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3.03 THE FLIGHT OF FRANCIS JEFFRIES Body hopping. I know what you're thinking. Totally the stuff of fiction. The stuff of a few great B-movies. But when we're talking Gua, we're talking a fiction we never wanted to become reality. ŒCause a body-hopping Gua could spell the end of the world as we know it. And recently we had reason to believe that such an unreality was about to become a true- to-life nightmare. But you guys like the details, need to dissect the facts and find the truth. So let me break it down for you. See, the Gua grow husks to inhabit here on earth. And then they have to go through a very specific and elaborate "download" process. If they could find a less complex means of transfer then we were looking at a "game-over." Every one of our bodies would be ripe for the picking. They could get the President. The Pope. Even Pamela Anderson. It was all totally scary. Something we never wanted to consider. But we were forced to. Investigating a quatrain led me to an alliance with the leader of the Raven Nation. We'll call her Jordan here, the fire-haired temptress who saved Cade's butt back at the church all those weeks ago. The details of my recent dealings with Jordan will have to remain sketchy for a while that's just the way she wants it. Suffice to say we weren't exactly on the same page regarding our methodologies in battle. The quatrain pointed Lady J and I to Ohio. There, a girl named Lindsay Tilden was on death row for murdering her father, Alistaire, a scientist for a weapons design house called Rocom Industries. Jordan and I thought Lindsay was innocent and wanted to get her off. We were also dealing with a puzzle unlike any Cade and I had faced. The device Rocom was developing seemed to be enabling a body-switching effect. The scientists involved in the project were being picked off one-by-one and the culprit seemed to be a Gua on the inside named Francis Jeffries. When Jordan and I finally caught up with the remaining scientist before Jeffries was able to kill her, she explained it all. Her name was Susan. The project Susan and Alistaire's team was working on at was called "The Vessel" or the "V.S.S.L. Project." Virtual Super Storage Logarithms. It was a weapon. For you tech heads, think of it as a handheld supercomputer, a device that could suck every bit of information out of another computer's memory without even touching it. Jeffries had figured out how to use it by making himself a guinea pig. Too bad the other scientists had gotten in his way. Now they were dead. Susan further explained that the Vessel used a quantum molecular processing chip coupled with a receiver that doubled its speed. It was nothing short of brilliant. I figured Jeffries must have used an electrical charge as a catalyst to separate himself from the husk. From then he was essentially unbound able to transfer by touch. And then it hit me, with the quantum vessel we could literally suck a Gua consciousness out of its husk. Build enough of Œem and we could beat every one of these alien sunsofbitches! Luckily Jordan found the device, I got to studying it right away. And then the Gua got it back. I figured it was being delivered to Mabus. Figured we were all a bunch of goners. Jordan went after the Vessel, which, I gotta admit worried me like heck. I mean, Jordan's a take-no-prisoners kind of gal, which meant whatever human Jeffries was in was about to get the crap kicked out of Œem. Or worse. He coulda been killed. Jordan intercepted Jeffries and we took him in. We stopped the Gua from getting the body-jumping device. But I'm still a bit freaked. Listen people, the Gua keep getting closer to winning this fight. Cade is gone. And they're still studying us here, working experiments, developing new technology. You'd better believe they're gonna make this invasion as easy as possible. We cut this one off at the pass, but who's to say we're gonna catch the next one? The only way is to keep fighting. Keep using the quatrains. Keep all our eyes open and our paranoid radars tuned to super-sensitive. Turns out I could work with Jordan, and her Raven Nation certainly has resources that'll take some of the pressure off as the fight marches on. But you guys are still the key. Always stay aware. Because the Gua are ready to strike, and we have to be ready to fight back.
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