The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 22, 2566

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When Mateo, Angela, and Ramses landed on this new colony planet, the latter immediately started trying to figure out how to get back home. It wasn’t right for Romana to make this decision for them. He was completely locked out, and embarrassed by that. He guessed that the invisible probe he had orbiting this planet were monitoring their progress. Once they satisfactorily completed the assignment, it would automatically unlock the recall program, and send them back home. Until then, they were forced to help the locals come to an agreement regarding their grape conflict.

Romana didn’t send them off with nothing. Ramses had the equipment he needed to sample the soil himself. The colonists had their own ways, but they weren’t very sophisticated. They came here with personal tech restrictions. They wanted to be as organic as possible, so while they happily maintained their transhumanistic enhancements, they shunned powered tools. They weren’t against them in general, they had just decided that they wouldn’t use them. They were perfectly content with Ramses doing it for them. He discovered that the south side of the river had better soil. The grapes would be happy there, and they would also be able to expand the farm as needed.

After the locals agreed to follow Ramses’ suggestion, they hoped to be slung back to Ramosus, but no such thing happened. Romana may have been waiting until midnight central, but there could have been some other issue. Maybe she needed to see that the colonists would indeed follow the new plan, and not just a pinky promise. So they helped till the land manually until midnight central approached, at which point they snuck off to a remote part of the forest. There they waited for their time jump.

It was now a year later. The vineyard was absolutely thriving. It had grown bigger than they thought it would in the short amount of time. Ramses guessed that the sun was emitting more desirable wavelengths of light, but he did not care to test it. They were ready to go. They should have been returned by now. Maybe Ramses wasn’t right about how it worked, or Romana was keeping an eye on them, and simply controlling it manually. Or maybe something was seriously wrong somewhere else, like the team’s other assignment site. Or Romana herself was in trouble.

“Are you sure you can’t bypass it?” Angela questioned. “Can you proverbially reverse the polarity, and undo the lockout? Or find some kind of backdoor in the system? We have our own slingdrives. We should maintain full control over them.”

“You’re right, we should,” Ramses agreed. “Rather, I should. I don’t know how she did it. Our onboard slingdrives are non-negotiable, but they’re missing a component. It’s...if you know anything about guns, it’s essentially the firing pin. The process won’t trigger without it, unless it has some external trigger, like the Ramosus base.”

“Can you build a new one?” Mateo proposed. “Just the new trigger.”

“Hmm,” Ramses said. “I didn’t think of that. It shouldn’t be too hard, as long as she didn’t sabotage anything else. I don’t even know how she gained access to our catalyzers in the first place.” He pulled out his tablet, and started tapping on it. “I can’t promise it’ll be done in a day since I’m away from my lab, but I’ll work as fast as I can.”

“Take your time,” Angela encouraged. “It’s better to get it right than do it rushed.”

“In the meantime, should we go back and help in the vineyard?” Mateo suggested.

“Let’s leave them alone,” Angela decided. “They need to learn their own limits. They will probably eventually bring external tech back, and just become normal. I think we did all we were obligated to. I just wish I understood why Romana doesn’t agree.”

Ramses was unable to finish. The next year, the vineyard was burnt down.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 21, 2565

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Things were awkward and tense on Ramosus, though it was no one’s fault. It wasn’t even Romana’s, though she definitely felt like it was. They were in a holding pattern. Ramses believed he had successfully cleared all the corruption in her by flushing her system of all foreign bodies, but they still weren’t going on missions, even though they received two pings from the alert system. They were all saying it was because they were burnt out, but they just wanted to stay and support Romana. Yet that was exactly what she didn’t want. She didn’t want to be coddled or protected, because it just made her feel worse. She clearly had other things on her mind anyway.

Romana was brushing off their concern. She seemed to be more worried about Boyd at this point, which was fine. Mateo would be fine. Ramses had a lot of data on who he really was, and what separated him from any data corruption. Boyd, on the other hand, was a threat—to them, and to himself. She wasn’t even allowed to talk to him.

Mateo was in her room now to check on her. “Hey. I’m not gonna ask you how you’re doing.” He coolly sat down on her bed next to her. “Instead I’ll say...what’s up?”

“We have already talked,” Romana said. “We do not need to go over it all again.”

“That’s why I asked that question,” he pointed out. “You decide on the topic.”

“I wanna talk about those outstanding pings,” Romana decided. “You should go.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Mateo insisted. “Before you say anything, I know you don’t need to be cared for like a little baby, but I think you need to be distracted, and it’s easier to do that if the distraction is being created and controlled by someone else. If you spend all day dwelling on what happened—even unintentionally—it will eat away at you. You run the risk of it becoming part of your personality. You don’t want that, do you?”

“Guilt and regret are facts of life,” she responded. “They serve a necessary function. They prevent future potential mistakes. I don’t wanna dwell, but I don’t wanna forget either. I’m going to spend the appropriate amount of time reflecting on it.”

“I respect that,” Mateo admitted. “And if you really don’t want to do something with me, like play a boardgame, I won’t force it. But I still need to be here as an option, not off on some colony, helping aliens decide where to plant their grapes, or whatever.”

“Someone should respond to the pings,” Romana reasoned. “It might not be the problem of low-stakes garden design. It could be really serious.”

“No, that’s the actual problem,” Mateo explained. “It’s a grape conflict. They don’t know which side of the river is the best, and don’t have time to observe the seasons.”

“Why would the system flag that?” Romana questioned. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Because the computer calculated a high probability of it leading to what will initially appear to be a compromise by planting on both sides. But this grape species is high maintenance, so they will have to live in two separate communities. Years from now, the computer thinks it will start a war. It has apparently run a lot of simulations.”

Romana was annoyed. “So you should go. Why are we arguing about this?”

“That could take decades,” Mateo dismissed. “They will still be there a few days from now. I’m staying here. Again, we don’t have to do anything, but I’m not leaving.”

She sighed. “Yes, you are.” She reached up and slapped the back of his neck.

It stung. He tried to pull it out, but whatever it was burrowed into his skin.

“Boyd helped me build that. You won’t be able to return to Ramosus until you’ve completed whatever task you went there to do. This is my decision as navigator.”

He teleported into the on-base slingdrive, which powered up on its own, and sent him away, along with Ramses and Angela. A second trip took the other three.

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