The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 12, 2525

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

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

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

“Oh, of course I do. The Oblivios.”

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

“On it, boss.” Ramses left.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Be right there,” Leona responded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The tower, or the dome?” Mateo asks.

“Both, I guess.”

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

“Yeah, he, uhh...he was my father.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How does that work?” Romana questioned.

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?” Mateo asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aeterna shrugged. “Whatever.”

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

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

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

“What’s that?” Mateo asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Extremus: Year 37

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Three and a half months later, and they still don’t have any answers. They can’t explain what they’re seeing in the mysterious box that the drone they sent out for resupply returned with. The person living inside of the box is too small to be seen with the naked eye. The glass the box itself is made of can be adjusted to magnify the image a little bit, and a microscope can make the image even larger, but it’s so far not enough to communicate. They can’t even make out the individual’s face, but she appears to be feminine, and she recognizes that giants are gawking at her. She mostly sits in a tiny chair, reading a tinier book, inside of a sort of living room that looks more like a movie set since there are two walls, and a floor, but no roof. She shows no signs of fear, insecurity, or general helplessness. The scientists placed in charge of figuring this out posit that she’s patiently waiting for them to do just that. One thing they’ve learned is that she refuses to leave the box. They drilled a little hole on the side, but she won’t crawl out of it for further testing. They don’t know why, so they’ve come up with a way to reach out to her.

“You wanna shrink somebody?” Kaiora questions.

“No, Captain,” Dr. Kreuleck says. He’s not in charge of the team, but the man who is has trouble communicating with anyone who doesn’t have at least three advanced degrees, so Daud usually finds himself as the interpreter between them. “The envoy will be piloting a miniature avatar. You’ll still be much larger than the specimen, but if you speak the same language, you ought to be small enough to carry on an intelligible conversation.”

“When you say you, you mean generic-you, right?”

“Umm...no, we were thinking actually you, sir,” Daud clarifies.

“Why would I be the one to do it?”

“We assumed you would want to make first contact.”

Kaiora hadn’t considered it. It sounds right, though, doesn’t it? She’s responsible for the crew and passengers, and she represents them in a way that no one else does, even compared to First Chair. Surely the technology is safe. Surrogate piloting is old technology that has only improved over time. There should be no danger to this. “That’s not what an envoy is,” she can’t help but point out. “You can’t be an envoy for yourself.”

“You mean yourself,” Daud jokes.

The Captain always tries to maintain a distance from everyone, for obvious professional reasons. She would be lying to herself, however, if she claimed to not find Daud’s company to be pleasant and enjoyable, but of course, no matter what she feels, she has to lie to everyone else. “Right.” She sighs, and takes another look at the nano-human, who’s presently sleeping in her little bed. “Tell me what to do. If it’s ready, I’ll make contact when she wakes up.”

Daud goes over the specifications of the interface pod. Everything is pretty standard. They will lie her back in the chair, hook her brain up to the machine, and then link her neural signals to the nanobot. It may never have been done at this scale before, but billions have experienced it in the history of mankind, so Kaiora isn’t worried. A few hours later, the specimen gets out of bed, cleans herself up, and then goes back to her books. That’s when they initialize the program.

Kaiora finds herself standing at the entrance to the box. The hole they drilled is as big as a building from her perspective. She has to climb up the side just to get to it, but it’s not that hard, because the glass is pretty rough, with lots of handholds. It’s not like she can get tired of it either, because she’s not really there. The bot is doing all the work, she’s just controlling it. After a little while, she reaches the edge, and walks over the threshold. Before she can climb down on the inside, everything changes. She can no longer see the box, or the movie set that the specimen lives in. She just sort of sees shapes and colors. Nothing looks distinct. She can’t orient herself. It’s all just a meaningless blur.

Kaiora forces herself back to her real body, and works hard to catch her breath. The experience was more traumatic than she even realized while it was happening. It was surreal, but now she’s shaken, and doesn’t want to go back. What the hell was that? “What the hell was that?”

“Tell us what happened,” Daud prompts.

She describes the images to the best of her ability, and slows down when the scientists seem to be having some kind of simultaneous revelation. “What? Tell me.”

“It was just a theory, and we tried to test for it, but we found it impossible to penetrate the box,” Daud doesn’t explain.

“You drilled a hole in it,” she points out.

“I mean, we can’t get our sensors in. We can’t take any readings. It seems that only visible light crosses the barrier.”

“Barrier?” Kaiora echoes. That word is really only used for one thing in regards to temporal manipulation. “You mean dimensional barrier.”

“Yes. She’s not actually tiny, she’s just in another dimension, which is being generated and sustained by a powersource somewhere inside the box. The glass serves as the boundary, and when you crossed it, you became part of it. You were in the form of a nanobot, so in the other dimension, you’re still in a nanobot, so from the perspective of everything else in there, that is how you appear...or rather don’t appear, because you were so small. At that point, to us, you were smaller than an atom.”

Kaiora nods once, and points to the box. “So in reality, she’s regular size; it’s just a different reality?”

“We believe so.”

“So if we teleported someone into the box, they would become her size.”

“Theoretically.”

“Why didn’t we do that in the first place?”

“If we were wrong, it could have destroyed the box, and the specimen. It would be like if we teleported a planet inside the Extremus.”

“Fair enough. But can’t you teleport her to this dimension?” Kaiora suggests.

Daud looks at the rest of the team. “We didn’t...think of that.”

Kaiora continues, “if we transport her from inside that box to our dimension, she should show up as a normal-sized person from our perspective. And if she doesn’t, she’s still safe, because we’ll know exactly where she is.”

Daud scratches the back of his head, embarrassed. “We’ll build the environment, and the laser teleporter. We have to be more precise than most teleportation jumps require. It should take us a few hours to be safe.”

“I’ll come back in a few hours.”

She does come back in a few hours, and the team is ready for the procedure. Kaiora takes one more look in the box. The specimen has straightened up her living environment. She’s made her bed, and shelved most of the books. She’s holding a large stack of some of them, though; presumably the ones she hasn’t read yet. She looks ready. She knows they’ve finally solved the problem. “Push it,” the Captain orders.

“We thought you might want to.” Daud lifts the single-button remote, and presents it to her with both hands.

Without thinking about it too hard, Kaiora unceremoniously presses the button, and activates the laser teleporter. A woman appears in the egress chamber, still holding her books. The bookcase behind her managed to come through too. The woman looks at it over her shoulder. “Oh, good. I was only able to hold about half of the ones I wanted.”

Kaiora recognizes her immediately, now that she can actually see her face. “Lieutenant Suárez, welcome back the Extremus. I’m Captain Kaiora Leithe, Third of Ten.”

One of the other scientists steps over, and carefully removes the books from Rita’s arms. “It’s nice to finally be back. We have a lot to discuss, but before I say anything, could someone please escort me to the hock. I need to talk to Halan first.”

Kaiora looks over at Daud. She knows that Halan is locked up, which begs the question how she would know such a thing after having been gone for nearly 34 years. “I suppose...that’s...a fair request. You’ll need a medical examination first, though.”

“I suppose that’s a fair request,” Rita echoes.

They’re careful not to let anyone else know that Rita is back. The Supply Recovery team that discovered the box in the first place agreed to secrecy, and still won’t be told this much anyway. Kaiora escorts Rita to Dr. Holmes’ office, and once the exam is over, to the hock, which adds yet another person to know the secret in Caldr Giordana. Hopefully that’s the last one besides Halan. Kaiora still doesn’t know what they’re going to do with her, and honestly, a former captain’s opinion will be invaluable in that regard.

After the pleasantries, Rita sits in the guest chair, nervously scratching her upper teeth against her index finger, but fortunately not biting down.

“Take your time,” Halan assures her.

“You’re safe,” Kaiora adds.

“Old Man knew what was going to happen. He was wearing a sort of survival pack. When Debra—that was Airlock Karen’s real name; I don’t know if anyone here ever knew that. Anyway, when she and I landed on the planet, there was no air. We were just in the vacuum of space, dying. I woke up however long later in a tent barely sufficient for two people. All three of us were in there together. Apparently, he had shot us with a teleporter gun, since we were a few meters away from him. Then he wrapped us all in the self-assembling tent. The rest of the survival supplies were in his bag. He called it the Heskit; Harsh Environment Survival Kit. It was equipped with carbon scrubbers, but since they take time to get going, he also had an oxygen tank that was good enough to last us six or seven hours. We didn’t have to share a mask. He just opened the valve, and filled the tent. I thought we were gonna die, but he just kept walking us up the steps. He had enough meal bars to last him a month alone, but we rationed them together, and still made it through that month.

“While we were waiting for the hydroponics to grow, a meat bioreactor printed meat patties for us. They weren’t particularly flavorful, and they took a shockingly long time, but they did the job. Everything was powered by small scale fusion reactors. He programmed and released nanites to build us a larger structure to live in using materials found on the planet. When we finally teleported there, we found that we were not alone. He was there, and he was a lot better off than we were. He was already wearing a vacuum suit, and brought with him far better supplies. To him it wasn’t an emergency, but a planned move. He wanted to live there. That was his temporary home, before...”

“Before he built a time machine to take over the galaxy before the Earthan humans could,” Halan tries to finish for her.

“Oaksent didn’t build shit. He forced Old Man to do everything. He also had a gun; not a teleporter gun, but a real one with bullets. A schism formed between us. It quickly became clear that Debra was on his side, and Old Man and I were on the other. I never much liked Elder, but he was a lot better than that megalomaniac. In response to our impudence, Oaksent modified the orders so that the time machine would only fit two people. The two of them then went off on their merry mission in the past, leaving us only with that second structure, and a microreactor to power it. He took everything else, including the hydroponics, not because he needed it, but because he didn’t want us to have it. Now I thought we really were going to die, but then we saw it. A vehicle was driving over the regolith, heading our way. Long story short, they were descended from the embryos or whatever that Oaksent stole from the Bridger Section. This small faction had broken off from the rest of the empire. They didn’t have any strong feelings about us, or Extremus, but they figured they might as well execute a mission to rescue us, just to make sure we were all living in the same timeline.

“They agreed to let us join their group, and we did so, because we didn’t want them to kill us, or just let us die. I mean, you fall in with whoever you can to survive, right? I didn’t love the life, because it was needlessly difficult. The empire is clearly technologically advanced, but this faction subsisted on outdated and worn out technology, I guess as a means of expressing some kind of rebellious sentiment. Stuff constantly broke down, and we were always in danger of dying. I made it work, but Old Man couldn’t. He wanted to get back to the ship, so he built another time machine in secret. He tried to get me to go with him, but I refused. It was too risky. I don’t wanna mess with time. So I stayed, and that’s when my story begins...”

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Microstory 1801: Jellyfish Cycle

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I have been around for centuries, but I’ve not been young the entire time, or even most of the time. A few species of jellyfish are capable of something similar, through by different means. They use their genetics to be immortal. I use my soul. Before they can die, they will revert to an earlier stage of development, and begin anew. These creatures have evolved to do this, but the same can’t be said for me, because humans are not like that. The majority of us aren’t, anyway. I belong to a subspecies of humans called voldisil. We did not technically evolve out of the other either, though. You see, there are three genders. Normal people are only conceived by two, but a third can get involved, often without their knowledge. They’ll inject something else into the process. It’s a spiritual experience, which those like me would consider a gift. Back in the early second century, I was created, and unfortunately, I never had the pleasure of meeting my third parent. My mother and father died shortly after I came into the world, when you think about it, because it was only a few decades. I felt like I was able to spend a lot of time with my family back then, but I now realize how precious those moments were, and how I should not have taken them for granted. When I was 36, I contracted malaria, and I assumed that was it for me. There was no cure, no vaccine. It was pretty much a death sentence in my region in that time period. One night, I felt myself drifting away, and had to make peace with the end. I was surprised to find myself waking up the next morning as a toddler. All of my memories were intact, and I was cured. I couldn’t explain it. A new couple adopted me, thinking I was the child of a victim, and not even considering the possibility that I was the patient. They just thought of me as their little miracle.

I continued to go through this cycle lifetime after lifetime. Though, I probably shouldn’t call them lifetimes. I would be older when the transition happened every time, but I was also coming back older. The second time it happened, for instance, I looked more like an eight-year-old. By the fifth cycle, I no longer had to worry about someone trying to take care of me. I appeared to be old enough to handle myself. Each time, I would have to pack up, and move to a new land, so no one would become suspicious. I felt like I was in my early forties the last time I cycled, but that was only sixteen years ago. I’ve not known what it was like to die of age-related causes in a very long time. If I keep this up, I’ll probably only have days to live at a time, and I don’t want that. My soul’s ability to rejuvenate my body was never destined to last forever, and I always knew this about myself. What I needed to do was find some way to make my legacy last. I, of all people, understood what it looked like when someone just faded away. That’s what happens to most, in the end. Barring great fame, perhaps someone’s great great grandchildren will recall stories of their ancestors, but they won’t likely pass these on to their own descendants. I didn’t have any myself, because I didn’t know what their lives would have been like. It wasn’t worth the risk. As I lie here on my bed, prepared to go through this once more, and come back as another middle aged woman, I see now. I see that my third parent must have been in my same position all those years ago. This must be how it works; we pass the torch. I may simply be the latest in a line going back to the dawn of man. My final thoughts are of a newborn baby crying with the others two floors down, who receives my spirit ability, and has no choice but to accept the burden.