"Good going, John," Jason muttered at the man from behind bars. John, Bertram and David stood across a dismal hallway in their own prison. Ned, Jason, Jerry and Phillip stood in the other. The girls were in a cell adjacent to them, but Jody was too busy consoling Catherine to pay attention to them.
"That's not going to help," Phillip said, then he eyed John himself. "Who are these people?"
"You know your friend had no intention of bringing us back," John sniped in return, intent on avoiding the question that would inevitably lead to his admittance of what was sure to be their impending executions.
"That's not true," Phillip said loudly. "He was, and now we've left the restaurant...if he builds a storm..."
"He's not going to build a storm," John shouted.
"How do you know that?" Phillip shouted back. "You don't know Gerald!"
John snorted in disgust, crossed his arms turned his back to the opposite cell.
"You're going to have to tell them," Bertram muttered. He stood up and walked to the bars so the entire group could clearly hear him.
"We're in the Chromian Galaxy," Bertram said. He then looked directly into Phillip's cool blue eyes with his own hard stare. "Your Gerald sent us to a planet in a galaxy were time travel is expressly forbidden and has been so since the Holochrom Treaty: a treaty that gives the people of this planet permission to execute temporal trespassers."
"How could they have a treaty if they can't even time travel?" Catherine sniffed.
"Space travel, yes. They are present in intergalactic affairs, but concern themselves only with linear time. Takes them years to send out diplomats. Not many people come here though. The address has been removed from the map. Only the brightest minds can figure out what it is and only because they fancy themselves clever. Some don't even believe it exists, or they don't want to believe it. It's basically...what would they call it in their time?"
"I believe that would be a cult," John replied glumly.
"Yeah," Bertram spat bitterly. "A legally recognized and sanctioned cult. Do you understand now, Phil?"
"Don't you ever, ever, ever call me that," Phillip replied. He stared them down with an abject scowl on his face. Any small hope that Gerald had ever had actual feelings for him or that Gerald would stick to the plan were quickly being extinguished. The plan Phillip had been privy to was obviously not the real plan at all.
"He sent us here to die," John said. "And it's all your fault."
David approached the bars from where he had been sitting and gripped them in his hands. He lay his head against them and peered through the gap at Phillip, trying to comfort him from several feet away. Phillip was thankful that at least someone had truly forgiven him. Jason, Ned, and Jerry stood off to the side, trying their best to ignore the conversation.
Any forgiveness that John had doled out was forgotten with the realization that he was probably going to die and might never regain use of his hand.
"He's not worth it," he approached David and spoke harshly. "He's in bed with the man who gave us a death sentence."
David shook his head. "Not anymore," he replied in a voice barely above a whisper.
"You'd like to believe that," John leaned back and growled. He set his eyes across the hallway on Phillip.
"That's enough," Bertram spoke up from his vantage point. "Don't do this, John. It's bad enough..."
"I believe him," David said a bit louder.
"Ah, yes!" John paced a few steps behind him and stroked his chin ponderously with his good hand. "He told you he's from the future, he told you that he was in on it, and he's told you that he's a mathematician, yes?"
David nodded. "And all that was true."
"Right," John agreed.
"John," Bertram spoke again, this time the warning was apparent in his voice.
"Did he also tell you that he was a whore?"
John said that loudly enough to pique the interests of the rest of the group. Phillip blanched at their astonished stares.
"Don't call him that!" David shouted and spun around on John with fury in his eyes. John took a step back then shrugged.
"Ask him yourself."
David tentatively turned back towards the other cell.
"Is it true?" he asked.
Phillip nodded miserably then asked John how he knew.
"We had to make sure you are who you say you are," John replied. "Bertram has the databases for all the inhabitable planets up until the 100th century uploaded into that nifty little gadget of his. We scanned you while you were sleeping. You're registered."
"You said you don't work in the future division," Phillip snapped. "You're not supposed to have access to that kind of future data."
John shrugged. "Bertram's smart enough in his own right. It's not that hard to hack a database. Right, Bertie?"
Bertram only scowled angrily at his partner in return.
"That's a violation of the intergalactic privacy act, article 342034!" Phillip screamed at them.
"So it is." John shrugged, ambivalent towards his own law breaking. "And conjuring up temporal storms to transport unsuspecting kids from the past to a time and a place that expressly forbids time travel is perfectly on the up and up."
It was then that Phillip lunged forward, his hands outstretched through the bars. Finding that he could not reach John to strangle him and also that John had begun to laugh at him, he repeatedly threw himself up against the metal with no thought to his own safety. It took Jerry and Jason both to subdue him, and they dragged him to the back wall of the cell and sat him down on the ground where he started to sob.
Ned stood at the bars in a sort of dazed shock, looking back and forth between a defiant John Arker and Phillip, the future boy. He finally settled a narrow eyed gaze on John and calmly pointed his own finger through the bars at him.
"Not cool, man. Not cool." he said, then joined his cell mates in their attempt to calm down Phillip.
John turned back to his own cell mates in a huff. He noted the glare of reproach on Bertram's face and the utter look of devastation on David's and he knew that he had let his emotions get the better of him. He had crossed a line.
"I'm sorry," he said. It was a soft and sincere apology, but Bertram, for one, was not ready to forgive him.
Bertram turned his back on John without a word and walked over to David.
"Are you okay, kid?" he asked.
David nodded numbly. It had been a shock for sure. He knew that he didn't know Phillip at all. They had only talked about their own planets and how much they had missed home. He knew he had no reason to expect all of his friend's life story in one go for the simple fact that David liked him. It wasn't fair. Those kind of secrets only came with time.
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah." David nodded. Then he looked at John, who stood in the opposite corner of the cell with his head bowed in shame.
"It's alright, John." He said. "I was gonna find out sooner or later."
John looked up, and nodded slightly, accepting David's words.
Bertram sighed and patted the boy on the back.
"You're a better man than I am," he said.
*****
Catherine's tears had all dried up. She and Jody sat with their backs against the bars of the adjacent cell where Ned and Jason also sat on the opposing side.
"It's funny," Catherine said.
"What?" Jason muttered. "Nothing about this is funny. Did you not hear the part about execution?"
"No, I mean...here we are millions of billions of years in the future and we are sitting in a jail cell." She said. "With metal bars and everything."
"Well," Jason pondered. "It's a simple and effective design solution for incarceration I guess."
"We should escape," Ned suddenly spoke up as if he had only just decided that it was the most logical course of action.
"How?" Jason asked.
"Well, they let us keep our bottles," Ned pointed towards where the champagne bottles filled with water were piled in the corner of the room.
"So? What?" Jody said. "We should break the bottles and cut our wrists with them so we can just put an end to our misery? I half think that's what those jerks want us to do anyway!"
Jason and Ned eyed her curiously, but Ned shook his head.
"I think we should get the guard drunk and steal his keys!" he said.
Jason rolled his eyes at his friend. If there was something to be said about Ned, it wasn't that he was smart.
"You know that those are filled with water, right?"
"Correction," Ned said with a grin adorning his face. "Yours are filled with water. What makes you think good old Ned would really dispose of all that alcohol?"
Jason laughed at his friend. "Ned, that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard," he said. "First of all, the guard is stationed outside. Second of all, why the hell would he get drunk enough to be incapacitated. If the bastard wasn't wearing a helmet I'd think it would be more effective to just bash him over the head."
"You're right," Ned said solemnly, but he walked over the bottles anyway.
"Come on Ned," Jerry said. He was seated against the wall. Phillip had fallen asleep leaning on his shoulder, and Jerry pretended not to notice David staring him down from across the room while he silently paced the length of the bars like a caged wildcat.
"You know Catherine's right."
"I know," Ned sighed. He wished he had another joint on him. Reality was such a downer. "If we're going to die," he said. "We can at least get drunk before we do."
*****
Arwyn stood, framed by the doorway to her office, scratching the back of his head. As he stared at the illegal tech strewn about the place, he wondered just what he had gotten himself into with the crazy lady. He consoled himself that he would be able to turn her in if things got out of hand. That was until she turned to him with a Time Travel Device firmly entrenched in her hand.
"Hey, lady!" He held his hands up as a symbol of dismay at having the TTD pointed at him.
"Get that thing away from me."
She glanced down at the mostly harmless bit of machinery.
"Calm down, Anderson!" She placed the device back on her desk and gave him an appraising look. "What's wrong with you? You're a Time Detective aren't you?"
"In training," he replied, a bit embarrassed at his overreaction to the TTD. "I'm still a cadet."
"A ten year cadet." She bit back the urge to laugh at him again. She had done so on several occasions on the ride over and had watched as his face fell further and further until only a permanent frown of disappointment was left on it. She hadn't meant to be cruel to the only person in the world who somehow believed her story. She knew that there was no reason for him to.
"Hey, I'm sorry." She walked over to him and grabbed his hand to pull him into the room and then she sat him down at her cushiony office chair while she pulled out a folding chair from her closet and sat beside him. To his surprise and unease she took up both his hands then and commanded him to look at her. He did and found her smiling at him, her eyes clear and bright, and he trusted her.
"What happened?" she asked.
He shuddered as he thought about it.
"It was only a prank," he muttered, and she groaned. She knew about the pranks that had been played on her when she was merely a detective In training.
"It shouldn't have affected me so much," he said. "They used the remote control, kept sending me all over the time line. Hah. hah. I'd gotten a clean bill of health, but still..."
"Time sickness?" She wondered.
"Yeah." He smiled ruefully to himself. "They wouldn't have kept doing it if I hadn't freaked out so much. I should've gotten over it by now. It's been ten years."
"No amount of physicals can predict someone who is susceptible to time sickness...and if they kept time tripping you as a prank...It's not your fault." She said.
"I know," he replied. He looked away from her then. "But I could jump...I could take the pill."
"Yeah," she agreed.
"I'm just afraid."
"That's okay," she consoled him.
"They call me 'the baby'," he said sadly. "It's just, I was sick for days. It was awful. I didn't know where I was, didn't know when I was, or who I was. It was like I was drowning. I couldn't breath. The world winked in and out of existence every few minutes. Now I'm just scared. I can't advance any further than your average receptionist. I'd leave the force if not for the benefits."
"Come on," she replied, trying her best to cheer him up. "Everybody loves being on the force. It impresses people, right?"
He looked up to face her cheerful grin. His own face was creased into an sad frown.
"Yeah, for a while...until they ask to hear about your great adventures in time and space...then you have to admit you're just a desk jockey."
"And they don't have anybody you can talk to now?" She asked. Even though she could tell he wasn't keen on pity, she couldn't help but feel sorry for him. It was a sad day indeed when a Time Detective couldn't face jumping through time.
"What do you mean?" He asked.
"Well," she said. "Back before the fissure..."
"Alleged Fissure," he interrupted her.
"Yes, alleged fissure," she corrected herself. "Back before that we had councilors for the people who came down with time sickness. It really seemed to help. Almost all of them were able to jump again once they took the pill."
"Sounds nice," he replied. "Too bad..."
"You're gonna have to get over it, because we're gonna track my partner down using my Time Travel Device. It's directly linked to his."
"What?" He had calmed down a measurable amount and relaxed with his hands in hers, but the thought of traveling through time again caused him to snatch them back. "I'm not jumping anywhere."
"It'll be fine," she replied. She reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a blister pack of small red pills.
"Why do you have those?" he asked incredulously. "They only distribute those to people who..."
"Yep," she tapped the pack on the edge of her desk and smiled kindly at him. "They only give them to the people who need them. People like me and you."
"That's not going to help," Phillip said, then he eyed John himself. "Who are these people?"
"You know your friend had no intention of bringing us back," John sniped in return, intent on avoiding the question that would inevitably lead to his admittance of what was sure to be their impending executions.
"That's not true," Phillip said loudly. "He was, and now we've left the restaurant...if he builds a storm..."
"He's not going to build a storm," John shouted.
"How do you know that?" Phillip shouted back. "You don't know Gerald!"
John snorted in disgust, crossed his arms turned his back to the opposite cell.
"You're going to have to tell them," Bertram muttered. He stood up and walked to the bars so the entire group could clearly hear him.
"We're in the Chromian Galaxy," Bertram said. He then looked directly into Phillip's cool blue eyes with his own hard stare. "Your Gerald sent us to a planet in a galaxy were time travel is expressly forbidden and has been so since the Holochrom Treaty: a treaty that gives the people of this planet permission to execute temporal trespassers."
"How could they have a treaty if they can't even time travel?" Catherine sniffed.
"Space travel, yes. They are present in intergalactic affairs, but concern themselves only with linear time. Takes them years to send out diplomats. Not many people come here though. The address has been removed from the map. Only the brightest minds can figure out what it is and only because they fancy themselves clever. Some don't even believe it exists, or they don't want to believe it. It's basically...what would they call it in their time?"
"I believe that would be a cult," John replied glumly.
"Yeah," Bertram spat bitterly. "A legally recognized and sanctioned cult. Do you understand now, Phil?"
"Don't you ever, ever, ever call me that," Phillip replied. He stared them down with an abject scowl on his face. Any small hope that Gerald had ever had actual feelings for him or that Gerald would stick to the plan were quickly being extinguished. The plan Phillip had been privy to was obviously not the real plan at all.
"He sent us here to die," John said. "And it's all your fault."
David approached the bars from where he had been sitting and gripped them in his hands. He lay his head against them and peered through the gap at Phillip, trying to comfort him from several feet away. Phillip was thankful that at least someone had truly forgiven him. Jason, Ned, and Jerry stood off to the side, trying their best to ignore the conversation.
Any forgiveness that John had doled out was forgotten with the realization that he was probably going to die and might never regain use of his hand.
"He's not worth it," he approached David and spoke harshly. "He's in bed with the man who gave us a death sentence."
David shook his head. "Not anymore," he replied in a voice barely above a whisper.
"You'd like to believe that," John leaned back and growled. He set his eyes across the hallway on Phillip.
"That's enough," Bertram spoke up from his vantage point. "Don't do this, John. It's bad enough..."
"I believe him," David said a bit louder.
"Ah, yes!" John paced a few steps behind him and stroked his chin ponderously with his good hand. "He told you he's from the future, he told you that he was in on it, and he's told you that he's a mathematician, yes?"
David nodded. "And all that was true."
"Right," John agreed.
"John," Bertram spoke again, this time the warning was apparent in his voice.
"Did he also tell you that he was a whore?"
John said that loudly enough to pique the interests of the rest of the group. Phillip blanched at their astonished stares.
"Don't call him that!" David shouted and spun around on John with fury in his eyes. John took a step back then shrugged.
"Ask him yourself."
David tentatively turned back towards the other cell.
"Is it true?" he asked.
Phillip nodded miserably then asked John how he knew.
"We had to make sure you are who you say you are," John replied. "Bertram has the databases for all the inhabitable planets up until the 100th century uploaded into that nifty little gadget of his. We scanned you while you were sleeping. You're registered."
"You said you don't work in the future division," Phillip snapped. "You're not supposed to have access to that kind of future data."
John shrugged. "Bertram's smart enough in his own right. It's not that hard to hack a database. Right, Bertie?"
Bertram only scowled angrily at his partner in return.
"That's a violation of the intergalactic privacy act, article 342034!" Phillip screamed at them.
"So it is." John shrugged, ambivalent towards his own law breaking. "And conjuring up temporal storms to transport unsuspecting kids from the past to a time and a place that expressly forbids time travel is perfectly on the up and up."
It was then that Phillip lunged forward, his hands outstretched through the bars. Finding that he could not reach John to strangle him and also that John had begun to laugh at him, he repeatedly threw himself up against the metal with no thought to his own safety. It took Jerry and Jason both to subdue him, and they dragged him to the back wall of the cell and sat him down on the ground where he started to sob.
Ned stood at the bars in a sort of dazed shock, looking back and forth between a defiant John Arker and Phillip, the future boy. He finally settled a narrow eyed gaze on John and calmly pointed his own finger through the bars at him.
"Not cool, man. Not cool." he said, then joined his cell mates in their attempt to calm down Phillip.
John turned back to his own cell mates in a huff. He noted the glare of reproach on Bertram's face and the utter look of devastation on David's and he knew that he had let his emotions get the better of him. He had crossed a line.
"I'm sorry," he said. It was a soft and sincere apology, but Bertram, for one, was not ready to forgive him.
Bertram turned his back on John without a word and walked over to David.
"Are you okay, kid?" he asked.
David nodded numbly. It had been a shock for sure. He knew that he didn't know Phillip at all. They had only talked about their own planets and how much they had missed home. He knew he had no reason to expect all of his friend's life story in one go for the simple fact that David liked him. It wasn't fair. Those kind of secrets only came with time.
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah." David nodded. Then he looked at John, who stood in the opposite corner of the cell with his head bowed in shame.
"It's alright, John." He said. "I was gonna find out sooner or later."
John looked up, and nodded slightly, accepting David's words.
Bertram sighed and patted the boy on the back.
"You're a better man than I am," he said.
*****
Catherine's tears had all dried up. She and Jody sat with their backs against the bars of the adjacent cell where Ned and Jason also sat on the opposing side.
"It's funny," Catherine said.
"What?" Jason muttered. "Nothing about this is funny. Did you not hear the part about execution?"
"No, I mean...here we are millions of billions of years in the future and we are sitting in a jail cell." She said. "With metal bars and everything."
"Well," Jason pondered. "It's a simple and effective design solution for incarceration I guess."
"We should escape," Ned suddenly spoke up as if he had only just decided that it was the most logical course of action.
"How?" Jason asked.
"Well, they let us keep our bottles," Ned pointed towards where the champagne bottles filled with water were piled in the corner of the room.
"So? What?" Jody said. "We should break the bottles and cut our wrists with them so we can just put an end to our misery? I half think that's what those jerks want us to do anyway!"
Jason and Ned eyed her curiously, but Ned shook his head.
"I think we should get the guard drunk and steal his keys!" he said.
Jason rolled his eyes at his friend. If there was something to be said about Ned, it wasn't that he was smart.
"You know that those are filled with water, right?"
"Correction," Ned said with a grin adorning his face. "Yours are filled with water. What makes you think good old Ned would really dispose of all that alcohol?"
Jason laughed at his friend. "Ned, that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard," he said. "First of all, the guard is stationed outside. Second of all, why the hell would he get drunk enough to be incapacitated. If the bastard wasn't wearing a helmet I'd think it would be more effective to just bash him over the head."
"You're right," Ned said solemnly, but he walked over the bottles anyway.
"Come on Ned," Jerry said. He was seated against the wall. Phillip had fallen asleep leaning on his shoulder, and Jerry pretended not to notice David staring him down from across the room while he silently paced the length of the bars like a caged wildcat.
"You know Catherine's right."
"I know," Ned sighed. He wished he had another joint on him. Reality was such a downer. "If we're going to die," he said. "We can at least get drunk before we do."
*****
Arwyn stood, framed by the doorway to her office, scratching the back of his head. As he stared at the illegal tech strewn about the place, he wondered just what he had gotten himself into with the crazy lady. He consoled himself that he would be able to turn her in if things got out of hand. That was until she turned to him with a Time Travel Device firmly entrenched in her hand.
"Hey, lady!" He held his hands up as a symbol of dismay at having the TTD pointed at him.
"Get that thing away from me."
She glanced down at the mostly harmless bit of machinery.
"Calm down, Anderson!" She placed the device back on her desk and gave him an appraising look. "What's wrong with you? You're a Time Detective aren't you?"
"In training," he replied, a bit embarrassed at his overreaction to the TTD. "I'm still a cadet."
"A ten year cadet." She bit back the urge to laugh at him again. She had done so on several occasions on the ride over and had watched as his face fell further and further until only a permanent frown of disappointment was left on it. She hadn't meant to be cruel to the only person in the world who somehow believed her story. She knew that there was no reason for him to.
"Hey, I'm sorry." She walked over to him and grabbed his hand to pull him into the room and then she sat him down at her cushiony office chair while she pulled out a folding chair from her closet and sat beside him. To his surprise and unease she took up both his hands then and commanded him to look at her. He did and found her smiling at him, her eyes clear and bright, and he trusted her.
"What happened?" she asked.
He shuddered as he thought about it.
"It was only a prank," he muttered, and she groaned. She knew about the pranks that had been played on her when she was merely a detective In training.
"It shouldn't have affected me so much," he said. "They used the remote control, kept sending me all over the time line. Hah. hah. I'd gotten a clean bill of health, but still..."
"Time sickness?" She wondered.
"Yeah." He smiled ruefully to himself. "They wouldn't have kept doing it if I hadn't freaked out so much. I should've gotten over it by now. It's been ten years."
"No amount of physicals can predict someone who is susceptible to time sickness...and if they kept time tripping you as a prank...It's not your fault." She said.
"I know," he replied. He looked away from her then. "But I could jump...I could take the pill."
"Yeah," she agreed.
"I'm just afraid."
"That's okay," she consoled him.
"They call me 'the baby'," he said sadly. "It's just, I was sick for days. It was awful. I didn't know where I was, didn't know when I was, or who I was. It was like I was drowning. I couldn't breath. The world winked in and out of existence every few minutes. Now I'm just scared. I can't advance any further than your average receptionist. I'd leave the force if not for the benefits."
"Come on," she replied, trying her best to cheer him up. "Everybody loves being on the force. It impresses people, right?"
He looked up to face her cheerful grin. His own face was creased into an sad frown.
"Yeah, for a while...until they ask to hear about your great adventures in time and space...then you have to admit you're just a desk jockey."
"And they don't have anybody you can talk to now?" She asked. Even though she could tell he wasn't keen on pity, she couldn't help but feel sorry for him. It was a sad day indeed when a Time Detective couldn't face jumping through time.
"What do you mean?" He asked.
"Well," she said. "Back before the fissure..."
"Alleged Fissure," he interrupted her.
"Yes, alleged fissure," she corrected herself. "Back before that we had councilors for the people who came down with time sickness. It really seemed to help. Almost all of them were able to jump again once they took the pill."
"Sounds nice," he replied. "Too bad..."
"You're gonna have to get over it, because we're gonna track my partner down using my Time Travel Device. It's directly linked to his."
"What?" He had calmed down a measurable amount and relaxed with his hands in hers, but the thought of traveling through time again caused him to snatch them back. "I'm not jumping anywhere."
"It'll be fine," she replied. She reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a blister pack of small red pills.
"Why do you have those?" he asked incredulously. "They only distribute those to people who..."
"Yep," she tapped the pack on the edge of her desk and smiled kindly at him. "They only give them to the people who need them. People like me and you."
