Betaen 6.7.00

Excerpt from “The She Chronicles”

The papers were good. Really good. Even the internet. I checked the time stamps. They were real. This hadn‘t just been put on line. It had been online for 39 years. Literally there since her birth in 2420. I had gained a decade. I felt like I had lost it. This was really deep shit. This was the stuff that had been hinted at in the academy. That there were agents so deep only a few people knew they existed, that there were identities so perfect that the person who had been Tabitha Jones was really now Xe McCullen. The fabled DEEP project. Up until that moment I had thought it was all just fantasy. Now I was holding a table of data points in my hand and looking at the internet history of a woman who hadn’t lived until I opened that folio. I was her. The sociologist on special assignment. The one who had been waiting in the shadows for her chance to live. I had given her that chance. I wondered what she would do with it?

I had to learn her life; who her friends had been, what her parents were like, who she had lost in the flu. All those things. The quarantine seal on the door would help, but the rest was up to me. When I opened that door I had to be her. And the woman I helped kill on Betaen 6 would forever be dead. I pulled the photo of my father out of the leather folio I kept it in and wondered why the Inspector had let me keep it. I flipped it over and ran my fingers over his signature. Remembered collapsing on my bed, sobbing so hard I couldn’t breathe, as I read his signature on the back. I still didn‘t quite understand how this all was supposed to work, but I had time.