Microstory 2320: Earth, September 19, 2178

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Dear Corinthia,

That actually sounds like a great job to have. It may not be as glamorous as field work, but you’re gonna outlive all your peers, which is good for me, because now we have more time to get to know each other. I’m in a bit of a different situation. My work is boring, but not because there’s nothing to do; it’s just really terrible. I am our father’s assistant, but only when he’s here. When he’s not, I report to his boss. He’s not a bad guy, but he gives me these tedious tasks that don’t really need to get done. I swear, he asked me to file a batch of documents last year that I just refiled last week according to case number instead of tracking number. For an explanation, while these two numbers are different, they only ever refer to the same thing. One case will always have one tracking tag, and one tag will only have one case attached to it. It doesn’t matter anyway, because everything is electronic, and these are just for backup! That is merely one example, and I won’t bore you with any more. Suffice to say that I would take your job over mine any day. You may never have encountered an issue yet, but it’s quite important, and if something does come up, you could be instrumental in saving lives. Mine is pointless, and utterly redundant. As far as the pictures go, you don’t have to do anything you can’t afford, or don’t want to spend money on. I really mean that. I’ll send you one photo of my place, but you don’t have to send anything back at all. I’m happy just to read your words. I don’t know if I really thanked you for reaching out. A lesser person would have suppressed their emotions about it, or at least waited until they could wrap their minds around it. I want you to know how brave you are for speaking up, and giving us this opportunity. Attached is an image of my quarters, from as far back as I could step, so it would get as much in frame as possible. What you’re not seeing is the shared lav around the corner, and the closet that isn’t deep enough for a coat. I don’t want to complain, though. As I’ve said, I know how fortunate I am to have any of this.

Wishing you were here,

Condor

Microstory 2176: And Young

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The thing about the way that I’ve developed my website is that I can sometimes get trapped in my own format. When I started out, I wanted to do really short stories on weekdays, and my permanent story on one day of the weekend. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the other day of the weekend, and I didn’t know how canonical I was going to get with the whole thing. It’s the numbers that make the decisions for me. The numbers dictate all. Once I started doing continuous microfiction stories, I decided that I liked to block them out in batches of 100, but there are roughly 260 weekdays every year, and I don’t like to cross the December 31 border, so I can’t always do the 100 installment thing. I end up with remainders, and the value of each remainder often determines what that shorter series is all about. The reason I wrote exactly fourteen sonnets in 2022 is because I had a remainder of fifteen, and could use one of them for an intro. If the remainder had instead been, say, nineteen, I doubt I would have ever thought to do them. I actually decided to change everything up this year by shifting to a regular blog format, hoping that I would have an interesting enough life for that to make sense. As 2024 approached, and I realized that it wasn’t the right call, I had to alter the plan into a fake blog format. That’s what we’ve been doing every weekday since January 1. And like all series here, I don’t get much of a chance to do something different when the situation arises. But it does sometimes arise, and I occasionally have to briefly put my ideas on hold in order to detour to something else. Something important.

I was running a series in 2020 set in another universe. Each installment was told from the perspective of a different fictional character. But then my grandfather died in real life, and I wanted to say something about him. I wanted to get real with my site, so I hit pause on Reactions, and shared my true thoughts. I’m spending a lot of time explaining myself, but I think it’s important for you to understand what a big deal it is for me to deviate from the structure that I’ve limited myself to. The last time I did it was when I lost a dear loved one. Yeah, I do it during introductions too, but those are strongly dependent upon the forthcoming series. These are true shifts, and come from the real me, rather than the fictional version of me. Though, it was fitting back then, since Reactions was about death, and fitting now for other reasons. Last month, my alternate self was pressured into eating meat, even though he was a vegetarian. I was the one who gave him that diet in the first place, even though I hadn’t mentioned it before when he was first introduced, and that’s because I had become a vegetarian myself since then. I’ve struggled with the idea of harming the environment, and killing animals since I was a child. I just didn’t think that I could get all of my nutrition if I cut out meat, and as it turned out, I was spot on. I’ve struggled with my health and weight since college. I used to be able to eat whatever I wanted, and still be quite thin, because I was unwittingly super active. And young. As I’ve aged, it’s become harder and harder to match my calorie intake with activity, and if anyone told me that that would happen, I didn’t listen to them. One thing I didn’t think that much about was that most junk food is vegetarian. Sure, I can have an entire pizza, just don’t put pepperoni or sausage on it. Ice cream? Of course! Pastries, chocolate, all the cheese in the world? No problem. Just don’t give me any meat, because animals died to make it, and I don’t like that. In addition to how much you can eat as a vegetarian before you feel full, you have to eat so much to get the comparable protein. So it was really easy to justify the binging regardless of what the food actually was. I have come to the profoundly difficult decision to press pause on my vegetarian diet recently. I’m going to focus on lowering my caloric intake, and erasing my reliance on comfort food that doesn’t do anything for me except make me feel full, and add fat to my belly. It won’t be forever. I just have to get down to my goal, then I know I can start maintaining. I was so close before, I’m certain that I can get there and stay as long as I stop resorting to garbage. Then I’ll go back to where I want to be, for the environment, and for the animals. I just hope this months-long detour doesn’t end up giving me some terminal disease, or something. That would be ironic, wouldn’t it? Oh wait, careful...spoilers. That’s it for me. Nick Fisherman IV will be back tomorrow.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 9, 2430

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Ex-908 was unlike the other two planets in the Goldilocks Corridor that the team had been to. The first one was at medieval-level technology. The second one was more like the 2030s. This world was far more advanced, with an early-warning outer system defense grid, and multiple space stations in orbit. Fortunately, the AI on this little ship was intelligent enough to avoid being detected. It stayed out of range by hiding on a planetesimal in the inner edge of the transtellar debris cloud, which was smaller than the Oort Cloud that was around Earth.

“What are we going to do here?” Angela asked. “We’re trying to find the bad guy, but what exactly are we expecting to accomplish on this world? Or the next one? Do we have any protocols, procedures, or plans?”

“Good question,” Mateo said. It took him a few seconds to realize that everyone was waiting for him to answer it. “Why are y’all lookin’ at me? I’m not the captain.”

“This was your idea, though,” Marie pointed out.

“Wull...” He fumbled for words. “Why are you listening to me? I don’t know what the hell I’m talkin’ about!”

“It’s okay, honey.”

“Look at them, salivating like honey badgers, acting like I have all the answers. This is just what we do, try to stop all the bad shit happening when we find ourselves in a position to make a difference.”

“Okay, okay, it’s fine. Relax,” Leona encouraged. She looked into his eyes, and started to breathe methodically until he matched her. Then she gestured for him to continue while she talked. “This is the most advanced civilization we’ve run into. There seems to be some air of mystery surrounding the emperor of this empire, of whatever it is they call him, but maybe they know something. Let’s go and ask.”

“The last one could stop us from teleporting,” Olimpia reminded her as she was rubbing Mateo’s arm up and down, since he was the one who suffered from that technology the most. “We were smart to leave one of us in the ship, but that could have easily not been enough. We may not be so lucky this time.”

“Ah.” Ramses disappeared into his lab, and returned a few seconds later. He was holding a damaged gizmo with wires loosely hanging out of it. “The spatial tether. Yes, I almost forgot. In the future, I might be able to help us avoid it altogether, but until then, I’ve designed some clippers, which will break us out of it.” He held up the remote that he had been carrying around lately to do other things, like disrupt Bronach Oaksent’s interstellar holographic projection. The only thing is, there’s only one. If any of us gets caught, you’re gonna need me.”

Leona takes it out of his hand, and turns it around in her own. “How long will it take you to build another one?”

“A second remote that does everything? All day,” Ramses answers. “A cheap knock-off that only clips spatial tethers? A couple hours, maybe.”

“Stay here and do that,” Leona orders. “I’ll take this one in case we need it. Hopefully, if they have such technology, it operates on the same principles. If not, you’ll be up here to save us.”

“I’ll stay with him,” Olimpia volunteered. “I don’t think anyone should be alone. I can be your little assistant,” she said to him.

“I would love that.”

“Okay, we’ll split into three teams. The second group needs to go find this planet’s version of The Caretaker. Vitalie, I don’t know if you wanna do that, or if you very much don’t want to...”

“If not me,” Vitalie!324 began, “at least someone she recognizes. So either you or Matt. The other iterants never met Angela-slash-Marie.”

“I’ll do it,” Mateo said. “Whatever questions need to be asked to find Oaksent’s ruling world, I’m not the one to ask them. It may end up in a fight, who knows?”

“Okay,” Leona agreed. “I’ll go start askin’ questions, and knockin’ heads. Mateo will find Vitalie!908. Ramses and Olimpia are staying with the ship. By the way, keep moving. Break orbit, if you have to, which I think you probably will. Go into darklurking mode. We’ll still be able to communicate through our comms. I don’t think more than two need to stay here, though. Nor do I think finding the other Caretaker is more than a two-person job. So who wants to join my husband while the other two come back me up?”

Both Angela and Marie raised their hands.

“I don’t know what that means,” Leona said to them.

“We both want to help Mateo,” Marie clarified. She looked over at her sister. Then they dropped their hands down simultaneously for a round of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Marie won after the third game.

“All right, is everyone ready?” Leona posed.

They nodded.

“Rambo, navigate us to the planet. I want you to look for three things. Number one, the biggest, baddest seat of government you can detect. Number two, the remotest region on the surface. Number two, the most complex cave system that’s still remote. If something goes wrong, jump to, and hide in, the caves. We can find each other while avoiding pursuit. Once we know where to go, we’ll split. Group Confrontation will go to the city. Group Stasis will find the other iterant. She seems to usually be away from civilization. Obviously, Group Breakthrough will stay with the ship, which I’m realizing now still needs a name.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Mateo claimed.

She was thrown off a little by this, but didn’t push it. “Okay. Let’s do it to it!”

The quickly-conceived plan went as well as they thought it would. Speed was key, which Leona knew. Orbital defenses sprang into action, but they weren’t fast enough for them. The three groups jumped to their respective missions, and no one was caught. Not yet, anyway.

As it turned out, they might not have to worry about spatial tethers preventing them from teleporting. When they appeared in the lobby of what appeared to be some kind of capitol building, no one batted an eye. They walked up to the reception desk. “Hello. My name is Captain Leona Matic of the...” She faltered. “Well, I gave my ship away, but that doesn’t matter. We need to talk to whoever is in charge here.”

“In charge of what?” the receptionist asked. She looked pretty young to hold the job, and didn’t seem to care about it. She may as well have been chewing gum.

“The planet.”

She yawned. “I heard he’s dead.”

“Not Bronach Oaksent. I mean, in charge of this world specifically, or maybe even just this city?” Unlike the first two planets, this world had several distinct cities, and any number of smaller towns in between. This one was the largest.

“Oh, the Prime Minister. He’s on the top floor, but—”

They didn’t bother listening to her full explanation. They just jumped right up there and started to look around. There were people hurrying about, but it didn’t feel like a crisis. This just looked like a Tuesday. One of them made the mistake of walking a little bit slower than most. Angela gently stopped him by the arm. “Pardon me. Where can we find the Prime Minister?”

“He’s back there. Can I go now?”

She let him go, and they walked down the hallway until they reached the big double doors. Angela opened one while Vitalie!324 opened the other. Leona barged in through the center. A group of men were in the middle of a conversation around the long table. They stopped and looked over at the disruption. “Good afternoon, folks. My name is Leona Matic. Perhaps you’ve heard of me. It seems that your god-king is a pretty big asshole. I’m aimin’ to take him down. Problem is, ya see, I don’t know where he is. You tell me what you know, I’ll leave you be. You stand in my way, I’ll take you down first.” She teleported randomly around the room, which wasn’t impressing them. “You may know people who can do this. You may be able to do it yourself. But I have other tricks up my sleeve, so don’t test me. Where is the seat of power for this Exin Empire? My guess is you call it Ex-001, but I dunno.”

The man at the head of the table was the only one standing. He tugged down on his sports jacket authoritatively, and began to come around the corner. “Emergency teleportation.” Everyone disappeared, except for him. “You’ll leave them be, because they got nothin’ to do with this. Your fight’s with me.”

“You’re not Bronach Oaksent,” Leona accused.

“No, but I run this rock. We have heard of you. We were just discussing your team. You’re a problem. You’ve been to two planets already, not counting the, uhh...traitors. I think you’ll find that you won’t be able to bully us like you did 275 and 324. They are...irrelevant, especially Ex-324, which is in the state that it’s in because it doesn’t provide Oaksent with what he demands. And you’re wrong, the primary system is not called Ex-001. You could never begin to understand our naming conventions.”

“What’s the main world called?”

The Prime Minister smirked. “I can tell you what it’s called, but that doesn’t mean you’ll find it. No one goes to Ex-69, not even me.”

Leona cleared her throat. “Do you know the significance of the number 69, sir?”

“Oaksent calls it the Divine Figure. That’s all we need to know. That’s more than you deserve to know.”

Angela wrote it out for him on a whiteboard. “It’s two numbers having sex.”

Leona never broke eye contact with the Prime Minister. “Your leader is a fucking child. Tell me where he is, or I’m gonna fuck up your shit.”

“I would rather die.”

“Weird nerd,” she mused. She tilted her head away. “Ramses, are you locked on?”

“We’re in, sir,” he replied through comms. “What do you wanna do?”

“Burn up the biggest one,” she ordered. “I want this world to be defenseless.”

The Prime Minister’s face couldn’t decide if he felt horrified, or confused. “What are you doing? What are you burning?”

The phone on the back counter started to ring.

Leona paced around menacingly. “We were wondering, why would your world need the kind of defenses that it does? It doesn’t make any sense. This is an empire in the middle of nowhere. No one out there knows that you exist. And the other two planets don’t have it. You don’t care about Ex-324 and Ex-275. So are you fighting against outsiders like us...or amongst yourselves? We didn’t speak long, but Oaksent didn’t strike me as the type who would have some sort of inherent opposition to civil war. You’re not his little babies. You’re his playthings. Hell, he probably stirs up conflict on purpose. I suppose I’m more like him than I thought, because I’m doin’ the same thing. If you keep refusing me, there will be nothing left to defend you, except for her.”

Vitalie raised her hand up, and waved with her fingers. “That’s assuming you can convince her to stay here as your Caretaker. The rest of your defenses will have burnt up in the atmosphere.”

“What do you want?” the Prime Minister demanded to know.

“I want to know where your god-king is!”

“I told you, no one knows that!”

“Ramses, on my mark, drop another one, but don’t worry about avoiding populated areas this time.”

“Wait!” He struggled to catch his breath. “You would do that? You would kill innocent people? That’s not the Team Matic I grew up hearing stories about.”

“You must have heard sanitized versions of those stories. The way I see it, you’re fighting a war on multiple fronts. I consider you to be an enemy combatant, and I’ll do what I need to do to protect the lives of the people that I care about. The Welriosians weren’t hurting anyone, and your boss tried to destroy them all. What happens when the vonearthans make it this far out? How will you react?”

“It’s not my job to react to outsiders. We’re the farest from the stellar neighborhood out here. That’s the whole point.”

“What is Ex-908’s responsibility to the empire?” Leona asked.

The Prime Minister took a breath. “These are testing grounds. Ex-182 regularly attacks us to see how we survive. If you destroy even one more of our satellites, we’ll all die. These aren’t games, the stakes are real.”

“I’ll leave you with what you have left if you tell me what you know, like I’ve asked a thousand times already.”

“I really don’t know where Ex-69 is, but I know someone who might. Ex-42 could have the answers you need. I think it’s about 24 light years away. It’s where we keep all of our data. It’s like one giant space server.”

“Ram, you know where Ex-42 is?”

“There are thirty-one planets between here and there.”

“That’s our next stop.”

The Prime Minister looked over at the phone. “I never answered it. Which satellite did you destroy?”

Leona looked at him incredulously. “I didn’t destroy any of them. Ramses was the one calling you on that phone. He was able to hack the communications network, and not much else quite yet.”

“You were bluffing,” he realized.

“We were that time.” They teleported away.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: February 4, 2399

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Mateo and Ramses are still not back yet from dropping the boys off on the AOC. Aldona has not even bothered to think about long-range communications systems, because it’s not priority. They have to build the ships and satellites first, then they can worry about all that stuff. All Leona can do is hope that they wanted to have a longish conversation while going relativistic speeds, and that nothing is actually wrong. She’s been trying to keep her mind busy with her work, but it has not been easy. She’s been distracted, and not even by her husband’s absence. It’s something else. Something has been gnawing at her, and it’s not the loneliness, nor the exhaustion, though both of those have become real problems. No, she’s realized what it is. It’s the Constance!Five android they tucked away in the antarctic. She’s still a threat. She’ll continue to be a threat until she’s gone forever.

Aldona knocks on the door for her two hourly check-in, which she apparently thinks Leona has not noticed. “Hey, what’s up? Could you check these numbers for me?”

Leona accepts the tablet, and gives them a cursory glance. “They look great.”

“You barely looked at them.”

“I’m that good. You are too. Stop asking me for input that you don’t need.”

“Measure twice, cut once,” Aldona muses.

“That’s what the computer is for.”

Aldona sticks the tablet under her armpit, and folds her arms.

“Is there anything else?”

“You want to ask me for something.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Once a day, you ask for something extra. Resources, access to something. We’re nearing the end of the evening, and you’ve not done that yet. So, out with it.”

She stares at her for a few seconds. “Okay, you’re right. I was hoping to borrow one of your rockets.”

“What is it this time?”

“There is something that we need to get into space.”

“Okay. Because...?”

“Because...that’s where the sun is.”

“And what do you need with the sun?”

Leona scrunches up her lips, and shakes her head rapidly. “We may or may not need to allegedly throw something into it.”

“You need to throw something into the sun...like garbage?”

“That’s a word for it.”

Aldona narrows her eyes. “Are you trying to murder someone?”

“That...is a word for that.”

“Talk to me, Leona. Tell me what I need to know.”

“We call her Constance!Five. She can make herself look like anyone. We trapped her in a stasis pod, but it’s only a matter of time before she breaks out.”

“Why wouldn’t you tell me this? That’s who’s trying to kill Cedar.”

“I know, but not everyone believes that all’s fair in love and war.”

“If you have a version of Constance, I want it gone. Permission: granted.”

Microstory 1614: That Which is Made

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I’ve mentioned the biverse to a few people before, and they always get confused. They think that the person who named them is an idiot. These two branes started out as one, and became two when it was duplicated. Now, this happened during an unpopulated period of the Universum Originalis, as it’s called, so don’t worry about alternate versions of people. It was really just more like a cell splitting in half. They were identical when it happened, but began to diverge from there on out. So which one is the original, and which is the duplicate? Well, it’s hard to say for sure, but this occurred as a result of an unexpected visit from a ship that originated in a completely different universe. And while identity is very complex, the universe where that ship ended up has always been treated as the duplicate. So they call the other one Prime, and this new one The Composite Universe. This is where people laugh. In math, a prime number is one that cannot be divided by any number but 1, and itself. A composite number is anything else. People laugh, because as the name of a universe, the word prime should not be using this definition. It really just means primary, main, foremost. And the opposite of this definition is not composite. Maybe it should be secondary, or alternate. The thing is, no one ever said it was. In this case, composite refers to—not the opposite of a prime number—but to the fact that it was composed, created, produced. This is where the confusion lies, and while I don’t know who actually came up with the names Universe Prime and Composite Universe, I suspect that this confusion was done intentionally so people like the ones I’ve talked to can complain about it, and then be schooled.

The Composite Universe is full of life. One of the passengers on the ship that accidentally created it grew to be lonely. He wasn’t the only survivor, full stop, but he was one of a kind, and he wanted to create life in the void. Fortunately, he was made immortal, and had plenty of time to realize his dreams. He wasn’t particularly well-educated in the beginning, but give him a few thousand years, and he’s leagues beyond anything any of us can understand. He started tinkering with genetics, biology, and evolution. He created all sorts of different intelligent creatures. Some he developed right off the bat, while others took time to evolve, just as life does in nature. Evolved and intelligent life is incredibly rare, and while I wouldn’t characterize it as deliberate, it is regulated by nature. The reason Universe Prime is called that is because that’s where all universes I’m fully aware of originate. Every one of them is branched off of it, which is why I’m always talking about Earth. It’s not like Earth is truly the center of the bulkverse. Almost none of them even has an Earth, and its inhabitants will have never heard of it. What they have in common is that—within the confines of their respective universes—they’re isolated, and alone. Life will evolve on one planet at a time, and won’t evolve again until that one has long, long been extinct. Why is this the way things are? I do not know. That is a lofty philosophical question that I can’t help you with. I can tell you that the Composite Universe is different, because this man decided it should be. He filled the galaxies to the brim with his creations, in places that never would have had it on their own. That’s what makes the Composite so different from all other universes. It’s complicated, and it’s busy, and though Earth is still important, it’s mostly ignored, and a lot of people elsewhere don’t even know that it exists.

Microstory 905: Rising Literacy

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I’m not much of a reader, which I recognize you’ll see as either a lie, or just plain bizarre. Despite my many hours of not reading, I obviously can read, and this is a trait that I take for granted. It wasn’t hard for me as a child to make the connection between spoken words, which I already knew, and writing skills. Of course that’s the alphabet, and of course that string of letters ultimately makes that sound, and carries that semantic meaning. Even if it didn’t come so easily for you—perhaps you were more into numbers—I bet you didn’t struggle all that much. People in developing countries are more likely to struggle to learn to read, but it’s nothing compared to the way thing were just centuries ago. Literacy was not all that common. It was reserved for noblemen, and often just men in general. Not only were educational opportunities hard to come by, and society looked down upon certain peoples learning certain skills, but there was also little point. They completed their menial labor, and that was all that was required of them. But people are seeing now the value in being able to read, regardless of one’s station, and that is something to be celebrated. But that’s not to say we have reached some goal. There are still tens of millions of adults, in this country alone, who are considered illiterate. They are easily forgotten, as education tends to focus on children. Please note that simply knowing the alphabet does not mean you count as literate. The threshold is formulated by a group of academics smarter than me that you can research on your own. We still have a long way to go, but I did want to take a minute to show that progress is possible, and is happening.

Microstory 684: The Quantum Darkness Begins

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This is a turning point; in the taikon, for the believers, and for Fosteans as a whole. It’s easy to forget that Sotiren Zahir did not write the taikon as prophecy. We do occasionally use that word, but we know that it can be rather misleading. He was not telling us what would happen, he was telling us what needs to happen if we are to survive them. The taikon are tests, our salvation being dependent upon our ability to succeed in them. Which means that it is entirely possible to fail, leading either to the uprising of The Liar, or a complete cessation of the taikon. This particular taikon, in fact, is one where the latter possibility is more likely than it ever has been before. It is designed to test our faith. We have been steadily gaining followers to the Light. Even before the taikon began, our numbers would show a general trend upwards. The Quantum Darkness threatens to damage that trend, and could even go so far as to diminish our numbers to their lowest in recent history. The day after the observation of the very first Daglit, all stars switched off simultaneously, as if mere lightbulbs. Literally every single star in the galaxy simply disappeared from sight. Their power was still warming their respective orbitals, and the people on them, but they could not be detected by the naked eye, or simple telescopes. Plants began to suffer from having no way to conduct photosynthesis, destroying a significant amount of the animal population almost immediately. Humans have plenty of ways to survive this in our advanced technological era, but that was never our problem. We crave the light. You’ll notice that nobody lives in the void between galaxies, and only the sickest few of us live underground, deep underwater, or otherwise cut off from daylight. Every intelligent species in the universe evolved and grew out of the light of a sun, and to lose them all at once was the worst thing we’ve ever experienced. When the Sacred Savior spoke of this in the Book of Light, it’s not that we didn’t believe him that something like this could happen, but we severely overestimated his use of metaphors. We could never dream of the possibility that we would be plunged into actual darkness everywhere. We don’t know how to save ourselves from this terrible new environment. We know only that if we don’t, we shall all surely die, or be as good as dead.

Microstory 412: Floor 31 (Part 1)

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Mine is the newest department in the entire company, which is funny, because it’s our job to create even newer departments. Since its inception, Analion has been focused on creating a holistic internal experience. The founders didn’t want to outsource labor, contract consultants, or cooperate with other companies. It wanted to be able to do everything within its purview independently, and that might have worked in the olden times, but this is the 21st century. If you’re not growing, you’re not nothing. The biggest organizations, the ones leading the world markets, are able to do so because of the labor, technology, and patents they acquire through complex negotiations with others. To be honest, and I don’t like to brag, but I’m a beast. I can sell salt to a slug, porn to a monk, veal to a cow, or an abacus now. When we stand up from the table, my side’s gotten everything it wanted, and more, while the other is left feeling good about being screwed over. The company’s problems right now have nothing to do with unsafe products, or a lack of money, or even management. It all comes down to expertise. Quite frankly, Analion just didn’t have the technology to pursue these recent projects. I’m not the least bit surprised that their plans backfired before they knew what hit ‘em. If they had hired me before all this, they wouldn’t have even known there might have been a problem, because I would have shored up our organizational structure. There are a lot of things I could have fixed if I had been around sooner. I guess I’m just going to have to do it now. Its my family’s curse to fix everybody else’s mistakes. Sorry to cut this short, but I better get back to work. Saving the day is a fulltime job.

Microstory 411: Floor 32 (Part 1)

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Honestly, I checked out of this job months ago. Technically my disassociation with the company started from the very beginning, but it’s only been recently that I truly stopped caring. The thing is that I don’t have to care anymore. While I was still in college, I started working on software designed to revolutionize the finance and accounting industries. My goal was to attain full automation so that companies would be able to trim the fat from their workforce, cut costs, and become more efficient. Theoretically, my artificial intelligence concepts could be used in a variety of fields, but accounting is my specialty, so I used that as my focus. Obviously I knew the whole time that such software would put my job at risk, but I was comforted by the idea that, as the creator of this new technology, I would be fine. In fact, I figured I would be able to become a millionaire. But things started to change over the years. Firstly, I’ve developed a far more minimalist attitude towards life. I love to travel, but that’s really about all I need to spend money on. I only do as much as necessary to survive, I don’t care about luxury, and I don’t even watch television. By the time my software was completed, I simply did not have any interest in having millions of dollars. I’m quite happy where I am in life, and I see no reason to change my position. However, I did manage to find a silver-lining to all of the extra hours I spent perfecting my side project. Now I don’t have to actually do any work to complete my job. The best part of it, since I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing, I still get paid as if I am the one doing it. I sit in my corner, watching streaming sports, or reading the news while my program works in the background. I even offer to do other people’s work for them, and they fall for it. It’s a win-win situation, because they get more free time too, but also carry the satisfaction of pulling one over on me. At least all this was how I thought things were going. I’ve just discovered a bug in my software that might have had grave consequences for the entire organization. It seems to have made minor errors in the results that added up over time, and I think these may have had something to do with Analion’s current problems. Whoever just jumped down the atrium might have had the right idea. I’m in big trouble.

Microstory 410: Floor 33 (Part 1)

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I don’t know what people want from me. Never in my life have I hired or fired a single person. Have I been responsible for the company letting people go? I’m certain of it, but this was not my intention. In fact, there’s no way to find out whether anything I say has any impact on the labor force. I work in the corporate finance department. Obviously we handle the money, but it’s extremely complicated an nuanced. People send me data and I analyze it; that’s all. I determine what projects or departments are making us money, and which ones are failing to deliver, and also which new ventures we should pursue. I can’t help it if you happen to be one of the failures; that’s just how business goes. I do feel for these people, though, I really do. My job is to look at the numbers. I don’t know people’s names, and I don’t know how they’ve personally contributed to the success of our organization. Someone else is responsible for that information. I’m not saying this to absolve me of things I’ve done, but they have to understand that we don’t communicate with the managers on that level. We don’t mix the qualitative and the quantitative, and I dare you to reveal a company that does. This is the way man has been conducting business since the dawn of time. I’m absolutely not qualified to change things, for the better, or worse. I have been able to make myself a better person, at least. My old college roommate works somewhere else as a transcriber. Well, there’s no real way for the higher-ups to see how he makes the company money. Nobody buys the transcriptions themselves. They buy products which happen to include the benefit of his endeavors. So they keep shrinking his team and trying to add extra work at the same time, which pulls down productivity, which harms the company. It’s only because of him that I’m starting to suspect the same thing is happening here. What have we done that has harmed Analion? How have I contributed to our failures? Who was fired who should have stayed? Who has remained that should have left? I suppose the only real question is what can I do about it now? The answer, as always, is nothing.

Microstory 343: Authority

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Mastery

People with authority are a special breed of masters. I’m not talking about people who just happen to be in charge of something like supervisors or judges. Authority, in this case, refers to a master who’s become so versed in their field that they’re matched by no one but a few other authorities. These are the people you call when only the best will do. When a meteorite lands in Russia and alien insects start tearing out politicians’ brains, you call authorities on geology, astrophysics, exobiology, neuropsychology, etc. I said in my previous step that mastery is not a lofty concept; that you could become a master in what’s considered a “low-tier” job. This is not so with authorities. They’re the tippy-top masters of a relatively small number of fields. This is not to them just about a job, or even a career. This is their whole life. Not everyone is going to become an authority. By its very nature, only a handful of people will succeed. You can be a master cashier, but there’s really no such thing as an authority on cash registers, because what would that even mean? Unless, that is, you’re talking about an engineer, or maybe a technician or mechanic. Now, I know what you’re thinking, where is he going with this? Nowhere. This is one of those entries that sounded good on paper, but can’t really amount to much. This would probably be better as an inspiration poster, or something. So why don’t I tell you how I came up with this series in the first place? I don’t remember. But I know that I took every major aspect of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Then I stretched them out so that I had 33 of them. Then I broke each of those into thirds so that I would have 99 in the end. That’s why I sound so repetitive. It seemed like a great idea, but hasn’t turned out like I had hoped. At least landing on the right number of words hasn’t been as hard as

Career Integrity

Microstory 342: Mastery

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Subculture Recognition

Once you have found your strength, and built your life and/or career around it, you’re going to want to go all the way. We’ve all probably heard the research that says you can’t become a master of something without 10,000 hours of practice. Of course, that’s an arbitrary number, and though I don’t know for sure, I suspect the original writer meant that figure to be more of a foundation for understanding the concept of repetition. Practice creates procedural memories. This allows you to grow so good at something that it becomes simply part of who you are. It attaches itself to your identity, weaving in and out of your other character traits, making it impossible to see one aspect of you without seeing the rest. You are a master when the question who are you? becomes nearly identical to the question what do you do? It does not mean you know absolutely everything about your chosen topic. It just means that you have studied enough to act upon your knowledge through career choices and interactions with colleagues. It means that when someone asks you for your opinion about a certain aspect of the field, you understand what it is their asking, and can express a logical perspective, comparable or superior to theirs. Mastery, however, is not a goal. It’s about getting up to speed with the state of the art so that you can participate in furthering the world’s comprehensive study of it. A master’s job is never done, for it is their responsibility to keep up with changes and other developments to enrich their own lives, and to support the field as a whole. Mastery may now sound like a lofty concept, but the fact is that the word can be used for any profession. Anyone can become a master of anything to which they hold competence. If you want to become a master cashier, and you’re fine with that life, then that’s perfectly all right. Masters are not the elite, they’re just all the ones who worked hard enough.

Authority

The Odds: Eighty-Three (Part V)

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I’ve already talked to you how I came up with Eighty-Three. I don’t understand why you’re asking me about it again. It just that the thing is that a four part story sounds weird, and I’ve already scheduled out one more week for this, and I’m not yet ready with the premise of my next story anyway. I had an idea for this final part, though. What was it? Dammit, I completely forgot what random thing I was going to talk about. I blame you. Oh yeah...no forgot it again. My sister’s chatting with me online. Give me a second. The lottery! Yes, that was it! Do you remember how this story started out with me claiming that I won the lottery? Well, I’ll explain that to you. Just to make sure you know, I make $11.95 in a job I don’t hate, but with very low weekly hours. I absolutely did not win the lottery, which makes sense, because I only played it once. And when I did so, it gave me the idea for what eventually transmogrified into this story you’re reading right now.

The story was originally not about me at all, and was planned as a standard novel. Think Slumdog Millionaire meets 2007’s The Winner. What’s that second one, you ask? It’s a Rob Corddry show about a guy from the present telling the story about how he was once a loser, but eventually grew to be successful. He..might have won the lottery, or he might not have. It was pretty bad, so I didn’t exactly give it much thought. The point is that my story, originally entitled simply Lottery, was about a guy who uses a special set of numbers for the lottery, and ends up winning. And the book goes over what each number means to him; why he needed to use them. Upon decided to start my website, the idea was truncated to weekly series form that I was intending to write sometime in the beginning of my second year. That ended up being what happened, but not everything went as planned, obviously. I sat down on my computer a few weeks ago, knowing what story I was about to start, but not having any clue how to actually follow through. This was the Saturday of, literally a few hours from deadline. So what was I going to do? I did what every bad writer does: I wove myself into the story. I created a fictional version of myself and laced him with exaggerations, straight up lies, and warped perspective. I just had to get something out. And this isn’t the first time its happened. Nearly any continuous series I’ve tried to write that doesn’t take place in a canon I’ve already created ends in disaster. Siftens Landing, Mr. Muxley Meets Mediocrity, and this weeklong group of microstories about a bunch of vehicular collisions. They were all bad, or worse, and those first two have been stripped from the book version I’m releasing later this year, along with this. Really, the only series I like that doesn’t belong to salmonverse or recursiverse is my Perspectives microstory series. And even that is hit or miss, depending on my mood, how much sleep I’ve had, and what I have yet to do that day.

This series was supposed to be a couple more installments long, but I’ve had to truncate it because of how little interest I have in continuing it. It’s no longer a story at all; more of just a collection of random thoughts. So the next two weeks are going to be a fairly short story, supposedly told in second person perspective. If you recall, back before I even had a short fiction website, I posted a little thing in second person on Facebook. It’s also told backwards. I considered it to be my first microstory, and reposted it here, so you can read it. If you want, whatever, no big deal *shrugs and blushes*.

I just went through thirteen years of photos, and thirteen years of calendar events. I was hoping to find an interesting story I could tell you about myself, even a fictional one inspired by my life. But the truth is that I desperately hope that no one is reading this at all. I’m just going to quit while I’m behind and end it here. I’m sorry to have wasted your time. It’s just as well seeing as I need to focus on The Advancement of Mateo Matic. I made some major arc breakthroughs yesterday and today. Eighty-Three more installments to go until we can get to August 5, 2151. What’s the significance of that one? Dunno, that’s too far in the future. Do I seem like the kind of guy who plans well? I just wanted to mention the numbers one last time. Speaking of non-sequiturs, here’s a picture of the time I jumped into the air in the basement and plugged the shop-vac into the ceiling socket. Not impressed? Let’s see you do it. But the ceiling we use has to have two and a half feet on you.

The Odds: Fifty-Six (Part IV)

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Do you think it’s possible that the only reason I’m starting this sentence with a question is because, in order to set up formatting, I copy-pasted each installment beginning with ‘Have you ever wanted to write a story?’ and when I tried to highlight and overwrite it, I missed the question mark? No, it’s not.

Honestly, it would be rather difficult for me to remember exactly how I came to the conclusion that Fifty-Six should be my fourth number. The first three numbers in my list were a part of me. They were inherent to my understanding of how writing, and the world, works. It’s also a bit of a chicken or the egg thing with whether I thought to come up with numbers after watching LOST, or if I focused a lot on the LOST numbers because I had already found significance in my own. But as the old tangent goes, there’s a logical answer to the chicken or the egg “dilemma”. The problem here is that a chicken cannot be born but from an egg, and an egg cannot exist without being laid by a chicken. And so they seem equally likely and unlikely as each other, because one is wholly dependent on the other. But...ignoring all evolutionary concepts (read: reality) on the matter, one has an advantage over the other. Are you ready to have your minds blown? A chicken can live perfectly happily without an egg, but an egg cannot survive without a chicken to protect it from danger, following its creation. Somebody clean up this graymatter! You’re welcome!

Back to what I was saying, when you add up all the LOST numbers of 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42, you end up with the number 108. When I started adding up my three preexisting numbers, I somehow realized how easy it would be for them to reach 216; twice 108, of course. Without any more calculations, I determined that, in order to reach that sum, my last two numbers would have to be around 50 and 80. I tried a few different combinations. 55 + 84? I didn’t want Fifty-Five to intrude on Eleven’s purpose of being palindromic. It would have been an interesting choice since it’s a Fibonacci number, but since my first three preclude me from also using 89, it would have seemed like a waste anyway. 52 + 87? I didn’t want there to be a connection to playing cards, and I didn’t like my birth year being in there, because it’s too obvious. I tried a few more, and finally settled on Fifty-Six and Eighty-Three. Now this seems very inorganic and insincere, but the process itself is what makes these numbers relevant. Yes, by the time I got to them, I had already been looking to complete my collection, but that’s what makes it so cool. The effort I put into finding Fifty-Six in the first place is what imbued it with its power.

Other people have used Fifty-Six for their own reasons, all of which I read about just now, and did not consider when first coming up with it. The most fascinating one is that Shirley Temple’s mother always ensured that she wore 56 curls as a child. I can’t find any information as to why her mother chose that number (or why that number chose her mother), but it seemed to have worked. She was the archetype of the cute child; one that casting directors and modeling agents seem to look for even today. While the ideal “beautiful person” has changed over time, if you think about it, the most adorable children in advertising are determined by how closely they resemble her. I suppose the curls themselves have nothing to do with that, but still. Hey, I’m just spitballing here. Well...I mean, I’m not. That’s gross.

Speaking of numbers, when I started writing for my website, I went through some growing pains to try and figure out how long each installment would be. The early ones are all over the place, and show no level of continuity, in that regard. But then the microstories started being between 200 to 300 words each. I think. I would have to go back and look, but I’m pretty sure they were on the short side, just reaching into my memory. The weekend stories—which I first referred to as flash fiction, and now call mezzofiction (in order to maintain that continuity)—were shaping up to be longer. In fact, they were about five times as long, which meant that five microstories were equal to one longer story. But that’s dumb, because there are two days in a weekend. I continued to work on creating a site that you could count on. Literally. Instead of posting nanofiction stories as they popped into my head, I starting writing them out in a spreadsheet, with the intention of posting them every three hours, a pattern which is broken only by my afternoon story post, and my evening photo. Speaking of which, sorry about the lack of photos. They take more effort than you would think, I’ve run out of “things” in my house, and I don’t get out much. As my methods progressed, I came up with interrelated microstory series that would last for weeks, and were connected in some way, rather than just whatever I could come up with at the time. Lastly, I decided to decide on story arcs for The Advancement of Mateo Matic that would last a year/volume each, and I planned for future Saturday mezzofiction so that I would never again be caught with my pants down, like I was with the continuation of Mr. Muxley Meets Mediocrity. And that’s funny, because my pants fell down when I realized I had no idea what this very story you’re reading now would be about.

Things were falling into place as they should have. Microstory length increased to about 300 to 500, with the mode being rather close to the median. Mezzofiction story length still hovers around 1250 words, but I’m finding I need a little more for my more recent installments of The Advancement of Mateo Matic. It’s easy to go over my mark, but it’s hard for me to be under. I always feel like I’m cheating you out of something, or that I’m missing something and it’s incomplete. But I need to get over that. I don’t encounter Fifty-Six nearly as much as the other four. And that’s okay, because magic numbers aren’t real. When an installment is done, it needs to be done. And right now, I’m only at 1119 words, but it’s done. That is at least more than I thought there would be.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I only started posting my images alongside my stories because I noticed an uptick in clicks when I did so. Most of my traffic, I believe, comes from Facebook. And as you’re going through your feed, if you don’t see a picture, you don’t see it. It might as well not exist. I’m a word guy, I like words. Honestly, you guys are frustratingly simplistic, and I struggle to come up with images that match my words. I’ve even altered my stories in order to match with a picture I already have. Which is ridiculous, and not how writing should be done! Grrr! Anyway, here’s a picture of some penguins, because nothing else works with this story. This is what you have reduced me to. Are you happy? 1256 words. Hmm...

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The Odds: Forty-Two (Part III)

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Everyone knows the answer to life, the universe, and everything. The problem is that no one knows the question. Hi, my name is Tavis Highfill, but you can call me Nick Fisherman. Today I’m here to talk to you about the number 42. It’s a beautiful number which, unlike 24, has a grand history of significance. Hey, did you notice that those two numbers are the reverse of each other? Interesting coincidence, don’t you think? Tons of religions looked at 42 and said coolly, “nice...nice.” Some think it’s bad number, but don’t worry about them. Why, just now, I read a tweet that came in while I was at work involving Molybdenum, whose atomic number happens to be 42. Boom, apophenia again! The most famous uses of the number come out of writers Douglas Adams and Lewis Carroll (the latter likely influenced the former).

I’m not going to go over what other people think of the number, because why would I do that? I’m going to explain how I came to the number myself. I first started watching the hit television series LOST on September 22, 2004. I didn’t look that up. It’s just something that I remember. It’s practically a religion for me. I grew up in a TV family. That’s what we did together. We didn’t go hunting, we didn’t do crafts, and we didn’t ignore each other. We watched TV. But when I was young, my viewing practices were limited. I spent a great deal of time watching PG-13 movies on HBO when my parents were at work. Sorry not sorry, mom and dad. I fell in love with Quantum Leap because it was my introduction to science fiction, was on before my mother got home and needed the TV for herself, and was just generally awesome. I also felt like I was getting away with pretending to be an adult for an hour a day.

I watched a few other things on my own, like Spiderman cartoons which seemed like a huge betrayal against my parents, because even though they hadn’t told me I couldn’t watch it, they also never told me I could. Besides the standard family-oriented programs like Step By Step, Boy Meets World, and Full House (one of the worst shows ever made, admit it) the family watched Scrubs, Will and Grace, and a few other comedies. In the summer of 2004, I started seeing previews for LOST, and I was immediately excited. A daring tale of survival, mystery, and intrigue. Was it drama? Was it science fiction? Who were these people? What is the island? It was around this time that I was starting to feel like television may be more relevant for my skills as a writer than books. I turned out to be right about that, by the way.

The years following the premiere of LOST saw me adding series to my repertoire exponentially, and I do mean that literally. With every passing season, the number of hours of scripted primetime television I was watching increased dramatically. I was watching the majority of new series, and catching up on series that I had missed. I was going back to long-lost legacy programs like Firefly, Dark Angel, and Surface, as well as then-current seasoned series like Battlestar Galactica, Smallville, Veronica Mars, and The 4400 using illegal streaming links. I was obsessed, and still am. I got to the point where I was probably watching 70-80 hours of content per week, no joke. I was more dedicated to understanding the art of television than most people are to their fulltime jobs. Again, no joke.

I was watching shows I loved, shows I could only watch while working on other things, and even shows that I absolutely detested. To that last part, I watched a couple of seasons of 2 Broke Girls, and stuck with Bones long past the point they ruined it. I finally managed to watch Stargate SG-1 & Stargate: Atlantis, Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Angel, and Odyssey 5. My sister’s gift of Netflix allowed me to streamline my viewing habits, and made it easier to watch shows like Farscape, Supernatural, SGU Stargate Universe, and Alias, among many, many others. I’ve seen Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Dollhouse, Heroes, and Prison Break at least twice. I’m going on a third for that last one to prepare for the revival. It would be impossible to count how many times I’ve seen any given episodes of LOST. Now that I’m running this website, and have lots of other responsibilities, my repertoire is much more tempered, but it’s still pretty strong. I study television like some study film. I look for what makes a good show and what makes a successful one, along with what’s happening when those two things are in conflict. I hunt for easter eggs, research interesting casting decisions, read trivia, and analyze trends. I’m an expert. If I could have earned a bachelor’s degree in the field, I so would have, and I would have kicked ass.

I used my knowledge of how to tell a goddamn story to write my own. My writing got better, not just because I was older and more experienced, but because TV taught me story structure. My high school teachers are not responsible for my talent, and my college professors sure and shit didn’t teach me two things. Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse are the ones who began my education, because they sent me on a path of exploration. They taught me how far to go with a cliffhanger, how to develop character relationships, and even why reading is important. Even though it’s clear that I gather the majority of my inspiration from TV, I do read some. The special LOST numbers of 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 led me to reading the five primary books in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy franchise. And so it was Douglas Adams who got me interested in reading again, and taught me that I should shy away from the so-called “classics” and gravitate towards exciting cult lowbrow fiction. I still don’t read as much as my contemporaries, but I read The Hunger Games trilogy, yet part of The Magicians trilogy, and many Richelle Mead novels.

Forty-Two is important because it’s not important. It doesn’t really mean anything. It doesn’t matter what the meaning of life is, because what would knowing that change? Is that really what you want; to have a purpose? If your purpose is to help someone else, aren’t you really just helping someone whose only purpose is to help someone else? Do you find comfort in “God’s plan”? Why? I say that if the point of life is to reach some sort of literally lofty goal, then there isn’t real a point at all. When you play a game of chess, you know that there will be one of two outcomes; a stalemate, or a win. But you’re not playing so you can discover which one, are you? You’re not even really playing to see who wins, should that be the result. You’re playing for the game itself. You could just knock one of the kings over and walk away from the board as soon as you sit down, but what the fuck would that accomplish? My God isn’t moving us around to his liking in order to get something done. She doesn’t send hurricanes, and she sure as hell doesn’t kill children. I don’t know why you’re praying to a God who kills children, but he sounds like a prick.

The number forty-two taught me what life is really about; whatever you make of it. Everything is just about choices, and your purpose is to make the world a better place. If you’re interested in making it worse, then your life is meaningless at best. There are quadrillions of stars in the universe, a couple hundred billion of which are in our galaxy alone. The chances that a planet with conditions like ours exists—as far from the sun as it needs to be, landscape as it needs to be, in a solar system as far from the central black hole that it needs to be—are incredibly low. Evolution has led us to this moment right here where I’m writing this, and you’re waiting to. The perfect set of circumstances had to combine in a perfect series of causal connections in order to make you be a thing that is real. I find that far more impressive than a God who came into being via magic and then just decided to invent you. Forty-Two is my third number because in no reality is it not. Click here for the next installment...