Flashback (The Saskia Brandt Series Book Two) Read Online Free PDF Page B

remained in her pocket at all times. They connected her physically to the future.
    Someone in the crowd had stopped walking. It was a young woman with blue hair. She turned to look at Saskia.
    Na, Schlumpf ? thought Saskia. The Smurf had a looseness to her frame. A scarf flickered around her neck, smoky and silent. Her blouse was open on a T-shirt with the logo ‘ cool as fcuk ’. The woman’s skin was cloud white. So who was she?
    Something inside Saskia assaulted the Internet.
    (A match from a photo taken at Maynard School, Exeter, 1998: Jem Shaw, British)
    Saskia smiled. The woman smiled back: relief. She entered the café as though the meeting were arranged.
    Before the Smurf joined her, Saskia thought, Tell me more . Data rushed through her. She noticed an email attachment from a therapist registered in Exeter and stopped it with a twitch of thought. It began:
Jem Shaw: There is this anxiety in the background... like the hiss of a TV tuned to a dead channel.
Me: This hiss actually comes from the music box, doesn’t it?
JS: (is startled) How did you know about that?
Me: You mentioned it yesterday, when you were under.
JS: Perhaps it comes from the music box, yeah.
Me: Do you know the name of the tune?
JS: No, I never did.
Me: Sing it.
(JS hums a tune which I think is Bach’s ‘Ich rouff zu dir mein Jesus Christ’)
    Saskia frowned. Ich ruf zu dir , she thought, Herr Jesu Christ .
Me: Tell about feeling split in two.
JS: Split in two?
Me: Feeling like two people.
JS: Two people. Well.
    Saskia lingered over those words.
    Two.
    People.
    She thought back to a letter she had written earlier in the summer.
    ~
To whom it may concern:
My name is Saskia Brandt but I am living under an assumed name in Berlin. Use the attached information to contact me. It is the year 2003, some twenty years before the summer of my departure, the Indian summer of 2023.
As per the instructions of my representatives, this note should be delivered by hand to my friend Professor David Proctor or his daughter, Dr Jennifer Proctor, no earlier or later than September of 2023. I choose paper and ink because digital media are ephemeral, and I choose plain English because this letter might require the involvement of a third party. This third party should be a close professional associate of either David or Jennifer in the event they cannot be contacted.
Please: To the Proctors – or the person reading in lieu of them – if the technology to travel in time has not been lost or suppressed, I request and require that you make all reasonable efforts to rescue me. I claim this as the right of the second person in history to travel in time. To convince a third party for whom my story is unfamiliar, I will outline my circumstances and how I came by them.
Today, somewhere in Germany, is a little girl no more than five or six years old who will grow up to become the same person who writes this letter. This fact alone makes me sad in a way unique to me.
There was a hope that the time traveller would arrive in some parallel version of their past.
This has not happened. There is one world.
I began this letter with the statement of my name. You should know that my mind is a fusion – I can find no other word – of two people. Some time in the spring of 2023, a woman was convicted of multiple murders. Her name was Ute Schlesinger. This woman was forced to undergo a surgery in which her brain was emptied of all but the deepest structures of her being. Then, a glass bead containing some form of nanoprocessor was implanted near her brain stem. My attempts to identify the source of this nanoprocessing wetware device have come to nothing. It is, I believe, an experimental technology whose existence may not be widely known beyond a few individuals.
The device contains the identity of a second human being. Through some form of impregnating mesh, it imposes this donor mind on the victim’s brain. It is this donor mind that I, Saskia Brandt, am. It is this donor mind that