Microstory 2484: The Renaissance

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Gemini Pro text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3

If you even tangentially like the Renaissance, this is the dome for you. A lot of people seemingly mistake this as one big Faire that never ends, but it’s more complicated than that. It’s not really even a faire at all. Faires in the past have not only come and gone, but the actors involved are simply playing characters. They know what year it is, and they sometimes forget to take off their smartwatches. This is more like a form of time travel. The droid actors are fully immersed, and will be genuinely confused by any anachronisms that they might encounter. You are allowed to take personal technology in with you, but you are encouraged to keep it concealed as much as possible to protect the integrity of the experience. Unless you’re in the anachronism sector, where advanced tech is not only allowed, but prevalent. Other sectors have their own rules and restrictions, though there’s generally free movement between them. They’re not divided by unscalable walls, or anything, unless that’s the point of the story of that given area. The droids just believe that they are residents of the time periods, and don’t even know that they’re artificial. Do not—I repeat—do not try to disabuse them of their reality. With enough brute force, you can break their software, and force a repair, but that’s so disrespectful and destructive of you. And keep your kids in line, because they will do this. Humanity has a long history of trying to get its actors to break character, and it’s always been incredibly annoying. Just enjoy this place for what it is. There is a sector for everyone. If you want to be very authentic and historically accurate, you can find that. If you want it to lean more into the fantasy aspect, that’s available too. And like I said, there’s an anachronism sector, where people pretend to be alien space travelers, and time travelers, and whatever. I don’t personally care for that, but I’m okay with it existing. Just stay in your lane, so to speak.

This dome spends so many resources basically policing people’s movements. There are some areas you can’t go to if you’re wearing modern garments, because you’re also meant to cosplay as a typical member of society in that time period. Perhaps they should build walls, so you know exactly how far you can stray before you run into a different theme. For the most part, everything is pretty simple here, with the majority of the work going into measures that uphold the illusion of an isolated reality. There are some advanced aspects of it, though. For instance, there are a few dragons, which while fully mythical, are deeply tied to the historical culture and beliefs of the day. These dragons are not genetically engineered, because even though they could absolutely code the genome for something dragon-like, it would not be able to fly, because dragons break the laws of physics. Stop reading if you don’t want to know how the trick is performed. They’re just holograms. Conventional and totally normal aircraft fly around, usually in an array of synced drones, which project a holographic image of whatever flying beast its programmed to be at the time. They can generate heat, but not fire. That would be technologically possible, but also not safe enough, or they would have to require people come in here with certain types of substrates. As it stands, you can walk in as a normal human, and everything be safe enough, and I think they want to maintain that freedom. You shouldn’t want to be breathed on by a dragon, but if that’s you’re thing, I guess look for a VR simulation. This dome doesn’t always stick to pure historical accuracy, but it’s for leisure and education, not adventure, and certainly not danger.

Microstory 2454: Elizabeth Victoria

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Gemini Pro text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3

If you’re looking for something anachronistic and weird, you’ve come to the right place. The Elizabethan Era ran from 1558 to 1603, during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The Victorian Era started in 1837 and ended in 1901. They are both iconic periods in Great Britain’s history, but vastly different as they were separated by more than 200 years. The technology here is hard to get a grasp of. Not only are we dealing with stuff that they were using nearly a millennium ago, but they’re juxtaposed by each other. When you walk into a building, you never know if it’s going to be lit by gas lamps, or incandescent bulbs. It could be both! Which, I mean, it’s not like they destroyed all the gas lamps when they invented electricity, did they, innit? People walk around in all sorts of different clothes. They all looked alien to me, but I could tell that some of them were really old, and some were really, really old. The architecture is a mix, of course, with wooden cottages and natural stone buildings right next to giant even-stoned factories. Again, I’m sure a lot of the old stuff still existed in the new era, but the way they have it organized so randomly, it seems very forced and intentional. I’m not sure if I was supposed to learn something here, but it was fun to spend an afternoon getting a look around. I don’t think I would want to spend a lot of time there, though. I don’t much care either way, but I went with a historian friend, and they didn’t like it. They would prefer a historical dome to be accurate. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like they were shocked and appalled. The design was very clear in the prospectus, and you know they read that whole damn thing, because I waited for them to finish it while we were sitting in the vactrain station. They told us that it was intentionally incongruent, and in that goal, they delivered. That’s all you can ask sometimes, innit? (Hey, am I using that word right? I don’t even know.)

PS: Please read my friend’s review. They actually know all the historical and cultural stuff that kind of flew over my head anyway.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 15, 2436

« < » > Table of Contents

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

The new ship was done. The holographic projectors were up and running, making them look like something else entirely. Reminiscent of holodecks from the Star Trek franchise, a magnetic field of equivalent dimension gave it the impression of physical size, for when light was not enough. If someone, for instance, were to shoot a missile at a section of it that didn’t technically exist, it would not simply pass through it, but interact with this field, reinforcing the lie that they were bigger than they really were. In honor of this inspired technology, Ramses chose the USS Defiant from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as their first hologram. It was a warship, so it looked a bit menacing, but was also relatively small. They couldn’t make it look as large as something like the Death Star, because the truth would be too easy to detect. There were a few other fictional ships that Ramses, and other members of the team, wanted to try, but they would eventually transition into original models. It wasn’t super likely that anyone in the Exin Empire had ever seen anything of these things, but there was always a chance.

This was an important test, because while the resort planet they just went to had no orbital infrastructure, Ex-666 did. It wasn’t much, but it was there, and it was trying to destroy them. Leona and Ramses both stayed on board so they could outrun it. For now, they were doing just fine with that. The defense satellite was apparently not designed to attack, but to prevent unauthorized entry. With this clearly being a penal colony, that made a hell of a lot of sense. So they were just going to keep away from it, and only fight back if the situation grew tiresome. Generally speaking, they did not operate on ships with weapons, but the Dorsch had an offensive system that they could use if they had no other choice. Ramses still had his eyes set on something brand new, advanced, and tailored specifically for their needs, but they weren’t going to find help on Ex-666, so that was still a dream for another day.

The rest of the team took the dropship down to investigate the surface. They didn’t want to teleport while they were being so closely watched, because they still didn’t know how ubiquitous such abilities were in this region of space. It could look too suspicious. The satellite may have called in reinforcements from somewhere, and who knew how quickly that would happen? Their only real concern was finding Vitalie!666, but it seemed ridiculous to not at least try to communicate with the locals. They were worried it would go terribly, and now was the moment of truth. “Good evening, folks. We are refugees from Ex-741. Have you, perchance, heard of it?” Mateo asked. At present, he looked like James Van Der Beek, because that was the only form he found himself able to maintain for extended periods of time for some reason. Again, hopefully no one here knew enough Earth pop culture to recognize him.

“We’ve heard of Ex-741,” one woman replied. “Why would you need to be a refugee from there? Weren’t you just engineers and technicians?”

“They were technicians,” Mateo lied, pointing to Angela, who looked like her finishing school teacher, and Marie, who looked like Marie Antoinette. “I was a janitor. She was a singer,” he added, pointing to Olimpia, who looked like a woman she had a crush on while she was still living in society on Earth.

“Singer? The dockyard had singers?”

“We need entertainment too. Anyway—” He had this whole explanation about how Ex-741 was going to be destroyed, and they were the last to escape, but they got lost in space, but these people didn’t seem to care.

“Sing something,” the woman insisted.

“Well, she doesn’t have to do it on comman—” Mateo started to say, but he was interrupted yet again.

“No problem.” Olimpia started to sing, using that positively gorgeous voice that the other five had forgotten she had, because she did not do this often enough. The locals were just as enamored by it. More started walking up when they heard it. They all clapped profusely after she was finished singing Ex:Re’s The Dazzler.

The woman from before smiled and nodded. “You’ve landed in the right place. This is where the Chief Ascendant lives. He’ll want to meet you.” She looked over to a teenager nearby. “Go gather some wagmen.” The young man ran off, and when he returned with five men who were rolling a wagon by hand, the woman rolled her eyes. “I meant pedal wagmen, son. These are honored guests.”

“Wait,” Mateo said, stepping forward. “You don’t have automobiles, so you get around by people who walk or pedal?”

“That’s right,” she answered. “Our technology is limited. You’ve fallen on a prison world. I’m sorry.”

Mateo shook his head. “Just tell us where the Chief Ascendant lives. We can walk there on our own. Really, we’re built tough. We insist,” he added when he saw that she was going to argue.

“Very well. It’s not far, just up the road.” She pointed up the hill.

The four of them nodded, and headed that way. Once they were at the sort of castle-looking building, the guards opened the gates with no questions, and let them through. They were wearing headsets, likely connected to radios, which meant that their technology wasn’t evenly limited. Who knew what other anachronistic things that they used in their daily lives?

They expected this Chief Ascendant to be lounging around on a bed full of pillows, and a harem of women, but he was behind a standing desk, along with other people. They were looking through papers, and discussing matters of state. “Ah. You are the freemen, aren’t you? Welcome to Ex-666.” He didn’t stop working. He kept signing declarations, and approving memos, or whatever else his staff was asking him to do.

“You’ve built yourself a nice society here, haven’t you,” Mateo put forth.

“Yes, well, we share a common purpose. We all hate the Exin Empire. I don’t know who told them that they should throw all of their insurgents onto one world, but we are probably the most successful one in the region. We work together, and if you’re here to disrupt our way of life, we will fight back.”

“That’s not why we’re here,” Mateo insisted. He was doing all the talking today. That was probably fine, for now. My colleagues are up in our ship right now, avoiding the ire of your orbital defense satellite.”

The Chief Ascendant laughed. “It’s not ours. It’s part of what keeps us here.”

“Do you want us to destroy it for you?”

The Chief Ascendant stopped, and raised one eyebrow at Mateo. “You came here in a warship?”

“It has weapons. It’s not a warship, but my engineer assures me that they can do it. They just don’t know what the consequences will be.”

“They’ll send an armada from Ex-182.”

Mateo sighed. “We can’t protect you from all that.”

“Could you...gain control over it?”

Mateo smirked, and turned his head slightly away to listen to Leona’s response. “Yeah, they surely could. They just need to get on board.”

“You could have anything you wanted,” the Chief Ascendant began, “if you did that for us.” He placed his elbow on the desk, and pointed to the sky. “That thing has an energy beam that can shut off all systems from hundreds of ships all at once, and then draw them in. If we had control over it, instead of the Exins, we would beg the armada to come, so that we could steal it.”

Mateo cleared his throat, and faced the group. “What do y’all think?” The conversation over comms was short, so he turned right back around. “Any enemy of Bronach Oaksent is a friend of ours.” He looked at the twins. “Go help them.”

Angela and Marie nodded. Angela tapped on her chest twice. “Two to beam up.” They both teleported away.

The crowd gasped. “You have some wild technology.” The Chief Ascendant noted.

Mateo chuckled. “They destroyed our planet on purpose, and since they didn’t wanna be destroyed along with it, they ran off a long time before it happened. We were left behind, with no oversight, so we stole all the tech we could, and flew off in the opposite direction.”

“Yes,” the Chief Ascendant agreed. “Their inability to organize, and our ability to do so, will ultimately be their downfall.”

One of his men sidled up to him, and whispered in his ear, “sir? What about the True Prisoner? They could help with her too.”

“Who is the True Prisoner?” Mateo asked, having easily heard his remark.

“This whole planet is a prison,” the Chief Ascendant began to explain, “but it is lush with vegetation, and other useful resources. We can’t leave, but most people don’t feel the need to. They’ve built a life for themselves. They entrust me to protect them, and to prepare to fight in their stead, which you’ve agreed to help us with. The point is, very few of us actually feel like prisoners. For the most part, things are better than they were before we came here. More would probably come on purpose if we could get the message out to them, letting them know that crime actually does pay. Only one of us is in a real prison. We, uhh...have been trying to get to her for decades. We don’t know anything about her; who she is, what she did to anger the Empire so much, or how she is able to survive the extreme heat and noxious fumes.”

“Extreme heat, and noxious fumes?” Mateo echoed. That sounded familiar to him. “Is she in a volcano?”

“You are quite perceptive. Yes, she is. It’s quite a distance to this volcano, but if you can teleport, you can get there quickly, and maybe even get her out. We would sure like to finally meet her.”

“Show me.”

The Chief Ascendant called for a map. His Prime Cartographer explained where they would be going, and went into more detail about the temperatures involved. Someone also called ahead to let the people who lived closer know that visitors would be arriving, and would need firesuits. Mateo thought about arguing against the need for such things, but decided not to bother. “Uhh...two more to beam up,” Mateo said awkwardly, trying to replicate Angela’s fake request for a technological solution. Unfortunately, he tapped on his chest after his request, instead of before, which would mean that their team wouldn’t have even heard it. That was stupid of him, but there was no undoing it now. He and Olimpia just let it go, and disappeared.

They found themselves in the magma chamber, standing on a solid rock formation. The heat was intense, as were the fumes. They could see a manmade structure shimmering in the distance, sitting upon its own rock island. It had a metal frame, but most of his was transparent, surely made of some kind of heat-resistant polycarbonate material. Mateo and Olimpia looked over to their left as someone was slowly side-stepping towards them in a shiny suit. They were holding an extra firesuit in their hand, and struggling in the attempt to give it to whoever was willing to take it. They were clearly finding it difficult to move in the thing, full stop, and the two of them didn’t need all that dead weight. Mateo dismissed the helpful volcanologist’s help, waving him away politely. He took Olimpia’s hand, and they made a jump into the cell. It was better inside, though not by much. Now that they were closer, he could see that this was no ordinary prisoner. He took her in his arms, and jumped them both to safety.

“Took ya long enough, James Van Der Beek!” Mirage exclaimed.

Mateo instinctually dropped his hologram, and turned back into himself. “Mirage Reaver, how the hell long have you been in there, dude?”

“That’s not my last name. What year is it?”

“It’s 2436.”

“I’ve been in there for eighty-three years,” she answered. “I did get one break thirty-six years ago, but then I had to go back.”

“Argh! God, it’s been so long!” He stepped back into her, and gave her a big hug. “I can’t believe you’re, like, all into this whole thing.”

“I’ve been doin’ my own thang, man. I know people. I’ve had adventures. I’ve traveled through time.”

“Not all it’s cracked up to be, eh?”

Leona appeared next to them. “Mirage. It’s nice to see you. Last we saw each other, you were on Altair.”

“You knew that she was back in this dimension?” Mateo questioned.

“I don’t tell you everything.”

“Are we cool?” Mirage asked Leona.

“We’re cool,” Leona confirmed. “Ramses is alive and well.”

“Thank you for getting me out of there. That place sucked. And also, hello.”

“Hi, I’m Olimpia.”

“Olimpia Sangster. It’s nice to finally meet you in person. I helped you once. You didn’t know it was me.”

“Thank you,” Olimpia replied graciously, not asking her to clarify.

“So.” Mirage clapped her hands together. “This is a prison world. My ship is nearby, and it’s invisible, so if you need a way to escape, you can come with me.”

“Where are you going?” Mateo asked her.

“I have a score to settle.” She looked at her bare wrist. “I just hope he’s still alive.”

Leona was too curious. What kind of vessel would an entity like Mirage build for herself? “What’s the name of your ship?”

“It’s actually a module called the Ambassador. It can detach from, and propel itself independently of, the main ship, which I named The Iman Vellani.”

« < » > Table of Contents

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 7, 2396

« < » > Table of Contents

As soon as Mateo and Ramses jumped to April 7, 2396—or what passed for the date in this reality—the friend detector alerted them to the relative proximity of one of their people. They didn’t know which reality they were in, or who it was, but Mateo couldn’t help but feel hopeful that it would turn out to be Leona. He loved Olimpia, Angela, and Marie, but not like he loved his wife. “Is this going to work?”

Ramses sighed. “We may not have much time to think about it. I’ve done all I can to prepare. But if our target is in a hostile environment, it’s best that we get to her as soon as possible.”

“Then do it,” Mateo decided.

Scientists from the Parallel created these devices for them. The one that accessed other realities was originally designed to grapple onto the target, and pull them here. It wasn’t meant to actually go to that reality. But Ramses wasn’t satisfied with that. He wanted to leave the Parallel, and never come back. Mateo pointed out that they may still have to in the future. When Dalton separated them throughout time and space, there was no guarantee that they each landed nice and neatly in their own special pocket of the cosmos. It was neither predictable, nor necessarily evenly distributed. Leona could show up here ten years from now, or ten thousand. However, Ramses could tell that they were going to a different reality right now. Three realities, three years, each falling on a proper day on their pattern. That was a pattern in its own right. “Okay. Hold on.” He pushed the button.

It felt just as it had before, when Ramses pulled Mateo from the Fourth Quadrant, except in reverse. They were pushed across dimensional barriers, and gracelessly dropped at their destination. Mateo wasn’t knocked unconscious, but he suffered a terribly annoying headache, and was on the verge of retching. “Ow,” he said plainly.

Leona was hovering over him. She helped him off the floor. “Mateo. Do you know why we’re back here?”

“I don’t know where we are.” That wasn’t true. He looked around, and quickly realized they knew what this was. It was the wreckage of the Suadona, back in the Fifth Division. All that, and they were right back where they started. “Where’s Ramses?”

“I only saw you, but it was a blur. I’ve only just arrived myself.”

“Ramses? Ramses!”

A weak voice came from the other side of some debris, “here.”

They climbed over it to find their friend badly hurt. A metal bar of some kind had impaled him through the stomach, perhaps at his kidney. “Oh my God! What do we do?”

“We have to cut him out of it,” Leona determined.

“No,” Ramses said amidst the coughs. “Just pull me off.”

“That’s not how it’s done,” Leona argued.

“I’ll be fine, my body will heal,” Ramses insisted, “but it can’t do that until you get it out of me. Don’t worry about how much it hurts along the way. That will go away too.”

Though Leona never took the Hippocratic Oath, this still felt wrong. Even so, Ramses obviously knew more about these bodies than she did, so she chose to trust him. They carefully lifted him off of the spike, and laid him back down in a safe space. “What do you need? What kind of medical attention will help?” She opened her bag, and awaited a response.”

“I don’t need anything,” Ramses answered. “I’ve rested recently, absorbed sufficient amounts of sunlight, and consumed the necessary nutrients. I just need time.”

“Do we have time?” Leona asked.

“Matty?” Ramses prompted.

Mateo checked the friend detector. No one else was close enough to sense. “So far, so good. Just let your substrate do its thing, buddy.”

Leona was hesitant to leave him alone, but they needed to get out of the wreckage of the ship to assess their situation. There could be danger nearby. Perhaps this reality contained scavengers. They began to teleport around the ship to see if they could find any sign of more recent activity. “Report.”

“Dalton screwed up. He separated us. Ramses went to the Parallel, but didn’t travel through time. I stayed in the Fourth Quadrant, but jumped forward a year. You jumped two years, and came here. The others are theoretically elsewhere, and elsewhen. We may all have been sent to different parallel realities.”

“The math doesn’t check out,” Leona warned. “There are only five concurrent realities, and six of us.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’ve only heard of five.”

“Maybe there are more that you’ve never heard of.”

“We’re time travelers, Mateo. If anyone ever discovers a sixth reality, and if they ever return to report this development, that information can travel in both directions of time.”

“You had heard of the Fifth Division before we first came here?”

“Yes. I didn’t know anything about it, and I didn’t know we would ever come here, but it was a known unknown.”

Mateo thought about it. “What’s the last one; the one we haven’t gone to yet?”

“They call it the Third Rail. I don’t know much about it either, except that we’re—to some degree—not supposed to go there.”

“We’re probably gonna go there.”

“I know.”

“And there may be another one after that. There are a lot of things we don’t know about until we know them. I was at my own memorial service on Dardius. Billions of people were aware both of the fact that it happened, and that I survived it anyway. Like you said, information moves in both directions of time. Yet no one ever talked about it beforehand. As soon as I killed Hitler, and created the new timeline, somebody could have shown up to warn me about it, but they didn’t. They don’t tell us everything. That’s just one example.”

“You’re right. Just because information travels, doesn’t mean it’ll come to us.”

Mateo tilted his lizard brain, which given the fact that he was now genetically engineered, he shouldn’t really have anymore. “Do you feel that?”

Leona smiled. “Yeah, he’s not feeling any pain anymore.”

“When I was shot, it happened even faster than that.”

She shrugged, but made no attempt to explain the discrepancy.

Once they were finished checking the perimeter, they were about to go back to Ramses when a small ship approached them from the mountains. Its shape reminded Mateo of a container of floss. It was smooth and rounded, with no sharp corners.  “Let’s assume they don’t know about him, and stay here.”

“Of course.”

The ship hovered before them for a moment. Then lasers came out of it, and transported them inside against their will. Before them stood a man that only one of them recognized.

“Hello,” Mateo said politely. Rule number fifteen, don’t antagonize the antagonist. Except maybe he wasn’t an antagonist at all, what did he know?

“Hi, Mithridates,” Leona said a little less politely.

“I heard you left,” Mithri pointed out.

“We came back. It was an accident.”

“Well, you’ll be happy to know that I have not wavered in my promise to be an agent of peace in this reality. Rátfrid and I have been making real progress. Xerian Oyana of the Security Watchhouse Detachment absorbed the Dominion Defense and Offensive Contingency Detachments, and they have all been standing down. Unfortunately, the Warmaker Training Detachment detached again, and declared war on the rest of us, but I have faith in the future.”

“Glad to hear it,” Leona acknowledged.

“I would like to ask if you also kept your promise, or if you found a way to age yourselves up,” Mithri asked.

“No,” Leona lied. “It’s just been awhile for us since we’ve been here.”

He squinted at her. “You’re lying. Why are you lying to me?”

“I’m not lying,” Leona dug in deeper.

“It’s okay,” Mithri said with a kind smile. “I never specified you had to stay that way. Time travelers gonna travel time.”

“Thank you. It was just...”

“Impossible to have sex? I bet. That was the joke, but I’m older and wiser now.”

“Since you’re being so understanding, is there somewhere here on Earth where we might find refuge? It seems pretty desolate, but I haven’t exactly circumnavigated it.”

“I have a place you can hide,” Mithri said as he turned to the controls. “We’ll pick up the injured Mr. Abdulrashid before we go.”

“We’re hiding?” Mateo asked while Leona was making sure Ramses was okay after he was transported inside. “Are you expecting an attack of some sort?”

Mithri placed his hand on a big lever, but waited to pull it. “Rule number sixteen, when Team Matic is involved, always anticipate conflict.” He pulled the lever.

What he didn’t say was that he was taking them through a Nexus, and transporting them tens of thousands of light years away. They were on a world so deep in the void that it would still have been outside the Milky Way galaxy proper if the stars were as spread out as they were originally. It orbited a Stage Tau Gerostar, which in the main sequence would be called a blue dwarf.

Leona placed her hands on the glass, and stared at it like a long lost lover. “How is this possible? Wait, you must have accelerated time.”

“We have only been here for tens of thousands of years,” Mithri explained, “and it was waiting for us, as was the Nexus building that we just came through. Even if we had accelerated to one second for every year, we wouldn’t have had time to make this. It would have taken two hundred thousand years. Besides, we don’t detect any temporal energy around it. You can check for yourself.”

“Could someone please explain this?” Mateo requested. “Why is it a big deal?”

She stopped gazing to address her husband. “Mateo, that thing would have to be six trillion years old, or older.”

“The universe isn’t that old, is it?”

Leona scoffed. “Uhh...no.”

“So how do we know a blue dwarf is even a thing?”

She sighed. “It’s science, Mateo, I can’t explain it.” She returned to gawking at the apparent anachronism. She surely could explain it, but she didn’t want to.

“It just looks white to me,” Mateo noted.

She growled.

“Is there somewhere I could rest?” Mateo asked Mithridates.

“Downstairs, pick any of the pods. Not the full-sized bed, that’s mine.”

Mateo giggled when he got down there. The sleeping pods along the wall were shaped just like the ship itself. The man must love to floss. Prestons were such an odd bunch. He wasn’t all that tired, so he just started snooping instead. There weren’t a whole lot of things to find here. The floors, walls, and ceilings were all white, and smooth. Pretty nondescript, he would say—aesthetically pleasing and classy, but not particularly interesting. That was until he opened the door to a pocket dimension. Inside was a full stable, with hay, and manure on the floors. He walked through it, peeking over the doors to see if there were any actual horses, but there weren’t. It wasn’t until he got to the last stable that he came across another lifeform. It was undoubtedly a centaur. She was saddled, but not wearing any other clothes.

“Oh, hello. Are you Mithri’s friend?”

“That’s a strong word,” Mateo answered. “I don’t really know him. Does he...um?”

“Does he ride me like I’m an actual horse?” she figured.

“Uhh...”

“My son is still in regular human form. This is how I get him around on our home planet. It’s only weird if you make it weird.”

“I don’t think it’s weird.” Mateo looked around the room. “Where is he, and where is your planet?”

“They’re in the same place. He’s at school right now. Mithridates agreed to help me get back to him after rescuing me from my captors.”

“You don’t seem that anxious about it?”

“My planet is safe, he’s fine.”

“I’m Mateo.”

“Delintza,” she returned.

“Delintza, we were to understand that consciousness transference isn’t a thing here, nor is cloning. No one realized after we had done it.”

“I’ve never heard of it either,” she said. “This is my real head and torso, and this was a real horse. A surgeon put us together.”

“Oh, so...the horse died? That doesn’t bother you?”

“No, why would I care? It’s just a dumb animal.”

The friend detector began to beep, which was good, because he didn’t want to have to get into an ethical debate with this stranger.

“What’s that?” she questioned.

“Sorry, gotta go.” He ran back upstairs.

« < » > Table of Contents

Microstory 1769: Pointed Pyxis

< > Table of Contents

Folks, there’s no doubt about it, this is the biggest find in archaeological history. I don’t know how it’s possible, but I’ve had it checked by a dozen of my colleagues, and we all agree on the results. This box before you dates back 16,000 years. It calls into question everything we know about pre-literary history. It breaks the laws of physics, and quite honestly, it’s driving me insane. I’m not here to talk about the science we used to date this artifact. You can read our paper at your leisure. Today, I’m going to be showing you the artwork on the box, and explaining just how impossible it is, just in case some of you aren’t surprised by it on your own. Now, we call this object a pointed pyxis, and the first of them rose up in Greek culture during the eleventh century BCE, which is a full 13,000 years after the artifact was made. That alone would be astonishing, to learn that people were making certain styles of art so much earlier than we once believed. That’s not the exciting part. If that was all there was, I suppose we could have just assumed it was a coincidence. Again, still remarkable, but not too crazy. Let me zoom in. In the first hexagon is a woolly mammoth. Nothing weird there; they weren’t extinct back then. But if you look closer, you’ll see that it’s not alone. There’s a human riding on top of it, and as far as we know, people never did that. We hunted and co-existed with them, but we did not domesticate them. Or maybe we did. In the next hexagon—and by the way, I’m not sure what to call this shape; curved hexagons on a sort of pointed cylinder—there is what appears to be a bird. This is not the kind of avian you would expect to find on something from this time period, or from any time period in human history. The pterosaur went extinct 66 million years ago, and was never seen by man. It’s possible the artist uncovered fossilized records, but unlikely they were intact enough for them to so accurately depict it’s living form. That’s your first clue to time travel, but not your last.

This appears to be an illustration of a crucifixion, which didn’t start happening until about the 6th century BCE. This is a sea-faring vessel, of a design which the vikings used in the tenth century CE. This writing is Cuneiform, this is Kaqchikel, this is Cyrillic, and these are Neolithic Chinese characters. Over here is the number pi to 12 decimal places...converted to binary. Here’s the hex code for gunmetal gray, but we had to figure that out, because it’s written in a language that we have never seen before. Right next to it is a photorealistic picture of a cannon in said color. There’s a mushroom cloud, there’s the logo for a car company, and look at this and tell me it doesn’t look exactly like TV’s James Van Der Beek. I could go on and on, but you get the picture. Our best guess is that this is the work of some kind of time traveler, but why would they paint all this on a pointed pyxis? What was the purpose of the container at the time? We’ve tested the inside as well, of course, and found absolutely no residue; not even the paint they used on the outside. No dirt, no microbes, no nothing. We’ve even exposed it to modern air, and while we take every precaution to protect against contamination, at least a little always gets in. We don’t operate inside of a vacuum. I’m presenting this to you, because you are the brightest minds this planet has to offer. We’ve decided to crowdsource the mystery, but we’re not ready to reveal it to the world at large yet. If any of you can explain any aspect of this incredible fine, we encourage you to sign up for some time to examine it. Thank you very much.