Anybody there?

Well, since it's quiet, I thought I'd toss out story thoughts I've been playing with.

I've generally assumed that Zelda was close to Cally in age and that they'd been raised together. What if they hadn't? What if, due to either genetic engineering or good skin care products, Zelda was Cally's senior by a generation or so? And that Cally was her clone in the more traditional sense of the word, a daughter twin? For this to work, I'd have to guess Cally's parents were foster parents (although, for that distorted reflection thing to work with the rock, I've usually assume they were biological). Suppose being able to adopt a clone of a highly valued citizen was a great privilege, but that part of Cally's rebellious streak came out of everyone expecting her to be just like Zelda? If nothing else, I think it puts a different spin on Zelda's last words if she's telling her _daughter_ that even Servalan's children deserve a chance to live. It also makes Cally's decision _not_ to help raise the 5,000 a bit more interesting - a break with the past on more than one level.

A while back, I was toying with the idea of Avon being a refugee from the System and the Liberator actually being something he'd designed. Hence, his extreme possessiveness of it. It had some obvious problems (the big one being that Avon seemed to have a very established history in the Federation and that he obviously made things as complicated as possible to _get_ the Liberator instead of finding a way to take it with him in the first place).

Well, I kept toying with it and came up with a slightly different scenario.

This requires two Avons (sort of).

Avon 1: Either an acquisition or a creation of the System. Pretty much down to just being a preserved brain at the beginning of all this whose intellectual talents the System uses. He's at least partially separate from whatever the Altas are wired into to keep the intellectual originality they valued in him in the first place functional.

Avon 2: Avon 1 is understandably less than happy with his situation. Escaping himself is borderline physically impossible (brains in a jar require such a support network, etc) besides the basic fact that a brain in a jar can't get out of the jar regardless of where the jar happens to be. Solution? Well, the usual plot device would seem to be a clone body that he could download his own mind into. The problem being that a clone of him in the System would probably not have a much better chance of escaping before joining the canned cranium club. So, the answer is to somehow get the clone _outside_ the System.

Still working on details. Some SF stories have allowed for the use of adopted embryos on colony worlds to keep the gene pool from becoming to limited. It's possible I could have the Federation doing this. If the Clone Masters played some part in this sort of thing, I wouldn't even have to work out the technicalities of transporting the embryo from the System, just the technicalities of one entity in the System being able to download a computer coded DNA sequence when the Clone Masters do a mass runoff (or possibly multiples and our Avon was the only one who made it to the right place at the right time?).

The chain of circumstances that got Avon on the prison ship may be a bit more suspicious (I'm working on alternatives to 'unbelievable coincidence'), but he's in the the right place at the right time to meet up with Liberator.

Avon 1 had downloaded everything he needed to - and provided his alternate self with everything he might need in the way of a comfortable, defendable home with large cash reserves (and clothes in his size). The 'defense mechanism' that killed the first people to come on the ship _wasn't_ a defense mechanism - it was the attempted mental download.

As for getting the ship out. Most of this fell under Avon 1's duties - designing and programing the ship. He'd been fairly cooperative for ages and the System didn't know he had anything to gain through sabotage.

I don't wish to be unkind to Avon's father, but I think living in a jar and having no contact with any living beings besides his jailer-exploiters may have effected his perspective. Or maybe he just wasn't a nice guy. The fact that the attempted download would _kill_ anyone besides Avon was evidently not considered a problem (and there is the question of what happened to the crew). As for the illusion of close relatives in trouble, Avon saw his rather senior twin brother (years of being in a jar apparently colored the guy's perspective of what he looked like). Technically true and designed to trigger something that would make him open up his mind, etc.

Obviously, Blake interrupting the download was not part of the program, but Zen was there as back up. Perhaps the idea was to have some sort of back up if Avon _wasn't_ ready for the download (hence, Jenna is the one Zen contacts directly since her mind was expendable [in Zen's defense, he could have been following programing without knowing whys and wherefores]). Ergo, all those details and bits of information Zen was unwilling to share because Avon was deemed 'unready' (more to the point, Avon might have taken some steps to protect himself if he'd realized what he was in for).

Since plan A failed, it was onto plan B. Eventually, when the time was right, Zen was forced to take Avon to the System.

Now, just suppose that most of that episode was a 'back to reality' illusion being fed into the others' minds while Avon had his meeting with his maker.

Hmm, I wonder if the resident telepath noticed something was going on?

OK, that's my bit for getting conversation started. Hope it does some good.

Ellynne ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/.