Microstory 2473: Empty Planet

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Are you ready for an adventure? What about an adventure mystery? I don’t wanna say too much about this place, because finding out what’s going on is the entire point of it. I’m sure that if I did give away the ending, the system would autoreject it, so you wouldn’t see it anyway. Instead, I’ll just say that it’s a gorgeous, eerie setting. The premise is that you wake up on an alien world, and you’re all alone. This was obviously once a civilized and populated planet, but they’re all missing, and it’s up to you to figure what happened to them. Sometimes you’re outside, and sometimes you’re locked in a room. They don’t erase your memories (because they don’t have to) but they come up with a backstory for your character, and part of the mystery is also unraveling how you ended up here. If you play the game right, you get those memories (or for the in-universe explanation, you get them back). There’s a waiting list for this dome, and it’s only getting bigger. Without going into detail, it is possible to run into another player, but they do try to keep you pretty far apart. Unlike Threshold, if you wanna figure out how to hotwire an alien vehicle, and drive to the other side of the dome, you can do that, and you might encounter others while you’re there. So if you want some help solving the puzzles, that’s always technically an option. What they don’t want is to have thousands upon thousands of visitors stepping over each other. It would kind of undermine the concept of an empty planet, even though it’s mostly about finding the truth about the alien race that once lived here. There are multiple levels, so the sky above you is closer than it appears, and that keeps people more separate, but there’s obviously a limit to that, and I don’t know how many levels there are. It doesn’t specify on the prospectus, or during the very brief orientation. Speaking of orientation, there’s not much to it. They ask you a few questions, they give you a little bit of info about how to exit the game if you wanna quit in the middle of it, and then they give you a sedative so you can wake up at the starting point. That’s about all I can say. As I said, the design is magnificent. It really does feel alien. As for the story? Eh, I think it could be better, but your mileage may vary. You’ll just have to see for yourself, and test your reasoning skills.

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.

Microstory 1181: Farhana Sultana

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Humans are an exploratory species. They like to go out and see what else there is. Even if they weren’t, their expansion beyond the planet was inevitable. There were many reasons for them to leave, including the search for new resources, and a better understanding of how the universe worked. Farhana Sultana was a social psychologist, who specialized in the study of human behavior in isolation. She wanted to understand how people reacted when their options were limited. She was born late enough in history that she could study this as it pertained to outer space. It was her dream to set up a semi-permanent establishment in interstellar space, and study her subjects’ lives without the safety net of civilization. Unfortunately, not everyone shared her vision. The system leadership considered her proposal to be unethical, and an unnecessary use of resources. The intention was for people to always live around a star; be that Sol, or some other system. To them, there was no point in knowing what it would be like to be so far away from that. Farhana disagreed, and though she never thought of herself as a criminal, she knew she had to go off without permission, and prove them wrong later. She commissioned the use of a special type of ship called a darkburster. It was incredibly dangerous, and highly illegal, but if it worked—which there was only a fifty percent chance it would—she would be able to leave a planetary body, completely undetected. She got herself assigned to the space station they were still constructing to orbit Neptune. At the time, it was the farthest permanent installment from Earth, and the best location from which to darkburst. She gathered her team, and her group of volunteers, who all knew what they were signing up for, and then they disappeared.

The darkburster did not explode, but instead traveled tens of thousands of astronomical units, all the way to a randomly selected uncharted celestial body that they named after their own ship, Vespiary. There they remained for years, working through the experiment. At one point, something went seriously wrong with the base they constructed on the surface, and it was on the brink of being destroyed. About half of them managed to escape to their ship, but they would have died eventually anyway, as the planetesimal of Vespiary did not provide them with the fuel they might have used to eventually leave. It was a problem they had not yet solved, since they had been so focused on the experiment. This was their first taste of time travel. A man appeared out of nowhere, and saved their lives with technology they could not explain. It sustained them for three years on its own, until they had finally affected repairs. More people arrived, hoping to borrow the traveler’s special technology, and Farhana realized that the experiment had to be over. They were no longer completely isolated, so any further data they gathered would not be viable. There was still hope, however, as they were now able to make contact with their associate who was still living in civilization, who alerted them to the means of reaching a rogue planet. That would allow her to begin a new, far more valuable, social experiment. So they left, hoping to start again soon. Sadly, yet again, there was a major issue on their return. Everyone was going to die, but hope was still not lost. A woman on board named Holly Blue had been researching time travel, and just before The Vespiary exploded, was able to rescue Farhana from certain death. She transported them two centuries into the past, which was where Farhana learned that she was with child. Holly Blue started working right away on a means of traveling back to the future, but Farhana didn’t think it was safe to do so while she was pregnant. Her baby would just have to be be born here, and maybe if she decided to leave later, she would. She didn’t know who her child would grow up to be, but that would turn out to be a good thing. If she had realized who she was carrying, she would’ve contaminated that future. In the end, her ultimate demise was inevitable for that same reason. Sadly, she died shortly after giving birth, and the child grew up having never known her. In fact, he wasn’t even made aware that he was from the future at all. He grew up to be a great man, who changed the world, and helped create the society his mother, who hadn’t even been born herself yet, would come to take for granted, like so many others.

Gatewood: Project Topdown (Part II)

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The year is 2240, and it’s time to send the galaxy-class telescope arrays into the void. Eleven telescopes will work in tandem with each other to develop and deliver a clear picture of the entire Milky Way from one side of the relatively flat spiral galaxy. Another array of eleven will be on the other side, doing the exact same thing. This is all necessary so that the Project Stargate ships that are being sent in the next ten years have an idea where they’re going, and where they will be landing their seed plates. The two twin gamma ray detectors are responsible primarily for identifying obstacles, like supernovae, neutron stars, and black holes. These pose a danger to the ships, and might prompt course corrections to avoid them. The X-ray detector’s sole job is to catalogue the galaxy’s pulsars, by which the ships can navigate. If you can find the nearest pulsar, you always know where you are. Three optical telescopes, and two ultraviolet telescopes, work together to seek stars and their orbital bodies, so the quantum network can be mapped. The microwave telescope and radio telescope can help map the Milky Way too, but will mostly be looking for signals that could indicate the presence of intelligent life. The Stargate ships themselves are armed with such equipment as well, in case a particular star system needs to be ignored, or studied more thoroughly. The infrared telescope is the only one that isn’t really part of any of this. It’s going to be facing the opposite direction, just checking out the other galaxies, and relaying this data back to Gatewood.

Kestral, Ishida, and Saxon were not the ones who came up with Project Topdown. Nor did they even design the original plans. The public would be completely all right with the idea of mapping the galaxy from the outside, so the only reason they don’t know about it is because it’s too connected to Project Stargate, which is less socially acceptable. That’s why this is all being done on Gatewood, rather than back home. As Team Keshida was looking over the designs, they realized there were a few flaws. Long ago, Earth came up with the four pillars of spaceflight, which were Safety, Compartmentalization, Redundancy, and Modularization. The engineers for Topdown did not appear to have taken these to heart, so Keshida needed to make some adjustments. Every telescope in both arrays is important to the mission. Take one away, and the whole endeavor could be lost. The idea is to send these into quite empty space, with the nearest celestial body being thousands of light years away. If something goes wrong, there is no way to affect repairs, and this is not an acceptable possibility.

To solve these problems, Ishida practically scrapped the plans they were given, and engineered new ones. Companion ships will fly parallel to the telescope ships, equipped exclusively with replacement parts, raw materials, and mega-format industrial synthesizers. These will also deposit specialized seed plates on the border systems, so if all else fails, at least the project can go on eventually. She wasn’t the only one who worked on this. Their friend, Weaver, who had gone off with Mateo on the AOC, helped build special temporal components. She invented a teleportation shield, so that any debris in one of the ship’s paths will be instantly transported hundreds of meters away, safely away from the vessel. It appears that everything is ready to go, and today is meant to be the launch date, but Kestral isn’t so confident.

“Are we sure everything’s done?”

“I went over the checklist a million times,” Ishida assures her.

“I checked a million more,” Saxon adds. His arrival prompted them to rename themselves Team Keshidon.

“We have no time for hyperbole,” Kestral complains. “How many times did you each go over every single thing in the preflight book?”

Ishida sighs. “Over the last year? Seven and a half.”

“Why half?”

“I had to poop.”

“Be serious, Ishida.”

“I am serious, Kestral. This isn’t just your baby; it’s all of ours.”

“Less so mine,” Saxon admits. He only just arrived a few years ago.

“I understand that,” Kestral says to Ishida. “I’m not trying to diminish your contribution. Far from it. I’m the one who only went over the list twice, and I’m kind of freaking out about it.”

“Do you wanna wait another year?” Ishida asks.

“Could we?”

“No,” Ishida answers plainly. “This is happening. I can’t promise you that we’ve thought of everything, but I can tell you we added a hell of a lot more redundancies than the dumbasses who came up with this.”

“Yeah, I know,” Kestral acknowledges. “Do you feel like there are too few people here?” She looks around the command center. “I mean, there are only three of us. This is the biggest thing humans have ever done, and we don’t have a team? Why don’t we have a full team?”

“You’re spiraling, love.” Ishida places a hand on Kestral’s shoulder. “Our full team is humongous. We had three artificial general intelligences working various problems, and making calculations. Still more AI entities have been uploaded into the ships. They’re going to take care of everything en route. Our job is done.”

“What about the AI? Did we check the code? Are we sure there isn’t some huge bug? Or a virus. What if there’s a virus?”

“Who would have written a virus, and how would they have gotten it here?”

“Don’t look at me,” Saxon says defensively, even though they made no indication that they suspected him of anything nefarious.

“The refugees,” Kestral poses. “There are billions of them. We don’t know who they are.”

“The refugees?” Ishida asks. “These are the same refugees who came from a universe where they lived partly underground, and couldn’t even have electricity, or the evil white monsters that also lived on the planet might detect their presence? You think one of them is a hacker?”

“Okay, well what about the Maramon refugees? They were here awhile before they flew off to colonize a new home world.”

“Kestral,” Ishida says. “Stop making dumb suggestions.

“There is no such thing, my mother always said.”

“Your mother was stupid,” Ishida reminds her. She isn’t being mean. Kestral’s family was what the Earthans would call noncontributives. After money was abolished, and automation took over the world, people no longer needed to work. A citizen has the right to certain amenities, like a place to live, and food to eat. They do not need to do anything to earn these rights. They’re simply provided. Anyone who chooses to work—in some capacity—which may be nothing more than occasionally helping to design virtual constructs or simulations—is afforded other conveniences. They have access to any of these authorized virtual realities, they can travel anywhere in the solar system, and they can apply for relocation to an exoplanet, among other things.

Kestral’s parents chose to do nothing. They spent their days sitting around their arcunit, watching virtual entertainment that was converted to basic holography, and sometimes going for walks outside. Kestral had to seek out higher education, and eventually had no choice but to estrange herself from them. Plenty of noncontributives were perfectly fine individuals, but they at least got out and socialized. The McBrides didn’t even vote for their governmental representatives. Even noncontributives have the right to longevity treatments to give themselves very long lives, but the bare minimum requirement is first exercising their right to vote. They both died of age-related diseases several years ago, according to an automated quantum message Kestral received, but of course, she couldn’t have attended a service if she wanted to.

“I’m sorry. What were we talking about?” Kestral is the poster child for the absent-minded professor. She regularly gets lost in her own thoughts, and people around her either have to pull her back to reality, or just wait for her to come back on her own.

“You were really excited about launch day,” Saxon jokes, knowing she’s not an idiot, and doesn’t actually believe this. He continues, “you wanted to push the big red button yourself. I could get you one, if you want; it won’t do anything, but you can time it so it’s like you’re controlling the launch.”

“Ha-ha,” Kestral says in monotone. “I’m just doing my due diligence. I don’t think I’m asking too much.”

“You have been incredibly reasonable during this entire process,” Ishida says. “We have all done a great job here. Though it will be centuries before anything really comes of this, we should be proud of ourselves; you included,” she says preemptively, before Saxon can remind them yet again that he’s the new kid on the block. “A great writer is no good without a great editor to check their work. Your due diligence, and attention to detail was incredibly helpful. My God, you polished a lens once with a handrag.”

“I was bored, and wanted to see how difficult and tedious it would be,” Saxon explains.

“What was the verdict?” Kestral questions.

“Guilty on all charges,” he answers.

Ishida smiles, and takes a look at her watch. “The ships are scheduled to leave in eighty-three minutes. We need to depart in eleven if we want to get good seats.”

“Has anyone done a preflight checklist for our observation vessel?” Kestral asks in feigned urgency. She’s finally starting to feel like she can relax. The ships are indeed leaving in an hour and a half. If something were to go wrong, it’s pretty much impossible to stop it now. They have no choice but to wait, watch, and hope.

Saxon recognized it was a joke, but replies with the truth anyway, “I did, yes.”

“Does anyone want popcorn?” Kestral offers.

“Gross. No, thanks.”

They boarded their little ship, which was mostly clear, so as to see nearly all sides out of it. They flew away from their centrifugal cylinder, and headed towards the midway point between it, and the shipyards. From here, they watched all ships for Project Topdown fly off to the intergalactic voids. One went for the top...and the other went down. Everything went flawlessly, and for the next four years after that, they reported nothing but smooth sailing. Then something strange happened.

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Microstory 1174: Juan Ponce de León

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Famous explorer, Juan Ponce de León lived in the late fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries. But he also lived in an incalculably high number of other time periods. When he arrived on the Florida coast, he was surprised to find another apparent westerner waiting for him there. The woman spoke of the Fountain of Youth, which up until that point, Juan had never heard of. Still, he was curious, so he broke from his crew, and set about on a journey through the wilderness. Upon reaching what was supposedly his destination, he discovered what appeared to be a dried up river bed. At first he was discouraged, not in disappointment for having missed out on a magical elixir that could make him immortal, but because he felt a fool for having believed it existed in the first place. Just to be safe, however, he decided to dig, but did not intend to go very deep. Perhaps the water was deep underground. He just kept thinking that he only need scoop out one more handful, and water would spring forth. It never did, but he did eventually come across a compass. It must have been buried there for a long time, but it was in pristine condition. Curious, he started fiddling with the device, and after awhile, a rectangular light appeared before him, as if he had created it. Curiouser still, he pushed forward, and stepped into the light, where he found himself face to face with a bus. The bus was not moving, so he was in no danger, but he had no clue what this magnificent structure was. He looked around, and discovered there to be dozens of other buses like it, all in a row. He walked a little farther, until he came upon the road, where similar vehicles were ferrying their passengers to various destinations. He continued to do what he does best, and explored this strange new world, quickly learning this to be hundreds of years in the future. He only stopped when he finally encountered a library, where he could learn almost everything he wanted to know about what had happened to the world after he’d left it.

When he wasn’t studying the books, Juan was studying his new compass. Over time, he learned to navigate this special time object, and moved all across time and space, meeting all sorts of interesting people. Other time travelers started calling him The Navigator, which he had to admit, he quite liked. He learned several languages, beheld beautiful things, and witnessed terrible tragedies. He kept fairly detailed journals of his experiences, but even he didn’t quite know how long he had been gone from home. The possibility of a Fountain of Youth continued to nag at him, and he felt compelled to learn more about it. Certain other travelers believed it to be real, in some form, but even they thought the immortality water was just too difficult to procure. Yet he persisted in his search. Many times, some of the ingredient waters were in his grasp, but he had to give it up, to help others, or because he wouldn’t be able to find all of the ingredients in time. Each one was in a different place and time, and would go bad if they weren’t all found before the timer ran out. Following what must have been years from his perspective, Juan decided to create a map. He sought out each ingredient independently, but did not take any. Instead, he simply confirmed its authenticity, and then moved onto the next, until he had a clear picture of everything he would need. Then, he got a good night’s rest, tied his sweet kicks, and set about on his journey. He literally ran through the continuum, opening portals like a pro, and never stopping until he had checked off the entire list. His efforts proved fruitful, when he drank the waters, and became truly immortal. So now, Juan Ponce de León could never be killed, but that still left him with a terrible conundrum. He hadn’t seen his family in many years, and once he returned to them, would have to watch them die. This he could not have. He got his hands on something called a homestone, which delivers its user directly to when and where they first were when they first started traveling through time. He went back to his family, and his life. Then he frequently ushered everyone he cared about through his compass portals, and along the route towards the immortality waters. His whole family, sooner or later, became just like him. Now the only question that remained was, where in the world could they possibly live?

Gatewood: Project Ethics Debate (Part I)

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The year is 2238. Kestral McBride and Ishida Caldwell have just watched their friends ship out to find one of the crew members, Mateo Matic’s wife on a planet called Varkas Reflex. They stand here with a man named Saxon Parker, who has arrived to aid them in their endeavor to map the whole galaxy. The Milky Way is one of the largest galaxies in the observable universe. It spans over a hundred fifty thousand light years across, and contains anywhere between two hundred and four hundred billion stars. Those wildly inaccurate numbers are why the three of them are here. Situated nearly six light years from Earth, Barnard’s Star is the perfect location to build unfathomably large hyperstructures. Kestral and Ishida were first dispatched here to restart the construction of centrifugal cylinders. The initial intention was to allow colonists from Sol to cross the void, and settle around a new star, but these plans were abandoned in favor of diverting resources to other stellar neighbors. It came to serve a new function, as a refuge for the billions of people fleeing an oncoming war with an alien species in another universe.

Team Keshida, as they were sometimes called, built the cylinders in preparation for them, but they did not know this at the time. They were receiving instructions through their dreams, by a then unknown entity, who they later learned to be an artificial intelligence from another reality named Mirage. This being exists in a dimension that observes time as a spatial dimension, and can therefore see how the future turns out, simply by looking further down the timeline. Now that the cylinders are complete, and the refugees have begun to stabilize a new body of government, Team Keshida has other responsibilities to handle. Three interconnected projects, and one semi-unrelated project, are on the schedule right now. First, gigantic telescopes must be sent out to the void between galaxies, to gather a better picture of what the Milky Way is composed of. As this is happening, even larger ships will depart to systematically reach every single star system. The journey will take many tens of thousands of years, while traveling at nearly—but still not quite—the speed of light.

All three members of the team, original and newly conscripted, are aware that temporal manipulation is possible. With enough innovation, and access to the right time travelers, every star in the galaxy could probably be reached within a century, or maybe even faster. As of yet, though, the vonearthans are not aware of such possibilities, and they are the ones for which the team is working. The ignorant are expecting the project to last for two hekamyres—which means two hundred thousand years—so that’s how long they’ve designed it to last. Of course, the entire project remains a secret for now, because ethical questions regarding outward expansion were never fully resolved. Certain members of Earthan leadership have given the go-ahead for Project Stargate, and all that goes with it, but not everyone would be happy to find out it had been approved. They would be especially upset if they learned about its side project, Operation Starseed.

There are plenty of ethical concerns when it comes to Project Stargate. The idea is to send billions of modules through interstellar space. At first, these are held together within two gargantuan quad carriers, but they continually break apart, and fan out in different directions, until reaching the smallest independent unit; the seed plate. Each plate contains historical data, sensors, nanites, and other instruments. Once it arrives in a star system, it will start gathering details about it, and in order to do that, it must start building new machines, using the resources orbiting the star, or stars. The Earthan government, and civilian researchers never really figured out whether it was okay to do that; to interrupt the natural development of the system, in even the smallest of ways. Theoretically, the tools on the seed plate could build quantum messengers, and consciousness focal tethers, which would allow an individual to cast their mind light years away, almost instantaneously, and operate a surrogate body while there. This might be immoral on its own. Operation Starseed takes this further, and not even all of the people involved with Stargate are aware of it. Instead of allowing people to travel to new worlds using the quantum network, people would be grown on the new worlds. The exact nature of their lives is up to any number of variables, which would probably have to be calculated by an artificial hyperintelligence, but they would be created using genetic samples from people back home, who have not been told that their samples are being used in this way. Saxon Parker arrived on Gatewood with these samples, and Team Keshida still hasn’t decided whether or not they’re going to use them.

“All right,” Kestral says to Ishida. “You played a good devil’s advocate when it came to terraformation ethics. I suppose it’s my turn to play D.A. for this dilemma.”

“When do I get to play devil’s advocate?” Saxon asks.

“You’re just the actual devil,” Ishida says to him. “Your position on Starseed is quite clear. The purpose of this exercise is to consider all perspectives, by forcing one’s self to take an opposition position.”

“You’re saying you don’t agree that we should move forward with it?” Saxon asks. “Or, sorry, you, rather.”

“You’re part of the team now,” Kestral assures him. “Your opinion matters just as much. You’re just not part of the argument right now. I’m completely convinced that we should do this, which is why I’ll be fiercely arguing against it.”

“Okay,” Saxon says. “I’ll go back to the audience.” There is no audience but him, since the three people here right now are the only ones in the solar system who can be trusted with this information.

Ishida takes a deep breath. “Wait, which one am I again?” She likes to play dumb. She and Kestral get along so well because they’re both modest, and never want to be the smartest one in the room. The only time either of them is not the smartest one in the room, however, is when they’re both in the same room.

“You believe in Starseed,” Kestral reminds her. “Now. Try to get me on board too.”

“Okay.” Ishida takes another deep breath. “Egg Basket Theory,” she says simply.

“Go on,” Kestral encourages.

“Egg Basket Theory states that, if you rely too heavily on a single source of assets, when that source fails, all operations tied to it fail. Diversity is key.”

“You said, when it fails,” Kestral echoes. “Is that inevitable?”

“Umm...yes?”

“In all cases?”

Ishida thinks about her response. “Plus Murphy’s Law.”

“Explain.”

“Nothing lasts forever. Failure is indeed inevitable. Nothing is indefinitely sustainable. We know the ultimate fate of our home star, which is why scientists are already discussing Project Tipping Point.”

Kestral waves her hand dismissively. “I don’t wanna talk about Tipping Point. Life on Earth is doomed regardless. An argument for the preservation of life does not explain how that helps the life that does not survive.”

“Explain,” Ishida prompts.

“Operation Starseed functions on the idea that human life is unconditionally valuable, in any form it takes. The continuance of the species is considered to be good on its own. It doesn’t matter where the species lives, or what happened to its predecessors. Life simply must go on, even if individual specimens don’t survive long.”

“Well, should it not survive?”

“I’m not saying that. I’m questioning whether we should be focusing resources on creating life that has almost absolutely nothing to do with us, when we could be devoting those resources towards protecting the natural progression of life. Starseed basically grows genetically recombined clones of a handful of what are essentially randomly selected sample donors. But who cares? The life we seed on other planets are not our children, or our legacies. Right now, they’re just hypothetical, and there’s no logical reason we should manifest them. Egg Basket Theory is a good argument for why we should colonize our stellar neighbors, which is why we’re in the middle of doing that. Most of the civilizations we seed will never know where they’re from, or how they got there, if they even last long enough to form a civilization. We will never interact with them, and if all life in the galaxy dies in a blink except one given world, that one world doesn’t matter to us. Earth is where life began, but this survivor world has no connection to Earth, so why are we meant to care about that?”

“You don’t care about them because you’ll never meet them?”

“You’re twisting my words.”

“I’m practically repeating them.”

Kestral tries to figure out a different approach. “Let’s say Saxon and I have a child.”

“Okay.”

“Does that child have value?”

“Of course it does.”

“Let me rephrase. Does that child have value...” She emphasizes the punchline by pointing twice to the floor, “...right now?”

“I don’t understand.”

“The child does not exist. He and I have never had sex. I don’t even think I’ve physically touched him before. Maybe I shook his hand once. The child doesn’t have any value; it isn’t real. If it were to become real, sure. But we would have to complete that task first. We would have to, at the very least, initiate the creation of this life. We can’t, as rational people, assign value to it until we do.”

Ishida opens her mouth to speak, but is cut off.

“And if we were to do that, we would decide together, and we would raise that child in whatever way we see fit. Starseed, on the other hand, is asking us to shoot our gametes into space with nothing more than a smile and a salute. It’s one thing to become pregnant, and not be able to raise the child yourself. It’s a whole different thing to create life with the intention of not being around for it. Is that not unethical?”

“Ah, but we will be around. Not us personally, but the seed plates will hold the knowledge required to nurture that life. You’re only talking about the first generation. A hundred and forty-seven people. The second generation will have parents.”

“A hundred and forty-seven people per world,” Kestral corrects. “Upwards of billions total. That’s a lot of orphans.”

“Again, they’ll still have parents, per se. They’ll be robots, but...they won’t be alone. That’s more than evolved life on Earth can say. When you think about it, what we’re trying to do is more ethical than what God did.”

“Okay, now you’re bringing in religion, which is not what we’re doing here.”

“Kestral, you’re doing a really good job of sounding like you don’t think we should do this. We decided it was ethical to terraform certain worlds, as long as exhaustive life-potential surveys are conducted first. Would you have us scrap Starseed entirely?”

“I’m not going to break character until we understand this issue completely. I will, however, submit to a break.” She looks over to the audience of one. “I believe Saxon needs some time to process the hypothetical scenario where we parent a child together.”

“I’m fine,” Saxon promises. “This was...as impressive as it was intense.”

“We’re not done yet,” Kestral says. “I need to check for imperfections in the Project Topdown telescope lenses again, though, so we’ll sleep on it. Come ready for round two tomorrow.”

“Yes, captain.”

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Microstory 1161: Ida Reyer

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After the death of her husband, Ida Laura Pfeiffer decided to fulfill her dream of becoming an explorer. She went all over the world, from Brazil to Persia; Australia to Oregon. She also jumped through time. In 1851, she found herself in Kansas City when it was still in its very early infancy, and there she met a woman named Holly Blue. Holly Blue was from the future, and after a weeks-long relationship, sort of accidentally admitted to Ida who she really was. Ida asked her to take her with her on trips throughout spacetime, but Holly Blue refused. At this point in her own personal history, she hadn’t yet discovered a way for nontravelers to safely travel through time. Certain people were capable of it, while others would experience terrible medical issues. She later overturned this decision, but it was long after Ida had left Kansas City, and returned to her life. Holly Blue went back to eleven years before they were meant to meet, and rewrote her own history—and Ida’s. She bequested Ida one of her newest, and most valuable inventions, which she called The Compass of Disturbance. Holly Blue disappeared without giving any explanation for why she chose Ida for this give, presumably not wanting to repeat their unfortunate breakup. The compass turned out to be a powerful tool. Its main purpose was to seek out, and stabilize, natural tears in the continuum, which would allow a user to travel through them, even if they wouldn’t otherwise be able to survive the trip unharmed. It had other functions as well, but it took months of trial and error to understand them all. And so Ida began to lead a double life. She spent part of her time exploring the world in her own time period, but part of it elsewhere. She particularly enjoyed going into the far, far future, because life there was just so fundamentally different. In her travels, she encountered others, but they were born to manipulate time, and did not require technology to do so. She learned of special places with unusual temporal properties, and of other objects that regular humans would be able to utilize. She even discovered that there was a way to live forever, given the right ingredients. Unlike her successor, Juan Ponce de León, Ida had no interest in finding immortality water, or in living forever. She wanted to live a full life, partially in the future, and partially in her own time, and she wanted to write about her travels. The reason she kept exploring her own world was so that she could publish her adventures, and build a legacy. That was her way of living forever. She knew it wouldn’t be safe to author her time travel stories, but she kept a fairly detailed diary in the internal memory of the Compass of Disturbance itself. A few years in, she met someone who recommended she go ahead and publish those works, so they could be distributed to people who had the permission to see them. She took her up on that advice, and eventually ended up with a full series on her life that most people in the world would never see, yet it made her more famous than would have been without the books. The woman who suggested she do that was known as The Historian, and anyone wishing to read her work, or those of others like her, could find copies in the library section of her museum on Tribulation Island.

Microstory 958: The Spirit of Exploration

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A few years ago, my parents sat me down with my sister and asked if we would be okay if we all stopped giving gifts to each other for things like birthdays and Christmas. They argued that we valued experiences over material objects. This was something I had sort of been lobbying for for years. I tried asking for presents when I was younger, but as I matured, it started making me feel not so good. They ended up having to guess what I might want, and it took them quite a while to really catch onto the fact that I legitimately didn’t want anything. An unfortunate side effect to this is that I’m terrible at giving gifts to others, because those aren’t the kinds of things I think about. My computer and phone are important to me, because they give me access to the world, and the only thing better than that is the actual world. Besides my family itself, travel is the most important thing to me, and I wish terribly that I could do it more. I want to go to all the places, and see all the things. I want to visit every country, and every continent, and every planet in the solar system, and beyond. This urge to explore is not a unique trait of mine. It’s human nature to be curious and exploratory. Perhaps there is an evolutionary reason for this. For the majority of human history, we have been nomadic. Even after beginning to domesticate animals, and build farms, a lot of cultures were still exhausting resources in one location, and moving onto the next. Even centuries after developing settled civilizations, we continued to reach out and search for other places. Sure, we were looking for better trade routes, and  foods or medicines we didn’t know about, or maybe even the fountain of youth, but that isn’t all. We wanted to see what was out there, and we continue this tradition today. We built vessels that go into space, and then ones that could land on the moon. Then we went turned our eyes to the inner planets, and the solar system as a whole. Now we’re trying to figure out how we could send a probe to another star, which would be a massive achievement. But while space may be the final frontier, it is not the only one we’ve not checked off on our list. Other scientists are researching the depths of the oceans. Others are studying the brain; some on a neurological level, others on a psychological and emotion one. We’re looking back at our history, and planning for the future, and that is all part of the spirit of exploration. All this is because the true purpose of exploration is learning. We crave to know the unknown, and I believe strongly that this sentiment is far more powerful than our fear of it. So raise a glass of a nonalcoholic drink, and let’s make a toast. To Ida Reyer and Stephen Hawking. Jacques Cousteau and Marie Curie. Alan Turing, Gregor Mendel, Rachel Carson, Simone de Beauvoir, Cheryl Strayed, Grace Hopper, Katherine Goble Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Sally Ride.

Microstory 880: Lights Out

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You do not know my name, for even if we once met, no recollection of me survived what happened. I was hiking in the Amazon rainforests, just because I had the money, and wanted the experience. I’ve climbed great mountains, swum in freezing waters, and seen all four corners of the Earth. It took a great deal of effort to get to this point in my life, but it was something I always wanted. I have little technical expertise myself, but I can spot talent from a lightyear away, while wearing a blindfold. I managed to befriend a nerd I went to high school with. I could just tell he was destined for great things. He got all his homework done on time, and aced his tests, but never seemed to pay any attention to the instructors. He just wrote furiously in his notebooks, and when we grew older, he started typing on a little keyboard attached to an even smaller screen. He wasn’t taking notes, which was what those little computers were designed for. He was writing code, and even though I didn’t understand it, I knew it would become something important. As it turned out, it was the software side of the framework of the early internet. Everything you do online today, and the way you do it, was at least partially based on his vision. And I found him first; together we built what people today would call a startup. Then when it was all finished, we sold it to the Canadian government, and went our separate ways. Until the incident, we would email each other on a regular basis, and were on excellent terms—which you probably didn’t expect from this story—but I have not seen the man in person in probably a decade. He used his half of the deal to fund more technological breakthroughs, and I started to travel.

Everyone wants to find a way to make as much money as possible, doing the least amount of work, in the shortest amount of time, and in this I succeeded immensely. I don’t want to brag, but I had it planned out well, and I followed through perfectly. This. Is. The. Life. And the last thing I did with that life was to bring about the greatest change this world had ever known, and I’m not talking about the time I helped invent the internet. I am not writing this, and you are not reading it, because this story cannot be told. In my final moments, I entered an uncharted cave, which was just one of many in the region. I found a small puddle of water on the floor, and in my reckless bravery, I sipped at it until it was gone. I immediately felt a disquieting stir, but it was not until later that night, after I had left the cave, that things really started to change. Millions of tiny lights began fluttering inside of me, trying to get out. Instead of going up through my mouth, they decided to tear through my skin; one by one, two by two, and so on, at an accelerated rate. It hurt at first, but then I became numb to it, for now I was more ethereal light than I was man. As the last of the lights escaped, I saw a flash of all of time and space in this universe, including the introduction of a new species, called the bladapods. I was giving birth to the first of these creature right now, and after the last light floated to the trees to continue their development, I stopped existing. While no one will ever know what I did, I live on...in them.

Microstory 799: Joker

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When the great machine exploded, it sent everyone inside of it to various universes. Once there, their respective bodies adapted themselves to their new environments. Ezqava ‘Effigy’ Eodurus gained time powers, Azazil ‘Adversary’ Aj-lishdefil and his kind became god-like, and Shuhana ‘Shepherd’ Shenare developed a permanent connection to the machine itself, and also shed her original form. Meanwhile, Jakira ‘Joker’ Jeriesdi failed to end up in one of the universes. Instead, she became at first trapped in the limbo of the bulk itself, which eventually served to imbue her with properties of bulkverse. With practice, she was able to learn how to travel between the universes, becoming one of the few people capable of this. She no longer possessed a physical form, however, so she had to steal it from others. Unlike others with this power, such as Avatar, Gilbert Boyce, Quivira Boyce, and even Avery Ron, she had to completely burn out the original consciousness to accomplish this. If she forced herself into the substrate of one of your loved ones, that individual would be destroyed, and you would never be able to see them again. Instead, with the face of someone you once knew, there would be this stranger and monster. And once she left that body, it would die.

Though Jakira wasn’t evil, she was quite curious; always wanting to explore, and learn new things. She wanted to go to all the universes, at all the times, and see all the things. It was a noble pursuit, and why the machine was built in the first place. She didn’t even know right away that she was killing her hosts every time she did this, and thought she was just borrowing their bodies for a time. She killed myriad of people rapidly in the beginning, because of her intention to not steal time from any one person for very long. Once she discovered the truth, she returned to the outer bulkverse, as a disembodied consciousness, not capable of gaining any new experiences. This caused her to be angry and antsy. She wanted life, and if that meant a few hundred...thousand...million, people died, then so be it. She became indifferent to the problem, and eventually began to see other people as tools, rather than free-thinking individuals. She began to be more methodical with her trips. She would possess someone upon their reaching of that culture’s age of maturity, and maintain that body for the rest of its life, which was generally about twice as long as it would have lived with its original consciousness. Then she would hop into someone else’s body; someone young, but no longer a child. And she would do this for the entire duration of the civilization, only leaving once she had learned everything there was to know, and moving on. In a bittersweet twist, a certain group of people realized what she was, and what she was doing, so they went after her. They created a custom substrate for her, one that might be able to live forever, and travel to other worlds. But first, as punishment for her murders, she would have to spend a great deal of time locked in a prison built specially for her. This is when her story begins.

The Advancement of Leona Matic: August 21, 2167

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The crew was in a depressive funk when the two of them returned to the timestream a year after Nerakali’s death. None of them particularly liked her—though Dar’cy did a little, because she didn’t have any history of hostility with her—but they were apparently right about the necessity of her virtual worlds. At least, the problems losing the worlds would cause was a self-fulfilling prophecy. They were going a little stir crazy being trapped in a tin can with hardly anything to do. The database was loaded with some mindless video games, but they quickly got old. There were some books and movies, but not all of it was good, and what was good, they had already watched or read over the last five years.

Nothing had gone wrong with the ship in the meantime. It was on course, and on schedule; Leona’s water filtration system was working perfectly; and Missy’s atterberry pods were functional, though they hesitated to use them. It took so much effort to convince The Emissary to allow the pods as backup in the first place. Though this was never stated explicitly by the powers that be, they had the distinct impression that the pods were not to be used just to pass the time quickly. In lieu of this, the organic humans spent an unreasonable amount of time sleeping, or just lying in bed with their eyes either opened, or closed. Brooke and Paige, the not entirely organic beings, did have a limited ability to go into a sort of power-saving mode that tempered the dullness of this life. They could not completely shut down, but it was a vital extension of a software feature used for regulating their conceptualization of the passage of time. At some point in the advancement of transhumanistic technology, developers recognized how horrifically tedious life would be when an individual with enhanced neural processing power perceived seconds as centuries. Thus, the temporal attenuator. Without it, people kill themselves purely out of boredom.

Right now, those two were in an especially deep hibernation, while Missy was performing more tests on Serif’s healing abilities. Dar’cy was the only one free to talk, and it looked like she desperately needed it. “I think it’s punishment for us letting Nerakali disappear to her death,” she said, almost completely unprompted.

“What is?” Leona asked, worried they had been in the middle of a conversation, and she just hadn’t been paying attention.

“My powers,” Dar’cy added. “I’ve not been able to use them all year. If Nerakali were still around, I wouldn’t need them anyway, but now they’re gone completely. I can’t even jump five minutes away.”

“Yeah, your father experienced the same thing on Tribulation Island. But that was Arcadia’s doing.”

“How did he get through it?”

“You mean, how did he get his powers back, or how did he handle life without them?”

“The latter.” She was tearing pieces of skin off her lips with her teeth.

“Well, life on the island was a lot more interesting, I think. They did have some arbitrary amenities, but they also had a lot of work to do. Hunting, fishing, repairing the shelters. Then again, I think he spent a lot his life up to that point using his powers, more than I imagine you have. I suspected too that somebody blended his brain with alternate versions of himself, so he was probably rather accustomed to having them. You know, I guess I don’t know how he managed to not go crazy. Eventually, he met your mother, though, so I’m sure that helped.”

“So, I should find a girlfriend?” Dar’cy gathered.

Leona looked around the room they were sitting in, which wasn’t any less empty than any of the other rooms. She and Serif were now staying in Nerakali’s quarters, since she no longer had use for them. “Well, your options are fairly limited.”

“You and Serif got any openings?”

They laughed for as long as they could, glad for a joke that took up the better part of twenty seconds of their long journey to Durus. But also Leona had a fleeting thought that they did indeed have an opening, like there really was meant to be a third person in the relationship.

“You just need to get creative. How about a play?” Leona suggested.

“Which play?” Dar’cy asked.

“Doesn’t really matter. On The Next Generation, crew members would rehearse and perform plays for each other. The characters weren’t generally actors, but they often filled their time in between missions with the performances. Sometimes they were even originals, written by one of them. They also played instruments, and put on concerts. That would take even more time, if you don’t already play.”

Dar’cy thought this over. “The only play I know that’s in the database is Waiting for Godot. I don’t know anything about it, but I guess we could do that.”

“Probably not that one.” It would make them even more depressed about sitting around and doing nothing.

“There’s also a musical called...um, Bridgedoom, or something?”

“Brigadoon?” Leona assumed. “Yeah, maybe not that one either.” That hit a little too close to home when it came to Leona and Serif’s real lives. “I’m sure you’ll find something in there, though. Ask the others for guidance, since they’ve spent more time on Earth, and know what would be in the library. You could perform it for Serif and me when we get back. Maybe you’ll even find something they created after our first time jump.”

“Yeah, that might be fun.” She didn’t look super convinced. She planted her face into Leona’s pillow. “Or I could just go back to sleep.”

Leona affectionately pulled her back to a sitting position. “No, don’t do that. Eight hours a night. Maybe nine. No more.”

“What is night? What is night when there is no day?”

“Deep.”

“Do you hear that?”

Leona did think she could hear something as well.

“It’s like...like a metal blade cutting into something else metal. Or, soldering? Or a laser etching into something? What is that?”

It grew louder, and Dar’cy’s descriptions were pretty good. Then a light began forming on the floor. They jumped up on the bed, as if it were a mouse, and as if they were afraid of mice. The light started as a pinpoint, but grew larger and larger, as the sound intensified.

“Is someone taking apart our ship?” Dar’cy asked. “Are we being boarded?”

“The floor just leads to the deck below us,” Leona explained. “If we’re being boarded, they’re already in.”

The light continued, until it was large enough to reveal a portal, out from which came two hands that pulled a woman into the room. She struggled to get her feet all the way through. “Verdammt! Scheisse!”

Leona helped her the rest of the way through, while Dar’cy became combat ready.

The woman looked around and got her psychological bearings, then she took out the Compass of Disturbance, and tried to get her literal bearings. “Wo bin ich?”

“What did she say?” Dar’cy asked, still ready for a fight, even though the intruder looked like she was over sixty years old.

“I don’t know,” Leona said.

“Don’t you speak Russian?”

“That’s German, and no, I don’t speak either of them.”

“Obviously you do, because you know which language it is.”

“That’s not how that works.” Still. Leona tried to remember what few things she picked up in college. “Uhh....dein name?”

“Ida,” she answered. “My name is Ida Reyer.”

“You do speak English,” Dar’cy pointed out, suspicious of her.

“Yeah, sorry,” Ida responded, still in a German accent. “It’s not my first language, though. I still don’t think in it.”

“Ida Reyer?” Leona echoed. “I feel like I’ve heard that name before.”

“I got a Wikipedia blurb,” Ida said, only halfway proud of herself. She shook their hands. “I’m an explorer. From Austria.”

“You have Juan’s compass.”

“No,” Ida said. “Juan has my compass. I’ve yet to go back in time and leave it for him to find. The Weaver bequested it to me originally.”

“How far out of your time period have you gone?” Dar’cy questioned. “This is a space vessel.”

Ida nodded and inspected the bulkhead. “Yeah, it’s okay. Not the best I’ve seen. The first thing I did was go hundreds of thousands of years in the future, to a planet of two kinds of aliens called the Eloi, and the Morlocks. They themselves didn’t have any working ships, but I came across an ancient crash site or two while I was there.”

“The Eloi and the Morlocks?” Leona asked, wide-eyed.

Dar’cy had no reaction.

“Yeah,” Ida laughed. “My friend, Helena bastardized that story so the 19th century dum-dums could understand it better. Don’t worry, she gave me some of the proceeds from the book.”

That was a lot to unpack.

Ida went on, “anyway, today is your day, Leona, which means I’m here on time. Looks like we have about a year to adjust heading just enough to avoid the cataclysm.”

“What cataclysm?”

“The 2167 gravity well.”

“It is 2167,” Dar’cy said.

It took a second for this to register with Ida. “Wait, what, are you serious?”

“Well, relatively serious.”

“Ah, crap, I’m late. She ran out of the room. “Shut off the engines! Shut ‘em off now! Plan B!”

“Computer,” Leona ordered, running out after her. “Awaken Brooke.” She ran into the cockpit to find Ida hastily tapping and swiping at the computer interfaces.

Brooke came out of her standby and tried to get her off of her precious machines. “Hell you doin’?”

“Brooke, we have to stop right now.”

“What do you mean, we have to stop? You can’t just stop a vessel traveling at a hundred-forty-seven million miles per hour.”

“We don’t need to stop the ship, just attitude control and thrusters. And mostly everything else.”

“What are you talking about?” Brooke protested. “Who are you?”

“A really good friend of yours. I’m sorry you’ve not yet been introduced to me, but I implore you to trust me. If we don’t take systems offline right now, the sheer will tear the hull apart. We have to let The Warren fall into the well without resistance. It’s the only way we’ll break free of it.”

“Are you crazy, we’ve got a schedule to keep.” The computer had woken Paige up as well.

“You won’t be able to keep it. Better late than dead.”

“Miss Matic, who is this woman?” Paige asked.

“A famous explorer. She’s using the Compass of Disturbance.”

“Yes, thanks for reminding me,” Ida said, taking the compass out, and placing it on the interface table. Circles emanated from where the compass was placed, along with tangential and radial lines, the bridges connecting information between the two devices. Ida seemed to be able to read the data. “Okay, so we still have time, but we have to do it now.”

“Captain,” Brooke asked.

“I’m not doing it,” Paige said. “I don’t know who the hell you are, but I’m not compromising the safety of this crew, or the importance of the mission, for you.”

“Don’t you see,” Ida said, “that’s exactly what you’re doing. There’s a tower out there that Saga’s wife, Andromeda created. A choosing one used his power to levitate it off the ground, and away from the planet, but it’s been gathering gravitational energy ever since.”

Paige wasn’t relenting.

Ida turned her face to stone. “Warren, override operations, authorization two-one-six-seven-plaintiff-temple-bachelor.”

“Transfer complete,” the computer responded.

“What did you just do?” Paige argued.

Ida ignored her. “Warren, shut down all operations besides life support, and minimal internal lighting.”

“No!” Paige screamed, but it was useless.

The lights dimmed, and the engines cycled down. With the gravdisk below them decelerating, they were lifted from the floor, and started floating around aimlessly. Not used to life without some level of gravity, Leona found herself hitting her head against the wall. And then nothing.

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