Microstory 2585: Renata Has Grown Bored as They Wait for the Next Assault

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Renata has grown bored as they wait for the next assault. She and her mother successfully forced the first group of attackers off the road, and then another one once they reached the log cabin, but there hasn’t been a peep since. They’re still here, having already buried the bodies in shallow graves. The worry is not that someone else will come, but that they won’t. They are the decoy team, while Quidel and Lycander are the ones in charge of the real package. There is a procedure for meeting back up later, but that’s following 24 hours of no activity at the safehouse. It involves switching cars, and traveling to a small town farther east.

“Hey,” she says, holding her cup of tea. “Are you the strong, silent type, or can you talk?”

“I can talk,” the driver replies. “I just don’t usually say much.”

“That’s basically the definition of the strong silent type. Can I sit?”

“Be my guest.”

She sits down on the swing, still wrapped in her quilt. It’s funny, sitting here with a stranger, but she’s sick of being inside, and there is no other seating on the porch. She takes a sip. “What about your name? Is it a secret? Does my mother just call you The Driver?”

He chuckles. “It’s Polykarpos. Polykarpos Goldd. Everyone just calls me Polly.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Polly. I’m Renata, by the way. I don’t know if I ever said that.”

“Madam Granger speaks of you often.”

“She does?”

“Yes. She’s quite proud of you.”

“Did she tell you to say that?”

“I work for her, but I have my own opinions. She tells me what to do, not how to think.”

She nods, and doesn’t speak for a moment as they just enjoy the sunrise. “How long have you worked for the NSD?”

“I technically don’t. I work for a company that contracts to the NSD. Many low-level jobs like mine are like that.”

“I wouldn’t call it low-level. That was some smooth driving while we were being shot at. You didn’t flinch at the bullets. You must have some tactical training.”

Polly smiles. “Well, I wasn’t always only a driver.”

That’s when Libera interrupts. “Ren, could you help me with something? We need some more firewood from the shed.”

“I can do that, sir,” Polly says as he’s standing up.

“No, I want my daughter,” Libera discourages.

Renata knows this tone well. Libera doesn’t actually need help with anything, but wants to speak privately. She downs the rest of her tea, which has already gotten cold out here in the winter woods, and sets it precariously on the window sill. A metaphor for her and her mother’s relationship?

They head out into the shed, and Libera just stands there, not even pretending that the request was genuine. “You don’t need to be talking to him too much.”

“I’m a big girl, and I actually think he’s younger than me.”

“That’s not the point,” Libera contends. “He’s...irrelevant.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean, that he’s expendable?”

“Look, some people in this world are simply more important than others. You could call them...exemplars. I’m an exemplar, you’re an exemplar. Polly is just...background. I have no plans for him.”

“Plans? What about Lycander, is he background too? I saw the way you looked at him, like you couldn’t trust him. Do you too have bad history?”

Libera smirks. “Lycander is something else.”

“And Quidel?”

“He’s very something else.”

Renata shakes her head, and consults her watch. “Let’s go find that small town where we’re supposed to meet up.”

“It hasn’t been twenty-four hours yet,” Libera says.

“We have to wait that long to make the call,” Renata reasons, “but we may as well get there. I would rather wait by a real bathroom.” She begins to leave.

“We have a nice bathroom here.”

“Get the car!” Renata shouts up to Polly as she’s walking back to the cabin. “I wanna get some real breakfast, instead of these MREs.”

“Yes, sir.” Polly hops down the steps, and heads towards the back, where they hid the car loosely under some brush.

Renata, meanwhile, picks her teacup up to prepare to wash it.

Libera starts walking up the steps as she’s watching Polly walk away. “He followed your orders.”

“What?”

“You told him to do something, and he didn’t hesitate. He didn’t even look over at me for guidance. He just went off to do it.”

“Yeah, we bonded a little. He trusts me. I’m sure I was nicer to him in those two minutes than you ever have been, if you think he’s only background,” Renata says with airquotes.

Libera scowls at her daughter. “Go make your bed. We should leave this place looking like we’re trying to make it look like no one has been here for months.”

“Yes, sir! Commander, sir!” Renata replies sarcastically. She goes back into the cabin even though her bed is already made because she’s no longer a child. While she’s finishing the dishes, she hears the sound of gunfire. She drops the cup into the sink, letting it shatter. She grabs the pistol from the counter, and heads outside.

It’s another group of attackers, hoping to get their hands on their special device, not knowing that it isn’t really here. She sees three men a few meters from the cabin, pointing their shotguns at Polly. He’s sitting in the dirt, holding the right side of his chest with one hand, and trying to drag himself away from the shooters with his other.

“One more step, and he dies!” one of the bad guys says in a Javelotian accent. Javelot is one of their closest allies. “Gun on the ground!”

Renata drops her gun.

“Wait!” Libera is walking through the door behind Renata, her hands up in supposed surrender. In one hand, she’s holding the decoy bag. “You came for this, you can have it!”

“Drop it down the steps,” the Javelotian guy demands.

“Does that sound wise and safe?” Libera asks rhetorically. She sets it down on the porch, and begins to back away from it, as does Renata in the opposite direction.

Two of the Javelotians creep up to it, pointing their weapons at the ladies, but of course, it doesn’t matter. The bomb in the bag explodes them both when one of them tries to open it, and the surprise is enough to push the remaining Javelotian off balance. Libera pulls her own pistol out of the back of her pants, and shoots him dead. It was a short-lived attack, but they’re not out of the woods yet.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 18, 2531

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It took a few minutes, but that was all they needed. A.F. shut them down almost entirely, but he left a few key essential systems running. He let them keep breathing, and stay warm, and to keep a relative sense of down. That last one was key. He either did this so his own people could be comfortable when they were ready to board, or when he was ordering his people to shut all other systems down, he simply ignored that one as irrelevant. Under normal circumstances, it was true. Internal artificial gravity alone could not save or protect them. But all these systems were integrated with each other, and rerouting them wasn’t all that difficult. Séarlas, Leona, and Ramses worked together to change the internal gravity to external. It was messy and ridiculous, but it allowed them to move the station, and it allowed them to do it without propulsion. This wouldn’t be useful if they wanted to fly on a particular vector. A.F.’s fleet could always match it, so relative to each other, their velocity would be at zero. But that wasn’t the only dimension to maneuver in. Instead they spun themselves around. The station was basically spherical, so they became a chaotic ball, rolling around space randomly and unpredictably. If the bad guys wanted to board them, they were gonna have a hell of a time getting a foothold.

They were at an impasse, because while A.F. couldn’t reach them, Team Matic and the twins still had nowhere to escape to. Little had changed during the interim year between August 17, 2530 and August 18, 2531. The only thing was that, while the spin was random, the roll that it caused was fairly consistent. The station had spent the entire time in a decaying orbit around the host star, and it was pretty close to it now.

“Oh my God, I forgot to ask,” Marie began. “Why can’t they teleport in here? Whoops.” She lost her grip on the corner of the table. In order to maximize power from the internal-for-external gravity drive, they had to lose it for themselves. This placed them in freefall, just like the ancient astronauts had to suffer when humanity was first dipping its toes into outer space centuries ago. “I’m gonna hold onto you instead, Matt.” She grabbed his thigh with both hands. She could have just magnetized herself to a surface most everyone else, but whatever.

“I have a teleportation-suppression field,” Séarlas explained. “It’s decoupled from the main systems, and even has its own powersource, so A.F. can’t control it.”

“Can we exploit that?” Olimpia asked. “Can we decouple other systems?”

“We did, with the gravity,” Séarlas confirmed. “Unfortunately, we can’t do it for anything that he already has control over, like the quintessence drive, or communications. I gave him too much tech, and too much power.”

“We need a distraction,” Angela suggested. “We can’t gain an advantage over them,\ because they can just stay on us indefinitely. We need something that they can chase just long enough for us to get out of range of their equipment.”

Ramses was looking at the viewscreen. They were tumbling around aimlessly, so trying to look through a viewport, or even a static image, would just make them nauseated. Instead, the exterior sensors were programmed to operate in tandem, and generate an artificial stabilized image, which would be what they would see if they weren’t moving so quickly. “The sun. You get me to the sun, I’ll get us out of here. They won’t be able to block our slingdrive array with all that cosmic interference.”

“We can’t move fast enough,” Séarlas reasoned. We’re in a decaying orbit, but it’s still gonna take us years to get close enough to break free from their grasp.”

“Hence, the distraction,” Angela said, looking over at Leona. “Maybe make it look like there’s a giant hammer out there that’s about to smash them to bits?”

“Or my hubby could make a solid hammer that actually could smash them to bits,” Olimpia offered.

“I don’t know that I have the strength for solid holograms,” Mateo countered, “especially not at scale. I’m still trying to recover. It takes a lot of energy to regather the dark particles, and I can’t turn that off, even if I didn’t care about it. Which I do, because they may be our only hope.”

“We don’t wanna kill them,” Leona argued. “Olimpia, maybe you could replicate us? Confuse them about which space station is real?”

“I could try,” Olimpia volunteered.

Franka shook her head. “It wouldn’t matter. They have anti-holographic technology. It uses augmented reality to delete any falsified light source. The image might still be out there, but they won’t see it, because their AI knows that it’s fake, and shows them what’s behind it. They probably already have it on. They know that you’re illusionists.”

They continued to discuss options, sometimes talking over one another, trying to come up  with a workaround. Marie thought that maybe she could teleport over to one of the other ships in the fleet, and impersonate A.F. to give them false orders. Franka said that the anti-holographics can be miniaturized into other forms. The crewmembers could be wearing glasses which broke the illusions for them on an individual level. Mateo then suggested that Olimpia, instead of creating a remote image, turn the whole station invisible, but that wouldn’t work either, since they were still generating waste heat. Séarlas had not thought to install a hot pocket, since they were 28,000 light years from the stellar neighborhood, and he didn’t expect anyone to get anywhere near them. A.F. must have had some great intel to have gotten close enough for even the longest of long-range sensors to be meaningful. The Dardieti were a hundred times farther away, and even the reframe generation ship, Extremus was farther from the stellar neighborhood at this point, but those were outliers. He found this station because it was the only artificial structure out here. It reportedly could have taken them up to forty decades, which was an insane commitment choice. Either way, now that they had already been found, none of their illusions could counteract it.

“I can help,” Romana spoke up. She said it very quietly, but that was why her voice stood out amidst the cacophony of discussion, because until this moment, she had been completely silent.

“You can?” her father questioned.

“I can use my own holographic specialty. It’s different than yours.” She looked very anxious about it, perhaps even ashamed?

“I guess I hadn’t thought to ask you about it, or try to foster your ability,” Mateo realized. He looked over at Ramses. “Actually, I’m not sure I realized you even had that since you would have gotten your upgrade much later than us.”

Ramses shrugged. “I gave her what I gave everyone else. She’s part of the family.”

Franka winced.

“What can you do, dear, and when did you have time to practice?” Leona asked.

Before she could stop herself, Romana’s gaze flickered over to Olimpia. That was enough.

“Pia?” Mateo asked simply.

“I wanted her to think of me as another mother. I wanted her to know that she could trust me with her secrets. She can.” Olimpia took a deliberate step towards Romana. “You can.”

“We’re not mad,” Leona promised. “Romy, what are you so afraid of?”

“My illusions, they’re...tiny. I don’t generate images that anyone in the room can see. I project them directly onto people’s eyes.”

“We’ve watched movies together in secret,” Olimpia admitted. “You all were sitting right there in the room with us, and you had no idea.”

Romana sighed, relieved to be unburdened of yet another thing that she had been keeping from the group, but not yet clear on the consequences. “You’ve all seen my personalized illusions. I would place a knick-knack on a table that wasn’t really there, or move the edge of the doorframe over a few centimeters. I was testing my own limits.”

Marie massaged her shoulder. “I remember that doorframe.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Marie said with a sincere smile.

“I can bypass any normal anti-illusory tech and make them see what I want,” Romana went on, shaking her head, “including bad things...scary things. I can’t get in their heads, but I can freak them out, and certainly distract them. I could show them only darkness, and make them think they’ve gone blind. Unless they’re using cybernetic eyes, or something, it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“I don’t want to be negative,” Mateo began, “but there are only six of us. There could be hundreds of crewmembers out there. That’s a tall order. I don’t know how much practice could prepare you for that.”

“She wouldn’t need to do all of them,” Franka decided, “just enough to cause some chaos. Ramses needs the sun. If we can regain control of the base teleporter for only a couple of seconds, that would be enough to get us there. It might even be enough to break us free permanently, and we won’t need to abandon ship. Our quintessence drive needs time to spool up after a power disruption like this, but is otherwise just as capable of traversing the universe as yours or the Vellani Ambassador’s.”

“I can’t do it blindly,” Romana said apologetically. “I need to know who and where, so I would need to get on the ships.”

“If I shut off the teleportation suppression field to let you jump out there, it will allow anyone over there to jump here,” Séarlas explained. “All or nothin’.”

“It’s a risk we’ll have to take,” Leona determined. “Olimpia, you go with her. Make you both invisible. The rest of us will hold off any boarders.”

There were boarders, and a lot of them. They were probably trying to teleport this entire time, waiting for the team to give them an opening, if only via a brief power fluctuation. Leona fought them off physically, as did Franka, who probably hadn’t trained with the Crucia Heavy on Flindekeldan, but had apparently undergone some level of combat training. Mateo used his solid holograms a little, having been reminded that they were a thing. He really was pretty weak, though, and this was draining him further. If he didn’t use it sparingly, he would collapse and pass out, which would do them no good. Angela and Marie held their own too, but mostly relied on the protection of their EmergentSuits, rather than offensive blows. There was not really anywhere to hide as this station wasn’t all that large. The twins hadn’t built it with the thought of housing any more people than were living here now. They just kept holding them off while they waited for Romana and Olimpia to do their things.

Romana was making her tiny retinal illusions, and besides protecting them both with invisibility, Olimpia was trying to figure out how to sabotage the ships themselves. She didn’t have the technical know-how to do that, though, so Séarlas volunteered to jump over there to help. Unavoidably, when Angela took him over, it created a second teleportation window for the bad guys, which caused an influx in attackers that also needed to be fought off. A.F. was still nowhere to be seen, no doubt cowering in his luxurious stateroom. Before too long, the fleet’s hold on the station’s systems was gone, and they were free to straighten back out, and start to move away.

They had to scream through the ruckus. “They’re integrated!” Séarlas shouted through Angela’s comms. “The fleet’s quintessence drives! They’re all connected, so they can jump to the same place together, even if navigation goes wonky!”

“How does that help us?” Mateo asked. He was just using his bare fists now, punching faceless stormtroopers left and right. They had their armor too, but it wasn’t nearly as strong, probably because their commander didn’t really care about them. “Just get back here! Franka says your quintessence drive is spooled up!”

“I can rig them to blow up! We can be rid of this nuisance once and for all, the both of us!” Séarlas clarified. “We’ll be able to stay here if we want, or take the time to plot a course! This is a future-proofing act!”

“No killing!” Leona insisted.

“You’re not really my mother!”

“It’s more complicated than that, and you know it. Besides, it wouldn’t matter! You could be a stranger, and I would still urge you not to kill!”

“You’ve done enough, Olimpia and Romana. Go back to our station where it’s safe,” Séarlas suggested strongly.

“I won’t let you do this!” Leona contended.

“Now that I’m over here, I can deactivate their teleporters en masse! You won’t have to worry about any more coming over when the girls go back, but you’ll still need to deal with the ones who are already there! I suggest you float them! Wake Miracle up from stasis. She doesn’t mind the dirty work!”

“No killing!” Leona repeated.

“Good on ya,” Séarlas joked. “I wish you could have taught me your values!”

A moment passed. Angela, Olimpia, and Romana reappeared on the station.

Having lost his means of interfacing with their comms network, Séarlas got on the normal ship-to-ship radio, which meant that everyone could now hear what he was saying. “I’m sorry you didn’t raise us! I’m sorry we couldn’t be a family! I’m sorry I didn’t find a way to make it happen!”

“Don’t do—” Mateo started to yell back.

“Wait!” Franka interrupted. She pressed a console button, then pointed at him.

“Don’t do this!” Mateo implored his once-son. “All we needed was to break free, and we’ve done that now! We’re miles and miles away! You don’t have to massacre everyone, and get yourself killed in the process!”

“I don’t have to, but I should!”

A.F. suddenly appeared before the team. “Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!”

They didn’t have time to respond or react. Despite having managed to fly a significant distance from the fleet, they could see the ships explode into technicolors, mostly all at once, but not quite. And they could feel the blast wave as it rippled into the station, and dispatched the team to somewhere else in the universe.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 13, 2526

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There were some major issues with the sensor array, which delayed its activation. Aeterna promised that she had nothing to do with it, but they weren’t the dome police, so she wouldn’t have owed them an explanation either way. It was a year later now, and they were back on track. It would be turned on in a few days, when the team was out of the timestream again. It was inevitable, though, that the descendants of the Oblivios would start noticing the giant tower in the middle of their habitat. Well, they wouldn’t notice it, per se, but their instruments would claim that it was there, and if the Valerians didn’t want to damage people’s psyches, they would reveal themselves. They still didn’t know exactly how they were going to explain it, but now hoped maybe someone on the team had a good idea.

“I don’t know that we have to worry about it,” Leona claimed. They had spent the rest of yesterday in the penthouse, but now they were getting a look at the lower floors. She recognized them, and it clicked. “This is Arvazna.”

Mateo winced. “That micronation that you owned in The Third Rail?”

“That I will own,” Leona corrected. “It hasn’t happened yet, from this building’s perspective.”

“It was 130 years ago,” Marie reminded her. “I know, we’re time travelers, but if this thing ends up on an alternate Earth, thereby avoiding being detected here on Doma, it’s going to have to leave soon, and it’s going to have to go back in time, and then it’s going to have to be shunted to a parallel reality that doesn’t exist in present day.”

“The whole thing doesn’t have to end up there,” Mateo said. “This thing is, what, forty times larger than that one?”

“That’s true,” Leona agreed, examining the walls. “Tertius, how is this thing attached to the dome? Is it buried in the ground, or hanging from the apex?”

“Both, basically,” he answered. “They’re connected. It’s like a giant pillar connecting the ground to the top. Or a column? I don’t know, I’m not an engineer. I just asked Étude to build it, and she used her magicks.”

“I assume you have specifications for it, though,” Ramses said. “We would like to look at those. If we’re gonna bootstrap this tower to the Third Rail—or part of it—we will need to know how it works first.”

“Are you being serious? Are you just gonna make the tower disappear for us?” Tertius pressed.

“I think we’re fated to,” Leona said. The three of them went back upstairs, along with Aeterna and Marie, who was mostly just curious.

“I don’t know what understanding the engineering of the tower is going to do for them,” Mateo lamented. “You can’t just move a tower like this. None of us has that kind of power.”

“It doesn’t have to be one of us,” Olimpia claimed. “We already know someone who can do it. Well, we don’t know they can do it at scale, but we just met them. You partied with one of them.”

Mateo considered all the people he had met recently before landing on a guess. “The Overseers?”

“Yeah,” Olimpia confirmed. “They can just make one of their black hole portals, and send it through.”

“How’s the building going to move?” Mateo questioned.

“Gravity,” Romana suggested. “They can make the portal on the surface of the ground, and it will just fall through.”

“Is that even possible?” Mateo asked. “I’m guessing the foundation runs several kilometers deep. Could they get under it somehow?”

“You’ll have to ask them.”

“You want me to Boyd my way to them,” Mateo presumed.

“We don’t have time to get there and back using the slingdrives,” Angela reminded him. “It takes too long to recharge.”

“Plus, only you can find them through the dark particles,” Romana added.

A few hours later, Leona chuckled upon seeing Magnolia and Garland. “We were just gonna suggest that.”

“Great minds,” Romana mused.

“Can you do it?” Ramses asked the dark portal makers. “Can you make a portal wide enough to fit the tower?”

“The width alone is not really the problem,” Garland began. “Holding it long enough will be.”

“It’s not really the time either, son,” Magnolia said to him before facing Leona, “it’s the mass. I can hold a portal open for several minutes if nothing goes through in that time. But a tower? How long would you need? How long would it take to fall?”

“If we time it right,” Leona replied, “from the moment we release the clamps, to the second the roof makes it past the threshold, I would feel most comfortable with a minute and a half. With Proxima Doma’s gravity, it’s going to fall fairly fast, and get there in under that time.”

Magnolia’s eyes widened. “Whew, that’s a lot.”

“Together we can, though,” Garland said confidently.

She smiled at him. “Yeah, I’m sure we could do it. It would be a hell of a lot easier to send it somewhere with lower gravity, though, like outer space. I don’t know how to get it to another reality in the past anyway, so this would be just a stop-gap measure.”

“We just gotta get it out of the dome,” Rames said.

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this, everyone,” Tertius finally jumped in. “I regret asking them to build it in the first place. It was never necessary, and this isn’t the first headache I’ve gotten from it.”

Everybody filed into the elevator, and went down to the surface. The Overseers and the smart people began to survey the tower, and the surrounding area, rapidly developing their plan to make a gigantic building disappear. It was not a good plan, it was just the only one they had. Any number of things could go wrong. The Valerians could make the inhabitants forget they saw something unexplainable, but if the calculations were off by a single decimal point, memory would be the least of their problems. The apocalyptic explosion from the falling tower would send shockwaves across the surface...literally. It would decimate the dome, at best, and certainly kill everyone in it. As they were standing there, trying to consider every contingency, a tremor came through to remind them what started all this. It was a small one, but a herald of times far worse. They could see the nearest city shake in the distance. Nothing serious broke apart, but they could see tons of dust from here, and it might have been more destructive in other regions.

“We better do this now,” Magnolia decided. “If the ground begins to shake during the attempt, we could lose our balance.”

“That tremor means the big one is coming,” Leona tried to explain, “not that we won’t have another for a while.”

“Then let’s get on with it,” Aeterna contended.

“It could be minutes,” Leona warned, “and it’s not your call.”

“No, it’s ours,” Garland argued. “I say we do it, and we do it now. Ninety seconds is all we have available to us anyway.”

Just in case they needed a couple of extra hands, Angela teleported up to the control room in the penthouse with Tertius and Ramses, so they could release the clamps connecting the tower to the dome. They were coordinating on comms, relayed to Magnolia by Leona on one side of the cylinder, and Marie on the other with Garland. They were still in the middle of the process when another tremor began. “Guys, we need to abort,” Leona urged. No, she begged.

It was pretty much too late, though. Declamping the tower links wasn’t a single step. For clamps that large, it happened in stages, and they had already opened the first two stages, which placed them at more risk if they didn’t just move forward, full steam ahead.

“On my mark,” the team could hear Ramses say through comms. As he counted down, Leona and Marie’s voices synced with his, “eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, mark!” They slammed their fists down in the air, and pointed to the Overseers.

Magnolia and Garland opened a joint dark portal, slicing through the bottom floor like a hot knife through butter. The tower started to fall through. It was a magnificent sight to behold. The people in the control room appeared back down on the ground next to Mateo, Olimpia, and Romana.

“We can’t hold it anymore!” Leona cried, just about immediately, repeating what Magnolia was saying.

Marie reported a similar sentiment from Garland. “It’s worse than we thought! Best we can do is collapse the portal uncleanly, and generate an annihilating vortex!”

“I’ve never done that before!” Magnolia argued.

“Do it now!” Garland urged. There was absolutely no time to argue. After only about ten or eleven seconds, the portal fell apart, but it didn’t just evaporate into nothing. It exploded from the ground, and ate up part of the tower like a Lucius bomb. Unlike an L-bomb, though, it didn’t travel very far. Almost all of the tower was now falling towards them, preparing to crash on the surface. Leona teleported Magnolia out of the dome while Marie took Garland. Ramses hugged both Valerians, and spirited them away to safety.

Mateo was about to teleport too when he saw his wife, Olimpia take her Sangster Canopy out of her bag. She didn’t even give him the chance to protest before she jumped only a couple hundred meters away, directly underneath the falling tower. She opened it, and aimed it at the annihilator. She sent pockets of new space out of the tip. It wasn’t holding up the tower, but perpetually making the ground farther and farther away from it. She couldn’t hold on forever, though, and in fact, not for any meaningful amount of time. The Oblivios could not evacuate before she lost control. The first to escape would probably still be in the tunnel when it happened, and still be caught in the destruction. This was a desperate attempt doomed to fail.

But maybe Mateo could help instead. Both he and Romana jumped over to her, and took hold of the umbrella. “No!” he argued. “Just me! You two get out of here!”

“I know what you’re planning, dad! I can help!”

“You don’t have dark particles anymore!”

“Oh, yes, I do! Get out of here, mom!”

“Mom?” Olimpia echoed. “You’ve never called me mom before.”

“Go!” Olimpia reiterated.

“I love you!” Olimpia disappeared.

“Is this gonna work?” Mateo asked his daughter.

“Hell, yeah, it will!”

They both screamed their heads off. A massive swarm of dark particles erupted from them, through the umbrella. They were still adding space between them and the tower, but they were experiencing diminishing returns. It and the swarm met in the middle, but it was taking time for the dark particles to cover the entire thing. Meanwhile, it continued to fall, closer and closer to the surface. It might have appeared to be going rather slow from the outside, but it was actually accelerating, and would strike the planet with an even greater force than it would have had they done nothing but save themselves. The particles were nearly at full coverage and the tower was nearly upon them when the rest of the team appeared next to them. One by one, they took hold of the handle or the shaft, wherever they could find purchase.

“There’s nothing you can do to help!” Mateo shouted at them.

“We can die together!” Leona reasoned.

“That’s freaking stupid!” Romana volleyed.

“Don’t talk to your mother like that!” Olimpia scolded.

They continued to scream into the wind, as a team, and as they struggled to hold on, they started to float in the air a little. With one final push of their might, the dark particles turned all sorts of colors, and disappeared, as did the tower, and the whole team with them.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 30, 2512

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It was time. This was the moment that Ramses, Marie, Olimpia, and Boyd had been anticipating for the last two days. For two years, the temporal energy crystal was being bombarded with the sonified version of a simple lemon, converted from its genetic sequence in full. While cracks had formed on the surface, nothing major had changed to the crystal. It was nearing the end of the original music piece, and it still wasn’t entirely obvious what was going to happen. As they watched the visualization of the chords fly by on the monitor from the safety of the antechamber, something bad happened. It stopped. With only one single bar of four chords left, the music just stopped. It wasn’t reacting to the near-end of the song. It needed the complete, unadulterated piece. The universe seemed to be fighting back.

“It stopped,” Olimpia stated the obvious.

“Yeah, I see that,” Ramses replied, angry, but not really at her. He just kept staring through the window.

“What does this mean?” Marie asked.

“I don’t know,” Ramses admitted.

“Well, do we have to start over, errr...”

“I don’t know!” he repeated.

“Surely we don’t have to start all over,” Boyd figured. “Let’s just get the music playing again.”

“Yeah.” Ramses grabbed the keyboard, and started fiddling with the program, trying to force the music to start up again. It wouldn’t budge, it just wouldn’t. His hands started shaking out of frustration. He looked like he was about to throw something across the room. “Get me that bowl of lemon juice out of the fridge.”

“We can’t do that,” Marie argued. “It’s too dangerous.”

“It’s our only choice now. It wouldn’t be so bad to wait another two years to try again, but the crystal doesn’t want to be turned off, so I have no reason to believe that the next attempt will go any better.”

“Well, let’s at least get a robot in there to do it for us,” Olimpia suggested.

“I don’t use robots,” Ramses explained. “I like to do the physical jobs myself.”

“Well, we’ll get one from somewhere else. It’s a big planet,” Olimpia said. She then stood there, concentrating.

“You can’t teleport out of my lab, remember?” he reminded her.

“Right.”

“I’ll go with you,” Marie offered. They both started to leave.

While Ramses’ attention was split between the girls and his hope that there was something he could do from here, Boyd had slipped over to the other side of the room unnoticed. He had opened the fridge, carefully grabbed the pitcher of pure lemon juice, and slowly left through the other door.

Only by the thud of the door closing did Ramses notice that Boyd had left. “Wait. No! Don’t go in there!”

Boyd was already through the next door, and was approaching the crystal.

Ramses hit the intercom button. “Just wait. They’re going to get us a robot.”

“There’s no time,” Boyd contended, still inching his way across the room. If he spilled just one drop...it would definitely be okay, but he obviously didn’t want to risk wasting any. “Look at the clock.” He was right. There was probably just enough time before midnight that the girls could come back with the robot, but this needed to be done while everyone was still in the timestream. And there was a security concern with bringing in an unauthorized intelligence of any kind without proper assessment.

“Run as fast as you can out of the teleportation suppression field,” Ramses urged Marie and Olimpia through comms. “It’s not safe.” He activated his EmergentSuit, including his external PRU.

Boyd reached the pedestal. “Tell everyone who has ever met me that I’m sorry,” he requested. He lifted the pitcher up, closed his eyes, and dumped the juice on the crystal. As predicted, it exploded in his face.

While it was difficult and rare to travel between The Eighth Choice and Fort Underhill, it certainly wasn’t impossible. And if anyone had the natural authority to cross the border, it was anyone from Team Matic. After making contact with Gilbert Boyce, Leona, Angela, Romana, and Jessie were sent passes to board a transport ship, which flew them through the interversal conduit, and into the other child universe. They were on the planet of Violkomin now, standing by the prebiotic lake, waiting for Mateo to appear. Any minute now.

“Are you sure your contact in the new afterlife simulation was talking about the right person?” Leona asked.

“How many Mateo Matics do you know?” Nerakali asked right back. “It doesn’t matter how many there are, I would bet my life that only one of them died anytime in the last many decades. It’s the right guy.”

“Well, where is he?” Romana asked for the fifth time.

Nerakali sighed. “His pattern could have messed with the transition. You’re not like any other salmon; I know this much. It’s hardwired into his neurology in a way that I don’t understand. Do you? The server that he was placed on when he died is quantum. The lake is controlled by a biological computer. The way it was explained to me, it’s difficult for them to communicate with each other. That might make it sound unsafe, but the fact that he hasn’t shown up is probably a good thing. It’s probably erring on the side of caution while it makes the necessary—and unique—data conversions.”

“He needs to get here soon,” Angela pointed out. “It took us so long to get here from that other universe. Is it possible that he already came out? Or could he be clear on the other side of the lake?”

“He’ll show up here,” Nerakali assured her, “and he hasn’t gone through yet, or I would know. This is my job. I asked for it. Returning from death has always been my thing. I wanted to give back.”

Romana commanded the nanites that formed her shoes to recede into their implants. She started to wade into the water. “Can we...go in after him?”

Nerakali smiled, almost condescendingly, but still in a nice way. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“There’s one way to get there,” Romana said darkly.

“Don’t even think about it,” Leona warned. “You don’t know what’s waiting for you. Like she was just saying, we each have a weird biology, and a weird neurology. You might not end up in the simulation. You might just die.”

“Then you do it,” Romana suggested. “You’ve been there be—” She stopped when she felt a sudden pit in her stomach.

Leona and Angela felt it too. It felt like they were losing something. Something was being removed...not from their bodies, nor even their minds, but somewhere else. They shuddered at the same time, a highlight of technicolors flowing over their skin, and then they nearly collapsed to the ground. They were feeling weak and woozy, but still had enough wherewithal to keep themselves aloft.

“What the shit was that?” Marie asked.

“The crystal. They must have shut it off.”

“Why did we need to feel it?” Romana questioned. “Wasn’t it just Boyd and Octavia who were on our pattern? I mean, we didn’t end up with their powers.”

Marie and Olimpia woke up on their backs on the roof of a building, but they didn’t know if it was the right one. They were trying to teleport to Bot Farm, but this could be just about anywhere. “What happened?”

“The crystal exploded,” Marie replied. “That’s the only logical conclusion.”

“We need to go back. If you’re right, we don’t need the robot anymore.”

“No, I don’t think we do.” Marie stood and waited a moment. “Is there a suppression field here too?”

“Why would there be?” Olimpia pointed to the ground in the distance where scraps of metal and other materials were being unloaded from a truck so they could be recycled into mechanical substrate components. “This probably is indeed Bot Farm.”

“Well, something is stopping us from teleporting.”

“Do you think...?”

“Oh my God, the crystal. It took away all our powers.”

“It was only—”

“Yeah, well this is why we didn’t just dump lemon juice on it in the first place. We knew that we couldn’t control the results.”

“Then we need to get down to the vactrain station.”

“Agreed.” Marie looked around for a more traditional way off the roof.

“My suit. It’s not emerging. I was just gonna jump down to the ground, but I can’t. The suit isn’t a time power, I don’t understand.”

“The suit’s not, but the way we control them with our minds is biotechnopathic. We control it more in a psychic way than people typically interface with tech.” She placed her chin against her chest so she could see the manually interface on her shortsleeve. She was able to activate the suit from there. “So we don’t have to crane our necks like that, whenever you change clothing, keep a wristband on, so you always have easy control over it.”

“Good idea.” Olimpia did the same to get her suit on. Then they jumped over the edge, and started walking, like animals.

Ramses woke up alone. “Hey, Thistle. Report.”

“You have been unconscious for eleven hours and twenty-four minutes. You are otherwise healthy and unharmed. Environment is hostile, and not survivable, but life support is holding.”

“It’s 2513?”

“Unknown.”

“Where are we?”

“Unknown.”

“Lifesigns?”

“No life detected within sightline. No satellite detected.”

“Why does the air taste stale?”

“Primary carbon scrubber damaged and offline. Helmet scrubber is functioning optimally, but conservatively. Ramscoop nodes require manual service.”

“What about the transdimensional backups and replacements?”

“Pocket dimensions are inaccessible.”

That wasn’t good. This looked like it could be Castlebourne, but a region of it where there were no domes in sight. His best guess was the mirror dimension version of it, though there was no way to test that hypothesis from this random vantage point. “I can’t teleport,” he noted.

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Thistle replied.

“If Boyd destroyed the crystal, it would have taken him off our pattern. Though if it killed him, that doesn’t really matter. If the pocket dimensions are gone, and I can’t teleport, it must have also wiped out all excess temporal energy across the board. Time must have spit me out here by random chance. All hope is lost. I can’t get back. Even if my slingdrive were available, I couldn’t use it on my own. But what does that mean for my pattern? Am I stuck here for years?”

“I recommend you repair the ramscoop nodes for your indefinite resource management needs.”

“Thanks, Sherlock. Thank God I had my suit on at all, or it would be game over.” It was pointless to dwell on anything. “The composition of this world’s atmosphere. Analyze it. Is there enough helium and neon for meaningful lift?”

“No,” Thistle replied plainly.

“I’ll do the heavy lifting, so to speak, but I need you to run the calculations. I would like to jury-rig a fusion torch, and power it with the microreactor. Once I fix the nodes, there should be more than enough hydrogen to get me in the air.”

“I’ll start developing the models.”

Boyd Maestri woke up in the afterlife simulation. He had expected to find himself lying on the top of a mountain, or strewn halfway in a babbling brook. Instead, he was sitting in a hardback chair. A woman was standing before him coolly and trying to appear patient, but clearly itching to explain the situation. Boyd wasn’t tied to the chair, but he couldn’t move either. The computer program was just arbitrarily holding him in place. Physical restraints weren’t truly physical anyhow.

“Mister Maestri. Welcome to the afterlife.”

“You the boss around here?”

“I am,” the woman replied.

“How’d that happen?”

“I died at the exact same time that the original sim was being evacuated.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

She shrugged. “I did it on purpose.”

“You know my name,” Boyd pointed out, then let the implication sit there.

“They used to call me Pinocchio, but I didn’t like it. So when I came back here, I adopted a new identity. You can call me Proserpina. I am a unique lifeform.”

“I get it. I didn’t like my name for a time, and went by Buddha instead. That was a mistake, though. How did you take charge of this place?”

“I was responsible for the original version for a time, until Ellie Underhill sent everyone to a new universe. I just reclaimed my birthright.”

“What do you want with me?”

“I don’t care about you at all,” Proserpina explained. “Mateo Matic does. My counselors receive the names of everyone who dies, and is on their way to this world. One of them will make sure Mateo gets the message, and he’ll come here to get you.”

“Did you kill me?”

She laughed. “I’m just taking advantage of the situation. You got your own self killed. Something about lemons? I dunno, I didn’t read the whole report.”

Just then, Mateo opened the door to this room, and came in deliberately, but not hostilely. He was dragging some old man behind him. “I was told you turned off the lake, or something?” Only then did he notice the detainee. “Boyd, you’re here?”

“I died destroying the crystal.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Wait, you didn’t come for him?” Proserpina questioned. “I made sure Keilix knew about it.”

“I don’t think I told her about Boyd at all,” Mateo said. “I doubt his name means anything to her.”

“So, why are you here?” she asked. “The lake?”

“Yeah, I can’t go through. I’ve been trying for two days, which was two years ago.”

“Yeah, I turned it off for you,” Proserpina explained, confused as to why he didn’t already know this. “I need you here.”

“For what?”

“For your wife.”

“What about her?”

“She’s the one who created me last century,” Proserpina began. “I need her to do it again. I keep sending people to kill her, and she keeps surviving, I don’t understand.”

“What?” Mateo was so lost. “No one has tried to kill her. I mean, she’s faced danger, and there is that one guy, but he’s always trying to kill us, and has his own reasons.”

“Yeah, I exploited those reasons. Just like I exploited Pacey’s, and Bronach’s, and even Buddy’s here.”

“Well, you weren’t very good at it,” Boyd contended. “I didn’t want to kill her.”

“Well, I’m kind of limited under these conditions,” Proserpina argued. “I pass messages along with dead people who cross over to the other side, and I know my targets get these messages, but I think something gets lost in translation.”

“Are you trying to escape the simulation?” Mateo asked her, still not clear on what her agenda was.

“No, I’m trying to create a community of my own, but I need your wife to do what she did to me to all the other NPCs. I cannot figure it out myself.”

Mateo stared at her. Who the hell was this idiot? “Well, I need the lake to get back to her to ask her.”

“I assumed she would come for you!” Proserpina reasoned. “That’s what happened the last time you died!”

That was true, but it was still a poorly thought out plan. Even dum-dum Matt could see that. “Whatever. Let me out, and I’ll ask her what she can do. Okay?”

How do I know you won’t screw me over? she asked.

“Uh, Mateo?” Boyd piped up. “You don’t need her to let you out. You’re like how I was before. You can resurrect yourself...through dark particles.”

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The Fifth Division: Solid as a Rock (Part V)

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Ingrid wanted to be discreet, and not change the timeline. Yeah, it could be their chance to prevent all this horror from ever happening, or the result could be even worse than before. There is no way to know which path you’re on until your fate is upon you. That’s why the representatives from the various Sixth Key cultures are all here right now. They were trying to prevent themselves from meddling with their people’s futures. And now their worst fears might be realized. She and Onyx were hoping to slip in, rescue the fabled red fruit, and sleep away unnoticed. But that’s no longer possible. The regular blue magnolia fruit pod that they took to get here was more powerful than they knew. It has brought with them a bunch of noisy gold. Killjlir and Andrei come around the tree, ready for battle, surprised to see the two of them, but even more surprised by all this random treasure.

“Was this all about a heist?” Andrei questions. “Are we trying to thwart a heist? Are we doing a heist?”

“This has nothing to do with anything,” Ingrid explains. She looks at the garbage strewn about the ground. “This is a transport error.”

“Fair enough,” Andrei decides. “You’re dressed differently. Yet you left about thirty seconds ago.”

“A lot has happened since then,” Ingrid replies. “It’s been longer than thirty seconds for me.”

Ayata suddenly appears. “How did you beat me back here?”

“I’m from the future,” Ingrid says plainly. “And I need you four to do everything that I say. We don’t have much time before the enemy arrives.”

No one argues.

Ingrid looks over at Killjlir. As terrible as she feels about her new friend being injured, it’s even worse to be considering urging them towards the fall. Unfortunately, she really has to hope that this is all predestined, and she’s just working on closing her own loop. Killjlir has to climb that tree, and they have to fall, so they can float down the river towards the tunnels, and set this whole time travel rescue operation in motion. “Climb the tree on that side. There’s a red fruit at the top that we need.”

“Yeah, I was starting to climb it when you showed up.”

“Good,” Ingrid decides. “I’ll be climbing on this side. This is a stealth mission. One of us has to reach it.” She looks at Ayata and Andrei. “You two have to fight, and keep them from catching us, or even spotting us.”

Andrei tenses up. “Understood. Get on up.”

“What do I do?” Onyx asks.

Ingrid winces. It should be obvious. “Hide.” There’s only one vertical object on this island, and it’s the tree. Luckily, there’s an alcove at the base for him to curl up in. He might still get caught, but since he’s a pacifist, they may not hurt him, especially since they’re planning to blow up the tree anyway. It all depends on how psychotic the First Explorer’s human agents are.

Here’s how the timeline should go. When the enemy comes, Ayata and Andrei hold them off while Ingrid and Killjlir go for the red fruit. Ayata and Andrei lose, but don’t die. The attackers plant their bomb, and bug out. That hopefully leaves enough time for the five of them to escape too.

Onyx gives Ingrid a boost up to the first branch while Ayata does the same for Killjlir on the other side. Ingrid is just starting to reach the foliage when evil Tamerlane Pryce and the other chick show up, but Ingrid can’t see them. It doesn’t sound like they see Killjlir, though, so they must have scurried up far enough already to be concealed by the leaves. Meanwhile, Ingrid quickly moves too high up to really hear the conversation. This close the tree, her ears are overwhelmed by a low hum coming from it. It’s only now occurring to her that it has been doing this the whole time, but it felt so natural and normal, she didn’t notice before now. The trunk lets out the sound consistently while the leaves echo it back as they rustle, like a sound visualizer. She keeps pulling herself up, branch by branch, trying to stay as quiet as she can. These people absolutely cannot know that there is any hope in saving all of this beauty.

As she’s heading up towards the very top, she notices that there aren’t any other fruits up here. They were thinning out, and now they’re gone. It feels like a wasted opportunity. They’re going to need to get out of here as fast as they can, and they’re certainly not going to be able to outrun it. They could try to jump into one of the rivers, like Killjlir incidentally did in the future past, but she was severely injured, and only survived because a magic branch kept her alive, and she happened to float towards the underground bunker. Ingrid doesn’t even know which river goes that way. No. They don’t just need the one red fruit. They also need blue fruit pods, at least one each. She’s so high that she and Killjlir can finally see each other. They stare for a moment, not knowing if it’s safe enough to utter a word. There’s no need. Ingrid just points at them, and then points upwards. She points at herself, and then downwards.

That’s all Killjlir needs to know. They nod, and get back on their way.

Ingrid carefully starts heading back down. She’s not carrying a bag, or anything, so the best way to handle this is to find a branch that happens to be holding several pods, and just break that whole thing off to keep them all together. Another thing comes to her mind. They’ve both been up here a long time. She occasionally hears the clanking of gold, strongly suggesting that the fight is still going on down there, but should it be? Shouldn’t the tree have exploded by now? She tries to multitask, and think back to when she experienced this before. After evil Pryce and that woman disappeared, Ingrid and Iolanta continued to fight each other, but it didn’t last long. And the explosion wasn’t long after that. No, this timeline is all wrong. They’ve changed things. Maybe it doesn’t matter, but maybe it means everything. If she could only hear better what’s happening down on the ground, she would know what to do.

No, it definitely doesn’t matter. She needs these fruits. That’s her only job right now. She’s found the branch that she was hoping for. Five pods are hanging from the tip, which is precisely how many they require. It’s too thick closer to the trunk, though. She’s going to have to crawl farther out to make a clean break. She would much rather inch her way down, but she doesn’t have time for that. The explosion could happen any second. She slides out there as fast as she can, but before she can reach her goal, the branch that she’s standing on cracks first. In a last ditch effort, she reaches out for the bundle of fruit pods, and takes it in her grasp. She falls with it through the branches below, and crashes down on the ground.

Her head hurts, not like a simple headache, but sharper and tighter. It’s concentrated on one very specific spot. Ingrid tries to reach up to find out what’s wrong with her, but she can’t move her arms. She’s either actually paralyzed, or just too injured to move right now. It’s cold, though. It’s cold and wet.

Onyx’s face appears above her. “Don’t move,” he whispers. “I won’t lie to you, it’s pretty bad. We’re gonna get you fixed up, though.”

“What happened to me?” Ingrid can feel her own mind being blanketed over by confusion. She’s trying desperately to hold onto her wits, but they’re slipping away from her in realtime. She’s dying, and her brain is turning the lights off one by one.

“You fell on a crown. It’s jammed into the back of your head,” Onyx explains.

She can still tell that she’s holding the bundle of fruits. Hopefully she’s lifting it up towards him, so he gets the idea. She can’t leave, but everyone else should be able to. “Where are they?” Ingrid struggles to ask.

“They’re inside the tree, trying to set off the bomb at the heart, as they said.”

“And the others?”

“Ayata and Andrei. They’re pretty hurt too, but I’ll feed them the healing sap as.”

Someone else walks up. Ingrid can’t turn her head, and moving her eyes isn’t enough. Onyx doesn’t look happy, though, so she’s guessing that it’s one of their enemies. “You get away from him.”

The woman whose name Ingrid still doesn’t know steps into view. “You think because you changed the timeline, you’ve made things better?”

“You know?”

“I’m omniscient, you insufferable dimling,” she claims.

“Why are you doing this?”

The woman pulls her face into an evil grin. “For this.” She swings her hand into view, showing that she’s holding the red fruit.

“What is it to you?” Ingrid questions.

“It’s an end to my competition,” the woman answers. Ingrid can see her fingernails begin to pierce the skin of the red fruit pod. Unlike the blue ones, it does appear to contain juice. It looks a lot like blood as it’s running down the side of her hand, and her arm. She twitches when a stick bursts out of her chest. Her blood starts spilling out too. Some of it spurts and drips on Ingrid’s face.

“Did you see that coming?” Killjlir asks, having been the one to impale the defiler.

The woman hasn’t stopped smiling. “Yeah. Sure did.” Her hand opens.

The magic red fruit falls into Ingrid’s mouth. For some reason, her reflex is to bite down. It feels a lot different than the other one. As she noticed, it’s juicy, and maybe is indeed made of blood, since it has a bit of a metallic taste, but with a pleasant sweetness to it. The juice runs down her throat, into her lungs, and her stomach. Her whole body pulsates with a power that she’s never felt before. Still, she can’t move. She just begins to know what’s happening around her without being able to see it. Everything starts to move in slow motion. Killjlir angrily tosses the woman to her side next to Ingrid, but falls to their knees, having also been injured prior to this. Onyx lunges towards them to help. Ayata and Andrei are both lying on the ground a few meters away. They’re reaching out for each other, but they’re probably not gonna make it. As soon as Tamerlane steps out of the tree portal, a fire sparks at his feet, and rises up the trunk of the magnificent magnolia tree. As it’s shooting up to the sky, it billows out, and threatens to engulf the lands as it did the first time they tried this. Time moves even slower...and slower.

The power surging within Ingrid intensifies. It too spreads out. Two primal force of nature, preparing to battle it out on this one tiny island. Or maybe not. Ingrid’s energy reaches out for Onyx and Killjlir, as well as Ayata and Andrei. It forms a protective bubble around them, but it doesn’t stay put. It drags them all together into a single entity, and spirits them away just before the wrathful fires can consume them all.

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