A web of technicolors appeared out of nowhere, and spat Team Matic out onto
the floor. They rolled away from each other like marbles from a jar. It was
not only the six of them, though. Romana was with them, as was some guy.
“Who are you?” Leona demanded to know, prepared to fight, while Mateo was
making sure that his daughter was okay.
The stranger stood up and cracked his neck. He held his arms out in front of
him with his elbows bent a little. As he was clearing his throat, he
adjusted his nanites, looking down at himself, making sure they were all in
working order. It was only then that he acknowledged their presence, though
not out of surprise. “My name is Amal,” he answered stoically.
“What are you doing here, Amal?” Leona questioned, almost as if she didn’t
believe him.
“What year is it?” he posed.
She kept one eye on him while she consulted her watch. She tapped on it a
few times with her fingernail. “No idea, this is broken.”
“Use your other one,” Amal suggested cryptically.
“My other what?” Leona asked, confused, and even more defensive now.
“Uh,” Ramses began, massaging his forehead. “I replicated that watch’s
powers. We all have one now.” He receded the wrist of his emergent suit to
show his bare skin. The time and date appeared on it, glowing a bright
green. “Nanobotic tattoos, tied directly into the timestream.”
Leona looked at her own. Then removed her broken watch. “July 11, 2493. We
jumped early from last year.”
“No, you went on a detour,” Amal contended. “You’ve been gone longer than
you realize.”
“Where were we?” Marie asked, stepping forward. “When were we?”
“I cannot answer that,” Amal replied. “I honestly do not know.” Agent Smith.
That was who he sounded like; Agent Smith from the Matrix franchise. “Our
minds have been erased to protect the future. I could not even tell you why
I’m here. We have not yet met.”
“It seems that we have,” Angela reasoned.
“Quite,” Amal agreed. “Something must have gone wrong after you were
summoned to the future. I should not have come through with you.”
“Summoned by who?” Olimpia pressed.
“That I could answer, but I won’t. But I can promise that you trust
them.” He laughed through his nose.
“It was us,” Leona figured. “We summoned ourselves.”
“I never said that.” Amal was worried, which probably meant that she was
right.
“How do we proceed?” Mateo asked him. “What are we gonna do with you?”
“What you’re going to do is be patient,” Amal answered. “Until we meet
again.” There was no stopping him. He slammed his fists together, crouched
down, and stuck his knees between his elbows. Technicolors overwhelmed him,
and he was gone.
“Hmm,” Ramses said. He looked around at his lab. “The sensors picked that
up. Now I bet they know how to make a miniature slingdrive.”
“Careful, Rambo,” Leona said to him. “That’s what we call bootstrapping.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
“Roma,” Mateo said to his little girl. “How did you end up with us?”
“We were going on a mission,” Romana answered. “I stepped into my Dubra pod,
just as we always do, so our temporal signatures don’t interfere with the
operation of the slingdrive on the Vellani Ambassador. Then I woke up here.”
“You must have been summoned too. It could take years before we find out
where we went, and even then, it may only be from an outsider’s perspective.
Then again, I once closed my own loop, and my otherwise paradoxical memories
of it finally came flooding back into my brain, like they were just waiting
for me.”
Romana shook her head. “I’ve been gone for almost a year. I have to go
report in.”
“I understand.” He gave her a hug, and then let her go.
A swarm of dark particles spun her around, and into oblivion.
Olimpia was playing with her new suit. She opened some sort of flap on the
top of her wrists, which she pointed around the room with a menacing look on
her face. “I have guns. I’m gonna shoot sum’im.”
“Those are not guns,” Ramses said with a laugh. “There are no onboard
weapons.” He lifted his own flaps, then switched on the flashlight on his
right arm.
“Oh,” Olimpia said, figuring out how to turn her own flashlight on, and
looking down the barrel of it. She then did the same with her left arm.
“What’s this other one?”
“Sensor suite,” Ramses explained as he was walking towards her, “for more
detailed information about your environment. It has a medical array too. You
should read up on it. He tapped the center of her chest, just under her
neck, with three of his fingers. A holographic computer interface was
projected from two emitters on her shoulders. “You should peruse the
manual.”
“Why is it called the EmergentSuit?” she asked.
“Because the nanites emerge from the implants in your body,” Ramses said.
Olimpia read a little more of the text, which was probably pretty dry and
uninteresting. “Boring, I’ll wait for the movie.”
He put an arm around her shoulders, and used his other hand to control her
interface. A video popped up. “Hi. I’m a virtual avatar, presenting in
the form of my creator, Ramses Abdulrashid. Let me show you how your new
EmergentSuit works!” He muted it. “What a fox,” Real!Ramses mused.
Mateo huffed. “You did not tell me that was there. I had to read pages and
pages of that thing.”
“If that’s true, you would have seen the part where it tells you that
there’s an interactive alternative.”
Mateo mocked Ramses playfully with his pursed lips as he bobbled his head.
He pulled up his own interface, and searched the manual for the exact terms.
“Interactive alternative; no results.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot to put that blurb in your version of the manual, and you
never received the updated edition. You do have the video, though.”
“Thanks, that’s great,” Mateo said sarcastically.
“This all sounds fun,” Leona said, “but we need to go check in with
Hrockas.”
“Wait,” Angela interrupted. “Is that it? We were sent to the future, and
brought back to our pattern, and we’re just gonna move on as if that’s
normal and fine? We’re not gonna try to get our memories back, or
investigate how this could have possibly happened, or anything?
Someone summoned us, Ramses, using technology that you have apparently not
invented yet. Doesn’t that worry you?”
Ramses was about to answer, but Leona stepped in, starting with, “I—” She
took one moment to gather her thoughts. “Before you died, did you believe in
God?”
“Excuse me?”
“It was very common at the time, to believe in a higher power.”
“Well, yeah, I did. I was raised to be a Christian,” Angela admitted.
“Did you ever question God?”
“All the time,” Angela replied, like she was winning the argument. My dad
was a slaveowner.
“And did you ever get anything out of that? Did God ever...come down, and
apologize? Did he give you answers?”
Angela was not happy, but Marie was even more upset. “The people who took us
are not gods.”
“By our standards,” Leona reasoned, “they may as well be. We know nothing.
We don’t know for sure that it was Future!Us, though that is the assumption.
We can’t go preoccupying ourselves with every little thing that happens to
us. We’ll go crazy. The truth will reveal itself in time. Until then,
Hrockas needs to know that we’re back. Because we returned later than
expected, and we made a commitment to build him a relay network.”
“The relay network is done.” They had left Ramses’ lab, and were now in
Hrockas’ office. “Well, it’s not done, but it’s on its way, and will
be ready in time for the grand opening in seven years.”
“Team Kadiar agreed to help you with it?”
He shook his head. “No need. Some friends stepped up. They didn’t want us
clogging up their own quantum terminals, but they agreed to build us
dedicated machines. Most of them will be stored in the corner somewhere on
their Lagrange-one stations.”
“I thought you couldn’t do that,” Leona reminded him. “I thought they were
unwilling to help.”
“No, the core government was unwilling to help. But the neighborhood
representatives finally secured a win for key legislation that gave them
more latitude. They’re free to build whatever technology they want—as long
as it follows certain criteria, like not being a weapon—and they don’t have
to share it with any other world. This places each machine squarely in the
local leadership’s control, and I’ve managed to negotiate with all of them,
even some core worlds. So we’re good. Thanks for the offer.”
“This sounds risky,” Leona pointed out. “They could revoke the charter
whenever they want, right?”
“Absolutely,” Hrockas admitted. “Maintaining strong diplomatic relations
will be of the utmost importance to the continuity of my operation. That’s
why I’ve hired a Minister of Foreign Affairs to be in charge of all the
little ambassadors that I’ll need to liaise with our relay partners.”
“Could we meet this person?”
“She’s not here yet,” Hrockas explained. “I believe that she’s leaving in a
few weeks, then it will take her a couple of months to arrive.”
“A couple months?” Ramses questioned. “The only way you can get out here in
a couple months is if you use a reframe engine. I mean, that’s if you’re not
just quantum casting which is within an hour.”
“Yeah, she has a reframe engine,” Hrockas said. “I guess Earth has done
enough work to develop them on their own.”
“I guess,” Leona agreed. “I hope we did the right thing, letting them have
that technology.” It had actually been a pretty long time since the Edge
Meeting where they granted certain knowledge to certain parties in the main
sequence regarding the manipulation of time. It was Hokusai Gimura’s
responsibility to actually coordinate with Teagarden and Earth, and Leona
didn’t exist most of the time, so she lost track of how that process was
faring. It didn’t sound like it was going to be as easy as beaming them the
specifications, and walking away. Still, it felt rushed, probably because to
the team, this whole thing only started a few months ago. “Well, I’m glad
you’re doing okay.”
“Yep,” Hrockas agreed. “So, if you wanted to move on to your next project,
maybe fight the bad guy in that Goldilocks Corridor, I think that would be
fine.”
“Yeah, we might do that,” Leona said with a nod.
The rest of the team was there, but besides Mateo and Ramses, they were all
kind of busy reading up on their new suits. It was awkward, so Leona just
disappeared. Mateo broke the others out of their trances, and pulled them
out of the office too. “Hey. How are you feeling?” he asked his wife. They
were in the replica of Kansas City now, standing in the parking lot where
all time travelers were funneled to when they showed up in the Third Rail.
“We never...finish anything,” she mused. “We don’t accomplish our goals.
We’re always pulled in some other direction, and all we can do is hope that
we’ve done enough for whoever we had to leave behind. I got used to
that. I got used to knowing that I did my best, but this new crowd needed me
now, and it was time to refocus.” She finally looked up at him. “But do we
even need to go back to the Corridor? Niobe’s army is taking the offensive.
I even think fighters from Verdemus finally showed up in the Anatol Klugman.
Team Kadiar is rescuing defectors left and right. I don’t know
what’s going on with the Sixth Key, but the delegates were doing fine
the last we saw them.”
Mateo nodded. “We’re aimless again, aren’t we? And we don’t do well when
we’re aimless. Ramses needs to invent, you need to lead, the Waltons need to
counsel.”
“And the two of us need to be dum-dums,” Olimpia added.
Mateo nodded again. “And the two of us need to be dum-dums,” he echoed.
“Dum-dums with cool flashlights,” Olimpia corrected. She shined it on the
asphalt, thought it was daytime under this dome, so the light may as well
have been off.
“We may be aimless,” Marie said in a soft voice, “but we’re not useless.
We’ll find our place to be. Ramses just needs to get us there.”
“I can finish the mini-slingdrives,” Ramses confirmed, “but someone will
need to decide where we go.”
“Are you sure?” Angela smiled. “We’ve used it before without plotting a
destination. You could even say that we were aimless.”
Leona smiled too.
“Orders sir,” Ramses requested from the Captain.
Leona took a breath to center herself. “Engineer, build me my new engine.
Counselors, find out what you can about this Minister of Foreign Affairs. I
don’t want to leave our friends hanging if there’s only one last thing to
do. Mister Matic, go see if you can spend some time with your daughters
before we leave. And Miss Sangster?”
“Yeah...?”
“I believe we owe each other date.”
