The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 5, 2518

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Only Mateo was able to try the Daedalus wings during the reception, and that was only because he flew off before Ramses could stop him. They should have been inspected first to make sure that they were safe. Humans with wings were not impossible these days. There was, in fact, a relatively small community of wingèd people on the Core Worlds. The main reason they were impossible prior to genetic engineering and bioengineering was the weight. Wings with enough lift to carry a person would have to be so large that no one was physically capable of flapping them. If they were mechanical, well, that just added to the weight, especially with a powersource, and this all made it totally impractical. Only when humans could build new substrates for themselves did it become a reasonable prospect. Ramses designed the team’s bodies to be lighter than a natural human being’s, but they still weren’t specifically tailored for flight. Daedalus was an android of some kind, and since the mythology stated that the character had fabricated wings, he was almost certainly designed to be perfectly suited for flight. Mateo was not, and that was dangerous.

Fortunately, once Ramses did manage to get his hands on the things, he discovered that they weren’t just well-ordered feathers. Carefully hidden along the underside were tiny little fusion thrusters, which provided the lift, and the forward movement. They were controlled by the adjustment of the wearer’s head. It was essentially a cleverly disguised jetpack. It was unclear whether Daedalus’ own wings operated on the same principles, or if he was just somehow smart enough to build them after being instantiated in this physical simulation. He should have been placed under this dome with the knowledge typical of the time period he supposedly lived in, but who knew what was going on in Hrockas’ head when he conceived of Mythodome? It was one of the few domes that he conceptualized with hardly any help from his AI. He was an expert in Earthan mythology prior to his travels to the Charter Cloud, so this one was near and dear to his heart. He refused to explain it, expecting the art and adventure to speak for themselves.

Now that Ramses was satisfied with the results of his assessment, everyone was trying them. Well, he wasn’t so much as satisfied as he wasn’t allowed to block them anymore. He was hesitant to trust a gift from such a mysterious legendary individual, but he was overruled. Daedalus probably really did have a hidden agenda, but that doubtfully involved killing anybody on Team Matic, or anyone else. He did put his foot down at Romana, though. Her temporary reyoungification had not yet worn off, and she was still walking around in her original substrate. He might consider it later, but he wouldn’t allow anyone else on Castlebourne to use them unless they agreed to let him perform a thorough physical exam, which they didn’t. Leona was the last to give them a go before Ramses took them back, and secured them in his lab. That was okay, because it was about time to get to work.

“Wait, you’re not having a honeymoon?” Angela questioned.

“The average honeymoon these days,” Mateo began to reply, “is one month. That’s thirty years for us. We don’t have time for that.”

“Okay, well, you don’t have to do a full month,” Marie reasoned. “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t choose a dome or two, and relax for a bit.”

Mateo and Leona exchanged a knowing look.

“What? What was that?” Marie asked.

“You should have noticed by now,” Leona said, to her, and the group, “that there is no such thing as a vacation for us. As soon as we try to relax,” she explained with airquotes, “something will come up, and we won’t be as prepared for it as we should be.”

“What are you talking about?” Angela pressed. “We relaxed for, like, three years on Flindekeldan before The Warrior finally found us.”

“The exception that proves the rule,” Mateo contended.

“You’re not using that right,” Leona told him reluctantly.

Mateo was about to ask for clarification when they heard whooping and hollering in the distance. An indistinct dot appeared just under the lowest clouds a few kilometers away. They focused their telescopic eyes, and were able to zoom in enough to make out that it was Young!Romana. She was wearing the wings, having presumably stolen them from Ramses’ lab. She flew towards them, and almost kissed the ground, but arced upwards at the last second, and headed back for the sky. “Hell yeah!” she exclaimed in her little high-pitched voice.

Ramses was noticeably upset. “I give you people too much access to my operations. I will be changing that.”

“She’s just a kid,” Marie reasoned.

“No, she’s not,” Ramses volleyed.

“Shouldn’t she have re-aged by now?” Olimpia asked. “I thought she said it wouldn’t last more than a day.”

“Yeah, that’s why she went down for a nap,” Leona said. “She said she thought it would trigger her transformation back. I’m not sure if she lied about that, or the nap, but she obviously teleported to Treasure Hunting Dome at some point to sneak into Ramses’ lab.”

Ramses was fiddling with his armband. “I’m working on new security protocols now.”

“She just wanted to be part of the group,” Mateo defended his daughter. “She’s been through a lot over the last few years. She needs this.”

“Daedalus didn’t design those things for a child’s body,” Ramses argued.

“They’re adjustable,” Marie reminded them. “That’s why I was able to wear them after Olimpia managed to fit the straps around her ample bosom.”

“Please,” Olimpia said, feigning disgust while holding up the back of her hand. “I’m a married woman.” She lowered all of her fingers but her ring finger, simultaneously showcasing her wedding ring while making it look like she was flipping Marie off.

“For now...” Marie joked.

“I can teleport up and grab her if you want,” Angela volunteered.

“No, that’s too dangerous,” Ramses replied. “She has to come down eventually.”

“Will the fusion thrusters run out of fuel at some point?” Mateo asked.

Ramses shook his head. “The feathers are lined with microscopic ramscoop nodes, which can draw in hydrogen for processing, so...no. She’ll get tired, though. She’s just a baby. Speaking of which, we need to fix that. Who are these twins who did this to her?”

“The Ashvins,” Angela reminded him. “Twin gods, part of the Hindu pantheon. We found them in the Dawnlands. This dome has many sectors, and they can’t all be accessed just by walking through a door. If you don’t have access to the right portal, you can’t go. Of course as teleporters, we can skip over those rules.”

Ramses tapped on his comms. “Romy, you’ve had your fun. I’m worried about your condition. I’ll let you use the wings later, but first, you need to go from Allen to Garner.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Romana responded.

“Just get back down here, please. I’m not mad, but you could be in medical distress, and not know it until it’s too late.”

Romana suddenly appeared a few meters above them. She slowly glided down towards the ground, and landed with grace and poise. The wings collapsed into their little box, which slipped off of her chest.

“You’ll navigate us to the Dawnlands,” Leona said as she was picking up the box.

“No,” Ramses decided. “The Walton twins are right. You need some kind of honeymoon. Get on the catalog, and choose a dome for your vacation. I don’t want to see you at least until 2521. That’s not that long of a honeymoon. Doesn’t it sound fair?”

“Yes, sir,” Mateo said, standing up straight, and saluting. He bent over real low and gave his daughter a kiss on the forehead. “I love you, sweetie. Be good for Uncle Ram-Ram.”

“Okay, I think we do need to go see the Ashvins again.” Them playfully treating her like an actual little girl got old a long time ago.

After a few more goodbyes, the newlyweds ran off for their honeymoon adventures. They weren’t going to confine themselves to only one dome, but a series of them, starting with Mud World: World of Mud. Ramses and Angela then split off to take Romana back to the Dawnlands sector. Marie said that she would be staying behind to do her own thing elsewhere without telling anyone what or where.

The name was absolutely appropriate. It was dawn here. It was bright enough for them to walk around without running into anything, but not clear enough to see the details of the landscape. It was a beautiful and calming place. Even the air seemed ultraclean, like something you would breathe out of an oxygen tank. As they were standing there,  two horses trotted up to them, pulling a golden chariot. Two strong young men stepped out, and approached. One had lighter skin, and the other darker. They moved with grace, symmetry, and synchronization. They were perfectly attuned to each other, perhaps by some kind of centralized hivemind shared between them. When they spoke, they did so in a seamless concerted effort, finishing each other’s sentences in some cases, and saying words simultaneously in others. “Hello, and welcome to the Dawnlands, foothills to Svarga, the celestial plane of light. How may we help you?”

“Could you undo what you did to her?” Ramses requested, gesturing to Romana. “She was told that the de-aging process would be temporary.”

The Ashvins smiled, again in sync. “Youth is temporary for all before they enter the Svarga or Naraka Loka. Aging is a part of life. It may be undone, but as the lotus reliably blooms each year, so too will man grow and change.”

Ramses gently closes his eyes, exasperated. “Are you telling me that she will only return to her normal age because she’s aging normally from here, and will eventually reach it anyway?”

“She will one day be as old as she was, and following, she will be even older. So too will you.”

“That’s not how my species works.”

The Ashvins were confused by this as it was leaning on the fourth wall, and they did not have a response.

“Look, we need this to happen faster than the full twenty years,” Ramses went on. “She clearly misunderstood the rules when she requested this from you.” She looked down at Romana. “Right?”

“Right. I didn’t want this to be permanent, or...so slow,” Romana confirmed.

“Apologies for the confusion,” the Ashvins claimed, “we meant no harm to your body or mind. We may reverse the ravages of changing seasons, but not hasten them. We cannot return you to the state you were in before your bath in the Sindhu River.”

Ramses shook his head again, which he felt like he was doing a lot of today. “Do you know of anyone—in any realm—who might be able to do what we ask?” No one on the team had ever heard of a retroverter who wasn’t also a proverter, but to be fair, they weren’t all too familiar with the concept. They really should have been questioning how such temporal powers ended up on this planet in the first place. They hadn’t recruited anyone with such abilities. Perhaps someone they did bring here, however, had connected Hrockas with other time travelers. These others could have donated their gifts to building Mythodome, or maybe even other domes, in such ways that broke the publicly known laws of physics.

“That is not something that we would know,” the Ashvins answered, a little bit sadly, but still believing that this wasn’t their fault. They did not know that they should clarify how Romana’s situation would work.

“All right. Let’s go do some research,” Ramses said, turning around. “There are a lot of mythological beings here. Maybe one of the other gods has real powers too.”

“Wait,” Romana said, stopping him with a hand on his arm. “I know someone who can do it.”

“Who?”

“You.”

Ramses’ eyes darted over to Angela’s from a brief feeling of panic, because he didn’t know what Romana was talking about. “I can’t do what you ask. I’m not a proverter either.”

“I don’t need a proverter,” Romana clarified. “I need a cloner.”

Ramses sighed. “That is a big decision, and it’s also irreversible. Once your consciousness is digitized, it can’t be undone. You will never be what you once were. A scar you got when you skinned your knee skateboarding in first grade. A missing appendix from surgery. You will lose all of that. The body that you’re in now, at whatever age you happen to be, will be destroyed as biomedical waste. Your consciousness will remain intact, but not everyone appreciates that. There are those who have expressed regret at being uploaded.”

“I know the process, and the rules. It’s about time I become more like you all, particularly Mateo. If I’m gonna be on this team, I wanna feel like a part of it.”

“Ro-ro,” Angela began, placing a hand on her shoulder. “If we’ve ever made you feel excluded, that was not our intention. You are on the team. That’s undeniable.”

“It’s nothing that you’ve done. In the past, I’ve hesitated to digitize, but it’s the practical choice, and it’s inevitable. I don’t wanna die any more than you do. I’m more vulnerable than all of you, and I don’t like it. People have to be more worried about me than they should. This isn’t out of nowhere. I’ve been considering it. I think...maybe, reaching out to the Ashvins was my way of testing the waters, to see how I would feel about my body changing so drastically. I am ready now.”

“Well, it’s complicated,” Ramses started to try to explain. “You were born with your time-skipping power. The rest of us were either made that way from Tamerlane Pryce’s design, or we stole it from those who were. I don’t know if I know how to replicate what you are. You have to remember that we’re not technically on the same pattern. They just technically match up. If you had a hiccup, and got off by one day, we may never sync back up.”

“All the more reason to do this,” Romana contended, like it was obvious. “Don’t worry about understanding my pattern. Just put me on yours.”

“We’ll need to talk to your father first,” Ramses insisted.

“This isn’t his decision,” Romana retorted.

“Absolutely, but he’ll never forgive me if we just do this without even so much as a heads-up. He would feel the same if you got a secret tattoo, or...” He cleared his throat, and chose not to finish that thought.

“Okay. We’ll take our time with this,” Romana agreed, “but it’s happening, one way or another. If not you, then I’ll find some other cloner to do it. You’re not the only member of The Shortlist.”

Ramses nodded. “All right. Now let’s get back to THD. I’m mythed out.”

“Uth too.”

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The Sixth Key: Rock Up (Part VI)

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Cedar Duvall, leader of the Sixth Key, stands on the bridge, watching as the seams to the time bubble that has been slowing their progress down start to rip apart, and finally release them. They expected to break free from its tyranny eventually, but the calculations the scientists made placed that estimation much later than now. “Steady, boys. I fear we have been freed intentionally by whatever intelligence is down there. We still don’t know if they’re friendly.”

“There’s no planet here anymore. It’s just a small patch of land. Should I prep an away team?” the Captain of the Starship of State offers. Any vessel that The Sixth Key is on is the Starship of State, but this is the ship that is typically used for this purpose, so the two of them have a nice rapport. She knows that Cedar isn’t going to say yes. He is the away team. He’s reckless like that.

“No, Cap’n. Teleport me down alone. Keep the whole crew on PrepCon Three.”

“Aye, sir. Teleporting you now.”

Cedar appears on the grassy hill. A bunch of people are sitting around. Two others appear to be dead, but it doesn’t seem to be bothering anyone. “My name is Cedar Duvall, Sixth Key of the Sixth Key! Report!”

“I’m confused,” a woman says.

“About what? The re part, or the port part?”

“Ha-ha-ha. The Sixth Key of the Sixth Key, I don’t know what that means.”

Cedar is taken aback. He hasn’t spoken to anyone who doesn’t know who he is in decades. “I am the Sixth Key, because I created the Sixth Key universe. Me and five other keys.”

“Oh,” the woman says. She’s holding back further laughter. “Right. My name is Hogarth Pudeyonavic.”

“Ah, I’ve heard of you. I know all the salmon and choosing ones. And the other...extra people.”

“Of course, sir. You’ve taken a leadership role since all these people left?”

These people? Cedar starts studying people’s faces, instead of just treating them as background actors. She’s right. Some of these are the former leaders of the original five realities. Not all of them, though. They disappeared, and he did indeed have to step up. They needed a singular voice, and they needed someone whose loyalties did not lie in one past civilization or another. “I have. Is that going to be a problem?”

“What year is it now?” Ingrid Alvarado of the Fifth Division asks.

“It’s 2500. At least, it should be. We were stuck in a time bubble on the way here, so who knows?”

“That was probably his doing,” Hogarth says, gesturing towards the dead man.

“Is that why you killed him?”

“He’s not dead, he’s asleep.”

Cedar cocks his head to the side, and eyes the supposedly sleeping man. “There’s something happening to his face.”

Hogarth looks down at him too. She takes a pair of goggles out of her pocket, and presses them against her eyes without bothering to strap them onto her head. “He’s de-aging. Interesting.”

“How do we stop it?” Cedar asks. “Cosette DuFour,” he says to another woman. “You can do that, can’t you?”

“Not to other people,” Cosette answers. “I can only adjust my own age.”

“Pity.”

“This is what he wanted,” Hogarth tries to explain. “He’s...resetting his brain back to factory settings. At least that’s how I’m interpreting his words. He didn’t allot any time to talk about it. He just collapsed, and fell asleep.”

“I think she’s de-aging too,” a guy calls up after examining the dead-not-dead woman. Who is he again? He ran the main sequence. Some kind of General.

“So, they’re gonna be all right?” Cedar asks.

Hogarth shrugs. “Dunno. We’re waiting to see.” She jerks her chin towards the sleeping woman. “She wasn’t a good person.” She jerks her chin towards the sleeping man. “He’s trying to fix her. Too early to tell whether it worked or not.”

Cedar takes his water disc out of his suit. He flicks it in the air, but it doesn’t open, so he flicks it several more times until it does. He presses the button, and summons the interdimensional water. “Well...” He takes a drink. “There’s something weird about this void.” He takes another sip. “Ahhh. I mean, besides the fact that there’s no black hole in it, which I’m told is unusual. It’s been drawing power lately.” Some of the water has gone down the wrong pipe, so he coughs it out. “It’s been stealing from us. We came here to plug the leak.”

Hogarth glances down at the sleeping man now, who looks a lot younger than he did when Cedar first showed up. “Well, that would probably kill them.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking too.” Cedar vigorously shakes the back of his head. “Thing is, I still gotta plug the leak. The galaxy runs on temporal energy.”

“Every universe runs on temporal energy,” Hogarth says. “That’s what time is.”

“I have no doubt that that’s true, but I don’t care about the other universes. I care about mine.”

“You’re the confused one now,” Hogarth says, taking a step forward. “This universe is mine. You may have made your little pocket universe, but I made the full-sized one that it’s inside of. You’re here because I say you can be here, and technically speaking, all of the energy that you have is sourced from me.”

He studies her face. “You’ve been gone as well. We’ve been holding diplomatic discussions with one Ellie Underhill, and her cohort. Perhaps you’ve heard of her? She lives in Fort Underhill.”

Hogarth cracks a smile. “That I named it after her does not diminish my own power. You still need to respect me. The Third Rail spent billions of years without excess temporal energy. They lived off the time that was naturally available to them. You will be fine with a little bit of rationing while we figure out who these two are when they wake up...what they are.”

“The Third Rail was one planet in its original reality. We number in the trillions of habitats. We need the excess.”

“And you’ll have it,” Hogarth reiterated, “when these two are done doing whatever it is they’re doing.”

They look like children now. How long is this gonna go on? “Which will be when? When they each turn back into an unfertilized egg and a sperm?”

“It’s called a spermatozoon,” one of the people Cedar doesn’t recognize corrects. “What? I’m a biologist, I have to know these things.”

“I thought you were a princess,” the Nuadu-something guy from the Parallel says.

“We don’t know,” Hogarth jumps back in before the conversation can be moved too far off topic. “I expect that they’ll stop de-aging at some point. I’m sure that this was all part of his plan, and I’m choosing to accept that. Why? Because he may be the single-most powerful being in both of our universes. Let’s not piss him off, shall we?”

Cedar clears his throat, and coughs again. He smashes his cup back down to disc form, and slips it in its pocket. “Can’t argue with that logic. Wadya all eat around here?”

“We just got here,” Hogarth answers. “We don’t know what’s edible.”

No one ends up eating anything. They’re too nervous to find out what’s going to happen when the child-gods wake up. They’re both eight years old or so when the de-aging process ceases. They stay asleep after that, though, continuing to work through their apparent metamorphoses. While they’re waiting, they catch Cedar up on who and what the sleepers are, to the extent of their knowledge. In turn, he catches them up on the goingson of the Sixth Key, and all the history they missed while they were gone. They’ve maintained the imaginary wall that is holding back the Reality Wars, but it is a constant threat to the peace that their new civilization is enjoying. That’s why Echo and Clavia are such a concern. Energy is still the number one commodity in the galaxy, so they can’t afford to waste one ounce of it. These two god-beings could be the key to maintaining the peace forever, or they could be the instruments of its destruction following total domination. It all depends on what happens when they come to.

About an hour passes before they begin to stir. Clavia wakes up first, dazed and confused. “Mommy?” she asks. She thinks she has a mother. Who is she talking about, though? “Mom, where are you?” She’s looking around and blinking a lot.

“Umm...I’m right here.” Hogarth carefully approaches her.

“You’re not my mommy,” Clavia argues.

“No, but I care about you, and I’m here to care for you.” Nice save.

Clavia is very pouty. She continues to blink as she tries to wake up fully. She looks around again, and stops when she sees the second-in-command for the Sixth Key version of main sequence Earth. “Mom! There you are!”

Judy Schmidt widens her eyes. “Uh, me?”

“Yeah, silly!” Clavia laughs joyously.

“Right, okay. Um. Come here...honey.”

Clavia hops over, and tackles Judy with a big hug.

Judy mouths what the fuh to everyone else, but no one has any answers. This little magic girl has imprinted on her, for whatever reason, and there’s probably no going back on that. Kids don’t just switch parents on a whim. It’s her job to raise her now. So she better figure it out.

“Group hug!” Echo comes running up the hill. He hugs Judy and Clavia. “Come on, daddy!” He beckons Judy’s superior, General Bariq Medley.

“Oh, um.” Bariq leans over to hug them too, but not very tightly.

“Okay,” Judy says, gently separating them all. “Why don’t you go play with your aunt...Princess Honeypea, so your mommy and daddy can talk to their friends.

“Okay!” the kids say in unison. Good, they do see Honeypea as a member of the family. Out of everyone here, she’s probably the best with kids.

“What the hell is happening?” Bariq questions Hogarth.

“Everyone seems to think that I’m some sort of expert in all this, but I don’t know what’s going on. I came here because this is where the trail led after the magnolia tree was destroyed. But here’s all I know. Two extremely powerful individuals were just regressed to childhood, and now they think you two are their parents. I don’t know if they have false memories of you, or if it’s just an intuition they have, but I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it. You have to be there for them. No one can replace you. Think about how you were when you were their age. Would you have accepted just being moved to someone else’s care?”

“No one suggested that,” Judy defends.

“You were thinking it.” Cedar steps forward, injecting himself into the conversation. “I would be.”

Bariq looks over his shoulders. Princess Honeypea is teaching the kids pattycake. “I want a seat at the table.”

“What?” Cedar asks.

“You rule the galaxy now. I wanna be a part of that.”

“I don’t know that there’s any reason—”

“Hey, Clavia and Echo!” Bariq calls over. “Who’s this guy?”

They both just shrug their shoulders.

“They don’t know you. You wanna have any say what they do with their power? You wanna make sure the people of the Sixth Key have what they need? You better cozy up to their parents.”

“Bariq, we can’t just exploit them like that,” Judy warns. “They’re children.”

“No, they’re not,” Bariq argues. He turns back to Cedar. “What’ll it be? The woman’s name literally means key. That’s a strong symbol, but they don’t answer to you. They answer to the two of us.”

“They’ll answer to me better,” Judy reasons. “Children always love their mommies more. Especially when their daddies are dicks.”

Bariq chuckles. “I’ll dote on them. But I can’t do that from the sidelines.”

“Yes, you can,” Judy insists.

“Okay,” Cedar says. “You come with me, bringing the temporal energy gods, and I’ll find you a place in government. High up. People will know you, respect you. They remember you. I didn’t erase the past, though I literally could have.”

“They’ll be well taken care of,” Bariq tries to explain to Judy when she shakes her head at this devil’s deal. “No one’s exploiting anyone. It will be years before they’ll be mature enough to make their own serious decisions, and it’s better for them if they’re close with the leader of all of reality. If you don’t want this to go badly, then be their mother. You have that instinct. That’s why the tree chose you to be my second at the Rock Meetings. You weren’t my lieutenant before this. I would have chosen someone else to stand by my side.”

“I wouldn’t have chosen a military leader to be the main representative,” Judy reminds him. “I would have chosen Earth’s Mediator.”

“Yeah. We’ve been over that,” Bariq acknowledges.

“Okay, but I’m the head parent,” she says with airquotes. “I decide what’s best for them, even if that comes to mean leaving the Capital, or wherever you operate out of,” she says to Cedar.

“Sure,” Cedar agrees.

“Them too.” Bariq points at everyone else in this little bubble. “Give them what they want.”

“We want a garden,” a woman says.

“I got lots of gardens,” Cedar replies.

“A big one,” she clarifies.

Cedar nods his head. “I’ll see what I can do.”

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Microstory 2007: Oregon

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In summer of 1987, papa was 14 years old, and about to start high school for the first time. But remember, this would be at the same school he was before, but it was still going to be different. His mother was a teacher, so she knew how important schooling was. She knew that it was going to be a lot harder for papa than it was in the lower grades. She wanted him to have one more experience as a kid, where he could have fun, and not worry about grades yet. She also wanted him to be away from his family, because she knew that he was going to have to go off to college when he got older, so he had to learn. She found a summer camp that went for a whole two months! I went to summer camp once, but it was only for two weeks. Papa only saw his parents twice while he was there, and his sister once. I remember him telling me that he had a lot of fun, but he was sad to be away from his family and friends for so very long. He made friends there, though, that he stayed friends with. They did a whole lot of things there, like swimming, horseback riding, and even archery. The camp was in Oregon, so it took them 9 hours to get there, which is why his family didn’t get to visit him very often. The place was called Antelope Reservoir Camp, and it doesn’t exist anymore, because the people who owned it ran out of money. I would have liked to see where my papa spent so much time, but maybe when I’m older, my dad will let me go to a place that’s like it.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 4, 2393

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Mateo looked at his wife, who was seething with anger. He was worried she was about to jump up and tackle this McCord girl, or whatever her name was. Thack seemed as lost as him, but then it apparently dawned on her. “Oh. Oh, that’s right. I forgot you went to their universe once.”

“It was not a pleasant experience.” That was the day that Leona learned she was just a character in a role-playing game, being moved around time and space by a group of children. She spent a lot of time in therapy with Bungula’s once-leader, Eight Point Seven because of all that. The one good thing about the situation was that she and Mateo were temporarily off of the Matic pattern, or Leona would still be in therapy today, working out her issues, it having only been six months since the trauma in that hypothetical scenario.

“What is this?” Mateo questioned. “I don’t know who this is. I should know everything you know, since Nerakali gifted me your memories during the time that I didn’t exist.”

“This was after that,” Leona said, not breaking her gaze from Xolta. To be sure, Xolta was one of the younger players she met, and the only one to express sadness over learning the truth about their game. If she had to run into one of those again, it was best that it was her. “This was when you were on Dardius, and I was on Bungula.”

“Oh, right,” Mateo recalled. “You didn’t talk about your time there.”

“Maybe it’s time I tell you the truth,” Leona said to him, finally looking away from the target of her fury. “Do we have time?” she asked Thack.

Thack bowed slightly. “Time has no meaning here. Miss McCord can wait.”

Leona went off to another room to explain what had happened to her those years ago. When they returned, the rest of the audience had cleared out. Only the team was left, along with Thack and Xolta. No one was talking, nor looked like they had been talking that whole time.

“Okay,” Thack continued, “as I was saying, this is Xolta McCord. She is a witch from Universe Prime, and she can age you up.”

“I haven’t actually agreed to that,” Xoltra reminded her.

“Yes, you have,” Thack corrected. She was not one to be argued with.

Ramses stood up, and shook the witch’s hand. “Ramses Abdulrashid. Mid to late twenties, please. I would very much appreciate it.”

Xolta waited a moment to see if anyone protested, but they were all just waiting to see what it would look like. Then she shut her eyes, and prepared herself. She quite slowly moved her hands around, like she was trying to find the exact right position.

“Is this gonna take very long?” Leona asked after a few minutes of this.

“I’ve never done it in the outer bulkverse,” Xolta explained. “I don’t know how to reach the gods from here.”

“The gods?”

“That’s just what we call them,” Xolta defended.

Thack placed a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t need the gods for this. It’s a local engagement. Just sense his body.”

Ramses opened his eyes back up, having closed them instinctively, and sported a certain look.

Thack reached over, and physically moved Xolta’s hand to Ramses’ chest. “Connect with him. Remember what I taught you about soulwork. Craft and spirit articulation are not so different.”

Xolta kept trying, until something apparently clicked. “I have it.”

“Now, don’t summon the gods. Use the words, but don’t worry about them. Use them to command Ramses to change directly.”

Xolta took a breath, and whispered, “eesa..avra..turo.”

Ramses did begin to change. He rose a couple inches taller. His hair lengthened. His skin wrinkled. By the time Xolta reopened her eyes, he was an old man.

“Oh no,” the witch lamented.

“What is it?” Ramses asked.

“Shit,” Thack said, which sounded very unlike her.

Embarrassed, Xolta held her left hand in front of her eyes, palm outwards. She then clapped it with her right, turned that palm outwards as well, and slapped them back together a second time. Finally, she slid them away from each other—quite abruptly at first, then smoothly—right hand downwards, and left hand up a little. Xolta’s face was gone, replaced with Ramses’ own. She turned herself into a mirror image of him. “I’m so sorry,” she told him.

“Is it not reversible?” he questioned.

“It is,” Thack promised.

“No, it’s not,” Xolta argued, “because this is one of the easiest engagements. I’ve done it a million times before, so if I messed it up, it means I just can’t do it.”

Thack put Xolta’s hands back together, and wiped Ramses’ face away. “That was one of the easier engagements, and you performed it beautifully, with no hesitation. You just need to concentrate harder on the one you really want. Do it again, but in reverse. We all believe in you...right?”

“Yeah,” and “we do,” the group confirmed, not all that convincingly.

Xolta took a breath. “Okay.” She placed her hand on his chest again, and reconnected with him. “Asee...arva...turo.”

That did it. As requested, Ramses was back to his twentysomething self.

“There,” Thack said happily. “Now the other five will be easy, ‘cause you know you can do it.”

“I would like to be a little younger than that,” Angela asked, bashfully. “If that’s possible.”

“Yeah, I can do that,” Xolta said.

“And I would like to be older,” Marie asked. “Just to tell us apart easierly,” she explained when people looked at her funny. “I’ll be the older one.”

“I’m the older one,” Angela pointed out.

“By a few days, Marie contended. “Please, let me give this to you. I promise I won’t fall on my sword ever again. I’ll look thirty-five, but I won’t age beyond that, will I, Ramses?”

“No, sir,” Ramses agreed.

And so Xolta continued her magic, except that she was clear it wasn’t magic. Craft, as it was called—and very much not called witchcraft—was not magic. Nor were the gods. They were people who were in charge of certain technologies in her home universe, having used this technology to tap into a higher level of physics than most other cultures ever grew to understand. Craft was a way of hacking into this tech, except that the so-called gods were aware that this was happening, and rarely withheld it, though they surely could. They didn’t interfere with the regular people in the main dimension, for reasons no one could say, so this was kind of their loophole. Witches studied enough about the cosmos to learn some of their secrets, and that was fine.

Before too long, the whole team was back to where they belonged, not necessarily at the age they were before they died, but it was close enough, and exactly what they were looking for. Mateo was particularly relieved, more so than Leona, who had been trapped in a body younger than them all. That was precisely why he was so relieved. Ever since they transferred to these bodies, they were too busy with other things to dwell on how uncomfortable it was, looking so illicitly young. There was one specific thing it robbed them of. “Now we can have sex again,” he mused...in mixed company. 

“Mateo, damn,” Leona scolded.

“What, you’re my wife.”

“And we no longer have access to our grave chamber, so it’ll have to wait. We can’t even get back to our home universe.”

“Yes, you can,” Thack said. “Though I admit, I can’t get you back to your reality.” She ushered them into another room, where a young man was sitting in a recliner, reading something on an e-reader. “You can go home now. Your passengers are ready.”

The man shut off his device, and stood up. “Whatever.”

“Gang, this is—” Thack tried to say.

“No, no,” the young man stopped her. “Rule Number Two...”

“Never be surprised, but never assume you have the whole story,” Olimpia recited proudly.

The man shook his head, and at the same time as Leona, recited, “no names.” He was pleasantly surprised by this, which was slightly ironic.

“You’re not the first person to tell me that,” Leona said.

“Where does he live?” Mateo asked.

“Fourth Quadrant,” Thack answered. “It’s the best I could do. I pulled a lot of strings just to get him here, and it cost me. He was not invited, so it was not received well. Getting you six in was easy by comparison.”

“Do you have a way back to the main sequence?” Leona asked of the man.

“Not personally. I’ll point you towards someone who might.”

“Thank you,” Miss Collins,” Leona said. Then she turned. “Thank you, Miss McCord.”

“Forgive me what my friends and I did in our youth.”

“I do not blame you,” Leona admitted. I blame him,” she said, implying The Superintendent.

Like Saga and Vearden, the way back to the man’s home was through a doorway. Evidently, the system was designed to prevent people from even realizing that they had traveled the bulkverse at all. The target left their house that day, was spirited away to another brane, and continued down the street, under the impression that nothing special had happened. Perhaps that was where the doorwalkers’ power came from, as some kind of extension of Westfall.

The man threw his keys in the bowl by the door, and plopped down on the couch. “I suppose you’ll be wanting me to offer you drinks?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Angela said. “Could you just take us to who might be able to help us?”

He leaned his head back all the way, farther than was medically wise. “I’m so tired. Can you just go yourself? Call a RideSauce.”

“We don’t have cell phones,” Marie explained.

He whined some more, and muttered unintelligibly. Now they could see the strings that Thack pulled. He wasn’t witness to the birth of a Boltzmann Brane material.

“That’s quite all right,” Leona said, pulling Marie away. “We’ll figure it out. Thank you for letting us hitch a ride back, Mister Mystery Man.”

They left his house, and stepped down to the sidewalk. Leona squinted her eyes in the sun, and got her bearings. “I can see downtown from here. We’ll just walk, it’ll be fine.”

“Do we get tired?” Olimpia asked Ramses.

“Yes, but after longer,” he answered. “Plus, we can teleport.”

“I keep forgetting about that,” Marie noted.

“I would rather just walk, though,” Angela said. “Despite the fact that the outer bulkverse is the greatest expanse than even a whole universe, it feels so claustrophobic, with all those lights swirling around.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Leona concurred.

“Walking it is,” Mateo said cheerfully.

The Fourth Quadrant looked mighty different than it had before. While the main sequence chose to tighten themselves up into fewer and fewer megastructure habitats, this was more like what science fiction writers proposed for their stories set in the future. The buildings were sleek and shiny; more rounded, and less straight up and down. Each one was made of wildly different design, but they were seemingly constructed of the same materials. They fit together like a puzzle, as if someone had planned the entire thing from the start, and hadn’t begun until they knew exactly what they wanted it to be in the end. All of the cars that passed them were hovering half a meter over the road, while others flew overhead, possibly as drones, or maybe automated taxis. It was beautiful, and sprawling; clean and environmentally conscious.

Night had fallen by the time they reached The Capitol. It looked pretty much as it had the last time they were in this reality, though now with that new, advanced metamaterial. Two guards were standing at the entrance. They stepped forwards as they approached, and made it clear that they weren’t so much as allowed to enter the building.

“Hello,” Leona began. “My name is Captain Leona Matic. We are here to speak with someone who can help us return to the main sequence. Is President Natasha Orlova still in power? We’ve worked directly with her before.”

The guards looked at each other. “President Orlova is dead,” one of them answered in some kind of slavic accent. “Long live President Orlov.”

Mateo turtled his head towards them. “Like, a relative?”

“Her brother,” the other one answered. He checked his watch. “He’s the daytime president, at least.”

“And who runs the show at night.”

“That would be my brother,” came a voice from behind them. It was a woman, surrounded by her own posse of bodyguards. “Thank you, Arsenio, Stan. I’ll take it from here. Hi,” she said to the team. “My name is Skylar Spout, and we have all been expecting you.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: Boltzmann Brane

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The men continued to struggle against each other. Mateo and the team’s visions started coming back to them until it was clear enough for them to see that most of them didn’t recognize the fighters. Mateo did. One was part of Lucius’ group in the universe where he got his soul back. The other only looked familiar, but he couldn’t place him. He did get the feeling that he wasn’t a good guy, though.

“Listen, I know we don’t know each other yet,” Lucius said, sort of contradicting himself, “but could you help us get this guy out the airlock?”

“It’s not an airlock,” his friend said. Man, what was his name?

“Whatever.”

“Uhhhhh...okay,” Mateo said. He looked like a fifteen-year-old, but Ramses built his body to be stronger than the average person, so he didn’t find it too difficult to help.

“Are you freakin’ serious?” the bad man cried. “Stop, you son of a bitch! Get me—no! Argh!” The other dude was right. It wasn’t an airlock. They didn’t place him in another room, and then close the doors between them before opening a set of outer doors. They just threw him directly into the void. He was caught in some kind of current, and pulled away before he could grasp onto anything.

Lucius’ friend shut the door again. “Thanks, Mateo.”

“How do I know him?”

The friend sighed, and thought about it for a moment. “Oh, you were there. Yeah, when Cain and I were sent off on our respective missions, you were in the room.”

Mateo tilted his lizard brain.

“On Gatewood,” he continued. “When you were trying to get the Ansutahan humans safely across the threshold?”

“Oh, yeah!” Mateo said, remembering. “Oh...yeah.”

“Don’t worry,” Lucius comforted, “this one is good now...we think.”

“It’s complicated,” the other guy—Abel; his name was Abel—said.

“What also must be complicated,” Lucius began, “is how you remember any of this when you’re barely out of diapers. This all happened when you were adults.”

“We are adults,” Leona explained. “We just had to move into younger bodies.”

Lucius nodded. “I see. Well, you wanna come back to the other room, and meet with the rest of us, or...?”

“I’m afraid he doesn’t have time for that,” came a voice from behind the team. It was someone they hadn’t seen in a very long time, and never knew all that well. Back when Arcadia Preston was forcing Mateo and Leona to plan their wedding before they were ready, many of their guests arrived via The Crossover. It was a special machine that could travel between universes, and it was larger than anyone knew. It even included a hotel, which this man here was apparently responsible for. They just called him Bell.

“Bell,” Leona said.

“Yes, that’s me. Have we met?”

“Maybe not yet for you.”

“Okay,” Bell said. “Well, like I was saying—”

“Before you explain,” Mateo began, “could you tell us your real name? I feel weird not knowing it.”

“It’s Apothem Sarkisyan,” he answered.

“Sarkisyan. Are you related to a Dodeka?” Leona asked.

“She’s my sister.”

“Running hotels must run in the family.”

“It really doesn’t,” Apothem said bluntly. “Anyway, Lucius..Abel, thank you. You can go now.”

“What do you want with them?” Lucius asked, worried about his friends.

“I assure you that I will take great care of them. They are all on the guestlist.”

“The guestlist for what?” Lucius pressed.

“Come on,” Abel urges, taking Lucius by the upper arm. “It’s fine. It’s not nefarious. It is a great honor. I still don’t know if I’m on the list.”

“Don’t tell anyone else we’re here,” Apothem warned.

“Of course not,” Abel replied as they were stepping away.

“The guestlist for what?” Angela echoed.

“You have been selected to witness the birth of a Boltzmann Brane.”

“Are you serious?” Ramses questioned with great interest. “They’re real?”

“This one is,” Apothem confirmed.

“Wait, where’s Medavorken?” Olimpia asked.

“He’s on his own path,” Apothem claimed. “Follow me.” He led them down the corridors, into what Mateo recognized as a black box theatre. Except instead of a stage, the couple hundred or so seats were angled towards a large window to the equilibrium space outside. “Welcome...to The Stage,” he said proudly.

“So this is a show?” Olimpia asked.

“The greatest show this side of the bulkverse,” Apothem said.

“Did you bring us here?” Leona asked.

“No, but I knew you were coming, because like I said, you’re on the list. And as our first guests, you shall have the privilege of the first row.”

“When does it begin?” Marie asked.

Apothem stood up straighter, and looked at her. Then he looked over at Angela. “Which one of you is Angela Walton?”

Mateo interrupted before Marie could point to her alternate self. “They both are.”

Apothem pulled at an embellishment on his uniform sleeve, which revealed a scroll of e-paper. He studied it for a moment. “One name, one person...” He looked up to the group, and added, “one ticket.”

“One of them can have mine,” Mateo volunteered.

“You don’t have to do that,” Marie said with unwarranted shame. “I’m the temporal intruder. I’ll recuse myself.”

“No,” Mateo insisted. “I don’t know what this is we’re supposed to see, but I’m sure I’ll get little out of it.”

“It’s the spontaneous emergence of an ordered intelligence in the vastness of infinite spacetime due to random fluctuations in a balanced thermodynamic state,” Ramses explained poorly.

“Huh?”

“It’s a person who just suddenly exists due to the crazy amounts of time that have passed, rather than as the result of some logical series of causal events,” Leona translated, though even that was a little much. “But he doesn’t mean a Botlzmann brain as in B-R-A-I-N, do you? You mean B-R-A-N-E, which isn’t a person, but a universe?”

“It’s both,” Apothem disclosed.

“Hot damn,” Ramses said, which didn’t sound like him at all.

“The tickets are transferable,” Apothem went on, “but there are no plus ones, no extra seats, no double bookings, no waitlist. We invited a certain number of people, and since time doesn’t matter here, we don’t worry about whether everyone can make it. Every one of the two hundred and sixteen guests will make it, and they’ll arrive sometime in the next hour, from our perspective. The six of you will have to work it out amongst yourselves, but there is no loophole.”

“They can have my seat.” It was Gavix Henderson, an immortal from another universe who was present, not only at Mateo and Leona’s wedding, but also their engagement party a year prior.

“Sir, you don’t have to do that,” Apothem said.

“You and I both know that this event is not a rarity,” Gavix said to him. “It’s just easier for the humanoid mind to comprehend this particular instance in three dimensions. I’ve seen it before, and I’m sure I’ll see it again.”

“Very well,” Apothem acquiesces. “You may exit.”

“Thank you for this,” Mateo calls up to Gavix, embarrassed for having let him get so far before he remembered.

“Yes, thank you,” Marie echoed, since it was she who would be taking the seat.

“Just invite me to that fancy weddin’ o’ yours,” he returned, not turning around.

“We saw you there,” Leona said.

“Nah, not that one.” He rounded the corner without another word.

It was hard to describe what it was Marie would have missed. No, literally, it was hard to describe. It wasn’t exactly an explosion, which was how scientists back home had always described the big bang. But was this even the same thing, or entirely different? Mateo was at one end of their group, sitting right next to a clearly intelligent and knowledgeable individual, who explained a little more about what they were witnessing. Like stars and planets coming together particle by particle, chunk by chunk, and collapsing into their gravitational forces, something called bulk energy was becoming so hot and dense that it was transforming itself into solid matter. So it was less of an explosion, and more an implosion, though he said that this made perfect sense, because the explosion would be seen as such from inside the universe in question. But from out here, all that energy and matter had to come from what we would consider a low entropy state. This was evidently the greatest mystery in his field of brane cosmology. In a given universe, entropy increases, so why does it happen in the reverse in the outer bulkverse? Why does it operate so differently from the metacelestial objects that it creates? And why, from their puny human eyes, does each one look like a knife?

Well, Mateo had trouble following the man’s lecture, but it was still fun, and made a lot of sense while he was saying it. The team was grateful for having been around to witness such a thing. Apparently, like Gavix said, branes form like this all the time. His own did at some point, as did everyone else’s, but dimensionally speaking, they were all like partial eclipses, while this was a full eclipse, as seen from their position in the greater cosmos. After it was sufficiently over, the crowd began to stand, and move over towards the refreshments, where they could get to know one another.

There didn’t seem to be anything they all had in common. Some were scientists too, but others were just regular people. Some of them already knew about these other branes before today, but some hadn’t heard of any of it. Why and how they were chosen was another mystery their new friend couldn’t explain. The team itself was pretty special, but only within the context of their own pocket of that bulkverse. Out here, they were small fish in an infinite ocean.

“I don’t know of anyone in my universe who could help ya with that,” said an older gentleman by the desserts. He had a thick southern accent, and didn’t look anyone in the eye. This wasn’t out of a superiority complex, but more like his eyes would wander around, and he would forget where exactly he was meant to be directing his words. “I tell you, maybe that genie over there could help ya. Her special thing is she refused to grant anybody any wishes on her world, which is why the rest of the genie council, or whatever, sort of exiled her.”

“Why would she help us if her defining characteristic is that she doesn’t help people?” Leona reasoned.

The old man chuckled with delight. “Yeah, I guess yer right ‘bout that.” He took another swig from his flask. “I’m such a dumbass sometimes. By the way, drinkin’s legal on my planet. I feel I hafta say that, cuz some people think it’s weird.”

“It’s legal in ours,” Mateo said.

“Oh.” He widened his eyes, and presented the flask.

“No, thank you.”

“Aright.” He shrugged his cheeks as if to say your loss.

“Well, it was nice meeting you,” Angela said to him, gracefully stepping away. The others followed like magnets. “Seemed too eager to give children alcohol,” she said once they were out of earshot.

“We told him we weren’t as young as we look,” Olimpia reminded her.

“I know, but a normal person would still hesitate to believe it, let alone act on it.”

“What is normal?” asked a woman they hadn’t noticed before. It was Thack Natalie Collins of voldisilaverse.

“Miss Collins,” Mateo said. “It’s nice to meet you in person.”

“Likewise.” She shook everyone’s hands.

“Wait, you put us on the list, didn’t you?” Mateo guessed.

Thack sighed. “It was either this, or have you join the Newtonian Expats on their adventures. I wanted to give you a break. I know you reconnect with them in the future.”

“If you know all you know,” Leona began, “then you must know both of someone who can get us back home, and provert us to more appropriate ages.”

“Yes to the second one, but no to the first. We all came here through Westfall.”

“What’s that?” Olimpia asked her.

“Basically...we don’t know how we got here,” Thack said cryptically. “It’s a special feature of the Crossover. It just happens. You walk through a door, and you’re in a different universe, and most of the time, you don’t even realize it. You just end up going back home, and living under the belief that everyone you met on the otherwise simply lives on the same world as you. Of course we only went halfway, and made a stop here.”

“Sounds trippy,” Marie decided.

“The point is it’s not. You don’t notice unless you knew enough about brane cosmology before. Anyway, this is my friend.” She reached over without looking, and ushered a young woman into the huddle. “She’s not technically a proverter, but she can accomplish the same thing in her own way. Just tell her how old you wanna be.”

“Hi, I’m Xolta McCord.”

Leona frowned at her with rage. “We’ve met.”

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