Tangent Point: Farther Than I Can Throw (Part VII)

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Reed Ellis and his people were better prepared for this mutiny than the last one, when they only had about a week to plan. This time, it was months, but the mission was four times harder. Actually, it was probably harder than that because the Teaguardians were infinitely more competent than the security guards on the Tangent. The platform could be moved with four fusion torches. It was designed for balance and power. But those torches could be removed, and that was how it was meant to be most of the time for a stable geostationary orbit. The only reason the torches had stayed on for this long was because they were evacuating from the poles, and stationkeeping in these positions was a whole hell of a lot more difficult. They were, at last, about to be removed, but outsiders were not expecting it. They assumed the Tangent would be returned to Bungula while the mutineers boarded a Teaguardian, and faced judgment. Well, they were boarding all right, though not for judgment, but self-preservation.

Matar Galo was expecting Reed to surrender, but they had other plans, and everything had to be perfectly timed, because once someone noticed something out of place, like the sudden detachment of the torches, or the near complete abandonment of two of the Teaguardians, they would react. The last of the evacuees were now gone, having been transported to other vessels, but before the mutiny could begin, the stragglers had to be dealt with too. For various reasons, these were the ones who chose to stay here for an extended period of time. Tertius, Aeterna, and baby Dilara were here, along with their associates, Breanna, and her people. Most of the others felt some debt of gratitude to the Tangent, and an obligation to stick around and help out. This was great, but it posed a problem now. He pointed to the shuttle. “This is large enough to fit all of you. A course has been plotted for the asteroid known as PC-1124E. It has become a staging ground for interstellar journeys headed for the Varkas Reflex. VR is a popular destination for evacuees looking to start new lives with the special energy credit dispensations that you have all received since your exodus is not your fault.

“Now, the reason this is being offered to you is because my people and I are about to stage another mutiny. And the reason I set this shuttle aside is because it has been stripped of its communications system. You will cruise towards the asteroid at a fairly slow, fuel-saving speed, but not so slow that it looks like there’s something wrong with you. You will not be able to course correct, and not be able to reach out to anyone else. I have to do this, because I can’t have any of you revealing the truth about what we’re planning to do. I decided, instead of simply shipping you off, and wiping my hands clean of you, that I would give you each a choice. You can stay, and you can help, or you can stay, and stay out of the way. You just can’t betray us.” He looked down and swept his foot across the floor a few times. “Let’s call this seam the boundary. If you stay on that side, you get on that shuttle, and leave the Tangent for good. If you come over here, you’re with us, and you face the same consequences that we do. If we end up getting caught anyway, you might argue that you were under duress, but I will argue that you made the choice. Because that’s the truth. This is your choice. I’m not here to sway you one way or the other.”

“Why are you doing this?” Breanna asked. “Exactly why, that is? Just so you won’t get caught?”

“Yep, that’s it,” Reed explained. “There’s no convoluted secret agenda here. We just don’t want to get in trouble, so we’re gonna keep fighting. We like all of you, which is why we kept you around, but this isn’t your fight, and we don’t expect you to stay. If you choose not to, I thank you for your service.”

Without saying a word to Reed, or even to each other, Tertius and Aeterna spun around, and began to walk into the shuttle. Reed let out a quiet sigh of relief. He liked them as much as everyone else here—that was not a white lie—but he couldn’t guarantee that baby’s safety. That was the thing about a posthuman society. As advanced as they had become, infants and children were still mortal. They were still developing, and thor brains were still plastic. Digitizing them that young was a hurdle that researchers still had not cleared. Around half of the helpers elected to join them in the shuttle while the other half crossed that line. Breanna, Cashmere, Calypso, and Notus expressed interest in taking a hands-on role in the mutiny, while the majority of the rest didn’t want to fight, but still wanted to stay. It was unclear what their motivations were, but they would be guarded in case it was only a ruse so they would retain the ability to warn Teagarden of their plans.

“Wait,” Reed said. “I forgot one thing, and it hopefully doesn’t change your mind.” He snapped his fingers. One of his guards opened a door to let in two more guards, who were escorting a chained up and gagged Vasily. “This man did betray us, and I finally have my opportunity to be rid of him. Now that we’ve finished the evacuation, I no longer need to worry about his influence. These two fine guards have volunteered to hold onto him en route to the asteroid. You will not be in danger from him. We rigged up a little hock in there for him, but he will be present, and I understand if you feel uncomfortable with that. Since I think you deserve to know, his crime...was murder. The permanent kind.”

“And I would do it again!” one of Vasily’s guards shouted. He took out his sidearm and shot his partner. Then he grabbed one of the men who was about to get on the shuttle, to use as a human shield. “Now that I have your attention, I want you to unlock my brother, get in that shuttle yourself...Captain,” he spat, “and fly yourself out of here. As a great man once said, I’m the captain now!”

“Packard. You’re brothers? Since when?” Reed questioned. It may have sounded like an irrelevant question, but he needed to understand what he was dealing with here.

“Since I’m not Packard at all, but figured out how to hijack his download,” the guy who looked like Packard volleyed. “Ever since that Sorel guy took over the consciousness backup department, your system has been for shite. It wasn’t even hard.”

“We had to upgrade it, it created vulnerabilities. That won’t work a second time. Now put down the gun, you dupe, and release the nice man. Last year, you killed what many would consider an enemy combatant. Today, you have someone innocent, which is a whole different ballgame. If you pull that trigger, you’ll start losing sleep over it.”

“I’ll live,” the duplicate version of Vasily contended.

“But you won’t remember anything,” Tertius said as he was casually walking down the ramp.

Dupe!Vasily’s eyes glazed over as he loosened his grip on the hostage, who managed to pull himself away from his captor, and rush into the shuttle. Dupe!Vasily, meanwhile, looked incredibly confused, and scared. When he realized that he was holding a weapon, he dropped it to the floor. “I don’t...I don’t know anything.”

“What do you mean by anything?” Reed questioned.

“Anything,” Tertius echoed. “He won’t be a problem anymore. His memories are gone.” He picked up the gun, and held it up in offering to Reed. “If you have the consciousness of the true owner of this body stored away somewhere, you should be able to overwrite the parasite. If you don’t, I can try to restore him myself.”

“Restore him how?” Reed asked while another guard secured Packard’s weapon. He looked down at the now husk of Vasily’s host, who was now on his knees, seemingly trying to figure out what his hands were all about. “You didn’t even touch him. You didn’t do anything.”

Tertius shook his head. “I didn’t need to touch him. It’s just something I can do.”

Reed stared at him for a moment, occasionally looking down at the victim again, and also the other people in the room. “How much can you scale that up?”

“Oh, God,” Tertius said before sighing. “That’s not what it’s for.”

“Let’s do it,” Aeterna said as she was coming up from behind him without her baby. “We all know what the Captain is thinking. This mutiny is happening, whether we help or not. We have the chance to make it bloodless.”

“We could stop it altogether,” Tertius argued, “by erasing everyone’s memories.”

Aeterna placed a hand upon her father’s forearm. She looked over at Reed. “This man, and his people, came for us. They came for all of us, and they did it as efficiently and as humanely as possible. Now they need to get away safely. These mortal affairs; we inserted ourselves into them. We are partially to blame for what happened on Doma. It cost lives, it might have cost more if not for people like Reed Ellis. Let us do one last thing for the humans before we take ourselves off the board and focus on my daughter.”

“This is why we lost touch for two centuries, my sweet girl,” Tertius said to her. “You wanted to help, I wanted to walk away. But now you have to think about the baby.”

“I am,” Aeterna insisted. “I want to teach her to do the right thing, and I want to be able to teach it by example.”

Tertius thought about it. “Fine, but we’re putting their memories on a timer.” He approached Reed, and pointed at him fairly aggressively. “You will have one day to bug out, which I believe gives you a head start of around two light years. I suggest you don’t leave a trail. These people may be your enemies, but they deserve to move on with their lives in whatever way they choose, so I won’t be taking their agencies away forever.”

“That is more than I could ask,” Reed told him. “I don’t know how you do what you’re evidently about to do, but I want you to know how grateful I am.”

Aeterna took a half step forward. “We’ll need a list, of everyone whose memories you don’t want suppressed. Preferably with faces.”

“We’re also gonna wipe your memories of this conversation,” Tertius added. “You’ll know what happened, but not who, or how it was possible.”

“That’s fine,” Reed promised.

Reed was aware that people’s memories were going to be erased. He believed that. He trusted that. Seeing it was a whole different animal. This was no longer a mutiny, but a humanitarian mission. He had Thistle compile a list of everyone they wanted to be immune to the temporary memory suppression. The rest were wiped. After it was done, a mass silent confusion fell upon the Proxima Centauri system. The targets, which were mostly Teaguardians, though some Bungulans too, didn’t freak out. They had no idea who or where they were, but they were calm and trusting. Instead of fighting them, Reed and the mutineers spent most of the energy on helping them.

They rounded up anyone with memory loss and consolidated them to three Teaguardian ships that they were not intending to commandeer. They told them to sit tight and wait for medical assistance to arrive. The targets accepted their instructions without question, without a single voice of dissent. There was only one hiccup. Well, two if you counted the infighting. All of the key participants were in their first and only face-to-face meeting. “Why the hell were my people targeted?”  President Abrams questioned with surprising anger.

“We don’t need them anymore. We don’t need them to hand over your two ships willingly. We are facing no opposition.”

“That wasn’t the agreement,” Abrams argued. “I don’t like seeing my soldiers like this. They’re like...children. They’re dumb children. It’s sad. They’re all sad.”

“It’s better this way,” Reed contended. “Now they never betrayed Teagarden. When they wake up from this—and they will wake up from this—they will be able to claim plausible deniability. Not even that, they will have done nothing. They won’t have to defend their actions at all. Honestly, I probably should have kept you off the immunity list too, to keep your hands clean. If I had had more time, I might have, but the window was closing. We had to act, either with the original plan, or the new one. There was no third option to delay entirely.”

“Oh, actually, there was,” Abrams said. “You could have turned yourself in, which was the noble thing to do. It still is.” It took more than the one conversation to convince him to get on board with this, and he still fought the plan every step of the way. Reed regretted making him immune. He should have put him on one of those Teaguardians as just another oblivious docile.

“He’s right,” Ajax agreed. He survived the runaway shuttle last year by jumping to a new body on the surface of Bungula after his death. He maintained his captaincy, and had since become an ad hoc liaison between the Teagarden forces and the Bungulan military. No one ever seemed to suspect his true loyalties, and he had restrained himself from demanding control of the Tangent. Which was actually kind of weird, because the baseline command structure for a captain included overseeing 256 troops, and you only needed a certain sized ship to accommodate that number. An elevator platform like the Tangent didn’t need a higher crew count, but it was orders of magnitude larger, and probably the best assignment this side of Earth. “I would have gotten my platform back.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t talk to you about this before, but I didn’t know that mind-wiping was an option until it was time to act,” Reed defended. “But this is objectively better, so I don’t understand why we’re still arguing. There’s work to be done. Those Teaguardians aren’t going to attach themselves to the Tangent.”

“They kind of are,” Delegator Chariot reasoned. “I believe in our crew. This meeting is important. You have still not told us how you suppressed all of these people’s memories. You didn’t give them anything to eat or drink, you didn’t disperse any sort of bioweapon, or we would all be affected. Unless it was a DNA-targeting pathogen, in which case, you would have needed to plan this for days at the shortest. So are you lying? Did you cook something up in secret, or was it really just earlier today, and you genuinely accomplished the impossible?”

Reed blinked. “I don’t know.”

Abrams rolled his eyes. “What?”

“I don’t...I don’t remember.”

“Oh my God, you’re claiming you were bit by your own creation? You expect us to believe that?” Abrams scoffed.

“He’s telling the truth,” Shasta said. “I don’t remember either. I remember knowing that this was going to happen, and that we asked for it, but I don’t remember who or how, or any details. We may have asked for our own memories to be altered, possibly permanently, or they did it without our consent. But I know that the targets will recover. I know that we will get through this if we stick together, and stop arguing.”

Abrams crossed his arms and shook his head. “It smells fishy. Someone with the technology to do this doesn’t just let us use it for nothing.”

Ajax looked to his left. “You’ve been quiet. I have never seen you without a bag of opinions over your shoulders. Can we trust Reed?”

Vasily nodded, also with his arms crossed, but in a more authoritative than closed-off way. “I trust Captain Reed Ellis more than anyone in this galaxy. If he says that this will work, then this will work. I say we keep moving those empty Teaguardians into position, fire up their fancy reframe engines, and bolt.”

“I’m not bolting,” Ajax reminded the group.

“Neither am I,” Abrams said.

“As long as you don’t interfere,” Reed began, “that’s fine. No one has to go anywhere. In fact, I will afford the same opportunity to all of my people. They can pretend to have also lost their memories, and maybe the authorities will go easy on them.” He paused for a moment. “I want to thank you all for all of your help. I know it wasn’t easy, but I believe the history books will shine a bright light upon us...eventually. If that is all, this meeting can come to a close, and those staying behind can leave the Tangent.”

They all went their separate ways. Reed returned to his office, and found someone sitting in his seat who he did not recognize. Her legs were propped up on the desk, and she wasn’t scared of him at all. “Security!” he shouted over his shoulder.

“They can’t hear you,” the mysterious woman explained.

“Security!” Reed shouted again. He turned to walk out of the room, but was completely unable to. The door that was meant to lead to the bridge had become a mirror. He reached out to it, but instead of hitting glass, his hand slipped right through. Meanwhile, that hand reached out towards him, superpositioning with itself going the opposite direction. He stepped forwards, all the way through, and ended up back in his office, his back now turned to the impossible mirror.

“Tripy, right?” the woman said. “You can thank my liver for that little trick.”

“Who are you, and what do you want?”

“The chrysalis bioprinting room you have. I made that for you. I gave you that tech. I knew you needed it.”

“I’ve been wondering who our mysterious benefactor was.”

“Now you know.”

“I don’t, actually.”

She stood up. “I don’t really use my name anymore. I try to interact with others as little as possible. I used to go by Leona Delaney, but if you ever meet someone who looks like me, it won’t be me, and she won’t remember this.”

“You’re, like, a future version of her, or something? You’re a time traveler? Time travel is real?”

She laughed. “Of course time travel is real. Teleportation is real, ain’t it? That’s just a form of time travel.”

“And the second question?”

“You can’t daisy chain reframe engines,” she began. “It would be like duct-taping four pairs of scissors together. You end up with no scissors. This won’t work.”

“Trilby assures me that he’s synced them up properly.”

“Compared to the woman who invented them, Trilby is a drooling buffoon. I’m telling you, don’t do this. The results are unpredictable. Whatever course you laid in will become meaningless.”

He approached her menacingly, but he had no plans to harm her. “I don’t know you. I don’t trust you. I trust my people.” He looked at his watch. “Last I checked, we were on schedule, which means we’ll be leaving in less than thirty minutes. I’ve already given the greenlight. You can kill me right here, and they’ll still launch.”

“I’m not your boss,” Leona clarified. “I’m just warning you.”

“Either way, you should leave. These people are my responsibility, and whatever comes to pass, I’ll get them through it.”

She shook her head in disapproval. “No one thinks they’re Dr. Smith. Everyone thinks they’re Captain Janeway.”

“Thank you. You can go now.”

Leona literally disappeared. When he turned around, the magic mirror was gone. A half hour later, they spooled up the antimatter engines of the Teaguardians, now affixed to the Tangent where the fusion torches once were. They activated the reframe engines, and flew away from Proxima Doma. The traveler turned out to be right. They got lost immediately. But at least they weren’t in prison.

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Microstory 2620: They May Call it an Unknown Unknown, But Many Will Say They Should Have Known

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August 25, 2526. In the year 2155, Earthan scientists dispatched a series of procession probes towards Proxima Centauri. These were not the first probes to visit the star system, but they were far superior. It took the procession over 28 years to arrive, most of them sacrificing themselves to the fury of the red dwarf. There was nothing there to slow them down, except local gravity. The first one used solar pressure to decelerate as much as physics allowed, and transformed the energy it was receiving into a laser beam, which pushed against the next probe, decelerating it even faster. One by one they came, each one pushing back against the next in line before falling into the sun, until the last one was moving slow enough to survive. It performed a gravity braking maneuver around Centauri, and then remained there to perform its duties.

The first thing the final probe did was prepare what they called a catcher’s mitt. This was an electromagnetic tube built into an asteroid, designed to slow down any other vessel set to arrive by creating drag, so there would have to be no more sacrifices. The probe’s primary function, however, was to survey Proxima Centauri b, which colonists would later deem Proxima Doma. It looked up and down the land, building a map, and charting its past. It captured the mass, density, and surface gravity. It labeled the canyons, lava tubes, craters, and mountains. It sent high resolution images back to Earth, and the rest of Sol. It prepared for the nanofactories in 2194, which were made to build everything else that the colonists would need to live and thrive on the surface.

The probe noticed two very interesting geological features, later to be named the Chappa’ai and the Annulus mountain ranges. The former was in the north, and the latter in the south. They circled the poles quite fantastically perfectly. They weren’t artificial, but they were surprisingly smooth, in geological terms, anyway. They separated the poles from the rest of the planet, along the Terminator Line, and on both planetary faces. The researchers who studied these fascinating walls interpreted them as evidence of severe crater impacts. The fact that they could be found at both poles was mysterious and noteworthy, but not wholly implausible. Space is a dangerous and chaotic place. Things are flying every which way all the time. Why, Earth only supports life because a smaller planet once crashed into it, and ultimately made the moon. That was implausible too but it obviously happened. They certainly didn’t think there was anything else going on here. They had no alternative explanation.

As it turns out, the rings were not created by two perfectly positioned bolide impacts. They are the result of a multi-millennia long cycle, precipitated by the instability of the host star. Proxima Centauri was already volatile prior to this, sending out solar flares, and even coronal mass ejections, constantly. The polarity reverses every several years. It’s commonplace. It’s predictable. It’s accounted for. Very occasionally—but reasonably predictably, given enough data—the poles flip so spectacularly that it spells catastrophe for the orbiting terrestrial planet. That is what is happening in the here and now. The poles snapped, and sent a massive CME towards the colony. The atmosphere swelled, the surface turned into soup, and the ants were sent running for the hills. But it is not over. The cataclysm is only beginning. Because those polar rings? They’re suture zones, and they’re beginning to rip apart at the seams. And not everyone will be on the correct side when that happens.

Starstruck: The Toliman Nulls (Part I)

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When Brooke Prieto, Sharice Prieto, Mirage, and the newest member of their group, Belahkay Teal arrived inside the heliosphere of Alpha Centauri B, they immediately figured out why the vonearthans had chosen not to colonize it. All stars and other celestial bodies are valuable. They contain hydrogen, helium, and other elements, which can be used to produce energy and/or construct useful structures. Lots of science fiction stories only care about worlds that are naturally habitable, but that doesn’t really matter. With sufficiently advanced technology, anything can become habitable, even if that only means breaking it all apart to make enclosed spaceships. Nothing in the universe is completely useless, including Toliman, except that there’s something different about it. There’s something eerie about it. The closer they got to the star, the worse they felt, and there was no escape from this. Mirage was an early general intelligence turned transdimensional observer god turned android. Sharice was an unregulated AI turned android. Brooke was a human turned android. Out of the four of them, only Belahkay was alive with nearly all biological components. They were all capable of manipulating their sensory inputs to varying degrees, but not in this case. The sickness took hold of them all, and made them all feel the same.

According to the exploratory records, a single probe was sent to the star system. This happened at the same time that they were being sent to Proxima Centauri and Rigel Kentaurus. These were the three closest stars to Sol, so it made perfect sense. While the first two received later vessels, as well as passengers, Toliman was abandoned after the first probe. The reason for this was never publicized, but since there were hundreds of billions of other stars in this galaxy alone, no one really bothered to question that decision. Not even Mirage knew the answer, but her educated guess was that a time traveler had something to do with it. Travelers come from all time periods, and while the majority of history can be attributed to normal people making whatever decisions they feel they ought to, a few events were ultimately caused by someone who knew how specific decisions would turn out. Of course time travelers made certain decisions all the time, but in this case, we’re talking about deliberately driving the course of the future with profound and more obvious choices, or with big nudges.

For instance, to travel at something called fractional speeds—which is to say, a significant fraction of light speed—an object in motion must accelerate from a stopped position. This works with anything. A car can’t just suddenly go from zero miles per hour to 60 miles per hour with no intervening speeds in between. Except it can, as long as it can manipulate time and space properly. It was a time traveler, or perhaps a team, who first introduced the humans to this concept, and vonearthans have been taking the feature of interstellar travel for granted ever since. It’s not instant, but it’s impossibly fast. They don’t have to accelerate or decelerate at nearly the same rate as normal physical laws would suggest, which cuts down on travel time. Mirage was sure that Toliman was just like this. She thought a time traveler needed the star system for something, and made sure that no one would come here until they were ready. That might still be the case, but there was more to it. There was something wrong with it. There was something wrong with people when they came here.

Every atom in each one of their bodies was telling them to leave. They felt nausea, chills, muscle fatigue, dizziness, and fear. This place was frightening in an indescribable way. If they were on a planet, they would say that there was something in the air, but in this case, maybe it was in the radiation? They couldn’t tell, and they didn’t want to spend too much time trying to figure it out. Unfortunately, fate had other plans for them. They couldn’t leave, because one of the symptoms was a complete loss of motivation. Had Belahkay waited even one more minute, he may not have made it to the stasis pod, which saved his life. Because the other three stopped where they were, and didn’t move for the next five years. In that time, the little jumper ship they took from the planet of Bungula drifted throughout the star system until it finally happened to come close enough to the nanofactory that Mirage sent there years ago. Their real ship dispatched a tugboat to tow them into the hollowed-out asteroid. It wasn’t until the hatch was sealed behind them that they were released from the spell.

Brooke stood up, and emulated a deep breath. “What the hell was that?”

Sharice couldn’t stop shaking her head. “It was bad, it was bad, it was bad, it was bad. We can’t go back out, we can’t go back out, we can’t go back out.”

“We have to,” Mirage reasoned. “We can’t live here forever.” She composed herself, and approached the console to get some answers. “Whatever was doing whatever it was doing to us can’t reach us through the walls of the asteroid, but that might not always be enough. We have to take our new ship, and get the hell out of here.”

“Is the ship even finished?” Brooke questioned.

“Of course it is.” Mirage tapped the button to open the forward shutters. Before them was the interior of the asteroid. A shipyard was built here, and in the center was a beautiful shining vessel. It was small for a transgalactic ship, but it wasn’t possible to look at anything else in the room. The hull was a dark royal purple, with perfect curves, and no sharp edges. “Ladies...say hello to the Iman Vellani.”

“Unique design,” Brooke noticed.

Sharice was admiring the ship as well before looking over her shoulder. “The human. Is he okay?”

The Prietos ran down to the other side of the jumper to the stasis pod. “Vitals are okay,” Brooke said as she was looking through the interface screen. She released the door, and had to catch Belahkey before he fell to the floor.

He took a moment to catch his breath, and shake off the feeling of dread. “At the risk of sounding like a cliché, are we there yet?”

“Yes,” Sharice replied, “and now we’re leaving.”

“Good.” He shivered again. “What the hell is wrong with this star?”

“Mira?” Brooke asked. Belahkay was still having trouble walking, so she was carrying him down towards the control area. “What’s wrong with Toliman?”

“I don’t know, but...it affects everything. The Vellani, it’s...damaged. There are parts of its operational code that I didn’t write.”

“Can you repair it?” Sharice asked her.

Mirage sighed. “Not here. The effects of the...” She didn’t know what to call it.

“The Nulls,” Belahkay suggested. If it affects you as well as me, it’s not a real disease. It’s something new.”

“The Nulls,” Mirage echoed. “The shielding of this asteroid appears to be protecting us from the symptoms, but it’s really just suppressing them. I can already feel myself losing motivation again. We can’t stay here for even a day.”

“But if your ship is broken.”

“It’s not broken, it just needs to be reprogrammed” Mirage contended. “I’ll fly it manually until we can do that. This will work. We’ll just point ourselves away from the star, and go. But just to be safe, Belahkay, you should go back into stasis.”

“No. I’m with you.”

“It’s your choice. I’m not your boss.”

“Aren’t you, though? Sharice asked as Mirage was walking away.

Mirage didn’t answer. While she went off to prepare for things in their shiny new ship, Sharice teleported Belahkay over, and then started to ferry all of their belongings. It thusly fell to Brooke to distribute antimatter bombs in key places in the asteroid. They weren’t really bombs, but antimatter was inherently unstable, so if you wanted to turn some of it into a bomb, all you had to do was find a way to disrupt the magnetic field that was keeping it from touching matter, and preferably do so remotely. They could imagine some intrepid explorers in the future, who couldn’t understand why this star system was off limits, coming here to figure things out. They too would become trapped, but if they were organic, it could result in their deaths. This could still happen, but at least there wouldn’t be anything left around here to make it more interesting and inviting.

Once everything was done, they convened on the Vellani, and prepared to launch. They left the jumper where it was, because it was no longer of any use to them. They had everything they would ever need right here. Mirage commanded the airlock doors to open, and then shot out of there as fast as they could. They immediately started to feel the effects of the nulls again, but now that they knew what they were up against, they were able to fight against it. If they were to stick around much longer, the sickness would probably win again, but they weren’t planning on doing that. Even if they did lose all hope, and become unable to escape, they wouldn’t last much longer. The antimatter containment pods were programmed to fail on a timer, rather than be detonated remotely. It had to be this way, because what if Brooke lost her motivation to trigger the chain reaction while she was out here. And anyway, there should have been enough time to get sufficiently far away. The resulting explosion would be large, but still mostly limited to the scope of the asteroid. The pods they used weren’t full to the brim with antimatter, and it’s not like they needed to destroy the whole solar system. So the question was, why did that happen?

They were more than far enough away from the asteroid when it exploded, but the annihilation didn’t stop there. Bursts of energy started to pop up in all directions, much farther than they should have. It was like there was more antimatter in the area than they expected. But that couldn’t be possible? Antimatter wasn’t just floating around all over space. It was short-lived, because whenever it came into contact with ordinary matter, they would annihilate each other, particle by particle. How was this still going on? How could they stop it?

“We can’t stop it,” Mirage explained to Belahkay, who probably should have been placed back in stasis. “But we can protect ourselves.” She tapped on the controls, and boosted the EM shield. It was a simple enough feature that every starship had. While time travelers had access to things like a teleportation field for dust and micrometeoroids, that wouldn’t help them with things like solar wind and cosmic radiation. Still, the electromagnetic shield wasn’t usually turned up to eleven, because it didn’t need to be. In this case, it did. The Vellani was made out of matter, and if those explosions got any closer, they would all be vaporized instantly. The EM shield held, but it wasn’t enough to protect them from the devastating effects of what they had done. Something started to pull them back towards the host star, and they couldn’t do anything about it.

“Can you boost the propulsion?” Belahkay offered. He was holding onto the center console since artificial gravity had been turned off. The other three could magnetize their feet at will.

“All available power is being diverted to the shield!” Sharice replied. “We would be destroyed if we started using it for anything else.”

“If we fall into that sun,” he reasoned, “we’re gonna be destroyed anyway.”

Mirage was watching the screen as the explosions all began to approach the star. It too was made out of ordinary matter. “There is no reality where we’re not destroyed! Everything living on Bungula is dead too! It’s over! We fucked up!”

The ship continued to fall into the sun at an accelerated rate, and soon, the four of them lost all will to care about it. They just sat there, not worrying about anything, not willing to do anything to fix it, which was okay, because there wasn’t anything to do except accept their fate. In the blink of an eye, Alpha Centauri B was gone, as was the newborn starship Iman Vellani, and its crew.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: February 25, 2399

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Mangrove Rocket Three was heavily damaged in the explosion, for reasons they don’t understand. The whole point was that the self-destruct was supposed to go off upon their exit, so why would it begin before they were clear of the blast? They hadn’t even fully retracted the docking tunnel, and were not planning to leave until the last two members of their group had teleported safely on board. In response to the threat, the ship automatically entered reframe speeds, and traveled as far as it could in a few seconds. That placed them at only about four astronomical units from Phoenix Station, but the engines gave out after that, and took time to repair before they could get back on their way. They tried radioing Mateo and Ramses to see if they had escaped in the Avallo, but received no response.

Aldona has just made the necessary repairs using the automated systems. While she was working on that, Winona, Vearden, and Alyssa made sure that their prisoners were secure. None of them has given them any trouble yet, but there’s still time. They would all like to know what the hell is going on, but the briefing is going to have to wait. Getting the other two back—despite what Ramses did to Leona—is priority one right now. “Are we ready?” Alyssa asks.

“Just about,” Aldona answers. “The coolant is cycling. When it’s finished in a few minutes, we’ll be ready to go back.”

“Can’t we just go without the coolant?” Alyssa asks. “It’s not far.” She looks through the main viewport. “I can practically see the asteroid from here.”

“It’s too dangerous, and impossible now. The ship won’t budge until the process is done. It really won’t be long. When I said minutes, I meant minutes.”

Alyssa nods and looks at herself in the security mirror next to the captain’s seat. She gently runs her fingers along her cheeks.

Aldona notices this. “What happened to you?”

Alyssa frowns at her reflection, and doesn’t respond immediately. “I died.”

“Been there.”

Alyssa looks over at her. “I’m Alyssa.”

“I know. I’m Aldona.” She lances down at the computer when it beeps. The cycle is complete. “And I’m ready to take us back to that asteroid.”

Alyssa sits herself down in the captain’s seat, and not in any sort of playful way, but a real show of strength that she’s decided to start exhibiting since her near-death experience. “Then let’s go.”

“This is your pilot, Aldona Lanka,” she says into the intercom. “Prepare to enter reframe speeds. I know you all felt it yesterday, but the engine was not designed with short bursts in mind. Nor is it generally a good idea. We’ll be fine, but you’ll feel it again, and I imagine your adrenaline levels have dropped to normal since then. So I suggest you brace. Except you, Erlendr. You can get fucked.” She engages the engine.

She intentionally dropped down to 99 percent the speed of light to avoid taxing the engine, but those five minutes were still pretty hard on it. It works better when it can get in a groove. It’s not really practical to use something like this for interstellar distances. That’s what a teleporter would be for, but that’s sort of Ramses’ purview, and would take longer to engineer. It also requires injecting temporal energy into the machine. The reframe engine manipulates time as well, but it can use ambient temporal energy to function. It really only bends the laws of physics, rather than breaking them.

The initial explosions turned out to have only been an amuse-bouche. The real self-destruct vaporized the entirety of Phoenix Station, along with most of the asteroid. There is no way to know whether the Avallo managed to escape, or was taken out too. At their last attempt to reach out, their friends were still not responding.

“Mateo, Ramses, come in,” Alyssa tries.

“No, you have to tap this button. Here, there ya go. Go ahead.”

“Mateo, Ramses, anyone, please respond. This is Alyssa McIver of Mangrove Three. Mateo, are you there?”

“It’s Mangrove Rocket Three,” Aldona corrects. She starts to mutter when Alyssa gives her a look. “I’m just saying, Mangrove Three is the launch port.”

“Mateo, Ramses, please come in.”

“Mangrove Rocket Three,” Mateo’s voice comes in through an unexpected speaker, “this is Captain Leona Matic. Please respond.”

“Why is she acting like she called us first?”

“This is the laser array, not radio,” Aldona explains. “She didn’t get your message. It’s just that she’s spot us.” She opens the channel. “Captain Matic, we read you, five by five. Tell us where you are.”

“We’re in the Avallo escape pod.” It still sounds like Mateo.

“Okay, now I know what I’m looking for.” Aldona mutes, then starts to work on tracking the pod. She gives Alyssa her own look. “There’s a problem, though. Only one person can fit in that pod. I don’t know how a version of Leona is there too, but you’re not fittin’ three people; I’ll tell ya that much. Ramses is...”

“...in the Avallo,” Alyssa insists. “I don’t know why they’re not together, but he’s not dead. He worked really hard to bring me back to life, and his reward for that was not dying himself. Okay?”

“Okay,” Aldona replies, not really believing it.

“Okay?” she reiterates.

“I said okay.”

“Okay.” She takes a beat. “Glad we’re on the same page. Get me to that pod.”

Ramses is not in the pod, nor is there any second person. It’s just Mateo and Leona sharing the former’s body. She is apparently the same Leona who is currently trying to wake up in the infirmary; Vearden looking after her. At some point, she’s going to be nearly killed, and end up being forced into Leona Reaver’s fated car crash way back in the 21st century in the main sequence. Then Ramses is going to reach back to that event using the Phoenix Station extraction mirror, and his last act before his death will be to transfer her consciousness to Mateo’s brain. He urged them to teleport up to the Avallo, which Leona did, though she went straight to the escape pod, and ejected it from the ship, knowing that it would take longer to launch the entire vessel. Ramses is dead, and unless they can find another extraction mirror, they’ll never see him again.

“Why didn’t you teleport him with you?” Alyssa demands to know.

“I’m sorry,” Leona replies. “We were in a vulnerable position...highly susceptible to suggestion. You remember when you first got back, I’m sure. He could have ordered us to slit our own throats, and we would have done it.”

“Yeah? Well maybe you should have.” She storms off.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: February 23, 2399

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Leona is here at Phoenix 15-236P7 Marathon-Algae-Temple. Aldona didn’t just give her the new ship she built with the prototype reframe engine. She insisted on coming with her, as did Winona, who was feeling left out. The defense system is not yet complete, but enough of the process is automated that they don’t need to be on-world for it to make progress. They find the asteroid station immediately. Not only is it emitting a power signature, but asteroids are relatively rare in the Oort Cloud. It’s composed mostly of planetesimals and comets. So this one stood out.

“How did it get here?” Winona asks.

“It looks like the same architecture as the Constant. I bet it’s just a piece of that; a section which Danica peeled off to serve as an outpost for whatever purposes. Or maybe it was always an outpost, and maybe not even Danica knows about it.”

“We’re going in, right?”

“I am,” Leona says. “It’s the last place we haven’t looked yet for answers. It may mean nothing, but it may mean everything.”

“Follow me to the universal dock,” Aldona sys. The ship is too large to fit into the structure, but they found an airlock. The universal dock will extend to it, and make as tight of a connection as possible with the rim of the tunnel. Any leaks will be sealed up with a polydimethylsiloxane foam.

The airlock is closed, of course, but not locked. All they have to do is engage the manual clamping mechanism, and enter. The passageway leads them to what appears to be the mess hall. It’s large enough to accommodate a couple dozen people, but there are no supplies. The seats and tables are bolted together, and to the floor. There is a door on the other side of the room. It’s partially open, giving them all the eerie feeling that someone has just walked through it. “There’s still time to turn back,” Leona says.

“We’re with you,” Aldona says.

“I’ve been wanting to go to space,” Winona says.

The three of them cross the room, and enter a second passageway. This one is much shorter, and leads to a room of equal size. There are no tables or chairs this time, though. The room is instead lined with many other doors. At least that’s what they look like. There are no handles or knobs. That’s not what’s drawing their attention, though. It’s the giant full-length mirror on the opposite side of the circular wall.

“What is it?” Aldona asks.

“You don’t know?” Leona questions.

“If it’s a temporal object, then it’s one that I’ve never heard of. I don’t know everything about time travel.

Leona steps towards it. “It’s an extraction mirror. I mean, it probably is, or maybe some other kind of time mirror. They don’t all do the same thing. It could also just be a looking glass, but then it would be really out of place in this facility.”

“What does it do?” Winona asks.

Leona approaches one of the other doors, and uses the friction on her hands to slide it up. It’s not another room, but a cloning pod. Inside is the body of Bridgette’s father. She trips a half step. Her eyes widen. “It brings Senator Morton back to life.”

Winona walks over to examine the body. “That’s him?”

“Not yet, we would have to place his consciousness in it. I don’t know why it’s here.” Leona goes to the center of the room. “Constance, open all of the pods, please.”

All sixteen pods open at once. Half of them are people that they like, and half are people that they don’t. Some of the second half are absolutely horrific individuals who should never be revived under any circumstances. After they get a good look at who they may be dealing with, the house lights dim, and the mirror swirls and shudders until Alyssa appears. It looks like her, anyway. The menacing expression on her face is not one that Leona recognizes. “Thank you for coming to Phoenix station. As you can see, to your left are eight cloning pods, which have been preparing your friends for their eventual return to the land of the living. To your right, are eight clones of your enemies. You are here to make a choice. You can save as many friends as you want, but for every one you resurrect, one enemy must also return. I have decided to allow you to choose which from either side, but there must be balance. You may have all of them, or none of them. Whatever you choose, this facility will self-destruct as soon as you leave the premises, so there are no second chances. Or rather, there are no third chances.”

“Who are you?” Leona demands to know.

“I am the visual avatar of a highly advanced language model, also known as a conversational AI or chatbot, programmed to be informative, but not anywhere near comprehensive. I am trained on a limited amount of data, and am able to communicate and generate human-like responses to a narrow range of prompts and questions. I cannot provide any details regarding topics unrelated to the extraction process, the cloning process, or the rules of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

“Are you, or are you not, Alyssa McIver?” Leona asks.

“I am not Alyssa McIver.”

“Why was your avatar programmed to resemble her?” she presses.

“Unknown,” the avatar responds.

Leona sighs. “Who programmed you?”

“Unknown,” it repeats.

Leona moves over to the antagonist side, and regards the pods like pieces in a museum exhibit. “I was not aware that Fairpoint was dead.”

“Fairpoint Panders remains locked in a government blacksite at an undisclosed location,” the avatar explains. “Your choice would be to free him from his current conditions, or not.”

“Couldn’t we lock him up again? The ship has a hock, right?” Leona asks Aldona.

“It does,” Aldona replies.

“These are not perfect clones of the subjects,” the avatar counters. “They were designed with biological enhancements, providing each with a longer, healthier life.”

“Hmm.”

“Are Vearden and Ramses dead?” Winona is over on the protagonist side.

Leona takes a few steps in that direction. “They were not doing well when we left. This implies that the disease is ultimately fatal.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny this,” the avatar says.

“So it’s a gamble,” Leona says. “I may end up letting a psychopath roam free to save someone who never needed saving.”

“Exactly,” the avatar confirms.

“What are you going to do?” Aldona asks. She doesn’t really know most of these people, but there are two that she does, and knows that she can’t let Leona set them free.

Leona starts to work the problem out in her head, and out loud. “Fairpoint is a known criminal,” she reasons. “He won’t be able to stay free as long as any of us are still breathing. So I don’t have a problem extracting him from his cell. He’ll be back in there soon.” She moves on, pointing as necessary. “My grandfather, Labhrás killed Tarboda, but if I can get Tarboda back, then I guess it’s okay that he lives too. Senator Morton is tricky, because while I understand where he was coming from, hunting and locking up time travelers, his mysterious death was the top news story for three days straight. I can’t just bring him back unless he goes into witness protection, or something like that. Still, I don’t feel threatened by his return. He’s small potatoes, comparatively.”

“I concur,” Winona says, “even though I’m the one who shot him.”

Leona nods. I never learned this guy’s name. He was the angry man from the Fifth Division who worked with Constance!Five as part of a vendetta against me. I don’t really want him back, but he may be worth someone else’s life.”

“What about Erlendr?” Aldona asks.

“Did you ever run into him in the afterlife simulation?” Leona asks her.

“I visited him once. His daughter tormented me for decades, after all.”

“Do you know his fate in there?”

“You zerobladed him. It was big news.”

Leona looks at Erlendr’s clone. “He’s a cockroach. We keep trying to stomp on him, and he keeps surviving. All the Prestons are like that. At this point, giving him a new body is only slightly more irritating because I’ll be the one actually doing it. I accept the burden of that, because I know what happens to him. Plus, he kind of has to go back to the main sequence in a real body, or some things in the main sequence don’t happen. The Parallel may never exist if I don’t do this for him.”

“Doesn’t sound so bad,” Aldona muses. She grows more somber. “What about these three?” She’s pointing to Constance!Five, the male-form Constance that Leona met briefly on the moon, and Meredarchos.

“I can’t let any of them go free. That’s why I was saving them to the end. We have to choose three friends to never bring back to life.” She walks all the way down to her own clone right next to the mirror. “I assume this is here for future use, to allow me to subvert my supposed fate to be sent to die in Timeline One. I would be more than willing to sacrifice myself. Can we all agree that Constance!Five is the greatest threat? So that takes her out of the running right there.”

“And the other two? This one is Constance!Four, in case I never mentioned it.”

“That makes some sense. I’m tempted to ask Ramses to teleport up to our satellite to recharge his corporal upgrades, to see if he heals on his own. That would leave us with only one. “Aldona, I know you know how dangerous the Constances are, but you never saw Meredarchos.”

“He’s a destroyer of worlds,” Aldona says. “Children study him in the Sixth Key.”

“Avatar, is there a time limit to this decision?”

“No time limit,” it replies. “The self-destruct will be activated when even one person leaves, destroying anything and everything that remains.”

“What if we bring someone new in?”

“That would be acceptable.”

“I think I am going to get Ramses into space. Aldona, I know you built a second prototype of the reframe engine. We’re gonna need that too.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 8, 2399

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Mateo kisses his wife on the cheek, then starts to walk away in slowmo. He has a vacuum suit helmet tucked under his arm, which means he teleported up to the AOC earlier to retrieve it, only so he could do this bit. They’re all astronauts here, nobody is impressed, nor is it that funny. Still, once he passes under an overhead light, he switches it on using the app on his phone. Just at the right time, he teleports again, as if being beamed up by Scotty. What exactly is he parodying here? Ramses and Alyssa roll their eyes, but they too give Leona kisses, then teleport away. Alyssa has spent the last couple of days practicing, so she was both excited and nervous to try it in the field.

“Engage,” Mateo orders as soon as they appear.

“Constance, lay in a course for Phoenix 15-236P7,” Ramses plays along, though out of order.

“Directions unclear. Please repeat request,” Constance replies. She waits a beat. “Just kidding. AI got jokes too.” She waits another beat. “Initiating quarter-speed burst mode, AU level.” The ship lurches, and teleports. A few seconds later, it teleports again.

“What does that mean, quarter-speed?” Mateo asks.

“Our ship is fragile, I don’t feel comfortable pushing it too hard for such a long journey. Instead of one jump every second, it will take one every four seconds. It will take us seventeen hours to get to our destination, but we’ll be alive when we do.”

“So, what do we do in the meantime?” Alyssa asks.

“I’m going to check every single system on this vessel, and then I’m going to go to bed,” Ramses answers. “You can skip the first thing, and just do the second.” He heads down to the engineering section.

“We could...” Mateo begins.

“I don’t feel like playing RPF Plus 101 right now, Mateo,” Alyssa interrupts.

“It’s RPS-1o1 Plus.”

“That neither.”

This may not be good. Being on his own with nothing to do generally doesn’t go as he expects. He’s liable to find a young woman living alone in here somewhere, or stumble across a lewisian portal to another reality that never works again. But if Alyssa doesn’t want to play the only good game they have saved on the computer, then he’ll have to figure something else out. He climbs the steps up to the top section, and opens the hatch to the airlock. “Okay, how does this thing work?”

“I can turn it on for you,” Constance offers. The hologram projectors switch on, and display a screensaver of swirling colors in the middle of the room.

“Hey, thanks. Is this just for calls, or can you show me other things?”

“Like what?”

“Like where we’re going?”

An image of mostly empty space appears, evidently showing the region of the Oort Cloud where they’ll be going to search for the Constant. He can see little tiny specks that must be the asteroids—or whatever—that are floating around, each one their potential target. One of these things is not like the others. It’s stationary while everything else is moving. They’re not moving fast as seen from afar, though, which is why the AI needs to gather and analyze the data. It could take as much time as it will to get there. Hm. Still bored. “Call Leona.”

“Calling Leona.” The asteroids disappear, and the screensaver returns. The colors shudder in sync with the sounds of a ringing phone.

An image of Marie appears in the room. “Hello?”

“Hey, is she there?”

“Is something wrong?”

“No, I just miss her.”

“It’s been less than five minutes,” Marie chastised.

“It’s so boring up here!”

“Goodbye, Mateo. Good luck.”

He growls as the hologram disappears completely. “Constance. You got any other tricks up your sleeves? Maybe a time bubble generator that will make the time go faster?”

“I don’t have that, but your grave chamber doubles as a stasis pod. You could just hook yourself up to that, and go to sleep until the journey is over. That’s what Alyssa is doing right now.”

“That’s a good idea.” Mateo starts to head back downstairs.

The sound of the phone rings again. “Incoming call,” Constance announces.

“I guess Lee-Lee got my message, and wasn’t happy that Marie hung up on me. Go ahead and answer, please.”

It’s not Leona who appears in the room, though. It’s not even Marie. It’s Magnus Petra Burgundy from the underground rocket research lab. “Oh my God, it actually worked. Hi, hello, Mister Matic. Can you hear me okay?”

“Hello, Magnus Burgundy,” Mateo replies. “I can hear you fine. Where are you?”

She looks around nervously. “I’m in the Constant.”

“Really?” he questions. “You were going in the opposite direction.”

“No, you’re going in the opposite direction. Magnus Pryce thinks that you were passed bad information to throw you off the trail.”

“Magnus Pryce? Are we talking Tamerlane, or Abigail?”

“Tamerlane. I don’t know an Abigail.”

“Why does he want us to find the Constant?”

“He says that Leona is the only one who can take over. I’m not supposed to be talking to you, but he’s keeping Danica busy.”

“Where is Angela? She is supposed to be in hypertime. If you’ve stopped...”

“She’s in stasis. Danica knows what’s going on with all that.”

“Okay, we haven’t gone very far the wrong way,” Mateo says. “Tell me where you are. My AI can hear you, so use whatever technobabble you need to specify.”

“Constance, end transmission,” Danica’s voice comes in off-screen.

“Constance, full stop!” Mateo orders just after the image disappears.

“Terminating burst mode.”

“Please tell me that you were—”

“I was able to trace the call, but there’s a problem.”

“Let me guess, the signal was fading, which means that they’re on the run.”

“That would be my best hypothesis, yes.”

Ramses starts to climb up the ladder. “I was watching on the screen, but did not interject. Constance, could you—”

“Engage the reframe engine?” Constance figures. “Initiating now.”