Chapter 2

Disclaimer: none of the characters are mine, but belong to SyFy™.

Dr. Allison Blake woke up feeling startled, to put it mildly. “Jack,” she whispered intently, “Jack!”

“What?” Jack muttered next to her. “You’ll wake up the children and I would rather not have the talk with Kevin under such circumstances – explaining it to Zoe when she was his age was bad enough.”

“Jack!” Allison said weakly. “That’s not it. I had a very strange dream: I was in a confrontation with Beverly Barlowe in a back room of our house, and then she was washed away with a flood of warm milk!”

There was a pause as Jack looked at Allison trying to choose words at five in the morning with-out sounding too rude. “Allison,” he finally came up with, “this house has no back room, which makes me wonder: have you been testing GD’s astronaut food just a bit too much?”

“That – is a viable theory,” Allison said with a grimace. “Fargo had commented yesterday that it tasted funny, but I thought that it was just him and Isaac taking their rivalry one step further, you know?”

“That’s how it often starts,” Jack agreed, crossly. “Somebody decides to take an experiment further and it goes beyond control. We’ll deal with this as soon as GD opens.”

“Good idea,” Allison agreed, snuggling next to him. Soon both she and Carter were asleep once more.

* * *

“Dr. Barlowe? Are you alive?” Beverly’s blonde assistant sounded too unsure for Beverly’s liking.

“Yes!” the psychiatrist turned villain snapped, even as her senses registered a strong smell of smoke. “What has happened?”

“Well, you had established contact with the nanobots in Dr. Blake’s neocortex, when there was some sort of a power surge, and everything just burned out.”

“Burned out? As in ‘electric fire’ burned out?” Beverly’s voice must’ve doubled in pitch and intensity.

“Yes, the machinery glowed white-hot!” the assistant nodded. “How did you survive?”

“Good question,” Beverly nodded curtly, as she stood up, the smoked metal of her ‘crib’ splintering in Beverly’s grasp without either woman noticing. “Clean up this mess. I’m off to speak with my supplier – I am not going down without a fight!”

“What, where,” the blonde gasped, but Beverly was already up and gone.

TBC