Thursday, March 2, 2023

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: December 28, 2398

Alyssa seems okay. If there’s secret information in her brain that she can’t access, it doesn’t appear to be doing her any harm. It’s not making her hurt people, or spontaneously cluck like a chicken. After all the tests that Ramses could think of, and all the psychic therapy that Arcadia tried to perform, they had little choice but to give up, move on, and hope that it doesn’t cause problems later. It’s been a long time since they first came up with their plan to fake Leona’s death, and they have yet to go through with it, despite nearly everything being ready. All they need is for someone to pretend to be her using the currently vacant Leona Reaver body, and Alyssa has had enough of the waiting. “I’m doing this. Show me how.”
“It’s too dangerous,” Ramses warns.
“You’ve all done dangerous things. So have I. I went to Russia. This is important.”
Ramses shakes his head. He’s tired of this argument.
“I’m tired of this argument,” Alyssa says. Maybe she is psychic. “I’m doing this, so you can either help me with the Insulator of Life and Livewire, or I can try it myself. Talk about dangerous.”
He sighs. “Okay. We’ll do it tomorrow.”
She laughs, then starts to fake laugh, “ha-ha-ha. Let’s go to that secret government hospital. Right now.”
“Very well. If you’ll get the keys, I’ll—”
“No, I said right now.”
He’s confused at first, but then realizes that she’s expecting him to teleport them there. It’s less about the thrill of superpowers, and more about them getting there quickly without him having any time to change his mind, or try to talk her out of it. “Okay, we’ll do that. But I still have to get the special equipment.”
“Okay, go ahead,” she says as if he needs her authorization.
After they’re ready, they jump to the secret hospital, directly into Leona Reaver’s room. The guard standing outside her door is alarmed, but relaxes when he sees through the window that it’s just the two of them. Ramses peeks his head out to inform him that his assignment is about to be changed. Instead of watching over Reaver’s body, he’ll temporarily be watching over Alyssa’s. He understands, and isn’t surprised. He’s probably never shocked about anything anymore. One day, everyone in the world is gonna know about time travel and time powers. The secret can’t last forever.
Alyssa has seen this done before, but Ramses reviews the procedure anyway. It’s important for her to understand that this is not just dangerous because the mission she’ll be going on will result in a near-death experience. The transfer itself is also dangerous, because it’s mysterious. Normal human brain uploading technology has been researched and perfected by thousands of experts, and experienced by billions of people in the main sequence. This? No one knows how the hell this works. It just does. And that means that if something goes wrong, they won’t necessarily be able to fix it. She accepts the risks, and lies down on the bed next to Reaver. They provided a bariatric medical bed just for this eventually, so there’s plenty of room for the both of them.
“I’ll see you on the other side.” Ramses plugs the Livewire in.
Alyssa transfers to Leona Reaver’s body. Then she starts to have a seizure.

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