Microstory 2415: Underburg

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Around 400 years ago, advances in materials science allowed for truly gargantuan structures to be built with complete structural integrity. We were constructing buildings that rose kilometers into the sky. Hundreds of thousands of residents could now live in an area once fit only for a thousand or two people. They called them megastructure arcologies for their efficient population densities, low environmental impact, and self-sustainability. No one forced anyone to move to these places, but they were the most logical. Instead of taking a vehicle or train from Point A to Point B, you mostly only needed an elevator. People used to have tons of belongings, but with advanced computing and virtual simulations, as well as component miniaturization, material possessions no longer seemed so relevant. Your unit stopped being a place where you lived, and began to serve only functional purposes. You lived in virtual constructs, and needed only a minimal amount of realspace for your physical components. Even so, the entire point to Castlebourne is being able to spread out how you want. You see, the reason we wanted to concentrate our population on Earth was so that we could give the majority of the land area back to wilderness. Animals can’t live in high-rise apartments—at least not intentionally, anyway. We have more choices. We figured that it was only fair that we do everything we can to stay out of their way, and let them be. Castlebourne started out as an uninhabitable planet, which had to be paraterraformed in order for it to be habitable. We’ve done this to many other colonies, but never before at this scale. There was no life here before we arrived. In fact, we’ve added life. The same rules about verticalization don’t apply here. We’re free to stretch our legs, especially since there’s a ton more land area overall, what with the oceans being confined to the poles. Underburg doesn’t have many people here yet, but I’m sure it will expand. Unlike other domes, it’s not populated by androids meant to simulate human life. I mean, sure, there are robots here to help us get things done, but it’s clear who they are. They’re not trying to blend in. If you conduct a search for 21st century suburbia, it will look just like Underburg does. Big houses; big green, perfectly manicured lawns; garages with two cars in them. Don’t worry, they run on electricity, supplied by fusion reactors. And we don’t have a history of racism and elitism. It’s not about recapturing the lifestyle of Old Earth. It’s about living in a neighborhood of like-minded individuals, watering your flowers in front of the walkway, and waving to each other as you leave for the day. We go to work. Nothing needs to get done, but we do it anyway, because that’s what we find enjoyable. If you think you might like it too, why don’t you come move to Underburg? Yes, it’s a little unsettling with all these empty houses, but it won’t get better unless more people take the leap. We need more residents! Come on, you know you want to.

Microstory 2414: Adrenadome

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TRIGGER WARNING. I want to talk about laws here, but I’m not going to say which laws specifically right away, because if my review ends up in a blurb, then it could get banned—or shadowbanned—for perpetuating harmful ideas. I think I need a few extra words to be safe sooooooo, there we go. Suicide laws. That’s what I mean. Back in the old days, when death meant the end of everything, and there was no going back, it was illegal in many places to attempt or commit suicide. Over time, these laws were changed to account for people’s unique desires and needs. Suicide and assisted suicide became necessary evils in certain situations, especially when a slow, painful death was the only other option on the table. The funny thing is, over time after that, these laws had to adapt again. Once they started sufficiently treating, or even curing, certain previously life-threatening medical conditions, the reasons for wanting to unalive yourself began to disappear at about the same rate. People stopped having very good excuses for not wanting to be alive anymore. Progress in mental health research, the proliferation of advanced medical solutions, and the drive towards a post-scarcity economy, among other factors, contributed to a healthier society overall. The development of more extreme technologies, like maximal longevity treatments, transhumanistic or cybernetic enhancements, and consciousness uploading and transference made it practically impossible to justify ending your own life, or anyone else’s, for that matter. Even the language of the relevant laws shifted to phrases like “reckless self-destruction” or “consciousness back-up endangerment”. Self-harm became illegal once again. Whereas before, dying meant taking maybe only a hundred years from someone’s potential future, now you’re potentially robbing you or someone else of the rest of eternity until the heat death of the universe. That should be profoundly immoral and unethical in anyone’s book. They’re even talking about making normal biological humans illegal, with some arguing that letting yourself die after a pitiful century is tantamount to suicide when framed as a negligible blip in the full timeline of reality. I don’t know about that. What we’re talking about is your body, your choice. Anything short of total freedom in that regard is hypocritical when you really think about it. Castlebourne is a Charter planet, which means that it doesn’t have to follow Core World Law. They still do, for the most part, having modeled their legal system on what came before, but they’re also free to make some changes, such as the definitions of those phrases above, like reckless self-destruction. What does reckless even mean? Does it mean jumping out of an airplane without a parachute—a new extreme sport, which they call skydying? Adrenadome is attempting to test the boundaries of what you’re allowed to do with your own body. I’m not gonna just list the extreme sports that can be found here. You can look them up. They’re all available, along with variants that forgo safety measures entirely, and just let you die, knowing that your mind will wake up in a back-up body moments later. Not everyone is gonna like it. I personally don’t. I came here to study the concept, because I’m a scholar of law. But it’s certainly interesting that these philosophical questions about the meaning of life and death get to play out in the real world, and no longer only on the lips, or the page.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 22, 2443

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With their advanced substrates, the team was capable of surviving any number of harsh environments, but that wasn’t something that they were going to seek out on purpose. It was really only something they should use when they had no other choice, and this wasn’t such a case; it was a test. The reframe engine was ready, but there was still a chance that it would vaporize the whole ship upon initiation of reframe speeds. So they didn’t want to be anywhere near it when they first turned it on. Ramses created an interfacing computer, which would allow him to operate the Vellani Ambassador from Ex-382, where it was safer. It wasn’t safe, per se, because the world itself was dangerous in its own special way, but it was manageable for a period of time since they were staying within the self-contained atmosphere of their pocket dimension, and because they had vacuum suits for excursions.

The entire surface of Ex-382 was a toxic wasteland. No one lived here, and hopefully they never did. They at least didn’t detect any signs of civilization here, except for the piles and piles of garbage. It was all over the place, randomly strewn about. The smell was unbearable, even here at the South Pole, where there wasn’t as much as there was elsewhere. This wasn’t just a planet-wide landfill. They dumped truly dangerous materials here, namely radioactive waste. By the time the ship Extremus was built, fusion power was ubiquitous and unremarkable, which meant that Bronach Oaksent would have been able to utilize it as soon as he went back in time, and began to build his empire in the Goldilocks Corridor. There should be no real reason for him to make any plans that included nuclear fission power plants. It was a perfectly fine alternative for Earth during its developmental years, but when one was starting from scratch, it just didn’t make much sense.

One of the hardest obstacles to overcome when pursuing fusion and antimatter solutions to energy needs was manufacturing the stuff. It didn’t exactly grow on trees. That was why it took so long for these both to be adopted, even when power generation techniques were perfected. Mining fissile elements was not easy, but it was relatively straightforward. Hydrogen was the lightest element in the universe, which was why it literally floated away, making it difficult to capture, and even to store. Still, Oaksent was an immortal who came from the future, and had untold time to formulate his new civilization. Using resources to maintain the infrastructure for nuclear fission production was probably only done as yet another form of control over his people. He didn’t have to use it, but making people labor away in the mines, in the plants, and on the ships that brought all the waste here, was keeping everyone reliant on him, and not letting them be too happy. He didn’t like happy people. That much was clear from whatever psychological profile they could cook up in their collective headcanons. He wasn’t dumping the waste on the planets where people lived at least. That should also be in his profile, that he didn’t want his people to die; not prematurely anyway.

“Ugh, I can still smell it,” Marie noted.

“Switch off your olfactory receptors,” Ramses instructed. He was tweaking the interface system, making sure that he was linked to every single system on board the Ambassador, no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential.

“That...what? That’s something we can do?” she questioned.

“Did no one read the manual?” Ramses asked with a sigh.

“Be careful,” Leona warned Marie, and the rest of the team currently present. Smell is highly linked to breathing, and also serves the evolutionary purpose of alerting you to smells that could lead to death. Don’t keep it off all the time. You may still get sick, and just not know it.”

“So...” Marie pressed.

“You can shut it off right now because of the smell,” Leona allowed. “I would lock up our suits, but we have to keep them close and accessible in case of emergency. Just remember to turn it back on once we live. I’ll remember to clean and disinfect the suits thoroughly later.”

“I’ll do that,” Mateo volunteered. “You have more important concerns to worry over, Captain.”

“Did you guys know that Earth is 70% water? I’ve never seen that much water in my life.” Korali was still reading about Earth from the central archives, and had come to the conclusion that all of these simple facts were not likely to be lies that the team made up in order to brainwash her, but that it was the other way around. They were trying to show her what the galaxy was really like, and even though she had by no means switched sides already, she was starting to accept that some of the things that she was brought up to believe were not entirely—or maybe not at all—accurate.

“Hmm. You’re right,” Mateo realized. “The worlds that we’ve gone to have been mostly barren, with fairly little water. The resort world had the most, but they were nowhere near the levels of Earth from the orbital images that I’m remembering.”

“More control,” Leona guessed. She was spraying an air purifier on their suits to mask some of the terrible smell until they could be fully detailed.

“I’m ready,” Ramses announced. “What about the backup?” Leona asked him.

“It’s been coded, and will only take a year to manufacture,” he answered.”

“The pod is fueled?”

Ramses laughed. “It’s fine. It’ll get us into space. I wouldn’t let us go into this half-prepared.” The dimensional generator was attached to one of the personal pods. These were capable of traveling through a star system in a matter of months, and landing on an orbital, maybe to refuel hydrogen levels, or to manufacture other structures, or just to wait for rescue. They weren’t really designed to launch from the surface of a massive terrestrial planet, but they were technically capable of it. It would use nearly its entire reserve of isotopes to make it happen, but it was better than staying here if the Vellani Ambassador was destroyed during the test. Ramses planned to install teleporters on them, but that would also require temporal batteries or something, because they didn’t use any less fusion power than the rocket equation demanded for a regular launch, so it wasn’t like that solved the problem. Hopefully, the test of the reframe engine would go perfectly, and none of this would matter.

“I appreciate all of your hard work,” Leona told him. “It does not go unnoticed. Go ahead and start the countdown.”

Ramses switched on all of the camera feeds, including the satellite that they had dropped out to watch the event from the outside. He started counting down from eleven, hovering his hand over the button. Everyone held their breath, including Korali, who managed to peel herself away from her studies long enough to bear witness. “Three, two, one, max.”

The ship disappeared in a flash of light. They all looked at the other views now, which were coming in from the interior. The bridge looked perfectly normal, and was completely intact. The corridors and rooms were all still fine. The camera from the engine room was a problem at first, which prevented everyone from exhaling. It was showing them snow for the first several seconds until the spatio-temporal distortion resettled, and the image returned to normal. The engine was holding as it was meant to. It was vibrating at an incredibly high frequency; so high, in fact, that it was imperceptible to human vision, even with these advanced eyes that they had. If the ship was going to vaporize, it should have done it by now due to the immense stress that these intense oscillations were causing the machine to experience. Still, they wanted to be sure that the nanosealant was permanent, and not merely holding temporarily.

For the next three hours, the Ambassador flew away from them, managing to make it out about 15,000 astronomical units. The engine then shut off for an hour while an army of microbots spread all over the engine to check for nanofractures. Leona knew exactly where the original ruptures were. If the bots found these to have returned, the smart ones here would know that the sealant hadn’t fully worked. If they found new ruptures, that would tell them that there was some kind of systemic issue that might not be repairable by what they had, or by any efforts at all. By this time, most of the group had begun to breathe again. Mateo and Marie occupied their time teaching Korali how to play RPS 101 Plus. Ramses worked on other projects while he kept an eye on the quantum data coming through from the diagnostics. Leona proverbially held her breath the whole time as she focused on nothing but the data. It was her only concern. If this wasn’t successful, they could build a new ship, but their plan to free the people of the Corridor from its despot would have to be placed on hold indefinitely until they regathered resources.

“How’s it lookin’?” Marie asked after their game was over, and Mateo’s sponge was finally too bigged by her wall.

“I think we’ll be safe. We’ll know in another four hours,” Leona answered. The ship would make the three-hour trip back here, and then go through the whole diagnostic process all over again. Only then could they leave for their next stop.

“Good,” Mateo decided, still bitter about losing the game. “I’m ready to go.”

“Did y’all know that something called a cow has four stomachs?” Korali asked.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 21, 2442

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Half a day into the trip that the Vellani Ambassador was programmed to go on, getaway driver Mateo returned to the timestream in 2441 to find the guard who recognized their charade awake, and sitting patiently in hock. “Report,” she said.

“We’ve been on a relativistic journey,” Mateo explained. “It’s been about twelve hours for us, but a whole year for everyone else.”

“Why?”

“It’s all part of the plan,” he answered cryptically.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked.

Mateo nodded, and prepared himself for the role of a couple lifetimes. He was still wearing his disguise, and hoping that she wouldn’t recognize him as the famous Mateo Matic of Team Matic. Some of the intel that Vitalie!613 gathered was paramount to their mission, while some of it was just anecdotal. She wasn’t interrogating the people on the resort world. She was simply getting to know them, and secretly logging everything that they said in case the team needed it later. One vacationer had a story to tell about how lucky she felt to end up at the resort after everything that happened to the rest of her family. Mateo recalled this story, and reworked it for this lie, embellishing certain parts for dramatic effect. “When I was a very young child, my parents were taken by the Empire. They wore uniforms much like yours. I remember the smell. I think they had just been involved in a fire, because they were sort of woody and rusty. I don’t know how else to explain it. I still don’t know what my parents did to deserve that, because no one will tell me. No one cares.

“For a long time, it was just me and my brother. We took care of each other. Honestly, I couldn’t even tell you which one of us was older. We didn’t really keep track of those kinds of things on my planet. Our cousin was around too, but he had all these responsibilities, so we rarely saw him. When my brother was still pretty young, he was killed in a factory accident. This could have been prevented if again, anyone cared about such petty worries as working conditions. If there’s one thing I’ve learned living under the loving Exin Empire it’s that life is profoundly undervalued. I grew angry. I stopped going to my own job, and started to steal what I needed; never from people who didn’t deserve it. I mean people like you. For years, they couldn’t catch me, until they did. I ended up 666, and that’s when my eyes were opened. I was a criminal. I broke society’s rules; the ones that ought to indeed be rules. For most people there, though, their only crime was disagreeing with the state. Your messiah, Bronach Oaksent, he’s a liar. Everything he’s ever said is just a misdirect. If he says he loves you, he hates you. If he says he wants to help people, he wants to hurt them. I don’t know what made him like this, but his reign of terror is over. Ex-666 has been freed...and we’re comin’ for him.”

The guard stood up from her bunk, and approached the bars. She wrapped her fingers around two of them, two at a time, like it was an intimidating dance. “How will you ever hope to defeat him, sir,” she began before a long pause for her own dramatic effect that ended with, “when you only exist for one day every year?”

Goddammit, that whole speech was a waste of time. Maybe he could save it? “What are you talking about?”

“Drop the act, Mister Delaney. I figured out who you were while I was knocked unconscious. Thanks for that, by the way. I was just telling my partner the other day how I wished for a little more brain damage.”

“There will be no permanent damage. We have medical treatment here.”

She stuck her face between the bars now, as far as she could go, stretching the skin on her face like a botched cosmetic surgery patient. “I’m going to be alone in here for the rest of my life. You’ve killed people, but you don’t execute them. You can’t let me go, because I know who you are, and I’ll tell anyone I meet that you have illusion powers now. A lifetime for me will be a couple of months for you.”

“If you knew that we might do that,” Mateo began, “why didn’t you lean into the lie? Why did you admit that you recognized me?”

“Because unlike you, I don’t like to lie. Maybe you and my messiah aren’t so different after all?”

Mateo wrapped his own hands around the same bars, just above hers, and placed his face a centimeter away from hers. “Maybe we’re not. The difference is that I only live for one day a year, and he’s been around for thousands of years. My ability to rule over you would be severely limited. So which is the lesser of two evils? And if immortality is possible, why are you so scared of death?”

She pulled her head back a little, so she could move her eyelids enough to narrow them at him. “What would society look like if no one ever died?”

“Why don’t you ask Earth? They figured it out, as did everyone in The Parallel.”

“Mateo, we’re gonna have to teleport!” Leona cried through comms. “Stop darklurking, and spark a flare! Don’t dock with the station! Just stay within range!”

He tilted his head away, and tapped his comms disc to indicate that he wasn’t talking to the guard anymore. “Understood.” He reached over to the button that would drop the blast door over the bars so no one else would know that he abducted a hostage.

“Wait,” she said. “The Oaksent isn’t the only one who can be immortal?”

A year later, after the whole team, and nearly everyone else, was rescued from the now completely vaporized Ex-467, the Vellani Ambassador was in the middle of another bottle episode. The next planet was within a light year away, but they were holding off on it so that Leona and Ramses could see if they could fix the reframe engine with something that they stole from the tech warehouse. “How come you don’t already have something like this?” Olimpia asked. She was twirling the topological modulating umbrella. “No offense.”

While Ramses ran simulations, Leona was scanning the nanofractures in the reframe engine, making sure that she had them all cataloged, so they didn’t miss a one. She didn’t want to apply the sealant until she knew exactly where it needed to go. The machine was built out of a metal-metamaterial composite that was practically indestructible. Obviously it wasn’t actually indestructible, though, or they wouldn’t be in this mess. This was always a possibility, however unlikely. And this antintropic nanosealant was going to help them fix it, as long as every spot was addressed. Missing even one could spell disaster for them. She didn’t pry her eyes from her work. “We never anticipated it, and until now, I had never heard of a solution to a problem such as this. The nanosealant, as long as it’s not a hoax, shouldn’t just fill in the fractures. A regular nanosealant would mimic the molecular structure of the target material to fill in the gaps that formed, but that would come with risk, because of possible imperfections that develop during the process, as well as impurities. The original molecules have since been lost when the structure was first damaged. What this sealant apparently does is summon those molecules from wherever they are in spacetime, and place them back where they belong. A normal human scientist would call that impossible, but of course we know better.”

“Well, why wouldn’t you at least have had the regular sealant?” Olimpia pressed.

“I don’t know. It’s not my ship, we took it from someone else. We had something useful in the AOC, but we ran out of it a long time ago. The reframe engine is one of the strongest objects out there so it can survive the stress of full operation. It was obviously well ahead of time when Hokusai designed it. It can also be protected by the overlying structure of its vessel, because it’s not a propulsive drive, so it requires minimal contact with the exterior. What this all means is that if the reframe engine is damaged, so is probably everything else, rendering repairs essentially pointless to attempt. It’s also important to note that I’m not in love with the design of this ship. It’s not as protected as it should be, which we might be able to fix given enough time. I think that Mirage just wanted to create more living space for its passengers, which is not a problem for us, since we prefer to live in pocket dimensions anyway.”

“You think that you can actually rebuild this thing with a new design?”

“Maybe,” Leona said. This was when she took a break, and looked at her conversation partner. “Are you playing with that?”

“It’s fine, it’s not even open,” Olimpia defended.

“Are you sure that that’s how it works, it has to be open? Rather, are you sure that it doesn’t do anything while it’s closed?”

Olimpia cautiously set the umbrella on the table. “Yeah, you’re right. Ram should study it first. I don’t even know what I’m still doing with it.”

“Well, it’s yours,” Leona reasoned.

“How do you figure? I stole it from the vault.”

“Yeah, that makes it yours,” Leona insisted. “We’re certainly not going to try to give it back any more than I’m gonna give this sealant back.”

“I know we weren’t going to do that, but...mine? Really?”

“Absolutely! We’ll even name it after you. Let me think on that.”

Ramses walked into the room. “I already have. It’s the Sangster Canopy.”

“You can’t name it after me,” Olimpia contended. “Like I said, I just stole it. You’re acting like it’s the HG Goggles, or the Rothko Torch.”

“Not all temporal objects are named after the people who created them,” Ramses explained. “Jayde Novak stole the Jayde Spyglass too.”

Olimpia frowned just a little, embarrassed at the thought of being happy that her name and reputation may one day precede her. She didn’t want to seem so egotistical. “I dunno...”

Ramses shrugged. “I’m thinking about calling the thing that I stole the Motherbox.”

“No,” Leona and Olimpia rejected in unison, as did Marie who happened to be passing by in the hallway.

He smirked, having hoped to get a rise out of them for that. “I came in here for a reason. Take a break, there’s something you should see.

Leona followed him to the security room, and then went to find Mateo, who just so happened to be exactly where she needed to talk to him. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

“Um. Your hair looks nice. Did you go to the salon this morning?”

“Matty.”

“You were right, I was wrong, I’m sorry,” he recited.

“Matt. Say it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She pursed her lips, deciding that she was going to have to drive the conversation. “Why are the hock blast doors down?” She looked over at them.

“These are doors? Huh, interesting. And we have a hock?”

“This is a diplomatic detachment, originally designed to serve the needs of two competing parties. Yes, there’s a hock. You know that, and you put someone in there. And you thought I wouldn’t find out, because of the blast doors, and because I don’t have much reason to come back here. But you forgot one thing...do you know what it is, Mateo?”

“Did Ramses figure out how to make us psychic?”

“The security cameras still run.”

“Oh. Right.”

“It’s been a year, and we weren’t traveling at relativistic speeds. I hope you programmed a stasis pod for her, or she’s gonna be dead when we open it. I didn’t watch enough of the footage to find out.”

“I’m not a total idiot,” Mateo replied. “Yes, she was in stasis for the year.”

“Why did you put her in there?” Leona questioned.

“Well, I couldn’t hide her on the station, could I?” Mateo argued. “She would be found by the time we finished the heist, and the whole plan would fall apart.”

“It wouldn’t have,” she contended. “They could have spent months looking for us, and would never find anything, because we weren’t in the timestream anymore. A year later, we would have come back, but they would not have expected anything. Their guard would be lowered.”

“Not true. She knows who we are. She knows that we are Team Matic. She’s really smart, you’d like her.”

“Well, I didn’t know that she would figure that part out.”

“I think you meant to say, thank you, husband. You made the right call.”

Leona rolled her eyes, and walked past him to punch in the code for the blast doors. The guard was sitting on her bunk, leaning against the wall behind her, and staring at the one in front of her. “Report.”

“May 21, 2442,” Leona answered. How are you feeling?”

“Physically fine, socially unstimulated, emotionally scattered, and psychologically disturbed. How are you?”

Leona took a couple beats. “I’m fine.”

“Great,” the guard sarcasticated.

“I’m sorry this happened to you. This was not our intention. We didn’t want anyone to get hurt. I don’t think I’ll ever convince you that Oaksent is not the savior that you’ve been indoctrinated to believe him to be. I could try to tell you my side of the story, like how he destroyed a gas giant from light years away just so he could kill everyone living on the moon orbiting it, but I’m sure you would just argue that they were heathens who deserved it. I could show you footage from the world that kept people as slaves, or the one whose only purpose it is to suffer countless attacks from the military outpost. I could show you the numbers from Ex-811, where all food is grown and raised, which proves that resources are being distributed unfairly, and according to Bronach’s own personal whims. He starves people on purpose to keep them dependent on him. But none of this is going to resonate with you, because he’s taught you that he knows the way, and there is no other. There are, of course; many other ways, but you’ll never see them, because they don’t match your impression of reality as he has forced you to trust without question.”

“Prove it,” the guard spit.

“I’ll try,” Leona agreed. “I’ll get you a tablet with a copy of the central archives, so you can start learning what he’s been lying to you about. But first, what’s your name?”

“Korali.”

“It was nice to meet you, Korali.”

“Was it?”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 20, 2441

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While Mateo was taking a trip away from the station, the rest of the remaining team was trying not to get caught. When they first entered this station in 2440, they didn’t want to rely solely on Marie’s excellent impersonation skills. At some point, someone may realize that she couldn’t be who she said she was. Not everyone who worked here was in the hangar bay. As word spread, the chances of somebody catching on increased. The first guard who realized it could have just been the tip of the iceberg. Besides, they didn’t know anything about what objects were being stored here, or how vast the collection was. They needed time to download the manifest, analyze it, and make a plan. Still invisible, Olimpia walked straight to the primary security room too upload a computer worm that would take control of all management systems, but lay in wait during the interim year, so that no one would know that it was even here. Leona, Ramses, and Marie snuck into the main office to find the information that they were looking for. There they uploaded their own worm to gather all data on the warehouse, which they would redownload once they came back.

All of the personnel were so busy trying to find the fake missing item that no one came to bother them, and as midnight was approaching, they held their breaths, hoping that they would jump to the future without anyone realizing it. The staff would be very confused about what happened to their messiah, the godking Oaksent, but they would have no reason to believe that it was really Team Matic in disguise, right? They opened the door to a storage closet so they wouldn’t suddenly appear next year in front of other people when someone actually did show up. “I think I found it.”

“What?” Leona questioned. That should be impossible. They told these people that they deliberately misplaced a warehouse item at an earlier date, and that whoever discovered it would be rewarded. But nothing was actually misplaced. It was just to keep everyone busy while they executed the heist. They didn’t consider the possibility that an artifact was genuinely misplaced without their intervention, probably accidentally. A flaw in their plan.

The young man, whose job in the station was not immediately clear, held his palms out before them. On top of them was a lighter, and it was one that they recognized. This was the Muster Lighter, which could be used to summon people from distant places as a mass teleportation object. It was lost centuries ago, but it wasn’t entirely out of left field that it should end up here. This region of the galaxy was seeded with life by someone who once lived on the generational ship, Extremus, which launched from the Gatewood Collective, where the lighter was last used and seen. They didn’t think that Bronach was alive at the time, but perhaps a relative stole it, and he ended up with it. Or it was someone else on Extremus, and he procured it later. “This wasn’t in the Time Vault, where it belongs. It was hidden behind a box of scissors by the door to an auxiliary maintenance airlock that doesn’t get use.” When Ramses reached towards it, the young man pulled away. “No. I shall hand it directly to the Emperor.”

Marie nodded appreciatively, and accepted the lighter as ceremoniously as she could while so pressed for time. “Thank you, my child.”

“It’s legit,” Leona said to Marie before turning towards the young man, “but, uhh...this isn’t it. We hid a different item. Someone else must have left this where you found it. They probably just use it to smoke in the airlock, because then they can easily vent it all into space when they’re done.”

He frowned, and hung his head low.

Leona’s watch beeped, as did the other two. “Shit, we gotta go.”

The three of them slipped into the closet, and hoped that the boy would give up, and leave. He didn’t. He opened the door behind them. “Wait, can I still be sent to—”

They didn’t hear the end of his sentence before midnight central hit, and sent them into the future. But they heard it once they came back, “...the resort planet.”

Leona looked at her watch to confirm that they had indeed jumped forward. It was May 20, 2441. She looked over at Marie and Ramses, who now appeared as themselves. They were unable to hold illusions across the time jump. Good to know. “You’ve been waiting for us this whole time?”

“Yes,” the young man answered. “People underestimate me, but I am smart. I had a whole year to work out who you really were, Leona Reaver.” Odd choice for a surname that she technically remembered having, but never actually used in this timeline.

“Who did you tell?” Ramses questioned.

“No one. Something that you probably don’t know about the Corridor is that most don’t give much thought to who the Emperor is, or how the Empire is run. We just deal with our own lives. I have no strong feelings about him. I just wanna get out of here.”

“You want us to take you with us so you don’t have to work anymore?” Leona guessed.

“I think I deserve it. I kept your secret, and lured everyone away for a party that I’ve been planning for months. I don’t know why you’re here, but I know that you won’t stay here forever. You don’t have to keep me, or even take me to Ex-613. You can just drop me off on an uninhabited world where I can live the rest of my life in peace.”

“What do you think?” Leona asked the other two.

“I’m fine with it,” Marie replied. “We’re here to help people, right?”

“Rambo?” Leona pressed.

He was busy studying his tablet. “Oh, I don’t care. The worm has delivered the data. The algorithm found what we were looking for. We were kind of misled. This warehouse is predominantly for banned and restricted tech. As he said, there’s a Time Vault, and that is the only place that stores temporal objects.”

“All right, let’s go there. You’re coming with us,” she said to the refugee.

They made their way along the corridors, up the elevator, and down the people movers. The Time Vault was heavily guarded, as they expected it would be, though their new friend whispered that it was usually worse. The party was a banger. Marie took the initiative to speed up, and approach first. “I see that you are all dedicated to your work, and I would like to thank you for your loyalty and devotion. The winner of last year’s contest has finally found the missing object. That is why we have returned. She would like to attend the party now. Please proceed to the mess hall to offer your joint protection. You will be rewarded for your efforts as well.”

“Sir!” one of them said with intense respect. And then they all left.

“I could get used to this,” Marie mused.

They entered the vault, and started to look around, each of them being drawn to something different. Most of the objects were generic, like teleporter guns, spatial tethers, and wall breachers. These were all lining the walls. Unique and rarer objects were on pedestals in the center of the room, a few of which they didn’t recognize. The Muster Lighter pedestal was empty, which made sense, but so was one labeled for HG Goggles. It was never clear how many pairs of those existed, but like the lighter, these were probably being unlawfully used by some rando who worked here.

“Hey kid, what are ya doing?” Ramses asked as he was inspecting a teleporter rifle.

The refugee was standing before a pedestal near the back, blocking the others from seeing what was sitting upon it. He turned around, holding what resembled a Fabergé egg, though not so intricate and pretty. “They never would have let me in here, but I know that when the Oaksent learns of my heroism, he’ll reward my family with riches beyond imagining. I killed Team Matic.” He turned two sections of the egg away from each other, then another two sections, and then he pressed the plunger that popped up on the top. The egg began to disintegrate, followed quickly by the boy.

“It’s a Lucius bomb!” Leona shouted. “Get out!” As she ran for the hatch, she grabbed a tube of concentrated antintropic nanosealant while Ramses was swiping a clear box. “Olimpia, where are you!” She screamed into her comms.

Olimpia came into view next to her as they were running. “Right here, buddy!”

“Mateo, we’re gonna have to teleport!” Leona cried. “Stop darklurking, and spark a flare! Don’t dock with the station! Just stay within range!”

“We can’t just leave!” Marie yelled, still running. “These people are innocent enough! We have to save them!”

“We can’t!” Leona argued. “There’s too many, and the bomb is too fast!”

“Yeah, we can!” Ramses and Olimpia replied in unison. “I took something!”

“Okay, we’ll try, but I make no guarantees. Ram, where’s the party?”

“A few life signs are scattered throughout the station, but most are right here!” He showed her the dots on the floor plan.

“Tap into the public address system!”

“Go ahead.” Ramses handed her his tablet.

Marie ripped the tablet out of her hands. “This is your emperor, Bronach Oaksent! The station is suffering from a cataclysm! If you are not already at the party, go there now! That is the only safe location! Go! Go!”

“Whatever you two stole,” Leona began, taking the tablet back to keep an eye on the dots, “get ready to use them!” The live sensors were actually pretty smart, and well-distributed. She could watch the dots running for the party, and unfortunately, she could also see dots disappear from the screen, along with the wall boundaries that they were between, indicating that the bomb had already reached that section of the station. All sensors that had yet to be destroyed remained in operation throughout.

They made it to the mess hall, and started funneling people inside until they could do so no longer. The blast was approaching them quickly, and they had to get inside. Leona still didn’t understand how they were going to stop it, though. A Lucius bomb didn’t start working until it reached sufficiently dense matter, and once it did, it didn’t stop until all reachable matter was consumed. It didn’t really matter how thick the walls were. Olimpia had that covered, though. She was the last inside. She immediately turned around, and opened and umbrella, tensely holding it up against the wave of energy trying to kill them. The wall continued to disintegrate, but slower now, and then slower still. They watched as the last remnants of the station disappeared, ripped apart molecule by molecule, until everything but this room was gone, and the tumult ceased. They were now floating alone in outer space. This weird umbrella that none of them had ever heard of before was keeping the atmosphere from escaping into the vacuum.

Olimpia held fast, and smirked at the team. “Topological modulator umbrella. I can’t hold this forever.”

“You won’t have to.” Ramses spun around, and stepped onto the nearest table to address the crowd. “Workers of Ex-467, I know that you’re all scared and confused right now, but we are here to help you! The four of us have the ability to teleport out of here!” He pointed to the Vellani Ambassador, which was hovering over them now. “We could save ourselves alone, or we could save all of you as well! If you would like to die today, stand over by that far wall! If you wanna live, stand on this side, and wait to get into this tiny little box!”

Everyone stood still for a moment before all moving over to the rescue side.

“What the hell is that?” Leona asked him.

“Subdimensional Crucible. It should be able to shrink people.”

“Should?” Leona echoed.

“Hey, I’m just goin’ by the name.” Ramses removed the teleporter rifle from his pants, and began to program it.  “I can get everyone in. All you have to do is wait patiently, and maybe give Olimpia a break.”

“I’ll give her a break,” Marie volunteered. She now looked like herself as well. She took hold of the umbrella, and they shared the burden for a minute before Olimpia felt comfortable letting it go.

Ramses used his tablet to interface with the box, and also the rifle. There was enough charge in it to pocket all of these people away. The problem was figuring out how the box worked. If he didn’t understand the mechanism well enough, all he would do was send the first person as a mangled mess of blood and viscera into the box. Everyone else would die when the umbrella stopped working. The survivors eventually started to sit down to wait, trying not too look up at the rippling force field above them, which threatened to fail every few minutes when the current holder of the umbrella got a little tired. It shifted hands periodically amongst the three ladies. A few members of the personnel volunteered to help, but it wasn’t safe. Even if Leona chose to trust them, they did not necessarily metabolize temporal energy. This thing might not work without it. Ramses needed time to investigate it, which of course, he couldn’t do right now.

After half an hour, Ramses was finished with his work. One of the section leads agreed to go first, and report back if anything went wrong. Ramses shot him in the chest, and then Leona used the box’s built-in microscope to check on him. He was standing in a miniature furnished living room in the middle of the box, and waving up at them in all directions. He was so small that he couldn’t even discern the shadows, shapes, and colors above him as people. “All right, he’s fine,” she announced. Who’s next?”

Ramses continued to shoot people with the rifle. It took longer than they would have liked, because the remainders always wanted to be sure that that last person also survived. They were apparently worried that each time was a fluke, and the next one after that may have resulted in disaster. The girls had to keep holding onto the umbrella the entire time, but eventually, everyone was shot and safe in the box, and they could drop it. The atmosphere vented around them as they teleported up to the ship together.

“Long day?” Mateo asked them, perhaps with a little too little sensitivity.

“Let’s just go. I don’t know what the hell we’re gonna do with these people.”

“Did you bring me a present?” Mateo asked.

Leona showed him the nanosealant. “Yes. I think I can fix the reframe engine.”

« < » > Table of Contents

Fluence: Saga (Part I)

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Generated by Google Gemini Advanced text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 2

The date was November 21, 2259 by the Earthan calendar. The new crew of the X González starship just launched from the planet of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. Superpowered inventor, Holly ‘Weaver’ Blue; career government administrator, Goswin Montagne; and superintelligence, Eight Point Seven left friends both back on that world, as well as on another ship going in a different direction. Coming along with them was prisoner Briar de Vries, who was accused of, and admitted to, murder. The nature of his crime was too complicated to let him be processed through any standard judicial system in the stellar neighborhood. The crew didn’t know what they were going to do with him yet. The leadership of the planet where the incident occurred wanted him gone, so this was the best way to accomplish it. For now, he was being limited to his cabin.

They didn’t know where they were going either. They made a few jumps, but dropped down to drifting speed until they could decide on a vector, or at least a direction. There was no point in firing up the fractional engines until they had some clue what they were doing. They were still within the Tau Cetian heliosphere, watching the host star get smaller and smaller as they slipped farther away from it. Goswin and Weaver were doing this anyway. Eight Point Seven’s consciousness was uploaded into the ship’s systems itself, and Briar’s cabin did not have a viewport, nor was he going to be involved in the decision-making process.

“How far has the galaxy been colonized by now?” Goswin asked.

“To varying degrees,” Weaver began to answer, “Earth has begun to explore most systems within fifty light years. That’s the bubble of the stellar neighborhood, and Earth is going to be focused on that for a while. Of course, Gatewood has launched a set of modular ships that will spread across the entire galaxy, but it will be tens of thousands of years before that’s all over.”

“So that limits where we can practically go,” Goswin posed. “Unless, I suppose, if we want to go somewhere that no one has been before. That sounds boring, though. If there aren’t any people, it’s probably not all that interesting yet.”

“Mostly, you’re right.”

“I have a suggestion,” Eight Point Seven announced through the speakers.

“What is it?” Weaver asked.

“Thirteen and a half light years from here is Alpha Centauri B,” Eight Point Seven continued.

“Also known as Toliman,” Weaver added, nodding. “I’ve heard of it.”

“Did you hear that it was destroyed?” Eight Point Seven asked her.

Weaver took a moment to respond. “No. Destroyed how?”

“Unclear, but my guess would be a matter-antimatter annihilation.”

“How would it be possible to annihilate an entire star?” Goswin questioned.

“An antistar,” Eight Point Seven answered.

“If antistars exist,” Weaver started, “they’re nowhere near regular stars. The chances of one drifting close enough to hit Toliman before hitting something else are approaching zero.”

“Maybe then it’s worth checking out?” Eight Point Seven offered.

Weaver sighed. “You’re the captain.”

“I am? Oh, I am. Well, that was...” Goswin had leadership skills, but did that make him qualified to captain a starship? It was a tiny little crew, with only a pilot and an engineer, so he didn’t feel much pressure taking it on as a role, but now a real decision had come up, so he needed to start thinking about what his job truly meant. “That does sound interesting. How far away did you say?”

“It’s 13.5 light years,” Weaver answered him. “It will take us 13.5 years to get there, but for us, it’ll feel like a week.”

“Eight Point Seven suggested it, which suggests that she’s in favor of it. I’m in favor of it. That leaves you, Weaver.”

“This isn’t a democracy,” she argued.

“I don’t see why it can’t be, at least for now. We’re not in any big hurry, are we? Let me make the decisions in the heat of the moment, but if everything’s okay, I’ll want to hear your respective opinions.”

“Sounds fair to me,” Eight Point Seven agreed. She too had leadership experience, but has since retired, and she just wanted to fly the ship now.

“Very well. Let’s go to Toliman...or not, as it were.”

“Pilot,” Goswin said. “Lay in a course, and engage at maximum warp.”

Eight Point Seven laughed, and started the fractional engines.

A few days into the trip, everything was going fine. They had passed several light years already, and were on track to making their arbitrary deadline. The ship was perfect, running on its own, with Eight Point Seven only having to make a few minor course adjustments, and repairs from micrometeoroid strikes that the EM and TK fields were unable to handle. This was all about to change. The great thing about moving at extremely high fractional speeds is that you get to where you’re going much faster, but it does come with its downsides. First, those micrometeoroids can become a real problem if the power shielding and the hull fail. Secondly, you could encounter—or even pass—something without even realizing it. For the most part, space is empty. The chances of running into a celestial body are rather low, which is why it’s generally okay to move so quickly. There are some things that cannot be predicted, however, nor detected. Eight Point Seven processes information rapidly, and can see a lot beyond the doppler glow that blocks views from the ports, but even she isn’t omniscient.

Something came upon them; some kind of force, and they never saw what it was. Normally, the internal inertial dampeners would prevent them from feeling that the ship was even in motion. The humans would be splattered red against the walls if this safety feature didn’t exist, which was why the redundancies for the redundancies on all of these interstellar ships had multiple stages of redundancies on top of their redundant redundancies. It was the one thing that almost no one could survive. Even the loss of life support could be okay, as long as it was brief, and not too extreme. Even so, failures did happen, and it was what happened here. Fortunately, it was not as bad as it could have been. Everybody survived, but the humans were severely injured when the ship X González suddenly lurched to the side.

This was when weird things started to happen. As they were each trying to get back to their feet, they started to see other versions of themselves, standing, crouching, or lying in different places around the bridge. Even a few versions of Briar were there with them, when he should have been still locked up in his cabin. A nearby console would spontaneously transition from being whole to being damaged, and then back again. The lights changed colors, and the space around them warped and stretched to a point of infinity. Feelings of profound dread were met with feelings of elation, and even euphoria. At one point, the whole ship cracked in half, and then reassembled itself. Finally, after all this tumult, everything stopped, and they started to drift at normal subfractional speeds again.

“Eight Point Seven!” Goswin and Weaver cried at the same time. When the latter conceded to the former, he repeated himself, and went on, “Eight Point Seven, report!”

“I...I don’t know,” Eight Point Seven admitted. “The data in my memory indicates conflicting information, including that the incident took place over the course of a few moments, that it took 141 years, and also that we’ve been gone for an eternity. I cannot rectify the discrepancies.”

“All right, don’t worry about the past. Let’s just focus on our present circumstances. Can you find our location?”

“We are roughly 135 light years from our original position. I’m afraid that I don’t have an exact number, due to an uncertainty regarding our starting point, but based on astronomical data, I can pinpoint our location at the outer edge of the Achernar system, also known as Alpha Eridani.”

Goswin looked to Weaver for guidance, who shook her head. “Never heard of it. I’m an inventor, not an astronomer.”

“I don’t suppose it’s populated,” Goswin asked.

“It appears to be,” Eight Point Seven answered.

“You mean, it appears to not be,” Goswin figured.

“No,” Eight Point Seven insists. She turned the main viewscreen on to show them the star that they were approaching. It had been surrounded by a Dyson swarm. There were definitely intelligent entities here. How they managed to cross the vast distance in such a short amount of time was unclear. Then again, they didn’t quite know what year it was anyway.

“Do they see us?” Goswin pressed.

“Absolutely, they do,” Weaver replied.

“I’m receiving a message. Text only.” Eight Point Seven displayed the message on the screen. X González, please rendezvous with Intake at the below coordinates for debrief. Klaatu barada nikto. And then it provided the coordinates.

“They know who we are,” Goswin pointed out the obvious.

“Time travelers.” Weaver nodded. “The ship has no weapons, captain. I suggest we rendezvous, and I recommend we do so at subfractional speeds.”

“Do you know what those last three words mean?”

“No idea.”

“It’s hard to know their intentions,” Eight Point Seven began, “but it’s a pop culture reference from the 20th and 21st centuries that could mean stand down.”

“Uhh...” Goswin had been learning a lot about this ship, but at relativistic speeds, he had not had that much time with it. “Maximum subfractional to the coordinates, or whatever. Just...go as fast as possible while operating under the assumption that these people actually don’t know anything about time travel and teleportation.”

“Understood.” Eight Point Seven piloted the ship into the asteroid, and docked where the lights indicated. The two humans stepped out, and approached a small group of other humans who were waiting for them on the pier. A man took a half step forward, and offered his hand. “Captain Montagne, my name is Intake Coordinator Pontus Flagger. Let me be the first to welcome you to the Parallel.”

“It seems you have us at a disadvantage,” Goswin responded. “We don’t know who you are, or what this parallel is.”

“You’ve heard of alternate timelines?” Pontus assumed.

Goswin was determined to remain cagey. “Maybe.”

Pontus smiled. “This is like an alternate timeline, except that it happens at the same time. It’s a parallel reality. There are other parallels, but ours was the first, so it earned the most on-the-nose title.”

“Do you know how we ended up here?” Weaver asked him.

Pontus started casually doing finger tuts with one hand. For the last movement, he slid his index finger horizontally, allowing a holographic screen to appear between them. It started to show them images from a very, very old TV show. “Do you recognize this?” he asked.

“It looks like something out of The Verge Saga, perhaps Crusaders?” This was a multiseries franchise that took place in a far away galaxy, a long time ago.

“That’s right,” Pontus confirmed. “The premise is that there is a single point in space at the center of the fictional galaxy where all interstellar travel meets. It doesn’t matter where you wanna go, you can only move in two directions; either towards the Verge, or away from it. This place is like that, except it’s not so unilateral. In a few months, people, objects, and even individual particles, will find themselves here. In addition to preparing for these arrivals, we’ve been studying the phenomenon for decades, trying to figure out what causes it, and whether it can be controlled. You appear to be some kind of vanguard. If you explain what happened before you arrived, it might help us understand. Perhaps you’re just early to the party, for whatever reason, or there’s a chance that you caused it.”

“You know who we are,” Goswin reminded him, “and the name of our ship.”

“Your story is a matter of historical record to us,” Pontus clarified. “It would be like you knowing who was on the boat that crossed the Delaware on Christmas 1776.”

“Do you also know who else is on our ship?” Goswin questioned.

Pontus waited a moment to respond. “Besides the pilot, we are aware that you are transporting some kind of prisoner, but we do not know who.”

Goswin looked over at Weaver, not for help navigating this situation, but because she may not approve of the direction that he wanted to take. He decided to make his first executive decision as the Captain. “Yes, we’re transporting him, because there is nothing else we can do for him. He is the man who killed Mateo Matic. If you’ve heard of us, I’m sure you’ve heard of him. To my knowledge, time travelers do not have any formal legal institution, and we believe that he would be unfit to stand trial within any court system in our...reality. Do you suppose someone here would be equipped to take this challenge on?”

Pontus did not expect this development, but he was showing signs of patience, as well as a hint of curiosity. “We have nothing like that here, and due to the nature of our research, we couldn’t install a Nexus for instantaneous interstellar travel. We would be willing to transport him elsewhere, but you should first learn how our legal system works. You may not be so keen on it if it’s sufficiently different from what you know.”

“Yeah, I think that would be best. Something should be done about him. He can’t stay in his cabin forever,” Goswin decided.

“Very well. Come with me.”

< > Entire Story

Starstruck: Lie Low and Sing Small (Part VIII)

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Generated by Google Gemini Advanced text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 2

Brooke nodded, understanding at least the facts of the story, but not necessarily the subtext. “So where is the Elizabeth Warren now?” she asked.

Mirage and Lilac were back where they belonged in the timeline. The latter was currently having a discussion with her alternate self, trying to figure out how they would raise Aristotle and Niobe. That was between the two of them, and the crew of the Iman Vellani had no say in it. Their trip back here was uneventful, albeit long and convoluted. They stole the ship from where Mirage knew it would be sitting unattended, docked at the top end of the space elevator leading two multiple points on Earth, including Panama. After she placed Lilac in stasis to keep her alive, she plotted a course to Alpha Centauri B. During the eleven-year journey, Mirage regrew her skin, retrofitted their ship with some upgrades, and then placed herself in stasis too, so she wouldn’t be bored the rest of the way. Once they were at their destination, they still had to wait another thirty some-odd years before it was time to literally jump ship.

Mirage’s past self sent a nanofactory to Toliman in the year 2225, just in case they ever needed to make a quick getaway from the planet of Bungula. They did end up needing to do that, though it wasn’t as urgent as she was originally worried it would be. This was where the Iman Vellani was originally built. The crew wouldn’t board it for another two decades. Until then, it sat dormant in its asteroid, protected from the ill effects of the Toliman Nulls that will essentially freeze any sentient entity that attempts to draw near. To protect themselves from that, Future!Mirage placed the Warren in an extremely high orbit from the host star. This kept them at a safe distance at all times until they were ready to head for the asteroid, and enter the Vellani.

“I left it in its orbit to automatically warn anyone else off of trying to get to the solar system. Just because the star was annihilated, doesn’t mean that the Toliman Nulls aren’t still a thing there.”

“Yeah, about that matter-antimatter annihilation,” Sharice began, “are we ever going to do anything about it? Aren’t people going to be surprised that a star in the neighborhood suddenly just disappeared one day?”

“That is the elephant that lives in the room, isn’t it?” Mirage posed.

“It’s a problem for tomorrow,” Brooke decided.

“You mean yesterday,” Belahkay mused.

“Anyway,” Brooke went on, “you two have just been hiding on this ship the whole time? You never came out? You never tried to change anything?”

“Too risky,” Mirage said. “The timeline is complicated enough as it is.”

“No, you’re right,” Brooke agreed. “But perhaps you...made preparations that could help us now that you’ve closed your own loop?”

“Yes,” Mirage said. “I finally understand who reprogrammed the Vellani. It was me. I just hadn’t gone back to the past to do it yet.” She swiped a specific pattern on the wall next to her, which released a hidden compartment. Inside was a secret quantum terminal. She pressed a few buttons, causing a crystal to pop out of the storage drive. She took it out, and held it up. This should contain proof that Verdemus was completely destroyed.”

Belahkay looked down through the viewport on the floor. “No, it’s still there.”

Mirage smiled. “It ought to be.” She shook the crystal a little. “If my plan worked, this should have footage of Toliman b being destroyed instead, and with a little tweaking of the metadata, we can use it to make the Exins believe that it was Verdemus. We’ll even burst in there, and scream at them for making us do that when there is no such thing as a hypercubic crystal lattice.

“You don’t think they’ll come check?” a skeptical Brooke asked.

“Radiation,” Sharice offered. “We’ll say that this whole region of space has been irradiated. You can’t exactly tear a planet apart with a giant space knife.”

“Don’t their ships have shielding, same as ours?”

“No, I once got a quick look at their hull coding. They’re gamma rated for zero-point-five-l. They don’t have an e-rating. I doubt they’ve even heard of superenergetic particles. All we have to do is claim that the process we used necessarily emits exotic particles, and they’ll stay away.”

“How could they have not heard of SEPs?” Mirage questioned. “They have time travel, don’t they? That’s why come they’ve been a civilization for thousands of years, even though they were founded only a few decades ago.”

“I think that technology was lost,” Sharice argued, “perhaps intentionally. The Exins we met could be just as oppressed as the rest of the empire.”

“We’re banking a lot on that idea we brought up a while back about how disorganized they are,” Brooke warned. “We may be wholly misinterpreting that. They could have e-rated shielding, but we’ve just not seen it. Shari, you didn’t get a look at the hull coding for even every vessel in the fleet.”

“I’m confident on this,” Sharice insisted. “They won’t go near it, especially if we sell the lie. We know that there is no hypercubic crystal lattice in the core of this planet. How could we know that if we didn’t do as they asked?”

Mirage and Brooke both shook their heads, unsure if this was all worth the risk. The bad guys wanted the Verdemusians dead, whether by the crew’s hands, or someone else’s. They could have a backup team lying in wait. “What if the crystal lattice does exist? What if Spirit is wrong about that?”

“I’m not.” Spirit was leaning against the doorway. “But if you feel more comfortable, why don’t you test it? See for yourself if it’s there.”

“We can’t destroy a whole world on the off-chance,” Sharice contended. “That would defeat the purpose.”

“It doesn’t have to be permanent,” Spirit reasoned. “Tear it apart, and then go back in time to stop yourself from doing it. All the humans will be up in space, just in case something goes wrong, but you might as well check for yourself, right?”

“Are you suggesting we used the homestone to reverse it?” Mirage asked her.

“No, you don’t just have a rewinder on this thing? It has everything else.”

“We’re less time travelers, and more associated with time travelers,” Mirage explained. “I mean, we’ve all broken the conventional laws of physics, of course, but...no, I didn’t engineer a time rewinder on the Iman Vellani.”

“Yes, you did.” Someone else was there, standing against the other doorway. It was Mirage. It was some other version of Mirage.

Present!Mirage sighed, more annoyed than shocked. “What the hell?”

Future!Mirage glided over to the opposite wall, and swiped a pattern on it to reveal a secret control terminal. “This is preprogrammed to reverse time by one year, but you can adjust it as necessary. You still need to build the planet-destroying machine, but I’m sure you already have an idea or two about that.”

“Yeah, I’ve never been worried about that,” Present!Mirage confirmed. “It’s just a simple transdimensional gravity beam. I just don’t know about this. I don’t like fudging with time, or gravity. What’s to stop us from going back, and avoiding all of this?”

“If you weren’t here,” Spirit began, “you would not have been able to save my friend, Tinaya’s life.”

“Or mine,” Lilac said, also coming into the room. “And who knows what would have happened to the children? You can’t undo anything.”

“Except for destroying the planet,” Present!Mirage countered.

“Except for that,” Future!Mirage agreed. Without another word, she gradually faded away until she was completely gone.

“I think you just erased her from the future,” Belahkay guessed.

“Whatever,” Mirage said. “It’s not up to her anyway. We vote. Everyone votes, including Tinaya. We’ll stick her mind into the virtual construct, and get an answer.”

“Everyone?” Lilac pressed.

“Yes,” Mirage replied, “including your alternate self.”

“I don’t have an alternate self,” Lilac revealed. “We are one now.”

“How did you manage that?” Brooke asked.

“I don’t know. It just happened.”

Mirage smirked. She knew how it was done.

“No, I’m talking about the prisoner, Ilias Tamm,” Lilac clarified.

“Prisoners have rights,” Brooke said adamantly. “This is his planet too, and he has the right to have a say in what’s done with it. We’ll explain the stakes to him, as well as to the children. I agree, everyone votes, and it must be unanimous.”

A year later, Verdemus was torn apart by transdimensional artificial gravity, which supposedly released exotic particles in the region that rendered a radius of fifty light years too dangerous for normal ships to survive. Exotic particles were actually just very, very, very energetic particles that were extremely difficult to shield against. They were capable of passing through an entire planet, kind of like neutrinos, but destructive to baryonic matter. They aided in time travel tech so the only way to shield against them was by manipulating spacetime, essentially forcing them to pass along the shielding on a new vector, rather than through it, and then letting them go once they were on the other side. They were rare, and the crew didn’t think that the Exins understood them enough to have what was called an e-rating, so it was safe to make this claim.

Only the crew plus Spirit Bridger was on board the Iman Vellani Proper. The rest were on the Vellani Ambassador, which meant that they did not go back in time. Once the timeline was reset, they had no recollection of the past year, because they had never experienced it. They knew that it had happened, but now they were able to move on with their lives from here, safe on Verdemus, protected by a fake bubble of exotic radiation. Belahkay and Spirit got to know each other for the course of that undone year, and both could remember the relationship that was kindled by it. They wanted to see where it was going, so he left the ship and stayed behind on Verdemus. Mirage gave them and the rest of the Verdemusians a shuttle that could be used for interplanetary travel, or very slow interstellar travel, if they ever needed to evacuate. It could not reach fractional speeds, and definitely didn’t have a reframe engine, so their options were limited. But at least they weren’t singular, which was what they were facing without the crew’s arrival and intervention.

Brooke and Sharice took the ship off into the black, and quite deliberately told no one where they were going. They had to do this, because the Vellani needed to stay off the radar for the foreseeable future. Its discovery would ruin the lie that Mirage was about to tell Ex-10 regarding the fate of Verdemus, the Verdemusians, the ship, and her crew. At the rendezvous point, she teleported over from the Vellani Ambassador, and just started to wail on him for killing her crew. It took nearly twenty faceless stormtroopers with chains to get her off of him. She was pulling her punches, though. She didn’t want to kill him, she just wanted to sell the rage that she was supposedly experiencing due to what happened. They stuck her in hock while they healed their leader, and let her stew a bit.

A few days later, he came to visit her, as calm as ever, and apparently not vengeful from her attack. “Start at the beginning. What happened?”

Mirage prepared herself to solidify the cover-up. “We did what you asked. We went to the planet in question. There were people on it, but not too many, so we pulled them up to our ship, and got back to work. They protested, but we were there to do a job, so we ignored them. I built a machine that uses transdimensional energy to manipulate gravity, which ripped the planet apart, and do you know what I found there?”

“Nothing?”

“Oh, so you know. There’s no such thing as hypercubic crystal lattice.”

“No. We just wanted you to destroy the world. It is of utmost importance that the people you found living there did not multiply. They are our sworn enemies, and they were in a position of great strategic advantage. They were too close to the new antistar, and we couldn’t have that. It’s fine that you saved the ones who were already there, though. We don’t have any strong feelings about them as individuals.”

“Oh, I didn’t save them, you asshole. Have you ever heard of exotic particles?”

“Yes. But I admittedly don’t know what they are.”

“I don’t either, but they’re deadly. I was in charge of supplying the power, so I was far enough away, and naturally shielded, when we turned on the machine, but my crew was not so lucky. They were bombarded with highly energetic particle radiation, and killed. They didn’t die right away. No, it took time, but all of their cells were split, their DNA unraveled, and their inorganic parts degraded extremely rapidly. They may have been able to transfer their consciousnesses to new substrates, but those would have been destroyed too. They insisted that I escape to get my revenge before too much of the radiation could get to me on the other side of the host star that we were using as a power source. You let me out of here, and that is exactly what I will do. Or you could come in here, I’m not picky.” She was doing a pretty good job in this role. It didn’t hurt that if any of this were true, she probably would actually react this way.

Ex-10 smiled, almost kindly, likely because he felt that he was in a position of safety and power. “Well, then I suppose I will have to never let you out, except to transfer you to our penal colony.”

Mirage suspected that this might happen, which was why she programmed the Vellani Ambassador to turn invisible and escape under certain conditions, such as her absence for a week. “I will get out eventually, even if it takes me a hundred years. I’m gonna live forever.”

“And I wouldn’t be surprised, but I’ll be dead by then. I decidedly won’t live forever, so I’m not worried.” He lifted his radio. “This is Ex-10. Plot a course to Ex-666. Warn them too, so they have time to make arrangements for a special new prisoner.”

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