The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 16, 2529

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The team stayed on Jaunemus the rest of the day, eating the local cuisine, and recharging their photovoltaics by the star that they were orbiting right now. This moon was a gargantuan spaceship, which could move through space at will. The Jaunemusians couldn’t travel all the way back home to Verdemus to eat lunch with their friends every day, but they didn’t have to stay in one place either. They bounced around the nearest stars in this area, and spent a lot of time in interstellar space to avoid detection.

There was nothing for Team Matic here, so they decided to bug out. “We have to get back to Proxima Doma,” Angela suggested. “We have to find out what happened there, if anything.”

“I thought we were going after Miracle,” Ramses countered.

“That trail has gone cold,” Marie figured. “She has had a whole year to get those cuffs off.”

Leona chuckled. “She has not been able to get them off. They’re held together by a distributive bond. Breaking them would cause her to explode, and I’m the only one with a key.”

They all looked to Ramses for confirmation. He nodded. That was how their EmergentSuits worked. It was how they could be so thin, yet so durable, and protective against harsh environments, like the vacuum of outer space.

“There’s still the question of where she is,” Olimpia tried to remind them. “She could have gone anywhere. I’m guessing the quantum connection doesn’t extend this far.”

“Even I have my limits,” Ramses admitted. “But your husband doesn’t.”

“Me?” Mateo questioned. “If I can find her, why didn’t we do that yesterday?”

“We all needed a break,” Leona explained, “especially you. As I was saying, those cuffs aren’t going anywhere. There was no need to rush off, and besides, I don’t like traveling with low slingdrives. Mateo, your dark particles are the backup, not the other way around.”

“All right,” Mateo agreed. “I’ll use my black magic for a locator spell.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Romana said. No, it wasn’t Romana, but Miracle. She was holding her arms in front of her chest, like a beggar. “Get them off of me, and I’ll agree to transfer to a new substrate. It doesn’t matter anymore. I stole this body because that’s what Pacey asked of me. But I never wanted this.” She sighed, and looked off into a random direction. “I just wan—I just wanted to end him...and his reign of terror.”

The real Romana stepped forward, and placed a comforting hand on Miracle’s shoulder. “You’re not doing this for Pacey, you’re doing it for yourself. You’re from the Goldilocks Corridor.”

Miracle sighed again. “My name isn’t really Miracle. It’s just Mirinda. Mirinda...Oaksent.” They didn’t know exactly what that meant. In modern times, you couldn’t guess someone’s relationship to someone else based on their appearance. They could look 50 years older, but be 200 years younger. She giggled. “You’re all waiting for the clarification before judgment. That’s quite magnanimous of you. I’m his daughter. I’ve been that way for millennia. You see, all those people out here in the Corridor, they are his subjects...his toys. He built them to serve, and to adore him. But the problem with that is they were indoctrinated into belief from birth. Ignorance is the killer. I mean, you showed one person the truth about Earth, and an entire opposing faction spread out from it, which is what he’s always been afraid of. Sycophants who don’t know any better aren’t very satisfying either way. He wanted a group of people who loved him because that’s what they were supposed to do. He wanted a family. He made us just like he made the others, but he made us immortal, just like him. He didn’t really raise us, but we got more face time with him than most, so I suppose he figured that was enough.

“I grew to resent him, of course, which is how we ended up here. In defiance of his plan to curate a family of superhumans, I started fighting back violently. I killed all of my clones, as well as my brothers and sisters’ clones. I didn’t kill them too, but they eventually died, and there was nowhere for their consciousnesses to go. Oaksent doesn’t like virtual simulations, I don’t know why, so there’s no uploading to a central server. There’s just backup bodies. I was just about to kill my own final clone when Pacey found me. He made me realize that Bronach never cared about any of us, which was why he made almost no attempt to stop me. His plans didn’t work. He’s not a likeable guy, and if he didn’t force adoration through ignorance, it wasn’t going to happen. All of his children loathed him. I’m just the only one who wanted to do anything about it. Pacey promised that he could kill my father. He promised to find a way. You were supposed to be that way, but what he didn’t tell me was that you always look for the peaceful resolution. Your ship was literally called the Vellani Ambassador. I’ve been trying to get you to change, but if I thought that anyone could do that, I would never have let my siblings die. I would have tried to call them to action. I believe that I’ve just been trying to replace them...with you.”

Leona stepped forward, and gently held Miracle’s wrists in her hands. It looked like she was about to remove the cuffs from her. “Obligation.”

“Yeah,” Miracle said with a nod. “Wait, what?”

“It’s a movie, about a sibling rivalry that goes too far. The motif throughout is Nazca boobies, which are known for killing their siblings.”

“Oh, I guess that’s kind of similar,” Miracle agreed.

“No, it’s almost the exact same premise. What you just described here, killing off your siblings to drain the parents’ of their power, and their legacy...that is the plot of Obligation. That never happened to you.”

“Well, I hardly think that’s a unique situation. I mean, I’m sure—wait, wait, wait, wait, wait!” she screamed when Leona started to lift her arms up. “You don’t have to do this! Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay! I’ll help you! I’ll switch sides! Just don’t make me transfer out of this body.”

This was such a weird freak out. What was she so afraid of? Why did she not want to transfer to a new substrate? It wasn’t like the processes hurt, or anything. It just felt like going to sleep, and waking up in a different room after surgery. It could be disorienting, but that went away, and relatively quickly. Why did she even ever want Romana’s body if not to parade around as Romana, and give her a bad reputation? They should have asked this as soon as Miracle agreed to keep it. They shouldn’t have been so trusting of her. They won’t make that mistake again.

“Please don’t, please don’t! Miracle continued to beg.

Leona suddenly broke the cuffs apart, and let the nanites recede into her implants. “There you go.”

“You’re setting me free?” Miracle asked, shocked.

“I don’t want us to be enemies anymore. It doesn’t come for free, though. I want you to take us to Pacey. We need to have a talk with him. I’m sick of going through his little minions. It’s inefficient at best.”

Yeah, sure,” Miracle said, stepping away and rubbing her wrists. Déjà vu, this was basically what she looked like yesterday, just before escaping through a black hole portal. “I just need to, uh...speak with him first. I’ll be right back!” Still reminiscent of just yesterday, she fell through a portal, which closed up behind her immediately. And it wasn’t going to reopen.

“Why did you do that?” Olimpia asked her wife.

“She ruined our plans,” Ramses answered for Leona. “Miracle was supposed to lead us to Pacey, not come back here. Matty?”

“Okay,” Mateo said. Gather ‘round.” They huddled in a group, and let Mateo generate a swarm of dark particles to overwhelm them. It was a pretty weak showing, though. There weren’t very many of them. “I think we’re trying too soon! I can’t pull enough out,” he warned. “It took too much to get us to the Fifth Division!”

“That’s okay,” Ramses shouted back. “Just build a bridge! The slingdrives will take us the rest of the way!”

Mateo didn’t exactly know what he meant by that, but his intuition told him to spread the dark particles thin, so they reached far enough out to their destination without being wide enough for a group of seven people to cross over with them. They then activated their slingdrives, and used the signal to navigate them to the right destination. The technicolors came and went, and they found themselves in a familiar place. This was the room they went to before they were knocked unconscious, and inserted into the Underburg simulation with false memories. The place was empty back then, but not this time. Miracle was there, as were Octavia, Pacey, and some other woman. He seemed to like the ladies. He wasn’t happy right now, though.

Miracle’s eyes widened in fear as she stared at the team. She looked over at her boss. “I’m sorry. They took the cuffs off! You said I could come back if they took the cuffs off!”

“We never needed the cuffs, you idiot,” Ramses argued. “He can find anyone in the universe.” He jerked his head towards Mateo.”

“Not with my shielding,” Pacey contended. “There must be something else.”

“Nanites are very smol,” Leona said to him. “They could be on you, without you even knowing it. We never needed the cuffs,” she echoed Ramses.

“You tracked me, like an animal,” Miracle spat.

“You’re a murderer. Which one is worse?”

“Who said I murdered anybody?”

“So you were lying.”

“Enough,” Pacey interrupted. “You obviously came here to talk, so let’s talk. Leave my girls out of it.”

“Mr. Henricksen, again, I’m so—” Miracle tried to apologize.

He held up a commanding hand. “We’ll talk about it later. You both can go now.”

Miracle left, as did Octavia, having never said a word. Miracle was annoying, but an opposing force. Octavia still felt like a betrayal. They wanted to talk to her again too, but on a personal level. Today was about business. The mysterious other woman stayed. She didn’t lurch or hesitate. She knew from the start that he wasn’t ordering her to do anything. If this were an action movie, she would be the one in charge here, and all of their previous dealings were with her henchman or lieutenant, who was only pretending to be in charge. But this wasn’t a movie, was it? Was it? It was a movie before, under the dome. It could certainly be that again, or worse...still.

“I understand that you have reservations about fulfilling the mission,” Pacey began, getting himself comfortable in an arm chair while the woman sat next to him in a hardback.

“That’s an understatement,” Leona said. “We’re not doing it. We don’t need higher compensation, or incentive. We don’t need you to explain why you think we should do it. It’s just not happening. We don’t care if you agree or not. We don’t care what you want or know at all. It’s. Not. Happening. If you have some kind of Plan B, which doesn’t involve us, then I suggest you move forward with it. We’re not interested, and we never were. Why don’t you make like a snowflake, and let it go?”

“I don’t know what that means, but I want you to know that I’m listening, and I hear you. I won’t make you do anything that you don’t wanna do.” He seemed proud of himself for the response, which meant that it was a trick. It probably had something to do with the woman next to him.

They all realized that this wasn’t actually going their way, and it felt exhausting. Mateo stopped forward and placed his hand upon Leona’s chest. He gently nudged her backwards in the direction of the team. “It’s all right. I got this.” He took another step forward, but more towards the stranger. “Who are you? What is your stake in this?”

The woman looked over to Pacey, not for guidance, but more like they were having an unspoken conversation with each other. She lifted her eyebrows to ask a question. He shrugged like the answer was maybe. She pointed at him, and lifted her brows again. He shrugged again, but this time, more as if to say, yeah, fine. They made a couple of other gestures towards each other, all basically implying that they were relenting to the team’s demands, but really, it was impossible to know for sure what they were saying. In fact, they could have been in the middle of an actual psychic conversation. Finally, after Pacey said, “okay” out loud, the woman took a breath, and leaned back in her chair. “I was admittedly hurt when I first heard the term Team Kadiar.”

“No,” Mateo said.

“I felt left out,” the woman went on.

“No,” Mateo said louder. It couldn’t be.

“Yes, it’s true, father. I’m your fourth daughter. Or should I say...your first. His name isn’t Pacey. It’s Séarlas. And I am Franka.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 15, 2528

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The tree light receded. They were now standing outside. The ground beneath them was yellowish, there was no apparent atmosphere, and they felt very light. It was probably an uninhabitable moon. There was a massive structure before them, maybe four or five kilometers away. Leona checked her watch interface. “August 15, 2528.”

Ramses knelt down, and scanned the surface with his sensor suite. “Sulfur and sulfur dioxide, also silica. We got some pyroxene and feldspar. That explains the yellow.” He stood back up. “I believe that we are on the rogue moon of Jaunemus.”

They didn’t know much about this world. It once orbited the planet of Verdemus, but was transported to the Goldilocks Corridor, and used as a staging ground for the Verdemusian Corps. They lived and trained here when they weren’t on the Anatol Klugman warship. The team looked around, and couldn’t find Miracle Brighton anywhere, nor Adult!Dilara. They were dispatched, not ferried, or perhaps the other two had just moved on, since it had been a full two years since the team was last in the present day.

The Jaunemusians seemed like all right people. They were warmongers, sure, but not Klingons. They didn’t want to fight simply for the sake of it. They felt a duty to protect their home planet from the Exin Empire, and decided to take an offensive strategy, instead of a defensive one, since Verdemus was still in hiding, much like Castlebourne now. According to their military mandate, the fighters on this moon didn’t have much interest in fixing the Goldilocks Corridor. They just calculated that the only way to prevent the Exins from spreading beyond it were to put an end to it altogether. It was unclear how they felt about Earth, the rest of the closer regions, or Team Matic. According to Core World conventions, this whole part of the galaxy belonged to what they called the Borderworlds. It was technically too specific of a term to use for it, however. It was only called that because it covered all systems between 14,000 and 28,000 light years from Earth. On the other side of the Milky Way, that referred to systems that were literally on the edge. In this direction, though, they were still in the middle.

“Drive check!” Olimpia announced as she looked down at her wrist band. “Whew, I’m in the red. Anyone else have a better gauge?”

They all shook their heads. It took an enormous amount of power for them to send the entire Oblivion tower to another reality in the past. That wasn’t even that long ago for them. It would be a while until their slingdrives recharged. They might as well pop in to see how the Jaunemusians were doing lately. They teleported to an airlock that appeared welcoming enough, and knocked on the door. There was a doorbell, but it looked like it was only meant for emergencies. Hopefully the sound would travel through the structure well enough for someone to hear. They stood there for a few minutes before a face appeared in the viewport. Hm. No cameras? Or were there, and he just wanted to get a look for himself? They waved at him with smiles.

The man went away, and then the airlock door opened. They let their suits collapse before the airlock was fully pressurized again. The man was still watching them, from the observation chamber now. Another man entered the room behind him with an air of authority, so the first one opened the next door for him. “Greetings, Team Matic. My name is Anatol Klugman.”

“No, it isn’t,” Mateo said, being unable to stop himself.

The man winced. “I may not have been born with the name, but I earned it.”

“Forgive him,” Leona mediated. “It’s just that we know the man who serves as the namesake for your warship. You’re obviously not him, it’s just a little jarring to hear.”

“Ah, yes.” Fake!Anatol nodded. “It’s easy to forget that the ship was named after a man. I am named after the ship. And when I retire, a new Anatol will be selected to take my place. There are others like me even now.”

“Are you connected to your vessel?” Ramses asked him, fascinated. “Do you control it with your mind?”

Fake!Anatol considered the words. “It’s more like I instruct it with my mind. The crew has to carry out the orders, and could theoretically refuse them. Right now, my second has the reins. The human brain cannot handle the interface for too long, so the link changes hands regularly.” His gaze shifted to Romana. “I’m guessing that you’re here in search of your sister? I can take you to her.”

“That is not my sister,” Romana said, her blood boiling. “She is an impostor.”

“Oh. She said her name was Miracle Brighton.”

“Oh, well that’s her name,” Mateo explained, “but she stole my daughter’s body. Well, she stole one of them. The extra one.”

Fake!Anatol lifted his chin as he absorbed the information. “I see. We might be able to help with that. We are...pretty good at cloning here.” That was how this army began. Omega Strong cloned himself thousands of times, but he didn’t use the exact same code. Each clone was slightly different than the one before it. Despite ultimately being born of a single source, the population was almost as diverse as any other of comparable magnitude, thanks to this intentional genetic drift. That was a long time ago. This man would be a descendant of the original generation, now many generations removed.

“It wasn’t technically theft,” Romana explained, “but more of a con. She has legal claim to that substrate. If we were to move her to a different one, she would have to consent.”

“If she does, we can arrange that,” Fake!Anatol offered. “Do you still want me to take you to her?”

“Yes, please,” Mateo confirmed.

They followed him down the corridors until they reached a common area of couches, tables, and other basic amenities, like you would find in a hipster apartment complex. Fake!Anatol stopped when he noticed Miracle sitting in a comfy chair with a good book, and a cup of tea. She, of course, knew when they would be returning to the timestream, so she was not surprised to see them. She dogeared the page she was on, and snapped it shut. “Thank you all for coming. And thank you, Mister Klugman, for bringing them to me. You can go now.”

Fake!Anatol looked awkwardly at the team, not sure if he should do what she said, or accept their guidance, or do whatever the hell he wanted.

“Please, sir, could you show me your neural interface?” Ramses requested. “I would much like to learn about it, if at all possible. This conversation is going to become uncomfortable, and I don’t need to be here.”

Romana stepped forward, between the team and the antagonist after Ramses and Fake!Anatol departed. “Thank you for not using my name,” she said to her doppelgänger

“I prefer mine.”

“I wouldn’t,” Romana mumbled.

“What was that?”

“I am as appreciative as my daughter,” Mateo said, also now stepping forward. “We would like to ask you, what is your plan here? What do you think we’re going to do for you?”

“You’re going to find a way to kill the unkillable,” Miracle answered plainly.

“If you want him dead, why don’t you just do it? You, Pacey, and Octavia seem intelligent enough. Why are you trying to make us do your dirty work?”

Miracle bit her lip.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Olimpia posed. “She thinks we’re untouchable. If his sycophants come after us for it, not only will it keep their hands clean, but she thinks we’ll survive it anyway...because we always do.”

“Or she’s counting on us not surviving this time,” Marie countered. “Because if the Exin loyalists interrogate us, we’ll be able to link her to it.”

“Lots of people know I’m here,” Miracle argued. “Word will get out that I’m involved, I don’t care.”

Mateo shook his head. “Word might get out that a woman who looks like Romana, and goes by the ridiculously made-up name of Miracle, is involved. Not very strong evidence that it has anything to do with Pacey. I’m not even sure if anyone besides us, and his sycophants, knows that he exists. We’re the only ones who have interacted with him, to our knowledge. He’s Snuffleupagus.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Miracle said.

Their armbands beeped at the same time, alerting them that their slingdrives had charged up to Orange. “We won’t do what you ask,” she contended. “We won’t kill him, and we will no longer interfere with these people’s lives unless we decide that it’s necessary, and we will also decide when that is, and what that means.”

“Those things can’t save you,” Miracle claimed. “We’re like Arcadia Preston. We can just keep bringing you back here. You have to remember that Pacey is the one who invented the—what do you call it—slingdrive technology, not your precious little Gyppo.”

Mateo tensed up, and leaned in closer. “Do not..ever say that.”

“Sorry, that was too far, I’m just trying to remind you that you took quintessence from Pacey. He has every right to dictate what you do with it.”

She wasn’t getting it. It was irrelevant how long they had to wait to sling again. This was a perfect example of you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. If she kept dropping them here, they would keep escaping, or just doing nothing. Even if their slingdrives weren’t ready to go again, they didn’t have to do anything they didn’t want to. She only had the power to move them places, not control their actions. If she could do that, why would she need them at all? “It doesn’t matter, we’re not doing it,” Angela reiterated.

Miracle finally stood. She sighed. “Miss Nieman is the youngest in your group, and for that reason, she will be spared. The Oaksent doesn’t see her as a threat, and I think he may have a little thing for her. He has instructed his minions to spare her, should they encounter Team Matic, and find a way to end the rest of you without hurting her. If you don’t kill him, Romana will be the one to do it, if you get my meaning. She won’t be safe anymore. She will be the primary target.”

Leona smiled.

Miracle was confused. “What? What just happened? Why are you so excited?”

The others weren’t excited, it was just Leona. She reached out, and took hold of both of Miracle’s wrists. She instructed her nanites to construct handcuffs around them. “You just gave me permission to remove you from that substrate.”

“How’s that now?” Miracle questioned.

“You just admitted to making plans to commit a crime using a substrate that will implicate a different individual of said crime. That gives me everything I need to get you out of it, and reclaim the substrate to protect the world from you who would abuse her power in it.”

“I was just speaking in hypotheticals, I didn’t say anything,” Miracle insisted. “Plus, I was so vague.”

“We all heard what we heard, and I’m sure that camera caught it too.” Leona pointed up at the security cam. “Besides, at worst, it places us in a stalemate. You can’t actually commit the crime any more than you can admit to the conspiracy of it. If you go through with the plan, we’ll show that footage to the Exins. They have similar cloning laws internally. Harsher ones, in fact. Your safest course of action is to leave that body, and move on with your life without it. Romana is damaged goods.”

Miracle was flustered. She backed up a little, and tried to pull the cuffs apart through brute force. “I have an exit strategy. These can’t keep me here.”

“We can track you wherever you go. Their friends can, anyway,” Leona added, referring to the nanites that she was still using herself.

Their armbands beeped. They were now in the Yellow.

“Not if I figure out how to get them off first!” Miracle shouted. A black hole appeared underneath her feet, and she fell right through it.

“What if she does it?” Angela asked. “What if she just goes off to kill Bronach before we have the chance to find her, and remove her from that substrate?”

“She doesn’t know how,” Leona believed. “She was bluffing entirely. She called him unkillable, because they also need us to find the killswitch that will prevent him from coming back to life, however exactly he does it. We’re known for finding loopholes, and Team Pacey is betting on us finding this one too. There’s more than one reason they chose us.”

“What do we do?” Mateo asked her.

“Today, we rest. I don’t think we’re gonna be able to sling again until next year.”

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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.”