The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 22, 2504

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“Who here likes music?” They were back at the Matic house now, sitting on lawn chairs in the front yard. Pacey had convened them, evidently thinking it was funny that they tried to break out of the simulation by examining blades of grass. While they were waiting to listen to his spiel, Mateo was looking at the grass himself since he wasn’t around for that test before. “I’m prepared to offer you a new home in a new dome,” Pacey finally started to say. “It’s basically a city, though the residences are minimal. It’s all about music. All the greats are there. Do you wanna see a live show with Elvis Presely? We have that, as an android who looks, acts, and sounds exactly like him. I can get you front row tickets. You can always have front row tickets. Any show from any artist, past or present.”

“What is this?” Marie questioned. “What are you doing here? Are you seriously asking how we would like to live as prisoners?”

“I mean, would you rather I just decide for you?” Pacey asked. “Seems weirder.”

“I remember you,” Leona pointed out, “but I don’t. You were...on a ship.”

Pacey sighed. “You were prisoners on that ship. You broke free, broke into my lab, and tricked me into giving you my technology.”

Their memories weren’t all there yet, but the most relevant ones seemed to come up when they were most needed. If they once had an adventure involving a ball of rubber bands, seeing a rubber band ball here would probably bring it back to the surface. But for now, it mostly had to do with their time on Castlebourne, and now Leona and Marie’s brief stay on a ship commanded by that Angry Fifth Divisioner who could not give his vendetta against them a rest. “What are you talking about?” Leona asked. “I didn’t trick you into anything. Yeah, I went in there to steal it, but you gave it to me instead.”

“You said that you were going to use it to protect a population in another universe,” Pacey said.

“Yeah, and we did,” Ramses interjected. “The Ochivari can’t get in there anymore.”

“Fair enough,” Pacey accepted, “but I told you not to use it for anything else, yet you did, didn’t you? You created something called a slingdrive, and you even managed to develop it enough for miniaturization and interdimensional pocketing.”

Mateo stood. “You’re right, he did, which is why we should be able to leave whenever we want. Right, guys?”

Pacey rolled his eyes. “I obviously put a dampener in the dome. You ain’t goin’ nowhere. So sit back down!”

It seemed unlike Pacey to get all riled up and intense like this, so Mateo did as he was told.

Pacey continued, “I don’t want to hurt you, which is exactly what would have happened if I had tried to extract the technology from these bodies. I might have asked you to switch to new ones, but that wouldn’t have solved the problem of you having this technology. You would have rebuilt it.” He dismissed it immediately as soon as Ramses opened his mouth to argue. “Even if you promised not to. Something would come up, and you would have to break our agreement. You already did! I asked you to use it once, then you explored your options. You can’t be trusted, so I’m keeping you on this planet. That is not in question. Your only choice now is which dome you want to live in. Some are obviously off-limits, like The Bowl and The Terminal. I thought Underburg was the best idea, because it’s pleasant, and inoffensive, but I guess you didn’t like how nice it was. So I’ve come up with some other ones, which is why I ask, do you like music? Melodome is the Music City...the real one.”

“How do you have control over all of this?” Angela asked. “Where’s Hrockas, and the rest of the staff?”

“They’re on the real Castlebourne,” Pacey answered. “That’s all I’ll say. Even though I’m gonna erase your memories again once it’s time to wake you up in the new dome, I don’t want there to be any memory of you understanding where you are in the cosmos. I can’t delete memories, I can only cover them up. It’s an ethics thing. I actually follow rules, even if I’m the one who came up with them.”

“What are our other options?”

“Boyd,” Romana scolded.

“What?” Boyd asked her. “He has the power. I recognize power, I’m a pragmatist.”

Pacey smiled with only a slight bit of relief, knowing that this didn’t mean everyone was on board. “Well, you can also just live in the Palacium Hotel; have any suite you want, whenever you want it. I’m sure you’re aware of all the amenities, like the swimming pools, the game room, and the spa.”

“Boring!” Boyd complained.

“There’s also Tokyo 2077.”

“I’m not familiar with that one,” Olimpia noted.

“It’s what Tokyo looked like in the year 2077. Your lives would be as interesting as you want them to be. I can even implant the Japanese language in your brains, if you don’t already speak it.”

“I don’t like city environments,” Olimpia said. “What else you got?”

“You’re not seriously entertaining this idea?” Mateo asked her, shocked. “He’s the bad guy here. We can’t just roll over.”

“What choice do we have?” Boyd posed. “As I said, he has the power. Don’t antagonize the antagonist. Isn’t that one of your rules?”

“Technically, it’s mine,” Leona said. “And technically I agree.”

“Et tu Brute?” Mateo didn’t know where that phrase came from. He just hoped that he was using it right.

“Yesterday, we thought that we were hopeless because we were in a virtual simulation, where we couldn’t even trust our own minds.” Leona paused dramatically. “That doesn’t appear to be the case. So we are not hopeless. Put us in whatever dome you want,” she said to Pacey. “We’ll get out again.”

“You’re welcome to try, but you won’t remember any of this.”

“Go on with your options,” Ramses spat.

Pacey wasn’t perturbed. “Canopydome might be nice. It’s a rainforest, but there are nice places to stay.”

“What if we refuse to choose?” Mateo asked.

“Then I’ll choose for you, and you might not like it. And if you continue to piss me off, you might really not like it.”

“We can’t just let him control us,” Ramses argued. “We have to fight.”

“You’re changing your tune,” Romana pointed out.

“It’s not hopeless anymore,” Ramses explained. “We’re physical, I didn’t know that. I can’t tell you all what to do, but I will say that I’m not going to choose my own prison. I reject it on principle.”

“I have a nice place lined up for you,” Pacey said. “Maybe pack a coat or two.”

“Do your worst,” Ramses volleyed.

“He doesn’t speak for all of us,” Angela said, trying to be clear on her concession.

“He speaks for me,” Mateo told him.

“Then you won’t all necessarily be together anymore,” Pacey decided. “But don’t worry, because most of you won’t remember each other anyway.” He glared at Mateo. “Most of you,” he repeated. “Some of you might even not be alone.” He stood there for a moment, in apparent deep thought. “Okay, I have your assignments. Go to sleep.”

His command was ineluctable. He said it, they did.

Mateo woke up with a start. It was dark, but he could see the foreboding crooked lines of bare tree branches above him. He was in the forest. It was soft and dry. He could not bring himself out of an intense feeling of fear. At first, he thought it was due to a nightmare, but he couldn’t remember having one. No, he was afraid of something here, in the real world. He darted his eyes back and forth, but he daren’t move a muscle. Something was around him, lurking...biding its time. He didn’t know what it was, but it was incredibly dangerous. This whole world was dangerous. Even if he managed to clear the most imminent threat, another would be right there in moments. He was so uncomfortable, though, on a root maybe. The more he adjusted his position—the more sound he made—the more enemies would be alerted to his presence, and his location. They weren’t just enemies, though. They were monsters. There were all monsters.

He could remember what happened now. The current antagonist dropped him under this dome with full memory of all that happened in the dome before. He even found himself being able to distinguish the true experiences from the implanted memories that Pacey used to reinforce the illusion. As Mateo lay there, still too fearful to make a move, he found his old memories returning as well. His unremarkable origins in the 1980s, growing up with his adoptive parents, being turned into a time traveler, unintentionally erasing himself from the timeline, exploring space, fighting villains, changing the past. He was Mateo Matic, husband to Leona Delaney, and father to Romana Nieman. And he had to get back to all of his friends. Get up. Get up!

Mateo sat up, at first thinking it prudent to stay on his rear, but realizing that to be the most vulnerable position. At least when he was on his back, he was theoretically concealed. So he quickly shifted to a crouch. He looked around, not seeing anything in the foliage, but knowing that they were there. Pacey never specifically said where he would be sending him, but there was only one place it could be, given recent developments. Hrockas named this one Bloodbourne. Take every horror film killer, and stuff them in one metropolitan-sized environment. That was the idea, to incorporate visitors into a world full of real danger and violence. On Castlebourne, there were safeguards in place, chief among them being every visitor’s ability to have their consciousness transferred to a new substrate whenever the old one became too damaged. It wasn’t so much an ability as a requirement. It was just as illegal to let oneself die permanently and for real as it was to kill someone else. According to Pacey’s cryptic words, though, this wasn’t really Castlebourne; it was somehow just very similar to it. Perhaps those safeguards weren’t around. The only thing to do now was to find a way to survive.

Something was in the brush. There could be rabbits here, like that common trope in fiction where that was what it turned out to be; a misdirect for the audience to let their guard down just before the true jumpscare emerged. Or it could be something genuinely frightening. Mateo didn’t want to stick around and find out. There was no reason to approach the shaking leaves, like the idiot protagonist in a movie. The only choice was to run. Cautiously, but still quickly. He took off, deftly dodging tree trunks, and avoiding getting his feet caught in exposed roots. Where was he running to? Well, the scope of these domes were limited. They each had a radius of 41.5 kilometers. So if he just kept going in any direction, he would eventually hit the wall. Now, whether he would be able to find an exit, or if there was even one to find, was a different question. Either way, it was the only logical way to go. Of course, he could already be next to a wall, and running in the complete opposite direction, which would mean he would have to travel the full 83 kilometers, but there was no way to know that.

Perhaps this was the wrong call. Maybe movie characters had the right idea by investigating one unknown at a time. His running has evidently awakened a number of monsters in the area. At first, only a couple of them showed up, but then more. And more, and more, and more. Pretty soon, two dozen creatures were chasing after him. He couldn’t run from them in a straight line either, because some of them were actually ahead in his path. So he was zigging and zagging, and desperately doing everything he could to avoid being caught by even one of them. Then he saw something in the corner of his eye. It was a human, and something about her figure made her seem less threatening than the others, even though there were plenty of human killers here. It was the mask, or rather the lack thereof. Most horror genre killers wore some kind of mask, sometimes to conceal their identities, but also to instill dread in their targets. For franchises, it was a way to become iconic, and differentiate themselves from their competitors, even though the formula was pretty much the same throughout all of them.

She wasn’t wearing a mask of any kind, and it didn’t look like she was looking to attack him. No, it looked like they were chasing after her too. Pacey said that not all of them would be alone for their assignments. But it wasn’t Leona or Romana. Not Olimpia, nor either of the Walton twins. Holy crap, it was Paige. Paige Turner, at an age that he had never seen her before. “This way!” she cried.

She seemed to know what she was doing better than he. Mateo turned when she did. They rounded a thick grove of trees, and found themselves coming up on a cliff. He couldn’t see the elevation just yet, but based on the beautiful scenic view beyond, it was probably pretty high. “You got a plan?”

“Don’t stop!” she replied.

He trusted her, though to be fair, it could have been a shapeshifter. Those belonged in horror films too. Just as he leapt over the edge, she stopped for half a second. This was just enough time for him to get ahead of her. After she jumped, she reached for Mateo’s shoulders and held on, digging her knees into his back. He wasn’t one to make a good guess at a falling height even when he was in the middle of it, but it was surely over fifty meters. He maybe could have grabbed some branches below to break his fall, but Paige might get tangled up in them, so he stayed on the straight path, and just let himself crash land on the relatively smooth ground below. He lay there for a few minutes while the nanites flowing through his body started to affect their repairs. It didn’t sound like she was worried, so the monsters probably hadn’t taken a leap of faith behind them. Once he was healed enough to move just a little, he turned over on his back. She was sitting next to him, still catching her breath. “It’s nice to see you, Paige.”

“That’s not my name,” she responded. “I go by Octavia.”

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Microstory 2096: Before I Came Out

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When I was pretty young, my dad told me that he once jumped off a cliff in Boy Scouts. I think he said it was a hundred feet or something, which may or may not have been an exaggeration. Because of the way my brain works, I interpreted this to mean that jumping off a cliff was some kind of a requirement, which immediately took me out of the running, because I’ve always been afraid of heights. That’s not a phobia, by the way, because it’s not irrational. You fall down, you could die. It doesn’t even have to be that high. You could fall from your own height, and still crack your head wide open. Some time later, I either learned that it wasn’t really a requirement, or I forgot all about it, because I did join Cub Scouts, and eventually moved up the ranks as appropriate. I graduated to Boy Scouts with a group of other boys, and we stuck together for a little while. Over the course of the next several years, almost invariably, when one of them would attain the highest rank of Eagle, they would stop coming to meetings and camping trips. I started noticing this throughout the whole troop. If they didn’t quit sometime before, they ended up seeing reaching Eagle the end of their journey. By the time I turned 18, I was one of only a few kids my age left. Everyone else was younger, placing me in a de facto leadership position in many cases. Despite the fact that I initially ranked up faster than most of my peers, I was the last to finally get Eagle. In fact, it was four weeks before I turned 18. I don’t think there was a rule that said that I was disqualified at that age, but I definitely wanted to finish by then either way.

Shortly thereafter, we went on a canoe trip, which we would do every year. It was set to be my last. I knew that I wasn’t going to be involved in the organization for much longer. Since all of my “friends” were gone by then, I shared a canoe with my dad. In the middle of the trip, we came across a cliff that looked like we could climb up to from the side. It was not a hundred feet up, but it wasn’t six feet neitha, I’ll tell ya that much. I was still afraid of heights—which, like I said, is rational—but older, stronger, and more confident in my abilities. So we got out, checked the depth of the water below the cliff, and then made the short trek to the top, where we jumped off together. I dunno, I think it’s rather poetic that the one thing that almost stopped me from experiencing those ten years of my life was one of the last things I did for my scouting career. I left the scouts, and I never looked back. I don’t regret the activities that I participated in, but I can’t look back on the whole experience fondly either. Those people suppressed my sexuality for many years beyond that. I just got so used to being someone that I wasn’t, and it took a lot for me to decide to live as my true self. I was in my 30s before I came out as omnisexual, and I will never forgive them for that. I could have been so much happier. How many others went through something similar? I’m still attracted to women, so at least I wasn’t lying about everything, but there are those who can’t express themselves at all, and that was never okay. I do not tolerate the excuse that it was a “different time”. A part of me wants/wanted them to change, but another part of me just wants to see them destroyed. I’m vengeful like that sometimes.

Microstory 1770: Net Loss

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I’ve always been a terrible person, who treats others poorly, and only looks out for himself. I don’t like that about myself, but no one understands how hard it is to change. I keep trying to do better, but when I think of something nice to say, it gets stuck inside my head, while a bunch of malice comes out instead. One of my therapists and I worked out the metaphor. There’s a golden net on the top of my throat. It catches all the pretty things that people want to hear, and what I wish I could say to them. These pleasantries are larger, as they should be, but it means that they can’t escape. The smaller, meaner, bits of darkness can slip out easily. After deciding to look at it this way, we began to work on ways to make me easier to work with. Before I respond to someone about something, I’m meant to force myself to smile. This apparently should stretch out the golden net so much that it breaks, and lets out all the goodness I supposedly have inside me. Well, I’ve never been able to break it, but the stretching helps a little. It opens up the holes just a little more, allowing some of the smaller pretty words to get out sometimes. It’s not enough for the Catholic church to canonize me as a saint, but I guess I would call it a start. Sadly, that’s not my only problem anyway. My biggest issue is how I behave, not just what I say to people. Sociopaths and psychopaths say charming things all the time, but if they still act selfishly, or even hurt people, it’s not really good, is it? Altering my instincts to stop just taking what I want without regard to others is going to be the biggest thing I’ve ever tried, and I don’t think I can do it alone. So here I am at this spa, upon the recommendation of one of my therapist’s other patients. They can reportedly turn anyone into a nice person. I feel like I’ve seen this movie before.

I sit on the table in the exam room. The woman who ushered me in here ordered me to remove my clothes. She took them all with her, and never provided a gown. I thought maybe it was an oversight, but when the...I guess, doctor comes in, she’s not fazed, so I guess this is how it goes. She looks me over from the door, quite clinically; not sexually, nor critically. She reaches up, and turns a dial on her glasses, like she’s seeing me through multiple filtered lenses. Once she’s satisfied with her readings, she steps over to a computer terminal on the wall, and begins to input the data. I don’t say a word. She’s the one leading this hoedown, so I wait for her. When she’s finished, she walks back over to the door with a clicker, which she uses to retract the floor. I try not to freak out, but I’m rather confident that the exam table is safe. It stops short of it, like I figured, but I’m stuck up here. It’s a surprisingly large room. There’s no way I would be able to make the jump. The maybe-doctor gives me a choice. I can wait 30 seconds, and walk out of here on the floor with a full refund, or I can take a literal leap of faith, and fix my life. With no context, she leaves. I peer over the edge, and see a beautiful glow emanating from below. My eyes adjust and I realize it’s a net. It’s a golden net. Am I dreaming? Am I just living in the metaphor? This can’t be real, it doesn’t look real. So I jump. I jump belly first. My body lands in the net, and it gives just enough to keep it from hurting. I bounce a little before it returns to equilibrium, and then I’m just lying there. Not for long, though, before I begin to feel skin ooze off my bones. It’s like the net is melting me, except it doesn’t hurt, and I’m not scared. I fall all the way through; not all of me, though; just the best parts, leaving behind only the garbage that once weighed down my soul.

Microstory 868: Fall at the Final Hurdle

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I’m an extremely competitive person, and I quite frankly don’t understand people who aren’t. What’s the point of life if you’re not going to develop, progress, get better...be better, than everyone else? What are you doing with your time if you’re just sitting there, content with being mediocre. I’d sooner kill myself than waste away with no purpose. Obviously not everyone can be the best, but people who don’t try just don’t make sense, and I can’t stand them. Thing is, I can’t stand other competitive people either. We’re all alphas, so we easily get on each other’s nerves. I’ve never been in a fight in my whole life, but I can’t hold in my anger this time. There’s this one guy from Easton High who I have never been able to beat, in any track event. I’m always so incredibly close, but I just can’t make up that fraction of a second. But I’ve resolved to correct that in my last event before I graduate. If I don’t win this, I’ll forever be a loser, and that is not acceptable. I push myself harder than I ever have before, and almost feel like I’m gonna pass out. I’m about to do it when something hits me in the chest. Whatever it was, it was small, but even that is enough to make me fall face forward, right on the hurdle. Looking back, I guess I’m just lucky I’m alive, but I was not so clear-headed at the time. I know he threw a rock at me, or something like it. My lane was right by the the grass, I so I couldn’t find it to prove it; not that the police would have dusted it for prints, or anything. The first thing I see when I come to is my nemesis, jumping up and down at the finish line, rousing the crowd, and proverbially patting himself on the back. The rage boils up inside of me, then explodes. I hop right over the hurdle from a standing position, and bolt right for him. He’s so shocked at seeing me keep going even though the race was long over than he can’t move. I barrel right into him like a charging rhino. I want to punch him in the face, but I hold myself back. No matter what anyone tells you, I showed restraint; it wasn’t because the other racers kept me away from him. Needless to say, I regretted what I did, but the principal didn’t care. That bitch expelled me three days—three days!—before my last final exam. It’s so late in the year that I can’t even transfer to a new school. I’m going to have to go to summer school just to graduate. I still don’t know if college will let me defer a year so I can take care of this. Whatever happens, though, I know I’ll fix it, and probably still graduate early, because I’m a winner. And that’s something people like my bitch principal could never understand.

Microstory 856: A Bridge Too Far

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We’re walking slowly, which I’m grateful for, because even though I’m in good enough health to move as fast as these horses normally walk, not everyone here is. The guy tied behind me is absolutely emaciated. He must not have eaten for weeks. If the men leading us to our deaths were pulling us along as fast as they sometimes do, he would probably fall down and die right here. I look up at the lead ranger. He has kind eyes, but they’re also sad. He feels a lot of empathy, and does not appear to personally want to be doing this, but it’s his job. He notices the starving man as well, so when the other guards aren’t looking, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a piece of bread. He hands it to me, and jerks his head over my shoulder. If he weren’t asking me to give it to the other one, I would have done it anyway. And I’m not just saying that because I’m going to die anyway, because I’m not. Unlike everyone else here, I’m lucky to have lived in this county most of life, and I know a secret about these tracks that no one else does. No one here is going to die; not if they listen to every word I say, and trust me. Execution by train is a fairly new concept in these lands. In the olden days, it was too dangerous; While 999 times out of a thousand, the train would be fine, that thousandth execution could lead to a derailment. Now that even rural areas used maglev trains, the government decided it was a good way of getting rid of its undesirables. It’s quick, and nearly impossible to survive, and they always do it over a high bridge, so the bodies fall off, and disappear downstream. If the prisoners try to escape, they’ll just fall and die anyway, so no harm done. They picked the wrong bridge today, though.

The extremely tall man ahead of me is actin’ real shifty-like. I can see his eyes dart from side to side, and he’s twisting the rope on his wrists, hoping to eventually get them off. But even if he does, he’s only a third of the way there. All of our arms are tied to the stomach of the man in front of us. All of our ankles are tied together as well, and the same goes for our necks. It’s possible to shake these restraints, but by the time you get all the way done, a guard has noticed, and then he’ll just shoot ya. Some men try this, thinking it better to die from a bullet to the head than the strike of a train goin’ four hundred miles an hour. They may be right, but chances are, they’ll be caught quickly enough to just be tied back up, and then it was pointless. Other prisoners have tried coordinating massive escape plans, which caused the guards to keep people scheduled for the same time and place locked up in separate locations until it was time to go. That didn’t stop every attempt, so they started adding emaciated people like the poor schmuck behind me, so the team has no chance of getting too far. Fortunately for this group here, they’re with me, and I have a plan; a plan that doesn’t work if the guy ahead of me tries his own fool’s errand. I sneak up when even the nice guard isn’t looking, and try to whisper to the other prisoner that he needs to trust me. We have to make it all the way to the bridge for this to work, and it will work, but he has to let go of whatever he’s thinking. He doubts me, but he knows how hopeless his situation is, so in the end, he gives up and agrees. Just in time too, because a guard turns around, and starts lookin’ at us suspiciously.

As we step onto the bridge, we begin to feel the vibrations, and hear the train up ahead. One of the guards urges us on. It’s best for us to be nearly on the other side, so we’re not thrown clear back to the road. But there’s a special spot on this bridge for what I want to happen to work, and it’s about three-quarters of the way there. I whisper up to the guy ahead of me again, and also the guy behind that they need to jump when I say. I can’t get any message up to the other prisoners, so the weight of us three will just have to pull them over. We hit the spot, and I can see the greenish ripple in the air that you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t staring at it. I scream for them to jump, and we jump. The guards try to stop us, but they’re not strong enough, nor do they think we have any hope of surviving the fall. What they don’t know is that the ripple in the air will transport you to the other side of town in an instant. No one in the county knows what it is, or how it got there, but we all know about it, and we all agreed to never tell anyone else. The old world is over, though, so the secret no longer matters. I remember jumping through the ripple as a child, and having so much fun with it. I also remember the three kids who died because they missed the ripple. You gotta go right at that ripple, or you just fall. Other people grew out of the exhilaration, but I never did. I continued to enjoy it all the way up until the world turned to crap, and today, I’m extremely grateful for it. We land on the edge of the Humphrey Farm, just like we’re meant to. I’m the only one on my feet, but the others scramble up quickly, relieved and excited about what happened, but still so very confused. I smile, and help the man ahead of me get his ropes off. The others start helping each other too, and we make plans to get as far away from here as possible, but then we hear rustling in the trees behind us. A half dozen men with guns come out and grin at us. One of them points his shotgun right at my gut, and cackles. “You didn’t think we knew about the spatial distortion, did ya? Glad to disappoint.” Then the firing squad squeeze their triggers.

Microstory 817: Fly in the Teeth Part II

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Most of us escaped and headed for the nearest airfield, and everything seemed okay. Another group of survivors was getting there just as we were, and we agreed to travel together. It was only while we were in the middle of taking off that we learned they were actually a zombie-worshipping cult, with plans to secure food for their gods. The fact that we were to be that food was not lost on us. We intended to parachute out of the plane, but found only wingsuits, which we weren’t all confident we knew how to use safely. Still, there was no other way, so we quickly put them on, and jumped out of the aircraft. The wingsuits turned out to be specially designed to operate near the plane. They could actually generate their own electromagnetic field, that allowed us to stay in the air indefinitely. The meant we could fly all the way to a safer environment, but stay away from the danger of the fuselage. While we were flying, I began to have this vision of someone trying to kill me with a rifle. I fought him off as best I could, but my only option was to turn the gun back on him, and make him shoot himself. This not only didn’t kill him, but seemed to give him incredible rage, and I suspected his bullets had been laced with some toxic poison. He was delirious, so I was able to trick him into stepping into traffic. I realized only then that this was a flashback of a real experience I had had, that led to the demonic kids who had been chasing me in my truck. I had suppressed the memory. I had done it. I was the one who started the zombie apocalypse.

Our shrinking group of survivors found refuge on a military base that we took over once the zombie cult who had taken up residence there got a fatal dose of their own medicine. As fate would have it, zombies don’t want to be worshipped by their own food. The base was heavily fortified, and well-stocked with provisions, and we were able to ride out the apocalypse there in near complete safety. My zombie pheromone powers increased and changed as time went on. I was never able to fly, but I could jump to incredible distances. And I seemed to be totally invincible. I used my new gifts to venture into the world, so I could report back to my people how things had changed. I found that the apocalypse had played itself out. Zombies needed flesh from the recently deceased. They couldn’t feed on each other, and since they were driven purely by desire, never regulated their hunting habits. In trying to destroy humanity, they had starved to death, and destroyed themselves instead. Still, they couldn’t be removed from the equation completely, apparently. I found another group of survivors, trapped in a former academy. It was surrounded, and ruled, by a horde of zombie-ghosts. They can smell fear, and can’t help but revert to their violent instincts when that fear was present. They can’t actually bite or eat people anymore, since they no longer possess corporeal teeth, but they are capable of affecting the real world in some ways. They can make your life hell if you don’t display an adequate level of confidence. As potentially immortal myself, I have no problem with this, but I feel obligated to help others overcome their insecurities. And so that’s what I do, and why I’m here right now. I can teach you to survive.

Microstory 816: Fly in the Teeth Part I

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Throughout my whole life, I was utterly convinced that the zombie apocalypse was coming. Whenever anyone would ask me about it, I would be able to explain exactly why I thought that. I cited diseases that could mutate to something resembling a zombie-like state, and had all these scientific explanations for why it was not only possible, but inevitable. Everyone thought I was crazy, as you can imagine, and as time went on, I started wondering whether they were right all along. But they weren’t, were they? My first true evidence that there was something wrong—that some kind of epidemic was starting to spread—was when I ran into a group of what I thought were just mischievous kids taunting me for my theories. They turned out to be incredibly fast and riotous, and I began to fear for my life. I had to knock them off of my truck as I was driving away. They could almost keep up with me, but I had to speed to make sure they didn’t. Somehow the story of my harrowing adventure landed in the ears of the White House, and I was secretly invited to speak with the President himself, as well as the First Lady. We discussed the problem, but still things didn’t seem too dire, because I can remember having a good laugh about his opponent’s running mate in the election that led to his first term.

As I predicted, though, the zombies did show up, and man did it spread quickly. Fortunately, the President and I had covertly coordinated the installation of special buttons on nearly every street corner in every major city in the country. One push could summon the aid of military force. I still believe this saved a lot of lives, even though the proverbial shit has since completely hit the fan by now. When it all happened, I was nowhere near Mount Weather, so even though the government had secured for me a place in their bunker, I was unable to make it in time. I instead had to care for a young boy whose mother had abandoned him to save herself. We struggled to run away from the zombie hordes, but some of them seemed to release a pheromone that slowed us down. We managed to push through just barely, and found ourselves with a band of survivors, who were on their way to a series of caves they claimed would easily rival that of Mount Weather’s. A lovely and unexpected side effect of the zombie pheromones was increased agility and strength, which allowed me to jump down a forty-foot cliff to make sure it was safe for the others. I discovered the caves to not be so safe, for other survivors had already made their way there, and had all been turned by the time we arrived. We needed to go somewhere else, and somebody suggested we try to find a plane. Zombies clearly hated the cold, because it slowed them down, so our best bet now was to head North.

Microstory 25: At Odds

Robert Mathers opened the door to the roof and switched on his favorite song. He slowly walked over and stepped up onto the ledge. He had to wait until he got to hear the best part of the song one last time before jumping. As he was standing there, he saw something in his peripheral vision. It was a woman, standing on the ledge and crying. They made eye contact. What are the odds? He slipped off his headphones while they stared at each other, neither one knowing what to do in such a strange situation. If they both jumped, it would look like they were connected. The police would handle the case incorrectly. Robert stepped back down and bowed, opening his arm to graciously give this moment to her. He would have to find another roof. He started to walk away so that he wouldn’t be there when it happened but was stopped by a scream from the building across the street. He turned back and saw a man and a woman fighting in an apartment. They watched as the man grabbed the nearest heavy object and struck the woman across the face, dropping her to the floor. Robert and the other jumper looked at each other again. Things had gotten even more complicated. They looked back and saw the attacker prepare to hit her again. Before he could, sirens flared up in the distance, getting closer. The man stopped when he heard it too and ran out of sight. "There," the other jumper said. She was pointing toward a different window in the other building. Another woman was watching them, talking on the phone. The police cruiser pulled up and nearly struck the other man as he ran out of the building, still holding the weapon. They all lived.