Special thanks to Malady for his help in editing and ideas.

The Letters Chapter 5

Suddenly, Grace stood up. "Let's take a little trip."

"Where?" Greg asked.

"The future," she said grinning."

"Wait a minute!" Future exclaimed.  "I'm not sure that's a good idea."

"You never think anything's a good idea."

"None of yours are!"

"Only from your point of view, Gregory."

"Fine," the old man said.  "Let's go."

"Where are we going?" Greg asked again.

"Haven't you been listening, Kid?" Future asked. "We're heading to right here, only in the future."

"Sorry," Greg told him.  "I should have said, 'When are we going?'"

As soon as he said it, he figured what the answer would be, and his speculation was proved correct.

"Now," Grace said, with a devilish gleam in her eyes.

Greg sighed and stood.  He followed into the dining room, and they stood together.  Grace told him to set his belt for nine hundred seventy-eight years into the future, and all three pressed their activation buttons.

What seemed to be instantly, the feeling of displacement disappeared, and Greg looked around.  The room hadn't changed in all that time.  Even looking through the window didn't look any different.  

Grace, however, led the way out of the house and to a vehicle waiting outside.  This was where, or rather when she had come from.

They got in the vehicle, which had no visible controls, and not even any wheels that he could see.

"1625 McDonald Boulevard," Grace told the car.

Smoothly, the vehicle seemed to lift and turn, then began accelerating.  It was a comfortable ride, but there were no windows he could see out of.  

"Can we see where we're going?" Greg asked.  

"Display," Grace said, and the air in front of them shimmered, then they were looking at a scene Greg would have expected from the front seat of an airplane. The ground had to be over a thousand feet below them and continued to drop.  

He wasn't sure how far they'd flown, but he could see definite movement below.  

They continued to accelerate and climb until he saw a vast expanse of water in front of them, then land was gone.

"Why are we going to the company?" Future asked, suddenly.

"To show it to young Greg," Grace responded. 

"Why?"

Grace shook her head. "I thought he'd probably like to know what he's dealing with."

Future shook his head.  "You always do things like this.  I really don't see that it's necessary."

"Why not?  Do you think he's in danger there?"

"You know," Greg said suddenly. "I'm in the car too."

Grace and Future laughed.  “So you are, Kid.  Sorry about that.  I forget that things like that can be considered rude,” Future added.

“Right,” Greg responded.  He noticed that the car seemed to be descending now, and was slowing down.  There was very little sensation either way, but there was still a bit of sensation saying their speed was dropping.  The water below seemed to have more detail as well.  

Very little was said for the rest of the trip as they continued to descend and slow.  Finally, Greg saw a distant island that drew closer very quickly.

At last, they were over land, and moving over a beach lined with giant heads looking out to sea.  Easter Island? Greg wondered.  What are we doing at Easter Island?

They set down on a concrete pad that was a ways inland, and then the whisper of the engine died away.  Then the doors opened and they stepped out.  Greg had grown up in the middle of the United States, and never gotten to the seashore at all.  He was transfixed by the view, and the smell was strange to him.  After looking towards the sea, he turned around, looking at what he could see of the island.  There was very little to see, except scrub brush and water.  He could see the heads looking out at the water, but there wasn’t much more.  In front of the car – plane? – was what looked like a bunker door.  Like the entrance to ‘Sarah’ – the house Sheriff Carter called home in the show, “Eureka”.  

“This is the ‘company’? Greg asked. “It looks like the entrance to a nuclear bunker.”

Grace giggled at that. “You know where we are in the future,” she said.  “This is 3023.  Very few buildings remain on the surface of the world.  Most are built underground.”

“You called this by an address on McDonald Boulevard, I think it was.  There’s no street here,” he said as he looked back and forth.  In fact, maybe ten ‘cars’ could park on this pad.  Granted, there was no need for a road, but the area looked abandoned except for the entryway rising out of the ground.  There were two cars sitting near theirs, but no more.

“City streets are more a designation of a route now.  This is on a route through the South Pacific Ocean, strangely, called McDonald Boulevard.”

They filed through the doorway into a circular room, perhaps six feet in diameter.  Greg guessed that it must be an elevator.  The door to the outside slowly closed.  He watched as the front of their car disappeared from view.  The light in the elevator seemed to be coming from the walls and ceiling.  

After a moment, he felt a gentle sensation as the floor started moving downward.  Above, he observed the ceiling rising.  Apparently, the ‘elevator’ was simply the floor.  He reached out to the wall and touched it.  Well, he touched something.  It seemed like it was just’ well, resistance!  There was no sensation of movement at all.

It seemed by the ceiling above them, that they descended nearly a thousand feet.  We must be considerably below sea level by this point, he observed.  

When they stopped, he turned and saw Future glaring at Grace.  “You’re her!” he said quietly, but with venom.

“Huh?” Greg asked.

“The car parked in her parking spot.”

“We’re all her in one way or another,” Greg said. He stopped for a moment.  “What her are you talking about?”

“She owns the company.  It takes a fifteen hundred digit, encrypted code to allow a car to park in her space.”  Future was still glaring at Grace.  His eyes hadn’t moved since Greg turned.

Greg looked at Grace.  “What does he mean, you own the company?”

She smiled gently.  “Not only did I make the belt that all of us wear, I also built the equipment that rejuvenates us.”

“There are fifteen companies spread across the globe,” Future explained, “but this is the first.  She’s the only one who can make one land where that one did.”

“There’s a flaw in your thinking,” she told Future.  “One of you could be her. The car could have responded to one of you.”

“Wait a minute,” Greg said looking back and forth between them. “How could the car respond to one of us.  You said there was no way to tell the difference, but obviously there is a way, if the car responds only to one person.”

“Another gold star!” Grace exclaimed, beaming radiantly at him.

“So you are her!” Greg said. “You have to be!”

“No,” she told him.  “I don’t have to be.  I’m very serious when I say one of you could be.”

“Don’t let her fool you, Greg.  Her car will only respond to her, and she flew it to the house.”

"If I am her, and I'm not saying I am, what difference does that make?  I would still be one of us.". Her twisted syntax confused Greg somewhat, but he was able to decipher it pretty well. He wished he'd brought some Tylenol along, though.

They had been meandering down a gleaming white corridor for a couple of minutes, and now came to a door.  It opened for them when Grace got near it.  They stepped inside the room, and while Greg looked around himself in wonder, Future shook his head.

"No!" He told Grace. "You won't do that to him."

"Wasn't this done to you?"

"What's going on?" Greg asked, his heart suddenly pounding in his chest.

The room was basically empty except for a cabinet.  Off one side was an arch with a small hall that seemed to lead nowhere.

"This is one of the genetic resequencing machines," Grace told him. "This is a rather interesting unit.  Seventeen years ago, you were an aging me and went through this very machine.  Only something went wrong.  The DNA strand broke down inside the machine.  It literally unwound, causing malfunctions." She glared at Future as she continued.  "The machine is programmed to abort if that happens. It had two choices at that point.  It could allow you to die, or reassemble you with a hard copy of your DNA.  From that, it could extrapolate what you would appear to be as a three year old.  It really can't go any further than that.  Even the processing for that is incredibly complex."

"If that's true, why am I male?"

She sighed.  "Genetically, we're the same.  Both genetically male. "Since the machine lost its DNA sequence from the physical me, it had to do a bank shift to the hard copy.  That lost the characteristics of how I had developed.  The computer saw the male chromosomes and built you from that point up.  It still had your memories, but my memories would hardly do any good in a three-year-old child."

Once more, Greg shook his head at the messed up syntax. "So where are our memories then?"

"This machine has been unused since then.  They're still inside it."

"Wait a minute.  You're genetically male?"

"Yeah.  Rather ironic, don't you think?  You're how our DNA says we're supposed to be, but you're Trans.  You want what I have."

He shook his head.  "Don't you?"

"Of course. I find it funny is all." She turned toward the arched hallway.  "Activate," she said.

A low hum of power came from all around them, and the hall lit up.

"In ya go," Grace said as she pointed what looked like a taser at Future. "Our memories do no more good in a computer than they do in a 3-year-old boy"

"What are you doing?"

"Taking my memories back."

"They're not yours," Future pointed out.

"Yes, they are.  I haven't gained them yet, but I will.  I'll be what he was supposed to be." She put a huge amount of disgust in her voice at the last.  "He just has to activate the machine.  It's waiting for him."

With that, she pulled the trigger and something happened.  Nothing physical came out of the gun but Future was suddenly on the floor convulsing as sparks seemed to jump all over his body.  

Greg smelled sizzled flesh as his eyes went wide.

"Doing worry.  He'll probably be okay." There was a big pop and the sparks and convulsing ended.  "Well, maybe," she added in surprise.

Turning to Greg she said, "it just needs your form to activate it.  You can go in willingly or not."

He sighed and stepped inside, not knowing what to expect.

The machine's sound intensified, and he saw a rainbow of colors swirling all around him.

He felt himself falling as he stood up straight, and the rainbow faded to blackness.  The black tasted like vanilla, although the smell was closer to anise.  He felt the scent of the burning Future vibrating throughout his taste buds.  He tried to stop it, but no sound would come out of his eyes.  

He inhaled sharply as the violet color suddenly tickled him, and he got a mouthful of fuzzy red light. He tried to spit it out as it smelled like aquamarine. 

Something told him that colors shouldn't feel like this, but he couldn't place why.  A moment later, he found himself lying on the floor, unable to move, and things faded to black.

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--Rosemary