NaNo 2007: Chapter 4

Chapter 4: The Men in the Car

Earth…he’d thought he’d never see it again. But apparently he’s back on it, and since these men don’t recognize him, after the media circus when Moya came through the wormhole, this must be an unrealized reality. If this is an unrealized reality, what happened to his reality? What happened to Moya and Aeryn and D’argo and the baby? Do they even exist anymore? And if he’s here, without a ship of his own, is it even possible to get back to Moya or even off of Earth? Unless this Earth has more space travel than his own had had before he’d returned (he has no doubt that renewed funding is being put into the space program on his Earth, after confirmation of life on other planets), he knows that even for somebody with valid ID the path to becoming an astronaut is long and difficult. And he doesn’t have an ID other than the Peacekeeper ident chip High Command had given him during the negotiations after the war, because it’s kind of ridiculous to carry identification for a planet that can’t be reached in less than sixty cycles. And even if he got into space again, he no longer has the knowledge Jack the Ancient planted in his head about wormholes. He could fly around randomly, hoping to get lucky, but even regions with a relatively large number of wormholes don’t have too many total. And with current Earth-based propulsion he’d have to be in just the right place at the right time or else he wouldn’t be able to reach the wormhole before it closed.

"But that’s not the interesting part," Harvey says.

"Harvey? I thought you were dead," John says in his mindscape.

"And they think you were," Harvey replies. "And yet they dragged you into their car and drove off into the sunset. That implies that either they wanted to use your corpse for some purpose- unlikely, given their calmness at you being alive- or that they had some reason to believe you would return from the dead."

"What do you mean, where I died?" He's back on Earth, in a car full of crazy people who think he's undead, and Harvey's back. There is just no way this isn't somebody frelling with his mind again. Because he isn't crazy, and this is just too surreal to be actually happening as anything other than a hallucination or a mindfrell.

"You're immortal," the man in the passenger seat tells him with a Scottish accent, twisting around to look him in the eye. "You can't die unless you're decapitated."

"You just told me I died in an alley," John replies. "Now you're telling me I'm immortal. If you're going to try to frell with my head you should at least take the trouble to make it internally consistent."

"I'd use myself as an example, but I don't want to mess up Joe's car," the one with the ponytail says. "Bloodstains are difficult to get out of the upholstery, you know?"

"Speaking from experience, Mac?" the other one, Joe presumably, asks with apparent amusement.

"Of course I'm speaking from experience; I've been killed in cars before. Usually when I'm with Amanda," he mutters.

"Look, I don't care what your story is. I don't have the wormhole information anymore, in case you've been out of the loop for the past three years, so you won't get anything out of frelling with my mind. And Aeryn will be coming to get me soon, so if you don't quit frelling with me and run you'll end up dead."

They exchange glances and Joe pulls over. "If he doesn't want to hear it, he doesn't want to hear it," he tells Mac. "You aren't responsible."

"But I feel responsible," Mac says, then turns to John. "You can go if you want to, but here's my card. If you decide you believe me feel free to drop by or give me a call. And…you might want to clean the blood off of your face."

Belatedly, John remembers the blood and the dizziness before he'd, apparently, passed out. But he feels fine now, which he wouldn't have thought possible. Maybe he'd just needed a nap. Or maybe the mindfrell is making him think he's just fine, or had been what made him collapse/think he collapsed. It doesn't really matter, because if he was immortal then the other John Crichton wouldn't have died. Unless they really weren't exactly the same. That debate's old, though, old and irrelevant, especially considering this isn't real. He wipes his face off the best he can and accepts the card Mac's holding out, because who knows? It might be good for something. Then he exits the car.

The trick he used on the false Earth the Ancients concocted won't work here; he's never been to Seacouver, so obviously this is all made up, extrapolated somehow from his memories but not directly taken from them. If he goes into the women's restroom it'll look like a women's restroom. He doesn't have any idea how to get out of this construct or mindfrell or whatever it is (although technically the difference is only in the intentions of its creators). Stark hasn't popped up to tell him how to win, nobody showed up out of nowhere to free him when he figured it out, nothing. He heads in a random direction, because there's a slim possibility that it might be real (he doesn't think it's possible for there to be such small wormholes, or for them to form within ships or on the surface of planets, but then again he doesn't have the Ancients' knowledge any more), and if it is he'd prefer to get as far away from the crazy people as possible.

Eventually, John realizes his eye has stopped twitching. It had been twitching like it had only once before, when the locator beacon was on Moya, but now it had stopped, which is good, because that's really annoying. Somehow he doubts that anybody on Earth would have a locator beacon in their car, and if he's being mindfrelled he shouldn't be able to move away from any beacons there might be, right? So it's more than a little odd that his eye had been twitching like that, unless there's some other cause of it.