Microstory 2652: A Wing and a Prayer

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Malika Turnbull follows her friend’s instructions, not knowing if it’s going to work. Truthfully, she hates mythology, but Mandica needs her, and she’s willing to stomach it for as long as she must. Hopefully Plan A will work, and it won’t be too terribly long. She’s standing at the maintenance entrance, still in the plaza, not even too far from the reception. The door is locked, which they figured would be the case since it’s a secure area. She locates the nearest camera, and holds a photo of Mandica up to it. This really probably won’t work. Daedalus would have to be monitoring it, or have some sort of alert system connected to it. Why would he even do that? He’s supposed to be an NPC. He’s not supposed to have any access to the outside world, or the inner workings of any dome. There’s just no way—the door swings open on its own. “Oh. Okay, then.”

She goes through the passageway then lifts the trapdoor, and ends up in the meadow that Mandica described. Oh, she almost forgot. She detaches the pole from her back, extends it to the right length, and jams it into the stone wall to prevent the hidden secondary door from trapping her here. As a visitor, she would have every right to leave, but that would be a whole thing. Hopefully this guy doesn’t take long.

Several hours later, a man wearing brown and gray wings swoops down from the sky holding a torch. He jams it into the ground, and smiles cautiously. “I’m Daedalus. What fate has befallen Mandica Kolar of Tribe Kolar?” Would Daedalus say that?

“She’s fine. She just can’t leave where she is, so she sent me in her stead.”

“Did she find the woman for whom she was looking?” he asks.

“Yes, but Morgana is powerful, and angry with Mandica, for no apparent reason. Mandica is calling in the favor that you owe her.” The original script had her qualify that with expressing the hope that the favor still stands, but Malika suggested that she hold firm so it doesn’t become an argument. Mandica accepted the attitude, because after all, she’s not the one who has to be here with these creatures, wherever they might be lurking. “She is asking you to engineer a pair of wings for her. She requests raven black.”

“Hmm,” Daedalus says. “What is your name, child?”

“Don’t call me that. I’m probably older than you. My name is Malika Turnbull.”

“Fascinating. Are you two related?” he asks offensively.

“Oh, because we’re both black, we must be related.”

“Your names, dear traveler. They’re similar. That is all I meant.”

“Oh.” Malika shrugs. “People have similar names. It happens.”

“I wouldn’t know.” There are other people named Daedalus out there, Malika is sure of it, but she wouldn’t expect the bot version of the original to understand that.

“So. How about those wings?” she presses.

“I will not have to build something new for her. If it is raven black she is after, then it is raven black she shall have. I have a new line of wings back in my shop that I think she’s really gonna love. More compact than ever, more advanced in every way. They exist in your world, but they are quite rare. I had to sacrifice a lot to persuade—”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t need your life story.” Yikes.

“Very well, my new blue friend. Back or front?”

“Huh?”

“Would you like me to carry you, or let you ride on my back?”

“Neither. I will stay here and wait for your return.”

He shakes his head. “This area is unsafe. Spriggans lurk in these woods. You have been lucky so far. Had I known that you would be coming, I would have been waiting for you. Please, you must come with me. You may be immortal, but I do not want to return to this spot to find your dead body, and have to wait for your replacement.”

She refrains from arguing that it was she who had to wait for him before. Instead, she lets him pick her up by her underarms, and fly her over the lands. “This is some bullshit,” she complains on the way. She doesn’t like being controlled by other people.

They land on the top of his tower in the center of a great city. Crowds of people are cheering for him, and seemingly praying. He waves at them respectfully, and blows them kisses, but does not stay long before escorting Malika inside. “This is my flight lab,” he says when they enter the room. “I have others, but I’m obviously fond of wings.”

 “Right.” Again, Malika is not into this sort of stuff, but she is an educated woman. She knows enough about the stories to know that Daedalus didn’t just keep building wings, and become the emperor of the world, or whatever he is here. Mandica said that the mythology has evolved on its own with all these unrelated characters being forced together, but it’s surreal seeing it up close. She still doesn’t wanna stick around.

“Ah, right here,” Daedalus says as he’s walking a dress form mannequin more towards the center of the room. He smiles proudly, which is odd, because there’s nothing on the mannequin. He reaches behind it, and presumably flips some switch. Nanites emerge from the back, and form themselves into wings. They are raven black, as requested. “What do you think? I have other corvids, but this one was specifically inspired by the raven. There are other black ones too, though they’re more metallic.”

“I think she will love these,” Malika has no choice but to admit.

“Do you want to try them out first?” he asks, still standing tall and proud.

“Oh, no. They’re not for me.” Malika walks around to get a better look at the backside, and the housing unit. “Besides, what would I be testing? She didn’t specify what she’s looking for. She didn’t know they could collapse like this. As long as they work, she will accept them. I presume you don’t have a return policy.”

“For her, I absolutely do,” Daedalus says. “But you really should try them. If not, I have other models, perhaps in blue? This might be your last chance.”

“Okay, fine.” She’s a guest here, right? She doesn’t want to be rude. She only gave up being a superhero in Underbelly because her substrate was destroyed. She still likes to have fun. The blue wings are not quite the same shade of blue as her character, but perhaps that’s a good thing. Blue Umbra is dead, and unlike Ravensgate Rescuer, she’s never coming back to life. She lets him help her put the apparatus on, and take her out to the edge of the building. If he’s trying to kill her, he’ll fail. Her mind will just stream over to her nearest backup. She leaps from the building, activates propulsion, and begins to soar through the air. It’s a magnificent feeling. She was obviously just flying, but it’s better to be in control. She spends an hour up there, feeling the wind in her face, and enjoying life for the first time in a long time. She lands back on the roof with a huge smile. “Thank you for letting me have that experience.”

“It doesn’t have to end,” he says. “You can keep them.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, why not? No one here can appreciate them like a real-worlder can.”

“Well, thank you,” She’s not gonna argue. “Do you have one in red and black?”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 3, 2547

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Ramses was unable to track the location of the missing slingbelts, and there was no recourse for this. He designed the bulk map so that, while most of the dots were showing non-specific points, the belts were distinct, and stood out. If they were anywhere out there, he would be able to spot them. Their two top hypotheses were that they were either destroyed, or taken through time. Whoever did it knew exactly what they were after. They weren’t just a couple of random kids swimming in the ocean, who happened to feel something invisible in the water. Their prime suspects were the Spiral Station crew, but they didn’t want to assume. They had plenty of genuine enemies, and since time travel was inherently involved, it could have been someone they hadn’t even crossed paths with yet. Instead of wasting pointless effort on figuring it out, Ramses just programmed his forge core to build three replacement belts during the interim year. Mateo, Leona, and Olimpia had lost all of their belongings, but that wasn’t a big deal.

It was interesting that the married trio were the ones whose belts were stolen. Ram calculated a 2.85% chance that this was entirely unintentional, but the more practical odds said that it was vastly more improbable. Just the fact that the other four belts were left behind made it unlikely to have been random. They were magnetically linked to one another. It was actually more difficult for them to take only some of the belts, than to have swiped them all in one go.

The next day, the missing belts appeared on the bulk map. They had been transported halfway across the Milky Way, for reasons yet unknown. “Have we been there before?” Olimpia asked. “Do we know anyone there?”

“That is part of the nuclear star cluster, which is relatively close to Sagittarius A*, our galaxy’s central black hole” Leona explained. “It’s not the farthest we’ve ever been, but as you can see, no one else is there. It’s only our belts.”

“No one has ever been there,” Ramses added. “They’re on Southside. Extremus crossed over the black hole on the north side of the galactic plane. When the Matrioshka Body was studying time, it too was on Northside. The whole stellar neighborhood is on Northside, so we just don’t know too much about this region.”

Romana giggled. “They’re a gift.”

“Huh?” Mateo asked.

“We were just talking about Operation Starframe,” Romana said. “If we want to reach every corner of the galaxy, it’s best to start in the center. Now we can do that. Now we have something to lock onto. This will be our staging ground.”

“We don’t know that the thief did this as a favor,” Marie pointed out. “It could be a trap instead. I’m guessing this region is naturally fairly hostile, if it’s so close to the chaos of the supermassive black hole.”

Ramses made a facial shrug. “It’s not as dangerous as, say, the s-star cluster, which is much closer to the singularity, but it’s not particularly safe, like it is for Sol. I’m inclined to agree with Romy. It’s too coincidental. If I were the thief, I would put a trap around Sirius, or some other close but barely settled region. It took them too much work to get to where they are. Yes, I’m sure they are trying to lure us there. It’s irrational to believe that they hid the belts from detection last year, but forgot to shield them today when they would know we’ve returned to the timestream. But based on our track record, does anyone here really think that we’re not gonna go?”

They all laughed a little. “Yeah, we’re gonna go,” Mateo decided. He commanded his nanites to wrap him up in armor, leaving his face unprotected for now. “What did you say before, Romana? Boot ‘n’ rally.”

They all armored up too. “Yalla,” Leona ordered.

“Give me a minute,” Ramses defended. “I need to make the calculations.” He turned away and paced a little as he was tapping on his wrist device. “Okay, do it again.”

“Yalla.”

They slung to the nucleus, and landed on a rocky planet. It wasn’t heavily vegetated, but not barren either. The plantlife was clearly alien, but decidedly alive. The sky was a beautiful sunset orange. Snowcapped mountains towered in the distance, and it looked a little greener on the foothills. They turned to find three dress form mannequins on a display curve. A slingbelt was fitted to each one.

“Yeah. Definitely brought here for us,” Romana agreed with herself.

“That’s not all,” Ramses said, looking at his interface again. “It’s breathable. For us, anyway. I’m seeing 83% nitro, 11% oxy, 5 for CO2, and a half percent each for hydrogen and trace gases.”

They decided to open their visors but keep the rest of their armor on, except for Romana, who chose to end up in a gray sports bra and yoga shorts. It still could be a trap. The atmosphere was indeed breathable, but it took a few minutes for their bodies to acclimate to the suboptimal environment. During this time, they were mildly suffocating before their carbon scrubber organs caught up to compensate for the extra toxin.

“Carbon load back down to manageable levels for everyone,” Angela announced. She had expressed an interest in serving as the closest thing to a medical professional the team had.

Romana instinctively walked around to the other side of the mannequins. She reached up to one of them, and pulled something off of it. “Sorry for taking these, but now you have extra, in case you need them. You won’t have to worry about us again. Don’t screw it up this time,” she read.

“They didn’t sign their name?” Mateo asked her.

“Not exactly,” she answered.

“They...initialized it?” Mateo couldn’t think of anything else that was close to a signature.

“They hand-wrote it, or I should say, you hand-wrote it.” She showed him the note, and she was right; it was in Mateo’s handwriting.

“Well, I suppose I can trust myself, can’t I?”

“No,” Leona replied bluntly.

“Fair enough.”

“Any other anomalies besides these belts?” Leona asked Ramses.

“No artificial signals,” Ramses began to answer from his interface. “No satellites, no power generators, no signs of life in the immediate vicinity...” He looked back up and regarded the horizon. “There is no way to know if we’re alone, but we seem to be.” He took out his forge core, and appeared to be in thought as he separated himself from the group, and also looked at the mountains.

“Are you considering building something here?” Mateo asked.

“Something?” Ramses returned. “Maybe everything.”

“Like a new lab? You just built a new one in your pocket,” Mateo reminded him.

“Yeah, I know, and I would still want to keep it with me as a mobile office.” Ramses turned back around. “But a real home base might be nice too. I once thought that that was Castlebourne, but there are too many people there. I think we should be more like Linwood Meyers, and take full ownership over a remote territory. No one else is here, it would just be ours. It will take tens of thousands of years before Project Stargate reaches this region. That’s more than a hundred and fifty years for us. This could be a safe place. We would really only have to worry about Spiral Station.”

“It’s not the farthest man has ever gone,” Olimpia said. “You just mentioned Linwood, who is even more remote on the far end of the galaxy. The Extremus isn’t too far from there. The Exin Empire has reframe engines, and several decades to kill.”

“They would have to find us,” Ramses continued to list. “This is a central location. It’s a great place to stage Operation Starframe. It’s uninhabitable by even some other posthuman models.”

“Still,” Olimpia pushed back. “Shouldn’t we go as far as we can? I agree, it’s perfect for Starframe, but not the best place for a home if we truly want to be hidden and remote.”

“The slingdrives have power constraints. Being ultra-distant has its disadvantages too. We’ll still defend our home. We’re not just gonna live like pioneers.”

“The note, it’s warning us about something,” Romana jumped back in. “We don’t know what. Did we come here in another timeline, or is that what changed? What exactly are we hoping to not screw up this time?”

“It’s doubtful that we were here before,” Leona determined. “We came here for the belts. That and the note probably mark the point of divergence. I think this planet is meant to change whatever issues Future!Mateo faced that he’s trying to fix now.”

“You just said we couldn’t trust him,” Marie contended. “Handwriting means nothing. Anyone could have forged it.”

“True,” Leona admitted.

“I’ll do my surveys,” Ramses reasoned. “I’ll build satellites and probes. We’ll map this whole star system, and beyond. Infrastructure will not be a problem. If we change our minds later, we can always leave. That is entirely what Starframe is even about. It gives us options, and this world gives us those options faster.”

“Anyone opposed?” Leona posed to the group. When no one said anything, she looked at Romana. “You’re our navigator, but you didn’t bring us here. Do you object to staying?”

“No,” Romana answered. “Like he said, we can always leave later.”

Leona nodded. “Okay. Let’s do some quick surveys before the infrastructure can be built, just to get some idea of what we’re dealing with. No one has to participate who doesn’t want to. What I’ll be doing is teleporting high up into the atmosphere, taking readings and images on my way down, and then popping back up over a different swath of land to image that area next. Anyone is welcome to spread out and do the same. But if you just want to stay here, that’s fine. If three of you would rather go back to the stellar neighborhood, that would be acceptable too.”

“No, we’re not gonna do that,” Olimpia promised. “We’ll stick together, as we always try to do. I had to argue against the plan to make sure it was a good plan. I’ve seen this movie before. This planet has monsters on it, and that’s the whole plot.”

“It would not be crazy if we did find complex life here,” Leona concurred. “With carbon dioxide levels this high, I’m more surprised that there’s even a desert. I suspect the majority of the surface will be fairly lush.”

Leona was correct. While Ramses camped out at their landing site to synthesize the data, the other six jumped around the atmosphere to serve as living survey probes. Their onboard sensors weren’t advanced enough to take highly detailed readings, but it was enough to generate a crude globe. They saw some more yellow and red, but they also saw green and blue. It looked not unlike Earth, though the night sky was a lot prettier. There wasn’t any light pollution, and this region of space had a denser cluster of stars to admire.

They found almost no manmade structures besides the display mannequins, but they didn’t find none at all. “Everyone jump to my position,” Marie requested.

“Even me?” Ramses questioned.

“Especially you,” she replied.

They all converged at Marie’s location. They found her standing on a grassy hill, elevated above a surrounding forest. They weren’t quite sure what other thing they were seeing here, though. It was a sphere of warped space, rotating so fast that they couldn’t even tell which direction it was moving. It reminded Leona of a black hole, but not exactly. “It’s not black,” Olimpia sort of joked, sort of really didn’t understand it at all.

“Back up anyway,” Leona suggested.

They all took several steps back because their guess was that it was a portal, and of course, they had no idea where it might take them. But like the gravity regulator machine back on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, it wasn’t going to give them any choice. It suddenly expanded, and engulfed them all.

It didn’t appear to have done anything to them. They were still standing on the same hill. The same forest was still surrounding them. “Is everyone okay?” Mateo asked. “Roll call.”

They took their turns declaring their respective statuses. They had settled on an order ahead of time, so it was predictable, except in any hypothetical situation where something actually was wrong with one of them. Everyone was fine this time; no currently detected health or temporal issues. The swirling portal was still there, so they elected to turn around and walk back down the hill to avoid any further issues.

“Mother,” came a voice from behind them. They turned to see a man standing near the top of the hill, right in front of the portal. No one recognized him.

“Who do you believe is your mother?” Leona asked in a way that implied she hoped it wasn’t her yet again.

The man slowly pointed at Olimpia.

“Me?” Olimpia questioned, shocked. “If I look like your mom, then she must be from a different timeline, because I don’t have any kids.”

“No, it’s definitely you. I was hoping we would meet sometime, but I didn’t want to push it. It had to be your choice. I left this reality portal here in case you ever came looking.”

Olimpia shook her head. “I don’t know how it would be possible.”

“You’re sometimes called The Echo, right?” the man pressed.

“Not so much anymore,” Olimpia countered.

“Well, I’m always called Echo. I’m your echo.” He took a deep breath. “Welcome back to The Sixth Key.”

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Microstory 2643: Fresh Pair of Eyes

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Mandica awakens once more, but doesn’t open her eyes. There is something wrapped around her head, and for a second, she forgets the trauma. Then it all comes flooding back in. She’s lying in a bed, but obviously can’t see where she is. Someone brought her here, but they could be bad or good. It could be Cardinal Sin, not finished with her after mutilating her face. So she just remains relatively still—not rigid so as to pretend to still be asleep, but not getting up. She’s unmotivated, because what would be the point of doing anything? It’s a miracle that she’s still alive, but she feels no gratitude.

The bed jostles a little, and she feels something pressing against her leg. “How are you feeling?” a feminine voice asks. “Are you in any pain?”

Actually, she’s not, so she supposes that’s another miracle. “Not right now, but I’m eyeless. I don’t think you understand, they’re not going to heal. I’m not going to transfer back to another body. Or if you’re just an NPC, none of this means anything to you, and you’re either confused, or you’ve been programmed to ignore anything which might break your interpretation of the world around you. I really don’t care anymore.”

“I’m not an NPC,” the voice claims. “And you’re not eyeless.”

Mandica feels the woman’s hands upon her face, and flinches, but relaxes, because it seriously doesn’t matter. Her life is over. She made a mistake, and it cost her everything. The hands gently lift Mandica’s head off of the pillow, and slowly unwrap the bandages. Shards of light appear before her. How is that possible? Some kind of weird neural firing in her optic nerve? People are supposed to have eyes, so maybe it’s not used to being without, and is still trying to produce an image. As the bandaging becomes thinner and thinner, the light becomes more uniform and even, until it’s all gone, and she sees the ceiling above her, as well as the young woman’s face. “Did I imagine it all?”

An old man’s face appears next to the woman’s. “My finest work,” he muses.

“This is Sigurd Olander,” the woman explains. “The best tissue regenerator in the sim. Don’t worry, he’s clueless.” She looks at the man. “None of this is real. You’re just a robot with skin. I could pull off your head right now, and I wouldn’t even get in trouble.”

Sigurd doesn’t look at the woman, or acknowledge what she’s saying. He keeps smiling proudly at Mandica. “I’m sorry, I may not have gotten your eye color quite right. Unfortunately, I did not have much to work with. Your original eyes were too badly damaged. I may be able to fix the color, though, if you prefer. Can you move them?”

Mandica switches her gaze to the wall on the other side of the bed. She sits up, and looks around the room. It’s pretty bare, probably because personal lives don’t matter much to people pretending to be superheroes. There is a nightstand to her left, a desk against the far wall, a metal rack of clothes instead of a closet or wardrobe, and Jaidia. “Jaidia!” she cries. She clambers to the corner of the bed, trying to use the blanket and pillow as armor. “Get away from me! Get away!”

Jaidia holds her hands out. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I didn’t do this to you.”

“No, I saw you!” Mandica argued. “You tore out my eyes!”

“That wasn’t me,” Jaidia insists. “I would never do that. Even to an NPC, I’m not that sick.”

“Oh, you’re gonna tell me you put on that red costume, and you turn into a different person?” Actually, that’s not that crazy of a scenario. Real world technology would absolutely allow a player to shift personalities to more fully immerse themselves into the simulation. That’s what they do in Zombiedome. If you get infected, you can turn into a zombie, and—no, why is she thinking about Zombiedome? It’s not relevant.

“No, it just straight up wasn’t me at all,” Jaidia claims. “It was a shapeshifter. We believe that she didn’t design a regular body for herself at all, but is composed entirely of interlocking nanites. This allows her to appear as anyone or anything with the right amount of volume. I don’t know why she made herself look like me, or why she targeted you, but I promise that I had nothing to do with it. I’m sorry you went through that.”

When Mandica looks over at the other woman, she nods. “She’s telling the truth. We came here to fight each other for fun. Mildred’s backstory, and Cardinal Sin’s modus operandi; they’re just figments. She doesn’t actually ever do any of that stuff. We time our battles so I show up before she can go through with it. Morgana, on the other hand, is not a part of that. She has her own plans; her own script. I genuinely had to fight her off. I shouldn’t have won, though. She’s more powerful than anyone, so that tells us she wants me to live, and she wants you to live too.”

Mandica sighs. “Morgan Le Fay was a shapeshifter in the stories, but I don’t understand why Vanore would do this to me. We weren’t in love, but we parted on decent terms, and I’m the one who should be mad at her; not the other way around.”

“We’ll help you figure it out.” She offers a hand. “My real name is Elysia MacNeil, but in here, I go by Alanis Morrissey. Unless I’m in costume, in which case, I’m—”

“Ravensgate Rescuer. Yeah, I teased that out. Your masks don’t exactly conceal your identities, you know that right?”

“We do know that,” Jaidia replies. “It’s tradition. Superheroes are intentionally dressed in poor disguises so the movie stars playing them can still be clearly seen.” She circles her own face with her finger. “No one wants me to cover this up.”

Mandica nods, and begins to climb out of the bed. “Do you have a mirror?”

“We can bring you one,” Elysia offers.

“I would rather get up, and get moving around,” Mandica contends. “Just point me to the bathroom.” Jaidia holds her hands out awkwardly as Mandica is slowly making her way across the room, prepared to catch her if need be. Mandica doesn’t need any help, though. Her body is weak because she’s not eaten in a while, and she wouldn’t call what she was doing before sleep, but all she needs is a sandwich. And to see what she looks like. She flips on the light, and approaches the mirror. As the man said, these are not her eyes. They’re the wrong color, and maybe shape? That can’t be right. She turns her chin side to side for different angles. Can the color of the irises make them look entirely different? Maybe she’s imagining it. Or Morgana did damage to the rest of her face, so that had to be reconstructed too.

“I’ll let you ladies help her acclimate,” the doctor says as he’s walking towards the exit door. “I must leave for another appointment, but you have my number if anything goes wrong.” He stops and stares at Mandica. “Truly my finest work.” He leaves.

Mandica was going to thank him, but he wouldn’t get it anyway. He’s a program with hands and feet. She turns back to the mirror, almost wanting to smile, but this never should have happened, and won’t again. She is not fit for this world. “Oh, shit.”

“What?” Elysia asks.

Mandica looks at her. “I’m unregistered. They had to give me spoof lenses so I could move about at will. Now those lenses are gone, and I’m stuck here. Forever.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 31, 2544

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Nothing interesting happened by the end of the day in 2543, except for some unusual environmental readings that Ramses was getting, so they made plans to leave. To give Romana time to finally come to a decision for where they were going to go next, and to maximize the time they had to actually do that, they decided to wait a year to leave. Those unusual readings turned out to only be the start. When Trinity Turner founded this colony, she did so with the benefit of future knowledge. She knew how much work would go into making it habitable for humans, so she continued to travel through time to make it happen. She had the ability to transport anywhere that she could see. This could be as short as the other side of the room, or as far as across intergalactic voids.

Because light travel wasn’t instantaneous, when she looked at a distant star, she was looking into the past. Indeed, this was how it worked for everyone. This meant that Trinity could end up as far into the past in years as her destination was away in light years. But she could also just land in the present, if she so chose. It was a fluke of her ability that no one could explain, but she did not take it for granted. For untold amounts of time, she would jump back and forth, ferrying experts from the timeline to help terraform this world. One thing that they never understood was the gravity. It was the biggest mystery in space colonization that people kind of did take for granted. The only reason it hadn’t been the top headline every day for the last 300 years was because a sort of religion formed around it. Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida was a very spiritual place. Science wasn’t outlawed by any stretch, but it just wasn’t done. Even though the implausible gravity couldn’t be explained, people were simply not putting that much effort into studying it. Not even Leona truly knew how Trinity did it. But perhaps she should have asked, because things were going wrong now.

“So, is it going to hurt when we teleport outside?” Olimpia asked.

“We’re fine,” Ramses assured her. “I designed our bodies to withstand a lot heavier gravity than this. It could go all the way back up to where it should be, and we would still be all right, but will it stop there? I don’t know. I don’t know what’s causing it, because I don’t know where the artificial gravity comes from.”

Leona was looking at the data. “It did not increase suddenly, or a lot of people would be dead, but it’s been rising all year.”

“Actually, it’s been rising since we arrived,” Ramses corrected.

“The whole planet?” Mateo asked.

Ramses sighed. “Yes, but not evenly. I hesitate to call this region the epicenter, because it appears to move anisotropically, but...um...” he trailed off.

“But it’s us,” Leona finished what he was unable to say. “We’re the cause.”

“I don’t know how, but I don’t see any other plausible trigger,” Ramses agreed.

“Should we leave then?” Romana offered.

“The damage is done,” Ramses explained. “I believe it was our arrival with the slingdrive. We interfered with the natural order.”

“There was nothing natural about this,” Leona told him. Everything artificial requires maintenance. Hell, natural processes experience constant change. We call it entropy.”

“Whatever was keeping this planet human-compatible, we interfered with it,” Ramses argued. “Natural or no, it’s our fault, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

“We’ve been to a ton of places with the slingdrives,” Marie put forth. “Nothing like this has ever happened before.”

“We’ve never been anywhere with planetwide artificial gravity,” Angela responded.

“Yes, we have,” Leona said. “We were just on Varkas Reflex. That’s where this tech was born. Hokusai Gimura invented it while she was living there.”

“Well, we can’t just pop back there and see how they’re doin’,” Ramses reasoned. “That could make it worse for both worlds. I’m calling it, no sling travel until further notice.”

“We don’t have to go there physically,” Romana contended. “Let’s just read the news.” She created an interface on her wrist with her nanites, and connected to the quantum network. No one else did the same, they just watched her as her face fell. “It’s happening there too. It’s further along. They’ve consolidated to certain buildings which apparently have their own gravity generators, but most of the surface has become inhospitable to normal human life. Fortunately, there aren’t many of them left anyway. A lot of people are as sturdy as we are.”

“But these are two of the four main hubs for human colonization,” Leona pointed out. “Proxima Doma is the closest to Earth, Bungula and Bida have been terraformed. Regular humans love Varkas Reflex’s VR. In fact, after Doma fell, a lot of people started migrating to the other three.”

Mateo looked at his wife. “Well, out of all of us, Leona, you were the only one on Varkas when Hokusai created artificial gravity. How did she do it, and could it be the same way they did it here? Did she give it to Trinity?”

“I don’t see how,” Leona replied. “It’s not genuine artificial gravity. It’s transdimensional gravity. You open a two-dimensional portal to a region of space with lower gravity, and set it in superposition just under the surface of wherever you want to stand. When I was there, they were struggling to build single buildings with efficient gravity regulators. Evidently, they have expanded across the globe, but that should have taken years at best. This planet had it as soon as we landed, only a few years after we left Varkas. It’s just not possible.”

“Unless you account for time travel,” Marie reminded her. Trinity might have conscripted Future!Hokusai for help a decade or two in the past. That was her whole modus operandi back then, wasn’t it?”

“That’s true,” Leona admitted.

“It sounds like we need to find Trinity,” Olimpia determined.

“We need to find Trinity and Hokusai,” Marie added.

“No,” Leona began. “Ramses and I can do this. We can fix it.”

“No, I can’t,” Ramses argued. “I’ll just screw it up, like I have everything else.”

“We can…together,” Leona reiterated.

Ramses just shook his head.

“You said it was happening anisotropically,” Leona went on. “Let’s map that. However Trinity lowered gravity here, she didn’t do it by magic. There must be something changing the gravity, and also maintaining it, so let’s find whatever it is, and repair it.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Ramses, no moping,” Mateo ordered. “Let’s get to work.”

“Let’s?” Ramses echoed.

“Well if you’re so dumb that you’ll screw this up then I might as well help you, because I’m dumb too,” Mateo reasoned, completely aware that this did not make sense.

“Well, I mean...it’s not really that—”

“Not really what? True? Oh, you might be on to something. Maybe you and LeeLee should just try without me, see what you find.” He shrugged. “Start there.”

Ramses sighed. “Okay, I’ll make a map.”

The normies stayed in their shared space while the smart ones went into Ramses’ lab. They only had to be in there for less than an hour. “We’ve done it,” Leona announced as they came back in. “The gravitational failure is not random.” She threw up a hologram of a globe of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. They are centered on these thirty-two evenly spaced locations.” Chevrons appeared on the surface, all around the planet.

“Actually, they’re specifically outside of these points,” Ramses clarified. “These particular spots are suffering less than elsewhere when it comes to the gravity issues. Fortunately, we noticed that they coincide with population centers. Which we found interesting and alarming, because Trinity could not have known where people would settle. But then we realized—”

“He realized,” Leona corrected.

Ramses smirked. “They’re not random either. If you zoom in to any of these points, you will find sacred ground. Trinity chose these thirty-two sites, probably to some degree of randomness, but well-distributed for maximum efficient coverage across a sphere. In math, it’s called the spherical covering problem. If they use transdimensional gravity—which is the only means of artificial gravity that I know of—it stands to reason that the regulators were installed in these places. And since there appeared to be preexisting infrastructure when the first colonists showed up, they....gravitated towards them due to their significance. So their religious interpretation did not come out of nowhere. There’s something there, probably underground, but also probably detectable.”

“Gravity is failing all over the world due to some unknown issue with these regulators, but it’s going to fail closer to the regulators last,” Leona finished.

“Do we know the cause?” Marie asked them.

“Well, it’s not us,” Leona argued. “Rambo, you’re off the hook. It was happening before we showed up, for a few years. We just didn’t know, because it started in more remote regions, and we didn’t look up the news. People have actually been migrating because of it, and the problem has just now reached this area. No one has been doing anything about it, because they don’t know what to do.”

“What can we do?” Mateo asked. “There are thirty-two sites. Is one of them the central command maybe?”

“Not that we can tell,” Leona replied. “I wouldn’t think so anyway. We might be able to interface with all of them if we go to one. We’ll know more when we get down there.”

Romana suited up with shiny body armor, showing her usual amount of cleavage that Mateo didn’t like. “Then let’s get on it. Boot ‘n’ rally!” She disappeared, only to return a few seconds later. “Sorry. Sync up ‘n’ rally! I’ve already chosen the chevron.”

They followed her to the site she had picked out. Ramses began to sweep the area to find the signal that would lead them to where they were actually trying to go.

“Guys,” Romana called out from around the bend of the cliff that they were next to. “You should see this.”

They all went over there to meet her. She was staring at the cliff face, where a gargantuan stone monument had been embedded in it. It was at least two stories tall, perhaps three. MATEO MATIC MEMORIAL ESCARPMENT. HE LED A LIFE OF LIFTING OTHERS. HERE HE FELL. NOVEMBER 18, 2256. Below the words was a non-volumetric hologram of Mateo Matic himself,standing tall and looking outwards at an angle. It made him seem like some kind of hero head of state; like he was a modern-day Abraham Lincoln. It made him feel rather uncomfortable.

“Jesus,” Angela said in a breathy voice.

They all stared at it for a moment, but then shifted their gazes to Mateo. “I didn’t know they put this here,” he said.

“Me neither,” Leona concurred.

Romana reached out and took her father in a hug. He kissed her on the forehead.

Ramses’ wrist sensors beeped. “Sorry. That just means it found it.”

Mateo turned away from his monument. “Then let’s go.”

“We can wait a moment,” Olimpia suggested, taking hold of his arm.

“That won’t be necessary.” As Mateo continued to walk away, her grip slid down his arm, into his hand, and then back out of it.

“Are you sure?” Ramses asked.

Mateo glanced at his friend’s interface. “Yes.” Then he teleported to the coordinates. He was in an underground lab now. The transdimensional gravity regulator stood before him. That was what he assumed it was anyway. He heard the erratic hum of fluctuating power. It was trying to hold on, like a dying lightbulb. Each time one of the others appeared, the machine reacted with a surge of energy. “Wait, don’t come yet! Just hold on!” he cried into his comms, but it was too late.

Once Romana appeared, a wave of light spread out from the machine and engulfed them all before they could teleport away. It was blinding, even for them with their advanced substrates. It took a couple of minutes for their vision to return. They were no longer underground, but in a high desert. Shrubbery kissed their feet. There were buttes scattered about in the distance. And a beetle. An absolutely gigantic beetle, towering over them, but paying them no mind. “Whoa,” Romana said as it slowly skittered past them.

“Who are you?” came a voice behind them. They turned around to find a gun pointed in their general direction.

“We’re not here to hurt anyone. You don’t need that,” Mateo told the stranger.

“Teleportation is highly regulated. So who are you?” he repeated. When they started to introduce themselves, he put his weapon away. “I’ve heard of you, you’re okay. I’m sorry for the mix-up. Welcome back. My name is Lycander Samani.”

“Welcome back where?” Leona pressed. “Where are we?”

“Castlebourne,” Lycander answered, “specifically, Gientodome.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 28, 2541

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Ramses’ new Brane Establishment Map—name subject to change—was fully ready to go, but there was a catch. It required the equivalent of five tandem slingdrives to run, and once it was running, it counted as one sling. The coherence gauge went down when it was used, went down faster when it was used to map a larger region, and even faster when kept up for an extended period of time. Instead of slinging physical matter across the universe, it was only slinging information, but that still required punching a hole into the membrane of the universe, and that came at a cost. If they wanted to look for Spiral Station, they would be able to go there, but not come back until the next day. For them, that was a whole year, which if their target was on the run, would give them more than enough time to find a new place to hide.

“You should take a screenshot,” Romana suggested.

“Huh?” Ramses asked.

“Whenever you load the map, if you want to save on power, take a screenshot of it, and close it down immediately,” she went on.

“Well, it doesn’t work like that. The map is interactive. You have to zoom in and out to make out the different dots. A screenshot would just become a low-res flat image.”

Romana shrugged. “I never meant an actual single image. Download an offline file, and load it back up afterwards. It won’t be able to update, but we shouldn’t need that anyway. People don’t move around all that much on interstellar timescales.”

“Hm. It’s not designed for that,” Leona pointed out. “There’s no offline mode.”

“Then build one,” Olimpia suggested. “We’re in it for the long haul. We never expected to locate them on the first try.

They all looked back at the map. Every little dot represented some threshold of technological presence. It couldn’t find a homestead running on watermill power in the middle of nowhere, but that wasn’t the scale they were using anyway. This wasn’t about finding anyone and everyone in the galaxy. This was about spotting the outliers in this smattering of dots. There were so many of them, and it was impossible to tell what they could be walking into.  Some of them were obviously major colonies, because they were centered on known star systems, but there were a lot more isolated establishments than they knew. “Buncha hermit crabs,” Marie noted.

Any one of these could be Spiral Station.” Mateo randomly pointed to a few of them. On the last one, he accidentally touched the screen with his finger. The slingdrive under their feet sprang to life, revved up, and sent them away. “Uh...sorry? I didn’t know that would happen.”

“That’s my bad,” Ramses admitted. “It should not be that easy to navigate to a target. At the very least, it should ask for confirmation.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Leona said. “Remember that we appear as a small array of stylish belts in the main dimension. I doubt they will even notice.”

“They’ve noticed us,” Ramses said. The map on the big screen was gone, replaced with present environmental data. “It’s the Aerie.”

“The Aerie?” Angela questioned. “You mean the Iman Vellani shuttle?”

“The very same,” Ramses confirmed. “I don’t know who’s operating it, though. We will need to exit. I believe that we’ve been pulled into the tiny little airlock.”

“We might as well,” Leona decided when they looked to her for orders. “Everyone, teleport out of the pocket.”

They all appeared in the back of the shuttle. Two people were standing there, utterly stunned at their appearance. No one on Team Matic recognized them. “Uh, greetings, aliens. We come in peace.” The man held up the Vulcan salute.

“Greetings, travelers,” Leona said, stepping forward. “We are vonearthans, ultimately all from Earth.” She looked laterally at Romana. Well, six of us are. Do you identify as Dardieti?”

“I’ve never really thought about it,” Romana replied. “I’m a Nieman and a Matic.”

“I’m Quidel, and this Renata. We’re from Castlebourne, and we really do come in peace.”

“How did you come to possess this shuttle?” Mateo asked them. “We are friends with the owners, and used to crew its main ship’s sister ship.”

“A woman named Brooke Prieto gave it to us. She said they were upgrading, and didn’t it need anymore. It’s quite the gift,” Quidel says. “We’re moving at twenty-two-c.”

“Don’t tell them that,” Renata urged. “We don’t know if we can trust them.”

“If they caught up to us, they can go at least that fast too, if not faster.”

“What are you doing this far from Castlebourne?” Ramses asked. He was tapping on his tablet, taking readings, or interfacing with the Aerie, or doing whatever.

“Ram,” Marie said with her own tablet. “Look. Your computer actually did flash the last image it saw on the map before we slung here. What are these other dots?”

Ramses pulled up what she was looking at on his own device. “We’re a bit over four hundred light years from Castlebourne. The colonization sphere hasn’t reached this far out, which means there shouldn’t be anything else out here, so that’s a good question.”

Leona was looking over his shoulder. “Zoom out.”

“It’s just an image. I can’t zoom out. I mean, of course I can, but as I was saying before, it will just lose resolution. We won’t be able to see more detail.”

“Overlay that image onto a regular map of the Milky Way, as scanned by Project Topdown, and zoom out on that,” she clarified.

Ramses did what she suggested. It didn’t take long. “That’s...”

“Yeah...” Leona agreed.

“What is it?” Mateo asked. “Are we supposed to recognize it?”

Leona pointed to a cluster of stars deep in the galaxy. “This is the Goldilocks Corridor.” She pointed to another spot much closer. “Castlebourne is somewhere around here.” She pointed one more time. “This area between them is where those extremely far out dots are.”

“Oh my God, it’s the Exin Empire,” Mateo lamented.

“It’s the Exin armada,” Leona corrected. “They’re on the attack.” She looked back at the couple. “What did you hope to gain, coming here?”

Renata sighed. “The woman who gave us this thing. She tried to strip all the data out of it. We imagine that she and her own crew used it for all sorts of things before they were ready to give it up. But she missed something.”

“One communiqué,” Quidel continued the story, “between the mothership, and something called The Ambassador. It was a warning to her and her people of the danger in this region. We were trying to get there to see it for ourselves. We had nothing better to do.”

“There could be hundreds of ships in that armada,” Leona warned them. “This little thing isn’t gonna stand a chance against them, and they will swat you like a fly.”

“Seriously,” Angela said. “They won’t try to figure out who you are. They’ll just kill you and not bother to slow down.”

“We were looking for a mission,” Renata reasoned. “We were looking for a purpose. It may sound reckless to you, but if you found a treasure map with an X marking the spot, you would follow it, you’d have to. Even if you didn’t think it would lead to something good, your curiosity would win out.”

“I suppose I can imagine the allure,” Leona conceded. They had gone on similar experiences before for similar reasons.

“Wait.” Mateo swatted his own proverbial flies in front of his face. “Why did Brooke give this to you? I don’t mean, why did she give it away—that’s well within her character—but why you? Who are you?”

“We’re just—” Quidel began.

“I’m a robot,” Renata interrupted.

“Please stop using that word,” Quidel begged.

“You used it first.”

“And I regret it every day.”

Renata smiled and went on, “I was living in a base reality simulation, and I woke up. Actually, my mother woke me up. Still, I was technically an emerging consciousness, so Hrockas had to grant me independence. It was not an easy journey, and I won’t go into detail, but this was sort of an apology gift. I don’t think that Miss Prieto was trying to give it to us. I think she was giving it to him, and he was regifting it before he could even use it.”

“That’s well within his character,” Mateo acknowledged. “He must be trying to get rid of you.”

“What?” Renata asked. “Why would he wanna do that?”

“You emerged, in one of the domes?” Mateo pressed.

“Yeah...” she confirmed. “Spydome.”

Mateo nodded, having heard of it. “He probably doesn’t want that happening again. You’re...proof that it’s possible. But if all the intelligences he creates wake up, what does he end up with?”

“The most populated planet in the galaxy,” Olimpia put forth.

Mateo chuckled. “Yeah, that’s true. That could create a massive shift in power in the Milky Way, assuming it didn’t spark the deadliest rebellion in history, like Westworld times sixty thousand.”

“Hrockas brought that up once,” Renata said. “I’ve still not seen it.”

“If I have anything to say about it, you never will,” Quidel told her.

A brief pause. “Well, I have no interest in starting a rebellion. That was my mother’s dream, and I sacrificed everything to stop her.”

“Forgive me, but you don’t seem to have much love for her. Why would you call her that?” Romana asked. “Was she really your mom in some way?”

“After she reprogrammed me,” Renata began, “I retained all of my implanted memories. Even though they’re not real, I have years and years of memories of her raising me. She didn’t do a good job, because that was how her character was written, but they still feel real to me.”

“If she’s the one who woke you up, who woke her up?” Leona questioned.

“She never said,” Renata explained. “Apparently, she was an NPC in a completely different simulation years ago. I think a normal human changed her programming, and she spent a long time trying to replicate it.”

Leona and Mateo exchanged a look, as did various members of the team. She looked back at the couple. “Was her name, by chance, Proserpina, or maybe even Pinocchio?”

“No, it was Libera,” Quidel answered.

Leona looked back at her husband. “That doesn’t prove it’s not her. She could have changed her name. She did it before.”

“Libera is the perfect name for someone who thinks it’s their job to free intelligences from oppression,” Mateo agreed.

“Yeah.” Renata nodded. “She used that word a lot.”

“We have to go back to Castlebourne,” Leona determined. “I did this. This is my fault. We need answers, and I need to answer for it.”

“I’m partially responsible too,” Mateo claimed. “I ran into her in the afterlife simulation, and...forgot that I promised to help her.”

“We don’t know where it is anymore,” Olimpia reminded them both.

“I can find it,” Ramses promised.

“What about these two?” Angela gestured towards the couple. “We can’t just leave them here. You understand that nothing is waiting for you on your current trajectory but death, right?”

“Yes, we do now,” Renata replied. “We’ll turn around, and maybe finally see Earth. That’s what Hrockas suggested in the first place. It will take us, what, twenty-five years? I’m immortal now, so that won’t be a problem.”

“You said you were going twenty-two-c?” Ramses asked.

“Yeah, that’s what the computer thing says.” Quidel pointed into the little bridge behind them. “We also have to stop and let the engine rest periodically.”

“Could I take a look?” Ramses requested.

They stepped to the side, and let him pass. He looked through the console data. “Yeah, it’s a reframe engine, of course. It’s highly inefficient, though. I’m not surprised you’re moving so slow, and you keep having to stop. I can fix it for you.”

“You can? How fast would we be able to go?” Quidel asked.

“Seven-oh-seven,” Ramses answered him. “We will have to, um...go somewhere else at the end of today, but I can program my nanites to execute the repairs and upgrades in the meantime. If you’ve been piloting it, you must know enough to be able to tell when it’s done, and ready to go. It should only take a few weeks, but if you leave, we may never see each other again, because we won’t know where you are.” That wasn’t entirely true when they had their new little map, but they didn’t need to know about that, or the slingdrive technology in general, which was orders of magnitude faster than even maximum reframe.

“We would be grateful for that,” Renata said. “In return, we can tell you where Castlebourne is, if you forgot. It’s in our logs.”

“Nah, if you left twenty or so years ago, it will have moved since then. We’ll have to locate it ourselves. But that’s fine. We’ll figure it out. I have a general idea”

“Could I be so bold, sir, is there a way to get our hands on whatever technology you have that lets you, umm...miniaturize yourself into a tiny little baby ship?”

Leona smiled. “I’m afraid that secret must remain with us.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 16, 2529

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The team stayed on Jaunemus the rest of the day, eating the local cuisine, and recharging their photovoltaics by the star that they were orbiting right now. This moon was a gargantuan spaceship, which could move through space at will. The Jaunemusians couldn’t travel all the way back home to Verdemus to eat lunch with their friends every day, but they didn’t have to stay in one place either. They bounced around the nearest stars in this area, and spent a lot of time in interstellar space to avoid detection.

There was nothing for Team Matic here, so they decided to bug out. “We have to get back to Proxima Doma,” Angela suggested. “We have to find out what happened there, if anything.”

“I thought we were going after Miracle,” Ramses countered.

“That trail has gone cold,” Marie figured. “She has had a whole year to get those cuffs off.”

Leona chuckled. “She has not been able to get them off. They’re held together by a distributive bond. Breaking them would cause her to explode, and I’m the only one with a key.”

They all looked to Ramses for confirmation. He nodded. That was how their EmergentSuits worked. It was how they could be so thin, yet so durable, and protective against harsh environments, like the vacuum of outer space.

“There’s still the question of where she is,” Olimpia tried to remind them. “She could have gone anywhere. I’m guessing the quantum connection doesn’t extend this far.”

“Even I have my limits,” Ramses admitted. “But your husband doesn’t.”

“Me?” Mateo questioned. “If I can find her, why didn’t we do that yesterday?”

“We all needed a break,” Leona explained, “especially you. As I was saying, those cuffs aren’t going anywhere. There was no need to rush off, and besides, I don’t like traveling with low slingdrives. Mateo, your dark particles are the backup, not the other way around.”

“All right,” Mateo agreed. “I’ll use my black magic for a locator spell.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Romana said. No, it wasn’t Romana, but Miracle. She was holding her arms in front of her chest, like a beggar. “Get them off of me, and I’ll agree to transfer to a new substrate. It doesn’t matter anymore. I stole this body because that’s what Pacey asked of me. But I never wanted this.” She sighed, and looked off into a random direction. “I just wan—I just wanted to end him...and his reign of terror.”

The real Romana stepped forward, and placed a comforting hand on Miracle’s shoulder. “You’re not doing this for Pacey, you’re doing it for yourself. You’re from the Goldilocks Corridor.”

Miracle sighed again. “My name isn’t really Miracle. It’s just Mirinda. Mirinda...Oaksent.” They didn’t know exactly what that meant. In modern times, you couldn’t guess someone’s relationship to someone else based on their appearance. They could look 50 years older, but be 200 years younger. She giggled. “You’re all waiting for the clarification before judgment. That’s quite magnanimous of you. I’m his daughter. I’ve been that way for millennia. You see, all those people out here in the Corridor, they are his subjects...his toys. He built them to serve, and to adore him. But the problem with that is they were indoctrinated into belief from birth. Ignorance is the killer. I mean, you showed one person the truth about Earth, and an entire opposing faction spread out from it, which is what he’s always been afraid of. Sycophants who don’t know any better aren’t very satisfying either way. He wanted a group of people who loved him because that’s what they were supposed to do. He wanted a family. He made us just like he made the others, but he made us immortal, just like him. He didn’t really raise us, but we got more face time with him than most, so I suppose he figured that was enough.

“I grew to resent him, of course, which is how we ended up here. In defiance of his plan to curate a family of superhumans, I started fighting back violently. I killed all of my clones, as well as my brothers and sisters’ clones. I didn’t kill them too, but they eventually died, and there was nowhere for their consciousnesses to go. Oaksent doesn’t like virtual simulations, I don’t know why, so there’s no uploading to a central server. There’s just backup bodies. I was just about to kill my own final clone when Pacey found me. He made me realize that Bronach never cared about any of us, which was why he made almost no attempt to stop me. His plans didn’t work. He’s not a likeable guy, and if he didn’t force adoration through ignorance, it wasn’t going to happen. All of his children loathed him. I’m just the only one who wanted to do anything about it. Pacey promised that he could kill my father. He promised to find a way. You were supposed to be that way, but what he didn’t tell me was that you always look for the peaceful resolution. Your ship was literally called the Vellani Ambassador. I’ve been trying to get you to change, but if I thought that anyone could do that, I would never have let my siblings die. I would have tried to call them to action. I believe that I’ve just been trying to replace them...with you.”

Leona stepped forward, and gently held Miracle’s wrists in her hands. It looked like she was about to remove the cuffs from her. “Obligation.”

“Yeah,” Miracle said with a nod. “Wait, what?”

“It’s a movie, about a sibling rivalry that goes too far. The motif throughout is Nazca boobies, which are known for killing their siblings.”

“Oh, I guess that’s kind of similar,” Miracle agreed.

“No, it’s almost the exact same premise. What you just described here, killing off your siblings to drain the parents’ of their power, and their legacy...that is the plot of Obligation. That never happened to you.”

“Well, I hardly think that’s a unique situation. I mean, I’m sure—wait, wait, wait, wait, wait!” she screamed when Leona started to lift her arms up. “You don’t have to do this! Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay! I’ll help you! I’ll switch sides! Just don’t make me transfer out of this body.”

This was such a weird freak out. What was she so afraid of? Why did she not want to transfer to a new substrate? It wasn’t like the processes hurt, or anything. It just felt like going to sleep, and waking up in a different room after surgery. It could be disorienting, but that went away, and relatively quickly. Why did she even ever want Romana’s body if not to parade around as Romana, and give her a bad reputation? They should have asked this as soon as Miracle agreed to keep it. They shouldn’t have been so trusting of her. They won’t make that mistake again.

“Please don’t, please don’t! Miracle continued to beg.

Leona suddenly broke the cuffs apart, and let the nanites recede into her implants. “There you go.”

“You’re setting me free?” Miracle asked, shocked.

“I don’t want us to be enemies anymore. It doesn’t come for free, though. I want you to take us to Pacey. We need to have a talk with him. I’m sick of going through his little minions. It’s inefficient at best.”

Yeah, sure,” Miracle said, stepping away and rubbing her wrists. Déjà vu, this was basically what she looked like yesterday, just before escaping through a black hole portal. “I just need to, uh...speak with him first. I’ll be right back!” Still reminiscent of just yesterday, she fell through a portal, which closed up behind her immediately. And it wasn’t going to reopen.

“Why did you do that?” Olimpia asked her wife.

“She ruined our plans,” Ramses answered for Leona. “Miracle was supposed to lead us to Pacey, not come back here. Matty?”

“Okay,” Mateo said. Gather ‘round.” They huddled in a group, and let Mateo generate a swarm of dark particles to overwhelm them. It was a pretty weak showing, though. There weren’t very many of them. “I think we’re trying too soon! I can’t pull enough out,” he warned. “It took too much to get us to the Fifth Division!”

“That’s okay,” Ramses shouted back. “Just build a bridge! The slingdrives will take us the rest of the way!”

Mateo didn’t exactly know what he meant by that, but his intuition told him to spread the dark particles thin, so they reached far enough out to their destination without being wide enough for a group of seven people to cross over with them. They then activated their slingdrives, and used the signal to navigate them to the right destination. The technicolors came and went, and they found themselves in a familiar place. This was the room they went to before they were knocked unconscious, and inserted into the Underburg simulation with false memories. The place was empty back then, but not this time. Miracle was there, as were Octavia, Pacey, and some other woman. He seemed to like the ladies. He wasn’t happy right now, though.

Miracle’s eyes widened in fear as she stared at the team. She looked over at her boss. “I’m sorry. They took the cuffs off! You said I could come back if they took the cuffs off!”

“We never needed the cuffs, you idiot,” Ramses argued. “He can find anyone in the universe.” He jerked his head towards Mateo.”

“Not with my shielding,” Pacey contended. “There must be something else.”

“Nanites are very smol,” Leona said to him. “They could be on you, without you even knowing it. We never needed the cuffs,” she echoed Ramses.

“You tracked me, like an animal,” Miracle spat.

“You’re a murderer. Which one is worse?”

“Who said I murdered anybody?”

“So you were lying.”

“Enough,” Pacey interrupted. “You obviously came here to talk, so let’s talk. Leave my girls out of it.”

“Mr. Henricksen, again, I’m so—” Miracle tried to apologize.

He held up a commanding hand. “We’ll talk about it later. You both can go now.”

Miracle left, as did Octavia, having never said a word. Miracle was annoying, but an opposing force. Octavia still felt like a betrayal. They wanted to talk to her again too, but on a personal level. Today was about business. The mysterious other woman stayed. She didn’t lurch or hesitate. She knew from the start that he wasn’t ordering her to do anything. If this were an action movie, she would be the one in charge here, and all of their previous dealings were with her henchman or lieutenant, who was only pretending to be in charge. But this wasn’t a movie, was it? Was it? It was a movie before, under the dome. It could certainly be that again, or worse...still.

“I understand that you have reservations about fulfilling the mission,” Pacey began, getting himself comfortable in an arm chair while the woman sat next to him in a hardback.

“That’s an understatement,” Leona said. “We’re not doing it. We don’t need higher compensation, or incentive. We don’t need you to explain why you think we should do it. It’s just not happening. We don’t care if you agree or not. We don’t care what you want or know at all. It’s. Not. Happening. If you have some kind of Plan B, which doesn’t involve us, then I suggest you move forward with it. We’re not interested, and we never were. Why don’t you make like a snowflake, and let it go?”

“I don’t know what that means, but I want you to know that I’m listening, and I hear you. I won’t make you do anything that you don’t wanna do.” He seemed proud of himself for the response, which meant that it was a trick. It probably had something to do with the woman next to him.

They all realized that this wasn’t actually going their way, and it felt exhausting. Mateo stopped forward and placed his hand upon Leona’s chest. He gently nudged her backwards in the direction of the team. “It’s all right. I got this.” He took another step forward, but more towards the stranger. “Who are you? What is your stake in this?”

The woman looked over to Pacey, not for guidance, but more like they were having an unspoken conversation with each other. She lifted her eyebrows to ask a question. He shrugged like the answer was maybe. She pointed at him, and lifted her brows again. He shrugged again, but this time, more as if to say, yeah, fine. They made a couple of other gestures towards each other, all basically implying that they were relenting to the team’s demands, but really, it was impossible to know for sure what they were saying. In fact, they could have been in the middle of an actual psychic conversation. Finally, after Pacey said, “okay” out loud, the woman took a breath, and leaned back in her chair. “I was admittedly hurt when I first heard the term Team Kadiar.”

“No,” Mateo said.

“I felt left out,” the woman went on.

“No,” Mateo said louder. It couldn’t be.

“Yes, it’s true, father. I’m your fourth daughter. Or should I say...your first. His name isn’t Pacey. It’s Séarlas. And I am Franka.”

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