Microstory 2350: Vacuus, May 18, 2179

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Dear Condor,

Happy belated birthday! I decided to wait a few days to send you my next letter, so it could be after the party, but you ought to already know that, since I sent you the custom read receipt about it immediately after receiving your last one. This was a really good reason to use that system, so thank you for coming up with it. The party went great on my end. We had food and cake, and everybody was wearing the same thing. That’s right, I decided to pass along your cool, fashionable garment design to all invitees, and encouraged them to print and wear one of the options themselves. The garment fabricator liked them a lot herself, so it was her idea to really lean into the theme. She was there too, along with several other people. I’m sorry if I gave you the impression that I didn’t have anyone to invite, or that I didn’t have any friends in general. We’re in fairly cramped quarters for logistical and practical reasons, so everyone knows pretty much everyone. I don’t like them all, and they don’t all like me, but we get along pretty well. We have to, or it could lead to catastrophe. Animosity does not mix well with a planetary base on an airless world. One person gets mad at another, and decides to open an airlock out of anger, and it’s bye bye half the living people on Vacuus. No, we obviously compartmentalize the sections, but you get what I mean. We place great emphasis on counseling and mental health. So I do have friends. It’s true that I never developed relationships as strong as the ones I sometimes see on TV, but I would still consider them my friends. I don’t know why I’ve never talked about them to you, but they were there, and we had fun. Who else was at yours? We don’t really do much with constellations here, so we’re not all that familiar. We found Libra, and everyone looked at it, trying to figure out why they’re called “the scales”. It wasn’t until someone had the bright idea to turn the image slightly then we were all, like, “ooooohhh. Kinda!” It was fun, though, and I thought of you the whole time. I wish we could have been in the same room. How did it go on your end?

All partied out and not alone,

Corinthia

Microstory 1629: Legend Has It

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Let’s get away from the depressing Darning War stories, and talk about something unrelated. I don’t want to say that this universe has nothing to do with the war—because sooner or later, the Ochivari find everyone—but the story itself will be about something else. This version of Earth only encountered one instance of time travel. One day, an underemployed twentysomething man living in his recently deceased grandmother’s house heard an explosion downstairs. His name was Legend, but he was anything but. He didn’t have any passions, or goals. He just went to work every day, and came home to his cat in the evening. It was his once grandmother’s cat, and it came with the house as a packaged deal. He was convinced it would outlive them all. When Legend went down to investigate the ruckus, the cat was just sitting in a chair on the back deck, having barely acknowledged the explosion in the kitchen. He didn’t expect her to run to his rescue, but it should have freaked her out. That thing could not be flapped. He crept around the corner, and looked in to find a naked woman about his age, brushing the dust off her skin. “Axel Quincy?” she presumed.

“Is that your name, errr...?”

“I thought you were Axel Quincy,” she said.

“Nope. Sorry. Wrong house. Never heard of him.” As it turned out, the woman was from the future, and desperately needed to find an engineering prodigy whose designs were this close to saving the world decades from now. He was destined to die sometime within the next two weeks, and only he could prevent disaster. He was unable to finish the plans for many of his inventions, and while the time traveler’s people were able to reverse engineer what they needed once the initial plans were discovered, they weren’t able to do so in time. They could have really benefited from having them already exist by the time any of them were even born. She had to find him, and save his life, so he could complete his work on his own, and be prepared to defend the planet against a terrible future. After a little sleuthing, they realized that the time machine had accidentally sent her to the wrong place. It wasn’t even the right country. She didn’t have any money, or a present-day identity, and she didn’t know how to drive, and she wasn’t familiar with the national borders, which were erased from the map when catastrophe struck the first time. Legend was her only hope now, even though he was nobody, and didn’t know anything about how to find some Canadian stranger who wasn’t going to be famously important until after his death. Still, he agreed to help, because it was the right thing to do. So the two of them set off on an adventure, along with the cat, and hijinks ensued. She tried to drive once, because he was too slow, so they had to wait for it to be repaired. Getting across the border was tough, because neither of them had a passport. The people they met along the way either tried to help and failed, or actively tried to stop them. They were running from the law, and a CEO who thought Legend was someone else; evidently someone who was a far greater threat to his freedom and wealth. They bickered and struggled, and of course became friends, and I won’t tell you how it ends. You’ll just have to see it for yourself, if you get a chance.

Microstory 1219: Maqsud Al-Amin

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Also known as The Trotter—as in globetrotter—Maqsud Al-Amin was the most impressive teleporter in histories. Most people with the ability could move across a planet, or into orbit, at best. Maqsud, however, was capable of traveling the expanse of the universe, or at least, the observable universe. He could also travel through time, but only under very particular conditions. As counterintuitive as it may be, the farther he was trying to jump, the easier it was for him. Shorter jumps required greater concentration, and higher accuracy, and often wore him out. Think of it this way. When an aircraft pilot takes off, they have to fly up as steep as is reasonable, and then level off. If they were to try to take off and land within only a few miles, but still reach their standard altitude, they would have an incredibly steep climb to make it in time. It’s much easier when they’re going thousands of miles, because then they have some time to reach this altitude. You just wouldn’t take a plane to go down the block, or even to the other side of the city. This same principle was why Maqsud could fairly easily jump to another star system, but it was practically impossible for him to go interplanetary. He would be hopeless to reach the moon, or any other satellite of the planet he was already on. Aiming in general was difficult for him, and limited what he was able to see when he arrived at his destination. Fate would sort of pick the exact landing site, and if there was something interesting on the other side of the world, he wouldn’t get to see it unless he found some other—more normal—form of transport. Despite his restrictions, there were those who believed that there were no limits to his strength. It was once theorized that he could transport an entire planet’s worth of people to an entirely different planet. This belief would be tested when a distant colony was threatened by an unstoppable cataclysm, and only his power could save them. Unfortunately, it did not go well.

Microstory 771: Dewey

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When Kalista Dewey was born, the world was completely fine. Well, it might be a bit of a stretch to say that, but it was certainly still standing. She was just out of college when she was recruited into a secret research project, aimed at studying the unusual temporal properties of a remote island in the middle of the ocean. While she was there, great calamities began to befall the world outside, leaving those on the island as the only ones who were truly completely protected. It was unclear whether Dewey’s superiors started their organization knowing that these civilization-ending scenarios would wreak havoc on the world, but once they did, her job transitioned to studying what went wrong. As time went on, their research collective separated into three camps. Camp One came to believe that this was somehow part of destiny; that the island protected them from harm so that they could restart civilization in their image. Camp Two believed that, though this was not an ideal situation, the world needed to just move on from it. They rejected the idea that they were somehow the chosen ones, and ultimately sought to prevent the organization from returning to the outside world with such a massive technological advantage. They would be too powerful. They wanted to be there to support and nurture the survivors, so they could rebuild something that was better for everyone. Dewey belonged to Camp Three, however. She believed that the island’s special properties were there for a reason, and that they could find a way to save the world by learning more. Though they had no proof of this, they thought there was actually some way to harness its energy, and go back in time, to fix the world’s problems, before they even came to a head. The only question to answer at that point was, what was she willing to sacrifice to make this a reality?

Microstory 766: Four Spot

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The four spot, or the universal heart symbol, is a graphical representation of the human heart. Historians are unsure who first came up with the symbol. Earliest depictions can be found in prehistoric art from the sixth century BUC, but it is believed to be much older than that. As the myth goes, there were two people deep in love with each other, who used the four spot as their new family crest, intending to pass it down to their children. The four curves represent the four chambers of the standard human heart, and later on as four tenets, ideas, or beliefs. Many religions have adapted the four spot to their respective faiths, and have come up with differing uses for the quadrant symbolism to satisfy their own dogma. The original story, however, says nothing about it. What is present is the intersection of two independent streams of infinity, symbolizing time as cyclical, and that no matter how far one travels from their loved ones, they will always inevitably come back around to their intersection. This is important as the story progresses, predicting a grand reunion between the lovers sometime in the future, after a great cataclysm separates them across a seemingly insurmountable vastness. Supposedly, each of the couple was holding onto one side of the crest at the moment of the calamity. When they were torn apart, so too was the crest itself, with the man retaining only the bottom half, and the woman keeping the top. Later apocrypha suggests the man’s half represents the testicles, while the woman’s the breasts, but this is improbably more than coincidence. The man ended up in the new universe, spreading the symbol to its inhabitants as the only symbol for the heart, while the woman stayed in the primary universe, notably causing Earthan humans to believe that they had come up with it on their own. As the tale predicts, these two universes shall one day be made whole again, and the four spot heart can once again be accepted as the true icon of love.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 12, 2036

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“How can we be sure that it worked? You could just be in the exact same position as you were before. You could have even been standing there for an entire year, and now you’re just pretending that it worked.” Leona, always the skeptic.

“I suppose you’re right,” Mirage replied.

“I am?”

“She is?”

“You’re right,” Mirage began to clarify, “in that you would never be able to know. You could jump for 300 days, and in those 300 years, I will never never aged. I could never prove to you that I was jumping through time.”

Leona and Mateo had no idea how to respond to that.

“I don’t know about all that,” said Parker, the same astronaut from a year ago. “But I do know that when you two disappeared last year, Mirage disappeared as well, and she reappeared at the exact same time.”

“Can her nanites turn invisible?” Mateo asked.

Leona and Parker laughed. Mirage looked at him like he was a three-legged puppy.

Parker? came a voice from the intercom.

“Parker here, go ahead.”

I have two visitors here who claim to be from Alyerr Base, but I can’t reach Alyerr on the comms network. They say they know you. One of them is named Gardner.

“That’s my mother, here to take us back home,” Mateo confirmed after Parker gave them an inquisitive look.

“Let them through, please,” Parker said into his comm before turning his attention back to the other three. “You’re lucky I manipulated the schedule to get myself back here at this time. I still wasn’t convinced that you guys were telling the truth about what you are, but I couldn’t risk some poor schmuck having to deal with you.”

“We appreciate the sentiment,” Leona said, half sincerely and half sarcastically.

Ironically, since the lawyers could never prove that their house exploded due to human error, Aura won an out-of-court settlement case. Reaver was forced to pay them millions of dollars. The look on his face was said to have been just absolutely hilarious, and reminded Mateo that he had yet to encounter the man in person. What would happen when that day inevitably came? In the future, Reaver’s message had suggested that they were somehow kept from killing each other directly, but that probably wouldn’t stop him from punching him in the face.

Aura spent a large amount of their money on a private spacecraft in order to retrieve them from the moon. Mateo tried to apologize for this, and for the exploding house, but she just said that she always wanted a spaceship, and that the blame for the house belonged solely to Reaver. Advances in space travel allowed the trip from the moon to take a matter of hours; the majority of their day that year. It could have been much worse. Some ships use less fuel and take days, which would have trapped in space during their jump. If Leona hadn’t fallen into his pattern, he actually might have tried doing that to see whether being in space could stop him from jumping at all, or if the powers that be would just cut their losses and let him die in the vacuum.

“I assume that you can’t simply leave Earth’s atmosphere without someone’s permission,” Leona said on the way back. “I mean, even if only rich people can do that at this point, is it not still heavily regulated?”

“It is. But it only took a few bribes to get out and back in,” Samsonite explained. “Though some collaboration has been taking place, space exploration is largely disjointed. If one country wants to send a vessel up, other countries can’t really dispute their attempt, unless it poses a clear threat to human life. Technically, we are subject to the laws of Japan as they were the easiest to contact regarding our intentions, and the most interested in keeping other governments out of their affairs.”

“I have another question,” Mateo said.

“Yes, honey?”

“How...does one...vomit space?”

“Are you asking for theory or practical application?”

Mateo just lurched against his seatbelts.

Samsonite quickly grabbed a pack from a drawer in the wall and opened it before handing it to Mateo. “Remember that there is no up and down. You’re going to have to propel the sick forward, and then use that liner to wipe your face before closing it and stuffing it into the ziplock bag as fast as you can.”

Mateo did as he was told. Leona didn’t seem to have any trouble, though she did always seem to have a stronger stomach than him.

Relatively speaking, when they were not far from Earth, an alarm began to sound. Then a voice came on the intercom, Private spacecraft Gelen, this is the Titan Exploration Project. Please come in.

Samsonite reached over and spoke into the microphone, “This is The Gelen. Go ahead, what’s the problem?”

We have been assigned to contact your vessel regarding an emergency. We are in the middle of experiencing a collisionally cascade. I repeat, a major Kessler catastrophe is occurring. They are currently using an ablation laser to clear the debris, but it will be another few days before you can return to Earth. Please enter an orbit of 3,000 kilometers and ration your supplies.

Samsonite shook his head urgently, “we have an injured passenger. We don’t have a few days before he dies. We have to reenter atmosphere now!”

I apologize for this. They are maneuvering the lasers as fast as possible. There is nothing that we can do. If you attempt reentry, you will all die.

“What happened?”

It was Reaver, sir. He sent an unauthorized unmanned space probe. It exploded and began the cascade. It’s...it’s awful out there. At last report, three people were dead, with several more still in immediate danger. You’re lucky to have still been out so far.

“What are we talking about?” Mateo asked.

“Space debris,” Leona explained. “When Reaver’s ship exploded, it sent shrapnel hurtling towards other objects. Those objects hit other objects, and it just keeps going. It would be like trying to walk across the highway. This is his latest attempt to kill you.”

“How did he know? We were so secretive,” Aura insisted.

“The question is, how are we going to get these two to safety. We cannot be in a moving vessel at midnight.”

“Can we go back to the moon for now?” Mateo asked.

“It would take too long,” Leona said.

“I can get you back down,” Mirage claimed. “Everybody put on your helmets. I’m going to be eating the ship.”

After some arguments, the four of them finally agreed that her plan was their best option, and their only chance for survival. As the ship drew closer towards the debris, they sealed themselves up. Mirage’s nanites chewed on the material of The Gelen and converted it to increase the number of her nanites. They were replicating at an astonishing rate. Mateo watched as the ship was being torn apart. It was only exposed to the vacuum for a few minutes before the nanites were numerous enough to create a second vessel around them.

The new nanite ship had a much smaller interior than the first so that the hull could be extremely thick and protective. Still, Mateo could tell that small pieces of the debris were damaging Mirage as they flew towards her at high speeds. She seemed to feel some level of physical pain. There weren’t any windows, but she kept them updated on how close they were to the surface. The kilometers she was listing off decreased alarmingly fast. Holes began to form between the nanites, but the structure continued to hold. Fire overwhelmed them as their descent was far too steep, but she was trying to get them down as fast as possible. Finally, they were in the air. Mirage transformed her shape so that she was more like a platform than a ship. They continued to fall, and she spoke to them through their comms, I’m doing my best, but I cannot decelerate fast enough. My nanites are faltering, and it’s almost midnight central time.

Mateo watched as the nanite platform grew smaller and smaller. Nanites were dropping away like flies. They weren’t strong enough to hold on to each other. She made one final push, trying to get them over the water. Mateo tore off his helmet and grabbed a handful of nanites, stuffing them down his own throat.

“I’m so sorry, Mateo,” Mirage cried.

“Stay with me, literally,” he yelled as loud as he could through the wind.

“I can either send my consciousness to the nanites you swallowed, or I can remain behind to save your family. I lied. The procedure didn’t work. I have been waiting for you for a year.”

An alarm rang out from Aura’s watch. “No!” Mateo yelled. Leona pulled him into a hug just before they jumped into the future. Mirage’s nanite platform was gone, along with his mother and Samsonite. They were still probably fifty meters up in the air...over land.

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