The Quantum Connection

CHAPTER 17

On several occasions since finding him I had asked Mike to explain to me about the Grays' history and where they came from. He seemed only to have navigational data as to various alien homeworlds (the Grays' homeworld was one he didn't have) and data about the abductees. He explained to me that this was because he didn't know the Grays' mission and that he only flew the ship, ran day-to-day functions, and took care of certain mundane data storage. The Grays were great strategists and didn't really need the SuperAgents involved in their business. Consider a computer on the web, Mike said. The computer is useful, but the goals of the computer's owner are not known to the computer itself.

Using the navigational data in Mike we put together a map of the Milky Way and overlaid upon it territories of various aliens. Anson and Anne Marie and I were discussing this one morning over doughnuts and coffee (I was having a Mountain Dew) and Anson noticed something startling.

"So, let me see if I understand this completely." Anson stroked his thinning hairline and took a swig of his coffee. "The blue area is where we have been and the green is where we have looked. The tiny dot that makes on the galaxy overlay is just that, a dot. The red area here is Gray territory, this yellow area is some other alien, and there are no other aliens in the galaxy?"

"Well, Anson, I'm not sure that's right. The SuperAgent on board the Phoenix just says that the large areas are controlled by the Grays and the Lumpeyins, whoever they are. It doesn't say if they are the only species or not. But it does appear that the Grays and the Lumpeyins have divided the galaxy between them," I explained.

Anne Marie leaned across the table and grabbed a doughnut. "Yeah, I see that, but what about at higher resolutions? Are there other species like us embedded in there?"

"Good question, Annie. Let me ask it." I leaned back in my chair and talked to Mike verbally as I had been doing in front of the W-squared folks. "Mike, do you have data on other species and can you mark them on the graphic display with a black x?"

"Sure, Steven." Mike responded over the intercom we had set up a few days earlier. The image of the painted galaxy on the flat-screen display now had two thousand or so black x's on it.

"Wow!" Annie exclaimed.

"I had no idea!"

"Mike," Anson asked, "can you zoom in on our area and show it at a scale that will show us the boundary between us and the Grays' territory?"

"Yes."

"Look at that; it's a perfect circle around us, two hundred light years in diameter. No wonder we haven't found any aliens yet," Anne Marie pointed out.

"Mike, can you tell me if there are other of these civilizations that have such a perfect boundary about them?" Anson was on to something, but I wasn't sure what.

"Yes, about a quarter of them display such boundaries," Mike replied.

"What? You mean five hundred or so of these spots have a two-hundred-light-year diameter boundary around them?" I asked.

"Yes, Steven, exactly five hundred seventeen," Mike assured me in the automaton voice he used for the intercom.

Anson stroked his chin and then leaned back in his chair. "Mike could you paint these with a bright orange x instead of a black one?

"Yes," Mike said.

The image now displayed was startling. All of the orange x's were deep inside the Grays' red-painted region of the galaxy. What did this mean?

Anson stroked his chin again and ran his fingers through his hair. He picked up his coffee cup but then set it back down before he took a sip from it. "That's it! We are quarantined from the Grays for some reason or other. It could be due to a Prime Directive like in Star Trek or fear or some treaty with these Lumpeyins or, heck, it might even be an actual quarantine. Who knows? The one thing I am sure of is this. The Grays outgun us and outnumber us by a huge portion of the galaxy. Their resources must be immense. So, something is keeping them from conquering us. Maybe it is these Lumpeyins doing it. Somebody had to have been around five thousand years ago with technology that could shoot them down and I'm betting on them."

Then I had an epiphany and opened my private channel with Mike.

Mike, are any of these quarantined planets locations with isolated abductees?

That is a very interesting question, Steven. The answer is yes. All of the planets in the quarantined regions have isolated abductees in them.

Do any of the nonquarantined planets have isolated abductees in them? I held my breath for an eternity during the millisecond it took for Mike to process the data and return with an answer.

No, Steven. Only the planets with quarantines have any of the isolated abductees.

My God, Mike, what does that mean?

I do not have enough data to give you an answer, Steven, sorry.

One thing was certain. It was time to come clean with the W-squared folks and with Tatiana, but in what order? I owed it to Tatiana to talk with her first. Besides, I loved her and I could no longer justify hiding this from her. After lunch I went to find Tatiana. She had been out on a routine patrol with 'Becca and several other soldier types. In the weeks that had followed the battle between us and the W-squared people Tatiana and 'Becca had made amends and had actually become friends. She had also befriended 'Becca's sidekick, Sara Tibbs. Apparently, Sara was an original member of the warp drive development team. Sara and 'Becca were a pair, much like a younger sister/older sister arrangement ('Becca being the oldest).

Tatiana, 'Becca, and Sara had completed a Solar Focus Telescope survey and were now hanging out on the patio of the Luna Grill by the lake. I knew this because several times during the mission Tatiana and I had tested the link between the SuperAgents. We never even had a fuzzy connection or a time lag even with more than six hundred astronomical units separating us. It was cool.

Obviously, the signals were noncausal and we began discussing temporal paradox issues. Soon after heading down the horrid path of temporal mechanics I got a headache and gave up.

What if you traveled toward me at warp speed and I thought to you to turn your vessel to the right? Would I see you travel to the right before I thought the message to you? Could we devise a way to send a message back in time that would be useful? Tatiana asked

Let's leave time travel alone for now, what do you say? I thought to Tatiana.

Suits me, it hurts to think about it. But maybe one day we'll try to make use of it, she thought back to me in Russian.

Maybe, but let's stop the alien abductions first.

Okay.

On the way to the Luna Grill I bumped into Jim and Anson and they decided to join me. The two of them were wearing karate outfits, were very sweaty, and seemed tired.

"Anson, you guys do martial arts, I take it?" I asked.

"Yeah, some of us around here ain't nanomachine enhanced and must maintain our fitness levels as best we can." He laughed.

"Yeah, we mere mortals have to stave off death the old-fashioned way," Jim added.

"You know, there is no reason for you to be getting old. I could repair any ailments you have and even reverse and stop the genetic deterioration of aging. I've done this with myself and it doesn't take the nanomachines to maintain. Actually, I have to give Tatiana the credit for the idea. She came up with it." I shrugged my shoulders and raised my eyebrows as if to ask if they were interested.

"Are you serious?" Anson asked.

"Of course I am," I assured them.

"Well, shit fire boy, why you waiting so long about telling us this?" Anson asked in his deep Alabama drawl.

"I guess I thought you might think it to be unnatural?" The truth was, it had taken me a while to trust them enough to enhance them to even a limited extent. It had been a good tactical idea for me and Tatiana to remain the only ones so enhanced until we got to know everyone better.

"Listen, Steven," Jim started in on me. "I know you are a Californian turned Ohio . . . Ohioan . . . Ohian . . . whatever the hell, and you might think of things a little more, uh, emotionally . . ."

"Hell, Jim, why you beatin' around the bush about it?" Anson said. "He's from California; he knows he comes from a liberal and utopian-minded background. Steven, we are more logically minded here. If a man comes along and offers me the fountain of youth you better believe I'm gonna take a big-assed swig from it. Morality has no play in it."

Jim laughed and punched Anson on the shoulder. "I agree with the old codger."

I chuckled and placed a hand on Jim's shoulder and one on Anson's. I instructed Mike to implement the fountain of youth program and to pull twenty years off Anson's appearance and ten off Jim's.

"Aggghhh! That stings!" Anson yelped.

"Oh, you big sissy, it only tickles," Jim said.

"There, it's done. You guys are somewhere between twenty-five and thirty now and will remain like that until you get hit by a truck," I said.

"Can't be, son," Anson said. "My pants still fit. I was four inches smaller in the waist when I was twenty-five."

"I had the clothing adjusted as well. And be careful for a bit because I thought you guys might like a bit of extra strength and speed as well."

"Are you serious?" Jim asked.

"Of course he is," Anson replied as he blurred, zipped to the edge of the lake that was a hundred meters away and back in about two seconds. "Holy shit!" he said. He looked his right hand over and pulled his top off and looked at his chest. "The scar on my hand that's been there for twenty years is gone and the bullet hole scars are gone too!"

"Did you want to keep them? I can put them back."

"No, Steven, I had just as soon forget I ever got shot," he replied.

Realizing his new abilities, Jim leapt into the air five meters and completed several backflips before hitting the ground. He lost his balance and fell on his butt. He got up and dusted off his karate pants and then jumped up again and did a three-hundred-sixty-degree outer crescent kick followed by a tornado roundhouse kick that was perfect and nearly impossible for a normal human being in one gravity.

"Wicked!" he said. "Would you do this for the rest of the team?"

"Of course."

And so we did.

The crew decided to use cosmetic surgery, diet, and exercise as a cover story.

Anson posed the thought that if his body could so easily be adjusted and enhanced that his mind could too—couldn't it? Tatiana and I conversed in our mental speak for a few seconds to decide how to handle it and we decided not to let them in on the whole story of the alien SuperAgents but we could let them in on the enhanced memory-handling and problem-solving abilities. We asked them what types of enhancements they would like and whatever they came up with we tried to accommodate them to some extent. Anson was thrilled to be able to do any type of calculator function in his head instantly, and to be able to remember every page of every book that he read in the future. Jim wanted instant and total recall of anything any of his senses had ever detected.

Well, you can see that this went on for the rest of the evening and turned out to actually be kind of fun. Tatiana and I bonded with the group a little more and were beginning to be trusted as part of the family. They also opened up to us about their own pasts. Anson and Jim told a riveting story about how their crew had developed the world's first nanoscoptic power generator that was powered by the vacuum energy fluctuations of spacetime. They figured out how to use these Casimir-effect power supplies to power the first warp field tests in a laboratory in Huntsville, Alabama. These power generators also had the problematic trait of going chaotic every now and then and blowing up with a very big bang.

At some point in the process of developing the warp drive field coil technologies Rebecca had been involved in an accident that implanted her with millions of these microscopic power systems and she remained sick for a major part of the development project.

But, after persistence and Southern stubbornness, Anson and his team finally built a warp drive that could be tested in space. Anson and Tabitha deployed the warp probe test vehicle from the Space Shuttle and were preparing to launch it from orbit when the Space Shuttle was destroyed, thus stranding them in orbit. Anson and Tabitha reprogrammed the probe and traveled at warp speed back to Earth and crashed into a pine grove.

That was just the beginning of their adventure. They told us about how they were chased by giant tornados that were spun up by the warp probe's entry into the atmosphere (the public all thought it was a meteor) and about how they got their scars in a harrowing shootout, and about the Secret War with warp weapons against the Chinese and the Russians. The story was incredible. The description of The Rain did remind me of my family and I felt a little sad. But more angry with the people who started the war. After many margaritas, Tabitha grabbed Anson by the hand and told him that she wanted to go try out some of her new modifications on him and see how his turned out. I took that as a good sign that it was time to go to our quarters in the trailer park. It was time to talk to Tatiana about the isolated abducteeism.