missed

The Sliders arrive in a world remarkably similar to Earth Prime. The Professor, Wade, and Rembrandt decide to take the opportunity to visit the doubles of their long-lost family and friends. As they find out, however, the difference between this world and home is that, in this world, Quinn, the Professor, Wade, and Remmy never slid.

This gives Arturo, Wade, and Remmy the chance to discover what their lives (and the lives of Quinn, Mrs. Mallory, Bennish, et al.) would be like now if they had never slid. But what their 'families' tell them is disheartening. All of their doubles are living the good life...lives that they could be leading now if it weren't for sliding.

Quinn is world-famous, the winner of a Nobel Prize in Physics, and now works at Cambridge. Wade is the founder and president of MuseWorld.com, a major competitor with Amazon.com that seems to be gaining the upper hand. She and Quinn married and moved to England together, where they had a daughter named Kelly, after Wade�s sister. The Professor found true love with a brilliant female professor who was hired at U-Cal one year after our Professor went sliding. Rembrandt is currently on a sold-out tour of the country, for his career did indeed actually begin to take off again after he sang the national anthem at the baseball game that fateful day in 1994.

But is everything as perfect as it seems? After speaking with family and friends, Remmy, Wade, and Arturo decide to actually visit their doubles to get a taste of the good life they've missed...but they find that the picture is not really so pretty.

Quinn and Wade�s marriage is on the rocks. Quinn feels his life peaked back in �94 when he invented sliding and feels like the rest of his life is going to be downhill. This fear of failure has led him to be overly stressed whenever he encounters the slightest bump in the road to his next discovery. Wade has become so wrapped up in the business world that she�s forgotten the original spirit of MuseWorld.com, which was to share the joy of literature and poetry with the world. She�s also become emotionally distanced from her husband and child as a result of both her and Quinn�s emotional problems, and their baby is basically being raised by her nanny, Wade�s former best-friend Sabrina (mentioned in �Into the Mystic�). The Professor and Quinn have a terribly strained relationship because the Professor feels he�s been surpassed by his student (they never underwent the bonding experience of sliding that eliminated that strain in our Quinn and Prof). The Professor has, in fact, become an all-around bitter man, which has strained his relationship with his new wife as well. Rembrandt unintentionally left his fianc�, Alesha Avo (we met and learned about her in �Dragonslide�), in the dust once his career picked up, and she went on to marry an abusive husband; in addition, Rembrandt began suffering from a bad back after performing in so many concerts and has become addicted to his pain-reliever medication.

While the other three learn about their doubles, Logan and Colin stay at the Motel 12 together and begin to bond. They are forced to deal with the complications that arise from the fact they are sort of attracted to each other. You see, they�re basically brother and sister, even though they technically have different people as parents and have never met each other before recently. At first, they think that because of the special circumstances they might try a romantic relationship, but they very soon decide that the strangeness of it would ultimately be too much to deal with. They decide to just be friends and to enjoy a much-less-weird sibling relationship instead.

By the time the sliding window arrives, Rembrandt, the Professor, and Wade have gained a new appreciation for sliding. In spite of all the horrors they�ve faced, they have each other as friends, and have made new friends in Colin, Logan, and the missing sliders, and they would have missed out on all that had they not gone sliding. They still, of course, miss home and see their families, but they have received a powerful reminder of the fact that some good has come from sliding after all.

THE END