and back in about two seconds. 'Holy shit!' he said. He looked his right hand over and pulled his top off and looked at his chest. 'The scar on my hand that's been there for twenty years is gone and the bullet hole scars are gone too!'
'Did you want to keep them? I can put them back.'
'No, Steven, I had just as soon forget I ever got shot,' he replied.
Realizing his new abilities, Jim leapt into the air five meters and completed several backflips before hitting the ground. He lost his balance and fell on his butt. He got up and dusted off his karate pants and then jumped up again and did a three-hundred-sixty-degree outer crescent kick followed by a tornado roundhouse kick that was perfect and nearly impossible for a normal human being in one gravity.
'Wicked!' he said. 'Would you do this for the rest of the team?'
'Of course.'
And so we did.
The crew decided to use cosmetic surgery, diet, and exercise as a cover story.
Anson posed the thought that if his body could so easily be adjusted and enhanced that his mind could too— couldn't it? Tatiana and I conversed in our mental speak for a few seconds to decide how to handle it and we decided not to let them in on the whole story of the alien SuperAgents but we could let them in on the enhanced memory-handling and problem-solving abilities. We asked them what types of enhancements they would like and whatever they came up with we tried to accommodate them to some extent. Anson was thrilled to be able to do any type of calculator function in his head instantly, and to be able to remember every page of every book that he read in the future. Jim wanted instant and total recall of anything any of his senses had ever detected.
Well, you can see that this went on for the rest of the evening and turned out to actually be kind of fun. Tatiana and I bonded with the group a little more and were beginning to be trusted as part of the family. They also opened up to us about their own pasts. Anson and Jim told a riveting story about how their crew had developed the world's first nanoscoptic power generator that was powered by the vacuum energy fluctuations of spacetime. They figured out how to use these Casimir-effect power supplies to power the first warp field tests in a laboratory in Huntsville, Alabama. These power generators also had the problematic trait of going chaotic every now and then and blowing up with a very big bang.
At some point in the process of developing the warp drive field coil technologies Rebecca had been involved in an accident that implanted her with millions of these microscopic power systems and she remained sick for a major part of the development project.
But, after persistence and Southern stubbornness, Anson and his team finally built a warp drive that could be tested in space. Anson and Tabitha deployed the warp probe test vehicle from the Space Shuttle and were preparing to launch it from orbit when the Space Shuttle was destroyed, thus stranding them in orbit. Anson and Tabitha reprogrammed the probe and traveled at warp speed back to Earth and crashed into a pine grove.
That was just the beginning of their adventure. They told us about how they were chased by giant tornados that were spun up by the warp probe's entry into the atmosphere (the public all thought it was a meteor) and about how they got their scars in a harrowing shootout, and about the Secret War with warp weapons against the Chinese and the Russians. The story was incredible. The description of The Rain did remind me of my family and I felt a little sad. But more angry with the people who started the war. After many margaritas, Tabitha grabbed Anson by the hand and told him that she wanted to go try out some of her new modifications on him and see how his turned out. I took that as a good sign that it was time to go to our quarters in the trailer park. It was time to talk to Tatiana about the isolated abducteeism.
CHAPTER 18
'Hey gorgeous, there is something I need to talk to you about.' I pulled the covers over Tatiana's shoulders since there were chill bumps forming there.
'Mmm, can it wait until morning, Stevie?' She snuggled up closer to me and appeared to be going to sleep.
'I . . . uh . . . it can't. I won't be able to sleep if I don't get this off my chest,' I told her.
Tatiana rolled off me and rose up on her right elbow and mussed her long, wavy black hair. She rubbed her eyes and yawned. 'Okay, let's hear it,' she said in a thick Russian accent. She used that accent when she was toying with me. She smiled, but looked a little sleepy.
'Okay, I don't know how to say this so I'm just gonna say it. I haven't been completely honest with you about Mike and Mikhail.' I paused to watch her reaction.
'What do you mean, Steven?' she asked in a perfect American accent.
'Mike is the original SuperAgent and Mikhail is a copy of him. I had to make that copy because . . . Mike will not let you give him direct orders and won't let you have direct access to him.'
'Why not?' Tatiana didn't seem upset, just a little surprised.
'He doesn't know.'
'What? He doesn't know why he will not give me access?' Now she was interested and speaking in Russian.
'We have talked about it at great length and for some reason the Grays programmed him so that no matter what anybody did to his programming you would not be able to gain access to him.' This wasn't so hard.
'Me specifically?' she asked.
'Uh, well sort of. It's you—and a whole lot of the other abductees—specifically. Mike tells me that out of the millions of abductees over our history a couple hundred thousand or so of them would have been isolated like you from accessing him. We have been calling these people isolated abductees. We don't know what it means, just that they are isolated from him.'
'Why haven't you told me this before?' She didn't seem upset, just curious.
'Well, there is more.'
