Microstory 2669: I Thought it Felt Light

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From the shadows, Resi watches Speaker Lincoln wake up in the middle of the night in reaction to a notification. She blinks rapidly as her eyes adjust to the harsh light of her device. “I’ve stolen the Kidjum elixir,” she reads out loud. “What the hell? I never told you to do that,” she whispers loudly. She scrolls a little. “Someone hacked my account!” she complains to what she thinks is an empty room. She dials a number, and holds it up to her ear. “Get security to the Tadungeria lab. We have a breach. Aether is going off script.” She hangs up and rolls her nightgown up and over her head.

Resi taps on his own device, careful to not let the light give away his position yet.

Lincoln’s device dings again. “Oh my God.” She opens the drawer of her nightstand and takes out a gun. She checks the magazine to find it empty.

Only now does Resi flip on the lamp in the corner. He’s sitting comfortably in her armchair, trying to look menacing but authoritative. He saw this in a movie once. Actually, it’s been in a few movies. “The first to raise a hand in violence dips one foot in their grave,” he recites calmly.

Lincoln looks down at her half naked body. “You like what you see?”

“Relax, I’m asexual. Go ahead and cover up.”

She wraps herself in a robe. “You must have Bungula tech if you could teleport here that fast.” She jerked her chin towards the device that she tossed onto the bed. “I just read your message that you’re gonna poison me with an overdose of elixir.”

“You think I would order one of my people to do that in the same second that I decided to just do it myself? You got security all riled up for nothin’. No one from my House is anywhere near the Tadungeria. Your elixir is safe, and so are you, physically speaking. I won’t hurt you, but I wanna know why you’ve been impersonating me, and sending my people orders that I would never give. You want us to stop. You wanted to bring the Kidjums back, so why are you undermining those efforts?”

Lincoln breathes through her nose as she regards Resi with a facial expression that he is unable to read. She’s trying to look calm too, though. She thinks she’s still in control here. Bizarrely, she lets the robe drop from her shoulders again. She then starts to remove the rest of her clothing.

“I told you, I’m asexual. I feel nothing. Seducing me will not work.”

“I’m not trying to seduce you,” she explains as she’s crawling back into bed and neatly rearranging her belongings on the night stand. “I don’t have to tell you anything. I just need to let you step both feet into your own grave, which you have done quite nicely by breaking into my house tonight.”

“I’m having signals blocked. If the answers you give me are satisfactory, I’ll leave before anyone notices. It will be your word against mine. If you lie, I don’t know what will happen. I want to know why. It makes no sense. Do you want a fifth House, or not?”

“I don’t care about the houses,” she admits. “It’s an arbitrary stratification that most cultures don’t have and do just fine. Divide into fourths, divide into eights, just have one united peoples; it’s irrelevant. The total population is the same.”

“So the Kidjum is fake, and it’s all about control? Do you just want to decide who goes where? Worker bees versus drones, as long as the queen stays on top.”

She smirks. “It’s not fake. It’s not about control. It’s about human lives, and the Garden we were promised. The Kidjum is very real. It’s the easiest and most reliable way for us to know what you want. Everyone has a place, and everyone chooses. Again, it’s not about that. But anyway, I’m tired, and I just want to end it all. I won’t be answering any more of your questions. It’s your turn.”

He sighs and grunts. This isn’t doing any good, and who knows where they go from here? So he’s proved that she’s a bad guy? She didn’t do it on her own. Anyone or everyone on the Assembly could be a part of it. The best he can hope for is that the other two nations hear him out. Maybe they’re not a part of the conspiracy. Or maybe they are, and House Kutelin really does need to revolt. He’ll have to just go out and try his best. Staying here, listening to these lies and vague answers, isn’t going to pay off, so let’s be done with this quickly. “I’m an open book. I’ll answer any questions you like.”

“Have you ever fired a gun before?” she asks, picking hers back up, and sliding three of her fingers across it like it’s her pet.

“No, but I know that that’s a projectile weapon. It needs bullets, not a maser charge, or whatever. I already took the mag out, and checked for extras.”

She smiles and nods, still looking at it admiringly. “Did you check the chamber?”

He jumps up in fear, now remembering other movies, where yeah, the bullets aren’t only stored in one place. There’s also this other thing on the top. 

Instead of aiming it at him, she points it at the side of her own head, as far from her temple as her bent arm will reach, and squeezes the trigger. Blood goes everywhere.

He’s seen it in those movies before, but it’s a different thing, being in the room when it happens. He’s frozen, though he doesn’t know for how long. People don’t really die around here, except peacefully in their sleep, or in a hospital bed. They’re not immortals, like the colonists, but life is pretty safe. They’ve built out the infrastructure, and everyone knows what they’re doing. The Kidjum doesn’t just choose what you want, but what your mind knows it would be good at doing. Everyone is professional and skilled. That’s why he doesn’t know history and geography, because their nation doesn’t value those things. It places all of its focus on people who can get work done. If they need to know anything about how the universe works, they can ask the Bungulans. Leave science to people who’ve been doing it for millennia.

Why the shit is he thinking about any of this right now? They’re hauling him out of the bungalow by his upper arms. He’s not resisting, he just can’t move his legs on his own. He feels the splinters catch on his toes as they drag across the old front porch. They throw him into the wagon, and drive off. He realizes that they never bound his limbs. He could jump out, and run away. But where would he go? They would look for him at the dorms, and then his birth parents’ home. It’s an island, and it’s probably being locked all the way down. This is the first murder he’s ever heard of, so the whole planet is probably freaking out. He could try to swim it. How far is Anchor Island again? Only forty-some-odd kilometers? Easy, he could do that in one breath.

He’s in a hardback chair now. When did they pull him out of the wagon? They’re asking him questions. He can’t really hear them. They say something about already finding his prints on the gun, which makes sense, because he had to take that magazine out. The chamber. The goddamn chamber. How could he be so stupid? That’s why the action stars are always pulling that thing back while they’re making their snide remarks. He thought he had it all figured out. The honeypot was brilliant. His people were on the ball. Like he was saying...trained as professionals. He’s the one who screwed up, and it’s gonna land him in prison. House Kutelin will fall, and she’ll get away with it. Oh wait, no, she died. She killed herself. Why? Just to frame him? What an asshole.

Microstory 2667: Pure Guano

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It’s been another few days since the fruitless meeting in Ambassador Hall. Resi has been trying to go over the heads of the ambassadors, and secure an audience with the Presidents of Sanggar and Pekat themselves, but no such luck. It’s looking like Cortez was right. There’s no place for them on the island anymore. Their numbers haven’t stopped going up. There are now 428 of them. Fortunately, it’s not the rainy season right now, so the kids who have to sleep outside of the dorms are doing okay. They’ve lived on an island their whole lives, so it’s not like any of them isn’t used to the elements. Resi is trying to hold it together, but everyone is looking to him to fix this. They have less than two weeks to figure out where to go, but it’s not so simple. Leaving Yana is the one thing that no one wants to do. They’re islanders. That’s their whole thing. They didn’t choose any of the four original houses, but they didn’t choose Kinkon either. They can’t stand the thought. But if they leave, they can’t just let the Bungulas plop them down wherever there happens to be open space. They’re not familiar with the planet’s geography, but there has to be more than one island. Maybe even a better one?

“Caprice,” Resi says as he’s walking towards his unit. “You’re with me.”

“Boss,” she replies respectfully as she’s following him down the hall. The way she justifies her involvement in this is that the Kidjums were supposed to end for good, leaving her free to choose a new destiny for herself. She says she couldn’t help it that the Assembly decided to go back to the old ways. That was weeks ago. She’s quit her job, and found a new one. She’s the only older person here.

Resi pops his head into the room. And there’s the only younger person here. He steps back out and looks down the hall. “Hey, Chaya! Are you free?”

“Yeah, need me to take her?” Chaya was the Ilah girl from his first non-Kidjum who challenged his decisions. Not everyone from that fateful day is part of Resi’s personal Fold now, but a lot of them have proven themselves capable of serving well as his advisors and delegates. Chaya, in particular, is good with Kala, so she takes on babysitting duties when Resi can’t look after her, or needs some privacy. She takes Kala’s hand when she comes out of the dorm on her own, knowing the drill. “Let’s go get some bolon de verde.”

“Not too much,” Resi instructs.

Caprice closes the door behind her. “I think you need to stop trying to talk to the presidents. They don’t have time for us. They don’t care.”

“Oh, I’ve stopped,” Resi agrees. “We only have one more option now, and it’s not Yana. I’m hoping that you know where we could go, given your history.”

“My history?” Caprice questioned. “What do you mean?”

“You’re Kinkon,” he says. It’s not something they ever talk about, but while she looks Tamboran, she’s clearly had a lot of experience on the outside.

“What the hell are you talking about? No, I’m not. I was from Naino. I grew up as a fisherman. I hadn’t realized I hadn’t told you that. That’s why I always wear blue.”

“The color codes don’t really exist anymore, and that’s not a Kutelin thing.”

“They were when I was a kid. Naino wore mostly blue. I don’t understand why you thought I was Kinkon, because I know how to work a nanoparticle microinjector?” They don’t use a lot of technology from the outside world, but the Bungulans insisted on providing them with medical supplies. They said it was a humanitarian issue. No amount of non-interference laws could overshadow basic existential ethics.

“No, your name. Caprice is not Tamboran.”

She stares at him for a few seconds. “Yeah, my parents gave me a western world name. That’s not illegal, and it doesn’t mean I’m from one of the other settlements. I’m Tamboran through and through. I’m sorry if you thought that I had some special knowledge about what else is out there, but I probably had a worse education than you. I skipped half of the school days because I had to deepsea fish with my family.”

“So you do know about the ocean,” he presses. “Have you seen any other island, just when you were living your life, not studying it?”

“I’m sure there are a ton of islands out there. We didn’t go to any of them, because that’s not deep sea. The only specific one I know off the top of my head is Anchor Island, and we all know that one.”

“That’s the one with the elevator?” Resi asks rhetorically. “That would be in our own knowledge archives.” He takes out his device, and looks it up. He reads as much as he can without the silence becoming too awkward between him and Caprice. “It was ours. It’s only forty-two kilometers away, and used to be an extension of Yana. We gave it to the colonists not too long ago, historically speaking.”

“Yeah, that sounds right. I think our ancestors would mine guano there for fertilizer. But then they stripped it clean, and had no further use for it. They traded it for something—I don’t remember—but it was only recently that the Bungulans started using it for their space elevator, since we’re at the equator.” She looked up to think. “You were probably just being born when that was all going down. Somebody stole the top part of the elevator, and nearly started a war, so they had to build a new one to replace it.”

“Did they ever...figure out how to plant there? Or is it still barren?”

“No, I don’t think they care about that,” Caprice answers. “They just just use it to go up and down. So if you were hoping they would, for some reason, give it back, I don’t see why they would, and I don’t see what we would do with it.”

He sighed and frowned, looking down at the floor, defeated yet again.

“But. Even though I’m not Kinkon, one thing I know about them is that Anchor Island doubles as a waypoint. When they choose to leave Yana, they go there first, and start to acclimate to a new way of life. I obviously don’t know exactly what that entails, but every time they’re needed, the Anchor people come here in a really fast boat, and ferry them over. I think such an excursion is not a big deal for those people. They could probably make the trip on their lunch break.”

“How often does someone’s subconscious choose Kinkon during a Kidjum?”

“In my experience, a few people a week. It fluctuates, though. During periods of great strife, we usually end up with more, because kids believe there’s a better life for them on the other side of the ocean.”

“Is there?” Resi asks her. “Are we stupid for not choosing Kinkon too?”

She’s silent at first, looking away, then looking him in the eyes again. “Probably.”

Resi nods. “Thank you for your help. I’m sorry this conversation started out so combative. Now. I think I need a camera. For now, we are no longer accepting applications to join House Kutelin. The Kidjums must start again so someone can choose Kinkon for us, and trigger that boat. You and I are gonna get on it.”

Microstory 2666: Two Ambassadors Walk Into a Farce

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When the saviors—whoever exactly they were—rescued the would-be victims of the 1815 Mount Tambora eruption, they only took those whose bodies would never have been recovered. They know this, because lots of people did die from that catastrophe, even all across the world, due to secondary effects, and no survivor left on Earth reported seeing magical beings come down and whisk certain people away. They were missing and presumed dead, most likely vaporized. The Kingdom of Tambora was closer to the volcano, so the history books have written them off as wiped out. In reality, they were brought here to Bungula, for some reason over 400 years in the future. That’s what some people currently living on Yana believe. To the rest of the galaxy, the original Yana islanders must have been an isolated population of colonists, who came to this planet in ships like everyone else, then later made up superstitious stories about their origins. Yana Islanders have accepted the more rational explanation for the most part. Some of them reject the lore so strongly, though, that they leave the island as Kinkon. Only some still believe, and out of them, the majority live in Tambora.

Fewer people were rescued from Pekat and Sanggar, but they have maintained their own culture here too. They don’t have Houses, they don’t care about the Tamboran Houses, they don’t have anything to do with any of this. They occupy a smaller portion of the island because their population remains a smaller fraction, but they have their own things going on, and certainly their own problems. Still, a few hundred sixteen-year-olds isn’t too much to deal with. Surely one of them will agree to take them in as refugees. Members of House Kutelin don’t have to stay together. It would be nice, but Resi is prepared to be flexible in case their neighbors aren’t. That’s why he has asked to meet with them at the same time, so they can all three work this out together.

Resi stands when they enter simultaneously, likely having been discussing matters away from him beforehand. “Ambassador Churchill,” he says with a nod. “Ambassador Cortez. Thank you for agreeing to meet with me. I apologize if our customs are incompatible. If there is anything I should do or say, please let me know. My studies focused primarily on agriculture. We were not taught much of your cultures.”

“It’s fine, Mr. Brooks,” Churchill assures him. “Let us sit.”

They’re at the triangle table. It looks about as you would expect. It’s usually for the Tambora ambassador to sit on this side, but if she has an issue with it, she can climb the hill and complain. He focuses on keeping his breath steady. “I believe that you two know why I am here, so in lieu of pitching it to you formally, I thought I would give you the opportunity to speak first. Unless, that is, you do want to hear a speech.”

“That’s all right,” Cortez agrees. “We have been talking amongst each other, but cannot give an answer until we know a little bit more information. The last we were told, there were three hundred and thirteen of you?”

“There are three hundred and fifty-five now, since it took a couple of days for you two to become available for this meeting.”

They both consult their devices. “Forgive me,” Churchill begins, “but we were to understand that your number was static. The Tamboran Assembly claims to have put an end to the new system, and reverted back to the old one.”

Resi nods. “They’re trying to do that, yes, but they’re struggling. Kids are excited to join us, and we have not been turning them away. If they skip their Kidjum, and come right to House Kutelin, we always open our doors. So far, the Assembly has not been arguing with us about it. The ceremony Kokore has...remained on my side of things, which makes reinstituting the Kidjum a somewhat complicated endeavor. I believe they are secretly relieved to have the extra time to get things back up and running.”

“Do you anticipate further defection?” Cortez presses.

“We don’t use that word,” Resi replies, “but as I said, we’ve been opening our doors to those in need. That is how I was raised. My family once took in a Bungulan who came here for vacation when there was no more space at any of the resorts.”

A brief awkward pause.

Cortez went on, “you understand that we are already reluctant to extend a hand, and risk instigating tensions with the Tamboran Assembly.”

“The Assembly has no problem with it,” Resi insists, hoping it wasn’t too rude to interrupt. He just needs them to understand this before they start arguing more, because he knows what their real concern is. “We’re not fugitives or war criminals. We’re exiles. They want us to find somewhere to live. The stratified system that they use in their economy is not conducive to the introduction of an additional house. There are no jobs left. Your systems are more fluid, allowing us to fill in the gaps wherever necessary while maintaining our distinct culture association.”

“We appreciate that,” Churchill says. “But if your numbers are increasing, it makes our decision harder. We do not have infinite resources, nor infinite jobs. The Pekat are also facing a mild distribution issue with our own population. The island is only so large, and we are never not negotiating the size of our fractions of it.”

Cortez nods. “Sanggar is running out of space as well. I don’t know if you know this, but 300 years ago, Tambora reserved the best land for themselves. They can dig down in certain regions. You have basements and high rises. We don’t have that luxury.”

“We have had to maintain strict population control,” Churchill concurs, “so we do not exceed our allotment. We may be able to take in a few dozen of your people.”

“Us as well,” Cortez agrees.

Churchill continues with the same breath, “but that’s only if those we take in are willing to live on the harsh Tambora border, and build their own infrastructure.”

“That is unacceptable,” Resi says with a shake of his head. “I can’t leave any of my people behind. There’s nowhere to go.” He takes a breath before he says something unbecoming of an ad hoc ambassador. “Let’s think this through. You need more space.” He taps on his heart. “We do too. Point to the map. Show me where they can build basements that’s closest to your borders. My former Maing’aing are excellent engineers. They can whip up a new building in a matter of weeks.”

“Nowhere on our side of the border is dig-worthy.” Churchill stands now. “I know the geography well enough to say the same for Sanggar.”

“It doesn’t have to be on that side. It just has to be close, and we’ll annex it. We don’t have anything over there. The border isn’t a heavily trafficked area. They might as well give it to us, and by extension you. But we need your support to do that.”

The Ambassadors look at each other, appearing to share a telepathic conversation before Cortez looks back over at Resi. “I’m sorry, but we simply cannot risk conflict with Tambora. Taking land on your way out isn’t really exile, is it? You’ll have to find another way. It looks like you are no longer welcome anywhere on Yana.”

Microstory 2659: Nightmare Fuel

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Zombiedome is obviously full of zombies, but Malika has been here before, and it was never this bad. It feels like every square meter of the surface has a zombie in it, though it probably tapers off in the distance. A player would not be able to move around, let alone have any hope for survival. There also aren’t any buildings, which Malika says isn’t right either. It would obviously be a ridiculous setup. If there’s nowhere to run to or hide behind, it’s not really a game. There’s something very wrong here. If Jiminy spent a third of his time in this dome, how could he have dismantled all of the infrastructure without the Custodians, or the executive administrative authority, noticing? It really doesn’t matter, though. The undigitized organic humans are in trouble.

“What do the residences look like?” Mandica questions. “All we can do is split up and check every one in order. When you find the right one, holler.”

“No, that’s a poor use of time. When there are this many of them, the zombies aren’t enemies; they’re the weather,” Reagan argues. “We could never kill them all. Many of my people are posthumans. They will protect the others. We have to find a way to close the portals. Look at all of them. Something is keeping them open and stable.”

“Do you have some way of finding the power source, or the controls, or something that can help us put an end to this?” Jaidia asks him.

“Oh yeah, let me just take out my transdimensional window detector. Shit, I think I left it in my pure gold airplane.”

No one responds. They just keep hovering, watching the horror.

“I’m sorry. I’m just trying to think of how to fix this,” Reagan says.

“Can y—ear me?” Elysia asks. She’s speaking through comms, but it’s garbled.

“Yes, but barely,” Jaidia replies. “Are you still in Seagate? We’re in Zombiedome.”

“I see you, I’m on my way,” Elysia says. She starts out as a flying dot over the ground before getting bigger and bigger as she draws nearer. “Report.”

“We’re hoping to find the source of all this,” Mandica says. “It has to be some kind of machine. Maybe it’s integrated into the dome’s own power systems—”

“This isn’t Zombiedome,” Elysia interrupts.

“What? What other dome could have been filled up this much already?”

“Well, it is, but it’s not our Zombiedome. That’s why I could hardly reach you when I was near the portal, and why we can’t talk to the EAA from here. We’re in a...different reality, or something. That’s why Jiminy was able to accomplish all this without anyone noticing. It’s a different world, parallel to our own. Which means our only priority is shutting it down. Once we close the portals, the military will only have to deal with the attackers that are already on the other side. But there’s a problem.”

“That’s not the problem?” Malika questions.

“They’re not just coming from here. There are also portals linking to an alternate Bloodbourne, and even an alternate Botfarm full of crazed androids, as well as a number of simulations which were originally privately held intellectual property. We have to close every one of them. All nightmares have descended upon the real Castlebourne.”

“But bottom line,” Reagan begins, “the military has been deployed.”

“Yes,” Elysia confirms. “They’re prioritizing domes which have the most UDOs in them, like State of the Art, and the residences. Your people are being cared for. We are not alone in this. The villain opened portals in our domes first to keep us busy, but he underestimated how fiercely non-superheroes would protect the innocent. We mostly designed our bodies with the best powers, but transhumanism is perfectly legal anywhere else. So let go of your anxiety, and focus on our task. We’ve been given this assignment because of how fast we can move. Any ideas of where it would be?”

“I don’t think it would be here. It’s too random,” Jaidia decides. “If they’re drawing from multiple domes, and there is a central command center, we have to think like Jiminy, or maybe even Morgana. Would he be in this dimension, or the real one?”

“We have to understand what he wants,” Malika says. “If he just wants to destroy the world, as bad as this is, it’s not a good permanent solution. Most people will survive it. If you truly didn’t want them to, you would go after the backup terminals, and all consciousness maintenance infrastructure. You would do it quietly and meticulously. You wouldn’t just throw monsters at as many people as possible.”

“They’re only a distraction,” Jaidia agrees. “He’s banking on our drive to fight back. That’s why we all entered Underbelly in the first place. He obviously has a thing for Pinocchio. I say we look for him in Collodidome.”

“No, there’s a reason he dressed himself up as Morgana, and did it in two domes. He’s either in Ravensgate or Loegria,” Malika counters.

“He only did that to get under Mandica’s skin,” Jaidia argues.

“Why would he need to get under her skin?” Elysia jumps in. “He hasn’t gotten anything from her. I think he was just playing a part. I think that was a distraction too.”

“Well, he can’t be in Loegria anyway, because that’s where he died,” Jaidia adds.

Malika shakes her head. “That’s exactly why he would be there, because we left.”

“We left to go to Ravensgate, and you thought he could be there instead!”

Reagan flies between Malika and Jaidia. “Guys, he’s not in either of those places, or Collodidome, or if he is, then he’s on this side. It’s the safest place for him. There’s no authority, he controls everything, he can draw an ungodly amount of power. The portals are coming from here, so it stands to reason they’re being controlled from here too.”

“I’m the key,” Mandica utters quietly.

“What?” Elysia asks.

“When you were all dead, it was just me, Vanore, and Jiminy. He said that I was the key. He said it like that, he emphasized the word. He needs me to open something. I don’t know what, or why it has to be me, but he’s been keeping me alive for a reason.”

“He stabbed you with a sword in the jewelry store,” Elysia tries to remind her.

“Right next to the Philosopher’s Stone,” Mandica reminds her right back. “He knew it was real. He probably put it there. And that sword? That was a special sword too. He used it once, and then never again. None of this makes any sense unless you frame me as being the ultimate target. But why? What’s so special about me?”

“You were a UDO,” Reagan answers. “That’s pretty special these days.”

“You said it yourself,” Mandica responds. “There are others like me in the residences; your people who chose not to back themselves up. They were closer.”

“We’re not vonearthans,” Reagan explains solemnly. “We are descended from a generation of ancestors created in a lab under vastly different conditions. We all received special shots when we came to this region of space. Our biology is different. They’re not even sure if we can procreate together. They consider it unethical to test it.”

Mandica stares at him for a moment. Without saying a word, she leans backwards and dives towards the ground. She pushes herself to supersonic speeds, which is incredibly dangerous inside of a dome, but she needs to break away quickly. Her friends can’t know where he’s going. She doesn’t know where he’s going. It just needs to be away from here; away from this whole mess. Before she’s reached the ground, she collapses her wings into her body. She shuts her mouth and plugs her nose, then slams herself into a bunch of zombies as hard as she can, absolutely pulverizing their bodies, and leaving her covered in their undead viscera. Now that she smells like the other zombies, they begin to leave her alone. She blends in with them, making her way through the crowd to a more distant portal. It can’t be the one she landed near, because that is where they’re going to look for her. It takes hours to meander through, like a neutrino in a star.

After she walks through the portal, she doesn’t know where she is right away, but it’s a good thing she didn’t wait even one second longer, because it closes right behind her. In her absence, her friends managed to figure out how to shut them down. They may have found the controls for the interdimensional technology, but they didn’t likely find Jiminy, nor what he’s truly after. He’s not going to make it easy on them. She’s going to take a page out of his book, and do the same. She’s going to rob him of the one she does know he wants. She’s depriving him of her.

She discovers she’s in Party Central, which is a great target to send a bunch of zombies and monsters. It was on Trilby’s green dome list so she was free to come here back when she was just a boring and delicate human. She still needed to be careful of falling disco balls and spiked punch, but she has had to be worried about freak accidents her whole life. She finds a fur coat on the ground. It’s covered in blood and guts, but that’s okay, because she fits right in with all the party-goers who were just attacked. People with guns and other weapons are here, cleaning up the last of the monsters. They’re not dressed in military garb, but some of them match. Her guess is that they’re from Mêléedome or Shmupdome. Those were on the red list because their only point is violence. She ignores them, doesn’t talk to anyone, and goes on her way.

She finds a public water closet where she takes the opportunity to clean up, throwing all of her clothes into the trashbot, which she pats on the head in remembrance of the one who got her here. After the shower, she grabs one of the robes, and walks back out. No one is paying any attention to her. They’re all still reeling from the assault. She continues to walk until she finds a remote building that is currently under construction. There’s an incinerator here to dispose of unrecyclable materials, so she switches it on, sets a timer, then dives in. It’s agonizing, but she needs answers.

Unlike the other times she’s died, she comes back to life this time with some memory of what happened to her. She doesn’t have many details, but she knows enough to get by. Jiminy was the lieutenant for a dangerous man named Pinocchio, who was once in charge of wherever Mandica goes when she dies. After being stripped of power, he eventually downloaded himself into base reality, where he continued to carry out his nefarious plans, predominately in the Spydome Network, until he was caught and locked away. Mandica is sure that Jiminy wants to break his boss free, and this stone and Mandica are collectively the way he does that. She can’t let that happen. She has to stop fighting, and start hiding. So she crawls out of the furnace, gets cleaned up again, and then simply attends the nearest party. This is where she lives for the next five years.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 5, 2549

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On a scale from robot butter-passer to ecumenopolis, the infrastructure that Ramses’ forge core was able to construct during their interim year sat at about a 5.6. This logarithmic scale was designed by a team of futurologists back in the very late 21st century; not just something that he made up himself. The core’s interface was very intuitive for even the dumbest of dum-dums. It was basically a store, where they added things that they wanted to a shopping cart, and the cost—the time it would take to complete the whole project—automatically calculated in the corner. At first, all they wanted was to build a Nexus, which took a healthy chunk of time alone due to its sheer complexity, outmatching all other buildings on their plans combined in that category. Without it, the starter nanites could have resulted in a continent-wide civilization-ready network of interconnected megacities. But what they ended up with was more than enough. There were only nine of them, including the three on the away mission.

There were several arcological megastructure tripods now. If any Earthan were to move here, they would feel right at home. They weren’t actually expecting that to happen, though. They only built all this because they were trying to maximize the time available by hitting that 365-day mark. They figured it was better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. They had no idea what they wanted to use any of this for yet, but that was where the Nexus came in. People from anywhere in the galaxy, or farther, would be able to travel here near-instantaneously. It only had the capacity of a few dozen people, so it wasn’t suitable for some kind of mass-exodus, but it wasn’t useless either. If Hrockas had had access to this level of technology back when he was building Castlebourne, it could have been completed in under a decade. Now there was the simple question of what to name all this.

“I’ve been trying since we got here,” Romana revealed.

“What have you come up with?” Mateo asked her.

“Nothing good. The best ones are Lorramm, Ramlorm, and Marmorl.”

“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...” Mateo said.

“They’re all seven of our initials.”

“Oh.”

“Not enough vowels.”

“Right.”

“We could add E and C for Echo and Clavia,” Angel suggested.

“Leave me out of this,” Clavia insisted, weirdly offended.

“I thought this planet was named Echo,” Marie pointed out.

“Yeah, on the other side,” Romana agreed. “Firstly, I started thinking about this before the weird interversal portal we went through. And secondly, I was brought up to believe that there is no such thing as an alternate self. We’re each unique, even when we come across people who look just like us, and share our memories. I think that goes for planets too. That’s Echo. This is somewhere else.”

“That’s completely true,” Clavia agreed. “When Olimpia screamed the Sixth Key pocket universe into existence, she based it on the original Milky Way, but it’s not an exact copy. It was just mostly close. You should name it something else. My brother would say the same thing if he were here right now.”

Mateo nodded in agreement. “Well, let’s keep thinking while we explore. We also need names for the various domes and cities, I guess. And there’s still the issue of what the purpose of this planet is.”

“I think it’s whatever it needs to be,” Marie began. “If there are more refugees, we can bring them in. If people want to come here for vacation, we will have recreational facilities available too. If someone is in need of a prison, we’ll build a remote site somewhere here, and house them safely. Even if they escape, where are they gonna go? It’s an all-purpose planet. It will serve as the central hub for the Milky Way galaxy one day, and maybe sooner than you think.”

“Well, if that’s the case, we need someone to host,” Angela said. “We need someone who is here every day of the timestream.”

They all looked over at Clavia.

“Oh, no. That’s not my job,” she contended. “I don’t even live in this universe. I’m just here to keep an eye on you people until your friends and lovers come back.”

“Most of our permanent friends are on Castlebourne,” Mateo pointed out, not expecting her to change her mind. “We would have to poach them.”

“Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be a sanctuary,” Romana argued. “I thought it was going to be just for us; a place that no one else could get to. They wouldn’t even know about it. Whatever happened to that plan? We got so wrapped up in what we could do with the forge core that I think we lost the plot.”

“It was always going to end up like this,” Marie countered. “We don’t stay out of things, even when we try. If we ever do need a real sanctuary just for our team, we’ll use some other distant world that Rambo’s Operation Starframe colonizes for us. It doesn’t even have to be big. It could be a hollowed out asteroid, like Linwood’s.”

“That’s gonna take over a hundred years from these staging grounds,” Romana volleyed. “I’m not saying we can’t build out, but my Future!Dad was warning us about something. Even if this planet had nothing to do with anything in his timeline, there might be an inevitable threat that us coming here only worsens, or at least doesn’t alleviate. We keep making these choices which have lasting consequences for the universe. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for your meddling. I would not exist if my Past!Dad hadn’t randomly ended up on Durus at the exact right moment, but what he and Leona did that day resulted in more than just me. It impacted the future of an entire civilization.” She focused her gaze upon her father. “Present!Dad, you helped make Dardius what it is today. I still believe we hastened the carnage on Proxima Doma. Who knows what we’ve done to Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida just by helping a woman carry her potatoes? Again, I’m not saying we bury ourselves in a hole, but let’s try to think things through. Romana Nieman, youngest one here, unlikely voice of reason.”

Romana was right to be cautious. Despite only living one day out of the year, their actions have rippled out in ways that few could have predicted. They would need someone like Bhulan Cargill to see all the branches. That metaphor gave Angela an idea so she went off alone to unpack it. The rest had their own things going on. Marie left the city entirely, reacclimated to the planet’s natural atmosphere, and took a walk in the wilderness. Clavia accompanied her for protection since they didn’t know what else could be out there, and no one should be alone outside of the controlled environment of a dome. Mateo tried to activate the Nexus for a test. Everything seemed to be in working order, but they had not been given their own term sequence. The gods only assigned it once everything was engineered to absolute perfection, but he didn’t know what was wrong, and obviously could not have fixed it either way. Romana just sat down on the dirt, apparently to meditate. This far out, no grass had been planted yet.

A few hours later, Angela called everyone back, claiming to have figured it out. They didn’t know what exactly she had been working on, but they came anyway. After a moment of silence, she began with a single word. “Ramosus.” She uttered it in an accent a couple of times, like she was getting the feel of it, before returning to her normal voice.

“Is that a band, errr...?” Romana hadn’t gotten the chance to make that joke yet.

“It sounds like a corruption of Ramses,” Marie suggested.

“It is,” Angela confirmed. “But it’s not just that. Romana certainly helped point me in that direction, but your comment about branching timelines is what really led me there. It’s Latin for branched, which I think works because the initial hope for this outpost was to serve as the launch point for Starframe. Plus, it has natural life on it. I love those willow-like trees we saw that we think recycle their water by sending it up the trunk, running it across the stems, which hang down, and dripping it back into the soil.”

“Yeah, I like it,” Mateo decided. “It’s good that he’s not here, or he would argue against it. We need to find ways of solidifying the name so it’s established before he has the chance to come back here and put a stop to it. Maybe we build a welcome sign?”

“We can start to spread the word,” Romana offered. “If we send it out into the universe, what’s done will be done, whether he likes it or not. People in the past will probably even hear about it. Were you able to turn on the Nexus?”

“On?” Mateo questioned. “Absolutely. Power is not the problem. It just won’t go anywhere. It’s a cell phone without service. I think we need him and Leona back for that. I probably shouldn’t have even tried. It was too risky for an idiot like me.” When they were all silent, he added, “wow. Not even gonna argue that I’m not an idiot. Thanks.”

They all laughed.

“All right,” he went on. “Clavia, do you have anything to contribute?”

“Like I said,” she began, shaking her head, “I’m just here to protect you. I’m not a part of the team.”

“Well...” Mateo thought about it. “Olimpia is my wife, and Echo is her son, and you’re Echo’s sister, so whether you like it or not, we’re family. That doesn’t mean you have to help, or even stick around. Romana’s sisters don’t, but we still love them.”

“I have plenty of family,” Clavia reasoned. “Thanks, though.” She didn’t sound pretentious or arrogant, more just trying to keep her distance. That was fine.

“We don’t need the Nexus,” Marie said after the group relocated from the middle of nowhere to a picnic table. The biggest bottleneck in construction was managing heat dissipation. The laws of thermodynamics always slowed rapid deployment down when not utilizing temporal manipulation technology. Life, on the other hand, was a different story. It would take years to make this dome look less artificial or dead, so for now, this park was only a placeholder. It was just this one table and some fast-growing resilient shrubbery. “We have our tandem slingdrives. We should go to Castlebourne. We’ll let Hrockas know what we’ve built, and give him an idea of where we are. If some refugees from the Exin Empire would like to move, now they have a new option.”

“Shouldn’t we wait for the others?” Angela figured.

“They’re making decisions that affect the multiverse,” her sister reasoned. “They can stand to come back to a surprise or two.”

“They’re your wives and best friend,” Romana said to Mateo. “It’s your choice.”

“Let’s wait until tomorrow,” he decided. “If they’re not back, we’ll pull the trigger. For today, let’s focus on the capital. I think I have an idea of what we should do with the dome. Let’s lean into the branching theme.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 3, 2547

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Ramses was unable to track the location of the missing slingbelts, and there was no recourse for this. He designed the bulk map so that, while most of the dots were showing non-specific points, the belts were distinct, and stood out. If they were anywhere out there, he would be able to spot them. Their two top hypotheses were that they were either destroyed, or taken through time. Whoever did it knew exactly what they were after. They weren’t just a couple of random kids swimming in the ocean, who happened to feel something invisible in the water. Their prime suspects were the Spiral Station crew, but they didn’t want to assume. They had plenty of genuine enemies, and since time travel was inherently involved, it could have been someone they hadn’t even crossed paths with yet. Instead of wasting pointless effort on figuring it out, Ramses just programmed his forge core to build three replacement belts during the interim year. Mateo, Leona, and Olimpia had lost all of their belongings, but that wasn’t a big deal.

It was interesting that the married trio were the ones whose belts were stolen. Ram calculated a 2.85% chance that this was entirely unintentional, but the more practical odds said that it was vastly more improbable. Just the fact that the other four belts were left behind made it unlikely to have been random. They were magnetically linked to one another. It was actually more difficult for them to take only some of the belts, than to have swiped them all in one go.

The next day, the missing belts appeared on the bulk map. They had been transported halfway across the Milky Way, for reasons yet unknown. “Have we been there before?” Olimpia asked. “Do we know anyone there?”

“That is part of the nuclear star cluster, which is relatively close to Sagittarius A*, our galaxy’s central black hole” Leona explained. “It’s not the farthest we’ve ever been, but as you can see, no one else is there. It’s only our belts.”

“No one has ever been there,” Ramses added. “They’re on Southside. Extremus crossed over the black hole on the north side of the galactic plane. When the Matrioshka Body was studying time, it too was on Northside. The whole stellar neighborhood is on Northside, so we just don’t know too much about this region.”

Romana giggled. “They’re a gift.”

“Huh?” Mateo asked.

“We were just talking about Operation Starframe,” Romana said. “If we want to reach every corner of the galaxy, it’s best to start in the center. Now we can do that. Now we have something to lock onto. This will be our staging ground.”

“We don’t know that the thief did this as a favor,” Marie pointed out. “It could be a trap instead. I’m guessing this region is naturally fairly hostile, if it’s so close to the chaos of the supermassive black hole.”

Ramses made a facial shrug. “It’s not as dangerous as, say, the s-star cluster, which is much closer to the singularity, but it’s not particularly safe, like it is for Sol. I’m inclined to agree with Romy. It’s too coincidental. If I were the thief, I would put a trap around Sirius, or some other close but barely settled region. It took them too much work to get to where they are. Yes, I’m sure they are trying to lure us there. It’s irrational to believe that they hid the belts from detection last year, but forgot to shield them today when they would know we’ve returned to the timestream. But based on our track record, does anyone here really think that we’re not gonna go?”

They all laughed a little. “Yeah, we’re gonna go,” Mateo decided. He commanded his nanites to wrap him up in armor, leaving his face unprotected for now. “What did you say before, Romana? Boot ‘n’ rally.”

They all armored up too. “Yalla,” Leona ordered.

“Give me a minute,” Ramses defended. “I need to make the calculations.” He turned away and paced a little as he was tapping on his wrist device. “Okay, do it again.”

“Yalla.”

They slung to the nucleus, and landed on a rocky planet. It wasn’t heavily vegetated, but not barren either. The plantlife was clearly alien, but decidedly alive. The sky was a beautiful sunset orange. Snowcapped mountains towered in the distance, and it looked a little greener on the foothills. They turned to find three dress form mannequins on a display curve. A slingbelt was fitted to each one.

“Yeah. Definitely brought here for us,” Romana agreed with herself.

“That’s not all,” Ramses said, looking at his interface again. “It’s breathable. For us, anyway. I’m seeing 83% nitro, 11% oxy, 5 for CO2, and a half percent each for hydrogen and trace gases.”

They decided to open their visors but keep the rest of their armor on, except for Romana, who chose to end up in a gray sports bra and yoga shorts. It still could be a trap. The atmosphere was indeed breathable, but it took a few minutes for their bodies to acclimate to the suboptimal environment. During this time, they were mildly suffocating before their carbon scrubber organs caught up to compensate for the extra toxin.

“Carbon load back down to manageable levels for everyone,” Angela announced. She had expressed an interest in serving as the closest thing to a medical professional the team had.

Romana instinctively walked around to the other side of the mannequins. She reached up to one of them, and pulled something off of it. “Sorry for taking these, but now you have extra, in case you need them. You won’t have to worry about us again. Don’t screw it up this time,” she read.

“They didn’t sign their name?” Mateo asked her.

“Not exactly,” she answered.

“They...initialized it?” Mateo couldn’t think of anything else that was close to a signature.

“They hand-wrote it, or I should say, you hand-wrote it.” She showed him the note, and she was right; it was in Mateo’s handwriting.

“Well, I suppose I can trust myself, can’t I?”

“No,” Leona replied bluntly.

“Fair enough.”

“Any other anomalies besides these belts?” Leona asked Ramses.

“No artificial signals,” Ramses began to answer from his interface. “No satellites, no power generators, no signs of life in the immediate vicinity...” He looked back up and regarded the horizon. “There is no way to know if we’re alone, but we seem to be.” He took out his forge core, and appeared to be in thought as he separated himself from the group, and also looked at the mountains.

“Are you considering building something here?” Mateo asked.

“Something?” Ramses returned. “Maybe everything.”

“Like a new lab? You just built a new one in your pocket,” Mateo reminded him.

“Yeah, I know, and I would still want to keep it with me as a mobile office.” Ramses turned back around. “But a real home base might be nice too. I once thought that that was Castlebourne, but there are too many people there. I think we should be more like Linwood Meyers, and take full ownership over a remote territory. No one else is here, it would just be ours. It will take tens of thousands of years before Project Stargate reaches this region. That’s more than a hundred and fifty years for us. This could be a safe place. We would really only have to worry about Spiral Station.”

“It’s not the farthest man has ever gone,” Olimpia said. “You just mentioned Linwood, who is even more remote on the far end of the galaxy. The Extremus isn’t too far from there. The Exin Empire has reframe engines, and several decades to kill.”

“They would have to find us,” Ramses continued to list. “This is a central location. It’s a great place to stage Operation Starframe. It’s uninhabitable by even some other posthuman models.”

“Still,” Olimpia pushed back. “Shouldn’t we go as far as we can? I agree, it’s perfect for Starframe, but not the best place for a home if we truly want to be hidden and remote.”

“The slingdrives have power constraints. Being ultra-distant has its disadvantages too. We’ll still defend our home. We’re not just gonna live like pioneers.”

“The note, it’s warning us about something,” Romana jumped back in. “We don’t know what. Did we come here in another timeline, or is that what changed? What exactly are we hoping to not screw up this time?”

“It’s doubtful that we were here before,” Leona determined. “We came here for the belts. That and the note probably mark the point of divergence. I think this planet is meant to change whatever issues Future!Mateo faced that he’s trying to fix now.”

“You just said we couldn’t trust him,” Marie contended. “Handwriting means nothing. Anyone could have forged it.”

“True,” Leona admitted.

“I’ll do my surveys,” Ramses reasoned. “I’ll build satellites and probes. We’ll map this whole star system, and beyond. Infrastructure will not be a problem. If we change our minds later, we can always leave. That is entirely what Starframe is even about. It gives us options, and this world gives us those options faster.”

“Anyone opposed?” Leona posed to the group. When no one said anything, she looked at Romana. “You’re our navigator, but you didn’t bring us here. Do you object to staying?”

“No,” Romana answered. “Like he said, we can always leave later.”

Leona nodded. “Okay. Let’s do some quick surveys before the infrastructure can be built, just to get some idea of what we’re dealing with. No one has to participate who doesn’t want to. What I’ll be doing is teleporting high up into the atmosphere, taking readings and images on my way down, and then popping back up over a different swath of land to image that area next. Anyone is welcome to spread out and do the same. But if you just want to stay here, that’s fine. If three of you would rather go back to the stellar neighborhood, that would be acceptable too.”

“No, we’re not gonna do that,” Olimpia promised. “We’ll stick together, as we always try to do. I had to argue against the plan to make sure it was a good plan. I’ve seen this movie before. This planet has monsters on it, and that’s the whole plot.”

“It would not be crazy if we did find complex life here,” Leona concurred. “With carbon dioxide levels this high, I’m more surprised that there’s even a desert. I suspect the majority of the surface will be fairly lush.”

Leona was correct. While Ramses camped out at their landing site to synthesize the data, the other six jumped around the atmosphere to serve as living survey probes. Their onboard sensors weren’t advanced enough to take highly detailed readings, but it was enough to generate a crude globe. They saw some more yellow and red, but they also saw green and blue. It looked not unlike Earth, though the night sky was a lot prettier. There wasn’t any light pollution, and this region of space had a denser cluster of stars to admire.

They found almost no manmade structures besides the display mannequins, but they didn’t find none at all. “Everyone jump to my position,” Marie requested.

“Even me?” Ramses questioned.

“Especially you,” she replied.

They all converged at Marie’s location. They found her standing on a grassy hill, elevated above a surrounding forest. They weren’t quite sure what other thing they were seeing here, though. It was a sphere of warped space, rotating so fast that they couldn’t even tell which direction it was moving. It reminded Leona of a black hole, but not exactly. “It’s not black,” Olimpia sort of joked, sort of really didn’t understand it at all.

“Back up anyway,” Leona suggested.

They all took several steps back because their guess was that it was a portal, and of course, they had no idea where it might take them. But like the gravity regulator machine back on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, it wasn’t going to give them any choice. It suddenly expanded, and engulfed them all.

It didn’t appear to have done anything to them. They were still standing on the same hill. The same forest was still surrounding them. “Is everyone okay?” Mateo asked. “Roll call.”

They took their turns declaring their respective statuses. They had settled on an order ahead of time, so it was predictable, except in any hypothetical situation where something actually was wrong with one of them. Everyone was fine this time; no currently detected health or temporal issues. The swirling portal was still there, so they elected to turn around and walk back down the hill to avoid any further issues.

“Mother,” came a voice from behind them. They turned to see a man standing near the top of the hill, right in front of the portal. No one recognized him.

“Who do you believe is your mother?” Leona asked in a way that implied she hoped it wasn’t her yet again.

The man slowly pointed at Olimpia.

“Me?” Olimpia questioned, shocked. “If I look like your mom, then she must be from a different timeline, because I don’t have any kids.”

“No, it’s definitely you. I was hoping we would meet sometime, but I didn’t want to push it. It had to be your choice. I left this reality portal here in case you ever came looking.”

Olimpia shook her head. “I don’t know how it would be possible.”

“You’re sometimes called The Echo, right?” the man pressed.

“Not so much anymore,” Olimpia countered.

“Well, I’m always called Echo. I’m your echo.” He took a deep breath. “Welcome back to The Sixth Key.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 1, 2545

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While Team Matic was living semipermanently on Castlebourne, Hrockas set up an annual meeting on their days in the timestream. He typically wanted them to be caught up on certain things, and maybe ask for their advice or help. Even though the team had since left, this meeting was still going on and going strong. It was a review of the prior year, and a general check-in for the planet’s administrative staff. Of course, they held meetings all the time, but this was the big one. Lycander left the meeting after the unauthorized teleportation alert because responding to such threats was part of his job. They were pressed about it because everyone who was given the ability to teleport was in the meeting, and none of them had left. He reported that all was quiet on the western front, and escorted them back so they could join the meeting too. But they weren’t necessarily going to participate as if it were business as usual.

Since Hrockas wasn’t expecting them, he didn’t simply continue with the agenda. He called a recess for an impromptu debrief. His trusty bodyguard, Azad leaned against the credenza behind him, and didn’t speak. “The last time I checked, you did not have the coordinates to Castlebourne’s new location. I’m not mad, but how did you find us?”

“Truthfully,” Leona began, “you can be found, but not by just anyone. First of all, we did not come here on purpose, and we did not go through the bulk. We were investigating a gravitational anomaly on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. We still don’t know how it works, but we found a key piece of technology. Due to our presence, it sent us away. It sent us...here. We have no idea how or why. Maybe it read our minds, and thought we considered it home. I don’t know. We’ll need to look into it more, but to answer the spirit of your question, Ramses created a map that sends signals through the membrane of the universe, and pinpoints technological establishments. It is precise enough to target a single-person habitat. So yes, we knew where you were. We were using it to look for someone else, and initially avoided this region, because we guessed that the signal was coming from you. That being said, if Ramses could do it, that means it can be done. It doesn’t mean that the Exin Empire can do it, but it’s not impossible. The bottom line is that you’re not safe here, but to put it in perspective, you’re not safe anywhere. Moving the star was still your smartest move.”

“You just answered all of my follow-up questions,” Hrockas said. “Thank you.” He looked over to Ramses now. “I hesitate to believe that it was a mind-reading machine. What is your hypothesis? I know you always have one.”

Ramses looked around at his friends as he hesitated. “Bida, and presumably Varkas Reflex, generate their gravity artificially. Basically, what they do is blanket a surface with an invisible portal that blocks the gravitational pull of the celestial body that you’re actually on, and just gives you gravity from somewhere else. That somewhere else part is critical. It has to come from somewhere.” He looked around again, but this time at the walls and ceiling. “My hypothesis, sir, is that it comes from here. To Trinity Turner and-or Hokusai Gimura, it might have been a random point in space. They might not have chosen it with any level of intentionality. The gravity regulator may have even chosen it for them, and it worked, so they left it as it was.”

Hrockas closed his eyes and nodded. “But then we moved a new solar system to this region, and screwed everything up.”

“Honest mistake,” Mateo assured him. “In fact, not even a mistake. You couldn’t have known that it was here.”

“Actually,” Hrockas said. “I think I did.” He stood up from his chair, and tapped the back of his ear. Ramses had given him his own set of communication discs, which operated on their own network. “Telman, could you come to my office?”

A man they didn’t know appeared. “Sir?”

“What did that—what was that thing you saw a few years ago when we first started decelerating the stellar engine?” Hrockas asked him.

“The blip?” Telman asked.

“Yes, the blip.”

Telman looked at the others in the room very briefly. “It was a blip. It messed with our quantum connections. People’s consciousnesses weren’t properly received for a few weeks. Fortunately, our safeguards worked, and their signals were rerouted to an off-site back-up facility on the outer edge of the system. But then for a few weeks after that, transmission to Castlebourne started working again, and it was the off-site facility that stopped working. We’ve had to shut it down permanently, and rely on a second outpost on an adjacent side of the system for emergency back-up streaming.”

“Teleportation stopped working too,” Azad added. “We all took the trains during that period of time.”

Hrockas nodded again. “We didn’t know what to make of it. We never found the source of the issue, but things are mostly back to normal.”

Leona paced clear to the other side of the room. “Your stellar engine, was it polar?”

Hrockas cleared his throat. “There are some things even you are not allowed to know, but...no. It wasn’t a traditional thruster. We used other means. We just call it that because there’s no other name for it, and it’s what people understand. We moved laterally, sometimes towards the planet, and sometimes away from it, depending on its place in orbit at the time. We didn’t have to worry about any sort of exhaust beam with the technique that we used, and that was the direction we wanted to go.”

“That’s okay,” Leona said. “I’m guessing that the first back-up site was on the trailing edge of the ecliptic plane, which means Castlebourne crossed a particular point first, and then it followed.”

“Yes, that’s what happened,” Telman confirmed.

“Which means we can plot where it is now,” Leona said. “If you give us the data we need, we’ll get your other outpost up and running again, and maybe save a few hundred million lives in the stellar neighborhood while we’re at it.”

Ramses holed up in his lab, and processed the data that Hrockas okayed Telman to provide for him. Telman even spent a little bit of time in there with him to discuss the issue. Ramses occupied himself all day with doing that, and designing some kind of new probe. He launched that probe before the team left the timestream, and reconnected with it after they returned on the first of September, 2545. “I found it. The probe found it. This region of the galaxy has its own gravitational anomaly. It’s kind of like a planetary-mass black hole, but it behaves unlike what the science predicts. I’m guessing the added mass of the solar system is interfering with its function.”

“Why use this?” Olimpia questioned. “Why get your gravity from a random point in space using an invisible black hole, when you can get it from a planet that already has the mass you need, say, Earth?”

“Because as we’ve seen,” Ramses continued, “that interferes with the equilibrium on both sides of the portal. You can’t share the gravity. You can only steal it. I’m starting to think that this area wasn’t the least bit random. Hokusai somehow managed to either find an Earth-mass black hole, or collapsed a comparable planet into a singularity to create one. I’m guessing that it was a rogue world, which made it inhospitable to life, and ripe for the taking according to ethical standards.”

“The timeline doesn’t make sense to me,” Angela said. “Castlebourne and the star both have deeper gravity wells than the outpost asteroid that it says the black hole is next to right now. Why have things been getting progressively worse on Bida? It seems like they would have been so much worse before.”

“That’s why it was so hard to find,” Ramses started to explain. The black hole didn’t pass through Castlebourne, or the star. They just got close to it. They got the ball rolling, so to speak. Now that the solar system has settled where it is, the issue has been worsening because it’s been persistent. The current competing gravity hasn’t been enough to destroy it all at once, but it’s been throwing things off. Before you ask, it’s actually not just compounding gravity here that is raising the gravity on the other planets. It’s simply disturbing the optimal operation of the regulators on the other side of the portals. Indeed, they were well-engineered to compensate for this disturbance, but are constantly fighting against it, and it’s taken a toll.”

“So, what can you do?” Hrockas asked him. “Can you move the black hole, or...should we try to move? I’m gonna tell ya, that’s not gonna be so easy, and definitely not fast. I can’t reach out to my contact whenever I want. We had a deal. Getting us here was the deal. I said nothing about a second move.”

“Relax,” Leona said with a laugh. “We have another solution. For the permanent one, we’ll need a reframe engine, but for the temporary one...a slingdrive.” She glanced at Rames. “A bigger one than we have. Incidentally, we must enact both plans, even if the permanent one sounds easier. It’s not easier at all. I couldn’t help but notice that none of the crew of the Vellani Ambassador was at the meeting. We really need them, and preferably yesterday.”

“They don’t come back here much anymore,” Hrockas revealed. “Their days of regularly transporting refugees are behind them. Anyone who wanted to escape pretty much has already. They mostly go on diplomatic missions on an as-needed basis. There’s still a lot of internal conflict that needs to be managed so it doesn’t explode into all-out war.”

“I assume you know about the armada that is on its way to where Castlebourne used to be,” Marie said to him.

“We do. We’ve been monitoring their progress. So far, they’re still headed in the wrong direction, but we will be prepared to fight if we absolutely have to,” Hrockas said.

“Do you happen to know where the VA is at this moment?” Leona asked.

“They don’t keep me updated,” Hrockas answered, “they don’t have to.” He paused for a second. “I can call them, if this is an emergency. Is it an emergency?”

“Not for you,” Romana said, “but for the Bidans and Varkas, uh...Reflexers...”

“Varkans,” Leona corrected.

“All right.”

Hrockas stood up, but Azad placed a hand upon his shoulder. “I’ll take care of it. It’s still glass, and you’re not armored.” He opened a cabinet on the wall and removed a few objects, like a stack of tablets and what appeared to be a king’s crown. Behind them was a second cabinet, made of glass. He punched through it with the side of his fist, letting the shards scatter in the main cabinet. He reached deep into a dark hole that they couldn’t see into, then quickly jerked backwards.

“It might be a few hours,” Hrockas told the group, “and it might not happen. Our needs do not take precedence over absolutely anything else going on. They might not be able to get away quickly, but they will eventually show up, and definitely within the year. Once they do, I’ll speak with them, and I’m sure they’ll work around your schedule so they’re here next year. I wish I could do better. I wish I had realized what we had done.”

“It’s not your fault,” Angela insisted. “Black holes are invisible.”

Mirage suddenly appeared, standing upon Hrockas’ desk. She was wearing an extremely loud rainbow outfit, and presenting in a hero stance, with her hands on her hips. “Have no fear! Mirage Matic shall be the tip of your spear!” She looked down to see the team. “Oh, hey, guys.”

“Why do you still use my name?” Mateo questioned.

Mirage teleported off the desk, and onto the floor, right behind Mateo. “Because I can see the future...husband,” she whispered into his ear. Then she nibbled on his earlobe, and slapped him on the ass before starting to walk towards the center of the room. “What can I do for you all? Your words; my deeds.”

Ramses stepped forward, and evidently decided to lean into it. “My queen, we ask for access to your great vessel. A marble-sized singularity must be moved out of this solar system. It will take a great deal of quintessence to perform such a feat, but we have no time to waste. Will you help us?”

Mirage frowned at him, but only still playacting. “This marble of yours, it wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with what’s going on with Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, Varkas Reflex, and Muñecai?”

The group looked amongst each other. “We didn’t know it was happening on Muñecai, but yes,” Leona answered.

Mirage nodded. “I’m quite familiar with interstellar filter portals. That is how we ended up in the Goldilocks Corridor in the first place.”

“So, is that a yes?” Mateo pressed.

Mirage pursed her lips, and turned her chin to the side. “You son of a bitch, I’m in!” she exclaimed with a smile.

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