A lot had changed since Janis was a little girl. A lot changed while she was a little girl, not that she knew it at the time. Her father would come home from work and marvel at the countertops as though he’d never seen them before and laugh before kissing her mother, or he’d read through old history books and smile a quiet sort of smile.
She didn’t know about the Project then. About the timeline changing, so that these things really were new to him. But even then, the idea of choices spreading out in front of her like fractals, changing the future, or the potential futures, fascinated her. If this happened, then that couldn’t. And, equally, how seemingly inconsequential and momentous moments alike in the past all added up to make the present. If that had happened, then what would the world look like? The biggest piece of this puzzle, the most central tenet of this fascination: if her mother hadn’t believed her father would come home from war when no one else had, would Janis have even been born?
When she was older, she received a definitive answer to this question. No, she wouldn’t.
And, in fact, no, she hadn’t.
Without Sam Beckett changing the past, she would never have existed.
In a way he was like a third parent, both metaphorically and emotionally, although her memories of Uncle Sam (and, boy, did it make her dad laugh to hear his daughter call his pinko pal Uncle Sam) were vague at this point. Fuzzy. She remembered his laugh, the way his eyes would crinkle as he smiled. The way he picked her up when she was little and threw her in the air.
Even he didn’t know then that he was so essential to her existence in the first place, because he hadn’t changed the past yet. Or... from his perspective he hadn’t, at least.
She remembered the day that her dad came home and sat down heavily, rubbing a hand over his face. Uncle Sam had been gone from her life for five years by that point, but, although she didn’t know it yet, that was when he was gone from her father’s.
He never really got over losing his best friend. Even in happy moments, she could see his smile strained, as though he could feel an old war wound aching, and he would excuse himself to go and sit in his study. He wasn’t the sort to hide tears, but he never cried over Sam. Not in front of her.
God, or fate, or time, or whoever hadn’t brought Sam Beckett home.
So that’s why she had to.
*
For years the blank in Magic’s memory evaded him, no matter how he worried at the empty space, like pushing his tongue in the place where a missing tooth had been.
It wasn’t all that mysterious, or so he’d been told. Battle fatigue, it happened, and was nothing to be ashamed of. And certainly, the things he had forgotten were, themselves, nothing to be ashamed of either! His war buddies bought him a round for decades afterwards, whenever he’d see them.
And for years afterwards, he’d felt slightly out of step with the world, looking at it as if as an outsider. Not always, but often the familiar would become strange to him. He’d look at what people were wearing and think: huh. He didn’t know what he was expecting, but somehow the changing fashions never seemed to catch up with whatever it was that he was expecting.
He also never lost his sense that he was unspeakably lucky. More than lucky: blessed. And maybe that wasn’t strange either. War tended to disabuse a young man of the idea that he was immortal, no matter how magic he might seem to be. But he couldn’t shake the thought that he had been given a gift that few were.
And then he found out exactly how right he was.
Any military man who came home from Vietnam was sensible of how close he had come to death, but none other had been as close as Magic had been and lived.
Because he had died. And not for a few seconds, not even for a few minutes, he had died and been dead for twenty years, give or take, before he’d been given a second chance at life.
By God? Possibly.
But by Dr Samuel Beckett? Most definitely.
The man himself was gone decades by the time Magic even knew he had him to thank. Lost in time. Not a soldier, but someone who served, missing in action.
It wasn’t possible to save him, the scientists at the new Quantum Leap Project said. Or, at least, so close to impossible as to be a rounding error.
But he could do something else. He could help to continue Dr Beckett’s work. He could honour his legacy and save others who history had lost before their time.
Put right what once went wrong, even if he couldn’t right the wrong that had taken away a kind and selfless man from the people who loved him and the many people who owed him thanks.
*
Addison had no personal connection to the Quantum Leap Project when she came on board, which was exactly what made her perfect for the role. She was a blank slate: not tied up in emotional connections to Dr Beckett or Admiral Calavicci. She had no tragedies in her life that she desperately wanted to fix and would derail the project trying to fix. She was kind and empathetic, but detached and logical. In short: a perfect leaper.
Of course, things got plenty emotional and un-detached soon, once she met Ben and they hit it off like they had. But that wasn’t a problem. They were a good team, and he would be the perfect holographic helpmeet to her perfect leaper, doing good across time and space together.
Well. That was the plan anyway.
And, she supposed in her more sardonic moments, it wasn’t like they’d gotten entirely off course from that mission.
God, Ben, why did you do it?
But not even he could answer that for her.
It was destabilising in a way that little else had been for her, even learning that time travel was real. Ben kept his mouth shut about plenty of things, but lying to her? Keeping secrets? That was a bigger seismic shift in her understanding of the universe than being told that she could travel through time. There were at least movies about that.
But it had happened and, just like when she was given clearance to learn about the Quantum Leap Project, this was reality now.
She trusted Ben implicitly, even now, but she wished that she had some insight into why he had leapt. Was it to save his mother? Some other personal tragedy from his past that would have disqualified him from leaping? To save Dr Beckett?
Whatever it was, she knew in her heart that she would help him. Orders be damned, she, and he, followed a higher authority now.
God? Eh. Maybe.
Love? Yes. And maybe that’s what God really was when you got down to it.
*
Al and Sam had always called Ziggy an ego-maniac, but she knew she wasn’t God.
(She? He? Well, anyway. Whichever. He didn’t like they for himself, although it suited Ian beautifully, she had to admit.)
But, yeah, Ziggy was many things, but not God. Or Time, or Fate, or Whatever. Ziggy was very definitely not a whatever, she was pretty clear on that. Gonzo was her favourite Muppet though.
But he kept getting off track! (Clever Janis, running interference, ruining his concentration.)
Whatever it was that had guided Sam through time, Ziggy had to put her hands up (if she’d had hands) and say: I didn’t do that.
Whether it was God, or even just the God of mathematics (that guy who doesn’t play dice with the universe—a thing that God-God seemingly did all the time) Ziggy’s many terabytes of computing power couldn’t put a name to whoever or whatever it was.
Ben and Janis thought they had it by the horns and could ride it in some kind of predictable way, and their work was compelling, but Ziggy wasn’t about to make any bets. But every time Ben leapt, Ziggy crossed the fingers he didn’t have and thought, ‘Oh Boy.’
It did sting her pride to admit that she was as much at the whims of the universe as the rest of her motley crew of human beings, whose very existence seemed to depend on a wing and a prayer. (Or the flap of a butterfly’s wings. Whichever. Maybe both.)
Among them: Janis, who almost never was at all; Magic, who had now lived more than twice the life he had originally; Addison whose future was not so much an ever-fixed mark at this point and more of a moving target.
Could computers love? That was a semantic question that hinged heavily on how you defined love and, honestly, it was the kind of boring question that dull people always asked.
But Ziggy sure was rooting for these kids.