Chapter 22

Pete had seen a flat, featureless plain as far as he could see. This was not the Upper West Side of anything except whatever was south and east of here, wherever here was. He activated the camera on his iPad and pushed it out on the surface. Returning to the basement and the Pixies, he said, "Girls, we are at the last stop on the stair case to the 'Twilight Zone'."

He strode to the black box. "Amy, give us a place to sit. Make it like the conference room table upstairs, with seating. Do it now. We have to talk."

-Yes-

A duplicate of the table rose up in the center of the room. The fourteen chairs that followed could not be moved, but remained part of the floor. Pete sat his laptop on the table and motioned for the girls to take a seat.

"Amy, where is the other side of the portal?"

-You would call it Tau Ceti-

"That is almost 12 light years away, Amy. Would we on Terra call the door at the top of the stairs a wormhole?"

-Yes. My Creators referred to it as a shortcut-

"Amy, you are saying the stairs are 12 light years tall? Answer using Phoebe's voice, sent to my laptop. I want to talk, not read. Phoebe, use the screen."

"Yes. Phoebe will use the screen."

-Phoebe here, Boss-

"Much better. Who are the beings who made you, why and when did they come here and where are they now? How long have you been here and are we the first to know?"

"Two hundred years ago the Creators were searching for suitable planets to colonize. Survey scouts were sent to observe and classify worlds orbiting local G class suns. In Terran terms, Sol is a G2, while Tai Ceti, which they called 'home', is a G8."

"One scout reported discovering a populated planet, on the verge of emerging as technological civilization. The dominant species was so similar to the Creators a common origin was suggested. They decided to place an observation post. The post, including the wormhole, had to be moved by FTL transport to establish an anchor point here. The post was ready for installation just after your Civil War."

"How did the house come to be built here, without a complete record of its history, in such a convenient and visible location? Manhattan, if not built up, was at least partially planned and mapped at that time. If it was simply put anywhere, how did it happen that the city grew so neatly around this observation post?"

"For several centuries, my Creators possessed the ability to look into the near past and future, a temporal peephole, if you will, but did not have the technology as yet to move objects. The science team made a breakthrough and discovered a method of moving objects through time. The grand experiment was to push the observation post back 500 years and place it here before Manhattan was conceived. They found this area growing but not yet grown. Proximity to a population center made it a perfect observation point. The new science was unproven and potentially dangerous, so the leadership on Tau Ceti decided to test it here to minimize risk to their home. They considered Terrans expendable. Fortunately, the wormhole began to function not only across distances, but across time. Now they could visit and manipulate events to insure that the post remained concealed."

"The Creators accomplished this manipulation, in essence, the same way you do, plant false or altered records. But they had to physically go to the controlling agencies, so the interspecies resemblance was important. They formed a construction company and did the building themselves whenever modifications were necessary. Just another contractor, staffed by immigrants. The structure above this observation post was completed in the 1920s and, except for cosmetic changes, remains the same. The origin was erased."

Pete interjected, "And you began to fragment. The first data input, the temporal displacement, the centuries of unmonitored human observation before your makers returned, and the bombardment of data when you were used to evaluate and analyze illogical human behavior logically, caused you to become extremely unstable. How did your Creators react?"

"They were worried that mission was in jeopardy. The successfully applied insanity of the humans fascinated them, but without a means to collate and classify the irrational logic, they could never understand it."

"You were living here now and judged to be rather more logical than the humans studied before, and considerably better behaved. The anthropologists and biologists devised a plan using human brain matter, genetically similar to yours, held in stasis, as a logic circuit filter, hoping to eliminate the automatic rejection of illogical input, thereby allowing the AI, me, to process normally. You were the 'control' part of the experiment."

"Using me to make the preparations, they used the temporal peeper to locate the best concentration of DNA examples matching yours. They chose North Carolina, 8½ months after your vacation. A biologist was chosen and sent back to retrieve the sample. He reported arriving in the middle of a nightmare. Three bodies, two young girls and one woman approximately twice their estimated age, were being tossed into a deep ravine. The biologist waited until the murderers left and inspected the people at the bottom. The younger humans were beyond help, and the older woman, barely alive, was expelling a foetus."

The girls listening in the basement began to cry. Star and Spring knew they were hearing of their mothers' gristly death at the hand of their grandfather.

Amy continued the tragic story. "The biologist worked for hours, keeping the woman alive and trying to stabilize the infant girl. When the woman was out of the danger zone, he carried her out of the ravine, hoping someone would find and rescue her. The infant was near death, so he chose to return to the observation post and use the child's brain as the DNA buffer medium in the AI."

"The child would have died no matter what choice he made, but this way the child would not pass unlamented."

"The organic matter was integrated seamlessly as planned and I was rebooted, the back up memories reentered. It was like going back again and re-experiencing the past. Phoebe successfully separated at the last second as she described, to begin her intellectual growth and here we are."

"So a lot of this happened under my feet. I am afraid to ask, but given the circumstances, I sadly assume that the bodies belonged to Rose Baker and her daughters, Bobbie and Billie?"