by JK Stone
Alise found the scars added to his appeal, but she knew the bonding process would heal all of them in time.
She had sifted through some of Jason’s memories, and she was shocked that he was able to survive the brutality inflicted upon him. She found the memories too disturbing to continue, pulled out of his mind and returned her gaze to him. She knew he had been tortured for several months more than she witnessed and it brought forth myriad emotions she had never experienced before, and she wondered how she was experiencing them at all, but she chalked it up to the odd bonding process.
Alise found it hard to concentrate with Jason around. That was the main reason she had sent him to the upper level while she sent out the probes. But even with him out of her sight, she fought the urge to go to him. She was pleased when she heard Jason mention Elgon, because it gave her a reason to talk to him without the distraction of his appearance.
Alise performed several diagnostics on the binding disk to isolate any problems. She did find anomalies but nothing that would account for the sensations she kept experiencing.
In the end, she chalked it up to feedback issues from the bonding process and she figured they would subside with time once the bonding was complete. Which was yet another oddity. The bonding process had never taken this long before, but it was progressing, albeit very slowly.
She sat there drinking in Jason’s appearance. He really was a ruggedly handsome man. Peering back into Jason’s mind she had to stifle a laugh. He was going to be a true pleasure to be bonded with. His humor was pleasantly refreshing.
*****
Jason awoke to the feeling he was being watched. He opened his eyes suddenly, only to realize it wasn’t just a feeling. Alise was sitting in a chair apparently studying him with an odd look on her face. It took a moment for the previous day’s events to sink in and for him to remember where he was. It all flooded back in a rush and he sat up on the side of the bed.
Alise smiled at him and said cheerfully, “Good morning, sleepyhead.”
“Morning?” Jason asked groggily.
Alise chuckled. “Well, it is morning somewhere. It seemed appropriate because you just woke up.”
Jason looked at the chair she was sitting in and yawned. “I wondered if there was more furniture than just the bed and night stand.”
“You can have any furniture you like. All you have to do is pick the style and fabric, and as long as we have the base materials and designs, the computer can produce it. The same thing goes for any food you wish to eat. Elgon stopped eating when he became a host commander, and there were not many base food materials in storage at that time. If and when you decide to eat again, we will have to locate what you want and acquire it.”
Jason stared off for a second before asking, “What qualifies as base food materials and where do you get them?”
“Well, any food source that can be broken down into a natural mineral or grain is considered a base. Once we have it onboard, we use the ship to de-materialize it for storage. The same thing goes for non-food items. Pretty much any natural mineral is a base.”
“Would the food I have in my bunker work, or would we need to get something else?” Jason asked.
This time Jason could feel Alise looking through his mind and heard her think, Looks good enough. We will need to remove them from the vacuum seal and containers though.
Jason saw Alise was about to speak and he asked, “Why would the vacuum seal have to be removed?”
Alise smiled. “You heard that, did you? That is a good sign. Well, the ship will de-materialize the products as a whole. So, unless you wish to eat the plastic or metal at some point it is best to remove it and have the base food put in storage separately.”
Jason let out a laugh. “And to think, people said I was being paranoid and I wouldn’t need all that food. It’s quite a bit. I was stockpiling it because I kept having feelings of impending doom. There must be enough for a family of four for a decade at least.”
“Actually, with your new metabolism, that amount of food should last you a good two to three hundred years,” Alise stated.
A thought came to Jason and he asked, “Is your body fully functional?” Realizing what that must have sounded like, Jason felt a flush enter his face, and not wanting her to get the wrong impression he hurried to say, “I mean to say is it able to process food?”
Alise looked at him with a grin and said, “Yes, it is the same as any other human female. On this ship, the computer can keep my consciousness in this body. It is kind of like forcing the body to do my will. If the body were to be removed from the ship it would resemble a deceased corpse though, and nobody would be able to tell the difference. As to whether I can eat, my body is ship generated, so the food I eat is de-materialized and put back in base food storage after I taste it. It is the best recycling in the universe.”
Jason chuckled and thought a second before saying, “That’s nice I guess. Do you feel hunger?”
“No, but I do feel it as the food is removed from my stomach. It feels kind of fluttery.”
Jason sighed. “That’s good. I wouldn’t want you to go hungry.”
Alise just chuckled and then her expression turned serious. “There is no fear of that. Now that I have sensed you are awake enough, it is time to discuss what I have found.”
Alise looked a little hesitant before continuing. “About your cousin. The probe I sent out confirmed my suspicions. Jeff was set up on the murders, and the minor drug charges as well.”
Jason’s mouth dropped open. “How do you know that?”
“I sent a temporal probe back and tracked his movements. Someone incapacitated everyone on the bus, then killed the guards and the other prisoners. They then planted evidence leaving your cousin to take the blame. I sent the probe further back and found that the drugs he was convicted of possessing were planted in his car as well.
“Furthermore, the other probe I sent out came back with similar results. Your brothers were killed by what appeared to be the same person. So, it looks as if we have a conspiracy on our hands.”
Alise paused a few seconds apparently letting Jason wrap his head around that information. She looked gloomy as she continued. “I advanced the time dilation on the probes and went forward and tracked your relatives. Your cousin Jeff was or is murdered in the ADX facility this coming Tuesday, and a memorial service is to be held for you the following Saturday.”
“I died?”
Alise kind of shrugged. “Yes and no. Elgon was getting paranoid near the end. There were too many events happening and he felt his actions were being manipulated somehow. He decided nobody should know the person he picked was missing, so he devised a plan. You pushed the blue button and just as we phased, the ship shot a meteor fragment near the location of your camp.
“The camp site was obliterated and at the same time cloned tissue was strewn throughout the area making it appear as if you had died in the impact. The issue we have is while the memorial services are being held, there is an explosion and it will kill the remaining members of your family, which is why we were unable to locate any of them in the future. This is very disconcerting as there are very few people who know about your family’s lineage. Worse yet, I could see the person who will plant the bomb and it appears to be the same person who killed your brothers and set up your cousin.”
Jason stared at her and said, “What do you mean ‘appears to be’? Didn’t you get a good look?”
Alise looked distraught now and said, “No, my probe was having technical issues, but the person appeared to have some type of cloaking suit on. Here let me show you.” Alise activated a monitor in his room and played back the attack.
Jason watched as a cloaked figure crept around his house. His brothers had arrived a couple of days earlier in order to celebrate their upcoming birthday together. He had an overnight sleep study, and once he was back they were going to take a two-week camping trip together. The person came up behind his brothers as they were walking towar
d the kitchen and they looked over their shoulders as if hearing something, but they didn’t seem to see the figure, so they just shrugged and began talking to each other again. A moment later the cloaked figure began brutally stabbing them from behind, then took off for Jason’s bedroom.
“I tried to follow the attacker past that point, but my probe malfunctioned,” Alise stated.
Jason was in shock. He knew DARPA had been working on personal cloaking devices for the military, but he didn’t think they were that far along yet, and he couldn’t think of any reason their government would use them to attack his family anyway.
“What is DARPA?” Alise asked.
“It’s the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They develop weaponry for the United States government and the military primarily. I saw a prototype of a cloaking device like that. When it was activated you could only see the person if you had on special goggles, and it looked a lot like this. But their prototype was huge.”
“That could be, it seems a little advanced for their technology level though. I have not seen anything like that. The only reason we can see them at all is that our probe has the ability to scan multi-spacial spectrums simultaneously. But something does not feel right about this. I was thinking it might be one of the races who can sense when we alter temporal events. As I said Elgon made enemies, but if you saw that technology on Earth, then it might be as you suspect.”
“Is there anything we can do?” Jason asked as he looked back to the display.
“That is what we will have to look into. If it is your government, and they are monitoring your family, they will know when we rescue your family and if we return them at a later date, whoever is responsible for this could just have them killed at that time. Regardless of who is after your family, we would have to convince them that your family members are dead, and I cannot think how to do that if your family is being monitored.”
“If the government or someone else is watching us, wouldn’t they have seen this ship come get me?” Jason asked.
Alise smiled and said, “Like I said, Elgon was getting paranoid in the end and with good reason apparently. When you pushed the blue button, it did one other thing. It caused a five-minute paradox in time. The ship, once you were onboard and you pushed the button, went back in time to a microsecond before we appeared, and caused the explosion with the meteor impact. There was a temporal echo that you thought was a flash from an explosion and a sonic boom. What it did was create a bubble of time that is unique to itself, and technically it killed you for that five-minute bubble. But within the quantum phasing of this ship, you are not really dead. So, to answer your question, no, they would not have seen you being rescued.”
“So, I’m Schrödinger’s cat?” Jason asked.
Alise just looked at him a second before busting out with laughter. When she finally caught her breath, she said, “That was hilarious. You are going to be a delight to be bonded with. And yes, you are right. In essence, you are like the cat.”
“So,” he said, “how long do we have to come up with a solution?”
Alise closed her eyes for a second, then she said, “Ninety-eight hours and counting until we have to come out of time displacement.”
Jason was in shock. “Ninety-eight, but last night the computer said one hundred and twenty hours.”
“Well, I did call you a sleepyhead,” Alise said with a smile.
“How long have you had this information?” Jason asked nervously.
“About two minutes before you awoke,” Alise stated.
Jason let out a relieved sigh. “Good, I was worried I had wasted time sleeping that could have been used to save my family.”
Jason put his boots on and standing up he said, “Let’s stick this pig,” and he heard Alise’s laughter following him to the corner of the room to descend down to the control room.
Chapter Nine
Alise and Jason worked for three days straight before a solution came to him. His mind seemed to be wandering off topic a lot over the past days, and almost every time it was because he was examining Alise’s appearance, and he was a bit dejected when she asked him if he was hungry yet. Something bubbled up from the back of his mind, and he asked her to say that again. With a quizzical look, she repeated her question, and he had a holy shit moment of clarity.
“Can this ship make complete bodies other than the one you have?” he asked excitedly.
Alise stared at him with a crestfallen look. “Yes, do you not like my appearance?”
Jason smiled and said, “I love your appearance.”
He hurried on to say, “That’s not why I asked though. I think I may have a plan.
How long does it take to transfer a body from one place to another?”
“About half a second, why?” Alise asked.
Jason laid out his plan. “If we create cloned copies of my family’s bodies we could swap them at the last second and do the same thing as Elgon had me do with the blue button, correct?”
“Yes, but we will be cutting it very close with the time we have left for cloning and transport… There. I have begun the cloning process. This process will work for your family members in the church, but your brothers’ and cousin’s deaths were up close and personal. We will need to swap the bodies after the attacks to make whoever attacked your brothers believe they are dead.
“We will not have to create a paradox for them though. Once they are transported aboard this ship, they will be safe. The only reason we needed to do that with you, is that this ship was in real time until you boarded it.”
Jason asked, “Don’t you need their DNA to make the clones?”
Alise nodded. “Oh, yes we had all of your family’s DNA on file. It allowed us to use genetic tracking to find you and your relatives. The probe is still at the location of the church explosion and I can gather the DNA of the non-genetic family members there as well. I will review the position and injuries to your cousin Jeff and your brothers and have the cloned bodies reflect the same. A distraction and direct transfer to medical will be safest for him. So, we will get your cousin first as he is the next to die. It is best to not waste energy going back and forth too much with our limited reserves.”
Jason asked, “Can we use that genetic tracking to follow the person doing all of thi—
There was a brilliant flash in the room and a moment later Jason shook his head, trying to regain his focus and he tried to remember what he’d been saying. He noticed Alise looked dazed too. “What happened? And what were we talking about?”
Shaking her head, Alise said, “Uh I cannot remember… we were discussing swapping the family’s bodies for the clones, right?”
Jason nodded. He still felt his mind going a little fuzzy, and he asked, “Don’t you need their DNA to make the clones?”
Nodding Alise said, “Oh, yes we had all of your family’s DNA on file. It allowed us to use genetic tracking to find you and your relatives. The probe is still at the location of the church explosion and I can gather the DNA of the non-genetic family members there as well. I will review the position and injuries to your cousin Jeff and your brothers and have the cloned bodies reflect the same. A distraction and direct transfer to medical will be safest for him. So, we will get your cousin first as he is the next to die. It is best to not waste energy going back and forth too much with our limited reserves.
“After we get Jeff then we will go forward in time and save your family from the explosion, then go back and retrieve your brothers. Since the killer is working in linear time, he should not notice what we have done and after we collect them it will not make a difference because all of your family will be safe in a temporal bubble as soon as we have them onboard this ship. But we will not be able to bring them back to Earth until we make sure whoever is after all of you is taken care of.”
Jason was having a profound sense of Déjà vu, he could’ve sworn she said that already and was about to ask Alise something, but the thought seemed to flit from his mind a
s he looked into her eyes. He just stared in awe at her as she explained the timing.
“We only have twenty-three hours eleven minutes of time displacement left until we have to recharge. So, we will have to phase in at the moment of Jeff’s attack, perform the transport, and then time displacement. That will use up three hours from our energy reserves, and then we will move forward to get the rest of your family.
“We will have to pull them out a half of a second before the blast though. After we retrieve Jerren and Justin, we will have to get out of this solar system. Our displacement will drop about seven minutes after we perform the final transports, but we should be well away from here by then.”
Jason let out a sigh, he had never imagined it was possible that his brothers would be alive again and he said, “That sounds good. It looks like our plan is ready! When do we set it in motion?”
Alise looked at him and said with a warm smile, “We already have.”
Chapter Ten
Jason was in the control room watching as the events in the prison played out on his display. His cousin Jeff was walking in a circle inside the courtyard for his sixty minutes of allocated physical exercise. The inmate shackled directly behind him moved closer and a second later he proceeded to stab Jeff several times before breaking a shiv off in Jeff’s back as he was collapsing to the ground.
Alise caused a distraction by activating an alarm to the north of the courtyard, and a second later it was done. They had swapped his cousin with the cloned body and Jason felt the familiar blurring associated with time displacement before they were moving again.
Alise looked at Jason. “Jeff is responding well in medical. We have twenty-five minutes before the next rescue. Your cousin should be awake in a moment and you might want to explain what you can to him.”
