Final Disposition by Ken Goddard

road.
          It didn’t take long for Cellars to discover that there weren’t many local radio stations broadcasting at this time of night, and that the reception for most of those that were was poor at best.
          So he left the radio set to scanning every fifteen seconds, mildly amused — or at least distracted — by the intermittent and unpredictable signals that cut in and out.  Until, suddenly, as he came around a bend in the narrow mountainous road, a sense of very enticing background music playing very softly and one voice — a very familiar voice — suddenly came in beautifully clear.
          The response of his frontal lobes was almost instantaneous.
           Hey, I know her!
          He tried to listen to what the now-extremely-familiar voice was saying, but kept getting distracted by his efforts to remember who she was and why he knew her.
          Then, all of a sudden, the faint-but-very-soothing background music, and the all-too-familiar melodic timbre of her voice, was replaced by the high, sing-song pitch-voice of an obnoxious telemarketer that seemed to rip through his auditory sensors like a suddenly-turned-on jackhammer …
          “Shit!” Cellars cursed as he pulled the Humvee over to the side of the road again, stopped, and then fumbled with the j-Connector’s menu until he had it back on the station with the familiar voice of …
           Eleanor.
          He blinked.  Like ‘Jody’, the name had come out of nowhere.
          No, not nowhere ... memory fragments have to reside somewhere , a deep analytical portion of his frontal lobes reminded.  Just a simple construct … the orbito-frontal cortex, being clever again, picking up on the melodies.
           What?  Eleanor?  Eleanor who?
          Eleanor Patterson, the orbito-frontal cortex responded as more memory fragments cross-linked at unfathomable speed.  Definitely her … no question about it … positive ID based on tone, rhythm and timbre … much more accurate and definitive than a fingerprint.
           Okay, who the hell is Eleanor Patterson? Cellars demanded of his memory, but lacking relevant data, the frontal lobes and all their inter-connected cortexes remained silent.
          “Crap,” he muttered, and then forced himself to concentrate on the broadcast.
     

      “… been talking with Eleanor Patterson, an absolutely fascinating woman who has some absolutely fascinating ideas about who and what we are … and possibly were long ago. Deep topics, my friends… very deep indeed!  And don’t forget, if you’d like to take part in our fascinating discussion and ask Eleanor Patterson a question of your own, all you have to do is reach for your phone and speed-dial our call-in number.  For our new listeners, that’s area code five-four-one, seven-seven —” 
          Cellars scrambled to pull MacGregor’s field notebook and pen out of his jacket pocket, repeating the numbers over and over in his head — knowing he couldn’t depend on his seemingly porous if not absolutely vacant memory! — until he was finally able to scribble the numbers down on a flipped-open sheet of note paper.
          Then he had to make a choice: keep on listening to the broadcast, in the hope that Eleanor Patterson would say something that would trigger his personal memories of why and how he knew her, or —
          MacGregor’s pack set radio sudden came to life.
          “Major Colin Cellars, report your location immediately!” an enraged voice demanded.
          MacGregor.
          A long pause, and then:  “Cellars, goddamn it, report your position!”
          Cellars smiled coldly, guessing that the MP sergeant hadn’t reported the loss of his vehicle and weapon yet, probably hoping that —
          At that moment, another possibility occurred to him.
          He quickly pulling the pack set radio out of the