The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 19, 2532

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It wasn’t really accurate to say that the slingdrive explosion sent the space station to somewhere else in the universe. They were actually not in the universe at all anymore, and in fact may not have even really moved, in the three-dimensional sense. The totality of the cosmos include a seemingly infinite bulk of universes called branes, floating around, occasionally colliding with each other. The stuff that the bulk was made out of was known as bulk energy, but it went by other names. When bulk energy would leak into a brane, it essentially created a tiny new pocket of space, and this phenomenon was once known as dark energy, because scientists couldn’t explain why it was a thing. After settling into a more stable quantum state, it became known as your average, everyday vacuum energy. Each of these leaks caused the universe to expand, which stretched the brane out, which caused it to thin, which caused more leaks. That was why the universe was not only expanding, but why this expansion was accelerating. But if the outside of a brane was bulk energy, and the inside was vacuum energy, and these two things were virtually the same, what was the difference? What was the barrier? What was the membrane part of the brane? Well, it used to be called dark matter, but it was now known to be quintessence. As the fifth fundamental force, quintessence was repulsive, and served as the mirror image to the attractive force of gravity.

Quintessence was there to hold everything together. It didn’t like to touch anything else, but it liked to touch other quintessence. So it naturally formed clumps, like two raindrops sliding down a window, ultimately coalescing into a single, larger drop. This was why 3D space existed, because it was being contained. Without it, matter and energy would just be floating around that bulk as formless blobs at best, inherently at its own equilibrium, and having no reason to make anything of itself. You owe your entire existence to quintessence. But was still dangerous and unforgiving, and despite being so repulsive to baryonic matter, it wasn’t a one-dimensional sheet, but a massive clump with thickness. This was how the slingdrives worked, not by escaping the universe, and then returning to it, but by only piercing one layer of the membrane, and sliding alongside it to a new destination. And if it was possible to get into it, and get out later, it was possible to succeed at the first thing, but fail at the second. It was possible to get stuck. Team Matic, and a few opposing individuals, were stuck. To make matters worse, they weren’t all stuck together. To make matters even worse, they weren’t all stuck with friends.

They were alive, and had been for about a year, but divided, and communication was difficult. The space station was supposed to be a sphere, but it wasn’t like that anymore. It had become unraveled, as if God herself had come by with a grapefruit peeler, and spiraled it out to slurp it up like linguine. Lots of metaphors here, but when there was nothing to do, they came up with such things to occupy their time. When this happened, all pocket dimensions, and other temporal anomalies, burst apart. Reserve water flooded the chambers, dayfruit smoothie spilled out, and slingdrive components broke apart. Everyone had the basics, like carbon scrubbers, food synthesizers, and the power to run them, but they weren’t left with ways to retain their sanity. No inter-sector talking, and no teleportation. Not even their team empathy could penetrate the barrier.

Romana and Franka were alone together in one sector, having to figure out how to be civil with each other, if not sisters. Mateo and A.F. were in another sector, and it took everything they had not to tear each other apart. Marie was all right as she was with Dutch. They met Dutch years ago in another universe. They didn’t really know how he ended up here, but in order to survive, he ended up having to go into stasis with Romana during the period where half the team was in the Goldilocks Corridor, and the other half was on Castlebourne, which had been physically moved to another region of space. Truthfully, they had kind of forgotten about him, and just sort of left him there in his pod. He didn’t seem upset, because no time had passed for him, and he was a pretty easygoing guy. The sector with the most number of people contained Ramses, Angela, and Octavia. They weren’t hostile with one another, but it was rather awkward, and the two members of Team Matic had to learn to get along with this stranger whose alternate selves they didn’t even know very well. Leona and Miracle were trapped in the fifth sector, and that was weird too, but unlike with Mateo and A.F., they weren’t too worried about killing each other. Fittingly, Olimpia was alone again in the final sector. When was this girl gonna catch a break?

The spirals of the space station were not uniform, which meant that some of them were able to see each other some of the time. They didn’t understand why at first, but there were some theories floating around about passing suns, which they tried to share with each other during optimal times. While it didn’t feel like they were moving, they maybe were. It was dark the majority of the time, so the windows showed them absolutely nothing but the black. Periodically, however, light from some unknown source would bounce off of them, allowing them to peak into other sectors. They would leave messages for each other by gluing pieces of paper together into shapes, mostly letters. If they were lucky, they would happen to be there at the right time, and could use hand gestures to convey information. There was no quantum communication, nor even radio signals. These brief moments of connection were the only way for them to know that everyone was still alive and well enough, albeit depressed and pessimistic. The smarties worked through the problem, though they couldn’t do it together, so it was slow-going. They finally thought they had a solution, but it would take coordination.

“Do you have any idea what the hell you’re doing?” A.F. questioned.

Mateo sighed. “My wife was clear on how to do it. I wrote it down.”

“You’re the worst person to be responsible for this.”

“Yes, well, Ramses is in the cargo bay, and Leona is basically in a bathroom.” That was the worst part of all of this. The other sectors had the means to access the sewage lines, but not officially or...pleasantly. Leona and Miracle weren’t actually in a bathroom either, but the stasis chamber was equipped with better access.

“I’m saying that I should do it,” A.F. reasoned.

“I’m not trusting you with it, and I’m taller.”

“Oh, by, like, a centimeter.”

They had done something similar to this before. When trying to escape the kasma—from A.F. and his army—the quintessence was trying to crush them too, or let them crash into it. Olimpia used her magical Sangster Canopy to create extra space in front of them, cutting through the membrane until they were free, and in the greater bulk again. They would come to realize now that she was channeling bulk energy. It wasn’t easy back then, but even harder now. Olimpia’s window appeared visibly the least often, and she reported issues with her umbrella. As it turned out, it needed some power. She had to tap into the fuel cells of the station, which was not something she knew how to do right away. All these little studies, experiments, and instructions were why it had taken months to solidify the plan. It was now finally time to implement it.

Olimpia’s would be the toughest job, but Mateo’s was not voluntary either. Right now, a magnetic field was the only thing preventing the quintessence from crushing them into what Leona was calling proton soup, and that was keeping Mateo up at night. While the field was great, it was also what was trapping them in the membrane. What they needed was to make it spit them out, and that was a delicate and nuanced procedure that he didn’t know if he was prepared for. The field couldn’t simply be switched off. It had to be oscillated and directed, matching progress with Olimpia’s work at creating an opening for them, because there was no way to steer. They still couldn’t talk, so Leona and Ramses came up with a very tight schedule, and taught it to both of them beforehand. If they both started at the right time, and followed the plan correctly, they shouldn’t need to communicate.

He was standing on a ladder, staring at his watch, waiting for the right moment. There was a very small margin of error here. He could start adjusting the field generator a few seconds early, or a few seconds late, but no more than that. He was breathing deliberately now; in through his nose, out through his mouth. He noticed A.F. copying him, but didn’t say anything. Six, five, four, three, two, one, go. Mateo reached up, and tried to connect the wires together. A paralyzing sensation spread throughout his whole body, and sent him flying backwards, onto the hard surface of the floor, but not before slamming his head against the edge of the counter.

Meanwhile, Olimpia was having her own troubles. The blasted umbrella wouldn’t open. There wasn’t a problem with the mechanism, it was just that her hands were sweaty, and she was incredibly nervous. Oh, no. She was late. She was too late! No, she had to just start. If she didn’t get on it, there was no going back. They couldn’t just wait until the next communication window, and try to coordinate again at a later date. There was no way for Mateo to know that she had given up. And if he made his adjustments thinking that she was creating space when she wasn’t, they would all die. Proton soup, she didn’t like the sound of that. Open, open, OPEN! It opened. NOW!

Mateo opened his eyes. Well, he opened them as much as he could. His eyelids were heavy, and were his lashes clinging together like Velcro? His head hurt and felt sticky. He lifted his hand and reached for his neck. Some kind of fluid. Was it blood? Red. Yeah, it was blood. He could surely live, in this superadvanced substrate that Ramses has cloned for him. There was something else wrong, though. He was meant to be doing something. It felt very urgent and important. What was it? He shot up at his waist. “Magnets!”

“Yeah, buddy, I got it,” A.F. replied.

Mateo looked over to see A.F. on his ladder, his arms buried in the ceiling access panel. He didn’t look back over his shoulder, but kept his focus on the wires. If he wasn’t fulfilling the plan, what else would he have been doing? “Are you doing it? Are you doing it right?”

“Yes, I’m not an idiot,” A.F. replied, sighing with annoyance.

“I didn’t know you were paying attention to Leona’s messages.”

“Again, not an idiot. If there were nine other people here with us, I would have expected them to learn the procedure too.”

“Well...I appreciate it.”

“Do you think I wanna die any more than you? You think I wanna kill you so bad that I would sacrifice my own life to do it? I’m not crazy either. I doubt there’s an afterlife simulation relay module anywhere near here.”

“No, probably not.” Mateo massaged the back of his head, knowing that he was risking getting an infection from all the touching, but confident that his body would survive that too. He paused awkwardly. “So...is it going okay?”

“I’m doing what we were told to do, and we’re still alive. Maybe you can look through the windshield to make sure we don’t accidentally pass our turn?”

“I’ll get on it,” Mateo joked back. A.F. wasn’t such a bad guy when he wasn’t trying to kill all of them. They obviously called a truce because it was profoundly irrational for them to try to reenact Hell in the Pacific, but Mateo didn’t know how long that would last after they got out of this mess.

“Right,” A.F. replied quietly.

Mateo suddenly started to hear something. It was a crunching, crackling sound, but only in one ear. He stuck his finger in it, and tried to scratch out the noise. He looked at the tip, worried that blood was pooling in his ear cavity, but it seemed to be okay. It didn’t even quite sound like it was in there, but more behind it. Oh, the comms disc. It had been so long since he had been able to use it. He tried to regulate that instead, standing up, and wobbling around as he searched for a better signal. Voices began to emerge, and become clearer. “Hello?”

“Mateo?” Ramses asked.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“That’s my dad, everybody, he’s here too!” Romana said jovially. 

“Is that the whole roster?” Marie asked.

“Yeah, the whole station is out of the membrane. We’re in realspace now.”

“How is Olimpia?” Mateo asked.

“I’m fine,” Olimpia answered. “I’m still using my umbrella. I’m afraid to let go. I still can’t see anything.”

“A little extra vacuum energy never hurt anybody,” Leona promised. “Nonetheless, you can indeed let go. I assure you, we’re free.”

“Are we still a spiral?” Angela questioned.

“Nothing to be done about that,” Franka said. “My station is a spiral now.” When did she get her own comms disc? She responded too quickly to not have heard it herself.

“I can help you seal up the damaged sectors so the bulkheads open again,” Ramses offered.

“I’m sure I can figure it out on my own,” Franka said.

“So, uh...” A.F. began. “Since you’re talking to people, can I stop futzing with these power crystals?”

“Oh, sorry,” Mateo said, embarrassed. “Can confirm, we’re safe now.”

A.F. let go, and climbed back down the ladder. He took a breath, and stared at his enemy for a moment. Finally, he reached out with a friendly hand.

Mateo looked down at his own. “It’s a little bloody.”

A.F. chuckled. “I’ve been trying to get your blood on my hands for decades. This will have to be good enough, I guess. Let’s call it a draw.” He shook Mateo’s hand.

“I would love to not have to run from you anymore.”

“This doesn’t make us friends.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” Mateo agreed. He took a beat. “What happens now?”

“Now...I leave you in her hands.”

“Whose?”

“Proserpina’s. Good luck.” And with that, A.F. disappeared.

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Microstory 2539: Fareweller

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I’m the last stop on this wild ride that we call a once-in-a-lifetime miracle cure. Unlike the Greeter, my job is exactly what it sounds like. There’s a tiny bit more to it, but mostly, I just smile and wave goodbye. Most of the time, the questions I get are about where the restrooms are, how to get back to where they parked, how to get back on the highway, and the like. I make sure that they didn’t forget anything in the waiting rooms too. It doesn’t happen often, because the Guides and Queuers are watching for those types of things, but it happens; people lose stuff. Usually, they don’t even care, because they’ve just been cured, but I have to do my due diligence. There’s also one important duty that doesn’t sound like something that should be necessary, and maybe it isn’t, but I’m there, so I might as well. I always ask them if they expected Landis to breathe on them, and if he did. I know, it seems redundant, and I’ve never run into any issue, but it’s a chaotic place. It wouldn’t be impossible for someone to get confused, and wander to the exit when they ought to be looking for the entrance. It’s impossible to get through the Settlement area without paying or being paid, but if you haven’t entered the healing room yet, you absolutely could subvert the entire process. For most people, even if this does happen, they’re gonna see that EXIT sign, and realize that something went wrong. We do have patients with memory and mind problems, however, and they could get lost. Again, the Guides and Queuers are there to wrangle people into the right places, but the system isn’t perfect. This is also a great question for people to hear if they have complaints. It offers them the opportunity to air their grievances, without me first pestering them for feedback, or implying that there should be something for them to complain about. “Were you expecting Landis Tipton to breathe on you, and if so, did he?” // “Well, he did, but he also accidentally spit on my face a little, and I don’t like that.” There’s not really anything that I can do about it, but perhaps send it as feedback through the proper channels, but the biggest reason is to make sure that these people are feeling seen and heard. It’s our last chance to provide them with a quality experience, so we don’t want to miss anything. One of my co-workers came up with the idea. She thought that it was a good question to ask, and management actually agreed, so they wrote it into the procedures guide, which I think is pretty cool. They actually listen to us. Not every organization would do that. I think that’s it for me. Goodbye.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 3, 2516

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Ramses leaned up against the building they were all sprawled out next to. He took insufficient, shallow breaths, trying to make them deeper, or at least complete one good inhalation so he could jumpstart his system. He occasionally did get some air to go all the way down to the bottom of his lungs, but it was never as helpful as he hoped. Finally, he yawned, which helped more.

“What’s the issue?” Mateo asked. He was choosing to try to recuperate while staying horizontal on the ground. “Why aren’t our healing nanites fixing our bodies?”

Ramses slurred his words. “Whatever they gave us, it was probably designed to target our substrate repair systems. It’s harder for the modern man to get intoxicated, which is fine, because people stopped doing recreational drugs anyway. They’re still around, though; in certain dark corners of the universe. The drugs people take now have had to be adapted to contend with our advanced bodies. The funny thing is, if someone from, say, the year 2025 were to try this drug, it probably wouldn’t even affect them. They’re too simple.”

Mateo was doing a lot of half-yawns, which were never satisfying, and his frustration with this was only growing. “Even when you’re drunk, you’re a genius. Quit soundin’ so smart.” He coughed.

“He’s right,” Garland said, turning himself over to the side so he could throw up and not choke on it. He wiped his lips with his sleeve. “That’s the solution, though.” He retched, and prepared to let go of more. “Purge it.”

“Yeah, clear the system. That makes sense.” Ramses reached his hands out, and apported his solid helmet into them from the pocket dimension that it was stored in. It was a backup in case the nanite helmet he usually formed wasn’t working, for whatever reason. “Okay.” Oh, big yawn. “Here’s what you’re gonna wanna do.” He turned the helmet over, and placed his lips near the back of it. “This is gonna make you throw up like Garlique did.” Ramses stopped talking for a moment, still staring into space blankly. “Did I start calling you Garlique?”

Garland got to his hands and knees so he could force more out of his stomach. “You sure did. Bleeaaargh! Gaaack!” He spit. “I don’t care for it.”

“It’s gonna make you throw up, Matic. Oh, I get it, it’s not just garlic. It’s like if I combined your two names. Anyway, medicine is gonna shoot out, and then what you’re gonna wanna do is turn away immediately, so you don’t vomit into the helmet itself, which is why the emetopuff is placed in the back, instead of the front. Watch me do it. Puff me, Thistle.” As he promised, a cloud of medicine darted out of the hidden cartridge, and into Ramses’ mouth. He dabbed away from his helmet, and vomited onto the ground, more productively than Garland with his piecemeal attempts.

Mateo did exactly as Ramses did, and immediately felt a lot better.

“Can I get a hit of that?” Garland requested.

Ramses tossed him his helmet. “Only one. It has two doses. It’s not exactly something the suit was designed to expect to need a whole lot of.”

“How do you know to purge?” Mateo questioned. “You said that you didn’t know the water was laced with the stuff.”

“That’s what I said, that’s what I meant,” Garland replied, holding the helmet, waiting for the opportunity to use it. “I never said I didn’t know what the drug was, though. It’s called Dare. Let me see if I remember...it stands for Debilitating Anti-Resistant Euphoriaceutical. I think it’s a backronym, though.”

Bronach had been surprisingly quiet this whole time, and they had kind of been ignoring him. Garland probably didn’t know who he was, but he was doing a good job of following their lead. Bronach now took something out of an ankle holster, and jammed it into his own neck. “Ahh,” he said with relief. He stood up, and started hopping around to get his muscles loosened up. “Cleaner, safer, more effective, and doesn’t taste so bad in my mouth.” He held it out towards Garland. “I have an extra dose too, just so you know all of your options.”

“It won’t do anything,” Ramses warned. “I’m pretty sure he was just drunk. Alcohol is nothing compared to what it sounds like we were slipped.” He apported two bottles into his hands. “Electrolytes.” He threw one of them over to Garland.

“I don’t know who he is anyway.” Garland took the puff, and purged.

Mateo apported his own drink, and started sipping on it. “Bro, are we in the Goldilocks Corridor?”

“You appeared to me through dark particles last year. You told me that you thought you could put me on your pattern as long as we timed it just right. Then you activated the particles again just as the clock struck midnight central. We ended up here, and I think it worked.”

“You agreed to be on our pattern?” Ramses asked.

“Of course not, but I was drunk, and I couldn’t fight back. What are those little creepy things?”

“Neu—”

“New reason to fear us,” Mateo interrupted. Boom, saved it. He didn’t need to know that they were neutrinos. For that matter, neither did Garland. “Never mind that, though. “Do you know what planet we’re on?”

Bronach looked around. “I don’t just by looking at the sky.”

“How do you expect to get off of it yourself?” Ramses asked him.

Bronach shrugged. “I have a tracking implant. They’ll come for me, and when they do, they’ll get you too. All I have to do is wait it out.”

“Not if I can help it. Come along now, boys.” Mateo stood and waved Ramses and Garland towards him. After they got close enough, he tried to release a swarm of dark particles from the dark dimension, but it didn’t work. He could feel the tiny windows opening up, and he could feel his power engaging, but it wasn’t enough. He was empty. It reminded him of turning the key on a car with a dead battery. Click, click, click, but no ignition.

“It’s okay,” Bronach began to joke. “It happens to a lot of guys your age.”

“I probably just need to recharge,” Mateo insisted. “We’re gonna go to the other side of the planet now, so...bye.”

“Wait, Mateo.”

“Don’t you worry, we haven’t forgotten about you. We’ll overthrow you in due time. Just not quite today.”

“No, I just wanted to say something.” He kicked at the dirt bashfully, like a little boy trying to ask the older girl if she wanted to see his rock collection in his treehouse. But then he suddenly shifted to a far more serious, and perhaps even sinister, expression. “I know you’re on Castlebourne. I’m gathering my forces now.”

Ramses suddenly blitzed Bronach, and spirited them away. Mateo tapped on his comms disc. “Ram. Ram! Are you there? Where did you take him? What are you doing?” No response. He tapped again. “As anyone else on this channel? Can anyone hear me? This is Mateo Matic. Calling anyone and everyone in the Goldilocks Corridor.”

Ramses reappeared, soaking wet.

“What did you do?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ramses answered gravely, sending shivers down Mateo’s spine. “He’ll be fine. Guy’s got nine-thousand lives. I’m more worried about us.”

Mateo didn’t approve of what Ramses likely just did, but he understood it. And he was right, they needed to get out of here. They couldn’t use their tandem slingdrives with only the two of them. They really should have brought a third member of their team. He just didn’t want to overwhelm Garland, and make him feel ganged up on. Why didn’t Boyd warn him that the dark particles didn’t always work, presumably if you use them too much? He played around with them a lot during the party; probably very wastefully.

They didn’t have to be stuck. They weren’t beyond saving, just a little lost at the moment. Their best hope would be if the Vellani Ambassador happened to show up, which it probably wouldn’t because there was no one else here. Maybe they were the exact reason why this little town looked abandoned. Team Kadiar came, and scooped up the whole population because they all wanted to escape the Exin Empire, and left. Or maybe this place just outlived its usefulness. There was no telling where the ship would be, and no way of getting there either way. It wasn’t like they were ever given a schedule of which world the VA would go to next. They weren’t even sure if the refugee program was still active. They did have friends here, though they didn’t know exactly where; just not in range of comms so far.

“Garland, only you can save us now.”

“How’s that?” he asked, genuinely confused.

“Your mother says that you have some means of blocking her from finding your location. You need to release that so our team can come get us.”

“I dunno, I never agreed to see her.”

“That’s not really the point anymore, is it?” Mateo posed.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Garland agreed, sighing. He shut his eyelids and centered himself. Nothing special happened to him. There was no change in the way he looked, nor any dramatic light effect. He just reopened his eyes and said, “it’s done.”

Right on cue, a blob of technicolors formed a few meters away. When the colorful light receded, their team was left standing there. Most of them looked calm as they spotted the guys, and opened their helmets. One of them started to stumble around, however, and grasp at her helmet. Marie was the closest, so she tapped on the side of Magnolia’s helmet, using the master code to unlock it for her.

“Oh,” Magnolia said with relief. “I felt like I couldn’t breathe.”

“You should be able to breathe better in it,” Leona informed her, “not worse.”

“Well...” Finally, Magnolia made eye contact with her son. “Garland.”

“Hey, mom.”

“I don’t have any expectations,” she claimed. “I just wanna talk.”

“I can do that. Maybe away from them, though?”

“Certainly,” Leona agreed. “Stay within view, though. This rock might be dangerous. We would never eavesdrop intentionally, but we do have superior hearing, so I recommend going about fifty meters. We’ll walk in the opposite direction a little.”

“Hey, thanks. All of you,” Magnolia said.

“No problem,” Mateo replied, despite the myriad of problems.

“Report,” Leona requested for their own team meeting.

“Do you know where Epsilon Eridani is?” Mateo asked her.

“Yeah.”

“That’s where we were, before,” Mateo began. “We must have left Darko there. At least, I hope we did. I don’t know where else he could be.”

“Well, now that we have somewhere to navigate to, we’ll be fine. But why didn’t you just go back with your dark particles?”

“It’s broken. I think I used it too much.”

“Yeah, that can happen,” Romana explained. “It’s kind of bass-ackwards. The more you use it, the faster your energy runs out, but also, the more used to storing it your body becomes, so ultimately, your reserves will grow, and you’ll last longer between recharging cycles.”

“Thanks. I’m glad he...told you so much about it,” Mateo lied.

“I used to metabolize dark particles too, remember?” Romana said.

“Oh yeah, you don’t seem to do that anymore. How did you stop?” Ramses asked, quite curious about it.

“Boyd absorbed them from me in the mirror reality, so I could be free.”

“Oh.”

They continued to catch each other up. The girls had their own celebrations without them, and while there weren’t any drugs involved, they were pretty eventful too. After Magnolia and Garland finished talking, over half of them departed. Leona, Ramses, Marie, and Olimpia used their tandem slingdrives to transport the outsiders back to Earth, with plans to rendezvous with their other half later. Mateo, Angela, and Romana would go straight back to Castlebourne to warn Hrockas of the impending invasion. They didn’t know when Bronach’s forces would arrive, but hopefully not for years. This was one reason why Leona discouraged Hrockas from figuring out how to install a Nexus on his planet. It opened them up to too many security vulnerabilities, and it wasn’t necessary with the quantum casting and reframe engines. As long as they maintained the encryption of The Terminal, and reinforced their orbital defense systems, there should be nothing they couldn’t take on.

Before the three of them finished investigating the nearby buildings in case there was anything useful to find out, a ship descended from the heavens. A ramp opened in the front. A contingency of soldiers filed out, just as they were wont to do in the Exin Empire. A masked menace slowly walked down the ramp between their goons, and stood before the three members of Team Matic who were still here. They reached up and removed the mask. It was Korali. She was smirking. “Mateo, Mateo, Mateo. I should have known you would be involved with the abduction. Tell me. Where’s his body?”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 2, 2515

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The team was sitting around their table. It was the end of the engagement party, and only a few people were still around. Darko was in the middle of a seemingly flirtatious conversation with one of the android waitresses whose self-awareness and agency were in question. Mateo was about to ask if there was any way of determining whether she could provide consent when a black hole suddenly appeared on the opposite wall. A woman stepped out who looked moderately familiar. The first words out of her mouth were, “okay, I’ll do it, but I want something in return.”

“What?” Leona questioned. “Were we in the middle of a conversation? You’ll do what for us? Who are you again?”

“I’m Magnolia Quintana?” she reminded them. “The Overseer?”

“Oh, right, yeah, we met,” Leona remembered. “Is there an operation here, or something? This is just Party Central.”

“Yes, if this is where you’re gonna have the wedding,” Magnolia said. She looked around the room. “Little small.”

Leona did her best impression of Mr. Spock’s eyebrows. “We’re gonna have it outdoors, and not tonight, and...this is only one room in an entire city of party venues.”

Magnolia pulled out an old fashioned pen and notepad set. She took notes out loud. “Okay. Outdoors. Party Central. At least one year to plan.”

“Are you offering to be our wedding planner?” Olimpia questioned.

“Not offering,” Magnolia said. “Got the job. Very excited. Already have some great ideas rolling around up here.” She tapped her head with her pen.

“Madam Quintana,” Mateo began. “We were just gonna plan this ourselves. It’s not gonna be as big as our last wedding. Only family and close friends.”

Magnolia dropped her hands in disappointment, and sighed. “I need your help.” She was very uncomfortable. “I obviously need you more than you need me.”

“Well, we might be able to just help you,” Leona offered. “You don’t have to do anything for us. What do you need?”

“I need you to find my son,” Magnolia requested, averting her gaze awkwardly. “I can find anyone in the world, but he shares the same gift, which makes him a blindspot. I know he’s in this time period, but I don’t know where. Honestly, because so many planets have become habitable now, the Great Pyramid Shimmer actually serves a meaningful purpose, so he might not even be on Earth anymore.”

“Is he in trouble?” Romana asked.

Magnolia hesitated to answer. “He’s...mad at me. I just want the chance to apologize. I think he’ll be receptive if I say the right thing, but I have to find him first.”

“Well we can’t really find people,” Leona tried to explain. “I’m sure you’re asking us because you have been made aware of our slingdrives, but they don’t operate on magic. We have to know where we’re going. We’re no better equipped than you with your, uhh...”

“Hither-thithers,” Magnolia finished for her. “That’s what our dark portals are called. And I didn’t come for your slingdrives. I can harness Shimmer myself, and go anywhere he might be. I need his dark particle power to track his location.”

“Not that I won’t agree to that,” Mateo started, “but you just used a special word. Have you not reached out to a genuine Tracker, like Vidar Wolfe?”

“They have the same limitation as me. We can conceal ourselves from such people. I believe that you are the only person in the universe who can see through the shroud.”

“All right.” Mateo wiped his lips with his napkin, then dropped it down on the table. “I’ll see what I can find.” He leaned over and kissed his wife, then leaned over the other direction to kiss his bride.”

“Wait, we have your bachelor party after this,” Ramses reminded him. They decided to get all the traditions out of the way, so the separate celebratory events are falling on the same day as the engagement party, instead of being spread out across 12 to 18 months. Leona will have her doe party, and Olimpia will have a separate bachelorette party. They’ll then reconvene for a bridal shower. A bit out of order, but who cares? “Or no, we’re calling it a bull party.”

“Come with us,” Mateo suggested. “Hey, Darko!” This was Mateo’s chance to not worry about what an encounter with the android would mean, ethically speaking. “Time traveling bull party!”

“I’m in!” his once-brother exclaimed. He turned back to the waitress. “Catch you later, gorgeous.”

“I shouldn’t go with you,” Magnolia decided. “I have some initial work to do to plan your wedding, and Garland may still want me to stay away. I don’t wanna ambush him, so if you could, please tell him that I’m sorry, and ask him if he wants to see me. If he doesn’t, I’ll understand, and I’ll trust that you did find him, and are telling me the truth either way.”

Mateo nodded. “Don’t break your back planning, though. It’s gonna be intimate and low-key. Thanks!”

“No. Thank you.” She was a little too mousy and contrite for someone called The Overseer. This whole thing with her son must really be messing her up. And that wasn’t how she came across a few minutes ago when she first arrived. Maybe she didn’t realize how receptive to her request they would be, and decided to rein in her energy after the deal was done.

The three men stood next to each other in a vague line, and regarded the women still sitting at the table. “Three to beam up.” Dark particles swarmed around them, and sent them away to unknown lands.

As the darkness faded away, the nature of their destination twisted into focus. “Oh, not again,” Ramses groaned. They appeared to be in the middle of a tundra. It wasn’t Tundradome, though. It couldn’t have been. They were standing in what must have been a park, or a town square. There were buildings on all sides of them in the middle distance. This was some kind of city. People were milling about, enjoying the day. No one seemed to have noticed their arrival until they turned all the way around to see a young man sitting on a bench.

He did not have a look of shock on his face, but minor annoyance. “I put a time block on this world,” he said. Still nettled, he closed the cover over his e-reader, and set it down next to him. “No one else should be able to come through. Now I have to check the wards.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Mateo tried to explain. “My power is a bit of an exception. I doubt anyone else can come here if you did anything to prevent them.”

“Who would want to?” Ramses jabbed.

“For that.” The young man looked up towards the sky with his eyes as he pointed with a finger.

It took them a moment to possibly figure out what was going on. Scale was a bit hard to determine with this out-of-context problem. It looked like a ceiling of ice that stretched all the way across in every direction, down to the horizon. The fractures and imperfections glimmered in the light from the ground, and maybe even from above as well? Vaguely-shaped circular blobs were hanging in the background, perhaps pulsating, or perhaps they were only illusions. This whole thing might have been a hologram, but it was a good one; reminiscent of something they might find on Castlebourne. Had this frustrated stranger not claimed to be somehow preventing others from traveling here, they might have guessed that it was indeed one of the domes on Castlebourne, which they just so happened to have never heard of before.

“Wait, wait,” Darko began. “I think I’ve heard of this. Epsi...Epson...”

“Epsilon Eridani,” Ramses said. “Roughly eleven light years from Earth. No habitable planet, but a gas giant like Juputer, and a couple of ice giants, similar to Neptune.”

“We’re orbiting the gas giant, AEgir,” the stranger added. “This moon is called Kólga. The surface is inhospitable, so they built a giant hanging city-structure, attached to the ice. What you’re seeing up there is several hundred meters of ice, followed by the daytime sky, in which we can currently see both AEgir and E-E.”

“Where are our manners?” Mateo extended his hand. “Mateo Matic, Darko Matic, and Ramses Abdulrashid.”

“Married or related?”

“Brothers across different timelines,” Darko clarified. “You’ve never heard of us? You’ve never heard of Team Matic?”

“I try to stay out of the whole time travel industry. That’s why I came here. People keep to themselves. They’re as immortal as anyone, but they don’t want to explore. They don’t want to learn. They don’t want to build worlds. They just want to live their lives day by day, century by century. They don’t ask questions, and without them even knowing it, I protect them from the likes of you. I try anyway.”

“We’re not here to cause trouble. We’re just looking for our friend’s son, who we are guessing is you?” Mateo asked.

He nodded. “Garland Dressler. She sent you to take me back to her?”

“No pressure,” Mateo said to him. “She says she wants to apologize. I don’t know what for. I don’t need to know. You don’t have to come with us. If you want us to leave, we will.”

Garland sighed. “You might as well stay a while. You look like you’re in the party mood, and there’s one down the street tonight.”

The three of them looked at each other, narrowing in on Darko, who was wearing a glow necklace that was inert when they came here, but was now twinkling, probably triggered by the time travel event. They were supposed to be partying.

“I’ll think about whether I wanna go back or not,” Garland went on.

“Let’s go get chocolate wasted!” Ramses suggested. He literally started running towards the street.

“Other direction!” Garland called up to him.

Ramses didn’t stop running. He just teleported to the other side of them, and started moving that way instead.

“Do you have a jacket?” Darko asked as the rest of them followed Ramses at a normal pace.

“It’ll be warmer inside,” Garland promised.

They had to call Ramses back again when he passed the entrance to the party venue, but once inside, they had a lot of fun. The other residents took no issue with shifting focus of the festivities to being more about Mateo and his upcoming nuptials. They didn’t go there with a particular reason to party in the first place, so it wasn’t like they were stealing attention from someone else. Garland had been a little inaccurate about why he came here, and didn’t let anyone else. He didn’t only want to protect the Kólgans from time travel, but also to have them all to himself. He was the life of the party, opening up hither-thithers left and right. He helped party-goers throw sports balls at their own asses as fast as possible. He let one guy fall down an endless loop of portals on the ceiling and the floor. Mateo wowed them with a swarm of dark particles before he and Ramses entertained with a holographic lightshow. Darko met a man with combat training, so they sparred in the middle of the floor as the crowd cheered.

They would find out later that the chocolate they were eating was laced with some kind of local drug, which Garland didn’t even know about. They reawoke at some point later with no memory of how the night ended up, but they had some clues to work with. First, they were not likely on Kólga anymore as it was pretty hot here. Secondly, Darko was missing. And finally, passed out next to them was the last person they expected to find. He actually looked rather peaceful there, and they didn’t get the sense that there was any lasting animosity between them. It was Bronach Oaksent.

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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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