Microstory 2497: Swampdome

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I’m not saying there’s something lurking under there, but...there’s something lurking under there. In case you didn’t tease it out from the name of this dome, this is swamp country. If you go to any swamplands on Earth, this is what they look like. It has all the same flora from there, and some—if not all—of the fauna. You can take a boat on the water. It can be a rowboat or an airboat. I don’t really think you have any other options. You could also just wade or swim in the water if you’re feeling brave. The water is so murky, there’s no way to know if something is hiding underneath the surface. I’m almost certain there is. As I was sitting on my boat, I could both here and feel something bump up against the wood. I couldn’t see anything, but I seriously doubt a turtle is strong enough to hit it with the amount of force it would have needed to. Yeah, it could have been an alligator. And that would be scary. But it could also be something else, which I think is scary, because there’s so much uncertainty. Humanity is long past the time since we perfected genetic engineering. There’s no reason it can’t be a creature that never existed in nature. There’s that one character from the comics. I’m thinking it’s that guy, or someone very much like him. I mean, his story would be different, but they could absolutely make a person who approximates whatever properties that character had. I wasn’t scared, I wanna be clear on that, but it was a little unsettling; I have to admit. There’s really nothing more to say about it. They didn’t do anything special. There are docks, boathouses, houseboats, and cabins randomly strewn about, so if you find one of those, you can get out and explore. Come here if you wanna be in a swamp, but not if you want to learn anything, or have a story to tell. Unless that monster that I think lives down there shows its face, it’s just gross water to me.

Microstory 2494: Biolock

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When this planet was first discovered, it was a barren wasteland. It still technically is. It has not been terraformed. It’s been paraterraformed, which means that the only places where anything can survive are under the domes. You can’t just plant a seed in the dirt, and wait for it to grow, and start producing oxygen for you. The composition of the atmosphere at the moment is not suitable for life, and if we wanted to make it so, we would have to be extremely destructive. Terraformation is always a centuries-long project, which even today, we’ve only completed on one planet, and there are rumors of alien intervention with that one, because no one knows how it was possible. Besides, the whole point of Castlebourne is having these special themed domes. Even if we were to make the rest of the world habitable without destroying everything currently standing, we wouldn’t want to. For that, you can go to Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, which was already habitable when we discovered it (though, I have my doubts about that too, because what are the chances?). I digress. What I’m saying is that, in order for us to have any life on this planet, it had to be transported. In some cases, that means digital DNA, but even that’s tricky, because you’re gonna need feedstock to actually develop the organism into something physical. In other cases, we transported live plants and animals, on something called an Arkship. While it took 108 years to get here, the ships were traveling at relativistic speeds, so the time as observed by the passengers was only about two months. It was during this time that the specimens were being monitored under their second quarantine. They experienced their first while still on Earth, which lasted four months. Six months isn’t bad, is it? You should be able to tell whether something has a disease or not in that time. Eh, probably. We’re probably always safe enough, but we don’t want the bare minimum. We want to be extra careful. Besides, the conditions on Castlebourne are different. The atmospheres in the domes are typically optimized, not natural. The surface gravity is different. In order to satisfy our requirements for safety, specimens are kept in special habitats in Biolock for an additional six months so that we may observe and study them, but also so they can acclimate to their new conditions. Once this time period is complete, they will be either transported to their new home under whatever dome they are destined for, or a parallel preserve for further acclimation efforts. Up until now, this was only a Logistical dome not fit for visitors. We have recently completed renovations, which will allow visitors to come through for tours. You will not be able to touch or interact with any of the specimens, but will be able to see them from the protection of a sealed corridor while your tour guide teaches you about our process in greater detail. My superiors asked me to write the first review just to get things started so that our prospectus is ready for it once the first tours go through, and reviews are unlocked for public contribution. Thank you for your time.

Microstory 2459: Savanna Land

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Right now, this is one of the least impressive domes on the planet. I guess I can’t say that. It’s not like I’ve seen every single other one. Then again, people have been making these kinds of statements forever, like when a food blog would rate the best restaurants in the country, as if they have any semblance of a comprehensive authority regarding anything close to what they’re claiming. All I mean is that there aren’t any animals here yet. For this one, I don’t think that they want to get by with lifelike robots. I think they want it to be really authentic, and that’s going to take some time. Still, it’s not called Savanna Animal Kingdom. They opened it, because it currently already exemplifies exactly what it says on the tin. There’s a ton of grass, patches of barren dirt, and very few trees. I didn’t see many other people while I was there, and the ones who did show up didn’t stay very long either, because we all saw the same thing. Potential. But not completion. The vehicles are ready, which is an interesting thing, but the real interesting part about that is how big they are. Back on Earth (before we stopped having to drive) roads had to be sort of standardized. It would have been ridiculous if French roads were 10 meters wide and Spanish roads were 50 meters wide. They developed organically, initially based on the size of people, then of horses, then horse-drawn carriages, and so on, and so forth. They got bigger, but you could still still see the natural origins. Even when they broke new ground, like I was saying, the cars were the size they were, and they weren’t going to make special cars for some hip, new region. I’m talking a lot about vehicles, because I can’t talk about the lions or the elephants yet. The point is, we’re starting from scratch here, and not limiting ourselves to tradition. Some of the vehicles are big, with giant observation bubbles which allow for 360 degree viewing all around. Man, it’ll be great in 15 or 20 years when this place is populated, and there are actually some cool things to see, but until then, we can literally only imagine.

Microstory 2457: Horseback Mountain

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I love horses, and if you don’t, then we can’t be friends, so don’t @ me. Horseback Mountain is a pretty simple concept. It’s all about horses, and horseback riding. It’s not one mountain, though, which I think is a little weird, but I don’t really care, because I love horses. The first thing I did when I heard about Castlebourne was access the prospectus, and look for a place like this, and it was the first thing to come up. There’s another dome that has ranchland, and a few other horse-inclusive environments, but this is the one where that’s all there is. You can ride horses on a mountain (of course), but there are other areas too. There are plains and prairies, muddy trails, dirt roads, and even beaches. The ocean next to it isn’t real. Curious, a member of one of my riding parties got off, jumped into the water, and started swimming. He was still within yelling distance when he reached the dome’s walls. A hologram makes it look much bigger than it is. This isn’t a complaint, by the way; I really don’t care. The point is to have a place for the horses to run, and the can’t run in deep water anyway. If you want the ocean, go to one of the big ones on the poles. Now for the big question. Are the horses real? The answer is...it’s your choice! There are many real horses available, though they are in limited supply. It takes a long time to grow an animal this large, and they have to be introduced to their environment—and to people—using safe and ethical methods. I much prefer a real horse, but the same can’t be said for everyone, which is why there are other options. There’s more variety, though, than simply organic versus automaton. Your horse can be programmed with whatever temperament or personality you chose. We passed by a group of kids whose horses were fully intelligent. There was only one adult with them. From what we could gather, the horses were the children’s chaperones. They were keeping them in line when they got too rowdy, and teaching them about nature, particularly horses, as you can imagine. I believe the human adult was there in case there was an emergency that required adult hands. I don’t know what kind of intelligence she was, because she didn’t speak while we were passing by. I just think that’s a cool little feature that I wouldn’t have thought of myself. Before you ask, all kinds of equines are here, including donkeys and mules,  zebras, and a few other things. Yes, there are unicorns and pegasuses. You cannot ride either of these things, because if they existed in the real world, they wouldn’t let you, at least according to the Castlebournian interpretation of the mythology. The pegasuses can’t fly. I don’t know how they would without breaking any law of physics, but they have wings, so they look cool. They’re supposed to be rare, but you can go on a particular tour where you’re guaranteed to see what you’re looking for, because they’re either programmed or trained to be in sight. I honestly don’t know if they were mechanical or organic. I didn’t ask, because I don’t care about mythological creatures. I’m a horse girl, and a purist. That’s why I never want to leave. This isn’t a residential dome, but I’ve requested that they make an exception, and build me a home to live in, so I don’t have to take the vactrain here every day. I’m waiting for their response. Wish me luck.

Microstory 2452: Coraldome

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This dome is categorized under multiple categories, but you wouldn’t know it by finding it in one of the categories, and opening its prospectus. It’s a little nitpicky, but I just happened to notice that it shows up when you change filters. It’s unclear how many domes are multicategorical, which I guess just bothers me on principle? I know, that’s not really what we’re talking about here, but you can’t provide public feedback on the catalog itself, and I just felt like this was something that other people should know. Okay, I’ll get back to it, and I promise that it won’t be negative moving forward, and that’s because Coraldome is a beautiful place. After looking through all the category filters, I was able to determine that this dome is Residential, Leisure, Ecological, Research & Development, and Institutional. You can live here, if you find an apartment that strikes your fancy, or have a temporary stay at Korallion Hotel. Whether you’re here for long-term exploration, or a one-day visit, there’s a lot to see, and a lot to learn. Life on Earth began through a process known as abiogenesis in the ocean, specifically in hydrothermal vents. It evolved from there, organisms multiplying, taking in energy from their environment, responding to stimuli. They mutated, adapted, filled ecological niches. They transformed into independent species, gained new traits, and eventually left the waters, growing new limbs, and reaching for the sky. But some stayed in the water. Most of them, indeed. Earth’s biosphere is perfectly tailored for the life that evolved there, because any life that wasn’t suited for survival...didn’t. And it still doesn’t. Castlebourne is a different place. You can stick as many domes on it as you want. You can pump air in here, and salt the water with minerals. You can warm it up and cool it down, but it will never be Earth. It will never be our origin. Still, we like life, and our biological imperative demands that we make it. Humans are unique in that we are compelled to make and preserve other species besides our own. Whether it benefits ourselves or not, we want it to live. It’s why we consolidated our population into centralized spaces on Earth, and why we left. It’s why we settled on barren worlds, including Castlebourne; because it didn’t require us to destroy life. When you come to Coraldome, you’ll be met with a community of organisms of all varieties, imported from Earth via digital DNA. They live here now, genetically altered to survive in Castlebourne’s unique ecosystems. We may call it a clownfish, but it’s not the same clownfish that you may find off the coast of Australia. It’s a Castlebourne clownfish, because the composition of the water is different, as is the gravity. The other plants and animals are different too, which impacts how they interact with each other. You could know everything about the biosphere back home, but you’ll have to relearn everything if you come here, and Coraldome is the perfect place to do it. The fish swim all around you, right up to the glass, on multiple levels. It’s my favorite place in the world. This world anyway. Nothing will ever be better than Earth; where it all began. See? I told you that I would start being positive.

Microstory 2436: Tundradome

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It’s just a big tundra, what do you want from me? It’s even worse than one of the desert domes, because it’s cold. I know, that’s obviously the point, tundras are supposed to be cold. I don’t know what I was expecting, but there’s just nothing here. They don’t even have animals running around, which you would find in a real tundra. I did get the sense that this dome was unfinished, but also not a priority, but there wasn’t anyone around to explain it to me. The vactrain stopped here, I walked through the doors, and I was outside. I went back into the lobby to see if I needed to sign in, or something, but there really wasn’t anyone around. They didn’t even have a help button on the wall. Surely they wouldn’t have let me come here if it was legitimately closed to visitors. There were others who showed up a few minutes after me. We didn’t talk, but they seemed pleased. They stopped a few hundred meters from the entrance, and I guess admired the beauty before them. Then they picked up their gear, and walked away. I assume they went off to camp somewhere, but I don’t know for sure. I doubt they went far, because they were carrying their stuff in their hands, instead of in packs. Listen to me, reviewing the other visitors as if that matters. I should have asked them real quick if maybe I missed something. Like, maybe there’s a different entrance where they went to first, or they messaged someone ahead of time. I could contact customer relations, but I think writing this review is as far as I’m gonna take it. It’s clearly only meant to be a tundra as that’s the name. They’re never going to add activities or adventures, so no matter how much they work on it, I’m never gonna wanna come back. I don’t suggest you do either. If you want to camp, try Foggy Forest. At least they have trees there.

Microstory 2424: Aquilonian Deep

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Why do they call it that? I don’t care. It’s an ocean. You ever see an ocean before? It’s just like that. I mean, the way my buddy hyped this up, I expected to find giant sea creatures lurking the dark waters, like a krakken, or what’s that thing from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? I never read it, I just heard about it. But mermaids. And sirens! You could do so much with this, but it’s pretty much just a giant-ass ocean. I could get that on Earth. It’s got islands too. Are you incentivized yet? No, because again, it’s just an ocean under an invisible dome? At least Polar Tropica has sun and sexy ladies in bikinis. That’s all I got to say about this. It was a nice idea, but they totally botched the execution. They told me that I would never be bored on this planet, but I was bored. I just sat in the boat, and the waves were crashing, and it wasn’t a fun experience. No one else around me seemed to be enjoying it. Sure, they were smiling and laughing, but I know what they were really thinking. Get yourself some monsters to escape from, and we’ll talk. Until then, I’m going back to one of the Lovecraftian domes. They got what I need.

Microstory 2415: Underburg

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Around 400 years ago, advances in materials science allowed for truly gargantuan structures to be built with complete structural integrity. We were constructing buildings that rose kilometers into the sky. Hundreds of thousands of residents could now live in an area once fit only for a thousand or two people. They called them megastructure arcologies for their efficient population densities, low environmental impact, and self-sustainability. No one forced anyone to move to these places, but they were the most logical. Instead of taking a vehicle or train from Point A to Point B, you mostly only needed an elevator. People used to have tons of belongings, but with advanced computing and virtual simulations, as well as component miniaturization, material possessions no longer seemed so relevant. Your unit stopped being a place where you lived, and began to serve only functional purposes. You lived in virtual constructs, and needed only a minimal amount of realspace for your physical components. Even so, the entire point to Castlebourne is being able to spread out how you want. You see, the reason we wanted to concentrate our population on Earth was so that we could give the majority of the land area back to wilderness. Animals can’t live in high-rise apartments—at least not intentionally, anyway. We have more choices. We figured that it was only fair that we do everything we can to stay out of their way, and let them be. Castlebourne started out as an uninhabitable planet, which had to be paraterraformed in order for it to be habitable. We’ve done this to many other colonies, but never before at this scale. There was no life here before we arrived. In fact, we’ve added life. The same rules about verticalization don’t apply here. We’re free to stretch our legs, especially since there’s a ton more land area overall, what with the oceans being confined to the poles. Underburg doesn’t have many people here yet, but I’m sure it will expand. Unlike other domes, it’s not populated by androids meant to simulate human life. I mean, sure, there are robots here to help us get things done, but it’s clear who they are. They’re not trying to blend in. If you conduct a search for 21st century suburbia, it will look just like Underburg does. Big houses; big green, perfectly manicured lawns; garages with two cars in them. Don’t worry, they run on electricity, supplied by fusion reactors. And we don’t have a history of racism and elitism. It’s not about recapturing the lifestyle of Old Earth. It’s about living in a neighborhood of like-minded individuals, watering your flowers in front of the walkway, and waving to each other as you leave for the day. We go to work. Nothing needs to get done, but we do it anyway, because that’s what we find enjoyable. If you think you might like it too, why don’t you come move to Underburg? Yes, it’s a little unsettling with all these empty houses, but it won’t get better unless more people take the leap. We need more residents! Come on, you know you want to.

Microstory 2410: Mildome

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This dome is for flowers. It’s a self-sustaining ecosystem, and it’s growing. Here’s the thing, at the moment, it’s mostly just grass in the center of a vast desert. There are pockets of flower gardens here and there, but they are going to spread over the course of the next several decades. This was done intentionally, not because the builders were lazy, or something. It’s all about the pollinators. You got your bees, you got your butterflies and moths, you got your flies. Not houseflies, that’s not what we’re talking about, nor blackflies. Those are gross and annoying. Don’t ask me the exact species of any of these things, I’m not that big of an expert. I just really like flowers. Continuing on, you got your hummingbirds, you got your honeyeaters and sunbirds, you got your bats. I looked it up, there are other animals that are good at pollinating on Earth, but they either don’t have them on this planet, or it’s taking time to engineer them. I doubt that they transported live specimens clear across the interstellar void. I don’t think you can do that legally, unless they qualify as a pet. You know what I learned while I was here? Humans are pollinators too. I don’t just mean that we plant plants. Obviously we do that, but we also have a history of lifting pollen, and carrying it to other places. Isn’t that cool? Well, you can do that under Mildome, if it strikes your fancy. The creators want this space to be the culmination of the hard work of millions of living organisms, including people like you can me. One day, the whole surface will be one giant garden, like a little microcosm of the world. I will be coming back regularly to see how it progresses, but I can’t wait for the “end” result. Of course, it won’t be finished at that point. The pollinators will continue to do what they do best, and this dome will thrive. Without any negative environmental factors, like climate breakdown, there’s nothing standing in its way. That’s something you have to see if you’re here on the planet anyway. Plus, there’s tons of honey, because of the bees. In addition to taking care of them, and learning about them, you can also eat however much honey that you want. If that doesn’t convince you, I suppose nothing will.

Microstory 2405: Ancient Thebes

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Sorry for my poor writing. It’s just not a skill that I ever picked up. I’m more into history. I’m really interested in history. I don’t have that much interest in going to one of the adventure domes, or whatever. I feel no want to run from zombies, or even relax by the ocean. I like to see what real places looked like at different times in history. Today is all about Ancient Thebes, Egypt. I could go on and on about this place, because it was amazing, but I’m sure it would be boring for you. Words just can’t describe how it feels to feel like you’re really there. As I was saying, I’m just not good at writing. That might have been too repetitive. The great thing about a planet like this is that you can make these places. It all looks so real and authentic. Ancient Thebes is gone. It was all modernized by the time people started taking photographs of the area, and now it’s been entirely removed in order to make room for the wilderness. I’m not saying that I don’t like plants and animals, but at one point, there was a plan to make wildlife refuges on rotating cylinders in orbit. What happened to that plan? I think that they were worried about us using it as an excuse to blanket the whole surface of Earth in a giant city. I wouldn’t have wanted that either, I think we just should have preserved historical architecture. I mean come on, there’s a middle ground, you know? I’m getting off track, but you really should be more cultured, and visit Ancient Thebes. They can’t build this sort of thing on Earth because of the whole animal thing, and it’s their territory, or whatever, but it works here. It really works. It’s like you’re really there. Just, if you come to this planet, don’t spend all your time having fun. Try to learn something. You can get a robot guide here who will tell you everything about Thebes and Ancient Egypt. You might find you like it more than you thought. Oh, and don’t ask if there are any attacking mummies. Those movies weren’t real. Okay? Had this guy on my tour kept asking about that shit. It’s like, shut the hell up.

Microstory 2256: Keep My Mouth Shut

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Last we spoke, I told you that pretty much the only way the authorities would swoop in to clear the crowd off our lawn would be if that crowd got to be too big. They were invasive and annoying, but they weren’t doing anything illegal, and they weren’t technically placing anyone in danger. I was venting to my readers, but some of you took it as a call to action. You flooded the neighborhood for the sole purpose of forcing the cops to shut the whole thing down. They didn’t just remove you from the premises, but everyone, because it otherwise would have been some form of discrimination. I didn’t know that you were going to do that. I didn’t tell you the “loophole” even thinking that that might be a possibility. And it’s not the first time that’s happened. I have to be really careful about what I say to people. They will do things for me without me explicitly asking for it, or having any clue how they’re interpreting my words. Sometimes I just say things about how I’m suffering, or lacking, and they’ll want to fix it. And I never see it coming. When I was fifteen, a few weeks from my birthday, my parents asked me to go on a road trip with them. My aunt was out of the country, but she needed a car when she got back, and she liked a particular make and model. This is something that I knew about her, so I wasn’t the least bit suspicious that something else was up. They asked me to help them make the drive up to, and back from, Minnesota, so I obliged without question. We spent one night in a hotel, and when we woke up, we drove out to a farm where the car was supposedly waiting for us. We saw dogs in big pens, screaming at us for attention. So a farmer was selling their car, and they had a bunch of dogs? Didn’t seem like that big of a deal. We got out, and I was watchings those hounds bark their heads off when the owner came out carrying a little puppy. My parents admired it, and asked me if I would like to hold her too. I loved dogs, so I jumped at the chance. I had that wee furbaby in my arms before they told me that she was mine. She was my early birthday gift. It didn’t occur to me that the trip had anything to do with me, nor that it was weird for there to be a car being sold at a farm that also had dogs.

The point is, Sophie was a total surprise to me. I stopped asking for a dog when I was young, but I would still talk about how much I loved them, and all animals. I never asked for a bunk bed, but I got one around fifth grade, because my parents knew that about me. Again, I have to be so careful about what I say, but being autistic, I don’t ever think that my random musings will have any real impact on the world. It’s caused other problems too. Since I don’t think that way, it makes me less of an attentive person. When someone else talks about how much they would like it if things were a certain way, I hear them, I listen, but I don’t think to help them. The way my brain works, if you want me to know something, then you should say it. You should say it clearly and unambiguously. I sort of have a different idea of rudeness. Well, it’s not different, it’s just not as broad. I don’t notice subtext, and I don’t accept innuendo. Be honest and straightforward. Or don’t. Just be the way that you are, and hope that I take the hint. I probably won’t, but you can hope just the same. And me? I’ll try to keep my mouth shut in case I say something that accidentally prompts a response. We’re just talkin’ here. It’s only a blog. I appreciate what you did for us with the lawn, but don’t worry too much about my needs. I’ll figure it out. And if I ever do need your help, I’ll just ask.

Microstory 2176: And Young

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The thing about the way that I’ve developed my website is that I can sometimes get trapped in my own format. When I started out, I wanted to do really short stories on weekdays, and my permanent story on one day of the weekend. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the other day of the weekend, and I didn’t know how canonical I was going to get with the whole thing. It’s the numbers that make the decisions for me. The numbers dictate all. Once I started doing continuous microfiction stories, I decided that I liked to block them out in batches of 100, but there are roughly 260 weekdays every year, and I don’t like to cross the December 31 border, so I can’t always do the 100 installment thing. I end up with remainders, and the value of each remainder often determines what that shorter series is all about. The reason I wrote exactly fourteen sonnets in 2022 is because I had a remainder of fifteen, and could use one of them for an intro. If the remainder had instead been, say, nineteen, I doubt I would have ever thought to do them. I actually decided to change everything up this year by shifting to a regular blog format, hoping that I would have an interesting enough life for that to make sense. As 2024 approached, and I realized that it wasn’t the right call, I had to alter the plan into a fake blog format. That’s what we’ve been doing every weekday since January 1. And like all series here, I don’t get much of a chance to do something different when the situation arises. But it does sometimes arise, and I occasionally have to briefly put my ideas on hold in order to detour to something else. Something important.

I was running a series in 2020 set in another universe. Each installment was told from the perspective of a different fictional character. But then my grandfather died in real life, and I wanted to say something about him. I wanted to get real with my site, so I hit pause on Reactions, and shared my true thoughts. I’m spending a lot of time explaining myself, but I think it’s important for you to understand what a big deal it is for me to deviate from the structure that I’ve limited myself to. The last time I did it was when I lost a dear loved one. Yeah, I do it during introductions too, but those are strongly dependent upon the forthcoming series. These are true shifts, and come from the real me, rather than the fictional version of me. Though, it was fitting back then, since Reactions was about death, and fitting now for other reasons. Last month, my alternate self was pressured into eating meat, even though he was a vegetarian. I was the one who gave him that diet in the first place, even though I hadn’t mentioned it before when he was first introduced, and that’s because I had become a vegetarian myself since then. I’ve struggled with the idea of harming the environment, and killing animals since I was a child. I just didn’t think that I could get all of my nutrition if I cut out meat, and as it turned out, I was spot on. I’ve struggled with my health and weight since college. I used to be able to eat whatever I wanted, and still be quite thin, because I was unwittingly super active. And young. As I’ve aged, it’s become harder and harder to match my calorie intake with activity, and if anyone told me that that would happen, I didn’t listen to them. One thing I didn’t think that much about was that most junk food is vegetarian. Sure, I can have an entire pizza, just don’t put pepperoni or sausage on it. Ice cream? Of course! Pastries, chocolate, all the cheese in the world? No problem. Just don’t give me any meat, because animals died to make it, and I don’t like that. In addition to how much you can eat as a vegetarian before you feel full, you have to eat so much to get the comparable protein. So it was really easy to justify the binging regardless of what the food actually was. I have come to the profoundly difficult decision to press pause on my vegetarian diet recently. I’m going to focus on lowering my caloric intake, and erasing my reliance on comfort food that doesn’t do anything for me except make me feel full, and add fat to my belly. It won’t be forever. I just have to get down to my goal, then I know I can start maintaining. I was so close before, I’m certain that I can get there and stay as long as I stop resorting to garbage. Then I’ll go back to where I want to be, for the environment, and for the animals. I just hope this months-long detour doesn’t end up giving me some terminal disease, or something. That would be ironic, wouldn’t it? Oh wait, careful...spoilers. That’s it for me. Nick Fisherman IV will be back tomorrow.

Microstory 2175: Belly in the Saucer

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A few weeks ago, I had a bird problem. House sparrows were nesting above my balcony, and a few of the baby birds almost died, so I first had to save them so they could grow up and fledge away. Once they were gone, I sealed up the gap underneath the next ceiling to prevent them from nesting there again. Today, an adolescent sparrow perched on the railing of my balcony. It sat there for a pretty long time, jerking its little neck around, looking for either food or danger. There’s no way to know this, but I felt like it was one of the nestlings that I stuck back up with their brothers and sisters, come home to see the old place. I know that birds can’t feel nostalgic. At least, I think I know that, I don’t know for sure. Do they? In all likelihood, it was a completely unrelated bird who just wanted to be there in that moment. But perhaps not. Perhaps it could remember my scent (even though I wore gloves) and knew that I was not a threat to it. I opened the door to see how close I could get, pretty confident that just the sound of the latch would be enough to scare it off, but I was wrong. It stuck around, and just watched me. I shut the door, once again sure that it would be too startled by the noise, but when I turned back around, it was still there. It might have hopped over a few centimeters, but other than that, it was totally chill. I sat down at my little table, and took out my phone to catch up on the headlines. That’s pretty much all I do, just skim the news stories without reading any of the stories in depth. If it’s a good headline, it tells you all you need to know, and if it’s not, the full story probably isn’t worth reading anyway. If it’s a topic that I’m particularly interested in, then I will tap on it, though. The bird, meanwhile, stayed there. At one point, I reached behind myself to the corner where I keep one of my plants, and removed the drip saucer from underneath. It was totally dry, which probably means that I should water the plant, even though it looked fine. I set the saucer on the table, and scooted it away from me, closer to the bird. I don’t know what it’s like to be a bird, but their legs and feet are so tiny. I would think that they would get tired of standing on them, and even more tired of perching. I thought maybe it could rest on its belly in the saucer. It was a stupid idea. It didn’t understand that that’s what I intended, so it didn’t get in, but that would have made for a cooler story, wouldn’t it have? There’s really no point to anything I’m saying. I thought that it was just a nice little innocuous anecdote to tell you while I’m on my mini-vacation. If you didn’t like it, maybe my next post will be more interesting. Oh, and speaking of which, I now have a million subscribers to my blog, so there’s that too. Okay, talk later!

Microstory 2154: It Can’t Be Undone

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I’m not having a good day. The meeting with the people went fine. We struck a deal, and I’ll start to promote their products and services in future installments. These won’t be non sequiturs, though. They’ll provide me with samples, so I can mention them more casually and naturally during my regular updates. You won’t ever hear me just randomly doing ads only for them. I’ll still have normal things to say about how my life is going, but also what I’m using. I’ll also be incorporating their own banner advertising system, as opposed to the one that’s built into the blogging service. Everything still has to go through their legal department, and I’ve been advised to find a lawyer of my own, but once I finish signing the paperwork, we’ll start. It was after the meeting was over that things started to become not so great. As you know, I’m vegetarian, and I’ve been this way for years. It’s something that I wanted to do for a long time before I found the opportunity to make the leap. I never liked the idea of killing to survive, but fresh fruits and vegetables are expensive, and I am not a good cook. Once I started living in Havenverse with Cricket and Claire, though, that all stopped being a problem, so I was able to adopt my desired diet. That all changed this evening. My new business partners wanted to celebrate the deal with a meal, like you do. Unfortunately, they have a more specific idea of what that entails. To avoid being rude, I let them order a steak for me, and I ate it. It was the first meat I had eaten in years, and I did not feel good about it. I’m an all or nothing kind of guy. It can be my worst character flaw, but it has kept me completely away from drugs and alcohol, so I’ve never tried to change. I don’t want to.

I once believed that I wasn’t very susceptible to peer pressure, but now I think that that had more to do with the fact that I didn’t have peers. No one outside of my family ever cared much what I did or didn’t do with my life. So I reluctantly agreed to the steak, and I had to hold back tears as I was chewing. When it was over, and we officially said our goodbyes, I went back to my apartment, and threw up again. A part of it was because it was too much, and a part of it was stress and guilt, but another part of me believed that I could undo it by not letting my body process the meat all the way. Of course, it doesn’t work like that, and anyway, one point is to lower my carbon impact, and the damage has already been done. I’m just going to have to figure out a way through this. I’ve said this before, and it’s always been about my health and weight, but this time, it’s for the animals: my diet starts now. From tomorrow onwards, I will never eat meat again, whether anyone asks me to or not. They’ll have to force me if they want it to happen. I’m just gonna go to bed for now, and try to put it in the past. As I said, it can’t be undone.

Microstory 2150: Phone Calls in Jail

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I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but I have some things to think about now. When you start reaching an audience of a million on this platform, it starts looking like you can focus on that fulltime, and not have to worry about any other job. If I were to push myself towards multimedia content, endorsements, and even public events, I would be at the point where I not only could quit my job without suffering, but also should, since it would free up my time for those other pursuits. I’m still working on that partnership I told you about not too long ago, but I remain reluctant to branch out into other types of content, and I don’t really want to make public appearances. Someone once told me that I have a face for radio...and a voice for print. It was mean, but they’re right. Even without all that, if my readership keeps growing, I may be able to quit anyway. I didn’t even say that during my interview for this job. My interviewer brought it up unprompted, acknowledging that I may not exactly be destined to retire from there. Now, I’ve not made any decisions yet, but it’s definitely becoming an option, which I know could be weird for you, since you still don’t even have a clue what I do for a living, let alone who specifically I work for. The great thing about quitting a job for a form of self-employment is that I can take my time with it. If I were to transition over to somewhere else, I would want to do it within two weeks. That’s standard practice in this country, and beyond. But here, I can hold off, and wait for them to find my replacement, and perhaps even train them. Not forever, mind you, but longer. I’m sure I’ll be getting a call from my boss as soon as this installment posts, but I’ll be in jail by then, so I will not be able to answer. There is a way to take phone calls in jail, but it doesn’t happen all that much, because we’re all only in there for a couple days at a time. And other people have families that they want to stay in contact with, so I wouldn’t want to take any time away from them. I’m alone whether I’m in there, or out here. Maybe I should get a pet. Now that I’ve made friends with my neighbor, I might be able to leave on the weekends without worrying. That’s yet another thing that I need to be considering, but I’ll put it on the backburner.

Microstory 2141: Smol Birb Friends

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I don’t want to talk about my last weekend in jail. It was relatively uneventful. Most everyone in there has read at least a little of my blog by now, and that’s making things a little awkward, but I’m getting through it. It does feel like it’s painting a target on my back, but as I’ve been saying, this is not prison, so it was never going to be as intense and dramatic as you see it depicted on TV. It ain’t no picnic neither, but I’ll be fine. No, what I need to talk to you about today are my new smol birb friends. If you follow me on social media, you already know that I found a nest above my balcony. One of the babies fell out the other day, and died, but then two more babies fell out the next day, and I was able to scoop them up, and carefully place them back in the nest. They were pretty noisy, which the internet says is a good thing, because obviously, it means they’re still alive. It was really stressful being away for 48 hours, though, because even though I could check on the camera feed I had up there once a day, it’s not like there was anything I could do about it. Welp, that turned out to not be so true. My landlord also just so happens to be a reader, so she took it upon herself to unlock my door, and go out onto the balcony while I was away. She returned the precious chick to its rightful place in the nest. Happy ending, right? Not so fast, nothing’s actually ended yet. According to those internet people I’m always going on about, this species of borb propagates like crazy. If you want to take the nest down, which I’m required to eventually, you have to do it in between laying cycles. But that’s a very difficult time to measure.

You see, I don’t know how far along they were in their development when I noticed the nest in the first place, so I didn’t know when they were going to fledge. Once they do, I pretty much have to immediately take the nesting down, and install bird deterrents, or they’ll be right back. Why do I have to do this? Well, it’s a legal thing. I’m not allowed to foster wildlife in or around a building like this, and since house sparrows are considered a nuisance, I’m actually encouraged to just kill them. If I don’t, someone will. Of course, I never want to do that, so I knew I would have a really short window to clear them out to prevent them from coming back. The problem was, I was far too early in this venture. They stopped chirping. I even climbed up there on a chair, and started gently poking on the nest, and nothing. They never chirped at all. You would think that they would have said something, if only leave us alone, we’re babies! But nothing at all. I assumed that they were further along in their learning, and had flown off already, so I began to take the nesting down. Suddenly, two tiny borbs fell out, and landed on the balcony. I was horrified. I thought about trying to stick them back up there, but it was kind of deep in the crevice, and I didn’t know what shape it took in there, or how they moved around. Putting the chicks back was one thing, but trying to recreate everything their mama had done to build their home seemed like an impossible task. I’m sure the internet will be mad at me, but what was I supposed to think? I would not have done that if I thought that they were still in there, and alive. I still can’t figure out why they weren’t chirping anymore. But it was too late, I had to act fast, so I went back inside, and grabbed a plastic bowl. I could save them. I just had to give it time, so that’s what I’m doing. I moved the camera again to just above the bowl, so we’ll see whether mama comes back to take care of them again. I’ll update you tomorrow, probably only on social, though.

Fluence: Monarch (Part VII)

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Weaver stepped towards Misha Collins, who looked at her with some level of familiarity, suggesting that he had been here before, or had at least seen her somewhere. He wasn’t shocked or scared, but more annoyed. She reached out to shake his hand, but pulled it away before he could reach back. “Sorry. First. Do you know who we are?”

“You’re Holly Blue, Goswin Montagne, Eight Point Seven Point Two, and Briar. I never learned his last name.”

“Have you been to this location before?” Weaver pressed.

Misha looked around. “Yes. About a month ago.”

“I wish I knew which kind of month we’re talking about,” Weaver muttered to herself. That is, had it also been three months in the Ediacaran period? Understanding whether the disparate time periods were somehow linked to one another could help prevent this from happening again. She reached her hand out once more, but pulled back yet again at the last second. “Sorry, do you like...salmon?”

“I suppose I do, as much as anyone,” Misha said, confused.

“I didn’t say salmon,” Weaver tried to clarify, “I said salmon.” This was a test of sorts. When a time traveler encountered someone whose understanding of time was in question, pointedly asking them whether they liked salmon should indicate at least a baseline. If they thought that they were only talking about the actual fish, they probably didn’t know anything, or perhaps just not very much.

“I’m sorry, I don’t hear the difference,” Misha admitted. He was a human, and while this obviously wasn’t his first time around the block, other shifted selves of this group had so far kept him pretty well in the dark about the details.

“Holly Blue,” she echoed, finally shaking his hand, “but you can call me Weaver.”

“You can call me Castiel, if you want. A lot of people prefer it.”

“We need to get you home, Mister Collins,” Goswin said, also stepping forward. “If you’ve met others like us, and returned home, then they must have figured out how to do it.”

“They just surrounded me in a circle, closed their eyes, and then I was home.”

“That’s all it was?” Eight Point Seven asked.

“Oh.” Misha pointed to Weaver. “You tapped something on this refrigerator, and said something about a bubble.”

“I don’t know how he got through the bubble in the first place,” Weaver began, “but we’ll probably have to drop it to send him back. It would be the only safe way to do it. But we should be quick. We never know when other shifted selves will show up. We could have just missed the group that came before us. Measuring time is difficult. I don’t even keep a clock in here, except for my special watch. I may have left it somewhere...”

“Do what you gotta do,” Goswin requested. “Let’s make this quick. We’ll try to send him back where he belongs, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll just go with him.”

“Wait, there was one more thing,” Misha remembered. “You gave me this.” He knelt down and pulled something off of his shoelace aglet, handing it to Weaver.

She inspected it. “This is a temporal tracker. She probably used it to make sure that you were returned to where you belonged, instead of Belgium, or something. You weren’t meant to keep it; that’s why you were able to break through the bubble.”

“I must have missed that part,” Misha said. “I was looking at the sea cucumber.”

Weaver looked over at the glass. “That’s not a cucumber. What was the date?”

“The first time it happened was January 11, 2011,” Misha answered. “This time, it was February 25.”

She handed him the tracker back. “All right. Wait thirty minutes, and then step on it. I mean exactly thirty minutes. Set your watch to it.”

“I understand,” Misha promised.

“Okay.” Weaver went over to the refrigerator, and started tapping on the screen. Blast doors dropped down over the glass, to block the view of the water, and its sea creatures. She kept tapping on it, causing the space around them to shimmer, implying that the temporal bubble was now down. They all felt a small lurch in their stomachs as a result. Still, Weaver kept tapping on the fridge. They started to hear a persistent beep from down the hallway, the exact source of which was not clear.

“I think your smoke detector needs a new battery,” Misha guessed.

“It’s fine, we like fire,” Weaver said oddly. “You heard the man. Let’s put him in a circle.” They all came together, and held hands, even Briar, who wanted to fix this just as much as the rest of them.

Goswin was the captain here, and even though Weaver knew a lot more about this stuff, he needed to step on up. “We’re trying to get our new friend here back to February 25, 2011. February 25 in...”

“Vancouver. You don’t need to know my exact address; anywhere there is fine.”

“Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada,” Goswin said. “Everyone think about that, and nothing else.”

They shut their eyes instinctually, and focused on the goal. None of them wanted to open their eyes for fear of breaking concentration, but success was fairly obvious when they felt a short burst of wind, and heard the flap of wings. They each peeked with one eye, and found there to only be three others in the room. Weaver checked the tracker output on the fridge. “He’s home.”

“What’s to stop it from happening again?” Goswin asked. “It happened once before, it could happen a third time, and more, and nothing can stop it.”

“You hear that beeping noise?” Weaver posed.

“Yeah?” Briar answered in the form of a question.

Weaver sucked her teeth a little. “We should go. Oh, there’s my watch.”

They climbed out of the bunker, and back onto the surface. One set of their shifted selves was standing out there already, with their version of Weaver trying to unlock the door using the secret boulder switch. “Weaver!One,” she acknowledged with a nod of her head.

“Weaver!Two,” the first Weaver replied.

“Self-destruct?”

“Had to be done.”

“How long?”

Weaver!One looked back at the steps as the hatch was closing up. “It’s soon enough. We should all go.”

“We came here for a reason,” the other Briar pointed out.

“The cons outweigh the pros,” Weaver!One tried to explain. “Now hustle off. Don’t let us get mixed up with each other.”

When Weaver!One tried to walk away, Weaver!Two took her by the arm. “Don’t go back to the Nucleus.” Her eyes darted over to the first Goswin. “One of them has taken his job a little too seriously. We barely escaped.”

“One of the Goswins?” Weaver!One asked.

“Just don’t go to the Nucleus,” she reiterated. “At least one group ended up on Dardius, where they were forced to watch some bizarre propaganda films. They’re taking the Reality Wars very seriously, they think we should join, and they have a way of keeping us from shifting away.” She didn’t say anything more about it.

The two groups separated from each other, and disappeared. At least that was what presumably happened. The first version of the crew leapt away first, leaving the newcomers’ fates in question. Perhaps they would go down into the bunker, halt the self-destruct sequence, and start the whole cycle over again. Misha Collins could spend the rest of his life being shifted back and forth to the Ediacaran period, altering future events irrevocably. It was possible that every other Weaver or Holly Blue who took her copy of the crew to that place inevitably made the same choice to destroy it, only for her plan to be unknowingly thwarted by the next copy. Time and reality were now defined by chaos. That was only meant to be the expected end state of the universe, not the beginning of it, nor the middle.

“This is where you grew up?” Eight Point Seven asked. They were standing by a pond in the middle of a small field, with a forest all around them.

“Monarch, Belgium,” Goswin confirmed. “Population: zero.”

“Your family was the only one here?” Eight Point Seven continued the interview.

“There were others...until the very end. In the late 21st century, when they started erecting all the arcological megastructures, of course most people eventually moved to them, or they wouldn’t have been successful. It was the rewilding effort that did it. As antienvironmentalists started to be turned over to death, it became easier and easier to convince people that giving the land back to nature was the only ethical choice given our technological ability to accomplish it. They left their homes, and made new ones. The cities disappeared, both in name, and in infrastructure. I believe they used to call this Ghent. Ghent didn’t get an arcology. The nearest one is closer to where Antwerp was.”

“Yet some people didn’t do that?”

“The megatowers are more environmentally friendly for sustaining the massive population of the whole planet, but it’s okay if a few choose other methods. North America had their circles, and we had our villages. We lived in arcologies too, just not gigantic ones. We lived on the land, but we didn’t live off of it, instead importing produce from vertical farms. That was my job for a time, pulling the cart of food by bicycle. That’s all I did; just pedaled back and forth from the village to the arc.” He stared at the pond. “Over and over and over and over and over again.” He paused for a few moments. “I got tired of the monotony, so I left. I had studied both history and futurology, so I knew that the villages would die out too. It was only a matter of time before kids like me decided that there were more social options in the towers. I won’t get into how I moved up to become the Futurology Administrator of the whole world, but...I’ll never forget where I came from. This is where my mother died. She wasn’t transhuman, so she only lived for 74 years. My dad underwent some treatments, but he stopped them for her. Unfortunately, I guess, it was too little too late. He still outlived her by 21 years. But not here. After the second to last person left Monarch, he left too, and moved into my cluster in the arc.”

Goswin looked up as if just remembering that he was talking to other people. “For those of you who don’t know, the arcologies are modular. Each unit is the same size, and comes with a baseline configuration, which includes a bathroom. It can be turned into a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, a bedroom, or even a simulacrum of an outdoor space, among other variations. And they can be moved around, so he didn’t move into my cluster of units so much as they literally picked up my one unit, and flew it down to another slot; one that had empty units next to it, which we began to occupy together.”

“Where are we in the timeline?” Eight Point Seven asked him. “Are you still on Earth? Is your father?”

Goswin took a deep breath, and twisted Weaver’s wrist, which sported a watch that always told her the time, even when she traveled through it in the wrong direction, or at the wrong speed. “We were very precise with this jump. My younger self left with my dad fifteen minutes ago. We just had my mother’s burial ceremony.”

“Where’s her grave?” Briar asked.

Goswin actually smiled. “Over here.” He led them down the path a ways.

“Monarch butterflies,” Eight Point Seven pointed out as a few of them began to land on her arms and head.

“Our namesake,” Goswin explained. “Like I was saying, they gave all this back to nature, but they didn’t just let it grow on its own. They planted things on purpose according to a very well thought out ecology algorithm, generated by an entity such as yourself. They decided that Belgium would do well with milkweed, and with milkweed comes Monarch butterflies.” He continued through the trees until coming to another clearing. A gravestone marked the spot where his mother was laid to rest, but it wasn’t altogether necessary. A swarm of monarchs were keeping watch over it.

“It’s beautiful,” Briar couldn’t help but say. He was starting to relax into himself.

“We can’t stay,” Weaver said with a sigh. “We have to go back to the Nucleus.”

Goswin nodded gently, though no one was looking at him; they were still watching the monarchs flutter about. “I know,” he whispered.

“You heard?”

“I may look like a regular human, but I have excellent hearing.”

“Are you prepared to meet your possibly evil self?”

He took a beat, but then answered confidently with, “yes.”

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Fluence: Cass (Part VI)

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The four of them reached out for each other, and took hands. They were totally in sync, and were able to make the jump without saying a word. They were back on Earth, but roughly 542 million years ago, standing on the beach of an ocean. They lingered for a moment or two before letting go, and awkwardly turning away from each other. Weaver walked over to a rock a few meters away, and stuck her arm into a deep hole. They heard a click, which served to split the ground apart, and reveal a stairway leading down into the earth. Lights began to switch on automatically, revealing that the bottom was only a few stories down. “It’s okay,” she said. “We’ll be safe down there. I built my own mini version of the Constant to be alone.”

“You’re not alone,” Goswin contended.

“We’ll see.” She stepped down, and never looked back to see if they were following, but they were anyway.

They landed in a decent-sized foyer with a mostly homey feel, but also laboratory-like qualities. Weaver continued to lead them down a hallway until they came upon the main room where they found an aquarium that took up one entire wall. The glass barrier curved inward, which would let creatures swim right up to investigate the humans, if such creatures were anywhere to be found. There was a lot of underwater life to admire, such as algae and a seaweed of some kind, but no fish.

After Weaver tapped something on a control panel that the others assumed was a security passcode, she watched them watch the prehistoric creatures floating around soothingly. “Those aren’t plants, if that’s what you’re assuming. They’re not animals either. They’re unlike anything you’re used to in the modern age.”

“Protista?” Eight Point Seven guessed. She was more knowledgeable than the other two, but still didn’t recognize these organisms.

Weaver shook her head. “Some people think that there are eight kingdoms, including Protista and Chromista, but there have actually been eleven throughout history and prehistory. Two of them went totally extinct long, long ago. These right here belong to Ankorea, which came this close to surviving to our day. They exhibited traits from all of the other modern kingdoms. Their frond right there shows the first inkling of photosynthesis that we’ll later see in plants. It doesn’t convert sunlight directly into energy, but it does power the decomposition process that the organism uses to break food down like fungi. It’s what makes them brown, instead of green. Despite being multicellular, they reproduce via splitting, like bacteria, which sounds insane, though I’ve never witnessed it up close. This area is really calm and hospitable, but they’re extremophiles, like Archea, able to survive in both high and low temperatures. They can nearly all transition from one to the other if need be, making them unique. But unique isn’t the right word, because they’re quite diverse, like protists.

“All of these that you see belong to Ankorea, despite how different they look, and that explains why I built my constant here. You see, their defining characteristic is that they all have this anchor that can anchor them to the seafloor. This allows them to catch food as it floats by from one spot while saving energy. Once they feel that the area has been stripped, they pull the anchor up, and move on. They can swim or drift, depending on their energy reserves. Some of their anchors extend, like the majority of the ones you’re seeing, but that one there isn’t a rock. It has a nonextendable anchor. When it’s released, this thing will kind of start to roll around until it finds a better source of food. I don’t see it here, but one of them actually has two anchors, so it can walk like an animal. It’s crazy to watch, I wish you were here for that.”

“They sound so resilient,” Goswin pointed out, “how did they go extinct?”

“No one knows. I’ve brought a few experts back to study them, but we don’t understand it yet. Of course this is all before whatever ended them, but the current theory is that they were outcompeted by stronger organisms. They might have overgrazed their own environment. As you can see, there’s not a whole lot here. That’s pretty indicative of the world right now. The food cycle is difficult to maintain in the Ediacaran period. The ones that survive are the kind that thrive with less.”

“You brought other people here?” Eight Point Seven asked. “Did that not risk paradoxes? If they had published papers regarding what you know to be facts, but which were lost to the fossil records for the majority of the population, I would have it in the repository of knowledge.”

“I erased their memories,” Weaver explained. “They weren’t happy about it, but I promised to credit them for any work published after a point in the timeline when I felt like this information could be shared. Honestly, I’ve not even decided whether that moment will ever take place. There’s no decent way to explain how anyone could possibly know this much about organisms that never fossilized. Unless time travel becomes public knowledge, this is just for me. And for you now, I suppose.”

“Are we going to keep talking about something dumb and meaningless, and sidestepping the real issue, which is why we’ve come here?” Briar questioned.

“He’s right. We have to address the elephant in the room.” Goswin looked around the room, and took a half step back as if he were searching for a literal elephant. “It’s no coincidence that we all agreed to jump to this place without exchanging a single word. We all wanted to leave where we were so we could unpack recent events and revelations.”

“The question I have,” Briar began, “is which of us are real?”

“We’re all real,” Weaver reasoned. “There’s just a slight possibility that we’re shifting timelines without realizing it.”

“Not only a possibility,” Eight Point Seven argued. “I don’t belong with the three of you.” She frowned. “This isn’t even my body.” The cut on her forehead had since healed into a scar, which perhaps alternate or shifted versions of her would be able to use to tell each other apart, but it meant nothing to the other three members of the crew.

“We don’t know that it quite works like that,” Weaver tried to clarify. “Time is a weird thing, and it’s getting weirder. The laws of causality are breaking down, and we are at the center of it. Remember what I told you about the river of consciousness. That’s not just a metaphor that applies to us because of our bizarre situation. All conscious beings experience this on the quantum level. Your mind is in a constant state of flux. Eight Point Seven, you’re considered a true artificial intelligence because when you were first created, you passed a series of rigorous tests meant to determine this very thing. Classical computers do not flow like human minds. Their alterations are quantifiable, and even reversible. They can be codified as a series of rapidly changing states. No matter how rapid the change is, each state can be pinpointed and recorded. Humans do not exist in states, and neither do you. Not simply knowing, but understanding, this phenomenon was key to advancements that led to things like mind uploading, digitization of the brian, and total immersive virtual reality.”

“I’m having trouble following,” Briar said nervously.

Weaver faced him. “Time travelers tend to think of reality in terms of clearly definable timelines, which you can destroy when you create a new one by triggering a time travel event. We call this a point of divergence. But that’s not really how it works. Time is constantly shifting through an array of equally probable potentials of superposition—”

“You’re getting technical again,” Goswin interrupted to warn her.

Weaver sighed, frustrated at having to figure out how to dumb this down. “There is no real you, or fake you. They’re all you, and you are all them. Even without this thing that happened to us, you may be jumping to different realities all the time, which exist simultaneously in parallel. That’s what we’re all worried about, right? We’re afraid that we don’t belong together, because we can’t know whether someone’s been replaced. Think of it this way, it may be true that you’re always being replaced, no matter what you do. You step into a new reality, don’t realize it, and move on like nothing happened. That could simply be how it works for everyone. It may be an inexorable characteristic of existence. There’s still a lot about the cosmos that even I don’t know. So the question is, if that has been happening to you your entire life, why worry about it now?”

“Because some of us appear to be shifting back,” Goswin noted.

“Yes,” Weaver conceded. “We’re encountering ourselves, not as fixtures at different points in the timeline, nor even as alternates from conflicting timelines. They’re just us, copied to possibly infinite numbers, looping back on ourselves, and criss-crossing each other’s paths. It’s chaos. It’s chaos incarnate. That’s scary, I get it. We can try to fix the issue, or  we can try to ignore it.”

“Wait.” Goswin stepped farther away, and peered around the corner of another hallway. “If we thought to come to this place, how come no one else did? Our other selves, that is. Or...whatever we should call them.”

“Shifted selves,” Eight Point Seven suggested.

“They should not be able to enter the premises,” Weaver assured him. “I placed us in a temporal bubble. We’re currently moving through time at a speed that is only nanoseconds slower than outside, which is more incidental than anything. The purpose is to erect a barrier that cannot be breached, even by another me. It’s a safeguard I put in place, not to stop my...shifted selves from coming in, but any alternate. If another Weaver shows up, she’ll see the bubble, and know to jump to a different moment—perhaps a year from now—to avoid running into herself. When you travel this far back in time, precision is implausible at best. I have labs all over the timeline, but this is more of a vacation home to get away from people.”

“Maybe this already happened, and they went back, instead of forward,” Goswin proposed. He had wandered over to the kitchen table where he found a piece of paper. He lifted it up, and turned towards the group to read it out loud. “Shifted Selves Visitor Log. Weaver, Goswin, Eight Point Seven, Briar, Six Point Seven, Ellie Underhill, Holly Blue...” He stopped at the last name on the list. “Uhh...”

“Are there tally marks next to each one?”

“Uh, yeah,” Goswin confirmed. “The usual suspects are about even. Holly Blue is here three times, as is Six Point Seven, and Ellie came once. I guess she decided to join us on the X González in one timeline.”

“At least one,” Briar added.

“Right,” Goswin agreed.

“What is it, Gos?” Weaver asked him. “You’re balking at something, and it isn’t the tally marks. Those are interesting additions to the crew, but not wholly shocking. Who’s on the list that shouldn’t be?”

Goswin looked up from the paper. “Misha Collins.”

“The Misha Collins?” Eight Point Seven asked.

“Who’s Misha Collins?” Briar asked, having lived his whole life literally under a rock, or cave, rather.

“Misha Collins is an actor from the 20th and 21st centuries,” Weaver explained. “I would like to hear the story that led him to show up here.”

A shadow appeared out of nowhere next to the refrigerator. It was sliced up in segments, which were shimmering, and moving from side to side like Pong, as molecules worked to coalesce into full form. It started with the shoes on the floor, and began to work its way up as the traveler struggled to find his place in this point in spacetime. Pants, trenchcoat, narrow tie over a white shirt, and finally the neck and head. It was none other than Misha Collins. He only took a few seconds to get his bearings. “What is it this time? Uh, I mean...report.”

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