Microstory 2462: Aztec Empire

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Flow text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3

My girlfriend dragged me to this place. She’s all in on this historical BS, and I couldn’t be less interested. I’m writing this anonymously because she won’t let us leave, and I cannot even with this guy. He keeps talking about their traditions and customs, but I just don’t care. I’m telling her that I’m looking up extra information about the Aztecs, so you’re my excuse. Just be cool, okay? Be cool. I will say that it is nice here. Like, they did a good job making it feel like you traveled through time to ancient Aztecia, or whatever you’re supposed to call it. I’m sorry, I’m not listening to him. There are a few weird things. The androids who are programmed to believe that they’re Aztecs mostly ignore you. They just go about their day like you’re invisible. Something the guide will say will sometimes trigger them to respond in some way that is relevant. For instance, the guide mentioned how a man would court a woman, and then we would see that play out off to the side. I didn’t notice they were doing that right away, but I guess that’s a nice touch. It’s like they’re a part of this elaborate show, but they don’t realize it, because everything is so well-timed. Anyway, a few of the androids seemed to be breaking character, or they were just straight up broken, because they did seem to notice us. One kid just kept staring at me. I looked over my shoulder to see if there was anyone or anything else, but nothing. I moved over to the side to see if his eyeballs would follow me, and they did. At one point, he pointed right at me, and mumbled something in whatever language they spoke. I had kind of fallen behind the tour at that point, so no one else saw. My girlfriend didn’t even completely believe me about it. It was creepy, but honestly, it made the trip that much more interesting. Well, no. It made it slightly more tolerable. That’s a better way to put it. Come here, don’t come here, I don’t care. Just don’t stray from the pack, lest you be cursed by some evil shaman child. Beware.

The Seventh Stage: Rocking the Boat (Part IV)

« < » > Entire Story

Generated by Google Gemini Pro text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3

Clavia is taking a break to meditate. It’s not just for her mental health in the abstract sense. In her case, it’s non-negotiable. She has to do it or parts of her will overwhelm the others; usually the not-so-great part. One of her constituent personalities was told a story once. It’s not so much a story as a brief metaphorical anecdote. Well, it can be boiled down to that anyway. The gist of it is that everyone supposedly has two wolves inside of them. One of them is good, and the other is evil. The one who wins is the one you feed. It’s not so simple with Clavia, though. She actually has six wolves inside of her. Debra, a.k.a. The First Explorer is definitely the alpha. She’s the strongest, and the one who had initial total control over this body. When Echo Cloudberry regressed her back to youth, and tried to erase her memories, the balance of power shifted. Clavia became more of an amalgamation of all six identities. Yet those six original people are still technically in here, and in order to maintain the balance, she has to sort of commune with them every once in a while. She has to assure them that the choices she’s making are righteous, and that she won’t let Debra take over again. It brings a whole new meaning to being greater than the sum of one’s parts. Because if “Clavia” can talk to the seven people that she’s composed of, who even is Clavia at all? Is she a seventh person, or what?

“I would like to call this Meeting of the Seven Stages to order,” Clavia says from her perch on the topmost stage. She could have created a mind palace that looked like anything, but this seemed fitting. The stage area is in the shape of a hexagon, with the six lower stages surrounding the central stage. Curtains divide the six audiences from each other, and can be pulled further up so that each audience can only witness what’s happening on their particular stage. As it is situated much higher, however, the seventh stage is always visible to all audiences. Of course, there is no audience; it’s only a metaphor, but it works for their needs. Right now, the curtains are all pulled back, so everyone can see each other, including the one underneath the seventh stage, allowing the others to see each other. Clavia herself stands in the middle. Around, in clockwise order, we have Ingrid Alvarado, whose body Clavia is occupying; Ingrid’s love interest, Onyx Wembley of The Garden Dimension; Ingrid’s rival before the Reconvergence, when they lived in the Fifth Division parallel reality, Killjlir Pike; Ayata Seegers of the Third Rail; the dangerous one, Debra Lovelace; and finally, Andrei Orlov of The Fourth Quadrant.

The play that they would be performing this year—if any of this were real—is about a prisoner transport ship on the high seas of a planet called Earth. Clavia is obviously the captain, with Debra as their one prisoner. Andrei and Ayata are her guards. Ingrid, Onyx, and Killjlir serve as helmsman, navigator and quartermaster, and boatswain respectively. Again, the acting troupe is just the premise of the scenario, but Clavia felt that it was necessary to come up with some sort of fictional background to stimulate their minds. Their old lives are over, and there is no going back. They don’t even have bodies anymore, so it’s best to have something new to look forward to every day. They didn’t have to pretend to be stage actors—it could have been anything—but the name of their pocket universe made the concept essentially inevitable. They rehearse a new play every year. This one is called Rocking the Boat. These meetings allow Clavia to regain the memories that Echo took away from her, but before that happened, she had the mind of a child, so you can’t expect anything too complex or cerebral, even now that she’s older. Though, this one is indeed a little bit more mature. It still has that classic Clavia tinge of humor as Debra is playing the notorious evil pirate, Karen the Unappeasable.

“Can I get out of these chains?” Debra requests.

“I didn’t put you in those today,” Clavia answers.

“We did a dress rehearsal without you,” Ayata explains. She steps onto Debra’s stage, and unlocks her manacles.

Clavia tears up. “Without me?”

“Wait, look over here,” Ingrid requests. She goes on when her double turns to face her, “you did it. You cried on command.”

“I’ve been practicing in the real world,” Clavia explains proudly.

“I hope that doesn’t mean you’re using it to manipulate people,” Onyx warns.

“No people, just stars,” Clavia responds. “They are unmoved by my tears.”

“So the project is going well?” Killjlir assumes.

“Quite,” Clavia confirms. “We’re ahead of schedule. We’re more powerful than even we realized.”

“I knew your parents were keeping you restrained,” Debra says with disgust. “You had to get away from them to reach your potential.”

“We don’t know that they were doing anything,” Onyx reasons. “She’s older now—it’s natural for her to come into her own. Maybe it’s like a stage of puberty.”

“I chose them as my surrogate parents as a reason,” Clavia speaks up for herself. “I love them both. Echo and I are doing this in honor of them, not in spite of them.”

“Whatever,” Debra says.

“Aww, is someone a sad panda because I took away her solo?” Clavia asks.

Don’t get her started. “The story is about how we’re all feeling about our place on the boat, and how we’re dealing with those emotions without telling anyone about it. I have to sing, or my story’s not getting told.”

“No, the story is about how prisoners are silenced, and how the general public doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. That’s the whole point. The way your character keeps being interrupted and dismissed should be shocking and annoying to the audience. Karen lives in the subtext, and the negative space.”

“That’s another thing, I don’t like her name,” Debra says. “It’s what people actually used to call me.”

“Well, I admit, that one came from a place of pettiness,” Clavia tells her. “I kind of like it now, though. I can’t imagine calling her anything else.”

“I won’t say another word about it if I can play the hero in the next one.” Debra pitches this every year, and she has been denied every time except for the third year. In it, she did portray the protagonist, and she absolutely sucked at it. She’s the main character in her own story. Everyone feels that way, but she really feels it, and that came out in her performance. The rest of the cast may as well have not even been there the way she was chewing up scenery. If an audience really had seen it, they would have closed down on opening night.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Clavia says. She’s switching between smiling and frowning, because she doesn’t know whether she should even bring this up. They contemplated doing it a long time ago, but the technology is too unreliable and messy. Consciousness transference is very good about moving a digital mind from one substrate to another. It works by scanning an entire brain all at once. It doesn’t understand the concept of an amalgamated mind. Why would it? That doesn’t exist in nature. If two people are occupying the same body, they’ve probably been allocated entire independent partitions in the brain. The Seven Stagers are too entangled with each other. When they’re on these platforms, it’s very easy to distinguish them, but the mind uploader can’t enter this memory palace. It has no way of recognizing them as multiple units, which should be uploaded separately. The other concern is Clavia herself. They still don’t know how much she relies on the six of them to even be her own person. Perhaps she only thinks that she’s her own entity. Perhaps if they were to leave, she would cease to exist.

“Did you decide what the next play is going to be about?” Ayata asks.

“It’s not about the play at all,” Clavia begins to clarify. “There may not be one. There may not need to be one.”

The others look at each other across their stages. “Did you figure out how to transfer us out of your avatar?” Killjlir guesses.

“I think I did.”

“Technology doesn’t advance that fast,” Onyx decides. “Not even the Parallelers can do it.”

“To be fair,” she didn’t talk to any of them,” Ayata says to him. “She couldn’t, or it would give us away. Maybe she found someone to trust who has a new idea.”

“I already have someone to trust,” Clavia explains before anyone can come up with their own theories on what’s going on. She takes a breath before continuing, though. “I think that Echo can do it.”

Everyone has their own way of reacting to this, but some common threads are groans, throwing up their hands, and shaking their heads. It’s not that they don’t like Echo. They love him. They just don’t think that he can do this. He’s conjured little critters out of nothing before, but that was back when he wasn’t consciously aware that he was doing anything, or had any power. He’s proven himself to be too in his head since he wiped his own mind, full of self doubt and fear. As far as they know, unlike Clavia, he never got his old memories back, and he may never have been strong enough to create human bodies.

“Now, why do you think he can’t do it? We’re starscaping out there. We’re building an entire universe out of dark matter and elementary particles. You think he can’t build a few puny human bodies for you? With his help, I could guide each of you out of my brain, and into your new ones. That’s what the conventional technology is missing. It was designed to dump everything in all at once, but Echo will have the context and intuition that it lacks.”

“You’re missing something too,” Onyx begins to use his experience and expertise from the Garden Dimension. “Stars are somewhat uniform balls of plasma, composed of hydrogen, helium, and metals. You can just toss in all the ingredients, and the laws of physics will take over, particularly gravity. I’m not saying what you and Echo are doing isn’t incredibly impressive, but the complexity will come out of the imagination you have for how your new universe is arranged, not by the inherent nature of the individual celestial bodies. Human bodies, on the other hand, are extremely precise entities, with complexities on a smaller scale. But just because it’s smaller, doesn’t mean it’s easier. Sure, it requires vastly fewer resources, but one tiny mistake could lead to catastrophe. You’re talking about creating something that took billions of years to evolve naturally, and unlike stars, it only happened once.”

“Wait,” Killjlir interrupts. “He doesn’t need to conjure the bodies. Those can be bioengineered using the normal techniques. We would just need a way to transfer us into them from Clavia’s head.”

“He wouldn’t be transferring them,” Clavia contends. “He doesn’t have the power to upload digitized minds. These would be true organic bodies, imbued with your respective consciousnesses through interdimensional pathways.”

“I don’t understand,” Ayata confesses.

“When you bioengineer a human body,” Onyx begins again, “there are only two ways to do it. Either it’s an empty substrate waiting for a mind to be uploaded into it, or it’s a regular person. An empty substrate is inherently digital in regards to consciousness transference. Even if it’s organic, it’s encoded with neural formatting compatibility. It can read a mind from another digitized brain, or a computer server. A normal body can’t do that. Back in the old days in the main sequence and the Parallel, they had to first figure out how to convert people’s brains into the right format since they didn’t evolve that ability.”

“So let’s do it like that,” Killjlir offers.

“We can’t,” Ingrid counters. “Like he was saying, that would be a regular person. It would have its own mind already, right?”

“Right,” Clavia agrees. “However smart or dumb that person is, or how competent they are to learn new things, the body would be ocupado, just like someone born from a mommy and a daddy. You would be stealing their body. Only Echo can make something both undigitized and empty.”

“Then why can’t we just use the digitized kind?” Ayata questions.

“Because you’re not digitized,” Clavia answers. “Our minds came together through completely different means, using a rare if not unique metaphysical process, catalyzed by the magnolia tree fruit that Ingrid ate just as you were all about to die. And digitizing us can’t be done as an aftermarket retrofit, because like we’ve been struggling with, the computer can’t differentiate between our seven discrete consciousnesses.”

Ayata nods, getting it, then looks over at her love. “Andrei, you’ve been quiet this whole time. Thoughts?”

Andrei takes a long time to respond, but by his body language, it’s clear that he’s going to, so no one else speaks instead. “I don’t wanna leave. It’s too risky. We would likely only get one shot at trying something like that, and if it fails, our minds could become totally decorporealized, or we might just die. I think we should revisit the idea of rotating control of the Clavia body.” He looks up at her. “I wanna stand on the seventh stage.”

“Same,” Debra concurs.

She obviously just wants all her power back, but does Andrei have the same aspirations?

« < » > Entire Story

Fluence: Saga (Part I)

< > Entire Story

Generated by Google Gemini Advanced text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 2

The date was November 21, 2259 by the Earthan calendar. The new crew of the X González starship just launched from the planet of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. Superpowered inventor, Holly ‘Weaver’ Blue; career government administrator, Goswin Montagne; and superintelligence, Eight Point Seven left friends both back on that world, as well as on another ship going in a different direction. Coming along with them was prisoner Briar de Vries, who was accused of, and admitted to, murder. The nature of his crime was too complicated to let him be processed through any standard judicial system in the stellar neighborhood. The crew didn’t know what they were going to do with him yet. The leadership of the planet where the incident occurred wanted him gone, so this was the best way to accomplish it. For now, he was being limited to his cabin.

They didn’t know where they were going either. They made a few jumps, but dropped down to drifting speed until they could decide on a vector, or at least a direction. There was no point in firing up the fractional engines until they had some clue what they were doing. They were still within the Tau Cetian heliosphere, watching the host star get smaller and smaller as they slipped farther away from it. Goswin and Weaver were doing this anyway. Eight Point Seven’s consciousness was uploaded into the ship’s systems itself, and Briar’s cabin did not have a viewport, nor was he going to be involved in the decision-making process.

“How far has the galaxy been colonized by now?” Goswin asked.

“To varying degrees,” Weaver began to answer, “Earth has begun to explore most systems within fifty light years. That’s the bubble of the stellar neighborhood, and Earth is going to be focused on that for a while. Of course, Gatewood has launched a set of modular ships that will spread across the entire galaxy, but it will be tens of thousands of years before that’s all over.”

“So that limits where we can practically go,” Goswin posed. “Unless, I suppose, if we want to go somewhere that no one has been before. That sounds boring, though. If there aren’t any people, it’s probably not all that interesting yet.”

“Mostly, you’re right.”

“I have a suggestion,” Eight Point Seven announced through the speakers.

“What is it?” Weaver asked.

“Thirteen and a half light years from here is Alpha Centauri B,” Eight Point Seven continued.

“Also known as Toliman,” Weaver added, nodding. “I’ve heard of it.”

“Did you hear that it was destroyed?” Eight Point Seven asked her.

Weaver took a moment to respond. “No. Destroyed how?”

“Unclear, but my guess would be a matter-antimatter annihilation.”

“How would it be possible to annihilate an entire star?” Goswin questioned.

“An antistar,” Eight Point Seven answered.

“If antistars exist,” Weaver started, “they’re nowhere near regular stars. The chances of one drifting close enough to hit Toliman before hitting something else are approaching zero.”

“Maybe then it’s worth checking out?” Eight Point Seven offered.

Weaver sighed. “You’re the captain.”

“I am? Oh, I am. Well, that was...” Goswin had leadership skills, but did that make him qualified to captain a starship? It was a tiny little crew, with only a pilot and an engineer, so he didn’t feel much pressure taking it on as a role, but now a real decision had come up, so he needed to start thinking about what his job truly meant. “That does sound interesting. How far away did you say?”

“It’s 13.5 light years,” Weaver answered him. “It will take us 13.5 years to get there, but for us, it’ll feel like a week.”

“Eight Point Seven suggested it, which suggests that she’s in favor of it. I’m in favor of it. That leaves you, Weaver.”

“This isn’t a democracy,” she argued.

“I don’t see why it can’t be, at least for now. We’re not in any big hurry, are we? Let me make the decisions in the heat of the moment, but if everything’s okay, I’ll want to hear your respective opinions.”

“Sounds fair to me,” Eight Point Seven agreed. She too had leadership experience, but has since retired, and she just wanted to fly the ship now.

“Very well. Let’s go to Toliman...or not, as it were.”

“Pilot,” Goswin said. “Lay in a course, and engage at maximum warp.”

Eight Point Seven laughed, and started the fractional engines.

A few days into the trip, everything was going fine. They had passed several light years already, and were on track to making their arbitrary deadline. The ship was perfect, running on its own, with Eight Point Seven only having to make a few minor course adjustments, and repairs from micrometeoroid strikes that the EM and TK fields were unable to handle. This was all about to change. The great thing about moving at extremely high fractional speeds is that you get to where you’re going much faster, but it does come with its downsides. First, those micrometeoroids can become a real problem if the power shielding and the hull fail. Secondly, you could encounter—or even pass—something without even realizing it. For the most part, space is empty. The chances of running into a celestial body are rather low, which is why it’s generally okay to move so quickly. There are some things that cannot be predicted, however, nor detected. Eight Point Seven processes information rapidly, and can see a lot beyond the doppler glow that blocks views from the ports, but even she isn’t omniscient.

Something came upon them; some kind of force, and they never saw what it was. Normally, the internal inertial dampeners would prevent them from feeling that the ship was even in motion. The humans would be splattered red against the walls if this safety feature didn’t exist, which was why the redundancies for the redundancies on all of these interstellar ships had multiple stages of redundancies on top of their redundant redundancies. It was the one thing that almost no one could survive. Even the loss of life support could be okay, as long as it was brief, and not too extreme. Even so, failures did happen, and it was what happened here. Fortunately, it was not as bad as it could have been. Everybody survived, but the humans were severely injured when the ship X González suddenly lurched to the side.

This was when weird things started to happen. As they were each trying to get back to their feet, they started to see other versions of themselves, standing, crouching, or lying in different places around the bridge. Even a few versions of Briar were there with them, when he should have been still locked up in his cabin. A nearby console would spontaneously transition from being whole to being damaged, and then back again. The lights changed colors, and the space around them warped and stretched to a point of infinity. Feelings of profound dread were met with feelings of elation, and even euphoria. At one point, the whole ship cracked in half, and then reassembled itself. Finally, after all this tumult, everything stopped, and they started to drift at normal subfractional speeds again.

“Eight Point Seven!” Goswin and Weaver cried at the same time. When the latter conceded to the former, he repeated himself, and went on, “Eight Point Seven, report!”

“I...I don’t know,” Eight Point Seven admitted. “The data in my memory indicates conflicting information, including that the incident took place over the course of a few moments, that it took 141 years, and also that we’ve been gone for an eternity. I cannot rectify the discrepancies.”

“All right, don’t worry about the past. Let’s just focus on our present circumstances. Can you find our location?”

“We are roughly 135 light years from our original position. I’m afraid that I don’t have an exact number, due to an uncertainty regarding our starting point, but based on astronomical data, I can pinpoint our location at the outer edge of the Achernar system, also known as Alpha Eridani.”

Goswin looked to Weaver for guidance, who shook her head. “Never heard of it. I’m an inventor, not an astronomer.”

“I don’t suppose it’s populated,” Goswin asked.

“It appears to be,” Eight Point Seven answered.

“You mean, it appears to not be,” Goswin figured.

“No,” Eight Point Seven insists. She turned the main viewscreen on to show them the star that they were approaching. It had been surrounded by a Dyson swarm. There were definitely intelligent entities here. How they managed to cross the vast distance in such a short amount of time was unclear. Then again, they didn’t quite know what year it was anyway.

“Do they see us?” Goswin pressed.

“Absolutely, they do,” Weaver replied.

“I’m receiving a message. Text only.” Eight Point Seven displayed the message on the screen. X González, please rendezvous with Intake at the below coordinates for debrief. Klaatu barada nikto. And then it provided the coordinates.

“They know who we are,” Goswin pointed out the obvious.

“Time travelers.” Weaver nodded. “The ship has no weapons, captain. I suggest we rendezvous, and I recommend we do so at subfractional speeds.”

“Do you know what those last three words mean?”

“No idea.”

“It’s hard to know their intentions,” Eight Point Seven began, “but it’s a pop culture reference from the 20th and 21st centuries that could mean stand down.”

“Uhh...” Goswin had been learning a lot about this ship, but at relativistic speeds, he had not had that much time with it. “Maximum subfractional to the coordinates, or whatever. Just...go as fast as possible while operating under the assumption that these people actually don’t know anything about time travel and teleportation.”

“Understood.” Eight Point Seven piloted the ship into the asteroid, and docked where the lights indicated. The two humans stepped out, and approached a small group of other humans who were waiting for them on the pier. A man took a half step forward, and offered his hand. “Captain Montagne, my name is Intake Coordinator Pontus Flagger. Let me be the first to welcome you to the Parallel.”

“It seems you have us at a disadvantage,” Goswin responded. “We don’t know who you are, or what this parallel is.”

“You’ve heard of alternate timelines?” Pontus assumed.

Goswin was determined to remain cagey. “Maybe.”

Pontus smiled. “This is like an alternate timeline, except that it happens at the same time. It’s a parallel reality. There are other parallels, but ours was the first, so it earned the most on-the-nose title.”

“Do you know how we ended up here?” Weaver asked him.

Pontus started casually doing finger tuts with one hand. For the last movement, he slid his index finger horizontally, allowing a holographic screen to appear between them. It started to show them images from a very, very old TV show. “Do you recognize this?” he asked.

“It looks like something out of The Verge Saga, perhaps Crusaders?” This was a multiseries franchise that took place in a far away galaxy, a long time ago.

“That’s right,” Pontus confirmed. “The premise is that there is a single point in space at the center of the fictional galaxy where all interstellar travel meets. It doesn’t matter where you wanna go, you can only move in two directions; either towards the Verge, or away from it. This place is like that, except it’s not so unilateral. In a few months, people, objects, and even individual particles, will find themselves here. In addition to preparing for these arrivals, we’ve been studying the phenomenon for decades, trying to figure out what causes it, and whether it can be controlled. You appear to be some kind of vanguard. If you explain what happened before you arrived, it might help us understand. Perhaps you’re just early to the party, for whatever reason, or there’s a chance that you caused it.”

“You know who we are,” Goswin reminded him, “and the name of our ship.”

“Your story is a matter of historical record to us,” Pontus clarified. “It would be like you knowing who was on the boat that crossed the Delaware on Christmas 1776.”

“Do you also know who else is on our ship?” Goswin questioned.

Pontus waited a moment to respond. “Besides the pilot, we are aware that you are transporting some kind of prisoner, but we do not know who.”

Goswin looked over at Weaver, not for help navigating this situation, but because she may not approve of the direction that he wanted to take. He decided to make his first executive decision as the Captain. “Yes, we’re transporting him, because there is nothing else we can do for him. He is the man who killed Mateo Matic. If you’ve heard of us, I’m sure you’ve heard of him. To my knowledge, time travelers do not have any formal legal institution, and we believe that he would be unfit to stand trial within any court system in our...reality. Do you suppose someone here would be equipped to take this challenge on?”

Pontus did not expect this development, but he was showing signs of patience, as well as a hint of curiosity. “We have nothing like that here, and due to the nature of our research, we couldn’t install a Nexus for instantaneous interstellar travel. We would be willing to transport him elsewhere, but you should first learn how our legal system works. You may not be so keen on it if it’s sufficiently different from what you know.”

“Yeah, I think that would be best. Something should be done about him. He can’t stay in his cabin forever,” Goswin decided.

“Very well. Come with me.”

< > Entire Story

Starstruck: Lie Low and Sing Small (Part VIII)

< > Entire Story

Generated by Google Gemini Advanced text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 2

Brooke nodded, understanding at least the facts of the story, but not necessarily the subtext. “So where is the Elizabeth Warren now?” she asked.

Mirage and Lilac were back where they belonged in the timeline. The latter was currently having a discussion with her alternate self, trying to figure out how they would raise Aristotle and Niobe. That was between the two of them, and the crew of the Iman Vellani had no say in it. Their trip back here was uneventful, albeit long and convoluted. They stole the ship from where Mirage knew it would be sitting unattended, docked at the top end of the space elevator leading two multiple points on Earth, including Panama. After she placed Lilac in stasis to keep her alive, she plotted a course to Alpha Centauri B. During the eleven-year journey, Mirage regrew her skin, retrofitted their ship with some upgrades, and then placed herself in stasis too, so she wouldn’t be bored the rest of the way. Once they were at their destination, they still had to wait another thirty some-odd years before it was time to literally jump ship.

Mirage’s past self sent a nanofactory to Toliman in the year 2225, just in case they ever needed to make a quick getaway from the planet of Bungula. They did end up needing to do that, though it wasn’t as urgent as she was originally worried it would be. This was where the Iman Vellani was originally built. The crew wouldn’t board it for another two decades. Until then, it sat dormant in its asteroid, protected from the ill effects of the Toliman Nulls that will essentially freeze any sentient entity that attempts to draw near. To protect themselves from that, Future!Mirage placed the Warren in an extremely high orbit from the host star. This kept them at a safe distance at all times until they were ready to head for the asteroid, and enter the Vellani.

“I left it in its orbit to automatically warn anyone else off of trying to get to the solar system. Just because the star was annihilated, doesn’t mean that the Toliman Nulls aren’t still a thing there.”

“Yeah, about that matter-antimatter annihilation,” Sharice began, “are we ever going to do anything about it? Aren’t people going to be surprised that a star in the neighborhood suddenly just disappeared one day?”

“That is the elephant that lives in the room, isn’t it?” Mirage posed.

“It’s a problem for tomorrow,” Brooke decided.

“You mean yesterday,” Belahkay mused.

“Anyway,” Brooke went on, “you two have just been hiding on this ship the whole time? You never came out? You never tried to change anything?”

“Too risky,” Mirage said. “The timeline is complicated enough as it is.”

“No, you’re right,” Brooke agreed. “But perhaps you...made preparations that could help us now that you’ve closed your own loop?”

“Yes,” Mirage said. “I finally understand who reprogrammed the Vellani. It was me. I just hadn’t gone back to the past to do it yet.” She swiped a specific pattern on the wall next to her, which released a hidden compartment. Inside was a secret quantum terminal. She pressed a few buttons, causing a crystal to pop out of the storage drive. She took it out, and held it up. This should contain proof that Verdemus was completely destroyed.”

Belahkay looked down through the viewport on the floor. “No, it’s still there.”

Mirage smiled. “It ought to be.” She shook the crystal a little. “If my plan worked, this should have footage of Toliman b being destroyed instead, and with a little tweaking of the metadata, we can use it to make the Exins believe that it was Verdemus. We’ll even burst in there, and scream at them for making us do that when there is no such thing as a hypercubic crystal lattice.

“You don’t think they’ll come check?” a skeptical Brooke asked.

“Radiation,” Sharice offered. “We’ll say that this whole region of space has been irradiated. You can’t exactly tear a planet apart with a giant space knife.”

“Don’t their ships have shielding, same as ours?”

“No, I once got a quick look at their hull coding. They’re gamma rated for zero-point-five-l. They don’t have an e-rating. I doubt they’ve even heard of superenergetic particles. All we have to do is claim that the process we used necessarily emits exotic particles, and they’ll stay away.”

“How could they have not heard of SEPs?” Mirage questioned. “They have time travel, don’t they? That’s why come they’ve been a civilization for thousands of years, even though they were founded only a few decades ago.”

“I think that technology was lost,” Sharice argued, “perhaps intentionally. The Exins we met could be just as oppressed as the rest of the empire.”

“We’re banking a lot on that idea we brought up a while back about how disorganized they are,” Brooke warned. “We may be wholly misinterpreting that. They could have e-rated shielding, but we’ve just not seen it. Shari, you didn’t get a look at the hull coding for even every vessel in the fleet.”

“I’m confident on this,” Sharice insisted. “They won’t go near it, especially if we sell the lie. We know that there is no hypercubic crystal lattice in the core of this planet. How could we know that if we didn’t do as they asked?”

Mirage and Brooke both shook their heads, unsure if this was all worth the risk. The bad guys wanted the Verdemusians dead, whether by the crew’s hands, or someone else’s. They could have a backup team lying in wait. “What if the crystal lattice does exist? What if Spirit is wrong about that?”

“I’m not.” Spirit was leaning against the doorway. “But if you feel more comfortable, why don’t you test it? See for yourself if it’s there.”

“We can’t destroy a whole world on the off-chance,” Sharice contended. “That would defeat the purpose.”

“It doesn’t have to be permanent,” Spirit reasoned. “Tear it apart, and then go back in time to stop yourself from doing it. All the humans will be up in space, just in case something goes wrong, but you might as well check for yourself, right?”

“Are you suggesting we used the homestone to reverse it?” Mirage asked her.

“No, you don’t just have a rewinder on this thing? It has everything else.”

“We’re less time travelers, and more associated with time travelers,” Mirage explained. “I mean, we’ve all broken the conventional laws of physics, of course, but...no, I didn’t engineer a time rewinder on the Iman Vellani.”

“Yes, you did.” Someone else was there, standing against the other doorway. It was Mirage. It was some other version of Mirage.

Present!Mirage sighed, more annoyed than shocked. “What the hell?”

Future!Mirage glided over to the opposite wall, and swiped a pattern on it to reveal a secret control terminal. “This is preprogrammed to reverse time by one year, but you can adjust it as necessary. You still need to build the planet-destroying machine, but I’m sure you already have an idea or two about that.”

“Yeah, I’ve never been worried about that,” Present!Mirage confirmed. “It’s just a simple transdimensional gravity beam. I just don’t know about this. I don’t like fudging with time, or gravity. What’s to stop us from going back, and avoiding all of this?”

“If you weren’t here,” Spirit began, “you would not have been able to save my friend, Tinaya’s life.”

“Or mine,” Lilac said, also coming into the room. “And who knows what would have happened to the children? You can’t undo anything.”

“Except for destroying the planet,” Present!Mirage countered.

“Except for that,” Future!Mirage agreed. Without another word, she gradually faded away until she was completely gone.

“I think you just erased her from the future,” Belahkay guessed.

“Whatever,” Mirage said. “It’s not up to her anyway. We vote. Everyone votes, including Tinaya. We’ll stick her mind into the virtual construct, and get an answer.”

“Everyone?” Lilac pressed.

“Yes,” Mirage replied, “including your alternate self.”

“I don’t have an alternate self,” Lilac revealed. “We are one now.”

“How did you manage that?” Brooke asked.

“I don’t know. It just happened.”

Mirage smirked. She knew how it was done.

“No, I’m talking about the prisoner, Ilias Tamm,” Lilac clarified.

“Prisoners have rights,” Brooke said adamantly. “This is his planet too, and he has the right to have a say in what’s done with it. We’ll explain the stakes to him, as well as to the children. I agree, everyone votes, and it must be unanimous.”

A year later, Verdemus was torn apart by transdimensional artificial gravity, which supposedly released exotic particles in the region that rendered a radius of fifty light years too dangerous for normal ships to survive. Exotic particles were actually just very, very, very energetic particles that were extremely difficult to shield against. They were capable of passing through an entire planet, kind of like neutrinos, but destructive to baryonic matter. They aided in time travel tech so the only way to shield against them was by manipulating spacetime, essentially forcing them to pass along the shielding on a new vector, rather than through it, and then letting them go once they were on the other side. They were rare, and the crew didn’t think that the Exins understood them enough to have what was called an e-rating, so it was safe to make this claim.

Only the crew plus Spirit Bridger was on board the Iman Vellani Proper. The rest were on the Vellani Ambassador, which meant that they did not go back in time. Once the timeline was reset, they had no recollection of the past year, because they had never experienced it. They knew that it had happened, but now they were able to move on with their lives from here, safe on Verdemus, protected by a fake bubble of exotic radiation. Belahkay and Spirit got to know each other for the course of that undone year, and both could remember the relationship that was kindled by it. They wanted to see where it was going, so he left the ship and stayed behind on Verdemus. Mirage gave them and the rest of the Verdemusians a shuttle that could be used for interplanetary travel, or very slow interstellar travel, if they ever needed to evacuate. It could not reach fractional speeds, and definitely didn’t have a reframe engine, so their options were limited. But at least they weren’t singular, which was what they were facing without the crew’s arrival and intervention.

Brooke and Sharice took the ship off into the black, and quite deliberately told no one where they were going. They had to do this, because the Vellani needed to stay off the radar for the foreseeable future. Its discovery would ruin the lie that Mirage was about to tell Ex-10 regarding the fate of Verdemus, the Verdemusians, the ship, and her crew. At the rendezvous point, she teleported over from the Vellani Ambassador, and just started to wail on him for killing her crew. It took nearly twenty faceless stormtroopers with chains to get her off of him. She was pulling her punches, though. She didn’t want to kill him, she just wanted to sell the rage that she was supposedly experiencing due to what happened. They stuck her in hock while they healed their leader, and let her stew a bit.

A few days later, he came to visit her, as calm as ever, and apparently not vengeful from her attack. “Start at the beginning. What happened?”

Mirage prepared herself to solidify the cover-up. “We did what you asked. We went to the planet in question. There were people on it, but not too many, so we pulled them up to our ship, and got back to work. They protested, but we were there to do a job, so we ignored them. I built a machine that uses transdimensional energy to manipulate gravity, which ripped the planet apart, and do you know what I found there?”

“Nothing?”

“Oh, so you know. There’s no such thing as hypercubic crystal lattice.”

“No. We just wanted you to destroy the world. It is of utmost importance that the people you found living there did not multiply. They are our sworn enemies, and they were in a position of great strategic advantage. They were too close to the new antistar, and we couldn’t have that. It’s fine that you saved the ones who were already there, though. We don’t have any strong feelings about them as individuals.”

“Oh, I didn’t save them, you asshole. Have you ever heard of exotic particles?”

“Yes. But I admittedly don’t know what they are.”

“I don’t either, but they’re deadly. I was in charge of supplying the power, so I was far enough away, and naturally shielded, when we turned on the machine, but my crew was not so lucky. They were bombarded with highly energetic particle radiation, and killed. They didn’t die right away. No, it took time, but all of their cells were split, their DNA unraveled, and their inorganic parts degraded extremely rapidly. They may have been able to transfer their consciousnesses to new substrates, but those would have been destroyed too. They insisted that I escape to get my revenge before too much of the radiation could get to me on the other side of the host star that we were using as a power source. You let me out of here, and that is exactly what I will do. Or you could come in here, I’m not picky.” She was doing a pretty good job in this role. It didn’t hurt that if any of this were true, she probably would actually react this way.

Ex-10 smiled, almost kindly, likely because he felt that he was in a position of safety and power. “Well, then I suppose I will have to never let you out, except to transfer you to our penal colony.”

Mirage suspected that this might happen, which was why she programmed the Vellani Ambassador to turn invisible and escape under certain conditions, such as her absence for a week. “I will get out eventually, even if it takes me a hundred years. I’m gonna live forever.”

“And I wouldn’t be surprised, but I’ll be dead by then. I decidedly won’t live forever, so I’m not worried.” He lifted his radio. “This is Ex-10. Plot a course to Ex-666. Warn them too, so they have time to make arrangements for a special new prisoner.”

< > Entire Story

Microstory 1861: The Tarmides of Tasmania

< > Table of Contents

In the late sixteenth century, a certain famous playwright wrote what would become perhaps his most obscure works. He was two years from death, and didn’t even get to see his final piece performed on stage. Once Tarmides of Egypt finally did make it to the theatre, opening night was riddled with such bad luck that it ruined the show’s future indefinitely. The lead forgot many of his lines, his co-star had to give birth halfway through, forcing them to switch to an understudy. The man who played the grandfather died of a heart attack near the end, and another was impaled when the stage collapsed due to all the weight of the people who ran up to tend to the old man. The injury resulted in death a day later. It was for these reasons that all further showings were cancelled. Years later, a different troupe tried to put on another production, but it went badly too. No one else died on the night, but set pieces fell apart, multiple actors flubbed their lines, and historians believe this to be the probable ground zero for what came to be known as the relatively shortlived Lurch Plague. The play was cursed, according to the superstitious majority of the time, and no one else so much as attempted to produce it again for at least a century. Since then, rumors of further unfortunate events have spread about more recent attempts, but most of these claims remain unsubstantiated. The fact of the matter is that the play has almost certainly been produced dozens of times without any issue, but that’s not a very good story, so most students are taught the melodramatically stretched truth that the curse always takes them in the end. The mystique of this whole thing is only fueled by the subject matter of the play itself.

Tarmides was born in Greece, but the narrative is about him immigrating to Egypt to escape his past, only to find himself at the center of one disaster after another. The playwright was probably trying to demonstrate the futility of life, having become more nihilistic in his latter years, but this depressing lesson is lost to the more sensational idea that he was a prophet, who wrote it in order to prompt destruction in the real world. When I was a young man, a tyrant rose to power, and waged a war against the rural parts of my country. Villages were demolished under the weight of his superior technology. I probably wasn’t truly the only survivor, but again, that’s not sensational enough, so the media billed it that way. I became famous, and an international effort formed in order to relocate me to a safer region of the world. Most of the time, developed world nations fight over who has to take in refugees, but in my case, they fought for the honor. Tasmania won, so that’s where I moved. Shortly thereafter, an undersea earthquake in the Southern Ocean sent a tidal wave to the island, killing thousands of people, and destroying a great deal of the infrastructure. Once again, in order to sell papers, journalists began drawing connections between my arrival, and the completely unrelated and unpredictable natural disaster. Like most regular people, I hadn’t even heard of the play myself at the time, but I soon came to be known as The Tarmides of Tasmania. This nickname followed me for the rest of my life. Whenever an item fell off of the shelf at the grocery store, or I was around when it began to rain, I was blamed for it. There was always someone around who enjoyed pointing it out, especially if something even moderately inconvenient happened to someone else. I lived the rest of my life with this mark, and as much as I don’t want to die, I won’t miss it.

Microstory 1844: Extra

< > Table of Contents

People often ask me what made me want to be an actor, but I can’t point to anything. There wasn’t a moment when I was enthralled with a character on screen. There wasn’t an emotion I had never felt before. I don’t remember the first three years of my life, but it was that version of me who made the decision for the both of us. As far as I know, I have always been an actor, and I never could have been anything else. I begged my parents to move to Los Angeles, but they refused. I honestly believe they would have agreed to it if we had lived in, I dunno, Tennessee, or something. They were so supportive of my dreams, but we were in New York, so I guess they looked at it as a lateral move. “If you want to act, you can do it here,” my mom would tell me. I didn’t want to do stagework, though. I wanted to be on the screen. I wanted to shoot something once, and have anybody in the world be able to see it again forever and ever. As the years went by, I didn’t let my living situation get in my way. I went to auditions for things that were shooting in the area, and while I didn’t get any roles, I think I gained a lot of great experience. That’s how I saw it. Every failure was just a step towards success. Then I got the audition that changed my life. I can’t remember what the role was exactly. I think I was a little too old for it, but the casting director was handing out little flyers calling for extras. There were going to be huge crowds in the movie, so they were trying to fill out the streets. It was an alien invasion, so we had to run from spaceships flying down to kill us. I thought, all right, it’s just more experience, right? It was so great, being on set around all those people. We were all there for the same thing; to support the main cast, and we all understood our jobs.

I had to join a talent agency to get more parts like that, and I found myself preferring it. I suddenly realized that I no longer wanted to be an actor. Yeah, that’s how I got started, but I ended up enjoying staying in the background. I wasn’t getting noticed, but I met a lot of really cool people, including celebrities, and it was always fun. It was pretty steady work too. Film crews always needed people like me to make it look like their story took place in the real world, instead of a snowglobe, like Waiting For Godot. Then my career changed again. I was in a movie about a demon who could possess recently deceased bodies. In one scene, he was having a menacing conversation with the hero on the battlefield, so there were plenty of fresh bodies to possess. Several of the extras were elevated a little bit to actually say a few lines before crumpling to the ground, and making way for the next possession. Luck of the draw, mine was the last body used before the protagonist realized how to kill the demon permanently. So instead of just falling down like the others, I had to pretend to die. I was given no direction for this, I had to figure it out myself. Everyone on set was extremely pleased with my performance. We nailed that thing in one take, and the audience received it well. People were talking about it online, trying to figure out who I was, because I wasn’t credited for it. This was my big break, and I didn’t even see it coming. Talent agencies started reaching out to me, hoping to book me auditions for speaking parts, and I ended up choosing one out of L.A. By then, I had enough money to get out there on my own, and get back to what I originally wanted. I die today with 56 titles on my résumé, the last of which will have to be released posthumously. My agent says she’ll get me a dedication credit.

Extremus: Year 18

« < » > Table of Contents

It’s getting to be that time when the civilian government is preparing to elect the next administration of their civil servants. If tradition holds, Ovan Teleres will announce his intentions to run a third time for Passenger First Chair in about a week. Halan and Mercer decided to blitz him during this period, to give him enough time to not make such an announcement, but not so much time that others can talk him back into running. Here’s the deal. If Ovan joins the crew of the Extremus, he won’t be able to run for reëlection, because it would be a conflict of interest. He’ll technically be free to run for a civilian position after his shift ends, but only after a waiting period of five years, and by then, the electorate will have moved on. Now, Halan can’t guarantee that the following administrative changes will be any better than they are now, but his mother always told him, fight the monsters you can see before worrying about the ones you can’t.

The strategy for making this happen is simple, but it’s going to take both Halan and Mercer, and they’re going to have to be the best actors this ship has ever seen. They actually reached out to the Theatre Department Director for help. Yes, Extremus has a theatre department, so people have a little bit of entertainment while they’re waiting to die in a tin can in the middle of interstellar space. He was quite helpful, and while he doesn’t know everything about what’s going on, he’s politically unaligned with Ovan and his cronies, so he agreed to keep it hush-hush.

Right now, the two of them are waiting in Ovan’s antechamber. His assistant is on her computer, acting like she’s working on something important. In all probability, Halan is willing to bet she’s just playing Quantum Colony. The whole population is addicted. He’s considering starting a support group for the few who don’t play, but have to overhear the conversations about it all the fuckin’ time. They booked this meeting a month ago without telling Ovan completely what it’s about. All he knows is that they want to discuss crew-passenger relations, and based on the way they framed it, he’s probably expecting them to walk in there with hats in hands. Thinking he has the home team advantage, and the higher ground, he’s chosen to make them wait for it. That’s fine, there isn’t anything else to do today. Each of them gets time off from their responsibilities, and their vacation days don’t usually coincide, but it’s allowed to happen once per year in case the captain and lieutenant want to do something together. This bylaw wasn’t written thinking that anyone would use it for subterfuge, but it didn’t exclude it either.

Finally, he opens his door electronically, and the assistant knows to wave them on in. “Captain, Lieutenant! What can I do for you on this, the day of my daughter’s wedding?”

“Pardon me?” Halan questions.

“It’s a reference, sir,” Mercer explains. He’s playing his part well already, ashamed of needing to ask for help, and scared that his superior officer will forever look down on him for it.

“I see.”

“Please, have a seat,” Ovan says. There’s a difference between politeness and niceness, and they’re both wildly different from kindness. He’s very good at the first one, but he has no ability to conceptualize the last one. The second one is reserved for his so-called friends, unless they’re very good friends, in which case he’s meaner to them than anybody, because he believes their behavior reflects on him too much to let them be themselves. “Seriously, how can I help you?”

Halan hopes he can act as well as Mercer, but the theatre department director didn’t give him as much praise. He nods, and directs his attention to Mercer. “This is your show.”

Mercer looks back with puppy dog eyes, then clears his throat. “I need help.”

“With what?” Ovan asks.

“My job.”

“Just, in general, your whole job?”

“Yes.”

“It’s too hard for ya?”

“Yes.”

Ovan nods, desperately trying to hide his great pleasure at hearing this. “I’m sorry to hear that, but as you know, I’m obligated to the passengers. If you’re asking me to take on some of your duties, I’m afraid I can’t.”

Now Halan needs to take over. “Look, everyone knows you’ve been doing a great job here. Not to speak ill of the retired, but I would say you’re at least twice the Chair Satyria was.”

He can’t hide his glee this time. “I’m happy to hear you say that. I’ve never thought of you as...a fan.”

“It’s not something that has been easy for me to admit. I must..confess that, while I don’t hate the civilians, I certainly have always considered you...other. We’re not better than you, but I’ve probably run this ship with a little more...divide than there should be.” Using slightly improper grammar, and stammering, indicates that you’re not confident in your own words. You believe them, they’re true, but you don’t feel comfortable expressing them, and you’re worried about how you’ll be received, and perceived. Ovan has to feel the power here, so Halan has to fake submission.

“That’s very big of you to say. I’m sad to tell you that I agree. We are far more separate than is healthy, or prosperous.” He’s lying. He loves it.

Halan looks down towards the desk, and compresses the air above it with his hands, pretending to be searching for the words he practiced well, and has perfectly memorized. “My Lieutenant needs help. The crew needs a firm hand, besides myself. The civilians need a leader who understands both them, and that crew. I can’t make you my new lieutenant—I can’t decommission him—that would look awful. Fortunately, there’s a loophole. The bylaws included a special rank known as Second Lieutenant.” Special rank, that was Mercer’s idea. “If we institute it, it will greatly unburden Eckhart’s shoulders, and help us better communicate with the passengers. We already know you can do that. You’ve been proving it for the last six years. If you agree to this, the ship will run even smoother than it was before now, because you still hold power over those passengers, but you also have rank within the crew.” Within the crew, not over the crew.

He seems open to this idea, and his body language suggests that he wants to hear more.

Halan goes on, “you see, I’ve always wanted to command both.” This implies—but doesn’t verify—his own narcissism, which doesn’t exist, but Ovan thinks it does. “I’ve not been able to, because that’s not how we’re structured. It’s obviously a way to protect us from falling under a single authority, which could be quite dangerous with the wrong leadership. Like I said, you’re the loophole, because as a member of the crew, you don’t technically have control over what the passengers do, but as former Chair, people can’t help but listen to you.” He’s deliberately using the present tense in order to subliminally make Ovan feel like he has already accepted the position, and that the choice only exists in the future as a formality. This should still help things, even if he ends up not taking the job, because he’s just been told that he doesn’t have control, but it was framed in a nice, noncombative way, so Ovan isn’t compelled to argue, allowing this idea to germinate in his mind regardless.

Here’s the moment. Ovan’s first reaction can make or break this plan. If he so much as suspects that this is all just a way to get him out of power, it’s over. At that point, he could take the job, or leave it, but the ship would still end up pear-shaped. If he ever realizes what they’re doing, they’ll fail. He has to go on thinking that he’s won. They especially have to make it past the one-year mark, because if not, the government he leaves behind would likely allow him to forgo the five-year waiting period, and return to civil service. The bylaws are sketchy when it comes to who counts as a crewmember, and what happens if they quit before too long. He’s making them wait again.

Halan reaches down to the side of his knee on the sly, and gives Mercer a predetermined signal with his fingers, like a catcher at a baseball game.

Mercer knows what it means, and he begins to recite the contingent speech, “I can’t do this on my own anymore, and I don’t trust anybody else. I won’t lie to you, it’s a tough job, but you’re so much better with them. I thought I could learn, because I don’t have the natural talent. I can survive if you don’t want to do this, but...I would rather not.” This applauds Ovan for his skill as a leader without being obvious and brown-nosey. If it works, it will allow him to interpret Mercer’s perception of him just enough to push him off that fence.

Ovan sighs. “I won’t lie either, I’m leaning towards not doing this. I love my job, and I’m doing great things here.” What a douchebag. “I have seven more years in me no matter what. I imagine my shift would end when yours does.”

“That’s the thing,” Halan says, happy to have reached this part of the conversation. It’s a good sign. “It’s a standard 24-year shift, but it’s not attached to my rank, like his is. We didn’t start together, because Rita was with me first, but he’ll still have to retire when I do. You can just keep going under the new captain. To me, that’s even better than only having two more terms left.” This is actually the worst part about the whole thing, but if it doesn’t convince him to accept, probably nothing will.

“Wow, that’s pretty enticing; the chance to serve this ship longer than I ever thought possible.” That’s a step in the right direction, but it’s also sickening.

“This is good for everyone.” There’s that present tense again.

“Yes, Ovan agrees. He stares down into space, surely imagining what he’ll do with all his imaginary new power. “Okay,” he decides. Okay, what? “Okay,” he says louder.

“Okay?”

“Okay, I’ll do it.” Holy shit, it worked.

“Thank you,” Halan says. “Lieutenant?”

“Thank you,” Mercer echoes.

“Thank you, what?” Halan urges.

He smiles with feigned admiration. “Thank you...Second Lieutenant Teleres.”

This is the most excited Ovan has ever been in his life. “So, that’s it?” he asks. “No ceremony?”

“Oh, there’s a ceremony,” Halan says. There’s not supposed to be, but there can be. Hopefully it doesn’t set a precedent. Holding a celebration for every commission or promotion would become tedious.

“I would say more like a parade,” Mercer half jokes, half wants to blow his own brains out.

Ovan nods and grins, showing only the top row of his teeth. “Cool.”

“We don’t need to wait for the ceremony, though,” Halan promises. “You’re already Second Lieutenant, and can already start working. Your Second Chair takes over for you immediately. This gives us time to plan something special.” Gross.

“Cool,” he repeats.

« < » > Table of Contents