The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 29, 2542

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During the team’s interim year, the pocket dimension generator belts they left behind explored the galaxy on their own. They did so while holographically invisible, in case the next encounter was with someone less kind than Renata and Quidel. The belt stack was able to visit nearly one new spot a day, for a total of 360 slings. When the stack arrived somewhere new, it had to wait for the coherence gauges to return to the violet. In the meantime, it took that opportunity to scan the region, providing Ramses with the data that he needed to rule out Spiral Station. The majority of the dots on the map were crabitats, but not all. Obviously, they started with the most remote since those were most likely to be what they were looking for. Besides Extremus, there was Verdemus, which created its own outpost around nearby stars. Some people from the Sixth Key had established a presence in this reality, and it didn’t look like they were hurting anyone, so the team decided to leave them be.

Every day, the belts would chip away at the map, gathering enough information to check each dot off. Now that they were back in the timestream, they elected to give the belts a break since the chances of being present when they found their target were low, and they really didn’t feel like going on another adventure. Ramses built them such a nice multidimensional home to live in, they decided to simply relax. The search was probably going to take years, so what was the rush?

Romana slammed her palm on the couch. “Downbeat!”

Everyone giggled. They actually weren’t even playing Downbeat, but trying to contrive the rules to another fictional game called Hassle the Fishmonger.

“No? I didn’t just win?” Romana questioned.

“Not unless you’re holding Mateo’s hand,” Marie suggested.

“Oh, good idea. I’m writing that down as a new rule,” Mateo said before taking his daughter’s hand in his.

They looked at each other before saying, “downbeat!” simultaneously. And then, as if it had been the magic words, the proximity alarm went off. A security feed appeared in front of the doors that led to the simulated backyard. A giant object had appeared before them, the technicolor webbing still fading away.

“Spiral Station,” Leona said, standing up.

“They must have been looking for us while we were looking for them,” Olimpia figured.

Without doing or saying a single thing, the station wrapped itself in bulk energy, and slung away.

“What the hell was the point of that?” Mateo questioned.

“They left something behind.” Ramses was tapping on his tablet. “It could be a bomb. Executing emergency teleportation.”

For about thirty minutes, they waited thousands of kilometers away, but nothing happened. Ramses had dropped a sensor buoy near the gift. It needed time to assess the threat level, but he was quickly confident that it contained no explosive materials. His best guess was that it was some kind of communication device, so they pulled it inside. He set it on the table and pressed the blinking red button. A hologram of Franka appeared behind the table. The sphere itself turned invisible to declutter the image. “Greetings, Team Matic. Word around the membrane is that you’ve been looking for us.”

Mateo stepped forward. “We have.”

“To what end?” Franka asked.

“Our slingdrive system,” Ramses began. “Someone pointed out that it can’t take us absolutely anywhere. It can only travel to a technological establishment, however remote. We were hoping you could fix that.”

“So you used the limitation to build a map of the galaxy, which pinpointed our location, albeit in an unlabeled manner. That’s clever,” Franka acknowledged.

Ramses looked awkwardly at Romana. “I’m not the one who came up with that either.”

“We’re guessing that you don’t have the same restrictions,” Leona said.

“We do not,” Franka admitted.

Dutch suddenly appeared behind her. He waved at the camera. “Hi, guys!”

“Hi, Dutch,” a few of them replied.

“Hi,” Romana said too, but in a very different tone. Not again.

“Okay, I’m talking here,” Franka said to Dutch, shooing him away without too much anger. She looked back at the team. “I’m afraid that bulk tech was my brother’s responsibility. I don’t know if you heard, but he kind of died?”

“We could have mourned together,” Leona argued, “but you abandoned us in the middle of nowhere.”

“You threatened me!” Franka volleyed. “I don’t like to be threatened!”

“Well, I’m sorry, I regret it!” Leona explained. “Which I would have said earlier, but we couldn’t find you!”

“Well, I’m sorry too!” Franka shouted back. “When you have this much power, it’s hard to remember how much normal people matter!”

“Well, okay!” Leona caught her breath. “I’m done with this sphere. You need to come back so we can have a real conversation.”

“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” Franka argued. She then tried to continue.

“We’re busy,” Dutch interrupted again.

“Thanks, Dutch, I got this.” Franka rolled her eyes in a way that suggested she liked having him around to keep the mood light, but it could be a bit much at times. “I brought you this intergalactic communicator so we could stay in contact, but Dutch wasn’t lying. We really are busy. I promise, it’s nothing you wouldn’t approve of, but you have your own destinies to fulfill. You are more boots on the ground, hands-on, street level people. And you...ya know, don’t exist most of the time? We have to stay out of the Milky Way galaxy, because it might cause a severe shift in the balance of power. The people there need to develop as they are for the most part. Project Starseed can’t have—forgive me for using this word—gods saving them all the time. They need people like you...with your limitations, your restrictions...your rules. I bet you’ve been trying to decide where to go. My advice? Go anywhere. Someone there will need you.”

“What about the Oaksent?” Mateo asked her.

“We’ve been monitoring the situation,” Franka told him. “It seems that you were...” She trailed off, and mumbled inaudibly.

“What was that?” Leona pressed. “We can’t hear you. There must be dark matter interference.”

“You were right!” Franka admitted. “The situation was a lot more nuanced than just the hypothetical assassination of one man. They are evidently fixing their own problems. A faction has broken off, and is on its way to go to war with Castlebourne, but it will take them long to get there and find it, and by the time they do, the balance of power will make their efforts fruitless. But instead of it being unfair and easy, the Castlebourners will have done it themselves. Thanks to people like you who made little changes, instead of sweeping decisions. The truth is, mom and dad, I admire you. And we can get to know each other better, but we can’t spend time. Our paths diverged before any of us were even born. One day, we might be able to team up again. I can see the Vellani Ambassador reuniting with the Iman Vellani. I see them working with The Jameela Jamil and Spiral Station. And I see Team Matic at the center of it. But for now, please stay in your corner. They need you, even if they don’t know it.”

“Wait,” Ramses said, worried that Franka was about to log off. “Is there anything you can do about my slingdrives? I know you didn’t design it, but surely Séarlas left behind operator’s manuals.”

“Why would you wanna go where there isn’t anyone else around?” Franka posed.

“I would like the option,” Ramses contended.

Franka sighed, and seemingly considered it. “When you return to the timestream next year, open your little map, and take note of a ping that you didn’t see before. That will be a beacon that I left in a remote region of the galaxy. You can go there for respite. But I’m not granting you access to all of time and space. This is the best I can do.”

“Well...thank you then,” Ramses said, having been hoping for a lot more.

“I better be going,” Franka said.

“Bye!” Dutch jumped back in. “You should go to Be—”

The call was disconnected.

“Well, that was weird,” Mateo said.

“We should try not to think of her as our daughter...because she isn’t,” Leona said to her husband. “She had different parents, who looked like us, and would make a lot of the same decisions as us, but were not us. We didn’t experience that, and we don’t have the right to treat her as family.”

There was an awkward silence, which Olimpia decided to break. “I think I’m gonna take a nap.”

“Yeah, me too,” Angela agreed. “Let’s all take an hour to do whatever we need to do, be that a nap, a talk, or a nice bath.”

Half an hour later, Mateo and Leona were in the former’s room, exhausted from having been talking about their feelings, when the slingdrives powered up. They ran out of their unit, and back into Marie’s. Most of their teammates were doing the same. Angela was fully naked, dripping wet from her shoulders down, and trying to dry herself off with a hand towel. Ramses came out last from his lab. “Who did that?”

“I did.” Romana was walking up the steps from Marie’s basement.

“Where did you bring us?” Leona questioned.

“The only logical place,” Romana answered enigmatically.

“Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida,” Ramses announced, looking at his device.

“Is this because of what Dutch said at the end of the call?” Mateo asked.

“This is obviously what he meant. Trust me, I looked through the colony catalogs, looking for an alternative, and this was the only place he could have possibly been trying to say before he was so rudely cut off.”

“Yeah, that’s probably true,” Leona agreed, “but that doesn’t mean we had to come here, or that you could make that decision without our input.”

Romana brushed it off. “Ugh, I’m so bored. I can’t take another game of Cones of Dunshire. It’s too thinky thinky.”

“The people who live here...” Leona began, trailing off, not knowing how to word it. “They’re not—oh my God. I don’t know how to put it. From the outside, they basically look like hermits, but instead of crabitats, they live in small pockets on the land and sea. Some do live in rotating cylinders, coins, and hammers, but up in orbit, because they don’t see their relative proximity to be any less isolating on a daily basis. No, that’s not right. They participate in community, but they technically live separately. They utilize technology efficiently, to make it so they don’t have to work. They otherwise worship nature, which makes sense given that this world is a miracle. I’m being really general here, but that’s to give you an idea of how they live. They don’t reject technology, and they don’t hate outsiders, but we probably shouldn’t meddle in their affairs.”

“Hold up,” Marie said. “Romy, you’re the one who sent us to Proxima Doma too. Is this the same thing? Did someone tell you to bring us here?”

“Yeah, Dutch,” Romana reminded them.

“I mean someone other than that. Did you meet a seer, or...?”

“It’s nothing like that,” Romana defended. “No more secrets. This is just our next stop. You don’t have to read anything into it. It’s just...we’re just...Doctor Who.”

“Doctor Who?” Leona asked. “How’s that now?”

“The Doctor doesn’t have to do anything,” Romana reasoned. “Everytime he goes somewhere, he pretty much always knows all the stuff. He’s not seeking out new life and new civilizations. He’s just flying around, and whenever he shows up, he helps whoever happens to be there. The writers gave up on contriving reasons for him to do that. It’s just the premise, and that’s enough. Let’s make that our premise. Let’s check out Bida for a little bit, and when we’re done, we’ll pick somewhere else to go. You don’t have to wait for someone to hand you a mission, should you choose to accept it. That’s what my sister was trying to tell us. She’s not my favorite sister, but it makes sense to me now, and I think I agree with her.”

Leona nodded. “It’s not a bad idea. The problem is that Bida has become almost entirely decentralized. That’s the consequence of extreme advancement in a post-scarcity economy. It’s why people like Linwood Meyers exist. Most aren’t misanthropic, but they lost their reasons to work together. Basically, everything that needed to be done is done. Some people will continue to look for new adventures, and new knowledge, but for a lot, a cabin in the woods is enough. They stand upon Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs alone because there is not much room at the top of a pyramid. So the people here probably don’t need us, and even if someone does, the chances of you landing us exactly at that settlement, instead of any of the other twenty million plots, are incredibly low.”

Romana held out her hand, but not in friendship. “I’ll take that bet.”

Leona smiled. “What are we betting?”

“If I win—if we’re where we’re supposed to be, helping the right person or people—you make me your navigator. As Captain, you reserve the right to veto, as I trust your judgment and wisdom, but as navigator, I initially choose our mission, every time.”

“And if I win?” Leona asked.

“If you win...you get infinite favors.” Romana seemed confident that she wouldn’t have to worry about the gravity of that offer.

Leona smiled wider now. “Okay.” She shook her daughter’s hand.

By the end of the day, Romana was the team’s navigator. It wasn’t even that hard. She cheated.

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Tangent Point: Death Spiral (Part III)

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Shasta is a very capable woman, but she is not a pilot, nor an engineer, nor a mechanic, nor anything else that they would need to get them out of this mess. She was able to fire the three torches because that much was obvious from the console. Since it had been almost a minute now, and no more kinetic drones had destroyed any part of the platform, or the propulsion attachment, they were guessing that her initial act had worked. But they were still in trouble, and something had to be done about it. They needed their pilot back at his workstation. But that seemed to be impossible. The platform was spinning like a carnival ride. Artificial gravity was down, and they were all pinned against the wall. No one was going anywhere. Shasta was barely holding onto the console, even if the pilot could somehow walk her through whatever procedure needed to be done.

Suddenly, however, they found themselves slowing down. They were still rotating, but their eyes were no longer bulging out of their heads, and what food remained in their stomachs wasn’t threatening to follow what had already come up. “Grab my ankle!” Shasta cried.

The pilot jumped over and took hold of her leg. He climbed her body until he could hold onto the console himself. “Someone is controlling this,” he announced, looking at the screen. “I can’t pinpoint where, but it’s not remote. They’re somewhere on this ship.”

“Get me AG!” Reed ordered.

“That’s my job,” his specialist insisted. Her official title was Transdimensional Regulator, and Reed did not understand what exactly her job entailed. He just needed her to make it work again. She was crouched on the wall, tapping on her tablet. “I’ve been trying to fix it this whole time. It’s giving me so much shit!” She growled as she continued to work on it. “I need more power. I need someone to reroute it from non-essential systems. I don’t care which, but the portals are closed. I need one burst to reopen them, and then they should draw normally.”

“Climate control,” Reed decided. “Reroute from climate control.”

“On it.” Shasta swung over to environmental control, and gave the Regulator what she needed.

“Ramping gravity to thirty seconds,” the Regulator informed them. “I would make an announcement if I were you.”

Reed placed his wrist in front of his lips. “This is Acting Captain Reed Ellis, calling all hands. We are restoring dimensional gravity. Relocate the floor, prepare for a sudden shift.”

“Sudden shift,” the Regulator mumbled. “There’ll be nothing sudden about it. I do my job.” She stood up on the wall, and deftly walked back down to the floor with perfect timing. Everyone else tumbled towards it with varying degrees of gracelessness.

Reed got back to his feet, performed the Picard maneuver, and cleared his throat. “Report!”

“We’re still spinning, sir,” his pilot answered, “but gradually regaining attitude control. Soon enough, we’ll still be plummeting to our deaths, but doing so straight as an arrow.”

“Arrows spin,” the Regulator argued.

Reed ignored her casual combativeness. She was one of the most important people on this platform. Of course, everyone had their own job to do, but transdimensional gravity was incredibly rare, and one could count on their fingers how many people were qualified to operate it safely and effectively. Again, he had no clue how it worked. Some unnamed singular genius invented it, and doled it out very selectively. At the end of the day, his Regulator could do or say whatever the hell she wanted, because everyone here was replaceable...except for her.

“Did you find out who fired the thrusters to control our spin?” Reed asked the pilot.

“Not who, but where. They’re in main engineering.”

“That should be impossible.” Reed pointed out. “I was told that it was not survivable.”

“It might be temporarily survivable,” the pilot reasoned, “and the person in there is about to die, or already has after fixing the issue.”

“Good point. Stay here, and get us the hell out of this gravity well. Fire all three operational thrusters if you have to. It doesn’t matter if we have our own gravity working.”

“It’s the elevator pod, sir,” the pilot reminded him. “They don’t have AG, so they’re in danger as long as they’re still out there.”

“Then reel them in!” Reed turned to face Shasta. “You’re with me.” He started walking away. “I also need one engineer.”

“Sir!” an eager young engineer said, literally jumping at the chance. He would learn these people’s names eventually.

They walked in silence for a moment before Reed was finally ready to ask, “how are you here?”

Shasta shrugged. “We’re immortals.”

“I didn’t ask how you were alive,” he snapped back.

“I had a back-up in a respawn sector. Not a big deal.”

“It is a big deal. I had to bring you into this. You didn’t have Tangent clearance. I’ve never actually been up here before, yet you’re telling me that you had time to construct a clone of yourself? You would have had to do it months ago at least.”

“I had this substrate made while you were in blackout hock.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. No one can clone or print a body that fast.”

“They can on Castlebourne,” she contended.

“Yeah, they use special technology that we don’t have. We got artificial gravity, they got rapid bioprinting.”

“We got both,” Shasta insisted. “You just need to know where to look.”

“How did you know where to look, but I don’t?”

“You were asleep,” Shasta tried to explain. “There were many last-minute details that you don’t know. We recruited others that you are not aware of. Someone from Castlebourne came here to help. We don’t know how they knew that we needed it, but we didn’t question it after they proved their worth. I watched a copy of her materialize in a pod in seconds. It was phenomenal. I’ve never seen anything like it. It does not look like what you’re used to.”

“However it looks, it would not have been a software issue, but a hardware issue,” Reed said. “You would have needed to get this mysterious savior on the Tangent to make the secret upgrades.”

“She said that she would take care of it, and she did,” Shasta replied. “We decided to trust her. I don’t know if she magically made her way onto a secure yet to be operational space elevator platform in record time, or if she already had someone on the inside, but it obviously worked.” She swept her hands down in front of her chest illustratively.

They were back at main engineering, so Reed couldn’t press the conversation, but he was determined to get more answers later. Random people didn’t just help like that, and they certainly didn’t show up unprompted. He pointed at the dented door. “I need you to tell me what’s happening in there without any of us going in there.”

The engineer’s fingers were dancing in the air before her. She was controlling an augmented reality interface that they could not see as it was being projected directly into her pupils. These weren’t too terribly common, probably because it was a little awkward, pressing buttons that you couldn’t feel. People tended to prefer the haptic feedback of more traditional form factors. “This way.” She walked off. They followed her around the corner, and around the next corner, to the opposite side of engineering. “This door is fine, but I don’t have authorization.”

“Are you sure it’s not gonna boil me alive?” Reed asked the engineer. He glanced over at Shasta for a second. “I don’t have a magical back-up body.”

“You would if I had had time to ask for your consent,” Shasta claimed.

“I’m sure,” the engineer said. “This door doesn’t lead all the way into engineering. It’s just a mechanical service terminal, but it’s undergoing unusual power spikes, so I would start there. I promise, it’s safe.”

Reed opened the door.

None other than their shuttle pilot, Trilby was on the other side. He was elbows deep into an access panel of some kind. Wires and power crystals were hanging out of other panels behind him. Trilby looked over at them. He quickly pushed his steampunk goggles to his forehead before going back to the wires.  “Cap’n. Nice to see you again.”

“What are you doing?” Reed questions.

“Fixing your ship,” Trilby answered.

“It looks like you’re taking it apart.”

“Oh, no sir. I couldn’t get into engineering, so I’m piloting ‘er manually.”

“Those are just the power relays,” his engineer said. “How the hell are you doing anything from here?”

“Power is everything,” Trilby said. “It’s all just ones and zeroes, on and off, stop and go. You can make a machine do anything if you pull the right connections in the right sequence.” He let go of the wires, pulled his arms out, and faced the three of them.

“That’s ridiculous,” the engineer retorted. “You would have to have an insane amount of intimate knowledge of this platform’s systems to exercise any semblance of control over it. Not to mention the fact that the fusion torches are an attachment, not tied directly into the infrastructure.”

“Is the platform still spinning?” Trilby posed.

“No,” the engineer admitted.

Trilby showed a cocksure smirk that was eerily serious. “You’re welcome.”

“You were supposed to leave,” Reed reminded him.

“I got held up,” Trilby replied.

“Good, I’m glad,” Reed said.

“No, I literally got held up at gunpoint,” Trilby clarified. “But then someone shot them, and I ran off. I’m not sure whose side they were on.”

“It’s all settled now,” Reed determined. “Please report to auxiliary engineering. I know you didn’t come here for this, but no one gets in and no one gets out. We won’t begin hostage negotiations until we’ve broken orbit, so you might as well keep yourself busy.”

“Aye, aye.” Trilby began to walk away, but stopped. “Hey, you know you have five hours to keep from crashing into the atmosphere, right?”

“Yes, we’re working on it,” Reed concurred. “Thanks for help with that.”

“Sir, I think...” his engineer trailed off.

“You should go to aux engineering too,” Reed interrupted. “Keep and eye on him for me, but don’t get in his way. We may really need him.”

“Aye, sir.” The engineer left.

Reed turned back to Shasta. “I need to see this crazy advanced bioprinter.”

“I can take you to it,” Shasta promised, “but I warn you, it’s not going to make sense. It’s not just the same ol’ technology made faster. It’s entirely unrecognizable.”

“Stop teasing me, and let’s go.” Reed went down the hallway, figuring that he had a fifty-fifty chance of choosing the right direction.

“It’s this way,” Shasta countered.

“That’s all you had to say.” He spun around, and followed her down.

As they were walking, they listened to updates from engineering, the bridge, and other sectors. It wasn’t going to be easy, but they were making it work. They would get out of this mess and finally be on their way to the Proxima system. Everyone was doing a fine job, and the hostages weren’t giving them trouble after having reawoken from being stunned. The two of them ended up in the bowels of the platform; precisely where you would expect to find a secret respawn chamber. It was dark and damp, until it wasn’t. They entered a different section, and found it to be pristinely new, sleekly designed and sparkling.

Shasta stopped. “Okay. I warned you that it was different, but nothing can prepare you for actually seeing it with your own two eyes. Nonetheless, I assure you, it works. I woke up not an hour ago, and I’m fine.”

“Just open the door,” he urged.

She punched in the code. The door slid open.

Reed walked in first, slowly, and very confused. He was looking at something rather gross hanging from a pipe on the ceiling. It had come out of there apparently, and grown afterwards, and according to Shasta’s claims, it had done it impossibly fast. “What is that, a cocoon?”

“A chrysalis,” she corrected.

“It’s organic?”

“Yes.”

“That’s even more outrageous than I thought,” Reed began. “If anything, something like this should be slower.”

“The Castlebourner said the growth acceleration was a separate thing from the medium. It doesn’t have to be that fast. In fact, it usually isn’t. As a senior...rebel, I was granted the fastest development time, but not everyone has that luxury.” She jerked her head over to another empty chrysalis a few meters away. “I didn’t have time to learn who this was, but it was sealed up when I was here, so they must have eclosed since then.”

Reed stepped over to the second open chrysalis. He looked around it, and on the ceiling, but didn’t find any sort of interface, or anything that might point to who this would have been. “Wait. Are all of our people in the system?”

“Almost. Notable exceptions include you. Our mysterious benefactor said that she wouldn’t allow it since you couldn’t give your consent in person. A few others just straight up refused, since it freaked them out.”

“What about Vasily? Was he a holdout?”

“No,” she answered. “He was a junior rebel, so he qualified for fairly fast growth time; just not as fast as me. Why, did he die in the fight?”

“You could say that. Vasily, this is Ellis, report in,” he spoke into his comms. “Vasily, report in. Where are you?”

“Why do you look so nervous?”

“He murdered someone,” Reed explained. “A normal human.” He went back to his comms. “Vasily, report in right now!”

“Captain, sorry, I know you’re looking for Vasily, but we got a major problem on our hands,” Sartore, the elevator tech interjected. “The tethers have snapped. The pod is in a steeper decaying orbit. I hesitate to say, but...I think they were sabotaged.”

“Sabotaged by someone here, or in the pod?” Reed asked.

“Definitely here.”

“Security, get to the tether sector,” Reed ordered. “Search the entire complex. Shoot anyone who isn’t a part of our group.” He paused. “And if you find Vasily, bring him to me.”

“Sartore,” Shasta spoke in her own comms. “Can we get the pod back?”

“With a shuttle, sure,” Sartore replied. “But every second counts.”

“We’re very close to the shuttle bay,” Shasta told Reed.

“Let’s go!” He ran out of the room.

“Thanks, Sartore!” Shasta yelled into her comms as she was running out too. “Take stock of the tethering that we have left! We need to make sure we have enough to actually help on Doma!”

They raced down the corridors, and into the shuttlebay, but Vasily was one step ahead of them. He was standing at the top of the ramp of the shuttle, his gun up and ready to fire. Once they were close enough, he tensed his arms, and aimed at Reed’s head. “I know you’re not in our chrysalis system yet, Captain. If you die, you’ll end up off-world.”

“Are you so mad at me, Vasily, that you would ruin our chances to help the Domanians?” Reed asked him. “I didn’t tag you as that petty.”

“Well, I am. Have you ever been stabbed in the head before, sir? It’s not pleasant. It’s the worst way I’ve ever died.”

“You killed someone in cold blood,” Reed reminded him. “I would have shot you cleanly if I could have, but the gun wouldn’t let me, so I improvised.”

“You tried to banish me back to Bungula, where the authorities likely would have been waiting!” Vasily screamed.

“I’m sorry about that, but we need that shuttle to go retrieve those VIPs. The mission isn’t over yet. Let us finish it. Help us finish it.”

“Nah, I’m done with that. I knew you would come here, so I didn’t come alone.” Vasily slammed his palm against a button on the inside. The door to the cockpit slid open. Someone was in there, tapping on the console, likely running the pre-flight check. “How are we lookin’?” he called back.

“We’re just about ready to go.” The shuttle pilot turned around, which showed Reed and Shasta that he was not one of theirs, but a hostage. “I just need to run diagnostics on the hook that we’ll use to grab the pod. It’s never been deployed before.”

“Hook?” Vasily questioned. “We don’t need the hook. We’re just gonna crash into it. I have no interest in dropping the VIPs off on the planet. I just want to prevent him from using them as leverage.”

“Hey, that’s not what I signed up for,” the shuttle pilot argued. “I thought we were gonna save them. Some people on there aren’t even backed up.” He tried to continue arguing, but couldn’t finish.

Vasily quickly swung his arm around to shoot the shuttle pilot dead, which was just enough time for Reed to take out his own maser, and point it into the shuttle. Vasily smirked at it. “You can’t shoot me, remember?”

“But I can shoot the junction box, which will disable the shuttle, and if I aim it just right, it might even blow your body up.”

“You’re not that good ‘a shot,” Vasily contended.

“But I am.” Shasta lifted her weapon too. “Put your gun down, and step out of the shuttle, Vas. We need it.”

“You’re not getting it.” Vasily looked over his shoulder. “Shoot the box for all I care. I don’t need it to fly. This is just a bullet now. You’re the one who needs a fully functioning shuttle to retrieve it.”

They heard a gunshot. Vasily seemed to be hit in the chest. They all looked over to find Ajax behind them, walking up fast. He shot again, and again, and again, and again. Vasily’s whole body shook like a cliché as he stumbled backwards towards the cockpit. He fell to his back, and was struggling to breathe. “You should have gone for the junction box.” He reached his hand up and tapped on the console. The shuttle suddenly shot forward, through the plasma barrier, and headed straight for the floating elevator pod.

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Microstory 2620: They May Call it an Unknown Unknown, But Many Will Say They Should Have Known

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August 25, 2526. In the year 2155, Earthan scientists dispatched a series of procession probes towards Proxima Centauri. These were not the first probes to visit the star system, but they were far superior. It took the procession over 28 years to arrive, most of them sacrificing themselves to the fury of the red dwarf. There was nothing there to slow them down, except local gravity. The first one used solar pressure to decelerate as much as physics allowed, and transformed the energy it was receiving into a laser beam, which pushed against the next probe, decelerating it even faster. One by one they came, each one pushing back against the next in line before falling into the sun, until the last one was moving slow enough to survive. It performed a gravity braking maneuver around Centauri, and then remained there to perform its duties.

The first thing the final probe did was prepare what they called a catcher’s mitt. This was an electromagnetic tube built into an asteroid, designed to slow down any other vessel set to arrive by creating drag, so there would have to be no more sacrifices. The probe’s primary function, however, was to survey Proxima Centauri b, which colonists would later deem Proxima Doma. It looked up and down the land, building a map, and charting its past. It captured the mass, density, and surface gravity. It labeled the canyons, lava tubes, craters, and mountains. It sent high resolution images back to Earth, and the rest of Sol. It prepared for the nanofactories in 2194, which were made to build everything else that the colonists would need to live and thrive on the surface.

The probe noticed two very interesting geological features, later to be named the Chappa’ai and the Annulus mountain ranges. The former was in the north, and the latter in the south. They circled the poles quite fantastically perfectly. They weren’t artificial, but they were surprisingly smooth, in geological terms, anyway. They separated the poles from the rest of the planet, along the Terminator Line, and on both planetary faces. The researchers who studied these fascinating walls interpreted them as evidence of severe crater impacts. The fact that they could be found at both poles was mysterious and noteworthy, but not wholly implausible. Space is a dangerous and chaotic place. Things are flying every which way all the time. Why, Earth only supports life because a smaller planet once crashed into it, and ultimately made the moon. That was implausible too but it obviously happened. They certainly didn’t think there was anything else going on here. They had no alternative explanation.

As it turns out, the rings were not created by two perfectly positioned bolide impacts. They are the result of a multi-millennia long cycle, precipitated by the instability of the host star. Proxima Centauri was already volatile prior to this, sending out solar flares, and even coronal mass ejections, constantly. The polarity reverses every several years. It’s commonplace. It’s predictable. It’s accounted for. Very occasionally—but reasonably predictably, given enough data—the poles flip so spectacularly that it spells catastrophe for the orbiting terrestrial planet. That is what is happening in the here and now. The poles snapped, and sent a massive CME towards the colony. The atmosphere swelled, the surface turned into soup, and the ants were sent running for the hills. But it is not over. The cataclysm is only beginning. Because those polar rings? They’re suture zones, and they’re beginning to rip apart at the seams. And not everyone will be on the correct side when that happens.

Microstory 2619: There Are Those Who Know That There is an Easier Way to Escape

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August 24, 2526. The majority of the population of Proxima Doma live in domes. The word doma does not mean dome, so that is not why they called it that, but they do share a linguistic history. The connection is not random, they are still related. The purpose of the colony has always been to serve as a second home for Earthans. Until recently, with the advent of Castlebourne, it was the most heavily populated human settlement outside of the Sol system. They don’t count Glisnia either, because it was reserved predominantly for posthumans, which can explode in population at the whims of its individuals. One person can make a million copies of itself, or child assets, in a matter of days. But that’s not what Doma is about. It’s mostly about the humans. They’re typically transhumanistic themselves, and even virtually immortal, but they still require protection from the outside. And one way to do that is to build in lava tubes.

Lava tubes are very popular on Luna and Mars. That’s because they work very well there, and not so well on Proxima Doma. But they are not impossible, and there are precisely two of them. One is under construction, but the other is the home to hundreds of thousands of people. Well, it used to be. They have since abandoned their precious tube in the evacuation, but unlike most, they didn’t do it by running towards the nearest pole. They escaped using their minds.

“You don’t think they’re coming back?” the upload tech asks.

The lookout looks down at her friend. “They found the nearest spine. I think they’re gonna keep trying to head for the northern pole.”

“On foot?” he asks.

“Eh, doubtful. The reports said those vactrains are non-operational, but there are other means of traveling along the spines and domes, which are harder to break.”

“Should we keep waiting, in case there are other survivors who might be heading our way?”

The lookout turns the periscope southwards. “It is not looking good. If anyone is still alive in that direction, they’re about not to be, either because they’re stubborn or stupid.”

“Or stuck or trapped or confused, or a myriad of other reasons,” the tech offers.

“Regardless,” the lookout begins, “those are probably the last stragglers we’re gonna see. They were looking right at us. They probably can’t tell what we are. From that distance, with only their helmet scopes, we probably just look like generic ninety-degree angles. I think we should go.”

The last remaining herder walks into the room. “What’s the word?”

“We saw a couple of survivors on the surface,” the upload tech relays. “It looks like they were checking us out, but they decided to walk back towards the domes.”

“On foot?” the herder questions.

“That’s what I said.”

The lookout hops off of her perch a few steps at a time. “Did you find anyone during your sweep? What happened to your clothes?”

“Uh, it’s about 95 degrees celsius in some parts out there. I see you’re not exactly wearing a parka either, and this chamber still has working climate control. And no, all clear in my sector. Did any of the other herders find anyone?”

“A few,” the tech answers. “They’re all gone now, however, including the other herders. No one was so stubborn that they absolutely refused. If you didn’t find anyone, we are the last three people in Owl Town.” Owl Town isn’t the official name of the lava tube city, but it’s what everyone calls it. Some tried to get a lava theme going, but most leaned into the tubular aspect. If there had been any other lava tubes being colonized on this planet at the time, they probably wouldn’t have made any sort of connection.

“So, is it time?” the herder presses.

“I would prefer to wait for the next update from the other settlements that are evacuating the same way we are,” the tech explains. “It would be cool if we were the last everywhere; at least out of those who aren’t scrambling for the poles, or already there.”

“Are they all going to the same place?” the herder asks.

“Mostly, since it’s the most happenin’ spot right now,” the tech reports, “but some are going closer, like VR. I can send you there, if you want, or anywhere else with a quantum terminal.” His tablet beeps. “Oh, speaking of which.”

The lookout shakes her head. “No, it’s like you were saying, it’s a popular destination, and it’s that way for a reason. I was considering moving there before all this happened, but I’m glad I stayed to see it end. I mean...sorry, I’m not glad it’s ending, but if it has to end, at least I was here. I was one of the first colonists, and it sounds like I’ll be one of the last.”

The upload tech is looking over the update, and shaking his own head. “I wouldn’t be so sure. “Most of the people who are wanting to transfer have done it already. They’re just waiting on bandwidth. The polar residents, and the refugees that they’re letting in, are showing no intention of leaving like us. Reports indicate that Bungula is refusing to send their elevator platform. Even if some people do want to evacuate, there’s nowhere to go.”

“Why aren’t they doing what we’re doing?” the herder questions, flabbergasted. “I know some people aren’t digitized, but that still leaves a huge number of people who are, but are staying anyway? Do they think Proxima Doma will become habitable again?”

“There’s no reason to think that it won’t be,” the lookout begins. “Think about it, this planet has been here for billions of years, and we’ve been here for a few hundred. We just happened to be on it when it’s being completely destroyed forever? I don’t buy it. This is a cycle. It might be a very long cycle, but if we found a temporal niche to survive in, someone will find one again at a later date. Maybe people shouldn’t leave, or maybe they should plan on returning. That doesn’t sound crazy or dumb to me.”

“So, why aren’t you choosing to stay?” the tech questions.

“Because where we’re going sounds like more fun.”

“Agreed,” the herder says. “Best get on with it. I’ll go first.”

She and the lookout sit down next to each other. “I wanna try that Underbelly dome first,” the latter says as her final words. “See you on the other side in an hour.” She closes her eyes and lets the upload tech send her and the herder to Castlebourne.

The tech sighs. “No...you won’t.” He hits RECORD on his workstation cam. “This is Sorel Arts of Vulcan’s Hollow. If you find this message, I urge you to stop trying to escape to the poles. Nowhere is safe on Proxima Doma. Leave. Just leave. Transmit your consciousness to another world. It is the only logical choice. I’m only staying to convince others to do the same. Sorel Arts...signing off. Vulcan’s Hollow is closed for good.”

Microstory 2618: The Way is Clear, the Beetle Knows the Way

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Almost straight east, another kilometer and a half away, in the direction of the planet’s night side, lay another manmade structure. Since it would have been so far out of the group’s way, Breanna decided that a detour would require a unanimous vote. Last time, they received one when they didn’t need it, and this time, they needed it, but didn’t get it. Less than half were willing to risk it, so they elected not to. Those who voted in favor of it were not upset or argumentative. They accepted the results, and moved on.

They have continued on their way northwest, trying to head in the general direction of the pole while also hoping to run into a dome, or one of the tunnels used to connect the disparate domes to each other. After hours, they finally see it, and decide to forgo their break in lieu of pushing forward to reach their interim goal. They’ve become more accustomed to their suits, though they still feel very confining. Even Breanna and Cash have had just about enough. They’re designed to operate indefinitely, but changing human psychology is a different challenge altogether.

“I think I see a person up there,” a passenger notes, looking towards the spine. It is a massive structure, snaking through the land, made to transport people and supplies along walking corridors, vactrain tubes, or sometimes chairlifts for steep climbs. Breanna isn’t extremely familiar with the inner workings of these structures, but while she can’t quite make out someone standing on the top herself, there is surely a way up there on the exterior. The megaengineers responsible for all this infrastructure tried to plan for everything. Everything but a worldwide cataclysm apparently.

“I see it too,” someone else declares.

Breanna reaches up and extends the magnification on her helmet to its extreme limit, and is able to see a silhouette, but no detail. “Whoever they are, they’re not wearing any protective gear.” She looks over at Aeterna.

Aeterna smiles. “I told you he was alive.”

“We don’t know that that’s him,” Breanna says. “Unless you have some reason to believe that you’re the only two insanely invincible immortals in the universe.”

“No, of course not. They’re just probably not on Proxima Doma, or in this time period.” That doesn’t make much sense. If they can’t die, why wouldn’t there be just as many—this doesn’t make sense at all. She’s choosing not to question it, however, because it’s hurting her head, and she probably doesn’t really want to know.

They get close enough to resolve a face, and just as they suspected, it is indeed Tertius Valerius. He’s smiling like he doesn’t have a care in the world, waving to them gleefully, pointing towards some particular part of the spine that he’s standing on, and beckoning them forwards. As they draw even nearer, they discover that there’s a fully functioning escalator on the side, which they use to reach the top and reunite with him. He and his daughter hug, but not particularly exuberantly. Neither of them is surprised. Why would they be? As they keep saying, they can’t die. She hands him an extra mask so he can utilize the radio, and tell them all what happened since they lost contact.

Everyone wants to know how Tertius survived the ordeal. He claims that there’s not much to tell. He just did because that’s what he does. Once the cyclone was over, he got up from the ground, and just started walking, hoping to catch up with everyone eventually. He makes it sound so simple. They have more questions, but Breanna understands their priorities. “Did you check the interior? Are there working vactrains?”

He shakes his head. “Not in the one behind us, nor the one in front, but there’s a maintenance railcar a little bit farther down. It’s not meant for people, so there aren’t any seats, but we can make it work. It’s for repairing the exterior, so it will go all along the perimeter of each dome, but if you do the math, I’m guessing it adds up to being faster and easier than walking. You’ll want to find something to hold onto as I do not believe the floor is ferromagnetic.” He turns and starts walking away. “Come on.”

He leads them farther down, towards the other end of the spine, and then down some steps on the side opposite of where they came from, where there are tiny little baby train tracks, and a small railcart. “Are we...gonna fit?” Cash questions.

“Oh, this is a maintenance drone.” Tertius waves his arms around the giant machine occupying the majority of the railcart. “I can’t pull it off, I was assuming you had tools to take care of it. There will be enough room once we get rid of it.”

Brenna holds her fist in front of the drone, and taps on her wrist interface. It suddenly springs to life, unlocking itself from the dock, and using its six little legs to skitter off of the railcart, onto the tracks behind them.

Cash bends over and pats the beetloid on its head. “Good girl. Good girl. Now, stay here, and try not to get swallowed up by the infinte abyss.”

“It can’t hear you through the suit,” Breanna says.

“She knows what I’m saying,” Cash claims.

They all climb onto the railcart, and find various components to hold onto. There actually is one ferromagnetic spot. It’s the hatch that leads to the engine. Breanna stands there so Tertius and Aeterna can stand in front of her, using her as a backboard. A couple of other passengers hold onto her arms and neck. Cash is the only one sitting so she can operate the controls, which were originally designed to be manipulated by giant beetle robot claws. She has to ramp up the speed slowly, because even though their suits offer them protection, they don’t exactly have inertial dampeners. A drone will normally just punch it and go, but as humans, they need a little more time to ease into it. She also needs to watch for the curves, and slow down appropriately and safely. Her onboard AI is telling her when and how, but she has to physically do it herself.

“Boss?” the guy they rescued from the other rover asks Breanna. “How do I do that thing where I just talk to one person?”

“You’ve done it,” she replies. “We’re talking one-on-one.”

“I mean with, umm...Tertius,” he clarifies.

“Oh, he just has a regular radio transceiver, so he can talk to everyone or no one.”

“I wanted to apologize for what happened...for...what I did. For what he had to do for me. It’s not that I don’t want anyone to hear what I say. I guess it just feels like I would be performing. I really just wanna have a private conversation with my savior.”

“While Cash is keeping the railcart going, I’m linking up with the dome systems as we run along them. I’m hoping we end up finding one with a fully operational train station, so we can get into one of the vacuum pods, and go a hell of a lot faster than this. You will have a chance to speak with him quietly, even if it’s not until we reach the northern pole.”

“Okay, thanks, I appreciate it.” The guy never gets his chance.

Microstory 2617: Leave it Alone as it is Neither Useful Nor Worth It

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August 24, 2526. The passengers are wildly impressed with how easy it is to walk over the land. The Integrated Multipurpose Suits aren’t just fancy, thin vacuum suits. They are made of multiple layers, one of which is specifically designed for muscular support. It’s composed of extremely strong threads, woven together to mimic the arrangement of natural muscles. You can feel yourself taking it step by step, and it’s not like it doesn’t burn any calories at all, but it definitely feels like your arms and legs are tied to an invisible friends who is doing the majority of the work for you. So, it’s great. Despite the fact that the world is ending, everyone mostly feels like they’re going to make it. There is just one other little problem.

What the guy in the other rover was feeling was claustrophobia, but being outside like this has not diminished that. They’re all experiencing a very common psychological phenomenon called encapsulation anxiety. In order to be able to move around freely while being protected by the IMS, the user must inherently sacrifice their freedom within the suit. That’s actually why it became more common for people to just wear them all the time. Even if you don’t use your helmet and gloves unless you need them, experts recommend growing comfortable with your suit; even sometimes emotionally attached to it. The passengers here do not have that luxury. This is their first time, and it’s freaking them out. Luckily, there are safeguards in place, which stop them from being able to start removing components on their own in such a hostile environment, but a few of them have tried, driven purely by their panic and instinct.

These two aspects of the journey are at odds with each other. The muscular support layer, and other lifesaving features, are allowing them to keep walking for an extended period of time. The cleithrophobia, however, is making it hard to do that psychologically. They have had to take multiple breaks just to let people move around less encumbered. There were two vacuum tents in the rover. One of them fell out of its case, and was damaged in the wreck, so they only have one, but it’s better than nothing. They can all technically fit in it at the same time, they just have to take turns stretching and sprawling. They need to sleep anyway, though, so Breanna has decided to take these frequent stops as an opportunity to encourage a segmented sleep schedule. None of them has done that before—except for Cash, who worked many split shifts on the Sentinel—but everyone has napped, and they understand the stakes, so they’re figuring it out. They have no choice. They would still rather find transportation.

“I see something up there.” They’ve been walking in a sort of random formation. Just like the caravan, Breanna and Cash aren’t always in the front.

“What is it?” Breanna asks.

The passenger is up on a ridge while everyone else is still behind it. “Uhh...the magnification on this head up thing says two kilometers. I don’t know what that means, and I can’t actually tell what it is. The little man in here says it’s artificial because of ninety degrees?”

“Yeah, nature doesn’t really make ninety-degree angles,” Breanna explains. “It’s probably a manmade structure of some kind. It could be a permanent outpost, or it could be debris that got thrown around, just like we did. Is it in the same direction that we’re headed?”

“It’s a little out of our way,” the passenger replies. “You’ll have to decide whether we go for it, or keep trying to find those connecting spine things that the domes have.”

Breanna makes it over the ridge, and looks out at what he’s seeing. She squints her eyes, but it’s obviously not going to help. If the sensors can’t identify, she’s certainly not going to be able to. “This is one of those voting times we talked about yesterday. Everyone needs to get up here and take a look. Then we’ll raise our hands for who wants to go check it out. “We don’t just need a majority, but a supermajority. That means eight out of the ten of us need to agree.”

She waits for everyone to get a good look at the difference between the main quest and the side quest, and then they take a vote. It’s unanimous because it’s not too far out of their way, and it could lead to their salvation. The answer turns out to be rather complicated. Once they reach the object, they find that it’s a partially sunken, dusted over rover. A quick link-up shows that it was one of the ones from the caravan. There are no bodies inside, alive or dead. The assumption is they got stuck, and had to get out. The question is whether the other rovers let them distribute amongst them, or if there forced to go on foot, just like Breanna’s ragtag team. Optimism says the former, of course. That’s one reason why they deliberately grouped Breckenridgers and Levins together. They wanted everyone to have some kind of connection to every other vehicle, so if some crap like this happened, no one would get screwed.

The other feeling of optimism is that the caravan managed to get out at all. It might have just been this one vehicle, and maybe another, but one can hope that all of them survived the thermal cyclone, and are continuing northwards where it’s safe. That is what Breanna and Cash are choosing to believe right now. They’ve been growing close over the last couple of days. As harrowing as their adventure has been, the walking portion has been rather uneventful. You have to spend your time doing something. Some people are just watching TV on their HUDs, but the two leaders have been talking, and wishing they were friends prior to this. Maybe something more? Breanna knows that it’s not the time to push for anything like that right now. Survival is paramount.

“Can it be fixed?” one of the passengers asks.

“You know this stuff better than we do,” another adds. “Maybe they abandoned it because they didn’t know what they were doing.”

“We’re not mechanics either,” Breanna admits. “So we’re not the ones to ask. There’s one among us who would know best.” She chuckles when they look at Aeterna, the weird immortal. “Not her. Thistle, damage report.”

“The vehicle could be repaired, but it would have to be dislodged from the mud first. There is no equipment available to perform such a maneuver. Recommendation: salvage anything left inside, and return to the trek.”

“Thank you, Thistle,” Breanna says. “I’m overriding that recommendation,” she says to the people. “Our friends who were in this car weren’t stupid. They would have taken anything valuable, and I can’t vouch for the stability of this thing. So we leave it alone, and leave. I’m not taking votes on it this time. It is not worth the risk.”

“We might need to vote on this, though” the guy they rescued from the other rover says, looking out on the horizon.

“What is it?”

“More ninety degrees...and far out of our way.”