The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 10, 2462

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Three years ago, Leona and Marie finally escaped the Angry Fifth Divisioner’s ship, and returned naked to the kasma. Leona asked Marie to insert the data crystal into the interface drawer on her PRU, which allowed her to download the information, and display it on her HUD. She began to look through the technical specifications for the machine that could thicken the membrane of a universe, and also the skeleton key that would allow a ship to pass safely through it, despite its great thickness. She had spent the last three days studying the manual. They were surviving on the recycled air and water contained in the pocket dimension inside of their PRUs. They were just stuck here in the equilibrium of the kasma for now, because there was no way to travel to one universe, or the other. She had the means to understand the skeleton key, but no way to construct one for themselves. “Quintessence!”

“Eureka!” Marie replied. She had spent this time reading some of the books stored in her helmet, because there was no way she was grasping the high level mathematical concepts that Leona was working on. It was taking her longer than it should have to finish Rules for Fake Girlfriends due to all these interruptions.

Leona laughed. “Sorry again. I didn’t mean to say that out loud. It’s just that Ramses is gonna love this stuff. Up until now, we’ve just been thinking of the universe as being contained by a membrane. That’s how brane cosmology works. But we never really knew what this membrane was made out of, just that you have to break through it if you want to travel through the bulk. Now we know that it’s called quintessence. For centuries, scientists have referred to it as dark matter, because we didn’t know what it was. But here it is. It’s what’s responsible for the repulsive fifth fundamental force, and explains why bulk travel is so difficult. It’s like trying to place two positively charged electromagnets together, except instead of being separated by an EM field, it’s a quintessential field.”

“Oh, that?” Marie began to joke. “I’ve always known about quintessence. You should have just asked.

“Lol. Some have theorized that quintessence is what explains dark energy, instead of dark matter, but we know that dark energy is just bulk energy that has leaked into our universe to become vacuum energy, and the work that it completes is what explains the accelerating expansion of the universe. These three things are just the same thing in different states, like the difference between a meteoroid, a meteor, and a meteorite.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t matter how much you try to explain it to me, or how many analogies you try to use, I’m not gonna understand it. All I need to know is can it get us out of the kasma?”

“Yes,” Leona replied.

“What? Really?” Marie didn’t expect to get such a good answer.

“Yes, because quintessence repulses baryonic from within its field. We may not be able to get out, but we can go back in just fine. That’s what lets bulk energy leak inside in the first place. If it didn’t, the universe would be static.”

“Oh. Well, then...let’s go.”

“We can’t.”

“You just said that we could,” Marie reminded her.

“We can’t...yet. What is the one thing that’s more powerful than bulk energy, or quintessence?”

“I’m sorry, why do you think that I can answer that question?”

“The answer is temporal energy. Now, a normal person—or even a choosing one—will not usually ever have enough temporal energy to disrupt the quintessential field in order to pass through the membrane, but you and I are special. Every single day, for a few seconds, our bodies overload on the stuff, and generate a burst of energy that sends us forward in time. That’s one advantage that salmon have over choosers. We don’t have to build the energy ourselves. It always comes to us.”

“But you’re not a salmon anymore. Tamerlane Pryce just recreated your pattern.”

“I was never technically salmon, but the fact holds true for us, even after what Pryce did when he gave us our new bodies, and what Ramses did when he upgraded us twice after that. Come midnight central, we’ll release enough temporal energy to break though. Now, if we don’t actually try to break through, then we won’t. It would be like being strong enough to open a door, but still not reaching for the doorknob—”

“What did I say about your analogies?”

“Teleportation. At exactly midnight, teleport into the universe. That’s what we’ve been missing; timing.”

“Okay. Good.” Marie looked at her wrist display. “That should be just enough time to finish my book.”

“All right.” Leona closed her eyes, not to sleep, but to give her brain a short break from all this research.

“Wait.” Marie stopped reading. “Which universe are we going into?”

“Whichever one is closer.”

“Which one is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t?”

“There aren’t any landmarks out here, it’s easy to get turned around. Based on Ramses’ modifications to our onboard sensors, I can tell you that we are sufficiently near the outside of the nearest membrane, but I couldn’t tell you which one it is. It’s our only hope, though. If it’s not the one we want, we don’t have time to teleport to the other side of the kasma, even if we knew which direction that was. Besides, which one do you wanna go to? They both contain friends who can help us get back to Stoutverse, but this task will be no easier from one than the other.”

“True. Okay. Back to my book.” She literally turned herself away to concentrate.

About an hour later, midnight struck, and they jumped to the other side of the year, and the other side of the membrane. Now they were in a vacuum, rather than the kasma. They could feel themselves in freefall, and could see stars all around them. They still had no clue where they were, but they could see a host star relatively close in the distance, so they began to teleport towards it little by little, hoping to spot a rocky celestial object to land on. The armor module of the IMS was equipped with mechanical assistance, which made movement less fatiguing than earlier models of spacesuits, but they were still tiring to use for an extended period of time. They were both ready to be locked down by gravity again. That was how humans evolved, and not even Ramses’ upgraded substrates were immune to the negative effects of microgravity, or equilibrium.

There it was, a planet, but there was more to it. Their suits also detected friends nearby. Mateo and Angela were here already. What a lovely coincidence. Leona pinpointed their exact location on the planet, and made one final jump. “Boo!”

“I saw you coming,” Mateo said. That made sense. His suit had its own sensors.

Marie and Angela tried to give each other a hug, but it wasn’t particularly satisfying with their armor modules on. “Report,” Angela said after they gave up.

The two parties caught each other up on everything they had been through since they parted ways for their respective missions. They hadn’t known how they were going to come back together, but they had been confident that it would turn out to be something like this; totally coincidental, and barely within their control. Well, this was only the first step out of three, and the easiest one, at that. Their next order of business would be figuring out how to get Past!Mateo back to where he needed to be. Only then could they find a way back to their own place in Stoutverse. But first, one of the Maramon had something to say about it.

“Now that you’re here, you can help us.” It was the guy who had genetically engineered the new human-Mar hybrids. He was still not happy that Mateo had spirited him away to this planet without even trying to transport his gestational pod too.

“Help you with what?” Leona asked.

Mateo smiled, glad to have their group’s leader back, if only to be the bad guy in situations such as this.

“My equipment. Your husband made me leave it on the moon. I must have it returned to me. I am to understand that your carrying capacity is roughly 300 kilograms. Being 800 K-G in mass, the four of you should, therefore, be able to teleport it together, even with your suits.”

Leona stared at him for a moment. “I’m not doing that.”

“You must!” the Maramon insisted.

“Actually, I must not. This is not my universe, it is not my decision. If you would like help in this regard, you will have to take it up with Hogarth Pudeyonavic, or perhaps Ellie Underhill. It has nothing to do with us. You don’t need teleporters, you need authorization. I’m afraid that this conversation is now over, so speak of it no further.” She knew that he was just going to keep hounding her about it, so the longer she waited to put her foot down, the harder it was going to be to land it flat upon the ground.

“I have what you seek,” the Maramon claimed vaguely.

“What does that mean?” Leona asked.

“Well, the truth is that I do not have it in my possession, but I know where you can find it. If you retrieve my pod from the moon, I will tell you where to go.”

“Where to go...for what?” he obviously could be lying, so in order for her to even consider trusting him, she had to know that they were at least on the same page.

“The timonite. That’s what you came here for, right? You expected to find it in that cave in the Third Rail, but it was nowhere to be found, was it? That’s because you weren’t looking in the right place.”

Past!Mateo took a step towards him. “Are you lying just to get what you want?”

He laughed. “I could never. You’re Team Matic. You famously don’t take kindly to betrayal. I could never send you far enough away from me that you could not find a way to return, and exact your revenge upon me. I speak the truth. In fact, as a sign of good faith, I will give you a hint.”

“Okay, go ahead,” Future!Mateo urged.

“No. The hint comes after you agree, but before you get me my pod. Once you do get the pod, then you get the exact location.”

Past!Mateo gave the rest of the team puppy dog eyes. “Please.”

“You don’t have to convince us that you need it,” Marie told him. “We already know that you do. We were there, remember? Our reluctance in this is helping him, and in trusting that he’s telling us the truth.”

“I am,” the Maramon said. “If I didn’t have this leverage, I would probably just threaten one of your lives to coerce the others.”

“Fair enough,” Leona decided. “We agree to help. Where is the timonite?”

He took a breath, and prepared for the big reveal. “Verdemus.”

“Is that a band, errr...?” Past!Mateo joked, but then he looked at everyone else’s face. No one was surprised to hear this. “Oh, you’ve heard of it?”

“Yes,” Leona answered. She took Past!Mateo’s hand in hers, and Angela’s in the other. Angela then took Future!Mateo’s, who took Marie’s, who took Past!Mateo’s to complete the circle. They did the same thing around the gestational pod once they were on the moon, and transported it down to the planet.

“Okay, you have your little pod,” Future!Mateo said to the Maramon. “Now where exactly is the timonite on Verdemus?”

“The Miracle Plains,” he replied, almost as if it should be obvious. “Don’t worry, the locals will know what you’re talking about. But you better hurry, they’re set to abandon the whole planet soonly.”

Angela sighed. “How the hell are we going to get all the way to Veremus? We can’t even get out of this universe.”

“Quintessence!” Marie shouts, echoing Leona from earlier.

Leona chuckled. “I’ll need time, but uh, I’ll build something. It could take a couple of years to complete construction.”

“There’s no way to be sure that it remains undisturbed during our interim years,” Future!Mateo lamented

“I’ll set up a lab in secret.” She reached over and took a dish of starter nanites out of Marie’s PRU. Then she looked up at the Maramon. “If any of you find it, and disturb it, while we’re gone, I cannot guarantee your safety.”

“We’ll leave it alone,” he promised to the best of his ability.

While she buckled down to make a plan to build a temporary ship equipped with what could now be called a quintessential skeleton key, the rest of the team started to teleport kind of randomly around the planet to search for a good spot to set up a new lab. It had to be rich in minerals, so the nanites would have a lot to feed on, and preferably somewhere beautiful, so they could return to a pleasant scenery. But of course, it had to be remote, and hard to find. They could not trust the Maramon, nor their hybrids. They returned with several candidates each for Leona to inspect for herself. She ultimately chose one of Past!Mateo’s picks. It was inside of a sea cave that looked like something that could be found on the rocky beaches of Iceland.

Leona programmed the nanites to begin building the ship, as well as the deuterium harvester in the ocean to power it. The design of the vessel was based on the shuttle that was already built for the Iman Vellani proper, since it was readily available in the database, but with less cabin room, to accommodate the skeleton key. When they came back a year later, it was done, but occupied by one of the hybrids.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: February 3, 2399

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Leona is in her office, doing her multitasking thing, but this time, she’s not trying to steal from the world governments. She’s only trying to help by making this the best planetary defense system in six realities. Right now, the biggest issue is power generation. It doesn’t matter how fast they build all these fantastic structures, producing and storing energy takes time. You can always cultivate more of it with more time. Aldona is an expert in antimatter production, which is a field of research that Leona knows relatively little about. The AOC runs on the stuff. She knows how to handle the storage pods, load them, and maintain the equipment. But she’s never had to make the antiparticles herself. She’s never even seen a power plant before.

Antimatter is, as the name would suggest, and to put it simply, the opposite of matter. When a particle and antiparticle meet, they annihilate each other. Since the universe is made of matter, there’s unsurprisingly not enough of the other kind around. It doesn’t last long; it can’t. It will take a culture decades to figure out how to do it, and that’s after decades of using other, completely unrelated power sources, like fossil fuels and renewables. It’s extremely powerful in small quantities, but requires a great deal of infrastructure. Aldona can’t figure out how to make it happen in time, which is a problem. Nuclear fusion is good enough for a defense system that doesn’t have to do anything, but once a serious force tests it, that whole system could fall apart. If an enemy were to bombard their weakest link with fodder, that part of the grid would run out of juice quickly, like the health bar for a video game character who’s underwater.

“What about the Fourth Quadrant?” Leona asks.

“We’re working closely with them,” Aldona answers. They’re in less danger, because the Kansas City bubble is virtually impenetrable on its own, and there’s a way to evacuate the other islands into it, but we’re still going to help.”

“No, I’m talking about power. Antimatter is better than fusion, but what’s better than antimatter?”

“Uhh...a blackhole drive?”

“In a way, yes, but you don’t need to capture a black hole, not when you’re one of us,” Leona says.

“I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”

“Temporal energy,” Leona explains. “It’s what powers the Novus Metro in the Fourth Quadrant. At least, it did at one point. Time moves at a different speed as the main sequence, so they steal the energy that the discrepancy releases, like static from your socks on the carpet. We can use that, instead of half-assing the construction of antimatter plants, just to get them completed in time.”

“Are you feeling okay?” Aldona questions. “You look—forgive me—exhausted.”

She is exhausted, but there is nothing she can do to change that. Too many people are involved; she can’t just do whatever she wants. She’s never been responsible for an entire world. All those people, and more, are relying on her to make this happen. “That’s not the point, I’m not making this up. Let me speak to someone in Novus Metro.”

“I’ll see what I can do, but this goes beyond my understanding. What would you even call something like that?”

“I believe they ended up going with temporal dynamo.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: Boltzmann Brane

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The men continued to struggle against each other. Mateo and the team’s visions started coming back to them until it was clear enough for them to see that most of them didn’t recognize the fighters. Mateo did. One was part of Lucius’ group in the universe where he got his soul back. The other only looked familiar, but he couldn’t place him. He did get the feeling that he wasn’t a good guy, though.

“Listen, I know we don’t know each other yet,” Lucius said, sort of contradicting himself, “but could you help us get this guy out the airlock?”

“It’s not an airlock,” his friend said. Man, what was his name?

“Whatever.”

“Uhhhhh...okay,” Mateo said. He looked like a fifteen-year-old, but Ramses built his body to be stronger than the average person, so he didn’t find it too difficult to help.

“Are you freakin’ serious?” the bad man cried. “Stop, you son of a bitch! Get me—no! Argh!” The other dude was right. It wasn’t an airlock. They didn’t place him in another room, and then close the doors between them before opening a set of outer doors. They just threw him directly into the void. He was caught in some kind of current, and pulled away before he could grasp onto anything.

Lucius’ friend shut the door again. “Thanks, Mateo.”

“How do I know him?”

The friend sighed, and thought about it for a moment. “Oh, you were there. Yeah, when Cain and I were sent off on our respective missions, you were in the room.”

Mateo tilted his lizard brain.

“On Gatewood,” he continued. “When you were trying to get the Ansutahan humans safely across the threshold?”

“Oh, yeah!” Mateo said, remembering. “Oh...yeah.”

“Don’t worry,” Lucius comforted, “this one is good now...we think.”

“It’s complicated,” the other guy—Abel; his name was Abel—said.

“What also must be complicated,” Lucius began, “is how you remember any of this when you’re barely out of diapers. This all happened when you were adults.”

“We are adults,” Leona explained. “We just had to move into younger bodies.”

Lucius nodded. “I see. Well, you wanna come back to the other room, and meet with the rest of us, or...?”

“I’m afraid he doesn’t have time for that,” came a voice from behind the team. It was someone they hadn’t seen in a very long time, and never knew all that well. Back when Arcadia Preston was forcing Mateo and Leona to plan their wedding before they were ready, many of their guests arrived via The Crossover. It was a special machine that could travel between universes, and it was larger than anyone knew. It even included a hotel, which this man here was apparently responsible for. They just called him Bell.

“Bell,” Leona said.

“Yes, that’s me. Have we met?”

“Maybe not yet for you.”

“Okay,” Bell said. “Well, like I was saying—”

“Before you explain,” Mateo began, “could you tell us your real name? I feel weird not knowing it.”

“It’s Apothem Sarkisyan,” he answered.

“Sarkisyan. Are you related to a Dodeka?” Leona asked.

“She’s my sister.”

“Running hotels must run in the family.”

“It really doesn’t,” Apothem said bluntly. “Anyway, Lucius..Abel, thank you. You can go now.”

“What do you want with them?” Lucius asked, worried about his friends.

“I assure you that I will take great care of them. They are all on the guestlist.”

“The guestlist for what?” Lucius pressed.

“Come on,” Abel urges, taking Lucius by the upper arm. “It’s fine. It’s not nefarious. It is a great honor. I still don’t know if I’m on the list.”

“Don’t tell anyone else we’re here,” Apothem warned.

“Of course not,” Abel replied as they were stepping away.

“The guestlist for what?” Angela echoed.

“You have been selected to witness the birth of a Boltzmann Brane.”

“Are you serious?” Ramses questioned with great interest. “They’re real?”

“This one is,” Apothem confirmed.

“Wait, where’s Medavorken?” Olimpia asked.

“He’s on his own path,” Apothem claimed. “Follow me.” He led them down the corridors, into what Mateo recognized as a black box theatre. Except instead of a stage, the couple hundred or so seats were angled towards a large window to the equilibrium space outside. “Welcome...to The Stage,” he said proudly.

“So this is a show?” Olimpia asked.

“The greatest show this side of the bulkverse,” Apothem said.

“Did you bring us here?” Leona asked.

“No, but I knew you were coming, because like I said, you’re on the list. And as our first guests, you shall have the privilege of the first row.”

“When does it begin?” Marie asked.

Apothem stood up straighter, and looked at her. Then he looked over at Angela. “Which one of you is Angela Walton?”

Mateo interrupted before Marie could point to her alternate self. “They both are.”

Apothem pulled at an embellishment on his uniform sleeve, which revealed a scroll of e-paper. He studied it for a moment. “One name, one person...” He looked up to the group, and added, “one ticket.”

“One of them can have mine,” Mateo volunteered.

“You don’t have to do that,” Marie said with unwarranted shame. “I’m the temporal intruder. I’ll recuse myself.”

“No,” Mateo insisted. “I don’t know what this is we’re supposed to see, but I’m sure I’ll get little out of it.”

“It’s the spontaneous emergence of an ordered intelligence in the vastness of infinite spacetime due to random fluctuations in a balanced thermodynamic state,” Ramses explained poorly.

“Huh?”

“It’s a person who just suddenly exists due to the crazy amounts of time that have passed, rather than as the result of some logical series of causal events,” Leona translated, though even that was a little much. “But he doesn’t mean a Botlzmann brain as in B-R-A-I-N, do you? You mean B-R-A-N-E, which isn’t a person, but a universe?”

“It’s both,” Apothem disclosed.

“Hot damn,” Ramses said, which didn’t sound like him at all.

“The tickets are transferable,” Apothem went on, “but there are no plus ones, no extra seats, no double bookings, no waitlist. We invited a certain number of people, and since time doesn’t matter here, we don’t worry about whether everyone can make it. Every one of the two hundred and sixteen guests will make it, and they’ll arrive sometime in the next hour, from our perspective. The six of you will have to work it out amongst yourselves, but there is no loophole.”

“They can have my seat.” It was Gavix Henderson, an immortal from another universe who was present, not only at Mateo and Leona’s wedding, but also their engagement party a year prior.

“Sir, you don’t have to do that,” Apothem said.

“You and I both know that this event is not a rarity,” Gavix said to him. “It’s just easier for the humanoid mind to comprehend this particular instance in three dimensions. I’ve seen it before, and I’m sure I’ll see it again.”

“Very well,” Apothem acquiesces. “You may exit.”

“Thank you for this,” Mateo calls up to Gavix, embarrassed for having let him get so far before he remembered.

“Yes, thank you,” Marie echoed, since it was she who would be taking the seat.

“Just invite me to that fancy weddin’ o’ yours,” he returned, not turning around.

“We saw you there,” Leona said.

“Nah, not that one.” He rounded the corner without another word.

It was hard to describe what it was Marie would have missed. No, literally, it was hard to describe. It wasn’t exactly an explosion, which was how scientists back home had always described the big bang. But was this even the same thing, or entirely different? Mateo was at one end of their group, sitting right next to a clearly intelligent and knowledgeable individual, who explained a little more about what they were witnessing. Like stars and planets coming together particle by particle, chunk by chunk, and collapsing into their gravitational forces, something called bulk energy was becoming so hot and dense that it was transforming itself into solid matter. So it was less of an explosion, and more an implosion, though he said that this made perfect sense, because the explosion would be seen as such from inside the universe in question. But from out here, all that energy and matter had to come from what we would consider a low entropy state. This was evidently the greatest mystery in his field of brane cosmology. In a given universe, entropy increases, so why does it happen in the reverse in the outer bulkverse? Why does it operate so differently from the metacelestial objects that it creates? And why, from their puny human eyes, does each one look like a knife?

Well, Mateo had trouble following the man’s lecture, but it was still fun, and made a lot of sense while he was saying it. The team was grateful for having been around to witness such a thing. Apparently, like Gavix said, branes form like this all the time. His own did at some point, as did everyone else’s, but dimensionally speaking, they were all like partial eclipses, while this was a full eclipse, as seen from their position in the greater cosmos. After it was sufficiently over, the crowd began to stand, and move over towards the refreshments, where they could get to know one another.

There didn’t seem to be anything they all had in common. Some were scientists too, but others were just regular people. Some of them already knew about these other branes before today, but some hadn’t heard of any of it. Why and how they were chosen was another mystery their new friend couldn’t explain. The team itself was pretty special, but only within the context of their own pocket of that bulkverse. Out here, they were small fish in an infinite ocean.

“I don’t know of anyone in my universe who could help ya with that,” said an older gentleman by the desserts. He had a thick southern accent, and didn’t look anyone in the eye. This wasn’t out of a superiority complex, but more like his eyes would wander around, and he would forget where exactly he was meant to be directing his words. “I tell you, maybe that genie over there could help ya. Her special thing is she refused to grant anybody any wishes on her world, which is why the rest of the genie council, or whatever, sort of exiled her.”

“Why would she help us if her defining characteristic is that she doesn’t help people?” Leona reasoned.

The old man chuckled with delight. “Yeah, I guess yer right ‘bout that.” He took another swig from his flask. “I’m such a dumbass sometimes. By the way, drinkin’s legal on my planet. I feel I hafta say that, cuz some people think it’s weird.”

“It’s legal in ours,” Mateo said.

“Oh.” He widened his eyes, and presented the flask.

“No, thank you.”

“Aright.” He shrugged his cheeks as if to say your loss.

“Well, it was nice meeting you,” Angela said to him, gracefully stepping away. The others followed like magnets. “Seemed too eager to give children alcohol,” she said once they were out of earshot.

“We told him we weren’t as young as we look,” Olimpia reminded her.

“I know, but a normal person would still hesitate to believe it, let alone act on it.”

“What is normal?” asked a woman they hadn’t noticed before. It was Thack Natalie Collins of voldisilaverse.

“Miss Collins,” Mateo said. “It’s nice to meet you in person.”

“Likewise.” She shook everyone’s hands.

“Wait, you put us on the list, didn’t you?” Mateo guessed.

Thack sighed. “It was either this, or have you join the Newtonian Expats on their adventures. I wanted to give you a break. I know you reconnect with them in the future.”

“If you know all you know,” Leona began, “then you must know both of someone who can get us back home, and provert us to more appropriate ages.”

“Yes to the second one, but no to the first. We all came here through Westfall.”

“What’s that?” Olimpia asked her.

“Basically...we don’t know how we got here,” Thack said cryptically. “It’s a special feature of the Crossover. It just happens. You walk through a door, and you’re in a different universe, and most of the time, you don’t even realize it. You just end up going back home, and living under the belief that everyone you met on the otherwise simply lives on the same world as you. Of course we only went halfway, and made a stop here.”

“Sounds trippy,” Marie decided.

“The point is it’s not. You don’t notice unless you knew enough about brane cosmology before. Anyway, this is my friend.” She reached over without looking, and ushered a young woman into the huddle. “She’s not technically a proverter, but she can accomplish the same thing in her own way. Just tell her how old you wanna be.”

“Hi, I’m Xolta McCord.”

Leona frowned at her with rage. “We’ve met.”

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Microstory 1609: Area W

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The majority of universes don’t really allow time travel. Even if they do, it probably doesn’t occur. Which is good. Manipulating time is extremely expensive, and by that, I mean that it demands a lot of energy. It often takes so much energy that it’s not even worth it. The universes that have it, most of the time use a little loophole for this. You can go back in time, but it’s going to cost you the entire timeline. Reality will collapse behind you, and the energy that was being used to maintain that reality will simply be channeled into the new reality. Nothing has been lost, nothing has been gained, you’re just picking up a path, and moving it in a different direction. Well, I suppose that would require a little extra energy just to do, but there’s enough excess in the bulkverse to account for it. The point is that matter can neither be created nor destroyed; it just changes form, and time travel is a higher level example of this. There are some universes, however—and I believe it’s quite rare—that persist with multiple timelines. Salmonverse, for instance, has a few: The Main Sequence, The Parallel, The Third Rail, The Fourth Quadrant, and The Fifth Division. And as you now know, holding all these realities up simultaneously uses up energy, but that’s okay, because there is plenty left over; there’s just not enough for every universe to work this way. There are a few universes that take this one step further, and maintain many, many parallel realities, which do not necessarily exist because of time travel, but are more like the many-worlds interpretation of multiverse theory.

Technically, and I know this sounds contradictory, every universe does have infinite realities attached to it, but they don’t exist all at once, and they don’t last long. They’re called microrealities, and they pop up in case the true reality needs to use them, but they pop back out when they’re no longer needed, and the energy they used is transferred to new microrealities, which will in turn collapse soon thereafter. How do they come to be, and why do they collapse? Each new event comes with any number of potential outcomes. Every outcome that could exist, will exist, but only for a short time, because one of them will quickly win, and cancel out the ones that now can’t exist anymore, because they’re no longer possible. If you approach a door, you could walk through it, or just walk away from it, but once you decide to walk away, every reality where you walked through it will disappear. Area Doubleuniverse is different. Catchy name, I know. For whatever reason, this particular brane absorbs an unreasonable amount of bulk energy, and uses it to maintain thousands of realities. This is the kind of thing you see when you watch a movie or show about alternate realities. In one, you’re a juggler; in another, you’re a sea lion trainer. Most decisions are practically impossible to detect, because you might walk through that quantum door one nanosecond later, and that’s an entirely different reality. In fact, it’s even more than one separate reality, because you’re not the only one  making these minute decisions. The fact that Area Doubleuniverse only contains thousands of parallels makes no logical sense. It should be infinite, but it’s not. They’ve actually mapped them, and they travel between them fairly easily. It suggests there’s some sort of higher intelligence in control of which realities exist, and which collapse with all the others. I’ve just not been able to see this force. The people use it mostly to protect witnesses, so whatever the original intention, it’s benevolent now.

Glisnia: The Last Gate (Part XI)

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To practice using her time power, Hogarth first took Jupiter back to where he belonged in the 21st century. She didn’t have to be extremely accurate with her temporal navigation, because he was flexible, but she managed to land on the target moment anyway. This gave her a better understanding of how to do it, and when it came time to deliver Ambrose Richardson to his home universe, she was up to the task. While the team didn’t need either of them to complete the matrioshka body, had they not shown up, Hogarth would never have found the solution she was looking for. With this new plan, she would be able to take a little bit of matter from quadrillions and quadrillions of different places, all over the universe. Each time she connected with something, or someone, it would act as a relay point, so she wouldn’t have very far to go before reaching the next point. The more things she connected with, the stronger she would become, and the farther out she would be able to reach through the voids. She could take thousands of molecules from smaller objects, and billions from others, without causing even the least bit of disturbance in what she left behind. The structural integrity of these objects would remain perfectly fine, but once combined, these molecules would be invaluable towards their goals. She could do this, as long as she had help.

Ethesh used his technical know-how to build her a machine, and together, they refined it. It was a chamber inside a room that was to be connected to every single system in the matrioshka brain. From here, they could control mirror angle, energy output, even the hallway lights; everything. It only took the team three weeks to convince the Glisnians to give them access to all of these things, which they didn’t have to do. Those separate systems were compartmentalized for a reason, because when together, they would be too easy to exploit. This put the entire population in danger. They had no reason to believe anyone would want to sabotage Glisnia, but it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. Of course, very few people were allowed in the room, and the only reason Hilde was one of them was because she was, to be honest, too incompetent to be of any threat to them. Beyond the walls, the greatest security contingency ever protected the room from any external influence, and they used an interesting tactic.

Most security plans assumed one thing; that a given set of people would have a certain level of access to the inside, and as long as only those people were accepted, everything would be fine. The problem with that was time. The longer something existed, the more chances a nefarious entity had to interfere with it, and that interference often started through some weakness in the population. A receptionist, for example, might have an ill father, who needed certain expensive medicine to survive. All an intruder would have to do was pay for that medication, and the receptionist would let them past the badged area. There were no receptionists on Glisnia, but the analogy held. The best way, they figured, to prevent any weak spots in the security system, was for it to be in constant flux. Robot A will only be on the front lines for an hour, before it’s removed, and replaced by Robot B. Robot B will last a day and a half before Robot C comes along, and to keep would-be intruders on their toes, it will only be around for seven minutes, before it’s forced to make way for Robot D.

If someone wanted to hack one of these robots to let them in, they wouldn’t know how long they had before it became useless anyway, forcing them to start over with something else. Access codes, data transference, and other vulnerabilities followed the same model by constantly shifting. The most vital component of this was secrecy. The robots and mechs they used to guard the room had absolutely no clue what was in it, and the people of Glisnia predominantly didn’t even know this was happening at all. Some weren’t even cognizant of the fact that the matrioshka body was in the plans in the first place. To coordinate, they needed a single person with the brain capacity to handle the randomized decision gates. Mekiolenkidasola was that someone. Lenkida, Hogarth, Hilde, Ethesh, and Crimson would be the only people ever in the room. They would not leave, and literally no one else would be allowed in, until the job was done. Once it was, the room would be completely destroyed, and never rebuilt.

They lived there for a month, the mechs surviving on an isolated miniature fusion power source, and the humans on mostly nonperishable food. They didn’t want anyone to need any supplies or other resources from the outside. They had all the tools they required to make sure Ethesh’ machine operated correctly, and that Hogarth would be able to run it. After countless simulations, Hogarth was ready to take the penultimate step. She knew she had access to all the energy in the bulkverse, but she still needed to reach out to Aitchia once more, to make sure he was cool with it, and to help, if necessary.

Now that she was organic again, Hogarth couldn’t just scan the QR code on the back of the Book of Hogarth with her eyes. This was something they forgot to ask for before the room was sealed, but that was okay. Ethesh had everything he needed to build a scanner from scratch. After all this, that was probably the least difficult thing they had to do in here.

“You’re back.”

“Is that okay?”

“Of course,” Aitchai assured her. “The bulkverse belongs to everyone, I just keep it running.”

“I was gonna ask you for permission, or a favor, or...forgiveness, depending.”

He grinned. “What do you need?”

“Oh, not much,” Hogarth began, worried how he would react. “Just access to all the energy in the entire universe.”

“Done.”

“Really? You don’t even wanna know what it’s for?”

He shrugged. “It’s just one universe. It would be like if I asked you for one of your atoms.”

“That’s kind of what I’m trying to do.” Hogarth then went about telling him their plan to extract miniscule amounts of matter from everywhere, but not too much from any one place.

“Diversify!” Aitchai exclaimed. “My finance guy always recommends I do that,” he joked.

“So, you’re cool with this?”

“I don’t see any problem with it. You’re a bookmaker, you have all you need to do what you need to do. I wouldn’t go getting a big head about it, or anything, but I’m happy for ya.”

Hogarth thanked him, and prepared to leave, but stopped. “Just one more thing. It’s...I don’t know if it’s big or not. I’m not a hundred percent certain that my friends are a hundred percent certain that you exist.”

“You want proof,” he guessed.

“Have you ever needed to do that before?”

“Tell ya what, you go back to them, and tell ‘em to look out the window.”

“Which one?”

“Doesn’t matter, I’ll know. While they’re watchin’, clap your hands once. That’ll be my signal.”

“I appreciate this; the signal, and everything.”

“It is a joy.” He smiled like a loving father.

“He wants us to watch the window?” Hilde asked.

“The stars, I believe,” Hogarth assumed.

They didn’t budge.

“What’s the worst that can happen? You’re looking out a window. Or...a viewscreen.”

Crimson simulated a sigh, and switched on the screen.

“This is realtime, right?” Hogarth confirmed. Their silence answered the question, so she clapped her hands, as instructed. A beam of light shot out from one of the stars, and made its way down to another star. A second beam then came out of the first star, and made its way to a series of other stars, eventually forming a curve, which stopped back at the second star. The lines and curves continued from left to right, until a complete imperative formed, reading DON’T PANIC.

“Holy shit,” Ethesh exhaled.

“Is this authentic?” Crimson questioned.

Lenkida walked over to a nondescript panel on the wall. He opened it up, and took out what looked like a red landline phone. He held it to his ear. “Did others just see that?” He waited for a response. “Has it been authenticated?” He eyed Hogarth as he listened to whoever was on the other end of the line. “Well, it was proof, in case anyone doubted that we could do what we said we would do. I know we had a protocol for beginning the procedure, but I believe this will suffice? Please open the last gate.” He stayed on the phone for another moment before hanging up, and casually punching the phone with his fist so hard that it shattered. He looked over at the team. “We’re a go.”

After completing the launch sequence, Hogarth closed her eyes, and said a prayer, not to god, but to Aitchai, who could make or break this whole project. When she was ready, she nodded to Ethesh, who activated the machine, and gave her access to the whole matrioshka brain. She didn’t need it to build a body, but things could go awry if the brain and body weren’t perfectly compatible. Having every qubit of data that the network was storing—about itself, about everything—was vital in completing this mission properly. It would allow her to find the right matter from the right places, and install them at the right spots, to create a seamless transition from head, to shoulders, to knees, and toes. She could see it all, it was glorious, and it was exactly what she needed.

She took a chunk out of her own body to start, then moved on to stealing a little bit from Hilde, and then from everyone else in the room. Then she continued with every independent entity on the shells, and a little extraneous matter from the shells themselves. She took some from the star, and the nearest stars, and their orbitals, and then from Sol, and the rest of the stellar neighborhood. And still, it was impossible to detect that the matrioshka was any larger than it was before. She needed more, she needed a shit ton more. No, she needed a shit ton of a shit ton more, and then she needed to take that to the power of a shit ton. Every star in the galaxy, every planet, every moon, every asteroid, every meteor, every comet, Andromeda, Triangulum, beyond; she took from all of them, and only then did they notice any progress. She reached out farther, to the rest of the cluster, and the supercluster, and the hypercluster, and the great wall; all across the observable universe, and then the rest. Before a man in Tokyo could finish his morning coffee, it was done. It was all done. The matrioshka body was complete. It had arms, legs, a torso, a behind, and even protrusions that resembled breasts. That’s right, the matrioshka was a woman, which made the most sense since the word meant mother.

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Glisnia: Flesh and Bone (Part X)

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“Well, I know that body belongs to you, but that was a little jarring,” Crimson Clover said.

“I’ll make it up to you,” Hogarth replied. “Lenkida said this was a long-term project, but I’m gonna prove him wrong. I’m gonna build his matrioshka body, and I’m gonna do it all at once.”

“How is that even possible?” Ethesh questioned. “I know I’m not anywhere near as intelligent or knowledgeable as anyone here, but that doesn’t seem physically possible.”

Hogarth shook her head, glad to have it back in her possession. The upgrade was nice, but it wasn’t really her. She was more of a flesh and bone kind of gal. “You’re thinking linearly. Everything happening in order, and over time, is the exact same thing as everything happening all at once, as long as you’re looking at it from the right perspective. I can see it now. I mean, I can’t see it like Aitchai can, but I understand it better. Everyone, everything, contributes just a little bit. We’ll all become part of the Glisnian collective. It will be the body that’s made up of the whole universe.”

“I’m not sure you’re making sense,” Ethesh pointed out, “and not because I’m just a dumb technician, but because you’re only giving us half the information.”

“I know,” Hogarth said with a nod. “I will explain everything. We just need to put the team together.”

“Who is on this team?” Crimson asked, like he was preparing a grocery list.

“Call everyone who’s still here. We don’t need Ambrose, Jupiter, or Hilde, but they can join us if they want.”

They met back in the room where The Shortlist and The Shorter List had their respective meetings. Hogarth, Hilde, Ethesh, Mekiolenkidasola, Crimson, Holly Blue, Jupiter, and Ambrose were there.

“Oh, God,” Jupiter said, “are we doing this again?”

“You’re not here to decide how we’re going to move forward,” Hogarth began. “I just want to tell you my new plan.”

“If there’s a new plan, then we should contact the others,” Holly Blue announced.

“I’m not going to do that, I’m done with the meetings. Holly Blue, you can leave, if you would like. Once I’m finished here, I will honor our deal, and get you back to our son, but if you don’t want to continue helping, I won’t make you. I think I can handle this.”

“Are you even capable of traveling to Declan’s world?” Holly Blue asked.

“Let me put it like this,” Hogarth said, “if I’m not capable of getting you back to Declan, I’m not capable of completing the matrioshka body.”

“How do you propose you do that?” Lenkida asked, wanting to get to the matter at hand.

“The time siphon,” Hogarth started her presentation. “You told me you wanted me to help you reach other star systems at faster-than-light speeds, so that’s how I went about tackling the problem. I saw each star as a target, but it doesn’t have to be like that. We could reach every star...every orbital around every star, in multiple galaxies. If we take just a little bit from everything—and I’m talking a molecule here and there—then it doesn’t matter if there’s life, or potential for life, or anything. No one will notice it’s gone, and they won’t miss it. I don’t see an ethical problem with it.”

The group sat in silence for a moment before Holly Blue spoke. “You wanna build a filter portal.”

“If that’s what you call it, then yeah,” Hogarth agreed. “Am I not the first to think of it?”

“You’re probably the first to think of something on the scale you’re talking about, but I know of other filter portalers. Keanu ‘Ōpūnui is a notable example. He uses his powers to manipulate the weather.”

“He can teleport individual molecules from one place to another?” Hogarth asked to make sure she was understanding her correctly.

“Yes.”

“That’s what you do, but only with your body,” Crimson reminded her. “What makes you think you can scale it up that much? Mr. Richardson?”

“Hey,” Ambrose said, “I’m not sure I feel comfortable with that. I still have no clue how we conjured a star from another universe.”

“I don’t need you to do anything anymore,” Hogarth assured him. “I can get all the energy I need from the universe itself. Every time I reach out to a celestial body, it will connect me to the other nearby bodies, like a chain reaction, or a web crawler.”

“That’s absurd,” Holly Blue argued. “What makes you think you can do that? I can’t build something that can do that. My powers only let me invent time technology that exists as a power or salmon pattern that is exhibited by someone else. It’s a lot easier when I’ve seen it done by that someone else, and even easier when I can study them. I don’t know anyone who can filter portal the universe, do you?”

Hogarth smiled. “I do. I just met him, the Aitchai.”

“Ugh,” a few of them said.

“We don’t know anything about this mysterious energy god you claim to have met,” Holly Blue added.

“You think I’m lying?” Hogarth questioned. “Tell me, Holly, how could I have gotten rid of the star intruder if not by his hand, and why would I have not just told you that truth?”

“I dunno,” Holly Blue admitted, “and don’t call me that; you know I don’t care for it, which is why you said it.”

“We used to be friends, a long time ago.”

Holly Blue took a breath. It would seem she was having a hell of a time with her respiratory system. Hogarth had thought she was imagining it, but now it seemed real. Holly Blue could sense this realization in the others. “I’m dying.”

“What?”

“I have a time disease.” She smiled quite sadly.

“Do you mean a time affliction?” Hilde asked. “That’s what we called what Piglet had before we learned she could control it.”

“No,” Holly Blue answered. “It’s an actual disease.” She breathed heavily again. “It’s the kind of thing that humans go through when someone messes with their linear pattern, and they don’t receive the proper treatment. It happened to me, ‘cause...because time and I have been working against each other for a long...um...space.”

“What does this mean?”

“It’s a unique cerebrovascular disease that affects my autonomic nervous system.” She reached up, and tapped on her eyeballs, removing two contact lenses from them. “It started out by blocking my pupillary response. I had to invent these things to regulate how they constrict and dilate, because my brain can’t do it on its own. The disease then moved on to my urinary system, which I imagine you don’t want to hear about. Now it’s gone after my lungs. Eventually, if I survive long enough to reach the final stage, my heart will just stop beating. Even if you implant artificial organs, my capillaries will stop exchanging chemicals with my tissue, and I won’t be able to transport water, nutrients, or oxygen. Can’t replace those, not all of them, anyway.”

Lenkida reached over and placed his hand upon hers. “Yes, we can.”

Holly Blue nodded negatively. “Yeah, but I’m not going to do that. I have to see my son, even if it’s the last thing I do. I don’t know if I can jump universes as a mech, but I know I can as a choosing one. I might consider upgrading afterwards, but...”

“But what?” Hilde encouraged.

“The disease might follow me through any transhumanistic upgrade. That’s why I called it a time disease, because it doesn’t respond to medical treatment. It...disappears, and comes back in the future. I think it’s literally traveling through time.”

“Have you spoken with Dr. Hammer or Dr. Sarka?” Hogarth suggested.

“Both,” Holly Blue said. “They tried, but they couldn’t do a thing.”

Hogarth looked over at Crimson. “How do you navigate the bulkverse? How can you find Declan?”

“Give me back the body, I’ll take her,” Crimson requested.

“No, I want to take her,” Hogarth insisted. “Just tell me how.”

“It requires calculating hyperdimensional metamathematics,” it responded.

Hogarth accidentally let out a belly laugh. “I sent an entire town to another planet when I was a kid. You think I don’t know metamath?”

“You did that on accident,” it said to her.

“Can you teach me, or not?”

“Yeah, I’ll teach you,” it promised. “Of course I’ll teach you.”

“Thank you.” Hogarth returned her attention to Holly Blue. “I’m sorry I’ve been hard on you.”

“No, I should be apologizing,” Holly Blue contended. “I’ve been grumpy about it. When you’re a time traveler, the future seems inevitable, as does the past. You can live in 1992, and then jump right to 2400. It can really feel like you’re immortal, because you see how things change. But I didn’t watch history unfold, I just skipped a bunch of parts. I’m just as prone to death as anyone else, and I can accept that. It’s just been tough. So many people have promised to help me find my son, and they have done so with the absolute best intentions, but they have not been able to deliver.”

Hogarth glanced over at Crimson for a half second. “I can deliver. I will. I wasn’t trying to be dismissive earlier. I can do this without you now, because you’ve been invaluable thus far, and not just on the technical side. Your sense of ethics is unmatched by anyone I’ve ever met, and I won’t forget the lessons that you taught me. But it’s time for you to go home.”

Holly Blue looked like she was tearing up, but nothing came out of her ducts, probably because of the disease. “Thank you.”

Hogarth tabled the discussion on the intergalactic time siphon thing, and focused on helping her friend with her dying wish. Crimson spent the better part of the next week teaching her how to transport her atoms to other universes, and more importantly, how to navigate to a specific point in spacetime. Then it showed her the coordinates to Declan’s location specifically. Once Holly Blue was packed, and ready to leave everything she had ever known behind, Hogarth embraced her, and dismantled every molecular bond in their bodies and belongings.

Declan was waiting for her on the side of a road, apparently having settled on this moment as a rendezvous with Crimson Clover long ago. It warmed Hogarth’s heart to witness the reunion, and reminded her that the point of doing anything in life was to progress, and support others. The matrioshka body was great and all, but it wasn’t the only path to the future, and it wasn’t essential. She would still do it, for sure, but at least she was no longer so anxious about getting it done. She had all the time in the worlds, which was nice, because that allowed her to hang out with her friends for a good month. When she left to go back to their universe of origin, Holly Blue was still alive, and actually kind of doing okay. It was possible that her time disease couldn’t follow her here, but Hogarth would never know. Holly Blue asked that she leave before seeing proof either way. She wanted her friends to move on with their lives without knowing how things turned out. She somehow took comfort in that, and Hogarth did too.

When she returned, a few days had passed for everyone else, indicating that the calculations Hogarth had come up with were a little off, and she needed to really nail those down before she tried something like that again. For now, they had work to do, and Ethesh was eager to show her the prototype that he had built in her absence.

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