“Welcome to the transfer room.”
Bob had dressed up for the occasion, wearing a futuristic version of a suit and tie.
“What’s up with the penguin suit?” Tess asked him. “Are you going to a wedding?”
“No, a baptism… of fire. Yours, in fact!”
Her very first tachyonic insertion, a day to remember!
Tess and her three teammates stepped forward timidly. They were aware that they had just penetrated the TIME Agency’s inner sanctum, its nerve centre.
The division into groups had taken place an hour earlier. Tess had been teamed up with a motley trio. First, there was a tall Slavic woman named Dominika. She was young, pretty, and heavily built. It seemed she had been a sniper in the Soviet army, back in the twentieth century. It was whispered that she had notched up kills of thirty-seven German soldiers. Impressive, if the rumour mill hadn’t twisted or exaggerated the truth. The second member was a Ganymedian, a small green-skinned humanoid from Jupiter’s largest moon, with a drooling mouth and big globular eyes that always looked astonished. He was hard to understand, even with the universal translator chip activated, his every utterance punctuated by the clacking of his forked tongue. His full name was unpronounceable, so they called him Rr’naal for short. He was apparently endowed with a prodigious intelligence, so his air of being the village idiot, or rather station idiot, was deceptive. The final member of the team, James, fit the profile of a cold English aristocrat, looking down on others with a vaguely condescending expression. He kept his distance and didn’t say much, but it seemed like he was always calculating something, as if the wheels in his brain never stopped turning. Tess decided right away that he was going to get on her nerves. She always hated guys who seemed to have a stick up their ass.
Four machines were arranged in a semicircle occupying the centre of the room. They somewhat resembled sensory isolation tanks, except that they stood in a vertical position, and apparently did not contain water. Their lids were transparent and seemed to be made of the same material as the station’s portholes and observation windows.
What did they call that stuff? “Solido?” No, that was used for the walls. Ah, I’ve got it: “clearsteel!”
The main source of light came from a circular conduit that opened directly above the containers. Separated from the rest of the room by a big window, a handful of technicians were working in what looked like a futuristic control room, with countless blinking indicator lights.
Spectrograms monitored the energy flows channelled by the machines. Few words were exchanged. The procedures involved were routine – a simple nod of the head sufficed to transmit instructions.
“You will now take your places in the capsules.”
“Another ‘painless’ process, is that it?” Tess complained.
She had retained a very unpleasant memory of her time on the “operating table” in the transit room.
“The teleportation itself is painless,” Bob reassured her. “You’ll go to sleep and then you’ll wake in your ‘receptacle’, your new body. On the other hand, taking possession can be very disconcerting psychologically, or even distressing from a sensory perspective. You’ll find out soon enough…”
“And the receptacle’s soul?” asked James with the residue of a British accent that the bio-integrated app had been unable to eliminate completely. “I mean, their mind? What happens to it?”
“It’s ‘crushed’, relegated to the background of awareness… A little bit as though the previous self remains an understudy waiting in the wings, while the new self takes its place on stage. Even so, the residual personality can serve as a ‘prompter’ and help you out of certain difficulties. Thanks to this host, you can immediately speak a language that you did not know the instant before, for example. You won’t need your universal translators. But the host’s experience and acquired knowledge can be disturbing and sometimes a burden. Traumatic and repressed memories may resurface without being summoned by you.”
Tess saw what Bob meant. Everyone had emotional baggage, didn’t they?
“So, you must always remain vigilant,” he continued, “even if the receptacle hosting you seems normal at first. If I’ve learned one thing on this job, it’s that normality doesn’t exist.”
“Once the mission is over, does the receptacle regain control?” asked Tess.
“Yes. They have the sensation of emerging from a bad dream. They’re aware of a parenthesis when they were ejected from themselves, but without really remembering what happened.”
“And what if they die through our fault during this… parenthesis?”
“It happens, but the receptacles have been selected in part because of their lack of influence in the timeline being used. They have almost no eco-temporal impact. They’re pawns. And unfortunately, sometimes pawns need to be sacrificed to win the game. It doesn’t happen systematically, of course, but prepare yourselves for that contingency. Although you, personally, aren’t risking anything – if the host dies, you’ll suddenly wake up in your original envelope, that’s all – it’s never a pleasant experience to feel yourself dying.”
Rr’naal, the Ganymedian, asked a complicated question about the cortex, neocortex, and the brainstem (apparently, he knew all about human physiology). Bob nodded before replying, in teaching mode: “Consciousness isn’t localized in a specific area. It wanders around the brain in the form of a magnetic field.”
For the moment, Dominika wasn’t saying anything. Standing with her arms crossed, she was examining the machines and the busy technicians behind the window with a cold, analytical eye. She had a very stern demeanour, like an armoured tank.
Four holographic portraits appeared above the four capsules: a woman and three men. Nothing but humans.
“Here are your receptacles,” Bob explained. “I’ll let you choose.”
Since it was her first time, Tess did not want to change sex. Changing bodies already risked being a disorienting experience, without adding further complications. She headed toward the woman without hesitation. James chose the teenaged boy with long hair and sulky lips like Jim Morrison.
Where did they find this dude? At Woodstock?
Dominika planted herself in front of the image of a man in his forties. Regular features. Not bad-looking. Not really an athlete, but in good physical condition. The only remaining choice was a man with a puffed-up face, obese and bald. The extraterrestrial narrowed his globular eyes. Was he judging the receptacle according to his own criteria of beauty? For him, all humans must look alike. He approached the capsule beneath the 3D portrait of the bald man, emitting a dubious tongue click.
“Who are these people?” Tess asked.
“They’re recruits who refused to play the game,” Bob informed her.
“Excuse me?”
“Persons we asked to become agents, who at first agreed to the deal and took the ‘giant leap forward,’ just like you four, by way of the transit room and so on. But later, these brave people got cold feet, for one reason or another… It was just too much to take on: the shock of the future, this space station, parallel universes… So, what were we supposed to do? Sending them back to their own time and planet of origin would be too expensive, and also too risky unless we erased their memories, which is always a little bit delicate. It seemed kinder to let them stay here…”
“So that they could play the role of guinea pigs? Yeah, that’s really charitable of you.”
Bob gave her a faint smile, tinged with cynicism.
“At least now, you know what you’ve missed out on, Ms Heiden.”
“So… we’re not travelling in time, for this first transfer?” asked James, with pursed lips.
“No, you’re not. You’ll be changing bodies, but you’ll remain here on the station, in the ‘present’, if you’ll allow the term. Everything is relative, right? It would be a waste to use up tachyonic energy for these initial tests. Consider this phase as… preliminaries.”
Behind the window, a technician signalled that it was time to activate the process. Bob gestured toward the waiting capsules: “Please take your places. We’re ready.”
The bulging lids all opened at the same time, and the four containers released a hiss that sounded like decompression. The novice agents got into their respective capsules. The compartment inside the fourth capsule, smaller than the others, had been adjusted to the Ganymedian’s morphology. The safety harness clicked into place across his chest. The same occurred in the capsules containing the three humans.
It’s like we’re about to go for a ride at the fairground, Tess thought.
But it started to seem less like a ride when the cortical sensors were placed on her temples. Now she started to feel more like the subject of a medical experiment. It was not very comforting.
“Hey! Just make sure no flies slip into our capsules,” she joked with a little nervous laugh.
“There aren’t any flies on the station,” Bob muttered, stern-faced.
Dominika and James didn’t seem to have gotten the joke either, but given when they were from that wasn’t a surprise.
The capsule lids closed and Tess felt a growing sense of anxiety. Her breathing became increasingly jagged and left a patch of warm mist on the clearsteel surface.
“There’s no danger involved,” Bob said soothingly.
And the young woman realized that she’d been given an earphone along with the standard sensors.
She swallowed hard.
Will we ever get used to doing this?
Probably… but she wasn’t quite sure. After all, plenty of people suffered from fear of flying, even after going around the globe in planes three times or more. They still felt apprehensive during takeoff or at the slightest hint of turbulence. Yet the probability of a plane crash was tiny compared to that of a road accident. But there was no remedy, the fear was there, lodged in the pit of their chest.
Like her fear right now.
Bob waved goodbye to the four novices. For once, he was smiling. Of course, his smile seemed to be saying, “I’m looking forward to seeing how you people screw up,” but coming from someone as stiff as him, it made a change.
Psssshhhh…
That was air entering the capsules. Unless it was leaving. In any case, it made a soft whistling sound…
Tess felt herself letting go, like when the anaesthetist places a transparent mask over your nose, just before an operation. Things start to whirl, and you have the feeling of falling into a brightly-lit well, just before your eyes close…
Tess drifted beyond time, beyond space, beyond everything… Then a thunderous torrent filled her ears. She had the sensation of putting on a costume that was badly fitted, too small and tight around the armholes.
Her mind reshaped itself to fit its new envelope.