The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 1, 2484

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Mateo instinctively opened up to hug his daughter, Dubravka, but quickly took a half-step back. Like Romana and Kivi, he never got the chance to raise her. Perhaps it would be inappropriate. It was certainly presumptuous. Unfortunately, he failed to think of this beforehand, leading to an awkward moment for all. Even so, she took it in stride, and stepped up to initiate the hug herself. He was still her father, and she knew that it was neither his intention nor choice to miss so much of her life.

“Gang’s all here.” It was Kivi. She managed to appear out of nowhere just at the right time, as she was known to do.

“Kivi,” Leona said, surprised. “Which one are you?”

“The all-of-me one. I remember everything. I held a gun on an uninhabitable planet once.”

Mateo hugged his eldest as well, then followed up with one for Romana. He looked around, wondering if his children from an old timeline would show up as well, but it didn’t look like it was in the cards. “Argh. Argh!” He suddenly felt a hot sensation on his hip. Something appeared to be possibly literally burning a hole in his pocket. He hopped around, and struggled to reach in to pull it out. It was his silver rendezvous card. It was even more difficult to hold it between his fingers, but after letting go, he realized that this might activate it, so he reached out with both hands, nearly catching it several times before finally failing, and ending up on Snake Island.

Dr. Hammer was waiting for him in the vestibule. “We need your help.”

“Me?”

“Not necessarily you, per se, but you’re the one I had access to. You were talking about how you have illusion powers now, but yours weren’t as good as the others, so...”

“What do you need illusioned?” he asked.

“This whole place.” She indicated the building, and then pointed behind Mateo. “Look through the telescope. Don’t touch it, it’s already pointed in the right direction.”

Mateo approached the coin-operated binocular telescope, and peered into the eyepieces, careful not to move it in the slightest. He saw a wooden boat, but had no idea how far out it was.

As if reading his mind, Dr. Hammer answered his question, “I looked up the flag they’re flying. They’re Carthaginians, and they’re currently six kilometers out, but drawing nearer. Much closer, and they may be able to see us.”

“You don’t have active camouflage for this facility?”

“Never thought we would need it. No one should be on this side of the island in this time period.”

“Woof,” Mateo said. “You’re right, I’m not good enough at illusions to protect you. We’ll need someone else. Olimpia is best at invisibility, but Angela can make holograms that last even when she walks away.”

“We’re both here,” either Angela or Marie said over comms, but probably the former.

“So are we,” Romana added.

“I’m sending down Angela to see if she can work a job that big,” Leona interrupted before anyone else could join the conversation. “Ambassador out.”

Angela appeared in the vestibule, and started to look around, but she didn’t have much to see. “I really need to get a better view. I’m going outside.”

“I cannot allow that,” Dr. Hammer said apologetically.

Angela scoffed. “I’m wearing a spacesuit. The snakes can’t get me.”

Dr. Hammer shook her head. “There are no doors. I did that for a reason.”

“I’ll be fine. We do this sort of thing all the time.” Angela took a small device from her chest compartment, and tossed it to the doctor. “This is tapped into our comms, but only has global range. We’ll need it back.” She took Mateo’s hand, and teleported them both out of there.

They stood on the beach, letting the waves crash in, and kiss their knees, though they could not feel it. Angela examined the building. It was up against the mountain, and painted natural colors, like green and brown, but it definitely stood out as an artificial structure. She would have to smooth out the right angles, and hide all the windows. She could use the mountain itself as a sort of mental template to know what it should look like. She tilted her head, and electric slid down a little to see what she was working with from slightly different perspectives. She even made a rectangle with her index fingers and thumbs, and looked through it like a movie director. “Okay, yeah.”

“Yeah, you can do it?” Mateo asked. He was some ways away now, wandering around out of boredom.

“Oh, sorry, you weren’t there for our brief discussion on the ship after Leona cut off comms. No, I mean, yeah, it’s impossible.”

“Are you sure? You’ve not even tried to do anything.”

“It’s too big,” Angela contended. “I’m good, but I’m not that good.”

“Is there anything you can do?” Dr. Hammer asked through comms. “Can you...combine your powers, or something?”

“No,” Ramses said, “but I have another idea. If you’ll allow me to meet you on the ground...”

“Please,” Dr. Hammer asked.

Mateo was about to jump back there when he looked down at himself. “There’s a snake wrapped around my leg.”

“Is it venomous?” Dr. Hammer questioned.

“How am I meant to know? It’s yellow, and menacing, though.”

“Okay, that’s probably the Golden Lancehead. Put your helmet on.”

“I got this,” Leona declared. She appeared before Mateo, but she wasn’t alone for long. Dozens of birds materialized on the ground around her, pecking at the sand, and hopping around, presumably looking for worms. They were mostly a bold red, with black wings, and black tails. Their beaks were black on top, and white on bottom.

Mateo couldn’t help but notice how badass the birds were, and whatever they were called, would probably make a great inspiration for a superhero persona. The snake had a very different impression of them. It immediately unwrapped itself from Mateo’s leg, and went for the flock of holograms. It was probably pretty upset that none of them seemed to be real, but no one stuck around to see its full reaction. All three of them were gone in seconds.

“...that’s for you to decide. I think it should be close, but you know these lands better than me.” Ramses was in the middle of explaining something to Dr. Hammer. He had come down with Romana.

“What are we talking about?” Leona asked.

Dr. Hammer crossed her arms. “He wants to teleport that whole Carthaginian boat away from here.”

“Oh, that’s a good idea,” Leona determined.

“No, it’s not. You’ll disrupt the continuum,” Dr. Hammer argued.

“Oh.” Leona dismissed it by waving her hand in the general direction of the boat. “Those people believe in gods, and crap like that. They’ll just think that Poseidon was messing with them. Or saving them.”

“Uh, Neptune,” Angela corrected.

“I’ve heard it both ways,” Leona said, again dismissively.

“It’s neither,” Dr. Hammer asserted.

Leona checked her watch. “Look, Angela can’t hide your building today. Perhaps she can work through it, and cover you up in time, but not before that boat gets close enough to see it. This is our best option. We can jump the Ambassador to just underneath the boat in secret. Then we’ll make a very short jump, say, a few hundred klicks, and leave them somewhere safe. We’ll find an island of comparable characteristics, and I’m sure they’ll attribute any changes to topography to whatever god they do think would have the power to move them, or tricks of the light. Do they have a sun god?”

Dr. Hammer was shaking her head. “It’s too risky. How can you get right under them without tearing their boat apart?”

Defghij the Robot came out of the building. “Pardon the interruption, Doctor, but I’m receiving a radio message.”

“From the Vellani Ambassador?” Leona questioned.

“No,” he answered.

“Uh. Put it through,” Dr. Hammer ordered.

“Certainly.” Defghij dropped his jaw, and let the sound come out. “Hello? Hello? Can anyone here me? This is Tertius Valerius. I’m on the boat. I can see your building. I know there are time travelers here. Please respond.”

“Tertius, this is Leona Matic of the Castlebourne Sanctuary Ship Vellani Ambassador. We read you, five by five.”

“Oh, Leona, great. I’m sure you’ll understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Let’s talk in person,” he clarified. “Could someone please come pick me up?”

“Depends,” Leona went on. “How much influence do you have over that boat you’re on.”

“Total control,” Tertius replied.

“Tell ‘em to turn around. This island is full of deadly snakes.”

“Give me a minute.” They waited for about four minutes before he got back on the radio. “Okay, they’re turning.”

“Okay,” Leona began, preparing to execute the new, new plan. “If you can...jump into the water without any of the locals seeing you, and tread for about five minutes. Someone will come get you in secret.”

Tertius didn’t reply, but then they heard a splash. Dude was nothing if not reliable.

Mateo dropped his visor, and didn’t bother to wait the full five minutes. He let his HUD connect to the VA in orbit, which was serving as a temporary satellite. This piggy-backed on the signal that Tertius was sending, and told Mateo exactly where his target was. He teleported to the location—a couple meters under the surface—grabbed Tertius by the legs, and transported him out of there.

“Whoo!” Tertius cried, exhilarated. “Again!”

“Go get a towel,” Dr. Hammer ordered her robot before looking back at Tertius. “How did you get here?”

“Well, it should come as no surprise that I’ve made an enemy or two in the future. For the most part, what do I care? I can just erase anyone’s memory of their hatred of me. But occasionally, that doesn’t work. Some people are just resistant. This one guy, I won’t even bother to tell you his name, got on my bad side, as I got on his. I refused to work for him, and erase his enemies’ memories.” Tertius looked away. “Hm. That sounds like a band name. Enemies’ Memories,” he repeated. “Oh, thank you,” he said to Defghij for the towel. “Anyway, just as punishment, he banished me. He said that he was zoicizing me, which is totally not the right word to use in this context, because he was actually trying to send me back to my own time period. But he even screwed that up, and threw me over two hundred years off course! I anticipated this sort of thing happening at one time or another, so I hid this temporal phone in a cave near my home in Carthage.” He took it out of his pocket, and shook some of the water droplets off of it. “Sadly, by now, it’s out of power, but I knew that you built this Center all the way out here, so I talked my way onto a boat, and convinced them to come way, way south. At best, you could get me back to civilized times, when people used toilet paper. At worst, I could maybe charge this thing in an outlet? You use temporal energy, right?”

“How did you have power for a radio, but not the phone?” Romana asked.

“This uses lions,” Tertius explained, dropping the now redundant walkie-talkie on the ground. The temporal phone uses a small temporal battery, and lions are incompatible with it. I don’t know why it ran out when it was off the whole time.”

“It was probably leaking,” Ramses diagnosed.

“That was my thought,” Tertius agreed.

Mateo cleared his throat, cupped his hands together, and leaned in. “Did this man happen to be named...I dunno...Buddha?”

“That was it!” Tertius cried. “You’ve heard of him.”

“Unfortunately.”

Dr. Hammer took a breath. “Well, I’m glad it all worked out. Team Matic, if you could remain here for the day to make sure the boat does indeed head in a different direction—”

“They will,” Tertius insisted. “I literally made them think that it was their choice.”

“Just the same, I would like to take precautions. And in case it ever happens again, I would ask Angela to see if she can indeed eventually make this whole building permanently invisible for us.”

“I would be happy to,” Angela said with a polite nod.

“Uh, under one condition,” Leona said quickly before anyone tried to sign on any dotted line.

“And what might that be?” Dr. Hammer asked.

Leona stepped over, and took Romana by the shoulders, gently nudging her forward until she was front and center. “Help my stepdaughter. She’s fallen off of our pattern, and we don’t know what other consequences that’s having for her, besides the emotional distress.”

Dr. Hammer gave the girl a cursory examination. “Consider it done.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 18, 2376

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A message popped up on the table hologram, showing a series of symbols that Mateo did not recognize, as well as diagrams and graphs. Leona and Ramses squinted their eyes and studied them for a moment. Angela and Olimpia tried to do the same, but they couldn’t interpret it any better than Mateo, so they eventually gave up too. “It’s a math problem,” Leona decided. “Really simple too, just not in Arabic script.”

“L-O-L, it’s pi,” Ramses said. “Reply in pi, use Arabic.”

“Yeah,” Leona agreed. She quickly typed out the answer. “Fifteen digits should be more than enough to satisfy this little test.”

“Are we sure we want to respond to these people?” Olimpia asked as the voice of reason.

“If they’re the type to fire upon a helpless six-person ship for giving the right answer, they’re surely the type to fire upon us for not answering, or giving the wrong one, for that matter,” Leona reasoned. She did wait a moment before pressing enter, in case there were any further objections.

A few seconds passed before the hologram changed into the image of a human being. “Greetings from The SWD Investigator. We do not recognize your vessel. Where do you come from?” the little guy asked.

“Greetings to you too,” Leona replied. “This is Captain Leona Matic of the stateless private vessel known as the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. We hail from Earth, but the ship was constructed on Proxima Doma, Proxima Centauri.”

The hologram looked confused. “Earth, you say?”

“Indeed. There may be a time discrepancy.”

“Quite,” the hologram agreed. “It is the standard year 22,376.”

“Hmm,” Angela noted. “Twenty-two thousand years exactly into the future.”

“We don’t know that,” Ramses pointed out. “We were scheduled to restart the calendar in two centuries. Who knows how many times they do something like that?”

The man had been listening to them politely as they spoke amongst each other. “Is your ship capable of light year burst mode?”

“It is not,” Leona responded. They were too far advanced for her to lie and risk ending up on their bad side. “We operate at a maximum speed of seven-oh-seven-c.”

“Interesting. You may dock with us, and we will transport you to the Wanderer.” He closed the transmission, leaving the hologram with an image of the space above them, where his ship was opening up to accept them.

“That must be the W in SWD,” Olimpia figured.

“Do we run?” Mateo asked. “Serious question.”

“We don’t,” Leona answered. “Trust, but verify.” Leona activated the teleporter for a single jump into the belly of the beast.

No one came to the docks to speak with them, so they just waited until the hatch opened up again, and a clearly automated voice instructed them to, “please exit the Investigator, and follow the highlighted route.”

The presently personality-less AI of the AOC accepted the coordinates, and transported them to the surface of an even larger vessel, which Leona and Ramses explained was probably an understatement. They couldn’t quite tell how massive it was, but it appeared to be larger than a star.

Now a woman was waiting for them when they exited their ship, and climbed down the steps. “Please follow me to the Office of the Director of Alien Affairs. She will be...extremely pleased to meet you. If you are telling the truth that you are stateless, you’ll be the first true alien we’ve ever met. We would be interested to know why you look so human.”

“So would we,” Mateo said. He had a pretty good idea why, though.

They entered a teleportation closest, and transported down to the deepest, darkest, section of the whole facility. Of course, they didn’t really know that was what it was, but it sure felt like it. It was dark anyway. “There ya go,” she said with what looked like a slight shiver. She reentered the closet before they could ask any more questions.

They walked down the rest of the corridor, and knocked on the only door they saw. A hairy animal that resembled an ape of some kind opened the door, and looked them over. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“We’re, uhh...” Leona began, “aliens.”

“How do you know?” the ape questioned.

“We’re from Earth,” Leona added.

“This is Earth,” the ape contended. “What’s become of it at least.”

“We’re from the original Earth,” Leona clarified. “When it was a planet?”

The ape sighed deeply. “Come on in, I’ll run some tests.” She began to mutter under her breath. “Can’t possibly be aliens. Time travelers, sure, but I don’t know how they got past The Barricade.” She squeezed them all onto a couch that would not have been fit for three adults. She tried to scan them with a device before realizing she was pointing in the wrong direction, and had actually been scanning herself.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Ramses asked.

“And I suppose you do?” the ape spat back.

He scoffed lightly. “I’m the engineer, Ramses Abdulrashid. This is our Captain, Leona Matic, First Officer Mateo Matic, and Crewmen Angela Walton and Olimpia Sangster.”

“Titles and ranks TBD,” Mateo said. Not once had anyone ever referred to him as the First Officer.

“Whatever,” the ape said dismissively. “I am Salufi.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Salufi,” Ramses said politely.

She closed her scanner, and carelessly tossed it onto a chair. “This damn thing can’t tell what you are, but what makes you think you’re an alien? Earth hasn’t been a planet for tens of thousands of years, but you’re still one of us. You’re an ancestor, I guess.”

All this time, Leona had been staring at something on the wall, chin resting in a palm attached by an arm to an elbow resting on Mateo’s knee. “I keep seeing that symbol. What does it mean?” It was a fairly simple graphic. A large arch was on the outside, followed by a second arch inside of it, which would be identical to the first, except it was broken down the middle. Inside of that was an arch broken into three parts, and then four, and then five.

Salufi looked over at it like it wasn’t important. “It’s The Fifth Division. That’s how our culture got started.” She scoffed harshly. “That symbol has existed long before you would have been born. If you have your own ship, and know how to use it—”

“We didn’t tell you we had a ship,” Angela argued.

“I knew you were coming,” Salufi explained. “You think I didn’t know? We’re not idiots around here. Do you wanna know about the symbol, or not?”

“Go on,” Leona urged.

“In the beginning, there was unity. One peoples, on Earth. Then a small group of them decided that they wanted to go back in time to—I guess—rule the world, or something. They call this The First Division. Well, about half of them wanted to go back only a little bit, while the other half wanted to go back thousands of years. They call it The Second Division. We don’t know what happened to the less ambitious half; their existence was probably negated by the people who went back further. Those people stayed there for a little bit, grew their numbers, and then decided to go to another dimension. Some of them—very few of them—chose to stay. They call it The Third Division. We don’t know what happened to those who stayed, they probably just lived their lives, and died pointlessly. In that other dimension, the people I think did rule over all of reality, making changes. Or no, wait, they were undoing changes that other travelers were making. Yeah, that was it. Well, apparently they got bored, so nearly all of them left; went back down to Earth. The Fourth Division. Finally, some of them chose to stay there, and do whatever. The rest, well, they went back in time again. We don’t know how far back, but either way, it certainly negated everything that had ever happened to them and their ancestors. It was they who developed the civilization you see before you. We call them...The Fifth Division. That’s their symbol.”

“Easter Island,” Leona said cryptically. “She’s talking about The Gallery.”

“The Gallery, yeah, yeah,” Salufi realized. “The other dimension was called the Gallery.”

“That’s where the Prestons lived,” Leona explained to the group when it was clear they didn’t know or recall what she was talking about. “A bunch of people used to work there, but when they left, Athanaric Fury had to keep things running with a skeleton crew composed of the couple, their three...clay children, and himself.”

“But that doesn’t make sense,” Mateo said. “We met the Prestons. They weren’t erased from the future by these Fifth Division travelers.”

“No, they wouldn’t have been able to,” Leona said, getting excited. “The creation of the Gallery dimension was a fixed moment in time. It could not be undone. If they wanted to create a timeline where it didn’t exist, it would have to be concurrent with the main sequence. We’re in an alternate reality; just like The Parallel. We probably didn’t even jump forward in time. This is probably still 2376, except as Ramses assumed, it’s a different calendar, because an advanced peoples created one long before the one we used could have been standardized.”

“We are aliens,” Ramses declared. “Being from an alternate reality counts.”

Leona nodded in agreement. The rest of them weren’t so pleased. What fresh hell awaited them here?

“Okay,” Salufi said, slapping her knees. She stood up, and lifted the Fifth Division symbol they were all talking about from the plaque on the wall. This revealed a big red button. She pressed it, sounding a terrible alarm throughout the room.

“I am not going back to jail,” Angela said definitively.

“I’m tired of being locked up too,” Leona agreed.

“Sync up and jump,” Ramses said as he literally took a stand.

Leona synced their cuffs, and tried to jump them back to the AOC. They could see it before them, but it didn’t stay where it was meant to be. It quickly disappeared, only to be replaced by the wall in Salufi’s office. Then it returned. They just kept flickering back and forth between the dock and the office, dozens of times before Salufi engaged some special temporal device, and permanently pulled them back into the office.

“You think you can just teleport wherever you want?” she asked rhetorically. “Time powers are heavily regulated in this reality. You’re gonna stay here until the authorities come to scoop you up. My department handles aliens who evolved somewhere else in the universe, of which we have so far found none. Soon, you won’t be my problem anymore, and I’ll go back to my nice life of not doing a damn thing all day, which is why I pursued this career in the first place. Until then, sit your hairless asses back down on the couch!”

The authorities did come to scoop up the team. They didn’t lock them up in a cell, though. They just quarantined them in their ship until they could figure out whether they were a threat. They wrongfully figured they would have at least one day to wait.

“We have one shot at this,” Leona said. “Can you do it?”

“Yes,” Ramses said. “We can attach ourselves to any object. Usually, we don’t want to do that, because we want to stay on the celestial object we’re already on, but just because we’re inside this matrioshka brain doesn’t mean we have to stay here.”

“Still,” Leona continued, “I want to be as unpredictable as possible. “Olimpia, you remember how to set the ship to burst mode?”

“Yes,” Olimpia replied. “Six bursts, six AU.” Hull integrity was predicted to degrade past that.

“Angela, time battery?”

“Fifty-six percent,” Angela answered.

“Ramses?” Leona asked simply.

“We won’t be stuck in one place when we’re done, but we still won’t have a power source to replenish our reserves.”

“I wish we had asked for them before they knew what we were,” Leona lamented. “Okay, we’ll build that bridge when we get to it. Mateo.”

“Yes, boss?” he said, hoping to contribute in some way.

“Were I you,” she said.

“Were I you,” he echoed.

“Okay,” Leona decided. “Timing is everything. We’re coming up on midnight. The stellar engine is operational. They should be far from this location by the time we come back a year from now. If all goes according to plan, they will assume we found a way to escape, not that we jumped to the future.”

A few minutes later, everyone was ready at their action stations. Angela was monitoring communications and ship systems, ready to report if the natives realized what they were up to. Olimpia was hovering her hand over the button, ready to activate the teleporter for six fairly short jumps. Ramses was down in the engineering section, ready to do whatever. Leona was there to coordinate. Mateo was making tea. “They should have never underestimated you people,” he pointed out. He sure got lucky, falling in with this good lot of people. His life could have ended up a lot worse.

Leona began to count them down by the second. “Six, five, four, three, two, one, mark!” They jumped into the future, as did the AOC. Olimpia sent them six AU away, just to be safe. The matrioshka brain was gone, but that didn’t mean they were alone.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 17, 2375

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It was happening again. The ship just experienced a sudden loss of power. Fortunately, it wasn’t as bad as last time. Instead of returning to the timestream after a year, they were here when it happened, which meant there was still enough breathable air to keep them from dying within the next few minutes. The artificial gravity was gone, and the lights were off, but their Cassidy cuffs were still working, suggesting that they weren’t suffering from a direct impact of the Power Vacuum. Still, it was incredibly annoying. There should have been more than enough distance between them and the beam, even when accounting for the waves that go beyond the visible spectrum of light. Leona asked to gather all of the cuffs so they could try to siphon their fusion generators into the ship. Ramses said that wouldn’t be necessary. “Why not?” she asked.

He pushed himself off the wall, and floated down to his grave chamber. He opened it up, accessed a storage panel, and retrieved a box. “I was worried this would happen, so I came prepared.” He opened the box, and inside was another box. “The insulation worked. It wasn’t strictly necessary, but it’ll make it easier to open.” He casually tossed the outer box into the slowly thinning air.

“That’s some kind of power source?” Mateo asked.

“It’s a time battery,” Ramses said. “Or rather, it will be.” He set the inner box on the table, and activated the magnet to hold it in place. Then he flipped over just for fun, and got himself down to his seat, where he strapped in.

Everyone else did the same, though with less gymnastics. “You haven’t built it yet?” Angela questioned. “How are you going to charge it if we have no power to begin with?”

“Oh, it’s charged,” Ramses replied. “It just doesn’t exist right now. I programmed it to jump two hours into the future an hour before the Vacuum was scheduled to show up. When it returns, it will be more than enough to power up the reframe engine, and get us back to Earth.”

“You shouldn’t be able to store that much power in that small of a package,” Leona argued. “Now if it’s a fusion reactor, you might be onto something, but you called it a battery.”

“It is a battery, but it doesn’t store electricity. It’s not called a time battery because it travels through time. It stores temporal energy, which is the most powerful kind in the universe.”

“Where did you get it?” Leona pressed.

“I engineered it, obviously,” Ramses answered. “You don’t think I could do something like that?”

“No, I mean, where’d you get the energy? You usually spend more generating it than you get out of it, like fusion was back in ancient times.”

“I did spend more energy than I got out of it. But I used a stellaris collapsis, which is basically free. Two devices were attached to each other by a tether. I sent the collector through a portal, which exited close enough to the event horizon to create temporal dissonance. I then processed the energy using the device on my end, and charged the battery. And when I say I did these things, I barely did anything. I was too busy working on the limbo simulation. Ishida did most of the work. The Jameela Jamil has their own time battery. Actually, they have a battery of batteries, and they’re all larger than this one.”

“Could you have not just siphoned Hawking radiation, or rotational energy, from the black hole itself?” Olimpia asked.

Mateo was surprised she knew that a stellaris collapsis was another name for a black hole, since he had already forgotten learning that a while ago. What was Hawking radiation?

“Storing that would have been harder. Temporal energy works well in compact form, such as this thing right here.” He pointed to the still empty box.

Most of the team just nodded. “Do we have enough oxygen to last us until it shows up?” Mateo asked, feeling dumb.

“Plenty,” Leona answered. “That’s why we have microponics upstairs.” She looked at her watch. “We are coming up on midnight central, though. Did you not account for that?”

“When I said the battery was scheduled to return two hours after it disappeared, I really meant two hours and one year. We’ll just have to set the AOC to jump with us, instead of waiting for us. So I guess we will need to siphon some cuff fusion.”

“I see,” Leona said. “I suppose you already modified the ship to utilize our new power systems.”

Ramses smirked, and reached under the table. After a click, the center of the table popped up. He took hold of it, and pulled out a tube that Mateo never knew was there. “For those of you who don’t know, we use an antimatter drive for propulsion. Regular ol’ fusion isn’t good enough to reach the speeds we need, or power the reframe engine.” He kicked the base of the table with his foot. “That regular fusion, however, is more than enough to power internal systems. It’s always better to have redundancies. This will be our third redundancy. The battery goes in here, and can handle both propulsion, and the ship itself.”

“For how long?” Angela asked.

“That depends on how we use it, and how much loss the battery experienced from the time jump. Normally, we wouldn’t have to do that, but it obviously didn’t work as an emergency cache if the Power Vacuum drained it while it was still in the timestream.”

“This was a good call, Ramses,” Leona complimented. “I wish I had thought of it. I was just so concerned with Mateo, and the afterlife simulation.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Ramses said, dismissing her guilt. “That’s why we’re a team.”

They spent pretty much all of their time together now, so there wasn’t much for them to talk about. They were relatively silent for the rest of the hour, but Angela and Olimpia had some stories, so that kept them occupied a little. A year later, the indicator light on the box turned green, prompting Ramses to open it, and check on his special battery. “Perfect condition, 83% capacity; not bad.” He installed it in its housing like it wasn’t any more complex than a USB drive, and powered up systems. The tube receded back into the table, and the fresh air came on.

“All right, it works,” Leona said, only a little surprised. “Plot a course to the exit portal. I’ll try to contact the Jamil.”

“Neither one of those things may be possible,” Ramses said, looking at his screen.

Leona pulled up her own screen to find out what he was talking about. “This doesn’t make any sense. Where the hell are we? Where’s the megaportal?”

“Did the Power Vacuum knock us off course?” Angela guessed.

“There are two things it could have done. One, left us to drift not too terribly far from where we were, or two, pulled us into the portal with it. Either way, we should have an inkling of where we are. I’m not seeing any stars at all, just distant galaxies. This is...”

“Bonkers?” Ramses finished for her.

“Bonkers,” Leona agreed.

“Maybe we traveled through time,” Olimpia suggested. “The stars are always moving.”

“I thought of that,” Ramses said. “Which is why I ran a program that checks the date based on stellar drift. A good time traveler always does that.” He gently pulled Leona over by the shoulder, and pointed to his screen. “What the shit is that?”

“A galaxy?” Leona offered, unconvinced herself.

“A galaxy?” Ramses questioned, like it was the stupidest thing he had ever heard.

“A...hyperdense? Galaxy?”

“What is it?” Mateo asked, not feeling dumb anymore, because they were just being cryptic.

“You’re not missing anything here,” Leona told him. “We’re just as confused as you.” She cast her screen to the central hologram, showing them a big blob of light. “Those are stars, and they are very close together. It’s not enough for them to have chaotic gravitational pull on one another, but it’s not natural either.”

“How could it not be natural?” Olimpia asked. “You’re saying that someone moved these stars?”

“It’s doable,” Ramses explained. “It would take a hell of a long time, though.”

“Time ain’t nothin’ but a thang,” Angela said. It was a common aphoroid for time travelers, but it sounded rather odd coming from her lips.

“If that’s where all the stars are,” Olimpia began, “then that’s where all the planets are. Earth may be somewhere in that blob.”

“It would be virtually impossible to find,” Leona said, “even if that’s The Blob, formerly known as The Milky Way. There’s no frame of reference. We can’t even tell where we are. All we know is that we’re about thousands of light years away from that thing.”

“Still, shouldn’t we go there?” Olimpia continued. “Maybe we’ll receive more data as we get closer, and be able to make more informed decisions.”

“Maybe,” Leona said, unconvinced. “It could take a month to get there, assuming we’re as far from it as I think. It’s impossible to tell from here. We would be drowning in radiation, I’m not sure anyone still lives there.”

“Were you able to contact the Jamil?” Mateo asked.

“Yes, but we’re not receiving anything,” Leona said. “I sent a message, but no one’s there to hear it. We could be billions of years in the past, or even trillions of years into the future. Who the hell knows?” She tensed up, and looked around like a paranoid racoon.

“What is it?” Mateo asked.

“Usually when we say things like that, someone appears and tells us they have the answer. It’s more often than not the villain.” She continued to look around, prompting the rest of the team to do the same.

No one was there.

“I think we’re safe,” Mateo decided.

Leona pointed to him. “They sometimes show up after someone says something like that.”

They looked around some more. Still no one.

“We may be the only people left in this universe,” Ramses lamented. “Trillions of years is a long time. They could have set the stellar engines on autopilot, and then died out.”

“We don’t know anything,” Mateo reminded them. “Let’s not despair just yet.”

“We better hope someone is still around. We need other people,” Ramses concluded. “We’re going to run out of hydropellets and antimatter pods sooner or later. The time battery is a quick fix, and I can’t recreate it in the span of a single day. This ship is not designed to be completely self-sufficient. If I had had more time back when—”

“No one is blaming you for this, Ramses,” Leona hoped he understood. “We all love this ship, and we’re grateful. The Power Vacuum does not discriminate. It seems to have been even more powerful than we knew. We can only hope that our plan to redirect the beam worked as intended, even if it was the last thing we did.”

“Still,” Ramses said, “I would feel much better near a star—a safe star, free from dangerous gravitational disturbances, and hot hot heat—than out here in the void.”

“Aren’t there stars and planets in the void?” Angela asked. “Someone once told me there were more isolated rogues, actually, than there are in galaxies.”

“Probably,” Leona agreed, “but anyone powerful enough to consolidate a galaxy of stars is likely also capable of stealing intergalactic stars as well. Even if we could confirm that the blob was once the Milky Way, we don’t have the tools to measure its mass to figure that out. My estimate of how far we are is based on how far we were from the galactic core, but that operates under the assumption that we traveled through time, but not space.”

“Let’s scan the best we can,” Olimpia suggested, wincing with regret for letting it rhyme. “Maybe we’re parked ten light years from a Class-M planet, and we don’t even know.”

“Class-M planet,” Leona echoed with a laugh. “Thanks, I really needed that.”

“What did I say?” Olimpia asked.

Mateo patted her on the head like a puppy. “Welcome to the club.”

They did scan as best they could with the technology they had. They were able to detect a faint source of light that was anywhere between a few light years away to tens of thousands. The only way to measure its distance would be to compare its relative position to other celestial objects, of which there was none in that general direction. Furthermore, if it was being moved towards the blob like all the others, its location would be even more unpredictable, because they were seeing its light reach them from as far in the past as it was away from them in space. It was moving either way, but the stellar engines were almost certainly faster than natural stellar drift. Regardless, it was their only option, so they pointed the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez towards it, and took a leap of faith.

They left the timestream a day later, and returned to find themselves still in void space. They hadn’t reached the star, and in fact, couldn’t find it anymore. It could have been receding from them, for all they knew. They weren’t alone here, though. A massive ship was hovering above them. Oh boy.

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