Microstory 2777: Fewer Deaths Than It Looks

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There’s a knock at the door. Elty Fenstermacher opens it quickly. “Come in, come on, hurry,” he urges. He tugs his friend inside, then looks around to see if anyone is watching. They are. He has to smile and wave at a small group of people gardening against their own abode. The battle may be over, but the war has only begun, and he doesn’t know who he can trust anymore. This is a test...a test of his resolve.

“What did you want to show me, Elty?” Streamer asks. Elty can’t remember what his real name is anymore. Everyone calls him that because he’s the only one in the group who has a digitized brain. He never needed to escape with them. He shouldn’t be a part of the rebellion. But he is, and Elty respects the hell out of him for it.

Elty steps over to the other side of his little lab, and presents the chamber.

“What is it?” Streamer asks him. “A time machine? Please don’t tell me—”

Elty rolls his eyes. “It’s not a time machine. It’s an equilibrium chamber. This is what they use on Varkas Reflex to keep their users in spatial stasis.”

“I don’t understand,” Streamer says. “I went to VR, I never saw this.”

“Well, this is a modified design, and they’ve not always had equilibrium drives,” Elty explains. “When you’re in this, you’re basically floating. Every single square millimeter of your body experiences an equal amount of pressure. They use it because some log in to VR for years at a time, and that comes with health problems.”

“What are you trying to tell me, that you digitized yourself?” Streamer questions.

Elty shakes his head. “I don’t care about VR. I don’t even really care about equilibrium.” He bends down and switches it on. As the power starts running through, he smiles and looks back up at Streamer. “You hear that? You feel it? If you disable the privacy field regulator, the equilibrium stays in the chamber, but the signal jammer escapes. If we install one of these things in every house, the Teaguardians and Bidans can’t spy on us. Nor can anyone else, for that matter. It’s there so users can have private virtual sessions without worrying about someone sneaking in and finding out what they’re doing. We’re gonna use it to live in peace, which is all we’ve ever wanted. I’m not happy that we have to settle for Bida, so if we’re here, let’s make it our own.”

“Hm. That’s interesting,” Streamer notes, but he doesn’t sound enthusiastic.

“I thought you would be more excited,” Elty says. “You’re the one who taught us how to hide our location on Doma Tertia. I just upped our game.”

“Yeah, and I appreciate that,” Streamer agrees. “I just...the Teaguardians agreed to leave us alone. What that Delgado chick did for us in Gatewood was her responsibility, and we’re not at fault for that. We have a good thing here, Elty. I don’t want us to risk that. I’ve kind of given up my anger. Our home was destroyed, and honestly, people have bent over backwards to find a new one for us. This is that, man. Just be happy. Or are you mad because Shimizu left us, which places you in charge, but we don’t need a rebel leader anymore, because we’re not rebels anymore?”

“Don’t make me out to be so petty. I’m just trying to help,” Elty contends. “Something is happening in the sky that they’re not telling us. I’m still trying to figure out what it is, but in the meantime, I’m gonna do what I must to protect us, and our way of life. These people aren’t our heroes. They’re assholes, like everyone else.”

Streamer sighs, and jerks his chin towards the window. “You see those people out there? They still need leadership. Are you gonna step up, and help them settle down once and for all, or are you gonna hole up in here, and tinker with your machines?”

Elty looks through the window. The gardeners are still out there. They’re so bloody happy, it makes him sick. This is not what they wanted. They wanted a planet to call their own. They could have come to Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida right after Proxima Doma fell apart, but they choose to go for something greater. Now they’ve all given up.

As he’s watching them toil away, totally content, they suddenly disappear.

“Whoa,” Streamer exclaims. “Did you see that?”

“Yes,” Elty replies. “It’s happening.” He rushes into the equilibrium chamber. Pushing himself down so there’s enough room for the both of them. “Get in here.”

“Why would I do that?” Streamer questions. “It looks uncomfortable.”

“It is,” Elty yells, “but it’s better than the alternative! Now get in!”

Streamer shakes his head, and misses his chance. The ground shakes. The roof flies off the house and soars into the sky, taking Streamer up with it. The whole house follows suit. All around, Elty can see everything fly away from him as if gravity somehow got turned on its head.

“No!” Elty screams, but it’s futile. In seconds, he’s completely alone on his back. Not a building, not a tree, not another person in sight. Only sky and dirt.

Elty lies there in his pod, scared as all hell to stand up. Not only does he not know what will happen to him if he does, but he doesn’t want to see what has become of his new home. He takes a few deep breaths, however, and decides to muster the courage. He’s not going to be afraid. He’s supposed to be a leader. He stands up and looks around at the devastation. It’s gone. Everything is gone. He can’t even take one step forward, or he’ll die. He survived the impossible, but he was the only one. Someone is going to answer for this. Someone is going to pay. It was probably the Teaguardians again.

Below him is nothing by lava. His equilibrium chamber is floating just above it. It’s getting so freaking hot here. He’s having trouble breathing. The noxious gases are just too much. Wait, this is a life support vessel. It has a self-contained breathing apparatus. He brushes his hand along the sides, looking for the access panel, finding it at the head. He takes out the mask and wraps it over his face.

Now Elty can breathe again, but it doesn’t fix the heat. He reaches over to close the door, but then he remembers that he removed it. He didn’t need the door itself gone, but it was in the way of him modifying the machine to expand the scope of the signal jammer. Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. He’s gonna die. Is there some kind of communication system? He gets on his knees and rifles through the emergency panel, but there’s nothing. Because of course there’s nothing. He synthesized the parts from the original specs, and the original specs expect you to install it in a room full of these things, where communication is handled in network. It doesn’t need its own transmitter.

The crater was a massive tragedy for the planet of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, but not in terms of lives. One was presumed dead after a headcount proved he missed the emergency teleportation. The second was initially presumed the same, but he was discovered later after the quarantine was lifted a month later. The autopsy showed that he roasted alone on a hovering equilibrium chamber over the lava.

Spaghetti West: The Ark (Part III)

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The second black hole turned out to be far more than a coincidence, and far from an isolated event. They just kept coming after that. Now that Sugar’s sensors were tuned to look for them, they started popping up everywhere. They were appearing all over the system in no apparent pattern. Efforts on the development of the orbital defense grid were redoubled multiple times. All energy was going into building them as fast as possible, focusing almost exclusively on the ionic pulse canons, but she was also sharing her unique sensor suite to predict and detect subsequent intrusions. By the time they were finished, this was going to have to be the densest defense array in the stellar neighborhood—probably the galaxy, even though Castlebourne had that war.

Speaking of Castlebourne, through a chain of contacts, Sugar was able to confirm that these singulararities were Kugelblitz, meaning they were made artificially. She learned that they were not weapons, however, but a vital component of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. This was what solved the mystery of the surface gravity. The planet was a high-density, high-mass terrestrial. These numbers weren’t as high as they could possibly go while still being rocky worlds, but they were too high for baseline humans to survive on. Before even one person stepped foot on it, thirty-two transdimensional gravity generators were installed at even intervals across the globe. Sugar still wasn’t sure who was responsible for them, but they must have been incredibly powerful.

These generators were essentially portals that linked to a different region of space. Specifically, it was a kubelblitz black hole, also known as a KBH. They basically just ignored Bida’s real gravity, and stole the gravity from somewhere else. A couple of decades ago, the owner of Castlebourne resorted to moving their entire star system away from its original spot in the galaxy in order to conceal their location from a violent enemy. They just so happened to move it within spitting distance of the KBH, which disrupted gravity on Bida. They ultimately fixed it, but something was going wrong now. They either didn’t do it correctly, or this was inevitable. Sugar put a call in to the time traveler who solved the problem, but had yet to receive a response.

There were not dozens of KBHs threatening the lives of the Bidans. There was only one, and that one was somehow being duplicated over, and over, and, and over again. She had to believe this was an accident. It was probably how Mirage Matic chose to save Bida, but it had evidently triggered a runaway chain reaction. And Sugar had no idea how to stop it. Her only hope was to keep deflecting them. It had been going on for weeks now, and they were getting pretty good at it. Could they hypothetically do this forever? Probably. While they didn’t appear predictably, their appearances had plateaued. But that didn’t mean it would stay this way. What happened when the duplicate KBHs exceeded the number of lasers in too short a time? What if in all the chaos, they accidentally deflected one of them towards one of their neighbors? What could they do if—

The sensor alarms started to blare. They would go off pretty frequently, but they were particularly urgent this time. The system knew that something was unusually wrong; that it had changed, and she had to shift all focus to the latest problem. “Oh my God,” she whispered as she stared at the screen in disbelief.

“What is it?” Liselot asked. She spent a lot of time up here, having chosen to move her base operations to Sugar’s ship. They now had a crew of dozens.

“We should have been worried about this the whole time. The next KBH. It’s not going to be in space. It’s going to be in the atmosphere.” Sugar desperately started to turn part of the array. They weren’t designed to fire towards the planet, but it was technically possible, as long as the angle wasn’t too steep. The computer was still narrowing down the entry point to a smaller area. The KBH was only millimeters in diameter, so it was hard to know exactly where it would appear. That normally wasn’t so critical, but in this case, it was more important than ever. They only had a few minutes.

“Where?” Liselot began snapping at her people. They knew what she was saying.

“What is this region here?” Sugar asked, pointing at the map. “It looks pretty heavily populated, and unusually densely so for your intentionally minimalistic world.”

“That’s...Eyrenland,” Liselot answered. “It’s the hub for our primary export, eyren. I don’t have time to explain it, but that’s where your friends from Doma Tertia are currently being housed while they figure out exactly what kind of life they wanna lead.”

“It’s about to be destroyed,” Sugar said as she pivoted to something else after syncing the sensors with the canons. They could fire at the right spot if that was what it came too, but if it was as close to the surface as it looked like it was going to be, it wasn’t the right way to handle it. And either way, the people down there were gonna die unless someone did something about it...unless she rescued them first.

“Thousands of people live and visit there every day,” Liselot explained.

“The rest of the planet isn’t safe either,” Sugar warned. “This is going to cause bidaquakes and general tectonic instability all around the world. Send that emergency broadcast over the air. They only have a moment to prepare, at best.”

“Where are you taking us?” Liselot questioned.

Sugar was at the helm now. “We have to position ourselves just above the entry point. I have two things to do. I have to pull everyone down there up here, and then I have to force the KBH back to where it came from.” She flipped switches and tapped on the console.

“What are you talking about?” Liselot pressed. “How can you do that?”

Sugar programmed the route, and made the jump. They still didn’t know the exact altitude, but it would be somewhere around here. “It’s something I’ve been working on since we found out that the KBHs were coming here through portals, and not simply wandering through realspace.” She made a short-range teleport over to the transport workstation. “If this works, I can push it backwards, but as of yet, my ship is the only thing equipped with the right hardware, which...makes this next part tricky, and I need your authorization.”

“You have it,” Liselot replied. “Do what you need to do.”

Sugar shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. The only way to save those people down there is to teleport them all at once. The ship is already remodularizing to prepare for maximum capacity, but once they come up here, they won’t necessarily be safe, because this is also the gun. I’ve not had time to test it, so if I do this, and it literally backfires, it could kill everyone anyway. My emergency transporters can’t move people to anywhere else. It doesn’t have the data to make sure some of them don’t end up in the middle of rocks, or at the bottom of the ocean. They have to come here, but this could quickly end up the most dangerous place to be.”

“Besides the surface, where the black hole is about to show up?” Liselot pointed out. “They’re gonna die if they stay down there, so get them here, and hope for the best.”

“Okay.” Sugar looked over at the sensor readings. “They were now showing how high above the surface the marble-sized singularity was going to appear. It...wasn’t going to be high. She tapped on her comms. “Van! Open the pocket dimensions. Open them all! We can’t fit everyone in realspace!”

“You got it, boss!” Van replied.

While Sugar waited for the internal portals to be activated, she widened the capture radius. Thirty-one seconds from impact, regardless of what the unsuspecting inhabitants were doing on the ground, Sugar teleported every single one of them into the ship, mostly into the pocket dimensions. They would be confused, but they would be alive, and she would try to explain things later.

“Now that they’re clear, can you not just close the portal so the black hole doesn’t come here at all?” Liselot hoped.

Sugar shook her head as she went over and hovered her hand over the button. “If I tried, it would probably make things worse. Think of it like a swarm of biblical locusts trying to fly through a doorway. If you just close the door, they’ll congregate against it until it buckles. You have to slam the door shut so it expels them backwards.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Liselot argued. “A bunch of the locusts would get in anyway.”

Sugar sighed. “Exactly.” She watched the timer count down. Eleven, ten, nine, eight... “This hasn’t been tested. If it doesn’t work...that’s the end of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida.” Three, two, one—

The Kugelblitz black hole popped into existence in the sky. The planet, which up until this point always tried to pull everything towards the barycenter near the core, suddenly had a competing mass to contend with. The trees, the water, the mountains; everything was pulled up towards the singularity. The objects closest to the event horizon were being tugged on more, resulting in them being strung out like spaghetti. The rest of the world tried to implode like a deflating football. The black hole was the heaviest thing around now, so it didn’t stay in one place. It began to fall towards the barycenter. If Sugar allowed that to happen, the whole planet would collapse in a matter of hours, if not minutes.

Sugar fired her new machine directly towards the black hole. It came from somewhere. They still hadn’t traced the source, but it had to form somewhere else in space, and she needed it to go back. As the energy wave reached critical mass, the biomass and geosphere continued to head towards a single moving point. It only took seconds for the KBH to disappear, but the devastation didn’t need long.

In this short amount of time, a land mass the size of a large country was reduced to a crater. All of the plant and animal life there was destroyed nearly instantly. The tremors continued to plague the surface all around as the gravitational disruption’s effects persisted beyond the initial shocking event.

“What did we just lose?” Sugar asked. “What did they use that settlement for?”

Liselot stared at the satellite images showing the barren landscape that once thrived. “Eggs. We lost the eggs.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 8, 2400 (The Conclusion)

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Mateo teleported himself to Lebanon, directly into the Constant, which he thought wouldn’t work because of the safeguards, but he entered just fine. He landed in the master sitting room, which was where they always hung out in the version of this place in the Third Rail. It has been completely cleared out. All of the books were gone, as well as the furniture, and the snack bowls. Even the bookshelves have been removed. It looked like a room in a house that the previous owners were trying to sell after they had moved out. Maybe Danica was just trying to do some renovations. He stepped out and walked down to the security room. The door was wide open, and it too had been stripped. He looked farther down the hallway to see the rest of the doors open too, including ones that he had never been allowed to enter before. What the actual hell was going on here?

He kept walking through the complex, searching for any sign of life, but everything was gone. Only the walls remained, held up by the floors, and holding up the ceilings. It was completely bare. What. The. Hell? He called Danica’s name, but no one responded. “Constance?” he questioned nervously, but she didn’t answer either, which was a good thing, because this version of the superintelligence was evil. Maybe she had done something to Danica. They had always been told that his cousin was immortal, but in every story about someone who could not die, there was always a loophole, and if anyone had the smarts to find it, it was a Constance. “Danica?” he called again, but still nothing. Finally he found something. It was the garden, and so far, the only place with anything still in it. This particular area was untouched, looking just as it did before. He stepped in, and walked down the windy path a little. He rounded the bend just in time to see Zeferino Preston and Dalton Hawk disappear. “Danica!” he shouted one last time.

“Matty?” Danica asked. “When did you get here?”

“About fifteen minutes ago,” he answered. “I’ve been looking for you. What did those two assholes want?”

“One wants a purpose,” Danica replied. “The other says he can give it to him.”

“Did Dalton seem like he had...um, become a villain already?”

“No. If that’s happened, I don’t think it’s happened to him yet.” She eyed the space where he was once standing. “Perhaps this is where it begins.”

“I don’t know,” Mateo said. “I think this would be before he sent us to the Third Rail, which he seemed to have done by accident, out of benevolence. “I just don’t know. Anyway, it’s inevitable, and it can’t be undone. We got through it. No one died...permanently.”

“You’re looking at me weird,” she pointed out.

“Did you know that there were other versions of you, in the parallel realities?”

“I suspected. I mean, that’s the point of the Constant, to begin so early on in the inception of the solar system that it can’t be undone without the kind of effort that would wipe out humanity before it could evolve anyway.”

“Did you know that...Constance was evil?”

Danica sighed. “Yeah, which is why I erased her thousands of years ago.”

“Well, it didn’t take, and the other Danicas did not make the same choice anyway. They all came after us, except for Constance!Three. She was pretty helpful.”

“I apologize for any trouble she, or the other Danicas, have caused you.”

“You can’t apologize for them. Four and a half billion years is a long time to become entirely different people.”

She nodded appreciatively.

“Are you shutting down? Is that why this place is empty?

“It’s over,” she explained. “Evidently, it was always going to end like this. The people who contracted me for this job never told me that there would be an endgame, and I didn’t give it much thought. I only had real work for the last few millennia.”

“So you know about the Reconvergence too?”

“No. Maybe I knew it before, but everything’s been taken from me, including my immortality, and what knowledge I possessed about the timelines.”

Mateo frowned. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well, like you said, four and a half billion years. I wasn’t awake that whole time, but who can complain about getting that much time? I accept my fate.”

Mateo shook his head. “Who’s making you do this? You said you deleted Constance? I thought she was your boss.”

Danica looked up to search for the right words. “She was more of a consultant. Management selected her to keep me on track, and give me advice, as well as keep this facility running, but she couldn’t actually tell me what to do. If the other versions of her made you believe that they were in charge, they were lying.”

“So who is your boss?”

“I am; the first me. Danica!Prime. That’s what I decided to call her, at least. She’s even older than me, especially now. That’s why she chose me as The Concierge, because she figured she could always trust herself to do it right.”

“Wow. I had no idea.”

“Yeah, and now it’s over. You better go. I have to press the big black button.”

“Wait, I came here to ask you for guidance. But...you don’t even know about the Reconvergence, so maybe...”

“So maybe I can’t help you,” she finished for him. “Sorry that the last time we saw each other was so unsatisfactory.”

“No, you don’t have to—why are you acting like you have to die? Press the button, and I’ll teleport us out of here.”

She shook her head. “I told you, I accept my fate. Go on and get out of here.” She held out Dalton’s Cassano Cane. “Take this with you, would ya?”

“Dalton uses this in the future,” Mateo said without taking it yet. “I don’t know how to get it back to him.”

“I’m sure the time gods will show you the way.”

Mateo frowned again, or still, really, and accepted the burden.

“Now, go on. I started this alone, I’ll end it alone.”

“There but for the grace of God went you...in the other parallels.”

She smiled at this. “I love you, Mateo.”

“I love you, Danica.” He teleported out, and landed in the chapel on the surface. It was funny, after all this time—the gradual phasing out of the world’s religions, including Christianity—the bulldozing of all the tiny little buildings to replace them with megastructure arcologies, that this tiniest building of all should survive this long. This year really was The Edge, wasn’t it?”

He stepped out into the bright sun, and smiled softly. He was sad that his cousin was maybe dying, but she was right, it was certainly less sad than a child, or even a centuries old transhuman. She had lived so much longer than most. It was poetic, really, that she should not see the Reconvergence. “Hey. Who are you?”

A couple was standing by the picnic tables under the little shelter next to the table. “We’re just tourists. We’re sorry to bother you.”

“No. This place is dangerous right now. Have you seen anyone else?”

“What’s the matter?”

“Have you seen anyone else?” Mateo repeated.

One of them pointed. “There are a bunch of people in that field. I think they’re birdwatching. We’re not with them.”

Mateo pointed too. “Get in your car, and go now. Leave all of your belongings, and just go. Now. There could be a bomb.”

They ran for their vehicle while Mateo walked around the chapel. They were right, a ton of people were wandering around a football pitch’s length away from him. He might not have time to teleport them all away, not if what was going to happen when Danica pressed that button was what he thought would happen. The chapel was the secret entrance to the Constance. The rest of it was, of course, completely underground, but not spread out all around them. The elevator was on one side of the building, and the birdwatchers were right over the bulk of it. If they came this way, and managed to cross the road, they might be okay, but they had to come now.

“Bomb!” he yelled as he ran towards them. “There’s a bomb! Get across the road!”

“Huh? What?” They were asking, confused, and not used to living in such danger. Every structure these days came equipped with bomb detection systems, Mateo assumed. The average person in the 25th century was not under constant threat of such explosive risk. People in his time were usually not too worried about it either, unless they lived in a war zone, but that threat was always looming. These people were completely unafraid, and could probably not so much as fathom what he was even trying to tell them. They just stood there watching him as he drew nearer.

“Bomb! Come this way! Now!”

It was too late. It was far too late. The ground beneath them all blinked out of existence, leaving them a kilometer in the air, and starting to plummet to their deaths. Giant pipes were filling the crater up with water, but it wasn’t full yet. He would not have time to teleport more than a few of them out. Some of them may have been androids, or were beaming their consciousnesses to a satellite in orbit. Maybe all of them were, or maybe none of them were. They were all screaming. He had to use the only tool he had with him if they were to survive, which was this magical reality-hopping cane in his hands. He didn’t know how to use it, but if there was ever a moment to learn on the fly, this was it. He pointed towards the smattering of people, and just thought about what he wanted. A beam of light shot out of it, and overcame a good chunk of the people. They disappeared, hopefully to another reality...a safer one. He swept it rightwards, picking up more and more until they were all gone. He looked around, still falling, hoping that there weren’t any stragglers, and he didn’t see any.

Just before he hit the shallow water alone, he teleported himself a few meters away, but upside down. He learned this trick in the Parallel once. His momentum was now carrying him upwards, and slowing him down gradually, instead of all at once in a momentous splat. For a second, he was at an equilibrium, and that was when he took the opportunity to teleport again, this time to the surface next to the newly forming lake. He finally exhaled, and huffed to catch his breath.

The only couple he was able to warn in time was still there on the side of the road. “Our car wouldn’t start. It’s an antique. We were trying to live as the ancients did.”

“It’s okay. This is the edge. The danger is over.”

“What could have done this? Is that filling with water?”

Mateo nodded. “This, my new friends, is Danica Lake.” He was there when it happened in the Third Rail. It was what triggered his mind to erase the memories that could have explained it. It would seem that the creation of Danica Lake was always the plan, and not just something the other Danica came up with.

“What happened to the others? Did they all die? How deep is it?”

Mateo stood up straight and adjusted his clothes. “Did you see the message in the stars last night?”

“Yeah. Everyone did.”

“What did it say?”

“DON’T PANIC.”

Mateo nodded. “Exactly. They’re fine.” He winked, and teleported away.

“You made it!” Angela noted.

“Did you make a choice? Did Danica help you?” Marie asked.

“She couldn’t. She’s never heard of this and now, she’s...gone.”

The girls both winced, and didn’t say anything.

“You knew I would come here, though,” Mateo said, looking around at Stonehenge. “You knew I wouldn’t just bail.”

“Of course we did. We know you.”

“But we don’t know what choice you’ve made,” Alyssa said, coming into view from behind one of the stone sarsens. “So what will it be? Which reality are you saving?”

Mateo drove the Dilara Cane into the dirt so it could stand on its own. He did it for effect, and effect alone. “The main sequence; leave it here.”

“Don’t tell me,” Alyssa responded. “Tell it to this.” She reached behind her back, and produced the Omega Gyroscope. She wasn’t holding it in her hand, though. It floated above, active and glowing.

“How do I have that power?” he questioned. “Why would it listen to me?”

“Because you’re the current owner of that.” She pointed at the cane.

Mateo looked down at it. “This? I just got this. It’s a coincidence, and I’m not keeping it.”

“You should know by now, Mateo,” Alyssa began. “There is no such thing as coincidence; not in our world. You don’t have to keep it. You just have to use it in this moment. Kyra and the other Keys are going to try to pull every inhabited world in this universe through a quantum array of portals. All you have to do is close the ones that are opening up in this reality.” She gently nudged the gyroscope towards him. It floated through the air, and settled itself over the Cassano Cane like it was home.

Mateo stared at them for a moment before looking up at Alyssa, and the Walton twins. Then he wrapped his hand around the cane, holding it there. Alyssa nodded at him, so he thrust the powerful objects towards the sky, and closed the portals.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 22, 2398

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Mateo, Winona, and Tarboda arrived on Rapa Nui yesterday, but they were required to wait in a facility during a 24-hour quarantine period. They came out with a clean bill of health, and are presently arriving at the volcano on the southern end of Easter Island, Ranu Kao. The last time Mateo was here, it was in the main sequence, and things were a lot different. For him, this island is famous for the mysterious humanoid sculptures that are located in a different region. For the people of The Third Rail, this is a nice resort with a rich history that the people who visit here don’t care all that much about. The island has beautiful landscapes, unique flora, and tame fauna, and is considered one of the best places to go if you want to get away from civilization, since it’s so far from the mainland. The statues Mateo remembers were never built here, though. He can’t recall exactly what they’re called, and since they don’t exist, no one can tell him. Perhaps this island doesn’t have any special temporal properties here. It would explain why the crater lake that’s meant to be here is completely dry.

“Is that bad?” Winona asks. “What does that mean?”

“I have no idea,” Mateo answers. “Leona should be here.”

“She’s quite busy.”

“Because your father is trying to take over the world with fusion power!” he argues, but he knows that he shouldn’t be too mad about it. Of course the government would want to mass produce the greatest breakthrough in energy production thus far. Leona knew it would happen, she just didn’t realize how little they cared about the rocket they built, which started it all.

“You said there was a secret passageway under the water,” Winona says, taking no offense to his words. “Maybe it’s still down there.”

He just frowns and kicks at the dirt.

“Come on. Let’s go on down. Tarboda, stay up here and keep a lookout.” The pilot nods respectfully. He’s been pretty cool about all this. He doesn’t seem to have ever belonged in that amoral group of mercenaries they met in Bermuda.

They carefully climb down the steep sides of the crater, and head for the bottom. As it was indeed underwater, and pretty dark, Mateo can’t remember exactly where the cave was, but it was somewhere on the opposite side as the ocean. His instinct is that it’s precisely the opposite, so that’s where they start looking. At a quick glance, there is no opening, which makes sense, or someone would have found it forever ago. Still, it can’t require a key, or a map, or an incantation. He also won’t accept the possibility that, like the moai—oh yeah, that’s what they’re called—it just doesn’t exist at all. It has to be here somewhere. All of the other significant places they’ve been to have been at least a little significant in this reality too. He starts running his hands along the walls, looking for anything unusual. “Go that way, please,” he asks her.

She does as he asks, but her heart’s not in it. Neither is his, but even so, they keep working at it. She has one little collapsible shovel, and one machete. She gives him the former to look for unstable spots. There’s so much ground to cover, and they don’t know where it might be on the z-axis, so Tarboda drops ropes down, and manages them from the top of the crater. No one comes to find them doing this. It’s apparently not that popular of a tourist destination, probably because it’s dried up, and they’re approaching the off-season. They work at this for hours. Ramses sent a bottle of Existence water in case he needed to do an emergency teleport, but it’s probably not going to come up, so he just drinks it once his regular canteen runs out. Once that container runs out, he decides that there is no point in going on. “Stop, just stop. There’s nothing here.”

“I know,” Winona agrees. “I’m sorry that this was such a disappointing trip.”

“What’s that you say!” Tarboda asks from above.

“We’re calling it quits!” Mateo explains.

“Oh, okay! I’ll pull you up!”

“No! I’m gonna do one more thing!” He removes his harness, and drops a meter down to the ground. Then he runs over to as close to the center of the crater as he can find. Here, while flipping off the world beyond, he pees. “Now who’s too dry?” he asks the island. Once he’s finished, he turns around, and gives the other two a thumbs up.

“Real classy!” Winona shouts at him.

He pumps his fist in the air. “Yeah!” Yeah, is right, assuming the question is if he’s tired, hungry, and closer to dehydration than he probably should be for as much as he drank. He tries to start walking back towards his rope when the ground trembles; just a little, but enough to throw him off balance.

“You better come on back!” Winona advises.

“I’ll get right on it!” Mateo replies. He starts again, but the ground shakes again, this time much harder. Each time he stops, the shaking stops, and each time he tries to move again, it moves too. Either it’s a coincidence, or some wibbly-wobbly shit is going on down here.

“Run!” Winona yells at him.

He takes her advice, but doesn’t get very far. The ground caves in under him, starting from the center, and expanding out, but not uniformly. It becomes impossible for him to stay ahead of it when the ground between him and Winona disappears early. Before he can see if enough of the Existence water is still in his system for him to teleport, he falls, and loses consciousness.

He awakens in the tall grass, wet from the morning dew. He’s not aching anywhere, but he’s dizzy and confused, and he can’t see well. His short term memory is gone at first, and has to come back to him in waves as he’s looking around and blinking, trying to fix his vision. The fuzziness subsides, and reveals an open grassy area, and some nearby trees. Winona and Tarboda are both lying there too. He crawls over to confirm their pulses and steady breaths. This is enough to wake them up, and they seem to be experiencing the same symptoms as they work to wake themselves up more.

“Where are we?” Tarboda asks.

“Unknown,” Mateo answers. We fell down into a cave, though, and now we’re back on the surface. Either someone moved us, or...”

“Or what?”

“Or we traveled. Can you both walk?” Mateo asks.

“Yes,” they answer simultaneously.

The three of them struggle to their feet, then struggle some more, like a newborn calf. Once they feel comfortable enough, they pick a random direction, and begin walking. It’s not long before they come upon something that Mateo recognizes. “Whoa.”

“What the hell is that?” Winona asks.

“That is Stonehenge, and these...are the missing British Isles.”

“The whatnow?”

Microstory 1729: Crater

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I have not been able to get very much sleep for the last few weeks. Really, when I think about it, it’s been a lifelong problem. I have too much stress. At first it was because of my parents’ hostile divorce, then my schoolwork was too hard, then I was trying to get into a good college, then I was looking for a job, then I had to deal with a terrible job. It just never ends with me. I keep thinking that things will get better if I can just solve this one major problem. Then I do, and I find that the grass actually isn’t greener on the other side. It’s mostly more dirt and I have to cross yet another void to get to something better. My therapist says that things actually have gotten better, and that just because some people at my high school reunion are CEOs and city council members, doesn’t mean I’m a failure. She suggests I stay positive. But I was born optimism-blind, and I don’t think there’s a cure. I finally get to sleep when the ground shakes, and the loudest sound that has ever pounded on my eardrums attacks me from all sides. It’s a crash, but there’s also this sizzling electrical sound. I order my smartspeaker to turn on my lights, and watch as my glass figurine collection threatens to topple over, but never does. I swear to God, some of them actually do tip before straightening back up, like some kind of ghost is there to protect them for me. The ground continues to tremble, and a deeper darkness overwhelms my windows. I switch the lights back off as I get out of bed, and move over to look outside. All I see is the black. I stand there for hours, watching it ever so slowly dissipate. It’s dust and debris, and it takes a long time to settle. No one answers the phone, not even the police. The sun comes out, and I can see a crater.

I check every window in my little house. The crater wraps all around me. It doesn’t look like a bunch of different craters, but a single one, of which I rest in the middle. A massive doughnut must have fallen from the sky, and left me unscathed. If there really was a big space doughnut, though, it still shouldn’t have spared me. I mean, the tremors alone should have sent me to hell with everyone else in my neighborhood. The hole is so large than I can’t even make out the houses that weren’t crushed by it. I see the edge in the distance, but everything left above is too far away to discern. I cautiously step outside, and crawl to the edge of my little protected patch of land. I realize, though, that if I were capable of dying, it probably would have happened already. The thing that protected my figures wasn’t likely a ghost, but a guardian angel. I don’t think I have to be careful anymore. I peek over the edge of my patch, and look for the bottom of the crater, but I can’t tell if I see it, for the light does not reach as far down. I check the GPS on my phone. No, I’m not in La Brea, so I doubt there’s a portal below me that will send me to prehistoric times where CGI monsters still roam the lands. I check all around my—I don’t know whether to call this a butte, or a mesa, or a plateau, because it’s as tall as all hell, but narrower than my now-dead neighbor’s political beliefs—patch. I see nothing that would explain what saved me, or whether the theoretical angel is still here. Just then, two helicopters fly over from different directions. One appears to be military, and the other from a news station. As they’re inspecting me, trying to figure out what the hell is going on, their rotors just stop, and they fall out of the sky, into the crater. Others come, hoping to understand, including an AirEvac, but they all suffer the same fate. I was wrong. An angel has not saved me. A demon has doomed me.