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There was no need to worry about the new Minister of Foreign Affairs for
Castlebourne. They didn’t know who she was prior to today, but she was
already familiar with time travelers, a few in particular. Rochelle Sumner
grew up with Dalton Hawk as he was living through multiple lifetimes.
Curious about people like him, she started to be on the lookout for others,
eventually running into Dave Seidel and Jesimula Utkin. She was actually
with them in the past, trying to figure out how to transport a citrus fruit
from the future at the behest of the villainous Buddy. Rochelle couldn’t or
wouldn’t divulge whether they succeeded in this mission, but she had long
since moved on. In more recent decades, she was trained as an Interstellar
Charterwright, so it was her job to handle these situations specifically.
The fact that she knew about time travel could have entirely been a
coincidence, because it didn’t sound like she had concerned herself with
such matters for the last few centuries.
While they were gone, Ramses’ machines finished all of the calculations and
simulations for the new mini-slingdrives, but it was complicated. The
components were successfully miniaturized, and shunted into specialized
pocket dimensions. The problem was that they could not accrue enough
quintessence on their own for an individual to make a jump. At least three
people had to come together to combine their power. They should all be able
to jump together at that point, which meant that the resulting power was
more than the sum of its parts, but it was a limitation that the math simply
could not overcome.
“I don’t like that word,” Angela decided.
“What would you have me call it?” Ramses asked.
She pursed her lips to the side, and looked up towards the ceiling with only
her eyes. “A constraint?”
He laughed a little. “Okay. That’s our constraint. Three or more of us have
to go together, which will allow us to theoretically split into two groups,
but no more.”
“Can we take other people with us?” Mateo asked him. “Passengers?”
Ramses took an uncomfortably long time to respond. “The AI couldn’t figure
that out. I can run as many simulations as you want, but it needs targeted
data. It needs to know who these passengers are, and what’s up with their
quantum and qualium realms. I can’t just iterate the variables. We would
have to calculate each particular passenger, like they used to do with
airplanes, when they needed to know everyone’s weight for safety.”
“Have you devised a way to gather this data, if we were to find ourselves in
a situation where people are in need of being evacuated?” Leona asked.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “It’s a little slow, but I can improve the efficiency.”
“That’s good enough for me for now,” Leona determined.
There was a lull in the conversation. No one knew if they were going to
leave this very moment, or after saying their goodbyes to everyone here, or
even this year. Leona was still worried about her right to be the leader, so
she couldn’t just order it. Fortunately, Romana appeared out of nowhere to
break the ice. She showed up using the dark particles that she was now
stricken with thanks to Buddy’s protracted abduction and imprisonment of
her. “Good, you’re not gone yet. I wanna go with you.”
“With us?” Mateo asked. “We don’t even know where we’re going.”
“Yeah, that’s the point,” Romana agreed. “It’s time for me to move on from
Team Kadiar. They can handle it without me.”
“It wasn’t about needing you,” Mateo argued. “You should be with your
sisters. I can’t...for any extended period of time, but you have a
choice.”
“Plus, you put the R in Kadiar,” Olimpia noted.
“We’re not the only three on the team,” Romana said. “It was never only
about us, or the name.”
“We’re Team Matic, but more than half of us aren’t Matics,” Marie reminded
everyone.
“Y’all wanna switch to Team Walton?” Mateo proposed.
“That’s okay,” Angela replied sincerely.
“I’ve spoken with my sisters,” Romana went on, getting back to the matter at
hand. “They give me their blessings. We’re doing good work out there, it’s
not like I hate it. It’s just that the operation has grown so much since we
started. The Ex-Exins—we need to come up with a better name for
them too—have become so much more involved. Kivi and Dubra are
considering leaving as well, and just letting the refugees take care of
themselves. Mirage would stay, as would Tertius, since their powers are
paramount, but I would say that anyone else is interchangeable.”
“I would love to have you here,” Mateo assured her. “I’m not going to harp
on how dangerous it will be, because you already know that, and it’s not
like you’ve been living in a padded cell for the last several years. I just
want to make sure you don’t walk away with any regrets.”
“It hasn’t been long for you,” Romana said, “but I’ve been seriously
considering my options for a year, and questioning it for years prior to
that. I’m not doing this on a whim.”
“Yeah, it’s hard for us to remember that,” Leona admitted. “Everything
happens so fast from our perspective.” Another break in the conversation,
though a short one. “Well, okay. You’ll need a suit. Ram, you have a regular
IMS that’s fitted with all the slingdrive upgrades?”
“Actually,” Romana interrupted Ramses before he had a chance to speak.
“Could I maybe get one of those...nanite suits? What do you call them...?”
“The EmergentSuit,” Ramses answered. His eyes darted over to Romana’s
father. “I suppose you’re not a child anymore, and you can make that
decision.”
Romana waited for a moment before tensing up with confidence “I have. This
is also not on a whim. I don’t want the upgraded substrate like you all
have, just the nanobot implants. I don’t know if I should have these dark
particles in my body, but they’re part of me now, and I can’t risk losing
them.” She looked over at Mateo now. “I hope you don’t disapprove.”
Mateo took a respectful moment to ponder his position, then decided to
simply say, “your body, your choice.”
“Thank you,” she said softly.
Romana underwent the procedure in private with Leona, instead of with an
audience like most everyone else. She had a harder time adjusting to the way
her brain interfaced with the implants, and their nanites. She had less
experience with that sort of thing. She spent a lot of the day practicing in
the lab, during which Ramses realized that there was a flaw in his
programming. They were optimized to the team’s physiology and neurology.
They were walking around with posthuman bodies, and teleportation and
illusion powers. Romana was in no risk of exploding, or something, but she
wasn’t ever going to be good at using her new suit in its current state. Her
software needed to be adapted to account for the differences between her and
her friends. He finished it by the time the day was over, but there wasn’t
enough time for them to leave Castlebourne for their little exploratory
slingdrive jump. Still, Romana wanted to integrate herself into the team, so
she chose to turn her pattern back on, and skip over the next year.
When they returned, it was July 13, 2495. Castlebourne was celebrating a
major milestone in their development. For the first time ever, the
percentage of domes in the Gamma testing phase exceeded the percentage that
were still totally non-operational. While the domes currently still in Alpha
and Beta testing would gradually go down as more and more people were given
the opportunity to explore these worlds, the top number would probably
remain largely unchanged moving forward. Using various methods, including
crowdsourcing, ordered list iteration, AI creativity, and just plain sitting
down and thinking about it, Hrockas had managed to come up with over 67,000
ideas for the various recreational and relaxation destinations. The other
16,000 or so just wouldn’t be original enough to warrant construction, and
would be left there as barren deserts. There were many other deserts, but
these ones were unplanned, bare, and unused.
It took some time, but Hrockas eventually accepted the fact that there would
be empty areas. Four out of five domes did have something to brag about, and
that was a pretty big deal. The only reason he chose to construct as many as
he did was because that was close to how many could fit on the surface of
the planet. It wasn’t like he came up with all of the ideas first. He was
happy, and so were the residents. The population from the Goldilocks
Corridor was still growing at a steady rate. The ones already here held a
vote, and agreed to call themselves Castlebourners. They were here to start
new lives, and build a new civilization. Language mattered, and tying
themselves to where they escaped from by calling themselves Ex-Exins—or by
the designations of their planets of origin—wasn’t helping them move
forward.
“Why are you telling them about this?” Hrockas questioned Aeolia when he
finally came into the room.
“I’m trying to get them up to speed,” she defended. She was taking charge of
the briefing while Hrockas was busy with other matters.
“I don’t care about that. They need to see that desert, and explain what the
hell is happening there.”
“What’s happening in what desert?” Leona asked.
Hrockas took wide strides over to the holo-wall on the other side of the
conference table. He switched it on. It was showing a nude beach located in
the South Ocean. “Who the hell was watching this?” he questioned,
frustrated as he was trying to find the right feed on his handheld device.
“Here.” He changed it to the view from a flying drone, looking down at one
of those deserts that they were talking about. It wasn’t natural, though, as
was the majority of Castlebourne outside of the domes. It was sandy and
duney. And there was something else.
Leona leaned forward and peered at the screen. “Are those...?”
“Dark particles?” Romana finished the question with a gulp. There were tons
of them, flying over the surface, morphing and turning like starlings.
“That’s what they look like to me,” Hrockas responded. “Care to explain?”
“Which dome is that?” Romana asked.
“It’s Dome 216. A meteorite crashed through it years ago, and I never
bothered repairing it. I just marked it for disuse, and moved on to 217.”
With fear in her eyes, Romana looked over at her father. “It’s mine. That’s
the one I used to release the excess energy I have pent up when I’m not
skipping time, or teleporting, or whatever.”
“You always go into the same dome?” Mateo asked her.
“It was in disuse,” Romana explained.
“How is there an atmosphere?” Olimpia asked.
“Oh yeah, if there’s a breach...” Romana posed to Hrockas.
“You tell me. There’s not supposed to be an atmosphere, I can’t
believe I didn’t notice. Maybe it has something to do with what you do in
there? Some kind of weird form of electrolysis?”
“I purge the energy,” Romana repeated. “It doesn’t really even look like I’m
releasing dark particles. It’s more of a transparent wave that distorts
space around me. It’s a very private experience, and I don’t talk about it.
It shouldn’t be making oxygen, though. I have no idea what’s going on.”
“Ramses, you need to go there and see what data you can get,” Leona ordered.
“No,” Romana and Hrockas argued at the same time. “It’s too dangerous,”
Hrockas continued. “I’ve sealed it off; placed it in its own quarantine.”
“I’ll send a probe,” Ramses negotiated.
“There’s already one in there,” Hrockas said, pointing to the feed.
Ramses chuckled. “I’ll send a better one than that paper airplane you got
roaming around the skies.”
“Please do,” Hrockas said.
They started to get up to return to their respective duties when Marie
noticed something. “That paper airplane just spotted a person out there.”
“Computer, zoom in,” Leona commanded.
The camera zoomed in towards the ground. It wasn’t a person, more of a
silhouette...made of dark particles. If it had any approximation of eyes,
though, it was staring up at them.
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