From: Coast2C@aol.com
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 1996 21:39:10 -0400
Message-ID: <960430213801_387237014@emout18.mail.aol.com>
Subject: Convergence:  Part 25 of 25 and End Notes

Convergence
by
Dana Anderson

Part 25 of 25 and End Notes
(Author's Notes and Disclaimer found in Part 1)

*               *               *               * 

After showering, dressing and drinking some coffee, Al and Jenna 
were as prepared to see what Sam had discovered as they would ever 
be.  The three of them went to the lab.  Sam had covered two large 
white boards with calculations.  He pulled three pages of computer 
paper out of his pocket and laid them out on the work bench.

"See," he said eagerly "here, here and here.  In and of themselves, 
the equations appear correct; but together..."

"They combine to cause a sequence error" Jenna finished his 
statement.

Sam nodded.  "And look at this" he said, turning to one of the 
whiteboards. 

Jenna scanned his calculations.  She pointed to a conclusion.  
"That's it.  That's what caused you to leap uncontrollably instead of 
observing."  She looked at the other whiteboard.  "You've already 
started working on a correction?"

"How long have you been at this, Sam?" Al asked.

"About three hours" Sam said.  "I woke up with the answer staring 
me in the face."

"Knowing you, I'm surprised you were asleep at midnight with all 
this work that needs to be done" Al said.

"Well, I kind of decided to try Jenna's technique" Sam admitted.

Al looked at him in confusion for a moment, then his eyes widened.  
He laughed and turned to Jenna.  "Donna might decide she likes you 
after all" Al began cheerfully, then sobered when he saw the look on 
Jenna's face.  "What is it, what's the matter?"

Jenna swallowed with some difficulty and turned to Sam.  "This is 
what you meant was overwhelming?" she asked, tapping the second 
whiteboard.

Sam nodded.  "Does it go where I think it's going?"

"I hope not" Jenna replied.  "Let's finish the corrections and run the 
whole program through Ziggy."

Sam and Jenna worked on the corrections while Al entered them 
into Ziggy's program.  When they had finished, they set the program 
running under test parameters and went to the cafeteria to have 
breakfast and wait.  Sam could barely contain his excitement.  Jenna 
was almost morose.  Al tried to decide which mood was causing him 
the most annoyance.  When Ziggy announced that the test program 
had been completed, they all slammed down their coffee cups and 
ran for the door.

The test results were displayed on both monitors in the Control 
Room.  Sam went to one and Jenna to the other.  They scrolled 
through screen after screen of mathematical projections faster than 
Al could follow, but he didn't have long to wait for a judgment.

"It works!" Sam crowed.  He spun around and grabbed Al by the 
shoulders.  "We can hit the target every time and retrieval is 
guaranteed!  We can control it!"

Al glanced over at Jenna, who had stopped scrolling through the 
results.  She was leaning against the control panel, with one hand 
over her face.  Al freed himself from Sam's grasp and walked over to 
her.  Sam saw where Al was going and followed him, his gleeful 
expression becoming serious.

"What's the matter, don't you agree with Sam's interpretation of the 
results?" Al asked her quietly.

Jenna removed her hand from her face and shook her head.  "No, I 
agree.  As far as he went anyway" she said.

"What do you mean?" Al inquired.

"This," Jenna said, indicating a series of equations on the terminal.  
"This is what I mean."

Sam looked at the information she had displayed.  "The effect is 
limited to the Leaper's or the Observer's own lifetime.  What's so 
disturbing about that?  You understand that part of my theory."

"Not lifetime, Sam.  Life.  You know damn well that's what it says" 
Jenna said in a tense voice.  

"The Leaper's or the Observer's own life?" Al questioned her, as 
Sam reviewed the data Jenna had indicated.

Jenna nodded.  "Without the random effect of the sequence error, 
the reach of the program is limited to our lives.  Just as the 
holography is limited to work effectively only with our brain waves, 
and for the same reason."

"Ziggy's biological components" Al concluded.

Jenna nodded again.

"No" Sam said.  He looked up at them and shook his head.  "I think 
we can overcome that.  And I'm going to prove it" he added, 
stepping away from the console.

"Sam!" Al shouted, grabbing his arm.  "Over my dead body, that's 
when you leap again."

Sam put his hand around Al's wrist and tried to remove his friend's 
death grip from his arm.  "I'm not going to Leap, Al" he said calmly.  
"I'm going to Observe.  Want to come along?"

*               *               *               * 

The three of them experimented with the Imaging Chamber for 
several hours.  With Sam in the Chamber, with or without company, 
either Jenna's or Al's past life could be observed.  With either Al or 
Jenna in the Chamber, Sam's life could be accessed.  Since there was 
no Leaper back in the past to focus the reception of the Observers, 
none of their past selves perceived that they were being watched.  
Jenna soon lost interest in the proceedings.

"I'm going for a run" she told them.

"You're kidding" Sam said to her in amazement.

Jenna waved her hand at their present holographic surroundings.  
"I've seen all this before.  In fact, I can see it any time I want.  It's all

right up here" she said, tapping her temple.  She turned and left the 
Chamber.  

Al and Sam looked around them again.  They appeared to be 
standing on the sidewalk of a street in downtown San Francisco.  It 
was night and they had been watching a small, dark haired girl of 
perhaps ten or eleven years of age ducking in and out of alleys, 
trying to elude a policeman. 

"I wonder if Joe knows just how young she was when she first 
displayed her talent for avoiding the long arm of the law" Al mused.

As different views of their lives were displayed in the Chamber over 
the next few hours, Sam and Al found themselves ordering Ziggy to 
move on to another place and time whenever their own lives were 
accessed.  As a result, after a time, they found themselves observing 
only Jenna's life.  

They saw her detained, drugged and questioned by the scientists 
from the biological weapons project.  They watched her laughing 
and talking with Paul, sometime early in their marriage.  They 
witnessed her meeting Joe Brooks for the first time, and saw how 
she had saved his life when they barely knew each other and she 
could easily have been killed in the attempt.  They were given a 
glimpse of her sitting on the floor of a cavernous underground room, 
surrounded by bodies and cradling the head of her dead husband in 
her lap; an expression of shock and denial frozen on her face.  They 
saw her receive several of her degrees and both Sam and Al noticed 
that there was no one cheering for her in the sea of family and 
friends gathered for the commencement ceremonies.  They observed 
several scenes in the orphanage where she grew up.  She always 
seemed to be alone, even when there was a crowd of other little girls 
in the room.  

Finally, they went far enough back that she was still living with her 
mother.  *She moves around the house like a shadow,* Al thought, 
watching the tiny girl slip from one room to another.  Just as Al 
decided it was time to call a halt to their voyeuristic activities, they 
were subjected to a scene of torture.  It was an incident which Jenna 
had not mentioned to Al and the brutality of the vision shocked both 
men into silence and immobility.  They stood like statues in the 
center of the Chamber while episode after episode was exhibited 
around them.  Some of the events were ones that Al had heard about 
from Jenna, most of them were not.  

Then the display changed to a moment when they saw Jenna, at the 
age of five or so, shoved down a flight of stairs to land at the bottom 
with her right leg resting at an unnatural angle to her body, Al 
choked out a painful "Oh my god, she's going to...Jen said she..." he 
gulped.  "Hearing about this was bad enough."

They both watched in horror, one in apprehension and the other in 
suspense, as Jenna's mother approached her.  The woman lifted the 
little girl up under her arm and carried her, like a sack of potatoes, 
back up the stairs.  They stared as a view of the attic became visible 
to them.  The woman dropped the child to the floor and reached for 
two lengths of rope.  She used the short piece of rope to tie Jenna's 
wrists and elbows, pinning the limbs painfully behind her back.  
Then her mother tied one end of the long rope to Jenna's 
ankle and flung the other end over a rafter.

"No..." Sam breathed, as he realized what was about to happen.

Jenna's mother hoisted her up off the ground and tied off the rope on 
a hook that was attached to an upright.  The two men observed the 
agony in the face of Jenna, the child, as she hung conscious, but 
silent, from her injured leg.  Her mother left the attic.  Jenna 
remained awake, aware and in obviously excruciating pain, sweat 
and silent tears dripping from her face, until the sound of her hip 
snapping back into its' proper alignment came to them out of the 
past, through the vision.  The child fainted from the pain.

"Ziggy, end program" said a calm, quiet voice from the entrance to 
the Imaging Chamber.  The walls immediately melted into a 
featureless, blameless white.  

Sam and Al turned slowly around.  

Jenna was standing just inside the door, her face without a trace of 
emotion, her body tense.  She met their eyes, first Al's then Sam's, 
and carefully considered what she saw there.  "I don't know about 
the two of you" she said, her voice still calm "but I could use a 
drink."

They both nodded.  

The three of them went to Sam's office.  Al collapsed into the 
armchair beyond the end of the desk.  Jenna perched on one arm of 
the chair in which Al was sitting and Sam lowered himself into his 
desk chair.  He reached into the bottom drawer of his desk and 
produced a bottle of scotch and three glasses.  Sam poured a 
generous amount of liquor into each glass and distributed them.

Each of them took a long swallow of scotch, then sat silently.  None 
of them met the eyes of another.

Jenna finally broke the silence.  She set her glass down on Sam's 
desk and looked back and forth between the two men.  "Can we 
power down the Imaging Chamber now?"

Sam squirmed in his chair and refused to meet her eyes for a long 
time.  Al put his hand on her back and moved his palm up and down 
in an attempt to soothe and comfort her, or possibly himself.  
Finally, Sam spoke.

"I'm sorry if you're upset about what we saw what" he apologized.  It 
sounded insufficient, even to his own ears.

Jenna remained silent until Sam met her gaze.  "I'm not upset that 
you observed parts of my history.  You and Al can watch every 
second of my entire life if that's what you want.  It won't bother me a 
bit.  I am concerned about what you might be planning to do."

"'Do'?" Al echoed.  "What do you mean, 'do'?"

"You know exactly what I mean" Jenna said, maintaining eye 
contact with Sam, not Al.

Apparently, Sam found his desk chair uncomfortable again.  When 
Al became aware of the scrutiny his wife was subjecting Sam to and 
saw his friend's reaction he began to understand the nature of the 
accusation Jenna was leveling.

"Sam, you weren't planning to 'do' anything, were you?" Al asked.

Sam had been uncomfortable under the pressure of Jenna's reproach, 
now he was getting the double whammy.  "It just doesn't seem 
fair..." he began, then fell silent.

"What doesn't?" Al inquired softly.

"That I leaped into all those other people's lives, and that Jenna did 
too, and we never changed your life or hers' for the better" Sam said.

"I knew it" Jenna said firmly.  She stood up and leaned both hands 
on Sam's desk, pinning him to his chair with an angry glare.  "I 
absolutely forbid it!  Don't you dare..."

"Whoa, hold on a minute!" Al said, rising from his chair and taking 
Jenna gently by the shoulders.  He eased her back away from Sam's 
desk and motioned for her to seat herself in the armchair he had just 
vacated.  Al stood in the narrow space between the chair and the 
desk, looking back and forth between his wife and best friend.  
"We're all a little emotional right now.  Who wouldn't be after the 
day we've had?  We've seen too much and slept too little.  Maybe we 
should take the next forty eight hours off and resume this 
discussion when we can be more objective."

"This is as objective as I'm ever going to be.  It's my _life_ we're 
talking about!" Jenna insisted.

Al turned toward Jenna to calm her, but Sam jumped back into the 
fray.

"And you can honestly say that you wouldn't change anything, not 
one single thing, if you had the chance?  Or if someone volunteered 
to change it for you?" Sam challenged.

Al momentarily flirted with the idea of making another attempt to 
delay this confrontation, but thought better of his impulse.  Maybe it 
was better for them to settle it now.

"Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.  It's over and done with; it's the 
past.  Leave it alone, Sam" Jenna said.

"How can you say it's over and done with?  I'm a doctor, remember?  
I know you're in pain, constant pain, and will be every day for the 
rest of your life because of those injuries your mother inflicted on 
you!" Sam countered.  The memory of Dr. Ambrose's records 
detailing the physical description of her injuries burned in his mind.

"That's enough, Sam!" Al interjected, seeing a look in Jenna's eyes 
that told him Sam's words had brought the pain she was feeling 
right now to her attention.

"It's all right, Al.  He has a point, but now he's going to hear mine" 
Jenna replied calmly.  "What are you going to do, Sam?  Leap back 
to 1956 and murder my mother?  Get her to give me up for adoption 
as soon as I'm born?  What?"

Sam bit his lip and cleared his throat nervously.  "I don't know.  
There's no hurry for us to decide.  We could talk about what the best 
plan would be, have Ziggy run the scenarios..." he trailed off.

"And then who will I be?" Jenna asked.

"What do you mean?" Sam said, startled.

"Who will I be?" Jenna repeated, then went on patiently.  "Sam, I 
am what I started out with, tempered and formed by every 
experience I've had, good or bad.  Changing anything in my past 
means changing who I am.  It also means changing the rest of my 
past, present and future.  I like who I am right now, I can live with 
my past and I love my present" at this point she reached out and 
took Al's hand in hers "and have every hope for a wonderful future.  
Can't you understand that I have everything to lose and possibly 
nothing to gain?"

Sam considered her words silently for a time, then shifted his regard 
to Al's face.  When Jenna had reached out to him, Al had stepped 
back, seated himself on the arm of the chair in which she was sitting 
and put his arm around his wife's shoulders.  He didn't speak, but 
the message in his steady gaze was crystal clear nonetheless.

"You feel the same way, don't you?" Sam said, feeling a need to hear 
his friend verbalize this confounding attitude.

"Yes, I do" Al replied.

"But..." Sam began weakly.

"No 'buts', Sam" Al interrupted.  "I have more than I ever dreamed 
I'd have and I wouldn't risk losing you or Jen even if it meant you 
could make every day of my life up until this moment a bed of 
roses."

Sam looked from one serious face to the other, feeling his frustration 
grow at their adamant refusal to allow him to improve their lives.

"Sam" Jenna said gently, sensing exactly what he was thinking.  "If 
it ain't broke, don't fix it."

"Amen" came Al's firm concurrence with her sentiments.  "Besides, 
pal, you're responsible for bringing us together.  How much more 
happiness do you think we can stand?"

Sam remained silent, gazing at the couple with indecision.  Al's left 
arm was still across Jenna's shoulders and her right arm lay easily 
and naturally along his left leg, her hand curved around his knee.  
Finally, the meaning of their words and the calm, contented 
expressions in their eyes made sense to him.  It was precisely 
because they had suffered and lost so much that they could truly 
appreciate what they had.  Neither of them was interested in wasting 
time on 'what ifs' or 'might have beens'.  A smile slowly and 
tentatively grew on Sam's face.

"I guess I'm not used to everything being all right" Sam said.

"That's an adjustment we'll all just have to suffer through" Al 
replied, with an answering grin.

*               *               *               * 

Al and Jenna sat in companionable silence on the shelf of rock 
outside the Project Complex.  They were both tired, but too wound 
up to try and sleep just yet.  Jenna watched the smoke from Al's 
cigar rising lazily into the air, making pale patterns that formed and 
dispersed.  She shivered slightly as the visual display caused flashes 
of memory to surface in her mind.

"Are you cold?" Al asked her.

The sound of his voice snapped her out of her reverie and she turned 
to face him, smiling as she met his eyes.  "No.  Just thinking" she 
said.  "I guess I had better start working on the retrieval program 
again."

Al sighed.  "You saw it too?"

"Sam doesn't exactly have a good poker face.  He'll leap again.  If he 
can't overcome the limitations of the controlled program, he'll 
reintroduce the sequence error" she said sadly.

Al ground out his cigar butt and thrust himself to a standing 
position.  Jenna watched as he took a few angry paces away from 
her, then stood rigid and silent, staring out into the desert.  After a 
few moments, she rose as well and went to stand next to him.  She 
slipped one arm around his waist and he settled an arm across her 
shoulders.

"We could threaten to leave" Al said softly.  "Sam wouldn't leap 
without an Observer."

"Do you really believe that?" Jenna inquired.

Al let out a long, frustrated hiss of breath.  "No.  I guess not.  He'd
still go."

Jenna nodded.  "And without you to help him he'd be in a lot more
danger."

"Why can't he just leave well enough alone?" Al choked in a 
combination of anger and sadness.

"You know why, Al" Jenna said softly.  "There are still windmills 
out there and he's Don Quixote in the flesh."

"But there are so many wrongs to right" Al objected.  "How many 
dragons is Sam Beckett supposed to slay?" 

"As many as he can, Al.  It would haunt him if he didn't try.  You 
know that, too" Jenna replied.

Al expelled a long sigh.  He turned and put his arms around Jenna 
in a complete embrace and she rested her head against his shoulder.  

"He had better leave _our_ dragons alone" Al said.  "Or I'll kick his 
butt.

Jenna laughed softly and looked up into her husband's face.  "I guess 
we'll just have to stick around and remind him."

Al squeezed her shoulders in assent and released her.  They walked 
slowly, arm in arm, back to the complex.

*               *               *               * 

End Part 25 of 25

*               *               *               * 

End notes:

I guess every QL fan has their own idea of how Sam would finally 
get home; this is one of mine.  And do any of us _really_ think he 
would stay?

Hope you enjoyed this.  As stated in the Author's Notes, any 
correspondence to the author can be sent to either 0002682600@mcimail.com or
coast2c@aol.com.

One final comment:   Write, write, write!  Post, post, post!  I'm 
                                  getting tired of reading X-Files fan
fiction!  
                                   _Their_ show is still on the air!  
                                 (Sorry, I had to get that out of my system.)

Dana Anderson

"I'm not crazy...I've just been in a very bad mood for forty years."  
Shirley Maclaine, Steel Magnolias

*               *               *               *