Torchwood LA: Retcon

Chapter 7: Oh, Snap!

Present day…

Tess looked down at the tablet. After the light show in Science 2, she had been led by Bauer to Gwen's office, and was currently sitting across from the Torchwood leader herself.

"Okay," said Gwen. "First of all, let me apologize categorically for what happened to you this morning. It was not my intention to have you manhandled and trundled into a car like a common criminal." Gwen stood up, putting one hand to her forehead as she faced away from Tess. "I would've sent Jack to get you, or come myself, but we were…otherwise engaged. So I let Jack send his thugs, and they screwed it up!" She sat back down and looked at Tess. "They were just supposed to make initial contact, and then take you to the rendezvous point we always use - this little Indian place about three klicks to the west; the naan there is exquisite - where we would meet you and bring you in. I swear!"

"Jack's 'thugs?'" Tess asked. She realized that, the whole time she had been at the Torchwood base, she had not seen Ortiz or any of the others who had abducted her.

"Yes," said Gwen, tapping her hands on the desk to relieve some of the frustration she was feeling. "When Jack came onboard, he brought his list of 'contacts' with him, people who could do odd jobs for us. Jobs that don't require Torchwood-level clearance: surveillance, cleanup, retrieval…" she said, gesturing toward Tess on the last one. "They're not really part of Torchwood, more like contractors. However, they have their uses," Gwen said grudgingly, "so we keep them on retainer."

Tess said nothing; instead, she went back to looking at her tablet. She was currently reading a series of old Torchwood mission reports Jack had downloaded for her so she could catch up on what Torchwood was about. She was surprised and a little frightened to recognize her own writing style in some of the reports.

"How long have I been a 'retired asset?'" she asked.

"Three months." The speaker was Jack Bauer, who walked in the door with the glass of orange juice Gwen had offered Tess twenty minutes earlier. "Sorry," he said, as he handed the now warm glass of juice to Tess, "I got caught up…helping Adam." He looked to Gwen, and she exchanged a meaningful nod with him. Then he turned back to Tess. "You left not long after Adam and I came on board."

"Three months," repeated Tess.

Gwen nodded. "Let me start at the beginning," she said. "Does the name Bruce Stanley ring any bells?"

"No," replied Tess, "should it?" She shook her head. "I mean, you're not going to tell me I'm married to him or anything, are you?" she asked, using the flippant remark to try to regain some sense of control over the day's events.

Both Gwen and Jack remained completely silent and kept their faces expressionless.

"Oh, God!" said Tess, after looking from one Torchwood agent to the other. She quickly glanced down to look at her fingers, half expecting to see the telltale marks from a wedding ring. In her mind's eye, she saw a man sitting alone at her dining room table, covered with three months' worth of dust and cobwebs.

Gwen burst out laughing. "Sorry, sorry!" she said in between breaths. "I couldn't resist having you for a laugh there! And YOU went along with it!" she said, pointing at Bauer after he rolled his eyes.

"Dr. Stanley is openly gay," Jack offered in partial explanation, his use of the word "openly" earning him a mock-dismayed look from Gwen.

"With my track record, that's not an answer," mumbled Tess.

Gwen took on a matter-of-fact tone and demeanor. "Dr. Bruce Stanley is head of the Australian Torchwood – my opposite number in Sydney, if you will," she told Tess. "You met him when he was undercover at your radio telescope facility." Tess looked up sharply at that. "Some alien entity possessed one of your scientists, tried to 'phone home'…" Gwen waved away the details. "Anyway, whatever happened on that mission, you so impressed Bruce that, when he heard I was trying to set up an American Torchwood, he made sure the jacket he'd put together on you made it across my desk." Gwen sat back. "You were one of my first hires." She leaned forward again. "We did your interview over that virtual reality hologram thingy you had," Gwen added excitedly, "do you remember that?"

Tess shook her head. "No," she said with all honesty. "When did I start working here?"

"About a little over eight and a half months ago," Gwen answered.

"Eight and a half months?! That's not possible!" Tess exclaimed. "I've only been back in the States since…" she stopped. She had been working backward in her mind, trying to work out the timeline Gwen had given her, but she suddenly realized that it meshed really well with the events of her life over the past year.

"Can you remember why you left Australia?" It was Bauer again. He knew that Tess was beginning to see the truth, but he wanted to hammer the point home.

"I got homesick," Tess replied, and she suddenly realized how rotely she had said those three words, like reciting a times table, or the rest mass values of subatomic particles. "No, wait," she said, "I didn't." She looked to Bauer, and then Gwen, as she tried to pull out a memory. "I left the radio telescope array – I wasn't homesick! I loved that job!" Tess put her head in her hands. She remembered putting in her notice at the job in Australia. "I burnt a bridge!" she lamented. "It took me over a year to get that job! That was the job I dreamed about having since I was sixteen years old, and I just up and left."

But what had she left for? Now that she thought about it, the sum total of her professional accomplishments since leaving Australia nine months ago were notes for a book she was working on and a rejection letter from the Hayden Planetarium. And that interview was only two months ago, she thought. What was I doing for the rest of the time? It also puzzled her why, if she had been homesick, she would have moved to Los Angeles? I don't know anyone here, she thought. If anything, I should have been looking for a job back east, to be closer to my parents…like I am now, she realized.

"Running a radio telescope array?" Gwen was asking with a smirk. "That's what you fantasized about when you were sixteen?"

Any rebuttal was cut off by Gwen's cellphone chirping. Gwen answered it, then became immediately serious as she talked to whoever was on the line. "Okay, I'll be right down," she said. She hung up, and then pointed to Tess.

"Jack, I have to go check something with Greg. Why don't you show Tess her old office?" the Torchwood leader said as she left the room.

"I have an office?" Tess asked, getting up as Jack motioned her out into the hallway.

Doot…deet…doot…deet…

"Woah!" said Tess, as Bauer led her through the door to Science Lab 1. "This is some office!" She could see about a half dozen work tables spaced out around the expansive room. There was an alcove in the wall ninety degrees to her right, which upon closer inspection Tess realized was the opening to another mini-room. That space was being used for storage, as it was filled with a couple of metal shelving units identical to the ones she had seen in the other Science room. There were also a couple of cubbyhole work areas: one next to the alcove, and one in the opposite corner. She recognized the person at that one.

"Don't mind me," said Adam. He was working on soldering two pieces of circuit board together. "Just needed to get this done for Gwen." He went back to work.

Bauer led Tess through the room to the other cubbyhole. A cardboard box, blanketed by a thin layer of dust, sat on top of the worktable.

"Oh," said Adam, looking up again, "I got that out for you, Tess." He pointed to the box. "Although, I think we never actually put it away after you left, just boxed everything up and left it here." He looked at Jack.

Tess went over and opened up the flaps of the box, afterward wiping her hands on the table top to get the dust off. She reached in and pulled something out.

"Oh, wow, my book!" she exclaimed. It was a copy of the book on astrophysics she had published about a year before taking the job with Global Dynamics. In truth, she knew, it wasn't so much a book as one of her dissertations, padded out to book length. Unfortunately, it had sold about as well as a dissertation padded out to book length, which was why she had waited so long to start thinking about writing a sequel. She opened the book up, and immediately lost the place of whoever had been using the dust jacket as a bookmark. It hadn't been more than about fifty pages in, she noted with dismay.

"You told me they found that in a bookstore for you as a joke, gave it to you as a surprise to cheer you up one day," Adam explained. "That's why you keep it around."

Tess looked at the inside cover. She had autographed it: To my friend Roy was the dedication. She put the manuscript down and went back to peering into the box. There was a large, folded up piece of paper, with the residue of double-sided tape still on the corners.

When Tess pulled it out and unfolded it, it turned out to be a man-sized target from a shooting range, complete with bullet holes. Most of the bullets had hit within the scored rings, or at least within the black silhouette, with only a few outliers. It was the name on the shooter's line that drew her attention: T. Fontana. She did a double take and looked at the scoring section again. She had apparently gotten an eighty percent, as certified by the instructor, one K. Ryan. She had no idea who K. Ryan was, but the handwriting was the same as whoever had written "I'm so proud of you!" and "Ephesians 3:20 : )!" along the bottom. It was also a different handwriting than whoever had written "BROADSIDE" and "BARN" with arrows pointing to two holes completely outside the silhouette.

She reached in and began to pull out other items: a paperweight, a box of push pins, a laminated periodic table, some old pictures of family and friends, even a couple of funny novelty pencils that she thought she had left in Australia. She found a piece of yellow legal paper stuck against the inside of the box. Fishing it out and looking at it, Tess saw her own handwriting. She read aloud:

"GWEN'S RULES:

#1. Don't open the rift.

#2. Do not take any alien artifacts out of the building without express permission.

#3. Don't open the rift.

#4. No personal deliveries to the Hub. This includes takeout. No exceptions.

#5. Don't open the rift.

#6. There is no Rule Number 6.

#7. Don't open the rift."

She put the paper down. "What's the rift?" she asked.

Jack and Adam looked at each other for a moment, and then Jack pointed to an open door next to Adam's workspace. "That's our rift monitor."

Tess had noticed the small room a few moments earlier. It looked about the size of a small bathroom – in fact, that's what she had originally taken it for, until she had noticed the strange equipment inside. Now, upon closer inspection, it appeared to be a monitoring station of some sort, as there were several screens mounted on a metal frame and a couple of moveable keyboards. She walked over to it. As she did, she noticed a lever marked with red and white warning stickers.

"Don't touch that!" said Jack as she neared the device. As she stopped, he pointed to the lever. "When fully armed, that lever can force open the rift. If you do that, you can break the space-time continuum and destroy the city, the world, the whole solar system…everybody dies."

Tess didn't react at first, but once her brain caught up with what Bauer had said, she involuntarily jumped backwards. "Why do we even have that?!" she asked.

Bauer gave her a genuine smile. "That's what I said!" He took her arm and led her away from the rift monitor. "Gwen says they rebuilt it from plans of the one they had in Cardiff. You and Roy Caftan were working on a theory that you could attenuate the worst of the rift openings by doing small, controlled openings…like setting a backfire," he said.

Tess looked up at that. She recognized the name from some of the reports she had read, and from her autograph. "Will I get to meet this Dr. Caftan?" she asked.

Bauer looked straight at her. "No," he said. "He's dead."

Tess was brought up short. She did not know how to respond.

Fortunately, Bauer's phone chirped at that moment. He looked at it. "Gwen needs me," he said. He looked around, then walked over to a large piece of equipment covered in a tarp. "Here," he said, pulling the tarp off, "why don't you work on this while I'm gone? Adam, show her."

Tess looked at what Bauer had uncovered. "That's…is that what I think it is?" she asked.

"Yes," said Adam. "It's the prototype of the sampling laser you designed for your robotic Titan probe. We brought it back from Global Dynamics." He walked over to the others. "You had a theory that a directed energy pulse, in this case a laser beam, of sufficient magnitude would be enough to penetrate the shielding of a 114."

"The 114, right," said Tess. She remembered reading about the 114 attacks in Las Vegas and Ottawa in some of the briefings Bauer had shared with her.

"Adam's been working on trying to make a man-portable version of Star Wars here," said Bauer, as he indicated the prototype. "You could help." He turned to head toward the door. "We need a better way of stopping them than running them over with a tank," Bauer said as he walked out.

Tess just stood for a moment. Finally, Adam had to wave a hand in front of her face to get her attention.

"Sorry," she said, "this is just so overwhelming."

"S'alright," Adam said cheerfully, "I understand. I know a bit about having a lot to take in at once, myself." He walked over and started tinkering with the laser. "I haven't worked on this in a while," he said. "You don't suppose your memory's coming back, do you?"

"Enough to remember that I didn't design the laser," Tess replied. "Another team did that; I just integrated their work into Tiny's chassis." When Adam looked up, she explained, "Tiny was what I called the probe."

"Oh," said Adam, laughing at the joke. "Well, I've since come to the conclusion that 'man-portable' is not feasible in the short-term, given the power requirements," he said, gesturing at the prototype. "Instead, I'm going for something we can mount in the back of one of our trucks – you know, like those Vulcan guns your Secret Service has," he said while pretending to fire a machine gun. "But again, the power is just too much for even this size. I was hoping to ask you how you dealt with the heat exchange. The circuits always fuse and I'm back to square one."

"You mean from the waste heat?" Tess asked. Already, working on a scientific problem was helping her feel like she was getting back some sense of normalcy. "I seem to remember that was an issue. What's the power curve look like when you test fire?"

"Actually, I've only been able to fire it once," Adam said. He walked across the room and lifted up a wall calendar, revealing a couple of scorch marks and a suspiciously round drywall patch. "It's probably for the best that I can't get it to work anymore," he said sheepishly, "as Gwen threatened to invoice me if I burned down the building."

"Aw," said Tess, as it was now her turn to laugh. Yes, she was definitely feeling more comfortable than she had been all day. "We'll figure it out, Adam." She saw a blank notebook on one of the tables, so she walked over to get that. On the way, she took a longer route to get a good look at some of the material in the storage alcove, in case there was something just lying around that might be useful.

"I mean, it was a space probe, right?" asked Adam, as Tess was busy grabbing a pen. "You didn't really need to worry about heat exchange, because it was in absolute zero and could just radiate."

"True, but you're forgetting it was meant to function on Titan," Tess said as she walked back to the laser, "where the ground is covered in liquid methane. You don't want your sampling laser to risk melting the footing underneath your 20-ton lander every time it's engaged…" She got lost in thought for a moment, then suddenly remembered how she had solved that particular problem before. "Aha!" she said, snapping her fingers. She turned to Adam and looked at him. And looked.

To her credit, she didn't scream.

Doot…deet…doot…deet…