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

The Letters Chapter 6

Greg slowly regained consciousness and found himself lying on the floor, facedown. He got his arms in front of him and pushed.

His center of gravity felt off, but that wasn't totally unexpected.

As the headache from the dizzying sensations wore off, he found his mind was full of a massive bank of memories. As he sifted through them, he found that he remembered being the Grace that had just taken… taken what? He didn't know what had been taken. Granted, seventeen years of memories were now in her mind that hadn’t been previously. But those… he looked around for Grace. She was nowhere in sight.

Those memories would be a problem for Grace. Greg had them too, but he also had seventeen years of experience being Greg that tempered his own perspective.

He looked down at himself. Herself. She was definitely Grace now… again. Stop thinking like that. You'll just get another headache.

She looked toward the door and saw Future still lying there. She hurried over. As she knelt to check his pulse, she found that he was alive. She pulled him into the machine, and spoke some rapid-fire commands.

She heard the machine start as she moved to the cabinets. Opening them, she found the clothes she had left here 17 years ago and put them on. A few minutes later, the machine clicked off, and she heard a groan.

Moving to the opening, she saw Future getting to his feet. He had two again!

"I would have preferred not going into that damned thing again," he grumbled, although his voice was a considerably nicer sound than the raspy, old man voice he had just a few minutes before.

"Would you have preferred to come out female?" I asked, ignoring his curmudgeoness.

"I'm fine being male," he said. "I guess it's one more sign that you and I aren't of the same line." He appeared at least fifty years younger.

"One more? So you do know we're not the same?"

"I wasn't sure. Some of our people don't have this little adventure. One version of Grace is nice and doesn't shoot me." He sighed. "It's all so damned confusing."

"So you had this 'adventure?'"

He nodded. "Except my Future wasn't shot, and I came out of the machine still a man."

They started making their way back to the elevator.

"I'll tell you what," Future said. "Just for my own mental clarity, I'm gonna call you Gracie, and I sure hope you're nicer than your other self."

Gracie stopped walking and looked at Future. "I know what I remember, but this is gonna take a bit to process.

Future nodded. “I can imagine.”

They got to the elevator, and Gracie had an idea. “Let’s wait a few moments in here,” she said, indicating a room off the corridor. She touched the door controls, and a light flashed green, and then it opened. It closed, and a few minutes later, they heard footsteps in the hall. Gracie put her finger over her mouth, signaling that they needed to be quiet. Future nodded in agreement.

They heard the room controls being touched, and then a hand hitting the door. There was a curse, and then they heard quick footsteps down the hall.

Once the footsteps faded, they cautiously opened the door and peeked out. Grace was nowhere in sight, so they hurried to the elevator. Once the lift started up, Gracie breathed a sigh of relief. She turned to Future and said, “You couldn’t have come to this facility on your ‘adventure.’”

He cocked his head at her. “What do you mean?”

She held up a stunner and pointed it at him. “You indicated different versions of me in different ‘adventures.’ They couldn’t have controlled the equipment here.”

“You really do have your memories back, don’t you? You’re right. My adventure was at the Winnipeg facility.”

She nodded. “We’ve got to put a stop to this madness, you realize,” she said as she slipped the stunner back into her waistband.

The elevator reached the surface, and they stepped out into the sunshine. By her watch, it had been almost 24 hours since they arrived. She stepped back into the elevator and told him, “Stay there. I’ll only be a moment.”

She touched a control on her belt and was gone. Future had an idea what was happening, and he glanced at his own watch. Sure enough, in half an hour, she popped into being inside the elevator. “Did you do the facility as well?”

She nodded smugly. “It’s coded only to respond to me.”

He started to ask how she managed that, as Grace was simply a younger her.

“I trust you, Gregory,” she told him. “But only so far. I can’t tell you that.”

He nodded. “I can understand that.”

She touched the door controls, and they got into the car. A moment later, they were flying.

“She’s locked down there?” Gregory asked.

“She can’t call the elevator down, and even if she could, it won’t respond to her.” She sighed. “I remember being in her situation, and how frustrating it was.”

“That’s got to be incredibly strange for her. She has to remember what’s going to happen to her,” Gregory commented.

“She does. It’s horrible for her too. She’s living in a constant state of deja vu. It’s driving her mad. That’s why, when she can enter the machine, even though she knows she’ll become male, she’ll be lucid enough to it will be better than what she’s going through.”

As she spoke, the car began to drop, and before long, they were landing. They exited the car and looked around. There was no visible city, but there were the occasional car or drone overhead.

At the advent of underground buildings, other changes came with it, not the least of which was the technology that allowed excavation to be done almost entirely free. The technology was what developed into the time belt, although she had only ever made one belt. It’s very nature had allowed for the multiple belts which now existed and each one controlled only by a version of Grace.

Grace had designed the original technology to move things from place to place via wormholes. If used correctly, metal alloys could be made almost for free as well. The only charge was the device itself, of which she had only made one.

It was only the size of a large tablet and, in fact, utilized a tablet interface. The energy it controlled was immense, however. The matter removed from the excavation was sent through a wormhole into the surrounding walls, thereby increasing density immeasurably. The process rearranged molecules so the excavation walls became metal alloys that would hold up through level ten earthquakes.

With the right placement of particles, the excavator could make entire machines from the material. Building materials no longer needed to be made or cut down, and the power to run everything in the ‘buildings’ came from the same source as the excavator’s.

Almost immediately, Grace had realized that by trading off physical location with temporal location, she could move something through time, so she designed and built her time belt, something that was known to be made eventually.

Grace tied both devices to her DNA, so only she was able to utilize them. Initially, she to prevent experiments with transporting people and safely control the energies harnessed by her devices. As she incorporated the machines powered by the same source, however, things had to be done differently. Housings for inner workings were designed with no way to open them. No user-serviceable parts became a common phrase.

Grace made the excavator out of the goodness of her heart. She hoped it would remove the use for destroying the beauty of the planet and rid the world of homelessness. It did succeed in creating a utopia, but there was a dark secret. One that Grace discovered after a long while, and it completely changed her outlook and mental stability.

“What are we doing here?” asked Gregory as they entered the elevator shaft of the facility.

They started down through a very long shaft before Gracie said anything.

“There is a myth that the different facilities are different companies. That’s to dispel the idea of a monopoly.” She sighed. “The fact is, I am of the original line of Gracie. With so many different versions, it’s hard to know who I can trust.”

“Why is that?” Gregory asked.

She gave him a look that was so full of sadness that he felt like a maw would open up below him and swallow the world. “I made a discovery many years ago that changed how I viewed all of this,” she said, gesturing around herself.

Before he could ask any questions about her discovery, another Grace exited the bunker door and walked up to the car. She looked exactly like Gracie, and it was soon apparent that the two were, in fact, the same person.

Gracie moved to the bunker door and walked in. She beckoned to Gregory, and he joined her. The Gracie that had exited the bunker door got in the car, and it launched as the bunker doors closed. Gregory wondered where it was going, but he watched as Gracie opened a panel at the bottom of the elevator shaft and tapped a few buttons. There was now no way the elevator would raise unless it was her that told it to. She made her way to the room that contained the mainframe for the facility. She logged directly into the machine and altered the access to respond to her alone, then overwrote the operating system’s backups so that even a fresh installation would result in the same restrictions.

She gave one more command to the system, and power went out. A moment later, the power came back on, and the computer rebooted.

She and Gregory exited the room to find a copy of Grace running down the corridor. The other Grace skidded to a stop when she saw them and seemed to be uncertain.

“What did you do?” the copy asked.

“This facility is now under my direct control. No one can issue a command here except me.” Gracie folded her arms as if to dare the copy to defy her.

“Why?”

“It’s time we stop taking advantage of the people around this world.”

“Oh, really? Is that your only reason? What about the drain?”

Gracie’s face went white as Gregory looked on.

“The drain is a horrible thing. We need to stop it as well.” Her voice was shaky as she spoke.

“The drain?” Gregory asked.

Wordlessly, she nodded. “The belt and the machinery. Every house that I’ve built for someone pulls energy from a single star. Every piece of machinery.” She looked like she was about to cry. “It’s in a different galaxy, so there’s no real effects on us. What I didn’t count on was an inhabited planet in that star system.”

She took a deep, shuddering breath. “It takes almost no power to create a wormhole of any kind. After all, it’s a connection between two points that is there anyway. I just have to transmit through it. A single wormhole isn’t much, but I found that if I open many to places in that star, I can bring plasma through to power things. The excavators, batteries for homes and businesses. The belts.”

“You’re bringing plasma from a star to our world to power everything here?”

“Yes.”

“Won’t that affect the mass of our planet?” Gregory was aghast.

“I send it back once it’s burned out.”

“So, in effect, we’re accelerating the burning out of someone else’s star?”

“No. We’re not accelerating it, but the power reaching those people is less.”

“How much less?”

She shook her head. “Not a lot, but several people have expressed the desire to utilize my free energy to power ships and colonize our galaxy.” She took another deep breath. “The power to accelerate a starship to high speeds – a massive ship, would be considerable. Several massive ships would be a massive drain on the star.”

Gregory thought for a bit. “What if those people realize what we’re doing? They probably won’t take a shine to it.” He paused a moment. “No pun intended.”

“I wouldn’t think they will. I’m sure they’ll notice it eventually. I’ve seen their world. They seem to have a pretty good scientific understanding.”

“Will they retaliate?”

She shrugged. “I really don’t know. I can hear them in my observations-- they do use a language, but I can’t understand them.” She seemed to consider for a moment. “I think they’re relatively peaceful. They seem to have family units that are caring toward one another.”

“They like each other, but what will they do when they find that aliens are stealing power from their star?” Gregory mused.

The other Grace smiled thinly. “The male me gets it!” She shook her head. “Only I don’t give a damn if they don’t like it. They don’t own the star. They just use it too.”

“No!” Gregory exploded! “Eventually, our use of the star might send them into an ice age, or something of the like!”

“Not my problem,” she said.

Gracie glared at her. “No, it’s mine. I created the technology. I’m stopping it. Or I will soon.”

“You bitch! We’re all a version of the same person. Who’s to say which of us is the original line? We all have just as much responsibility for the wormholes. We all own them equally! You can’t just shut them off. They’re not yours any more than the plasma is!”

Gracie got into the other’s face. “I can, and I will. You don’t have a say in the matter.”

“I most certainly do!”

“You’re locked out of everything here. I’m the only one who can control it.” She paused, then warned. “And don’t get any ideas of destroying me.” She reached into a pocket and pulled out what looked like a multi-sided die but without any numbers or letters on it.

The other two saw the item, and both backed off. Placing the right amount of pressure on the pentacontagon would release the flowering timeline that allowed both of them to exist without causing a paradox. Only the one line, the original line, would then exist. That was the theory, anyway. Like the facility on Easter Island, and now in Winnipeg, it was keyed directly to her. No one else could activate it in any way. There was a rumor that it was a dead man switch as well. If she died, they all died.

As if to prove her power, the device started to glow.

The copy grabbed Gregory and tried to hold him like a shield. Gregory, in turn, elbowed her in the face. Her nose must have shattered as she started bleeding profusely from it.

“Don’t do anything like that again,” Gregory told her. “I don’t take kindly to being bitch handled.”

“Fifty lines are branching out of mine,” Gracie said. “If you try anything like that again, I’ll find which one is yours.”

“You’ll destroy other lines in the process,” the copy mocked her.

“But I’ll find it.”

She started walking towards the elevator. Gregory looked at the copy, raised an eyebrow, smirked, and then followed her.

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-- Rosemary