Friday, September 16, 2022

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 14, 2398

The clock strikes midnight by the time Leona makes it to the lab. She takes her phone out, and checks on the location of her friends. They’re either still at the condo, as she asked them to be, or their phones are, but they’re elsewhere. She gets out of the car, and enters the lab. She and Marie checked here after they returned to the Ponce de Leon in case Mateo, Ramses, and Angela were holed up, or left clues. The place was exactly as they left it, and the security measures they put in place proved that no one else had come into the building either. Even so, she needs to check secondary security to ensure that no one opened the vault.
Once she’s sure that everything’s okay, she opens the door herself, which she and Ramses promised not to do unless they both agreed, or if it was an emergency. She can’t achieve the first one, but the second one certainly applies. They don’t have very much of this stuff left, and what she’s about to do hasn’t been tested, let alone perfected, but she’s desperate. She doesn’t know where her people are, or what sort of state they’re in. If communication was compromised, she can’t trust anything Mateo said to her over the phone. She has to assume the worst and act accordingly. She has to go to them, even if it means placing herself in the same predicament. Leona draws the Existence water into the syringe, and injects it into her arm. Reckless, but it works. She can sense Mateo, quite distantly, but they’re out there somewhere, and she should have just enough power to make it there. She grabs the satellite phone, and teleports away.
“Leona?” Mateo asks.
They’re standing in the main cabin of The Olimpia. Nothing looks out of place. “Oh, thank God. Report.”
“No. You report. How did you get here?”
“I know how,” Ramses says, stepping up the stairs. “You injected yourself with samples from the Bermuda Triangle.”
“I had to,” Leona defends. “I had to get back to you.”
“It wasn’t ready,” Ramses counters. “It may never have been.”
“But it was ready, I’m here,” she insists.
“You couldn’t have known that,” Ramses continues. “Besides, we don’t know what kind of side effects there might be. That is not what the immortality waters were designed for.”
“They weren’t designed for anything,” Leona argues. “They’re natural.”
“Are you sure about that?” Ramses asks, kind of rhetorically.
Leona looks over at Mateo, who is looking down at the floor disappointingly. He shakes his head. He can’t believe she did that. It was so stupid and dangerous, and she should know better. He made contact. He used the proper language to let her know that they were fine. She should have trusted that. She should have trusted him.
Leona frowns at them. She hears a noise behind her, just now noticing that Angela has been sitting in the cubby. “I’m sorry, everyone. I didn’t think it through.”
“It’s okay. We’re gonna be okay now,” Angela tells her. “Let’s all go back home.”
“Where are we?” Leona asks, flipping on the nearest viewscreen to see nothing but the cold dark ocean.
“Enemy territory,” Mateo answers. “Russia.”

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