"The Three Tinkerers" - Part Four

 

Part Four

            Craig bounced back and forth between Skeeta’s TARDIS and HAL’s “brain room,” a red lit area consisting of hundreds of transparent rectangles, each one containing a center of fine-grid wires upon which the information was programmed. Skeeta and Craig each held one end of some jumper cables – or a tool resembling those used on Earth – gripping one alligator clip onto the inner workings of the central console, and the other end onto one of the memory blocks.

            After finishing on his end, Craig consulted with Skeeta, “O.K., what next?” But Skeeta didn’t respond; instead, he just glared towards one corner of the brain room, deep in thought. Again, Craig beckoned, “Mr. Jenkins?”

            Hearing his name snapped Skeeta out of it. He refocused on Craig, seeing how the boy had been waiting on him. “I’m sorry, son. Lost my head for a second there. What did you ask me?”

            “Are you alright?” Craig asked in concern.

            “Yeah, I’m good,” Skeeta huffed. “I’m just lettin’ those two friends of yours get to me.” His face twisted in a fury that intimidated Craig more than he already was of this Tinkerer incarnation. “No offense, son, but where do they get off on tellin’ me what to do with my own ship?!”

            Craig trembled and stammered, “M-Maybe they know a little more than you think?”

            Skeeta shot Craig a stare that made the 10-year-old stand in attention. “How so?”

            “I-I j-just mean that…” Craig struggled to get the words out. Skeeta was far more threatening than either of his parents on a day when he came home with a bad grade. And yet, he respected the Second Tinkerer all the same, because he was a past version of one of his best friends. Swallowing hard and mustering the courage, he told Skeeta, “What if Rania and Mireya were actually your future selves?”

            Skeeta glowered. “What?!”

            “You asked me earlier who they were and why you couldn’t find your future counterpart in the TARDIS we arrived in,” Craig recapped. “Well, what if I told you that they are your counterparts?”

            Unbeknownst to either of the two, their entire exchange was being observed by Rania from her TARDIS, via a monitor separate from the one where she worked on her hack. She waited patiently for Skeeta to make the connection between his TARDIS and HAL, but this conversation between her distant predecessor and her 10-year-old companion sidetracked the endeavor.

            Admittedly, her focus centered on the conversation itself, once Craig somewhat confessed the truth to Skeeta. A proud smile formed along the left corner of her rose-red lips. “Attaboy, Craig,” she murmured. She watched Skeeta walk straight up to Craig, dwarfing the boy with his mountainous height. Even though Skeeta was as harmless as a teddy bear around children, Rania was fleetingly concerned about Craig’s well-being, after he proposed the idea of her and Mireya being future Tinkerers.

            “Ridiculous,” Skeeta dismissed. “I would’ve sensed it.”

            Rania scoffed. “And I bet you did, Big Man.”

            “It’s not ridiculous,” Craig counterargued. “Why else would they be so against you connecting HAL to the TARDIS computer? Because your TARDIS is their TARDIS.”

            “Boom!” Rania exclaimed, imitating a mic drop, in support of Craig. She could see how stumped Skeeta was, and she laughed as he struggled to contend with Craig’s logic. “He’s too smart even for us, Jenkins. You’ll get used to it…and learn to love it.”

            A loud thud reverberating from outside the TARDIS broke her attention from the monitors. Had she watched a second longer, she would’ve noticed Skeeta and Craig also reacting to the sound. They rushed out of HAL’s brain room simultaneously with Rania, who exited her TARDIS with a multi-purpose rifle that she modified herself.

            She emerged from the TARDIS to see Mireya on the floor, right beside the dented compartment board in the pod bay. Across from her was a black man with a muscular build. “Tell me where Craig Williams is,” he demanded as he advanced on the battered Mireya.

            “Craig?!” Mireya rasped, as Rania noticed her hand gripping one of the wrenches that fell out from the damaged board. She used it as a weapon against her assailant, bashing him repeatedly across his face and body. It tore through his flesh, exposing parts of a metal endoskeleton.

            “A Terminator!” Rania gasped. Not since the Robocop incident with Neas and Al-Lee had she seen one. It was the whole reason that she modified her multi-purpose rifle with an EMP that she fired on the Terminator aboard Discovery One, before it could have laid another finger on Mireya. It stood frozen, like a hyper-realistic statue, in the middle of the pod bay.

            Breathless, Mireya looked to her emerald-eyed savior in the black turtleneck, who struck a heroic pose with her rifle. “Thanks,” she told her.

            “Hey, gotta save my own butt once in a while,” Rania returned with a smile.

            The two women circled around the neutralized Terminator, examining it.

            “Why does something so hot gotta be so murderous?” Mireya griped mockingly.

            Rania shook her head, ignoring Mireya’s levity. “The more important question we should be asking is how did it get all the way out here, in the middle of space, in an alternate dimension?”

            As they pondered on the mystery, they heard rapid footsteps echoing through the interconnecting corridors – one heavy, the other light. Rania knew the light ones belonged to Craig and, seeing the bloodied and nude cyborg in the room, rushed over to the corridor before he and Skeeta entered. Once they did, she allowed Skeeta to brisk past her, but she blocked Craig, keeping his line of sight obscured with her body.

            “What’s going on?!” Craig asked, seeing the rifle in Rania’s hand and becoming alarmed. “Are we being attacked?!”

            “We were, sweetheart,” Rania calmly said. “But we handled it.”

            Craig tried to peek around her hourglass figure, but she sidestepped him every time, keeping him limited to inside the corridor. “Then why can’t I come in?” he asked her in frustration.

            “Because it’s nothing a boy your age should see,” Rania established.

            “Oh,” Craig huffed, crossing his arms.

            Rania gave him a playful rub on the head, walking him over to her TARDIS whilst still shielding his view of the naked, battered Terminator. “Wait in the ship for a while, O.K.?” she told him. “We’ll let you know when it’s safe to come out.”

            “O.K.,” Craig huffed again, entering the ship.

            With him out of the scene, Rania reaccompanied her past and future counterparts, all three of them inspecting the frozen Terminator. “What in heaven’s name is this creature?” Skeeta inquired of it.

            “It’s called a Terminator,” Mireya told him.

            Skeeta nodded. “I see. And where have we seen this ‘Terminator’ before?”

            “We?” Mireya noted his personal pronoun usage.

            “Our lil’ friend,” Skeeta nodded towards Rania’s ship. “He convinced me that you girls…you ladies…are my future.”

            Rania and Mireya shared a brief glance, both of them gleefully grinning.

            “May I ask why my future is so female?” Skeeta curiously asked. “After regenerating the first time, I always figured I’d continue to remain a man.”

            Rania understood his concerns; he was, after all, still getting used to being a completely different man (of a completely different race). “It took us a long time to figure it out, after three straight female regenerations,” she said.

            “Three?!” Skeeta bellowed in wide-eyed astonishment.

            Mireya gave him a gentle pat on the shoulder. “Baby, you got some wild times comin’,” she forewarned him, albeit jokingly.

            “But how? Why?!” the desperate Skeeta begged to know.

            “Because we miss Kristin, honey,” Rania consoled.

            Mireya supported her standpoint, having come to the same conclusion from a future sense. “Each one of us have been headstrong, independent, crafty, witty…”

            “…flirty, quippy, kind, caring, loving, supportive…” Rania continued.

            “…and protective,” both Time Ladies finished in perfect sync.

            Skeeta was overcome with emotion, fighting back tears. “Makes sense,” his voice broke. “I never once stopped thinking about her, after I left our Earth for her protection.”

            “We know, baby,” Mireya wiped a tear from her eye. “We haven’t either.”

            The sentimental moment shared by the three Tinkerers was suddenly disrupted by the voice of HAL, who interjected and insisted, “Might I suggest a full internal analysis of the cybernetic organism to better understand its purpose aboard Discovery?”

            “NO!” Rania and Mireya roared to the A.I.

            “I’m sorry, but only Skeeta is authorized to deny or approve my request.”

            Skeeta noticed his future counterparts looking on him with imploring eyes. For the first time since their paths crossed in the space station, he finally saw them as his successors – delegates of an exciting, promising future.

            “You heard the ladies, HAL,” he said. “The answer’s no.”

            “Very well, Skeeta,” HAL conceded.

            Rania and Mireya were relieved to finally have Skeeta on their side. But that relief was short-lived when they heard Craig coughing violently from inside Rania’s TARDIS. Hearing it, Mireya cried out, “Oh, no!” She rushed inside the ship with the heavily concerned Rania and Skeeta following after her, abandoning the stationary Terminator.

            In their departure, one of the ceiling panels automatically slid open. From it emerged a pair of robotic arms that hovered over the Terminator’s head. The left arm proceeded to slice open the back of the head with a laser scalpel, while the other peeled back the synthetic flesh to expose a CPU port.

----------------------------

            Mireya called out Craig’s name half a dozen times as she darted into Rania’s TARDIS. She and her past counterparts expected to have found the 10-year-old in the console room, but there was no one there. This heightened Mireya’s panic, prompting her to run to other areas of the ships, thoroughly checking for Craig’s whereabouts.

            Meanwhile, Rania and Skeeta were confused.

            “I don’t know why she’s so worked up over a cough,” Skeeta said of Mireya.

            “It did sound like a really bad one though,” Rania noted, her own anxiety swelling. “Craig didn’t show any signs of being sick before we got here. Could HAL have done something to the life support systems?”

            “You really think he’d be capable of that?” Skeeta frowned.

            “Skeeta, he killed Discovery’s entire crew, including Poole and Bowman!”

            “HAL?! Look, I know he seems a little cold, but he’s just a machine.”

            “An intelligent machine that is capable of murder – just like that Terminator.”

            Their argument ended abruptly when Mireya returned, out of breath and sobbing. “I can’t find him anywhere!” she wept. “It’s happened again!”

            “Whoa, whoa, back up,” Rania reacted in alert. “What do you mean ‘again’?”

            Before Mireya could elaborate, the three Tinkerers heard TARDIS engines dematerializing; however, they weren’t coming from Rania’s ship.

            There was only one other TARDIS that could have made such sounds.

            “MY SHIP!” Skeeta thundered, summoned back out of his successor’s ship to respond to the theft in process. Rania and Mireya accompanied him outside, discovering the Terminator’s body gone from the pod bay area. “HAL!” Skeeta called out to the A.I. “What’s going on?!” He received no answer.

            Running to HAL’s brain room, they arrived in time to witness Skeeta’s TARDIS vanishing out of sight.

            “My TARDIS!” Skeeta bellowed in horror and rage. “HAL’s stolen my TARDIS!”