| Generated by Google Gemini Pro text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3 |
Boyd managed to convince the group to stay one more day so he could shore
things up with his people. It wasn’t that tall of an order, and they figured
it was the least they could do. This was some kind of alternate version of
Castlebourne, and once they were gone, what would become of it? Would Pacey
make an effort to keep it running, or would these AI androids just start to
degrade and wither away? Ethics demanded them to do what they could while
they were still around to try.
Come midnight central, everyone jumped forward to the future, including
Romana and Boyd. They immediately made their way back down to the vactrain,
and navigated it to Castledome. Unlike last time, nothing went wrong, and
they actually reached their intended destination. It wasn’t flooded or on
fire. They just stepped out, and waited for Octavia to find what she was
looking for. The way she was feeling around on the tiles of the train
station made it seem like a platform nine and three-quarters type of
situation. If there was a way to cross back and forth between these two
versions of Castlebourne, it couldn’t be something that any rando could
stumble upon accidentally. She couldn’t seem to find the right tile, though,
so she started tapping on every one of them one by one. Perhaps the special
sequence was different on either side.
While they were waiting, Mateo, Leona, and Olimpia wandered over to the
other side of the ring, and fully into the dome. Mateo hoped to have a
personal conversation about their relationship, but Leona tilted her head
clear down to her shoulder, struck by something surprising. “What is it?” he
asked.
She kept staring at the castle in the distance. Finally, she said, “it’s a
mirror.”
“What’s a mirror, honey?” Olimpia asked.
“I can’t believe I didn’t notice it in any of the other domes. Look at the
castle. It’s flipped.” Leona pointed. “That spire should be on the other
side.”
“Oh yeah, you’re right.”
Leona’s eyes widened. She powerwalked right back through the ring, and into
the station where Octavia was still trying to find the secret entrance. She
went over to the opposite wall, and tapped the tiles in the same order that
Octavia had when she made her first attempt.
The tube sealed up, and they heard the rush of wind indicating the train
that they had taken here was now gone. Then the weird part happened. With
more rushing wind, the two halves of the vacuum tube separated from each
other, split down the middle where the doors once met. As a cloud of gas
filled the space left behind, a second set of doors materialized, identical
to the first. They then opened, triggering the rematerialization of the tube
as well. Inside the pod—which was much smaller than the usual train car—was
Pacey, standing there as cool as an autumn day.
“Can we go?” Mateo asked Pacey.
Pacey smirked. “I dunno. Can they?” he posed to Octavia.
She separated herself from the group, and stepped closer to Pacey, but did
not step into the vacpod. “I think we’ve made our main point, but they’re
not done learning.”
“Ah, crap. Really?” Mateo questioned. “Friends become enemies? What the hell
did we ever do to you?”
Octavia smirked now too. “It’s not about friends becoming enemies, Matt.
It’s about enemies becoming friends.” She nodded ever so slightly towards
Boyd.
Mateo turned his head towards Boyd quite dramatically. “This whole thing has
been about this guy?”
“You need him,” Pacey explained. “Bronach is too powerful to defeat without
someone equally powerful.”
“But him?” Mateo pressed. “I mean...maybe Arcadia, or something.”
“Arcadia is not that big of a deal,” Octavia contended. “She gets most of
her power by conscripting others, and keeping them behind the proverbial
curtain, so it looks like it’s all her. Boyd operates on his own.”
“That’s the problem,” Leona countered. “He’s not a team player.”
“I know hundreds of homo floresiensis bots who would beg to differ,” Pacey
reasoned.
“I was being tested too,” Boyd realized.
“Did it teach him to stop being such a pervert?” Mateo asked.
“Oh,” Octavia said dismissively. “Your daughter’s hot. Stop acting like
everyone should pretend that they don’t see that. Plus, she’s well into
adulthood. She just aged, like two years, right before your eyes. She makes
her own choices.”
“Paige would never do this,” Leona said. “Who are you?”
“I am Paige,” Octavia insisted. “I’m just one who’s been through some
shit. You’ve led multiple lives. You know what I’m talking about. I did this
for you, so you could end it. Soon enough, the Exin Army is going to
find their way to Castlebourne, and everything that Team Kadiar worked for
will be wiped out in an afternoon, along with millions of totally
unsuspecting visitors from Earth, and the rest of the stellar neighborhood.
You can’t stop their advance, but you can end the Oaksent regime. The
empire is a mess of factions, not because they disagree with each other, but
because it’s designed to be compartmentalized. Use that to your advantage.
Confuse them, and neutralize them.” She took a breath, and glanced around at
the station. “This world is a playground. Some of the domes that we mirrored
from the original are dumb, like Heavendome. Others are for relaxation, like
Raindome, so you can take your breaks there. The rest are training
facilities. That crystal goes both ways. Instead of putting someone else
on your pattern, it can take you off. Stay here, keep
practicing. Prepare yourselves for the Ex Wars. The train will still be
waiting for you when you’re ready.”
“I don’t like to be tricked,” Ramses said to her.
“A necessary component of the lesson,” Octavia claimed.
“A faulty one,” Ramses argued. “We didn’t go looking for Boyd because we
wanted him on our team. We went there because your boyfriend told us that we
had to. So what’s the real lesson? That you’re the powerful ones
here? If that’s true, then okay, but...I’m not sure how that would help us
end a war.”
Octavia and Pacey seemed decidedly stumped. “However flawed our plan might
have been,” Pacey said, “he’s here now, and I don’t see you ringing his
neck.”
Ramses winced. “Well, we can be civil; we’re not savage animals.”
“That’s all it is?” Octavia asked. “You don’t see any good in him,
even now?”
“I didn’t say that,” Ramses replied.
“All right, all right, all right. Your pitch is over,” Leona determined. She
turned to address the team. “We’re gonna vote on what we wanna do. Will we
stay here and train?” she asked with airquotes. “Or will we get our
powers and patterns back, and go back out to do whatever we want in normal
space?” She looked over her shoulder at Pacey. “Including everything we need
to use our tandem slingdrives.”
Pacey shrugged his shoulders, closed his eyes, and nodded.
Leona went on, “all in favor of staying here for an indeterminate amount of
time?”
No one raised their hands.
“All in favor of leaving this place behind with our respective toolboxes.”
Everyone raised their hands, except one.
“Boyd, are you abstaining?” Leona asked him.
He’s surprised that she even said his name. “I get a vote?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Yeah, I—I wanna go. I don’t need to stay any longer.”
“Okay, cool.” Leona clapped her hands. She bent over to take the crystal out
of her bag, then held it out between herself and Pacey. “I don’t care how
this thing works. Just undo what you did. Put us back the way we belong.”
Neither Pacey nor Octavia made a move.
“Are you still holding onto our agency?” Leona questioned.
“No,” Pacey said, disappointed. “But it can’t be done here. Turning off the
crystal is fairly simple, though not necessarily obvious. It holds a
tremendous amount of temporal energy. You need to block that energy. What do
you know blocks that?”
“Lemons?” Olimpia suggested.
A few of them kind of laughed.
Pacey smiled. “She’s right. Dunking it in a bowl of citrus juice would do
it. But if you want to exercise some control over what it does—and
you don’t want an explosion—you need the harmonic equivalent to citrus.”
“The sound of lemons?” Olimpia pressed.
“Yeah, in a way. Boyd knows what I’m talkin’ ’bout.”
They all looked at Boyd who was a little awkward about it. “There was music
involved in one scenario when I was trying to find a way to transport the
Buddha’s hand citron to the future. It’s hard to explain, but they converted
the genome sequence to sound, and that allowed it to be...it doesn’t matter.
All DNA can be translated to music. You just need to pick a reasonable
method, and be consistent with it. There are multiple methods,
though. Dave had to find the right one for—Pacey, do you want us to use the
same method, or what?”
“That’s up to you to decide,” Pacey answered.
“Does that mean that any method will do,” Angela pressed, “or is this
another challenge?”
“That’s up to you to decide,” Pacey repeated.
“Great. Boyd, you’ll be our expert,” Leona said. “These two are no help.”
Boyd scoffed. “I wasn’t actually involved in generating the music,” Boyd
started to clarify. “I was the boss. Making someone else figure it out for
me was part of the thrill. I just heard the highlights afterwards. Which is
how I know that playing the entire piece from start to finish will take
something like two years.”
“You mean...two days?” Marie asked with a smile.
“Let’s just get back to the real world, and then we’ll make a plan,” Mateo
suggested. “There’s nothing for us here.” He then looked directly at Pacey,
and added, “if you wouldn’t mind...”
Pacey obliged, stepping out of the vacpod, and off to the side.
“Are you two, like, a thing?” Mateo went on while everyone else was stepping
into the pod.
Pacey and Octavia exchanged a look. “Just because we work together, and have
the same goals, doesn’t mean we’re hooking up.”
“That’s why I asked,” Mateo retorted. “Because I didn’t know the answer.
Don’t be so defensive. You’re the antagonists in this situation, you know
that, right? If someone were to write this tale down in a history textbook
with any semblance of accuracy, the students would not be rooting for you.
Whether the ends justify the means or not, most people don’t like dirty
means.” Amidst their silence, he deftly stepped backwards into the pod too.
“Just remember that the next time you come across someone you think needs to
be taught a lesson.” The doors closed with perfect timing, sending them away
and home. Hopefully, that is.
The pod stopped, and the doors reopened. A blackness came flooding in. Dark
particles immediately swarmed all around them. Now that Octavia no longer
needed Mateo’s protection, he redirected it. He wrapped his arms around
Boyd’s body, and endowed him with his EmergentSuit nanites. Everyone else
was able to just activate their own suits. They couldn’t talk, though—not in
this world. They had to rely on their long histories with each other,
and their empathic connections. The other six huddled around Mateo and
Boyd. They engaged their tandem slingdrives, and dispatched them all to
real, normal space.
Mateo fell straight to the floor, coughing uncontrollably. It felt like the
dark particles had entered his body, which didn’t sound possible. According
to Ramses, they were just neutrinos, which couldn’t interact with regular
matter. Whatever was causing it, he couldn’t stop it, and neither could
anyone else. He just kept coughing and coughing until he either passed out
or died. He couldn’t tell which.
