Origin (Book 2)

Chapter 17

"You remember? Remember what?" I grabbed his arm and hoisted him up to his feet. "Answer me!" I yelled frantically. A panicked feeling came over me. I didn't want to wait for someone else to try to kill me.

"Calm down," he said. "I'll tell you everything."

At that moment, Cassie walked back in followed by a tall, eccentric-looking man that bore a frightening resemblance to Einstein.

"Look at him now!" the professor exclaimed on seeing me. "Already making an impression on our new guest."

I let Wren go and walked over to shake the professor's hand. I reached over the divider. "You must be the professor."

"I am," he said. "Professor Strong." He shook my hand. His grip was firm, but not overly so. He wasn't trying to impress me, so he saw me as a close underling, almost a coworker.

"Well, Professor Strong, you look nothing like your copied programs," I said.

"Oh, I don't look like this. I was just giving you a reference to my intelligence. I really am quite the jokester," he said cheerily. He slipped his jacket sleeve back and pressed a button on a bracelet that wrapped itself around his forearm.

His form changed to reveal the man that looked just like the programs I had seen before. "We've never really had a chance to meet after your excursion with your friends. Although, you were begging for a fight. I watched on the cameras while you were pummeled to a pulp. In the beginning, I mean."

He struck me as the kind of man that the programs had tried to imitate. I figured they were hard light constructions brought to life by something the professor did, I assumed. Anyhow, I was comfortable with thinking they were all one and the same.

"You watched me getting beat and didn't say anything? Is this a pattern I didn't know about with this dimension's Afterlight?" I asked.

Behind me, Wren approached and rested his arms on the divider, leaning over to hear.

"I'm the one who called the others to check. And to be fair, to me it seemed as if you were practicing or trying to being out your powers. If it was at first the latter, I congratulate you on your success. Physical energy constructs can be useful if you can learn how to build the right things," he said.

He did talk like a really smart professor would. I understood what he meant with the Einstein thing, because in real life, he looked nothing like a usual professor in any form or fashion, but he did have the mannerisms of one.

"Now that that's out of the way, I believe we can begin to inquire about the young man's findings," said the professor. "I presume you can now recall the events leading up to your arrest?"

The word confused me. I had arrested him. Well, we had. I usually only heard that with official officers about criminals. As far as I could tell, this man was no criminal.

"Yeah, about that, I have to explain something first. Don't freak," he said to me. "What took over me, what took over you guys, too, that wasn't mine control. Those were body snatchers."

"This isn't an alien movie," Blink said.

"No, that's just the most accurate way to describe it," he said, speaking faster as he became more elated. "These guys take over your body, and they can control it for a short amount of time."

"I guess I was right a little bit," Cassie said from the back of the semicircle that had formed around Wren.

No one paid her any attention; we were too focused on the implications of Wren's deduction. "How do you know this?" I asked him.