The Advancement of Mateo Matic: February 15, 2399

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“Do you not recognize me?” the stranger asks. “We met once...when you killed my superior officer, and drove me from my home.”

“You’re gonna hafta be more specific,” Leona jokes.

“Rorkele Mast.”

“Is that your name, or your boss’?”

“It was his.” The still unnamed man turns back around and gazes out the window. He was a brilliant tactician, a powerful leader...” He faces her once more. “And someone I was proud to call my friend.”

“Still nothin’.”

“You killed him in a coup for the detachments, along with several other people.”

Leona thought back to that event. They were trying to stop a war, and the people in charge of it weren’t listening to her, so she felt she needed to just steal control from them. Nearly all of them decided to select champions to fight in their stead, and—believing that it would dissuade her from going through with it—chose Leona’s friends. The only person she killed was Mateo, which was fine, because all they had to do was upload his consciousness to Ramses’ lab on their ship, the Suadona. That’s what they did for Angela, Marie, and Olimpia as well. They were all killed by, “Rorkele Mast. He was the original leader of the Dominion Defense Detachment, right. I remember.”

“Yes!” He’s relieved that she finally remembers.

“I didn’t kill him, my husband did, and then I killed my husband.”

“Yes, we were surprised by that, to say the least. Of course, now the survivors know about cloning, consciousness transference, and all that stuff, but it was a harrowing time in our lives. And anyway, we still blame you for this, because you are the one who issued the challenge. Your husband was as much of a victim as my boss.”

“This is what this has all been about?” Leona questions. “You’re here for revenge? You’re just an action movie sequel villain? Oh my God, wake me up when cliché day is over already! He chose to fight. He could have chosen his own champion. He could have chosen you, in fact.”

“Rorkele never asked anyone to do anything he wasn’t willing to do himself.”

“You’re preachin’ to the choir, buckaroo billy. If you’ll recall, I fought for myself as well. I don’t understand why you’re all butthurt about this. If you thought your boss was going to win without question, what did you think the point of any of it was?”

“You still have to follow through,” he reasons.

“It doesn’t matter. He lost.”

“You cheated!”

“How the hell did I cheat?” Leona questions.”

“You uploaded all of your friends to new bodies!”

“So the hell what! Rorkele still died, and nothing would have changed that!”

“Yes, it would. If you hadn’t been capable of switching to new bodies, you wouldn’t have even considered challenging the detachments!”

Leona goes quiet. She’s right, but so is he. This man’s mentor may be alive today if Team Matic had not been able to subvert death in the way that they did. They would not have even considered the challenge as an option. She breathes deeply, and decides to take a page from her late husband’s book. “This is true. I’m genuinely sorry for your loss. I was trying to end a war, and I wasn’t thinking about the collateral damage.”

“That sounded sincere.” He shakes his head. “You continue to surprise me.”

“Friends?” She extends her arm. “Most of my enemies are my friends now.”

He takes her hand, but doesn’t shake. “Not on your life,” he mutters in disgust.

Leona pulls away when something stings her palm, leaving a tiny bloody mark.

He smirks and waves at her, but only to display the pinprick that’s coming out of his ring. “I didn’t want to take any chances. You’re dead, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. He takes a deep breath, and collapses into his chair. “It’s finally over. You have no idea how hard I worked to get to you. I found out that the time machine in my reality was a bastardized, partially working replica of an incredibly ancient version that was once on what you would call Earth. It was reportedly still there, so I scoured the land, and finally found the Constant. It was there that I met an intelligence aptly named Constance. We hatched a plan that would see her getting whatever it she wants from this world, and me getting my revenge on you. It was tough. There were so many moving parts. But she figured it out, and while it was not without its obstacles and complications, I’m happy to say I’ve finally done it. Did she get what she wanted too?”

“How long do I have?” Leona asks, ignoring his question.

He’s still reveling in his victory. “What? Oh, uh...a day, maybe two.”

“I’m going to survive this.”

He leans forward to place his arms on his desk, and rest his chin upon his knuckles. “Oh, because of the extraction mirror? Yeah, no, that was part of the plan too. You didn’t think I knew about the other Leonas, did you? Nah, we knew you would eventually find yourself in that body, so that’s where we have forced you to stay. The extraction mirror is gone, the loop is over. When you die, your body will jump back to that reality, where you’ll be declared dead on impact. There is no getting out of this.”

“I always get out of it,” Leona argues. “I beat Rorkele, I’ll beat you too.”

He’s still smiling. “In the meantime, why don’t you save your energy?” He presses a button on his phone three times. “My man will take you too your deathbed. Don’t worry, I’m not a savage. It will be a comfortable place to end your life.”

Leona follows the guard who comes into the room to her new quarters. A feast has been prepared for her on a cart. They put everything here, including breakfast, lunch, and dinner foods. They probably just didn’t know what she would like, so they threw it all in so no one would have to come to her door later. She eats a little of almost everything, then goes to sleep.

When she wakes up the next morning, the door is open. It’s not just unlocked, but ajar. Either someone is helping her, or the boss man just doesn’t care. She is sorry for what happened in the Fifth Division, but this guy murdered her immediately after she apologized, so she holds no sympathy for him. She starts to wander around. The last time she was here, she was mostly in the Nexus chamber, so she doesn’t know where she’s going, but who cares? The guards apparently do. Word got around that she doesn’t like to be touched, though, so they escort her back to the top office at gunpoint only.

“How did you get out of your room?” he asks when she arrives.

“I have my ways,” she answers vaguely. “Hello,” she says to a man sitting in one of the guest seats, but her face drops when she sees who it is.

“Yes, I believe you know Summit Ebora,” the boss says gleefully. “You abandoned him at the time machine, and he vowed to assist me in my quest.

Summit had a slight look of embarrassment when they locked eyes, but he replaces it now with an evil grin. “You should have figured out how to take me with you.”

The boss comes around the desk, and places an affectionate hand on Summit’s shoulder. “He’s the one who first gave me information about you. He sparked my curiosity about your whole team.”

Summit places his own hand upon the boss’. “I barely did anything.”

“Oh, don’t be so modest.” The boss goes over to the bar. “Would you like a drink?” she asks Leona. “I have the best bourbon in five realities.”

Summit follows him over to the bar to help make the drinks. He playfully tosses the chain that’s around his neck over the boss’ neck too. Leona assumes that he’s symbolizing their bond.

The boss giggles. “What are you doing?”

That’s when Summit twists around, and holds their backs together. He leans forward, holding the chain away from his own neck, and preventing the boss from doing the same. The victim gasps for air, but he’s running out quickly. Summit continues to lean forward, picking his once-lover up off the ground. His strength increases at the same rate that the boss weakens. In one final motion, Summit drops to his knees, and ends it once and for all.

Leona helps gently turn the both of them to their sides so Summit can remove the chain from his neck. “Why did you do that?” she asks him.

“The war ended, Leona. What you did for my reality worked, and I’ll never be able to thank you enough for that.” He scowls at the dead body. “He was weak and selfish. All he could see was what you did to his mentor. He couldn’t let it go, and I couldn’t stop him. My only option was to stay by his side, and keep him away from you as much as possible. I hoped that it would never come to this.”

“Do you know what he poisoned me with? Is there an antidote?”

He laughs. “I’m not sure if there is an antidote to saline. Maybe...river water?”

She’s confused.

“I’m the one who provided the poison. Trust me, you’re fine. I tested your blood last night, just in case he suspected me of being a mole, and you’re clean.”

“Great. Well, that solves that problem, but do you have a way out of here?”

“I have a way to take back the base, but I’m gonna need your help.”

“Help with what specifically?”

“I need you to bring my mother here,” Summit requests.

“Your mother? Ya know what? Doesn’t matter, if that’s what you need, you got it.”

He leads her into a secret passageway, all the way back down to the bottom of the facility, and into the Nexus chamber. They sneak up to the control room, but no one else is here, so it’s okay. “After a fraction of the DDD army came through, Coronel Zacarias managed to lock the computer. Only one person has the code, and it’s not him. I’m the only one who realized that it must be you. I need you to unlock the system itself, and then I need you to open travel from all addresses, starting with this one.”

Leona accepts the slip of paper that he hands her. “Wait, I recognize this term sequence. This goes to Flindekeldan in the Parallel.”

He nods. “You’ve heard of the Sixth Key, right?” Summit asks rhetorically.

“Yeah...?” she answers anyway.

“I’m the Second Key. My mother is the First.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 24, 2399

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There is something wrong with Alyssa’s brain. Or her body. Or both. Or maybe there’s something wrong with Leona’s body instead. Ramses’ current theory—with no evidence—is that whoever wants Leona Matic to die had a two-fold plan to accomplish it. Step one: get her into Leona Reaver’s body. Step two: prevent her from leaving that body, or coming back to her real body. To put it another way, they locked her in, and just in case she ever found a way to break free, they also locked her out of her own body. Alyssa is just kind of caught in the crossfire of that. Now that she’s here, she is unable to leave, because it would open a vacancy for Leona’s return, and their enemy does not want that to happen.

Ramses also believes that it’s possible for Alyssa to look more like herself before he comes up with a permanent solution. Time powers are apparently more mental than they are physical, meaning that there’s a chance she can create illusions from here. He said that it can’t hurt to try, so she did a few times, but she never even came close. It didn’t feel like it did when she used her ability before. The way she sees it, it would be like transferring the mind of someone with legs into the body of an amputee, and expecting them to walk again just because they remember what it was once like. Still, she doesn’t want to give up, so when he urged her to meditate in order to reactivate that side of herself, she decided that she might as well. She’s been spending most waking hours doing it, if awake is even the right word. In the darkened room there are only candles, a pillow to sit upon, and a mirror in front of her. She has to force herself to concentrate and not check it every ten minutes. When she does check it, the result is always the same. She still looks like Leona, and that is probably never going to change.

“Okay,” Alyssa says to herself. “You can’t look for another hour. How am I meant to know when it’s been an hour? Well, people who are good at meditating probably develop the magical power to automatically know things like that, so you’re off to another bad start. Just close your eyes, and stop thinking.” She holds there for what may be the hour that she was waiting for, or just another ten minutes. “Stop. Thinking. You think too much.”

“I agree,” comes a voice.

She’s scared to check. Was that in her head, or is someone else in the room? It didn’t sound like Ramses, or anyone else she knows. “Is that you, God?”

“Close. I’m a hawk. Majestic creatures.”

Alyssa opens one eye. She’s not in the meditation room anymore. She has no idea where she is. She opens the other eye. “What just happened?”

“I brought you back. Your reality needs you,” the mysterious stranger claims.

“Who are you?”

“You don’t recognize me? No, I suppose you wouldn’t in this body. It’s Dalton.”

“Nice to meet you, Dalton...I think.”

“No, we’ve met. I traced your location. This is where I sent you, and it’s where you’ve been. I mean, it was where you were in the future, but it’s the past now.”

“What the hell are you talking about? How far back in the past are we?”

“About four and a half billion years.”

“This again? Goddammit!” Alyssa laments. “Okay, I have power, but I’m not that powerful. You’re telling me I ended up here just because I was meditating?”

“Must have been a coincidence,” Dalton says. “I’m the one who brought you back here, using the temporal translocator.”

“What do you want with me? I’m telling you, we’ve never met. Perhaps there’s another me in another reality, or something? I don’t know, I’m still learning this stuff.”

“Leona, I know that you—”

“Wait, Leona? That’s who you think you’re talking to? Well, that’s your problem, dude. I’m not really Leona. My name is Alyssa McIver. I’m just stuck in her body.”

“Pshaw. I’m the master of switching bodies. You don’t think I would be able to tell? I did my research. I know who you are.”

“Maybe that’s just who the assassin wants you to think. Something went wrong with the switch. We can’t switch back. Maybe it’s, like, masking our neural signatures; making me look like Leona, even from a brain scan. Honestly, now I’m just pulling words I’ve heard Ramses say.”

“So, you admit you’re lying, Leona.”

“That’s not what I meant!” She tries to remember what the internet said about meditating and centering one’s self. “Look, Mr. Dalton. I’m sure you have perfectly reasonable intentions, but you got the wrong guy. Why don’t we both just go to 2399, and get this all sorted out, okay?”

“No, I can’t. I can’t use the machine again,” he contends. “Even if you’re not really Leona, you’re close enough. If she switched bodies with you, it means she trusts you, which means you can do this job. I found you by hacking into the Omega Gyroscope, so it thinks you’re Leona too, and in the end, that’s all that really matters.”

“What job are you talking about? What’s the gyroscope thing again? I’ve never seen it, so I can’t remember what they said about it.”

“The Gyroscope is a thing that you own, but you’ll lose possession of it in 50,000 years. I can’t let that happen. Someone has to be in charge, or it won’t work. So I’m going to close the door, and leave you in here. You’ll reconnect to it every 49,000 years.”

“What? No. Don’t do that. What the hell are you doing? Let me out!”

“Don’t worry. The toilet and sink are in the corner. Those shelves are stocked with enough food for a month, but you won’t need it. You’ll only be inside for about five days. Try to get some rest, and don’t let yourself go crazy. It looked like you were meditating. You’ll have plenty of time to perfect your technique.”

“Stop!” Alyssa pleads, trying to keep the door open, but ultimately no match for his strength. “Please! I don’t want to be locked in! Please let me out! Dalton! Dalton!” He wins out, and gets the door closed. She starts to bang on it, and the walls, but receives no response. If anyone can hear her, they don’t care, can’t help, or won’t try. Though, if the time bubble activated immediately, it’s already been over a hundred thousand years for that guy. So she gives up, and just tries to teleport to the other side of the door. It doesn’t work. She spends the next hour-slash 36,000,000 years trying again, and looking for any other way out, but this is a cell designed to keep people in, and is probably inescapable. So she gives up on that too.

Four and a half billion years later, the door pops open on its own, and blinding light floods in through the crack. Alyssa tries to open it more, but there’s something blocking it. She pulls the door in, then back out, then it, then out. It’s going a little farther each time, and the sound it makes sounds familiar. Once her eyes adjust to the sunlight, she can see that it must be snow. It’s all over the place, part of which must be preventing her from getting out. She keeps working at it, though, and eventually shaves off enough to slip out. Wait, no, it’s freezing out here. She goes back inside, and retrieves a heated suit from the emergency kit. They’re thin overalls, but warm enough to handle the coldest of conditions. She takes the rest of the kit with her, and slips out again.

Alyssa comes face to face with a bear, growling at her. At least it looks like a bear, but unlike any kind she’s ever seen before, even in pictures. She realizes that she’s in a cave, and this big fella is the one what lives here. She presses her back against the ice wall behind her, and tries to inch her way to the side, but he doesn’t like that. He doesn’t want her to be there, he doesn’t want her to leave; why can’t this guy make up his mind? That’s when she remembers that she can teleport now. She tries to make a jump to the cave opening behind the bear, but it’s not working. Whatever was preventing her from escaping the stasis chamber is still doing its thing.

The emergency kit. It has a signal pistol. She carefully sets it on the ground, not wanting to make any sudden movements. She opens it slowly, and sticks her hand inside. She starts feeling around for the gun, maintaining eye contact with the bear. He hates it even more when she tries to look away. There it is. She quickly pulls it out, aims it, and shoots. The flare goes towards the bear, but doesn’t hit it. Instead, its lodges itself in the ice wall, and starts spewing out sparks. This is enough to scare the animal into running away from it. Alyssa takes this opportunity to run past it, and out of the cave. She’s not out of the woods yet, though. When the bear recalls that there’s no backdoor, it follows her, and starts to charge. She has to keep running, but she knows that she’s no match for its speed. She can practically feel its breath on the back of her neck when it suddenly disappears. She instinctively spins around, causing her to trip on a rock, and fall to her ass.

The bear is on the ground a few meters down the hill, a wooden pole sticking out of it. No, it’s not a pole. It’s a spear. She turns her head. A man still has his arm forward in the follow-through. Like the bear, though, there’s something very wrong with his face. He looks unlike any man she’s ever seen. It’s sort of flat and uglyish. He has one brow, instead of two, sitting upon a more pronounced forehead. He’s short and wide, but not fat. He does look like he’s smiling at her, though, so he probably was trying to save her life, instead of just wanting to kill the bear. As he approaches, Alyssa instinctively recoils, so he gives her a wider berth, and goes over to retrieve the spear from the bear. It’s still moving a little, so he serves it a death blow to the neck to put it out of its misery.

“Umm...thank you,” Alyssa says to him, still nervous.

He looks at her quizzically, and faces the direction he came from. He grunts something loudly in a language that she doesn’t recognize. A woman appears from behind the hill, carrying a child. He’s maybe four or five years old. She looks more like a regular person, and the child looks like a cross between the two of them.

“Oh! You’re a primacean!” They’re an ancient relative of humans who lived tens of thousands of years ago. Some believe they interbred with modern humans, while others do not. “I guess this proves those people wrong.”

He looks at her quizzically again, as does his mate as she draws nearer.

“The door opened too early,” Alyssa says to herself. “Oh no, this isn’t good. There’s no telling how far off the mark I am; I’m not a historian.”

The massive language barrier made it difficult to communicate, but she was able to determine that they wanted her help transporting their kill back home. She does, and eats with them that night. What else is she gonna do, fix the stasis chamber?

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 22, 2399

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Alyssa is lying on the bed next to her real body. She didn’t spend much time looking at it after she transferred to Leona’s. It’s so weird, seeing herself from the outside. Many religions talk about having out-of-body experiences, but none of them has been proven. It’s sad, really, all those eager believers who wish they could do what she’s done. Now it’s time to go back, though. Being able to teleport was fun and all, but this—substrate, is what these people call it—doesn’t belong to her, even though the real owner can’t get back to it. “Will it hurt?”

“Did it hurt last time?” Ramses asks.

“Well, that was a pretty different situation.”

“I know. But no, it won’t hurt. You’ll close your eyes, and when you reopen, they will be a different pair of eyelids, and you’ll be over there.” He points to her body.

“We don’t need the Insulator of Life, right? I don’t want to run into Erlendr again. I don’t much care for him.”

“We don’t need it. This is a simple one-to-one transfer.”

“Great.” She leans all the way back, and starts to relax herself by counting the holes in the ceiling ties. When she’s ready, she gives him the thumbs up. Moments later, she wakes up, unhurt. “Was that the smoothest transfer you’ve ever seen, or what?”

Ramses stares into empty space. “You know what, I think it was. It was probably the best anyone has ever seen with this thing. Seems as though something always goes wrong.” He coils the Livewire up, and sticks it into the little pouch they bought for it.

Alyssa looks back over at Leona’s body, which is now an empty shell, imagining there to be a way to save her. An odd feeling washes over her. It’s like a stomach ache without the pain. Her eyes grow weighty, and drop down. She wakes up in the other bed. “What just happened?”

Ramses had turned his back to the both of them. “Leona?”

“No, it’s Alyssa,” she says using Leona’s lips.

Ramses is dumbfounded. “Not the smoothest transference in history.”

“I’m stuck here, aren’t I?”

“Not forever, I’m sure,” he replies.

“How do you know?”

“We’ve already met you in the future, remember?” Ramses reminds her. “You didn’t look like Leona, you looked like yourself.”

“Maybe that was just an illusion,” Alyssa puts forth.

“Can you use your illusion powers while you’re in this body?”

“No, but I’m not the only one with them, and maybe someone else ends up taking over my body, and decides to use them to make this body look like me.”

“Okay, so we don’t know for sure that we’re going to fix this. But we definitely don’t know that we won’t. Let’s try to be optimistic, okay? I’ll have to run some tests, and then I’ll have more answers. Something—or perhaps someone—doesn’t want you to go back to your original substrate.”

“Or maybe it’s that someone wants me in Leona’s substrate instead.”

“That is a possibility, I won’t dismiss it.”

Alyssa lies back down on the pillow and sighs. Here we go again.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 3, 2399

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Alyssa wraps her towel around Leona Matic’s body, wishing that she had a robe instead, and peeks her head out into the hallway. It’s kind of annoying now, not having a bathroom directly attached to her room. Then again, this was how she grew up. She had to share one with her brothers and sister growing up. What’s awkward here is that she still looks like Leona. It’s not her face, though; she’s a temporal illusionist, so it’s not the first time that she’s looked like someone else. It’s the rest of the body. Seeing it, washing it, using the toilet. It all feels like a violation. Leona told her that it was fine, partly because this isn’t even her original body anyway, but that hasn’t made things any less weird.

By the time she makes it to the shower room, Mateo has come around the corner, holding his own shower stuff. “Oh, sorry. Go ahead.”

“There’s more than one stall in there,” she points out.

“That’s okay, I’ll just wait.”

Alyssa frowns, but doesn’t enter the room.

“Have you talked to Ramses about switching to your old body? When does he think it’ll be safe?”

“Oh, it’s safe now,” she replies. “I just don’t really want to switch back just yet...”

“Why not?” He starts thinking about it when she doesn’t answer. “Oh, you like the idea of being able to teleport and survive in the vacuum of space.”

“I haven’t tried to do anything yet, I’m kind of scared, but yeah. Is that wrong?”

“No, it’s not wrong, I’m sure—” He stops talking abruptly, and a look of horror appears on his face. “Oh, no.”

“What? Did I already mess something up?”

“No. No, you didn’t do anything wrong. This is their fault. They should have seen this coming. In fact, Ramses shouldn’t have let you even attempt to transfer to Leona Reaver’s body, because something like this may have ended up the consequence.”

“What? What consequence? Tell me.”

“It’s hard to explain, and I definitely don’t understand it, but when we were resurrected from the afterlife simulation, the man in charge added a code to our minds that gives us our time skipping pattern. We can’t delete the code, or modify it. We can’t even get rid of it by switching to new bodies, because it’s a part of us. Every time we transfer to a new body, it somehow becomes a part of it too. Again, I don’t get how it works, but that body you’re in right now has the code...and now so do you. You are now like us, and it apparently can’t be undone.”

“So once you five start jumping through time again, I’ll go with you?”

“Yeah, unless Ramses can finally figure out how to stop it, which he might actually, because he didn’t really have time to work very hard at it the first time it happened, and now we’re in this world, which has different rules.”

This is big news, and a huge game-changer for Alyssa. It explains why all these people already knew her from the future. She would not officially join the team if something like this hadn’t happened. They wouldn’t have asked her, and she wouldn’t have been able to keep up. She needs some time to process. Without saying another word, she just walks through the door, and spends a good forty minutes under the hot water. The good thing about this being a medical facility is the shower seat.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 1, 2399

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Mateo, Leona, and Marie were asked to stay in quarantine for 24 hours following their return to the right time period in the Third Rail. It was the New Year, and they could hear the celebrations from inside the tent. The government erected it weeks ago, after Marie no longer had to pretend to not be working for them. So far, no other time travelers have appeared. At least none has been reported to Team Matic. No legally binding document was signed that would force them to divulge such information. Any concessions and transparency the government affords them is done in good faith, and can be stopped or modified at any time without warning. In return, Team Matic reserves the right to do the same. Even so, it’s best not to rock the boat, so the three travelers agreed to follow protocol. They were just released, and are now heading towards the SD6 black site, where Alyssa is suffering from an unknown medical issue.

“How long has she been like this?” Leona asks.

“Four days,” Ramses replies.

“She’s been shaking for four days straight?” Mateo asks.

“Well, it started off worse, but then relaxed into this.”

“You call this relaxed?” Marie questions.

“It’s more relaxed than it was,” Ramses says. “It was a full on seizure. Now it’s a lot of constant twitching. The doctors have her on their version of an EEG. She’s in a state of deep sleep, so they’re categorizing her movements as a form of somnambulism.”

Mateo looks to Leona. “Sleepwalking,” she translates. She looks over at Alyssa’s real body, in its own bed now, hooked up to its own machines. “Have you tried—?”

“Putting her back?” Ramses finishes for her. “Of course I have. My best guess is that the Livewire needs a conscious, or semi-conscious, subject. Slow-wave sleep is the furthest from that you can get from that. We don’t need someone’s permission to force them into the wire, but we need them to be at least vaguely aware that something is happening.”

“Assuming that you’re not all total morons,” Leona begins, “and you’ve exhausted every possible strategy to revive her, then perhaps our only option is to go in and get her out in a more direct approach.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Ramses agrees. “I just couldn’t do it all alone out here. Kivi is on a huge mission, and Arcadia really needs to focus on the baby.”

“Well, you know more about this time tech than I do,” Leona says, removing her jacket. “I need you to stay out here. I’ll be the one to go in.”

Ramses clearly wants to do it instead, probably because he feels responsible for her, and because the two of them surely grew close all this time that the rest of the team was MIA. He’s this close to arguing, but decides to concede and let her have it. “All right, I’ll keep an eye on you both.”

Mateo watches as they get situated. He’s tired of all this body switching. And this whole idea about faking Leona’s death so the world will stop hunting her? It’s so stupid, and it’s never gonna work. There are too many moving parts—too many variables. He can’t say anything, though, because they’re all much smarter than him, and he’s not one of the people in danger here. Ramses connects Leona to her own EEG-like machine. She’s sitting in a hospital chair between Alyssa’s vacant body, and Leona Reaver’s failing body. Maybe that’s the problem. An unknown individual or group placed Alt!Mateo and Leona Reaver in the extraction mirror loop. Theoretically, they can take it away. Maybe they chose a maximum number of times that it would happen, and that limit has been reached. Nerakali only had nine steps before she ultimately had to accept her fate. How many has Leona Reaver had? No, it’s too dangerous. Leona can help get Alyssa out of the doomed body, but then no one else is going into it. They’re not going to do it, even if it means that Mateo has to figure out how to destroy the Livewire himself.

Using insulating gloves, Ramses tucks one end of the Livewire between the two Leonas’ hands. He prepares the other end to be plugged into the wall. Leona Matic is also holding Alyssa’s hand, with the idea that Alyssa’s consciousness should pass from the Leona Reaver body, into the wire, then into Leona Matic, and finally into her own body. That sounds dumb too, it probably isn’t going to work either, but again, Mateo can’t say anything. This is Ramses’ plan. “Now, you may find yourselves connected psychically for a moment. I could see the problem being that Alyssa’s mind is trapped in her subconscious, or somewhere else. In that case, you’ll have to find her, and pull her to the surface. We still don’t know how this stuff works, so be ready to improvise.”

“Understood,” Leona says with a nod. “Do it.”

Ramses plugs it in and sends her off. Now it’s just a waiting game to see if it works, and how well.

A whole fifteen minutes later, Leona wakes up with a start. She lets go of everything and everyone, and jumps out of her seat. Like an unbroken wildhorse, she backs away from her friends, and instinctually keeps them at bay with outstretched arms. But she’s just confused. She doesn’t actually think that they’re going to hurt her. It looks like she’s starting to calm down and get her bearings when suddenly she jerks her head to the side, and disappears.

“What the hell was that?” Marie asks as she’s checking Leona Reaver for a pulse.

“I can sense her, and I still have a ton of temporal energy from my time in the past,” Mateo says. He teleports to her location.

“How did I get here?” Leona asks when he arrives.

“You teleported. Are you trying to get back down to the Constant?” They’re standing on the edge of Danica Lake.

“No, this is home.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I remember now. I remember everything. I’m not Leona, I’m Alyssa. This is my farm. I was scared, and I think I came here to feel safe.” She places a hand on her chest. “But my heart rate seems to be going back down now.”

“Where’s Leona? Is she in there with you?” Mateo asks, hopeful.

Alyssa shakes Leona’s head. “No, she’s still back there. She...she got stuck. She stayed behind to save me. Someone had to stay inside that brain.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s a trap. That body is a trap. You can’t just empty it out, and send it back to its fate in that old timeline. Someone has to be occupying it, and that someone is Leona Matic. Mateo, if she dies, she’s not coming back to that parking lot. The extraction loop is over. She’s going to die for real, and for good. It’s what they wanted all along.”

“It’s what who wanted all along?” Mateo questions.

She shakes her head again. “I don’t know, but they’re bad news. Leona is the only thing standing their way. At least that’s what she said. She didn’t have time to explain.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: December 15, 2398

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Okay, the other times could have been indigestion, or something, but that was definitely a kick. The baby is kicking. Arcadia finds the nearest device, and pulls up a calendar. Based on every test she’s undergone, and every memory she has of her experiences with Vearden, their best guess is that she got pregnant on the first of September. No date before that is possible, and not many dates after make much sense. They weren’t trying to get pregnant, so it’s not like the two of them were having sex every night. They had just gotten together, and things were still new, so September 1 is the best estimate. The doctor agreed with this assessment. And as long as she’s not crazy, and today is indeed December 15, it’s only been fifteen weeks, which is too early for kicking. According to the baby books, the earliest should be sixteen weeks, and even then, eh, probably not too much. It shouldn’t be this intense either. “Feel.” She takes Vearden’s hand, and sticks it up her shirt. “I think something’s wrong.”

Vearden doesn’t know why he’s doing this, but he leaves his hand there patiently. He’s prepared to stay like that for months. He knows better than to question her requests, however bizarre they become. Then something happens, he feels the kick. “Oh, wow.” He smiles. “That’s amazing.”

“That’s amazing?” She scoffs. “Don’t you know what this means?”

“That our little girl is an early bloomer.” He read the baby books too.

“Don’t be ridiculous. It means that the baby isn’t ours!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Someone else was using this body before I showed up. I think we’re way off on our estimate.” She looks back at the calendar. “We would be off by a month. Leona Delaney could have gotten pregnant the day she left her body, on August fifth.”

Vearden doesn’t want to upset her, but... “Honey, the doctors are not off by a month. Those tests are pretty accurate.”

Who knows how accurate these dumb Third Rail doctors are? Third Rail? More like third rate. She’s distraught. This is someone else’s baby, and she stole it. Who cares if the math doesn’t work out so great? The baby books don’t lie. They don’t lie!

Vearden can see how close she is to the edge. “It’s okay, we'll figure this out,” he promises. “Let’s think about this. If this body was pregnant before you started using it, you couldn’t have ever had a period, right? Have you had a period in this body?”

Arcadia hangs there earnestly for a moment, but then her heart rate starts to drop back down to acceptable levels. She sighs. “Yes, of course I have.”

“This is your baby, this is my baby. Like I said, she’s just a little ahead of the game. If you’re really worried, we can set an appointment for later today, or tomorrow. We are time travelers, so it’s not irrational for us to be extra cautious.”

“Okay, I think we should do that, yeah.”

Vearden nods, and pulls up the medical scheduler app. “There’s one at nine tomorrow morning.”

“Book it, Dano.”

He laughs, and does the thing. Then he puts the device down. “In the meantime, what do you think of Delaney?”

“Leona or Theo? Doesn’t matter, I can’t rightly say that I’m a fan of either. They started out as my enemies, and I’m a work in progress.”

“No, I mean Delaney as a first name,” he clarifies. “I feel like it would be a nice way to honor the genetic mother.” 

She mulls it over for a second. “Delaney Haywood. I think it’s an unusual choice, so I like it.”

“Or Delaney Preston,” Vearden suggests. “I’m a modern man.”

“I don’t believe the world needs any more Prestons,” Arcadia decides. “It may have been a lie that I could never have children, but one thing’s for sure, the idea behind convincing us of that was a noble pursuit, and I can admit that.”

“I dunno,” Vearden muses, “I don’t regret having a child with you. Do you? And do you think Nerakali would be a bad mother?”

“No, and no.”

Ramses opens the door to the room, and waits there. “She’s ready for you.”

Arcadia nods, and stands up. “Arcadia Haywood, reporting for duty.”

Ramses stops, tilts his Spock brain, and stares at the corner.

Arcadia gently lunges towards him, because he’s blocking the way through. “Are we doing this, or what?”

“You just called yourself a Haywood. Are you married?”

“Umm...no. I mean, we haven’t really discussed it.”

“Well, I’ve discussed it a little,” Vearden argues.

“Argh,” she growls softly. She didn’t expect to have to have this conversation again, especially not with Ramses.

“No, it’s good. Um...do you remember when the Officiant showed up, and took Cheyenne and Curtis away?”

“Neither of us was there, but yeah, I remember you telling us about it. Why?”

“The Officiant. She comes for divorce, but she’ll also come for a marriage, won’t she? That’s her main job, I would hope.”

Arcadia winces. “Not in this reality. That was a special occasion. Cheyenne had a magical script to read, and  had never heard of it before. I’ve actually only crossed paths with the Officiant once, and that was for Leona and Mateo.”

“Well, what prompted her to show up for that?” Ramses asks

Arcadia shrugs. “It was the biggest event of the timeline, everyone was talking about it. I think it’s harder for normal time traveler couples.”

“Maybe we could try a few things to see how hard it really is.” Vearden offers.

Arcadia gives him that look.

“If only to help our friends. We don’t have to get married if you don’t want to.”

“Some people’s psychic calls work by intention. You have to really mean it, or it won’t work,” Arcadia explains.

“Then let’s mean it!” he suggests.

“I thought we were here to help Alyssa,” she reminds them both.

“Yes, right,” Ramses remembers. “She’s waiting. We can talk about this later.”

“Okay.” Arcadia steps through the door as Ramses is holding it open for her. But she swings back, and switches her gaze between them. “And for the record, there’s no such thing as an illegitimate child. I won’t get married just to satisfy some kind of traditional, socially acceptable standard of a dutifully nuclear family dynamic.”

Vearden holds his hands up in defense, but doesn’t rebut, because he agrees with what she said. He wants to marry her anyway.

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: November 27, 2398

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Ramses and Alyssa went into town for an extended lunch, and extended it further with a walk in the park. They returned to Danica Lake a few hours after leaving Leona to her solo mission. He dropped a single probe in the water. They sat in the trunk of their SUV and ate ice cream while they waited for confirmation that the Bridgette was gone. The probe didn’t detect any technology down there, so Leona’s plan seems to have worked. They waited for another hour after that, because...time travel, but she never came out, so they just drove back to Kansas City, hoping that she would be there. She wasn’t, so they are trying to move on without her, and be patient. Temporal navigation is an inexact science. She and Mateo may just be in the middle of overshooting the mark, and they’ll be back in a few days. If they never return, the rest of the team is to assume that she made it to her destination, and they’re living in the past together. That’s Plan B. Of course, she may have failed to find him at all, and it’s all gone to shit, but it’s best not to dwell on that possibility. It’s unhealthy.

Ramses woke up this morning, realizing that he hadn’t seen Marie for a while. She didn’t say that she was going back to SD6, but he called Winona anyway, and she claimed to have not seen her. He called Arcadia next, but she had no idea where Marie could be. Vearden and Arcadia are in their new home in the suburbs, but it’s not an ideal situation. She walks around with a disguise to prevent anyone from recognizing Leona’s face, and they have two live-in SD6 operatives who protect her at all times in shifts. They still don’t know how they could get her and Leona out of this predicament. She has a lot of fans in this world, but just as many enemies, including those who couldn’t care less about her politics, but would like to cash in on the bounty that’s on her head. Hey, maybe that’s why Leona can’t come back. The chances that she undershot the mark is just as likely, and she’s been hiding out somewhere all this time. If he can solve the bounty problem, it won’t matter anymore. But how?

Alyssa tilts her head, and thinks about it. “Hm. No...” she says to herself.

“What is it?”

“Nah, we couldn’t do it, it’s not even worth mentioning.”

“We’re brainstorming here, sister, No bad ideas.”

“Well, I’ve not been with you guys all that much, but I’ve already seen you switch people’s minds to different bodies to trick other people on multiple occasions.”

“You’re right, that wouldn’t work. We don’t have any extra bodies hanging around, except for Leona Reaver’s, and that doesn’t actually change anything. Plus, Arcadia needs that body right now to gestate her baby.”

“I’m not suggesting we move either of them to Reaver, but that body would be involved, assuming you could work your magic with that weird mini-consciousness you created a long time ago.”

“What are you talking about?” he questions.

“The problem is that people want Leona dead, but only one or two people can actually kill her, and collect that bounty, right? If she dies, people will stop trying to come after her, because they’ll be chasing after a ghost.”

He stares at her. “That’ll never work. We can’t kill the Leona Reaver body, it will just jump back to her reality of origin, and then jump right back here. I mean, the group that set up the bounty will expect proof of death.”

“You’ll have proof,” Alyssa contends. She uses airquotes, “kill her in a very public way, let her body go through that weird time loop cycle, and then delete the consciousness to make it vacant again. A body without a mind just looks like a dead body, doesn’t it?”

“Well, if we’re just going to give up the body for proof, why do we need to pretend to kill her at all?”

“Technically, you wouldn’t, but...think about the people who are going after that bounty, and the people who are rooting for it. They want to see her suffer. They want the spectacle. It will make it harder to disprove if they both see it happen, and see the outcome. They want to watch her walking around alive, and then...stop being that way.”

“And what happens to Reaver’s body afterwards? I’m not asking, I honestly don’t know; we would have to pay a corner, or something.”

She shrugs somewhat dismissively. “You don’t have to pay a coroner. The government has their own, enough of them know our situation.”

“I dunno, does that really help Arcadia? She would still have to wear a disguise.”

“True, but I think that it would be safer since people will not be looking for that face anymore. If someone is suspicious of the girl in the store wearing sunglasses, she’ll be like, oh, I get that a lot. Don’t be racist. Plus I’m preggers, look at me.”

Ramses chuckles. “She did have a cute little baby bump last I saw her.” He breathes in deeply. “This isn’t a bad idea, it’s just not a very exciting one. It’s pretty morbid, really. You’re suggesting I go out in public and pretend to murder someone very believably. Even if the government can get me out of jail—”

“You? Who said anything about you doing anything? No, it would be someone from the government; a trained assassin. Don’t forget to use all of your assets.”

“There are a lot of moving parts here, it’s not something we’ll be able to accomplish today.”

“Then let’s work on it. I’ll call Winona.”

“I don’t want to get her involved just yet. Short of being able to contact the real Leona about this, we have an obligation to at least ask Arcadia how she feels about it.”

The two of them leave the lab, and head for the suburbs.

One of the personal security guards answers, kind of surprising them with regular clothes, but they obviously don’t want to arouse suspicion. He’s probably pretending to be a cousin, or something. “Come on in, Mister Abdulrashid,” he says, stepping aside.

“Thank you.” They haven’t met, but they must have all of their photos on file.

The couple is sitting in their breakfast nook with their pancakes. She’s holding her stomach. It’s not that big yet, but not as slight as Alyssa expected.

“Hey, what’s up?” Vearden asks

They sit at the table next to them, and go over the beginnings of their dastardly plans. They both listen intently, and don’t interrupt. When it’s over, Arcadia nods understandingly, and stands up to look out the window. “Are you asking for my permission, or my opinion? Or are you just letting me know what you’re going to do?”

“The first two things,” Ramses replies.

She looks over her shoulder at him. “I’ll agree under one condition, and it is non-negotiable.”

Now he’s real worried. “What’s that?”

“Don’t make one of your weird mini-mind things. Make my father do it.”