Phase Shift

Cadet Evans had barely had more than a minute or two to calm Annie down when another figure unexpectedly materialized in front of him. He was nonplussed, but Annie greeted the new arrival with enthusiasm. "Sam! I can't believe all of this! What's happening?" Sam did not answer immediately, but cast a dark look around the room. "Sam, where are we? What is this place?" Annie's voice had a slightly pleading tone about it. She recognized the look on Sam's face, and she knew she needed to pull him back to earth. Or here. Wherever that happened to be.

"Can't you even guess, Annie?" Sam turned from surveying the control room to face her. He had heartily wished he would never see this place again. "I told you where I was from."

"What? What do you mean? From the future, or from Hyde?"

"Yes. Both. I mean..." He trailed off. From the look in her eyes and the tone of her voice, he could tell she didn't want to hear any wild stories, she just wanted to be reassured that she wasn't going insane. He knew the feeling well. "I mean, this is where I came from. This is where I work. Where I used to work, anyway."

Cadet Evans brightened at the statement. "You're a member of the project? A field agent?"

Sam turned to him as if he had just become aware of his presence. "Yes, I was. Why?"

"You must be the reason why the controller went back!"

"What *are* you talking about?"

"I'm sorry, I'm just so excited to be seeing all of this." The young trainee tried to calm himself. The thought of merely meeting a field agent was almost too exciting for him to contemplate, and now here he was, talking to one in the flesh. "The controller was just demonstrating how the transporter and transponder would follow a guide beacon, and the next thing I know, here you both are!" He turned to Annie. "It's a great honor to meet you both."

But before Annie could respond, Sam interrupted. "What do you mean, 'the controller was demonstrating guide beacons'?"

"Well, she was giving me the basic orientation, and then suddenly she went off on a tangent about guide beacons. No, that's not it exactly. It was a specific kind of beacon she was talking about. What was it she said..."

"Return beacons?"

"Yes, that's it! Return beacons. And for some reason, she started asking me about them. I don't really understand why. We didn't cover that in our basic instruction. I thought she was just testing my knowledge."

"What exactly did she ask you about return beacons?"

"She said something like...um, she asked, 'Why weren't they turned on?' Does that make any sense to you?"

"She didn't know they weren't on?"

"Apparently not. But she must have gone ahead and activated them, because she told me to stay here and make sure that this," and he gestured to the control panel with the steady light still shining "that this stayed on no matter what happened. But it must be working now, because here you both are." And he smiled at them both, obviously pleased with himself that he had successfully completed his first assignment.

His satisfaction was lost on Sam. "She didn't know the return beacons were off. No wonder I was bouncing all over. My transponder was just following the closest active beacons." He turned back to Annie. "Come with me, I want to show you something." And, taking her by the hand, he headed towards the door. As an afterthought, he glanced back at the bewildered trainee hovering uncertainly behind. "Coming?" The cadet jumped up to follow them.

"Where are we going?" Annie asked. She allowed Sam to guide her down the seemingly endless hallways and openly gawked at the array of machinery on display through several open doorways.

"If my controller didn't know that the beacon..." he glanced at Annie and decided to simplify his explanation, "if the person responsible for bringing me back didn't know I couldn't come back, I want to find out the reasons why. Why the way back wasn't working, and why she didn't know about it."

"But how could you ever find any of that information?" Annie wondered aloud.

"I don't know if we can find all of the answers, but this is the place to start looking." And Sam turned aside into a doorway that seemed to Annie to have appeared out of nowhere.

"What is this place?" She looked around at the small space. The bare walls gleamed and there wasn't so much as a single cabinet or storage container in evidence. There was a small console and chair near the center of the room, but not much else. "And how could possibly find anything here? It's empty!"

"Annie, do you remember that I once said to you that I'd give anything for a good search engine?" She nodded uncertainly. "Well, I'm going to show you what I was talking about right here and right now." And he guided her gently into the seat. "I'm going to show you how to use this, and you're going to be surprised at just how much you'll be able to find." With that, he jabbed at a few keys on the console, and the monitor in front of Annie flickered to life. She gasped in sudden comprehension.

"Is this a computer?" Sam smiled at her despite his mood. Her talents were going to waste in 1973. He would have to see to doing something about that. "It is, isn't it? I heard about how them at university, about how much information could be stored on them. But I never imagined they were so small!" He wondered how she would ever react if she saw a mobile phone.

"Here, Annie. Just type in the name you're looking for, which would be me, and press this key here." He indicated the location on the keyboard and continued. "This will show you all of the most recent files on cases I worked on, and it will also show who looked at them most recently. We want to find out who was accessing my case files and maybe we can find out who may have known where I was and why I couldn't come back. While you're doing that, our young friend here and I are going to look at some other files."

Annie felt nervous about using the machine without Sam nearby, but before she could object, they had gone up the hallway and she was left on her own. She carefully typed Sam's name into the computer and pressed the key he had indicated. The screen filled with information, and she began reading. The first thing that struck her was the personal information. Date of birth, 24-05-1969. How was that possible? "I was 4 in 1973, Annie." Graduated from police academy training, 1986. She shook her head. Was this some elaborate prank?

She read further with growing apprehension. The list of cases carried random, and in some instances impossible, dates. The final entry stopped her cold. "Extended assignment, 2006," she read aloud to herself from the screen. 2006. "...from 33 years in the future..." From 33 years in her future.

"Investigate possible serial killings." She was unsure of the wording, but meaning seemed ominous. The entry ended abruptly, with only a single line at the bottom of the screen. Annie gaped in disbelief at the words. "File last viewed: 10-04-2612 Frank Morgan."

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"Frank Morgan? Are you sure?"

Nelson was irritated. Why did no one believe anything he said anymore? "Yes, that's what I said. Frank Morgan."

The controller was not amused. Who was this that Nelson was talking about, and what was he doing interfering with the program? "You say this Morgan character came in claiming to know Sam and to be from Hyde?" she asked incredulously.

"Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. But there's definitely something wrong with the man, you know what I'm saying?" Nelson leaned over the bar and dropped his voice even lower. "I was told that the mission was to clean up the CID here and to introduce and promote updated methods of policing. I don't know what that might mean where you come from, but I'm thinking it wouldn't include trying to frame DCI Hunt for murder. He may be many things, but he's a good cop."

She wasn't so sure about that from what little she had seen of the man, but if what Nelson was saying was true, then something very strange was going on. And she had worked with Nelson before. He had been a field agent himself for a short time, before he had decided to stay put on an assignment in the 1960's. What he was doing in this place was anybody's guess, but she was glad he was there. She knew he could be trusted.

Which was more than could be said for this man Morgan. He had turned up at the base as an observer shortly after Sam had departed on his mission to 2006. She had disliked the idea of having a complete unknown poking their nose around one of her active cases, but the supervisor had insisted that he be allowed to view case files and be briefed on the mission. He seemed to have some knowledge of the murders that were being investigated. At the time she had thought he had been there to help. Now the beginnings of an ugly thought were beginning to form about why he had been there. But before she could say anything more, a loud voice at her elbow announced, "That's right, I am a good cop. And you'd all do well to remember that." Gene Hunt turned to face her. "Buy me a drink, we need to talk."

She thought that a drink was about the last thing he needed, but before she could object, he leaned a little closer and added, "About Hyde."

She managed to talk Nelson into loaning her some local currency and a few free drinks and steered herself uncertainly to the table where Hunt was holding court at the center of the room. Well, it wasn't really in the center of the room, but his presence seemed to demand that the center of the room was wherever he happened to be sitting at the moment. Ray looked distinctly disappointed when Gene shoved him aside to allow her to sit next to him. "So," she asked as calmed as she could manage as she handed him his drink, "just exactly what about Hyde did you want to talk?"

"I've been doing some checking up. I know our Sammy boy graced us with his presence after they got sick of him there," (she nodded in agreement as he spoke, silently congratulating the logistics team on their thoroughness in creating Sam's backstory) "but, you, you're most definitely not from Hyde. And neither is your friend Frank Morgan."

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"What was Morgan doing here?" Sam was leaning over Annie's shoulder, reading the screen with equal amounts of confusion and something approaching fearfulness. The two men had returned quickly to the computer room when Annie had called out to them, but he had had no idea she would find such an outrageous result.

It was Annie who finally voiced the thought that Sam was fearing. "He's been two places you've been."

"Three, actually. He was there in 2006, also."

Annie looked at the screen again and finally asked the question that had been bothering her. "What does it mean when it says you were born in 1969, Sam?"

He shook his head slightly in something resembling surprise. Of all the questions he had expected after she had read the case file, that was not one of them. He had thought he had explained that to her, but apparently she had only been humoring him. How else could it be explained? "It means just what it says, Annie. I was born in 1969. Shortly after I finished my police training, I was approached by the program, as I suspect Cadet Evans here also was," to which Evans nodded in agreement. "I was sent on this particular assignment because it very closely matched my actual timeline." Annie looked confused at that statement. "It was close to the same time I would have actually been in if I hadn't joined the program." He suddenly looked wistful. "My mum just thought I had been away on long assignments..." But he shook his head at the thought. He couldn't afford the luxury of going down that particular road at the moment.

"Cadet Evans, you have proved yourself an expert at manning the return beacons. We're going to go finish some unfinished business, and you can be of help."

"What did you have in mind, sir?" Evans snapped to attention as if on parade review.

"Annie and I are going to complete this assignment in 2006."