex-starved newlywed outside this room that I’d rather not have to reject.”
“Sorry,” John said, “I was getting the scan on Nexus Quinn.”
At this, her eyes lit up. “That’s today?”
John nodded. “That’s right. We’re pulling you out in a couple minutes, so just sit tight.”
Sherri nodded, giving him a sad smile. “I can’t believe this’ll be the last we see of them.”
“If we do our jobs, we’ll see them again,” said John, before looking down at the handlink to see the retrieval progress.
A few thumps came on the door.
“Amanda! What are you even doing in there?”
John chuckled. “Sorry for putting you in this situation, Sherri.”
Sherri rolled her eyes. “I’m sure Missus Amanda Fairchild will be happy to find herself already married. Do you think she’ll remember the ceremony?”
“According to our records, each leapee is usually able to recall the significant beats of your actions while replacing them, but not the finer details. Though it appears to vary wildly from person to person.”
As Sherri tilted her head to consider this, John’s handlink chimed. He looked down at it.
“Okay, here we go.”
As Sherri began to crackle with electricity, the holographic projection winked out of John’s view, and he found himself back in the empty, all-white Imaging Chamber.
* * *
Earth Prime
February 2, 1998
Sherri tensed up as she found herself in a seated position, her mind cleared of whatever had been in it a moment ago.
Her racing heart relaxed as she glanced around. She was reclined on a leather sofa, in a room that had long been arranged to mimic a standard hotel suite. Their facility’s Waiting Room.
Okay. Now. Where did I just come from?
“Welcome back!” John called out.
As John hurried in the door, she stood to greet him. The pair hugged – it was a rare chance that they could do such a thing – and she noted the forlorn look in his eyes.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” she asked, her mind struggling to figure it out for herself. John chuckled, patting her on the shoulder.
“Must be nice to clear your working memory like that,” he said bitterly, and straightened, giving a command: “Begin your Remembrance Protocol, Beckett.”
Right.
The ‘Remembrance Protocol for Post-Retrieval Amnesia’ was the counterpart to her ‘Leap-In Protocol,’ the checklist she ran through her mind at the beginning of each leap. After each retrieval, her leaps would fade like a dream, only to resurface days later in her long-term memory after something in her day-to-day that reminded her. It had been a tricky thing when she’d first started out. Of course, John was able to jog her memory a lot of the time, but they figured it was important to give her some exercises to jog her own memory, just in case. The trick was to hang on to one image through the retrieval process that would be an entry point into the buried memory, like bait on a fish hook into the pool of her subconscious.
Point One: Find the image.
She reached into the emptiness for a fleeting image, and grasped it as it threatened to slip away. A small child. A young boy watching a purple dinosaur video tape, named Cory. A blonde woman in the mirror. A nanny, and…
Right. I was Stephanie. The nanny was Wade, and she was having an affair with… Quinn.
Point Two: What was the mission?
She thought about the Quinn she had been married to. Nexus Quinn. Her heart jumped as she realised it had been the mission. The number one, all-important mission that was the primary reason behind this project in the first place.
Point Three: Was the mission successful?
She ran through the leap in her mind, each moment dragging the next out of her memory banks. And she realised her failure. He’d been far more observant than the average person, and had pieced together things that most would have not even noticed, let alone considered red flags. And it had led to him losing trust and fleeing to another Earth. She hoped it hadn’t been the Kromagg world.
Her shoulders dropped as the weight of what happened fell upon her, and she slammed her fist into the couch seat.
John’s lips formed a sympathetic frown, as he watched her recall.
“Dammit,” she said. “What an unmitigated disaster. So what’s the plan now?”
John turned to lead her out of the room.
“Well, first, we both get some rest,” he said, rubbing his eyes as if to demonstrate his exhaustion. “We have a few months of wiggle room to send you back, but obviously we don’t want to wait any longer than we need to, in case something else goes wrong.”
Sherri nodded, as they traversed the aisles of computer cabinets.
“You’re not going to leap me into Wade next, I hope.”
John snorted. “No… I think two leaper versions of you meeting may cause a recursion error in the multiverse,” he said.
“That sounds fake,” Sherri laughed.
“Okay, I just made that up,” he said, flashing her a playful grin. “But, I don’t know what would happen, so we’re just going to steer clear of that possibility. Besides, there’s only so much control we have from here. We just send you with some coordinates and a frustratingly loose time window, and hope that you end up where you need to be.”
“Yeah, I know,” she sighed. “God or whatever, right?”
She looked at him with disdain, as he gave an affirmative tilt of his head.
“Well, that’s what my counterpart described to me. The ‘god of the gaps’ argument is not my favourite explanation for the unknowns of existence, of course. I’d love to identify what’s really doing it. You ever seen Next Gen?”
Sherri crossed her arms. “Where is this going?”
“Well, maybe it’s like Q,” he mused. “Something like that?”
“Saying it’s a powerful alien being doesn’t explain anything more than just saying ‘God,’ you know,” she said, exasperated, as the pair entered the control room.
Her eyes met Will, sitting at his terminal, and he gave her a wave. Since 1994, he’d become decidedly less hairy, opting for a shorter cut and clean-shaven face. But he still wore dark circles under his eyes. Sherri wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen him relax.
“Welcome back,” he said brightly, before turning subdued. “Sorry it didn’t go so well.”
“We’re not licked yet,” Sherri said, forcing a smile.
“That’s right,” John chimed in, and turned to address all the staff there. “Let’s take a few days break, and be back fresh next week. Need you all at the top of your game if we’re going to make this intercept. So wrap it up for now, everyone.”
He turned to Sherri. “Let’s go get some dinner, okay?”
Sherri, though tired, was decidedly more hungry than anything.
“Let’s.”