1994 Reno, Nevada

United States of America

Anastasia awoke in the hotel and walked to the minibar. There was very little left from the previous night. She and Ricardo had torn through the supply after they ran out of the junk food that Ricardo insisted on eating. Hamburgers, fried chicken, booze, cocaine, reefer. He was truly attempting to test the limits of the body he inhabits. Normally she would applaud the experiment, but that would require notes, control groups, and other subjects beside himself.

She scavenged some peanuts and chips from the mess, but there really wasn’t much left to eat. She glanced at Ricardo, laying naked in the bed, the sheets wrapped around him as if he had been tossing and turning all night.

At least he didn’t suddenly send anything flying across the room last night.

Ricardo was now in his sixties and still as eager and ready to make a mess in bed as a teenage boy. She had hoped that he would have grown out of this phase of life. The drugs, the sex, the gorging. The journey was about discovery, about learning and expanding the knowledge of their people. It was not supposed to be about playing out god fantasies and abusing the native populace. It was not supposed to be about the baser desires of the flesh.

She walked into the bathroom and washed her face. How had she become tied to this man? How? Was it the nature of being to find another that you are akin to and then pair up? No.

No. There might have been a part of her that desired that, but truly? She knew that what kept her here were his abilities. His telekinetic abilities that she cannot learn, no matter how much she tried tied her to this man. There was just something fundamentally different about his physiology. His powers were beyond her. They simply cannot be learned and that infuriated her to no end.

She had prolonged this for long enough. Looking at Ricardo and his gluttonous ways today only makes it more clear that if she is going to get a chance to fully understand the differences in his mind that allow for these abilities, she is going to have to take action now to preserve this subject for further study.

She walked into the main room and went to her purse. There she found what she was looking for, a bottle filled with Sojourn, a general anesthetic. She understood what needed to be done, this human attachment to a specific time and form was getting to her. She had to steel herself for what comes next.

Anastasia was not a cold person. In fact, she often had a problem controlling her emotions, her empathy specifically. But in this she understood there was nothing else to be done. As she dosed Ricardo with the sedative she felt the bite of remorse in her soul.

She had little trouble manipulating the staff to bring the overweight Ricardo down to her car, wrapped in a sheet. From there it was just a matter of driving him back to her home.

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The land in Nevada is always abundant. Who wants to live in the deep desert? Her home out here was out of the way, no neighbors, no curious passers-by. It was a sprawling ranch house with several buildings across the land. It was the perfect place to house many of her experiments and keep them away from the prying eyes of the human race.

She pulled the car into her garage and struggled to get Ricardo out of the vehicle by herself. The man’s large, overweight frame was too much for her to move without the aid of a wheelbarrow and a lot of cursing. She was able to eventually get him to her machine, with a combination of the two, and some elbow grease added to the mix.

She had been experimenting on reading her own intrinsic field aura and now she believes she has everything she needs to edit Ricardo’s. It was going to be messy, slap dash but effective. She needed to first remove Ricardo’s IFA from his physical body. If this was successful, she should be able to read much of the data and guided by intuition, to make the edits needed to the man’s aura.

This was only the first part. There were flaws in Ricardo’s personality to be sure, but there was also a lot of valuable and necessary information there. She did not want to damage his next incarnation, but she needed to be sure that the defects would be eliminated.

The device took up near the entirety of the room that it is housed within. There were stacked computer boards and hard drives all wired together with a liquid cooling system that allowed them to sync together to process without overheating. Bundles of wires ran from the stacks to a large metal chair where the subject that is to be edited is strapped down. Where Ricardo was now strapped down.

Hundreds of small wires were attached to the man’s body in various areas. The wires read all the neurological activity throughout the body as well as the intrinsic field aura that is housed throughout the nervous system.

Anastasia’s machine worked frantically to download the data that was Ricardo’s IFA while still keeping the body alive as it was removed. Impulses were sent throughout the body to stimulate the tissue while the soul was removed. All consciousness transmitting energy in the body is taken and then stored in hundreds of hard disk drives throughout the computer network.

She worked on the process over the span of hours to edit and remove the negative aspects of his personality. Such a task was more art than science, and she was not as skilled as she believed. When she was satisfied that she had done everything she could to help Ricardo’s immortal being, she then released it from the system into the Terran Intrinsic Field to be reborn.

The following day, refreshed by a good night’s sleep and a wholesome meal, Anastasia returned to the body of Ricardo. The machine had kept the body stimulated throughout the night and without the soul it was essentially brain dead.

Using her machine Anastasia sent electrical impulses throughout the body in order to gauge and understand its various functions. The results were inconclusive. Anastasia moved Ricardo’s body to a wheeled steel table. From here the work would get messy, as she slowly dissected the living corpse to unlock the secrets that she could not while he was alive.

As she took him apart she stimulated his brain in every way that she could think of. In the end, the body yielded some of the results that she wanted, though, not all. She was now without Ricardo, but she had moved forward the journey’s intended purpose, she took solace in that. She had discovered that Ricardo was not fully human. She also discovered that this rock had been visited by other extraterrestrial life before. Visited, and their lineage mixed with something, otherworldly.

The shell of Ricardo was studied for the sake of scientific discovery. It had been years in coming. She knew this. But it hurt so much. It hurt, because no matter how she attempted to rationalize what she had done, she knew, she loved the man. She knew that it would be decades before she would see him again. She knew that she would miss him for those decades, and that the regret of her actions would haunt her forever… unless.