Microstory 2793: Okay, So They Are Bloodthirsty Now

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Article 5, Section 6, Subsection (c), Clause (vii). That is a mouthful, and no one knows what it says by heart, so Ersence leads the charge to the wall terminal to find out if the agreement is accessible. “It says I need authorization for network access.”

Van tilts his head back a little bit. “Okay, they’ve granted it. Go ahead.”

Ersence navigates to her private portal and pulls up the document. “Article five, section six, subsection-c, clause v-i-i.” She clears her throat. “Anycandidate, at any time, may end the selection process immediately upon declaration of a prevailing qualifier.” Ersence leans back a little. “Declaration of a prevailing qualifier. That just sounds like the competition ends when someone is chosen. Sure, it talks about any candidate, but there’s not even any connective tissue between the candidate who ends it and the candidate who wins it. I mean, this could be interpreted a number of ways, and it’s buried in the document so deep, no one would have caught it.”

“I caught it,” Tamerlane says. “I always read every agreement I get before I sign.”

“Then you obviously didn’t understand it,” Ximena points out, “or you would have declared yourself the winner long before any of us had the chance.”

“First of all,” Tamerlane begins, “Van only gave you the part that explains the result, not the lead-up. Earlier language specifies that at least one candidate must be removed from consideration before this clause is triggered. Second of all, I never wanted to be Superintendent, so even after Eyrenlander Number One fell off his platform, I stayed quiet. I have been waiting for someone else to do it. I had money on Jande.”

“Why are you here, wasting our time?” Zanele questions. “If you don’t want it...?”

“Because I just wanted to be Deputy Superintendent,” Tamerlane explains. “I declare myself Deputy Superintendent of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida.”

“So it shall be,” Van affirms.

“Oh my God!” Haoran complains. “You can do that too?”

“That’s in a different clause,” Tamerlane says. “Always read the contract.”

“What was the point of any of this?” Kool questions. “If anyone can just say that they’ve won, why did you hold a competition at all? Jande has had a little time to prove himself, but he could have had almost none after that Eyrenlander fell.”

“You weren’t the only applicants,” Van says. “You were only the ones who received a supermajority of votes from the citizens of Bida. It was a silent vote. That’s why we asked you to wait two days before announcing your candidacy. Thousands of others applied; none of them voted either, and anyone who didn’t apply got to vote for who they wanted in the running. You’re all winners.”

“That’s not true,” Dare points out. “Nine of us lost, only two of us won.”

“Not necessarily. How many positions of power are left?” Ersence asks Van.

“As many vacant positions as there are on Bida at this very moment,” he answers.

“Does anyone remember what they are?” Dare looks over at Tamerlane. “You?”

Tamerlane only shrugs his shoulders.

Haoran gets too close to breaking his medical oath when he shoulder-checks Ersence out of the way so he can look it up. He’s not the only one to think that way. Kool, Ximena, and even Zanele start fighting for access to the terminal, hoping to read the list one second before anyone else, allowing them to declare their consolation prize.

The commotion stops when the terminal shuts off entirely. Dare is on his knees, holding the main power supply in one hand. He stands. “Jande. Put a stop to this.”

“He can’t make any decisions,” Van claims. “He has not been sworn in yet. Until he has, all positions are up for grabs, according to the agreement.”

“All positions?” Dare asks.

Everyone freezes.

“Now, hold on,” Jande says, backing away slowly. “You had your chance to kill me, and you didn’t do it. Nothing has changed. The prize is still the same.”

“Yeah. That was you,” Ersence reasons as she’s matching his pace.

Dare, Ximena, Priscilla, and Mireline walk towards him menacingly too.

“We like you, Jan,” Ersence goes on. “You’re a good man. Now we have another option. It wouldn’t be the top spot, but it’s better than nothing.”

Jande steps between Tamerlane and everyone else. “You’re right, I am good, which is why I’m not gonna let you kill anyone. Not even he deserves that.”

“Oh, come on,” Dare argues. “Get real. It’s 2565. Do you actually think that anyone’s dying permanently? Murder isn’t legal anywhere, not even on Castlebourne. In fact, no state condones death at all. He’ll be fine. It will only hurt for a second.”

“You’re outnumbered,” Mireline warns. “This won’t be hard.”

Tamerlane gently takes Jande by the shoulders. “I appreciate what you’re doing. But the big guy in back will protect me.”

Everyone turns around, and when they do, Tamerlane teleports Jande away.

That’s the second time someone has done that to Jande, and he isn’t used to it yet. He separates himself from Tamerlane and turns around. “How did you sneak in the tech you would need for that? They didn’t even let us have communicators.”

Tamerlane chuckles. “It’s not technology, it’s neurology. These people can force me into any substrate they want, but they can’t stop me from using my powers.”

Jande nods, catches his breath, and gets a look around. “Is this your ship?”

“Yeah, it’s not much, but it gets me where I need to go,” Tamerlane answers.

Jande steps over and takes it upon himself to open the nearest viewport. They’re in orbit over Bida. He presses his face against the glass to get a look around. “We’re not spinning.” He stands up straight and oscillates his knees. “How are we not spinning?”

Tamerlane smiles. “Now that is tech. Artificial gravity is nowhere near ubiquitous, but it’s gaining traction. I’m not in what you would call the inner circle, but I’m not in general population either, so a friend procured it for me.”

“Teleportation, AG; this is Teagarden-tier power. And the Teaguardians have faster-than-light. If you’re on par with them, why are you slumming it here on the Core Worlds? You could rule your own colony on the Frontier, and you wouldn’t need permission. You simply get there first with some seed plates, and start fresh.”

“That’s something a megalomaniac would do,” Tamerlane begins. “I don’t want power for the sake of it, I want to protect. I want to make up for the sins of my alternate self. This world is even more sacred than you were raised to believe. Some very fine people put their blood, sweat, and tears into building it, and it’s on the verge of destruction. The KBH that destroyed Eyrenland? It was only the beginning.”

“And you think I’m up for a job that you didn’t even want yourself?”

Tamerlane offers a hand to shake. “I think we can do it...together.”

Microstory 2792: He’s Just Going to Declare Himself the Winner

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Jande only has one shot at this. If he misses, the drone flies off, and he may never get an answer. But there appear to be no rules to this game, and they seem to like it when the candidates improvise. There were no real weapons in the car, except for a small tool that Jande believes is meant to break the glass in case of emergency. He would have rather had a tire iron, but he took this little thing with him just the same. While the drone is still hovering in front of his face, Jande carefully slips his hand in his pocket, then pulls it out as fast as possible. He jams it into one of the rotors, and holds it down. Some drones are strong enough to lift a full-grown man into the air. Not this one.

The drone tries to escape, but it’s damaged and not strong enough. Jande lifts his legs in the air and takes hold of it with his knees like they’re making love. He wrenches the tool out and starts bashing the drone’s casing as hard as he can, as many times as he must, until the machine stops buzzing. Now he can relax and set it on the ground below him. The camera is still operational. “Citizens and visitors of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. I don’t think these people are being honest with us. I’m tired of runnin’ around, and gettin’ the runaround.” He yanks the navigation chip out of its port and smiles at the lens. “I’m gonna find some answers, you best believe that.”

After Jande smashes the camera, he starts tinkering away. This is not a particularly sophisticated model, but it’s also not designed to do what he needs. The navigational data is for internal and remote use, but the information is on the chip, which means it can be accessed if you create the right interface. He won’t be able to open and close menus, but he’ll find out what he needs eventually, with enough power cycling.

He jury-rigs a connection between the chip and the holographic projector because that’s the easiest readout to access. It projects the image onto the trunk of a nearby tree. He has to adjust the angle and proximity a little, but he gets a clear enough picture. He knows exactly where he is on the planet. It is probably the farthest you can be from Quiratan, and that doesn’t make much sense. The fastest vehicle or vessel can’t move them fast enough to be transported this far without knocking them out first. If they had been moved this distance while they were awake, everyone would have noticed, because it would have taken forever. They’re messing with time somehow, or rather their perception of it. In fact, none of this might even be real. It could be a simulation.

There was some water and emergency food in the drone’s payload. It’s not very satisfying, but it will get him through the next task. He leaves the mess on the ground, and makes the trek back to the car. It turns out to be a lot closer than he thought. He was not moving fast when he was starving and weak, and he probably zig-zagged a ton on the way. He gets back in the car, and retraces his steps back down the highway.

When Jande pulls back into the Vector stadium parking lot, he comes up to a gray van. Van, as in the man, is standing on the side of it holding an open umbrella. “It’s a clear day,” Jande points out as he’s stepping out of his own car. “It won’t rain.”

“Not here,” Van says. “I have somewhere else to be soon, though, and I’m starting to suspect that you have your mind on being there too. Tell me, when you broke the drone, did you find what you were looking for? Did you get your answers?”

“Why are we so far from Quiratan? What do you have planned?” All of this infrastructure could have been found, or as easily built, closer to home. They too have Vector fields. There was no reason to set it up all the way out here. Either he’s up against a huge conspiracy, or this is all a test. Either way, he can’t accept his current circumstances anymore. The deaths, the completely arbitrary challenges—it ends today. For him, anyway. He’s done with all this, not because they tried to kill him, but because something is not right, and he doesn’t have to be a superintendent to figure it out.

“I need to know your intentions,” Van says. “What do you want?”

“I want to quit this contest,” Jande replies. “I want to go back home, and back to my old life. As long as I can keep farming my land, I don’t care who’s in charge.”

Van’s lips stretch into a smile. He holds his hand out. “Take my hand.”

“I’m not looking for another spouse at this time,” Jande can’t help but joke.

Van’s smile widens. “Take it. You want answers, you got it, but you’re gonna have to take a leap of faith. No one’s watching right now. That drone you destroyed was the last broadcast camera we had online. It’s not over, but we’re on a commercial break.”

Jande is not afraid of Vantu’s hand, per se. It’s suspicious, though, why he should need to touch it. And what is up with that umbrella? Still, he’s intrigued, so he takes it.

The first thing Jande notices is the rain. One second, it’s perfectly dry and warm, then the next it’s pouring rain and somewhat chilly. He looks around, and recognizes his environment. This is Quiratan. He’s back where he belongs, and it only took a second. He steps a little closer so he’s more under the umbrella. “Gatewood,” he says to Van. “They say Gatewood has teleportation, like...beam me up, Scotty and all that shit.”

“They do,” Van acknowledges.

“You stole it from them?”

Van laughs. “Gatewood didn’t invent nothin’. Teleportation was a gift.” He jerks his head to the side. “My shuttle over there? Designed by one of the people who invented teleportation. We take it for granted, and if you make the right choice, you will too.”

“What choice would that be?” Jande questions.

Van jerks his head again, but more lightly this time. They start to walk through the uquira fields. “I can’t tell you what your options are, and I certainly can’t tell you what to choose. All I can do is respond. You have to decide what you want, and what you think you deserve. You tell me that, I’ll tell you what will happen because of it.”

Jande reaches down to pick a uquira steg off and starts chewing on it.

“Are those edible?” Van asks. “I wasn’t aware of that. How do they taste?”

“It depends,” Jande begins. “If you’re a baseline human, the frass is toxic. You’ll start to convulse and throw up uncontrollably until your intestines twist up so bad, you wouldn’t be able to eat anymore, even if you could hold a fork steady.” He manages to crack the shell. He spits it into his hands, dumps the remaining frass out so he can discard the shell pieces, then releases the frass into the wind.

“I was told uquira propagates differently, by firing seeds at each other,” Van says.

“That’s exactly what they do,” Jande confirms. He wipes the last of the frass and shell debris off of his tongue so they don’t poison him. “I’m not planting, I’m enriching the soil. It’s basically a natural fertilizer. Uquirakind are a self-sustaining ecology.” He stops and faces Van head on. “You were saying that it’s up to me to make my choice.”

“That’s right,” Van agrees. “What choice are you making, sir?”

“I want to be Superintendent,” Jande says confidently, “and I do not want to compete for it. It’s just me. I win, no questions asked, no arguments. It simply is.”

Van nods as he breathes the fresh air...and the frass. “Done.”

Microstory 2791: He’s Being Paranoid, No One is Coming

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Jande bolts. He does not wait to see who shows bloodthirst in their eyes. He does not ask questions, or hope to hear other people’s questions. He just takes off, needing to put as much distance between him and anyone who might want to see him dead. Van and the producers are truly sick, not only allowing deaths to occur, but actively encouraging murder. How are they getting away with this? Killing is illegal in the stellar neighborhood, and very illegal on the Core Worlds. It might be a clue that people aren’t really dying, or an old law is so ironclad that it’s a loophole no one can argue against. Either way, he just wants to survive. Even if it means he’ll never be Superintendent, he would rather at least keep living.

They’re still in the vector stadium, though it’s empty of its audience. Everyone is watching at home now. There is almost certainly plenty of smart dust tracking his every move. He doesn’t have the equipment to destroy it. It’s part of the competition, seeing him make it through...or not. He makes it out of the stadium, though. He isn’t looking back because it will only slow him down for precious fractions of a second. If someone catches up to him, there is no point in seeing it coming.

Jande is in the parking lot now. It’s pretty dead, but there are a few random ancient land vehicles scattered about. They may have placed them here strictly for ambiance, which could mean they’re non-functional. But they could also be the means of widening that gap between him and his opponents. But which one to choose? He doesn’t know much about obsolete Earthan tech, but some of these look nicer than others, which implies they would be faster. Is that a trap? Should he choose the boxy-looking one with peeling paint? Or did the producers guess that he would pick that, so they intentionally discharged the battery. Do these damn things even run on electricity?

Oh, it’s a crapshoot. Now he does turn around, but immediately feels a shiver down his spine. Since he didn’t stick around, he doesn’t know if Van provided the other candidates with weapons. They could have bows and arrows, guns, or even rocket launchers. He has no clue. His only hope has not changed since the moment Van said go. Jande has to let his instincts take over, and pick a car without thinking about it.

He runs over to a sweet cherry ride. The door is unlocked, which is either very good for him, or the trap he was worried about. Nope, it doesn’t matter. Always forward, never back. He slides inside. It feels so good, the seat wraps around him perfectly, like the designer knew he would be the one to drive it. Maybe they did. Who knows how long they have been planning? Even if this is a real model from the olden days, the producers could have commissioned a synthwright to modify it, knowing he would be right here, right now. Again, it doesn’t matter. He just needs to make it go. How do you do that?

Jande stares at the console before him. There aren’t any buttons or levers. It’s just a smooth, curved surface. He looks to his left. “Oh. That makes sense.”

Jande climbs back out of the car, takes another look towards the stadium, feels another shiver, then jogs over to get into the driver’s side of the vehicle.

“Welcome to your new Starburst,” the AI voice says in what he has heard described as an Australian accent. “Where would you like to navigate to? Or if you would like, you may browse Aevum’s comprehensive library of entertain—”

“Just get me out of here as fast as you can,” Jande interrupts.

“Posted speed limits require that I travel no faster than ten miles per—”

“Manual mode,” Jande demands.

“Sir, I really must discourage—”

“Manual mode!” Jande screams.

The engine engages. The steering wheel adjusts itself to Jande’s dimensions. A little graphic tutorial appears on the central screen, showing him the basics of how to operate it. It’s not all that different from the vehicles he uses on the farm. The pedals are new, but they look intuitive. And when he presses down on one of them with his right foot, it feels so intuitive too. It feels like this car has been waiting for him since it was invented. It doesn’t even lurch. It knows exactly what he wants from it, even though he’s quite inexperienced. He starts out by taking it a little slow, but he can’t afford to wait much longer. He takes one more look in the rearview mirror, and then he guns it.

He finds the parking lot exit to the main road, and then the highway. They don’t have much infrastructure like this anymore, but if you’re looking for it, the early colonies are the place to check, especially Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. They pride themselves in being low-key and low-tech when luxury is not necessary. Many worlds are building out their vactrain network, but it doesn’t really fit the naturistic vibe of this one. The highway doesn’t either, but it looks fresh and new. He still doesn’t know what continent they’re on, but this could be a closed course built specifically for the game.

Jande is smiling now, realizing how many miles he’s putting behind him. It slowly fades, though. There were other cars in that lot. Maybe none of them was a trap. Maybe they were there to even the playing field. He should have taken the time to disable them. Of course, he wouldn’t have known exactly how to do that, but he could have brute forced it by crashing one car into all of the others before absconding with the only good one. Then again, that would have taken a lot of time. Those people don’t likely know how to drive either. They live in the same time period. Even if they were alive when self-driving was more common, they probably lost those skills. Or he’s just kidding himself, because there are plenty of simulations—both physical and virtual—that will teach you legacy skills like this. The fact is, he is no better off than he was before. All he can do is keep going and hope to run the timer out. Except...the road abruptly ends.

It just stops. There are three little lozenge-shaped signs in a row, sticking out of the ground where the asphalt meets the grass. Jande stops the car and gets out. There was nowhere to turn off for miles and miles. If he tries to double back, he could wind up running into someone who is trying to kill him. The grass is tall, this thing won’t be able to make it through. One of the cars in the lot looked like it was some kind of off-roader, but what you get in versatility, you sometimes lose in speed, and he wanted to go fast. The producers knew this. They knew exactly what he would choose, and they designed the path so he would lose no matter what. There were a number of ways he could have gone, but they probably all end like this. It was inevitable.

Jande shakes his head, disappointed in how they rigged the game. He checks the trunk for supplies, but finds nothing, so he reties his shoes, prepares himself mentally, and walks into the woods. He doesn’t stop moving save for periodic five-minute breaks. He doesn’t want to lose any lead he might still have.

He’s exhausted, but he never lets himself sleep. While he’s delirious and moving quite slowly, a drone descends from the sky right in front of his face. “Sudden Death contest is over. You won, Jande Ter Avest. All other candidates forfeited.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: October 2, 2576

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Olimpia woke up on a cot in an unfamiliar place. That wasn’t entirely true. It did feel familiar, but she didn’t recognize her surroundings. It didn’t feel safe either, but something was telling her that she chose to come here, and had some idea what she was getting herself into. It was dark and dirty. The walls were made of concrete, and the height of the two windows suggested that she was underground.

The door opened. Olimpia’s brother came in, who she hadn’t realized only a moment ago that they had even reconnected. So she was starting to get her memories back, which implied that she didn’t have amnesia, just a fogged mind.

“Hey, you’re back. It’s been another year,” Delfinus pointed out.

“What day is it?” Olimpia asked him.

“It’s hard to keep track of the Earthan calendar all the way in Miridir, but somewhere in late 2576. Hopefully that’s enough for you to gauge,” he answered.

Olimpia nodded and sat back down on the bed to massage her forehead. “Unless I’ve fallen off of my pattern, it should be the second of October. Where are we?”

“A planet called Desulforudis. It’s in the middle of a civil war, but it’s winding down because there aren’t very many people left alive.” He filled a glass of water from the sink in the corner and offered it to her. “Don’t worry, it’s clean. Leida has been drinking it for years. She chose this world so people would leave her alone. She can protect herself.”

She accepted the water and chugged it, having not realized how thirsty she was.

Delfinus sighed and sat down next to her. “Leida feels awful about what happened. She thinks you have nanites in your brain which complicate the psychic wards she gave you. She thinks it worked, but the two competing systems fought for dominance, so your brain shut down to protect itself. She and I have been living here together for a year. She figured out how to turn off my time curse. And yes, it had more to do with time than we thought. I wasn’t narrating people’s thoughts. It was more like I was seeing the timeline from the outside, and extrapolating private thoughts based on a pattern of events from history. It’s hard to explain, but now I can control it. I can talk normal.”

“Good, I’m glad.” Olimpia breathed. “I remember something. We came here with a little card. It can take us back to Snake Island in the Milky Way galaxy. Now, we’ll be thousands of years in the past, but they’ll have a way to propel us back to the future.”

“I can’t leave,” Delfinus began. “Leida and I—ya know it’s been a year, and the only other people in this world are trying to kill each other, so...”

“You don’t have to explain why you fell in love.” Olimpia was still a little loopy and dizzy, but she managed to crack a smile. She patted her brother on the back a couple times before leaving her hand there. “I want you to be happy, but...here?”

“It seems counterintuitive, but the Desulforudisians had psychic warfare capabilities, so everyone by now has their own wards. It’s quiet for her.”

“Does it have to be a planet? You know they make private rotating habitats, right? My friend, Ramses could whip one up in a matter of weeks. That way it doesn’t have to be so...” She looked around the room again, “hard to maintain.” That was the best she could come up with to say that this woman’s home was disgusting.

“I’ll talk to her,” he said, “but as far as the card goes, we never found anything. If it’s not on your person, it might be lost. It could have fallen into a storm drain, or something. We looked for it because I couldn’t remember if you retrieved it, or what.”

Olimpia spent the next half hour hunting for the rendezvous card in her pockets, her pack, and the floor of the bunker. She was choosing to believe that it truly was lost, and not that it was taken on purpose. She was regaining her memories over time, but the last few hours were still a blur. The card wasn’t there, and she couldn’t get back to the Milky Way on her own, let alone to Ramosus.

Olimpia walked into the living area of the bunker, where Leida and Delfinus were sitting together.

“Hey, I’m sorry about the card,” Leida immediately said. “We did look for it last year, while you were passed out. And I’m sorry about that too.”

“You can make it up to me,” Olimpia said. “There’s some kind of signal jammer, which even blocks quantum connections. I need that switched off so I can make a call.”

Leida shook her head. “That’s not me. It’s planetwide. It’s one of the first things they did when the war started. They didn’t want people making contact with other colonies, and calling in reinforcements. The control room is somewhere in a fortress.”

“You tell me where that fortress is, I’ll get myself in there, unless you also tell me that they have teleportation technology, and potentially teleportation-suppressing tech.”

“Not that I know of,” Leida said. “I wasn’t aware that you were a teleporter.”

“I am many things,” Olimpia replied. “The fortress?”

Leida raised both of her eyebrows and simply pointed to the nearest window.

Olimpia moved a chair over to the window, and climbed on it to look outside. She could easily see what Leida must have been talking about. It was in the shape of a mountain, but was clearly made of artificial materials. She stepped back down. “How many people will try to stop me if I break in there? I’ll need to look for the controls.”

“No people,” Leida answered. “The people are all dead, but the automated systems will stop you.”

“What kind of automated systems?” Olimpia pressed. “Optical? Thermal?”

“Probably, yeah,” Leida replied. “So unless you can turn invisible...”

Olimpia made herself disappear. “Yeah, I can turn invisible. I have other tricks, but this one is my specialty.”

“How do you have so many time powers?” Leida questioned.

Olimpia showed herself again. “Time powers aren’t magical. It’s just a matter of finding and understanding the intersection where time, biology, and neurology meet. That’s what Ramses said anyway. You two stay here, I’ll turn off that jammer, and then we’ll all leave. By this time tomorrow, you should be free. I don’t want to argue about it right now, but there are other ways to isolate yourself from society. I’ll explain when I return.” She turned invisible again and teleported away before either could respond.

Olimpia transported herself to the base of the fake mountain. The doors were wide open, probably because the defensive systems were confident in their ability to keep unwanted users out, and also because the population of this planet was estimated to only be in the thousands at this point. She strolled in, prepared to teleport away if the sensors were sophisticated enough to detect her.

This turned out to be harder than she hoped. The place was gigantic, but since no one worked here anymore, a total mess too. She had a hell of a time just finding the room that controlled the massive signal jammer, and it took even longer to determine how to shut it off. It was on a split-control mechanism, which made sense given how vital this tool would have been to the war effort. Olimpia tried to trip both terminals herself using teleportation, but it wasn’t enough. They had to be flipped at the exact same time. So she returned to the bunker to seek help. She only needed one of them, but both came.

“If you want to do this,” Leida began, “I’ll help and support you, but we don’t know what’s gonna happen. It looks like this machine does a lot of things—not only control signals. We don’t know enough about it.”

“Did you steal my rendezvous card?” Olimpia asked her.

“What?” Leida was shocked. “We went over this, no.”

“Then please flip the switch for me,” Olimpia said.

Leida conceded with her face before her voice. “Okay.” She stepped onto the platform.

Olimpia counted down from three, then together, they turned it off.

Her connection reestablished itself instantly. Olimpia tapped on her wrist to send a message. At millions of light years, it could take hours to reach Ramosus, depending on what kind of relay and boosting infrastructure they had in this galaxy. So the three of them went back to the bunker to wait it out. Olimpia was hungry, so they ate too. Leida wasn’t a savage. The bunker wasn’t clean or nice, but she had all the necessary amenities, such as a simple food synthesizer. And a shower. Olimpia needed a shower too.

As midnight central was approaching, that was when Olimpia started to grow nervous. Even at this distance, the call should have gone through. Without that rendezvous card, they were stuck here, and she wasn’t sure she was buying that it could have slipped down a storm drain, or something. If she could only remember more of yesterday...

“Is there anyone else you can call? If they’re the only people who can jump this far, maybe there are other friends who can check in on them?” Delfinus suggested.

Olimpia consulted her watch for the umpteenth time. “It will take a year for them to get back to me, but yes, there’s an alternative. I just wish I had sent them a message at the same time to hedge my bets. That was a stupid move. Now I’ve wasted all this time.”

“We’ll be here,” Leida assured Olimpia. “It will only be a few minutes for you, and we’ll be waiting. Tell your other friends to come a few hours early so I can provide them with a proper welcome; maybe serve some tea. Then when you show up, you leave whenever you’re ready.”

“Okay,” Olimpia agreed. “Thanks.” She was still suspicious of this woman, but Leida had been nothing but helpful since they met.

Olimpia set her message to the Vellani Ambassador, knowing that they wouldn’t receive it until after she had disappeared from the timestream. Her friends would know this too, so they would not try to make their way here right away, where they would have to wait anyway.

When Olimpia popped back into existence on October 3, 2577, the VA was on the ground next to her. And the bunker? The bunker was gone, replaced with a big, scarred crater.

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Spaghetti West: Strange New Worlds (Part VI)

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While Sugar was talking into the microphone, trying to appeal to the masses, she was quickly generating a network portal for them to access. Though their systems were not entirely interoperable, everything was technically built on the same architecture. Computers were invented on Earth, so every civilization that spawned from it should be compatible with that technology, even if it required some tricky integrations. With Desulforudis, it was relatively easy, almost as simple as sending a web link for them to click.

Sugar wanted their input. She wanted them all to respond to her queries, and tell her how they felt about Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, the Milky Way Galaxy, and just sort of everything, including their own government. Their answers were surprising. They weren’t just isolationists. That didn’t even begin to cover it. They were hateful, mean-spirited, and if Sugar and Liselot could be so bold, potentially downright evil. The AI which aggregated their responses reported a great deal of comments that it interpreted to be racist, though their vocabulary was just a little different than standard English.

It was heartbreaking and hard to read. An entire civilization of misanthropes. How did they ever manage to survive together? If they bonded with each other over hating everyone else, she couldn’t see a common thread. There had to be something deeper...something preventing them from imploding. The two of them stood there for a moment, trying to think of a solution to this. How could they get through to the Desulforudisians?

Liselot’s face suddenly looked puzzled. “Wait. Why would we need to do that?”

“Why would we need to...try to understand these people?” Sugar assumed. “Oh, um...you’re right. We can just write these people off. They live in the sticks of a distant galaxy, and an examination of their technology shows that they are not capable of reaching anyone we care about, not even Dardius. Though, we do need to find out if they have any enemies. Maybe someone else is trying to attack them, and Bida just got caught in the cosmic crossfire. The detectives call it victimology.”

“All right,” Liselot said with a shrug. “Punch it in.”

Sugar said it out loud as she was typing, even though she could have plainly used voice-to-text. “At the risk of the answer being literally everyone in the universe, who might have reason to attack you with charged Kugelblitz black holes?”

They waited for everyone to input their respective answers. The whole world had stopped for them, like an extremely cynical and depressing remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, which was saying a lot.

Liselot rolled her eyes and took it upon herself to command the aggregator, “filter the answers that say some variation of everyone. They’re either trolls, or stupid.”

Then there it was. After removing every result that just basically blamed every non-Desulforudisian, only one remained. They don’t care about the Desulforudisians, or the Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bidans. They’re trying to kill me. If your planet is being attacked, it’s because there must be another dupe of me hiding out there too. I’m surprised he made it that far, but I suppose it proves our enemy has intergalactic range.

Sugar and Liselot exchanged a glance. Sugar then zeroed in on that one reply, cancelling the global address. She used voice-to-text this time. “Where are you?”

What are you going to do with me? the mysterious target asked.

“I’m going to get you off this world, for one. My ship can handle a black hole or two. We need to get you away from these, uhh...innocent people, and then we’re going to find your Bidan dupe to pick him up too.”

The next response took a long time to come through. “Oh, no thanks.”

“Ah,” Liselot said. “He’s hiding out here on purpose. He probably knew the KBHs were coming, and chose certain planets specifically because they were more likely to have the means of combatting the attacks.”

“Yeah, that’s my guess too,” Sugar agreed. “I don’t know if he thinks we can’t track him, or what...” She started fiddling with the console to trace the pings. She sighed.

“Problem?” Liselot asked.

“Maybe it’s that he knows we can’t track him.” Sugar growled.

“If he’s the type of guy to get an enemy to send countless singularities after every version of him, no matter who gets in the way, we shouldn’t be surprised.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Sugar violently rubbed her eyes. “Okay. We’re goin’ nuclear.” She opened the global address again. “This is happening because of one person. We don’t know who they are, or where they are, but they do not belong on your planet. They’re a foreigner. It sounds like you don’t like those. If you have any information, tell us, and we’ll be on our way. If we never find them, we never leave, so there’s your incentive.” She slammed the microphone toggle off, annoyed at having to resort to this.

Liselot peered at the screen. “Lots of different coordinates. They can’t all be our guy. They’re turning on their neighbors, trying to get us to do their dirty work.”

“Yeah, we found the keystone holding this all together. This could end the world,” Sugar mused, “eventually. Thistle, synthesize all tracing data we were able to gather from the target. Cross-reference it with the tattle-tales. Isolate the most likely coordinates. Re-ping our mystery man if you have to.”

“Processing...” Thistle reported. “Coordinates locked; dead zone.”

“Why would it be him if it’s a dead zone?” Liselot asked, noticing Sugar’s smile.

“He doesn’t wanna be caught, so he blocked all signals, and out of every patch of land on this God forsaken world, it’s the only area like that. If you want to hide, you don’t go somewhere remote, you get lost in a sea of people who look just like you. Stay here.”

Sugar teleported herself to the dead zone. Under her feet was a broken device. It was still slightly warm from having recently been in use. She looked around. She wasn’t the only person here. It looked like some kind of homeless encampment. So they did have some hate left over for internal use.

She switched her watch to megaphone mode. “I’m looking for someone who doesn’t belong here. Anyone who tells me which one it is gets a minishuttle, fully stocked with a bed, hygiene amenities, and a food synthesizer.”

Everyone pointed to the same guy. When he realized he had been caught, he disappeared.

“Do you all have teleportation abilities?” Sugar asked the unhoused.

They shook their heads.

“Your prize will be here in a moment.” Sugar adjusted her watch to breach-scanning mode as she was walking over towards the spot where the target was standing. Her watch locked onto the next coordinates, so she jumped away. She had to jump a few times, but she kept following his trail until she caught up with him.

“Just leave me alone!” the man screamed, not bothering to escape again.

“You answered my question! You obviously want this to end!” Sugar shouted.

“You can’t make me go,” he argued. “It would be a death sentence.”

“I’m the only one who can save you,” Sugar reasoned. “These people are holding back the KBHs for now, but how long do you figure it will be before one of them gets sick of it, and turns on the others? What happens when a KBH threatens a competing nation, or whatever it is? This is not a sustainable sanctuary for you. Come with me willingly.”

“They...they can always find me,” he explained. “If I leave, these people will be safe, but I’ll be more exposed. Are you sure your ship can survive that?”

“I’m quite certain,” Sugar confirmed. “It doesn’t have to exist in realspace.”

He tried to wrap his brain around it. “Fine.”

She took his hand and teleported them back to the ship. “Thistle. Did you already prepare that minishuttle I promised?”

“I’m preparing a full-sized shuttle,” Thistle answered, “based on the scope of aid.”

“Thank you,” Sugar said as she was dragging the stranger into the cell. “Once it’s ready to go, stripped of its flight capabilities, go ahead and dispatch it to ‘em.”

“They’re going to kill each other over it if there’s not enough for everyone, or if others come to take it,” Liselot warned.

Sugar watched the shuttle disappear from the hangar. She just kept staring at its now-empty dock. “That’s not our problem anymore. We’ve done enough for these jerks. Thistle, take us back into orbit, and activate a trans-ejection burn in any random direction. Get us away from this fly speck on the ass of the universe as fast as possible.”

A duplicate, by all philosophical measures, was their own unique self. Sure, the two versions could share a lot of the same memories, but their neurology was different, and every second that passed following their split increased the divide between them. Even so, on the quantum level, there was enough similar data to match them. It was like the modern version of a paternity test, which was perfected in the 21st century. They weren’t 100% the same, but close enough within a margin of error, and that was all it took to find the target’s other dupes.

Now that Sugar’s ship had experienced passing through a wormhole safely, it was better at it. It learned how to compensate for the gravitational perturbations during transit, allowing for a much smoother trip. None of these wormholes ever took them to the point of origin, as far as they were aware, and no pattern emerged. Each time they pushed a KBH back, and tried to follow it, they ended up in a random star system, quite often doubling back to worlds they had already been to, thanks to a likely tracking delay.

Most of the planets were in the Miridir galaxy. None of them was welcoming. Some were almost as hostile towards visitors as Desulforudis. It sounded like they specifically left because they didn’t like how soft Dardius had become. It wasn’t Sugar’s place to judge or help. She just fired up her quantum locator, scooped up the alternate hiding out there, and bounced. None of them gave her his name, but they all looked like the same guy, so it wasn’t hard to be sure that she had found the right one.

Finally, they had some evidence that they had rounded all of them up. They were back in the Tau Ceti system. She beamed up another human target, and waited for another attack to give them another window out of here. It never really came. Sure, more KBHs appeared, but every time she pushed one back and entered the wormhole, it spit her out somewhere around Tau Ceti again.

“This must be it,” Liselot decided. “We have them all, and now the KBHs are coming because this is where they all are.”

“Well, I don’t want to overload the defense grid, so we should leave. I must say, I’m rather glad it at least brought us back to the Milky Way, so we wouldn’t be so far from home. I don’t know what it’s going to take to find that damn source, though. It could be in Miridir, for all we know.”

“Well, where are we gonna go?” Liselot questioned.

Sugar stared into space for a moment. “Three hundred years ago, a seer asked me to personally colonize Waizidi, and set up a facility there. No one is allowed to go there but me, which I was able to accomplish using an ungodly amount of energy credits, and a colonial law loophole that allowed me to install defensive measures back then which are illegal today. Honestly, I forgot it was a thing. They didn’t tell me what to do with it. They just had me set the trap, and I moved on with my life in other places.”

“That’s only about one and a half light years away,” Liselot pointed out.

Sugar nodded. “It will take us less than a day to get there using the reframe engine.” She took a deep breath and started tapping on the console. “Thistle. Plot a course. I’m also uploading a hazard map into navigation which will show you the path to avoid my booby traps.” Sugar looked back at Liselot. “If my traps have held, it should be empty. They can send as many KBHs as they want; it will hurt no one. But I need to know something.”

“You need to know who those men in hock are,” Liselot figured.

Sugar went back down the corridors where the cells were packed with human targets of unknown origins. “The first man to tell me his name gets to go free. I will make contact with friends of mine who can get you tens of billions of light years away in an instant, but I need to know who I’m saving. Because the way I see it, if you’re all dead, the KBHs stop coming, no matter where your bodies happen to be.”

“Denver Strong!” they all cried at the same time.

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Microstory 2790: Spoiler Alert: It’s a Parachute

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They’re moving everything out of the backyard. It’s the only space big enough for what they need to do. Lawn chairs, the table, the cornhole game things; it all has to go. Jande asks Ersence if she can go around stripping everyone’s bed. Some might not be so happy with that, and she doesn’t care what people think, so she can still get it done. Jande carries the sewing machine downstairs himself and sets it on the patio. The point where it gets the best faux sunlight is too far from the wall outlet, so he has to go around looking for an extension cord too. He sets everything up, Ersence gets all the bedding in a pile, and they should be ready to go. He doesn’t know how long it will take, though.

“Why are you asking me?” Dare questions. Everyone’s looking at him.

“You’re the sewing expert,” Jande tells him.

Dare winces. “What the hell gave you that idea?”

“The sewing kit was under your bed,” Jande points out. “Aren’t you a sewer?”

Dare rolls his eyes. “I took the kit because I wanted to learn how to sew. I didn’t even get a chance to try because we got wrapped up in getting rid of the smart dust.”

“Well, shit,” Jande laments. “This whole plan is contingent upon someone being able to sew all these sheets together.” He lifts his head. “So who here can do it? Come on, don’t be shy. Even if you’ve only done it once, at least that’s somewhere to start.”

Ximena raises her hand. “Um...no, not me, but, uh, Mayor can.”

“Mayor,” Jande echoes. “The guy currently playing footsie with Death. He’s the only one with any experience sewing? How did that happen? Was this all planned?”

“Haoran, how is he doing?” Ersence pushes. “Can he move? We could set him up in a chair so he only has to move his arms and hands. There’s a pedal. If he needs someone to hold a pedal down, well, I can certainly volunteer for that.”

Haoran stares at her blankly. “There is a torn shirt in his stomach that reads Y2K Princess. No, Ersence. He can’t move. Best I can do is carefully drag him to the patio.”

“That might be enough,” Jande decides. “He can instruct one of us how to do it.”

Haoran shakes his head, very annoyed. “If he needs to sleep, he needs to sleep.”

“We’re doing this for him,” Tamerlane reminds him. “If he wants to live, he’ll stay awake long enough to teach the sewer. I saw an epinephrine injector in the med kit—”

“You are not giving my patient epinephrine, you fucking psycho. He’ll bleed out in minutes.” Haoran makes himself calm down a little. “Though...I could theoretically...crack it open to control the dosage myself, and get some lucidity out of him. But only for a crash course. We’re talking about a sewing machine here, not a quantum terminal. Once he’s done teaching, he goes back on the sedative to recover.”

“Don’t use too many sedatives,” Kool warns. “We probably won’t get more.”

“And who else needs them?” Haoran questions. “They’re not recreational.”

“I’m not talking about myself,” Kool reacts. “I’m just saying...”

“I’m just saying,” Jande interrupts, “that we need to decide who is the best person for the job. It should be someone with nimble fingers who picks up new skills quickly.” He scans the crowd again. “Really? Still no takers. Do you all want Mayor to die?”

Still no response. No one is guilted into volunteering. They probably don’t want something to go wrong and be blamed for someone’s death. Death is so rare these days.

Jande sighs. “Fine. As a farmer, I guess I have decent hand-eye coordination. But we all have to contribute. Nap time’s over, people. Someone other than me or Mr. Gao, go get our patient, and carefully carry him out here so he can see the machine. There’s a lot of fabric here. I’m going to need help wrangling it. I’ll sit at this little chair, and control the section I’m working on as needed, but it will be a group effort.”

Jande sits down while everyone else is getting ready. He wants to study the sewing machine before he tries anything to maximize the time he has with his injured teacher. It looks relatively simple, but the real danger could be messing up after Mayor falls back asleep, and not knowing how to fix it.

Once Jande actually begins, he soon finds that it’s not as simple as moving the fabric and thread in the right way, and pushing the right buttons. It’s tiring. After twenty minutes, his body has kind of already had enough. He doesn’t keel over and pass out, but he starts making little mistakes which could cost whoever uses this thing their life. It doesn’t have to be pretty, but they only have so much thread, so they have to make sure it holds. Fortunately, he wasn’t the only one paying attention.

A few others tag in so they can cycle the responsibility. It’s like a firing squad. If it tears somewhere, they won’t know whose fault it was. In fact, realizing this, Tamerlane suggests that everyone gets a turn on the machine, so they don’t end up being able to zero in on one person. Of course, they hope it holds together anyway, which is why everyone’s work gets checked and stress-tested, but it has to be fair.

Now comes the time when they have to decide who the hell is gonna use this thing. Van declared that whoever showed up would get the antibiotics that Mayor needed, but also that there would be a second prize. Of course, to maintain that tension the producers love so much, he didn’t say what the prize would be. It could be as simple as a slice of pizza, or the chance to name an opponent to be kicked out of the race entirely. That was Zanele’s random idea, and she shouldn’t have said it, because now the producers can use it, assuming they didn’t think of it before.

Jande has been the de facto leader throughout a lot of this, but not all of it. He literally has the loudest voice, except for Mayor. That’s really the only reason. Right?

“Wait, why would I be in charge of deciding?” Haoran asks.

“You don’t have to decide,” Jande says, “but you have to at least decide how we decide. You’re the doctor. You’re the only one who can’t go. The rest of us are fair game.”

“It sounds like you still wanna lead, like you did the sewing challenge,” Haoran reasons. “Candidates vote for themselves every election. So get on up here, big guy.”

“Hold on.” Pryce shakes his head with a chuckle. “We don’t need a moderated debate. We can just vote. All in favor of Jande being the one to go, raise your hands.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. How did I suddenly become the only one in contention? That’s not fair. Who votes for Pryce instead?”

No one raises their hand, not even his literal wife. So Jande has to trust the parachute that he was primarily responsible for putting together. Which actually is somewhat fair. It’s not as bad as he thought. The ride down is cold as hell, but mostly boring. The annoying part is as soon as he lands, the house does too, having been lowered safely on the hydraulics. It was timed perfectly to make him look like a chump.

Van walks over with his microphone. “Welcome to the next challenge! We lied. Before you get the antibiotics, you have to compete in our Sudden Death round. Whoever kills Jande Ter Avest before the timer runs out becomes the Superintendent. If Jande survives the day, we keep going. Okay, three, two, one,” he rattles off, “go!”

Microstory 2789: Well...They Will Sew Him Up At Least

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The candidates created something called a chore wheel. Every time they clear the entire house of smart dust surveillance, the producers replace them. They are spending a great deal of time hunting for the dispensers. That is one of the jobs, but there are others. First, the dust has to be blinded and grounded. That takes oil or glue, which can be found in their cooking spray and hairspray. Once the spies are coated, they fall to the ground, but they can still hear. They have to be mopped or shampooed up. Any dust that was already on a surface has to be wiped up too. The rags are then microwaved to destroy the miniature electronics. The rags are cleaned, inventory is recounted, and the whole process starts over again the next day.

They can’t figure out why the producers are doing this, though it might be because of how cheap the dust is to replenish. They don’t have to come out and argue about it because it’s not a big deal to put things back how they were. But for a few hours every night, it’s quiet. Or it’s not. Some are starting to get paranoid that the producers have plenty of other ways to keep the broadcast going, and that it doesn’t matter what they try. The dispenser hunters are also responsible for searching for other surveillance equipment. They have so far found nothing, and they’re running out of time.

Jande stops hearing the hissing sound of the nearby spray bottle. He looks over.

Kool is shaking it, looking at it, shaking it again, and trying to spray again.

“I told you that we were using too much,” one of the Eyrenlanders argues. “It doesn’t take a lot. We should have been more conservative with it.”

“We only have one flashlight, and we’re out of batteries too,” Dare argues. “We couldn’t hold it in place while we sprayed the entire house. Wide spray; cover the whole space. That was the only way to do it, and we all agreed. You said nothing before.”

The Eyrenlander woman plops down in the egg chair. “Well, now it’s over, and my hair looks like a mess. And we’ve not had a decent meal in days because we can’t cook with oil anymore. How did our ancestors survive without synthesizers?”

Jande sits on the ottoman’s edge. “We need to consider the possibility that we were never meant to overcome this as a challenge.”

“Why have they not given us any challenges since day one then?” she asks.

“To make us stew,” Ersence offers. She tosses her own spray bottle in the trash. “They want tension, they want conflict. Well...they’re getting it. Just now, you’re complaining about it, and I bet the audience is eating it up.”

“Oh, so it’s my fault?” the Eyrenlander spits at Ersence.

“You have an amazing ability to make everything about you,” Ersence responds.

The Eyrenlander woman leans forward and vigorously talks with her hands. “You literally just blamed me!”

“It was one example, ya scratchcather!” Ersence cries.

“All right, let’s try to not be so ironic here,” Jande suggests. “We’ve decided that that’s what they want, right? So let’s not give it to ‘em, and maybe they’ll have to intervene. We might hate what they do next, but at least we’ll get some feedback.”

An Eyrenlander man comes in from the fake backyard. “You want feedback?” He aggressively powerwalks through the room. “I’ll get you feedback.” He picks up one of the wooden dining room chairs and starts to bang the leg against the window.

Jande stands up to put a stop to it, but Ersence holds him back. “No. You can’t help him. You would only escalate the issue. The best thing we can do is sit back and stay out of his way. He’s like an animal right now. I’ve seen it in my men. They get cabin fever, and they won’t listen to reason. Don’t give him ammo. Don’t give them footage.”

“This isn’t actually the 21st century,” Dare reminds him. “The glass won’t break.”

The glass breaks.

As it turns out, their ground level house is actually high up in the air. The open window reveals not open sky, but clouds. The sudden change in pressure tries to suck the Eyrenlander man out. Jande jumps up and manages to catch him by the ankle at the last second. It’s out of the frying pan and into the fire, though, because not all of the glass fell away from the frame. The man has fallen right on top of some shards. They cut deep into his stomach. Blood spills out of him like a torn bag of milk. They lift him off.

“Haoran!” Jande takes off his shirt and desperately tries to plug the wounds, but some of the glass is still in there. “Haoran! Get down here right now!”

“He can’t hear you in all this wind!” Ersence explains. She runs off.

Haoran shows up and dives down to the floor. “Move your hands,” he orders. “Do you have any medical training, Mr. Ter Avest?”

“Not really,” Jande answers truthfully. People don’t die. In his world, if someone gets hurt this bad, you just let them pass on and come back in a new body.

“Okay, good instincts with your shirt.” Haoran starts to make adjustments. He takes off his own to add to it. “But you were applying pressure. That’s just gonna squirt out more blood. We can still stop the bleeding. I’m gonna need you to put your hands right here. Yes, right there, but don’t push down or forwards. Kool?”

Kool kneels down without hesitating.

“Kool,” Haoran goes on, “do what he’s doing, but below the glass. Once you’re both in place, push towards each other, carefully but not delicately. Good. Very good.” He looks up. “Dare, get that squeeze bottle that Pryce uses. Wash it with soap and water, inside and out. Fill it with one of those vodka bottles from the freezer, then dump it out, rinse it out again, and fill it with room temperature water. Got it?” After Dare leaves, he shifts his gaze. “Ersence, go find that sewing kit. The last I saw, it was in the girls’ room.”

“No, it’s under my bed!” Dare yells from the kitchen.

“Understood!” Ersence runs off yet again.

When Dare comes back, Haoran uses the water to flush bits of glass and blood out of the wound. Now that he has a better look at what they’re dealing with, he frowns and scans the crowd, which has since been filled out with the rest of the candidates. “None of our bedsheets are good. Kool, is that shirt cotton?”

Kool takes it off and checks under the collar. “That’s what the tag says.”

“Hold please.” Haoran takes the shirt and stands. He waits for a moment. “If ever there was a time for medical intervention, this would be it!” he calls out to the aether. “If you don’t come in with a medical team, you know what I have to do. It’s not safe, and it’s not pretty, but I’ll do it. You have until the cloth finishes boiling.” He starts walking.

Haoran returns with a long strip of Kool’s former shirt. After Pryce pulls the last shard from the wound, Haoran stuffs the cloth in to replace it as it’s the only way to stop internal bleeding while they wait for clotting. Then he sews the guy up, saying he’ll need another surgery later if he makes it that long. What he really needs now...are antibiotics.