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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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 27, 2399

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When Leona was in college, in the second reality that her brain has been blended to remember—the one where she studied astrophysics, rather than film—she was always taking a lot of classes at once. For four semesters straight, she had at least a full load, if not more. The first semester of her sophomore year, she had to get special permission to take more than the maximum number of hours allowed. It was extremely taxing, but worth it. She had to learn a lot of ancillary subjects if she wanted to succeed. If she didn’t understand computers, she wouldn’t know how to model star systems. If she didn’t study geology, she wouldn’t know the difference between a volcanic rock, and a meteorite. She took the summers off to relax, justifying that she deserved a little time to herself, but it was a lie, as it’s not like she wasn’t working at all. That’s when she took extra classes, at the community college, and a few at the learning annex.

These were mostly designed to teach her how to learn better, and prepare her for the upcoming regular school year. It was in these classes that she learned things like basic library sciences, speed reading, hacking, and the skill that she’s using a lot of today, multitasking. Aldona has asked her to help revamp the entire global defense strategy, and she’s doing that. She’s fulfilling her commitment. But she’s also doing other things. Winona gave her access to the security systems on the base, so she would know how to incorporate the government’s preexisting protocols into the new orbital defense grid. She used the security feeds to keep an eye on her husband and Ramses, as they were secretly teleporting the latter’s new satellite up to Mangrove Zero. She knew what they were doing the whole time, but she didn’t say anything, because she needed to keep these people happy long enough to get what she needed out of them.

The security cameras do not allow audio recording, for legal privacy reasons, but as a loophole, they do stream audio. You have to be watching a live feed of any given camera in order to pick up sound, but you won’t be able to return to it later. This is where Leona’s multitasking skills failed her. While she was consolidating the command codes into a master code known only to her, she was also shoring up the orbital station-keeping fuel reserve calculations, locating the room where the starter nanites were being stored, and downloading the complete list of everyone involved in the Mangrove Program. She had been keeping an eye on Mateo and Ramses’ progress all the while, but stopped paying so much attention to it when it looked like they were just about done with their little mission. She didn’t notice when Aldona ran up to them with a teleporter gun, because she had lowered the volume to concentrate on those very precise fuel measurements. By the time she turned the volume up, Ramses was already gone, and she was only able to catch the tail end of the conversation before the audio was lost forever.

For whatever reason, Aldona doesn’t want Mateo to go back up to the ship, and she’s willing to let Ramses wither and die up there alone to stop it. She shot him with the gun, transporting him to hock, no doubt. So before Aldona came back, Leona had to add yet another task to her then-current caseload. She had to find out where Mateo was, and how to get him out. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to do that right away, because she was still not done with her other stuff.

“Have you seen my husband?”

“Not since the meeting yesterday,” Aldona lies.

“I’ve been so busy, I worked through the night, and never went back to our quarters,” Leona says. It’s not a lie, but not the whole truth either, of course. “I went to take a quick shower a couple hours ago, and he’s not there.”

“Hmm, I don’t know.”

She’s not going to accuse Aldona of anything. “The kids are okay, though, in case you were wondering. Carlin is old enough to take care of them both now.”

“Right,” Aldona agrees, though she’s not spent any time with them.

“Anyway, here are the plans.” She hands her a tablet. “You have a thousand rockets already, I suggest a thousand satellites to start. You can always add more.”

Aldona peruses the data. “This is perfect. I wish I had thought of it.”

“Yeah.”

“I appreciate this. I’ll get the nanofactories back online with their new directive.”

“Cool. I’m gonna go to bed. Hopefully Mateo comes back by the time I wake up.”

“I’ll let him know you’re looking for him if I run into him first.”

“Thanks.” Leona leaves.

Mateo has been awake in his cell for hours. He’ll sit on his bunk for a few minutes before getting sick of it, and lie down. Then he’ll stand up, and maybe pace a little bit. Standard bored prisoner behavior. An action movie would put his movements on a loop to make it look like he’s still there while the heroes sneak in and rescue him. But Leona has something they don’t. She has deepfake technology. She can generate new footage that’s based on his patterns. While she’s walking down the hallway, she initiates the program she wrote during her last multitasking session, and heads downstairs.

“Miss me?” Mateo asks, standing up to greet her.

She goes right up to the bars, and pulls him in for a passionate kiss. “I knew where you were all along.”

“I figured. It took us a long time to get that satellite up there. I thought it was weird that we were never caught.”

“There are things I needed to do here. They’re done; we can go. I had to prioritize though, and decided not to access the layout for Mangrove Zero, which is different than the newer models. Is it an okay place to keep children?”

“I didn’t see much of it.”

“We’ll have to risk it,” Leona decides. “When Aldona realizes you’re gone, our bridge to this place will have been burned, possibly the one to the government as a whole.” She punches in the code to unlock the gate.

They casually walk back up to the residential section, where Carlin and Moray are staring out their viewport like the rolling waves are a TV show. They pack up their belongings, then Mateo teleports the two of them up to the ship. When he returns to the room, Aldona is there. She always knows how to show up at the last minute. “Why?”

“You shot my husband,” Leona says. “That’s reason enough.”

“No, you were planning this for a long time,” Aldona assumes.

“Not that long,” Leona says. “I’m just that good. You should have agreed to help us find Alyssa. She’s part of our team. You’re not. That’s never a good position to be in.”

“I have full control over Mangrove Zero,” Aldona claims.

“Not anymore,” Leona replies coolly. She holds out her hand.

Mateo takes it, and teleports them away.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 17, 2399

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Ramses is watching the footage from the lab yesterday. The current feed is running on the other screen, showing Mateo sitting on his bed, and doing nothing of note. Leona walks into the room. “How’s Arcadia?” he asks her.

“They say that she’s in a coma, but...”

“But it’s more than that.”

“Yeah. If it were anyone else, she’s the one I would call to go inside her mind, and figure out what’s wrong.”

“Yeah.”

“What have you found here?”

Ramses rewinds the video, and plays it again. “See for yourself.”

“Did they bring you in to see if I’m really Mateo?” Mateo asks.

“Are you?” Arcadia asks.

“I’m an open book. Read my mind if you’d like.”

Arcadia closes her eyes, apparently using her psychic powers on Mateo. After a few minutes, she reopens them. “Your story checks out. I don’t see anything in there that suggests you’re anyone other than who you say you are.”

“I told you. I don’t like to lie.”

“I’ll go tell the others.”

Mateo nods, unsurprised by the verdict. He turns away to pull the sheets off the bed, presumably in anticipation of having to wash them before the next guest arrives. That’s when Arcadia collapses. He turns back around, and starts banging on the glass. Remembering that there’s an emergency button by the door, he runs over and pushes it, prompting Ramses and Marie to run in. The rest of the video plays out as they remember it. As for how it all began, it doesn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense.

Ramses and Leona exchange quizzical looks. She holds her hand out to him, which he takes. They teleport to the middle of a forest in Nowheresville, Russia. “What the hell did we just watch?”

“A deepfake is my guess,” Ramses replies. “But, like, a really good one.”

“How did Mateo do it? He doesn’t know how to do that.”

“It’s not Mateo.”

“He knows things.”

“Maybe he knows things the same way that Arcadia can know things.”

“If...whoever that is is powerful enough to generate a deepfake remotely without any obvious means of interfacing with the recording system...”

“Then the containment chamber is useless, at least in the lab.”

“Which means the entire facility has been compromised, and nothing in there can be trusted.”

“What are we gonna do with that thing?”

Ramses shakes his head. “We have to move it.”

“Where?”

“The where is not the problem, it’s the how. I would have to build a mobile containment chamber, get him inside, and hope that he doesn’t interfere with any of the systems of the vehicle we put him on. This is after we build a second full-sized chamber elsewhere. And that’s assuming any of this matters. My guess is that he can’t use his time powers while inside, but can use whatever else he can do.”

“But that’s just a guess.”

“He may be playing the long game, and only pretending to be trapped.”

Leona tilts her head. “Wait, the lock is electronic. He could just open it.”

“There’s a mechanical component,” he explains. “It’s just a sliding bar, but you need hands to open it.”

“Ah, I didn’t realize that. I haven’t been involved in all that all that much.”

Ramses chuckles, and watches a bike of ants carry something indiscernible away.

Leona believes that she can read his mind. “You’re thinking of moving him yourself; no mobile containment chamber.”

“It would be the fastest way to do it,” he acknowledges. “We would still need to contain him at the destination, and there couldn’t be any electronics for miles.”

“But it could be done,” she finishes.

“I don’t know if we have time to do anything. He’s expecting us to let him out soon. He might just brute force it if we take too much time. We keep calling him a him as if we know who this person is, but we almost don’t know anything at all. All we know is that the consciousness in Mateo’s body isn’t Mateo...at least not one we love.”

Leona kicks at a nearby tree to stimulate her thinking brain. After a few minutes, she’s got it. “How attached are you to the AOC? How badly do you want to keep it?”

He narrows his eyes, suspicious of her. “Why? What are you thinking?”

“I have an idea, but we need to work it out together. I want to come up with every variable, and have a contingency to correct it. We’ll only have one shot.”

The two of them go over the plan, keeping it all in their head, or writing it down with good old pen and paper, because they can’t trust computers right now. They don’t know the extent of Impostor!Mateo’s power, and can’t risk him catching wind of what they’re going to do to him. He may be able to sense other people, which means he’ll know if Angela is in or out of her stasis pod. There are too many questions, so they have to be extra cautious. All they know is that he has to be isolated and contained. They’ll have to just figure the rest out later. They bring Marie and Alyssa into this, but no one else. Alyssa’s main job is to stay with Arcadia, Vearden, and her brothers in the hospital.

They’re about to execute the plan now. “Are you ready?” Leona asks.

Marie cracks her neck, and gets into position. “Ready.”

“Radio check one,” Leona says.

“Check two,” Ramses replies.

“Check three,” Marie says, adjusting her ear piece a little.

“On my mark,” Leona declares. She looks at her friends and nods. “Four, three, two, one, mark.”

“Stepping one.” Marie teleports first. She jumps to the infirmary in the lab. She starts to open Angela’s stasis pod.

“What are you doing?” the doctor questions.

“Help me lift her up,” Marie orders.

He helps her, even though he doesn’t know why.

“Step one complete. Stepping two now.” She teleports again, this time with Angela and the doctor in tow.

“Stepping three now.” Ramses jumps to the infirmary. He activates the stasis pod’s hover feature. He then gets on top of it, and holds on tight. It’s heavy, so even though it’s possible to transport, it’s a little harder to do than a person is. “Stepping four now.” He jumps to an Antarctic island that the main sequence would call Heard Island.

“Stepping five now.” Leona teleports last. She unlocks the containment chamber, and power walks towards the man who looks like her husband.

“Hey, honey. Is it over?” he asks, feigning delight at the sight of her.

“Step seven primed,” she can hear Ramses say through the radio.

Without a word, Leona wraps her arms around him, but not in a loving way. “Stepping six.” She teleports to Ramses’ location on the other side of the planet. He already has the stasis pod open, and is waiting to close it. “Stepping seven.” She shoves Mateo into the pod.

“Hey what the fuh—?”

Ramses shuts it.

She locks it. “Step seven complete.”

“Stepping eight,” Marie tells them through the radio. “Purging Constance.”

The two of them look up at the sky, knowing that they can’t see her from here.

“Step eight complete. Stepping nine now.”

“Godspeed, Marie,” Leona says.

“Love you all.”

“Love you too,” Ramses responds.

“Step nine complete,” Alyssa reveals through the radio. She was keeping an eye on the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from the hospital, since they can’t have electronics around Impostor!Mateo. She sees that it has successfully entered relativistic speeds, but not using the reframe engine. It’s the only way to keep both Angela and Marie alive long enough for Angela to finish drinking all of the immortality waters. Impostor!Mateo needed the stasis pod more than her.

He surely wouldn’t agree, though. Speaking of which, he can speak. “What, no step ten? There are usually eleven steps. What’s the deal?”

Leona rips her earpiece out, and hastily sets it on a rock. She takes a second rock, and slams it down. Ramses hands her his, and lets her do it again. “How is he talking to us? One second should mean ten thousand years in there.”

Ramses checks the pod to make sure it’s set to the right differential, and functioning properly. He then looks into the window to see Mateo lying there, frozen in time. “Framejacking.”

“What’s framejacking?” Alyssa has teleported to their location. “The others are fine,” she assures them before they can ask.

“Framejacking is a superintelligence concept. It refers to altering one’s perception of time, as opposed to actually changing the time that passes around you,” Ramses begins to explain.

“Basically it’s when you’re thinking so fast, it’s like you’re living a lot longer than you would if you just operated in normal time,” Leona continues. “Different species at different sizes do this naturally. Ever notice how a fly can move away from your swatting hand so quickly? That’s because it sees your hand move in slowmo. Computers can process upwards of millions of calculations per second. A really advanced one could do billions, or even trillions. I think I know who’s really in the box.”

Ramses and Leona look at each other and simultaneously say, “Constance!Five.”

“Constance!Five. Right,” Alyssa says hurriedly. “That’s what I was gonna say too; we’re all equally smart.”