The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 2, 2515

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The team was sitting around their table. It was the end of the engagement party, and only a few people were still around. Darko was in the middle of a seemingly flirtatious conversation with one of the android waitresses whose self-awareness and agency were in question. Mateo was about to ask if there was any way of determining whether she could provide consent when a black hole suddenly appeared on the opposite wall. A woman stepped out who looked moderately familiar. The first words out of her mouth were, “okay, I’ll do it, but I want something in return.”

“What?” Leona questioned. “Were we in the middle of a conversation? You’ll do what for us? Who are you again?”

“I’m Magnolia Quintana?” she reminded them. “The Overseer?”

“Oh, right, yeah, we met,” Leona remembered. “Is there an operation here, or something? This is just Party Central.”

“Yes, if this is where you’re gonna have the wedding,” Magnolia said. She looked around the room. “Little small.”

Leona did her best impression of Mr. Spock’s eyebrows. “We’re gonna have it outdoors, and not tonight, and...this is only one room in an entire city of party venues.”

Magnolia pulled out an old fashioned pen and notepad set. She took notes out loud. “Okay. Outdoors. Party Central. At least one year to plan.”

“Are you offering to be our wedding planner?” Olimpia questioned.

“Not offering,” Magnolia said. “Got the job. Very excited. Already have some great ideas rolling around up here.” She tapped her head with her pen.

“Madam Quintana,” Mateo began. “We were just gonna plan this ourselves. It’s not gonna be as big as our last wedding. Only family and close friends.”

Magnolia dropped her hands in disappointment, and sighed. “I need your help.” She was very uncomfortable. “I obviously need you more than you need me.”

“Well, we might be able to just help you,” Leona offered. “You don’t have to do anything for us. What do you need?”

“I need you to find my son,” Magnolia requested, averting her gaze awkwardly. “I can find anyone in the world, but he shares the same gift, which makes him a blindspot. I know he’s in this time period, but I don’t know where. Honestly, because so many planets have become habitable now, the Great Pyramid Shimmer actually serves a meaningful purpose, so he might not even be on Earth anymore.”

“Is he in trouble?” Romana asked.

Magnolia hesitated to answer. “He’s...mad at me. I just want the chance to apologize. I think he’ll be receptive if I say the right thing, but I have to find him first.”

“Well we can’t really find people,” Leona tried to explain. “I’m sure you’re asking us because you have been made aware of our slingdrives, but they don’t operate on magic. We have to know where we’re going. We’re no better equipped than you with your, uhh...”

“Hither-thithers,” Magnolia finished for her. “That’s what our dark portals are called. And I didn’t come for your slingdrives. I can harness Shimmer myself, and go anywhere he might be. I need his dark particle power to track his location.”

“Not that I won’t agree to that,” Mateo started, “but you just used a special word. Have you not reached out to a genuine Tracker, like Vidar Wolfe?”

“They have the same limitation as me. We can conceal ourselves from such people. I believe that you are the only person in the universe who can see through the shroud.”

“All right.” Mateo wiped his lips with his napkin, then dropped it down on the table. “I’ll see what I can find.” He leaned over and kissed his wife, then leaned over the other direction to kiss his bride.”

“Wait, we have your bachelor party after this,” Ramses reminded him. They decided to get all the traditions out of the way, so the separate celebratory events are falling on the same day as the engagement party, instead of being spread out across 12 to 18 months. Leona will have her doe party, and Olimpia will have a separate bachelorette party. They’ll then reconvene for a bridal shower. A bit out of order, but who cares? “Or no, we’re calling it a bull party.”

“Come with us,” Mateo suggested. “Hey, Darko!” This was Mateo’s chance to not worry about what an encounter with the android would mean, ethically speaking. “Time traveling bull party!”

“I’m in!” his once-brother exclaimed. He turned back to the waitress. “Catch you later, gorgeous.”

“I shouldn’t go with you,” Magnolia decided. “I have some initial work to do to plan your wedding, and Garland may still want me to stay away. I don’t wanna ambush him, so if you could, please tell him that I’m sorry, and ask him if he wants to see me. If he doesn’t, I’ll understand, and I’ll trust that you did find him, and are telling me the truth either way.”

Mateo nodded. “Don’t break your back planning, though. It’s gonna be intimate and low-key. Thanks!”

“No. Thank you.” She was a little too mousy and contrite for someone called The Overseer. This whole thing with her son must really be messing her up. And that wasn’t how she came across a few minutes ago when she first arrived. Maybe she didn’t realize how receptive to her request they would be, and decided to rein in her energy after the deal was done.

The three men stood next to each other in a vague line, and regarded the women still sitting at the table. “Three to beam up.” Dark particles swarmed around them, and sent them away to unknown lands.

As the darkness faded away, the nature of their destination twisted into focus. “Oh, not again,” Ramses groaned. They appeared to be in the middle of a tundra. It wasn’t Tundradome, though. It couldn’t have been. They were standing in what must have been a park, or a town square. There were buildings on all sides of them in the middle distance. This was some kind of city. People were milling about, enjoying the day. No one seemed to have noticed their arrival until they turned all the way around to see a young man sitting on a bench.

He did not have a look of shock on his face, but minor annoyance. “I put a time block on this world,” he said. Still nettled, he closed the cover over his e-reader, and set it down next to him. “No one else should be able to come through. Now I have to check the wards.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Mateo tried to explain. “My power is a bit of an exception. I doubt anyone else can come here if you did anything to prevent them.”

“Who would want to?” Ramses jabbed.

“For that.” The young man looked up towards the sky with his eyes as he pointed with a finger.

It took them a moment to possibly figure out what was going on. Scale was a bit hard to determine with this out-of-context problem. It looked like a ceiling of ice that stretched all the way across in every direction, down to the horizon. The fractures and imperfections glimmered in the light from the ground, and maybe even from above as well? Vaguely-shaped circular blobs were hanging in the background, perhaps pulsating, or perhaps they were only illusions. This whole thing might have been a hologram, but it was a good one; reminiscent of something they might find on Castlebourne. Had this frustrated stranger not claimed to be somehow preventing others from traveling here, they might have guessed that it was indeed one of the domes on Castlebourne, which they just so happened to have never heard of before.

“Wait, wait,” Darko began. “I think I’ve heard of this. Epsi...Epson...”

“Epsilon Eridani,” Ramses said. “Roughly eleven light years from Earth. No habitable planet, but a gas giant like Juputer, and a couple of ice giants, similar to Neptune.”

“We’re orbiting the gas giant, AEgir,” the stranger added. “This moon is called Kólga. The surface is inhospitable, so they built a giant hanging city-structure, attached to the ice. What you’re seeing up there is several hundred meters of ice, followed by the daytime sky, in which we can currently see both AEgir and E-E.”

“Where are our manners?” Mateo extended his hand. “Mateo Matic, Darko Matic, and Ramses Abdulrashid.”

“Married or related?”

“Brothers across different timelines,” Darko clarified. “You’ve never heard of us? You’ve never heard of Team Matic?”

“I try to stay out of the whole time travel industry. That’s why I came here. People keep to themselves. They’re as immortal as anyone, but they don’t want to explore. They don’t want to learn. They don’t want to build worlds. They just want to live their lives day by day, century by century. They don’t ask questions, and without them even knowing it, I protect them from the likes of you. I try anyway.”

“We’re not here to cause trouble. We’re just looking for our friend’s son, who we are guessing is you?” Mateo asked.

He nodded. “Garland Dressler. She sent you to take me back to her?”

“No pressure,” Mateo said to him. “She says she wants to apologize. I don’t know what for. I don’t need to know. You don’t have to come with us. If you want us to leave, we will.”

Garland sighed. “You might as well stay a while. You look like you’re in the party mood, and there’s one down the street tonight.”

The three of them looked at each other, narrowing in on Darko, who was wearing a glow necklace that was inert when they came here, but was now twinkling, probably triggered by the time travel event. They were supposed to be partying.

“I’ll think about whether I wanna go back or not,” Garland went on.

“Let’s go get chocolate wasted!” Ramses suggested. He literally started running towards the street.

“Other direction!” Garland called up to him.

Ramses didn’t stop running. He just teleported to the other side of them, and started moving that way instead.

“Do you have a jacket?” Darko asked as the rest of them followed Ramses at a normal pace.

“It’ll be warmer inside,” Garland promised.

They had to call Ramses back again when he passed the entrance to the party venue, but once inside, they had a lot of fun. The other residents took no issue with shifting focus of the festivities to being more about Mateo and his upcoming nuptials. They didn’t go there with a particular reason to party in the first place, so it wasn’t like they were stealing attention from someone else. Garland had been a little inaccurate about why he came here, and didn’t let anyone else. He didn’t only want to protect the Kólgans from time travel, but also to have them all to himself. He was the life of the party, opening up hither-thithers left and right. He helped party-goers throw sports balls at their own asses as fast as possible. He let one guy fall down an endless loop of portals on the ceiling and the floor. Mateo wowed them with a swarm of dark particles before he and Ramses entertained with a holographic lightshow. Darko met a man with combat training, so they sparred in the middle of the floor as the crowd cheered.

They would find out later that the chocolate they were eating was laced with some kind of local drug, which Garland didn’t even know about. They reawoke at some point later with no memory of how the night ended up, but they had some clues to work with. First, they were not likely on Kólga anymore as it was pretty hot here. Secondly, Darko was missing. And finally, passed out next to them was the last person they expected to find. He actually looked rather peaceful there, and they didn’t get the sense that there was any lasting animosity between them. It was Bronach Oaksent.

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Microstory 1884: Transience

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Transient Retrograde Amnesia is what they call it. I can’t remember how long I’ve had it, or what caused it. And that’s not an amnesia joke. I can’t remember, because I’ve been suffering from it for a long time, and I just happen to not recall that far back in the past. Lots of people have that kind of poor memory without it being a symptom of some larger issue. Most of the time, I’m normal. I know who I am, and what I’ve done. I can form new memories, and I know whether I left the proverbial stove on. Of course, I don’t own a stove, on account of those periods of time when I don’t remember a thing. Sometimes I wake up, and I have no memory at all. It doesn’t always occur when I literally wake up, but that’s what it feels like; like everything that happened to me before was a dream that disappeared from my mind in a flash. I know stuff did indeed happen, but mostly probably because it must have happened, since I know that adults don’t just suddenly come into being. I know this, because my memory condition doesn’t affect semantic memory, which is the kind that tells me what an adult is, and what a baby is, and what words to use to describe them. My problem is all about events, plus the most basic information about myself. I can’t tell you my name, or what kind of upbringing I had, for instance. Even the most recent of things are gone. I don’t know where I am, or how I got there. When the attack is over, it all comes flooding back to me, including the time I spent in that state. So I remember how fearful and anxious I become each time. I’m talking about this like it’s in the present, but I’m happy to say that I’ve not had an attack in over a year, whereas before, it would happen nearly every day.

Like I said, I don’t own a stove. It’s not worth the risk to be out in the world when I could lose it all without warning. Medical professionals of all sorts have tried to figure out what prompts an attack. Is it stress? Fear? Reminder of a past trauma? There seems to be no link between them. There’s no temporal connection either; it happens at all times of the day. As far as anyone has been able to discern after studying me for decades, it’s completely random and unpredictable. So I live in a facility, where others take care of me, even while I don’t need it. That’s the most humiliating part. I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself, but they won’t let me do anything. I can’t blame them. I once had an attack while I was holding a knife. It was quite obvious that I was cutting vegetables with it, but my father was in the room, and I thought he could have been a threat. So over the years, little by little, my privileges have been taken away. It’s for my safety as much as anyone else’s. Again, I’m not going to forget what a knife is, or how it works, or which end is the hazardous one, but I obviously can’t be trusted with it anyway. In a way, I’m relieved that my body has been failing me recently. When you’re bedridden, and it’s difficult to move, people have to wait on you anyway. It feels natural now, expecting the nurse or orderly to come in and feed me, or take my vitals. That’s what they’re supposed to do, and they do it for everyone who lives long enough to die like this. It’s almost over now anyway. My spirit has pulled itself away from my body. I’m hovering over it, looking down at myself like it’s not me anymore, because it’s not. The man left on the bed is looking around, confused and lost. He doesn’t remember a thing. I can’t believe I’m witnessing my last attack as a ghost. I keep watching, knowing the other me can’t hurt himself, and that it won’t be long before he’s dead too.

Microstory 1014: Gertrude

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My name is Gertrude Feldt, of the Blast City Feldts, or so they tell me. I’m kidding. I actually do remember who I am, and much of my childhood, but the closer you get to the incident, the hazier it is. I remember virtually nothing from the last few years of my life. The doctors called that the robot’s law for Mercury retrograde amnesia, or something. I wasn’t really paying much attention. Anyway, I was apparently there when Viola died. They tell me she and I were pretty good friends, and we liked to hang out by Masters Creek, but that must have been a fairly recent development. It’s funny that, uhh...was it Rolof who told you to start with the classmates who knew her the least? Sorry, I’m still relearning names. I knew most of these people when we were younger, but I was kind of in my own world back then, and didn’t have the inclination to memorize my contemporaries. So yeah, I might be able to tell you less than anyone else can, even though apparently I was part of that whole group. The others people in that clique haven’t spoken much to me. Wanda’s been the nicest, but even she’s rather distant with me. If I had my memories, I might be offended by this all, but it means so little to me now. When I first woke up, I was confused and belligerent. I was getting over some pretty bad physical trauma, of course, so I wasn’t capable of thinking clearly. Once all that passed, and the pain started subsiding, though, life became clearer. Not a single memory has returned from the threshold since then, but I’ve fully recovered emotionally. I truly don’t care about those memories. Sure, it would be nice if I could answer the sheriff’s huge array of questions about what went down that day—maybe give the Woods family a little closure—but other than that, I’m great. I feel like I can start fresh, and I don’t even know why. What am I missing? What events unfolded in my life that defined me, and what I became, and what am I without them? I’m still Gertrude Feldt, right? Right? Who else might I be? I have all the knowledge I learned in school all this time, even though I don’t recall the moments I learned them. I have all the skills I grew up with, and all my credentials. I have a caring family who have been rockstars in the face of this adversity, and I have several prospects for colleges. Do not misunderstand me, I wouldn’t recommend losing your memory, because again, what am I missing? Did I experience something so phenomenally beautiful, and unique to me, that I will never get back. Did my former self know the loving touch of another woman, but that woman has not taken the opportunity to tell me about it, and no one else knows? Could it have been Viola? Could we have been closer than anyone else realized, and could that have played a part in her ultimate demise? Could it have even been the driving force behind the terrible crime? As freeing as I’ve considered my new reality, these questions you’re making me ask are really bumming me out. Thanks, Alma, for the positively depressing wake up call. Maybe it’s exactly what I need. You seem to know me so well, but I don’t remember a thing about you. Were you and I friends as well?

Microstory 681: A Lost Man Made to Remember

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Few illnesses in the modern day are incurable. Fate—or The Darkness, if you prefer—seemed to think that this was an unfortunate condition, and so it came up with an entirely new class of medical issues. We call them quantum diseases, and they only inflict people who have, to varying degrees, merged themselves with technology. Any standard human can be treated to near a hundred percent health using medical techniques that we’ve had for centuries. It would be hard to find out which was the last disease medical science has cured. We keep encountering new ones, like when we travel to new worlds, but we even make quick work of those. Quantum diseases are different, however, in that they are the blending of biological pathogens, and computer viruses. There is treatment for some of these conditions, but not many have been cured, because no machine built yet is capable of calculating curative scenarios. Even if such technology did exist, the data necessary to rebuild whatever has been lost from any given disease may be long gone. One man, named Meliton Rete recently experienced an extremely rare disorder called episodic quantum amnesia, also known as EQUA. Doctors first discovered EQUA two decades ago when the first case presented itself on a transhuman-run asteroid orbiting Arithmi called Feulon, after its founding family. Data is often corrupted when attempting to transfer a subject’s consciousness into some other substrate, which is something often done on Feulon. Most of the time, this data can be recovered, and the process can be restarted. In other cases, there is not so much a corruption as the data simply disappears without a trace. Now, this sort of thing happens in the natural world all the time. Particles blink in and out of existence periodically, and we still don’t really know how, or why. Since consciousness transference is only practical using quantum computers, however, this phenomenon can sometimes have an effect on consciousness uploading, which is just one danger of such practices. Meliton Rete was faced with this truth while trying to upgrade to a new body. He was left the shell of a man, with no memory of who he was, or what he had been through. Like most quantum diseases, there is no cure for EQUA, because no one knows where the information disappears to. Even if its path could somehow be found, it will have by then lost its cohesion, and become randomly spread across spacetime. As a miracle, nonetheless, this is what happened, on its own. As if by magnets, Meliton’s memories suddenly returned to his original substrate, which he had been stuck with in a care facility for the last several years. He could remember everything that ever happened to him, with even greater accuracy than he ever had before. No one knows how the memories came back to him, or where they had been this whole time. Some believe they were never really gone, but instead skipped through the timestream, returning to their origin as if they had never left. With these memories came his ideas and notions, some of which would help us find the best ways of achieving the next taikon in the list.

Microstory 572: Amnesia Patients Receive Erroneous Memory Infusions

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When then-President of Development at Sikie International Knowledge Insights Enterprises. stood before a press conference, he promised us one thing; the cure for all memory-related neurological disorders within ten years. That was five years ago, and it has recently come to the attention of the authorities that this is a promise Sikie will not be able to fulfill. The board of directors, according to documentation recovered by SDS detectives, has been acutely aware of this fact for at least a year, however. In response to this problem, they redirected resources towards a new strategy. They decided to refocus all efforts on one singular technomedical advancement: memory infusions. By aggregating data from medical histories, correspondence, criminal reports, second-hand accounts and other anecdotal evidence, along with many other resources, Sikie believed that memories could be reconstructed and implanted in the damaged brain. They believed that the brain simply possessing the verifiable evidence of past events could be enough for that brain to fill in the gaps, and possibly even restore the actual memories hidden away in broken neural connections.

Historically, amnesia patients, for instance, have been told about who they are. They meet their loved ones, and are shown photographic evidence of their adventures together, with the hope that something will spark their memories. Sikie’s new process was an attempt to expand on this by actually inserting these data into the neurosubstrate itself, thereby allowing the brain to absorb that information physically. Unfortunately for Sikie, and its early program testers, this method does not work. At best, patients possess a distant understanding of these ‘memories’ but no emotional attachment to them, as if recounting nothing more than a fictional narrative. At worst, the process further damaged the patient neurologically, leading to a life of even less quality than they had before. It is for this reason that a second round of testing was ordered, but with even more unethical parameters. Recorded data is supplemented by the transferred memories of others. Without their reasoned consent, the brains of the patient’s loved ones were scanned. Their memories were then extracted, and inserted into the patient’s brain. The hope was that the memories of their events together, coupled with the original data, would create an even clearer picture of their time together, and these memories will enrich other memories through a snowball effect. Of course, this method did not work either, leaving patients with altered perceptions, and dissociative disorders. They no longer felt like themselves, but a horrific amalgamation of other people they knew. So far, only ground floor researchers have been arrested by the SDS, but an investigation into everyone who possibly knew what was going on the department is presently underway.

Rogue Possession: Nightmares (Part I)

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Armed guards carelessly pulled Mateo Matic and Gilbert Boyce down the dirty compound hallway. They dragged them down the steps and threw them in their glass cage like lemurs at a zoo. The two of them decided to not speak to each other. Anything they said would definitely be used against them later, and it wasn’t worth it. They quietly sat next to each other and privately wondered what was going to happen to them. Hours later, Gilbert’s nemesis, Horace Reaver strutted in with this weird platter of finger food.

Reaver dropped the platter on the ground. “You guys like turkey?” he asked in an unsettlingly jovial voice.

“You have us now,” Mateo said with a hoarse voice. They hadn’t been given any water, and the dry Australian heat was taking a massive toll on their bodies. The fact that they now had food, but still no water, was proof that Reaver was just toying with them. “Let Leona go.”

“Oh, she’s fine,” Reaver replied dismissively. “She’s staying in a six-star resort with air conditioning and television. It’s my ol’ buddy, Gilly who you should be worried about.”

“Worried why?” Gilbert asked, knowing right away that he would not be happy with any answer.

“Because you don’t matter,” Reaver explained before shooting him in the forehead.

Gilbert freaked out, struggled with the sheets, and got himself out of bed. He stumbled along the floor a little before resting against the wall.

“What the hell was that?” someone screamed.

Gilbert tried to rub the pain out of his head while he was standing back up. “I have no idea. I also don’t know where I am.”

The woman waved her head in the air and activated the lamp on the nightstand. “You’re home. Everything’s fine. Were you having a nightmare?”

Gilbert looked around the unfamiliar room. “Since when has this been my home?”

“Uhh...” the woman said, trying to remember. “Since 2048. May, I think it was.”

Gilbert took a deep breath and instinctively placed his hands on his chest, only to find a pair of breasts. “This can’t be a dream.”

The woman smiled and looked at him seductively. “Oh, believe me, sweetheart. Those puppies were always my dream.”

“What’s my name?”

“Are...are we role-playing?”

“Yeah, sure, what’s my name?”

“Okay, umm...how about Gaia Neptune?”

“No, what’s my real name?”

“How is that role-playing?”

“We’re role-playing that I have amnesia.”

She stared at him for a few moments. “That doesn’t sound very fun.”

Gilbert stared at her for a few moments. “Please.”

“Rebecca—” she tried to begin.

“Rebecca what?”

“Rebecca!”

“Rebecca what!”

“Halcyon.”

“And you are?”

“Judy Schmidt. Yeah, I was right. This isn’t fun at all.”

He took another deep breath and went over to the mirror. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to know who this woman thought he was before trying the mirror. It just made sense. Maybe he thought it would make the situation easier to understand. It didn’t. Looking back at him in the reflection was a beautiful twentysomething, apparently named Rebecca Halcyon. He repeated the name in a whisper.

“Honey? Are you okay? You’re kinda scaring me now.”

Gilbert briefly looked down at Judy, but then went back to admiring his new body in the mirror. “Let’s have salmon for dinner tomorrow,” he said using Rebecca’s voice.

“That’s not funny,” Judy said.

Gilbert turned all the way around and sat on the edge of the bed. “So you know what I’m talking about?”

She shook her head, not as a negative response, but because she couldn’t believe he was saying these things. “Your...trips. That’s what the others call you. Yes, I know what you’re talking about. Did something happen? Is it affecting your memory, or something? I knew we should have gone to some doctor.”

Gilbert peered at Judy, wondering whether he should speak to her delicately, or just not give a crap about her feelings. “So you also know that there are other people like me.”

“Other time travelers, yes. You’ve mentioned them, and you say you get the feeling there are many more you’ve never met, but you’ve come across a few. Please...tell me what’s wrong.”

“Have I ever mentioned anyone that can jump into other people’s bodies?”

“You mean like Quantum Leap?”

He was pleased with her familiarity with the show. “Yes! Just like that.”

“No, no of course you...” she trailed off and became lost in her own thoughts. Then she pulled away as much as she could and tried to cover up with the sheets. “Are you not Rebecca?”

“I’m afraid not,” Gilbert answered honestly.

She started crying and looking around, either for a weapon, or a way out.

“But I’m not going to hurt you. This is all new to me. I mean, I know other time travelers, I just...I’m not supposed to be one. Last thing I remember, I was in a cell, and Reaver was pointing a gun at me. Then I heard a shot. Judy, he shot me.”

She was not any less scared than she had been before.

“He shot me in the head. What a dick! But then...now I’m here.”

“What happened to Rebecca?”

“I have no idea. Maybe she’s in my body. No, because then she would be dead.”

That didn’t help with Judy’s fear.

“Oh, don’t you cry,” Gilbert nearly scolded. “I’m the one who should be crying. I’m the one who was just murdered.” Quickly changing the topic, he asked, “is it April 27, 2051?”

“It’s the 28th,” she said through her tears.

“So I didn’t jump here immediately. There was a latent period. But why, where was I?” He stood back up and found his truth. “Okay. I’m sorry that I caused you so much pain. I assure you that I meant you no harm, and that I will leave, if possible. I’m going to try to jump out of your wife’s body. If it works, in a few seconds you’ll have your Rebecca back, and she will be as scared as you are right now.” He closed his eyes to concentrate.

When he reopened them seconds later, he was outside.

“Octavian!”

For a second, he couldn’t move. It would seem that each jump came with some kind of side effect. Hopefully it would soon wear off. Hopefully it would soon wear off. But he was rather pleased with how relatively easy it was to jump into other people’s bodies. He didn’t even have to be taught by a wise old man, or something like that.

“Octavian, can you hear me?”

“What?” Gilbert asked, instantly feeling ready to slip into his new role.

“Gun or knife?”

“Um...whichever one you...don’t...want.”

“You know that I prefer knives.”

“Great.”

“Just like you. What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m just not feeling myself today. I’m fine.” Gilbert wasn’t fine, though. When he first leapt into the body of Rebecca, it made him feel different. He looked at the world differently; more optimistically. He felt happier and more comfortable, and he even felt a level of love for Judy, even though he had never met her. He was now starting to suspect that leaping into the body of someone else causes one to adopt certain characteristics of their personality. This Octavian fellow, whose body he was currently in, must have been a pretty bad guy. Gilbert wasn’t feeling much of anything. His initial thought was that Octavian, much like this other guy, was probably a sociopath.

“Yeah, we all have those days, brother. But it’s time to work. We can’t go back home until this guy’s dead.”

“What guy?” Ah, no. He wanted to be more confident, but that was a dumb question, for Octavian would already know the answer.

Yeah, his brother was confused. “The...Donald Trump?”

“Donald Trump? What year is this?”

“How do you not remember this?” He prepared himself to go over the mission. “Okay. It’s February 11, 2000. Donald Trump is about to kick his presidential campaign into high gear. The boss wants us to take him out before he can do that, and he wants it to be messy.”

“Trump doesn’t run for president in 2000, and he certainly isn’t killed.”

“No, because that’s what we’re doing here, to change history. What about time travel are you not getting? We’ve been doing this forever, have you lost your marbles?”

“I...yes. No?”

“I don’t understand what’s happening. It’s like I don’t even know you.”

A man walked in from the aether. Literally. “That is because you don’t. The man you’re looking at, Sevastian, is not your brother.”

“Then who is it?” Sevastian asked, more curious than upset or worried.

“Mister Boyce,” the man said. “You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?”

“How do you know who I am?” Gilbert asked, checking his face with his hands to confirm that he still looked like Octavian.

“I see into people’s souls. Those few who know me...call me The Maverick.”

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Microstory 162: Denton Wescott

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Born to park ranger parents in the middle of nowhere New Brunswick, Denton Wescott was a very precocious child, having figured things out long before his peers. He attended a one room schoolhouse and didn’t so much as step one foot in a city until he was eleven years old. He pretty much always knew that he had the ability to passively absorb semantic memory from others. He knew more than he wanted to about the forest, how to teach children, and a little about farming. He was known as a vowel student for having never earned any grade below a U. He was bored at all times. After graduating from tertiary school, he decided to turn down the Tier 1 elite colleges, and instead attend Raiford University. He chose this not only because it was a nice change in scenery, but also because it boasted the highest number of students in North America. The more people he was around, the more knowledge he could absorb from them. Things were going well, as he was finally in a school that included A’s, E’s, and even I’s as grades. Unfortunately, his life took a turn. He was being inundated with all this semantic memory, and none of it could be applied to procedural memory. That is, he could learn in theory what it takes to be a car mechanic, but he would have to be trained the old-fashioned way if he wanted to actually repair a vehicle. As more time passed, things only became worse. He started to lose episodic memories. Events from his early childhood began to disappear from his mind little by little. His brain was only designed to handle so much. By the time he graduated two years later, he could not remember a single thing that had happened to him from his entire life. He didn’t seem to be perturbed by this, but soon found himself struggling to perform simple actions like driving, or even tying his shoes. He was beginning to lose his procedural memory, and if he continued on his path, he would eventually be nothing more than an encyclopedia with a beating heart. He was moved to beautiful Brooks Lake in a remote part of Wyoming. He spent a good portion of his life there until Bellevue was able to treat his condition. They were never able to retrieve his missing memories, but they were able to salvage his procedural memory, and taught him to control his ability. He eventually learned to pause his knowledge absorption, and also delete erroneous knowledge to make room in his brain.

Microstory 161: Rick Rain

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Rick Rain was in his college roommate’s brother’s house in Kansas City when a commercial jet airliner fell from the sky and crashed into the neighborhood. He woke up with retrograde amnesia, having absolutely no episodic memory of his life beforehand. He was found on the floor in front of the couch with only a minor head wound, believed to have been caused by the edge of the coffee table. This trauma would not be expected to be detrimental enough to cause brain damage, so medical professionals were not sure why he had no memory. His brain scans appeared to show an abnormal amount of activity, but the science had only recently emerged, and so the results were categorized as inconclusive. He was sent back to his parents in Georgia, but felt uncomfortable there. Though his family felt familiar, they also felt like strangers. After only a few months, he decided that it would be best for him to move away and take some time to develop a new life. He chose to return to Kansas City and begin work as a taksi driver. One night, a group of anomalies from out of the country were desperate to get up to Bellevue, Missouri, but they had no money. The distance was greater than city taksis normally drive, and since Bellevue was not a real city, there would be no hope for a return fare. A pretty girl in the group convinced him to take the fare on the promise that he would receive three times his rate upon arrival, at least. Because of his amnesia, he decided to take her up on it, knowing that every new experience helped define him as a person. Once they arrived, he found himself with an urge to stick around. After incidentally learning about special abilities, he felt that he had nothing to lose. And so he remained in Bellevue as one of the few early non-anomalies, and became an extremely important figure in its history. He formed a romantic relationship with the pretty girl from the original group, as well as close friendships with a number of other members. The mysteries of the plane crash and his unusual amnesia were eventually revealed, and Rick ended up proving to have a few impressive gifts of his own, as well as a background in anomalies.