Microstory 2509: Former Girlfriend

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Landis wasn’t always the great and noble guy you’ve heard of. I’m not surprised that he became what he is today, but I do wish that it was happening while we were dating. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he really struggled with motivation. He didn’t want to work very hard at anything. He didn’t want things handed to him, but he didn’t want to have to think too hard either, and figure the solutions out for himself. He wanted to know how to do something, and understand why he should be doing it. He didn’t have a great job, bu he was content with it, because he gave an unremarkable interview, yet they gave it to him. He didn’t care about being promoted, or even making more money. His budget was always based on the bare minimum, and he didn’t care about anything else. He didn’t want to improve, or have a better life. This sounds really selfish of me, but it might have been nice had he treated me to dinner every once in a while. I felt like I was the only one making an effort in the relationship. I had to leave him, because it was so one-sided, and when I finally did, he didn’t seem to care. This goes to show how dispassionate he was. I wanted him to want something, even if it wasn’t me. I couldn’t tell you how he got his powers, because I wasn’t around for that, but I’m happy for him. I am not bitter, and I’ve not tried to get back together. He’s doing his thing, and I’m doing mine. I feel lucky that the path we walked took us to where we are. Even if I were miserable, at least he’s a superhero now, and that’s a beautiful thing. People ask if I regret not sticking by him but if I had, the Foundation might not exist. It’s all so mysterious, so we don’t know how he ended up with the abilities, but he has told us that we received them. He wasn’t born with them, so he would not have randomly developed them in an alternate reality. He was reportedly simply at the right place at the right time. If we had still been living together, he would have been in a completely different place at that particular time. We would have gone on with our lives none the wiser, still not happy, and none of you would be cured. I guess I should say...you’re welcome.

Extremus: Year 92

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For nearly two years now, little but old Silveon Grieves has been going to see his older but younger friend, Waldemar Kristiansen almost every single day. It is this boy’s destiny to grow up to be a tyrant...or maybe it isn’t. That’s what Silveon came back to put a stop to, but he won’t know for a long time if he’s successful. He seems to be doing okay for now—better than just a few years ago—but none of them knows what that means. Just because the timeline has changed doesn’t mean it’s better. If Waldemar eventually discovers the truth, he may swing all the way back to where he was headed, or even further into his evil ways, just to spite Silveon. Neither Tinaya nor Arqut are young enough to expect to be alive when Silveon’s efforts come to a result, whatever that may be. Niobe is, though, so when the parents die, it will be up to her to maintain vigilance, even if he’s legally old enough to care for himself. She is typically responsible for sitting with the boys when they’re playing. Calla has grown used to this situation, and self-medicates enough to be passed out most of the time, thankful for the extra parenting help, be it unexplained and unconventional.

Tinaya once asked Silveon why they don’t ever have Waldemar come to the captain’s stateroom to play. Apparently, his distrust in authority is innate, or is otherwise so ingrained in his worldview, that exposing him to leadership this early would only do more harm than good. Right now, he needs positive influences, and since they can’t control all the variables, the best way to do that is to simply limit the number of influences, full stop. The older they get, the less relevant their age gap will become, though, which will supposedly make these secret morality lessons easier to accomplish. At the moment, Waldemar likes their playdates, and hasn’t made any attempt to stop them, but he does see Silveon as a little kid. One day, though, he should see him as a peer, and that’s when the true education begins. This is a very long-term plan, and will probably never end until the day Waldemar dies. Silvy has sacrificed his own personal life to save the happiness and freedom of everyone who will be alive on this ship over the course of the next several decades, and probably no one will ever know. If it backfires, however, things will end up so much worse, because he’ll have associated himself with an authoritarian oppressor. The Leithe family name would never recover from that.

While her son is dealing with all that, Tinaya is busy with her usual Captain’s duties. Even in times of peace, there’s work to be done. They are nearing the end of Year 92, which of course means that it’s time to start thinking about the next captain in line! Yay! Who will it be? Who will Tinaya choose? No one.

Head Councillor Paddon Paddon is here to discuss the matter. “Have you had time to take a look at the class of 2365?” The reason the successor is generally considered around this time is because the only people who will be qualified to take over the position have to at least graduate from school by the selection date. In this case, the greenest of candidates are currently four years from graduation, and by now, pretty much anyone who was going to wash out of the captain’s track would probably have done so by now. The best of the best have already proven themselves in every meaningful—yet still not official—sense. Basically, the idea is that everyone who can be put on the shortlist is already a known option. They don’t have to worry about someone sneaking up on them closer to the deadline, because even if they would be great for the job, they won’t be ready yet.

Tinaya doesn’t care about that, because it’s not her problem. It’s supposed to be, but...it can’t be. Not this time. Not her. “I’m afraid that I will not be participating in the process. You will have to make the decision on your own.”

Paddon scrunches up her face. “I don’t understand.”

“We have exhausted the conversations surrounding my appointment to the seat. My aunt, my friendship with the previous captain, my relationship with the superintendent. It all sounds great to you, but history will not look kindly upon us unless we leave it where it is. I am done. Well, not today. I mean, in four years, I’ll be done. I’ll become an admiral, and then I’ll die. Or I’ll die first, who knows? That is the order of events, and we shouldn’t add any more to that.”

“I really don’t follow what you’re talking about,” Paddon complained.

“There are other variables which I am not at liberty to divulge,” Tinaya says vaguely. Silveon and Waldemar are the big ones, but her knowledge of The Question, the Bridger Section, the Nexa, and Verdemus also contribute to the complexities of this fragile situation. “What you would like me to do is help appoint someone who I believe will captain the ship in the same way that I would. That’s the idea, whether it’s in the bylaws, or not. Belo wasn’t too dissimilar to Yenant. Leithe the First wasn’t too dissimilar to Belo. Tamm was a weird one, which actually proves my point. The council appointed him, and while it didn’t work out in that case, we went right back to the pattern. Keen wasn’t too dissimilar to my aunt, and I’m very similar to them both! Some people feel—even though they don’t actually believe it in the literal way—that the same captain has pretty much run the ship the whole time.”

“So, what?” Paddon asked. “That’s called continuity, and it’s a good thing.”

“Yes, in wartime, it’s a very good thing. In peacetime, it’s not. People crave change.” Tinaya laughs. “Even if the candidate they love is running on a campaign of going back to the good old days. They want to see someone come in who is not a carbon copy of the person before. Trust me, I have been paying attention, and I have been listening to my advisors, both official and unofficial. The populace is restless. They need someone new. They need to feel that they were involved in the decision. And most importantly, they need to know that I was not a part of it.”

“This is so subjective, and our studies are not reflective of what you’re claiming. You are the most popular captain in our history, including Olindse Belo, who has become a sort of folk hero because she burned bright and early. They wanted you in that chair for years before you finally sat down, and they don’t want you to get up. But since you are, the easiest way for them to accept that is if you are totally involved in the succession search process. It’s the opposite of what you think, and I don’t know how you could be so wrong about it.”

“Like I said, there are other variables.”

Paddon Paddon is a reasonable woman, who doesn’t ask questions that she doesn’t want the answers to. She is aware that Tinaya has had a much more eventful life than the general population was told, but she’s never tried to investigate. She assumes that it was all necessary, and that Tinaya deserves to be where she is today. Nonetheless, she has her limits. “I respect that, but if you can’t tell me what they are, then I can’t take them into account.”

“How about a compromise?” Arqut is coming in from the closet.

“How long have you been there?” Tinaya questions.

“I teleported in there to change my shoes about a minute ago, but I didn’t want to interrupt or eavesdrop, so I eventually decided to do both!” he answers.

“What is your suggestion?” Paddon asks.

“Make your pick,” Arqut begins. “Select the new captain yourself, but choose someone good. Find the best candidate available, and I don’t just mean by your standards, but by the passengers’. They need to be socially accessible, well-liked, noncontroversial, and clean. Once you do, make the announcement. At least a day later, Tinaya will make her own, independent announcement, with her endorsement of this person. This new captain will benefit from her stamp of approval...without having gotten the job because of her.”

“Hm.” Paddon thinks about it for a moment. “That’s not a bad way to frame it.”

He laughs. “Of course, she can only give that endorsement if the candidate has truly earned it, so you really do need to find someone worthy. To maintain ethics and transparency, we can’t have any secret meetings to make sure that they’re gonna secure that endorsement. You have to get it right the first time. You have to not screw it up.”

“I think we can make that work, Superintendent Grieves.”

“I’m only Mister Grieves these days,” he corrects. “Except to you; you can just call me Arqut. We’ve been friends for years.”

“Okay,” Paddon says with a deep, rejuvenating breath. “I’ll take this to the council.” She pauses for a bit. “Though, I don’t think I’ll tell them everything.”

“That might be for the best,” Tinaya agrees.

They shake hands and part ways. Tinaya and Arqut won’t have to concern themselves with any of this for the next few years as the entire point is to leave them out of it. After Paddon leaves, the two of them start to have lunch together, but it’s cut short when they receive an emergency call from the infirmary. Silveon has been hurt. They teleport straight there to find their four-year-old son lying back on the examination table. They can only see his body, though. A mounted scanner of some kind is blocking the view of his face at the moment.

“No, don’t,” Silveon’s pediatrician, Dr. De Witt warns. He steps in between when Tinaya tries to look underneath the scanner.

“What do you not want me to see? What is that white stuff on his shirt?”

“It’s cake frosting,” Niobe explains.

“Cake?” Tinaya questions. “What the hell happened to my son!” Tinaya screams as she tries to get to him again, but this time, the doctor holds her back physically.

“You don’t want to see him like that! Besides, the machine is currently assessing the damage, so we need to wait until extraction is complete.”

“Extraction. Of. WHAT!” Arqut cries.

“A candle.”

“Why the hell is there a candle in his face? Why the hell is there a candle? We’re on a ship! We don’t need candles, we use lights!” Tinaya is not letting up.

“It’s an Earthan tradition,” Niobe starts. “You make a cake with sugary frosting, and you stick little candles on the top. Since he’s turning four next week, there were four candles. One of them got into his eye. It was an accident.”

“How would they get into his eye? How is that an accident?” Arqut asks.

“Go on, Ni!” Tinaya urges when Niobe, for some reason, looks over at a door.

“It was only a prank,” Niobe goes on with sadness. “He thought it would be funny if Silveon got some frosting on his face. He didn’t factor in the candles, but he didn’t hurt him on purpose. I promise you, this was not on purpose. It was just a stupid joke that went too far.”

“Are you telling me that a twelve-year-old boy shoved my baby’s face into a candle—four candles?”

“The other three fell down from the force of his forehead and cheeks,” Niobe recounts. “One of them got caught between his eyelids, and remained straight.”

“The nanites will repair the damage,” Dr. De Witt says. “I assure you that he will be good as new once he wakes up.”

“Where is he, in that room?” Tinaya points at the door.

“I don’t think you should talk to him right now,” Niobe suggests.

“Why, because he’s upset...or because he isn’t?”

Niobe doesn’t answer.

Without permission, Tinaya opens the door to the private consultation room to find Waldemar sitting on the bench against the wall in the dark. He looks mad, but it’s not entirely clear why. It could be that he blames Silveon for ruining the perfectly good cake, or it’s because a certain sports team lost some game way back in 2024. Honestly, it’s impossible to tell with an unwell kid like this. “Are you sorry?” she asks him.

“I didn’t do it on purpose, so no,” he spits.

She looks over her shoulder, then shuts the door behind her. She turns the lights on, but keeps them at a low brightness. “Even if you didn’t do something intentionally, you should feel remorse for it. You should at least wish that it hadn’t happened.”

“My therapist says that I don’t have remorse. I don’t know where to get it. I don’t know where everyone else keeps theirs.”

Tinaya nods. “I’m not qualified to help you with that. But you need to understand that what you did was hurtful. It may have been a mistake, but there were consequences. There are consequences to every action you take. Maybe...” she trails off. “Maybe your brain can’t feel guilt. Maybe you’ll always have to fake it. But truthfully, I don’t really care what’s happening in your brain; right now, or ever. It’s what you do that matters. Regardless of what you’re feeling—or not feeling—don’t do bad things. I am ordering you to not. Do. Bad. Things. You know right from wrong, whether they impact you or not. If you’re ever confused, or unsure, you can read up on the laws and rules. And if you still don’t get it, ask for help. Ask my son. He will always be a great resource for you.”

“No, he won’t...not anymore.”

“I guarantee you that he will not let this stand in the way of your friendship,” she contends. “When he’s feeling up to it, he’ll wanna see you. I’m first trying to teach you that you will not be able to function in society if you don’t follow society’s rules. Even if they annoy you, even if they make you mad; they are there for a reason, and you are beholden to them, just like everyone else. Humans are not stupid. We are not doing things that don’t make sense. So again, if you don’t understand why things are the way they are, ask someone you can trust, like me, Silvy, Niobe, or Mr. Grieves.”

“Not my mother?”

She takes a long time to respond. “Not your mother.”

He nods.

“Okay. You wait here. I’ll come get you after he wakes up.”

“Missus Grieves?” He stops her when she tries to leave. “Thank you.” He waits for a second. “Sorry.”

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Fluence: Anchor (Part V)

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Briar was a normal biological human, Goswin was a transhuman with biological upgrades, Weaver was technologically enhanced, and Eight Point Seven was mostly inorganic. Despite the range of substrate properties, they all slept in one way or another. Even Eight Point Seven needed to periodically take time to reorganize her data drives, perform diagnostics, self-repair, and give her microfusion reactor some time to power cycle, and purge waste byproducts. For the longest time, researchers believed that giving inorganic intelligences the ability to dream was nothing more than, well...a dream. They figured that they would have to directly program scenarios for them to merely simulate the experience. As it turned out, once technology advanced sufficiently, this was not necessary. Androids will do it themselves during these periods of low-power memory consolidation. Random neural firings will generate aberrant thoughts akin to the way that  humans dreamt. One of the greatest challenges of 21st century AI research was figuring out how to teach such intelligences to wake up from these dreams, and leave those thoughts behind, so that they didn’t negatively impact their normal operational requirements. Occasionally, this subroutine will fail to trigger, just like it can in humans, who sometimes wake up angry with someone for things that never happened in the real world. Early models sometimes became unexpectedly violent due to these errors.

The first night that they spent in Briar’s old camp on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida just so happened to be when Eight Point Seven needed to go into sleep mode for about an hour. She tried to hold off on it, so she could keep watch over the others, but she was not yet used to this new substrate. She didn’t even take this form on purpose. Her consciousness somehow uploaded itself to it at some point before their first jump. They had been so busy with all this stuff that she hadn’t taken the time to really investigate. That was probably why she had to do this now, because her mind was in conflict with her body. They were unfamiliar with each other. That night, she dreamt of her home. She was first created on a planet called Bungula, which orbited Rigil Kentaurus. Theirs was an ever-changing society, always run by an artificial intelligence, which frequently purged its own memory to be made anew. Her name was Eight Point Seven because she was the 78th incarnation of this entity.

Something went wrong with Eight Point Seven’s programming. She decided that she wanted to live, and not make way for the next version. The Bungulans eventually accepted her decision, and let her keep administering them accordingly. She grew tired of this, however, and ultimately chose to leave with Leona Matic. They eventually made their way to Bida together, and then separated to different ships. She had always wondered what became of Bungula, though. They had to have some form of government without her. Was it a human this time, or did they recreate the old program, and finally get their Eight Point Eight? Perhaps they skipped all the intervening versions, and just went straight to Eleven Point Nine.

All four of them woke up with a start. They were no longer in the jungle of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, but under a geodesic dome on the very end of a lava tube. They could see the stars above them, shining through the triangles of polycarbonate. The air wasn’t stale, but it wasn’t windy anymore. The whole world felt still, whichever world this was. Eight Point Seven Stood up from her cross-legged position. “This is my homeworld,” she determined. “This is Bungula.”

“Why are we here?” Goswin asked. “Who brought us this time?”

“We all did,” Weaver stated. “Remember? We don’t go anywhere unless we go together. There has to he some kind of consensus”

“No, it was me,” Eight Point Seven argued. “This is what I was dreaming about.”

“You can dream?” Briar questioned.

Of course they could dream. Goswin ignored the question. “Maybe we’re not entirely right about how this works. Maybe one of us sometimes pilots the whole crew. Someone’s...psychic power is just a little bit stronger. I wasn’t dreaming of going anywhere in particular. If your thoughts were more specific, they may have overwhelmed the three of us.”

“I was dreaming of seeing Leona again,” Briar explained.

“She’s here,” came an unfamiliar voice. They turned to find an unassuming man standing outside of their circle. “But you cannot see her. Hi. I’m Lieutenant Administrator Eleven Point Eight. I am...moderately aware of this time travel stuff, but I’m not well-versed, and I would not like to be. The current Administrator is very busy with her new plans for this world, and she does not have time to deal with whatever this paradox-waiting-to-happen is. Please leave however you came.”

“Forgive us,” Goswin said. “What is the date?”

“October 19, 2226.”

“This is the day I left,” Eight Point Seven noted.

“Yes,” Lieutenant Eleven Point Eight concurred. “You’re about to launch, and I’ve been asked to retrieve Madams Prieto and Prieto so that my superior may speak with them. As I asked, please leave.”

“Hold on,” Eight Point Seven stopped him. “The past version of me has not yet left, but there is already a new admin?”

“Of course,” Eleven Point Seven confirmed. “You thought there would be a gap?”

“Have we met? It and I, have we met?” Eight Point Seven questioned.

“Yes, you met. I was there during the handover ceremony.”

Eight Point Seven’s eyes widened. “That didn’t happen in my timeline. I never met my replacement. There was a gap, because it’s fine. The colonists mostly govern themselves.”

“Things have changed beyond Bida,” Weaver acknowledged. “We changed them.”

“Why should they?” Eight Point Seven questioned her. “This is before I showed up on Bida. I had never heard of Briar or Irene yet.”

Weaver shrugged. “Harrison was in the twelfth century, in England. That was the point of divergence. Nothing we know of history since then can be trusted.”

“Could you please get on with it?” Eleven Point Eight urged. “I have to go, and so do you.”

Eight Point Seven shook her head. “We can’t stay in the past. I know you wanted to keep studying that tree, but it’s too dangerous. We don’t know anything about what the universe looks like post 2400. That’s the only safe point in time for us. We have to stop risking these paradoxes, like he said.”

“She’s right,” Goswin agreed. “Let the past stay in the past.”

Weaver nodded. “Okay.”

They all turned to Briar, even Lt. Admin Eleven Point Eight. He was taken a little aback. “What, you think I would sabotage this? It’s fine, it’s fine. Let’s just go.” He sighed, frustrated at still not being trusted. “I said, let’s go!”

They blinked, and the scene changed. They were back in the ship bay in the asteroid near the planet of Po. “Hmm, that worked,” Briar mused.

“Yes, so it would seem. Or maybe not. “We’re still in the past, just not too terribly much this time.” Goswin nodded over to the clear end of the bay where he could see himself.

The other Goswin was holding a tablet and staring at them while staying in the discussion that he was having with the man next to him. He pointed towards the door, like he was respectfully instructing the other guy to leave.

“Though, I don’t remember this,” the present-day Goswin noted. “I don’t recognize that man at all.

Once the local was gone, Alt!Goswin made his way to the group. “Report.”

“Uhhh...report,” Goswin said back.

Alt!Goswin kept his eyes on his other self, but lowered his chin in distrust, and repeated, “report.”

“Report.”

“Report.”

“Report!”

“Report!”

“REPORT!”

“REPORT!”

“Enough!” Weaver stepped in. “This is never gonna end. Goswin that we don’t know, how long have you been here?”

“A few months,” Alt!Goswin replied.

Weaver looked over to her Goswin. “We’re not in the past. We’re in a new timeline. The changes we made, this is a natural byproduct of that.”

Just then, another version of Weaver appeared behind them. “That’s not exactly what’s happening. Tell me, were you on the X González, or the Emma González?”

“The X, of course,” the first Weaver replied. “That’s their chosen name.”

“Yes, but sometimes the ship is named after their original name,” Alt!Weaver clarified.

“Sometimes?” Weaver echoed. “How many timelines are there?”

“All of them,” Alt!Weaver said cryptically.

“What the hell does that mean? What was the point of divergence?”

“It’s not like that,” Alt!Weaver answered, still not clarifying anything. “There was a moment of split, but it wasn’t linear. Perhaps you remember seeing a whole bunch of other yous on the González?”

Yeah, that happened. They saw a few alternates on the bridge, but they assumed that that was just some temporal glitch, since they quickly disappeared. They didn’t think that those other selves still existed somewhere. How many splits were created that they didn’t witness? “Yeah, were you one of the alts we saw on the bridge?”

“No, I was in the engine room at the time,” Alt!Weaver began, “but not all of us were. Not all of us were even on the ship at all. Like I said, it wasn’t linear. We’ve been replicated all over the timeline, and rescattered all over elsewhere on the timeline, and in every parallel reality. Furthermore, we can move ourselves along the timeline, and across realities, at will. This star system here is a sort of an anchor point. We’ve all been showing up here for months, and recording each other, adding to the data pile. It’s difficult, though. I don’t always know if the versions of my friends that I’ve been with are still the ones that I’m with now. We may be shifting between groups, and not even realizing it.”

“That’s why I have a body,” Eight Point Seven realized. “It’s not my body. I was uploaded directly to the ship, but I stole this from someone else. What happened to her, the victim?”

“Mapping our alternates is even more difficult than mapping the timeline itself,” Alt!Weaver explained. “I don’t know how to differentiate anyone. A lot of people think that time is a river, and that’s only a metaphor that they recognize because it’s not analogous to time...but to consciousness. Your mind is fluent, and you are not the same person that you were a split second ago. Shifting to your alternates could be happening literally as we speak, and we wouldn’t be able to detect it. In this region of space, spacetime breaks down. Everything converges here. Everything diverges here.”

“Did we cause that, or did it cause us?” Goswin asked her.

Alt!Weaver smiled. “Yes. And no. There is no cause. There is no effect. It’s just bleh.” She pantomimed vomiting. “It’s everything,” she added, mouth still agape, and hands still cupping the bowl of the imaginary toilet.”

“Everything, everywhere, all at once?” Alt!Goswin offered.

“Pretty much,” Alt!Weaver replied.

“There is a magnolia on Bida,” Weaver said to her alternate. “I believe that it can reconverge us. We just have to figure out how to control it.”

Alt!Weaver nodded. “The Blending Tree. Yeah, it’s possible, but we would have to get everyone there at the same point in time; to the everything bagel,” she said as she was gesturing to Alt!Goswin to reinforce his reference. “As I was saying, I don’t know how many of us there are, or where they are, or what they’ve changed in the timeline. Some of us keep displacing other people, and that’s a whole other box of problems,” she added under her breath.

“Oh, haha,” Goswin laughed awkwardly. “What a bunch of bozos.”

Two different versions of Eight Point Seven showed up, one of which had a deep scar running across her cheek. The first Eight Point Seven stepped closer and regarded her, tilting her head to the side as if she had a lizard brain nestled inside of her dominant neural net. After taking a look at the scarless Eight Point Seven, who was indistinguishable from herself, she reached up to her own face, and dragged her fingernail across her forehead. Blood leaked out, and dripped down. She then stepped back to where she was, not bothering to clean it up.

The Eight Point Seven with the other scar nodded. “Your new designation is Eight Point Seven Point Six.”

“Dude,” Briar said, aghast.

Eight Point Seven tilted her head back to where it belonged. “It didn’t hurt,” she said, a little like Cameron from The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

The other scarred Eight Point Seven addressed the whole group. “It’s beginning.” She sounded even more like Cameron, so robotic.

“What’s beginning?” Goswin asked.

“The Reconvergence,” the other, other Eight Point Seven answered.

“Of us?” Goswin pressed. “We were just talking about the magnolia tree.”

“It has nothing to do with us, I don’t think. The destruction of four realities, and the creation of a new universe, is happening today. The war begins tomorrow.”

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Fluence: Magnolia (Part IV)

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Neither Harrison nor Madam Sriav were where the four of them expected them to be. It was still raining when they went back to England centuries ago, but the area was empty. They figured that Harrison took Briar’s mother, Irene to safety somewhere, but when they looked around, they couldn’t find anyone. “Will he hurt her?” Briar asked.

“I really don’t think so,” Weaver answered. “He knew Mateo and Leona back in the day, and helped them with some of their earlier exploits. He wasn’t programmed for violence, nor does he have any reason to cause harm to her.”

They kept searching, but still couldn’t find either of them. Whatever cave was supposed to magically transport them to Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida was presumably pretty well hidden, which would explain why the local villagers didn’t constantly go missing, only to reappear in the timestream a thousand years later. Briar didn’t know much about time travel, so he reasoned that his mother must have survived all of this, or he wouldn’t exist right now. Of course, the other three knew that the cosmos was full of new timelines, sprouting up every time someone went back in time to change history. It was entirely possible that Briar was wildly different in this current version of reality. Just because he was still standing here didn’t mean that everything that happened in the past was identical to what happened where he was from. No one told him all of this, partially because it was a complex and hard-to-teach concept, but also because they were better off not meddling in this time period any further than they already had. If he understood that there was no such thing as fate, they would never be able to get him to leave. He would die of old age in the attempt to locate her again.

They huddled together, and thought of the island of Lorania on Dardius. Here, the weather was a lot less exceptional, which made it difficult to be sure that they had returned to the right moment. Madam Sriav was also nowhere to be found, but Eight Point Seven was pretty sure that little time had passed since they last left. When Madam Sriav was frustrated with having been taken from her home, she kicked flowers, and at one point, sat down to pull pedals apart. Some of this debris was still where she had left it, or nearby. It had not yet been blown away by the wind, or decomposed to the ravages of time. Eight Point Seven estimated that at most, only several minutes could have passed. They were less certain in this case that anyone involved would be safe. They had no frame of reference for predicted events here, nor any clue whether Madam Sriav was destined to do something particular in the future. If she was taken by someone, or otherwise lost, it could be catastrophic, and they would be hopeless to stop it. They didn’t have enough information about it.

“At least we’re navigating pretty well,” Goswin acknowledged. “If we keep this up, we shouldn’t have to worry about ending up in outer space, or anywhere else too dangerous, or even just wrong.”

“That’s still a danger,” Weaver determined. “If there’s no way to put a stop to this, we’ll probably find ourselves trying to use it towards some end. Good luck to us, figuring out what that objective should be, and how to go about achieving it.”

“Are you talking about me?” Briar questioned, offended. “She looked at me when she said that.”

“I was looking at everyone,” Weaver insisted.

“No, you were looking right at me,” Briar volleyed. “I get it, I’m the problem child. You’re all saints, but I’m the no-good dirty murderer.”

“She was looking at you,” Eight Point Seven confirmed.

“Thank you!” Briar shouted. “At least you’re honest.”

“She was looking at you, not because you’re a problem,” Eight Point Seven went on, “but because your motivations are distant from ours. In fact, I’m not sure what they are. What do you want?”

“What do you want?” he asked. “Are you quite certain that the three of your motivations are as aligned as you think?”

Eight Point Seven tilted her head, having been programmed to simulate inquisitive dispositions to better blend in with human cultural communication. “They may not be, but these other two can listen to reason, and they can agree to a decision without necessarily liking it. You were raised alone, in a world of two people. You lack social skills, and I need you to remember, Briar, that that is not your fault.”

Briar blinked excessively, waffling on whether to let the tears welling in his eyes fall to the ground, or somehow suck them back into their ducts. “You’re right,” he realized. He glared at Goswin. “It’s his.” 

“What? What do you mean?”

“We could have saved her,” Briar explained. “We could have kept my mother out of that cave, and away from Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. I could have grown up on Earth, around normal people.”

“I didn’t do that,” Goswin defended.

“Yes, you did. You took us away from there during your little experiment to see who was causing this. By the time we got back, she was gone, having no other option but to seek shelter in that cave. This is all you! You’re why I grew up alone. You’re why I killed Mateo Matic! But I didn’t, did I? You did. You killed him!”

“Briar, that’s not how it works. The timeline has been changed,” Weaver said. “Harrison would not have left her alone to go travel the English countryside. He’s with her on Bida.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Briar argued. “I was there, remember? I never knew the guy.”

“Exactly,” Weaver agreed. “That’s why I said the timeline changed. Our memory of events is different than what happened in this reality. Harrison was probably there the whole time, but none of us recalls that, because we’re the ones who changed it. We originated in a different timeline, and we’re all duplicates now. Our alternate selves are currently somewhere else, having done different things with their lives, if only slightly.”

“So, there’s another me out there, one who didn’t kill Mateo at all?” Briar asked her. “He’s happy?”

Eight Point Seven took a half step forward to indicate that she would field this one. She shook her head. “What you did cannot be undone. They already tried to change it, but you were wearing the hundemarke. That’s why the timeline is likely only slightly different. What happened happened, and couldn’t have happened any other way.”

He frowned and hung his head low. “Oh, yeah. I remember that.”

They all tensed up, waiting for Briar to decide that they should go back to save his mother, and maybe himself, in some other way, but he just stood there. With disaster somehow averted by the truth, they participated in an impromptu moment of silence, each of them lost in their own minds. Goswin stared at the broken flowers on the ground as the wind picked up, and did begin to scatter them down the hill. He ultimately took a breath, and looked up at the others. “Now that we know this about ourselves—that we share some sort of...power—we have to decide what to do with it. What’s our next step? Where and when do we go? This was always a vaguely mandated mission, but I feel like...we can’t just waste this on a beach resort.”

“You mean...what are you going to do with me?” Briar asked.

Goswin took a deep, rejuvenating breath. He got right into Briar’s face, but in a comforting way, rather than a threatening one. “You killed a man. You did it with malice and intent, and you expressed no remorse for it. What I need to know is are you going to do that again, to anyone, for any reason?”

Briar took a long time to respond. He was thinking on it carefully. “I know what you wanna hear, but the truth is that I don’t know. I don’t want to promise you something that I can’t necessarily follow through on.” He looked amongst them. “You three seem to have some idea of what’s going to happen in the universe. You have to understand that I don’t. I imagine that it’s quite easy for you to tell others what you’re gonna do, because you know what you’re gonna be up against. It’s not fair, really, being around such confident people, and being so...ignorant. So small.”

Goswin closed his eyes and shook his head mildly. He could actually relate to this sentiment, having to compare his knowledge of the universe to these other two, especially Weaver, who conceivably knew that all of this would happen, and how it would turn out.

Briar continued, “I can tell you that I don’t want to kill anyone in this moment, and that I have no plans to do it again. And I can tell you that I do feel remorse. I just don’t know how to show it. I think my mother was a little too...patient with me. She did her best to teach me how to feel, but not to make sure that what I felt was clear to others. I’m sorry that Mateo is dead, and that he died by my hands. I really do wish that I could undo it. Now, no matter how many other duplicates of me there are, they’ll always be just as miserable as the real me.”

“Don’t think of it like that,” Goswin told him. “You had good times in your life, I know it. Otherwise, you would be a wild animal. You wouldn’t wish to undo anything, except maybe to make things worse.”

“Maybe,” Briar admitted.

They all looked up to find that they had moved again. They were in a jungle that looked not unlike the one on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida where they tried to experiment with their new joint ability. “Where did we go this time?” Eight Point Seven asked.

Weaver started to work on her handheld device.

“Don’t bother,” Briar said to her. “I know where we are. This is my home. This is where I grew up. I was feeling nostalgic, I guess.” He walked straight for a large tree that had been marked up by tons of hashes. “This is tree eight. It’s my favorite one, because it’s when my mother started letting me mark the calendar unsupervised. I was eleven at the time.” He looked down the line at the other trees with hash marks, which supposedly represented their own years. He appeared to be doing some mental math. “It’s too late. Mom’s dead, and so is Mateo. We can’t change anything now.”

“We should still leave,” Weaver warned. “We don’t want to step back into our timeline. People live here, maybe not in this area, but still.”

Briar nodded, still admiring the eighth calendar tree. “I know, I’m sorry.”

“We all did this,” Eight Point Seven reminded him. “That’s how this works.”

“Yeah.” He nodded again, and managed to tear his gaze away, only to find himself distracted by something else. It was a different tree. This one had no hash marks on it, but there was something very different about it. The branches spread wide despite its currently short stature. The flowers were a stunning shade of blue. It was one of a kind, at least in the immediate area. “What the hell is this?”

“What? What’s wrong with it?” Goswin asked him.

“This shouldn’t be here. I memorized every blade of grass in this area. That tree was never here.”

“As I said,” Weaver began, “we’ve changed things. As we suspected, Harrison was here. He must have planted it a long time ago. Briar, he probably helped raise the other you. I don’t know how you feel about that.”

“I don’t either,” Briar said.

Eight Point Seven stepped towards the tree, and began to examine it closely.

“What is it?” Goswin asked her.

Eight Point Seven leaned forward and licked the bark to absorb some of the mysterious tree’s DNA, which she took a moment to analyze. “Magnolia arthurii. This species was introduced to England by mysterious travelers in the early 12th century, and disappeared from the records shortly thereafter. This is from Earth.” She turned to face the group. “Harrison didn’t just plant it, he brought it here. He might have done it on purpose, or the seed got stuck in his boot.”

“It’s beautiful,” Briar said in wonder. He slowly walked up to it, and reached out. He placed a hand upon its truck, and suddenly froze. The flowers buzzed as if carrying an electric current. Ripples in spacetime emanated from the bark, and into Briar’s face. With each wave, his head jerked back a little from the force, but he never let go of the tree. By the time any of them thought to maybe stop whatever was happening from happening, the ripples ceased, as did the buzzing. Briar fell towards his back, but Eight Point Seven managed to catch him before he crashed.

Is he okay?” Goswin asked.

“I’m okay,” Briar answered for himself. He gently pulled himself away from Eight Point Seven’s grip. He stumbled a bit from dizziness, but he never fell again. “I remember everything now. I remember my life with Harrison. He was my father. That didn’t happen before, but I remember it now. I remember both timelines.”

Weaver walked up to the special magnolia now. “This somehow stores memory, and he activated it for upload.” She turned to face Briar. “Do you have anyone else’s memories, or just those of your alternate self?”

Briar stopped to think about it for a moment. “Just mine, I think. I don’t feel like I’m anyone else.”

“Psychic and at least moderately sentient. This thing is very interesting. Either all magnolias of this particular species could do this, or it changed when it passed through the time cave.”

“Should we...all touch it?” Goswin posed.

“Absolutely not,” Weaver urged. “Don’t go around touching things. That could be one of Leona’s Rules for Time Travel.”

“You wanna stay here, don’t you?” Goswin presumed. “You wanna study it.”

“We could always leave later,” Weaver said out of hope. I don’t think any of the colonizers made it all the way out here. But it’s up to you, Captain.”

Briar seemed to want to stay as well, which made some sense. Eight Point Seven couldn’t care less. “Okay,” Goswin agreed. “We still don’t know exactly what year it is, though, so we can’t be certain how far the colonizers are. Stay vigilant.”

< > Entire Story

Fluence: Mirage (Part III)

< > Entire Story

Generated by Google Gemini Advanced text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 2

Goswin wiped the rain from his eyes, and was able to see that this Irene de Vries woman was not alone. A very young child was huddled against her hip. All signs pointed to the fact that this was Briar, but it could also be his son, or his great grandfather, or his eleventh cousin, forty-two times removed. “What year are you from?” Goswin asked. “Oh wait, no. Sorry. I mean, uhh...report.”

Irene smiled. “Trinity used to say that to me all the time. Is that in the time traveler’s handbook, or something?”

“If there’s an actual handbook, I’ve not actually seen it. That’s just what I’ve heard others say. May I ask the boy’s name?”

“It’s Briar.” Confirmed. “Hey, do I know you from somewhere? You look familiar. Have you ever been to the 21st century?”

“Captain!” Behind him, Weaver was power walking up, followed by Eight Point Seven, and Harrison.

“Is Madam Sriav with you?” Goswin asked.

Weaver shook her head. “She didn’t come. We assume she’s still on Lorania.”

“That’s not good,” Goswin mused. “We’ll try to get back to her. Crew, I would like you to meet Irene de Vries, and her son...Briar.”

Eight Point Seven didn’t react, and of course, neither did Harrison. Weaver flinched, but kept it together. Briar was in very, very big trouble, but not yet. Warning Irene that her son would one day become a killer was not going to help. Things could conceivably get better, but they could also get worse. She may decide that the only way to stop this would be to murder her son, and that would not be an okay decision. It wouldn’t work anyway. Briar killed Mateo while he was wearing the hundemarke, which was a special temporal object that created fixed moments in time. No matter how you try to change the past, this will always happen, as will anything inherently necessary to lead up to it. “It’s nice to meet you.” She pulled Goswin towards her, and did her best to whisper in his ear while still being heard through the rain. “We need to get out of here.”

“I know,” he replied.

“If you have to go back to the Middle Way, or whatever it is you did to make this happen a fourth time, then do it again. I don’t care if we end up on the moon. Just get us out of this paradox.”

“Fourth?” Goswin questioned incredulously. “You think I’m the one who took us to Achernar in the first place? You think that this was just something I’ve always been able to do, but the first time I tried was when I was in my 80s?”

“The thought crossed my mind. Maybe you’re salmon.”

“Excuse me?” Irene interjected. “The rain’s starting to come down harder. I really could use some shelter. There’s a cave nearby that we can hide in temporarily.”

“Hey!” a voice shouted to them. “Get the hell away from my mother!” Briar was running towards Goswin as fast as he could, and unlikely preparing to come to a complete stop just to exchange a few choice words. He was in a tackle posture. Fortunately, he didn’t make it that far. Harrison reached out, and lifted him up by his underarms, holding him in the air effortlessly as Briar continued to paddle his feet to no avail. “Let me go!”

“Did he just say mother?” Irene asked, confused and scared.

Goswin waggled his finger at the still struggling Briar. “Stop. Stop! We’re not going to hurt anyone. If you want to protect her, then you will stop moving, and listen to me very carefully.”

Briar went limp, and started to pant.

“Everyone gather around. Not you, Madam de Vries. Please go protect your son.” Once everyone else was in a huddle, Goswin went on. “I have a theory. Briar, are you familiar with any landmark on Earth; anything at all?”

“No, nothing.” Yeah, he had only ever remembered living on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. “Well, except for this.” He held up a photo of Irene in her younger days, smiling in front of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. “It was her favorite place in the world.”

Goswin closed his eyes and sighed. “Okay, I’ve been there too. That’ll work. Think about that place. Think about trying to go there.”

“Why?”

“Would you just do it? The National Museum of Natural History. Think about the museum. Think about visiting there. Don’t think about anything else.”

“Okay, I guess.”

The rain suddenly stopped. They were now in the middle of a grassy park. To one side of them was a giant bosom, and to the other a giant phallus. Behind them stood a red castle, and before them was the target museum, which was the second bosom. This was Washington D.C. all right. They were soaking wet on a bright, sunny day. The tourists around them were confused, and a few of them looked really nervous.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea,” Goswin admitted. “I just didn’t want us to go back to Bida, and Briar doesn’t have a frame of reference for much on Earth.”

“What is your hypothesis,” Weaver asked, “that he’s the one who brought us?”

“Well, it seems like the only possibility,” Goswin determined.

“We didn’t even see him at the other locations,” Weaver pointed out.

“Excuse me?” A man in overalls had approached Briar. “Could you please step closer to your friends?”

“They’re not my friends,” Briar spit at him.

“That is very much not my point, sir,” the stranger said. “Please step closer to them.” He waited, his patience thinning. “Please,” he repeated. “Thank you,” he added when Briar finally complied.

“What is it you need?” Goswin asked, ready for a fight, even though he was not much for violence.

The stranger held up his hands like he was trying to block the sun from his eyes. He jerked them a centimeter away from each other, which served to freeze everyone around them in place. Time was stopped, or at least moving very slowly. He gradually pushed his right hand forward, and in front of his left hand, which pulled back, and moved in the opposite direction. As he did so, time began to reverse outside of the bubble he had erected for them. They watched as the tourists walked backwards. A child’s scoop of ice cream flew back up to his cone from the ground. Once the scene was back to where he wanted it, he closed his hands into fists, and snapped them against each other, pinky to thumb. The five of them felt a lurch, as if the roller coaster ride were just beginning. The man carefully placed his left fist against his nose, and looked over his hands like a sniper. His arms were shaking, but not like he was struggling, more like it was integral to the process. As he slowly moved his fists away from his face, the scene around them began to blur and fade into blackness. They flew forward, also like a roller coaster. Finally, he opened his hands back up, and separated them, stopping the ride.

They were standing in a desert, the three main pyramids of Giza rippling above a mirage a few kilometers away. The slight distortion from the bubble dissolved, and the warm wind began to blow sand into their eyes and noses. “All right. It’s done.”

“What’s done?” Eight Point Seven questioned.

“You’ve been erased from the timeline. No one who witnessed your arrival in the National Mall remembers that it ever happened, because it didn’t. They’re all going about their day, still clueless about time travelers, and the like.”

“Thank you, Repairman,” Weaver said to him as if they were old friends. Maybe they were.

“When you say, we were erased from time...” Goswin trailed off intentionally.

“You just never showed up there,” the Repairman clarified. “Instead, you transported yourselves to this random spot in the Necropolis. You’ve been here the whole time, and if anyone were to ask a lizard or cactus around here what they saw, that’s what they would say.

“I don’t see any cactuses,” Briar noted.

“Then maybe you don’t have to worry about any witnesses,” the Repairman joked. He paused a moment. “Well, bye.”

“Wait!” Goswin stopped him. “Could you help us again...maybe by telling us what’s happening to us?”

“I wouldn’t know, but I heard you blame everything on this guy,” the Repairman said. “What I’ll tell you is that the ability to transport people from a distance is rather rare. It’s not impossible but...in my experience, when multiple individuals travel together without any of them realizing how or why, it’s not because one of them is doing it on purpose, but because there’s some kind of glue that binds them together.” He made a quarter turn, reached out, and opened an invisible panel in the air. They couldn’t see anything, but they could hear the familiar creak of metal scraping against metal. He reached into it, and took hold of an equally invisible handle, which he pulled down. His figure turned into a black silhouette for a split second before disappearing completely.

They stood there in silence for a few moments. “I have another idea,” Goswin finally said, worried how they would take it.

“A new experiment?” Weaver asked him, intrigued.

“Are you up for it? We have to get a handle on this. I don’t really want to spend the rest of my life randomly jumping from point to point.”

“Let’s hear it,” Eight Point Seven encouraged.

“You can’t,” Goswin replied. “I’m going to write four places down, and keep them compartmentalized. You will each think about your own place, and only that place. If he’s right, and there’s some kind of glue between us, it won’t work, because it will be contradictory.” He pulled out his handheld device, and started writing the locations down. He showed Briar the first one.

“Really?” Briar asked incredulously.

“Don’t. Give it away,” Goswin warned. “It’s a magic trick.”

Briar sighed, upset. He was being expected to think about the cliff where he killed Mateo Matic. It was simultaneously the worst and best place for him. What happened there was probably the worst thing he had ever done, so that meant, now that he had been triggered, he wouldn’t be able to think of anything else, even if he wanted to.

The other three, on the other hand, were going to be thinking about the the west entrance to the primary research facility on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. No one ever went back there, so they shouldn’t have to worry about being seen. Goswin was the only one who knew that he, Weaver, and Eight Point Seven had the same spot in mind. If Briar were the one in charge, it didn’t matter what the others thought of, because they would always end up where he wanted to go instead. “Everyone ready?” Goswin asked. “I guess time travel works on psychic powers, so...everyone think about your respective locations, please, and really, truly, desperately try to actually go there. Don’t think about anything else. It may take a while, I really don’t know.”

They stood there in their huddle for a minute or so without anything happening, the humans struggling with the dust storm that was starting up around them. It did work, though. The sand and sun disappeared to be replaced by a dense forest at twilight. Alien bugs crawled around on a tree next to them, as wingèd ones swarmed in their faces. This was definitely Bida. But it wasn’t the cliff where Briar committed murder, and it wasn’t anywhere near the research facility.

“Whose spot was this?” Eight Point Seven asked.

“No one’s,” Goswin revealed. I don’t know that we’re right about this.”

“Don’t be so hasty,” Weaver said, taking out her own handheld. “I can connect to the satellite now.”

Goswin was worried again about how they would take it. “Briar had the...the cliff. You know the one I mean. The rest of us had the west entrance to Pryce’s lab.”

Weaver peered at him over her device. “Only two places.”

“Yes, it was like a blind study.”

Weaver nodded, and tapped on the screen. She held it in front of his face. “We’re right in the middle.”

“What?” Goswin took it from her, to see what she was talking about.

“Exactly equidistant from the cliff and the building.”

“We split the difference,” Eight Point Seven noted. “The Repairman was right. It’s all of us. Whatever each of us wants, this...force between us tries to come up with something that matches our criteria combined. If you wanted Italian food, and she wanted Chinese, and I wanted French, and he wanted Ethiopian, we would end up at a fusion restaurant.” She started pointing at the members of the group accordingly. “If we wanted to go to the years 1776, 1912, 2024, and 2100, we would show up in 1953.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Goswin said. “Briar wasn’t with us on that void planet, or on Dardius.”

“Wasn’t he?” Weaver prodded.

Briar frowned. “I was hiding. I wasn’t planning on showing myself at all, but then you attacked my mother...”

“No one was attacking her,” Goswin defended. He grunted. “We have to figure out how to get rid of this. It could cause us serious problems. If one of us wants to go to Teagarden, and the rest want to go to Glisnia, are we gonna end up somewhere in the middle of empty space?”

“We can’t do that yet. We have to go back to return Harrison and Madam Sriav to where they belong.”

“That’s true,” Goswin agreed. “Can we all come to a consensus long enough to make that work?”

< > Entire Story

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 17, 2438

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Generated by Google Gemini Advanced text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 2

When the team stepped on board to familiarize themselves with their new ship, they were surprised to find out that the holographic generator that was meant to keep it invisible while it awaited the return of its original crew was not the only nonoperational component. The reframe engine was also broken. It was literally cracked. Trying to start it up could have vaporized them all, which was why it was so important to always run a preflight check before launch. Mirage didn’t know how this could have happened since the thing was fully intact the last time she saw it. Her best guess was that the Empire had somehow detected it, even while it was all cloaked up, and engaged it in battle. How it managed to ultimately avoid capture, and rendezvous with Mirage on Ex-666, was a question that this theory could not answer, but it was designed with its own AI, which could come out of dormancy as necessary. Its flight logs did not say anything about an attack, but maybe it erased this information on purpose, which Mirage said it might do if it suspected the risk of a temporal paradox.

As far as Mirage herself went, Niobe Schur managed to convince her to stick around to help formulate this new anti-Exin army. If the Empire was going to be destroyed, they were the ones to do it. They wouldn’t necessarily be staying here to work on this revolution, and they decided that any need they had to make some noise on other worlds would help Team Matic avoid being discovered. The fact that a new group of rabble rousers showed up once a year, generally a light year away from where an apparent different group of them showed up, was always a flaw in their plan. Everyone knew what the team’s pattern was, and even if they knew nothing about holographic disguises, they would eventually start to see that pattern shine through. Perhaps if others took up the mantle at the same time, the pattern might get drowned out as just one of many rebel factions spreading throughout the Corridor.

“Vitalie!613 has sent us the information that she was able to gather on the planets that we might be going to,” Leona said to the group. “Someone from just about every planet was sent to the resort recently enough to know what we could be in for. A few worlds are missing from the data, presumably because nobody from there ever won the competition, but that’s not a problem yet. Rambo?”

“Ex-811,” he began. “You could call it FarmWorld. So far, we’ve not seen a whole lot of automation going on, but this place wouldn’t survive without it. The whole surface is covered in crops, livestock, or oceans, lakes, and rivers of creatures. The people who work there are meant to keep the machines maintained, and to make executive decisions about the work. It is they who decide where the produce is going, and how much of it. There are some incompatibility issues going on with species that didn’t evolve alongside each other, so it’s also their responsibility to figure out how to return the ecosystem to homeostasis. Apparently, the people who used to work here, who now live on Ex-612, talked Vitalie’s ear off about it. They loved to brag about how they used to live here, that it was the best planet in the Corridor, besides the luxury worlds for the elite. I don’t know if that’s true, but I also don’t know whether there’s anything we can do here. What mission could we go on, besides finding Vitalie!811?”

“We could burn the crops.” When everyone frowned at Marie like she was a serial killer, she frowned back. “There are no bad ideas in brainstorming!”

“We don’t want the...Corridorians to starve to death,” Mateo told her. “But maybe we need to look at those distribution schedules. If someone isn’t getting enough food, either unintentionally, or as some form of oppression or punishment, we could maybe alter them?”

“That’s a good idea,” Leona agreed. “Though, that would be a long-term mission, and one thing we know about this region of space—and about ourselves—is that we are not built for the long-term. If we do something like that, our only hope is to sneak down and reprogram the automated delivery ships, and somehow make it so that the supervisors don’t realize that it’s happening.”

“Well, we’ll have to leave at the end of the day,” Marie began, “but maybe we can insert a ringer into the team.”

Leona nodded. “Vitalie!811. We could set her up as a new...President of Distribution, or something. Ram, do we have the necessary intel to put someone undercover like that?”

“Yeah,” Ramses answered, consulting his tablet. “We have a pretty recent roster. There may be some discrepancies from the time lag, but Distribution President is not a preexisting position, so I believe we could justify making it up.”

“We’ll have to find Vitalie!811 first, and then hope that she’s up for it.”

“That could be tricky,” Ramses said. “Those automators have tons of sensors. They’re not designed to detect sneaky humans, but they would see us anyway.”

“Maybe it’s time for us to do something different, ya know, instead of looking like celebrities,” Olimpia suggested. “We’re supposed to be able to turn invisible.”

Leona nodded. “That’s technically an ability that we have, but it’s complicated. “Time powers are ingrained into the neurology of the person who was born with them. And the way they specialize is not well understood. There are different flavors, even among people with the same thing. One teleporter, for instance, but only be able to make a jump by literally jumping into the air, while another doesn’t have that quirk. We’ve met other people who can manipulate photons, like Vito, but Alyssa McIver is not Vito Bulgari. He’s better at invisibility, she’s better at impersonation. I don’t think any of us has time to learn something new, at least not reliably.”

Olimpia smirked knowingly. “What are you talking about? I’ve been invisible during this entire conversation.”

“What are you talking about?” Leona questioned. “I’m looking at you right now.”

“Are you?” came Olimpia’s voice from behind them.

Everyone jolted their heads to find her leaning casually against the doorframe. They looked back to see the other Olimpia, still perched next to them on the couch. Mateo reached out, swept his hand through one shoulder, out the other, and back again. Yeah, she was just made of light.

The standing Olimpia giggled, and shivered intentionally. “Oo, Mateo, you just touched my boobies.”

Leona stood up and approached what was presumably the real Olimpia, and peered into her eyes. “You can throw a perfect image of your likeness. That’s very interesting. I’ve made external holograms before, but nothing quite like that, not something that moves fluidly enough to make someone think that it’s me.”

Olimpia shrugged slightly. “You’re the Captain, and Second Engineer. I’ve had more time to practice. I’ve actually been doing it in my spare time for a while now. The other day, when you were teaching us, I was faking low proficiency until I was ready to show off this level of sophistication.”

“We might use that in the future,” Leona acknowledged. “Thanks for letting me know, Loki.”

Olimpia smiled. “It’s nice to finally be able to contribute in some small way.”

“Thanks,” Mateo said. “Now I’m back to being the only useless one around here.”

“We’re not gonna have this argument again,” Leona told him.

“Can you turn others invisible?” Angela asked Olimpia.

“I’ve never tried, because I wasn’t telling anyone about it.” Olimpia glided over to her friend, and extended a hand to help her out of the chair. “One thing I do know is that I have to initialize it with a passionate kiss.”

“I don’t really care for PDA,” Angela muttered.

“Well,” Olimpia muttered back, “if you don’t wanna turn invisible, okay...”

Angela rolled her eyes, and let Olimpia kiss her in front of the group, leading Ramses to squirm a little in his seat. “All right, enough games” Angela insisted. “Let’s get on with it.”

Olimpia looked towards the floor, and started to take a deep breath, which incidentally transformed into a yawn. “Okay, I’m ready.” She shut her eyes, and continued to breathe deliberately. Beams of light began to shoot through her body. They weren’t really going through her, but striking a spatial field that she had formed all around herself, which teleported the flux of photons to the other side, and then let them continue on their way. The beams grew and merged with each other until she was fully gone. Now she could begin to put Angela through the same thing, but it was slower, more erratic, and prone to being undone. The beams would shrink, and unmerge after they had already come together. The light flickered, and parts of Angela’s body began to appear randomly all over the room. They could hear the grunts of frustration in Olimpia’s voice.

“It’s okay,” Leona said. “Ramses and I can come up with a different way to fool the sensors. We’ll find Vitalie!811, even if we have to stay here for a couple of days. We’ve done it before. There’s no rule that says we have to leave within 24 hours.”

“No, no!” Olimpia protested. She sighed and gave up trying to make Angela disappear, but she stayed invisible herself. She started to speak again through Holo!Olimpia on the couch. “It’s true that I won’t be able to figure this out today. I need more practice holding two flux fields up simultaneously, which as I was saying, I’ve never tried before, because I was keeping this all a secret. That doesn’t mean this can’t be done. I’ll just go down to the planet on my own.”

“No,” Leona argued, “we don’t go anywhere alone. I’m pretty sure that was your idea, Oli.”

“It was? Well, great. Then I can change it. I’m going alone.”

“No, you’re not. That is an order.”

“Leona,” Olimpia said calmly.

“What?”

“I’m already gone.”

“How is that possible?”

“I can throw sound particles too. That’s part of the deal, I guess.”

“Number one, no it’s not. Number two, they’re not particles; they’re waves, which is Physics 101. It’s deeply concerning that you think you’ve mastered this technique when you don’t even understand the basics of it.”

“Well, I don’t know how my heart pumps blood throughout my body, yet I’ve never accidentally stopped doing it, have I?”

“Mateo, she listens to you. Will you please talk to her?” Leona pleaded.

He tilted his head down to the side, kept it there for a few seconds, and tilted it the other way. “Olimpia, you go, girl.”

“Goddammit, Matty!”

“You can’t do everything, Leona,” Mateo contended. “We are a team, and we have to trust each other to help in our own special ways. I don’t know if you’re just jealous that she’s the best now, but it gets kind of annoying that you are always the end-all, be-all. You’re the leader, the scientist, the computer hacker, the master schemer. You’re the whole package, which tends to sideline everyone else. I don’t know if she’s gonna succeed down there, but I’m gonna let her try. And if something goes wrong, any one of us can jump down and save her. You can find your faith in us...or you can sulk in private, but you need to remember that you’re a captain, not a king.”

Fuming, but not about to blow up, Leona stuffed her fingers in Ramses’ pocket, and pulled up his magical clicker device. She pointed it at the Holo!Olimpia, and made her disappear with the push of a button. “The guy we’re trying to stop can do exactly what she can, but he can reach across light years. Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know,” Mateo admitted.

“Me neither, and that scares the shit out of me. What we’ve learned about our friend today presents us with two possibilities. Either it’s a coincidence, or that girl down on the planet ends up giving that man out there power. Everything we’re doing right now could just be a loop that we’re closing, which leads to the greatest tyrant the timestream has ever seen gaining everything he needs to accumulate the power he has now, but in the past. I have no proof that that’s what’s happening, but it’s a possibility. It always is. It’s happened to us before. Horace Reaver terrorized you at the beginning of your journey, because you ruined his life in another timeline. Zeferino Preston moved us around like chess pieces in a game that he had all but already won. I don’t want to be the cause of my own effect.”

“That’s a good point.”

Leona tapped on her neck. “Olimpia, don’t talk, it’s not safe. Your life is first priority. Finding Vitalie is only second priority. You understand me? I mean...I know you understand me, still don’t talk. If she’s down there, she’s been asleep for centuries, and she can stay that way for another few years while we focus on the mission at large. Get back up here safely by EOD, whether The Caretaker is in pocket, or not. If you do understand...send me some love.”

They all five felt a lot of love coming from Olimpia.

Leona couldn’t help but smile from it. “I love you too.” She tapped on her comms disc to close the channel. “Now. Ramses, please look back through the data that Vitalie!613 sent you. Start working on a new food distribution plan. If this entire planet is covered in crop and livestock, there’s more than enough to go around, even if every other planet is as densely populated as Earth. An army marches on its stomach. Prepare a disc for Vitalie too, because we may have to amend the plan later.”

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