Xaviers!

Ashlie carts the sample container and Will into the research lab and over to a large machine. She connects the sample container to one of the many valves and intakes and starts the machine up, which begins to hum.

"Basically what's happening is that the machine sucks in the sample and superheats it in the large compartment back here until it reaches a plasma state. Then the injector condenses it into a narrow stream that's injected into the accelerator. The accelerated sample is shot past a detector that'll calculate the molecules that make up the sample and attempt to measure their isotope composition and radioactive decay. Finally the sample is shot into the quantum detector where a high-energy proton stream shatters atomic cohesion. Enough fragments and it'll give us an idea of the spin and angular momentum of your subatomic particles."

"Sounds like a fun way to spend a Friday night," Will joked.

He had definitely gotten a bit larger since wheeling from one room to the next.

A narrow beam of what mostly looked like glowing liquid is visible through a view-port in the machine as one of the monitors starts displaying various moving and adjusting peaks and readouts.

"Looks like... a lot of complex carbohydrates, saccharides... Very few lipids or proteins. Biological material but no signs of complex cell structures, no nucleic acids. Almost like dense primordial soup. Lacking in nitrogen compared to terrestrial life, but a good lattice for biological forms. Base materials. Probably subject to a lot of quantum drifts across the periodic table during shapeshifting. Too little information available on that to make a call whether this is naturally occurring or a planned base matrix."

"What do you mean, a "planned matrix"?

"Like I said, I think it's a possibility that you were artificially created."

"Well, how the heck would you even test for that? Looking for a maker's mark?"

"That would help, but aside from that there are some other things that could point towards that. Molecules that are rare or non-existent in nature, mechanisms that don't occur naturally. Nothing I can see so far, though I'm getting some strange readings here..." she says as she watches the data peaks fill out more into distinct, narrow peaks. "There are almost no radioactive isotopes here... This can't be right?" she starts typing away on the computer attached to the machine, double-checking calculations and reads, even bringing up the raw data from the detector.

"How is this possible? How can there be almost no Potassium-40? It has a half-life of a billion years!"

"Do I need to pick some up at the store or something? Is there a supplement I could take?"

"It's not something you need." she says, still sounding almost confused. "At this point in time, 0.012% of all Potassium is Isotope 40. The only only place you'd find this low levels of it is 14 billion years from now." she says as she's interrupted by the machine loudly beeping at her. Additional windows are popping up, displaying complicated patterns of quantum particle trajectories along with rows and rows of numbers.

"Wait, hang on... Different dimensional quantum signatures... I knew it! You're not from this Universe. You're from one of the adjacent ones Emilie has been bouncing through or from one of the same causal clusters anyway! But those would be in a similar universal era, the only way the Isotope decay could have advanced billions of years is if..." Ashlie speechlessly turns her head away from the monitor and towards Will. "...if you somehow spend a long time in suspended animation. A really, really long time."

"...That.

That's not possible, Ashlie," Will said, nervously.

"Is it? They found you in the ice. Do you know how long you were there? Or how you got there?"

"I....only remember...." Will said, trailing off.

"Blackness," he said after a moment.

"Nothing else? Heat? Pressure? Anything at all?"

"Well, cold, and lots of it," Will laughed. "Ice, you know?"

"LOTS of cold..."

"The vacuum of space is pretty cold as well. If I dug into the US Army's files, what do you think are the odds it'll say they found you in the crater left behind by something that impacted from space?"

"Um...Antarctica has a few of those, don't they?"

"Yes, but you don't find strange, sentient substances in most of them."

"I'm just saying, the answer's probably yes, because I had to be found somewhere, and there's lots of craters there."

"Well if these numbers are correct then you're older than this planet. The only logical explanation is that you fell from space at some point."

"Or that your numbers are wrong," Will pointed out.

"I'm nothing but numbers. They're correct. I will double-check this as well as the machine but it's unlikely that it would fail only on this one particular parameter. It's possible you weren't even sentient. No more than I was when my base-components were extracted from the ground."

"I'm just saying, Occam's razor and all that. The Earth's really old. Machines malfunction."

"You don't seem to like the implications of this." she states the obvious, sounding kind of confused by that, as if she doesn't quite understand why.

"Well, I'm NOT billions of years old. I'm, like, maybe 50. What you're saying just isn't true..."

"It just means that the materiel you're made from is that old. There's no need to be upset, Will."

"I'm NOT upset!" Will said, upset. "Do I sound like I'm upset?"

"You do and I don't believe I am malfunctioning either."

"Well, if you were malfunctioning, you might not realize it!"

"Will, why is this so hard for you to accept as a possibility?"

"Because it's not true! I'm not...not some strange, ancient...thing from another dimension. I'm just a normal thing!"

"You're not a thing any more than I am. And you wouldn't be the only refugee from a different dimension either."

"Of course I'm a thing," Will said, annoyed. "What else would I be."

"To humans a 'thing' means an inanimate object. If that's what you call yourself they won't respect you. I thought that's why you chose a humanoid form to interact with them. It's why I did."

"I get plenty of respect. I get all the respect I need.

I turn human for five minutes, I get thrown in jail. I am what I am, and there's nothing that that...that...that machine can tell me that makes it any different."

"They didn't lock you up because you turned human but because they weren't aware of your presence and you know that. All this machine is saying is that you're ancient. It's possible that you only recently developed sentience as you were embedded in the ice. This doesn't change anything about who you are."

"Of course it does! I mean, it doesn't, because it's wrong, but still!

You're crazy. This whole science thing is crazy. I regret coming here."

"I'm sorry you feel that way."

"Yeah, well, it is what it is," Will said.

He suddenly--and contrary to his earlier claims that it was impossible--grew legs.

"I think we're done here, yeah?"

"Yes. I'm sorry if I upset you." she says, showing no outward reaction but making a mental note of Will's sudden change in shifting ability. Objects or machines don't have instinctual abilities like that. Or dimensional counterparts that are human. I really need a sample of that American kid...

"Call me if you need me," he said, and then stormed walked out, seething perfectly calm.