All characters belong to their respective creators / film companies / etc. and are used without permission. This story may only be distributed on a non-profit-making basis.
Work in Progress. If you like this story, check out my other stories on the Fanfiction Net, Twisting the Hellmouth, and Fonts of Wisdom websites.
by Marcus L. Rowland
IV
Willow checked her watch as she left her psych class and adjusted her pace to ensure that she would "accidentally" meet Tara as she came out of a nearby lecture hall. Both women knew that their meetings were far from accidental, neither was quite ready to admit it yet.
Tara came out, noticed Willow, and smiled at her. "Good start" thought Willow, and smiled back. They walked side by side in silence, then simultaneously said "hi!" and laughed.
"How's it going?" asked Willow.
"Good," said Tara. "Lots of useful study. And..."
"I... slipped off the wagon a little today," interrupted Willow, and surprised herself by starting to cry.
"What happened, baby?" asked Tara, steering her to a seat in the corridor.
"Two guys turned up at Buffy's place, one of them tried some sort of mojo on me. And I used a magical defence without even thinking about it."
"If it was just a defence... did you hurt anyone?"
"No... it was just to block their spell, if that's what it was."
"That's good... you didn't try to spell them back, just defended yourself. That's restraint, it's good."
"But I used magic."
"Maybe there wasn't an alternative. Who were they anyway?"
"Who were who?" said Willow, wiping her eyes.
"The guys who used magic on you?"
"I don't know. It was weird. They turned up on the doorstep pretending they were DEA agents, then one of them showed me an NYPD badge. When I called them on it they tried to mojo me, I think it was some sort of mind control to make me think they had DEA identification. Then when Buffy came downstairs they practically wet themselves and went off in a hurry. They knew who she was, knew she's the Slayer, but seemed to be surprised to see her there."
"It must have been you they wanted, not Buffy, How did they find you? If they have an address for you I'd think it'd be your house, or the college."
"The only thing I can think of is through the computer here, or through the post office. I'm having my mail forwarded to Buffy's house, same as you did when you lived there."
"Or maybe the nerd squad told them, could it be something they set up, one of their lame plans? Or maybe the Initiative?"
"It doesn't feel qute right somehow. Anyway, I tried to trace their licence plates and got nothing, they'd never been issued. Same for the NYPD badge. Except that the number was in a long string of consecutive badge numbers that were issued to newly-recruited officers ten years ago. It's like this one record had been deleted."
"Weird. Any way to trace it?"
"I doubt it. One thing... the badges were issued to recruits in alphabetical order, the missing record is between Jacobs and Jensen. And I've just remembered that the other guy called the guy with the badge 'Jay'!"
"Could be his name, I guess. Or maybe an initial. Did the other guy have a name?"
"Didn't use one."
"What did they look like anyway?" asked Tara, glancing down the hall.
"One white guy in his forties or fifties, a black guy in his twenties or early thirties. Both wearing black suits. Why?"
"Because they're here and I think they're looking for you again."
Dawn was just home from school that afternoon when the doorbell rang. Sighing as only a teenager can, she left the sandwich she was preparing and went to the door and opened it cautiously. Standing there was a woman she'd never seen before, wearing a bright summer dress and sandals. "Hi, Dawnie, is Willow in?"
"Err... hi, do I know you?"
The stranger walked in without an invitation, and said "Of course you do, Dawnie, I'm Buffy."
"I don't think so. Unless Buffy suddenly grew a couple of inches and changed her voice and her hair and her body. Oh god, this isn't one of those mind transfer things is it?"
"Don't be silly. Now, where is Willow, I need to find her. She can help me find Warren and slay him."
"You're talking kind of odd.. um.. Buffy. Are you sure you're okay?"
"Am I okay? Yes, all systems are fully operational, fuel cells are fully charged, memory and processor parity checks nominal."
"You're a robot! Like the Buffybot!"
"That's a little rude, isn't it?"
"Just trying to understand what's going on here. Are you sure you're Buffy?"
"Yes, I am Buffy April Summers."
"April? Weird. Okay, who built you?"
"Warren, of course. Warren is my boyfriend. I need to find him. Do you know where Warren is?"
"No. Buffy, umm.. the other Buffy that is, and Willow have been looking for him and his friends."
"I need to see Willow, she'll know what to do. Do you know where Willow is?"
"In class, I guess," said Dawn, and started to say "I can call her if you...", but the stranger was walking off down the path. "Damn," said Dawn, and went to call Willow's cellphone.
"Okay," said Warren, as the van cruised the campus roads, "let's keep a nice low profile here. We don't want Willow to spot us, if that's who they're after."
"Who?" asked Jonathan.
"What?"
"Who's after Willow?"
Warren slapped him again, and said "Andrew, show him the tapes so he knows who we're after. And this time make sure he remembers seeing them."
"Okay," said Andrew. "Hey, I'm getting a strong signal to the left now, I think they're somewhere in the nearest block. According to the map that's one of the tutorial buildings."
"Sounds plausible... hey, there's their car. Parked in one of the Official Business bays. There's visitor's parking just beyond it, I'm taking us in."
"Stealth mode, Warren. Activate cloaking devices."
"I'm parking a van, you moron, not flying the Enterprise through a Borg formation."
"That'd be so cool though..."
"Yeah, wonderful," said Warren sourly. "Tap into the campus security cameras and find them, I'm gonna take a look at their car and see if there's any technology we can assimilate."
"Miss Rosenberg, could you spare a few moments?" asked Jay.
"I guess."
"Privately, please."
"I think I'd like my friend to hear whatever you have to say."
"It's a security matter, miss Rosenberg."
"Then I definitely want a witness present."
"Can you vouch for your friend's discretion," asked Kay.
"Oh yeah."
"Absolutely," said Tara. "My lips are sealed. Unless you're going to ask Willow to do something illegal, of course."
"Let me simplify this," said Willow. "You've already shown me that you don't want to talk in front of the Slayer, which probably means you want something she won't approve of, and if she wouldn't I probably won't either. That means that I don't want trust you, and I'm not going to talk to you without a witness present."
"Very well," said Kay, "brief them as we discussed."
"Are you sure?" asked Jay.
"We have no alternative."
"Okay... what do you know about the nature of time, Miss Rosenberg?"
"Some physics, especially quantum mechanics, and I'm reasonably familiar with Hawking's work."
Jay nodded, trying not to show his alarm. "Then you'll already know some of the background. We have evidence that a time machine will be invented within the next twenty to thirty years, and that it will be used to change history. One of these attempts is targeted at someone called Rosenberg in Sunnydale, California. We think that it may be you, or possibly your parents or some other relative."
"So someone wants to.. what, kill me?"
"We honestly don't know," said Kay. "They may want to push you into doing something, or prevent you from doing something, without trying to kill you. And of course it may be another member of your family."
"Wait a minute," said Tara, "that can't possibly be right."
"No way," said Willow, "it's the whole shrimp thing again."
"Shrimp?" asked Kay.
"Say you want a world without shrimp," said Tara, "and you've got magic to make it real. The world without shrimp appears, but that doesn't mean that the world that has got shrimp disappears. The timeline bifurcates."
"That's what happens if you try to change reality," said Willow, "but every decision, every change in the nature of reality already exists, if it's remotely possible. Decisions go every possible way. You have the worlds with and without shrimp, worlds where Buffy didn't come to Sunnydale along with the ones where she did, the one where the Mayor ascended, and so on. All of them exist simultaneously anyway, if there's any way that things can go more than one way, with endless variations. The whole Terminator thing is a fallacy. You don't need to change the past, you just need to get to the right present."
"That's a good theory..." began Kay.
"It's not just theory," interrupted Willow. "I've met the me from another timeline, okay she was a skanky vampire but it was real enough. The point is, there's no way you could build a time machine without knowing that you don't really need one, and that even if you had one you can't change your original world."
"You... vampire?" said Jay.
"Come on, guys, if you know that Buffy is the Slayer, you know that this is the Hellmouth. Weird things happen here. Now, if you decide to tell me the truth I'd be kinda interested, I guess, cos' if you have to use all these lies the truth must be a doozey. If you want to know if I can be trusted take a look at my record, it'll show you some of the secrets I'm already keeping. I'm sure that whatever the heck agency you come from knows all about me. Go look at it and get back to me. Only we're going to do this with witnesses, people I trust like Tara or Buffy, and without you using that flashy thing on me or my friends. I think we're done here."
Willow's mobile began to buzz, and she said "Excuse me a second" and answered. "Dawn... what's the matter?... said she was Buffy... Buffy April Summers?... Yeah, I kinda know what it is... Let me finish here, I'll get back to you."
She smiled at Jay and Kay insincerely, and said "We're done. There's an emergency, I have to go. Tara, I think I'm gonna need your help. Do you have time?"
"Sure."
"Someone's coming looking for me, and I think she'll be trying our old dorm. We need to get over there and wait for her. Later, guys."
"Thank you for your time," said Kay, as the women left. "Nice try there, Ace, but I think that girl's going to be a hard sell. I have a feeling we're going to have to come clean with her."
"We'll have to get authorisation," said Jay, "you know what Zed is like about breaking security if it isn't an emergency, and it sounds like we're going to have to let the Slayer in on it."
"Wonderful."
Warren pried and prodded at the trunk of the black Ford, but was getting nowhere. A tiny portion of the car's robotic brain monitored his progress, and was ready to use countermeasures if he seemed to be getting anywhere, most of its attention was devoted to monitoring CNN and a dozen other Terrestrial and alien channels, while playing five chess games on the Internet.
"They're talking to Willow and her girlfriend," called Andrew from the van. "Can't get any audio."
"Let me know if they finish," said Warren, going back to the van for a small thermite charge, "I'm still working on the car."
Warren looked around to make sure that nobody was paying attention, put the charge on the lock, held by a strong magnet, and lit the fuse. The car analysed the threat, rated it as "level 2: possible damage to paint," and briefly applied an intense magnetic field to repel it. It exploded in mid-air, showering a visitor's Porsche with burning thermite. Soon the Porsche was merrily ablaze.
Warren stared for a few seconds, then jumped back into the van and drove away.
"Do you really think that time works that way?" asked Tara, as she and Willow walked to Stevenson Hall.
"Kinda, but who knows for sure? They sure as heck didn't, which means they were lying about the whole thing. Can't worry about that with this robot thing."
"Are you sure she's coming here?" asked Tara as they arrived.
"I'm not sure... from what Dawnie said it's April but running the Buffybot software, don't know how that's possible. I had her on standby in my house as a kind of burglar alarm, something must have made her activate. I had backups for both robots on CD-ROM, maybe something went wrong and she reprogrammed herself. But I wouldn't have thought she could. Anyway, if Dawn's right she'll know where our old room is and come looking for me."
"I didn't know April was still around." They went into the lobby and found comfortable seats.
"Buffy wanted to bury her, but Joyce died before we got round to it, and I ended up taking her home to study the programs. After Buffy died I was going to cannibalise her to fix the Buffybot but it turned out the parts weren't interchangeable, I think Warren used a different contractor."
"So it was all for scientific study?"
"Well yeah, of course it was, doofus."
"And having a hot robot babe in your closet was nothing to do with it?"
"Come on, Tara, that's Warren, not me. Besides, there's only one babe I want..."
"Umm... can you hear sirens?"
"Yeah, must be a fire somewhere."
Warren parked the van in another visitor's space, not far from Stevenson Hall, and set Andrew and Jonathan to work tapping back into the security camera system. He found a pair of binoculars and climbed out to look back across the campus towards the burning car. Behind him a half-forgotten voice said "There you are!".
A few minutes later Andrew said "Warren, Willow and Tara are in the lobby of Stevenson Hall... Warren... Warren...?"
That evening Buffy came home to find Willow, Tara, and Dawn waiting for her.
"...so we hung around Stevenson Hall for a while but there was no sign of her, so we stopped by my house to check that she was really gone, then came back here."
"April's dangerous," said Buffy, "she was at least as strong as the Buffybot, if not quite as fast, and hurt Warren's girlfriend. And of course there was that whole thing with throwing Spike through the window."
"What exactly was it she said she was going to do?" Willow asked Dawn.
"For the third time, she said she wanted to find Warren and slay him."
"'Find Warren' was part of her original core program, but I thought I'd erased it. Slaying has to come from the Buffybot program. I just don't see how that's possible, she could maybe load one backup, but she'd go to standby mode as soon as she loaded it so she couldn't load the second one. Someone must have tampered with her."
"Has to be the Nerd squad," said Buffy.
"Or those strange guys from this morning. Did I mention they came to the college? We were talking to them just before we heard from Dawn."
"Didy'a find out what they wanted?"
"Not really, they tried a really lame story but we could both tell there was something off about them."
The doorbell rang, and Buffy went to answer it. "Speak of the devil..."
"Is Miss Rosenberg in?" asked Kay.
"Yes."
"Can we come in?"
"Can you?"
Buffy stood back, but didn't ask them in. After a few seconds they came inside. Buffy showed them to the lounge.
"Now, do you guys want to explain yourselves properly this time?"
"In front of all of you?" asked Kay.
"All of us," said Willow. "Take it or leave it."
"This really must remain secret. Can you all agree to that, at least."
"Okay." "Yes." "I guess so." "Yeah, like I'd tell tales in school."
"Was that a yes or a no?" Kay asked Dawn.
"Yeah, I guess."
"Right. We're agents for a secret organisation that's responsible for monitoring..."
The doorbell interrupted him, and Buffy said "Give me a moment" and went to answer it. Spike was at the door, and came in saying "Just went out for some fags, came back to find that bugger Warren and his sex-bot screwing in my... Bloody hell, it's sodding Kay."
Kay stood, warily, and reached for his Noisy Cricket. "Spike..."
To Be Continued
