Bad Behavior (The Last Time Traveler Book 3)

by Aaron J. Ethridge

  Brother also informed Robert that – as per their plan – he had backups of all the crews’ memories that Robert had sent him just before they started the Galfin job. Robert was ecstatic to hear this – having not been able to remember whether he had actually done that or not – and asked Brother to send the memories back to the ship immediately.

  With this information in hand, Robert decided to try to determine exactly when the girls had gone missing in the hopes that this would lead them to new evidence. He did not, however, let Chairman Ross, Brother, or Sister so much as know that the girls were missing. Robert explained to Morgan that, for the moment, they couldn't be sure who they could trust – or even, who else might be a clone. As they had already notified them about the single hair they had discovered, however, they had to show an interest in the clues it uncovered. Not doing so might have made their adversaries – whoever they were – suspicious.

  Just minutes after their former memories reached the ship, Robert checked their validity. Part of his wipe our memories plan had been to provide himself with the data he would need to make sure that the memories Brother had were, in fact, their own. They were. The being the case, Doc restored them.

  It turned out to have been a rather quiet evening. Robert had gone over the data on the job, flown the ship out into a section of empty space, and ordered everyone to go to bed. He had then gone to the recording studio and made the video to himself. Roughly an hour before everyone normally got up, Robert woke up, grabbed a stealth-belt, snuck into each of the crew member's rooms, backed up their memories and then erased them. The last thing Robert remembered was initiating the backup of his own memories. However, as he found himself sitting on the edge of his bed with a brain-scanner in his hand ten-minutes later, it was obvious that he had sent the backups to Brother, gone back to his room, and wiped his own memory.

  As this information revealed absolutely nothing of importance, they decided to hit the ground and see what they could uncover. Robert and Vox locked the ship down tight – leaving it floating miles above the island – before the four male members of the crew climbed into the car and headed to Vox's rental home.

  “Nice place,” Morgan said as they stepped through the door.

  “Thanks,” Vox nodded. “Celeste likes it; that's the main thing.”

  “It is,” Doc agreed with a smile.

  “So, what are we looking for, exactly?” Morgan asked.

  “Proof that the girls came here before date night,” Robert explained.

  “What might such proof look like?”

  “Hopefully, we'll recognize it if we find it.”

  After roughly half-an-hour, they hadn't found any signs that anyone had been there in recent days. However, they had not found evidence that Robert felt was conclusive. The clothes the girls had been wearing when they set out to buy their dresses were nowhere to be found. This being the case, Robert decided to head back to the ship.

  They then contacted The Apparelial Palace – the boutique where the dresses had been acquired – and found out at exactly what time they had been purchased. With this information in hand, Robert hacked into the Never Never Land security archive and retrieved the video data from all the street cameras outside the store for several hours before and after the purchases. Morgan pointed out that doing so was a crime. Robert counter-pointed-out that he didn't care and that, under the circumstances, he felt certain the council would drop the charges if he got caught – which he wouldn't.

  Roughly an hour before the dresses were paid for, all three girls got out of the cab they had taken when they left the ship and walked into the store. Half-an-hour after this, all the cameras in the area experienced some kind of problem, which kept them from recording for a roughly twenty minute period. A little more hacking revealed that the cameras inside The Apparelial Palace had experienced a similar hiccup during the exact same time-frame.

  This left Robert absolutely certain that they now knew where and when the girls had been kidnapped. He then did even more hacking; acquiring all the video footage in a two-mile radius around Martha Summers' home and the boutique for an hour before and after the all three video outages. This done, he contacted Chairman Ross to tell him that the crew was exhausted and that they would be taking a few days off.

  With an excuse in place for the time they were going to spend seemingly doing nothing, they began going through every moment of video; searching for any connecting threads that might exist among them. Early on day three, they found something. A stereotypical black future van appeared in the areas in question before and after all three video outages. Robert pulled up the vehicle's transponder tag – the cameras recorded more than just video – it was the future, after all – but, when he cross-referenced the tag-code in the Never Never Land registry, it turned out to be a fake.

  This left them little choice but to acquire even more footage and trace the van back to its point of origin. This turned out to be none-other than The Institute of Advanced Clone Studies, which was – in fact – the very research laboratory that Vox had put on his short list of possible sources for the Summers clone. It was also the one that Sturm happened to be the director of.

  “Sturm!” Morgan cried, shaking his fist at the ceiling before turning to Robert with a look of anticipation.

  After several seconds of Robert not reacting, Morgan spoke again.

  “Aren't you going to say: it's not Sturm?”

  “No.”

  “So, you finally put the pieces together and figured out that I've been right all along, eh?”

  “It's not that. I'm just sick of our game of: it's Sturm – it's not Sturm.”

  “It is Sturm,” Morgan asserted.

  “It's not Sturm,” Robert replied, shaking his head.

  “Got ya!”

  After this childish taunt (which Morgan found rather amusing), Robert decided that he wanted to make absolutely sure they were pursuing the correct conveyance before they went any further. As a result, he got the video footage from the day of the fan-club-ambush from all the street cameras leading from The Institute of Advanced Clone Studies to where the club met the bus. The van left the laboratory right on time and headed in the right direction. Just before it reached the area, however, all the cameras went out. By the time they started recording again, the van was back on its way to the institute. Although they didn't have their man yet, there was no question: they had their vehicle.

  “That's enough for me,” Morgan said, shaking his head. “Let's call Chairman Ross, have Sturm arrested, and get the girls back.”

  “Even if it's enough for you,” Robert chuckled. “It certainly isn't enough for the council. Not to mention, all we've managed to prove – sort of prove – is that the same van was driving around in areas where and when street cameras happened to be malfunctioning.”

  “You know it's more than that!”

  “Yes, I do. But, that doesn't mean we have definitive proof. And, that, is exactly what we need.”

  “How do we get it?”

  “Doc,” Robert said, turning his gaze to his old friend, “if you had kidnapped Cleo and had to be positive she couldn't escape, what would you do?”

  “Keep her sedated,” Doc replied without hesitation. “She's too clever to trust any prison to hold indefinitely.”

  “How would you do that?”

  “I assume I have an advanced cloning facility at my disposal.”

  “One of the most advanced that ever existed.”

  “I would store her in a clone tank,” Doc replied, “keeping her perfectly safe and completely unconscious.”

  “What if other people had access to the facility?”

  “It would be relatively easy to rig the monitors to make it look as if Cleo were a clone.”

  “Would you take any other precautions?” Robert asked.

  “If I planned to use a facility such as The Institute of Advanced Clone Studies, yes.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, provided I could
get access to such a government program, I would request permission to conduct a series of classified experiments using a clone of Cleo – as well as any other targets I had in mind. I would then find a way to falsify them giving me permission to clone them. Using that, I would file the necessary forms and begin my experiment, knowing that all the information would be classified.”

  “Joe would know about it.”

  “That's true,” Doc nodded, “However, even assuming that I couldn't persuade Chairman Ross to become one of my co-conspirators, there would be little danger in his knowing. As the information would be classified, the only person he might discuss it with who wouldn't already know about it would be the target and – due to the fact that they supposedly gave me permission – there wouldn't seem to be a great deal for them to say to each other on the subject. Plus, of course, the window of danger would be closed fairly quickly. After the target had been replaced by the clone, the clone would, obviously, be more than willing to discuss it with the chairman.”

  “It's an interesting theory, Doc,” Robert replied with a smile. “Let's see if we can find any evidence that it may have gone down that way.”

  “How do we do that?” Vox asked.

  “The first thing we're going to do is take a look around the institute,” Robert replied. “The four of us – except for Morgan...”

  “Cute,” the young man interjected.

  “…are going to rig up a very special – and very small – cloaked probe,” the traveler continued. “We're going to send it into the lab in search of the girls. If it finds them in there, we're going in after them.”

  “If it doesn't?” Vox asked.

  “Let's deal with one if at a time, brother,” Robert replied.

  Chapter 14: Long Time, No See

  “We're in,” Robert said, gazing down at the screen in front of him.

  “Well, hot dog,” Morgan replied with a definite tone of sarcasm. “Two days of non-stop work and we've managed to get through the front door.”

  “I let you put the comm relay in, didn't I?”

  “Lucky me! Because of all my fine work, we can now see the reception desk. Of course, if we had just slipped on stealth-belts and waltzed in there, we could have been seeing it two days ago.”

  “We'd have had to modify the belts,” Vox replied. “Otherwise, those security cameras would have been able to detect us.”

  “Didn't you have to modify that micro-stealth-field-emitter the probe is using?”

  “We did.”

  “How long would it have taken to modify the belts?”

  “Considering the fact that Rob and me worked out a way to get around that particular kind of camera years ago; two hours, maybe.”

  “Oh, wow!” Morgan exclaimed, slapping himself on the forehead. “What a waste of time that would have been. Thank goodness we saved those precious hours to dump into the two days’ worth of work we had to do.”

  “I told you, Morgan,” Robert said, guiding the probe just above the head of someone who had caught the elevator going down, “if the probe ends up discovered, it'll wipe its memory and fry its communications circuits. No one will be able to trace it to us, even if they suspect us. On the other hand, if they physically caught us there, it would be hard to keep them from leaping to the conclusion that we might have been involved.”

  “You could lie our way out of it.”

  “Even I have limitations.”

  “I'm surprised to hear you admit that.”

  “Well, to be completely honest,” Robert smiled, “that was a lie. See how well it worked?”

  “Two questions.”

  “Go.”

  “If we can modify the belts to hide from those cameras, why don't they already have those modifications?”

  “They're very illegal,” Vox replied. “Plus, they really drain the power. If the belts were rigged up like that, they'd die in about an hour-and-forty-five minutes.”

  “And, the last thing you want,” Robert said, moving the probe out of the elevator, but not far from it, “is for your stealth-belt to power down mid-stealth.”

  “So, the probe will de-cloak in an hour-and-forty-five minutes?”

  “In about an hour-and-a-half, actually,” Vox asserted.

  “What do we do if we haven't found the girls by then?” Morgan asked.

  “That was three questions,” Robert pointed out, “and, we'll bring it back, recharge it, and try again.”

  “That was actually one question and two spin-off questions,” Morgan explained. “My second question is: what makes you think they're in the basement?”

  “I snagged the schematics of the building,” Robert explained. “Most of the clone storage facilities are on the bottom floor, including their high-security area.”

  “That's where they are,” Morgan asserted.

  “That's what I'm hoping,” Robert nodded.

  At this point, another employee hit the down button on the elevator in the hall where the probe was currently hovering.

  “Hopefully, he's heading down to clone storage.”

  “How many floors are below ground?”

  “Four.”

  “The last one must be just about hanging out of the bottom of the island.”

  “Not quite,” Robert chuckled. “The island's got some mass beneath it.”

  As it happened, the young man the probe was currently following was – in fact – headed for the very bottom of the facility. As he made his way toward the mass storage area, the probe took a different course in quest of the high-security area.

  “What do they do at The Institute of Advanced Clone Studies, anyway?” Morgan asked.

  “Study advanced clones,” Robert replied.

  “Actually, Morgan,” Doc interjected, “it's rather interesting. The work they do has helped press clone technology forward, allowing us to program them more quickly, and for more complicated tasks. Although even basic clones would be a reasonable substitute for a human from your time, their capacity doesn't nearly equal our levels. Or – in your case – your potential.”

  “Which, incidentally,” Robert added, “was why clone-Cleo took close to eighteen hours to write that operating system for the main-drive. I actually thought that was a little odd at the time but, I figured she had other things on her mind, and I knew I did.

  “Anyway, my point is that the clone was only able to do it because Cleo had done the same types of things many, many times. It was able to use what it knew about how she wrote code to simulate writing code. The end result being that it took the clone almost eighteen hours to write up a no-frills OS that Cleo would have probably banged out in four or five.”

  “If that's the case, how was clone-Celeste able to do what she did?”

  “She may not have done any of it,” Robert explained. “You have to keep in mind that our adversary is also a time-traveler.”

  “But not the last one,” Morgan chuckled.

  “No, I'm the last one. In any event, it struck me as almost unbelievable that we just happened to be near a planet where Celeste would be able to fly into the future, find a derelict that could make the trip to Duck à l'orange, and fix it – not to mention steal it without anyone noticing – in less than ten days. Truth, however, is stranger than fiction. Many things that no decent writer would ever put in a story have actually happened in real life. So, I felt that I didn't have any choice but to believe it.

  “Now, though, I think it's obvious that our opponent searched through the up and coming jobs, found one with all the pieces they needed, moved it to the top of the pile somehow, and programmed Celeste with all the information she would need to do the job. Not only that, there's a good chance the ship was repaired, ready, and waiting for her. She may have even had a ride waiting for her when the escape pod landed. In fact – if you want to get technical – we can't prove that the clone we nabbed was the same one that stole the escape pod.”

  “So, there could be more clones of the girls out there?”


  “There could be,” Doc nodded.

  “We're going to have to stay on our toes,” Morgan observed.

  “Yes, we are,” Vox agreed.

  “There it is,” Robert smiled.

  In less than thirty-seconds, the probe had approached the door, entered the pass-code, and made its way inside.

  “Well, that was crazy easy,” Morgan said, shaking his head.

  “It's a lab, Morgan, not a military base.”

  “Then why does it have a high-security area?”

  “It's high-security when compared to the rest of the place. It wasn't designed to keep out people like us – or even industrial spies – it's just meant to keep people from wandering in off the streets.”

  “Isn't it classified?”

  “Any particular project might be, but not the basement itself,” Robert explained. “The experiments are what are secret. Even if – by some miracle – someone managed to break in and steal a clone, that wouldn't give them any research data.”

  “Never mind all that,” Vox said somewhat excitedly. “Are they here?”

  “Let's find out.”

  Fortunately, there were only thirty clone tanks in the high-security area. As a result, they found what they hoped to find in less than five minutes.

  “That's Celeste,” Doc asserted, gazing down at the screen.

  “Are you sure?” Vox asked, a clear tone of trepidation in his voice.

  “Can we risk raising the shield, Rob?” Doc asked. “We need to do that in order to scan her, either way.”

  “I think so,” Robert replied, spinning the probe slowly three-hundred and sixty degrees. “We just need to be quick.”

  The probe raised the shield to reveal what appeared to be Celeste suspended in glowing red liquid. It then hovered nearer her head, quickly scanned her brain, and lowered the shield again.

  “That is Celeste,” Doc nodded.

  “Thank everything good!” Vox cried. “Let's go! When I get my hands on Sturm...”