Author's Note: Ryn takes up the story for this section. It's time for some background details.Please read and review.

Dead and Alive (Part Four)

Space exploration used to be the greatest dream of our people. The concept of visiting alien worlds captured the public imagination, many billions of tarfs were spent on realising that dream. We had an enormous government funded space programme, as you might expect, and thousands of our people volunteered themselves to train as potential space travellers. The lucky few hundred who met the entrance criteria all became massive celebrities, the public could not get enough of them. Within just thirty years of the first crewed space flight we had a fleet of more than two hundred spacecraft and we were swarming out across the universe like a benign, but curious, plague. Our interests laid not in the conquest or exploitation of any planet that we visited, we just wanted to see as much as we could.

Every child on Belanth wanted to grow up to be a space traveller, I was one of the lucky ones who achieved his dream. By the time that I was active in Space Fleet, our scientists had mastered a new technology which quickly came to totally revolutionise life on Belanth. I'm talking about matter transmission. Of course, in the early days we were fairly cautious and just used it to transport goods, food and stuff. The potential application to the space programme became obvious as soon as we started to transmit people across Belanth. The government decided that it would be a fantastic idea to install matter transmission booths on all of the planets which we regularly visited - if that could be achieved then space exploration would be open to every citizen of Belanth rather than remaining the preserve of just the lucky few deemed fit enough to stand up to the physical demands of long journeys. Now anyone would be able to transmit themselves from Belanth directly to the planet of their choice - so long as they had government permission to make such a journey..

One of my earliest space trips had been to the planet Earth, I'd fallen in love with the place, so when the government announced its decision to install a booth there I volunteered to be part of that mission. We chose a quiet little city called Lincoln and we soon had the booth up and running. It was located in a public park, the Arboretum, but was hidden from prying eyes by our advanced cloaking technology - which I assume you don't require a lecture on, Miss Grant? Oh, good. While we had been installing the booth, our sister mission had been equally busy launching the relay satellite into Earth's space - again this was also cloaked. With both devices up and running the only thing left to do was to put them to the test. Some of us transmitted ourselves back to Belanth, our mission accomplished. We were treated as heroes.

Over the next few years the government decided to recoup some of the money spent on the space programme by selling off the operating rights and ownership of the various transmat booths to interested private concerns. I'd become very rich through my numerous media appearances and the sale of my autobiography, as one of the interplanetary transmat pioneers I was a household name. I had more than sufficient funds to purchase the Earth transmat booth, and its relay satellite, so I did so. It became my new personal aim in life to bring cheap holidays on Earth to the Belanthi people and I set up a company called Earth Experience. I offered my customers the unique experience of living the life of a human. By that I don't just mean that I sent them down to Earth to live like a human for a couple of weeks, oh no, each of my customers got to take on the actual identity of a real pre-selected human being and live that person's life for a time. I personally picked the humans who were to be temporarily replaced and it was all going fine until the day that I selected Sophie Athwell…

(TO BE CONTINUED)