"Snapshot 24:Pandora Revisited"

Disclaimer: Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, and any other tangentially
mentioned characters were created by Chris Carter, and remain the
copyrighted property of him, TenThirteen Productions, and Fox
Television, a unit of 20th Century Fox, Inc. All characters are used
without permission, and no infringement is intended.

Archivists : Sure. Just make sure to keep my email address and this
entire text as is without changes.

Feedback : Please. Positive, negative, what have you. Address
is drambo@sonic.net

Classification : MSR, X, A
Rating : R (Adult situations, gory violence)

Geographical Note : There is no Court County in Montana, to the best
of my knowledge, nor is there a town called Pave Creek. Readers that
hail from Big Sky Country, I have created the entire town, it's
population and customs out of whole cloth for the needs of this story.
I have put Pave Creek in a place where there is no city, or if
there is one there, it doesn't show up on my Rand McNally map. :)

Enjoy!


-----------------------------------------

"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours,
you think it's only a minute. But when you
sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think
it's two hours. <That's> relativity."
        -- Albert Einstein

"Every minute starts an hour."
        -- Paul Gondola

"Nothing is improbable until it moves
into the past tense."
        -- George Ade

1920 Mamaroneck Avenue
Eastchester, New York
Yesterday
1650 Hours

        Doctor David Kane clicked the STOP button on his microcassette
recorder and sighed, placing it gently on the blotter in front of him.
Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was almost time to go home. It
had been an extremely long day, and he was looking forward to getting
out of the office, heading towards his three-bedroom split-level ranch
house in Jefferson Valley, and relaxing in front of the television
with a bracingly cold martini. Just to make sure, David checked his
schedule for tomorrow; he had no delicate surgeries scheduled for the
morning, and he was only planning on having one, anyway.
        Maybe two.
        As he flipped the cover to his DayTimer closed, David saw the
tan-line on the third finger of his left hand. Up until about two
months ago, David would have been enjoying that martini with Beth, his
wife of twelve years. But, she had left to go and 'find herself,'
whatever that meant. A sudden wave of nostalgia and loneliness washed
over him, and David wondered where his wife was at this exact moment.
Who was she with? What was she doing? Was she on the way back? Back to
the marriage, the house, to him?
        The phone rang. David thought about letting it ring through to
the service, but he was a dedicated physician, one of the most highly
sought-after plastic surgeons in the country, and you don't get such a
sterling reputation by blowing patients off when you feel like
drowning yourself in a pitcher of martinis.
        "Dr. Kane's office," he said.
        "Do you recognize my voice?" the caller asked, and Kane
suddenly realized that he wasn't going to be seeing that drink
anytime soon.
        "Of course," he said.
        "Twenty minutes. I will need the procedure. Again."
        Kane said nothing, as he knew the man on the other end of the
phone wished, and disconnected. Moving quickly, he got up from his
desk and went into the outer office. Dismissing his physician's
assistant, nurse, and the two medical secretaries as quickly as he
could, Kane then moved to the biggest treatment room he had. Quickly
locating the instruments he would need, Kane prepared to do what he
had done for Scimitar several times before.
        Returning to his office, Kane unlocked a floor safe and took
out a slim file. Opening it, he slid the two sheets out onto his desk
and turned the green-shaded lamp on, focusing the high-intensity
halogen lamp directly onto the papers.
        In his professional estimation, Kane thought that Scimitar had
perhaps four or five more chances to utilize the procedure he was
preparing to undergo. Any more than that, and it would be worthless.
        Kane held his hands up, fingers spread. They were rock steady.
        Good. If Scimitar detected any tremble, there was no telling
what the man might do.
        Kane didn't have much more time to think about it. He heard
movement in the outer office, and then the most feared man in the
history of the Mossad walked into his office.
        "Are you ready?" Scimitar asked.
        "Of course. This way," Kane said, using his arm to lead the
agent back to the treatment room. A highly paid 'consultant' for the
Israeli Mossad, Dr. David Kane had perfected something once thought
impossible. Changing the appearance of an undercover operative was
very important, and plastic surgery had existed to change faces for
such men for decades. But no matter how many faces you had, with the
current forensic technology, sometimes a new face was not enough.
        But fingerprints...
        Kane had perfected a way of injecting microscopic amounts of
surgical silicon just under the surface of a man's fingers, changing
the ridges and whirls and loops just enough to confuse any attempt at
matching a person's prints to any already on file. It only lasted
about a week before the body absorbed the minute amounts of silica
back into the system, but for short-term solutions to a thorny
problem, Kane had no equal in the world.
        Wherever Scimitar was going, if he left prints behind, they
wouldn't match any prints on file anywhere in the world. Kane didn't
care to ask where the man was going, but he took a small amount of
professional pride in the fact that the legendary agent wouldn't leave
a trace of himself behind.

***

22 Mon Bar Road
Pave Creek, Montana
0905 hours

        "So if not where, then...what?" Mulder asked.
        "Again, not quite right," Zack answered. "It'll be easier to
understand if I start at the beginning, Mulder. I know you've been
waiting a very, very long time to learn anything about your sister,
so I will make it as brief as possible."
        Mulder just nodded, sitting back in the incredibly comfortable
chair. He was so nervous he found himself pulling at his lips with two
fingers.
        "As you have probably already been told, or surmised, I am
quite a smart little kid. I'm a certified genius, but it goes beyond
that, I think. From as long as I can remember, I've always understood
things much better than anyone I know. I can grasp arcane concepts
very, very quickly, and I make logical leaps and bounds that other
people just can't seem to make until I explain it to them. I'm not
saying that to brag, but it's true.
        "When I got interested in computers, I saw the potential right
away. Not so much to play games, or to do spreadsheets, or to write
poetry, but to explore things in a way they have never been explored
before.
        "I wrote a computer language that I call PEACH. It Pluralistic
Enhanced Algorithmic Computer Hashing. Now, that sounds like a really
cool name, and for the most part, it doesn't mean anything. But from
what I've read, and what I've seen, PEACH is so much more advanced
than any computer language in the world that, frankly, it scares me
sometimes."
        "How does this-" Mulder interrupted.
        "I'm getting there. Stick with it a little while longer. What
I did with PEACH was play around a little bit. I wrote a sniffer
program that had some of PEACH's ability to...well, not think exactly,
but make educated guesses. It's like fuzzy logic...only not so fuzzy.
So I let CREAM, which was the name of the program I wrote, out on the
net. It's job was to find interesting things and report back to me. It
was kind of like a worm, only it wasn't destructive, and it wasn't
detectable. Guess what it found?"
        "A rouge game of Pong?" Mulder asked.
        "No, but that would have been interesting. No, Mulder... it
found the NSA. Or more specifically, it found ... a brother. A
computer that I eventually deciphered as being called Wuzzle. I have
no idea what a Wuzzle truly is, but I know what this Wuzzle was."
        "Was?"
        "Wuzzle went off line about six days ago. But, that's getting
way, way ahead of the game. I sent a mail message to the person that
Wuzzle belonged to, and within twenty four hours some very unhappy
looking men in suits were on my front door asking me questions about
computer hardware, software, modems, IP spoofing and packet sniffers.
        "The next thing I knew, I was in Washington, under a secret
Federal subpoena, talking to some very important people in the
government. People so high up they don't answer to anyone except The
Man.
        "The end result of all this is that after the group satisfied
themselves that I wasn't a spy, and realized the technical
accomplishment of what I had done, they asked me to come to work for
them."
        Scully snorted. This story was so completely unbelievable, she
was more than sure that Zack was suffering severe paranoid delusions,
probably brought on by chemical schizophrenia.
        "A sixteen year old boy working for the NSA? I hardly think-"
        "Oh, no, Scully. Of course not...sixteen years old is
ludicrous." He paused. "I was fourteen. This was two years ago.
Anyway, they wanted me for a very specific reason." Again, he paused.
        "The box."

***

Billings International Airport
Billings, Montana
0930 Hours

        Starke took his bag off the carousel and turned, spotting his
contact. Walking up to him, Starke stuck his hand out.
        "Stone! How they hanging!?"
        The man waiting for him made a face. Ignoring Starke's hand,
he held up a thin manila envelope. "Here's the information. Make it
quick, Starke. In and out."
        Starke took the envelope with a dour expression. "Fine. Just
don't act like you're any better than I am, asshole. I may be the
lucky fuck with my finger on the trigger, but you set them up, Stone.
        "All three of them."

***
22 Mon Bar Road
Pave Creek, Montana
0932 Hours

        "The box? What the hell-?" Mulder started.
        "Yeah, Mulder, what the hell. That's a very good question, a
question I've asked myself several times. When I first saw the box...I
had no idea what it was. It didn't look like anything I'd ever seen
before in my life, short as it is."
        Mulder shifted in his chair, his attention totally focused on
Zack.
        "They wanted me to tell them what it was. It was a test, they
said. It only took me about half a day to figure out that they didn't
know what it was, and need me to tell them. They wouldn't tell me
where it came from, or where they'd found it. They just wanted me to
tell them what it was, what it was used for. And what it could be used
for."
        "What did it look like?" Scully asked.
        Zack described a square in the air. "About the size of a VCR,
but twice as thick, and slightly wider. No lights on the outside, no
buttons, knobs, dials, controls of any kind. No ports, no jacks, no
plugs. It looked like a solid plastic square."
        "What was it?"
        "It wasn't plastic, I'll tell you that. It was the hardest
thing I'd ever seen in my life. Harder than an industrial diamond bit
that I used to try and peek inside. It turned that bit into dust in
less than a minute."
        "Wait a minute," Scully said, holding up her hand. "There's
nothing in the world that's harder than a diamond."
        "Exactly," Zack said. "You just hit the nail on the head,
Scully."
        Scully felt the puzzlement on her face. "I don't understand."
        Zack spoke the next four words distinctly. "Nothing. In. The.
World."
        Scully realized what he was implying. "I should have known,"
she groaned.
        "Scully, I know you believe in science. Nothing exists that
can't be proven, except faith, and faith is for believers, not
scientists. I am the same way. Nothing exists for me unless it can be
theorized and then proven.
        "I can prove it to you. But that's not the important part, you
guys!"
        "What is the important part, Zack?"
        "I figured out what it is! I got it work!"
        "What is it?" Mulder was on the edge of his seat.
        "Well, I don't know what the person who built it calls it, but
I call it a key. A very special key, a key that unlocks more doors
than anyone ever knew existed."
        "Then it's a kind of access device...an encryption...
something?"
        "No, Mulder. Not literal doors. Metaphysical ones. The box
turned out to be a way of interfacing with...well, I don't know how to
explain it exactly...there's a lot of theoretical physics you need to
understand-"
        "My bachelors is in physics," Scully interjected.
        Zack nodded and turned to face her. "OK, Einstein postulated
that no one can go faster than the speed of light. That's true, in
normal space. If we were able to enter a state of existence that's not
normal space-time, then the laws of Newtonian and Einstein physics
no longer apply."
        "If it were possible, sure."
        "Ok, now, what if space and time are, like we know them to
be, continuos? That they exist in a logical, orderly progression from
the Big Bang to whatever ends the Universe...with me so far?"
        "So far," Mulder agreed with Scully's nod.
        "Ok..the box...the box opens the gate to that other part of
space. Actually, all the other parts of space and time."
        "How many are there?" Scully asked, wondering if she was
humoring the boy, or actually starting to believe him.
        "Infinite," Zack admitted. "The last time I counted with the
Cray XM1 I had running in the background, we counted over two billion
separate space and time lines intersecting through the box."
        "You mean...?"
        "Yeah, Mulder. I mean that whatever alien civilization built
that thing figured out the way to cross the stars without breaking the
speed of light. They drop into this...area of space between existing
universes, if you will, and it's like a temporal shortcut. They can
show up, do what they want, and vanish back into it. To us, stuck in
normal space-time, it looks like they just...vanish. Poof! Gone! But
to them, everything is normal. It's all..."
        "Relative," Scully finished, not missing the pun. The small
smile on Zack's face told her he hadn't missed it either.
        "Exactly, Scully. But that was just the beginning. After we
figured out what the box was, we decided to research it as much as we
could. We discovered something inside of it, my team and I. We
discovered a new kind of subatomic particle. Two particles, actually.
One we named a Hamion. The other, I'm afraid to say, we named a
Martion."
        Scully frowned. "That's an ugly name."
        "You had to be there. Remember, a camel is a horse built by
committee. Anyway, here's the thing...in every single space-time line,
there exists these things we call Hamion signatures. Each person, each
living thing, dog, cat, rat, mouse, tree, every living thing has a
unique Hamion signature. It's the combination of the Hamion signatures
of the individual cells the make up the whole. Each living thing in
the entire universe has a unique, one-of-a-kind Hamion signature. It's
like a...temporal fingerprint, if you will.
        "With me so far?"
        "So far," Mulder agreed.
        "Ok...now, the Martion particle was only found in specific
cases. It is a very, very rare subatomic particle. It only exists
between very special pairs of Hamion signatures. It fills the space
between them in a stream of subatomic energy, a kind of... thread
connecting two Hamion signatures. You know how sometimes people say
that twins are hypersensitive to each other? Well, we know why. The
Martion connection between their two Hamion signatures is so strong
that it can connects them, even over long physical distances."
        "What does this have to do with Samantha?" Mulder asked.
        "Ok, we're almost there. Here's the deal...for some reason,
the builders of this box have been coming here and...borrowing people.
They get into whatever vehicle it is that they have, and they drop
into that temporal shortcut, and vanish. But, the Martion thread still
exists in this space-time line, and it links, though the temporal
shortcut, to the other Hamion signature."
        He paused.
        "In other words, Mulder, that feeling that you've had since
she was abducted is genuine. You've always known that Sam is out there
somewhere. You just didn't know where."
        "Do you know?"
        "Still some more to go, Mulder. Here's the other part of the
puzzle. The thing is...those alternate space-time lines? They're all
different from ours in one major way, but similar in every single
other way. Each space-time slice, or line, is unfolding at a different
relativistic rate. In other words, in another time line, it's 1991, not
1997. In still another, it's 1950, or 1900, or 1530. In some time
lines that are just relavistically unfolding, it's still the time of
cavemen. And in some, it's already the 23rd century."
        "So..." Mulder said, putting it all together. "It's not so
much a matter of where Sam is..."
        "...but when," Zack finished.
        "Because," Scully jumped in, "this can't be the only
intersection point of all the different time-lines in <this> time
line."
        "Correct," Zack said, smiling like a teacher in front of his
two prize students. "That's what the box does. It finds those
intersections and allows us access to them."
        Scully interrupted. She still hadn't accepted what Zack was
telling her. Hell, it sounded like a Grade-C scifi movie, the kind
that Mulder loved to watch on a rainy Saturday afternoon. And Scully
loved to watch them too, if only to poke holes in the psuedoscience
most of them seemed to be based on.
        "Where's the box now?" she asked.
        Zack sat back. "Ah, as I said...there's the crux, Scully. I
took it."
        Mulder blinked.
        Scully blinked.
        "Excuse me?" they both said.
        "I took it," Zack affirmed. "I took it and hid it."
        Mulder and Scully exchanged a glance. Scully rolled her eyes
at him, sending her thoughts as clearly as if she had spoken them.
"Oh."
        "No...really," Zack said. "It's hidden in a very safe place,
and for a very good reason."
        "Name one," Scully demanded.
        "There was this guy, see....someone that the both of you are
probably very familiar with."
        "Does he chain smoke?" Mulder joked.
        "Him? He's nothing, Mulder. He's a wannabe. He's more of a
puppet than Pinnochio was. Once you open your mind to the possibilities
of the universe, that tumor of a human being is less important than a
pile of cold dog shit."
        Mulder liked the image Zack's words formed in his mind. "What,
then?"
        "You mean, of course...who. Someone more dangerous than that
idiot. At least the chain smoking moron had the good sense to realize
that putting himself into a Martion stream was a very, very bad idea.
Sure, it's cool to think about going to one of those other timelines.
        "But there was someone that wanted to do it. And she sent one
of her goons to do a little experiment. But before I talk to you about
that, you need to know something else about this entire affair,
something that effects the both of you directly."
        Mulder and Scully exchanged another meaningful glance. "Are we
in any danger?" Scully asked.
        "Yes, and no. No immediate danger, and no more danger than
either of you have been in during the past four years." Zack cracked a
smile. "You two became partners when I was in sixth grade. What a
trip."
        "Groovy," Mulder agreed.
        Zack laughed. "Anyway, here's the deal. Just as I explained
that there's a subatomic particle field between you and your sister,
there's another thing we noticed about Hamion signatures. Sometimes,
in different universes, especially universes that lie physically close
to each other on the subspace domain...imagine a stack of plates...
one on top of the other? Sometimes, in two concurrent domains, we can
see the relationship between two known Hamion signatures. Give you an
example...in domain 'A' for instance, a brother and sister are born,
and we can see how the Martion particle field is differentiated across
other domains. In another domain, the two Hamion signatures might be
husband and wife. Or dog and master. Or they might not even know each
other at all."
        Zack leaned forward. "No one else except the woman... the one
that wanted to use this..discovery, for lack of a better term, to her
own advantage..knows what I'm about to tell you. As of this moment,
there are only two people in the world that know about this." He
studied their faces for a long moment, switching his gaze back and
forth between the two.
        "We noticed something special. There are a pair of Hamion
signatures in every single domain that we've examined in detail. As I
said, we detected two billion or so separate domains. Of those we
examined perhaps two or three hundred thousand. On each of those we
discovered something...amazing. Something we never imagined."
        The teenager grinned at his two new friends. "Two Hamion
signatures were always near zero differentiation."
        Scully tried to put it all together in her head. "Are you
saying that no matter which subspace domain you examined, two...
people, for assumptions sake were always...together?"
        "Exactly!" Zack nodded. "No matter which of the two or three
hundred thousand domains we examined, two specific, identifiable
Hamion signatures were always involved in some way with each other's
life. Husband and wife, brother and sister, father and child, mother
and child...but the differential analysis of the Martion particles
showed us that the two life signatures were always involved."
        Mulder was the first to ask, and he only beat Scully by a
fraction of a second.
        "What does that have to do with us?"
        "Well...it's your Hamion signatures, Mulder. Yours and Scully."
        The stunned silence that followed was palpable, pregnant.
Scully turned to Mulder, and he to her, and they stared at each
other, their silent lines of communication opening in full duplex
mode, information, emotions, thoughts, questions flowing back and
forth at a speed and a depth no computer manufactured yet could have
interpreted or quantified it.
        "Are you saying," Mulder asked, turning back to face Zack.
"That we...Scully and I..."
        "Yup. In this life you're partners pretending to be husband
and wife." He saw the look they exchanged, and smiled. "OK...maybe
more than partners pretending to be just partners pretending to be
husband and wife. That's none of my business, Mulder."
        "So why did you steal it again?" Scully asked.
        "Because of this...woman. She is the single most power
hungry...witch I have ever seen in my life. Her plan, her idea, was to
send people into other domains to...steal for her. To bring back
money, gold, technology, whatever they could get their hands on. She
wanted it all. She wanted to use the box to create a personal empire
that she could build on forever. Imagine it...being able to send
someone...a dozen someone'sa thousand...a million, to another domain
with instructions to return with everything and anything of value that
she could use."
        "Do you know her name?" Mulder asked.
        "No, but I'll never forget her face. And the plan. I'll never
forget the plan. It was ingenious."
        "How so?"
        "Criminals. She found the most hardened criminals she could,
and offered them the chance of a lifetime. Think about it...you want
someone with no morals, no safeguards against doing things that most
of us would find totally repugnant. She would find rapists and
murderers, men accused of multiple crimes. Offer them the deal, and if
they accepted, their troubles went away. Evidence vanished. Jurors
were bought and paid for, judges kept on the bankroll like servants.
Cases went up in smoke, and these hardened, amoral men were delivered
into the arms of a woman that made them look like Snow White."
        Scully looked over at Mulder, and everything started to fall
into place. "It wasn't them," Scully whispered. "Doubles?"
        "What?" Zack asked.
        "That's what started all this," Mulder said, indicating the
house. "For us, I mean. We were in San Diego, and I noticed
something...a criminal whose case got dismissed on a technicality, and
then he blew up in an explosion...I found sixty, seventy cases just
like it. The next thing I know, we're here...having this insane
discussion."
        "No, Mulder...they're only related a little bit. See, this
woman...she got ahead of herself. She got greedy. They haven't been
able to send anyone to another domain since I took the box over three
months ago. Anyone that's died since then is probably just
housecleaning."
        Scully stood up and walked around the room, hands on her hips.
"I do have a question," she said. "How did you know who Mulder and I
are?"
        "Your Hamion signatures. I knew who you two were almost two
years ago."
        Mulder had one final question. "Can you get her back? Can you
bring my sister back from wherever the hell it is they took her?"
        Zack turned to face him.
        "Maybe."
-----------------------------------------
End Chapter 24