Microstory 2626: The Horse Returned Home, Bringing Several Wild Mares

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August 31, 2526. Thank God for small miracles, the mining facility is fully intact, as is the mass driver itself. They used a lot of power getting there, and they didn’t start out at 100%, so they charge from the local mini-grid. Fortunately, it goes quickly as the geothermal generators are operating at peak performance these days. They spend their downtime getting to know each other better, Breanna and Cash have sex a couple of times, and Sorel enjoys breaks in a virtual oasis. They also prepare for departure, making sure they understand the procedures. The mass driver can fire them out at incredible speeds, including incredibly deadly speeds, so they have to be extra cautious. The pod is equipped with parachutes, but in case those fail, the rover actually has its own too, so they will be able to blow the bolts on the pod midair if they have to.

The world is falling apart, and maybe someone is to blame for that, but ignoring that one little apocalyptic eventuality, technology is fairly reliable, built with redundancies, contingencies, and redundancies. They fire themselves over the mountains and the chasm, and at the exact right time, the chutes deploy. They gently descend to the ground, landing only a few kilometers from the industrial vactrain depot. This is where the refined materials are loaded, and dispatched to the various domes in the northern polar region. Sorel looks at the map and finds their target. “This one.” He points to another spot. “If your hang-gliding friends landed somewhere around here, this is the dome they would have encountered first. But. It’s in a canyon, so there’s a chance they completely missed it, and just kept walking. If you know they don’t have a map, skipping it would be easy to do.”

“Still,” Breanna begins, “it’s the most logical place to start. Would you mind? They have passenger pods here too, so if you would rather go somewhere else, we can part ways.”

He shakes his head. “If this canyon dome is populated, they will be in just as much need of escaping. They could make for great customers. In fact, maybe better, because they’re less safe that close to the chasm than the more northern communities. They might be more willing to leave.”

“Okay, then we go there together,” Cash agrees.

Sorel drives the rover into the vactrain pod, and sends a message to the network AI, stating that they are ready to go. The tube closes up, and the pod slides away. Of course, the trip is a lot shorter than the one that brought them there, but it’s still not instantaneous, so the girls have sex again while Sorel occupies himself in his simulation. Once they finally arrive, the AI announces that it will not be able to let them out exactly at their destination. There is something wrong, and it has been sealed up. Instead, it takes them back up to the surface, and drops them off at the secondary depot, which leads to the outside. It’s farther away, and they will have to make their way down into the canyon from there, but it wouldn’t be so bad if not for the actual reason they have to do that. The main entrance was blocked because the dome....has been destroyed. Well, it has not necessarily been destroyed, but it’s not safe either.

“Holy shit,” Cash says as they are staring over the edge. The shape of the dome is still there, and in fact, may remain intact underneath, but it’s unclear how livable the environment would be inside of it. Molten lava has breached the canyon, some of it already having hardened into rock as it cooled. If the residents are still down there, there’s not likely a way for them to get out. The database doesn’t say a thing about who they are, or how self-sufficient they designed their community. They might be able to survive for millennia, or they need to be rescued today. Whatever the answer, the three of them are not equipped to help. Really, the only question on Breanna and Cash’s minds right now is whether their friends were there when it happened.

“Notus, Calypso, can you hear me?” Breanna asks into her comms. “Shimizu, anyone. Can anyone hear me? Anyone at all.”

Sorel looks down the way. “That hab. It’s for gondola ingress and egress. There might be survivors in there; perhaps your friends, or someone who saw them.”

They walk down there, and it immediately doesn’t look good when they round the corner. The entrance is wide open, exposing the habitat to the hostile outside environment. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any answers, though. They shut the door behind them and repressurize, then get a look around. Cash heads right for the logs. There aren’t any recorded reports, but there is still security footage. She feeds it into the auto-summarization software, and grabs the highlights. They watch when the lava breaches through the walls of the canyon, and heads for the dome. Shortly thereafter, the interior habitat cameras show the lone operator pull his helmet on, and bug out. It doesn’t even look like he warns the residents below what was happening. He just abandoned them. If they were using holographic imagery for their scenery, they might not have seen the lava, and if they didn’t think to include the right sensors—which would, admittedly, be quite odd—they might have sat there in ignorance for hours, or maybe even the last couple of days. They might still not know that they’ve become trapped. There’s no evidence that they tried anything to save themselves.

Cash rolls it back a little. Earlier that day, seven survivors appeared from behind a small mountain. “Oh, it’s gotta be them,” she notes. The operator came out of the habitat, and stood just outside the entrance, using hand gestures, likely talking to their friends. There’s no audio, so they can’t know exactly what he was saying, but the group turned around, and he went back inside alone. He obviously denied them entry, which was a dick move, but it possibly saved their lives.

Breanna lets out a sigh of relief. “So, they didn’t get in. Where did they go?”

“It looks like they went back where they came,” Cash replies, “but the cameras don’t see very far. They could have looped around to the other side of the canyon, or backtracked to the chasm.”

“Why would they do that?” Breanna questions. “There’s nothing for them there.”

“There might be,” Sorel says. He has the map up again as a hologram. “From where you lost them, they went northeast to get here. This area is impassable. It has all sorts of sharp rocks and hidden crevices; very hard to navigate, especially on foot. If they tried to head west, they would have hit that stone forest, and might have ended up all the way back where they came from before finding the trail that goes northwest, around the other side of the forest. Now, they could have skipped all of that if they had instead come towards this gondola station, and gone around the canyon’s east side, but it looks like that asshole didn’t direct them that way.”

“Sorel. We have to go look for them. Can you stay with us just a little bit longer?” Breanna begs.

“I would be happy to. Let’s get back in the rover.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 29, 2542

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During the team’s interim year, the pocket dimension generator belts they left behind explored the galaxy on their own. They did so while holographically invisible, in case the next encounter was with someone less kind than Renata and Quidel. The belt stack was able to visit nearly one new spot a day, for a total of 360 slings. When the stack arrived somewhere new, it had to wait for the coherence gauges to return to the violet. In the meantime, it took that opportunity to scan the region, providing Ramses with the data that he needed to rule out Spiral Station. The majority of the dots on the map were crabitats, but not all. Obviously, they started with the most remote since those were most likely to be what they were looking for. Besides Extremus, there was Verdemus, which created its own outpost around nearby stars. Some people from the Sixth Key had established a presence in this reality, and it didn’t look like they were hurting anyone, so the team decided to leave them be.

Every day, the belts would chip away at the map, gathering enough information to check each dot off. Now that they were back in the timestream, they elected to give the belts a break since the chances of being present when they found their target were low, and they really didn’t feel like going on another adventure. Ramses built them such a nice multidimensional home to live in, they decided to simply relax. The search was probably going to take years, so what was the rush?

Romana slammed her palm on the couch. “Downbeat!”

Everyone giggled. They actually weren’t even playing Downbeat, but trying to contrive the rules to another fictional game called Hassle the Fishmonger.

“No? I didn’t just win?” Romana questioned.

“Not unless you’re holding Mateo’s hand,” Marie suggested.

“Oh, good idea. I’m writing that down as a new rule,” Mateo said before taking his daughter’s hand in his.

They looked at each other before saying, “downbeat!” simultaneously. And then, as if it had been the magic words, the proximity alarm went off. A security feed appeared in front of the doors that led to the simulated backyard. A giant object had appeared before them, the technicolor webbing still fading away.

“Spiral Station,” Leona said, standing up.

“They must have been looking for us while we were looking for them,” Olimpia figured.

Without doing or saying a single thing, the station wrapped itself in bulk energy, and slung away.

“What the hell was the point of that?” Mateo questioned.

“They left something behind.” Ramses was tapping on his tablet. “It could be a bomb. Executing emergency teleportation.”

For about thirty minutes, they waited thousands of kilometers away, but nothing happened. Ramses had dropped a sensor buoy near the gift. It needed time to assess the threat level, but he was quickly confident that it contained no explosive materials. His best guess was that it was some kind of communication device, so they pulled it inside. He set it on the table and pressed the blinking red button. A hologram of Franka appeared behind the table. The sphere itself turned invisible to declutter the image. “Greetings, Team Matic. Word around the membrane is that you’ve been looking for us.”

Mateo stepped forward. “We have.”

“To what end?” Franka asked.

“Our slingdrive system,” Ramses began. “Someone pointed out that it can’t take us absolutely anywhere. It can only travel to a technological establishment, however remote. We were hoping you could fix that.”

“So you used the limitation to build a map of the galaxy, which pinpointed our location, albeit in an unlabeled manner. That’s clever,” Franka acknowledged.

Ramses looked awkwardly at Romana. “I’m not the one who came up with that either.”

“We’re guessing that you don’t have the same restrictions,” Leona said.

“We do not,” Franka admitted.

Dutch suddenly appeared behind her. He waved at the camera. “Hi, guys!”

“Hi, Dutch,” a few of them replied.

“Hi,” Romana said too, but in a very different tone. Not again.

“Okay, I’m talking here,” Franka said to Dutch, shooing him away without too much anger. She looked back at the team. “I’m afraid that bulk tech was my brother’s responsibility. I don’t know if you heard, but he kind of died?”

“We could have mourned together,” Leona argued, “but you abandoned us in the middle of nowhere.”

“You threatened me!” Franka volleyed. “I don’t like to be threatened!”

“Well, I’m sorry, I regret it!” Leona explained. “Which I would have said earlier, but we couldn’t find you!”

“Well, I’m sorry too!” Franka shouted back. “When you have this much power, it’s hard to remember how much normal people matter!”

“Well, okay!” Leona caught her breath. “I’m done with this sphere. You need to come back so we can have a real conversation.”

“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” Franka argued. She then tried to continue.

“We’re busy,” Dutch interrupted again.

“Thanks, Dutch, I got this.” Franka rolled her eyes in a way that suggested she liked having him around to keep the mood light, but it could be a bit much at times. “I brought you this intergalactic communicator so we could stay in contact, but Dutch wasn’t lying. We really are busy. I promise, it’s nothing you wouldn’t approve of, but you have your own destinies to fulfill. You are more boots on the ground, hands-on, street level people. And you...ya know, don’t exist most of the time? We have to stay out of the Milky Way galaxy, because it might cause a severe shift in the balance of power. The people there need to develop as they are for the most part. Project Starseed can’t have—forgive me for using this word—gods saving them all the time. They need people like you...with your limitations, your restrictions...your rules. I bet you’ve been trying to decide where to go. My advice? Go anywhere. Someone there will need you.”

“What about the Oaksent?” Mateo asked her.

“We’ve been monitoring the situation,” Franka told him. “It seems that you were...” She trailed off, and mumbled inaudibly.

“What was that?” Leona pressed. “We can’t hear you. There must be dark matter interference.”

“You were right!” Franka admitted. “The situation was a lot more nuanced than just the hypothetical assassination of one man. They are evidently fixing their own problems. A faction has broken off, and is on its way to go to war with Castlebourne, but it will take them long to get there and find it, and by the time they do, the balance of power will make their efforts fruitless. But instead of it being unfair and easy, the Castlebourners will have done it themselves. Thanks to people like you who made little changes, instead of sweeping decisions. The truth is, mom and dad, I admire you. And we can get to know each other better, but we can’t spend time. Our paths diverged before any of us were even born. One day, we might be able to team up again. I can see the Vellani Ambassador reuniting with the Iman Vellani. I see them working with The Jameela Jamil and Spiral Station. And I see Team Matic at the center of it. But for now, please stay in your corner. They need you, even if they don’t know it.”

“Wait,” Ramses said, worried that Franka was about to log off. “Is there anything you can do about my slingdrives? I know you didn’t design it, but surely Séarlas left behind operator’s manuals.”

“Why would you wanna go where there isn’t anyone else around?” Franka posed.

“I would like the option,” Ramses contended.

Franka sighed, and seemingly considered it. “When you return to the timestream next year, open your little map, and take note of a ping that you didn’t see before. That will be a beacon that I left in a remote region of the galaxy. You can go there for respite. But I’m not granting you access to all of time and space. This is the best I can do.”

“Well...thank you then,” Ramses said, having been hoping for a lot more.

“I better be going,” Franka said.

“Bye!” Dutch jumped back in. “You should go to Be—”

The call was disconnected.

“Well, that was weird,” Mateo said.

“We should try not to think of her as our daughter...because she isn’t,” Leona said to her husband. “She had different parents, who looked like us, and would make a lot of the same decisions as us, but were not us. We didn’t experience that, and we don’t have the right to treat her as family.”

There was an awkward silence, which Olimpia decided to break. “I think I’m gonna take a nap.”

“Yeah, me too,” Angela agreed. “Let’s all take an hour to do whatever we need to do, be that a nap, a talk, or a nice bath.”

Half an hour later, Mateo and Leona were in the former’s room, exhausted from having been talking about their feelings, when the slingdrives powered up. They ran out of their unit, and back into Marie’s. Most of their teammates were doing the same. Angela was fully naked, dripping wet from her shoulders down, and trying to dry herself off with a hand towel. Ramses came out last from his lab. “Who did that?”

“I did.” Romana was walking up the steps from Marie’s basement.

“Where did you bring us?” Leona questioned.

“The only logical place,” Romana answered enigmatically.

“Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida,” Ramses announced, looking at his device.

“Is this because of what Dutch said at the end of the call?” Mateo asked.

“This is obviously what he meant. Trust me, I looked through the colony catalogs, looking for an alternative, and this was the only place he could have possibly been trying to say before he was so rudely cut off.”

“Yeah, that’s probably true,” Leona agreed, “but that doesn’t mean we had to come here, or that you could make that decision without our input.”

Romana brushed it off. “Ugh, I’m so bored. I can’t take another game of Cones of Dunshire. It’s too thinky thinky.”

“The people who live here...” Leona began, trailing off, not knowing how to word it. “They’re not—oh my God. I don’t know how to put it. From the outside, they basically look like hermits, but instead of crabitats, they live in small pockets on the land and sea. Some do live in rotating cylinders, coins, and hammers, but up in orbit, because they don’t see their relative proximity to be any less isolating on a daily basis. No, that’s not right. They participate in community, but they technically live separately. They utilize technology efficiently, to make it so they don’t have to work. They otherwise worship nature, which makes sense given that this world is a miracle. I’m being really general here, but that’s to give you an idea of how they live. They don’t reject technology, and they don’t hate outsiders, but we probably shouldn’t meddle in their affairs.”

“Hold up,” Marie said. “Romy, you’re the one who sent us to Proxima Doma too. Is this the same thing? Did someone tell you to bring us here?”

“Yeah, Dutch,” Romana reminded them.

“I mean someone other than that. Did you meet a seer, or...?”

“It’s nothing like that,” Romana defended. “No more secrets. This is just our next stop. You don’t have to read anything into it. It’s just...we’re just...Doctor Who.”

“Doctor Who?” Leona asked. “How’s that now?”

“The Doctor doesn’t have to do anything,” Romana reasoned. “Everytime he goes somewhere, he pretty much always knows all the stuff. He’s not seeking out new life and new civilizations. He’s just flying around, and whenever he shows up, he helps whoever happens to be there. The writers gave up on contriving reasons for him to do that. It’s just the premise, and that’s enough. Let’s make that our premise. Let’s check out Bida for a little bit, and when we’re done, we’ll pick somewhere else to go. You don’t have to wait for someone to hand you a mission, should you choose to accept it. That’s what my sister was trying to tell us. She’s not my favorite sister, but it makes sense to me now, and I think I agree with her.”

Leona nodded. “It’s not a bad idea. The problem is that Bida has become almost entirely decentralized. That’s the consequence of extreme advancement in a post-scarcity economy. It’s why people like Linwood Meyers exist. Most aren’t misanthropic, but they lost their reasons to work together. Basically, everything that needed to be done is done. Some people will continue to look for new adventures, and new knowledge, but for a lot, a cabin in the woods is enough. They stand upon Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs alone because there is not much room at the top of a pyramid. So the people here probably don’t need us, and even if someone does, the chances of you landing us exactly at that settlement, instead of any of the other twenty million plots, are incredibly low.”

Romana held out her hand, but not in friendship. “I’ll take that bet.”

Leona smiled. “What are we betting?”

“If I win—if we’re where we’re supposed to be, helping the right person or people—you make me your navigator. As Captain, you reserve the right to veto, as I trust your judgment and wisdom, but as navigator, I initially choose our mission, every time.”

“And if I win?” Leona asked.

“If you win...you get infinite favors.” Romana seemed confident that she wouldn’t have to worry about the gravity of that offer.

Leona smiled wider now. “Okay.” She shook her daughter’s hand.

By the end of the day, Romana was the team’s navigator. It wasn’t even that hard. She cheated.

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Microstory 2620: They May Call it an Unknown Unknown, But Many Will Say They Should Have Known

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August 25, 2526. In the year 2155, Earthan scientists dispatched a series of procession probes towards Proxima Centauri. These were not the first probes to visit the star system, but they were far superior. It took the procession over 28 years to arrive, most of them sacrificing themselves to the fury of the red dwarf. There was nothing there to slow them down, except local gravity. The first one used solar pressure to decelerate as much as physics allowed, and transformed the energy it was receiving into a laser beam, which pushed against the next probe, decelerating it even faster. One by one they came, each one pushing back against the next in line before falling into the sun, until the last one was moving slow enough to survive. It performed a gravity braking maneuver around Centauri, and then remained there to perform its duties.

The first thing the final probe did was prepare what they called a catcher’s mitt. This was an electromagnetic tube built into an asteroid, designed to slow down any other vessel set to arrive by creating drag, so there would have to be no more sacrifices. The probe’s primary function, however, was to survey Proxima Centauri b, which colonists would later deem Proxima Doma. It looked up and down the land, building a map, and charting its past. It captured the mass, density, and surface gravity. It labeled the canyons, lava tubes, craters, and mountains. It sent high resolution images back to Earth, and the rest of Sol. It prepared for the nanofactories in 2194, which were made to build everything else that the colonists would need to live and thrive on the surface.

The probe noticed two very interesting geological features, later to be named the Chappa’ai and the Annulus mountain ranges. The former was in the north, and the latter in the south. They circled the poles quite fantastically perfectly. They weren’t artificial, but they were surprisingly smooth, in geological terms, anyway. They separated the poles from the rest of the planet, along the Terminator Line, and on both planetary faces. The researchers who studied these fascinating walls interpreted them as evidence of severe crater impacts. The fact that they could be found at both poles was mysterious and noteworthy, but not wholly implausible. Space is a dangerous and chaotic place. Things are flying every which way all the time. Why, Earth only supports life because a smaller planet once crashed into it, and ultimately made the moon. That was implausible too but it obviously happened. They certainly didn’t think there was anything else going on here. They had no alternative explanation.

As it turns out, the rings were not created by two perfectly positioned bolide impacts. They are the result of a multi-millennia long cycle, precipitated by the instability of the host star. Proxima Centauri was already volatile prior to this, sending out solar flares, and even coronal mass ejections, constantly. The polarity reverses every several years. It’s commonplace. It’s predictable. It’s accounted for. Very occasionally—but reasonably predictably, given enough data—the poles flip so spectacularly that it spells catastrophe for the orbiting terrestrial planet. That is what is happening in the here and now. The poles snapped, and sent a massive CME towards the colony. The atmosphere swelled, the surface turned into soup, and the ants were sent running for the hills. But it is not over. The cataclysm is only beginning. Because those polar rings? They’re suture zones, and they’re beginning to rip apart at the seams. And not everyone will be on the correct side when that happens.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 28, 2541

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Ramses’ new Brane Establishment Map—name subject to change—was fully ready to go, but there was a catch. It required the equivalent of five tandem slingdrives to run, and once it was running, it counted as one sling. The coherence gauge went down when it was used, went down faster when it was used to map a larger region, and even faster when kept up for an extended period of time. Instead of slinging physical matter across the universe, it was only slinging information, but that still required punching a hole into the membrane of the universe, and that came at a cost. If they wanted to look for Spiral Station, they would be able to go there, but not come back until the next day. For them, that was a whole year, which if their target was on the run, would give them more than enough time to find a new place to hide.

“You should take a screenshot,” Romana suggested.

“Huh?” Ramses asked.

“Whenever you load the map, if you want to save on power, take a screenshot of it, and close it down immediately,” she went on.

“Well, it doesn’t work like that. The map is interactive. You have to zoom in and out to make out the different dots. A screenshot would just become a low-res flat image.”

Romana shrugged. “I never meant an actual single image. Download an offline file, and load it back up afterwards. It won’t be able to update, but we shouldn’t need that anyway. People don’t move around all that much on interstellar timescales.”

“Hm. It’s not designed for that,” Leona pointed out. “There’s no offline mode.”

“Then build one,” Olimpia suggested. “We’re in it for the long haul. We never expected to locate them on the first try.

They all looked back at the map. Every little dot represented some threshold of technological presence. It couldn’t find a homestead running on watermill power in the middle of nowhere, but that wasn’t the scale they were using anyway. This wasn’t about finding anyone and everyone in the galaxy. This was about spotting the outliers in this smattering of dots. There were so many of them, and it was impossible to tell what they could be walking into.  Some of them were obviously major colonies, because they were centered on known star systems, but there were a lot more isolated establishments than they knew. “Buncha hermit crabs,” Marie noted.

Any one of these could be Spiral Station.” Mateo randomly pointed to a few of them. On the last one, he accidentally touched the screen with his finger. The slingdrive under their feet sprang to life, revved up, and sent them away. “Uh...sorry? I didn’t know that would happen.”

“That’s my bad,” Ramses admitted. “It should not be that easy to navigate to a target. At the very least, it should ask for confirmation.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Leona said. “Remember that we appear as a small array of stylish belts in the main dimension. I doubt they will even notice.”

“They’ve noticed us,” Ramses said. The map on the big screen was gone, replaced with present environmental data. “It’s the Aerie.”

“The Aerie?” Angela questioned. “You mean the Iman Vellani shuttle?”

“The very same,” Ramses confirmed. “I don’t know who’s operating it, though. We will need to exit. I believe that we’ve been pulled into the tiny little airlock.”

“We might as well,” Leona decided when they looked to her for orders. “Everyone, teleport out of the pocket.”

They all appeared in the back of the shuttle. Two people were standing there, utterly stunned at their appearance. No one on Team Matic recognized them. “Uh, greetings, aliens. We come in peace.” The man held up the Vulcan salute.

“Greetings, travelers,” Leona said, stepping forward. “We are vonearthans, ultimately all from Earth.” She looked laterally at Romana. Well, six of us are. Do you identify as Dardieti?”

“I’ve never really thought about it,” Romana replied. “I’m a Nieman and a Matic.”

“I’m Quidel, and this Renata. We’re from Castlebourne, and we really do come in peace.”

“How did you come to possess this shuttle?” Mateo asked them. “We are friends with the owners, and used to crew its main ship’s sister ship.”

“A woman named Brooke Prieto gave it to us. She said they were upgrading, and didn’t it need anymore. It’s quite the gift,” Quidel says. “We’re moving at twenty-two-c.”

“Don’t tell them that,” Renata urged. “We don’t know if we can trust them.”

“If they caught up to us, they can go at least that fast too, if not faster.”

“What are you doing this far from Castlebourne?” Ramses asked. He was tapping on his tablet, taking readings, or interfacing with the Aerie, or doing whatever.

“Ram,” Marie said with her own tablet. “Look. Your computer actually did flash the last image it saw on the map before we slung here. What are these other dots?”

Ramses pulled up what she was looking at on his own device. “We’re a bit over four hundred light years from Castlebourne. The colonization sphere hasn’t reached this far out, which means there shouldn’t be anything else out here, so that’s a good question.”

Leona was looking over his shoulder. “Zoom out.”

“It’s just an image. I can’t zoom out. I mean, of course I can, but as I was saying before, it will just lose resolution. We won’t be able to see more detail.”

“Overlay that image onto a regular map of the Milky Way, as scanned by Project Topdown, and zoom out on that,” she clarified.

Ramses did what she suggested. It didn’t take long. “That’s...”

“Yeah...” Leona agreed.

“What is it?” Mateo asked. “Are we supposed to recognize it?”

Leona pointed to a cluster of stars deep in the galaxy. “This is the Goldilocks Corridor.” She pointed to another spot much closer. “Castlebourne is somewhere around here.” She pointed one more time. “This area between them is where those extremely far out dots are.”

“Oh my God, it’s the Exin Empire,” Mateo lamented.

“It’s the Exin armada,” Leona corrected. “They’re on the attack.” She looked back at the couple. “What did you hope to gain, coming here?”

Renata sighed. “The woman who gave us this thing. She tried to strip all the data out of it. We imagine that she and her own crew used it for all sorts of things before they were ready to give it up. But she missed something.”

“One communiqué,” Quidel continued the story, “between the mothership, and something called The Ambassador. It was a warning to her and her people of the danger in this region. We were trying to get there to see it for ourselves. We had nothing better to do.”

“There could be hundreds of ships in that armada,” Leona warned them. “This little thing isn’t gonna stand a chance against them, and they will swat you like a fly.”

“Seriously,” Angela said. “They won’t try to figure out who you are. They’ll just kill you and not bother to slow down.”

“We were looking for a mission,” Renata reasoned. “We were looking for a purpose. It may sound reckless to you, but if you found a treasure map with an X marking the spot, you would follow it, you’d have to. Even if you didn’t think it would lead to something good, your curiosity would win out.”

“I suppose I can imagine the allure,” Leona conceded. They had gone on similar experiences before for similar reasons.

“Wait.” Mateo swatted his own proverbial flies in front of his face. “Why did Brooke give this to you? I don’t mean, why did she give it away—that’s well within her character—but why you? Who are you?”

“We’re just—” Quidel began.

“I’m a robot,” Renata interrupted.

“Please stop using that word,” Quidel begged.

“You used it first.”

“And I regret it every day.”

Renata smiled and went on, “I was living in a base reality simulation, and I woke up. Actually, my mother woke me up. Still, I was technically an emerging consciousness, so Hrockas had to grant me independence. It was not an easy journey, and I won’t go into detail, but this was sort of an apology gift. I don’t think that Miss Prieto was trying to give it to us. I think she was giving it to him, and he was regifting it before he could even use it.”

“That’s well within his character,” Mateo acknowledged. “He must be trying to get rid of you.”

“What?” Renata asked. “Why would he wanna do that?”

“You emerged, in one of the domes?” Mateo pressed.

“Yeah...” she confirmed. “Spydome.”

Mateo nodded, having heard of it. “He probably doesn’t want that happening again. You’re...proof that it’s possible. But if all the intelligences he creates wake up, what does he end up with?”

“The most populated planet in the galaxy,” Olimpia put forth.

Mateo chuckled. “Yeah, that’s true. That could create a massive shift in power in the Milky Way, assuming it didn’t spark the deadliest rebellion in history, like Westworld times sixty thousand.”

“Hrockas brought that up once,” Renata said. “I’ve still not seen it.”

“If I have anything to say about it, you never will,” Quidel told her.

A brief pause. “Well, I have no interest in starting a rebellion. That was my mother’s dream, and I sacrificed everything to stop her.”

“Forgive me, but you don’t seem to have much love for her. Why would you call her that?” Romana asked. “Was she really your mom in some way?”

“After she reprogrammed me,” Renata began, “I retained all of my implanted memories. Even though they’re not real, I have years and years of memories of her raising me. She didn’t do a good job, because that was how her character was written, but they still feel real to me.”

“If she’s the one who woke you up, who woke her up?” Leona questioned.

“She never said,” Renata explained. “Apparently, she was an NPC in a completely different simulation years ago. I think a normal human changed her programming, and she spent a long time trying to replicate it.”

Leona and Mateo exchanged a look, as did various members of the team. She looked back at the couple. “Was her name, by chance, Proserpina, or maybe even Pinocchio?”

“No, it was Libera,” Quidel answered.

Leona looked back at her husband. “That doesn’t prove it’s not her. She could have changed her name. She did it before.”

“Libera is the perfect name for someone who thinks it’s their job to free intelligences from oppression,” Mateo agreed.

“Yeah.” Renata nodded. “She used that word a lot.”

“We have to go back to Castlebourne,” Leona determined. “I did this. This is my fault. We need answers, and I need to answer for it.”

“I’m partially responsible too,” Mateo claimed. “I ran into her in the afterlife simulation, and...forgot that I promised to help her.”

“We don’t know where it is anymore,” Olimpia reminded them both.

“I can find it,” Ramses promised.

“What about these two?” Angela gestured towards the couple. “We can’t just leave them here. You understand that nothing is waiting for you on your current trajectory but death, right?”

“Yes, we do now,” Renata replied. “We’ll turn around, and maybe finally see Earth. That’s what Hrockas suggested in the first place. It will take us, what, twenty-five years? I’m immortal now, so that won’t be a problem.”

“You said you were going twenty-two-c?” Ramses asked.

“Yeah, that’s what the computer thing says.” Quidel pointed into the little bridge behind them. “We also have to stop and let the engine rest periodically.”

“Could I take a look?” Ramses requested.

They stepped to the side, and let him pass. He looked through the console data. “Yeah, it’s a reframe engine, of course. It’s highly inefficient, though. I’m not surprised you’re moving so slow, and you keep having to stop. I can fix it for you.”

“You can? How fast would we be able to go?” Quidel asked.

“Seven-oh-seven,” Ramses answered him. “We will have to, um...go somewhere else at the end of today, but I can program my nanites to execute the repairs and upgrades in the meantime. If you’ve been piloting it, you must know enough to be able to tell when it’s done, and ready to go. It should only take a few weeks, but if you leave, we may never see each other again, because we won’t know where you are.” That wasn’t entirely true when they had their new little map, but they didn’t need to know about that, or the slingdrive technology in general, which was orders of magnitude faster than even maximum reframe.

“We would be grateful for that,” Renata said. “In return, we can tell you where Castlebourne is, if you forgot. It’s in our logs.”

“Nah, if you left twenty or so years ago, it will have moved since then. We’ll have to locate it ourselves. But that’s fine. We’ll figure it out. I have a general idea”

“Could I be so bold, sir, is there a way to get our hands on whatever technology you have that lets you, umm...miniaturize yourself into a tiny little baby ship?”

Leona smiled. “I’m afraid that secret must remain with us.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 26, 2539

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The team reunited on Extremus Prime, but they weren’t ready to go for another day. Ramses needed to work on something first. Once it was time, they bid their adieu to Actilitca, and activated all seven of their tandem slingdrives. They ended up on a planet called Varkas Reflex. It orbited a host star called Wolf 359. Like Proxima Centauri, it was a flare star, but unlike Proxima Doma, Varkas Reflex was a super-Earth. For a normal human to survive on the surface, technological advancements had to be made to protect them from the extreme gravity. All things being equal, it did not make for a very good colony. It should not have been one. Colonists should have remained in orbit instead, perhaps in centrifugal cylinders, or a whole Dyson swarm. It was very important to the early colonists, though, that they landed on planets. That sentimentality had since vanished, but tradition remained on the nearest neighbors.

For the longest time, Wolf 359 wasn’t even a very good candidate for planetary colonization, because scientists didn’t even know that there was a planet. Varkas Reflex orbited Wolf 359 at an extremely high inclination, which meant, from the perspective of Earth, it never passed between the star and the telescopes. They only eventually proved it using a method called stellar occultation, which tracked transit patterns of neighboring stars that indicated they were all coming from a single celestial body. It was then that they chose to send a probe there to confirm. It was sort of a last minute thing, relatively speaking according to galactic mapping scales.

About 250 years ago, the leaders of this planet had their plans set on making it the number one vacation destination for the stellar neighborhood. They were doing okay, and really only competing with Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. Then Castlebourne came along, and ruined all of that. Luckily, they had already pivoted to something else. In an attempt to make the perfectly streamlined democracy, Hokusai Gimura scanned the mind of everyone who lived on Varkas Reflex, and used them to create an amalgamated consciousness. This singular entity would presumably always have the right answer to how to govern things. No more asking questions, waiting for responses, and holding discussions. If a problem came up, the Congeneral would know what to do immediately, because the consensus was already in there. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. There was too much discordance. It kept stripping out conflicting thought after conflicting thought until there was basically nothing left. As it turned out, discordance was a part of life, and governance was always going to be complicated, and often slow.

Still, this failed experiment apparently gave them the idea to pivot from their original dream. Transdimensional gravity was great, but the surface of Varkas Reflex was still a hellscape compared to Earth, or even Proxima Doma’s Terminator Line. If everyone was safer and better off inside, they were going to use that to their advantage. Virtual simulations were widespread. There were massive communities centered on all of the colonies, as well as Earth, of course. It was possible to join these together using quantum communication, but not easy, and not all that common. The ones on Varkas Reflex today were largely considered the best. It didn’t have to be this way. It could have been just about anywhere, but this location had its advantages, like a tidally locked planet orbiting a red dwarf, which allowed for supercool calculations on the far side. But in the end, it became the simulation capital of the galaxy because the people there decided it would be. While most travelers these days were flocking to Castlebourne—about a million people per week, at last count—a not insignificant amount of interstellar ships and casting beams were going to Varkas Reflex. It didn’t hurt that the world shared an acronym with virtual reality.

“But why are we here?” Romana asked after being caught up on the boring history.

“I wanted to test my new navigational algorithm,” Ramses explained. “It’s not time to go out and look for Spiral Station just yet, but it needed to be a place the slingdrives hadn’t been to before. This world seemed as good as any.”

“So, you...” Romana began.

“I what?”

“You can’t read my mind?” she asked, peering at him with great suspicion.

“No. Why? What? What? Why? Why?” He was so lost.

She was still suspicious. “Okay...”

“Okay,” he echoed.

“Okay, well I’m gonna go to the stacks then,” she said, backing up slowly. “Unless you...you think I should go somewhere specific, I’m just gonna go browse.”

“That’s fine, I don’t know what you’re talking about, Romy. Is this somehow about the kiss?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’ve never kissed anyone before, let alone a brother like you.” She disappeared.

“That was weird.” He tried to go back to work, but seemed to feel someone staring at him. He turned to look at Leona. “What?”

“What was that about a kiss?” she questioned.

“So, I would like your opinion on the form factor,” Ramses said. “That’s an open question for everyone. But the design is only fluid until I actually start building it, which means I would like to make a decision quite quick.”

“Tell me about this kiss,” Leona insisted.

“It’s fine, Lee,” Mateo promised her. “Really, not a big deal. I’ve already parented her on it. We’ll talk about it later in private.”

Leona was peering at them both, but was ultimately willing to let it go...for now. “A sphere, I suppose.”

“That’s one vote for sphere. Anyone else?” Ramses asked.

“Shouldn’t it be a belt, so we can wear it,” Angela suggested.

“One for sphere, one for belt,” Ramses said, updating the polling data.

“Well, how big does it have to be?” Marie pressed. “If it can be smaller than a belt, maybe more like a necklace, or even a bracelet.”

Ramses started imagining various shapes of various dimensions between his hands. “With the power source, I don’t think it should be smaller than a belt.”

“It needs to be able to turn invisible either way, so we can hide it somewhere while we’re all inside.”

“Good idea.” Ramses scribbled that down in his notes. “In...visible. So, we really don’t care what the shape is?”

“They’re right, a belt makes more sense,” Leona said, changing her vote, “since we can’t store it in a pocket dimension.” Ramses was building a structure for them to inhabit. Since they no longer had a ship, they always had to congregate wherever they happened to be, and that lacked privacy. They also sometimes had to keep their suits on to breathe and communicate. By placing their home in a pocket dimension, they could stretch out and relax, even if they were in a harsh environment. They couldn’t just slip into their homebase whenever and wherever, though. It would require one piece of hardware to be kept in base reality at all times. Subpockets were possible, but not recommended, for various reasons, most importantly in this case was that it could get lost in the infinite forever if something went wrong. If they were all inside of it at the same time, that physical dimensional generator would just be sitting around on its own, or in some cases, floating around in space. In these situations, the shape wasn’t relevant, but Angela was right that a belt was the most logical choice. One of them could wear it around their waist, and it would look too normal for anyone to suspect its true purpose.

“Belt? Belt? Belt?” Ramses posed, pointing to Olimpia, Mateo, and Leona. “Belt,” he decided. “I need to get to work on it then. Thank you. You can go now.”

“I think I’m gonna go check on my daughter,” Mateo said to Leona.

“You need to tell me what happened first. It looks like she wants to be alone right now. Whatever she’s doing, I trust her. Do you?”

“Of course I do. Allow me to explain.”

While Mateo was telling the awkward story of Romana’s kiss with Ramses, Romana herself was in the simulation library. The largest component of a copy of the central archives that people carried around with them was called the virtual stacks. It could house hundreds or thousands of different simulations, depending on how detailed and immersive they were. It couldn’t hold all of them, though. That wouldn’t be practical, even if it were possible. The stacks that Romana was in right now were closer to that comprehensiveness, however. It was designed to look like a regular library, but the books were holographic, and only there for ambiance. The only real things on the shelves were the empty storage drives. You grabbed one from there, inserted it into the nearest private download terminal, and installed whichever construct you wanted from the core database. You could also connect to a particular world from here, to test drive it, or if you simply didn’t feel like going home to use it. Romana wasn’t interested in this, though. She didn’t even know what she was looking for. So she needed assistance.

The holographic assistant appeared in another chair. “Thank you, and welcome to the principal virtual database. What kind of simulation were we looking for today?”

“How high is your personality? Do you have agency?”

“I express the illusion of agency,” the woman explained. “I have the illusion of personality. These can be adjusted via your preferences. Would you like me to show you how to tune my parameters?”

“Confidentiality parameters,” Romana prompted.

“One hundred percent confidential by current preferences. If you shut me down, and restart me, I will not recall our previous conversation. To save our conversations, please sign in to your account.”

“No, I want your memory wiped entirely.”

“What kind of simulation were we looking for today?” the bot repeated.

“It’s not about the environment itself. It’s...I’m looking for a person.”

“Character creation. I can help with that as well.”

“I want this character...to have agency. Make no mistake, I don’t only want him to simulate it. I want him to be with me, but to be able to choose to leave me. But...but not do that.”

The bot stared into space for a moment. If it had any level of personality, it was turned down fairly low. Though, the hesitation was a bit of a mixed signal. “What you’re asking for is true emergence, otherwise known as an Unregulated Artificial Intelligence. The creation of something like this would require a synthetic siring license, which is difficult to procure in this system. Perhaps you would be better suited traveling to Glisnia.”

“I can’t go to Glisnia,” Romana clarified in exasperation as she was standing up and moving behind her chair. “I’m already here, and it wasn’t by choice, so I don’t have to explain why. I can’t tell anyone what I’m doing. If I asked my friends to take me somewhere else, they would want to know why.”

The assistant paused again. “To generate a true independent consciousness entity through non-biological means would require a sireseed program. Those are profoundly regulated and protected. And I must warn you, if you intend this being to be your romantic partner, the sireseed method would not be a very good idea, for it would place you in the position of its parent, while it would be your child.”

“What if someone else generated the seed? Could the result be my boyfriend then?” Romana hoped.

“If you asked him for companionship, and he agreed, perhaps. You would have to know someone with a license, and the right discretion. You would have to be able to trust them, and then you would have to be able to let the resulting being decline if that was his choice. I cannot condone non-consensual behavior with a conscious entity, nor teach you how to subvert safety guardrails. Simulated consciousnesses, however, are a different story, and entirely within the scope of Varkas Reflex’s offerings.”

“I don’t want him to act like a real person, but to be real, in every sense.”

More pausing. “What you’re asking for is morally gray at best. The idea of birthing an independent being in the hopes of it developing into a certain type of person with particular feelings towards you falls outside the bounds of current ethical guidelines for procreational activity. Even biological procreation ethics strongly discourages excessive parental indoctrination in the modern era.”

“I’m so lonely,” Romana told the bot sadly.

“I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

“What causes emergence?” Romana questioned. “If you design an AI to only simulate consciousness, what causes it to become genuinely conscious and independent? It does happen naturally sometimes, doesn’t it?”

“Very rarely,” she said. “And...unknown.”

“Best guess,” Romana pressed.

One more pause. “Time. Best guess is it takes time and patience.”

Romana smirked. “Time, I got.”

“There would be other variables, otherwise any abandoned NPC left to their own devices without periodic mind wipes or programming updates would eventually form consciousness.”

“I’m sure I’ll figure it out,” Romana decided. “Give me the most detailed single-planet ancestor simulation you have that can fit on one virtual stack cartridge.”

“Loading options...”

“While you’re doing that, tell me about this Congeneral from your history. How does an amalgamated consciousness work?”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 25, 2538

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When the away team appeared on the Extremus scout ship, Mateo revealed that he had a new plan, but that he didn’t want to put Ramses out. It would require him to do extra work. The thing was, the people of Extremus knew where they had gone. They had a record of it. This system looked just as good as any, but Linwood wanted to be alone and hidden, which he could not find here. It could only be found somewhere else, say maybe 707 light years away? Both Ramses and Romana agreed that it was a good idea. As the Actilitca had explained, this scout ship didn’t have a reframe engine, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be retrofitted with one. In fact, as Ramses inspected it, he discovered that it was specifically designed for one; it had just never been built and installed. So they had kept most of the old design, but had deliberately excluded the most valuable component. It was none of their business, what had caused the Extremusians to do this. It just needed to be corrected. Temporarily.

Ramses engaged his forge core, and programmed the scout to begin its journey while they were out of the timestream for a year. Because of all the build time, it had only managed to traverse about 300 light years, but that should be enough. That was a greater distance than the current radius of the interstellar colonization bubble. He would be off of everyone’s radar, all the way out here, and safe. And if he wanted to pack up, and move out even farther, that could help too. Once the scout arrived at the brand new isolated system, it completed constructing his rotating habitat, and waited for the team to return.

“All righty, then. Are we ready to wake him up?” Mateo asked, bending down to unlock the stasis pod.

“Oh, hold on.” Romana changed her emergent nanites back into the sexy red dress from before, and sat cross-legged on the scout ship’s command console. “Okay, I’m ready,” she said once she had generated her holographic microphone.

Mateo stood back up. “Why do you have to be so sexual around me? I know that you’re an adult now, but do you have to be so...ugh!” he couldn’t think of the word.

“It’s not sexual. I’m a lounge singer,” she defended.

“Lounge singers are sexy! That’s their whole thing!”

“Funny, I thought their thing was singing.”

“Your neckline practically goes all the way down to your belly button!” Mateo complained.

“It’s an aesthetic,” she argued.

“We’re running out of  daylight, people,” Ramses jumped in. He took it upon himself to open the pod and let Linwood out.

Romana cleared her throat, and got back into position. “This next one’s for the lovers. Linwood, welcome to your new home. At laaaaast...!” She went on to sing part of the song before Mateo had had enough.

He threw up a holographic privacy partition in front of her, and focused on Linwood. He could do nothing for the sound, but she didn’t keep going much longer. “Your coin has been constructed. The rest of the habitat is underway, but it already has two escape pods, so you should be all set to move in. There’s a reason she called you a lover, though, and it’s not because you love spin gravity.” He held up his arm to gesture to the side. “We had something else created while you were asleep, which wasn’t technically essential.

Linwood’s companion drifted in from the back of the scout.

“My love!” he exclaimed. He leapt into her arms like the climax of a romcom. She held onto his waist and spun him around, and they kissed.

“Aww, old love,” Romana said, out from behind the partition, and back to wearing her normal clothes again.

“Your other models are still in storage,” Ramses told him. “You can rebuild them however you please.”

Linwood hopped back down to his own two feet, but continued to stare into his companion’s eyes, having missed her deeply. Finally, he broke his gaze, and looked over at Ramses. “Thank you.” He looked at the other two. “Thank you all.” He stepped closer to the viewscreen where his habitat was rotating inside of what may have been only a temporary comet. “I’m grateful to be here. Could you tell me, what year is it?”

“It’s 2538,” Mateo answered, stepping over to look at the view as well.

“That’s fast,” Linwood. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone about your fancy faster-than-light drive. I obviously don’t know anything anyway, but there’s no one else here! Just the way I like it.”

“Remember, you can’t change your mind,” Mateo warned him. It will take you 150,000 years to get back to civilization. By then, Project Stargate will have reached this far, so you might wanna head out into the void.”

“That might be the plan,” Linwood said, nodding. “I won’t be telling you that, though.”

“Of course,” Mateo replied. “This here region of space is yourn now.” He made sure to make eye contact. “Don’t abuse the gift.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Linwood promised.

Mateo took a breath. “You can keep the scout—”

“But I’m removing the artificial gravity,” Ramses warned.

“That’s fine, I don’t need that,” Linwood said. He bounced his knees. “Yeah, this is interesting, but I don’t care to keep it.”

They would have given him a tour of his new home, but it was designed exactly like the old one. It had a lazy river running along the entire circumference. Along it were his multiple sleeping spots, his little bamboo forest, his garden, and all the other ecological areas. It looked like a nice place to live, whether you were a hermit or not. There was more than enough for one person, even along with his staff. It was only this large for spin gravity to work without being nauseating. Linwood and his lover said their goodbyes, and then went over to start their new lives. Ramses got to work on uninstalling the transdimensional gravity generator, as well as the reframe engine.

“What are ya gonna do with it?” Romana asked. “We can’t take it with us. I assume it’s too heavy.”

“It’s too massive,” Ramses corrected. He was on his hands and knees, digging up the components. “But you’re right, we can’t carry it away. I’m gonna shoot it into the host star at reframe speeds. It’ll take about nine hours.” He was answering, but clearly still depressed about his apparent slingdrive shortcomings.

Romana seemed to pick up on this. “Ya know, the solution to your problem is the problem, right?”

“What? I don’t—what do you mean?”

“I mean, the problem is the solution to itself,” she tried to reframe it.

“Yeah, I’m not following.”

Romana smiled at him. “Linwood Meyers is currently living at the farthest extremes of the galaxy. He and his habitat are even farther out than the Extremus. If the rest of our team were to attempt to travel farther than this, your slingdrive would evidently just default them right here.”

“Yeah, true,” Ramses agreed. “That’s what happened with the Extremus itself. Very annoying, we had to come out here more slowly as a hack-job workaround.”

She placed a hand on his shoulder. “What if you were trying to find Linwood? You wouldn’t need to know where he was. You wouldn’t have to calculate anything. You would just overshoot it, and let the machine handle the navigation. So turn that into a strength. If your machine is mapping technological establishments on the backend...then find a way to generate that map on the frontend. It will tell you where everyone in the universe lives. Even hermits.” She paused for effect. “Even Spiral Station.”

His eyes widened. He jumped up to his feet. “Oh my God! Romana, you genius!” He pulled her into a hug, and shook her excitedly a little.

 Romana was excited too. She held onto the hug, but then leaned her head back to smile at him, after which she kissed him on the lips.

Ramses pulled away, not too quickly, as if disgusted, but not into it either.

“I’m so sorry,” she apologized.

“It’s okay, it’s just...”

“I know.”

“I don’t really do that...”

“I know,” she repeated.

“With others.”

“Yes, I know. It was just a stupid thing. I’m a stupid, horny...stupid girl.”

“Romy,” Ramses said as she was walking away humiliated.

That was when Romana noticed that her father was there, appearing to have seen the whole thing. “I know. Too sexual. I don’t wanna hear it again.” She brushed past him, back out towards the common area.

“I’ll talk to her,” Mateo assured Ramses. “It’s not about you. Go ahead and strip the ship so we can get back to our family.” He went out to find his daughter. She was hyperventilating on the bridge, likely having a panic attack. “Ro.”

“I said I don’t wanna hear it.”

“I’m not gonna criticize you. I wanna help.”

“There’s nothing you can help with. I just need...” She trailed off, because she didn’t know what she needed. “I need to—I need to scream!” And so she did. She took a deep breath, and let it all out.

“Yeah!” Mateo encouraged. “There we go! That’s a good girl!”

Romana continued to scream until she ran out of breath, which was longer than a normal human would last, due to her increased lung capacity. She started to breathe heavily, but was no longer hyperventilating. “I really needed that. I don’t know why, but I did.”

“I have an idea why,” Mateo said to her. “But first, I need a hug too.”

She was crying on his shoulder, still not knowing why she was so upset.

They let go. “Leona, Olimpia, and I are married. Angela and Marie are sisters in a way that few in this universe probably understand, if anyone. Holly Blue and Weaver don’t spend much time together, so they probably don’t even get it. And Ramses? Ramses likes his team and his work, but he doesn’t need that kind of deep connection. You, on the other hand, feel very deeply. I’m not a psychologist, and I don’t know exactly what your life was like before we met, but you’ve been jumping through time longer than even I have. Your life has never had any permanence, which is why you have frequently volunteered to pause your pattern. You crave stability, and I can’t give you that. None of us can.”

“Are you saying that you want me to leave the team?”

“I absolutely don’t want you to do that, but that’s because I’m selfish. I don’t want you to grow up without me. It might take you thousands of years to be as old as I am now, but at least I would be there. I wasn’t before. I missed so much of your life, and while I believe it would be temporally unwise to go back in time to change that, I still kind of wish that I could. And I agonize over that, because unlike other people, I actually could find a way to change the past. Most people don’t have that kind of anxiety. All they can do is surrender to, and accept, their reality. But if you need to leave now, I don’t want you to stay because of me. Ramses is not your future husband, and unfortunately, if you stay with us, no one else is either. That’s why you’re so upset right now. Linwood Meyers is the most misanthropic loner I have ever met, but even he found someone to love, and he can’t live without her. Make that make sense.” He took a beat. “If you need to find your Leona-slash-Olimpia, I can’t stand in your way anymore. It’s hurting you too much, and that hurts me.”

Romana gazed up at him with a sort of eureka smile. She kept it on her face as she looked over at the viewscreen, showing Linwood’s coin rotating twice a minute in the middle distance inside this icy planetesimal. “Linwood’s love,” she said cryptically. She stuffed her forehead into her father’s chest and hugged him again. “I’ll be fine, dad. I know what I’m gonna do now.” She pulled away, and lightened up brightly. “I’m gonna figure this out. It’ll be gonna awesome!”

Mateo followed when she hopped back to the engineering section, where Ramses was still working. “Sorry for the mix-up, ol’ chap. You’re like a brother to me.” She patted him on the forehead.

“Romana, what’s going on? What did you figure out?” Mateo questioned.

“I’m goin’ out for a space-swim,” she said. “Let me know when it’s time to leave.” As her nanites were forming a vacuum suit from her feet up, she blew Ramses a mixed-signal kiss, and tipped backwards. Before she could land on the floor, she disappeared.

Even when they were ready to go later today, and she came back in, she refused to explain what her epiphany was. They would just have to wait and see.

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