Microstory 2334: Earth, January 22, 2179

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Dear Corinthia,

I beamed your contact card to dad, and he said that he’s going to write to you as soon as possible. Take that with a grain of salt, because his definition of possible might be different than yours. I would say, give it a couple of weeks, and then maybe just give up. I could talk to him again, if you wanted, but he’s really nervous. He doesn’t know if you forgive him, or hate him, or what. I have not told him anything about you. I told him that you and I were in contact now, and demanded he explain his involvement in our separation thirty-six years ago. I didn’t say anything about your job, or what your life is like on Vacuus. I did divulge that his wife, your mother, was dead. I felt like he had a right to know that, regardless of how at fault he is. Anyway, I hope that whatever happens between the two of you, it doesn’t negatively impact our relationship. I think he may be partially worried about that too. I want you to know that I won’t let him ruin our new sibling connection, and I would hope that you don’t let whatever he does or says—or doesn’t do or say—stop you from wanting to converse with me. Okay, I think I’m done with all this negativity now. You inspired me today. I actually don’t have much idea of how the platform can move from one part of the ocean to another. You’re right, it’s pretty big, so it can’t be easy. I’ve started taking some courses on it, not necessarily so I can tell you, but because I would like to understand it myself. I’m so old, I doubt that I’ll ever become an engineer, or a mechanic, or a sailor, but it doesn’t hurt to learn more stuff.

Until next time,

Condor

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 6, 2458

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There was a scuffle in the hock section of whatever this ship was called. A.F. immediately went after Leona, but he never made it all the way. True to her promise to protect her, Marie stepped between them, and started fighting with him instead. It didn’t last very long. Either one of them could have won, and it could have ended in death, and Leona couldn’t take the chance. She unlocked the hock cell door again, and threw him inside by the shoulders. Once she slammed the door closed in his face, she discovered her mistake. She hadn’t patted him down, or knocked him unconscious. All he had to do was send a quick message to his security team that there was a breach. Their plan to sneak around quietly while no one was the wiser was no longer a viable option. They ran out of the room, and into the next so they could change. They chose faces from their pasts again, who no one here would recognize, because pretending to be A.F. himself wasn’t going to work anymore. As for their clothes, they made them look like the standard uniform of the crew, and just hoped that there were enough of them roaming around here—or enough chaos after the alarms started going off—that they wouldn’t stick out for being unauthorized strangers.

They quickly, but not too quickly, ran back down to the room where their stuff had been held, and retrieved Leona’s gear. She got dressed as fast as possible, and then reestablished her holographic disguise, just in time for a team of three to open the door in search of two hot lady criminals. “Secure this area!” one of them ordered. “The fugitives will come here in search of their belongings.”

“Understood, sir,” Leona replied, looking like a boy she had a crush on in college. He was a film student, on the same track as her for a few semesters before he switched to some other major, and she never saw him again. She always thought he would make a great enlisted soldier. He just had that Starship Troopers look about him.

“Stay here with them, Bartok,” the commander barked before running off with his partner. That was an annoying complication.

Now, for the most part, the IMS did not come with weapons, and as a rule, the team didn’t carry them either. They were a mostly nonviolent crowd, made up of people who would rather sneak in with surgical strikes, and leave without anyone knowing that anything had happened. Even the two of them, who possessed years of combat training, preferred peaceful solutions. Much like one could theoretically hit someone over the head with a frying pan, even though the pan was not designed as a weapon, there was a way to use a built-in nonviolent feature of the suit as an impromptu weapon.

It was called a static discharge, and it was meant to protect the wearer from dust and debris in dusty and debris-filled environments. A very low charge was keeping the outer layer clean at all times while medium intensity charges could repel foreign objects when the area was particularly harsh. Safety mechanisms usually prevented extreme discharges, but these safeguards could be subverted in emergency situations. It might be enough to shield the wearer from a fallen or thrown rock, but it had to be done on purpose by concentrating the energy in one spot. This was no emergency, and she didn’t want to have to use it, but it appeared that they had no choice. Leona rubbed her forearms together to build up and focus the charge. Then she released it into Bartok’s back without a word. He slumped towards the floor, but she caught him before that, and laid him down gently.

“What do we do,” Marie asked, “wait for midnight central?”

Leona shook her head. “A.F. will be free by then. He probably is already. He’s quite familiar with our pattern, and will be expecting that gambit. Our only choice is to get off of this ship, and away from the teleportation dampening field. Fortunately, they’re drifting, so it shouldn’t be too rough of a ride.”

“Are we sure that our suits can handle the equilibrium?”

“No, but we can’t steal a shuttle, or they’ll find it.”

“Maybe we do steal a shuttle,” Marie suggested. “Maybe we let them find it.”

Leona didn’t know what she meant by that.

“We’ll require a distraction. How good are you at those external holograms?”

She was pretty good, having gotten even better since she was first given Alyssa’s powers. She leaned into her knack for creating holograms away from her person. She considered it her specialty. Nearly each one of them had their own specialty. The only one who wasn’t all that great with any of the tricks was Mateo. He would hopefully find his place eventually, but there was no guarantee. Sadly, some people were simply not particularly skilled. Using the nearest workstation, they pulled up schematics of the ship, and made their plan. Leona generated an enemy vessel, which appeared out of nowhere only about a couple hundred meters away. Now, this being made of pure light and all, it wasn’t giving off any energy readings. If someone tried to send a photon torpedo towards it, it would pass right through, and fly off into the aether. The only reason it worked as a distraction was because it was so big and sudden that it freaked everyone out before they could determine that it was fake. While everyone was looking at the port side, Leona and Marie went over to the starboard side.

The two shuttles that they tried to open were locked, but they noticed that the fighters were all completely open, which made sense, because pilots needed to be able to jump into them at a moment’s notice. So they stole one of those instead. But they didn’t get inside of it to do it. Leona programmed it to fly off in one direction, and make basic escape maneuvers when the situation arose. It was vital that it managed to evade capture at least until midnight, or the plan wouldn’t work. With that gone, giving A.F. and his crew the impression that the fugitives were attempting to escape, the two of them turned invisible, and stayed hidden. It was annoying, not being able to use their jump to the future to their advantage, as they had often been able to do in the past, but this slight modification would hopefully get the job done this time.

A year later, they returned to the timestream, still in the hangar bay, but hiding in the corner. Perhaps about every single soldier on this thing was there now, pointing their weapons at the once-stolen fighter jet. Their plan had worked. Everyone thought that that was where Leona and Marie would come back.

“Sir?” one of them asked after several minutes passed, and the jet was still empty.

“I know,” A.F. replied.

“Sir, they must have bailed out. They’re probably floating around out there naked.” He didn’t mean unclothed, but unprotected by a hull.

“I know,” A.F. repeated. “Scan the entire kasma for lifesigns. They can’t get through the membrane without the skeleton key.”

This was a big risk, but there were a lot of people here, and Leona could use that to her advantage. Alyssa’s power gave them the ability to turn invisible, but not to go unheard. Hopefully what she said here would get lost somewhere in the crowd, and A.F. wouldn’t care about who specifically said. “Unless they already stole the key last year!” she suggested in a fake voice.

A.F. did look around to see who had said that, as did others, but no one fessed up. It quickly became unimportant to him, because the voice was right. “Lieutenant,” he said to a woman standing nearby. “Go secure the key. I want two security teams left right here in case we missed something. Everyone else, back to your action stations.”

The thing about being invisible to these people was that they were necessarily also invisible to each other. They didn’t have some additional magic power to see through their own disguises. Leona and Marie had to hold hands the whole time to keep track of one another. The former led the latter down the hallway, following the lieutenant to the place of their prize. It was quite a ways away, down a few corridors, into an elevator, and then down more corridors. The farther they went, the fewer crewmembers they saw around until it felt like an eerie ghost town. Presumably no one was allowed in this area for security reasons. The lieutenant punched in the code, unaware that it was being seen and memorized by two invisible girls. They immediately had more respect for her than they ever could A.F. Her code too was composed of eight digits, but they were all different. It was a good thing that they saw it, because she slipped in so quickly that they were unable to tag along. There wasn’t even a little window for them to see what she was doing in there.

Leona pulled Marie away, and felt her up a bit until she found her ear. “When she comes out, continue to follow her,” she instructed in a whisper. “We don’t know that the key is in the same place as the membrane thickener. We don’t even know that the membrane thickener is on this ship. It could be an entirely separate thing. But the key is in there, so once she confirms that, she might go after the machine itself next, just to be safe. I’ll sneak in here after she leaves. You gather all the intel you can. If you need help, send me the feeling of fear, and if you find the jackpot, send me elation.”

“Understood, captain.”

Leona gave Marie a kiss on the cheek, and then let go of her. When the lieutenant came back out of the room, the two of them accidentally ran into each other in their attempt to begin their separate sub-missions. The sound of the collision caused the lieutenant to turn around in confusion, but she didn’t pursue the issue, instead assuming that she was mistaken. Leona hovered her hand over the keypad, preparing to unlock the door once the coast was clear. She could only hope that Marie was doing okay on her own. A few minutes later, she entered the secret chamber, and started to get a look around, expecting to be alone.

A bespectacled bearded man was sitting at a desk in low-lighting. He stood up, and looked around, but didn’t see anything. This could still work. She could still find the key, and she might even be able to steal it. The name was almost certainly metaphorical, so it could be the size of a semi-truck, but at worst, she should be able to steal the plans for it on the computer. She just needed to wait for this guy to calm down, and maybe go out for a smoke break. He just kept staring into the dimness, before apparently coming to a revelation. “Ah. I get it.” Without looking down, he pulled a drawer open, and reached inside to retrieve a part of HG Goggles. He removed his own glasses, and pressed the goggles against his face without wrapping them around his head. “Mrs. Matic. I heard about what you could do. I came prepared.”

Just in case he was bluffing, Leona waved one hand to her side, waxing on. She waxed off with her other hand.

The man smiled, and mimicked the gesture. “Yes, I’m not lying, I see you there.”

Leona revisiblized herself. “I need that key.”

“I know you do.”

“You do?”

“Everybody needs it. It’s a key.”

“Are you going to give it to me?”

“Doubtful.”

“You don’t look like much of a fighter.”

“You have no idea what kind of weapons I have in my arsenal. Yet I know all about those suits. I helped design them.”

“Did you design the key?”

“Yes.”

“And the membrane thickener?”

“Indeed.”

“Is that here too?”

“It may be.”

“Where do your loyalties lie?”

“They lie with science. She has my heart.”

“Yet A.F. has your soul.”

He chuckled. “I guess. He’s not evil.”

“He’s a dick.”

“Isn’t everybody?”

Leona was done with the banter. “The people of Stoutverse need that key.”

“Oh, it’s for someone else? You’re not just trying to take this one down?”

“Not really. It’s not my concern right now. I’m not certain how vital it is for Salmoverse and Fort Underhill to maintain physical connection to each other. But I know that a race of violent antinatalists are intent on wiping out an entire planet. It’s my responsibility to put a stop to that.”

The man lifted his chin, and studied her face. “You’re not lying.”

“You’re right, A.F. isn’t evil. To my knowledge, he’s only ever hurt me and my friends, and we don’t have much use for grudges. We’ve always only been trying to just get away from him. Any sense of hostility he feels is in service to that end, not any real hatred that we feel. I suppose we may have to deal with him one day, but that day is not today. Please. Give me the plans for the machine, and the key, and then we’ll just leave. I won’t even manufacture them in this universe.”

Now he sighed. “Very well.” He reached into his lab coat pocket, and came back out with a data crystal.

“You just carry that around with you at all times?” she asked, but only after she took it out of his hand.

“The second my boss found you in the kasma six years ago, I knew that this was what you were after. My equipment can detect time travel events. You obviously came back on purpose.”

“You’re too smart to be working for him.”

He cleared his throat, and reached up to the wall. He flipped a switch, and Leona could immediately feel her ability to teleport return to her. “People like me...always work for men like him. Now get off my ship before I sound the alarm.”

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Extremus: Year 74

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A year later, and Tinaya is still made of glass, but she’s doing okay, and adjusting to her new life. Solid walls no longer faze her. She’s gotten used to walking right through them whenever she needs to. She’s not technically phasing through them though, as one would conventionally picture a superhero’s atoms curving around the object’s atoms without interacting. It’s more like she makes the atoms disappear, even while they appear to still be present. There is a time when the house that Belahkay built for him and Spirit is standing there by the river. And there is a time when that house isn’t there at all; it doesn’t exist yet. What Tinaya does when she’s passing through the wall is steal little bits of spacetime from the past, specifically the mostly empty air that was once occupying the area that is now occupied by the wall. While it may look like Tinaya and the wall exist in the same point simultaneously, a clever bit of time travel allows her to become the only solid object in that moment. There has only ever been one recorded case of someone with this temporal ability. It was reported in the early 23rd century, on a ship called the Sharice Davids, but this was never confirmed.

While Tinaya was learning to accept her new physiological situation, she also needed to accept her new life in general. She is on a planet in the middle of nowhere with almost no hope of reconnecting with her friends and family back on Extremus. They considered manufacturing a long-range communications device of some kind, but ultimately decided against it. The True Extremists who now live somewhere kind of close to this area are under the impression that Verdemus was destroyed. There could be spies from this civilization amongst the people of the ship. They were there before; there could be more who have as of yet not been found. Even if they’re all eventually rooted out, the nature of time travel places all intel at risk at any other point in time. It simply isn’t safe to return, if the people on the ship could even find a way to backtrack. This is their home now, and they are better off acknowledging that. Tinaya has finally managed to do that today. She’s in a good place, and ready to move forward. Today is also the first day that she’s going to speak with the prisoner.

Everyone had a job to do on this planet in the beginning, but thanks to Belahkay’s extensive understanding of automated engineering, they don’t have to do a single thing at all anymore. Agricultural robots tend the fields. Kitchen robots make the food. Construction robots build the structures. This is like a permanent vacation. Of course, automation is the name of the game back in the stellar neighborhood too, but people still pursue goals. There’s no way to advance the human race here, though, so the simple life is the only rational pursuit. There is still plenty that they’re missing. The boy’s mother, Lilac was assigned to be Hock Watcher for their one prisoner, who was not fit to serve his time on Extremus, where he might be discovered by someone who was not aware of the persistent human presence on this world. Since her job was mostly incredibly boring, she was allowed to bring the majority of central archives, including the grand repository and the core compendium, with her. She was not, however, given copies of any of the virtual stacks. She wouldn’t be very good at watching if she were spending time in a simulation. Niobe was living too simple of a life in Exin territory where she was a slave-in-training, so she’s been eager to learn computers now, hoping to one day build the Verdemusians virtual worlds to explore. Tinaya isn’t worried about that right now, not only because there’s still plenty they don’t know about this world, but also because all she can think about is Ilias Tamm.

“First Chair Leithe, you’ve finally come.”

“I’m not First Chair anymore,” Tinaya volleys.

“I don’t see it that way.”

“You better. My chances of going back to that ship aren’t much higher than yours.” She looks around at his four walls.

“I’m holding out hope,” Ilias says cryptically.

She sighs. “Why did you ask to see me?”

“That explosion killed most of the people who were living here.”

“The explosion that you caused,” she reminds him.

He shuts his eyelids. “I’m not arguing that. I’m stating a fact to lead to a point.”

“Well, get on with it.”

“The Hock Watcher is the only survivor, besides the children, who know nothing. Many secrets died with the rest of the victims. Why do you think I was here?”

“You wanted a pardon for your father.”

He smirks. “It was more than that. I wanted you on these lands, so you could uncover those secrets. Yes, I wanted to restore my father’s name, but it will do him no good, since he’s already dead.”

“What are you saying, there’s a conspiracy of some kind?”

“Well, we’re talking about Extremus; of course there’s a conspiracy. You’re part of at least two of them. How’s Thistle doing, last you spoke with him? Still one hundred percent sentient?”

“No comment.” He isn’t supposed to know about that.

He doesn’t mind her stonewalling him. “Tell me, what is the purpose of the Extremus mission? What are we trying to do?”

“We’re trying to find a home in the farthest reaches of the galaxy.”

Ilias flinches as if that’s a bad answer. “Why? What’s the point of that?”

“It has its intrinsic value. The mission is the mission.”

This makes him laugh. “That’s a nice tautology, but it’s bullshit. Everyone who started this is dead now, and they mostly did not pass their motivations onto the latter generations. My bloodline is an exception. And I’ll explain it to you, if you want.”

“Only if you’re not lying...”

He nods slightly. “Operation Starseed is a secret subprogram under Project Stargate, designed to seed human-based life all over the galaxy, starting from the stellar neighborhood, and propagating outwards. The galaxy is a couple hundred thousand light years wide, which means it will take about that long to reach the whole thing. The point of Extremus is quite simply...to beat ‘em to the punch. It’s a race, and Extremus is trying to win it.”

“Okay. Well, that’s a pretty cynical way to put it. What does that have to do with Verdemus anyway?”

“It has everything to do with Verdemus, as well as the Goldilocks Corridor and the True Extremists-slash Exins. The goal of the farthest reaches of the galaxy has always been vaguely defined. Who wins this race has therefore always been determined by your definition of that goal. Bronach Oaksent decided that the goal was in the past. He won the race thousands of years before any of us were born. He didn’t just beat Extremus, he beat modern Earth. Verdemus is just another off-shoot of that idea. The people who were meant to live here would have been just as much Extremusians as our descendants will be, who will exit the ship together on a hypothetical world out there.”

“No, that’s not true. The goal was a factor of the time that we were going to spend on the journey. That’s why there were nine captains planned, because it was going to last 216 years. This is not Planet Extremus, and not only because we didn’t literally call it that. We’re not even halfway across the galaxy yet.”

Ilias nods again, but more substantially. He removes a piece of paper from under his pillow, and sticks his arm through the bars. “Go to these coordinates. You’ll see what I mean. I’m right about this.”

Tinaya reluctantly accepts the sheet. “What the hell is this? What are coordinates? Is this based on the Earthan system? We’re not on Earth.”

“Turn it over,” he urges. “I stashed a satnav there that’s coded to Verdemus’ coordinate system,” he goes on when she flips it to the back where there’s a map to a second location using the settlement as the origin, and various large landmarks as points of reference.

“Why didn’t you just draw a map to the coordinates?” she asks.

“That’s about a quarter way around the world,” he explains. “I wouldn’t recommend trying to walk there.”

“The satellite up there is new,” she begins to argue. “It doesn’t have a coordinate system, because it’s just a warning station. The original ones, which would have been programmed with such a system, were destroyed by the crew of the Iman Vellani, because they might be detected by the Exin invaders.”

He shakes his head dismissively. “The data is in my satnav. It will send the program to the new satellite once you establish the link. It will take some doing, but the way I hear it, you know your way around a microchip.”

Tinaya reluctantly follows the map, and digs up the lockbox. She punches his code in, and retrieves the device that he was talking about. It does indeed take a little work to find a way to interface it with the orbiting satellite. Once she manages to do it, her window to actually use it closes up. In order for it to be able to warn them of external threats, it can’t remain in geostationary orbit, which would place it above them at all times. It’s constantly moving around the world, so she enjoys a limited amount of time before it disappears over the horizon, forcing her to wait. The good thing about this is that it can effectively map the coordinate system that it has just learned to the actual geography. A geostationary satellite would not be good enough to help her get to where she needs to be. About an hour and a half later, the coordinates are locked in, and the device receives an accurate set of directions. The easy part is over.

Tinaya walks over to Belahkay’s workshop where he’s building them something, or rather working on something that a robot will build when the plans are ready. “Hey, Tiny,” he says. That’s what he calls her.

“I need the jet.”

“The jet?” he questions, surprised. “Wadya need that for?”

“Fishing,” she lies.

“I hear the..bass is good on the..third continent.”

He slowly smiles, and twists his chin. “All right, I’ll let you have the jet, but I’m going with you.”

“No, I would like to be alone. That’s part of what I enjoy about fishing.”

“Tiny, I’ve never synthesized any fishing gear for you, and you’ve never mentioned it before. You’re obviously lying, which is fine, but I’m not letting you go off alone; you’re literally made of glass.”

“Ugh, everyone’s always saying that. It’s magic glass, I can’t break.”

“You don’t know that. Maybe you just haven’t got hitten hard enough.”

“Hitten?”

“It’s a word, don’t look it up. So how’s about it? I’m goin’, or no one’s goin’...? Or I’m goin’...?”

“Okay, fine. But don’t ask questions, I don’t have the answers. And you have to promise to not tell anyone what we find unless I tell you it’s okay.”

“Very well. Just let me run a preflight check, and we’ll go.”

They came up with a quick lie about the two of them wanting to feel like free birds, far, far away. The rest of the group bought it because they had no reason to believe that they were being deceived. The six of them spent time together, and they spent time apart. Aristotle went on a hike alone for a week a couple of months ago, and no one tried to stop him. He stayed in contact the whole time, and agreed to let an aerial sentinel drone fly over his head at all times. As mentioned before, this is basically all one big, long vacation.

The jet that Belahkay engineered is sleek and modern, but it’s not hypersonic. It will be some time before they mine the necessary raw materials to build anything like that, and it might not be necessary anyway. The point of getting halfway around the world in a few hours would be to connect people to each other. There’s no one else where they’re going. At least there shouldn’t be anyway. Perhaps that’s where Ilias is leading her. It could be a trap too, but it’s unlikely that he ever had enough power here to set anything like that up so far from the settlement. They didn’t find any preexisting jets over the course of the last two years, nor any place that they would have been manufactured. What could possibly be all the way out here?

A building, that’s what. A series of nested buildings, in fact. Belahkay lands the jet in an open field, and then they get out to walk back there. They’ve already seen it from the air, but they want to get a more detailed picture. Tinaya remembers learning about these in class. In the late 21st century, most people lived in arcological megastructures that towered over the landscape kilometers high, and could accommodate hundreds of thousands of people. But they didn’t go straight from modest highrises to this hypercondensed style of living. They gradually worked up to them. They built superblocks first, which housed hundreds of people, and later thousands. Then they upgraded to megablocks, which housed tens of thousands. What they’re seeing here is a megablock. A giant complex several stories high surrounds a courtyard, and on the inside of this courtyard is another building, shorter than the first. They just keep going like that, each layer being smaller in two dimensions than the one outside of it. In the very center is a 10,000 square meter park.

The fact that they’ve found this thing is shocking enough. It shows that the people who first came to this world weren’t just curious about the flora and fauna. They were planning to settle it with a significant human population who would never see the Extremus again, and would start a new civilization. Ilias was right, different people were making up their own definitions for the end state of the Extremus project. But that isn’t the only thing they find here. In the park is what looks like a downed jet. It seems to have crashed here many years ago. There was one apparent survivor, or maybe he had nothing to do with it. He comes out of a handcrafted structure next to the pond, and approaches to shake their hands. “Hi. Welcome to Sycamore Highfields.”

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Expelled: Explanted (Part I)

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Elder Caverness was being blackmailed. He didn’t know how, but this stranger knew everything about his past. They knew where he had been. They knew what he had done. He was a war criminal, on the run from an authority who may not even exist. The Extremus was the best place for him to hide, because it was so random and inconsequential. That was the whole purpose of the mission, to travel so far from civilization that it no longer interacted with anyone else. He would die on this ship, safe from his past. But the stranger could ruin that. He wasn’t afraid of being found out by someone on this ship per se, but if the truth came out, it could get back to someone who really could get him in trouble. The blackmailer wanted him to do something that he shouldn’t. The Captain asked him to create a device that could transport any passenger back to the launch point, on the day of launch. There were those here who wished they had never come aboard, and this was their chance to undo that mistake. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what this device would do. It would instead banish them to the nearest sufficiently massive terrestrial planet. It didn’t even need to have an atmosphere. The blackmailer just wanted Captain Yenant to be on it. They must have had plans for him, though, because if they just wanted the Captain dead, it would be much easier to program the device to teleport him to interstellar space. Why did it have to be a planet?

There was a knock on the door. Elder didn’t use any cameras, or anything. He was the smartest engineer on the whole vessel, but he still liked to do some things the old school ways. He opened it to find a stranger. Whether it was the same person who was coercing him to do all this was still in question. They never met face to face.

“I’m your blackmailer.” Well, that answered that question. “Did you do what I asked? The Captain will be getting impatient. I calculated an 83% chance that he reaches his breaking point with you today, and that could result in him giving up on this project entirely. That cannot happen.”

Elder slipped his gloves back on, and showed the stranger what he had created. He couldn’t touch it with his bare hands, or he would become one of its victims. Pulling the string, and pressing the button activated it, but anyone who ever came into contact with it would succumb to it. “No, don’t,” he cried when the stranger reached for it.

“Oh, did you think that I wasn’t going on the trip?” He smirked, and took the transporter from Elder. “That’s the whole point, my friend.” He twirled it in his hands, and then handed it back. I calculate a 97% chance that he will use this between forty and fifty-five minutes after receiving it. Please message me when he takes it.”

“What if I can’t get him to touch it?” Elder asked.

“Do whatever you can.” That was odd. Getting rid of Halan Yenant seemed to be this man’s entire motivation. If that wasn’t actually the case, what was he really after?

Shortly after the blackmailer left the room, the Captain did come to check on his progress, and he did retrieve what he believed to be the recall device, but he did not touch it personally. He instead ordered his lieutenant, Rita Suárez to take hold of it. They were suspicious of him right away. Elder should have been cooler about it. He was a pretty good actor. This was absolutely not the first time he had gone undercover. It used to be his entire job. But maybe that was okay, because again, the man who made him do this didn’t seem to care one way or the other anymore. He appeared to be obsessed with probability, so maybe he knew that Halan would touch it eventually, or maybe he wanted Rita to be transported all along, and the best way to make that happen was to pretend that Halan was his target. Elder was pretty smart, but he had no illusions about whether it was possible for someone to outthink or outshine him. He was too old for that, though perhaps not as old as everyone believed. They all called him Old Man because he wanted them to; because it was easier to hide this way.

Rita wasn’t the only one who touched the device, though. Due to their suspicion, they forced Elder himself to place hands upon it as well. He had to find a way to take himself out of the queue. After the Captain and Lieutenant were gone, he got back to work. He ran over to the sink, and started scrubbing his hands vigorously with soap and water. There was a coating on the device, which left a residue on any holder’s skin. Elder had created it, but using a formula that the blackmailer provided. Surely it would come off if you knew that it was there, and worked hard to get rid of it. Right? Maybe not. He kept scrubbing and scrubbing, but his autodermatologist kept detecting a foreign substance. It was still there. He kept scrubbing, but it was just wasting time. The transporter was going to spirit—or maybe it wouldn’t. He threw his watch around his wrist, and activated the regular teleporter. He kept jumping all over the room. Maybe flooding his skin with temporal energy would get rid of the residue. After all, this energy didn’t usually just stay on you forever. It would dissipate, and in this case, hopefully remove anything related from his hands. No, the autoderma still read positive. Shit. There really was no hope. He only had one choice left.

He grabbed his emergency evacuation bag. It was called a Harsh Environment Survival Kit, and they were standardized in this time period in Earth’s stellar neighborhood. Once people started traveling to the stars, researchers came up with something called SCR&M, which stood for Safety, Compartmentalization, Redundancy, & Modularization. Bags like this one were designed to protect against any eventuality, such as having to abandon ship. Older time periods referred to it as a go-bag. Obviously, it could be tailored to one’s specific needs, but there were some strong recommendations, like shelter, air, water, and food. The one that Elder built for himself was unique, and filled with technology that not everyone in the universe even knew existed, like this teleporter gun, which...didn’t have much charge left, but it would do. And most Heskits had collapsible toilets, but this one here led to a pocket dimension, which was of vital importance to Elder’s sanity. He quickly checked inventory, and then disappeared.

His personal teleporter wasn’t able to send him directly into the Hock section, but he was able to get close, and then break in using more traditional means. They were just in an interrogation room, so it wasn’t like he had to make it deep into the belly of the beast. The problem was, he didn’t really know how much time he had left. He reached the door, and could see them through the little window. It was Captain Yenant, Lieutenant Suárez, a fellow genius named Omega Parker, and an awful woman who everyone hated so much, they just called her Airlock Karen. There was no telling how many of them had touched the device. The entire crew could have played a sports game with it by now. Elder would not be able to save the lives of all those people, but he might be able to protect this small group here. That was assuming he couldn’t just stop them from activating it in the first place, which was the ultimate goal. He started banging on the glass. “Stop! I couldn’t wash my hands! It’s not good enough! Don’t push the button, button is bad!”

The group noticed him, but didn’t get up to open the door for more information.

“Don’t push that button!” he urged desperately.

While Halan and Rita were talking, probably trying to decide how to react to this development, Airlock Karen snatched the device from the table, and gave herself some room. Before anyone could stop her, she pulled the string, and pressed the button.

Elder had thought about putting on his suit and helmet, but there was no time. Luckily, the vacuum tent was designed to open and reseal quite quickly. He could have saved himself with little issue, but he wasn’t the only one in danger here. Of course, Airlock Karen came with him, as did Rita. No one else did, though, so Halan had never touched it, and neither had Omega. It was just the three of them. He pointed his teleporter gun at the both of them, calibrated it for the mass of two bodies, and summoned them to his position. He tugged on the string to expel the tent, which enveloped them like a Venus flytrap, wrapping them up completely. The valve on the emergency air tank opened on its own as well, and began to fill the space with a breathable atmosphere. They weren’t out of the woods yet, though. The ladies had passed out already, because they did not expect any of this to happen, but Elder was about to suffer from the same fate. He retrieved the dermal wand from the pack, and flashed it against his neck. He felt immediate relief, but his body still needed time to absorb the nanococktail. He gave Rita and Airlock Karen their own flashes, then let himself pass out next to them.

He awoke later to someone shaking him at the shoulders. He blinked, coughed, and checked his watch. It hadn’t been that long, so the tank had plenty left in it to keep them alive until he could get the carbon scrubber working. “Report,” Rita demanded.

“I screwed up,” Elder answered.

“Ya think?” Karen asked sarcastically.

“I’ll explain everything. Right now, we need to solve our immediate issue, which is air.” He reached into his bag to take out the scrubber, and the tablet. He handed Rita the latter. “Here, interface with the tent. Make sure there are no leaks or vulnerabilities.”

“Wait, where are we?” she pressed. When Elder just gave her a harsh look, she sighed, and did as she was told, because it was the only logical next step. They could talk and work at the same time.

“I don’t know where we are. We’re wherever the Extremus was when she pushed that blasted button.”

“Oh this is my fault?”

“Partially, yeah. I literally told you to not do it. Did you think that maybe there was some reason for that, and that I wasn’t just high and confused?”

“I don’t know who you are, or what power you yield. Maybe you were the admiral, who could have stopped Halan from letting me go home.”

“Vice Admiral Perran Thatch isn’t Halan’s boss. He’s an advisor.”

“Well, whatever.”

“Old Man,” Rita began, “why are we here?”

“Someone made me do this. I thought he was trying to remove Yenant from the equation, but now I’m thinking that he wanted all three of us to be here instead. He’s smart. He’s real smart. He knew things that he shouldn’t have known. About me.”

“Halan was always suspicious of you. No one knows where you come from, or who gave you the job that you had.”

“I gave it to myself. I’m good with computers.”

“How do we get back to the ship?” Rita asked him.

“We’ll worry about that later,” Elder insisted.

“Later is too late,” Karen argued. “The ship will be out of range by then.”

“Extremus travels two light years every day,” Elder volleyed. “It’s well out of range already. I didn’t want to put the horse before the cart by explaining the long-term goal so soon, but our only hope of returning is to go back in time, which will...take time.”

“I never understood that,” Rita said, almost getting comfortable here, but still checking for leaks. “Why does it seem like it’s easier to go back in time than to go faster than light? The reframe engine has a maximum speed, but couldn’t someone build something that surpasses it? Aren’t they basically the same thing?”

“The difference is that the power required to travel through time scales linearly with mass, and distance from egress to ingress. Faster-than-light travel, on the other hand, scales exponentially from a high starting value. All current theoretical designs demand types of power generation that we do not yet have. A hypothetical ship with true FTL would probably have to be gigantic from the onset, and the more you want to pack on it, the more powerful the power source has to be. It suffers from similar downsides as the rocket equation. You want more payload, you need more fuel. To add more fuel, you need a bigger ship. You got a bigger ship, you need more fuel. It’s a vicious cycle that a time machine would have no trouble with. That’s not to say that building one will be easy. Back on Extremus, I had resources. Here, we’re tied to what I was able to carry in my bag, and whatever is here on this world.”

“I don’t suppose there’s enough for all three of us,” Rita reasoned.

He looked between the two of them. “The pack is made with one survivor in mind, but we can stretch it out if we’re careful.” He finished engaging the carbon scrubber, so he hung it up near the ceiling, and took the tablet back to interface with it too. “We’ll have to ration food, and really be careful about how we recycle our waste, but we should be okay. Water is our main concern as it’s the most difficult to insulate from leakage. We will be drinking our own urine for a while.”

“We do that anyway,” Airlock Karen said dismissively.

“Not like this,” Elder said with a heavy sigh. “The miniature filters we’re limited to don’t do much for the taste. But I think I can program the dayfruit seeds to produce extra sugar to mask the taste a little.” Dayfruit was a genetically engineered food that someone came up with centuries ago. It weighed about five pounds, and could provide a single person’s entire nutritional needs for one day. Under ideal circumstances, one took about a week to grow, but to conserve water, they would have to lengthen the growing period intentionally.

Rita sighed and looked around at their new prison. A lone survivor could go a bit crazy in the limited space, so the three of them should be total maniacs within only a few weeks. “I need an inventory of everything that we have on hand. After that, you’ll need to come up with a survival plan with extension contingencies. Once you’re done with those, start working on the escape plan. I’m not going to give you a time limit for when we need to be back on Extremus, but I will tell you that the answer is not never. Debra, I see you. It’s not his job to get you home. Gatewood is far too far away to worry about right now. So while he’s working on his assignments, and I’m setting up the dayfruit grower hourglasses, it will be your job to shut up. Do you think you can handle that?”

There was a knock on the tent.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 31, 2452

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One of the crew members started counting down the distance. The physics of extradimensional space weren’t very intuitive. The equilibrium was proof that the membrane was all around. It wasn’t like one would have to travel a certain distance to reach it. They should be able to break free from anywhere. The fact that the Transit moved so quickly was just its way of accomplishing this, as opposed to other methods, like temperature and pressure, or surgical strikes. Still, there was a physical boundary, which would kill them if they collided with it, and it was approaching fast. Or rather, they were approaching it. In order to combat this, they needed Olimpia’s umbrella.

“Eleven units!” the engineer called out about a second or two after saying that it was thirteen. “Nine! Seven! Sir, we need to abort!”

“There’s no time, Dawn,” Freya reminded her. “We have to trust in magic.”

“This will work!” Olimpia insisted. “We just have to get closer before it actually starts...w—w—working.” She wasn’t super confident in this.

“Three! One!”

They held their breaths again.

“Two! Four! Six. Eight. Ten.” Dawn was beginning to relax.

“It is working, Olimpia, keep holding!”

“For how long!” Olimpia questioned. Increasing the length of the kasma itself was proving to be far harder than simply holding back the Lucius bomb back on Ex-467. And this time, she probably couldn’t ask someone else to give her a break, or they would be destroyed during the hand-off.

Dawn’s numbers kept going up and up and up as the walls of the universe cleaved for them. For Olimpia. “Fifty-five, fifty-six...infinite.”

“Infinite?” Freya asked.

“Infinite,” she repeated. “We’re not in the kasma anymore. We’re in the outer bulk. She just built a canal for us.”

Marie started to massage Olimpia’s back. “Ya done good, kid.”

Olimpia was breathing heavily, and hanging her head low. “I think I need to go to the med car too.”

Marie caught her when she keeled over, and teleported her away.

Leona held one finger up when Azura tried to say something to her. She and Angela were listening to the state of their teammates. Both Olimpia and Ramses were probably going to be all right eventually. “Okay. What was that?”

“Are you talking to me now?” Azura asked.

“Yes, Azura, go ahead.”

“I don’t have the coordinates for very many universes. I’ve sort of...burned bridges in most of them, and I don’t know how the Maramon in Providenciaverse would react to you, since your history with their species is...complicated.”

“Can we get back into Salmonverse from here?” Angela asked.

“The membrane is too thick,” Dawn explained as she was looking at her computer. I can get you back in, but...”

“But what?” Freya encouraged.

“Not in your present day,” Dawn clarified. “The part of the barrier that runs throughout the entire time period is thicker. It’s like if you sealed a box with tape, and then wrapped a whole bunch of tape around the middle until the whole roll was gone.”

Azura looked at her like she was crazy. “You’ve heard of adhesive tape?”

“I grew up on a fairly primitive planet. Yes, I’ve heard of tape.”

“Where can we go?” Leona pressed.

“Where’s Treasure?” Freya asked, knowing that no one here knew the answer, or they never would have been in the kasma in the first place.

Leona sighed in the middle of the silence. “Matt, get back here, please,” she said into her comms. “I know, but you’re not a doctor. Trust whoever’s there to take care of them, and come back. You’re the only one who can do this.”

Mateo reluctantly jumped back to the executive car. “What is it?”

“I need you to reach out to Amber. We’re looking for someone in the bulk, and she’s the only one we can communicate with from presumably anywhere.”

Mateo looked at everyone in the group. All of the delegates from the Sixth Key were still here, watching him like eagles over a river. “I could use some space.”

“Olkan, take our guests to...” Azura grumbled, and massaged her face with both of her hands. “I dunno, nothing is ready here yet. I guess use car six. It would not be a bad idea to remodel some VIP living compartments at some point.”

A guy apparently named Olkan led the delegates away. Besides Leona, Mateo, Angela, Freya, and Azura, only Carlin stayed behind, which was fine. Mateo found a seat to relax in. Amber appeared to be able to reach out to him psychically whenever she wanted, and with very little effort, but it was a lot harder for him since he wasn’t a psychic himself; he was just bonded to her. He closed his eyes, and let himself drift away from this plane of existence. A few minutes later, he reopened them. But it wasn’t actually him. His consciousness was being suppressed. Amber smiled his lips, and looked amongst the small group, settling on Azura. “You must be Azura. I’ve met your brothers and sisters.”

“How are they doing?” Azura asked.

Amber shrugged Mateo’s shoulders. “They were all right, last I saw them. They left in their little grenade thing. Said something about a different war.”

“We need to talk to Thack Natalie Collins,” Azura went on. “You can do that?”

“No, we are not bonded,” Amber answered. “I can talk to Sanaa Karimi, though, and there is a point in the metaphysical history of the bulkverse when those two cross paths. Would you like me to call her?”

“That would be great,” Freya said in Azura’s stead.

Amber shifted her gaze over to Freya. “One moment, please.” Mateo’s eyes glazed over, quite literally. The irises and pupils were all but gone. Another few minutes later, the trance was broken again. Mateo looked over at Leona. “Hey, bitch.”

“Sanaa?” Leona questioned.

“Now with one hundred percent more penis. How the heck are ya?”

“Where are you?” Leona asked. “Is Thack there? Can you ask her where Treasure is for us?”

“Treasure’s here too, dum-dum.”

“Where?” Freya asked frantically. “Where are you?”

“Thack called it Stoutverse. We’re havin’ a picnic. Whole gang’s here.”

“Stoutverse,” Freya echoed. “Have you heard of that, Azura?”

“No,” Azura answered, shaking her head.

“Is this the Transit?” Sanaa questioned.

“Yeah.”

“She’s expecting you,” Sanaa said like it was no big deal. “ So you must figure out how to get here at some point.”

“What did you mean by the whole gang?” Azura asked Sanaa. “Who is that? Is anyone else there who might have the coordinates?”

“Well, sure,” Sanaa began. “The Crossover, the Prototype, some chick in a sexy spacesuit, a dude in a very colorful coat.”

“Dawn,” Azura said quickly. “Remember I told you about the Crossover. We’ve never formed a link before, because there’s no way to know who’s in control of it, but now we have a baseline. Piggyback off of Mateo’s psychic connection, and send a ping. We’ll have our coordinates.”

“Later, sluts!” Mateo blinked. “It was nice to meet you all.” That was probably Amber. He blinked again. “You’re all gonna die.” he said in a darker tone, and with furrowed brows. He blinked again, and widened his eyes in horror. “Help!” he cried, in a higher pitched voice, but quietly, like someone might do if mimicking a cheering crowd without raising their voice too much. One more blink, and suddenly the Time Shriek started to echo throughout the car, and reportedly in other cars down the line. It wasn’t coming from Mateo’s mouth, but it was probably triggered by the multiversal link. They covered their ears in pain, as it was far louder than it usually was.

Azura reached over to the controls, and somehow figured out how to shut it off. “Jesus. What the hell was that?”

“You’ve never heard that before?” Angela asked, shocked.

“No, I’ve heard it before, of course, everyone has. I just mean why here, why now, why that frickin’ bad?”

“Mateo, what do you remember?” Leona asked.

“I remember how it felt,” he told her. It was fine when Amber and Sanaa were in my head, but not after that. It was...disturbing in a way that was all too familiar.”

“You know who that was,” Angela said, not as a question.

“It was Meredarchos. He’s not happy with us.”

Everyone exchanged looks.

“If he’s not where Treasure is, then I don’t care,” Freya determined. “If he is, then we have to go. We have to go either way.”

“Dawn?” Azura posed.

“I have the coordinates. Well, I have a trail of breadcrumbs anyway.”

“Then let’s go.”

The trip took them most of the rest of the day, though their aging and metabolisms were halted. Ramses and Olimpia recovered fully in this time, thanks to their superior substrates, and the work of the medic, Spectra. She checked Mateo out too, though they weren’t exactly equipped to detect issues that resulted from psychic connections, or psychic intrusions. One thing that Mateo was able to tell was that the person who cried for help at the end was not Meredarchos, but a fourth consciousness, and he didn’t know who it was, or where they were. He offered to reach out to Amber again, or even try to contact Sanaa, but Leona forbade it. It was not safe; what happened before could be repeated, and Meredarchos might be able to find a full foothold next time. They just all sat there and waited until the journey was over.

Finally, they pierced the membrane of what was evidently called Stoutverse. They could hear the train horn blare, which Dawn said they were unable to figure out how to disable. The viewscreens showed confirmation of Sanaa’s claims. The Prototype and Crossover were sitting next to each other in a wide open field. Several picnic tables were a few dozen meters away, but only a handful of people were there, watching them until the spacetrain came to a complete stop. Azura and Team Matic followed after Freya ran out. “Where’s my daughter?” she demanded to know

Thack pointed towards the sky, and looked up. “On the frontlines. The Darning Wars have begun.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Freya said angrily.

“It means the Transit needs to get up there, and start defending this planet,” Thack replied. “Anyone who doesn’t want to participate should disembark now. They’ll be safe here on the ground.”

Azura lifted her watch up to her mouth. “Evacuate the passengers. We’re going into battle. This is not a drill.”

“Get her back right now,” Freya ordered. She was also talking to a man standing next to Thack. “This is not what we talked about. We agreed to let her be more independent, not a soldier.”

“Zek made the decision to pull her up there,” another woman explained.

Freya gave her a dirty look, and then turned her face away again. “I don’t care that she asked to watch. Send her back down to me this instant.”

A teenage girl, a twentysomething guy, and a thirtysomething woman appeared on the ground. “Mom, why did you do that? We could talk later.”

“Are you fighting the Ochivari up there?”

“The Cormanu is the safest place I could be right now. And I need to learn.”

“That’s not true, young lady,” the man said, the implication being that he was her father. “The Primus has a bunker. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that she went up too,” he loud whispered to Freya. “It was only for a couple of minutes, though.”

They hadn’t realized that Azura had run back to the Transit. “Fray, are you coming?” She wasn’t urging her, just asking.

“Do what you gotta do!” Freya yelled back.

“Hi, I’m Primus Naraschone Mihajlović. This is my lieutenant, Kineret McArthur.” The other stranger reached out, and started shaking hands, but she kept messing it up, as if she were still learning how.

Leona showed her Mario Matic’s special watch, which recalibrated itself to every new destination’s timekeeping standards. “Is this the date and year right now?”

“May 31, 2452,” Primus Mihajlović recited with a nod. “It is.”

All of Team Matic were surprised. It was quite the coincidence, that the time period was close to what it was when they left home. Perhaps it was done intentionally, and the plan was for them to come here all along, but whoever was pulling the strings was waiting for the right moment. They may have let it go, but if they had broken the accelerated time bubble early enough, and returned to their regular pattern, this was bound to be one of the days that they were in the timestream. Did their pattern follow them here? Before they could dwell on it, though, most people there suddenly disappeared. Other than the team, only Carlin, Thack, the Primus, and her lieutenant remained. “Uhh...can any of you teleport? Please say yes.”

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Microstory 2095: Not Thick Enough

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My parents were pretty tired when they flew into town. There was this whole issue at the airport. I didn’t know this before, but they just built a new airport for Kansas City, and it’s not my favorite. I preferred the older concept, with the circles. People hated that, but my thing is, it can be a great thing, if you do it right. They designed those specific ones poorly, I’ll admit, but the idea is perfectly sound. These are rings, which allow your driver to pull up pretty much right to your gate. There are multiple security entrances, which means that you only have to contend with the people who are getting on your flight, or one of a handful of others. If they staggered the flight schedule right, though, and assigned the gates wisely, they could actually make it so that the only people who are in line for security at any one time are on the same flight. The other flights in your sector have already left, or don’t need to get through yet. Anyway, the issue was that the original ones were not thick enough, which left less room for bathrooms, and almost no room for restaurants, and other shops. Everything was on the outside of security, which I didn’t have a problem with. Since getting through security was so much faster than at other airports, it was fine. You didn’t have to get there three years early, because you’re already just right there! Ugh, I could go on and on about airport layouts, including the fact that you can squeeze more planes in the same area, because the curve is constantly dropping away from the fleet, but let’s get back to the story. I spent a lot of time in the new one, waiting for my parents to land. They’re still figuring out how to coordinate all this foot and car traffic, it was a mess to know where you can pick up your family, and when, then there was a glitch, so everyone was waiting at the wrong baggage conveyor belt. I think it will be fine, they just need time to work out all the kinks. I was going to take them back to my landlord’s house to meet her, and share a meal or two, but they just wanted to get to the hotel, order room service, and then go to sleep. They’ve both been retired for years, so they’ve grown used to their days not being so busy. I decided to spend the night with them. Fortunately, the hotel made its own mistake, and assigned them a double room, so there was a bed there for me. I don’t post on my blog on the weekends, so I’ll catch you all up on Monday. That’s when they’ll be flying back out, so I’m sure we’ll run into more trouble.