Microstory 2772: Dasshutsu

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Flow text-to-video AI software, powered by Omni Flash 1.1

There is a natural atmosphere on Castlebourne, but it doesn’t have the right composition for human lungs. That’s why the owner built tens of thousands of domes, so each could contain its own atmosphere. The hunters knew the risks going into this plan, but they didn’t talk about it, because it was the only one they had. As soon as Elise clears the dome opening, she turns and follows the curve back down towards the surface.

They already picked out a rendezvous point. The desert where the rocket was buried is not on any map they’ve ever seen. It’s much smaller than a regular dome, which has a diameter of 83 kilometers. It’s situated between Bloodbourne and Tokyo 2077, and was supposedly built exclusively for this hunt. For whatever reason, the single escape pod always transports the designated survivor to Tokyo 2077, where they find themselves having to navigate their way back home using directions found hidden in the pod. Rage once tried to ignore them, and exit herself, but the target exit is the only way to reenter the normal dimension, instead of this Facsimile thing.

Elise and Colley fly through the airlock, where they inject themselves with an emergency baseline cocktail, which brings their body back to equilibrium after exposure. They walk through the tunnel where they catch up with the rest of the group, who have already found Rage sitting on the edge of the pod’s hatch, reading the instructions.

“Don’t you just remember where to go?” Jolanda asks her.

“The exit is in a different place every time,” Rage explains.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Minotaur presses. “If you’re going back in time, why would it move, unless Hrockas is aware that you’re doing it?”

“He may be,” Miracle explains, “but even if he’s not, Rage makes different decisions in different time loops, which affect how the hunt progresses, if only due to the butterfly effect. I don’t have to go over the butterfly effect, do I?”

When Rage shakes her head, she notices something. “We’re missing someone.”

“Zelda didn’t make it,” Elise answers solemnly. “I couldn’t carry both.”

Colley hangs his head low. “It should have been me.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Elise argues. “There were no good options.”

“There might be a way,” Miracle claims, “to get her back.”

“How?” Rage asks. “Is death just a form of time travel?”

Miracle chuckles. “No. But you have to understand that, in the world of time travel, if something ever exists, it always exists. We can get her mind back by stealing it from the past, and pulling it up to the present. We have to find Zelda’s body before it wakes up, though, because the Zelda we meet there will begin to be her own person, and blending their minds together is ethically tricky the longer we wait.”

“Well, I can’t read this,” Rage complains. “I’m starting to think that Hrockas is aware of my time travel. It’s always, always, always in Japanese, which is why I uploaded the language into my neural net, but now it’s in something else.”

Colley takes the paper from her, and studies it. “It is Japanese. It’s an old style called Kuzushiji; basically their form of cursive. They stopped using it nearly 700 years ago specifically because it was hard to read, and they wanted something standardized.”

“So we have to find someone to translate it,” Rage decides, snatching the document back. “It takes forever because people are assholes. I think that’s why this is Tokyo 2077, rather than 2050 or 2100. It was a complex time in Japan’s history. And the NPCs are just as modern as me, so now we need a scholar who studied this ancient form of writing, which will make it even harder. Zelda doesn’t have time for this!”

“It might actually be easier,” Colley reasons. “Scholars love history. If we go to the nearest university’s language department, they’ll probably be excited to see this.”

He was right. The Head of Linguistics is ecstatic to see the directions because he was programmed with a passion for dead languages. He agrees to transcribe it for them, but only into modern Japanese hiragana, and only if he gets to keep the document. That is absolutely fine. Once they know where to go, they won’t need anything else from it. Elise suggests that he start with the last step in case it’s the only one they need, and that turns out to be the right call. It saves them a ton of time. Rage has familiarized herself with the city enough to navigate. The problem was, the exit is in a bad neighborhood.

“Well, they’re all NPCs, right?” Elise asks. “One restriction when it comes to fighting is holding back so you don’t accidentally murder someone. But here, that doesn’t matter. We can go full force with anyone who attacks, and not feel bad.”

“It’s not that easy,” Colley contends. “Ambients are programmed to be reactive. If you fight harder, they fight harder. That’s why conventional wisdom says to use diversion combat methods, like aikido, or maybe judo. Try to deescalate the situation.”

“Again, Zelda doesn’t have time for that,” Rage argues, “and she didn’t teach us either of those things. I’m guessing you only know them academically.”

“Let’s just try not to make trouble, okay?” Minotaur suggests. “This isn’t a video game. A confrontation is not guaranteed to pass the level. We might be okay.”

Minotaur’s advice was sound but unfortunately inaccurate for their situation. They aren’t only in a dangerous part of town. They have to walk into a den of thieves, surrounded by people open-carrying firearms and underneath nude video billboards. While it’s true, they didn’t study the gentler martial arts, they do have an intuition for similar tactics, based on what they did practice with Zelda and Jolanda. The latter still being alive obviously takes point, but she isn’t able to handle all attackers on her own. Everyone has to participate, including kinder Colley. They keep moving as fast as possible to reach their exit. Luckily, there’s no final boss to destroy.

By the time they reach the door, they are all bloodied and bruised, but still breathing, and once they do open it, all the fighting ceases. The NPC criminals instantly begin to ignore them, and go on with their fake lives. So it is a little like a video game. Meanwhile, the hunters cross the threshold, through the magical dimensional portal, and back into the real world. They end up in the same basement, but it’s the polar opposite as it was before. It appears to be a school, or a childcare facility. They’re attacked again, but this time by a bunch of children gawking at the unusual strangers, who are mostly dressed in racing uniforms, and also one of them is a green moth.

Amidst all of this, they make their way back to the outer walls of the real Tokyo 2077 dome, get on the vactrain, and travel clear to the other side of the planet to The Terminal. This is where everyone who comes to this planet by casting their consciousness through the quantum network shows up. Every dome has its own highly secure vault of primary and backup substrates, and people have their own pods in their private residences. They don’t know where Zelda will end up, so this is the only place they can go to find out since it should store routing priority procedures in its database. This is the hard part, though. It’s time for a good old fashioned high-tech heist.

Microstory 2745: My Respect and My Friendship

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Flow text-to-video AI software, powered by Omni Flash 1.1

Pribadium and Sora retreat into the auxiliary control room because that’s the most interior sector of the base. It’s deep in the asteroid. The rest of it is slowly being torn apart by the tidal forces of the dimensional barrier collapse. They won’t be able to stay here forever, though. They need to come up with a plan. Or rather, she will have to come up with it, because as intelligent as Sora is, he doesn’t know much about this stuff.

“Can you freeze time?” he suggests.

“Freeze time?” she echoes.

“Yeah. Just to give you more time to think of a permanent solution. I saw that in a TV show once. The ship was about to be destroyed by a big laser so they created a time bubble. I think they spent something like fifty years in there, which for people like me, is a long time, but that’s barely a blip for someone like you. Is that possible?”

Pribadium thinks about it. Yes, of course it’s possible. She is a time scientist. The problem is, what she needs is not in this room. This controls the lab itself. It doesn’t have any time tech in it. The main time lab is presently under siege. “It will be dangerous. It may already be destroyed. We’ll be jumping blind.” She offers her hand.

He takes it without hesitating, letting her teleport them both to the lab.

The walls are buckling. Particulates are falling from the ceiling. The tremors make it impossible for Sora to stay on his feet. She only can because of her advanced substrate. While he lies down on the floor and braces himself, she teeters over to the workstation and starts running through the process. It’s too long, it’s taking too long. She should have imagined this could happen, and been better prepared.

Just as the airlock buckles and bursts open, the bubble engages, preventing the air from escaping, and saving their lives. She dives down to make sure Sora’s okay.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he assures her. He stands and looks at the hole. “It worked.”

“Sort of,” Pribadium says. “In my rush, I didn’t set the differential to be wide enough. For every minute that passes, a second passes out there. We probably only have about half an hour before this sector collapses too. I can’t raise the differential now. I would have to cancel it and start again. And if you were thinking about transporting the bubble back to the aux room, that’s not possible either. I only delayed the inevitable.”

“I wasn’t seriously suggesting we spend fifty years in here,” he explains. “You’re a genius, and if this is the main time lab, I’m sure you have everything you need to figure it out. Thirty minutes should be more than enough. I believe in you.”

Pribadium takes a deep breath, appreciating what he’s saying. It’s at least not so dire, but as she looks around, she’s seeing all the damage. All of her tech is lined up against the walls for feng shui reasons. The time machine, the time reverser, even the dimensional generators; they were all decimated prior to their arrival. There’s just nothing that will—the timechairs. They’re in the middle of the floor, intact. She looks over at him with sad eyes. “Our only hope is to send our consciousnesses back to their younger bodies. The only safe place is in the past. This timeline is defunct.”

“That will undo all of this,” he determines. “Runaway and Sugar will never exist.”

“No, they will,” Pribadium contends. “They left the universe entirely, which permanently protects them from timeline collapses. They’ll still be out there, and if they ever return, they will find the new timeline, but...what will that timeline look like?”

He offers her his hand like she did before. “Let’s go find out...together.”

Microstory 2633: Riding the Blinds

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Gemini Pro text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3.1

It’s the year 2424, and the trip to Castlebourne will take 108 years, because it is 108 light years away, and the ship will be able to travel at just under light speed. Due to special relativity, however, it will only feel like a couple of months for anyone on the ship. That preposition is more appropriate for Mandica than for anyone or anything else. They will actually be inside of it while she’ll be on the outside, like a parasite.

“That’s not the right term,” her pilot argues. “It makes it sound like you’re hurting the ship. I promise, it won’t even notice you. You’re not a parasite, it’s...” He trails off as he looks it up on his device. “Phoretic. You’re a phoresy. Yeah, that sounds better.”

“You literally called the pod The Barnacle,” Mandica argues.

“It’s a joke,” he defends.

“That hat is a joke,” she snaps back. She knows, she shouldn’t be so mean.

“Uh, it’s a trilby, and it’s what we call retro-stylish,” he boasts.

“All right, Trilby.” She notices that he seems to like that nickname. “Tell me how this works so I don’t vaporize myself in the middle of interstellar space.”

Trilby literally pulls back the curtain to show the little pod that she’ll be in. It looks like the inside of a nutshell, but only half of it. There is no other half. This will evidently be sealed against the hull, so the hull acts as the fourth wall, and if that seal ever breaks, she’ll be exposed to the vacuum of outer space. “Okay. You’ll have to be in your Integrated Multipurpose Suit when we begin, helmet and all. You can hold onto these handles so you don’t slip off. Of course, you’ll be tethered, but if you slip out during the process, the seal will snap that tether, and you’ll start to float away.”

“Got it. Hold on tight.”

“Right,” he agrees. “Once it’s sealed, I wouldn’t unseal it until you reach your destination, or you’ll be screwed. It can be resealed, but you would have to keep your grip on it for that to work, so just don’t do it. There’s no door. You can only get out by detaching from the hull. I assume you’re halfway decent with computers. Everything you need is on this console, and it will interface with your suit. It has its own powersource, but it’s minimal, so I suggest you let it siphon from the arkship. Don’t worry, it’s a small pod, and you’re only one person, so the power draw will be well within the margin of error. As long as you don’t do anything crazy, you won’t be detected.”

“Can I take my helmet off in transit, or even my suit?”

“Helmet off should be fine. This thing has its own climate control. I would leave the suit on most of the time, however. If you do remove it, do it in short bursts to let your body breathe, but don’t fall asleep like that, or anything. It’ll be a tight seal, but I won’t be there to fix any issues. It will all be up to you.” He lifts a flap on the end of the console. “Here’s a copy of the operator’s manual, in paper form. There’s obviously a virtual version of it, but this is just in case. He opens a small cupboard. It also has dayfruit growers, but I could only fit four of them, so you’ll want to supplement with the meal bars below it, and your dayfruit smoothie in your Portable Resource Unit. I don’t remember how long regular humans can go without food, so rationing will be up to you. Just be careful and pay attention to your supplies.”

Mandica sighs and looks over her little lifeboat. “Any exercise equipment? I’ve actually never been to space before today, and I spent most of the time hiding in that shipping container. But I hear that we regular humans have trouble with zero-g over long periods of time. I assume I’m subject to the inertial dampeners, or I simply wouldn’t survive high relativistic speeds at all anyway.”

Trilby nods. “The pod will leech from the inertial dampeners, but it’s weird because of how it attaches.” He points to some of the controls. “You’ll be able to tune it, however. If you just turn this dial, it will lower the effects slightly, allowing you to make the back of the pod down. Don’t be scared of it, you will not be able to turn your private dampeners so far down that you splatter against the wall. And this isn’t even the wall. Think of it as the floor. See? Here’s your bed.” He slides the bed lid away. Because of this little shuttle’s own inertial dampeners, it looks like the bed is up against the wall, but that will change once she’s attached and on the move. “You can still do exercise. Your suit has a number of programs built in, which you can peruse yourself. Just be sure to narrow the results to close-quarters, or it may try to get you to run away.”

Mandica nods repeatedly. She’s growing quite nervous. It was bad enough when he snuck her onto the space elevator, but now she will be completely alone. If this fragile thing pops off, and she manages to survive that, she won’t be able to get into the ship. She won’t be able to ask for help. Even in an emergency—even if she’s willing to get caught—the arkship may be fully automated, and help may be difficult. Some bots don’t respond to black swan events. They won’t know how to respond to her pleas. And she’s not going to ask this guy if there will be any intelligence present, because nothing should go wrong at all. She will be tucked away safely for two months, and be free of Core World rule forever. She doesn’t hate the establishment, but she wants to remove herself from it, and this is the only way. She can’t afford the energy credits for anything else.

“It’s gonna be okay,” Trilby says to her.

“Have you done this before?”

“Not this exact thing, but I’ve tested the barnacle pod. It will work, as long as you treat it right, and don’t push the wrong buttons.”

“No pressure,” she says.

He takes a chance and places a hand upon her shoulder. “You’ll do well.”

She doesn’t know him, but he’s been helping her, and risking a lot to do it, so she decides to go for it and give him a hug. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He looks over at his screen. “We’re comin’ up on it. Remember what I taught you, and for everything else, rely on your survival instincts. Digitized people don’t have those anymore, but yours will know what to do. Better put on your other two IMS layers, but first, fix your inner layer. You have it on backwards. The autozipper goes in back. Let me know when you’re ready. I have to seal the bulkhead before I open the airlock, but we’ll be able to talk on comms. I’ll stay with you until I get out of range myself, or the arkship launches, and you speed away in a flash.”

“All right.” She puts her suit all the way on, and tethers herself to the barnacle pod. He opens the airlock, and lets the pod drift out for a little bit before seizing it with his grabber claws. He maneuvers the barnacle in front of his shuttle as he makes his approach. She wants to close her eyes, but that would just be unsafe, so she watches. She looks around for any cameras, drones, or lurking spacewalkers. No one. No one will know she’s here. The claws push the pod forward, and automated systems automatically latch on. The vacuum seal engages until she’s fully secure. They spend the next few hours getting to know each other better before the arkship powers up and flies away.

Microstory 2350: Vacuus, May 18, 2179

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google ImageFX text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 3

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

« < » > Table of Contents

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

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.

« < » > Table of Contents

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: February 27, 2399

« < » > Table of Contents

Generated by Canva text-to-image AI software

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

« < » > Table of Contents

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

« < » > Table of Contents

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

« < » > Table of Contents

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.”