Benjamin Grimm

"Well enough, well enough. I miss seeing you though. Any idea when you can change that?"

"Sorry mom, I'm still doing top secret tests and things."

"Like what things?"

"Mom," he chides, "you know I can't tell you. We've got lots going on though. We just came back from Europe."

"Oh, I've always wanted to go to Europe. What part?"

"Denmark. Weird place."

"I don't know. I've heard a lot of college kids like it there."

"I'll get back to college mom, I swear," Ben says catching the hint. He hopes he can find a way to make this not a lie, maybe one of those online colleges.

"What else is going on?"

"I'm learning to fly..." He breaks off as he realizes he's just finally pushed past bending the truth and fully lied to his mom. He just lied to his mom. He hasn't doen that since he was three.

"Ben, what was that?" 

He didn't realize he put his fist through the wall until his mom asked what the crash was. "Sorry mom, I gotta go. I love you..." He starts to say when the line goes dead. Behind him the door to his room opens and General Ross's assistant is there red faced.
Later, Reed pokes his head into his room and is holding a weird looking cell phone. It's an older model that seems to have newer parts attached to it.

"Hey Ben. I heard about today. I, uh, made this for you. It's encrypted and the signal is scrambled so it shouldn't be noticed, just dont' use it too often or it will be noticed. I'm sorry for the way things are." Guilt is obvious on his voice and normally Ben would offer some sort of absolution but he's in no mood. Still...

Reed clears his throat as he takes a seat in what is currently passing for Ben's room. From what Ben understands they already have a room for him; the floor's been reenforced and all the fixtures have been adapted to be easier for him to use but they're having trouble finding furniture which will take his weight. "I've, um, I've got some questions from Sue. That, um, she thought might be better, y'know, coming from me."

"Okay," Ben replies. This oughta be good, he thinks.

Reed swallows a few times.

Ben just stares at him.

"Can you, um. Can you still go to the bathroom?"

We saved Sue so she could ask me this? Ben thinks and just stares at Reed for a second. "Yeah," he finally says scratching his head. He moves to scratching his nose before realizing Reed is still looking at him expectantly. "You don't wanna know the details."

"Okay," Reed says and looks away embarrassed. "Sue might need to see you use the bathroom."

"Sue can bite me."

"She'd break her teeth."

"Dude..."

"I'm sorry," he says and looks down.

"Nah, it's cool. It's just...Two months and you still don't have a clue about this, do you? What happened, how it happened..."

"I know how it happened. I just don't know how to reverse it."

Startled, Ben exclaims, "You know how it happened?"

"Sure," Reed says surprised and a little confused. Hadn't he told Ben? "Victor messed with the software that ran the superpositioner, creating a phase-space fugue that..."

"Whoa," Ben says interrupting Reed before he gets started. "I got everything up to 'software'."

"Okay. Try this," Reed says and presses a few buttons on his pocket computer. A hologram of an apple appears to float above it. "Here's the apple we were going to transport through the N-zone. What we were going to do is e-mail it, okay? The transporter in Nevada was like a computer, and the N-zone was like a phone line.

"Now check this out," he continues pressing another series of commands. The hologram changes to display a multitude of apples all in different stages; seeds, shriveled, decayed, ripe, different sizes and colors, worm eaten. "This is the phase-space of the apple. Phase-space is all conceivable states of an object. Like, maybe, this apple's seed never grew. Maybe it got a plant disease. Maybe it rotted on the branch. All the ways the apple could have gone see?"

Ben nods and Reed stands to continue, "Once something organic goes into the N-zone, it shifts into its own phase-space. It's the superpositioner that tells the N-zone that, no, its our grown apple, and it's being e-mailed off to another computer. Yeah?"

"'Kay," Ben says hesitantly pretty sure he's got it.

"'Kay. Victor messed with the superpositioner. The hole into the N-zone expanded out. For a fraction of a second, we were all in the N-zone. From a fraction of a second, we were all in our own phase-spaces. And the superpositioner wasn't able to tell the N-zone that we were us."

"So we all came out as rotten apples?"

"Kinda."

"So the good apple here," Ben says gaining confidence that he's getting all of this, "This is me? And all these others, these are what I could've been? And because of the broken thing, my body got swapped over with one of these?"

"Yeah."

"So this is permanent." He doesn't bother making it a question cause he knows the answer. Or thinks he does.

"No," Reed says and Ben gives him a disbelieving look. "See, if I knew how Victor changed the code, I could eventually rerun the whole thing. Put use back in the phase-space condition, select out a modality and..."

"Put me back in the apple."

{OOC: All dialoge from Ultimate Fantastic Four # 08}