Our heroine, Sheila, has been to the future, taken a trip to Japan, but is now in her recent past.  That's the uncomplicated bit.  If you'd like to catch up with her adventures, start here.

I had just become used to the fact that it was 2007.  Again.  And then Jack showed up.

For a brief moment I considered pretending to be the Sheila of 2007 who hadn't met Jack yet, and tell him he had the wrong house. But he was just so darn handsome that I'm sure I must have betrayed the emotion of seeing him again even before I had completed the thought.

"I like your yard," he said, which made no sense at all, since it was overgrown and neglected.

"Let's go look at the river," I suggested, leading him around to the back of the house where the land dipped down to the narrow estuary. I had a sort of tree fort in one of the pines, a platform with a little fence, really, and we climbed up there to catch the breeze off the water and look out over the little stretch of marsh that separated the land from the channel.

"I had no way of knowing what time you had come back to until I saw your face," he said, after a while of just gazing at the scene. It was pretty, with the Spanish Moss hanging from the live oak trees and the Confederate Jasmine blooming everywhere it could elbow its way in.

"My face? What, I got a date stamp on my forehead, or something?"

"No. But you look different now."

"Different from when?"

"From before you first were treated by Shimata."

"But it is before that. I don't meet him for a couple of weeks."

"You know what I mean. You're the you that has come back. It took three trips to find you." He didn't exactly look pleased at that circumstance, and I guessed the return journeys weren't much fun. I was about to speak when he leaned in suddenly and kissed me gently on the mouth. A sweet kiss. Tender, almost. Warm. My hand raised automatically, as it does in these cases, to the side of his face and I traced some of the lines that made up fine crow's feet on his tanned skin.

"You said that you have no control over when you have to leave the past; how long did you stay each time?"

"It's not always the same, but around six weeks." He leaned back against the trunk of the tree and looked at me. "I should have guessed you would come here, now -- you're going to try to stop Shimata from treating you, aren't you?" I looked into his eyes, and was surprised at the gentle concern. I would have thought he would be angry, had I had the time to think it over.

My reply took me aback as much as it did Jack. "No," I said, "I want to help him."

"It's not that simple. There's more to it than --" he trailed off, and seemed to be searching for words

We surveyed the river again for a while after that, letting my words sink in. I wasn't quite sure what I meant by them, and there was a nasty little niggling part of me that was beginning to think I had been preprogrammed to say and do all kinds of things I wouldn't normally say or do.

For starters, there was the whole 'oh look; I've been transported forward in time' escapade with the Pons in H-Pons Three. I had let them ask me all kinds of questions about life in the early years of the twenty-first century without hardly ever losing my temper that much.

Then I had been kidnapped off a train by a handsome stranger. And how had I reacted to that? Like we were going on a picnic or something. Not that there was really anything I could have done about it, but still. And this instantaneous travel anywhere on the planet stuff, too, that had taken Jack and I to Japan to meet with Shimata.

I suppose that, after time travel, instantaneous transportation is no big deal?

"Why did you come back? If this is your fourth trip, you must have a pretty good reason."

"Good enough. You haven't experienced the return part of the journey yet; just wait -- it's the only part that ever feels uncomfortable, and least of all because you can never predict when it's coming."

"Umm. . . uh-huh; you avoided the question. What did you come back for? To kidnap me again?"

"It's just that. . . you have a way of figuring things out; and we want to be able to retrieve the information Shimata was able to store in your brain, and even though it's technically a couple of weeks before you go to hospital; well. . . ."

"It's already in my brain. It's already there. I don't get it -- what's the problem with that? So it's already there. Hey -- how come some things are the same and some are different?"

"What's the same?"

"Well; the reason I was hospitalized in the first place was for major depression. And while I don't feel as bad as I did the first time around -- the black dog is here."

"What dog?" Jack held his face up as he said this, like a dog sniffing the air, and I realized he was doing what I had done for the first few days I'd been "back"; he was trying to access the vids.

"Not a real mutt. It's another name for depression that Churchill came up with."

"Churchill who?"

"No, not Church-- oh, never mind. It just means depression."

"You can't go to hospital. If you do, the ECT will wipe the information Shimata stored in your brain."

"Well, if we go by the calendar date, he hasn't stored it yet. I know what you're going to say --" I stopped him from speaking; and then I stopped myself. "Oh. I'm Johnny Mnemonic, aren't I?"

"I don't know what that means."

"The information in my brain. It can't be wiped, and it can't be stored again, is that it?"

He was silent.

"There's something else?" I persisted, noticing that he was now avoiding my gaze.

"Any treatment such as ECT will. . . Dr. Shimata thought it would be a bad idea to --" he was struggling for words; but I finally figured it out for myself.

"ECT would fuck my brain completely, is that it?" He nodded. I reviewed my options. "Well, then; I just won't go to the hospital, and then if your theory is right, and I'm drawn back to your present after another couple of weeks, and Shimata can download this stuff. So no big deal."

"There's something else," Jack said, looking me straight in the eye again, and holding my gaze, "something else I have to tell you."

"So tell me already."

"Shimata is dead."