Microstory 2449: Windbourne

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Holy crap, it’s windy here! It’s almost like that’s the point! I’m yelling, because it’s hard to hear with all this wind! Did I mention that it was very windy? Why did they make a dome that’s just super windy? Well, I don’t know, why the hell not? What would you do instead? I’m asking a lot of questions, and I’m not a prolific reviewer on the network, so no one’s going to answer them. The staff certainly didn’t. It’s windy here, because that’s the way they wanted it, and they were technologically capable of it. Before you read on (if you do manage to find this review) you should know that I’m one of the uneducated. By early 21st century standards, I would have been an average student. By today’s standards, with perfections in educational tools, and individualized lesson planning, I’m well-below average. I did this on purpose. I don’t find value in learning beyond a certain point. I’m happy, and I’m content with who I am. So if you’re looking for a scientifically dense explanation for how the wind generation works here, tap on, buddy...tap on. Windbourne. It’s windy. The topography has been moulded to create the perfect conditions for wind, where they want it, when they want it. Air is heated and cooled in very precise configurations to create the wind patterns as planned. Temperature usually flows spontaneously from hot to cold, I remember that. I’m not sure how they’re heated, but I think the process is solar-powered, perhaps by use of mirrors, rather than just solar panels to convert into electricity. They also use gargantuan fans to control the airflow, but I didn’t see them, so the must have cleverly hidden them behind geographic features, or maybe holographic illusions. Some regions are windier than others, of course, and they tell you where these are. The map color-codes the zones by the speed of the wind, so if you just want a light breeze, you can stay there. If you want near tornado-like conditions, baby, you’re gonna wanna go to Gale City. Winds in this area reach up to 400 kilometers per hour. That sounded like a lot to me, but I didn’t have much of a frame of reference until I tried it myself. What you do is enter a tunnel where you can walk through, or stand on people movers. Once you’re on the other side of the Arnett Mountains, you climb up to these towers. There are robot staff here, so they’ll tell you where to go, and how to get there. You get to your platform, which is fully protected by walls, and situate yourself in the waiting station. You have a few options here. You can strap yourself in, hold onto the straps, hold onto a bar, or freehand it. Once you’re ready, they’ll open the flap behind you. At this point, you can hear the wind roaring at your sides, and above you, but you’re still protected. This only lasts for a few moments before the wall opposite you opens up. The wind rushes in, as I said, at 400 km/h. What happens to you next is entirely dependent upon your choices, both leading up to it, and once you hit the point of no return. Did you grab on to something? Can you keep holding onto it? Are you gonna fly over the edge? If you do, will you activate a parachute, or a wingsuit? If not, will you manage to land in one of the scattered foam pits, or plummet to your death? Please note that, due to the obvious dangers, there are certain criteria that you must meet before they let you go to Gale City, such as, do you have a heart condition, and do you have mind-transference on, or are you a suicidal moron? I’ve already gone on the ride several times, and I’m gonna end this here, so I can go back to see if I can beat my own record for the farthest fall without wings. Wild ride, friends, wild ride. Catch the wind, and fly out of control!

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 27, 2399

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Mateo is closest to the window. He looks out of it to see whether it explains why no one else is here. Based on what they’ve learned from Heath and Imani, even on the off hours, the auditorium is never empty. Whether the speakers are rehearsing, or worshipers are praying, this place is never as dead as it is now. It’s also falling apart, as is everything outside, which can really mean only one thing. “We’re in the Facsimile. Did we just skip over the entirety of Saturday?”

“Why did you bring us here?” Leona demands to know from Dalton.

“I just reset the timeline,” Dalton begins to explain. “Anyone who was still in the Third Rail has forgotten everything that’s happened in the last few days. Well, they didn’t forget. To them, it never happened. I brought everyone here so you will remember. This is not a gift. I did this so that you will know for the rest of your few remaining days that you did this to yourself. When the Reconvergence comes, you will have no hope of escaping. Reality will collapse, and you’ll just blink out of existence.”

“We’re supposed to be friends,” Leona reminds him. “Why are you doing this?”

“We’ve  not been friends for a long time,” Dalton argues. “As for why I’m doing this, I’m not. I told you, you brought this on yourselves. All you had to do was build your little satellites, and save your little refugees, and leave the rest to me.”

“So you’re just going to kill us,” Leona states.

“Alternate versions of most of you will remain. For the rest, you’re collateral damage. I’m sorry it had to come to this.”

“We know how to get out,” Mateo contends. “You’re not dooming us.”

“I am, though. The door in the un-Salmon Civic Center has been closed. It’s technically still there, but I filled it up with cement. You could try to chisel through, I guess.” Dalton looks at his watch. “I don’t like your chances.”

“There’s still time,” Leona pleads. “Don’t do this. When we get out of here another way, and we will, because we always do, you’re going to regret it.”

“Whatever. I’m not too worried about it.” Dalton reaches out towards Alyssa. “Come dahling,” he says in a British accent.

“I’m not going with you,” Alyssa spits back. She takes Mateo’s hand, but she’s not doing it just because they love each other. She’s slipping him a note.

“This is non-negotiable. You’re gonna give them false hope that all they have to do is teleport to the Constant, or something.” He takes her by the hand, and whisks them both away.

“I don’t understand,” Senator Morton says. “What is this place?”

Leona explains to all those not already in the know where they are. If they don’t find the exit by midnight, they will be stuck here for another week, and that’s assuming they can make it by the time it hits midnight again. That may be what Dalton wants. His primary objective seems to be getting people out of his way. As far as they know, though, he doesn’t kill people. This seems very unlike him, and unless he’s just another version of Constance, there is another way out of here.

“There is,” Mateo jumps in after Leona’s done. He holds up Alyssa’s note. Scribbled quickly in god-awful handwriting, it says BACK DOOR. “There’s another exit.”

“Great.” Aldona throws up her hands. “There’s a back door somewhere, but we have no clue where.”

“Aldona,” Leona begins, “if you know something about the future that will help us, now is the time to ignore my rules of time travel, and just tell us.”

“I would tell you if I did,” Aldona replies. “I was not aware that this would happen. If Dalton has the power to reset the timeline, maybe nothing I knew of the future has done us any good. I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore.” She’s distraught.

“We don’t have time to search the whole planet,” Leona complains, “even if he let us keep our trusty teleporter. I have access to an aircraft. Ramses specifically designed it to be duplicated into this dimension, and be ready to go if and when we ever needed it, but where are we going to take it?”

“I know where we need to go.” Tarboda looks at Mateo. “We’ve been there.”

Mateo looks puzzled. Then he starts to think. “The antipodes,” he realizes.

“Which antipodes?” Leona asks.

“What is an antipode?” Labhrás asks.

“Kansas and Madagascar,” Tarboda answers Leona. “I don’t know for sure that it’s right, but there’s a weird dimensional thing out there, and if I were to install a back door, the first place I would think is the opposite of where I put the front door.”

“That makes some sense,” Winona encourages.

“It’s our only hope. Can everyone walk? Our aircraft will fly, not none of the other vehicles in this dimension are operable, and the Lofts are about an hour away.”

The group starts the hike northward from the Plaza to the Crown Center area. They don’t slow down, and they don’t make any stops. Their destination being very intentionally the farthest point on Earth from where they are now, it’s pretty much the longest flight they could possibly have to take. The jet is small, and barely big enough to fit all of them. Not everyone has a seat, but they’re not exactly worried about federal regulations at the moment. There is not enough time to make more than one trip. Ramses engineered it to be fuel efficient, and that meant sacrificing speed. It takes them the entire rest of the day, placing them within minutes of their midnight deadline. They don’t even have time to find a landing spot in all this dense vegetation. There aren’t enough parachutes for everyone either, so they have to triple up, which is also extremely dangerous, but they don’t jump from very high. Leona and Tarboda go last after gaining some altitude, and making sure the jet flies off into the distance.

“Leona takes out her phone. “There’s no GPS here, but the terrain is the same as it is in the Third Rail, so I can get us there.”

“I can get us there,” Tarboda insists. “They were walking before, but now they’re running. With only a few minutes to spare, they find the half-hut. From the looks of it, it’s the other half. This is obviously not where Cheyenne and her key friends are living, though, because they were able to access the portal on a day other than Salmonday.

“Okay,” Leona says. “I’ll go first, and if I don’t come out in one minute, assume this is a one-way trip, and just follow me. If it’s killed me, well...you would have died in a matter of weeks anyway, right? All right, see you on the other side!” She runs through. Thirty seconds later, she peeks her head back through. “It’s two-way. Come on in.”

Everyone files in, with Mateo as the caboose. They’re in a world of white, like the Construct from The Matrix. A vague blur appears before them like a TV with a bad signal, then solidifies into Cheyenne. “You’re back.”

“Yeah, sorry,” Mateo begins. “We wouldn’t have come, except—”

“I was just gonna say that you’re right on schedule.” She points. “Walk that way.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 16, 2398

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Leona wasn’t calling Marie and Kivi because she wanted them to try to find her husband in the Mariana Trench. She just wanted to record a census of all the versions of Mateo that they’re currently aware of. The one down there appears to be the only one at the moment, which makes things simpler. The two SD6 teams are free to go off and do their own thing. She’s going to handle this herself, but she needs more data. The global brain scanner that found him operates on two axes. They can get some idea of elevation by measuring the strength of the signal, but it’s impossible to pinpoint a precise location. If she’s going to teleport down to him, she needs to know precisely how deep to go, and where to land, or she’ll end up drowning in the ocean while being crushed by its unyielding thousand atmospheres of pressure.

Ramses has been working on a temporal energy detector capable of surviving the stress of reentry into Earth’s top atmospheric layers, and he’s finally finished. They have decided that this is a perfect opportunity to feed two birds with one worm. The detector will fall to the surface of Earth, measuring the temporal energy fields along the way, as well as hopefully whatever is suppressing that field. It should land in the ocean over the trench, then detach itself from the parachutes, and sink down to look for Mateo.

“About how long will all that take?” Cheyenne asks.

Ramses is monitoring the exterior maintenance robot—or EMR—that’s readying the probe for launch. The ship wasn’t designed for this, so he’s had to improvise a lot of the process. If they’re in a time crunch, that’s all the more reason they can’t rush. “Forty-two minutes and eleven seconds.”

“Oh, so you know exactly how long?”

“Well, I couldn’t tell you how quickly the probe will find Mateo, because the whole point is we don’t know where he is, but if it has to sink all the way to the bottom, it will take forty-two minutes and eleven seconds from launch.”

“If your bot ever finishes building the launch brackets,” Leona says impatiently.

Ramses peels himself from the central hologram to look at her. “I hope you know that there is no guarantee—”

“I know,” she interrupts, frustrated.

“Sorry, what were you gonna say?” Vearden asks.

“He was going to remind me that we can’t be sure Mateo is the one down there,” Leona answers instead. “It’s true, were I you is not, like, this secret phrase that no one else would know. I just don’t think anyone else would think to use it in this situation.”

“Okay,” Ramses says passive-aggressively. “We’ll find out in about forty-two minutes.” He starts heading back down to engineering. “The EMR is finished with its work just in time for our launch window. You can all watch from up here.”

A few minutes later, the probe is through the miniature airlock that Ramses built in engineering, sacrificing what was once used as storage space. It’s now a little bit more difficult to walk around downstairs. The probe flies away from the AOC, and heads for Earth. It screams across the sky, exciting all amateur astronomers who were not expecting such a large piece of orbital debris to decay today. The truth is that it’s not all that large, but it’s built with materials not found in the modern world, so it would be assumed to be the size of a tiny home. Let the conspiracies begin.

The probe is through the rough spots now, so the parachutes deploy to slow its descent. Ramses frowns as he’s watching the data come in. Velocity, temperature, pressure, pollution levels. It’s picking up all of these things, but the one thing it’s not sensing is temporal energy. This is incredibly odd, even for the Third Rail. After it lands on the water, he goes back up to the rest of the group.

Leona shakes her head. “You see these numbers?”

“Yes, they don’t make any sense,” Ramses notes.

“Forgive me, but...” she begins awkwardly

“I didn’t screw it up. The detector is working fine. There is something seriously wrong with this world, and it’s bigger than we ever imagined.”

“I don’t understand,” Vearden says, worried that they’re going to roll their eyes at best, or chew his head off at worst.

“If I’m reading this right—and I’m no scientist, so I might not be—but it says here that you’re not sensing any temporal energy whatsoever,” Arcadia says.

“That’s right,” Leona replies. She reaches forward to play with the interface, but stops. There’s nothing to adjust or calibrate. It’s all laid out before them. It’s all wrong.

“Didn’t we kind of expect that, though?” Vearden presses. “We already know there’s no time travel, at least not down on the planet.”

“There’s always time travel.” Arcadia starts to talk with her hands. “For most people, time moves at a one to one ratio, which means that for every second that passes, one second passes. Temporal energy isn’t this magical substance that we use to manipulate time and space. It’s simply the transfer of excited particles from one moment in time to another, as a function of entropy.”

“Huh?”

“Temporal energy is just what happens when time passes,” Arcadia clarifies. “You can’t have no energy, because that would mean you have no time. It’s either balanced or unbalanced, and as time travelers, we exploit the unbalanced levels, but you can’t just have nothing. If you have nothing, you don’t exist. This world...doesn’t exist!”

The computer beeps. Leona looks back up to the hologram. “The probe is close enough to the source of the were I you signal. I know where to go.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Ramses offers.

“No, stay here and...deal with this.”

Leona puts on her wetsuit, which is a half-measure, since it’s not what’s going to keep her safe down there. It just seems dumb to go down in her civies. She inserts the rebreather in her mouth, nods to the group, and then teleports to the signal. She can instantly tell that she’s standing inside of the Bridgette. She hears someone shuffling behind her, so she turns around to find Alyssa in a defensive position. Alyssa doesn’t loosen up, since Leona doesn’t look like herself with the mask on. “It’s me, it’s me.”

“Oh, okay. I guess it’s 2398 again.”

“Where were you?”

“Billions of years ago.”

“Tell me everything.”

Alyssa shakes her head. “I can’t. My memories are on a detonation mechanism. As soon as we surface, they’ll disappear, and I don’t have time to relay them to you.”

“I understand,” Leona says with a nod. “Is Mateo here?”

She hesitates to answer for a beat. “No. He’s never coming back.”

Microstory 1580: Getting Through It

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Prompt

The pilot is dead, and the plane is going down. I’m the only one here with any hope of flying it, but I only have a few hours under my belt so far.

Botner

I’m still hoping to find a navigator with a good enough map. My hands shake as I make the first turn. I need to be able to do this for seven more hours. I don’t know how much time has passed since I’ve flown in the cockpit of a plane, but the engines of the aircraft are now cold. There are no instruments, and no radio. I’m just hoping for the best. There is nothing more terrifying than taking over an airplane by yourself. I could attempt to write something to make you feel better about it, but I’m sure I would fail miserably. I’m not an expert on flight. I’ve never flown. I’ve never even been in a plane. But if I can do it, you can do it. You need this, though. Well, maybe not now, but you will want this. This is how they knew that they would need you. You need to be able to write about moments that are random and out of your control and also be able to make them actionable. So, here you go: It is coming up to one year since I last saw Dustin. The last time we spoke we...

Conclusion

...had this awkward moment where I was thinking we might get back together, and he paused like he was thinking the same thing, but then we looked away, and said our goodbyes. I’m trying to concentrate on what I’m doing, but my mind drifts to the past. I would be here with him if I had just stopped, and forced a conversation. We could have worked through our issues. We didn’t end on bad terms, but at the time, neither one of us was willing to compromise, and get on the same page. I regret that now, and not just because I’m heading for a mountain, and I don’t know if I can pull up in time. The people in the back are crying, reminding me of when I was volunteering at the assisted living facility. I watched a family watch their patriarch die right before their eyes. That was how I met Dustin, as he was an orderly there. I tried very hard not to become overly emotional in the moment, because it wasn’t about me, and he helped me get through it without seeming cold and uncaring instead. If he were here, he would know what to do. I mean, he wouldn’t be able to fly the plane, but he would keep me calm and focused. We barely miss the summit, and I feel like I can breathe again. It’s not going to be easy getting back home from here on out, but the worst of it should be over. I know this part of Colorado well enough, because it’s where he’s from, and we used to plan a lot of trips back, because it’s so beautiful. There won’t be another flat place to land for a while, I’m sure. We’ll just have to sit tight and wait. We keep going for about ten minutes until the engine starts making a sound I’ve never heard before, but we all know what it means. We’re running out of fuel, which I was hoping wouldn’t be the case, but like I said, no instruments. We’re gonna have to do a crash landing somehow, and I don’t think we’ll make it. Now I’m so glad that Dustin isn’t here, because he would just die with the rest of us. Another passenger yells that she finally found the parachutes, but there aren’t enough for all of us. This is my fault. It’s all my fault, Dustin included. I’ll stay.

Microstory 837: Family Trip

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Our parents died in a plane crash when my two sisters and I were still just children. Well, it wasn’t so much a crash as a hole blew through the cabin, and their row of seats was sucked out. The rest of the plane landed somewhat safely on the highway. The news of it was overshadowed by certain other aircraft tragedies that happened on the same day a week earlier. The third man with them left a family behind too, which served to bring us all together. My older sister wasn’t quite eighteen years old, but she was given emancipation, and started taking care of all four of us. I didn’t appreciate until I got older how much she did for us. The youngest of our foster brothers was a child prodigy, and a scientific genius. We all moved into their house, and found it to be equipped with a full laboratory in the basement that would bring Dexter to tears. He became obsessed with time travel, as you can imagine, hoping that one day, he would see his parents again. He had no plans to change history, seeing that as far too dangerous. All he wanted was to be able to speak with them again, and we supported his delusion. We discovered nearly ten years later that he was not so crazy after all, when he asked us down to his lab to show us something, and dropped us all the way back to 1974 with absolutely no warning. He wasn’t exactly aiming for that year, but he apparently hadn’t worked out all the bugs, so this was where we found ourselves. Only then, standing at the welcome sign, did we realize our parents all grew up in the same small Iowa town. As far as we knew, my mother and father stepped onto that plane without knowing the passenger they were seated next to, or his wife, who had died of cancer two years prior.

But here we were in Watland, a town so small I don’t even think they bother putting it on the map in 2011. We asked our resident physicist to send us back, but he said his recall device was damaged in the trip and he would need time to fix it, so we decided to go ahead with his plan to meet the younger version of our parents, who were now still in grade school. It was a surreal experience, being older than mom and dad, smiling as they tried in vain to build a sand castle with the pebbles under the jungle gym during recess. We knelt down to help them, glad for the fact that the 1970s were a different time, and the staff was too busy smoking around the corner to be bothered about five grown adults at a playground. We talked about what their favorite subjects were in school, and who their friends were. Just then our foster sibling’s new parents came over. They really did know each other this whole time. We wondered whether they recognized each other on the plane, or if it was just this crazy coincidence, and they had been too long estranged. The bell rang to end recess, and we knew it was time to leave. Our brother flipped a switch, and told us he was ready, revealing that the device hadn’t really been broken, and he was just stalling for time. But he was wrong, because if it wasn’t broken before, it certainly was now. We were stuck in the past, and he didn’t have the materials he would need to build a new machine, and get us back home. He worked on it for the better part of the rest of the day, though, and realized there was some kind of temporal interference, which he was able to track by rewiring his device. It led us to the edge of a cliff, where we found an eclectic group of people, strapping themselves into parachutes, and other gear. They smiled as we approached, seeing our futuristic clothes, and knowing we didn’t belong there, just like them. They hinted that they were from further in the future than 2011, but wouldn’t say exactly when. They provided us with our own special parachutes, which would evidently read our unique temporal signatures, and take us back to our own time, while they went off to theirs. Our brother seemed to think this to be sound scientific logic, so we trusted them, and strapped in too, ultimately finding ourselves back in the basement we had left, not minutes ago. It was another twenty years before I looked at my adopted children, nieces, and nephews, and remembered that I had already met them...in 1974.

Microstory 754: Pedro

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Pedro Gomes was born with a quite unusual medical condition; one that made his daily life extremely unpleasant. He suffered from completely uncontrollable internal vibrations during all waking hours. Lying down to rest seemed to lessen his symptoms enough to allow him to fall asleep, but anyone who placed their hand upon his skin while he was in bed would still feel the vibrations. This came with other problems, including numbness and weakness, dizziness and vertigo, and difficult visual focus. Basically nothing around him would stand still well enough for him to get a clear picture of it. At times, these vibrations would rise to the surface, and he would demonstrate external tremors, but often these would be done on purpose. Sometimes the best way to relieve the pain from his vibration was to keep moving around, be that jumping, swinging, or even rolling on the floor. His family gave him the nickname of Holy Roller, partly out of affection, partly out of insensitivity. As he grew up, though, he decide to adopt this moniker, but he would not maintain its attachment to his true identity. He ended up joining a group of supervillains who were purporting themselves to be superheroes. Upon leveling through the ranks enough to learn the truth behind this organization, Pedro started secretly fighting back, aligning himself with a small group of rebels who too knew what they had really signed up for. He worked under the leadership of Stuntwoman, who was highly trained in not only stunt work, but also martial arts. She wore a flame resistant suit that burned to the touch, but only to her opponents. She kept with her sidegliders, a parachute, and landing padding that softened her falls. Stuntwoman’s cousin, Bolster wore special boots that could spring her high into the air. Her cousin taught her some hand-to-hand combat, as did her mentor, whose intentions were not so honorable. As for Pedro, a.k.a. Holy Roller, he learned to focus his body’s vibrations to use them against others. Though he couldn’t be rid of them entirely, he could draw the vibrations to a single point, say his fist, and expel the force against enemy combatants. Of course, he wore hybrid roller skating boots, with wheels that could descend, or retract, as needed. An associate of theirs later built for him a poison dart gun that resembled a snake to cement his flare identity. Pedro never had an easy life, even after discovering his calling as a champion of justice, but he owned his weaknesses, transformed them into strengths, and became a feared name in the criminal underworld.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 4, 2089

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Mateo slipped his feet into the new shoes. The laces tightened up automatically, and what felt like a foam filled in the gaps around his feet. Shoes no longer seemed to need to fit exactly as they could be modified on command. They were extremely comfortable, like he was walking on air, which he technically was. He stood up and bounced up and down a little. He had a far higher spring than he did with normal shoes. He might have been able to enjoy the future if he weren’t so busy trying to survive it.

The Cleanser walked in while he was straightening his new suit. “Take care of that thing. It once belonged to a famous racer in the 2020s.” So he wasn’t even using present-day technology. What mind-bogglingly amazing tech were people using now that was better than this?  “Don’t worry, I didn’t kill him. He doesn’t need it anymore.”

“What am I doing?”

“I need you to retrieve something for me from a very dangerous location. The only thing more deadly than the location itself is the path to get there.”

“What am I there to get?”

“Rule number three,” he said with an evil smile.

“Keep track of everything you do, and everyone you meet?” Mateo asked, unsure. He had them memorized, and no longer needed to think about it. These rules were just second nature now.

“No, not your dumb time travel rules,” the Cleanser quipped. “Frank’s rules. Never open the package.”

“Oh, right. We’re still on that? Why is The Transporter franchise coming up so often?”

“Uh...” he said. “Foreshadowing?”

“Really,” Mateo did not ask.

“Probably not,” he replied quickly, clearly wanting to move on. Just go get what I asked for. I’ll drop you off at the starting line, and you’ll know what I’m looking for when you get there.”

Mateo was going to insist he tell him what the proverbial package was, but why should he even care?

“Are you ready?”

“Is that relevant?”

“Yes, this is very important to me. This isn’t designed to kill you. In fact, I would be very disappointed if it did, because you’re my only hope. I can’t coerce anyone else into doing it for me, and I’m certainly not going myself.”

“What’s so dangerous about it?”

“You’ll see. Just...keep moving.” He handed him a pair of goggles.

“Why the hell are you giving me these?”

The Cleanser was confused about why he was asking. “Well, they’re augmented reality goggles. They’ll help you navigate.”

“No, obviously,” Mateo shot back. “But I thought you didn’t like movies.”

“I don’t dislike movies, I’m just not interested in mapping them to the tribulations anymore.”

“These are the goggles that Vin Diesel wore in the movie Riddick.”

He was genuinely surprised by this. “They are? I did not know that. It changes nothing. It’s time for you to go either way.”

He stepped back with one foot so that he could be in a surfer stance. He then gathered airbender energy in slow-motion that he forced towards Mateo. It blew him away and transported him to the starting line. Or maybe he should have called it the starting altitude.

He was falling through painfully cold air, the distorted sight of an airplane shuttered a bit before disappearing completely. He looked up and saw his feet were strapped to a snowboard, and when he looked down, he could see snowy mountains reaching up towards him. He twisted and flipped around, desperately trying to get to his feet. His inability to find his place was causing him to panic, so he needed to catch his breath and calm down. He thought about how he had already done this a few times before. In fact, he spent a great deal of time practicing this sort of thing on a simulator. That was years ago from his perspective, and he was out of practice, but he just had to call upon his muscle memory.

After finally situating his feet towards the ground, he pulled the ripcord on the backpack he was now somehow wearing. He orientated himself again and started aiming for a nice layer of snow on the side of a mountain. He landed with a lot of force, but he was able to survive. The parachute automatically released itself from his back and flew away as he continued down the mountain.

Yes, he had a lot of experience with parachutes, but never had he been snowboarding. They always freaked him out, so he stuck with skis for the few times he went to the Weston mountain with his family. With that in mind, he decided it would be safest to just go ahead and stop as soon as he could, even if it hurt. There was no telling what was going to come up next. He could be heading for a cliff and have no idea. Can you jump off cliffs and survive? How does that work? No, it just wasn’t worth the risk. He went by instinct and turned the board towards the sides, switchbacking his way to a lower speed until he felt like he was going slow enough to just fall down and stop altogether.

His Riddick goggles were telling him that his destination was about a hundred miles away that way, but wasn’t any more specific than that. He pointed his board in that direction and slowly slid diagonally across the mountain. The Cleanser had told him to keep moving, but there weren’t any obvious dangers, so there was no point in getting there any faster.

It took him a long time, but he made it all the way down to the bottom. After a few miles of nothing but walking, he noticed something weird. The snow was blinking. Rather, there was something in the snow that was blinking periodically. That in itself wasn’t strange, but upon bending down and inspecting it, he discovered the light to be coming from a screw. The goggles said nothing about it, but it sure seemed important, so he slipped it into his pocket and moved on. As he continued forwards, he came across other hardware, all blinking in sync with each other. Oh no, he was going to have to build something, for whatever reason.

At the end of the leg, he found what he was apparently looking for. It was a mostly built snowmobile, also blinking. He had a bit of experience fixing cars, but not all that much more than normal people have. As a “professional” driver, he had to know a few tricks, but he was in no way a mechanic. This felt like an Amazing Race challenge, but the more he worked on it, the more he focused on the blinking light aspect of the challenge. Sure, it could have just been a way for him to find the parts themselves, but why wouldn’t the Cleanser just program their various locations into the goggles?

Once he was finished repairing the machine, he consulted his goggle map and sped off in its general direction. Now, these were tribulations, and he was starting to get a hang of how things worked around here. The first mini-challenge was surviving a drop from a plane. The second was repairing the snowmobile. The third was shaping up to be about speed, and if there was one thing he understood when it came to speed, it was that it also always involved chase. Before he knew it, two drones appeared from the other side of a snow bank and started flying toward him. As they did, they released bullets and missiles towards him, all of which he had to dodge and trick. This was where his driving experience came in handy.

When movies show this kind of scene, the hero usually finds some way of getting the enemies to crash into each other, or other obstructions. That wasn’t an option here, because there weren’t any obstructions, and because those movies usually break the laws of physics in order to accomplish their goals. No, he couldn’t outsmart them, so he just never gave up. They kept shooting, and he kept snowmobiling. Eventually, they ran out of bullets and flew away. Fortunately, there weren’t any backups, otherwise, he could have been doing that all day. There was some kind of temporal distortion up ahead that he knew he would have to pass through in order to keep going. What he didn’t know was what was waiting for him on the other side. Instead of the snowy mountains, he was in a hot and dry desert. His snowmobile hit a rock and flipped him off, apparently knocking him out.

He found himself bleeding when he reawoke however long later. He looked around, hoping to find help, but all he saw were tall rock formations and billows of smoke. The goggles were no longer showing a map, but everything was in this weird purple tint. They must have been damaged in the crash. As he was crawling to what his instincts told him was a watering hole, a lightbulb turned on above his head. The goggles, this place, he was in a movie. Actually, he was in multiple movies. Falling out of a plane with a snowboard was out of xXx, blinking hardware in the snow was in the epilogue of The Iron Giant, and the snowmobile drone chase was from Babylon A.D. They were all Vin Diesel movies, and Mateo didn’t like to brag, but he did manage to see every single one of his movies, even the ones that were released after his first timejump. Right now, he was on the planet from the movie Riddick. This was all very unexpected as the Cleanser had made it very clear that the film-based tribulations were over. Perhaps that was just another lie.

Or maybe Makarion set up this tribulation before his death. He recalled conversation he and Makarion had about movies, because it was logical to do so. It was no secret that Vin Diesel was one of Mateo’s favorite actors. Perhaps it was the fact that they were both notable drivers, but Mateo always felt a particular connection to his roles. He was also an interesting guy in his personal life. He played Dungeons and Dragons, and he designed video games. He seemed like the kind of guy who belonged to a fight club, and probably had a criminal background, but no, he was just a normal dude. His movies were dangerous, but they were also exciting, and Mateo would know just what to do with each of them. If this was Makarion’s—man, what was he supposed to call him now that he knew he wasn’t really Makarion?—last gift to him, then he wasn’t going to waste it.

Mateo rolled to his back to get better access to the thick, and probably toxic, air. Up above, he could see creatures flying around. He ordered his goggles to zoom in on them to confirm that they really were aliens. It had been a while since he saw Riddick, but he could still tell that they weren’t the exact same kind, so they weren’t recreations. This meant that he really was on another planet. No big deal, this wouldn’t be the first time. Unfortunately, there was no telling what other dangers were waiting for him that he had no way of preparing for. His watch beeped, and then he jumped forward an Earthan year to the future, but everything else changed too.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 26, 2050

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“No,” Aura said, in no uncertain terms. They were standing in their present cabin in the parched scrubland of the Amazon; a place where there was once a lush rainforest.

“I don’t need your permission, mother,” Mateo snapped at her. “You’ve been doing this longer than I have. In your experience, if the powers that be want something of you, have you been able to resist?”

“That’s besides the point.”

“What is your point?”

“I am your mother, and I’m going to protect you.”

“When have you ever done that? You gave me up when I was a baby, you disappeared when I was a child, and you haven’t been around much since your return.”

“And who’s fault is that?”

“It’s mine, but it doesn’t lessen the fact that I don’t need you dictating my life.”

“I just can’t believe you’re planning on going after Reaver...again. After all that happened before—after you saw Leona die—why would you be so enthusiastic about this?”

“Leona died?” Gilbert asked.

“And who are you?” Aura asked sardonically.

Mateo moved on, “I’m not enthusiastic about this. I’ve just accepted my place in the world. Some people work crappy jobs in the produce section of the grocery store, some people shovel shit, and some people are hopelessly thrown through time where they’ve given hazy assignments by a mysterious cabal of control freaks! We all do what we do, and right now I do need to find Horace Reaver, and bring him to justice. I do what I’m told.”

“How do you even know this Head Guard guy has any authority?” Samsonite asked, trying to contribute, but also worried about speaking out of turn.

“Last we saw him he was being taken away by the Delegator. He is literally a person of authority as he was an actual security guard in his former life.”

“And,” Leona continued, “we spoke with him in a magical cave that sits underneath a constantly shifting time window.”

“And that too,” Mateo nodded.

“That doesn’t mean you can trust him.”

Mateo threw up his hands. “You can’t trust anyone, doesn’t mean we have a choice.”

Theo walked in with a packet of documents. “Here’s the report. I printed it off on paper since I know you’re not used to anything else.”

“Thank you, brother,” Leona said, taking the documents from him.

“What is this? You’re helping them? Is that information on Reaver’s whereabouts?” Aura became more furious than she already was.

“They called me last year to ask me to get in touch with Boyce’s loyalists so that we could locate and keep tabs on Reaver,” Theo explained to her before debriefing the team. “He’s been lying low and moving around a lot, but we’re confident he’s in Tasmania at the moment.”

“We have a notable disadvantage,” Leona said. “When we confront him, he’ll have already experienced the day, so he will know exactly how to avoid us, kill us, or do whatever else he wants.”

“How do we stop someone that powerful?” Gilbert asked.

“We need to call Harrison and ask for help with that.”

“You already did.” Ulinthra came in with fanfare. “Last time I experienced this day, we spoke and decided to do nothing, so Reaver doesn’t know we’re working together. This time around, we’ll go at him, and he’ll never see you coming.”

“Who is this?”

“Mr. Boyce,” she replied. “It’s nice to meet you again for the very first time.”

“I’m sorry?”

“She relives days, just like Reaver.” Leona, always having to explain things to the lessers. “She is his counterpart.”

“Oh,” Gilbert smirked. “What have you been waiting for? If you could have stopped him at any time, why not do it?”

“We both relive days, but he has an advantage over me.”

“What would that be?” Aura asked.

“He’s more violent and scary. Remove time travel from the equation, and he is still a formidable opponent.”

Mateo echoed a line he had said when they first met, “fair enough. What do we do?”

“I don’t know,” Ulinthra said bluntly. “I’ve done my part. I helped you yesterday, so that you could change the timeline today. What you do with that is your decision, but know that I will not help you again. This is your one and only favor. Besides when I lent Harrison to you for several years.”

“Assuming we fail,” Leona began, “why would you not help again? Do you not want to stop him as much as we do?”

“He contacted me after getting out of prison. I don’t attack him directly, and he leaves me alone. You’re my loophole. I suggest you not waste your opportunity.” Ulinthra walked away, refusing to explain herself further.

“I thought she was supposed to have changed her ways,” Mateo said.

Leona watched as Ulinthra was leaving. “You can add some croutons, but you can’t turn chicken shit into chicken salad.”

Theo laughed. “Well said, little sister.”

“I’m never going to get used to you being older than me.”

“Honey, I was older than you before I was born.”

Changing the subject, Aura declared, “I’m coming with you, so if we’re going to Tasmania, I’ll need time to pack.”

Frida appeared out of nowhere. “No. They go alone.”

A stunned Aura tried reaching out to her daughter, but she was gone again too quickly. “Aquila...”

“What was that? Why did she leave so quickly? Is she coming back?” Samsonite was devastated.

“She is a choosing one,” Leona said with her eyes squinted on the spot where Frida was once standing. “But there must be some kind of hierarchy. Her brief jumps allow her to say something in a hundred and forty characters or less, but the others don’t let her stay too long. That’s just my hypothesis, though.”

“Mateo,” Aura said, holding on to his shoulders so that he was focused on her. “If your sister wants you to do something, then do it. But keep your phone with you.”

Because of the curve of the Earth, the trip to Tasmania was taking them over Antarctica. Mateo, Leona, and Gilbert sat in their seats without speaking as the artificial intelligence with no programmed personality continued flying them towards their destination. But then something went wrong, as one might expect for the couple. There were just no easy days. Not for them. Not anymore. With no warning, the aircraft lurched and shuddered. All of the electrical systems shut down at once, sending them shooting towards the surface. But they were not falling as steeply as Mateo would have thought. “What’s happening?” They were urgently but not chaotically getting into their parachutes.

“Safety measures!” Leona explained. “The plane will crash, but it will glide to a certain degree before that happens! Open the escape hatch carefully.”

Gilbert crawled over and tried opening the hatch, but it wasn’t working. He struggled with it for a few moments before the nose tipped down. Leona and Mateo rolled towards the front, but Gilbert was able to hold on to the door handle. He grabbed the fire extinguisher from the wall as the other two were trying to climb back up to meet him. He banged on the latch over and over again, but Mateo couldn’t tell if he was making any progress. Just at the right time, he hit the latch one more time with as much strength as he possessed while the plane tipped over so that he was at the bottom. The added force caused the hatch to burst open and break off, pulling Gilbert out with it. Mateo wasn’t prepared for this either, and was sent hurtling out the opening, slamming his head on the edge as he was leaving.

Mateo woke up in a tent. “Leona!”

“Careful,” Gilbert insisted. “You banged your head pretty bad.”

“How did I get here?”

“Your parachute opened on its own just before reaching your lower limit. We’re somewhere in Antarctica. Near the sea.”

“Where is Leona?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where’s the plane, Boyce!”

“It’s a few klicks southwest of our position.”

“Was Leona on it when it crashed?”

“I couldn’t tell you. She isn’t responding to my calls, and the beacon doesn’t give me that information.”

“Why are we still here if we know where the plane is?”

“What did you want me to do? Drag you? I’m no spring chicken.”

“Well, I’m awake now, so let’s go.”

They packed the tent and set out to look for Leona. It was snowy and windy, but not as bad as Mateo would have expected. They were pretty far north, and due to climate change, Antarctica wasn’t getting any colder. “What the hell are those?” Mateo asked. The beach was full of crabs.

“King crabs,” Gilbert explained. “It’s a global warming thing. Just ignore them.”

Mateo was about to say something else when his phone rang. It was Leona. “Where are you?—It does?—How do I open that?” Leona had told him that their phones would provide them with each other’s coordinates. “Okay, I see you now. We’re not far away. We can meet in the middle.” They continued walking, but much faster now. After awhile, they began to hear a buzzing sound. “Leona what is that?—It could be Reaver.—I know it could be a rescue team, but we can’t take that chance.—You have to hide.—It’s not too late! Hide! It’s almost midnight central!”

They ran as fast as they could. Gilbert had trouble keeping up, but that didn’t matter. Mateo continued running until he could see Leona in the distance. But then he saw that the snowmobile in pursuit was growing closer to her. “You hide,” Leona instructed him from the phone. “I love you.” Leona put her phone away and stared at him, unmoving. Midnight struck and sent them to the future, which would have been a good thing if no one knew where they were, but the snowmobile driver had her coordinates, and when the three salmon reappeared in the timestream, they were waiting for her.

Mateo watched helplessly as Leona was being escorted into the aircraft. He began running again, but it was too late. The plane took off, leaving the other two behind.

“At least they didn’t take us as well,” Gilbert said after catching up.

“Don’t be so selfish,” Mateo spat back.

“It’s not selfish. It means Leona has a chance to be rescued. Call that Theo guy and ask him where Reaver is now.”

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