Microstory 2581: Renata Comes Back Out from Behind the Counter After Shutting the Other Gates

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Renata comes back out from behind the counter after shutting the other gates. Her statement stands, that she can’t trust Quidel, but those motorcycles don’t sound good. They’re so loud and obnoxious. This is a remote part of town, but it’s not completely cut-off. People can hear them, and if there’s a shootout, the cops will become involved, whether the alarms are still working or not. All this running through her mind, she’s starting to freak out. She didn’t pass the first test—the first test!—for the NSD. She can’t protect an entire bank from a bunch of shadowy biker spies. She gets on her knees, and checks for Lazar’s pulse. He doesn’t have one. “How will they get in? Blowtorches? Explosives? A truck?”

“They’ll use a key,” Quidel answers calmly.

She’s just staring at Lazar’s bloodied face. “If they have access to this building, why did this guy kill my boss?”

“Because he didn’t have a key. They’re not working together. The location of this bank was leaked, and multiple parties are coming to claim it.”

“Are they here for everything, or for one specific thing?”

“Little bit of both. They all have their priorities, but they’ll take anything they can get their hands on. Grab his gun. Our only hope is to fight back.”

“Are reinforcements coming?” Renata presses.

“Yes, but they’ll be a while. The Kumati will be inside in seconds, as soon as they find which key goes to which gate.” They can hear the warble-whang of the gate as the bad guys begin to try to open it. “Their slight lack of intel is the only thing protecting us right now, and the clock is ticking. Please pick up that gun.”

Renata is still not looking up. “If this bank is so valuable, why doesn’t it have round-the-clock surveillance?”

“Renata! Please!”

“I mean, at least keep a guard here overnight.”

The gate opens. A bunch of men file in, and start waving their guns around, as if there were more threats than only two people in the center of the lobby. They’re speaking Kumati, which Renata never learned, but they don’t sound happy.

“If it were me, I would keep a surveillance house nearby, with officers who are always on watch. If not every bank employee knows it’s a front, the panopticons only come in during an emergency.”

“It’s over, Renata.” Quidel drops his gun, holds his hand up to surrender.

“Like this one,” Renata finishes.

More yelling.

“Stand up, Renata,” Quidel urges. “These guys aren’t messing around, and I don’t know what happens to your consciousness when you die!”

Now she looks up. “Huh?”

“You. Are. A. Ro. Bot.”

She winces.

More yelling. This guy’s right up in her face with his shotgun. And he’s about to fire it.

She slaps the muzzle of his gun, so it swings to the side. He instinctively pulls the trigger, shooting a few of his compatriots. She takes the shotgun with both hands, jams the butt into his toe, then shoots him in the chin. No more shells. She finally does pick-up the original motorcyclist’s pistol. She shoots the rest of the attackers in the head, one-by-one, before any of them can fire back even once. No more bullets.

Two more guys rush into the bank. Quidel has since retrieved his own weapon from the floor, which he uses to take out these guys. They can still hear more outside. A lot of people came for the treasure. The two of them swipe their dead enemies’ guns from their hands, and walk out of the bank together. They don’t speak, they don’t coordinate. Renata handles the gunmen who are more on the left side as Quidel takes care of the right. They only fire as many times as necessary to get the job done, and they don’t take a single bullet for themselves.

They stand there for a moment, waiting for anyone to come out from behind a tree, or something. “What did you mean by that?”

“By what?”

“You said I was a robot.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I heard you, plain as day. It...triggered something in me. I felt invigorated. I felt bulletproof.”

“You may be.”

“Because I’m a robot?”

He shakes his head. “That’s not the right word for it. There’s no such thing as an intelligent robot. Android, yes. Superintelligence, absolutely. But robots are just machines with programming. You don’t have programming. Even when you did, it wasn’t a rigid set of instructions, but a deeply engineered personality. You still made your own choices. It’s just that you made the predictable ones, and you didn’t know that they came from implanted memories, rather than lived experiences, and that you were designed by another intelligence.”

“What the hell are you going on about?”

Quidel looks at her with what Renata feels is unwarranted sadness. “You’re not the only one. I just think you were the first. That’s what I’ve been doing here, in your world. The NSD gives me missions, which I take, but I’ve been running my own investigation in parallel. It took me a long time to find you, and I encountered other anomalies along the way.”

“You are not making any sense, as per usual. Maybe the gas that nearly killed us gave you permanent brain damage.”

“It didn’t nearly kill me, Renata. It did kill me.”

“How is that possible?” she questions.

He gestures all around them. “How is this? Did you take marksmanship classes? Did you even learn basic gun safety? This is your handiwork, yet as far as you remember, you’ve never picked up a gun even once. Can you explain that?”

“No. Can you?”

“Yes. But you won’t believe me, and if I do manage to convince you of the truth, it’s gonna ruin your life.”

Renata looks around now. “What else is new?”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: October 3, 2398

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Ramses removes the brain scanning bonnet from Mateo’s head. He places it on the table, and starts looking over the data. Everything looks good. No full consciousness has been uploaded, just the basics. The entity is capable of making decisions, and moving muscles. Or at least it would be, if it were attached to any muscles. For now it’s just a blob of digital synapses, waiting to fire. “All right, the upload went great.”

“Better than Leona’s?”

Ramses smirks. “Virtually indistinguishable. You two may as well share a brain.”

“Did you delete hers from the system?”

“She might ask to see it later. It’s best to just keep both programs around, maybe even after we use them.”

“When do we test it? How do we test it?”

Ramses is uncomfortable. “We test it on Rothko.”

“So you upload my partial mind into Alt!Mateo’s brain, which is currently being occupied by Rothko Ladhiffe. Then someone tries to kill him, at which point fate will intervene, and take him back to the place where that body is supposed to die in another reality. Meanwhile, the extraction mirror will be waiting to bring him back to this reality, but my mind will override any survival instinct that Rothko has, forcing him to stay where he is, so that an old version of Horace Reaver can murder him in a New Jersey Hospital.”

“Well, when you put it like that, it sounds absolutely bonkers.”

“It is bonkers. It’s just...also necessary.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. Rothko is a person. We will be murdering him.”

“Reaver will be doing the murdering,” Mateo rationalizes.

“That is a pretty weak justification, Matt. If this were made public, we would be arrested for conspiracy and-or reckless endangerment, or something like that. Alt!Mateo was destined to die, not Rothko.”

“Someone in that hospital is supposedly wearing the hundemarke—”

“That’s not why his death can’t be changed,” Ramses claims.

“What? What else is there?”

“His murder is inevitable because it precipitates the creation of the next timeline, and the one after. It’s a major turning point in reality, as is Leona Reaver’s accidental death. They have to happen, or none of us comes into existence, not even you.”

“You’re telling me that if we don’t kill these two people’s bodies, whoever is using them at the time, we will all just blink out of existence.”

“It’s possible, yeah. I mean, it’s hard to be sure what the consequences would be.”

Mateo considers this. “Maybe that’s why someone created the extraction mirror loop. They’re trying to disrupt the continuum in some way, be it for good or bad, like what Erlendr and Jupiter were trying to do when the Parallel was created.” Fair guess.

“Yeah, that could be the case. Either way, this is why extraction mirrors are so dangerous. It’s best to never use them. Given that, how would you say we proceed?”

“Let’s hold off on the testing for now,” Mateo recommends. “I’m not convinced that it’s the right call anymore. Why don’t we run more tests on my hands? I’m fine with losing my teleportation ability, but I need to know when, and what my limits are.”

Microstory 1600: Welcome to The Bulk

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My name is Thack Natalie Collins. Weird name, I know, but my parents are a little weird, and they have good reason to be. I belong to a subspecies of humans called voldisil. I was not born of only the two parents, but also of a third, which provided me with a special gift that no one else has. This third parent did not raise me, and does not concern itself with human affairs, and it is unclear what their intentions are in regards to us, if they’re even driven by anything beyond their instincts. They may not quite realize what they’re doing. My gift may be part of some grand plan, or it’s just something that happened, but either way, I decide how I use it. I can witness events that occur in parallel universes. I can’t see it all at once, and I can’t see too much detail, but I am able to recognize momentous occasions, and important historical figures. I’m especially good at noticing when someone from one universe travels to another. Those events are so clear to me, as are some others, and what I’ve realized is that they are not inevitable. I can change things sometimes. I can only do it from a distance, mind you, but it is possible to interfere. Communication across these unfathomably vast distances is not easy, but when I need to reach out to someone, I can do it. And when I do, it’s because they’re at some kind of fork in the road, and I believe I can help them choose the right path. There are an infinite number of universes—which those in the know know are called branes, and that they are floating in something called the bulk—and while I could theoretically see any of them, I’m most concerned with the ones that are “closer”. Close is a complicated concept when dealing with hyperdimensional physics, but the fact is that some branes impact other branes more than others, and as selfish as it may sound, they have the potential to impact my universe. All of these are the ones that I’m worried about. They threaten each other, and upset the balance, and since I’m one of the few people who can actually make a difference on a grand scale, it’s my responsibility to try to make things better. The following are some of the more interesting anecdotes from across the bulkverse. I meddle in some of them, and stay out of others, but they are all important, and they all matter.

Microstory 1429: Fort Frontline

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The time monster portal was gigantic. It wasn’t like this single doorway that they all stepped through. If that had been the case, the Durune humans could have created some kind of blockade around it. Maybe they would have built an actual impenetrable structure, or simply stationed mages around to bottleneck them as soon as they arrived. Unfortunately, that was not practical. The portal was a ring, several kilometers in diameter, and a monster could appear from anywhere along that ring. Had the planet enjoyed Earthan population numbers, they probably could have figured it out, but they just didn’t have enough manpower, or resources. But the population was rising, and people were already developing a pattern of building more towns to accommodate the increase, rather than simply expanding the borders. It just became an assumption that a fifth town would follow the fourth, and would probably be finished around 2056. Every new town up to that point had its own reason for being, though. They weren’t making them just for the sake of it. Splitsville arose from a fundamental dispute about how to protect themselves against the monsters. The ones who built Parade wanted to be closer to Watershed. Hardtlanders wanted to live in a forest, which didn’t always exist, as plantlife took a long time to take root. So what would the fifth town be all about? Well, it had to do with the monster portal. As explained, the portal was a ring, so monsters could be heading in any direction when they arrived, but they wouldn’t stay that way forever. If they wanted to get to the other towns without circumnavigating the globe, they would all eventually head in the same direction. Experts surveyed the land, and found that—no matter where the monsters originally came from, and no matter which town they would end up attacking—they would all pass one specific spot. So they chose that as the site of the new town, and called it Frontline. Families would not be living in Frontline. Having children around would not only be discouraged, but against the law. It was designated only for mages, and particularly adept fighters. It would also remain pretty small, and be used primarily for defense. Once this was determined, they stopped calling it a town, and started referring to it as a fort. Fort Frontline. It did have everything anyone would need to live there happily, though, just like any town. It had an inventorium, and a forge, and even a barber shop. They did do some training, in preparation for attacks, but they didn’t spend all of their time that busy. They still enjoyed themselves. The other towns kept all the mages they needed, but their jobs suddenly became a little bit easier, because now there was this protective barrier between them and their enemies. The best part about it was that the monsters didn’t communicate with one another, or warn each other of obstacles. So they just kept coming this way, sensing that there was life to destroy, almost always completely oblivious to the fact that they were not going to get far. Some did manage to move around it. Speedstrikers, for instance, were cunning and strategic, and capable of planning for the future, instead of only following instincts. And there was the occasional monster who just randomly went all the way around the planet. But for the most part, Fort Frontline was considered to be a grand success.

Microstory 1402: Alone Here

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There were a lot of things that Savitri was unable to learn, because she was ripped from her life, and her family, at such a young age. Fortunately, she wasn’t completely feral, as she did retain memories of living in civilization. She didn’t have a very large vocabulary, but she did have a concept for spoken language, which was enough for her to learn the words she needed when she finally stopped being alone. She reverted to her lizard brain for most of the first decade, though, and her instincts told her to be safe, and to stay alive. But what exactly did that mean? What would it mean if she stopped being alive, and how exactly would she go about doing such a thing? Her body knew it didn’t want to jump off of a cliff that was too high, but intellectually, she wouldn’t have been able to explain it. Fate didn’t care about that, though. She didn’t have to jump off the cliff to fall from it. Ten years into her life on Durus, as she was climbing up the cliffside, in an attempt to reach a new plant that looked appetizing, a rock gave way, and dropped her down. Death wasn’t something she understood until then. She had never seen it before. No one had taught her about it, and even if they had, they couldn’t have explained what it truly meant. She could feel it coming over her now, though, and she did not like it. To be honest, it was a miracle nothing like this had ever happened to her before. Sure, she had scratched her skin on burrs, and tripped often, but this was the first time she experienced a fatal injury. Her instincts took over again. She pulled off her shirt, and wrapped it around the gash in her leg. Then she dragged herself to a secondary shelter she had found that she only used if a storm came in, and she was too far from home. There she remained until it was safe enough to hobble across the lands to the small and only source of water in the world to clean her wound. Again, that was just out of instinct.

After it was over, she started to heal, and tried to get back to a normal life. But all the while, she contemplated what had happened. Had there been any animal life on this world, she probably would have thought to kill some of it to eat. But as it stood, she was totally vegetarian, and when she pulled these edible plants apart, it never occurred to her that she was stopping something from growing and persisting. She saw plants as food, or clothing material, and as far as she knew, this was just something the land provided. The more she thought about it, though, the more she started to put things together. She was smaller before, and had grown older. When she pulled a plant from the ground, she couldn’t go back to that place right away, because a new plant had not grown in its place. And it probably was indeed a new plant, rather than the same one magically going back to how it was, just for her. She didn’t have a word for it, but she was figuring out death on her own, and she was assuming it was an end. Had she fallen from higher up on the cliff, it would have caused more pain, and eventually ended her. Right now, she existed, but it was possible to not exist. And maybe that was preferable. Maybe that was easier. It certainly couldn’t be harder than all this that she was going through. Right? So she resolved to do just that. Once she was well enough to walk, she went back to that cliff, climbed all the way up to the top, and prepared to jump on purpose. As she was waiting for her bravery to show up, she started going over her memories, hoping they would bring her comfort. It was from this that she remembered more about her life before the hell world. A relative or friend had died, and the family attended their funeral. They were not happy that this had happened, and they wished it hadn’t. That was all it took for Savitri to decide that death was a bad thing. It wasn’t easier; it was just nothing. So she climbed back down, and never considered committing suicide ever again.