What if the Intersect had been...different? What if its negative effects had been much more immediate, plaguing Chuck from the get-go?

A short chapter to prepare us for the stretch run of Book Two.

His exhausted mind felt tender, sore - blistered all over. Still, he felt more or less like himself. Except for the need, the urge, the need: deal with Fulcrum, destroy Fulcrum.

"I love you, Chuck." The memory of Sarah's gentle whisper, the words she had spoken, had been in his mind since he parked the car, her words his life-preserver.

She shrugged. "You get used to it, I guess. Try to tell yourself it's just a job. Do the job. Try to do it well, whatever that means in the midst of so much that's so bad. Worry about promotions...demotions...spy versions of office politics."

"Yeah, well, how about 'The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge'?"

Sarah kept seeing images of herself everywhere: in the eyes of a tiny baby, the eyes of innocent children, Chuck's warm brown eyes, Frost's arctic blue ones.

Chuck's old professor from Stanford, the one who had gotten him kicked out, Fleming, was now part of the MSU psychology department, the holder of an Endowed Chair. Chuck pressed his lips into a line, the voice in his head sounding metallic: ~The Fulcrum Chair, that's what they should call it.

Chuck Amuck

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The WABAC Machine

Monday night

Chuck found, as expected, an open door on the side of Traphagen Hall, the building that housed the MSU Psychology department. Or, rather, a door was wedged open, a partially crushed Coke bottle keeping the door from fully closing.

The ground around the door was littered with cigarette butts - a hideaway smoking area of a kind that existed all over campuses across the country. Chuck remembered some from Stanford, standing in them - even though he did not smoke - talking with computer engineering professors - who did smoke - after class, talking.

Stanford. It had all been so exciting, exciting at the beginning and more exciting each year. He met Bryce Larkin freshman year and had entered a new world, another one, alongside the intellectual world he entered there.

Bryce Larkin. Bryce was popular, instantly winning, always a winner. As Bryce's friend, Chuck got ushered into a new world: fraternities, parties, beautiful young women. And while Chuck had been smart enough to know none of that was really for him per se - he had been invited as Bryce's friend - it was still so exciting. Chuck enjoyed it all, enjoyed Bryce as King of it all, from the sidelines, or leaning against a wall. The women were there for Bryce, not Chuck, but Chuck got to talk to them and interact with them, women he would never have interacted with otherwise. Chuck understood, without Bryce ever saying it in so many words, that Chuck was there as Bryce's tag-along: Bryce was the superhero, Chuck the sidekick. His job was to show that Bryce had depth - that Bryce had intellectual chops, that Bryce could graciously condescend as King of Stanford to entertain Chuck, King of the Otherwise Ignored.

Ellie, on her first campus visit after Bryce befriended Chuck, picked up on the terms of their friendship immediately: "Yeah, that Bryce, he's a dick."

"No, Ellie, he's great. Really great. Being his friend is...well, a privilege."

"You're the friend of a privileged dick."

Chuck had not been able to persuade Ellie otherwise, and over time, she had come to dislike Bryce more - and that was before the horrible end of things at Stanford. Chuck knew that part of Ellie's deep frustration with his five-year ambition coma was that she thought it was Bryce-induced.

But, however that went, what Bryce did that cemented and proved their friendship for Chuck was to introduce Chuck to Jill.

"She's perfect for you, Chuck."

The truth was, perfect, for Chuck, was a blonde Hitchcock leading lady, Grace Kelly first, Eva Marie Saint, Kim Novak third - the Holy Trinity. But Bryce's choice otherwise had been right.

Jill was, if not perfect, amazing. Lovely, not trumpet lovely but flute lovely: soft, intelligent, sensitive, more alluring over time, possessed of a grin that was intimate and fun and sweet all at the same time. Chuck, who had never had a girlfriend, who rarely dated, plummeted like a stone.

Looking back, he wondered if he had ever loved her as he thought he had. Even before the end, the horrible end, she had seemed reticent, hesitant - as he thought their feelings were deepening, and as she claimed that they were, he felt like she was withholding some part of herself. But Chuck had convinced himself that was just her apprehension about graduating, starting a life, presumably together, somewhere. Now he wondered if he had been mistaken, if there had been some other source of the reticence. Odd as it sounded, it was Sarah's lack of reticence over the past few days, her openness to him, despite his strangeness, that made him wonder about Jill. All he knew was that he never felt shared-with when with Jill as he did when with Sarah. -No, that is not all I know: I also know that whatever I felt for Jill, even given the time it had to develop and deepen, is incomparable to what I feel for Sarah.

He had kept Sarah in mind despite gathering his things from the car and heading to Fleming's office. He couldn't keep other thoughts from crowding in, a drain of constant, nagging mistrust, warnings about betrayal, swirling doubts, images of his mother as a young woman. He held onto Sarah and let the other thoughts vortex around him. He might now be able to reach out to Sarah, given the Intersected static interfering with his bodily volition, but the Intersect could not really control his thoughts, although it could confuse them, speaking to him now in his own voice, not his father's. Sarah.

Chuck finished climbing the stairs to the fourth floor, the floor of Fleming's office. He left the stairway through the fire door and walked down the hallway. He stopped outside Fleming's door. A nameplate affixed to the door declared it to be the office of The Wainfleet Endowed Chair in Psychology, I. Fleming. An old Far Side cartoon was the only thing affixed to the door, a well-known one: two deer standing upright in the forest, one of them with an apparent bullseye on his chest, the other, looking at it and commenting: "Bummer of a birthmark, Hal."

Chuck realized that Fleming had the same cartoon affixed to his Stanford door. It made Chuck think back to his first semester, the freshman seminar he had taken with Fleming, the seminar in which Chuck met Bryce, a seminar called, simply and confusingly, Brain-Mind. Chuck recalled his excitement at the first meeting of the course and recalled chuckling at the black and white drawing of a brain in the upper left-hand corner of the syllabus. The seminar had been intense, enlightening. It had at times reminded Chuck of conversations with his father, before his father disappeared. Fleming's thinking and his father's were similar, at least to the extent that Chuck could remember - and understood - his conversations with his father.

The focus of the course was on learning, on the contrast and relationship between the knowledge and retention of information and the development and employment of habits. Fleming had been brilliant, spellbinding. The class was so good that the students typically moved en masse from the classroom to a nearby coffee shop to talk and to argue. That was where Chuck and Bryce first started talking, there in the coffee shop, where their friendship began.

Chuck shook his head in regret. What had gone wrong? Other than Morgan, Bryce had been Chuck's only real friend. That friendship had been terrific, hadn't it?, until suddenly it was not, until Bryce accused Chuck of cheating - and Jill had cheated on Chuck with Bryce.

Chuck refocused on the Far Side cartoon. He identified with Hal. Bummer of a birthmark, indeed. The Bartowski Family Curse. Chuck had never thought of that before, but it seemed to fit. He felt cursed. What had happened between his mom and his dad: a curse. He meets Sarah only to run from her - twice. What explained all that, and all the other shit in his life and his head, but a curse, a bummer of a birthmark? Born with a target on his chest, subject to forces outside his control, Daffy in Duck Amuck.

He shook his head again. Fulcrum. The Intersect connected Fleming to Fulcrum. Chuck needed to get inside Fleming's office. He took off his backpack and knelt beside it. He pulled out a slim piece of metal and went to work. Another thing he did not know how to do he did, did it knowledgeably. The door opened. The Farm. I am a spy.

Chuck stowed the strip of metal and grabbed the flashlight from the bag, then put the bag on his back. He could feel the gun in one of his coat pockets, but he left it there. A burner phone, bought earlier, was in the other. The office was dark. Chuck stepped inside and closed the door. Fulcrum. He started his search by running the light along the bookshelves. Books were not neatly arranged - they looked used, consulted. Some were horizontal. On some shelves, the books were two rows deep. Nothing attracted Chuck's immediate attention. He walked around the large wooden desk and sat down in Fleming's desk chair. He pulled open the top drawer. A profusion of pens and pencils and paper. The second drawer contained copies of academic papers, old syllabi, old Thank You cards from students.

Chuck shut the drawer, reached out and turned on Fleming's computer, an older laptop open on the desk. It came to life. Almost instantly, Chuck had zipped past the protections on the computer. That he had done it so fast, given that it was Fleming's computer, gave Chuck a sinking feeling. If getting into Fleming's computer were so easy, there was likely nothing on it worth seeing. That proved to be true. Chuck checked and double-checked, but nothing stood out. Chuck sat back in the desk chair. Fleming must do his real work, his own Fulcrum research lab work, somewhere else - perhaps not even on campus.

But where? How was Fleming involved? The Intersect steered Chuck to him, it felt like Fleming was key, but had supplied nothing that explained exactly why Fleming mattered so much.

Chuck was not sure why he had not flashed since - well, since seeing his mom chained to the wall, if his reaction to that counted as a flash. There'd been nothing that flashed before his mind's eye, no force-feed of facts or data points, just an overwhelming, vertiginous pain, and sorrow. Scottie Ferguson. Hitchcock. Kim Novak. Mary. Sarah. Chuck's heart hurt and he swiveled in the office chair.

Chuck noticed a yellowed folded newspaper on the radiator below Fleming's window, below the closed blind. Chuck grabbed it and swiveled back around. He had taken several classes with Fleming at Stanford, the last one during his senior year. Fleming seemed to think highly of Chuck, to like him. Chuck had coffee with him a few times outside of class. A couple of times, Fleming suggested that Chuck participate in Psychology department experiments. Chuck assumed it was because he knew that Chuck, although a scholarship student, had little spending money, and because Fleming thought Chuck would find the process of interest. Both were true. Both experiments turned out to be connected to Fleming's own work, so Chuck had a better sense of it when Chuck signed up for what he expected to be his final Fleming class. Chuck had not expected it to be his final Stanford class.

The class was devoted to a more finely-tuned examination of the issues opened in Chuck's freshman Brain-Mind seminar, and its treatment of the issues was practical - digital, you might say, instead of conceptual. Bryce had been in that class too. The class focused on digital encoding, pattern recognition - on questions in AI that were descendent of questions like the old gestalt psychologists had asked. In many ways, the class was ground-breaking. Fleming had new, fascinating ideas about how part/whole relationships worked, not just in human learning, but in any transfer of information. The old Cartesian idea that parts preceded wholes was rejected in favor of the idea that parts only meant something, were prior to wholes, in favor of the idea that parts were only bearers of information when they were part of a prior whole that meant something.

Chuck had been convinced.

The theory struck him as right, as an AI-version of Gottlob Frege's Context Principle - "Never ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a sentence". But it also seemed true to practice, to the workings of Chuck's own mind. He was fascinated by the class, devouring the reading, working feverishly on assignments. Pretty quickly, the meetings of the class became largely conversations between Chuck and Fleming, with everyone else, Bryce especially, scrambling to keep up.

Chuck opened the newspaper. He looked through it in the light of the flashlight. Then he saw it. An article on Fleming, on his acceptance of the Endowed Chair at MSU. Atop the article was a picture of Fleming shaking hands with the MSU President.

Chuck looked at it. Chuck flashed.

Brown took off his sweater and sat down.

He dug a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow, the cold, nervous sweat.

He had done it. He played off his entrance into the analyst's office as a mistake. Other analysts used the space, and Brown claimed he had been looking for one of them. He had managed to press the bug into place beneath the analyst's desk when he wasn't looking. Then he had excused himself. One advantage of being older and lame was that Brown did not seem, in person, like any kind of threat. The analyst, distracted anyway, had not paid much attention to Brown, and had seemed only to want Brown to leave. But that also told Brown something: the analyst was clearly under pressure, anxious, and that meant that he was likely engaged in a task he did not want to be interrupted and certainly did not want to be identified.

Brown had made a purposely awkward exit, stressing his dependence on his cane, and left. He could now hear what was going on in the analyst's office. He was about to turn on the receiver when he phone lit up. Zondra, Ellie, and Morgan were on the ground in Bozeman. Brown sent a text to Sarah to tell her. A moment later he got a response. Sarah was en route, TBA one hour. Late.

Then another text: Chuck is gone.

Brown looked at the phone twice. Where?

Unknown. West on I-90. We are hoping he's going to Bozeman, but we have no idea. Can you find him?

Brown responded: Getting to work.

Damn. What went on in Outlook? Why would Chuck be on his own? Brown's hands shook as he put them on his keyboard. It was partly residual nerves. But it was mostly exhaustion. He could not keep this up much longer. He was going to make a mistake. Maybe he had already made one and did not know it.

He initiated a facial recognition search of cameras along the relevant section of I-90W, and of recent social media posts. He did the same for Bozeman. Thank God - Brown smiled grimly at the welcome unwelcome thought - thank God the entire damn US is now effectively under surveillance. His dad had hated that. Part of the disease, his dad loved to say, we live in a spy's wet dream. Brown made himself focus.

He had to find Chuck. Chuck had proven bizarrely capable, but Brown knew that each step was putting Chuck in more danger. How much further could Chuck go before he was in over his head? Bartowski needed Walker, everyone else.

Brown swallowed his exhaustion and extended himself digitally via his supercomputer, all along the length of Montana's portion of I-90W.

Ellie was standing beside Zondra in the Bozeman airport.

They had gotten a text from Brown. Sarah was due at any moment. Ellie had been pacing and Zondra had put a hand on her shoulder, wordlessly asking her to be calm. But Ellie was scared, scared for her brother, and she was tired, tired of not really knowing exactly what was going on, where things stood. She needed to talk to Sarah, to the Enforcer. Was Chuck really involved with an assassin? That thing in his head and a woman like that on his arm?

"Hey," Morgan said, standing on the other side of Zondra and pointing to a car outside. "Isn't that Sarah? Hard to make a mistake where she is concerned."

Ellie walked forward quickly. Sarah was out of the car - it was her, no mistake - and was walking inside. A woman with red hair had gotten out of the driver's seat and was following. A moment later, the man who had come to her apartment looking for Chuck, the military guy, got out of the front passenger seat. What the hell? Ellie's heart began to race.

Then the entire universe went into super slow-mo. Out of the rear passenger seat emerged a woman, handsome, in her middle fifties. The woman looked nervously into the airport but she did not see Ellie. Ellie's steps stopped. She froze. Without realizing it, she spoke aloud, just as Morgan caught up with her. "Mom?"

"Mrs. B?"

Sarah saw Ellie and Morgan. And then she saw her - Zondra Rizzo. What is she doing here? Sarah felt for her gun as she went in the doors. She saw her action register in Zondra's eyes, but Zondra did not respond in kind. Instead, she held up her hands, empty, and gave Sarah a forced smile.

Sarah kept her hand in place as she neared the group. "Hey, Ellie, I didn't know you were bringing...Company." Somehow Sarah said the last word so that the majuscule 'C' was audible.

"Sarah, she asked me not to tell you. She's with us - you know, with-with us." Ellie answered automatically, a prepared answer, while looking beyond Sarah.

"Long time, no see, Sarah," Zondra said, her voice soft but softly challenging. "Never thought we'd meet again for the first time in Bozeman, Montana."

"Mom." Ellie stated, all color gone from her face, all emotion from her voice. Frost had walked up, along with Casey and Carina. Ellie gave herself a shake, pointedly turning from Frost and pretending to focus entirely on Sarah. "Where's Chuck?"

Sarah took a breath. "Gone, Ellie. We're not sure where. I've got...people looking for him, we will start looking for him as soon as we leave here."

"Zondra!' Carina said, stepping forward, toward the brunette, her tone deliberately carefree. "It's like Mr. Peabody's WABAC machine is just vomiting up folks at random." She glanced at Morgan. "So you must be Sherman?" She gave him no chance to answer, going on quickly. "This just keeps getting weirder. I'm so glad John and I decided to come. It's a veritable CATs reunion."

"Cats?" Frost asked, trying to ignore Ellie's studied ignoring of her. "What the hell do cats have to do with anything?"

Sarah's day kept getting worse.

A/N: Happy reunions everywhere, eh? Lots to be worked out, to the extent that it can. Tune in next time as Chuck plunges deeper into Fulcrum and into Fulcrum's Intersect plans. Ellie and Mary chat, Sarah and Zondra too. Oh, and Sarah and Ellie. Good times.

Chapter Theme: Oasis, Don't Look Back in Anger