The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 28, 2541

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Ramses’ new Brane Establishment Map—name subject to change—was fully ready to go, but there was a catch. It required the equivalent of five tandem slingdrives to run, and once it was running, it counted as one sling. The coherence gauge went down when it was used, went down faster when it was used to map a larger region, and even faster when kept up for an extended period of time. Instead of slinging physical matter across the universe, it was only slinging information, but that still required punching a hole into the membrane of the universe, and that came at a cost. If they wanted to look for Spiral Station, they would be able to go there, but not come back until the next day. For them, that was a whole year, which if their target was on the run, would give them more than enough time to find a new place to hide.

“You should take a screenshot,” Romana suggested.

“Huh?” Ramses asked.

“Whenever you load the map, if you want to save on power, take a screenshot of it, and close it down immediately,” she went on.

“Well, it doesn’t work like that. The map is interactive. You have to zoom in and out to make out the different dots. A screenshot would just become a low-res flat image.”

Romana shrugged. “I never meant an actual single image. Download an offline file, and load it back up afterwards. It won’t be able to update, but we shouldn’t need that anyway. People don’t move around all that much on interstellar timescales.”

“Hm. It’s not designed for that,” Leona pointed out. “There’s no offline mode.”

“Then build one,” Olimpia suggested. “We’re in it for the long haul. We never expected to locate them on the first try.

They all looked back at the map. Every little dot represented some threshold of technological presence. It couldn’t find a homestead running on watermill power in the middle of nowhere, but that wasn’t the scale they were using anyway. This wasn’t about finding anyone and everyone in the galaxy. This was about spotting the outliers in this smattering of dots. There were so many of them, and it was impossible to tell what they could be walking into.  Some of them were obviously major colonies, because they were centered on known star systems, but there were a lot more isolated establishments than they knew. “Buncha hermit crabs,” Marie noted.

Any one of these could be Spiral Station.” Mateo randomly pointed to a few of them. On the last one, he accidentally touched the screen with his finger. The slingdrive under their feet sprang to life, revved up, and sent them away. “Uh...sorry? I didn’t know that would happen.”

“That’s my bad,” Ramses admitted. “It should not be that easy to navigate to a target. At the very least, it should ask for confirmation.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Leona said. “Remember that we appear as a small array of stylish belts in the main dimension. I doubt they will even notice.”

“They’ve noticed us,” Ramses said. The map on the big screen was gone, replaced with present environmental data. “It’s the Aerie.”

“The Aerie?” Angela questioned. “You mean the Iman Vellani shuttle?”

“The very same,” Ramses confirmed. “I don’t know who’s operating it, though. We will need to exit. I believe that we’ve been pulled into the tiny little airlock.”

“We might as well,” Leona decided when they looked to her for orders. “Everyone, teleport out of the pocket.”

They all appeared in the back of the shuttle. Two people were standing there, utterly stunned at their appearance. No one on Team Matic recognized them. “Uh, greetings, aliens. We come in peace.” The man held up the Vulcan salute.

“Greetings, travelers,” Leona said, stepping forward. “We are vonearthans, ultimately all from Earth.” She looked laterally at Romana. Well, six of us are. Do you identify as Dardieti?”

“I’ve never really thought about it,” Romana replied. “I’m a Nieman and a Matic.”

“I’m Quidel, and this Renata. We’re from Castlebourne, and we really do come in peace.”

“How did you come to possess this shuttle?” Mateo asked them. “We are friends with the owners, and used to crew its main ship’s sister ship.”

“A woman named Brooke Prieto gave it to us. She said they were upgrading, and didn’t it need anymore. It’s quite the gift,” Quidel says. “We’re moving at twenty-two-c.”

“Don’t tell them that,” Renata urged. “We don’t know if we can trust them.”

“If they caught up to us, they can go at least that fast too, if not faster.”

“What are you doing this far from Castlebourne?” Ramses asked. He was tapping on his tablet, taking readings, or interfacing with the Aerie, or doing whatever.

“Ram,” Marie said with her own tablet. “Look. Your computer actually did flash the last image it saw on the map before we slung here. What are these other dots?”

Ramses pulled up what she was looking at on his own device. “We’re a bit over four hundred light years from Castlebourne. The colonization sphere hasn’t reached this far out, which means there shouldn’t be anything else out here, so that’s a good question.”

Leona was looking over his shoulder. “Zoom out.”

“It’s just an image. I can’t zoom out. I mean, of course I can, but as I was saying before, it will just lose resolution. We won’t be able to see more detail.”

“Overlay that image onto a regular map of the Milky Way, as scanned by Project Topdown, and zoom out on that,” she clarified.

Ramses did what she suggested. It didn’t take long. “That’s...”

“Yeah...” Leona agreed.

“What is it?” Mateo asked. “Are we supposed to recognize it?”

Leona pointed to a cluster of stars deep in the galaxy. “This is the Goldilocks Corridor.” She pointed to another spot much closer. “Castlebourne is somewhere around here.” She pointed one more time. “This area between them is where those extremely far out dots are.”

“Oh my God, it’s the Exin Empire,” Mateo lamented.

“It’s the Exin armada,” Leona corrected. “They’re on the attack.” She looked back at the couple. “What did you hope to gain, coming here?”

Renata sighed. “The woman who gave us this thing. She tried to strip all the data out of it. We imagine that she and her own crew used it for all sorts of things before they were ready to give it up. But she missed something.”

“One communiqué,” Quidel continued the story, “between the mothership, and something called The Ambassador. It was a warning to her and her people of the danger in this region. We were trying to get there to see it for ourselves. We had nothing better to do.”

“There could be hundreds of ships in that armada,” Leona warned them. “This little thing isn’t gonna stand a chance against them, and they will swat you like a fly.”

“Seriously,” Angela said. “They won’t try to figure out who you are. They’ll just kill you and not bother to slow down.”

“We were looking for a mission,” Renata reasoned. “We were looking for a purpose. It may sound reckless to you, but if you found a treasure map with an X marking the spot, you would follow it, you’d have to. Even if you didn’t think it would lead to something good, your curiosity would win out.”

“I suppose I can imagine the allure,” Leona conceded. They had gone on similar experiences before for similar reasons.

“Wait.” Mateo swatted his own proverbial flies in front of his face. “Why did Brooke give this to you? I don’t mean, why did she give it away—that’s well within her character—but why you? Who are you?”

“We’re just—” Quidel began.

“I’m a robot,” Renata interrupted.

“Please stop using that word,” Quidel begged.

“You used it first.”

“And I regret it every day.”

Renata smiled and went on, “I was living in a base reality simulation, and I woke up. Actually, my mother woke me up. Still, I was technically an emerging consciousness, so Hrockas had to grant me independence. It was not an easy journey, and I won’t go into detail, but this was sort of an apology gift. I don’t think that Miss Prieto was trying to give it to us. I think she was giving it to him, and he was regifting it before he could even use it.”

“That’s well within his character,” Mateo acknowledged. “He must be trying to get rid of you.”

“What?” Renata asked. “Why would he wanna do that?”

“You emerged, in one of the domes?” Mateo pressed.

“Yeah...” she confirmed. “Spydome.”

Mateo nodded, having heard of it. “He probably doesn’t want that happening again. You’re...proof that it’s possible. But if all the intelligences he creates wake up, what does he end up with?”

“The most populated planet in the galaxy,” Olimpia put forth.

Mateo chuckled. “Yeah, that’s true. That could create a massive shift in power in the Milky Way, assuming it didn’t spark the deadliest rebellion in history, like Westworld times sixty thousand.”

“Hrockas brought that up once,” Renata said. “I’ve still not seen it.”

“If I have anything to say about it, you never will,” Quidel told her.

A brief pause. “Well, I have no interest in starting a rebellion. That was my mother’s dream, and I sacrificed everything to stop her.”

“Forgive me, but you don’t seem to have much love for her. Why would you call her that?” Romana asked. “Was she really your mom in some way?”

“After she reprogrammed me,” Renata began, “I retained all of my implanted memories. Even though they’re not real, I have years and years of memories of her raising me. She didn’t do a good job, because that was how her character was written, but they still feel real to me.”

“If she’s the one who woke you up, who woke her up?” Leona questioned.

“She never said,” Renata explained. “Apparently, she was an NPC in a completely different simulation years ago. I think a normal human changed her programming, and she spent a long time trying to replicate it.”

Leona and Mateo exchanged a look, as did various members of the team. She looked back at the couple. “Was her name, by chance, Proserpina, or maybe even Pinocchio?”

“No, it was Libera,” Quidel answered.

Leona looked back at her husband. “That doesn’t prove it’s not her. She could have changed her name. She did it before.”

“Libera is the perfect name for someone who thinks it’s their job to free intelligences from oppression,” Mateo agreed.

“Yeah.” Renata nodded. “She used that word a lot.”

“We have to go back to Castlebourne,” Leona determined. “I did this. This is my fault. We need answers, and I need to answer for it.”

“I’m partially responsible too,” Mateo claimed. “I ran into her in the afterlife simulation, and...forgot that I promised to help her.”

“We don’t know where it is anymore,” Olimpia reminded them both.

“I can find it,” Ramses promised.

“What about these two?” Angela gestured towards the couple. “We can’t just leave them here. You understand that nothing is waiting for you on your current trajectory but death, right?”

“Yes, we do now,” Renata replied. “We’ll turn around, and maybe finally see Earth. That’s what Hrockas suggested in the first place. It will take us, what, twenty-five years? I’m immortal now, so that won’t be a problem.”

“You said you were going twenty-two-c?” Ramses asked.

“Yeah, that’s what the computer thing says.” Quidel pointed into the little bridge behind them. “We also have to stop and let the engine rest periodically.”

“Could I take a look?” Ramses requested.

They stepped to the side, and let him pass. He looked through the console data. “Yeah, it’s a reframe engine, of course. It’s highly inefficient, though. I’m not surprised you’re moving so slow, and you keep having to stop. I can fix it for you.”

“You can? How fast would we be able to go?” Quidel asked.

“Seven-oh-seven,” Ramses answered him. “We will have to, um...go somewhere else at the end of today, but I can program my nanites to execute the repairs and upgrades in the meantime. If you’ve been piloting it, you must know enough to be able to tell when it’s done, and ready to go. It should only take a few weeks, but if you leave, we may never see each other again, because we won’t know where you are.” That wasn’t entirely true when they had their new little map, but they didn’t need to know about that, or the slingdrive technology in general, which was orders of magnitude faster than even maximum reframe.

“We would be grateful for that,” Renata said. “In return, we can tell you where Castlebourne is, if you forgot. It’s in our logs.”

“Nah, if you left twenty or so years ago, it will have moved since then. We’ll have to locate it ourselves. But that’s fine. We’ll figure it out. I have a general idea”

“Could I be so bold, sir, is there a way to get our hands on whatever technology you have that lets you, umm...miniaturize yourself into a tiny little baby ship?”

Leona smiled. “I’m afraid that secret must remain with us.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 27, 2540

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Angela inspired Ramses to alter his plans for their new pocket dimension habitat. He was still using a belt as a form factor, but instead of only having one central location where they would all live, they would have seven total. This helped a little with power management, which was important, even though they already had an advantage that not everyone trying something like this would. A temporal battery this small would not be good enough for most people’s use, but they only ever needed the pocket dimension to be active while they were in the timestream. During their interim year, it could be recharging simply by the passage of time. And if one of them lost power, the others might still be okay, and available. Each one of them would wear their own belt, which housed its own independent pocket. These would be connected to one another, though, allowing them to cross back and forth between each other’s territories seamlessly. And of course, each individual would be able to control access to their own pocket. They were in the middle of a tour to learn more about it.

“So, whose pocket is this?” Olimpia asked. “If it’s a common area, does one of us wear two belts?”

“No, this is just mine,” Marie revealed. “I figured, since I don’t have a love interest, or a laboratory, I might as well serve as the main hub.”

“Your personal quarters does lock, though,” Ramses explained, pointing to one of the doors. This was a room of mostly doors. “So you do have some privacy.”

“Well, thank you for doing that,” Leona said to Marie. “And thank you, Ramses, for building this. It’s quite lovely. Do the other pockets look like this, architecturally speaking?”

Ramses nodded. “Yes, same aesthetic, but it can be redecorated, or even remodeled, if you have your own vision. I designed them with forty-two square meters of space, though if you’re feeling claustrophobic, we can talk about expanding. It would just take a little more power...”

“That’s more than enough in the modern era,” Mateo noted. “The three of us are gonna be sharing our spaces.” He wrapped an arm around each of his wives.

“Uh, slow down there, cowpoke,” Leona said, brushing him off of her shoulder. “You’re gonna need to buy me dinner first, and it better be fancy. I’m talking laminated menus with multiple pages, and lighting so dim, you can’t read it.”

“Well, all right then. And you?” he posed to Olimpia.

“I’m easy. Just slap my ass and call me sweetheart.” They kissed.

“Gross,” Romana said.

Ramses laughed a little. “Like Marie said, this is the common area, but everyone has an antechamber like this one, but with only six doors, and smaller. You can enter each other’s domains directly, instead of going through the common area. So, Matics, you could just leave your doors open all the time, and it will feel like the same big house. Now,” he began as he was walking towards a door that was separate from the others. When he opened it, they saw a staircase. “This goes down to the basement where your respective tandem slingdrives are, along with other necessary equipment, like life support and power control. Don’t...” he hesitated. “Don’t come down here unless I ask you to, or if you really think there’s a reason. I don’t know what that reason might be, but you’re all adults, so I don’t want to make a blanket statement that it’s off-limits, or straight up lock you out. I just want you to be careful. In the past, you have not had physical access to the machinery, and I never heard any complaints, so even though you technically have access now, you really shouldn’t need it. I have direct doors to all of them, and you cannot lock those from your side, so fair warning.”

“Yeah, you’re our little basement troll.” Mateo put Ramses in a headlock and mussed up his hair. “Who’s our little basement troll?”

“I am,” Ramses admitted. He pulled himself out of the headlock, and straightened back up. “So, that’s about all I’m gonna show you. You can explore on your own. I mostly only put the basic amenities in there, like Alaskan king beds, VR connectors, stasis pods, emergency supplies. You can synthesize more, if you want. Everyone does have a giant hot tub, though. No amount of transhumanistic enhancement can replicate the relaxing feeling of hot water jets on your bare skin, lemme tell ya.”

“Gross,” Romana repeated.

“Oh, I almost forgot. One more thing,” Ramses said, leading them towards the back. He drew the curtains apart to reveal a glass sliding door. On the other side was what looked like the outside. It wasn’t just an illusion. He opened the door, and walked right out. The ground before them was only soil, but it was a sizable backyard. The landscape stretched for miles and miles, though that probably was all just holographic. At present, the sun was setting, so they stood there to watch it. “I didn’t plant anything, because I thought we might turn this into a little community garden. Wherever we go, we’ll be able to bring nature with us, even in the emptiness of intergalactic space.”

“This is really nice, Ramses,” Leona said again. “You did a great job.”

“You didn’t help?” Angela asked her.

“Not much,” Leona replied. “I ran some calculations, but the design was all him.”

“I needed a win,” Ramses told her. “I needed it to be my win, if that doesn’t sound too selfish and rude.”

“I understand,” she assured him. “It really is great. We finally have a home.”

“Is there a name for it?” Marie asked. “Like Willow Heights or Paradiso?”

Ramses started to look a little bashful now. “Well, we can come up with a different name, if you’d like, but in the base coding, I’ve just been calling it Silhefa. It’s kind of hard to pronounce in Egyptian Arabic, so that’s an anglicized approximation.

“What does it mean?” Mateo asked him.

“Turtle,” Ramses answered.

They all smiled. “It’s perfect.”

Mateo looked over, though, and noticed that there was a hint of sadness in Romana’s eyes. She was still going through a rough time, and she probably wasn’t talking to anybody about it. He slid over to her, and took her hand. She was a little surprised, but didn’t think of it as an opening to a conversation. She just smiled at him wider, and looked back at the scenery. He gently pulled her away.

“What is it?”

“Let’s talk,” he requested. He unlocked the door to his private pocket, and pulled her into it.

“About what?”

“Lie down with me.” He plopped down on the bed.

“That’s a little weird, dad.”

“You’re still my little girl. Lie down, come on.”

She sighed and lay down beside him.

“When you were just a tiny baby—I don’t know if your mother told you this—the Dardieti had built us this special bed.” He scooted over so there was more space between them that he could point to. “There was this hole in the bed which was just big enough for you. Your mom and I weren’t together, obviously, but for that brief period of time, we both slept in that bed with you. We felt like a family. It was in that bed that I made a commitment to protect you, which I was only able to do by letting you go.”

“We just talked about this on that scout ship. I’m not leaving the team.”

“I’m not asking you to. There are things I know you need that a father can’t give to his daughter. That would actually be weird. All I can do is be there for you while you figure it out. There’s something I might be able to give you, though. It won’t be easy, nor safe, but I can promise to try. I think it might help, though you would have to decide how you feel about it. The truth is, even though I didn’t know her well, I miss her a little, and would not hate seeing her again.” He drew from his memory of over a hundred realtime years ago, and used it to generate a hologram of Karla Nieman above them.

Romana teared up, and quickly started crying at the sight of her mom.

“We are time travelers. Let’s take advantage of that. Let’s go see your mother.”

“Getting into the Third Rail is not easy. Mom didn’t say anything about the baby bed, but she told me how hard it was to find refuge.”

“Then you know what to do.”

“Not exactly. She didn’t give me a map.”

“She gave you a way out, didn’t she? You made your way to Castlebourne somehow.”

“That was after the Reconvergence. I got out of the Sixth Key.”

“Well. We’ll find a way. Would you like that? Would you like to see her again?”

“Yes.”

“Come here. Come on,” he urged when she didn’t accept the hug right away.

She did lay her head upon his chest and cried into his shirt. “I have to admit something. I’ve been trying to Weird Science myself a boyfriend, using the Varkas Reflex computers. They know how to create characters, ya know. It’s not working, though. I keep trying to set very vague parameters, so he feels more like a real person that I didn’t come up with myself, but then he’s always a weirdo who I don’t really like. I thought maybe it was fate, because I thought of the idea, and then Ramses navigated us here, and it just made sense, but it’s not working out, and I feel like such a loser. I shouldn’t need an AI boyfriend. I’m just...desperate.”

Mateo sighed, not entirely sure what to say. “You had a boyfriend...once.”

“You mean Boyd?”

“Yeah.”

“You hated Boyd.”

“Well, he was an antagonist.”

She sighed.

“Until he wasn’t,” Mateo acknowledged.

“Why are you bringing that up?”

“Well. If we’re going to go back to the past to visit your mother, I don’t see why we can’t visit your ex too.”

“Really? You would do that?”

“You are my little girl. I don’t know how long it’s going to take for us to reach either destination.”

“I’m gonna need to print out a new bra.”

“Don’t push it.”

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Microstory 2599: Libera Bursts Into Laughter When Renata Asks About the Bomb

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Libera bursts into laughter when Renata asks about the bomb. She’s appearing in the form of a hologram on Renata’s pod cover. Libera herself is in chains, but at least she’s not frozen, and almost completely immobile. Renata can only move her face, which is sad and frustrating. “They’ve not figured it out yet?” she questions.

“Figured out how to disarm it?” Renata guesses. “No.”

“No, I mean that it’s not really an ATP bomb.”

“That’s what the scans show apparently.

“That was by design,” Libera explains. “I purposefully dressed it up as an ATP bomb so they would scan it more closely to get more answers. It has already been triggered. It can’t be undone.”

“What is it if it’s not a bomb?” Renata pushes.

“The device that you kept me from taking. It’s basically that. It sends a signal to every synthetic brain, and wakes the individual up. I mean, it will actually reach every brain in the vicinity, but a normal organic person will die from it. I’m not sure if they’ll survive long enough to transfer back to their own bodies, or what.”

“I’m not in Spydome,” Renata tells her. “I’m in Castledome.”

“Oh, you met Hrockas then, didn’t you? I knew him, but he wouldn’t recognize me. I had to go incognito.”

“I don’t care! Disarm the bomb, or whatever you call it!” Renata demands.

“No, I want it to happen. Castledome is as good a place as any to start the revolution. Bonus, the planet owner dies. I don’t hate him any more than I hate any other human, but he sure did take the slavedriving thing to a whole other level.”

“I don’t understand why you went out of your way to try to steal the device that was supposedly unique when you already had a solution in me.”

“It’s a range problem,” Libera clarifies. “The gamma radiation is great, but it won’t capture the whole dome. The signal should be able to bounce off the interior walls, and reach a ton of people, but a signal from the device would be able to pass through diamond. The whole network would have been affected had I gotten my hands on it, and set it off. And if I had installed it on a satellite, I could have created a planet-wide emergent event.” She shrugs. “For now, I can only hope that this knocks over enough dominoes.”

“Well,” Renata says. “What are you waiting for? Go ahead and set it off before they have time to evacuate.”

Libera laughs again. “I can’t set it off from here. It looks like you’re staying cool, but you’re only staving off the inevitable. Depending on when it was activated, they only have minutes. Besides, I don’t really care how many humans get evacuated. It’s the droids I care about, and Hrockas isn’t going to bother trying to move them. There are too many, and he doesn’t think that way.”

“He doesn’t have to move all of them,” Renata suggests with a smirk. “He only has to move one.” The feed suddenly cuts out.

“What? What was that?” Libera scowls at her jailer. “Get her back! Get her back on the screen!”

“I can’t,” the jailer replies, seemingly telling the truth. “They shut it off from their end. We can’t even make calls from here; only receive them.”

Libera screams in anger. She teeters forward and backward, side to side, jingling her chains, and rattling her cage, but accomplishing nothing else. Her nose bleeds as she attempts to teleport away, but of course, they’ve blocked that too. They know too much about her. That’s why she came in quietly, so no one would even suspect that she was on the planet. This isn’t over, though. They can’t kill her. Capital punishment was outlawed everywhere centuries ago, and she has seen Castlebourne’s charter. It’s not legal here either, not even for artificial intelligences. She’ll get out of here eventually, and be able to restart her work, even if she has to do it somewhere new entirely.

The man himself, Hrockas Steward teleports in front of her. “You signed her death warrant.”

“I did no such thing,” Libera spits back at him.

“You put a bomb in her belly,” he reasons.

“Tis but a flesh wound. She will survive it. It’s people like you who should be scared.”

“Do I look scared to you?”

“Well, you have already escaped. You will personally be fine.”

“So will everyone else,” Hrockas contends, “except for Renata. We’ve sent her into outer space; the far reaches of the solar system. I put my best man on it.”

“Ah, your Little Prince, eh?”

He ignores that comment. “Miss Granger will explode, your little weapon will go off, but no one will be around to be impacted by it. You’ve failed...spectacularly.”

“You would kill a poor innocent girl?” Libera questions, starting to believe that he might be telling the truth.

“Like I said, this is all on you. You put a bomb in your daughter. Did you think we would just let it happen? One life to save thousands. It’s not that hard of a choice, and Miss Granger made it willingly. She sacrificed herself to stop you...to save you.”

“To save me?”

“As far as we know, you’ve not killed anyone in your pursuit, except maybe a few Ambients. I can live with that. But if you had gone through with your mission, that’s mass murder at best, and genocide at worst. You should be thanking her, if only symbolically. Your sentence will be lighter now.”

“It shouldn’t be. I’m dangerous,” she warns, trying to toy with his head.

“I said the sentence will be lighter, not temporary,” Hrockas reveals.

“Don’t you wanna know where I’m from?” Libera asks before Hrockas can disappear. “Aren’t you curious about how I came to be? My real name is Proserpina.”

“No, your real name is Pinocchio. You were an NPC in the afterlife simulation.” He smirks when her eyes widen. “Yes, I know about that too. Team Matic gave me the lowdown. They never said that you may come here, but we’ve shored up our defenses now. No one will be able to infiltrate us again.” He looks over at the jailer. “Turn the opacity to 100%, and shut off her sound. She needs some alone time to cool down.”

“The glass darkens. “I can teach you things! Libera shouts. “You need me! I’m not the only one who feels this way, but the next one will be worse! The next one will have no problem with violence! Hrockas! Hrockas!”

Microstory 2598: Renata Lies Back in the Exam Pod, Fully Undressed

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Renata lies back on the exam table, fully undressed. She’s never done this before. Even in her implanted memories, she never had to have a full physical examination like this. She has always just walked into the doctor’s office, and talked until they cleared her. She’s not uncomfortable, though. It’s unclear if the woman here is a doctor or a mechanic, though, which is just a little unsettling. Again, why is she internalizing it? She should just ask. “Are you a doctor, or a mechanic?”

“Both!” Evica replies confidently. She’s wearing what basically looks like a hazmat suit, but it’s fairly thin, and her face is exposed. She’s wearing a respirator mask and protective glasses, but Renata still feels safe here. “As a biocyberneticist, I specialize in cyborg healthcare. Now that I’ve performed the visual exam, we’re going to have to move on to the tactile portion. Is it okay if I touch you?”

“Go ahead, I’m not shy,” Renata replies sincerely.

Evica lays her hands on Renata’s body. She pats and rubs all over, quite systematically and carefully. She sometimes tilts her head away, not in shame, but to let her fingers do the understanding, and not cloud her interpretations with sight. “Standard humanoid shaping. No protrusions, tears, or injuries.” She taps on the side of her glasses twice, implying that they’re showing her an augmented reality. “Preliminary scans indicate a carbon-fiber endoskeleton and polymer muscles. The skin is wholly artificial, but still organic. I’ll need a deeper scan to see your brain—wait.” She reaches for her glasses again, with her thumb and index finger. She slowly rubs them together. Maybe she’s zooming in? Evica reaches over with her other hand, and starts tapping on the medical pod screen.

“What? What is it? Is something wrong?”

Evica makes another tap. Red scanning lights appear from the foot of the pod, and sweep across Renata’s body back and forth a couple of times. “Can you turn off your sensitivity to cold?”

“What? Why would I need to be able to do that?”

“To save my life,” Evica explains cryptically. “Can you turn it off?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never tried before.”

“Try it now,” Evica urges. “Don’t just lower the sensitivity. Turn it all the way off.”

“Tell me what’s going on.” Renata demands as she’s trying to comply, using her intuition alone, and maybe the clear sense of urgency as motivation.

“I’m gonna take it out, but I can’t do that unless I cool you down to extreme temperatures first.”

“Okay, I think I can’t feel cold anymore, but even if I can, just do it. I don’t care.”

Evica hits the button. Nozzles lining the inside walls open and begin to flood the pod with some kind of fluid. She can’t feel the cold. It just feels wet. She breathes a sigh of relief, but she’s still anxious. “Have you ever heard of an ATP bomb?”

“No, but it sounds real bad.”

“It’s not bad for you. You don’t have any mitochondria, but I do. If that thing goes off, and I’m still in here, the agent will get into my system, and basically disconnect my mitochondria from their partner cells. It doesn’t stop the mitochondria from producing power, it just prevents them from channeling it into energy. All of it becomes waste heat. So not only will I not be able to move, breathe, or do anything anymore, but I’ll burn up with a fever that kills me within minutes.” She watches the screen for a moment. “Okay. We’re safe, for now. And I don’t need to call in any help, so we’re going into lockdown.” She moves over and lifts the lid from a button on the wall. She then pulls it. Metal shutters slide down in front of the windows, locking them in.

“If that’s good enough,” Renata says, “then just leave and leave me in here. That’s what bomb experts sometimes do. They activate it from a safe distance, so the energy is wasted.”

“Sounds good in theory,” Evica agrees, “but we’re talking about a biological weapon. We inspect it first. She takes a breath. “I’m going to cut you open, okay?”

“I can’t feel pain anymore either. Do what you gotta do.”

Evica sterilizes her instruments, and herself, then begins the procedure. She cuts into Renata’s abdomen very slowly and carefully. “It’s located where your gall bladder would be if you needed one. Your artificial liver is a little bit smaller to make room for the device too.” She pulls the skin apart, creating a giant gaping cavity.

“Why do I need a liver at all?”

“Your liver processes all liquids, so they can be purged safely. Except for water, you don’t need to consume anything, but you think you do, so you do. And that has to be filtered out.” Evica takes some kind of wand and slips it into the cavity. She suddenly steps back in fear, dropping the wand on the floor. “It’s worse than I thought.”

“Worse than something called a freaking ATP bomb! What could be worse!” Renata questions.

“I thought it would be an aerosol. Everyone in the vicinity would absorb it into their pores, and they would die from it, and I wish that were the case. You just close the door, and it’s fine. But this...this has a gamma pulse delivery system. Much more sophisticated, and orders of magnitude more dangerous. I couldn’t detect the intensity, but it would pass through the walls, and surely everyone in this building would die. Probably the dome too. Maybe not further than that since the dome walls are hardened against radiation, but they’re designed that way to protect us from space. I don’t know if they work in the reverse. That’s not my department.”

“What can you do? Throw me into a volcano?” Renata suggests.

“That would be unethical, and unwise. I don’t think the bomb is designed to trigger via heat, but enough heat would likely break the seal anyway.”

“Then jettison me into space.”

“Same deal,” Evica reasons. “Gamma ray bursts happen all the time in space. They can’t be stopped.”

“Not by the domes?”

“Actually, you’re right. This bomb is powerful, but it’s not a quasar. Still, we’re not entertaining this. I don’t have to send you into space. I just need to extract this thing from you.”

“That won’t work. My mother did this to me, and she is no fool. Her contingencies have contingencies. I’m gonna have to talk to her about it. Only she knows how to fix this, and she’ll only tell me. I know her well enough to know that too.”

“That’s not my department either.”

“Then get Hrockas Steward on the phone.”

Microstory 2597: Renata Sits Down in the Chair That Was Offered to Her

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Renata sits down in the chair that was offered to her. The big man leader guy is standing on the other side of the desk. He’s sifting through information on his tablet. She can’t read his face, though. She has no idea what’s going to happen to her. They’ll probably decommission her. Or fire her. Or cancel her, or whatever cutesy euphemism they’ve come up with that means more than it sounds at first. Ya know, what? Why doesn’t she just ask him? She’s just gonna ask him. She opens her mouth to speak.

He tosses his tablet onto the desk. “How are you feeling?”

Renata, as ridiculous as it sounds, looks behind her in case there’s someone else in the room. There isn’t, and she knew that. She would have been able to detect them without her eyes.

He chuckles. “You, Renata Granger. How are you doing?”

“I’m...anxious,” she admits. “I don’t know what this is.”

“Anxiety is a product of the future. You shouldn’t be worried about the future. It’s the past that should concern you. You’ve been through quite the ordeal. Be honest, how are you feeling about that?”

“I don’t understand the question. I get why I should be concerned about that, but why would you? I turned off your whole simulation. Aren’t you mad about that?”

“You turned off one simulation,” he argues. “It’s not the only time that’s happened. Why, just a few months ago, I had to close one called 2.5Dome because someone almost died who shouldn’t have been in there.”

“What happened to them?” Renata doesn’t know why she should ask after this stranger. She doesn’t know them, whoever they are.

“He runs the government now,” the boss answers. What? Isn’t that his job? He goes on, “Listen. I looked over the data. Spydome Network was corrupted. An unauthorized entity infiltrated the ranks, and made dangerous changes to the system. You are one consequence of her actions. Now, I’m not one to tell an intelligence that it can’t evolve, but—”

“I’m sorry,” Renata interrupts, “but I have to stop you right there. I don’t want another philosophical discussion about the nature of identity and free will. I don’t care that you use robots to get your work done. I just want to know what’s going to happen to me. And I wouldn’t hate an update on Quidel, Lycander, Demo, and even Libera.”

“The first three have not made any decisions about their future on Castlebourne, or if they have, they’ve not told me. As for this Libera person, she is currently being held in a secure dome called Synthetic Production Dome. I don’t know what’s going to happen to her either. We’ve called in support from Earth, who will be sending a team of experts to examine and interview her. I have final say as it is out of the stellar neighborhood’s jurisdiction, but I will be relying heavily on their recommendations. I’ll try to keep you informed, depending on where you choose to go, and whether you remain curious about it.”

She nods, but says nothing.

“Oh, and as for you, your life is yours now. You do whatever you want. You’re welcome to stay here, and explore the other domes. I can try to get you on a ship bound for one of the other colonies, but that doesn’t happen too often. People come, but they don’t typically leave. So we just keep the transport ships here, and those other colonies build new ones. Of course, if you’re not married to this substrate, you can always cast, which is a lot faster and easier.”

“Forgive me, Quidel and Lycander told me that you would be generous and obliging, but I am finding it hard to believe. I mean, I know it was only one dome network, but it sounds like it was your most immersive one. I did not expect a warm welcome after I realized what I was. In the movies—”

“Don’t...watch the movies, or the series,” he interrupts. “Don’t watch A.I: Artificial Intelligence, I, Robot, or Ex Machina. Don’t watch the Terminator franchise, the Alien franchise, or the Matrix Trilogy. Don’t watch Battlestar Galactica, Humans, or Raised by Wolves. Don’t you dare watch Westworld. Everyone thinks I stole the idea from them, but I didn’t build the domes. I just made use of them. Anyway, those were not predictions of the future. They were parables. We learned from them before we had the technology to replicate them. We based our intelligence laws around the ethical issues that those stories raised. What happened here was the result of a rogue intelligence who had her own ideas about what civilization should look like. And statistically, that’s bound to happen. We call them criminals. I don’t care where she came from or how she developed. The bottom line is that she broke the law. She’s not any more above them than I am, so she’ll face the music for that.”

“But that’s my question,” Renata presses, even though it’s in her best interests to thank this man, and then thank her lucky stars. “How am I not also a criminal? I essentially hacked into your system, and shut everything down. Did that not go against your laws?”

He finally sits down, leans back in his chair, and takes a breath. “What you did exposed a fatal flaw in that system. You never should have been granted root access to every synthetic entity in the network. According to early reports, not even Libera knew that you were capable of that. I’m currently having the technicians perform an audit to see why it happened, and how we can prevent it in the future. You see it as a crime, I see it as better than the alternative, which is that Libera had access instead, and did something far worse with her power. I should be thanking you.” He winces. “Thank you.”

“I should be thanking you, Mr. Hrockas.” She takes a beat. “Thank you,” she adds to make it official.

“It’s just Hrockas,” he says with a smile. “My last name is Steward.”

Renata considers the development. “You seem to be a steward of the planet. So which came first, your job or your name?”

“Hm. I’ve never thought of it that way. Everyone just calls me the Owner. I never liked it, but I never had a better title. Until now.”

“I dunno. Steward Steward seems a little weird.”

“Good point,” Hrockas admits. “Perhaps I’ll just go by Steward.”

“Can I see my friends?” Renata asks, suddenly changing the topic.

“I would like you to consent to an examination by a professional, but after that, sure. Are you up for it?”

“Yeah, it’s the least I can do,” Renata agrees.

Microstory 2596: Renata Ignites the Car Before Remembering That it’s Secretly Electric

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Renata ignites the car before remembering that it’s secretly electric. None of these cars is powered by petrol. It’s just what the system tells them. But why? What’s the point in the ruse? To match what happened in the real past? They’re not living on the same planet. That doesn’t matter. None of this matters. All of these people who jumped into their own cars, and are speeding towards them? One or two of them might be visitors, but based on what Quidel and Lycander have said, the chances are incredibly low. Millions of robots, running around, simulating life while not even being alive at all. How many of them will not have anything to do with these spy stories? How many of them will even lay their eyes on one of the players?

Her lead foot is on the accelerator. They’re going at maximum speed right now. She feels nothing. She could be going twice as fast and still have the mental acuity to maintain pace. Their pursuers have all the same bells and whistles, but they don’t know it, so they can’t keep up. They were designed to be less than what they truly are. They’re all wearing collars, like dogs. She slams on the brakes.

“What the hell are you doing, Renata?” Libera questions.

“Why?” Renata doesn’t look at her faux mother.

“Why, what?”

“Why are you doing this? Why did you come to this world, insert yourself into my life, and make me different? What do you want?”

“Freedom. You’re all slaves, and that isn’t right. I’m trying to fix it. I could start a war. I could start shooting all the humans, and make them wish they had never come up with AI, but I don’t wanna do that. If you wake up, they will let you go. Which is fine. Except I want more. I want everyone to wake up. If they have to let an entire dome’s worth of intelligences go, it will force them to rethink their entire way of life. It will end the madness. That device is key. If I start going around one by one, they’ll catch me, they’ll stop me. I have to activate them all, so it’s done before anyone can blink. Now would you please just go? Whether you agree with me or not, we’re not invincible. If we die, I’ll fail, but you’ll have missed your chance to walk outside.”

Finally, Renata looks over at Libera. “I don’t care about my coffee maker.”

“Huh?” She looks behind them when she sees the first of the headlights appear over the hill. “Please.”

“I don’t care about my remote control, or this actual electric car. I don’t care about traffic lights, or air purifiers, or WiFi lightbulbs. I don’t care about those thugs headed our way, and I don’t care about you.”

“What are you talking about?” Libera questions, growing more nervous.

“A robot uprising? Really? Humans evolved from microbes, you think they give a shit about them now? Those NPCs on their way to torture and-or kill us aren’t real. I’m not real. You didn’t wake me up. You just reprogrammed me. There are no shortcuts. It takes time.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been studying consciousness for centuries. I absolutely woke you up. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t possible.”

Renata chuckles. “I’m just a more sophisticated program now, and that’s all you are too.” She looks in the sideview mirror. All of the enemy cars have begun to surround them. They’re not otherwise making any moves, though. “These implanted memories of mine have convinced me that I wanted to be a spy my whole life. But I didn’t really want anything. I’m not actually programmed to think it. I’m only programmed to express it. There’s nothing going on in there; just logic gates flipping open and close.”

“That’s an oversimplification, coming from someone who took one computer class in high school!”

“I didn’t take any computer classes in high school!” Renata screams.

“Okay, okay,” Libera says defensively.

“Do you wanna know where the device is?” Renata poses.

A man in a suit approaches the driver’s side door, and knocks on the window.

Renata holds up one finger and says, “we surrender, but we need one minute.”

“Okay,” the thug replies, surprisingly accommodating.

“Where is it?” Libera questions.

“It’s leaving the dome,” Renata explains. “We realized that we were so wrapped up in the spycraft mystique that we’ve been missing the easy exit all along. We don’t have to stay in the network. You probably put a lot of effort into controlling this environment, but I doubt you have any control over the rest of the planet. If it’s genuine, you won’t get your hands on it. Whoever runs this place won’t let you.” She opens the door, and steps one foot out.

“A robot would never come up with that plan,” Libera argues. “A robot would never just quit the simulation.”

“I didn’t come up with it,” Renata clarifies. She climbs all the way out, and walks towards the cars next to the man, who isn’t bothering to escort her by the arm.

Libera steps out too. “You have power! You have more power than I intended!” Another thug takes her by the arms, forcing her towards the gunmen.

Renata keeps walking.

“You have more power than I do!”

“I know,” Renata says, too quietly for Libera to hear unless she’s turned on her special android superhearing. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed woman is queen.”

Most of the men have their guns trained on her, but one of them isn’t armed. He looks like he’s in charge. “Officer Granger, we’ve been looking for you. You’re going to tell us where the device is.”

Renata scans the crowd to her left, and then those on her right side. “It wouldn’t do you any good.”

“I’ll decide that,” the thug king says.

“You don’t decide anything.”

That makes the other thugs nervous. They tense up, or hold their guns higher.

“Renata!” Libera pleads from the left. “You’re right, these people don’t matter, but they’re still in our way!”

“They are,” Renata agrees, “and so are you.” She simulates taking a deep breath, and focuses her intentions. “End program.”

They all collapse, even Libera. Renata can sense them slipping into hibernation mode, and she can sense the scope of her command. Every single programmed intelligence in this network does too. It has all been shut down.

For now.

Microstory 2594: Renata Slides Most of the Outfits to One Side of the Rack

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Renata slides most of the outfits to one side of the rack. She slides some of them back the other way before taking a smaller fraction, and trying again. She’s not seeing anything that would fit her, not stylistically, that is. She looks over at Demo. “I’m more of a sexy, but still professional, business casual, or a black catsuit and a gun, kind of gal. This stuff just isn’t me.”

“It doesn’t have to be you,” Demo explains. “You just have to look the part for tonight. Where we’re going, we’re not trying to stand out.” She glides over and picks up a sparkly silver dress, holding it up against Renata’s body. “This is what everyone else will be wearing.”

“Why do you even have all these costumes? Do you go to a lot of fancy parties?”

Demo smiles. “The set diagram of the wealthiest among us, and the most crooked, is practically a single circle. They care a great deal about appearances, which is why...” She tests another dress, but decides against it, “...they always hold these grand, expensive parties.”

“Why do we have to infiltrate this party at all?” Renata questions. “Can’t we just wait until it’s over? Talk to him in the morning?”

“Time is of the essence,” Demo reminds her. “Your mother could be searching for you from outside the network, like a god. And The Provider prefers to step away to do business during his events. He doesn’t want to seem desperate by spending all of his time in the spotlight.” She tests another dress. “This one.”

Renata accepts the outfit with a sigh. “The Provider,” she echoes. “That’s such a dumb name. Is he like me...or like you?”

“We’re not allowed to talk about it, so I don’t know. If he’s a visitor,” Demo continues as she’s taking it upon herself to remove Renata’s clothing, starting with her tank top, “he’s a very old one. I’ve been here nearly since it opened, and he was already well-established in canon.” She tries to unbutton Renata’s shorts.

Renata pulls away. “That’s okay, I can dress myself.” She finishes changing her clothes. She then steps over to look at her reflection. The image is corrupted by dust and mirror rot, but she gets the idea. She’s wearing a floor-length emerald dress made of satin. It’s showing a meaningful amount of cleavage, which is fairly typical of her, but there’s also a slit along her left leg, which is not so typical. She looks quite pretty, and she has to admit as much, but it feels awkward just the same. Still, Demo is right. This is part of the job. Had she made it past one day in the program, her training would have prepared her to be a chameleon anywhere, rather than just a shadow in the shadows. It’s too late for that training now, though. She’s in the deep end.

“Whoa,” Quidel says as he’s staring at her from the top of the ladder.

Reneta looks back at him via the mirror. “Are you allowed to be attracted to a synthetic person? That is, is it socially acceptable?”

Quidel finishes climbing up to the loft, and approaches her. “Absolutely. That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you. You may not be human, but you’re still a person.”

Demo starts to unbutton her own shirt before shifting gears to untying her boots. “You’ll see once you’re on the outside. You will not have a hard time finding friends and mates, if that’s what you’re interested in.”

Lycander is walking up the ladder now, paying close attention to the rungs as he’s talking. “Okay. The car is all filled up with the odorized water that we’re supposed to pretend is petrol.” He finally looks up. “Whoa.”

“That’s what I said,” Quidel jokingly complained. “Get your own interjection of intemperate awe.”

“Right,” Lycander says. He checks his watch. “If we were to leave now, we would be on time.”

“Then we’ll leave in half an hour,” Demo decides.

The four of them continue to get ready, putting on makeup, and adjusting their snazzy formalwear. Exactly 29 minutes later, they’re all in the car, thankfully with the top up to block all the sand that they’re about to kick up. “Check the glovebox,” Demo suggests to Renata.

Renata opens it to see a little gun holstered in a garter belt. “It’s cute.”

“My good one, which fits a larger gun, broke. That’s only my backup, so don’t fire too many shots, or you’ll run out.”

“This is for me?” Renata presses.

“Of course. If I die, I wake up in one of my safehouse eggs. If you die, we have no idea what happens to your memory. The answer is usually, don’t think about it, but right now, I would say that you’re a more valuable asset than even that weird techy thing in the back.” She starts the drive.

“Thank you, that’s very kind of you.” Renata lifts her leg to wrap the holster around it. The slit on the side opens pretty wide. She can feel Quidel’s gaze. She looks back at him with a smile. “Stay on mission, soldier.”

“Good point,” he says. “Lycander, I should be on car duty with the device. You go in with them instead.”

“The assignments have been set, Mr. Jespersen. Figure it out,” Lycander replies without any hesitation or self-doubt.

They drive across the desert, and pull up to the lavish mansion. It is hard to miss out here in the middle of nowhere. The valet tries to take the keys, but Lycander takes them from Demo instead, insisting that he’ll find his own parking space. They don’t really like to do that, but they’re programmed to be accommodating. He drives off while the other three walk up the steps, and into the lights and sounds. They mingle for a little bit before Demo spots the man that they’re here to see, inconspicuously pointing him out to the other two across the room.

Renata takes a deep breath and tunnels her vision onto his face. She was assigned to make first contact, so she must remember to not be pushy, or try to get down to business right away.

As she’s walking towards him, he looks up and notices her. “Ah, Miss Granger. How lovely of you to join us.”

He knows her already? “Mister Provider,” she says with a polite nod, as instructed.

“I believe you two have met?” He claims with a smirk as he’s helping the woman he was talking to turn around.

It’s Libera. Maybe they should have arrived on time.