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Only Mateo was able to try the Daedalus wings during the reception, and that
was only because he flew off before Ramses could stop him. They should have
been inspected first to make sure that they were safe. Humans with wings
were not impossible these days. There was, in fact, a relatively small
community of wingèd people on the Core Worlds. The main reason they were
impossible prior to genetic engineering and bioengineering was the weight.
Wings with enough lift to carry a person would have to be so large that no
one was physically capable of flapping them. If they were mechanical, well,
that just added to the weight, especially with a powersource, and this all
made it totally impractical. Only when humans could build new substrates for
themselves did it become a reasonable prospect. Ramses designed the team’s
bodies to be lighter than a natural human being’s, but they still weren’t
specifically tailored for flight. Daedalus was an android of some kind, and
since the mythology stated that the character had fabricated wings, he was
almost certainly designed to be perfectly suited for flight. Mateo was not,
and that was dangerous.
Fortunately, once Ramses did manage to get his hands on the things, he
discovered that they weren’t just well-ordered feathers. Carefully hidden
along the underside were tiny little fusion thrusters, which provided the
lift, and the forward movement. They were controlled by the adjustment of
the wearer’s head. It was essentially a cleverly disguised jetpack. It was
unclear whether Daedalus’ own wings operated on the same principles, or if
he was just somehow smart enough to build them after being instantiated in
this physical simulation. He should have been placed under this dome with
the knowledge typical of the time period he supposedly lived in, but who
knew what was going on in Hrockas’ head when he conceived of Mythodome? It
was one of the few domes that he conceptualized with hardly any help from
his AI. He was an expert in Earthan mythology prior to his travels to the
Charter Cloud, so this one was near and dear to his heart. He refused to
explain it, expecting the art and adventure to speak for themselves.
Now that Ramses was satisfied with the results of his assessment, everyone
was trying them. Well, he wasn’t so much as satisfied as he wasn’t allowed
to block them anymore. He was hesitant to trust a gift from such a
mysterious legendary individual, but he was overruled. Daedalus probably
really did have a hidden agenda, but that doubtfully involved killing
anybody on Team Matic, or anyone else. He did put his foot down at Romana,
though. Her temporary reyoungification had not yet worn off, and she was
still walking around in her original substrate. He might consider it later,
but he wouldn’t allow anyone else on Castlebourne to use them unless they
agreed to let him perform a thorough physical exam, which they didn’t. Leona
was the last to give them a go before Ramses took them back, and secured
them in his lab. That was okay, because it was about time to get to work.
“Wait, you’re not having a honeymoon?” Angela questioned.
“The average honeymoon these days,” Mateo began to reply, “is one month.
That’s thirty years for us. We don’t have time for that.”
“Okay, well, you don’t have to do a full month,” Marie reasoned.
“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t choose a dome or two, and relax for a bit.”
Mateo and Leona exchanged a knowing look.
“What? What was that?” Marie asked.
“You should have noticed by now,” Leona said, to her, and the group, “that
there is no such thing as a vacation for us. As soon as we try to
relax,” she explained with airquotes, “something will come up, and we
won’t be as prepared for it as we should be.”
“What are you talking about?” Angela pressed. “We relaxed for, like, three
years on Flindekeldan before The Warrior finally found us.”
“The exception that proves the rule,” Mateo contended.
“You’re not using that right,” Leona told him reluctantly.
Mateo was about to ask for clarification when they heard whooping and
hollering in the distance. An indistinct dot appeared just under the lowest
clouds a few kilometers away. They focused their telescopic eyes, and were
able to zoom in enough to make out that it was Young!Romana. She was wearing
the wings, having presumably stolen them from Ramses’ lab. She flew towards
them, and almost kissed the ground, but arced upwards at the last second,
and headed back for the sky. “Hell yeah!” she exclaimed in her little
high-pitched voice.
Ramses was noticeably upset. “I give you people too much access to my
operations. I will be changing that.”
“She’s just a kid,” Marie reasoned.
“No, she’s not,” Ramses volleyed.
“Shouldn’t she have re-aged by now?” Olimpia asked. “I thought she said it
wouldn’t last more than a day.”
“Yeah, that’s why she went down for a nap,” Leona said. “She said she
thought it would trigger her transformation back. I’m not sure if she lied
about that, or the nap, but she obviously teleported to Treasure Hunting
Dome at some point to sneak into Ramses’ lab.”
Ramses was fiddling with his armband. “I’m working on new security protocols
now.”
“She just wanted to be part of the group,” Mateo defended his daughter.
“She’s been through a lot over the last few years. She needs this.”
“Daedalus didn’t design those things for a child’s body,” Ramses argued.
“They’re adjustable,” Marie reminded them. “That’s why I was able to wear
them after Olimpia managed to fit the straps around her ample bosom.”
“Please,” Olimpia said, feigning disgust while holding up the back of her
hand. “I’m a married woman.” She lowered all of her fingers but her ring
finger, simultaneously showcasing her wedding ring while making it look like
she was flipping Marie off.
“For now...” Marie joked.
“I can teleport up and grab her if you want,” Angela volunteered.
“No, that’s too dangerous,” Ramses replied. “She has to come down
eventually.”
“Will the fusion thrusters run out of fuel at some point?” Mateo asked.
Ramses shook his head. “The feathers are lined with microscopic ramscoop
nodes, which can draw in hydrogen for processing, so...no. She’ll get tired,
though. She’s just a baby. Speaking of which, we need to fix that. Who are
these twins who did this to her?”
“The Ashvins,” Angela reminded him. “Twin gods, part of the Hindu pantheon.
We found them in the Dawnlands. This dome has many sectors, and they can’t
all be accessed just by walking through a door. If you don’t have access to
the right portal, you can’t go. Of course as teleporters, we can skip
over those rules.”
Ramses tapped on his comms. “Romy, you’ve had your fun. I’m worried about
your condition. I’ll let you use the wings later, but first, you need to go
from Allen to Garner.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Romana responded.
“Just get back down here, please. I’m not mad, but you could be in medical
distress, and not know it until it’s too late.”
Romana suddenly appeared a few meters above them. She slowly glided down
towards the ground, and landed with grace and poise. The wings collapsed
into their little box, which slipped off of her chest.
“You’ll navigate us to the Dawnlands,” Leona said as she was picking up the
box.
“No,” Ramses decided. “The Walton twins are right. You need some kind of
honeymoon. Get on the catalog, and choose a dome for your vacation. I don’t
want to see you at least until 2521. That’s not that long of a honeymoon.
Doesn’t it sound fair?”
“Yes, sir,” Mateo said, standing up straight, and saluting. He bent over
real low and gave his daughter a kiss on the forehead. “I love you, sweetie.
Be good for Uncle Ram-Ram.”
“Okay, I think we do need to go see the Ashvins again.” Them playfully
treating her like an actual little girl got old a long time ago.
After a few more goodbyes, the newlyweds ran off for their honeymoon
adventures. They weren’t going to confine themselves to only one dome, but a
series of them, starting with Mud World: World of Mud. Ramses and Angela
then split off to take Romana back to the Dawnlands sector. Marie said that
she would be staying behind to do her own thing elsewhere without telling
anyone what or where.
The name was absolutely appropriate. It was dawn here. It was bright enough
for them to walk around without running into anything, but not clear enough
to see the details of the landscape. It was a beautiful and calming place.
Even the air seemed ultraclean, like something you would breathe out of an
oxygen tank. As they were standing there, two horses trotted up to
them, pulling a golden chariot. Two strong young men stepped out, and
approached. One had lighter skin, and the other darker. They moved with
grace, symmetry, and synchronization. They were perfectly attuned to each
other, perhaps by some kind of centralized hivemind shared between them.
When they spoke, they did so in a seamless concerted effort, finishing each
other’s sentences in some cases, and saying words simultaneously in others.
“Hello, and welcome to the Dawnlands, foothills to Svarga, the celestial
plane of light. How may we help you?”
“Could you undo what you did to her?” Ramses requested, gesturing to Romana.
“She was told that the de-aging process would be temporary.”
The Ashvins smiled, again in sync. “Youth is temporary for all before they
enter the Svarga or Naraka Loka. Aging is a part of life. It may be undone,
but as the lotus reliably blooms each year, so too will man grow and
change.”
Ramses gently closes his eyes, exasperated. “Are you telling me that she
will only return to her normal age because she’s aging normally from here,
and will eventually reach it anyway?”
“She will one day be as old as she was, and following, she will be even
older. So too will you.”
“That’s not how my species works.”
The Ashvins were confused by this as it was leaning on the fourth wall, and
they did not have a response.
“Look, we need this to happen faster than the full twenty years,” Ramses
went on. “She clearly misunderstood the rules when she requested this from
you.” She looked down at Romana. “Right?”
“Right. I didn’t want this to be permanent, or...so slow,” Romana confirmed.
“Apologies for the confusion,” the Ashvins claimed, “we meant no harm to
your body or mind. We may reverse the ravages of changing seasons, but not
hasten them. We cannot return you to the state you were in before your bath
in the Sindhu River.”
Ramses shook his head again, which he felt like he was doing a lot of today.
“Do you know of anyone—in any realm—who might be able to do what we ask?” No
one on the team had ever heard of a retroverter who wasn’t also a proverter,
but to be fair, they weren’t all too familiar with the concept. They really
should have been questioning how such temporal powers ended up on this
planet in the first place. They hadn’t recruited anyone with such abilities.
Perhaps someone they did bring here, however, had connected Hrockas
with other time travelers. These others could have donated their gifts to
building Mythodome, or maybe even other domes, in such ways that broke the
publicly known laws of physics.
“That is not something that we would know,” the Ashvins answered, a little
bit sadly, but still believing that this wasn’t their fault. They did not
know that they should clarify how Romana’s situation would work.
“All right. Let’s go do some research,” Ramses said, turning around. “There
are a lot of mythological beings here. Maybe one of the other gods has real
powers too.”
“Wait,” Romana said, stopping him with a hand on his arm. “I know someone
who can do it.”
“Who?”
“You.”
Ramses’ eyes darted over to Angela’s from a brief feeling of panic, because
he didn’t know what Romana was talking about. “I can’t do what you ask. I’m
not a proverter either.”
“I don’t need a proverter,” Romana clarified. “I need a cloner.”
Ramses sighed. “That is a big decision, and it’s also irreversible. Once
your consciousness is digitized, it can’t be undone. You will never be what
you once were. A scar you got when you skinned your knee skateboarding in
first grade. A missing appendix from surgery. You will lose all of that. The
body that you’re in now, at whatever age you happen to be, will be destroyed
as biomedical waste. Your consciousness will remain intact, but not everyone
appreciates that. There are those who have expressed regret at being
uploaded.”
“I know the process, and the rules. It’s about time I become more like you
all, particularly Mateo. If I’m gonna be on this team, I wanna feel like a
part of it.”
“Ro-ro,” Angela began, placing a hand on her shoulder. “If we’ve ever made
you feel excluded, that was not our intention. You are on the team. That’s
undeniable.”
“It’s nothing that you’ve done. In the past, I’ve hesitated to digitize, but
it’s the practical choice, and it’s inevitable. I don’t wanna die any more
than you do. I’m more vulnerable than all of you, and I don’t like it.
People have to be more worried about me than they should. This isn’t out of
nowhere. I’ve been considering it. I think...maybe, reaching out to the
Ashvins was my way of testing the waters, to see how I would feel about my
body changing so drastically. I am ready now.”
“Well, it’s complicated,” Ramses started to try to explain. “You were born
with your time-skipping power. The rest of us were either made that
way from Tamerlane Pryce’s design, or we stole it from those who were. I
don’t know if I know how to replicate what you are. You have to remember
that we’re not technically on the same pattern. They just technically match
up. If you had a hiccup, and got off by one day, we may never sync
back up.”
“All the more reason to do this,” Romana contended, like it was obvious.
“Don’t worry about understanding my pattern. Just put me on
yours.”
“We’ll need to talk to your father first,” Ramses insisted.
“This isn’t his decision,” Romana retorted.
“Absolutely, but he’ll never forgive me if we just do this without even so
much as a heads-up. He would feel the same if you got a secret tattoo,
or...” He cleared his throat, and chose not to finish that thought.
“Okay. We’ll take our time with this,” Romana agreed, “but it’s happening,
one way or another. If not you, then I’ll find some other cloner to do it.
You’re not the only member of The Shortlist.”
Ramses nodded. “All right. Now let’s get back to THD. I’m mythed out.”
“Uth too.”
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