For the next few hours Rick and Sharon got reacquainted, talking about Jim and BlackCo mostly. After all, Jim and BlackCo were the only things that connected Rick and Sharon together. Rick was glad to see that Jim and Sharon were still a couple, but had to admit he was quite surprised about it. While Rick could see what kept Jim tied to Sharon (she was good looking, smart and paid all of his bills), unless Jim had changed drastically over the last eight years Rick didn't see what kept Sharon hanging around Jim. Jim was a dreamer and a slacker who's admittedly brilliant mind was also saddled with an obsessive/compulsive streak and a fixation on... well, we should all know by now what Jim's fixations are.
And then Rick thought, maybe it was because of those things that Sharon stayed with Jim. She certainly couldn't complain that her life was just like everybody elses.
Sharon's story was pretty straightforward: After graduating college with a business management degree and a minor in business law she headed out into the job market. By that time she and Jim had moved in together full time. Jim meanwhile wasn't in any hurry to finish up his own degree, but he kept busy with his experiments and his inventions, some of which even earned him a few bucks. For a time Sharon worked for a small law firm but when the chance to work for BlackCo came up she jumped at it. That was four years ago. Her superiors were very happy with her work and they soon transferred her to the corporate headquarters. This required moving, but that was ok with both she and Jim. As for Jim, once he finally got his degree he was contacted by ChangeCorp through a university referral program. He was offered a job and he accepted it without looking twice. ChangeCorp was located in Philadelphia, which was perfect since now he and Sharon wouldn't be so far apart. Jim had his own apartment in the city, but he mostly used it as a place to house his private experiments. Half the time he was living with Sharon. Sharon had a roommate she shared the condo with, but Candace was almost always out and didn't mind having Jim around at all.
Rick smiled, thinking back on all of the experiments he and Jim had come up with back in their high school days. "Hey, I wonder if Jim ever figured out how to make that home-made perfume of his without it smelling like Coke?" he said with a laugh. Sharon suddenly shot a look at him of extreme irritation. Rick realized he had said something he shouldn't have. He guessed that Jim hadn't stopped trying to perfect his special perfume and that Sharon had been a guinea pig of one of the less than successful test batches.
"So, uh, Jim's working for ChangeCorp now," Rick said, clearing his throat and changing the subject. "Yup," Sharon nodded, her annoyance completely disappearing. "Today is his first day at work, as a matter of fact."
"Listen, uhm, I'm just curious," Rick then said, finally getting to what he really wanted to know about. "When you two were in college, were you ever into campus clubs or organizations?"
"Well, I was a member of the Honors Society," Sharon answered. "But if you mean the frats or the sororities, no."
"Were you ever involved with causes or crusades?" Rick asked again, thinking back on the footage he'd seen of Jim storming the BlackCo HQ with a commando team of nerds. "You know, like 'Save the Whales' or 'Tear Down the Corporate Establishment', that sort of thing?"
"Of course not," Sharon laughed. "That kind of stuff was around, sure, but I certainly wasn't interested. And Jim, well... you know the stereotype that the kind of girls that are into that sort of thing are flat-chested, near-sighted, hairy legged dyke losers? On our campus that was all very true. So I'm sure you can see that Jim never paid any kind of attention to those kinds of groups or whatever it was they were whining about. He did become quite a fan of the women's volleyball team though."
Rick fell silent as he thought about this. He was trying to connect the dots. The data-streams from the Farscape Project had revealed images of BlackCo HQ under attack. Little six-inch tall plastic people were involved, and so was a group of nerdy terrorists that included good old Jim. This event had never actually happened, in this reality, but maybe what they were seeing was coming from an altered timeline? According to the data-streams the attack had occured four years ago.
But four years ago in the real world, the real timeline, Jim had just been a normal college student. Odd though that that was just when Sharon began working at BlackCo. So there was at least a small connection between Jim BlackCo.
But maybe, Rick mused, if what might have happened four years ago did change the course of time, then maybe the repercussions went back even further in time than any of them had thought. Maybe a change in the timestream was like throwing a pebble into still water - the impact occured at a specific point, but the ripples would change the surface of the water in all directions. And maybe the timeline change set Jim and Sharon on completely new paths, new directions in their lives, but not just from that point in time four years ago, but beginning far earlier than that.
Rick shrugged. Temporal mechanics and transitional space/time shift equations were not his strong suits.
Tue Jul 20 16:34:35 2004