The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 2, 2423

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It was easier for Maqsud to transport people from one planet to another while they were floating in water. Every choosing one had their little quirks like that. Ramses packed up their pocket dimensional home, and stuck it in his pack. Then they hiked to the nearest waist high body of water. It took them most of the rest of the day, but they made it in time. The Krekel authorities were acting like them having a week to get out was some kind of standard deadline, but it didn’t sound like the smorgasbord of punishments for Leona’s crime was any age-old tradition. None of the others they managed to speak to had ever heard of anything like that. No matter. They had a way off the planet, and no need nor desire to ever return.

A weird thing happened on their way to their destination. Well, two things ultimately. Teleportation generally implied instantaneous travel, but that wasn’t always the case. Sufficiently rapid transportation was equally impressive and helpful. It didn’t even have to be a superpower to be worth it. A hypersonic jet that could get from New York to London in under two hours was still a useful advancement to the travelers of the 21st century. Maqsud’s globetrotting ability took time. He still had to move from point A to point B. He just did it a hell of a lot faster than anyone else could. Not even Team Keshida’s FTL engine could match it. He offered the passengers sunglasses to protect their eyes from the literal blinding light of the journey, but Ramses said that they wouldn’t need them. Their new eyes were designed to withstand the doppler glow.

By the time they got into the water, midnight central was approaching, and by the time they had arrived on the next planet, it had passed. While it only felt like a few minutes to them, the trip had technically taken a whole year. Maqsud jumped to the future with them, which didn’t seem to bother him, as long as it wasnt a permanent thing. Leona confirmed their suspicions about the delay with her once-father-in-law’s special watch, then they tried to figure out where they were. Maqsud’s ability was not very precise. Actually it was when you thought about it a little. He could always land on a planet, even if it was billions of light years away. He just couldn’t pick a specific point on that planet. They could have been anywhere on Earth. Fortunately, this group had abilities of their own. They could teleport the rest of the way. At least they might have, but this wasn’t even Earth.

“Don’t you feel that?” Olimpia asked. “The gravity. It’s...wrong.”

“She’s right,” Ramses said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “We’re too heavy.”

“I don’t really recognize this plantlife either,” Mateo pointed out, “though I would not have thought much of it if Olimpia hadn’t said something. I’m not a biologist.”

Maqsud was concerned. “I aimed for Earth. That is where we should have gone.” He looked around. “How could we not be on Earth?”

“It’s okay,” Leona told him. “We can all breathe, including you. Everything else, we can deal with.”

Maqsud was growing more upset by the second. “This has never happened to me before, except that time I took you and your other friends to Mars accidentally. But that was one planet over. Which other possibility might we have gone to that’s anywhere close to Sol, and still looks like this?”

Leona thought about it. “The best candidate would be Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. It has a higher surface gravity, a breathable atmosphere, and tons of life.”

“I don’t think that’s it!” Marie called down to them from a hill. “This isn’t a planet,” she said after they all jogged up to see what she was seeing. She was right. A ringed gas giant could be seen plain as day in the sky. They were orbiting it on a moon.

“What is that thing?” Olimpia questioned. Some kind of energy beam was coming out of the planet, shooting outwards to the side. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe the beam was coming from elsewhere, and shooting the planet.

“Is that from a Death Star?” Mateo asked.

“No, it’s a Nicoll-Dyson beam,” Leona whispered.

“What is that?”

“It’s...it’s basically a Death Star, except it’s powered by a real star. Someone out there is trying to kill whoever lives on this moon.”

“Why would they shoot the planet, and not the star?” Angela questioned.

“Larger target. It will eventually destroy everything.” She sighed. “I’m not too terribly familiar with the concept, because I don’t much care for weapons, but the way I understand it, we should be dead by now. It should happen in a matter of minutes. For whatever reason, it’s low intensity, resulting in a delayed—but inevitable—reaction.”

“Can we do anything to stop it?” Mateo asked her.

“If we still had a ship?” Ramses asked rhetorically. “No. Without a ship, definitely not. The best we can do is...” He trailed off a short time to look over at Maqsud, “...get the hell out of dodge.”

“We can’t do that yet,” Leona said, shaking her head.

“She’s right,” Mateo agreed. “We have to help these people, if we can.”

“What people?” Marie asked. “I don’t see any people. There could be billions of them on the other side of the planet—or moon rather—for all we know.”

Ramses dropped his bag on the ground, and started sifting through it. “Lee-Lee, I happen to have a high-speed spectrographic camera in the lab.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen it. I could try to use it to estimate the beam’s progress.”

“Yeah,” Ramses concurred as he was taking out the pocket dimension generator. “While you’re doing that, I’ll send up a satellite to detect human lifesigns. Let’s just hope they are human, because it’s not calibrated for anything else.”

“We just need one cluster of humans. Hopefully they’ll be able to tell us what’s going on here,” Leona replied. After he opened their home, she followed him into the lab, and came out with the equipment they needed.

“How are you going to launch that?” Maqsud asked. “You have a rocket in there too? I’ve seen some advancements in my day, but...”

Ramses smirked. “I’ll take it up there myself.” He winked, and disappeared.

“You can breathe in space,” Maqsud imagined.

“No,” Mateo answered. “But we can hold our breaths for a very long time.”

“Actually, you don’t want to hold your breath,” Leona began to try to explain.

Mateo cut her off. “He doesn’t need the details. We wanna help, though.”

Leona handed him a bag. “Figure out how to get this tripod open. I need to read the manual on the camera.”

As Mateo was removing the tripod from its case, he started to hear a beeping sound in his comms device. It sounded like morse code. Everyone but Maqsud stopped to listen. “It’s Ramses,” Angela translated. “He spotted civilization a few thousand kilometers from here. He’s still going to launch the sat, but he thinks one of us should check it out.”

“I’ll go,” Olimpia volunteered.

“As will I.” Mateo held onto the plastic ring on the tripod, and jerked it downwards to make the legs pod out. “This is done.” As he was taking Olimpia’s hand, Marie slipped her own around his other one.

Maqsud then took hers. “I need to feel useful.”

The four of them jumped to the coordinates that Ramses relayed to them. It was a laustrine community, not particularly advanced, but not the old west either. The place appeared to be abandoned, but rather recently. Bicycles were left scattered on the sidewalks. A few vehicles were stopped in the middle of the road, doors left open. Mateo climbed into one, and found a radio. “Hello? Is anyone there? This is—”

“You’re not talking to anybody,” Marie said from the passenger side. She adjusted the knobs for him. “All right, Try again.”

“This is Mateo Matic of the...of the Team..Matic. Can anyone read me?” He asked the question only one more time.

“My God, it’s good to hear your voice, Mister Matic. This is the Mayor. Are you in the town?”

“We’re in a town, at least. “It’s by a lake.”

“There’s only one,” she replied. “We’ll send someone up to get you.”

“Did you recognize her?” Marie asked.

“No, but that doesn’t mean we never met.”

As they were climbing back out of the car, they could see a little girl running up to them from what looked like a recreational center. She didn’t get too close before she stopped. She urgently waved them over to follow her, so they ran to meet her halfway. She led them into the building, and then down some stairs, which led to an elevator. They took it down several stories. They were in a bunker of some kind. People were lining the hallway. They looked dirty, tired, and scared, but hopeful at the team’s arrival. It was unclear whether it was actually a good thing yet, since they no longer had a ship, but they still didn’t know exactly what was happening.

The little girl took Maqsud’s hand and continued to lead them deeper into the underground facility. They reached a set of double doors. A small crowd of people were standing around a table. On it was a map. “Thank you for coming.” It was the woman from the radio; the Mayor. “Did someone send you, aware that we were in trouble?”

“They didn’t send us directly,” Mateo explained. “Though they may have interfered with our transportation somehow.” He couldn’t help but let his eyes drift towards Maqsud.

The Mayor noticed this, and looked over at The Trotter to size him up, and his peculiar clothes. “Are you Maqsud Al-Amin?”

“I am. Honestly, I was just trying to take them from Worlon to Earth. I don’t even know where we are.”

She nodded. “So you’re not here to rescue us. You’re just here for your son.”

“What? My son? I don’t have a son.”

“You do,” Mateo corrected. “He’s about as famous in our circles as you. We’ve never met him, though. I guess I would have thought you would know of him, even while he would have only been born in your future.”

Maqsud was shocked. “You’ve known this whole time. Who is the mother?”

Mateo shrugged his shoulders. “I would have no idea. I can’t be sure if you’ve conceived him yet, or what.”

“Do you think Senona brought us here for this?” Olimpia whispered to Mateo.

He really didn’t think so. It felt like Senona’s job was done. Someone else was aware of Maqsud’s connection to this place, and the team was incidental to that end. Whether that meant they were a bonus or unfortunate collateral damage was yet to be seen. “I think it’s just the latest in a series of people who have tried to control our lives,” he whispered back.

Maqsud redirected his attention to the Mayor, who frowned at him. “I know who she is, and where they both are,” she said to him. “They live in another sector.”

“First,” Marie began, “are you aware that there is some kind of laser trying to destroy the planet that you’re orbiting?”

The Mayor sighed. “Yes. That is a little gift from the Exins.”

“The who?” Mateo asked.

“The Exins,” she repeated. “Our ancestors once belonged to them, but they broke off, and fled to this world. The Exins didn’t like that, so they fired a weapon at them. It’s taken hundreds of years to get here. None of the refugees are still alive today, nor are the people who retaliated against them. It’s kind of stupid, really. We’ve been trying to figure out whether there’s any way to survive it, maybe by being on the opposite side of the planet at the time. There is another bunker like this one, but it’s not quite at the antipodes. Again, we don’t know what the severity of the destruction will be, or when it will happen. This all may be a waste of time.”

“How many live on this moon?” Marie asked them.

“Roughly eleven thousand,” the woman answered. “We were excited to hear that you had arrived, but we shouldn’t have been, should we have? There’s no way you can save us all, even if we had years to wait.”

“We’ll be right back,” Mateo said. He placed a hand on Maqsud’s shoulder, and teleported them back up to the surface. “How many people can you take at once?”

“All at once? On dry land, half a dozen. In water, twice that much.”

Mateo took out his handheld device, and opened the calculator. “And how many can you do in a day, assuming they’re in water?”

“Um...one trip every few days.”

“That’s, like, four years.”

“Yeah, dude, I can’t save all of them. I doubt I could even save all the children.”

“Mateo, can you hear me?” Leona asked through the comm disc.

“Yeah, I’m here. We found a town. They’re living in an underground bunker right now. They’re aware of the weapon.”

“It doesn’t matter how deep they go. There’s a reason this beam is taking as long as it is. A sudden explosion would vaporize the moon. The people who delivered it want the residents of this world to experience prolonged suffering. In a few days, the toxic gasses from the planet are going to rain down and poison the atmosphere of the moon. It will become superheated, and break apart eventually as well.”

“Ramses’ camera told you all of this? How do you know the intention behind the weapon?”

“Because the person who ordered it is here, having evidently detected our arrival.” Leona replied. “He calls himself Bronach Oaksent.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 25, 2416

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Angela Walton stood at the door, waiting to go in. No one was keeping her from simply walking through on her own, but she wasn’t quite ready. She had not been given clear instructions, so she wasn’t sure exactly what she was going to say. Only two things were clear to her. One was that Dardius had no interest in forming any sort of strategic relationship with the Sixth Key, or any of its components. Two, her sister, Marie had no interest in rekindling—or even reminiscing about—any relationship with Heath. Their unwelcomed arrival placed Mateo’s daughter in danger. It was irrelevant whether this was the Sixth Key representatives’ intent. It was what happened, and it had to be dealt with. That was Angela’s responsibility now, because it couldn’t be anyone else’s.

“You’re not Marie,” Heath determined immediately.

“No, I’m not.”

“I want to see her.”

“She doesn’t want to see you.”

“I need to hear her say that.”

“No, you don’t. She owes you nothing. You walked out on her when she needed you most, and nothing has changed. She’s decided to move on. She’s had to. I’ll ask you kindly to respect that.”

“Fine. I didn’t come here for that anyway. You and your team appear to hold a lot of sway with these people. Could you please request an audience with the planet’s leadership for me? We have important business to discuss.”

Vearden and the world owners are aware of you and your request, and they are denying it. I’m sure they’ve told you. The only reason you’re still here is so that I could return to the timestream to send you off. All you have to do is give them back control of the Nexus so they can actually do that. And agree to take this.” She held up a vial of clear liquid.

“What is that?” Heath asked.

“Memory eraser. The entire last year will be wiped from your minds.”

“Why would we do that?”

“You’ve seen too much here, and you have placed my family in danger. I asked them to make this for you. Not only will they send you back home, and erase your memories, but they’ll send you back to the original time you left. It will be as if it never even happened.”

“We’re not doing that. Our memories are too important to us. They are part of who we are. The six of us have held meetings in our jail since then. We have shared stories, grown closer. You can’t take that away from us. I, more than anyone, know what it’s like to lose who you are.”

“You know nothing. The man who looked like you, who lost his memories, was not you. Your consciousness was summoned to the future before that happened.”

“Miss Walton, I’m keeping my memories.”

“The only other option is Lohsigli.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Exile,” she clarified.

“We can’t do that either. We have responsibilities to our people.”

“What did you think would happen when you came here unannounced?”

“We hoped that they would at least sit down with us; not lock us up, and ignore us for an entire year. Now, I understand that you’re on your own schedule, but that has nothing to do with us, or the Dardieti government.”

“I think you’re a little ignorant here. This world is millions of light years away from Earth, and it is not populated because of all the pretty trees and animals. It was founded as a sanctuary. It was literally called Sanctuary. What started out as a hotel has grown into a powerful civilization since then, but this mandate has not been lost. The people who live here are under the protection of the leadership, and you have threatened that. Even if you have the best of intentions, you broke into their home, and they’re not going to listen to you. If you had gone through the proper channels, you might have been okay. This...” She held up the vial again, “is your second chance. If you make the same choice again, they’ll know they can’t trust you. If you reach out first, they may listen this time.”

“Why would we make a different choice? If you’re forcing us to an earlier state—”

“Humans don’t store memories in little boxes that are organized by date. Memory is associative. The solution doesn’t erase them. The solution opens up your mind, so a trained psychiatrist can extract what they need. They’ll strongly suggest you make a different choice. And you’ll only not take that option if you genuinely came here with bad intentions.”

Heath sighed. “If this is what the Dardieti want, I’ll talk it over with the others.”

“Very well.” Angela turned away, and found herself face to face with Leona.

Leona looked over Angela’s shoulder. “What’s happening here?”

Angela looked over her own shoulder. Then she took Leona by hers, and teleported them to the middle of the Mirage Desert. “How did you find me? Did Olimpia tell you where I was?”

“I sensed great tension,” Leona explained. I was leaving you alone, but then the tension was suddenly relieved, and it was so jarring that I felt compelled to come to you. How did Heath Walton get here?”

“We don’t know. He’s not said, but the Dardieti did not expect him. There was a huge military formation on the island. They were freaked out. Olimpia was there; she told them that they should lock Heath and his friends up until it could be resolved. I was asked to facilitate that resolution.”

“Why? Why you? Why didn’t they tell us?”

“We were leaving you and Mateo out of it. For the baby. And Ramses is busy anyway. Olimpia only told Marie because of her ex-husband. She’s refused to see him. She wants that part of her life to be over, I guess.”

“That was my fault,” Leona said. “I keep talking about us leaving the past behind. But you should have told me. I could have been there to look into the Nexus problem. I could have spent this whole time trying to figure it out.

That was a good point. Angela wanted to keep everyone else out of this, but Leona was the one with the power to actually fix the situation. She should have said something before...before it all got so out of hand. “You’re right, I’m so sorry,” she said. “The Dardieti have asked the Sixth Key representatives to have their memories erased, and then go back home, but only after they tell us what they did to the network.”

“If you had told me, I could have told you that they probably spoofed their number.”

“What do you mean?”

Leona prepared to explain. “Every Nexus is supposed to have its own term sequence, even ones in alternate realities. Generating a new sequence after a duplication event is, from what I gather, a complicated matter. There is a period of time when both Nexa can serve as the real one, and this can cause travelers to end up in the wrong reality. What Mateo did with the Omega Gyroscope probably caused a little confusion when it came to the now two versions of the main sequence, especially since one of them is now in another universe. Basically, it was on the network, and off the network at the same time, which gave it a little extra power. I think I can either request a new number for it, or simply have the machine removed from the network entirely.”

“Oh. Well, yeah, let’s do that.”

Leona took Angela by the hand, and teleported them back to Tribulation Island. “Everyone out. I’m gonna fix this for you.”

All of the techs left without question. Once they were gone, Angela slid the door closed. “Thank you, Leona. I messed up. I was just trying to protect Marie.”

“I understand. Hey, Opsocor.”

“Yeah?”

“Why are the Dardieti locked out of the Nexus?”

“They have been placed in a feedback loop. It’s a glitch that I never really did figure out, but it’s rarely exploited. Basically the molecules in the air underneath the dematerialization drum—”

“It is called a drum?” Leona questioned.

“Yeah,” Venus answered.

“Oh.” She didn’t know that. “You were saying about air molecules?”

“Right. They’re constantly being broken apart and rematerialized. This makes the Nexus think that it’s in the middle of transporting a person or object to itself, and won’t let it form another connection until that one is complete, except it never is.”

“The line’s busy,” Leona reasoned. “Except it’s not, it’s just that the phone was left off the hook.”

“Yeah,” Venus said once more.

“How do we stop the loop?” Angela asked, hoping that the superintelligence wouldn’t ignore her as unworthy of response.

“Create a vacuum,” Venus suggested. “Others have solved this by sucking all the air out of the whole building, but technically, only the molecules underneath the drum are the issue.”

“That sounds like a lot of work,” Leona said. “But okay.”

“There’s another way,” Angela offered. “We’re under about one Earthan atmosphere of pressure, right?”

“Right?”

“And the composition of the air is about the same as it is on Earth?”

“I should think so,” Leona replied. “Humans survive here without issue.”

“We can teleport the air out. Just you and me. Each of us can transport two times the equal mass to ourselves, and Ramses built us to be around a hundred kilograms...”

“We would need one more person,” Leona calculated. “But it should work, if we concentrate hard enough. We’ll get Olimpia to help us. One quick jump to outer space, and then back down to the sand. Venus, you ever seen anyone do it like this before?”

“Never. That’s why I picked you.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 25, 2383

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Mateo and Marie made their way to the nearest library, which wasn’t all that near to where they were. They walked, took a sort of subway transport, stepped on a teleporter pad, took another subway, and walked a little more. The library was gigantic; large enough to fit millions of books, but there was not one in sight. This was the future, they didn’t use paper books anymore. They didn’t even bother building shelves for them. The architecture was complex and highly vertical, with pillars going up hundreds of stories at least. The highest part of the ceiling went beyond the horizon, so it may have gone higher. It would seem that whoever designed this just wanted it to look pretty, when a single terminal built into the wall of a nondescript hallway would have sufficed. No one else was here, as one would imagine. According to Dilara, there weren’t very many people on this vessel planet thing compared to its size, and probably most people walked around with a library in their pockets, or perhaps in a tiny chip implanted in their brains. That was if they weren’t just full-on androids. So far, they hadn’t encountered anyone who appeared to be even somewhat nonbiological, but surely they were from being this advanced.

“What are you doing here?” It was a man. It was a very tall man. Maybe this sector wasn’t quite so deserted.

Marie stepped forward to prevent Mateo from speaking first, even though he had no intention of taking lead on this. “We seek asylum.”

“You’re far from it,” the man pointed out.

“We’re here to look for it.”

“If you’ve done something wrong, I have every right to arrest you before you get there. You can’t be granted asylum if you haven’t crossed that border.”

“Are you?” Marie pushed.

“Am I what?”

“Are you going to arrest us?”

The man checked his lower arm, where a tattoo that could move was telling him the time. “You have ten minutes.” He rolled his neck, and shook out the sedentaries. “Then you better learn how to run to where you’re goin’.”

“You’re literally gonna chase us?” Mateo questioned.

He cracked his knuckles. “You don’t understand how boring it is working security in an abandoned sector.”

“Okay,” Mateo said, sending a psychic message through a facial expression to Marie that she ought to get to searching. He, meanwhile, kept an eye on his own clock.

“Found it,” Marie said rather quickly. She swiped the navigation data over to her own cuff, and then swiped it over to Mateo’s. “In case we get separated.”

“I’m right behind ya.”

They took off down the corridor together. Then Mateo carefully began to let himself fall behind, so the bear chasing them would reach him first. “Keep going!” he cried up to her when she started showing signs of downshifting. “I’ll catch up!” he lied. As Marie’s footsteps redshifted away from him, their pursuer’s footsteps blueshifted towards him, and Mateo stopped completely. He took a breath, waited until the man was close enough to keep pace, and then turned to the left. His diversion was working. Marie was moving off safely, while Mateo was going in the wrong direction.

It wasn’t long before the guy did catch up to him, but he didn’t even tackle. He just tapped Mateo on the back as if this were a game of touch football. Still, Mateo felt compelled to stop.

“Where is your compatriot?”

Mateo played dumb, and looked around. “I thought she was with you?”

He chuckled. “Doesn’t matter, this was fun.”

“That’s all it was?” Mateo asked. “So you can just let me go.”

“Oh, no. I’m still arresting you.”

“What does that mean? What happens to me?”

The security officer slapped a pair of cuffs on him. They just looked like thin silver bracelets. He pointed a little remote at him, and pressed a button. Mateo felt his arms being flung over to the wall, and trapped against it with magnets. “Exile.”

“Exile to where?”

“Like I said, this is an abandoned sector of the SWD, but it’s not the most remote, by far. I’ll escort you so far away that you won’t see a single soul even if you walked in the right direction for your entire life. No teleporters, no relativistic trains, no windows to get your bearings.”

“Get on with it then.” Mateo was all right with this if it meant Marie was free to make her attempt to end the war. It would all be worth it if it was the last thing he did.

The security man released Mateo from the wall, but immediately snapped the cuffs together. He was even more immobile than he would be with the regular handcuffs cops used in his day in the main sequence. “You won’t need this anymore.” He removed Mateo’s Cassidy cuff, and stuffed it in his pocket. He had no idea what he was dealing with here. “Let’s go.” He pressed a button on the remote once more, and jumped them to some other sector. It didn’t feel any more abandoned than where they were, but he seemed pleased.

“This doesn’t look so bad,” Mateo mused.

“You’ll get sick of it. From here on out, you’ll always be alone.”

Mateo sported his best impression of Joker. “No, I won’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll never be alone as long as you’re with me.”

“Uhh, I’m leaving.”

“If you’re leaving, then I’m comin’ with.”

The man winced. He pressed a button one last time, to unlock the cuffs. They flew right into their dock against the remote. “Good luck with thaaaaaat...”

“Activate ankle tag,” Mateo ordered.

The Cassidy cuff in the guard’s pocket teleported out, and wrapped themselves around his ankle. “What the hell?” he reached down, and tried to remove it, but of course he could, because that would have defeated the purpose of the security feature.

It wasn’t the perfect answer, but it was the only one Mateo had. This was the primary cuff, which meant that the owner was the one in control of it, but only while he was wearing it. The order he just gave was the last one he could. Right now, no one was the owner, and all features were deactivated, except for the one that placed the wearer on the last pattern programmed into it. This man was now on the Matic pattern, whether he wanted to be or not. It was going to take a clever engineer to get it removed, but that could take time, and they only had one day at a time now.

“What does it do?”

“You’ll see,” Mateo said, thinking it would be much more fun to watch him squirm at the sight of the clock.

He checked his device. “My teleporter still works. I can just leave you here, and figure it out.”

Mateo shrugged. “Okay, but...”

“But what?”

“Good luck deactivating the bomb before that happens.”

“You’re bluffing.”

He was indeed bluffing. The anklet was real, but the bomb was not. “It’s not the only extension I have for my substrate. That thing is linked to me, even though it’s now on you. If you get more than a few meters away from me for too long, kablooey.”

“Turn it off.”

“You really think I’m gonna do that here? Come on, man. You’re smarter than that. I certainly am.”

“What do you want?”

“Just get me to the Asylum Sector, and leave us alone. You had your fun.”

He hesitated, and looked at the time again. “It’s been nearly two months.”

“We’ve been here for weeks?”

“Yeah, see?” He presented the clock to Mateo, which was running quite quickly.

“You idiot!” Mateo scolded. “That’s coming up on two years, not months. The bubble runs faster than you know.” He pointed a finger at his chest. “You better get us out of here before the next year passes, or I’m going to run a few meters away, and the bomb will blow your leg off. I assume they don’t have doctors around here?”

“I’m gonna kill you if I find out you’re lying.”

“Teleport. Now. Now!”

“Dammit,” he hissed. He pressed a button, and got them out of there.

“Have you found them?” Leona asked a year later.

“Yes,” Ramses said. “It wasn’t easy. This isn’t technically a Cassidy cuff. It’s like a new model on a different network. I can’t just pull up a list of the other cuffs. But I was able to trace its signature.”

“Just one?” Leona asked for clarification.

“I only found one online. The others are dormant, and I can’t see them.”

“Oh, okay.” Leona put on the brand new cuff. “I’ll contact you when it’s time to carry out the mission.

“Be careful.”

“I will.” Leona activated the associative teleporter, and jumped. She was surprised to find herself next to Angela Walton. Mateo was nowhere to be found.

“Leona,” Angela said. “No need to worry, this is my associate. She’s here to help.”

“What are you doing here? I left you on the ship,” Leona said to her in a whisper, which the nearest other people in the room could probably hear.

“Time, right?”

“Marie, our patience grows thin,” someone of importance declared. “First you tell us that you can unite the detachments, then you disappear for a year, and now you’re back with someone else. If you want to negotiate, then let’s see what you have to bargain with. Your asylum credentials will only last three more years, so if we don’t get something working, we’ll have no choice but to inform security that you are here, and let them begin the pursuit process of you and the rest of your team.”

“That is why she is here,” Marie explained. “She can bring you Xerian Oyana.”

“Is this true?” the leader asked.

“What would you do to him if I did?” Leona asked her.

“We would follow him. He is the true owner.”

“I can get him here,” Leona promised, “but I demand assurances that neither he, nor my people, will be harmed.”

“We can do that.”

“I’ll need some time to make preparations,” Leona insisted.

“How much time?”

She looked over at Marie, who she believed to be a future version of Angela. “One more year.”

The leader sighed. “Very well. We shall move on to other business.”

“What are you wearing?” Marie whispered as they were leaving the diplomacy room together.

“Do you like it? Ramses made it for me.” Leona extended her arm like she was showing off an engagement ring.

“It’s...”

“Different,” Leona agreed. “Do you remember where the AOC is?”

“Yes,” Marie replied. “I can’t sync with you, though.”

“Just beam me the coordinates. We don’t know that this can be synced. But it can teleport without having to associate with a beacon device.”

They teleported to the ship almost at the same time. It was here that Marie explained who she was, and how she came to be here. Leona was surprised at the news, but not shocked. It obviously wasn’t the first time she met an alternate version of someone. Why, she once sent her own alternate to another universe to live out her life safely and happily, away from all this drama.

“So you don’t know where Mateo is?” Leona asked.

“Not anymore. I didn’t wanna say anything to them, even though they might be able to help, because we don’t know for sure they can be trusted.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Leona began. “Insurance.” She pointed to her new model cuff. “This will get me back to the Suadona, particularly a beacon on the bridge. But we may still need to destroy his ship, even though you’re clearly in the middle of negotiations. I need the other cuffs, so we can associate to a lifeboat that Olimpia and the other you are on. That is our way to safety if anything goes wrong.” She knelt down, and started to access the hidden safe. “I need to get their cuffs back around their wrists.”

“Stop,” Marie said.

“What?”

“Mateo didn’t want anyone else to get hurt. He may be dead by now, and if so, he sacrificed himself in the name of peace. I want peace too, and if I want it, Angela wants it. Bring Xerian here, leave the others on the Suadona, and don’t make plans to turn any ship into a teleportation missile. If we can’t learn to trust a little, these negotiations aren’t going anywhere. This is war, Leona, and in war, the diplomat speaks first.”

“Marie...”

“Close the safe, and walk away.”

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Microstory 1490: Birth of a Big Problem

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One of the first things that the people of Durus voted on for the Solar Democratic Republic was what to do about the Time Crevice that Escher Bradley was trapped in for a hundred and eighty years. It was too dangerous to leave lying around, even with guards protecting people from it. There was no reason for something like that to exist, so it was vital that they find some way of getting rid of it. Of course, any attempt at destroying it could have devastating consequences, and completely backfire on whoever was unlucky enough to be assigned the task. If they were going to do this, it would have to be by fighting fire with fire, using paramount powers against it, once and for all. The first thing they needed to do was study it, not only to understand its properties, but also to know its range. Obviously, anyone who walked through it would start experiencing time at a much slower rate, but where exactly did that start, and where did it end? If they dug a tunnel from five meters away, when would it start happening for them too? Was it the rock? Some kind of temporal gas inside the crevice. An invisible man in there who was just controlling the whole thing for kicks and giggles? After all this research, they came up with a few options. There were some paramounts who had the ability to control the flow of time, and could potentially alter it for the Time Crevice. Unfortunately, none of them was successful. They could hold a time lock for a period of realtime, but unless they actively remained there, it would always snap back to the way it was, so that wasn’t a long-term solution. Perhaps they could simply bury it, so that no one could accidentally end up in there anyway. Well, that would take quite a long time, because remember that one second for the crevice was one day everywhere else. It took weeks to make any noticeable progress, and years until completion. Then someone had a bright idea to rid themselves of the problem forever.

A former president of the Democratic Republic suggested that they remove the crevice altogether. There were definitely paramounts powerful enough to rip it out of the ground, and banish it from the surface of the planet, at least when working in tandem. To be safe, they could even remove a kilometer diameter of land along with it, and hey, free crater. The risk was great, but if they could jettison the entire thing into space, they wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. Fixing the time discrepancy or burying the crevice would have been fine to do once they covered the logistics. Something like this, however, couldn’t be decided by just the people involved. All Durune had to have a say in the matter, so they put it on the ballot for the 2205 elections, to make sure everyone had a voice. The great thing about this, which was one of many this democracy enjoyed, was that no one was fighting too hard one way or the other. Everyone could agree that they wanted to do what was best for Durus, and if that meant going back to the drawing board, then that was what they would do. Earthan governments experienced a lot of infighting, but not Durus; not anymore. There was only one side now. The ballot measure passed, not with unanimous votes, but not by a small margin either. The necessary paramounts started working together immediately, to make sure they could perform this amazing feat in one go. They had never apported anything quite this large before, so it was important that they took their time, and got it right. Once they were ready and confident, they got into position, took out the huge chunk of land, and sent it into outerspace, in a fairly random direction. They didn’t come out of it unscathed. A lot of them ended up with psychic nosebleeds, and one developed a chronic migraine condition. She was okay with it, though, because she felt they had saved a lot of lives, or at least a major hassle that might have been. Sadly, they didn’t consider all of the angles, and that chunk of rock would one day come back to bite them in the ass. It wouldn’t be for decades, but it would ultimately change everything about how Durus operated, and potentially destroy all they had worked for since the beginning.

Microstory 1428: Waterloo

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A great many people turned out to compete in the second vicennial Mage Selection Games. There were now four separate towns on Durus, with a fifth one in the middle of being built, and a sixth one in its planning stages. Knowing that these, as well as two more, would require mages to protect them by the time the next competition could backfill their ranks, the source mages selected a great many winners. Each town was thusly being protected by about fifty per cent more than they figured they needed, with further excess being sent off on other missions, like dam repair, and exploration. Most of the new mages wanted to be assigned to one of these other things, because it gave them a chance to get out, and look around. People otherwise didn’t generally go anywhere. They didn’t even travel to each other’s towns all that often. Being a mage, in some ways, meant more freedom and agency. Rumat Dunn was particularly disappointed when he was sent off to work in Splitsville. There was nothing wrong with this town, but it was the least coveted role, because it still maintained a lot of its border protection through the use of technology. The mages stationed there knew there wasn’t much work to do. Many were perfectly happy with that, being the backup force in the event the power grid suffered some kind of failure. Still, there were not enough of these volunteers, so some just had to accept their positions. It wasn’t like they would be stuck there for the entirety of their twenty-year contract. Transfers happened all the time; they just weren’t known to happen at a town mage’s request. It was something the source mages, and their advisors, decided, using whatever protocols they had in place. It was all a delicate balance that involved placing people where their work would do the most good for the community. For instance, temporal anomaly detectors—which were capable of sensing when a time monster was near—were great for any town to have, but no town really benefited from having more than one. So if there were only four of those, they would necessarily be placed separately. A new town mage spent two months in extremely intense training after being sourced, during which time their powers, their skills to use those powers, and their other talents, would be assessed. So when the source mages told Rumat that he belonged in Splitsville, that meant he belonged in Splitsville. Unfortunately, Rumat never accepted where he was assigned, and spent a lot of his time trying to prove that he was worthy to be transferred somewhere else. He was specifically interested in helping construct the as of yet unnamed fifth town, which was being built by a single construction crew, in realtime. It was located nearest to the broken portal that was sending the time monsters to their world, so Town Five was notably more dangerous than the other four, and required some pretty powerful mages to protect it. Rumat was good, but he wasn’t the best, and either way, Splitsville needed him, and in the future, others would too.

He had the power to open what came to be known as filter portals. No object of significant size would be able to pass through, so it wasn’t like normal teleportation. The best application of this ability was irrigation. He could instantly transport fluid from anywhere on the planet, to anywhere else. For now, Splitsville was located the farthest from Watershed, so it benefited most from this power, but the people in charge of planning Town Six were interested in choosing a site that was even farther away. Rumat didn’t care about any of this, and didn’t have the patience for delayed gratification. He thought he could use these powers to attack the monsters, if the authorities simply gave him the opportunity. They wouldn’t, so he grew angry, and lashed out. He flooded Splitsville from within by portaling massive amounts of water into its borders. They wanted him to irrigate, so he was gonna irrigate, and they weren’t going to be able to stop him. Well, they did stop him, and he didn’t like the way they did it. Now that he was contained, however, there was a problem. They didn’t have any clue what they were going to do with him. The source mages had never come to a decision of what to do about someone with powers who caused problems such as this. They had a jail, and forced labor, but neither of these things would be able to keep Rumat down. Some suggested exile, but that wouldn’t work either. Durus was a very, very small planet. It might even have actually once been a moon. The only reason the surface gravity was comparable to Earth was because it was so dense. There were no oceans or islands, so there really wasn’t anywhere to exile anybody. They might have made him go to the broken portal, but that would be a death sentence, and capital punishment hadn’t been legal here since the Smithtatorship. The source mages only had one option, and they were saving it for such an occasion, because they didn’t want people to know they were capable of it until they had no choice. They stripped Rumat of his powers completely, which few people were aware was possible. This changed everything about the Mage Protectorate, and how people viewed the sources. The good news was that their plan worked, and Rumat would go down in history as the first and last criminal mage ever.

Microstory 1415: The Last Ditch

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There were two major factions that came to be when Springfield started trying to form a new society on Durus. They were completely cut off from Earth, and now the responsibility fell on them, and them alone, to survive. Some people followed Smith and his despotocracy, while others were loyal to Councilwoman Hardt. People on both sides at least liked her, so an all out war would have spelled trouble for everyone. Still, she was never able to maintain enough power to take control of the situation, and Smith ruled over everyone for years. He was the one who figured out how to protect everyone using the Baby Barrier, and that won him too many points to overcome, because even those on Hardt’s side knew they had to protect themselves from the monsters. Even within these two factions, there were those who were more peaceful, and those who were more violent. The latter wanted a war, believing that the winner would decide how things played out for the next several years. There seemed to be no doubt that the special children would grow up and lead them one day, but that wouldn’t be for a long time, so there was a lot of work to do until then. One subgroup decided after about three years of Smith’s rule that it was time for an official change in leadership. They started planning a coup, which they felt had to include Smith’s assasination. Now, there weren’t a lot of people with experience with this sort of thing. There were a few law enforcement officers, but they had all chosen Smith. Some in town were part of the military, but nearly all of them had died, because they were always first to place themselves in danger for the greater good. Only one veteran was still alive at this point, and he was pretty old, so while he could teach the would-be assassins how to carry out their mission, he wouldn’t be able to handle it himself. Either way, they needed to convince him to help the cause. He was quite reluctant, since he had left all that violence behind him, and he was never gung-ho about it in the first place. In the end, he agreed that a transfer of power was the only way to turn this town from a place of inequality, to a thriving community founded upon fairness.

Smith had too many people in his pocket, so instead of trying to get them all out, perhaps their only choice was to simply destroy the pocket. They had just spent this whole time trying to use reason, and it had gotten them nowhere. Violence was not ideal, but they had always considered it the last resort, and now they believed this was the moment to descend to it. They chose their best marksman, which wasn’t saying much with this lot, but it wasn’t like it would have been on Earth. There was no federal government to come down on them, or significant public outcry. The primary obstacle was going through with the act itself; not getting away with it afterwards. That wasn’t to say there wouldn’t be any fallout, but they felt prepared to deal with the aftermath, because justice was on their side. Unfortunately, conviction was not enough to make this work. Their assassin was caught, and sentenced to death by exile. She held strong, though, and did not give up any of her compatriots. Only she was ultimately punished for treason. Smith and his loyalists were twisted, but they were also cowards. No one was willing to execute her themselves, but if they forced her outside the protected perimeter, there was a chance she would survive, and that cleared their respective consciences, and gave them comfort, so they could sleep at night. Of course, intellectually, they knew there was no way she would last the week, because they were ignorant about how this world worked. Time monsters were drawn to people, but more than that, they were drawn to crowds. It was much easier for a single individual to move about the lands undetected. That didn’t mean the exile was completely safe, but she did survive, and their lack of follow through would prove to be Smith’s people’s downfall.

Varkas Reflex: Force (Part V)

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Iota Leonis was a triple star system located about seventy-nine light years from Earth, but not quite that far from Wolf 359. Iota Leonis B, in particular, was a main sequence star that was not a whole lot different than Earth’s sun, Sol. Because of its distance, it was not considered part of the stellar neighborhood, which was exactly what Hokusai was looking for. Her initial desire was to be alone, at least for the next decade or so. Fortunately, the trip from Varkas Reflex was a lot shorter for her than it would be for most people. It was she who developed a new way of traveling the stars called the reframe engine. The fact that the star was seventy-one light years away meant that it would take seventy-one years to get there. Or rather, that was what everyone outside of the ship felt. Just being inside the ship made time move slower, so that seven decades equaled only thirty-seven days, from a traveler’s perspective. The beauty of the reframe engine, however, made it so that this relative time frame actually equaled the true passage of time. Thirty-seven days for her was thirty-seven days for everyone else, yet she was able to travel seventy-one light years. It was the only form of faster-than-light travel that anyone had come up with on a technological level. Certain time travelers could move much faster, but she hadn’t figured out how to replicate these abilities, and maybe never would.

When people first became virtually immortal, they were able to hold onto their old values and ways of doing things. After all, knowing that they might never die did not yet change how little life they had lived so far. After ten years, the people who had been married for fifty years simply became people who had been married for sixty. But then seventy rolled around, and then eighty, and now things were starting to feel different. By the time the first couple celebrated their hundredth anniversary, the institution was transforming; not into something better or worse, but altered. Of course, individualism being what it was, different couples had different plans. Plenty of married folks were these days enjoying their fourth century of being together, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with that. Still, there were others who placed limits on their relationships. Instead of letting death do them part, they were agreeing to stay together for a few decades, before moving on to other people. Others kept things up in the air, without worrying too much about what they would do in the future.

Where divorce once marked the end of a bad relationship, it now only signified a transitional period, and former partners often maintained healthy relationships with each other. Some even found themselves separated by light years, and didn’t maintain contact at all, but still remembered their time together fondly. Hokusai and Loa’s relationship was on the complex side of this. They frequently married, separated, divorced, and spent time far away from each other. They always ended up back together eventually, and not because they realized they made a mistake, but because they decided to not be apart anymore, and they were going to stay that way until something changed their minds. Hokusai didn’t ask Loa to come with her to Ileaby, and Loa didn’t offer to. They didn’t divorce either. They were just going to be apart for now, and probably meet back up somewhere else later. They never made any plans, and it wasn’t like they had to. Not everyone in the entire stellar neighborhood was afforded a quantum messenger to allow FTL communication, but Hokusai didn’t need to request one, because she could build one herself in her sleep. So she was able to talk with her wife on a regular basis, though not as frequently as she spoke with her student.

Pribadium Delgado knew a lot about how dimensional gravity worked, but she didn’t know everything, so Hokusai continued to train and mentor her for the last four years. There was even more that they both needed to learn about it. While she was the foremost expert, she had not yet explored all possibilities either. At the moment, they were telepresenting with each other using time technology. This wasn’t just a holographic communication device, like something out of an early Star Wars movie. This was more like a force bond, like something out of a later Star Wars movie. Their two labs—Pribadium’s on Varkas, and Hokusai’s on the Greta Thunberg—were merged together. They could move freely between each other’s areas, but they restricted this level of interaction, since the connection was tenuous. A choosing one named Kayetan Glaston was capable of doing this sort of thing on his own, but Pribadium figured out how to do it herself. Hokusai was so proud of her.

Partially inspired by the speech Gangsta Dazzlemist gave years ago when he first exiled Hokusai, the two of them were presently working on a new technology called the equilibrium drive. This wouldn’t simply be lower or higher gravity, but controlled gravitational force on the molecular level. When you drop an object on a world, it will fall towards the center of that world. Of course, the surface will get in the way, and not let it reach that center, but that’s essentially what gravity is doing. It doesn’t matter how high or low the gravity is, that object will always eventually fall to the ground, unless hindered by an external force, like a hand catching it. Even the artificial lower gravity that Hokusai invented in the first place retains this principle. She can make it easier for a vessel to escape its world’s gravity well, and rise up, but she can’t make the gravity itself propel the ship away. It still requires some kind of fuel. In an attempt at undoing this natural deficiency, the two scientists came up with something new. They all but abandoned the original idea in favor of another. Surely it would come in handy, but it wasn’t the most interesting application. What if an object dropped on a world neither fell to the surface, nor rose up from it, but instead, stayed exactly where it was?

With an equilibrium drive in play, the only objects capable of motion would be the ones in possession of self-propulsion. The most obvious example of this would be a person. Someone standing inside the chamber could climb up the invisible gravity lattice, and stand high above the floor. They would be able to get themselves down, but gravity would never do the work for them. And if they were holding, say, an average plastic basket, only they would be able to make that basket move. If they were to let go, it would just wait for them right in that spot, as if sitting on top a table. Of course, the ultimate goal of this tech would be to imbue individual objects with this equilibrium. The chamber might be a lot of fun, but if you want to take advantage of it, you have to stay inside, and that doesn’t really help if you want to use it in your everyday life. And they couldn’t accomplish this effect simply by turning the whole world into an equilibrium chamber, because not everything should be in equilibrium all the time like urine or a swimming pool. In fact, there seemed to be some issues with prolonged exposure.

“How are you feeling?” Hokusai asked.

“I feel like a puppet now.” Osiris Hadad, whose memories Hokusai had inadvertently erased, never lost his compassion. Though he could remember nothing about his life before the incident, he was still the same person he always was. People explained to him what Hokusai had done, but he was not angry with her about it. He too maintained communication with her across the light years, and they formed a true friendship. He still loved science, and wanted to pursue it, so he had to start from scratch, and get himself educated all over again. In the meantime, he loved helping her and Pribadium with their own research. He was in their equilibrium chamber prototype, so they could observe the long-term effects of the machine.

“It feels like there are strings on your shoulders?” Pribadium asked.

“No, it’s more like there are strings on ever pore of my skin, and they’re each pulling me in different directions.”

The other two were horrified.

“It’s not painful,” he went on. “The imaginary strings aren’t trying to tear me apart. I just don’t feel like I’m standing on anything, which I’m not. So to keep me from falling towards any surface, I guess they have to pull at me with equal force?”

“Yes, that’s how it works,” Hokusai said. “You say that’s uncomfortable?”

“It is now,” Osiris confirmed. “It’s becoming worse as time progresses. I don’t know why. I don’t think it’s changing. I think my body just gets tired of it.”

“The body gets tired of zero-g as well,” Pribadium noted. “Do you feel as if you’re exerting energy, like your body has to be the one in charge of holding in place?”

“I guess,” he said. “I mean, I know the chamber is doing all the work, and my body knows that too. It’s like I’m hanging here, waiting for you to shut off the machine, and if you do that, I have to be ready. I’m braced. That’s the word. I’m braced, in case this doesn’t last very long.”

“No species evolved to exist in true equilibrium,” Hokusai pointed out. “I mean, even zero gravity has its precedent on Earth. We evolved to handle the sensation of falling, and to float in water, but this is something entirely new; something that no one in the entire stellar neighborhood—maybe even the universe—has experienced before. Your body doesn’t know what to do with it.”

“Shoes.” Katica Petrić had walked into the lab.

“Dr. Petrić,” Pribadium said. “This is unexpected. It’s not what it looks like.”

“It looks like you’re using Glaston’s powers as a loophole to allow Hokusai to break her exile,” Katica explained.

“Are you going to tell the council?” Pribadium asked.

Katica laughed. “I’ve known you were doing this the whole time. Gangsta’s known for over a year. What he did, when he exiled you, was more to protect the people of Varkas Reflex from learning the truth about you. As long as you stayed secret, he had no problem with you continuing your work together. He’s actually counting on it. Every breakthrough you have helps the world, quite literally.” She looked up at Osiris, hanging in the equilibrium chamber. “You, however, I did not know about. I should have kept a better eye on you. I thought you were consumed by your studies.”

“Muscle memory,” he replied. “I may not remember how much proverbial baking soda to mix with the proverbial vinegar, but my hands still know how to pour the beakers. My studies go fast; I got time.”

“I see that,” Katica said. She wasn’t happy with his reasoning. She never agreed with the exile ruling, but she still felt protective over her former colleague, and knew that, because of his very condition, he could never truly understand what Hokusai had done to him; what he had lost.

“You said something about shoes?” Pribadium reminded her.

“Yes,” Katica began. “Like when we invented the clothes that lowered gravity for only the user, what you need are shoes that simulate slightly higher gravity. He needs to feel like he’s standing on a surface, even when he’s up there. He can keep climbing, or climb back down, but his inner ear needs to recognize what down even is.”

Hokusai was nodding her head. “Yeah, I think you’re right. We don’t need to make them 1-g, but they need to be higher, or you’ll always feel like you’re stuck in amber.”

“Does this matter?” Osiris questioned. “I thought we wanted to create micro-equilibrium drives, so I can hang my hat in the middle of the air while I’m putting on my coat, or accidentally bump into the coffee table, and not shatter my glass of water.”

“That is what we’re going for,” Prbadium agreed, “but we have to study its effect on the conscious body. If we don’t do it now, people are going to wonder about it later.”

“About a year after I first left Earth in 2017,” Hokusai began, “there were no significant studies on the health benefits of flossing.”

“What’s flossing?” Osiris asked.

“Exactly. Floss was this fine string you stuck in your teeth to clean them.”

“Why didn’t they just crack sonic-cleaning pellets?” he asked.

She chuckled. “They didn’t exist yet. For years, parents would scold their children for not flossing their teeth. Then scientists finally asked, hey wait, does flossing actually work anyway? Turns out, not really. They were better off using regular brushes, and brushing more thoroughly. The people who sold floss told people they needed to buy it, and no one questioned this...until some people did, and the truth came out. Science takes time, and it’s our job as scientists to let that time pass while we do our due diligence. I made a grave error when I erased your memory. I asked a couple questions, then I pushed a button. I should have been more patient, and more considerate. I won’t make that mistake again.”

“Then maybe he, in particular, shouldn’t be your guinea pig,” Katica figured.

“No, it’s fine,” Osiris assured her. “I want to do this. I should be contributing to science in my own way at this point. Until I get my knowledge back, this is how I can help.”

Katica nodded her head in understanding. “I hope you know what you’re doing, because you don’t know much beyond that. Anyway, I didn’t come in here to discuss this technology with you. Madam Gimura, your exile has been lifted, if only temporarily. Your planet needs you. I suppose you can just...come with me.”

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