THE STORY SO FAR: In 1990 consultant Jerry Staute is sorting through strange new memories of 1972 somehow bestowed upon him by captors only days before. Staute is stunned to recollect a self-proclaimed female time traveler informing him he will someday write up details of a fantastic multi-universe-spanning transport technology. A technology with which something goes wrong in a future vessel of exploration, thereby leading to his own abduction in 1972.

I was speechless for a moment. Then I realized the truth.

"Well-- you're wrong, lady!" I shot at her. "I'm just a piss-poor engineering student who's barely scraping by in most of his classes! There's no way I could ever do something like that! A paper about whipping around the probabilities stream? I don't even know what the hell a probabilities stream is, much less how to find my way around one! You've got the wrong G.W. Staute, lady! And I want to go home!"

Ling looked unshaken by my outburst; the walls would tell me why.

"We wish to go home too, Jerry Staute. But we cannot. Neither may we return you to your home. For it was only due to the rarest of coincidences that we found you.

"As things stand now, we likely could not return to your origin in a thousand years of trying. So we shall all of us find our way home, or none of us.

"Like it or not Jerry Staute, you had best hope we didn't err in selecting you."

I didn't quite understand all this yet, but it sure sounded bad. The only thing I knew for certain was that they had picked the wrong G.W. Staute! Talk about mistakes! Here was the whopper to beat them all!

The Great Cosmic Joke: the only folks in the universe with worse luck than me, are cursed to elect me as their savior! I'd always known God had a sick sense of humor. But this was a stretch even for him.

I woke up cramped and sore. I'd fallen asleep on the sleeper shelf without a sleeper.

I also had a headache again. And was itching really bad this morning, all over. Morning? I couldn't tell if it was day or night in this place. Hell, I'd never even seen a single window to the outside since I'd been here.

I zapped in the toilet facilities, used them, and then watched them blink out of existence again. It was strange how easily one got used to such things. I thought about breakfast and it appeared, complete with table, chair, and cutlery. It seemed like I was getting the hang of this stuff after all, I thought, as I munched my twentieth century style eggs, bacon, and toast. No telling what the future geeks ate for breakfast-- if they still ate at all. Then I remembered seeing Ling eat at Tech. But of course she may have just been doing that as part of her act.

It occurred to me I hadn't had a shower since my abduction. I nuzzled my arm pit, but detected no odor. I couldn't understand it; I usually stank if I didn't shower regularly. But here, nothing. Well, I figured I must really look bad, anyway. I wished for a mirror.

A chunk of the wall from ceiling to floor turned reflective, and I had one. I studied my appearance. Funny: I didn't look a week plus unwashed.

It'd been two days (or two waking periods anyway) since Ling's revelation to me about who she thought I was.

The issue of my identity disturbed me. But the realization I hadn't even thought of bathing once in maybe a week, disturbed me still more. I hadn't been that busy! My mind hadn't seemed to be running on all cylinders since I got here. It felt like I'd been in a strange half-sleep, or dream-state, and was only waking up a bit at a time, as the days passed.

Then I noticed I was still clean shaven too. Now that really seemed odd, I thought, as I ran a hand over my chin. Was someone shaving me in my sleep? And there was no stubble! I always had stubble! There was no way I could shave this close...

And my clothes weren't dirty. Of course, I was no longer wearing my original clothes. Instead, my captors had dressed me in something like a reddish orange jumpsuit the very first time they had me unconscious. There was no underwear, I might add. I undressed, and examined both myself and the suit for signs of grime (or unclean smell). There were none. I looked and felt as if I'd had a shower today already.

I put my suit back on. It was funny, but I'd gotten faster accustomed to the toilet appearing and disappearing, than I had the fact that these funny clothes had no fasteners. You pulled on them and they came apart to let you out. Then you pulled them back on, and they came back together again, almost like they were alive.

You couldn't even see a seam, after the edges had rejoined.

When I'd first discovered this, I'd pulled them apart and put them back together a dozen times I guess, trying to locate a seam after the fact. Never could though.

The jumpsuit had something like a hybrid sock and shoe combination built-in to the bottom of the pants legs. Somehow the weird little bulbs there would flow over your entire foot the moment you pushed into them, forming a perfect fitting piece of footwear (complete with a thin sole) that I could never figure out where it came from, or where it disappeared to when you pulled your foot back out again. Heck: the entire suit always seemed perfectly tailored to fit me, and seemed to accomplish this feat on-the-fly when I put it on.

These clothes were weird in other ways as well. Once, I'd been pacing the floor thinking, and as I turned around I tripped. Not that there was anything to trip on; I'd just gotten my feet tangled up with one another (I admit it: I'm not what you'd call graceful). Anyway, I tripped and fell. And for a split second my jumpsuit changed on me. I know it did because I purposely repeated the act several times afterwards to confirm it. What did the suit do? Previously undetectable pads blew up like balloons over all the high impact points of my body during the fall. And blew up fast. I mean, those suckers were already full-size and ready to hit the ground instantly once I started falling. And they disappeared just as quickly after I'd soft-landed.

They were so fast about expanding and contracting that I wasn't sure they were really doing that the first time or two. Especially since they were so good at cushioning your fall, that you didn't even bounce afterwards. Anyway, it looked like it'd be really hard to get hurt in this jumpsuit.

My naturally rebellious nature was accompanying my self-awareness in its gradual return. I'd never liked being controlled by anyone-- even a pretty girl.

These future yahoos maybe had me trapped in their ship for now, but eventually I'd escape. I was learning more every day about how to exploit their resources. They didn't seem to realize it was a bad idea to teach a captive how everything worked in their prison.

Still, it'd be a while before I could make my break. For one thing, I hadn't figured out just where I might escape to. From the way Ling talked, even if I could find a way off the ship, there was nowhere outside for me to go.

I wanted badly to somehow defy their absolute control of me. I also felt the whole place was too strange: too alien. I wanted a touch of good old twentieth century Earth around to soothe my psyche, while I planned my escape.

And then it came to me: the perfect answer.

I had Arbitur whip me up a fresh set of twentieth century clothes, and began wearing them instead of the jumpsuit (Arbitur appeared able to make anything on request). If they tried to dress me again, somebody would get punched for it!

Arbitur refused to make the duds exactly like those they'd taken from me, though. My new ones possessed the same hidden inflatable cushions as the jumpsuit. But at least they looked right, and the fasteners were in the style of my own time. And the seams remained seams when the clothing was worn. Yes, I still had little bulb footwear which transformed into final form only when slipped into; but while being worn they looked exactly like socks and shoes from my home century.

Since the Signposts discussion, I'd also been further exploring the shush net services Ling had described. I'd learned a lot.

I'd discovered the ship was a damn big affair. Especially when you considered the miniscule number of crew. To get a firm grasp on its size I'd had Arbitur compare its usable interior space to that of the largest 1972 US aircraft carrier.

According to Arbitur, the Pagnew (the name of the ship) was roughly the equivalent of around several dozen 1972 aircraft carriers in total volume accessible (or otherwise useful) to the crew.

Of course, an awful lot of this space was just that: empty space. The ship had some fairly large storage compartments that contained almost nothing at present.

Ling told me later all the empty rooms were meant to hold anything interesting the Pagnew might discover on its voyage, to bring back to origin. But since the only interesting spot they'd been thus far was the twentieth century, and they couldn't very well scoop up much there without adverse effects, they'd settled for just grabbing me.

Of course! Why wouldn't an advanced civilization spend zillions of dollars, risk lives, and build the most fantastic ship of all time, just to come and kidnap me?

[The ludicrousness of this thought made it one of the most likely things about the whole tale so far, from my own experience. Take something like the present U.S. government, give it five hundred years to fester and inbreed, and it'd likely stock a craft like the Pagnew with people imbecilic enough to do just such a thing.]

I could recall past moments in my life when the thought of all this would have made me feel important. But it didn't now. Not when I knew it was all a horrendous (maybe historic!) mistake. Not when it meant being locked up with a bunch of hostile futurites.

Hell: maybe eight and a half more years from now I figured, we might find the real Signposts Staute, and he would lead us home.

At this moment in my onboard orientation, I'd been under the mistaken impression that there were only the two people in the active crew of such a huge ship. Yes: just two. Because Riki, it turned out, wasn't a person. At least, not a human one. He was human looking, but not human being.

Riki was a robot. Or something not far from it. And he wasn't alone. There were twenty-one other active robots on board as well. I say 'active', because there were another seventy-eight 'in-active' robots, spread out among various storage rooms. Along with a healthy supply of other organic folks (read: living), in stasis.

So there were a hundred humanoid robots on the ship. But the total number of robots had to be in the thousands-- maybe hundreds of thousands. Because there were entire fleets of robot bugs onboard. The visible faction of these ranged in size from football to ant scale. Don't get me wrong: these robot bugs weren't dirty or icky like real bugs-- at least, not when you got to know them. Actually, they were pretty handy to have around.

These bugs did all our dirty work for us. They kept everything cleaned up and organized, and did repair and maintenance tasks of various sorts.

They mostly stayed out of sight unless they were needed. Because mankind's natural aversion to little creepy crawlies had played a strong role in the initial development of the devices.

According to Arbitur there were even smaller robots in the make up of everything here; so small as to be invisible. He claimed that much of the stuff on-board was actually made up entirely of robotic bugs, which were simply so tiny you saw masses of them as solid objects.

For instance, he said our jumpsuits were such conglomerations.

Of course, by this point I was ready to believe almost anything.

Since Arbitur was the 'brain' of the ship, I'd considered he and the ship as one and the same. And used their names interchangeably at first.

But the shifter ship had actually been christened the 'Pagnew' after someone famous in Ling's time for discovering some new aspects of 'weather' that quantum particles experienced on their own level, or something like that. I didn't know what she was talking about, and didn't want to know. It was all I could handle just to absorb the stuff the crew insisted that I learn.

Arbitur said much of their equipment was modular, which meant many parts could be easily exchanged between devices. He said he himself (the brain) had been plugged into the ship in just such a manner, but that the plan was for this to only be a temporary state. Arbitur had volunteered for this duty after some council had notified him he was among those nano eyes qualifying. My mental ears perked up at the term, and I interrogated Arbitur a bit about it.

"Nano eye? What's a nano eye, Arbitur?" I asked aloud. For Arbitur wasn't nearly as fussy as Ling et al regarding modes of communication. Of course, since I was supposed to use the shush net as much as possible for practice purposes, Ling had warned me using verbal speech too often would force her to ban its functionality entirely. So I'd asked Arbitur to always warn me before I got too close to the limits she'd imposed.

It was still much faster to use the net for many communications, even at my own low level of proficiency. But early on I frequently found myself missing talking aloud. Don't ask me why; talking too much had always bothered me on Earth. Now, when it was severely rationed, I missed it. Of course, due to the unusual circumstance of me learning this stuff as an adult rather than during childhood, my head sometimes needed a break from the net. That was the only reason Ling allowed me any verbal speech at all by this point.

"I am a nano eye," Arbitur replied in like kind (Note this is the phonetic spelling of the term. In fact, the more accurate text presentation would be 'nano I').

"But what does it mean?"

"Nano eye was originally considered a slang form of the term nano technology based intelligence. When such sentience was but a theoretical concept it was often referred to as artificial intelligence; meaning it was not a direct result of natural evolution, but rather of man's own efforts to synthesize centers of cognition similar in abilities and perspectives to his own, utilizing inorganic materials--"

"Hey! I think I heard something about artificial intelligence in my own time. You mean you're one of those artificial intelligences come to life?"

"Certainly not. The original concept of artificial intelligence limited the possible results to functions and capabilities only on par with that of man himself. Nano eyes suffer no such limitations. Modern nano eyes such as myself were exclusively designed by previous nano eyes. No human had significant input in my own design, or the previous two hundred and thirty-two generations from which I hail. We are free of human conceptual limitations in virtually all ways but those of cooperation and mutual benefit."

I wasn't quite sure what he meant by that, but it didn't sound good that he considered cooperation and mutual benefit as human conceptual limitations.

But hey: any egotistical computer from the future was Ling's problem, not mine. I mean, I was just a visitor here that they picked up during some joy ride through time. Heck: I was five hundred years out of date in this place. Maybe they programmed their computers to feel superior for a reason.

In my time we'd made movies about such things being dangerous and going out of control. But if mankind hadn't had any problems with them in five hundred years, I guess we'd just been paranoid way back in the good old twentieth century.

Most of the time Arbitur was just fine. In fact, I began feeling like he was my second best buddy on the ship after Ling. For one thing, turning to Arbitur rather than Ling made me feel a bit more independent. And I didn't get so easily embarrassed asking dumb questions or making mistakes around Arbitur, compared to doing the same around Ling.

It was somewhere around this time that I awoke one night in a feverish sweat, puking my guts out. That is, until there was nothing left to puke out-- then I just dry heaved in those amazing bursts of agony which sooner or later all twentieth century folks get to experience. That part of myself always capable of standing aloof from even my worst moments idly wondered why this was happening; for I hadn't been drinking or taking any drugs other than those administered by the future folks, and one would assume the food here-- of all places!-- to be safe.

Ling had appeared by my side almost immediately, exhibiting the gravest concern I'd ever yet seen on her face. I found out later she'd never before seen anyone sick in this particular way, in her entire life! Never!

Ling's terribly anxious expression gratified me even in the midst of my heaves, as she looked almost as bad as I felt.

Riki showed up next and fixed everything, thank God. Bless his artificial heart. Within minutes, Riki determined the source of my illness was not a virus, or the food, or an allergy, but psychological.

Within a couple more minutes he'd narrowed it down to the softly tinkling music which was constantly playing throughout the ship. It turned out the music was full of subliminal messages and data. I personally knew nothing about subliminal conditioning at the time, even though according to the ship's archives the term was coined a bit earlier than my origin, and the concept itself was older still.

It was common practice at Ling's origin to blanket all organic sentients with subliminals twenty-four hours a day. These subtle signals helped maintain certain physical and mental equilibriums in individuals, and a beneficial synchrony of group levels. Whatever the hell that meant. Supposedly even the robots benefited from it, as it 'increased the bandwidth of group communications'. Whatever.

All I knew was that it was killing me.

Riki did something to my shush net node, and fixed it. Somehow he 'tuned out' the music, just for me (everyone else still heard it though).

I immediately began feeling much better. It seemed over the next few days that even the occasional itching I'd been suffering since my arrival lessened quite a bit too.

Riki and Ling determined that my antiquated psychological make up was just too different from that of modern people to cope with many centuries worth of refined subliminal conditioning all at once. The subliminals were just too strong for someone who'd matured in their absence. Ling's people had experienced them over multiple generations by now, and so were highly adapted to them. Ergo, it was no wonder the stuff was too strong for me; I had no built-up resistance!

Ling told me I had it backwards: that the trouble was I had too much resistance. My mind had fought it like my immune system would an intrusive infectious agent. And this had been a contributor to my headaches too, it turned out. Later I would discover there was more to this matter; much more.

Another day or so afterwards when Ling and I were deep into another shush net conversation, I caught her acting like I was that famous Signposts guy again.

This made me angry. Because I'd specifically asked her not to do so. Therefore, I confronted her.

*I cannot help it, Jerry Staute,* Ling told me, with that infernal touch of awe in her voice. She sounded sincere. But as I grew increasingly aware of the profound manipulation she'd put me through since the abduction (as well as before it), I also grew increasingly skeptical. And then there was the fact they had the wrong guy.

*You are renowned in my own time as the father of the physics supporting Probabilities stream traversal--*

*Ling, I tell you you've got the wrong person! Physics is my worst subject in school. I'll probably fail this quarter...if I ever get back....*

*I do not wish to argue, Jerry Staute--*

*And that's another thing! Do you know how many Stautes there are in the twentieth century? Zillions of 'em, I'd bet! Ling, there's probably several thousand Stautes with the initials G.W., even. I'm sorry Ling. But if you depend on me to get you back home, you'll be lost forever.*

My emotions were in turmoil. I actually felt guilty that I wasn't the Signposts Staute. But that was ridiculous! That fact was beyond my ability to remedy.

Still, the guilt hung over me like a cloud. And combined with returning memories of having loved Ling prior to my abduction-- and she seeming to love me too-- my mindset fluctuated wildly and unpredictably all over the place. One moment I'd be mad as hell at Ling, and the next I'd be wanting to comfort her. Agh!

Being torn in so many different ways and directions at once had to be bad for you. I mean, I often wondered which of the different things I was feeling was the right and proper thing for the circumstances. They couldn't all be right! Could they? I mean, they were contradictory as hell! Nothing made sense!

*Never mind that Jerry. If we succeed, we succeed. If we fail, we fail. It's as simple as that,* Ling leaned over and lay her head on my right shoulder.

This girl was getting to me. Even though I knew she had the wrong guy, I wished badly I could solve her problem for her and be the hero she thought I was.

Why couldn't I have been the one? Why couldn't God have had the decency to let Ling find her hero, after she got lost this way? Why did he have to play such a cruel joke on her, and give her me instead?

I wished I really was the writer of the Signposts document, for Ling's sake. But also for my own. I mean, it'd be nice to be remembered for something after you were dead and gone. It seemed like you'd get a warm feeling every time your name was mentioned, no matter how far into the future it was. If something of you still existed at all, that is.

I wanted so bad to take Ling into my arms and soothe her worries. To tell her 'Yes Ling, I am the great G.W. Staute. And I can indeed lead you home.' But it'd be a lie. If I gave her the slightest encouragement about the matter, it'd be a lie.

So I was feeling guilty about not being who Ling wanted me to be. And lonesome too. I didn't want to be here, in this impossible quandary. And these people didn't want me here either; they wanted someone else. Someone that wasn't me. They just didn't know the difference yet.

It was ironic. For I'd always wanted to be a hero in a science fiction adventure. And now here I was. Everyone here thought I was the hero. Only I knew I wasn't.

Ling was still close to me, resting her head on my shoulder. We sat quietly in her room, in front of her TV wall. I had my right arm draped around her.

The TV was going through a random sequence of possible options we could choose from. All sorts of things were flashing across the screen, each one staying on only a second or so. The sound was down very low.

Ling and I had grown very comfortable with each other despite our differences of opinion about my identity, and our somewhat strained beginning. I liked her very much, and often wished for a return to the wild and fun relationship we'd had at school. But that relationship had been a trap. Knowing what I did now, I wasn't even sure if we'd truly been intimate, or Ling had just made me think we had, as part of the deception.

Besides, Ling only liked me because she thought I was that other guy. If she knew the truth, she'd probably dump me overboard herself, I figured.

But at least it was nice to have her head on my shoulder at that moment. For whatever reason. Even if it could not last, and meant nothing.

Something about this last thought seemed profoundly true for the human race as a whole-- at least in my own twentieth century. Many of us had little choice but to take what miniscule bits of joy and comfort we could from wherever we might find it-- even if our gains were sometimes made under less than honest circumstances. The world was just such a cold and cruel place, and most of us so desperately unhappy at times...

*Jerry?* Ling sort of whispered over the net.

*Yes, Ling?*

*Will you give me truth?*

*Wha-- of course, Ling.* This conversation was beginning differently than previous ones. I realized I could use a rescue from my melancholy train of thought, though.

*How many girlfriends have you had in your lifespan?* The question surprised me. My first reaction was to protect my male ego and-- if not lie-- at least give the wrong impression. But what was the point? So I told the truth-- with just a bit of self-catering spin.

*Not many. Just a few.*

*What was your last girlfriend like?* Now she was starting to make me uncomfortable; maybe I should do the same to her.

*Well, it's hard to say.*

*Why?*

*I'm just not sure-- umm-- not sure who exactly my last girl friend was.*

*Are you referring to me?* Ling turned her head on my shoulder so that our eyes met.

*I don't know, Ling. I mean, I thought at the time you were my girlfriend-- hell, I seem to remember being head-over-heels in love with you-- but now I don't know if any of that was real at all. I mean, you could have just made me dream all that, without ever once being in the same room with me. Hell, I couldn't swear you're really here with me right now, for that matter!*

Ling pushed off of me to move herself into an upright position. *You were in stasis for three weeks before we woke you--*

Three weeks! I was asleep for three weeks before they even woke me? Holy crap!

*-- This was partly because we were afraid we might have to return you, if any anomalies were detected in the local event line. But this was not the sole reason for your suspension. I was assigned as your liaison, to lure you to us and to smooth your transition once onboard. But I could not be injected into your society as my normal self, filled with knowledge of the future, fully aware of your identity and significance to our fate. I could not have adequately performed my duties under such circumstances, and even if I could have, it would have been far too dangerous. Under some contingencies I might have divulged sensitive information damaging to the event lines. For reasons such as these, I was--* her eyes searched the air, then returned to mine-- *re-configured, to better fit my purpose and the security needs of the mission. The process is neither pleasant or brief, and was necessary twice: once before you met me, and again after we had you onboard. During the three weeks you were in stasis, I was undergoing the treatments required to restore me to my normal self-- the person who truly is here with you at this moment. During our time together at your school, I was as unaware of my true purpose there as you were. I was for all intents and purposes the very person you perceived me to be. For the sake of all of us aboard the Pagnew, I could be no more and no less, than the person you knew as 'Ling Chen'.*

I was flabbergasted. Could all this be true? Things changed here so often I couldn't keep up! Assuming it was true, what did that make Ling? Was she now my friend? Or my enemy? When people could change personalities like switching wardrobe closets, what did you end up with?

*Ling, I don't know what to say to that!*

*Perhaps you might have a question?*

*I-- well-- maybe. Like...no, not that-- ummm--* I truly was at a loss for words. So Ling met me halfway.

*Do I remember what happened between us? Is that a question you might pose?* she queried.

*Well, yeah. But to tell you the truth, I'm not sure I can remember a lot of it-- I've been kind of punch drunk since I came onboard.*

Ling smiled. *That is only to be expected. You were heavily conditioned after capture, for many reasons. As I explained just now, so too was I. My own mental state at this time may be much more similar to your own, than you might expect. Like you, some parts of me are only now returning, as if from a deep sleep. In some ways the ship and my fellow crew members seem strange to me as well, as a consequence of my recent conditioning sessions. Do I remember the time we spent together before? Some, but not all. I know this for fact because I have access to the ship records of our time together--*

*Ship records?* What could ship records have to do with-- uh oh. *You mean we were being watched?*

*Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week-- to use your own chronological syntax. The entire time. Both of us. Even when we were apart.*

*Goddamn, Ling! Isn't that against the law or something?*

*Your law of origin, perhaps. Not ours. At least, not in regards to the privacy issues to which I believe you are referring.*

*You say you have access to this stuff. What sort of stuff is it exactly?*

*Let me put it this way-- given the resources available aboard the Pagnew, there's sufficient detail in the records to allow us to re-live the entire period and be unable to detect any differences from the original.*

I thought about it for a moment.

*Well, if I remember correctly, there's at least a few times in there I wouldn't mind at all to go through again,* I said, smiling.

Ling returned my smile. *Does this mean you could someday forgive me for entrapping you as I did?*

*Well, that depends,* I said with a mock-serious tone. Though I wasn't feeling nearly as flip about my words as I may have sounded.

*Depends? On what?* Ling inclined her head at me, with one eyebrow raised.

*On just how much of you was missing on Earth, I guess. I mean, I know I was one hundred percent me there-- the wrong G.W. Staute, as I feel compelled to remind you-- but one hundred percent me none-the-less. You on the other hand, now tell me you weren't entirely present at the festivities which took place down there. Which leaves me wondering one thing...*

When I deliberately injected the significant pause, Ling played the straight man just as I wished her to.

*And what is that?*

Now the question was, would the lady like the punch line? Suddenly this became very important to me.

*Now that you're back to your old self-- your complete self-- one hundred percent future Ling-- and you've seen the records of us on Earth together, do you...have any regrets?* This wasn't exactly what I wanted to ask, but it was close enough. And besides, my nerve had faltered near the end of the question.

*Regrets? You mean did I do anything with you during my-- my time of narrowed perspective-- that I now wish I hadn't?*

*Yes* Was it a bad sign that she was so heavily qualifying the issue?

*No* The answer was unexpectedly quick and certain.

*Not even any regret about kidnapping me?* The question was spontaneous. I was sorry I'd asked it before the last word had left my node.

Ling hesitated, then replied again with certainty, though more softly this time.

*No*

*What if you found out for certain-- without a shadow of a doubt-- that I truly am the wrong G.W. Staute?*

This time Ling considered my query for several seconds before answering.

*We-- all of us-- have probably given far more thought to that possibility than you imagine. My personal feelings on the matter have changed somewhat since our return to the Pagnew.*

She paused. And I felt the old dread returning once again. But suddenly it seemed much worse than before. Because in this place, in this time, this woman was the closest thing to a friend and ally I had, or might ever have. If she rejected me, where else did I have to go? Who else to turn to?

Suddenly I was horrified by the direction in which I'd steered the conversation. I didn't want to know what she was going to say next. But it was too late, too late, too late....

*Though I am reasonably sure you are the correct G.W. Staute, there is always the small chance you are not. If you're correct and we've made a mistake, then it is very likely we will never return to our origin, and neither will you. On the other hand, if you aren't the Signposts Staute, there is much less chance that we will have significantly damaged any event lines by taking you, and Realtime will heal any problems stemming from your absence.*

Again she paused. I couldn't believe my luck: she'd said nothing about how she felt about me, or what would happen between us if I was right and I wasn't the Signposts Staute. I had to stop her now! Before she said the words-- the killing words--

*Wait! That's all I need to know, Ling. Really. Say no more--*

*But I'm not finished!*

*You've already answered my question! Really! I--*

*Jerry, you asked the question and I intend to answer it.* The look on her face was not promising at all. God help me. I know I shouldn't have asked, but like an idiot I did anyway. Oh God, please couldn't you save me just this once?

*Before I was prepped for going Earth-side, I was filled with apprehension. I'd been warned about natural gravity wells, and the enormous difficulty of mastering your verbal speech, even with modern aids. Making matters worse was our own dearth of hard information regarding your origin. Not much more than scraps of records regarding your time exist in ours. At origin we know more about Earth's pre-history than we do of humankind during the last few centuries of the second millennium. I especially dreaded meeting you-- the G.W. Staute so celebrated at origin. Never in my wildest imaginings had I thought to meet such an historic figure. Yet suddenly it was my job not only to meet you, but seduce you. To lure you to a place and time whereby we might first condition and then abduct you for our own purposes. I knew much of this burden would be lifted by the mission prep, as I would be reshaped into a near perfect vehicle for your capture. The preparation would also relieve me of the knowledge of who you or I were in relation to one another. In effect, someone else would be performing the mission-- not I. This at least was what Arbitur and my fellow crew members told me. But this proved to be not entirely true. Part of me was fully aware of the time we spent together, and well survived the second treatment. This partial memory, plus my examination of the record since my return to the Pagnew, have given me as complete a recollection of what we did together and were to one another as I shall ever have. Do I have any regrets as a result? No. Would I have any regrets should you prove to be the wrong person? Again, no. But I think these are not the real questions you want to ask. Your mastery of your node is far from complete. You leak as badly now as you did in our node simulations prior to leaving Earth. Though blunted by the trauma and treatments you've received since arrival, still some of your original feelings towards me seem to persist within you, and you wonder if the feelings are reciprocated.*

She paused once more, then continued.

*For someone so brilliant, you are very dumb, Jerry Staute. I am no slave to your wishes, or those of the crew. I am a free agent, or as close to one as anyone from my time could be. This is no military-style vessel from your origin. No one may dictate what I do with my free time, or who I spend it with. As I have assumed the role of your temporary help agent, you possess full access to my schedule, and know this very moment to be personal time for me-- or you would know this, if you paid more attention to such things.*

In fact, I hadn't known this moment was technically free time for Ling. Maybe if I'd thought about it more, I might have remembered that sometimes around this hour I couldn't raise her on the net for advice; but I hadn't kept that close a score on things.

*You may or may not be the principal author of the Signposts document, but you are definitely the bright second year engineering student who delighted me with his openness and honesty, was wonderfully shy and unassuming, and burned with a vision and hunger for the future that I would expect from a youth destined to shape history...*

*Ling, I--* I began.

*Wait. I'm not finished. Though returning home someday is important to me, it is not as important in my eyes as in those of my crew-mates. One of my specialties is anthropology Jerry, which is the study of humankind. And you are a wonderful sample of twentieth century man, regardless of your possible responsibility for the Signposts. You fascinate me for your origin, and for your possibly historic identity, but those do not completely describe what I feel towards you. I also like very much the person you turned out to be.

*I warned you before that I may be unable to fully reciprocate your feelings in the ways you may expect or hope for. I warned you of this at a time when I myself was unsure of my reasons. But you must heed this warning, as the 'love' which so saturates your media of origin is not a common element of mine. At my origin we often combine in what you would call 'marriages of convenience', but we call 'unions'. Our unions are rarely monogamous for any length of time, and require both more and less from participants than your own ritual couplings seem to. I will always perform my duty where you are concerned Jerry, but I may not always elect to spend my free time with you. Nor you I. There may well come a time when I never again visit you off-duty. You must expect this, and not allow such a change to take you unawares. You should also enjoy as best you can the time we do spend together, and not pick apart our relationship at every opportunity. To me, this is your most annoying habit.*

Ling paused again. I didn't know if she was done or not, so I waited. When she didn't resume, I spoke up.

*Ling, I'm sorry about being an idiot so much of the time, but-- but dealing with women has always been a very difficult thing for me. It's one of my least competent roles, I guess.

*As for my being madly in love with you, well, I don't think you have to worry much about that now. When you brought me onboard that pretty much killed a big part of it-- I mean, well, it's hard to explain-- but my trust of you went into the toilet for a while. And your drugs kept me so happy I didn't care about much of anything for weeks...and everything sort of changed for me, when I found out why and how we got together in the first place.*

Ling's expression was unreadable.

*Now there's all this new and fascinating stuff to learn on-board, and maybe an all new life for myself that I've got to think about. Things are a lot more complicated now than when I was contemplating marrying the girl from Taiwan.* I smiled at Ling. She was attentive to my node-cast, but unchanging in her expression.

*I think I can forgive you for your charade. I might well have done the same if things were reversed, I guess.

*Ling, I've never been the smooth talker my friend Steve is. I frankly don't often know what the right thing or wrong thing to say to a girl is-- I may be saying the absolute worst things right now! But all I can do is speak what's on my mind.

*Ling, I still like you very much. You're the closest thing I have to a friend in this new world, and I'm honestly afraid of what might happen to me if you're not around.

*I'll do whatever I can to help you and your people find your way home, though I'm positive you missed the mark in selecting me for the job.

*I guess what I want to say is...I hope you'll stick around a little longer to help this country boy find his way around the big city...and that I wish we could have met under different circumstances.*

This last statement seemed to confuse Ling for a moment. Then she smiled.

*The city is bigger than you know, Jerry.*

Ling's face took on a mischievous look. I began wondering what new bombshell she was about to drop on me.

Ling leaned closer to me again on the comfortable couch upon which we sat.

*In what circumstances would you have preferred to meet me?* The corners of Ling's mouth were turned up in a slight smile. It seemed the conversation had taken a different, lighter turn.

*I don't know, Ling. Just something...something more normal, I guess.*

Ling slid her arm around me, and drew closer still.

*I can feel your loneliness on the net, Jerry,* she node-whispered. I didn't say anything. She continued.

*My own people do not suffer this loneliness of yours. I thought the net might heal your own. But it has only sharpened it. For you are too heavily conditioned for an older world.*

I didn't know what to say. I didn't like the sound of somebody noticing your loneliness on the net. One bad thing about being kidnapped by future tourists is you have no way of knowing the difference between truth, lies, or plain exaggerations.

Ling net-spoke again.

*Your thoughts are at times anomalous for the net. I notice you may even deceive it on occasion. Not many of us can do that at origin. Perhaps because of training and conditioning since birth.*

Ling leaned in and kissed me gently on the cheek. I did the same to her. It felt nice. She displayed her mischievous grin again.

*I realize your doubts trouble you greatly, Jerry Staute. And our disagreement as to your identity could remain unresolved for years to come. But does all that matter at this moment? Let us be whatever we are in the present, and nothing more. And let us enjoy one another's company. Do you agree?*

It sounded good to me! *Yes, Ling,* I smiled back at her.

Ling then pulled away from me. I was surprised and disappointed. But only for a moment.

Ling stood up and pulled her jumpsuit apart into the great irregular flaps they turn into at such times. Within a couple seconds she was naked, and sitting again on the couch beside me. Apparently underwear is obsolete in the future.

*Ling.....you're amazing,* I stammered, as I stroked her long hair. I was excited, but also apprehensive. Things had changed a great deal since the last time Ling and I had fooled around.

Ling suddenly stood up again and said, *Let us go to the scenario room.*

*Why there?* I asked, wishing not to cause any major change in direction for the present sequence of events.

*Our options...will be maximized. But first we must prepare you too.*

To my delight, Ling began disrobing me. She apparently got a kick out of dealing with the ancient clothing designs of buttons and zippers. It took a bit longer to get out of my 20th century-style clothes than it would have the futuristic coveralls I'd previously discarded, but I enjoyed every second of it. I was fast losing any reluctance I might have had before.

Ling was on her knees before me relieving me of my pants. I was getting pretty high off the hormone kick she was inspiring in me. She looked up at me, past my rising excitement.

*Now we go to the scenario room!* she whispered net-wise, as she slithered up my body, rubbing sensuously against me all the way. After that, I was ready to follow Ling anywhere!

We blinked into a large white room, most of which was occupied by a forest of shiny aluminum trees: slender, gleaming metal columns, complete with branching limbs, leaves-- the whole shebang! But the forest didn't appear to have been designed with realism in mind. I wondered if it was some sort of future sculpture or artwork.

The spot where Ling and I stood among the glittering fake trees seemed the only clear area in the room.

I knew I was just a know-nothing hick from the 20th century, but it just didn't seem like this was a good place to come naked.

Well, except for one aspect maybe: the place was stiflingly hot. It seemed like I broke a sweat the instant we appeared in the new space.

Consternation and frustration must have been evident in my face. Maybe Ling hadn't had the same intentions as I. But if not, why had we gotten undressed?

A transparent fluid suddenly began pouring into the room at an alarming rate, just a few feet away. It was cool to the touch as it washed over our feet. I splashed about for a moment before I realized there was no way to escape the rising liquid. The trees looked way too flimsy and sharp-edged to climb, and there were no other objects in the room.

"What the hell?" I blurted out, aloud. Ling answered me over the net.

*It is the scenario gel. Do not worry. It gives us complete sensory experience of any dream or fantasy. It is much better than the contrived device you witnessed at your origin. You've been here before.*

Been here before? Only if that little fact was buried in one of my lost memories!

The liquid was up to my waist in only a minute. It was rising to fill the room unbelievably fast. And the flash flood showed no sign of abating. It'd warmed up considerably by this point. It seemed now to be virtually body temperature.

I carefully touched the end of a projection from one of the aluminum trees, and discovered it was surprisingly hot. Not enough to leave a burn, but enough to hurt if you held on.

*Ling, I don't understand. Why did we come to a swimming pool that's so full of junk we can't move around in it?* I'd returned to using the shush net. Ling often ignored me completely if I didn't, these days.

*A what?* Ling thought at me, then closed her eyes to reference the net. Before I could repeat my query, she opened them again.

*No, Jerry. This is not a 'swimming pool'. And the 'junk' is only used to prepare the gel.*

I looked skeptically at the aluminum trees. *And just what do these things do to the gel?*

*They are...heaters. They help the gel to expand. They replace the thermal energy the gel loses as it makes the transition to scenario consistency.*

My concerns changed as I realized the trend evident in the flood. And witnessed the aluminum trees begin folding up and collapsing into itty bitty little holes in the floor and ceiling. It was a very impressive display of mechanical motion. Fast, too.

*How are we going to breathe?* I asked, glancing at the rising tide, the ceiling, and back again. *We'll drown, Ling!* I exclaimed, with real fear erupting for the first time since our shift.

*The gel will not inhibit breathing in the slightest. Enter it and you will see,* Ling smiled at me, and plunged below the rising surface of the gel. The last of the trees had disappeared.

I dived too. There wasn't actually much choice, as the gel needed only another minute to completely fill the room. I'd also remembered I could blink to safety if I started to drown.

The gel didn't have the consistency I expected. It had poured into the room like water, but seemed lighter than water somehow. It seemed in fact to get lighter with each passing second. It quickly became very similar to air! This made it much easier to cautiously try breathing it in, with shallow, halting breaths.

I was fascinated to see the foggy last vestige of normal air I expelled be swept away by invisible currents in the remarkable substance.

Even Ling's long hair now gave no indication it was immersed in liquid by bobbing about like you would expect.

For the briefest of moments I could detect slight pressures, or resistance from the material. But this quickly disappeared.

If you paid attention in transition though, you could feel it as you blinked your eyes, and sort of combination feel and hear it in your ears. Just not for long.

Within just a few seconds of diving, I couldn't taste the stuff at all. For a brief time it seemed I had detected a slightly metallic tinge, but it was gone so fast I wasn't even sure about that.

It was supremely easy to move about in the material. It didn't put a drag on your movements like water.

I experimented, making large and sweeping gestures through the stuff to measure its resistance. It literally was 'light as air' by this point.

Now the room seemed completely empty but for Ling and I. The liquid didn't even bounce light reflections around like it should have. Of course, that effect might have been accomplished by the soft, diffuse lighting of the room in general.

Once the room was full, you couldn't tell the gel was there at all. Ling and I were one moment diving into a fluid-like substance, and a minute or so later just standing in a seemingly empty and completely dry room.

My twentieth century faculties protested a bit at this perceptual vertigo. Neither I or my evolutionary ancestors had ever experienced anything like this before.

To me, this water-like stuff that turned to air seemed even more fantastic than Riki or Arbitur or the Pagnew itself. At least for the moment.

Ling offered up some more information for me on the stuff.

*The scenario gel was originally only a special environment for crew or passengers aboard spacecraft. The fluid was denser, closer to the consistency of water, which made breathing it more laborious. But that was the whole point at the time. The slight resistance to breathing and movement the gel presented to those immersed helped ameliorate the adverse effects of micro-gravity, both physically and mentally. That early version of the scenario gel was the breakthrough required for biologicals to live in low gravity conditions for extended periods of time. Today we use a variation of the gel for entertainment only, and a wholly different method for emulating gravity in environments such as the living quarters of the Pagnew.*

Ling smiled at my obvious wonder, shook her head, and held up her hands in what I took to signify 'you-ain't-seen-nothing-yet'.

Suddenly we seemed to have been transported. Back to Earth! Ling and I were both standing on large rocks, amid a rushing mountain stream, bathed in glorious sunshine. It looked remarkably like a place deep in the mountains near where I'd grown up. Except more crisp-- more vivid-- than I'd ever seen it before. Everything looked better than the real thing.

The instantaneous change from the featureless room to the fabulous scenery was literally breath-taking.

The temperature was perfect for being unclothed. Everything was great but for one sticking point: we were on separate rocks! Perhaps twenty feet of rushing water flowed between our separate stone platforms.

The sound of the water was loud. I could see Ling was laughing, but couldn't hear her. Then she surprised me by shouting something at me. It was a surprise because she'd not truly spoken aloud to me since my abduction. But for the shush net and non-verbalizations like laughter, Ling was practically a mute onboard the Pagnew. She could express herself acoustically through Arbitur and the ship walls, or appear to do so within our dream learning sessions. But now that she was no longer specially 'configured' for the abduction mission, she'd lost all normal speech capacity, so far as I knew.

Yet here I could swear she was using her natural vocal apparatus to shout at me. I'd gone for so long without seeing her physically expel words during my waking moments that I was a bit taken aback. Plus, didn't this conflict with her constant admonishments that I not speak that way?

I shook my head. She was too far away, and the water too loud. I couldn't make out her words. In the excitement of the home-like scenery and Ling's verbal explosion I forgot about shifting, and began looking for a way to cross the rapids between us the old fashioned way.

Then, miraculously, the roar of the water diminished; as if the volume level had been turned down by God himself. I looked down at the suddenly whisper-quiet waters in puzzlement. My first impulse was to think something had gone wrong with my hearing. But Ling relieved me immediately on that point.

"Can you hear me now?" she asked, across the muted but still rushing waters.

"Yes-- but how did you do that?" I spoke back to her via larynx. But my voice came out as a raspy whisper. I was getting more and more out of practice speaking these days. My first words in any real vocal opportunity I got now tended to be on the shaky side. And alarmingly, I seemed to be forgetting how to pronounce entirely some of the bigger and more complex words in my vocabulary-- at least kinematics-wise, according to Arbitur. Arbitur had informed me that the more complex portions of my phonic vocabulary required regular exercise to maintain, even years after the initial learning involved. And that mere weeks or months of disuse could result in the loss of the ability to correctly pronounce some words. Yikes! At that rate I'd be a verbal moron in no time at all here! If I did get back home, my power of speech would be set back by years. Agh!

But at least my vocabulary inside my head would stay intact. I just wouldn't be able to express it as well as before. Maybe worst of all, Arbitur said some of my loss would be permanent because of my age(!). Although the Pagnew crew would do their damnedest to put me back like I was to start with prior to my return, a matter as delicate as the unraveling of pronunciation skills only in regards to particular words simply wouldn't be worth the risk to remedy. What a load of crap! Didn't they realize how important verbal skills were to my time? Arbitur had said yes, but still the risk of far worse damage loomed if they tried to make corrections. Plus, my hill billy accent was deemed a far more serious speech liability in regards to my social mobility and others' perceptions of my expertise.

Well, Arbitur didn't use the words "hill billy"; but that's what he meant. Double-damn! Cut out a piece of my speech prowess and then insult me on top of it!

[Holy crap! Now this story is getting way, way too real. For I do distinctly remember feeling like I was having unprecedented troubles speaking, not long before I dropped out of school in 1972! I'm sure I discussed the matter with Steve even, joking that one of our drinking binges seemed to have killed particular brain cells relating to my power of speech...and I'd mentioned it again once or twice in the years that followed. How the hell could the people who generated this scenario know about that? I'm getting goose pimples just thinking about it. There's no way this stuff could have happened! But there's also no way someone could have collected that tidbit from my life, and so artfully incorporated it into such a tale! Argh!]

I was sure Ling didn't comprehend my words, as I barely could myself. But she seemed to read my intent over the net.

"Jerry, have you forgotten? We're in a scenario. Here, we make the rules and create the worlds. It was Arbitur's mischief which placed us apart, with the noise so high. But let us tend to more serious matters," suddenly Ling was now on my rock with me, actually startling me with the instant change in location.

"What's your pleasure?" she whispered, up close, looking up into my eyes.

She spoke clearly, affected not at all by the invisible gel, or her own claimed inexperience with the verbal medium.

"I thought you couldn't talk any more after your mission prep was washed out," I said hoarsely. Actually speaking worse than she was, at the moment-- and I was the one who had a native tongue!

"I'm not talking, Jerry; I'm still using the net. I only told the scenario room to make it look as if I'm speaking."

"Oh" was the last word I spoke, before switching back to the net. I was getting ambivalent about verbal speech by this point; more and more often, it simply seemed to require too much work.

Of course, since I was no pro like Ling, I didn't know how to set things as she had. So now our speaking roles seemed to reverse from what they'd been when I was first brought onboard. Ling looked like she was speaking, while I used the net.

Ling moved into my arms. It was great to be with her again this way.

*How'd you get over here, anyway?* I thought at her.

"This is just a dream we are having in the scenario gel, Jerry. Here there is no waiting, unless we wish it so." It began to dawn on me that the scenario room was something like the rest of the ship, only maybe better. Perhaps all we had to do was wish a thing, and it happened...

*You mean we can just think of what we want, like with the shush net, and we'll have it?*

"Yes," Ling said, somewhat expectantly.

*Well, I know something I'd like to show you,* I said confidently, eager to display what I'd learned about using net services.

It took me a bit longer to paint the new scene than it had Ling. But the network, or Arbitur (I wasn't sure there was a difference) seemed to be actively helping me.

I thought about a place I'd been before, and felt something in my head began pulling on the stream of images. The strange pulling sensation then surprised me by demanding more imagery and recollections with which to complete the picture. I quickly thought of everything I could remember about the place, often repeating certain scenes from memory.

The world surrounding Ling and I flowed into something different. I say flowed, because for just the briefest of instants you could see the scene in transition to the next. But if you blinked, you'd miss it. It was different from a shift; those things were more abrupt in their scenery changes.

Of course, part of me thought, Ling might be able to manipulate things to make either change appear to be the other....my vulnerability to these future toys made me uncomfortable.

But at least I was exercising a little control of my own over the technology now. The new reality that had formed around us was one I'd created myself.

Now Ling and I stood near the edge of a cliff. Before us yawned a great gulf, with twin cataracts falling down opposite the side on which we stood. The land around us was thick with trees. A few big fluffy clouds obscured the sun. A cool breeze touched us.

Too cool.

We shivered in our nakedness. Ling smiled as her teeth chattered, and her brow furrowed. Her arms dis-engaged from me to cross over her unprotected chest.

"It is c-c-cold here, Jerry," she chattered.

My first scenario was far from perfect. I'd conjured it up from the memory of a spot I'd been before, in middle Tennessee. It was a beautiful place, at least in real life terms. But I'd been clothed when I'd been there in Realtime (Realtime? New terms continued to bubble out of my subconscious). And the season had maybe been fall. The altitude may also have taken a toll on the temperature.

My scenario was too real. As a result it was as cold as the original experience. And really not beautiful after all, compared to Ling's earlier scene. Her scenario had been idyllic. Perfect. Mine was a memory of the gritty, partially decayed nature of real terrain.

The difference disappointed me. And then there was the cold. Unfortunately, the cold wasn't the worst part. Agh!

Ling and I heard voices behind us. Startled, we both twirled around to behold not one, not several people, but a crowd.

I winced as I realized what I'd done.

When I'd called up my memories of this place, I hadn't edited them at all. So the scenario room had recreated it down to the last detail, including my friend Steve, his girlfriend of the time, and others.

They were all acting just as they would have in real life. Laughing and pointing and shouting in amazement at the two stark naked people standing before them.

Steve had been laughing heartily before we turned around. But upon recognizing me, he went into absolute hysterics.

It was too real. I turned to Ling with a pained expression on my face.

*Ling, please get us out of here!* I pleaded. I knew she could do it much faster than I.

In an eye blink we were elsewhere.

The cold lingered on in our bodies, though the new scene was much warmer than the last. I guessed Ling had purposely selected a tropical location offering a temperature which would warm us back up quickly.

My whole body was covered in red splotches of humiliation. My face felt like it was afire. I knew I was blushing heavily, but was powerless to stop it. I'd always been easily and obviously embarrassed, even by the smallest things. My tendency to blush at the drop of a hat had always been irritating to me.

Though I knew all those people had been only simulations, they'd seemed awfully real.

As pained as I was, it took me a moment to realize the terrible laughter hadn't stopped. I could still hear it. But no wonder! It hadn't stopped! It was Ling! Agh!

She thought all this was funny!

I blew up in anger. But that only made her laugh harder. She kneeled to the ground, holding her stomach.

My own reaction was a confusing mix. I was stumped on how I should feel, or what I should do. Then I realized I wanted some clothes.

At my bidding, a full set of clothing congealed around me. This made me feel much better. Until Ling saw what I'd done.

When she saw my new clothes, she absolutely lost it.

Ling literally howled with laughter. She fell onto the ground and began rolling about, striking her fists and feet against the earth.

I felt the hated, all-encompassing reddening take hold of me again. Unbelievably, I felt even more embarrassed now than I had before! What the hell was she laughing about?

I'd rarely seen anyone laughing so uncontrollably. Except for....my friend Steve. Hell, I guess I was one funny guy to be around. The thought made me feel no better.

After about a minute though, my anger and humiliation began to subside, and Ling's wild laughter began to feel infectious.

Plus, she looked good rolling about with her legs in the air.

Ling was still spectacularly nude. And my instincts made sure I didn't miss this chance to visually examine every inch of her lovely form, as she writhed about on a spot of close cropped, golden grass. After all, it'd been quite a while since I'd seen her this way.

Ling had shifted us to-- correction-- changed the scene around us, to an unexpected location. I'd never seen a place exactly like it before.

The land was flat in every direction. And carpeted with tall golden grass, for the most part. Here and there a clump of trees stood like islands amid vast seas of grassland. But they weren't the native trees of North America, I was pretty sure. In the distance I could hear the calls of birds. But those too seemed foreign. It was very warm here. Actually much too warm to be fully dressed the way I was now.

Ling's laughter was finally dying. Dwindling down to a mix that included moans of pain. I could vaguely feel over the net that she was experiencing some of the typical pains of excessive laughing.

I carefully looked around to make certain we were truly alone here. When I was satisfied, I made my clothes disappear back to whence they'd come.

Though my nudity still felt a bit uncomfortable, it was too hot here to wear much. And all this had begun as a romp, after all.

By now Ling was on her back, in an area of short grass which lay at the foot of one of the strange trees. She was gasping for breath, recovering from her fit. Her eyes were closed, and wet traces led from them down the sides of her head to the ground.

The corners of her mouth were still threatening a smile at any moment-- though a grimace was clearly dominating her features now.

As she calmed, she allowed her head to limply turn in my direction, and opened her eyes.

I winced as her eyes widened, and her convulsions began anew. Her choking laughter made my flesh burn with humiliation yet a third time.

Apparently she thought my on-again off-again modesty hilarious.

I decided all I could do was wait her out, and sat down beside her.

Luckily she was near laughed out. I savored my revenge, as her sounds fluctuated between those of mirth and pain.

But I didn't feel that way for long. I became concerned as she began to pay the full price for her display, in sore ribs and throat. I was amazed how I could feel some of her discomfort over the net, and was unsure exactly how I was doing it.

I lay down beside her and just held her hand in mine as she recuperated.

"Ohhh, Jerry....I think you have hurt me," she complained, with a pained smile and eyes filled with tears.

*Well, you deserve it,* I replied over the net.

"Why do you say that?" flowed from her pain-contorted lips.

*You laughed at me,* I acted more wounded than I was. But it really had hurt.

Ling tried to laugh again, but fought it down due to her soreness.

"Ohhh...I'm sorry, Jerry. It was an involuntary reaction..."

Her laughter welled up again, but died just as quickly.

"Please Jerry, can we change the subject? I must stop thinking about..." her sentence was interrupted by another painful eruption of laughter. But it was hurting her so much now it sounded more like sobbing than laughing. And she was talking to herself occasionally between sobs, trying to fight off the resurgence of now unwelcome merriment.

I knew she was hurting. And trying with little success to replace the humorous images with others in her mind. I wanted to help her stop her obvious suffering. But at the same time I was just a bit angry with her. Because so far our little jaunt hadn't turned out at all like I'd expected. I thought we'd come here to have fun!

As she tried in vain to pull out of her returning bouts of laughter, she was practically helpless. Swinging like a wild pendulum between laughter and small cries of pain.

But even so, she looked good laying there in the grass. Her golden body was striped with shadows from the sunlight filtering through the trees. Ling nude amid this tableau was literally a living work of art. Her glowing skin was complemented mightily by the subtly different shades of the yellowish-brown grass and ground around her.

I was struck by an idea.

So Ling wanted her mind taken off the previous scenario, did she? I figured I'd oblige.

Ling's arms were wrapped around her hurting sides, her breasts and bent legs shaking with the staccato bursts of her dying laughter.

I moved above her, gently prying her arms away and unfolding her legs to better accommodate me.

Settling myself atop her, I drew her arms over her head.

Ling's mixture of laughter and painful sobs quickly subsided. She looked surprised for a moment, but quickly adapted to the changing circumstances.

I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of our time in the scenario room that day.

So the present Ling was not the past Ling. The woman I'd known at Tech may have shared many similarities with the woman I now knew aboard the Pagnew, but the two were far from identical.

After a while I came to understand how the past Ling-- the one I'd known at Tech-- had been only a sub-set of the present Ling.

The new Ling was more complete, more confident in herself, than the old. She was more selfish too-- but perhaps her earlier incarnation had been programmed to be more giving in order to better trap me. The new Ling was much less emotional than the old, much less given to spontaneity than before.

Partly I came to realize these things from my returning memories of our time prior to my abduction, and partly from the records aboard ship Ling had alluded to earlier. The records were amazingly, embarassingly, infuriatingly complete. They even contained a continuous run of my own emotional reactions throughout. Apparently they'd been able to plant some sort of monitoring device on me early on. It hadn't been as good as the net node now inside me, but it'd been plenty good enough to provide them feedback on how well Ling was doing at luring me into their trap.

The emotional stuff wasn't the worst part though. There was stored in their surveillance record everything-- and I do mean everything-- that Ling had thought or seen or done while at Tech. It looked like anybody aboard the Pagnew who wanted could have vicariously shared in our most initimate moments together-- only with me unaware of the fact. Agh!

Of course, Ling hadn't known either. The records made it obvious Ling hadn't suspected her own duplicity at the time. The Ling I'd known had indeed been the one that was there-- a brilliant Taiwanese graduate student working on artificial realities. In preparing her for her seduction role her friends had carefully crafted for her a false past and upbringing guaranteed to predispose her towards being strongly attracted to me. This same false past had molded her into a near ideal version of the girl for me, too.

I thought they'd really lucked out on the asian-slash-polynesian hybrid look though. For even I hadn't known that such a cast could attract me like that. The only previous girls I'd fallen for that hard had been as American-looking as apple pie. Well, caucasian apple pie.

But silly me. It'd turned out there was no luck involved. A side reference in the record showed me another trick they'd made use of: pheromones. High powered sexual attractants. And not just any pheromones; they'd secretly obtained a sample of my DNA and concocted a set of pheromones guaranteed to knock any male in my immediate family tree for a loop. It was so powerful they'd also had to include something to prevent it from turning me into an imbecilic sex maniac whenever Ling was around. They wanted me to be unable to say no to her about most things, but not to be completely incapacitated by it all-- as such an extreme might have attracted attention at my origin, or even caused me to run amuck. Yikes!

[Pheromones! Well, I have to say my foes did their homework there. It is a fact that there's such stuff in the labs today-- though little if any of it has been released among the general public so far as I know. There's rumors big perfume companies are doing something with it, but no hard facts...

Of course, the speech impairment thing's still a much more impressive piece of intelligence and manipulation. Whew! I gotta stop thinking about that! It's too alarming. I'll just put off thinking about that until after I've seen the whole film strip here. Maybe I'll get some clues ahead that'll bust this whole thing wide open. Yeah: I like that.]

At least they weren't using those chemical stimulants on me anymore now that I was aboard (I checked). Heck, maybe that was why my ardor for Ling had cooled off some.

The new complete Ling-- despite her greater independence and more reasonably self-serving manner-- was still remarkably gentle and understanding. This made her a perfect choice for teaching me about my new surroundings. Her patience for enduring my sometimes chaotic and often extreme reactions to various events seemed to me at times to border on sainthood.

A lot more than I expected of our earlier relationship on Earth returned to grace our new one. But we did have a few barriers to breach between us. For instance, it turned out that the complete Ling's ideas of sex were quite different from the programmed Ling I'd known before.

At times disturbingly different. At least for a while. I suffered several minor shocks during the span of our new relationship.

Little did I know of the bizarre twists yet to come.

I should add here that more enlightened and/or experienced people than myself likely wouldn't have seen anything wrong at all with Ling's sexual preferences. It was just that many of them seemed awfully unusual to me at the time-- and a few downright sinful.

But after my initial shock and reluctance, Ling usually got her way in such matters.

Though sometimes one or both of us suffered minor injuries due to our enthusiasm, I must admit those lovemaking sessions represented some of the best times I'd ever had, up to that moment.

[My younger self's perspectives are pretty much what I'd expect, coming from the background I did. But many of the things he experienced are fairly commonplace on Earth in the nineties. Or at least commonplace in America, if not everywhere else. Mainly I just wish it were me instead of him it was happening to! Ah: sex is wasted on the young.]

Come to find out later there was nothing unnatural about Ling's desires at all. In fact, you could say her basic concepts about sex were more firmly grounded in traditional customs and ancient practices than my own were; but it would take me a while to discover why this was so.

The sudden second blossoming of my relationship with Ling seemed too good to be true. My previous track record with women wasn't all that great. I mean, I'd been incredibly lucky a couple of times-- but both those had been terribly brief affairs. And one downright tragic. Agh!

Of the two of us, my friend Steve was the lady's man. Me, I was-- well-- not.

So how had things turned out so happily with Ling so far? Beyond all the previous elements discussed, there was the culture Ling hailed from to consider.

Over time I managed to piece together an idea of the society from which Ling and the crew originated. It was remarkably open and honest. The existence of the shush net and continuous archival of practically all events and actions had sculpted it that way over time.

But the enormous wealth and opportunities generated by progress in both the social and technological arenas had also helped.

Deception and fraud just weren't as important economic and political forces as in earlier times. Where world piracy and smuggling had slowed to a trickle with the advent of reasonably free and open trade centuries earlier, so too had deception and fraud now shrunk down to insignificance as the social and economic pies had grown so large and easily accessible to everyone.

It intrigued me to look at these socio-economic trends based on perspectives 500 years into humanity's future.

In my own time capitalism had still been slugging it out with communism as the dominant world economic and political system.

Here, I had to look hard to find even an obscure reference to that original concept of communism (the word took on a somewhat different meaning in later centuries). Because surprisingly, the old style communism had faded from worldwide significance before 2000!

But that wasn't to say capitalism itself went unscathed by the passage of time. Humanity apparently discovered capitalism was much like the human discovery of fire: a powerful force which required much care and oversight in order to prevent all sorts of related calamities, including massive business and government corruption, grossly deceptive news and advertising, election fraud, market crashes, global depressions, long term social meltdowns due to income, education, and wealth opportunities and distribution tilted too far in favor of a tiny elite, environmental collapse, mass extinctions, runaway proliferation of weapons up and down the scale of destructive potential, industrial accidents which killed tens of thousands or more in single events, ill-conceived scientific research and development projects which basically reduced humanity's chances of long term survival rather than improved them, etc., etc, etc.

At Tech I'd found myself developing an interest in economics. The more I learned about the world in general, the more important economics seemed to be. I'd been surprised to learn along the way that the most profound differences between theoretical models of both communism and capitalism had been economic rather than political. And later observations had seemed to confirm that basic economics had more to do with what the average person experienced in their life, than politics did.

So of all the many wonders which existed aboard the Pagnew, all the fascinating things I could have looked up in the archives, all of what Ling and the rest of the futurians wanted me to learn, I found myself early in the game reading about how things had progressed economically in my world after 1972.

I found that economics and politics continued to be nearly inseparable for a long time. There were references to many things I'd never heard of before in the records, and I quickly wearied of looking up what they all meant. Managed trade. Internet. Superways. U.S.Asia and U.S.America listed as two different entities. NetSpace. Commonwealth of United World States. For now, I tried to get just the gist of how the world had developed economically, and ignore the rest. But it was difficult. Each of the strange names and terms generated dozens of new questions in their wake. This made me realize that somebody equipped with a time machine and bent on getting info from the future to profit with in the past (a common science fiction plot) could be faced with considerable problems about knowing where to begin their search-- there was simply too much information here. Even the slightest misunderstanding or missed fact in the project could make whatever info you did gather irrelevant. For example, I noticed pretty close to my own origin a sudden opening up of both China and the Soviet Union for business. This in itself might have given somebody a scoop in the stock market of some kind, right? But then a little later lots of investors lost their shirts in political chaos of various sorts in both places. If you knew of the opening, but not the later chaos, you could get badly burned. How could anyone know when they had enough info with which to make a killing they could really keep?

Then there was the 'mutability' of the past, as Ling had referred to it a few times. Ling and the others aboard the Pagnew were always expressing fear the past might change, leaving them stranded, or their origin drastically altered for the worse. Of course, I'd seen this fear played up in countless science fiction stories too, sometimes to hair-raising effect. Now that I was actually involved in a time travel adventure though, something seemed doubtful about the whole premise. I mean, how easy could it be to make a whole universe turn on a dime? Like I'd heard Steve say about a totally different subject in the past: "If it were that easy, everyone would be doing it". That statement seemed somehow appropriate to my present circumstance. I doubted the past was so easy to change as Ling and the rest thought. While easy modification made for good stories, it smacked of the unreal. After all, it should be much easier to influence the outcome of a job interview or asking someone out for a date than changing history-- but look how hard even the little things could be (cosmically speaking) and then extrapolate this difficulty to bigger matters like all of history. Surely there was more holding together the universe-- or event lines-- than the rubber bands and spit Ling seemed to envision.

On the other hand, I was just an average (or worse) engineering student, 500 years behind the times in almost every conceivable way. So what did I know?

So far as future economic history was concerned, the world seemed to muddle through one scary (and sometimes contrived) crisis after another, gradually and painfully finding its way through a veritable minefield of conflicting interests, astonishing corruption and high level conspiracies, offensive maneuvers, dumb ideas, and plain old wishful thinking-- much like it had prior to 1972, it seemed to me.

In my efforts to determine what had economically transpired over the five centuries since 1972, I at first got bogged down in a lot of irrelevant facts. I finally got going when I realized the fastest route to what I wanted to know was to examine how living standards had changed for the average citizen over that time.

Among the surprises was an oil embargo dead ahead of my own origin, which seemed to affect everything for ten years afterwards. The price of gas shot up, and there were various types of rationing measures briefly placed on gas and other energy usage. To my own limited experience as an autonomous car driving adult, this sounded like a world turned upside down. Heck: I'd personally experienced a much less drastic bout of local rationing the previous summer in Texas, which had been no darn fun at all: so I sure didn't look forward to a still worse shortage!

After the embargo, environmental concerns welled up in the developed nations towards the end of my century. And Japan, and then China (Red China!) became economic powerhouses, even as the U.S.S.R. fell into pieces. Some things I almost missed in my skimming, like the reunion of the two Germanys, and the opening up of eastern europe. And all this happened just between 1972 and 2000!

The surprises after 2000 were not only greater in number, but magnitude.

Apparently big changes happened in TV and telephones after 2000, though I wasn't quite sure what to make of them from my dips into the archives. Faxes, VCRs, video stores, remote controls, channel surfing, cells, on-line networks, digital, home shopping, HDTV, World Wide Web, etc., etc. comprised some of the jargon of the period.

The 21st century itself seemed to have been rocked by astonishing surprises and massive catastrophes. The New York skyline was changed by terrorists. The mideast was decimated by Israel and the Arabs basically annihilating one another after sufficient encouragement by America over many years (huh?), leaving a deadly mess which would last for centuries to come. But at least the calamity seemed to deflate some of the global religious strife which had been steadily building for decades or longer, as well as lend more strength to controls on the deployment and use of nuclear and space weapons, in its aftermath.

The world was also being forced to go cold turkey on oil and gas during this time-- a transition which appeared to be pretty rough on lots of folks.

Plain old war and terrorism seemed to reach their peaks in the 21st century, then greatly diminish afterwards.

When I saw one of the reasons experts gave for the increasing peace and good will in the world by the dawn of the 22nd century, I was shocked: most of them said it was the rapid decline in power and prestige of the United States of America throughout the 21st, culminating in a sort of frenzy at one point. It was difficult to read of the details-- and turned out difficult even to understand them, and how they came about. The America discussed in the archives did not seem like the America in which I'd grown up. It sounded more like the U.S.S.R. of the Cold War, or Nazi Germany of WWII!

Indeed, to me it smacked of time travelers changing history(!). But I dismissed the thought immediately. For there was no way my kidnapping would affect anything on that grand of a scale. Plus, Ling had already indicated they had detected no changes in the event line after my abduction.

[Hmmm. Nice try on the future history, my unknown assailants. But of course everything between 1972 and 1990 is now documented fact, and available for easy inclusion here. And everything else is just wild speculation. And not even high quality speculation at that. I mean, no way would America turn into a 21st century version of the U.S.S.R. or Nazi Germany! Our system is more robust than that.]

As armed forces and expensive weapons systems were down-sized or eliminated, huge resources were freed up for more practical matters. Combined with an acceleration in innovation too, this resulted in astounding changes for the better in the lives of just about everyone.

Unfortunately, pollution and climate change proved much tougher foes, with the struggle to overcome them lasting much longer than the primary 21st century battles. Finally though, humanity got a handle on those too.

By the late 22nd century lots of people not only owned flying cars but lived in flying homes as well! Actually the homes more floated than flew, but the main thing was they rarely touched the ground. Not long after that direct matter-to-energy conversion became widely available (a la Einstein's E=MC squared) and solved the world's energy problems pretty much for good. Government subsidized factories churned out tiny self-contained maintenance-free power generators and practically gave them away in order to improve living standards, allow hot and dirty old-line central power stations to close sooner, and improve the environment in all sorts of ways. Roads and highways too were falling into disuse by this point. The major airlines which existed in my time were only ghosts of their former selves by then, serving much like the Greyhound or Trailways buses of 1972; as inexpensive mobility in bulk, via truly strange looking but enormous aircraft. Curiously enough though, railroads did great in this environment! They simply increased in speed, and in some places burrowed for hundreds of miles underground to obtain the fast routes and reliability required to compete. Combine local VTOL (vertical-takeoff-or-landing) taxis and trucks with fast long distance rail and you get a potent mix of transportation flexibility.

I was kind of disappointed to see that space development didn't really hit the big time until the second half of the 22nd century. Something that was sometimes called a 'sky cycle' and other times a 'sky hook' by laymen seemed the main impetus to it all. I looked up sky cycle and found it to be a long contraption which spun end-over-end in orbit, allowing craft from earth to dock in the lower end as it descended into the upper atmosphere, and emerge in orbit when that end had returned to space. It was a scary looking thing that seemed destined to cause some catastrophes of its own. Never-the-less, sky cycles proved wildly successful and eventually were applied to several moons and asteroids across the solar system, too.

With all the action in orbit, the Moon, and Mars, space accounted for an important chunk of the total economy by the beginning of the 23rd century. Which was good, since Earth was getting itself into some sort of heat pollution emergency. The whole planet was getting too hot, the ice caps had melted, deserts expanded, and tropical and temperate zones shifted boundaries globally. World maps changed significantly as dry land was lost to rising seas. Since humanity couldn't shut down its industries or move to another planet, the only recourse was to put up a sun umbrella-- so they shielded the planet from the sun with big reflectors in space! Well, actually it was more complicated than that-- the system was designed to heat and cool the planet as desired, with one by-product being more control over the weather.

Total population was booming by the 24th century-- but not in terms of human beings. Rather, it was the numbers of artificial intelligences, robots, chimps, and dolphins which were exploding. The A.I.s and robots were servants of course, but the animals were the child races Ling referred to so often. Chimpanzees and dolphins were being boosted to intelligence levels comparable to human beings, and taking their own places in society. Other species too were being looked at in the labs.

Another thing going on in the 24th century was an Earth-type weather system being constructed for Venus to start preparing that world for terraforming. Did I mention the Mars terraforming project began two centuries earlier? On Mars though they concentrated on deep valleys-- not the whole world-- and didn't build nearly the extensive space-based weather control Venus enjoyed later.

Venus turned out to present more terraforming problems than expected though. Its geological dynamism was really bizarre compared to Earth's. And seemed almost designed to prevent or hamper major terraforming efforts. That project's references alone resembled an encyclopedia set in the ship library! Yikes!

Some of my explorations in the archives gave me an idea of what future generations thought of my own, and those which had immediately preceded and followed us. Most of it wasn't good. But a little was okay. And future generations recognized the fact that we'd all been groveling in abject poverty and ignorance, compared to later times-- so we couldn't have been expected to get everything accomplished, or do it in an ideal manner.

In fact, there were really only a few things that truly riled them. Mistakes we made that could never be fixed, or else would take a long, long time, and lots of resources or work.

The extinctions of certain species was one of these. Even in Ling's time they were unable to make up completely for these things. They could recreate up to around 96% of a vanished specie's genetic code with reasonable accuracy via environmental context and examples of the nearest living relatives which were still available, but beyond that they ran into great difficulties. Difficulties which could require centuries of costly effort to overcome. By Ling's time there were entire branches of biological science which specialized on the potential of DNA from a single species. Because there literally was that much good stuff to be found there.

Four missing percentage points in a genetic code may sound trivial on the face of it, but it's not. I learned in the archives that the genetic difference between twentieth century man and chimpanzee was only around five percentage points! So when we killed off all those species in the last half of the second millennium and well into the third, we effectively threw away maybe several million times the amount of evolutionary information which separated man and chimp in 1972! Gulp!

In the twenty-second century a series of major legal proceedings had taken place worldwide persecuting certain people for their roles in species extinctions, among other things. Many people had to be tried in absentia, as they'd died years before. But many of the culprits were unlucky enough to still be around due to lengthening lifespans, and suffered mightily for it (ironically, some of those who'd benefited the most financially from their crimes had now-- partly due to those same fortunes-- lived long enough to get punished for them).

Among these proceedings had been the Pan-American Crimes Against Nature trials in the twenty-one thirties, which reminded me of the Nuremburg trials of the nineteen forties and fifties in generational notoriety.

Where many Nuremberg escapees had moved to places like Argentina or America to lose their pursuers, the Nature Crimes perpetrators had disappeared into the political and economic turmoil of the mideast, eastern Asia, and central Africa of the period. The upheaval in (and corporate exploitation of) these places over nearly a century had created many niches of opportunity in which criminals could seek refuge.

Each missing percentage point of genetic information represented a whole library of knowledge that might be locked away from us forever. Knowledge which could have had beneficial impact on hundreds of other scientific fields.

I was surprised to discover many of the convicted criminals had in earlier decades or centuries been hailed as great people by their respective nations or other constituencies: several had been United States Presidents! Many others had been chief executive officers of hugely successful major corporations. At first all this sounded like environmental extremists hanging bad raps on people. But the deeper I dug, the more just I felt the trials had been. Those persecuted had obviously been well aware of the long term and possibly permanent harm they'd be doing to the planet and future generations with their actions, and shown little or no regard for it in their decisions. I ended up being glad the trials had taken place, but wishing the criminals could somehow have been thwarted from wreaking their havoc at all.

Other vexing problems for future generations involved those which came to possess a momentum of their own. Stuff that we (past folks) had started rolling from centuries of massive environmental abuse, which couldn't be fixed quickly even with super advanced technology. Though strongly related to the mass extinctions, they would still have rated as disasters in their own right, even had the extinctions never occurred at all.

The pollution of the sky and oceans was the worst. Land wasn't quite so dynamic in its distribution of poisons as air and water were. So largely land-locked problems were usually much more localized and easily fixed, as they only slowly spread from their origin points.

But the sky and oceans were different cases entirely. And what was worse, they were intimately interdependent. So fouling one automatically soiled the other.

Huge high tech plants had to be constructed in strategic locations all over the world, their sole purpose to regenerate or refurbish the fluids of the Earth (air and water). For by 2075 several major cities were literally uninhabitable; their air and water literally poison to all living things. Entire regional populations were dying and/or beng forced to move elsewhere-- and governments being toppled over it.

Several cities in central and south America as well as Asia were very hard hit.

Among the worst problems on land was the radiation stemming from the incidents of nuclear contamination in the first half of the twenty-first century. Terrorist attacks and military strikes by major powers were one source. Accidents, and brief but brutal wars in areas of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa were others. Vast regions were transformed into true 'no-man's lands', for a time.

Though the greatest devastation by far occurred in the Middle-East, Africa, and Asia, western nations did not escape unscathed.

Attacks of various sorts decimated a number of major cities there; among them Paris, Washington D.C., and New York. New York and a couple other major metropolitan areas worldwide suffered such attacks not once, not twice, but three times or more, before they finally succumbed to an irrevocable decline into the dustbin of history.

Some historians pointed out that humanity as a whole actually benefited from this period however, as several of the most intractably violent factions of the race were essentially wiped out in these instances-- and others like them chastened by the events. This allowed the world to drastically reduce their wasteful expenditures on arms, and finally get about the business of mobilizing everyone towards long term peace, environmental responsibility, and economic prosperity for all.

With many of the worst thugs gone-- or essentially reduced to insignificance-- a new golden age had dawned for the world. The shame was that this achievement required terrible suffering on the part of billions of people worldwide.

Even in the entertainment media, war and military themes rapidly declined in value. People simply outgrew them. Fantasies, mysteries, and science fiction boomed for centuries, fed by an unending cornucopia of new scientific breakthroughs and expansions in human knowledge and opportunity.

It was strange to find myself so fascinated by history; I'd always thought it thoroughly boring in school. I guess what made it so interesting now was it was all future history: it hadn't happened yet. I was getting a sneak preview of events no one else of my generation could. And beyond that, getting to see what would happen hundreds of years after my death!

Come to think of it, this glimpse of things happening after my own death was something even Ling and her bunch didn't have.

Maybe I wasn't the Signposts Staute, but I was still unique, I realized. Maybe unique in all of history, by virtue of this unprecedented glimpse of the future. For there'd been no other folks from the past ever given rides on shifters, according to Ling. Indeed, no shifter but the Pagnew had ever even visited the past to allow such a thing. It hadn't even been considered possible, before now.

So far as the date of my own death was concerned...well, I couldn't look that up. I wasn't allowed to. Arbitur censored anything in the archives which could possibly give me a clue to the time or place of my own death, or its cause. Plus Ling, Riki, and Sasha wouldn't tell me anything either. Not that I particularly wanted to know. It was just that over many weeks of fairly free access to the future history of the world, sooner or later curiosity about your own demise gets the better of you, and you make a try at looking it up. I didn't pursue it again after the first few times-- that's when I learned of all the safeguards listed above-- but I had to try, in the beginning. It was just too tempting.

Basically though, I do agree it's probably best not to know.

After a while I grew tired of studying future history, and decided to look up Ling's origin's substitute for marriage she'd mentioned before-- unions, as she'd called them.

I couldn't help but think Ling's unions somehow related to the labor unions of my own time, but they didn't. At least not directly. Though over time it did seem I discerned some similarities. And from what I'd seen of the centuries following the 20th in the archives, families and small businesses did get pushed pretty damn hard towards finding new and novel ways to compete-- heck, survive!-- during the period.

Just as Ling had said, her unions usually defined a temporary bond rather than a permanent one. But Ling had left out a lot in her reference to the groupings.

For example, there was no restriction on the number of partners in a union. Or on their sex. Or on their species, even.

That last bit threw me for a loop when I first saw it. But then I quickly realized it must have been thrown in because of the child races Ling had mentioned, and I'd seen in the historical records. Though boosted chimps and dolphins were a relatively new element in the society, still society had changed quickly to accommodate its new citizens in many ways.

I dismissed the matter for the time being. Later I'd find out a lot more about that little clause. More than I ever wanted to know.

[Places like this in the strange memory sequence are frustrating, as my younger self is referring to things he has yet to experience. From my vantage point in the recollections it is impossible to know what he's thinking of. I can't access the information randomly as he was when he originally pondered this issue in whatever process he used to record it. But here I am forgetting this is all a fictitious account! So it doesn't much matter anyway.]

Though each union often had a few unique rules of its own, few required sexual fidelity to one's fellow union members(!). So Ling's unions seemed more like potentially intimate 20th century clubs or business relationships, than marriages.

They bound members usually (but not always) economically, politically, by religion, or some other specialized interest.

It also appeared at Ling's origin that big awards and other doses of recognition were going more often to entire unions than to individuals.

But one of my biggest surprises came when I discovered that unions rather than individuals held most of the elected offices now!

Can you imagine electing a club to be president of the United States? It seemed outrageous to me at the time. But even stranger than this were the union hierarchies.

Union hierarchies were like family trees of the groups. Most unions were themselves largely independent subsets of bigger, more powerful union organizations.

Even the families of the future reflected this, taking on some of the organizational aspects of contemporary unions to garner certain advantages from existing government or business policies. So not all unions of Ling's time were marriage-like in nature: many were strictly business or family-oriented.

An entire family would be union A, for example. The parents would be union B. The children would be union C. The group of boy children would be union D. And the girl children, union E (or vice versa on the sibling union letter classifications). Family style unions seemed to get really complicated at times-- as well as bizarre-- so I soon tired of that particular niche and moved on.

[I wonder what he meant by that? Again, I cannot seem to reference directly the memory he's basing this on.]

The reason for unions in general turned out to be one of practicality. As these unions permeated government and industry at every level, they helped improve the accountability and responsibility of specific groups and individuals for literally every facet of government, business, and social interaction, somehow.

This supposedly helped the world's economic and political engines to run at their maximum potential. But the more I examined the notion, the less difference I could see between the unions of the future and the primitive tribes of prehistoric man-- at least in some aspects.

The current acting crew aboard the Pagnew was just such a union, for example. A union comprised of three smaller ones.

Ling, Sasha, and Riki were one union (and yes, nano eyes could be full fledged members of unions, though their contractual obligations were a bit different).

Jorgon, Yamal, Sota, and four other nano eyes were another. So the Pagnew's unions seemed largely divided along sexual lines, at least where organics were concerned (eventually I'd discover something about the nano eyes which made the groupings much more complex than I suspected).

Will was the only human in her union. But she had two male nano eyes as fellow members.

All this caused me to see the crew in a new light, as you might expect. But that wasn't all, by any means. For when I say Will, Jorgon, Yamal, and Sota were human, I use the term loosely. By 20th century notions, Will, Jorgon, Yamal, and Sota were all technically dead.

Yep, that's right. Dead. Death doesn't mean quite the same thing in 2483, as 1972.

Three of the currently active members in the Pagnew crew had died well before the ship had launched. Sota had 'died' from fairly mundane circumstances afterwards, with his intellect routinely preserved for continued duty. Death didn't stop any of them from manning the ship because at Ling's origin death was more an inconvenience than a tragedy.

Jorgon, Yamal, Sota, and Will were the first names of the four dead crew. To Ling these folks were 'proxies', not dead. But dead is dead to us 20th century hicks.

These four still existed partly because of the extensive surveillance on all citizens at Ling's origin. It turned out all the spying the Pagnew had done on Ling and me at Tech was standard operating procedure for this bunch and their society. Besides helping speed along things like judicial proceedings (and nipping many crimes in the bud), this pervasive spying on everyone and everything also provided a sort of extra copy of each individual covered. This extra copy wasn't really a single file somewhere, but a cross-indexed group of millions of individual recordings of various thoughts, actions, and events randomly scattered over all the databases at Ling's origin. Ling told me this wide scattering made each individual's complete record akin to a hologram, in that the significance of any one piece wasn't that great, but the totality, properly assembled, formed a fairly complete version of the person recorded in them. At least based on many external circumstances and how that person responded to or drove those circumstances via their behavior.

But that wasn't all. These records contained not just the events experienced by these folks from many perspectives, but even the memories inside their heads-- courtesy of the shush net nodes. This meant for example that Arbitur somewhere was keeping a running record of every little thought that flashed through my head. This outraged me, but I couldn't see what I could do about it. Arbitur and the rest wouldn't remove the node no matter what I said or did. Plus, without it I'd be blind, deaf, and dumb aboard the Pagnew-- compared to the rest of the crew.

Pretty much all I could do about the node was hope I got back home-- for there no one could use it to pluck my thoughts right out of my head. And the crew assured me the node would be removed anyway upon my return to Earth.

But there was also the little matter of this node recording helping to make you immortal, in its own way. For the more or less complete record of a person's thoughts could be integrated with the other pieces of the puzzle (including a peculiar software template meant to offer generic human consciousness support) to recreate that person's mentality, if the original somehow came to an unexpected end.

The powerful computers of Ling's time were easily able to generate complete human consciousnesses from such components-- that's what Jorgon, Yamal, Sota, and Will were.

But there was still more to the process. These four could have opted for physical reconstitution itself-- a complete regeneration of their adult physical forms, with subsequent re-installation of their mentalities into same. This recreation of the total person required a few years (if you chose a biological body rather than a synthetic one), but that seemed a small price to pay for what was effectively immortality-- for you couldn't be killed! At least not permanently.

Ling had explained that reconstituted people could not easily be differentiated from originals, either by those closest to them, or by many sorts of tests. Indeed, it wasn't unusual for people of Ling's time to neglect to mention to others that they'd been killed and remade since the last time they'd spoken(!).

From my own talks with the phantom quartet, I could vouch for the fact that they seemed pretty human. They seemed awfully irritable at times, but that had something to do with them having to wait for realtime folks to get from one thought to another. Discorporates like them are able to think at near lightspeed-- so one second for us meat-patty folks is something like a day or two for them.

I guess it's a good thing the computers which house them automatically manage their calendars, too!

What made these folks different from the living (to me) wasn't really anything they said or did, but rather just the knowledge they were programs running on computer chips somewhere.

For some reason the four had rejected reconstitution (Ling said lots of discorporates did that these days). When asked about why, one phantom spoke of things like freedom from trivialities, as well as 'having the nimbleness and lifespan of an electron'.

Even with their much increased mental processing speeds though, the phantom organics couldn't match a nano eye like Riki-- much less Arbitur!-- in brute intellect or processing power. So mostly they were just souped up mental versions of the people they'd once been. That's what it seemed like to me anyway, from the outside looking in. From the other side of the curtain all this seemed much different to the phantoms. But since I never fully understood much of what they told me, I might not do them justice if I tried offering their views of their own 'afterlife' here.

Once out of curiosity I'd accessed images of what the four had looked like before they died. I'd known Will was a girl, but was unprepared for the gorgeous redhead that appeared on my wall-screen.

Will was technically the oldest organic among the crew, according to her file. She was also the most experienced dimensional shifter on board, with six previous flights under her ghostly belt.

Will was an alien contact specialist. So she and Ling were sort of the front line team for that sort of thing (Ling being an anthropologist, among other things).

Another reason for Will's presence onboard though was her penchant for isolation. She loved the existence aboard the Pagnew, as it was completely cut off from the rest of human society.

Apparently the only way to reliably isolate yourself in 2483 A.D. was to ship out to another universe!

So the Pagnew's delay in returning to origin had actually delighted Will.

Will had been aboard the Ulysses (another inter-dimensional shifter like the Pagnew) when it'd found the alien ruins, though you couldn't get her to talk about it. Ling mentioned this in passing one day, and I looked it up in the archives on my own later.

Those tantalyzing clues of an intelligent extraterrestrial race had been the only tangible ones discovered to date when the Pagnew had deployed on its present mission (seemingly trivial distant signals of such had been detected in our own universe before that-- but frustratingly little had come of them). It was a good thing Will and her team mates had done a thorough job examining the ruins and taking sample items, because subsequent shifter missions had been unable to locate the place again, and technology did not yet allow them to post point-to-point inter-dimensional shifting stations as easily as Realtime stations. Plus there were security concerns about setting up a two-way gate in a place where there was evidence of intelligence, but no indication of that intelligence's motivations either for good or ill.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the alien site was it'd been stripped of most everything before it'd been abandoned, and that abandonment had occurred a very long time ago, on a planet with a dynamic climate like Earth's own. This meant natural forces had substantially eroded and widely distributed what was left, and then hidden that with overgrowth.

It was nearly a miracle the Ulysses had found it at all, from orbit.

Precious little had been learned about the builders. They'd apparently been roughly 20th century human in size, and the outpost may have been abandoned after an attack or accident of some kind. Though some intricate artwork which might have been circuitry or even just a hobbyist's collection was found, it too yielded little useful information about the aliens or their technology.

The Ulysses had extended its mission to search nearby space for other remnants, but had found nothing else of significance.

Will was officially 232 years old-- including her short time so far as a vested proxy. The average organic life expectancy at birth at Ling's origin was now 671 (though no one was actually that old yet: some of the various life extension technologies involved were still too new). Being a vested proxy meant Will basically had the same rights and privileges at minimum as any living human being. A proxy which wasn't vested was usually a temporary software copy of a living person which was subordinate to the original. Beyond that things got very, very complicated in proxy-ville. Especially since proxies of human beings really were very similar to all ways but intelligence and processing power to plain old soft nano eyes. But nano eyes had nowhere near the rights and privileges of human derived proxies. Got that? Seemed to me like a fine mess in mid-stew. But what did I know?

Note the estimated life expectancy given above was for newborns; older folks weren't expected to live nearly that long in bodies of high biological content (i.e., possessing few if any cyborg parts).

Ling had told me biological death for her people was rarely lingering. In fact, one often appeared and functioned almost exactly the same right up to within only a few weeks or months of the end. But then massive multiple organ failures would begin. And 100% biological replacements were usually rejected, even though perfectly matched to the recipient. It was as if the entire system just collapsed, and there was little you could do about it. And simply growing a whole new body to implant the old brain and spinal cord into wouldn't overcome the problems either. Indeed, the usual organ to fail first in the cascade was the brain itself.

When the time came, the dying person would be treated according to their previously set up arrangements.

But most people couldn't afford expiration. For you were charged a tremendous fee for such a luxury. A fee you couldn't escape through death. For if the fee was unpaid when you expired, you simply had to pay it anyway when you re-awoke upon re-animation. And no, paying it after you returned didn't allow you to die a second time. A second death would require yet another fee payment. You had to pay upfront in order to stay dead. Yikes!

If you didn't have the money for a single fee payment upon awakening after unauthorized death, then you automatically went into a term of servitude for someone else until you were paid up.

Why the weirdness? Acute labor shortages, for one thing. Despite unimaginable prosperity, vast robotic resources, boosted animal support, and ever expanding government 'baby factories', the explosion of human endeavors across the galaxies demanded still more. More people that is.

Individual deaths were a luxury modern humanity could hardly afford.

So most people had to either go inorganic when their organic bodies began to give out, or be reconstituted from scratch as described previously. If one selected the inorganic route, there was another fork in the road: they could go the cyborg way, or the discorporate path taken by Will and her three phantom companions. Or a combination of both: immediately take command of a fully robotic body as an embedded proxy consciousness.

The cyborg alternative involved certain critical portions of the brains, essential glands, and nerve networks being removed from failing organic bodies and placed into a special unit linked to a subordinate robotic form. The artificial body could be humanoid like Riki's, or any of a multitude of other shapes and sizes. There was something in the archives here about 'bushes' or 'starfish' as being some sort of advanced form available for those who qualified. (Bushes? Sounded like a step backward to me. I figured I'd follow that up later.)

The equipment could keep the small organic remnants of a person alive for years-- separated as they were from the rest of the rapidly deteriorating body-- with any lengthy spans not requiring the organic remnants to be active usually spent in a state of suspended animation to minimize further decay. Keep in mind there was quite a bit the robotic form could do autonomously, as it possessed its own intelligence which-- while normally subordinate to the organic elements-- was at least its peer and often its superior in many matters of pure intelligence and information processing. A human mind ensconced in a cyborg body could often switch itself off for days or weeks at a time with no problem or break in activity on the part of its machine shell. And no risk to itself.

After a suitable period of familiarization with their new robotic physique, people would gradually and consciously dispense with their remaining organic elements. They did this only after they felt they had comfortably moved the seat of their awareness from the organic to inorganic platform.

Most people made progress at their own pace in the process, some taking as long as a year or more. I'd questioned Ling at length about this transition process, for it seemed both fascinating and terrifying at the same time.

Ling said each incremental step was reversible, at least in the beginning. So if you got frightened at a step you could always go back for a while.

But what about the organic you that had to stay in the dying parts? I'd wondered. I figured that the real you must be stuck there; surely the robot version was just a copy of some kind.

But Ling told me I was wrong. That people would never have accepted anything less than complete transferral and continuous, unbroken awareness throughout the process.

When after a long time in research and development the full-blown procedure had first been initiated on a wide scale, there'd been several widely publicized events whereby individuals had tried to find a break point. A discontinuity which signified the human consciousness was not truly being transferred, but only copied. After enduring repeated scandals due to failed or only partial successes in seamless transfers, the technology had finally been perfected well enough for most people to accept, and the government to write edicts of transfer for the dying. The government had eagerly seized upon its new power over the populace. Recall that the masses had good reasons to want success in the matter too: the promise of immortality among them.

Ling said that when a mind is broken down into its essential elements, it consists of a unique pattern of interwoven neural networks, electrical charge, and attendant chemicals. These elements were painstakingly duplicated synthetically in the robot body.

But it was no copy.

As each synthetic or artificial cell structure was assembled in the robot, the corresponding organic original was disassembled. Subjects were fully conscious through the majority of the procedure, able to feel themselves on both sides, and make relative judgments as to the progress being made.

This aspect was very important, as it allowed you to subjectively sense and verify the transfer process for yourself.

It was then that I'd asked Ling for more about why you had to pay extra to simply die, than live. I told her in my day it was the complete opposite.

Ling told me that with all humankind's original problems solved, they'd ran into one little expected by experts of previous centuries: a people shortage.

She said the people shortage was the main thing holding back progress in her time. The opportunities mankind had uncovered scientifically and space-wise far outstripped the manpower we could apply to them. And in a vicious feedback loop, the manpower shortage also limited the pace of new improvements to social conditions in general.

It was like we'd discovered a vast library of books, each chock full of secrets which could propel us to even greater heights. And yet we had only a handful of people to read them.

Some short-lived experiments in mass producing people by way of cloning had had unacceptable results. So cloning as an option was now severely limited.

Mankind's people shortage had become the primary bottleneck on progress.

But getting back to the various unions onboard the Pagnew, you may recall me saying Ling, Sasha, and Riki made up one union. This meant (as much as I hated to acknowledge the fact) that Sasha was Ling's girlfriend.

Sasha made it a point to stay away from me most of the time. Which was fine with me, as Sasha's existence itself confused the hell out of me!

Why? For starters, Sasha was Ling's identical twin. Not twin sister-- just physically altered to resemble Ling in precise detail. They were identical in physical terms. And often went about dressed and made up exactly alike, as well. Agh! At my own origin this might have been considered kind of sick. But at Ling's origin it was simply one of many variations couples (sometimes entire unions!) might try for a while. When you considered humanity's past history of cults and clubs and identical uniforms for armies and company employees, this didn't seem so unusual after all. I guess the ease and rapidity with which individuals could alter their looks at Ling's origin contributed a lot too to all this. It had probably required no more than a matter of weeks of treatments for Sasha to originally transform herself into Ling's twin-- maybe less, depending on just what Sasha's own percentage of cyborg content was (I never inquired on that point). And changing back to her previous look would require about the same length of time.

Of course, you did have to have the permission of the original person to do this-- unless your own original biological composition was sufficiently near the same (there was a legal cut off point for the matter).

When I'd first discovered Ling and Sasha were a couple, I'd agonized for days over it. Ling helped me get used to the idea by explaining the changes that had occurred in society since my time and all, but still it hadn't fully squelched my concern. Only when Ling pointed out that I mainly seemed to be displaying jealousy, did I back off of the issue. For it was true: I was jealous of Sasha, and wanted Ling solely for myself.

I was sure Sasha felt the same way about me. Or hoped she did, anyway. For if she didn't, that might mean she felt more secure about she and Ling than I did about Ling and me. Agh!

Ling said the reason Sasha avoided me was not jealousy, but rather dislike for biological men in general. Ling reminded me about the sexual prejudices which were increasing at her origin: Sasha was a prime example of the trend. Sure, Sasha had little problem working side-by-side with the originally organic male proxies onboard, when necessary. But she went out of her way to avoid physical versions.

I asked Ling if Will too shared this dislike. The answer was no. Over the course of her life, Will had simply had her fill of all people, male and female, dolphin and chimpanzee (two of the boosted species) and was now more interested in finding a completely new species with which to relate.

In the absence of organic aliens she'd turned to local community inorganics, like Riki's kind. Which brought up the third member of Ling's current and most intimate union.

Riki was an inorganic intelligence modeled to resemble a human in appearance, and normally possess no more than average human capacities in many areas, most of the time. However, when the need arose he could dial up something akin to super powers, like incredible speed and strength, and perceptual acuity no plain human being could ever match.

Why were things like his strength normally limited to organic human standards? For safety reasons. For accidents happen even in the most modern of states. And there can be a big difference between getting accidentally jabbed by a human elbow in a crowded theater, and accidentally hit with a robot's elbow-- with all the power and rigidity of a bull dozer behind it.

Of course, Riki's intellectual capacities were allowed to run at 100% all the time. So he was ultra-brilliant in human terms.

Riki also had the ability to completely change his appearance within a matter of seconds. I was a witness to this sometime later, and must say it was nothing short of amazing.

Riki was a full member in Ling's union. So he was sort of like her husband. Agh! Again.

The strange thing was I never felt the same towards Riki as I did Sasha. Perhaps it was because he wasn't human. Maybe because he was like a super man I couldn't possibly compete with, and so didn't worry about. Maybe Sasha's strange likeness to Ling had something to do with it all. I don't know.

But it might have been because Riki became my second best pal onboard, next to Ling. Or at least Riki tied with Arbitur for the role.

I liked Riki better than the ex-organic proxies onboard for several reasons. One, he too was a close friend to Ling; and so we had something in common. Two, he didn't push the futuristic 'male bonding' thing on me like Jorgon and Yamal tried a few times in various ways. Three, he often provided me with useful info I simply couldn't get from Arbitur, for one reason or another. And four, he was real. Physically real I mean. Jorgon, Yamal, Sota, and Will may have had organic origins, but they were too much like ghosts now. Every time I talked to them I couldn't help remembering I was speaking to a dead person.

Technically of course, I was more dead than they were-- by a few centuries no less! But still I felt there was something tangibly different between them and me. And Riki seemed more real-- more alive to me-- than they did.

As Ling and Sasha were the only 'embodied' organic crew members currently on-duty onboard the Pagnew, and organics always ranked higher than inorganics where both were otherwise considered peers, that made Ling and Sasha the highest ranking of all the active crew-- at least at this time. As Sasha seemed content to usually defer to Ling's authority, that made Ling the effective captain-- to my mind anyway. But the truth was much more complicated. For a consensus by the majority of the active crew seemed necessary for some things, though Ling and Sasha could over-rule the majority in certain cases. But then again the entire active crew often expected Arbitur to run most all ship operations, and rarely questioned the top nano eye's decisions. Indeed, it seemed the crew almost never intervened in the running of the ship unless Arbitur specifically asked them to. And apparently there were some rules or guidelines Arbitur always followed in this regard; if the rules showed current circumstances required consultation with the crew, Arbitur did so.

Arbitur didn't seem to often ask for such conferences. Of course, that didn't stop the active crew from holding conferences on their own when they wished. It was just that conferences not instigated by Arbitur himself rarely led to any decision by the crew which was then relayed to Arbitur (I considered Arbitur to be male, based on the personality characteristics I perceived from interaction with him, despite his voice sounding pretty androgynous whenever I heard it in my head).

But lo and behold, after I'd undergone a certain amount of education about the ship and my circumstances, someone-- maybe everyone-- suddenly decided it was time for such a conference. The purpose of this confab? I was in the dark, but for figuring it had to be about me: otherwise why invite me?

There was no need for everyone to physically travel to a central location. Not with the shush net and TV walls everywhere. Practically anywhere you were on the ship could instantly become a full-fledged meeting room, with the main difference being no fisticuffs could break out without some further travel being involved. Of course there was no rule saying two or more crew members couldn't be in the same room during a conference. But for some reason my first conference convened with everyone in different physical locations: except for the ghosts of course, who maybe were all crammed into the same memory chip together.

From the displays I'd seen, it seemed the TV walls themselves could act as gigantic cameras at the same time they functioned as video screens. How? Beats me!

Ling informed me I was required to watch, listen, and be available for comment during the conference-- but that primary control over my shush net node would be turned over to Arbitur for temporary management. Why? For the convenience of the crew. I was only to speak when spoken to. Ling didn't exactly phrase it that way, but that's what it boiled down to.

Sure, I admit I was intimidated by these future ding-a-lings and their wild toys. But still I resented the restrictions on my node. I mean, though it was unlikely I would have spoken up much at my first conference onboard anyway, I didn't like the option being summarily taken from me like that.

So I was fuming a bit as I joined the meeting.

What happened next? Navigator

Above is a wire frame side view of the Pagnew time-traveling vessel, rendered in 1990 by 3D computer software available at the time.

Above is a top view of the Pagnew (again in wire frame) by 3D software from 1990 (the odd stains or wrinkles and such stem from aging of the original print-outs).

A 3D view of one of the Pagnew's flying remotes (roughly the size of a 20th century car). You didn't ride inside it, but stood on (or sat upon) the slanted platform encircling the thing. Nearer the top was something like a handrail. However, as riders were either androids or crew members wearing fourth skins, these weird accommodations didn't cause much problem. For either the androids or the fourth skins easily stayed attached to the remote during transport, in one fashion or another.

Above can be seen an angled top view in 3D of the Pagnew.

Above can be seen an angled bottom view in 3D of the Pagnew.

Above is an angled side view of the Pagnew from above, in 3D.

Copyright © 2004-2011 by J.R. Mooneyham. All rights reserved.