The Advancement of Mateo Matic: October 22, 2398

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Kivi hangs up the phone, confused and frustrated, perhaps even more frustrated than before she made the call, but now for different reasons. The interrogation of Meredarchos is not going well. There are only a few people in the world who are immune to his psychic abilities, and half of them don’t work for the government, so they’re off doing their own things. The rest are left to stay at the black site, and keep watch over him in tiresome shifts. They grow weary of it, but until they figure out how his ability works, they are the only line of defense against him. Kivi was hoping to get Arcadia to immunize others, but she can’t come back, for reasons she didn’t get into. She did make one crazy claim, which is that generating mental barriers in other people’s heads is something that Kivi may be able to do herself.

“What you’re doing when you say that you’ve picked up the scent of a target has nothing to do with smell,” Arcadia said. “The reason you can find people is because you’re tracking the unique psychic signal that everyone gives off, whether they want to or not. You too have psychic abilities; maybe not as strong as Meredarchos, or even me, but everyone has a little, and you’re definitely better than the average person.”

Kivi is confounded by this. Obviously she knew it had nothing to do with smell. Catching a scent was just the easiest way to put it without having a degree in neurology. Still, psychic is a bit of a stretch. If she can read minds, shouldn’t she have done so accidentally by now? In the movies, if a character has a special ability, it will always surface at an opportune time, especially if we’re talking multiple abilities. Kivi has been interrogating this dark entity for days, and nothing like that has happened to her. Though maybe just knowing it’s a thing will make it work the next time. She’s certainly going to try that before she attempts to protect a new agent from Meredarchos’ intrusions. If she fails, it places someone in danger, but this only puts her at risk.

They’ve been living at a safehouse about a kilometer from the secret one-person prison, which was built into an abandoned mine shaft by another team while Kivi and her team were still looking for the enemy. She makes the drive back, and checks in at the gate. She takes the elevator down, and heads for Meredarchos. His two frontline guards have already moved him to the interrogation room, and placed a dark bag over his head. If this is going to work, he can’t be allowed to sense anything through her microexpressions. She sits down across from him, and starts to operate on instinct. If I were a real psychic, how would I read someone’s thoughts?

After a few minutes, Kivi starts to feel something. Her own mental wall is still there, but now she’s getting the sense that there are two walls. One of them belongs to Meredarchos and Erlendr. They apparently also have to protect themselves against intruders. She looks up to the top. She can see both of them there, on separate corners, scanning the horizon. They’re looking so far in the distance, they can’t even see that she’s right there in front of them. It’s one tall-ass wall, though. As a metaphor, it’s a pretty good one. There’s no way she’s scaling that, and making it to the other side.

She hears a whisper at the base of the wall. “Psst. Come here.” It’s a shadowy figure, holding onto an open door.

“Who is that?” Kivi asks.

“It’s me, come on.” The figure steps a little more into the light. It’s Cheyenne.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 18, 2398

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Ramses looks at the time again, even though his hypothetical chronoceptor organs are operating at maximum efficiency, and he knows that it’s been around three minutes since he last looked, and also that Mateo isn’t due for another three minutes.

“How are we lookin’?” Winona asks. She’s about ten meters away, so everyone can hear her.

“No way to know until it happens,” he answers. Since Leona has been busy with her fusion work, Ramses has been consumed with harnessing the limited temporal power on this world. It’s the hardest job he’s had in his whole life, and it’s killing him. He barely sleeps, and eats too quickly, because every second spent holding food could delay progress. The problem is that his obsession has come with consequences. He rushed a teleporter out of the gate because he wanted to rescue Trina so badly, and now his best friend is stuck outside of the timestream. It was supposed to transport the site of the mine instantaneously, since that’s the whole point of teleportation, but he made a gross error in his calculations, and they ended up jumping forward two days. It’s not the first time that’s happened, and unless he gets his head out of his ass, it won’t be the last.

When The Constant imploded, it was replaced with a massive body of water, which Mateo called Danica Lake. He promptly passed out, and lost the memories that may have answered all the questions they had about the development, such as where the water came from, and why this happened at all, but that didn’t mean they were completely lost. With a little investigating, Ramses was able to learn that the water was there the whole time, just locked in an underground lake, and released from pipes by a series of valves. Those valves have been degrading over time, along with the pipes themselves, but they’re still there for now, and they can still be reversed, allowing some of the water to return to the ground. When the mine appears in the next two minutes, it’s going to displace billions of gallons of water, and if they hadn’t done something to prepare for that, it would have flooded the area. So really, the temporal delay was a good idea, and Ramses wishes that he could take credit for it. He never thought that Mateo would actually use the teleporter. It was only a last resort.

His thirty second warning alarm goes off. “Here it comes! Earplugs on!” When the lake first appeared, it made the news. Winona came up with a decent explanation for the public, which involved shifting tectonic plates releasing water from an underground lake, so it was almost half true. People have come from all over the world to see it, but while the filling of the lake was spectacular, it just looks like a regular body of water now, albeit shockingly deep for something in Kansas. The spectacle has since died down, and the last thing they need is to make another one. Fortunately, the agency team doesn’t have to cordon off the area to prevent people from witnessing the arrival. No one else is around. But they’ll probably hear it. He’s expecting a sonic boom.

Five, four, three, two, one, and...nothing. There’s no sonic boom. There’s no cloud of dirt. Maybe there was a little splash down there, but they can’t see it, because the water has been drained far below the edge to insulate them from that displacement issue, and they’re standing pretty far away. In cartoons, whenever the bad guy tries to shoot the good guy, the bullet either misses, or the gun just doesn’t go off, which makes sense, because these cartoons are meant for children, and not meant to be horrific. It’s perfectly okay for the bad guy to get himself shot, though—as long as it doesn’t kill him—and that’s usually what happens when he points the barrel towards his own face to figure out what’s goin’ on with the darn thing. Ramses knows that it’s a risk to stick his head over the edge, but someone’s gotta do it. What he finds there is a friendly face.

Mateo is treading water, and starts to swim over when he sees which direction to go. One of the military guys that Winona brought with her throws down a rope, and pulls him up. “Thanks,” Mateo says to him. He doesn’t look distressed, or scared, or anything. He’s perfectly okay, just a little wet. Well, he periodically grimaces as he’s standing there, but he must just be cold. He faces Ramses. “It worked. Nice. I guess you’ll have to get some divers down there to drag the bottom of the lake, though. Isn’t that what it’s called?”

“It’s not down there,” Ramses says.

Mateo looks down over the edge again. “Oh, no?”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“The water would still be moving, and be a lot higher. You are the only thing that came through the teleporter.”

“Oh.” Mateo squints. “Are you sure?”

“Damn sure.”

“Maybe it’s coming later. We’ve had trouble with delays before.”

“You’re already two days late.”

Mateo looks over at the frowny Alyssa. “I’m sorry. It was supposed to take the whole mine, not just me.”

“It did,” Alyssa tells him.

Winona steps forward. “National Intelligence Authority assets on the ground confirmed it. The would-be mine is gone. All that soil and rock went somewhere.”

“Or somewhen,” Marie advises.

Mateo nods, and grimaces again, but this time also leans forward, and reaches for his stomach.

“Are you okay?” Alyssa places a hand on his back.

“I’m fine. It must just be that Mongolian breakfast. They must have made it with a little citrus.”

“What does that matter?” Alyssa asks.

“It doesn’t travel well,” Marie explains.

“Really?” Winona asks. “You never told me that.”

“I was a non-traveler for four years. It didn’t occur to me to mention things like that, I suppose.”

“That’s not it,” Ramses contends. “There’s something seriously wrong with him.”

“Really, I’m fine,” Mateo insists. But he’s not fine. He lurches, and gets down on all fours, groaning in pain. He retches once, and twice. He looks like a cat trying to cough up a furball. People are standing around him, debating what they could do to help, when he does manage to cough something up. It’s a rock, but not just any rock. It’s a beautiful stone of many colors. It is red, and yellow, and green, and brown, and scarlet, and black, and ochre, and peach, and ruby, and olive, and violet, and fawn, and lilac, and gold, and chocolate, and mauve, and cream, and crimson, and silver, and rose, and azure, and lemon, and russet, and gray, and purple, and white, and pink, and orange, and blue. It could be tourmaline, but it’s probably timonite.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 16, 2398

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The checkpoint has evidently been abandoned by the time they get to it the next morning. From the looks of it, there’s a pretty decent operation here that’s designed to prevent unwanted crossings. There is no reason to not station someone here at all times, even if this weren’t the most popular place to transit, which it is, because it’s the closest to the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar. Mateo thinks he sees someone move over yonder, but it’s just some plastic sheeting flapping in the wind. This feels like the start of a monster movie. “Timofey, what do you make of this?”

“We should turn back,” he advises. “Something has happened here.”

“What, were they attacked, or something?” Alyssa asks. She already looks like the dvoryanin, Vissarion Chaykovsky.

“We would see signs of struggle,” Timofey explains. “The men were ordered to leave. They knew we were coming.”

“No, I meant that maybe someone else was attacked elsewhere, and the border guards went off to help.”

“It’s possible guards from one side were called off, but what of guards on other side? We should turn back,” Timofey repeats.

“You can,” Mateo says. “This is too important to stop now.”

“I tell you, it’s trap,” Timofey insists.

“Getting out of traps is sort of our thing,” Marie says. “Why do you think Winona keeps trying to recruit my people?”

“Very well,” Timofey submits. “We proceed...with caution.”

Mateo gently depresses the pedal, going only a kilometer an hour at first. He gradually accelerates every several seconds, until he’s finally back up to normal speed five minutes later. They don’t run into any trouble all the way up the highway. Timofey keeps his eyes on the windows for suspicious activity while Marie keeps her ear on the signals. No one seems to be tracking or chasing them. It goes smoothly...too smoothly.

It isn’t until they get to the site that they encounter a problem, and it’s a big one. Marie peers through the windshield. “Alyssa, Plan B.”

Alyssa transforms herself into the image of an agent that she passed in the hallway of Winona’s SD6 field office. He’s big and imposing, so while Alyssa hopes not to have to fight, she will be able if it comes down to it. Mateo sees what Marie does at the same time. Vissarion Chaykovsky is already here. He’s standing on the edge of the empty lot, clearly waiting for them. A construction crew is behind them, beginning to dig exactly where they expect the diamonds and timonite to be. One thing’s for sure, there’s a leak in the organization. He looks back at Timofey.

“I know how this looks,” Timofey says in an immediately defensive tone. “I swear upon my God’s heart that I had nothing to do with this.”

Mateo looks over to Marie sitting shotgun for guidance. She reaches under her seat and takes out an actual shotgun. It’s really short, which he believes would be called a sawed-off? Yeah, that sounds right. “Follow my lead.” She opens the door, and steps towards the men with action hero confidence.

“There is no need for violence,” Vissarion says with calm supervillain confidence.

She points her weapon at his head as she draws nearer. “We’re taking over this operation. Tell your men to shut off their machines, and surrender.”

“In our country,” Timofey whispers, “on local level, you want something, you take it. Strongest wins.”

Vissarion smiles. “You are not Russian. You have no rights here.”

“What are you digging here for?” Marie asks, unrelenting with the shotgun.

Vissarion waits to answer, milking this moment for all it’s worth. “Diamonds.” Yeah, definitely a leak.

Mateo checks Timofey’s expression again, but there’s still no way to tell if he’s truly defected, or if he’s been playing them the whole time. When it comes to double agents, you never really know.

Vissarion goes on, “we are prepared to make a deal. The diamonds, and all their worth, are ours, but we promise never to use any weapons we engineer from the funds against the United States. Also, we would like fusion, and this would be how we pay.”

“I’m not at liberty to make any deal such as this,” Marie admits. “And I don’t know what fusion is.”

“Don’t play coy, Mrs. Walton,” Vissarion grins. “It’s unbecoming of a lady.”

Marie thrusts her weapon forward, fast but only a little, to send the menacing message that she’s ready to use it.

“The deal is to get you to lower your gun,” Vissarion goes on. “We don’t need permission to mine these lands. They are well within Russian borders. You have no authority here. All I ask is that you give us your fusion reactor specifications. We will manufacture ours ourselves. In fact, we insist upon it to support our own economy.” This is a terrible deal, but it may be the only decent choice they have. They need that stone, whatever it takes. It doesn’t matter that Trina wouldn’t want them to risk a war on her behalf, because she doesn’t have a say in it. She’s the one who’s lost, and this might be the only way to get her back. They’ll worry later. “Or we could just hold you all for espionage until your government gives us what we want. We know you’re valuable.”

That was the wrong thing to say. Now Mateo can’t work with them at all, and has no choice but to resort to what he and Ramses decided to call Plan Z. It’s going to be demanding of his acting chops. “Okay,” Mateo answers.

“What are you doing?” Marie doesn’t know about Plan Z.

“I’m assuming control.” Mateo directs his attention back to Vissarion. “We agree to your deal, but we have to make sure that there are actually diamonds down there.”

“We’ve not had time to take samples and conduct studies,” Vissarion tells him. “We’re operating on your government’s intel, which is presumably why you’re here in the first place?”

“My scientists have developed a means of detecting subsurface minerals from the surface,” Mateo says as he’s heading for the back of the SUV. He hopes the sciency words he’s using make sense. “Don’t ask me how it works, but they assure me it does. Tim, help me with this.”

“What are you doing?” Marie asks again after Timofey hesitates to help.

“I’m doing what must be done. Put down the gun. Trust me.”

“I did not realize this was back here,” Timofey says as they’re both struggling to carry the machine from the truck to the bottom of the pit that has just been dug.

“It’s mostly water,” Mateo reveals in a hushed voice. “Once you and the girls are in the car, drive as fast as you can back to Mongolia. Stop for nothing, you hear me?”

“I can do it, but what will make us go to the car? It will be suspicious.”

Mateo catches his breath for a second once they set the machine down. Then he speaks for all to hear. “This is going to be really loud! I suggest you get in your cars, and shut the doors!”

The men laugh, but that’s okay. Only his people need to be safe. Once he hears the SUV start up, Mateo turns to boot the machine up. The Russians are scrambling, trying to figure out what’s happening. Some run off, but Vissarion and others run down to stop Mateo from doing what he’s trying to do. They’re too late. The teleporter engages, and sends them all to Lebanon, Kansas, along with 530 meters of soil, a crapton of diamonds, and time gods willing, the timonite.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 10, 2398

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Mateo knocks on the door, but can’t hear the muffled response from the other side, so he knocks again. The response is still muffled, but it sounds angrier this time, so either Alyssa wants him to just come on in, or she very much wants him to leave. He decides to open it carefully, and prepare an exit strategy. “Hey, sorry, I couldn’t hear you out there.”

She’s rushing from one side of the apartment to the other. She’s wearing a towel around her body, and one on top of her head. She’s trying to put away some dishes in the kitchenette, and haphazardly fold the clothes on the couch at the same time. “I said to come in. I can’t talk, though. I just came back to shower, because my brothers complained about the smell, but I’m going right back to the blacksite.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Look, Matty, I know you all say that Trina isn’t in there, but what if she is? What if this Erlendr asshole is just suppressing her consciousness, and she’s been trying to escape this whole time? She may be watching through his eyes, I have to control for that. When we get her back, what should I say to her, that I just stayed home, and left her there in the prison?”

“No, I suggest you tell her that you did everything you could to get her back, and sitting in that room doesn’t accomplish that,” Mateo replies. They’ve been to a number of places on Mateo’s list already, usually for other reasons, and now it’s time to start considering making a point of finishing off that list with a real world tour. He does not yet know, however, who will be accompanying him. A good start could be to ask for help for something very specific.

She unwraps the towel from her head, and furiously dries her hair as much as possible. “What else can I do? I’m not a physicist, like Ramses.”

“He’s not a physicist, he’s an engineer.”

“Whatever.”

“Speaking of Ramses, he needs something from somewhere, I need help getting it for him. Marie is considering going with, but whether she does or not, I could do with a translator.”

“You’re going back to Russia?” They learned that Alyssa’s mother’s family originates from Russia, and that her grandmother taught Alyssa the language before her death. The younger children don’t know it, and of course, wouldn’t be suitable for this mission anyway.

“Technically, I wouldn’t say that we were ever in Russia before since we never got off the boat. I’ve never been at all, even in my home reality.”

“What do you need in Russia, and how will it help Trina?” When he takes a little too long to answer, she winces. “Is it dangerous? Spit it out.”

“It’s politically very dangerous, they could brand us traitors by asking to excavate in the area, because we would have to give the Russians the mineral rights, but I don’t see that we have any choice given what else is down there.”

“What else is down there?” Alyssa questions, annoyed. “What is down where? You’re explaining this all out of order, you realize that, right?”

Mateo takes a breath. “You’re right. There’s a mine in Russia that contains a ton of diamonds, worth hundreds of billions of dollars—maybe even over a trillion—but the thing is that this mine was never discovered in the Third Rail. We know exactly where it is, and we don’t care about the diamonds. According to lore, there’s a gemstone down there that’s worth more than everything else combined.”

“Lore?” Alyssa asks skeptically.

“Marie’s friend from Australia who collected stuff like this, and things that Leona Delaney read in her book about time travel; they corroborated each other’s stories regarding the thing.”

“What is it?”

“It’s called timonite, and it’s rumored to grant the user control over all of time and space.”

“That sounds like a fantasy,” Alyssa reasons. She steps behind her bedroom door so she can finish changing. She starts to raise her voice a little to compensate, but it makes her seem irritable. “I don’t much care for fantasy. Talk to Moray about that stuff, he’ll go on, and on, and on.”

“It might not be real, but isn’t it worth the risk?”

“If it starts a war with Russia, which Russia will win because of their sudden influx in capital, then no. Trina is a child, so she doesn’t understand the politics, but if she did, I know she wouldn’t want that. She hates violence. She doesn’t even like to watch cartoon characters fighting each other, even though they’re all immortal.”

“You’re right. Again.”

“There has to be a way to dig where we need to dig without starting an international incident,” Alyssa figures. “You’re time traveling teleporters, for God’s sake; get creative.”

A lightbulb comes on over Mateo’s head. “Yeah, that’s a good idea. We need you more than ever.”

“I could interpret for you, but you’ll have to figure out who you want to talk to. It can’t lead to violence, that’s my one rule.”

“We require the most powerful person in Russia. He’s the only man who can get us what we need.”

“Well, yeah, but you’ll still be branded as a traitor.”

“Not if we have help from the U.S. government, because we don’t need to talk to the actual Russian President. We just need someone who looks like him, and we need him to talk to other Russians on our behalf.”

She stares at him. “Am I supposed to know where you’re going with this?”

Has anyone ever told you why we were immediately comfortable being around you? Didn’t it seem like we recognized your name, or something?”

“It seemed a little weird, but I had other things on my mind, and later I thought we knew too much anyway, so you either had to bring us in, or kill us.”

“It is we who knew too much,” Mateo corrects. “We already knew you. Or we knew of you. Vearden knows you personally, he met you centuries from now, or something.”

“You mean that I’m going to go with you to your alternate reality, and meet people I’ve already met before?”

“Yes.”

“Hm. What does that have to do with the Russian President?”

He smirks. “What are your thoughts on hats?”