Microstory 2658: Full Roster

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Gemini Pro text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3.1

Azad reaches down and scoops Jiminy’s gun up, so he now has both the fully operational model, and Reagan’s prototype, which isn’t as powerful. He looks down at Vanore, who is starting to do some breathing exercises. “Let me have her so I can take her to get medical attention.”

Mandica stands with Vanore in her arms. “No, take me and her both.”

He shakes his head. “You need to make sure this never happens again. That man has waged war on the living, and he’s prepared to overtake multiple domes in order to get it done. The Seagate Savior is rallying her people, and I need you to do the same for Ravensgate. I promise, she will receive the best care this side of Gatewood.”

“I brought her back to life,” Mandica explains, “with this stone.” She twists her shoulders demonstratively, but not enough to actually show the Philosopher’s Stone. “But probably only this one copy of her. Her backups are still likely dead, so don’t let anything else happen to her.” She hands her over to him. “What’s happening?”

“Underbelly is under attack,” Azad answers as he’s accepting Vanore. “Unlike in most cases, we can’t turn this off. They’re coming from other domes, since I don’t have time to explain how, let’s just say, they’re not using the door. You saw how I got here, and you’ll see me leave. There is more to this universe than you know, and whoever this person is, he has the same power. Real power.” He magically disappears with Vanore.

Mandica pulls her earpiece out of her pocket, and calls Elysia. “What’s going on over there? Are you being attacked?”

“Yes!” Elysia replies as she’s grunting. “Zombies!”

“Zombies?” Mandica questions. Zombies were played out centuries ago.

“Hordes of them! We think they’re coming from Zombiedome! There’s, like, a portal. A real portal. We don’t know how they’re doing it!”

“We need to get back to the vactrain,” Malika offers.

“That will take too long. Do you have any guns?” Mandica asks Reagan.

“Just this.” He holds his arm out. His own nanobots crawl out from his sleeve. They shape themselves into a simple tube, with a handle for him to grip, before exacting details and texture onto the cylinder as they bond together into a more solid shape.

“Yeah, that’ll do.” She just points, and lets him blast a hole in the tower wall.

“Don’t be mad, but I think we should go supersonic,” Mandica tells them both.

“We have definitely not tested that,” Reagan warns.

“Underbelly is, what, about 2,000 kilometers away? So if we just go—”

“No, no, it’s not happening. I won’t allow it,” Reagan insists.

Two minutes later, they have reached the opposite side of the Loegria dome. Malika is carrying Reagan by the waist. He blasts a hole in one of the dome’s panes so they can fly right through it. Now they’re flying over the real Castlebourne, no longer protected from the thin and unbreathable atmosphere. Fortunately, all three of them can survive this without even dying once. It’s not particularly comfortable at these speeds, but they only have to manage for half an hour, moving at roughly Mach 3. It’s actually better for them to go this fast now that they’re so exposed. They slow down to cruising speeds, and crash through the Ravensgate pane, but much lower this time since there’s a greater risk of diamond falling down on someone’s head.

They continue to fly at cruising speed until they’ve reached the heart of the city. It too has been overrun by zombies. Some of the other superheroes are fighting them off, along with some supervillains. Everyone else is running for their life. This is a black swan event for them. They were not programmed for this eventuality.

“Why would this Jiminy guy do this?” Mandica questions. “What’s the point? Everyone is either an NPC or using a temporary substrate. Yeah, it might hurt if you die, but they knew what they were signing up for. Does he just want to cause chaos?”

“It’s not just here,” Reagan is looking at his wrist device. “There are zombies in the residences too. Some people there are like you were before that stone. I have to go.”

“Wait!” Mandica urges when he tries to break away.

“I can’t wait! People are going to die!”

“We all saw what Azad did. He has real powers; ones that go against what we all learned about physics. Elysia said the zombie portal is real. But she’s in Seagate. They’re using two different portals, and if they’re all coming from the same place...”

Reagan nods. “Then that’s how they’re getting into the residences too. We have to get to that portal, but first, we need to make one stop.”

The three of them return to the lair.

Jaidia is there in a fresh new body. She’s naked, putting on her original wings since her upgraded ones are still back in Loegria. They have to go on before her costume.

“That was a quick turnaround,” Malika points out.

“Azad knows what’s at stake. I blew past reentry procedures,” Jaidia explains.

Reagan heads for his private lab. He has never let anyone into it before, but he leaves the door wide open this time while he makes a beeline for a raised black cabinet. He inputs his code and biometrics, opening the doors and extending a set of two stairs. Inside is an outfit that none of them has seen before. It’s mostly brown, embellished with some white and silver. It’s not simply a wing apparatus that attaches to the back, but an entire suit which he steps backwards into. The wings are feathered, the rest is piped and painted to be reminiscent of feathers. “Meet my new character...The Harrier.”

“And we’re married to that name?” Malika asks him awkwardly.

“Absolutely,” he replies. He steps out of the cabinet, and walks back down the steps. He’s a little off-balance, but at little risk of tipping over. “Let’s go join the circus.” His visor snaps shut, concealing his identity entirely. He leads the flock out of the lair.

The portal is probably 40 or 50 meters wide, but only a couple of meters tall. Zombies are knocking each other over as they shamble in. The team won’t be able to slip through without encountering them. To protect their wings, they land as close as possible, and start fighting their way through, bashing zombies’ skulls in, and tearing off their heads. It’s a bloodbath, but necessary, and the point of Zombiedome. They were designed to be threatening and deadly, and to die for it so visitors can have their fun. Their teeth are sharp, but not enough to pierce their skin, which is good, because according to Malika, you actually can become a zombie yourself, and either exit the game, or have your brain dumbed down. They are not interested in that here. They keep punching, kicking, and tearing until they’ve reached the portal together, and then they have to keep fighting on the other side to break free. They take flight again to get some rest. They scan the immediate area to find the paths to Seagate and the Residences. It’s not going to be so easy. There aren’t only two more portals, but dozens of them.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 5, 2549

« < » > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Flow text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3.1

On a scale from robot butter-passer to ecumenopolis, the infrastructure that Ramses’ forge core was able to construct during their interim year sat at about a 5.6. This logarithmic scale was designed by a team of futurologists back in the very late 21st century; not just something that he made up himself. The core’s interface was very intuitive for even the dumbest of dum-dums. It was basically a store, where they added things that they wanted to a shopping cart, and the cost—the time it would take to complete the whole project—automatically calculated in the corner. At first, all they wanted was to build a Nexus, which took a healthy chunk of time alone due to its sheer complexity, outmatching all other buildings on their plans combined in that category. Without it, the starter nanites could have resulted in a continent-wide civilization-ready network of interconnected megacities. But what they ended up with was more than enough. There were only nine of them, including the three on the away mission.

There were several arcological megastructure tripods now. If any Earthan were to move here, they would feel right at home. They weren’t actually expecting that to happen, though. They only built all this because they were trying to maximize the time available by hitting that 365-day mark. They figured it was better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. They had no idea what they wanted to use any of this for yet, but that was where the Nexus came in. People from anywhere in the galaxy, or farther, would be able to travel here near-instantaneously. It only had the capacity of a few dozen people, so it wasn’t suitable for some kind of mass-exodus, but it wasn’t useless either. If Hrockas had had access to this level of technology back when he was building Castlebourne, it could have been completed in under a decade. Now there was the simple question of what to name all this.

“I’ve been trying since we got here,” Romana revealed.

“What have you come up with?” Mateo asked her.

“Nothing good. The best ones are Lorramm, Ramlorm, and Marmorl.”

“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...” Mateo said.

“They’re all seven of our initials.”

“Oh.”

“Not enough vowels.”

“Right.”

“We could add E and C for Echo and Clavia,” Angel suggested.

“Leave me out of this,” Clavia insisted, weirdly offended.

“I thought this planet was named Echo,” Marie pointed out.

“Yeah, on the other side,” Romana agreed. “Firstly, I started thinking about this before the weird interversal portal we went through. And secondly, I was brought up to believe that there is no such thing as an alternate self. We’re each unique, even when we come across people who look just like us, and share our memories. I think that goes for planets too. That’s Echo. This is somewhere else.”

“That’s completely true,” Clavia agreed. “When Olimpia screamed the Sixth Key pocket universe into existence, she based it on the original Milky Way, but it’s not an exact copy. It was just mostly close. You should name it something else. My brother would say the same thing if he were here right now.”

Mateo nodded in agreement. “Well, let’s keep thinking while we explore. We also need names for the various domes and cities, I guess. And there’s still the issue of what the purpose of this planet is.”

“I think it’s whatever it needs to be,” Marie began. “If there are more refugees, we can bring them in. If people want to come here for vacation, we will have recreational facilities available too. If someone is in need of a prison, we’ll build a remote site somewhere here, and house them safely. Even if they escape, where are they gonna go? It’s an all-purpose planet. It will serve as the central hub for the Milky Way galaxy one day, and maybe sooner than you think.”

“Well, if that’s the case, we need someone to host,” Angela said. “We need someone who is here every day of the timestream.”

They all looked over at Clavia.

“Oh, no. That’s not my job,” she contended. “I don’t even live in this universe. I’m just here to keep an eye on you people until your friends and lovers come back.”

“Most of our permanent friends are on Castlebourne,” Mateo pointed out, not expecting her to change her mind. “We would have to poach them.”

“Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be a sanctuary,” Romana argued. “I thought it was going to be just for us; a place that no one else could get to. They wouldn’t even know about it. Whatever happened to that plan? We got so wrapped up in what we could do with the forge core that I think we lost the plot.”

“It was always going to end up like this,” Marie countered. “We don’t stay out of things, even when we try. If we ever do need a real sanctuary just for our team, we’ll use some other distant world that Rambo’s Operation Starframe colonizes for us. It doesn’t even have to be big. It could be a hollowed out asteroid, like Linwood’s.”

“That’s gonna take over a hundred years from these staging grounds,” Romana volleyed. “I’m not saying we can’t build out, but my Future!Dad was warning us about something. Even if this planet had nothing to do with anything in his timeline, there might be an inevitable threat that us coming here only worsens, or at least doesn’t alleviate. We keep making these choices which have lasting consequences for the universe. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for your meddling. I would not exist if my Past!Dad hadn’t randomly ended up on Durus at the exact right moment, but what he and Leona did that day resulted in more than just me. It impacted the future of an entire civilization.” She focused her gaze upon her father. “Present!Dad, you helped make Dardius what it is today. I still believe we hastened the carnage on Proxima Doma. Who knows what we’ve done to Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida just by helping a woman carry her potatoes? Again, I’m not saying we bury ourselves in a hole, but let’s try to think things through. Romana Nieman, youngest one here, unlikely voice of reason.”

Romana was right to be cautious. Despite only living one day out of the year, their actions have rippled out in ways that few could have predicted. They would need someone like Bhulan Cargill to see all the branches. That metaphor gave Angela an idea so she went off alone to unpack it. The rest had their own things going on. Marie left the city entirely, reacclimated to the planet’s natural atmosphere, and took a walk in the wilderness. Clavia accompanied her for protection since they didn’t know what else could be out there, and no one should be alone outside of the controlled environment of a dome. Mateo tried to activate the Nexus for a test. Everything seemed to be in working order, but they had not been given their own term sequence. The gods only assigned it once everything was engineered to absolute perfection, but he didn’t know what was wrong, and obviously could not have fixed it either way. Romana just sat down on the dirt, apparently to meditate. This far out, no grass had been planted yet.

A few hours later, Angela called everyone back, claiming to have figured it out. They didn’t know what exactly she had been working on, but they came anyway. After a moment of silence, she began with a single word. “Ramosus.” She uttered it in an accent a couple of times, like she was getting the feel of it, before returning to her normal voice.

“Is that a band, errr...?” Romana hadn’t gotten the chance to make that joke yet.

“It sounds like a corruption of Ramses,” Marie suggested.

“It is,” Angela confirmed. “But it’s not just that. Romana certainly helped point me in that direction, but your comment about branching timelines is what really led me there. It’s Latin for branched, which I think works because the initial hope for this outpost was to serve as the launch point for Starframe. Plus, it has natural life on it. I love those willow-like trees we saw that we think recycle their water by sending it up the trunk, running it across the stems, which hang down, and dripping it back into the soil.

“Yeah, I like it,” Mateo decided. “It’s good that he’s not here, or he would argue against it. We need to find ways of solidifying the name so it’s established before he has the chance to come back here and put a stop to it. Maybe we build a welcome sign?”

“We can start to spread the word,” Romana offered. “If we send it out into the universe, what’s done will be done, whether he likes it or not. People in the past will probably even hear about it. Were you able to turn on the Nexus?”

“On?” Mateo questioned. “Absolutely. Power is not the problem. It just won’t go anywhere. It’s a cell phone without service. I think we need him and Leona back for that. I probably shouldn’t have even tried. It was too risky for an idiot like me.” When they were all silent, he added, “wow. Not even gonna argue that I’m not an idiot. Thanks.”

They all laughed.

“All right,” he went on. “Clavia, do you have anything to contribute?”

“Like I said,” she began, shaking her head, “I’m just here to protect you. I’m not a part of the team.”

“Well...” Mateo thought about it. “Olimpia is my wife, and Echo is her son, and you’re Echo’s sister, so whether you like it or not, we’re family. That doesn’t mean you have to help, or even stick around. Romana’s sisters don’t, but we still love them.”

“I have plenty of family,” Clavia reasoned. “Thanks, though.” She didn’t sound pretentious or arrogant, more just trying to keep her distance. That was fine.

“We don’t need the Nexus,” Marie said after the group relocated from the middle of nowhere to a picnic table. The biggest bottleneck in construction was managing heat dissipation. The laws of thermodynamics always slowed rapid deployment down when not utilizing temporal manipulation technology. Life, on the other hand, was a different story. It would take years to make this dome look less artificial or dead, so for now, this park was only a placeholder. It was just this one table and some fast-growing resilient shrubbery. “We have our tandem slingdrives. We should go to Castlebourne. We’ll let Hrockas know what we’ve built, and give him an idea of where we are. If some refugees from the Exin Empire would like to move, now they have a new option.”

“Shouldn’t we wait for the others?” Angela figured.

“They’re making decisions that affect the multiverse,” her sister reasoned. “They can stand to come back to a surprise or two.”

“They’re your wives best friend,” Romana said to Mateo. “I say it’s your choice.”

“Let’s wait until tomorrow,” he decided. “If they’re not back, we’ll pull the trigger. For today, let’s focus on the capital. I think I have an idea of what we should do with the dome. Let’s lean into the branching theme.”

« < » > Table of Contents

Microstory 2652: A Wing and a Prayer

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Gemini Pro text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3.1

Malika Turnbull follows her friend’s instructions, not knowing if it’s going to work. Truthfully, she hates mythology, but Mandica needs her, and she’s willing to stomach it for as long as she must. Hopefully Plan A will work, and it won’t be too terribly long. She’s standing at the maintenance entrance, still in the plaza, not even too far from the reception. The door is locked, which they figured would be the case since it’s a secure area. She locates the nearest camera, and holds a photo of Mandica up to it. This really probably won’t work. Daedalus would have to be monitoring it, or have some sort of alert system connected to it. Why would he even do that? He’s supposed to be an NPC. He’s not supposed to have any access to the outside world, or the inner workings of any dome. There’s just no way—the door swings open on its own. “Oh. Okay, then.”

She goes through the passageway then lifts the trapdoor, and ends up in the meadow that Mandica described. Oh, she almost forgot. She detaches the pole from her back, extends it to the right length, and jams it into the stone wall to prevent the hidden secondary door from trapping her here. As a visitor, she would have every right to leave, but that would be a whole thing. Hopefully this guy doesn’t take long.

Several hours later, a man wearing brown and gray wings swoops down from the sky holding a torch. He jams it into the ground, and smiles cautiously. “I’m Daedalus. What fate has befallen Mandica Kolar of Tribe Kolar?” Would Daedalus say that?

“She’s fine. She just can’t leave where she is, so she sent me in her stead.”

“Did she find the woman for whom she was looking?” he asks.

“Yes, but Morgana is powerful, and angry with Mandica, for no apparent reason. Mandica is calling in the favor that you owe her.” The original script had her qualify that with expressing the hope that the favor still stands, but Malika suggested that she hold firm so it doesn’t become an argument. Mandica accepted the attitude, because after all, she’s not the one who has to be here with these creatures, wherever they might be lurking. “She is asking you to engineer a pair of wings for her. She requests raven black.”

“Hmm,” Daedalus says. “What is your name, child?”

“Don’t call me that. I’m probably older than you. My name is Malika Turnbull.”

“Fascinating. Are you two related?” he asks offensively.

“Oh, because we’re both black, we must be related.”

“Your names, dear traveler. They’re similar. That is all I meant.”

“Oh.” Malika shrugs. “People have similar names. It happens.”

“I wouldn’t know.” There are other people named Daedalus out there, Malika is sure of it, but she wouldn’t expect the bot version of the original to understand that.

“So. How about those wings?” she presses.

“I will not have to build something new for her. If it is raven black she is after, then it is raven black she shall have. I have a new line of wings back in my shop that I think she’s really gonna love. More compact than ever, more advanced in every way. They exist in your world, but they are quite rare. I had to sacrifice a lot to persuade—”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t need your life story.” Yikes.

“Very well, my new blue friend. Back or front?”

“Huh?”

“Would you like me to carry you, or let you ride on my back?”

“Neither. I will stay here and wait for your return.”

He shakes his head. “This area is unsafe. Spriggans lurk in these woods. You have been lucky so far. Had I known that you would be coming, I would have been waiting for you. Please, you must come with me. You may be immortal, but I do not want to return to this spot to find your dead body, and have to wait for your replacement.”

She refrains from arguing that it was she who had to wait for him before. Instead, she lets him pick her up by her underarms, and fly her over the lands. “This is some bullshit,” she complains on the way. She doesn’t like being controlled by other people.

They land on the top of his tower in the center of a great city. Crowds of people are cheering for him, and seemingly praying. He waves at them respectfully, and blows them kisses, but does not stay long before escorting Malika inside. “This is my flight lab,” he says when they enter the room. “I have others, but I’m obviously fond of wings.”

 “Right.” Again, Malika is not into this sort of stuff, but she is an educated woman. She knows enough about the stories to know that Daedalus didn’t just keep building wings, and become the emperor of the world, or whatever he is here. Mandica said that the mythology has evolved on its own with all these unrelated characters being forced together, but it’s surreal seeing it up close. She still doesn’t wanna stick around.

“Ah, right here,” Daedalus says as he’s walking a dress form mannequin more towards the center of the room. He smiles proudly, which is odd, because there’s nothing on the mannequin. He reaches behind it, and presumably flips some switch. Nanites emerge from the back, and form themselves into wings. They are raven black, as requested. “What do you think? I have other corvids, but this one was specifically inspired by the raven. There are other black ones too, though they’re more metallic.”

“I think she will love these,” Malika has no choice but to admit.

“Do you want to try them out first?” he asks, still standing tall and proud.

“Oh, no. They’re not for me.” Malika walks around to get a better look at the backside, and the housing unit. “Besides, what would I be testing? She didn’t specify what she’s looking for. She didn’t know they could collapse like this. As long as they work, she will accept them. I presume you don’t have a return policy.”

“For her, I absolutely do,” Daedalus says. “But you really should try them. If not, I have other models, perhaps in blue? This might be your last chance.”

“Okay, fine.” She’s a guest here, right? She doesn’t want to be rude. She only gave up being a superhero in Underbelly because her substrate was destroyed. She still likes to have fun. The blue wings are not quite the same shade of blue as her character, but perhaps that’s a good thing. Blue Umbra is dead, and unlike Ravensgate Rescuer, she’s never coming back to life. She lets him help her put the apparatus on, and take her out to the edge of the building. If he’s trying to kill her, he’ll fail. Her mind will just stream over to her nearest backup. She leaps from the building, activates propulsion, and begins to soar through the air. It’s a magnificent feeling. She was obviously just flying, but it’s better to be in control. She spends an hour up there, feeling the wind in her face, and enjoying life for the first time in a long time. She lands back on the roof with a huge smile. “Thank you for letting me have that experience.”

“It doesn’t have to end,” he says. “You can keep them.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, why not? No one here can appreciate them like a real-worlder can.”

“Well, thank you,” She’s not gonna argue. “Do you have one in red and black?”

Microstory 2651: Wildly Successful and Alive

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Gemini Pro text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3.1

Reagan jumps out of his seat. He doesn’t press himself against the wall, but he looks incredibly scared of Mandica, and is not relaxing. He starts clutching his chest, and for good reason. With Mandica’s heightened senses, she can hear how hard his heart is beating. “How are you alive? How are you here?”

Mandica hops off the table, and strides over to the mirror to check her back. The stone is still embedded in her skin, exactly where it was before. It’s glowing again, just as it was in the mortuary. Why is he so confused? It worked again, that makes sense. “Was your memory erased?” she asks him. “I don’t understand why you’re surprised.”

“You were a pancake,” Reagan retorts. “There was—oh my God, it was horrific. You were completely unrecognizable. I...I don’t want to describe the carnage in greater detail, but there was nothing left besides the stone. It was perfectly unharmed, but that’s it. After they removed the train, I swiped the stone, because I didn’t want it falling into the wrong hands, but I didn’t think it would bring you back from that. You...Jesus, Mandica. I’ve not been able to sleep for the last two nights. I felt responsible. I encouraged you to become the Ravensgate Rescuer. I helped train you. I...I...”

“I’m sorry for that. I guess we didn’t know the extent of the stone’s power.”

“I was in love with you!” he cries. “Well, I still am, but I started to mourn, and now I’m profoundly confused. I should be relieved, but it feels unreal.”

Mandica nods. “It’s a shock, I get it.” She looks down at her naked body. No injuries, no scars. No blemishes either. Everything looks brand new. It is new. If her body was pancaked under that train, then the stone would have had to rebuild her from scratch, which is probably why it took two or three days for her to come back this time. “We’ll get through it, though. This is a gift. I think I might not be able to die at all. I mean if a 300-ton train couldn’t do it, what could? I’m like you now, and our friends. You don’t worry about them dying, do you? Your anxiety will go away.”

“Their minds are backed up. That I understand,” he reasons.

“This is even better. I seem to walk around with my backup. As long as the stone survives, I will too.” She places a hand on his shoulder, feeling him twitch at her touch.

“We don’t know that the stone is invincible. Maybe blunt force isn’t a problem, but it has some ridiculous weakness, like battery acid, or...chocolate.”

She smiles as she pivots his body so they’re facing each other. “What kind of life would I be living if I couldn’t have chocolate?”

“Stop joking. We can’t get too excited. It might turn you into a zombie, or—”

“You stop,” she insists. “You’re spiraling. These worst case scenarios are not helpful. I’m not gonna go looking for death, but I’m not gonna hide away either. I’m done with that. I put on this suit without us even knowing that the stone wasn’t a one-time thing. Now that we know it’s not, I’m emboldened. I was hesitant out there with Velvet Thunder. It’s what got me killed. I’m not saying it won’t happen again, but this experience has given me a huge boost in confidence.” When he looks away again in sadness, she gently pulls at his chin. “I want you there with me. If Blue Umbra doesn’t come back, I would like us to be partners. I can’t promise you anything beyond that,” she adds awkwardly, “but I think we make a great team.”

He sighs. “We don’t know that yet. All I know is how I feel. I’ve met a lot of superheroes, but none like you. You walked right in here without protection. You are the bravest person I know; probably the bravest in the galaxy. But yes, I would rather have a working relationship with you than nothing at all.”

“And would it be okay if Cardinal Sin is with us as a trio? She expressed interest.”

He smiles now, starting to relax. “She doesn’t go by that anymore. She realized that it didn’t make any sense to maintain her original name if she switched sides. She’s Cardinal Virtue now. People are really starting to accept her. She reacted quite strongly to your death, and people saw that. Even though Velvet Thunder didn’t technically drop the train on you, they’re blaming him for it. He never wanted to be that hated. He may exit the game because of this. You should go see him.”

“I think I will. I don’t want him to feel any guilt.”

She doesn’t end up doing that. Instead, Reagan invites everyone to a meeting, reportedly to discuss funeral arrangements. It was Mandica’s idea to lie. He reaches out to Malika, who has to return from Castlebourne’s north pole first. Elysia left the simulation too, but was closer by. She will not say where. It sounds very hush-hush. Once everyone has arrived, Mandica makes her grand entrance. They’re all upset and all overjoyed at the same time.

No one else confesses their undying love to her, but Elysia does give her a certain look. After the hubbub dies down a little, she pulls Mandica aside for a more private conversation. “Listen. After you died a few days ago, I threw myself into work. After I died, the executive administrative authority offered me a sort of...job. I was holding off on making any radical commitments because I was training you, but I thought that was over. I didn’t want to think about what happened, so I tried to put Ravensgate in my rearview mirror.” Wow, a lot managed to happen in the last few days. “Since you were dead, it didn’t seem to matter, but now that you’re back, you should know...they know about you. They saw what happened at the jewelry store, and the train yard. They’ve been watching you. I didn’t get the impression that they were all that upset about it. I mean, they had weeks to pull you out, and didn’t. Still, you have a right to know.”

“I suppose we should not have been too optimistic about that. They got cameras all over the place. They were bound to notice. Thank you for telling me, I’m sure it will end up okay.” She means it. “Can you tell me about the project? Will you be going back?”

Elysia nods. “Ravensgate has been wildly successful in their eyes. They only built one city under one dome so as not to waste resources on an unproven concept. After decades of play and hype, it’s become one of the more popular destinations for visitors. They have had to start a waiting list because there is too much demand. You don’t want too many superheroes in one city, so they’re building a new one, under a new dome.”

“Oh, cool. That’s impressive. Congratulations,” Mandica says to her.

“Thanks. It’s not yet announced, but since my version of the Rescuer is dead, they might have me become a new character, after I’m done helping design it.”

“That’s really great, Lys, I’m happy for you.” She notices Malika eyeing the exit door. “I wanna hear more about it, but I need one moment before Malika escapes.” She jogs over to her other friend. “Hey. Are you going back to Aquilonian Deep?”

“Yeah. I’ve just been going through my own stuff. It’s not about you.”

“I can appreciate that, and I don’t wanna pressure you, but if you’re gonna be out there, maybe you could take a detour? I can’t leave the dome even though it might not matter anymore. Could you pick something up from someone who owes me a favor?”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 12, 2525

« < » > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Gemini Pro text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3.1

No one chased the team as they fled the city, probably because they hadn’t done anything wrong, so the locals had no reason to try to apprehend them. Most of the team didn’t even know why they were running. They just trusted that Leona had good reason to order them to. She had to remind them to slow down, though, because their bodies moved too fast. They were supposed to be normal humans who were born a few decades ago, and would die several more decades from now. Finally, when they were out of the city limits, and safe within the coverage of the trees, they were able to stop. “Rambo, you understand what’s going on?” Leona asked him.

“I have an idea. Fascinating development. I need to get my hands on the slingdrives, so I can figure out why we’re off the mark. Proxima Centauri is close to Sol, but it’s not Sol. We also jumped to our next year too early”

“No, I mean, with the people in this dome. Do you understand why we ran?”

“Oh, of course I do. The Oblivios.”

“Then please go check the perimeter. Do it quietly. There could be campers or homesteaders, or just hikers. I’ll explain what happened to everyone else. I’m not sure if they’ve ever heard of Oblivios.”

“On it, boss.” Ramses left.

Leona caught her breath so she could think more clearly. “Okay. Oblivios. They came to this planet with the intention of living a more simple life, with very primitive technology. It’s like Castlebourne’s Dome for Pioneers, but for real.”

“They don’t look like pioneers,” Angela pointed out.

“That was 300 years ago. The reason they’re called Oblivios is because they had their minds wiped. The first generations didn’t remember advanced technology. They didn’t even know that they were in a dome, so they didn’t pass stories onto their children. Most of the criticisms of the project were about how they would eventually end up like this. You can’t stop progress. Since whatever dogma they had against tech was lost to them, they couldn’t instill such values into their descendants, so those descendants kept trying to make their lives better.” She pointed back in the direction of the city. “This is where that leads.”

“You’re gonna wanna see this, sir,” Ramses said through comms.

“If you see people, don’t talk to yourself.”

“I’m sure they’ve developed short-range wireless by now. There’s something I don’t think they’ve made yet, though, and I’m looking right at it.”

“Be right there,” Leona responded.

The group walked over to Ramses’ location, and before they caught up, saw what he was referring to. A gargantuan tower rose up into the sky, and disappeared above the clouds. The city they came from was advanced, but not like this. It took the kind of megaengineering that the hosts needed to build the domes themselves. It was hard to tell, but it might have risen all the way up to the ceiling. It might have been structurally necessary, since this dome was so much older than the ones on Castlebourne, but probably not.

Leona tilted her head. “That looks familiar to me. Why does it look familiar?”

“We’ve seen towers before,” Mateo pointed out.

“Yeah...” Leona wasn’t so sure. It was of plain design, but not generic.

“There’s no one around,” Ramses informs them. “Let’s just jump over to the base, and see what’s up with it.”

Leona was hesitant, but she looked around too, and checked her lifesigns detector. They were calibrated for human life, and sufficiently related cousin species, so they should be pretty accurate in a world that didn’t have transhumanism yet, but there was no way to be sure. They weren’t even worried about naked eyes anyway, but surveillance. “Okay, fine. Let’s just slip back into the trees first.”

They hid away, and then teleported to the tower. As soon as they appeared, a door opened up, likely via motion sensor. They all stepped into the elevator, and let it take them all the way up to the top, which yes, was right there at the dome’s zenith. A woman greeted them when the doors opened. “Greetings, travelers. I saw you teleport in. My name is Aeterna Valeria. I run this joint.”

“The tower, or the dome?” Mateo asks.

“Both, I guess.”

“You’re related to Tertius Valerius,” Marie guessed.

“Yeah, he, uhh...he was my father.”

“We just saw him not too long ago,” Romana explained. “He’s still alive.”

“I don’t really see it that way. It’s been something like two hundred years for me.”

There was an awkward pause in the conversation, which Leona needed to break. “So...report?”

“Yeah, we’ll get to that. Are you hungry? I have a synthy. It takes a few hours, but I’ve already synthesized some mashed potatoes and green beans for myself, if you’re interested in joining me. I like leftovers, so I always make extra.”

None of them was hungry, but they agreed to eat to be polite. It was good, and interesting to go back to regular food, instead of just programmable dayfruit or dayfruit smoothie. Leona needed to break the silence again while they were eating. “The people down there. What do they think of this tower?”

“They can’t see it,” Aeterna began to explain. “I have my father’s powers. I make them forget. I make them forget the tower at the same time they’re looking at it. It’s not technically invisible, but effectively so. I exempted you from it when you showed up.”

“Did you notice that they have moved past their original mandate?” Marie pressed.

Aeterna rolled her eyes. “Of course they did. We knew it was gonna happen. Our key contact died, but before she did, she and my father would fight all the time about keeping the dream alive. He said he promised he would erase people’s memories, but that he wouldn’t govern their thoughts. If someone came up with the lightbulb, they could have a freakin’ lightbulb. So that’s what they did, and they kept doing it, and now they’re here.”

“They said something about tunnels,” Mateo brought up.

“Yeah, they interact with the other domes,” Aeterna confirmed.

“How does that work?” Romana questioned.

“The others are pretty good about it. They don’t understand the technology, and they certainly don’t know that there’s a pretty girl up in this tower with magical memory powers, but they play their parts. Most of the nearby domes were also once intentionally primitive, though with no one like me. The Oblivios don’t really get how the dome works, but they know that they can’t go outside. They used drones to find the wall a long time ago, in defiance of the sonic deterrents, and for some reason, they didn’t freak out about it. It looked like a barren wasteland, and it made them sick, but they saw through the ruse anyway, and now they’re about to figure out the whole thing. The weird part about it is that they simply accepted that this was how their little pocket of the universe functioned. I was expecting riots, but everyone’s okay. It’s crazy really; a fascinating social experiment, I’m sure.”

“If they know they’re in a dome, why are you still here?”

“They know they’re in a dome because the data told them so. The drones kept crashing into the holographic walls, and I can wipe their memories of it all I want, but they’re gonna look back at that data, and it’s going to challenge their beliefs. So yeah, I gave up. But they still can’t see the tower. I’m still making them forget that they’re looking at a superscraper in the middle of it all. It’s limited in area, so it’s easier. They’re not looking for it, whereas they were looking for a way through the wasteland.”

“You ever thought about just stopping?” Romana offered.

Aeterna consulted her watch. “Yeah, won’t be long now.”

“What do you mean?” Mateo asked.

“The planet is going through a period of instability,” Aeterna went on. “Back on Earth, technologies like LiDAR were inevitable. Earth is too big, and you gotta navigate it. It’s easier to let computers do it for you. Here, in this cramped space, they didn’t need it. Human-driven cars are fine. You never have to go very far.”

“The tremors finally gave them a reason,” Leona realized.

“Bingo. Necessity being the mother of invention, it was suddenly absolutely necessary that they build sensor arrays to measure the world around them. Weather, for the most part, can be controlled in here, but we can’t stop the ground from shaking. They feel it just like everyone in all the other domes does.”

Ramses nodded. “And as soon as they turn on one of these sensor arrays, it’s going to pick up on the tower that humans keep forgetting, even when a camera records video of it, and plays it back later.”

Aeterna nodded back. “I won’t be able to combat that. And honestly, I shouldn’t try. The tower was a dumb idea that my father had, and I stuck around because once it was built, it couldn’t be dismantled, or it would ruin everything. They thought that someone with our power would have to stay here forever to keep it working, but the scope of this place is not limitless. They were always going to find the wall, and the data from their geological surveys would always contradict their perceptions. The ancestors thought, if they just went back to the way things were, they would stay that way. But that’s not what happened before, or they wouldn’t have needed to leave Earth to reclaim that way of life in the first place. So shortsighted.”

“Why did Tertius leave? He didn’t even tell us that he had a daughter,” Mateo said, worried about how she would react.

“Well, he gave up on the Oblivios a long time ago. I don’t know why I’ve been holding on. I suppose in rebellion to him. I told him, if he left, he couldn’t come back. He has respected that, which I appreciate.”

“It might not have been as long for him as it’s been for you,” Leona reminded her. “I didn’t get the sense that it had been a full 300 years since he last saw me.”

Aeterna shrugged. “Whatever.”

“What if...” Romana began. “What if you did see him again? Would you be mad?”

Aeterna considered the question. “A year ago, I might have been, but as I said, this is all ending anyway, so it would be fine. I’m not gonna break down crying, and hug my daddy, but we wouldn’t fight. Well. I wouldn’t pick a fight. Let’s just say that.”

Romana accepted this answer, and decided that this somehow translated to her taking a matchstick out of her breast pocket, and setting it down on the table ceremoniously.

“What’s that?” Mateo asked.

“It’s a muster match. Light it, and Tertius Valerius will appear.”

“He gave this to you?” Mateo pushed harder. “Why would he do that? Did he know that we would end up here? Did you?”

“Of course she did,” Ramses deduced. “She brought us here.”

Romana’s demeanor didn’t change. She remained cool. “I spend more time in the timeline. I get to know people. He asked me to come here. He said that anytime would be all right, but he clearly really wanted it to happen by 2525, so I’m glad we got a move on with it.”

“I don’t like that you did that,” Ramses admitted. “I don’t like that you messed with my slingdrive.”

“I don’t like that you lied to me,” Mateo added.

“This is between a father and his daughter, but a different father and daughter,” Romana defended. She redirected her attention to Aeterna. “He asked me not to light it. He said that you have to do it, so it’s up to you if it gets lit at all. He did want to be here with you when the tower becomes detectable, but he understands if you’re not ready, and will accept it if you never are.”

Aeterna stared at the match for a moment before picking it up. She held it between her thumb and forefinger for another moment, until slipping the other end between the thumb and forefinger of her other hand. She was about to break it, or was at least contemplating it. No one knew what was going through her head, but it looked like an internal debate as her nostrils flared, and her lips moved, suggestive of the words that she was thinking of. At last, she let go of the match with one hand, and scraped the head against the wooden table. A flame burst out of it. It looked like any normal lit match.

For a second, nothing happened, then a smoke portal appeared a couple of meters away. When the smoke cleared, Tertius was standing there. He smiled kindly at his daughter, barely registering that there were other people in the room. They just regarded each other, her not being able to move, and him not wanting to make the first move. Suddenly, Aeterna burst into tears, and ran over to hug her dad.

« < » > Table of Contents

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 11, 2524

« < » > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Flow text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3.1

It wasn’t until the next year when Mateo, Leona, and Angela could safely reactivate their tandem slingdrives. They technically could have left shortly before midnight, but they decided it was for the best. They left a message with the Vitalie who lived on Vitalemus, to relay to the Vellani Ambassador if she ever heard from again. She hadn’t, but had kept apprised of Goldilocks Corridor news, and no one had reported seeing them lately, so no one knew where they were at this point. With nothing left for them here, they made the jump, and returned to the beacon floating around in the space where Castlebourne once was. They weren’t alone. They quickly picked up comms from Ramses, Marie, Olimpia, and Romana. They only had to make a few jumps to rendezvous with each other.

“Gang’s all here,” Mateo mused.

“How did you get back here?” Angela asked the other half of their team.

“You were taking too long,” Ramses began to explain. “We decided to come back here to see if you were stranded after failing to track Castlebourne’s new location. The rest is obvious. We were just about to come find you on Vitalemus.”

“Did you put a pocket dimension in the buoy thinking Romana would be able to use it?” Leona asked.

“No, that didn’t occur to me,” Ramses replied. “It was just a failsafe if something went wrong. With no other habitable structure around here, there needed to be some way to survive, like if you had a stranger in tow with a less advanced vacuum suit, or no suit at all. As it turns out,” he went on while tapping a piece of the buoy that he had separated from the rest, “it was necessary.”

“Is someone in there?” Leona questioned.

“You’ll see.” That was a weird way to put it.

“Can we all go back to Castlebourne together now?” Mateo asked.

Ramses shook his head. “I’m afraid this was a one-way trip. Hrockas scrambled the tracker from his end. Where they are by now is a mystery. I could probably write an algorithm that could predict their movements using their last known location. The choosing one he’s using to push the host star around is powerful, but she has her limits. They can’t be all the way to the outer arm of the Milky Way, or something. But we would have to leave something behind to keep trying to track them...”

“Or I could do it again,” Romana volunteered.

“No,” Mateo countered decisively. “I don’t want you breaking your pattern ever again.”

“Do we really need to find Castlebourne at all?” Marie asked the group. “We were trying to leave it at one point.”

“That’s true, I remember that now,” Mateo affirms. It was the closest thing to home they had ever had, but it was always going to end eventually. It was supposed to end a long time ago, but they got sidetracked with all that Pacey-Underburg stuff, which kept them tied to Castlebourne for a bit longer.

“Do you want to try another aimless jump?” Romana offered.

“And end up back in that hellhole?” Leona added. “No, thanks.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Romana reminded them. “I liked the outfits.”

“You could always wear that kind of outfit, whenever you want,” Leona said.

“True,” Romana replied. She shed her suit, and shifted her nanites to a 1950s-esque dress, not exactly like the kind she wore when they were oblivious and trapped in Underburg, but similar.

“Put your suit back on,” Mateo shouted.

Romana couldn’t reply in the vacuum, but she could still hear via conduction, yet she pushed the back of her ear forward as if she couldn’t even do that. After her father pointed at her with stern determination, she switched her suit back on. “Geeze, Papa Bear,” she joked. “Rambo’s got me covered. That man knows his way around a woman’s body.”

“Goddammit!” Mateo complained. “Don’t say things like that!”

“Okay, okay,” Leona jumped in, as she usually had to do when those two were at it. Romana knew how to push her dad’s buttons, and Leona knew how to put a stop to it, which was to change the subject as quickly as possible. “Let’s just go back to Earth. I’m feeling a little homesick. And it was home for all of us at some point, though not technically the same version of it.”

“That’s a good idea,” Marie concluded.

Ramses looked at his forearm readout. “My coherence gauge is in the Orange, where are you?”

“We just arrived, so it’s still Red,” Leona answered. “We won’t be ready to jump until nearly the end of the day, probably.”

“I’m doin’ a bottle episode!” Olimpia suddenly shouted.

“I was just thinking about that,” Angela said. “Not the bottle episode thing, that’s nonsense. “We should call it slinging. Why are we calling it jumping?”

“Seconded,” Romana agreed.

“All in favor,” Mateo posed. They raised their hands. “Motion passes. New lingo established.” He paused for a moment. “Great, that entertained us for all of ten seconds. What do we do in the meantime? And don’t say RPS-101 Plus. I don’t like playing in my suit. I can’t control my objects right.”

“You just say that because you consistently lose!” Olimpia teased.

“Mah-ri?” Angela began, “why are you looking around?”

“Oh, we just made a decision to go to Earth,” Marie replied. “That’s usually when God laughs and intervenes.

That was true. Everyone started to look around too, but found only space. The sudden intervention she was talking about didn’t usually happen when they were actively looking for it...kind of a watched pot never boils sort of thing, but it was still prudent to check.

“Do you guys realize there are three wars?” Angela offered. She opened the floor up to anyone, but no one responded. “The Exin Empire, the Sixth Key conflict, and those dragonfly aliens. I don’t know if you’ve realized this, but we’ve been switching between them. Once we close one chapter of one book, we start the next chapter of one of the other two books.”

Ramses glanced down at the piece of the buoy he attached to his chest. Only Mateo noticed, and he chose not to address it.

“Yeah, you’re right about that, aren’t you?” Leona asked rhetorically. “We just closed one of the books, but we don’t know which one we’re about to open, if either of the others.”

“I am curious about what’s going on with the Sixth Key,” Marie admitted. “It’s been a long time. I spent some years in one of those worlds.”

“So did I,” Romana said, referring to having grown up in ancient Third Rail.

“But the Ochivari are so fascinating,” Angela insisted. “We could end up in any universe, dealing with any new, unfamiliar culture.”

“Well, we might be able to trigger the Transit to show up if one of us makes a declaration that we want to fight in a cosmic war, or join the military,” Marie suggested.

“Let’s not do that,” Leona volleyed.

“Then the Sixth Key it is,” Angela responded. “Raise the sails! Navigate us to the aperture!” She pointed in a random direction. It was a little funny, but nobody laughed. They just fell silent for a time.

“That lasted us another five minutes. How’s everybody’s coherence? Mine’s still in the Red. Do we all have to be Green, or...”

“Maybe not,” Ramses explained. “I would feel safer if we were, though. I would feel even safer with Violet.”

“If you’re bored, we could just go into stasis for a few hours. It’s not bad in here. I found it easy to wake back up when they found me.”

“Well, yeah, Rambo knows his way around a woman’s body,” Olimpia echoed Romana from earlier.

“I want a divorce,” Mateo said, joking, but...clearly not happy for real.

The seven of them continued to hang out there while they waited for their coherence gauges to rise up to acceptable levels. They mostly held onto the buoy to stay close to one another, but occasionally, one of them would push off and float around. They could always return by utilizing their maneuvering thrusters, or just teleporting back. That was what gave Romana the idea to play hide-and-seek. It was a dangerous version of the game, which not everyone in the galaxy would be able to play. Because space was empty and black, the chances of finding someone just by the naked eye were incredibly low. They could use their heat signatures instead, but then detection would be incredibly easy. The only way to do it was for each hider to shut off their own life support systems, and stay in one place for long enough for the seeker to find everyone else first. They could still use their comms, but they would be untraceable. Some of them could withstand the cold for longer, and were better at hiding. Others were caught when they just couldn’t take it anymore. At this point, they could try to teleport away, but the seeker could always jump right to them wherever they ended up.

They played the game for a couple of hours before noticing that the same people were winning each time. It was always either Mateo or Ramses, which made this whole thing feel very unfeministic. Even though Ramses supposedly built their superstrates equally, it seemed as though the women got colder faster, just as they would if they were simply wearing business clothes in an office. The coherence gauges still weren’t Green for everybody, but they were sick of playing around, so most of them just took naps. They floated aimlessly there in the black, mostly apart, though Mateo and Olimpia held together like the two lovers they were. Leona was working on the self-destruct sequence for the buoy. Instead of bringing it with them, they were just gonna blow it up, so no one could have any hope of finding any information on it. It took a lot of time and work to engage the explosives. This was by design, so it couldn’t be switched on incidentally, or when the user wasn’t thinking rationally.

Finally, the last of them turned Green, and it was time to leave. Ramses woke everyone up with a calm, but crescendoing, song. They teleported back into a group, and magnetized their suits so they could watch the explosion together. It was a bit anticlimactic because of how fast and efficient it was, but still something worth seeing. They synced up their slingdrives, and with one final goodbye to the Castlebourne that was no longer there, they slung away.

They landed on the surface of what they assumed was Earth. They quickly detected a breathable atmosphere, and were able to recede their nanites into regular clothes. This did look like Earth, but perhaps one from long ago. Earth didn’t really have any cities anymore. They just lived in arcological megastructures, and some seasteads, if they weren’t just orbiting from space. They were on a street, though. The buildings were sleek and advanced, but just too dense for Earth in this time period. People were staring at them, including parents trying to hold their children close. A man approached them cautiously. “Do you mean us harm?” he asked.

Leona stepped forward. “Absolutely not. We’re travelers, attempting to return to Earth.”

The man looked over his shoulder at the crowd, and then back at Leona. “Never heard of it. How did you do that thing with your clothes?”

“Have you heard of other...” Leona trailed off. She slowly darted her eyes side to side, looking for the right way to word this. Unfortunately, the beginning of her sentence might have painted her into a corner. No, she could figure this out. The Prime Directive applied here until she determined otherwise. “...other cities.”

“You mean on the other side of the tunnels?” the man guessed. “Yes. We don’t interact with them, except to exchange some technologies sometimes.”

Tunnels. Leona looked up at the sky, or what appeared to be a sky anyway. She pulled a small swarm of nanites over her eyes, and used them as sensors. “Yeah, that was definitely a hologram, and they were under a dome. Goddammit, they were back on Castlebourne, and in some kind of simulation. Wait.

The man looked up at the sky too, trying to figure out what she was so baffled by.

The dimensions were off. This wasn’t one of the Castlebourne domes. It was too small. Not by much, but other than the ocean caps, and a few rare exceptions, all Castlebourne domes were pretty much the exact same skeletal design. Where would they be where people would be living under a dome, but alarmed by their use of nanite technology. She looked back at the stranger and breathed. “Have you heard of Proxima Doma?”

“Yes,” he replied. “We don’t know what it means.”

Leona looked back at the rest of the team. She just regarded them for a moment, trying to decide the best course of action. There was really only one. They couldn’t teleport, and they couldn’t explain their odd behavior. The locals wouldn’t understand, and it would break their worldview. “Run.”

« < » > Table of Contents