The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 2, 2398

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When Leona and Coronel Zacarias disappeared into the Nexus, she was surprised and startled, but okay. That was not the craziest thing she had ever seen in her life. She just didn’t think they would ever get it working. She knows a lot more about these machines than she is letting on. She knows more about a lot of things, for instance that there are only two Nexa in the entire universe in this reality, and they’re both on Earth. The Inventors always install them on celestial bodies of significance. That means populated, visited, or other points of interest. Such places do not exist here, and they never will before the Third Rail collapses into oblivion. She can’t remember the address of the other Nexus, but it’s not just zero. So what could Leona have meant when she yelled out that that’s where they went? Maybe she was trying to say that they pressed zero buttons, but that’s kind of a funky way to word that, right?

She and Bridgette tried to contact the people back in Kansas City, but the Mozambican soldiers wouldn’t let them. They were never granted access to any communication devices in this secret base, and they are not allowed to return to The Olimpia. She understands where they’re coming from. Their leader disappeared without giving them instructions on how to handle his disappearance. Before he did so, he had ordered radio silence, even to their own people back on the mainland, and their only choice now is to continue adhering to these orders. After their failure to get help, the two of them made an attempt to press the zero button on the pad, but it did not work for them. The soldiers figured that they ought to stay out of the control room after that, so they have not gotten any chance to try again. They have been sleeping in the main chamber ever since, in case anything changes.

At the moment, Cheyenne is sitting in the corner, where the stairs and the wraparound ramp meet at the control room door. It’s her turn to keep watch, so she is desperately trying to stay awake, but she’s struggling. This room is fairly far away from the Olimpia, which makes her a little too far away from the Insulator of Life. She doesn’t have to stay right next to it at all times, but she does need to receive frequent recharges, and it’s been too long since her last one. She can’t ask the soldiers to let her get closer to it, because they wouldn’t understand that it’s not about the radio anymore. She would ask Bridgette to take her shift, but she needs to sleep too. Bridgette has already done so much for her when she didn’t have to.

She yawns, and tries to find the strength to slap her cheeks a few times, but she doesn’t get the chance. The machine spontaneously powers up. In her head, she jumps into action, ready to fight against evil, or receive their new friends, whichever one is happening. But even this development isn’t enough to clear the sandman’s sleeping sand from her eyes. Technicolor lights appear from above the Nexus cavity, then flash away.

Four figures are left standing there. One runs over to Bridgette, who too is trying to wake up, while two of them run to Cheyenne. “Are you okay, Shy?” Leona asks.

“I need to get back to the Insulator,” Cheyenne ekes out, hoping that her words are loud enough for human ears to hear.

“Jacinto, can you help?” Leona asks the stranger.

“Of course.”

Cheyenne feels herself being lifted into the air, but no arms are under her.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 1, 2398

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Leona and Zacarias exchange a look. This is not what they expected to happen, but they didn’t really have any expectations in the first place. They didn’t have time, because neither of them knew that the first possible address on the dialer would work. Come to think of it, though, it makes a little bit of sense. If this person is in charge of the Nexus network, then it’s only natural that reaching them means pressing zero. After all, in Leona’s universe, that’s how you contact the switchboard operator.

“I can see that you’re confused,” Senona says. “That’s okay. If you have never experienced space travel, it can be a bit of a trip.”

“Wait,” Leona stops, “space travel? Are we still in salmonverse?”

Senona tilts their head, the confused one now. “No, I was just trying to simplify things. You’re cognizant of other universes?”

“I’ve been to several,” Leona answers like it ain’t no thang.

They’re moderately impressed. Zacarias, on the other hand, is quite impressed, and still confused. “You can grant any wish?”

“Yes, two of them. But don’t worry, you don’t have to agree upon them. You can choose two for the both of you, or one each. It’s up to you.”

“Anything?” Zacarias presses.

“Anything within my power,” Senona clarifies.

“How do we know what is in your power?” Leona asks.

They laugh. “Why don’t you ask me what you want, and I’ll tell you whether I can do it. Don’t worry, it can take as long as it takes. I’m not a genie, I’m not going to try to trick you into wording it the wrong way. We’ll work together to figure it out.”

Leona looks to Zacarias to start. “We don’t know each other well, so we’ll ask for separate things. You can go first.”

“I would like to end all war and wanting in the world,” he decides confidently.

Senona smiles. “As would I. Unfortunately, that is not within my power. This is more of a single act thing. I could probably lift your civilization up, but it would require too much time, and though I am immortal, I have other interests.”

Zacarias looks away to think about it. He feels like the steward of his whole planet. “Hold on, if I tell others—”

“One wish per traveler per Nexus,” Senona interrupts. “If you want another one, you will have to come to me from elsewhere.”

Zacarias nods. He was asking for clarity, not to be greedy with a loophole. He clearly wants to help people, and has no plans to ask for a zillion dollars in space cash.

“We can come back to it if you want a few days to consider your options.” Senona steps over to the dialing terminal. “In the meantime, if you’re hungry or thirsty, we can summon literally anything. I love a certain sandwich from Adamsverse.

“I’m ready,” Leona announces. She’s been thinking about her own options the entire time. There are so many things she could ask for. She could transport her and her friends to the main sequence. She could undo any mistake from the future, or the past. She could remove the powers that be and Superintendent from the equation. She doesn’t know if Senona could wield any control over such things, but all of them potentially leave her husband with his midan curse. Had they come here before the timonite, or in a timeline where it simply never happened, it wouldn’t be a problem. Then again, the only reason she went to Antarctica was to help him, and the butterfly wings that carried her led to this moment with Coronel Zacarias. Had they shown up under different circumstances, would he have come to the conclusion that they could try to contact this operator? This is a boon for them. Now that they know this place exists, when they get to another Nexus, they could ask for more things. Or perhaps that’s unethical. Is that really what this place is for? Or does Senona want to teach the a lesson of some kind? What does their title, Intentioner even really mean?

Senona smirks. “I can see that you’re struggling. It’s okay if you changed your mind about what you were gonna ask. This really is not a trick. My associates have their own lives and responsibilities, leaving me with nothing to do, so I decided to stay on Origin, and help people. The address you dialed is too poetic to not go somewhere special. Any rando planet would be anticlimactic. Still, not many think to try.”

“Do all possible addresses go somewhere?”

Senona narrows their eyes. “That’s a hard question to answer. As you know now, if you didn’t know before, they are technically capable of interversal travel, but they’re not really designed that way. They’re meant for local brane travel. If you have already experienced interversal travel yourself, then you probably already know that each universe has its own spacetime. So is every single possible permutation used up? Yes, at some point in time, because the bulk is the true definition of eternity. We will one day run out of numbers, but I haven’t even seen that happen in my personal timeline, so I couldn’t tell you what that day looks like. The fact is that most universes will never even hear of the Nexus network.”

“I’ve been to a reality where they built their own Nexa. How does one get on the network if one didn’t create it oneself? How do they have an address of their own?”

Senona nods. “If you build your own to satisfactory specifications, a new address will automatically be assigned to it. Most of the time, when your Nexus doesn’t work, it’s because one or more of these specifications have been corrupted, be it self-made, or one of ours. We did it that way so that people can’t modify them into weapons, or something else that we did not intend. To be the fairest, it’s an all or nothing deal, so even if the corruption was accidental or unintentional, it needs to be fixed before it’ll work again.”

“I wish for a detailed manual of these specifications, written in my native language,” Coronel Zacarias declares, jumping back in. “Yeah, that makes sense, right? If we can always fix it ourselves, we can use it as it should be used.”

“Is that your final answer?” Senona asks.

Zacarias thinks on it a little more. “Yes.”

Senona presses a button on the terminal, and releases a small device. “The manual is now accessible on your primary Nexus computer, but you will need this to copy it.” They prepare to hand it off, but wait. “You must recognize that this does not entitle you to travel to any particular place. You are still limited to your local network.”

“Understood.” Zacarias smiles proudly.

“And you?” they ask Leona. “Are you ready? No pressure, I literally don’t age.”

She takes in a deep breath, and lets it out slowly. “My husband, Mateo Matic, is cursed to banish any object he touches with his hands to an unknown location. I wish for him to be able to control when he does that, and when he doesn’t, and also to control where he sends things.”

Senona looks like they’re debating the request in their head. “Let me make a call.”

Microstory 1571: Secret Compartment

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Prompt

I just found this secret compartment in my grandfather’s old oak desk, and inside it was...

Botner

...his driver’s license! He’s never been married, he’s in his 60s, and he’s been married to the same woman for 25 years! How crazy is that? I had a hard time believing that, but there you have it. Here’s the proof. I’ve had many girlfriends over the years, but never an old girlfriend. After my daughter was born last May, a friend of mine called to ask if I could watch her infant daughter for a few days. Of course, I said yes. Then I asked, “do you happen to have an old girlfriend around who can’t have the baby?” We had a blast. The baby and I spent a few nights and weekends together, but we got to see each other the rest of the time. What did we do, you ask? We shopped, we talked, we ate dinner, and we watched movies. We didn’t actually get to do any of those things the whole time, but what we did do was talk for hours and hours on end. It was nice to reconnect after all these years. When I got my first full-time job in 1998, I saved money and...

Conclusion

...was able to hire someone to help me get clean. I had never done drugs before, but the cleaner says the desk must have been lined with some kind of hallucinogenic, perhaps to stop anyone from accessing it. Now that I’m better, and the things I’m saying make any bit of goddamn sense, and don’t contradict each other, I can get back to the driver’s license. At first, I don’t think there’s anything interesting about it, because I saw his current one in his effects after he died. Little by little, I start to notice discrepancies. Firstly, it claims that his birthdate was last year, and that his license won’t be issued until decades from now. That cannot be right, of course. Is there a smudge on the card? I try to wipe it off, then find myself a magnifying glass. No, it says 2020, which is absolutely bizarre. His home address is weird as well. It says he lives—or will live, as it were—at my friend’s house, the one with the infant daughter I just babysat. Only then do I notice the name. The baby’s name is Indra, and my grandfather’s was Darin. Those are anagrams of each other, which is not something I would have realized until seeing it here on the license, paired with the wrong surname. My grandfather was a time traveler. That’s the only explanation. He’ll grow up in the wrong body, undergo gender reassignment surgery, and then at some point, go back to the past, and become my mother’s father. I don’t know why, and I definitely don’t know how, but I know I have to do whatever I can to protect that baby...or I’ll never even exist.

Microstory 1027: Howard

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Have you ever noticed that we write addresses backwards? If I want to send a letter to my friend at 123 Main Street, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, I make it harder for the mail service to deliver by writing it out like that. We should start with the general, and become more specific from there. The first person at the post office only cares about which country it’s going to. They see Spain, they throw it in the Spain bin. They see Canada, they throw it in the Canada bin. Once it gets to Canada, the next person only cares about which Province it goes to, so put that on the next line. Next person after that only cares about the city, and the next which post office, which means it’s only the last one who cares about which specific building, or unit, it’s meant for. I had this dream that we would completely revamp our delivery system, to make it make more sense. Now, I don’t really know how it works. Maybe I was always wrong, and no worker has any problem hunting for the line that matters most to them. Or maybe the entire address is relevant to everyone who sees it. I just thought there was a better way, but Viola helped me get over it. It’s an insane idea to change something that’s been so ingrained in our way of life for centuries, but she never treated me poorly for it. She gently explained to me that the problem with the way we write addresses has less to do with the order, and more to do with the spacing. The system would work just as well top to bottom, if only we separated the geographical regions more clearly. Anyway, this was really just one carefully explained example of these ideas I have in my head that normal people don’t think about. I obsess over small inconveniences and inefficiencies that most people gloss right over. There are better ways we could be doing things, but in the grand scheme of things, that doesn’t matter much. Viola taught me that, but didn’t let on she was doing it. She taught me that life is not so much pointless as it is too complicated. A lot of good has come from humanity’s advances over the last few centuries, but some have made things worse. Why do we have health insurance? It’s an unnecessary step towards healthcare. We came up with these ways of treating maladies and other medical conditions, and then we muddied it up with a bunch of erroneous programs that do nothing but cause mess. I was getting so bogged down with trying to make this life more efficient, that my life itself was inefficient. Viola helped me shed what she called the extra from my life. Minimalism is key. That’s not to say I’m going to go live in a tiny cabin in the middle of nowhere, and drink milk straight from the udder. But I’m also not going to play by all of society’s rules. My life is going to be simple, and fulfilling, and I owe that to Viola’s ageless wisdom.

Microstory 71: The Address

There has been a dip in applications to work at the postal service after a package bomb killed everyone in three houses. The supervisor tells me that I’m hired, but she looks more grateful for me than I for them. It’s the first day on my route, and I’m so excited that I forget my headphones. They tell me that it can get really boring, so pretty much everyone has music. But that’s okay with me. When I was a child, I would write short notes to my family and deliver them on a wooden horse. Call me crazy, but I’ve always wanted to work at the post office. As I’m about to head out, one of my new coworkers asks me if I’m doing the Purple Rose route. When I confirm, he chortles a bit and says ominously, “just go through the gate.” Things are going well, until I find a letter with an address that doesn’t make any sense. The houses on Purple Rose Lane start at 4200, then on to 4204 and 4208, but then the next house is 4400. The address I’m looking for is 4256. I cannot mess up on my very first day, so I pull out the map, but it’s completely unhelpful. I seem to be on the right street, on the right part of town, so where is it? Then I see it. A gate. Between two houses. Exactly where the discrepancy lies. I laugh, because my coworkers are clearly hazing the new guy. Which is awesome since it means they already accept me. When I walk up and open the gate, I find myself in a pocket dimension. There is an entire slew of houses that are invisible from the main street, waiting for their mail. That makes more sense. I just hope that I can easily get back out when I’m done. The last time I was in a pocket dimension, I had to solve a riddle before they let me leave.

Microstory 64: The Package

My parents are on vacation in Hawaii, so I’ve been going to their house every few days to grab the mail and water some plants. When I get there today, I see a package. The label has their address, but it lists two names that I do not recognize. I send a text message to my mother, and she tells me that one of the people listed lives to the West of them, while the other lives to the East. She must be busy, because I don’t get a response when I ask which house I should take it to. It seems strange to me that two people who live in separate houses would both receive a single package. Perhaps the sender realized this and decided to split the difference by sending it to the house in between them. I flip a proverbial coin and walk over to place the package at the West house. When I get back to my parents’ I see the package has returned. And it must be the same package. I don’t have an eidetic memory, or anything, but the creases on the cardboard and the marks on the corners are the same as I remember them. If it’s just a duplicate, it’s a very good one. I take it back over to the West house, but the same thing happens again. I decide that the package magically knows where it’s supposed to be, and will default to the beginning until it’s put in the right place, so I take it over to the East house. Yet again, I find that it has defaulted to my parents’ porch. Before I can think of a third option, I hear ticking. On instinct, I run towards the street, but it isn’t far enough. The package explodes and sends me colliding into my car. When I wake up hours later at the hospital, the police inform me that the explosion stretched across all three houses, killing all those inside.