No Fragments Archive 10: Diskmags/nf_archive_10.iso/MAGS/SYNTAX/SPECIALPD1.MSA/QLPRIME.ART

Text File | 1994-10-25 | 8KB | 161 lines

                  THE "QUANTUM LEAP" PRIMER
       Created by: Sally Smith - Updated by: Deb Brown

                  Supplied by Graham Cluley

[Note: All dates are in US mm/dd/yy format]

Revision date: 9/26/91

Note that this contains internal contradictions as well as not
agreeing with earlier versions, but hey...take it up with
Bellisario, not me!

PROJECT QUANTUM LEAP: This top secret project is located in a
cavern in New Mexico in 1995 (when the show starts; it now seems
to be 1999). So far it's cost $43 billion of our tax dollars, with
$2.4 billion a year operating funds. However, it started out with
just Sam and Al "raising the funding, poring over the blueprints
late at night", and listening to the score of "Man of La Mancha".
:-)

SAM (Dr. Samuel Beckett, no relation to the playwright): Born in
1953 and grew up on his family's dairy farm in Elk Ridge, Indiana.
He could read at age 2, do advanced calculus in his head at 5,
went to MIT at age 15 (or maybe 17), graduating 2 years later, and
has 6 (maybe 7) doctorates including medicine, quantum physics,
and ancient languages, but NOT psychiatry or law.  He speaks 7
modern languages including English, Japanese, French, Spanish and
German, but not Italian or Hebrew and 4 dead ones (he can read
Egyptian hieroglyphics).  He has a Nobel Prize, field unspecified,
but probably for physics.  For this, "Time" magazine called him
"the next Einstein".

He played the piano at Carnegie Hall at 19, plays guitar, is a
good dancer, and sings tenor (his favorite song is John Lennon's
"Imagine").  He has a photographic memory, can cook, and likes dry
or light beer and microwave popcorn.  Sam also knows several kinds
of martial arts and has been afraid of heights since he was 9
years old.  He was originally engaged once, but was stood up at
the altar.  An accident occurred during a leap in the middle of a
lightening storm which caused Sam and Al to temporarily change
places.  At this time, he discovered he was NOT stood up at the
altar and that he was in fact married to his greatest love, Donna.
This was no doubt due to events in a prior leap where he was able
to alter her life in such a way that she was able to commit to
marriage with him.

Sam's older brother Tom, a good athlete, All-State basketball
player, Annapolis grad and Navy SEAL who convinced him to go to
MIT, died in Vietnam, on April 8, 1970.  However, Sam managed to
save him on one leap. Sam's dad John died in 1974 (or maybe 1972,
or maybe 1973) of a heart attack.  He has one sister named Katie
(Katherine), born in 1957, whose first husband was an abusive
alcoholic named Chuck (Unless maybe Sam convinced her not to. Who
knows?). Now she's married to a Navy officer, Lt. Jim Bonnick, and
lives in Hawaii with their mom, Thelma.

AL (Rear Admiral Albert Calavicci):  When Al was a child, his part
Russian mom ran off with an encyclopaedia salesman. Al's dad was
from Italy, so he speaks fluent Italian. His father was a
construction worker, so when dad went to the Middle East, Al was
sent to an orphanage, and his retarded sister Trudy to an
institution.  Later, his dad and his dad's girlfriend used to
sneak him out of the orphanage.  Kept running away, once to join
the circus and once he spent several months travelling with a pool
wizard. He had a pet cockroach named Kevin and a dog named Chester
(who he lost custody of to his third wife).  While in the
orphanage, Al took up acting and also fought Golden Gloves. When
he was old enough, he went to get his sister but she'd died of
pneumonia in the institution (in 1953, aged 16).

During the 60s, he went on civil rights marches. Later, Al went
to MIT, joined the Navy, and became a pilot. From 1968-1973 (or
maybe 1975), he was a prisoner of the Viet Cong; during this time,
his first wife Beth, a Navy nurse, lost hope, had him declared
dead and married a lawyer.  Later, he became an astronaut and is
now a rear admiral ("highly respected and decorated").  He likes
sports cars and classic cars and collects them.  Al likes to watch
sports, gambles a little (trips to Las Vegas, betting on horse
races), and in the past, he had a tendency to drink to excess.  Al
met Sam on the Starbright Project (we don't know what that was);
when they first met, Al was drunk, beating up on a vending machine
with a hammer.  It was Sam's influence that prevented Al from
being removed from the project because of his drinking.  It was
possibly his association with Sam that helped sober him up.

This is, however, all secondary to Al's main interest, which is
women!  He's been married 5 times, spending his 1st, 3rd, and 5th
honeymoons on the train to Niagara Falls. Wife #3 Ruthie was
Jewish, #4 was Sharon ("she wore pink babydolls"), #5 was Maxine
("she didn't wear anything at all--she used to flavor her toes
with mint leaves"), and either his second or third wife was
Hungarian. Al's currently semi-regularly dating a blonde woman
named Tina (they met in Vegas), who has a pet crocodile and a
tattoo in a "super-private part of her anatomy". Although Al
firmly believes in the "double standard", he really does respect
women as individuals and gets very angry when they're mistreated.
Al dresses flashy, smokes a lot of cigars, is somewhat
superstitious, has a serious aversion to dead bodies, and knows a
great recipe for chitlins.

MORE ON THE PROJECT: We don't know what it was supposed to do,
other than allow Sam to time-travel within his own lifetime; we do
know that Sam leaped too soon (before everything was ready; they
were threatening to cut funding), and apparently God [or Fate or
Time or some other unfathomable force--like maybe Don Bellisario?
:-) it's never been directly said] decided to use Sam to "put
things right that once went wrong". The Project is built around
Sam and Al's brain waves. When he leaps, Sam actually replaces the
leapee in the past, (they're in the future, to keep things even),
the leapee's aura (and Sam's in the "future") is what the people
around him see; he only knows who he's leaped into when he looks
in the mirror, and is forever having to figure out who he's
replaced and what good deed he's there to do. Sam's the only guy
who can figure out how to get himself back home, but the first
leap completely Swiss-cheesed his memory. Under normal conditions,
Sam's the only person who can see and hear Al, although animals,
people on the verge of death, the "mentally absent" and children
under 5 always can (they also see Sam as himself). Al appears to
Sam through a "neurological hologram" process:  "agitated carbon
quarks tuned to the optic and otic neurons".  Al sees Sam as the
leapee, but always knows who he is.

GOOSHIE is Ziggy's programmer/operator and operates the imaging
chamber that projects Al's image back to Sam. He's the one Al
sometimes talks to. He's a "short guy with bad breath" and a
moustache, and Tina once went to Vegas for a weekend with him just
to make Al jealous. It worked.

ZIGGY: The project's "parallel hybrid computer", created by Sam.
Ziggy has a definite personality; he has a big ego, crashes a lot,
hates to be wrong, and frequently sulks!  He freaks out sometimes,
too--once he turned off the climate control, once he wouldn't
output in anything but Japanese, and once he stuck an extra zero
on the end of everyone's paycheck, leaving Al to report "half the
staff took off for Vegas!"

We saw Ziggy in the fourth season opener, in which he was
discovered to be a she.  The possibility exists that the influence
of Sam's wife Donna (Dr. Alesi) may have given Ziggy a female
identity.  A perfect example of Sam's changes catching up with
them.  Ziggy responds to queries with a female voice and may be
the narrator of the saga cell that opens the show each week.

SUBJECT TO CHANGE W/O NOTICE AS THE WRITERS GET MORE BRIGHT IDEAS
Oh BOY is this subject to change.... ;-)













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