The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 21, 2534

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They were abandoned and stranded in the middle of interplanetary space in the Gatewood Collective. Their communication systems were advanced, but a signal could only be so powerful in such a small form factor. Ramses hadn’t given them quantum messengers to store in their pocket dimensions, but even if he had, those were mostly gone. When Spiral Station was thrown into the quintessence bubble, all of their pockets exploded. He built a new one for each of them while they were trying to escape, but these were only a stop-gap measure until he could fabricate a new lab for himself. Their supplies would be enough for them to survive here for a few days, but if they didn’t find somewhere to land soon, they could be in trouble.

When they reappeared in the timestream on August 21, 2534, another ship was waiting for them. It didn’t even reach out first. Whoever was on it was expecting them to arrive, and at that very second, for it transported them inside of it instantly. It looked like the average starship bridge, with the horseshoe-shaped console that allowed everyone to see everyone, as well as the viewscreen. The difference here was that the room wasn’t rotating. It didn’t need to. It was equipped with dimensional gravity, which was one of the few technologies that The Shortlist granted the vonearthans use of following The Edge meeting. That wasn’t why it was here, though. One of the people on the list was evidently in command as she was sitting at the head. It was Pribadium Delgado. “Hey, guys. Perfect timing. I could set my clock by your appearances...for now.”

That was a weird thing to say, but Leona chose not to address it. She stepped forward. “Miss Delgado, it’s nice to see you.”

“It’s nice to see you again too, but if you want to get technical, I’m not a miss. I was selected to be Gatewood’s Chief Asset Manager.”

“Which means...?” Mateo asked vaguely.

“We don’t have presidents or prime ministers here,” Pribadium began to explain. “This is nothing more than a materials depot. Travelers only come for what they need to get out of the stellar neighborhood. Not many of us live here permanently, but we are necessary to manage the resources. I’m not in charge of the people so much as I’m in charge of the stuff. I decide who gets what, how much, and from where. Well, I don’t do it alone. There’s also the Chief Distribution Manager, the Chief Allocation Manager, the Chief Fabrication Manager, and the Chief Personnel Manager. We’re all chiefs, but I’m at the tippy top. I’m the Chief Chief.”

“Fitting for you,” Mateo said to her. “Congratulations.”

“They wanted someone from the Shortlist,” Pribadium went on, “and we agreed that one of us ought to be here since they’re getting so much time tech. They might have asked you, but your condition makes that impossible.”

“I’m not jealous or mad, Pribadium,” Leona said. “I think they made the right call. The question is, what call are you making now? Is this a rescue, or something else?”

“It is a rescue, of course,” Pribadium agreed, “but it’s true, I need to make sure that you don’t cause any trouble. I’m not saying you need to leave, but you won’t be going anywhere—or doing anything—without an escort.” She glanced over at the rest of the crew.

“I was hoping to build a new lab,” Ramses said. “We can’t leave until I do, and it’s going to take some time because I lost a very valuable piece of technology. It’s quite sensitive, even in light of the Edge, I would rather be able to work alone.”

Pribadium nodded. “Gatewood is a well-oiled machine. I don’t have to micromanage anyone. If you need to build a lab, we will find you a pre-excavated asteroid, and I will personally monitor you there.” She pointed at one of the crewmembers on the starboard side, who started tapping on his console, and then looked back at Ramses. “I’m sorry, but that’s the best I can do.”

“No, I’m not mad about that,” Ramses insisted. “I trust you to be there. I just didn’t want someone who, uhh...”

“Doesn’t really understand the nature of the time tech?” Pribadium guessed. “We still hold secrets. The Edge meeting didn’t result in the promise of one hundred percent transparency. These guys know not to ask questions.”

The crew had been silent this whole time, but one of them tensed up. “Yes, sir, no questions, sir!”

“He’s joking,” Pribadium said with a smile. “I mean, what he’s saying is true, but his tone isn’t genuine. They’re not my minions, or however it looks from that side of the console.”

“From this side, it looks like you’re judging us,” Romana blurted out.

Pribadium laughed. “Yeah, that’s one purpose of the horseshoe layout. It’s quite standard. The main purpose is so no one has to crane their neck to look at anyone else, but there’s a reason why there’s all that open space in the center, and why it’s two steps down. It’s nice to meet you, by the way. Pribadium Delgado.” She reached her hand out towards the center.

“Romana Nieman.” She stepped up to a little platform at the top of the horseshoe, which was designed specifically so the captain could shake hands from this vantage point. “I’ve heard of you, but not much.”

“We’ll get to know each other better as Mister Abdulrashid focuses on his lab.” Pribadium looked over at the crewmember who she pointed to earlier. “Have you found us a good candidate?”

“I assumed you wanted something at the extreme,” he replied. “I found one in the CDS that is pretty remote.”

“Perfect,” Pribadium decided. She looked over to someone on the port side. “Plot a jump.”

“CDS?” Mateo asked Leona in a whisper.

“Circumstellar debris shell,” Leona answered, loud enough for the whole team to hear, in case they also didn’t know. “Like the Oort cloud, but a generic term. Almost every star system should have one.” She looked back up at Pribadium. “What is your teleportation range? It’s gonna be a year for us if it’s only one AU per second.”

Pribadium smirked. It’s not the AU-range. It can jump a light-month in one second.” She looked over at her pilot again. “Cycle us out.”

After a minute of burst mode, they were at their destination, on approach to an icy planetesimal which the viewscreen said was about three kilometers long at the major axis and two at the minor. One of the crewmembers suddenly stood up. Her section of the console rose up with her. “Sir. I’m picking up a distinct power signature. Someone is living out here.”

“Mauve alert!” Pribadium ordered. “Registrar?”

“It’s empty!” the registrar insisted. “This body should be empty! It’s barely excavated, just enough for a standard hopper dock and a pressure seal!”

“It’s not that one,” the woman who alerted them to the problem clarified. “But it’s nearby. Computer, highlight the signal.”

The view zoomed out, panned over slightly, then zoomed in to a different object that was reportedly roughly only 11 million kilometers away from the first one.

“Get me over there right now,” Pribadium ordered.

They jumped.

Someone who hadn’t spoken yet stood up. “Should I prep an away team?”

Pribadium thought it over, her eyes quickly drifting over to Team Matic.

Leona sighed, not upset or annoyed, more just to focus her breath. “We better earn our keep.”

Angela rematerialized her helmet, and let the visor slam shut. The rest did the same at varying speeds. They started to teleport individually to the celestial body. Before he left, Ramses flicked a comms disc up to Pribadium. “If you can’t figure out how to integrate this into your comms array, just hold it against your mastoid.”

The first thing that Ramses and Mateo saw once they caught up was Romana falling on her face, right at their feet. “Careful,” Mateo told her as he was lifting her back up. “Ice is slippery.”

“It’s not slippery, though,” Marie contended. She lifted her boot, and it looked difficult.

Mateo did the same. Yeah, it was tacky, like they were on the surface of a solidifying tarpit. “What the hell?”

“Ice out here works differently than it does under an atmosphere,” Leona explained as she started to walk. “Keep moving. Our suits might actually be welding themselves into it.”

“Why did she fall then?” Mateo questioned.

“Because she tried to slide,” Angela said.

“I’m a little scamp,” Romana said cutely.

“Testing, testing. One, two, three. Testing, testing. You and me. Testing, testing. Catch a movie?”

“Comms work,” Mateo responded to Pribadium.

“Our scans are detecting a modular habitat; family-sized. One rotating coin, one dormant hammer, three shuttles. An in situ harvester, and a fusion torch drive. This thing is a laser bore, which isn’t technically a weapon, but we’re gonna move away. We’ll keep an eye on signal integrity, though, and stay in teleporter range. We’re not picking up any lifesigns, but it could be sufficiently shielded. We’re not exactly equipped with the best sensors as they are typically not needed.”

“Aye, Captain,” Leona acknowledged.

“Aye, Captain,” Pribadium said back.

Leona generated a hologram of a coin-shaped object. Everyone adjusted their positions to get a better look at it. She tapped on the image demonstratively. “I want us in teams of two, back to back. Romana and Angela, jump right here to twelve o’clock. Ramses and Olimpia, over at three o’clock. Marie and Mateo, nine o’clock.”

“There are seven of us,” Angela reminded her.

“I’ll be alone at six o’clock, I’ll be fine,” Leona assured them. “We’ll only be three hundred and fifty meters from each other. Now, get into position, and go on my mark. We don’t have weapons, but prepare for resistance. Before you go, lower your center of gravity. Not all of us have teleported to a spin habitat before. It can be jarring. It’s not the same as regular mass gravity.”

They all got into position, Leona gave the signal, and they jumped. They immediately heard weapons fire. Mateo looked over to see bullets ricochet off of his daughter’s suit. Nothing was getting through, and it didn’t look like it was hurting her, or Angela, but the shooting needed to stop anyway. He used his HUD to calculate the source, finding one gunman hiding in a thicket of bamboo trees between the ladies and Ramses and Olimpia. Mateo jumped over there, and shoulder checked him.

The shooter was barely fazed. He pulled out a handgun, and started shooting Mateo instead, point blank. They were more powerful than the firearms of yesteryear, to be sure, but they weren’t even making a dent. Mateo stood there for a moment, taking it. Finally, he knelt down and snapped his fingers at a pile of dead bamboo leaves. They caught fire, which began to spread. The man stopped shooting, not because he was scared of the fire, or even of losing his bamboo. He was just profoundly confused. As the fire suppression system was putting it out, Mateo had enough time to disarm the man, confiscating the rifle from the ground as well.

Leona and the rest of the gang were here by then. She helped the stranger up, and set him down sideways in a hammock. “Hello,” Leona began in a friendly voice after receding her nanites until she was wearing normal clothes, maybe showing a little too much cleavage. “My name is Leona Matic. That’s my husband, Mateo, and our wife, Olimpia. Ramses, Angela, Marie, and Romana,” she said, pointing. “Report.”

“I’m nobody. Just tryna live my life.” He adjusted awkwardly. “Could we go somewhere else? I feel quite vulnerable lying back like this.”

“That’s kind of the point,” Leona replied with a smile. “I understand that you were trying to protect your home. And if you weren’t—if you’re just a sadistic murderer—then I’ll go ahead and write self-defense on the report, okay? But you’re going to answer my questions, because you are currently violating Gatewood law, as well as Core World law and Earthan law. Just all the laws. So my first question is, were you aware of that?”

“I was,” the squatter admitted.

“Okay. Did you think you just wouldn’t get caught, or was it an active act of defiance against the establishment?”

He shrugged. “Maybe a bit of both.”

“All right, I can work with that. Are you alone?”

“I have...a staff. Varying degrees of intelligence.” They heard a rustling in the leaves several meters away, and looked over to see a beautiful woman on approach. Now, she—she was showing too much cleavage. She just stood there with a mousey look on her face once she spotted them. The squatter looked at her over his shoulder. “That’s my companion model. She won’t hurt you.”

“Do you have a guard model?” Leona pressed.

The squatter sighed, annoyed. “He’s in maintenance at the moment. You couldn’t have come at a worse time. Unless...you planned it that way.”

“We didn’t know you were here,” Leona promised. “We might end up neighbors if the CAM lets you stay.”

“She would do that?”

“I doubt it, but it’s not impossible. You’re supposed to leave. Why didn’t you just leave?” Leona looked around in general. “At low subfractional speeds, this shell’s raw materials would last you hundreds of years, or thousands if you shut off internal systems, and go on ice.”

“It’ll last me a million if I stay put,” the squatter reasoned.

“But you would be in danger for those million years, since you are here illegally,” Leona volleyed.

“It’s illegal anyway,” he argued. “I didn’t have the resource credits. I stole this comet. I was trying to stay quiet.”

“Where are you from, partner?” Leona asked, seemingly shifting topics.

“Earth,” he answered.

“You don’t need resource credits if you’re in Sol. You could have taken something from the Oort cloud.”

He shook his head. “No one would take me there. It costs fuel to decelerate. Ironically, even though Barnard’s Star is farther away, it was easier to get here, because the cyclers run constantly. After deceleration, I snagged myself an escape pod, and drifted all the way out here until I found a suitable shell.”

“Hm,” Leona said. “That’s probably true, isn’t it?” Silence for a moment. “Well, I’m sorry, but the boss has already seen you. If we had encountered you on our own, we would have kept our mouths shut, but there’s no going back now. You are at her mercy.” She looked at her clock. “And we’re scheduled for a new assignment at the end of the Earthan day, so we won’t be able to advocate for you unless you come with us right now, and face the music.”

They returned to Pribadium’s ship, where they did attempt to advocate for this man, to the best of their ability. Pribadium said that she would take their recommendation under advisement, but when they returned to the timestream a year later, he had been in hock the whole time, and his hermit habitat had been completely dismantled. She claimed to have no choice, that if she didn’t enforce the laws, others would seek to be exceptions, and the entire system would collapse. Her proposal was that they take him out of there, somewhere very far away, since he had no resource credits, and wasn’t allowed to stay. They would take her request under advisement.

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Microstory 2446: Caverndome

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I have no idea how big this place is, or how many corridors and chambers this dome has, but it seems pretty complex and expansive to me. According to the literature, this was a natural cave system that survey satellites and drones discovered while they were mapping the topography of the planet during this project’s early days. Seeing the opportunity, they built one of the domes on top of it. I saw the satellite view myself, and there aren’t any other domes very close to the rocky formations to the northeast of Caverndome, which makes me wonder whether the caves extend far beyond its borders, so they just decided to cut it off, and call it good enough. It certainly is. You could probably spend a whole standard lifetime here, and not see everything. The prospectus hints at the possibility of there being secret passageways and hidden chambers, and given the scope of the network, that’s probably true. I wouldn’t know how to find or access one of them, though. It could be mechanical or electronic, where a wall will part after inputting some kind of code, or it’s a tight squeeze with a big payoff, or it’s just so hard to see through an optical illusion. Some of the walls may straight up be holographic. A lot of people were running their hands along them in case the apparent solid surface gave way to empty space instead. We’re not allowed to bring in our own surveying equipment, which makes sense, because unlocking all the secrets all at once would go against the spirit of the dome. At its heart, this is an ecological dome, which means there aren’t any planned activities. You’re only supposed to come here if you wanna explore and see some cool caves. There is opportunity for spelunking and cave diving, but through the lens of this goal of exploration, not so you can test your mettle, bump your heart rate up, or get your rocks off, so to speak. Don’t come here and be disruptive or annoying. There’s literally a chamber that is specifically designated for echoing. It’s called Olimpia Hall. I would have called it the Echo Chamber, but maybe there’s some significance in the name that I am not cognizant of. If you wanna do that, go there, don’t disturb or undermine other people’s experiences because you were freakin’ born yesterday, and you’ve never heard an echo before. Yeah, it’s cool because of how powerful Olimpia Hall’s echoes are, but it doesn’t have the same effect elsewhere, so stop looking for alternatives. Sorry, I’m complaining about other visitors, when I’m just here to review the dome, but staffing is an issue. I guess it’s not their fault, because like I said, the network is so deep and intricate that they can’t station bots everywhere, but people are taking advantage of that freedom, and it’s making it a frustrating experience, so maybe they can try to find a solution? I dunno, I’ll shut up now.

Microstory 2432: Infinity Suite

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Oh, I’ve just discovered that, not only can you review an entire dome, but also individual parts of that dome. So here I am, talking about the Infinity Suite in the Palacium Hotel. If there’s one thing this planet does well, it’s not worrying about how much space people take up. The Infinity Suite is the best example of this. I have no clue how it works, but that’s the right word for it. No matter how far I walk, or how many doors I step through, there’s always somewhere new to be. There’s always a new room to explore. Yet, I can’t get lost in it either. Each room, with no exception, has at least three doors. You can go back the way you came, press forward to explore more, or exit to the hallway. And when you do exit—again, no matter how deep you’ve gone—you’re back where you started. But here’s the thing. Your suite has two entrances from the main hallway. One goes back to the beginning, and the other returns to where you last were. So it’s not just some kind of trick of the mind, or an illusion. Or maybe it still is. It boggles my mind, I can’t figure out how the crazy Escher configurations work. Your last known location is somehow being stored in memory. And don’t you think that I’m just in a new hallway that was designed to look exactly like the original one. I’ve made changes, both inside and out, and tracked my progress. I’ve left little numbered pieces of paper on counters, chairs, and couches to create a map. I’ve matched each number with a photo of the room where I put it in. It matches afterwards. I can go back in through the second door, and retrace my steps, and nothing will have shifted. Those rooms are all in there where they’re supposed to be. That still doesn’t rule out some kind of advanced holographic illusion, but I suppose it doesn’t matter, does it? It’s still the craziest place I’ve ever been. They let me stay here for two nights, but then I had to give it up, so someone else could try it. There were presumably an infinite number of bedrooms, but I barely slept, because I was too busy trying to figure out how it works. If you manage to secure a booking, please write your own review, and provide any answers that you may have. Or, if you have any explanations, or ideas of what other tests that we could possibly run, comment below. I’m so confused and curious. I won’t ever stop thinking about it.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 12, 2494

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There was no need to worry about the new Minister of Foreign Affairs for Castlebourne. They didn’t know who she was prior to today, but she was already familiar with time travelers, a few in particular. Rochelle Sumner grew up with Dalton Hawk as he was living through multiple lifetimes. Curious about people like him, she started to be on the lookout for others, eventually running into Dave Seidel and Jesimula Utkin. She was actually with them in the past, trying to figure out how to transport a citrus fruit from the future at the behest of the villainous Buddy. Rochelle couldn’t or wouldn’t divulge whether they succeeded in this mission, but she had long since moved on. In more recent decades, she was trained as an Interstellar Charterwright, so it was her job to handle these situations specifically. The fact that she knew about time travel could have entirely been a coincidence, because it didn’t sound like she had concerned herself with such matters for the last few centuries.

While they were gone, Ramses’ machines finished all of the calculations and simulations for the new mini-slingdrives, but it was complicated. The components were successfully miniaturized, and shunted into specialized pocket dimensions. The problem was that they could not accrue enough quintessence on their own for an individual to make a jump. At least three people had to come together to combine their power. They should all be able to jump together at that point, which meant that the resulting power was more than the sum of its parts, but it was a limitation that the math simply could not overcome.

“I don’t like that word,” Angela decided.

“What would you have me call it?” Ramses asked.

She pursed her lips to the side, and looked up towards the ceiling with only her eyes. “A constraint?”

He laughed a little. “Okay. That’s our constraint. Three or more of us have to go together, which will allow us to theoretically split into two groups, but no more.”

“Can we take other people with us?” Mateo asked him. “Passengers?”

Ramses took an uncomfortably long time to respond. “The AI couldn’t figure that out. I can run as many simulations as you want, but it needs targeted data. It needs to know who these passengers are, and what’s up with their quantum and qualium realms. I can’t just iterate the variables. We would have to calculate each particular passenger, like they used to do with airplanes, when they needed to know everyone’s weight for safety.”

“Have you devised a way to gather this data, if we were to find ourselves in a situation where people are in need of being evacuated?” Leona asked.

“Yes,” he confirmed. “It’s a little slow, but I can improve the efficiency.”

“That’s good enough for me for now,” Leona determined.

There was a lull in the conversation. No one knew if they were going to leave this very moment, or after saying their goodbyes to everyone here, or even this year. Leona was still worried about her right to be the leader, so she couldn’t just order it. Fortunately, Romana appeared out of nowhere to break the ice. She showed up using the dark particles that she was now stricken with thanks to Buddy’s protracted abduction and imprisonment of her. “Good, you’re not gone yet. I wanna go with you.”

“With us?” Mateo asked. “We don’t even know where we’re going.”

“Yeah, that’s the point,” Romana agreed. “It’s time for me to move on from Team Kadiar. They can handle it without me.”

“It wasn’t about needing you,” Mateo argued. “You should be with your sisters. I can’t...for any extended period of time, but you have a choice.”

“Plus, you put the R in Kadiar,” Olimpia noted.

“We’re not the only three on the team,” Romana said. “It was never only about us, or the name.”

“We’re Team Matic, but more than half of us aren’t Matics,” Marie reminded everyone.

“Y’all wanna switch to Team Walton?” Mateo proposed.

“That’s okay,” Angela replied sincerely.

“I’ve spoken with my sisters,” Romana went on, getting back to the matter at hand. “They give me their blessings. We’re doing good work out there, it’s not like I hate it. It’s just that the operation has grown so much since we started. The Ex-Exins—we need to come up with a better name for them too—have become so much more involved. Kivi and Dubra are considering leaving as well, and just letting the refugees take care of themselves. Mirage would stay, as would Tertius, since their powers are paramount, but I would say that anyone else is interchangeable.”

“I would love to have you here,” Mateo assured her. “I’m not going to harp on how dangerous it will be, because you already know that, and it’s not like you’ve been living in a padded cell for the last several years. I just want to make sure you don’t walk away with any regrets.”

“It hasn’t been long for you,” Romana said, “but I’ve been seriously considering my options for a year, and questioning it for years prior to that. I’m not doing this on a whim.”

“Yeah, it’s hard for us to remember that,” Leona admitted. “Everything happens so fast from our perspective.” Another break in the conversation, though a short one. “Well, okay. You’ll need a suit. Ram, you have a regular IMS that’s fitted with all the slingdrive upgrades?”

“Actually,” Romana interrupted Ramses before he had a chance to speak. “Could I maybe get one of those...nanite suits? What do you call them...?”

“The EmergentSuit,” Ramses answered. His eyes darted over to Romana’s father. “I suppose you’re not a child anymore, and you can make that decision.”

Romana waited for a moment before tensing up with confidence “I have. This is also not on a whim. I don’t want the upgraded substrate like you all have, just the nanobot implants. I don’t know if I should have these dark particles in my body, but they’re part of me now, and I can’t risk losing them.” She looked over at Mateo now. “I hope you don’t disapprove.”

Mateo took a respectful moment to ponder his position, then decided to simply say, “your body, your choice.”

“Thank you,” she said softly.

Romana underwent the procedure in private with Leona, instead of with an audience like most everyone else. She had a harder time adjusting to the way her brain interfaced with the implants, and their nanites. She had less experience with that sort of thing. She spent a lot of the day practicing in the lab, during which Ramses realized that there was a flaw in his programming. They were optimized to the team’s physiology and neurology. They were walking around with posthuman bodies, and teleportation and illusion powers. Romana was in no risk of exploding, or something, but she wasn’t ever going to be good at using her new suit in its current state. Her software needed to be adapted to account for the differences between her and her friends. He finished it by the time the day was over, but there wasn’t enough time for them to leave Castlebourne for their little exploratory slingdrive jump. Still, Romana wanted to integrate herself into the team, so she chose to turn her pattern back on, and skip over the next year.

When they returned, it was July 13, 2495. Castlebourne was celebrating a major milestone in their development. For the first time ever, the percentage of domes in the Gamma testing phase exceeded the percentage that were still totally non-operational. While the domes currently still in Alpha and Beta testing would gradually go down as more and more people were given the opportunity to explore these worlds, the top number would probably remain largely unchanged moving forward. Using various methods, including crowdsourcing, ordered list iteration, AI creativity, and just plain sitting down and thinking about it, Hrockas had managed to come up with over 67,000 ideas for the various recreational and relaxation destinations. The other 16,000 or so just wouldn’t be original enough to warrant construction, and would be left there as barren deserts. There were many other deserts, but these ones were unplanned, bare, and unused.

It took some time, but Hrockas eventually accepted the fact that there would be empty areas. Four out of five domes did have something to brag about, and that was a pretty big deal. The only reason he chose to construct as many as he did was because that was close to how many could fit on the surface of the planet. It wasn’t like he came up with all of the ideas first. He was happy, and so were the residents. The population from the Goldilocks Corridor was still growing at a steady rate. The ones already here held a vote, and agreed to call themselves Castlebourners. They were here to start new lives, and build a new civilization. Language mattered, and tying themselves to where they escaped from by calling themselves Ex-Exins—or by the designations of their planets of origin—wasn’t helping them move forward.

“Why are you telling them about this?” Hrockas questioned Aeolia when he finally came into the room.

“I’m trying to get them up to speed,” she defended. She was taking charge of the briefing while Hrockas was busy with other matters.

“I don’t care about that. They need to see that desert, and explain what the hell is happening there.”

“What’s happening in what desert?” Leona asked.

Hrockas took wide strides over to the holo-wall on the other side of the conference table. He switched it on. It was showing a nude beach located in the South Ocean. “Who the hell was watching this?” he questioned, frustrated as he was trying to find the right feed on his handheld device. “Here.” He changed it to the view from a flying drone, looking down at one of those deserts that they were talking about. It wasn’t natural, though, as was the majority of Castlebourne outside of the domes. It was sandy and duney. And there was something else.

Leona leaned forward and peered at the screen. “Are those...?”

“Dark particles?” Romana finished the question with a gulp. There were tons of them, flying over the surface, morphing and turning like starlings.

“That’s what they look like to me,” Hrockas responded. “Care to explain?”

“Which dome is that?” Romana asked.

“It’s Dome 216. A meteorite crashed through it years ago, and I never bothered repairing it. I just marked it for disuse, and moved on to 217.”

With fear in her eyes, Romana looked over at her father. “It’s mine. That’s the one I used to release the excess energy I have pent up when I’m not skipping time, or teleporting, or whatever.”

“You always go into the same dome?” Mateo asked her.

“It was in disuse,” Romana explained.

“How is there an atmosphere?” Olimpia asked.

“Oh yeah, if there’s a breach...” Romana posed to Hrockas.

“You tell me. There’s not supposed to be an atmosphere, I can’t believe I didn’t notice. Maybe it has something to do with what you do in there? Some kind of weird form of electrolysis?”

“I purge the energy,” Romana repeated. “It doesn’t really even look like I’m releasing dark particles. It’s more of a transparent wave that distorts space around me. It’s a very private experience, and I don’t talk about it. It shouldn’t be making oxygen, though. I have no idea what’s going on.”

“Ramses, you need to go there and see what data you can get,” Leona ordered.

“No,” Romana and Hrockas argued at the same time. “It’s too dangerous,” Hrockas continued. “I’ve sealed it off; placed it in its own quarantine.”

“I’ll send a probe,” Ramses negotiated.

“There’s already one in there,” Hrockas said, pointing to the feed.

Ramses chuckled. “I’ll send a better one than that paper airplane you got roaming around the skies.”

“Please do,” Hrockas said.

They started to get up to return to their respective duties when Marie noticed something. “That paper airplane just spotted a person out there.”

“Computer, zoom in,” Leona commanded.

The camera zoomed in towards the ground. It wasn’t a person, more of a silhouette...made of dark particles. If it had any approximation of eyes, though, it was staring up at them.

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Microstory 2317: Vacuus, August 28, 2178

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Dear Condor,

Thank you so much for writing me back. I had so much anxiety, wondering if you would get my message, and if you did, if you want to have anything to do with me. I’m sorry to hear about your world. We don’t know anything about that all the way out here. Well, I don’t at least. I’ve recently learned that I was kept in the dark about my whole family history, so they could be keeping other things from me, for all I know. So it sounds like we’re in the same boat in some respects, trapped with limited movement, in a hostile environment. The difference is that people here are trying to make the world a better place, and it sounds like a bunch of greedy corporations ruined yours on purpose. The last we heard—or I heard, anyway—it was pretty much a paradise. I have a holo-window on my wall. I can change it to anything I want on a whim, but I’ve always kept it on The Blue Marble. It’s the first full-disc image of Earth, and it’s over 200 years old. It’s not the best quality, but I think it’s perfect, because it represents humanity’s ambition, and the spirit of exploration. Plus, it’s nice to pretend that I have a nice view, even though my quarters are on the interior side. As much as I struggle living here, I know that just flying tens of billions of kilometers to this spot is an achievement that proves that we can do great things. We can be better than the atmosphere poisoners. I have faith that things will get better one day, for both you and me, on our respective worlds. I’ve asked about going to Earth many times, long before I knew anything about you, but it’s always been impossible. This was planned as a one-way mission. We’re supposed to die here. Some already have. We don’t have the resources or manpower to engineer a return trip, and I’m sure that the people in charge don’t want that, because then probably too many people would volunteer. I’m rambling, sorry, but that’s just who I am. I’m not sure if I was born this way, or if it has more to do with how I grew up. People here are always so preoccupied with their work. If you want to be seen, you have to be loud, and you kind of have to say it quickly before they get bored, and start to ignore you. Thanks again for responding! Hope to hear from you again in a week!

Love,

Corinthia

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 17, 2399

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Leona has finally come back to the Superscraper after spending days at Homes for Humankind, working on something big. She even made a short trip to Haiti without even telling Mateo about it. She hasn’t given any details regarding their plans, but Mateo has briefed her on what he and the volunteers discovered as they were exploring the sublevels. She wanted to see it for herself, of course. She is particularly interested in the fusion reactor on the very lowest level. She stares for a few minutes, not vocalizing her thoughts. Then she walks over to it, and starts opening panels and hatches. She presses a few buttons, and flips some switches too. When she’s satisfied, she brushes the dust off her hands, and walks back over. “It is more interesting than you thought.”

“Why’s that?”

She points. “See that over there, that collection of tubes?”

“Yeah. Kind of looks like an organ.”

“It’s part of a cooling system.”

“Sounds reasonable to me. Fire hot. Fire burn,” he says like a caveman.

She smirks knowingly. “Let’s go back upstairs. I need to test something.”

They take the elevator up. Leona stops on the main floor, and opens the door to a maintenance closet. She looks around a little bit before finding what she’s looking for, which is apparently a large metal pipe. She smacks it against her other hand to test its strength, then they get back into the elevator to go up a few more floors. She doesn’t say a word this entire time. Mateo doesn’t think she’s going to hurt anyone with it, but he’s very confused, and a little nervous. She usually likes to explain herself along the way.

They get out on the fourth floor, and walk into a random unit. It’s not being used by any of the people they took in. Still silent, Leona pulls the pipe into a backswing, and sends it straight into the window as hard as she can. It’s not too hard, because she never played baseball, or works out, but it should have done at least a little damage. There is not a mark on it. Also silent, Mateo reaches out. She hands him the pipe, and he takes his own shot. Nothing. Impenetrable. “What does this tell us?” he asks.

She takes back the pipe, and hits the glass again, like a pickaxe this time, and not with all of her might. She feels the seams with her fingers, and looks closely at them. “Does this kind of window remind you of anything? Like, when you think back to the times you’ve encountered one that appears to be indestructible, were you in an office building, or were you...in something else?”

Puzzled, Mateo winces, and tries to think. “I mean, they’ve always been like that when I’ve been on ships?” He shakes his head tightly, and widens his eyes. He looks around at the room that they’re in, and slides his palm on the walls. “This is a ship?”

“I think so. In fact, I think that it’s just a giant evacuation vessel. They built them to replace the original arcologies in the main sequence during Project Airtight, but we never saw them. The whole planet could be evacuated in a matter of hours, if need be.”

“Leona, one of our new friends did the math. If some lived up top, and some below, a million people could fit. How many would you need to save literally everyone?”

“At a million per ship, that’s about eight thousand, just like this one.”

Mateo gazes out the window. “Is that possible? Do you think more exist?”

She sighs and watches the sun set upon the city. “That...would be crazy.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 16, 2399

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The building has been inspected, at least with a cursory glance. They didn’t hire a professional to go through the entire thing, and check or mold, or whatever it is they do. All the doors are open now, though, which will allow drones to go through, should Leona deem there to be some need for that. While she’s been dealing with other things, Mateo has been in charge of helping the volunteers check the rooms, and now it’s time to go in the opposite direction. A building this tall has to have a deep foundation, and there should be space down there too. It may not be furnished, or even clean, but there will be potential in it. The elevator turns out to be large enough for all of the now two dozen volunteers, so he invites everyone to join, including the kids. It’ll be a little adventure.

When the doors open, they find themselves in a wide expanse, which may cover the entirety of the building in the first two dimensions. There is nothing here but support columns. It’s made of concrete, but really clean and unused. Maybe this is meant to be used for offices. Underground, though? That seems unnecessarily cruel, especially since there should be plenty of space in the common areas on the bottom floors above the surface. “Come on,” Mateo says. “There’s nothing to see here. Let’s keep going down.”

They go down one story. This one is just as expansive, but it looks different. It’s filled with stuff. As they step onto the floor, and spread out, they find compartments that mirror the kind of rooms up above. Each room is equipped with four bunk beds, and is separated from its neighbors by only half walls. Metal bars come up and go across, suggesting that a modest amount of privacy can be created from curtains. There are rows and rows and rows of these bunks. “What are they for?” a teenager asks.

“Emergency shelter, in case of a tornado?” someone else suggests.

“Look at this sign,” one of them says. “ROOM CAPACITY: 34,768.”

“Okay,” Mateo says, stepping back towards the elevator. “Let’s try one more.”

They get back in, and go down one more story. It’s the same, doubling their current known underground capacity. Mateo looks over at the buttons. There are twelve stories total, numbered zero through negative eleven. “Who here is good at math?” he asks the group.

A girl snakes her way forward.

“Assuming that every floor is just like this one, subtracting that first one that was empty, how many people can fit in the shelter?”

She takes a moment to perform the calculations. “It would fit 382,448 people.”

Mateo shakes his head. I was kind of worried about that. “That’s not much more than half of the population that can fit above. That doesn’t sound like a great shelter.”

“Well, we don’t know what we’re looking at here,” a man pointed out. “The other floors could be bigger, or maybe they can’t make an elevator this big that goes down as many floors as there are, and we’re expected to get off, and get on another one.”

They keep riding the elevator down, stepping out for a moment just to check that it’s equipped with all the same stuff. Floor Negative-10 is different. It’s just a giant open area, like the first sublevel. There’s only one more to check now, and while this is all rather exciting, they don’t expect anything different. They would all be wrong. “I recognize this,” Mateo says. “This is a fusion reactor...a big one.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: Year 52,398

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The security room in the Constant has always been unlocked, which leads Mateo to believe that it’s only there for show. If any room needs to remain secure, it would be that one, so it’s probably just to make any intruder think that they have control. Today, he needs it, because he appears to be completely alone. He still doesn’t even know where the others hole themselves up in stasis. Surely someone is awake, though, right? Tamerlane even said that they don’t want him wandering around alone. He steps into the room, and approaches the microphone. He holds the button down, and taps on it. He can hear it out in the hallway, and other nearby rooms. “Hello? Is this thing on?”

No one responds.

“My mic sounds nice, check one!” he tests in a funny voice.

Still nothing.

“Okay, I’m gonna be in the master sitting room for the next ten minutes. If no one shows up by then, I’m gonna go exploring.” He pauses a moment. “I hope that’s okay.”

He sets the microphone back down, and walks down the hall to the master sitting room. He waits twenty minutes, actually, and no one shows up. So, true to his word, he leaves, and starts looking for something interesting to do. He ignores all the places he’s been to before, like the pools, and the gaming rooms. He wants to find something he’s never seen before. This is a big place, but how big is it?

Hmm. Not as big as he thought it might be. The Olympic-size pool and basketball court take up a lot of space, as does what looks like it’s supposed to be a go-kart track, but he can’t find any of the go-karts. He gets to thinking, though, that maybe he’s going about this the wrong way. He’s been trying to see how deep this facility goes, but he has no idea what it looks like on the surface in this time period. That’s where the real crazy stuff is going on, right? He’s imagining rivers of lava, and unending lightning storms all across the sky. There’s probably no way to see it, but he may as well go up to check. He has nothing better to do today until he figures out how to get back to his own time.

Mateo heads for the main elevator, and presses the call button, expecting it to just do nothing at all, but instead, it opens. He steps inside, and commands it to take him to the top floor. Again, he’s surprised when the elevator moves up for as long as it normally does, covering the entire kilometer distance. He’s in what looks like the little chapel outside of Lebanon, Kansas, but that shouldn’t exist for billions of years. Is this all a trick, or is this all real, and everything up to this point has been a trick? He goes to the window, and looks out, realizing upon closer inspection that they’re vacuum sealed, which the ones in the real chapel are not. It’s just a replica; a replica of something that does not yet exist. It will have to be destroyed anyway by the time humans begin to roam the world in this area, so what’s the point?

Outside is a wasteland, but there are no rivers of lava, nor lightning storms. It’s just barren and empty. There’s no dirt, nor even a sky. This world does not yet have an atmosphere. Right? That makes sense, right? Maybe that’s what she should be spending his extra time doing; studying astronomy and physics, so he doesn’t have to ask these questions. “Hey, Constance, are you there?”

“I’m here, Mr. Matic,” it replies.

“This world isn’t called Earth yet, so I’m going to take this opportunity to give it a name before anyone else does. Wadya think?”

“I think that this planet isn’t Earth, regardless of what you call it.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“As of yet, there is no planet Earth.”

“Explain.”

“In millions of years, the world we’re on will collide with its neighbor. The explosion will forge a new world, composed of parts from the two original celestial bodies. It will also result in the creation of the future Earth’s only significant natural satellite, which the world’s inhabitants will one day know as the moon, or Luna.”

“So, this is Earth, it’s just not done cookin’ yet.”

“No. Based on orbital patterns, and composite share of the resulting body, it is more accurate to say that the other planet is Earth.”

“So, does this one even have a name, if no one even knows it ever existed?”

“Scientists will one day hypothesize its existence, and name it Theia.”

“Theia,” Mateo echoes. “I like it.” He looks through the rest of the windows to get different perspectives. How weird to be on an alien world, yet still so close to home. He comes to the closet. “What is in here?” he asks himself. The AI doesn’t respond, because it knows that he’s about to open it anyway. Inside are vacuum suits. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Constance interprets this one as a real question. “I’m thinking that you should go back downstairs. You have seen enough of this. Best not to tempt fate.”

“Fate is fate; you can’t tempt it. It’s gon’ do what it’s gon’ do.”

“You know what I mean,” Constance argues, but still, it doesn’t do anything to stop him, though it absolutely could. It could lower the elevator on its own. It could alert Danica to the breach. It could even just lock the airlock, and not let him out, but it doesn’t, because it’s cool with it.

He steps into the suit, and let’s the automated robot hands on the door seal him up. Still, no one tries to stop him. He’s like Chris Pratt in Passengers, except this isn’t an accident, and if it were, this place would be designed to correct for it. Welp, anyway, it’s time to go outside and see what Theia looks like from the ground. “Wish me luck,” he asks Constance.

“I’ll be with you the whole time, even if it’s just to walk the suit back to base with your lifeless corpse still inside.” If it’s going to have an attitude like that, he should probably stop thinking of the AI as an it, and more of a her.

Mateo opens the hatch, and steps outside. He tries to hop around, but the gravity isn’t that low. He was on Mars once a long time ago, and it feels a bit like he remembers. He’s been outside of a ship in space a number of times, but it never gets old. He doesn’t go too far from the Constant, and Constance does stay in his ear the whole time. He just looks around a little, and kicks a few rocks. It sucks, being away from his friends and family, but this experience is certainly nothing to regret. Even assuming that all of the people in the Constant right now have also stepped outside for a walk, he can still count on one hand the number of people who have seen what he has. That’s pretty cool.

Danica’s voice comes through the earpiece, “you’ve had your fun. Come back in.”

“Be right there.” He starts to head that way. “And Danica...?”

“Yeah...?”

“I love you.”

Brief moment of silence. “I love you too.”

Microstory 1829: First, Youngest, Alone, and Female

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Until recently, I was the youngest person to have gone to space. I’m still the youngest to have landed on the moon. In 1966, I was working as a test pilot for the Canadian Air Force, having racked up thousands of hours of flight time, and apparently impressing the Usonian government with my skills. At the time, only three nations were engaged in space flight, and Canada was not one of them, but the Usonian Space Department was looking to show the world that they were inclusive. They reached out to us to help realize humanity’s dream of reaching the moon within a year. By then, the primary crew of astronauts were already picked, and all of them Usonian. I was part of the B-team, so I would only be called up if something went wrong. Something did go wrong, and they needed me to pilot the craft. No one ever thought that I would go on the mission, so I didn’t receive quite as much training as I probably should have, but I was confident in my competence, and ready to do my country proud. I still wasn’t meant to set foot on the moon. Three people made the trip to lunar orbit in 1967, but only two were intended to go down. Someone had to stay up and keep the module running while the landing party did their thing. Unfortunately, something else went wrong. The USD wanted the crew to be inexperienced in space. A few people had already been to Earthan orbit a few times, but they wanted this new mission to start with fresh faces. No one had really done any studies until then regarding the psychological effects of being in outer space for long periods of time, trapped in a tin can, with so little stimulation. This was the longest mission yet, and the most difficult. Our commander couldn’t handle the pressure. He had a breakdown which threatened the safety and continuation of the mission.

The lander pilot wanted to go down on his own. There was a contingency for this, and the USD was prepared to agree to this decision. The problem was that our commander was exhibiting erratic behavior, and I was not qualified to help him through it. The two of them knew each other. They understood each other. And the lander pilot was the only one who could make sure the commander didn’t jeopardize the lives of all three of us without realizing what he was doing. If he landed, and the commander did something to sabotage the module while he was gone, all three of us would die. Because of all of this, the USD decided to abort, and bring everyone back home, but the other pilot wasn’t happy with this decision. We went all the way out there, spent millions of dollars, and inspired millions of people to reach for greatness. Someone had to be the first to land on the surface of the moon, goddammit, and if it couldn’t be him, there was only one option left. Me. The USD wouldn’t hear of it. Back then, it wasn’t illegal to be a woman, or anything, but many people who were huddled around their TVs and radios—and some in the control room—didn’t want the history books to record that a female Canadian achieved this milestone, especially not alone. He didn’t listen. While he protected the commander from himself, I climbed into the lander by myself, detached from the module, and flew down to my destiny. I planted both feet on that gray regolith at the same time, and spoke some of the most famous words in history, “I stand here, lighter than ever, smiling at the Earth in the distance, not as a Canadian...not as a woman...not as a pilot. Today I represent the world, and the spirit of humankind. I am not the first explorer, and I cannot wait to watch the next ones lead us further into the future.”

Microstory 1777: Cosmic Sextant

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The Cosmic Sextant, like many other special temporal objects in the universe, was not made, but born. It’s possible to create a piece of technology that exhibits reality-bending properties. You can engineer a spaceship that is capable of traveling faster than light. You can make a pair of binoculars that shows you what the area you’re in will look like at some given point in the future. Many of these technologies were created by a particular person, and her alternates. Her name is Holly Blue, but in some realities, she goes by the nickname The Weaver. Her time power is to make objects with their own time powers. It’s easier for her to do if she’s seen the power in action, and even easier if she has long-term access to the subject for study, but she’s been known to intuit her inventions on occasion. She’s not the only temporal engineer in the timeline, but she’s perhaps most famous for it, at least across multiple circles. Holly Blue did not invent the Cosmic Sextant, nor did anyone else. It didn’t happen for no reason at all, but it wasn’t done by anyone’s intentions either. These special special objects are rare, and demand a particular set of circumstances to coincide. It’s not always obvious which is which, but there is a way to make a good guess. Typically, the simpler an object, the more likely it is that it was imbued with its power, and not an invention. You don’t design a stone that can send people back to the moment they first experienced time travel. Such a form would be too capricious. Instead, what most likely occurred was that a person with the ability to return others to the beginning of their respective temporal journeys was holding a rock while they were in the middle of working, and enough temporal energy flowed into it, and stuck. Home stones are very old, so no one knows who this person could be, but it’s probable that a time travel event erased them from the future, but left the stones they once created intact. Again, no one knows.

Maqsud Al-Amin is a choosing one with the ability to transport himself, and others, across the largest distance ever covered by a teleporter. He can make the trip to the nearest galaxies in a matter of seconds. Anyone with access to Shimmer, which is channeled by The Great Pyramid of Giza, can do the same, but not as quickly, and not as far. Maqsud is an explorer, who enjoys going to other worlds, and learning about new cultures. When he was first starting out, he did so before a telescope with sufficient range was invented, so it was actually better for him to use a sextant, and measure his destination manually. He happened to do this in what would come to be known as Bryce Canyon, in what would come to be known as Utah. The temporal energy from him passed through the sextant, and flew off to collide with one of the hoodoos, where it bounced off, and collided with another. This energy just kept bouncing all around the geological formation, until it all landed back into the sextant, where it remained for future use. Maqsud was long gone by then, having dropped the sextant in the initial energy release, and ending up in the wrong star system, where he would have to make his way back on his own. He didn’t find out what the sextant could do until later, and felt no ownership over it, so it began to trade hands from there. For whatever reason, travelers can’t take it with them when they use it, so they always have to find some other means of departing from the destination planet, if they so wish. This has necessarily limited its use. It’s powerful, but risky, because it was not made on purpose.

Microstory 1701: Project Andromeda

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When the Ansutahan refugees were successfully transported from the brink of war in their home universe, they were relieved. They could finally stop living in fear of the white monsters who roamed the majority of the continents on their home planet. The Gatewood Collective was their home now, at least for now...at least for most of them. Decades later, a portion of the refugees, but mostly their descendants, would choose to begin a journey to the other side of the galaxy. This was the largest exodus that the Ansutahan humans had experienced so far, and probably the most ambitious, but it was not the most far-fetched. A transgalactic journey was nothing compared to what happened 15 years earlier—or only 10 years, for that matter. One of the last major ventures that the leaders of Gatewood endeavored to complete was Project Andromeda. While reaching the other side of the Milky Way would take a couple hundred years at reframe speeds, Andromeda would take thousands. If they only traveled at relativistic speeds, any observer inside the ship would still only experience a few thousand years, but millions of years would pass them by before they arrived. Unlike Operation Extremus, Project Stargate was designed to spread across the galaxy at such speeds, so that when they began to send data back to the stellar neighborhood, people would understand how it was possible that a ship had made it so far away. That was what they thought the maximum speed was. Faster-than-light travel was relegated to  science fiction for them. For people living 3500 years from now however, surely they would have long been introduced to FTL, and even other forms of time travel. They probably wouldn’t freak out to learn that someone was already exploring Andromeda. In fact, there was a strong chance that humanity would have already reached it even faster.

So Kestral and Ishida came to the decision to make Project Andromeda travel much faster than most people living in 2255 thought possible, under the assumption that the truth would eventually come out, and be fine. They constructed 11 small vessels. One would act as primary, while the others were backups. This would give them a greater chance of succeeding, since so many things could go wrong in transit. The original plan for Project Stargate was for the ships to be entirely automated, with no organic lifeforms on board, except for human DNA samples, which could one day be used to seed life on other planets. One of the team members chose to go against this mandate, and clone himself millions of times, so that a human touch would be available to negotiate any crisis that might come up. Inspired by this, Team Keshida decided to allow volunteers for Andromeda. Anyone who wanted to make this trip, which would potentially be only one-way, could submit an application. They figured that if no one applied, then they would just revert back to the original plans. They received thousands of requests, and had to narrow it down to 24 people. Two would be in each of the backups, while four would be in the primary. They would remain in stasis for the whole trip, and only be awakened if it was absolutely necessary. They all had extensive knowledge that would help them effect repairs, yet they received additional training to ensure that these were undoubtedly the best candidates for the job. Once they were ready, the ships launched, each one a month behind the last, until they were all gone. Again, the ships were still automated, so now the only thing to do was wait, and hope that everything worked out.