Well there's hours of time

On the telephone line

To talk about things to come

Sweet dreams and flying machines

In pieces on the ground

"Fire and Rain"

James Taylor

May 18, 2036

Burbank, California

Frantically, Sarah scanned in the hallway. The girls' bedroom door was open, neither one still inside any longer. It was still early, she thought, so they were probably downstairs having breakfast. Sarah wasn't sure of their plans for the day, but she needed to create, potentially fabricate, a situation where she could get them out of the house.

The terror caught up with her and she paused at the top of the stairs, placing her hand over her chest and feeling her heart hammering beneath. She had hundreds of questions, but nothing she could do now but what her husband had asked her to do. How was he so sure? Sarah herself had been incapacitated both times most of that information about the identity version of the Intersect had been discussed. She did know, however, vaguely, that the transition from Hartley to Volkoff, the one that had been irreversible, the one Chuck's father had spent the rest of his life trying to fix, had happened gradually. Long enough for his wife to move to Moscow with him, have his child, and not know until it was too late that her husband had changed into someone else.

Fifteen years, though? How could that be? She tried reasoning with herself as she started moving down the stairs, resisting the urge to run, though Chuck had been more urgent. Chuck had downloaded a version of the Intersect when he was nine years old, and never knew until he was 29. She realized with growing despair that it was possible the timeframe her son needed to search was wider. It made the task that much more daunting. And, he was already leaving on a mission for some other purpose as well.

Stephen, Casey, Corrine, Mary, Ellie…the list of people Sarah needed to call aligned in her head. First things first, she told herself. Get Ally and Abby out of the house. Then she could call Casey and tell him he needed to help her get Chuck to a safe location. Then, tell her son what Chuck had discovered, or thought he had discovered, to aid in his search. Both Corrine and Mary had extensive knowledge about how the program had worked in the past.

At the bottom of the stairs, Sarah scanned, seeing both girls in the living room, doing yoga, something they frequently did first thing in the morning. Sarah ran into the laundry room and pulled her casual clothes for the day out of the dryer. She changed quickly right in front of the machine, needing to move quickly and not wanting to explain her haste to her daughters. As she was changing, she saw her cell phone, and the seven missed calls from Corrine Winterbottom since early this morning. That couldn't be a coincidence, Sarah thought.

She scanned quickly to make sure the girls were still occupied in the other room, then clicked the phone to call Corrine back.

"Sarah, thank god you answered, I've been calling all morning!" Corrine gushed into the phone.

"Corrine–" Sarah started, but Corrine just kept talking.

"Sarah, Morgan called. Explained about Chuck. I wish we had known earlier," she said gravely.

"We were trying to not worry anyone," she said in a hurry, anxious that the call was distracting her from what she needed to do. "We–"

"Sarah, you don't understand," she interrupted.

"Chuck…" she said, her breath faltering. "Chuck…said it's an identity Intersect. I don't know how he was sure," she added, keeping her voice low so no one overheard.

"It's exactly what happened to Hartley. It just happened more quickly with him, it seems. If anyone's brain was more resistant, I would bet it was Charles'. Stephen knew that, long ago," Corrine said, a fatalistic flatness in her tone.

"We have to go. Leave the house. Chuck is locked in the upstairs bedroom, but…" Sarah added desperately.

"Good lord, Sarah, why? What in the world happened?" she asked.

"I'll tell you soon. I have to get the girls out of here without calling attention to the situation," she said.

"Tell them I need help. That I threw my back out and Hartley can't help. You're closer to us than anyone else. I'll…play the part, I promise," Corrine offered.

"Both of them?" Sarah asked.

"It's really, really bad," Corrine stressed, an urgency now in her tone.

"Ok," Sarah agreed. "Thank you," she finished, hanging up.

Sarah rushed into the living room where both girls were sitting cross-legged on the floor, each on their own yoga mat. "Girls, I just got off the phone with your Aunt Corrine. She's having a back spasm, a very bad one. Hartley needs help lifting her. We're close and we're available, since Aunt Vivian's on her way to work."

Both girls were on their feet without another word. "Sure, Mom," Ally said first. "Is she ok?"

"It's really bad, that's all I know. Hartley's too frail to get her up, and she can't move. The sooner the better," Sarah added, glancing quickly up the stairs, hoping her daughters didn't notice.

They didn't even change out of their exercise clothes. Ally grabbed the keys and Ally followed her out the door. Sarah waited anxiously, hearing the car start and then pull away. Once it was clear, she grabbed her own keys and fled the house as well.

She started calling the moment she was behind the wheel.

Was Stephen already in the air? She remembered the text from him. GMT 2 meant wherever he was going was ten hours ahead of them. She called anyway.

"Mom?" he asked quickly when he answered.

"Where are you?" she asked in a clipped voice.

"At the airport waiting for the transport. We leave in about an hour. Mom, what's wrong?" he asked, cutting through the preamble.

"Your father," she gulped, swallowing the high-pitched sob that surprised her. "Your father had another…episode…like what I described to you before. He thinks that what Aunt Ellie saw was the evidence of an identity Intersect, like the one your grandfather created a long time ago, the one that–"

"Turned Hartley into Alexei Volkoff," Stephen finished for her. "How is that possible?"

"I don't know. But it gives you a place to start, doesn't it?" Sarah asked. "I'm going to call Casey…and Corrine…and Aunt Ellie. Just, please, do whatever you can, Stephen," she said.

"Don't worry, Mom. I'll figure this out," he assured her.

"Please be careful. I didn't want to distract you with this, if you have a mission, but–"

"It's Dad," Stephen interrupted her. Sarah knew that tone. It was the same tone she had heard Chuck use all the time she had known him. It's Casey. It's Morgan. It's my family.

"I love you, Sweetheart," she whispered into the phone.

May 18, 2036

Elevation 30,000 ft, over the Atlantic Ocean

Stephen had been waiting for Delson to fall asleep, as he usually did on long plane rides. Now they could hear their partner lightly snoring in the back of the cabin. Stephen thought it was safe to start.

"Zette, my mom called right before we got on the plane. I was waiting until Del fell asleep," he told her, leaning close to her to keep his voice low.

"What?" she asked him, scanning his face.

"My father thinks for some reason what's been happening to him, what my Aunt is trying to figure out how to remove is…a primitive version of the Intersect…that can…alter his personality. Change him into someone else," he explained. She knew about his Intersect, and Chuck's Intersect, but nothing of Project X or anything that had been resolved (or so he thought) before he was born. It was time to let her know all of it.

"My grandfather created the Intersect as an identity, for an operative to use when they were going undercover. He built it using my Aunt Ellie's brain as a template. She, and my father, and me for that matter, have a genetic mutation that allows connections in the brain at an exponentially higher rate than people without that gene. My grandparents didn't know it at the time, but a double agent was working with them, and the head of the CIA at the time. The program my grandfather created was switched for a defective version. It turned Hartley Winterbottom into Alexei Volkoff." He paused to let that sink in. Zette knew who Alexei Volkoff had been, but the rest of the affair was still classified at a security level above hers.

"The reason why my dad and my Aunt Ellie were alone most of their childhoods was because my grandmother and my grandfather spent their lives trying to undo what had happened to Hartley. The only reason Hartley did it was because he needed to go undercover to extract Corrine, who was on a mission in Russia. They thought everything was fine. Until the Volkoff personality took over. It took a long time. They were in Russia with a baby, my Aunt Vivian, before they realized what had happened. It was that subtle. He ended up replacing the arms dealer they were sent to take down. He sent Vivian away and terrorized Corrine. She had to shoot him to get away, and then she spent the next 20 years in Romania with an arms dealer who knew Volkoff was a CIA implant, and was trying to prevent the man from obtaining the technology. My grandfather sent her the program that was supposed to remove it, but she never got the chance.

"My dad and his team took them down in 2012, all of them. Every last bit of technology left was supposed to have been destroyed, mostly to protect my dad's secret, that he still had the Intersect. Your dad knew my grandfather, by reputation, and he knew all about plans to build another Intersect. When your mom brought you to America, after she thought your dad was killed," he said, reminding her of the time frame.

She sat quietly for a long time, letting this new knowledge take hold in her mind. "So…the original program was defective?" she asked.

"The program Hartley uploaded was defective, because the double agent altered it. It drove my grandparents underground, which is exactly what they wanted. My grandfather died thinking he had caused all of that, when it wasn't true. He was intentionally sabotaged," Stephen told her.

"There was no other known copy of the original? How was it uploaded?" she asked.

"It was 1980," Stephen told her. "Probably a very early model of computer."

Cozette had worked for Stephen's father for almost four years. She wasn't a computer engineer or computer programmer, but she knew enough to question. "The kind of processing power needed for that, back then, would have been extremely hard to procure. Like, a room full of processors, floor to ceiling. Now we have that in the palm of our hand, but back then…"

Stephen was nodding, following her train of thought. "I know while my Aunt Corrine was in the U.S.S.R., she continued to transfer the file she had from my grandfather to newer disks when the old ones became obsolete. She was there for eight years before she ran to Romania."

"Right," she replied quickly, and continued talking rapidly. "But that program, if you had it available to you right now, compared to the processing power in your laptop, would be a small file, right? A miniscule amount of memory would be needed. By the time your dad got that compressed data stream for the first time in 2007, it took a football field sized room to compress the data. If your grandfather could use a Commodore 64 in 1980, whatever file that was could be hidden literally anywhere now. In a phone, on a disk, a flash drive… anywhere."

She was right, of course. "That's going to be impossible to detect, then," he muttered, defeated.

"You thought the size would stand out and make it easier to find. Which would have been true if you were hacking into the CIA. But you can build a search with an algorithm, and let it run in the background. If that file is anywhere in the mainframe, classified or not, you can find it. If it's classified above your grade, you can call General Casey," she explained.

"That's brilliant, Babe," he said, his eyes alive.

"Stephen, how did your father know that was what was wrong?" she asked nervously.

Stephen was already working, his fingers flying across the keyboard on the laptop set in front of him. "I think he scared the hell out of my mother. Again," he muttered.

"Look, Babe, I don't want to make this worse…but…is your family safe…if that's…happening to him?" she asked again, spacing out the words as she thought.

Stephen couldn't think of that, not in the same breath as being so worried about his father. He couldn't comprehend a change in his father that could make him into something other than his father. "My mother was calling General Casey. I don't know what he's going to do, but he won't let anything happen to anyone in my family, including my father."

Cozette could rationally accept that answer, but internally was extremely worried about just what it would entail if the situation worsened before they figured it out.

May 18, 2036

Westside Medical Center, Los Angeles, California

"There's no way for me to tell, Sarah, I'm sorry," Ellie apologized once again, as they both felt the frustration of the current situation. "The government removed what was left of Hartley's Intersect, the one Decker suppressed. Even if I did an MRI on Hartley, nothing will show now."

"So what happens then? Ellie, Chuck sent me and the girls out of the house because he said we weren't safe with him!" Sarah said, gesticulating with her hands as she spoke. She had been alternating between that and gripping her entire body as if she were hugging herself.

"I know you're worried, Sarah. I'm worried, too. But Casey's on his way to get him. We have to let Stephen do his job, you know, figure out where the file was. If he can do that, I can start trying to recreate the program that could remove it. I don't have enough knowledge or skill set to build it from scratch, the way my father did. It's times like these, I just wish he were here so I could talk to him," Ellie said, finishing on a wistful note.

Sarah sat forward suddenly. "Wait, Ellie. What if you could? Talk to your father?" Sarah asked.

Ellie gasped out loud. "Oh my god, Sarah, that's right. The file from the key…the one in Chuck's head. It could work. As long as it's still there, and the new program hasn't overwritten it. When was the last time he interacted with my father's engrams?" she asked.

Sarah blushed and averted her eyes. "He doesn't always tell me when that happens, Ellie. It's something private."

"When was the last time that you know of?" Ellie asked again.

Sarah frowned deeply. Now that she was searching her memory, it seemed alarming, how long it had been since he had spoken of it. "I don't…I don't know, Ellie, but…last summer, that I am 100 percent sure about."

"We're going to have to hope against hope," Ellie told her.

Sarah's phone ringing made her jump. It was Casey. Her heart was pounding when she answered, clicking it onto the speaker for Ellie's sake. "Casey?" she asked right away.

"Sarah," Casey said, sounding breathless, like he had run up a flight of stairs. "Chuck's not here. His car is gone."