Phase
Part I of III

“But he knows you’re telling me all this,” Nelson says. “He knows you’re reporting everything back to me.”

^^^

“Are you talking to Nelson now?” Davidson barks at me back on Lodo. His uncanningly timed question unnerves me.

“No,” I lie. “I’m watching the news.”

Davidson is overweight and sweaty. He wears these strange ornate clothes he had the Lodotians make for him. His outfit looks like he’s wearing a tacky Asian basketball uniform. His purple silk shorts are edged with gold trim. He wears a tank top with a painfully complex landscape scene stitched into the fabric. The Lodotians think he’s some kind of god.

“The news, huh?” He huffs to let me know he knows I’m lying and lumbers out of the room. Is he psychic? I'm not sure. That is not the first time he seemed to read my mind.

^^^

Back to Nelson on Earth.

“Do you think he’s giving me false information? Or does he just not care what we know?”

Nelson stands up from the conference table. The zigzag pattern is replaced by a pulsing blue ring that slides across his blank face, down his neck and into his chest.

“I’m not sure,” he says. “We need to prepare for both possibilities. Are you sure you’ve watched him every second?”

“Every damn one. He’s a freak.”

“Yet we can’t forget he is one of the most intelligent human beings who’s ever lived,” Nelson says. “God knows what he’s capable of.”

I know fearless leader is right. It was easy to forget that Davidson was an Ultra genius. To look at him you wouldn’t have a clue who he was. He looked like an underpaid bureaucrat with a desk-job ass; an accountant waiting for the three o’clock raid on the vending machine. Yet he could teleport himself across the universe and raise a multi-limbed species from roughly a medieval culture to a space-traveling, missile-spitting, nuclear power in less than eight years. Scary stuff.

I shrug at Nelson. “Well, all I can do is wait and see.”

Story of my life.

^^^

I’ve had a couple off different nicknames over the years. I’ve been called The Ghost and The Observer. Bandog calls me Peeping Tom. My official name, bestowed upon me by Nelson, and accepted by myself, is “Phase.” I am basically a prison guard. A tattletale. A narc. I keep an eye on the bad guys we can’t catch or kill. Davidson is my sole client right now.

At this second, I am actually in three different places at once. I have learned that three consciousnesses are all I can handle without drooling. I can split into more than that, but things get nuts after four or five. Try watching four television sets at the same time, then multiple that by a thousand and you’ll have an idea of what it’s like. Chaos.

I keep one of me with Davidson, while another me hangs back on earth, reporting to Nelson, watching TV, and reading when someone will turn the pages for me.

And then there is the constant me. The me that never changes. The one that lives in the quiet place. I try not to concentrate on that one.

I am different than the other Ultras. Nelson can’t quite explain me.

My condition struck in 1979. I was seventeen years old. A pothead cutting class and playing Asteroids. I had a ‘74 Nova with an 8-track player in the dash and a 350 under the hood. I had yet to be laid for the first time.

When the Ultra Syndrome hit me I had on blue jeans, a pair of hiking boots with red laces, and a black Led Zeppelin T-shirt. I still have them on today. Although I am over 40, I still look like that seventeen-year-old pothead. That’s what getting plucked out of time does to you.

Davidson occasionally makes fun of my appearance, although I don’t see where he has room to talk.

“Whoa, dude,” he snorts like a dork. “Too bad you didn’t have a bong with you when the syndrome hit.”

^^^

It’s a typical night on Lodo. The planet’s six colorful moons waltz slowly across the blue-black sky. Davidson is finishing off his dinner for the evening. It looks good. Some kind of noodles with a salad. I haven’t tasted food in a while. No biggie, I’m not hungry much.

“So what’s Nelson’s take on you?” Davidson asks. There are times I know he’s glad I’m watching him. He has another human to talk to, albeit an intangible one. “By your nickname, I bet he thinks you’re in some kind of quantum phase-shifting mode. I bet he thinks you come in and out of our reality in a wave so you can be split into an equal continuum. That’s why you can be several places at once. And that’s why those places can be anywhere you want.”

“Something like that,” I answer. “I don’t get the math really.”

“Hmm,” Davidson says. He stares silently, then gets up and comes toward me. He puts his hand through my body, which is not really there. Obviously, it goes right though me.

“You see, that’s just it,” he says rubbing his chin.

“What?” I ask. “ You’ve done that a hundred times before.”

“About nine, actually. And it doesn’t make sense.”

“Which part?”

“How can you be standing there if you don’t exist?”

“Huh?”

“You have no substance. There’s nothing holding you up,” he says, pointing to my circa 1979 hiking boots. “If you’re a projection, why are you reacting to the ground as if it’s solid? Why aren’t you sinking into the earth or floating a meter in the air?”

He’s right. I can’t actually feel the ground beneath my feet yet I walk over it to get around. I can pass though walls like they’re not there, but I do not sink. It is a problem Nelson and company have been struggling with for two decades.

“I have no idea, man,” I wave him off. I don’t want an evil freak like Davidson figuring me out.

He stares at my feet another moment then sits back at his table.

^^^

I have been stuck on this planet with Davidson for two years. Ever since the Antarctic Confrontation. That was when he teleported us here.

He’d hatched some scheme to imprison Peacehammer on the South Pole, and had been prepared for a quick retreat if things didn’t go as planned. When the situation went to hell, he took an exit all the way across the universe.

But the doctor had been thinking ahead. Davidson had escaped him twice before and Nelson wanted to know how, so this time he brought me. I had been watching two baddies on opposite sides of the world at the time. The Freak was living a life of total debauchery in Costa Rica, while my other client, Allison Three, had dug a hole for herself in the side of a Himalayan mountain and appeared to be hibernating. Nelson pulled me off both jobs and took me to the Antarctic for Davidson. It was that big a deal.

“Find Davidson and stick with him,” Nelson had shouted over the screaming ramjets of Interceptor 4 as we sped toward the bottom of the world (I can be anywhere I want to be in the universe, but I’ve got to get there the old fashioned way -- train, plane, boat, car, spaceship, teleportation or just hoofing it). “I want to know how he’s been escaping and what he plans on doing next. This is high priority, Andy.”

By the time we landed, the fun had already begun. Davidson had managed to imprison Peacehammer inside this weird, giant green cone that was like a half mile high. Apparently the thing was made of some kind of stuff that had to be kept frozen, thus the chilly setting.

Viceroy, Karen McVee and The Dane had freed Clair Watson -- a.k.a Thermite --and were letting Davidson’s crew have it. I recognized some of the bad guys: Spector, Mike Duncan, Shade, Amber Rage.

As the fight blazed I basically walked right into the heart of Davidson’s lair. Spector and Duncan ignored me. They knew there was nothing that could stop me. They also knew there was nothing I could really do to affect the battle.

Amber Rage saw me walking up to the concrete and steel entrance of Davidson’s bunker and let loose an incredible amount of firepower in my direction. Yellow bolts of charged protons released from the jewel in her forehead shot through me like a hundred electric arrows. They hit a packed snowdrift behind me, instantly vaporizing it to steam. It was very cool.

She gawked for a minute and then realized who I was.

“Oh, yeah, I heard about you,” she said and shot up into the sky to flank Viceroy, who was going at it hand-to-hand and airborne with Spector.

I didn’t see any more of the battle after that. I got inside and started looking for Davidson. It took me a few minutes to find him, and, sure enough, he was already well into his escape. He had some briefcase-sized device with him that unfolded into a thingy that looked like a portable shower. He was tightening wingnuts on the frame when I came up to him.

“Hello, Phase,” he said, without turning from his task. “I had hoped to flee before you arrived.”

“Sorry to disappoint you Mr. Davidson,” I said, all official. “Now if you’ll just stop what you’re doing and surrender we can make this easy.”

“Easy?” He smiled. “I can’t have that.”

We were deep underground at this time, but the explosion that erupted above us was strong enough to shake concrete dust from the ceiling and burst a few light bulbs. I would later learn that the explosion was caused by Clair sacrificing herself to free Peacehammer from the cone. I still miss her.

“Gotta go, Ace,” Davidson said, flicking switches and turning dials while he stood in the center of the portable shower.

Not knowing what else to do I stepped beneath the showerhead with him and POP! we were suddenly two million light years away on the surface of Lodo.

“Whoa!” I said.

“Ah, crap,” said Davidson.

I quickly discovered that Davidson had been here several times before. The Lodotians knew him well enough to have erected huge statutes of him all over the place and put his picture on their money. They also enjoyed showing him how well they had learned their military drills, how well they could use their strange flying tanks, and how ready they were to conquer the evil rulers of Earth.

He’d been coming here for the past eight years, preparing the Lodotians for war. He told me once that it had taken him years to find an advanced species with militant tendencies that could survive on our world. He couldn’t find anything in our galaxy and had to look out of town. Then he stumbled on the poor Lodotians. What luck! They might look a little gross but they could fight like hell. And there were four billion of them! Between them and his Ultras, he said, Earth would be his within the year.

I told him I thought that was pretty optimistic, but to be honest, I wasn’t quite sure.

Continued next month

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Here's the first hundred words or so of next month's installment

PHASE Part II

“So, where do you keep the real you, Andrew?” Davidson says, pushing away his dinner plate. His Lodotian servant pads in promptly to clean the mess, making fleshy, galloping thumps across the floor. In a flurry of tentacles she clears all the cups, bowls, plates and silverware from the tabletop and is out the door. “There’s got to be an original somewhere.”

Over the years of watching him, I’ve gotten to know Davidson. Up next to the guy on Atlantis who invented the Ultra Syndrome, he’s the smartest human who’s ever lived. Yet he’s got this streak of moron in him. He knows everything about chemistry, physics, biology, etc., but he doesn’t know shit about people ...