Chapter 1

Once there was this old man wandering down the road and he came to this big rock beside the road. Now on the rock was this big frog, and the frog said to old man, “I’m really a young beautiful enchanted Princess. If you kiss me you’ll break the enchantment and I’ll give you the time of your life”. Well the old man picked up the frog and put it in his pocket and started walking again. The Princess was insulted and asked the old man why he didn’t kiss her, and the old man says, “at my time of life I’m content with just owning a talking frog”.

2010 the Beginning; Beam Me Up Scottie?

We had finally done it! Yes, we had done it, but it didn’t help much. Working in a small lab at the University of Southern California, in San Diego, USC to most of us that lived there, we teleported a live lab rat from one lab to another lab. This was over a five hundred foot one hundred centimeter in diameter fused fiber optic cable bundle. Weather a fiber optic cable or a culminated laser beam the principal was about the same. We could now transmit a perfect copy of the original organic rat one hundred feet or one hundred million miles. The only limitation on distance was the power pushing the signal and the spread of the beam over the distance it had to travel, even collated light has a spread over those kinds of distances, which was only at the speed of light anyway. In theory the copy was produced instantaneously, but who knows or really cares, it was close enough for government work. Of course the process destroyed the original, but the copy was a perfect replicate of the original wasn’t it. As far as we could tell it was a physically perfect copy anyway.

Of course the bottom line was it arrived on the receiving platform dead. To be sure we tried the experiment three more times, with the same results. Well our part of the project was complete. We had scanned the rats down to a molecular level destroying the original in the process. We then made a copy of it in that instant of destruction and transported that copy as light a hundred feet over the fiber optic bundle to the next platform where we reassembled it, converting it back to matter, and recreated an actual copy of the original. Even though it was dead, that wasn’t my team’s problem. Our job was done.

We had proven our theory, mainly “that you couldn’t transmit a living person over a light beam”. Well you could, but he would arrive at the other end technically dead. Even if we were able to get our receiver to another planet our traveler would arrive on the platform years latter dead. This was the end result of ten years of intense research and experimentation and for some of us it was a dead-end. This was not surprising to me. I had argued from the start that there is a big difference between dead inert matter and a living organism. Yes my machine reassembled everything that was there, everything that is except that primal spark. That spark which makes us alive instead dead. We never even got around to the question of how much pain the test rat felt.

This was 2010 when everything was LSI, DLSI and now UDLSI. With the advent of Large Scale Integration, the day of individual discrete components, transistors, diodes and such was just about over. One think-tank predicted that electronic components got two times smaller each year and doubled in power every two years. Everything was solid-state and getting smaller and smaller all the time. Even the large lead acid batteries of yesterday were being replaced with large light weight capacitors for the storage of energy.

For our Project thought we were back to technologies and materials of the early 1920’s and 30’s with theories expounded by Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Ambrose Fleming, and others of that age, using technologies that required enough energy to run a small city. We had actually blown the breakers at the local substation while doing our first test run. We were back to vacuum tubes and the theories behind them. We had discovered that we had to create what was essentially a giant vacuum tube with a cathode and plate arrangement to make all this happen. Then we had to invent an Class A amplifier, in our digital age Class A amplifiers were almost a forgotten thing these days, we wanted fidelity not a sample of it. To use our laser array to cut our subject apart in that absolute vacuum, instantaneously destroying all of it. Our process destructively reduced the object on the plate of our vacuum tube to it’s component atoms in the blink of an eye. As Einstine said “matter cannot be destroyed only changed in form”, so we changed it. Our laser did this in a very fast effective controlled manner, which was the key to the transmitter part of our Project. Then we transported the energy created to the assembly room as light over the fiber optic cable. When it arrived at the other end it was converted back from a sort of high energy plasma to matter on the cathode of another vacuum tube. This receiver made use of a screen grid array and acted as an advanced version of a 3D printer in some ways. All this technology was dependent on an absolute vacuum and lots and lots of sheer raw energy. Maintaining that high energy plasma and vacuum had been one of our main problems on this Project. There was no way to reduce the intense burst of energy created by our process to anything we could record or anything we could digitize either, well not any time soon I figured. Frankly, I did not see a time we could capture or record the burst and keep it from degrading into something unusable. Essentially you were trying to record, contain and store high energy plasma. One day we might invent a big enough capacitor or some kind of energy buffer to do the job of recording that signal, but for now we had proven that it could be done and moved on to other projects.

2020 Ten years later

Ten years later I was seventy two, retired, and still living in the San Diego area. Though I didn’t surf much now, I still liked to hang out at Mission Beach. I even liked to paddle out some mornings and catch a wave on a long board I kept around. I even liked to have lunch on the Pier still. Yes, I’m that old. Through my connections still at the Project, I knew that the Government had continued to experiment with the copies. It was even discovered that a copy, if placed in an special electrolytic bath, could be shocked back to life. Of course they were brain dead, for all practical purposes. They were the tabula rasa or the blank slates Freud talked about. Yes, they lived and breathed, they reacted to stimuli. but they were as blank as blank could be. They had no memory or anything else the psychology boys figured.

I guess your asking yourself how we knew that, after all the rats were up and running around again and how do you ask a rat if it’s Ok. Well they taught or conditioned the originals to do a trick or tricks and the new copy apparently could not remember it. Just SNSO, shit in shit out for the new copy. They were blank slates with no memory at all, as blank as a new born babe it was determined. Yes, they could be taught, but only as fast as the original and they were actually slower than an actual infant rat on most things. One researcher on the project speculated that the adult form does not produce some of the hormones necessary for fast learning that are present in infants.

All this was still under a blanket governmental secrecy act which I had signed and we couldn’t talk about it. In the hard cruel world of Academia, the rule is “Publish or Perish”, and I guess I perished. I couldn’t publish anything we had discovered, and I wasn’t going to get a Nobel for teleporting a dead body anywhere anyway, so I had moved on to other projects and pretty much forgotten about Alice through the Looking Glass, as I remembered the Project.

I had just gotten back to my apartment when the front doorbell rang. That’s really how this whole thing started, an innocent knock on my front door, ha, ha. Putting down my sack of groceries, I unlocked and opened the front door to discover a pretty little girl of, at first glance I figured she was maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. Of course she could have been younger. She was in some kind of cute brown chocolate chip or computer generated camo military outfit thing. Her outfit was complete with utility belt, cap and canvas combat boots. There she was, just standing there looking up at my six foot one, one hundred seventy five pound still trim, some would say skinny frame. I judged her to be around four foot nine or ten, maybe ninety five pounds sopping wet. Nobody could seriously consider her a threat in her cute little combat outfit. Whatever she was selling in this cute getup, I would probably windup buying a couple of boxes of overpriced cookies from her to support some high school band’s drive to buy new band uniforms or some nonprofit to save the whatever was the popular cause of the week.

“Doctor Harry J. Evans”, she asked politely.

“Yes”, I answered, at which point she calmly pulled a one and one quater inch in diameter by six inch long tube shaped device with a large glass lens on the front from behind her back and shot me with it pointblank. What? No small talk I remember thinking just before my lights went out. Conversation ended! When I came to I was sitting on my own couch and there were now two identical pixies in camo in front of me. For some strange reason, I didn’t think I was seeing double either. For some other reason I was not afraid or even angered that one of them had just shot me with something. At least I wasn’t dead, I hadn’t been so sure of that at the time. All of which really confused me when I tried to think about it. I tried to get up next, but nothing worked. I mean I could not move anything from the neck down. This confused me more than their attack had.

“It’s nice of you to rejoin us Doctor Evans, Harry”, said pixie number one. “I can call you Harry can’t I Doctor Evans?” she smiled disarmingly.

“I don’t know young lady, I should be upset that you just shot me and that I can’t move, but for some reason I’m not. Which I know is all wrong, but it doesn’t seem to worry me for some reason. What have you done to me, anyway?”, I got out.

“I told you he was a fast one Ann”, identical pixie number two smirked at number one.

“Well Harry we have some questions we have to ask you right now.” the one identified as Ann went on. “Is there anyone living with you”

“No”, I answered, without quite knowing why I did.

“Is there anybody that would miss you if you disappeared for a couple of weeks”. Ann followed up.

“No, I haven’t even got a cat anymore”, I babbled again, while a little voice in the back of my mind was beginning to scream at me that this was wrong, telling me not to answer. Tell them nothing fool, it silently screamed at me, but what did it know about my situation.

“Ok, Becky”, you can take over”, Ann said.

“Harry we need you to be calm. Ann shot you with a EMP pulse gun that momentarily disrupted your brain waves and shocked you into unconsciousness. We then brought you in here and I placed a device on the back of your neck that acts as a spinal block. Then we gave you certain sedatives and other things that block your anxiety and make you extremely suggestible. The drugs we gave you will be wearing off soon, but the spinal block is permanent for the time being, well at least for now, so for the time being it will stay on. Ann (she gestured to her twin pixie, who held up a little black box, like your average car finder) has a device that turns it on and off. Ann a demonstration for Harry please”, Becky pointed at me.

All of a sudden I could feel everything again and tingled all over, like when an arm or leg goes to sleep sometimes when you’ve sat too long. I started up from my seat, but Becky warned me back and I complied.

“We are not going to hurt you Harry, but we can’t let you go just yet either”, Becky warned. “Ten years ago you were the Chief Researcher in Project Alice. Have you continued.”

“No, I was removed off that Project ten years ago”. I answered honestly.

“You never inquired if it continued?”,

“Well I did inquire and found that the copies it produced could be shocked back to life, but they’re brains were reduced to blank slates. Essentially their brains, which are just bioelectrical devices after all, were erased by the process when they lost their electrical charge. Essentially their brains were reset, completely erased. So the project was deemed a dead-end failure and finally abandoned,” I told her.

“So you didn’t know that the military, over the protests of the researchers working on the project, asked for a volunteer and did produce a copy of a solder. It was a disaster of course, he couldn’t even feed himself, but it convinced the Agency not to try it on anybody else.” Ann told Harry.

“What! ... What ... Who ... that would be the same as murder”, I blurted out, shocked to my very core at the very ideal she had suggested. “How could they do something like that to a living thinking human being. It would kill the person. It would be nothing less than cold blooded murder and would still only produce a adult body with no real mind. It was certainly not teleportation as we envisioned it.” I ranted to her.

“It never occurred to you that some people could actually want a full grown adult body with the mind of a child. A beautiful body that they could train to be whatever they wanted in very little time Doctor”. Ann spat out.

“No ... no it didn’t”, I answered back still in shock.

“It never occurred to you that this would be better than hypnosis or brainwashing. This would be better than any form of mind control anybody has thought up yet.” Becky cut in,

“You ever want a sex slave Doc?”, Ann put in.

“A sex slave?” I questioned curiously.

“What’s the matter Doc, you don’t like sex?”, Ann questioned.

“Oh, recently I’ve gone to Nevada a couple of times, and a few years ago I even had a couple of flings with a female intern I was working with. She was an assistant of mine at the time, and it was only the once really. Hey, that must have been twenty, thirty years ago, but it seems like only yesterday. Now that was robbing the cradle according to a few nosey people on the Project I was working on at the time. Hell, the way they talked you would have thought they wanted to label me a pedophile. Heck, I’ve never even thought of a slave ... a ... a ... sex slave.” I stammered defensibly.

“Never thought about it Doc?”

“Well I did watch a few movies.” I chuckled.

“Not into submission, bondage or S&M Doc”, Ann shot back with a smirk.

“I guess you found my porn collection Becky?”, I blushed.

“Yes, we did while we were waiting”.

“Well I guess you saw my Edgar Rice Burroughs collection too Becky. I really equate one with the other. They’re both just popular fiction, the only difference is one is PG13 and the other is Adult.” I got out.

“You’ll have to explain that one to me Harry”. Becky said coolly.

“Why do I have to explain anything to you two? Especially about my sex life, with two little girls that are probably still in grade school. You break into my house, shoot me with some weird weapon, pump me full of God knows what kinds of drugs. Then you start asking me questions. Questions that I consider extremely personal, about a Project that’s still classified Top Secret. For no good reason I can see, and I’m telling you about it. What’s worse is I seem to have an urge to actually try to explain things to you two!” I shot back, too calmly for my own liking.

“It’s the drugs.” the one called Ann put in.

“What? Your drugs causes diarrhea of the mouth, ha, ha.” I laughed.

“Lets say they allow you to address your unresolved childhood issues Harry.” Becky put in around her laugh, or should I say sniggle.

“Yeah!” I snorted.

“Please Harry it’s extremely important to us, more that you know”, they both implored me in stereo.

“Ok, I’ll try, I don’t know why, but I’ll try. Growing up my childhood was uneventful. My Father’s Mother insisted I had to go to Catholic kindergarten and the Nuns loved me. Everything was perfect until I entered the first grade. When I entered elementary school I discovered I had something called mirror vision. I discovered that everybody else read from left to right, me though, I read from right to left. If that wasn’t bad enough I also had perfect recall, or what they called a photographic memory back then. The memory trick at first allowing me to cover up the mirror vision thing. My world was a mirror image of the real world around me, but perfectly normal to me. I still have a hard time knowing my right from my left, which still plays hell with my marching ability both in band and the military. They later said I was suffering from dyslexia, to give it a name. The bottom line for me was I failed the first grade, and was held back to repeat it. It’s still something I think of as impossible, even now. I mean how can you possibly fail finger painting 101, sleep time 101, and my favorite lunch time 101. As a result of it anyway I was held back to repeat it, and put in a special education class. My Mother was outraged and pushed the local school system and local PTA hard, which just made the local school system dig their heels in deeper. When that failed to work Mom pushed the lawyer she had on a string hard and he pushed the State Board of Education hard.

The state begrudgingly admitted, after extensively testing me, that I was a “gifted student” and should not have been held back. Of course this was a year after I had been held back. Oh, did I forget to mention that I was a product of the Catholic education system and had actually been ahead of my class in everything that mattered, but attending a state public school for the first time because my Father insisted. Me?, well I was discovering that there are all kinds of prejudice out there in the world.

When it was all over, I wasn’t moved up a grade like my Mother wanted and the State had promised, but the teacher that had caused it and the principal of the elementary school that had done this to me were reprimanded. They themselves were sent back to school for further education and training. As you have probably guessed by now, this infuriated the local school employees and their clique of other teachers, parents and their pet students even more.”

“Maybe I wasn’t a genius like the state’s tests said I was, but I was certainly smarter than the average kid my age in that school system. As you might have guessed, from then on the damage had already been done. The System does not like to admit it made a mistake and has a nasty habit of burying it’s mistakes, sometimes quite literally. From then on I was singled out and punished or made an example of by both the teachers and other students. The peer pressure and actual bullying alone almost killed me. So I guess it was only natural that my second grade teacher kept hitting me on the kneecap with her yardstick, which she wielded like a broadsword, every time she walked by my desk. Finally she put me in the hospital with bone cancer in my kneecap. For six months I was in traction in the men’s ward of the TCI company hospital with bone cancer and almost lost my leg and died. Six months of raging fever and pain, out of my head half the time, either from the cancer itself, or the drugs they were using to treat it. Finally after exhausting every miracle drug they had in their arsenal at that time, the cancer went into remission. Not cured just remission. It was explained to me and my parents, that it was only in remission, and it could start back up again at any moment. I was written up in all the medical journals of that time because I had survived this particular nasty brand of osteo cancer. The two doctors that cured me became emanate in their field of cancer treatment with my case. I was one of the few that survived, and they still didn’t know why I survived. Since I had survived though, and since the cancer was in remission, I was finally allowed to go home. From then on I was under a death sentence from the bone cancer coming back if I bruised a bone, any bone. My first exposure to romance was Edgar Rice Burrows Classics comic books and later Superman and Batman while in the hospital in traction. Carter of Mars and Carson of Venus along with the other characters Burrows created were some of my first heroes, or should I say role models.

By the time I got to junior high I was almost six foot tall, and skinny as a rail, weighing only 128 at best, with curly dark brown hair that some said was kinky, and wore coke bottle lens for glasses. Far from being weak I was rather strong and limber from swimming and paddling a boat all summer. I wasn’t allowed to play football or get into fights because of the cancer issue, and my Father’s insistence that only animals brawl in the streets. Not being allowed to play football did not mean that I couldn’t go out for a sport. I foolishly chose to go out for basketball. I learned the hard way that football was the only serious sport in Alabama. Basketball was only to keep the football team in shape in the off season. So now I had a conflict with the football team and their butt boys. When I refused to back down I was mobbed by the team and the school said they couldn’t protect me after school.

My Mother’s answer to all this was to enroll me in Karate classes. She said if I was going to be forced by the school system to fight I would learn to do it well. A man should learn to do anything he did well she admonished me. She found me this group of older boys, really a gang, to take me to the Karate Dojo for classes after school one day a week. She also made sure the Dojo was out of my school district, ha, ha.

From that time on I got a liberal education in everything to do with mayhem and fast living. The boys, really grown men, I ran with hunted the bullies. For them it was a game with few rules. Of course they had all learned they couldn’t be too obvious about it. To this day when I hear that Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue” I always think of them. It appears that the best way to get into a fight with a bunch of redneck bullies was to just walk into a bar, or pool hall for that matter, and announce that you didn’t fight or want any trouble. It appeared that the mere statement “I don’t want any trouble” has the same effect on bullies, as blood in the water has on sharks. My personal contribution to all this was to go out for the wrestling team.

I became a nerd, of course back then that word didn’t even exist. I define nerd as anybody that likes to learn things just to learn them, and likes to fix things instead of destroying them. Of course, by this time, I was a nerd with an extremely bad attitude, that pushed back when pushed. I got so good at defending myself, that I wound up putting quite a few of the football team in the hospital. I found that the old saying, “the best offense is a good defense” was absolutely true. Where a fist or open palm to the trachea, better known as the Adam’s Apple, can stop the biggest bully dead in his tracks, it can also accidentally kill him, so it should be avoided where possible. On the other hand that same palm or open hand can break a collarbone quite easily. Though only a few inches to either side of the first mark, it quite easily stops your local bully and doesn’t kill. This, as you can imagine, did not endear me to the school system, the football team or their coaches. I went from the one doing the bleeding to the one smiling down at the boy on the floor, who if not bleeding was at least partially broken. It is simply amazing how many weak points Mother Nature left in the human body to be exploited by somebody that studies that body. Though it was always clearly self-defense I was still expelled many times for fighting which kept my Mother’s lawyers quite busy in my junior high and latter high school days. By the time I graduated high school I had become an enforcer, of sorts, of school code in the late 60’s desegregation era of the South. Bullies did not roam the halls of my school.

The girls I dated latter in high school didn’t need or want protecting, and were to put it rather bluntly, mercenary little gold diggers. I learned fast, that they only wanted to date me because I was a quote dangerous rogue, had a car, and they could use me to get even with their ex-boyfriend, or move up the food chain to their next boyfriend. Of course I only dated them because I could count coup on the other boys they wanted to play me off against. I had a motorcycle first, a car first, played a mean sax in the band, and was even a state wrestling champ for awhile. I always managed to also have a school letter jacket and sweater for my alleged girlfriend to wear and show off and a little money in my pocket for a reasonable good time.

My Mother wanted me to go to college, but after my high school graduation I was immediately drafted and wound up in the USMC. No, let me rephrase that, I was drafted so I volunteered for the Marines and Viet Nam. I guess you could say I had something to prove to myself, after all that is the only person you have to impress in the end. The old saying, “to thy own self be true”, has a lot of merit.

At about this time I really discovered “working girls”, AKA hookers. With a hooker it is just sex, no emotional entanglement, just a job to be done in the safest way possible, in as little time as possible with most of them. Of course I did find that some hookers did have hearts of gold or at least tried to have one. I had always had problems forming personal attachments with girls or women because they seem to require some kind of commitment, and I was honest with them and myself at least, about not being able to make that kind of commitment. I admit it, it scared me then, it scares me now. I couldn’t just let go and trust, I always expect the worst of my fellow man or woman for that matter, and I have never been disappointed in my fellow man’s, or woman’s, duplicity yet.

To me, at an early age it was drummed into my head that sex has consequences, not just for the girls, but the boys as well. Just as many boys are ruined as girls by early sex, there are responsibilities that go along with sex and consequences if those rules are ignored. Unwed mothers and shotgun weddings are a common thread throughout our culture. Even as late as today those same things still occur. It’s amazing how many boys refuse to do the right thing when confronted by the results of their actions. Unlike my buddies I just couldn’t lie about loving her just to get into her panties. Sex with a hooker or call girl on the other hand does not require a commitment, just a deposit and a prophylactic, ha, ha. I might have had problems with making a lasting commitment to a good girl, but I had no problem with sex. Being truthful, that part of me that was afraid to make that kind of commitment or take on those kinds of responsibilities, had no problem with sex workers. Also, unlike some of my more religious and strange buddies in the Corp, I didn’t try to reform or save them. We both knew what we were getting into I like to think.

On the other hand instead of spending all my time in Tijuana Mexico I got a surf board and spent my out of school time at Mission Beach and Hamal’s Surf Shop. I soon found myself hanging out with San Diego high school students and older USC students. I even found, to my chagrin, that some of the prettier whores that worked at the Manhattan, a whore house in TJ, attended USC. I also discovered that most of the chicks I was making out with at night on the beach were anti war protesters, and I saw no need to dissolution them with the fact I was a Marine. I wasn’t thrilled about Nam myself, after all we had lost Korea, and Castro had been smart enough to not let his good friend the CIA shoot him in the back. He was now firmly in control of Cuba, and the ‘Bay of Pigs’ was a disaster, and we never shutdown the Cuban sub pens and they all had nuclear missiles. Also think of this, if Castro had really wanted Guantonamo, GetMo, back he could have had it anytime he wanted it. After all he had two fortified entrenched 16 inch Naval Cannons zeroed in on everything that wasn’t part of a mind field. In ten minutes there wouldn’t have been any legitimate military targets left on our naval base there.

Anyway I’d meet a girl at the beach, we’d go out and have a good time, and she’d want me to return something, a commitment to the future, didn’t I love her? What were my plans for us? Whatever it is she want’s I can’t return it. To be honest it scares the hell out of me. I’d get in a sweat just thinking about it. So I’m just satisfied with having safe sex now. It’s legal over the border in TJ Mexico and in Nevada for that mater. In my younger days I went to TJ alone or with my Marine buddies, but that became old and dangerous fast. So now I head for Nevada every now and then when I get that old itch you can’t scratch for a little gambling and a clean girl. It’s just easier and safer for everybody concerned now. Satisfied girls?” I wanted to know.

“Harry do you think that some women are born to be slaves ... well sex slaves anyway?”, Becky seriously asked.

“No it is a condition that someone imposes on another against their will.” I shot back instantly.

“What would you do to free a sex slave Harry”, Becky asked.