Twelve Years Ago

After the shock and awe of finding a twelve-year-old girl in the target chamber of the research Transportal, Leandre looked upon the unconscious girl with puzzlement. Her eye lids fluttered for a moment before she cracked them open just a tiny bit to see Leandre hovering above her.

“Who are you?” she asked squinting from the lights that shined behind Leandre.

After asking that one question, she fell unconscious again.

Leandre knew from that first question that the girl had no memories of her previous lives as Elise nor as Lilou. Before he could attend to her, he had unfinished business to take care of.

Leandre removed the twelve-year-old girl from the target chamber and, with a gentle touch, lay her down and covered her with a blanket. The girl slept without any indication of restlessness.

Then, Leandre returned to the control console of the research Transportal and re-energized it. Again, the lights dimmed and the familiar glow of green appeared along with the surrounding sound of an alien hum. He had to complete the transmission of the body of Elise, whose teleportation was still on pause. Leandre tapped on the controls of the touch surface and resumed transmission of Elise to the target chamber.

As before, a shower of sparks erupted in the target chamber. The outline of a body appeared to fade in and out. Yellow light enveloped the reconstituting body of Elise. After only a minute or two, teleportation of Elise completed. Of course, she was not alive after decoherence and reconstitution. With Elise’s body back from the other dimension where it waited all this time, Leandre’s attention returned to the twelve-year-old girl and the question of what to do with her.

A full moon hung in the early morning sky at the edge of the ocean near the outskirts of Capital City. It was still a couple of hours before dawn. The air at the shoreline by the sea was cool, but not cold even this early in the morning. Gentle waves lapped at the sand with the quiet sound of flowing water. No one could be seen for miles around, for it was the dead of night.

Leandre was the only one near the water’s edge and just under a breakwater made from piles of jagged rocks. He looked around to make sure he was alone. He carried in his arms the twelve-year-girl still wrapped in the blanket from the laboratory. When he was satisfied that no one was looking, he set the girl down near the breakwater and unwrapped her from the blanket leaving her unclothed on the sand and still unconscious. Looking down at the girl’s abdomen right below the waistline and on the right side of her body was a birthmark. Only this birthmark was not small and unnoticeable. It was a bit large and looked to be in the shape of a fox.

Leandre stole away having dropped the girl off at the seashore knowing that she would soon be discovered by locals who frequented this beach for running and morning exercise. After setting the girl down, Leandre returned to the Physics laboratory to report to police that Elise died from suicide and passed away right there in the laboratory. The police had no reason to suspect Leandre’s recounting of events.

Several days later, Elise’s funeral was held. In attendance were Leandre, his nearly three-year-old daughters Anaelle and Marielle along with a small crowd of friends and colleagues from the University. Elise was interred without fanfare nor complication.

Several weeks later, at a local police station, two detectives sat at their desks. They were overwhelmed by their workload of petty crimes as represented by the piles of memory sticks spilling off their desks. Each memory stick represented a case.

“A new missing-persons report just came in,” one detective said while holding up a memory stick between his fingers. “A landlord is reporting a tenant missing for over a month.”

“Oh? Who is it?” asked his partner.

“Some lady named Mistress Lilou.”

“Oh, she’s a prostitute. She probably just skipped town when she couldn’t pay her rent. Throw her file into the low-priority pile over there.” The detective pointed to a large pile of dusty memory sticks.

“Okie-dokie!” The other detective threw the memory stick of Lilou’s missing-persons report onto the pile.

Because of Lilou’s line of work, the police did not take her disappearance seriously and her case was lost in the shuffle of low-priority crimes never to be investigated.

Present Day

Dr. Renard, at last, finished telling Viviane everything about what happened in the past and how she was created from the merging of two, separate women. Viviane, whose emotions were under control for the most part, felt numb from the overload of information she had to absorb. She felt very conflicted by the fact that she was supposed to be the mother of Anaelle and Marielle and she was supposed to be the wife of Dr. Renard.

Dr. Renard kept these secrets to himself for twelve, very long years. Secrets that for twelve years tormented him. He was never able to share them with anyone and the memories of them would sometimes drive him mad. Now that he revealed all his secrets to Viviane, he felt free to express what he always wanted to after twelve, slow years of dread eating away at his heart. He turned to Viviane as his beloved re-animated Elise and pleaded with her.

“Elise! Please forgive me for doing this to you! I shouldn’t have used the power of teleportation to play God to pull you back from the realm of death when I didn’t know for sure what was going to happen. I never wanted you to end up like this. I just wanted you back with me again.”

Viviane could only sit and blink her eyes in disbelief. She still had no memories of being Elise nor of being Lilou. Hearing herself be called “Elise” by Dr. Renard made her feel very uncomfortable. She leaned away from him and crossed her wrists over her chest as if to shrink away hoping to disappear, but Leandre continued to speak to her as if she were Elise.

“These twelve years I hoped beyond hope that your memories might return. I searched pictures of your face looking for any sign that Elise might emerge. I even tried introducing you to Anaelle and Marielle to see if any connection with them might bring you back. But I suppose that was only wishful thinking.” Leandre resigned himself to the fact that Viviane was never going to become Elise. “I should have accepted the truth twelve years ago.”

“Is that all you wanted to tell me? Why did you wait until now?” asked Viviane.

“There is still one last thing you need to know about your creation, Viviane.”

“I don’t know if I can take much more.”

“After I left you to be found by locals at the seashore, I went back to study the logs of your teleportation event. The Artificial Intelligence had to make decisions on how to reconcile the substantial dissimilarities between Elise and Lilou in order to merge Elise’s ‘template’ onto Lilou’s living body. Looking over the recorded data, I discovered that the AI decided that by reversing the entropy to such an extreme degree, it had reversed the arrow of time and caused Lilou’s body to travel backward in time to that of a twelve-year-old pre-adolescent girl. It was at that point in time that the AI decided Elise and Lilou were the most ‘matched’ and it was at that age that the fusion of Elise and Lilou was performed.”

Somewhere in the world, in Case Carswell’s courtroom, Case read the secrets in Dr. Renard’s lab notes about Viviane’s creation. He was so awestruck to learn of the twelve-year-old girl that he used his finger to point at each word on his screen as he read Dr. Renard’s notes out loud.

“This ‘time-travel’ effect uncovered from the data, I call it, the ‘Fountain of Youth Effect.’” Case stopped cold in his tracks after reading Dr. Renard’s notes as he realized what this meant. “I can use Renard’s discovery to live forever! IMMORTALITY will be mine!!!”

Case Carswell could not stop coughing due to his respiratory illness. Dillon scrambled to find the judge’s inhaler.