The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 8, 2552

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Before calling anyone else about the creep, the twins walked back around the portal building, which they had named The Gatehouse. Angela wanted to call it The Iris, but Marie said that they weren’t allowed to. They stress-tested the structure, and found themselves unable to get in, which suggested that Bronach Oaksent would not be able to get out. They certainly didn’t design it to be that easy. But they had only just now built it, so they were paranoid that it wasn’t enough. Who knows what tricks this guy had up his giant sleeve? They returned to the doors where he was waiting to be let out, and urged him to go back where he came from. He didn’t leave, and he didn’t speak. He didn’t lift his hood either, so they weren’t even able to confirm that it was him. For all they knew, it could have been a troublemaking teen just playing a prank.

Once it looked like their opinions weren’t being respected, they relented, and called in everyone else. The Matics were not happy to be interrupted from what they were doing, but they understood the seriousness. Ramses was fortunately at a stopping point in his work, where the trillions of simulations he was running needed time to iterate and resolve. “I’ll handle this,” he said. He took the forge core back from Angela, and started working on something new, claiming that it would be complete by the time they returned to the timestream. He was right. When they came back a year later, it was impossible to even get close.

It was now surrounded by the largest pyramid they had ever seen. Ramses said that the perimeter was 20 kilometers in total length. He would have built it bigger than that, but that was all the space he had to work with outside of the capital dome. There was actually an entrance that went from the dome, into the pyramid. From there, a maze leading to the portal would make it virtually impossible to find your way through. Even if Bronach returned to where he came from, and flew back through the portal with a stealth bomber, he should not have been able to escape. He kind of went overboard with this one, but admitted to feeling bad for not addressing the issue before. Leona wanted to point out that it was Echo who made the portal in the first place, with no apparent way to shut it off, but that would have been insensitive of him.

“Is he still there?” Leona asked over Angela’s shoulder as Angela was studying the Gatehouse’s feed.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Well, his robes are anyway.” She cast the video to the big screen, and stepped through days and days of footage. “See? He doesn’t move. He’s literally frozen. I’m thinking he teleported out, and teleported a mannequin in to take his place.”

“I though you had the suppression field up.”

“Oh, that doesn’t just prevent people from getting in or out?” Angela asked.

“It should stop it altogether.”

“Oh, then I don’t know,” Angela said. He’s, uhh...a robot? I saw that in a show once. An evil android went too far back in time, so he made himself a little money, bought some infrastructure, then sealed himself up, and just went dormant for decades.”

“That’s absolutely not impossible.” Leona looked back at the screen for a few seconds. It made her shiver. “Ack, that’s so creepy. Turn it off, turn it off.”

Angela exited out, letting it revert to a wide shot of the pyramid from the outside. “I know this was all automated, but it still took a lot of energy for just one little person.”

“It’s not a waste. It’s good to have a pyramid anyway. It helps facilitate interstellar and intergalactic travel.”

“I’ve heard that,” Angela said, nodding. “I don’t understand why, or why it seems like we’ve never worried about it. Most people can’t jump that far anyway. Is it just for people like Maqsud and Aristotle Al-Amin?”

“The way I understand it, it’s specifically not for them. They were born with the ability to cross those distances on their own. There are a lot of things going on that we don’t hear about, from both salmon and choosing ones. They need to cover those distances too, for various reasons. I don’t think that pyramids hold special power. I think it’s more about the size.”

“Also the shape,” Ramses added, having returned at some point from his work on the moon. “It could be a cone instead, but those are harder to engineer, and I personally prefer the former, though I am Egyptian. It’s about funneling temporal energy from a large area to a fine point. But you’re right, the pyramid-builders in ancient days didn’t do anything special to the interior. Energy just concentrates well from this basic shape.”

“Right,” Angela said. She twisted her shoulders back and forth a couple of times between Leona and Ramses. “Am I the only one seeing an issue here?”

“What do you mean?” Ramses questioned.

“We built a megastructure to prevent someone from coming here from far away without our permission. And this new structure is particularly well-suited for helping people come from far away without our permission.”

“Don’t say that,” Leona urged, “because if you say that, something’s gonna happen, and we’re not gonna like it.”

Fearfully, all three looked back up at the live feed. Leona was seemingly correct. A beam of fiery blue light landed right on the tip of the pyramid, releasing a pressurized vhwm, loud enough to be heard by the far camera, but not from inside the dome.

“Everyone report to main control immediately,” Leona ordered into comms.

They all appeared nearly instantaneously, except for Romana.

“Romy!” Leona cried. “Romana, where are you!”

Mateo checked the locator. “She’s in the pool. She likes to float around in there when she’s meditating.”

“I guess that’s okay, as long as she’s not near the portal pyramid,” Leona decided. “We have an intruder. I don’t know who it is. Marie, you’re with me. Ramses, secure virtual systems. Angela, be an extra set of hands if he needs it. Mateo.... Mateo?”

“It looks like he’s at the pool now,” Olimpia notified her.

Mateo reappeared, wet from the waist down, carrying his daughter in his arms. She was breathing, but not opening her eyes, or stirring. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

“I do,” Marie admitted. “She’s in VR. She’s been living a second life.”

“Ram...” Leona began, “deal with that too. Marie, we gotta go.”

They took each other’s hands, and teleported to the benbenet, where they found Bronach Oaksent, as well as some unknown person, who was wearing too much clothing and goggles to recognize. That second guy had some kind of apparatus attached to the balcony floor, and was doing something with a tablet.

“Whoa, hold on, ladies,” Bronach said, holding up his hands defensively. “We’re not here to hurt you. There’s a peace treaty, remember?”

“I remember we can’t trust you. How did you get out?” Leona demanded to know.

“I didn’t,” he answered. “I didn’t have to, because I was never in there.”

The other guy pushed his goggles to his forehead, and looked up. It too was Bronach, but the old version of him, who Mateo rescued from the afterlife simulation. The two of them had a weird relationship since they could both lay claim to the Goldilocks Corridor. “It’s nearly done, then it will need to calculate the return vector.”

“Make sure you make it two-way,” Young!Oaksent instructed. “I don’t want the two of us getting trapped in there too.”

“No, we wouldn’t want that,” Leona said sarcastically.

“Before you get any bright ideas,” Young!Oaksent responded, “there’s a reason we’re wearing these vests. They let us dig tunnels through suppression fields. All he’s doing now is calculating the trajectory so we get a straight shot into the Gatehouse. Without it, we would still be able to get free.”

“I don’t like how much you know about this place,” Marie spat.

“This is the most famous planet in the galaxy,” Young!Oaksent explained. “Or it will be anyway. I don’t have time to tell you everything—”

“I don’t care,” Leona contended. “I just need to know who the hell is down there, and what you want with him.”

Young!Oaksent winced. “It’s Key!Bronach, obviously. Your portal only goes to one place. He’s been searching for a way back here since the Sixth Key was created. He finally found a safe route with the portal that you so graciously created for him. We don’t want him here. We can’t have it. We’re already splitting power in the Corridor. He would only muddle things up.”

“Why is he all weird, and not showing his face?” Marie questioned.

He shrugged. “No clue. We don’t know that much about what he’s been through. We just see him as a threat. I promise, once we get him, we’ll shimmer back home, and not bother you. There’s no reason for us to stay on Ramosus.”

“Not yet,” Old!Oaksent quipped.

“Shut up,” Young!Oaksent scolded.

Leona laughed. “Wow, could you two be more having totally rehearsed that?”

“Huh?”

“Look, I don’t doubt that you have a problem with sharing the wealth, but I don’t believe that you’re going to leave us alone. I’m sure you already know that we’re formulating a plan to shave the top of this pyramid off so it can no longer access Shimmer.”

“That’s your prerogative,” Young!Oaksent agreed. “Either way, I’m getting my alt self, and taking him somewhere so far away, you’ll never see him again.”

“Let me guess, the distant future?”

“N—no,” he protested.

Old!Oaksent’s tablet beeped. “We’re good to go.”

Young!Oaksent put his goggles on. “All right, sweethearts, it was nice to catch up, but we gotta do a thing.” He clicked his tongue and pointed at the girls with both hands.

Before they could tunnel away, Olimpia and Angela appeared behind them with jet injectors, which they promptly stuck into the two Oaksents’ necks. They fell over unconscious immediately.

“Boom, asshole! Wait for her to shoot you!” Olimpia cried. She looked up when she realized her words weren’t landing. “Dredd, 2012. Anybody? Anybody? Whatever.”

A few hours later, they saw on the interior Gatehouse cameras as the two newest Oaksents were waking up in the Gatehouse with the third version of him. The creepy one was still just standing there frozen. “Welcome back,” Leona said into the microphone.

Young!Oaksent looked up at the camera. “You took our vests.”

“Ramses is already looking them over,” she told him. “What a thoughtful gift.”

“I underestimated how ruthless you were,” he said. “A chemical attack. It doesn’t sound like you.”

“I do what I must,” she replied.

“Are you gonna trap us here forever?” Old!Oaksent asked.

“There’s a way out, right behind ya, up the hill.”

They both looked over their shoulders at the portal. “We’ll find a way back. And anyway, our people know what to do in our absence.”

“We’ll be ready,” Leona claimed, not knowing if it was true.

Young!Oaksent shook his head indignantly. He snapped his fingers in front of the supposed Sixth Key version of them. “Simon says, unfreeze.”

The hooded figure slowly turned towards him, but didn’t react too dramatically.

Young!Oaksent took him by the upper arm, and began to walk up the hill. Old!Oaksent followed them both through the portal.

“We need to find a way to close it completely,” Leona determined. “I thought it would be a good idea to have that connection for our own use, but it’s too dangerous.”

“Yeah, I’ll look into it,” Ramses volunteered. “But right now, I’m trying to get Romana out of her virtual environment.”

Leona looked across the room, where Mateo was next to his daughter, stroking her hair gently. Leona breathed deeply. “Yes, that’s priority. Then the portal. Then the Outriders. Then...preparing for anything and everything else. And we thought this world would be boring.”

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Microstory 2670: You Can’t Fight a Wave

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Resi told the truth, knowing that it wouldn’t matter, because the evidence was overwhelming. The victim was unclothed in her bed. He was found in the room, having no good reason to be there. His fingerprints were found on the gun. The police on the island are absolutely not trained to investigate this sort of thing because high-level crimes don’t happen here, but they know how to dust an object. They’ve seen the same shows and movies that Resi has, and probably more, since this is their chosen profession. They keep order, though. They help facilitate large crowds, so everyone is safe. They don’t solve crimes. They don’t catch criminals. They have no idea what they’re doing, and they know it. A few of them asked him a few questions, but again, none of it was based on any training or experience. It was just what you would expect to ask, like did he do it, what was his motive exactly, and where did he get the firearm?

He’s sitting in his cell now, which maybe has never been used before. Or it’s been used a lot more than he thinks and that’s why it’s so dirty? No, this is dust, not dirt. He’s a rarity here, which is perfect. Just perfect. It’s what he deserves, letting himself become the First Tongue of Aether. He should have meditated more before the Kidjum. There are those who will teach kids to take control over their dreams, so they don’t have to rely on their subconsciousness. It’s not against the rules, but definitely frowned upon, and those people often do poorly in their jobs unless they choose the House they grew up in. He never would have gone that route. He did everything right, except he broke into Speaker Lincoln’s bungalow. That probably was a bridge too far. He will spend the rest of his life paying for it. The officers aren’t buying his story. He just sounds desperate.

He hears a ruckus outside, so he drags his cot over to the high window, and stands on it to peek between the bars. Hundreds of members of House Kutelin are here, swarming the building. “Free Resi! Free Resi!”

“He’s there!” one of them says, pointing to the window. A selection of the convoy breaks off, and crowds around. “We’re here to break you out!”

“You can’t do that,” Resi contends, looking around for someone from his Fold, or anyone he recognizes better. He has not had enough time to get to know everyone, and wouldn’t have the brain capacity for it anyway. “It will make only things worse.”

“We know you didn’t do this,” someone else says.

“Yeah, you’re too smart to solve your problems that way.”

It’s hard not to see them as children. Even though this is the age where Tambora thinks you’re mature enough to make your own decisions, it’s really just about labor redistribution. It’s about keeping things moving. Make no mistake, he’s no better than them. He’s just not as naïve. Breaking him out is just going to make him look more guilty. “Please. Just go. Listen to Caprice. She will figure this out for you. I’m cooked.”

They’ve come all the way into the station now, surrounding Resi on all sides. Finally, someone he knows. “We have the keys,” Kasati says, jiggling them in front of the bars. “We just need to figure out which one to use. The guards aren’t cooperating.”

“You better not have hurt them,” he warns her.

“Are you kidding me?” She looks back at the horde behind her, as she’s trying keys one by one. “We don’t have to hurt anybody. We’re a wave. It’s comin’ whether you brace or not. They’ve just pressed their backs against the wall, not even arguing.”

“You can’t fight a wave!” someone echoes from the group.

“You can’t fight a wave! You can’t fight a wave!” they all start to shout.

“No chanting!” Resi cries. He hates chanting more than most things.

“You can’t fight the wave either,” Kasati replies. She turns a sixth key. “First try.”

They realize that he’s not going to go with them willingly, so several of them flood into the cell, and begin to gently nudge them in the direction they want him to go. It does feel like a wave, pulling him away from justice. He may be innocent, but this is not how it’s done. Even without much crime, they still have procedure. They take him through the station, and outside. Some start chanting the new motto again, others are yelling or cheering unintelligibly. Resi is hopeless to stop it. Have they just sparked war?

They all start to squint and shield their eyes when a gust of wind washes over them from the sky. A flying vehicle is descending upon them. They back up to form a hole. Several kids almost fight each other over who is going to protect Resi from whatever this is. “You can’t fight the wind either!” an Enaiyo boy screams. “Come on, say it with me! You can’t fight the wind! You can’t fight the wind! You can’t—”

He stops when a figure hops out of the opening of the aircraft when it’s still two or three dozen meters in the air. They drop to the ground, landing safely on their feet. She pulls her hood off to let her locks breathe. She holds a finger up, and swirls it around above her head, presumably triggering the craft to fly away, and lower the decibels in the area. “Which one of you is Resi Brooks?”

“I’m Resi Brooks!” someone claims, followed by several others.

“Stop, stop it!” she orders. “He’s not in trouble, I just need to know who to talk to. In case it wasn’t clear, I’m from the mainland. I’m Bungulan.” This whole planet is called Bungula, and the Yana Islanders acknowledge that, but they typically prefer to identify with their nation, and relegate Bungulan to all outsiders.

“I actually am Resi,” he insists, freeing himself from his self-assigned protectors. He approaches the stranger. “If you’re here to process me through your court system, I’ll go willingly. But I must ask that you speak with the Assembly first.”

“That will not be necessary,” the stranger explains. She steps up onto a flower bed retaining wall so all can hear. “Resi Brooks is innocent of the crime he was accused of! I was sent here to personally oversee his release, in case there was resistance! We demanded photographs of the crime scene, and of Mr. Brooks! That’s all we needed! Any bumbling 20th century detective could tell instantly that he did not shoot the victim! It was, in fact, a self-inflicted wound! I won’t go into specifics about blood spatter and blowback, but the reality is quite obvious to us, and we were worried that something like this would happen as a result of the miscommunication! Please peaceably return to your homes! I need to speak with Mr. Brooks myself, so I can understand the full extent of the situation! Thank you!”

The Head Peace Officer pushes his way through the crowd as it’s trying to break apart, and approaches the Bungulan, lifting his pants up by the belt, again, like he’s seen in movies. “I don’t appreciate you coming down here. I only called for an opinion.”

The Bungulan gestures towards the crowd. “You obviously needed more than that. You didn’t do anything wrong. You followed the evidence. I hope I can count on your cooperation, however, now that we know the truth.”

He fancies himself a sheriff, pretending to chew on something when there’s nothing in his mouth. “I don’t care what you do with the exile. Just get off my island.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 7, 2551

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While he was spending time with his son, Echo—when they weren’t going on missions with Leona—Ramses was also working on Operation Starframe. Echo offered to conquer the whole galaxy in the main sequence with a wave of his hand, but Senona said that they would not allow it. The Superintendent forced him and Clavia to leave Salmonverse for a reason, and it wasn’t to come back at will, making sweeping changes to the galactic starscape. Ramses felt like he agreed with this, instead wanting to complete the project on his own. Still, he let his son give him a few pointers. Ramses was glad that everything was ready to go, because there wasn’t much time. Senona dropped them back on this planet with only moments to spare. He teleported into outer space alone with his forge core, and dropped it on the smaller moon in orbit just before his jump into the future.

After the rest of the team returned to the timestream a minute later on September 7, 2551, they joined him up there to take a look at the massive shipyard that had been constructed in their absence. Hundreds of new ships had been built already, and the design was not unfamiliar to them. About 300 years ago, Leona was on Varkas Reflex with some of their friends, but she needed to get to Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, because that was where Mateo was going to end up. Hokusai Gimura designed the prototype for the reframe engine for her. The Radiant Lightning was only capable of traveling 22 times the speed of light, but that was faster than anything back then, except for certain time travelers. It was a tight fit. Both Leona and Sanaa were there, so it really only worked because Leona skipped over the entire trip due to her pattern. Ramses figured that the same basic design was perfect for this situation because the Outriders—as he was calling them—didn’t require life support. They just needed the ship itself, ancillary components, and a little standing room just in case someone had to get inside for maintenance.

Ramses picked the forge core back up. “You guys don’t need to be here. I just need to look through the logs, and make sure everything’s on schedule.”

“We were hoping to give you the fifty-cent tour of our new planet,” Angela told him. “The one that I named after you?”

Ramses patted his hips and chest. “I’m a little short.”

“So you’re not mad?” Angela asked him.

He took a deep breath. “I know better than to argue with you. If that’s what you wanna call it, I’ll accept.”

“I built a giant tree,” Mateo added. “That’s what the word means; branching. If you prefer, that’s what we’ll tell people. It’s just Latin, and has nothing to do with you. Nothing more than a coincidence.”

“I appreciate the exit clause,” Ramses said. He lifted his forge core a tad bit with his wrist. “I really do need to get back to work, and it’s going to be boring.”

“The tests,” Marie reminded him. “We need to know how small an establishment can be to work as a slingdrive target.”

“I have that covered,” Ramses explains with a smile. “I’ll use the Outriders themselves. Different ones will be programmed to paint different sized targets, at different distances. No one else needs to do anything for that. It really wouldn’t work to make short testing slings ourselves, because I do think distance is a factor. Farther locations probably need bigger targets. But we’ll see. I appreciate the offer. Olimpia, Leona, you should go see how Ramosus has changed. This really will be super boring.”

“Call us if you need anything.” Mateo placed a hand on his friend’s back.

Hours later, after touring the other structures on the surface of the planet, they were back inside the capital dome, standing on top of a water tower. It was deliberately made smaller than the standard size of 83 kilometers. With a diameter of only 11 KM, The walls were still visible to the naked eye, rather than being obscured by the internal atmosphere, and the way light scattered. This was important, because the panes didn’t tessellate evenly like they did for the standard domes. They used what the dummies left behind to work on this discovered was known as a voronoi pattern. It showed up in nature all the time, particularly with certain insect wings, and the native trees which inspired it. It was random, beautiful, and more importantly, structurally sound. It made the capital dome look less rigidly constructed, and more naturally grown, even though it wasn’t. It was still made of diamond and metamaterials, like graphene. But instead of fading into the background, ignored in favor of holographic imagery, it could be seen in its full glory. At certain times of day, such as right now at sunrise, the light passing through the panes created criss-crossing rainbows that couldn’t be found anywhere else in the galaxy. It felt like they were in the fairy realm.

“This was a brilliant idea,” Leona noted as she admired the view. “You didn’t just take what was already in Ramses’ forge core. You built something new.”

“Well, the AI did it all,” Mateo admitted. “It already had templates for fractal branching. We just tweaked the details to fit our specifications.”

“That’s what Ram does,” Leona argued. “You think he writes the code line by line? He didn’t even make the AI himself. He took the base code from multiple AIs, and used them to write something new, but not original or unique. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a genius. We still need him for things like this most of the time, but look at Linwood Meyers. He’s not particularly smart, but he doesn’t have to be. He just needs to know what he wants, and how to ask for it. And if he doesn’t know what to ask for, he’ll ask what to ask. Anyone can build something like this, but it’s impressive that you did it in a couple of years with your level of education. No cerebral enhancements, no neuro-educational downloads. Just you and your imagination. You should be proud. I still don’t know what we’re gonna do with this world, but at least we have something that no one else does.”

“Thanks, my love.”

“I like the rainbows,” Romana said, pointing.

“Castlebourne has those too,” Leona explained. “You just can’t see them through the holograms. Missed opportunity, but good for us.”

“Welp,” Olimpia began, “I’m pretty tired. I think I’m gonna go to bed.”

“Okay,” Leona said.

“Are you a little tired, Leona? And Mateo?”

“No, it’s only been a couple days for me, remember?” he reminded her.

“Yeah, but I think maybe you’re a little tired,” Olimpia tried to claim.

Mateo wasn’t getting it.

“Just go,” Romana requested, “so I stop hearing the deafening subtext.”

“Oh. Okay,” Mateo said, realizing what they meant. The three of them disappeared to go be gross together.

“I think I’m gonna go meditate again,” Romana decided.

“You’ve been doing that a lot,” Marie noted. “Is there anything that we could do for you, or is it purely an internal issue?”

“No issue at all, just trying to stay centered. Call me if you need anything, but please don’t need anything unless you really need it.” Romana teleported away too.

“Well, now it’s just the two of us,” Angela said. “We can’t do what the Matics are doing, nor Ramses, and we don’t know what Romana is up to.”

“I know what she’s up to,” Marie contended.

“You do? What? How?”

“I was a superspy for four years, and she’s not hard to figure out, but I shouldn’t tell you. She is entitled to her privacy.”

“Okay,” Angela conceded, agreeing at least on that last point.

They stood in silence for a good amount of time, watching the sunrise twinkle the rainbows all over the land.

“Do you wanna build something?” Marie suggested. “We still have that extra forge core, with all the templates in it.”

“I think we need permission to make a lot of those things, like the space elevator, or the quarantine dorms.”

Marie shrugged. “Let’s do something small...just for fun. It won’t interfere with anything else we have here, or will have in the future.”

Angela squinted, and tried to look through the panes, to the outside of the dome. “That reality portal, which Echo used to come here. Is that still there?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Sounds like a vulnerability to me,” Angela decided. “Maybe that shouldn’t be out in the open where anyone we bring here could come along, and fall into it, or be attacked by an interdimensional alien.”

“It’s not under a dome,” Marie reasoned. “A normal human wouldn’t be able to breathe near it anyway.”

“Better safe than sorry. Most people have upgraded substrates, like ours.”

“True, and it shouldn’t be too hard. Okay, let’s go build a big door for the portal. If the others get mad, it will not be that hard to tear down.”

The Walton sisters snatched the forge core from its stand, then teleported back to the little hill where the reality portal was still swirling around. They were careful not to approach too close. Angela sat down with her tablet, and began to add components to their shopping cart. She selected a template that was specifically designed to sit on a raised surface. Marie walked around the entire thing, holding her sensor array out to scan the terrain. The hill was actually fairly even, making the template only need to add two minutes to the total estimate for complexity. This wasn’t only to keep people out, but also in if someone were to cross over who wasn’t supposed to, or expected. So they included a life support system, as well as enough rations to last a handful of people a full year. If even more than that showed up, the supplies were self-sustainable to a degree.

They knew they could add more to it later, like sharks with lasers on their heads, or a lava moat. For now, this was all they needed. Given the relatively minor complexities, it only took forty-two minutes to finish the whole thing. The nanites did all the work themselves, since it was a small job, instead of building larger automators to complete the work. They were nearly expended by the end, but that was fine. The core could be replenished with more. Ramses would have to build out his own lab however he wanted it, but they built him a barebones facility with just the basics, including nanotech fabrication.

It wasn’t an aesthetically pleasing facade, but a nice little cylinder with an asymmetrical dome on top. It looked a little like lipstick, with its black and red theme. After they both got a good look inside, Angela stepped out, and Marie stayed in. She tried her hardest to teleport out, but was unable to. Meanwhile, Angela fought to teleport back in, but was equally blocked. The teleportation suppression field was holding. The geothermal generators that it was drawing from couldn’t supply enough sustained power, though, so they switched it off. The field would only turn back on when someone attempted to break through it. Until then, this was just going to sit here and look pretty. They inspected the foundation together, walking all along the perimeter, until getting back to the main door.

They felt a jumpscare when they noticed someone staring at them from the door. They were wearing a creepy red cloak, their face concealed by darkness. They were shaking the door at the handle, trying to get out. The figure lifted their arm, keeping their hand in their sleeve. They drew it across their neck threateningly, but did not say a word.

“Who are you?” Marie asked.

The interloper reached into their collar, and pulled out a gargantuan knife. They stuck it into the opposite sleeve hole, and when they pulled it back out, it was covered in blood. They scratched into the window with the tip, sometimes going back to their own arm for more blood, until the simple message was complete.

“Bro?” Angela questioned. “You’re someone’s brother?”

“Nah, he means Broheim or Bro Montana,” Marie joked.

The creepy figure knocked hard next to the word with their still hidden fist.

“Sorry, we don’t know what you’re trying to say,” Angela responded.

Angrily, the figure slid their blood-soaked sleeve across the glass to draw a line right underneath the word they had written.

“Bro,” Angela repeated.

They immediately hit the glass again.

“Knock,” Marie said. “Oh.”

The Waltons exchanged a look.

“Oh, shit.”

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Microstory 2574: Renata Granger Wakes Up Feeling Like a New Person

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Renata Granger wakes up feeling like a new person. The scent of coffee beckons her from the kitchen. That’s funny, she didn’t program the coffee maker to go off this morning. This was a very calculated choice. She doesn’t want her breath to smell, she doesn’t want any stains on her teeth, and she doesn’t want to have to take too many bathroom breaks. In fact, if she could last the whole day not eating, and not drinking fluids, that would be ideal. As far as her new colleagues go, they should think that she’s a machine, who doesn’t need anything but her job, and maybe a gun or two. She wishes that they had already issued her one now when she hears another noise out there, besides the coffee. Someone is in her apartment. Renata quietly slips out of bed, and grabs the baseball bat, which is leaning against the corner for this very situation. It’s more reliable than the cops in this town, and she can be in control of it, so she doesn’t even bother picking up her phone too. She opens the door, making sure to pull up on the knob ever so slightly to make sure that the latch bolt doesn’t scrape against the strike plate. She slinks out of the room. Shit, she forgot to put on clothes. The intruder is gonna have a bittersweet day, whoever he is.

“Mom,” she utters with a frustrated sigh of relief. “There’s a reason I never made you a key, or even told you where I moved to.”

Her mother casually takes the first sip of her coffee. She’s not the least bit fazed by anything that’s happening here. The nudity, the bat, the lack of a key, or a proverbial welcome mat; it all seems perfectly normal to her, which is so her. “No secret or locked door is gonna stop me from getting what I need.” She smiles, impersonating a kind person who might care what happens to her own daughter. “I wanted to see you off on your first day.” They’re not on speaking terms, but Libera Granger has eyes everywhere, so it’s no surprise that word has spread.

“More like, wanted to make sure I didn’t sleep through my alarm.” Renata is not the type to miss an alarm. She deactivated the snooze button on her alarm clock when she was six, and hasn’t looked back since. But her mother is the type to expect everyone around her to let her down, even when they successfully don’t time and time again.

“Clearly I needed to. Look at you, you’re not even dressed yet.”

“It’s four in the morning.”

“Don’t keep them waiting,” Libera says, like she even knows who she’s talking about. “This is the most important job of your life, and the way you hold yourself today sets the tone.”

Renata smirks. “You’re slipping, mother. It’s actually not a job at this point. It’s only training. I’m not even on probation yet; that’s how far I am from a job.”

“I’m sure you’ll do well.” Libera sets her cup down, and takes a pack of gum out of her pocket. “Take this. You’ll certainly need it.”

Renata wants to argue, but if there’s one thing the two of them have in common, it’s the concern for other people’s perception of them. She hates that she inherited this trait, but it was always going to be something, and she certainly doesn’t want to change. So she simply accepts the gift, and slips it into the pocket of her pants, which she laid out over the chair last night.

“Well,” Libera begins before a long pause while she dumps the last bit of her coffee in the sink, and rinses the mug out. “I won’t keep you. Just be careful today. And remember...no one there is your friend.” What a strange thing to say. As far as her mom thinks, Renata is training to be a management consultant. She obviously can’t have any idea that she’ll be working for the National Security Division. They would respond so fast if she blabbed, she probably wouldn’t survive walking out the door this morning. Libera turns towards the door, but stops short. “And invest in some deadlocks, my dear. I could have been anyone.”

That too is a good idea. Renata locks the door behind her mom, and returns to her room to get her mat out. Might as well do some meditation if she’s not gonna be able to fall back asleep. She would go for a run, but then she would need to drink a lot of water, and the bathroom problem has already been established.

She gets sick of it after about 45 minutes, so she cancels her departure reminder, and leaves an hour earlier than she needs to. It’s winter, so it’s still dark outside. She leaves her apartment building, and walks down the street to the subway station. No one else is here, but the train still comes, and she gets on it. They told her to travel to 108th and Deliverer Road. That’s such a weird name for a street, and she’s never heard of it before—it’s clear on the other side of the city—but she’ll only have to change trains once to get there.

It moves for about five minutes before stopping. No, something is wrong. There’s no chance she’s arrived at her first stop already. There’s no announcement as the doors open. It’s dark and eerie on the platform. A man is standing there, wearing all black, hands behind his back. He looks at her with a sense of familiarity that he has not earned. “Welcome, Miss Granger, to the NSD Training Facility. We call it The Depot. You’re right on time.”

Microstory 2453: Threshold

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A liminal space is an empty place of transition, such as a hallway or a stairwell. The keypoint is that it’s empty, devoid of life...except for you. This invokes a sense of unease, suggestive of not simply being alone in the room that you happen to be in, but in the world, or even all of time. It is quiet and creepy, and behind every corner could be a lurking threat. It’s hard to decide if such a threat even would be worse, however, or if you wish something would be there just so something would happen to break up the emptiness. Just so you wouldn’t be alone anymore. That is the idea behind a dome simply called Threshold. It’s nothing but liminal space. Any empty room you come across will just lead to a closet, another hallway, or another empty room. You will occasionally come across a small white bucket on a table that’s missing a leg, or a stain on the carpet in the vague shape of a man. While it is generally quiet, random unplaceable noises will sound off somewhere nearby, like a creak, or a chirp. When you walk over to investigate, you won’t find anything, except maybe a surprise mirror, which could give you life-affirming jumpscare. I’ve been through this one a lot, because I revel in the disquiet. I see it as an opportunity for introspection and self-reflection, if there’s a difference. I should wander around and give a think on that. There are some water stations for safety, but no other supplies. You go in with a dayfruit grower-slash hygiene station combo cart, and a cot, but that’s it. Whenever you’re ready to leave, you can activate an exit beacon. A bot will come to retrieve you and lead you out through the nearest locked trapdoor. That’s the only time you’ll see someone else, and once you press that button, you gotta go. If you’re wondering if it’s even possible for multiple people to visit Threshold, and not run into each other once in a while, I assure you that not only is it possible, it may be impossible for two to cross paths. There is plenty of room here. Like the terminal, the outer shell of the liminal space complex takes up just about the entire volume of the dome, which—I looked it up—is 149 thousand cubic kilometers, or 149 billion megalitres. With over 13,800 floors, you’re not gonna run into anyone else. They make sure to keep us separated, and while I can’t be sure, I believe the locked doors I run into occasionally would lead to other people’s areas. Thresholders, as we like to call ourselves, have been discussing the possibilities on the message boards, but Castlebourne gives you very little information. Obviously part of the experience. Normally I wouldn’t discourage someone from visiting a dome. My reviews are usually pretty upbeat and favorable, but it takes a strong stomach to even cross one threshold once you’re inside, let alone a series of them. I don’t know for sure that there aren’t any monsters hiding in dark corners. I only know that I’ve never seen any before. But I do hear those noises, and I don’t know what’s making them.

Fluence: Aura (Part II)

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Briar was gone. Once Goswin felt like he knew enough about the Parallel justice system to trust that it was fair and, well...just, he returned to the X González to explain things to the suspect. Briar was not in his cabin, nor did it look like anyone had ever stayed there. The bedsheets were perfectly aligned, and the surfaces were dusty from disuse. Goswin stepped back into the hallway to see if he was just turned around, but this had to be the right cabin. Still, he checked all of the others, and Briar wasn’t anywhere else either. It wasn’t a huge ship. Eight Point Seven’s sensors were damaged, in addition to her memory, so she was unable to find his location. The researchers on this asteroid had their own security system, which could not find him either, nor detect that anyone besides Goswin and Weaver had ever stepped out of the González. It was a mystery, the answer to which almost certainly had something to do with time travel.

“There’s a database,” Pontus began to explain. “It stores the records of every single person in every reality, throughout all of time, in every timeline. It could trace Briar’s steps as long as he showed up somewhere that records such data. While it does have an unspeakable amount of data, it’s not magic. If someone went off somewhere alone, they could hide from it, just like you could slink through the blindspots of a security camera.”

“Might as well try it,” Goswin decided.

“It’s not that easy,” Pontus replied. “It’s not here. It’s hard to reach, and reportedly harder to access. Almost no one in the universe is granted permission, and even when they are, their activity is heavily monitored to prevent abuse. The Tanadama, which are sort of like our god-leaders, would be prone to letting someone like you use it, but you would still have to go there first, and there is no guarantee.”

“Can we just...call them?” Goswin asked. “I don’t need to look at this database myself. He’s a dangerous and unstable man. He was an adult before he met anyone besides his mother, and he found himself trusting the wrong person. I don’t know what he’s gonna do...and if he’s dead, I need to know that too.”

Pontus shook his head. “We can’t just call. Part of the point is making the journey to Sriav.” He looked towards the back entrance of the hollowed-out asteroid. “It’s out there, in the void, away from all others, in this tiny pocket of civilization. I couldn’t even give you the exact coordinates. I think you’re expected to intuit your vector somehow. They call it our sister outpost, but we’ve never interacted with them, and I’ve never given it much thought.”

“Well, this has to happen. Whatever you need from us, it will have to wait. Briar de Vries is our priority.” He turned away as he tapped on his comms disc to make it clear that he was starting a separate conversation. “Eight Point Seven, Weaver, we’re going to a world called Sriav.”

When he turned back to ask for permission to leave the asteroid, Pontus was gone. Beside him were Weaver and Eight Point Seven in her humanoid form. “How did you do that? Did you have that body ready and waiting?”

She was just as surprised as he was. She patted herself. “Are we all corporeal?”

“No way to test that,” Weaver acknowledged. “We could all be in a simulation.”

“Not a simulation,” came a voice behind them. “It’s Sriav.”

They turned to see a grand entrance to an expansive room. It was so wide and deep that they couldn’t see how big the room was. The walls and ceiling were ornately decorated, but it appeared to be completely unfurnished, like a shell waiting to be filled and used. “I’m sorry, I got the impression that this planet was located in the intergalactic void.”

“It is,” the woman confirmed. “It’s roughly a million light years from the edge of the Milky Way galaxy.”

“We were just on an asteroid in the Achernar system,” Weaver said.

“Well,” the woman began, “if you were going to be in one place one second, and another the next, it would be Po.”

“Po?”

“That’s the primary planet orbiting Alpha Eridani. Hi. I’m Madam Sriav. You came here for a reason, I presume?”

“Captain?” Eight Point Seven urged.

“We’re looking for a man by the name of Briar de Vries,” Goswin started to explain. “He disappeared from our ship. We don’t know exactly when, or how, and we certainly don’t know where we went. Our arrival here is the second time today we’ve jumped through spacetime inexplicably quick. I was told that you have a database?”

Madam Sriav smiled. “This world is quite remote, as I’ve said. We have true faster-than-light travel, of course, but you can’t use it to get here. If you try, you’ll slow down for no apparent reason. It’s a security feature. No, if you wanna come here, you have to do it the old fashioned way, with a simple reframe engine. That could take you upwards of 1400 years. Most barely try, and most of the rest quit. The few who have dedicated their lives to such a pursuit have ended up staying here. There is no better place to live, I believe.”

“Okay, but the database?” Goswin pressed.

She smiled again. “A mechanical rabbit lure, just to give people a reason to head in this direction.”

“So it doesn’t exist,” Weaver surmised.

“A computer that tracks everyone in every reality? What horrors could that lead to? I wouldn’t want to live in a universe that had something like that.”

Weaver faced Goswin. “There must be some reason we’re here. There’s a reason we were thrown to Achernar, and now this place. I think you’re doing it.”

Goswin shook his head with the confidence of a math professor. “No, I’m not.”

“There are only three reasons to slip timespace the way we’ve been doing it; incidentally, by one’s own hand...or by someone else’s,” Weaver went over.

“What is here?” Goswin asked Madam Sriav. “What is the purpose of this world?”

“If you have to ask, you don’t belong,” she answered.

“It would help us understand how we ended up here,” Eight Point Seven reasoned. “Perhaps Briar is already here.”

Madam Sriav sighed. “It would not be my place to say, but...”

“But what?” Goswin waved his loose hand in circles. “Go on.”

“You could always look for a tracker...assuming you can make it back to civilization.” Madam Sriav didn’t think that would ever happen. “There are people who specialize in it. Some have learned and trained, others are born with the gift. Some were imbued with power by the Tanadama themselves.”

“A tracker?” Goswin questioned. “Is there a real database of such people, like a...um...”

“The word you’re looking for is a phonebook,” Weaver helped. “Madam, I know you don’t use money for transactions, but if these people help people like businesses, there must be some central location to find them.”

Madam Sriav shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I was born on this world. I don’t have much of a practical understanding of the way they do things out there.”

Now Goswin sighed as he looked up at the high ceiling. “Well, do you have any ships? We forgot to bring ours.” Something weird happened. Did the ceiling change? Yeah, the ceiling appeared to change. It was sort of gradual, but also abrupt? He kept staring at it, and trying different angles. It looked more like a sky at dawn now.

“Captain. It happened again,” Eight Point Seven explained.

Goswin nodded, still checking different angles of the sky-ceiling. “Yeah, I know. I’m just afraid to look. Everytime I wanna go somewhere, we go.”

“It’s worse than that this time,” Weaver said.

Goswin dropped his chin. Madam Sriav was still here with them, and they were no longer in the frighteningly large room. They were outside, in the center of some kind of meadow nearish the top of a mountain. “I do apologize for...whatever is going on. With me, or with us. I just don’t know.”

“You need to get me back,” Madam Sriav insisted. “So please, figure it out.” She seemed like the kind of person who was not used to getting upset, and was desperately trying to keep her emotions in check, even though she had ever reason to be cross.

“Hey! Who are you?” A man was walking towards them from the slope.

“We are the crew of the X González,” Goswin replied, hoping that Madam Sriav would rather be lumped in with them than stand out in the presence of yet another stranger. “Can you tell us where we are?”

“You’re on Lorania, on the side of Mount Aura.”

“Lorania?” Eight Point Seven echoed, “as in, the island on Dardius?”

“That’s right,” the man said.

“Dardius only exists in the main sequence,” Madam Sriav revealed. “You brought us across realities. How are you doing this?”

“I still don’t know, but I’m worried that he’s accidentally joined us, and if I start thinking about going somewhere else, I’ll only make matters worse.”

“No,” Madam Sriav began to calculate. “Think about Sriav, and that’s where we’ll go. I don’t really care where anyone else goes. I welcomed you to my planet, because that is my job, and I can’t do it if I’m here, so I’m done humoring you.”

Wow, this situation escalated quickly. “Are you a tracker?” Goswin asked the new guy. “If you’re a tracker, that’s why I’m here.”

“No. I’m Harrison. Tracker Four is up there.”

“Great. Maybe they can help everyone get home,” Goswin hoped.

“She’s with another client,” Harrison said, stopping them from stepping forward with an imposing stance.

“You can come back for her later,” Sriav said to Goswin. “You take me back first.”

“I can’t control it,” Goswin argued. “I’m not even sure I am doing it. I don’t feel anything when it happens. Do either of you feel anything?”

Weaver and Eight Point Seven shook their heads.

“Yeah,” Goswin went on, “so let’s say it’s me. What if I accidentally send us to the inside of a volcano, or hell, just the vacuum of outer space?”

“Don’t even suggest things like that!” Sriav was raising her voice now. “Don’t put those thoughts in your own head!”

Goswin made prayer hands, with his index fingers wrapped around his nose, his middle fingers pressed up against his forehead, and his thumbs pushing up the corners of his lips. This is what he did when he was frustrated, and trying to solve a problem. “Harrison, is this region dangerous in any way.”

Harrison didn’t expect the question. “Uh, there’s a natural merge point a few kilometers that way, which will take you to prehistoric times. As long as you stay away from that, you should be good.”

“I’m not gonna try to do anything yet. Madam Sriav, I know that your life and your job are important to you, but you have a few hours to just wait, so I can get this right. I’m going to go meditate. When I get back, if you happen to have photos of where you live, there’s a chance that helps. I really couldn’t say for sure. I’m sorry if I did this to you, but this is uncharted territory, so your patience would be greatly appreciated.”

Still annoyed, Madam Sriav raised her eyebrows, and gestured for him to get on with it. Then she turned around, and started kicking at some nearby flowers.

Goswin wasn’t super into meditation, but he had done it a few times, and it was a great excuse to get away from everyone. If he really was responsible for all of this, standing around and being berated about it wasn’t going to help. He found a nice, soft patch of grass a couple hundred meters away from them. He sat down cross-legged, and closed his eyes, hoping to free his mind from all distractions. The birds were starting to chirp, but they were very consistent and melodic, so it actually helped. There was a slight breeze that cooled his face just enough to be comfortable in this tropical weather. He breathed in deeply, held it in for a few seconds, and exhaled through his mouth. This wasn’t him. It couldn’t be him. He didn’t have powers, or a pattern. He was just a normal guy who met a bunch of time travelers one day. That was why he jumped at the chance to board the X González. He wanted to know more, to meet other people. He wanted to have an adventure. He didn’t want to ruin people’s lives.

He was sitting there for several minutes when it began to rain. It was only a sprinkle at first, but then the drops began to fall harder. It didn’t stop him, though. He stayed where he was, trying to find his center. This was just another distraction that he had to let go of and ignore. Before too long, though, the rain was pouring. The grass under him was pushed away to be replaced by mud. He didn’t know how long he could stand it. It wasn’t the most discomfort he had ever experienced, but he certainly didn’t want it to worsen.

“Ēalā! Eart þu hāl!” an unfamiliar voice shouted to him.

He felt like he had no choice but to open his eyes. This was definitely not Lorania anymore. “What? Sorry, I slipped, but I’m okay.” He started to stand up. “Where am I?”

She seemed quite confused at his words. “It’s England.”

“Forgive me, but...what year?”

“Oh. You must have come through the cave.”

“What cave?”

“On Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. It’s the year 1133, on Earth. My name is Irene. Irene de Vries.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 25, 2399

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Alyssa went into the panic room to meditate in the dark yesterday. There’s only one way in, and one way out. It wasn’t designed for a criminal to get away undetected. It’s there to protect the homeowners from intruders while they wait for help to arrive. If she had left through the door, he would have seen her, and if she had teleported out, she would have said something. She wouldn’t have just disappeared. If for no other reason than to be here for her brothers, she would never have done something so irresponsible. Something happened to her, and Ramses is determined to remedy the situation. Since the Bridgette is already in Southeast Asian Oceania, he requested transport from the government. The McIver boys are here too, because now there’s no one else left to take care of them. Vearden has gotten everything he needs from the house by now, so he’s able to stay with Arcadia at the hospital permanently.

Mangrove One. Ramses thought the team had contributed a hell of a lot to this world’s development, but it’s nothing compared to what this Aldona woman has done, and she did it in a fraction of the time. He knows how to build nanofabricators, but he made a deliberate choice to withhold such technology. It’s not exactly the Prime Directive, but he didn’t think that these people deserved quite that level of sophistication, so he never bothered. He didn’t even want them to know that it was possible. Welp, the cat’s out of the bag, and he’s going to take advantage of it. There’s a spaceship at this ocean facility capable of reaching orbit, and sustaining life. There are other space agencies, of course, but gaining access to them would require reading too many people in to the whole time travelers situation, and would be a political nightmare. Ramses needs to deploy a new temporal error scanner, and this Mangrove Program is his only reasonable way of accomplishing that.

While Mateo stays with the kids, Ramses pleads his case to the little committee they formed here. It consists of Winona, Aldona, Leona, and a couple of other people, whose names may or may not also end in -ona. They never introduced themselves, and they have yet to say a word. Aldona is speaking now. “I’m sorry, we can’t do it.”

“And why is that?” Ramses questions. “It’s just a little satellite. All I need is a means of getting it up there.”

“You’ll just have to do what you need from the ground,” Aldona insists.

“The point is to get in orbit, so it scans the entire planet,” Ramses argues.

“Yes,” Aldona says, “and I do not feel comfortable with that. Honestly, if I had been aware of the last time you scanned literally every human brain on the planet, I would have tried to stop you back then.”

“Winona?” Ramses asks. “You let her push you around like this?”

“She’s...helping us,” Winona defends.

“More than we are,” Ramses says. “Got it.”

“It’s not like that,” Winona claims.

“No, no, I get it,” Ramses begins. “What you’re trying to say is that she has you over a barrel, and the water’s freezing. No, I understand perfectly. You lost your balls.”

“Watch it, Ramses,” Leona warns.

“Do you not want to rescue Alyssa?”

“Of course I do,” Leona contends, “but we’re not even sure she’s gone. It’s barely been a day.”

“Funny how differently you react when it’s not your husband,” he condemns.

“Watch it, I say,” Leona repeats.

Ramses sighs. “If you’re not going to let me take Mangrove One, then I need some temporal energy to make a few jumps up to Mangrove Zero. The equipment is too heavy to carry all at once, so I’ll have to partially disassemble it, and take multiple trips.”

“Why is it any heavier than the one that Mateo took up to the AOC the first time?” Leona asks.

“This one does a little more than just scan for temporal errors,” Ramses says. “I figured I might as well feed two birds with one worm while I’m up there. I didn’t know that I would get so much pushback.”

“Well, if you won’t even tell me what else that thing does, then I’m definitely not letting you go up there. Permission to enter Mangrove Zero is also hereby denied,” Aldona decides.

“You can’t stop me,” Ramses tells her.

“Do you have the temporal energy it would require to make it up there?” Aldona asks, annoyingly confident that she knows the answer, and feeling no need to wait for it. “I thought not. Permission to procure more is denied as well. I’m not telling you that you can’t go look for Alyssa, but you won’t do it by invading the privacy of everyone in the world. It’s my job to protect then, and I won’t have you undermine me.”

Ramses can’t accept that. He will find her. He doesn’t care how many bridges he has to burn. There may not be enough time to synthesize more temporal energy, and he doesn’t have a lab anyway. Here’s hoping he’s right that Mateo doesn’t run out anymore. He fumes at Aldona for another few seconds, then does the same for Winona, and especially Leona. “I don’t know if you and I will ever be okay.” He doesn’t lead them to believe that he’s going to go over their heads. He just tries to walk out of the room. He nearly runs into Mateo in the process.

Mateo places a finger in front of his lips.

Ramses has already faltered at the surprise, so he tries to cover with a cough. “Harrumph. I’m fine. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer,” he spits at them unconvincingly. He nods like that was a good save, and then leaves with Mateo.

“I was listening in,” Mateo says once they’re safely out of earshot.

“I gathered that.”

“I can’t believe that Leona isn’t backing you up. She must know something that we don’t. But if that’s true, we can only go on the information we have at the moment, and at the moment, it looks like the right thing to do is get you up to that ship.”

“I’m glad that someone around here hasn’t lost their mind yet.”

“No, the reptilians can’t catch me; I’m too fast for their chemtrails,” Mateo jokes in a conspiratorial tone.

After a laugh, Ramses takes Mateo to the hangar, where the new satellite has been set aside in the back corner. Together they disassemble it into more manageable parts. It takes them the rest of the day. It’s a surprise that no one surmises what they were doing all this time. Ramses accesses the blueprints for Mangrove Zero, so Mateo  knows where the cargo bay is. It’s only upon his last jump that something happens that they didn’t plan for. Aldona claimed that Mangrove Zero was completely unmanned. She was either lying, or mistaken.

“Hey,” the teenager says. “Are you here to kill me?”