Chapter 1: Memories

Jennifer whistled a few bars of a classic jazz melody under her breath as she unlocked the door to Laboratory Seven, brushing a shower of water droplets from the new silvergray raincoat she'd pulled out of her closet this morning to wear over her stretch jeans and turquoise ribknit sweater. She had found it on sale at Nordstrom's and hadn't been able to resist purchasing it, knowing that its silver and jet trim highlighted her ebony complexion.

She ignored the fine mist of droplets that sparkled in her conservatively styled afro as she hung coat and purse in her locker. The conditioned air of the labs would soon have them dry. She'd been listening to jazz station KMHD as she drove to work, her favorite from among Portland's FM stations. An old Louis Armstrong melody had gotten tangled amongst her synapses and was playing itself over and over inside her head.

She glanced about almost smugly, shrugging into a white jacket with the 'Marten Research Laboratories' logo neatly embroidered in bright red over mint green on its breast pocket. She took deep breaths of the conditioned air, subconsciously noting the difference between its electronically scrubbed taste and the rainwashed freshness outside. Located on the crest of a ridge of low hills between Portland and Beaverton, it was far enough from the heart of the city to get away from the worst of the smog, but there was no escaping it entirely anywhere between the CoastRange and the Cascade Mountains.

The lab was still deserted, but then she hadn't expected either Jake or Tony, her assistants, to be here yet. Even after stopping in the parking lot outside the lab building for a quick cigaret, she usually arrived before they did. It wouldn't be eight o'clock for another two minutes and twenty seconds, by her quartz watch.

Most of the lab's employees made a game of it, being very careful not to actually enter their labs until exactly on the tick of eight AM. After getting here early to avoid the crush of traffic along the Sunset Highway and I217 they would spend every second they could over their morning cups of coffee in the tiny cafeteria, dawdling until they had to hurry to reach their labs exactly on time. There was no way that Neal Marten was going to get any of their precious morning minutes for free. Not if they could help it, he wasn't!

She smiled at the thought of their gameplaying, but she enjoyed these moments here by herself too much to join them in their harmless fun. There were no time clocks here, and nobody worried about hanging around a halfhour or so after quitting time if they were in the midst of an interesting project. Or two hours, or three or four, when projects fell behind schedule and the pressure was on. Saturdays and Sundays spent in the labs were no rarities, either. In return, Neal Marten was more than generous with unscheduled time off when things slowed down. He never questioned the occasional order of quickdelivery pizza or Chinese food that showed up on expense accounts after such sessions either, and there were always pots of strong black coffee brewing in the halls outside the labs.

She prowled about the room, her softsoled shoes squeaking faintly against the freshlywaxed vinyl floor. She fairly revelled in the lab's clean, new paint and modern electronic equipment. The building might be old, a converted mansion built nearly a hundred years ago when lumber was king, but everything in it was the newest and the best. Not that the building was in bad condition; though over the years it had been everything from a hotel to a girls' school to a convent to a convalescent home. Best of all, this lab was hers, all hers. She might still be working on her Doctorate, but she was Jennifer R. Daniels, MS. It said so in bold Gothic letters on her diploma from PortlandStateUniversity, hanging right there in a plain black frame on the wall over her desk.

No matter that she was young, and Black, and a woman. That had nothing to do one way or the other with her being promoted at twentyfive over the heads of a dozen older employees after only six months on the job. There was no discrimination at Marten Laboratories, reverse or otherwise. Certainly, Neal Marten himself had never indicated that he thought of her as anything but another employee, she reflected almost ruefully. It was solely because of her own skills that she had so quickly achieved the title of Research Technician Grade Two, with its more than adequate salary, and she felt that most of her fellow employees would admit it if pressed for their opinion. For a full two weeks now she had been in charge of this project in Lab 7, with two assistant technicians working under her sole direction. So far to come, in only a few months...

She was studying the randomlooking scramble of electronic components on a workbench breadboard when the lab door opened, so deep in her own thoughts that it was several moments before she really noticed the arrival of her two helpers. Her attention was fized on the plasticencased object that was at the center of the array. About the length of the last joint of her little finger, it was a misshapen mass of translucent gray crystal, vaguely Lshaped within its shrinkwrap housing.

"Morning, Miss Daniels." Jake Mullins was middleaged, a smiling, stocky redheaded exjock whose muscular physique had succumbed over the years to the effects of large quantities of pizza and beer. He was closely followed through the door by curlyhaired Tony Parrish, who was only two or three inches taller than her own fiveeight and almost skinny. He was closer to her own age than most of her coworkers; not long out of college. He boasted curly black hair, worn a bit long, and a suntanned olive complexion. His Mediterranean good looks sometimes reminded her of pictures she'd seen of Frank Sinatra, back when he'd first started his singing career.

Both of her assistants were good, careful workers, but that was all they were. Neither of them had shown even the slightest trace of that bright spark of initiative and imagination that marks off the born researcher from the merely adequate technician. Still, given a set of clear directions, they could almost always be relied on to follow them to the letter.

"Good morning, Jake, Tony. Did you check out these circuits before you went home Friday?" She smiled a welcome as they hung up their coats and donned jackets like her own. She privately thought that Jake looked just a bit hungover, while a tiny patch of white clinging to Tony's lower lip spoke of a slip of his safety razor. The younger man seemed on edge about something, his eyes darting about the room nervously. She almost asked what was bothering him, then decided that it was none of her business. He'd probably just quarrelled with one of the endless procession of girl friends he liked to boast about on his coffee breaks.

"We sure did," Jake answered in his gravelly voice, pulling his jacket tight in front to fasten the lower buttons. He smiled wryly at her. "Everything tested out right on the mark. You mean it isn't working the way it should?"

She flashed a quick grin back at him. This had quickly become a standing joke among the three of them. The device, referred to in the project title as an 'electronic inducer', had been a total washout so far. It was supposed to project simulated emotions to TV viewers, according to the writeup they'd been given. She suspicioned that it was an offshoot of the work being done by some of the big companies on neuroelectronic interfacing, but she hadn't read any reports of similar circuits in the professional journals she subscribed to. So far it had done nothing but burn out components, using up large quantities of the company's time, materials and electricity.

"Oh, it's working the way it should all right," she answered. She turned on a recorder, then clipped a test probe to an exposed terminal and used the resulting flat line to calibrate her oscilloscope. "It's doing precisely what it's designed to do, which is absolutely nothing! Just watch, and I'll prove it one more time. You are sure that you checked those connections?" She spoke into the lab bench's builtin cassette recorder, giving the date and exact time. "8:04 AM. Project Seven dash ThirtyThree, variation seventyfive. Test number one hundred and twentyseven. Voltage increased to 4.375 across leads Alpha and Delta."

She flipped the switch that fed power into the exposed circuitry, and everything happened at once. A tiny strand of wire, fallen away from the blob of solder that should have held it in place, crossed two other threads of silvery metal. The surging current welded it into its new position, sending power through components that weren't designed for the abrupt overload.

It was like seeing the sound of a multitoned chime as it reflected endlessly through the corridors of her mind, smelling the touch of purple velvet running across her fingertips, tasting a laugh that was filled with sorrow; Jennifer felt a kaleidoscope of unfamiliar emotions, then heard a 'snap' that seemed to come from beyond some distant horizon. She had no idea of what was happening; she only felt a wave of dizziness, striking like a blow from a giant fist. She lashed out blindly toward an alarm button, not even realizing that Tony and Jake were already falling like puppets whose strings had been cut. She didn't even feel herself hit the floor as everything went dark.

Pulses of strange radiation bathed the small laboratory, reflecting back and forth from the shielded walls. Some ten microseconds after the test began, a protective relay acted to break the circuit.

It kicked out at least nine microseconds too late.

"Miss Daniels! Are you all right? Where's that doctor!"

She opened her brown eyes, looking dazedly at the strange surroundings and the unfamiliar people standing over her. A pair of blue eyes in a tanned face studied her anxiously.

"I want my mommy," was her whimpered plea, but then she slipped back into the welcoming darkness even as she felt a warm wetness spreading from between her legs.

She was in a real nice room, she thought sleepily, but it wasn't one she'd ever seen before. It sure wasn't anything like the tiny attic room she shared with her two big sisters. It was too light, too bright, too clean. It even smelled clean, with smoothpainted walls and a high ceiling, and there wasn't nothing nowhere that looked worn out or beat up.

She was lying flat on her back in a hard, narrow bed with white siderails. She'd never liked sleeping on her back, but right now she was too tired to move, to turn on her side. Hey, she was too old for a crib. Wasn't she? Yeah, sure she was! Lots too old. The room had a high narrow window in one whitepainted wall, and a shiny white bedside table. Everything around her was white! There was a faint smell of disinfectant. Was she in some kind of a hospital?

The nicelooking Whitey sitting on a straight chair by the side of her bed seemed kind of familiar, almost like she knew him from someplace, but he sure wasn't from her neighborhood. Anyhow, he wasn't a doctor, that she was somehow sure of. He was wearing slacks and an opencollared sport shirt, and a dark stubble of beard spread across his chin like he hadn't shaved this morning. Why did she think of him wearing a suit and tie? His blue eyes were worried, tired looking, but the lines around them relaxed when he saw that she was awake.

"How are you feeling, Jennifer?"

"Arright." She smiled trustingly. "What's your name, Mister Man?"

"I'm Neal Marten." He straightened up and caught his breath. He seemed startled by her words, almost as if he was scared by them. "Don't you remember me at all?"

"Nuhuh. Anyhow, I don't think so. My frens call me Jewel. That's 'cause my middle name's Ruby. Should I 'member you? You look awful nice."

"You've been working for me for the last six months, Jen... I mean, Jewel." He turned his chair to face her more directly, leaning forward to study her reactions.

"Working? I have? I don't 'member doing that!" She wrinkled her nose at him perplexedly. "Why don't I? Remember things, I mean?"

"There was an accident in your laboratory, and it must have made you forget some things for a little while. Just what all do you remember?"

"Just being a little girl." She pondered, trying to gather in the stray wisps of memory that seemed to swirl about inside her head like a flock of seagulls she'd seen once around a fishing pier, coming nearer, circling farther away, leaving bright splatters of themselves behind but never seeming to land anywhere. "But it seems like such a long time ago. I'm big now, ain't I?"

"Yes, you're quite grown up." He forced a chuckle, though she could tell that he was still upset, and handed her a small mirror from the nearby table. "Here, you can see for yourself."

She gripped the handle of the mirror tightly in one hand, poking at her hair with the other while studying her reflection with mingled fear and fascination. The face that peered back at her did look kind of familiar, yet was all the stranger for that. Her first thought was that it looked a lot like pictures of how Mommy had looked a long time ago, when she'd first met the Daddy who'd gone off and left them right after she'd been born. The Daddy that Jewel only knew from those same old pictures.

The luminous darkbrown eyes that looked back at her were fringed with curling lashes that seemed far longer and thicker than any that she remembered having. She'd always been kind of pudgy, and hated it, but grownups always said she was pretty anyhow. Now her face was less round, the bridge of her nose higher and thinner, reminding her of pictures she'd seen in a book of longago people who lived in pyramids. Almost like a queen out of one of those picture books, cold and royal except for her full, almost pouting lips. Her dark eyes and white teeth were highlighted by a smooth complexion that was almost as black as ebony. She threw back the covers on the narrow bed, studying the slimly rounded body and long legs that were almost completely revealed by her scanty hospital gown.

"I sure am grown up," she breathed at last, running her hands over her body and down her legs to convince herself that this was really her. "And I'm pretty, too."

"Yes, you're very pretty," Neal agreed wryly, and she thought that his breathing quickened. "Do you remember anything else?"

"A... A little bit. I useta play baseball in the vacant lot across the street from our house with the other kids. The street wasn't all that busy, but Mommy allus worried about me getting hit by a car and landing in the hospital 'cause I'd run back and forth so much. She wants... wanted me to go to college when I grew up. Did I? Go to college, I mean?"

"You sure did, graduating right here at good old PortlandStateUniversity. You got very good grades in almost all of your classes." He leaned back in his chair, relaxing as he talked.

"Was that when I came to work for you?" She continued to study herself in the mirror as they talked, turning her head this way and that.

"Well, not right away. You see, when you graduated the electronics industry was in the middle of what they called a 'rolling readjustment'. Still is more or less, for that matter," he added with a wry twist of his lips. "There haven't been very many jobs open lately anywhere in the country for the kind of work you're trained for. I was looking for someone with your kind of skills when I heard about you from a friend of mine, one of your college professors. He was quite upset that one of his best students had to earn her living by dancing in a night club chorus line."

"I remember doing that!" She sat up straighter, leaning forward from the supporting pillows and dropping the mirror to clap her hands together. "I had pretty clothes on, only not very many of them. Why, you were there! We sat at a little bitty table, and you gave me a whole bunch of money. Why did you do that? Give me money, I mean?"

"Because I wanted you to come to work for me, and you didn't know whether you could trust me or not. You needed the money so that you could afford to pay your back rent, move up here and buy some different clothes."

"That was silly of me, not to trust you." She smiled sunnily up at him. "You're nice."

"Not everyone had been nice to you, the last few years. Do you remember going to school at all?"

She lowered the rail to swing her legs over the side of the bed and stood up, stretching, unconcerned that her short hospital gown was only loosely held together down the back by a couple of flimsy ties. "I don't think so. Were you there?"

"Here, what's this?" The gruff voice came from the doorway. "Is my newest patient up and around already?"

Jewel dove back into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin, gazing with wide, frightened eyes at the doctor.

"Oh, Mark. Come on in. Our patient seems to be having some trouble remembering things. She was just telling me about it. Apparently the accident has wiped out or blurred most of her recent memories. Jewel, this is Doctor Worth." Since she just watched with tightly closed lips, Neal went on to give the doctor a concise summary of what she had told him.

"And just what else do you remember, Miss Daniels?"

"I... I don't know." She smiled timidly up at him. "I was just telling Neal that I didn't remember going to school, or nothing like that."

"But you did remember meeting him. Let's see what else you can tell us. Don't be afraid, just relax and say the first thing that comes into your head. First, what's your name?"

"Jewel. I mean, Jennifer. Jennifer Ruby Daniels. I don't really like to be called Jennifer, though. I'm named after my Aunt Jennifer, and I don't like her a whole lot. She's got a screechy voice, an' she's always after me to do things I don't wanna do, like wear dresses 'stead of jeans, an' play with dolls and things when I'd rather go outside and play baseball with Freddie an' Tommie, and Jamal from acrost the street. No, not Jamal. He's dead. He was a Crip, and the Bloods got him."