Spaghetti West: Childhood’s End (Part V)

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The mysterious local ship or space station was wasting time and resources trying to fire on Sugar’s ship. She had no offensive measures of her own, save for the hot pocket, which was currently empty because up until this point, they had no reason to conceal their heat signature. The defensive measures, however? Well, those were stacked to the ceiling. It was designed with an EM shield, a TP field, and a GD yield. The first one was the most common. Every interstellar vessel needed to have it, or compensate for it with an extremely robust—and costly—physical hull. The teleportation field was simple enough, but at the very least, it required knowledge of temporal manipulation in the first place. The geodesic yield was a different story altogether, and these strangers instantly assumed that Sugar’s ship would not be equipped with it.

The first two defensive methods were no match for extremely high-energy particles, which were sometimes known as exotic particles. They were just too small and too fast. Even an endless supply of power would make the task an improbable proposition. There was an entire star system called Toliman, which colonists avoided due to an unusually high concentration of ultra high-energy cosmic rays. To protect against them, you don’t just have to know about time travel, you have to have an intimate understanding of advanced spacetime mechanics.

The GD yield didn’t deflect these particles, it basically just moved out of their way. It warped spacetime around the ship, so that when particles attempted to collide with it, they instead passed around the breadth until reaching the other side. From the particles’ perspective, nothing happened—they simply maintained their respective constant vectors the whole time. This was the best way to handle it without going the transdimensional route because it prevented energy exchange, which would be the inevitable result of any means of deflection. Again, even if you had the power to simply swat the particles away, doing so would generate subatomic reactions that could result in secondary damage, especially at scale from trillions of these collisions.

The first thought these strangers had was to beam them with exotic particles. They didn’t ask questions, they didn’t assess the threat, they just fired. And instead of starting small, they went straight to one that most vessels would be powerless to survive. Whoever these people were, they were not nice, and they were not messing around. Someone would have to do something about that.

Sugar could have just stood there and waited them out, but now she was just pissed off. If they wanted to play dirty, she could get creative.

“So what are you doing?” Liselot asked her after Sugar quickly explained how they were able to protect themselves from the onslaught.

“I’m dialing down the GD yield,” Sugar explained.

“Won’t that hurt us?” Liselot pressed.

“It would,” Sugar said, “if I turned it off entirely, but I’m just creating a few billion collisions, the irony being that if they didn’t ever fire, I wouldn’t have any ammo against them. Until they showed up, we had no reason to mask our heat signature, so the heat shunt was off. I’ve now turned it on, and I’m diverting the energy to it. Once it builds, I’ll purge it and fire right back, targeting their weapons array as a warning. Every time they hit us, we’ll hit them back just as hard, like Sebastian Shaw.”

“Is that a band, errr...?” Liselot asked, trailing off.

Sugar stopped. “Where did you hear that?”

“I told you, I’ve never heard of him.”

“No, that phrase, is that a band, errr. That’s a common time traveler phrase. We say that all the time. I didn’t know it had made its way into the general population.”

“I don’t know that it has,” Liselot replied with a shrug. “It’s just something I said. Is it a secret code, or something?”

Sugar sighed and shook her head. “No. Never mind.” She looked back at her screens. “Hot pocket is full; that was fast.” She leaned over the console. “Unless you have any objections, I’ll fire it.”

“Do what you gotta do,” Liselot encouraged.

Sugar pushed the button. Their own energy beam was released from its hold all at once, hitting the supposed enemy so hard and fast that it didn’t have time to protect itself. That was what happened when engineers designed for offense; they sacrificed defense in service to it. They had diverted all of their power to the energy weapons so that their own EM shield was severely underpowered, and practically useless. In seconds, the weapons were disabled, leaving the strangers as sitting ducks.

A console began to beep. Liselot looked over to it. “I think they’re calling.”

“You’re my comms officer now. Go ahead and open a channel,” Sugar requested.

After Liselot did as she was asked, a woman appeared on the main screen. “This is Supreme Chancellor Gentry Ruvow. We attempted to end your lives quickly and painlessly, but you have chosen the difficult route. Please switch off all defensive and offensive systems, and prepare to be boarded. In exchange, my operatives will no longer make it painless, but we will still make it quick. If you resist or attack again, the full force of the Desulforudisian Guard will descend upon you, and nothing will keep them at bay. Respond now with your surrender.”

Sugar smiled. “Supreme Chancellor, we will not be surrendering—”

Gentry immediately closed the channel. The viewscreen turned black.

“This, kids, is why it’s sometimes necessary to bury the lede.” Sugar sighed. “Okay. The global address system we installed so we could reach out to all of Bida. Do you think you could modify it to address the planet down there, whether they call it Desulforudis, or whatever? I need to work on a few other things.”

“Yeah, if you could do it, I can do it,” Liselot agreed.

Meanwhile, a number of ships launched from their space stations, or even from the surface, all heading towards Sugar and Liselot. They would not be able to take them all on. Orbit was no longer a safe place to be. Sugar didn’t understand what these people had against Tau Ceti, but she was going to find out, no matter how much they resisted.

After a few minutes, Liselot said, “I’ve done it.”

“Great. Just in time.” Sugar flung the hardware identifier code over to Liselot’s workstation. “Route communications to this buoy. It’s equipped with its own miniature hot pocket, and can scramble regular radio waves on a quantum level, so they will not be able to trace it.”

“Where are we gonna be?” Liselot asked as she was uploading the new program, and taking the initiative to launch the buoy.

“On the surface. I have a nice little patch of land picked out for it. Well, it’s a building. Brace for minor atmospheric disturbance.” They didn’t need the equilibrium generator again this time, though entering an atmosphere always did throw off the artificial gravity controls, especially if done so quickly. This planet came with a protective teleportation barrier, but she rather easily bypassed it. The natives still didn’t understand who they were up against, and continued to underestimate the two of them.

In a moment, they were parked on top of the Capitol Building, which was where Ruvow was talking to them from. “Reopen the channel to that asshole first, not the whole planet yet.”

Liselot tapped on her screen, then nodded at Sugar.

“Supreme Chancellor? Supreme Chancellor, are you there?” Sugar asked. “Supreme Chancellor, I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re no longer where we were before. If you attempt to fire on us again, you will literally only be hurting yourselves. I suggest you answer so we can work this out. I realized my mistake when I first responded to you. I tried to be nice. I should have started with...I’m not fuckin’ around! Answer the goddamn phone, or I poison the well with your own people!”

Ruvow’s face reappeared on screen. “You insolent little—”

“No, you’re gonna listen to me now,” Sugar interrupted. “You have been sending us black hole after black hole after black hole, and when we show up to put a stop to it, you don’t even apologize? You just try to kill us? What kind of monster doesn’t even take a second to find out if they’re murdering innocent children on a school trip, or a hospital ship? That’s ignoring all the people you tried to kill on my home planet in the first place. I want an explanation, and I don’t want any more threats out of your little mouth.”

Ruvow narrowed her eyes. “We have not been sending you black holes. You have been sending them to us!” She started out calm before devolving quickly by the end.

Sugar shut her eyes in frustration. “Did you ever think that maybe that wasn’t us, and you should ask us about it first? Again, what kind of monster are you?”

“We don’t ask questions,” Ruvow replied. “If someone invades our space, we destroy them. That is our way. We have established ourselves in this system, and that should be enough. Merely being present makes you a threat. I don’t know if I believe the black hole weapons aren’t from you, but it doesn’t matter. Now exit your vessel and surrender to the operatives who are now surrounding you on the roof.”

Sugar pantomimed turning down the volume, prompting Liselot to do it for real. “I’ve heard of these people...total idiots. I thought we sort of bred them out of the population because they kept putting their hands on hot stoves and eating glass, but I guess some managed to survive long enough to invent the aerosol can.” She glanced over at navigation. “I know where we are now. We’re in another galaxy. My people call it Miridir, but you may know it as Andromeda XXI.”

“That is millions of light years away. How is it colonized?” Liselot questioned.

“It’s a long story,” Sugar began, “but this isn’t Dardius, which is the only planet I’m personally cognizant of as being populated here. I’m guessing this is some kind of offshoot faction from there...isolationists in the dark forest.”

“The dark forest hypothesis was virtually debunked centuries ago. If you want to keep people out of your home, you tell them that it’s your home, you don’t make it look available.”

“I know. Like I said, they’re stupid. But they’re also under attack. If they’re getting their own procession of KBHs, our conjecture of natural causes no longer sounds viable.” It wasn’t just happening to Tau Ceti, which meant the black holes were no accident. Only happening at one location? A tragedy, but at least it followed a plausible natural pattern. Many locations, each only experiencing one black hole? Okay, that would be even more believable because of the randomness. But two systems—constant bombardment? That was a directed attack. Someone wanted to hurt Tau Ceti, as well as the Desulforudisians, and perhaps understanding their common thread would tell them who. Who would have motive to destroy them both when the two worlds were millions of light years apart, and had not even heard of each other?

“Volume back up, please,” Sugar ordered. She looked back at the Supreme Chancellor, who was still sitting there, surprisingly patient. “Someone is attempting to hurt us both. We have a saying where I’m from. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

“We have a similar saying. It goes, the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy. I can have more than one enemy, and do. All are enemies.”

“Well, that’s quite a mouthful but... Suit yourself.” Sugar turned her head. “Lise, open a global channel now. I wanna talk to everyone who lives here.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 15, 2497

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Like a bunch of idiots, Team Matic lost the plot. Ramses and Leona were absorbed in trying to understand neutrinos, and everyone else was just relieved to have their friends back. They totally forgot the only question that mattered. Who was the scary neutrino monster, and how were trillions of neutrinos sentient? As simple of an explanation as there was for their profound overestimation of the intelligence of these subatomic particle clusters, that thing’s awareness of its surroundings could not be in doubt. It was shaped like a person. It moved like one, and at one point, it was reportedly trying to communicate. It had a mind of some kind, perhaps as a disembodied consciousness that attracted, or could control, the neutrinos, like Buddy. They had to go back to Dome 216 for more answers.

“It’s...gone,” Olimpia stated the obvious. They were standing in the space between domes, exposed to the harsh environment that was Castlebourne’s natural state. There should have been a geodesic dome here, but it was just a deep crater under open space. They didn’t know that it was going to be like this. Out of an abundance of caution, Mateo insisted on taking Romana back to Castledome for medical treatment. She was only exposed to the vacuum for a few seconds before her suit automatically formed itself around her to protect her, but she wasn’t expecting it, and could still be suffering from the effects. Hers wasn’t an upgraded substrate designed to withstand such deadly conditions unaided.

“This is it,” Leona said. “We’re where it once was. Hrockas completely destroyed it somehow.”

Ramses was checking his sensors. “No radiation, so he didn’t blow it up.”

“Could they have dismantled it?” Marie asked. “I mean, it’s been a whole year for everyone else.”

“Baudin could have taken the dome itself down relatively quickly,” Leona explained. “That’s not the problem. The question is what would have left this crater. Maybe they dug it out to be certain that all of those dark particles were gone.”

“We could go ask,” Angela offered.

“I already tried, we’ve been cut off,” Leona contended,

“What? Why?”

“It’s nothing personal,” Leona went on. “He just has to focus on the upcoming grand opening event. We’re no longer in the inner circle. We claimed to be leaving a few years ago, so he wasn’t expecting us to still be here.”

“So the neutrino monster is his problem now,” Marie decided, “and we can finally leave.”

“I still have questions,” Ramses complained.

Leona patted him on the shoulder. “You always will. This isn’t our home. We’ve overstayed our welcome, and we gotta go.”

They didn’t leave right away. Leona allowed Ramses to take some soil samples, and other residual readings. Everyone else on the team spent the rest of the day seeing their loved ones one last time. Mateo focused on his other two daughters, but also spent a little time with his once-parents, Aura and Mario, his once-brother, Darko, and Darko’s daughter, Dar’cy. She showed up a couple years ago, but never reached out to them, for whatever reason. They didn’t even know if she still had all her special powers, which Dubra lost when her consciousness was transferred to her new body.

Goodbyes were always hard, and they never seemed to last long enough, but at some point, they just had to decide that it was over. They congregated on the outside of Ramses’ lab. To protect it, he trapped it in a temporal bubble, sunk it into the ground, and disguised it as an unremarkable rock formation. These weren’t holograms, but solid objects. People knew that it was around here somewhere, but perhaps they would forget precisely where, and after being unable to find it, give up, and move on. Or they would indeed make their way into the rooms, and cause some damage. The team couldn’t live their lives in the what-ifs, so they washed their hands of it, and teleported away.

They were floating in orbit now. Well, they weren’t really in orbit. They were just fully outside the atmosphere, and in freefall. Since they had no means of propulsion, they would eventually burn up in the atmosphere and die if they didn’t leave. They could hang here for a moment, though, and admire the planet from such an amazing vantage point.

“Do you think we’ll ever come back here?” Romana asked. She was all better now. Space exposure was an easy fix these days.

“It’s almost inevitable,” Ramses mused. “We always go back.”

“Really?” When’s the last time you were in Egypt?”

Ramses pointed. “I think that’s Giza.” It was impossible to tell from this elevation, but it could have indeed been the replica of the Great Pyramids that Baudin built under one of the domes.

Some of them chuckled. Then they continued to fall, and watch the ground get just a little bit closer. “Y’all ready for this?” Leona asked, knowing that they didn’t have much time left before it became unsafe even for them.

“I’ve been running diagnostics on the tandem slingdrives,” Ramses said. “They look good. We’re in the violet.”

“Okay,” Leona said. “Yalla.”

They decided to follow through with their plan to fly blindly by merely activating the slingdrives, and letting it send them wherever. They weren’t going to navigate, or think about where they wanted to go. They wanted fate to take over, come what may. The web of technicolors formed around them, and sent them away.

They emerged from the quintessence cocoon in a room. It was dark, with the only lights appearing over what looked like an altar on the far wall. There were other objects around them, like tables and glass cases, but it was hard to make anything out. There weren’t any dark particles flying around them, though, so they were presumably not in the neutrino dimension again. Ramses looked at his arm interface. “Atmosphere: Earth perfect. No toxins detected.” He collapsed his helmet back into his neck. Everyone followed suit, so to speak.

As soon as they were exposed to the air, an alarm blared, and a red light flashed. They all passed out at the same time, and fell to the floor.

Mateo Matic woke up in his bed. He gently lifted the blanket and sheets off of his body so he wouldn’t wake up his wife, but it was too cold in the room. Most women preferred it to be warmer than men, but Leona was the opposite. She kept turning the thermostat down. Part of him thought that maybe she did it so he wouldn’t sneak out of bed every morning. She was right about that. He quivered, and put the covers back down. Five more minutes wasn’t gonna hurt anyone. Besides, what was the boss gonna do? Fire him? He was the boss!

Leona groaned and turned over. When she saw that her husband was still there, she smiled and nuzzled his neck. Then she grabbed him by the shoulders. “I’ve trapped you!”

“Oh no!” he cried jokingly. “What can I do to escape you?”

“Kiss me.”

He kissed her.

She took her lips off of his, and tilted her head all the way back away from. “No! I know what that kiss means! That’s a goodbye kiss!” she complained.

He really did have to go. He was onboarding a new assistant today, and needed some time to get some actual work done before she came in. They didn’t make him Fleet Commander of the Central Midwest because he couldn’t make it to his destinations on time. “I promise to be home in time for dinner.”

“Good. Romana’s cooking, and she’ll be disappointed if you don’t make it.”

“I’m sure it’ll be great.” He gave her another goodbye kiss, then jumped out of bed, shivering all the way into the bathroom.

Once he was finished getting ready, he ran downstairs to catch his ride. Of course, as the big man on campus, he could absolutely afford his own car, but he wanted to support his own business, and stay in touch with his people. He always called a driver so the public would know that he believed in his company. He wasn’t famous, per se, but if he were ever to be interviewed—say, by the local news—hopefully this would help his image. He didn’t know, maybe it was stupid, but it was important to him.

“Dad, you’re missing breakfast again.”

“Sorry, I gotta go. Boyd M. is coming, and you know how obsessed he is with his q stats.”

“Wait, give me a kiss,” Romana urged, tapping her own cheek.

When he leaned it to kiss her, she faked him out, and stuffed a piece of toast in his mouth. “Thanks, honey,” he said, grabbing it with his hand so it wouldn’t fall to the floor.

“Most important meal of the day!” she said as she was running back off to the kitchen. “Your tea is by the door!”

Mateo’s watch dinged. “Thanks again!” He ran outside to find Boyd M.’s car waiting for him on the street, next to the driveway.

“Hi, neighbor!” It was one of the Walton twins, digging around in her flowers. Actually, they were his flowers, but she had a lot of time on her hands, so he never complained about her crossing the property line. He could never tell her apart from her sister, mostly because they lived together, always matched their outfits, and acted like the same woman. If he hadn’t ever seen them both at the same time, he would think she was just a crazy person who sometimes wanted to be called a different name.

“Hi...you.”

“Say hi to me too!” the other twin asked after appearing from behind a bush.

“Hi to me too!” Mateo joked. He walked over to the car, and shook his head. “We talked about this, Boyd. You’re only gonna be here for thirty seconds. Park in the driveway. If someone needs you to move, you move!”

“Your door is on the left side of your driveway,” Boyd defended. “Studies have shown that they prefer to step into our cars from the passenger side.”

“Okay, I personally don’t care about walking around, but a solution would be to take a moment to back in.”

“You got it, boss.”

“Great.” He opened the front door, and climbed in. A regular customer wouldn’t do this, but Boyd was his employee. They needed to be on the same level here. It was about respect. Speaking of which, Mateo noticed that Boyd was looking around Mateo’s head, back at the house. Mateo turned to see the curtain in the parlor fall back into place. “She’s sixteen,” he reminded him.

“What? I was just admiring your flowers. Tulips?” Boyd cleared his throat uncomfortably, and began to drive away.

“Daisies.”

The regional RideSauce branch wasn’t too far away. Once he secured this promotion, Mateo could pretty much live wherever he wanted within this region, and they would find affordable office space to accommodate him. Not every region had a local office, but it was growing in popularity in recent years. That was what set them apart from their competitors. They only had corporate offices. They didn’t care about their drivers, and never reached out to the communities. Their drivers weren’t even considered real employees, but contractors. There was this whole lawsuit surrounding the status of their personnel, which cost these other companies millions. RideSauce managed to avoid all of that by treating their workers with the respect they deserved from the very beginning. It was why they were now number one in this country, as well as in many others. Boyd stopped in front of the door, and let him out.

“Thanks! Five stars!” Mateo found his new hire waiting at the door. “Miss Sangster, you’re early.”

“If you’re early, you’re on time; if you’re on time, you’re late; if you’re late, you’re fired.”

Mateo smiled as he was starting to unlock the door. “We don’t operate like that here. We’re more chill. But I appreciate the initiative.”

Before he could manage to unlock the door, it opened. His engineer, Ramses was on the other side. “You’re a bit late, boss.”

“Then I guess I’m fired.” He gave Olimpia wink. “Come on in.”

Before this, Olimpia was living in Lincoln, Nebraska. Until today, they had only ever spoken on video chat. So she needed a tour of the offices. It didn’t take long. He took it seriously, but still casually. “This is the congregation area, where we can talk to drivers if there are any questions, comments, or concerns. This is the front desk, you’ll probably spend a lot of time here. Kitchenette to the right, bathroom to the left.” He gave her the side-eye. “Sorry, there’s only one, but there are only three of us, so we should be fine. That back there is the server room, which is Ramses’ workspace, and that’s my cubicle. There’s technically a basement, but we’re only allowed to use it in case of a tornado emergency. It connects to a store next door called Pregger Craves, which uses it for storage.”

“Pregger Craves? What does that mean?”

“They’re open 24/7, and only sell foods that are most commonly associated with pregnancy cravings. You got your ice cream, but you also have...pickles.”

“Oh, that’s what that smell is.”

Mateo chuckles. “I give it a year.” There was a short awkward pause. “Well, you can drop your bag down anywhere. Rambo, please make sure her computer is set up how she wants it.” He turned around while he was taking a sip of his tea, and gazed out the window. “Let’s keep the Midwest moving,” he said to himself.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 14, 2496

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“Anything?” Mateo asked.

“Nothing,” Leona replied.

“Where could they possibly be?” he went on. “You need at least three people to make the new slingdrives work, if it even works at all.”

“Maybe he was wrong about it,” Olimpia offered. “Maybe it works with only two.”

“We should still be able to detect them,” Leona reasoned, “wherever and whenever they are.”

“Unless they’re shrouded in dark particles,” Mateo pointed out.

“Yeah, that’s my hypothesis,” Leona agreed, “but Ramses’ systems are being finicky with me. I technically have access, but it’s...argh!” She didn’t want to have to explain the complexities of it all, and she didn’t have to.

“If it is dark particles, you know who we can call,” Angela said.

“Won’t work,” Marie countered as she was walking back in from the other room. “Buddy was here. He disappeared with them.”

“How do you know?” Leona questioned. “The surveillance was garbled.”

“I didn’t look at the footage from the lab. I looked at the recordings from the drone in Dome 216.” She lifted her hands, and projected a hologram of the video recordings from Dome 216 last year. They could see Buddy standing there with Romana and Ramses. There was no sound, and it wasn’t detailed enough to read their lips, but their body language appeared nonconfrontational. None of the others remembered experiencing angry emotions from this moment, though there was some agitation leading up to it, if they were remembering correctly. As the three of them were standing there in the desert, the dark particle creature appeared out of nowhere, and seemingly tried to kill Buddy. It kind of looked like Romana was trying to save him, further reenforcing the idea that they were not at odds at this moment. Marie closed the hologram with a drop of her hands after the creature grabbed Romana and disappeared, and the other two left, presumably to rescue her.

“You gotta fix that machi—” Mateo began.

“I know,” Leona interrupted. Then she sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“I know that you love her too,” Mateo acknowledged. “I’m just sick of worrying about her.”

“I don’t think that ever goes away,” Olimpia said.

“There’s another possible way to find her,” Angela began. “Maybe we don’t need Buddy. Ramses has given us all we need.”

“You wanna use the tandem slingdrives, and hope that they take us where we’re trying to go, even though we don’t know where exactly that is,” Leona guessed.

“If it doesn’t work, we’ll try again,” Angela reasoned. “If we can’t navigate back here for another attempt, it probably means that it never mattered if we knew where they were, because they’re probably out of range, and the tandem slingdrives don’t work right.”

Leona sighed, and looked back over to the screen. The computer was trying to find them just as it had when Buddy abducted Romana years ago. “I don’t know if this thing is good enough. That seems to be an entire person made out of dark particles. It could be orders of magnitude more powerful than the stasis field that Buddy put Romana in before.”

“Is that a yes?” Angela asked.

“I would have preferred to test the tandem slingdrives in a more controlled situation, but you make a good point that that doesn’t really exist. The whole purpose of these things is to push the boundaries of intergalactic travel. If we get lost, that was always going to be the result, and we’ll be no further from locating Rambo and Romana than we are now.”

“The great thing about these suits he made for us, we’re never not ready to go.” Mateo mused.

Olimpia interlocked her arm with his. “As long as we have each other.”

“They could be in a harsh environment,” Leona warned. “Suit up.”

Mateo released his emergent nanites, and commanded them to turn mostly green. He now looked strikingly like Green Arrow. When Leona looked at him funny, he shrugged and said, “she loved this show.”

“She had time to watch it?” Leona questioned.

Marie looked at the time readout on her interface. “Eleven, ten, nine...”

Everyone shut themselves up safe in vacuum mode, though Mateo kept the superhero costume on over it to keep things light. If he didn’t laugh, he would cry. No one lost track of their children as many times as he had. Put a bell on her, he thought to himself. Well, she had a bell. A psychic bonding bell, which should always let them know where the other one was. These dark particles were incredibly frustrating, and how funny it should be that they would come into their lives around the time the quantum connection was too. Their fates were sealed, whether they were aware of it or not.

Marie finished counting down, and they all slung away, concentrating on nothing but Ramses and Romana’s location. It looked like they were still in the lab, but it was very different. It was a hell of a lot darker, and these flashlights that looked like forearm weapons weren’t doing them much good. They couldn’t make out any details in the room around them, it just had the vague shape of everything back home. The right angles of the tables, desks, and chairs; the curve of the gestational pods in the corner; the height of the ceiling. They were here, but not here, kind of like the Upside Down. Everything was just a shadow of its true self, nothing more than a slight hint of its presence. Shadows, really. They could call this a shadow realm. It was very much like that in more ways than one. This was seemingly where the dark particles lived. They were swarming all around them, not paying the humans much attention, but clearly aware of their sudden appearance, however complex their intelligence might be.

Something was coming at them from the darkness. It was moving steadily, and maybe a little threateningly, but not too quickly. Before it reached them, it split in two. Shortly after that, they could be recognized as people; people wearing EmergentSuits. It was Ramses and Romana. Nice, it worked. Ramses took Mateo by the hand. He was already holding Romana’s. She took Marie’s, and together with everyone else, they completed the circle. With nothing more than a sense of homesickness, and no words exchanged, they reactivated the tandem slingdrives, and left this place as quickly as they had come. They were back in the lab; the real lab, complete with light and solid objects.

Ramses collapsed his helmet, and fell to his knees, sliding on the floor a few centimeters. At first, they thought he was hurt, but he was positively ecstatic. He was laughing and crying simultaneously, holding his arms up and to the side like he had just won Olympic gold, panting, both relieved and proud. No one had a clue what was going on. Romana was just as perplexed as the rest. “Oh my God. Yes! Yes! That’s it! I finally figured it out! I saw it! Me! Well, Romana and I, but I understand it. Whew!” he whooped.

“What happened in there?” Mateo asked his daughter.

“I don’t really know,” she replied. “We couldn’t talk, but he was super excited the whole time. He kept tapping on the interface modules of his suit. I’m guessing he was taking readings, but who knows?”

Ramses was still laughing. “Yeah. I was taking readings, all right.” He stood up, all giddy and cheerful. “I know what it is. I know what it all is.” He squealed. “I have to write it down.” He rushed to find the nearest device.

“Care to share with the class?” Leona asked.

“Yes, class first. Then the paper.” He clapped, then started gesturing with his hands as he prepared his remarks. “Neutrinos.”

“Neutrinos?” Leona echoed. “Are you saying that that’s what the dark particles are?” She didn’t seem to believe him. She was the only one who was following him even remotely.

“Yes.” Oh, Ramses was still so jazzed about this whole thing, whatever it was.

“That doesn’t make any sense. They’re subatomic particles. You can’t see them.”

“I was wrong,” Ramses went on. He kept talking with his hands. “I thought that they were lifeforms, which were replicating, but that’s not it. They don’t breed, they congregate. They form masses. They’re like...snowflakes; water adhering to a mote of dust, and clumping together until it becomes too heavy to stay up.”

“So, a dark particle isn’t a neutrino. It’s billions of neutrinos.”

“Exactly. But not like water forming on a mote of dust—”

“You literally just said that that’s what it’s like,” Angela reminded him.

“I know, but not really,” Ramses insisted. “It’s more like...a whole bunch of neutrinos who happen to be on the same trajectory as each other. They emit some kind of energy. Individually, it’s negligible, but combined, we can actually see it. We perceive it. It’s dark, because neutrinos don’t interact with photons very well either, but these bursts of energy, firing in rapid succession, do occasionally repel light like a solid object would. Again, it appears dark, because it’s a minuscule amount, but it is technically visible. For fractions of a second, but as I said, when they get close enough to each other, these bursts are happening all the time. Normally, you don’t see it, because we can’t see the neutrino dimension, but Buddy can...call them forth.” He pointed while adding, “and so can Romana.”

He was talking real fast, but no one bothered to ask him to slow down, because they didn’t understand him either way. Except for Leona. She knew what he was saying, she just  couldn’t believe it. She crossed her arms, but didn’t say anything else for now.

“So, they’re not alive?” Romana asked.

“No, as I said, I was wrong. They just seemed to be that way, because baryonic matter freaks them out. No, that’s personifying them again. They’re not used to baryonic matter, because they usually pass right through it, but in these clumps, and with some sort of weird charge that Buddy can artificially generate, they do find themselves running into us.”

“That doesn’t make any sense either,” Leona pointed out. “The particles move around people. That requires some level of sentience.”

“Yeah, I was thinking about that. I don’t think they’re diverting with any semblance of intent. I think as soon as this energy comes into contact with normal matter, they split off into different directions, ultimately colliding with other clusters, and forming new temporary trajectory masses. It only looks to us like they’re swarming, because we can’t effectively track one clump at a time. They don’t have to hit us directly, because a sufficiently concentrated layer of air is all around us at all times. To us, it’s meaningless, but it’s like a wall to them. I thought they were disappearing and reappearing, and I was sort of right. They don’t hold together for very long, but they do form clumps constantly during this charged condition. I would really love to get my hands on Buddy, and see how he does it. I may have learned all I can from Romana.”

“Where is Buddy, by the way?” Olimpia asked. “We saw you with him on the drone cam in Dome 216.”

Ramses brushed it off. “Oh, I dunno, we lost him in there. He could still be trapped for all I know, or he knew exactly how to escape. I’m sure he’ll show up again at some point.”

“Hold on,” Leona said, still unconvinced. “Where were we? What was that place? The neutrino dimension? That’s where they live? Why? Seems random.”

“It’s not,” Ramses continued his lesson. “Let’s say you have a vacuum-sealed room with two doors. There’s a screen door, and then the fully sealed door. When you open the sealing door, only the screen door remains, which allows the air to rush through the screen, and into the room. That’s because nature abhors a vacuum. As you know, neutrinos don’t interact with electromagnetism, or the strong nuclear force. The dimensional barrier is apparently made up of one or both of these, which is why the neutrinos pass into it. It’s just like entropy, where a state of order naturally flows into a state of disorder. It wasn’t made for neutrinos specifically, but those are the particles that go into it, because nothing can stop them. And they don’t usually come back out, because there’s so much space in there.”

Romana tapped on her arm interface. “Yeah, that was my interpretation too.” She lifted her arm up. “That’s what it says here, neutrino clumps.”

Mateo laughed. “You’re adorable. Like a young me.”

“Why are you dressed like Green Arrow?” she asked.

“Why aren’t you dressed like Speedy?”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 13, 2495

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Ramses was doing a lot of things at the same time today. He deployed a sophisticated drone to fly around Dome 216, and try to figure out what was going on. There was inexplicable life support in there. Obviously simply sealing a dome up didn’t automatically make it habitable. Hrockas had a complex network of tubes piping in oxygen, nitrogen, and other gases. An AI managed all of this, making sure that compositions remained at optimal levels. Some of the oxygen came from the natural thin atmosphere native to Castlebourne while the rest was from various electrolytic processing plants placed strategically between the inhabited domes. Carbon scrubbers then recycled this air as needed. Ideally, they would just be growing plantlife to do this all for them free of charge, but that kind of infrastructure was a very long-term plan.

Dome 216 had no such gas pipelines. They were installed years ago, but ultimately removed and repurposed elsewhere. Nothing should be alive in here, yet as the drone surveyed the land in greater detail than its predecessor, it found not only breathable air, but also desert plants. Either someone was sneaking in, and making changes to this environment, or there was something fishy going on. In addition to preparing the team for their departure with their new tandem slingdrive array, Ramses was examining Romana to see how she was involved. There was a...dark particle monster lurking in the mysterious dome, and it theoretically came from her. But how?

“How indeed?”

 Ramses covered up his patient. She had to be undressed for him to scan her entire integumentary system properly. They still didn’t really know how her dark particles were released, or exactly where they lived when they weren’t swarming around. “Hrockas, this is highly inappropriate, you can’t just burst in whenever you want.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, this is my planet. All of this belongs to me.”

Ramses didn’t respond to this. Yes, Hrockas technically owned Castlebourne, but it was its namesake, Vendelin Blackbourne who initiated construction of the domes before he died and joined Team Keshida. A great deal of the work since then was completed by others, particularly Ramses himself, and Baudin Murdoch. Hrockas’ contribution was not nothing, but it wasn’t singular either.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”

“How did you get into this sub-lab? You shouldn’t even know about it.”

“I have particles of my own,” Hrockas replied. “Keeping watch...taking notes.”

Ramses nodded. “Smartdust. I should have had my countersurveillance protocols account for that. I guess I just trusted you too much. I won’t make that mistake again.”

Hrockas chuckled. “Intentional obsolescence has gotten me out of a lot of jams. Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to give me their secrets.”

Ramses looked around. “I was getting sick of this place anyway. It’s time to move on. What did you come in for anyway?”

“I was just checking on your progress. She tell you anything?”

“She can speak for herself,” Romana argued. “And no. I don’t know anything.”

“I meant, his little tests. Have they given you any insights?”

“Thank you. You can go now,” Ramses said to him pointedly. They would tell Hrockas what he deserved to know, when they were ready for him to know it.

“Fine. I’ll go.”

“You can take your smartdust with you,” Ramses added.

“Okay.” Hrockas patted himself on the hip, and spoke in a high-pitched tone, “come on! Let’s go, little motes. Come on! Come on!” He was smirking as he walked through the holographic door backwards.

“Hey, thistle,” Ramses said. “Purge the dust for me.”

“Certainly, sir.” The biohazard decontamination protocols rained hell over the little guys, destroying all forms of minuscule surveillance, as well as all other visual security measures.

“Did my body tell you anything?” Romana asked once the purge was over.

He rolled a cart around so she could see what was on the monitor. “You have an aura.” The screen was showing Romana in silhouette, as well as a hazy second shadow surrounding her. To the untrained eye, it would look like nothing more than a regular second shadow, created by an additional source of light. But when Romana moved around, this aura followed her nonuniformly. It was sometimes lagging behind, and sometimes clearly ahead, predicting her future movements perfectly.

“So it’s always there, just invisible.”

“It would appear so.”

“Could you take—I dunno—a biopsy, or something?”

“Not invisible as in, a trick of the light. They seem to exist in a parallel dimension, just as we always suspected. This is where they multiply.”

“Are they alive?” Romana pressed.

He threw up a hologram containing a list. It was the eight requirements for life. He pointed towards each one like a schoolteacher. “To be alive, an entity must have complex organization, metabolize chemically, maintain homeostasis, grow, reproduce, respond to stimuli, adapt or evolve, and contain coded information.” He swiped at the image. The list remained, but a couple of the items were crossed out, and a couple of them were highlighted, while others were left unchanged. “They don’t appear to be very complex, more like single-celled organisms. If they metabolize, they don’t necessarily do it chemically. Maybe they process...time, or other forms of energy? They do seem to be homeostatic. They hopefully don’t grow. They one hundred percent reproduce by some means. They definitely respond to stimuli. It’s too early to tell if they evolve. And I have no idea how to test for any equivalent to DNA.”

“Do they...get angry at you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you getting the sense that they don’t like when you run your tests on them?”

Ramses lifted his chin in curiosity, and peered at her. “Do you feel an anger around you? Do you think they’re angry?”

“When I get mad, even at someone I love, like my sisters, I feel...a power. I feel stronger. Maybe there’s more of them in those instances. Maybe that’s how they reproduce, by feeding off of the emotion.”

“I don’t know how one would go about feeding on emotion,” Ramses said, shaking his head as he was struggling to find any evidence to contradict his hypothesis, and support hers.

She looked down and to the side, but didn’t say anything.

“Have you talked to anyone about this before? Mateo, or your sisters?”

She didn’t look up. “I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what, that they would start to fear you?”

She waited to respond, but then she looked up. “Afraid of being encouraged, to embrace it. To use it.” She looked down again, and breathed out. “To exploit it.”

“Shit,” Ramses said, exasperated. “You’re afraid of becoming Buddy. Why weren’t we worried about this before? Of course you would feel some connection to him, however dark.”

“I don’t think he did this to me on purpose. I don’t think he understood what he was getting himself into, how it would affect someone with my biology, and what was it—my qualia?”

“I don’t think so either. Guy’s a dick, but I think he would have said something, or hinted at it.”

Romana looked over at the holographic wall. “What if that thing out there is... I don’t even wanna say it.”

“I think I know where you were going. Do you want me to say it?”

“No, but...someone should.”

“Our child.” Buddy was suddenly here. His swarm of dark particles were just finishing up retreating into their home dimension.

Ramses stepped between Buddy and Romana. “Do you spy on us?”

“Cocktail party effect,” Buddy said cryptically. “I know when people are talking about me. I tend to ignore it, but there was something different about this. I’ve been sensing your dark particles since you left. I thought it was just residual energy, but now I know better.” He started to step closer.

Ramses tensed up. “Whoa there, buckaroo billy.”

Buddy stopped. He was stoic, and maybe even respectful? “What I did to you was wrong; a violation. I didn’t see it that way at the time, but it’s my greatest regret. I recognize that I am seen as the villain; an antagonist. That was never my intention. I started out normal, just a little ambitious. But those ambitions grew, and took over. They became obsessions. I know it’s crazy to force people to go get me a fruit. Intellectually, that’s just dumb. I can’t think about anything else, though. It feels like my purpose in life, and if I ever manage to get it, I’m worried that my next obsession will be bad. What if I start fixating on vaporizing a whole planet, or turning everything into paperclips?”

“Why are you telling us this?” Romana questioned.

“Because it could happen to you, and you don’t deserve that. I didn’t. I was innocent...until I wasn’t. These things are toxic, and while it’s too late for me, I believe that you still have time.” He straightened up, and cleared his throat, giving himself a surge in self-assuredness. “I wanna help. I wanna fix this. It’s my mess, and my responsibility to clean it up.”

“We obviously can’t trust you,” Ramses reasoned. “The first time we encountered you was because you abducted our friends. And then the next time, you abducted her.”

“I know, and as I said, that was wrong. Don’t let her become the next me. Don’t let her do something like that to innocent people.”

“If what you’re saying is true,” Romana began, “then you’re just trading one obsession with another. Let’s say you fix what’s wrong with me, what happens to you then? Do you just go back to the way you were, coercing people into doing your bidding?”

“Like I was saying, I’m a lost cause,” Buddy reiterated.

“Well, what if you become obsessed with self-improvement?” she suggested.

“Well, that’s self-defeating, Romana, it would never work,” Ramses determined.

“No, I want to hear her out. You really think that I can choose my own obsession?”

Romana smiled. “I think that you’re choosing it right now, asking for me to let you help me.”

“I believe that he was asking me,” Ramses said, like an idiot.

She glared at him for a moment before returning her attention to Buddy. “Might as well give it a shot. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“He vaporizes the world with paperclips,” Ramses gibed.

“Thank you, you can go now,” Romana said to Ramses. He was being mean-spirited with Buddy, albeit plausibly justified. She was just joking, though, because she couldn’t do this without him. If anyone was going to figure out how to save her from her own dark particles, it was the one person in the timeline who both was smart enough, and cared for her. Buddy’s knowledge and experience were equally invaluable, and since he was offering it, they had little choice but to accept.

“All right,” Ramses relented. “If you want to help, I will set aside my reservations, and remain professional. But in the end, I still don’t trust you, and I will go to any lengths to protect my people from you.”

“I would expect nothing less,” Buddy acknowledged.

There was a pause in the conversation, which Ramses volunteered to break. “Do you have any ideas off the top of your head, errr...?”

“Yeah, I think it’s time for me to meet my child,” Buddy figured.

“Okay.” Ramses was immediately regretting his decision to be civil. “We don’t know if we should frame it that way. The dark particles that you gave her are hers now, and if she made a particle baby, that doesn’t mean it’s yours. Okay?”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Ramses knew that Buddy was being sarcastic, but that didn’t make his statement untrue. “I’m choosing to believe that you didn’t father a child with a fifteen-year-old girl.”

“She’s not fifteen anymore.”

“She was when you...impregnated her,” he shouted with airquotes. He threw up a little in his mouth.

“Okay, okay!” Romana cried, trying to shut down the argument. “Ramses is right. We’re not calling it anyone’s child. We’re not calling it a child. It’s a...fuck!”

Ramses calmed down. “We’ll just call it the particle entity. It doesn’t have to be an extension of you in any way for most discussions.”

“Great.” Buddy clapped his hands. “Let’s go meet—not my—but a particle entity.”

“That’s not the next step in this process,” Ramses told him.

“It is for me.” Buddy spun around, and disappeared into his dark particles.

“He’s gonna get himself killed,” Romana warned.

“No, wait!” Ramses knew what she was about to do. He growled after she called upon her own dark particles, and disappeared too. He teleported the regular way, grateful that he could always pinpoint her location.

They were now standing in a desert. A swarm of dark particles were flying around in the distance. Another swarm was farther down the hill in the opposite direction. According to the drone’s readings, they were multiplying faster than ever, and showing no signs of stopping. The particle entity, however, was nowhere to be seen. They still had time to get out of here before it spotted them. “It might kill us,” Romana contended.

“Then you should leave, so if it kills, it only kills me,” Buddy calculated.

“What if it kills you because it’s made up of my anger, and I’m angry at you?” Romana proposed.

While they were looking at him, Buddy was scanning the horizon, searching for the entity. “Then Team Matic will finally have defeated me, just as they once promised.”

“We should go,” Ramses said. “This is not the way. You start small, and work your way up to the more dangerous experiments. We do it like that for a reason.”

“That’s too cautious, not how I operate, and my efforts are about to pay off.” He was looking down at the ground a few meters away. Dark particles wafted up from the sand, forming themselves into a blob, which assembled into a humanoid figure. It developed approximations of human facial features, but only as creases and pits. It was a great example of body-horror. Its mouth moved. It was trying to speak, though no sound was coming out, probably because it didn’t have vocal cords, or anything else that a normal person would need to function as a living organism. Buddy gave it a Vulcan salute. “We are of peace...always.”

The entity jerked its head to focus on Buddy, reinforcing Ramses’ assertion that the particles were responsive to stimuli.

“I am your father,” Buddy said to it, much to everyone’s chagrin, including the entity’s.

It reached out, and took Buddy by the neck. It was trying to strangle the life out of him.

“I told you!” Romana yelled. She took the entity by its arm, and attempted to pull it off of Buddy, but it was superhumanly strong, and barely paying her any mind. She continued to pull while Ramses urged her to let go. “No! I am your mother, and you will do as I say!”

The entity released Buddy from its grasp, and stared at Romana. It was impossible to tell what it was thinking, or even if it was capable of thinking at all. Without any warning, the particles that it was made up of blew up like a balloon, and enwrapped her. They both disappeared.

“Do you know where she went?” Buddy asked Ramses after they were gone.

Ramses tried to focus on their bond to one another, but he wasn’t getting anything. Dark particles were evidently the one thing that could block the signal. “No.”

“I do.” Buddy walked towards him, almost menacingly, and transported them both away.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 12, 2494

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There was no need to worry about the new Minister of Foreign Affairs for Castlebourne. They didn’t know who she was prior to today, but she was already familiar with time travelers, a few in particular. Rochelle Sumner grew up with Dalton Hawk as he was living through multiple lifetimes. Curious about people like him, she started to be on the lookout for others, eventually running into Dave Seidel and Jesimula Utkin. She was actually with them in the past, trying to figure out how to transport a citrus fruit from the future at the behest of the villainous Buddy. Rochelle couldn’t or wouldn’t divulge whether they succeeded in this mission, but she had long since moved on. In more recent decades, she was trained as an Interstellar Charterwright, so it was her job to handle these situations specifically. The fact that she knew about time travel could have entirely been a coincidence, because it didn’t sound like she had concerned herself with such matters for the last few centuries.

While they were gone, Ramses’ machines finished all of the calculations and simulations for the new mini-slingdrives, but it was complicated. The components were successfully miniaturized, and shunted into specialized pocket dimensions. The problem was that they could not accrue enough quintessence on their own for an individual to make a jump. At least three people had to come together to combine their power. They should all be able to jump together at that point, which meant that the resulting power was more than the sum of its parts, but it was a limitation that the math simply could not overcome.

“I don’t like that word,” Angela decided.

“What would you have me call it?” Ramses asked.

She pursed her lips to the side, and looked up towards the ceiling with only her eyes. “A constraint?”

He laughed a little. “Okay. That’s our constraint. Three or more of us have to go together, which will allow us to theoretically split into two groups, but no more.”

“Can we take other people with us?” Mateo asked him. “Passengers?”

Ramses took an uncomfortably long time to respond. “The AI couldn’t figure that out. I can run as many simulations as you want, but it needs targeted data. It needs to know who these passengers are, and what’s up with their quantum and qualium realms. I can’t just iterate the variables. We would have to calculate each particular passenger, like they used to do with airplanes, when they needed to know everyone’s weight for safety.”

“Have you devised a way to gather this data, if we were to find ourselves in a situation where people are in need of being evacuated?” Leona asked.

“Yes,” he confirmed. “It’s a little slow, but I can improve the efficiency.”

“That’s good enough for me for now,” Leona determined.

There was a lull in the conversation. No one knew if they were going to leave this very moment, or after saying their goodbyes to everyone here, or even this year. Leona was still worried about her right to be the leader, so she couldn’t just order it. Fortunately, Romana appeared out of nowhere to break the ice. She showed up using the dark particles that she was now stricken with thanks to Buddy’s protracted abduction and imprisonment of her. “Good, you’re not gone yet. I wanna go with you.”

“With us?” Mateo asked. “We don’t even know where we’re going.”

“Yeah, that’s the point,” Romana agreed. “It’s time for me to move on from Team Kadiar. They can handle it without me.”

“It wasn’t about needing you,” Mateo argued. “You should be with your sisters. I can’t...for any extended period of time, but you have a choice.”

“Plus, you put the R in Kadiar,” Olimpia noted.

“We’re not the only three on the team,” Romana said. “It was never only about us, or the name.”

“We’re Team Matic, but more than half of us aren’t Matics,” Marie reminded everyone.

“Y’all wanna switch to Team Walton?” Mateo proposed.

“That’s okay,” Angela replied sincerely.

“I’ve spoken with my sisters,” Romana went on, getting back to the matter at hand. “They give me their blessings. We’re doing good work out there, it’s not like I hate it. It’s just that the operation has grown so much since we started. The Ex-Exins—we need to come up with a better name for them too—have become so much more involved. Kivi and Dubra are considering leaving as well, and just letting the refugees take care of themselves. Mirage would stay, as would Tertius, since their powers are paramount, but I would say that anyone else is interchangeable.”

“I would love to have you here,” Mateo assured her. “I’m not going to harp on how dangerous it will be, because you already know that, and it’s not like you’ve been living in a padded cell for the last several years. I just want to make sure you don’t walk away with any regrets.”

“It hasn’t been long for you,” Romana said, “but I’ve been seriously considering my options for a year, and questioning it for years prior to that. I’m not doing this on a whim.”

“Yeah, it’s hard for us to remember that,” Leona admitted. “Everything happens so fast from our perspective.” Another break in the conversation, though a short one. “Well, okay. You’ll need a suit. Ram, you have a regular IMS that’s fitted with all the slingdrive upgrades?”

“Actually,” Romana interrupted Ramses before he had a chance to speak. “Could I maybe get one of those...nanite suits? What do you call them...?”

“The EmergentSuit,” Ramses answered. His eyes darted over to Romana’s father. “I suppose you’re not a child anymore, and you can make that decision.”

Romana waited for a moment before tensing up with confidence “I have. This is also not on a whim. I don’t want the upgraded substrate like you all have, just the nanobot implants. I don’t know if I should have these dark particles in my body, but they’re part of me now, and I can’t risk losing them.” She looked over at Mateo now. “I hope you don’t disapprove.”

Mateo took a respectful moment to ponder his position, then decided to simply say, “your body, your choice.”

“Thank you,” she said softly.

Romana underwent the procedure in private with Leona, instead of with an audience like most everyone else. She had a harder time adjusting to the way her brain interfaced with the implants, and their nanites. She had less experience with that sort of thing. She spent a lot of the day practicing in the lab, during which Ramses realized that there was a flaw in his programming. They were optimized to the team’s physiology and neurology. They were walking around with posthuman bodies, and teleportation and illusion powers. Romana was in no risk of exploding, or something, but she wasn’t ever going to be good at using her new suit in its current state. Her software needed to be adapted to account for the differences between her and her friends. He finished it by the time the day was over, but there wasn’t enough time for them to leave Castlebourne for their little exploratory slingdrive jump. Still, Romana wanted to integrate herself into the team, so she chose to turn her pattern back on, and skip over the next year.

When they returned, it was July 13, 2495. Castlebourne was celebrating a major milestone in their development. For the first time ever, the percentage of domes in the Gamma testing phase exceeded the percentage that were still totally non-operational. While the domes currently still in Alpha and Beta testing would gradually go down as more and more people were given the opportunity to explore these worlds, the top number would probably remain largely unchanged moving forward. Using various methods, including crowdsourcing, ordered list iteration, AI creativity, and just plain sitting down and thinking about it, Hrockas had managed to come up with over 67,000 ideas for the various recreational and relaxation destinations. The other 16,000 or so just wouldn’t be original enough to warrant construction, and would be left there as barren deserts. There were many other deserts, but these ones were unplanned, bare, and unused.

It took some time, but Hrockas eventually accepted the fact that there would be empty areas. Four out of five domes did have something to brag about, and that was a pretty big deal. The only reason he chose to construct as many as he did was because that was close to how many could fit on the surface of the planet. It wasn’t like he came up with all of the ideas first. He was happy, and so were the residents. The population from the Goldilocks Corridor was still growing at a steady rate. The ones already here held a vote, and agreed to call themselves Castlebourners. They were here to start new lives, and build a new civilization. Language mattered, and tying themselves to where they escaped from by calling themselves Ex-Exins—or by the designations of their planets of origin—wasn’t helping them move forward.

“Why are you telling them about this?” Hrockas questioned Aeolia when he finally came into the room.

“I’m trying to get them up to speed,” she defended. She was taking charge of the briefing while Hrockas was busy with other matters.

“I don’t care about that. They need to see that desert, and explain what the hell is happening there.”

“What’s happening in what desert?” Leona asked.

Hrockas took wide strides over to the holo-wall on the other side of the conference table. He switched it on. It was showing a nude beach located in the South Ocean. “Who the hell was watching this?” he questioned, frustrated as he was trying to find the right feed on his handheld device. “Here.” He changed it to the view from a flying drone, looking down at one of those deserts that they were talking about. It wasn’t natural, though, as was the majority of Castlebourne outside of the domes. It was sandy and duney. And there was something else.

Leona leaned forward and peered at the screen. “Are those...?”

“Dark particles?” Romana finished the question with a gulp. There were tons of them, flying over the surface, morphing and turning like starlings.

“That’s what they look like to me,” Hrockas responded. “Care to explain?”

“Which dome is that?” Romana asked.

“It’s Dome 216. A meteorite crashed through it years ago, and I never bothered repairing it. I just marked it for disuse, and moved on to 217.”

With fear in her eyes, Romana looked over at her father. “It’s mine. That’s the one I used to release the excess energy I have pent up when I’m not skipping time, or teleporting, or whatever.”

“You always go into the same dome?” Mateo asked her.

“It was in disuse,” Romana explained.

“How is there an atmosphere?” Olimpia asked.

“Oh yeah, if there’s a breach...” Romana posed to Hrockas.

“You tell me. There’s not supposed to be an atmosphere, I can’t believe I didn’t notice. Maybe it has something to do with what you do in there? Some kind of weird form of electrolysis?”

“I purge the energy,” Romana repeated. “It doesn’t really even look like I’m releasing dark particles. It’s more of a transparent wave that distorts space around me. It’s a very private experience, and I don’t talk about it. It shouldn’t be making oxygen, though. I have no idea what’s going on.”

“Ramses, you need to go there and see what data you can get,” Leona ordered.

“No,” Romana and Hrockas argued at the same time. “It’s too dangerous,” Hrockas continued. “I’ve sealed it off; placed it in its own quarantine.”

“I’ll send a probe,” Ramses negotiated.

“There’s already one in there,” Hrockas said, pointing to the feed.

Ramses chuckled. “I’ll send a better one than that paper airplane you got roaming around the skies.”

“Please do,” Hrockas said.

They started to get up to return to their respective duties when Marie noticed something. “That paper airplane just spotted a person out there.”

“Computer, zoom in,” Leona commanded.

The camera zoomed in towards the ground. It wasn’t a person, more of a silhouette...made of dark particles. If it had any approximation of eyes, though, it was staring up at them.

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