When The Sleeper Wakes

by Kim EM
© 2002, All rights reserved

Part 05: Revelations

"When the Sleeper Wakes" Created by Kim EM and Debra Rachel

Chapter Five: REVELATIONS

I shook my head and retreated to the institutional green chair. "No more tests until I get some idea what’s going on here. You’ve been poking and prodding and running tests and I don’t know a thing except you’ve been mumbling about ‘body suits’ and ‘hugglebugs’ and meaningless drivel like that."

Elle looked down at me, her arms folded, and appeared to be deep in thought.

"Look," I said plaintively, "I don’t want to be a Wendy head, but so far I’ve been jerked from pillar to post, told nothing, and I still don’t even have a clue who I am. And from the sound of it, I don’t think you have a clue, either."

She sighed and sank to the rolling stool opposite me. "Okay. Look, yesterday you were found, naked and unconscious, on an unused catwalk in one of the high bays of the Vertical Assembly Building. With no idea who you were or how you got there, NASA security was called. They gained no clues from examining you, and turned you over to the medicos. I have to apologize," she stated quietly, "that they didn’t do that first, but at the time everyone was running around like morons."

"And?"

"And the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with you, except that you were out cold and they couldn’t wake you. That’s when they called me in. While I was in transit you started to come out of it, and the idiots decided to put you under until I could be there for your awakening. You crossed them up, though, by waking six hours ahead of schedule."

I looked at her blankly. This was making less and less sense, even though it was consistent with what I’d overheard between her and the general.

She continued, "It really caused a flap when you turned up at the security desk, tastefully attired in a bedsheet. Even moreso, when you professed having no knowledge of your own identity, there was some real panic."

"Why the panic? I can understand their concerns about the security breach, but why should my condition panic them? As it is, I should be the one panicked, turning up under these circumstances with no idea who I am or how I got here."

"That’s true enough, and yet... You didn’t panic. Almost anyone I can think of would be a basket case in your position."

I thought a bit, as she silently watched. "I don’t know. I’ve thought much the same, that I should be panicking. And yet I don’t seem to be reacting much at all, which I most certainly don’t understand."

"There’s another factor. Your body..." She trailed off, looking speculatively at me. Uncomfortable with the long look, I stood and walked to the window, looking at a nearby neighborhood of close-set houses, visible over the omnipresent palm trees.

"My body?" I finally prompted.

"It’s perfect."

"What?"

"I’m not talking about in the aesthetic sense, mind you. You appear to be in your early to mid twenties, no visible marks or scars, perfect teeth, seemingly perfect health."

"That’s a problem?"

"It’s impossible."

"Impossible?"

"Growing up, people get scars. Childhood accidents, mishaps, there are thousands of things that can happen. The skin gets cut or abraded. Bones break. Burns happen. Nobody, and I mean nobody, grows up with their body in pristine condition. Plus, there’s your teeth. They are perfect. No cavities or plaque, no fillings. That’s not totally impossible, but it is exceedingly rare. Your breasts, well, not to be indelicate, but they are fairly large, and there’s not a bit of sag or stretch."

I turned from the window. "I guess I should feel complemented, but I have the feeling there’s another shoe waiting to drop."

Your cholesterol, LDL and HDL, both are right smack where they should be. Again, not impossible but worthy of note. We did some tests and found that your arteries don’t contain any plaque."

"Is that bad?"

"No, but it’s damned unusual. I’ve only seen that once before, four years ago, and that person had something in their blood that we’ve already determined isn’t present in yours."

"So..."

"So basically your body is in a condition that should be impossible. There are no signs of, well, of anything. That has the NASA doctors climbing the walls."

"I’m surprised I haven’t been packed off to a research laboratory somewheres."

She stood and returned to her computer. "They wanted to. I had to overrule them. If there’s nothing there for them to find, keeping you as their research pet isn’t going to provide any answers."

"And this ‘body suit’ and ‘hugglebugs’ nonsense?"

She sighed. "It’s not nonsense, unfortunately. There’s been a lot going on in the world in the last thirty years. For some reason, God knows why, there’s been an explosion of the technology of form change."

"Form. Change."

"Yes. It’s something the governments have done their best to keep secret, both ours and every other government. Imagine the chaos if everyone had the ability to change their form at will. Wanted fugitives would have the ability to vanish without a trace. Duplicates of people – both the famous and the everyday – would abound. Imagine someone wants something someone else has. They could change themselves into a duplicate of the other person, dispose of the original, and then take over their life."

"This has already happened?"

"Too many times for me to think about. We’ve been working for years to keep it secret, but things leak out from time to time. Nowadays any reports are mostly confined to the supermarket tabloids, which nobody believes anyway, and to a few corners of the Internet."

"The what?"

"It’s a new medium of electronic communication. Don’t worry about it for now, you’ll find out soon enough. There are a few newsgroups and story sites online that have fiction dealing with form change, larded with just enough fact to keep our security people nervous."

"Umm..."

"Like I said, don’t worry about it."

I returned to the chair and sank back, trying to digest all this. "So. Form change is possible, and it happens, and the government tries to keep it secret."

"That’s about it. There’s only one form that’s been released to the public, and that has some sharply limited capabilities."

"Those ‘body suits’ you mentioned?"

No, those are still secret. There’s been some speculation in popular fiction, most notably a novel, "ManFac", by Martin Caidin. There’s a lot of proscribed technology out there. Plus, and this is the thing that REALLY scares the higher-ups, there’s a lot of techniques that are best described as ‘magic’."

"Magic? Really, now."

"No, seriously. Oh, I doubt it really is magic, though I try to keep an open mind. My personal speculation is that some of these use a technology that we just haven’t been able to identify."

"What things are we talking about?"

"Well, for instance, there’s stories about a medallion that changes anyone who touches it into the image of the last person whose clothing it came in contact with. It’s supposedly magical, but it’s more likely some technology that picks up on the DNA of the clothing’s wearer and forces a change to the victim’s DNA."

"Wow."

"There’s also uncorroborated stories about a mysterious ‘shop’ that appears and disappears in various shopping malls, changing unsuspecting shoppers into other forms. We’ve tried for years to track down the source of that legend, but so far without success."

"And the ‘hugglebugs" you mentioned before?"

She sat back, smiling, cupping her hands on one knee. "Ahhh. Now that’s the one publicly known and available technology. Remember the DNA gathering and implanting possibility I mentioned?"

I nodded, wondering where this was going.

"Do you know what Nanotech is?" I shook my head. "Nanites?" Again I demurred. "Nanites are very tiny machines, almost built to a microscopic level. There are a number of commercial uses, but only one has been permitted for biomedical use."

"Which is?"

"There’s a company, called HuggleBugs, Ltd., which manufactures and sells to the public nanites designed to cause form change."

"Why? If form change is so dangerous, then why allow this form?"

She colored slightly, then went on. "It was kind of an accident."

"An accident. Right."

She sighed again, then started talking. "It all started on a sheep farm in New Zealand. In the early Nineteen-nineties, a livestock researcher named Prue Walker was experimenting on increasing the productivity of a herd by raising all the animals in the herd to championship levels. Using a solely DNA-based approach there was some promise of success, but no immediate breakthroughs."

"Okay," I said. "I assume she stumbled onto a method of changing human genes?"

"Something like that. There was an accident. I won’t go into the details, but it caused the transformation of her assistant from a husky football-player type into a somewhat petite woman."

"It changed a man into a woman? This form change can go that far?"

"Oh, yes," she laughed ruefully. "In fact, that’s one of the primary markets for the HuggleBugs product. After Rose’s accident – that’s the assistant’s new name, by the way – their emphasis shifted from animal to human research. Their method, though, proved unpredictable, and was irreversible, so they needed to find something else."

"And that was these ‘nanites’?"

"You’ve got it. They refocused from a purely DNA-based transformation to a highly controllable and reversible transformation with the nanites. They brought in a couple of programming gurus to design the nanites and then program and build a failsafe form of transformation. It’s a shame, too, because the nanites have the potential to do far more than what the world’s governments will allow"

"So how did it get on the market if that kind is thing is so dangerous to society?"

"Well, for obvious reasons we don’t publicize the restrictions on form-change technology. Since most research into that sort of thing is done in either universities, major corporations, or government facilities, we don’t have any problems keeping tabs on the research and deflecting it away from anything that would cause problems. The problem here was that the research was done at a fairly remote sheep ranch on the other side of the world, without publicity, and they had brought their first product to market before any of the governments twigged to what was going on."

"Ouch. So the genii was out of the bottle at that point?"

"Precisely. We’ve been able to limit their product line to two fairly narrow products. First is a nanite that causes temporary changes; the other causes permanent alterations. Both have some fairly elaborate code built in that limits their usefulness for the kinds of things we’re trying to restrict. Even so, it’s been a major pain in the rear."

I thought a moment and rapidly figured out what she wasn’t telling me. "Your real concern, the government’s concern, is it’s potential usefulness for espionage, right? So when I appeared, looking like my body had no history, you and the other intelligence people assumed I was the product of one of these technologies."

"You’re quite close to the mark."

"If it’s true, if my body was created –- or changed – it seems to me I wouldn’t be much of a spy with no idea who I am, who I work for, or what the bloody hell I’m supposed to be spying on."

"I know. That’s part of the mystery. Who are, or were, you, how did you get into the VAB, and why?" She keyed something into the computer, and within a few seconds it shut itself off. "The only thing any of us have been able to come to consensus on is that if has to do with the upcoming Endeavour launch."

"Endeavour?"

"It’s one of the space shuttles."

"Space shuttle?"

She sighed once again, something that seemed to be becoming a frequent part of her repertoire. "I keep forgetting how much you don’t know." She stood and gestured me to do likewise. "I’m going to have to get you some reading material."

I laughed. "Stranger In a Strange Land."

She froze, raised one eyebrow, and asked, "How do you know that title?"

"Stranger? Valentine Michael Smith and all that? I’m not sure. I must have read it at some point, I expect. Why?"

"It’s something you may remember from before your memory went away. It’s a possible angle, at any rate."

I was dubious, but given everything that had been going on, I wasn’t prepared to dispute her. She took another close look at me, then nodded towards the door. "I think we’re done here. Put your clothes back on; I think it’s time for us to move on."

"Where are we headed now?" I asked.

"Texas."

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To Be Continued....