Quantum Leap fanfiction...sort of...
Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2010 1:58 am
I've been a fan of Quantum Leap since I was a child. A few months back, I started watching it from the beginning for the first time in years. I still enjoyed it, but my now-adult perspective made me wonder how things would have worked out if Project Quantum Leap had been run by someone a bit less saintly than Dr Sam Beckett. Someone a bit more human.
The tone is deliberately unlike the original.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
It's only in those moments that I feel truly alive. This job has a lot of perks, but that is one of the purest. It's certainly the most intense. It begins as a faint hissing in the depths of my ears, as though the drums themselves are turning to steam. I didn't even notice that the first dozen times, but now I recognise it and it gives me a second or so to brace myself. The next part is the bit I could never fail to notice. A moment after the hissing begins, I suddenly feel a surge of hot tingling, like a cross between the adrenaline rush of a skydive and an imminent orgasm. It comes from my bowels, my shoulders, and the soles of my feet; it races along my limbs outwards, inwards, in tiny concentrated cyclones through my body, like eddies of buzzing sensation. Finally, as it reaches a peak that feels almost intolerable, it builds a fierce, hot tension in my head that flares then bursts out through my eyes and paints the world, for the briefest instant, in shades of vivid blue. The whole process takes only a couple of seconds, but it feels like a sudden injection of life: hypodermic vitality rammed into my spine. I burn, and I feel like a bonfire on a gloomy autumn day, or the sun in an empty sky.
For a second, I live - pure, free, and unburdened. Then, even more quickly than it came, it all swirls away like water down a plughole, leaving only trembling vacancy in its place. And usually a punch to the face, or a fall down a flight of stairs, or something equally abrupt and unpleasant. As if burning me with electric life then taking it away isn't cruel enough, the Accelerator sees fit to drop me in the middle of chaos every single time, at exactly the moment I'm reeling from the transition.
But let's wind it back a little. There's some stuff you need to know.
The last thing I heard, through what seemed like the piercing wail of sirens or alarms, was 'Hurry! He's leaping! He's actually leaping!'
It was some time before I reclaimed even that disconnected memory. They've been gradually seeping back into my head for months. I certainly didn't have that particular memory when Arnold came to me with his explanation.
'The project wasn't ready,' he said. 'We needed to make some more adjustments, but you wouldn't wait. You were afraid they'd shut us down if we gave them the chance, and maybe you were right. But based on the state of your mind now, they were probably right too. It wasn't safe, was it? You're stuck here, alone except for my intangible advice, with no way of getting back and no sense of your own identity. You're, frankly, screwed.' There was no sympathy in his face, as far as I could see. I'd woken in a state of tense urgency that morning, thinking I'd had a wet dream so powerful it had shocked me awake. It happens. But after a few moments of lying there, the emptiness of my head became apparent. What happened next is irrelevant. I blundered through a morning of unfamiliar life, brushing aside the troubled faces that seemed to think they knew me, until Arnold turned up and told me I'm a genius physicist from the future. Well, the present, but the relative future. That alone was enough to make me feel like my brain was bleeding.
Bits came back, though, as he talked. Not that panicked departure - not until later - but fragments of life: a dog named Red; a middle aged lady, wrinkled beyond her years; a teetering mass of half-finished plastic components speaking in a smooth monotone. Just incorporeal images, and words that seemed to sit insubstantially in my head like reflections on the surface of water.
They figured out that I needed to achieve something in order to get home. I went along with it.
It didn't work.
To make a long and boring story less of both: I'm stranded out here, in the past, in other people's lives. My only chance of getting home is to keep fixing stuff that's gone wrong, and thereby propelling myself into leaps to apparently randomly selected lives. The theory is that one of these leaps should, sooner or later, push me back to my own body. Statistically, it has to; my consciousness has a greater affinity to its own home than to any other, so it should favour returning there. So far, it hasn't happened. Hell, I only have their word for it that what I've just told you is accurate; for all I know, they were just trying to comfort me. In fact, I have to take it on faith that there even is a 'they.' The only one I've spoken to is Arnold - he could be some kind of sick tormentor of people, keeping me trapped in his psychological maze for his own amusement. Sounds far-fetched and bizarre, I know, but I've had a lot of time to think, and all kinds of possibilities have crossed my mind.
I'm not good at living on faith alone.
'What?'
'Don't you think he has a nice smile? Like a big, soft bear that just wants to give me a hug.' She beamed at me like she'd just grasped a fundamental truth of existence.
'No. I think he has a scaly smile, like--' I couldn't be bothered with similes. 'Look, he wants to hug you, yes. But not in a comforting way. More in a painful and frightening way.' I gave her a sidelong look that was meant to be visible and seem sidelong. 'A warm bear can always be arranged, if you're that bothered.'
She shifted uncomfortably, kind of flexing her shoulders as though shrugging off a reluctantly borrowed jacket that smells of urine. The motion momentarily pushed out her chest, and I hastily tried to assess it. She so rarely wore anything that gave me the chance. An interruption: 'Stop saying those things, Dora. I'm not sure what you mean, but I don't think it's nice.' She wandered off, and I rolled my eyes at the missed opportunity. I thought they were a C, maybe a D, but she probably wore a bad bra, and that made them look like a B.
Leara passed by on the opposite side of the foyer. I saw her notice me, and made a point of staring. I made her uncomfortable in a different way from Collette. Where Collette seemed troubled and confused by me, Leara seemed like she was afraid she knew exactly what I meant.
The opportunity of this leap was too good to miss. We've all wondered, at least once, what it's like to be a woman - and what certain activities feel like to a woman compared to us. All I had to do was make sure I could leave Collette in mortal danger for a few days more without letting her actually die. Then, once I'd satisfied my curiosity, I could whip her out of harm's way and blue-flash my way out of this shithole '50s hotel.
'Theorising that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr Dan Barnett stepped into the Quantum Leap Accelerator...and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own. Enraged by his own perforated memory and infuriated at the Project's inability to bring him home, he began forcing 'leaps,' propelling him from one identity to another back and forth across the years. His only guide on this journey is Arnold, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Dan can see and hear. Arnold speculated that only by correcting past wrongs could Dan engage the Accelerator and initiate a leap. And so Dr Barnett finds himself leaping reluctantly from life to life, grudgingly putting right what once went wrong, and doubting each time that any leap can ever take him home.'
In my mind, I recite it in a breathy female voice. All the finest epitaphs should be read by an attractive woman in a tone of awed reverence. Odds are, though, that my actual epitaph will be more like 'theorising that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr Dan Barnett leaped into the past and got stuck there, forced to relive history's worst fashions while saving the criminally inept from a variety of embarrassing ends.'
Well what else am I supposed to do with my time? I can have no friends, no colleagues, no family, no home, no career. All I have is brief moments stolen from other people's lives. I might as well use them.
It wasn't all that long, really, before I realised that being stuck bouncing around the past is a blessing, of sorts. One with heavy price, certainly, but if I'm going to be paying the price anyway I might as well gain what benefit I can in exchange. Take this one, for example:
'Fetch my coat, Perkins.'
'Yes sir. Do you think we should--'
'Perkins!'
'Yes sir. At once.'
Perkins scurried off to fetch my thick and ludicrously expensive overcoat. It wasn't even a very comfortable garment, too heavy to wear for long periods and too cumbersome to leap (ha!) into action at a moment's notice. But I didn't plan to do either of those things.
Once Perkins was out of earshot in the next room, I whirled on Arnold.
'I don't care. I don't see why I should. You refuse to bring me back, and I have no kind of life out here as long as I'm hopping around. So I might as well stay here, right?'
'I keep telling you, Dan. You can't take someone else's life. You don't belong here!'
'He's a bastard, though. You've made that very clear. He terrorises everyone who works for him, he turfs old ladies out of their homes, he demolishes homeless shelters... He's a dick. So I'm doing everyone a favour by staying.'
'That's not the point. It's not your life!' He scowled. 'Besides, you're not doing us a favour. You know people don't just disappear when you leap into their bodies. We get them. Right now, Leo Carneith is hunched over that blasted mirrored table you insisted on putting in the waiting room, staring at himself and drooling. When we try to speak to him, he either vomits or bellows. We need to get him back to his own life.'
I shrugged and wandered over to the generous en-suite.
'Arnold, I don't care. You've done precious little for me, so I don't see why I should help you out. I know what you're about to say: you lot run yourselves ragged trying to find out what I should be doing on each leap. But that's for you, not for me. It never gets me any closer to home. All I'm doing is running errands you think I should be running.' I flexed my back and moved to the sink. 'Let him suffer. And you too. I don't give a shit.'
Arnold appeared in front of me then.
'No. You have to--'
'It's settled. I'm staying. Carneith's no loss to the world. You lose, but I win, Perkins wins, Carneith Holdings wins...and maybe a few lucky girls will win too.' I gave him a grin I like to consider wolf-like. It doesn't work on everyone's face, though, so I glanced past Arnold at the mirror above the sink to see if Leo Carneith's features looked devilish or ridiculous with this expression. And I found out. He looked dull. Even my most predatory grin looked like a bland smile on his face. My face. But not my face, of course. I never saw my face anymore.
I lunged through Arnold to the sink and snarled into Leo's forgettable face. I gaped and barked at him, spat in his reflected eye and yelled until his face went red. But nothing. He just couldn't hold the expressions. He couldn't look how he should. He couldn't look like he had my face.
I swung back to Arnold as though my cheeks were made of wood and my arms were filled with lead. I was going to speak, but all I managed was to breathe out, and the release of air seemed to sag me like a sack of rotting vegetables against the sink, leaving a damp line across the back of my trousers.
'Alright. Alright, you suited harpy. Get me out of this skin bag. What do I have to do?' He told me, but I had trouble focusing on his words. I felt loose, as though I was sloshing around inside Leo's body and I might spill over at any moment and just splatter on the floor to be mopped up permanently by the leathery old maid. He got my attention with the word 'hour' though.
'What? Hour? As in singular?'
'Yes. You have less than one hour to find out where Perkins is, catch up with him, and stop him losing both his legs in a hit-and-run.' Now his face was clamped into expressionless professionalism by force of will, but he did consent to one slight purse of his lips, like a prudish old man. 'You would have had more time if yesterday had been handled differently.'
I didn't bother responding. I had to find Perkins.
I did find him, just barely. I dragged him out of the road as the rickety old truck passed, but I wasn't fast enough. It got his right leg and my left arm. I screamed. Of course I screamed. The asphalt rose up to slap my face, and my body burned with savage heat that shot in molten solar jets from my arm. My screams stuck the asphalt and reverberated back past my head, and poured into my ears until they hissed like scalding heat. Then with scalding heat, that ripped down through all my nerves. My arm roared with scouring white pain, I wrenched into one brutal spasm, then the world flashed blue.
The tone is deliberately unlike the original.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
It's only in those moments that I feel truly alive. This job has a lot of perks, but that is one of the purest. It's certainly the most intense. It begins as a faint hissing in the depths of my ears, as though the drums themselves are turning to steam. I didn't even notice that the first dozen times, but now I recognise it and it gives me a second or so to brace myself. The next part is the bit I could never fail to notice. A moment after the hissing begins, I suddenly feel a surge of hot tingling, like a cross between the adrenaline rush of a skydive and an imminent orgasm. It comes from my bowels, my shoulders, and the soles of my feet; it races along my limbs outwards, inwards, in tiny concentrated cyclones through my body, like eddies of buzzing sensation. Finally, as it reaches a peak that feels almost intolerable, it builds a fierce, hot tension in my head that flares then bursts out through my eyes and paints the world, for the briefest instant, in shades of vivid blue. The whole process takes only a couple of seconds, but it feels like a sudden injection of life: hypodermic vitality rammed into my spine. I burn, and I feel like a bonfire on a gloomy autumn day, or the sun in an empty sky.
For a second, I live - pure, free, and unburdened. Then, even more quickly than it came, it all swirls away like water down a plughole, leaving only trembling vacancy in its place. And usually a punch to the face, or a fall down a flight of stairs, or something equally abrupt and unpleasant. As if burning me with electric life then taking it away isn't cruel enough, the Accelerator sees fit to drop me in the middle of chaos every single time, at exactly the moment I'm reeling from the transition.
But let's wind it back a little. There's some stuff you need to know.
The last thing I heard, through what seemed like the piercing wail of sirens or alarms, was 'Hurry! He's leaping! He's actually leaping!'
It was some time before I reclaimed even that disconnected memory. They've been gradually seeping back into my head for months. I certainly didn't have that particular memory when Arnold came to me with his explanation.
'The project wasn't ready,' he said. 'We needed to make some more adjustments, but you wouldn't wait. You were afraid they'd shut us down if we gave them the chance, and maybe you were right. But based on the state of your mind now, they were probably right too. It wasn't safe, was it? You're stuck here, alone except for my intangible advice, with no way of getting back and no sense of your own identity. You're, frankly, screwed.' There was no sympathy in his face, as far as I could see. I'd woken in a state of tense urgency that morning, thinking I'd had a wet dream so powerful it had shocked me awake. It happens. But after a few moments of lying there, the emptiness of my head became apparent. What happened next is irrelevant. I blundered through a morning of unfamiliar life, brushing aside the troubled faces that seemed to think they knew me, until Arnold turned up and told me I'm a genius physicist from the future. Well, the present, but the relative future. That alone was enough to make me feel like my brain was bleeding.
Bits came back, though, as he talked. Not that panicked departure - not until later - but fragments of life: a dog named Red; a middle aged lady, wrinkled beyond her years; a teetering mass of half-finished plastic components speaking in a smooth monotone. Just incorporeal images, and words that seemed to sit insubstantially in my head like reflections on the surface of water.
They figured out that I needed to achieve something in order to get home. I went along with it.
It didn't work.
To make a long and boring story less of both: I'm stranded out here, in the past, in other people's lives. My only chance of getting home is to keep fixing stuff that's gone wrong, and thereby propelling myself into leaps to apparently randomly selected lives. The theory is that one of these leaps should, sooner or later, push me back to my own body. Statistically, it has to; my consciousness has a greater affinity to its own home than to any other, so it should favour returning there. So far, it hasn't happened. Hell, I only have their word for it that what I've just told you is accurate; for all I know, they were just trying to comfort me. In fact, I have to take it on faith that there even is a 'they.' The only one I've spoken to is Arnold - he could be some kind of sick tormentor of people, keeping me trapped in his psychological maze for his own amusement. Sounds far-fetched and bizarre, I know, but I've had a lot of time to think, and all kinds of possibilities have crossed my mind.
I'm not good at living on faith alone.
'What?'
'Don't you think he has a nice smile? Like a big, soft bear that just wants to give me a hug.' She beamed at me like she'd just grasped a fundamental truth of existence.
'No. I think he has a scaly smile, like--' I couldn't be bothered with similes. 'Look, he wants to hug you, yes. But not in a comforting way. More in a painful and frightening way.' I gave her a sidelong look that was meant to be visible and seem sidelong. 'A warm bear can always be arranged, if you're that bothered.'
She shifted uncomfortably, kind of flexing her shoulders as though shrugging off a reluctantly borrowed jacket that smells of urine. The motion momentarily pushed out her chest, and I hastily tried to assess it. She so rarely wore anything that gave me the chance. An interruption: 'Stop saying those things, Dora. I'm not sure what you mean, but I don't think it's nice.' She wandered off, and I rolled my eyes at the missed opportunity. I thought they were a C, maybe a D, but she probably wore a bad bra, and that made them look like a B.
Leara passed by on the opposite side of the foyer. I saw her notice me, and made a point of staring. I made her uncomfortable in a different way from Collette. Where Collette seemed troubled and confused by me, Leara seemed like she was afraid she knew exactly what I meant.
The opportunity of this leap was too good to miss. We've all wondered, at least once, what it's like to be a woman - and what certain activities feel like to a woman compared to us. All I had to do was make sure I could leave Collette in mortal danger for a few days more without letting her actually die. Then, once I'd satisfied my curiosity, I could whip her out of harm's way and blue-flash my way out of this shithole '50s hotel.
'Theorising that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr Dan Barnett stepped into the Quantum Leap Accelerator...and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own. Enraged by his own perforated memory and infuriated at the Project's inability to bring him home, he began forcing 'leaps,' propelling him from one identity to another back and forth across the years. His only guide on this journey is Arnold, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Dan can see and hear. Arnold speculated that only by correcting past wrongs could Dan engage the Accelerator and initiate a leap. And so Dr Barnett finds himself leaping reluctantly from life to life, grudgingly putting right what once went wrong, and doubting each time that any leap can ever take him home.'
In my mind, I recite it in a breathy female voice. All the finest epitaphs should be read by an attractive woman in a tone of awed reverence. Odds are, though, that my actual epitaph will be more like 'theorising that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr Dan Barnett leaped into the past and got stuck there, forced to relive history's worst fashions while saving the criminally inept from a variety of embarrassing ends.'
Well what else am I supposed to do with my time? I can have no friends, no colleagues, no family, no home, no career. All I have is brief moments stolen from other people's lives. I might as well use them.
It wasn't all that long, really, before I realised that being stuck bouncing around the past is a blessing, of sorts. One with heavy price, certainly, but if I'm going to be paying the price anyway I might as well gain what benefit I can in exchange. Take this one, for example:
'Fetch my coat, Perkins.'
'Yes sir. Do you think we should--'
'Perkins!'
'Yes sir. At once.'
Perkins scurried off to fetch my thick and ludicrously expensive overcoat. It wasn't even a very comfortable garment, too heavy to wear for long periods and too cumbersome to leap (ha!) into action at a moment's notice. But I didn't plan to do either of those things.
Once Perkins was out of earshot in the next room, I whirled on Arnold.
'I don't care. I don't see why I should. You refuse to bring me back, and I have no kind of life out here as long as I'm hopping around. So I might as well stay here, right?'
'I keep telling you, Dan. You can't take someone else's life. You don't belong here!'
'He's a bastard, though. You've made that very clear. He terrorises everyone who works for him, he turfs old ladies out of their homes, he demolishes homeless shelters... He's a dick. So I'm doing everyone a favour by staying.'
'That's not the point. It's not your life!' He scowled. 'Besides, you're not doing us a favour. You know people don't just disappear when you leap into their bodies. We get them. Right now, Leo Carneith is hunched over that blasted mirrored table you insisted on putting in the waiting room, staring at himself and drooling. When we try to speak to him, he either vomits or bellows. We need to get him back to his own life.'
I shrugged and wandered over to the generous en-suite.
'Arnold, I don't care. You've done precious little for me, so I don't see why I should help you out. I know what you're about to say: you lot run yourselves ragged trying to find out what I should be doing on each leap. But that's for you, not for me. It never gets me any closer to home. All I'm doing is running errands you think I should be running.' I flexed my back and moved to the sink. 'Let him suffer. And you too. I don't give a shit.'
Arnold appeared in front of me then.
'No. You have to--'
'It's settled. I'm staying. Carneith's no loss to the world. You lose, but I win, Perkins wins, Carneith Holdings wins...and maybe a few lucky girls will win too.' I gave him a grin I like to consider wolf-like. It doesn't work on everyone's face, though, so I glanced past Arnold at the mirror above the sink to see if Leo Carneith's features looked devilish or ridiculous with this expression. And I found out. He looked dull. Even my most predatory grin looked like a bland smile on his face. My face. But not my face, of course. I never saw my face anymore.
I lunged through Arnold to the sink and snarled into Leo's forgettable face. I gaped and barked at him, spat in his reflected eye and yelled until his face went red. But nothing. He just couldn't hold the expressions. He couldn't look how he should. He couldn't look like he had my face.
I swung back to Arnold as though my cheeks were made of wood and my arms were filled with lead. I was going to speak, but all I managed was to breathe out, and the release of air seemed to sag me like a sack of rotting vegetables against the sink, leaving a damp line across the back of my trousers.
'Alright. Alright, you suited harpy. Get me out of this skin bag. What do I have to do?' He told me, but I had trouble focusing on his words. I felt loose, as though I was sloshing around inside Leo's body and I might spill over at any moment and just splatter on the floor to be mopped up permanently by the leathery old maid. He got my attention with the word 'hour' though.
'What? Hour? As in singular?'
'Yes. You have less than one hour to find out where Perkins is, catch up with him, and stop him losing both his legs in a hit-and-run.' Now his face was clamped into expressionless professionalism by force of will, but he did consent to one slight purse of his lips, like a prudish old man. 'You would have had more time if yesterday had been handled differently.'
I didn't bother responding. I had to find Perkins.
I did find him, just barely. I dragged him out of the road as the rickety old truck passed, but I wasn't fast enough. It got his right leg and my left arm. I screamed. Of course I screamed. The asphalt rose up to slap my face, and my body burned with savage heat that shot in molten solar jets from my arm. My screams stuck the asphalt and reverberated back past my head, and poured into my ears until they hissed like scalding heat. Then with scalding heat, that ripped down through all my nerves. My arm roared with scouring white pain, I wrenched into one brutal spasm, then the world flashed blue.