Microstory 2344: Vacuus, April 2, 2179

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Dear Condor,

That all sounds very dangerous. I’m glad that you’re inside fulltime now. I’ve only ever lived in three places, and never go outside. I grew up on the ship while it was on its way all the way out here, and a little when it was first in orbit around Vacuus. I was eighteen when we arrived, and after some initial surveys, I was part of the first group to drop down to the planet. And I really mean that. We took something called a dropship down to the surface. We lived there for almost two years before they had built enough of the residential base for us to move in there. Back then, we couldn’t launch any ships back into orbit, because it takes too much fuel to do it the traditional way, and the necessary infrastructure for more advanced methods took time to engineer. Now we have something called a launch loop, which—if you don’t know—is like a giant-ass roller coaster that allows us to get into space without expending too much energy, or requiring as much tensile strength as a space elevator would. They’re thinking about building the latter at some point, but it’s going to take a lot more effort and time. Anyway, until we started to be able to travel back and forth relatively cheaply, there were two separate populations. Those who never dropped down to Vacuus lived up there, and had their own kids. We stayed in contact with each other, though, since it was the only place we could talk to which had no significant time delay. I’ve never been back in person, however, while most people I know have gone back at least once. It’s really just little kids who have no had the opportunity yet. My friend who lives up there now has been asking me to take the launch loop into orbit for a visit, and I want to do that, but I also don’t. So much can go wrong. I cannot believe that I used to live on a ship. How did I end up so soft and cowardly? How did you do it? How are you so brave? You don’t have to answer that. This is just my neuroses getting in the way of my goals. I already go to counseling to get this stuff figured out.

Not yet living my best life,

Corinthia

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: February 3, 2399

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Leona is in her office, doing her multitasking thing, but this time, she’s not trying to steal from the world governments. She’s only trying to help by making this the best planetary defense system in six realities. Right now, the biggest issue is power generation. It doesn’t matter how fast they build all these fantastic structures, producing and storing energy takes time. You can always cultivate more of it with more time. Aldona is an expert in antimatter production, which is a field of research that Leona knows relatively little about. The AOC runs on the stuff. She knows how to handle the storage pods, load them, and maintain the equipment. But she’s never had to make the antiparticles herself. She’s never even seen a power plant before.

Antimatter is, as the name would suggest, and to put it simply, the opposite of matter. When a particle and antiparticle meet, they annihilate each other. Since the universe is made of matter, there’s unsurprisingly not enough of the other kind around. It doesn’t last long; it can’t. It will take a culture decades to figure out how to do it, and that’s after decades of using other, completely unrelated power sources, like fossil fuels and renewables. It’s extremely powerful in small quantities, but requires a great deal of infrastructure. Aldona can’t figure out how to make it happen in time, which is a problem. Nuclear fusion is good enough for a defense system that doesn’t have to do anything, but once a serious force tests it, that whole system could fall apart. If an enemy were to bombard their weakest link with fodder, that part of the grid would run out of juice quickly, like the health bar for a video game character who’s underwater.

“What about the Fourth Quadrant?” Leona asks.

“We’re working closely with them,” Aldona answers. They’re in less danger, because the Kansas City bubble is virtually impenetrable on its own, and there’s a way to evacuate the other islands into it, but we’re still going to help.”

“No, I’m talking about power. Antimatter is better than fusion, but what’s better than antimatter?”

“Uhh...a blackhole drive?”

“In a way, yes, but you don’t need to capture a black hole, not when you’re one of us,” Leona says.

“I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”

“Temporal energy,” Leona explains. “It’s what powers the Novus Metro in the Fourth Quadrant. At least, it did at one point. Time moves at a different speed as the main sequence, so they steal the energy that the discrepancy releases, like static from your socks on the carpet. We can use that, instead of half-assing the construction of antimatter plants, just to get them completed in time.”

“Are you feeling okay?” Aldona questions. “You look—forgive me—exhausted.”

She is exhausted, but there is nothing she can do to change that. Too many people are involved; she can’t just do whatever she wants. She’s never been responsible for an entire world. All those people, and more, are relying on her to make this happen. “That’s not the point, I’m not making this up. Let me speak to someone in Novus Metro.”

“I’ll see what I can do, but this goes beyond my understanding. What would you even call something like that?”

“I believe they ended up going with temporal dynamo.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 14, 2252

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Leona was maybe a meter and a half in up in the air when she jumped forward in time. She hadn’t expected the shuttle to be gone, and since she wasn’t prepared for it, she didn’t have time to land on her feet. Still, it wasn’t too far of a drop, and the ground was relatively soft, so she quickly recovered. She stood there for a moment, a bit disoriented, trying to make sure she wasn’t just confused about where the shuttle was. No, it was definitely gone, and Briar was the only one who could have taken it. Why, though, would he have done that? When did he do it? And how long had it taken him to fix it first. She checked her pocket and discovered the drive chip to still be in it, so he must have figured out what was missing. Perhaps he was a lot smarter than she realized, or he had purposely misled her. Either way, she was stuck there, and might never be saved, unless the powers that be assigned someone to rescue her.

Firewood. The first thing she needed to do was find firewood. Then she needed to go back to the nearest source of water, which was only about a half kilometer away. She had only gathered a handful of sticks when she heard the low drone of the shuttle as it approached. It landed exactly where it had been before.

Briar stepped out. “Sorry! Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. I lost track of time. I think you’ll understand later. We didn’t worry about such things on the other side of the mountain. My mother was never more than a kilometer away from me, so things just happened whenever they happened.”

“You fixed it.”

“Yeah, once I read through the entire manual, it wasn’t too hard.”

“Briar, that thing is, like, five thousand pages long.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t have anything better to do. The drive chip was missing.”

Leona cleared her throat, but didn’t say anything.

He examined her for a second. “Oh, I see. You thought I would abandon you.”

“I thought...” she hesitated, “it could happen.”

“You were right to be worried. I get that we just met. I would have done the same thing, though I probably would have removed the main engine access grip instead. It’s made out of tantalum hafnium carbide, just like the rest of it, which means I wouldn’t have had the raw materials to synthesize a new one, and the panel wouldn’t have closed without it.”

“I’ll remember that for next time. Where did you go?”

“I went to the coordinates that my mother left me. I didn’t know if you would be willing to take me, and I kind of needed to go on my own anyway.”

“You should have risked that I would refuse,” Leona said. “What if you had missed something in the manual? You could have died, and I could have been stuck here forever.”

“This is true. I wasn’t thinking about that, though. I just knew I needed to go there. It’s on an entirely different continent, so I’ve never been able to get there before. This was my one and only shot.”

“Well, what are you talking about? What did you find?”

“I’m talking about a secret my mom kept that I don’t even think Trinity knew. I can’t tell you what I found, but I can show you.”

Leona weighed the options of getting into the shuttle with this stranger. She was planning to do that anyway, but that was before he proved how intelligent he was. Smart people are dangerous. Still, his story was intriguing, and her curiosity was stronger than her reason. “Do we have enough fuel?”

“The solar paint is enough to hold us. We won’t be going hypersonic, of course, but we’ll get there soon enough.”

Several hours later, they were across the ocean, and on the other continent. He had to land a few kilometers away from the destination, both because there weren’t great landing sites closer, and because he didn’t want to disturb the people on the other side, whatever that meant. Leona gained a decent grasp of the population geography of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida in this time period, so she could find a remote region to escape to. Like the area they had come from, this wasn’t inhabited either, so she didn’t know who it was he might be referring to.

After they traversed the distance, they came upon the foot of a mountain, right at the mouth of a cave. “We’re going in there?” she asked. She wasn’t scared of the cave itself, but she still couldn’t be entirely comfortable going into an enclosed space with him. Now it was even more frightening, because of there really were other people around here, who knows what he had planned? Had he just wanted to kill her, he could have done it anywhere, but if others were involved, that would explain his need to transport her to a second location. Yet she pressed on, and followed him into the darkness.

Before too long, she started feeling noticeably lighter. It was as if the surface gravity was being altered with each passing step. Now, it was true that gravity was slightly different at different parts of any planet, based on proximity to the equator or poles, or altitude. But it didn’t change this dramatically in a matter of meters. Something weird was going on, and she was getting the impression they weren’t on Bida anymore. This much was all but confirmed when they finally exited the cave, and found themselves in the middle of a wintry forest at civil twilight. It would have also been impossible for the climate to have changed this quickly, for a number of reasons. They had walked in a fairly straight line, and would never have had the chance to reach the other side of the mountain this fast. It was pretty hot where they entered. Plus, she was pretty sure she had gotten a good bird’s eye view of the mountain, and it just didn’t look like this. No, they weren’t on Bida anymore, but where?

“I don’t know,” Briar answered. “Mom made me memorize these coordinates when I was a boy, but didn’t tell me why. She said I could use it to escape if it was my only option.”

Leona was nodding, and inspecting their new environment.. “It’s definitely an escape. It’ll be dark soon; here, not back where we came from. Night should fall by the time we get all the way back to the shuttle, and then all the way back here.”

“Why do we need to return to the shuttle?” he asked.

“There’s something in the storage compartment that I need. I don’t think this is Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, but unless you’ve explored, and seen some frame of reference, there’s no way to know without more data. I have a pretty good guess, but we need confirmation. Didn’t you say there were people?”

“I’ve seen footsteps, but no actual people.”

“Okay.”

And so they got their ten thousand steps in with a trek across the rocky landscape, back to the shuttle. They must have just missed a dust storm, because the craft was so much dirtier than it was. This time, she remembered to seal it up. They got even more steps with the walk back to the mountain with supplies. It was indeed nighttime on the other side of the cave. The more dramatic contrast proved that they had walked through some kind of portal. Leona removed the particular instrument she required, and set it up on the tripod in the closest clear area she could find. She needed a good view of the night sky. She made adjustments when the readings didn’t give her accurate results, working through the problem out loud. “Okay, Northern hemisphere, probably.—No, that can’t be right.—Predictive modeling only goes so far, so I better hope it’s within close range.—Historical data only goes so far back too.—There!”

“What is it?”

She double-checked the results, then sighed. She didn’t know how she should feel about what the readings told her. Whether this was naturally occurring, or created by a choosing one—perhaps spatial merger, Kayetan Glaston—this was Earth. The problem was that it was Earth over nine hundred years ago, so she was worse off than if she had just taken the reframe engine. “It’s Earth, year 1343.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s just not helpful. This is why your mother said it was a last resort. It would really only help you if Tau Ceti was about to explode, or something. There are civilization in this time period, but they’re not great. I mean, we’re in the middle of the Black Death right now, though I guess that wasn’t true when your mom told you about the cave. Or maybe it was. Maybe the portal always takes you to 1343; I don’t know.”

“What does that thing do?” he nodded towards the tripod.

“It measures stellar drift. By looking at the stars, we can find out where we are, but with enough data, we can also find out when we are.”

“What do we do with this information?”

Leona triple-checked the results, then started packing everything up. “We do nothing. We can’t interfere with the native population, and we can’t tell anyone else. When we go back to Trinity and the others, you can’t say a word about the portal. Can you keep a secret? Did your mother teach you how to do that?”

“Well, she didn’t, because we didn’t have secrets between us. I spent a lot of time by myself, though, even when she was alive, so I certainly know how to be quiet.”

“I’ll have to hope that’s good enough. Word cannot get out about this place. Sure, lots of people can travel through time, be it on their own, or with help. We don’t need to be giving them any other means, however. This has to stay between us.”

“I understand.” It looked like he really did. She was fairly confident Briar would keep his mouth shut, especially since it was unlikely to come up naturally in conversation. He just needed to get through the first few days when people would still be asking him questions about his recent experiences with Leona. After that, no one would think to ask him whether he encountered any weird spacetime anomalies.

“We should go. The others are only going to believe it took me so long to repair my shuttle. After that, they’ll be questioning my timeline.”

“Will we ever come back here?”

“I’ll need to when I get a chance, to check how the portal operates over time. You won’t need to come back, and I kindly ask you to not try while I’m gone. Secrets don’t only get out when you tell them to people. Sometimes people catch you because of your actions.”

“I never learned how to lie,” Briar said, “but I’m not an idiot. You don’t just want me to not tell people; you want people to not find out. I really do understand.”

“Good. Now, come on. I’ll introduce you to everyone.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 13, 2251

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After her talk with Eight Point Seven, Leona felt that she needed to get away from people. Fortunately, she had a whole world to explore. Unlike the other exoplanet colonies, Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida was fully hospitable, so her movements didn’t have to be restricted. She could go literally anywhere on the planet, and she didn’t even have to tell anyone. She left a note in the hangar, apologizing for borrowing a skyshuttle, which was a flying vehicle that wasn’t space-capable. Then she disabled all tracking and communication devices, input a somewhat random set of coordinates, and took off. She got a few extra hours of sleep that she didn’t really need while it took her away. When she arrived at her destination, she found herself unimpressed. It was certainly still quite beautiful, but it didn’t do much to alleviate her depression. She didn’t know what she expected to find, but this wasn’t helping. She just started wandering around the forest, not headed in any particular direction. She eventually strayed too far from her landing point, and couldn’t find the shuttle anymore. She was lost, and that was fine, because what did anything matter? She didn’t put much effort into finding her way back, and barely noticed when midnight hit.

With nothing better to do, Leona found a sorry excuse for a cave—which was more just a fixture in the face of a cliff wall—and holed up for a few hours so she could get more sleep that she didn’t need. Now armed with this rest, she called upon her orienteering skills, recalled her memories of where she’d gone, and finally found her way back to the shuttle. It looked a lot different already. Ivy had winded its way through the hatchway, which she had foolishly left open. There were noises coming from inside too, so some kind of creature must have taken up residence. It wasn’t like she had memorized the fauna catalog, so she would have little hope of knowing whether the animal was dangerous or not. She needed to get back to her friends, though, so there was no other choice. She carefully peeked inside, and didn’t find an animal at all; but a human. It was a young man, actually, around her age.

“Oh my God,” she exclaimed on instinct.

He was just as scared to see her, if not more so. He fell back into the control console with a short yelp, and started shaking.

Once the shock was gone, Leona calmed herself down, and tried to look as nonthreatening as possible. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you. Do you speak English?”

“No, I don’t,” he answered with complete fluency. He wasn’t being funny; he seemed to legit think he didn’t.

“You appear to speak at least a little of it.”

He thought about this for a moment. “Oh, is that what this is called?”

“It is, yes.”

“Then yes.”

“Are you one of the colonists?” she asked him.

“I don’t know what that is,” he replied.

It sounded like she needed to approach this a different way. “How long have you been living here?”

“Here, exactly?” he pressed rhetorically. “A few months, I s’pose.”

“Where were you living before that?”

He crawled towards the exit, and pointed at a mountain that was probably twenty or twenty-five kilometers away. “I spent most of my life East of Mount De Vries.”

Leona looked back at it. “Who named that mountain?” She didn’t think anyone lived on this continent of Bida at all, let alone taken the time to name geographic features. While they were presently in a highly vegetated valley, most of this was rocky and mountainous. There was obviously life here, but it wasn’t as diverse and interesting as other regions of the world, so the researchers had not yet begun surveying and cataloging it in greater detail.

“My mother named it; after herself.”

“Your name is De Vries?”

He nodded. “Briar De Vries.”

“Where’s your mother now?”

He pointed to the mountain again. “Scattered over the summit. After she died, I performed the resting ritual, and then went out in search of a new place to live. I didn’t want to stay where everything would remind me of her. That was two years ago. Is this your spaceship?”

“It’s not a spaceship,” Leona answered. “It can only fly in the sky.”

He frowned. “The sky isn’t space?”

She shook her head. “Not while there’s still air. Space doesn’t start until there’s no more air.”

“Hm.” It would seem his mother attempted to educate him as much as possible, but there were still some key facts he was missing. Back in civilization, he could look those questions up, but trapped all the way out here surely left him with some significant misconceptions. He appeared to be receptive to new information, though.

“Do you have any idea how you got here, so far away from other people? Do you know that there are other people?” She didn’t want to assume too much.

“Of course I know that,” he said, offended. “They all live back on Earth. This is Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. A woman hired her to help make this world safe for people, but no one lives here yet.” He was talking about Trinity, and her habitability project. His mother must have been pregnant, possibly unbeknownst to Trinity, when she came here. The question was why Trinity just left her here, instead of sending her back home to live out her life? Why was Briar still here now?

She shook her head again. “Your mother was successful. People do live here now. I suppose you wouldn’t have seen any of the landing ships in this hemisphere.”

He widened his eyes. “They’re here?”

“Yes. Thousands of them, with more coming every year.”

“The woman never really said when she was going to bring others. I guess mom thought it would take much longer. That was forty-two years ago.”

“Wait, you’re forty-two?”

“No, it was forty-two years ago when she told me why it is I was born on this planet, but I was fourteen already.”

“You’re fifty-six!” He didn’t look a day over thirty.

“Yes?”

“You’re aging much slower than normal, Briar.”

“Oh, right. Kahaeli root. It doesn’t taste very good, but it keeps you young. Can we go meet the others now?”

“Umm, yeah.” Leona crawled in to start the pre-flight check. It was more important than ever since the vessel had been left exposed and unmaintained for a whole Earthan year. It was worse than she thought, though. Heavy rains must have caused really bad water damage in the circuitry, and it looked like vines had punctured the primary fuel line. There might be enough in the reserves to make it back to Homebase, but this was going to take a lot of work. “I imagine your mother never taught you to be a mechanic, or technician, or something?”

She was a virologist. I wouldn’t know the first thing about flying this, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to fix it. Did I do something wrong by moving in here?”

“No,” she assured him. “If anything, you being here lessened the impact nature had on it. I should have been more careful.”

“Can we not call for help?”

“I disabled communications, like an idiot. I’m kind of going through some stuff right now, and I didn’t want anyone to be able to follow me.”

He had no response to this.

“I can fix it, but it’s going to take some time.”

“How much time?”

That was an awkward answer. “Technically, only a day. But truly...an Earthan year.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t just leave the craft for an entire year while I lived somewhere else. At the end of today, according to how time is measured in a certain zone of Earth, I will jump forward one year. I can work on fixing this for the next several hours, but then I’ll literally disappear, and I won’t be back until 2252. I have no control over this. It’s just how I am.”

He stared at her for a moment. “I have a basic grasp of the idea of time travel. Mother was instantaneously transported here fifteen years prior to the arrival of the probe ship Earth sent to see what the solar system was like. It took that probe thirty-four years to traverse the distance. I don’t understand why it is this happens to you, but I can conceptualize the pattern.

And so Leona got to work fixing the flying machine. She probably could have completed it faster, but she wanted to teach Briar a few things along the way, in case more maintenance was required while she was gone. As she did so, however, she started getting worried that he might take advantage of his new knowledge. What if he was such a quick learner that he affected the rest of repairs, and stranded her there? She would have no way of returning, and no one would have any clue where she was, unless he decided to tell them. When he wasn’t looking, Leona pocketed the drive chip, so she could keep it with her when she made her jump to the future. It was a small but vital component. The shuttle would not fly without it, unless another was synthesized. Since that part of the controls wasn’t broken, she never explained to Briar how it worked, so hopefully he wouldn’t know what to do. In a perfect world, she could trust him to just wait until she came back, but this wasn’t anywhere near that. They had only just met, and there was no telling what kind of person he was.

She stopped working as midnight approached. “I could keep going with these last few things,” she began to explain, “but chances are I wouldn’t be able to get through it, and I don’t really want to be in the middle of it when midnight strikes. I think we’re at a pretty good stopping point. By this time next year, you’ll be at Homebase, where you will finally meet the woman who hired your mom to work here.”

“Trinity is still here?” he questioned.

“Yeah, of course.”

“I don’t wanna meet her.”

“Why not?”

“She ruined my mother’s life.”

Leona frowned. “Briar, why did she not return to Earth?”

“She couldn’t,” he said, as if Leona should have automatically understood that.

“Why not?”

“Against my mother’s advice, Trinity partook in wanderberries. It puts you in a haze, and makes you forget everything that happened to you for an amount of time proportional to the amount of berries that you ate. The way mom tells it, Trinity was so confused that she couldn’t even tell that my mom was there, begging her to take her back to Earth. After hours of trying, Trinity finally just disappeared on her own, and never came back to this region.”

“Well, that sounds like it wasn’t Trinity’s fault. I mean, I’m sure there’s a logical reason she ate the berries; maybe she didn’t know what they would do. And once she was in that state, she was in no condition to help your mother.”

He shook his head slowly. “Wanderberries wear off. She would have become fully lucic two days later, at most, assuming she stopped eating them. She would have remembered everything about her life, including the time she was on the drug. She never came back, Leona. She abandoned us here. Now, I can’t complain about my life. I lived with my best friend until she died two years ago, and I don’t know really know what I’ve been missing. But my mother longed for her, and it made her a little sad, all the time. I won’t forgive Trinity for that.”

“I understand your position,” Leona said to him. “But it’s irrational to make these judgments based on one side of the story. I’m not saying your mom lied, but maybe Trinity has a different perspective. Maybe she really did forget forever, because she also accidentally ate a different type of berry at the same time that your mom didn’t realize. Right there is all the more reason we have to go see her. You need to confront her about it.” Before, she was worried Briar would fix the shuttle and leave her here, but now she was worried he would sabotage it beyond repair, and still leave her here. That wasn’t something she would be able to protect herself against. Maybe she should have refrained from teaching him anything, and just worked doubletime, so they could leave today. It was too late now.

“I guess you’re right. If nothing else, I can yell at her about it.”

“So, you’ll still be here when I come back a year from now?”

“I promise.”

A year later, Leona came back to find the landing zone completely devoid of all shuttles and humans. Somehow, Briar had fixed the ship on his own, and had flown off to who knows where.

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Microstory 742: Credos, Convention Thirteen: Compromise, Chapter One

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Many years ago, before anyone in the galaxy was flying to the stars, there was group of kingdoms that held lands not far from each other, and they each had something that the another needed. One had the best soil for farming, but no water to irrigate it. One had access to a great river of freshwater, but no decent way to transport this water anywhere else. One had developed advanced forms of transportation, but did not have enough fuel to power them. One was sitting on top of a grand reservoir of chemicals that could be processed into fuel, but no way to dig into the soil. The last had the tools to access underground resources, but few crops and other food, so the highly trained workers were hungry, and unable to work. From the outside, there may seem to be a perfect solution to all of their problems. Kingdom One can give its crops the the workers of Kingdom Five. Kingdom Five can dig for the chemicals under Kingdom Four’s lands. Kingdom Four can provide fuel for the transportational vehicles of Kingdom Three. Kingdom Three can deploy vehicles to transport Kingdom Two’s water to Kingdom One. This seems easy enough to do, until you place yourself in each Kingdom’s respective perspective. No one is interested in trading with anyone else, for they are too close to the issues to see what the entire system looks like. Why would Kingdom One give any crops to Kingdom Five when they cannot get anything in return? They cannot see the whole cycle, and how it will ultimately come back around to them. Even if they could, who can start the cycle in the first place? The only way for anyone to give what they have is to first get what they need from someone else. Fortunately, there was a workable solution to this, but the whole process depended on everyone working together. Though there was no easy way to transport the water from Kingdom Two to Kingdom One, there were still much harder ways. Everyone in the five kingdoms had to band together, and get that water to the crops. The queen from Kingdom Four understood this, and she organized the labor force into something no one had ever seen before. The first batch of crops was sent to the trained diggers, and the cycle was able to begin. Eventually, this worked so well, that they ended up with a single unifying economy, and the kingdoms merged into a single nation, living in prosperity for decades.