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Before calling anyone else about the creep, the twins walked back around the
portal building, which they had named The Gatehouse. Angela wanted to call
it The Iris, but Marie said that they weren’t allowed to. They stress-tested
the structure, and found themselves unable to get in, which suggested that
Bronach Oaksent would not be able to get out. They certainly didn’t design
it to be that easy. But they had only just now built it, so they were
paranoid that it wasn’t enough. Who knows what tricks this guy had up his
giant sleeve? They returned to the doors where he was waiting to be let out,
and urged him to go back where he came from. He didn’t leave, and he didn’t
speak. He didn’t lift his hood either, so they weren’t even able to confirm
that it was him. For all they knew, it could have been a troublemaking teen
just playing a prank.
Once it looked like their opinions weren’t being respected, they relented,
and called in everyone else. The Matics were not happy to be interrupted
from what they were doing, but they understood the seriousness. Ramses was
fortunately at a stopping point in his work, where the trillions of
simulations he was running needed time to iterate and resolve. “I’ll handle
this,” he said. He took the forge core back from Angela, and started working
on something new, claiming that it would be complete by the time they
returned to the timestream. He was right. When they came back a year later,
it was impossible to even get close.
It was now surrounded by the largest pyramid they had ever seen. Ramses said
that the perimeter was 20 kilometers in total length. He would have built it
bigger than that, but that was all the space he had to work with outside of
the capital dome. There was actually an entrance that went from the dome,
into the pyramid. From there, a maze leading to the portal would make it
virtually impossible to find your way through. Even if Bronach returned to
where he came from, and flew back through the portal with a stealth bomber,
he should not have been able to escape. He kind of went overboard with this
one, but admitted to feeling bad for not addressing the issue before. Leona
wanted to point out that it was Echo who made the portal in the first place,
with no apparent way to shut it off, but that would have been insensitive of
him.
“Is he still there?” Leona asked over Angela’s shoulder as Angela was
studying the Gatehouse’s feed.
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Well, his robes are anyway.” She cast the video to the big
screen, and stepped through days and days of footage. “See? He doesn’t move.
He’s literally frozen. I’m thinking he teleported out, and teleported a
mannequin in to take his place.”
“I though you had the suppression field up.”
“Oh, that doesn’t just prevent people from getting in or out?” Angela asked.
“It should stop it altogether.”
“Oh, then I don’t know,” Angela said. He’s, uhh...a robot? I saw that in a
show once. An evil android went too far back in time, so he made himself a
little money, bought some infrastructure, then sealed himself up, and just
went dormant for decades.”
“That’s absolutely not impossible.” Leona looked back at the screen for a
few seconds. It made her shiver. “Ack, that’s so creepy. Turn it off, turn
it off.”
Angela exited out, letting it revert to a wide shot of the pyramid from the
outside. “I know this was all automated, but it still took a lot of energy
for just one little person.”
“It’s not a waste. It’s good to have a pyramid anyway. It helps facilitate
interstellar and intergalactic travel.”
“I’ve heard that,” Angela said, nodding. “I don’t understand why, or why it
seems like we’ve never worried about it. Most people can’t jump that far
anyway. Is it just for people like Maqsud and Aristotle Al-Amin?”
“The way I understand it, it’s specifically not for them. They were
born with the ability to cross those distances on their own. There are a lot
of things going on that we don’t hear about, from both salmon and
choosing ones. They need to cover those distances too, for various
reasons. I don’t think that pyramids hold special power. I think it’s more
about the size.”
“Also the shape,” Ramses added, having returned at some point from his work
on the moon. “It could be a cone instead, but those are harder to engineer,
and I personally prefer the former, though I am Egyptian. It’s about
funneling temporal energy from a large area to a fine point. But you’re
right, the pyramid-builders in ancient days didn’t do anything special to
the interior. Energy just concentrates well from this basic shape.”
“Right,” Angela said. She twisted her shoulders back and forth a couple of
times between Leona and Ramses. “Am I the only one seeing an issue here?”
“What do you mean?” Ramses questioned.
“We built a megastructure to prevent someone from coming here from far away
without our permission. And this new structure is particularly well-suited
for helping people come from far away without our permission.”
“Don’t say that,” Leona urged, “because if you say that, something’s gonna
happen, and we’re not gonna like it.”
Fearfully, all three looked back up at the live feed. Leona was seemingly
correct. A beam of fiery blue light landed right on the tip of the pyramid,
releasing a pressurized vhwm, loud enough to be heard by the far
camera, but not from inside the dome.
“Everyone report to main control immediately,” Leona ordered into comms.
They all appeared nearly instantaneously, except for Romana.
“Romy!” Leona cried. “Romana, where are you!”
Mateo checked the locator. “She’s in the pool. She likes to float around in
there when she’s meditating.”
“I guess that’s okay, as long as she’s not near the portal pyramid,” Leona
decided. “We have an intruder. I don’t know who it is. Marie, you’re with
me. Ramses, secure virtual systems. Angela, be an extra set of hands if he
needs it. Mateo.... Mateo?”
“It looks like he’s at the pool now,” Olimpia notified her.
Mateo reappeared, wet from the waist down, carrying his daughter in his
arms. She was breathing, but not opening her eyes, or stirring. “I don’t
know what’s wrong with her.”
“I do,” Marie admitted. “She’s in VR. She’s been living a second life.”
“Ram...” Leona began, “deal with that too. Marie, we gotta go.”
They took each other’s hands, and teleported to the benbenet, where they
found Bronach Oaksent, as well as some unknown person, who was wearing too
much clothing and goggles to recognize. That second guy had some kind of
apparatus attached to the balcony floor, and was doing something with a
tablet.
“Whoa, hold on, ladies,” Bronach said, holding up his hands defensively.
“We’re not here to hurt you. There’s a peace treaty, remember?”
“I remember we can’t trust you. How did you get out?” Leona demanded to
know.
“I didn’t,” he answered. “I didn’t have to, because I was never in there.”
The other guy pushed his goggles to his forehead, and looked up. It too was
Bronach, but the old version of him, who Mateo rescued from the afterlife
simulation. The two of them had a weird relationship since they could both
lay claim to the Goldilocks Corridor. “It’s nearly done, then it will need
to calculate the return vector.”
“Make sure you make it two-way,” Young!Oaksent instructed. “I don’t want the
two of us getting trapped in there too.”
“No, we wouldn’t want that,” Leona said sarcastically.
“Before you get any bright ideas,” Young!Oaksent responded, “there’s a
reason we’re wearing these vests. They let us dig tunnels through
suppression fields. All he’s doing now is calculating the trajectory so we
get a straight shot into the Gatehouse. Without it, we would still be able
to get free.”
“I don’t like how much you know about this place,” Marie spat.
“This is the most famous planet in the galaxy,” Young!Oaksent explained. “Or
it will be anyway. I don’t have time to tell you everything—”
“I don’t care,” Leona contended. “I just need to know who the hell is down
there, and what you want with him.”
Young!Oaksent winced. “It’s Key!Bronach, obviously. Your portal only goes to
one place. He’s been searching for a way back here since the Sixth Key was
created. He finally found a safe route with the portal that you so
graciously created for him. We don’t want him here. We can’t have it. We’re
already splitting power in the Corridor. He would only muddle things up.”
“Why is he all weird, and not showing his face?” Marie questioned.
He shrugged. “No clue. We don’t know that much about what he’s been through.
We just see him as a threat. I promise, once we get him, we’ll shimmer back
home, and not bother you. There’s no reason for us to stay on Ramosus.”
“Not yet,” Old!Oaksent quipped.
“Shut up,” Young!Oaksent scolded.
Leona laughed. “Wow, could you two be more having totally rehearsed
that?”
“Huh?”
“Look, I don’t doubt that you have a problem with sharing the wealth, but I
don’t believe that you’re going to leave us alone. I’m sure you already know
that we’re formulating a plan to shave the top of this pyramid off so it can
no longer access Shimmer.”
“That’s your prerogative,” Young!Oaksent agreed. “Either way, I’m getting my
alt self, and taking him somewhere so far away, you’ll never see him again.”
“Let me guess, the distant future?”
“N—no,” he protested.
Old!Oaksent’s tablet beeped. “We’re good to go.”
Young!Oaksent put his goggles on. “All right, sweethearts, it was nice to
catch up, but we gotta do a thing.” He clicked his tongue and pointed at the
girls with both hands.
Before they could tunnel away, Olimpia and Angela appeared behind them with
jet injectors, which they promptly stuck into the two Oaksents’ necks. They
fell over unconscious immediately.
“Boom, asshole! Wait for her to shoot you!” Olimpia cried. She looked up
when she realized her words weren’t landing. “Dredd, 2012. Anybody? Anybody?
Whatever.”
A few hours later, they saw on the interior Gatehouse cameras as the two
newest Oaksents were waking up in the Gatehouse with the third version of
him. The creepy one was still just standing there frozen. “Welcome back,”
Leona said into the microphone.
Young!Oaksent looked up at the camera. “You took our vests.”
“Ramses is already looking them over,” she told him. “What a thoughtful
gift.”
“I underestimated how ruthless you were,” he said. “A chemical attack. It
doesn’t sound like you.”
“I do what I must,” she replied.
“Are you gonna trap us here forever?” Old!Oaksent asked.
“There’s a way out, right behind ya, up the hill.”
They both looked over their shoulders at the portal. “We’ll find a way back.
And anyway, our people know what to do in our absence.”
“We’ll be ready,” Leona claimed, not knowing if it was true.
Young!Oaksent shook his head indignantly. He snapped his fingers in front of
the supposed Sixth Key version of them. “Simon says, unfreeze.”
The hooded figure slowly turned towards him, but didn’t react too
dramatically.
Young!Oaksent took him by the upper arm, and began to walk up the hill.
Old!Oaksent followed them both through the portal.
“We need to find a way to close it completely,” Leona determined. “I thought
it would be a good idea to have that connection for our own use, but it’s
too dangerous.”
“Yeah, I’ll look into it,” Ramses volunteered. “But right now, I’m trying to
get Romana out of her virtual environment.”
Leona looked across the room, where Mateo was next to his daughter, stroking
her hair gently. Leona breathed deeply. “Yes, that’s priority. Then the
portal. Then the Outriders. Then...preparing for anything and everything
else. And we thought this world would be boring.”
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