First time writing for this fandom...
...so I hope it works out well.
Title: Heuristic Method
Fandom: Eureka
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Moving somewhere new is always hard, but Eureka was REALLY going to take some adjusting to...
Characters/Pairing: What, and spoil the surprise?
Warnings: Fair warning, Jess, one of my OCs, can be a bit... angsty, at times. But the evil muse and I do give her cause...
Disclaimer: No, I don't own Eureka. If I did, do you think I'd be working at Wal-Mart?
Author's Note: This story begins between episodes 1 and 2.
Well, it certainly was... green.
Agent Kayla Rangan eyed the scenery as she drove. It had been a while since she'd last been on the west coast, and even then she hadn't spent much time in the Pacific northwest. Of course, even that was more then her passenger could say. She'd managed to forget just how wet it got up there.
But then, the F.B.I. did keep her fairly busy. Acting as an escort/bodyguard for someone in the Witness Protection Program was not one of her usual duties, but given the curious nature of this particular case, it simply hadn't made sense to bring in the Marshalls, when the F.B.I. had been involved since the very beginning.
Her passenger sighed quietly, and she looked away from the road to give the young woman a brief look. She didn't think either of them expected to be in this situation again. Rangan had been one of the agents involved when the girl had first stumbled into their office the year before, and had remained involved during her lengthy debriefing - very lengthy, considering it covered two years worth of experiences, and had required a few experts to be brought in to explain just what the hell the girl had been talking about - and had been a member of the team that had watched her while the guilty parties had been apprehended.
After that, she'd been shipped off somewhere - the higher-ups hadn't been terribly forthcoming with details - and that was the last they'd heard from her... until two weeks before, when Rangan's boss had called her in to his office to let her know that an old friend of hers required relocation. Again.
Jessica didn't seem especially happy about the move, and it wasn't hard to figure out why. While the 19-year-old didn't really say much of anything about where she'd been for almost a year, one of the few things she had said was that there had only been a handful of people there at most. Having to go from that - for whatever reason; that was something else that was evidently too classified to explain - to dealing with an entire townful of strangers was going to be very difficult for her.
Rangan had been assured that everything would be ready and waiting for Jess by the time they got there. Unfortunately, that almost certainly included the rest of what was making Jess so unhappy. She hadn't been told much about the town, or whatever was there that was so ridiculously classified, but supposedly they had better medical care there then anywhere else in the world. She wasn't entirely sure she bought that, but she knew that if she hadn't agreed to transport Jess, they just would have assigned another agent, and it was better for Jess to have someone she knew along for the ride.
Still, though... The people of Eureka had better be everything that her bosses seemed to believe them to be.
If they knew what was good for them.
Sheriff Jack Carter was still a bit iffy about his new job. Yes, it was a promotion... technically. Higher pay, higher clearance level, significantly less risk of being gunned down in an alley somewhere... These were all good things. He didn't deny it (even if going from Marshall to Sheriff didn't sound like a promotion).
However, as the recently repaired hole in the ceiling of his office testified, he wasn't necessarily any safer where he was now. Indeed, given the often dangerous and unpredictable nature of the various experiments that pretty much everyone in town were engaged in almost all the time, it could be argued that he was in far more danger now then he had ever been during his tenure with the U.S. Marshalls. The technobabble was disconcerting, many of the townspeople seemed a bit... odd, and his deputy seemed hostile towards his presence.
Not that anyone had exactly asked him before promoting and transferring him.
They hadn't warned him, either. If they had, he might have been able to find a place to stay before moving. As it was, he'd taken to sleeping in the cell in the sheriff's office. He hadn't exactly pressed much when Jo had told him that no, she didn't have any extra rooms he could stay in; given how little she seemed to want him there, it was just as well. (Not that he would have been afraid for his safety or anything - Jo was a good cop - but when he'd considered the number of things that could potentially have "accidentally" happened to his stuff... Well.) He hadn't really met all that many other people in town, and didn't really know any of them well enough to even consider imposing. He supposed he could have gone back to Beverly's Inn, but living with a psychiatrist just did not seem like fun. Thus, the cell.
He knew that his belongings were almost ready to be sent out to him, though, and it would be nice to have a place to put everything by then. Maybe Henry could recommend a good realtor.
Or, hell, maybe he was one. He certainly seemed to be everything else.
The day had started off slow. He hadn't been there long enough to know for certain, but he could already guess that that was the usual pattern: slow days, broken up by the latest scientific mess that, naturally, the only two people in town who didn't know much of anything about science had to clean up. Not that the townspeople looked down on them, necessarily... Well, most of them didn't. Probably.
The important ones didn't, anyway.
The sound of the door opening shook him out of his reverie, and he looked up to see two people he didn't know enter the station. Even after the town meeting where they had announced that he was replacing Sheriff Cobb, he hardly believed he knew every single person in town, so that didn't necessarily mean anything. However, a look over at Jo told him that she didn't know these people, either.
The older woman was wearing a dark suit that fairly well screamed 'government agent'. Given the D.O.D. presence in town, that wasn't unlikely. She stood at about 5'7", if he wasn't mistaken, with features that were either Asian or Indian, and black hair hanging just past her shoulders.
It was the younger woman next to her - almost hiding behind her, really - that made him curious. She looked to be a few years older then his own daughter, Zoe, and had her arms crossed over her Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt as if she was cold, despite the warm weather. Well, warm for the Pacific northwest, anyway. Maybe she was from somewhere more down south. He knew that if he hadn't been so used to traveling all over the country, he would have had a bigger adjustment to make after moving here from L.A.
She also seemed a bit... twitchy. Her gaze was constantly moving around, though she didn't seem to be looking at anything specific, and she'd seemed to fight down the urge to flinch when Jo moved.
She didn't seem to react at all when he stood up to greet them, though, so he decided he'd probably imagined it. "Is there something I can do for you?"
The woman gave him a brief smile, then reached into an inner pocket in her jacket and withdrew her identification. Flipping it open, she extended it to him to examine even as she said, "Agent Kayla Rangan, F.B.I. And yes, there is, Sheriff Co-" Her gaze flicked down to the identification pin on his uniform, and she frowned. "Carter," she finished. She fixed him with an inquisitive look as he returned her badge, satisfied that she was who she said she was. "I was told to expect a Sheriff Cobb."
"He was injured in the line of duty, and decided to retire." That was really the closest he could come to explaining what had happened to someone who didn't have clearance. "I was transferred here to take his place."
"But you're not happy about it. Either of you." This was said so softly, he almost missed it. He couldn't have said whether or not the girl had meant for it to be heard, and the fact that she still wasn't looking at anyone else in the office didn't help.
He wasn't quite sure how to react to that, but Rangan saved him the effort. "If you could contact someone at Global Dynamics and let them know we're here, it would be appreciated."
Having no real idea what someone from the F.B.I. would have to do with G.D. - or how she knew about them at all - he could only hope that Allison would have some answers for him. And that she'd actually tell him what they were.
He picked up his phone and dialed a number that he'd memorized fairly quickly - mainly due to how often he needed to use it - as Jo leaned forward and fixed their visitors with a borderline suspicious look. "Who's she?" she asked, the girl's twitchy behavior obviously setting off her instincts. It was triggering his instincts, too, but not the same ones.
"My name's Jess," the girl answered for herself, finally focusing on something. Her voice was perfectly clear this time, and though she seemed somewhat wary, she didn't look afraid. "Jessica Coleman." She paused. "Well, it is now, anyway."
"Witness Protection," Rangan added, before Jo could ask.
"Allison Blake."
Attention diverted, he said into his phone, "Allison, there's an Agent Rangan here from the F.B.I. who says you're expecting her?"
"They made good time," Allison mused, and Jack felt himself relax a bit. It certainly sounded like they were legit. "I need you to bring Miss Coleman to G.D. as soon as you can."
"At which point you'll tell me what's going on?" It hadn't escaped his notice that the conversation in the room had pretty much stopped, with everyone now watching him, which was just a little awkward.
"I'll try," Jess said with a shrug, at the same time Allison replied, "I don't know everything myself, just yet. We'll talk when you get here." With that, she hung up.
As he put his phone away, Jess turned and began talking quietly with Rangan. It wasn't a long conversation, and she ended it by giving the older woman a hug before the agent gave Jack and Jo each a nod of acknowledgment, then left.
Jess looked nervous and uncertain, standing there by herself, so Jack decided that there was no real point in putting things off. It would only serve to make her more tense. "I'll be back later, Jo," he said, making sure he had his keys. Hopefully with an explanation his expression added, and for once, Jo simply nodded, not arguing in the slightest.
He wondered if it was too much to hope for that her resentful attitude would stay gone.
He suspected that it probably was.
His passenger was quiet on the drive up to G.D., taking in the scenery with a sort of nervous curiosity. He'd made a few attempts at conversation as he drove, but she responded to each with answers that were rarely longer then one word, and politely but firmly shut down each one. It was obvious that she didn't especially want to be there, which was odd.
Global Dynamics was home to the most cutting edge scientific research on the planet, and as such was extremely classified. To even be allowed access you had to either be in the wrong place at the right time - like he had - or work damn hard to earn an invite. "You are cleared for this, right?"
It wasn't the first time he'd asked - and he knew Allison at least well enough to know that she would never tell him to escort someone to G.D. who wasn't supposed to be there - but she didn't display even a hint of annoyance. "Yes," she replied simply.
"Why?"
She frowned and focused on him for the first time since they'd left the sheriff's office. "What do you mean?"
Not only a complete sentence, but a follow-up question, as well. They were making progress. "Why do you have that kind of clearance?"
Her attention drifted back to the window. "You'll find out when we get there."
So much for progress. He sighed quietly and refocused on the road.
This, of course, meant he missed her brief smile.
The next time she displayed any real interest in what was going on was when they reached the hologram that both protected and shielded G.D. That didn't surprise him, as it was fairly cool. The closer they got to G.D., though, the more tense she grew. He almost expected her to jump out of the jeep when her picture was taken for her visitor's identification badge. By the time they arrived, her grip on the door handle was white-knuckled.
He still had no idea what was going on - par for the course, really - but it was impossible to miss the fact that something was very wrong. "Are you okay?"
She started, then looked embarrassed. "I'm fine," she said, consciously banishing the tension from her posture. She opened the door and stepped out of the jeep, as if to prove just how fine she was.
To someone as good at reading body language as Jack Carter, she might as well have been holding up a sign that said 'I really, really don't want to be here'.
He didn't call her on it, though, instinctively sensing that it wouldn't work, and would only serve to agitate her further. "Okay, then. Right this way."
It took her a moment to work up the nerve to follow him inside.
He hadn't quite adjusted to the organized chaos of Global Dynamics, so he could understand why she kept looking around apprehensively as they moved through the lobby. Still, this seemed a bit excessive. "Is there something in particular you're worried about?"
She let out a quiet chuckle laced with bitterness and pain, and said nothing.
This, quite naturally, did nothing but make his concern grow by about three or four times. Before he could say anything else, though, a new voice spoke up. "Carter," Allison called as she headed their way. As usual, she was dressed more formally then anyone else present, and - as usual - her suit looked very good on her. Not that Carter noticed, or anything. "And you must be Miss Coleman. My name is Allison Blake."
Jessica simply stared at her, face utterly blank.
Allison cleared her throat, then said, "Come with me, please. We're heading down to Section Two." No one said anything as they followed her to the elevator. Jess frowned and cocked her head to the side as they descended, looking around as if trying to determine the source of some sound.
Hearing nothing out of the ordinary himself, Jack wondered about that, but her behavior lasted for only a moment, and they arrived in Section Two shortly after. Allison lead them to a room containing a number of computers - he was convinced they came standard with every room in GD - which was dominated by what looked, to him, like a dentist's chair with a hair dryer attachment.
Jess swallowed hard, and when he looked at her, she'd gone pale. "Well," she managed. "That looks familiar."
Allison looked at her apologetically. "It's one of the few of Dr. Morrison's inventions left from his time here. Unfortunately, it's also the best method we have of seeing how extensive the damage is, and what we can do to fix it."
"There's nothing you can do." Her voice was quiet, but filled with certainty. Nevertheless, she still climbed into the chair, gripping the arms tightly as the metal dome lowered itself onto her head.
Allison moved to one of the computers, but hesitated. "Before we begin, I just want to say on behalf of all of us how incredibly sorry we are for what you went through."
"I know." Jess laughed humorlessly. "Believe me, I know."
"What did she go through?" Content to observe up until that point, Jack couldn't quite let such an obvious question remain unasked. He had been promised answers, after all.
Allison finished keying in a sequence on the keyboard, and the chair began to hum quietly. She hesitated a moment longer before saying, "Several years ago, Doctor Charles Morrison lead a team to investigate human psychic potential. Telepathy, precognition... that sort of thing. He grew dissatisfied with the theoretical nature of his work, resenting the ethical limitations imposed on him by GD."
"Ethical limitations?" He had yet to see any sign of such a thing.
Allison gave him a tight smile. "Yes, Carter. Believe it or not, we do have an ethical code of conduct here. Morrison ignored that, as well as several other company regulations, so he was let go."
"At which point they stopped keeping track of him," Jess interjected. "Because, really, what harm could a morally bankrupt scientist interested in screwing around with people's brains do with no one to keep him in check, or even bothering to keep an eye on him?"
Allison winced.
For his part, Jack had a bad feeling about where this was going. "So, he-"
"Immediately got up to his old tricks again, yes," Jess confirmed. A bit of anger had seeped into her voice, which was at least better then the resigned anxiety that had been there before. "I was abducted off the streets three years ago, and I was far from the only one. Don't ask why me - evidently, there was something that set us apart, just a bit. Some genetic quirk or other. His experiments had a fairly high mortality rate, you see, so he constantly needed new subjects. I'm one of maybe three or four people to survive, and two of the others hadn't even made it past the preliminary stages, yet."
"That's..."
"Yes, it certainly is." She paused. "And I do appreciate how appalled you both are, believe me. Now, where was I? Ah, yes. His experiments. While he'd been here, he'd become convinced he could create a telepath. He was sure that mind-reading was only the first step, that once he'd achieved that, other mental abilities would follow. He was also sure that if he could create a soldier capable of reading the enemy's mind, of killing the enemy with their mind, the government would absolve him of all his sins." She snorted humorlessly. "They probably would have, too."
Unwilling to touch that particular landmine, Jack instead decided to focus on the other implication of her statement. "You can read minds?" That was... Well, he didn't know what that was.
"No," she replied. "I was one of the failures. I can only pick up emotions." Her mouth quirked into a strained smile. "Actually, he never did get it to work. Probably why he kept us around. A partial success was better then nothing, after all, and we could teach him what to do differently the next time. So he kept us, and trained us, and poked and prodded and sliced and zapped..." She fell silent for a long moment. "I used to live in New York, you know? The city. I couldn't go back, though. Because of him, I feel everyone else's emotions, all right - everyone else. All the time. Every minute of every hour of every day, pouring into my head until I couldn't tell what was coming from me and what wasn't. It was driving me insane. So, after I was finished telling the FBI what had happened, I was shipped off to a research facility in Antarctica that had only four other people. It was..." she sighed. "It was quiet. Once I got used to the others, I could tune them out, more or less. Then..." She shivered. "Well, without going into anything classified, I met someone who helped me learn to shield my mind, at least a little. Unfortunately, what Morrison had done, at least in my case, was more along the lines of waking up a dormant part of my brain... only he hadn't gotten whatever part I needed to block everyone else out completely, or, even better, to shut it off if I wanted to." The words were pouring out of her, now, her frustration with her situation finally being allowed to vent. "Then I had to leave, to come here, and be poked and prodded more. Oh, I know, you're just trying to help, and I even appreciate that. What I want most, though, is to be left alone. Try and guess how many decisions about my life I've had any input in over the past several years. Yeah, I may have been homeless before - and that sucks - but at least I'd been free to go wherever I might want, to do whatever I felt like. Now I'm stuck here for who knows how long, set up in a nice, comfortable cage. That's why I'm here, Sheriff. Why I'm twitchy around scientists, why I don't want to be here. Aren't you glad you asked?"
He honestly had no idea how to respond to that.
And for those of you who may be curious, this is what I envision Jess looking like:
Title: Heuristic Method
Fandom: Eureka
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Moving somewhere new is always hard, but Eureka was REALLY going to take some adjusting to...
Characters/Pairing: What, and spoil the surprise?
Warnings: Fair warning, Jess, one of my OCs, can be a bit... angsty, at times. But the evil muse and I do give her cause...
Disclaimer: No, I don't own Eureka. If I did, do you think I'd be working at Wal-Mart?
Author's Note: This story begins between episodes 1 and 2.
Well, it certainly was... green.
Agent Kayla Rangan eyed the scenery as she drove. It had been a while since she'd last been on the west coast, and even then she hadn't spent much time in the Pacific northwest. Of course, even that was more then her passenger could say. She'd managed to forget just how wet it got up there.
But then, the F.B.I. did keep her fairly busy. Acting as an escort/bodyguard for someone in the Witness Protection Program was not one of her usual duties, but given the curious nature of this particular case, it simply hadn't made sense to bring in the Marshalls, when the F.B.I. had been involved since the very beginning.
Her passenger sighed quietly, and she looked away from the road to give the young woman a brief look. She didn't think either of them expected to be in this situation again. Rangan had been one of the agents involved when the girl had first stumbled into their office the year before, and had remained involved during her lengthy debriefing - very lengthy, considering it covered two years worth of experiences, and had required a few experts to be brought in to explain just what the hell the girl had been talking about - and had been a member of the team that had watched her while the guilty parties had been apprehended.
After that, she'd been shipped off somewhere - the higher-ups hadn't been terribly forthcoming with details - and that was the last they'd heard from her... until two weeks before, when Rangan's boss had called her in to his office to let her know that an old friend of hers required relocation. Again.
Jessica didn't seem especially happy about the move, and it wasn't hard to figure out why. While the 19-year-old didn't really say much of anything about where she'd been for almost a year, one of the few things she had said was that there had only been a handful of people there at most. Having to go from that - for whatever reason; that was something else that was evidently too classified to explain - to dealing with an entire townful of strangers was going to be very difficult for her.
Rangan had been assured that everything would be ready and waiting for Jess by the time they got there. Unfortunately, that almost certainly included the rest of what was making Jess so unhappy. She hadn't been told much about the town, or whatever was there that was so ridiculously classified, but supposedly they had better medical care there then anywhere else in the world. She wasn't entirely sure she bought that, but she knew that if she hadn't agreed to transport Jess, they just would have assigned another agent, and it was better for Jess to have someone she knew along for the ride.
Still, though... The people of Eureka had better be everything that her bosses seemed to believe them to be.
If they knew what was good for them.
Sheriff Jack Carter was still a bit iffy about his new job. Yes, it was a promotion... technically. Higher pay, higher clearance level, significantly less risk of being gunned down in an alley somewhere... These were all good things. He didn't deny it (even if going from Marshall to Sheriff didn't sound like a promotion).
However, as the recently repaired hole in the ceiling of his office testified, he wasn't necessarily any safer where he was now. Indeed, given the often dangerous and unpredictable nature of the various experiments that pretty much everyone in town were engaged in almost all the time, it could be argued that he was in far more danger now then he had ever been during his tenure with the U.S. Marshalls. The technobabble was disconcerting, many of the townspeople seemed a bit... odd, and his deputy seemed hostile towards his presence.
Not that anyone had exactly asked him before promoting and transferring him.
They hadn't warned him, either. If they had, he might have been able to find a place to stay before moving. As it was, he'd taken to sleeping in the cell in the sheriff's office. He hadn't exactly pressed much when Jo had told him that no, she didn't have any extra rooms he could stay in; given how little she seemed to want him there, it was just as well. (Not that he would have been afraid for his safety or anything - Jo was a good cop - but when he'd considered the number of things that could potentially have "accidentally" happened to his stuff... Well.) He hadn't really met all that many other people in town, and didn't really know any of them well enough to even consider imposing. He supposed he could have gone back to Beverly's Inn, but living with a psychiatrist just did not seem like fun. Thus, the cell.
He knew that his belongings were almost ready to be sent out to him, though, and it would be nice to have a place to put everything by then. Maybe Henry could recommend a good realtor.
Or, hell, maybe he was one. He certainly seemed to be everything else.
The day had started off slow. He hadn't been there long enough to know for certain, but he could already guess that that was the usual pattern: slow days, broken up by the latest scientific mess that, naturally, the only two people in town who didn't know much of anything about science had to clean up. Not that the townspeople looked down on them, necessarily... Well, most of them didn't. Probably.
The important ones didn't, anyway.
The sound of the door opening shook him out of his reverie, and he looked up to see two people he didn't know enter the station. Even after the town meeting where they had announced that he was replacing Sheriff Cobb, he hardly believed he knew every single person in town, so that didn't necessarily mean anything. However, a look over at Jo told him that she didn't know these people, either.
The older woman was wearing a dark suit that fairly well screamed 'government agent'. Given the D.O.D. presence in town, that wasn't unlikely. She stood at about 5'7", if he wasn't mistaken, with features that were either Asian or Indian, and black hair hanging just past her shoulders.
It was the younger woman next to her - almost hiding behind her, really - that made him curious. She looked to be a few years older then his own daughter, Zoe, and had her arms crossed over her Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt as if she was cold, despite the warm weather. Well, warm for the Pacific northwest, anyway. Maybe she was from somewhere more down south. He knew that if he hadn't been so used to traveling all over the country, he would have had a bigger adjustment to make after moving here from L.A.
She also seemed a bit... twitchy. Her gaze was constantly moving around, though she didn't seem to be looking at anything specific, and she'd seemed to fight down the urge to flinch when Jo moved.
She didn't seem to react at all when he stood up to greet them, though, so he decided he'd probably imagined it. "Is there something I can do for you?"
The woman gave him a brief smile, then reached into an inner pocket in her jacket and withdrew her identification. Flipping it open, she extended it to him to examine even as she said, "Agent Kayla Rangan, F.B.I. And yes, there is, Sheriff Co-" Her gaze flicked down to the identification pin on his uniform, and she frowned. "Carter," she finished. She fixed him with an inquisitive look as he returned her badge, satisfied that she was who she said she was. "I was told to expect a Sheriff Cobb."
"He was injured in the line of duty, and decided to retire." That was really the closest he could come to explaining what had happened to someone who didn't have clearance. "I was transferred here to take his place."
"But you're not happy about it. Either of you." This was said so softly, he almost missed it. He couldn't have said whether or not the girl had meant for it to be heard, and the fact that she still wasn't looking at anyone else in the office didn't help.
He wasn't quite sure how to react to that, but Rangan saved him the effort. "If you could contact someone at Global Dynamics and let them know we're here, it would be appreciated."
Having no real idea what someone from the F.B.I. would have to do with G.D. - or how she knew about them at all - he could only hope that Allison would have some answers for him. And that she'd actually tell him what they were.
He picked up his phone and dialed a number that he'd memorized fairly quickly - mainly due to how often he needed to use it - as Jo leaned forward and fixed their visitors with a borderline suspicious look. "Who's she?" she asked, the girl's twitchy behavior obviously setting off her instincts. It was triggering his instincts, too, but not the same ones.
"My name's Jess," the girl answered for herself, finally focusing on something. Her voice was perfectly clear this time, and though she seemed somewhat wary, she didn't look afraid. "Jessica Coleman." She paused. "Well, it is now, anyway."
"Witness Protection," Rangan added, before Jo could ask.
"Allison Blake."
Attention diverted, he said into his phone, "Allison, there's an Agent Rangan here from the F.B.I. who says you're expecting her?"
"They made good time," Allison mused, and Jack felt himself relax a bit. It certainly sounded like they were legit. "I need you to bring Miss Coleman to G.D. as soon as you can."
"At which point you'll tell me what's going on?" It hadn't escaped his notice that the conversation in the room had pretty much stopped, with everyone now watching him, which was just a little awkward.
"I'll try," Jess said with a shrug, at the same time Allison replied, "I don't know everything myself, just yet. We'll talk when you get here." With that, she hung up.
As he put his phone away, Jess turned and began talking quietly with Rangan. It wasn't a long conversation, and she ended it by giving the older woman a hug before the agent gave Jack and Jo each a nod of acknowledgment, then left.
Jess looked nervous and uncertain, standing there by herself, so Jack decided that there was no real point in putting things off. It would only serve to make her more tense. "I'll be back later, Jo," he said, making sure he had his keys. Hopefully with an explanation his expression added, and for once, Jo simply nodded, not arguing in the slightest.
He wondered if it was too much to hope for that her resentful attitude would stay gone.
He suspected that it probably was.
His passenger was quiet on the drive up to G.D., taking in the scenery with a sort of nervous curiosity. He'd made a few attempts at conversation as he drove, but she responded to each with answers that were rarely longer then one word, and politely but firmly shut down each one. It was obvious that she didn't especially want to be there, which was odd.
Global Dynamics was home to the most cutting edge scientific research on the planet, and as such was extremely classified. To even be allowed access you had to either be in the wrong place at the right time - like he had - or work damn hard to earn an invite. "You are cleared for this, right?"
It wasn't the first time he'd asked - and he knew Allison at least well enough to know that she would never tell him to escort someone to G.D. who wasn't supposed to be there - but she didn't display even a hint of annoyance. "Yes," she replied simply.
"Why?"
She frowned and focused on him for the first time since they'd left the sheriff's office. "What do you mean?"
Not only a complete sentence, but a follow-up question, as well. They were making progress. "Why do you have that kind of clearance?"
Her attention drifted back to the window. "You'll find out when we get there."
So much for progress. He sighed quietly and refocused on the road.
This, of course, meant he missed her brief smile.
The next time she displayed any real interest in what was going on was when they reached the hologram that both protected and shielded G.D. That didn't surprise him, as it was fairly cool. The closer they got to G.D., though, the more tense she grew. He almost expected her to jump out of the jeep when her picture was taken for her visitor's identification badge. By the time they arrived, her grip on the door handle was white-knuckled.
He still had no idea what was going on - par for the course, really - but it was impossible to miss the fact that something was very wrong. "Are you okay?"
She started, then looked embarrassed. "I'm fine," she said, consciously banishing the tension from her posture. She opened the door and stepped out of the jeep, as if to prove just how fine she was.
To someone as good at reading body language as Jack Carter, she might as well have been holding up a sign that said 'I really, really don't want to be here'.
He didn't call her on it, though, instinctively sensing that it wouldn't work, and would only serve to agitate her further. "Okay, then. Right this way."
It took her a moment to work up the nerve to follow him inside.
He hadn't quite adjusted to the organized chaos of Global Dynamics, so he could understand why she kept looking around apprehensively as they moved through the lobby. Still, this seemed a bit excessive. "Is there something in particular you're worried about?"
She let out a quiet chuckle laced with bitterness and pain, and said nothing.
This, quite naturally, did nothing but make his concern grow by about three or four times. Before he could say anything else, though, a new voice spoke up. "Carter," Allison called as she headed their way. As usual, she was dressed more formally then anyone else present, and - as usual - her suit looked very good on her. Not that Carter noticed, or anything. "And you must be Miss Coleman. My name is Allison Blake."
Jessica simply stared at her, face utterly blank.
Allison cleared her throat, then said, "Come with me, please. We're heading down to Section Two." No one said anything as they followed her to the elevator. Jess frowned and cocked her head to the side as they descended, looking around as if trying to determine the source of some sound.
Hearing nothing out of the ordinary himself, Jack wondered about that, but her behavior lasted for only a moment, and they arrived in Section Two shortly after. Allison lead them to a room containing a number of computers - he was convinced they came standard with every room in GD - which was dominated by what looked, to him, like a dentist's chair with a hair dryer attachment.
Jess swallowed hard, and when he looked at her, she'd gone pale. "Well," she managed. "That looks familiar."
Allison looked at her apologetically. "It's one of the few of Dr. Morrison's inventions left from his time here. Unfortunately, it's also the best method we have of seeing how extensive the damage is, and what we can do to fix it."
"There's nothing you can do." Her voice was quiet, but filled with certainty. Nevertheless, she still climbed into the chair, gripping the arms tightly as the metal dome lowered itself onto her head.
Allison moved to one of the computers, but hesitated. "Before we begin, I just want to say on behalf of all of us how incredibly sorry we are for what you went through."
"I know." Jess laughed humorlessly. "Believe me, I know."
"What did she go through?" Content to observe up until that point, Jack couldn't quite let such an obvious question remain unasked. He had been promised answers, after all.
Allison finished keying in a sequence on the keyboard, and the chair began to hum quietly. She hesitated a moment longer before saying, "Several years ago, Doctor Charles Morrison lead a team to investigate human psychic potential. Telepathy, precognition... that sort of thing. He grew dissatisfied with the theoretical nature of his work, resenting the ethical limitations imposed on him by GD."
"Ethical limitations?" He had yet to see any sign of such a thing.
Allison gave him a tight smile. "Yes, Carter. Believe it or not, we do have an ethical code of conduct here. Morrison ignored that, as well as several other company regulations, so he was let go."
"At which point they stopped keeping track of him," Jess interjected. "Because, really, what harm could a morally bankrupt scientist interested in screwing around with people's brains do with no one to keep him in check, or even bothering to keep an eye on him?"
Allison winced.
For his part, Jack had a bad feeling about where this was going. "So, he-"
"Immediately got up to his old tricks again, yes," Jess confirmed. A bit of anger had seeped into her voice, which was at least better then the resigned anxiety that had been there before. "I was abducted off the streets three years ago, and I was far from the only one. Don't ask why me - evidently, there was something that set us apart, just a bit. Some genetic quirk or other. His experiments had a fairly high mortality rate, you see, so he constantly needed new subjects. I'm one of maybe three or four people to survive, and two of the others hadn't even made it past the preliminary stages, yet."
"That's..."
"Yes, it certainly is." She paused. "And I do appreciate how appalled you both are, believe me. Now, where was I? Ah, yes. His experiments. While he'd been here, he'd become convinced he could create a telepath. He was sure that mind-reading was only the first step, that once he'd achieved that, other mental abilities would follow. He was also sure that if he could create a soldier capable of reading the enemy's mind, of killing the enemy with their mind, the government would absolve him of all his sins." She snorted humorlessly. "They probably would have, too."
Unwilling to touch that particular landmine, Jack instead decided to focus on the other implication of her statement. "You can read minds?" That was... Well, he didn't know what that was.
"No," she replied. "I was one of the failures. I can only pick up emotions." Her mouth quirked into a strained smile. "Actually, he never did get it to work. Probably why he kept us around. A partial success was better then nothing, after all, and we could teach him what to do differently the next time. So he kept us, and trained us, and poked and prodded and sliced and zapped..." She fell silent for a long moment. "I used to live in New York, you know? The city. I couldn't go back, though. Because of him, I feel everyone else's emotions, all right - everyone else. All the time. Every minute of every hour of every day, pouring into my head until I couldn't tell what was coming from me and what wasn't. It was driving me insane. So, after I was finished telling the FBI what had happened, I was shipped off to a research facility in Antarctica that had only four other people. It was..." she sighed. "It was quiet. Once I got used to the others, I could tune them out, more or less. Then..." She shivered. "Well, without going into anything classified, I met someone who helped me learn to shield my mind, at least a little. Unfortunately, what Morrison had done, at least in my case, was more along the lines of waking up a dormant part of my brain... only he hadn't gotten whatever part I needed to block everyone else out completely, or, even better, to shut it off if I wanted to." The words were pouring out of her, now, her frustration with her situation finally being allowed to vent. "Then I had to leave, to come here, and be poked and prodded more. Oh, I know, you're just trying to help, and I even appreciate that. What I want most, though, is to be left alone. Try and guess how many decisions about my life I've had any input in over the past several years. Yeah, I may have been homeless before - and that sucks - but at least I'd been free to go wherever I might want, to do whatever I felt like. Now I'm stuck here for who knows how long, set up in a nice, comfortable cage. That's why I'm here, Sheriff. Why I'm twitchy around scientists, why I don't want to be here. Aren't you glad you asked?"
He honestly had no idea how to respond to that.
And for those of you who may be curious, this is what I envision Jess looking like:
