“All right,” Mouse finally said. “In that light, revealing himself may not have been as terrible as it appeared at first blush.”
“I’m sure the future me will appreciate that,” I noted. “So what exactly did he say about me being immune?”
“I basically told him I had an unusual object coming in and that he might want to go elsewhere while I studied it.”
“The Tristan Construct,” I concluded.
“Yeah,” Mouse affirmed. “It’s not rooted in our reality – our space-time continuum – so I wasn’t sure if it would affect him in some way due to his ‘problem.’”
“What was his response?”
“He said he’d stay put – that stuff like that had never affected him.”
“So that was your hint that it might not affect me.”
“Correct.”
“That’s why you called me and asked for my help. You figured that if anything went sideways, I would come through unscathed.”
“Pretty much.”
“So how exactly does the Construct fit into all this anyway?”
“Believe it or not, it’s actually a prison.”
“What?!” I exclaimed.
“Yeah,” Mouse continued with a nod.
I spent a moment contemplating. The Construct hadn’t seemed very large. It could certainly hold one person – possibly two, depending on their size. Not many more than that, I was sure.
“Who’s in it?” I asked.
“The Busuigno, of course,” Mouse replied. “Presumably, someone, somewhere got tired of being a marionette, so they locked them all in the Construct.”
“So how many are in there?”
“Billions, I’d guess. Possibly trillions. All except the ones that got out when I opened it.”
I looked at him with a horrified expression. “Excuse me?”
“Well, how do you think that one got on you?”
“I don’t know!” I shot back. “You said they were interdimensional beings, so I just thought it came into our dimension and latched onto me. I didn’t realize you were running some kind of transdimensional parole board.”
“Once again, they’re mid-dimensional beings,” Mouse corrected. “They typically exist in a space between dimensions. Not in our dimension, not in some other dimension, but in a space between them.”
“Whatever,” I said dismissively. “Where are the other ones that got out?”
“Can’t you guess?” he replied. “One’s on AP. Another’s on Luna. Buzz. Solar Surge. Smokey. Electra…”
He rattled off more names, but in all honesty, I stopped listening after he mentioned Electra. Now I kind of understood her behavior to a certain extent; it wasn’t her who had been drugging me – it was the thing on her.
“So basically,” I said when he finished, “you threw open the gates of a penitentiary and let a bunch of convicts out. Now the inmates are running the asylum.”
“Well, in my defense,” he replied, “I didn’t know it was a prison at first. I realized that it wasn’t rooted in our reality, but beyond that, it was just kind of a lock-box puzzle.”
“And you couldn’t resist opening it.”
Mouse shrugged. “We all have our weaknesses. But I didn’t just open it without any thought to what could be inside. I knew it wasn’t inherently dangerous – no explosives, no bio-weapons, or anything along those lines. That said, as long as it was on this planet, we needed to have some notion of either what was inside or what it could do.”
“Or we could have just tossed it back where we found it, or locked it away.”
“You mean closed our eyes to the problem? The way you could have just ignored that there was another Jim in the lab?”
“Point taken,” I conceded. “So what exactly happened when you opened that thing?”
“To explain that, I need to give a little more background,” he noted. “As I said, the Busuigno exists between dimensions, but they can freely travel from one to another, which is how they find their hosts. That being the case, it took a special type of prison to hold them.”
“Some kind of mid-dimensional stockade,” I offered.
“Exactly. Being mid-dimensional, the Busuigno – in their natural form – can pass through steel and stone like they aren’t there. So, any prison built to hold them can’t fully exist in our space-time continuum. It has to exist, to some extent, in their space.”
“Okay,” I intoned. “I think I get that.”
“Anyway, when I opened it, there was some kind of temporal distortion. It was like a sphere formed around me and the Construct, and inside it time moved normally. Outside of it, though, time appeared frozen.”
What he was describing sounded remarkably like the time sheath Older Jim had created, but I didn’t think it wise to mention it at the moment. Instead, I simply asked, “What do you think caused it?”
Mouse’s brow crinkled in thought. “I assume it was whoever built the prison. I think they tacked it on as some kind of safeguard, just in case the prison ever, uh, inadvertently opened. It would provide time to hopefully round up any escapees, toss them back inside, and bar the door before they could do any damage.”
“How’d that work out?” I asked sarcastically.
“I got the door closed, wise guy,” Mouse countered. “And only a limited number got out. Unfortunately, they’re controlling some of the most powerful people on the planet at the moment, and they’re dead set on releasing the rest of the Busuigno from lockup.”
“Why didn’t they take over you?”
“Believe me, they tried, but it didn’t work. I have certain safeguards against mind control techniques. Frankly speaking, it’s kind of what gave me a leg up. When one of them tried to control me, I got a glimpse inside his mind. Not a lot, but enough.”
“And that’s how you know so much about what you’re dealing with.”
“Correct. It’s funny – if they hadn’t tried to control me then I might not have known anything was going on because ordinarily human beings can’t perceive them. As it was, I discovered they were there and used the time in the temporal sphere to find out all I could about them and the Construct.”
I frowned. “How
