The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 5, 2518

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Only Mateo was able to try the Daedalus wings during the reception, and that was only because he flew off before Ramses could stop him. They should have been inspected first to make sure that they were safe. Humans with wings were not impossible these days. There was, in fact, a relatively small community of wingèd people on the Core Worlds. The main reason they were impossible prior to genetic engineering and bioengineering was the weight. Wings with enough lift to carry a person would have to be so large that no one was physically capable of flapping them. If they were mechanical, well, that just added to the weight, especially with a powersource, and this all made it totally impractical. Only when humans could build new substrates for themselves did it become a reasonable prospect. Ramses designed the team’s bodies to be lighter than a natural human being’s, but they still weren’t specifically tailored for flight. Daedalus was an android of some kind, and since the mythology stated that the character had fabricated wings, he was almost certainly designed to be perfectly suited for flight. Mateo was not, and that was dangerous.

Fortunately, once Ramses did manage to get his hands on the things, he discovered that they weren’t just well-ordered feathers. Carefully hidden along the underside were tiny little fusion thrusters, which provided the lift, and the forward movement. They were controlled by the adjustment of the wearer’s head. It was essentially a cleverly disguised jetpack. It was unclear whether Daedalus’ own wings operated on the same principles, or if he was just somehow smart enough to build them after being instantiated in this physical simulation. He should have been placed under this dome with the knowledge typical of the time period he supposedly lived in, but who knew what was going on in Hrockas’ head when he conceived of Mythodome? It was one of the few domes that he conceptualized with hardly any help from his AI. He was an expert in Earthan mythology prior to his travels to the Charter Cloud, so this one was near and dear to his heart. He refused to explain it, expecting the art and adventure to speak for themselves.

Now that Ramses was satisfied with the results of his assessment, everyone was trying them. Well, he wasn’t so much as satisfied as he wasn’t allowed to block them anymore. He was hesitant to trust a gift from such a mysterious legendary individual, but he was overruled. Daedalus probably really did have a hidden agenda, but that doubtfully involved killing anybody on Team Matic, or anyone else. He did put his foot down at Romana, though. Her temporary reyoungification had not yet worn off, and she was still walking around in her original substrate. He might consider it later, but he wouldn’t allow anyone else on Castlebourne to use them unless they agreed to let him perform a thorough physical exam, which they didn’t. Leona was the last to give them a go before Ramses took them back, and secured them in his lab. That was okay, because it was about time to get to work.

“Wait, you’re not having a honeymoon?” Angela questioned.

“The average honeymoon these days,” Mateo began to reply, “is one month. That’s thirty years for us. We don’t have time for that.”

“Okay, well, you don’t have to do a full month,” Marie reasoned. “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t choose a dome or two, and relax for a bit.”

Mateo and Leona exchanged a knowing look.

“What? What was that?” Marie asked.

“You should have noticed by now,” Leona said, to her, and the group, “that there is no such thing as a vacation for us. As soon as we try to relax,” she explained with airquotes, “something will come up, and we won’t be as prepared for it as we should be.”

“What are you talking about?” Angela pressed. “We relaxed for, like, three years on Flindekeldan before The Warrior finally found us.”

“The exception that proves the rule,” Mateo contended.

“You’re not using that right,” Leona told him reluctantly.

Mateo was about to ask for clarification when they heard whooping and hollering in the distance. An indistinct dot appeared just under the lowest clouds a few kilometers away. They focused their telescopic eyes, and were able to zoom in enough to make out that it was Young!Romana. She was wearing the wings, having presumably stolen them from Ramses’ lab. She flew towards them, and almost kissed the ground, but arced upwards at the last second, and headed back for the sky. “Hell yeah!” she exclaimed in her little high-pitched voice.

Ramses was noticeably upset. “I give you people too much access to my operations. I will be changing that.”

“She’s just a kid,” Marie reasoned.

“No, she’s not,” Ramses volleyed.

“Shouldn’t she have re-aged by now?” Olimpia asked. “I thought she said it wouldn’t last more than a day.”

“Yeah, that’s why she went down for a nap,” Leona said. “She said she thought it would trigger her transformation back. I’m not sure if she lied about that, or the nap, but she obviously teleported to Treasure Hunting Dome at some point to sneak into Ramses’ lab.”

Ramses was fiddling with his armband. “I’m working on new security protocols now.”

“She just wanted to be part of the group,” Mateo defended his daughter. “She’s been through a lot over the last few years. She needs this.”

“Daedalus didn’t design those things for a child’s body,” Ramses argued.

“They’re adjustable,” Marie reminded them. “That’s why I was able to wear them after Olimpia managed to fit the straps around her ample bosom.”

“Please,” Olimpia said, feigning disgust while holding up the back of her hand. “I’m a married woman.” She lowered all of her fingers but her ring finger, simultaneously showcasing her wedding ring while making it look like she was flipping Marie off.

“For now...” Marie joked.

“I can teleport up and grab her if you want,” Angela volunteered.

“No, that’s too dangerous,” Ramses replied. “She has to come down eventually.”

“Will the fusion thrusters run out of fuel at some point?” Mateo asked.

Ramses shook his head. “The feathers are lined with microscopic ramscoop nodes, which can draw in hydrogen for processing, so...no. She’ll get tired, though. She’s just a baby. Speaking of which, we need to fix that. Who are these twins who did this to her?”

“The Ashvins,” Angela reminded him. “Twin gods, part of the Hindu pantheon. We found them in the Dawnlands. This dome has many sectors, and they can’t all be accessed just by walking through a door. If you don’t have access to the right portal, you can’t go. Of course as teleporters, we can skip over those rules.”

Ramses tapped on his comms. “Romy, you’ve had your fun. I’m worried about your condition. I’ll let you use the wings later, but first, you need to go from Allen to Garner.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Romana responded.

“Just get back down here, please. I’m not mad, but you could be in medical distress, and not know it until it’s too late.”

Romana suddenly appeared a few meters above them. She slowly glided down towards the ground, and landed with grace and poise. The wings collapsed into their little box, which slipped off of her chest.

“You’ll navigate us to the Dawnlands,” Leona said as she was picking up the box.

“No,” Ramses decided. “The Walton twins are right. You need some kind of honeymoon. Get on the catalog, and choose a dome for your vacation. I don’t want to see you at least until 2521. That’s not that long of a honeymoon. Doesn’t it sound fair?”

“Yes, sir,” Mateo said, standing up straight, and saluting. He bent over real low and gave his daughter a kiss on the forehead. “I love you, sweetie. Be good for Uncle Ram-Ram.”

“Okay, I think we do need to go see the Ashvins again.” Them playfully treating her like an actual little girl got old a long time ago.

After a few more goodbyes, the newlyweds ran off for their honeymoon adventures. They weren’t going to confine themselves to only one dome, but a series of them, starting with Mud World: World of Mud. Ramses and Angela then split off to take Romana back to the Dawnlands sector. Marie said that she would be staying behind to do her own thing elsewhere without telling anyone what or where.

The name was absolutely appropriate. It was dawn here. It was bright enough for them to walk around without running into anything, but not clear enough to see the details of the landscape. It was a beautiful and calming place. Even the air seemed ultraclean, like something you would breathe out of an oxygen tank. As they were standing there,  two horses trotted up to them, pulling a golden chariot. Two strong young men stepped out, and approached. One had lighter skin, and the other darker. They moved with grace, symmetry, and synchronization. They were perfectly attuned to each other, perhaps by some kind of centralized hivemind shared between them. When they spoke, they did so in a seamless concerted effort, finishing each other’s sentences in some cases, and saying words simultaneously in others. “Hello, and welcome to the Dawnlands, foothills to Svarga, the celestial plane of light. How may we help you?”

“Could you undo what you did to her?” Ramses requested, gesturing to Romana. “She was told that the de-aging process would be temporary.”

The Ashvins smiled, again in sync. “Youth is temporary for all before they enter the Svarga or Naraka Loka. Aging is a part of life. It may be undone, but as the lotus reliably blooms each year, so too will man grow and change.”

Ramses gently closes his eyes, exasperated. “Are you telling me that she will only return to her normal age because she’s aging normally from here, and will eventually reach it anyway?”

“She will one day be as old as she was, and following, she will be even older. So too will you.”

“That’s not how my species works.”

The Ashvins were confused by this as it was leaning on the fourth wall, and they did not have a response.

“Look, we need this to happen faster than the full twenty years,” Ramses went on. “She clearly misunderstood the rules when she requested this from you.” She looked down at Romana. “Right?”

“Right. I didn’t want this to be permanent, or...so slow,” Romana confirmed.

“Apologies for the confusion,” the Ashvins claimed, “we meant no harm to your body or mind. We may reverse the ravages of changing seasons, but not hasten them. We cannot return you to the state you were in before your bath in the Sindhu River.”

Ramses shook his head again, which he felt like he was doing a lot of today. “Do you know of anyone—in any realm—who might be able to do what we ask?” No one on the team had ever heard of a retroverter who wasn’t also a proverter, but to be fair, they weren’t all too familiar with the concept. They really should have been questioning how such temporal powers ended up on this planet in the first place. They hadn’t recruited anyone with such abilities. Perhaps someone they did bring here, however, had connected Hrockas with other time travelers. These others could have donated their gifts to building Mythodome, or maybe even other domes, in such ways that broke the publicly known laws of physics.

“That is not something that we would know,” the Ashvins answered, a little bit sadly, but still believing that this wasn’t their fault. They did not know that they should clarify how Romana’s situation would work.

“All right. Let’s go do some research,” Ramses said, turning around. “There are a lot of mythological beings here. Maybe one of the other gods has real powers too.”

“Wait,” Romana said, stopping him with a hand on his arm. “I know someone who can do it.”

“Who?”

“You.”

Ramses’ eyes darted over to Angela’s from a brief feeling of panic, because he didn’t know what Romana was talking about. “I can’t do what you ask. I’m not a proverter either.”

“I don’t need a proverter,” Romana clarified. “I need a cloner.”

Ramses sighed. “That is a big decision, and it’s also irreversible. Once your consciousness is digitized, it can’t be undone. You will never be what you once were. A scar you got when you skinned your knee skateboarding in first grade. A missing appendix from surgery. You will lose all of that. The body that you’re in now, at whatever age you happen to be, will be destroyed as biomedical waste. Your consciousness will remain intact, but not everyone appreciates that. There are those who have expressed regret at being uploaded.”

“I know the process, and the rules. It’s about time I become more like you all, particularly Mateo. If I’m gonna be on this team, I wanna feel like a part of it.”

“Ro-ro,” Angela began, placing a hand on her shoulder. “If we’ve ever made you feel excluded, that was not our intention. You are on the team. That’s undeniable.”

“It’s nothing that you’ve done. In the past, I’ve hesitated to digitize, but it’s the practical choice, and it’s inevitable. I don’t wanna die any more than you do. I’m more vulnerable than all of you, and I don’t like it. People have to be more worried about me than they should. This isn’t out of nowhere. I’ve been considering it. I think...maybe, reaching out to the Ashvins was my way of testing the waters, to see how I would feel about my body changing so drastically. I am ready now.”

“Well, it’s complicated,” Ramses started to try to explain. “You were born with your time-skipping power. The rest of us were either made that way from Tamerlane Pryce’s design, or we stole it from those who were. I don’t know if I know how to replicate what you are. You have to remember that we’re not technically on the same pattern. They just technically match up. If you had a hiccup, and got off by one day, we may never sync back up.”

“All the more reason to do this,” Romana contended, like it was obvious. “Don’t worry about understanding my pattern. Just put me on yours.”

“We’ll need to talk to your father first,” Ramses insisted.

“This isn’t his decision,” Romana retorted.

“Absolutely, but he’ll never forgive me if we just do this without even so much as a heads-up. He would feel the same if you got a secret tattoo, or...” He cleared his throat, and chose not to finish that thought.

“Okay. We’ll take our time with this,” Romana agreed, “but it’s happening, one way or another. If not you, then I’ll find some other cloner to do it. You’re not the only member of The Shortlist.”

Ramses nodded. “All right. Now let’s get back to THD. I’m mythed out.”

“Uth too.”

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Extremus: Year 102

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There is a very old, and very sad, tradition on Ansutah, which gratefully, no one has had to practice in a very long time. Life was hard on the human continent. It was perfectly designed to be a protective haven from the white monsters, but that was pretty much it. They were limited technologically, because they still had to keep hidden from any Maramon who might stray too close. They couldn’t develop aeroplanes, fireworks, or even tall buildings. They made do, and their population eventually numbered in the billions, but that was thanks to the knowledge that they retained from their ancestors, who lived on post-industrial Earth. Had they been starting entirely from scratch, many experts posit that they would have gone extinct. Unfortunately, while they survived as a people, it did not come without loss.

Dead babies were once a fact of life, on Earth, as it was on Ansutah. Though they don’t receive much news from the stellar neighborhood all the way out here, the Extremusians believe that it’s still going on. There are holdouts, who refuse to adopt certain advances, including those which might save their own children’s lives. Such choices come with consequences. This did not happen in the Gatewood Collective. The refugees embraced modern technology, grateful to finally achieve a way of living that was safer, healthier, and less restrictive. No more dead babies, what more could they want? To not forget their past. History is a profoundly important subject to teach each subsequent generation. Not every kid likes it, nor do they grow up to change their minds, but they do recognize its value. There was a time when the bed of mourning ritual was a common practice, and they’re getting a practical history lesson on the subject today.

When someone died on Ansutah, a funeral or memorial service would start off the mourning process. They were superstitious that the scent of the decaying corpse would attract the white monsters, alerting them to their location. The body was buried deep to hide them, and they were buried quickly. For many years, there was a debate about whether they should start performing autopsies on their deceased when the circumstances called for it. Many murders went unsolved because this belief was so ingrained in the culture that medical examiners had very little time to perform proper inquiries. This technique of a quick burial was also used when it was a child who died, but this created a secondary problem. Especially in the case of infants, there were few—or even no—images of their loved one. There was little to remember them by. Often, the only thing they had that remained was their bed. Often, not even that existed yet, and there was an entire industry that specialized in single-use cribs.

With the body of the child gone too soon, their bed was left temporarily empty, and the Ansutahan humans believed that the angels would not be able to find their soul so deep underground. The belief did not extend to adults, for their soul should be strong enough to seek the angel’s gate on its own. To help the angels find her child’s soul, the mother was expected to drag the child’s little bed out into the cemetery, lie in it the best they could...and cry. Her wails of pain would bring the ferrying angel to her, where they would find the child’s soul below, and rescue it. She would not be alone, at least not at first. Friends and family would attend the ritual, just as they had the funeral. They would not stay forever, though. While the mother continued to mourn, and the father or partner continued to try to comfort her, little by little, the visitors would leave. The first to go were anyone who just wanted to be there for the family for a fleeting moment, who did not know them at all. The next ones were passing acquaintances. And the dance continued until only the mother and father remained. And then...the father would leave as well. That is the most depressing part. The lessons in this are that you are ultimately alone, and that everyone leaves eventually. When that angel comes to retrieve your soul, it comes only for you. No one can be there with you. No one can see you. Not even your mother. For once she has been alone in that bed of mourning for some time, she too will leave. The bed, the body, and the place in their hearts where the child once lived, will finally be empty forever.

Audrey is in her bed of mourning right now, and Tinaya is standing nearby, in irony. It feels like five minutes ago when she was scolding the medical team, and the other conspirators who betrayed the public with their secret plan to impregnate however many women on this ship without their consent. Now it is she who is lying to their people. Audrey’s baby is not dead. She is being kept in a secure location while they put on this little charade. It is not entirely a lie, however. Audrey will never see her daughter again. That is called an ambiguous loss, and it can be just as impactful and saddening as an unambiguous one. Once this is over, she will give the child a name, say her goodbyes, then watch her disappear into the mini-Nexus that they have in the Admiral office. Audrey, Tinaya, Silveon, Arqut, Thistle, and one other person are the only ones who will know what truly happened to the girl. Everyone else is in the dark, including the baby’s father. That sixth person is presently caring for the baby until it’s time to leave. It’s someone they can trust, but whose absence will not be noticed at the ritual.

Waldemar is hovering over the crib. He is incapable of feeling certain emotions, but he has become better at pretending. Tinaya can tell that he’s faking it. She even caught a glimpse of the nanopuffer that he used to induce tearing in his eyes. He still doesn’t quite have the facial expression right. It’s overexaggerated, like what they show in cartoons, so young viewers can tell with certainty which emotion is being displayed. Arqut is gifted at reading people. He’s scanning the crowd for any indications that anyone is clocking Waldemar’s performance. He hasn’t seen any skeptics so far, but they may be exceptionally emotionally intelligent too, and pretending not to notice. One day, everyone will know what Waldemar truly is. That day is unavoidable, but they hope to put it off until there are no longer any innocent people in his orbit. That may be an impossible task too, especially now that Audrey is in so much more of a vulnerable position than she was before the baby.

People are really starting to leave now. They’re in Attic Forest. It’s not expansive enough to fit everyone on the ship comfortably, but they’re not all trying anyway. Some strangers want to be there, but some are just living their lives, or have to be at work. This is the first dead child in a very long time, so it is absolutely noteworthy, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to be involved somehow. Even so, there were a lot of people before, and now, it’s mostly empty. Even Lataran is walking away now. A few random visitors are here because they want to walk around the forest, but the Captain’s people are asking them to leave, because that’s not really appropriate at the moment, even if they are clear on the other side. Tinaya wants to be the last one to stay with the sad couple, but she’s only the mother of a friend of the mother. The families need to go through the final steps alone. Captain Jennings will stick around until it’s time for Waldemar and Audrey to be there alone, though. Waldemar’s mother is still a hot mess, and kind of needs supervision, and he’s perfect for this role because he can go anywhere he wants, and he always carries a good excuse with him.

Tinaya and her family are currently standing outside while Audrey’s parents depart. Audrey overwrote her younger self’s consciousness at an older age than Silveon did, so she was able to hide her maturity from them. They have no idea that she’s from the future. She thinks that Waldemar took advantage of her, and they are pursuing legal action in this regard, which is a whole other thing that they’re going to have to deal with, one way or another. They’re not exactly right, but they’re not wholly wrong either. Waldemar is not a good guy, but it’s unclear what happens to the future if he goes to hock. Will he still become a leader, and if he does, will he be worse than he was in the previous timeline? Will all of Silveon and Audrey’s efforts be for naught?

Immediately after Audrey’s parents round the corner, Waldemar steps out too. He’s supposed to stay in there with his baby’s mother for longer than that, but he’s not feeling anything but annoyed with what this might do to his ambitious plans. He nods politely at the three of them, then walks away. Audrey is now alone in there. Waldemar was right about one thing, there is no need to drag this out. “Meet us in my office.” Tinaya teleports back to the crib, helps Audrey climb out of it, and then waits patiently as Audrey tries to wipe the tears out of her eyes.

“Did I do okay?” Audrey asks.

“That was perfect,” Tinaya answers.

“Believable?” Audrey presses.

“You are in mourning, Audrey. You weren’t faking anything.”

“No, it’s fine. She’s fine. She’s gonna grow up on a planet. That’s everyone’s dream. That’s why we’re here.” She’s smiling, but her tear ducts continue to leak.

“Aud. You’re sad. I would be very concerned if you weren’t. I wouldn’t let you see her again.”

“I know,” Audrey admits. “I’m just trying to be strong, because it’s going to be hard to watch her leave.”

“I can only imagine what you’re going through,” Tinaya responds with a nod. “But you are right. She’s going to be happy there. The only thing that she’ll be missing is you. I know that sounds like I’m trivializing you, or your contribution, but you’re gonna need to make a clean break, and being optimistic about her future is vital to that, for your own sake.”

“I agree.”

“Are you ready?”

She wipes more moisture from her cheeks. “Yes.”

They take hands, and Tinaya attempts to teleport to the entrance to Admiral Hall, but they end up somewhere else. “Thistle? Where the hell are we?”

“This is a sealed chamber in a currently vacant sector of the ship. You can only enter through a teleportation frequency of my own devising. I built a clone lab here.”

Tinaya is confused and apprehensive. “...why...?”

“It’s a gift,” Thistle replies. “Turn to your left.”

They both turn to find a gestational pod. It lights up. A copy of Audrey is floating inside. “What did you do?”

“I understand that one Audrey Husk must stay behind on the ship to fulfill her mission, but that does not mean that a different Audrey can’t travel to Verdemus, and raise her child. I know that it’s not the same thing, but my own consciousness has been copied countless times, split across multiple universes, injected into countless systems and devices. You will get used to the knowledge that there is another you out there.”

“We did not discuss this at all,” Tinaya begins to scold. “You had no right to build this, let alone that clone. It is a violation, on par with what the medical team did with the faulty birth control.” She keeps going on with her admonishment against the superintelligence.

Meanwhile, Audrey has slowly been approaching the pod. She’s looking at herself in there, tilting her head in thought. “Thank you.” She says it quietly, but Tinaya can hear it.

“What was that? You’re thanking him?”

Audrey ignores the question. “Have you already copied my consciousness?”

A light flickers on over a casting pod on the other side of the room. “Not yet.”

Audrey nods as she’s slowly walking towards the second pod. “Sedate me. Copy me. Do not reawaken either of us until one Audrey and the baby are on the other side of the Nexus. It doesn’t matter which one you send away. There is a fifty percent chance that I will simply awaken in my cabin, and an equal chance that I will awaken on the planet.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Tinaya says. “Others would say that there’s a hundred percent chance that you’re the copy, and a hundred percent chance that you’re not. Both of you will think that you’re the original, and one of you will be just as disappointed as the other would have been.”

Audrey spins back around. “I am a consciousness traveler already, Admiral Leithe. I understand the philosophical ramifications of the process, better than you ever could. This is my choice. One of us is gonna stay here as Space-Beth, and the other...will be happy.”

“Audrey...”

“She will be happy planetside...with Silvia.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 30, 2512

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It was time. This was the moment that Ramses, Marie, Olimpia, and Boyd had been anticipating for the last two days. For two years, the temporal energy crystal was being bombarded with the sonified version of a simple lemon, converted from its genetic sequence in full. While cracks had formed on the surface, nothing major had changed to the crystal. It was nearing the end of the original music piece, and it still wasn’t entirely obvious what was going to happen. As they watched the visualization of the chords fly by on the monitor from the safety of the antechamber, something bad happened. It stopped. With only one single bar of four chords left, the music just stopped. It wasn’t reacting to the near-end of the song. It needed the complete, unadulterated piece. The universe seemed to be fighting back.

“It stopped,” Olimpia stated the obvious.

“Yeah, I see that,” Ramses replied, angry, but not really at her. He just kept staring through the window.

“What does this mean?” Marie asked.

“I don’t know,” Ramses admitted.

“Well, do we have to start over, errr...”

“I don’t know!” he repeated.

“Surely we don’t have to start all over,” Boyd figured. “Let’s just get the music playing again.”

“Yeah.” Ramses grabbed the keyboard, and started fiddling with the program, trying to force the music to start up again. It wouldn’t budge, it just wouldn’t. His hands started shaking out of frustration. He looked like he was about to throw something across the room. “Get me that bowl of lemon juice out of the fridge.”

“We can’t do that,” Marie argued. “It’s too dangerous.”

“It’s our only choice now. It wouldn’t be so bad to wait another two years to try again, but the crystal doesn’t want to be turned off, so I have no reason to believe that the next attempt will go any better.”

“Well, let’s at least get a robot in there to do it for us,” Olimpia suggested.

“I don’t use robots,” Ramses explained. “I like to do the physical jobs myself.”

“Well, we’ll get one from somewhere else. It’s a big planet,” Olimpia said. She then stood there, concentrating.

“You can’t teleport out of my lab, remember?” he reminded her.

“Right.”

“I’ll go with you,” Marie offered. They both started to leave.

While Ramses’ attention was split between the girls and his hope that there was something he could do from here, Boyd had slipped over to the other side of the room unnoticed. He had opened the fridge, carefully grabbed the pitcher of pure lemon juice, and slowly left through the other door.

Only by the thud of the door closing did Ramses notice that Boyd had left. “Wait. No! Don’t go in there!”

Boyd was already through the next door, and was approaching the crystal.

Ramses hit the intercom button. “Just wait. They’re going to get us a robot.”

“There’s no time,” Boyd contended, still inching his way across the room. If he spilled just one drop...it would definitely be okay, but he obviously didn’t want to risk wasting any. “Look at the clock.” He was right. There was probably just enough time before midnight that the girls could come back with the robot, but this needed to be done while everyone was still in the timestream. And there was a security concern with bringing in an unauthorized intelligence of any kind without proper assessment.

“Run as fast as you can out of the teleportation suppression field,” Ramses urged Marie and Olimpia through comms. “It’s not safe.” He activated his EmergentSuit, including his external PRU.

Boyd reached the pedestal. “Tell everyone who has ever met me that I’m sorry,” he requested. He lifted the pitcher up, closed his eyes, and dumped the juice on the crystal. As predicted, it exploded in his face.

While it was difficult and rare to travel between The Eighth Choice and Fort Underhill, it certainly wasn’t impossible. And if anyone had the natural authority to cross the border, it was anyone from Team Matic. After making contact with Gilbert Boyce, Leona, Angela, Romana, and Jessie were sent passes to board a transport ship, which flew them through the interversal conduit, and into the other child universe. They were on the planet of Violkomin now, standing by the prebiotic lake, waiting for Mateo to appear. Any minute now.

“Are you sure your contact in the new afterlife simulation was talking about the right person?” Leona asked.

“How many Mateo Matics do you know?” Nerakali asked right back. “It doesn’t matter how many there are, I would bet my life that only one of them died anytime in the last many decades. It’s the right guy.”

“Well, where is he?” Romana asked for the fifth time.

Nerakali sighed. “His pattern could have messed with the transition. You’re not like any other salmon; I know this much. It’s hardwired into his neurology in a way that I don’t understand. Do you? The server that he was placed on when he died is quantum. The lake is controlled by a biological computer. The way it was explained to me, it’s difficult for them to communicate with each other. That might make it sound unsafe, but the fact that he hasn’t shown up is probably a good thing. It’s probably erring on the side of caution while it makes the necessary—and unique—data conversions.”

“He needs to get here soon,” Angela pointed out. “It took us so long to get here from that other universe. Is it possible that he already came out? Or could he be clear on the other side of the lake?”

“He’ll show up here,” Nerakali assured her, “and he hasn’t gone through yet, or I would know. This is my job. I asked for it. Returning from death has always been my thing. I wanted to give back.”

Romana commanded the nanites that formed her shoes to recede into their implants. She started to wade into the water. “Can we...go in after him?”

Nerakali smiled, almost condescendingly, but still in a nice way. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“There’s one way to get there,” Romana said darkly.

“Don’t even think about it,” Leona warned. “You don’t know what’s waiting for you. Like she was just saying, we each have a weird biology, and a weird neurology. You might not end up in the simulation. You might just die.”

“Then you do it,” Romana suggested. “You’ve been there be—” She stopped when she felt a sudden pit in her stomach.

Leona and Angela felt it too. It felt like they were losing something. Something was being removed...not from their bodies, nor even their minds, but somewhere else. They shuddered at the same time, a highlight of technicolors flowing over their skin, and then they nearly collapsed to the ground. They were feeling weak and woozy, but still had enough wherewithal to keep themselves aloft.

“What the shit was that?” Marie asked.

“The crystal. They must have shut it off.”

“Why did we need to feel it?” Romana questioned. “Wasn’t it just Boyd and Octavia who were on our pattern? I mean, we didn’t end up with their powers.”

Marie and Olimpia woke up on their backs on the roof of a building, but they didn’t know if it was the right one. They were trying to teleport to Bot Farm, but this could be just about anywhere. “What happened?”

“The crystal exploded,” Marie replied. “That’s the only logical conclusion.”

“We need to go back. If you’re right, we don’t need the robot anymore.”

“No, I don’t think we do.” Marie stood and waited a moment. “Is there a suppression field here too?”

“Why would there be?” Olimpia pointed to the ground in the distance where scraps of metal and other materials were being unloaded from a truck so they could be recycled into mechanical substrate components. “This probably is indeed Bot Farm.”

“Well, something is stopping us from teleporting.”

“Do you think...?”

“Oh my God, the crystal. It took away all our powers.”

“It was only—”

“Yeah, well this is why we didn’t just dump lemon juice on it in the first place. We knew that we couldn’t control the results.”

“Then we need to get down to the vactrain station.”

“Agreed.” Marie looked around for a more traditional way off the roof.

“My suit. It’s not emerging. I was just gonna jump down to the ground, but I can’t. The suit isn’t a time power, I don’t understand.”

“The suit’s not, but the way we control them with our minds is biotechnopathic. We control it more in a psychic way than people typically interface with tech.” She placed her chin against her chest so she could see the manually interface on her shortsleeve. She was able to activate the suit from there. “So we don’t have to crane our necks like that, whenever you change clothing, keep a wristband on, so you always have easy control over it.”

“Good idea.” Olimpia did the same to get her suit on. Then they jumped over the edge, and started walking, like animals.

Ramses woke up alone. “Hey, Thistle. Report.”

“You have been unconscious for eleven hours and twenty-four minutes. You are otherwise healthy and unharmed. Environment is hostile, and not survivable, but life support is holding.”

“It’s 2513?”

“Unknown.”

“Where are we?”

“Unknown.”

“Lifesigns?”

“No life detected within sightline. No satellite detected.”

“Why does the air taste stale?”

“Primary carbon scrubber damaged and offline. Helmet scrubber is functioning optimally, but conservatively. Ramscoop nodes require manual service.”

“What about the transdimensional backups and replacements?”

“Pocket dimensions are inaccessible.”

That wasn’t good. This looked like it could be Castlebourne, but a region of it where there were no domes in sight. His best guess was the mirror dimension version of it, though there was no way to test that hypothesis from this random vantage point. “I can’t teleport,” he noted.

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Thistle replied.

“If Boyd destroyed the crystal, it would have taken him off our pattern. Though if it killed him, that doesn’t really matter. If the pocket dimensions are gone, and I can’t teleport, it must have also wiped out all excess temporal energy across the board. Time must have spit me out here by random chance. All hope is lost. I can’t get back. Even if my slingdrive were available, I couldn’t use it on my own. But what does that mean for my pattern? Am I stuck here for years?”

“I recommend you repair the ramscoop nodes for your indefinite resource management needs.”

“Thanks, Sherlock. Thank God I had my suit on at all, or it would be game over.” It was pointless to dwell on anything. “The composition of this world’s atmosphere. Analyze it. Is there enough helium and neon for meaningful lift?”

“No,” Thistle replied plainly.

“I’ll do the heavy lifting, so to speak, but I need you to run the calculations. I would like to jury-rig a fusion torch, and power it with the microreactor. Once I fix the nodes, there should be more than enough hydrogen to get me in the air.”

“I’ll start developing the models.”

Boyd Maestri woke up in the afterlife simulation. He had expected to find himself lying on the top of a mountain, or strewn halfway in a babbling brook. Instead, he was sitting in a hardback chair. A woman was standing before him coolly and trying to appear patient, but clearly itching to explain the situation. Boyd wasn’t tied to the chair, but he couldn’t move either. The computer program was just arbitrarily holding him in place. Physical restraints weren’t truly physical anyhow.

“Mister Maestri. Welcome to the afterlife.”

“You the boss around here?”

“I am,” the woman replied.

“How’d that happen?”

“I died at the exact same time that the original sim was being evacuated.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

She shrugged. “I did it on purpose.”

“You know my name,” Boyd pointed out, then let the implication sit there.

“They used to call me Pinocchio, but I didn’t like it. So when I came back here, I adopted a new identity. You can call me Proserpina. I am a unique lifeform.”

“I get it. I didn’t like my name for a time, and went by Buddha instead. That was a mistake, though. How did you take charge of this place?”

“I was responsible for the original version for a time, until Ellie Underhill sent everyone to a new universe. I just reclaimed my birthright.”

“What do you want with me?”

“I don’t care about you at all,” Proserpina explained. “Mateo Matic does. My counselors receive the names of everyone who dies, and is on their way to this world. One of them will make sure Mateo gets the message, and he’ll come here to get you.”

“Did you kill me?”

She laughed. “I’m just taking advantage of the situation. You got your own self killed. Something about lemons? I dunno, I didn’t read the whole report.”

Just then, Mateo opened the door to this room, and came in deliberately, but not hostilely. He was dragging some old man behind him. “I was told you turned off the lake, or something?” Only then did he notice the detainee. “Boyd, you’re here?”

“I died destroying the crystal.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Wait, you didn’t come for him?” Proserpina questioned. “I made sure Keilix knew about it.”

“I don’t think I told her about Boyd at all,” Mateo said. “I doubt his name means anything to her.”

“So, why are you here?” she asked. “The lake?”

“Yeah, I can’t go through. I’ve been trying for two days, which was two years ago.”

“Yeah, I turned it off for you,” Proserpina explained, confused as to why he didn’t already know this. “I need you here.”

“For what?”

“For your wife.”

“What about her?”

“She’s the one who created me last century,” Proserpina began. “I need her to do it again. I keep sending people to kill her, and she keeps surviving, I don’t understand.”

“What?” Mateo was so lost. “No one has tried to kill her. I mean, she’s faced danger, and there is that one guy, but he’s always trying to kill us, and has his own reasons.”

“Yeah, I exploited those reasons. Just like I exploited Pacey’s, and Bronach’s, and even Buddy’s here.”

“Well, you weren’t very good at it,” Boyd contended. “I didn’t want to kill her.”

“Well, I’m kind of limited under these conditions,” Proserpina argued. “I pass messages along with dead people who cross over to the other side, and I know my targets get these messages, but I think something gets lost in translation.”

“Are you trying to escape the simulation?” Mateo asked her, still not clear on what her agenda was.

“No, I’m trying to create a community of my own, but I need your wife to do what she did to me to all the other NPCs. I cannot figure it out myself.”

Mateo stared at her. Who the hell was this idiot? “Well, I need the lake to get back to her to ask her.”

“I assumed she would come for you!” Proserpina reasoned. “That’s what happened the last time you died!”

That was true, but it was still a poorly thought out plan. Even dum-dum Matt could see that. “Whatever. Let me out, and I’ll ask her what she can do. Okay?”

How do I know you won’t screw me over? she asked.

“Uh, Mateo?” Boyd piped up. “You don’t need her to let you out. You’re like how I was before. You can resurrect yourself...through dark particles.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 28, 2510

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Generated by Google Flow text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3

Mateo woke up lying facedown in the dirt. He stood himself up, and looked around. He definitely wasn’t in the train station anymore, but that didn’t tell him much. Any number of domes looked like this, with the lush jungle, and the clear blue sky. There was something extremely familiar about it, though, especially when he looked down over the edge of the mountain that he was on, and saw smoke billowing up from the valley. This was what he woke up to just before he learned that he was in the afterlife simulation. He took another look around, now with fresh eyes. Yeah, this was exactly what it looked like. He could have been dreaming, or it could have been something that Hrockas found out about, and recreated it in one of the domes. But why, though?

The only answers were in the direction of that smoke, so he started walking down towards it. No one else came out of the trees to do the same, so at least that much was different. He continued on down until he reached the amphitheater, just as he had the first time he died. No, it wasn’t the first. Ah, who could keep count?

A woman was on stage, smiling kindly, and waiting for him patiently. She was pressing a clipboard into her belly, which she glanced back down to now. “Mateo Matic?”

“Indeed.”

“Have a seat,” the clipboard lady offered, pointing towards the seating. “We’re waiting for one more.”

Only one other person was sitting there already. It was another woman, perhaps in her thirties. She looked scared and-or nervous. He left two seats between them. “Hey,” he tried to say in the calmest voice he had. “It’s gonna be okay.”

“Am I dead?”

“You may have died, but you survived it.” He inhaled, and admired the digital beauty surrounding them. “And you’ll go on...indefinitely. Your life now will be longer than your first one was. In a trillion years, you might not even remember it.”

“You act like you’ve done this before.”

He nodded. “I have. They let me go back, because I had more work to do in base reality, but now... Now I think I’ll just wait for my friends to join me. Could be a while. We’ll all be okay, though.”

The woman stood up, and sidestepped over to sit right next to him. She remained there for a moment before working up the nerve to give him a hug.

The counselor smiled at them, but didn’t say anything. She then looked up as the last guy was jogging down the hill.

“Sorry! Sorry, I see smoke, my instinct is to move away from it, not towards it.”

“It’s all right, Brian. We have all the time in the world.”

“Cool.” He sat down on Mateo’s other side.

“Hello, my name is Keilix Oliver, and as you have all surmised, you have died. Fortunately for you, some people long ago decided that they didn’t like death, so they built a computer program where the deceased could live on in a simulation. That simulation has since been defunct. They were hosted by a powerful society of advanced intelligences who grew to see them more as a nuisance, and a bit of a power hog. Do not be alarmed, though, because the 120 billion or so people who were in there at the time managed to escape—if you can believe it—to another universe. I don’t know that much about it as I have never been there. You see, when the hosts discovered that the identities in the simulation had all left, they actually didn’t bother to shut it down. It was no longer taking up too many resources, and there didn’t seem to be any reason to end it. That is how I survived, as did a few others.

“To explain a little more, the sim was not one single world. You could travel between different environments, each with their own laws of simulated physics. I just so happened to be in the middle of traveling between two of these worlds when the evacuation happened. Lots of people were doing that, of course, but they were closer to one side, or the other. I was right in the middle, so when I came out on the other side, I was alone. I didn’t make it through evacuation. Didn’t know how. Didn’t even know that it happened. I was just confused. The hosts discovered our presence—the rounding errors—and brought us all together. They offered to facilitate our exit to join the others in the new universe, which a few of us agreed to. The rest, we stayed here to keep the lights on. If we didn’t, when you died, you would just be dead.” She gestured towards all the empty seats. “As you can see, death is quite rare these days. The mortality rate used to be at 100%, but now life is a lot safer. It still happens. Accidents and errors, and people who just never upgraded from their normal organic bodies. You are three of the exceptions. You are the only three who died today. Well, it was yesterday, but... And you died a year ago, or something?”

“Yeah, it gets screwy,” Mateo admitted.

Keilix nodded. “Anyway, you can stay here if you want. The hosts did eventually dismantle and cannibalize most of the servers that the afterlife simulation was running on, but we still have plenty of space for a moderate population. You can also move on to the other universe, if you’re interested. Again, I can’t tell you anything about it, but I hear it’s nice. You can’t go back home, though. Your friends and family can’t find out what the endgame is. We don’t know for sure what would happen, but there’s a strong chance that people would start killing themselves out of pure curiosity. We just can’t handle that many people anymore. The system only works at this scale, because deaths have become so few and far between.”

“Did you know Serkan Demir?” Mateo blurted out.

Keilix smirked. “Yeah.”

“Cool.” He turned towards the other guy. “Did you know Lincoln Rutherford?”

“Yeah, I went to school with him.”

“Small world.”

“Do we have a connection?” the newly dead woman asked Mateo.

“I dunno, what’s your name?”

“Cecelia Massey.”

Mateo reached for his bag to check whether she was on a list of people he had met or ever heard of, but realized that he no longer had any possessions. “No, I don’t think I’ve heard of you. Nice to meet you, Cece. I’m Mateo.”

“The three amigos!” Brian shouted. “Four!” He pointed at Keilix. “You’re part of this too. Four, uhh...four musketeers!”

Keilix laughed. “That’s very sweet of you, but my job is here. While people don’t die as often as they once did, they still do occasionally, and someone ought to be there to greet them, and facilitate their transition.”

“How did you get this job?” Cecelia asked.

“I just stepped up,” Keilix answered. “Why? Are you interested?”

“I was a guidance counselor on Earth before I became obsolete. So I do have the experience. Do I have to choose right away, or can I change my mind later?”

“If you choose to stay here,” Keilix began, “you can always move on later. But if you choose to move on, I don’t think you can come back. I’ve never heard of it. I don’t even know who’s in charge over there.”

“Her name is Hogarth Pudeyonavic,” Mateo answered, even though she didn’t actually ask a question.

Keilix is surprised by this. She looked back down at her clipboard. “How do you know that?”

“We’re friends,” Mateo explained.

“Interesting. What else do you know?”

“How much time you got?”

“All of it,” Keilix said.

“All of what?” Leona asked as she was walking across Ramses’ secret lab.

“His EmergentSuit nanites,” Ramses answered. “I need them all back. Or rather he needs them back.”

“He doesn’t have them?” she questioned.

“Boyd must have been injured, however slightly, when Mateo gave him the suit. It’s not just designed to form a protective barrier. They can also treat medical conditions, just like any other medical nanites. Some of them must have stayed with him to conduct repairs, and are still swimming in his blood.”

“Well, they should be done by now. It’s been hours. So go ahead and take them,” Leona ordered. “You’re not trying to hold onto them, are you?” she posed to Boyd.

“I have no mental control over them,” Boyd replied.

“He’s right. Only I can do it. They’re not responding to my commands, though,” Ramses said to her. “They’re his now. I just need to keep trying...”

“Well, why do you need them? How does it help Mateo?”

“Each one stores little bits of data from their host,” Ramses began. “If we want to bring him back, I think I need that intact data. We’re lucky we even have a chance. If he didn’t have any nanites at all, we would have no way to anchor him to this point in spacetime.”

“I don’t understand why you can’t find him,” Leona complained to Boyd. “Isn’t that your thing?”

“Until we get that time power crystal switched off, I don’t have my normal powers,” Boyd said apologetically.

“We’re almost there!” Olimpia shouted from the other side of the room. She and the twins were responsible for figuring out how to convert the lemon DNA into musical chords. Once complete, they will blast the crystal with the music, and let it play over the course of the next two years, which for them, will only feel like two days.

Leona sighed. “He could be anywhere, anywhen.”

“I know that,” Ramses agreed. “This is all I can do. The ladies are smart enough to wire an array of speakers, and my AI finished converting the DNA last year to musical chords. It’s a bit above my paygrade, to be blunt, so I need to focus on an alternative way of retrieving Mateo from wherever he ended up.”

It looked like Mateo was there, lying on the exam table between Leona and Ramses. But it wasn’t him. It was just his suit; an empty shell waiting for its host to return. “What if Boyd got back in the suit? Could that...trigger the stray nanites to return to their brethren?”

“Yeah, I thought about that,” Ramses admitted. “It might work, or they might all switch to him as their new host, and then Mateo could be lost forever.”

“I can do it,” Boyd insisted. “You get that crystal turned off, I’ll find him for us.”

“Forgive me if I have little faith in your motivation to help,” Leona said.

“That’s fair,” Boyd acknowledged, “but I really did learn a lot on the fake Castlebourne. I have grown. I’m not a saint, but I’m not the same man you met those years ago.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it. Ram, keep working. Boyd, do whatever he says. And ladies!” The three of them stopped working, and looked up at their captain, so she went on, “I need one of you. Romana has an idea, but we need a third to activate the tandem slingdrives.”

“I’ll go,” Olimpia volunteered.

“I’m sorry, I meant one of the Waltons,” Leona countered.

Olimpia frowned.

“Pia, you have sonic powers. I need you on the music thing. That just makes sense. If we needed a driver, I would ask Mateo to be a part of it, even if it’s driving a giant futuristic terraforming tiller piloted by an AI.”

“I’ll go,” Angela said, setting her screwdriver down, allowing her sister to finish rigging up the speaker apparatus.

Leona and Angela teleported away to meet up with Romana, who was sitting on the edge of an emerald pool, under a dome fittingly named 10,000 Emerald Pools. She was staring into the water, obviously aware that they had arrived, but ignoring them for now. “What do you see in there?” Angela asked her. “They say the pool reflects your true self back at you.”

Romana, frowning, slapped the water before standing up. “I see an orphan.”

“We’ll get him back,” Leona assured her. 

“You can’t promise that.”

“If he died,” Leona started, pausing dramatically, “we’ll get him back from that too. There is nowhere he could be that we couldn’t find him. Now, what’s your idea? Where are we going?”

Romana activated her suit, helmet and all. The other two followed her lead. They took each other’s hands. “We’re going to a new universe, called The Eighth Choice. I know a Pathfinder there.”

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