Glassford Girl: Boxed Set (Complete Series) (Time Jumper Series)
Page 44
“Go on, I’m listening.”
“I’m not sure how to tell you this—”
Nora didn’t wait for her to continue. “Let me guess. You’re pregnant,” she said, using a disappointed, motherly voice. “And I’m guessing that street boy, Derek, is the father? Am I right?”
Emily nodded and gulped, not sure what Nora was going to say next.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
A few minutes earlier at the house next door. . .
Ingrid Johannsen loved getting up early to work out, and today was no different. She was already in a full sweat, lying on her back on a purple yoga mat in the upstairs exercise studio her successful husband, Paul, had built for her the year before. The studio was a birthday present—at least that was the official statement they’d made to their family and friends. However, the truth told a different story.
It was actually a make-up gift for an indiscretion Paul had with the next-door neighbor’s slutty daughter last summer. The gorgeous girl was home from the university that weekend and tramping around the neighborhood, screwing all the men on the street.
Ingrid couldn’t bring herself to say the slut’s name, but apparently, the girl was on some kind of a revenge quest for something her college boyfriend had done to her. The kids at her school even had a name for her sexual rampage. They called it ‘seed farming’ and Ingrid understood the meaning to be collecting semen from every man in a one-block radius.
She decided to forgive Paul, especially since they hadn’t had sex in the previous five years. Sure, some of it was his fault, but most of it was hers, having gained sixty pounds and letting herself go. She couldn’t blame him for not wanting to touch her—she didn’t like how she looked or felt, and she didn’t want to touch herself, either.
At the time, her sex drive was nonexistent and she’d moved into the bedroom at the far end of the hall, leaving him alone and sexually frustrated. Every woman knew that men were just cavemen with table manners. They had needs. It was genetic. It was something that’d been hardwired into their DNA. Something that could be traced back to the days of Adam and Eve and it’s how Earth had become so overpopulated.
Truth was, only society had changed, enforcing the idea of marriage and monogamy. Deep down, she knew his needs would eventually win out and he’d cheat on her. Maybe on some level, her subconscious wanted him to stray, forcing her to finally get her act together.
Paul’s affair ended up being a much-needed wake-up call for both her marriage and her long-term health. Since then, she’d lost most of the extra weight, saving both her self-esteem and her marriage.
Thankfully, they made it through the turmoil, unlike some of the other couples on the block. Ingrid was now back sleeping in the master bedroom each night, and she and Paul were having regular sex. She felt like a vibrant, confident woman again, making every minute of every day worth living. Her universe was back in balance, like it used to be when they first got married—a time in her life when the air around her was brimming with sweetness and she couldn’t stop smiling.
So after all the crying and sleepless nights, the slut’s actions that weekend had saved Ingrid’s life on multiple levels. Not that she’d ever admit it to anyone, and certainly never to Paul. He needed to stay on his toes and continue to make up for what he’d done. She had him right where he needed to be, uttering her two most favorite words whenever she asked him for something: “Yes, dear.”
She’d learned a lot through the horrible experience, especially one important axiom: a woman had to learn how to train her caveman. And sometimes, in order to do that, she had to take one in the heart. Ingrid did. And in some strange, twisted way, she knew she was better for it.
Let’s face it. Life isn’t perfect. Neither are couples. And certainly, cavemen aren’t either. There were gonna be setbacks, some more painful than others. But rarely were they the end of the world, unless you let them be. That’s what wisdom taught a woman, because starting over at her age wasn’t the answer. So she sucked it up, swallowed the pain and her pride, then took charge.
But the story didn’t end there.
The fallout from the girl’s seed farming was so scandalous that her parents were forced to put their house up for sale and move away. It was the same house that Ingrid could see from where she was right now—the workout room on the second floor.
Her massive studio stretched from the rear of the house to the front of their home on Canyon View Drive, where they’d been living for the past eleven years. Paul was still asleep in the master bedroom next door and would be until the alarm clock woke him up at 6:40 a.m., like it did every morning.
Ingrid was on her last set of ‘hundreds’—a Pilates exercise designed to strengthen both her core abdominal muscles and her external obliques. She kept her legs off the ground at a forty-five degree angle, her shoulders off the floor, her chin tucked to her chest, and her lower spine flat on the mat. She put her arms straight alongside her torso, palms down, pumping them up and down in short arcs as she counted.
“Three-two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten,” she grunted, exhaling on each number, then inhaling when she reached ten. “Four-two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.” She continued until she reached one hundred, then rolled over onto her knees and folded her torso over her thighs in a resting position.
Before she should catch another breath, she heard the low rumble of a car cruising by on the street outside, which was unusual—their cul-de-sac was quiet, particularly at this time of the morning. She got up, still breathing heavily, and went to the window overlooking the next-door neighbor’s vacant house.
The car slowed down to about half its original speed, but continued along the street until it suddenly braked and made a sharp U-turn. When it returned, it turned right and pulled into the driveway of the house next door.
Ingrid kept her eyes on the stranger’s vehicle, trying to catch a glimpse of the license plate, while her hands went in search of the pad of paper and pencil on the window sill. She always had the note taking items handy in case she needed to record something happening in the area, like right now. She’d done so ever since she and Paul had joined the neighborhood watch committee.
Everyone was supposed to keep writing materials near each window in their house, so that’s what they did. Not that Paul ever used them, but that was a story for another time. Right now, she was focused on the activity outside.
The driver leaned over and pushed the front passenger door open, then sat back up and flashed the headlights twice. Then, to Ingrid’s shock and amazement, a naked girl with messy red hair appeared from behind the bushes. Ingrid hadn’t noticed her there before, probably because the high angle view was partially obstructed by a palm tree on the side. The girl dashed to the open car door and got in.
“Paul!” she yelled over her shoulder as the occupants hugged in the car. It wasn’t long before the car started moving, backing onto the street before speeding off with a roar of its engine.
“Paul, wake up. There’s something going on outside. Call the police!”
Before Paul could answer her hail, something else caught Ingrid’s eye. A bright light behind the neighbor’s house—maybe ten feet from the fancy pool slide. Everything in the backyard was now being bombarded with random flashes of colorful light, all of it originating from a single point about two feet off the ground.
A second later, the flashes changed, coming together until they formed what looked like a blue sphere of energy about the size of a softball. It quickly grew in size and intensity, expanding until it was at least ten feet in diameter, all the while still hovering and spinning above the lawn.
“Paul! Come here! Quick! You have to see this!”
Just then, she saw a blur of movement. It was coming from inside the blue sphere. Some type of shape was forming near its center, but she couldn’t make out what it was. It was hard to keep her eyes on the object because the light emanating from around the sphere was too bright.
Then, in a flash, the brilliant sphere vanished, leaving behind only a naked man in the grass. Even though the stranger was curled up and on his side, Ingrid could see he was very well built and his skin had an odd orange tint to it. Wait, that couldn’t be right. Orange-colored skin? Must be the yard lights playing tricks on her.
Regardless of his color, she wasn’t sure if he was alive or not since he wasn’t moving. But her answer came a moment later when the muscular man straightened his legs and arms, uncurling from the fetal position. He stood up and turned around to face Ingrid. Her eyes caught a full-frontal view of his well-defined privates.
“Paul! Call the police! There’s a naked Orange Man in the neighbor’s backyard! And he’s huge!”
Paul finally answered in a sleepy voice. “Yes, dear. Orange juice with a huge breakfast is fine. Anything you want, Sweetie.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
The muscular man with orange-hued skin stood up and turned to face north after his arrival, allowing his astrometric sensors to align. It took a full second to process the position of the constellations relative to his present location, but confirmation finally came. He’d arrived at the designated coordinates on Earth.
His tactile inputs indicated he’d been lying in wet grass before he stood up. He was concerned about the excessive moisture, so he ran a quick diagnostic to verify the status of his integrated bio- systems. He was thankful when all indicators reported green. It meant the new upgrades by HQ had done their job. The moisture wasn’t going to be a problem, not like last time when he followed his target into a stand of murky water on a golf course, causing a complete cascading shutdown.
He hated shutdowns, because they meant a painful short-term memory purge would be next. Then he’d have to endure a complete systems refit and cognitive restore as of the last neural save point, leaving him drained and exhausted.
Even though the wet grass wasn’t going to cause him issues, there was one problem—his internal atomic clock showed the local time to be seven minutes later than expected. The mission specs were usually dead-on accurate when it came to coordinates and arrival time, meaning the transmission must have been delayed, again.
He waited a few seconds for his onboard Encrypted Action System to scan the hyper-stream encoded by HQ just before he departed. The data channel relayed to him what had just happened. The setback was due to his transmission’s penetration of dark matter. HQ was forced to make some last-second adjustments to ensure his safe arrival, landing him a few minutes behind schedule.
Even though delays were rare, it had happened before so the setback wasn’t entirely surprising. The Authority’s spatial charts weren’t always the most accurate, especially when traveling this far. At least it was only seven minutes this time. It wouldn’t take him long to catch up to the target, assuming she was on foot.
The bioengineered man was one of many versions just like him. Each was identical, standing six-feet-two-inches tall and weighing two-hundred-and-forty-pounds. He wasn’t fond of his light brown hair, high cheekbones, brown eyes, and narrow nose, but what was an engineered man to do? You are who the makers say you are. Or in his case, you are who they make you out to be.
He was known to his makers, The Authority, as 3D57, which was short for Three Delta Fifty-Seven. His designation number was stenciled on the inside of his upper lip, near the gum line, and used for tracking and identification purposes. In an instant, anyone looking at his bio-marker would know his incarnation batch, generation model, and imprint number. In truth, it was the only way to tell all the identical units apart from each other.
The Authority had first obtained the working prototype—the living person from which all viable cells were derived—approximately thirty years earlier during an advanced scouting mission to determine the index point of the failure.
He often wondered why his skin was a strange orange color, but asking questions wasn’t within his purview. So he just did as he was programmed and kept his seldom-used mouth shut.
The only thing on his body used less often than his mouth was the appendage hanging between his legs. He had no idea why The Authority had included it, but it was there nonetheless.
All he knew for sure was that his creators had spent a bundle on developing his kind, enhancing all six layers of his neocortex with an intricate lattice of heuristic algorithms that would allow him to process sensory input, conduct spatial reasoning, and achieve conscious thought at genetically enhanced levels.
It was a masterful blend of advanced technology, all of which was created and installed for one objective: find and track his assigned target, Emily Heart. And to do so until it was time for extraction—which, as it turned out, was the focus of today’s incursion. He couldn’t wait to finally complete his mission, then be tasked to something else. Something more interesting and less volatile.
On the surface, his mission objective appeared to be rather simple and straightforward, but he’d learned the hard way that it wasn’t. Not when following an emotionally-charged teenage girl across time and space. Complications would often result, like arriving underwater or attempting to stay out of sight while keeping tabs on her outside a crowded sports arena.
3D57’s instruction matrix contained twenty-eight-billion neuro-routines embedded inside clusters of non-transient memory engrams. His memory clusters were designed in such a way as to act as a command and control operating system, while pulling double duty as permanent data storage for each of his twenty-one sensory input channels.
He wasn’t sure how it all worked exactly, not that it mattered. His tech made him who he was and why he was—the sole reason he existed in the first place.
One could say the same about his sidekick—the metallic briefcase that was due to arrive any moment. It went everywhere he went, tagging along on each mission.
He remained perfectly still as the Communication and Reconfiguration Toolkit, or CART for short, arrived in the grass a few feet away. It was delivered inside a sphere of crackling blue energy, like it had been numerous times before.
The CART allowed his controller back at HQ to remain in constant contact and monitor him thanks to its built-in quantum transceiver. His controller could also revise, update, and enhance each one of his processing routines and mission protocols, if necessary, and do so remotely.
But the CART wasn’t only for command and control; it could be used for tactical scenarios as well. Its matter reconfiguration device was his favorite tool, allowing him to create whatever objects or weapons he needed during a mission. That single piece of tech had saved his orange-colored hide on more than one occasion over the past thirty years, avoiding the dreaded memory purge and system reload back at HQ.
Ever since its inception, The Authority had been carefully monitoring for spikes in energy utilization between neighboring spacetime dimensions. A surge meant one of their designated targets was active and traveling, leading the technicians inside the Central Command and Control Center to take action.
First, they’d task a subspace micro-probe to sample the particle trail and determine its biological signature. Then, once they had a match, they’d deploy any number of units, like 3D57, depending on the mission specs for that particular traveler.
In 3D57’s case, a match on the bio-trail meant that Emily Heart had just been transformed into exotic blue matter before jumping across time and space. Emily was at the top of The Authority’s target list, requiring them to task far more resources than any other traveler in their history. In total, there were seven units assigned to her, including 3D57—three more units than any other target currently being monitored.
Now that he had the CART, it was time for 3D57 to move. He scanned the area but didn’t detect the presence of Emily Heart. His makers had hoped he’d come out of his time jump only a f
ew seconds after Emily Heart had materialized, allowing for a quick recovery. However, the unpredictable nature of nearby dark matter had affected the particle flow during transmission, delaying D57’s arrival.
His analytical protocols kicked in, relaying subsequent steps to be completed: produce weapon, find clothes, acquire target.
3D57 knelt by the briefcase and opened it. Inside the top of it was a gleaming chrome surface filled with swirling contours of gray energy. The bottom of the case was a black void receptor plate, connected via a quantum link to the Akashic Field.
During the first training session after his creation, his newly-assigned handler told him that the Akashic Field was a realm of metaphysical space where all information in the universe was stored as digital data. Not only that, but the Akashic Field was the single point in the multi-verse where all universes and all dimensions connected with each other and shared energy and information.
The CART’s shadow base began to change color, from all black to gunmetal gray. A bulge rose from its interior and changed shape a dozen times, eventually morphing into an all-white, right-angled pistol-like weapon.
He plucked it off the gray connector strand and turned it over in his hands, then held it over the case. The CART became active again, this time sending three snake-like tentacles swirling up and out, eventually connecting to the weapon. A radiant ball of blue energy surged through the tentacles and landed in the center of the handheld weapon to deposit a fully-charged power core into the gun. A moment later, the tentacles retracted into the briefcase and disappeared into the swirl of nothingness.
He went to a window along the back of the house and detected a residual heat signature lingering inside the home. “Possible Target Sighting,” he recorded in his mission log.
Just then, his auxiliary sensors detected movement from the right. His eyes went in search of the source and spotted a middle-aged woman observing him from the second-story window of the neighboring domicile. His mind took a snapshot of the observer’s face just before the woman’s eyes went wide and she ducked below the window frame. He saved a copy of her image in his secondary contact database and returned his focus to the primary objective.