The Advancement of Mateo Matic: February 21, 2399

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Across the street from the parking lot where the transreality anomaly is, there is another parking lot, and across the next street is an office building that is no longer in heavy use. A few companies still hold their offices there, but the majority of them had moved to newer facilities by the time any of this got started. Some of the rest of them left when the government first put up the containment tent. Those still lingering were placed in their own special quarantine on the top floor following Humbert Messer’s attack. Other nearby office workers faced similar situations. A long-ass plastic tunnel was placed at the entrance to the tent, going all the way to the new isolation building. Everyone who happened to be in the tent at the time was sent through, and relocated to their own room. There were enough executive offices that had their own bathroom to accommodate the bulk of the patients. Some were placed in actual bathrooms, but a few had to suffer with a bucket. But they didn’t stay that way for very long. The point of these rooms was to separate the infected from the non-infected. It wasn’t long before they were all symptomatic. They were recently moved to the popup clinic that the government set up in the cafeteria on the bottom floor.

No one who wasn’t in the tent at the time of Humbert’s arrival has shown any signs of infection. They were fortunate enough to have not undergone a shift-change by the time Vearden showed up and figured out that he was contagious. According to experts who have begun to research the disease, killing Patient Zero immediately was the only option there. He would have only made things worse by staying alive. They will study his corpse, and the living patients. The quarantined office workers will be released and evacuated soon. This whole area will be a ghost town in a matter of days. The government takes this seriously, and will not accept any pushback from the public. Fortunately for the process, they’re not getting any, because this is not the first outbreak this world has experienced. There’s a reason the team keeps being locked up in quarantine when they travel, despite there being no current threat...until now.

Leona flew back to Kansas City from São Paulo. She was trying to find the Harlows there, but it’s been difficult. The satellite can give them a good idea of where they are, but not only is it a dense and heavily populated city, and not only have they been hiding out in a particularly dense area, but the nation was also celebrating a religious holiday last week, so the streets were chaos. It’s already begun to clear up, though, and it should be easier now for Kivi and her team, who are taking up the mantle. Leona isn’t annoyed that she had to cut her search short. All they need is for someone to confirm whether or not Alyssa is the other target. Once that’s made, the hunt will be over, because if it’s not her, they will be out of leads.

Vearden is in a private room, and will remain there as the others are moved downstairs. He’s shaky and weak. His skin has turned red from capillary leak syndrome. Inflammation is causing severe damage to the blood vessels, resulting in blood leaking into the interstitial tissue. Doctors can usually make it go away, but the root cause has been hard to identify. They have never encountered a pathogen like this before. The fact that it appears to not be from this world is not what’s tripping them up, but the fact that it’s new, and there is no antibiotic or antiviral for it. They’re not sure yet if it even is bacteria, or a virus. It could be something else. “It doesn’t hurt. Shouldn’t it hurt? I mean, look at me. This looks like it hurts.”

“I would say that not feeling any pain is a good thing, unless you don’t feel anything at all, like you’re numb,” Leona replies. “Are you numb, because then we would have to call the doctor back.”

“I’m not numb.” He slaps himself in the face. “No, not numb.”

“Don’t do that.”

“I’m sorry. Thanks for coming back here. I know you have your own crap to deal with.”

“You are my crap. I mean...you know what I mean.”

He nods. “How are all the other patients doing?”

“They’re the same. This pathogen does not discriminate.”

“I bet they’re pretty butthurt that they had to convert the nearest emergency pandemic research facility into a time lab that you’re not even using anymore.”

“Their new lab is also close, and anyway, they’re not even using it. They’re based out of this building so far. It’s not even an epidemic, let alone a pandemic.”

He nods, but his mind is elsewhere. “Listen, I’ve been meaning to ask you for something. I can’t believe I never thought of it before, and like I said, I know you’re really busy, so I don’t want to put you out—”

“Vearden,” she interrupts. “Ask me.”

“Will you try to talk to Arcadia using all that fancy technology that you and Ramses built? Like, with the Insulator of Life and the Livewire? Can they help?”

She smiles. “That’s a good idea. When I leave here, I’ll give that a shot.”

“Could you...leave right now? If you have to fly all the way back to Indonesia—”

“All that stuff is still here. We never thought to transport it to Mangrove One. It’s unrelated to our work out there.”

“Good. I appreciate it.”

“Do you need anything? I can get you some real food. There’s a way to pass it through without risking cross-contamination.”

“I’m okay with what they give me. I’m more worried about Arcadia.” His face tells her that the request is still urgent, even though she won’t have to fly overseas first.

“All right. I’ll go grab the supplies, then head for the hospital.”

“Thanks.”

Leona goes to get what she needs. It takes more than the Insulator and the Livewire. Interfacing with people’s minds is not something that any known special temporal object can perform. It requires technology that Ramses reverse engineered from research that experts spent centuries developing. Vearden was right, though, that they should have thought of trying this before. Arcadia is still in there, she just can’t wake up. Leona doesn’t even think that comas are a thing in the main sequence. It’s the kind of technology that should be inherently produced in tandem with consciousness transference advancements.

She has to call Ramses for a little help, because he understands this stuff better, but she gets it working. Nurse Chenda stays awake as a failsafe to pull her out if need be. Leona connects herself to Arcadia’s mind, and tries to reach out to her. It’s not long before she hears the sound of screaming. She runs towards it and finds Dream!Arcadia, who is standing in place, unmoving, and unrelenting in her piercing cry. Leona tries to shake her a little, but a skintight forcefield prevents them from touching. She just holds there like a statue. This isn’t a coma. This is something else.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: October 31, 2398

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They’re moving. They’re moving out of the lofts, and not just for their residential needs, but also for Ramses and Leona’s lab. This building was built to last, but it doesn’t belong to them anymore. They’re giving the whole thing to the new owners of Angela’s company to do with it what they will. Maybe they’ll expand, or rent out the upper floors. Or perhaps they’ll demolish the whole thing and replace it with a mini waterpark. Whatever they choose, it will have nothing to do with Team Matic. They should have known that something like this was going to happen. Their whole thing is an ephemeral, nomadic lifestyle. They don’t stay anywhere for too long. Best to not get attached.

A moving company is allowed to handle some of the generic equipment, like tables and beakers. The sensitive materials, however, must be done in house. Ramses is here today, directing Mateo and Alyssa on this task. They’re not in any sort of rush, though. The government-run lab where this will all be moving to is not quite ready for them. Well, the space itself is reportedly totally ready. Winona claims that they keep such future-use places primed in the event of an pandemic, or some other emergency need. That’s what’s holding up the opening process. They have to secure approval from about seven different departments to use one of them, because another emergency venue will have to be developed to replace it.

Mateo holds up a computer monitor stand. “This?”

“Green box, storage” Ramses responds.

“And this?”

“Also green box.”

“Should we really be trusting these people?” Alyssa questions. “I mean, consider everything that you did to make sure this place was yours, and not even the agency that gave it to you had access to it. All these lava lamps and security cameras. Now you’re just going to work in a place built by them, for them?”

“Yeah, I can see how strange that seems,” Ramses admits. “Past!Me probably wouldn’t understand, but things have changed. Our relationship with the government has changed.” They have already given them tons of data and technology so far that they never would have dreamed to do for any government in the main sequence. Trying to keep whatever’s left a secret seems futile at this point. A better facility is more important. “I would rather have unfettered access to an advanced mass spectrometer, and an MRI machine, than my own place. It’s time to grow the operation. I have a lot of things I want to do, and this new place gets me all that. Plus, I think it makes them happy, and we need to keep them on our side.”

Alyssa rubs a lava lamp like a genie might come out of it. “But I love these. I’ve grown accustomed to staring at them during my parking lot surveillance shifts.”

“Blue box,” Ramses says. “We’re taking them with us, not just for storage.”

“You will have some privacy, though, won’t you?” Mateo asks.

“Yes, that is the very first project on my list. They may think they’ll have free and full access to my work, but with the right resources, I can protect anything that we feel they don’t need to know about.”

“What resources will you need for that, and how will you be accomplishing it?”

“I need a submarine. We’re retrieving the AOC from the bottom of the ocean.”

Microstory 1812: Civic Duty

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I was alive for the turn of the 20th century, but I obviously don’t remember it. I was only a few months old at the time, but I still get people asking me what the 19th century was like. I suppose it wasn’t much different than the early 1900s. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 122 years on this Earth, it’s that things don’t change dramatically. They’re drastic. It’s not like January 1, 1980 hit, and everyone who was listening to disco at the time turned it off all at once. Life is a journey, and it’s hard to see the path while you’re on it. Living all these years, I can see my pattern; where I’ve been, and whether I made the right choices. I made a lot of mistakes, and I die with a lot of regrets. We didn’t have much money growing up, but my parents saved so they could send me and my two sisters to college. They wanted us to get ourselves educated, so that we could choose whether we wanted to work or not. Some women didn’t have a choice back then. If you didn’t continue school, you had to find a man to take care of you. Well, those weren’t the only two options, but they were the only two society told you about. I was the middle child. My younger sister didn’t go, and married the widower who lived a few streets down. Our parents were tight-lipped about our financial situation, so it wasn’t until decades later during a fight when my sister let it slip that she actually did want to go, but I had taken her tuition for myself. I was smart enough to get accepted into a really good school, but unfortunately, it cost a bit more than my parents could afford. Their future son-in-law helped make up some of the difference for me, but that left nothing for my poor baby sister, who ended up being—let’s face it—the prize for his generosity. Reportedly, he would have been willing to shoulder the burden of her higher education too, but I suspect that he strongly discouraged it. He was an old man, and she was a pretty seventeen-year-old trophy. He wanted her to be dependent on him.

As far as I could tell, he wasn’t abusive, even for the time period, which saw more blatant inequality than 2021. And when he died, she inherited all of his money, so maybe she was the one with the last laugh. I’m certainly not laughing. I went on to find my own problems. I met a nice girl in college. By then, homosexuality was all right on principle, but there was this unfair unwritten rule that you didn’t go down that path unless you were infertile, or had already given the country at least two more children. You see, we had just suffered a massive population decline from a nasty pandemic, and a lot of propaganda came out, urging people to do their part by having as many children as possible. Gay people weren’t deviants anymore, but they weren’t productive. I could have my girl on the side, but I was expected to find a man, so we could do our civic duties together. It was a war, really, against a neighboring country. Both were vying for global domination, but instead of amassing weapons, or developing technology, they figured that growth in all sectors meant prosperity. The man I married ended up not being able to have children, which of course, defeated the whole purpose. Still, neither he, nor the love of my life, were willing to share, so we all lost. Divorce was frowned upon back then, even when it could help the population problem. I wasn’t miserable my whole life, though. He wasn’t nearly as old as my brother-in-law, but he died long before me, and I was free to be myself. By that point, the population was fine, but my love had moved on without me. So I die here today, as alone as I always have been.

Microstory 1635: Isoverse

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I already told you about Floaterverse, where just about everyone on Earth lives on artificial floating islands. Isoverse is similar to that, but taken to an extreme extreme. I didn’t repeat myself, the first extreme is an adjective, and the second a noun. The Floaters still maintain their communities, they’re just modular. They can shift them around, which serves to promote a global community. The Isoversals, on the other hand, stay almost completely separate from each other, and they do it in space. Civilization started out normal, but quickly diverged, both socially, and scientifically. Advancement became an obsession for these people, and contrary to popular belief, this is not normal. For centuries, most versions of Earth will develop technology quite slowly, necessity being the mother of invention, and all. Most will not form a drive to push forward regardless of true need until much later. Coupled with religious hangups, this can hold progress back rather well. These same obstacles happened to the Isoversals as well, but unlike others, it severely pissed them off. A resistance group of sorts rose to power, and banned all religion impressively early. I say impressive, but do not mistake that to mean I condone their violent behavior. It’s just such an unusual thing to happen in history, but all told, there was less violence here than in most other universes. The group also banned war, and were prepared to stoop to the level of irony in order to protect that mandate. This also had the effect of increasing the global population, which might sound like a good thing, but it came with some problems. It came with disease. It was worse than any pandemic on any other world, except for the sterility virus. The Isoversals were nearly wiped out by it, and it forced them to change their perspective.

The survivors continued to advance, and came up with ways to protect themselves against something like this happening again. Self-quarantining became the norm, and each passing generation was more and more used to the idea, until no one was left alive who felt that there was any better way to live. To maintain the species, they had to live separately. It was the only way, according to researchers. Innovation didn’t halt, though, of course, and soon they were reapplying their methods to space travel. This reached its inevitable state when every family was afforded its own fusion-powered spacecraft habitat that could orbit a planet, or a host star. If requested and approved, they could even be fitted with a propulsion system capable of delivering them to other star systems. When a child was old enough to go off on their own, they did so literally, by transferring to a unit only large enough to accommodate them. Obviously, the entire point of all this was to protect the species, but the price of not going extinct by some disease could not be going extinct by a lack of propagation. Instead of interacting in base reality, communities formed in virtual constructs. They kept their physical bodies, but spent most of their time connected to the network. When two people met, they would begin by dating each other remotely, and would even form a permanent union in VR. They would only come together outside of VR to start a family, and they were assigned a larger habitat in order to make that work. This was how they lived, and they never thought there could be a better way. They didn’t colonize space to protect the environment of their home planet. They did it because they believed it was the best way to insulate themselves from each other. But it protected them from the Ochivari just the same.

Microstory 1592: Literally Can’t Get Out of Bed

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Prompt

I fell asleep in my own bed last night, and I’ve woken up in a stranger’s.

Botner

As I blink and slowly adjust my eyes to the ceiling of the attic room of my new home, I see the bed I’ve been sleeping in isn’t just the bed of my past, but the bed of my future. And I can see that in the corner of the room I’ve been sleeping on for the last two days. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, you dirty rat?”

I open my eyes and recognize the voice coming from my left. I look to the floor, then quickly look up. Shocked, I sit up straight, my jaw gaping. Standing at the edge of the bed is a man in a blood-stained white suit, his black shoes stomping the wood floors of the room, his hands stuffed in his pockets. His black hair hung loose, partially covering his dark eyes, his rough and scuffed shoes seemingly out of place on the soft floors. “I thought you were my husband,” I try to scream, but my mouth has gone dry. My head is dizzy. I can barely see the man standing over me. “Who are you?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead he stares back. I jump to my feet, realizing the...

Conclusion

...immense danger that I’m in. I’m not supposed to be here. He knows it, I know it, and now he knows I know it, and now he knows I’m going to have to do everything I can to get the hell out of here. But first, I must break free. My ankles are chained to the bed post, and since I’m no Houdini, my only hope is to talk my way out of it. I don’t know what this guy wants with me—I never wronged him, as far as I remember, and that’s going to make it much harder. He might not want an apology, but he sure as hell will be pissed off if I can’t acknowledge his pain. Think, I think to myself. Think about the last time you saw him, and try to remember what went down. It was my dog. She pooped on his lawn, and even though I cleaned it up right away, he wasn’t happy. This can’t be what caused him to abduct me, though, is it? That’s an insane overreaction, even if I hadn’t picked it up. No, it has to be something else. That was probably just the proverbial back-breaking straw. What happened before? What is he so upset about? Oh, you know what, maybe he knows. Maybe he’s finally figured out that I’m the one who called the cops on him for having a huge party with strangers in the middle of a pandemic. Yeah, that’s probably it.

Microstory 1533: Forcing the Future

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To be honest, this ________ thing has made my daily life a lot ________ . Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s ________, and I want this to be fixed as soon as ________, but I also can’t hide from the ________ that I prefer this way of ________, on a personal ________. The thing is, there ________ need to be a ________ for me to ________ like this. I just need to get people on ________. I wasn’t surprised at how much ________ I could get done while staying at ________, or how much less work there actually is when I don’t have my ________ breathing down my ________. Virtual meetings, as long as you have a ________ internet ________, are just as good, if not ________ than regular old face-____-face. A lot of ________ don’t think so, but the structure really forces you to prioritize your words. It’s more ________ to get trapped in an off-____ conversation with each ________. My co-____s were always just hanging out in ________, and not in a way that let me ________ out either. We weren’t ________ with business yet, so we all had to _________ around anyway. It was so pointless, really, I ________ it. Meetings are better, but also the normal work that I do. I know, it’s not something I should be ________, but I like to stop and check social ________, and play ________, and watch ________, or maybe just ________ the birds outside my ________. And we’re all doing it, and it’s totally ________. The way I see it, as long as I’m being product____, what exactly is the problem? Nothing. There is no ________, except now there is. My company is thinking about ________ up a surveillance state. They’ll ________ my webcam, and listen to my ________’s microphone, and they’ll hire a ________ of temps to watch me for my full ________ hours. They want to make ________ that I’m not ____ing around, like I do. They think it’ll save them ________, because they’re a bunch of ________. They’re paying people to ________ all these feeds, so they’re actually losing ________. I don’t know for sure, but I’m also sure of it. There’s no ________ it’s cost effective, even though the ________ will probably be at minimum ________. Pay shouldn’t be based on the ________ of time you spend stressed and busy, but the amount of ________ productivity. How much benefit did I ________? Not how much time did I ________ on it? If you give me ________ hours of work every day, I’m going to do it in ________ hours. I’m getting the ________ done, and that should be enough for ________. I think I’m gonna ________. I don’t need this job, I can ________ from anywhere now.