Jim and Blair's Excellent Terminator Adventure part three of three
#
"This is a bad, bad plan."
Jim couldn't settle. He had walked the perimeter twenty seven times so far - Blair had counted. Blair, however, sat in the middle of the warehouse on the most comfortable chair he could find and split his concentration between watching that fine ass prowling and on controlling his own breathing. In... out... in... out...
It was a good plan.
Provided the thing with the telephone booth and the alternate reality versions of him was true and he hadn't actually gone mad. In that case, Jim would be right, and it would be a really bad, bad plan. But he'd be dead in half an hour and it wouldn't really matter, and, to be honest, after the destruction at the police station (Banks, he thought distantly. Rafe!) he would rather be dead than live in this kind of fear for any longer.
But it was all right. He wasn't mad after all, because there was the lightning effect, and there was the psycho movie noise, right on cue, and there was the telephone booth again, and both his other self and the other Jim looked really, really pissed.
But not half as pissed as they looked when Jim - his Jim - threw the gas grenade into the phone booth and jammed the door shut till they were both unconscious. And then dragged them out and tied them up and gagged the second Jim and pulled him back a few feet, so that they were both facing Blair but although Jim #2 could see Blair #2, Blair #2 couldn't see his Jim.
"Woah! Dude!"
Blair #2 was awake, then. Jim #2 was rocking back and forth in the chair and making inarticulate noises through the gag, but Ur Jim just smiled and shook a warning finger at him and he subsided, meeting his match.
"I told you what to do. You need to do what Jim tells you, right? And, I'm betting, this wasn't Jim's idea, huh?"
"Wow, you really ARE a flake, aren't you? Look, unstoppable killing machine has just killed a whole bunch of cops. How did you let that happen? I mean, if you knew it was going to happen."
"Oh man, I'm sorry, but it's a necessary stage in your development. And trust me, it'll be worth it. You'll develop philosophically as a result, and the end result will be..."
"Screw aligning the planets and music of the spheres. I just saw people - real people - die, and I could have saved them if I'd known. So... we're going to do things differently, in this reality."
"Woah dude! If you go off-script, how am I going to be able to guide you?"
"Did I ask you to guide me, man? Now, you and your Jim can wait there for a few, while Jim and I work out how this thing works..."
Jim kicked the remains of the gas grenade out of the telephone booth and nodded the all-clear. Blair got into the booth with him and they looked, together, at the controls.
Blair #2 struggled in his bonds and yelled "Jim! Do something!!!"
The booth vanished.
#
"What did you do? WHAT DID YOU DO????
JimandBlair #2 weren't in an abandoned warehouse any more, but in the number 4 interrogation room of the Cascade Police station, down the corridor from Major Crimes.
Jim - UrBlair's Jim - waggled his eyebrows at his double and his partner and stood back to watch the fun. Blair #2 looked like he was going to pop a vein if he didn't chill, but Jim #2 produced a brown paper bag, improbably, from a pocket and made his partner breathe into it till he calmed down a bit.
"Well, it's obviously a machine to move you through realities, but I worked out that if you were moving reality to reality you have to be able to control your entry point... which means you can turn up at different times as well as different locations. What you've got here is a practical time machine! So we nipped out to your dimension, re-entered a few hours before you turned up in the first place, tracked your unstoppable killer guy when he first got here from the future, froze him with a future weapon we stole from, like, 200 years into the future from now along the way, took him with us back to the future, and then got him re-programmed by these guys who were living in the future world I'm going to create with my aligning the planets and creating universal harmony etc etc. Oh, and then we re-inserted him into the timeline where he couldn't possibly do any
harm."
And Blair - UrBlair - sat down triumphantly.
Blair #2 looked like someone who has been slapped around the face with a
wet herring.
"Wha?" he said.
Improbable interlude several hundred years into the future
"What is that godawful NOISE?"
"Hey, calm down. It's probably just future-style music. Hey, maybe it's that music of the spheres my flaky other-me was talking about. Maybe I'm going to invent it!"
"Maybe I'm going to let the Terminator kill you first!"
"Big guy, we have to work on this. Have you thought about using imagery? Like, dials, maybe? You can probably dial it down if you just visualise..."
"What did you just call me?"
"Erm..."
"Sandburg?"
"Erm... it's just an expression."
"What is?"
"Big guy?"
"Big. Guy. That's what you called me?"
"Aw hell, don't kill me, OK? I mean, it just... slipped out."
"Slipped out?"
"You're kind of... Personal bubble, dude. You're..."
"I'm what, Sandburg?"
"Just... kind of close..."
"It's a small phone booth, Chief."
"Really small."
"What? Small enough that you can feel me... breathing?"
"I can... feel... you..."
"Feel... good?"
"Oh yeahhhhhhh..."
"Oh yeaaaaaahhh..."
Fifteen minutes later (than the scene before the scene before this one, that is, not taking into account any time a person, or, as it might be, two persons, might have decided to spend in a remarkably comfortable and really astonishingly private room several hundred years in the future that wouldn't affect the timeline at all really, so there)
"I'm going to understand this some time, am I, Sandburg?" Captain Banks
said cheerfully, sucking on his cigar.
"Understand what?" Blair said innocently.
"Why there's an exact double of you and Jim sitting in interrogation room 4 watching CNN? And why there appears to be a telephone booth newly installed in the same room?"
"Oh that. Well, they'll be gone in half an hour so in the end you'll probably thank me for NOT explaining, to be honest."
Now that they'd readjusted the timeline so that Banks and Rafe and Henri and Joel and the rest of them didn't get dead, Blair had suggested that Jim use his unexpected lease of life in the twentieth century to get himself embedded in the Cascade Police force. The timeline had kind of healed itself around him - produced a brother and a father and grafted him onto his ancestors' family tree in round about the right place and time. There were some continuity errors, sure - the appearing and disappearing senses for example, the uncertain status of his mother, the loft apartment with no visible means of support - but on the whole it had been a successful graft, and Jim clearly now had a support network of his own in the Major Crimes family - and, surprisingly, Blair found he was right
there with him, as Guide to his Sentinel.
Yes, all in all life was good. If in twenty years he was going to develop a philosophy that would promote universal harmony and all that other hippy crap that his double kept going on about then all well and good. But he was more concerned about the happiness quotient in the people he could actually see and hear and talk to in the here and now. And his friends in Major Crimes weren't dead, and Jim wasn't a lone gunman from the future, and the unstoppable gunman was nicely neutralised and, know what? Life was looking pretty damn good, thank you very much, and reaching an understanding with his miraculously appearing Blessed Protector From The Future (only now firmly established in the present) that looked likely to lead to lots of hot sex in the loft apartment with no visible means of support (that apparently they BOTH lived in now, and who bought this 'roommates' story anyway) couldn't hurt. And looked likely to lead to hot monkey sex on frequent occasions. Which was also good. Or had he already thought that? The mind-melting sex would do that to you. Ahem.
One last thing to deal with, and then he could relax.
"OK then; Jim, you laid it out for them?"
"Yeah Chief, we're clear. They go back to their timeline and we go back to ours. And if they ever stray into ours again, we terminate them with extreme prejudice. After all, we reprogrammed the Terminator once, and all we've done is stashed him where he can't do any harm. This JimandBlair understand that, if they start meddling with us again, we'll reprogramme him again."
"Just tell us one thing, man," Blair #2 begged as his Jim dragged him into the phone booth. "What have you done with the Terminator?" Blair smiled and pointed towards the TV screen, still tuned to CNN, as the phone booth started up its disappearing sequence. The lightning flashed and the psycho noises started, but over them the plaintive voice of Blair#2 could be heard wailing: "you made him governor of California?????"