Before anyone could so much as begin to guess what the hell was going on, a
pod appeared a few meters away from them, and opened up to reveal what Mateo
could only describe as a future-cop. He smiled at the group apprehensively.
“Hello. Reports indicate that some unusual temporal activity has been
occurring in this area. Where, and/or when are you from?”
Hmm. He seemed to be a deveiled human, who used time technology on the
regular. Mateo checked his wrist. Yes, it was honest hour, so he resolved to
take the lead on this one, and not worry about whether anyone disagreed. “We
apologize if we have broken any laws.” He showed the cop his Cassidy cuff.
“We are not in control of our temporal movements. We do the bidding of
someone who is very powerful. He’s trapped us here in your reality, though
to be fair, all we’ve done so far is help people, so he may not be as bad as
he wants us to believe.”
The time cop looked to the rest of the group, not because he didn’t believe
Mateo’s story, but to see if anyone else had anything to add. “You’re from
the main sequence.” It was a half-question.
“If that is what you call it,” Leona confirmed. “We just call it the main
timeline, and we call this The Parallel.”
“Indeed,” the cop agreed. “You have been foretold.” He looked at his own
watch, but literally. “No point in transporting you into the heart of the
city, and alerting anyone else to your presence. I’ll be right here to pick
you up in three years, two days.” He climbed back into his pod, and
teleported away. Ninety minutes later, midnight central was quickly
approaching.
Sanaa knelt down, and picked up what were formerly Ramses’ cuffs.
“Don’t touch those!” Leona warned.
“Why not?” Sanaa asked. “Will they magically wrap themselves around my
wrists, and trap me on your hyphenated pattern?”
“Yeah, they might,” Leona warned further.
Sanaa smiled, and gracefully strapped them onto her wrists. “Well, what the
hell else am I gonna do?” The damage was done now, and could not be undone,
unless they forced someone else to take her place, or Kalea returned to
explain how she removed Ramses from them in the first place.
Just as the man said, he was waiting for them three years later, but this
time with a larger transport vehicle. He ushered them into it. “We’ve
requested an audience with the Tanadama.”
“The whatnow?”
“The gods who created our galaxy. They’re very busy, but I’m optimistic that
they will come here to speak with you.”
“They created the galaxy?” Leona asked.
“Well, not literally. The stars form naturally, of course. They saved our
species, so that we almost never die. We only experience the occasional
suicide from someone who’s just over it, or an AI malfunction that cannot be
repaired.”
“You never die,” Leona continued the questioning. “How long have you been
like that?”
“About twelve thousand years,” the cop answered. “I’m Officer Tynosey, by
the way, but everyone just calls me Tyno.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Tyno.” Now Leona was just going to take over the
conversation. “I assume that you are an interstellar civilization.”
“We’re an intergalactic civilization, but the majority of our population
still lives in the Milky Way. We’re at K3.”
“My God,” she said. “How many people is that?”
“A couple undecillion,” Tyno said, like it was nothing. Mateo had never
heard that particular prefix attached to -illion, which meant that it was
probably pretty damn big. “Each host star houses around five septillion
people. We could go higher than that obviously, but we like to spread out.
“That’s insane.”
“Yeah,” Holly Blue concurred. “Do you have faster-than-light travel?”
“We do,” Tyno replied. His watch beeped. “Oh. That’s confirmation. I’ve been
authorized to return you to Earth, where your friends are waiting for you.”
He closed the hatch behind him, synced his watch with a panel on the wall,
and transported them to Earth.
The hatch opened from the outside as soon as they arrived. Ramses was there
with his big fat smile. They were on the side of a mountain, overlooking a
valley. “Man, we had always planned on being there, waiting for you when you
arrived, but the timeline is complicated. We weren’t sure which timeline you
would remember, so we just decided to let the locals handle it until this
year.” He gestured towards Tyno.
Tyno hopped out of the transport, and closed his eyes. He placed three
fingers loosely on his forehead, and then moved them down to his lips. He
kept switching back and forth between these two positions, occasionally
spending several seconds in one stop, and changing speed erratically. It
reminded Mateo of how the Catholics did the sign of the cross. Catholicism
probably didn’t exist in this reality.
“That’s enough, my child,” Ramses said to him.
“It is such a deep honor, Father. I am so humbled in your presence. I’m not
worthy to breathe from the same atmosphere as you—”
“All right,” Ramses stopped him. “What does it say in the Book of Ramses,
Chapter Eleven, Section Twenty-Four, Paragraph Forty-Two, Line Fifty-Six?”
“When the Mother or Father appear to you, they will be human, and they will
be accessible, and you will respect them, but you will not worship them,”
Tyno recited. “Sorry, sir.”
“It’s all right. Just don’t forget that I’m only a person.”
The group looked at him in disapproval.
“It got away from us,” Ramses tried to explain to them. “We didn’t write the
books, but we did edit them, adding lines like that so they wouldn’t kill
themselves out of reverence every time we showed up.”
Leona rejected this response. “You formed a religion. That’s time travel
one-oh-one. In fact, I better make it Rule Number Fourteen, do not form, or
inspire, a religion.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that,” Ramses argued.
“Clarify,” Mateo said. “Report.”
So Ramses began to explain where he and Kalea had gone, and what they had
done. “This isn’t the first new timeline that we created. At first, we
followed the plan. We got everyone off of Durus, and back to Earth. We
continued on the pattern, and things were okay when it came to us. It wasn’t
okay with the rest of the world, though. Earth was still devoid of nearly
all human life. There was us, and the people that Jupiter transitioned.
Kalea didn’t like that. Her whole purpose as a source mage on Durus in the
main sequence was to protect people using time powers. So the lot of us went
back to the cataclysm that destroyed the species, and fixed it. Now things
were even finer, but not great. Technology was incredibly slow. They were
building castles when they should have been working on the first rockets. So
we went back again, and saved more lives. Every time we went back, we made
the timeline a little better; a little safer. Kalea was never happy, though.
She needed to fix everything, and to do that, we needed help. We created
more mages, and used them like the powers that be use salmon in the other
timeline.
“I don’t even remember how it happened, but the last thing we did was go
back thousands of years, and turn everyone immortal. I tried to explain to
her the repercussions of such a thing, but she wouldn’t hear it. She would
not listen to the math. I told her that over a hundred billion people had
ever lived on Earth, and also that Earth could indeed support that many
people, but I also told her that in a timeline with virtually no death, you
can’t just go by that number, because those people are going to have
children. Over time, the number has grown so large that we are now a
Kardashev 3 civilization, occupying every star system in the entire galaxy.”
“Yes.” Leona nodded. “Tyno did tell us that. You made a galaxy of time
travelers. I can’t imagine how problematic that has become.”
“No,” Ramses contended. “Time travel is against the law, galaxy-wide. It’s
not technically necessary, since the only way to have time powers is to get
them from me or Kalea, but it’s a redundant system. People don’t die, and
they can move across the galaxy at superluminal speeds. That’s all we gave
them. They developed the rest of the technology they have.”
Leona shook her head continuously. “Two undecillion people,” she said
quietly. “I don’t even know what that means.” She wasn’t the only one
wondering this. Leona and Holly Blue were two of the smartest people Mateo
knew. If even they had trouble fathoming the vast number of people presently
alive in a galaxy with a millennia-long history of nearly no death, then he
would have no hope of understanding it. “You couldn’t maintain a homogeneous
system with that, even with ubiquitous FTL. That’s just too many people.”
“Each solar swarm has its own governmental body, yes,” Ramses said. Saying
we’re K3 is a bit of a misnomer. We’re more like a bunch of separate K2s.
But there’s a lot of collaboration, and we don’t allow war. Half the Book of
Kalea is about living in harmony.”
“People keep talking about these K-numbers,” J.B. complained. “What does
that mean?”
Sanaa chose to explain this one, “a K1 civilization can harness all the
power on its planet. K2 can use its whole sun. K3 can use the whole galaxy.
What Ramses is saying that, since the galaxy is so big, they’re not really
K3, because they’re not all one civilization anymore.”
“What are you?” Mateo asked Ramses, not bothering to ask Sanaa why she
understood this scale the scientists were talking about.
“I’m a source mage now,” Ramses answered. “Most of the time, the source
mages in the main sequence only create lesser mages. There was a theory,
however, that they could effectively make more, just by giving someone the
power to give other people powers.”
J.B. giggled. “It’s like using one of your three wishes to wish for more
wishes.”
“Kind of,” Ramses admitted. “She only did it once, though. She made me, and
we’re it.”
“The Dadamama, that is,” Mateo put forth.
“Tanadama,” Ramses corrected, but you were on the right track. Ta, da, ma,
and na are all used in various languages to mean father and mother,
respectively. We put it together, because parents didn’t seem to do our role
justice. It was Alt!Jeremy’s idea.”
“Sounds like me,” J.B. decided.
“So, it’s over,” Holly Blue presumed.
“What’s over?” Ramses questioned.
“The Matic-Bearimy pattern. The only reason we were on it was because
Jupiter was too powerful to go against. That can’t possibly be the case
anymore.”
Ramses deafened them with his silence.
“Ramses?” Mateo began. “Can’t you just put a stop to this...or make somebody
who can?”
“It’s complicated,” Ramses told them, but did not elaborate.
“Keep going,” Leona urged.
“The Book of Ramses clearly states, To maintain temporal integrity, no
native of The Parallel may interfere with the actions of those from the main
sequence.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Sanaa argued. “You’re from the main sequence,
and Jupiter is interfering with the Parallel. It doesn’t go both ways? Seems
irrational.”
“The line I recited is taken a bit out of context. If you read more of it,
you would understand that I can’t help you. I’m not really from the main
timeline anymore. I’ve been here for tens of thousands of years. I couldn’t
be The Father if I didn’t integrate myself fully into this reality.”
“Leona,” Mateo interrupted her before she could argue again. “This is not
the friend who left us yesterday. He is an entirely different person, who
has been through more than we will ever understand. You won’t be able to
convince him to help. We just have to accept the fact that this is how it
is. I tried arguing with The Superintendent, and it got me nowhere.” He
turned to the man who looked like his best friend. “Thank you for rescuing
us from Durus, and thank you for your time. We will let you get back to your
galaxy, as we return to the mission. We would be grateful, however, if you
could find us a ride to Australia.”
“He’s right,” J.B. said, looking at his own cuff. “Now that we have a
satellite feed, we can see exactly where we need to go.”
“I’m sorry,” Ramses told him.
“I firmly believe that we’re saving lives,” Mateo said. “I don’t know why
Jupiter wants us to think he’s evil, or why he thinks the only way to save
these people’s lives is to temporarily pull them into another reality, but
I’m going to keep going until we run out of people to help.”
Ramses nodded in understanding. “I’ll get you to that transport. It’s not
far from here; right where you left it in the underground hangar. I don’t
know when it transitioned.” He was talking about the Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, which was the closest thing they had to a home these days.
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