:Thanks to those of you who've reviewed already. Your opinions are highly valued and encourage me to keep writing. As for this chapter, I do hope it's able to be followed, seeing as I was trying to do an exposition with a migraine. If it's complete dosh, just let me know in the reviews and I'll see if I can make it make sense. Any review at all is enough to make me happy!:

Chapter Two

Ianto stepped into Jack's office, closing the door behind him. "The police have the entire park cordoned off and the cover story of a fallen American satellite is in place. The press is already assuming that there are illegally placed nuclear warheads aboard, and Gwen has convinced PC Davidson to walk around the place in a radiation suit to keep the cameras at bay."

Jack nodded, still staring at the wrist strap they had taken from the girl. "We'll have to send him a basket of fruit."

"I'm thinking at this point we may have to move him up to the cheese-of-the-month club reward tier. He's asking me about job openings, now." He sat on the edge of the desk. "Are you sure it's safe to leave half their crew back at the ship like that?"

"No captain from that part of space would leave his ship without at least one person guarding it. Even with the lure of food, parts, medical treatment, supplies, and the threat of violence. Three of them here is enough. Besides, would you want that girl wandering around the Hub?" Jack finally looked up. "She's not all there."

"Yes, I feel much better thinking she might just roam off somehow and have a walk around the city, checking to see how many of us come back from head wounds. So it's a vortex manipulator?" Ianto nodded toward the strap.

"Same model as mine. Like I said, only one other person had one of these." Jack ran his finger over the interface board. "We were part of the same mission, but working different sides of it. John and I worked shuttling men and supplies around the independent worlds in a Firefly at the beginning of the war, which gave us a perfect opportunity to slip into the black zone and set up a network of buoys to form the isolation network. Aiden was our specialist. He went in as an Alliance Science Division officer to get access to the communication satellites and the core planet network to implant the isolation code for proliferation to the entire commsat net. Ben was his partner and bodyguard. John was really pissed off about that, that we had to face combat on backwater moons while Ben got to babysit a programmer on well-connected space stations and developed planets with advanced technology."

"It wasn't the first time you went into battle. So what happened to him? Ben, I mean. What did you mean, he MOTHERed?"

"Memory Override Total History and Experience Revision. It's a last resort failsafe for time agents. Think of it like taking a cyanide capsule if you're a spy, only you're meant to survive it." Jack leaned back in his chair. "The last contact we had with them was when they went to a planet called Miranda. It was off the net, really. There'd been some terraforming accident or something that killed off the colonists on that world, but there was a sophisticated computer core that would be a great place to store the programming relays and virtual switchboard so agents could get in and out past the isolation net. We got a garbled message, couldn't make much of it, even after we got back and the techs ran it through every filter they could think of. All we got was that they'd been attacked trying to leave the planet and that it wasn't safe to send any retrieval agents. Ben's MOTHER protocol tripped in about a month later by their timeline. Aiden's never did. He must have died before whatever happened that necessitated the failsafe, because Ben would never have left him."

"Were they lovers or something?"

Jack snickered. "Um, no. I'm sure Aiden wouldn't have minded. We all had a thing for Ben, but he didn't share fifty-first century values about sexual liberty. Don't ask, don't tell was more his speed." Jack propped his chin on his palm. "He's from here.. From now, I mean. He was a gunnery sergeant in the good old USMC, killed in action last March when Prince Harry drove past his post on a road in Afghanistan and someone shot a rocket at them. That's what it says on his death certificate at least."

"And what really happened?" Ianto leaned forward.

"He did take a shot for the royals, that much is true. An alien masquerading as a Taliban was going to infect the prince with a viral agent that would, I dunno, do something alien. Whatever it was supposed to do, it didn't even get to the prince. Ben stepped into the path of the dart and got infected instead. The royals had him shipped to UNIT and locked up in the cryo-vaults in hopes they could figure out what it was he had, but before they could get samples, he disappeared from the vaults." He grinned. "The Time Agency came back and recruited him is what happened. Whatever effect the virus was meant to have on Prince Harry, it made Ben highly resistant to genetic mutation and alien infection. He was pretty much a walking biological tank."

Ianto laughed. "Okay, so the short version is, we have a twenty-first century US marine with a super resistant immune system who worked as a fifty-first century time agent and got lost in the twenty-sixth century currently sitting in our surgery trying to get in Martha's trousers because a crazy girl slammed him over the head with cookware?"

"Basically. Add amnesiac in there."

"The failsafe, you mean. MOTHER." Ianto played with Jack's pen cup, organizing it absently. "What exactly did it do if it was a survivable cyanide pill?"

"It was designed to protect the Agency and agents from psychic probing," explained Jack. "You get caught by anyone who can read minds, you initiate MOTHER so they never find out anything that could compromise the Agency. It was a personality matrix that overwrote everything. Memory, motivations, experiences. The personalities were simple, of course. Basic. All they cared about was surviving until the program decided they were safe and could bring them back out of it, so the matrix was patterned specifically to the mission to create someone who was most suited to live through whatever they'd come across in that time and place. After the MOTHER system determined from monitoring the networks that the agent was no longer in danger, it would send them an object that would trigger a retrieval of their own memories. Of course, setting MOTHER off also burned out your vortex manipulator until retrieval, too. It would only work once, to open a trip to the one stable Rift exit point where an agent could be safely picked up."

"Cardiff, early twenty-first century, could you mean?"

"That's the time and place." Jack tapped the manipulator. "It was supposed to be used once you retrieved your memories. Until then, you just had an obsessive need to keep track of the strap, even if you didn't know what it did."

"So the strap was how MOTHER tracked you?"

Jack shook his head. "A tracking device would be too dangerous. Scans would pick it up. Tracking was done by the agent themselves. The personality believed it was from that time and place after all, so it also believed it had a mother to write home to. You'd wind up writing home, sending money from your checks, even making phone calls and leaving messages on the answering machine, whatever was appropriate. MOTHER would even write back with news about the homestead and family, anything needed to help the cover."

"Rather ingenious."

"Well, the director tended to be clever like that." Jack pushed himself up to his feet, taking his mechanical pencil away from Ianto and putting it back in the cup. "The thing is, either Ben never got his retrieval item or it didn't work on him. He's still the MOTHER personality, and it just might fight back if it senses there's any threat to it, such as an empath. I want you to avoid reading him, understand? I'm surprised he managed to travel alongside that girl without attacking her, but then again, the first priority of the override personality is pure survival, so he'd have done whatever was best suited for that. Still, it doesn't exactly make him stable, got it?"

Ianto nodded. "Of course, sir. I'll keep my mind to myself."

Gwen looked up from the conference table as Jack and Ianto walked in. The captain and woman they'd first met were picking through their second pizza. Gwen got to her feet to get them fresh cans of soda. "Captain Malcolm Reynolds and First Officer Zoe Washburne of Serenity, Jack. Mal, Zoe, this is Captain Jack Harkness and Ianto Jones."

"Thanks, Gwen." Jack sat down in his chair at the end of the table. "Enjoying the pizza? I know they didn't have any decent pies to the black side of Persephone when I was in the Anglo-Sino system."

Mal raised a brow. "It's like real food. So you were where in the system? Gwen said it's the twenty-first century. Ships don't leave Earth That Was until end of the twenty-second. You fell through this Rift thing?"

"I've done some time travel, yes, but more intentionally." Jack leaned forward on his elbows. "So your other crew member in there, what's his name?"

"Seein' as he can't have warrants 'fore he's born no more than us, don't see the harm in telling you." Mal washed his pizza down with a drink from his soda can. "Jayne Cobb."

"We're not really interested in criminal records so long as you behave yourself while here." Jack smiled. "We're really more interested in finding a way to get you back home, to be honest. So how long has he been with you?"

"About a year and a half, give or take a month." Zoe wiped her hands on a napkin. "Is there some reason you're interested in him?"

"He might have been part of my crew while I was there, that's all." Jack sat back. "Of course under another name. So does he still write home to his mother?"

Mal and Zoe exchanged glances. "We ne'er met her, actually," replied the captain, grabbing another slice of pizza.

"She never sent him anything from home?" Jack sighed, tapping his fingers on the table. "It would've been seven years, I would think he would have gotten it."

"You mean the hat?" Mal scratched his chin. "Because he did get that."

"He even wore it." Zoe shook her head. "That's the only thing, though. A really ugly hat she made him."

"That's it, the hat. It didn't.. make him act differently?" Jack asked hopefully.

"No, just made him look like a gorram chûnrén," she answered. "Which is pretty fitting."

"Was he around that girl, River I think you called her, when he got the hat?" Ianto leaned on Jack's chair.

"She was 'round an' about at the time, don't right recall if she were too close or not." Mal shrugged. "They ain't zackly kin close, those two. You seem to be askin' a lot of questions 'bout stuff seems not so much your business."

"Considering you're not likely to get off this planet without our assistance, I think you might want to be a little more patient with our nonsense, Captain Reynolds." Jack got to his feet. "If you can just give Gwen some more information about the rest of your crew, I'll see what we can do about getting you the parts you need to fix your ship."

chûnrén: fool, idiot (sino)