Serial Fiction with Friends
In the last installment, re-spawned Tucker was captured by the Tjalians and immobilized in a control pod, where he lamented his huge memory gaps and experienced an inconvenient growth spurt.
100% of respondents voted that this month's segment should be "Ainan raids the lab." Vote and ye shall receive!
Read up on previous segments (in past issues) here.
Convergence
Ainan hiked up the steep foothill toward the shiny black building – the lab Jonas built about 25 years after she jumped into the first time stream portal they'd found. She stopped to catch her breath for a moment and admire it. It seemed out of place in this lonesome setting, next to a river in the Wyoming wasteland, but it was a thing of beauty as it reflected the very last rays of the setting sun.
Jonas’s security measures were legendary. She knew they would be; she taught him just about everything he knew. At least to start. The man was brilliant. And because of that, she had to find a way to get him off of her tail, preferably permanently, or he’d wreck her plan to make her future what she’d always dreamed it could be.
She'd risked capture, disfiguration, and death to explore multiple time streams to investigate her options to get into the new lab, until she determined that this time was her best bet, with her current level of knowledge and skill. After this year, Jonas would install new tech that made the lab more impenetrable than Fort Knox or Cheyenne Mountain.
Ainan needed to steal his entire personal hard drive somehow -- or at least an upgraded time capsule pack and anything that might be related to the "skin map" tech -- as far into the future from her origin as she could, so she could use it to more safely elude him and his teams of the past, make some counter-tech, and disappear from his reach forever.
Returning her gaze to the quickly dimming path ahead of her, she set down her pack and pulled out her tablet. The wide main path ended just ahead of where she stood, diverging into three narrower paved paths. Each of the three diverged into more, and so on, up the hill to the lab half a mile away. If she didn’t take the correct path, the strong temporal forces Jonas had somehow harnessed to booby-trap this area would wreak havoc with her body on a cellular level, resulting in nausea and a loss of control of her extremities. She found that out the hard way a couple jumps ago.
She made a special trip to early in the following year so she could tag an employee with a tiny camera while they were in line together at a coffee shop in town. Then she sat back, drank her coffee, and recorded the safe way up. The camera feed was disabled upon entry, though.
While she was in that time, she camped out in a hotel in Cheyenne for several weeks to put the finishing touches on a device that could record and holographically mimic the unique biosigns of another human being for at least a full minute. She would have tried for longer, but she was hoping she could get what she needed without having to risk another series of jumps for a more suitable battery, and then risking Jonas waking up after she rufied him to record all of his biosigns for longer than a minute.
Squatting to pull out her water bottle, she breathed in the sharp, cool air and the scent of the mulched landscaping that ended here, and blew out a breath. She took a drink as she looked at her map and re-familiarized herself with the correct route.
I've earned this retirement. My whole life, people underestimated me, thought I was insane. I'm done with them. I did what I was created to do, made my mark, and now I'm gonna get my payoff!
"Why couldn't you just let me go, Jonas?" she whispered toward the lab.
She placed her bottle back in the side pocket of her time capsule pack and pulled her hood up. Swinging her pack up over one shoulder, she picked up her tablet again and started up the left-most trail.
***
Getting into the lab had been difficult. Despite having Jonas's biosigns recorded, she'd still had to hack her way through an extra layer of security protocols to open doors into this inner sanctum, using a regular peon's terminal on another floor.
It seemed too easy, actually.
She felt the seconds ticking away like whole minutes, knowing that she had to have triggered an invisible alarm system at some point.
Now she stood staring into a dark room full of sleeping monitors, blinking robotics, and who knew what else -- the future of time travel. She wandered across the room, scanning back and forth with the light from her tablet, looking for Jonas's office, desk, table...whatever he had.
There. In front of the floor-to-ceiling window at the far end. That huge desk had to be it. Jonas never loved working in the basement. He loved natural light. She trotted the rest of the way across the room, carefully sidestepping and ducking through cords, robotic arms, and a maze of tables and computer workstations. She sat down at his desk.
Yep, this was it. He'd left a box with a picked-over assortment of donuts behind. They both loved glazed donuts when they were working on a particularly difficult solution, but her favorite donut was a filled chocolate bismarck. She hadn't had one in forever...and she was in luck! She took a large bite out of the last bismarck in the box and wiped the bit of left-behind frosting from her lip with a finger. Heaven!
She rifled his desk drawers with her other hand until she found what appeared to be a portable drive. Would it be big enough? It was all she could find quickly, so she woke up his terminal, put on his newer version of her virtual-time-reality headset, turned on her biosigns imitator for the initial scan sequence, and went to work. She knew the bioscans would be random following the initial scan, and there was no way to predict when she would inevitably set off the alarm.
She couldn't believe he wasn't here already.
Ten minutes passed in a blaze. Her adrenal glands were in overdrive. As she tapped the final popup screen to download a copy of his entire hard drive, she turned on the biosigns imitator again to give confirmation and popped the very last morsel of the donut in her mouth. The machine began to hum faintly. She took a drink from her water bottle and stuck it back in her pack.
Thankfully, his terminal was lightning-fast, and that enormous number of terabytes flew onto the portable drive with space left over, in less than a minute. She could use the device she'd brought from the future to try to create a backup, but she wasn't sure it was worth the time, since it might not be time-safe (was anything, truly?), and it might not even interface with the older operating system.
No time to think about it. She restarted the process, linked the device with few issues, and made a second copy. She tossed both drives into her pack. Fumbling back toward the main door while scanning the work stations, she found what appeared to be a nanite sample, and swiped the tube. She was so excited about the potential of the nanites that when she finally looked up, she was halfway down a hall she didn't remember seeing when she entered the main lab.
The lights in the main lab flicked on. "We know you're here, Ainan! There's no way out!" Jonas's voice echoed in the main lab room. "Just come talk to me! Why are you running? Why are you doing this? Just come talk!"
She ran tiptoeing down the rest of the hall toward a doorway that stood cracked open at the end.
She couldn't believe her luck. These were definitely upgraded time capsule packs -- not much different on the outside from the one she had! She grabbed one from the cubbies on the wall. If this is a capsule storage room, then... She scanned the rest of the room with her tablet light. Yes! Another door. It was locked, of course. She turned on the biosign imitator and used it to enter the next room. She closed the door behind her and heard the multi-lock engage.
Turning, she stopped, stunned. No way.
FOUR time streams were visible as she peered around the enormous, round chamber through the upgraded VTR headset. A convergence! How could four exist so close together, and why wasn't she or anyone else affected by the inevitable space-time-shredding forces that had to be filling this room?
She pressed the power button. "Training mode!" she voiced quietly into the mic. The pack lit up, showing her which button to press for the initial setting.
Jonas, my friend, you've really outdone yourself. And, in this case, un-done yourself.
Ainan had the capsule figured out and programmed for her destination in under a minute. She heard the door to the capsule storage room close, and footsteps clattering closer. The multi-lock disengaged. She took off her old pack, threw the new pack on her back, and ran for the nearest time stream, to her left.
"Ainan!" Jonas yelled, reaching for her and missing as he came through the door with two men behind him. "Don't do it! You don't know--"
She jumped, and the stream pulled her in and away. She giggled as she zipped down the glittering tunnel of time. This was a fast one!
