QUANTUM SINGULARITY
By Kapact
Rated
G
Quantum
Leap/AOS
Disclaimer: Star Trek belongs to
Stallion's Gate,
"Admiral, we've got problems."
Admiral Albert Calavicci rarely heard Ziggy's voice outside of the operation areas of the Project
Quantum Leap complex. And for Ziggy to admit to 'problems'
was not just rare. It was creepy. These thoughts rushed through his head as he
woke up and started to move. Military training had long ago taught his body to
rise and start dealing with things even as the brain was struggling to accept a
new day. "What did you say, sweetie?"
"I am not a sweetie, Admiral. I am the most sophisticated computer ever devised.
And I said 'Admiral, we've got problems'."
"Right, honey." Al didn't care if she was a
computer. She had a voice straight out of 1-900-. "Wait a second. What
problems?" He had gotten as far as shorts and a khaki shirt when the brain
started thinking beyond Ziggy's sexy voice.
"There is someone in the waiting room."
"That's not funny." Al muttered as he rushed through stark white
corridors. Hidden audio pick-ups and
speakers along the way enabled him to continue the conversation. "There
hasn't been anyone in the waiting room in five years." He stopped by the cafeteria for a coffee. Ziggy would be wrinkling her cute computerized nose at
that. But he needed caffeine. "Not since Sammy Jo tried to—"
"I am aware of that, Admiral. But there is someone in the waiting
room."
There was something she wasn't saying. He knew that. "Is it Sam? Is it
Sammy Jo?"
"No, Admiral."
She sounded... No, it couldn't be. Ziggy couldn't be
scared. "Well who is it? What is it?" He was close to the waiting
room now, coffee carrying him along and danish
helping him to think. He turned the corner, and came to the white double doors
of the waiting room. "Come on Ziggy! What's in
there?" But he couldn't wait. He
keyed the security code and opened the doors. And dropped his coffee and danish.
It looked... almost human. Two arms, two legs. Eyes. Mouth. All
standard. But pointed ears... a
green complexion, and... upswept eyebrows. Not just slanted,
but gracefully upswept. It wore bland robes, and a face so stern that Al felt
like a wet-behind-the-ears cadet. He was aware that he'd dropped his coffee and
danish, and he felt burning
liquid splash on his legs as the creature stared at him with an expression that
seemed straight out of hell. "Oh boy."
Sam felt mercury shoot through his head and his veins, just like he did with every
leap. He also felt sick to his stomach. He felt the ground drop out from under
his feet, just as his stomach started to churn. Then he saw that he wasn't
alone. He was standing with a group of people... but not quite humans. Faces that he knew but didn't know. Pointed
ears. Gracefully upswept eyebrows. Calm, even
as the planet seemed drop out from under them. "Oh, bo-." Spock. T'Pau.
They were there, thank goodness, along with the elders. The holders of the Katras. But where was Amanda? She was dropping away.
Arms outstretched to Spock, flailing helplessly. Mind outstretched to him. To Sam, but not to Sam. To Sarek.
But he couldn't touch her. All he could do was stand there with a blank look on
his face as the hell around him swirled into nothingness, and he began to see
details of a chamber of some kind solidify. It was as if the process of
leaping, which was normally instantaneous, had been slowed to a crawl. He felt
a powerful presence in his mind. Familiar, yet... alien.
"You must return me," the alien said in a voice that made Al squirm.
"Uhh, yeah," Al answered. "We're
working on that." Then he tore his eyes from the alien face. "Ziggy, a little help,
please!" No answer. "Ziggy!" Al looked
back at the alien, exasperated. "Look, sir, uh, I'm not sure who you are,
or why you're here, or what we're going to do, but..." his voice trailed
off. What was it about the guy that made him feel wet behind the ears?
"You want a cup of coffee?"
"I do not require a stimulant. I require my wife. I require a return to where,"
he leveled a steely gaze at Al, "and when I
belong."
"Yeah." The same
infuriating defense mechanism that had always kicked
in when the heat was on showed up, in spades. Bad humor. "Well, we're aware of the problem, and
we're working on it." And he backed out of the room like his life depended
on it.
"We're aware of the problem, Admiral, and believe me, we're working on it,"
Gushie said as he brushed soot from his white lab
coat.
"That's not funny, Gushie." Al wanted to
push into the computer room, but funny-smelling smoke and Project Engineer Gushie's bad breath stopped him cold. "What
happened?"
"Ziggy was just finishing a diagnostic when a
massive amount of electricity shot through the system. Then she was gone."
"What? I was talking to her just—"
"Yes, yes, we aren't sure quite how she engineered that."
"Engineered? She did it on purpose?" Al started to lead Gushie into the cafeteria. He didn't feel right leaving
whoever it was in the waiting room, and Sam hanging by a thread wherever he
was, but he needed to get a handle on things before he could help anyone. He
took a plain white coffee mug from a counter and moved to the industrial
percolator. Finally he sat at a table, with Gushie
still following along. "Now, how about you just start at the beginning?"
"A bolt of lightning struck the auxiliary satellite dish."
"I thought you said Ziggy engineered it."
"I did. We're just not sure how she knew that the lightning would strike—"
"So anyway…" Al said, prodding the engineer along.
"The lightning. I mean, not even Ziggy can predict exactly when and where lightning will
strike."
"What happened next?"
"Oh! Oh right. Well, one point twenty-one gigawatts
of electricty were pumped into the system. That was
when our guest appeared in the waiting room, and Ziggy
seemed to have been..."
"What?"
"Here's where it gets interesting, actually."
"What happened to Ziggy?"
"Fried chicken. Burnt toast.
Charcoal, really." Gushie brushed at his blackened
lab coat again. "Soot, actually. Yes, soot. Ziggy
is soot."
"We need Ziggy to find Sam, Gushie.
So how can you say you're working on it?"
"Well, we're thinking about it," he blinked and half-smiled from
beneath a shock of singed hair. "We're thinking about it really
hard."
There was an element of humor there, Al realized. But
there was more. "Make sure you think as hard as you can, Gushie, 'cause Sam is out there somewhere, hanging by a
thread, and we can't help him without answers."
Sam wanted to ask Spock why he was there, but realized that he should know. It was one thing to have a swiss-cheese memory as a result of quantum leaping. This
time his memory and thoughts seemed to be scrambled. And the icy/fiery mercury
was still in his brain, giving him a splitting headache. He gradually materialized in a chamber of
sorts. It reminded him vaguely of the Quantum Leap chamber, the last part of
the Stallion's Gate complex that he'd ever seen, but his logic also reminded
him that the mind sometimes sees exactly what it wishes to see. And his swiss-cheese memory and apparently scrambled-egg mind was
also pretty good at playing tricks on him. Suddenly his surroundings
materialized around him, and his stomach showed up several seconds later. He
swayed briefly on his feet, and felt himself being hustled out of the transport
chamber. There was trouble. Big trouble. Sam! Al's voice, but not Al's voice. His voice, but not his voice. And all in
his head. Sometimes 'Oh, boy' just didn't cover it.
Sarek's fingers had a feathery touch to them, but still seemed to bore through
his skull. My mind to
your mind. My
thoughts to your thoughts. Our minds are merging. Our minds are one.
Al felt the intrusion, and knew immediately that it was distasteful, more so
for Sarek than for him. He wanted to shout immediately for Sam. To find his face along one of the regular, perfectly constructed
walls that were his intrepretation of Sarek's mind.
But no. There were equations. Images.
A man named Archer, who, Al realized with a start, could be Sam's older
brother. But there was a barrier there, that became
opaque. Off limits. Amanda. T'Pau.
Skon.
Solkar.
So many living. So many gone.
Katras saved and katras
lost. Again, the barrier came up like a brick wall. Off
limits. Finally, the sparklers appeared. Neurons and
mesons that comprised Al's link to Sam, and subsequent link to Sarek, in their
joined mind. They led him through twists and turns, drawing closer, in concentric
circles, to an image of a planet being swallowed from the inside out. And there
was Sam, reaching out to a woman... to Amanda, as the planet fell out from
beneath them. He tried to call to him then, but couldn't. They all
materialized, linked by neurons and mesons that reminded Al of Tinkerbell, in a chamber that looked alot
like the imaging chamber. Now it was time. "Sam!"
Sam heard/felt Al's voice in his mind again, and he allowed himself to be hustled
out of the chamber as the ship... the *
Exactly. Whatever it was, he finally had a chance to
talk to Al.
Al knew that he wasn't, in fact, walking around in the transporter
room of the starship
"What?" Al asked, not really expecting an answer. "Who are
you?"
"I am the most sophisticated computer ever devised, Admiral."
"That's funny. I always pictured you with longer legs,
and a cute little—"
"Ziggy?" Sam interrupted Al. "Can you
please explain what we're doing here? What
I'm doing here? How I'm here?"
"We're here to put our minds together, so to speak, Doctor Beckett. You're
here to help save the ten thousand Vulcans who would have otherwise died, and
spelled the end of the Vulcan race. And you are here thanks to," the cat rose
and rubbed against Archer again, "this man."
"Admiral Archer," Sarek said.
"Exactly," Ziggy the cat answered. "As
you might notice, Dr Beckett, you bear a striking resemblance to Admiral
Archer. That's because he is a direct descendent of yours. Unfortunately, we
needed a little more than your influence in order to save the ten
thousand."
"One point twenty-one gigawatts of
electricity," Al muttered. "Has that got something to do with
it?"
"Yes it does," Ziggy answered. "I knew
from weather records that a bolt of lightning would strike the complex-"
"Records from the future..." Al muttered, disbelieving.
"That's a long story, Admiral." The cat glanced quickly at Sarek, who
arched an eyebrow but remained steadfastly silent. "I knew that a bolt of
lightning would strike the complex at precisely
"Would you care to explain that?" Sam asked.
"Admiral Archer had a great deal to do with the construction of this
ship," she answered. "Doctor Richard Eugene Daystrom,
who helped to create the computer systems for this ship, secretly incorporated
some of Admiral Archer's brain engrams into the
software of the
"What does that have to do with saving ten thousand Vulcans?" Sarek
asked.
"I needed the power of the
"And that is...?" Al asked.
"A theoretical point—" Sarek began, speaking as if from a great
distance.
"Where all possible realities exist side by side," Ziggy continued.
"Where everything is possible," Sam added. "Everything that can
happen does."
"Where Surak never lived," Sarek said.
"And Vulcan conquered the Alpha Quadrant before extinguishing
itself," Ziggy added.
Al saw images on a wall-mounted monitor of Vulcan warships blasting through fleets
of primitive ships, and felt real fear at the possibility.
"Where there was no NXprogram,"
Sam said. "No Earth Starfleet. No T'Pol. Where Broken Bow never happened. Where Earth was the Empire."
More images on the monitor, this time of Earth ships doing the same thing. Al was just as frightened at this.
"You guys are starting to scare me," Al said. "What does this
have to do with the ten thousand-?"
"Vulcan wasn't supposed to die," Sarek answered. "In some
realities, it didn't. But in this one, we couldn't allow them all to die."
"So I used the evil done here to create the quantum singularity at the
heart of Vulcan. To put right—" Ziggy began.
"—what once went wrong," Sam continued. "She found a reality
where some would live."
Now the monitor showed a young Vulcan in a cave with a human woman. It was Sarek,
but not Sarek. A different man, but unmistakably Sarek.
They were there for the birth of a son. Al looked quickly to Sarek, then to the
frozen form of Spock.
"Ten thousand," Sarek said flatly. "Enough to
start again."
"Enough to start again," Ziggy
echoed. "As bad as it is, it could have been far, far worse."
"Okay, so ten thousand are saved," Sam said. "We split this
reality. Patched it up. So why am I still here?"
"Yeah," Al said. "Sam always leaps when his work is done. What's
left to do?"
"I'm not sure, Admiral. This is a new reality. There are no records."
Ziggy seemed to shrink down as she tucked herself
into a small, furry ball. Her ears twitched, as if something was coming in on
the wind.
"Dad?" The small, frightened
voice of a young girl crackled, seemingly coming in through the ship's
intercom. "Daddy?"
"Sammy Jo?" Sam looked around,
expecting to see her appear. When she didn't, he was forced his eyes closed on
a tear.
"Sam's daughter," Al said to Sarek. "She leaped out, trying to
bring him back. We never heard from her again."
Finally, she appeared on the transport platform, looking at Sam with wide, loving
eyes. "Daddy?"
The voice was still crackling through the speakers, but it was unmistakably
her. Twenty years old now, but still the fierce little girl destined to follow
her Dad like an echo. A shadow. "Daddy? Thank goodness you're okay."
"Yeah, I'm fine, Sammy." Sam wanted to grab her, to dry his tears on
her shoulder. "I'm fine." But he also knew it wasn't to be. "I'm
just happy to see you, baby."
"Sam lost his wife in time," Al explained to Sarek. "He never
knew his daughter. Not in person. Not until now, that is."
"We're still here because of her," Sam said. "Not what I'm
supposed to do, but what she's supposed to do."
"Yes, that's it," Ziggy said. "She was
somehow caught in the transporter. So she could take
somebody's place."
"Yes," Sammy said quietly. "I love you, Daddy..." Sammy
Jo was enveloped by swirls of light and sparkling matter. And slowly, as she
looked into Sam's eyes, she vanished, to be replaced by a young human woman.
Sarek's eyes softened, and Al knew suddenly that the
Vulcan secretly kept fiery passions. The Vulcan stood and approached the young
woman retrieved from non-existence. "My wife."