The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 16, 2398

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Leona wasn’t calling Marie and Kivi because she wanted them to try to find her husband in the Mariana Trench. She just wanted to record a census of all the versions of Mateo that they’re currently aware of. The one down there appears to be the only one at the moment, which makes things simpler. The two SD6 teams are free to go off and do their own thing. She’s going to handle this herself, but she needs more data. The global brain scanner that found him operates on two axes. They can get some idea of elevation by measuring the strength of the signal, but it’s impossible to pinpoint a precise location. If she’s going to teleport down to him, she needs to know precisely how deep to go, and where to land, or she’ll end up drowning in the ocean while being crushed by its unyielding thousand atmospheres of pressure.

Ramses has been working on a temporal energy detector capable of surviving the stress of reentry into Earth’s top atmospheric layers, and he’s finally finished. They have decided that this is a perfect opportunity to feed two birds with one worm. The detector will fall to the surface of Earth, measuring the temporal energy fields along the way, as well as hopefully whatever is suppressing that field. It should land in the ocean over the trench, then detach itself from the parachutes, and sink down to look for Mateo.

“About how long will all that take?” Cheyenne asks.

Ramses is monitoring the exterior maintenance robot—or EMR—that’s readying the probe for launch. The ship wasn’t designed for this, so he’s had to improvise a lot of the process. If they’re in a time crunch, that’s all the more reason they can’t rush. “Forty-two minutes and eleven seconds.”

“Oh, so you know exactly how long?”

“Well, I couldn’t tell you how quickly the probe will find Mateo, because the whole point is we don’t know where he is, but if it has to sink all the way to the bottom, it will take forty-two minutes and eleven seconds from launch.”

“If your bot ever finishes building the launch brackets,” Leona says impatiently.

Ramses peels himself from the central hologram to look at her. “I hope you know that there is no guarantee—”

“I know,” she interrupts, frustrated.

“Sorry, what were you gonna say?” Vearden asks.

“He was going to remind me that we can’t be sure Mateo is the one down there,” Leona answers instead. “It’s true, were I you is not, like, this secret phrase that no one else would know. I just don’t think anyone else would think to use it in this situation.”

“Okay,” Ramses says passive-aggressively. “We’ll find out in about forty-two minutes.” He starts heading back down to engineering. “The EMR is finished with its work just in time for our launch window. You can all watch from up here.”

A few minutes later, the probe is through the miniature airlock that Ramses built in engineering, sacrificing what was once used as storage space. It’s now a little bit more difficult to walk around downstairs. The probe flies away from the AOC, and heads for Earth. It screams across the sky, exciting all amateur astronomers who were not expecting such a large piece of orbital debris to decay today. The truth is that it’s not all that large, but it’s built with materials not found in the modern world, so it would be assumed to be the size of a tiny home. Let the conspiracies begin.

The probe is through the rough spots now, so the parachutes deploy to slow its descent. Ramses frowns as he’s watching the data come in. Velocity, temperature, pressure, pollution levels. It’s picking up all of these things, but the one thing it’s not sensing is temporal energy. This is incredibly odd, even for the Third Rail. After it lands on the water, he goes back up to the rest of the group.

Leona shakes her head. “You see these numbers?”

“Yes, they don’t make any sense,” Ramses notes.

“Forgive me, but...” she begins awkwardly

“I didn’t screw it up. The detector is working fine. There is something seriously wrong with this world, and it’s bigger than we ever imagined.”

“I don’t understand,” Vearden says, worried that they’re going to roll their eyes at best, or chew his head off at worst.

“If I’m reading this right—and I’m no scientist, so I might not be—but it says here that you’re not sensing any temporal energy whatsoever,” Arcadia says.

“That’s right,” Leona replies. She reaches forward to play with the interface, but stops. There’s nothing to adjust or calibrate. It’s all laid out before them. It’s all wrong.

“Didn’t we kind of expect that, though?” Vearden presses. “We already know there’s no time travel, at least not down on the planet.”

“There’s always time travel.” Arcadia starts to talk with her hands. “For most people, time moves at a one to one ratio, which means that for every second that passes, one second passes. Temporal energy isn’t this magical substance that we use to manipulate time and space. It’s simply the transfer of excited particles from one moment in time to another, as a function of entropy.”

“Huh?”

“Temporal energy is just what happens when time passes,” Arcadia clarifies. “You can’t have no energy, because that would mean you have no time. It’s either balanced or unbalanced, and as time travelers, we exploit the unbalanced levels, but you can’t just have nothing. If you have nothing, you don’t exist. This world...doesn’t exist!”

The computer beeps. Leona looks back up to the hologram. “The probe is close enough to the source of the were I you signal. I know where to go.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Ramses offers.

“No, stay here and...deal with this.”

Leona puts on her wetsuit, which is a half-measure, since it’s not what’s going to keep her safe down there. It just seems dumb to go down in her civies. She inserts the rebreather in her mouth, nods to the group, and then teleports to the signal. She can instantly tell that she’s standing inside of the Bridgette. She hears someone shuffling behind her, so she turns around to find Alyssa in a defensive position. Alyssa doesn’t loosen up, since Leona doesn’t look like herself with the mask on. “It’s me, it’s me.”

“Oh, okay. I guess it’s 2398 again.”

“Where were you?”

“Billions of years ago.”

“Tell me everything.”

Alyssa shakes her head. “I can’t. My memories are on a detonation mechanism. As soon as we surface, they’ll disappear, and I don’t have time to relay them to you.”

“I understand,” Leona says with a nod. “Is Mateo here?”

She hesitates to answer for a beat. “No. He’s never coming back.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: October 4, 2398

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It’s impossible to estimate how long Mateo has until he can no longer teleport, or how many times he can do it, or even how far he can travel altogether. Ramses ran every test he could come up with multiple times, and couldn’t come to a solid conclusion. Mateo is not losing the ability little by little. It’s fluctuating unpredictably, and will likely only become more unreliable with time. He may start to have trouble aiming at his destination, or lose a lot of time in a given attempt. Where he is when he’s not at Point A or Point B is unclear, but the answer could be incredibly dangerous, whether he knows what it is, or not.

“What about the timonite that’s stuck to my hands? Is that dripping off, or what?”

“I don’t know,” Ramses admits. “I don’t know enough to figure out how to detect it. I’ve scanned your hands, and it can’t tell whether there’s any timonite there at all. It can’t even detect the weird telekinetic outer layer that the god dude gave you.”

“I guess I’m more worried that I’m going to lose that, and go back to midasing everything I touch, dispatching it to an innocent, unsuspecting universe.”

“The guy who gave that to you was wildly powerful, based on Leona’s descriptions, and what I’ve witnessed for myself. I doubt that it has a time limit, and if it does, it’s surely based on the integrity of the timonite that it’s there to contain.”

“I sure hope you’re right,” Mateo says.

“I’m sorry that I can’t do anything about the other thing.”

That’s okay. Having that power back felt nice, but it’s not like he was used to it. He spent most of his life without the ability to teleport, or do anything like that. He was born to be a salmon—he’s not supposed to make his own choices—so anytime he has is gravy. “Don’t sweat it. We’ll get out of this reality, and go back to the way things were.”

“You’re mighty confident these days,” Ramses notes.

“I’m trying not to be so stressed out and worried. Everyone else is having a really hard time right now, and the best thing I can do is stay calm, and help where I can.”

“That’s a very mature thing for you to say.”

“Well, I am hundreds of years old, or thousands, or just a regular adult, depending on how you’re measuring time,” Mateo muses.

“I measure it with this.” He takes a wand from his cabinet, and waves it around.

“What is that?”

“It’s a temporal...a temponeural, umm...”

Mateo laughs “What? What are you trying to say, guy?”

“I’m not sure what to call it yet. A neurotemporal something something detector.”

“What exactly does it do?”

Ramses hovers it over Mateo’s forehead. It makes a noise. Once it’s finished, he inspects the readout. “Hmm. It says that your consciousness is a few seconds old.”

“So it needs work.”

“Yes.”

Mateo thinks that he might possibly have a halfway decent idea, which he hopes won’t sound stupid. “Could you scale that up?”

“How big?” Ramses asks.

“Big enough to scan the whole world?”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 14, 2252

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Leona was maybe a meter and a half in up in the air when she jumped forward in time. She hadn’t expected the shuttle to be gone, and since she wasn’t prepared for it, she didn’t have time to land on her feet. Still, it wasn’t too far of a drop, and the ground was relatively soft, so she quickly recovered. She stood there for a moment, a bit disoriented, trying to make sure she wasn’t just confused about where the shuttle was. No, it was definitely gone, and Briar was the only one who could have taken it. Why, though, would he have done that? When did he do it? And how long had it taken him to fix it first. She checked her pocket and discovered the drive chip to still be in it, so he must have figured out what was missing. Perhaps he was a lot smarter than she realized, or he had purposely misled her. Either way, she was stuck there, and might never be saved, unless the powers that be assigned someone to rescue her.

Firewood. The first thing she needed to do was find firewood. Then she needed to go back to the nearest source of water, which was only about a half kilometer away. She had only gathered a handful of sticks when she heard the low drone of the shuttle as it approached. It landed exactly where it had been before.

Briar stepped out. “Sorry! Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. I lost track of time. I think you’ll understand later. We didn’t worry about such things on the other side of the mountain. My mother was never more than a kilometer away from me, so things just happened whenever they happened.”

“You fixed it.”

“Yeah, once I read through the entire manual, it wasn’t too hard.”

“Briar, that thing is, like, five thousand pages long.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t have anything better to do. The drive chip was missing.”

Leona cleared her throat, but didn’t say anything.

He examined her for a second. “Oh, I see. You thought I would abandon you.”

“I thought...” she hesitated, “it could happen.”

“You were right to be worried. I get that we just met. I would have done the same thing, though I probably would have removed the main engine access grip instead. It’s made out of tantalum hafnium carbide, just like the rest of it, which means I wouldn’t have had the raw materials to synthesize a new one, and the panel wouldn’t have closed without it.”

“I’ll remember that for next time. Where did you go?”

“I went to the coordinates that my mother left me. I didn’t know if you would be willing to take me, and I kind of needed to go on my own anyway.”

“You should have risked that I would refuse,” Leona said. “What if you had missed something in the manual? You could have died, and I could have been stuck here forever.”

“This is true. I wasn’t thinking about that, though. I just knew I needed to go there. It’s on an entirely different continent, so I’ve never been able to get there before. This was my one and only shot.”

“Well, what are you talking about? What did you find?”

“I’m talking about a secret my mom kept that I don’t even think Trinity knew. I can’t tell you what I found, but I can show you.”

Leona weighed the options of getting into the shuttle with this stranger. She was planning to do that anyway, but that was before he proved how intelligent he was. Smart people are dangerous. Still, his story was intriguing, and her curiosity was stronger than her reason. “Do we have enough fuel?”

“The solar paint is enough to hold us. We won’t be going hypersonic, of course, but we’ll get there soon enough.”

Several hours later, they were across the ocean, and on the other continent. He had to land a few kilometers away from the destination, both because there weren’t great landing sites closer, and because he didn’t want to disturb the people on the other side, whatever that meant. Leona gained a decent grasp of the population geography of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida in this time period, so she could find a remote region to escape to. Like the area they had come from, this wasn’t inhabited either, so she didn’t know who it was he might be referring to.

After they traversed the distance, they came upon the foot of a mountain, right at the mouth of a cave. “We’re going in there?” she asked. She wasn’t scared of the cave itself, but she still couldn’t be entirely comfortable going into an enclosed space with him. Now it was even more frightening, because of there really were other people around here, who knows what he had planned? Had he just wanted to kill her, he could have done it anywhere, but if others were involved, that would explain his need to transport her to a second location. Yet she pressed on, and followed him into the darkness.

Before too long, she started feeling noticeably lighter. It was as if the surface gravity was being altered with each passing step. Now, it was true that gravity was slightly different at different parts of any planet, based on proximity to the equator or poles, or altitude. But it didn’t change this dramatically in a matter of meters. Something weird was going on, and she was getting the impression they weren’t on Bida anymore. This much was all but confirmed when they finally exited the cave, and found themselves in the middle of a wintry forest at civil twilight. It would have also been impossible for the climate to have changed this quickly, for a number of reasons. They had walked in a fairly straight line, and would never have had the chance to reach the other side of the mountain this fast. It was pretty hot where they entered. Plus, she was pretty sure she had gotten a good bird’s eye view of the mountain, and it just didn’t look like this. No, they weren’t on Bida anymore, but where?

“I don’t know,” Briar answered. “Mom made me memorize these coordinates when I was a boy, but didn’t tell me why. She said I could use it to escape if it was my only option.”

Leona was nodding, and inspecting their new environment.. “It’s definitely an escape. It’ll be dark soon; here, not back where we came from. Night should fall by the time we get all the way back to the shuttle, and then all the way back here.”

“Why do we need to return to the shuttle?” he asked.

“There’s something in the storage compartment that I need. I don’t think this is Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, but unless you’ve explored, and seen some frame of reference, there’s no way to know without more data. I have a pretty good guess, but we need confirmation. Didn’t you say there were people?”

“I’ve seen footsteps, but no actual people.”

“Okay.”

And so they got their ten thousand steps in with a trek across the rocky landscape, back to the shuttle. They must have just missed a dust storm, because the craft was so much dirtier than it was. This time, she remembered to seal it up. They got even more steps with the walk back to the mountain with supplies. It was indeed nighttime on the other side of the cave. The more dramatic contrast proved that they had walked through some kind of portal. Leona removed the particular instrument she required, and set it up on the tripod in the closest clear area she could find. She needed a good view of the night sky. She made adjustments when the readings didn’t give her accurate results, working through the problem out loud. “Okay, Northern hemisphere, probably.—No, that can’t be right.—Predictive modeling only goes so far, so I better hope it’s within close range.—Historical data only goes so far back too.—There!”

“What is it?”

She double-checked the results, then sighed. She didn’t know how she should feel about what the readings told her. Whether this was naturally occurring, or created by a choosing one—perhaps spatial merger, Kayetan Glaston—this was Earth. The problem was that it was Earth over nine hundred years ago, so she was worse off than if she had just taken the reframe engine. “It’s Earth, year 1343.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s just not helpful. This is why your mother said it was a last resort. It would really only help you if Tau Ceti was about to explode, or something. There are civilization in this time period, but they’re not great. I mean, we’re in the middle of the Black Death right now, though I guess that wasn’t true when your mom told you about the cave. Or maybe it was. Maybe the portal always takes you to 1343; I don’t know.”

“What does that thing do?” he nodded towards the tripod.

“It measures stellar drift. By looking at the stars, we can find out where we are, but with enough data, we can also find out when we are.”

“What do we do with this information?”

Leona triple-checked the results, then started packing everything up. “We do nothing. We can’t interfere with the native population, and we can’t tell anyone else. When we go back to Trinity and the others, you can’t say a word about the portal. Can you keep a secret? Did your mother teach you how to do that?”

“Well, she didn’t, because we didn’t have secrets between us. I spent a lot of time by myself, though, even when she was alive, so I certainly know how to be quiet.”

“I’ll have to hope that’s good enough. Word cannot get out about this place. Sure, lots of people can travel through time, be it on their own, or with help. We don’t need to be giving them any other means, however. This has to stay between us.”

“I understand.” It looked like he really did. She was fairly confident Briar would keep his mouth shut, especially since it was unlikely to come up naturally in conversation. He just needed to get through the first few days when people would still be asking him questions about his recent experiences with Leona. After that, no one would think to ask him whether he encountered any weird spacetime anomalies.

“We should go. The others are only going to believe it took me so long to repair my shuttle. After that, they’ll be questioning my timeline.”

“Will we ever come back here?”

“I’ll need to when I get a chance, to check how the portal operates over time. You won’t need to come back, and I kindly ask you to not try while I’m gone. Secrets don’t only get out when you tell them to people. Sometimes people catch you because of your actions.”

“I never learned how to lie,” Briar said, “but I’m not an idiot. You don’t just want me to not tell people; you want people to not find out. I really do understand.”

“Good. Now, come on. I’ll introduce you to everyone.”

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Microstory 834: Insight

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“Now remember,” the scientists says, “you can’t change the past. It has already happened for us. All you are there to do is recon. Find out exactly how the world ended, and hopefully how we can make life better moving forward. Anything you try to do while you’re there will have an effect on the future, but only in that reality. Time travel within a single timeline is impossible, because just by traveling to an earlier moment in time, you create a new timeline. You can’t save your family; not your real family.” I nod, because I understand this truth fully. She has me remove all of my clothes, then she takes my measurements and vitals again. It’s important for the machines to calibrate the trip according to my specifications. If they’re just a little bit off, I could wind up rematerializing without a finger, or the part of my brain responsible for remembering my daughter’s name. I volunteered for this mission, and I can think of no greater honor. It’ll be strange being back in a world before everything turned to shit, but I can’t take it for granted. Those aren’t my people, and if I don’t get back in time, those I actually care about will never see me again. She submerges me in the solution, letting me suck on some oxygen with a rebreather, but I won’t be able to take it with me, which means I may have to hold my breath for up to four minutes, once the process gets underway. It feels so good to be in water again. After the shortage began, baths and swimming became illegal. It took years for this team to procure enough of it for their experiment, wasting a lot of it along the way as they worked towards perfecting it. The project leader is a brilliant woman, who reminds me of my late wife. I feel so fortunate to be part of this endeavor.

She holds up the okay scuba diving hand signal, and waits for me to return it. Then she removes the rebreather, and activates the machine. The water tenses up, almost like it’s become solid. I can feel an electrical current surging through me. It’s painful, but not debilitating. Bubbles form at the bottom of the tank, and start shooting up towards the surface. It’s getting hotter and hotter, and I’m thinking I’m going to pass out, but I don’t, because I can’t. For a moment, everything stops, and all I see is darkness. Then light begins filtering back to my eyes, and I feel myself moving. The electrical current is gone, replaced by a river current. I pop out of the water, swim over to the bank, and crawl onto dry land, cry-laughing uncontrollably for having survived the journey. After a decent walk, I find out that I had surfaced in the Yangtze River, upstream of Shanghai, China. I start studying the problem there, remembering the water shortage began in this region. It would seem some mysterious contaminant made its way into one of the largest drinking water reservoirs in the world, by population served. Shanghai needed to source their water elsewhere for a long time, which caused strain the world over as the dominoes continued to fall. It was me. I caused the end of the world. Distraught, I make my way to Russia, where the scientist I meet in the future now lives, and break a rule of time travel by telling her that I think I actually did land in the same timeline that I came from. She just smiles at me and says, “good. Now I know for sure that my plan works.”

Microstory 708: Satisfaction With Little

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This was probably our greatest challenge, even against the trickier ones. We’ve spent our entire history, and then some, valuing the accumulation of wealth. To us, this has always been each and everyone of our respective goals. We believe every civilization needs some kind of metric, if not more than one, to determine who has been successful, and who hasn’t. Otherwise, how will we know who to trust in positions of leadership? How can anyone live a fulfilling life if they can have everything they need just from having been born in the first place? These are questions we’ve not had any experience asking, and in fact, haven’t so much as considered. Wealth as a metric is so ingrained in our culture that our brains never though to ask such things. Honestly, we’ve all needed time to think over our notions and behavior, and reexamine our choices. Fortunately, each taikon is not sprung upon us after the previous one is complete. We were able to read ahead, with these last ones being laid out for us in the Book of Anseluka. Ever since encountering these new taikon, we’ve been working on transitioning the galaxy towards more inclusive values. We have deepened our connection with the various of cultures of Earth, cementing our plans to become a more traditional capitalistic society. We see now that we were blinded by the Light of Ignorance, which prevented us from seeing beyond our own way, or the way of our ancient communist ancestors. We now understand that there are many ways to run an economy, rather than simply the two extremes. The dirty communists from whence we came value success just as much as we always did. Their problem is that they believe everyone should share in this success, rather than finding ways of improvement. We still think this way to be wrong, and strongly believe in the Earthan method. Life is all a balance, so why shouldn’t a civilization be the same? You still have to earn what you have, but we now recognize that there are those who are born under such poor circumstances that self-improvement is practically impossible. How foolish we had been claiming to ourselves that anyone in Fostea can have what they want if only they had a strong enough work ethic. That is not how it works now, nor was it ever. Not all men are created equal, but we’re all born with a capacity for charity and compassion. Likewise, we’re all capable of surviving on very little. The New Light teaches us that acceptance in one’s misfortunes does not preclude the perseverance against them.

Microstory 688: Force of Faith

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While the quantum darkness was a perilous and depressing time for Lightseers, we returned from it stronger than ever before. We saw an uptick in conversions, of course, as people now had definitive proof of the Light’s power. There were changes for preexisting Lightseers, though. After careful study, experts now strongly believe this to be a attributed to a nonmaterial, but measureable, force. As vague as it may sound, we call it the Force of Faith, and it is sort of a cousin of the Light of Truth. It cannot be seen, as the Light can, but it is just as divine. While the quantum darkness can permeate vast distances for insidious and malevolent purposes, the Force of Faith does so to strengthen belief. While probably nothing is capable of precluding crises of faith altogether, this new force is a mighty enemy against it; a ward, a wall, a shield. Scientists are still trying to understand and codify this new physical phenomenon, and are unsure why it has not been detected before. The obvious answer is that it did not exist before; that it was somehow created out of necessity, and is responsible for the salvation from the darkness that preceded it. The truth is that we still do not know, but that’s the point of faith, isn’t it? If we knew things to be true with undeniable evidence, then it wouldn’t be faith at all; it would just be a standard fact. Perhaps religion thrives in the face of adversity, and requires the opposition of those who do not believe in it. If everyone believed, no one would be special, and the Light wouldn’t matter so much anymore. Perhaps. Whatever the truth, we believe in this, never more staunchly than now.

Microstory 571: Calendar Reset to Zero Following Fall of Civilization

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The world has ended. A lot of people worked extremely hard to prevent it, and then even more worked even harder to keep it from getting worse, but in the end, there was nothing anyone could do. The floodwaters came, overwhelmed our cities, and destroyed them. The water has not receded, leaving only those survivors on the highest points of the planet; mountain ranges, and superstructures. Of course, many of our people were able to escape. Some went to other planets; some of those even to other galaxies. Some are even believed to have traveled to the past, or the future. But some of us remain. We are still here, fighting to maintain the human race on the greatest planet in history. It is time to make some decisions, and one of those decisions involves the calendar. Two-thousand and one hundred years ago, the world was fragmented. We lived in prenational territories, fighting for resources, and hoarding treasures. We had kingdoms built with two somewhat contradictory principles; isolationism, and conquest. Everyone wanted to take over everyone else’s lands, while simultaneously trying to prevent anyone from doing the same to them. Empires rose and fell, and the world was in chaos. But then something happened. We came together. We had nothing at that point like the Confederacy, but we at least developed some civil attitudes towards each other. We drew lines in the sand and respected each other’s borders. Though war and pain still ruled the lands, we call this The Grand Unity, and on the first day of every year, because of it, we have celebrated Unity Day.

It was this time in history that a group of scholars and other important figures came together and came up with some conventions. They decided how things were meant to be measured. Distance, volume, economic exchange value. These were important facets to navigating a world, both literally, and also figuratively. We needed to know how to communicate with each other, because we realized that, if we all had different forms of measurements, we would always be confused. Along with this, we also needed to schedule things out together, in a logical way, that anyone could relate to. This Ribalion Convention, as it’s known today was composed of academics and agriculturalist who already understood how time worked, and it is their work that we still use. There are one hundred seconds to a minute, one hundred minutes to an hour, twenty hours in a day, ten days in a week, three weeks in a month, and ten months in a year. We also break this apart into five seasons, based on standard weather patterns, that help guide farmers with their businesses. This system works perfectly, and has served us well for more than two millennia. Unfortunately, things have changed. With the development of what most agree to be the end of civilization, our calendar no longer suffices. A second convention was held, this time on Mount Shiirapa; the closest landmass to Ribali, which is now submerged. Temporal measurement will remain the same, but the calendar has been reset. We are now living in the first year of this new calendar. The Shiirapa Council has released one short statement, to be followed by more detail later on: “We’re hoping never to repeat our past mistakes, and we feel that starting fresh is the first step to a better, more prosperous, future.”

Microstory 377: Life Extension

Click here for a list of every step.

Calm

I’ve told you that I am what we in the business call a transhumanist. I’m also a futurist, which means that I study future events in the same way that historians study the past. You can actually go to school to study this, which I would do if I had the money. For now, I just do research on my own. My macrofiction series The Advancement of Mateo Matic is basically a sensationalistic textbook from the future. On subject, most people don’t really understand what aging is. Don’t feel bad, I know slightly more than you, and scientists know less than you would think. It’s a big mystery, but what we do know is that there are these things called telomeres. Every time our cells divide, our telomeres get shorter. The diminishing returns from this process ultimately leads to the death of the organism. It’s like a tiny hourglass counting down to our demise. And if this exists, then it can be stopped. The hourglass can be turned over, almost literally. Science marches on, and while we’re working to cure disease, restore vitality, and protect people from danger, we’re also working on repairing genetic flaws. You’ve all been operating on the assumption that death is inevitable. You drink, smoke, and take unnecessary risks. You think you might as well do whatever you want, because you won’t have much time on this world anyway. At most, any death is stealing eighty or ninety years from an individual. I’m here to tell you that this is no longer true. Anyone born 1960 or later is estimated to be young enough to reach the longevity escape velocity. Of course, this only works if you’re also a healthy individual. If you’re sedentary, if you have a preexisting medical condition, or if your job puts you in a level of physical danger, then I can’t guarantee you’ll last. I suppose I can’t guarantee it either way, because of unexpected dangers, but you get what I mean. The reason I keep bringing this up is because I think it’s important that people understand their options, and this is my only medium. Now is the time to change your life if you’re not happy with it, because there’s a chance it goes on forever.

Imagination

Microstory 205: New Measurements

I realize that I’ve mentioned a few what you must believe to be measurements, but are not completely sure. You see, my stories take place in a universe where such things are part of common knowledge, and very few people can act as “audience proxies”. I try to go over things, but at the same time, I want to organically bring them up, rather than just spell them out. If you were telling a story about Barack Obama, you wouldn’t first explain that Obama was the President of the United States of America between the common era years of 2009 to 2016. Everybody knows that...mostly. But since the secondary purpose of this site is to give you an introduction to my new world, I’m just going to go at it; in this case, giving you highlights of a fictional (or is it?) measurement system. The smallest positive unit of measurement is the yoem. It is equal to 2.442 millimeters. Multiply that by 10 and you get the deam which is 2.442 centimeters. Multiply by 10 and we have a sheam: 24.42 centimeters. Get the picture? Continue to multiply by 10 for a geara: 2.670603674541 yards (8.011811023623 feet); demra: 26.70603674541 yards (80.11811023623 feet); shemra: 267.0603674541 yards (801.1811023623 feet); and nayko: 2.442 kilometers (8,011.811023623 feet). That last one is what my characters use in place of a mile, and naykos per hour are informally referred to as neels. Units of mass follow a similar linguistic and mathematical structure starting with the yoemtra: 2.442 grams; deamtra: 0.86139 ounces; sheamtra (sheels): 0.538369 pounds; gearatra: 5.38369 pounds; demratra: 53.8369 pounds; shemratra: 538.369 pounds; and naykotra: 2.691845 tons (5,383.69 pounds). So the next time someone asks you how tall you are and how much you weigh, after punching them in the face for being rude, you can say something like 7 sheaman and 24 gearatran. Oh yeah, by the way, if you want to pluralize something, you add -an to the end (or just -n if the singular ends in a vowel). Did you not already know that?

Crossed Off: Death Knell (Part XII)

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Starla soon learned that her confidant, Cam’s student Quang Phan, had his own ability. He was the final piece of the puzzle; or rather, he was the last person with abilities she would have the pleasure of meeting. He was born with this innate understanding of how things were measured. He could instantly tell the distance between two objects, their weight, and just about anything else about them that could be quantified. He and Starla grew close over the months. Even though he was several years her junior, she felt a bond to him. He became her little baby brother. The Vietnamese education system was a little different than the Usonian one, but he was currently in the equivalent of primary school. Because of his ability, he was exceptionally good at math, but excelled in most of his classes. He struggled a bit with history, and so Cam was devoting extra time to tutor him. Starla would help as well, and even secretly taught the rest of the classes on rare occasions to give Cam’s mind a break.

She wasn’t spending every second of her time in Vietnam, however. She continued to visit her other confidants, but they were more difficult than Cam. While she basically pretended like nothing was wrong, the others pitied her and tried to give her encouragement. That was the last thing she wanted. Now that he lived closer, Sendoa visited her and Alec in person. The rest of her extended family came down from South Carolina to visit her as well. They had trouble understanding the extent of her condition, and treated her like she was in a coma; that is, they acted like they weren’t sure whether she could even hear them. And this was funny because, unlike regular people with Locked-in syndrome, sometimes she couldn’t, because she was thousands of miles away at the time. Little by little, however, the visits ended. People moved on with their lives and left Starla and her family alone.

Each time one of her friends or family members left, she crossed them off her mental list of greatest hits. This gave her the idea to do the same with her confidants abroad, and everyone who knew about her ability, including Ling, René, and Máire, even though she didn’t get the chance to know them very well. Karam managed to track down Don and his friends in Finland, so that was a nice touch. After she was done, she intended to never see them again. Though she had given up trying to kill herself, she still considered all of this to be the end. She would have to stop butting in on Cam’s life sooner or later. As they say, as fate would have it, she would be forced into this decision sooner.

She was taking in a play with Cam and her colleagues when she felt something she had not experienced before. It wasn’t so much of a feeling as it was a sound. This low-pitched hum rang in her ears, and coaxed her into returning to her body. Once she had, she discovered that she was not alone. Though she was on the floor, and turned toward the darkness under her bed, she could sense two people in the room with her. “Don’t make me do this,” one pleaded to the other.

“I’m sick of caring what other people want or need,” the one further away from her said back. Though Starla had never met anyone who drank alcohol, this man sounded about like the actors in the anti-drug videos she watched in health class.

“She’s just a girl. She doesn’t deserve this.”

“She can’t move. What does it matter?”

“She can’t move because of her ability,” the first man explained. “I can tell you this much, but I can’t tell you why.”

“Again, what do I care?”

“Because, you idiot, if you take her ability, it could happen to you.”

“Then you should have no problem with me giving it a shot.”

“I beg of you, don’t do this. And don’t make me be a part of it.”

“You’re the only way,” the leader said. “And I’m tired of your complaints, Ambrose. You want to do this,” he ordered.

“I want to do this,” Ambrose repeated in a monotone voice. But then he leaned down to Starla and whispered, “I’m sorry.” This was more than just threats by domination. This was mind control. The man in charge had an ability, and either this Ambrose fellow was a scientist, or he had one as well. For some reason, he could give other people abilities, but the conversation implied that this was not a good thing for the original user.

And then it was over. She was dead. She didn’t feel pain, and she didn’t go anywhere. For a second or two, all she could see was gray. Out of the corner of her eye was some kind of pristine white desk, but then she was back in her room, looking down at her now dead body. All around her was indigo, just like when she first met the spirit-walker, Don in Greece. Though she had seen this indigo world before, it instantly felt different. She was wearing a gray tunic. She felt better rested than she had in her entire life, but she also felt more vulnerable, like the slightest encounter with a mildly sharp object would pierce her skin and drain her of all her blood. She could also feel the seconds go by, to the same accuracy that Quang seemed to be able to.

Ambrose moved over to his master and did something with his hands to give him Starla’s ability. The master smiled under his own accomplishment. He gave the impression that he had experienced this before, and that it was amazingly refreshing. But then his face changed. He looked like he had just been drugged, and was having trouble keeping his eyelids open. Perhaps it was the alcohol. “What...?” he started to ask. “What did you do to me?”

“I did what you asked,” Ambrose said with no hint of irony. “Starla’s ability is now running through your blood. You should be able to jump to any body you wish within hours, maybe days.”

“No,” the master argued. “This is different. It’s different than last time.” His knees buckled and he had to catch himself on the corner of Starla’s dresser.

Ambrose made no attempt to help him. “I honestly don’t know what’s happening. But I warned you that her ability would be dangerous. We just don’t know enough about it. With time, I might have been able to find a way to do this without killing, or stop whatever it is that’s happening to you right now.”

“You’re going to help me,” the master barked at him as he slipped to the floor.

Ambrose reached down and tried to help the master up, but was struggling. He was now able to fight the compulsion. “Your control is wearing off. I don’t have to do what you say anymore.”

“This was your plan. You did this!” the master screamed.

“I’m telling you that I didn’t.”

And then the master used the last of his power to let out one final order. Before dropping his lids completely and drifting off to wherever he was going, he said to Ambrose, “you’re crazy if you think I’m going to believe that you didn’t do this on purpose!”

Unfortunately, Ambrose did believe such a thing, and so he went crazy. He yelled at the top of his lungs for a few seconds before slinking into the opposite corner of the room and rocking back and forth. Starla could do nothing but watch as her parents burst into the room, first looking at the sleeping master, and then over to the literally insane Ambrose, and then finally to their daughter’s body. Her father started to cry out from agonizing loss. Her mother dove down to Starla and frantically searched for a pulse, of course coming up empty.

It was done, and so Starla walked away, not wanting to see her family in this condition. She laughed to herself, but then remembered that she was a ghost, and no one could hear her, so she laughed as loud as she could. For it was then that she realized she had spent so much time crossing her friends off of that mental list, but she had now hit that final entry. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her imaginary list. With the other hand, she mimed the checkmark next to her own name. Then nothing happened. There was no bright light inviting her to heaven, nor a reaper man to pull her away. She could find no signs directing her to “cross over”. No. She just remained there. Alone. As a ghost. Her story was not quite finished.

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