Microstory 2411: Party Central

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Party, party, party! All aboard, party people! This is where the party’s at! It’s Party Central! That is a great name, because it’s true. It’s January 1, 2500, according to the Earthan calendar, and Castlebourne is officially open for business! They’ve been in testing until now, and while a ton of domes are still not open to the public, a lot of the earlier ones are. There’s plenty to see and do here after the hard work of thousands of testers who were here on the frontlines, making sure that the activities and adventures in the domes were enjoyable, worth your time, and safe. Except for the residentials, all of the domes were shut down yesterday, and will remain that way until tomorrow. Everybody’s here, getting their groove on, and having a great time. We’re all in the main hall right now, but there’s a reason they called this dome what they did. There’s a venue for every need, every niche, every theme. It’s basically if you took the concept of every dome on the planet, and squished them down to smaller scale. You like sports? There’s a venue designed specifically for people who like sports. You can play sports there, and eat bar food, and talk about the sports that you like. I’m not into them myself, so I don’t know what it’s like, but I’m sure it’s great. There are multiple levels to this dome, so you can hang out in the sky, if that’s your thing. I don’t know what else to say about it. As of this posting, the festivities are still ongoing. Even when they officially reopen the domes, we’ll still be here dancing and partying. You know what parties are like, well this is the greatest one ever thrown, and it never really has to end. Come on down, and when you’re ready, go find your bliss elsewhere. Or stick around, I’ll be here. It’s my home, I see no reason to leave.

Microstory 2321: Vacuus, September 26, 2178

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Dear Condor,

Thank you for the sentiment regarding my job. I’m okay whether it’s important or not. It gives me something to do, and besides, it’s not like I have to sit and stare at the alarm for hours on end. There are other tasks, like making sure communications are running smoothly. I mean the communications between various outposts on Vacuus, not to other planets. It would give me a lot more freedom if I had full access to those systems. I would probably know more about Earth than you! Speaking of interplanetary communications, I should have said earlier that they’re going to be down for the next couple of weeks or so. They’re overhauling the entire system, which is something they do every three Earthan years. We’re still on your schedule, which I’m sure you’ve noticed since I’m dating these messages according to your calendar. That’s not just for your benefit. There are certainly no local periodic astronomical phenomena to base anything off of. Anyway, back to the explanation about the systems. Obviously, they update the software about once per month to make it faster, more efficient, and just better overall. But at the end of what they call a Research Cycle, they also upgrade the hardware, because those software updates stop being enough to keep up with advancing technologies, and operational needs. We have all sorts of anniversaries here. The day we launched, the day we landed, the day the first baby was born on Vacuus. One of these “anniversaries” only happens every three years, because we were on this planet for that long before people finally felt like we weren’t just trying to survive, but actively starting to conduct stable daily research as true Vacuans. I dunno, it seems kind of arbitrary to me. No one day marked the end of survival mode, and the beginning of thriving mode, but it’s a pretty big deal. It doesn’t actually happen until the end of October, but that’s when we celebrate it, so they always want the big overhaul to be finished by then. I definitely won’t be able to send you any messages, but it’s a two-way street as far as the transceiver goes, so your messages to me won’t come through either, and in fact, may not even be waiting on a server somewhere for me to read later. I may not ever be able to read a message that tried to come through during the upgrades. If you do try to send something—as people used to say in the olden days—it could get lost in the mail. I’ll hit you back when systems are up and running again. I apologize for not warning you about this sooner. I just forgot about it, because I have to do so much to prepare as part of my job, and I’ve never spoken to anyone who doesn’t already know everything about it.

Until we can talk again,

Corinthia

Microstory 2267: 2018 Was No Bueno

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Funny story. Obviously, before you meet the President, the Diplomatic Protection Authority has to run a thorough background check on you. You have heard of everyone that I know. I’ve mentioned literally everyone I’ve ever met here beyond random customers and clients. I don’t have a past from before the beginning of this year, and the DPA doesn’t know what to do with that. I think they still don’t believe me, which is understandable, but I don’t know what to tell ya. I can’t conjure a family out of nowhere, and no matter how deep you dig, you’re not gonna find them, because you’re looking in the wrong world. I’m guessing that there are two camps; one which wants to believe me, and one which thinks that this is all part of an extremely intricate coverup to hide the fact that I’m some kind of international assassin. That would be one hell of a long con. Could you imagine, doing everything I’ve done for a year just on the off-chance that the leader of the free world would eventually want to meet me? I gave myself an incurable disease, managed to cure it in a matter of moments anyway, and everyone who saw it happen is somehow loyal to me, or has been paid off. That’s more bonkers than the truth. I didn’t ask for this meeting. I didn’t see it coming. So if you want to cancel on me, that’s fine. I have no strong feelings about it. As I’ve said, I just got here, so I’m not all that familiar with your history, or your politics. I don’t even know whether I would have voted for her if I had been born on this planet. One major difference between my world and yours is that it’s okay to be apolitical, because you’re not deciding between a decent human being, and one of the worst monsters ever created. Trust me, I know that I call you boring, but this is far better. The administration I left behind in 2018 was no bueno.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: Year 120 RSS

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Mateo zips Erlendr’s wrists together behind his back. He’s not real aggressive with it, because the man is currently using his best friend’s body, and Ramses is going to need it back one day. Still, it should hold, especially since he also pats him down for blades, and other weapons, even though Leona didn’t specifically order him to.

“Where are we going?” Alyssa asks as soon as they start on their walk.

“I need to get out of this forest. I have an idea of where we are, but I have to confirm it with a better view of the sky.”

“I know where we are,” Erlendr claims.

“You’ll forgive me for not trusting you,” Leona spits.

“How about I tell you where we are, and if it’s what you suspect, you can be pretty sure I’m not lying?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“It’s Proxima Doma, except the people here call it Spectrevale. Well, that’s what they call the terminator zone, but since it’s the only habitable region of the planet, they’ve become the same thing.”

Mateo looks over at Leona, who sighs. “That’s what I thought. How long have you been here?”

“Three years,” he answers.

“Three years, as in three Earthan years, or as in thirty-three days?”

“Thirty-three days,” Erlendr clarifies. Proxima Doma—or Spectrevale, as it were—orbits its sun about every eleven days. Back when they were on their brane’s version of the planet, though, this was mostly useless fun fact that the residents mostly ignored. They lived inside of domes to protect themselves from the solar flares, and paid very little attention to the orbital period.

“How did you get here?” Mateo asks.

“I don’t know that I should tell you,” Erlendr responds. He’s probably right about that. They’re in dangerous territory now. That was the silver lining to being in a reality where temporal manipulation didn’t generally work. They were no longer worried about encountering—or worse, creating—a paradox. Time travel made it a constant threat, and bulk travel compounds the risk. Anything he says about what he did since he stole Ramses’ body, and fled the lab, could cause real problems for a lot of people.

“You don’t have to tell us anything,” Leona says. “You’re from our future. We have you now, and when we get you back to the Third Rail salmonverse, we’ll Livewire you out of that body, and move on from this. That was the plan, and it will remain the plan, except for one minor change.”

“What might that be?” he questions.

“You won’t be placed in my alternate self’s body. You’ll just be put into the Insulator of Life, where you can’t move, or do anything to harm anyone. It was going to happen anyway. It’s fate, if you will. But I don’t know if I should tell you.”

“That’s okay. I’ll get out of it. I always find a way. There’s something that even you don’t know about what death really means.”

Oh, you mean Pryce’s afterlife simulation? That doesn’t work out for you either, Mateo wishes he could say out loud, but he knows that he can’t give that much away.

“We’re going the wrong way,” Pryce says after a bit of silence.

“I still need to see for myself,” Leona explains. “We’re going to climb a little bit.”

“Where you were, where you came through. There’s a portal there. It’s roving, but it doesn’t move too much. The only way out is to jump through it the next time it comes around.”

“And when will that be?” Alyssa asks him.

“In eleven days.”

“There is nothing particularly special about the orbital period of a celestial body,” Leona begins. “There is no starting point, nor ending point. These moments are arbitrary human constructs, designed to help people manage the events of their lives.”

“Okay, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, I understand that that’s how it seems to work where you’re from, but there’s a sunspot on Proxima Centauri that triggers a bulk dumping event once a year, right here in Sargan Forest. I’ve seen it happen twice now, plus the time I came here. That’s a pattern. The locals call it The New Year Nose, because it somewhat resembles a nose.”

“Sunspots move more than portals do,” Leona argues.

“I’m just telling you how it is. This is a different universe, with a different set of proper physics. You can’t necessarily rely on the old rules.”

Leona knows that this is true, she just hates when someone like Erlendr Preston knows something that she doesn’t. She doesn’t want anyone to be a rapist, but if he’s already a rapist, at least make him wrong about literally everything. “I’m going to check the sky, and that’s final! If what you say is true, we have eleven days anyway, so what’s it to ya?”

“I just want to make sure we get a good spot to sleep. I found a lost mattress a couple of kilometers away that we can share. It hasn’t been here long. That’s what I’ve been doing, examining the lost objects, and estimating their arrival times, so I can figure out a pattern to the roving portal.”

Leona stops walking, and pushes Erlendr in the shoulders. She immediately regrets it, since she too doesn’t want to harm the body, but she’s just so angry. “If you think we’re going to sleep anywhere near you, then you seriously missed my point of view on rape.”

“For the last goddamn time, I did not rape anybody!” Erlendr screams, still on his back. “She was my wife!”

“She still has to consent!”

“She did!”

“Bullshit!”

Erlendr shouts unintelligibly. He swings his legs to trip Mateo onto his own back. Then he rolls over enough to make it to the hill, and keeps on rolling, hoping to escape. “Screw you!” he yells, dropping the volume of his voice deliberately, because he’s not slipping away fast enough for the sound to grow all that fainter naturally.

Leona drops her emergency pack as Alyssa is helping Mateo off the ground. She casually removes a teleporter gun from the bag, quickly calibrates it, and shoots Erlendr before he can impale Ramses’ head on a tree branch. He appears a few meters away, and maintains his momentum, ending up right at Leona’s feet. “Are you done yet?”

“Yes,” Erlendr replies, face in the dirt.

“Then come on. That was a good idea, tracking the movement of the portal. But you lack the tools necessary to come to a valid conclusion. I don’t.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 18, 2376

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Indeed. There may be a time discrepancy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How do you know?” the ape questioned.

“We’re from Earth,” Leona added.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go on,” Leona urged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Angela, time battery?”

“Fifty-six percent,” Angela answered.

“Ramses?” Leona asked simply.

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

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

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

“Were I you,” she said.

“Were I you,” he echoed.

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

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

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

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Microstory 1790: Mateo Daily

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First off, I probably could have figured out how to squeeze in one more constellation to round out the year, but I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about my plans for next year. I’m going to be doing something wildly different with my macroseries, The Advancement of Mateo Matic. So far, I’ve mostly been writing one installment per week. The first one didn’t come out until the middle of March in my first year, so it only has 42 installments. In fact, I actually doubled up on one day, because I hate the number 41. The next year was pretty normal, but the third year, while there were 53 Sundays, I still only did 52 installments, because I skipped a week for narrative reasons. Ever since then, though, I’ve been able to keep to a steady routine of 52 installments per year. That is all about to change, but not permanently. Everything will hold to convention for the first 24 weeks. Mateo’s story will continue as you would expect, year by year. So too will my current Saturday mezzofiction series, Extremus. I have two microfiction series lined up as well. The first is a return to my Vantage Points multiseries, which will give way to 14 original sonnets. I’m scared about that last one, but hopefully I’ll come up with some good stuff by then. The last sonnet will post on June 10. The last entry in the second volume of Extremus will post on June 11. A new installment for TAMM will be on June 12, but I’m not yet sure how long it’s going to be, or whether the official changeover will happen the following day, where you will find...another installment of The Advancement of Mateo Matic. The next day, there will be another, and then another, and so on.

Throughout the rest of the year, I’ll only be posting TAMM stories. No mezzofiction, and no microfiction. Though, because expecting myself to write 2,000 words—give or take—every day is unreasonable, they will be shorter than usual. I’ll probably do at least 600 words, but I’m not sure yet. I’m not holding myself to anything that restrictive. Each one will take place a day after the last, as we follow Mateo and the team through their latest adventures. They’ll probably be more subdued, and less intense. They’ll probably be family-oriented, with less action. They might read like diary entries. Again, I don’t know yet. I have to get to that point before I really know where the story is going. I serve the story, not the other way around. There is a reason why the team will fall off their pattern, and a reason why it will last them a full year, but I’ve decided to not give that away just yet. If I had chosen to start this in January, I might have said something, but since it’s so far out, I call that a spoiler. This new posting method will continue until the middle of July 2023 when I start a new microfiction series called Conversations, and begin volume 3 of Extremus. I will also get back to the weekly installments of TAMM, and while the story will continue to evolve, I presently have no intentions of altering the posting schedule further. I think I messed up the math, so we’ll see what it looks like when I finish working on the calendar, but I’m sure it will be fine. Speaking of math, I came up with this in my first year, before I had tampered with Mateo’s pattern, so this felt like a much more dramatic change. Since then, he and Leona haven’t always jumped forwards each day anyway. Still, I’m excited, and I hope you are too. This started as a working title, but it’s the best I’ve come up with. I’m obviously calling it...Mateo Daily.