The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 21, 2503

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Mateo and Ramses didn’t leave the scene of the crime because they didn’t want to get caught, but because they didn’t want to get caught yet. They still needed to give their friends enough time to conduct their more precise experiments and examinations. As far as the two of them were concerned, though, they had enough proof. Nobody looked over the edge of the ravine to see if they were okay. That was how a lot of video games were, once you passed out of a certain area, you were free, even if any pursuers should still be able to follow you. NPCs were programmed to stay within a particular radius, because it was easier to code them with specific context than as individuals with freedom of movement. Of course, that didn’t make much sense here. The simulation was so incredibly sophisticated that they were all fooled for years before getting the hint that something was off, so why would there be such limitations? They still didn’t understand how any of this worked. It just seemed so inconsistent.

“What did you mean back there?” Ramses asked as they were back up onto the road. “You didn’t think that this was a simulation?”

“No, I said that I didn’t think that we were in a computer,” Mateo corrected.

“Okay, and why’s that?”

“I dunno.”

“You don’t?”

“My memory has been erased, remember? I think I remembered something just before we hit the wall, but now it’s gone again.”

They continued to walk a ways in silence. They ended up in a sort of downtown area, situated on the opposite side of where they lived from where they worked. Mateo had never been here before, but a new memory was coming in. This wasn’t mission hills, or the area surrounding it. In the real world, it was very suburban. It wasn’t located between two urban centers like this. This was wrong. Everything was wrong. More evidence, which they managed to ignore all this time until they had no choice. Someone left their skateboard on the sidewalk. Mateo picked it up, and sent it through the window of a clothing shop. No one was hurt, it just landed in the display case. The shopkeeper came out, and started waving his hands, just like the construction workers. He didn’t say anything, though, probably because there was no reason to program these particular NPCs to speak.

Ramses kicked the sideview mirror off of a car as they were passing by. The driver got out, and said, “hey!” but that was it. He didn’t try to stop them, or anything. It did look like he was calling the cops, though, so that was a minor improvement. They jaywalked across the street, blocking traffic, and forcing drivers to honk their horns. There was a small restaurant here with outdoor seating. Mateo grabbed a burger off of someone’s plate while Ramses took a drink right out of their hands. “Ugh,” he said. “I hate this flavor.” He just dropped the glass on the ground. They were becoming a real nuisance, but still, no one tried to do anything to stop them. It was getting dark now, perhaps a little earlier than it should for May? Or was it September? It was impossible to know, since none of this was real.

They turned into an alley, and opened a random door. It took them through a kitchen, and into what appeared to be a dance hall. They could see a woman in a white dress, and a man in a tuxedo. Classic wedding reception. Mateo grabbed the microphone from the DJ, who wasn’t even playing anything. He was just bouncing to an imaginary beat, and pretending to scratch at the records. “I’m really happy for you, Imma let you finish, but Kanye had one of the worst videos of all time!”

“Who?” one of the bridesmaids asked.

“I dunno,” Mateo said. The rapper didn’t seem to exist in this reality, though he was rattling around in Mateo’s brain somewhere. “Love is a joke, and none of you are real, I mean it!”

Ramses grabbed the mic, and put it up to his own lips. “Is real.”

Mateo took it back. “What? What does Israel have to do with anything?”

“No, none of you is real,” Ramses tried to explain.

“That’s what I said.”

“You said are real. That’s wrong.”

“No, it’s not wrong, they’re not real. Look at ‘em!” Mateo pointed to the crowd. They were watching and listening intently, smiley as ever, like this was a usual reception, and nothing strange was going on. They weren’t engaging at all. He could say anything, and they would still just stare up at him like he was making sense. “Whatever. I’m outtie...five thousand!” He reached down, and tipped the DJ’s table over. The DJ just kept bouncing to the music that wasn’t playing, and pantomiming his job.

On their way out through the front, both of them grabbed a handful of wedding cake, and started stuffing their mouths. That was when Mateo’s phone rang. “What up?”

“It’s Boyd. You crashed my car. Now the cops are talking to me at the station.”

“How’d it go with the grass?” Mateo asked him.

“They’re all unique,” Boyd answered. “The grass is real. Everything is real.”

“All right. We’ll be there when we can, but as you said, we crashed the car, so we’re movin’ a little slow.” He barely got the word out before they opened the door to find themselves surrounded by cops themselves, all pointing guns at them, like they were criminal masterminds, or something.

They just stood there for a moment, frozen, not out of fear, but apathy. These cops weren’t real either. They may have thought they were, but it was a lie. The world was a total lie. Ramses reached out towards them to offer them, “cake?”

“Gun!” one of the cops cried. They all started shooting.

It was comical how they unloaded their bullets into Mateo and Ramses’ bodies. They were shaking uncontrollably with each shot, but never did fall down. They didn’t have to. The bullets weren’t real! Finally, someone managed to shout, “hold your fire!”

They all stopped, except for one guy. He just kept firing, slowly but steadily. He wasn’t even hitting either of his targets. They were good shots, though. Mateo and Ramses looked over to the wall a meter away from them. Dust blew out of the bullet hole each time, and it really was just the one bullet hole. He managed to hit the exact same point every single time. Definitely a computer program. Definitely.

Once one of his mates managed to stop him, it was he who placed the handcuffs on the suspects, and drove them off towards the station. Some of the other cruisers followed with their lights blaring, and their sirens going off. The others dispersed, and continued to police a world that didn’t need their help, since everyone could simply be programmed to follow the law at all times.

“I stole his car, let him go,” Mateo demanded. They were sitting in the interrogation room now; all three of them. A piece of plastic from Boyd’s car was sitting in a baggie on the table, presumably to intimidate them into confessing.

“You don’t make the demands here,” the detective argued.

“You don’t make the demand here!” Mateo yelled back.

“Yes, I do!”

“Yes, I do!”

“Stop copying me!”

“Stop copying me!”

“Detective Sanchez, he won’t stop copying me!”

“Detective Sanchez, he won’t stop copying me!”

“All right, all right,” Sanchez interrupted. “Why did you steal his car?”

“Seemed like fun,” Mateo replied.

“All right, all right. Why did you steal his car?”

“You got them both in a loop,” Ramses said with a laugh.

“All right, all right. Why did you steal his car?”

“Why didn’t you?” Mateo asked her accusatorily.

“What?”

“Oh, give it up, Sanchez,” Mateo began. “They know you’re dirty, and working with us. They’re trying to catch you in a lie.”

“I’m not dirty, I take a shower every night!” she contended, slamming her hand on the table. She darted her eyes only to one side, thinking about her own comment.

“Prove it!” Ramses shouted.

“Maybe I will,” she returned

“All right, all right,” the dude detective interrupted. “Why did you steal his car?”

“I didn’t steal anything,” Mateo defended. “You’re the one who stole it.”

“Is this true?” the detective’s eyes teared up as he was looking over at his partner.

“No, they’re joking,” she insisted. She looked back over at Mateo. “You are, aren’t you?” She sighed, and went over to sit in a chair against the back wall.

“Where were you last night?” the guy went on to ask.

Sanchez came back over, and pointed at Mateo. “You know where I was!”

“Don’t you lie to me!” the other guy urged.

She mouthed his words as he was saying them, then grabbed the evidence bag from the table to take it back over to her little wall chair. Meanwhile, the man nodded with a smirk on his face. “We got you. Your partner confessed. He’s in the other room right now, giving you up.”

“My partner,” Mateo asked, “who’s sitting right next to me?”

“That’s the one,” the detective corroborated, still smug.

“Well, I’m giving him up,” Mateo decided. “He stole my pencil in first grade.”

Both of the detectives’ eyes widened. “He is?” they asked, perfectly in sync. They scowled at Ramses. “We’ve been looking for you for years, you..son of a bitch!”

Mateo just remembered something else, from a movie that didn’t exist in this reality, but did in the real one. “I think there’s been some kind of mistake. We’re actually supposed to be getting out of jail today, not going into it.” Could this even work?

“Ugh,” Sanchez said. “You idiots.” She started to undo their handcuffs. “Come on.” She led them out of the room, and to the exit without any further issue.

“Need a ride?” a voice asked from the wall as they were passing by. It was Pacey. “My company specializes in that. I’m kind of a big deal.”

“Your computer simulation is breaking down,” Ramses gloated at him.

Pacey chuckled once. “It’s not a computer simulation, and it’s breaking because I let go of the wheel.”

“So it was you,” Mateo accused, “this whole time.”

“Depends on what you mean by it,” Pacey reasoned. “Some things were real, some things were scripted.”

“Who am I?” Mateo asked. “Who are we? What did you take from us?”

“I didn’t take who you were,” Pacey started to explain. “You’re in love with Leona, and Olimpia. Romana is your daughter, and Ramses is your friend, as are the Waltons...though, they’re not exactly twins; it’s more complicated than that.”

“Marie is four years older than Angela,” Mateo recalled.

“Heh. Yeah. Time, right?”

“What did you do?” Boyd pressed.

“I held them accountable for their actions,” Pacey said. “And you? You’re just a dick. I consider bringing you in here to be a public service. A bonus.”

“Let us out,” Mateo ordered.

“Yeah, I will,” Pacey agreed. “This dome was broken as soon as you went on your joyride. If I had let the scenario play out, you would have ended up in jail, and that’s not really what I want. I could have reset the premise, but it’s clear that Underburg just isn’t working. I’ll be moving you somewhere else, however, I’m not sure where yet.”

“The dome,” Mateo said out loud. That triggered something in his mind. His memories weren’t flooding back in, but a few of them were squeezing through the barrier. Dome. Dome, dome, dome, dome, dome. “Castlebourne. We never left.”

Pacey was surprised, but not shocked. “Oh. I need to tweak my memory suppressing machine yet again. Your brains; I can’t figure them out. Your stronger than you should be. But to clarify, you’re not technically on Castlebourne, so don’t expect Hrockas or Bran to swoop in and save the day. Ain’t nobody here but us chickens. And the androids,” he added.

“So, it really isn’t a virtual construct,” Ramses determined. “We were wrong. This is base reality.”

“It’s a reality,” Pacey corrected. “There’s no such thing as base reality. It’s all about your perspective. Are you but ones and zeros on a chip? No. Never were. Never crossed my mind to do it like that. Probably wouldn’t work very well because of your patterns.”

“So our patterns are intact?” Mateo was remembering more about their real lives.

Pacey nodded. “You jump forward in time every day. But I mess with your memories on an as-needed basis. Sometimes you think it’s been a day, and sometimes a few weeks. It just depends on what I need, and how much I’m willing to fill in to account for the extra time that never really happened.”

“Why are you doing this?” Boyd asked, basically the same question as before, just worded a little differently.

“Half-punishment, half-reward. You’ve all done enough. Buddy, you’ve done enough bad. I took you out of the timeline in my own way, because while the rest of you have done some good, you’ve also been meddlesome. Just stay here, and no harm will come to you. Just accept your new reality, and live your life.”

Mateo listened to Pacey’s words carefully, all the while also remembering where they knew him from in the first place. But if this guy knew the first thing about them, he wouldn’t be asking such a dumb thing of them. None of them was the type to roll over, and let someone dictate their lives. “No.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 20, 2502

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Everyone was home now, and they were having a meeting. Even Boyd was here, because while he felt like a separate unit, it also seemed like he was somehow part of this. He and Romana exchanged awkward glances, which were annoying to Mateo, but he didn’t want to overshadow the purpose of this gathering. Marie had the floor right now, because she studied this in school in multiple classes. “Simulation hypothesis,” she began. “It’s a modern flavor of one of the oldest philosophical conundrums in history. Since the dawn of man, we have been asking ourselves what reality is. Is it subjective or objective? Do we all share the same reality? Are you real, or just a figment of my imagination? I think, therefore I am, so I know that I’m real in some sense, but I can’t say the same thing about you. Or this couch. Or anything in the world. Maybe I’m dreaming...remembering. Or maybe we are all real, but everything else is some kind of construct. What we’re concerned with today is specifically whether we are in a computer simulation, and it’s not necessarily full sim hypothesis. Perhaps, it’s all about us. Everyone in this room feels connected. Olimpia, you don’t remember applying for the role of Mateo’s assistant, you just know that you did.”

“I...I must have,” Olimpia decided.

“Must you have?” Marie asked rhetorically. “We all have weird memories, and we all look at each other with this familiarity that shouldn’t be there. Mister Maestri, you and I only met today, yet I feel like I’ve known you for a while.”

“Is that a good thing?” Boyd asked.

She cocked her head to the side, and regarded him. “No. I don’t like you. Anyone else feel the same way?”

People grimaced, or they looked away. Everyone was uncomfortable.

“Well, I feel like I like all of you,” Boyd defended. He crossed his arms, and started to pout. “But whatever.”

“Yeah, and...I get that,” Marie went on. “You don’t feel the same way about us that we feel about you. But...those kinds of feelings should come from history, not first impressions. I don’t know anything about you. That’s why I think that it’s not really simulation hypothesis. That’s why I think...we’re stuck in a virtual environment. Just us, and everyone else is an NPC.”

“NPC?” Romana questioned.

“Non-player character,” Leona answered. “Just a program, coded to act like an independent entity, but ultimately only an extension of the system.”

“We’re all part of the system,” Ramses argued. “If we are in a virtual reality, and our minds have been messed with, it means that we can’t even trust our own thoughts. I may not have a choice in saying what I’m saying right now. The programmers could be feeding this into the program, and forcing me to say it. While Marie is right, we all feel real, and we feel like everyone else here is real, in contrast to everyone else, we’re just as vulnerable to the code. We’re just as hopeless.”

Marie was loudly quiet.

“Marie?” Angela prompted.

She looked at her sister with a smile. “It’s true, what he says. That’s why I studied these concepts in my philosophy courses, not computer science. It’s unverifiable. Any evidence we find one way or another could merely be what the overlord wants us to see. I use that word, because maybe it’s not computer programmers. Maybe it’s an evil demon. Maybe it’s God.” She chuckled. “Maybe it’s me.”

“So, what do we do?” Boyd asked, trying to be involved, and maybe get on people’s good side. “Is there anything we can try?”

“We can certainly try,” Marie encouraged. “You can always try.” She took a breath. “Simulations are expensive, there’s no way around that. Coding an entire reality is a lot of work. Even if you ask an AI to do it, you’re just shifting that work to the AI. It still has to get done, and it’s not really easier for that AI, it’s just theoretically better equipped to handle the workload.” She carefully pulled a red hair from the arm of her chair. Leona’s. “I can put this under a microscope, and see all the fine details. I can put it under a stronger microscope, and see even finer details. I can put it under the strongest microscope in existence, and resolve atoms. Can you imagine how much work it would take to program a simulation so detailed that it can be broken down into all the atoms in the universe? Some theories say that that’s not really what’s happening. The simulation renders basic visible objects most of the time, and only generates smaller bits when they become necessary. If I were to actually procure that transmission electron microscope, only then would the program say, okay, let’s code a few billion atoms. Well, perhaps there’s something there. If we want to test the boundaries, we could start pulling random things, breaking them down, and testing how detailed they look. If we do it fast enough, maybe the servers that the construct is running on don’t have enough bandwidth to keep up, and we’ll start seeing low-res results.”

“Should we be talking about this out loud?” Romana asked. “Could someone be listening right now?”

Ramses laughed. “If they are, it doesn’t matter what we do. Again, we’re helpless.”

“You said hopeless before,” Olimpia reminded him.

“It’s both,” Ramses agreed.

“All we can do is try,” Leona said. “We might as well run whatever tests we can think of.”

“Sis, what were you talking about last night?” Angela asked. “Geo—geometric—”

“Geometry instancing,” Marie helped. “That’s another thing; related.” She gently kicked the end table. “When you went to the store to buy this, you might have seen multiple copies of the same model. In the real world, you would have to manufacture each one separately. You might use machines—I doubt it’s handcrafted—but you can’t just copy and paste like you can data in a computer. But if we’re in a computer, then you can! So all the other end tables that are just like this one were probably only coded once, and literally re-rendered whenever it was necessary. Because, why wouldn’t you do it like that? Why bother wasting your time writing the same code over and over again? Even if two things aren’t exactly alike, but very closely similar, copying and pasting will help you get the work done faster before you tweak the modifications. Imagine doing this with the houses on this block, or the trees.”

“Or blades of grass,” Romana offered.

“Yeah, grass is perfect,” Marie confirmed. “People don’t pay attention to grass. It all just looks the same. A programmer, trying to save time and resources, might only come up with a dozen or so grass blade models, and just reuse them repeatedly. That’s how I would do it.”

Mateo had been very quiet throughout this whole thing. It wasn’t only that he was listening, but if they were truly at risk of being overheard—by a simulation developer, or a scientist with a bunch of vats full of brains—then someone should be staying quiet, and not give anything away. If they could read his mind, it wouldn’t matter, but on the off-chance that the overlords were limited to audible speech, he was gonna play it close to the chest. He looked over at Leona now. She turned to meet his gaze. Still, he didn’t say anything. He just stared at her. He didn’t know what he was trying to tell her, just...maybe only that he couldn’t tell her anything. She would have to come to her own conclusions, and do it totally with his help.

Leona’s eyes suddenly widened. “Marie, Angela, go get a microscope. Start breaking things down. Olimpia and Boyd, you’re with me. We’re gonna touch grass.”

“What about me?” Romana asked.

“You have a final exam to study for,” Leona reminded her daughter.

“If we’re in a computer simulation, then I don’t,” Romana reasoned.

“If we’re not, then you do. Why are we arguing about this? The whole point of running these tests because we don’t know the truth. Go study.”

“Fine,” she huffed.

“And me?” Ramses asked.

“I thought you said we were hopeless and helpless,” Leona said to him.

Mateo deliberately stared at his wife again.

“Keep my husband company,” Leona decided. “He doesn’t have a job either.”

Mateo stood up, and finally said one word, and it was to Boyd. “Keys.”

Boyd was confused, but Mateo was his boss, so he handed him the keys to his car.

Mateo went outside without saying anything else.

Ramses followed, and then got in the passenger seat. “Where are we going?”

Mateo still didn’t speak.

“Gotchya.” Ramses didn’t know what was happening, but Mateo was his boss too, so he chose to trust him.

Mateo just started driving, going the speed limit, and following all traffic signs. After about ten minutes, he realized how much danger he was putting Ramses in, as well as his family. If they turned out to be wrong, their lives would be ruined. “How confident are you that none of this is real?”

Ramses did nothing for a moment. Then he placed a hand on the door handle. “Keep driving. Don’t stop.” He opened his door, and let his right arm hang over the edge, scraping against the asphalt below. After fifteen seconds, he pulled his arm back in, and closed the door. He sighed as he examined his bloodied hand, front and back. “Pretty confident.”

“Doesn’t hurt?”

“Not really,” Ramses replied. “I can already feel myself healing. It looks worse than it is.”

Mateo nodded. “Good enough for me.” He slammed on the accelerator, and while this wasn’t the fastest car in the world, he was going over a hundred miles per hour before too long. Cars were honking at them as they were whizzing past. He was an administrator at work now, but he still knew how to drive. He didn’t even put two hands on the steering wheel. He was as cool as ever, fully in control. Even at these speeds, they were in no danger of crashing. If that was going to happen, he would have to do it on purpose. He just couldn’t put anyone else in danger. Just because they thought only their small group was real, and everyone else was an NPC, didn’t mean it was true. It was still possible for them to be in a simulation, and these other people were just as real, and just as oblivious. Their connection to each other could be something else, or just because they happened to be the ones who were sensing the inconsistencies. Mateo thought they made a movie about that once, but he couldn’t remember it. Maybe that was in a different world altogether.

He was about to hit traffic, so Mateo jumped up onto the median, and started driving on that instead. Cars continued to honk, but after he drove past, everything just looked kind of normal. They went back to their daily lives, now that the game players were no longer triggering their preprogrammed responses. The traffic jam ended, so Mateo got back on the road, but not before running over a couple of small trees, and an orange sign warning drivers of an upcoming construction zone. Perfect. He saw what it was talking about. They were building a new high rise on the corner, and having to close down one of the lanes next to it, probably to work on the sewage line. For a few seconds, they were Tokyo drifting when Mateo made a sharp turn, and then blew through the fence. The closest call was when he nearly ran into another car who was probably coming in to work here. Construction workers waved their hands in dismay, but again, just went back to what they were doing before he showed up. Man, if this wasn’t a program, something had to be going on.

Mateo continued to drive on the rough dirt non-road, splashing in the mud, and sideswiping some kind of big white and yellow machine. It slew him down, but he didn’t stop. There was a dirt ramp up ahead. He smirked. “I’ve always wanted to try this.”

“It might be the last thing you do.”

“Hashtag-worth it!”

“What’s a hashtag?” Ramses questioned.

They drove right onto the dirt pile, and jumped over the far side of it. It was short, and low to the ground, so they didn’t land on the moon, but it was still pretty fun while it lasted. And luckily, it wasn’t enough to stop them in their tracks. Mateo kept driving, but had to swerve to avoid a small group of workers on their lunch break. They didn’t even seem to notice, reinforcing this hypothesis of theirs. “You wearing your seatbelt?”

“Nope,” Ramses answered.

Mateo pulled the bar under his seat, and pushed the seat as far back as it would go. “Ready to eject.”

“Ready,” Ramses confirmed.

The concrete traffic barriers were coming up fast, but he never wavered. He did grip the wheel with two hands now, though, in anticipation. At the very last second, he remembered something from his past that he didn’t think he was meant to. The truth. A look of horror fell upon his face. “I don’t think we’re in a computer!” Crash.

The car stopped suddenly. Both Mateo and Ramses did not. They flew up, and through the windshield. There was a reason those concrete blocks were there. They were trying to prevent people from going over the edge of a ravine. The two of them arched over the barriers, and down that ravine, onto the dirt and rocks below. They lay there, bloody and mangled, for a couple of minutes. Then they stood up, and instinctively began to reset their own bones. Mateo noticed that Ramses’ leg was twisted the wrong way, so he stepped on his foot, and twisted Ramses at the hips to get it back in place. They looked up at the top of the ravine.

“We’re in trouble,” Ramses mused.

“We’re a distraction,” Mateo said. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

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Microstory 2327: Earth, November 25, 2178

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Dear Corinthia,

Yeah, I think it would be a great idea to be able to send quick acknowledgements to each other after each message. It does need to be more than just an automated read receipt. My friend is a coder, and he’s written us a quick program for that, if you’re interested. It’s nothing crazy. It just integrates with the messaging application, and lets you pull from a list of canned responses. You can have one that says, got it, I’ll get back to you soon, and another that says, it will be a few days before I can respond. You can even write one that goes, I’m being attacked by a horde of sad zombie aliens from the future of a parallel dimension. I can’t believe this isn’t already a feature, but we have it now. The file is attached for you to download, or tell me no, if that’s the case. In other news, my dad is coming home soon. My next letter to you should be a recap of what we end up discussing. He’s been fumfering when I’ve managed to get him on a call, so I know that he wasn’t innocent. We’ll finally get some answers, Corinthia. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say in that letter, so I’ll cut this one short here.

Sharpening my zombie alien weapons,

Condor

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 6, 2458

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There was a scuffle in the hock section of whatever this ship was called. A.F. immediately went after Leona, but he never made it all the way. True to her promise to protect her, Marie stepped between them, and started fighting with him instead. It didn’t last very long. Either one of them could have won, and it could have ended in death, and Leona couldn’t take the chance. She unlocked the hock cell door again, and threw him inside by the shoulders. Once she slammed the door closed in his face, she discovered her mistake. She hadn’t patted him down, or knocked him unconscious. All he had to do was send a quick message to his security team that there was a breach. Their plan to sneak around quietly while no one was the wiser was no longer a viable option. They ran out of the room, and into the next so they could change. They chose faces from their pasts again, who no one here would recognize, because pretending to be A.F. himself wasn’t going to work anymore. As for their clothes, they made them look like the standard uniform of the crew, and just hoped that there were enough of them roaming around here—or enough chaos after the alarms started going off—that they wouldn’t stick out for being unauthorized strangers.

They quickly, but not too quickly, ran back down to the room where their stuff had been held, and retrieved Leona’s gear. She got dressed as fast as possible, and then reestablished her holographic disguise, just in time for a team of three to open the door in search of two hot lady criminals. “Secure this area!” one of them ordered. “The fugitives will come here in search of their belongings.”

“Understood, sir,” Leona replied, looking like a boy she had a crush on in college. He was a film student, on the same track as her for a few semesters before he switched to some other major, and she never saw him again. She always thought he would make a great enlisted soldier. He just had that Starship Troopers look about him.

“Stay here with them, Bartok,” the commander barked before running off with his partner. That was an annoying complication.

Now, for the most part, the IMS did not come with weapons, and as a rule, the team didn’t carry them either. They were a mostly nonviolent crowd, made up of people who would rather sneak in with surgical strikes, and leave without anyone knowing that anything had happened. Even the two of them, who possessed years of combat training, preferred peaceful solutions. Much like one could theoretically hit someone over the head with a frying pan, even though the pan was not designed as a weapon, there was a way to use a built-in nonviolent feature of the suit as an impromptu weapon.

It was called a static discharge, and it was meant to protect the wearer from dust and debris in dusty and debris-filled environments. A very low charge was keeping the outer layer clean at all times while medium intensity charges could repel foreign objects when the area was particularly harsh. Safety mechanisms usually prevented extreme discharges, but these safeguards could be subverted in emergency situations. It might be enough to shield the wearer from a fallen or thrown rock, but it had to be done on purpose by concentrating the energy in one spot. This was no emergency, and she didn’t want to have to use it, but it appeared that they had no choice. Leona rubbed her forearms together to build up and focus the charge. Then she released it into Bartok’s back without a word. He slumped towards the floor, but she caught him before that, and laid him down gently.

“What do we do,” Marie asked, “wait for midnight central?”

Leona shook her head. “A.F. will be free by then. He probably is already. He’s quite familiar with our pattern, and will be expecting that gambit. Our only choice is to get off of this ship, and away from the teleportation dampening field. Fortunately, they’re drifting, so it shouldn’t be too rough of a ride.”

“Are we sure that our suits can handle the equilibrium?”

“No, but we can’t steal a shuttle, or they’ll find it.”

“Maybe we do steal a shuttle,” Marie suggested. “Maybe we let them find it.”

Leona didn’t know what she meant by that.

“We’ll require a distraction. How good are you at those external holograms?”

She was pretty good, having gotten even better since she was first given Alyssa’s powers. She leaned into her knack for creating holograms away from her person. She considered it her specialty. Nearly each one of them had their own specialty. The only one who wasn’t all that great with any of the tricks was Mateo. He would hopefully find his place eventually, but there was no guarantee. Sadly, some people were simply not particularly skilled. Using the nearest workstation, they pulled up schematics of the ship, and made their plan. Leona generated an enemy vessel, which appeared out of nowhere only about a couple hundred meters away. Now, this being made of pure light and all, it wasn’t giving off any energy readings. If someone tried to send a photon torpedo towards it, it would pass right through, and fly off into the aether. The only reason it worked as a distraction was because it was so big and sudden that it freaked everyone out before they could determine that it was fake. While everyone was looking at the port side, Leona and Marie went over to the starboard side.

The two shuttles that they tried to open were locked, but they noticed that the fighters were all completely open, which made sense, because pilots needed to be able to jump into them at a moment’s notice. So they stole one of those instead. But they didn’t get inside of it to do it. Leona programmed it to fly off in one direction, and make basic escape maneuvers when the situation arose. It was vital that it managed to evade capture at least until midnight, or the plan wouldn’t work. With that gone, giving A.F. and his crew the impression that the fugitives were attempting to escape, the two of them turned invisible, and stayed hidden. It was annoying, not being able to use their jump to the future to their advantage, as they had often been able to do in the past, but this slight modification would hopefully get the job done this time.

A year later, they returned to the timestream, still in the hangar bay, but hiding in the corner. Perhaps about every single soldier on this thing was there now, pointing their weapons at the once-stolen fighter jet. Their plan had worked. Everyone thought that that was where Leona and Marie would come back.

“Sir?” one of them asked after several minutes passed, and the jet was still empty.

“I know,” A.F. replied.

“Sir, they must have bailed out. They’re probably floating around out there naked.” He didn’t mean unclothed, but unprotected by a hull.

“I know,” A.F. repeated. “Scan the entire kasma for lifesigns. They can’t get through the membrane without the skeleton key.”

This was a big risk, but there were a lot of people here, and Leona could use that to her advantage. Alyssa’s power gave them the ability to turn invisible, but not to go unheard. Hopefully what she said here would get lost somewhere in the crowd, and A.F. wouldn’t care about who specifically said. “Unless they already stole the key last year!” she suggested in a fake voice.

A.F. did look around to see who had said that, as did others, but no one fessed up. It quickly became unimportant to him, because the voice was right. “Lieutenant,” he said to a woman standing nearby. “Go secure the key. I want two security teams left right here in case we missed something. Everyone else, back to your action stations.”

The thing about being invisible to these people was that they were necessarily also invisible to each other. They didn’t have some additional magic power to see through their own disguises. Leona and Marie had to hold hands the whole time to keep track of one another. The former led the latter down the hallway, following the lieutenant to the place of their prize. It was quite a ways away, down a few corridors, into an elevator, and then down more corridors. The farther they went, the fewer crewmembers they saw around until it felt like an eerie ghost town. Presumably no one was allowed in this area for security reasons. The lieutenant punched in the code, unaware that it was being seen and memorized by two invisible girls. They immediately had more respect for her than they ever could A.F. Her code too was composed of eight digits, but they were all different. It was a good thing that they saw it, because she slipped in so quickly that they were unable to tag along. There wasn’t even a little window for them to see what she was doing in there.

Leona pulled Marie away, and felt her up a bit until she found her ear. “When she comes out, continue to follow her,” she instructed in a whisper. “We don’t know that the key is in the same place as the membrane thickener. We don’t even know that the membrane thickener is on this ship. It could be an entirely separate thing. But the key is in there, so once she confirms that, she might go after the machine itself next, just to be safe. I’ll sneak in here after she leaves. You gather all the intel you can. If you need help, send me the feeling of fear, and if you find the jackpot, send me elation.”

“Understood, captain.”

Leona gave Marie a kiss on the cheek, and then let go of her. When the lieutenant came back out of the room, the two of them accidentally ran into each other in their attempt to begin their separate sub-missions. The sound of the collision caused the lieutenant to turn around in confusion, but she didn’t pursue the issue, instead assuming that she was mistaken. Leona hovered her hand over the keypad, preparing to unlock the door once the coast was clear. She could only hope that Marie was doing okay on her own. A few minutes later, she entered the secret chamber, and started to get a look around, expecting to be alone.

A bespectacled bearded man was sitting at a desk in low-lighting. He stood up, and looked around, but didn’t see anything. This could still work. She could still find the key, and she might even be able to steal it. The name was almost certainly metaphorical, so it could be the size of a semi-truck, but at worst, she should be able to steal the plans for it on the computer. She just needed to wait for this guy to calm down, and maybe go out for a smoke break. He just kept staring into the dimness, before apparently coming to a revelation. “Ah. I get it.” Without looking down, he pulled a drawer open, and reached inside to retrieve a part of HG Goggles. He removed his own glasses, and pressed the goggles against his face without wrapping them around his head. “Mrs. Matic. I heard about what you could do. I came prepared.”

Just in case he was bluffing, Leona waved one hand to her side, waxing on. She waxed off with her other hand.

The man smiled, and mimicked the gesture. “Yes, I’m not lying, I see you there.”

Leona revisiblized herself. “I need that key.”

“I know you do.”

“You do?”

“Everybody needs it. It’s a key.”

“Are you going to give it to me?”

“Doubtful.”

“You don’t look like much of a fighter.”

“You have no idea what kind of weapons I have in my arsenal. Yet I know all about those suits. I helped design them.”

“Did you design the key?”

“Yes.”

“And the membrane thickener?”

“Indeed.”

“Is that here too?”

“It may be.”

“Where do your loyalties lie?”

“They lie with science. She has my heart.”

“Yet A.F. has your soul.”

He chuckled. “I guess. He’s not evil.”

“He’s a dick.”

“Isn’t everybody?”

Leona was done with the banter. “The people of Stoutverse need that key.”

“Oh, it’s for someone else? You’re not just trying to take this one down?”

“Not really. It’s not my concern right now. I’m not certain how vital it is for Salmoverse and Fort Underhill to maintain physical connection to each other. But I know that a race of violent antinatalists are intent on wiping out an entire planet. It’s my responsibility to put a stop to that.”

The man lifted his chin, and studied her face. “You’re not lying.”

“You’re right, A.F. isn’t evil. To my knowledge, he’s only ever hurt me and my friends, and we don’t have much use for grudges. We’ve always only been trying to just get away from him. Any sense of hostility he feels is in service to that end, not any real hatred that we feel. I suppose we may have to deal with him one day, but that day is not today. Please. Give me the plans for the machine, and the key, and then we’ll just leave. I won’t even manufacture them in this universe.”

Now he sighed. “Very well.” He reached into his lab coat pocket, and came back out with a data crystal.

“You just carry that around with you at all times?” she asked, but only after she took it out of his hand.

“The second my boss found you in the kasma six years ago, I knew that this was what you were after. My equipment can detect time travel events. You obviously came back on purpose.”

“You’re too smart to be working for him.”

He cleared his throat, and reached up to the wall. He flipped a switch, and Leona could immediately feel her ability to teleport return to her. “People like me...always work for men like him. Now get off my ship before I sound the alarm.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 5, 2457

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Leona and Marie were in hock, and had been for the last five days. They managed to return to their past, in the middle of the kasma, where they hoped to be, but they were immediately scooped up by the Angry Fifth Divisioner’s ship. As he was the one who deployed the technology needed to seal up the membranes of the two sister universes, he could pass through them freely using some kind of temporal skeleton key. They needed that key, as well as the technology itself. They just had to escape first. In the meantime, he was looking for their co-conspirators. He was convinced that the rest of the team members were floating around here somewhere, and had been on the search this whole time. It was only five days for them, but five years for him. He would not listen to reason. Well, to be fair, he had every reason to believe that the others were here too, but after all this time, how could they still be alive?

“Maybe you two had to bail out in your suits, but your friends had personal pods, or an evac shuttle.” He didn’t know that they had come back in time from the future. He assumed that the Transit had managed to escape, but left the team behind for whatever reason. There was no point in correcting him. At best, he wouldn’t believe them, and at worst, it would make things harder for them.

“Well, I think that you would have found them by now,” Leona told him. “They would be emanating heat, and you could detect that heat, right? There’s not much heat in the kasma naturally, is there?” She kept having to baby him, and it was exhausting.

“No, it’s even colder than the vacuum.” He was right about that. Ramses measured the mean temperature to be at 2.16 Kelvin. “So, where are they?”

“We don’t know!” Marie said for the upteenth time. “We got separated.” This was technically true, even though her wording implied that it was not done intentionally.

“So, what do you want me to do, let you out?”

“That would be a start,” Leona replied.

“You realize what you’ve done, right?” A.F. asked. “The only thing that was keeping you alive was the prospect of being able to kill you all at the same time. If no one else is here, I’m just going to cut my losses, and kill the two of you alone. I’ll worry about the others later, I suppose. Your execution will be scheduled for tomorrow morning.” A.F. said with confidence.

“Problem with that,” Marie started to point out.

“We won’t exist tomorrow,” Leona added.

“Right.” A.F. tried to figure a way out of this glaring mistake. “Tomorrow, Greenwich Mean Time. It’ll be later tonight local time.”

That was a dumb answer, but they didn’t push it. “Of course, sir.”

“I’ll go make the preparations. Say your final prayers to your god.”

“Yes, sir!” Marie saluted him sarcastically, but he took it genuinely. She watched him leave. “Okay, your plan hasn’t worked so far, so can we just go with mine now?”

“Yeah,” Leona answered her with a sigh. The original idea that Leona had for their escape plan was to hack into the keypad on the cell door. They heard the beeps when they were first locked in here, so they knew that they were dealing with an eight-digit combination. She was able to covertly stick a brute force strip underneath the pad, but in all this time, it had yet to find the right answer. It was probably something absurd, like 99999999. The strip was programmed to try them in order, so that would be its last guess. Unfortunately, it might take up to another year or more for it to get to that point, and they no longer had the time for that.

Obviously, when A.F.’s people captured them, they removed the outer layers of their integrated multipurpose suits, leaving them only with the biometric base. They stashed the response and armor layers elsewhere on the ship. Ramses upgraded their suits in various ways, but they appeared normal, so anyone here wouldn’t have felt any need to take any special precautions with them. They just stuffed them in a drawer, and forgot about them for the last five years. One special feature was the suit’s ability to become mobile on its own. This was possible to some degree in all standard models, but it would still need a user to be wearing it in order to provide physical support. It was meant to allow the suit to carry its user back to safety if they fell unconscious, or to their gravesite if they were dead. The original engineers didn’t think that the suit would have any need to move around completely on its own, but Ramses being Ramses, he did. It could indeed move while totally empty, like something out of a cartoon. It was less inconspicuous than a hacking strip, but it would work.

Marie placed her sleeve up against her temple to activate the remote neural interface, and began to command the outer layers to climb out of their drawer, and walk down the corridors towards them. The helmet was fully attached as well, so it looked like a real person, but that didn’t mean it had the authorization to go where it was going. If someone decided to stop and ask for its ID badge, or something, the jig would be up. Fortunately, that didn’t happen, but making it to them was the easy part. Dealing with the hock watcher was the real challenge, and it was about to begin.

“Wait,” Leona ordered just before the empty suit could enter the hock section. “This isn’t going to work.”

“It’s all we have, LeeLee.”

“Just give me a second.” Leona tried to concentrate, but she didn’t have the power to see remotely. “Here, let me join.” She grabbed Marie’s free hand, and placed the sleeve against her own temple. She closed her eyes to see through the suit’s point of view. “I can do this. Throw your voice into the helmet, but put a delay on it. For everything you say, make it come out of the speaker ten seconds later.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m changing your plan so it actually works. Throw your voice.”

“It’s not my voice. It’s going to sound like A.F.’s.”

“Even better. Ten second delay,” Leona insisted.

The hock watcher opened the little window in the door when the suit knocked on it. “Can I help you?”

“I need to interrogate the prisoners again,” Marie said through the speaker, modulating her voice to impersonate the leader.

“Sir? You’re back so soon?”

“Yes. Open the door.”

“Why are you wearing one of their suits?”

“Because it makes me feel sexy, now open the goddamn door.”

The hock watcher was unconvinced, but that was okay. That was why Leona was here. “I’m sorry, sir, but this could be fake. I’m going to need you to raise your visor.”

Marie looked to Leona for guidance. Leona nodded confidently. She was ready for it. “I appreciate your dedication to the job,” A.F.’s voice said to the hock watcher. Marie raised the visor. Inside the helmet was A.F.’s face, in holographic form, of course. This was why Leona needed the delay. Every time Marie said something, Leona would need to match the hologram’s lips to it.

“Thank you, sir. I just want to be cautious.”

Of course, they didn’t want to make this any harder on themselves than they had to, so from this point on, short answers only. “I’ll remember that for your next evaluation.” Could’ve been shorter. Leona really struggled with that, but it seemed to work. The hock watcher opened the door, and let the deepfake A.F. in. “Go ahead and open it up.”

“Sir? That’s not protocol. You’re the only one who knows the code.” Shit. Really?

“Uhh...use the master code.” A decent guess?

“Master code?” The hock watcher questioned. “Who are you?” He shook his head. “This is a trick. I’m calling security.”

The suit reached up, and slammed the hock watcher’s head against the cell wall. He was knocked out cold, which would delay the security team’s response time, but someone would find him eventually, or he would wake up on his own, and call them then. The fact was they were still locked in this cell, and didn’t know the code. They were going to have to extend this mission even further, and go find A.F. himself.

“Stuff the body in that cabinet,” Leona ordered.

“He’s not dead.”

“He still has a body. Put it in there, please.”

“You do it...Captain.”

“This is your plan!”

“You’re supposed to be the smart one. You should have come up with both Plan A and Plan B. Now you’re going to have to impersonate someone else for A.F., and he’s going to be a lot less accommodating since he’s apparently the guy in charge.”

“Well, we may have had more options if you hadn’t knocked him unconscious,” Leona reasoned.

“I didn’t do that. You did.”

Leona was taken aback. She decidedly had not. Before they could argue any further, though, the door clicked, and swung halfway open. The stared at it for a moment. “Hm. The strip found the code.” She stepped out, and looked at the keypad. Her guess was close. It was 88888888.

Marie saw it too. “All ones would have been easier on us.”

While Marie was putting her suit on, Leona dragged the hock watcher into the cell, and locked it back up. She removed the hacking strip, and tucked it back into her base layer, in case they ever needed it again. They also didn’t want to let anyone know how they managed to get out of here. Hopefully, they would just blame the hock watcher for the whole thing, and not investigate any deeper. “I still can’t teleport. I think the power blocker works all over the ship.”

“Well, you can obviously make yourself look like anyone, so I’ll continue to be A.F., and you be the hock watcher. We’ll go down to get your suit, and then get to work.”

“No, I don’t want to run into anyone else again. Let’s become invisible instead.”

“That’s Olimpia’s forte.”

“We can all do it. There’s a mirror over there for us to practice with. I’m sure no one will be back too soon.”

The door opened, and A.F. walked back in.

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Microstory 2141: Smol Birb Friends

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I don’t want to talk about my last weekend in jail. It was relatively uneventful. Most everyone in there has read at least a little of my blog by now, and that’s making things a little awkward, but I’m getting through it. It does feel like it’s painting a target on my back, but as I’ve been saying, this is not prison, so it was never going to be as intense and dramatic as you see it depicted on TV. It ain’t no picnic neither, but I’ll be fine. No, what I need to talk to you about today are my new smol birb friends. If you follow me on social media, you already know that I found a nest above my balcony. One of the babies fell out the other day, and died, but then two more babies fell out the next day, and I was able to scoop them up, and carefully place them back in the nest. They were pretty noisy, which the internet says is a good thing, because obviously, it means they’re still alive. It was really stressful being away for 48 hours, though, because even though I could check on the camera feed I had up there once a day, it’s not like there was anything I could do about it. Welp, that turned out to not be so true. My landlord also just so happens to be a reader, so she took it upon herself to unlock my door, and go out onto the balcony while I was away. She returned the precious chick to its rightful place in the nest. Happy ending, right? Not so fast, nothing’s actually ended yet. According to those internet people I’m always going on about, this species of borb propagates like crazy. If you want to take the nest down, which I’m required to eventually, you have to do it in between laying cycles. But that’s a very difficult time to measure.

You see, I don’t know how far along they were in their development when I noticed the nest in the first place, so I didn’t know when they were going to fledge. Once they do, I pretty much have to immediately take the nesting down, and install bird deterrents, or they’ll be right back. Why do I have to do this? Well, it’s a legal thing. I’m not allowed to foster wildlife in or around a building like this, and since house sparrows are considered a nuisance, I’m actually encouraged to just kill them. If I don’t, someone will. Of course, I never want to do that, so I knew I would have a really short window to clear them out to prevent them from coming back. The problem was, I was far too early in this venture. They stopped chirping. I even climbed up there on a chair, and started gently poking on the nest, and nothing. They never chirped at all. You would think that they would have said something, if only leave us alone, we’re babies! But nothing at all. I assumed that they were further along in their learning, and had flown off already, so I began to take the nesting down. Suddenly, two tiny borbs fell out, and landed on the balcony. I was horrified. I thought about trying to stick them back up there, but it was kind of deep in the crevice, and I didn’t know what shape it took in there, or how they moved around. Putting the chicks back was one thing, but trying to recreate everything their mama had done to build their home seemed like an impossible task. I’m sure the internet will be mad at me, but what was I supposed to think? I would not have done that if I thought that they were still in there, and alive. I still can’t figure out why they weren’t chirping anymore. But it was too late, I had to act fast, so I went back inside, and grabbed a plastic bowl. I could save them. I just had to give it time, so that’s what I’m doing. I moved the camera again to just above the bowl, so we’ll see whether mama comes back to take care of them again. I’ll update you tomorrow, probably only on social, though.