Ghost in the Machine
A "Quantum Leap" fan fiction by aurora*nova
(Disclaimer: the characters of Sam Beckett, Al, and others in the canon universe of "Quantum Leap" are the creations of Donald Bellisario. I do not own these characters or concepts nor do I claim them. All other characters and concepts are from my own imagination, and bear no resemblance to anyone living, dead or otherwise. "We've Got Tonight" written by Bob Seger; "I'm Afraid This Must Be Love" written by Frank Wildhorn and Jack Murphy.)
August 10, 2007
Chapter 1
The feeling of having my molecules coalesce back into a solid state is one that always leaves me a bit disoriented. And never knowing exactly who, or where, or when I leap into always leaves me feeling more than a bit confused.
"Grudge? Mark? Dude, it's your turn." I looked to my left at the thirty-something man sitting next to me. He was sandy-haired, rather on the large side, with a trim beard and a face full of laugh lines. On the table in front of us was a gridded map with little miniature figures arranged on it. The man had a cardboard screen printed with fantasy scenes on its face, and around the table were four other people with books, papers and polyhedral dice in front of them. This seemed oddly familiar to me.
"Give him a minute, Joe," said the only female at the table. "One wrong move and we're all toast." She looked to be in her late thirties-maybe no more than forty-attractive and in good shape. Her eyes twinkled behind her glasses and her head was crowned with a cap of brown hair that had soft reddish highlights in it, as well as more than a few strands of silver. Around her neck she wore a moonstone pendant in a tantalizingly familiar configuration: a solid circle flanked by two opposing crescents. I couldn't remember where I'd seen the symbol before.
She grinned briefly at me before returning her gaze to the papers in front of her. "Of course, if you kick over, I won't be able to bring you back. A witch doesn't get those kinds of spells." A witch! That was it! Her pendant was a pagan triple-moon symbol. I wondered briefly if she wore it for the game, or because she followed that faith.
"Ah..." I looked carefully at the map. I remembered this game! I'd played hours of it with my buddies in college. Stalling for time I asked, "Which one is me again?"
"This one," the woman said, pointing to a small figure that was obviously an overly-muscled fighter. I shuffled through the papers in front of me and quickly learned I was playing a barbarian named Grudge. The character sheet listed all the weapons and equipment my character possessed. And it wasn't much.
"What's that in front of me?" I asked, nodding at the large figure on the grid map.
The game master, Joe, looked confused. "I already described it to you."
One of the men across the table spoke up. "We know it's an ogre, Mark, but our characters don't know. They've never seen one before."
"Yes, we did, Leo," countered the woman. "Back in the dwarven caverns, remember?"
"Yeah, but Mark wasn't with us then," said Leo. Okay, so I was a relative newcomer to this group, but I knew the game, and that made me feel a bit more secure. At least I could fake things through until I figured out who I was, and what I was there to do. And where was Al? My holographic counterpart was supposed to zero in on my whereabouts and tell me why I had leaped into this person's life.
"So are you forfeiting your turn, Mark?" demanded Joe.
"Um, no, I'll...uh..." I looked quickly at the character sheet again to verify what type of weapon I had. "I'll slash at him with my battleaxe." A chorus of groans went around the table, and Joe started in surprise. Leo began laughing uproariously, and the woman sighed and shook her head, muttering, "I don't believe it!" Still, she was grinning.
"Was that the wrong thing to do?" I asked, confused. Leo guffawed all the harder.
"Too late now," Joe said, laughing. "Roll the dice to hit, then."
"You're going to let him attack the emissary?" the guy on the end complained, incredulous.
"That's why I love Grudge," Leo chuckled. "You never know what he's going to do!"
It had been the wrong decision. Very quickly I learned the ogre was a representative bargaining for a peace treaty which our characters were supposed to negotiate. Instead, I sparked off a vicious battle as the ogre's companions came to his aid. So much for the peace treaty! "Ohhhhhhh boy…" I groaned.
As I continued the sham of pretending to be Mark, I took the opportunity to look at each of the people around the table. Any one of them could be the person I was here to help. From the good-natured, friendly bantering that flew back and forth, it was easy to see they'd known each other a long time. If Project Quantum Leap hadn't consumed my every waking moment, I might have become just like them, going about a normal life, using the game as a social outlet.
"Your name is Mark Simmons," said Al's voice from behind me, and I restrained myself from jumping out of my skin. "No...don't respond, Sam. I'll give you as much information as I've got until we can talk privately. It's August 10th, 2007. The guy sitting to your left is Joe Sanderson, your host; this is his house. Across from you is Leo Notolini-huh, fellow Italian! Buona sera, connazionale! The guy sitting to his left is Stan Wexworth, and next to him on the end is Eddie Rivera. You work with Joe and Leo at the same place in downtown Chicago-ohhh, Chicago! What a great town! I once knew a girl there who worked at the Ambassador East Hotel as a waitress in the Pump Room. And boy, could she pump!"
Ordinarily I didn't mind when Al would tell me who I was supposed to know, but he tended to get side-tracked easily down his sordid little Memory Lane. I've always had a photographic memory, which helped a great deal in remembering names and faces on the barest of introductions. And if my brain didn't get Swiss-cheesed each time I leaped, that statement would sound a whole lot more impressive than it is.
Game play continued around the table as I nodded my head deliberately at the woman sitting next to me while making it look like I was trying to adjust my neck. Al hesitated.
"She's the reason you're here, Sam. Her name is Heather Connelly, a retired factory-worker. She's the same age as you, forty-nine-" Al broke off. "Forty-nine? Whoa! She's one hot mama-!" He leered at her, and I cleared my throat, innocently enough for those around me, but Al took it for the warning it was meant to be. "Ah, she was widowed a little over a year ago. You used to date her back in college but dumped her for the woman you ended up marrying." Al paused a moment and took another long, appreciative look at the woman to my right. "What were you thinking? Oh, and you're widowed, too. You lost your wife about the same time Heather lost her husband."
It really irritated me when Al dragged out the information. I wished he'd just get to the point, and I cleared my throat again, quietly. Al let out a heavy sigh and hit the handset, which squealed in protest. "Ziggy says it's ninety-five percent probable that she gets killed tomorrow while working on a house she's restoring."
I couldn't help myself. I blurted out, "She dies?"
Heather looked at her character sheet and made a few quick hash marks. "No, not yet. I'm down to one last hit point but I'm still alive." She did a double-take past my shoulder, then took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, murmuring something under her breath about needing new ones. I wondered what that was about.
"So what are you going to do, Selene?" Joe asked her. "It's your turn."
"I'm going to pull back thirty feet and cast a 'cure' spell on myself!" Heather reached out toward her figure and moved it back, then picked up her dice. "Please let me roll well!" she grinned, looking upward.
"I've never understood this game," Al drawled, puffing on his cigar.
As she continued her turn I thought about what Al had said about Mark having known Heather in the past. Did she know that I...that he...was the person sitting next to her? Or had enough time gone by that she had forgotten the past? I needed to find a place to talk to Al.
"Earth to Grudge," came Joe's voice again. "You're up."
"I..uh...have to...you know..." I glanced toward Joe with raised eyebrows hoping he'd understand the unspoken question.
"Right around the corner, here, Mark." He gestured behind him towards an alcove. Al rolled his eyes and sighed, "Not the john, again!"
"That works out for me, too," said Joe, pushing himself back from the table. "I need a smoke. C'mon out when you're done, Mark." He looked at Heather. "You coming?"
"You know I don't smoke, Joe," she grimaced. "Besides, I want to call Mom and Dad and check in on Callie."
"How long is she staying with them?" he asked, on his way out the door.
"A month. They said I needed a break, but it doesn't look like I'm going to get one. I'm still working on the house."
"You're gonna be workin' on that house for a long time, you know," he teased her, stepping out onto the patio.
Right…the house. I wanted to ask her more about it, but Al was already motioning me toward the bathroom door, and Heather was digging her cell phone out of her purse, so I retreated. Once inside I turned on the vent fan to help muffle the fact that I would sound as though I were talking to myself.
As I turned to face Al, I could see Mark Simmons clearly in the mirror. He was still a very handsome man, though obviously getting older. His blond hair had more than a fair share of gray in it, but overall he was still in good physical condition. He wore dark rimmed glasses, and the gray eyes behind them were surrounded by little laugh lines. A neat, trim moustache with more gray in it than blond perched above a mouth that had smiled a lot. I knew that I didn't know much about Mark yet, but I liked what I saw.
I was wearing what appeared to be a light blue work shirt with "ADVANCED MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES" embroidered above the left pocket, which had a few obligatory pens stuck in it. Dark blue slacks and comfortable dress shoes rounded everything off. Mark must have come here straight from work, I thought.
I turned to face my holographic companion, who looked decidedly rumpled in a plaid bathrobe pulled over black silk pajama bottoms and a five o'clock shadow. It must be early morning, Al's time. "Alright Al, so what else does Ziggy say?" I demanded.
"Okay, well, your name is Mark Simmons; you're forty-nine years old and a systems analyst for an I.T. company. You're a computer geek."
"That doesn't sound too hard to fake," I commented drily, knowing I'd built the super-computer, Ziggy, which maintained Project Quantum Leap.
"Oh well, I don't think you'll have to worry about that," said Al, just as drily. "You're on vacation for the next two weeks. Hopefully you'll do what needs to be done and leap out of here before you have to do Mark's job for him. Uh...lessee...the date is..." he broke off and hit the handset, which squealed in protest, "...August 10th, 2007."
He was stalling. I knew it, and he knew I knew it. Whenever Al had too little information to give me, he tended to rehash what I already knew. "Okay, fine. What else has Ziggy got?"
"You've got three kids, all grown and gone, one grandson, and you've been widowed-"
"Okay, okay, I've got all that," I cut him off crossly. "What about Heather?"
Al scratched his head. "Ziggy doesn't have quite as much information on her. Uh...you dated in college, but you broke it off when you met Lisa-that's your late wife-and you haven't had any contact with Heather until tonight, when she accepted your co-worker Joe's invitation to play this little fantasy game he's running. It seems she used to be a regular player until her husband died, then she stopped coming. You've been with the group for a couple months now, every Friday night." Al grinned smugly. "Apparently Mark didn't know it was her when he first walked in this evening. It's just dawned on him."
"Yeah, well, she doesn't seem to recognize me."
"Oh, she knows, Sam."
"How do you know that? Did you ask her?" I demanded.
"No, but I got eyes. She's been stealing glances at you since I walked in. And even if her last name has changed, yours hasn't. Trust me...she knows it's him!"
"So what am I supposed to do here, Al? How does-how did Heather die in the original timeline?"
"Ah..." he peered at the handset again. "She falls through the floor of the attic in this old house she's restoring. Apparently there were some weakened boards up there and she fell through down to the first floor."
"First floor? How tall is this house?"
"Three floors plus the attic. Ziggy says that when she fell through to the third floor, the force of her weight, and a couple boxes that were up there, broke the floor of the third story and she fell a total of..." he squinted again at the handset, "...thirty feet. Suffered massive internal injuries and died before help could arrive." Al let out a sympathetic whoosh. "Not a nice way to go!"
"So I need to be there to keep her from falling through?" I asked, wondering how I was supposed to accomplish that.
"Or keep her from working on her house tomorrow. Although..." Al broke off and scowled at the handset.
"What?" I demanded. "What does Ziggy say about that?"
"Well, Ziggy's not very clear. She's sulking again."
"Sulking? What for?"
"She says something is messing with the data." He shook the handset vigorously and glared at it again. "Ziggy says it's now ninety-two percent probable that she dies tomorrow..." he squinted at it with a puzzled expression. "And seventy-one point nine percent possible that if you save her tomorrow, she dies anyway on Sunday!" Al tucked the handset into the pocket of the bathrobe in frustration. "Now she's not even talking to me!"
"Look, Al, I've got to have more to go on."
"And I'll get it for you, Sam, just as soon as I can. In the meantime, you'd better go out there and acknowledge to her that you recognize her before everyone else comes back in." Al pulled the handset out again and hit a button; the door to the Imaging Chamber whooshed opened. "Oh, and..." he paused before stepping through and turned back to me.
"Yes?" I raised an eyebrow.
"Have fun stormin' the castle, Geek-Boy!" Al stepped through and the door closed behind him. I would have been irritated with him, except that he was the only person in the world I'd ever told that nickname to. And I couldn't help but grin at the movie reference. One more glance at Mark in the mirror, and I left the bathroom.
Heather was poring over her papers and books, but looked up as I came in. Either her telephone conversation had been very short, or hadn't taken place at all. The other guys were still outside talking and laughing, so I decided to take Al's advice for once.
"Hello, Heather," I said, as if meeting her for the first time. Technically, I was, but she didn't know that.
She smiled, a bit sadly I thought. "Hello, Mark."
"I...uh..I didn't recognize you at first," I apologized for the absent Mark.
She nodded. "I know. I knew who you were right away." After what Al had said, it didn't surprise me, but I had a strange sense that Mark was. I wasn't sure just where that sensation was coming from, though, so I ignored it.
"You did?" I asked.
"Mm-hmm," she nodded. "I didn't say anything, though, because I didn't want to embarrass you or make you feel uncomfortable." She kept her eyes down on her papers, avoiding mine. "No one here now knew us then. Except maybe Eddie, and he doesn't have a very good head for names or faces, so I doubt he'd remember."
"I would never be embarrassed to know you, Heather," I said, reassuringly.
She looked up then and a half-bitter smile quirked her mouth. "Really?" She gave a small laugh. "Because I would be embarrassed to know me. I remember what I was like then."
"You weren't that bad," I said, cautiously. Heather laughed, and it was clearly a self-deprecating sound, without any humor in it.
"Yeah I was. I was hopelessly naive and terminally clueless," she said.
Truthfully I told her, "I've never thought of you that way. In fact," I continued, "I was just going to say that I think you look terrific!"
A smile, a genuine one this time, lit up her face. "Thank you, Mark," she said softly. "The years have been very good to you, too." We sat in awkward silence for several minutes. Heather kept her eyes on her books and papers in front of her, and I tried to think of something to say. I knew it couldn't have been easy for Heather to meet up with a guy that broke up with her years ago. Of course, I wouldn't have remembered if I'd ever been in that kind of situation myself, but I could empathize with her. I wanted to broach the subject of her house, but at that point the others came in and the game continued for the next couple of hours.
During the rest of the evening, I watched as Heather interacted with the other men around the table. Though she appeared to have known some of them for quite some time, it was apparently a strictly platonic friendship on her part. Two of the men were single, yet Heather made no attempt at all to flirt with them or give them any indication she felt anything other than sisterly affection for them. She kept them at a virtual arm's length. With me-or rather, Mark-there was the cool reserve of strangers just meeting for the first time. She gave no sign to the others that we'd had a mutual past.
Since I could nothing but wait for Al to come up with more details about what I needed to do in order to leap out, I decided I might as well throw myself into the moment and enjoy the game. It wasn't a pretty battle, and we nearly lost our rogue, Leo's character, when he tried to back-stab one of the ogres who saw him coming and chucked a huge boulder at him. Simeon almost bled to death from crushing damage before our cleric could get to him. It was a lot of fun and there was a lot of laughter around the table.
At length, when it was getting close to midnight, Joe brought the campaign to a stopping point. "So, are you coming out to karaoke tomorrow night?" he asked me. I was momentarily caught off guard.
"Karaoke?" I repeated, dumbly.
"Yeah, remember I asked you last week about coming out to sing karaoke this Saturday night? You said you'd think about it."
Tomorrow night. And Heather was supposed to die tomorrow. "I don't know," I hedged. "I might be busy..."
"Well, okay. If you can make it, great. If not, there's always next Saturday. What about you, Heather?"
Heather looked up from packing away her gaming paraphernalia. "I don't know, Joe. I'm pretty busy right now with the house. And I haven't sung in public for quite a while."
"You sing karaoke?" I asked, interested. I've always felt it takes a certain amount of courage to get up and sing in front of people, whether you're a good singer or not.
"Well, I pretend to," she said dismissively.
"Oh, bullshit!" Stan exclaimed. "Heather has an awesome voice, Mark. Don't let her tell you otherwise."
"Let's just say I haven't been booed off the stage yet," she qualified with a smile.
"I'd like to hear you sing," I said. "Maybe you can put off working on your house?" If I could get her to delay the restoration work, she might avoid the circumstances that led to her death, and I'd leap out!
She shook her head. "I can't. Callie comes home in a month and I need to get the place habitable. She's hoping to have a brand new bedroom when she gets back."
"Callie?"
"My daughter. She's nine. She's spending some time with my parents right now, but coming home in a few weeks, so I really have to get some stuff done. I'm living out of a duffle bag and sleeping on a futon right now, and I'm getting too old to camp out." She flashed a grin. "Just kidding about the futon!" I really liked that grin! It lit up her whole face and made her eyes dance.
"Karen and I have plans already," Joe put in, regretfully. The others around the table also claimed prior engagements, but Heather just shrugged.
"Not a problem," Heather said, reassuringly. "I know it's short notice. I'll manage."
"I can help," I offered. If I couldn't get her to postpone the work, then I had to arrange somehow to be close by to prevent anything from happening.
"Oh, no, that's not necessary, Mark!" she said quickly. "You barely know me..." I could see the barriers being raised, and I couldn't let her do it.
"That's alright. I'm pretty handy with tools. I'd be happy to help."
Joe spoke up, "Dude, you have no idea what you're getting into."
"It's a one-hundred and thirty year old Victorian, Mark," Leo added.
"And it's been abandoned while in probate for the last two years," Eddie finished.
Heather nodded. "I bought it a couple months ago. I saw it listed on a home-improvement website, in danger of being demolished. The local historical society was hoping someone would buy it and restore it, since they didn't have the money. I got it fairly cheap, but it's going to need lots of work. I've already had workmen out to re-wire, re-plumb and tuck-point the masonry, but I still have a long way to go."
"What will you be doing tomorrow, then?" Joe asked.
"Stripping wallpaper and tearing up old carpeting," Heather replied. "Some idiot back in the seventies put shag carpet in most of the rooms upstairs, and it looks vile. I know there are hardwood floors underneath, though, and I need to see if they can be saved."
"Gosh, I'm sorry I'm missing that," Joe said, laughing. It was obvious he meant nothing of the sort. Heather pulled a face at him and drawled, "Beast!"
"I'm not afraid of getting a little dirty," I assured her. Like Joe said, I had no idea what I was getting into.
As I drove back to Mark's apartment, with the help of his driver's license and a GPS system in his car, I tried to figure out how I was going to keep Heather out of the attic. And even if I was successful, Ziggy had indicated she would die the next day despite my efforts. I thought about the data fluctuations, and the seriousness of that. If Ziggy couldn't give me accurate information that could help me prevent Heather's death, I might not be able to be at the right place at the right time.
My Swiss-cheesed brain doesn't always remember previous leaps, but it seemed to me I had had more successes than failures. In point of fact, memory lapses notwithstanding, I couldn't remember any leaps I'd made that had failed. I wondered briefly what would happen to me if I did. Would I remain in that person's life, living out the rest of their days, or would I leap to the next life anyway? Would I even remember if I failed? I needed to talk to Al, but he hadn't reappeared since our bathroom discussion.
Mark's apartment was in a newly-built neighborhood on the outskirts of town, with many buildings still under construction. Small spindly trees were anchored into the clay earth by guide wires. In the glare of the streetlights I could see small bushes and floral borders struggling to survive in the thin layer of topsoil that hadn't been scraped off the land just before these complexes were built. As the son of an Indiana farmer, I scowled at the knowledge of what had happened to the three or four feet of rich, dark soil that had once been here, growing wheat, corn and soybeans. Developers were the same all over-clear the land, scrape it flat, build your buildings, put two or three inches of topsoil back and sell off the rest for profit. Maybe it was just good business, but I preferred being able to turn over furrows and see acre after acre of corn growing high in the fields.
As I turned the key in the lock, I heard the Imaging Chamber door sliding open, and Al appeared, clean-shaven and wearing a bright purple jacket with light blue stripes over a shirt of gold lamé and teal trousers. He practically glowed in the dark.
"Sam, I've got some good news!" he crowed. My mood lightened immediately. I ushered him inside and turned on the lights, locking the door behind me.
"Great, Al!" I said, eagerly. "What's up?"
"Ziggy has pin-pointed the data fluctuations, and it's not being caused by any programming glitches," he announced. I waited. Al stood there beaming as if he'd just delivered a brand-new baby.
"Well?" I encouraged. "What is causing it?"
"Oh!" Al chewed on his cigar as he hit a few keys on the handset. "Ziggy says there's a-" he paused and peered at the display, his eyebrows disappearing into the wrinkles on his forehead. "Oh, no, that can't be right!"
"What?" I demanded. "What can't be right?"
Al sighed, deflated. "She says there's a ghost in the machine, if you can believe that!"
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "A ghost in the machine?" I repeated. "What kind of talk is that?"
"I don't think she means a real ghost, Sam," Al began, but a loud squeal from the handset made him pause. "Oh. She's says that's exactly what she means."
"Al, that's impossible," I insisted, falling into what Al liked to call my "lecture mode". "Ghosts don't exist. And besides, the term 'ghost in the machine' is a philosophical term used to describe the dual nature of mind and body. To computer programmers it means a hidden sequence string that causes an echo in the programming, preventing it from running properly, or causing two separate programs to run simultaneously."
"Sam we can't have Ziggy screwing up her own programming," Al said, alarmed. "If anything shuts her down-" Al choked off that thought, but I knew what he hadn't said. If Ziggy crashed, I'd be lost in time, and they'd be unable to help or retrieve me unless and until she could be brought back online.
"Have Gooshie run a diagnostic series and see if he can isolate the echo. And have him pay special attention to the prediction parameters in particular," I said. "If that's what's interfering with Ziggy's ability to crunch the numbers, the diagnostic should be able to reset that part of the programming without affecting the rest of her system."
"I'm on it, Pally-O," Al said, all business.
"And Al?" I stopped him, "find out all you can about this house of Heather's. Here's the address." I showed him the slip of paper Heather had given me, and he peered at it, punched the information into his handset and nodded. He disappeared for several moments but returned as I was getting ready to fall into bed.
"Gooshie's running the diagnostics now, Sam. He said it would take a few hours."
I nodded. "It usually does, Al. Were you able to pull up anything on the house?"
"Not yet," he admitted. "Ziggy's a bit sluggish at the moment. But I'll have something for you in the morning, I promise."
"Good enough," I yawned. "Now I just have to figure out how to keep Heather out of the attic tomorrow. Or actually, later today," I amended, looking at the clock by the bedside.
"Maybe if you distract her, Sam," Al suggested.
"Distract her?" I asked, puzzled. "How?"
Al leered. "Well, you could put the moves on her, and spend the day playin' house-"
"Al-" I began, warningly.
"-and she'd be too busy to think about the attic-"
"AL!"
"-and you could show her how you hammer-" He gestured emphatically.
"AL!" I practically shouted.
"Alright, Sam, you don't have to get upset about it!" He sounded offended.
I sighed in frustration. "I don't think coming on to Heather is the right thing to do. It seems to me that she took it really hard when they broke up years ago. I don't want to hurt her again."
"Well you'd better think of something before tomorrow, Sam," Al cautioned me. "If Ziggy's having trouble with her Prob and Stat parameters, we may not be able to pin-point exactly when and where the accident happens. Even though Gooshie's troubleshooting, she keeps insisting something's wrong. She's still claiming 'incorporeal interference'," he grimaced.
"How can anything 'interfere' with Ziggy, Al?" I demanded. "Ziggy's a high-security super-computer. No one outside of the Project has any access to her programming. Everything is on a private server and highly encrypted."
Al shrugged. "I don't know, Sam. Personally, I think Ziggy's got an inflated opinion of herself, with a good dose of paranoia thrown in. You should never have given her Barbra Streisand's ego."
"How can a computer be paranoid, Al?" I asked wearily, yawning and stretching. "That doesn't make sense."
"Yeah, well, I got a feeling nothing about this leap is going to make sense, Sam," Al growled. "Get some sleep, buddy boy. I'll wake you bright and early in the morning."
"Not too bright or too early," I mumbled, tumbling across the bed without bothering to undress.
"G'nite, pal," Al said softly, and the last thing I heard was the whoosh of the Imaging Chamber door.
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