Chapter Seven: Freakiness

Alarms. That was the first thing that Harper was able to recognize as he slowly came awake. Alarms, blaring incessantly all around him, drilling into his already throbbing skull like some kind of red-hot drill. He groaned and shifted slightly, realizing he was lying on top of debris that poked him sharply in the backs of his arms and legs. There was something heavy lying across his legs, too, something that ground into his shins painfully. He opened his eyes slowly, blinking at the sudden light that flooded in. Red, white, red, white... warning lights were flashing all around the room. The smell of acrid smoke hung heavy on the air, making him cough painfully.

After several long moments of lying there, he finally gathered the strength to sit up. It was a slow, painful process, but he finally managed to do it, uttering another groan that was lost under the cacophony of alarms. He glanced around the room. It was completely trashed. A massive hole was blown in the wall that had separated this lab from the main generator room; there was only a huge pile of twisted wreckage where the generator had been. Debris was strewn the entire length of the lab; some of the larger pieces had embedded themselves in the far wall. All of the windows were shattered.

His eyes fell on his body. His body, lying with arms and legs twisted at odd angles five feet from where he was. "Whoa, this is freaky," he muttered to himself. "I don't even want to know what kind of trouble I've gotten myself into now."

He felt his eyes grow wide as his body stirred, first moving one leg, then the other. It groaned, and brought one hand up to massage its singed forehead. It sat up slowly, looked around. Finally, it saw him and its eyes grew wide.

"Harper?" it asked. With his voice.

Harper felt his own eyes grow even wider. "Trance?" he said back. "Oh... crud." Unwillingly, he looked down at himself... and started screaming.

====

"What exactly is going on in there?" the Assistant Professor asked for what must have been the tenth time.

Professor Deedran waved her away from the screens he was hunched over. "I don't know!" he replied yet again. "There's so much smoke! Wait, wait! I can see something moving! Oh, they're alive!"

The large group of scientists and researchers behind him gave a collective sigh of relief.

"What are they doing?" the Assistant Professor prompted.

Deedran leaned closer to the screens, his bald brow furrowed in puzzlement. "Oh, this is odd, very odd indeed," he muttered.

"What? What is it?"

"Mr. Harper is looking very confused, which is certainly understandable, considering the circumstances," Deedran explained, looking over his shoulder at the others and nodding. They nodded back.

"Oh, yes, quite."

"Indeed."

"What's the odd part?" the Assistant Professor interrupted.

Deedran shrugged. "Trance Gemini seems to be very upset. She's screaming so loud that I think I can hear her from here!"

====

"Harper!" Harper's body exclaimed. "Shut up! You're making my head hurt even worse. I'm trying to think."

"Think?" Harper screamed back, with Trance's voice he now realized. In Trance's body! "Think? What is there to think about!? You're in my body, I'm in yours, we're both doomed! I don't even know what I've done this time, so I don't even have a clue as to how I can fix it!" He stopped screaming for a moment as a terrible thought occurred to him. "Holy freakin' cow, we're gonna be stuck like this forever!"

Trance crawled over to him on her knees, grabbed him by the collar of the outfit she had been wearing a minute ago, and shook him hard enough that he saw stars. "Get a grip on yourself, Harper!" she ground out at him. She looked very angry at the moment, and seeing that kind of expression on his own face made Harper more than a little uncomfortable. It certainly made him shut up. "We are not going to be stuck like this forever! We are not going to be, because I refuse to accept it! We got ourselves into this mess, and there has got to be a way we can get out of it. I need you to calm down and help me find that solution. Got it?"

He nodded quickly. "Uh, yeah. Totally."

She kept her gaze locked with his for a moment, as if to make sure he meant what he said, then let go of him and sat back on her knees. "Good." She sat back and stared at him for a moment, then shook her head slowly. "I thought looking at my younger self when she was still purple was weird. This is worse."

"Yeah, well, that's the understatement of the year," Harper replied. He reached up to run a hand through braids of red hair. Hair that was now his. "Weird' doesn't even begin to cover it," he added quietly.

They looked up as the door burst open and twenty or so Perseids swarmed into the room. Professor Deedran was ahead of the others.

"Oh, my! Mr. Harper, Trance Gemini, are you all right?" he exclaimed. "That was quite an explosion! There are reports of power surges from all over the complex. Everyone felt it! I'm glad to see that you're still alive!"

"Yeah, and that's about all we are, too," Harper said.

"We'll be fine," Trance added. "Eventually."

Deedran nodded in relief. "I'm glad to hear it. Mr. Harper, do you have any idea of what went wrong? I may not know as much about teseracts as I would like, but I'm fairly certain that a generator overload was not what you were trying to achieve."

"You can say that again," Harper groaned as he pulled himself to his feet, using what remained of one of the tables to support himself. "I have no idea what I did wrong."

Deedran's gaze swung from Trance – in Harper's body – to Harper. Who, Harper belatedly realized, was in Trance's body. "I beg your pardon, Trance Gemini?" the Perseid asked in a puzzled voice.

"There's one more complication to this entire incident, besides the explosion," Trance explained. The attention of every Perseid in the room was suddenly focused on her. "Somehow, Harper and I have traded bodies. I'm Trance." She pointed to her own body. "That's Harper."

Deedran glanced quickly back and forth between the two of them at least a dozen times. He pointed first at Trance, then to Harper, then back and forth several more times. "Oh, my," he muttered quietly.

"How very interesting!" exclaimed the Assistant Professor.

"Interesting!?" Harper exclaimed back. "Interesting? I'll give you interesting, you blue-chinned little –" He started after her, intent on showing her exactly how interesting he found all of this.

But Deedran cut him off, holding out his arms. "Come now, Trance Gemini – er, Mr. Harper, I mean – there's no need for violence. Please forgive her. She's known to be a little over-scientific at times, if you know what I mean." He gave several quick nods for emphasis.

Harper backed off, forcing himself to keep his fists at his sides. For a moment, he had suddenly felt very powerful, as if he would have been capable of ripping the Assistant Professor into tiny blue shreds. He had no idea where that feeling came from, but it scared him, and that stopped him more than anything Deedran had said. "Right," he muttered. "You're right. Sorry. I'll just... sorry."

"Harper," Trance muttered into his ear, so only he could hear. The sound of his own voice so close made him jump, but he listened to what she had to say. "Keep yourself under control. Whatever you do, don't lose your temper."

"What do you mean?" he asked, turning to look at her.

The look she returned made him swallow the question.

"Right. Okay. I will, don't worry. I'm under control now. Everything's cool."

"So what are you going to do?" Professor Deedran was asking, oblivious to the fact that they had been whispering to each other. "This is just a hypothetical guess, but I'm assuming that neither of you wants to stay trapped in each other's bodies indefinitely."

"That would be a very clever assumption," Trance replied with more than a hint of sarcasm in her voice. "In situations like this, the most correct solution is usually the simplest one. We need to figure out what we did wrong, duplicate it, and try the experiment again. Hopefully, Harper and I will be returned to our own bodies."

"Yeah, but the mistake could be anything," Harper replied. "Crossed wires somewhere, an impurity in the photonic resonator, a problem with the power generator... It could take us months to figure out exactly what we did wrong – what I did wrong – and we might not survive another bang like the one we just went through."

"That's a risk we're going to have to take," Trance replied calmly. "Professor, are you still interested in helping us with this experiment?"

Deedran nodded readily. "Oh, yes, of course! I am most eager to assist you."

"Good. I suggest you start by getting your team to start looking for the components of Harper's teseract generator. They're probably scattered all across this room. Once we have them, we can see if we can find our mistake. Right now I..." She trailed off as she took one hand from the back of her neck; her palm was red with blood. "I think I need to go to medical," she finished with an odd expression on her face.

"I'll come with you," Harper said as he started out the door after her. The two left the room and its Perseid occupants behind and made their way down the long corridor beyond. "Are you gonna be all right?"

"I think so," she replied. "I don't think it's serious, it's just that... I've never had to go to medical before to treat wounds of my own."

Harper thought about that for a moment, and then realized that, besides his headache, there was nothing wrong with him. Trance's body had somehow escaped serious harm, while Trance herself – in Harper's body – was looking a little worse for the wear.

"Look, uh..." he began, "I'm really sorry Trance. I should have listened to you. I should never have undertaken this experiment. All you had to do was tell me that you knew for sure something like this would happen, and I would have listened."

Trance stopped and looked over at him. "I didn't know for sure," she said finally. "And I know how much this experiment meant to you. Besides, even if I had known, I still would have come with you, and I might even have let you go through with it anyway."

He looked confused. "What? Why?"

She grinned, and Harper noticed how brilliant a smile he had. "Who knows? We might learn something useful from this in the end." She turned away from him and continued down the hall.

Harper followed, wondering what she meant by that. Knowing Trance, whatever she meant, she was probably right.