Microstory 2383: Earth, November 1, 2179

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Dear Corinthia,

Huge news. I couldn’t wait to write this until after your next message, whenever that ends up being. I know that dad told you what he found out from our old neighbor, so I won’t go over all that again. While he was gone, I managed to make contact with my old nurse. Her name is Madalena Rich, and she was part of it all. She wasn’t just hired by the researchers to observe me. She was part of the braintrust that came up with the idea to study twins separated at birth throughout their entire lives. It was she who located our mother, since her name was in the records as being pregnant with twins. She didn’t make first contact with your mom, but they did become friends after Alizée was read into the program, and honestly, kind of brainwashed into believing that this all made sense. At first, mom thought that they were just going to have her live a few towns over, but then they kept talking about it, and a few towns became a few states, and a few states became a different country, and so on and so forth, until we ended up where we are today. It was this whole long-con. They just kept getting her more and more excited about what kind of data they could get from this study, and how beneficial it would be for the advancement of science. Madalena was already a nurse by the time this happened, which means that she lied to our father about being a student. It was an excuse she came up with for why she wasn’t demanding much money to care for me. She didn’t need money, she just needed to get into that apartment, though obviously it would have been quite suspicious had she agreed to do it entirely free.

We talked about a lot more than this, so these are only the highlights. I screen recorded our conversation—in secret at first, though I later divulged it, which she didn’t argue against. She said that she has done a lot of growing up, and has dedicated her career to helping the less fortunate. She also regrets having participated, especially since it made little sense to begin with. It took them a few months to build up to the whole Vacuus expedition offer, and just when they had it, they discovered that we were fraternal twins. We were right that it was really disorganized. They didn’t try to develop a relationship with any other candidates, this was their one chance, or they would literally miss the boat that took you across the interplanetary void. They realized how little meaning their study would have at this point, but decided to press forward. Over time, they eventually gave up. At least, that’s what Madalena believed. She stopped treating me (by the way, but illnesses were real, it’s not like she was getting me sick on purpose), and she walked away from it all. She only later found out about her old business associates approaching our neighbor for further observation when I was a little older. One last thing. The screen recording doesn’t have this, because she never said it out loud, but she sent me an old contact card with the name of the person assigned to study you on the ship, and on the planet. It was Elek Katona. Isn’t that Velia’s last name?

Reeling from the truth,

Condor

Microstory 2267: 2018 Was No Bueno

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

Microstory 2257: And He Paid It

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The money is in. Our bank account is so full, money is spilling out of it. I mean that in the most literal sense while still not talking about physical cash. Knowing that the funds would be in there by the end of the day, I set an autopayment for a number of various charities, so the full amount was only available for a few minutes before a chunk of it was gone. I’m laughing now, reading all of the replies and comments from readers who were under the impression that I was getting scammed. Oh, so many of you thought that it was never gonna happen; that I was just setting myself up for failure. We kept mentioning all the things we had to do at the bank, and whatever. You were convinced that it was going to come back to bite us in the ass. I suppose I can see where you could have guessed that. In an alternate reality, that’s what would happen; us becoming the victims of a long con. The thing is, though, even though I’m not telling you who commissioned me to give up my specimens, he’s not just some random guy who claimed to have a bunch of money. He’s fully on the books, and can’t run from me. The FBI, and other agencies, were fully aware that this was all happening, and they could have easily gone after him if he hadn’t been on the up and up. I know that a lot of scams work by telling you that they’ll give you a whole lot of money if you just give them a tiny bit up front, and the idea is that they’ll accept the tiny bit, and just run away with it, because to them, it was better than zero. But this guy didn’t ask me for a cent, and like I said, he’s a public figure with a life to lead. Taking my index and bone marrow probably won’t do much for him, especially since as I’ve been trying to tell everyone, they’re not the key to immortality. Risking going to prison by stealing them? That would have been even more absurd. He set the price, and he paid it. He paid it today, and now that business is done. I’m keeping enough of it for the three of us to live comfortably in this house, and to pay my security detail and publicist. Everything else should be spent on things that help the community, and maybe the world.

Microstory 1778: Bullsh

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I was a terrible liar when I was young. I would keep doing bad things, and trying to hide it from my parents, and they always realized right away that I wasn’t telling the truth. I just kept trying, and they kept seeing right through it. My father would get angry about it, and my mom was always disappointed, but not in the way you think. She too was a liar, but an expert at it. Over the years, I learned more about who she was, and what she did behind everybody’s backs. She shoplifted, pulled mean-spirited pranks on complete strangers, and cheated on her husband more times than want to think about. I was basically just like her, except that I wasn’t good at keeping secrets. Seeing my potential, she took special interest in me, but you wouldn’t know it if you were looking from the outside. She treated our lessons just like she did anything else, as nobody else’s business. Mother was a grifter before she met dad. He was the first man she met who she didn’t want to screw over, so she gave up that life, and settled down. She couldn’t let go of her compulsive habits, but she was no longer taking thousands of dollars from her victims. He provided them both with more than enough money, and that was really all she cared about, unlike the con artists you see in the movies, who apparently mostly do it for the thrill. She couldn’t be sure I would grow up to be a functioning member of society with a decent job, so she felt that she needed to teach me her old ways so I would have something to fall back on no matter what. It wasn’t normal, and it wasn’t moral, but she taught me that everyone has to come up with their own set of morals, and I believed her without question, because I couldn’t tell when she was lying. I’m better at spotting it now that I’ve gone through all my lessons, so I know that she legitimately believed that. Before she passed, she lived her life with no regrets, and she wanted me to live mine the same way. I have, but not as she imagined. I use my powers for good.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has an entire division dedicated to fraud, and that’s all well and good, but they don’t do what I do. They investigate crimes with forensics, by hunting for, and searching through, evidence. They don’t know what a grifter looks like. They just know what their victims look like when they’re done with them. It’s really obvious too, when a corporate executive turns out to have been embezzling, or cheating their customers out of the product or services they paid for. How do you find out which ones are bad, and which ones are good? Simple: they’re all bad. Every single one of them is a devil, and they’re not even in disguise. What I do is go after the people that are in disguise, or who work in the shadows. They make small scams here and there, which add up to a lot, and ruin a lot of people’s lives without anyone ever knowing their true identities. I can practically smell when someone is getting scammed. There’s a certain lightness in the air that most people can’t detect. I can teach you to find these people too. I believe everyone at this continuing education seminar can help me grow my team of investigators, which focuses on stopping the fraudsters that aren’t out in the open, and don’t ever end up in the news. I know I can do this for you, because I...do not even work for the FBI. I made this badge in the bathroom this morning, after waking up and deciding on a whim what I was going to do today. I’m that good. Your real teacher will be coming in soon, but don’t tell her that I was here. She’ll ground me for a month if she finds out that I snuck into her building yet again. Parents just don’t understand, right?

Microstory 1461: Special Election

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Eskandar Aljabari was the polar opposite of former Sekundas Poppet Drumpf. He was kind, progressive, and most of all, a philogynist. Years ago, a very, very small group of men got together and formed an organization. Though organization was probably a strong word to use. Club might have even been too strong for it. Friends. They were friends. More to the point, they were like-minded friends. They all loved women, and not only in the way it sounded like. They believed women ought to be treated equally, just like they were on Earth. The Thicket was great as a rebellious force that was trying to change things by making a lot of noise. People needed to hear dissenting opinions, or they would just go on believing that their opinions—if only the ones indoctrinated into them by the government—were the correct ones. A rebel faction wasn’t the only way to make change, however, and this group of friends believed that their way was what was best for them. They were men, after all, so they didn’t need to fight against oppression if they managed to infiltrate the system, and tear it down from the inside. The first attempt at this was Neifion Summerfield, but he frightened people with his radical ideas about the treatment of women, so they recalled him. His downfall was what led to Drumpf’s regime, and this group didn’t want to see that sort of thing happen again. If Eskandar wanted to win the special election following Drumpf’s removal, then he needed to learn from Summerfield’s mistakes. He needed to be smarter, slower, and far less conspicuous. They had to play the long game, and though it would start with Aljabari, it wouldn’t end with him. The plan was to replace him with someone else in the next election after this one, so people could gradually appreciate the idea of trusting women without even realizing it.

There was a problem, though. One of Poppet Drumpf’s conditions for agreeing to step down as Sekundas was that his successor be a mage remnant. It didn’t matter what weak power the next leader of Durus would have, but he couldn’t just be a regular human. Though Aljabari was smart about concealing his true intentions regarding feminine policy, there were those who saw through his façade. They couldn’t prove who he really was, so they figured they should take him out of contention some other way. Then they never needed to try to oppose him at all. Aljabari was no mage remnant, so it seemed there was nothing they could do to qualify him for office. But there was. Most men had been denying the existence of female mage remnants since the very end of the Interstitial Chaos, and this obvious lie was the Republic’s official position. Some even denied that there were ever female full mages during the Mage Protectorate. The bottom line was that, if your daughter was born with powers, and you didn’t want her to be locked up for her entire life, you had to keep it a secret. You had to teach her to keep it a secret, and you couldn’t trust a soul. Fortunately, though Aljabari and his friends didn’t even reveal to their own wives that they were secretly in favor of women’s rights, his wife did confide in him about her time power. And so she gave them their loophole. She was an empath, so she had the ability to sense other people’s emotions. She could also send emotions to others. Now, this might seem like it didn’t matter, because Aljabari himself obviously had to be the one with powers, but all they had to do was use the Republic’s stance on wives against them. His wife had to be with him literally at all times, because the wife of anyone in a political position was more dangerous than the wife of a regular guy. She wasn’t allowed to campaign for him separately, because she would probably screw it up, or undermine him on purpose. So she was in the room when Eskandar was asked to demonstrate his empathic abilities. When prompted, she sent him a given target’s emotion, let him claim he was the one who sensed it himself, and he was able to pass the test. People were suspicious, since he wasn’t openly remnant before, but there was no law against that, and there seemed to be no way around his demonstration, so that had to let him through. He won handily, and began the long con towards equality.

Microstory 454: Floor 32 (Part 2)

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Accountant 2: Accountant 1, what are you doing?

Accountant 1: Nothing. It’s nothing.

Accountant 2: Is that a server? When did they install a server in your office? I thought that was a wardrobe? And I thought you keep it locked up because you didn’t want us to see a shrine of our boss in it, or something weird like that.

Accountant 1: Heh, funny. Let’s go with that, just the same.

Accountant 2: You’ve drilled holes into your hard drives and now you’re waving magnets over them.

Accountant 1: You can never be too careful.

Accountant 2: Is it...do you have a pictures of kids on it?

Accountant 1: What do you mean, I don’t have any...oh my god! No! Christ, Accountant 2.

Accountant 2: Then talk to me. What did you do?

Accountant 1: I dunno. Maybe nothing. I didn’t look at the data, but...I have to clear the evidence either way.

Accountant 2: Have you been stealing money?

Accountant 1: No, I’ve just been using software to make my job easier.

Accountant 2: How much easier?

Accountant 1: Well, um. I barely had to turn my computer on in the morning.

Accountant 2: What about paper reports, or  voicemail updates? You at least had to feed those in, didn’t you?

Accountant 1: My server could analyze all that. Everything I received automatically went in there. It even knows which Russian scam sites are actually run by one group of con artists.

Accountant 2: That may be, but no one trusts AI with accounting. There is too much at stake. All that money. The industry is scared to death of the next Y2K.

Accountant 1: I know, but I had it right. At least I thought I did.

Accountant 2: Is this why you always volunteered to do our work for us?

Accountant 1: I figured you deserved the downtime.

Accountant 2: You did that for us? You risked exposing your unauthorized software just so that we could play boardgames in the conference room? Why didn’t you just monetize it?

Accountant 1: I have my reasons.

Accountant 2: Stop what you’re doing right now.

Accountant 1: Why?

Accountant 2: Is the core code still intact?

Accountant 1: Well, yeah. But all the data’s been erased. I took away everything it’s learned about the world.

Accountant 2: Keep it alive. We can do something with that.

Microstory 34: Fate

Frank Williams was leading an incredibly mundane life. He had had the same job for ten years. He went to the same coffee shop every morning. He was a walking cliché. One random day, while waiting for his coffee order to be filled, a man wearing shorts and a robe walked up to him. “Are you the Frank Williams?” When Frank asked if they knew each other, the man explained,“you’re that famous model-turned-actor.”

“No, sorry. You have me confused with someone else.” But the stranger insisted that Frank was who he thought he was. He started ranting about presidents no one had heard of and Frank’s second wife, even though there wasn’t even a first wife. A woman, evidently the man’s sister, came in and pulled him away. She apologized and admitted that he was not well. A week later, Frank was in his coffee shop when a second man approached him, claiming to be a talent agent. He gave him his card and asked him if he had ever done any modeling. Could it be possible that the lunatic from before was from the future? Or some kind of psychic? Was it just a coincidence? Or were they all working together, intending to con him. Frank left and searched the web for the talent agent. He appeared to be completely legit, with verified tweets from celebrities and everything. While distracted by the biography on his site, Frank was hit by a garbage truck and died.