Elizabeth Roxanne Markona

Beth was born in NYC, NY, USA, Earth, in a universe far, far, far removed from any world of which you have ever heard. Her parents were both from someplace/time better described elsewhere. Her father, Markus Mikal Markona, was, at the time, a Senator from Colorado, her mother Stephanie Markona née Koya, was a translator for the UN. A few hours after ERMa was born, almost on the floor of the General Assembly, the family moved back to CO, and spent their time from then on split between CO and DC.

Beth was known early on as a mathematical prodigy, having invented calculus whilst still in kindergarten! When she was just hitting puberty she discovered a Talent for creating dimensional portals (called Doors⁽²⁾). She was tutored in Psionics by Capricorn⁽³⁾, an old family friend. He taught her to use her Doors, as well as Televoyance, and the rudiments of Telekinesis and Telepathy. When she was 16, in 1990, she went to Cornell University for a degree in Physics.

The next two years she spent studying math, physics, and Russian at Cornell, and perfecting control over her Doors with the 'superhero' group known as Covenant. This was a multi-national group, formed of the children of a similar group from the early Sixties (which generates obvious conclusions about the elder Markonas).

In 1992, with her B.S. only a year away, her parents' friend Richard Allen Holden, another Senator, but from Idaho, ran for President against (yet another) Senator Noel Ries (R, GA), with Ross Perot (Ind, TX) running against everyone⁽⁴⁾. Beth decided to take time off and help with the campaign when Holden chose Jennifer Unicorn as his running mate. She was a professional Lobbyist from DC they had met at her 'vacation home' in CNY. A little place about ½hour north of Ithaca that Covenant just happened to use as its headquarters most of the time. (Coincidence! Really! Honest!)

Holden/Unicorn beat Ries/Gingrich easily. Somewhere during the campaign, Rick and Jennie fell in love (kissing on election night? I ask you!) and so on February 14^th, 1993, they got married. However, several crises came up and the First Couple (as the Press called them) didn't get their honeymoon until July! As the only secluded place they could think of, they decided to use her place in CNY (kicking Covenant out for the duration). [It had been willed to her and part of the deal was she had to stay there at least one contiguous month each year.⁽⁵⁾] Beth had been working as staff for them part time since the election and went along as part of the entourage.

She had been splitting her time between DC and CO, where she was working for C&R (Capricorn's company) as a mathematical intern. But she was free for July because she was going back to Cornell in the fall to finish her B.S. and start on her M.S.

At the end of the month, the motorcade headed back to DC. Holden had eschewed a limo in favor of a fuel-efficient compact (well, not too, or he'd've never fit!), and he also felt the burning desire to do the driving himself. ("To keep in practice.") In this car were Holden, Holden, Beth, and a Secret Service agent. They had just gotten onto Rte. 81 north of Binghampton (unplanned and unannounced, just to be on the safe side) when the world exploded and the car was destroyed.

Everyone in the car that day, except the President, became a CumVi⁽⁶⁾ when the meteor struck. The President was dead. Permanently.

Domestic and Foreign Policy wait for no-one, and the First Widow was promptly inaugurated as the first woman and first black President of the United States of America. Over the loud and vicious protests of about half the planet (your guess as to which half). She named Senator Markona as her V.P. Beth decided that they really didn't need her, and she was able to escape memories of a beloved friend with school and lots of homework. She spent the next year finishing her degree in Physics, with a minor in Math. She also spent that year reading books and watching TV and going to the movies and working with Covenant, anything to keep from thinking about her close call.

Beth's Dreams started at the beginning of January. It could have been the stress of holidays without President Richie, it could have been the three extra classes she had scheduled herself, or it could have been that it was her first Star Trek marathon. She fell asleep in her dorm room in Risley, and woke up in her room at home in CO thinking she had to save Kirk! Despite the raging urge to assist fictional characters, she went back to Cornell and classes as usual.

The next night, she, having obviously not learned her lesson, started watching the ST:TNG marathon. After a several month adventure, she woke up in her room in the White House with a sense of a job well done. And a bio-cycle that was about 2 weeks off! She and her doctor decided that this last bit was obviously the result of stress and she should take a week, or, better yet, two, off of school. This she did, but the dreams continued. They didn't affect her during the day so she continued with her studies, but it did annoy her that she couldn't remember them clearly.

So she went to her mom, who was good with hypnosis, among other things, and got her to help with the dream recollection. It didn't work. All that remained of the dreams were vague images, feeling, and occasional snatches of dialog that could have been right out of the shows. So they tried another tactic. Stevie gave her several post-hypnotic suggestions to help her remember any dreams she might have. They combined this with standard Freudian practices, and Beth went back to school. Again. It seemed to be working, writing down every dream she could when she woke up, and analyzing them later, and indeed she had many peaceful nights. (She had also stopped ingesting vast quantities of one universe at a time, but no need for her to mention that to anybody.)

Then in April, with her finals in Russian, Latin, and differential equations on the next day seemingly in jeopardy, she went to bed with a book of stories of Ancient Rome swimming in her head, and woke up the next morning thinking in Latin!!! She aced her final that day, but postponed her other two. She tried several times that day, in several ways, but she could not remember the dream in which she was sure she had learned Latin from the ancient Romans themselves. Not sure what to believe, that night she tried sleeping to Dostoevski. The next day she aced her Russian final too.

A hypothesis needs experimental proof to turn it into a theory. So she tried again. This time she tried a book that contained one of the greatest mathematicians anywhere, Andrew Jackson Libby⁽⁷⁾. When she awoke the next day, she not only raced through her Diff-E-Qs, but also took an even higher level course's exam, for which she'd only studied casually, and aced that too! She brushed off inquiries by saying she'd gotten "special tutoring", and had picked it up quickly, but she let people believe that she'd been receiving this tutoring for a while, not overnight. But still she couldn't remember what had happened any more than the rest!

She then swore to herself to stay off fiction for a while, and enjoyed her graduation and the subsequent vacation in Moskva (Moscow). (Even though she felt parts of the city and countryside were much more familiar than they ought to have been.) Directly upon the end of her short vacation, she went back to CO and began working full-time as an assistant to Bill Ross, the other half of C&R. He himself was a CumVi from the beginning of what we now call A.D., so he was in a perfect position to realize what was going on when the incident occurred.

It seemed that Beth was in love with one of Capricorn's alien technicians, a reptillian midget named Genner, or Jim Ner (another CumVi, but nevermind). He felt the same about her and they were engaged in a tryst in a spare library when there was a problem in a nearby lab, and the shocks from the explosion caused the bookcases in the room to fall over. On top of them. Beth, being distracted, was not able to Door them away and the nearest case fell on top of them. Jim was unscathed except by falling books. Beth, however, was skewered by a metal bookend, right at the base of her skull.

When Ross heard Jim hollering and came to help, he found Beth sleeping atop the bookcase above Jim and her old body. Ross immediately understood and took measures to keep anyone unauthorized from figuring it out. He carried her body to the incinerator himself, and cleaned up the other evidence. Only then did he let anyone take the two away for medical treatment. When Jim was released, he got a stern dressing down for messing with someone who was not only effectively a native, but was, by all available data, an ephemeral!

Beth came in part-way through this tirade and put Ross straight in that she was the one who had initiated the relationship, and she had been the one to figure out he was an alien, and she had known that Jim's species was a long-lived one, and she hadn't cared. So don't pick on him! The two were told to be cicumspect, and Jim was set to be her tutor in what it meant to be a CumVi. As of the beginning of June, their world had reached a new equilibrium. Except for her dreams.

For a few weeks, all was fine. She worked herself silly during the day, and engaged in very relaxing diversions at night. She was generally too tired to read anything at night, let alone Dream about it. By now she had herself mostly convinced that her subconscious had cooked up the "Dreams" to help her brain integrate all that she had learned, but that didn't explain Moscow. (Oh, well. No time to worry, gotta run!)

Near the end of June, she even let herself start reading again. Light stuff this time, fantasy, silly sci-fi, stuff like Xanth or the Myth series, or Bill the Galactic Hero⁽⁸⁾. Stuff you couldn't possibly believe in enough to dream about. She had told her mom that everything was OK, and hadn't told Jim anything! So he can be excused for going on a short trip at the beginning of July and leaving her a set of all the books in the Humanx Commonwealth⁽⁹⁾ universe. The first night she finished the first contact novel and then plowed through the entire Icerigger trilogy. She Dreamed that night of Tran-ky-ky.

The second night she demolished the Flinx and Pip series. The next day she went in to her current job as the technician in Ross' personal lab. She made several calculations in the course of the day that caused the experiment they ran at 3:00 to blow up. Literally. Fortunately, she threw a force field around it before anyone was hardly aware that anything had happened. Ross dug aroung the wreckage for several minutes, and came out asking her how she could have possibly made such a stupid mistake!

They finally came to the conclusion that she seemed to have relearned overnight everything she had ever learned about quantum mechanics. They started asking questions, so she had to tell them about the Dreams, and the finals, and the books Jim had left her. She finished with the conclusion that she must have been taken in by the 'space plus/space minus' concept and had formulated alternate equations while she wasn't looking. Ross decided then and there that this was too big for him to handle, and probably not in his field anyway, so he called Capricorn first, the Markonas second, and Jim third.

Over the next two weeks, Beth was subjected to every test the combined knowledges of a great many different planets/times could come up with. She was also force-fed even more science and speculative fiction and fantasy than even her Author has read! Someone even had the presence of mind to throw in additional training in martial arts, Psionics, linguistics, etc. The Dreams continued due to the steady diet of books, movies, TV, etc. but Beth reported being in more control, because of the extra training. She also seemed to remember the events better, more clearly.

Someone suggested she was becoming more attuned to what she was doing. Someone else suggested her imagination was becoming more crazed as she was removed even further from what 'reality' she had had before. The scientists, psionics, physicians, and psychiatric professionals kept a close watch on her sleep to see if she disappeared, how she disappeared, how long she disappeared for, and how well her body and mind reacted to her Dreams.

On July 21^st, 1994, just barely at the tender age of 20, Beth snuck off to fall asleep in her own bed in Colorado for the first time in weeks, and hasn't been back since. That she knows of.

1. ERMa, Liza, Lizbet, Ann, Zia, Elis, Elise, Elsie, Ellie, Bette, Beth, Eliza, BethAnn, Roxy, Betsy, El, Rocky, Betty, Liz, Lisa, LizAnn, Bess, Eli, Li, Roxette, etc.
3. A Space Alien. See Will Rotach for details.
4. For more details on the election, see Dani.
5. If you really want to know more, ask Dani.
7. The Past Through Tomorrow, Robert A. Heinlein
8. Piers Anthony, Robert Aspirin, Harry Harrison respectively.
9. Alan Dean Foster, see Dani for more info.