Suddenly the door opened. A man in his thirties entered the room and the three turned to face him, Super Soakers loaded and ready. The man looked like he had seen more in his life than he ever wanted to, there was a tired and nervous expression on his face which was full of badly healed wounds. He was dressed in a worker's suit and the remains of a somewhat futuristic battle gear. His left leg was, from the knee down, mostly artificial, steel wires and plastic covers entwined with infected but live meat. All in all, he looked really ugly. He was armed with a dark parody of the three's Super Soakers, a steam-powered black and rusty rifle with a steel tank on top. Lisa was the first to decide that he really could have used a new body, and possibly a new attitude towards life. So she aimed right at the man's mouth, instinctively compensating for angle, and let her finger indulge a little on the trigger. "Wait" the man said "This is the fourth time I've been through this. Last time I failed and barely made it out alive. Can we TALK ABOUT IT FOR ONCE, for Thomas Edison's sake?" The last sentence made Jim reason about the whole thing. They were about to go out to conquer the world via a sexually enhancing liquid that he himself didn't really know how he made. The liquid itself replicates and the fact that Sharon's mother had literally created a Super Soaker Recruiter from herself indicated that the replication was supposed to be faster than exponential. Being a regular visitor of the BEArchive, Jim couldn't help connecting this and the stranger's quote with a series of stories he'd read on the Archive last year. The whole matter was about a goo called the Essence which in the end managed to reshape all of humanity into a hypersexed Borg collective, or something like that. Jim also noticed that he was the only one reasoning about all this. Sharon and her mother had tried to fire at the stranger, who took the splash without apparent effects and shot back with two darts from his steam gun. A force within Jim told him to return fire, but he kept it on hold. "I know that's just tranquilizer. You don't kill. Am I wrong?" "How the hack is it possible that you know me?" the stranger asked. "You're a fictional character. I read about you." "Possible. The same might be said about you too. And about whoever is reading our own story, and so on and so forth. With all the warping I have been doing lately, it's strange I haven't met Santa Claus yet." Only then the young ex-nerd and the old nerd-ex decided to end the Mexican stand-off and lower their weapons. The two women would have been KO for a good couple of hours, so they had time to talk. Like two business acquaintances, they settled down in the dining room to talk. "What do you know about me, mr. Jim?" "You've trying to resist the Essence, freed your boyhood girlfriend from its control, joined forces with a religious lunatic and escaped assimilation by fleeing on the MIR space station." "I see. Well, a lot of other stuff has happened in seven years, but I do not really feel like telling you (that will be narrated in Essence VII) so let me jsut explain. There is a spaceship full of Essence-filled aliens. They have gotten the strongest flavor of the stuff and now the only thing on their minds is to recruit the whole universe. They have done that at least the two times they haven't been stopped. You see, their wasn't much of a spaceship..." "More like a warp machine?" "Exactly. It travels between realities. It needs to be in deep space to initiate the warping device, though." "And so you've taken on the mission of stopping them... that's just in charachter with you, Steven Copenhaver. So quixotic. By the way, where's that cute girl of yours, Rose?" "You must mean Lily. I'd rather forget your previous insult and not talk about it, if you please, mister." "Fine. I know you're a whizbang inventor, but how did you manage to replicate the alien warp engine? That sounds a little too farfetched to me." "And it would be. I have managed to build a passive warper in tune with theirs... it sends me where they have already been, in a variable time interval. My best hope is to catch them before they land or take off." "Man, you look shattered." "I am. Three damn years chasing phantoms and the previous four weren't candy either, as you know." "OK, point made... there are two things which I do not understand, however. Why are we having this conversation, and why the hell do you bother?" "I bother because I believe in cultural diversity. And I am talking to you because in this reality the Essence seems rather weak, so you still have your own mind. Plus, you're a pretty bright guy. I need your help to have an active warper function long enough to confront the aliens." "What if I decided to 'recruit' you instead?" "I'm impervious. My primal will; my curse." "Makes sense to me. Well, you know what, mr. Copenhaver?" "Tell me."
Wed Jun 23 15:38:02 1999