Chapter 1

"Hello, Billy. It's nice to see that you arrived all in one piece. That's a pleasant change."

I had just opened my eyes to what looked like a hospital room. How did I get here? Oh, now I remember. I was out in the Gulf with my parents on our small boat when there was an explosion. The last thing I remember was a wall of flames coming toward me. Everything went blank, and now I find myself waking up to stare at a man bending over me. He was dressed in what I guess were pale blue hospital scrubs, though they didn't look exactly like anything I had ever seen on the TV hospital shows.

"Where are Mom and Dad? Did they get out alright? Where am I?"

"Please don't get excited, Billy. We are still trying to stabilize you. Everything will be explained in just a few minutes. Just let me finish my work, first. We don't want you to be harmed any more than necessary."

That sounded reasonable, so I tried to relax as much as a 16-year-old boy could under the circumstances. While I am waiting, I'll describe myself. I'm nothing special to look at, I'm 5'-8" tall and weigh 147 pounds. Yeah, I know, a little chubby in places. Mom insists that I will grow out of that in a couple of years, but it's a real pain right now. I don't even show on most girls' radar screens. I've never been laid and have no immediate prospects. Oh, well, Mom says that the girls will notice me in a couple of years, but, shit, what do I do now?

I have the dark brown hair and brown eyes of the typical nerd. Yeah, my IQ is somewhere around 200, and I never forget anything I want to remember. I have a knack for languages, both spoken and those used to program computers. About the only thing that keeps me from a perfect fit on the nerd chart is that I don't need glasses.

I spent a lot of my time in the last few years alone since there were no other boys my age in my neighborhood. As a result, most of my time outside my home has been spent at the local dojo. I have learned just about all of the forms of martial arts that can be mastered by someone who has only been at it for seven years, but I can hold my own, so I have not been bothered by bullies. Usually, they only need one pass to learn to leave me alone. I have even taken on as many as three attackers at one time, but, fortunately, that has only happened twice. In both cases, I was forced to put them in the hospital in the course of defending myself. Mom gave me a hard time, but Dad congratulated me out of Mom's hearing.

"Well, Billy, I am now ready to answer your questions. First, let me say that you were in a terrible accident. The boat's fuel exploded and shot out a fireball that consumed your parents so fast that they felt no pain. You were blown clear by the explosion, and we picked you up out of the water."

God damn it, that is no way for someone to tell you that you are an orphan! I was very upset by the news and started to react accordingly. I heard all kinds of alarms going off, but the sound lasted only for an instant. Apparently, the asshole that was talking to me did something to knock me out, because the next thing I knew, I was waking up and another person, a woman, was standing over me.

I remembered everything the man had said, so I burst into tears. The woman tried to comfort me, but there wasn't much she could do, short of knock me out again. I spent about half an hour crying, but most of the pain and sorrow and, yes, fear, seemed to be burned out of me. I came to myself and started paying attention to my surroundings.

I saw that I was now in a different room. It still looked like a hospital room, but some of the details were different, so I knew that I had been moved. I also noticed that I was very hungry, so I asked for something to eat. The woman punched some buttons on a nearby console, and I heard a chime. She opened a panel and removed some food on a tray. It was a kind of mush, but I was hungry enough not to care—I ate it as fast as I could shove it down. Surprisingly, though it looked like library paste, it tasted very good. Finally, I was satisfied and she put the tray back where it had come from. She pushed another button and turned back to me.

"Billy, my name is Carol, and I have been assigned the pleasant job of taking care of you for the next few weeks. One of my jobs is to tell you what is going on and to help you adjust to your current situation.

"I'll give you some background. You were about to die where you were, so we rescued you. You were badly burned over most of your body, and several bones were broken by the force of the explosion. To date, most of our efforts have been directed toward repairing the physical damage to your body. I don't know what we can do about the emotional damage, but I'll help as much as I can.

"Now, hang on tight, because the rest of what I am about to say will be very hard for you to comprehend. You are no longer in the year 2015. We are part of a research project involving time travel, and you are our first successful subject. You are now in the year 2297. I won't bore you with the details of how the transfer was done, but I will say that it was a one way trip—there is no chance that you can return to 2015.

"In case you think that we have done you a dirty trick by kidnapping you, consider the fact that you would have died within another few seconds if we had not snatched you up and cared for you in our medical facilities that are much in advance of those in your home time. Back then, you would have died, even if you had been picked up and transferred to a hospital. They just did not have the necessary facilities and knowledge to save you.

"Yes, you were picked up to be a research specimen. You were selected quite by accident, but consider the alternative. We wish to gain as much information as we can from you about your life in 2015. Believe it or not, there was a terrible disaster which resulted in most records of the time being lost, and we want to fill in the missing information. You are to be our first source of that knowledge. I must tell you that you have no choice in whether or not you cooperate. Our machines will extract the information from your brain, no matter what you do. The process is painless and you will not lose the information; it will simply be copied from your memory to our computer memory. The whole process will take about two months. Will you cooperate?"

"Well, it doesn't look like I have much choice, so, yes, I will cooperate. But what will happen to me after you get the information you want?"

"I don't know the answer in detail, but you will be released to the government run orphanage system and will become their responsibility. There are regular programs for handling orphans and other children, so you will not be dumped on the street to fend for yourself."

"OK, that sounds like something I can handle. In any case, thank you for saving my life. I hope that the information that I have will be worth it to you."

One of the things they did was to run me through a teaching machine to teach me the modern language. It was a variation on English, but it was much changed. A lot of the junk stuff like the subjunctive case and irregular verbs were gone. Spelling had been rationalized, so words were spelled like they were pronounced. The language was so simplified that I could have learned it in a few days without their machine, but I didn't tell them that. I didn't know why, but I suspected that I should keep as much personal information to myself as possible.

An advantage of learning through their machine was that I also received the equivalent of a highschool education at the same time. Therefore, I was well on my way to being acclimated to local life without the pain of learning.

Anyway, the two months in their lab to give them as much information as I could was reasonably pleasant, if you can call boredom "pleasant." No harm was done to me, and I ate and slept regularly, though I did get tired of that mush, despite its good taste.

Finally, the day came that I was ushered out of the research facility and into the "loving" arms of the bureaucracy. Had it been in my original time, there would have been stacks and stacks of paperwork to be gone through, but now it was screen after screen on a computer display. I was told later that I actually had less detail than normal to go through because the research lab was also part of the government, so they had done a lot of the necessary stuff while I was in their clutches.