BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY by TB's LMC RATED FRPT

This story was written in response to the 2006 Tracy Island Writers Forum's Silly Fic Title challenge.

"I don't understand. How can you say that's an Ace when it's clearly an eight?"

Brains blinked twice very slowly. "It's an Ace. That seems very clear to me. Note the large A on both corners of the playing card."

"Brains, this is an eight of diamonds or my name's not Jeff Tracy."

"Fascinating."

"What's fascinating? That you're trying to convince me this is an Ace?"

"No. What's fascinating is that you're not Jeff Tracy."

Steel gray eyes narrowed. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"All these years," Brains breathed, leaning back in his chair. "All these years this experiment worked so flawlessly. And now it's gone above and beyond what any of us ever expected."

"Experiment? Brains, have you lost your mind?"

"I believe it's time to show you something."

"You're not stuttering."

"No. Generally, Alpha Centaurians don't."

"Alpha...what?"

Brains rose to his feet and led Jeff to the elevator, which in turn took them down to the level beneath the house. They made their way to Brains' laboratory.

"Are you going to tell me what this is all about? I don't like to be kept guessing."

Brains moved to the fourth room within the lab. He pressed a complex series of buttons and suddenly the entire wall swung around Batman-style to reveal a large monitor surrounded by several smaller ones, and at least eighty-five raised and colored buttons with markings Jeff didn't recognize.

"I don't remember approving any of this."

"You never approved anything, Jeff," Brains replied, rapidly keying here and there as the monitors sizzled to life.

"Brains, I'm about thirty seconds from putting you in a straight jacket."

"The time has come that you know the truth."

"The truth?"

"Please sit down."

Jeff seated himself on a nearby stool as the main monitor, which filled a good half of the wall, showed the image of what appeared to be a flesh-colored humanoid who had eight arms instead of two and large angled gray-black eyes.

"What is that?"

"That," Brains replied, "is me."

You could have heard an atom drop as Jeff stared first at Brains, then at the monitor, then back at Brains as though watching a tennis match in which there were invisible players only he could see.

"You don't appear to be joking."

"No."

"What's going on?"

Brains seated himself on a stool across from Jeff. "I am many years ahead of my time. I am capable of feats of engineering far beyond those of my peers. But I am not who or what you think I am."

Before Jeff's eyes, Brains was surrounded by a shimmering, glimmering glow and transformed from the geeky, large-headed, blue-eyed human he'd known for years into the strange being still showing on the monitor. The being's small mouth turned upwards in a smile.

"My greatest experiment," came a voice that was familiar, yet different, "was you."

"Me?"

"You and your sons, yes. As I indicated, you are not Jeff Tracy. Not the original, at any rate."

"That doesn't make any sense. I know who I am. I remember my entire life. I remember my parents, the farm, Lucy, the birth of each of my sons."

"You remember the memories my team and I implanted for you. My species has evolved and is now dedicated completely to exploration and philanthropy. When we saw what was happening to your people we wished to help but could not reveal ourselves. And so I was assigned this project."

"Dammit, Brains, I am Jeff Tracy."

"The idea was to create an organization that could assist the humans living on this planet as well as perform other philanthropic endeavors which, as you know, are currently happening through the various Tracy Corporation entities, charities, donations, experiments, patents, inventions...the list goes on, as you are well aware."

"You didn't invent the Tracys. We have a history. A lineage. Ancestry."

"Yes, the Tracys do. However..." The being formerly known as Brains halted for a moment before starting again. "However, the story as you know it was slightly skewed in order to justify your presence. We intervened at the moment the car accident occurred."

"Car accident? You mean...Lucy's accident?"

"Yes. We had been searching for a way to join Earth's community without ‘sticking out,' you might call it. A way to bring our desire to assist humans to actionable fruition without obviously being aliens landing here. My team and I were in that sector performing research when one of us noted the crash in the forest."

"On our way back from Scott's peewee league game."

"Precisely. We...altered things a bit so it appeared she was the only one who perished."

Jeff's jaw dropped as he stared at the creature before him. "Are you telling me the entire Tracy family died in that crash?"

"Yes. We cloned each of you, including the unborn child. However, the clone of Lucille Tracy was unstable because she was female. We did not wish to experiment further after that failure on the female of your species. We therefore only had the six males to work with."

"But how could you have known we would perform as they had?"

"I was placed here to train and steer you. I enter you into programming mode when I wish to implant information or ideas of any kind. You are the only one who is programmable. The other clones act independently."

"Why were you trying to convince me that the eight was an Ace?"

"I thought I had placed you into programming mode. I was testing you."

"How...exactly...is it you place me into...'programming mode'?"

"A simple phrase we knew no one else in your dimension would ever say."

"Dimension? Now just wait a minute. You called yourself an...Alpha Centaurian and now...you're saying you're from another dimension as well?"

"Correct on both counts. In your dimension, Alpha Centauri is a triple star system upon which life never developed. In my dimension, life developed in our system but not in yours. There are multiple dimensions, and failing more interesting pursuits in our own, we travel through and among them as explorers and helpers. One such dimension contains a plethora of life from many different planets, and we coined a phrase from one of their more famous explorers."

"What's the phrase?"

Brains-turned-alien hesitated. "Well, I suppose since it evidently no longer works on you, I can tell you. The phrase I have always used to enter you into programming mode is, Beam Me Up, Scotty."

Jeff's eyes slowly opened. A frown creased his brow as he looked around and found himself in his own bed covered by a single sheet. A soft, warm breeze was blowing in through his open balcony door and as he rose to a sitting position it tossed his hair from side to side.

"It must have been a dream," he said as his feet touched the plush carpeted floor. Rubbing his eyes, he plodded through his sitting room and waited as his bedroom door slid open. Stepping out into the hall, he heard a noise coming from the first level and so made his way down the stairs. He turned into the kitchen and found the island's resident genius rummaging through a cupboard.

"Brains? What are you doing up at this hour?"

"I-I'm looking for something," was the muffled response. All Jeff could see was a hind end and a long pair of legs clad in pajama bottoms. He couldn't help but grin as the rest of the young man emerged holding something in one hand triumphantly, his short brown hair skewed in multiple directions. "This is it!"

"The old turkey thermometer? That was my father's, it hasn't been used in years."

"I-It's perfect for my purposes," Brains replied confidently, rising to his feet. "I-If I may ask, ah, Mr. Tracy, what are you doing up a-at this hour?"

"I had a very strange dream," Jeff replied as he took a glass out of an overhead cupboard. "Milk?"

"Certainly."

Jeff took out a second glass and pulled a gallon of milk out of the refrigerator.

"I-If I may inquire, what was this strange dream a-about?"

Jeff looked up briefly at his midnight-wandering companion and then back at the glasses as he poured. "I dreamed that you were from Alpha Centauri in another dimension and that the boys and I were clones of the real Tracys."

Brains looked thoughtful as Jeff handed him a glass of milk. "Fascinating," he said.

Jeff started, almost dropping his own glass. "What did you say?"

"What?"

"You said ‘fascinating' just now."

"I-I suppose I did." Brains looked at him quizzically. "What of it?"

"You said that in my dream, too."

"You seem a bit...disconcerted."

"I am. It was disturbing, Brains. You told me our entire family died in the crash that I know for a fact killed only Lucille. That you'd altered history a little so it would appear only Lucy had died."

"What else did I tell you?" Brains caught Jeff's strange look. "I mean, the me in the dream."

"That you programmed me, but that the boys acted independently."

"I programmed you? How did I do that?"

Jeff drained his milk and put his empty glass in the sink. And that's when it hit him. Stunned, he turned and looked at the two blue unblinking eyes. "You're not stuttering."

"Stammering. It's a more accurate description."

"Stam—Brains!"

"What?" Jeff narrowed his eyes and leaned in to study Brains' face. Brains blinked slowly twice. "Mr. Tracy?"

"You don't have a deck of cards, do you?"

"A deck of cards? No, I don't. Why do you ask?"

Jeff backed away, shook his head and sighed. "No reason. Well, I'm going back to bed. Good night, Brains. Have fun with the turkey thermometer."

"Certainly, sir. Good night."

Jeff left the kitchen as Brains drained his milk. The engineer placed his empty glass next to Jeff's, then turned to look at the doorway Jeff had just disappeared through. The corners of his mouth turned upward in a smile.

"It's best you remember it as a dream, Jeff Tracy," he said as he moved toward the elevator that would take him to his laboratory. "After all, your work here is not yet finished."

A strange shimmering, glimmering light surrounded Brains, and suddenly he was no longer the orphaned genius every resident of Tracy Island knew and loved. He stretched his eight arms and blinked his large, slanted gray-black eyes.

"But my work is."

"Good morning, Father. Alan. Tin-Tin."

"Good morning, Scott," came the chorus of replies.

"Anyone seen Brains this morning?" Scott asked as he poured himself a large mug of coffee. "We're working on One's new ejection system in five minutes and I haven't seen hide nor hair of him."

"Odd," Tin-Tin commented with a frown. "He's usually there at least half an hour before we are for any appointment."

Jeff looked up from the printed morning paper he'd been reading. "Did you check the lab?" he asked.

"Not yet, Father. I needed a second cup of coffee," Scott grinned.

"I'll do it," Jeff said, rising to his feet. "I've already eaten. You enjoy Alan's breakfast."

"Alan cooked?" Scott asked, appearing frightened.

"Yes, he did, and it's a positively lovely breakfast quiche, if I do say so myself," Tin-Tin answered as she flashed a beautiful smile in Alan's direction.

Scott laughed as he seated himself at the table, not noticing the look on his father's face as Jeff walked out of the kitchen. "Quiche, Alan? My God, what has Tin-Tin done to you?"

Tin-Tin giggled as Scott continued laughing. Jeff could vaguely hear the sounds of Alan rebutting the teasing comment as he raced to the elevator. For after his glass of milk and encounter with Brains last night, he'd had another disturbing dream. A dream in which Brains...looking Alpha Centaurian rather than human...had come and said good -bye.

The lab was empty. No signs of life, no sign that anything had been disturbed. Nothing new or out of place except, Jeff realized, for the old turkey thermometer lying in the middle of one of the lab tables. He picked it up and looked at it. It seemed perfectly normal.

He headed back up the stairs, stopping at the landing to enter the small room that was pretty much Brains' bedroom, even though he had a proper suite on the villa's first floor. Brains was nowhere to be seen. His bed hadn't been slept in, which really wasn't so unusual, but something seemed different somehow. He glanced at the computer sitting on Brains' desk and noticed the screen saver. It was a scrolling text message that said Read the note, Jeff.

Swallowing hard, Jeff sat down and hit the space bar. The screen saver was replaced by a typed message which slowly scrolled across the black screen.

Jeff Tracy,

I cannot tell you what an unmitigated pleasure it has been to work with you and your sons all these years. You have grown and evolved beyond my expectations and it is for that reason my presence here is no longer required. You will continue your life. You will continue the good deeds you have done throughout the years and you will die as you have lived – as Jefferson Grant Tracy. The one and only.

I told you the programming phrase was ‘Beam Me Up, Scotty.' Well, I shall leave you with yet another phrase from a being who hails from that same dimension, and know that I mean each and every word.

Live Long and Prosper.

Your friend from Alpha Centauri, Dimension 3215,

Brains

P.S. – We have perfected what went wrong. You will no longer be alone.

Jeff could only stare as the message finished scrolling. Suddenly an untold amount of zeroes and ones began cascading down the screen, and before Jeff could stop it, the entire hard drive had erased itself. He sat back in the chair and stared at the now-blank monitor in disbelief.

"It was all true," he whispered. "Brains, how... my God."

The vidphone rang, startling him. He reached over and opened the line. "This is Jeff Tracy," he said, suddenly doubting his own words.

"Jeff! Oh, my God, Jeff!"

"Mother? What is it?"

Ruth Tracy's face appeared in the viewscreen. "Jeff, it's...I can't believe it, but...I don't understand, I don't know how it's possible!"

She had his full attention now. "Mother? Mother, you're babbling, what's going on?"

"Look, Jeff. Just...I can't...I was at the farmhouse and...she just...she walked in...look! Jeff, just look!"

Ruth stepped away and another woman came into view. Jeff's eyes widened. His jaw dropped. "Jeff?" the woman said softly. "I came home, but you weren't here."

Jeff just shook his head as tears filled his eyes. We have perfected what went wrong. You will no longer be alone.

A broad smile filled his face as tears rolled down his cheeks. He touched his fingertips to the screen. "Lucy."