For Every Action - The Quantum Mechanic Series Book I

With the exception of Janelle, everyone present for Jessica’s message had hastily reassembled in the main conference room. Only minutes earlier Barnes, Sallinger, and Eddie had debriefed the AI as best they could considering the time limitations. A groggy looking Ginney had joined them a few minutes later and was nursing a massive mug of coffee. Tammy could see he was trying to absorb everything Eddie had told him and Jacob was brooding silently in the corner. Whatever it was that Janelle had referred to when she told him to listen to Jessica… it was obvious that it had affected him deeply.

Then Liao brought the enormous holographic table online and Eddie flicked the file Sheng had given him to it. To everyone’s surprise, a progress bar appeared floating above the glass and as far as she could recall nothing like that had ever happened at RAMBUS. The technology here was beyond state of the art and the idea of waiting for a computer had become a distant memory for her.

“Geez”, Ginney exclaimed, “How big is this file?”

“Three point seven yottabytes”, Eddie replied, “I couldn’t carry it on my slate so I had to pull the secondary drive from the workstation and put it into the server rack before you got here. It’s just so big that even our fiber backbone chokes on it.” He looked anxiously back to the progress bar, and the rest of them stood or sat quietly, nursing coffee or tea as they waited for the transfer. It took a full four minutes, but finally the bar disappeared and Eddie began waving his hands over the surface and tapping out terminal commands.

A moment later a faintly glowing blue outline flickered into place over the surface and began gaining detail. When it was finished it displayed a peaceful looking Jessica floating upside down in a fetal position. Her left hand was protectively curled over the stump of her right wrist and her long blonde hair swirled around her head like a slow motion tempest. The breathing, feeding, and other tubes that Sallinger had so meticulously secured for her were gone. In their place were delicate, organic looking connections that looped around and merged with a strange, semi-organic mass that floated behind her. It pulsed and thrummed in a complex rhythm that mimicked both heartbeat and breathing. Tammy looked closely, and saw that Jessica’s chest wasn’t moving, but a series of numbers that appeared next to her showed healthy blood oxygen levels and other vitals.

“Eddie, can you retract the table please?“, Barnes asked and began moving the chairs back towards the walls. Tammy gave him a puzzled look as she wondered what he was talking about, but before she could say anything Eddie nodded and tapped out a sequence on the glass. Immediately there was a deep thud under their feet, and an equally deep hum as the table sank down to become flush with the floor. Barnes and Eddie stepped onto the surface with a practiced ease that made it clear they had done this before, and after a moment the others joined in. Able to see closer now, Tammy was astonished at the definition and clarity of the holographic image. She had never seen anything that even came close to rivaling it, and that was saying something considering the technology they had access to here.

Eddie whistled, “Wow, no wonder the file was so big. That’s a molecular level rendering... it’s incredible.”

Sallinger, who had stepped up next to Eddie slowly put a hand up and passed slightly trembling fingertips through the ephemeral mass, “My God... It’s a synthetic placenta...“, he murmured, “No one’s even close to theorizing how to do that”, and Eddie nodded in agreement, “That by itself has to be one of the greatest medical achievements in history.”

But their conversation was cut short when Jacob interjected, “When all of this is over you can study it as much as you want, but right now you need to get focused on Jessica.”

Barnes, Eddie, and Sallinger turned to look at Jacob, but then quickly averted their eyes. The disapproving look Tammy had seen him give the Director had returned and as before no one could stand under its soul-piercing power. So they looked over at Eddie instead as he tapped out a few new commands on his slate. When he was finished a second image appeared next to the first and it also displayed Jessica within it.

But this was not the girl they had known.

Where her features had always been slightly rounded and petite, giving her a sweet and delicate look, this figure sported more angular lines, a fiercer countenance, and a sleeker profile. But only a fool would judge this creature weak due to its sylph-like slightness. The skinless body before them virtually gleamed with a lean and focused savagery that gave it an aura of power unlike anything Tammy had ever seen. The muscles were tightly constructed with black fibers so densely packed that the tissues looked like polished mahogany. They were bonded seamlessly into the titanium bones and the contrast this created gave the body an almost armored appearance. Tammy couldn’t even begin to imagine what half of the other structures she was seeing were for and when she looked deeper she saw there was more - a lot more.

Woven within everything were thousands of tiny organelles bound to each other by a dense network of glimmering threads. Power coursed through this to lick along the bones and light the muscles from within like miniaturized lightning storms. Titanium and ceramiplastic meshes wove, and layered themselves thickly into everything, and the bones themselves gleamed with hues that she knew indicated an alloy of heavy metals. Joints were heavily reinforced and the knuckles, knees, elbows, shins, and foot arches had been armor plated. Intricate patterns of circuitry seemed to be embedded everywhere as well. They were etched into the surfaces of every organ and muscle, and ran along every nerve, vein, and artery.

Beautifully arched cantilevering mechanisms had also been integrated into the powerful, compact muscles lining the thighs and calves. Equally elaborate and completely unidentifiable technologies filled the forearms, shoulders, and all of the other major muscle groups. But it was the head that caused her to finally question whether she could believe what she was seeing. It was so tightly packed with circuitry that it completely defied description. Curved heavy alloy plates hovered nearby, waiting for placement.

Curious, she put her thumb and forefinger slightly above the surface of one eye and spread them apart. A bubble of magnification appeared and what she saw drew a gasp of shock from her. She quickly put both hands above the bubble and spread her arms wide, causing it to snap out into a three-foot-wide disk between her palms. The magnification increased exponentially as Sallinger stepped up behind her and they stared in profound silence at what it revealed. Millions of micronites and nanites were swarming over ever surface; constructing, connecting, etching, and sewing. Layers upon layers of deeply interconnected technologies were being slowly built up, and Tammy suddenly realized what the mahogany muscles were.

“It’s all technology... she whispered in awe, “The bones, the muscles... all of it. Down to a cellular level.”

“No,” Sallinger corrected, “Look deeper.”

Reaching out, Tammy spread her hands again, and again, repeating until the magnification level on the edge of the disk read 500,000. They were looking at the surface of a single cell, and it also swarmed with micronites. Everywhere they looked the creatures were weaving and building tech.

“Deeper”, Sallinger prodded again and Tammy complied by zooming in on the cell’s nuclei. The ring grew as tall as she was and the magnification jumped to a million to one, then to ten million to one before Sallinger stopped her. “Look”, he said, and pointed to the nuclei wall, “It’s down to the molecular level... it might even go down to the atomic.”

Tammy suddenly felt overwhelmed by what she was seeing and simply stared in shock. The structures, circuitry, and interwoven connections before her were just as complex as what was on the surface of the eye - possibly more. She had been wrong. This wasn’t just technology layered on technology; it was technology inside of technology... in an almost infinitely nested sequence. My God… Jessica wasn’t just being rebuilt with integrated tech. It was becoming the underlying substance of her body… the very essence of her being. Not a single square atom of space was being spared and it was all so profoundly elegant in design and form that the result was artistically staggering. Tammy was no expert, but she knew that this had to be the greatest medical and technological achievement in history - and it was terrifying. This was her little girl. The one she had held while she slept for weeks. The one she had held when she awoke so horribly. The one she had fed from a spoon for months and cared for as she went through brutal surgery after surgery to repair her broken life. This was her… baby.

With a half choked sob she turned away, hidden from the others by the disk. She started to head for the conference room doors, but before she could leave Sallinger stopped her. Looking down at her with his unflinchingly cool blue eyes, he fixed her with a sternly paternal look.

“Stop it! Stop running away Tammy. You’ve done nothing but run and hide since Corsica. But you can’t get away from this... and I should know. I’ve done enough running away from feelings to know it when I see it. I know what you’re running from. I know you love her.”

Tammy looked up at him astonished, and was embarrassed to feel hot tears streaming down her cheeks, but she could see it was pointless to protest. He had seen through her and now her shame was out.

“Yes”, she murmured. Then even more quietly, so that only Sallinger could hear “I should have protected her from this. I should have seen how angry she was... helped her get past it. I should have… I should….”

Sallinger reached out to draw her in close and hold her tightly, “I know. I saw how much you loved her in your eyes the day I had to take her leg. I almost couldn’t do it after I realized what it would do to you.”

Tammy pushed him away and stepped back, wiping her eyes, “No!... Stop! Stop feeling sorry for me. I’m a horrible person. I’ve got no right to this... I’m not her mom. I... I can’t ever be her mom, or anyone’s mom. I just....”

But Sallinger stopped her before she could continue, “Tammy listen up… we don’t get to choose who we love, or when we lose them. God was good enough to take that away from us and we don’t have to live with the consequences of decisions like that. But while we have those people in our lives we have a responsibility to love them completely. Otherwise, what’s the point in living?” He regarded her carefully after his last statement, and Tammy glanced back over her shoulder at the spinning form.

“But what if she’s not her anymore when she comes out?“, she asked softly.

“Then whatever it is we have to accept that it’s what Jessica needed to send into the world to stop this coming tide of monsters and to avenge her parents. She offered up her life for a chance at justice and we have to accept that. All we can do is pray that she comes out of the other side OK.”

Tammy stood trembling in front of Sallinger for several long moments before stepping forward again to hug him. “Thank you... I guess you’re not quite the bastard I thought you were.”

“No”, Sallinger replied, “Trust me… I’m a much bigger bastard than you could ever imagine. But even bastards have souls... so your secret is safe with me.”

Laughing, Tammy stepped back and finished drying her eyes. Then once she had composed herself, she dismissed the magnification ring with a wave and furrowed her brow in puzzlement at what she saw.

Eddie and Liao stood together, virtually slack jawed in wonder and an almost alarming level of concern as they examined the other side of the projection. Tammy slipped over to see what justified such a reaction and Jacob appeared on the other side of them. Ginney and Sallinger eventually crowded in as well and they tried to make sense of what they were seeing.

Across the girl’s back, strange disc-like constructs had been integrated with the shoulders and ribs. Two larger ones were nested in the center of each shoulder blade, while two smaller ones were placed just above the kidneys. A fifth one, the largest of all, was integrated directly into the spine just below the neck. Power flickered and arced from them all in thunderous waves, generating what lit the muscles from within and Tammy felt and instinctual fear of them. Something deep within told her that forces of truly terrifying proportions were at play.

After a moment she looked over at Eddie who started to say, “Jesus Chri...“, before catching himself. Then he glanced over at Jacob before continuing, “Uh, I mean - Holy Cow, are... are those what I think they are?”

Liao leaned in and looked almost mesmerized in the glowing blue light of the projection. “I think so. They have to be Tesla Micro-Antimatter Generators... I guess Sa’allad and Gulteken’s theories were right. The plans they left worked.”

Tammy was confused and started to ask what they were talking about, but Ginney beat her to the punch. “Uh guys? Can you say that in English for us retards please? What the hell are you talking about?” Elena turned and rolled her eyes at him, “You slept through engineering class too, didn’t you? Geez... Tesla theorized that some of the phenomena he saw escaping from his large coil experiments were actually antimatter particles, but he never got around to exploring it. Back in twenty eighteen, Sa’allad and Gulteken reproduced his experiment and managed to catch one escaping on camera. But they could never stabilize the effect, and in twenty-two they published a paper theorizing that there was some sort of inverse-proportional rule in play. They believed that if you could build a reactor small enough that you could stabilize the antimatter, and generate power by how it interacted.”

Jacob stepped closer, “Wait, how much power are we talking about here?”

“Theoretically?“, Liao responded, looking up at him, “Practically infinite in short bursts I would think. But even stretched out over long periods just one of these things could probably provide enough power for two thirds of the planet. They never wear out, there are no moving parts and all they have to do is spin. Centrifugal force does the rest and since there’s no fission it doesn’t produce any waste.”

“Fuck me, are you serious?“, Ginney gasped, and Tammy cut him off before he could say anything else, “Hold on, how could they be inside her body? Aren’t they radioactive?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking”, Eddie replied, “It’s a different sort of nuclear power. All it produces is neutrinos and literally hundreds of trillions of those go through you every time you go out in the sun. They’re so small that a single atom is the size of a solar system to them. The odds of them hitting anything are trillions and trillions to one.”

“So why didn’t those guys build one and solve the world’s energy problems?”

“Sa’allad and Gulteken were Muslims. They both went on the Haaj to Mecca in twenty-three.” Eddie replied, and everyone in the room knew what that meant. Mecca had been nuked at the peak of the pilgrimage that year and millions of people had died. It had almost started world war three.

Liao nodded, “Everybody thought they were crackpots and the technology didn’t exist to construct generators as small as they said they needed to be. So the idea just got shelved and serious scientists wouldn’t go near it for fear of being discredited.“, Liao finished, “I was practically shunned out of the physics department at Stanford just for asking about it.”

“That’s an interesting history lesson”, Jacob interjected again, “But it doesn’t answer the real question here - why so much power? It has to be thousands of times more than she would need, even with this body.”

“It makes perfect sense”, Barnes interjected, “Think about it. She needs it to be certain that she’ll be able to overpower and kill the things we saw under that bridge. She knows all about the assailants too and maybe even the plans for the other kinds. She can’t just hunt down these Grendels and kill them... she has to become Beowulf first.”

“Yeah, but these things will produce more power than all the nuclear bombs mankind has ever set off combined”, Eddie mused and Tammy could see that he looked troubled, “She’s seriously not fucking around.”

“I wouldn’t either.“, Liao said solemnly, “I’m not much bigger than her and if I was going after a team of twelve-foot-tall cybernetic monsters, and only God knows what else, I’d want to have the biggest gun in the world just to even up the odds...”

The room grew quiet as they all contemplated that and watched as the images of Jessica’s old and new forms rotated.

After a long pause Eddie finally spoke, “Well, according to the schedule Sheng gave us the image of her current body is just showing us the disassembly and molecular mapping phase. We should probably let the simulation catch up to where she is now so we can track her progress - is that OK with everyone?” They all nodded and Eddie tapped out a few commands on his slate. Immediately the svelte and shark-like vision of Jessica’s future dispersed and her current form began to change. Lines appeared across her body in a complex web like pattern, and she relaxed from her fetal position to that of an inverted “T”. The exposed tissues at the end of her amputations floated softly and bodily fluids could be seen leaking from them in small amounts. Then a long console window appeared next to her and data began streaming by at an incredible rate. Numbers mixed with Sumerian characters and mathematical symbols blended to create an information torrent that raced down before them like a flood. Suddenly, amidst the deluge, amber characters began to appear, creating streaks that ran up through the cerulean blue current.

Then the symbols swirled out from a raging torrent into a set of concentric rings. The rings began to turn and a deep, skull rattling tone sounded from every speaker in the room. It didn’t sound like any signal Tammy had heard before, but its purpose was clear. Like the horn of massive cruise ship being sounded before it entered a port, it was the signal for the beginning of a dangerous maneuver.

“What’s happening?“, Liao asked, and Eddie marveled aloud in response, “I have no idea.”

Before their eyes, Jessica’s body suddenly began to break up. Tammy let out a long, soul-rending scream and her knees gave way at the horror of what she was seeing. The lines in the little girl’s form became separation points and with a wet, elastic pulling - she split apart. Individual sections telescoped out in all directions; including hair, skin, muscles, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, and bones. Even the organs sectioned apart, the skull fragmented into neat, hexagonal pieces, and her brain was deconstructed. Micronite colonies could be seen working quickly over every surface and flowing through the tissues.

When it was all over, Jessica drifted before them in a completely exploded view, and all of her bodily fluids drained away like a darkly swirling cloud. Tammy collapsed to the floor and sobbed; one hand outstretched to the projection as if she could somehow reach in and comfort the child. Jacob staggered backwards in shock until he struck the wall and slid down to the floor in horror.

Eddie, Sallinger, and Liao stood rooted to their spots, utterly stupefied by what they were seeing. “Is she dead? How could she still be alive?“, Liao gasped. “Look”, Eddie whispered, and pointed to the gap between two telescoped sections of a finger. Liao and Sallinger peered in closely, and Eddie used a gesture to magnify the area. Floating between the segments were thousands of gossamer thin strands of the golden material they had seen in her final form. Weaker flashes of light flickered along them in irregular patterns, and the flesh quivered at its touch. “She’s on life support... at a cellular level”, Sallinger answered reverently, “Just enough energy to keep each cell alive until it’s replaced.” Liao bent to comfort Tammy, doing her best to explain what was happening, and tried to make it clear that Jessica was OK.

But Tammy was beyond consolation and felt as if she’d been drained of emotion. Elena’s voice became nothing more than a flat droning that echoed down to her from the end of a long tunnel. She couldn’t stop seeing Jessica come apart like she’d been dissected, seeing her upside down inside the pulsating cocoon, seeing her being lowered into the gel. Like a reel on an unending loop, the sequence of horrifying events repeated itself over and over while nightmarish scenes of ghoulish monsters from Corsica merged in from her subconscious.

It was too much.

Deep within, she felt some basic component of herself buckle as she curled into a ball to squeeze her head between her hands and rock back and forth. A low keening began to squeeze itself out of her and rose until it became a series of intermingled moans, sobs, and pleading. She fought it desperately, knowing somehow that giving it full voice would open the way for something she would do anything to avoid. But with a horrible rending she felt it break free from her subconscious and come scrambling towards her in long, predatory lunges. With horror she watched as it loomed up out of her memories, dark and fetid with the stenches of murder, blood, cruelty, and rotting flesh. It smelled her heartbreak and despair and gleefully pounced to drag her back to her own personal hell. She heard her voice screaming from somewhere..

Terrified beyond sanity, she was paralyzed as a long repressed flood of horror, blood, agony, and flames came forth. Her screams returned from whatever distant world they had fled to and she felt her throat rattling itself raw from their bitterness. Clutching at her head, she felt her nails tearing furrows into her scalp as the slaughter at Corsica replayed itself across the theatre of her mind. She saw Jenny Gonzales sprint from their barracks and almost immediately backpedal as a twelve-foot-high biomechanical nightmare rounded the corner of the PX. Spotting her, it snarled and dropped to all fours like a rabid beast. Jenny managed to regain her balance and turned to run, but was immediately impaled on the ragged blade of the second assailant that had come up behind her. Blood gouted darkly from her mouth and her scream was cut off in a wet splash as the monster flipped its bladed arm upwards. Torso, neck, and head were instantly sliced apart vertically, leaving her legs to stand for a moment as the two sides of her split apart to dangle down like the peels of a banana. Only then did her knees buckle and her body slumped into the dirt.

Tammy trembled, weeping as everything that happened after the sadistic monstrosities breached the base walls echoed in impossibly vivid detail across her memory. She saw the Marine unit challenge an assailant on open ground, pouring firepower into it like avenging angels. It shrugged off their assault like it was an annoyance and waded into them with a chainsaw-like blade. Blood, limbs, and organs flew as it slaughtered them in three heartbeats.

She saw men and women running madly in all directions as another assailant blew them to pieces with high powered rounds. She saw one of the monsters become engulfed in flames and stagger directionless as its biological parts boiled, only to collapse onto the PX and ignite it like tinder. She saw bodies being flung across the base like the broken toys of an enraged child. Some burned, others lay in pieces, and even more were reduced to a gruesome rubble of dismembered parts that carpeted everything. The soil under the base ran red, purple, and black with the souls of her battalion, her teammates, and her friends.

Screaming herself hoarse, she desperately tried to crawl away to escape her horror. But the vision continued unabated. She watched it all end as Marine Sergeant McCallum faced off against the last assailant across the body strewn expanse of the motor pool lot. She saw a makeshift plate of tank armor chained onto the front of a huge forklift and twenty metal barrels of fuel strapped to its frame. She saw the detonation cord running around it all, and the suicide switch he held in his one good hand. His other arm and most of that side of his body was burned into a half melted mass of blackened flesh. But the incinerated limb still managed to grip and steer as he launched himself at the abomination. The assailant emptied its weapons into the armor plate as McCallum charged across the lot. But the Sergeant had chosen this to be the time and place of his death and with a horrendous crunch he rammed into the monster’s legs. Then he let out a scream so filled with rage, despair, and agony that Tammy knew it would haunt her to her grave. The fuel detonated and the monster, McCallum, and a fourth of the base were incinerated. The explosion mixed with the detonations from the artillery emplacement above her and she felt hot, burning impacts as molten shrapnel mixed with pieces of weapons and men punched holes in her body.

She felt herself fall, and fall, and fall.

She fell forever.

Then it all started over. In an infinite mix of interchanging horrors, she wove in and out of her own personal hell.

The poor boys in the tanks.

The monster that became the faceless victim of its own brethren, clawing itself in circles under the hot morning sun.

The burning medical tent with doctors and nurses desperately dragging patients to safety, only to be slaughtered by blade, flame, or blast.

Jenny peeling apart like an overripe fruit. The look of horrified surprise on the half of her face that Tammy could see.

Thirty-six demons from the darkest pit of hell boiling up out of the sand and loped towards her like plague from judgment day.

Turning to run for her station, to do her duty, and die.

Feeling selfish cowardice make a traitor of her by freezing her in her tracks.

Watching as they died so she could live.

Severed limbs littering the ground.

Wet screams cut short by disembowelment.

Burning flesh.

Smoke.

Horror.

Guilt.

Hate.

Then she suddenly felt arms lifting and cradling her. A man’s deep voice droning at the edge of her hearing, drilling its way through the heart of her hallucinations. Something solid in a world that ran and flowed like blood. She could practically feel the voice... touch it. So she latched on, held tight and listened with all the focus she could muster to the deep resonating intonations as they slowly lifted her from hell. She knotted her fingers tightly to the material of a man’s shirt. She felt his breath on her forehead and smelled his cologne.

But her nightmare held on, screaming and clawing quivering ribbons of flesh from her soul as it fought her inexorable pull from its grasp. With a snarl, it redoubled its efforts, throwing new scenarios at her mind in an attempt to drag her back down. She saw her mother strapped to a stainless steel table, slowly being disassembled as parts to build more monsters. She saw herself, writhing and howling in terror as an assailant climbed the hill to pull her apart like taffy.

Finally, the vision seized her with all of the strength it had left, and seared into her mind the most horrible image of all. A tiny Jessica, trying desperately to crawl away from the assailants with her handless arm, only to have them drag her back, and stomp her into jelly.

Then she was free, and could feel the real world around her again. She felt the demon in her mind slink away, howling in frustration as it withdrew into whatever putrid corner of her mind it had escaped from. Doors closed inside her. Locks turned. Then the crushed and broken part of her psyche that had previously held the Corsican atrocities at bay drew its battered self back up - and resumed its watch.

Opening her eyes slowly. She blinked and tried to focus. A field of soft muted blues and reds undulated before her, moving up and down with a gentle rolling. She heard breathing and a voice… THE voice. She concentrated on focusing her eyes and a man’s cotton flannel shirt came into view. Then she looked up... and saw Jacob holding her close to him. Cradling her really, and he was praying for her with his eyes squeezed tightly shut. She suddenly realized that she was in Salinger’s office, lying on his couch with the upper half of her body in Jacob’s lap.

" Lord, you say that if we but ask with sincere heart it shall be given, that if we seek, that it is we ourselves who will be found, that if we but knock, the door shall be opened. Therefore, I come before you with penitent heart... ”

“J... Jacob?“, she asked tremulously.

The rest of that night was something of a blur. She vaguely remembered that Jacob had half supported and half carried her back to her quarters. She had fallen into a deep sleep almost immediately despite being soaked in sweat from head to toe and hurting all over like her first week of boot camp. Now she found herself sitting in the cafeteria, staring at a breakfast that she knew she should eat, but couldn’t bring herself to.

Then she noticed Jacob and Janelle coming in and the older woman stepped into line, leaning over to eyeball the various offerings behind the glass. But Jacob skipped past all of that and grabbed some fruit, a protein bar, and coffee before joining her. He ate quietly while she watched her bowl of cornflakes congeal into a solid mass of starch and dairy.

Her stomach felt like lead.

Then out of the corner of her eye she noticed that Dr Liao had come in and was eating quietly in another corner with Janelle. Jacob simply finished his coffee and just sat across from her in a way that she knew would have been incredibly awkward with anyone else. But for some reason with him it wasn’t. So when she finally grew tired of the charade her meal had become she decided to break the silence.

“I’m sorry.”

His only response was a slight smile and a shake of his head.

“No seriously. I shouldn’t have freaked out like that. It’s my job to be there for you and Janelle. Not the other way around. You shouldn’t be taking care of me, when all of this must be so much worse for you.”

But he still said nothing and she noticed that his eyes had softened.

“How did Janelle take it?“, she asked with her voice barely more than a whisper.

That got a reaction out of him, and although he didn’t speak the serious look he gave her, along with a sidelong glance at the elder Saylor told her everything she needed to know. Janelle had no idea what they had seen they were never going to tell her.

“Oh... OK”, she nodded.

He gave her look of silent agreement and it occurred to her just how bizarre this entire exchange should feel, but somehow didn’t. In a way she couldn’t grasp he made not speaking, and communicating with just his body language seem like the most natural thing in the world. It was part of this strange aura he gave off and she found herself wondering again just who... and what in the hell he was.

That aura must also have been at work disarming her as they ate, because she suddenly found herself asking a question she had been holding back since he sat.

“How... How bad was I?”

One of his pale eyebrows arched up at this and the slight smile returned.

“Crap.”

He nodded.

“How long was I... out?”

For a moment she half expected him to stomp out the number like a horse to avoid breaking his silence, but he spoke instead and the answer shocked her.

“About four hours.”

“Four hours? But... I was just...”

“You blacked out.”

“And you... you stayed with me all that time?”

“Yes. You were having a flashback. You went somewhere in your head when you felt it coming and so I’m guessing this was not your first. I know what that’s like. So… I stayed with you and prayed.”

“For four hours?”

“I did seventy-two once in Jerusalem.”

“Jesus...”

He gave her a vaguely reproachful look, “Of course. Who else would I pray to?”

“Sorry... I... well... thank you. I guess I freaked out. I just...”

“You love her.”

Tammy stared at Jacob in open mouthed shock. “Did you overhear me and Sallinger last night?”

His eyes softened again and he shifted in his chair and to Tammy’s astonishment, this caused a hush to fall over the room and a ripple of movement to radiate out from him. Tammy watched in amazement... every person had lowered their voice or found a reason to adjust their posture. But not a single one of them so much as glanced in their direction. On some subconscious level, they were all acutely aware and sensitive to his presence without realizing it.

Then he spoke again, “No. You fell in love with her months ago. You got the same look on your face that Janelle did when she held her after her birth.”

Tammy lowered her eyes in shame. “Oh God. I’m so sorry.”

He gave her a slightly puzzled look at this, “Why would you apologize for loving someone?”

“Because she’s... I mean I... I’m not family. I’m not...”

“Her mother?“, He asked, and Tammy looked at him wide eyed.

“No. I mean, it’s just...”

“You can’t have children, and you thought you were OK with it. But Jessica proved you wrong.”

“Holy!... You can’t!... How? How do you know that?”

“Your scars. I saw them one day when you reached up to change her IV bag. Those are exit wounds, and whatever made them was pretty big.”

Subconsciously she touched her lower stomach where the rifle barrel fragment had pushed itself out and blushed.

“I’ve… I’ve never told anyone.”

“You didn’t have to. Aaron and Katrina struggled to get pregnant for a long time before Jessica was conceived and my brother had the same look in his eyes a lot. But Katrina... well, she had it all the time. Deep down her heart was broken and she looked ... hollowed out.”

Tammy shook her head, “That still doesn’t make it OK, especially after what happened to your brother and his wife.”

He paused for a moment and gave her a thoughtful look, “Well, we don’t get to choose who we love. God was good enough to not burden us with that.”

Tammy’s head snapped up in shock. Jacob had just echoed Sallinger almost word for word. For some reason that upset her, and angered her a bit. It was like she was being ganged up on by people who didn’t even realize they were doing it, and from Jacob it felt a little too “holier than thou” for her tolerance. So she lashed out with the only thing she could think of.

“You know, you sure had plenty to say in those meetings, and now you’re practically gabbing up a storm with me. So what’s with the monk act the rest of the time?”

His only response was to look over at her with a slightly wounded and indignant expression, and she felt her face flush hot with shame. He had no idea that Sallinger had told her that same thing just hours earlier, and she was just projecting her own insecurity onto him.

“I’m sorry. I... I guess I’m still not myself. I get it. It’s not an act. But I really don’t understand why you talk sometimes and the rest of the time it’s like you’re mute. Everyone thought you were antisocial, or crazy or something. Then we watched you stare down one of the most powerful men in American intelligence, speak fluent nanotech, show Eddie up on math - which is like beating Superman at arm wrestling by the way, and then reveal that you’re some sort of biblical Indiana Jones who speaks a half dozen ancient languages! You don’t make any sense! Who the hell are you... WHAT the hell are you?”

He surprised her by giving her a full sized grin before replying, “It’s only three languages, and... I’m no one of consequence.”

“Oh hardy har har”, she groaned, “What are you going to tell me next? That you’re looking for a six fingered man who killed your father?”

He smiled, “Wow, I didn’t think anyone knew that movie anymore.”

Tammy grimaced, “When you’re stuck in the middle of the desert with no cable, satellite, phone, or internet access, you get caught up on your reading – and you watch a LOT of movies.”

He nodded in understanding and stood up before turning to pick up her tray. “We should go. I want to see if anything has changed for Jessica.”

Tammy was harshly snapped back to reality by that and sat bolt upright, “Oh my God Jessica... is she?”

“She’s OK... Eddie came by and told me that Barnes had shown him how the bio-monitoring functions in the ArcLight code work. So now he’s keeping an eye on her. Apparently it looks a LOT worse to us than it must feel for her. She’s in some sort of suspended animation and despite the fact that she’s not breathing and her heart has stopped beating, her other vital signs are strong. The system Sheng has woven into her seems to be providing her tissues with the oxygen and nutrition they need while they’re being replaced. I can’t imagine how anyone could be in a more dangerous state than she is right now. But so far it looks like Sheng knows what he is doing and whether we like it or not – we’re going to have to trust him.”

Tammy sat back for a moment before a strange question came to her lips and she found herself voicing it without thinking.

“Jacob… Why is this all happening?”

He took another pause before answering her, and the answer he gave surprised her. It surprised her even more than her troubling urge to ask intimate and existential questions of this enigmatic man.

“If I had to guess, I’d say it’s the third law.”

“The third law? Law of what?”

He got a slightly faraway look as he replied, “Well, most people know that Newton was one of the first physicists, but he was also a deeply religious man and his writings on theological subjects far outnumber his scientific ones. He postulated that there were three laws governing the way the universe worked and the third one was ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction’.”

Tammy gave him a puzzled look, “But how does that explain any of this?”

Jacob nodded, “I think Newton was trying to tell us a lot more than what most scientists want to admit. He was convinced that there was a God who wrote those laws and that something that fundamental has to influence a lot of things. Like how the Constitution influences every law in the country. It extends itself out beyond math and physics and into how everyday life itself works. So when mankind started dabbling in things we didn’t understand well enough to handle responsibly like genetic manipulation, cloning, nanotech, cybernetics… it started a pendulum swinging that led to the creation of the Arclight soldiers. That in turn led to someone creating the monsters that attacked your base and the Embodied soldiers that attacked America. But now the third law is coming into effect, and the pendulum is getting ready to swing back. Maybe that’s why the man who rescued Jessica appeared when he did. Maybe that’s why she’s changing the way she is. If you look for it in the Bible, you can see that God built a sort of immune response for evil into humanity. When it rises up and the world needs just the right person to face it down, it’s God’s will that brings forth that person, or people. In fact… I think he already knows what’s coming and has his hand on their lives from the beginning. He makes them ready.”

“But she’s just a baby!”

“David was only fourteen, and by all accounts he was a scrawny kid. But he faced down a nine-foot-tall warrior, killed him with a slingshot, and then cut his head off with his own sword. An entire army turned and fled in terror and he went on to become king. Mary may have been as young as thirteen when the angel of the Lord told her she was carrying the Christ child and she still managed to shoulder the burden of raising the savior of all mankind.”

“But Jacob, why would God do that? Why would he put something like that onto someone so young?”

“Maybe it’s only the young that are able to handle it. One of the things about growing up is that you spend a lot of time learning about your limitations. God might have to give these tasks to the young just because they don’t know what they can, or can’t do yet.”

Tammy sighed, “There are days when I’m not sure I like God very much Jacob.”

Jacob favored her with a smile, “It’s OK. I’m pretty sure he still likes you.”