After adjusting to the lights of the infirmary, Romana looked over at her
father, but seemed to be focusing on her own breath. It started to look like
she was trying to speak, but she was home now, and everything was going to
be fine, so there was no reason to rush this.
“It’s okay. I’m here, and you’re safe. Only talk if you can,” Mateo
encouraged.
She struggled to bring her lips closer together to formulate words. She
didn’t look like she was in any pain, though, and the pod didn’t indicate
that there was any medical issue to be worried about. She didn’t make a
sound until she was ready to produce the word, fully and clearly. “Report.”
They told her what had happened, and asked if she remembered anything.
“Nothing,” Romana answered. “Ramses turned his new machine on, and then I
woke up here.”
“That might be for the best,” Olimpia hoped. It didn’t appear that she was
ever tortured or abused, but there was no telling how difficult it was to be
trapped in Buddy’s particles. They might try to find out more information
later, but for now, they were just grateful that she was back.
Romana needed physical help getting out of the pod, and then into the tub to
be washed up. Olimpia graciously assisted with that. Mateo didn’t feel
comfortable participating, and Romana probably preferred it this way too.
While she had no apparent memory of the dark particle prison, she still
looked traumatized. Perhaps the ordeal had a nuanced impact on her psyche,
or maybe her mind was repressing it to protect itself. This gave Mateo an
idea, to find a way to let her use his rendezvous card, so she could speak
with Dr. Hammer. That was against the rules, but if it could improve his
mental health, the Center might make an exception. And anyway, once he made
sure that Romana was better, Mateo probably wouldn’t need the support group
anymore.
He gave the two of them space, and went back to the bridge. “What’s the word
with this thing? Are we in danger of another tangent?”
“Probably,” Leona replied. “But the risk can be mitigated with some careful
planning.”
“Two jumps,” Ramses added. “I can probably only muster two good jumps a day,
though it’s best that we spread them out by several hours. And I’m only
guessing that due to our past experiences. We’ve obviously pushed the limits
before, but it hasn’t always worked out, so for the sake of a
successful jump, we should probably consider that the safety margin.
That doesn’t mean I know what’s causing it. It could be a design flaw, an
inherent limitation from the ship that the slingdrive has been retrofitted
to, or it could be because of the quintessence itself. Perhaps it doesn’t
like people to mess with it until it’s had time to settle down. I need more
time, and more tests...again.”
“Before, when we were testing the navigation function,” Mateo began, “it was
to save Romana’s life. Now we’re okay. Now we can afford to take a little
time. Do what you need to do, but take the pressure off.”
Ramses nodded with a frown.
“And don’t feel bad about what happened,” Mateo continued, noticing that
this was not his friend’s real concern. “Buddy is an antagonist who took
advantage of an accident that you even predicted. We all knew the risks,
including her. I’m not holding it against you, and I would like to see the
day when you don’t hold it against yourself. Romana will be fine. She’s back
now, and the tethers are holding. We’ll never lose her again. I love you,
man.”
“Love you too,” Ramses replied.
“There’s something else,” Leona said, now that the serious conversation was
over. “It’s about the Insulator. While he was getting us back, I was
conducting my own research.” She stepped to the side to reveal the glass
object sitting on the console. “As you can see, it’s missing the dome that’s
supposed to go on top. Glass insulators have no moving parts, yet it’s been
removed as if it could be popped off like a snap fastener. We scanned for
the dome out in the black while we were at our last pitstop, but it might be
lost forever.”
“Cool,” Mateo said. “I don’t care about it, though.”
“You should,” Leona insisted. “I was able to make minimal contact with the
inhabitant. I can hear her, but she can’t hear me. Mateo, it’s Dubra.”
“My sister?” Romana was here, totally naked, but not worried about it.
Olimpia rushed up, and wrapped a towel around her body. “Sorry, she suddenly
hopped out of the tub, and ran off.”
I could hear their conversation in their minds,” Romana explained. “If Dubra
is in there, I can turn that minimal contact into a real conversation.”
“Be my guest,” Leona agreed, moving away even farther.
Romana stepped up to it, took a deep breath, then lifted her arms,
apparently to prepare to touch it. Her towel fell right back off of her.
“Maybe you should get dried off and clothed,” Mateo asked.
“I got this.” Olimpia was wearing a splash tunic, which was a hydrophobic
garment caregivers used to aid someone in bathing, whether as a family
member, friend, or medical professional. She pulled it off of her own body,
and dropped it over Romana’s, since the latter didn’t seem to be bothered by
the mixed company. Now Olimpia was the one without clothes on, but that was
fine.
Romana adjusted the shoulders of the tunic, then refocused on the task at
hand. She placed fingers from both hands upon the Insulator. She stood there
for a few minutes, occasionally showing mild signs of active listening. She
nodded definitively, and separated. “Okay.”
“Okay, what? Is she all right?” Mateo asked.
“Yeah, she’s fine.”
“Is that all she said?” Leona pressed.
“No, she said quite a bit.” Romana was acting like these were perfectly
complete responses.
“Such as what?” Ramses asked.
“Oh, uh...sister-sister confidentiality.”
“That’s not a thing,” Mateo argued.
“Yes, it is.” Marie was walking onto the bridge, followed by her own sister.
“I’ll just talk to her myself. How do we get her out?” Mateo questioned.
“I’ll have to build her a new substrate,” Ramses reasoned, “but I don’t have
her DNA, so I can’t make her look as she did.” He consulted his watch. “And
it will take me a real year.”
“Go on and get on it,” Leona said. “Just give her something temporary, and
we’ll transfer her to something else later. She might know how we can
acquire a sample of her DNA somewhere in the past.”
“Let Romana ask for consent first, please,” Mateo suggested.
“Yes,” Romana said. She went back to briefly speak with Dubravka. “She’s in.
Something temporary is fine. It will take some effort to make her the real
thing, and she wants to be involved in that. I’m so glad I won’t have to
wait a whole year to meet her for real. I really don’t care for telepathy.”
Romana had to wait an entire year before she even had a chance to meet her
half-sister in person. She was sixteen years old when Mateo and the team
returned to the timestream. Instead of jumping forward like she was used to,
she found herself stuck in realtime. She spent that year trying to stay busy
by helping Hrockas to prepare for the Grand Opening. There was nothing else
she could do. Ramses and Leona were the only ones with any hope of figuring
out what might have gone wrong, and more importantly, how to fix it. She
certainly couldn’t understand it herself. She didn’t have a whole lot in the
way of a formal education. She knew what little she knew thanks to books
that her family was able to procure for her over the years, but her unstable
lifestyle was not conducive to studying in a classroom. She didn’t have
access to Ramses’ ground lab either, or she might have tried to initiate
Dubra’s download process herself.
She was depressed, and feeling left behind, but she had all year to come to
terms with missing the bus, and the delay in the big family reunion. She
also grew up hearing stories of Team Matic’s fantastical adventures, with
their top-notch engineer and captain. Together, they could fix anything. So
she was confident that they would solve the problem quickly.
“You noticed these, right?” They were back in the realspace infirmary on the
Vellani Ambassador. The patient was sitting on the exam table, legs hanging
off the edge. Leona was no doctor, but she had a penlight, and she knew how
to point it at someone’s eyes.
“Yeah,” Romana replied. “I’ve tried to flush them out, but they’re not
exactly...tangible.”
“What are you talking about?” Mateo was standing off to the side, arms
crossed, and thinking about the most painful way to tear Buddy’s limbs off
of his body.
“The dark particles,” Leona answered. “There are still some in there,
floating around. I can’t tell exactly where; behind the cornea, maybe? Or
they’re in another dimension...”
“Then figure it out!” Mateo cried.
“Stop it,” Leona instructed. “We’ve talked about your anger.”
Mateo took a deep breath. “I know it’s not your fault, I’m sorry.” He pulled
the rendezvous card out of his sleeve pocket. It was red, just as anyone
would expect out of someone this angry.
“What are you thinking?” his wife asked.
“I’m thinking that Dr. Hammer is not just a psychiatrist. She has diagnostic
equipment that Ramses wouldn’t be able to develop, or know how to use
properly. She may have even seen this before.”
“That’s not what that card is for,” she reminded him.
“My daughter’s back, I don’t need therapy anymore. I need her to be
healthy.”
“Maybe it’s a good thing.”
“No,” Romana jumped in. “I know what you’re saying. But Matics are
time-skippers. It’s what we do. I don’t wanna lose that.”
“I’m just making sure you understand your options,” Leona told her.
“My options,” Romana began before a pause, “are to find the man who did this
to me, and make him fix it.”
Mateo shook his head. “I get the impulse. Believe me, I want to ring his
neck. But Rule Number Fifteen is probably the most important one when it
comes to us, so if you’re going to be a part of our team in any capacity,
you will need to learn to follow it. Buddy is powerful, fragile, and
whimsical. In my experience, that combination equates to sudden outbursts of
excessive retaliation. His objective is to bring a fruit from the past into
the future. He has the power to simply go back to the past, and pick one
whenever he feels like it. He’s going to extreme lengths to accomplish
something stupid and pointless. You can’t reason with someone like that, and
we certainly can’t fight him. We try to handle this on our own. Locating him
is a last resort.”
“Okay,” Romana agreed. “Then can someone help me get back down to the
planet? I want to be there when Dubra wakes up.”
“Okay, but then we’re talking about Snake Island,” Mateo called to her as
she was trying to leave.
“Whatever, just let me get this gown off!
Leona sighed. “We’re not going to Snake Island.”
“Leona...”
“We’re not going to Snake Island. We like Dr. Hammer, but we don’t know her
all that well. Your own cousin became an adversary in the Third Rail. We
need to be cautious, and follow the rules. Now go get your daughter, and go
down to see your other daughter.”
Ramses’ ground lab was a lot bigger and better than the one he had in the
pocket dimension attached to the ship. He had been wanting this forever, and
finally found a place to build it. Starter nanites constructed it for him
while they were gone, with the first room being dedicated to the Insulator
of Life, as well as the equipment necessary to produce a new body.
Mateo peered at it, floating there in its amniotic tank. “What DNA did you
end up using, since we don’t have hers. I assumed it would just be one of
those public-use template things.”
Ramses was running through his tasklist before the download procedure.
“Uh...don’t worry about it.”
“I wasn’t too terribly worried before, but now I really am. What did you
do?”
“It’s fine, don’t—it’s fine.”
“Ramses Abdulrashid,” Mateo enunciated like a disappointed parent.
“Yours,” Ramses answered. “Yours and Leona’s. I mixed them together, like
what would happen if you had your own kid.”
The room grew extremely tense. “Oh,” Romana said quietly and accidentally.
“Ramses. Leona and I did conceive twins. She lost them.”
“This isn’t either of them,” Ramses reasoned. “Couples have multiple kids,
they don’t look the same. The DNA always combines differently.”
“Ramses,” Mateo said once more. “You can’t give my daughter that I had with
Serif a body created from what might have become the daughter that Leona and
I had together. It will remind her of that trauma.”
“Well, I can’t undo it.”
“Make her a new one.”
“What?”
“Make a new body.”
“Well, what am I meant to do with this one?” Ramses questioned.
“Whatever you do with it, don’t tell anyone; least of all my wife. Start
over, and just use one of the templates.”
Ramses breathed deeply, and looked over at Romana as if she would somehow be
able to alter the outcome of this situation. It didn’t matter how either of
them felt about it. This was Mateo’s decision, and nothing was going to
change it. Mateo shut his eyes and nodded. “Okay. It will be another year
for us. I’ve obviously developed a method of accelerating time to expedite
the maturation process, but I still don’t have it down to less than a day.”
“Sorry, kid,” Mateo said to Romana. He then looked back over at Ramses. “Get
it going, and automate the process. Then focus on my other daughter. Let her
jump with us. She shouldn’t have to wait a whole other year.”
Ramses got to work on the second major project, but couldn’t figure it out.
The team jumped forward without her, and came back to a seventeen-year-old.
Fortunately, she wasn’t alone. Now with access to the lab, she was able to
initiate the download process herself, and meet Dubravka for real. They had
grown quite close over the last several months.
