Spaghetti West: The Ark (Part III)

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The second black hole turned out to be far more than a coincidence, and far from an isolated event. They just kept coming after that. Now that Sugar’s sensors were tuned to look for them, they started popping up everywhere. They were appearing all over the system in no apparent pattern. Efforts on the development of the orbital defense grid were redoubled multiple times. All energy was going into building them as fast as possible, focusing almost exclusively on the ionic pulse canons, but she was also sharing her unique sensor suite to predict and detect subsequent intrusions. By the time they were finished, this was going to have to be the densest defense array in the stellar neighborhood—probably the galaxy, even though Castlebourne had that war.

Speaking of Castlebourne, through a chain of contacts, Sugar was able to confirm that these singulararities were Kugelblitz, meaning they were made artificially. She learned that they were not weapons, however, but a vital component of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. This was what solved the mystery of the surface gravity. The planet was a high-density, high-mass terrestrial. These numbers weren’t as high as they could possibly go while still being rocky worlds, but they were too high for baseline humans to survive on. Before even one person stepped foot on it, thirty-two transdimensional gravity generators were installed at even intervals across the globe. Sugar still wasn’t sure who was responsible for them, but they must have been incredibly powerful.

These generators were essentially portals that linked to a different region of space. Specifically, it was a kubelblitz black hole, also known as a KBH. They basically just ignored Bida’s real gravity, and stole the gravity from somewhere else. A couple of decades ago, the owner of Castlebourne resorted to moving their entire star system away from its original spot in the galaxy in order to conceal their location from a violent enemy. They just so happened to move it within spitting distance of the KBH, which disrupted gravity on Bida. They ultimately fixed it, but something was going wrong now. They either didn’t do it correctly, or this was inevitable. Sugar put a call in to the time traveler who solved the problem, but had yet to receive a response.

There were not dozens of KBHs threatening the lives of the Bidans. There was only one, and that one was somehow being duplicated over, and over, and, and over again. She had to believe this was an accident. It was probably how Mirage Matic chose to save Bida, but it had evidently triggered a runaway chain reaction. And Sugar had no idea how to stop it. Her only hope was to keep deflecting them. It had been going on for weeks now, and they were getting pretty good at it. Could they hypothetically do this forever? Probably. While they didn’t appear predictably, their appearances had plateaued. But that didn’t mean it would stay this way. What happened when the duplicate KBHs exceeded the number of lasers in too short a time? What if in all the chaos, they accidentally deflected one of them towards one of their neighbors? What could they do if—

The sensor alarms started to blare. They would go off pretty frequently, but they were particularly urgent this time. The system knew that something was unusually wrong; that it had changed, and she had to shift all focus to the latest problem. “Oh my God,” she whispered as she stared at the screen in disbelief.

“What is it?” Liselot asked. She spent a lot of time up here, having chosen to move her base operations to Sugar’s ship. They now had a crew of dozens.

“We should have been worried about this the whole time. The next KBH. It’s not going to be in space. It’s going to be in the atmosphere.” Sugar desperately started to turn part of the array. They weren’t designed to fire towards the planet, but it was technically possible, as long as the angle wasn’t too steep. The computer was still narrowing down the entry point to a smaller area. The KBH was only millimeters in diameter, so it was hard to know exactly where it would appear. That normally wasn’t so critical, but in this case, it was more important than ever. They only had a few minutes.

“Where?” Liselot began snapping at her people. They knew what she was saying.

“What is this region here?” Sugar asked, pointing at the map. “It looks pretty heavily populated, and unusually densely so for your intentionally minimalistic world.”

“That’s...Eyrenland,” Liselot answered. “It’s the hub for our primary export, eyren. I don’t have time to explain it, but that’s where your friends from Doma Tertia are currently being housed while they figure out exactly what kind of life they wanna lead.”

“It’s about to be destroyed,” Sugar said as she pivoted to something else after syncing the sensors with the canons. They could fire at the right spot if that was what it came too, but if it was as close to the surface as it looked like it was going to be, it wasn’t the right way to handle it. And either way, the people down there were gonna die unless someone did something about it...unless she rescued them first.

“Thousands of people live and visit there every day,” Liselot explained.

“The rest of the planet isn’t safe either,” Sugar warned. “This is going to cause bidaquakes and general tectonic instability all around the world. Send that emergency broadcast over the air. They only have a moment to prepare, at best.”

“Where are you taking us?” Liselot questioned.

Sugar was at the helm now. “We have to position ourselves just above the entry point. I have two things to do. I have to pull everyone down there up here, and then I have to force the KBH back to where it came from.” She flipped switches and tapped on the console.

“What are you talking about?” Liselot pressed. “How can you do that?”

Sugar programmed the route, and made the jump. They still didn’t know the exact altitude, but it would be somewhere around here. “It’s something I’ve been working on since we found out that the KBHs were coming here through portals, and not simply wandering through realspace.” She made a short-range teleport over to the transport workstation. “If this works, I can push it backwards, but as of yet, my ship is the only thing equipped with the right hardware, which...makes this next part tricky, and I need your authorization.”

“You have it,” Liselot replied. “Do what you need to do.”

Sugar shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. The only way to save those people down there is to teleport them all at once. The ship is already remodularizing to prepare for maximum capacity, but once they come up here, they won’t necessarily be safe, because this is also the gun. I’ve not had time to test it, so if I do this, and it literally backfires, it could kill everyone anyway. My emergency transporters can’t move people to anywhere else. It doesn’t have the data to make sure some of them don’t end up in the middle of rocks, or at the bottom of the ocean. They have to come here, but this could quickly end up the most dangerous place to be.”

“Besides the surface, where the black hole is about to show up?” Liselot pointed out. “They’re gonna die if they stay down there, so get them here, and hope for the best.”

“Okay.” Sugar looked over at the sensor readings. “They were now showing how high above the surface the marble-sized singularity was going to appear. It...wasn’t going to be high. She tapped on her comms. “Van! Open the pocket dimensions. Open them all! We can’t fit everyone in realspace!”

“You got it, boss!” Van replied.

While Sugar waited for the internal portals to be activated, she widened the capture radius. Thirty-one seconds from impact, regardless of what the unsuspecting inhabitants were doing on the ground, Sugar teleported every single one of them into the ship, mostly into the pocket dimensions. They would be confused, but they would be alive, and she would try to explain things later.

“Now that they’re clear, can you not just close the portal so the black hole doesn’t come here at all?” Liselot hoped.

Sugar shook her head as she went over and hovered her hand over the button. “If I tried, it would probably make things worse. Think of it like a swarm of biblical locusts trying to fly through a doorway. If you just close the door, they’ll congregate against it until it buckles. You have to slam the door shut so it expels them backwards.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Liselot argued. “A bunch of the locusts would get in anyway.”

Sugar sighed. “Exactly.” She watched the timer count down. Eleven, ten, nine, eight... “This hasn’t been tested. If it doesn’t work...that’s the end of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida.” Three, two, one—

The Kugelblitz black hole popped into existence in the sky. The planet, which up until this point always tried to pull everything towards the barycenter near the core, suddenly had a competing mass to contend with. The trees, the water, the mountains; everything was pulled up towards the singularity. The objects closest to the event horizon were being tugged on more, resulting in them being strung out like spaghetti. The rest of the world tried to implode like a deflating football. The black hole was the heaviest thing around now, so it didn’t stay in one place. It began to fall towards the barycenter. If Sugar allowed that to happen, the whole planet would collapse in a matter of hours, if not minutes.

Sugar fired her new machine directly towards the black hole. It came from somewhere. They still hadn’t traced the source, but it had to form somewhere else in space, and she needed it to go back. As the energy wave reached critical mass, the biomass and geosphere continued to head towards a single moving point. It only took seconds for the KBH to disappear, but the devastation didn’t need long.

In this short amount of time, a land mass the size of a large country was reduced to a crater. All of the plant and animal life there was destroyed nearly instantly. The tremors continued to plague the surface all around as the gravitational disruption’s effects persisted beyond the initial shocking event.

“What did we just lose?” Sugar asked. “What did they use that settlement for?”

Liselot stared at the satellite images showing the barren landscape that once thrived. “Eggs. We lost the eggs.”

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Spaghetti West: Moonfall (Part I)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You don’t,” Sugar stated.

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

Sugar nodded. “But the Roche limit.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Huh?” Liselot questioned.

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

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

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

Van teleported there instantly.

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

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

“Sorry, boss.” Vantu disappeared.

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

“Magnets!” Sugar joked.

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

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

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

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Microstory 2636: Don’t Forget To Bring a Towel

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Trilby throws a silky towel at her. “I hope you understand that I removed your clothes to provide you with medical treatment. I would have been waiting for you on the landing pad, but you showed up way too early. Why didn’t you go down on a slower trip, with the animals? That would have been a lot safer for your fragile human body.”

“They would have caught me,” Mandica explains briefly. “What is this?”

“Temporary,” he says. “I call it the cloak of invisibility. You will be perfectly visible to the naked eye while we’re out there, but the identity sensors won’t spot you. You will appear as an infrared aberration, caused normally by too many people beaming data to each other’s devices at the same time. We will take a particular route to where we’re going so that sort of thing doesn’t stand out.”

She frowns at the towel. Yeah, it isn’t a cloak, it is a towel. No hood, no draw string. It is see-through, but still just a big cloth square. “Will I not look a little odd, walking around with this thing over my head?”

Trilby laughs heartily. “Odd? Sweetheart, you’re on Castlebourne now. My next door neighbor is a giant beetle, and is probably smarter than me. They might as well call this world Substrate City. You’re not going to stand out. There is no way to stand out on this planet. Everyone is here to formulate their unique identity, and they change by their whims all the time. Now. Functionally, you’re rare. There are a few communities here who are just as unenhanced—less unenhanced, in fact—and they are not insignificant, but most people change bodies like you might change your hairstyle. But don’t worry, you can’t tell, and people are careful around each other, because there’s no way to know. No one’s gonna shoot you with a gun under the assumption that you’ll survive.” He taps his middle finger on a screen. “I took the liberty of building you your own modified prospectus. The green domes are fine. You’ll be safe in any of those. I’m talkin’ your residential areas, your museums, your educational historical recreations.

“Yellow, a little more dangerous. They have ways of protecting visitors. If they’re a normal human, the Custodians will make accommodations. They might even separate the unenhanced from the enhanced so there’s never any question. Red are no-go zones. Most of them are specifically designed for people who have disposable substrates. A visitor might even end up getting a whole fleet of bodies to switch to one by one. If someone like you without the spoof lenses were to try to sneak in, the sensors would flag them so fast, their head would spin off. Apparently, there was one guy years ago who got stuck in a dangerous game and nearly died because the people who were trying to murder him hacked the system. They won’t let that happen again. They installed new sensors all around the world, and are constantly checking. You will be walking around basically as an admin. They’ll let you in anywhere, but that’s why I made this list for you, so you can decide what you’re willing to risk. You need to understand your options.”

“You said something about spoof lenses?”

“Yes, it’s not just those. They have multiple ways of tracking identities, the most common of which is an eye scan. They also—”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Mandica interrupts. “If people are changing bodies, and your neighbor is an insect, how would a retinal scan even be possible in a place like this?”

“It’s not only a retinal scan. The retinal scan is a second stage identifier that the system will only perform if the first stage scan turns up blank. Everyone capable of transferring their consciousness is given a unique watermark, placed upon their optic nerves. I don’t know if you know this, but humans have a natural blindspot in their eyes due to where the optic nerves connect to the eyes. Your brain fills in the blanks, but you can’t see light that hits that spot. Fortunately for optic void scanners, though, light does still hit that spot. They shoot an invisible laser into it to read someone’s watermark, to know who they are. They don’t even have to keep their eyes open. It can pass through eyelids, and many other materials. For a normal person, if it doesn’t detect that watermark, it will default to the retinal scan, and register your preferences and restrictions.” He points at the invisibility towel. “The scanner can’t pass through that, so it will see infrared interference, and not see your unregistered eyes.”

“Why do I need the towel if I have these spoof lenses?”

“You don’t have the spoof lenses yet. The woman who’s getting them for me is on the other side of the planet. We have to travel to her first. Before you ask, she can’t come to us, because she’s also protecting you from brainwave scanners. That’s another thing you need in order to be a ghost. They’re becoming more common. They’ll never do away with the optic void scanning system, but spoofing an authorized watermark is easier than fooling a brain scan. Don’t tell anyone, but about zero-point-zero-zero-one percent of the time, a cloned or bioprinted body doesn’t produce the watermark correctly, and it has to be fixed, either with a new replacement, or a visit to the optomeger.”

“This woman with the brain scanner—”

“The baseline imager. A brain scanner verifies your brainwaves. The baseline imager is the thing that inputs in the data. It’s highly regulated. There are only a few of them in the world. People would notice if she borrowed it and took it on a vactrain.”

“I see. The baseline imager woman; can she be trusted?”

“She’s already done for me what she’s about to do for you,” Trilby explains. “She holds a special office in a special government for a special community. They were refugees fleeing oppression, and live here permanently, not simply as visitors. Apparently, her now-husband initially refused to be enhanced, so she’s sympathetic to that sentiment, even though he’s now just like her, and I am too. The only reason she’s keeping him out of it is so that he can have plausible deniability, but I told her about you, and she thinks you and the Superintendent would get along.”

“Okay, I think I have all the information I need. I should say, I trust you. Let’s go out there and walk around like ghosts, me moreso than you.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

And so the two of them leave the apartment. Trilby already has his spoof lenses on, but Mandica has to stay under the towel the whole time. He seems to have been right. People don’t even just ignore her. They smile and greet her as if she is just another regular person on this bizarrely accepting planet. She doesn’t see any giant beetle people, but a few who look decidedly unhuman. A lot of animals, but also alien-like beings that don’t match to something that ever existed on Earth. She’s starting to feel more comfortable here, like she can actually breathe and live a life. 

After only a few hours, they have made it to a dome that’s just called Capital. They enter a gorgeous woman’s office, who holds her hand out, sporting a very kind smile. “Hi. I’m Deputy Superintendent Yunil Tereth. I hear you would like to stay unregistered. Why don’t you have a seat?”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 2, 2423

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It was easier for Maqsud to transport people from one planet to another while they were floating in water. Every choosing one had their little quirks like that. Ramses packed up their pocket dimensional home, and stuck it in his pack. Then they hiked to the nearest waist high body of water. It took them most of the rest of the day, but they made it in time. The Krekel authorities were acting like them having a week to get out was some kind of standard deadline, but it didn’t sound like the smorgasbord of punishments for Leona’s crime was any age-old tradition. None of the others they managed to speak to had ever heard of anything like that. No matter. They had a way off the planet, and no need nor desire to ever return.

A weird thing happened on their way to their destination. Well, two things ultimately. Teleportation generally implied instantaneous travel, but that wasn’t always the case. Sufficiently rapid transportation was equally impressive and helpful. It didn’t even have to be a superpower to be worth it. A hypersonic jet that could get from New York to London in under two hours was still a useful advancement to the travelers of the 21st century. Maqsud’s globetrotting ability took time. He still had to move from point A to point B. He just did it a hell of a lot faster than anyone else could. Not even Team Keshida’s FTL engine could match it. He offered the passengers sunglasses to protect their eyes from the literal blinding light of the journey, but Ramses said that they wouldn’t need them. Their new eyes were designed to withstand the doppler glow.

By the time they got into the water, midnight central was approaching, and by the time they had arrived on the next planet, it had passed. While it only felt like a few minutes to them, the trip had technically taken a whole year. Maqsud jumped to the future with them, which didn’t seem to bother him, as long as it wasnt a permanent thing. Leona confirmed their suspicions about the delay with her once-father-in-law’s special watch, then they tried to figure out where they were. Maqsud’s ability was not very precise. Actually it was when you thought about it a little. He could always land on a planet, even if it was billions of light years away. He just couldn’t pick a specific point on that planet. They could have been anywhere on Earth. Fortunately, this group had abilities of their own. They could teleport the rest of the way. At least they might have, but this wasn’t even Earth.

“Don’t you feel that?” Olimpia asked. “The gravity. It’s...wrong.”

“She’s right,” Ramses said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “We’re too heavy.”

“I don’t really recognize this plantlife either,” Mateo pointed out, “though I would not have thought much of it if Olimpia hadn’t said something. I’m not a biologist.”

Maqsud was concerned. “I aimed for Earth. That is where we should have gone.” He looked around. “How could we not be on Earth?”

“It’s okay,” Leona told him. “We can all breathe, including you. Everything else, we can deal with.”

Maqsud was growing more upset by the second. “This has never happened to me before, except that time I took you and your other friends to Mars accidentally. But that was one planet over. Which other possibility might we have gone to that’s anywhere close to Sol, and still looks like this?”

Leona thought about it. “The best candidate would be Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. It has a higher surface gravity, a breathable atmosphere, and tons of life.”

“I don’t think that’s it!” Marie called down to them from a hill. “This isn’t a planet,” she said after they all jogged up to see what she was seeing. She was right. A ringed gas giant could be seen plain as day in the sky. They were orbiting it on a moon.

“What is that thing?” Olimpia questioned. Some kind of energy beam was coming out of the planet, shooting outwards to the side. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe the beam was coming from elsewhere, and shooting the planet.

“Is that from a Death Star?” Mateo asked.

“No, it’s a Nicoll-Dyson beam,” Leona whispered.

“What is that?”

“It’s...it’s basically a Death Star, except it’s powered by a real star. Someone out there is trying to kill whoever lives on this moon.”

“Why would they shoot the planet, and not the star?” Angela questioned.

“Larger target. It will eventually destroy everything.” She sighed. “I’m not too terribly familiar with the concept, because I don’t much care for weapons, but the way I understand it, we should be dead by now. It should happen in a matter of minutes. For whatever reason, it’s low intensity, resulting in a delayed—but inevitable—reaction.”

“Can we do anything to stop it?” Mateo asked her.

“If we still had a ship?” Ramses asked rhetorically. “No. Without a ship, definitely not. The best we can do is...” He trailed off a short time to look over at Maqsud, “...get the hell out of dodge.”

“We can’t do that yet,” Leona said, shaking her head.

“She’s right,” Mateo agreed. “We have to help these people, if we can.”

“What people?” Marie asked. “I don’t see any people. There could be billions of them on the other side of the planet—or moon rather—for all we know.”

Ramses dropped his bag on the ground, and started sifting through it. “Lee-Lee, I happen to have a high-speed spectrographic camera in the lab.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen it. I could try to use it to estimate the beam’s progress.”

“Yeah,” Ramses concurred as he was taking out the pocket dimension generator. “While you’re doing that, I’ll send up a satellite to detect human lifesigns. Let’s just hope they are human, because it’s not calibrated for anything else.”

“We just need one cluster of humans. Hopefully they’ll be able to tell us what’s going on here,” Leona replied. After he opened their home, she followed him into the lab, and came out with the equipment they needed.

“How are you going to launch that?” Maqsud asked. “You have a rocket in there too? I’ve seen some advancements in my day, but...”

Ramses smirked. “I’ll take it up there myself.” He winked, and disappeared.

“You can breathe in space,” Maqsud imagined.

“No,” Mateo answered. “But we can hold our breaths for a very long time.”

“Actually, you don’t want to hold your breath,” Leona began to try to explain.

Mateo cut her off. “He doesn’t need the details. We wanna help, though.”

Leona handed him a bag. “Figure out how to get this tripod open. I need to read the manual on the camera.”

As Mateo was removing the tripod from its case, he started to hear a beeping sound in his comms device. It sounded like morse code. Everyone but Maqsud stopped to listen. “It’s Ramses,” Angela translated. “He spotted civilization a few thousand kilometers from here. He’s still going to launch the sat, but he thinks one of us should check it out.”

“I’ll go,” Olimpia volunteered.

“As will I.” Mateo held onto the plastic ring on the tripod, and jerked it downwards to make the legs pod out. “This is done.” As he was taking Olimpia’s hand, Marie slipped her own around his other one.

Maqsud then took hers. “I need to feel useful.”

The four of them jumped to the coordinates that Ramses relayed to them. It was a laustrine community, not particularly advanced, but not the old west either. The place appeared to be abandoned, but rather recently. Bicycles were left scattered on the sidewalks. A few vehicles were stopped in the middle of the road, doors left open. Mateo climbed into one, and found a radio. “Hello? Is anyone there? This is—”

“You’re not talking to anybody,” Marie said from the passenger side. She adjusted the knobs for him. “All right, Try again.”

“This is Mateo Matic of the...of the Team..Matic. Can anyone read me?” He asked the question only one more time.

“My God, it’s good to hear your voice, Mister Matic. This is the Mayor. Are you in the town?”

“We’re in a town, at least. “It’s by a lake.”

“There’s only one,” she replied. “We’ll send someone up to get you.”

“Did you recognize her?” Marie asked.

“No, but that doesn’t mean we never met.”

As they were climbing back out of the car, they could see a little girl running up to them from what looked like a recreational center. She didn’t get too close before she stopped. She urgently waved them over to follow her, so they ran to meet her halfway. She led them into the building, and then down some stairs, which led to an elevator. They took it down several stories. They were in a bunker of some kind. People were lining the hallway. They looked dirty, tired, and scared, but hopeful at the team’s arrival. It was unclear whether it was actually a good thing yet, since they no longer had a ship, but they still didn’t know exactly what was happening.

The little girl took Maqsud’s hand and continued to lead them deeper into the underground facility. They reached a set of double doors. A small crowd of people were standing around a table. On it was a map. “Thank you for coming.” It was the woman from the radio; the Mayor. “Did someone send you, aware that we were in trouble?”

“They didn’t send us directly,” Mateo explained. “Though they may have interfered with our transportation somehow.” He couldn’t help but let his eyes drift towards Maqsud.

The Mayor noticed this, and looked over at The Trotter to size him up, and his peculiar clothes. “Are you Maqsud Al-Amin?”

“I am. Honestly, I was just trying to take them from Worlon to Earth. I don’t even know where we are.”

She nodded. “So you’re not here to rescue us. You’re just here for your son.”

“What? My son? I don’t have a son.”

“You do,” Mateo corrected. “He’s about as famous in our circles as you. We’ve never met him, though. I guess I would have thought you would know of him, even while he would have only been born in your future.”

Maqsud was shocked. “You’ve known this whole time. Who is the mother?”

Mateo shrugged his shoulders. “I would have no idea. I can’t be sure if you’ve conceived him yet, or what.”

“Do you think Senona brought us here for this?” Olimpia whispered to Mateo.

He really didn’t think so. It felt like Senona’s job was done. Someone else was aware of Maqsud’s connection to this place, and the team was incidental to that end. Whether that meant they were a bonus or unfortunate collateral damage was yet to be seen. “I think it’s just the latest in a series of people who have tried to control our lives,” he whispered back.

Maqsud redirected his attention to the Mayor, who frowned at him. “I know who she is, and where they both are,” she said to him. “They live in another sector.”

“First,” Marie began, “are you aware that there is some kind of laser trying to destroy the planet that you’re orbiting?”

The Mayor sighed. “Yes. That is a little gift from the Exins.”

“The who?” Mateo asked.

“The Exins,” she repeated. “Our ancestors once belonged to them, but they broke off, and fled to this world. The Exins didn’t like that, so they fired a weapon at them. It’s taken hundreds of years to get here. None of the refugees are still alive today, nor are the people who retaliated against them. It’s kind of stupid, really. We’ve been trying to figure out whether there’s any way to survive it, maybe by being on the opposite side of the planet at the time. There is another bunker like this one, but it’s not quite at the antipodes. Again, we don’t know what the severity of the destruction will be, or when it will happen. This all may be a waste of time.”

“How many live on this moon?” Marie asked them.

“Roughly eleven thousand,” the woman answered. “We were excited to hear that you had arrived, but we shouldn’t have been, should we have? There’s no way you can save us all, even if we had years to wait.”

“We’ll be right back,” Mateo said. He placed a hand on Maqsud’s shoulder, and teleported them back up to the surface. “How many people can you take at once?”

“All at once? On dry land, half a dozen. In water, twice that much.”

Mateo took out his handheld device, and opened the calculator. “And how many can you do in a day, assuming they’re in water?”

“Um...one trip every few days.”

“That’s, like, four years.”

“Yeah, dude, I can’t save all of them. I doubt I could even save all the children.”

“Mateo, can you hear me?” Leona asked through the comm disc.

“Yeah, I’m here. We found a town. They’re living in an underground bunker right now. They’re aware of the weapon.”

“It doesn’t matter how deep they go. There’s a reason this beam is taking as long as it is. A sudden explosion would vaporize the moon. The people who delivered it want the residents of this world to experience prolonged suffering. In a few days, the toxic gasses from the planet are going to rain down and poison the atmosphere of the moon. It will become superheated, and break apart eventually as well.”

“Ramses’ camera told you all of this? How do you know the intention behind the weapon?”

“Because the person who ordered it is here, having evidently detected our arrival.” Leona replied. “He calls himself Bronach Oaksent.”

« < » > Table of Contents

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: October 11, 2398

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Angela and Ramses stared at the sky after Mateo left, even though they obviously wouldn’t have been able to see him floating around up there. They themselves floated in the water for around ninety minutes until Ramses’ device beeped. The satellite module was up there, and starting to scan every brain in the world. It will take a little bit of time, but he programmed it with a threshold. Each scan will look for the most generalized data first. They’re not hunting for someone of an exact age. They’re looking for someone with an ungodly number of years of experience. The scanner doesn’t have to look very deep into someone’s mind to see whether they’ve been around for a lifetime, or several lifetimes. To be safe, he placed this threshold at a hundred years. Yes, it will find people who are 110 years old, but that’s okay, there still shouldn’t be too many to sift through, and once they have their dataset pared down, they will be able to run more detailed scans to tease out the specific person that they’re looking for. They don’t know how old Meredarchos is, and they don’t know how old Erlendr is at this moment, but it’s well past a century, and in all likelihood, the scanner will come back with an error when it comes across a single brain with two consciousnesses.

The two of them hit their emergency teleporters, and returned to the lab to watch the data come in. They would focus their efforts on North America, since the entity has only been spotted here, but that’s not how the scanner works. They’re not in control of whatever satellite the module managed to latch itself onto. It’s going to make a pass at a rate according to its speed of orbit, and will scan as many minds as possible before it passes out of range. Then it will make another pass and try again. It will do its best to filter and ignore duplicates, but the tradeoff in the cursory glance is that it won’t always know whether it scanned a given individual yet. Still, napkin math suggests that the process will only take a day. It takes half a day. It’s morning.

“There, that’s him,” Ramses announces, waking Angela up.

“Are you sure?” Angela asks.

“It has to be. This is the second time the scanner has seen him. It’s returned an error, because it can’t rectify the unusual brain chemistry, just as I had hoped and predicted.”

Angela picks up her phone, and dials. “I’m calling Kivi.” Arcadia is the one who picks up. Apparently, the tactical team is not too far from where Meredarchos and Erlendr are hiding out in San Diego, but they’re all pretty far from where Marie is being made comfortable at a hospital in Chicago. She hangs up. “I believe Mateo.”

“What do you mean?” Ramses is still looking over the data, making sure that there aren’t any other outliers, who might actually be who they’re looking for.

“He said that the Vertegens gave me immortality water, and that they gave each one to me in order. Do you know the order?”

Ramses sighs, and peels himself from the screen. “Yes.”

Angela waits for him to elaborate. “Go ahead.”

He sighs again. “You need Catalyst from the early waters of Earth, Longevity from Atlantis, Time from the island of Lorania on Dardius—which is in another galaxy, by the way, so I’m not sure how the Vertegens would have pulled that off.”

“Keep going,” Angela urges.

“Assuming you drank those three, the next one you would need is Body from the Atacama Desert, Existence from the Bermuda Triangle, Invulnerability from the North Pole, Energy from the Dead Sea, Youth from the Fountain of Youth in Florida, Death and Health from the Pools of Pamukkale, and...”

“Go on, don’t stop now.”

“And for any of these to become permanent, you would have to drink Activator from the last liquid water on Earth before it’s destroyed. Earliest estimate of that is a bolide impact on par with the Theia collision, which created the moon, which could happen anywhere between now and never, followed by solar expansion in over seven billion years.”

“So you’re saying there’s a chance.”

“Angela, you can’t save Marie by sticking yourself in the Insulator of Life. You would have to put, not just your mind, but also your body in there, and we don’t know how Meredarchos did it. We don’t even know if what you do can affect Marie at all!”

Angela goes over the lockers, where an extra set of tactical gear is just hanging there in case of emergency. “Fortunately, we find the Insulator, we find Meredarchos, so I’ll just ask him.”

“You won’t be able to get to San Diego in time,” Ramses warns. “The government team is already right there.”

“That’s why you’re gonna give me an injection of temporal energy. I know that you collected rocks from the Atacama, which you squeezed water out of. Don’t I need that one anyway?”

Ramses isn’t happy about testing his new formula on a living organism, but he doesn’t have much choice. Yes, he took rocks from the desert. Each one has oxygen and hydrogen trapped inside, and a process called electrolysis allows a scientist such as himself to extract both. The results can then theoretically be recombined to produce water, which he did. It is a painstaking process, and he needed a lot of rocks to make even one vial of the stuff, but it tested positive for temporal energy. It’s Body water, through and through. He unlocks one of his cabinets, and then lifts the bottom up to reveal a small refrigerated safe. He unlocks that with a 42-digit code, and retrieves the syringe. “Have a seat, I’ll get the rubbing alcohol.”

Once the injection is in, Angela finishes putting on her gear. She offers to take Ramses with her, but he decides that someone needs to stay at home base, which makes sense. So Angela teleports alone, all the way to the tack team’s location in Chula Vista, particularly to Kivi’s position. Best guess is Meredarchos and Erlendr are aware that the team is hot on their trail, and are trying to make a break for it across the border to Mexico. It’s hard enough for normal authorities to cross for official business, but when it comes to covert operatives, you can forget about it. It’s now or never.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Kivi whispers.

“I’m better trained than you are,” Angela either informs, or reminds, her. She can’t remember how much she’s talked about her experiences in the afterlife simulation.

A voice comes in on the radio, “spotter, report.”

“No visual yet,” Kivi reports back. “We have an addition who will be assisting with capture.”

“Understood.”

“She’s just letting me join the mission without question?” Angela asks.

“She’s been told that we have unusual skills and knowledge, and access to rare or unique resources. She’s been advised to expect people like you showing up when the situation calls for it, and assumes that you’ve all been properly vetted. It’s a pretty great group,” Kivi says, putting the binoculars back in front of her eyes. “I know that you’re worried about your sister, but please try not to ruin it.”

“I’m not here to get the Insulator back to my sister. I’m here to get in, and prevent her from ever getting sick.”

“I don’t understand how any of that works, but—” She interrupts herself to speak into the radio. “Visual on the target. I repeat, I have a visual on the target.” A man has just rounded the corner in the vacant park. He’s struggling to walk, but not because of any disability. He’s acting like half of him doesn’t really want to go in that direction. Maybe that’s exactly what’s happening. If Meredarchos and Erlendr are evenly matched, psychically speaking, it may still be difficult for them to agree on a course of action. That’s good for them.

“Light ‘em up,” the leader orders.

“No, you can’t kill him,” Angela argues, getting to her feet. “I need him to tell me how to use the Insulator.

“Stop,” Kivi demands at a loud whisper. “She means to target him with a laser designator.”

It’s too late. Angela stops herself from heading towards the man, but her cover’s been blown. He looks up, and spots her. He takes a gut out of the back of his pants and tries to aim it at her, but something stops her. That doesn’t really make much sense. At worst, both Meredarchos an Erlendr want her dead, and at best, they don’t care. Either way, nothing should be holding them back.

“Go, go, go!” the leader orders. “Blitz formation!”

Seven other people come out of the woodwork, and begin to run towards their target, holding their own guns. He tries to aim at any one of them too, but he can’t hold his weapon at anything but the ground. He yells, frustrated with his own inadequacy. The team overwhelms him, so he tries to invade their minds, but he’s shocked to find that they’re all impervious to his psychic powers, thanks to a little mental masonry on Arcadia Preston’s part. Two operatives place him in cuffs while a third searches his bag.

“Do you see a small glass greenish-blue object in there?” Angela asks.

“This right here?” He takes the Insulator of Life out.

“Yes.” Angela takes it from him and shakes it in front of Meredarchos’ face. “How do you get in this thing physically? It’s only supposed to be able to store consciousness, so how do you do it? Tell me!”

“I have no idea.” He kind of looks like he’s telling the truth, but that’s not good enough.

“Tell me!” she repeats.

“I honestly don’t. I didn’t even know that wasn’t how it was supposed to work,” Meredarchos claims. “She’s the one who put me in it in the first place.” He jerks his head towards Arcadia.

Everyone looks at her. “I don’t know what he’s talking about,” she tells them.

Kivi nods understandingly. “You haven’t done that yet. It’s in your future.”

“I must figure it out eventually,” Arcadia realizes. “The problem is that could mean this very moment, or a hundred years from now.”

“Marie doesn’t have that kind of time,” Angela complains.

“Then let’s give her more time.” It’s Leona. No one noticed her appear, and they don’t know where she’s been, or what she’s been up to, this entire time. “I suspected as much as Mateo did regarding the water, and I’ve been working on a backup plan.”

“What might that be?” Kivi asks.

Leona doesn’t bother answering her. She brings Angela into a hug, and teleports them both away. They land in the underground lab where Leona worked before the government provided them with their own facility at The Lofts. Angela looks up in awe at the huge spaceship towering above them.

“Welcome home,” a woman says, approaching them.

“Whoa. What are we doing here?” Angela asks.

“Angela Walton, this is Magnus Petra Burgundy. Petra, Angela.”

Angela shakes Petra’s hand. “It’s nice to meet you.” She faces Leona. “What am I doing here, LeeLee?”

“This is how we save Marie. What you need is time. Time to...procure the necessary ingredients for her recovery.” She eyes Petra, who clearly doesn’t know everything about what’s going on here, though she didn’t bat an eye when they appeared out of nowhere, so she doesn’t know nothing.

“The Insulator was a bust,” Angela laments.

“I know. That was probably never going to work. That’s why I’m giving you this.” She gestures towards the ship. “This project has not been officially abandoned, but when the government started focusing on homeland grid integration of fusion power, space exploration ended up on the backburner.”

“How does that help me? We already have Time water from Dardius,” she says through gritted teeth. It doesn’t matter much. Petra can hear, but isn’t familiar.

“You’re not going anywhere, per se,” Leona begins. “You’re going on a loop to and back from the Oort Cloud. For us, months will pass, but for you, around six hours. This is regular special relativity at work, no time powers necessary, just profound speed.”

“Is this going to work?” Angela questions.

“We can’t let the earlier water that you drank break down in your system. This is the only way.”

“Am I going alone?”

“I’m going with,” Petra says, “as will a crew of experts. You’re in good hands.”

Angela is nervous, but she trusts Leona’s judgment. “I guess I’ll see you on the other side then. It’s ready to go, right?”

“We’ve been in a holding pattern,” Petra explains, “but the countdown started as soon as you showed up. Follow me.”

All three of them take the elevator to the entry level of the ship while the silo blast doors are closing. “Shouldn’t you stay out here?” Angela asks Leona.

“I need to pick up my husband. I can’t teleport all the way into orbit, so I’m going to hitch a ride, and then bug out before you break orbit.” Hmm...he’s alive?

They continue walking through the corridors until reaching the seating area. Carlin and Moray are playing a card game with two other crew members. Angela exchanges a look with Leona, but they don’t talk about it. This may be the safest place for them. After the countdown reaches zero, they launch into space, much to the surprise of everyone in the world. Shuttles don’t launch from Kansas City.

Several hours later, Marie wakes up in her hospital bed feeling much better.

Microstory 1730: The Crux

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No one is old enough to remember what happened. It’s always just sort of been this way; a hill in the center of our little doughnut-shaped town where four roads meet. I don’t mean that it’s two roads crossing each other. Each of the four has its own name, and while it’s not impossible to get from one to the other by driving over what we unofficially call The Crux, it’s not recommended for regular cars. The hill is deceptively steep, and for some reason, it’s always rather muddy halfway up, on all sides. It’s a bit of a pain, but it’s much more reasonable to go around it on one of the other roads. It’s not a problem for people who live here. We know the hill is there, and we know heading towards it is going to get us nowhere...unless we’re trying to get to the hill itself, of course. Tourism is already hard to come by for us, and this just makes it harder. None of the internet maps knows it’s there, and don’t know it’s a bit of an impediment, so they direct folks right through it. We keep trying to get them to remove it from their system as a traversable road, but we’ve had no luck so far. Again, with the right vehicle, it’s possible to drive over it, but we’ve had some issues with people who don’t know what they’re doing. We actually have four ways of getting out of such a mess if it happens to you. The auto repair shop is on South Avenue, the county’s largest tow truck company is on Backbone Road, the dealership is on Krouka, and there’s a gas station on Heap Lane. It’s not all that necessary—problems don’t occur all that often—but it’s nice to know that people will have options, so they’ll think twice about saying bad things about us. Crux notwithstanding, ours is a fine town, with good, progressive people, who like to lead the simple life, but understand how the city operates, and why others would prefer it.

Anyway, today I’m sitting on top of the Crux with a bunch of friends. It’s got a good vantage point of the surrounding area, so we hang out there all the time. Flat Kansas being what it is, it’s nice to be above it all sometimes, ya know? So we’re sitting there, watching a small car we don’t recognize come down Krouka. They probably drove in from Great Bend, looking to fish in our world famous pond, where it’s pretty much guaranteed you’ll catch something. As the car approaches, we realize just how tiny it is. I bet only two people could fit in that thing, and maybe one bag each. There is no way it’s gonna make it up the Crux. We don’t even bother picking up our chairs to get out of the way this time. That little thing comes up there, from this perspective, lookin’ like a ground squirrel wondering if the mailbox poll drops nuts. It slows down, but doesn’t stop. Most people get out, and take a look around when they don’t know what the hell is going on here. They’re holding their phones, and spinning around to see if they’re facing the wrong direction. These people don’t even do that. They stop for five seconds, back up about fifty meters, and then gun it. They go towards this hill as fast as they possibly can, and they make it up pretty far. My best friend inches over to the side, afraid we’re all wrong, and they’ll actually go all the way. It doesn’t. It stops midway, and rolls back down, smoothly, though, like they saw it was gonna happen, and put it in neutral to be safe. Some of us laugh, but most are relieved, because we know how bad it can get. We’re about to go down to tell them about the dealership when their car transforms. This...laser gun—I guess you would call it—comes out from under the hood, and blasts a tunnel into the hill. We later see it’s large enough to fit a semi-truck. They even laser the other two roads, before driving off without so much as a you’re welcome.