Boundless Battlefields Broadening: Seclusion (Part I)

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Sentille Tereth dropped out of reframe speeds and opened the main viewports. There it was, her destination. It didn’t look like much from here, but what counted was on the inside. She twisted her helmet on and waited. She drew closer and closer until she reached the threshold. All of the Dritewing’s systems shut down. The asshole didn’t even ask after her business. He just took them out. He was probably trying to murder her right now, but it wasn’t going to work. There was a reason she volunteered for this mission. She was not susceptible to his ability. She still needed this suit, though, or he could kill her the old fashioned way. He still might try.

As her now dead battleship continued drifting on its own momentum, Sentille stepped into the custom escape pod, and launched. It was freezing cold and a rough ride, but this was what she trained for. They had been trying to make contact with the Aerie for decades, but every time they sent someone, the envoy never returned. They finally figured out why, but the number of people capable of surviving Falstead’s attacks was decreasing. Sentille deliberately kept herself vulnerable. Intentional obsolescence, her father would call it. He understood more than anyone. He stayed organic for a long time after everyone else upgraded. He had to give in eventually, though, or he likely wouldn’t be alive today, and Sentille wouldn’t exist at all.

She latched the pod onto the back of the shuttle, slid her own hatch open, and simply knocked on the door. If she had to, she would be able to break in, but she wanted to start on the right foot. Maybe all he needed was the right friend to talk with him, person to person. It seemed like he never gave anyone a chance, but they didn’t really know what went down during those earlier missions. She looked through his rear viewport. Something moved around the corner, but she couldn’t see what it was.

A face appeared—well, part of one anyway. Was that him? Was that the infamous Falstead Granperson? Such a funny name. Like she should talk, going around as Sentille Tereth. He looked nervous and mousey from here, but it was hard to tell since she couldn’t see a full facial expression. He was so used to attacking remotely, he probably didn’t have any experience getting his hands dirty. If he wanted to kill her, though, he was going to have to do it himself, and he was going to have to accept the fact that it would be permanent in her case.

She knocked on the glass again.

This startled him even though he was looking right at her. He reached out and waved her away. He didn’t want a confrontation. That was good, she could use that.

The door was the weakest part of the shuttle, and she had detailed specifications for the whole thing, straight from the designer’s plans. It sounded like Falstead had modified it since then, but he probably didn’t bother with the hull since he could neutralize any threat before it could get near him. Until today.

Sentille unhooked the blowtorch from her PRU and showed it to him.

Falstead’s one visible eye widened. He finally stepped out from his protective barrier, and held up his hands defensively, begging her with hand gestures to not use it.

Sentille reached up with her free hand and pointed in the general direction of the door control. She couldn’t see it from this angle, but she knew exactly where it was. She studied the designs hard. She had to in order to prove herself worthy of this job.

Falstead used gestures to concede. He cautiously walked towards her. He inched his hand towards the control at first before suddenly shooting it forward, and opening the door. As quickly as he could, he raced back to the safety of his corner.

Sentille stepped inside, closed the door back up behind her, and removed her helmet. She then made contact with Falstead’s eye. “If you don’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you, but we’re gonna have a conversation. Do you know how those work? Have you ever had one before?”

“Have I ever talked to people before?” Falstead questioned. “Of course I have, I’m not feral.”

“Good,” Sentille replied. “That’s a good start.” She held out her hand, even assuming he wouldn’t take it. My name is Sentille Tereth of Castlebourne, daughter of Dreychan Glarieda and Yunil Tereth. Don’t try to shut down my suit. It’s mostly mechanical. If you have been trying to upload my consciousness to your server, don’t waste your energy. I’m baseline organic. I can’t be uploaded.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Falstead contended. “Everyone is digitized.”

“Not me,” Sentille insisted. “We are aware of the afterlife simulation. They specifically designed me to be cut off from it. I am as I would be if we lived in the twenty-thousand years ago. I came here to ask you what the hell you’re doing. I was specifically chosen for this because you keep kidnapping everyone else.”

“I’ve not kidnapped anyone, they’re fine,” Falstead claimed.

“We know what you’re doing,” Sentille began. “We’ve done our research. You have the power to transfer digitized minds across substrates and systems. You can do this without consent, and most people are vulnerable to your power. I’m not. If you want to put me in your simulation, you’re going to have to shove a needle in my brain. Are you comfortable with that?”

He was silent for a moment. “Just leave me alone. I don’t know if you noticed, but we are in the Outer Sphere. I am not subject to your laws. I only upload those who would do me harm, or who would harm you!” He spoke calmly until those last few words. “Most of my prisoners are prisoners of war. They were on their way to destroy Castlebourne and enslave any survivors. I am doing this to protect you. I’m carrying on my parents legacy. You can’t stop me, and you shouldn’t want to.”

“We are not questioning your motives, or even your methods...only your right. My progenitors were prepared to handle the armada as appropriate, and according to their values. They did not ask you, or your parents, to intervene. Where are they, by the way? In one of your simulations too? Are they POWs too?”

Falstead was already frowning, but now he frowned more. “They didn’t understand either. They tried to negotiate. You can’t negotiate with an Exin. They’re fanatics. They can’t help it. They were indoctrinated from birth.”

“My parents are from the Goldilocks Corridor. They grew up under the Empire. My father lived on a luxury planet. He had no reason to leave, but he did, because even he could see that what they were doing was wrong. People can see the truth. They can change. But you have to trust them first. You can’t just transfer them to hell, and expect the universe to get better just because they’re gone.”

“They’re not in hell,” Falstead clarified. “They’re in a copy of our galaxy. They think they won the war. Nothing changed for them. One second, they were in base reality, and the next, they were in there, and everything felt the same. To them, they conquered Castlebourne, and enslaved them. I wasn’t lying about that, but what I did was protect real people from it. Their slaves are only NPCs. Everyone’s happy. I did that, I made you happy. So instead of trying to stop me, maybe I could get a thank you.”

Sentille breathed in, and then out. “Thank you.”

Falstead winced. He didn’t expect that response.

“Thank you for doing what you thought was right. I’m here to tell you, it wasn’t, and I’m here to ask you to stop. Free them from their prison. Just because they don’t know they’re in one, doesn’t mean they aren’t. It isn’t just, but there’s still time to undo it. They deserve the truth, no matter how dark their own desires. There’s a cliché that goes two wrongs don’t make a right. I have been trained and ordered to commandeer this vessel if need be. Need it be, Falstead?”

Falstead scoffed and shook his head. “You people do this all the time. You dress it up in fancy wording like virtual quarantine, but it’s VR prison. That’s what it is. The detainees can’t leave. And as I said, we’re not in the stellar neighborhood, or even the charter cloud. I have declared sovereignty over this region of space. There’s nothing here, so there’s nothing to squabble over. In my capacity as the owner and ruler, I imprison hostile forces at my discretion, just as they do on Varkas Reflex. Tell me where the difference lies. Because I’m only one person? Last time I checked, only one guy owns Castlebourne too, and I think I heard one woman owns YZ Ceti.”

“I don’t care about your sovereignty,” Sentille explained. “Because you’re correct, this is out of Castlebourne’s jurisdiction. Which is why I’m not here to arrest you.” She removed a tactical baton from its holster and flicked her wrist to extend it. “I’m just here to stop you, by whatever means necessary. And since you reminded me of where we are, you must realize that there’s no one to stop me.”

“Besides me,” Falstead pointed out.

“I read you quite clearly, Mr. Granperson,” Sentille laughed. “You’re not a fighter. You never had to be. You rely too much on your special powers.”

Falstead laughed back. “You’re gonna have to kill me. If you take the POWs I already have, I’ll just restart the program as soon as you leave. If you force me to go with you, you’ll just end up taking me to a planet full of people whose minds I can control.”

Sentille squeezed the trigger sending a surge of electricity throughout the baton. “Who said we’re going to a populated world?” She approached her target briskly and confidently, reaching up to drop him before he could reach for his own weapon. He tried to retreat into the bathroom, but he didn’t stand a chance. He struggled against her a little, but he was unpracticed. The tip of the shock-stick made contact with his neck, and he was out.

Around seven months later, Sentille turned off the anaesthesia, and gradually woke Falstead back up. He groaned in confusion. As his thoughts sharpened, his confusion did not abate. He still didn’t know where he was, or what was going on. He was likely starting to feel the technology around him, as well as Sentille.

He managed to crack a smirk. “Miss Tereth, you digitized. You think your job is over, and you’re safe now?” He was slurring his words a little, but improving. “You don’t understand. What I did to those soldiers was a mercy. I put them in new worlds. I maintained their consciousnesses; their...continuity. I can just as easily simply shut you down. You’ll just be dead at that point.”

Sentille nodded. She wasn’t in her bulky suit anymore. She was wearing a sexy little number now, to give him something to remember her by after they parted ways forever. “I didn’t digitize my brain, Falstead. This is just a surrogate substrate.” She picked up a kitchen knife and stabbed herself in the chest. “I can’t feel anything. You can sure shut me down, but I’ll wake up safe and sound on the Aerie. I promised to commandeer it from you, and that’s exactly what I did.”

“Where are we?” he questioned. “I feel some tech, but not a lot.”

“You have everything you need to survive, including your own simulation server, if that’s your thing. We have laws, we follow them. You’re entitled to immortality. But you’re not entitled to anyone else’s life. Now you’re alone. No one lives on this moon but you. Your habitat is self-sufficient, but you’re not leaving. Ever.”

“You can’t do this,” he argued. “You’re establishment. You have rules...due process.”

“I’m from the charter cloud, and we’re still not there. The extended bubble may be closer to the heart of civilization, but it has no laws either. Goodbye, Falstead. You did this to yourself.”

She was about to jump back to her own body, but he was evidently feeling vindictive. He shut her surrogate down himself. She would never be able to return now, and that was on him.

Sentille sat up, but didn’t climb out of the chair. She sat on the edge of it and breathed deliberately.

“Was he mad?” Renata  asked.

This was a serious situation, but Sentille couldn’t help but laugh. “Yes, Madam Granger, he was mad.”

“Maybe we should have gone down there too,” Quidel suggested. “We might be able to reason with him. We turned him into this. The least we could do is try to help him change for the better.”

“I don’t know if this is your fault, Mr. Jesperson,” Sentille said, “but I know going down there would not have helped. It would have made him hate you. As it stands, I’m his number one enemy, and as far as he knows, you had absolutely nothing to do with it. It might hurt, but this was the only way.” She hopped out of the chair and headed towards the door. “Now, I’m going to need you two to go back into the sim. You obviously can’t know where he is. And every time you even think about breaking him out one day, or even just visiting him, I won’t hesitate to give you the same treatment again. This is happening people. Get used to it.”

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Microstory 2799: They Will Get Married After This

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Now that Jande’s speedy trial is over, he has been able to catch up with what else has been going on. Dare left. He quit his job as Axiom of War and ran off. He employed the new induced blind suicide protocol, so there is no record of where he ended up. When that’s used, it bounces the user’s consciousness all over the galaxy for up to a few days before settling on one location, so he could be anywhere by now. He’s likely wanting to go back to his life as a hermit crab, but they may never find out what happened to him. His position and department were shuttered, like their predecessors, the Safety Department. It has since been replaced by the Defense Department. A shortlist of candidates is being vetted for it. Reportedly, no former superintendent candidate is on it, which makes sense. Looking back, that was all a big mistake.

Jande knows now why they didn’t bother firing him as superintendent, or rather impeaching. Firstly, it would make the stain on the history of this planet bigger than it already is. The first and only superintendent has to be removed after barely serving? No, they can’t have that. What they can do, however, is work around him, and quietly cut him out of the decisions. He was annoyed at first, but then he remembered that he never wanted any of this. His parents got in his head, and generated ambition that wasn’t initially there. He can’t believe he let that happen. He just wants to be a farmer.

“That’s this whole thing. They’re calling it rededication.” Ersence also quit her job, but not due to any sort of scandal. She just decided several months into Jande’s disappearance that she didn’t want it anymore. The competition changed her. She doesn’t want to be a leader, and she doesn’t want to hold on to the principles she valued when she was identifying as a Doma Tertian. Most of them don’t anymore.

“They want me to rededicate myself to the community? I can do that.”

“It involves switching to a new body again, even if the one you’re in now technically qualifies. You also have to swear an oath to Quiratan, and...”

“And what?” Jande presses. “If it’s bad, just tell me. I need to know regardless.”

“Someone in your position doesn’t get their own plot,” Ersence goes on. “You have to marry into a family, and they decide your lot. You won’t be head of household, even though you were before.”

“You and I are still married. What does that mean?” Jande asks.

“We were stripped of our status when we started the games,” Ersence begins to explain. “To get back in, I had to marry someone else. Now you’re a dangler.”

Split marriages happen all the time. It’s when someone is married to people who aren’t married to each other. They used to be kind of frowned upon, but it’s not the 22nd century anymore—lol—and there was a time when group marriages weren’t legal, full stop. And before that, you were only allowed to marry someone of the opposite sex! Society eventually realized that restricting other people’s happiness doesn’t make any sense, and the rules were always arbitrary. So now, it’s open. Do whatever you want, as long as it’s consensual. It’s perfectly normal to have a complex family tree. Some might say that it’s a little embarrassing to be a dangler, where you’re only tangential to a family. There’s only a slang term for it, but it’s also common enough in the galaxy.

“Who are they?” Jande asks. “It would be easier for me to stay on the same track, instead of finding some other random family to join.” He would have to divorce Ersence first, so there aren’t any land allocation questions. At least that’s how it worked before.

Ersence nods. “I would be okay with that. I honestly don’t know how the others would feel. It’s more of an arrangement than anything. I care for the young uquirapods in the nursery, getting them used to human interaction, but it’s not like the Quiratan you used to know. Not everyone is a farmer...they don’t have to be anymore. One of them actually works for Defense. He may have an opinion about you. I hardly ever see him.”

“I would like to meet him,” Jande decides, “as well as the others.”

“I can set you up on a date,” Ersence says. “It would be best if it were one on one, I think. He doesn’t like to be ambushed, I know that much about him, so while it might sound better to win over the others first, we should start with him. If he doesn’t accept you, it really doesn’t matter what the others think. Can you handle that?”

“I’ve been on a date before,” Jande replies.

Ersence turns around to get started. “Not like this. Not after what happened.”

It’s not for another three days when Ersence’s other husband, Ridley Forrester has time off enough for a date. They’re at a restaurant at the top of Tiny Tower. It’s called that because it’s only five stories tall, but that makes it the tallest living space structure in the world. There are taller objects, of course, but not for regular usage. Still, it’s a nice view of the valley below. Ridley’s face is so hard and still, if you only saw his head, and someone asked you to guess whether he was the type to wear his uniform at all times, you would say yes. And you would be right.

“Can I ask, what do you do for the Defense Department?” Jande asks.

“I’m Hock Watcher for the Prisoners of War sector,” Ridley answers.

“POWs?” Jande echoes. “Did you hold that role before we even had any, or is that a new position that had to open up because of what happened a couple months ago?”

“I was just Hock Watcher. Then I was promoted when the new sector became necessary. I applied to the original job sixteen years ago, hoping that I would never have anything to do. I wasn’t lazy, mind you, but I wanted to walk into that cell block every day and be completely alone. I wanted the isolation to show me that we rose above our past mistakes.” His passion increases noticeably as he speaks. “I wanted to see...the proof that crime no longer existed. And then they came.” Now he’s tearing up. “They came, and they proved me wrong. I didn’t want the promotion, but I accepted it, because now every day, I need to see that I was wrong. I won’t forget that lesson anytime soon.”

“I’m sorry,” Jande tells him. “I’m sorry for my part in that.” He doesn’t understand it. They came from a distant star, thinking that Bida was responsible for sending the Kugelblitz black holes to them, instead of the truth, which is that both worlds were victims. They don’t feel the same way Ridley does. They believe in death. They’re human, but that’s such an alien concept. You don’t jump into war before you have all the facts. Or rather, according to most Milky Way cultures, you don’t. Who knows what they’ve been through, and why they felt they had to do it this way? They didn’t. A single conversation, and this whole thing could have been cleared up.

Ridley is still teared up. “What you did, Superintendent Ter Avest, was believe the same thing that I did. You believed in the goodness of the universe. Don’t you ever apologize for that. Despite what happened, sir, you are a hero to Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, and I would be honored to one day call you my husband...if you’ll have us.”

Jande breathes, having not expected that response. “Yes.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 30, 2574

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Deflinus was Olimpia’s older brother, not younger. The fact that she was the only person in the family to have an echo, even after a decade and a half, strongly suggested to all of them that there was only something wrong with her. They didn’t realize she heard these fights, but her father regularly accused her mother of having an affair, which would explain Olimpia’s unusual condition. They didn’t understand it, but it just felt like something that would be passed down the bloodline. They conducted periodic DNA tests to prove him wrong because he kept bringing it up again every few years, thinking if he could have been duped for the conception, earlier tests could have been faked too.

Olimpia’s echo was very isolating. She never grew close to her siblings. They didn’t exclude her maliciously. It really came down to their parents. They raised her differently than they raised the others, which taught them to treat her differently too. They actually got a little better when they were older, but it was too late. She was too scarred to want to stick around, and didn’t really take their feelings into account as she left home.

“You’re not still using the body that you were born in, right?” Olimpia asked.

“Delfinus lost count of how many bodies he has used since his sister abandoned him to their abusive parents. He changed substrates multiple times in an attempt to correct his curse. Nothing has worked, but he keeps trying every once in a while.”

“You can’t turn it off, what you’re doing?” Olimpia asked, pretty sure of the answer.

“He obviously can’t, or he would never. Delfinus stopped speaking for years because of it. Knowing sign language has not helped. He simply signs his narrations, instead of the actual words he wants to say. The deaf community cast him out for signing so literally, and ignoring conventional sign grammar rules. Had his sister remained, they could have at least struggled together. She should have stayed.”

Olimpia sighed and shook her head. “There was no way I could have known. You were older! It doesn’t make any sense that it should have presented itself so late in life.” When Mateo and Leona’s kids from another timeline showed up, she actually questioned whether time powers ran in the family. She was told they only did sometimes. Being that Olimpia’s parents had no apparent patterns of their own, she was likely unique. She should not have taken that as gospel, however, seeing as how she didn’t have a power or a pattern, but an affliction, and those were probably handled differently.

Olimpia’s watch beeped. “There is more to me than there once was. There’s more to the world than you know. You have only scratched the surface. In under a minute, I will quite literally disappear, and you will not see me for another year, at the earliest.”

Delfinus nodded, and didn’t act surprised at all as he looked through his bag. “Del knows of time travel. He has not been sitting idly by doing nothing. He has done his research.” He removed a pocket tent and tossed it on the ground, which exploded. “He has learned to be a patient man. He will wait a year until his sister returns.”

Exactly a year later, everything was almost exactly as it was before. The tent was still open, and Delfinus was right where he was standing when Olimpia left.

“Okay. Now we have twenty-four hours to figure this out,” she began. “If we don’t we’ll have to wait another year. I assume you have met with doctors over the years?”

“Delfinus hates doctors. They always call what he does a psychological concern, probably built around the trauma of having a sister with her own medical issues.”

Olimpia sighs. “Well, this one will be different. Doctor Mallory Hammer will actually listen to what you have to say, and will believe you.”

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Spaghetti West: Moonfall (Part I)

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Decades ago, a star called Proxima Centauri underwent a cataclysmic magnetic shift, which created a coronal mass ejection that decimated the orbiting planet of Proxima Doma. Proxima Doma was tidally locked, which meant one side always faced the sun, and one side always faced away. Only a narrow band was ever habitable, but as it turned out, not for long. What researchers now believed was that this event was the culmination of a centuries-long cycle. Over time, the habitable zone along the terminator line will stabilize, and become survivable once more. It had already begun to do that. There was still no atmosphere, so it required intelligent intervention, and for some, this was enough, but not for most. They wanted something permanently safe.

While the cycle was meaningfully long for a baseline human, it was a flash in the pan for an immortal, and unsustainable for a community. Why put down roots when you knew they were going to be destroyed eventually? People died in that tragedy. Many stayed on the poles, which were the only permanently safe regions, but this made space commutes unreasonably costly. So the majority of the survivors left.

They went all over the stellar neighborhood, but the primary destination was the Gatewood Collective. Gatewood was a materials depot, which was designated to provide colonists with the resources they needed to go wherever their final destination was. No one was meant to live there who didn’t work as the managers of the depot. One faction from Proxima Doma wasn’t happy with that. They wanted to stay, so they tried to lay claim to one of the extremely inhospitable planets. These were more stable and consistent than Doma, but still harsh. And anyway, they were about to be annihilated.

After some political turmoil, the captain of a transport vessel agreed to relocate these holdouts to another planet. They wanted one to call their own, but if they didn’t want to die, they would compromise for their own secluded region of a preexisting colony. This one orbited Tau Ceti, and was called Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. It wasn’t the only planet in the system, but it was the only habitable one, and that was thanks to a particularly uninhabited world called Qishra.

Sugar Delgado stood on the bridge of her ship with the Axiom of Astronomy, Liselot Olteanu. They were regarding a terrible sight through the viewscreen. “Magnify more,” Sugar instructs the computer.

That was definitely a moon, and it was definitely far too close to the planet.

“Not to blame or criticize,” Sugar went on, “but you didn’t see it coming?”

“Qishra orbits the star slowly, and the moon is moving fast. For the majority of the time, the moon was behind the planet. Even if we had seen it coming, there still isn’t anything we could have done about it. Some researchers think that it’ll be a near-miss.”

“You don’t,” Sugar stated.

Liselot held both of her fists up and presented a crude demonstration. “If Qishra were the eightball, and the moon was the cueball, yes, the geometry says it would miss.”

Sugar nodded. “But the Roche limit.”

“The Roche limit,” Liselot echoed. “You have to account for the gravity. The two bodies are being drawn together, and they will crash into each other. Now, it’s not a Theia event, but it will be enough to cause chaos. We can’t model what will happen to the planet once the rogue moon strikes. The most widely accepted model has the majority of the moon being ejected from the system while Qishra begins to form a ring.”

“But it won’t stop there,” Sugar deduced.

“The collision will add mass to the planet, which will only help it do its job to protect us, but over time, the chaos will increase, and it could start to shoot us.”

“But you don’t know.” Sugar wasn’t arguing, Not knowing was the scary part, because, given their technology, there was nothing they could do to protect themselves besides leave. And that will be logistically difficult, even if the first impact took months.

This world was a haven for those who wanted to live on a planet, but still wanted the simple, isolated life. There was only one city, mainly for coming and going. Nearly everyone lived in villages or homesteads. Some areas had such perfect weather that they didn’t even have permanent structures. A nomad might walk around with their tech and a tent, and that was it. People moved here because they liked to be alone with nature.

“No, we don’t know. It could take years, or it could take decades, but either way, I would not want to live here if I were a Domanian refugee,” Liselot reasoned.

Sugar shook her head. “You don’t know these people. They were fully cognizant that their new planet, Doma Tertia, was going to intentionally be destroyed, but they refused to leave. We only finally got them off of it because they are fiercely loyal to their leader, so we only had to convince him to stop being stubborn and stupid.”

“Then tell him to tell the others to get right back on your ship and leave here too.”

Sugar sighed. “He’s not here. He persuaded them to leave, but had somewhere else to go. Now they can only operate on his most recent orders. It’s bizarre.”

“For a group of isolationists, they sure are dependent,” Liselot pointed out. “Sorry to be blunt about that.”

“No, you’re right. I don’t like them, I just got stuck with them,” Sugar explained.

“Some Bidans have packed up and left because of this threat,” Liselot added. “I mean, our population was already dwindling because people want to check out Castlebourne, or because they’re choosing Varkas Reflex over VR around nature. Some, however, report being afraid of Armageddon. It’s my job to give them the facts, and the fact is that we don’t have enough information yet, and once we do, it may be too late.”

“You called it a rogue moon,” Sugar pointed out. “Which planet is it from?”

Liselot smiled. She was actually rather excited about this. “We think it’s from Qishra. We think the planet ejected it millions of years ago, and it’s been rogue ever since, wandering the outer system this whole time. Which means it’s—”

“Coming home,” they said simultaneously. Then they were silent for a moment.

“I hope you weren’t thinking that we could help with evacuation efforts,” Sugar said, breaking the ice. This was a transport vessel, but it didn’t have unlimited capacity. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. With enough power, they could expand inward into pocket dimensions. But it could still not support the whole population of this planet, and none of them was authorized to know about that kind of tech in the first place.

“No,” Liselot assured her. “We may prefer nature, but the reason the city exists, and why my job exists, is because we understand that the universe is a dangerous place. Most who do want to leave are transferring their consciousnesses through the quantum network. We’re building deep underground shelters for those who want to stay, and constructing exodus ships for those who wanna leave in their own bodies with their own possessions. What we were hoping was that you could prevent the chaotic ejections that will follow. New ring systems are violent and unpredictable. With your weapons—”

“I don’t have any weapons,” Sugar argued.

“Forgive me, captain,” Liselot said. “Our sensors clearly indicate one.”

Sugar painted a puzzled look on her face. “Oh, that’s a hot pocket purge.”

“I’m sorry?” Now Liselot was the one who was confused.

“It’s a stealth feature,” Sugar began to explain. “You store your waste heat in a special contained environment, then you can purge it all at once when you’re, say, on the other side of a star, or something. You’re practically invisible in between purges.”

“That sounds like it could be used as a weapon,” Liselot contended.

“Yeah, but not for what you’re asking,” Sugar insisted. “It’s not anywhere near as powerful as the kind of nuclear bombs you would require. It can’t hold enough energy to accomplish that. I’m sorry. If I had realized your intentions, I wouldn’t have wasted—”

“No, it’s my fault. I listened to what my experts said they detected on your ship.” Liselot frowns and breathes through her nose. “Thank you. I’ll leave now.”

“Hold on,” Sugar said. “It will take months for the ring to form and become a real threat. Just because I don’t have what you need, doesn’t mean I can’t build it. At the very least, you need to construct orbital defense platforms with ablation lasers. Earth has been using those for centuries, and it’s worked out for them.”

“Earth has never faced the kind of onslaught we could have on our hands,” Liselot said. “Jupiter has always been stronger than Qishra. That’s why intelligent life was able to evolve on it in the first place. And their monitoring infrastructure is leagues beyond ours simply by its age. We knew what we were getting into when we colonized. Tau Ceti is a volatile system. This should come as no surprise. We were foolish.”

“Still,” Sugar urged, “you need ablation lasers, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right. I just don’t know that we have time.”

Sugar smirked. “Well...we store time in the stern.”

“Huh?” Liselot questioned.

Sugar had already said too much. “I have the design for an excellent defense platform in my privilege vault. It’s got a lot of bells and whistles that you don’t need right now, so I’ll take a day to modify it. All I’ll need are the raw materials.”

Liselot held a minute to think about it. “We’ll accept anything we can get.”

“Great.” Sugar tapped behind her ear. “Van. Come to the bridge please.”

Van teleported there instantly.

“Whoa. How did you do that?” Liselot asked him.

“Uh, he’s only a hologram,” Sugar lied. “Van, I need you to be able to make physical contact, so please turn off your imager and come back in person.”

“Sorry, boss.” Vantu disappeared.

“I could have sworn that I could feel his physical presence,” Liselot claimed. “Maybe even the warmth of his core.”

“Magnets!” Sugar joked.

Liselot breathed deeply and looked back over at the impending collision. “You really think we can do this? I know we don’t have to worry about something happening tomorrow, but we’re intentionally obsolete. We should have made the city bigger.”

Sugar watched the event too. “I can do this. Trust me, it’s no big deal.”

It was a big deal. The moon itself was nothing, but it turned out to be hiding something much, much worse. No laser could destroy a black hole. But it could move it.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 25, 2538

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When the away team appeared on the Extremus scout ship, Mateo revealed that he had a new plan, but that he didn’t want to put Ramses out. It would require him to do extra work. The thing was, the people of Extremus knew where they had gone. They had a record of it. This system looked just as good as any, but Linwood wanted to be alone and hidden, which he could not find here. It could only be found somewhere else, say maybe 707 light years away? Both Ramses and Romana agreed that it was a good idea. As the Actilitca had explained, this scout ship didn’t have a reframe engine, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be retrofitted with one. In fact, as Ramses inspected it, he discovered that it was specifically designed for one; it had just never been built and installed. So they had kept most of the old design, but had deliberately excluded the most valuable component. It was none of their business, what had caused the Extremusians to do this. It just needed to be corrected. Temporarily.

Ramses engaged his forge core, and programmed the scout to begin its journey while they were out of the timestream for a year. Because of all the build time, it had only managed to traverse about 300 light years, but that should be enough. That was a greater distance than the current radius of the interstellar colonization bubble. He would be off of everyone’s radar, all the way out here, and safe. And if he wanted to pack up, and move out even farther, that could help too. Once the scout arrived at the brand new isolated system, it completed constructing his rotating habitat, and waited for the team to return.

“All righty, then. Are we ready to wake him up?” Mateo asked, bending down to unlock the stasis pod.

“Oh, hold on.” Romana changed her emergent nanites back into the sexy red dress from before, and sat cross-legged on the scout ship’s command console. “Okay, I’m ready,” she said once she had generated her holographic microphone.

Mateo stood back up. “Why do you have to be so sexual around me? I know that you’re an adult now, but do you have to be so...ugh!” he couldn’t think of the word.

“It’s not sexual. I’m a lounge singer,” she defended.

“Lounge singers are sexy! That’s their whole thing!”

“Funny, I thought their thing was singing.”

“Your neckline practically goes all the way down to your belly button!” Mateo complained.

“It’s an aesthetic,” she argued.

“We’re running out of  daylight, people,” Ramses jumped in. He took it upon himself to open the pod and let Linwood out.

Romana cleared her throat, and got back into position. “This next one’s for the lovers. Linwood, welcome to your new home. At laaaaast...!” She went on to sing part of the song before Mateo had had enough.

He threw up a holographic privacy partition in front of her, and focused on Linwood. He could do nothing for the sound, but she didn’t keep going much longer. “Your coin has been constructed. The rest of the habitat is underway, but it already has two escape pods, so you should be all set to move in. There’s a reason she called you a lover, though, and it’s not because you love spin gravity.” He held up his arm to gesture to the side. “We had something else created while you were asleep, which wasn’t technically essential.

Linwood’s companion drifted in from the back of the scout.

“My love!” he exclaimed. He leapt into her arms like the climax of a romcom. She held onto his waist and spun him around, and they kissed.

“Aww, old love,” Romana said, out from behind the partition, and back to wearing her normal clothes again.

“Your other models are still in storage,” Ramses told him. “You can rebuild them however you please.”

Linwood hopped back down to his own two feet, but continued to stare into his companion’s eyes, having missed her deeply. Finally, he broke his gaze, and looked over at Ramses. “Thank you.” He looked at the other two. “Thank you all.” He stepped closer to the viewscreen where his habitat was rotating inside of what may have been only a temporary comet. “I’m grateful to be here. Could you tell me, what year is it?”

“It’s 2538,” Mateo answered, stepping over to look at the view as well.

“That’s fast,” Linwood. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone about your fancy faster-than-light drive. I obviously don’t know anything anyway, but there’s no one else here! Just the way I like it.”

“Remember, you can’t change your mind,” Mateo warned him. It will take you 150,000 years to get back to civilization. By then, Project Stargate will have reached this far, so you might wanna head out into the void.”

“That might be the plan,” Linwood said, nodding. “I won’t be telling you that, though.”

“Of course,” Mateo replied. “This here region of space is yourn now.” He made sure to make eye contact. “Don’t abuse the gift.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Linwood promised.

Mateo took a breath. “You can keep the scout—”

“But I’m removing the artificial gravity,” Ramses warned.

“That’s fine, I don’t need that,” Linwood said. He bounced his knees. “Yeah, this is interesting, but I don’t care to keep it.”

They would have given him a tour of his new home, but it was designed exactly like the old one. It had a lazy river running along the entire circumference. Along it were his multiple sleeping spots, his little bamboo forest, his garden, and all the other ecological areas. It looked like a nice place to live, whether you were a hermit or not. There was more than enough for one person, even along with his staff. It was only this large for spin gravity to work without being nauseating. Linwood and his lover said their goodbyes, and then went over to start their new lives. Ramses got to work on uninstalling the transdimensional gravity generator, as well as the reframe engine.

“What are ya gonna do with it?” Romana asked. “We can’t take it with us. I assume it’s too heavy.”

“It’s too massive,” Ramses corrected. He was on his hands and knees, digging up the components. “But you’re right, we can’t carry it away. I’m gonna shoot it into the host star at reframe speeds. It’ll take about nine hours.” He was answering, but clearly still depressed about his apparent slingdrive shortcomings.

Romana seemed to pick up on this. “Ya know, the solution to your problem is the problem, right?”

“What? I don’t—what do you mean?”

“I mean, the problem is the solution to itself,” she tried to reframe it.

“Yeah, I’m not following.”

Romana smiled at him. “Linwood Meyers is currently living at the farthest extremes of the galaxy. He and his habitat are even farther out than the Extremus. If the rest of our team were to attempt to travel farther than this, your slingdrive would evidently just default them right here.”

“Yeah, true,” Ramses agreed. “That’s what happened with the Extremus itself. Very annoying, we had to come out here more slowly as a hack-job workaround.”

She placed a hand on his shoulder. “What if you were trying to find Linwood? You wouldn’t need to know where he was. You wouldn’t have to calculate anything. You would just overshoot it, and let the machine handle the navigation. So turn that into a strength. If your machine is mapping technological establishments on the backend...then find a way to generate that map on the frontend. It will tell you where everyone in the universe lives. Even hermits.” She paused for effect. “Even Spiral Station.”

His eyes widened. He jumped up to his feet. “Oh my God! Romana, you genius!” He pulled her into a hug, and shook her excitedly a little.

 Romana was excited too. She held onto the hug, but then leaned her head back to smile at him, after which she kissed him on the lips.

Ramses pulled away, not too quickly, as if disgusted, but not into it either.

“I’m so sorry,” she apologized.

“It’s okay, it’s just...”

“I know.”

“I don’t really do that...”

“I know,” she repeated.

“With others.”

“Yes, I know. It was just a stupid thing. I’m a stupid, horny...stupid girl.”

“Romy,” Ramses said as she was walking away humiliated.

That was when Romana noticed that her father was there, appearing to have seen the whole thing. “I know. Too sexual. I don’t wanna hear it again.” She brushed past him, back out towards the common area.

“I’ll talk to her,” Mateo assured Ramses. “It’s not about you. Go ahead and strip the ship so we can get back to our family.” He went out to find his daughter. She was hyperventilating on the bridge, likely having a panic attack. “Ro.”

“I said I don’t wanna hear it.”

“I’m not gonna criticize you. I wanna help.”

“There’s nothing you can help with. I just need...” She trailed off, because she didn’t know what she needed. “I need to—I need to scream!” And so she did. She took a deep breath, and let it all out.

“Yeah!” Mateo encouraged. “There we go! That’s a good girl!”

Romana continued to scream until she ran out of breath, which was longer than a normal human would last, due to her increased lung capacity. She started to breathe heavily, but was no longer hyperventilating. “I really needed that. I don’t know why, but I did.”

“I have an idea why,” Mateo said to her. “But first, I need a hug too.”

She was crying on his shoulder, still not knowing why she was so upset.

They let go. “Leona, Olimpia, and I are married. Angela and Marie are sisters in a way that few in this universe probably understand, if anyone. Holly Blue and Weaver don’t spend much time together, so they probably don’t even get it. And Ramses? Ramses likes his team and his work, but he doesn’t need that kind of deep connection. You, on the other hand, feel very deeply. I’m not a psychologist, and I don’t know exactly what your life was like before we met, but you’ve been jumping through time longer than even I have. Your life has never had any permanence, which is why you have frequently volunteered to pause your pattern. You crave stability, and I can’t give you that. None of us can.”

“Are you saying that you want me to leave the team?”

“I absolutely don’t want you to do that, but that’s because I’m selfish. I don’t want you to grow up without me. It might take you thousands of years to be as old as I am now, but at least I would be there. I wasn’t before. I missed so much of your life, and while I believe it would be temporally unwise to go back in time to change that, I still kind of wish that I could. And I agonize over that, because unlike other people, I actually could find a way to change the past. Most people don’t have that kind of anxiety. All they can do is surrender to, and accept, their reality. But if you need to leave now, I don’t want you to stay because of me. Ramses is not your future husband, and unfortunately, if you stay with us, no one else is either. That’s why you’re so upset right now. Linwood Meyers is the most misanthropic loner I have ever met, but even he found someone to love, and he can’t live without her. Make that make sense.” He took a beat. “If you need to find your Leona-slash-Olimpia, I can’t stand in your way anymore. It’s hurting you too much, and that hurts me.”

Romana gazed up at him with a sort of eureka smile. She kept it on her face as she looked over at the viewscreen, showing Linwood’s coin rotating twice a minute in the middle distance inside this icy planetesimal. “Linwood’s love,” she said cryptically. She stuffed her forehead into her father’s chest and hugged him again. “I’ll be fine, dad. I know what I’m gonna do now.” She pulled away, and lightened up brightly. “I’m gonna figure this out. It’ll be gonna awesome!”

Mateo followed when she hopped back to the engineering section, where Ramses was still working. “Sorry for the mix-up, ol’ chap. You’re like a brother to me.” She patted him on the forehead.

“Romana, what’s going on? What did you figure out?” Mateo questioned.

“I’m goin’ out for a space-swim,” she said. “Let me know when it’s time to leave.” As her nanites were forming a vacuum suit from her feet up, she blew Ramses a mixed-signal kiss, and tipped backwards. Before she could land on the floor, she disappeared.

Even when they were ready to go later today, and she came back in, she refused to explain what her epiphany was. They would just have to wait and see.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 24, 2537

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The team came out of the technicolor sling web, and found themselves near another ship. It wasn’t looming over them this time but underneath their feet. Had they failed? This far out in the galaxy, no one should have reached by now. Sure, Extremus was traveling this far, but the chances of happening upon them were literally astronomical. Leona sighed. “Magnetize to the hull. They will sense us, and send a probe to investigate.”

“You don’t seem surprised,” Mateo pointed out.

“I’m not,” Leona replied. “Rambo?”

Ramses was desperately tapping on his wrist interface, looking for what could have happened, no doubt. “It worked. We’re 152,000 light years and change from Barnard’s Star. We should be alone. I don’t understand. Is this Extremus?”

“That’s exactly what it is,” Leona confirmed, looking at her own data.

As she predicted, they felt the vibrations of something moving several meters away. A giant metal ball flew up from an opening, and rolled towards them, hovering against a local magnetic field. It stopped before the team, and began to scan them.

“Place your hand upon it if you want to hear the conversation,” Leona said.

They all did it.

“Report,” came a voice.

“Leona Matic. This is my team. We are of peace...always.”

“Pirate got jokes,” the voice said.

“We’re not pirates. Look in the central archives. We were there when your ancestors were preparing for this mission. We helped come up with it.”

“We lost the central archives.” The voice paused. “We’ve lost a lot since launch. But we still have our oral stories. I know who you are, Madam Matic.” A graphic appeared on the probe’s screen. “This is the basic schematic of the ship. I will shut down the teleportation regulator for exactly five seconds. You better come in before then.” A red circle in the corner of the screen suddenly turned green.

“Now,” Leona ordered.

They teleported inside, landing on the bridge, inside of the horseshoe pit. It was just like when Pribadium’s ship showed up. “Déjà vu,” Olimpia noted after they had all receded their nanites into more comfortable clothing.

One woman was the only other person here. She took hold of a control console, and pulled it towards her. It swung on a hinge, giving her room to step down into the center of the horseshoe. “Welcome to the TGS Extremus Prime, Team Matic. My name is Watchstander Actilitca. The captain is in stasis, and I would like to keep her that way, unless you have some reason we should wake her up?”

“There’s no issue here,” Leona began to explain. “We came on accident.”

“I don’t know why,” Ramses said apologetically. “Did you change vectors, or are we off the mark? I deliberately chose a destination away from where I knew you were supposed to end up.”

“We’ve changed course before,” the Watchstander, “but by reputation, I know you would have aimed for something sufficiently far away. We’ve ended up just about where our ancestors planned to.”

Ramses shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“I know what happened,” Leona said to him. “I don’t know the why, but I know the what. The slingdrive doesn’t necessarily go where you want it to. It can’t go absolutely anywhere in the universe. It can only go where there is already an established presence. I don’t know whether it’s looking for some level of technology, or organic life, or what, but we can’t ever be alone.”

Ramses stared at her blankly as he went back through his memory, trying to retrieve even one instance which might point to her being mistaken. There were times when they certainly might have been alone, but there wasn’t proof one way or another. Her hypothesis didn’t sound too far-fetched. That wasn’t so far necessarily a bad thing as they weren’t in the business of being remote and isolated from others, but that was Linwood’s goal. They thought they could help him, but it was going to be much harder than they thought. They needed a ship. Specifically, they needed one with reframe technology. They needed to get somewhere far from here; far from everything. They promised him extreme solitude. “Oh my God,” he said in disappointment.

“I’m sorry to have gotten in your way,” Actilitca said.

“No,” Leona countered. “We couldn’t have come this far out at all if not for you. I suspected that this was a limitation of the technology—”

“No,” Ramses interrupted. “It’s a limitation of my implementation of the technology. I doubt your...um, the others have the same issue.” He evidently didn’t want this stranger knowing anything about Leona and Mateo’s children. That was logical.

Angela wrapped her arm around his shoulders. “It hasn’t caused us problems. You’re always so down on yourself about this, but we have always ended up exactly where we belong.” She looked up to the ceiling. “Maybe these old powers that be have still been with us the whole time, and understand that we’re no good to the universe if no one else is around who needs us.”

“Someone needs us now,” Leona said to Actilitca. “He requires total isolation and privacy. We promised it to him. But wherever we try to go, there’s always going to be someone else there.”

Actilitca stepped back up out of the pit, and started working on one of the standing workstations. “We sent hundreds of unmanned scouts in all directions, in search of our new home. We no longer have reframe technology, which means at most, they are 52 light years away. Now, if that’s not far enough for you, keep in mind that we are only drifting here for the moment. Once one of our scouts finds a suitable candidate, we will be heading that way, which in all likelihood, will take us even farther from whichever scout I give you the coordinates to.”

“You would do that?” Ramses asked. “You would give us coordinates to one of your scouts?”

“As I said, it’s unmanned,” Actilitca replied. “We never intended to scoop them all back up later. Not only will I find one for you that you can transport to—using whatever faster-than-light technology you have access to—but you can have it. It has life support, it just needs to be turned on. In fact...” She went back to her screen to look through the data. “A few of them were sent up towards the top of the galactic plane, which is quite sparse. And yes!” She flung the image on her screen to a hologram in the center of the horseshoe. The team stepped back to get a better look at it. They were orbital images of what appeared to be a barren, lifeless planet. “This one has reached a particularly isolated region of the galaxy. It has chosen to halt there, rather than moving on to find other candidates. It must have calculated that the chances of finding anything useful beyond it were too low to waste the energy and time on. You can absolutely have that, unless...you’re looking for paradise too.”

“No,” Leona contended. “He just needs raw material. That looks perfect. Not the planet. The gravity well is too deep, but I assume there are other celestial bodies there?”

“It hasn’t surveyed them,” Actilitca explained, “but it has spotted them.”

“We would be grateful for it,” Leona said.

“Wait, should we wake him up and ask?” Romana suggested regarding Linwood, who was still asleep in his own stasis pod on the floor.

“We already did ask him,” Marie reasoned. “He wants to be alone on the edge of the galaxy. We’re giving him that, we’re just going to be a bit delayed. He shouldn’t know anything about the Extremus.”

“We’ll have to strip out all mention of it from all the systems on the scout, if we provide it for him,” Mateo decided.

“Yeah,” Leona said. She looked back up at Actilitca. “Does this all sound acceptable?”

“Sounds like a fine idea to me.” Actilitca tapped on her screen.

Their interfaces beeped, having received the message. “It won’t take long for me to incorporate the coordinates into the slingdrive.” Ramses stepped over to the corner to focus on the work.

“While we’re here,” Leona began, “is there anything we can do to help?”

Actilitca seemed to think about it for a moment. “No, I believe that we have everything well in hand.”

“Are you certain?” Leona pressed. Hint, hint.

“No, we’ve been doing this a long time. The scouts are out, the crew and passengers are asleep. The skeleton crew schedule is working.”

“You said that you lost your copy of the central archives.”

Actilitca bobbled her head. “Yes, there was...a disagreement in our past.”

“I can give you a copy of it,” Leona offered. “Our tech is compatible with yours. You should be able to plug and play.”

Actilitca looked over at a door as if something on the other side might sway her decision. “The disagreement is...ongoing.”

“Which side are you on?”

“I’m on the fence,” Actilitca admitted. “Look, we came here for a fresh start. Some believe that holding onto our past holds us back. There are some things we kept, like...how to grow plants. But the reframe engine is sort of a no-go. It only took us 216 years to get here, and now that we have a stasis pod for every Extremusian, any trip back would feel instantaneous. We have had issues with people quitting on us, and we don’t want that to happen again. We’re stuck out here, and that’s the way we like it. Most of us, anyway. Technology threatens that stability. It threatens to undermine the entire mission, negating everything our ancestors worked for.”

“That’s a very Amish position to have,” Leona reasoned. “You don’t shun all technology. You shun tech that can take your people away from the community.” She contemplated it. “Is there any knowledge you lost that you regret? Perhaps it just got filed into the wrong category, or someone destroyed the wrong data drives?”

“That happened a lot,” Actilitca confirmed. “We lost all of Earthan history and entertainment. We lost most of our virtual stacks too, but a lot of that had to do with how much space they took up.”

“It’s done,” Ramses announced. “We can go.”

Leona didn’t move. She was studying Actilitca’s face. “You and Matt should go. Ladies, one or two of you have to go with them, but no less than two of you need to stay behind to keep my slingdrive company.”

“You really don’t have to do this,” Actilitca claimed.

“I don’t know much about what happened to you in the last 216 years,” Leona said to her, “but we were last here in 2397, and things didn’t look great, so I know you’ve been through some things.”

Actilitca brushed it off. “That was in another timeline. You were never here, not for us. You don’t know anything about what has happened.”

“Fair enough,” Leona acknowledged.

“We’re ready.” Mateo and Ramses were holding Linwood’s pod again.

Romana was sitting on it wearing a sexy red dress, holding a microphone, or rather a holographic microphone. “Fly me to the moon! Let me play among the stars!”

“Bye,” Mateo said.

“Let me see what spring is like on...” Romana’s voice trailed off and echoed from the aether as they slung away.

“Hey, that’s my thing,” Olimpia complained.

“Yes, it is, dear,” Leona agreed. She turned back to the Watchstander. “We have all day, but depending on how your skeleton crew shift works, maybe no longer than that. Let’s develop a list of what you need. I can write an algorithm that will copy admissible material, and ignore forbidden knowledge.”

“Okay,” Actilitca said. “I accept those terms. But we must quarantine the data so it can be purged all at once if we vote against it.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Leona replied.

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