| Generated by Google Gemini Pro text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 2 |
Cedar Duvall, leader of the Sixth Key, stands on the bridge, watching as the
seams to the time bubble that has been slowing their progress down start to
rip apart, and finally release them. They expected to break free from its
tyranny eventually, but the calculations the scientists made placed that
estimation much later than now. “Steady, boys. I fear we have been freed
intentionally by whatever intelligence is down there. We still don’t know if
they’re friendly.”
“There’s no planet here anymore. It’s just a small patch of land. Should I
prep an away team?” the Captain of the Starship of State offers. Any vessel
that The Sixth Key is on is the Starship of State, but this is
the ship that is typically used for this purpose, so the two of them
have a nice rapport. She knows that Cedar isn’t going to say yes. He is the
away team. He’s reckless like that.
“No, Cap’n. Teleport me down alone. Keep the whole crew on PrepCon Three.”
“Aye, sir. Teleporting you now.”
Cedar appears on the grassy hill. A bunch of people are sitting around. Two
others appear to be dead, but it doesn’t seem to be bothering anyone. “My
name is Cedar Duvall, Sixth Key of the Sixth Key! Report!”
“I’m confused,” a woman says.
“About what? The re part, or the port part?”
“Ha-ha-ha. The Sixth Key of the Sixth Key, I don’t know what that means.”
Cedar is taken aback. He hasn’t spoken to anyone who doesn’t know who he is
in decades. “I am the Sixth Key, because I created the Sixth Key universe.
Me and five other keys.”
“Oh,” the woman says. She’s holding back further laughter. “Right. My name
is Hogarth Pudeyonavic.”
“Ah, I’ve heard of you. I know all the salmon and choosing ones. And
the other...extra people.”
“Of course, sir. You’ve taken a leadership role since all these people
left?”
These people? Cedar starts studying people’s faces, instead of just treating
them as background actors. She’s right. Some of these are the former leaders
of the original five realities. Not all of them, though. They disappeared,
and he did indeed have to step up. They needed a singular voice, and they
needed someone whose loyalties did not lie in one past civilization or
another. “I have. Is that going to be a problem?”
“What year is it now?” Ingrid Alvarado of the Fifth Division asks.
“It’s 2500. At least, it should be. We were stuck in a time bubble on the
way here, so who knows?”
“That was probably his doing,” Hogarth says, gesturing towards the dead man.
“Is that why you killed him?”
“He’s not dead, he’s asleep.”
Cedar cocks his head to the side, and eyes the supposedly sleeping man.
“There’s something happening to his face.”
Hogarth looks down at him too. She takes a pair of goggles out of her
pocket, and presses them against her eyes without bothering to strap them
onto her head. “He’s de-aging. Interesting.”
“How do we stop it?” Cedar asks. “Cosette DuFour,” he says to another woman.
“You can do that, can’t you?”
“Not to other people,” Cosette answers. “I can only adjust my own age.”
“Pity.”
“This is what he wanted,” Hogarth tries to explain. “He’s...resetting his
brain back to factory settings. At least that’s how I’m interpreting his
words. He didn’t allot any time to talk about it. He just collapsed, and
fell asleep.”
“I think she’s de-aging too,” a guy calls up after examining the
dead-not-dead woman. Who is he again? He ran the main sequence. Some kind of
General.
“So, they’re gonna be all right?” Cedar asks.
Hogarth shrugs. “Dunno. We’re waiting to see.” She jerks her chin towards
the sleeping woman. “She wasn’t a good person.” She jerks her chin towards
the sleeping man. “He’s trying to fix her. Too early to tell whether
it worked or not.”
Cedar takes his water disc out of his suit. He flicks it in the air, but it
doesn’t open, so he flicks it several more times until it does. He presses
the button, and summons the interdimensional water. “Well...” He takes a
drink. “There’s something weird about this void.” He takes another sip.
“Ahhh. I mean, besides the fact that there’s no black hole in it, which I’m
told is unusual. It’s been drawing power lately.” Some of the water has gone
down the wrong pipe, so he coughs it out. “It’s been stealing from us. We
came here to plug the leak.”
Hogarth glances down at the sleeping man now, who looks a lot younger than
he did when Cedar first showed up. “Well, that would probably kill them.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking too.” Cedar vigorously shakes the back of
his head. “Thing is, I still gotta plug the leak. The galaxy runs on
temporal energy.”
“Every universe runs on temporal energy,” Hogarth says. “That’s what time
is.”
“I have no doubt that that’s true, but I don’t care about the other
universes. I care about mine.”
“You’re the confused one now,” Hogarth says, taking a step forward. “This
universe is mine. You may have made your little pocket universe, but
I made the full-sized one that it’s inside of. You’re here because I say you
can be here, and technically speaking, all of the energy that you have is
sourced from me.”
He studies her face. “You’ve been gone as well. We’ve been holding
diplomatic discussions with one Ellie Underhill, and her cohort. Perhaps
you’ve heard of her? She lives in Fort Underhill.”
Hogarth cracks a smile. “That I named it after her does not diminish my own
power. You still need to respect me. The Third Rail spent billions of years
without excess temporal energy. They lived off the time that was naturally
available to them. You will be fine with a little bit of rationing while we
figure out who these two are when they wake up...what they are.”
“The Third Rail was one planet in its original reality. We number in the
trillions of habitats. We need the excess.”
“And you’ll have it,” Hogarth reiterated, “when these two are done doing
whatever it is they’re doing.”
They look like children now. How long is this gonna go on? “Which will be
when? When they each turn back into an unfertilized egg and a sperm?”
“It’s called a spermatozoon,” one of the people Cedar doesn’t recognize
corrects. “What? I’m a biologist, I have to know these things.”
“I thought you were a princess,” the Nuadu-something guy from the Parallel
says.
“We don’t know,” Hogarth jumps back in before the conversation can be moved
too far off topic. “I expect that they’ll stop de-aging at some point. I’m
sure that this was all part of his plan, and I’m choosing to accept that.
Why? Because he may be the single-most powerful being in both of our
universes. Let’s not piss him off, shall we?”
Cedar clears his throat, and coughs again. He smashes his cup back down to
disc form, and slips it in its pocket. “Can’t argue with that logic. Wadya
all eat around here?”
“We just got here,” Hogarth answers. “We don’t know what’s edible.”
No one ends up eating anything. They’re too nervous to find out what’s going
to happen when the child-gods wake up. They’re both eight years old or so
when the de-aging process ceases. They stay asleep after that, though,
continuing to work through their apparent metamorphoses. While they’re
waiting, they catch Cedar up on who and what the sleepers are, to the extent
of their knowledge. In turn, he catches them up on the goingson of the Sixth
Key, and all the history they missed while they were gone. They’ve
maintained the imaginary wall that is holding back the Reality Wars, but it
is a constant threat to the peace that their new civilization is enjoying.
That’s why Echo and Clavia are such a concern. Energy is still the number
one commodity in the galaxy, so they can’t afford to waste one ounce of it.
These two god-beings could be the key to maintaining the peace forever, or
they could be the instruments of its destruction following total domination.
It all depends on what happens when they come to.
About an hour passes before they begin to stir. Clavia wakes up first, dazed
and confused. “Mommy?” she asks. She thinks she has a mother. Who is she
talking about, though? “Mom, where are you?” She’s looking around and
blinking a lot.
“Umm...I’m right here.” Hogarth carefully approaches her.
“You’re not my mommy,” Clavia argues.
“No, but I care about you, and I’m here to care for you.” Nice save.
Clavia is very pouty. She continues to blink as she tries to wake up fully.
She looks around again, and stops when she sees the second-in-command for
the Sixth Key version of main sequence Earth. “Mom! There you are!”
Judy Schmidt widens her eyes. “Uh, me?”
“Yeah, silly!” Clavia laughs joyously.
“Right, okay. Um. Come here...honey.”
Clavia hops over, and tackles Judy with a big hug.
Judy mouths what the fuh to everyone else, but no one has any
answers. This little magic girl has imprinted on her, for whatever reason,
and there’s probably no going back on that. Kids don’t just switch parents
on a whim. It’s her job to raise her now. So she better figure it out.
“Group hug!” Echo comes running up the hill. He hugs Judy and Clavia. “Come
on, daddy!” He beckons Judy’s superior, General Bariq Medley.
“Oh, um.” Bariq leans over to hug them too, but not very tightly.
“Okay,” Judy says, gently separating them all. “Why don’t you go play with
your aunt...Princess Honeypea, so your mommy and daddy can talk to their
friends.
“Okay!” the kids say in unison. Good, they do see Honeypea as a member of
the family. Out of everyone here, she’s probably the best with kids.
“What the hell is happening?” Bariq questions Hogarth.
“Everyone seems to think that I’m some sort of expert in all this, but I
don’t know what’s going on. I came here because this is where the trail led
after the magnolia tree was destroyed. But here’s all I know. Two extremely
powerful individuals were just regressed to childhood, and now they think
you two are their parents. I don’t know if they have false memories of you,
or if it’s just an intuition they have, but I don’t think there’s anything I
can do about it. You have to be there for them. No one can replace you.
Think about how you were when you were their age. Would you have accepted
just being moved to someone else’s care?”
“No one suggested that,” Judy defends.
“You were thinking it.” Cedar steps forward, injecting himself into the
conversation. “I would be.”
Bariq looks over his shoulders. Princess Honeypea is teaching the kids
pattycake. “I want a seat at the table.”
“What?” Cedar asks.
“You rule the galaxy now. I wanna be a part of that.”
“I don’t know that there’s any reason—”
“Hey, Clavia and Echo!” Bariq calls over. “Who’s this guy?”
They both just shrug their shoulders.
“They don’t know you. You wanna have any say what they do with their power?
You wanna make sure the people of the Sixth Key have what they need? You
better cozy up to their parents.”
“Bariq, we can’t just exploit them like that,” Judy warns. “They’re
children.”
“No, they’re not,” Bariq argues. He turns back to Cedar. “What’ll it be? The
woman’s name literally means key. That’s a strong symbol, but they
don’t answer to you. They answer to the two of us.”
“They’ll answer to me better,” Judy reasons. “Children always love their
mommies more. Especially when their daddies are dicks.”
Bariq chuckles. “I’ll dote on them. But I can’t do that from the sidelines.”
“Yes, you can,” Judy insists.
“Okay,” Cedar says. “You come with me, bringing the temporal energy gods,
and I’ll find you a place in government. High up. People will know you,
respect you. They remember you. I didn’t erase the past, though I literally
could have.”
“They’ll be well taken care of,” Bariq tries to explain to Judy when she
shakes her head at this devil’s deal. “No one’s exploiting anyone. It will
be years before they’ll be mature enough to make their own serious
decisions, and it’s better for them if they’re close with the leader of all
of reality. If you don’t want this to go badly, then be their mother. You
have that instinct. That’s why the tree chose you to be my second at the
Rock Meetings. You weren’t my lieutenant before this. I would have chosen
someone else to stand by my side.”
“I wouldn’t have chosen a military leader to be the main representative,”
Judy reminds him. “I would have chosen Earth’s Mediator.”
“Yeah. We’ve been over that,” Bariq acknowledges.
“Okay, but I’m the head parent,” she says with airquotes. “I decide
what’s best for them, even if that comes to mean leaving the Capital, or
wherever you operate out of,” she says to Cedar.
“Sure,” Cedar agrees.
“Them too.” Bariq points at everyone else in this little bubble. “Give them
what they want.”
“We want a garden,” a woman says.
“I got lots of gardens,” Cedar replies.
“A big one,” she clarifies.
Cedar nods his head. “I’ll see what I can do.”
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