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3.06 GULAG Déjà vu? We've all had it. That feeling that something just ain't right? And I don't mean like a Kevin Costner flick. More like, something is happening in your life again and again, that you've been there before. Seen it, heard it, said it, smelled it, dealt it. It's usually a fleeting sensation, usually unsettling, otherworldly ... some might say you even sounded paranoid ... if you told anyone about it that is. But what if you were made to relive a moment over and over? What if déjà vu were your only clue that the world you inhabited was a lie? Not an easy scenario to handle. Yet it's still the one our fair-weather Gua bud Joshua was handed this week. And naturally Cade got mixed up in it too. So you might ask, what the heck is the Nambualtor talking about now? Where's he going with this ramble? The answer my brethren, is straight into a quantum pocket and Joshua's privately engineered version of hell. Months ago, a big baddy who looked and walked like Big J started wrecking havoc in our lives. His name was Cain, and he was ten times as nasty as Joshua ever was. Guess the Gua decided Joshua was a traitor to his people so they tortured him, sucked out his memories and sent him to a quantum pocket, a gulag of sorts for Joshua where he'd relive a nasty failure over and over for the rest of his dark days. See, in the QP, the Gua had lost the war. Joshua and a few other Gua were stranded on earth, hunted by humans. At the beginning of the loop Joshua was reliving, he'd learn that the earth was about to be destroyed by a Gua-delivered neutrino bomb and at the end he'd fail to stop our destruction. Cade didn't know it when he busted into the pocket to bring Joshua back to the present, but he was gonna get stuck in the loop too. Of course that didn't matter to our hero, because he wanted to help Joshua and take him back to the real fight. He owed this particular alien. Of course, when Cain went in after Cade things got a little more complicated. As if following this adventure isn't enough to make Bochco's Theorem seem like a toddler's tale? Cain was what Joshua was when he first got here - driven by his goal, relentless, unthinking about consequence. Or maybe Joshua was never that bad? How different were the Gua from us? Did they all get off on the whole Œrape and pillage' principle? Don't know. But Cade and I think that Joshua's been converted from the way he was. Humanity got to him. In fact, we think he had plenty of humanity to start - it just floated to the top when the time was right. Cade had a stroke of paranoid genius in their penultimate loop run. He left himself a message that told Joshua how to beat the system. J took off to stop the destruction of earth and his exit was enough of a distraction to give Cade an opening to pop Cain in the chest. The bad alien was down. Joshua was successful. No more earth-go-kablooey! Cade and Joshua hot-footed it to the quantum pocket exit point. They came home. But Joshua didn't want to join Team Foster. Even though he wants to stop the invasion, he isn't ready to fight by our side. Cade thought we could all be stronger working together, told Joshua he broke him out of the gulag because we needed his help. We needed to know about Mabus - and Joshua was our only link. Joshua didn't have anything to say about the alien anti-Christ. He argued that there were other Gua out there who didn't agree with Mabus' plans, so he still had hope. Joshua had to find them - but he couldn't do that with a human at his side. He said goodbye. The Gua put Joshua in his very own purgatory, sentenced to live out his days repeating the same 19 minutes and failing at his desperate mission every time. Cade was bummed by Joshua's decision - figured Joshua must hear the clock ticking to the Second Wave just like us. Be it 19 minutes, 19 hours or 19 days, we can't afford to fail in this quest. And unlike the ŒGulag' there aren't any second chances in our world. We all carry that burden now. And we wish Joshua luck. He can only help save us ... even if he isn't right by our side.
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