Lowell disappeared shortly after the reception, and it wasn’t clear whether
body jumper, Dalton went with him, or if he moved on to someone else’s body.
Aura, and the rest of the people who Arcadia had already removed from the
timestream, secretly returned to the island resort in The Parallel. Speaking
of Arcadia, she kept her distance for the rest of the event, evidently moved
and frightened by Leona’s words. They would never call her a true friend,
but they developed some kind of understanding with at least two future
versions of her, so perhaps this was the start of that. The transition team
walked back towards the Nexus. Nerakali sent them through their own window
behind the scenes, and directed them to once again return to Earth.
The next year, they had a new transition, this time in what those in the
main sequence would call Croatia. “Look at the z-axis,” Jeremy pointed out
once they were nearly there. “We have to get up six hundred and forty-five
meters.”
Mateo looked around at the wilderness. “This must be where one of the
arcologies is in the main sequence. They’re on an upper floor.”
“Two-sixteenth,” Leona clarified. She pulled out a handheld device, and
started working on something without telling anyone exactly what. “I don’t
want a repeat of what happened with Xearea.” That was when they couldn’t
find the right room number in a hospital in time, and Mateo ended up falling
to one of his deaths.
“Whatever you’re getting,” Aeolia began, “do we have time?”
Leona glanced at her cuff. “Yeah, it shouldn’t be too long now.”
She was right. They waited a few minutes, before a cuboid flew down, and
landed on the grass before then. A man was waiting for them inside with a
polite smile, and a bellhop uniform. “Going up?”
“Yes, please,” Leona said. She placed her device against the console, and
beamed over the exact coordinates. The freestyle elevator started flying
back up.
“For a civilization that’s not allowed to help us,” Bran started, “they sure
do help us a lot.”
“What’s that?” The elevator operator asked.
“Nothing,” Bran answered. “Can he see me?” he questioned the group.
“He’s a bot,” Leona answered. “Their memories are different, so they can
hold on longer, but he will forget as well. I’ve already tested it.”
The elevator stopped. “Two one six,” the bot announced.
“Hold this pattern for the next ten minutes,” Leona requested.
The bot nodded, and froze in place, presumably in standby mode.
Six minutes later, the transition window opened up, and deposited two people
in lab coats. The man looked around a moment, then headed for the window.
“What is this? Did it suddenly start working?”
The woman fiddled with her tablet. “What program is this? We never initiated
anything. Computer, end simulation. Where’s the arch?”
Mateo stepped forward. “Greetings. You are not in a simulation. This is
reality...just a different reality.”
They both narrowed their eyes, and sized him up. The woman pulled at his
collar, and let it snap back to his neck. “What is your directive?”
“I am here to help,” Mateo answered. It was probably going to take them a
long time to believe that this was all real—that they were real—and it
wasn’t just a virtual construct. “My name is Mateo Matic. I hail from your
reality, but am currently living in this one. It’s called The Parallel, and
it is our responsibility to protect you from something that might have
happened in your future. We are not aware what that might be, but if you are
here, you belong here, and we will not return you until we’ve fixed whatever
was going to go wrong.” Wow, that was a mess of an explanation. Somebody
should write up a binder like customer representatives have to help them
navigate calls.
The woman went over to Angela, and pressed on her nose, like she wasn’t sure
whether it was a button, or stationary. “Boop!” Angela joked as she did it.
“Computer, freeze simulation,” the man commanded.
Mateo, Leona, Jeremy, and Angela tried to be as still as possible. They were
all thinking the same thing, and had the same idea of how to approach these
people. After about twenty seconds, Mateo broke free. “Just kidding, we are
real. This is not a simulation, as I said. You have been transported to
another reality.” He looked over at Leona. “How could we convince them?”
Leona lifted up her device, but acted like that wasn’t going to help. “I
have no way of knowing for sure what level of detail they expect from the
simulation in this time period. I suppose we have to show them something so
detailed and comprehensive that it would be impossible for their technology
to render with its current processing power. They do not believe that this
is VR. They believe that it is a physical sim...like a holodeck.”
“State your names, please,” Mateo asked of them.
“Let’s just humor the program,” the woman told her partner. “It may be our
only way to end it. My name is Miapaktem Ibuka. This is my colleague, Padera
Vortex.”
“The Ibuka Vortex,” Aeolia said. “We’ve heard of that.”
“As have I,” Leona said. “They pioneer physical sim technology. Twenty years
from now.”
“Why are physical sims important if you have virtual reality?” Angela
questioned. She had just spent centuries in an afterlife simulation, so she
had more experience with this than anyone.
“VR is great,” Miapaktem said to her. “You can do anything inside of a
construct, yet it still has its limitations.”
“Muscle memory,” Padera continued. “We’ve found that learning through
totally virtual environments is great for academic studies, but skills are
difficult to reapply to the real world. Physical simulations allow you to
get the feel for how something works.”
“In a controlled and safe, but still tangible, environment.” Miapaktem
finished.
The elevator operator broke out of standby mode, and didn’t miss a beat.
“Traveling to Corvenala Ecumenopolis.” He directed the cuboid back down to
the surface, but at a diagonal, so they could land next to the nearest
Nexus.
“That sounds perfect,” Leona said. “Come with us,” she asked Miapaktem and
Padera. “We’ll show you a world too complex for your computer to have
accidentally simulated.”
Seeing no danger in going with these non-playable characters, the two
technology pioneers shrugged, and went with them through the Nexus, to a
world on the other side of the galaxy.
“While most of Earth in this reality was left to wilderness,” Leona began to
narrate using the information she found on her device, “Corvenala was
completely industrialized. Don’t worry, they didn’t destroy life to make it.
Planets near the supermassive stellar collapse are often too hostile for
life, but planets that form on the outer edges of the Milky Way are
generally fairly smooth, and experience low volcanic activity. Nothing
really changes, so nothing really grows. It’s called an Ecumenopolis,
because it is completely covered in a gargantuan city. We’ll probably never
do it in our reality, but the population boom in this one makes it a viable
option. Quadrillions of entities likely live here, and still experience no
shortage of space.”
They left the Nexus building, and walked out into the super megacity. Leona
went on, “There’s no way your early developments are capable of rendering
these structures, on this scale. It would even be hard to render in VR. Step
up here.”
They all stepped onto a teleportation platform, which transported them to
another part of the city. They could have been thousands of miles away now.
It was just as elaborate and insanely large as the last location, but
definitely not just a copy. Leona immediately jumped them to another
section. Same thing, but clearly different. The more parts of the city she
showed them, the more the two scientists were convinced that their tech was
nowhere near good enough to make a simulation that looked like this. After
five jumps, they were done. “Okay,” Miapaktem said. “It would be hard to
claim that what you say is a lie, if not a dream. Why are we here?”
The group was silent. “We don’t know,” Mateo answered for them.
“We were assigned to welcome you, but we weren’t told what we can do for
you.”
“We never are,” Angela said.
“Usually it’s pretty obvious, though,” Jeremy said. “I mean, sometimes we
literally have to save someone’s life, but we often know the people who come
through, and we know what they’re supposed to be doing. We don’t really know
you.”
“It no doubt has to do with their research,” Leona suggested. “We’re either
here to stop them from creating it, or help them create it.”
“Any reason why the timeline would be better off without physical sims?”
Mateo asked his wife.
“Not that I can think of,” Leona answered. “We can certainly help them
further their advancements. Hell, we could expedite the process by ten
years, if not faster. The Parallel natives surely cracked this tech
millennia ago.”
“Why are they more advanced than us?” Padera questioned. “I understand the
concept of a parallel reality. What was the point of divergence?”
“The moment it changed is irrelevant,” Jeremy explained. “Unregulated time
travelers came here, defeated death long ago, and deliberately shielded its
people from the growing pains our race had to endure, such as war, and
religion. They skipped over some technological milestones, like figuring out
how to get a rocket out of Earth’s gravity well, and traveling to other
stars without dying on the way. They proverbially invented the aerosol can
before the wheel.”
As scientists, Miapaktem and Padera knew they had to be strong and rational.
Though they had never heard of real time travel before, they had to accept
it as a given, or the conversation would stall. “So...you’ll help us
overcome our obstacles?” Padera asked. “Like those time travelers did for
these people? You’ll just...give it to us?”
Leona leaned back against the guard rail. It probably wasn’t great that they
were just hanging out on the teleporter pad, but...other travelers would
just be rerouted somewhere close. “It’s not really ours to give. I mean, we
can mediate a deal, but... I dunno, are we even allowed to? Nerakali doesn’t
know everything, perhaps this is a huge mistake, and she shouldn’t be asking
this of us.”
Now that they were out from under the thumb of the powers that be, things
were different. Though Nerakali was a choosing one, she wasn’t forcing them
to do anything, but giving them opportunities. They grew quite used to
ignoring temporal ethics while they weren’t in control of their own actions,
but now it was up to them to decide. Was it right to let the team adapt this
advanced technology to their own world? What did the Prime Directive say?
Well, it would say that they violated the code already, and they should do
everything they could to prevent further damage. The main sequence should be
developing at its own pace, with no interference, and even coming here, and
learning this world existed, was a problem.
“We need an ethicist,” Angela said.
“I don’t think they have those here,” Leona negated. “They kind of do
whatever they want, because no consequence is too massive to walk past. Even
if people die from a mistake, they can just come back to life.”
Miapaktem and Padera regarded each other, and had a conversation with their
eyebrows. “We don’t want it,” Miapaktem finally said.
“Really?”
“That solves that ethical dilemma,” Bran noted.
“If you have a choice,” Padera agreed, “then we have a choice, and we choose
to continue on as we are. It would be too easy to roll down this slippery
slope. We’ll take physical sim tech, but then it’ll make us realize we want
a way to extrapolate the safeguards to the real world. And then we’ll want
to defeat death in whatever way these people have. Then we’ll want planetary
teleportation, and then interstellar. We’ll never stop wanting more, and
that will be problematic whether there’s some way to get back here to
actually ask for all those things, or not.”
“Was this some kind of test?” Miapaktem asked them. “Are you some ascended
alien race, trying to figure out if our species is worthy of joining you in
a higher plane of existence?”
Leona took a breath. “If that were what was going on here, it would be the
dumbest thing to ever happen to the human race. And what would give you the
right to be responsible for the fate of literally everyone else?”
“Agreed,” Miapaktem said. “I am relieved.”
The Cassidy cuffs beeped. “It’s a transition window,” Mateo said. “Nerakali
has been listening, and now knows that it’s over. You shall return to your
lives.”
“Will we be here on Corvenala? Can we even survive on this world in our
reality?”
“No, we’ll take you back to Earth,” Leona assured them.
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