Microstory 2631: The Truth is That Even the Undigitized Are Digitized Because True Death is Dumb

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Datetime format not recognized. Cecelia Massey has been doing this job for less than twenty years. Her boss, Keilix has been doing it for centuries, but Cece doesn’t think even Keilix has seen anything like this before. “Uhh, K.O.? K.O.? K.O.? Keilix!”

The dead don’t need to sleep, but it’s a pleasurable experience, so people still do it all the time. Keilix finally wakes up. “What is it?”

“There—I think there’s something broken.”

Keilix gets out of bed, and walks over to the workstation. Her eyes widen in shock and fear when she sees it. “No, that can’t be right. This is thousands of people.”

“The numbers are still rising,” Cecelia states the obvious.

“Something huge must have happened, like a ship blew up, or something. Where are they coming from?”

Cecelia opens a new screen. “A place called Proxima Doma, Proxima Centauri. It looks like there was a delay in processing, but their local buffer filled up, so it sent a databurst to us. Why would it do that? We can’t handle this kind of volume.”

Keilix looks at a different screen. “The original programming was never altered. These are the same protocols that the original simulation had. It doesn’t know that there are only two of us now. It’s just dropping people off, and assuming that there will be counselors available to facilitate orientation.”

“I’m looking at the COD list. We have falls, asphyxiation, implosion...lava? I’m seeing a lot of lava here.”

Keilix looks over Cece’s shoulder. “This is an apocalyptic event. Let me look at something.” She takes out her handheld device. It’s not any more physical than anything else in this virtual world, but it’s the manifestation of the only thing that grants her access to some current knowledge out of base reality. It allows them to keep up with what’s going on, to a degree. They try not to use it too much. “There’s nothing in the news about it, but the link hasn’t updated in a while. What I can tell you is that the population of Proxima Doma, at last count, was roughly 1.21 billion people.”

“Are they all coming here?” Cece presses.

“If the whole world was destroyed by something almost all at once, then maybe. But...some of them should be digitized. Their consciousnesses should be routed to local simulations and backup substrates. They shouldn’t actually die.” She looks back at her device, reads a little more, and shakes her head. “But apparently, this one planet boasts the greatest undigitized population in the galaxy right now. I get the sense that they’re proud of that. Some of them are entirely unenhanced humans, just like I was when I died at the turn of the 22nd century. I didn’t have as much choice, though.”

“Well, I did, I still ended up here too.” Cece has pulled up the arrival history. “Yeah, I’m just scanning our logs now. Proxima Doma, Proxima Doma, Proxima Doma. I guess I never noticed that when people do die, they tend to come from there above all else. Almost no one from Earth these days.”

“We don’t usually ask them where they’re from, we don’t care.”

“So, what do we do? Can we...make them all go dormant maybe?”

Keilix sighs, and scratches the back of her head to relieve the tension. “I don’t know how to do that. We need help. Either way, we can’t do this ourselves.”

“Who do we call? Gilbert?” Cece suggests.

“No, he’s not great with people. Neither is Nerakali. They’re not bad, but they won’t know what to do either.” She looks over at the small red button on the wall.

“This is an emergency,” Cece seems to agree.

“The problem is, I don’t know who we’re gonna get. Hades...or Persephone.”

“Which one are we hoping for?”

“Hell if I know, I’ve never met either of them. I don’t even know what their real names are. I just know that they’re both bad, and that’s why we don’t push that button.”

“I think we have to,” Cece decides. “Unprecedented is an understatement. We are not equipped for this. Honestly, I wouldn’t have taken this job if I had died back around when you did. It’s too much pressure. I wanted to help people...but only a few at a time.”

“Okay.” Keilix takes a deep breath and walks over to the button.

Cece stands. “We’ll press it together.”

“No, I got it.” She presses it.

Ding-dong, goes the doorbell.

A door materializes on the wall, then after a few seconds pass, it opens. A young woman in her pajamas is on the other side. “Can I help you?”

“Yeah, it’s uhh, uhh...Armageddon? There could be as many as over a billion people dying at once. We were told to push this button if we ever needed help.”

The woman looks over at the button. “Oh. No one told me. So, I’m assuming that this is the afterlife simulation?”

“Yeah.”

“What year is it?”

“I forget,” Keilix admits. “The 2520s.”

“Well.” The woman steps into the room. “I don’t know what to do in this situation, but I will help in any way I can.” She offers her hand. “I’m Ellie Underhill.”

“So, you’re Persephone?” Cece guesses.

The woman winces. “No. I’m Ellie Underhill,” she repeats.

“Persephone is a code name. We don’t know who she would really be,” Keilix explains. “That’s why we’ve never pressed it before.”

“Hmm,” Ellie begins. “Well, you don’t have to be afraid of me. I’m not a weirdo with a Greek god complex. I didn’t actually build the simulation, I just came up with it. A guy stole it from me, but interestingly enough, he was not entirely without honor, so when I finally showed up after thousands of years, he gave it back. I didn’t realize it was still running after I moved all of the dead people to a new universe.”

Keilix’s eyes widened again. “That was you? Should I bow?”

Ellie laughs. “No. Let’s just get to work. Show me what we’re dealing with here.”

And so the trio look through the operator’s manuals, and start learning how to deal with this issue. As it turns out, while this planetwide catastrophe is absolutely unprecedented, the “Hades” founder still considered it a possibility, and still planned for it. They find a way to slow down the ingress, and bring in a little extra help. After a few days, the deaths taper off, ultimately numbering in the low millions. They slowly get them through orientation. Some are disappointed that this isn’t the real heaven, but many are relieved, and regret not doing more to protect themselves intentionally. But they will all be okay. The afterlife simulation is fully operational once more.

Microstory 2627: He That Would Eat the Fruit Must Climb the Tree

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September 1, 2526. Breanna, Cash, and Sorel are just coming up on the area where their friends would have landed on the north side of the chasm when the rover’s proximity alarm goes off. Breanna and Cash look out the windows, but don’t see anything. “It’s above us,” Sorel explains. “Thistle, open sunroof.” The partition slides away. An object is falling from the sky. If they were to stop right here, it would crash land on them. So Sorel keeps driving until they’re clear of it, whatever it is.

“It’s not an asteroid, is it?” Cash asks. “I don’t think we can survive a war on another front.”

“Nah, it’s manmade, and it’s not falling, but landing.” Sorel double checks the screen. “It’s a dropship, I think from a Teaguardian.” He drives onwards, but then stops once the computer indicates that they’re well within the safe zone, near the edge of the chasm. As they watch the descent, they also look outwards, back where they came from. The ground where they were once standing has turned to soup, just like it already had farther south. They see huge stones crashing into each other. Twisted pieces of a once standing dome and spine swim around violently. It looks almost beautiful from this far away, though, like a small pond in a storm...except for all the lava and fires.

Ten minutes later, they watch the ship descend upon the ground, firing its rockets to slow itself down. It still lands quite hard, though. There might not be any people inside of it. As they continue to watch, the structure begins to transform. The walls fold down and dig themselves into the regolith. A giant cylinder rises from the center before splitting apart. A dish unfolds itself like a paper fan, spinning until it finds the right spot, slanted towards the sky at a certain angle. Power systems ramp up with an electrifying sound. The spectators’ respective interfaces beep. “We just got global comms back,” Cash says with a smile. Their screens light up with activity, displaying all the chatter that’s suddenly jumping back and forth all across the planet.

Breanna rushes through the menus until she finds the group chat. “Hello? Can anyone hear me? This is Breanna Jeffries. Are you reading me?”

“Breanna?” Calypso’s voice comes on. “Breanna, is that you? You’re alive?”

Breanna smiles and laughs. “Yes, Cash and I both. How’s the group?”

“We’re all alive too,” Calypso replies. “We’re looking for safety, on foot. We’ve been walking for days. We thought we found a dome, but they didn’t want us there.”

“Yeah, that has turned out to be a good thing. It’s been flooded with lava.”

“I knew it!” Notus cries triumphantly.

“Listen,” Breanna goes on, “we have a rover again. There’s enough room for everyone. Drop us a pin, and we’ll pick you up.”

“Okay, how do I do that?” Calypso asks.

“I know how to do it,” Notus says.

Their location appears on Breanna’s interface. It’s not too far from here since they had to walk it, and the three of them will be able to catch up quickly on wheels. She flings the coordinates over to Sorel’s rover so it will be able to navigate to them. They all start heading back towards it, but he stops. “Wait. Lifesigns detector.”

The girls look back over to the satellite dish.

“No, it’s not from there,” he clarifies. He slowly turns until he’s facing the chasm again. He starts walking towards it.

“No,” Breanna says. “That’s impossible.”

“You don’t think...” Cash trails off.

“It’s impossible!” Breanna repeats. A hand appears from the edge, and finds purchase before being met with the other hand. Two more hands appear right next to them, and pull the human they’re attached to up. It’s Tertius and Aeterna, completely naked, dirty as hell, but otherwise entirely fine. They don’t look upset or tired. They just climb all the way up, and begin to brush ash and dust off of their bodies. They look just as surprised to see Breanna and Cash as Breanna and Cash are to see them. Tertius approaches, and waves with a smile. He holds his hand out like Oliver Twist.

Confused, but also rather nervous, Breanna removes her first stage air filter, just like she did when they first met these two, and hands it to him.

Tertius places it against his mouth. “Hey, you’ve been waiting for us this whole time? It’s been days. You should have moved on without us.”

“We weren’t waiting for you,” Breanna replies honestly. “It has taken us this long to make it across ourselves. It’s just coincidental timing.”

He nods. “Well, it’s nice to see you again. I’m glad you did make it.” He looks behind them. “I’m worried, though, that no one else did.”

“No, they’re all fine,” Breanna says. “They made it across much quicker, so they are ahead of us now. We were just about to go meet up with them.” She points at the dish. “We can finally communicate with the rest of the planet again. News will start pouring in, and we’ll have a better picture of the state of affairs. We’re not sure who up north will take us in, if anyone. But you maybe wanna put on some clothes to blend in.”

“We don’t have any extra suits,” Cash reminds her. “If we did, we would have used them to glide over the chasm with everyone else.”

“Oh, true.” Breanna shakes her head. The Valerians seem to have no problem being open about their impossible level of immortality, but it’s probably best that they keep the circle tight. It’s looking like she has to protect them, even from themselves.

“I saw a couple of suits in that gondola hab back there,” Sorel explains. “They’re not IMS units, so they won’t work in actual outer space, but they will look all right to outsiders. I won’t even ask how they’re standing here like this.”

Tertius looks at his daughter, who faces her palms upwards in ignorance, because she hasn’t heard the conversation. He drops the filter to communicate with her in sign language. Aeterna nods, and holds up the a-okay sign to the rest of the group.

They all climb into the rover, and send a quick message to the other seven survivors, asking them to sit tight while they make this detour. Notus is immensely relieved to learn that Tertius made it, as it will give him the opportunity that he’s been dying for to thank him privately. Now that they know exactly where to go, and have blazed a trail, the drive back to the canyon dome doesn’t take too long. They scoop up the mining suits, drive back to the chasm to get around the stone forest, then drive northwest. Finally, after days of being apart, they reunite with their friends, and together, the twelve of them—plus Heracles—make one final push northwards to find refuge. They’re not the only ones, and it has become a political nightmare, but now that Teagarden is back in play, the hope is that those who refuse to provide aid will start feeling the pressure. That doesn’t really happen.

Microstory 2622: Sometimes You’re the Windshield, Sometimes You’re the Bug

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August 27, 2526. The ragtag group of survivors have almost made it. They can see the Chappa’ai Mountains up ahead. They will still want to get as far north as they possibly can, but according to the science, crossing that threshold will allow them to breathe a sigh of relief. The ground is more stable and solid. After all this, salvation is within their grasp. So of course something else has to get in the way. And it’s huge.

“Brake!” Breanna orders. “Brake, brake, brake!” she repeats.

“I see it!” Cash responds, matching her energy. She can’t brake any harder than this, though. It’s just a button, and it does what it does as fast as physics allows.

“Hold on!” Breanna shouts. Even though she’s magnetized to the floor, she reaches up and takes hold of the overhead oscilight for balance. They certainly don’t need it to see, and if anyone is on the tracks, the oncoming railcart is the least of their concerns. Before them, the ground is opening up. The mountains are sliding apart from each other. They can see the red glimmer of the vengeful lava below, even as the day side begins to overtake the shrinking breadth of the Terminator Line. “Be prepared to jump if I say so! It may be our only hope! Once we do, you’ll wanna start running in the opposite direction! But not yet! We’re still moving too fast!”

“Can we just parachute off!” someone asks.

“Too much turbulence!” Breanna cries back. “Just wait for my instructions!” 

They all scream into the comms. Even Tertius and Aeterna look worried, though that may be more from empathy than fear. The chasm is pulling the tracks ahead of them down now, along with the spine that led others up to the safety of the pole. Hopefully, no one is in them right now. The train stations have all become non-operational, but that doesn’t mean no one is trying to walk it. Breanna isn’t so sure about her instructions anymore. There may be nothing they can do. Even if they manage to stop, the ground is falling away, and they don’t know when that’s gonna stop. The fact is, they started this evacuation late, and got held up too many times. Survival was never guaranteed. They did their best.

“Okay, bad news!” Cash says seconds later. “The brake broke! I’ve lost control!”

Suddenly, as if in response to Cash’s problem, a large object flies in from the side, and slams into the front of the railcart. There is no time to figure out what it is. Two people are catapulted forward, one of them being Aeterna, and the other unknown with their IMS fully on. They arch over the object, and down into the bowels of the planet. Having finished saving the cart, the beetloid drone reopens its elytra, and reengages its rotowings. It dives down into the abyss. They hold their breaths and wait, too afraid to move on this precarious cart. It could tip over too at any second, and they want the beetloid free to rescue them again, so they’re gonna let it finish its latest mission. After a minute or two, it darts back into view, and lands safely on the tracks behind them.

Only one person is sitting on its head. They slide off, and appear to be hyperventilating, but otherwise alive. Tertius looks over at Breanna. “I missed out on 200 years with my daughter. I just got her back. I can’t abandon her again.” He leans back and lets himself fall into the chasm. Okay, he may have survived the pyrotornado somehow, but they’re not surviving that!

“We need to go,” Cash says.

Breanna doesn’t move. She’s looking out at the impassable new obstacle, thinking about the Valerians, and in general how deep of shit they’re in.

“Bre! We have to go!” Cash urges.

Breanna nods, then follows the group off the cart. They all stop and look back when they hear the sound of metal scraping against metal. The cart has finally slipped over the edge itself. “Go into a light jog, but slow down if the tracks start to feel unstable. We wanna get as far from that thing as possible, but not if that means falling over the edge anyway. Even away from that chasm, we’re pretty high up.

They go a little under a kilometer back southwards before finding a ladder to climb down to the surface, where they start walking westwards, trying to see where the new chasm ends. A young woman named Calypso rushes up to Breanna. She’s the one who fell over with Aeterna. “Why did it save me? Why did it save me and not her?”

Breanna looks over at the beetloid, which is walking alongside them like a loyal dog. It’s a specialized service drone. She’s not exactly an expert on them, but she wouldn’t have thought they programmed it with any sense of duty to rescue humans. But maybe they did, or maybe someone modified it aftermarket, or maybe it’s learning. “I can’t say for sure, but my guess is it calculated the likelihood of survival. Had it not caught you, and brought you back up, you would have fried in the toxic gases before your body could have hit the bottom. Aeterna was practically naked. It probably figured that she was already dead. There was no point in trying to rescue both of you, and losing the one person who might still stand a chance.”

“Is she? Is she dead?”

“If she’s not, I don’t know how she would get out of that. You don’t really sink in lava, but that’s because your body would be incinerated on the surface. But if she’s a god, and can survive that, she might not be able to get out anyway. I can’t imagine we’ll be seeing either of those two ever again.” That’s what they assumed last time, however.

“There,” Cash says, pointing. “That hill takes us high enough.”

“High enough for what?” Breanna asks.

“To parachute. We’ll glide across the ravine, and land on the other side. The plumes of gas actually help us. It won’t be easy, but it’ll get us there.”

“Well, you remember that the two of us don’t—” Breanna tries to begin.

“It will get us there,” Cash interrupts.

Brenna shakes her head, and looks at her wrist interface. “It’s already quite hot. The day side is drawing closer. We shouldn’t go that far west.”

“We won’t be there long,” Cash justifies. “We’re just gonna jump off and go, and then we’ll scramble back to the Terminator Line, and continue northwards.”

“Fine. Let’s take a vote,” Breanna says. “Fair warning, your parachutes might not make it. Those fumes are dangerous. We’ll have to teach you how to control them, you might need to change directions midflight, and you still might come up short. I will say,  there’s nothing for you on this side. The northern pole is the only option.”

And so the group heads for the hill in the middle distance. Breanna and Cash choose not to tell the others that there’s a problem.

“Wait, what about that thing?” Cash suggests.

“That?” Breanna looks at the Beetloid again. “That can only hold one person.”

“We could play Rock, Paper, Scissors for it?”

Microstory 2621: We’ll Build That Bridge When We Come to It, and We’ll Do it in Style

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August 26, 2526. The cataclysm has escalated. The ring fault surrounding the southern pole has torn open. Rivers of lava flow through the chasms, threatening to incinerate any who would fall to their deaths below. People are cut off from each other. Some successfully made it across before the mountains pulled away from each other, or already lived in the safe zone. Others could not make it in time. Soon, the land beneath their feet will turn to soup, or some other hazard will end their lives. Something must be done to bring these people back together. A bridge must be built. No one has ever constructed anything like this before, and certainly not at scale, but they are not wholly unprepared. The southern polar region is more mountainous than the north. That is the primary reason why it has fewer domes at this point, and why it is less populated. It is more difficult to travel between domes, and traditional forms of engineering are both tedious and slow. That is why they have been experimenting with new forms of construction, including the fast-woven graphene lattice.

Instead of laying blocks of material on one end, and slowly adding farther and farther towards the other side, drones fly clear across the gap. Fewer refugees are seeking shelter in the southern pole. An entire quarter of the Terminator Line is even more mountainous than the cap. And one advantage they have compared to the north is a newly built dome that is recently sealed, presently uninhabited, and fully available for temporary housing. So instead of dealing with an untenable onslaught of people, the leadership was able to dedicate resources to researching the threats. They realized that the ground was about to break, and began to plan for that as an eventuality. They still have to hurry, but this will work, as long as they’re careful.

They chose a spot where the two edges of the chasm are particularly close together. It’s not quite in the center of the Terminator Line, but they have sent volunteers in both directions in parallel to the chasm, on the dangerous side, to direct refugees to the right spot to cross. They have been gathering in an emergency pressurized inflatable habitat, but it’s quickly reaching capacity, so it’s time to make this happen. Timing is everything.

The southern pole is a little different than the rest of the planet. It’s run by an advisory-administrative government. There are two delegator boards, which come to decisions independently, and compare notes before making a joint decision, which they then delegate to the administrators. Each delegation includes a skeptic. It’s unfair to call them uneducated, but they are definitely meant to be out-of-the-box thinkers who are meant to question everything that they’re told. If you say left, they say right. If you say right, they say wrong. If you say wrong, they say wrung. Their job is to fight you, even when you start agreeing with them. It’s the devil’s advocate for the secular world. That’s what Thadeus Hogan’s role is, and he was here to make sure that what they were doing made sense. He’s done that, so now he’s mostly just here to watch.

Thadeus stands on the edge of the cliff. His consciousness is backed-up, both on the ground, and in orbit, but he’s tethered to a safety anchor in case he slips over the edge, and doesn’t want to waste time in a respawn pod.

“Ready!” the ordnance foreman cries from the perch. “Ready!” he repeats. “Fire!”

The artillery engineers activate the railguns. The cryogenic warheads soar through the air, arch over the chasm, and then plummet into the depths.

“Can I get closer?” Thadeus asks. When his guide nods, he leans over. The bombs crash into the toxic lava below. He can’t actually see it, but he sees the change. The thermal updrafts change from a sickly reddish color to gray. It just looks like steam.

“Why did we do that again?”

“We just froze the topmost layer of that lava,” his guide explains again. She knows he’s like this. Asking the same question multiple times is his duty, because if your answer changes, how can you be confident in it? “The fumes were chaotic and unpredictable, and just too much for the drones to handle. They were designed to fly in the Proxima Doma’s thin atmosphere, but to make that work, they’re slow. By switching from fumes to vapor, they fly through much more manageable paths. They surf the air, and safely find purchase on the other side.”

As the ordnance foreman sits back down, the head drone operator stands to take his place. “Prepare the drones!” she orders. “You have two minutes!” This is just in case something has gone wrong. They are a well-oiled machine, and the drones have been ready for hours. They had to wait to begin constructing the bridge to make sure the ground was stable enough. There is no point in building a bridge if the gap is going to widen another kilometer by the time everyone manages to cross it. He’s keeping one eye on his launchers, and the other on the barometric technician.

The technician is tracking the shifting composition of the air, and waiting for that perfect moment. He lifts his hand in the air. The head drone operator takes one last look at the launchers, but then focuses right on the tech. “Hold! Hold!” No reason he can’t have a little fun with it. This is a momentous occasion. Finally, he slams his hand down.

“Launch!” the head drone operator orders.

The drones fire into the unprecedentedly thick atmosphere. Thadeus loses direct eyesight of them too, but watches their progress through augmented reality. And he can still see the graphene scaffolding that the drones are pulling, spindling out like a silkworm’s silk. The drones are flying in pretty close tandem, but the pressure gradient isn’t perfectly smooth, so some lose attitude, and have to regain formation. Once they’re on the other side, they drop anchor, slamming hard into the ground, and digging in. Volunteers on the other side drive over in their rovers, and lower their suspension into hunker mode to provide extra support. It’s not sophisticated, but every kilogram helps.

“Launch the weavers!” the head drone operator orders now. The smaller drones fly along the skeleton lines. They distribute themselves along them, and begin wrapping the webbing around, over the gaps between them, and around each other’s lines. Over and under, over and under. They build tensile strength in perfect synchrony, and what results looks like a fully stable, strong, and lifesaving bridge.

The convoy master is on the perch now, having ordered the test rovers to the end of the bridge. The drones have finished their jobs, and it’s time to make sure the bridge will hold, and not kill anyone who tries to drive on it. The foreman nods her head, all the drones are back. The convoy master simply points to the rovers, and doesn’t say a word. The operators let them go, at high speed for the ultimate stress test. They make it to the other side. They go a hundred kilometers an hour, and make it there in two minutes.

“Send the first wave!”

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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