It was time. This was the moment that Ramses, Marie, Olimpia, and Boyd had
been anticipating for the last two days. For two years, the temporal energy
crystal was being bombarded with the sonified version of a simple lemon,
converted from its genetic sequence in full. While cracks had formed on the
surface, nothing major had changed to the crystal. It was nearing the end of
the original music piece, and it still wasn’t entirely obvious what was
going to happen. As they watched the visualization of the chords fly by on
the monitor from the safety of the antechamber, something bad happened. It
stopped. With only one single bar of four chords left, the music just
stopped. It wasn’t reacting to the near-end of the song. It needed
the complete, unadulterated piece. The universe seemed to be fighting back.
“It stopped,” Olimpia stated the obvious.
“Yeah, I see that,” Ramses replied, angry, but not really at her. He just
kept staring through the window.
“What does this mean?” Marie asked.
“I don’t know,” Ramses admitted.
“Well, do we have to start over, errr...”
“I don’t know!” he repeated.
“Surely we don’t have to start all over,” Boyd figured. “Let’s just get the
music playing again.”
“Yeah.” Ramses grabbed the keyboard, and started fiddling with the program,
trying to force the music to start up again. It wouldn’t budge, it just
wouldn’t. His hands started shaking out of frustration. He looked like he
was about to throw something across the room. “Get me that bowl of lemon
juice out of the fridge.”
“We can’t do that,” Marie argued. “It’s too dangerous.”
“It’s our only choice now. It wouldn’t be so bad to wait another two
years to try again, but the crystal doesn’t want to be turned off, so
I have no reason to believe that the next attempt will go any better.”
“Well, let’s at least get a robot in there to do it for us,” Olimpia
suggested.
“I don’t use robots,” Ramses explained. “I like to do the physical jobs
myself.”
“Well, we’ll get one from somewhere else. It’s a big planet,” Olimpia said.
She then stood there, concentrating.
“You can’t teleport out of my lab, remember?” he reminded her.
“Right.”
“I’ll go with you,” Marie offered. They both started to leave.
While Ramses’ attention was split between the girls and his hope that there
was something he could do from here, Boyd had slipped over to the other side
of the room unnoticed. He had opened the fridge, carefully grabbed the
pitcher of pure lemon juice, and slowly left through the other door.
Only by the thud of the door closing did Ramses notice that Boyd had left.
“Wait. No! Don’t go in there!”
Boyd was already through the next door, and was approaching the crystal.
Ramses hit the intercom button. “Just wait. They’re going to get us a
robot.”
“There’s no time,” Boyd contended, still inching his way across the room. If
he spilled just one drop...it would definitely be okay, but he obviously
didn’t want to risk wasting any. “Look at the clock.” He was right. There
was probably just enough time before midnight that the girls could come back
with the robot, but this needed to be done while everyone was still in the
timestream. And there was a security concern with bringing in an
unauthorized intelligence of any kind without proper assessment.
“Run as fast as you can out of the teleportation suppression field,” Ramses
urged Marie and Olimpia through comms. “It’s not safe.” He activated his
EmergentSuit, including his external PRU.
Boyd reached the pedestal. “Tell everyone who has ever met me that I’m
sorry,” he requested. He lifted the pitcher up, closed his eyes, and dumped
the juice on the crystal. As predicted, it exploded in his face.
While it was difficult and rare to travel between The Eighth Choice and Fort
Underhill, it certainly wasn’t impossible. And if anyone had the natural
authority to cross the border, it was anyone from Team Matic. After making
contact with Gilbert Boyce, Leona, Angela, Romana, and Jessie were sent
passes to board a transport ship, which flew them through the interversal
conduit, and into the other child universe. They were on the planet of
Violkomin now, standing by the prebiotic lake, waiting for Mateo to appear.
Any minute now.
“Are you sure your contact in the new afterlife simulation was talking about
the right person?” Leona asked.
“How many Mateo Matics do you know?” Nerakali asked right back. “It doesn’t
matter how many there are, I would bet my life that only one of them died
anytime in the last many decades. It’s the right guy.”
“Well, where is he?” Romana asked for the fifth time.
Nerakali sighed. “His pattern could have messed with the transition. You’re
not like any other salmon; I know this much. It’s hardwired into his
neurology in a way that I don’t understand. Do you? The server that he was
placed on when he died is quantum. The lake is controlled by a
biological computer. The way it was explained to me, it’s difficult
for them to communicate with each other. That might make it sound unsafe,
but the fact that he hasn’t shown up is probably a good thing. It’s
probably erring on the side of caution while it makes the
necessary—and unique—data conversions.”
“He needs to get here soon,” Angela pointed out. “It took us so long to get
here from that other universe. Is it possible that he already came out? Or
could he be clear on the other side of the lake?”
“He’ll show up here,” Nerakali assured her, “and he hasn’t gone through yet,
or I would know. This is my job. I asked for it. Returning from death has
always been my thing. I wanted to give back.”
Romana commanded the nanites that formed her shoes to recede into their
implants. She started to wade into the water. “Can we...go in after him?”
Nerakali smiled, almost condescendingly, but still in a nice way. “It
doesn’t work like that.”
“There’s one way to get there,” Romana said darkly.
“Don’t even think about it,” Leona warned. “You don’t know what’s waiting
for you. Like she was just saying, we each have a weird biology, and a weird
neurology. You might not end up in the simulation. You might just die.”
“Then you do it,” Romana suggested. “You’ve been there be—” She
stopped when she felt a sudden pit in her stomach.
Leona and Angela felt it too. It felt like they were losing something.
Something was being removed...not from their bodies, nor even their minds,
but somewhere else. They shuddered at the same time, a highlight of
technicolors flowing over their skin, and then they nearly collapsed to the
ground. They were feeling weak and woozy, but still had enough wherewithal
to keep themselves aloft.
“What the shit was that?” Marie asked.
“The crystal. They must have shut it off.”
“Why did we need to feel it?” Romana questioned. “Wasn’t it just Boyd
and Octavia who were on our pattern? I mean, we didn’t end up with
their powers.”
Marie and Olimpia woke up on their backs on the roof of a building, but they
didn’t know if it was the right one. They were trying to teleport to
Bot Farm, but this could be just about anywhere. “What happened?”
“The crystal exploded,” Marie replied. “That’s the only logical conclusion.”
“We need to go back. If you’re right, we don’t need the robot anymore.”
“No, I don’t think we do.” Marie stood and waited a moment. “Is there a
suppression field here too?”
“Why would there be?” Olimpia pointed to the ground in the distance
where scraps of metal and other materials were being unloaded from a truck
so they could be recycled into mechanical substrate components. “This
probably is indeed Bot Farm.”
“Well, something is stopping us from teleporting.”
“Do you think...?”
“Oh my God, the crystal. It took away all our powers.”
“It was only—”
“Yeah, well this is why we didn’t just dump lemon juice on it in the first
place. We knew that we couldn’t control the results.”
“Then we need to get down to the vactrain station.”
“Agreed.” Marie looked around for a more traditional way off the roof.
“My suit. It’s not emerging. I was just gonna jump down to the ground, but I
can’t. The suit isn’t a time power, I don’t understand.”
“The suit’s not, but the way we control them with our minds is
biotechnopathic. We control it more in a psychic way than people typically
interface with tech.” She placed her chin against her chest so she could see
the manually interface on her shortsleeve. She was able to activate the suit
from there. “So we don’t have to crane our necks like that, whenever you
change clothing, keep a wristband on, so you always have easy control over
it.”
“Good idea.” Olimpia did the same to get her suit on. Then they jumped over
the edge, and started walking, like animals.
Ramses woke up alone. “Hey, Thistle. Report.”
“You have been unconscious for eleven hours and twenty-four minutes. You
are otherwise healthy and unharmed. Environment is hostile, and not
survivable, but life support is holding.”
“It’s 2513?”
“Unknown.”
“Where are we?”
“Unknown.”
“Lifesigns?”
“No life detected within sightline. No satellite detected.”
“Why does the air taste stale?”
“Primary carbon scrubber damaged and offline. Helmet scrubber is
functioning optimally, but conservatively. Ramscoop nodes require manual
service.”
“What about the transdimensional backups and replacements?”
“Pocket dimensions are inaccessible.”
That wasn’t good. This looked like it could be Castlebourne, but a region of
it where there were no domes in sight. His best guess was the mirror
dimension version of it, though there was no way to test that hypothesis
from this random vantage point. “I can’t teleport,” he noted.
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Thistle replied.
“If Boyd destroyed the crystal, it would have taken him off our pattern.
Though if it killed him, that doesn’t really matter. If the pocket
dimensions are gone, and I can’t teleport, it must have also wiped out all
excess temporal energy across the board. Time must have spit me out here by
random chance. All hope is lost. I can’t get back. Even if my slingdrive
were available, I couldn’t use it on my own. But what does that mean for my
pattern? Am I stuck here for years?”
“I recommend you repair the ramscoop nodes for your indefinite resource
management needs.”
“Thanks, Sherlock. Thank God I had my suit on at all, or it would be game
over.” It was pointless to dwell on anything. “The composition of this
world’s atmosphere. Analyze it. Is there enough helium and neon for
meaningful lift?”
“No,” Thistle replied plainly.
“I’ll do the heavy lifting, so to speak, but I need you to run the
calculations. I would like to jury-rig a fusion torch, and power it with the
microreactor. Once I fix the nodes, there should be more than enough
hydrogen to get me in the air.”
“I’ll start developing the models.”
Boyd Maestri woke up in the afterlife simulation. He had expected to find
himself lying on the top of a mountain, or strewn halfway in a babbling
brook. Instead, he was sitting in a hardback chair. A woman was standing
before him coolly and trying to appear patient, but clearly itching to
explain the situation. Boyd wasn’t tied to the chair, but he couldn’t move
either. The computer program was just arbitrarily holding him in place.
Physical restraints weren’t truly physical anyhow.
“Mister Maestri. Welcome to the afterlife.”
“You the boss around here?”
“I am,” the woman replied.
“How’d that happen?”
“I died at the exact same time that the original sim was being evacuated.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
She shrugged. “I did it on purpose.”
“You know my name,” Boyd pointed out, then let the implication sit
there.
“They used to call me Pinocchio, but I didn’t like it. So when I came back
here, I adopted a new identity. You can call me Proserpina. I am a unique
lifeform.”
“I get it. I didn’t like my name for a time, and went by Buddha instead.
That was a mistake, though. How did you take charge of this place?”
“I was responsible for the original version for a time, until Ellie
Underhill sent everyone to a new universe. I just reclaimed my birthright.”
“What do you want with me?”
“I don’t care about you at all,” Proserpina explained. “Mateo Matic does. My
counselors receive the names of everyone who dies, and is on their way to
this world. One of them will make sure Mateo gets the message, and he’ll
come here to get you.”
“Did you kill me?”
She laughed. “I’m just taking advantage of the situation. You got your own
self killed. Something about lemons? I dunno, I didn’t read the whole
report.”
Just then, Mateo opened the door to this room, and came in deliberately, but
not hostilely. He was dragging some old man behind him. “I was told you
turned off the lake, or something?” Only then did he notice the detainee.
“Boyd, you’re here?”
“I died destroying the crystal.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Wait, you didn’t come for him?” Proserpina questioned. “I made sure Keilix
knew about it.”
“I don’t think I told her about Boyd at all,” Mateo said. “I doubt his name
means anything to her.”
“So, why are you here?” she asked. “The lake?”
“Yeah, I can’t go through. I’ve been trying for two days, which was two years
ago.”
“Yeah, I turned it off for you,” Proserpina explained, confused as to why he
didn’t already know this. “I need you here.”
“For what?”
“For your wife.”
“What about her?”
“She’s the one who created me last century,” Proserpina began. “I need her
to do it again. I keep sending people to kill her, and she keeps surviving,
I don’t understand.”
“What?” Mateo was so lost. “No one has tried to kill her. I mean, she’s
faced danger, and there is that one guy, but he’s always trying to
kill us, and has his own reasons.”
“Yeah, I exploited those reasons. Just like I exploited Pacey’s, and
Bronach’s, and even Buddy’s here.”
“Well, you weren’t very good at it,” Boyd contended. “I didn’t want to kill
her.”
“Well, I’m kind of limited under these conditions,” Proserpina argued. “I
pass messages along with dead people who cross over to the other side, and I
know my targets get these messages, but I think something gets lost in
translation.”
“Are you trying to escape the simulation?” Mateo asked her, still not clear
on what her agenda was.
“No, I’m trying to create a community of my own, but I need your wife to do
what she did to me to all the other NPCs. I cannot figure it out myself.”
Mateo stared at her. Who the hell was this idiot? “Well, I need the
lake to get back to her to ask her.”
“I assumed she would come for you!” Proserpina reasoned. “That’s what
happened the last time you died!”
That was true, but it was still a poorly thought out plan. Even dum-dum Matt
could see that. “Whatever. Let me out, and I’ll ask her what she can do.
Okay?”
How do I know you won’t screw me over? she asked.
“Uh, Mateo?” Boyd piped up. “You don’t need her to let you out. You’re like
how I was before. You can resurrect yourself...through dark
particles.”
