Microstory 2350: Vacuus, May 18, 2179

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Dear Condor,

Happy belated birthday! I decided to wait a few days to send you my next letter, so it could be after the party, but you ought to already know that, since I sent you the custom read receipt about it immediately after receiving your last one. This was a really good reason to use that system, so thank you for coming up with it. The party went great on my end. We had food and cake, and everybody was wearing the same thing. That’s right, I decided to pass along your cool, fashionable garment design to all invitees, and encouraged them to print and wear one of the options themselves. The garment fabricator liked them a lot herself, so it was her idea to really lean into the theme. She was there too, along with several other people. I’m sorry if I gave you the impression that I didn’t have anyone to invite, or that I didn’t have any friends in general. We’re in fairly cramped quarters for logistical and practical reasons, so everyone knows pretty much everyone. I don’t like them all, and they don’t all like me, but we get along pretty well. We have to, or it could lead to catastrophe. Animosity does not mix well with a planetary base on an airless world. One person gets mad at another, and decides to open an airlock out of anger, and it’s bye bye half the living people on Vacuus. No, we obviously compartmentalize the sections, but you get what I mean. We place great emphasis on counseling and mental health. So I do have friends. It’s true that I never developed relationships as strong as the ones I sometimes see on TV, but I would still consider them my friends. I don’t know why I’ve never talked about them to you, but they were there, and we had fun. Who else was at yours? We don’t really do much with constellations here, so we’re not all that familiar. We found Libra, and everyone looked at it, trying to figure out why they’re called “the scales”. It wasn’t until someone had the bright idea to turn the image slightly then we were all, like, “ooooohhh. Kinda!” It was fun, though, and I thought of you the whole time. I wish we could have been in the same room. How did it go on your end?

All partied out and not alone,

Corinthia

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 7, 2459

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Mateo and Angela suddenly appeared in the Third Rail version of Russia on August 16, 2398, standing next to a younger version of Mateo. He wouldn’t recognize his future self, even if he managed to look behind him in time. They were both in full IMS, their faces obscured by their helmet visors. He had just activated a big teleportation machine, hoping to transport him and a piece of timonite to Lebanon, Kansas without having to actually look for the mineral first. He needed this to save their friend, Trina McIver from being lost in time. The plan didn’t really work, though they did end up finding her anyway. The machine reached critical mass a second later, and took them away, along with two Russian soldiers who were trying to stop Past!Mateo. But they didn’t end up in Lebanon, and this fact was apparent immediately upon their arrival. The ground around them was gray, the sky was black, and the air didn’t exist. They were on a moon, or an asteroid, or something. A pinch of atmosphere managed to come with them to this place, but it did not last. The three men not wearing any special suits quickly begin to die. Future!Mateo couldn’t save them all, but he could save one.

Spacesuits in the past were traditionally slow and difficult to assemble. For many years, it was actually impossible for a wearer to accomplish the feat on their own. For emergencies, it was vital for an Integrated Multipurpose Suit to be designed to be put on quickly, without any snags, and without any help. For the most part, when the armor module was needed, the two inner modules were also needed. But it was technically possible for the armor module to function on its own when there was no other option. It was also the easiest to remove, and the fastest. Future!Mateo swiftly disconnected it, and opened it like a lid. He stepped out, and pushed his past self into it, letting it close up automatically. He then gave him the helmet for a complete seal. Past!Mateo could still be dying, though, because he had been exposed to the vacuum of outer space for too long, so Future!Mateo tapped on the arm interface to release a cocktail of exposure treatment drugs. This solved one problem, but created another, because of course, Future!Mateo was now the one at risk of dying. He could survive out here for a little bit, but not indefinitely. They needed to find shelter.

As Future!Mateo was looking around for somewhere to survive, Past!Mateo and Angela appeared to be talking to one other via radio. He had no idea what they were saying, though, so he just kept searching the horizon. Angela started to tap on her own arm interface. She pointed in one direction. Past!Mateo nodded. The both of them walked over to Future!Mateo, and took him by the arms. They teleported away, into a pressurized environment. Future!Mateo blinked, trying to recover. He would eventually, but he wouldn’t say no to his own shot of the treatment drugs. Angela knew this, so she removed her gauntlet, and placed it on his hand to administer the dermal flash. His health began to return to him, and he was able to speak. But before he could, Past!Mateo had something to say. “Did you think that you could survive better out there than I could?” he asked accusatorily.

“Indeed,” Future!Mateo responded. “My body has been upgraded again.”

Past!Mateo looked over at Angela, who nodded back, confirming that to be the truth. “Well...thank you, then. I appreciate your support. Now...report.”

Future!Mateo took a deep breath. “You need to return my suit, so I can go back out there, and hunt for the timonite in all that rubble.”

“No, I can look for it,” Past!Mateo insisted. “It’s my mission.”

“It’s mine too,” Future!Mateo explained.

“So we fail in the first timeline?” Past!Mateo guessed.

“Well, no. I’m closing my loop. I always wondered how we succeeded, though. Your memory will be erased before you go back with it.”

“You must not have had all of your memories erased, because you’re wearing these suits,” Past!Mateo reasoned. “You knew that we would end up here.”

“No, we just kind of wear them all the time now.”

“We would have brought an extra one if we had known that you would need it as well,” Angela clarified. “Buddy breathing doesn’t work in space.” She turned to Future!Mateo. “I’ll go look for the timonite. You stay here with your self to find out what this place is, where we are, and how to get back home.”

“Homes,” Past!Mateo corrected. “You two and I aren’t going to the same place.”

“No, we’re not.” Angela dropped her visor, and disappeared.

“Where are the others?” Past!Mateo questioned his future self.

“They’re fine. They have their own concerns to worry about. There’s no need to give you any details, but we move past this story arc, and into new ones. The parallel realities are just the beginning of our troubles. The way I see it, your life has barely started.”

“I see.” Past!Mateo examined the architecture of this airlock, as if he were knowledgeable enough to glean any information from it. He started walking towards the interior hatch, which was fully open. Lights turned on in reaction to his presence, though there appeared to be no people here. This facility, whatever it was, may have been abandoned. Or they were just out to lunch. He stopped while he was still on the threshold. “Have you noticed, the doorways are pretty high, as are the ceilings? This was made for tall people.”

“Or they just like extra space,” Future!Mateo countered.

“I dunno. This doesn’t feel quite human to me.”

“No, you’re right about that.”

“Yes, you are,” came another voice. A being was walking down the corridor, and she was definitely not human. She was a Maramon. She wasn’t, however, alone. Four human women were walking with her. “Aclima, Balbira, tie them up.”

“Oh, no thank you,” Future!Mateo said, like she was just offering him a second glass of water at a restaurant.

The Maramon looked like she was smirking, but it was hard to tell with her anatomy. “Kalmana,” she said simply.

One of the humans quickdrew a gun, and stunned them in the face. The suits could dissipate—and even channel—most energy blasts, but they couldn’t protect exposed areas. Still, they resisted the surge, and tried to stay awake. She had to fire once more. The lights went out.

The two Mateos woke up in a cell at around the same time. One of the women was sitting guard on the other side of the bars. She seemed nice, but honestly, so did the others. Hopefully they weren’t slaves to the Maramon. Mateo didn’t know enough about their culture to have any clue why they might be working together. “Hi. I’m Lusia.” She wasn’t bubbly, but professionally courteous.

“Hi, Lusia. This is Mateo. I’m Mateo.”

“I know.”

“Can I ask, why are you working with them?” Past!Mateo questioned.

“She is of my people,” she answered plainly.

“Is she? Do they treat you well?”

Lusia smiled. “We are hybrids. Half-human, half-Mar, but loyal to the latter.”

“To what end?” Future!Mateo asked. He had encountered her kind before, on a few occasions. He had gotten the feeling that those others were the only ones, so this was a new development.

“Our purpose has not yet been revealed to us. We are still training. Mother will explain all when we are ready to hear it. Until then, I’m here to watch you.”

“She’s not your mother, she’s just your creator,” Past!Mateo tried to argue.

“What’s the difference?”

“Lusia!” the Maramon’s voice shouted from another room. “Do not speak to them! Remain silent and steadfast!”

“Oh, no thank you!” Lusia yelled back. Now she was really smiling.

“Lusia!” the Maramon complained, holding the final vowel for several seconds.

“The young do not always do what they are told,” Lusia said to the Mateos. “She really is our mother, and not actually our creator. That was someone else. She’s the one who raised us, and cares for us. We do not call the man who engineered us our father. I just want to show you that I can defy her orders, and not be abused, or anything. I can’t imagine what horrors you imagine we experience in this world. But we’re doing okay.”

Future!Mateo stood up from his bunk, and approached the bars. He leaned back a few centimeters when he noticed her trying to hide her mild fear of him. “I do not have a problem with the Maramon. It seems only that they have a problem with us.”

Lusia widened her eyes to process the information. Then she shut them and nodded slightly.

“So we are in Ansutah,” Past!Mateo assumed.

“No,” Lusia replied, shaking her head. “This is Fort Underhill. June 7, 2459.”

“Really?” Future!Mateo asked, very surprised. “How did we wind up here?”

“No idea,” Lusia said. “Ukodenva ‘Underkeeper’ Unedisalk came here accidentally as well, with the rest of her cadet squad. Our genetic engineer was the son of the man who made the other hybrids. Yes, I noticed your sense of familiarity when I said that. I guess he wanted to follow in daddy’s footsteps.”

“Is Hogarth aware that you are here?”

“She found herself the unwilling commanding officer of the cadets, due to some odd laws that they were clinging onto from the Crossover,” Lusia began to explain. “Things reportedly went well for a time, but they fell apart eventually, and became hostile. A truce was later formed, which basically lets us do whatever we want, as long as we do not leave this moon. Hogarth could not stop us from being created.”

“Are there more than the four of you? Does he intend to make more?” Past!Mateo was more curious than he ought to be.

“Hopefully not.”

“What will become of us?” Future!Mateo asked her.

Underkeeper walked into the hock section. “That has yet to be decided. I’m advocating for you to keep your hands firmly attached to your necks, but I’ll be honest, your prospects are not looking good. The others are not as fond of humans as I am.” She looked upon Lusia lovingly. Perhaps she really was her mother.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: February 27, 2399

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Leona is ready to meet her fate. She’s standing in the airlock, hand hovering over the outer hatch pull, but she can’t pull it. She just stands there, trying to work up the courage. If this doesn’t work, she’s going to die in here. If it does work, she still may die in a car crash in an old timeline in the main sequence. Something else has to work too, which will bring her consciousness back to the present day through the extraction mirror. But she has no proof that it actually did. An entity inside of Mateo’s body is claiming to be a future version of her, but she doesn’t truly know that. This could be it. She could be committing suicide. She can’t bring herself to do it. As she’s frozen in place, she hears a banging on the hatch behind her. She turns to see Alyssa through the window, scared out of her mind, and trying to open it. Leona does it for her.

“What the hell are you doing?” Alyssa cries.

“I’m trying to open the other hatch. I’m just having a little trouble.”

“Leona, we don’t know that this is going to work.”

“That’s why I’m having trouble. My confidence is high, but apparently not high enough. You need to do it for me.” She points to the control panel. “Tap this one here.”

“Leona, I can’t murder you! I know we’re fighting right now, but I still love you.”

“You won’t be murdering me...probably...hopefully...I don’t think.”

“Your confidence level seems to be dropping.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine. I just...have to get this done.” She wants to speak with her husband, but she can’t, because another her is in his brain, and she doesn’t want to talk to her, because she doesn’t want anything she hears to impact her future choices. She’s trying to close this loop. It’s already done. “I can’t keep living in the anticipation.”

Alyssa shakes her head. “You know better than I, but I still can’t push that button. I can’t be the one who does it.”

Leona nods understandingly. “That’s okay. Could you do me a favor then?”

Alyssa leaves, and returns with someone else, but Leona sends her away again. She shouldn’t even have to see this. “Thanks, Aly.”

Erlendr grins. “You want me to pretend to kill you?”

“I did this to your daughter once, on another ship.”

“Yes, I’m aware. I never much liked that daughter, though, especially not after you corrupted her.”

“So you don’t want to get back at me for it?”

“Oh, I didn’t say that,” Erlendr replies. “I’m just savoring this moment.”

Leona turns her watch up to look at it, but isn’t paying any attention to the time. “If you don’t do this in the next thirty seconds, I’m going to go down to Earth, and do it to the daughter you do like instead.”

“You wouldn’t, she’s pregnant.”

“Eh, barely. I’m pro-choice.”

“That wouldn’t be her choice!”

“Then I guess you oughta do what I asked, and you oughta do it now!”

Erlendr pushes her back into the airlock, and seals the inner hatch. He taps the button out of malice, sending her to the deep past, and then the very recent past.

Leoteo walks up behind him. “Boo.” They take him back to his cell.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 8, 2399

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Mateo kisses his wife on the cheek, then starts to walk away in slowmo. He has a vacuum suit helmet tucked under his arm, which means he teleported up to the AOC earlier to retrieve it, only so he could do this bit. They’re all astronauts here, nobody is impressed, nor is it that funny. Still, once he passes under an overhead light, he switches it on using the app on his phone. Just at the right time, he teleports again, as if being beamed up by Scotty. What exactly is he parodying here? Ramses and Alyssa roll their eyes, but they too give Leona kisses, then teleport away. Alyssa has spent the last couple of days practicing, so she was both excited and nervous to try it in the field.

“Engage,” Mateo orders as soon as they appear.

“Constance, lay in a course for Phoenix 15-236P7,” Ramses plays along, though out of order.

“Directions unclear. Please repeat request,” Constance replies. She waits a beat. “Just kidding. AI got jokes too.” She waits another beat. “Initiating quarter-speed burst mode, AU level.” The ship lurches, and teleports. A few seconds later, it teleports again.

“What does that mean, quarter-speed?” Mateo asks.

“Our ship is fragile, I don’t feel comfortable pushing it too hard for such a long journey. Instead of one jump every second, it will take one every four seconds. It will take us seventeen hours to get to our destination, but we’ll be alive when we do.”

“So, what do we do in the meantime?” Alyssa asks.

“I’m going to check every single system on this vessel, and then I’m going to go to bed,” Ramses answers. “You can skip the first thing, and just do the second.” He heads down to the engineering section.

“We could...” Mateo begins.

“I don’t feel like playing RPF Plus 101 right now, Mateo,” Alyssa interrupts.

“It’s RPS-1o1 Plus.”

“That neither.”

This may not be good. Being on his own with nothing to do generally doesn’t go as he expects. He’s liable to find a young woman living alone in here somewhere, or stumble across a lewisian portal to another reality that never works again. But if Alyssa doesn’t want to play the only good game they have saved on the computer, then he’ll have to figure something else out. He climbs the steps up to the top section, and opens the hatch to the airlock. “Okay, how does this thing work?”

“I can turn it on for you,” Constance offers. The hologram projectors switch on, and display a screensaver of swirling colors in the middle of the room.

“Hey, thanks. Is this just for calls, or can you show me other things?”

“Like what?”

“Like where we’re going?”

An image of mostly empty space appears, evidently showing the region of the Oort Cloud where they’ll be going to search for the Constant. He can see little tiny specks that must be the asteroids—or whatever—that are floating around, each one their potential target. One of these things is not like the others. It’s stationary while everything else is moving. They’re not moving fast as seen from afar, though, which is why the AI needs to gather and analyze the data. It could take as much time as it will to get there. Hm. Still bored. “Call Leona.”

“Calling Leona.” The asteroids disappear, and the screensaver returns. The colors shudder in sync with the sounds of a ringing phone.

An image of Marie appears in the room. “Hello?”

“Hey, is she there?”

“Is something wrong?”

“No, I just miss her.”

“It’s been less than five minutes,” Marie chastised.

“It’s so boring up here!”

“Goodbye, Mateo. Good luck.”

He growls as the hologram disappears completely. “Constance. You got any other tricks up your sleeves? Maybe a time bubble generator that will make the time go faster?”

“I don’t have that, but your grave chamber doubles as a stasis pod. You could just hook yourself up to that, and go to sleep until the journey is over. That’s what Alyssa is doing right now.”

“That’s a good idea.” Mateo starts to head back downstairs.

The sound of the phone rings again. “Incoming call,” Constance announces.

“I guess Lee-Lee got my message, and wasn’t happy that Marie hung up on me. Go ahead and answer, please.”

It’s not Leona who appears in the room, though. It’s not even Marie. It’s Magnus Petra Burgundy from the underground rocket research lab. “Oh my God, it actually worked. Hi, hello, Mister Matic. Can you hear me okay?”

“Hello, Magnus Burgundy,” Mateo replies. “I can hear you fine. Where are you?”

She looks around nervously. “I’m in the Constant.”

“Really?” he questions. “You were going in the opposite direction.”

“No, you’re going in the opposite direction. Magnus Pryce thinks that you were passed bad information to throw you off the trail.”

“Magnus Pryce? Are we talking Tamerlane, or Abigail?”

“Tamerlane. I don’t know an Abigail.”

“Why does he want us to find the Constant?”

“He says that Leona is the only one who can take over. I’m not supposed to be talking to you, but he’s keeping Danica busy.”

“Where is Angela? She is supposed to be in hypertime. If you’ve stopped...”

“She’s in stasis. Danica knows what’s going on with all that.”

“Okay, we haven’t gone very far the wrong way,” Mateo says. “Tell me where you are. My AI can hear you, so use whatever technobabble you need to specify.”

“Constance, end transmission,” Danica’s voice comes in off-screen.

“Constance, full stop!” Mateo orders just after the image disappears.

“Terminating burst mode.”

“Please tell me that you were—”

“I was able to trace the call, but there’s a problem.”

“Let me guess, the signal was fading, which means that they’re on the run.”

“That would be my best hypothesis, yes.”

Ramses starts to climb up the ladder. “I was watching on the screen, but did not interject. Constance, could you—”

“Engage the reframe engine?” Constance figures. “Initiating now.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 16, 2398

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Leona wasn’t calling Marie and Kivi because she wanted them to try to find her husband in the Mariana Trench. She just wanted to record a census of all the versions of Mateo that they’re currently aware of. The one down there appears to be the only one at the moment, which makes things simpler. The two SD6 teams are free to go off and do their own thing. She’s going to handle this herself, but she needs more data. The global brain scanner that found him operates on two axes. They can get some idea of elevation by measuring the strength of the signal, but it’s impossible to pinpoint a precise location. If she’s going to teleport down to him, she needs to know precisely how deep to go, and where to land, or she’ll end up drowning in the ocean while being crushed by its unyielding thousand atmospheres of pressure.

Ramses has been working on a temporal energy detector capable of surviving the stress of reentry into Earth’s top atmospheric layers, and he’s finally finished. They have decided that this is a perfect opportunity to feed two birds with one worm. The detector will fall to the surface of Earth, measuring the temporal energy fields along the way, as well as hopefully whatever is suppressing that field. It should land in the ocean over the trench, then detach itself from the parachutes, and sink down to look for Mateo.

“About how long will all that take?” Cheyenne asks.

Ramses is monitoring the exterior maintenance robot—or EMR—that’s readying the probe for launch. The ship wasn’t designed for this, so he’s had to improvise a lot of the process. If they’re in a time crunch, that’s all the more reason they can’t rush. “Forty-two minutes and eleven seconds.”

“Oh, so you know exactly how long?”

“Well, I couldn’t tell you how quickly the probe will find Mateo, because the whole point is we don’t know where he is, but if it has to sink all the way to the bottom, it will take forty-two minutes and eleven seconds from launch.”

“If your bot ever finishes building the launch brackets,” Leona says impatiently.

Ramses peels himself from the central hologram to look at her. “I hope you know that there is no guarantee—”

“I know,” she interrupts, frustrated.

“Sorry, what were you gonna say?” Vearden asks.

“He was going to remind me that we can’t be sure Mateo is the one down there,” Leona answers instead. “It’s true, were I you is not, like, this secret phrase that no one else would know. I just don’t think anyone else would think to use it in this situation.”

“Okay,” Ramses says passive-aggressively. “We’ll find out in about forty-two minutes.” He starts heading back down to engineering. “The EMR is finished with its work just in time for our launch window. You can all watch from up here.”

A few minutes later, the probe is through the miniature airlock that Ramses built in engineering, sacrificing what was once used as storage space. It’s now a little bit more difficult to walk around downstairs. The probe flies away from the AOC, and heads for Earth. It screams across the sky, exciting all amateur astronomers who were not expecting such a large piece of orbital debris to decay today. The truth is that it’s not all that large, but it’s built with materials not found in the modern world, so it would be assumed to be the size of a tiny home. Let the conspiracies begin.

The probe is through the rough spots now, so the parachutes deploy to slow its descent. Ramses frowns as he’s watching the data come in. Velocity, temperature, pressure, pollution levels. It’s picking up all of these things, but the one thing it’s not sensing is temporal energy. This is incredibly odd, even for the Third Rail. After it lands on the water, he goes back up to the rest of the group.

Leona shakes her head. “You see these numbers?”

“Yes, they don’t make any sense,” Ramses notes.

“Forgive me, but...” she begins awkwardly

“I didn’t screw it up. The detector is working fine. There is something seriously wrong with this world, and it’s bigger than we ever imagined.”

“I don’t understand,” Vearden says, worried that they’re going to roll their eyes at best, or chew his head off at worst.

“If I’m reading this right—and I’m no scientist, so I might not be—but it says here that you’re not sensing any temporal energy whatsoever,” Arcadia says.

“That’s right,” Leona replies. She reaches forward to play with the interface, but stops. There’s nothing to adjust or calibrate. It’s all laid out before them. It’s all wrong.

“Didn’t we kind of expect that, though?” Vearden presses. “We already know there’s no time travel, at least not down on the planet.”

“There’s always time travel.” Arcadia starts to talk with her hands. “For most people, time moves at a one to one ratio, which means that for every second that passes, one second passes. Temporal energy isn’t this magical substance that we use to manipulate time and space. It’s simply the transfer of excited particles from one moment in time to another, as a function of entropy.”

“Huh?”

“Temporal energy is just what happens when time passes,” Arcadia clarifies. “You can’t have no energy, because that would mean you have no time. It’s either balanced or unbalanced, and as time travelers, we exploit the unbalanced levels, but you can’t just have nothing. If you have nothing, you don’t exist. This world...doesn’t exist!”

The computer beeps. Leona looks back up to the hologram. “The probe is close enough to the source of the were I you signal. I know where to go.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Ramses offers.

“No, stay here and...deal with this.”

Leona puts on her wetsuit, which is a half-measure, since it’s not what’s going to keep her safe down there. It just seems dumb to go down in her civies. She inserts the rebreather in her mouth, nods to the group, and then teleports to the signal. She can instantly tell that she’s standing inside of the Bridgette. She hears someone shuffling behind her, so she turns around to find Alyssa in a defensive position. Alyssa doesn’t loosen up, since Leona doesn’t look like herself with the mask on. “It’s me, it’s me.”

“Oh, okay. I guess it’s 2398 again.”

“Where were you?”

“Billions of years ago.”

“Tell me everything.”

Alyssa shakes her head. “I can’t. My memories are on a detonation mechanism. As soon as we surface, they’ll disappear, and I don’t have time to relay them to you.”

“I understand,” Leona says with a nod. “Is Mateo here?”

She hesitates to answer for a beat. “No. He’s never coming back.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 10, 2398

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Ramses is getting a little frustrated. He loves this ship, but like they were discussing the other day, it’s a passenger vessel. It’s designed to keep a small crew alive while they travel to other worlds. It’s not equipped to handle the kind of science that he needs to do up here. The only logical places to try are down in engineering, and up in microponics, but that’s two separate levels, and it’s made even harder by the main level in between them, where all the normies are hanging out. They seem to be dealing with their own problems, most likely due to extreme boredom. The central computer houses a plethora of entertainment and interesting data to keep them a little busy, but that will only take them so far. They’re all going a little crazy, even with the more manageable numbers, and nothing is going to make it better...nothing unless Ramses can solve their problems by ignoring his own self-care.

Leona’s healing nanites are hard at work, though they’re operating slower than they would in the other realities. She should be fully functional by now, having no issue climbing up and down the steps. This is something that she’s struggling with, though, because she’s not at a hundred percent. Ramses doesn’t help her down, but he has his arms open underneath in case she falls. “How’s it going?” she asks once her feet are safely planted on the floor.

“Slow,” he replies. “I don’t have any resources, or data. What I really need are samples from the moon, or some other celestial object. Preferably both.”

She shakes her head. “We can’t be that far from orbit. We must maintain immediate access to Earth.”

He sighs, and throws up a holographic image of the planet. He points at it demonstratively. “There is—I think—a direct correlation between proximity to the surface, and magnitude of the suppression of our powers and enhancements.”

“Okay.”

He’s getting frustrated again. “Don’t you see? After you and Mateo survived the vacuum of space, we hypothesized that the suppression originated from the atmosphere, but I think it originates from somewhere on the ground, and now we’re too far away.”

“Okay.”

He sighs again. She knows exactly where he’s going with this, but she’s pretending to be on a different page. “To test this, I need to change orbit. We need to get farther from the hypothetical source on the surface. I think whatever it is is spreading some kind of aerosol through the air. The denser the air, the easier it is to spread.”

“Then you’re going in the wrong direction. What we need to do is send something all the way through the atmospheric levels, and gauge how the temporal energy fluctuates, if at all.”

Okay, he’s really frustrated now. “I need to do both. I need to know if it’s based on proximity alone, or the air.”

“We’ve already tested that. We’ve been all over the world, across thousands of kilometers. Now we’re only a few hundred kilometers away. Does anything change across our orbital path? Can you pinpoint a specific source, like a city, or an island?”

“No, I’m just trying to cover all of our bases.”

Now Leona is the one who sighs. “I’ve been saying that I want our team to be more of a democracy. I have made too many decisions as captain.” She contorts her face sarcastically, and puts the word in airquotes. “We voted, you lost.”

“You swayed the votes.”

“That’s what campaigning is, it’s not unethical!”

“You swayed them...as captain!”

“Arcadia, Vearden, and Cheyenne do not have the same sort of visceral reaction to my leadership as you and Marie do. I was never their captain.”

“Stop doing airquotes! Why are you doing that? You are the captain.”

“It’s a meaningless title that you all just bestowed upon me, because there was no one else around to do it. It’s your ship, you would be better suited, except you’re busy keeping it from blowing up, and killing us all.”

“It’s not meaningless. You didn’t get the position by default. You were born with those leadership skills. Everyone agrees with that, including Arcadia, Vearden, and Cheyenne. Stop selling yourself short. There’s a reason why normal ships aren’t democracies, because we don’t have time for that!”

“Why do we keep yelling compliments at each other!”

“Because I’m tired, but I don’t have time to sleep, because there’s too much to do, but I don’t have a real lab, because that’s not what the AOC is for!”

“You need a spacelab,” Leona notes quietly.

“I need a spacelab,” he echoes.

She nods. “Let me see what I can do.”

“What would you be able to do? We can’t make this ship any bigger.”

“Can’t we?” she asks rhetorically.

Ramses takes a beat to answer, but then does so seriously, “no, we can’t.”

“But can we?”

He waits a longer time this time. “No,” he repeats.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she paraphrases herself from before. “Anyway, I came down to show you what I’ve been working on. I’m a scientist too, if you’ll recall.”

He follows her up, but they have to pass through the main level first. The other four are staring at them. “Are mommy and daddy done fighting?” Arcadia asks.

“For now...” Leona replies mysteriously.

They continue up to the next level, where she opens the hatch to the airlock antechamber, and then the one for the airlock. Mateo is standing there with a smile.

“Is everything okay?” Ramses asks. “Those temporal energy injections are supposed to be for emergencies only.

“Everything is fine,” Mateo says. “I’m not really here, I’m a hologram.”

“Oh.” Ramses looks up at the holographic projects that Leona installed. “Cool.”

“It’s more than that.”

“I see that.” Ramses sees some objects that are not projectors. “What are those?”

“Magnetic field generators,” Leona replies. She places a hand on Mateo’s shoulder to demonstrate how he feels like a physical presence, instead of just light.

“A real life holodeck.”

“Yeah.”

“So this is more for you, wouldn’t you say?”

Leona takes a beat. “Yes.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 8, 2397

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Leona was frustrated to have to leave the blue dwarf, but one of their friends was out there, and they may really need their help right now. Besides, it would seem that traveling across realities could be easier than they thought before, so perhaps one day, they could return for her to study it. The truth was that she didn’t really need to study anything. Information on it was probably in a database somewhere, having been discovered long ago. She just wanted to live around it because of how crazy it was. The time to dwell on it was past, though. They were about to jump to another reality.

“We’re all synced up,” Ramses said, checking his Cassidy cuff. “Everybody ready?”

“Yeah.”

“Good to go.”

They jumped. It was as jolting as the last two times, but they knew what to expect this time, so they all landed on their feet. They were in a dark room. Men with suits immediately took them by the arms. “Sir, there’s more,” one of them said.

A man who was trying to walk out of the room turned around and sneered at them. “Bring ‘em too,” he instructed in a graveled voice.

“By order of Captain Waldemar Kristiansen, Eighth of Eight, you are being detained for questioning. You will be escorted to primary hock, where you will await further direction. Resistance will be met with fatal violence. Please, please...” he begged, “resist.”

While the members of the team were not capable of psychic communication, they could feel each other’s emotions, and there were other practical applications to this. When one of them began to teleport, the rest could feel that too. Ramses did this, not to escape, but to see everyone else’s reactions. Leona’s emotions indicated that they should not try to jump. They were presumably on a moving vessel, and they were unfamiliar with its layout. These substrates were designed to survive, so even if they ended up in the vacuum of space, it wouldn’t kill them. But unless they retained momentum, they would quickly fall out of range, and wouldn’t be able to return, so just for now, they would do as they were asked. The good news was that they could feel Angela. When the men dragged them out into the hallway, they could see her too, also being dragged towards hock.

The men carelessly pushed them into the cell. “Sorry for the poor accommodations,” one of them said after the others had walked away without a second thought. He used a sarcastic tone at first, but then he made sure his compatriots were out of earshot. “We’re just...kind of full right now. The ship wasn’t designed to hold so many political prisoners. Whoever you are, you have to find out how to get out of here. If even one more person gets arrested, they’re going to kill them. Or maybe they’ll kill the oldest prisoner, I don’t know. We just don’t have the space anymore, and no one wants to spend the resources keeping people like you alive. So tell them what they want to know, and be good. It will probably take them a week to get to your interrogation, so hopefully no one else will screw up.”

“Thank you,” Mateo said to the boy.

“Our cuffs,” Leona said simply.

The boy shook his head. “You’re not getting your devices back. Teleportation is illegal, and they’re going to assume that they contain subversive media.” He closed the door and left without another word.

“He may sound nice,” came the voice of a stranger in the cell with them, “but...he still works for him, and that was his choice.”

Leona stepped forward. “Captain Leona Matic of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”

“I know who you are. Those morons would have recognized you too if they spent a little more time in history class. My name is Kaison Summerling.”

“What are ya in for?” Ramses asked.

“Possession of subversive media,” Kaison explained. “I was once Captain. I stepped down due to accusations of nepotism, but now I wish I hadn’t, because I would not have selected Kristiansen as my successor. And he’s aware of that, so I’m public enemy number one.”

“This is Extremus, isn’t it?” Leona asked.

“It is,” Kaison confirmed.

“That ship from Gatewood that Omega created?” Mateo asked.

“He didn’t create it, but yes,” Leona said, “we were there when he showed up at the lounge to plant the seed of this idea. It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Kaison agreed. “Things are only going to get worse. Did they call the current captain Eighth of Eight in front of you?”

“They did,” Angela answered, not thinking much of it.

By the end of this mission, there are supposed to be eleven total—rest in peace, mother. Kristiansen doesn’t ever plan on stepping down. Of course, nobody knows that, or they would get rid of him. There’s only one reason they let you hear that that’s the plan.”

“They’re going to kill us anyway,” Mateo figured, having seen a movie in his life.

Kaison nodded. “This isn’t a hock; it’s a morgue.”

Leona began to pace. She pushed her feelings to the other three. They were just as unsure as her. “We might be able to help.”

Kaison sighed. “Oh, you definitely can. You could teleport us right out of here since it’s part of your biology, and not something that can be switched off by central control. Then you could rescue all the other prisoners, and help begin our revolution.”

“But you’re not going to let us do that,” Angela realized.

“It would only fuel their hate. A revolution is nothing without the people in revolt. If we all break out of here, he’ll argue that that’s all the more reason he should just kill every seditious actor. You’ll give him the best excuse ever to wipe us out.”

“We have to escape either way,” Mateo pointed out.

Kaison understood. “The four of you do, yep. I don’t know what you got going on, but I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that your roster isn’t complete.”

“How do we leave without causing you problems?” Leona asked.

Kaison crossed his arms, and thought about it. “How strong are you?”

“Pretty strong.”

“Strong enough to break down that door?” Kaison questioned.

They all looked to Ramses, the engineer of their bodies. He stepped over to the door, and tested out its integrity. “Yeah, with a little time. I mean, no one here is as strong as Superman, but it could be done. Why would we, though, if we can teleport?”

“That would cause us problems,” Kaison said. “I’m brewing a plan, but...”

“But we’re not gonna like it?” Mateo guessed.

“I don’t know you well enough to answer that, but I wouldn’t call it foolproof, and I sure wouldn’t say it’s safe.”

They waited until it was closer to midnight central before making their move, using the time to get a little rest, and fill Angela in on what she missed. Mateo and Angela started punching and kicking the door, occasionally looking out the little food opening to make sure no one was coming to stop them. As much as these security guys loved to arrest people, they weren’t very careful with them once it was done.

Leona was regarding Kaison as he watched them slowly break down the door. “You’re coming with, right?”

“I’m afraid I can’t.”

“If you tell us where on this ship is safe, we’ll get you there.”

“No. I either die a martyr, or I live long enough to help the cause. Running isn’t going to save my people. The former would be better than anything, but my guess is Kristiansen would keep my death quiet, as he’ll keep what happens today quiet. It’ll be too much of an embarrassment. The upside for us is he can’t use it as a justification to round up every dissenting voice.”

“Okay,” Leona said, knowing there was no point in trying to convince him.

“In fact, if you could knock me out cold, that would be great. I’ll make something up about trying to stop you. He won’t let me go, of course, but it could earn me a few brownie points. They might even let me have an e-reader.”

“Thank you...Captain Summerling.”

He laughed. “Not a captain. Maybe I’ll start going by General.”

“We’re out,” Mateo announced. They were one kick from breaking the latch.

Leona turned her head, and frowned. “Good luck with your revolution.” She reached back, and punched him in the jaw. Then she strode over to the door, and gave it the final kick before leading her team towards freedom.

According to Kaison, the hock was equipped with an airlock in the floor. It wasn’t a very good escape option for normal people, because there weren’t any spacesuits anywhere around here, but that was fine with them. They just needed to make it look good. He didn’t have anything to write with, so he did his best to describe the layout of Extremus, and told them where they could go.

They weren’t going to have much time. At reframe speeds, jumping out of an airlock was indeed going to do what they feared before. They would pretty much stay put while the ship continued on its journey faster than light. They weren’t exactly in hyperspace, but it did kind of operate like that. The warp bubble was wrapped tightly around the vessel. Leaving it meant losing momentum. Since they weren’t wearing their Cassidy cuffs anymore, they couldn’t sync up as they normally would. Leona was going to be in charge. She would control the teleportation, and the others would surrender to her mind’s decision, using their empathy to link their simultaneous jumps.

When the outer doors of the airlock opened, the air disappeared, but it didn’t suck them out. They were still standing above the opening, preparing themselves. Their nanites automatically placed themselves at action stations to keep their hosts alive. When Leona was ready, she pulled them all downwards, and out into the cold. Mateo smiled and waved at the camera recording them from the corner. Just as space was trying to sweep them away, Leona engaged teleportation, and delivered them to the safehouse.

It wasn’t so much a house as another darkened room. There wasn’t anything in it except for a bench along the wall, and an extraction mirror in the middle of the room. “Did he tell you this was in here?” Angela asked as she was admiring it.

“He said it was an extra bridge that they used to use to pilot the ship,” Leona answered. “I don’t think this is that. Like I said, teleportation is hard to navigate in an unfamiliar place. Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Mateo said. “There’s no one else here, we’re fine.”

“We still need to get our devices back,” Ramses pointed out, “but...I like this as our exit strategy.”

“Okay,” Mateo said. “You all stay here. I’m going to retrieve them for us.”

“No, we go together,” Leona demanded. “We promised each other.”

“It’s irrational for us all to get caught,” Mateo reasoned. “If anyone tries to get through that door, you go through that mirror. Can you do that for me? Can you save yourselves? Can you...not argue with me about it?”

Leona stared at her husband. “You heard where the evidence room is?”

“Yes.”

“Hurry back. And be quiet.”

“Stealthy is my favorite of the eight dwarves,” Mateo revealed.

He jumped, and to his surprise, he was exactly where he wanted to be. He was in the narrow aisle between two shelves. They were filled with tons of stuff, but mostly personal teleporters. He looked around for some semblance of organization, but could find nothing of the sort. Nothing was labeled, nothing was grouped. Everytime they confiscated something, they obviously just threw it wherever they found space. So he just started walking up and down. Nothing. He passed by another door, where he could see a woman sitting at a table. The dimensional traverser was sitting open on the table, and she was preparing to do the same thing to the friend detector. He opened the door. “Stop! What are you doing?”

“They asked me to figure out how these things work,” the woman answered.

Mateo picked up the lasso device. Wires and other parts were hanging out of it, and he knew he could never fix it himself. He shook it in her face. “I need to make sure every single miniscule part is here, whether it’s attached where it’s meant to be, or what.”

“It’s all there. Just...sorry.”

He peered over, and saw a chain around her ankle. “You’re a prisoner too.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know that I’m a survivor, and I can get you out.”

She stared at him a moment. She grabbed a toolbag, dumped out the tools, and swept all the parts of their devices into it. She reached out to him. “Let’s go.”

“You’re not leaving anyone you love behind?”

“No, he...he’s gone.”

Mateo reached down, and yanked the chain away from the table leg. Then he accepted the woman’s hand, and transported back to the extraction room.

“What the hell is this?” Ramses asked after Mateo handed him the bag.

“Can you fix it?” Mateo asked.

“In the next few minutes? No. Everything’s fine, it just...”

“It just what?” Angela asked.

“I could send a message across the dimensional barriers, but we won’t be able to cross over,” Ramses replied.

“What happens if we just wait a year?” Angela suggested.

“They’ll be waiting,” the woman contended. “They’ll have plenty of time to realize who you were, track your movements, and just be waiting for your return.”

“Besides,” Leona began, “we don’t have a cuff for her. Do you know where those are, by the way?”

“I didn’t see any cuffs,” the woman said apologetically. “I work on what they give me.”

“Don’t we have to wait until the next window opens up anyway?” Angela thought.

“Not technically,” Ramses said. “Before being taken apart, this thing could go whenever we wanted it to. We just wouldn’t necessarily be heading for a friend. It has to connect with the detector to accomplish that objective.”

“There’s a workaround,” Leona decided, looking at the mangled remnants of their device over Ramses’ shoulder. “Link it to the mirror. All you need is a portal, and that’s got one. Then you’ll have time to fix it permanently. Then we’ll go get the other two.”

“You can’t promise that,” Ramses said. “This ship has resources. We don’t know what we would be walking into.”

“We have to risk it.” Mateo placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder.

Ramses exhaled. “Okay, I’ll need your help, Lee-Lee.”

Mateo and Angela stood by while the other three got to work. The woman was just as smart and experienced as they were, and she noticed something. “Is this supposed to look like this?”

“Crap, that’s what I was afraid of. We’re running out of power.”

“By how much?” Mateo asked.

“We have one more jump,” Ramses determined. That was unacceptable. They had two friends missing. One more jump was not going to be enough. They had to find some kind of power source here, because there was no way to know whether they would be able to find one tomorrow. There had to be something on this ship...somewhere. Before anyone could come up with a solution, they were surrounded by a team of teleporting security officers.

“Uhhh...we don’t have time,” Mateo warned them. “Let’s just go through the mirror to any old place.”

“We don’t have time for that either,” Leona said.

“We can hear you.” It was the leader security guard from before; the one who sounded like he smoked. “You’re not going anywhere, except back to hock.”

They stood there frozen, not wanting to comply. The others could feel Ramses’ feelings, implying to them that they only needed to wait for midnight. It was all ready to go. They couldn’t just walk through the portal, though. These guys would shoot them as soon as they moved an inch. Except they never got the chance. One turned against the others, and shot them all dead before they could react. Then he took off his mask.

“Omega!” the woman cried, relieved.

“Come on, Valencia. Let’s let the nice people go home.”

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