Chapter 46

Two hours later...

Time: May 4, year 204,883 6:30 PM Peruvian Local Time

After an uneventful trip, Child Transport dropped Isabelle off at the office of the top Genetic e-tech of the city. The secretary electronically signed the transfer log, and then gestured for Isabelle to enter the inner office. As Isabelle did, she heard a soft hiss as two layers of doors closed and sealed the entrance behind her. She looked around the new room.

The opulent office was somewhat dim with the panoramic windows shielded with blinds. There was a large desk with a lone woman sitting behind it, working with a monitor. She bore the rank of a Level-5 e-tech on her collar. There was also a single chair obviously positioned for someone to sit in, and after a moment Isabelle did just that.

The woman did not look at Isabelle at first. She ignored her completely as she worked at her desk. Isabelle sat patiently as the minutes flowed by, waiting for the e-tech to speak first.

The woman finally did. "This room is completely bug-free now, no listening devices, no microwaves are bouncing off the windows. I guarantee we are not being recorded or observed. So tell me Isabelle, what are your thoughts?"

Isabelle stared at the five stars on the woman's collar and then smiled. "Gee mom, five stars! Nice! I don't know whether to hug you or salute you!"

A'moth glanced down at her collar and smiled. "Yeah. Two years is the absolute minimum time between promotions. I just made five-star a month ago..."

A'moth and Isabelle were soon locked in a fierce embrace. "Oh, my true daughter..." A'moth murmured. "My dear, precious daughter..." She kissed the top of Isabelle's head. "Ah! Have you grown?" she whispered.

Isabelle nodded, burying her face into her mother's body. "Yep! Over a centimeter, in just two months! I'm finally doing it! After all the decades at Antelope Freeway and the arctic, I'm finally aging again!" Isabelle finally let go of her mom and headed back to her chair. "How's dad doing?"

"Fine," said A'moth as she sat back at her desk. "... still hanging out at Acapulco. It's funny. He and I joked once, about how he'd like to spend some time there. But I don't think he ever planned on nine years..."

At the end of her college years at the Genetic Institute of Hong Kong, A'moth jumped to the North Pole after her plane landed in Peru and met Gary as he walked out of the arctic home. After three years, A'moth needed to be fed, Gary was carrying Jim's sperm and Cindy's ovum. Gary's skills at teleporting would also be needed to carry out their master plan.

Over the next five years, Gary's powers increased dramatically. He was still locked at a range of a little over twenty-three kilometers, but within that sphere he had almost unlimited power. As a test, he once remote teleported a ten-ton rock from twenty-two kilometers south of him and a hundred meters below sea level to a similar spot twenty- two kilometers north of him in a single jump. He could also speed jump to any location within his sphere, even locations never visited. After years of practice, he could comfortably travel around the planet at twenty kilometers a second, enabling him to be anywhere on the planet in a thousand seconds.

The Caribbean gulf had a dozen cluster-towns, but the Pacific coastline from San Diego to Caral Peru was totally deserted. And with his infallible sense of all people within twenty-three kilometers, it was very easy for Gary to remain completely hidden around the Acapulco bay area. With a jump-line to the bay of 4,014 kilometers from her office in Lima, A'moth could be with her husband in the blink of an eye if necessary. And with a Great Circle path of 4083 kilometers, Gary could easily make the trip himself in less than four minutes.

With Jim and Cindy's help with information over the web, Gary used remote-teleporting to switch certain blood samples in a Korean vault with Isabelle's blood. The group targeted one of the incubator-9 tubes for their mission, teleporting a deceased infant out of the tube and using their phased-shadow quantum techniques from the arctic to fool the Korean computers into thinking the tube still had a live occupant.

A few days before the tube was to be unsealed, Isabelle left her arctic home and joined her mom and dad. After all the years of training for her mission, Gary remote-teleported Isabelle into the empty tube from twenty-three kilometers away, seconds before its seals were broken.

The one part of their grand plan that could not be thought out in advance was how to find and support the future Brianna in finding Kyle and falling in love with him. In the end, Jim said they would have to rely on the time loop to find the path of least resistance in its grand motion towards its destiny. A'moth now thought that Jim's faith was justified. His guess at who Brianna was had been proven accurate...