“So, this is a retcon,” Leona figured, totally unimpressed—bored even. “We
were told that The Artist built three Preston children, but in fact, there
was a fourth. You must have been so evil that the others never talk about
you, and blah, blah, blah.”
Mithridates chuckled. “No. I wasn’t built, I was born. You think my parents
spent centuries not having any children? I mean, even if they weren’t
trying, having at least one kid eventually would have been practically
inevitable. They don’t talk about me, not because I was too evil—because
we’re all evil—but because they were just ashamed that I left the Gallery
Dimensions with the rest of the disgruntled workers, instead of sticking by
my family.”
“I see.”
“Besides, as far as I can tell, they so didn’t talk about me, that not even
my brother and sisters know that I exist.”
Leona sighed, still bored. “Are you gonna...do your speech?”
“My villain speech where I reveal my dastardly plans?”
“Yeah, that one.”
Mithridates smirked. “Don’t have one.”
“You don’t have a speech, er...?”
“Don’t have a plan.” He started pacing somewhat menacingly. “Have you
wondered why I’m bringing all of the star systems together, or why I’m
taking so long to do it?”
“We’ve noticed it doesn’t make much sense.”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t have to. It’s cra-zy.” With these words, he bobbled
his head around, rolled his eyes, and spun his finger around his temple.
“The plan is to make everybody think I have a plan.”
“Okay, so no plan, but what’s the objective?”
“To make everybody think I have an objective!” He was so pleased with
himself for having come up with a gigantic waste of time.
“Oh, Jesus Christ.”
“It’s pronounced Mithridates,” he countered. “You can call me Mithri,
though.”
Leona didn’t want to end up in another battle royale with yet another
antagonist. The bad guys always lost, but the team always lost a lot along
the way, and she was disinterested in seeing that happen again. If the best
option was to jump over all of this, and just move on to the plan to return
to the main sequence, that was what she would do. “Look, I’m sure you’re
quite happy with—” She stopped talking when she noticed that all the
holography was back. The water, the tiny island, the hut; they had all
returned. The sky was just a regular blue with one sun, but everything else
looked as it did before Mithri dropped the illusion. Baudin’s faux son
wasn’t around, though.
Mithri was wearing the same female avatar as before, but she was clothed
now. He was walking out of the hut. “Oh, you’re back.”
“Where did I go?” Leona asked, pretty sure she knew the answer to that
question.
Mithri checked his watch. “Nowhere. You just disappeared exactly one Earthan
year ago. Imagine that.”
She reached over, and desperately tapped on her Cassidy cuff. It was off. It
was never off. Something was very wrong.
“Oh, yeah, that technology won’t work here.”
She looked back towards the tooth mountain, in the general direction of the
Suadona.
“That technology is fine. Your friends are fine. I’m sure they’ve just been
hanging out all year, wondering why you’ve not checked up on them.”
“How do you know so much about us? You didn’t ask me my name, or anything.”
“This.” Mithri grabbed a crystal tablet from a little table. He tapped on
it, and presented it to her. She could see a website on the screen, which
appeared to be a blog of some kind. The top entry read Extremus: Year 38.
“What is it?”
“It’s the Superintendent’s. This is how he tries to get people to read his
shit. Nobody does, of course. Well, not in his universe. The sad irony is
that thousands read it in this reality, and billions more in other
self-aware universes. Unfortunately, he doesn’t earn page impressions from
us. It’s just a mirrored site. You could even call it a quantum mirror?”
“So everything we’ve ever done, you already know.”
“No, not everything. Just what he writes about, and I don’t know how
accurate it is. It hasn’t exactly been fact-checked.”
“What are you going to do with me and my friends?”
Mithri yawned deeply. “Nothing. I’ve read enough to know that you’re a
non-threat.”
“How do you figure? We’ve fought against a lot of people, and we always
win...in the end. Some of them even became our friends.”
“I know, and those enemies of yours have one thing in common.”
She didn’t prompt him to continue. He was going to on his own.
He smiled, recognizing her attempt to take some level of control. “They all
tried to defeat you. You were right, when someone fights you, they lose, so
all I have to do is not fight. Ya know, there’s this saying in your reality;
you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take. This sounds right,
but it’s not. You miss zero percent of the shots you don’t take. I mean, can
you imagine not running for president of the United States, and then being
criticized for not being the president of the United States? That’s so
stupid. You should only take the shots you think you might make, and also
want to make. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try, or shouldn’t challenge
yourself, but come on! You and your team are a behemoth, but an underdog at
the same time. I’m not going there. So you tell me what you want me to do,
and I’ll just do it, because I don’t care.”
“Because you’re an agent of chaos,” Leona put forth.
“I’m an agent of confusion. Which means, if you stop asking me to do
anything I’m doing, it will maintain the status quo, because the status quo
is there is no status quo. I can’t lose! It doesn’t matter what you say.”
This sounded like one of those stories where the hero runs into a genocidal
artificial intelligence, and the only way to stop it is to force it into
some kind of logical paradox. There was an answer that Mithridates didn’t
want to hear, and she had to figure out what that could be. What would cause
him to lose?
He could see the gears turning in her head. “You’re hunting for a loophole,
but I assure you, it doesn’t exist.”
“What if I ask you to kill yourself?” She didn’t really want him to do that,
but she needed him to illuminate the boundaries, so she could start with a
decent frame of reference.
He shook his head like it was no big deal. He approached his hut, where a
relatively sharp bamboo pole was sticking a little too far out. With little
hesitation, he shoved himself forward, and let it dig into his neck. Blood
dripped down to the sand, followed by the rest of the body. After Leona
knelt down to check for a pulse, which she didn’t find, a figure started
walking towards her from the mountain. It was Mithri in his own form.
“Was that real, or an illusion?”
“This is like a holodeck,” he explained. “The objects aren’t real, per se,
but they are physical, and that body really died. I have mind uploading
technology, just like you do. Anything else?”
“Don’t ever hurt anyone ever again.”
He crossed his arms, and looked to the sky as he pondered the demand. “That
is a loophole,” he finally decided. “Yeah, I can’t do that one.”
“Because you just like it too much.”
“No, because it’s impossible. I mean, think about someone you love. Mateo,
your parents; whoever. You didn’t wanna hurt them, but you did, on a number
of occasions. You dated the wrong boy, or you failed a math test. That’s not
killing them, or punching them in the face, but it did hurt them. Just
because they forgave you for these things, doesn’t mean that pain could be
undone. No one can live their life painfree.”
“Fair enough,” Leona agreed.
“I suppose you just need to figure out what you want. If you tell me your
objective, I’ll come up with the plan.”
She had to laugh at this, but it did give her the idea she needed. “I want
you to become an agent of peace in this reality.”
Now he was laughing. It went on a little too long, actually. He literally
slapped his knee. “Have it your way, Mrs. Matic. I’ll become an agent of
peace. You’ll pardon me for having to take some time to figure out what that
means.” He laughed some more.
She closed her eyes, and tilted her head down respectfully.
“Now it’s my turn.”
“What?”
“Oh, this was a back and forth. You asked me for something, so now I get to
ask for something. What, did you think it was gonna be unfair?”
She sighed. “I should have seen this coming, but you should have warned me.”
“You hadn’t asked me to become an agent of peace yet. I was still an agent
of confusion, so I didn’t tell you, because that’s confusing.”
“Whatever, Mithri. Get on with it. I’m sure you already have your idea.”
“Two ideas,” he contended. “You asked me to do two things.”
“No, I asked you to do one thing. I asked for a response to a hypothetical
about killing yourself. I never actually said to kill yourself.”
He thought about this for a moment. “I’ll allow it. You’re a smart one.”
“I have three timelines of experience to draw upon,” she said.
“I have more than that. What you asked me to do is very complicated, and
it’s not going to come without its mistakes. I’m sure you expect something
similar from me, but what I’ve learned over the tens of thousands of years
is that sometimes simple is best. So I’m not going to ask you to do anything
crazy. It’s even going to be something that you weren’t going to do anyway.”
“Just say it.”
“Kill yourself, and immediately transfer your consciousness to the upgraded
organic substrate that Ramses engineered for you.”
“It’s not ready yet. She’s only twelve.”
“Yeah, that’s the joke. I thought you were smart.”
“I thought you were an agent of peace. Death isn’t peace.”
He shrugged. “Grace period.”
She frowned, now looking for a different loophole. There didn’t seem to be
anything to that. He specified which substrate, so she couldn’t use some
android body while she waited for the body to finish developing.
“I’ll give you one alternative.”
“What’s that?” It was probably going to be something even worse.
“Either start using your own new body right now, or make the rest of your
team transfer to their own new organic substrates within the year. That will
give me enough time to figure out what you even mean by peace. I’m not
confident I have the right definition in mind, since I’ve never done it
before.”
That was probably better, not worse. They would all be fifteen by that
point, which would almost make them look like adults. The prenatal growth
hormones and antibodies that they were currently floating in was the only
stuff capable of accelerating their aging safely, and without side effects.
It wasn’t something they could just inject into themselves afterwards. If
they wanted to age after the transfer process was complete, they would need
someone’s time powers. The team would surely understand that this was better
than her being stuck as a twelve-year-old. Still, they had a right to know.
“Let me speak with them first.”
“You can talk all you want, but the timer has already begun. If you jump to
the future, or leave this planet in your ship—which will restore function to
your Cassidy cuff—then you’ll have no choice but to switch to the
alternative. Either you’re a twelve-year-old by the end of the day, or
they’re fifteen by the end of the year.”
So Leona began to run. She wanted as much time as possible to figure this
out. “It was nice meeting you, Mithri!” she called back, recalling Leona’s
Rules of Time Travel number fifteen, don’t antagonize the antagonist.
“It was nice meeting you too!” he replied.
Leona hooked herself up to the computer, and entered the simulation. Her
friends were all there. They looked relieved to finally see her. She
explained the situation to them.
“Why can’t we just run?” Olimpia asked.
“I don’t know what he’ll do,” Leona replied. “He may just void the deal, but
he may come after us.”
“The answer is obvious,” Angela said. “Just transfer us. We can be fifteen,
that’s fine. It’s late enough in the timeline that people will understand.”
“Wait, Ramses, can’t you do something about this?” Marie asked.
“Can I accelerate growth after birth?” Ramses assumed. “With some time,
yeah, probably. I didn’t invent this technology. I stand on the shoulders of
giants, and none of them ever invented forward aging treatment, because it
could be used as a weapon, and not much else.”
Leona nodded. “Mateo, you’ve been quiet.”
“Angela’s right, the answer is obvious. He didn’t tell you that you can
transfer your mind to another body. He said you had to kill yourself to do
it. I’m not okay with that. What we experienced was awful...necessary, but
awful. You managed to avoid it, and I would like to keep it that way.”
This was true. They all died to end up here, and she never had to go through
the same trauma; at least not for a while. All things being equal, that was
the difference, so by the end of the day, Leona’s most recent body was dead,
and she looked as she did when she was twelve.
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