Having been drugged unconscious, Lilou slumped onto the surface of the Transportal’s control console. Leandre, the one who drugged her, pulled her body off the control console and lay her down with care in front of the Transportal’s two chambers, but not inside either of them. Except for being unconscious, Lilou was unharmed. Leandre fought with himself before moving ahead.

I won’t let death separate us, Elise. I will save you! I have the power of life over death. But is this mad? Should I use the power of teleportation to re-animate Elise in the same way I did for Marielle? I don’t want to live without Elise next to me. I love her too much. There isn’t time to do it any other way.

Leandre walked out of the lab in a hurry. He returned carrying the lifeless body of Elise who he had hidden away until now. Elise was limp in his arms. Her face lost all color of life and appeared grey. Her skin felt cool and clammy since her body had grown cold waiting for this moment.

Leandre wasted no time and lay Elise’s body into the source chamber of the Transportal which was energized and ready to begin the process of teleportation. The portable nuclear reactor to the side of the Transportal radiated a small amount of heat while the alien hum of the Transportal grew louder.

Leandre moved over to the table-sized control console of the research Transportal. Among the many monitoring gauges and progress graphs displayed on the console, one icon on the touch surface stood out. It read: “Commence Teleportation”

The first step in Leandre’s plan was to entangle Elise’s body with quantum particles. Leandre tapped on some buttons and pushed a slider upward. Elise’s body floated upward from the ground of the source chamber by a force field container. Yellow light from the source chamber flooded out and Elise’s body was bathed in this ethereal, warm, yellow light. Her body became wavy and started to fade in and out of sight. It became blurry and less distinct. Right before Elise became unrecognizable, a burst and shower of glitter erupted from inside the source chamber and faded away to nothingness. The source chamber was now empty and dark. Elise might exist somewhere between this dimension and the next.

With Elise’s body and “template” entangled and the information of her being encoded and stored into the quantum supercomputer, Leandre paused the teleportation process before allowing transmission to occur. As soon as it was certain that the source chamber contained nothing inside, Leandre lifted up Lilou from where she lay in front of the Transportal and positioned her into the source chamber similar to what he did with Elise.

The next step was to entangle Lilou with quantum particles. Again, the Transportal energized and the yellow light emanated from Lilou’s body. In another shower of glitter, Lilou also disappeared from the source chamber.

As soon as the light in the source chamber faded away, Leandre started to work at the touch screen surface on the control console. He was anxious on the border of frantic. He tapped everywhere, dragged and dropped everything and drew out numerous figures with his fingers. He worked hard on some kind of intense calculations, the most difficult kind he had ever encountered. He did not blink and his frantic hands quivered because they moved faster than he could think. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead as he tried in a desperate attempt to find solutions to the problems in front of him.

Even though Leandre had discovered a way to teleport living organisms without killing them, the power of teleportation could not start with something that was dead and make it become alive. It must start with something that was already living. In the case of Marielle, her twin sister Anaelle was alive when Marielle received Anaelle’s “template.” Being identical since conception, they were a perfect match and there was little to do to control for the differences. However, in the situation with Elise and Lilou, the two had physiologies that had vast differences. Leandre’s plan was to replace Lilou’s “template” with Elise’s, but the many differences between the two women needed to be controlled for and reconciled. Minutes slipped by, but Leandre became ever more frantic. His eyes looked wild.

No! There are too many dissimilarities between them! I cannot reconcile them all before the opportunity passes to complete the transmission. I might lose them both!

On the control console, a warning message with a countdown displayed a message in yellow: “WARNING: Transmission will continue in 5:50 minutes.”

The situation appeared to be hopeless. Leandre would have to complete transmission of Lilou without replacing her “template” with Elise’s. Lilou would return to being Lilou and Elise would remain dead. But then, Leandre had an idea!

I can’t finish these reconciliation calculations in time, but the Artificial Intelligence of the quantum computer can! If I let the AI finish my work quickly, there will be chance that Elise will be re-animated just like Marielle was.

Leandre did not like the idea of letting the AI take over calculations for him. By letting the AI do the work of reconciling the differences between Elise and Lilou, he could not predict the outcome. He did not trust the AI to make the same decisions as he would have had he done all the calculations himself. However, there was no time to debate the AI. There was no time left at all. It was do or die. Leandre prayed to God that the final form materializing after teleportation in the target chamber would at least look human and not be some awful, deformed monster created by the AI.

The countdown warning message in yellow reached “0:00” and turned green. The text changed: “Transmission Proceeding”

The Transportal again reached its energized state except this time, the attention was on the target chamber. After a brief moment, a shower of sparks erupted from the target chamber and faded away. After the burst of sparks, the outline of something could be discerned hovering in a force field container inside the target chamber. The coils of the target chamber glowed green and arcs of electricity flew off from the power cables supplying the Transportal and the target chamber. The outline of the form started off very blurry as it faded in and out of sight. It became wavy and the ethereal yellow light enveloped the form as it illuminated the entire room with its bright and warm light. As decoherence and reconstitution wound down the body of Lilou lowered to the ground of the target chamber and the Transportal powered down but did not power off.

On the control console the status message now read in white: “Transmission complete”

Leandre rushed over to the target chamber to view the condition of the resulting body. Will Elise be re-animated? Or will it be Lilou the same as before? Could the process of teleportation have killed Lilou, too? That would be a double tragedy. Did the AI make the wrong choices and a horrible, deformed body was reconstituted in the target chamber? If that happened, Leandre hoped that it did not survive and did not have to suffer. All these thoughts ran through Leandre’s mind as he approached the target chamber.

When Leandre arrived at the target chamber to have a look inside, he fell backward in utter shock and landed on the ground knocked off his feet. What horrible thing did he see? With his body and voice shaking, he got up to his knees.

“No! How could this have happened?”

With careful steps, Leandre peered over the edge of the target chamber to have another look. He saw inside the form of an unclothed girl who, although unconscious, appeared to be alive! She was breathing and had color to her cheeks, but his girl did not resemble Elise nor Lilou at all. In fact, this girl’s body was much smaller than either of theirs. Judging by her face and her physiology, the girl in the target chamber appeared to be about twelve years old and she had silky, wavy orange-sienna colored hair.

Present Day

Viviane fainted upon hearing about the twelve-year-old girl in the target chamber with the orange-sienna colored hair. She instinctively knew that she had just heard the story of her origin and the shock of which was too much for her to bear.