Microstory 1615: Going the Wrong Way

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Salmonverse is the messiest, most complicated, most dangerous universe that I’ve ever seen. It’s not dangerous because a bunch of demons are trying to kill you, like Adverse, or because of unpredictable base modifications, like you’ll find in Bladopodoverse. It’s dangerous because far too many people are capable of time travel and they travel through time far too often. With almost no regulation, this doesn’t just get complicated, though. It also leads to death. First of all, you have to understand that, since there are very few parallel realities in this brane, every time someone time travels, they’re technically killing billions of people. The act itself will collapse the timeline, and send its inhabitants into oblivion. Travelers justify this in a few ways. Many of the people who collapsed with the timeline they just came from exist in this new timeline as well. They will move on with their lives, and not worry about what might have been, unless there’s some other psychological reason for them to worry about that, in which case, the time travel isn’t relevant or necessary. Some people will never have been born, sure, but again, their once-loved ones will never know what they’re missing. There’s also the fact that reality itself is constantly springing and collapsing timelines. I’ve mentioned microrealities, which exist for fractions of a second, and are destroyed once true reality takes shape. There are people in those microrealities—duplicates of everyone who existed at the moment—and have just as much potential to survive as their counterparts. And this is happening all the time, in every universe, even the ones that don’t allow general time travel. But that’s not the same thing, because no one is doing that on purpose. Time travelers, on the other hand, are deliberate actors. Well, not all of them, I suppose. The universe’s namesake, salmon are controlled by the powers that be, but the accusation still holds. It’s just that blame must be shifted from the traveler themselves, to the people in control. It’s still happening, and timelines are still collapsing.

This is not a criticism of Salmonverse, or its residents, or the time travelers. It’s not even really about the people whose timeline collapses when a new one is created. It’s just not a good place to live if you want to make sure that you have a future. Anytime someone goes back in time, and changes something, everyone’s life is at risk. Their entire existence is in jeopardy. Sometimes it’s a timeloop, and everything they do is inevitable. When it’s not, though, even the slightest alteration—and I mean, on the quantum level—creates a new branching timeline. It may not have been their intention to change something, but it will, and they can’t stop it. Lots of time travel fiction involves doing your best to not make any changes to history, but again, unless it’s a timeloop, their efforts are pointless. History will change, even if they stand in one place until they catch up to their own present, which they won’t. Reality is also a lot less binary than people think. Stopping someone from dying on April 29, only to watch them die on April 30 still means that things changed. Death isn’t stalking you, trying to maintain some cosmic balance. If the person ends up dying anyway, it’s not because it was their destiny, or couldn’t be stopped. It’s just a coincidence. That’s what salmonverse is all about. Travelers are constantly making changes, often unintentionally, but also often in the attempt to improve something about reality. I don’t think anyone is qualified to say whether that’s good or not, but from where I stand, time travel is just not worth the risk.

Microstory 1609: Area W

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

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

Microstory 1406: Triumph of the Triumvirate

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Only weeks after Rothko arrived on Durus, Effigy came back, hoping to use a different tactic to get what she wanted. She had had just about enough of Escher getting in the way of her plans to bring all of her people into this universe, and she thought she finally had an advantage over him. On the outside, Rothko was a really good person. He was compassionate, thoughtful, and ready to help anyone who crossed his path, whether he knew them or not. Yet he carried a darkness inside of him that he was only beginning to discover, and being a master manipulator, Effigy believed she could exploit these two sides of him at the same time. She could turn him over to her side, both by appealing to his instinct to be helpful and understanding, and to his inner demons. She began to communicate with him when he was apart from the other two. She didn’t whisper in his ear, or claim that his friends weren’t good for him. She didn’t even charge him to keep their new relationship a secret. She just became friends with him, and taught him how to use his time powers, and let him decide for himself whether he was going to reveal the truth to the rest of the Triumvirate. Most choosing ones develop an instinct for their abilities. They don’t know exactly how they work, but they know how to use them, just like a baby will learn to walk, pretty much no matter what, even if you try to teach them not to. Rothko, however, was particularly unskilled with his, and he needed Effigy’s help. He was a lot smarter than she gave him credit for, though. He could see what she was trying to do to him, and as long as he stayed grounded, he felt he could overcome any psychological poison she tried to use on him. He let her keep thinking that they were becoming real friends, but it was all just an act, so he could learn from her. He recognized that she was his best hope of figuring out how to use his gifts. He proved his loyalty months later; to himself, to his friends, and to Effigy. One thing he had always wanted to do was restore Escher’s hand. Now, the range of his powers was limited. While it was indeed called reality-warping, it didn’t give him free reign over the whole universe. It was localized. He could only make small changes, and only within the immediate area. He was disrupting physics, but not quite breaking any laws. The energy he used had to come from somewhere, and a lot of his work were more illusions than real alterations. There was a way, however, for him to give Escher his hand back. There was a reality out there where Escher didn’t lose his hand at all. This reality was unstable, and short-lived, but that didn’t matter when it came to  time travel. He could still access that timeline, and take from it what he needed. He stitched events from this microreality into the real one, and returned the hand, as if it had never been removed at all. This was great; the Triumvirate had beaten Effigy yet again, and she was furious, because it meant she hadn’t really found a weakness at all. Sadly, their new, happy, and intact life together was not destined to last forever. In utilizing his powers in this way, Rothko had unwittingly opened the world up to much larger changes in the future, and none of them would prove to be powerful enough to stop what was coming.

Microstory 1206: Quincy Halifax

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Quincy Halifax was literally not from this world. He originated in a different universe entirely, but he was born with a special ability to crossover. The truth is that everyone capable of dreaming is also capable of traversing the bulkverse, which holds an infinite number of universe branes. A dreamworld has always been considered a mental collection of thoughts and memories; one that is abstract, and does not exist on its own. Actually, it does exist physically, within the hyperdimensional construct we know as collective reality. Most dreamworlds don’t last beyond the dreamer’s sleeping state, but for the ones that are stable enough, Quincy can access them. His is a long bloodline of dreamwalkers, who have used their abilities to accomplish various ends. Some build constructs where others can visit while maintaining full lucidity. Others travel the bulkverse, helping the people they find there, in whatever capacity they can. One of the more common uses for lucid dreamworld generation is to aid in people’s learning. By doubling up on the productivity for the fraction of the day that’s otherwise used for only one thing: sleeping or learning, participants can spend their waking hours doing whatever else they want. Quincy did end up becoming a teacher in Atlantis, but he did so using more traditional techniques. He actually didn’t use his ability to teach his students. He had no particular reason for this; it simply didn’t occur to him. He never thought he would soon be expected to use it for them in a unique way. Rather, he would expect it of himself. Some of his students found themselves in possession of very powerful technology, which could manipulate the events in other universes. Had he realized they obtained it in time, he could have stopped it, but once they started using it, there was no going back. His only option at that point was to enter the universe they were manipulating, using his own ability to crossover, and help the people living there as best he could. He chose to become a gravedigger, as unglamorous as that was. He figured he wouldn’t be able to alleviate much of what his students were putting their unwitting characters through, so any attempt to help any one person—or even a group of people—would be too myopic in thinking. He decided the best way he could help was to bury the dead. He didn’t bury everyone in the world, of course. The natives were generally responsible for their own practices. He was only in charge of a specific class: those who experienced nonlinear time. He chose this because, while there were billions of individuals in the universe altogether, his students were only having a direct impact on these relative few. He felt that this made them the students’ responsibility, and by extension, his. He wasn’t naturally immortal, but he knew he had so much work to do, and he couldn’t risk dying himself before it was done. Fortunately, he had a literal god’s eye view of the world, and was able to procure the necessary ingredients so that his mission would never be interrupted.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 8, 2246

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When a future version of Arcadia Preston—who was evidently good now, and using her not-so-gentle nature to protect various other universes from the white monsters of Ansutah—asked Mateo if he could handle tricking her past self, he was confident he could. The crew of the Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez had this whole plan lined up. They didn’t know when she was going to show up on their ship, but they were pretty sure she’d time it to not be there until Mateo returned to the timestream. She would be focusing all of her attention on Mateo, and perhaps Cassidy, since she was a pretty perceptive person, and would likely pick up on the tension between them. She would be wary of Weaver too, since Holly Blue could theoretically invent something to defeat Arcadia. No one really knew if she had any limits. Goswin and Thor were thusly the safest. Neither of them would be on Arcadia’s radar, but since Thor had some experience kicking ass, he was the obvious choice.

Surprisingly, Thor agreed without question to be the secret attacker. He didn’t much like Mateo, nor anyone else really, but he might have had a bit of a hero complex. He knew that, if anyone was strong enough to get the jump on someone powerful enough to alter reality with a thought, it was him. He was free to choose his moment, but once he decided, he had to commit. He was to sneak up behind her while her attention was on Mateo, and jam the memory-altering drug into the back of her neck. It apparently worked a little bit like the flashy thingies in the Men in Black franchise. The solution contained Arcadia’s sister’s sweat, so it could draw memories from alternate realities, but in order for that to take hold, they had to get rid of the real memories. And the only way to do that was to reinforce the false ones with spoken word. After Thor did his thing, Goswin was going to use his diplomatic experience to weave a story about how Arcadia had come here to punish Mateo for having crashed his own wedding in the past. He didn’t have to be too specific about what she thought she had done to him, because her brain would fill in the rest, but he had to be convincing.

None of this truly worked, and it was almost as if Arcadia knew all of it was coming. Once she appeared, she was immediately drawn to Mateo, and started asking him about who Cassidy was. So she didn’t seem to know everything about the timeline, which was at least a small miracle. Thor came up behind her, quiet as a mute mouse, and stuck the jet injector into her neck. She did indeed act like she felt it, but Nerakali’s sweat wasn’t the only ingredient in it. There were also good old narcotics, which caused her to be loopy and agreeable, and also immediately forget having received the injection at all. Goswin spun his tale, and she accepted it. Then she smiled triumphantly, and declared victory over Mateo. He would never do anything like that again. They never did learn what she thought she had done to him, but it was not anywhere not over. Following her obnoxious gloating, Arcadia tipped an invisible hat, and disappeared. Then she reappeared, from the ladder that led to the engineering section.

Arcadia climbed all the way up the ladder, and started clapping. “Brilliant performance. You had me completely fooled. I really moved on, believing I had punished you, when really, nothing happened at all.”

Dammit. “You get your memories back, sometime later,” Mateo guessed.

Arcadia shook her head. “No. The Arcadia that whoever that guy over there is assaulted really did get false memories. She will never get the right ones. She is going to move on with her expiations on Tribulation Island. Then she’s going to be recruited into the Prototype team, and start killing Maramon with her bare hands in other universes throughout the bulkverse.”

“But she’s not you?” Cassidy asked.

“Quiet,” Mateo whispered. The target on Cassidy’s back was there, simply because Arcadia knew she existed, but they didn’t need to paint another coat, and make it easier to spot.

Unfortunately, of course, Arcadia also picked up on Cassidy’s concern. She didn’t do anything about it yet, though. She just moved on, for now. “No. I was worried. I honestly don’t know what’s happening here. What is this ship? Where are you going? How did you come back into existence after the Superintendent wrote you out of the story? These are the questions I have no answer to now, but I’m not super worried about it either. I didn’t know you would do what you did, but I thought you might try something. Weaver is what tipped me off. I can tell she’s not from this reality, which means she’s not the same naïve young woman who doubts her every move. This Weaver,” she said, pointing to the subject, “is dangerous. She could hurt me, which means I didn’t know what I was walking into. I figured my best bet was to create a quantum duplicate of myself, and watch her initial interaction with you from a safe distance.”

“You’re telling me there are two Arcadias in this reality?” Mateo asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “I never really wanted to do that. People who know me know that I like to be unique, so I’m not in love with the idea of there being some shittier version of me running around here, but fortunately, she doesn’t last much longer. I intend to never return to any time period any other version of me has experienced before. I don’t know what I plan to do with my life, or how you fit into that, but I can tell you that we’re going to have a nice little expiation for you. At least one.”

Arcadia snapped her fingers, and they were suddenly standing on the ground. They didn’t stand for long, though, before gravity overwhelmed them. Mateo felt heavier than he ever had before. “What is this?” he struggled to ask. “I’m being crushed.”

“This...” Arcadia said, still standing, “is Varkas Reflex. It is a super-Earth, and unless you jump into some water, or stand in a mesh dimension, like I am, you’re gonna have a bad time. Right now, your hearts are working overtime to pump blood throughout your respective bodies, and you’re all alive, because those hearts are presently moderately successful at this. Sadly, they will experience diminishing returns, and eventually give out. Your brains will run out of oxygen, and you will die.” She stood in silence for a moment.

No one could speak.

Arcadia waved her hand, and released them from the torture. “But..I don’t want you to die yet. Maybe never. I still need to find out who you are.” She eyed Cassidy.

“Leona is here,” Mateo slipped. Arcadia already knew this, but he didn’t need to point it out.

“Yeah, but you won’t see her. Before you get your hopes up, not being able to see Leona today is not your punishment. It’s just a pleasant bonus for me. No, this will be just like any other expiation, except you’ll only have one day to complete it. Plus, I’m making you choose. Don’t argue, or I’ll make it worse. Whose expiation do you want to complete? Who do you want me to rip out of time, possibly forever?”

This was an impossible choice, but Mateo knew he had to think quickly, or she would get bored, and a bored Arcadia is a scary Arcadia. He cared about everyone here, even Thor. He didn’t know any of them incredibly well, but that didn’t make it any easier to choose. He had to think, though—not who he would rather never see again, but whose challenge would be the easiest to complete. He couldn’t choose Cassidy, because Arcadia would have to look into who Cassidy was to come up with a challenge. Sure, she would probably only make Mateo give everyone else a lapdance, which they would survive, but he wanted to keep Cassidy as safe as possible, for as long as possible. Thor was a runner, but he also helped build colonies on other worlds in Earth’s solar system, so that could get complicated. Weaver was too damn smart, so Arcadia would probably want them to engineer some crazy, complex device from scratch, like when she made them create a map of time and space. They would too easily lose that challenge. What would they have to do to get Goswin back? Give a speech? Moderate a peace summit?

In the end, there was only one good answer, and Mateo hoped she would allow it. He had already not existed for a long time, and knew he could do it again. If his friends weren’t able to succeed in the expiation, this was the least of many evils. It was the least by a lot, because Mateo rarely existed anyway, and when he did, he couldn’t contribute positively to the AOC’s operation. This whole thought process took about ten seconds for Mateo to go through. “Mine.”

Arcadia was only half surprised by this. “I kind of thought you might say that. I considered excluding you as a possibility, because I don’t want you to disappear for good. As you know, I’m not a great person, but I do follow my own rules. If I don’t account for everything, and you find a loophole, I have always honored that, haven’t I?”

She was right; she always had. She never punished them for finding a way to let Leona and Paige use sentimental objects to remember loved ones who were taken out of time. She didn’t separate Mateo from Lincoln, when she realized he too kept his memories. Arcadia was a jerk, but she didn’t lie, and she didn’t go back on her word. “You have, so I expect you to retain that honor. You gave me the responsibility to choose, and you never said I couldn’t choose myself...so I choose myself.”

Arcadia took in a deep breath, and let it out. “Very well. Your friends will have to do something for the entire year, until you return to the timestream. Unlike other expiations, I won’t judge their success or failure myself. You will come back on November 9, 2247, regardless of what they do. The challenge is that they have to last long enough for you to survive when you come back. Their failure could even mean the destruction of your ship, because I won’t just be making them all forget who you are. They won’t even know that someone is missing, or that something is expected of them. They won’t know goddamn anything. I’m going to erase all of their memories. I’m going to make them practically as dumb as you. Let’s see how they fare.”

They fared beautifully.

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Microstory 1145: Makarion Dimitrios

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In an earlier reality, Makarion Dimitrios was chosen as one of the last Saviors of Earth. His career was different than those of his predecessors. He was less involved with choosing ones and other salmon, and more linked to the powers that be. To be sure, he never met them in person, but he did meet with The Emissary more often than one might expect. His tenure did not last long, however. In an attempt to free himself from cruel torment, Mateo Matic tried to kill his torturer, who was a man named The Rogue. But the Rogue had a secret, that he could subvert death, by transferring his consciousness to the body of anyone else with temporal powers. In this case, the Rogue didn’t have time to hunt for a suitable host, nor did he have any control over which body he possessed, so the nature of his attempted murder changed his powers permanently. He found himself in possession Makarion’s body, but unlike with his previous hosts, he was unable to leave. This was his last body; he would be stuck with it until the day of his death. Masquerading as Makarion, the Rogue continued to force Mateo and his friends into challenges, one of which involved them both traveling back in time, and killing Adolf Hitler before he would have died on his own. This act elicited a new reality. Mateo no longer existed, and since Mateo was instrumental in his creation, nor did the Rogue. So now there were two people running around the timeline with Makarion’s face. This seemed okay, because it allowed a version of Makarion to fulfill his duty as Savior, having no idea that he died in a different timeline. But there were consequences. The Rogue had made a deal with an even more powerful man named The Cleanser, and the Cleanser felt this deal had been broken, so he finally ended the Rogue’s life. It turned out, maybe the Rogue wasn’t so bad after all, but his death was not the worst of it. The Cleanser’s sister was known as The Conservator, except when she wasn’t; she was instead The Extractor. Their entire family was born with some ability to perceive alterations to the timeline, and they used these powers to manage certain outcomes. Sometimes, a time traveling act did, or undid, a particular event in history, even if only accidentally. It was their job to manipulate the timeline again; to correct what they believed to be a mistake. This family was egotistical, narcissistic, and uncaring, so the Extractor decided no Makarion would live past the moment the Rogue died. At the exact same time the Cleanser was killing him, she was killing the new Makarion herself, even though there was no real justification for this—and, in fact, no link to it at all. Even though the Rogue looked like Makarion, they had nothing to do with each other, so this was completely pointless. Makarion wasn’t the shortest-lived Savior in the long history of the program, but he certainly didn’t live the longest. His untimely death had a major impact on the future of the program, totally changing who was chosen next, and perhaps more importantly, who was chosen to be The Last. Had Makarion survived the Extractor’s morbid logic, neither Xearea Voss, nor Étude Einarsson would have become Saviors themselves, and maybe their lives would have been that much less dangerous. Then again, maybe those two were exactly what the Extractor had in mind when she murdered him.

Microstory 1144: Keilix Oliver

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Everyone who signed up for the Kansas City Metropolitan Area City Frenzy event had their own reasons for it. About the only thing they all had in common was that they were athletic. Some were faster than others. Some were more competitive than others. Keilix Oliver was one of the few racers who was really just a runner. When she raced, she went straight for the finish line, not stopping for anything but traffic, and other obstacles. She studied the map exhaustively, and was extremely familiar with the entire metro. Unfortunately, her tactic wasn’t the most efficient. Even though she didn’t get distracted with dancing and waving at the cameras, she also didn’t take many risks, so she never won the Frenzy. That was okay, though, because that wasn’t why she did it, and when she finally aged out of it, she pretty much just moved on with her life. Keilix wasn’t ashamed of the things she did when she was young, but competition was never very important to her. She wasn’t a tracer, or a dancer, or a martial artist. She ran for health, and to fight against the wind. She could do that alone. She went off to college in Ireland, partially to gain new and exciting experiences, but also to deliberately separate herself from everything she had ever known. She wanted to be cut off from her family—her always reliable support system—so she would be forced to deal with her own problems, with no safety net. She lived in a world with people who had special time powers, and even knew a few of them personally, but she never discovered the truth. She lived in a time of great change, technologically and biomedically, though she remained as she was, and chose not to undergo youth and longevity treatments, or transhumanistic upgrades. She took an unremarkable job in a modest town, met a humble man, raised three lovely children, and lived out her days in the countryside. She kept running for exercise, until her body could no longer do it. She died as a content old woman, surrounded by her loved ones, which included seven grandchildren. She was a normal person—nothing to write home about, as they would say—but perhaps that’s exactly the kind of person whose story deserves to be told.

Microstory 1143: Mahala Davidyan

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Out of everyone in the Freemarketeer faction, Mahala Davidyan was one of the least capitalistic, second only to Ramses Abdulrashid, though the question remains if Ramses was ever that open-minded, or if he managed to improve a great deal, due to his exposure to Brooke Prieto and her friends. Mahala was never much for change, even though the entire point of her faction was to completely alter the way the economy operated. She didn’t outwardly question her parents’ convictions, because she didn’t really have any of her own, but she didn’t exactly agree with them either. No one was forcing her to stick around, but she saw no reason to live any other way. If there was one thing the Freemarketeers did right, it’s that they didn’t force anyone to be part of the group. Anyone born into it was given the choice to leave with no social controversy. Mahala didn’t leave, though she probably should have. And that’s not just true because of how badly things turned out. After decades of scarce recruitment, and zero progress towards their goals of a capitalistic society, the Freemarketeers realized the only way they would be able to live how they wanted was if they did it somewhere else. The ship that was trying to transport them to a nearby exoplanet, however, suffered a cataclysmic malfunction, prompted by their own resentful leader. They thought they were rescued when a comprehensive network of portals opened up, and spirited them away, but they soon found them in a complicated situation when the same exact thing kept happening. Parallel timelines are nearly impossible to stabilize for an extended period of time. Most potential outcomes only last for microseconds, which is why they’re known as microrealities. For most universes, this is completely irrelevant on a practical level, because people aren’t conscious of the path they might have taken, especially since they’re not the only ones walking down the metaphorical path. When you’re dealing with time travel, it’s entirely possible to access these short-lived realities, and even steal from them. They’re about to collapse, so it doesn’t matter much anyway, except when it becomes cancerous. For some reason, the technology that rescued them had a malfunction of its own, and kept trying to rescue them, over and over and over again. It just kept drawing alternate versions of the same people from microrealities, and transporting them to the planet of Dardius. Every day, a new batch of alternates would arrive. This was causing problems for the planet’s natives, and for the Freemarketeers, and war broke out for resources. Both sides knew that nothing was going to get better if they didn’t start communicating with each other. Mahala was chosen as the Ambassador to Dardius primarily for her apathy. It was a strange tactic, but the truth is the Freemarketeers wanted a solution just as much as the Dardieti. They didn’t want to keep fighting either, so if Mahala could negotiate a peace, and they would have to make sacrifices, then fine. This is what she did, and after years of fighting, the war was finally over. But that didn’t mean all of the issues between them were resolved. Mahala’s job as an ambassador was just getting started.

Microstory 1138: Nereus Jolourvedin

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When Opal Jolourvedin was 27 years old, she had a child, who she named Nereus. They lived relatively contently on Durus for the better part of the next decade, doing their part to increase social justice, and support the transitional government. She taught him to be a feminist, a kind person, and a generous human being. When he was eighteen, he found himself drawn to a mysterious section of the planet called The Abyss. It was out of here that the first monsters came, but since they were destroyed in the war, and the portal more or less was closed, no more temporal anomalies were coming through. Still, the Abyss was a dangerous and hazy place. No one who went in ever returned. Laws were passed to prevent it from ever being used as punishment for a crime, and a border guard was stationed along its perimeter to prevent the curious from trying their hand. Though over the years, these protective measures were lessened. Nereus knew that he had the power to alter reality, and he thought he would be able to repair the problem, so that no one else’s life would be at risk from it. He realized he had failed when the portal snapped him away, and sent him to another universe. This was an extremely dangerous place, for it is where the monsters originated. And they were not happy that humans were invading their home. That was what they were trying to do. Fortunately, when their powers were combined, a pair of women were capable of sending all the humans to the past, where it was safer. Unfortunately, not everyone was able to make it through when the bubble that formed to encompass the crowd was disrupted. Nereus and the rest of the standard humans had to fight their way out of a city of enemies, most of them losing their lives along the way, but Nereus survived. He protected those few survivors for years, by constantly generating realities where the monsters hunting them never succeeded. But this was becoming tiring, and he needed a permanent solution. After learning a little bit about the history of the universe, which was called Ansutah, he mustered all of his strength, reached deeper into the past than he ever had before, to find a reality where there was one final way of escaping Ansutah. Scientists long ago invented a way to travel to other universes, but before they built the main machine, they engineered The Prototype, to make sure the technology worked. Plans were made to build a version in between the Prototype, and the Crossover, to measure the feasibility of scaling the infinity drive that powered the machines, before they used up too many resources in the massive undertaking. These plans were scrapped in the original timeline, but Nereus needed it, so he changed history to accommodate those needs. He then found where The Transit was hidden, and finally left the hell world with all his new friends. He eventually returned to his home universe, but in a much earlier timeline; one in which he was never even born. He started calling himself The Repairman, and used his ability to protect the timestream, so that the actions of the time travelers didn’t get out of hand.

Microstory 1117: Opal Jolourvedin

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By absorbing all the powers of every mage in the world to finally end the war with the monsters, historical figure, Jayde Kovac ushered in a new era. Fortunately, while some monsters did survive that final attack, most were destroyed anyway. Unfortunately, the Mage Protectorate was destroyed as well. Most of the former mages survived, but they no longer possessed powers, which sent the planet into chaos. They would come to find out that these temporal abilities were not lost forever, though it would be a long time before they returned at full strength. For a while, all they had were people they referred to as mage remnants. Their powers were weak and unreliable; mere echoes of what their ancestors could once do. Opal Jolourvedin was not one of these people. She was a full mage, and in fact, quite a powerful one. The problem is that she didn’t realize this about herself. She knew that she could fix the present moment, like a magical undo button, but she never did figure out how much of reality she could alter. The universe is an uncertain place. Every decision you make springs a new reality, as does every decision anyone else makes, including the lowly cockroach. Opal had the ability to spontaneously draw forth the outcome of a decision that was never made, but could have been made, theoretically. Let’s say that a man is climbing a ladder, but is in too much of a hurry to get to the top. He rashly skips a rung, which causes him to slip, fall, break his neck, and die. With a snap of her fingers, Opal can elicit a timeline where he decides not to skip a rung, does not slip, does not fall, does not break his neck, and does not die. She doesn’t go back in time and warn him of his mistake. She doesn’t send her consciousness to his body, and force him to take a different path. She simply determines the best outcome of any situation, finds that outcome in an endless field of what are called microrealities, and then makes it so. For the most part, she is the only one aware that any change to the timeline has been made. According to everyone else, this is just what happened, and it was always going to have happened. She can, however, preserve certain people’s memories of the other timeline, just to give them a little perspective. After all, if they are not cognizant of what mistake they might have made, they may end up making a similar one later on, and she won’t necessarily be around to fix it for them. Again, she was never in a position to truly understand the magnitude of her power, but she would bear a son with the same gifts. He eventually made his way to Earth, and became...The Repairman.

Microstory 133: Alter Orenstein

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In order to understand how Alter Orenstein’s ability works, one would first have to understand the true nature of time. There is an infinite number of realities which exist simultaneously, each one based on a decision that any given free-thinking individual could possibly make. Let’s say that you are trying to decide whether you should place your foot on the next step in a staircase, or skip to the step above it. Before you make that decision, both of those possible realities exist at the same time, but as soon as you actually make the decision to skip the step, the reality where you didn’t skip the step is completely destroyed. And that’s only one simple example. You could skip two steps; you could fall down the stairs; you could even skip the step, but do so a half second later. Each one of those possibilities creates a new reality, but it will only last for a fraction of a second, which is why these are called microrealities. While you’re determining how you should proceed next on the staircase, your friend upstairs is wondering which sock to put on first, an insect on the screen door is deciding whether to crawl one more millimeter or stay in place and do nothing, and a child in another galaxy is choosing a piece of a candy from a bowl. This results in an incalculable number of simultaneous microrealities waiting to be adopted, as well as an incalculable number of microrealities collapsing in on their own irrelevance. Alter was born with the ability to perceive any and all possible futures. Fortunately, he was also born with natural precision, which allowed him to tease away the minute differences between realities, and only focus on the major potential changes. When looking into the future, the world appeared with a red tint, and so he named this RedTime. For whatever reason, he could only ever see 14 minutes and 73 seconds in the future. He would often use his ability to protect people from harm, warning them which decisions would be physically dangerous, and which were safe to make. He spent a lot of time working in the Special Projects department of Bellevue, since it was the most dangerous.