Julia's voice burst around them, "Guys, any time now would be fantastic."

"Almost there, almost there," C muttered, his steady hands navigating Speck's controls. 

"All right, take Danny first," she ordered. 

Then, once, he cut the mike, C murmured, "Dammit, this would be so much easier to do if they would just stand still."

"You're doing fine," Stuart assured him.  

"I know," C said.  "Okay, the kid's almost finished loading up."

The machine whirred ominously as the main screen informed the men, in red all caps, that it was "WORKING."  The bar demonstrating how much of Danny's and Julia's bodies had been locked on rose higher and higher by the second.  By now ninety-five percent was clear, but there could be no possibly safe return until his total mass had been ascertained.

Though he himself had never made the move across the time continuum, K had seen the physical toll it took on those who did, especially on the return trip.  Julia, he remembered, had dealt with the worst of it, being the first to be sent via that accursed glitch-ridden prototype, T-Rod.  Pulling Julia back across T-Rod's flimsy "bridge" had nearly killed her ten years ago.

It was an absolute miracle, though, that she came through without permanent mental or neurological damage, which everyone kept saying would be an inevitable consequence.  She did suffer a seizure like that of a severe epileptic and lay in a near-comatose state for about three days, but she came around nonetheless and made a full recovery over the course of the next few months.   

While Speck had a much more secure, sophisticated design, complete with its own form of A.I., the machine was not without its own glitches.  Everything had to be executed with the utmost care, respecting the device's unprecedented intricacy- which was why K was crossing his fingers so hard that his young friends would come back as whole and unharmed as they had gone in.

The bar hit one hundred percent.  "Okay, we got him," C announced. 

"How much longer for Jules?" Stuart asked K.

"Julia's at seventy-five," K replied.  "Just a half minute more, I'd estimate."

Then another call came in from forty-two years in the past, and Julia spoke again, this time in a scared, breathless tone, "Are you locked on yet?"

"We have Danny, we'll bring him in now," Stuart said.

"You promise it's safe?" she whispered.

"I promise, honey.  He's going to be fine."

Appeased, Julia gave a quick goodbye to Danny, and C executed the transport.  In a flash, there was only one red indicator light on the screen- Julia's.  The lights flickered in the room, but the men's eyes didn't look up and around, distracted.  They were on a mission.

Now came the part which always reminded K of the old Star Trek episodes.  Bit by bit, meticulously percentaged by the data counters, Speck reassembled Danny's body within its mollusk-like compartment.  As soon as the machine announced "Transport Successful," C darted over and lifted the emergency hatch.

Julia's comm beeped.  "Is he there?"

The boy lay limp on the Speck's floor.  His eyes were shut, his mouth slightly open, his limbs spread out to either side of him like he was attempting to make a snow angel without snow.  Gently lifting him out of the machine, C touched two fingers against Danny's throat.  K gulped.

C looked up at Stuart and gave him a thumbs up.  With a stoic nod, Stuart relayed the news to Julia, and K tried to conceal how completely relieved he was as he instructed his old friend to get ready.  He was just as fond of Danny as he was of Julia; he practically considered them his little adopted family. 

"Close her up again," Stuart ordered K, and then turning to C, "Tim, get the kid to the medic team, will you?"

But as Speck closed and sealed, preparing for Julia's touchdown, the room rang with her scream.

"Jules, are you all right?" Stuart called.  "Jules!"

However, she didn't seem to hear him as she cried, "Let me go! Is not funny, Mr. F-"

Then a second, hostile voice hissed over the mike, "Oh, cut the act, would you?  Who do think you are, f---ing Gorbachev?"

C stopped in his tracks, still holding an unconscious Danny.  "Is that who I think it is?"

"Who?" Stuart tapped wildly around the screens and open tabs, asking rhetorical questions over Julia's frightened voice.  "Who is it?  What's going on?  What's happening?"

K's throat went dry.  "He's got her."

C's eyes widened.  As much enmity as there existed between him and Julia, he knew what that could possibly mean.  "God, she's got to get away from him!"

"And quick!" K added.  "She's at ninety-nine percent!"

"Who's got her?  Not Freddie?  Guys, talk to me!" Stuart hated being out of the loop.

The man spoke again.  "Are you real?"

C nodded sagely.  "Yup.  It's the Fredster again."

Frustrated, Stuart ran his hand through his hair, mussing it a little.  "Shit."

"That's exactly what I said," K muttered.

"You're dreaming," she told Freddie.  "Please let go."  In spite of his worry for Julia, Stuart took some personal comfort from her tone; she sounded strained, not at all happy to be near her ex.

Just then, Speck gave the alert.  Her total mass and form had been pinpointed, all that needed to happen now was for Julia to break away for just long enough so that she would come back with no hitches to speak of.

"You're all set, Julia!  Let's go!" K cried- and that time, she heard it.  Julia said something very quietly to Freddie, then, and all of a sudden she gave a loud, hoarse yell.  She had broken away from him.

And she cried, "NOW, K!"

Instantly K executed the transport procedure.  The red dot signifying Julia turned blue on the screen; just as smoothly as you please, the machine starting fragmenting her and drawing her across Speck's continuum bridge, a bridge so fragile that the mass of anything greater than that of a stable atom had the potential of snapping it in half, destroying not only the bridge itself, but whatever was attempting to cross it.  Stuart ran closer to Speck, ready to pull his lady out the second the hatch opened.

K wiped his brow.  Not a moment too soon.

But then a warning appeared on the screen while a recorded, computerized voice stated, "Anomaly Detected."

Stuart rolled his eyes.  "Now what?"

K clicked on the box, which became the message, "Current Mass of Organic Matter Differs From Amount Previously Calculated.  Proceed?"

K read it aloud in his slow, methodical cadence, when Stuart interrupted impatiently and barked from his position beside Speck, "Yes, Steve, proceed!  We're running out of time here!"

But K was unsure.  "Is this supposed to hap-"

"Yes, it is.  Little variations in the body cause minute changes in mass, Speck's very precise, that message pops up every time we do this, you know that!"

"Dr. Preus, I really don't-"

"Do it, you moron!" Stuart snarled.  "Don't question, do it!  Do it NOW!"

Stuart had never spoken that way to K, but it was jarring now that he had.  Automatically K looked down and, swallowing quietly, he clicked "Yes."

The machine's whirring noise grew louder.  And louder.  Soon the very room seemed to shake with the sound.  All the lights flickered again, but much more severely than before.  Speck was taking a beating. 

Then K's eyes focused on the screen one more time before the lights flickered one last time.  And he gasped.  The machine hadn't even begun the transport yet, apparently, due to its attempts to accommodate the new mass, which had not slightly varied by a few grams. 

According to K's screen, the mass had more than doubled.  

Oh, no.  That could mean only one thing.

He shivered, and shouted frantically, "Hold it, wait, we haven't done multiple people at once, we gotta stop-"

Stuart yelled over the mechanical cacophony, "We can't stop Speck mid-transport, Ste- what did you say?"

K tried to repeat himself, but just then the lights extinguished.  All the power in the room, perhaps even in the whole building itself, was being leeched away by Speck.  Only the screens with their creepy block letters spelling out the flashing words "WORKING" or "DANGER," depending on which one your eyes fell upon, were illuminated, reflecting off K's wrinkly face, giving him a ghoulish appearance.  All the two men could do was wait it out.

Thankfully, they didn't have to wait long.  At last, Speck stopped whirring, and the fluorescent lights sputtered back to life, one by one. 

Stuart and K stared at Speck for a long while, afraid of what they might find if they opened the hatch.  The machine itself looked no worse for the wear, if you could excuse the frozen screens dotted about the room and one faint puff of smoke trailing up from where the gears and central motherboard were stored.  The main operating system had indeed taken a toll; how great a toll had yet to be deduced.  Stuart was already planning in the back of his mind to get one of his tech experts on the job as soon as possible.

At last, the voice resounded, "Transport Successful."

Stuart pressed the emergency exit button.  Speck's hatch slowly hissed open.  After calling another medic team down for immediate assistance, K raced over as fast as his legs could carry him. 

"What just happened?" Stuart murmured.  "Steve, what did you do?"

K opened his mouth to lamely protest, perhaps ask why he was to blame when Stuart was the one who gave the order in the first place.  But one look into Speck put those complaints to rest.  They squinted, stared, then briefly looked away with disgusted surprise a second before they decided that, as scientists, they were required to be scientific about this at the moment, and slipped inside to take a closer look.

"I think she's all right," K whispered optimistically.  "She's breathing kind of shallow, but she's breathing."

"Good."  Very carefully Stuart lifted Julia's limp body out - or tried to, anyway.  The hand wrapped around her left wrist still gripped her so tightly, even while its owner too lay senseless, that it held on and kept her from straying too far.

Julia had come back in one piece, and, judging by the gentle thump against K's fingers when he laid them against her throat, still alive.

But she had not come back alone.

Right beside her, maybe a couple of inches away, lay a second body. He had faceplanted into the metal floor of the machine, so only his backside was visible.  But Stuart knew exactly who it was, to his unending chagrin.

"Steve, pry him off her, will you?" Stuart muttered, unable to mask the disgust in his voice. 

So K, trying to avert his eyes from the other person lying there, swallowed and unhooked the long fingers from round her wrist. 

"Okay," Stuart breathed uncomfortably.  "Now, let's check Freddie."

Tucking his hand inside his sleeve (the latex gloves were on the other side of the room, but he still wanted to take some kind of precaution), he reached over and checked the man's pulse.

K froze.  "Well?"

Stuart was dumbfounded.  He looked up.

"Unbelievable," he murmured.  

The medic team was filing in now, ready to take action, but K paid little heed.  "What?"

Stuart blinked.  

"He's alive..."

***********************************************************************************************

The respected men of underground science silently paced the hall each at their own speed, just like they had been doing for the last ten minutes straight.  The digital clock screen on the wall declared the time to have just struck eleven at night. Stuart's George-funded medic team were working deftly, running tests behind the closed door nearest them on the three unconscious victims of Speck.  

K finally broke the silence.  "Well, look on the bright side," he ventured.  "At least now we know it works."

C rolled his eyes.  "Thanks, Captain Obvious.  Any other redundancies you'd like to vocalize?"

K frowned.  "Was that necessary?" Inwardly he said to himself, God, how did I ever end up with such an asshole- and how have I managed to work alongside him for this long?

But since that was a question to which he never could quite learn the answer, he turned to Stuart, who was saying, "That's just it, though.  We still don't know if it really worked."

"Uh, sir, with all due respect," K replied, "you can't tell me that guy in there isn't real.  I saw everything- way more than I needed to see."

"You're telling me," C muttered dryly, rubbing his eyes.  "I had to help put him on the stretcher.  Julia sure missed out.  What a bummer for her."

Stuart glared at him, which coaxed a "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean anything by that."

K shook his head.  Was that a load of baloney.  

He thought back to how the four-person medic team, half of which being female, reacted upon seeing a naked Freddie Mercury lying there on the floor.  And yes, he was completely naked; apparently when Speck referred to "organic mass," it meant flesh, blood, and bone, because not a stitch of clothing was found on him anywhere- an odd turn of events, since Danny and Julia both had returned fully clothed.  Perhaps it had to do with Speck having little to no time to adjust for Freddie's entire form, and instead stuck to the essential foundations with which it had been programmed.  

The younger of the two women, one of the interns who was clearly of an age to have never heard of Queen in her lifetime, couldn't help but breathily observe as they turned him over and moved him, "Not gonna lie, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

K nodded, pretending not to understand, "He does have a handsome face, I admit..."

She squinted, then her eyes widened, face flushing behind her mask.  "Oh, yeah... I mean, I guess..."  But he knew what she was thinking.  

It was something more along the lines of, "Face?  This guy has a face?  I didn't know that, sorry, I hadn't gotten that far up yet..."

However, Freddie had since been sufficiently covered up and dressed in the same standard hospital fare as had the other two.  The tests thankfully were nearly finished; nevertheless, Julia and her son would have to stay there overnight, in case of relapse or other similar complications.

"What I mean is," Stuart explained, "yes, his body was transported, but we've yet to see whether it's just his body, and he's simply going to lay there in a vegetative state, or..."

"Or if he's," K finished, tapping his head, "'all there'?"

"I'd have to get back into the lab, see if anything on that machine is still operational," Stuart muttered, nodding in response to K.  "It's been enough time, the computers had a chance to cool down.  I'll be right back, you two look after Jules, be there when she wakes up.  She'll have questions and answers both, I hope."

With that, he hustled down the hall, heading for his sanctum sanctorum.  C went back to pacing, but K had begun to think right where he stood.  

My God, he said to himself.  He's alive.  Maybe it's just a shell, maybe there's no soul there, no real consciousness... but then again, maybe there is.  

K didn't know much about Freddie.  Julia hadn't told him a lot about those two weeks, and while he enjoyed Queen's music every now and then, he was not a big enough fan to take a closer, behind-the-scenes look at the men who created it.  He liked music, and that was that.  He never felt the need to dig any deeper.

But he did know that in 1977, Freddie had done him a big favor, indirectly provided him the means to straighten his life out- such a favor one man could never forget- and he knew that in the eighties, Freddie contracted AIDS and died a few years later, never allowing him the chance to make it up to him somehow.  

Maybe now's my chance, he mused, rubbing his hands together.  But how?  

Before he could start seriously pondering the idea, one of the nurses walked out of their room and approached him.  "Ms. Samuels is waking, do you want to see her?"

K nodded readily.  "Absolutely.  How's Danny?"

"Still asleep, but he's doing just fine," she said.

The room was separated into two parts by a curtain.  Julia and Danny lay side by side on K's half, while on the other side of the partition lay the hidden, sleeping body of a man who had been dead for thirty-six years.  That alone was a miracle for the ages.

Julia sighed, rolled her head around.  She was stirring- slowly, but surely.  K sat down at her side and waited.