The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 22, 2398

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Marie called it in, and confirmed her suspicions. A spy satellite feed showed that a small speedboat-like watercraft was moving at top speed from the shores of Panama, while a fleet of larger ships were in pursuit. They could have overcome it at pretty much any time. There must be a reason that they want to maintain distance. The most likely explanation is that there is something dangerous on board, like a bomb, or a deadly chemical. Leona and Marie don’t want to teleport there if they don’t have to. According to Ramses’ research, their ability to metabolize the Bermuda Triangle water is diminishing. If they keep using it to reactivate their powers, it eventually won’t work anymore. Theoretically, they can’t overdose on the stuff, but also theoretically, they can. It’s here in case of an emergency, though, if the pursuing ships change tactics, or if either party reacts to their arrival. To be safe, by the time they make their interception, the SD6 team will put on their hazmat suits, just in case that’s what the problem is.

It took the team a long time, but they’re here now. They have the boats in their sights, and nothing has changed from the last satellite view that they saw. The pursuing ships are still 900 meters from the speedboat. It’s been on the water for so long, it has to be running out of power. It was going all night, so it had to rely on its battery reserves, and those things are not designed for overnight trips. The driver is running out of power, and it will probably happen soon. When it does, that could be enough to cause the ships to make bolder moves. The team has to get to it now, and figure this out. They don’t know if they’re target is good or bad, dangerous or harmless, so they’re not going to take any chances. Leona and Marie have their immortality water boosters inside their hazmat suits, ready to take the other three members of the team with them, plus the target, if necessary. Then again, they’re still not close enough to know if there even is only one person on the vessel. It’s the only one they can track using Ramses’ scanner, but that doesn’t mean that person is alone.

Once the team breaks the 900-meter radius, that’s when the ships start to change direction. They all move at the same time. “Oh, no,” Leona laments. “They’re coming in to attack us. Get your auto-injector ready.”

“No,” Marie says with a shake of her head. “That’s not what they’re doing. They’re leaving.” She’s right. They’re not getting into attack formation. They’re turning. It’s going to take them a long time at their sizes, going at their speeds, but they’re definitely turning away. From what, them? That is even weirder. What are they so afraid of? Why did they spend all this time and effort going after this little boat, only to bail when a three crew-sized tactical amphibious vessel shows up? Surely they have their own satellites, and would have seen them coming from literally miles away.

They’re not going to spend too much time dwelling on it. They get closer to the speedboat, which is being maneuvered into parallel position. Once they’re tied together, the hatch from the cabin opens. Bhulan Cargill climbs out of it, except it’s not Bhulan. It’s Mateo’s once-sister, Aquila in Bhulan’s body. “Why are you wearing those things?”

“We didn’t know what to expect,” Leona says. “This whole mission has been bizarre. Why were they coming after you, and why are they giving up now?”

Aquila looks back at the fleet. “Oh, they weren’t coming after me. Those are my escort ships. They were making sure no one attacked. We need to talk...about Mateo.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 17, 2398

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Marie has gotten a lot of steps today, already more than she had yesterday, and it’s not even evening yet. With every orbital pass, the map of the brain scanner errors updates, providing them with a new location of their current target in Paris, France. Whoever it is has been moving around a lot, and they cannot catch up to them. There is no pattern to their movements. Some of the places are good tourist traps, but others are just a random alley, and people’s homes. They appear to be on the move with great purpose. The distance from one location to the next is always short enough to reach within the timeframe, but in some cases, only if they’re being evasive. They never spend too much time in one place, suggesting that they know someone is on their trail, and they’re trying to stay one step ahead. The team is exhausted, and everyone agrees that they need a new tactic. Marie has come up with a plan, but it’s best done after nightfall, so they ignore the next two pings, and wait it out in their small Parisian safehouse.

Three hours later, Marie takes the auto-injector out of her pack. Ramses was embarrassed that they were still using regular syringes up until this point for emergency jolts of temporal energy, but it’s fine. She has it now, and it’s time to use it, even though it’s not technically an emergency. For some reason, she feels like this is going to be a bigger deal than the other times she’s used the stuff. It’s not. She jams it into her leg, presses the button, and feels the usually temperate surge of electricity all over her body.

“Tell me again why you can’t just give us one of those too?” Esmé asks. She just won’t let it go. She’s not a very good diplomat, which is annoying, but Marie isn’t in charge of choosing her own team. Perhaps if she had stayed with the organization fulltime, she might have more pull.

“This doesn’t give me the ability to teleport,” Marie explains once more. “My body was designed with the power. This injector reactivates what’s already there. If I gave you one, it would do nothing. At best, it would add a whopping one hour to your lifespan.”

“I’ll...take it,” Esmé declares. She pretends to not notice Marie rolling her eyes.

“It’s almost time.” Agent Filipowski holds the tablet in front of Marie’s face.

Specialist Cleary and Officer Sharrow take their positions on either side of Marie. “Keep an eye on our realtime pins,” she instructs Doric. She can only carry two other people with her. “I may have to transport our target to a third location.”

“Understood.”

The tablet beeps. “Shit.” They’re at the Eiffel tower. Ramses’ scanner can’t accurately distinguish elevation. They could be on the ground, at the top, or anywhere in between. Plus, even this late, there are going to be tons of people there. They can’t just jump around a few times to look for them. Marie has to make a split second decision, and the rest of her team isn’t going to like it. “I’ll stay in contact, I promise.”

“What are you going to do?” Esmé questions.

“It’s too risky to move in a group.” Marie pulls herself away from the other two, and makes the jump. She’s on the ground underneath the tower. It’s one of the many unusual things about this reality, which is strikingly similar to the main sequence, even with a profoundly altered historical timeline. The primary difference here is that the beams are made of steel, rather than iron. She calls Ramses. “Hey, are ya busy?”

“No, what’s up?” Ramses replies.

“Can you see where I am?”

“Gotcha right here.” The scanner has always picked up on the rest of the time travelers in the group, as they qualify as temporal errors. They have always filtered out and ignored each other, but it’s useful now. “Who’s that with you, Leona? We can’t get a hold of her.”

“No one is with me. The second dot is our target. I lost access to the map. How far away are they?”

“About twenty meters southwest. You better hurry. They’ll go out of range again within ten minutes at the most.”

Marie starts to run. There’s a larger group of people over there, so she could really do with an investigator, but she’s alone, and that was her choice.

“Stop!” Ramses warns. “Two hundred meters directly south of you.”

“They’re a teleporter.”

“Yes.”

“Just like me.” Marie focuses on visualizing the distance, then covers it with another jump. There are fewer people around here, but she still has no idea who she’s looking for. She starts to scan them, hoping to see someone suspicious. She does in a man who’s staring right back at here. Now she has a face. If she doesn’t get him today, she will later. He can’t hide forever.

He teleports away again.

“Jump to the ship,” Ramses tells her.

Marie looks up to the sky, and jumps to the main level of the AOC.

Ramses is waiting for her. He tosses her a handheld device. “He jumped another five hundred meters. Go get him.”

Five hundred meters. That’s an increase, but still not very far as teleporters go. He clearly realizes that he’s being tracked, and he doesn’t want to be caught. That’s fair, he doesn’t know that she could be a friendly. She doesn’t know that either, but she hopes she is. If he’s so worried, though, there must be a reason he’s not bailing to Madagascar or Argentina, or something. Either something is keeping him in the city, or his power has limited range. Regardless, they have to find him. If Ramses can learn why this reality isn’t suppressing his abilities, it will take them one step closer to solving the problem for everyone. She looks at the map, and focuses on the dot. She jumps down to him, and without giving him any chance to react, wraps her arms around him. She then makes one final jump, back to the AOC.

“Curtis Duvall.” Arcadia smiles at him.

“Oh, Leona.” The man goes over and gives her a big hug. “If I had known that you were involved, I never would have kept running.”

“Yes, Leona is involved,” Arcadia confirms, “but I’m not her. I was accidentally placed in this body. I’m Arcadia Preston.”

He nods like that makes total sense. “I don’t know who that is.”

Arcadia narrows her eyes at him. “Which timeline are you from?”

“I don’t know,” Curtis argues. “Why would I know that? What do you want me to do, give it a random designation, like Six-One-Six or Earth-X? I’m from the timeline where I’m from!” That’s a fair point.

“I don’t care about that,” Ramses says dismissively. “I wanna know how you can teleport when no one else in the world still has their time powers.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 6, 2398

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Ramses tries to deliver The Bridgette back to the park in New York, but it seems that Winona has managed to lock him out of all systems. That’s impressive. These Third Railers are more resourceful than he thought. He’ll have to remember that moving forward. He doesn’t like being surprised, or the one beholden to someone else. He’s always meant to be in control, and once he clears the override feature that Winona installed on this craft, he’ll get back to that. For now, he has to do what she says. They need their starship back, and this is the way they’re getting it. It’s not the first time their plans didn’t go as planned. They always figure out a workaround to the obstacles.

Winona sets her tablet on the console, and lets it sync with the Bridgette. “Constance, please navigate us to these coordinates in realspace.”

“Prepare for liftoff,” the AI replies.

“I’m sorry I had to do that,” Winona says to Ramses. “I like Leona; I consider her one of my own. But I had to make a call. We will get her up into space, I promise you.”

“You can’t promise that,” Ramses says, “but I can. I can also promise you that getting on my team’s bad side never works out for people. You live in your own little reality, but we always win. You apologized with words, now do it through action.”

Winona nods. The computer beeps. She looks down at the console. “We’re here.” She activates the radio. “Amberjack, this is Pelican. Come in, Amberjack.”

“Amberjack Actual here, go ahead.”

“Permission to land and come aboard. Three visitors total, limited equipment.”

“Permission granted.”

“Constance, please land. Once we’re aboard the Amberjack, dive to a depth of thirty meters, and travel three hundred kilometers to the Northeast, avoiding detection along the way. Once there, resurface, launch, and return to base.”

“Understood,” Constance replies.

She regards Ramses’ expression. “The Bridgette will be fully yours after today.”

“Clearly.”

They land the Bridgette, and board the sub. They’re surprised to see what must be a full crew waiting for them. It’s hard to walk through, there are so many people. They were to understand that there would only be a few left around, while the rest rested and relaxed in Bermuda. Winona and Executor Ongaro go into his office to have a chat about it. When they come out ten minutes later, Winona explains to Ramses and Alyssa that rumor spread about what kind of mission they were going on, and everyone wanted to be a part of it. She questioned why he didn’t just order them to go on shore leave, being the Executor and all. He claimed that his own curiosity made him feel like he couldn’t rob others of the opportunity. Bad leadership, if you ask Ramses, but nothing can be done about it now. They have already begun the dive.

By the time they reach the bottom, Ramses has started to receive a signal from the AOC. So not only is it close, but it’s on and operational. That’s good, it strongly suggests that life support is still active. Even if it’s not, it shouldn’t be too hard to re-engage it. Once they’re close enough, the sub’s lights shine upon the vessel. It’s sitting neatly on the ocean floor, right between two little rocky cliffs. Either it was damn lucky to have fallen right in the perfect spot, or the AI is still on, and navigated it well enough to protect hull integrity.

“Wow. This is yours?” one of the crewmen asks.

“Yes,” Ramses replies, not super happy about having all these eyes on his ship.

“It can fly to the stars?” another asks.

Ramses looks over to Winona. “You have some leaks to plug up.” He’s not referring to the sub, or the ship.

“A lot of people had to be read in for this, Winona defends.

“How do we dock with it?” Executor Ongaro asks them.

“We don’t.” And now for the hard part. There are more people here than Ramses was led to believe. Keeping the secret amongst a smaller group would have been easier, but they probably know enough already anyway. He’s just gonna teleport in, now that he has a target. “You have a torpedo room, right?”

Executor Ongaro laughs. “Yeah, but you’re not going to be able to fire one from there, if that’s what you’re thinking. That’s just where they’re loaded.”

“That’s not what I was thinking. I just need privacy. Can you give me that, or are we gonna have a problem?”

Ongaro sizes him up, but decides to agree. “That will be fine.” He doesn’t think there’s anything he can do in that room that they won’t be able to find out about.

The torpedo room offers them a plausible way off of the sub, and onto the AOC. It’s ridiculously impossible at this depth, but they will probably assume that Ramses used some kind of crazy supersoldier serum that allowed him to traverse the distance safely. What he won’t guess is that he can inject himself with a magical formula that will allow him to teleport over there without getting a single drop of water on him. Ongaro leads him down to the other side of the vessel, and shows him into the room, ordering the crew manning their stations to leave. He makes a mistake, though, when he accidentally looks up to the security camera in the corner. That’s fine, disabling basic surveillance is incredibly easy for Ramses with his trusty mission kit.

Winona closes the door behind them. “They’ll still be watching.”

“They’ll try.” Ramses presses the button on his signal scrambler, and shuts off the cameras and microphones. Then he places a magnetic lock on the door, in case going blind pisses them off enough to try to get back in here.

“You’re not going to try to stop me from coming with you?” Winona asks.

“I can’t leave you here with these warmongers,” Ramses tells her. “I’m mad at you right now, but we’ll get through this. That’s what it means to be on our team. Isn’t that what you want?”

“Yes.”

Ramses injects himself with the Existence Water. “Then hold onto me tightly.”

Both Alyssa and Winona take him in a bear hug, and let him transport them into the AOC. He was right, life support is fine. A cursory glance at the diagnostics screen shows that everything is fine. The hull did suffer a few scrapes on the way down, but it repaired itself without any prompting. Ramses takes out the data drive where he keeps the base code for the AI that he got from The Constant. He plugs it into a dataport, and uploads it as an upgrade. “Constance, can you hear me?”

“Five by five,” Constance replies.

“Run full diagnostics on yourself, please.”

Once the perfect diagnostic finishes, Ramses says, “okay, then. Please teleport to the last New York coordinates where the Bridgette was.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: October 17, 2398

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Technically, this next error that they’re investigating is a lot closer than Wyoming. It’s right in the heart of the Plaza in Kansas City, but Ramses chose to put it off, because he was pretty sure that Erlendr was on Brooks Lake, and that seemed more urgent. Interestingly, they’re in the shopping block where they first searched for the Salmon Civic Center, which doesn’t exist in this reality. Alyssa has been spending her free time monitoring the cameras that they have set up in the parking lot where everyone seems to appear, and no one has come through since Vearden several weeks ago. If someone is looking for the Civic Center, they’ve been looking for a real long time. Mateo has made up a story in his headcanon to explain that as they’re wandering around the block. He thinks that maybe a traveler showed up for the predictable reason, inadvertently drawing attention to themselves. Someone who runs one of these businesses noticed him, and they got to chatting, which eventually led to a job. The traveler is still around, because they work somewhere close now.

“That would be a decent story, and it may yet prove true, but there’s something different about this one.” Ramses is wielding a portable brain scanner, and is waving it around, hoping to detect their target.

“What’s that?” Mateo asks.

“The satellite orbited two dozen times before it stopped—or disappeared, as it were. In that time, ten brains produced ten errors two dozen times. One brain, however, produced an error only once.”

“Where was it during all the other scans?” Mateo questions, pretty sure that Ramses doesn’t know for sure.

“I can’t say for sure,” Ramses answers, “but funny enough, the orbital pass where it appeared happened at exactly midnight central Saturday night.”

“The club,” Mateo realizes. “The Salmonday Club only exists in an extra temporal dimension. I can’t remember what it’s called.”

“The Facsimile,” Ramses replies. “If my calculations are correct, it should be right around...here.” He stops at a dirty off-white wall.”

“That’s why we’re here so late.”

Ramses checks his watch. “We’re here just in time.” He pulls out a syringe, and prepares to inject himself with it.

“You’re going to teleport us in?”

“If our target is in there, they may not be able to get out, which implies the door that’s supposed to be in this spot doesn’t magically appear at 23:59:30. Ours may be the only way in or out.”

Mateo nods.

Ramses injects himself with the temporal energy-infused water. He lets it run through his bloodstream, then checks his watch again. “Are you ready?”

“You warned Leona where we might go, right?”’

“Of course.” Ramses winks, and takes Mateo by the shoulders. Once his watch beeps, he teleports them both through the temporal window.

They end up in the club, or what used to be the club. Now it’s a dirty and abandoned empty space with light trickling in from a collapsed roof, and mold growing on the walls. Ramses holds up his scanner, and tries to find the signal. Once he catches it, they exit the building, and head down the street. It too has been abandoned. Entire buildings have collapsed, vines have taken over. Cars have been burnt up. This is a post-apocalypse world. If anyone is living here, it’s not easy for them, and it’s not fun. Ramses continues to follow the signal only a short distance to the Ponce de Leon. It’s the only thing left standing in all its former glory. Someone is performing maintenance for it, and they likely live in this dimension’s version of the Bran safehouse.

They walk up the stairs, and knock on the door. They hear shuffling on the other side. A  very old man answers, and peers at them. He stares for quite a while, barely able to hold his own weight up. “I’m afraid there’s no way out.” He turns, and begins to walk towards the kitchen. “But there’s still tea, if you want it.” He sets a pot on a gas burner, and lights it. There’s no electricity, so he’s living like a camper in many ways. The unit is clean, though, and tidy. He takes pride in his space, even if no one else could ever have seen it until today.

“My name is Ramses Abdulrashid, and this is my associate, Mateo Matic. How long have you been trapped in this dimension?”

He looks up and to the left as he checks his memory archives. “Since Christmas Eve, 2022. The Cleanser trapped me here. He didn’t take too kindly to me helping one of his victims get her life back. Maybe you know her, Siria Webb?”

“We do,” Mateo answers.

“How was she doing?” the old man asks.

“She was all right when we left her,” Ramses replies, “but she never mentioned you, so you may have seen her more recently than we.”

The man nods. “Well, I’m Mackenzie Dodge, former proprietor of the Salmonday Club, and current sole occupier of this world. I wish we could have met under better circumstances.”

“We think we can get you out,” Mateo tells him. “We came here intentionally, strongly suspecting that someone was trapped. I can’t imagine being alone for over 370 years. It must have been hard.”

“It hasn’t been that long,” Mackenzie says with a laugh as he’s preparing the tea bags. “This place only exists on the eighth day of the week.”

“Right.” Mateo looks over to Ramses.

He does the math in his head. “More than fifty-three years.”

“That’s still a lot, sir,” Mateo says.

Mackenzie smiles. “It is, but—” He suddenly grasps his head, and hisses in pain.

“Oh, no,” Mateo laments.

Before they can do anything, the patch of timonite on Mackenzie’s head spreads throughout his body, and spirits him away to the Sargan Forest. The two of them just stare at the kitchen counter in horror.

“Come on,” Ramses says. “I have to get back to my lab.”

“Are we not going to talk about what just happened?”

“Only so that I can say that it’s not your fault.

“Yes, it is.” Once is an occurrence, twice is a coincidence, and thrice is a pattern. From Mateo’s perspective, twice is evidence enough. Even if he’s not the cause of this issue, he’s certainly not helping. This investigation is going to have to move on without him. His connection to timonite and the bulkverse is too strong to let him just run around free, ruining people’s lives.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: October 11, 2398

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Angela and Ramses stared at the sky after Mateo left, even though they obviously wouldn’t have been able to see him floating around up there. They themselves floated in the water for around ninety minutes until Ramses’ device beeped. The satellite module was up there, and starting to scan every brain in the world. It will take a little bit of time, but he programmed it with a threshold. Each scan will look for the most generalized data first. They’re not hunting for someone of an exact age. They’re looking for someone with an ungodly number of years of experience. The scanner doesn’t have to look very deep into someone’s mind to see whether they’ve been around for a lifetime, or several lifetimes. To be safe, he placed this threshold at a hundred years. Yes, it will find people who are 110 years old, but that’s okay, there still shouldn’t be too many to sift through, and once they have their dataset pared down, they will be able to run more detailed scans to tease out the specific person that they’re looking for. They don’t know how old Meredarchos is, and they don’t know how old Erlendr is at this moment, but it’s well past a century, and in all likelihood, the scanner will come back with an error when it comes across a single brain with two consciousnesses.

The two of them hit their emergency teleporters, and returned to the lab to watch the data come in. They would focus their efforts on North America, since the entity has only been spotted here, but that’s not how the scanner works. They’re not in control of whatever satellite the module managed to latch itself onto. It’s going to make a pass at a rate according to its speed of orbit, and will scan as many minds as possible before it passes out of range. Then it will make another pass and try again. It will do its best to filter and ignore duplicates, but the tradeoff in the cursory glance is that it won’t always know whether it scanned a given individual yet. Still, napkin math suggests that the process will only take a day. It takes half a day. It’s morning.

“There, that’s him,” Ramses announces, waking Angela up.

“Are you sure?” Angela asks.

“It has to be. This is the second time the scanner has seen him. It’s returned an error, because it can’t rectify the unusual brain chemistry, just as I had hoped and predicted.”

Angela picks up her phone, and dials. “I’m calling Kivi.” Arcadia is the one who picks up. Apparently, the tactical team is not too far from where Meredarchos and Erlendr are hiding out in San Diego, but they’re all pretty far from where Marie is being made comfortable at a hospital in Chicago. She hangs up. “I believe Mateo.”

“What do you mean?” Ramses is still looking over the data, making sure that there aren’t any other outliers, who might actually be who they’re looking for.

“He said that the Vertegens gave me immortality water, and that they gave each one to me in order. Do you know the order?”

Ramses sighs, and peels himself from the screen. “Yes.”

Angela waits for him to elaborate. “Go ahead.”

He sighs again. “You need Catalyst from the early waters of Earth, Longevity from Atlantis, Time from the island of Lorania on Dardius—which is in another galaxy, by the way, so I’m not sure how the Vertegens would have pulled that off.”

“Keep going,” Angela urges.

“Assuming you drank those three, the next one you would need is Body from the Atacama Desert, Existence from the Bermuda Triangle, Invulnerability from the North Pole, Energy from the Dead Sea, Youth from the Fountain of Youth in Florida, Death and Health from the Pools of Pamukkale, and...”

“Go on, don’t stop now.”

“And for any of these to become permanent, you would have to drink Activator from the last liquid water on Earth before it’s destroyed. Earliest estimate of that is a bolide impact on par with the Theia collision, which created the moon, which could happen anywhere between now and never, followed by solar expansion in over seven billion years.”

“So you’re saying there’s a chance.”

“Angela, you can’t save Marie by sticking yourself in the Insulator of Life. You would have to put, not just your mind, but also your body in there, and we don’t know how Meredarchos did it. We don’t even know if what you do can affect Marie at all!”

Angela goes over the lockers, where an extra set of tactical gear is just hanging there in case of emergency. “Fortunately, we find the Insulator, we find Meredarchos, so I’ll just ask him.”

“You won’t be able to get to San Diego in time,” Ramses warns. “The government team is already right there.”

“That’s why you’re gonna give me an injection of temporal energy. I know that you collected rocks from the Atacama, which you squeezed water out of. Don’t I need that one anyway?”

Ramses isn’t happy about testing his new formula on a living organism, but he doesn’t have much choice. Yes, he took rocks from the desert. Each one has oxygen and hydrogen trapped inside, and a process called electrolysis allows a scientist such as himself to extract both. The results can then theoretically be recombined to produce water, which he did. It is a painstaking process, and he needed a lot of rocks to make even one vial of the stuff, but it tested positive for temporal energy. It’s Body water, through and through. He unlocks one of his cabinets, and then lifts the bottom up to reveal a small refrigerated safe. He unlocks that with a 42-digit code, and retrieves the syringe. “Have a seat, I’ll get the rubbing alcohol.”

Once the injection is in, Angela finishes putting on her gear. She offers to take Ramses with her, but he decides that someone needs to stay at home base, which makes sense. So Angela teleports alone, all the way to the tack team’s location in Chula Vista, particularly to Kivi’s position. Best guess is Meredarchos and Erlendr are aware that the team is hot on their trail, and are trying to make a break for it across the border to Mexico. It’s hard enough for normal authorities to cross for official business, but when it comes to covert operatives, you can forget about it. It’s now or never.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Kivi whispers.

“I’m better trained than you are,” Angela either informs, or reminds, her. She can’t remember how much she’s talked about her experiences in the afterlife simulation.

A voice comes in on the radio, “spotter, report.”

“No visual yet,” Kivi reports back. “We have an addition who will be assisting with capture.”

“Understood.”

“She’s just letting me join the mission without question?” Angela asks.

“She’s been told that we have unusual skills and knowledge, and access to rare or unique resources. She’s been advised to expect people like you showing up when the situation calls for it, and assumes that you’ve all been properly vetted. It’s a pretty great group,” Kivi says, putting the binoculars back in front of her eyes. “I know that you’re worried about your sister, but please try not to ruin it.”

“I’m not here to get the Insulator back to my sister. I’m here to get in, and prevent her from ever getting sick.”

“I don’t understand how any of that works, but—” She interrupts herself to speak into the radio. “Visual on the target. I repeat, I have a visual on the target.” A man has just rounded the corner in the vacant park. He’s struggling to walk, but not because of any disability. He’s acting like half of him doesn’t really want to go in that direction. Maybe that’s exactly what’s happening. If Meredarchos and Erlendr are evenly matched, psychically speaking, it may still be difficult for them to agree on a course of action. That’s good for them.

“Light ‘em up,” the leader orders.

“No, you can’t kill him,” Angela argues, getting to her feet. “I need him to tell me how to use the Insulator.

“Stop,” Kivi demands at a loud whisper. “She means to target him with a laser designator.”

It’s too late. Angela stops herself from heading towards the man, but her cover’s been blown. He looks up, and spots her. He takes a gut out of the back of his pants and tries to aim it at her, but something stops her. That doesn’t really make much sense. At worst, both Meredarchos an Erlendr want her dead, and at best, they don’t care. Either way, nothing should be holding them back.

“Go, go, go!” the leader orders. “Blitz formation!”

Seven other people come out of the woodwork, and begin to run towards their target, holding their own guns. He tries to aim at any one of them too, but he can’t hold his weapon at anything but the ground. He yells, frustrated with his own inadequacy. The team overwhelms him, so he tries to invade their minds, but he’s shocked to find that they’re all impervious to his psychic powers, thanks to a little mental masonry on Arcadia Preston’s part. Two operatives place him in cuffs while a third searches his bag.

“Do you see a small glass greenish-blue object in there?” Angela asks.

“This right here?” He takes the Insulator of Life out.

“Yes.” Angela takes it from him and shakes it in front of Meredarchos’ face. “How do you get in this thing physically? It’s only supposed to be able to store consciousness, so how do you do it? Tell me!”

“I have no idea.” He kind of looks like he’s telling the truth, but that’s not good enough.

“Tell me!” she repeats.

“I honestly don’t. I didn’t even know that wasn’t how it was supposed to work,” Meredarchos claims. “She’s the one who put me in it in the first place.” He jerks his head towards Arcadia.

Everyone looks at her. “I don’t know what he’s talking about,” she tells them.

Kivi nods understandingly. “You haven’t done that yet. It’s in your future.”

“I must figure it out eventually,” Arcadia realizes. “The problem is that could mean this very moment, or a hundred years from now.”

“Marie doesn’t have that kind of time,” Angela complains.

“Then let’s give her more time.” It’s Leona. No one noticed her appear, and they don’t know where she’s been, or what she’s been up to, this entire time. “I suspected as much as Mateo did regarding the water, and I’ve been working on a backup plan.”

“What might that be?” Kivi asks.

Leona doesn’t bother answering her. She brings Angela into a hug, and teleports them both away. They land in the underground lab where Leona worked before the government provided them with their own facility at The Lofts. Angela looks up in awe at the huge spaceship towering above them.

“Welcome home,” a woman says, approaching them.

“Whoa. What are we doing here?” Angela asks.

“Angela Walton, this is Magnus Petra Burgundy. Petra, Angela.”

Angela shakes Petra’s hand. “It’s nice to meet you.” She faces Leona. “What am I doing here, LeeLee?”

“This is how we save Marie. What you need is time. Time to...procure the necessary ingredients for her recovery.” She eyes Petra, who clearly doesn’t know everything about what’s going on here, though she didn’t bat an eye when they appeared out of nowhere, so she doesn’t know nothing.

“The Insulator was a bust,” Angela laments.

“I know. That was probably never going to work. That’s why I’m giving you this.” She gestures towards the ship. “This project has not been officially abandoned, but when the government started focusing on homeland grid integration of fusion power, space exploration ended up on the backburner.”

“How does that help me? We already have Time water from Dardius,” she says through gritted teeth. It doesn’t matter much. Petra can hear, but isn’t familiar.

“You’re not going anywhere, per se,” Leona begins. “You’re going on a loop to and back from the Oort Cloud. For us, months will pass, but for you, around six hours. This is regular special relativity at work, no time powers necessary, just profound speed.”

“Is this going to work?” Angela questions.

“We can’t let the earlier water that you drank break down in your system. This is the only way.”

“Am I going alone?”

“I’m going with,” Petra says, “as will a crew of experts. You’re in good hands.”

Angela is nervous, but she trusts Leona’s judgment. “I guess I’ll see you on the other side then. It’s ready to go, right?”

“We’ve been in a holding pattern,” Petra explains, “but the countdown started as soon as you showed up. Follow me.”

All three of them take the elevator to the entry level of the ship while the silo blast doors are closing. “Shouldn’t you stay out here?” Angela asks Leona.

“I need to pick up my husband. I can’t teleport all the way into orbit, so I’m going to hitch a ride, and then bug out before you break orbit.” Hmm...he’s alive?

They continue walking through the corridors until reaching the seating area. Carlin and Moray are playing a card game with two other crew members. Angela exchanges a look with Leona, but they don’t talk about it. This may be the safest place for them. After the countdown reaches zero, they launch into space, much to the surprise of everyone in the world. Shuttles don’t launch from Kansas City.

Several hours later, Marie wakes up in her hospital bed feeling much better.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 11, 2398

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Training. Before Ramses started to have to devote all of his time to trying to get Trina back, he was working on a way to give people their time powers back permanently. The immortality water injections worked really well for a few uses, but they wore off quickly, and it would be nice to not worry about procuring more. It was never that high on the list of priorities since teleporting is a convenient alternative to traditional means, it isn’t usually necessary. It’s mostly a luxury that most of them spent most of their lives not having anyway. Angela and Marie could do it in the afterlife simulation once she reached Plus status, but she didn’t exercise the right very often. It wasn’t because she was used to a life without it. It’s that after you die, the time it takes to accomplish something the hard way doesn’t seem as bad as it once was.

Alyssa McIver was born in a reality that didn’t allow temporal manipulation, except for certain exceptions, apparently. But they know that she has time powers, which allow her to create illusions, which she may or may not use primarily to generate disguises for people. There is a chance that she gets such powers later in her personal timeline, but they have every reason to believe that she was born with them. She should have them now, though they would have been suppressed her entire life up until this point. The team was content to keep her in the dark regarding her destiny. If they couldn’t prove it to her, there would be no point in saying anything. But things have changed. They need disguises. They need McIver hats, if that’s even possible with the state that she’s in.

“It’s not working,” Alyssa says. Her eyes are so closed, so what does she know? Anyway, she’s right, it’s not.

“Do you feel anything different?” Ramses asks, tablet in hand, ready to take notes on how the experiment is going.

“Nothing. I’m still not sure that I believe you.”

“Perhaps that is your problem,” Mateo says. “If you believe you can’t do it, then you can’t, so why not try believing that you can?”

“You can’t just decide to believe something,” she contends. “Something has to convince you, and that usually comes from the outside.”

“We showed you the McIver hat.”

“Stop calling it that.”

“That’s what it is,” Ramses reasons.

“I didn’t make no hat, and you didn’t show me using any special power. You showed Marie changing herself into famous actors, and other celebrities. I have seen no evidence that that has anything to do with me. The hat is amazing. I’m unremarkable.”

“That is certainly not the word I would use to describe you,” Mateo argues.

“We have been at this for hours,” Alyssa begins. “We’ve not made any progress. You haven’t even seen my cheek bubble as the illusion tries to form. Nothing has happened. It’s useless.”

“It’s not useless,” Ramses tries to explain. “It’s all part of the process, and it’s all leading up...to this.” With the final words, he reaches into the box, and pulls out the McIver hat that Marie got from The Dealer, handing it to Alyssa.

“What am I meant to do with this thing?” she questions.

“You don’t know where hats go?” Ramses jokes.

She chuckles voicelessly. “I thought this was for other people who want to borrow my power.”

“Generally, yes,” Ramses says, “and it can do that because there’s power in it. Yours. It doesn’t work with everyone, because not everyone has the ability to harness it. The Dealer doesn’t, but Marie does, and I’m presuming that you’re more like her.”

“Someone told me that Marie has some of that immortality water in her system. They wouldn’t tell me what kind, or why it’s lasting longer than normal. But instead of these injections, why don’t you give me some of that stuff?”

Mateo and Ramses exchange a look. Marie still has Health and Death water in her system, because they were used to perform an abortion. This is a medical condition that cannot be replicated. “She has private reasons for that. It won’t work for you,” Mateo says as vaguely as possible, hoping to not elicit any followup.

“Go on and put on the hat,” Mateo suggests. “It’s like jumpstarting a car.”

She sighs, a tiny bit frustrated, but mostly tired. “I don’t know what that means.” Oh yeah, this world hasn’t used petrol cars in a long time.

Ramses doesn’t say anything, he just nods at her encouragingly.

She sighs again, and gives it a try. Her facial expression changes just from putting it on. She still looks like herself so far, but she’s clearly feeling something, maybe a surge of energy?

“Report,” Ramses requests.

“I don’t know,” she answers. “I can’t describe it. It’s...it’s like a light? What would light feel like if it didn’t feel like heat? I dunno.” She shakes her head, trying to come up with a better way to word it.

“That’s good, that’s good.” Ramses taps some notes down. “Okay, now I want you to do it the same way we practiced, except now there’s a zero percent chance that it won’t work. Think about someone you want to look like. Visualize an image of them standing in front of you. Then turn it around, and pull it back until the image is wrapped around you, like a suit.”

Alyssa closes her eyes and tries again. They can see her struggling with it, but in a way that makes it look like it might actually be working this time. Her cheek doesn’t bubble, like she said it might. Sharp beams of light appear out of nowhere, and shoot across her face and body. She slowly disappears, and then faster and faster, until she’s been completely replaced. It’s the current President of Russia.

“Okay,” Ramses says, smiling widely. “You’ll probably always have to wear the hat, until we fix the time power suppression problem for this reality, or get you to the main sequence, but I think we have something here. It’s a great start.”

Alyssa doesn’t seem to consider it a problem. It’s a comfortable enough hat, and it disappears when she transforms into someone else anyway. She’s more concerned with the mission itself, which is perfectly understandable. It won’t be a walk in the park. A part of her always thought that none of this would work, and she wouldn’t have to participate. Now it’s all too real. Ramses calling it a start is a nice thing to hear, though.

“A start?” Mateo asks. “I would call this more than a start. She looks exactly like him! I can’t tell the difference!”

“Take a step to your left,” Ramses tells her.

They see the President step over, but not all of him moves at the same time. It looks like a bad censorship job, not quite synced up. Okay, so he’s right; it’s only a start.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 23, 2398

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Mateo was excited to find the homestone at first. Its entire thing is being able to send people back to where they started before they first experienced time travel, whether that was in the present reality, or another. But that’s the thing that Alt!Leona pointed out, which is that every member of his team was from a different reality. Not even Mateo and Leona were from the same one. Even if Kivi’s idea of trying to duplicate the stone with Mateo’s quantum knife worked, it would still separate them all. Homestones were known to transport multiple people to the same point in spacetime, but asking for it to do it for nine or ten people all at once was more than pushing it. Plus, whether Alyssa knew it or not, she was destined to leave the Third Rail too, so the total number of people in need of such a thing was even larger.

Upon the properties of a homestone being explained to her, Andile thought there might still be a way if they could just get someone like Ramses back home, where he could use the vast resources of the main sequence to come back for the rest, but that seems like a stretch, and they have other thing to worry about at the moment. They have to focus on the mission at hand, which is to break Alt!Mateo out of Black Crook Rehabilitation Facility. Despite sharing a near identical name with its counterpart from 350 years ago, where Horace Reaver and Gilbert Boyce once lived, the two prisons are not very much alike. The first was a tower built on the peak, holding up a platform where residents lived in almost suburban-like homes. They worked together to maintain a microcosmic society, safe from and for the general population in its isolation. The one here is just a regular building with a fence around it. Rehabilitation isn’t even really part of the program. They just included that in the name to make people feel better about letting their social scraps waste away behind bars, kind of like how the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is neither democratic, nor a republic.

Mateo will not be able to get his alternate self out of there using wingsuits, as he did last time. The plan went well, but looking back now, it was reckless and foolish. Sure, they had the advantage of time that the guards were nowhere near prepared for, but so many things could have gone wrong. They pretty much just got lucky, or maybe the powers that be protected them in a way that they wouldn’t have been able to recognize at the time. They have a chance this time to do it differently, to make it far easier on themselves. Back in those days, time travelers were time travelers, and teleporters were teleporters, but they have learned so much about reality, the lines have been blurred. More specifically, Mateo is carrying with them one syringe of temporal energy-infused immortality water. It’s actually activated Energy water; double the energy. Ramses believes there is enough power in this thing to make two, maybe even three jumps, which is better than they have been able to do thus far.

“I wasn’t able to figure out where Mateo’s cell might be,” Andile says regretfully. She has become their resident researcher, which makes sense, because that’s what she did before all this happened to her. “That’s all confidential.”

“I don’t think I’ll need that,” Mateo hopes. “Whenever I get a taste of temporal energy, I also get back my superempathy. If there’s anyone in the world I’m more connected to than my Leona, it’s my self.”

“Are you sure?” Andile questions.

“No,” Mateo answers honestly, “but Kivi came up with a contingency plan.”

“It’s not a plan,” Kivi points out. “It’s just an idea.”

“And it’s a good idea,” Mateo tells her.

“It’s...not,” Kivi contends.

“It’s...going to be okay.” Mateo has learned in his advanced age that confidence is key to the success of any mission. Without it, he has to rely too heavily on other people, and he doesn’t want to do that anymore. He doesn’t want to be helpless and sad. He wants to get back in the driver’s seat of his own life. So after a quick goodbye to his friends, he injects himself with the Energy water.

Andile was right to be worried. He gets his empathy back, but he can’t feel anyone he hasn’t before. He can sense Leona, Ramses, Angela, and Marie back in Kansas City. He can feel Kivi in the room with him, which is a bit ambiguous except when accounting for the fact that he can’t feel Alt!Leona, because she’s not the one he’s in love with, and his mind is conscious of that. As Nerakali would explain it, there is only one you; even alternate selves are only approximations. So since he doesn’t know where Alt!Mateo is, he’s going to have to go with Plan B.

Mateo teleports into the prison, getting as close as possible to the room where they think the cells should be controlled. It’s dead center, and would be impossible to reach from the outside without being spotted, but he doesn’t have to worry about all the doors. He appears to be wrong about the purpose of this area, though, as this looks more like a rich person’s fancy office. The walls are lined with books, and there’s a putting strip on the floor. What a giant cliché, it must be the warden’s office.

“Mister Matic,” comes a voice from the other side of the chair. He spins around, once more like a cliché. It’s Tamerlane Pryce. Because of course it is. “I’ve been waiting.”

“Have we met?” Mateo asks. He doesn’t mean to act like he doesn’t know who he is, but it could be a different version of Pryce, rather than the one he grew to hate in the afterlife simulation.

Pryce understands the meaning. “We’ve not, but I’ve heard of you. I am aware of how my alternate self treated you, and for what it’s worth, I am sorry for that.”

“I have dealt with far worse people, Mateo says sincerely. The other Pryce was rude and self-centered, but not evil. When all added up, he probably did more good than bad. He did save the lives of tens of billions of people throughout history.

“I assume you’re here to bust Andy Dufresne out?” this Pryce asks.

“I assume you’re not going to stop me,” Mateo says, both because maybe saying it out loud will make it come true, but also because there’s a strong chance that it is true.

Pryce looks halfway disgusted. “Ugh, you don’t want that guy. He’s a douche. There’s someone else I have in mind who doesn’t deserve to be here, and could use your help instead. I assume you possess a limited number of jumps?”

“I can do what I need to, as long as you stay out of my way.”

Pryce takes out a big book of residents, listed in alphabetical order, and opens to a particular page. “This is where your other self is right now.” He’s deliberately keeping his finger over the location. Then he switches to another page. “This is where someone who deserves to escape is.” This time, he’s deliberately keeping his finger over the name, and only showing the location. “I won’t tell you who it is until you choose.”

Remembering his thing about the driver’s seat, Mateo takes a letter opener out of its cup, and jams it into Pryce’s wrist, who cries out in pain. He carelessly removes the book from the bloodied hand, and scans for the second name. It’s Leona Reaver.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 14, 2398

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The clock strikes midnight by the time Leona makes it to the lab. She takes her phone out, and checks on the location of her friends. They’re either still at the condo, as she asked them to be, or their phones are, but they’re elsewhere. She gets out of the car, and enters the lab. She and Marie checked here after they returned to the Ponce de Leon in case Mateo, Ramses, and Angela were holed up, or left clues. The place was exactly as they left it, and the security measures they put in place proved that no one else had come into the building either. Even so, she needs to check secondary security to ensure that no one opened the vault.

Once she’s sure that everything’s okay, she opens the door herself, which she and Ramses promised not to do unless they both agreed, or if it was an emergency. She can’t achieve the first one, but the second one certainly applies. They don’t have very much of this stuff left, and what she’s about to do hasn’t been tested, let alone perfected, but she’s desperate. She doesn’t know where her people are, or what sort of state they’re in. If communication was compromised, she can’t trust anything Mateo said to her over the phone. She has to assume the worst and act accordingly. She has to go to them, even if it means placing herself in the same predicament. Leona draws the Existence water into the syringe, and injects it into her arm. Reckless, but it works. She can sense Mateo, quite distantly, but they’re out there somewhere, and she should have just enough power to make it there. She grabs the satellite phone, and teleports away.

“Leona?” Mateo asks.

They’re standing in the main cabin of The Olimpia. Nothing looks out of place. “Oh, thank God. Report.”

“No. You report. How did you get here?”

“I know how,” Ramses says, stepping up the stairs. “You injected yourself with samples from the Bermuda Triangle.”

“I had to,” Leona defends. “I had to get back to you.”

“It wasn’t ready,” Ramses counters. “It may never have been.”

“But it was ready, I’m here,” she insists.

“You couldn’t have known that,” Ramses continues. “Besides, we don’t know what kind of side effects there might be. That is not what the immortality waters were designed for.”

“They weren’t designed for anything,” Leona argues. “They’re natural.”

“Are you sure about that?” Ramses asks, kind of rhetorically.

Leona looks over at Mateo, who is looking down at the floor disappointingly. He shakes his head. He can’t believe she did that. It was so stupid and dangerous, and she should know better. He made contact. He used the proper language to let her know that they were fine. She should have trusted that. She should have trusted him.

Leona frowns at them. She hears a noise behind her, just now noticing that Angela has been sitting in the cubby. “I’m sorry, everyone. I didn’t think it through.”

“It’s okay. We’re gonna be okay now,” Angela tells her. “Let’s all go back home.”

“Where are we?” Leona asks, flipping on the nearest viewscreen to see nothing but the cold dark ocean.

“Enemy territory,” Mateo answers. “Russia.”

Microstory 1818: Grandfather Death

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About a year ago, the papers and the public began to call me Grandfather Death. Capital punishment has been abolished in every country in the developed world, and much of the developing world as well. Mine was the last holdout, and I fall into a special category. You see, my trial was going on at about the same time as the law was being debated, so once they finally settled on abolishment, they realized that I was in a bit of a gray area. Two others were executed once the new law was passed, but before it went into effect. No others were on death row with us at the time, so there was a question as to whether I should be grandfathered into the old law, or placed back in the normal prison system to carry out a life sentence. Being grandfathered into a prior law is often a good thing, like back in the day when I could drive a car at the age of 15 even after they suddenly upped the minimum age from 14 to 16. This time, it’s not so good, and the whole thing was all really complicated and over my head. Because of the way the proceedings happened, I didn’t technically have a life sentence. I was sentenced to death, so there was nothing for them to fall back on. It was a weird loophole that everyone missed, and as much as it would benefit me to go free, it was honestly a huge mistake that never should have occurred. They considered retrying me, and reconvicting me, so they could do it right this time, but I think there was a legal precedent issue with that. It was just easier if they went ahead with the plan, and assured the public that this would be the very last execution ever. There were a lot of protests that I remember seeing outside my window. That was a concession, I guess, or a consolation prize. Death row was built underground, but they moved me to luxury accommodations for the last several months of my life. I’m not using that word sarcastically either. I would have killed to live in a place like that before I went to prison, it was so nice. Even for white collar criminals, this seems like far too much creature comfort. Why does it exist at all?

I’m not going to lie here and try to tell you that I don’t belong in this room, with these straps around my body, and this needle in my arm. I did what they said I did, and I would do it again. People sometimes ask me if I truly had to beat him as hard as I did, and like, that was the whole point. I wasn’t actually trying to kill him; that was just what happened to him in the end, because he couldn’t survive his injuries. My intent was for him to feel pain like all his victims did. He got in trouble for taking people’s money, but he didn’t suffer. Meanwhile hundreds of families were still destitute, and unable to believe in the concept of justice. I had to right that wrong, and I have no regrets. I made no attempt to conceal my actions, and when the police came, I did not resist. I knew that things could get this bad for me, because that man had a lot of loyalists that were holding onto a lot of strings. But he finally suffered, and that’s what matters, even if it means I go down too. Because, you see, even though he had people honorbound to him because of how much money he made them, I’m the one with fans. I’m the one with a following. I’m not just talking about the victims and their families either, but people who agree with my solution, and only wish they could have done it themselves. That’s what I gave them; peace of mind that he can’t hurt anyone anymore, and that they aren’t responsible for stopping him. I’m sacrificing myself so that they can get on with their lives. Yes, I lie on this table fully at peace—smiling, even—because today...I die a martyr.