Saying that the penthouse was the best was apparently not saying much.
Treasure hadn’t seen a lot of this world when she first arrived, but the
word she used to describe it in her headcanon was dumpy. The people here
weren’t just careless with the environment, but actively destructive of it.
No one deserved to be wiped out by the Ochivari, but she had to pick one
universe, she certainly couldn’t pick somewhere else over this one, right?
That wouldn’t be fair. Still, the individuals she met were very kind and
accommodating. They seemed to love and revere her quite a bit. She was a
legend before her time. She wasn’t really excited to get to the part of her
future where people knew her name, and she understood specifically why.
Again, she was still so young, so she hadn’t thought much about her future.
She only knew that she was born with this power, and it would be
irresponsible not to use it, since as far as she knew, it wasn’t something
she could bequest to someone else.
“Bequest isn’t a verb,” Quino instructed her. “I’ve been studying English.
It’s a noun. Perhaps you mean bequeath.”
“Bequest is also a verb in my universe,” Treasure explained.
“Really?”
“My own personal universal bubble that I live in that’s only large enough to
fit me and my tiara.”
“I can’t join you?” he asked. They had grown closer over the last few
months. They weren’t actively pursuing a relationship with each other, but
they also weren’t working very hard to prevent it. Though as he said, Quino
was now completely fluent in English, their preferred shared language was
Flirtish.
“Okay. I just need to absorb enough bulk energy to make it larger.”
He took an eighth of a step towards her. “Ya know, if I were to stand
closer, you wouldn’t have to expend so much energy to make your universe big
enough for the both of us.”
“That’s true,” she agreed as she was taking a quarter step. “How close were
you thinking, though?”
Quino skipped the half-step, and just jumped right to a pretty wide full
step. Their shoulders were touching each other, and maybe a few atoms could
flow between the left side of his chest, and her breast. She could feel his
breath on her forehead. “How much energy would it take to accommodate me
now?”
She was surprised by this. They had never come this close before, and until
this moment, the way they flirted could have always been dismissed as
nothing more than innocent, or maybe even platonic. She was glad he was
making the first move, though. It was so unlike him, which showed that he
felt comfortable being relaxed around her. She felt the same, so she kept
going. “Still too much.” She pulled him right up against her, and held him
in place with her arms. “This I think I can handle.” She rested her head on
his neck, and they just held each other tightly for the rest of time.
Without releasing completely, Quino reached into his back pocket, and showed
her some little metal thing that she didn’t recognize. “Happy birthday.”
“Is it my birthday?” Treasure asked genuinely. “How can you tell?”
“You told me how long ago your sixteenth was before you decided to show your
parents what you could do. Based on the amount of time we were in Hyperion,
and all these other universes, I think I can reasonably surmise that today
is the day you turn seventeen. I’ve been keeping track, because honestly,
while seventeen Standard Vertean years does not equal seventeen Earthan
years, it is pretty close, and it’s when my people consider someone to be an
adult.”
Treasure smiled and nodded. “How clever of you. But I must say, I do not
know what that thing is.”
“Me neither,” Quino admitted. “All I know is that it’s the last part that
your special ship needs to be complete. Once they insert this doo-da-bob
under the whatever-ma-thingy, we’ll be ready to go.”
“That’s sweet,” she said.
He pulled away a little more, and looked confused, as if someone else had
said something that made him wonder what was going on. “Is it? I’m now
realizing that my giving this to you is basically like giving you permission
to do something you’re already entitled to do. I have no right to give this
to you. It’s not mine. It’s always been yours.”
“Don’t overthink it,” Treasure said, taking the doo-da-bob from him. “Let’s
go tell everyone else.”
“Everyone knows. They’re waiting for you to give a go-ahead on the
manifest.”
“Why would I need to give the go-ahead?”
“Like I said, it’s yours. This is a gift. The engineers expect nothing in
return. They were happy to be doing something. Apparently, being a robot is
boring. Anyway, it’s your ship, so you get to decide who gets on it.”
“All the humans, I guess. I mean, if there’s room for any androids who want
to go somewhere else, I’m happy to oblige them as well.”
“No androids want to come,” Quino said, “not even Kickstand and Apple. There
is a complication, though. Word got out about you, specifically to the
island of organics who chose not to upload their minds to mechanical bodies.
There were thousands of them in the beginning, but the majority of them were
old, and have since died out. Over two hundred of them are still around,
though, and they would like to find a new home.”
“Aren’t they sick?” Treasure asked. When the Ochivari travel to a new
universe, they destroy all intelligent life with a virus that sterilizes the
entire population. It takes decades to complete, but it can’t be
stopped once it’s begun.
“Yes, they are presently in quarantine, to protect us, and the other
refugees. The virus is airborne, but it can only survive for an
extended period of time in a living host, so this whole area is virus-free.
That’s why we didn’t immediately contract it upon arrival. Bringing them
onboard is risky, and there’s still no cure.”
“Then what’s the point? Where do they want me to take them?” Treasure asked.
“We can’t let them try to integrate into some other civilization.”
“Yeah, but this world is polluted, even where they are. The atmosphere is
becoming toxic, and will kill them all before old age can.”
Treasure sat a moment with this information. Her parents and Miss Collins,
and pretty much every adult she ever met, taught her to help others. That
was everything to them; helping people. It was their reason for being, and
they instilled this value in her. Her instinct was to help, but that word
was more complicated than it sounded. If you were to try to help someone in
their quest to become president of a company, you might be hurting the
person who already was the president. So the very idea of helping others was
a lot more nuanced than just seeing someone in need, and providing them with
that need. She had to think about whether helping them could cause harm to
others, and the answer was yes. Yes, it would hurt others. If there were a
cure to the sterility virus, or even if there was a way to stop them from
being contagious, that would be a different story. They could live out their
lives, happy and healthy, and not worry about infecting others. But that was
not the bulkverse they were living in. In reality, taking these people to
safety meant risking destroying all life, in every universe. Not even the
Ochivari wanted that.
It was also prudent to consider the victims. As individuals, they may have
all been lovely people, but they were living in a dead world, because their
ancestors—and frankly, maybe even they—made it that way. They caused the
pollution, and by all accounts, it was worse here than any planet Treasure
studied in school. Perhaps they didn’t deserve to be sterilized. And once
she was ready, Treasure planned to do everything she could to thwart the
Ochivari’s plans. This was all true. The problem was that saying the locals
deserved this would be an overstatement, but saying they didn’t deserve it
didn’t sound right either. She could not justify rescuing these people at
the expense of the truly innocent, which yeah, included herself. She
breathed in deep, but didn’t say anything.
Quino understood. “I’ll take care of it, and I’ll leave you out of it.”
“No,” Treasure said. “Tell them it was my call. It’s what my mother would
do. Well, actually, she would be brave enough to confront them herself.”
“That’s why you have me,” Quino assured her. “We’re a team now.” He started
to walk backwards. “You, me, and Rosalinda. Hey, get your stuff together. We
leave whenever you want.”
Unlike how it was in Hypnopediaverse, the bridge collapse refugees here were
all from the same place. They were attending a concert in the park, and just
so happened to be in the same vicinity as each other in the parking lot
afterwards. That was going to make dropping them off that much easier. The
engineers were brilliant. They included a cosmic frequency detector, which
would allow her to navigate to any user’s universe of origin, or if
calibrated correctly, back to a universe they had been to before. Navigating
the bulkverse was difficult for anyone to do. Most of the technology the
Transit employed was dedicated exclusively towards making these
calculations. Treasure was supposed to be able to do it psychically, but
given where they were now, she was obviously not so great at that.
Fortunately, the cosmic frequency workaround was almost foolproof, and a
fairly easy component to add. In the future, they would try to link this
little lifeboat up to the Transit’s database, to gather the necessary
coordinate data.
It was very easy to pilot the little ship. An AI did most of the heavy
lifting for her. All Treasure had to do was tell it what she wanted, and it
would figure it out. Once all the refugees were back where they
belonged—having aged, but not having missed anything from their
lives—Treasure navigated them to what Miss Collins referred to as an
uncivilized universe. This may have sounded bad and dangerous, but all it
really meant was that life evolved on planets with the right conditions, but
did not progress enough to have any sort of sufficiently advanced
intelligence. They were actually some of the safest worlds to be, because
other travelers had no use for them, and there was no one around for the
Ochivari to sterilize. Here, she stepped out of the ship, and prepared to
return home on her own. “I’ll be back before you know it.”
“Where are you going?” Rosalinda asked.
“I have to go deal with my parents,” Treasure said. “I just need to explain
to them what’s happened, and that my life is out here now. They won’t like
it, but they’ll accept it, and they won’t be able to stop me.”
“Don’t do that,” Quino strongly suggested.
“Why not?” Treasure questioned.
“I want you to be back here soon, but from your perspective, it should be
longer.”
“How much longer?”
He hesitated a bit. “Three years.”
“Three years!” she exclaimed. “Why do you want me gone that long?”
“In three years, you won’t be that much younger than me. That’s important,
but there’s a reason age discrepancies are so frowned upon. You have not
experienced enough of your life. You have not figured out who you are, and
what you want to do. You’ve not explored your options. You need to finish
basic higher education before you start doing all this.”
“This is easy for you to say,” Treasure argued. “It won’t be but seconds for
you, no big deal. You expect me to wait years for you, just so I can get a
degree that I don’t care about, and won’t use?”
“You’ll use the education you receive; you just probably won’t use it to get
a job,” he reasoned.
“What if I meet someone new? What then? You know what you’re risking.”
“If you meet someone new, then you will belong with that person, and I will
be happy for you. You still need to come back here to pilot The Strongbox,
though. I don’t want to live in this universe forever.”
“The what-box?”
“The Strongbox,” Quino repeated. “That’s what this could be called, because
it holds treasure?”
They kept arguing about it, but Treasure decided to agree in the end.
Fighting wasn’t helping anything, and she could come back whenever she
wanted, regardless of what he thought was prudent. She wouldn’t even have to
tell him. So they said their goodbyes, and then she screamed her way back
home. In those few seconds while she was waiting for the shatter portal to
break open, she had an idea. If she navigated precisely to the moment she
first left, her mother would never even know she had gone. She wasn’t in the
room when it happened, so she didn’t actually see it happen. This was fate.
She knew she had heard a different scream when she left. She thought it was
some kind of echo, but no, it must have been Future!Her.
Her mom burst into the room. “What did you do?”
“See?” Treasure began, feigning innocence. She spoke with her real voice. “I
can scream and not travel the bulkverse. I don’t need my collar anymore, I
can control it. I can choose whether my scream is more than just a loud
sound.”
Freya regarded her, unimpressed. “Treasure.”
“Yes, mom?” She was still trying to act like a good girl.
“You’re wearing different clothes, and there’s something on your head. Did
you become the queen of another world, or something?”
“Uhhhhhhhh...quick-change trick. Mom, I want to become a magician.”
Freya sighed, obviously not believing the really bad lie. “Where did you go,
and how long were you there?”
“Wait, I can explain. Just—” Before she could finish her thought, an
obnoxious horn sounded outside. Treasure smiled gleefully. It was The
Transit. Azura was here.
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