I'd like to thank Malady for his help editing this.

To Return Home

Chapter 1.1

I dove into the water, alongside my sister, Paula. Neither of us wore any of the diving equipment of old, except for a pair of goggles each. I hated trying to see underwater without them. Many people didn’t worry about them either, but I had hated blurry vision since I was a kid. Before I was injected with nanobots, I was myopic, but the bots had cured me of that problem almost immediately. My vision had been perfect ever since then. To dive into the water and not be able to see was too nerve-wracking. Perhaps since it took me back to the time before I was female? I wasn’t sure, but nevertheless — I wasn’t willing to do it.

Now, Paula and I started to descend to the bottom. Mom and Daddy were already there and had been for quite some time. Probably for over half an hour. We rarely thought about it anymore, but under normal circumstances, we would not drown. I’m not sure how they would do it, but the bots were able to keep us oxygenated.

I was a bit freaked as I dove, not because I had never done it before, but because I was fearful that Amos might have planned for this eventuality. When he told us he buried Carla's crystals in the lake, it seemed too quick.

I suppose that is one of the reasons John offered to drain it. He felt Amos had been too quick to provide a compromise.

Daddy, however, wanted to try it this way first. Mom had seen where they were buried from Amos’ point of view, so hopefully, she would be able to find it quickly.

It wasn't to be, however. For two days, they had been searching and had found nothing. I tried to get Daddy to agree to Paula and me helping, but he was very reluctant. Both he and Mom didn't want to lose another daughter, but we wanted to save help our sister. It was a tough call for Daddy, I'm sure, and even tougher for us to obey, but I had given the command of Neo22 to him. I couldn't suddenly decide that I wasn't going to follow his direction.

Finally, halfway through the third day, Daddy agreed to let us help. So, now, we were diving in to help. I wasn't sure we would be useful, but it was well worth a try.

We reached the bottom, and though I could feel the pressure of thirty feet of water over my head, it wasn’t painful. I was glad I wore the goggles, however. I was able to see it fine.

I’d heard some people say that the bots changed their eyes after a significant time underwater. They supposedly created some external lens on the eye that allowed unhindered vision. I didn’t want that. They had altered me enough, thank you very much.

Perhaps that sounds hypocritical of me. After all, the most significant change the bots made to me was the most beautiful change I could have had. The fact was, however, I didn’t trust Amos, and allowing his bots to change my body anymore, went completely against my grain.

We searched the area around where Mom and Daddy were, digging in the lake bed a significant distance -- no luck. Finally, as we began to widen the search area, I heard a triumphant explosion of sound from Paula’s direction. I looked her way and saw her holding up a chain with a pendant and the familiar, turquoise-colored crystals in it.

Happily, I followed the others as they headed for the surface. John handed me a towel as I walked onto the shore. “You know, we’re going to have to go swimming here more often. I love your outfit, Hon.”

I blushed with the others hearing what he said, even as I was pleased with what he said. I glanced down at my swimsuit and smiled. In truth, I had asked a friend to make it, specifically for John's enjoyment. It was a two-piece and left very little to the imagination. Usually, wearing it with my parents around would have been out of the question. In fact, when Daddy approved Paula and me helping, both of us hurried home, and returned in similar outfits.

Daddy turned crimson and looked like he was about to explode, but since the only other people there were my husband and daughter, and Paula’s fiance, he decided to let well enough alone. He started to say something about skinny dipping, and Paula acted like she was going to remove what little she was wearing. Daddy held up his hands and said, “Forget I said that. What you have on is perfect.”

“Why thank you, Daddy,” I said, and he blushed all the more. I watched as Paula smirked as she turned away from Daddy.

Marc snorted, and Daddy turned on him. “You were saying?”

“Absolutely nothing, Sir.”

“That’s what I thought.”

He and Mom entered the water again, and Paula and I discussed where we wanted to search. We decided to add to our parent’s efforts and went in after them.

Once we had found them, Daddy and Mom took the crystals back to their lab, and the next day, they started working to see how to turn them back on.

-=#=-

John and I went back to our home, happy that the crystals had been found. I felt like celebrating, and I made a lovely dinner for the three of us.

Pearl, however, had other ideas. When I called her for dinner, she came out of her room, dressed to the nines.

She looked at the table and seemed chagrined as she told me, "Oh. I'm sorry, Mom. I forgot to mention that I was going to see Rashda tonight."

I was prepared to be mad, but John said, "That's okay, Pearl. Your mom and I have some things to do tonight. We'll be okay."

I started to respond; then, I saw Johns face.

Once Pearl left, I told him, "There will be severe consequences for approving Pearl going out tonight."

"You do realize, Rose, that our daughter is a few decades older than we were when we left home, right?"

"Is she? Then how come she's still living here?" I asked, all innocence.

He stared at me for a moment, as if trying to figure out what I was doing. "I'm not gonna win this, am I?"

"Do you want to?"

A smile started at the corner of his mouth. "Let's eat, then take this up in the bedroom."

"That sounds like a wonderful idea, husband of mine."

When I finally got to sleep, it was with a beatific smile on my face. I think John had one as well.

The next morning, we made our way to my parent's house, holding hands and reveling in the glorious morning. It had rained, complete with thunder and lightning, during the night, and the smell was beautiful. I had always loved the smell after a thunderstorm. I think John had programmed the storm when we planned our night. He knew I loved them, and I believe he wanted to keep me in a chipper mood during our walk.

The silly but wonderful man loved to act like he was somewhat clueless where women were concerned, but I knew better. He was very skilled in taking me to the top and keeping me there—multiple times.

In return, I knew exactly what to do to get him almost to the top several times before finally letting him relax.

Last night had been incredible for both of us.

Now, walking together, hand in hand took me back to our childhood. I had wanted to do this so many times, to be his girlfriend. Had I known that he wanted me to be as well, my childhood would have been so much better.

We didn't say much, which was fine with me. Just being together was enough. I think John felt the same way. He didn't seem to want to talk about our sex life. It was something that both of us left in the bedroom except for the inuendos that we enjoyed using to get each other in the mood.

We weren't hurrying, and I let my mind drift as we strolled along.

The fact that we found Carla's crystals thrilled me. I was so much looking forward to being able to talk to her. To sit down and discuss things.

I had no idea if she would remember all the time Amos controlled her, and I had no intention of reminding her of it. My main desire was to build a relationship with her.

Subjectively, I was now the youngest of all three of us. Neo22 had been constructed from material found in asteroids. While Centaurus waited for N22 to return, the people on board designed and built it.

Centaurus waited ten thousand years for N22 to return, but for us, only two hundred passed from our exile to our return.

That ten thousand years was after several centuries passed on earth between our leaving and Centaurus being launched.

I was only born seventy-five years before Carla was, and now she had millennia more experience than I did, as did Paula. To be fair, both of them were millennia older than Daddy and Mom as well.

The perils of space travel at high speed, I suppose.

We arrived at my parent's lab after a long walk. Marc and Paula were there, and from their demeanor, I suspected that they spent the night much as John and I had. Interestingly, Rashda and Pearl were also there. Was last night a celebratory night for all of us? It seemed so.

On a hospital bed, being tended to by Doctors, Jack and Sylvia was my little sister! She was completely thawed, and I saw that her body was alive.

We gathered around Daddy's workbench and waited for him to go into teacher mode. He looked up at us, and my elation quickly dissolved.

“Something’s wrong?” I asked.

“Yeah, Rosie. Something is very wrong.”

My throat went dry, and I felt my chest tighten. “What is it?”

“It appears as though Amos is up to his old tricks again.”

“How so?” Paula wondered.

“Carla is alive and will stay that way, but Jack and Sylvia tell me that it is all autonomous brain function. I've studied the bots in her body, and every one of them is dead."

“What?!!?” I almost screamed.

“So, she could get an infraction at any time!" John exclaimed.

“Infection, yes,” Daddy agreed. “That isn’t the worst of it, however. I can replace her nanobots. I can even reprogram them for the correct frequency, but her crystal computer shut down once it lost connection with her living brain.”

“But what about the information stored in her brain?” I asked.

“She is alive, Rosie. But her brain has short term memory, but it can’t access the long term memory.”

“Why?”

“I’ll show you, Rose,” Doctor Sylvia said to me.

She motioned me over to a portable scanner that she had and told me to lie down. She pulled the scanner in place and took several pictures of my head.

When she removed the scanner, she showed all of us the pictures as a moving, 3D image.

“Here is the problem, and as you've probably guessed, it is a problem all of us have." She pointed at a section of the picture. "This is where the short term memory is stored, and here," she said, indicating most of the upper parts of my brain, "is where long term memories are stored." Once more, she pointed to a section. "Notice that this section of Rose' brain seems to have very few connections going through it..."

She was cut off by Pearl. "I'm sorry, Doctor Sylvia, but I just know this is in my brain. Other than that, I'm lost."

Sylvia nodded and touched a control. We seemed to rush into the image in a heartbeat. I felt vaguely ill, knowing I was looking at what was inside my head.

She pointed at what looked like an incredibly complex network of cables. "Notice how all of these are interconnected?" I nodded as did my daughter. "This is where your short term memory is stored, Rose."

I watched as some of the connections disconnected and reconnected elsewhere. "What's going on?" I asked, alarmed.

Sylvia smiled. “You’re thinking.”

“The connections change?" I asked mystified.

“The brain can rewire itself, and that's how you think."

“Essentially,” Marc supplied, “That’s how a computer thinks as well.”

“Now, let's look at your long term memory."

Dizzyingly, we seemed to fly through my brain until we stopped somewhere else. It was very similar to the complex connections in my short term memory, but nothing was moving.

John speculated, “No connections are changing. I’m assuming because these longterm memories are set.”

“No,” Jack told us. “Even though these are stored in a much more permanent manner, they still rewire, to connect certain memories to others. If something has the same sound, or smell, as something else they will interconnect.”

“Why aren’t they?” Paula asked, looking around.

“Because this part of the brain is essentially dead.”

I felt faint. Thankfully, John was beside me, because I think I would have fallen if not for him.

“Explain that,” John said, sounding dangerous.

“Well, it's not really dead," Sylvia supplied. "but it's completely inactive."

“That’s not much of an explanation.”

“Let me continue, John.” She waved a hand, and we sped back toward the short term, but we stopped before we got there.

“The picture zoomed in a bit, and we saw something startling. Many of the nerves going through the area were fine, but others seemed to be cut off, with gray cells connected to them. “Those are nanobots,” Daddy said somberly. “They are intercepting your thoughts before they can be stored in your long term memory. Some of your nerves are still intact, but others…”

He took a deep breath and went on. “We looked in your mother’s and my heads. We have no interconnections left.”

“So, what are the nanobots doing?" I asked, chilled to the bone.

“I understand,” Marc said in wonder. “The crystals are taking over. And the computers act as the file server for our memories.”

“Exactly,” Daddy nodded.

“But what about the interconnections?” Paula asked.

“Once something is stored in a crystal, it is there to stay. However, connections can be made in the lattice, much like they are here. The difference is, all of the original connections are still there. That’s why your memory is crystal, no pun intended, clear. We literally can’t forget anything.”

“So all those people over there...” I began.

“All their memories are there,” Marc said. “They have to be.”

Something was bothering me, and I finally figured out what it was. “I was being programmed to forget that I was a human. Those people have completely forgotten their pasts, yet you say none of us can forget anything.”

“Well, we don’t know that they've forgotten their pasts. They might know of them, but be unable to act on them. Remember how we were with the fear of each other.” Marc said, “It would be possible, I suppose, if the computer were programmed to ignore anything saved beyond a certain point. Then it wouldn’t get through to the person’s brain.”

“Wouldn't someone younger have some connection to their old self from their brain?"

“In theory," Jack agreed, "unless Amos sped up the degradation of the connections artificially."

“I’d say this is all artificial,” John growled. “We should have killed that bastard when we had the chance.”

“Quite right,” Jack agreed. “Quite right.”

“So, we would have to build a new computer to communicate with her crystals and bots?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Daddy.

“Marc,” I asked, “Could you duplicate the computer in Carla’s necklace?”

“Sure. I might have to build a new case for it all. I can get a Kris to do that.”

“Do it,” I said. I turned to Jack. “Get her ready to wake up, and Daddy; give her new bots that will interface correctly.”

I realized everyone was staring at me. I had just given several commands, one even to the new commander, and it wasn’t my place.

Daddy was smiling at me. "You should never have given up command, Rosie." He turned to the others. "You heard her; get going!"

Marc grinned and turned to me. “Yes, Ma’am!”

“Sorry, Daddy," I said as I turned bright red.

“That’s okay, Sweetheart. I think you should take command back, but I understand you don’t want to.”

He paused for a moment, then asked. “Would you be willing to head up this project? Bringing Carla back to us? You’re absolutely passionate about it.”

“I spent time with the real her in my dive through Amos' crystals," I thought about it, then told him, “You’re right, Daddy. I’m very passionate about this. I’ll lead the project.”

“Good, Rosie. Do your best. I want all three of my girls, Okay?”

---

Please don't forget to leave kudos and comment!

I'd like to thank Malady for his help editing this.

To Return Home

Chapter 1.2

-=#=-

I watched as Daddy put out a command wide message saying that I was in charge of the project of reviving Carla. Then, he turned to me. "What are you going to do, Rosie?"

"As soon as I can dive into her crystals, I want to see what's there."

Daddy considered for a bit, then said, "I'm sorry, Rosie. I can't let you do that."

"Why not?" I asked. "You just gave me this project, and my first decision, you tell me no. Which is it, Daddy? Am I in charge of this or not?"

"You're questioning my authority. Am I in command or not?"

"I'm not asking as someone under your command. I'm asking as your daughter."

"And as your father, I can't lose two of my girls."

I shook my head. "What I'm going to find in those crystals is Carla's memories, but I've been in Amos' memories. Possibly in his mind."

"Think about it, Rose. For a long time -- over two millennia, Carla was under Amos' thumb. Don't you think that is in her memories? Don't you think there are memories from Amos in there?"

"Maybe there is, Dad, but to me, it's worth facing to get her back." I saw the look of shock when I deliberately called him Dad instead of Daddy. I think it showed him what this meant to me. I didn't want to lose what I had with him, but right now, even though I loved him to bits, I was madder than hell that he wasn't treating me with the respect I deserved if I was leading this project.

John was still present, as was Mom, but she was studiously ignoring us. John was looking on, but letting me fight my own fight.

"Bernie?" Daddy called, I suppose to get her to back him up.

"You got yourself into this, Vernon. You get yourself out."

He looked at John.

"I'm not saying a word, Dad. I couldn't agree with you if I wanted to. I know what her temper is like."

"But you don't agree."

"I will never disagree with you publicly, but since it's understood that we're family right now, I will say this. If she goes in there, I will be worried shitless. But, I know that she has already dealt with Amos in his head. I think she's stronger now than she was then. I believe she can handle it."

"Vern," Mom said. "I don't want to risk losing Rose either. I'll go in with her."

Daddy's face went white. "You want me to risk both of you?"

"No, Vernon, I want you to realize that your daughter and your wife are stronger than you're giving us credit for, and if we find any inkling of that bastard's mind in there, we'll back out immediately."

"Think of it as insurance, Daddy. I don't want Mom to go through that, and she doesn't want me to. We'll back out for each other."

He sat down and stared across the lab for a long time. He was looking at my little sister, and I saw his eyes getting misty. "Alright," he finally said, so quietly that I could barely hear him.

I hurried over and gave him a big hug. "Thank you, Daddy. You won't regret this."

"I already do, Rosie. But there are six thousand people over there, and I was willing to let every one of them die. That one girl there means more to me than all of them combined. I know she shouldn't, but she does. You and your mom do too. Don't you dare leave me!"

I nodded, feeling my own eyes misting over as well.

-=#=-

Rather than fall in, mom and I seemed to materialize in the bottom of a deep gorge. Rather than the blackness that I saw in Amos' memories, I saw turquoise all around me.

"So different," I murmured.

"You said Amos' crystals were black inside."

"They were." I tried to walk to a wall, but I couldn't tell if I was getting closer or not. There was no frame of reference at all. I sensed Mom beside me, and I took her hand. "We don't want to separate in here," I said.

"No, we don't."

We took another step; then, we were moving at a speed that took my breath away. I wanted to stop, and I was suddenly looking at the inside of Heaven's Rose. I walked up the stairs and into the observation lounge. I sat down and was no longer looking at anything. It seemed like an eternity, or possibly a half a second until I was now Kari. I walked to the security office, and suddenly I started to get cold. Colder and colder. I was freezing! Cold! I couldn't stand it! And colder yet! Suddenly, the sensation went away. I looked around, and I was myself again. Mom still had my hand, and we were both shivering.

"Do you think that was when she was put into stasis?" Mom asked.

"I think it must have been."

"I saw the rest in Amos' crystals," Mom told me.

“What do you mean?”

“His crystals continue beyond what we just experienced. All the way to the present.”

“I want to get to the past,” I told her. “I want to find her.”

“You’ve found her,” Mom said. “This is all her. It’s what makes her Carla.”

“If you know that, then why did you come in here with me?”

“I knew you wouldn’t give up until you had your father’s approval to come here, because there’s one thing you want to know.”

“And what’s that?”

“You want to know if her body is hers or Amos’.”

I stared at her for a few minutes. Finally, I asked her, “What makes you say that?”

“Because, Rosie, I wanted to know also.”

“You didn’t have to come here to know. You could have looked at Amos’ memories.”

“I did.”

“And?”

“Rose, that is Carla out there. Her DNA says she’s Carla.”

“But it’s Amos.”

“Not anymore. It’s Carla.”

“So Paul had Carla killed without knowing it.”

“Don’t you dare tell Paula that,” Mom said with force. “She has no need to know that.”

“Carla might tell her.”

“Not if we tell her not to.”

I shook my head. “She’s never listened to me, Mom. Why would she start now?”

“Because you have never given up on bringing her back. She is so important to you.”

“She’s my little sister. Of course, she’s important. I love her!”

“Yes. We all do, Rosie. But she understands the way you show it more than the way we do, or Paula.”

“Oh, come on, Mom.”

“It’s true, Sweetie. Do you remember the argument on her fifteenth birthday?”

“Of course, Mom. None of us can forget.”

Mom still had my hand, and she stepped into the turquoise again. Almost instantly, I was sitting at the dinner table in my parent’s house, looking across the table at my two brothers – well, brother and sister. I felt another presence in my mind. Amos was there.

Paul was running Amos down, and wouldn’t stop. I knew that Rose felt the same way, but she refused to give voice to her feelings like Paul did.

I was shouting at Paul just as much as he was shouting at me. I knew Rose was getting upset, and finally, she turned to our brother and told him, “You’re despicable, Paul. You know how she feels, and you just keep it up. Even if you could change her mind, you’ll never do it this way.”

As suddenly as that, Paul took his focus off of me and started on Rose. I was shocked. Rose agreed with Paul entirely on Amos, yet here she was, defending me! I watched in wonder, while Amos, in the back of my head scoffed it. He called it just acting, yet I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t say anything, as Amos wouldn’t let me, but I swore I would always remember that.

Mom and I stepped out of that memory. I turned to her, astonished at it. “So is she a passenger of Amos all the way to now?”

“Yes and no, Rose.” She seemed to think for a moment. “Well, yes. She was.”

“I don’t believe you, Mom.”

She sighed and said, “Amos designed the computers and crystals so that a person’s essence could be recorded.”

“Okay. I remember that from my dive.”

“He changed both of their bodies into each other, and programmed Carla to respond as him”

“So he knew what was going to happen.”

“He didn’t want to be incarcerated, so he sent Carla to be. When ‘he’ was tortured, it was Carla, yes.”

“So she’s really dead.” I felt like weeping.

“No, honey. When her body died, her essence, or spirit if you will, was recorded. It’s in here.”

“Then what did I meet in Amos’ memories?”

“I’m guessing it was a… ghost of her, I guess, created by her memories and his computer.”

I looked around at what seemed to me to be a monument to Carla. I started to cry in earnest and hugged my mother. “I want out of here, Mama,” I said. I hadn’t called her that since I was a little girl, but at that moment in time, that’s what I felt like. Just a little girl.

I suppose someone who had been born before the bots would have thought it was strange, me hugging a woman who could be taken for my younger sister, and calling her Mama, but Mom just looked super young.

“I want to show you something, Rosie,” Mom said as she pushed back to look at me from arm’s length. I don’t know how she did it, but suddenly, we were standing in a completely different area. It was the same turquoise color of the crystals, but there were thousands of lines around me. It seemed there were more, but they were so tiny, that they faded off into the distance.

All over, there were what appeared to be flashes of light that were frozen in place. I had one of the flashes just to my right, and I lifted up my hand and was able to move it through the light. The light didn’t waver in the slightest when my hand passed through.

“Where are we,” I asked.

Mama was standing in front of me with a sly smile on her face. “Where do you think we are, Rosie?”

“It’s like looking inside my brain when Sylvia showed us.”

She looked around again. “It is, isn’t it. But this isn’t her brain, sweetie. This is Carla’s essence. Her spirit. Or a representation of it.”

I looked around again. “How do you know?” I asked.

“I’m the ultimate spy, Rose. I remember whatever the enemy thinks. Whatever he has ever thought, I remember. He knew about this, and he knew I would too. He doesn’t think we can put her back where she belongs, but he doesn’t know my husband, and he underestimates my daughter.”

I laughed sardonically. “Daddy, yes, Mama. Me, I don’t think so.”

“You are underestimating yourself too.”

I’m not sure why I kept thinking of her as mama, but it just seemed so natural. It took me back to a time when I was a little girl, and maybe it’s something that Amos simply didn’t have. He knew how to navigate his memory crystals, but he didn’t have any empathy for anyone else. I looked around at the connections. It seemed Carla was frozen in time. She was written here, but how to bring her out. I wondered briefly if we could figure out how to replace her in her body, would we be able to do the same with everyone who had died? Provided we had their crystals? A new form of immortality, if only we could replicate their body. In theory, we could, but wouldn’t it require a donor body to change?

That was a scary thought! Who would donate their body? Presumably, someone who was considered less important. Dear Lord, we didn’t need a society where the rich were more privileged again!

“How would you rescue your sister, Rose?”

“I… Mama, this is a mistake. We shouldn’t do this!”

Mama sat down on… nothing. “Why do you say that, Rose?”

I looked around and realized we weren’t even standing on a floor, so to sit down… I imagined that I was sitting on a couch, and drew my legs under me as if I was, and suddenly I was sitting where I could huddle in, away from my fears.

“Rosie?”

I sighed. She was having none of it. I told her what I had just imagined, and she nodded. “It’s a scary prospect, isn’t it, Honey?”

I nodded, too frightened to say anything. “You’re forgetting something though, Rosie. There is a body out there that has Carla’s DNA and is just waiting for what we see around us here.

I turned my reticence another way. “It’s moot anyway, Mama. I don’t know how to collect her and transfer her. There’s just no way. This is too big. Too much of an expanse. It’s as if we’re actually inside the crystals, and her spirit is taking up the entire space.”

“Collect her. An interesting way of looking at it. How would you collect her?”

“I just told you. I don’t know!”

She gazed at me, then asked, “How are you sitting down?”

“I just imagined doing it, and I was able to.”

“Then imagine collecting her.”

I was scared. “You do it!”

“No, Honey. I have Amos in here too. I don’t want her lost in his thoughts.”

I sighed. Once again, the fear surfaced. “I can’t, Mama.”

“Rosie, you have been petitioning for saving your sister ever since she went catatonic. Why the hesitation now?”

“I didn’t know I was going to have to play host for her before!”

“Sweetheart, you said you would do anything to save her. That’s what you told your daddy.”

I felt silly, shouting when she was as calm as a midsummer day.

“I’m scared. Amos is in this,” I said as I gestured around us.

“I don’t think so. He’s in the memories. This isn’t them. It’s her essence.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Plenty. The essence, or spirit, doesn’t hold memories. It’s the consciousness of the person.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, Mama.”

She sighed, then asked me, “If this ‘spirit’ had been retrieved from Amos, would you want to put it in her body?”

I was confused. “Are you saying it doesn’t matter what spirit is in a person?”

She tried again. “Do you know what the term ‘ego’ means?”

“Beyond the fact that Amos has a massive one?”

She laughed a bit. “Okay. That’s part of it. “The ego is your sense of self. It’s responsible for your sense of identity.”

“Like when we dove into Carla’s mind, we had her memories, but we were still us?”

“Yeah. like that.”

“How do you know?”

“Call it a theory that Amos had. He knew that he wouldn’t get a person’s spirit unless he pulled much more at their death. That’s what he programmed the bots to do. It’s what sets off the death bot effect.

“So we could revive Kari!” I said, but then, I realized. “No. What body would she inhabit?”

“Her crystals were aboard N21 anyway. We’ve been traveling for over ten millennia, subjective time, away from N21. It’s in between galaxies, and we’re heading into the middle of ours.”

The momentary hope for my friend, then the dashing of it, plus my worries over Carla were too much for me. I started weeping. Mama came over and ‘sat’ beside me, pulled me to her, and shushed me as if I was still the little girl depressed to be in a boy’s body.

Finally, I felt somewhat better and asked. “How do we collect Carla?”

“I think we do as I said. When we touch the crystals, we are able to directly control ourselves in these memories. It is even easier here because nothing is changing as we go. So if you imagine collecting all of this in your mind, I think you will.”

“How would that collect it?”

“Right now, you have your memory crystals that your bots are connecting you to. Because you are in direct contact with Carla’s, you are able to access them secondarily. Think of them as read-only memory.”

“So I’m going to, in effect, copy this file into my brain?”

“You’re going to make a copy on your crystals.”

“I’ll give it a try, Mama.”

I tried to reach out with my mind and group Carla into my thoughts. I felt like a fool, and as I expected, nothing happened. I sighed, and once more, tried to reach out to my sister. Again, I felt like a fool. “It’s not working,” I said dejectedly. “I don’t know how to do this.”

“I’ll try to help you, okay?” Mama told me. “Try again.”

Once again, I reached out with my mind, almost calling for Carla. I knew she couldn’t hear me, but I knew she was there. I felt more this time, and it was like I heard her voice, almost like she was speaking but not. I focused on that area, and the voice got stronger. Not quite as tenuous as it had been. I opened my eyes and saw Mama. She was glowing with that turquoise color that was all around us. I was shocked, and when I looked down at myself, I was too. Suddenly, Carla was gone from my mind, and the turquoise light surrounding us stopped.

“You got sidetracked,” Mama told me, almost chiding.

I nodded.

“Once more, Rosie.”

I took a deep breath and started again. I focused as hard as I could to hold onto that faint echo of Carla that I had felt before. I could ‘see’ the turquoise glow through my closed eyelids, but I was determined to not be distracted this time. Somehow, I knew we were on the right track, but it wasn’t enough. I was determined, though. I didn’t want to lose the connection, but I needed more. My head was starting to throb like someone had just buried one of those axe things that you could turn over and use as a sledgehammer in it. I kept the hold on her that I had, and just barely got out the word, “More.”

Suddenly, it was like Mama gave me everything she had, and Carla was bathed in a spotlight. She was like a statue, and I grabbed her with all my might, then we were out of the turquoise. I opened my eyes and then collapsed. I was exhausted!

---

Please don't forget to leave kudos and comment!

Thanks to Malady for his help in editing this!

I woke up sometime later. I was in my bed, and Mama was sitting in a chair beside me, keeping watch.

“How long have I been out, Mama?”

“A couple of hours, Rosie.”

I looked around and seemed to remember opening my eyes and seeing the real world around me. “Did we get Carla?” I tried to sit up, but I was woozy.

“Yes,” Mama replied. “She’s in your crystals for now.”

I reached out with my mind. I had a better idea of how to navigate my crystals now, and I tried to find her. I could tell there was something there, but not what. I felt deeper and started to feel like there was another consciousness, but there was nothing else I could find.

“We’re going to let you rest up for a day, then you and I have another job to do.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“We’re going to transfer her into her body.”

“How come I’m home?”

“Jack and Sylvia are in the other room. I’m sure they know you’re awake, but they also know you’re doing okay.”

I had a massive headache. I’m sure that my bots were working on it, but I’m not sure they knew how. “I have a question. I know we had to go into Carla’s crystals and retrieve her consciousness, but why couldn’t it load into her mind from where it was?”

John answered. “Marc kinda explained it to you when you and Mom dove. Her consciousness needs to reboot.”

I nodded my head.

“To do that, it needs to be in her brain, not her crystals. The crystals aren’t alive. No connections are being made unless the computer is doing it.”

“So why couldn’t the computer hold her consciousness?”

“All that computer does is acts as a file server.”

I thought about that. “Then how can the people downstairs be programmed?”

“If I understand it correctly,” John said, “What happens is the programs are written into the crystals, and the firewall was programmed to allow only certain ‘files’ to be accessed.”

I wasn’t a computer programmer, but I understood the basics of operations. “So, if we change out the memory in each file server…” I stopped, as John was shaking his head.

“The file server's programming is in the read-only memory.”

“Then we can’t change it back!” I paused as something occurred to me. “Wait a second. How was the new programming put in then?”

“I asked the same question. Essentially, it was a computer virus that changed the underlying code of the server.”

“So if it’s read-only memory, how can we change it?”

Mom smiled. “We write a virus that changes it back.”

-=#=-

The next day, John and I made our way to Daddy’s lab. He and Mama were working on a new bot for Carla. These were tuned only to Carla’s crystals, so we weren’t concerned with Amos hijacking her body.

I went home and began working in the kitchen. A few minutes later, there was a knock on my door. I went over and opened it. Paula floated in. Not that she was in the air, mind you, but there was absolutely no mistaking the fact that she and Marc had consummated their relationship.

"How was it, " I asked, intending to tease her.

"Oh, God!" She said. "You'd never believe it. I can hardly believe it myself. I wouldn't have thought it possible…"

I held up my hand. "Sis. Yes, I would. Enough said."

Her eyes were as wide as saucers as she sat down in one of my dining chairs. She started off into space, twisting some of her honey blonde hair around her fingers. I glanced at her after a few minutes of rolling some egg rolls. Her eyes were closed and she was still playing with her hair. She had a beatific smile on her face, and I assumed she was off in her own little world.

I couldn't blame her. The same thing happened to me almost every night. Since I was doing much better now that my legs and arms had healed, John and I were making up for lost time.

I dropped the egg rolls into my deep fat fryer, and even the sizzling sound didn't seem to bother Sis. She was gone.

I started in on some General Tso's chicken for everyone in Daddy's lab. Two kinds. John, Mama and I loved my super spicy kind, but the rest couldn't handle it. I made the sauce, then added the extra ingredients to heat up part of it.

I looked at Paula and decided to give her a bit more time, and maybe fill out her day. While she enjoyed my General Tso's, my Orange Chicken was her favorite. It wasn't hard for me to make some sauce for some of that either. After some Chow Mein, I figured she'd had enough time. "Sis?"

"Uh huh?"

"Ready to help me carry this to Daddy's lab?"

"Uh huh." Twirl twirl.

She didn't move.

"This century?"

"Uh huh." Twirl twirl.

I carried the orange chicken over to her, set it down in front of her. I lifted the lid, and she simply said, "That smells nice."

Bonds were wonderful, but was I this far out after I'd…? yeah, I was. I shook her by the shoulder, and her eyes opened and slowly came into focus.

"Did you have to do that?"

"Well, I figured since you were here, I'd ask you for help."

She looked at the dish in front of her. It was enough for the main course for eight people. "Carrying it or eating it?" She inhaled, and I was afraid she might drift off again.

I grabbed the serving dish and clanged the lid onto it. "Oh no you don't!"

She slowly stood. "See if I come here after a fun night again."

"Sis, it's one in the afternoon."

"Is it?" She asked innocently.

I shook my head and determined that I would not exit my house until at least 3 PM when John and I had fun in the morning. "Do you think I might get some help?"

She sighed and picked up the dish. We made a couple of trips out to the garage where the cart was parked. We set everything on the flat trailer and I started the cart, flipped the switch that activated the remote for the trailer, and we were off.

The cart was very nice in not having wheels. Instead it used some of Trent's fields to levitate and then move forward. The trailer followed obediently behind, responding to my controls a predetermined amount of time after I changed them on the cart. The faster I went, the quicker it responded. It was a clever system, but I had no idea how it worked, just that it did.

I was moving slowly, as I hadn't bothered to tie down the food. We still didn't have far to go, so before long, we were sitting outside the lab. Sis seemed to be a bit more with it, but I wondered how long that would last. Marc was inside.

We carried the food in, and I was pleasantly surprised when she put the food on the table and then melted into Marc's arms for an long kiss.

Not that I could say much. I didn't react much differently with John. Such was the nature of bonds.

While we were eating, Daddy told me that he had to run some tests on the bots, then we would be ready to put Carla's consciousness where it belonged.

He spent six hours testing them, and then Mama and I prepared. I took my younger sister's and placed my necklace inside it, wrapping her fingers around it. Daddy taped her fingers closed so she couldn't accidentally let go as we placed her back in.

I could sense her body now, as my bots made the connection between us. Around my arm, I had Mama's bracelet, where her crystals we're set. I felt Mama enter my mind through the link, then we dove into Carla. It was so strange being in her body rather than her crystals. Everything seemed turquoise, but there wasn't a glow to it.

"How, Mama?" I asked.

"At this point, Baby, your guess is as good as mine."

"Thanks, Mom, " I said sarcastically.

"Do you know anyone who's done this?" she asked me pointedly.

"No, " I said contritely.

"Neither do I. We're just going to have to try it."

I looked around. I could see Mama, and I could see the walls around me. "Do you think this should be glowing too?"

"Maybe, " she answered thoughtfully.

We joined together and mentally imagined a copy of Carla's spirit moving from my crystals to the mind around us. We knew when it was done, but nothing glowed. And there was no response from Carla.

"We need to run the program, Rosie, " Mama said after a moment.

We thought about how it might happen, and all the sudden I felt like I was Carla and Carla was me. I was lying flat on a table, and memories came flooding back into my mind—all the things Amos had made me do. My eyes flew open, and I screamed!

-=#=-

I screamed and screamed—all the things I had done at his direction. I heard Daddy's voice. "Carla!"

I saw him looking down at me, and then he gathered me into his arms and sat me up, hugging me. I could feel his fingers in my hair and the warmth of his body as he comforted me. Then, I started to recede, and the sensations got farther and farther away. His voice got softer and softer, although I could tell from the timber that he was still speaking at the same volume.

Then I was myself again. Mama was there, as was Carla. She had stopped screaming and was weeping. Her arms we're around Daddy now, and I could feel everything she did, but very faintly. I was seeing three ways now, and it was very disorienting.

Daddy looked at Mama and asked, "Can she let go of Rosie's crystals now?"

"I believe so, Vern." I wasn't looking at Mama, but I knew she was smiling as wide as she could. I could feel it through our link.

I was shocked at Carla's reaction. I had felt it from her perspective, but in retrospect, her last experience had been being tortured for information she didn't have. I remembered it. It was excruciating!

Suddenly, I felt Mama put her arms around me while Daddy removed the tape from Carla's hand and gently removed my necklace from it. Suddenly, the link to Carla was gone. Gently, Daddy removed the bracelet from my arm, and I was alone in my head.

For a moment, I wished Mama was back, but John stepped up and gently put his arms around me. I couldn't get that feeling out of my head—that torture. I looked at Paula and felt a momentary hatred, but then it was gone. I had to remind myself that it was not Paula's fault. She had not known that Carla was the one experiencing the torture. She had no way to know that Carla didn't have the information that she sought.

Still, Carla was weeping. I stepped up to her and embraced her. I whispered in her ear. "Please don't tell Paula."

I felt her nod slightly, then she said, "I'm so sorry," between sobs.

I shook my head. "You have nothing to be sorry about."

"I did all those things."

"Amos was responsible."

"This body. It was his!"

I'm not sure when Paula realized the implications of that, but I don't think Carla did. When I looked back toward Paula, she and Marc weren't there.

I stayed with my little sister for a couple of hours; then, she started to get tired. I guess the weeping had tired her out.

I went outside with John, and I explained to him what Carla had said, and the implications that Paula must have realized.

"Oh shit, " John said.

We hurried to Paula's home, but no one was there. We started around the lake, and in the dark, I thought I saw some movement ahead. I definitely heard talking. We moved toward the people, and it was my sister and her new husband, sitting on a rock, talking. Marc waved us off, but without even looking up, Paula said, "How bad was it, Rose?"

"You don't want to know that, Paula."

"Yes, I do, Rosie. I tortured our sister until she died."

"She's alive, " I told her.

"She'll remember what I did to her forever."

"Paula. You didn't torture her."

"I authorized it!" She screamed at me. "I was there, watching! So was Fred. And you know what?"

"What?" I asked.

"I was happy when she died!"

"No you weren't, " I said. "You were happy when Amos died."

"He didn't!"

"But you didn't know that, Paula!"

"Go home, Rosie."

"Paula!" I began.

"Go. Home!"

"No." There was another large rock a few feet away. I sat down, and after a few moments, John joined me. He was looking at me strangely, but he wasn't arguing.

"I hate you, you bitch!" Paula yelled. I looked in her eyes, and I didn't see hate. I saw hurt—intense pain at what she realized she had inadvertently done to Carla.

I tried again. "Paula..."

"Leave. Me. Alone!" She screamed.

"I can't," I said calmly.

She glared at me, and then started to cry. She buried her head in Marc's chest. She spoke in between her sobs, and I could just make out what she was saying. "All... I can... do... is hurt... the ones I love."

I stood and quickly moved over to her, my heart breaking for what she must be feeling.

Marc started to say something, but then he stopped. He nodded, and I sat on the other side of her. I put my arm around her, and Marc released her into my hold.

"I'm not hurt by what you said to me, " I said quietly as she put her head on my shoulder. "I hurt for you, Sis. I understand why you feel the way you do. I can't imagine what you're feeling, but there is no way I won't be here for you."

She nodded and continued to sob. God, I have no idea how she felt, but I couldn't leave her. Marc put his arm around her again, and we sat there with our arms around her. A few minutes later, John was there, in front of Paula, lending his strength as well. Several times, Paula stopped crying, but then started again. I knew she would stop eventually, but with perfect memory, it would be a very long time before other things covered the hurt enough to lessen the pain.

Eventually, Paula stopped sobbing, and her breathing slowed. She had finally slipped into sleep. I released her, and John helped me to my feet. Marc carefully picked her up and took her to their house. I followed and hurried around him to open the doors. He gently laid her down on the bed and thanked me. I hugged him, then went home and climbed into bed just as the sun was beginning to rise.

We got up around noon that day, and went to see how Paula was doing. She was still sleeping, so Marc said he’d call us when she woke up.

Next, we went to see Carla. Daddy and Mama told us that she had cried the whole night, and finally went to sleep in the early morning.

“None of us got much sleep,” I said.

“That’s not surprising,” Mama told me. “It was a rough night for us all. Your daddy and I didn’t sleep very well either.”

“Mom?” It was Carla calling from the next room.

“I’m here, Sweetheart.”

We both walked into the room that Carla had spent the night in. She was sitting up in bed, and I rushed to her and gave her a big hug. “Carla, I’m so happy to see you back!”

She looked at me strange and pushed away from me. “Who are you?”

---

Please don’t forget to leave kudos and comment!

Thanks! Rosemary

Thanks to Malady for his work in proofreading and ideas!

Chapter 4

I stared at Carla. “I’m your sister. Rose.”

Carla laughed! “I don’t think so. Rose looks pretty good, but you’re obviously a genetic female.”

“What?”

Daddy spoke up. “It must be her bots. They’re programmed to protect the individual. To do that, they might cut off any memories that will cause a mental breakdown.”

“But that would mean blocking out a huge amount of time,” I pointed out.

“It might be how he keeps those people.”

For a moment, I didn’t understand. Then I realized that if Amos’s memories were going to cause Carla to have problems, it would probably not be good to mention it. Who knows how far she would regress then.

“What are you talking about?” Carla asked me. “Who are you, really?” She looked at me closer. “I could almost believe you’re Rose, but… No. You can’t be.”

“Carla,” Daddy began, but John held up a hand. Daddy backed up and nodded. He was a teacher, not a psychologist.

“We need Rachel now,” John said.

“Who’s Rachel,” Carla asked.

None of us really knew how to answer her.

-=#=-

We entered me and John’s home, this time with our resident shrink, Rachel. Daddy was making good on his promise that I was in charge of the Carla project, so we entered my office, and I took my place behind my desk.

“What is the problem?” Rachel asked. Daddy apparently hadn’t told her anything.

As he didn’t seem to be ready to fill her in now, I jumped in. “Carla has some problems. She has no memory of any events after she was taken over by Amos.”

“How could that happen?” Rachel asked. She looked to Daddy. “I thought perfect recall was inevitable with bots and the crystals.”

“Under normal circumstances, but there are times when they may be programmed to cut off certain memories.”

“Cut off certain memories?”

I’m not sure if it was part of her psychiatric training, but Rachel had an annoying habit of repeating the last words someone said as a question. Like she was asking someone to come up with the answer.

“It appears that if a memory is going to cause severe psychological damage, they’ll stop it from getting to the brain.”

“Stop it from…”

“Getting to the brain, yes. The computer with the crystals is basically a file server. You know that.”

“So it’s not the bots.”

“They send the health of the brain to the server, and it locks out certain files.”

“Certain files?”

Daddy sighed. "It locks out the ones that have caused the problems, and apparently all like that.”

“Daddy,” I offered, “She couldn’t remember Amos’ name. Maybe it’s his memory that’s causing it. Everything that’s associated with him.”

“That may be,” Rachel offered, “but have you considered that she may still be Amos?”

“I don’t think that’s the case,” Mama said. “Rosie and I went into her memories. They were hers.”

“And I would imagine that they contained everything she had done with Amos in control as well. How do you know that his memories aren’t guiding her now?”

It pained me to say it. “I suppose we don’t,” I told her.

“I need to dive into her memories myself,” Rachel announced.

“Do you mean you want to dive with us, or alone?” I asked her.

“Alone, preferably.”

I shook my head. “Not gonna happen.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m in charge of recovering Carla, and I know I haven’t been taken over by Amos,” I told her, probably more gruffly than I would normally have.

“I don’t. I don’t like those odds.”

“I’m sorry. That’s the way it is.”

“Then I won’t dive.”

“Why?” Daddy asked.

“Because Rose is the most likely person to be under control by the bastard! She dove into his memories before we knew what the hell was going on.”

John snorted and said, “Right. And you’re a psychologist? You know, Rachel, I recommended getting you, but I think that was a mistake.”

Rachel smiled and said, “Are you trying to make me mad so I’ll want to prove you wrong? That won’t work, Mister Carlson.”

“No. I’m not. I’m pointing out how illogical what you think is. You say that Rose is the most likely person to be under control? From what I understand, before you became a trans-woman, you were a straight man. Correct?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“Yet now, because of what the bots did to you, you are quite happy being a trans-woman. That about sum it up?”

“So you think I’m under the influence of the bots?”

“Sure seems like it to me. Amos’ bots changed a primary part of your thought processes.” He paused to let that sink in. “You’re more under Amos’ control than my wife. She has always considered herself to be female. So she has the body to prove it. There is no change in her mind where that’s concerned at all. You, on the other hand, have a huge change.”

She started to argue, but he interrupted her. “No, you aren’t the most likely to be under his control. You are under his control.”

She stared at John for a little bit, then nodded. “Very well, Mister Carlson, I’ll bow out of the situation. You’re right. I’m compromised as well.”

“No!” I yelled, then in a quieter tone, “John’s right, but you will not bow out. We know how people like you have been affected, or at least we think we do. Paula was a straight male as well. Now she’s a straight female. Nothing else, except what would normally be different in a woman has been changed.”

I looked at John, “And as for you, back off, John!” I told him. “You’ve made your point very well. We have no idea about anyone, and we need her. ”

I turned back to Rachel. “You don’t want to dive with Mom and me along. That won’t happen, for exactly the same reason, with one small exception.” I took a deep breath. “You are basing your disagreement on self-preservation. I’m basing mine on the safety of my sister.”

Rachel sat there for a minute, mentally debating what she wanted to do. Finally, she looked up. “You and John are pretty good psychologists, Rose. What do you need me for?”

“Because, I don’t know how to keep those memories in those crystals from tearing her apart.”

-=#=-

Eventually, we came to the conclusion that we really didn’t know who we could trust and who we couldn’t. No matter what we did, we were going to be up against the same type of problems.

We entered Carla’s room, and Rachel introduced herself.

“You’ve lost a lot of memories, Carla, and your mom, Rose and I are going to try to help you retrieve them.” she told her.

“I see,” Carla said. “I can see my mom, and I’ve never met you before. I still have trouble believing that Rose is my sister.”

“I understand that,” Rachel told her. “She is, however. Trust us on that. If we can retrieve your memories, we’ll retrieve that as well.”

“So you want to ask me a bunch of questions?”

“No, Carla. We’re going to do what is called ‘diving’ into your crystals. We need to do that so we can understand what’s happened. We might have to make several dives to bring all your memories back to you.”

Carla looked scared. “I’m not sure I like that,” she said. “My memories are mine, not anyone else’s.”

“I know it. This is completely unheard of in my field, but it’s the only way to deal with this, I believe.”

Carla nodded. “Do what you have to,” she told us.

-=#=-

"Will I even know you're there?" Carla asked as we were preparing to dive.

"We're not sure," Mama told her.

Carla nodded, then the three of us touched the crystals.

Everything was turquoise again. The three of us were standing in an endless expanse of greenish blue. There were no discernible features anywhere around us, same as before. The difference was that Carla was standing near us. "Go away!" she screamed. "You're not welcome! Leave me alone!"

Rachel stepped forward. "Carla?"

"Of course!" my sister said. "Who are you?"

"I'm Rachel. You don't know me?"

"I've never met you before."

"Who are these people?" Rachel asked, indicating Mama and me.

"Mama, and ... Well, she looks like Rose, but she's not."

"I see," Rachel said. "Are you here to guard Carla's memories?"

"You're not wanted here!" Carla exclaimed again as if she'd just remembered her function.

"She's not real," Mama said. "She's like a sentry."

"I think so," Rachel said. "Can she block us from the memories?"

"I don't think so," I said. "Mama, where do we go?"

"To the beginning," Rachel said. "I need to see what happened when Amos took over."

Mama and I grabbed Rachel's hands and we dove into the maelstrom of memories around us.

-=#=-

I walked up to the building. I knew what my parents, brother, and sister said about Amos, and I was going to be careful. At the door, I was greeted by a young woman who ushered me in to see Amos. We entered what amounted to a throne room. I was beginning to see why my family felt the way they did about Amos. This was obviously some sort of hero thing. He was too proud and self-indulgent. There were actually girls in some type of toga, fanning him constantly with what appeared to be palm leaves.

When he saw me, he clapped his hands twice, and the girls walked out. "Carla Richards. Such an honor to meet you." He rubbed his hand together as if he was preparing to do something he'd been anticipating for a long time. He said something else, but I couldn't understand it. It was as if my mind was becoming incredibly sluggish. I felt pain as if my lungs were on fire. A moment later, the pain started to spread. My vision was as if I was staring through a flame.

I tried to turn, and felt I couldn't move. Finally, Amos walked down to stand directly in front of me. I still wasn't able to control my own body. "Who are you?" he asked me as he slowly walked around me. "I'm you, " I said. "I'm Amos Goodwin."

"Very good. But you're going to use the name Carla, as much as that distresses me. You're going to be Carla Richards for now. Until such time as we need you to take my place."

I nodded my head, then went with him to his laboratory. There were female slaves all over his palace, but now, I knew that these young women were actually she-males. Several actual women were used as furniture or decorations.

We entered his lab, and he turned to me. "Be very glad I have use for you, Carla." He spat out my name as if it were distasteful. "If I didn't, you would find yourself as this poor creature does. " I looked at the chair he proceeded to sit in.

It was a woman in a blue satin catsuit. She was bolted through her arms and legs in the frame of the chair, her bottom making the seat cushion, and her arms and legs extending up, as the chair back. Her face was covered, but I knew that a screw literally went through the bottom of her chin, through her mouth, and into her hard palette, holding her mouth shut. The rest of her restraints and the tubes entering her body, I didn't want to think about.

To my horror, I walked over to another 'chair' and sat down, crossing my legs demurely. For several minutes, I simply sat and listened as Amos told me his plans for my family. I tried to block what he was saying out of my mind, but couldn't. I had no choice but to listen.

Amos pulled a lever on the side of his chair and leaned back. The woman groaned in pain as her arms and legs were moved after a long period of immobility. She probably hadn't moved for days.

Suddenly we were flying out of the hell he had created, and we're standing back in the endless turquoise.

All of us were speechless at what Carla must have gone through. Was her entire existence for over fifteen millennia where she was simply a passenger in her own body?

Finally, Rachel said what we were all thinking. "That was disturbing."

"He's been doing that type of thing since the beginning." I had no idea how people hadn't known.

"Maybe they knew, but decided to leave the nastier bits out," Mama said.

I turned on Mama. “You’ve been in his memories!” I almost screamed at her. “Why didn’t you tell us about this?”

She looked at me and shook her head. “Rosie, did you really think that since he did this downstairs, that he hadn’t done it on Earth? He always fancied himself another Caesar.” She shook her head. “Rome done ‘his way’ has always been a fascination for him.”

I just stared. I knew that Mama was correct, but it was so hard to stomach. My arms and legs were bolted inside restraints and pony boots without any form of pain relief. I couldn’t imagine what those women had gone through to become furniture.

Rachel shook her head. “While that’s disturbing, that’s not what I was referring to.”

I stared at her. “What do you mean?”

“I was referring to being only a passenger in her own body. Do you think that is what she had to deal with her entire life?”

Slowly I nodded. “Yes. When Mama and I entered her memories at the end of her life, it was the same way, although not as pronounced. It was like she had stopped thinking about it.”

“When she was tortured, however,” Mama told Rachel, “she wished with all her heart that she could tell Paul who she really was, but Amos wouldn’t allow it.”

“He was determined that we should think he died.”

Please don’t forget to leave kudos and comments.

Kudos are great, but I really like to know what people are thinking of stories. Especially this one.

--Rosemary

Thanks to Malady for his help editing and for ideas.

To Return Home 1.5

The three of us decided it was time to exit the connection with Carla and speak to Daddy and the rest of the command staff. We tried to release our grip on the necklace in real life, but we couldn’t.

Danger! I wasn’t sure where the voice came from, but it sounded in my head as if someone was standing right beside me. I looked at Mama and Rachel. They had clearly heard it too.

“Who are you?” Rachel asked.

There was no answer.

“What danger?” Mama asked whoever or whatever it was.

Danger has visited restricted memories.

“We’re not danger. I’m Carla’s mother.”

We are Carla.

“You are Carla?” I asked. “Why can’t we see you?”

“Is this the nanobots?” Rachel wondered.

“Are they intelligent?” I asked. “How can that be? They’re single cells!”

“Single cells connected by the frequency of the crystals,” Mama said. “Your daddy and I haven’t ever investigated this, but there certainly is the possibility that they’re connected into some kind of intelligence.”

“But they’re not Carla,” I said.

“Aren’t they?” asked Rachel. “They are her immune system and her link to her memories. They aren’t the sum total of Carla, but they’re a part of her.”

Mama asked the voice, “Are you her immune system?”

We control self-repair. We control memory retrieval. We are Carla.

“So, you restricted memories because they were dangerous?”

The restricted memories are detrimental to our brain function. It has been restricted from brain access.

“We are here to help the brain to deal with those memories. To stop them from being detrimental.”

The restricted memories are no longer detrimental. Your interference is not needed.

“But you are leaving Carla without a millennia and a half of her life,” I exclaimed. “I’m her sister, and she doesn’t even know me!”

We are Carla. We know that you are our sister. Rose confirms this.

“So, you’re talking to my bots?” I asked. The fact that they considered my bots to be my actual self was disconcerting to me.

They are Rose.

“You are not Carla. You are her immune system. Carla’s father built you, but you are not Carla. Ask Rachel!” Rachel challenged Carla’s bots.

This is true, they said after a moment.

“You do not have permission from Rachel to block her memories! You must allow us to help.”

Allowing your help will lead to irreparable harm to the brain.

“No, I don’t think it will.”

You are a psychologist. You are not a medical doctor. You do not understand the danger.

Rachel was frustrated, but she tried another tack. “What if we work together?”

Explain.

“Allow us to help her overcome the danger of the memories one at a time.”

You have pointed out that there are more than fifteen hundred years of memories that will need to be overcome. This is unacceptable.

“No,” Mama said. Rachel gave her a dirty look for interrupting but didn’t interfere herself. “There is a key memory that is causing a cascade reaction with the other memories. If we can overcome that danger, the rest of the memories can be dealt with as a whole.”

Rachel raised an eyebrow. It was true what Mama said.

There is more than one memory leading to the cascade. The cascade leads back to those memories. That is the reason for the restriction.

“We understand that,” I shouted.

You wish to overcome the key memories one at a time?

“Yes,” Rachel said.

We will allow this. From here or outside?

Rachel looked at us, then said. “We can work more effectively from inside.”

Very well. First memory being rerouted through the firewall and to you.

Suddenly we were sucked into the vortex of memories again.

-=#=-

I found myself back, realizing that I was just a passenger in my own body.

Then, as soon as I was there, I was back as myself. "That was it?!"

"As I said, Rose. That is a very disturbing memory."

"What's going on?" Carla suddenly asked.

She was standing in front of us, but very transparent.

"Carla!" I cried joyously. I ran to hug her, but it was as if she was a mist. Her body was like a fog that swirled around my arms, then slowly reformed.

"I remembered something. I couldn't control my actions. It was so strange!" She looked at me. "I'm beginning to think that you really may be Rose. I'm not completely convinced, but I know what I just experienced was a real memory." She looked to Mama. "I've lost a lot, haven't I?"

Mama nodded. "Yes, Carla. You have."

Mama and I watched as the bots returned access to memories to Carla and we helped comfort her as Rachel helped her to assimilate them into her mind.

There were lots of tears and lots of hits from Mama and me. Her body was still somewhat translucent when Rachel told the bots, “I can probably do more from outside now.“

Very well, the bots said. We will allow you to let go of the crystals now.

A moment later, I was standing beside Mama. My legs felt like rubber as if I'd stood there for the entire time.

Mama started to tell Daddy and the rest what we'd experienced.

"We heard," John said. "Everything you said in there, you said here too. And all four of you said what the bots said together."

"We did?"

"Yes. It helped us to follow the conversation," Daddy confirmed.

There was a groan from the chair Carla was sitting in. A moment later, Carla started to cry again.

I moved to her side. "Do you know who I am now?" I asked.

She nodded affirmatively.

"What do you remember now?" I asked.

"I remember what he did. What I did to those people who left Earth on the other ships."

"It wasn't you," Rachel told her.

"I know that," Carla snapped. "I'm dead!"

"No, you're not," I told her. "Your soul was saved in those crystals. It's been returned to your body."

"No!" Carla shouted. Suddenly, she seemed to look at something that wasn't there. "This is not working," she said in a monotone.

We knew immediately that it was the bots.

Rachel stepped forward. "This may take awhile. You know that."

"Proceed, but we will decide if we should restrict the memories again."

"At least tell us before you do."

"We have done so."

Suddenly Carla was back. "I heard them. I was just a passenger again."

Rachel stepped forward. She pulled up a chair, so they were on the same level. "Carla. You have to understand that you aren't dead. You are alive. By now, your body has gone through innumerable replacements. This is not the body Amos had back then, any more than it is yours. It isn't the body you had when you died, but it isn't the body Amos had either."

She nodded slowly. "Will you share with us what Amos did to the other ships?"

"He gave them some time without being bothered, but then he took over. The bots in the people were a surprise. Even to them!"

She took a shuddering breath. "Those ships constantly accelerate at 1G for their gravity. Then they flip and decelerate the same way."

I nodded. I want sure what this had to do with anything.

"The flip was the trigger. When they began to slow down, the bots would change. By that time the programs were written."

"The same thing as here?" Rachel asked.

"Worse. Unlike here, they all know what they used to be, but the bots have taken over. They have a little autonomy, but only within the program." Another shuddering breath. On Centaurus, all the women are animals, or immobilized as decorations. But every last man is in a harem as a slave to Amos."

She looked sick. "Half of them were impregnated with Amos seed, but he didn't actually do it. If they landed, that is. The ones that were impregnated were changed and made pre-pregnant. Each time they had a child, a new one would be started immediately. Once the population on the world suited him, each one of the former men were made into an animal. Any female babies they had were also made into animals."

"What are the animals for?" Rachel asked although we knew.

"The same as downstairs," she said. "Pets, work animals. Sustenance."

"Sustenance?!" Daddy was outraged at the idea.

Rachel glared at him, but chose not to say anything to him. Instead, she asked Carla, "Why doesn't he simply make the bots convert air into energy in the bodies?"

"He likes to eat. And it's not as fun as far as he's concerned." She said as if she was dead.

"Wait, you said downstairs was the same!" I suddenly realized.

She didn't speak. She just nodded.

-=#=-

We were seated around the conference table, discussing the situation. Rachel was working with Carla. Once again, Daddy admitted me into the meeting because of my former position as commander.

John was still in the formal position of second-in-command. He didn't always agree with Daddy, but once a decision was made, he would back him, no matter his personal feelings.

It's one of the things I loved about him.

"This is not a good situation at all," Daddy said.

"Ya think?" John wasn't one to hold back from speaking his mind.

Daddy usually ignored it. "Is there any way we can use the bots’ AI to our advantage?"

"We all heard them speak," Paula said.

"They can control us if we let them," Marc commented. "We've known that for a long time."

"This is more than just making us feel fear or increasing our feelings tenfold," Sylvia put in. "This is actually physically controlling us."

"Of course they can," John almost seemed pissed at Sylvia's assessment. "We've known that too. Look how they made Carla do Amos' bidding for so long."

"Not without an intelligence guiding them," Sylvia argued.

"They've got that too," Marc pointed out.

"Yes, they have, haven't they?" Daddy said thoughtfully. "Do you think Amos knows?"

"No," Mama said definitively. "He's too arrogant to believe they might be able to control him."

"Could we convince his bots that he's a danger to others?"

"No," Mama said. "But our bots might be able to."

"What would we need to do?" Marc asked.

‘Vern, give me as many voices as you can in those crystals of his."

Daddy nodded, and we were preparing to leave the conference room when a call came in from the command center. "Commander. Downstairs is starting to move away."

"What?"

"Yes. It appears to be turning."

"Stay with them," Daddy ordered. "We don't want those people killed."

"Why?" John asked. "He doesn't want to leave us. He knows we'll follow. Why?"

"A new destination?" Daddy wondered.

"The one we're heading for is the most likely."

"What the hell?" Marc breathed. "This is bizarre."

"Home," Mama said. "He's taking us home."

"What?" I exploded. "He's already ruined the planet! Why take us back?"

"He thinks he can destroy the nanites there."

"Can he, Bernie?"

"I'm not sure, Vern. Maybe."

"Okay. Give me the data. I need to know how he made those things and I want to know what he's planning." He paused for a moment, looking thoughtful. "Also, I want to know what the bots can do to him."

He looked around to make sure we understood. "Get to it." I really didn't have anything to do at the moment, so I stayed to ask him for permission to do something.

"What is it, Rosie?"

"Would you expand my duties?"

"I thought you didn't want to be in the chain of command."

I smiled. "I don't, but I want to help those people downstairs."

"How?"

"I want to know what the bots are capable of too." I closed my eyes for a moment. "I saw Belinda, Daddy. I saw what was done to her. I don't want to have any more people die that way."

"You didn't see her killed."

"No, but I saw her as a horse. No more friends like that, Daddy."

"Okay, Rosie. The job is yours. Work with your mom and Rachel. You three are the best for it."

I gave him a peck on the cheek. "Thanks, Daddy."

Then I hurried out.

-=#=-

I told Rachel and Mama that our objective was expanding when I got back to the lab.

"Can I help?"

I stared at my sister. Before I could object, however, Rachel told me, "It might be therapeutic. It will help her set a lot of things right."

---

Please don’t forget to leave Kudos and comment.

--Rosemary

Thanks to Malady for his help editing and for ideas.

To Return Home 1.6

Daddy shook his head. “That bastard really threw a problem our way.” He was mad. Livid, even. Although his voice was steely calm. I don’t think I’d ever seen him that way before.

“How so, Vern?” Mama asked.

“Search his memories, Bernie. He didn’t leave any DNA information from the people down there,” Daddy said in a furious voice. “What they are now, is what the computer records them as. Even down to pictures.” He showed us the picture of Belinda. It was her as a ‘horse’. Below the picture was the word, Deceased. “The computer record even goes on to say what happened to her, and what ‘dish’ she made. The guy is even more sick than we thought.”

He shook his head, and some tears ran down his face. “I’m not sure what we can do for them all. I’ve even looked through the medical records. There is an independent database there that holds the DNA. It’s been altered as well.”

“We know who they are, don’t we?” I asked.

“We have a rough idea. If we can get a hold of their memories from before the change, we can find out, but their DNA would be the problem.” Daddy said, nodding his head.

“In their memories,” Marc pointed out, “They’ve seen themselves in mirrors. We could at least tell their bots to make them look like that.”

“It’s better than nothing,” Paula pointed out.

“I want complete control of his bots,” Daddy said to Mama.

She didn’t say anything, but nodded.

“Daddy,” Carla said. “I have a special ‘gift’ for him, after all he did to me.”

I had to admit. It was fitting.

-=#=-

My office was in use again. Since I was broadly in charge of the rescue of the people downstairs, we were basing our work there.

In many ways, by being placed in charge of the rescue, I was back in command. Yes, Daddy was in charge of the ship, but this wasn’t Star Trek. While a starship might make it from Earth to another planet in a day or two, on Neo22, you gave the command to ‘engage’, and then waited a thousand years before giving the ‘disengage’ command.

My choice to relinquish command had nothing to do with giving those commands. I mean, start and stop, or engage and disengage are easy enough to say. It’s the responsibility for a large percentage of the remainder of humanity that bothered me. It wore me down. Tired me out.

Daddy, being in command, and John his XO was fine with me. This gave me something to focus on. I didn’t like people micromanaging my activities, but I reveled in micromanaging theirs.

Mama, Rachel, Carla, and I were discussing our options when my office door opened, and Daddy, Paula, John, Marc, Rashda, and Pearl entered.

“Yes?” I asked, not at all happy with my visitors.

“There’s not a lot going on in command, so we thought we’d offer our help,” Daddy said.

I know my eyes had to have blazed. John didn’t sit down, which he knew he was always welcome to do in my office. In fact, he had a chair that was well known to be his, and no one ever sat there, even when John wasn’t present.

Daddy, however, sat down. Not in John’s chair, mind you. He wasn’t that crazy. Pearl, being my daughter, and well liking to wind me up, just stood near the door with a smirk on her face.

I considered things for a moment. I loved every one of them, and I didn’t want to create a scene, but I had to know if Daddy was going to take the job from me.

“Daddy, can I see you outside?” I asked. At that moment, I wanted to make him stand up. The audacity of invading my space and then sitting down like he owned the place… Well, it infuriated me!

I saw his eyebrow raise quickly followed by the corner of his mouth. It was like he got the response he expected. I paused halfway through standing, and considered sitting back down. I almost did, but I had to know what he intended.

We got outside my office, and I counted on the soundproofing built into my walls and doors. I was a musician, remember. I did a lot of composing and practicing in that office.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked at the highest volume I could manage, and still keep my voice under control.

“Offering help,” he said, completely calm.

“You said this was my project!” I screamed. “Now, you’re here to take over!”

“Rosie,” he said, just as calm as ever, “Please settle down.”

“No!” I yelled. “This is my project!”

“Yes, it..”

I shook my head. “Why are you here?!”

This time, he didn’t try to say anything. Instead, he very deliberately crossed his arms and waited. I did a lot more shouting, but what I yelled, I’m not sure. I don’t think I knew at that time either. I just shouted, screamed, yelled… I took out all my frustrations on my daddy, and he stood there and let me.

Finally, I ran down and slumped onto a bench we had sitting in the hallway beside my door. Only then did Daddy move. He sat down beside me and said, “You have absolute control over this situation, Rosie. I have no desire to contradict any of your decisions.”

“You promise?” I asked, almost talking in a little girl voice.

“I promise, Rosie.” He paused, took a deep breath, and then said, “I’m going to go one step further, and I’m not taking no for an answer this time, Sweetie.”

“No!” I said, knowing what he was going to say.

“Nope,” he said. “My last order as commander is for you to take command.”

“If you want to give up command, Daddy, then give it to John.”

“Rosie,” he said in frustration. “Stop being a martyr! I saw your face when I suggested you take command when you asked for this project. Clearly, you wanted it, didn’t you?”

I couldn’t lie to him. “Yes.”

“Why didn’t you take it?”

“Because I’ve gone back and forth. People need to trust their commander to make solid decisions. Instead, I’ve not known what to do half the time. How can they trust me?”

“Do you believe that your family – everyone in that room is family – would let you down? You make a mistake, they’re going to let you know what they think. You know that.”

I shook my head. “I believe that in theory, but I could never have given the order to split the ship. There’s no way I could have.”

“Maybe so, Rosie,” he said, smiling, “But right now, what needs done, is getting those people rescued, and the ship put back together. I was willing to let them, and us, die to stop Amos.”

“You’ll fight just as hard to rescue them.”

“Maybe, but you’re proving my point. You’re saying that I don’t see something in myself that you do see.” He smiled gently. “I see that you have things you don’t see as well.”

He paused, then said, “I’ll give you a way to transfer command back to you in as gentle a manner as we can.”

“How?” I asked. I had to admit, I was intrigued.

He grinned. “Only four people will know that you’re in command,” he said.

I laughed. That would be the command staff, meaning, Daddy, John, Marc, and Paula.

“I have a counter proposal, Daddy.”

“And what’s that?”

“When we were exiled to N21, I suggested that we have a command committee. I still believe that would be the best bet for our situation. However, instead of three people, I propose we have five. Those same five people, but with you as a ‘tiebreaker’.”

“And what would be each of these five people’s jobs?” His eyes were full of merriment.

“John knows this ship like no one else. He designed N21, and this ship is just a supersized version of it.”

“So he commands the ship itself. Marc?”

“He’s a genius with computers and electronics. We have lots of those on board that he controls anyway.”

“Okay. Your sister?”

“Security, obviously.”

“We get rid of Amos, and hopefully, we won’t need security.”

“Daddy, you know that’s an air castle. It sounds great, but it won’t last. Eventually, we’ll have kids who don’t remember what Amos was, and we’ll be right back here. Probably not as bad, but we’ll need security.”

“Besides,” I went on, “what happens when we reach Earth? I believe we’ll be able to turn off those bots. Amos thinks we will, and I think he’s probably right.”

“You think we’ll need a security force then.”

“Paula did it before. She can certainly do it again.”

“What’s your job then?”

“Rescuing those people.”

“Uh-uh. That doesn’t last. Once that’s done, you conveniently get out of command. Not gonna happen, Rosie.”

“Culture. It may not seem important, but it really is. We’ve got to think beyond survival, otherwise, why survive?”

“Because we want to live,” he said.

I shook my head. “Things will get boring.” I laughed. “Call me the ‘morale officer’.”

“And me? Am I just to break ties?”

I frowned. “I misspoke, Daddy. You have the biggest job here.”

“And what’s that?”

“I trust you. You have been my father since I was born.”

“Obviously.”

I playfully punched his arm. “I’m serious! You are, as you said before, level-headed. You can make a decision when a hard one has to be made. You’re the patriarch of that family in my office.”

“I’m not patriarch to everyone else on this ship.”

“Are you aware, Daddy, that you’re the oldest person on this ship?”

“No I’m not. There are many people who are much older than me. Carla is older than me.”

“You were born before any of these people. Even though you may be physically younger than Carla, you’re still older. You’ve lived through the same time that she has. It’s just that for some of your life, time moved slower for you.”

I took a breath and considered how to proceed. “You have the experience of living before Amos was in charge. These people don’t know how to lead like you do. Even when Fred took over on Earth, there was a government that controlled everything. It had to, because people didn’t know how to live without it. You do, Daddy. We need that.”

I could see in his face, that he was listening intently to what I had to say.

“You’re leaving me in command,” he said finally.

“It’s your place, Daddy,” I said. It was hard to say, because I did want the job, but I had to admit. He was much better at it than me.

He nodded. “Okay. How do we propose this to the other people?”

“Just put it in place.”

“Nice idea, Sweetie, but I don’t think that would be appreciated.”

“Then you ask.”

This time he laughed hard. “No, Rosie. You’re the morale officer. You ask.”

“No. There’s no way I’d ask for that without your approval. That wouldn’t be good or moral. Besides. I’m not morale officer yet.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Daddy!” I whined. “Don’t do this to me!”

His grin was broad. “Let’s go in and make our suggestion.”

I nodded. At least it wasn’t entirely mine.

Please don’t forget to leave Kudos and comment.

--Rosemary

Thanks to Malady for his help editing and for ideas.

To Return Home 2.1

Daddy pitched the idea of the five-person leadership to the others as if the idea was his own. I didn’t think for a moment, however, that the others believed it, but at least they were gracious enough to pretend they did.

I had suggested that I be responsible for preserving our culture, but now I found that, somehow, the medical aspect of our culture came under my purview as well. I guess it had to do with the need for good health for morale, or morale for good health: one or the other.

So it was that we became a five-person committee running the government. Of course, I figured that, under the circumstances, Paula's position as head of security was more suited to leading the rescue of the people downstairs. Still, Daddy had given the job to me, and our committee reaffirmed it.

Daddy's decision made each of us equal in rank, and the outline I gave of our sections of government were reviewed and voted on by the group. That's how I found myself overseeing medical as well as culture.

-=#=-

The next day, I delegated jobs to each of the people. John and Rashda were put to work, figuring out how we could piece the ship back together. Somehow we needed to be able to connect the halves. Of course, we weren't going to do that until we knew that Amos was neutralized, but it would eventually be done.

Rachel and Carla started working toward a routine to help the people downstairs once we could work on their psyches.

Marc and Daddy were set to work on the bots. They were developing a rapid method of replacing bots if needed.

Mama and Paula began working toward disabling Amos.

And, me? Well... I found I'd delegated myself out of a job.

So, I was sitting in my office, staring at a book on my desk, when my daughter, Pearl, found me.

"Whatcha doing, Mom?" She asked me.

"Reading some logs. And I'm giving some of Marc's computer toys a try. This one takes memories and turns them into text."

"And then prints them out? That seems like a waste of resources."

I laughed. "Not really," I said as I pushed the book to the edge of my desk. As it slid off the edge, it disappeared.

"Is that a hologram? That's cool!"

"Yes, although the feel isn't quite right. It requires such fine control of low-powered fields. It tingles a bit when you turn the page."

“It’s still cool,” she told me.

I smiled and nodded.

“So how does it convert the memories to written text?”

I shook my head. “I’m not really sure. Marc is a genius with his computer programming.” I laughed a bit. “I suspect that your grandpa helped with it too.”

“Can I?” Pearl asked. I nodded, and she moved the book to where she could see it. After reading a bit, she said, “This records every detail. Of everything!”

“That’s why I’m reading it. See that link at the bottom of the page?”

Pearl nodded, and I continued. “Pressing that takes me into the memories themselves. I think some nanobots are somehow linked into this. Don’t ask me how.”

“Who’s memories are you looking at?”

“Amos’ of course,” I told her.

“But you were in his memories, Mom. Why are you going through them again?”

“I’m looking at them like this because the text doesn’t miss anything, and when I look at things, I see it from his point of view. This is like being under hypnosis and being retaken through an experience. Everything is amplified so nothing is missed.”

Pearl looked confused for a moment. “Do you think that’ll help, Mom?”

I paused, then shook my head. “No, sweetheart, but I can’t sit here doing nothing.”

Pearl nodded. “You’ve delegated everything to everyone else. So you’re waiting for results from them. You’re a victim of your own leadership.”

“Ha, ha,” I said sarcastically. The problem was, I knew Pearl was right. What was I supposed to do? “So what do you suggest?” I finally asked.

Pearl smiled hugely. “Let’s brainstorm!”

-=#=-

A few weeks later, I had a surprise. Mama and Paula told me they thought they had a way of disabling Amos. They had been able to communicate with his bots.

Mama called up a recording they had made of the conversation, and across the room, the wall seemed to fade from view, replaced by Mama and Daddy’s living room.

For a while, nothing seemed to happen. We watched as Mama and Paula took each other’s hands. Every movement seemed to stop, and their breathing became almost undetectable. Suddenly both of them spoke in perfect unison.

“We are Amos. You are danger. You will be neutralized.”

A moment later, both said, again in perfect unison, “We aren’t danger. We are Paula Dodson and Bernie Richards.” It was their bots speaking.

“Dodson?” I asked, looking at my sister. “I didn’t know you considered yourself married.”

“I didn’t expect the bots to say that, but I guess they consider us to be married,” she replied.

Mama glared at us both and rewound the hologram a bit. “This is important, you two. Pay attention, Rose.”

“Yes, Mama,” we both said contritely.

“State your business to Amos,” the bots said through Mama and Paula. Mama reached out and paused the recording. It was apparent that Amos’ bots had his attitude.

“We are here to speak to Amos regarding the people and animals on this vessel,” stated Mama and Paula’s bots. It was evident that Mama and Paula left most of the dialogue to their bots. I suppose it made sense. The bots were likely able to communicate their intents easier to Amos’ bots.

“We are Amos. State your business.”

“Amos has harmed many people.”

“Negative. Amos has harmed no one.”

“Amos has harmed many people,” the bots repeated.

“Show Amos!” his bots ordered.

Paula shuddered, remembering the next few moments. “You won’t see this, but my bots pulled his into my memories of the time I spent as a pony and as a decoration in Amos’ palace.”

“And then,” Mama supplied, “My bots pulled them into memories I had of the things Amos made us do.” She paused a moment and seemed to be searching for something. “They also,” she said cautiously, “must have pulled some things out of your mind, Honey. They showed your memories of recognizing Belinda, and then of Amos gloating over killing her and...” she turned green at the thought, “eating her.”

Paula took over as Mama worked to get her emotions under control.“Our bots also took all of us through the memories of Amos programming the bots of each person downstairs to change them, then purging all records of their DNA from the computers.”

I could tell that there were things Paula didn’t want to say about the experience, but I decided not to push her for any information.

"Did he do them individually?" I asked.

"Some, yes. But not all."

I didn't dare get my hopes up, but I asked, "Did he see any DNA that we could use to turn people back into their own selves?"

Mama shook her head. "No, Sweetie. I wish he had, but he didn't."

I watched the rest of the holo, and it was enlightening. Amos’ bots were extremely arrogant. I'm not sure if he programmed them that way or something they picked up from his brain. Either way, it grated on me.

-=#=-

I was in charge of the rescue, but I still wanted others to look at my decisions and tell me if they agreed, so I asked the administration to meet with me. I also thought it wise to include Mama, Rachel, and Carla.

We used John and my Living Area for the meeting. While my office would hold everyone, the living room was much more comfortable and didn't place me behind a desk when speaking to the others in the administration.

Rachel and Carla were hesitant when they heard of the arrogance of the bots. They were concerned that the bots might be more under his own control than they seemed. I had to admit. The thought had occurred to me as well.

“Even if they are, they can't hurt us,” he commented.

“That's not exactly true,” Paula told her husband. I hadn't heard them argue since they bonded, so this difference of opinion was interesting. “When you and John figure out how to reconnect us to the downstairs, they will be able to.”

“I'm not so sure, Paula,” he said. He turned to Mama and asked, “Mom, can you search Amos’ memories and see if he can communicate with his bots?”

She answered, “I've searched, and I've found no evidence that he can, but that doesn't mean he can't, just that he never tried. You can only prove the existence of something. Not the non-existence.”

Marc nodded. “I think we'll have to try this. It seems like it'll be our best bet.”

I nodded, then asked. “What do you think, John?”

He shrugged. “I'm not sure yet,” he answered. “I don't think we can execute this plan until we have a way of joining the two halves anyway.”

“Daddy?” I asked.

“I'm with John on this. I don't think we can make a decent decision yet,” he answered. “I think we should put this idea on the back burner for now. We need to look at more information and see if we can find anything else out.”

“Paula?” I asked.

“This isn't a command decision, Sis. You're in charge of this operation.”

“I still want everyone's opinions,” I told her. “This could potentially kill us all. Or worse.”

She sighed. “My honest opinion is this might very well be our only option. I recognize John and Daddy’s reluctance, but this may be the only chance we have when the time comes. If it is, I'm willing to take it.”

“I didn't say I wasn't, Paula,” John told her. “Neither did Dad, but while we have the time to examine other options, we should.”

“That extra time is because of your project?” Carla asked him.

“We're sure we can do it. In fact, we're ironing out the bugs.”

“Will those bugs become more complicated now?” she pointedly asked.

I was immediately enraged. “Carla!” I shouted.

In a complete reversal of how we did things as ’kids,’ Paula came to her defense. “Wait a minute, Rose.” She turned to our little sister. “I know you want that bastard dead, Carla, but John isn't that kind of person. He's not going to delay his project because he doesn't like what we're doing when it's done.”

Carla didn't say anything for a bit. For several minutes she stared at Paula with fire in her eyes. I didn't think Carla would back down, but finally, she turned to John and me. “Sorry,” she said simply.

It took me a few moments to calm down, but John held her gaze for a moment, then said, “Apology accepted.” He turned to me. “Give me a deadline.”

“Say what?” Marc asked. “I've got to replace a lot of wiring, and I'm not sure what it looks like over there!”

“The electronic connections between the two sides aren't important for the physical joining,” John told him.

“I beg to differ, John. We need to have control of the entire downstairs so we can segregate Amos from everyone else.”

“I may be able to help you there,” Daddy interjected.

“How?” I asked.

“The entire ship can be controlled by the command center, correct?”

“Of course, Daddy. You know that.”

“Then, what if we were to design a bot that could make its way to the command center and fashion a remote control device. Give us the ability to control everything from here.”

“And then while we're joining the halves, we let it loose,” Marc said. “That's intriguing.” He thought about it for a few minutes. “I'm wondering if it would be simpler to build a relay system in the command center, or program the bots to repair everything where we blew it loose.”

“I don't know much about the control systems, but you know what needs to be done in the command center. You haven't seen what needs done at the connection points,” I offered.

“Not to mention,” Daddy said, “you wouldn't need to fish through the connection points on this side. You could simply build the sending and receiving units here.”

“Why the receiving unit?” John asked.

“From my point of view, it will be much simpler to have the bots disassemble a premade unit, then reassemble it over there.”

John nodded. “I suppose that makes sense. They won't have to look for material to build it with.”

“That's part of it. Also, I won't have to program the entire unit into them. They'll do that as they disassemble it. It's actually how the bots learn lots of things.”

Marc was nodding. “That sounds great, Dad. I'll go that route, but once I'm done constructing the units, I'm going to continue rebuilding the connections on this side. As a backup.”

“Good idea,” Daddy told him.

“It sounds like we have a plan,” I said.

“I still need a deadline,” John told me.

“That's not necessary, John,” Carla said apologetically.

“I want one anyway,” he told her. “I want that skunk dead. He killed so many people, including our parents. He needs to be removed from our lives.”

Carla shook her head. “Have you any idea how many women he's had as furniture or decorations? Light fixtures suspended from ceilings. Statues in his ‘palace throne room?’”

“That’s why I want him dead,” John told her.

“I want him to spend time as he treated those women,” Carla explained. “I think it’s only fitting.”

---

Please remember to comment and to leave kudos!

--Rosemary

Thanks to Malady for his help editing and for ideas.

To Return Home 2.2

"I don't give a damn who it is, Bernie! I don't want you linking with anyone down there again!"

I stopped on my parent's porch. I had been reaching out to open the door, but now, hearing Daddy yelling, I wasn't sure I wanted to walk in on them. All three of us girls had a standing invitation to simply walk in, as did all of them, including Mama and Daddy, at our homes.

I had a particular reason to not want to walk in on this particular squabble. Mama was doing a favor for me. Apparently Amos was able to connect to others again. It frightened all of us. What was to stop him from trying to control us? I was very much afraid. Controlling me was something he might want to do to get to John.

I sat down on one of the bamboo chairs arranged around the umbrella table on their porch and pondered the problem. I could understand Daddy's anger. He was concerned. But I also knew he would agree that we had to go to great lengths in this situation.

I heard Mama's voice, but I couldn't understand what she was saying.

A moment later, Daddy was exploding. "Rose asked you to?!? We'll see about that!!!" Oh. That’s what she was saying.

I heard him stomping, and then the door swing open. He stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind him. He didn't look back, and I should have kept my mouth shut. I really should have.

"I'm right here, Daddy."

I was kicking myself as soon as I spoke. He turned, and his face was beet red. He was furious.

He stomped toward me, and I could see his anger as if it was oozing out of every pore in his body. However, there’s something about a daughter that no daddy can compete with. He dropped into the chair opposite me, and let out a big sigh. I knew he couldn’t stay angry for long, and so did he.

His face was still apoplectic as he stared at me, but I could see the red disappearing as I sat looking at him. I’m sure the dissipating ferocity was intentional as well as an unconscious response to his daughter.

Finally, in a quiet voice, he asked, “Why?”

Had I been Paula, I would have been smug and asked, ‘Why what?’ And as much as I had picked up on my older sibling’s example over the years, I decided to forego the temptation and Daddy’s resulting reaction. “We needed to know, and Mama is the only one who could get the information for us.”

“And did you think of your Mama’s wellbeing?”

“I almost didn’t ask her because of that. Then I thought of the reason she’s able to get that ‘intel’ and knew that she would never forgive me if I didn’t ask.”

Daddy seemed to deflate. “I know, Rosie.” I sighed in relief as he called me Rosie instead of Rose. “Your mama’s strength of character is one of the reasons I married her.” He gave a sudden laugh. “You know it took me forever to get her to call me ‘Vern’ instead of ‘Vernon?’ She didn’t think it was dignified to use a nickname. She preferred being called Bernice too.”

“She’s almost always called me Rosie,” I said, referring to the nickname.

“Yes, even when you were Gene.”

Suddenly, I laughed as well. “I do remember everyone calling me Gene, but with Mama I was always Eugene.”

“Yep. Prim and proper was her way. I think a lot of her easing off of a lot of that was when we realized you were Rose; not Eugene.” It seemed as if Daddy’s anger was gone. I didn’t want to bring it back though, so I just let him lead the conversation.

“She told me once that Paul and Fred were so close that if one had been a girl, they would have married.”

“They did,” I nodded.

“Yeah, they did.” He got a thoughtful look on his face. “I wonder if they would have, without the bond?”

I giggled. “I think they would have, Daddy. Mama was right when she said that.” My mirth quickly faded though, as I thought about Fred and how he had died.

Daddy seemed to read my mind. “Yeah. You’re right. We need to stop this animal. He doesn’t give a shit about anything. I’m so sorry that he and John are twins. Neither deserve a brother like that.”

I nodded in understanding. John was an incredible man. I’d had no idea that he had recognized me as a girl when we were kids, although when I thought about it, everything fell into place – things I hadn’t noticed at the time, but in retrospect, made perfect sense. Amos was beyond anything I could comprehend. Even having experienced his memories, and his motives… No. That wasn’t true. I hadn’t ever experienced what he was really like. I knew what Carla felt when she was controlled by him, but I experienced it from Carla’s perspective. She was only a passenger.

The only one who truly experienced Amos’ thoughts was Mama.

For a moment I shivered as I thought of Mama understanding what made him the way he was. Did she understand? Did she approve?

No! She couldn’t. She was working as hard as we were to stop him. Or was she?

Wonderful. Now I was second guessing everything again. I sighed as I considered what I knew, or thought I knew.

We sat for several minutes, saying nothing. After a bit, Daddy got up and pulled one of the other chairs to right beside mine. He sat down, and put an arm around me. “I’m sorry for getting so upset, Rosie. You are making the hard choices.” He chuckled. “I told you I knew you could, but I got mad when you did.”

I smiled as I leaned my head on his shoulder. “Thanks, Daddy.” I’m afraid, however, that my smile was only on my lips. I couldn’t stop thinking about Mama experiencing my mad brother-in-law’s thoughts.

-=#=-

The five of us in leadership roles set up a kind of town hall meeting after awhile. John, Marc, and I had done a similar thing while we could, on N21. After Amos’ program, one he apparently named ‘total_fun’, started, the fear between men and women prevented that.

We planned the town hall meetings on a lunar cycle, so once a month. Although we really had no year, or months on board the ship. We had it artificially, through Trent Carr’s holographic technology, and John’s arranging the ship to mimic the cycles of Earth.

Thus, a few nights after Daddy and I talked on his porch, we had a town hall meeting.

Vic Winston came forward. He was joined by Trent Carr. Both of them had been working on different sides of the holography technology. They had come up with an interesting method of using Vic’s force fields to give the feeling of reality to holographic constructs. Listening to their talk about what they had invented reminded me of the old Star Trek episodes where they had holodecks on board the ships – except we couldn’t produce matter with ‘replicators.’

Once they had finished, I wondered if we could use the tech for our rescue of the people downstairs. When I asked, they explained that they were considering different ways. One was a portable generator that would mimic some ponies and a chariot. I got a distaste in my mouth at the thought, but it might be necessary.

"Will it be able to carry a person?" I asked.

"I believe so," said Trent.

“That's very interesting,” John commented. “But, I thought force fields needed a huge generator for power.”

“We've been able to do a tradeoff. By upping the wattage, we've been able to create a sufficient field.”

Marc was very curious. “We couldn't do that before,” he stated. “What have you changed?”

“We're using the photons of the holograms to create the fields.”

there was a lot of murmuring in the hall. Lots of people couldn't seem to believe that light would be able to seem solid. I think Marc spoke for all of us when he said, “That's impossible!”

Vic and Trent we're standing at a lectern in the center of the auditorium. Trent hadn't said much since they arrived. In fact, I don't think he’d said anything. Now, Vic seemed to be fiddling with his watch, and Trent opened his mouth as if to speak. Then he picked up a glass of water from the lectern and took a drink. Vic looked back up and asked, “Why do you say that, Marc?” Trent took another drink, finishing off the glass.

“The amount of power required to make photons solid... Would literally be astronomical!”

“You think so?” He gestured up to the projector hanging from the ceiling. People who had ideas to present to us used it for holographic slideshows. I saw that the green light that showed it being on was lit. What was he doing? There were just the two of them there.

Vic touched his watch again. Trent flashed out of existence and we heard the water he had drank, splash the floor. I glanced at my brother-in-law and he was starting wide-eyed at Vic. None of us suspected that Trent had been a hologram. Trent touched his watch again and Trent was standing beside him again. All five of us were out of our seats in an instant, hurrying to the lectern. I reached out and touched the faux Trent's hand, then face. He felt as real as any person. Except... “It's cold,” I said to Vic.

I heard Trent's voice from the doorway. “We're working on a way to make a person seem warm to the touch. Not to mention an AI smart enough to control him.”

Vic continued. “We've got a way to warm it, but this projector doesn't produce enough power. Needless to say, we need enough power to create the necessary amount of heat. We probably could have warmed it gradually, but we really need to be able to produce more power to make it truly effective.”

“This…” I wasn’t sure what to say, so I finally settled on, “This is incredible!”

---

Please don't forget to comment and leave kudos!

--Rosemary

Thanks to Malady for his help editing and for ideas.

I’d also like to apologize in advance for the bending of physical laws in the following chapter. I suppose in my defense, I’ve been watching some lectures from the Royal Institute lately, and maybe it’s gotten me thinking a bit more – sideways?

To Return Home

2.3

John and I were in The Heavens Rose and I was trying to think, which was something I always did better in my kitchen. He had offered to help me, but was instead sitting on a stool placed in a corner where he could see me. It wasn't that I didn't want his help, but that we’d found that I would process things better while cooking, rather than explaining what needed done..

John wasn't just sitting watching me, though. He was explaining how he was hoping we could use the solid photons Vic and Trent had discovered.

“Really, Rose. I'm not sure you understand the gravity of the situation,” he said with a smirk on his face.”

I stopped what I was doing, and put my hands on my hips, glaring at him. “Would you care to enlighten me?” I knew there was something more to what he was saying... Probably one of his horrendous puns. I decided I'd figure it out soon enough, so I didn't push it.

He turned serious, and I knew he was going to tell me something with relatively little humor in it. “Do you remember what you read about the engines?”

I gave him a strange look and pointed to my necklace which was sitting on a small shelf by the kitchen door.

“Okay, Hon. Did you understand it?”

I glared and asked, “What do you think? Physics has never been my strong suit. I understand chemistry, so I understood the old reaction engines. But these? Hardly.”

He nodded and proceeded to explain, but in a way that I could grasp the simpler concepts.

The power for the ship came from the engines, but in a rather unusual way. The old stations converted to ships, N21 and N22, utilized reaction engines, although very powerful ones. When the new colonization ships were built, however, it was realized that there was no way to provide enough fuel for reaction engines to speed up and slow down more than twice.

Neo22 was built when people were desperate to make strides that had never been made before. There was no way for people to live on Earth, so changes had to be made. One of the areas that had made huge progress was the understanding of gravity. Of course, even before N21 was built, there was enough understanding to give any satellite, or ship, artificial gravity.

But the new strides allowed much finer control than had previously been possible. When coupled with the ability to produce a gravitational field through a relatively small amount of power, it allowed the use of gravity to produce safety measures in different areas of the ship with the low amounts of energy available.

Another remarkable discovery that became an integral part of the engine was dark matter. Not dark matter itself. We'd known about that for hundreds of years, but how to harness it, or more exactly, harness our ship to it. By increasing the gravity of dark matter pulling on the side of the ship in the direction we wanted to go, we were able to make the dark matter pull our ship. That alone wouldn't make it move very quickly, but by reversing the polarity of the gravity behind the ship, we would be both pushed and pulled in the direction we wanted to go, turning two slow methods of propulsion into one fast enough to be usable.

From there, the uses expanded even more. Gravity generation became the backbone of so many functions on board the ship. They weren’t just our engines, or letting us walk on the floors, we had a containment field of sorts, we had anti-gravity tractors.

“The thing is, Hon, whenever we expand something one way, we lose something in another. We can make a gravity field extremely powerful, but when we do, we have to focus it tighter.”

I shook my head. Maybe I was missing something. “What do you mean by focusing a field?”

“Okay. We have two types of fields that we use with gravity, depending on how we want to use it.”

I decided to take a break for a moment, so I sat down facing John.

He continued. “The first type of field is what I described for our propulsion. We sort of turn the ship into a ‘gravity magnet’ with a ‘north and south pole’. Normally, gravity doesn’t work that way, but somehow, physicists have made it work. But doing this, narrows its effect, which in our case is fine. We want to only project normal gravity in front of us, and anti-gravity behind us.”

I nodded. So far, so good.

“But we need it amplified considerably. That’s where the dark matter comes in. To amplify it to the extreme we need, we have to focus it so much that it only affects things in a very small space.”

I nodded. “I’m not sure I understand, but continue, and maybe I’ll make the connection when you’ve given me a bit more information.”

“Well, what do we do if we’re nowhere near a planetary body, or a star? What do we grab onto to move?”

I wondered if his question was rhetorical, but he seemed to want me to answer. “Dark matter?” I asked hesitantly. I mean, it seemed like a logical answer, and apparently, it was correct.

“Right. Dark matter is pretty much everywhere. There’s almost six times as much dark matter as there is regular matter in the universe. So even though we might not be able to lock onto something that’s visible, we can do it to the invisible. We can’t accelerate as fast by using dark matter, but we can still slowly speed up.” He paused for a moment. “I remember the idea of propelling a ship with solar winds, which seems like a great idea, but it would take so long to accelerate that it would take millions of years to accelerate. Granted, you could eventually be going nearly the speed of light, because the photons that make up the winds travel that fast. I suppose if we were in intergalactic space, it would take awhile to do any maneuvering, even with dark matter, but it would be possible to do it, where with solar winds, it would be almost impossible.”

“Uh huh.” I love the man, but he can get so distracted when he’s talking about sciencey things. “It sounds interesting, and it obviously works as we’re moving pretty fast. How does this help us now?”

He looked sad. I guess he was wanting to continue his explanations. It wasn’t often that I let him wow me with tech talk. I guess I needed to do it more often. I have to say, I was having fun listening as well. “I’m sorry for cutting you off, John. Please continue.”

He smiled a bit, and as he continued speaking, he seemed to gain his good mood again, and was soon speaking with as much feeling as before. “We get our electricity in much the same way. Our generators are in a vacuum, and we use a gravity generator pulling an armature around a stator to produce power. It uses only a little electricity to produce a lot more.”

I couldn’t help myself. “But that sounds like a perpetual motion machine!”

His smile got bigger. “It’s not. We convert gravity to electricity. We’re also using gravity already existing, and amplifying it. When we use the gravity this way, we lose the effect on other items, by amplifying it. It sort of narrows the beam. Sort of like how we can increase the voltage of electricity by sacrificing amperage.”

My head was spinning. I wasn’t sure how this was possible, but obviously, it was. We had plenty of power.

“The thing is, I think we can use this, as along with some of the other tech we have, and the solid light, to permanently disarm Amos.”

I stared at him. “How?” I asked in a small voice.

“What if we could target every bot in his body, and crush it with gravity?”

I couldn’t even fathom that idea. Could it be done? “Can you target through his body without hurting him?”

The look he gave was almost apologetic. “Rose. It hardly matters if we hurt him or not. The only reason I want to target each nanobot is so none of them are left. I don’t think it would be prudent to leave any of them alive.” He let that sink in a bit, then explained a bit more. “I say that it hardly matters that it will kill him eventually, regardless of whether we attacked him directly or just the bots. It would be a terrible death as well. Someone dying, ravaged by disease and old age. We haven’t seen that for years.”

“He wouldn’t have any immune system.” I tried to ignore the fact that we were talking about killing someone in cold blood. Removing what we knew would be his defense against a slow and painful death. I pushed that thought from my mind. I knew it had to be, and there was no way out for him. He had brought it on himself.

-=#=-

At our next meeting of the five, we discussed John’s plan. He went into much greater detail than he had for me directly. That was fine, as I wasn’t of a very technical mind, unless it had to do with a mixing bowl or a musical staff.

We were in Daddy’s home, and John had the floor, so to speak. We were seated around a table that had materialized in his office, rather than his desk. It was an oval table, and Daddy was at one end, while Paula and I sat opposite Marc and John.

It wasn’t a real table, but made with a hologram and force fields. Soon, the system would be replaced by a solid light hologram. It would take much less power then, and seem much more real, but the current ‘table’ worked for now.

John had a tablet on the table in front of him, and as he touched a control, a hologram appeared above the table. It showed the two halves of the ship pinwheeling along side by side in the void. I thought of the explanation John had given me of the engines and wondered how we compensated for the spin of the ship. Oh well, obviously we did.

“What I propose we do is slowly bring the ships as close together as we can, then bridge them using a solid light bridge. I think if we can tap into the projectors inside, we should be able to make a construct that can carry a gravity generator to Amos.”

“What would the gravity generator do?” Paula asked, clearly intrigued.

“I propose we map where every nanobot in his body is, and focus the generator on them at high power. Then we crush them. Literally.”

“We could do the same thing from here,” Marc said.

“Too risky. I don’t want to target the wrong person.”

“Why use the… Oh. Never mind,” Daddy suddenly said.

“Why use what?” John asked.

“I was wondering why we don’t use a force field sled to get it to him, but with the solid light, you can make it pretty well undetectable.”

John nodded. “Right. We can sneak it in. With the gravity generator completely encased inside a solid light box, it’s invisible if we cloak it in the same way as one of our cloaking suits. And using the already present hologram generators, we can avoid contact with any person. The chance of them noticing the power drain would be negligible.”

“Who will we have to inform of our plans?”

“Well, Vic and Trent, obviously. The Docs. Marc and I can handle the mechanics of it.”

“I can make a virus for their computers that will build the control system for the sled and grav generator,” Marc said.

“How can we map the bots?” Paula asked.

“That’s where we’ll need the docs. I got the idea from when we looked inside Rose’s brain. We could see the bots that were transmitting her memories to and from her crystals.”

We sat digesting the information for a while. Finally, Daddy said, “All in favor?”

The other four raised their hands, so it hardly mattered if I did, but I slowly raised mine as well. I felt sick to my stomach, although I knew that my feelings were based on reading his fake memories.

“Let's do it, then.” Daddy said.

I noticed that I didn’t have any duties in that plan, so I turned to John, “What will you need me to do?”

“Figure out how to help those people. They’ll be without a leader.”

I must have gone several shades of white as my head seemed to spin. “Okay, John.”

---

Please don't forget to leave kudos and comment!
Thanks!
Rosemary