The Advancement of Mateo Matic: February 24, 2399

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When Aldona first declared Radifor a new and independent nation, a lot of people who were working on the Mangrove Seasteads left. They returned to their own countries to serve in other ways. There were no hostilities during this time, and it happened relatively quickly. Some people, however, chose to stay. The majority of them were from the U.S., which maintains one of the healthiest international relationships with Radifor. No one had to turn coat, though. A lot of them were contractors who did not work directly for their respective governments, so there were no legal issues with them staying. Now, fewer people are involved in the program, but enough are still working, especially on Mangrove One, where the special projects are being conducted. The other seasteads are smaller, only large enough to accommodate the one rocket each, but this one has a number of other vessels. One in particular is not much larger than the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Aldona retrofitted one of her normal rockets with a new reframe engine, but this one was specifically designed for it.

After some of Aldona’s loyalists worked overtime to put the final touches on The Avallo, Ramses used his remaining temporal energy to teleport directly onto the bridge. He then launched it into space alone, and headed towards the Phoenix Station without bothering to orbit first. He arrived a few hours ago, and already feels better. The Omega Gyroscope is definitely on Earth, and it’s definitely still limited in scope. His biological enhancements are healing him rapidly, and at this point, they have no reason to believe that he’ll die from this disease. They should not have to rescue him through the extraction mirror. Still, he’s remained in isolation on the Avallo, testing himself once per hour to see whether he’s still infected. So far, he is, but the sample line grows fainter each time. He should be ready soon to join the others without worrying about infecting anyone. For now, though he’s only meters away, he communicates remotely. “Have you found the bomb yet?”

“No, nothing,” Leona replies. “They’re probably only accessible from the exterior, if they’re accessible at all.”

“I could take a spacewalk,” he suggests.

Aldona hops over. “Do not do that. I did not put a vacuum suit in there.”

“Don’t need one, my nanites are working.”

“Your nanites are healing you from the virus,” Leona reminds him. “Don’t make them work any harder than they have to.”

“Then I’ll go out when it’s done.”

“Even once you test negative, your body may still be in recovery. Once the line disappears, wait another hour, and then teleport in,” Leona orders. “We have a plan to get all of our friends back without destroying the universe at the same time. You being here, and alive, is what allows us to do that. If you die, then we’ll have to put you back in rotation, and someone like Constance!Five may have to be brought back to life as well. We already have one terrible decision to make.”

“Okay, I understand,” Ramses says, but he’s feeling antsy, so he tests himself once more, even though it’s fifteen minutes early. No line, he’s cured. An hour later, he injects himself with a small dose of temporal energy, and teleports himself inside.

“Are you good?” Leona asks.

“I’m good. Where are we?”

“I was just about to ask a very important question that I should have thought to ask before.” She faces the mirror. “Avatar, what is to stop us from extracting and resurrecting anyone we want from the timeline? How do you control that?”

“Actually,” the avatar begins, “you can resurrect anyone you want, as long as they belong in the half of the room that we have designated for them. For instance, you could place Tarboda Hobson’s mind into Vearden Haywood’s body, but you can’t place him into Erlendr Preston’s, because they’re on opposite sides.”

“Okay, but why can’t I just resurrect all seven of my friends, and then just walk away?” Leona presses. “What exactly is enforcing the one to one ratio?”

“I understand. Once you resurrect a friend, their pod will remain locked until you resurrect an enemy. Once you do that, both pods will open, and you will have to deal with whatever the outcome of that is.”

“Hmm,” Leona says. “So it’s as we thought,” she says to Winona and Aldona. It’s settled. Only five people need to be saved, and the five people they don’t like won’t be impossible to deal with. Whoever set up this sick game probably did the math, and realized that Ramses would be fine, but did not foresee the Mateo loophole. Here’s hoping they don’t change the rules on them.

“You thought what?” Ramses asks.

“We can’t tell you,” Winona tells him.

“Okay.”

Leona clears her throat. “Do I have to recite the magic words from the miniseries, or can we skip the performance?”

The avatar makes Alyssa’s face smile. “Just tell me who you want.”

“Vearden first,” Ramses interjects before Leona can speak. “He’s dead. They’re all dead. I found out just before I left. The virus is contained to them, though.”

Leona regards him soberly, then reprepares herself. “Bring back Vearden Haywood,” she commands of the mirror.

The image of the avatar disappears to be replaced with that of Vearden in his isolation room. There’s a second bed next to him where Ramses was kept briefly before he managed to escape. No one else is in the room. The IV pump goes up and down, up and down, until it quite nearly stops. Time has slowed to a snail’s pace. Leona rolls out the neural sponger that was being stored behind the mirror, and aims it at Vearden. She then activates it, and begins to absorb his consciousness, digitizing it at the same time.

In under a minute, his whole brain has been scanned, uploaded into a compressed allocation unit, then transferred to his new body in the cloning pod. Electricity surges through the artificial amniotic fluid, and shocks him to life, like something out of a Shelley novel. He opens his eyes, and looks through the glass in horror. He starts banging on it.

Ramses steps over, and calms him down with hand gestures. He speaks out loud too, but Vearden can’t seem to hear him through the hatch. “Hurry up,” he requests of Leona. “This is traumatic for them.”

“Show me Senator Morton,” Leona says quickly.

Vearden’s old body disappears. They’re now watching Past!Winona raise her gun up to shoot Morton in the head. Present!Winona flinches, uncomfortable with seeing herself like this. Remembering the things she’s done is different than watching it happen, especially in such high quality, at an angle that would be impossible to get without being noticed if this were anything short of a magic mirror. Past!Winona’s movements slow down as well, but her finger has already begun to squeeze the trigger. Leona reactivates the sponger, and transfers his mind too. Once his cloned body is ready, both doors open, letting the two of them spill out onto the floor. Ramses catches Vearden while Winona hops over to tend to Morton.

They’re both confused, but moreso Morton, who doesn’t know much about this stuff, and has no frame of reference for how he’s here now. Unless there is a secret passage to another section of this facility, they have looked all over, and the only things they’ve found are a bunch of heavy gray blankets. They lay each clone on a blanket, then cover them with another. Then they drag them out of the room, so they can recover. Winona stays with them while Ramses returns for the next batch of two.

Before she does it, Leona has another question. “Avatar, can I scan the enemy first, and then the friend, so the friend spends less time awake in their pod.”

“I understand what you are asking, and why, but unfortunately, the system is not designed that way. To my knowledge, this was not done maliciously. In fact, I believe the designer did it as a sign of good faith, so you’ll always get a friend out first.”

“It doesn’t really matter until the hatch opens,” Leona says to the group. “Okay. We all agree on Alyssa next, right?”

Aldona and Ramses nod their heads.

“Avatar, show me Alyssa McIver.”

Alyssa appears in the mirror, lying on the floor of a cave, next to a burning torch, covered in blood and lacerations. A group of men have surrounded her. They look like they’re about to kill her. Leona sponges Alyssa’s mind quickly, and pulls her into the present. She does the same for the vengeful Fifth Divisioner whose name she didn’t have to provide to the avatar of their mysterious new frenemy. The hatches open, and Aldona drags them off to the cafeteria. According to the report from that wing of the facility, the clones are still weak, and are in no shape to initiate hostilities. They ought to have enough time to resurrect everyone before having to deal with the awkwardness.

Leona retrieves her grandfather, Labhrás as the cost of getting Tarboda back. She takes Erlendr Preston out of the Insulator of Life in order to save Bridget. Then finally, she gets Heath for Fairpoint. Now all who remain are Mateo, Ramses, Leona, Constance!Five, Constance!Four, and Meredarchos.

This is when Winona comes back. “Vearden’s fine. He’s awake and mobile. He’s helping take care of the others. Morton doesn’t want me to care for him. He thinks that I was going to kill him. He doesn’t know that I already did...yet.”

“Okay, you stay here,” Leona suggests. “Aldona, please get them to your rocket. They may become more agitated, and none of them has any strong feelings about you.”

“I’m on it.” Aldona leaves.

“All right, we got nearly everyone we need,” Leona says. “Now for the hard part.”

Ramses is looking at the three enemies, who should probably be better known as villains. “Who are you going to free to get your husband?”

Leona sighs. “None of them. Avatar, show me my husband.”

The AI language model knows what she means. The image changes to a view of the ceiling over the crawl space on the bottom level of the Bridgette, as seen from the floor. Mateo isn’t even there.

“Avatar, what the hell is going on?”

“I don’t understand the question,” its voice replies without the Alyssa deepfake.

“He’s not even in the shot. Maybe he’s there, but we can’t see him.”

“I can see him just fine from here,” the avatar claims. “I can’t alter the angle, but you can stick the neural sponge through to scan. He’s to your left.”

“I got this,” Ramses says. Instead of lifting the transfer device, he sticks his own hand through, waving Mateo over.

Unlike the others, Mateo is not frozen in time. He’s able to move about freely. This is exactly what they wanted, and Leona is thankful that it’s the case, because she doesn’t want to use the scanner at all. In fact, it’s in their best interests not to. They see him crawl towards the mirror, then go right over it. When he comes back from the other direction, he’s pulling a frozen Constance!Five along with him. He takes her back towards the teleporter that’s in the middle of exploding, then returns to the mirror, and dives through. “Did that work? Is she dead?” he asks.

“It has not been that long,” Leona answers. “If she survived, we’ve not seen her.”

Mateo looks around, quickly spotting the viewport that can show him the outside. He opens it to see the stars. “Guys...where are we?”

Leona smiles at him. “We’re at that Phoenix location in the Oort Cloud that we’ve been talking about for ages.”

“Finally made it, eh?” He nods and turns his head to look at the stars again. Then he seems to remember something. “Aquila said you’d find me here.”

“Yes,” Leona agrees. “She wasn’t wrong or lying. We just didn’t have all the info.”

He inspects the extraction mirror. “Have you used this for anyone else yet?”

Leona goes over to a control panel on the wall on the friend side, using it to open the hatches for three cloning pods. “You were never killed, so you don’t need a new body. Neither do we. The rest have been taken care of,” she explains.

Mateo goes over to the clones. Then he looks over at the real things, puzzled.

“Okay. Maybe you’ve been gone for a little while.”

“You’re gonna need this later,” Mateo says to her.

“Can’t be done,” Leona says. She crosses the room, and opens the other three pods. “If we save my life, we’ll have to save one of theirs too.”

Without warning, Ramses comes up from behind her, and injects her with a sedative. When Winona pulls a weapon on him, he stands back, and holds his hands up. “It’s okay. I did it for her. You need to take her to the rocket.”

“Why should I?” Winona asks.

“Because it’s the only way to save her life. Please. Trust me. Close the hatch behind you, and fly away. We’ll take the Avallo. I can’t tell you why, or it’ll ruin it.”

Winona lowers the gun, and does as he asked.

“What is your plan?” Mateo asks.

“Have you ever shared a brain?” Ramses asks rhetorically. “Avatar, show me the moment just before Leona’s death in the timeline where she was married to Horace.”

The mirror shows the scene. It’s chaos in the car. Leona Reaver, Horace Reaver, and an alternate version of Mateo Matic are in the cab of the vehicle. No one is buckled in, and they’re all flying around. Leona is about to die. Ramses scans her mind with the neural sponge, but instead of transferring it to her clone, he sends it to Mateo.

“There’s a ship right above us,” he tells him in the middle of the procedure. “Teleport up there. I’ll be right behind ya.”

Mateo doesn’t respond, but he did seem to hear the instructions, because he disappears. Seconds later, Phoenix Station blows up.

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: February 2, 2399

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Angela is asleep again. Marie and Dr. Farlind woke her up for a few minutes to update her on the current situation, but she had to go back down so she won’t unintentionally purge the immortality water from her system. It’s been about a half hour, and they’re miles and miles and miles away from Earth now. Even so, the computer beeps.

“What is that?” Dr. Farlind asks.

Marie tilts her head at the screen. “It’s another ship. It just disappeared. It’s back again. It disappeared again.”

“Someone’s come after her. How long has it been on Earth?”

“Two weeks,” she answers. They’re about to be boarded. Marie goes over to the food synthesizer, opens the cabinet, and starts to pull the nutrient cartridges out. In the back are various parts. Half of the grip, the other half, barrel, trigger, magazine. In seconds, she expertly assembles them into a gun. She’s finished and aiming at the dark figure who has transported into the ship, and would have been able to shoot if Mateo had not been the one to step into the light. “Oh my God, I nearly killed you.”

“Wouldn’t have been the first time,” Mateo says nonchalantly. He looks around. “Room for three more?”

“Three who?”

“The McIver boys, plus another.”

“If need be, yeah, but who is this other?”

“It’s a newcomer. Name’s Cedar. I don’t know his last name. He’s good people. Constance is after him too. He can’t tell us why. We’ve accepted as much.”

Marie looks at the camera feed showing Angela sleeping in her grave chamber.

“Where’d you get the gun?” Mateo asks.

“Never mind that,” she replies. She tucks it into the back of her pants. “Bring ‘em on board. Then, unless you’re staying, you better get going. You’ve been here for almost an entire day already.”

“I know.” He holds up a portable drive. “This is the updated AI system.” He looks between the two of them. “One of you, or the other, can come back. This ship no longer requires human monitoring. It knows where to go, and how to get there.”

“I’m not leaving my patient,” Dr. Farlind says.

“I’m not leaving my sister,” Marie echoes the sentiment.

“Very well. You still need to upload this. It comes up with a full update on our lives since you’ve been gone. Not only does it tell you what we’ve been through, but you can ask the avatar for clarification. You can also ask it the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, or how many dimples are on a golf ball.”

“Three hundred and thirty-six,” Dr. Farlind answers proudly.

“Well. I guess you don’t need the AI then,” Mateo jokes.

He jumps back to the Bridgette when it pings again. It’s not traveling at relativistic speeds, since it’s not a ship. It has to teleport within range, and then Mateo can reach it. He returns with Carlin and Moray, then makes a second trip for the last passenger. “Marie and Dr. Farlind, allow me to introduce you to...Cedar.”

“We’ve met.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 28, 2398

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Alyssa and Ramses continued to discuss the plan to fake Leona’s death with Arcadia and Vearden. Their live-in guards got in on the conversation too, contributing their experience and expertise as career military servicemen. The National Intelligence Agency has an entire department tasked with faking people’s deaths, usually for witness and turned asset relocation purposes. Their methods usually involve using completely unrelated corpses as proof; they’ve never done anything like this, but they have not been read into the situation anyway, so no one is allowed to reach out to them about it. This is all very ghoulish of them, but they keep reminding themselves, and each other, that it would be a lot worse if they were planning an actual murder. The point is to prevent someone from dying, and if all goes according to plan, no one will get hurt at all.

Here’s what they’re going to do. First, they’re going to transfer Erlendr’s consciousness from the Insulator of Life, into Leona Reaver’s body. Well, first they have to convince him to play along, but assuming that he does, they’re going to equip him with concealed body armor to prevent anyone else from managing to actually hurt him before they get the chance to complete their performance. He’s going to make himself known in a very public space where Leona’s face is sure to be recognized. They will pick a place that is having a parade, or something, so it will be really crowded, and possibly even filmed and streamed. They’ve not chosen any event yet, because they’re not yet certain of their timeline. They may plant operatives in the audience to make sure Erlendr isn’t standing out in the open without anyone noticing.

Their fake bounty hunter—which will be an undercover SD6 specialist—will then begin his or her pursuit. If any other hunters happen to be in the area, other undercovers will run interference against them. The chase won’t last long, or go far, because they want the audience they end up with to be able to see the whole thing. Erlendr will duck into a car, and drive off a little ways before a bomb goes off. This is the trickiest part of the magic trick, because they don’t want anyone else to get hurt, so it has to be highly controlled, and focused, but not so focused that it looks like maybe Erlendr survived it. The timing has to be perfect too, because they can’t allow people to see the Leona Reaver body disappear when fate intervenes, and sends it to the other timeline. Tinted windows will be key, along with maybe a little remote driving.

They have to control for security cameras, audience involvement, and other crazy eventualities, this is not something that they’ll be able to pull off today. That’s probably all right, though, because they want Arcadia’s baby bump to get a little bigger, in case she gets recognized after the thing. That brings them back to the crux of the plan, which is Erlendr’s participation. He has no loyalty to them, so figuring out a decent incentive was the hardest part, and they did need to come up with one, because if they tried to force it on him, he would probably claim to be a twin or triplet in public, and ruin their whole gambit. They think they have a way to go about it, but they’re going to need Arcadia’s help. They don’t really have a Plan B if they can’t get him to cooperate.

“This won’t hurt the baby, right?”

Ramses smiles. “First of all, no, it wouldn’t. But I knew you would be concerned, which is why you’re not going in cerebrally. You’re just going to use these.” He holds up the goggles.

“What does that mean?”

“I’m connecting my brain to the simulation, which will make it feel like I’m really there...except I always turn off my pain receptors. You, on the other hand, will only be able to see what it looks like through regular VR. You won’t feel a thing, but you can pilot your avatar using this controller, if you want.”

“Okay.” She accepts the googles.

“Lyss?” Ramses asks.

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want her to be alone in there, even just as an avatar, so I’m going to set myself up first, and then you can push that green button in the corner of the screen to activate her once I’m jacked in, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Then when she gives you the signal, press the purple button.”

“Green button, then purple, got it.”

“Thanks,” he says to her. “Are you ready?” he asks Arcadia.

“I know kung-fu,” Arcadia says casually as she’s wrapping the goggles around her head. She might actually know it for reals.

Erlendr sits up in his cot, and blinks at the lights that have just turned on. They’re not real eyes, just visual coding that’s been programmed to become distressed due to virtual lighting changes to make it feel more real. “What’s this about?”

“Are we having fun yet?” Ramses asks.

“Barrels. What do you want?”

“We would like you to help us save Leona Matic’s life.”

“This oughta be good.”

Ramses and Arcadia go over the plan, altering certain details, so he doesn’t know too much about it yet. He has to agree to help them first, then he gets to know exactly how they’re going to fake his death.

“You want me to knowingly put myself in harm’s way, all for a woman that I couldn’t care less about? What’s in it for me?”

Ramses clicks the button on a little fob. The wall behind him, opposite Erlendr, falls backwards, and lands in the grass. The field of daisies where Bhulan was staying is there. Erlendr could run out and frolic if he wanted to. “This is a sign of good faith. You can live there, instead of in this room. If you don’t agree to help us, we won’t even put you back in here. That’s how important this is to us.”

Erlendr starts to speak in a weird mocking voice, but it’s hard to tell who he’s mocking. “They let you try it free? It must be good!”

Ramses looks quizzically at Arcadia.

“It’s an old television advertisement,” she explains.

“Oh. This isn’t your reward. Like I said, it’s a good faith gesture. Your reward...is this.” He takes a half-step to the side to get out of Arcadia’s way.

She takes off her ruana, and lifts her shirt to reveal the bump on her belly. It’s just a virtual construct, but Ramses built this avatar by scanning Arcadia today, and extrapolating what she would look like if she still had her real body, and it was pregnant, instead of Leona Delaney’s body. “If you don’t help us, you’ll never meet your granddaughter, because she will be killed before she can even be born. Now, Alyssa.” She transforms into the image of her current self, as Leona. “What say you, father?”

Erlendr frowns. “I’ll do it, but your plan sucks, I have...many suggestions.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 16, 2374

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In order for Ramses to make his small simulation look like the afterlife simulation, he had to connect the two of them together, and borrow code. The idea was that the fake sim, which they were calling limbo, would be placed between the individual’s consciousness signal, and the real afterlife. When Mateo and Leona died, they were supposed to travel through limbo first, but before they could make it all the way to where Pryce wanted them to go, Ramses would sever the connection, and trap them in limbo. From here, he should be able to download them into new bodies, and they would be on their merry way. And yes, Leona was part of this too. She decided that, if something went wrong, they would at least travel to the great known beyond together. No one argued with her about it, because it wasn’t a true and final death, and they were confident there would be some way to retrieve the both of them regardless.

They watched themselves fly right through Ramses’ backdoor into the afterlife sim, and land on the edge of the city. It didn’t look completely abandoned, but it didn’t look like it did before either. Vines were growing up the sides of the buildings, and there was trash all over the place. A few totalled cars were haphazardly parked off to the side. One of them was gently on fire. It looked like something out of a free-for-all violent video game. Did someone turn this place into a video game? It was certainly possible.

Mateo looked down at his clothes. “We’re wearing white.”

“I know,” Leona replied.

“It doesn’t seem like we should be walking around here wearing white.”

“I know, we can’t change into something else, though. If we try to put something else on top of our clothing, it will just turn white. Otherwise no one would be able to have purple curtains, or blue bed sheets.”

“Can we...?”

“We’ll stand out, but...it does work, I’ve seen it. I mean, it doesn’t automatically give you access wherever you want, or downgrade you, but at least no one can see what level you are. They’ll probably assume we’re Yellow Limiteds, who actually were downgraded recently, and are embarrassed by it.”

They both stripped down naked, and stuffed their clothes underneath the burning car. It was then that Mateo noticed his penis was exceptionally large, and Leona’s breasts were at least one size higher. She rolled her eyes. “He’s so superficial,” she said, referring to Tamerlane Pryce.

The backdoor was gone. It wasn’t located in a particular spot in the simulation. Ramses did that on purpose in order to prevent Pryce from being able to find it, and destroy it. Unfortunately, it meant it would be difficult for them to find it. It wasn’t impossible, though. If they just kept walking, their intuition should eventually just lead them to the right location at the right time. They started to walk down the streets, hoping not to be overrun by zombies, grand thieves, cyberpunks, or whatever roamed this world now. Leona stopped suddenly just after they passed by an alleyway. She held there for a beat before stepping backwards, and walking into it. Here she found what her intuition was trying to show her. It wasn’t the backdoor. It was something bad.

“Do we know him?” Mateo asked.

They were staring at a poster of a man who had co-opted the Barack Obama Hope poster design. That wasn’t the buzzword here, though. Instead, it was Autonomy. And yes, Leona knew him. “I did this. I made this world.”

“How?” Mateo asked without judgment.

“He was an NPC. I turned him into a real boy. I gave him agency.” She exhaled, and indicated the world around them. “This is apparently what he did with it.”

Mateo placed an arm around her hip, but it felt sexual, and that wasn’t what he was going for, so he switched to her shoulder. “Ellie is supposed to be in charge here. If not her, Pryce. You didn’t do this. Something would have had to happen long after you left. He probably just took advantage of some kind of power struggle.”

“Power vacuum,” came a voice from farther down the alleyway. He walked out of the darkness, revealing himself to be a talking human-sized bunny. He was wearing a cool hat, and a vest, but no pants. Fortunately, he didn’t have any genitals to speak of. His fur was pink. “They were both MIA for an extended period of time.”

“Do we know him too?” Mateo repeated. “I feel like I would remember if I met a talking rabbit, and I hope that you would have mentioned it at some point if you had met him without me.”

“I don’t know this avatar, it’s a mod.”

“I’ve always thought of myself as a bunneh,” the rabbit said. He seemed to be sincere, but they were having trouble taking him seriously like this. “Fast, cunning, deceptively intelligent. Protective and ambitious.”

“Well...” Leona began, “they’re fast.”

Perturbed and offended, the bunny waved his little paws in front of his face, and transformed it into that of a human’s. The rest of the avatar remained in bunny form, though, including the rest of his wittle head. “Recognize me now?” Yes.

“Ew, David,” Leona zinged.

“It’s grotesque! Kill it! Kill it with fire!” Mateo joked.

Vendelin Blackbourne growled in a very unbunny-like way. He approximated the motion a human would be able to execute to snap their fingers, since they would have hands...and therefore fingers. Still, the magic worked, finally showing them his true form. “Happy now?”

“Not really,” Leona answered honestly.

“You’re gonna need me,” Vendelin argued. “I know this world.”

“We’re not staying long,” she explained.

“And we have to get going,” Mateo added. “Have fun here.”

“Pinochio has eyes everywhere. You won’t get far.”

“Is that what he’s calling himself?” Leona questioned.

“Did he have some other name before?” Vendelin asked.

“I don’t think he had one at all.”

She led the way away from the once-bunny, and Mateo followed closely behind. He didn’t get far before something tugged at his ankle. He looked down to find an orange shackle around it. They both looked back, only to watch Vendelin wrap the other end of it around his own ankle. He chuckled once. “Hock chains. They won’t take you to jail, but...you won’t go anywhere without me.”

Mateo looked at Leona, who shrugged with just her eyebrows. They started walking again in the direction they were going. “Don’t slow us down.” Vendelin was a nuisance, and maybe even evil, but now that their friends were about to solve the Power Vacuum problem, he probably wasn’t too much of a threat. Once they figured out how to get these restraints off, they would decide what to do with him.

Vendelin jogged up to get next to them. “Don’t you two wanna know how I died?”

“We assume the Pluoraias executed you.”

“Yeah, but don’t you wanna know how they did it?”

“Not really.”

“You’re a lot less interesting than I’m sure you were led to believe you were when you were alive.”

“Oh, yeah? You think so? Yeah. Well. Um. I once, uh, lived in a different timeline.”

They just kept walking, unimpressed.

“Really? Nothing?”

“We’ve all been there.”

“No, I mean, literally,” Vendelin insisted. “I was a prisoner on Earth, and then suddenly, I wasn’t. And no one could remember who I was, and I didn’t have a record, and I just started my life over.”

“Cool story, bro.”

“You don’t believe me,” Vendelin assumed.

“No, we believe you, but we still don’t find it interesting. Like I said, we’ve all been there.”

“Oh. You’re serious. You’re time travelers.”

“Yes.”

He stopped, and looked down at the ground, but he was really just staring into space. “Am I not special? Am I not unique?”

“Blackbourne...” Leona began, not knowing where the rest of that sentence was gonna come from.

“I based my whole worldview off of that. I thought that I was given the chance to make something of myself. I didn’t want to go down the same road I walked before, and I didn’t; I was good. I was special, and...I had a purpose. The machine, it was...I thought I was helping. But did I just...?” He paused. “Did I just walk the same road I was on in the old timeline, but I went further?”

Mateo kicked the chain out of his way, so he could approach the man in his existential crisis. He stood before him, and patiently waited until Vendelin lifted his chin, tears still in his eyes. Then Mateo waited a few seconds more. “Probably.”

“Was what happened to me just random?”

Mateo slipped into a slight sad smile, and repeated himself, “probably.”

“Leona! Mateo!” It was Ramses. He was running towards them in full tactical gear. It was black, but it wasn’t killing him, since he was an interloper, as was Olimpia, who was holding open the door. It did not look easy for her.

“Come on,” Mateo urged. He pulled at the chain, but Vendelin wouldn’t budge. “Come on! We’re letting you escape with us!”

Vendelin reached down with a little key, and unlocked Mateo’s shackle. “I don’t deserve to escape.”

“Mateo!” Leona called back to him. Ramses had her by the elbow, still in the middle of ushering her towards the program’s backdoor.

Mateo held up the index finger of patience. “Do you know why you’re a pink bunny?”

Vendelin made an exaggerated shrug.

“Pryce created a system where most people come here Yellow. Bad people are in hock, or worse, but everyone else has to work their way up from Limited privileges. Why were you automatically pink?”

He shrugged again.

“Vendelin, time travelers get special privileges. You are special. And you still have time to walk a different road.” Mateo pointed to the backdoor, which Ramses was now helping Olimpia keep open. “It starts over there.”

Vendelin had to spend a little more time in the limbo simulation. The four of them had bodies waiting for them in base reality, but nothing was prepared for him yet. They still weren’t sure what they were going to do with him, and anway, it wasn’t the most pressing problem here. The Power Vacuum was right on its wait to the location of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The megaportals were up and running, and it was finally time to see this through. If no one else got hurt from this travesty, they could probably go easy on the man who built it. If even one more person was so much as superficially injured by its damaging power, it could be very bad for him.

Mateo and Leona crawled out of their pods in their new bodies, and came face to face with themselves. Alternate versions of the both of them were coming out of their own pods at the same time.

“Who are you?” Leona asked in an accusing tone.

“Now, don’t get mad,” the other Mateo said.

“We just don’t wanna have to wear the cuffs anymore,” the other Leona said.

Mateo squinted at them. “Ramses? Olimpia? What did you do?”

“They wanna be like us,” Leona realized.

“We want to be part of the team,” Ramses corrected. “And we don’t want anything to get in the way of us doing that.”

“You’ve just doomed yourself to this life,” Mateo argued, no longer weirded out by talking to someone who looked exactly like him. “The cuffs give you the freedom to walk away anytime you want. Now you’re stuck with us.”

“That’s exactly what we want,” Olimpia reasoned. “That’s what we’re trying to tell you. We’ve both been wanting this for a long time.”

“Me longer than her,” Ramses said.

“How did you even do it?” Leona asked. “Those bodies should be dead.”

“It’s the future,” Ramses said. “We can bring a couple of substrates back to life, if only briefly. We didn’t kill you with a bomb.”

“Look,” Olimpia began, “what’s done is done. There’s no point in arguing about it anymore. Let’s just go back to the AOC, and finish this mission.”

“Fix your faces first,” Mateo ordered. “It’s confusing.”

“Of course,” Olimpia said. “Our old bodies are still waiting for us.”

She and Ramses transferred their respective consciousnesses back to where they belonged. Even now, nothing could be done to undo what was done. They were salmon now, on the same pattern as the Matics, and Angela. Five of a kind. Honestly, if Mateo had to pick three people to stay on their team permanently, they would be them. It certainly wasn’t the worst thing ever.

They all went back to the AOC together through the closet portal. Sasha was back after having spent some time on New Earth, negotiating with the android who was deemed the rightful owner of it. His name was Onesnethri, and he agreed to let the seeding process proceed as planned, as long as he was in charge of early development. He agreed to work with a partner of Teagarden’s choosing. This was the result of a bunch of diplomatic discussions that the rest of the team didn’t have to worry about. They washed their hands clean of it. Now it was time to protect Gatewood and Earth from impending doom. Sasha and Kivi stayed with Team Keshida on the Jameela Jamil side, where the exit portal was. Theoretically, there was nothing that any of them could do at this point. They were just waiting for the destructive beam to show up, and only needed to be prepared to solve any hiccup, which would hopefully not come.

The team sat around the table, and watched the hologram in anticipation. “There!” Angela finally said, pointing at a flash of light, which had finally come close enough to be visible using one of their strategically placed interstellar stations. Immediately after the flash, the image disappeared completely. “What was that?”

“The diameter of the beam is larger than what we can see. The phenomenon exists beyond the visible spectrum of light.”

“Is the portal large enough to fit all that,” Angela continued, “what we can see, and what we can’t?”

“Yes,” Leona said confidently.

One by one, the warning stations went offline until the Power Vacuum was upon them. They saw it tunnel into the portal, but it also interfered with communications, so they couldn’t confirm its exit with the Jamil. Just as the tail of the beam fell through, they felt a loss of attitude control. The AOC went dark, and sent them spiraling.

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Big Papa: Biting the Ice (Part IX)

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We never could have guessed the truth about what has become of the afterlife simulation since we’ve been gone. For a world where you’re not supposed to be able to die, it sure is dangerous. Gilbert doesn’t come back with all the answers, but he has a decent idea what the hell is going on. Details about Pinocchio remain scarce, as people are evidently afraid to say anything about him, but the results of his efforts are clear. The worlds have been thrown into war, built on a foundation of a class system, fueled by real consequences...and weapons.

“It’s like the zero blade,” Gilbert explains as he’s still trying to catch his breath. No one is actually breathing in the simulation, or at least they don’t have to. If it’s possible to become tired, it’s because somebody deliberately turned that feature on to better resemble base reality.

“What does that do again?” Lowell asks.

“It kills you,” Nerakali answers. “It destroys your code, so you don’t respawn, or heal, or anything. You’re just...gone.”

“But you said it’s like the zero blade,” I point out. “What does it do?”

“There’s more than one,” Gilbert continues. “Blue, red, orange, yellow.”

“Downgrading weapons,” Pryce realizes. “I made one for every level.”

“Every level?” Gilbert questions. “Even the higher ones?”

“Yes,” Pryce confirms. “There’s even one for resurrection, which will transmit your consciousness to a new substrate in base reality. From there, you can pick out some other body.”

“I don’t care about the upgrades. How many of the weapons are there?” I ask.

“You can make more of certain ones,” Pryce explains. “There are only a few zero blades, though, and only one white staff. I lost it a long time ago, and I have no idea where the zero blades are. Obviously, Leona had one at one point, which she got from Boyce.”

“Tell us about the others,” Nerakali orders. “What are we dealing with?”

“The ones you have to worry about are the ice picks, the red axes, the hock shanks, the yellow hammers, and possibly the green collars. That last one isn’t all that bad, but some would disagree. The others would be considered upgrades, and they’re incredibly rare.”

“They’re using them in a war,” Gilbert adds. “If someone gets their hands one one, they can either use it against their enemies, or threaten them with it. The people with the worst weapons are the ones with the most power. No one wants their IDCodes to be shelved, so those with ice picks are considered elites. They make most of the decisions, delegating to the red axe wielders as needed, and so on down the hierarchy tree. I got the feeling when I was out there that a few people have the upgrade tools, but it’s unclear how powerful those people are. I think they can really only use them to bargain for personal favors, but they don’t control anything.”

Pryce is shaking his head. “When we started this project, we didn’t immediately know how the levels would work, or how you would rank up, or what. But we never wanted war. I wouldn’t have let this happen.”

“When we first showed up,” I begin, “we thought you were the enemy. We thought things would only get better if we removed you from power. Now I see how bad things get when you’re not here. Abandoning this place was the biggest mistake of your life. When you went down this path—shutting me out of it, manslaughtering Trinity, letting your daughter and Thor go off to wherever—you chose to assume the responsibility of tens of billions of people, and you should have respected that. People like you don’t get to quit; it’s a lifetime appointment. The fact that you’ve had an extremely long lifetime is no excuse.”

“You’re right,” Pryce says, “which is why I have to be the one to fix this.”

“How?” Lowell asks.

“Ice in the Hole,” Nerakali guesses.

“We can’t do that,” Lowell argues.

“I wasn’t here,” Gilbert reminds us. “What is that?”

“There’s a button,” Pryce starts to go over it again. “I doubt Pinocchio ever found it, it’s not in my office, and even if he did, he probably wouldn’t know how to use it. And he would be horrified by the downside. As the name would suggest, it puts everyone on ice. It shelves every single IDCode inside the simulation. Every single one,” he reiterates. “It’s like pressing a great reset button, except that it doesn’t destroy anything. The simulation itself remains up and running, and once it’s time to reinstantiate the identities, they’ll all be intact. I created it in case something like this happened.”

Like a great reset button that doesn’t destroy anything, I repeat in my own head. It’s a terrible choice, but if it’s the only reasonable solution, then it will be what we do. We have to end the war, and if we can’t do it through words, we’ll force it. But we have to try to use our words first. “That is a last resort,” I protest. “We haven’t even tried to stop it some other way. Can’t we start by deleting all of the weapons?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Pryce contends. “You can’t find and replace the weapons. The code is far too complicated for that. It’s designed to be self-teaching, and adaptive, and it simulates every law of physics that isn’t specifically counteracted by a programmed rule. In the real world, you can’t find every weapon, and erase it from reality, so you can’t do it in the simulation either. We created it that way to curtail our own power. There is no button, for instance, that turns everyone’s clothes black, even though it wouldn’t be very hard to program that. Hell, I could set every server on fire if I wanted to, because I have the privilege of a body, but it would take a long time, because each one is at least hundreds of miles from any other. These restrictions are all about preserving life, and preventing something disastrous. You’re right, Ice in the Hole is a last resort, but it is perfectly safe for the residents, and we are already at the point of a last resort.”

“Where is it?” Lowell asks. “I know it’s not murder, but I have experience with hurting people, so I should be the one to do it.”

“No,” Pryce says. “I’m responsible, I have to push the button. Besides, you’ve been resurrected. I can’t take that away from you.”

“Why would that take it away from me? Can’t you just re—uhh...re-in—”

“Reinstantiate,” Nerakali helped.

“No, I can’t,” Pryce replies without the full question. “I told you, the button has a downside. I said it was safe for the residents, but that doesn’t go for the person who pushes the button. It requires a blood sacrifice. You can push it all day long, if you want, but nothing will happen unless you do it with your bare hand.”

“What, does a needle come out of the button as it goes down?” Gilbert figures.

“Not a needle,” Pryce corrects, “a blade.”

I know where he’s going with this. “A zero blade.”

“Yes.”

“It’s not a blood sacrifice, it’s a code sacrifice.”

“In the end, yes,” Pryce agrees. “The code of your blood is different than the rest of your avatar. It contains your genetic information, just like it would in base reality. Once the blade tastes those genes, it will zero out the person they belong to.”

“You can’t just cut yourself with a regular virtual blade, and pour it on the button, while you push it with a meter stick, or something?” Nerakali suggests.

“Sure, you could,” Pryce says with a shrug, “but that doesn’t solve your problem. Your blood matches your code. You still die, because it knows it’s your blood. Or rather, it knows it’s my blood, because I’m the one who’s going to be doing this. And before you think you’ve figured out a loophole, that won’t work either. You wouldn’t be able to draw someone’s blood, and store it in a jar while you resurrect them. People who are resurrected are still connected to the simulation, and it will kill them, even when they’re on the outside. Plus, the virtual blood has to be fresh. I mean, seconds fresh. Nothing can resurrect you that fast, except for the white staff, I guess, but like I said, I don’t know where that is.”

“Why did you design it this way?” Nerakali questions. “This is needlessly complicated and deadly.”

“Not needlessly,” Pryce maintains. “Quite importantly. It’s not dangerous for the residents per se, but there is some risk. If the Glisnians detect a sudden drop in power usage—which is what this act will do—they could theoretically decide that the experiment is over. That’s what they keep calling it, an experiment. They don’t see it as a subversion to death for all the humans in history. As far as they’re concerned, they’re the only ones who matter, and they’ve already cracked immortality. They let me continue with my work, because I don’t get in their way, and I don’t use too much energy in the grand scheme of things. But they will end it if they see any evidence that I don’t need it any more. The button, and how it works, is a deterrent. If someone pushes it, someone else has to go up to the real world, and make sure they don’t shut the whole thing down. Ellie, you have proven that you can convince people of almost anything. The residents will rely on you to be their advocate once I’m gone.”

“I am their advocate,” says a voice from beyond the huddle. He looks familiar, but I can’t place his face. As he approaches, I start to remember. He’s altered his appearance to be a more attractive version of himself, but this is the bot who served us what would turn out to be fake refreshments back when I was trying to convince Glisnia to give me the simulation. This is Pinocchio? He’s been hiding in plain sight. He has two goons at his flanks that look mean for no reason but they were programmed to look that way.

“How did you get in here?” Gilbert demands to know.

Pinocchio chuckles. “IDCloner. Very easy.”

“Is it now?” Lowell asks, oddly interested in having something like that.

He chuckles again. “Well, I suppose not that easy.” He shakes the subject out of his mouth, and readies it for a new one. “I’ve been listening to your conversation, most of it, anyway.” He reaches behind his back, and slowly slides a sword out of a virtual pocket dimension. “Before I kill you, you’re going to tell me where I can find the Ice in the Hole button.”

“It’s up your ass,” Pryce tells him.

Pinocchio jerks his chin, prompting one of his goons to take Pryce by the shirt collars, and press him against the wall. “Your mom was there last night, she would have told me if she had seen it.”

What are these, fifth graders?

“Boys,” Nerakali shouts in a smooth and steady voice. “There is no call for violence.”

Pinocchio nods, which causes the goon to release Pryce, even though he wasn’t even facing his master. Yeah, they’re definitely NPCs. “I have no beef with you. I wasn’t created until after the other Pryce took over the simulation. I’m only going to kill you, because you’re a threat to my power, but it’s not personal. Just tell me where the button is. Understand this, though...now that I know it exists, I’ll find it myself eventually. You can make it easier, on everybody, but you can’t stop me by keeping this information to yourself. You do not have the upperhand here. If you don’t tell me, I’ll still kill you, but not before I kill your friends in front of you.”

“Wait.” I hope what I plan to say to him is the right call. “Is this what Leona wanted? When she gave you consciousness and agency, did she want you to do this?”

Pinocchio smirks knowingly. “A hundred percent. She wanted me to be able to make my own decisions...and these are my decisions.” He grows cold and passively angry. “This is my design. Tell me where the button is.” He lifts his finger, and starts wagging it in front of Gilbert’s face without even turning to face him. “Gilbert, if you try what I know you’re about to try, you will be the first to go.”

“I’ve died a thousand times,” Gilbert retorts. “Each time, I knew it could be the last.” With that, he drops a yellow hammer into his grip from out of his sleeve, and bashes one of the goons over the head, only to swing it back immediately, and smash it against the other one. Their clothes turn yellow, and they disappear. It’s the color of Limited, so they’re still very much alive, but they’re only allowed in public spaces now, which is pretty normal for NPCs, but it’s a good short-term solution. Gilbert swings a third time, and tries to strike Pinocchio, but he’s met by the zero blade. They hold there for a few seconds, neither one yet strong enough to overtake the other. “Nerakali...get them to the escape hatch.”

“No!” I scream.

“Come on.” Lowell takes me by the shoulders, and tries to usher me away.

I struggle against his pull. I’ve seen Gilbert across many timelines. I know how much he’s had to overcome, and it’s all been his own personality and instincts. He’s changed himself, and improved more than almost anyone I’ve ever known. You have know idea how hard that is. People who are naturally good could never understand. He doesn’t deserve this. “No!” I repeat.

Lowell’s too strong for me, I should have asked for an upgrade in here, but fake physical strength wasn’t really a priority. He pushes me into Pryce’s arms, who takes it from here. “I’ll help him,” Lowell promises. “Get her out.”

The last thing I see before we round the corner is Lowell removing a fireplace poker from against the wall, and heading back towards the still-struggling Gilbert and Pinocchio.

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