Chapter 4: Memories of the Earth’s Past

A discharge of a powerful stun gun can incapacitate a person for half an hour. This was not in my best interest, so I reduced the output of my device to its minimum beforehand. Nevertheless, it was enough for Bobby, after a few seconds of convulsions, to settle down on the wall and regain consciousness for several minutes.

I took her gun, phone, and wallet from her during that time. After gaining access to the net, I decided to find out a few facts, and by the time an exasperated Bobbie was on her feet and aware of her situation, I already knew that there was no patient named Amelia Rose Stansen listed in any of the hospitals in the city.

"Parker..." Bobbie hissed, but I cut her off halfway through the conversation by swinging the gun in front of her nose.

"I ask, you answer. Question one: Is Stans still in that mansion?" That's really the most important information right now. If Doc has been taken somewhere, to give the cops a reason to search the place, I'll have to become a victim and a witness in the case myself.

Bobby was silent, taking her time answering.

"Don't make this harder than it has to be, baby, and believe me, neither you nor I would like it to go any further," I hadn't really thought about what to do if Bobby didn't cooperate, but now... How could I be so sure? I'd never interrogated a man before. I seem to have forgotten some very important parts of my life.

"Yes," Bobby finally spat out.

"Where, do you know?

"No," the girl answered quickly. Too hastily, as if she were afraid for Stans.

"Come on, you've been with her so long, don't you care if she dies here without proper help?" Yeah, that's the right approach, Bobby's eyes flashed with surprise and fear for her friend. "Cindy has no idea what Doc has done to herself, she needs to be examined, and the doctors need to get data on what has happened to her. She's in danger, do you understand that, Bobby? Time is running out."

"Doc's on the second floor, there's a room with medical equipment," the girl surrendered, "but the doctor goes to see her, and she said her condition is stable.

"You kept Stans locked up. It's not a question, it's a statement. I'll tell the cops about the double kidnapping and the fact that Stans was, in fact, held in slavery. There is enough evidence in this lab. Would you be so kind as to shut your pretty mouth with that while I'm calling," I handed the girl a rag. "What? It's clean, and I don't want you to throw anything away. Like giving the cops my name."

The conversation with the police was surprisingly easy, except for the fact that they tried to ask my name five times. The officer who picked up the phone didn't allow herself to question my words and wrote down the address of the estate and all the other details provided.

"So, Bobby," I continued after the call, "you have a choice: help me escape now and get on with my life in relative peace, or stay here and go to jail with Cindy and everyone else. Keep in mind, if I can't get out of here before the cops arrive, I'll have to testify."

Surprisingly, Bobby really hesitated.

"If you help me now, I promise I'll handle the Stans problem personally. You don't have much time to think about it," I pressed a little more.

"Okay," Bobby decided, and immediately tried to take charge. "Then we have to erase all traces of us first."

"I've already done that."

The girl was surprised by this turn, and hesitantly asked me again.

"And my accounts on the computer Doc..."

"I had faith in your discretion." I smirked, "Okay, stomp a meter ahead of me. Get out, open the door."

There was no one in the hallway. Bobby tried to go straight to the back door, but I held her back.

"We need to lock the lock," I explained my manipulation of the door, "Cindy might try to destroy the evidence, and we don't want that, right?"

Done. Now to get into the lab, you'll have to take the door out, and it's not that easy.

"Move to the garage," I ordered, and Bobby took the shortest route, just past the post with the security guard who didn't like facehunters, "No, there's the security post, we'll go past the shower room."

"But there are electronic locks, I don't know the codes," Bobby objected.

"No one does," I grinned, "except me. And we'd better hurry before somebody makes a fuss about it.

I miscalculated. Opening the second door on her way to the garage, Bobbie bumped nose-to-nose with the two guards, who were obviously trying to do it before her.

For a second, the girls stared at each other. And then Bobby attacked her ex-girlfriends first before they knew what was going on. At that moment I was glad I'd been smart-if I hadn't forced Bobby to open all the doors for me, our escape would have been over. I don't think she would have sided with me if I had been in the hands of the guards. Now there were two armed guards on one side of the scale, and me, also with a gun, on the other. The girl was essentially left with no choice.

A scuffle ensued. The women fought with skill, using a forceful style to crush the opponent. Exactly the way a real guard should act, though they lacked a bit of mass. Bobby managed to dislodge the gun from one and secure the gun hand of the other criminal. I didn't want to make unnecessary noise by shooting, so I rushed to the dropped gun, the disarmed girl too.

Panic erupted for a moment. After all, I no longer had time to use my pistol, and my opponent was clearly dangerous in hand-to-hand combat.

The guard's first punch came on an awkward block. Oh, she was much stronger than me physically, but we were already too close. I didn't believe I could overpower a trained guard with muscles like mine, but habit took over: grabbing my opponent by the collar of her uniform, I fell on my back, taking the girl with me, and pushing her in the stomach with both feet in the process. While we were falling, she managed to put her fist in my face twice. What a way with the locals. Then I rolled smoothly sideways and jumped to my feet. The guard, on the other hand, was in a very awkward position: upside down, she was sliding down the wall, her back against it.

I was afraid she would get up before I could catch her like that again, so I ran up and knocked her out with my pistol. I really didn't want to get hit in the head again. I usually bound criminals with a web, and with my dexterity this was a simple matter, but I knew where and with what force to hit to stun a man.

"Wow," Bobby whistled behind me. "The boy is so dangerous," she hummed.

The other guard was lying there with her nose broken and her eyes rolled back, alive. Bobby, on the other hand, was twirling her trophy pistol in her hands.

"Ladies first," I nodded at the door.

So you got a gun now, then what? The cops are on their way, we're either in the same boat, or you go to jail. Bobby understood that, too, and so she took my advice, only laughing as if I had said something funny. Maybe she liked her own reworking of Jackson's song that much, though.

We made it to the right truck without incident. Bobby got behind the wheel, and I hid in the sleeper behind her with the curtain on my side. A fully enclosed sleeper could have aroused suspicion. Fortunately, this precaution proved unnecessary. We were not even stopped on the way out. What's more, the guards didn't care who was driving, or where the car was going. Thus we left Cindy Shaw's lair.

A police car passed us on the way out of the woods, speeding by at full throttle.

"Wow," I wondered, "how fast! Impressive, we might not have made it in time.

"Pfft... What did you think? A kidnapping report from a guy, and a minor, too."

I didn't comment on that statement, there are more important things on the agenda.

"You need to disappear, the call came from your phone. But rest assured, I will keep my promise. As soon as Stans is transferred to an official hospital, I will help the doctors make a proper diagnosis. There is, however, a chance that the... Uh, the more competent authorities might be interested," I didn't tell her about S.H.I.E.L.D., of course, "Then they'll figure it out even faster than I will."

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Bobby looked at me suspiciously.

"You're not your average teenager, are you?"

"Regular teenagers don't get kidnapped to work on illegal research," I hummed, staring at the bruises in the mirror.

I suggested Bobby split up, but she insisted on taking me home. She was weird, she'd have to worry about herself. We agreed that she would drop me off at the same place she'd kidnapped me, a five-minute walk from home. The girl grinned and suggested that I no longer take that route, because, she said, this alleyway, which reached almost to my backyard, was an ideal place for a lone attack, even in broad daylight. I ignored her words and staggered home, pulling on the hood of my sweatshirt and thinking about how to explain my bruises and my absence for several days to my family. I had some experience with this kind of thing, though. My whole superhero life has consisted of lying to loved ones, and I'm not exactly thrilled about it.

Only now it occurred to me that the police could easily connect my lead on Cindy Shaw to the discovery of missing Peter Parker, since my uncle and aunt must have filed a missing persons report... Shit.

Then my right shoulder exploded in a wild pain, something shoved me from behind, and random blows fell on my head. I recoiled in shock and covered my arms. What the fuck? Would Bobby's warning be justified so quickly? In the semi-darkness of the alleyway, the shadow of a hooded guy was flitting in front of me. Some fucking juvenile mugger!

A cold rage seized my mind. I intercepted my hand with the piece of pipe, then blocked the other and smacked my forehead into my opponent's face with all my might. The body recoiled, the teenager's knees buckled, he pressed himself against the trash can and covered his face with his hands, sobbing. I wanted to hit him a few more times, but this pathetic behavior knocked me out of fight mode. He no longer attacked or defended himself, but just sat there and clamped his profusely bleeding nose. The long bangs made it impossible to see the attacker's face.

I turned and walked on, my head ringing with emptiness. I acted on instinct, hard out of habit. I wanted to beat him up, and I would have, if he hadn't reacted so suddenly and incongruously. At the end of the alley I looked back and took one last look at the hunched figure walking away-the attacker was a girl.

The house was empty. It was probably a good thing, I'd have a chance to prepare for my aunt and uncle. Why was it so empty, like a bachelor pad? Aunt May would never let this happen. It's weird. I open the fridge. The smell of stale sausages hits my nostrils right away, and the milk's been stale for a week, too. No one's lived here for at least the whole time I've been gone. But where could they have gone? A look around the kitchen and living room reveals no obvious memories, but I recognize the place anyway. Memory holds memories of where things lie, where the floors are leaking, and where there's mold on the gutter. I've lived here for sure, but this place doesn't make me feel at home.

In the bathroom, I rinsed and medicated all my abrasions. It wasn't yet time for me to come in at night covered in bruises and wake up healthy in the morning. How silly, the worst bruise came from that tramp in the alley-even the skin burst at the point of impact, and my whole shoulder was swollen.

After I finished my bathroom routine, I went up to the second floor as a matter of habit, but instead of my room, I found it to be a mixture of a warehouse of old junk and a lab. Strange, I would never allow such a mess in my workplace. Are those dirty clothes in the corner? But at the same time, I realize that this was where Stans was working on the project.

The thick layer of dust told me that no one had been in this room in months. But no, there was a path of dust, trampled through to the disassembled system unit, from which the video card and power supply had been removed. It was as if the place had been temporarily set up as a lab, and then abandoned again. Nothing to do here; I need a bed and a sound sleep.

There was a bedroom on the first floor. Except there was nothing here that I remembered from my childhood. No posters on the walls, no tools, no traces of my activities at all, just furniture, clothes, and a computer.

The PC started up without any problems. The account was "Peter" with no password. What the hell?! I would never leave my computer unprotected. Opening the browser, it was time to find out who I was! The first line in the browser history is the Three Body Problem.

It's... I remember.

I looked at my browser history again. The Three Body Problem game is my google search query. Liu Xitsin's Task of Three Bodies, In Memory of Earth's Past dilogy read online - last page opened. Just a book. "In Memory of Earth's Past," what a terrible title, but how accurate.

I am the last memory of Earth's past. My Earth. It didn't work. I didn't go back in time, it's not my universe. In this universe, Threesolaris is just a book. Which means it's all for nothing, everyone is dead.

I suddenly realized with all clarity that I had lost them, who had once lived here with me, forever. I wanted to disappear, to stop being.

Somehow I reached my bed and fell into a life-saving sleep. I was no longer glad that I remembered, on the contrary, I wanted to forget everything again, just like I had a week ago. But I couldn't. Instead, my mind kept playing over and over the memories of those events...

*** ATENTION! ATENTION! This is where the flashback begins. Flashback in crossover, crossover in flashback... a really confusing part, retelling the events in Peter's past world that caused him to end up like this. In fact, reading the flashback is not necessary. If you feel confused and not interested, feel free to skip to the next chapter ***

Earth's conflict with the Threesolaris had been one-sided from the beginning. All attempts by Congress and the UN to organize a defense were doomed to fail. We had four hundred years to prepare for an invasion, but that war was lost before the first Threesolaris ships even left their home planet. Traitors. ETS - Earth Threesolaris Society. They gave the aliens all the information about humanity. And the Threesolaris took advantage of it. They realized the threat that rapidly evolving humanity posed to them. A technological explosion was what they feared. By the time the Threesolaris fleet arrived on Earth, who knows what heights Earth science would have reached. They had created their ultimate weapon, Sophane, a supercomputer inside a proton.

Just a proton. A tiny particle with no real power, but by interfering with Particle accelerator, it destroyed fundamental Earth science.

The first victim of the Sofans and the ETS was Tony Stark. Initially, Threesolaris considered Earth's most dangerous scientists to be other people. Reed Richards: his space-time theory was ahead of not only Earth science, but even Threesolaris science. Bruce Banner, whose gamma ray results were incredible. Hank Pym, who was the closest to the technology of matter based on strong nuclear interaction. But ETS leaders convinced Threesolaris that all these brilliant minds paled in the face of the threat posed by Tony Stark.

No, he was not the planet's most brilliant scientist, and his greatest creation, the cold fusion reactor, though ahead of Earth science, was not out of step with Threesolaris' anticipated timetable for civilization. But Tony Stark possessed two other qualities that weighed far more heavily than the genius of the other people on the list. Mental toughness and rational thinking as an engineer and armorer. Tony was not obsessed with basic science like the other scientists on this list; even his reactor was designed out of necessity. The collapse of the fundamental physics theories that were supposed to provide the Sophans' actions would hit Iron Man much less than it would hit the other scientists. Tony had many other interests in life, had already become a superhero, had already designed a damn iron suit. After all, he just knew how to enjoy life. It is extremely unlikely that such a man would have killed himself because of the actions of the Sofans.

As for the second quality, with all basic science research stagnating, it would be the technologies already mastered and the people capable of applying them with the greatest efficiency that would come to the fore. It was Tony Stark's engineering and weapons talent that made Threesolaris wary of the future. If such a man had all the resources of the planet in his hands, it is not certain that four hundred years from now, during the doomsday battle, Threesolaris' technological advantage would remain as undeniable.

The Sophans attacked Tony as soon as he arrived on Earth. It was his research they sabotaged in the first place. While other scientists were looking for errors in their calculations and equipment malfunctions at the Particle accelerator's, Tony Stark had already come to the realization of humanity's place in the Arrow and Farmer hypotheses.*

A couple of days later, the press once again captured how eccentric the billionaire can be during one of his drunken escapades. That same night, shocking footage of Iron Man's death became public. ETS struck its own blow. Tony Stark was a superhero, his death did not need to be disguised as an accident, those wishing to avenge him could form a line from the Iron Man Tower to the Statue of Liberty. And even the ensuing destruction of Stark's labs, though questionable, still fit with vigilante lore. The ETS, directed by the ubiquitous Sothans, systematically cleared out all samples of cold fusion technology.

Stark was followed by other scientists. In most cases, there was little or no ETS involvement. There were enough Sophans to go around. A series of mass suicides of the world's leading minds swept through the world. Otto Octavius, Hank Pym, Amadeus Cho, and many other lesser-known scientists could not withstand the pressure. Bruce Benner was also psychologically broken, but had no way of ending his existence. However, his state of mind was so shaken that he was no longer a threat as a scientist.

Reed Richards almost followed his colleagues, the collapse of his time-space theories and the inconstancy of the fundamental laws of physics became an unbearable burden on him. I managed to prevent his suicide at the last moment. And then more than once I defended Reed against attempts on his part by the ETS.

Many convulsive actions were taken by us during that period. In fact, all of humanity went into global hysteria. Eventually Reed and I made the decision to go to sleep for two hundred years using cold hibernation technology. Waiting for the completion of the space elevator.

But humanity exceeded our expectations. When we woke up, humanity had already built a huge space fleet, mastered gamma-ray laser and fusion technology. Alas, not cold fusion. Moreover, humans were confident of defeating Threesolaris, and ETS had been destroyed. Society had managed to go through the Great Schism and the Second Renaissance, the superpowers had disappeared, and now the Golden Age was in full swing.

Only basic science never got off the ground. In the universities, the awakened professors of my time could still teach from textbooks two hundred years old. To our shame, we too believed in the power of our race, for this dream bribed us like a sweet dream that became a reality. By happy coincidence, Reed and I were aboard the Blue Cosmos when our also recently awakened contemporary took over the flagship of the fleet, the Natural Selection. He was convinced that Earth had no chance of winning, and was trying to give humanity a chance at survival in this way. I truly admire this man.

Blue Space and three other ships rushed to intercept. And then came the shocking news that the one and only Threesolaris probe that had reached the Solar System fifty years ahead of schedule, a Drop the size of a truck, had destroyed the entire Earth space fleet. A fusion based on strong nuclear interaction technology and an engine beyond humanity's comprehension. Nothing in the solar system proved capable of destroying the Blob. No one could escape it. But by then we had already left the Solar System.

Natural Selection was on course for a star that had a gas giant planet in its system. It could have been used for refueling. The journey would only take a couple thousand years. Our fleet of five ships could have made it that far. But the calculations were wrong. We didn't take into account the braking effect of passing gas-dust clouds. In fact, the fleet would have spent 50,000 years on the road. There wouldn't have been enough spare parts or fuel to go that far.

I don't know the name of the ship that attacked first. The thermonuclear bombs exploded fifty kilometers away from all the ships at the same time. For twenty seconds the atomic flames of the explosions pulsed at infrasound frequency. When the powerful electromagnetic pulses reached the ships, their hulls vibrated, generating monstrous waves of infrasound. A bloody fog enveloped everything. The crew died, but the fuel and the spacecraft remained intact.

I foresaw this attack. The Captain of the Blue Space and I decided not to attack first. Instead, the crew donned spacesuits, and all the air was pumped out of the ship. In this way, we protected ourselves from the infrasound bombs. After that we destroyed the last enemy ship, picked up fuel and resources, and continued on our way.

Reed and I had the trust of the crew. Everyone relied on our intelligence. People thought we could invent new technologies using captured resources, since the Sophans had finally left us alone. Some even believed that, thanks to our inventions, they could live to find a new home. Faith was the only thing these people had left.

But Reed and I didn't believe; we knew it was impossible. So we created a different plan. Within six months, Reed had completed his space-time theory of two hundred years ago and built the first time machine in human history. We were going to go back in time and prevent disaster. Keep the Red Bank from sending a radio transmission to Alpha Centauri. Keep Threesolaris from finding out Earth existed. But they wouldn't let us.

The Sophans were probably watching us after all, and eventually decided to interfere. Instead of traveling back in time, I ended up in some parallel universe where the story of the conflict with Threesolaris is just a science fiction novel, and what happened to Reed, I can't even imagine.

Note:

*The shooter's hypothesis is this: a sniper shoots at a target, penetrating it every ten centimeters. Now imagine that the surface of the target is populated by a race of intelligent two-dimensional beings. Their scientists, observing the universe, discovered the great law: "Every ten centimeters there is a hole in the universe. They took the momentary whim of the shooter as a law of nature.

There is something of a horror movie in the farmer's hypothesis. So, every morning on the turkey farm begins with the farmer feeding the birds. The learned bird, who has observed this phenomenon for nearly a year, concludes, "Every morning at eleven, the food arrives. On Thanksgiving morning, the know-it-all proclaims this law to her fellow creatures. But that day, at eleven o'clock, the farmer slaughters all the turkeys instead of feeding them.

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