Find Me – Chapter 151

Steve and Kayla could not have known that Rolf’s lab back home in 2009 had suddenly spat out numbers that made the veins in his forehead pop out like they might burst.  They could not have fathomed what their proximity to his younger self would do to his calculations, which could only mean one thing.  And they couldn’t have had a clue that right now their primary Rolf so angry that he was thisclose to pulling the plug on the entire thing and letting the fates take them.  Because the only thing this could mean was that they were in his proximity in Copenhagen, and that they’d gone to find him.  Exactly what he told them not to do. 

Steve and Kayla weren’t stupid, they knew very well that this little visit wasn’t going to mean anything good for future jumps.  But the level of not good wasn’t something they had the luxury of accounting for right now.  They couldn’t care less what Rolf had told them to do, told them not to do, or neglected to tell them one way or the other.  They had spent years jumping from one manufactured timeline to another, going where the slipstream took them – where Rolf took them.  But this had to stop, and they weren’t leaving this apartment before Rolf told them how to make it.

“So let me get ziss straight,” Destination Rolf said incredulously as he leaned forward in his chair.  “I … have conquered time?”

Steve sneered at the impressive wonder in Rolf’s voice.  Somehow it didn’t surprise him that Rolf wasn’t so much fazed that time travel was real but was instead hedonistically pleased with himself. 

“’Conquered?’” Steve threw back at him.  “’Conquered?!’  Look at my face, man.  Do I look pleased to you?  Do either of us look like we’re the shining, happy results of a successful experiment?”

Rolf looked genuinely bewildered beneath the swelling eye socket that had borne the brunt of Steve’s fist.  “But you are here!”

“Jesus,” Steve muttered under his breath, “it’s like he didn’t hear a single other thing we said.”  He got up and paced behind Rolf.

“So it works, right?” Kayla huffed as she dropped herself into the chair Steve had just vacated across from Rolf.  “No interest in the nuance.  We came from there, now we’re here, so time travel works.  That’s how you see it?  You know, I’m shocked by how small your mind must really be.”

Rolf stood up indignantly, the bag of ice Kayla too kindly created for him falling to the floor at his feet.

“Sit down, dickweed,” Steve spat, pushing him back down by the shoulders. 

“Yes, it works,” she went on seamlessly, “but it doesn’t work well.  Seriously, I’ve never known you to be so limited to the binary.”  She rolled her eyes when he glowered at her, but then took a cleansing breath.  “Look.  I get it.  Two people show up out of the blue saying we’re the two experimental subjects of your time travel experiment 20 years in the future.  It’s a shock.

“A shock?  Madam, it’s a phenomenon!”

“Of course, he’s not shocked,” Steve smirked.  “You tell a narcissist he’s the shit, he’s gonna believe you.”

Now Rolf’s face went from awed to something more guileful as he crossed his arms and tilted his head.  For someone who vahnts my help so badly that you came and found me here, you’d think you’d be a little nicer to me, no?

“You want nice, you piece of shit?”

“Steve!” Kayla interjected before this got out of hand, “This is not helping!” 

Steve glared at her with restraint.  Kayla knew that glare wasn’t really for her but for the man before them.  Another thing she knew was that that restraint was hard, because she was barely able to harness her own.  Investing all of her energy into finding Rolf was one thing.  But now that they’d done it – actually had the man here in front of them – it was no longer speculative; It was real.  And it was releasing a pain that she’d had controlled in a soft corner of herself for a long time. 

Steve had shifted his heavy glare from his wife to Rolf and tried again.  “Ok,” he said as came around to stand beside his wife.  “Dr. Rolf, I know you’re not the one that we know yet.  But we think you might have some advice for us.  So we’re askin’ you real nice.  How do we get home?”

“How am I supposed to know?”

“’Cause you’re the guy that moves people from body to body.  You already did it for Dimera.”

“That vahs very different, Mr. Johnson.  Imprinting is one science, folding time is another.”  That was new for Steve and Kayla.  Folding time was not something they’d heard Rolf say before.  “There are years of quantum formulas I have not yet created.”

“But you will.  It’s in you,” Steve insisted.

“Not yet, it is not.”

“Yes, it is,” Kayla interjected.  And her breathiness told Steve her anxiety had caught up with her.  “Maybe this you  can’t end this,” she insisted, “but you know time. You created the slipstream. Somewhere in there you know what’s happening or can at least guess.  You can get us further down the—the line.”

That bobble in her words.  The anxiety that momentarily stole her breath.  Steve knew his wife’s every nuance, and what he’d suspected since they entered this apartment he was now sure of; Kayla was not quite ok.  He tried to take back this narrative, but the conversation was already starting to spiral. 

“So you are expecting I make those formulas now?”

“You could at least try,” Kayla replied.

“Just get out my computers and start creating a – slipstream you call it?”

“You call it,” she corrected.  “We’re speaking your language, Dr Rolf. 

“Madam.  I am a scientist vissout a lab.  That’s a man vissout a home.”

Kayla went white.  Home … she internally sobbed.  Where is home?  What is home?  Which of my children are my home?

“Jesus,” Steve muttered under his breath.  “That was the wrong thing to say.”

Emily was a wound that would never completely close.  Kayla was well past that place of vulnerability that threatened to swallow her up.  But that didn’t mean the pain wasn’t still there beneath the surface.  Now for the first time in many years, that pain was set free from where Kayla had compartmentalized it. 

For the next few moments, she found herself adrift in that safe place her mind took her to protect her.  A golden light bathed her in warmth.  Sometimes a small child with strawberry blonde ringlets had been in this place with her.  She didn’t look for her this time, both for fear that she wouldn’t be there but also for fear that she would.  Because she knew she’d, inevitably, leave this little girl behind.  Again.  Instead, Kayla sat in the quiet, golden light in Rolf’s chair, and she allowed herself to believe for the moment that she was alone.  Until Rolf’s voice sliced through the moment’s ephemeral protection.

“I don’t know vaht it is that you can possibly vahnt from me!” 

Steve placed his calming hand on his wife’s shoulder.  She felt him there, she felt the chair beneath her, and she somehow felt the slipstream press in on her like the burden it was.  What she didn’t feel was the tear escape from her eye and a create a track down her cheek.  She didn’t feel what her troubled expression did to silence what Rolf was going to say next, nor did she feel when her next words made him take pause. 

“I don’t know what I want, Dr. Rolf.  Every answer kills one of my children.”  She delivered these words in a near whisper that was filled with equal parts pain and bitterness.  She stared off in unfocused presence as the words came from the depths of her damaged soul.  “We lost our daughter a long time ago when we jumped away from her timeline.  And we can’t ever get her back.  She wasn’t part of our primary timeline with our other two children.  We’ve jumped to them, and I’m sure we will again.  But there’s nowhere in our real timeline to—” Kayla licked her dry lips that had gone dry and blinked heavily, “—to find her.  She only exists in a dead timeline.”  Rolf was at rapt attention.  “Losing her that way … is worse than death would have been.  “I have faith in God and that I’ll see everyone I love in Heaven.  I believe in science, too.  That I’m going to see our son and daughter again in another jump.  But not her.  I’ll never see her again.  Because she didn’t die, and she’s not part of our timeline.”  Another tear traced the path of the one before it.  “And you have the nerve to tell me you are a man without a home?  We’re the ones without a home, because home isn’t a place.  It’s what you love most in your heart.”

Her voice was so deadly quiet it truly scared Steve. “God, Sweetness.”  Seeing his wife’s pain was unlocking his own, but he was grateful that she didn’t seem to be fully checking out. 

Kayla was back in Rolf’s apartment now, the golden light gone, replaced with the muted blue of the room’s walls.  She shifted her eyes toward the man who’d put them through the unnatural trauma she’d been forced to endure.  And her piercing blue eyes made Rolf extremely uncomfortable in the knowledge that a future version of him was going to be the cause of it.

“We’ve given you a gift. The knowledge that you’re he most brilliant scientific mind in history.  That’s the meaning in your heart.  That’s your home, Dr. Rolf.  Our children are ours.  So, we are the ones without a home.  Only the real problem is that I don’t know what home is anymore.  Where that is or when or what I’m supposed to want anymore.  Since the day she was conceived, I’ve been living Sophie’s Choice.”  Steve shuddered at this reference.  “If we go to our real home, then Emily is truly gone.”  For the first time since she started talking, Kayla’s voice broke on her daughter’s name.  “And if you send us back to her, we lose the others.  Because no matter how much we tell ourselves we could make them …” Kayla trailed off and finally looked at her husband.  He shook his head silently begging her not to say it.  “… we can’t know for sure that’s true.”  Steve let a pained sound escape from his throat.  Hurting him like this was devastating.  “So, you see.  There’s no home to go back to where we haven’t … sacrificed … a child.  Where I have hope of seeing all of my babies again.”  Kayla had now dissolved into not two tears, but several.  “Any home I choose … I kill my children.”

That last sentence broke Steve.  He couldn’t take anymore.  “It’s not true,” he whimpered as he kneeled beside her.  “Don’t say that, Kayla!”  But he knew it probably was.  Steve knew she had felt this way, but it was something they’d never said to each other.  Very much on purpose.

“So the answer to your question is – Anything,” Kayla said as she finally leaned forward heavily and gripped the armrests of Rolf’s chair.  “What I want from you is anything.  As long as that anything makes it stop.  I want you make it stop.  For good.  That’s what I want from you.”

Rolf wasn’t completely evil yet.  The power he’d demonstrate in the things he could do had not yet wrested all of his humanity from him.  He was nearing that precipice, but right now there was still decency in him.  There wasn’t a lot of room in his heart for kindness, but looking at this woman’s desperation forced him to find a little.  The fact that all of this was due to a future version of him making a mistake that lost him control of whatever was happening in this future lab also lent some motivation.

“I have known for some time,” Rolf broke the difficult silence, “that these bodies are mere vessels.  That they can be deposited with any number of entities.  You know I have done this once already with Stefano Dimera’s pawn.”  Kayla leaned back, now, as she wept, giving Rolf enough of his personal space back that he was able to stand up.  This time Steve let him.    

“There is no Heaven, Mrs. Johnson.  Only presence.  We only appear to be gone when these vessels can no longer sustain life.  It is a crime against humanity that our lifesource – our awareness, you call it – has nowhere to go when these bodies die when it should rightfully live forever.  That awareness must have a vessel.  I can imprint any awareness onto another.”  Rolf had put distance between himself and his future subjects and was now standing by the window with his arms crossed in front of him.  “I have often … theorized … that one’s own body would be the most sustainable way of doing this.  Bringing their younger body from the past across folded space into their present and transferring their awareness into it.  It holds the least risk.”

Steve forced himself to push through his emotional pain and focus on what Rolf was saying.  “What do you mean, ‘holds the least risk?’”

“Your awareness into your own body from the past means there are no messy rules to follow to ensure you don’t erase yourself from your own history once you go back.  You, certainly, can’t go forward, your body is too old, it defeats the purpose.”

“I thought you can’t go forward ‘cause your future isn’t written, so there’s no body to jump into,” Steve said.

“Hmm,” Rolf reached a hand up from one of his folded arms to his chin, “Is that vaht I said?”  Steve nodded.  “That’s very interesting, I had not yet thought of that.”  It felt very on brand to Steve that Rolf’s head was primarily about the usefulness of the destination body. “It is also obvious that it is risky to imprint an awareness into a vessel that is not your own and now has to vie for dominance.  In your own body past and present awareness can merge into one.”

“That’s not how it works,” Kayla said, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand.  “We don’t have any memory of our destination awarenesses.”

“’Destination awarenesses.’  Is that vaht you call them?” he asked mostly to himself.  “Very interesting, yes.  That  is vaht they are, really.  Yes, well, of course, you must remember them, they are part of you now.”

“No,” Kayla repeated with a sniffle.  She’d found some control and stopped crying.  “We’ve been at this for over ten years, and I can promise you, they are not.  When we jump in, the rightful awareness gets replaced with ours, and the other one disappears.  It gets completely overwritten.  And when we jump to the next destination, this timeline stops.  It literally just ends, and everything and everyone in it stops, too.  It becomes a dead timeline.”

“Surely not!” Rolf said with the condescension of a man who couldn’t fathom being mistaken.  “Newly written timelines just continue.”

“No,” Kayla repeated, they don’t.  You, yourself, told us that they don’t.  They stop dead in their tracks.  There are no ‘numbers,’ she used air quotes, “being returned or reported in or whatever.  They literally freeze forever.  That’s what you told us the one time you found us.”

“But – that vould mean I will cease to exist when you leave, because I am part of this time.”

“Yeah,” Steve said with mock wonder.  “Look who just got to the party.”  Steve saw when the heat shot up the mad man’s spine at this nugget of information.  “And spoiler alert, but you’ve got it backwards.  It’s not our past bodies that came to 2009, it’s our 2009 awarenesses that went to our past bodies.”

Rolf started piecing it together, the look of pure adulation for himself very unbecoming.  “Perhaps, it was the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal.”

“The what?” Steve asked.

“The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal.  Perhaps, it prevents me from bringing a body forward.  I do not know, after all, how the calculations can be made on a corporeal element.”

“Jesus, man, speak English.”

“it is a very simple theory, Mr. Johnson, I cannot help it if your uneducated mind can’t grasp it!”

“Marcus isn’t here to translate for us this time!”

“I do not know what you are talking about!”

“What the fuck is it, Rolf?!”

“It’s simply that location cannot always be accurately tied to momentum!” Rolf pounded on the table in frustration.  “It must be why I didn’t bring your bodies through time to the present.  I think I must have adapted your imprints for folded space, instead, so they could be deposited backwards into your own waiting vessel on the other side of the fold.  It accomplishes the same goal.”

“He’s never said anything about folded space,” Kayla said to Steve, referencing the scientist as if he wasn’t even there.  “He always talked about ripples.”

“Vaht did I mean by this?” Rolf asked.

“It’s what happens when we veer too far from the established timeline,” Steve explained.  “Doing things we didn’t do the first time, or not doin’ ‘em.”

“Or having a baby that doesn’t exist in our real past,” Kayla added bitterly.  And, actually, Steve was glad to hear the bitterness over the sadness.  “Jumps after our failure to comply with the established timeline makes us sick.  Punishes us.”

“Punishes you?  Explain this.”

Once more into the breach, Steve and Kayla sat Rolf down at the small, cluttered kitchen table and gave him a detailed primer.  The dreams, the nightmare jumps, the amplification effect, the dangerous hypertension, and now the physical signs of the impending end to a jump.  His reactions were the exact déjà vu they’d expected, and Rolf observed with interest every time the two of them commented to just each other about this right in front of him. 

When they were done night had fallen, and Rolf had begun complaining of hunger. 

“Well, that’s just too bad, because—Kayla what are you doin’?”

She’d gotten up from the table and went into the refrigerator.  “Making him a sandwich.”

“Why, ‘cause he’s hungry?  Who cares, he’s not even real.”

“I’m tired of these ethical questions, Steve!” she snapped.  “He’s real enough right now, I’m not going to keep him like a prisoner without food!”

“Thank you, Mrs. Johnson,” Rolf smirked.

“It’s Dr. Johnson, you son of a bitch!” Steve spat.

“Ya know what, don’t!” Kayla yelled, slamming the refrigerator door.  “Don’t fucking thank me!”  Rolf had no way of knowing what her rare use of language in this way said about her emotional state.  But he didn’t need to, because it was clear just to look at her.  “You kept my husband prisoner in a cell for years, conditioning him and trying to imprint him as someone else.  And for that you don’t deserve my kindness!  So if you think I’m being nice to you, you’re out of your goddamned mind, ‘cause I’m not above shooting you, too!  It’s just a sandwich, and I’m not doing it for you, I’m doing it because it’s inhumane not to!  So, don’t thank me!”

Rolf didn’t remember any of this but upon reference to being shot had the good sense to say nothing more. 

Steve was a good man.  They didn’t make them better than him.  Yet, he couldn’t rise to the occasion on this.  If it were up to just him, he’d let Rolf starve.  So, when Kayla practically shoved the plate holding the simple ham sandwich in front of the scientist, Steve picked it up and took a bite before Rolf could.  Kayla couldn’t care less; she’d done her job and made the sandwich, it was up to Rolf to figure out how to negotiate with her husband on its ownership.

“So tell me,” Steve said with his mouth full, “what do you think we do to get home?”

“You mean … 2009, yes?” he asked carefully.  “Or the other one?”

Steve looked at Kayla.  All she could do was shrug.  They needed to talk.  And it wasn’t going to be a good conversation.  “2009,” he replied. 

“Steve,” Kayla said quietly.

“I said 2009,” he repeated.  Every part of him wanted to say 1989, but one of them had to stay rational.

“You say I will tell you two years from now that you are not being careful enough and breaking the slipstream, yes?”

“Yes,” Kayla confirmed.

“Why not do something more like this and let it break?”

“You said not to.”

“But why?  You’d just be pulled back to your regular time.”

“The other you said the slipstream was too damaged and you had to fix it first.  Our lives weren’t going according to the timeline, and you said if we broke the slipstream we might be stuck here forever.  If we knew we could just break it we would have by now, but we can’t risk living like this forever.”

Forever!  Rolf felt that statement almost like a sexual climax.  The concept of immortality was a siren song.  How could they not see that?  Rolf saw them now as his future self had been seeing them since almost the beginning – as ungrateful idiots. 

“If I programmed 16 years, why can’t you simply wait another six years?”  Steve bristled at the disgust he detected in his voice.

“Because we’re done,” Steve bit back.  “The you back in your lab can’t control the jumps or predict how long they’re gonna last, and one of the last ones we did we were kids.  You set it up so that we only were supposed to go to our lives since we’d met, shared time.  But we went way back.  Kayla was ten, I was 15.  We’d already gone way off the rails to unshared time, but that was 1970.  That’s batshit crazy.”

Rolf was stunned.  His subject was right, that was batshit crazy. 

“We were lucky that jump was only a few months, but our record is more than four years!  What if next time we go back even further?”

“But … if you simply wait, and don’t let the timeline get away from you—”

“No!” Kayla yelled.  “NO!  I’m tired of running!  That’s all we do, we run away from the effects of the timeline!  You don’t know what it’s like!  We try to do things exactly right, but sometimes that means living with people we don’t love.  People that hurt us!  Sometimes it means living through the very worst things!  Struggling to communicate.  Afraid to touch each other on the wrong day at the wrong time in the wrong place!  Having to relive real traumas!  I’d rather die!”

“That is a good idea,” Rolf said holding up a finger. 

“Don’t fuck with me, asshole!” Steve warned.

“Nein,” he replied insistently, waggling his finger like the future version of him tended to do.  He looked up toward the ceiling in deep speculation as he tapped his chin.  Then he pointed back at them.  “Have you tried dying yet?”

“We’re not dying, Rolf!”  Steve shouted then looked back at Kayla.  “No one’s dying!”

Now Rolf folded his arms and leaned back in the wooden chair.  “Then I think you’re going to go on living.”  He glared back at the man who would become his experimental subject twice over in his life, satisfied that he had nothing more to add, and even more satisfied that he was every bit the genius that he always knew he was.

At that moment, Rolf’s eyes unfocused, and his entire body stiffened into a mannequin-like state.  Both Steve and Kayla knew exactly what was happening, but neither of them could actually process it before the scientist inhaled a lungful of air and turned green.  The three of them looked at each other in silent shock before Steve twisted his face into a sneer of disgust for both the man who’d just left, as well as the one who’d just arrived. 

“If you throw up on me, Rolf, I promise I’ll kill you.

Chapter 150

Chapter 152 >