The 4400: "The Hurricane" (Maia, Kevin/Tess)
Title: The Hurricane
Fandom: The 4400
Characters/Pairings: Maia, Kevin/Tess
Rating: PG
Summary: The war for the future will be fought in the past, but there is one thing the future failed to take into account--and the thing about one thing is, it usually leads to another.
A/N: Thanks to globalfruitbat for the beta. Written for the 2007 yuletide; the original version, with the corresponding comments, can be found here.
The Hurricane
Seattle, Washington
June 10, 2010
Six Years after the Return of the 4400
The sign on the fence read: "Caution: Biohazardous materials processed at this plant. No unauthorized persons admitted. Trespassers will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law." Outside the fence stood a young boy, about sixteen. He fidgeted impatiently, as if he were expecting something to happen.
The boy was nervously looking to each side when a young girl, about his age, came up to him. "Oh, there you are," he said with clear relief. "I was beginning to wonder if you were going to show up. Any later and I'd have left, probably."
"I know," the girl answered. "Come on." He followed her with a boyish grin on his face, equal parts youthful mischievousness and teenaged lasciviousness. "Here," she said as they came to the end of the fence, where it intersected with the side of a small building. "I can't reach it by myself. Help me up."
The boy eagerly complied, his hands cupping her buttocks as he pushed her up, helping her to scale the wall and pull herself up to the roof. "Here," the girl said when she was stable on top of it, reaching down with her hand and helping him pull himself up as well.
Once up, the pair quickly jumped back down on the other side of the fence. They were surrounded by all sorts of buildings of various shapes and sizes, but the girl just started walking towards one in particular, the boy following. The door was unlocked, and the two entered.
"Should we be worried about guards or something?" the boy asked.
"No," the girl answered. "They're busy." She gave no further explanation.
Inside the building were racks and racks filled with vials of glowing yellow liquid. "This is really it?" the boy asked. "That superhero thing?" When the girl nodded, he looked thoughtful for a moment, then shrugged. "Whatever gets you hot," he said. In the next moment, his mouth was on hers as he pushed her against the wall. She went limp next to him, letting his tongue invade her mouth as his hands slid down the sides of her body to finally rest on her rear. Then one worked its way back up, under the fabric of her shirt--
The boy guiltily pulled his hands back to his sides and took a step back from the girl as a woman flanked by two uniformed guards with blank expressions on their faces. The woman examined the boy with a frown, then flicked her gaze to the girl. "You," she said, a pensive look on her face, the word not quite an accusation.
"Hello, Tess," the girl said with a smile. "How is Dr. Burkhoff?"
The boy looked from the girl to the woman. "Do you know each other?"
The woman, Tess, just ignored him. "Does your mother know you're here, Maia?"
Maia met Tess' gaze. "My mother is dead," she said. "Both of them. Aunt April doesn't care where I am."
There was silence for a moment, then the boy stepped away. "Well, I'll be going," he said, then made a move towards the exit, but before he could do so the two uniformed guards had blocked his path. Without warning, Maia picked up a syringe filled with the yellow liquid and plunged it into his arm.
Tess frowned. "You shouldn't do that, Maia."
"He'll live," she answered, as they boy grasped his arm in pain and fell to his knees. "He'll be able to fly. He's going to love it." She paused. "I think."
Tess looked at Maia with surprise. "You think?"
. . .
Dr. Kevin Burkhoff looked at the teenaged girl Tess brought back with her along with the promicin supply. "I heard about Diana," he said. "I'm sorry; she was a good woman. I don't know why Kyle--"
"He did what he thought he was supposed to," Maia answered simply. "What the future wanted him to do. Needed for him to do."
Kevin nodded, not sure how to respond. He tried again, "What were you doing in the plant?"
Maia looked at him as if he were stupid. "I was waiting for Tess."
"How--" he cut himself off. If he asked how she had known Tess would be there, he would be stupid. "Why?"
Maia shrugged. "To see what would happen."
Kevin frowned. "Didn't you already know what would happen? I thought you were improving your control over your abilities."
"I was," agreed Maia. "I could control what I saw, and the future was clear. I could see years into the future, but only when I wanted to."
"But?" anticipated Kevin.
"But things began happening wrong, things that weren't supposed to. I could only see months ahead. Then only weeks."
"Do you know what happened?"
Maia looked at Kevin and Tess. "You," she answered, unblinking. "Every deviation from the future in my head was somehow connected to you."
"A rogue variable," Kevin said, suddenly grasping what Maia was getting at. "A minute change which becomes catastrophic over a series of iterations. The butterfly flaps its wings in Singapore, hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico." He grabbed a nearby notebook and began scribbling equations.
"Why did you come find us?" asked Tess.
"Because I'm tired being living as a servant of the future. The Center, NTAC, the Nova Group--they're all just pawns. I want to be a rogue variable. Butterfly, meet Hurricane Maia."
. . .
And so Maia's ability was switched from being a source of order to one of chaos, contaminated by the rogue variable which was Kevin and Tess. The psychohistorical equations were beyond Kevin's grasp--he was a neuroscientist, not a mathematician, not a Hari Seldon or an Ian Malcolm--but the diminishing scope of Maia's ability could be used as a judge of the degree to which the system was veering towards the final, catastrophic break with the future which had abducted Maia and Tess, which had cured Kevin.
Maia's precognition only reached forward a few days now, but she was still able to use it to guide Kevin and Tess, to direct their movements and position the trio so they would be able to create the most chaos, to produce the most radical changes in history. They'd be in Roswell one week and D.C. the next--but it seemed that the crux events, like the 4400 themselves, held Seattle as their epicenter.
. . .
From the journals of Dr. Kevin Burkhoff:
aRb
(Ex) : aRx . Xrb
(Ex, y) : aRx . xRy . Yrb
. . . .
? ? ?
Still have not managed to isolate the rogue variable--Asimov's Mule, so to speak. It can't be me--I'm "the Father of 4400 technology," so the future's plans for me are too detailed, their knowledge is too vast. Which means it must lie in Tess--but how? Where? They must have planned for her to wake me and then drop back into oblivion. But doing what? Living a lifetime of schizophrenia? And, most importantly, what went wrong?
My best hypothesis is that it's Tess' and my love the future hadn't counted on, that they just couldn't (can't, won't be able to--whatever tense applies) understand the deepness of our bond. And if that's true, and the future we're fated to become lacks such a simple and important concept as that, then that means we're doing the right thing helping Maia make sure that future never comes to be.
We leave for Toronto tomorrow.
. . .
Tess came back to the van to find Maia sitting in the back, reading a book. Consolations of Philosophy.
"Interesting read?"
Maia shrugged. "Kevin gave it to me," she said. "It's about a man who's been sentenced to death. He's supposed to die the next morning, and Lady Philosophy comes and--" She paused, searching for a word.
"Consoles him?" Tess suggested. Maia nodded, accepting the word. "Does it work?"
Maia looked thoughtful. "He still dies," she said.
. . .
From the journals of Dr. Kevin Burkhoff:
Ff2(MgE) - C1R1 x M = L/So
Nearing catastrophe. Maia's ability now reaches approx. 6 hrs. As a result, we're reduced to keeping our history-altering activities within a defined radius from Seattle: can't make the longer trips we would when we started this. No longer have necessary forewarning.
It's better for Tess and Maia to have a stable home, I think; being constantly on the move was hard on them. I tried to get Maia to move back in with her aunt now that we're back in Seattle fulltime, but she refused. It'd be a lie to say there wasn't a part of me which is glad--it's good to for Tess to have someone other than me to talk to. We've settled into something, the three of us. Not quite a family, but--a team. A unit.
Is good for my research, too; have begun to work on the promicin samples again. I've managed to get the neuroreceptor to bond, but still unsure how to replicate the. . . .
. . .
"Thirteen minutes," Tess said, handing Kevin the test report. "For the first thirteen minutes, every one of her predictions was correct. After that--"
"--they're only slightly better than random chance," Kevin finished for her, scanning the results. "Hardly even statistically significant."
Tess nodded, bit her lip. "How much longer?"
"Until catastrophe?" Kevin put down the piece of paper. "Not long--the curve is logarithmic. Even at the outer boundary, probably less than a day."
"And at the soonest?"
"Mere minutes."
As if on cue, Maia appeared in the doorway. "It's time."
. . .
They were in the van, on their way to the address Maia had provided, "Bohemian Rhapsody" playing on the radio and Kevin and Tess singing along, when Maia gestured to get their attention.
Tess turned down the radio. "What is it, honey?"
"Could you stop here for a moment?" Maia asked.
Tess and Kevin exchanged looks, but Kevin stopped the van anyway, right in front of an empty alley. "It's a dead-end," Tess pointed out. "There's nothing down there."
"I know," Maia said as she unfastened her seat belt and slipped out of the van. She made her way down the alley which was, of course, empty.
"Are you sure you want to do this, Maia?"
Maia turned towards the voice. There she was--the woman who had pretended to be her sister Sarah. The woman from the future.
Maia stared at the woman, and suddenly felt the weight of the intervening centuries lying on her shoulders. "If I've ever been sure of anything, it's this."
"I can't promise the other side won't win if you do this," not-Sarah said. "I can't promise anything."
"No one can," said Maia. "That's what the future means: open, undiscovered. This way, good or bad, we're at least free to make the future we deserve for ourselves."
Not-Sarah sighed, then reached an arm around Maia. "I'm sorry, Maia," she said. "We did what we thought was best--for your time and ours." She pulled Maia into a hug, then pulled away. "Good luck, child. May the best wishes of a future which will never be go with you."
Maia nodded, then turned and walked back to the van in silence. "We can go now," she said as she got back into her seat. "Space Oddity" replaced "Rhapsody" on the radio, but Kevin and Tess were quiet the rest of the ride.
Finally, Kevin pulled into a parking lot under a sign that read "Cady's Confections." "This the place?" he asked.
"Mm-hmm," Maia agreed as she exited the van and made her way to the store, Kevin and Tess following behind her. When she entered, she walked up to the counter. "One chocolate canoli," she ordered.
The man smiled and put the canoli on a plate. "That's the last one," he told her. "A dollar fifty,"
Maia paid him and walked to the table where Kevin and Tess were already sitting. "That's it?" asked Tess. "It was that easy?"
"Miniscule changes," Kevin reminded her. "Butterflies. The kingdom was lost all for the want of a horseshoe nail. Or a canoli."
"So it's all done, then?" Tess asked. "We did it?"
"Let's test it," Kevin said and pulled out a coin. "Call it, Maia," he said as he flipped it into the air.
Maia watched the coin flip through the air, feeling the tears streak down her cheeks as she realized that, for the first time since her abduction, she didn't know what was going to happen next.
At last, at long last, she was free.
THE END
Fandom: The 4400
Characters/Pairings: Maia, Kevin/Tess
Rating: PG
Summary: The war for the future will be fought in the past, but there is one thing the future failed to take into account--and the thing about one thing is, it usually leads to another.
A/N: Thanks to globalfruitbat for the beta. Written for the 2007 yuletide; the original version, with the corresponding comments, can be found here.
The Hurricane
Seattle, Washington
June 10, 2010
Six Years after the Return of the 4400
The sign on the fence read: "Caution: Biohazardous materials processed at this plant. No unauthorized persons admitted. Trespassers will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law." Outside the fence stood a young boy, about sixteen. He fidgeted impatiently, as if he were expecting something to happen.
The boy was nervously looking to each side when a young girl, about his age, came up to him. "Oh, there you are," he said with clear relief. "I was beginning to wonder if you were going to show up. Any later and I'd have left, probably."
"I know," the girl answered. "Come on." He followed her with a boyish grin on his face, equal parts youthful mischievousness and teenaged lasciviousness. "Here," she said as they came to the end of the fence, where it intersected with the side of a small building. "I can't reach it by myself. Help me up."
The boy eagerly complied, his hands cupping her buttocks as he pushed her up, helping her to scale the wall and pull herself up to the roof. "Here," the girl said when she was stable on top of it, reaching down with her hand and helping him pull himself up as well.
Once up, the pair quickly jumped back down on the other side of the fence. They were surrounded by all sorts of buildings of various shapes and sizes, but the girl just started walking towards one in particular, the boy following. The door was unlocked, and the two entered.
"Should we be worried about guards or something?" the boy asked.
"No," the girl answered. "They're busy." She gave no further explanation.
Inside the building were racks and racks filled with vials of glowing yellow liquid. "This is really it?" the boy asked. "That superhero thing?" When the girl nodded, he looked thoughtful for a moment, then shrugged. "Whatever gets you hot," he said. In the next moment, his mouth was on hers as he pushed her against the wall. She went limp next to him, letting his tongue invade her mouth as his hands slid down the sides of her body to finally rest on her rear. Then one worked its way back up, under the fabric of her shirt--
The boy guiltily pulled his hands back to his sides and took a step back from the girl as a woman flanked by two uniformed guards with blank expressions on their faces. The woman examined the boy with a frown, then flicked her gaze to the girl. "You," she said, a pensive look on her face, the word not quite an accusation.
"Hello, Tess," the girl said with a smile. "How is Dr. Burkhoff?"
The boy looked from the girl to the woman. "Do you know each other?"
The woman, Tess, just ignored him. "Does your mother know you're here, Maia?"
Maia met Tess' gaze. "My mother is dead," she said. "Both of them. Aunt April doesn't care where I am."
There was silence for a moment, then the boy stepped away. "Well, I'll be going," he said, then made a move towards the exit, but before he could do so the two uniformed guards had blocked his path. Without warning, Maia picked up a syringe filled with the yellow liquid and plunged it into his arm.
Tess frowned. "You shouldn't do that, Maia."
"He'll live," she answered, as they boy grasped his arm in pain and fell to his knees. "He'll be able to fly. He's going to love it." She paused. "I think."
Tess looked at Maia with surprise. "You think?"
. . .
Dr. Kevin Burkhoff looked at the teenaged girl Tess brought back with her along with the promicin supply. "I heard about Diana," he said. "I'm sorry; she was a good woman. I don't know why Kyle--"
"He did what he thought he was supposed to," Maia answered simply. "What the future wanted him to do. Needed for him to do."
Kevin nodded, not sure how to respond. He tried again, "What were you doing in the plant?"
Maia looked at him as if he were stupid. "I was waiting for Tess."
"How--" he cut himself off. If he asked how she had known Tess would be there, he would be stupid. "Why?"
Maia shrugged. "To see what would happen."
Kevin frowned. "Didn't you already know what would happen? I thought you were improving your control over your abilities."
"I was," agreed Maia. "I could control what I saw, and the future was clear. I could see years into the future, but only when I wanted to."
"But?" anticipated Kevin.
"But things began happening wrong, things that weren't supposed to. I could only see months ahead. Then only weeks."
"Do you know what happened?"
Maia looked at Kevin and Tess. "You," she answered, unblinking. "Every deviation from the future in my head was somehow connected to you."
"A rogue variable," Kevin said, suddenly grasping what Maia was getting at. "A minute change which becomes catastrophic over a series of iterations. The butterfly flaps its wings in Singapore, hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico." He grabbed a nearby notebook and began scribbling equations.
"Why did you come find us?" asked Tess.
"Because I'm tired being living as a servant of the future. The Center, NTAC, the Nova Group--they're all just pawns. I want to be a rogue variable. Butterfly, meet Hurricane Maia."
. . .
And so Maia's ability was switched from being a source of order to one of chaos, contaminated by the rogue variable which was Kevin and Tess. The psychohistorical equations were beyond Kevin's grasp--he was a neuroscientist, not a mathematician, not a Hari Seldon or an Ian Malcolm--but the diminishing scope of Maia's ability could be used as a judge of the degree to which the system was veering towards the final, catastrophic break with the future which had abducted Maia and Tess, which had cured Kevin.
Maia's precognition only reached forward a few days now, but she was still able to use it to guide Kevin and Tess, to direct their movements and position the trio so they would be able to create the most chaos, to produce the most radical changes in history. They'd be in Roswell one week and D.C. the next--but it seemed that the crux events, like the 4400 themselves, held Seattle as their epicenter.
. . .
From the journals of Dr. Kevin Burkhoff:
aRb
(Ex) : aRx . Xrb
(Ex, y) : aRx . xRy . Yrb
. . . .
? ? ?
Still have not managed to isolate the rogue variable--Asimov's Mule, so to speak. It can't be me--I'm "the Father of 4400 technology," so the future's plans for me are too detailed, their knowledge is too vast. Which means it must lie in Tess--but how? Where? They must have planned for her to wake me and then drop back into oblivion. But doing what? Living a lifetime of schizophrenia? And, most importantly, what went wrong?
My best hypothesis is that it's Tess' and my love the future hadn't counted on, that they just couldn't (can't, won't be able to--whatever tense applies) understand the deepness of our bond. And if that's true, and the future we're fated to become lacks such a simple and important concept as that, then that means we're doing the right thing helping Maia make sure that future never comes to be.
We leave for Toronto tomorrow.
. . .
Tess came back to the van to find Maia sitting in the back, reading a book. Consolations of Philosophy.
"Interesting read?"
Maia shrugged. "Kevin gave it to me," she said. "It's about a man who's been sentenced to death. He's supposed to die the next morning, and Lady Philosophy comes and--" She paused, searching for a word.
"Consoles him?" Tess suggested. Maia nodded, accepting the word. "Does it work?"
Maia looked thoughtful. "He still dies," she said.
. . .
From the journals of Dr. Kevin Burkhoff:
Ff2(MgE) - C1R1 x M = L/So
Nearing catastrophe. Maia's ability now reaches approx. 6 hrs. As a result, we're reduced to keeping our history-altering activities within a defined radius from Seattle: can't make the longer trips we would when we started this. No longer have necessary forewarning.
It's better for Tess and Maia to have a stable home, I think; being constantly on the move was hard on them. I tried to get Maia to move back in with her aunt now that we're back in Seattle fulltime, but she refused. It'd be a lie to say there wasn't a part of me which is glad--it's good to for Tess to have someone other than me to talk to. We've settled into something, the three of us. Not quite a family, but--a team. A unit.
Is good for my research, too; have begun to work on the promicin samples again. I've managed to get the neuroreceptor to bond, but still unsure how to replicate the. . . .
. . .
"Thirteen minutes," Tess said, handing Kevin the test report. "For the first thirteen minutes, every one of her predictions was correct. After that--"
"--they're only slightly better than random chance," Kevin finished for her, scanning the results. "Hardly even statistically significant."
Tess nodded, bit her lip. "How much longer?"
"Until catastrophe?" Kevin put down the piece of paper. "Not long--the curve is logarithmic. Even at the outer boundary, probably less than a day."
"And at the soonest?"
"Mere minutes."
As if on cue, Maia appeared in the doorway. "It's time."
. . .
They were in the van, on their way to the address Maia had provided, "Bohemian Rhapsody" playing on the radio and Kevin and Tess singing along, when Maia gestured to get their attention.
Tess turned down the radio. "What is it, honey?"
"Could you stop here for a moment?" Maia asked.
Tess and Kevin exchanged looks, but Kevin stopped the van anyway, right in front of an empty alley. "It's a dead-end," Tess pointed out. "There's nothing down there."
"I know," Maia said as she unfastened her seat belt and slipped out of the van. She made her way down the alley which was, of course, empty.
"Are you sure you want to do this, Maia?"
Maia turned towards the voice. There she was--the woman who had pretended to be her sister Sarah. The woman from the future.
Maia stared at the woman, and suddenly felt the weight of the intervening centuries lying on her shoulders. "If I've ever been sure of anything, it's this."
"I can't promise the other side won't win if you do this," not-Sarah said. "I can't promise anything."
"No one can," said Maia. "That's what the future means: open, undiscovered. This way, good or bad, we're at least free to make the future we deserve for ourselves."
Not-Sarah sighed, then reached an arm around Maia. "I'm sorry, Maia," she said. "We did what we thought was best--for your time and ours." She pulled Maia into a hug, then pulled away. "Good luck, child. May the best wishes of a future which will never be go with you."
Maia nodded, then turned and walked back to the van in silence. "We can go now," she said as she got back into her seat. "Space Oddity" replaced "Rhapsody" on the radio, but Kevin and Tess were quiet the rest of the ride.
Finally, Kevin pulled into a parking lot under a sign that read "Cady's Confections." "This the place?" he asked.
"Mm-hmm," Maia agreed as she exited the van and made her way to the store, Kevin and Tess following behind her. When she entered, she walked up to the counter. "One chocolate canoli," she ordered.
The man smiled and put the canoli on a plate. "That's the last one," he told her. "A dollar fifty,"
Maia paid him and walked to the table where Kevin and Tess were already sitting. "That's it?" asked Tess. "It was that easy?"
"Miniscule changes," Kevin reminded her. "Butterflies. The kingdom was lost all for the want of a horseshoe nail. Or a canoli."
"So it's all done, then?" Tess asked. "We did it?"
"Let's test it," Kevin said and pulled out a coin. "Call it, Maia," he said as he flipped it into the air.
Maia watched the coin flip through the air, feeling the tears streak down her cheeks as she realized that, for the first time since her abduction, she didn't know what was going to happen next.
At last, at long last, she was free.
THE END