Chapter Nine
Back from the Future

But Michelle's voice is breathy as she, kneeling, supports herself against the bed over the astounding young woman who still lays prone on the white shag carpet before them. "I'm going to faint now."

Su Lin shakes her head. "You won't." She casts her eyes upward to Jimmy. "May I get up now, dad?"

Asking permission to get up only adds to the unreality of the moment, but Jimmy helps her to her feet, keeping the action automatic because if he allowed himself to think he would be the one who'd faint.

'Dad?'

When she's upright she's about midway between their heights, just about where he'd expect biology to put her, and in addition to green eyes in her definitely Chinese features he can find enough of himself for her not to be a younger copy of his stunned wife.

He decides he can't pass judgments, for if she's stunned he's flummoxed.

Susan Linda - Su Lin, okay, she looks more Asian than Scandinavian so he sees the sense, though if he ever had a daughter he'd call her Susan and Linda is a nice complement, says nothing. She stands still and allows them to look at her until their minds absorb their grown daughter standing before them while at the same time being a several week old dividing colony of cells in his wife's womb.

x

'Chelle boosts herself off her knees but must sit on the end of the bed, more a collapse on weak legs than a controlled sit.

Jimmy tries as hard as he can to say something reasonable without falling into uncontrolled stammering, something that happens all too frequently and he doesn't want it to defeat him this time.

Su Lin looks about the bedroom. "Wow, never been here before. Talk about a blast from the past."

"You've never seen this apartment?" he asks, forced, when he can force thought, to the realization that his wife had won her point.

"No, I grew up..." she halts. "Somewhere else."

"Rosemont? Near Alexandria?" 'Chelle asks, sounding shell shocked. "Bayliss near Cross?"

"Yes."

"What?" 'Where?' Are they on some mystical wavelength when he's not on any wave?

"Later, honey."

'Chelle recovers first - as usual, which is as frustrating as that short answer, though she gives him a very odd look before focusing her attention on their daughter. Wow. Daughter. "What are you doing here?"

x

"Before I can answer that: mom, you and your team got into Project Life Source today, didn't you?"

"Yes." She's not about to sound the fool by asking how the woman knows that. She's not that discombobulated.

"And Dad, you and aunt Sammy and some others have already been dosed with something that made its victims afraid of everything, right?"

"Right," he says. It's a breathy admission, testament to the fact that he's half blasted out of this reality. 'Aunt Sammy?' "Wait a sec, some others?"

"Dad, don't worry," she says instead. "you never suffer any effects from that drug. You and everyone else are really fine. There are no after-effects."

"That's a relief."

"Wait a second!" 'Chelle demands. "Some others? Everyone else?"

"Please, mom, one thing at a time."

"One thing at a time?" She sounds like she's going to lose it in about three seconds, but

"Time is everything," the young woman who claims to be their daughter declares, sounding satisfied, but it's with a sharp drop of shoulders that signals a release of pent up apprehension. She glances at the Scrying Mirror. "Sometimes Transitioning doesn't work exactly right when you muck about with Time as well as Space, especially when I was going by your stories to hit the correct moment." She glances again at the mirror, not much love in her look. "Or for it to hit me. Messing about with Temporal Spatial Transitioning is something like dealing with Schrödinger's cat, something hasn't happened until it's found to have happened. Until then it's–"

"What are you talking about?" blasts out of him. Okay, if he's her father that gives him the right - or the authority - to demand answers and he wants several hundred. "What are you doing here? What do you mean 'stories'? Who else was poisoned? Why were you unconscious on our floor? How can you be here from the future? How can you be both standing here and in there at the same time? And Why are you Grinning at me?"

"Because it's so nice to know that some things never do change, dad."

x

"Don't you 'dad' me." His knees finally give out and he's glad he hits the bed next to 'Chelle, his impossible daughter standing before them. "I'm too young to be a father."

"Well, technically that's true, but you do adjust by late April." Michelle looks up at her, starting to recover, but their daughter - this is insane - misunderstands the look with a shrug. "Twenty-third." She smiles. "But it really is incredible. You're both so young, I can't get over it."

Jimmy can't help but gape. This is going too far. "You can't get over it?"

"What are you doing here?" 'Chelle demands, looking like she's still not in a hurry to stand up.

"You sent me, mom, with messages." She allows a moment for that to sink in. "We weren't totally sure of everything; memory plays tricks after twenty four years, but she - you - remembered learning several ultra-important things you needed to tell yourself but you couldn't come because there'd be two of you so you sent me, remembered sending me, will remember having going to send me–"

"There ARE two of you!" she cries, hand inches above her lap.

"Not exactly. I'mmmm..." she shrugs, perhaps lost as well, "under construction."

x

"Wait a minute." Unaddressed for several moments, Jimmy has been able to rally and now gets to his feet without wobbling - feels slightly proud of the accomplishment - and tries to impose order. "You say 'Chelle - your Mother - sent you here, from...?"

"Let's just say two decades, don't want to get too specific."

"No, of course not." She's already said it's twenty four years, she'd be twenty three, has already given her birthdate so how unspecific does she want to get? "With information we absolutely have to have, information so vital it's worth violating the Temporal Prime Directive because she remembers getting it so you're avoiding rather than creating a Temporal Paradox."

"Honey."

He looks down to her. "Give me a break, would you? I'm winging this."

"And doing your usual very good job," Su Lin says. "That's essentially it."

"My usual very good job?" He's more used to 'occasional mediocre attempts'.

"For all the memories I have of you, you've never been anything other than an inspiration."

x

"Su Lin?"

"Yes, mom?"

She puts her hand to her head, looking down to the floor. The white shag is the only thing here that hasn't changed. "Ohh, I need an aspirin."

"You're kidding," she declares.

Michelle looks back up. "What do you mean?"

"Well, you simply don't get pain, at least I've never known you to, for more than a few moments; nor will you allow Dad any. Me, after I turned five, that was another story."

She reaches out, runs her fingertips along Michelle's forehead and Jimmy can see the effect reflected in her eyes.

"That's incredible."

"Very first thing you taught me." She looks to Jimmy, who hadn't responded well to that 'other story'. "And from the time she taught me, I was responsible for my own pains." She shrugs. "Only way to learn."

"Oh, I can relieve pain, but I have to hold my hand on the spot and it takes about ten seconds or so."

"Wow. By the time I started school you could do it with a wave of your hand from across the room."

She stands up. "Then I do become a more powerful witch."

The smile falls from her daughter's face. "Scary powerful."

x

Jimmy steps in. "I don't think I like the sound of that."

"You weren't meant to." She turns to her mother. "That's the first message, from you to you."

Michelle takes a deep breath, holds it, lets it out slowly. "Go ahead."

"You've always put more effort in focusing your talents on Healing, sometimes at the expense of other abilities, and that wasn't a bad thing because NCIS is a dangerous life and you have more than enough occasions coming up to justify making Healing an essential talent, but all your talents are growing, possibly more quickly than you realize. You're not balancing your training and you really have to, but you also have to work on your control. In this time you're having a lot of trouble with emotional control."

"She's got a temper that could–" but he falls silent at her glare.

"That's what I'm talking about. Mom, from my first memories growing up you've always had superb control, and you've worked hard to teach me to control myself, my emotions and my talents. You drummed it into me from Day One that a witch needs self control or she's 'disaster on the hoof'." She gives her a wry smile. "I went through my chunky phase."

Jimmy sees nothing chunky about her but keeps the assessment to himself.

"But at this moment you don't have that control and you need it, badly and soon."

"Why?"

This time his assessment of his daughter is that Su Lin is a woman caught in conflict.

x

"Something's going to happen, something terrible, something that will affect all Practitioners of the Magical Arts for decades, possibly centuries to come. I told you all about it before, mom, but–"

"Wait a minute." Jimmy demands. "You told her before?" This with a glare at his wife. They've withheld things from one another before, usually when the job leaves horrible behind and crosses over into nightmarish, but this is withholding on a totally new scale.

"This... ah... isn't the first time I've come back."

"You don't say."

"But it is the last time. At least I think it is. But you don't remember the last time, either of you, because I had to block it from your memories until time caught up with it." She sees something familiar in his expression. "I had to, Dad, and yes you were pis - mad when you remembered but I had no choice."

He wonders at that self-edit, but she turns to Michelle. "But something is going to happen, a few years from now, and you are going to need that self-control in place before it does. Right now you're ambivalent about those Anger Management sessions. You can't be anymore. You described them as having helped you through what you had to deal with when this came."

"When what came?"

x

She hesitates, apparently caught between what she has to say and perhaps all that she wants to say. "I can only tell you something's going to happen, that it's less than six years off, and when it hits you are going to have to have your emotional control in place."

"Or else?"

"You mentioned your development, that you become more powerful, and I said you were 'scary powerful'."

"And?"

"You brought me up not to exaggerate."

oooo

'Goddess,' Su Lin Palmer appeals as she faces her unnervingly young parents in their old apartment. Ever since coming through the Scrying Mirror in her office at Otherworld Investigations and getting knocked out by Transition Vertigo, she's barely managed.

'Mom's supposed to be fifty one – is fifty one – and Dad should have some white in his hair, but this is too much.

'I hate having to decide these things. Yes, I'm here with orders but I have latitude in how much I reveal and how but I really don't want it. I hate affecting the past without knowing the future – the one that's my future where everything either comes together or more likely gets cocked up beyond all reason or repair. And I hate the old days.

'The old days. That's when people just registered by checking off on a list Catholic, Protestant and so on. Ever since 2020 and Roe vs. Wade - and I stillwish they hadn't called it that - Witches of real ability in the Armed Forces are required to Register.

'Those were the bad old days I'm grateful that I was too young to know or care what was happening around me when things went from bad to horrible, but I grew up knowing all the stories. It's not just World History, its family history. The case that touched off the powder keg was Clarence Roe vs. Harrison Wade vs. the US Selective Services. It proved Witches of power really exist, brought us into the public eye and for some time almost made us - them rather, I was too young and still unknown - the secret weapon in what could have become World War Three.

x

'Mom was one of thousands who could have been forcibly conscripted into the Marines or one of the other branches. She'd've gone from Federal Agent to Soldier.

'It would have happened too but for the mundane but very powerful forces Uncle LeeJay could wield, but while mom got lucky not many others had been. Then Congress, in a rare example of rational political thinking, smashed the Military's hopes of creating the Super Force, but for quite some time America had been a truly horrible place for those like us.

'Freedom of expression and personal development had allowed the advent of truly talented Witches. The lack of those same freedoms choked development in the societies of our then-enemies. To my knowledge no totalitarian society has ever produced truly powerful Witches. That distinction had been the linchpin in a truly despicable plot.

'The 'Pentacle Plan', the Pentagon's tongue-in-cheek euphemism for creating a race of super-soldiers, would have touched off the very war they'd sought to avoid. What do you suppose our non-magical, our Mundane enemies - and our occasional Allies come to that - would have done when it came out we were developing human weapons against which there is neither range limit nor defense?

'Right.

'From 2020 to 2021 the political and legal battles waged in every arena you can name. The result is that Witches are as out of the closet as you can get. Screw 'don't ask, don't tell'; in the past decade plus you can practice and live in peace but you had damned well better tell.

'One result of that long shakeup of society and politics and the Arms race is that it allows me, and others, to make an honest living. It opened up commercial ventures the likes of which couldn't even be imagined at the turn of the millennium. The downside is that we're cataloged, classified, indexed. My file, which I'll never see, is probably a hundred pages thick.

'Or so I flatter myself. It's probably a couple hundred K's of data on a Server in the sub-basement of the Hoover building.'

ooo

Jimmy and Michelle are both frustrated, and recognize there's no help for that frustration. Su Lin had come from - where? - to tell them something so important they cannot wait for the natural course of events to reveal it. This is a case of 'forewarned is forearmed' but they do recognize that she will reveal what she may - or what the more mature Michelle told her to reveal - and nothing more. To try to pull more than that is to waste whatever unknown amount of time they have.

"Tell us," Jimmy directs and tries to ignore the irony of being a father giving an order to his grown daughter - who's nearly his own age.

"Yes, sir. The problem centers around a Court case: 'Roe v. Wade'."

"If that's the issue," Michelle says, "you're a couple of decades way too late."

"Yes, I've always hated that too but some Newscaster will, in a few years, shorthand the real title to the two principals in the conflict and it'll catch on with the public until this day - I mean until my day."

"Yes."

"The real title is 'Clarence Roe vs. Harrison Wade vs. the United States Selective Services' and the spark has been struck yesterday evening. The fuse is lit and before anyone realizes it, it will tear this country apart from the inside out."

"I don't know anything about your time," Michelle admits. "Yet. But in this time we have an expression: 'Give it to me in five words or less'."

"I'll give it to you in thirteen. We're Outed, and we're going to be conscripted to launch World War Three."

x

"We?"

"Witches, mom."

"Give it to me now, all of it, every word."

"Enough with the fore glimpses, young lady," Jimmy says.

"Yes, ma'am, sir," and this is very telling to them. "At the Naval Research Lab, there's a secret operation in progress. It's called 'Operation Life Source'."

"Been there, done that, scared the hell out of me."

Su Lin's eyebrows leap up but she apparently won't touch on why, says instead "So you told me. It was intended to be used to identify living beings by their life essences. The developer has the best of intentions; find lost people, disaster victims who can be located to the square foot, identify and track terrorists - all the sorts of altruistic, good purposes that the Military can't wait to subvert into a weapon.

"We think it detects Auras but whether life essences or whatever... Picture it, picture it, how to pict–? Remember the television show 'Star Trek'?"

Michelle's so focused that the tangent is painful but "We haven't been living in a cave."

"'A Taste of Armageddon' was the title. In a war room everyone's looking at a war screen when suddenly a light brighter than any other flares up, spreads and eventually fades. That happened last evening when five Solitaries, not Rising Star Coveners, in an exercise inside a Circle, raised a force equal to two hundred fifty life essences and sent it through the Circle out into the world. It was supposed to increase general wellbeing in the world, a foolish and undirected experiment, but when it was directed out through the Circle it didn't just get noticed, it was like sending up a flare."

"Shit."

x

For a moment Su Lin is clearly startled but she regains her track. "The ceremony ended immediately, the two hundred fifty bright spot went down to five before the scientists could lock onto anyone. Being unexpected, they put it down to a fluke, a power surge, something wrong with the machine - but they never did find anything wrong with it. They did not understand, then, what they had seen. Neither did they understand, in this point in the project, what happened when the machine read your magically enhanced aura."

"I thought they were reading you."

"No. I have no powers until the day I'm born."

"What? It shouldn't work like that."

"Please, mom, better you don't know. Trust me. Please?" That agreement is not easily won and Jimmy can see it will be temporary at best.

x

"Well anyway, they're right now pulling and testing every circuit the thing has but they won't find anything wrong because there is nothing wrong with the device. Further testing will ultimately prove that and will reveal us."

"What can we do?"

"History records that you warned Kendra Little tonight. She and the other High Priestesses forbade Unsupervised work outside the Temple but that order didn't work with Solitaries and only delayed the inevitable because it was Solitaries that ultimately did us in."

"How?" Jimmy feels a cold knot in the base of his stomach as his daughter outlines a personal disaster she and his wife lived through - will live through - and speaks as though there's no way to stop it from happening.

"A Marine General Gregory Castagna eventually put - puts - it together. Three years from now he realized - will realize - what we are, that Mystical talents are real and that Witches could be Conscripted as Warriors."

x

Michelle sits down upon the bed and Jimmy doesn't feel very stable either.

"When the Military realizes, four years from now, what we can do, it starts a secret undercover mission. Two years later it sees light and we're rounded up. You, as a Federal Agent, escape much of that and I was simply too young to be useful, but thousands of our Brothers and Sisters were conscripted and trained as weapons.

"We were the perfect soldiers who couldn't be defended against. Put on the front lines, we'd be devastating. Even at great distance many of us could decimate opposing forces. Dropped into enemy territory, such as into cities - I don't have the word for it."

"We have to stop this," she whispers, wishes she had a clue as to how.

"No. You have to let it happen."

x

"What? Don't be–"

"Listen, you've already been brought into the situation. You're going to investigate that device, I can't tell you why and I won't tell you when, but it's going to happen and when you find out what it can do – if not for this conversation – you're going to want to scuttle that thing, even if doing so destroys your career. You'll believe it's vital that you scuttle it, but you can't. You have to let it be developed."

"So it can bring down hundreds, thousands of my - of our - Sisters and Brothers? If I can stop that then my career is a tiny price to pay."

"No it is not. You are going to have to go against everything you believe in, all your faith, all your morals, because you are going to know what's going to happen and you have to let it happen, no matter how many thousands of people get hurt."

"What possible incentive could I have to do that?"

"Would you kill Hitler?"

x

Every student has been asked that at some time in his or her life ever since the concept of temporal mechanics had first been broached and had turned it from a question of Philosophy into one of Theoretical Physics. Such a pity no one gave serious consideration to approaching the problem from another angle, yet Jimmy has his long considered answer.

"No."

He doesn't flinch under Michelle's shock and outrage at his perceived betrayal. "Just from a Civil Rights perspective, to say nothing of technology, medicine, sociology, race relations, World War Two had to happen to bring us to where we are today. To change the war, to really change it, you have to kill every baby in Germany, Italy and Japan who grew up to direct and control the war, no matter how many babies that is. And then you can't be sure the survivors who take their place wouldn't be worse."

"Okay, Jimmy," Michelle challenges, "how about the Holocaust? Would you let that happen?"

"Yes."

She stares at him, appalled. "I don't know you."

"Because the Holocaust, horrific as it was, taught us the one lesson we had, as a race, to learn. It taught us 'Never Again'."

"And World War Three has to approach the brink," Su Lin declares, "because the horrors we as a country could have inflicted upon ourselves led to a new and broader 'Never Again'."

"How?" Michelle demands. If she is going to have to abandon her morals, take actions that will hurt - kill? - her brothers and sisters, she damned well wants to know Why.

x

"Witches were conscripted, Civil Rights for them were canceled, Citizenships dissolved, and then it was found that such an Army as America would raise could be duplicated all over the planet. True, we had the numbers but while the freedom of expression that allowed Wicca and so many other things to thrive didn't exist openly in several other countries, it inhibited group development but it didn't obliterate Magic or the Right Hand Path - and most especially not the Left Hand Path.

"Where Covens were rare, Solitaries existed in as great numbers as in any other society. There's a natural need for expression that totalitarian Dictatorships like the Middle East, the 'Stans, couldn't erase, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of their own citizens they exterminated. The Talented, be they Shamens, Vaudun or whatever, say Witches for collective shorthand, in other countries were identified, found and trained as weapons just as Americans and our Political Allies were."

"Goddess," she whispers, looking as though she's reached her limit, but her daughter has more horrors to convey.

"But that was the turning point. People finally realized that not only was a weapon that cannot be defended against being developed, but that it could also be duplicated. When the horror of that set in, the Pentacle Plan became a weapon that must never be used.

"And America openly canceling the Citizenships, Rights and Liberties of thousands of native-born Americans raised a backlash the likes of which Washington hadn't ever imagined."

ooo

'Actually, I wasn't too young to be useful. In fact, when talking raw energy, I was too tempting a target. I'd told mom last time I was here that my power boost came from my very dramatic birth in Autopsy, but that was one aspect and I let her believe it was the only one that set me on this Path.

'But from the days when she'd first started feeling the effects of pregnancy, the morning sickness, then the bloating, the back pains, the sore feet, the exhaustion, the mood swings, she'd drawn on the Cosmos, on the ambient psychical and eldritch energies in the world, to get her through the physical hardships.

She told me that was why she'd shown up so dramatically on the Life Source screen, though she hadn't realized it until months from today, well after I was born. She's recently started drawing on the eldritch energies to help her with morning sickness and even that was enough after months and years, as she started using it to get through long and hard days and weeks of NCIS trials over the years to ultimately have her shine on a screen intended to display life energies.

Today is just the start of a long process that leads to me, yet one more reason I can't tell her why it had happened. She drew on the directed force of the cosmos more and more frequently, eventually she was drawing constantly on the ambient eldritch energies, the magic of the Goddess, to get her through the days, bolster her up, keep her from the pains pregnant women go through for months. She used to amaze her team mates because, no matter how big I got, she carried like it had no effect at all.

'She realized far too late to matter that the constant influx of magical energy, the 24/7 infusion of mystic force that got her through the weeks and months, that though she'd expended much but not all of it in her daily activities, it had to go somewhere. There was a great deal she took in that she didn't use, and that massive, continuous influx of energy over some eight months had to go somewhere. Guess where.

'Right.

'Of course, when I was so young; infant, child, I hadn't come into my powers. I was like an overcharged battery whose energy I had no clue how to tap. But when I did, I lit up that Life Source thing like a super nova and suddenly everyone wanted me.

'But by then it was the end of things, the backlash was well underway, the people were coming down on the military plans and blasting them to shreds.

'And what do you suppose, just for an example, my uncle LeeJay was doing? Well, the military wanted to turn a 5 year old girl – his Goddaughter – into a Weapon?

'They tell me that on quiet nights on Capital Hill, when the wind is right, you can still hear him.'

ooo

"Treaties, long bickered over, were ultimately banged into shape," she tells them, not a moment lost in real time, "but it took years. The various countries ultimately banned all testing; the Pentacle Plan was over within months and the awareness of the Talented - as I said we were Outed to stay – resulted in the society we have today."

"And what is that society?" Jimmy practically demands, the tension high in him.

x

Su Lin reaches into her blue skirt's pocket, pulls out a leather folder and displays a gold shield. It's an intricate device in the classic shield form but among its words and symbols the sigil in the center stands out prominently, a raised five pointed star enclosed within a circle. "I'm a Licensed Private Paranormal Investigator. That is, I don't investigate the paranormal, I use the paranormal in Otherworld Investigations."

She looks to her mother. "You are NCIS' Headquarters Division Deputy Special Agent-in-Charge, uncle LeeJay's old job today." She has a moment to enjoy the light that shines in her mother's eyes. "You sit at his desk but like him you prefer the Field to an office so you head up your own MCR Team. And you are Chief Forensic Pathologist though you prefer CME, so this family does turn out okay."

"What about Doctor Mallard?"

Her shoulders fall. "Dad, it's been over twenty four years."

"Oh. Right."

"I can't tell you anything more about the people you know and what happens to them, so don't ask me about Director DiNozzo or Mossad Deputy Director David or Professor McGee or Bishop McGee or Doctor Marsters or Doctor Dwyer because I can't tell you."

"Doctor Who?" Neither of them is surprised at the reference to Dr. Marsters, not since Sammy's occasionally dramatic relationship with Bill, but who is Dwyer?

"Aunt Sammy and Aunt Ab– Darn it. I jumped the gun a bit, didn't I?"

"A bit. You must take lessons from Abby."

"True, until I got to her. Just forget it."

"That'll be so easy," Jimmy quips.

x

"I can fix it, if you'll let me, so you'll never want to reveal any of that, particularly about the device, to anyone, but I need your permission because I cast one spell on you because I had to, but I didn't like it and neither did you when you found out about it twenty three years later."

"Wait. Twenty three? Didn't you say you're from twen–?"

"My point was to tell you that things will work out, to let you know, mom, that you have to have the self-discipline to let them work out, for the people in the front lines to have the chance to do the right thing, no matter how vague that sounds at the time. You and others are going to want to use Witchcraft to combat this, but cooler heads have to prevail. It won't get underway, the bad times that is, for six more years but you must not stop it.

"You'll have real strength by then, remember what I said about scary powerful, but if you don't have the self-discipline to let things progress when you really want to wipe it all out, then you'll wipe out the good results along with the problems."

"So I sit tight and do nothing?"

"That was never you, but your actions must be considered, thoughtful actions, not reactions. This is what you sent me to tell you."

"And to let us know but make us not want to tell anyone," Jimmy concludes. He stiffens, holds his breath for a moment, then nods. "All right," he says. "Go ahead."

"Done."

x

"Done? What do you mean 'done'? Just 'done'?"

She shrugs. "You expected Doctor Strange, with flashes and streamers of eldritch energy?"

"I wouldn't have turned them down."

"You never change, backward or forward."

"But how do you know about Doctor Strange?" Michelle challenges. "That's got to be so ancient and inconsequential."

"Uncle Tim made sure we were all brought up on the Classics."

"We? You have brothers and sisters?"

She shakes her head. "No, dad, I'm talking about uncle Tony's, uncle Tim's, aunt –"

"I get the point," Michelle says, not wanting any more foreknowledge.

"You'll find out when you get there. But I have to go back. I'm glad you'll be there to catch me; there's a daybed in front of the mirror up there but I've missed it before." 'Though at least I won't slam into my desk; I had enough sense to arrange the office so I avoid that.'

"Catch you?" Jimmy's concern rockets. "You know, you never explained why you were passed out on the floor."

"Transition Vertigo. You know all about that."

"Remember, honey, the time I went home to China and they were going to take me to the hospital, and then you freaked when I got back? And when I transitioned into that Alternate Universe I was unconscious for a whole night."

"Don't remind me." She had told him he was dating someone named Breena and she was dead and in an uninformed fit of jealous rage she'd nearly killed that woman in their bed, thinking he was him – rather….

"We're moving with an Earth rotation of eighteen miles per second objective motion," 'Chelle says. "The reason we don't feel the Earth rotating, it moving laterally in its orbit, the sun moving and the galaxy turning is that we're established in our senses to treat the galaxy as though we're standing still in DC.

"If we allowed ourselves to feel Objective Motion rather than Subjective - it can be done with a stretch of senses - it'd scare the willies out of us. When I went to China my inner ear and every sense that orients me insisted I'd reversed objective direction by thirty six miles per second, and that apart from being upright and upside down, and I don't want to think of that AU." She, Jennifer, Siobhan all dead, Jimmy with some other woman named Breena, Ziva had tried to ...

x

"Well, in this case," Su Lin picks it up, "I started out in January so my spin and orbit would have been a hundred eighty six million miles apart and in opposite linear directions, but I also jumped in Time. The sun and Earth are each moving laterally, the galaxy's rotating and after a quarter century 'my' Earth is nowhere near 'this' one."

"Amazed it didn't turn you inside out," Jimmy says.

"Damn–" she glances to her mother before editing herself, "darn near did."

"All this time you two haven't solved that?" he asks, admitting that nowhere else in the universe than with these two so similar women could he have a conversation even remotely like this one.

"Can't be solved," Michelle declares.

"There's a price to be paid for instantaneous transportation, and Transition Vertigo is the coin. It's called the Law of Objective Motion and now I have to do it again."

"So soon?" He was just beginning to get to know his daughter.

"Have to, dad. Aside from the effect of two TVs on my system, and I do not want to do this - last time I did it twice it knocked me on my a - butt." Again that guilty glance to 'Chelle and the self-editing.

"Despite what I said earlier I am literally in two places at the same time - actually it matters more that my soul is - and believe me when I say that is not good. So I must vanish before... well, before.

"Mom, remember, you need those Anger Management Sessions so don't skimp."

She quickly embraces her, holds tightly. "I love you, mom." She turns to him, her hug just as tight. "I love you, dad."

"I love you too, Susan," he says, his line of sight including his wife's abdomen and, wonder of wonders, he means it.

She steps in front of the mirror before this can become more emotional. "Well, you'll see me in about five milliseconds... and I'll see you in nine months."

"Goodbye," Jimmy says. "And thank you for letting me know how you turn out - even though I can never tell anyone."

"You're welcome." She turns again to the large mirror, takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. "I'm really going to hate this."

From their point of view, their daughter steps into the large pane of mirrored glass. From how 'Chelle has described it, he doesn't want to know Susan Linda's view.

/*/*/*/*/

Author's Note: For the introduction of Su Lin Palmer in context, see my peek of the future in 'Into the Light'. For her earlier trip into the past and the secrets she cannot reveal a second time, see my episodes 'Fantasy Affair' and 'Otherworld', in that order.

Then if you like, read 'Pieces', her Mystery in which we meet the cast we so love a quarter century from now.