The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 30, 2005

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“Whoa. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. This isn’t right. You’re acting like you’re helping me, but the last time you did that, you turned out to be the bad guy. I can’t trust you.” Mateo and The Cleanser had jumped into a closet somewhere.

“Oh, that was ages ago.”

“How long?”

“What?”

“How long ago was that for you? It’s been only weeks since we’ve met.”

“I dunno,” the Cleanser said, like an actress who didn’t want anyone to judge her for her age. “Maybe 150 years?”

“How old does that make you?”

“More than 150 years old, that’s how old,” he answered. “You’re pretty pushy for a guy who desperately needs my help.”

“Do I need your help? I don’t even know what the problem is.”

“In this reality, Leona came to visit The Pentagon with her parents. They will all die in the 2005 attack unless you and I save them.”

“Okay, so what do we do? Pull the fire alarm?”

“First of all, that doesn’t work. That’s like cleaning the floors with a toothbrush, which I’ve tried by the way. Secondly, I’m still your enemy. I’m allowing you to save your family, but only them. Everyone else in this building who is supposed to die is going to die. There is nothing you can do to stop that.”

“Why not? I just killed Hitler. Let’s stop the attack as well. We know where the terrorists stole the planes from—I mean, I don’t personally remember, but you have ways of finding out. Let’s save everybody. Come on! Who’s with me?”

“Nope, that’s not part of the game. You either choose to save your family, or you choose to save nobody at all. Could I stop the attack? Yes. But that would mean screwing with my own timeline, and I’m not prepared to do that. An earlier version of me is in this time right now, and I have no intention of stopping him from carrying out his mission. Here’s something you have to understand. The powers that be, and the choosers are logistically capable of creating a perfect world. We could always, always go back in time and stop something bad from happening, replacing it with a better chain of events. We could stop Grog the Caveman from burning his face off when he tried to eat the fire he just discovered, and from there, we could adjust the timeline so that humanity never suffers. We could prevent all humans from ever knowing what pain feels like, but we don’t, ‘cause fuck ‘em.”

“That’s a pretty horrific perspective on the world ya got there.”

“That, Mister Matic, is everybody’s perspective on the world.”

“Well, I know better than to try to convince you to help your fellow man, and I do have to concede to the fact that you understand the timestream better than me. If you say I’m only allowed to save Leona and her parents, then I guess I have no choice but to go along with it. You’re too powerful for me anyway.” Was this Mateo maintaining his strategy of being unpredictable? Or was he giving up?

“I was expecting more backlash.”

“I’m happy to oblige.”

“No, that’ll be all.”

“Where is Leona?”

“Down the hall,” he said, sporting a knowing smile.

“What is it? What don’t I know.”

The Cleanser opened his mouth, hoping to release a bit of snark.

Mateo started speaking in a mocking voice, “yeah, I know that you could fill a fifty-two volume book series with what I don’t know. Har-har-har.” He went back to a normal voice, “tell me what you’re keeping from me.”

“I think it’ll be better if you just see.”

“If this is 2005, then I already know that she’s only a child, so if that’s what you have in mind...”

“No, it’s even weirder than that!”

“Okay,” Mateo said dismissively while opening the door.

He had seen photo albums of Leona from when she was younger, so it wasn’t hard to find her in the crowd. Little Leona was with a tour group, and was very excited to be there. As expected, her eyes were wandering. She wasn’t listening to the tour guide, instead taking in everything else around her. “Leona,” he heard from the crowd as he drew closer, but he couldn’t see who it was coming from. The voice was...very familiar, but that couldn’t be, because he had never met Leona’s birthmother. “Leona, get over here and pay attention.” A tall man finally moved over to reveal who was calling to her. No, it definitely wasn’t her birthmother. Or if it was, then his relationship with Leona would have been even stranger than they thought with the whole reincarnation bit.

“Carol, let her look around,” Randall Gelens said after coming into view. That’s right, Mateo’s adoptive parents from his original timeline were now Leona’s parents from the new timeline, presumably also adoptive.

“See what I mean?” the Cleanser asked him rhetorically.

“How did this happen?” It was neither good nor bad. It was just weird. And awkward. And weird.

“I actually don’t know the details, but I swear I had nothing to do with it. Both Leona’s parents died, instead of just her mother, and since you weren’t around to keep them busy, Carol and Randall ended up adopting her.

Leona was smiling in a way he hadn’t seen in a long time. Or maybe he never had. She was happy. Sure, both her birth parents were gone in this timeline, but if Mateo saved them, his parents would both live. She would never know what it was like to be painfully attached to a salmon, and the two of them would be able to live long and happy lives, possibly even long enough to reach that longevity escape velocity. Makarion and that Blender chick had left to take her from this life and pull her back into this one, forcing her to remember memories from another life without her consent. He now realized that that would not be fair to her. She had a life now, without him. She was better off, and it wasn’t like he could go back and stop her parents from dying, and create yet another timeline. No, this was as good as it gets, and it would be selfish of him to take that away from her.

“Could you do me a favor?” Mateo asked, still looking at the love of his life. She was, of course, way too young for him, even more so than when they had first met. But she still looked like the Leona he knew, and this was all he was going to get. He was going to savor every moment. If he only had had a phone, he could have kept an alternate photo of her on it. But he hadn’t had a phone since the early days of salmonhood, so this last sight of her would have to do. And bonus, he got to see his dead parents again as well. Maybe he had stepped into the best reality possible, even with the Pentagon attack. Erasing himself from the timeline might very well have been the single best act he had ever done in his life.

“You want me to stop Makarion and Nerakali from blending her memories from the alternate timeline?” the Cleanser asked.

“I know we’ve had our differences. I know you don’t like me for reasons I can’t even begin to understand. I know you are who you are, but for once, could you please try to do something nice for someone else, instead of what you think is going to be the funniest?”

“Yes,” the Cleanser replied somberly. “I sometimes make healthy choices. This will be one of them.”

“Thank you.”

“Find a way to get them out.” He teleported away.

Mateo spoke into the aether, “okay.”

How was he going to do that? None of them knew him, so it wasn’t like he could just ask that they leave the premises. He was already told that he couldn’t pull the fire alarm. He didn’t have a gun to wave around, and even if he did, he didn’t want to scare anyone. There was just no way out of this without looking like a terrorist. Yes, as a time traveler, he was one of the few people immune to retribution, but his ultimate disappearance from the timestream would raise eyebrows, making things worse.

The closet. Yes, that was the answer, as it had been before. After Mirage, the artificial intelligence tried to kill him in his birthmother’s home, Mateo jumped forwards through the year, and ended up appearing in Horace Reaver’s dastardly facility. But he hadn’t just landed anywhere, he had been in a closet. That closet happened to be filled with security guard uniforms, allowing him to blend in with his pursuers. The Pentagon closet had the same thing. He went back in and changed into the present guard uniform, hopeful that the mission would be easier than last time. Was this luck? Was this the Cleanser’s doing? Or was it something else?

He walked out with as much confidence as he could muster and approached Randall Gelen, the man who had raised him, but had no memory of it. For a second, Randall looked at him with some form of familiarity, but then shook it off. Maybe that was the answer to déjà vu, a brief peek into an alternate reality of things that once were.

“Yes, can I help you?” Randall asked, eager to comply with an authority figure.

“Sir, we are currently experiencing a threat to national security. I urge you and your family to quietly leave the premises, and move as far from the building as possible.”

“What about everyone else?” Carol asked, pulling Leona closer to her.

“We have protocol for this sort of emergency. It’s my job to methodically get everyone in my sector out, but a building-wide alarm would cause panic, putting civilians in further danger. Please tell no one of what you know.”

Randall thought it over for a second, but only to make sure Mateo knew that he knew how serious the situation could be. “I understand, thank you.”

It worked. His family quickly but carefully separated from the tour group and headed for the exit. Randall was keeping an eye on him, though, so Mateo started approaching other people, asking to see their visitors passes for a random check, making it look like he was trying to get them out of the building as well. Once the three of them were out of sight, and he was convinced that they would be safe, he walked away.

Mateo opened a door to the courtyard and slowly strolled toward the center, enjoying the scenery. He had never been to Washington D.C. before, and it seemed as good a place as any to die. He watched other people go about their day. They had no idea what was coming, but they were starting to see. Before too long, they could hear and feel a rumble, growing ever closer to them. Five airplanes were flying far too low, and getting lower. He stared up at them fearlessly, safe in the knowledge that everyone he loved would be able to go on with their lives without missing him. There was a sort of relief in that. He was the one person in the world who really could die without anyone caring. The worst part about death is the loss the survivors feel, and that was something he wouldn’t have to worry about. He was done. He wouldn’t have to jump through time anymore. What a nice thought.

I’m sorry to disappoint you, Saga Einarsson’s telepathic thoughts gently pervaded his mind. I’m not saving you for them, or even for you. I’m doing this for everyone else.

Mateo could see a person standing on the roof of each of The Pentagon’s five sides. It must have been Saga herself, but how she was able to be in five places at once was a question with no answer. As the planes dove towards the building, and everyone around him was screaming and fleeing, the five Sagas transformed into...something else. Just before their noses hit their marks, the planes disappeared. A sort of weird Matrixy ripple sort of thing fluttered through the air. Everyone who had been freaking out about the oncoming disaster flickered and returned to a state of calm. It was like several frames of film had been edited out of the movie. They continued as normal, none the wiser. Not only had Saga stopped the planes from hitting the building, but she had manually removed them from time so that only he could remember the version of events where they had existed. But why? Why could he? He was just a salmon. He shouldn’t have been immune to this particular change.

The Cleanser teleported next to him. “What happened? The planes should have hit. I’m the one who sent them here! This is not what I remember!”

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Second Stage of Something Started: Resignation (Part XIII)

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Vearden looked out the window to see the clouds flying by faster than they should have been. They were moving through time at an abnormal rate. He looked back to see The Cleanser dancing his fingers around in the air like he was lightly playing a floating piano. As he did so, everyone on the plane except for the door-walkers started drifting their head around in some kind of daze. “What did you do to them?” Vearden asked, probably a bit too curious.

“It’s like when you wake up and think you’re late for work but eventually realize it’s Saturday,” he tried to explain, “but that on crack.”

Saga violently grabbed him by the shoulder. “Forget about that! What did you say about crashing into the Pentagon?”

“Exactly what I said, bitch! Get your hands off me!”

“This isn’t what we signed up for.”

“What did you sign up for? Nothing? That’s what I thought. Now sit down and let me do my job.”

“And what exactly is your job?” Vearden asked, uncharacteristically more relaxed than his partner.

“I’m The Cleaner,” he replied.

“Don’t you mean cleanser?” Vearden asked.

“No, I mean Cleaner. What are you even talking about?”

As Vearden just stared at him in confusion, Saga quickly figured out what was happening. This was a past version of the Cleanser they all knew and hated. He did look significantly younger than before. For whatever reason, this chooser chose to change his name to the Cleanser, possibly as a response to whatever made him quit his chooser job and go rogue. Strangely, it would seem that Vearden had given him the idea for his new nickname all along. But if this were true, who came up with the name in the first place? “Nothing, sir,” she said, hoping he would drop the subject. “His bootstraps are just on too tight.”

The Cleanser Cleaner seemed to have understood the reference, and did make a point of letting it go. “Well, it’s my job to clean up the timeline. Some events are so pivotal to the timeline that when a chooser prevents them from happening, someone has to go in and put it back the way it was.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Saga pointed out. “I remember the 2001 and 2005 Pentagon attacks. The planes aren’t from the future. I mean, the government would have certainly tried to cover that up, but the events were so massive and far-reaching that we would have heard at least rumors.”

“First of all, you’re from a timeline where the 2005 Pentagon attack was carried out by humans, with regular airplanes that appropriately predate the event. Secondly, the government won’t have to cover up anything. We have ways of adjusting people’s memories by merging them with an alternate version of themselves through a quantum entanglement connection. I don’t expect you to understand how it works, because I certainly don’t.”

“We’ve heard that word before,” Vearden noticed. “Merging. We encountered someone called The Merger in 1975.”

“That’s quite interesting. I’ll have to remember that for my future, but I’m not talking about physical merging. I’m referring to blending.”

Remembering the problem at hand, Saga brought the conversation back. “So you’re going to send this plane to 2005 so it can crash into the Pentagon. Why would you need to do that? That human attack was successful.”

“Again, in the timeline you remember, but someone went back and stopped it.”

“Oh right,” Saga said. “I still see one problem with your plan.”

“That I’m short about four planes?”

“Oh yeah,” Vearden said, too excitedly. “Guess you better give up!”

The Cleaner smiled while he was interlocking his fingers to pop them. “I’ve not tried autocatalysis before, but I’ve seen it done, and I know that it’s one of my capabilities. I think I can do it for the whole plane, but I’m going to need your help.”

“Screw that, we’re not helping you,” Vearden argued.

“You keep acting like you have a choice. I recommend you get over that.” The Cleaner prepared himself and aggressively took both of them by the arm. He was incredibly strong, more so than he looked. Saga couldn’t think of any time manipulation function that would allow that, but maybe there was something. This particular chooser seemed to be excellent at finding loopholes, and using his powers in ever-creative ways.

They could feel energy surge through their bodies. The power didn’t move only from them and to him. Their combined powers cycled between all three of them like flowing water, methodically trickling out before shooting into the aether. With this power came knowledge. Both Saga and Vearden began to better understand time travel and the timeline. They saw the past, the future, alternate realities, spatial merging, extracting, regression, paradox stabilization, quantum blending, and autocatalysis, among others. They could feel the airplane split into two equal parts, and then those two separated into two more, and then those into one more pair. The Cleaner disintegrated the sixth plane across time, because it was not needed to accomplish his objectives.

The five remaining planes flew away from each other, headed toward the same spot. The three travelers could feel themselves in disparate places all at once, conscious of the slight differences, but still aware that they were but mirror images of only one thing. There was still only one plane, and it was about to crash into the past of the Department of Defense five times. In the original timeline, a powerful group of terrorists, angry from the ultimate failure of 9/11, coordinated a strike with five relatively small, but still powerful enough commercial airliners. Instead of hijacking preexisting flights, they simply stole the planes as they sat in their hangars. There was no lack of security, but certainly less than for aircraft being used for travel at any given moment.

The Cleaner had, probably inadvertently, bestowed upon Saga and Vearden a special level of perspective. A chooser, whose name was not relevant at the moment, traveled back into the past upon discovering her gift, before anyone else had a chance to introduce her to the world. A disproportionate number of family members of hers had died in the 2005 attack. So she used her foreknowledge to change the outcome of events, anonymously sending the authorities to the hangars before the terrorists could abscond with the aircraft. Her family was saved, but April 30, 2005 was too significant of a day in history. The powers that be were not happy with this change in the timeline. Though they did not particular enjoy the death of hundreds of people, they considered it too dangerous to prevent. Some events give rise to so many variables that not even the powers are capable of comprehending the ramifications. These variables stretch out beyond their purview, and create wrinkles in the fabric of space and time. Thousands of people are born or not by this single variation. And so they employed their Cleaner to repair the timeline for them, and restore their dominion. He was not the only one they used for this purpose, but he was one of their best. Ruthless and clever, he could always wrangle the variables. Or rather, he usually could. For one reason or another, he did not accurately predict what Saga would do.

The replicated time displaced airplane(s) plunged towards the building with even greater temporal precision than their counterparts in the other timeline. Vearden reached forwards with his mind and looked upon the faces of everyone in the affected area, including none other than Mateo Matic. He was standing in the middle of the courtyard, looking up at them with determination. At time slowed down from their point of view, the door-walking freelancers looked at each other in a way they never had before. In that moment, they both knew everything about the other one’s past...and Saga knew about Vearden’s future. She smiled. He frowned. But he understood. He couldn’t do what she had to. He had more work to do, and his time was yet to come. Her life was over, but he would see her again, in other ways.

Five copies of Saga Einarsson harnessed the fumes of the Cleaner’s special chooser powers to teleport themselves to five centers of the Pentagon’s roofs. They held their arms to the heavens, almost welcoming to the oncoming airplane barrage. She used the remnants of both her and Vearden’s power to transform herself into continuum bombs. The planes recombined into one and flew through a portal to a distant locations. The pilots reawoke and sprang into action, somewhat safely landing the plane in the ocean as if they thought it was the Hudson River.

Having lost his temporal insight and returned to salmon status, Vearden Haywood quietly crawled out of the airplane and swam to shore. He walked up to the stargate replica and stepped through. It sent him right back down the ramp, but about five years earlier. Harrison was waiting for him on the beach. “How long have I been gone?” he asked.

Harrison replied, “Several hours.”

“Mateo has yet to experience the tribulation.”

“Correct. Where is Saga?”

“She is not in this version of events. We changed history. She did.”

“What does that mean for what happens now?”

“It means I quit.”

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Second Stage of Something Started: 370-239-2005 (Part XII)

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“One thing about time travel is that it’s very easy to encounter someone at one point and have knowledge of their future. Or worse, they could have knowledge of yours. In some cases, both could happen simultaneously. Some salmon operate across a single timeline. The Shapers, for instance, often have an effect on their past selves without realizing it. Whatever happened, happened. Nothing can be changed. No one can be saved. No one can be stopped. If this were the only form of time travel, then things would be fine. Everything would remain as it was. If you tried to go back and stop a car crash, well, you would probably end up being the cause of the crash. To make things even more complicated, however, some salmon—and just about all choosers—are moving across realities. They can go back and make changes to the timeline. In fact, they can potentially make changes to their own timeline. Unlike in Back to the Future, this will not result in the end of the universe. Things might just get—for lack of a better word—fucked up.

“With all these salmon and choosers hopping through and altering timelines, then salmon who can’t do that are in weird positions, aren’t they? From their perspective, nothing about the timeline has changed. If anything does end up getting changed, single-timeline salmon are going to undergo the process of being overwritten. Their memories of the first variation of events will be erased from their minds, as if they had never happened...because they hadn’t. To them, and all the lowly humans, whatever happened, happened. They don’t know that anything changed, so they just move on with their lives, doing the best they can to make the future as good as it gets.

“There have been many terrible events in the history of mankind. The holocaust, 9/11, Aurora, and Pulse are but a few of the most recent. Have you guys gotten to Pulse yet? But you’re just a human, so you can see only one timeline. You don’t know all the other terrible things that happened before being retconned by time travelers. That may be a nice thought, but keep in mind that not every time traveler has good intentions, and people with the power to reign these bad eggs in are rarely interested in doing so. This means that many days have gone by without a hitch, but then someone goes back and makes things bad. I’m not going to go over these events with you, because I think you would be offended if I attributed heinous acts carried out by hateful people to magicks. You’ll just have to take my word for it that some of the worst moments in time were put there on purpose, while others were created incidentally from the butterfly effect of some earlier time traveling event.

“I’m telling you this so you’ll understand what I have to do. This may seem like a bad moment. The world will remember this day as the greatest mystery in commercial airliner history. But believe you me...this is the lesser of two evils. I guarantee that, my friend. Two-hundred-and-thirty-nine people are going to have to sacrifice their lives for the greater good. Now before you freak out, you’re not going to die. We’ll put you somewhere safe. I’ve already put in a call to The Chauffeur. But you can’t stay here, because then you really will die. The Triple Triple Seven catastrophe was the deadliest aircraft disaster of all times. I’m here to force us into a timeline where that does not happen. I went over a number of scenarios, and this is our only choice. Trying to divert the planes won’t work. All I can do is take one away.”

“Are you telling me that you’re a terrorist?” the passenger asked.

The stowaway sported a charming smile. “No. I’m an unsung hero.”

The passenger’s husband returned from the lavatory. “Hey, what are you doing in my seat, buddy?”

“The name’s not Buddy, Mister Burrows,” the stowaway said as he stood up and slipped into the aisle. “It’s Prince.” He started walking backwards to the cockpit, and spoke more loudly than decorum dictated, “Prince Darko!”

They were still looking at him with concern as Prince Darko spun around and stole someone’s drink from first class.

“Can I help you sir?” the flight attendant asked, then stopped short. “I don’t recognize you.”

“Oh, I’m not on the list. I’m a walk-in.” He nodded towards the cockpit door. “But it’s okay, I’m with them.”

“The pilots?”

“No.”

Saga and Vearden accidentally opened the cockpit door from the inside.

“Them.”

“Oh my God!” the flight attendant cried, unable to keep his composure.

“Where are we?” Saga asked, surprised to be on a plane, but also not.

Prince Darko took a sip of the drink he had stolen, but then put it down on the counter with disgust. “Exactly where you need to be.”

“What is going on here?” The Pilot in Command had gotten up and assumed authority.

Prince Darko pointed his phone through the doorway like a remote control and tapped something on the screen without looking.

“We have lost ACARS now, sir,” reported the co-pilot.

“Well...” Darko said in an uncertain voice. “Not all of it. We still have to shake a few more hands.”

“Who are you?”

“Why, I am now your commanding officer,” Prince Darko responded as-a-matter-of-factly.

“I don’t know how you people opened the cockpit door, but I will not recognize your authority.” He tried reclosing the door, but failed. Each time he tried to swing it inwards, it would keep going past the brink and open outwards. In was out and out was in. No matter how he moved the door, spacetime would shift around it so that he was always opening it. “What is this? What did you do?”

“I’m afraid I can’t take credit for that. I’m just an object threader.”

Vearden cleared his throat to get Prince Darko’s attention. “You are Mateo’s brother.”

“Indeed.”

“We were told that you were a good person,” Vearden said.

“I met you in my past, do you remember that?” Saga asked, referring to a time when she accompanied Baxter to a house call.

“I do not,” Prince Darko admitted as he continued to work on his phone. “It must take place in my future.” The plane started banking left, not enough to cause fear in the hearts of the passengers, but enough to wake up any sleepers.

The pilots and flight attendant were speechless, as any regular human would be by the turn of events, and the current conversation.

“You have control of the plane?” Saga asked.

“Indeed again,” Prince Darko replied.

“Then please give control back to the pilots so they can land these passengers safely at their destination,” she requested calmly and politely.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“Please,” Vearden pleaded, more urgently.

“Look, I appreciate you opening the door for me. I needed line of sight for the program to activate, but now that it has, your services are no longer required. You are now free to move about time and space.” He pointed to the nearest lavatory. “This is just one of many doors. Pick one.”

Kolby, the security guard from the Vietnam camp appeared through the curtain from a cheaper section of the plane. He lifted his apportation gun towards Prince Darko, but did not fire. The passengers who were in the right places to see the gun started screaming and freaking out. He ignored them. “Darko Matic, you are under arrest for colluding with a rogue element, and for reshaping an Essential Temporal Juncture. You are hereby sentenced to an indefinite stint at Beaver Haven Penitentiary. I am prepared to shoot if you do not comply.”

“Are you going to revert the juncture?” Darko asked, with no obvious intentions to run from his fate.

“That is not my department.”

“Very well.” Prince Darko held out his wrists and allowed Kolby to place a special set of handcuffs on him.

Kolby looked over to Saga and Vearden. “Is this before or after Vietnam?”

“After,” Saga confirmed.

“Then I suppose it’s not urgent for us, but I recommend finding a door off this plane. I don’t know what the others are going to do with it.”

“That’s not up to us,” Vearden said with a deep breath.

“No, I suppose it’s not.” Kolby tapped a sequence onto some high-tech bracelet he was wearing while his hand had a firm grip on the bar between Darko’s bound wrists. They both disappeared in a flash.”

Passengers continued to whoop and holler.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” The Cleanser called out right after teleporting onto the plane. “No need to get upset!” he assured them. “The worst is yet to come, I assure you.”

The crowd grew quiet out of fear for what that meant.

“Now who’s ready to go back in time and crash this plane into The Pentagon?”

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