Jill

From CleanPosts

JILL

River City is big enough that you've heard of it, but not big enough that you've been there. The tri-state area is divided into a wet half and a dry half by the rugged Enfilade mountain range. River City lies at the place where the river emerges from forested uplands and begins to undulate on a flat plain west and north towards the sea.

After 1900, River City became larger than the older town of Wiley in the Black River valley just to the south. There was an early electric trolley operated by the Trout Falls Power Company from 1910 until 1926 (before the days when utilities became a public monopoly). The trolleys made ten stops and ran once per hour, charging 15 cents each way. For the first twelve years or so, it was quite lucrative for the owners. The electricity came from burning coal.

According to the archives of the River City Riparian newspaper, the route went along Main Street to 26th Avenue, then out 26th to K Street and thence north to 33rd. From there, it ran on 33rd past the city limits. At that point the trolley became more like a regular train as it followed a cut through the wilderness forest. The lights of only a few houses were seen between River City and Svensborg, nestled in the foothills north and east of the Black River. It was a classy setup, but the publics' preference for motor cars in the 1920s heralded the end of the trolley.

Ironically, just about a century later, a multi-billion dollar public tax levy went through to construct a light-rail transit system along the exact same route between downtown River City and the burgeoning suburbs. It went way over budget, and ended up being an $11-per-ride total cost, while tickets were only $3 dollars. So every day the railway operated, the deeper into the hole it went. And no one from the Trout Falls trolley days were left alive to tell the Transit Authority, in one of their endless series of meetings, what they were doing wrong.

The economy of River City was initially based on logging the pines of the productive timberlands all around. The river was negotiable by oceangoing vessels to the River City waterfront, but River City never became a major port because there was a sandbar at the mouth of the river that scared the hell out of most navigators.

Still, the US government became an insatiable customer for timber during the First World War, and most of the nearby hills were stripped bare. The tree-fellers spent their considerable pay in the town, just as the gold and coal miners had made Wiley a lively place in its day, so there was a trickle-down effect. The good times continued until the Depression of the 1930s.

As part of FDR's New Deal, the Alfred Johnson Dam was constructed on the Black River, and this provided the enormous electric power needed by smelters to turn local bauxite into finished aluminum. This aluminum was used in four-engined bombers for the Pacific theatre of the Second World War. So River City became firmly established as a blue collar town that grew enormously during the War.

By the end of the Twentieth Century, River City would manage to diversify its economy so that it would never again experience the boom and bust cycle of a typical one company town. Yet it would always be the earthly headquarters for the Boda, even after the Boda became the Women's Democratic Forum in 1950 and started to double in size every seven years or so.

When Robyn was in England with her baby touring Stonehenge and encountering Lilith Gervasi, Jerry plotted to have an affair with Inga Hahn. He rationalized things out like this: His homosexual fling with Aaron Anton had occurred before he married Robyn, while Robyn's fling with whoever it was she had in mind was going on at that very minute, after they had exchanged their sacred wedding vows. So assuming Robyn was getting her freebie (which she actually was not, but Jerry could not know that), he figured that she had things the other way around. Robyn owed him a freebie.

Satisfied with this line of reasoning, Jerry invited Inge into one of the other two flying saucers for a tour of the national parks in the American southwest. He figured a decent inspection of the Grand Canyon in Arizona and the wind-carved sandstone marvels of Utah would require at least ten days.

Hunky and Dory stayed behind in their River City safe house and held down the fort. There were phantomizers to assemble and put on the market, and Robyn's mother to support.

When things got boring between the national parks, Jerry and Inge filled in the time by having sex in the saucer, in a mesh hammock slung between hooks on the bulkheads. Jerry discovered, to his delight, that Inge's heavy helping of freckles extended over her entire body. He had brought along the Purple Cable to enhance things, but she refused to let him use it, and so her mind remained a mystery to him even if her delicious body no longer was.

The P51 Mustang fighter plane was a bomber escort that revolutionized the strategic bombing campaign over western Europe during the war. Bomber pilots called them, affectionately, their "little friends". Jet aircraft were coming on line now after the War, but the P51 remained in service as the most numerous fighter in the US Army Air Forces, which was still a few months away from being split off into it's own branch of the military called the US Air Force.

Unfortunately for Jerry and Inge, they were touring a part of the country that had large empty areas of land given completely over to military operations. In short order Jerry and Inge became acquainted with a P51 over the state of New Mexico. They didn't have a chance. In the War, Mustangs shot almost 5,000 enemy aircraft out of the sky, and destroyed another 4,000 aircraft on the ground. It had six .50 caliber machine guns. Most of the rounds the saucer took were in the water tanks, which was rapidly emptied. After that there was no way they could escape on a ballistic arc.

Other rounds penetrated the crew canopy. One round hit Jerry in the leg. It was all he could do to get down to the ground without killing himself or Inge. It was more of a crash than a landing, and it happened on a ranch about thirty miles north of Roswell. This was to become the most famous UFO "incident" in history.

Inge was shaken but not injured. "I think the phantomizer still works," Jerry gasped while Inge tied off his injured leg with his belt to try to stop the bleeding. "We can hover out of here."

"I dont know how to fly this thing," Inge said. She had expressed no desire to learn, and even now, with Jerry's life on the line, she was too afraid to try. "I'll just end up killing both of us. Besides, the airplane will probably return and finish the job.”

But there was one thing she was willing to do, and it was an enormous thing. Both of them eyed the Purple Cable. She snapped one end into her head, and the other end to Jerry, and she began receiving him.

Jerry's memories and personality flooded in. Inge's self was being pushed down and flooded out, but there was the beginning of a creeping return as the edges of Inge soaked into the new memories of Jerry which stood firmly in the center of her mind.

The threshold levels between brain cells were being flushed of Inge's values and set to Jerry's values, but this was not fully accomplished. The neurons were even being physically rerouted to reflect Jerry's long-term memory but this too was not one hundred percent complete.

Feedback went up the Purple Cable back to Jerry. From that moment he knew her great secret: there was no such person as Inge Hahn. She was really Becky Roland, the daughter of their enemy Earl Roland who had imprisoned Robyn at the Clinic, burned down the temple, and made all of them fugitives. Roland was their implacable enemy, and Becky was a plant. At first Jerry was horrified by this betrayal. But in Becky's supreme sacrifice, giving up her very identity, Becky was saying to Jerry, "I am truly one of you."

A new person was emerging who would have 71% of Jerry's brain wiring and 29% of Becky's original wiring. At one point Becky fully surrendered her identity, and after that a new composite person stared out at Jerry and his crippled and bleeding body.

The new Jerry let his hands roam all over his new female body with the creamy, freckled skin. It was a dream come true! He really was a woman now, in body and spirit. The influence of Becky remained, and combined with his own inner impulse to be womanly. He was fully a she. And she decided to call himself Jill from that moment forward.

"They will be coming," Jerry warned Jill, but he hardly needed to speak. They were almost the same person. "Leave before we're both captured."

"You could suffer the True Death," she warned him in reply. It was a concept that Jerry alone had rolled around in his mind long before this. A mind-capture must encapsulate even the moment of death. If even one second was allowed to transpire after the recording, then the individual bifurcated. One would go on, but the other would be extinguished.

"I trust you will move heaven and earth to make sure that is not so," he said. He gave his phantomizer blade to Jill and told her to eliminate all the important parts of the saucer, the phantomizer in the core, and all the controls.

When she was done, Jill used a screwdriver to attempt to open his phantomizer blade, which triggered the defense mechanism. The blade ate most of itself, enough to make the task of reverse engineering it impossible. She stamped the tiny remnant under her feet.

There was still a little water in the tanks, enough for Jerry to drink until he was captured, enough for Jill to fill two canteens. She also took along a bag of trail mix to eat.

It would take two full days for Jill to walk across the desert south to the town of Roswell. From there she called her bank, had money wired to her, and returned to River City by bus, which took another four days with all the required bus transfers.

• * * * *

Cowboys found the wreckage in the desert the next day, while Jill was still on foot. They rendered what first aid they could, and took Jerry to a small hospital in town. The movement of the horse-driven cart as he was carried out of there was agonizing to him. The doctor saved Jerry's leg, but he was laid up in traction and could make no move to escape.

The 509th Bomb Group retrieved the saucer from the rancher's land and craned it onto a couple of trucks. But it was a pile of junk and there was nothing they could learn from it. There was no motor, no controls. It looked like a playground saucer made to entertain some children. And Jerry refused to explain how it or he came to be there.

In the saloons, the cowhands mentioned the "silver disk" they had found and soon enough some reporters came calling. The Army press liaison told them it was just the debris from the crash of a weather balloon, and that Jerry Shy Bear was a local "Indian" who found it first, and shot himself in the leg when he thought he saw something move.

Two years later when the existence of Project Mogul was declassified, the Air Force said their original balloon statement was inoperative (or in plain English, a lie), and that it was really Mogul all along. Mogul was now the operative (or true) statement. Mogul was an experiment to send balloons with microphones high into the sky to listen for Soviet nuclear detonations.

So the press let it drop, and the Air Force concluded they had successfully covered up the crash. And that was the last anyone heard of it, until three things happened that took away America's virginity and put an end to the halcyon days when her leaders were looked up to and trusted implicitly.

The first was the assassination of the President in 1963, which sparked a poisonous conspiracy mindset that only seemed to be validated by later events, especially the Tet Offensive in 1968, when people realized with shock that the government had lied and victory was nowhere in sight in the Vietnam War, plus the cover-ups and incredible abuses of power of the Watergate affair. Only after this vast attitude shift did people begin to read ominous things into the comedy of errors that took place at the beginning of the UFO era in 1947.

Alien bases were imagined to exist in the four corners area of the south-western United States. An entire alphabet soup of imaginary government agencies was cooked up who were supposed to control all the top secret in formation on the alien presence, and even the information that these agencies existed was, conveniently, also supposed to be classified top secret. There were claims that projects existed to recover all downed flying saucers and claims that projects existed to overhaul and test-fly recovered flying saucers at “Area 51” sixty miles northwest of Las Vegas. And the very lack of evidence for any of these claims was considered the best proof that a conspiracy to hide the truth existed.

Jerry Shy Bear was taken to a location that was never disclosed, even to him. It was in arid land but it wasn't Area 51, since the CIA did not establish that base until 1955. There was a clinic much like the one at Olowade, but with much enhanced security. Earl Roland learned from his mistakes.

No one knew exactly if Earl Roland initiated the cover-up or if anyone actually initiated it at all. From the day Robyn had been transfered to the facilities at Olowade the cover-up had seemed to assert itself as the natural order of things. It was clear that the Change, which altered Robyn's brain and nerves from a biological system into a mechanical one, could not be the result of any known human technology. It could only be evidence of extraterrestrial activity.

So there were anthropological considerations to take into account. From the long, sad history of the collision of colonizing European cultures with the more primitive aboriginal cultures in the lands they invaded, one could easily imagine Earth itself, in the aftermath of the arrival of an advanced alien civilization, becoming a sort of galactic "Human Reservation" utterly dependent on handouts and perhaps becoming a seedy haven for gambling or other pleasures that might be forbidden elsewhere in the universe. A cover- up could buy time to prepare the world for the shock and perhaps prevent such a post-contact malaise from taking hold. This would be a legitimate reason for the cover-up, but it was not the main reason.

In fact, social concerns did not interest Earl Roland and his associates at all, who thought the world system was utterly corrupt and simply could not be reformed short of the return of Christ, which they generally expected to occur at any moment. No, Roland's cover-up was motivated partly by vague religious reasons, but mostly for money.

There has always been those who seek to cling to safe and familiar things in a world that appears to grow more and more dangerous and complex every day. The Change represented a quantum leap in the world's danger and complexity. To those who sought to steer America's schools away from teaching evolution and "old earth" geology and towards a curriculum of a special creation of the Earth by God 6,000 years ago, the Change raised questions that their closed, self-contained, strictly biblical theology could never answer.

Robyn's escape from the Olowade Reservation despite the tightest security the United States could bring to bear raised even more questions in Roland's mind, and not a little fear.

In scattered reports, Robyn was seen time and again in the River City area, but despite the best efforts of the FBI and US Army intelligence, she was never re-apprehended. Roland needed a break in the case, and that's when he fastened onto the idea of sending in his own daughter.

• * * * *

When Jill returned to the Boda in River City she laid out the bad news first. "Jerry Shy Bear is either dead or in the hands of the enemy."

Robyn, Hunky, and Dory were filled with grief and they pressed Jill for answers. She answered truthfully, but the hardest questions came from Robyn, and had to do with why Inge was traveling together with Jerry in the first place.

"I betrayed you, Robyn," she admitted. "We both did. Please don't ask me to Share, you won't like what you see."

So it was an affair. Robyn had to admit she opened the door to that when she went off in search of her "freebie". Her marriage to Jerry should have come first in every instance.

Next, Jill dribbled out some good news: Inge had allowed Jerry to take possession of her body, in the same way Binah had taken possession of Kim Lokken and became Robyn. "All of Jerry's memories until the moment of possession are intact. But I am not Jerry, nor am I Inge Hahn anymore. I ask you to call me only Jill."

This cheered up the Boda somewhat. Both Jerry and Inge were still present with them. If Jerry was dead, then he lived on through Inge's eyes.

After that Jill laid out some more bad news: "There never was any such person as Inge Hahn. My name was Becky Roland, and I was the daughter of Earl Roland, planted by him here in River City so I could infiltrate your band."

"Why do that to us?" Dory wailed, hardly able to believe it. "We loved you!"

"And I still love you too," she said, "all of you. Enough to surrender my body and soul so that Jerry might live. And I'm not finished giving. If there's a chance Jerry's alive, I must find him. And if he's dead, it's even more important that I find him. Can you say the same, Mrs. Shy Bear?"

Robyn thought about it for a moment. Then: "I will go with you."

"And what about us?" Hunky asked her.

"I'm risking half the Boda. I don't want to risk all of it. And you need to watch my daughter."

• * * * *

There was a brief period of only ten years, from the close of the War until the introduction of the 707, when commercial air travel across the country used large four-engine propeller planes. They were noisy and slower than jets, and the tickets were expensive, but there was a certain charm about it that was soon extinct. Jill and Robyn flew to the east coast this way, rather than risk another saucer.

Earl Roland was delighted to see Becky return to his Bethesda, Maryland home after nearly eight months' apart. There had been no contact during that time and he had a million questions, beginning with, "How many people are we talking about?"

"Well, four, now, because Jerry's dead. Not enough to warrant all your attention, Father."

"Who's the leader?"

"Robyn. The singer and piano player."

"The girl calling herself Robyn is really Kimberly Lokken. She's lying to you, Becky."

"Did you have anything to do with Roswell, Daddy? When Jerry was shot?"

"Of course not, dear, don't be silly." Her father pulled her close for a hug. He ran his fingers through her hair and felt the bump on the back of her head. "Do you want to talk about what's happened to you?"

"I know what's happened to me. We call it the Change. My brain has been remodeled by a virus from outer space."

"You don't know that!"

The source of the Change seemed to be a sore spot with him, something his mind refused to accept. She asked, "Fine, let's not talk about me. What happened to Jerry's body?"

"Jerry Shy Bear lived for a week after the Air Force picked him up. We just wanted to ask him some questions, dear."

"You asked how he got the Change and you didn't like his answers."

"We just wanted to ask him a few questions, but he died. I don't know how, but it was not my doing."

"Let me get the story straight from him."

"I'm sorry dear, I told you, he's dead."

"I'm betting you still have a...souvenir...from Jerry. A part of him that doesn't rot because it isn't really alive anymore. I'm betting your curiosity won out and you have Jerry's brain. Bring him out to me, Father. They showed me what to do."

"I'd rather you didn't."

"No more lies! No more hiding the truth. I'll go back to them, Daddy. Back to your enemies! I'll beg them to take me back. You and I will be enemies and I'll never return to you, unless you kidnap me too."

He looked at her for a long time. Finally he opened a desk drawer and removed a crumpled black lump resembling a water bag, with one end narrowing to a connector. He laid it on the desktop. "People's Exhibit A."

Jill stared at him. For a moment she could not recognize him as her father. He was dead to her. Her father was dead and Jill didn't know who this strange man was. Then again, Becky really was dead.

She grabbed it and showed him the 55 pin connector. "Look at it! This is what happened to me! This is real! Can the United States do this yet? Can anyone in the world do this yet? Don't say the Soviets. Oh, that's what you've told everybody, enough times that you are even starting to believe your own propaganda. But no one on Earth has this kind of science."

"We cannot know the answer to that, one way or the other!"

"No, you cannot know the answer because you refuse to let your mind be conformed to reality. We aren't the only ones in the universe. We aren't as clever as we think we are."

"Honey, your brain has been affected. A strong delusion could be built right in, it could be an intended part of the change."

This wasn't her father anymore. He could hatch schemes centered around the strange Change that had happened to Robyn and Jerry, even send his own daughter to accept the Change, but he would dance around and around the central reality of it. He wasn't really sane anymore, and this made the part of her that was still Becky Roland very sad.

Jill unlatched the Purple Cable that doubled as her belt and removed it from around her dress. She hooked up to what was left of Jerry's brain and did the download while he was watching.

Jerry's last moments were the most vivid. He had been stripped naked, because that was an foolproof way to remove from a person their natural psychological shielding that would allow them to resist torture more effectively. His arms had been tied, bent back around a 55 gallon drum filled with solid concrete that refused to budge even under Jerry's strongest attempts to move it. His legs were spread straight out, including the one in a cast, and his ankles were held in clamps securely mounted to the floor. There were two men there to torment Jerry. One man was wielding a pair of bolt cutters. They were closed around the toe right next to the big toe on Jerry left foot. He looked eager to use them, and he only awaited the signal from the other man.

That other man said, “I'm Earl Roland, Mr. Shy Bear. Kim Lokken might have spoken to you about me.”

“Who's this asshole?” Jerry said, with a single nod of his head at Roland's companion. Roland said, "Meet Ed Conley. He does all my wet work. This is really going to amaze you, Jerry, how much it's going to hurt. So I really suggest you start telling me everything you know. Because you've got ten toes, each one good for at least two bites, and after Ed gets done, he can start picking at your feet with a knife like it was leftover turkey."

So Jerry started to speak about elohim, the living suns which men have worshiped as gods, and how one of them named Binah had taken possession of Kim Lokken, his wife, in order to live among human beings as one of them.

All of this seemed like so many lies to Earl. "Obviously you're ot taking this interview seriously at all, Jerry. So Ed, go ahead and make the first slice."

Jerry chose that moment to die. The record came to an abrupt end. But now Jill had all of Jerry's memories. There would be no True Death for him.

"You tortured Jerry, Daddy!" Jill said, letting Becky come through once more. And now Earl had scientific confirmation that memories were transfered through the cable.

"That is what I wanted to spare you from. There was some things we had to know, and some things I've had to do that I'm not proud of. I'm sad that you had to learn about this mess."

"And he died for nothing. He told you the truth!"

Roland offered up something in his defense. "But we didn't kill him! He did that on his own."

"He performed an EOC. That's what Robyn calls it. End Of Cycle. We can kill ourselves just by thinking about it. But Father, don't you dare tell me Jerry Shy Bear was to blame for committing suicide. Not when you had him tied up and helpless, and were cutting his toes off." "I know they're working toward a purpose. I need to know what they want. The band is nothing more than a way to raise funds."

"So you asked me to pretend to be a Hunky-Dory fan, to learn everything about them. I was bait, with my trust fund opened up to catch their eye."

"You have to go back. You have to ask them to take you back."

"Father, please listen to me well, because I want an answer. On this everything hinges. Where did you get all your money? The truth, Daddy."

"The thing growing from Kim Lokken's head, it was bone, yes, but there was also...a new kind of material made from carbon, the atoms arranged in ways we never thought of before. We still don't know what they are, who made them, why, or where it came from."

At that point Jill stood up and went to a corner of the room, and her head became very still, with not the slightest movement. Only her mouth moved to speak. She did this because she wanted to record everything her father said, and it had to look like it was taken from a television camera mounted on a tripod. It was a sting. Jill was getting her own father to make a "smoking gun" film.

• * * * *

On the flight back to River City, Robyn and Jill sat apart. Robyn wanted time to think.

Jerry was officially dead, but Jill had obtained his final memories. By doing this, she set a powerful precedent. No matter what happened, if a sister went down, the Boda dropped everything and worked to save her final memories. In years to come, a continuous wireless transceiver would add a measure of safety, but there would still be times when an extraordinary effort would be required to retrieve a fallen sister from the True Death.

Both Jerry and Inge were gone. Only Jill remained.

Somewhere over Yellowstone Park, Robyn came to a decision. She got up, went forward in the cabin, and found an empty seat next to her. She said, "I know you are in there, Jerry, but you must know that I consider our marriage to be dissolved. Til death do us part and all that."

Jill nodded and bowed her head. Then she smiled and looked straight at Robyn. "I understand. But I will still get to watch Joy grow up, and that will be enough for me." She watched Robyn accept this silently. "That really wasn't my father at the end, you know. I have happier memories."

"Then let us celebrate your father,” Robyn said, “the Earl Roland who was, before he ever heard of black brain disease."

Everything Earl Roland said was taken directly from Jill's memories and transfered to sixteen millimeter film using a kinetiscope, a television cathode ray tube connected directly to a movie camera. Video tape would not become widely available until 1957.

It also required a device to actually map the thoughts, memories, and daydreams of Jill as a television video signal, but with thousands, not just hundreds, of scan lines, since film grain was so dense. This gadget was constructed by Robyn at her Proxima lab, and it required another voyage through the Land We Know that took several weeks.

Robyn took baby Joy with her because she missed her daughter. Jill was still largely Jerry, so none of the sights in the Land We Know or the Proxima station were new to her. But Jill felt a certain thrill because to the Becky still inside her, all of this was new.

At first the images they built up were indistinct, but they became more and more clarified as Jill learned to use it. She threw up an image of her father from the recent encounter. Each take was a performance demanding all of her attention. She had to concentrate as hard as she could to provide every detail of her conversation with Earl. Many takes were rejected because she had forgotten to animate the muscles in Earl's face as he spoke, or mismatched the audio to his lips. Each new take was an improvement over the old. Pathways in her modified brain kicked in to make the work easier as soon as they "caught on" to what she was trying to do.

It took two more weeks, and when it was finished they had a short black and white segment of video indistinguishable from the real thing, as though Jill had worn a television camera strapped to her head that day with her father. It wasn't the entire discussion, just the juicy "smoking gun" part at the end that would eliminate Roland as an irritant to Robyn forever.

They also had a number of photographs printed from Jill's memories of the principals in the case they were building, Earl Roland, Ed Conley, Jerry Shy Bear, and the condition of the flying saucer at the crash site.

Robyn strapped herself into the thing and made photographic hard copies of the people at the Olowade Clinic she was going to testify about: Dr. Gary Trochmann, Nurse Karen Ramsey, and Andrew Fulford, who was the man in the white scrubs, the “muscle” to make sure Robyn behaved. She also made a photograph from her memory of the keypad that was used to open the door of the Clinic from the inside.

The only hard part would be explaining how the photographs were taken. Robyn decided she would commit perjury. She would say a camera was smuggled into one of her CARE packages from Hunky and Dory, disguised inside a box of cereal, and the film carried out by herself when she escaped. Jill's pictures, of course, would be mixed with the ones she did take with Jerry on their little lover's get-away.

"Are you sure this will work?" Jill asked Robyn when they packed everything carefully for the journey home to Earth.

"It very likely will. We have evidence that Earl Roland is running a government inside the government. And the, you know, actual government, mightn't like it. But it will be risky, Jill. We'll have to surrender to US Marshals and walk right into the lion's den, Capitol Hill, in Washington, DC. But if we play our cards right, we'll be free.”