From: perricone@wsyd.com (Frank Perricone) Date: 28 Apr 94 18:57:17 -0500 Subject: QL Squared Message-Id: Organization: Fidonet: 2 QL by Frank J. Perricone perricone@wsyd.com [Author's Note: the question of where in Quantum Leap history, as established by the television shows, this story falls, is problematical, as will be made clear by the story itself. It is best to start the story thinking it happens somewhere *after* _Mirror_Image_. Also: many special thanks to Sally Smith (sallylb@netcom.com) for providing information of great value to me in writing the story.] * * * * * "Doctor, do something, quick! She's dying!" _Oh boy. Not again. This isn't real, it's only a TV show. They're filming a TV show. This time, maybe I'll get the lines right._ Sam had just arrived here, in the body of... his swiss-cheesed mind refused to bring up the name of the person, but he'd leaped here before. He was a soap opera star, playing a doctor. One of his fans kidnapped him and he had to escape. Last time, he'd thought the medical emergency was real, and tried to do CPR on the woman in the hospital bed, only to find out she was alive. He remembered that that had nagged at him; CPR on a live patient can be very dangerous. _But why am I here again, if I solved everything last time?_ Sam's memory had been a conundrum to him during these last few years. Normally, he had an eidetic memory -- he could remember things perfectly and completely. However, the effects of all these hundreds of leaps had swiss-cheesed his mind, so he could remember one thing, but another would lie tantalizingly out of his reach. In its perversity, his memory yeilded up a perfect recollection of the lines he was supposed to say, and he said them, all at the right moments. When the woman died, or rather, when the machine made that flatline noise, he turned to the actor who was playing the deceased's love interest and said, "I'm sorry. There was nothing we could have done." There was a silence on the set; then Sam heard a voice call out, "Cut!" _But I got it *RIGHT* this time!_ he protested in his mind. "All right, let's try again from the leap in. Scott, remember, you don't know that this is just a TV show, not yet. Sam wouldn't have known. Places, everyone." The set was a bustle of activity. Sam could just make out a short, dark-haired director -- not the one he remembered from last time -- no, wait, there's the director from last time, but he's in front of that camera. He wasn't the one who'd spoken, though. And what was that about-- "I'm not SUPPOSED to know this is a TV show?" "No, not yet, you only just leaped in." _I just what?_ "I'm... I'm feeling a bit dizzy. Could I sit down for a moment, and maybe look at a script?" Sam wandered off the set. _How do these people know I leaped in? Where am I? Boy, I sure wish Al were still Observing on these leaps. It's awfully hard without him._ But then, he saw-- "Al?" _No, it doesn't look QUITE like him. But who else would dress that way?_ "Scott, are you OK?" The man who looked somewhat like, and dressed exactly like, Al, came over, an expression of concern on his face. He didn't have the ubiquitous handlink; instead, he was reading from a script. Actually, on a closer look, he didn't look that much like Al, but it was close enough to catch someone off guard. "Yeah, I just need to sit a few minutes, and check out my lines again. Can I borrow that script?" Sam took the script, then found a chair. The person who was not quite Al, looking convinced, left, so Sam had plenty of time to check out the cover of the script. It read QUANTUM LEAP Bellisario Productions Episode #71: Moments To Live The cast was enough to make his eyes water. It listed "characters" such as Sam Beckett, Al Calavicci, and the various people he'd met when he leapt into this leap before. _No, I guess this isn't the same leap._ "Oh, boy." * * * * * Sam had been thumbing through the script. It told a mostly accurate, though not quite perfect, rendition of the leap he had thought he was back in when he originally arrived. The background was quite clearly his own; even the highly classified, top secret Project Quantum Leap was clearly there. _These people are filming my life! How do they know all this?_ The director, who Sam now knew was named Joe Napolitano, had called a five-minute break, and Sam had used it to speed-read the script, trusting to his photographic memory to provide him with the lines when he needed them. He didn't think he'd need to work on the delivery any. He'd managed to find a copy of an older script, _Ghost_Ship_, that was lying around, and confirmed that Ziggy and PQL were in there, too. About this time the actor who was playing Al -- Sam now knew his name was Dean -- came over. "Are you sure you're all right, Scott?" He seemed about to go on, but Sam interrupted. "Yes, Al-- err, Dean, I'll be fine. I think I'm ready, once Joe gets back. What scenes do we have to do after this?" Dean rattled off a list -- thankfully short -- of scenes to do today. "Then, tomorrow we should be able to wrap this up." "Good, I'm looking forward to that." _What could I be here to do? Maybe the original actor -- Scott Bakula -- didn't do a good enough job of acting like me, the first time, and I have to do it? Finally, a leap I'd be perfectly qualified for. But..._ He'd been thinking around and around that fundamental question over and over, and it was just making his head hurt. _Better get this filming over with quickly so I can do some research. Oh, I wish Al -- the real Al -- would show up._ But it had been many scores of leaps since that had happened last, ever since Sam had leaped, again, into the life of Beth -- this time as one of her girlfriends -- and convinced her to wait for Al's return from Vietnam. Leaping alone was very hard. Filming the remaining scenes took a long, long time. When he'd been here before -- no, it wasn't here, but... When he'd leaped into a TV actor before, he hadn't really gotten to spend much time filming. As a result, he didn't realize how long, slow, boring, and exhausting a process it was. The director -- a short, intense Italian with quite a flair for keeping a lot of things in his head at once, like all directors -- always wanted at least two takes. The pauses between calls of "Action" were long and tiring. The scenes that were filmed jumped all around the story, but with a little practice Sam found it pretty easy to jump into the middle of the storyline for each new scene. Later, they went outside to film a number of the outdoor scenes, and the February air was chilly. Sam was also amazed at how many people it took to do something like this. There were several dozen crew, more men than women, doing things with wires and lenses and cameras and lighting gels and platforms, all the time. One thing Sam noticed was that the catering table was laden with some of the best food he'd eaten in a half-dozen leaps. It was late in the evening, well past sunset, when the director finally called it a day. It had gotten by now to the point where the dilemma of how to find his way home no longer even got his attention; it was a problem he'd solved a dozen ways, a hundred times. This time, he simply feigned exhaustion -- it wasn't hard to do -- and got someone to help him home. As it happened, she was the dramaturg -- that is, the assistant to the director who concentrates on interpretation issues. He took advantage of the opportunity. "Say,..." Once again, he didn't know her name. _Why don't you make them all wear name-tags?_ he thought, rolling his eyes skyward. "...ma'am, I've been thinking about a few things about... Sam, the way he feels. Is there a library of old scripts, or tapes of the episodes, somewhere around here? I'd like to check through them and look into a few things." The unnamed woman, a tall, dark-haired woman with a British accent, told him where the old script files were, then tried to press him to talk about these ideas of his. "I'd rather not talk about them right now, if you don't mind." She didn't. The gaze she swept across his body after depositing him at his room seemed predatory, but she didn't ask to be let in, and Sam was relieved at that. His room was sparse, clearly not his permanent home, but one that he used during filming. Thankfully, there was a mirror. _Hmmm... not a bad resemblance, this Scott. They got my silver lock of hair, too. A little young-looking, maybe. And the cheekbones aren't quite right. But good._ But that train of thought led him to the same question, again. Cutting it off, he rushed to the script files. * * * * * It only took him about three hours to read all the scripts. By that late, he ought to have been very sleepy, but the feverish obsession with this mystery kept him up. It had always been thus. Back in the early days of the Project, working late into the night with Al on the design, Al would need tons of coffee, while Sam could go on all night just on the energy of an idea, a problem needing a solution. That was before Al had quit the Project to spend more time with his family, of course, and Sam had decided not to include an Observer after all. _No, that's not what happened the first time. That's the result of a change I made. Hmmm... maybe that's why leaping swiss-cheeses my memory; I'm remembering both the original and the alternate histories, all of the thousands of alternate histories that keep appearing and disappearing as I change things. All that programming on Alpha -- no, on Ziggy, it was Ziggy first -- to get him -- or was it her? -- to remember both memories at once, that's what I am lacking. That was why Ziggy had to be a PARALLEL hybrid supercomputer -- parallel memories of parallel histories. That's what I need, I guess. Human minds aren't meant to have their memories yanked out from under them all the time._ But he could avoid working on the central question no longer. How had these people managed to learn about his life and film it? The original creator of the series was one Donald Bellisario, who, along with Deborah Pratt, wrote many of the episodes, as well as the "bible" (as they referred to the book of writing rules required to maintain consistency). Speaking of consistency, Sam noticed that, whatever their source of information was, wasn't perfect. There were quite a few errors scattered throughout the series; hardly an episode in the batch was perfect. Some of them brought up some inconsistencies that were, to him, glaring, even with one another. The overall feel, and basic storyline, of each episode, was right. But the details, the dialogue, and in some cases, some of the plot twists, were not. And an odd handful of leaps were totally fabricated. Sam could see no way that his leaps could have been recorded, even if those recordings were to be declassified by the government. What was worse, it was 1992. _At this time, Al and I are only just beginning to work on Project Quantum Leap. Why didn't I know that this show was being produced, as far back as 1988? How could no one have told me? And how could they know the leaps before I leaped them?_ There were only two possibilities he could see. The first was that this hadn't originally happened; a time traveller was doing it. But why? Could this be some insidious plot by the Evil Leapers, as he had come to refer to them? He'd crossed paths with them many times. Try as he might, though, he could see no reason for them to do this, even if they had some way to do it. The only other possibility was that the force which directed his leaps -- God, Fate, or Time -- was somehow responsible. But then, why the errors? And again, why do it at all? Was this some kind of reward for his "good deeds"? If so, maybe he was here to correct those errors. But no, these episodes had already been broadcast, some of them three and a half years earlier. It was a bit too late to correct them. In fact, there were only perhaps a dozen leaps left before the one where Al would be bowing out of the story, retroactively. Sam had found a note, in a printout of a computer file, about how Don Bellisario had come up with the idea for the series, late at night in bed. _Perhaps I should talk to Don. But what if he's an Evil Leaper? Maybe it'd be best to work out who he is first. But how? And what am I here to do, anyway?_ * * * * * The next day, he was awake bright and early, dressed and ready to be on the set by 7am. There would be more outdoor scenes first thing, the daytime ones (of course), and then a few at the shack they were using for the house of his captors. The shack they had was a bit more run down than the real one, but it would serve. Again, filming was boring and slow. And he was in virtually every scene. During one of the few breaks -- while his captors were interacting with one another -- he was sitting down, eating, when the dramaturg came over and started to press him for details on the results of his research last night. "I noticed you went the files right away, even though you were too tired to find your way home. What kind of idea are you working on?" She was very persistent. But of course, that was her job, to help the actors with interpretations and character issues. Sam tried to weave a lie but it didn't hold; she was a very quick and perceptive person, who knew her field well, and who took apart his story about an idea that Sam wasn't coming across human enough. _Perhaps I should tell her the truth. She could probably help me figure out what's going on. She could tell me how this Bellisario guy got the info about me, where he's getting his ideas._ With little alternative, Sam caved in and said, "I have to tell you the truth, but you're going to have a very hard time believing me. I'm not really Scott... I'm Sam. I leaped into Scott. I don't know why, or how. And I don't know how you all are making a TV show out of my life. But this is all real." The frustration and confusion poured out of Sam with his words. "It's not quite right, but it's real. How does the producer know all this about my life?" The woman was chuckling. "Scott, we've talked about doing that leap a thousand times, but you know it wouldn't work. Not even as a joke." She didn't seem surprised at all to hear Scott joking. "How can I prove it to you?" Sam paused to reflect. What would he know, that Scott wouldn't? Only things that hadn't been in the script. "Do you want me to explain the quantum physics of leaping? You see, the basis of the accelerator process is bound up with one of the more interesting properties of the subatomic particle known as the meson, which--" "Scott, stop! I'm the one who recommended that you read the quantum physics books, remember?" She seemed very amused. "I'm glad to see that you did. It's always good to really get into a role. Only, I think you're going a *bit* too far, this time." Sam sighed. There was no way to prove it. It was Scott's job to act, think, and be like Sam, when on the set, as much as he could; and he apparently did a darned good job at it. Anything Sam did would just seem like a reflection of Scott's talent. "Well, I wanted to see if I could convince you. You never really know, do you?" He chuckled, then hastily excused himself. _So much for that approach._ * * * * * Sam spent a good part of the afternoon, in between scenes, agonizing over whether he should confront Don, who (with Deborah) was here for today's filming, or come up with something else. It didn't seem like a good idea, but he couldn't find any other ideas to pursue. As it turned out, he needn't have worried; when the confrontation, as it was, happened, he had no choice in the matter. Exhausted, Sam was picking up a bit of food at the catering tray, when he felt a slap on the back. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Don, about to say something cheery and encouraging, as producers are wont to do, when he felt the tingle, starting on his back and quickly spreading across his body. Not the tingle of a leap; this was one he'd felt only a few times, when he'd touched Alia that first time, and the other Evil Leapers he'd met on his travels. He turned to confront the person who had leaped into Don. "Gooshie!" "Sam!" "Oh boy." Gooshie looked around, then whispered to Sam, "We need to get somewhere and talk. I've been waiting for you for a long time, Dr. Beckett. I never thought you'd leap right into the middle of all this, though." Gooshie (Sam knew that he still looked like Don to everyone else, but he looked like Gooshie now) went over to Joe, talked a few moments, then brought Deborah back over to Sam. "Let's go around here where we can talk in private for a few minutes, Dr. Beckett." They went around the back of a piece of old set and found some seats. "Dr. Beckett, do you remember my wife Tina?" Deborah shook hands with Sam, and turned into Tina, his phase technician, and former lover of Al, in another timeline. "Tina... Gooshie... What the hell is going on here, anyway?" "Listen, Sam, we can't talk too long now or we'll throw the filming schedule off. We--" "Why are you filming my life?" Tina spoke up; Sam's first reaction was to notice that the pitch and timbre of a person's voice also was masked by the aura, since Deborah's voice had been pretty low, almost husky, and Tina's, of course, was the high squeek that Sam had always thought felt like fingernails on a blackboard. "We had to get in touch with you. Sam, we know how to bring you home!" Gooshie interrupted, gently. "You see, Dr. Beckett, what happened is this. About a hundred of your leaps ago, Alpha told us that you had wrought a fundamental change in our history. We, of course, didn't notice. Since we don't share any brain cells with Alpha as you do, changes that you make that affect our lives, just CHANGE things; we don't remember how they WERE. But Alpha does. He printed out a list of the way all your leaps originally went. Apparently, Admiral Al Calavicci, the gentleman who was working with you on your original designs -- do you remember him?" What a question. How could he ever forget Al? He only managed to nod his head. "Well, in the original history, he stayed on with the Project, since his wife, Beth, had had their marriage annulled when he didn't return from Vietnam. You remember how you had originally planned to have an Observer? Well, in this other history, Al was your Observer, and--" "Gooshie, I remember all this from when it happened. Skip to the place where I changed all that." Gooshie seemed taken aback. He had always been in awe of Sam, and this rebuff made him pause to collect his thoughts before going on. "When you leaped into Beth's friend and convinced Beth to wait for Al, everything changed to the way it is now. Alpha is called Alpha, instead of Ziggy, which is a name Al gave to him. And we had--" Gooshie turned to face one side, to where no one was, and spoke as if someone were there. "Yes, of course I'll tell him that." _An Observer? Gooshie has an Observer? Could it be... Donna?_ "Dr. Beeks wants me to tell you that the reason we got to do the research that we did was because we weren't kept busy trying to keep up with your leaps. In the history you remember, we were always working on your leaps. Oh, we'd have anywhere from a few hours to two weeks between the moment you leaped out, and when you leaped in again. But it was never enough time, Alpha says, to get any serious work done. So we never could recreate your original theories to figure out how to get you home. We hired some more staff, as much as we could get funding for -- a Dr. Donna Alessi headed that team -- What?" Gooshie was looking to the side again. "Oh. Errr... Sam.... in one of the alternate histories, you were married to Dr. Alessi. But not in most of them. I'm sorry." _Not in most of them?_ At first Sam felt hurt. But the emotion drained away surprisingly quickly. _Maybe it's better that way._ But Gooshie had continued to talk. "--in our history, we had lots of time. When you leaped out, the person in the Waiting Room would vanish, then be replaced with another one. Dr. Beeks would try to comfort them and reassure them that all was all right, and we kept track of who they were, to supplement Alpha's recordings of your leaps, but there wasn't--" "Alpha recorded my leaps?" "Yes, through the link created by your shared brain cells. Alpha could always see through your perspective. We've used this to create the scripts, though I must admit, it was hard to maintain first person perspective all the time. I'm not much of a writer, after all, I'm a computer programmer. We had to hire a lot of ghost--" Tina interrupted. "You're messing up the story, Goosh!" It was clear Gooshie had long since gotten used to Tina's voice, and her abrasive personality. "Yes, dear. Other than recording this info, there was little for us to do, since the link was one-way so we couldn't send you information; so naturally we concentrated our efforts on trying to get you home. We did extensive research, leaping mice, and in some cases, chimpanzees, and finally, Alpha came up with a technique which worked." "You mean-- you can get me home?" "We think so, Dr. Beckett. Tina and I have leaped and returned several times. You see, when you leap out, what really happens is this. You have an excess of time-energy, due to the leaping process, and your current location in time rejects you." "Yes, I know, it's because of the Pauli exclusion principle. I *designed* this system, Gooshie." "Of course. But what happens when you leap out again? The situation you leaped into was one which was at a particularly low-time-energy state, which was why your energy surplus took you there, just as heat flows to cold. Once you solved whatever problems were causing this state, the energy state of time in that area rejects you again, leaping you out. Your host immediately leaps back into his original place, to fill the vacuum left behind, and you wander your timestring, looking for another low-time-energy point, so to speak. During this time, there is no one in the Waiting Room. When you finally find a point to leap into, you leap, displacing the host, who leaps to the Waiting Room, where there is a vacuum still left behind by your absence. "You know how electricity works?" Sam hoped that was a rhetorical question. "If a switch is open, electricity will not flow at all; it doesn't flow up to the break and then flow back on finding that there's no connection, it simply doesn't flow. It's as if the electrons know before they leave that there is no way to get where they're going. Leaping is somewhat similar. The new host will not leap out if there isn't a vacuum back at the Waiting Room for him to leap into. And that means you won't leap in." "So I leap into the vacuum, and come home?" "No, Dr. Beckett. For this to happen, we need to close off the Waiting Room, eliminating the vacuum, by running the acceleration process on the empty space there. You have nowhere to leap to, so you just hover in this state. During this time, your excess of time-energy dissipates. After a set time, Alpha releases the vacuum in the Waiting Room, then runs a modified and debugged version of the Retrieval program you entered during your last stay here. This altered version keys on your indeterminate state, and directs you towards the Waiting Room. In this state, you leap directly, rather than displacing someone else." "And you've--done this?" "Well, the first few times were failures. The chimpanzees we leaped, when they came back..." Gooshie got a distressed look on his face, and Tina seemed on the verge of weeping. "Apparently, being in the quantum indeterminate state for an extended period of time is very dangerous to living things. They all came back dead. We discovered that we could prevent this by ensuring that they had a very high quantity of MATTER energy, the kind of energy that normal physics deals with. In essence, you need to be mostly electrocuting yourself. Alpha was exploring in this direction during the retrieval attempts that we made during your first few leaps, but set it aside after those failures. This was before we confirmed the existence of time energy." "So why haven't you done this to me yet? I could have been home all this time?" "If we had, and you hadn't put yourself in a situation to get an excess of matter energy before leaping, you would have died. We had to find a way to tell you this. But there was no way." Sam pondered for a second. "If you could leap yourselves, why didn't you leap into one of my leaps and tell me then?" "We tried, Sam. At first, we tried to leap into your old leaps, the ones we had recorded. But you couldn't do the leap home then; because, for you, Alpha was at a different time, and we couldn't set Alpha to run the new retrieval program, because it was a different Alpha we were talking to. And if we told you, and hoped you'd remember right up through your present leap, we'd be relying on your swiss-cheesed mind. We could never be sure enough to activate the special retrieval program. I assume from this conversation that you did not, in fact, remember the previous times we met during a leap." That much Sam was sure of. How many times had he almost gone home? "We had to tell you *during* your current leap. The problem is, we couldn't find out when, where, and who you were until after you'd already left. That's the way your link with Alpha works; during your leaps, Alpha sees only the changes to history, in order to be able to follow all the parallel lines. Only after you've leapt, when the changes settle into a single timeline, can Alpha link to your mind, in order to try to guide your leap. That was, if you'll recall, one of the reasons you originally planned to have an Observer, rather than having Alpha appear directly to you as a hologram. It was necessary to have someone else to relay information, who was also linked in via the neural network." "Yes, I remember. Without Al, I couldn't get any information from Ziggy -- I mean, Alpha. And I needed that information, many times." "We tried to figure out who and where you were by talking to the leapee, but we could never do it in time and with enough accuracy. It seemed as if our attempts were doomed to failure, in fact. Several times we thought we had it, but as soon as we leaped, you leaped. Alpha thinks that the process of having someone leap into someone so close to you might have displaced you before your leap ended, but we never conclusively proved that." "Maybe that explains why I leapt before I finished saving Tania--" "Yes, Tania Terrance was one of the ones where I leaped into someone else, you may remember him, his name was Henry Allensen, a stockbroker--" "Yes," Sam interrupted harshly. "Please, Gooshie, I'd rather not talk about that leap. Ever." "Certainly, Dr. Beckett. We even tried to leap back to before the project began and convince you not to leap when you did. But the machinery failed on us, on no less than seven occassions. Tina and I believe it was whatever force directs your leaps, making--" "But you said it was just low energy states." Tina spoke. "Sam, God is the energy states. God is the universe." "--making sure we didn't undo all the righting of wrongs you did. Alpha believes that we were prevented by paradox. We were--are--able to leap into times before the project was underway, such as right now, in 1992. But if we try to seek you out, we always leap back, whether we want to or not." "But surely you could have-- no, that wouldn't work." Sam pondered, but got nowhere. "But couldn't you leap back into time, and create a low-energy situation that would force me to leap into it?" "Excellent, Dr. Beckett. It took us almost two months to come up with that idea, yet it only took you a minute. Truly brilliant. But there are thousands, millions, of low-energy states. Statistical analysis has shown that your choices are NOT random. You have a much higher likelihood of leaping into situations involving racism, in the United States, especially the south, into situations not involving famous people, and into situations related to people you know personally. But we couldn't manipulate these well enough to attract you. What we needed was a way to get your attention no matter what you'd leaped into. So we decided to make this TV show. "We leaped into the bodies of a pair of well-known, established television producers, and began filming your life. What we hoped would happen would be that you would, in whatever leap you were in, see the show, wonder about it, and seek us out. We had to use a television show because it had the widest distribution -- it was the most likely thing for you to see. Yet we've been at it for four years, almost, and you never sought us out. We were really considering giving up." "Well, I don't watch TV. Never have. And when I'm leaping, I rarely get a chance to do anything. If I have time to relax, I certainly wouldn't spend it on TV." "Yes, Dr. Beckett, but we could hardly publish an ongoing series that would get your attention, in a scientific journal!" "Err... now that you come to mention it, I can't think of any better way to get a message to me." "So that's what we've been doing. I'm afraid many of the episodes aren't quite as they happened to you. First, we had to fit them into an hour. Second, we had to make sure the series wasn't cancelled; it's very difficult keeping something on the air in this country. And, Tina and I are not very good writers. Many of the stories were written by others, with our direction. A few of them were totally fabricated by other writers, but we had to allow them to be filmed because it would have looked suspicious otherwise. We established a policy of never accepting, or even looking at, outside scripts, just to avoid having to film leaps that never happened, but even so, we got stuck more times than I'd have liked." "So what do I have to do now? Electrify myself?" "Well, it's not quite that simple. Tina and I were leaped under a different insertion program than you were, one that was highly refined. Dr. Beeks can trigger our leaping back any time she wants, using her handlink to control our time-energy states. You, however, were leaped under an uncontrolled program, so we can't force you to leap out. You're going to have to figure out what you're here to do, do it, and *then*, just before you leap out, electrify yourself." * * * * * The first thing to investigate was the possibility that Scott's life had a problem that needed fixing. But that didn't seem to be a possibility. Scott seemed to be happy. He had a beautiful wife, a great house, a very successful acting career, and the friendship and respect of virtually everyone who knew him. There were no problems that would require a leaper to fix. While some of his friends and relatives had their petty little difficulties with money, personality, or other of the common and niggling problems of life, none were big enough. The last hundred leaps without Al had taught Sam how to tell, and he knew none of these were the problem. _If only Al were here. He could tell me what the problem is._ Sam wasn't sure why he was so sure of this, but he was. After finishing the filming that night, he spent a few hours with Gooshie and Tina going over their notes for future scripts. Gooshie's notes were vague and imprecise, and only touched on a few of the more major leaps coming up. Gooshie explained that the demands of filming made it impossible to have scripts ready too far in advance; these few hastily-scrawled notes were all he'd been able to find time for. Tina's notes were even worse, covering more leaps, but in much less detail. She had written many of the Evil Leaper leaps down. Sam tried fixing some of the problems in their script ideas, hoping that might be his goal, but of course there was hardly anything left to fix. He helped Gooshie and Tina take notes on a few more leaps, but gave up when he realized how many he'd have to go through first. "Perhaps the show is in danger of being cancelled, and I have to ensure that it isn't? No, that doesn't make sense. The only purpose to the show is to get my attention, right? Hmmmm..." "Oh, Sam, don't be silly." Tina somehow didn't seem the same without her glowing jewelry and shoes. "You couldn't keep the show from being cancelled anyway; this ep won't run until May, and the current sweeps are almost over. We won't get renewal notices until almost June." "Well, I'm just about out of ideas, Tina, can't you come up with any?" "Gee, Sam, calm down!" Nothing ever broke Tina's cheeriness. "Why don't we ask Verbeena?" "Yes, she can run a simulation through Ziggy, I mean Alpha, the way Al used to do for me, and we--" "No, silly, she can just think of something. Run a simulation? How?" "Al always used to do that. If only Al were here." Gooshie spoke up. "I think I understand. Al could relay information between Ziggy and you, exploring the alternate timelines. I suspect Ziggy could only give you a percentage that any given goal was really what you were there to achieve, correct?" He went on without waiting for an answer. "But of course Alpha can't do that for you now." "Why not?" "Well, because.... because... maybe he can. If you'll excuse me-- Dr. Beeks, please ask Alpha if he can run a simulation along alternate histories caused by Sam's leap, to determine what the most likely probability of his goal is.... No, tell Alpha to use the main core matrix, and to offload the accounting process into the secondary processor for now. This is priority 127.... Segmentation fault? Can you get me the address? No, it'd be a number.... No, that was it.... Yes, numbers can have letters in them, when they're in hexadecimal.... OK, here's what you need to do. Go to the main console, log in as...." It took Gooshie fifteen minutes to talk Verbeena through the process, after which he concluded, "Well, that's the best I can do from here." Then, after a few moments, he reported, "Dr. Beeks reports that Alpha gives a 72% chance that what you're here to do, has to do with Project Quantum Leap, not with Quantum Leap, the TV show. I'm afraid that's all we can get. If I were there, I might be able to do better, but leaping out could disturb the time-energy state of this point, so it's not worth it." "The Project? Hmmm..." * * * * * "Where is Sam, Tina?" "He said he went to see Al." "How could he do that?" "Not our Al, silly, the Al in 1992, the one working with Sam on founding the Project. He thought Al might be able to help." "He'd better be back soon. Tonight we're supposed to do a speed-through of the next script, and Zoe wants to talk to Scott about character interpretation issues." * * * * * "Al, I need your help. You're not going to believe the story I have to tell you." "Who are you, sir?" "Al, listen. I've thought this through very carefully, so just promise me you'll listen for a few minutes before you go off the deep end." "Is this some kind of joke?" "Al, the project you're working on, the top-secret classified project, is about time travel." "How do you know that?" "Because I'm from your future. Your project worked, and I leaped back in time, and I'm here now. And you need to help me get back." "You're from the future? Prove it." "What's today's date?" "March 1st, 1992." "Last night, you and Sam Beckett spent the whole night working. You were going to have Chinese food sent in, but Sam didn't want Chinese food, and you didn't want pizza, so you sent one of the lab assistants to get burgers. The burgers were cold and overcooked. You had ordered a chocolate shake, and you got vanilla, which you hate, so you sent--" "How do you know all this?" "Al, I'm Sam. I'm... oh, I don't know, I must be pretty old now. It's 2003 in the future parallel to where I am now. I leaped in 1995, before the Project was quite ready, and -- Al. Before I say anything else, you must promise NEVER EVER to say any of this to me, the me that's in the same time with you." "Why not? I'm sure you'd want to know the project worked. What a kick in the butt!" Al was visibly excited. "Because if I do anything that might lead to you preventing me from-- from making a mistake I am going to make, this will all unhappen. Someone, or something, doesn't want me to undo that." "Huh?" "Trust me, Al." "You know I could hardly do otherwise. I don't understand any of this quantum physics stuff. Will I someday understand it?" "No, not really." Sam smiled slyly. "All right, I promise." "In 1995 I leaped... the Project's funding was being threatened and I had to start, even though we weren't ready. Since then I've been leaping through other people's lives... it's a long story. There's a TV show on about it now. No, don't ask. Someday, when I let you get away from the Project for a little while, look for the TV show. Anyway, I have a chance to get home now. You used to be my Observer, and you would tell me, on each leap, what I had to do -- what wrong I had to set right -- in order to leap out, and maybe leap home. But I changed your history, and you ended up quitting before you got to do that, to be with your family. Well, now I need you to help me figure out what to do." "I don't understand. What you have to do to leap out?" "You see, I leap into someone else's life. Right now, I'm leaped into the life of an actor named Scott Bakula. During this time I look like them, but I'm still me. I have to set right something that once went wrong, some problem in their life, or in the life of someone near them. Once I do that, I leap out. And if I don't do that, I can't leap out. I change history. You used to be the Observer, and you and Ziggy used to give me estimates of what it was most probable that I was there to fix." "Who's Ziggy?" "Our parallel hybrid supercomputer." "Ziggy? That's a nice name... much better than Alpha, the one you've been using." "Well, you came up with it." "I did? I mean, I will?" "Yes. I know you can't use Ziggy to get me an estimate, but somehow I'm sure you can help me figure out what it is I'm here to do." "Why isn't the me in the future there as your Observer, then, to get your Ziggy to estimate?" "I-- I changed your life. You know how Beth, during the time when you were a POW in Vietnam, almost annulled your marriage?" Al looked uncomfortable. "Yes, what of it?" "In the original history, she did. I leaped into her friend Sally, and convinced her to wait. Before I'd done that, you had stayed with the Project, but after this, you had quit to be with your family, and I didn't replace you." "So all I have to do is resolve to not quit. I'll make time for my family, somehow. Then, I'll be there to tell you the answer, the me in the future, that is." "Well, that's a pretty roundabout way of doing it, Al, one which would never have occurred to me..." "Sam?" Sam turned to look at the ghostly, hologram image of Al, the older Al, standing behind him. "What are you doing here, Sam?" There was a tingling all over his body. _Oh no, I can't leap yet, I haven't been electrified!_ He turned to the hologram Al and shouted, "Don't run the new retrieval program! Not yet!" The hologram Al said, "What retrieval program?" But then Sam leaped. * * * * * "Gooshie, you'll love this. Sam's leaped into a computer programmer this time. But he's asking me about a special retrieval program. He says in his last leap -- well, his story is a bit confusing, and I didn't get all of it. Plus, he's swiss-cheesed a lot of it. But he was talking about a retrieval program which involves using the accelerator chamber to put the waiting room into a high time-energy state to prevent the new host from leaping out, so Sam has nowhere to leap in to. Then we can retrieve him. At least, I think that's what he said." "Hmmm... I've never heard of the idea, Admiral, but it *IS* intriguing. Dr. Beckett is a genius." "He says YOU thought of it!" "Me?" "Well, did you?" "No, but it sounds like it has real possibilities. What do you think, Dr. Alessi?" "Well, we'd need to change the retrieval program... does anyone have a pen? I've got to get this down on paper." Ziggy said, "No need. I know the plan that Sam was referring to. I have it recorded from the alternate history he is now remembering. I also have the modified retrieval program stored in my databanks. Tina can retrieve it from the theta bank of crystal memory." "Does that mean we can bring him home, Ziggy?" "Yes, Beth, I believe it does. But not until he is ready to leap again." * * * * * END * * * * * --- CrystalShip 1.1 -- |Fidonet: Frank Perricone 1:325/611 |Internet: perricone@wsyd.com | | Gateway provide by: We Serve Your Drives BBS Lost on South Mountain | in the Republic of Vermont: 802-453-6074 1200-14.4 V32bis, V42bis