The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 31, 2513

« < » > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Flow text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3

Come midnight central, Leona, Angela, and Romana didn’t jump forwards to the future, proving that they were no longer on their time patterns. That was a week ago. Mateo never did come through the lake. Something was terribly wrong on his end. Nerakali said that she would look into it, but communicating with the afterlife simulation was tricky. It still existed in another universe, and getting through that Angry Fifth Divisioner’s thick quintessence membrane wasn’t easy. They took a suite in the Crest Hotel, and had sort of been lounging about, trying to wrap their brains around their new reality. Mateo was dead, and probably never coming back, and they were stuck in the present for the rest of their lives. It made them feel uncomfortable, even Romana, who should have been more used to it.

Leona had fallen asleep on the couch in the middle of the day, but something woke her up. “What’s that noise?” she groaned, not even opening her eyes.

“Sorry, I’m just watching TV,” Romana said, turning it down. “I didn’t know it would get so loud at this part.”

Bleary-eyed, Leona propped herself up on one shoulder, and tried to focus on the screen. “Is this SG Multiverse?”

“Yeah, did you watch it way back when?”

Leona chuckled and pointed. “That happened to me.”

“What?”

“What she’s doing right now. I did that. I had to cut my legs off. It was based off this show.”

Romana looked at her funny. “Are you messing with me?”

Angela walked in from the other room. “Mister Stark,” she began. “I don’t feel so good.” Dark particles swarmed around her, and she disappeared.

Leona barely reacted. She just looked over at her daughter. “Well. Boyd better have a damn good reason for this.” They both disappeared through dark particles too.

“The thing you have to understand about sling travel is that it’s not as quick as everyone thinks. It’s more like you leave time, and your mind can’t comprehend that. It can’t reconcile existing without time. It may be impossible for a human consciousness to interpret anything beyond four dimensions as anything but instant. Then again, we’ve been to the outer bulk before, and time has passed—can you hand me that drewscriver?” That wasn’t only a spoonerism. The drewscriver was a fanciful embossing tool invented in the late 21st century that could pull ferromagnetic metals and metamaterials upwards at precision scale. It was typically used to stamp industrial coding, but could also just be used to create texture for aesthetics. “Time has passed,” he repeated, “so I don’t know what that’s about. What I do know is that the way the slingdrives work, you actually spend a lot of time in the universal membrane, but you don’t remember it. It might even essentially be an eternity, but if thought stops, and metabolism stops, it’s like it never happened. You feel me?”

“I just push these buttons and tell machines to build domes,” Hrockas replied as if he were an idiot. It was obviously a lot more complicated than that, and he had to have a certain level of intelligence to even get this far, but point taken.

Ramses finished his finishing touches, and set the box back down. “There it is. The escape module.”

“That’s not big enough for a person,” Hrockas pointed out.

“No, I told you, that’s not—oh, you’re joking.”

“So. If what happened to you in the future happens again, all of your supplies will automatically be spit out of these pocket dimension things through this thing.”

“Not all of the supplies, just the essentials,” Ramses clarified. “Which I guess is pretty much everything. What else are we gonna put in there?” Ramses tapped on his wrist interface and whistled for effect. The escape module disappeared, tucked away safely in its dedicated pocket. “Oo, I feel heavier,” he quipped.

“Does that mean you’re finally ready to go?”

“No time like the present, even if 2396 isn’t my present.” Ramses engaged his new EmergentSuit, and walked towards the slingdrive, which was already programmed to send him back to the future. “Hey, man. Thanks for letting me use this dome for my new-slash-old lab. I didn’t want it to interfere with the lab that I end up building in my past-slash-future.”

“Mi Dome Eleven is su Dome Eleven. It’s been a hell of a year, Rambo.”

Ramses smiled as he stepped into the chamber, and turned back around. “Did you ever decide what you’re gonna do with it once I’m gone? I don’t remember what it ends up being in the future. You stop using numbers when you come up with names.”

Hrockas smiled back. “I’m thinking that it’s going to be a scavenger hunt, or something. The terrain has lots of natural corners.”

“Interesting. See ya in a hundred and sixteen years.”

“Apparently, I’ll see you in seventy-nine.”

“True. Hey, Thistle...” Before Ramses could execute a command, dark particles started to swirl around him.

“Is it supposed to look like that?” Hrockas questioned.

“No, this isn’t right! I don’t know what’s happening! Thistle, lock down the la—!” He disappeared.

Marie and Olimpia appeared from their swarm of dark particles and landed somewhat roughly on the ground next to the rest of Team Matic. They were surprised, and a little embarrassed, having been wearing their pajamas when it happened. Well, Olimpia was in her pajamas. Marie looked like she was auditioning for a jungle porno.

“Yoink!” Mateo exclaimed. “Nailed it.”

Everyone steadied themselves. They had all traveled through dark particles before, but this time was more turbulent. “You did this?” Leona asked.

“I stole his power,” Mateo said with a shrug. “NBD.”

“You can have it,” Boyd said sincerely.

“At least someone can still do it. We’ve been off our pattern for a week,” Romana lamented.

“It’s been a year for me,” Ramses one-upped.

“Boyd,” Mateo scolded.

“This isn’t my fault,” Boyd insisted. “I told you, work backwards to find him in the timestream, then once you do, go back further to see how long he’s been there. I told you that,” he reiterated.

“Oh, yeah, you did say that.”

“It’s fine, I was working on something. New upgrades. I even built a new lab. Actually, since I was in the past, it’s older than the last one, so... We can check it out if you want.”

“We need to make a decision first,” Mateo explained. “Boyd has something to say. Boyd?” he prompted.

Boyd looked at the ground abashedly for a moment. He then reached up to squeeze the collar of his shirt. A hologram over his face flickered before collapsing entirely to reveal his true face underneath. He still looked like himself, but crystal shards were embedded in his skin. It looked very painful.

“Ooo, that’s gotta hurt,” Leona noted with nurse-level concern.

“It’s not that bad.”

“He came out like this when we came back from the afterlife simulation,” Mateo explained. “I tried to kind of...remove them with dark particles, but I still don’t understand what they can do, and what they can’t.”

“It’s not something you learn,” Boyd said as he was putting the holographic illusion back up. “You build your intuition around it.”

Mateo nodded. “He is a living temporal energy crystal now. He believes that he can restore your powers, but that he would have to restore them all. You can’t just get back the teleportation and Alyssa’s lightbending. It’s all or nothing. You would be back on the pattern.”

“Is that even a choice?” Leona asked.

“We’ve been through this before, but this is another opportunity to leave. You probably can’t get Alyssa’s powers back, but Ramses could just build you new bodies with teleportation capabilities, and isn’t that really all you need? You don’t have to skip time. We got used to it, but it’s also been really annoying at times.”

“Can he...remove it from you?” Romana asked him.

“I don’t think so,” Mateo replied with a shake of his head. “I was already dead when the crystal was destroyed. I wasn’t affected by it. This is more of a reversal of what was done as a result of the lemon juice explosion, and it was only done to the six of you. And Octavia, I guess, but who cares about her?”

“We’re not gonna leave you behind,” Olimpia argued, stepping closer to him. She wrapped her arms around his waist. “I’m not done with you yet.”

“Let’s put it to a vote,” Marie suggested. “Raise your hand if you want to stay off the pattern.”

No one raised their hand.

“Boyd?” Leona asked. “Could you put yourself back on the pattern? I’m just asking. You decide whatever you want...”

“I don’t know, but I doubt it. I’ll explain why later, but I think it would be like trying to get a lighter to light itself on fire. It don’t bend that way.”

“Are you upset by that?” Marie pressed.

“It is what it is. I’m the one who poured the lemon juice. Good or bad, these are the consequences, and I’ll live with them.” Then he chuckled for some reason.

“How does it work?” Angela asked. “Do you just...stare at us with your crystal face?”

“Same as when it was a regular crystal on its own,” Boyd corrected. “You’ll touch my face, and I’ll transfer the energy to you. At least that’s what my intuition says. I’ve obviously never done this before.”

“There’s something else,” Mateo started. “It might change your mind, so just give me one last chance.” They all agreed nonverbally, so he led them down the hill, and then down the trail. They were in Canyondome, which was just a naturally-formed canyon on Castlebourne. It wasn’t even the largest one. It was only the largest one that still fit within the radius of a standard-sized dome. It was particularly deep, though. They were standing just over 14.5 kilometers below the edge of the canyon, which meant that they were 56 kilometers from the top of the dome.

They came ‘round the bend to find a man chained to a stake in the ground. He was sitting quite comfortably in a lounger, and seemed none too bothered by it, though he apparently couldn’t leave. “Is that...?” Olimpia began to ask.

“What’s Old Man Bronach doing here?” Leona questioned.

“I resurrected him,” Mateo answered. “We’re gonna help him regain power in the Goldilocks Corridor from his quantum duplicate.”

“Why the hell would we do that?” Marie asked.

“Because he’s the lesser of two evils,” Mateo claimed. “Some people in the Exin Empire don’t want an Oaksent to be in power, and we’ve helped them escape. Some, however, are true believers, and we’ll probably never be able to change their minds. So we compromise. We install this version on the throne, and in exchange, he doesn’t actively stop the rescue efforts of the Vellani Ambassador.”

Leona looked down at the Oaksent. “Is this true? Can you be trusted with this?”

Bronach grinned. “There’s a catch.”

Mateo sighed. “Anyone who wants to leave is welcome to leave, but he is free to...repopulate his worlds the way he did it the first time.”

“We’re allowing him to breed a new generation of sycophants?” Leona was disgusted.

“We can’t stop him unless we kill him,” Mateo argued. “But if we kill him, his most loyal subjects will just do it anyway, and the ensuing war could be devastating for the whole galaxy. We’re trying to end the Ex Wars, not make them worse. As I said, it’s a compromise. I don’t like it, but it’s the best I could do. There’s a loophole, though. He’ll accept your counsel, but only while you’re in the timestream. If you get back on my pattern, we only have influence on his decisions once per year.”

“Whose influence?” Leona asked. “Anyone on Team Matic.”

Mateo nodded. “The offer extends to anyone currently on Team Matic, including Boyd. It’s not the team itself. I had him sign an itemized list. We’re all on it.”

A lightbulb clicked on over Leona’s head. “Ramses is on the list?”

“Of course he is,” Mateo replied.

Ramses was hurt. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“No reason,” Leona answered. “I accept these terms.” She spun around, and placed both hands on Boyd’s cheeks. She then pulled his head down to her level, and planted a kiss on his lips, no tongue. Those standing at the right angle saw technicolors transmit from his crystalline face to hers before quickly dissipating.

“I never said we had to kiss,” Boyd reminded her once she let go.

“Just something to remember me by. I mean, something for me to remember you,” she said solemnly. After a beat, she spun back around. “Who’s next?”

They all took their turns, not even knowing what Leona had in mind to keep Bronach in line. They each gave Boyd a kiss, because monkey see, monkey do. Most of them were pecks. Romana’s was more than that. She only stopped when her father cleared his throat suggestively. Ramses was last, still nervous about Leona singling him out regarding the Bronach contract. He evidently got his powers back just in time. Because shortly afterwards...Boyd fell down and died again.

« < » > Table of Contents

Microstory 2449: Windbourne

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Gemini Pro text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3

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!

Microstory 2385: Vacuus, November 27, 2179

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google ImageFX text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 3

Dear Condor and Pascal,

We’re terribly sorry for the delayed response. This was one of the longest times when one of the Valkyries interfered with our communications. We thought that the attack was going to end much sooner than that. Researchers have been very worried about this phenomenon overall lately. There’s about a 24% chance that the long-cycle interruption is going to fall upon us soon, but it’s impossible to tell for sure. They don’t show up in a predictable pattern, or we would have been able to develop a reliable schedule by now. Some believe that each meteor resonates on its own frequency, which even makes it hard for us to plan for the way in which it will disrupt our signals. These electrostatic charges make random perturbations, and alter each other’s properties in more ways then just gravity. It’s basically like the three-body problem dialed up to hundred and eleven. Velia and I spoke, and we wanted to assure you that we intend to send you a message at least once a week. One of you should hear from one of us within that timeframe. Condor, you’re still getting my daily health stats anyway, but if you ever see a break in those, please don’t worry yet. There may be some other issue, like a quota constraint, which I will have to work through. I can’t get trigger reports each time there’s an error—especially not if that error comes from your end—so I may not realize that something needs to be corrected right away. Just wait a week, and you should get a regular message from Vacuus. I’m saying all this to make it clear that if you don’t hear from us at all, it’s because communications have been completely taken out, and that could last for years. We really just don’t know. I wanted to warn you about it, even though I explained it previously, so you’ll remember that I love you both, and I wish that it wasn’t out of my control. Condor, Velia wants me to let you know that she loves you too. We had a little...scuffle about it the other day, but then we talked calmly, and worked it out. She’s determined to stay connected with you in whatever way is possible given the chasm that divides you. We hope that the Valkyries will fly off into the void, and leave us alone forever, but if not, don’t forget that we’re thinking of you. And hey, maybe they’ll have that breakthrough in FTL communications, and the Valkyries won’t be able to block it. Here’s to hoping our conversations never have to end.

Best regards,

Corinthia and Velia

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 1, 2483

« < » > Table of Contents

Generated by Google ImageFX text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 3

After adjusting to the lights of the infirmary, Romana looked over at her father, but seemed to be focusing on her own breath. It started to look like she was trying to speak, but she was home now, and everything was going to be fine, so there was no reason to rush this.

“It’s okay. I’m here, and you’re safe. Only talk if you can,” Mateo encouraged.

She struggled to bring her lips closer together to formulate words. She didn’t look like she was in any pain, though, and the pod didn’t indicate that there was any medical issue to be worried about. She didn’t make a sound until she was ready to produce the word, fully and clearly. “Report.”

They told her what had happened, and asked if she remembered anything.

“Nothing,” Romana answered. “Ramses turned his new machine on, and then I woke up here.”

“That might be for the best,” Olimpia hoped. It didn’t appear that she was ever tortured or abused, but there was no telling how difficult it was to be trapped in Buddy’s particles. They might try to find out more information later, but for now, they were just grateful that she was back.

Romana needed physical help getting out of the pod, and then into the tub to be washed up. Olimpia graciously assisted with that. Mateo didn’t feel comfortable participating, and Romana probably preferred it this way too. While she had no apparent memory of the dark particle prison, she still looked traumatized. Perhaps the ordeal had a nuanced impact on her psyche, or maybe her mind was repressing it to protect itself. This gave Mateo an idea, to find a way to let her use his rendezvous card, so she could speak with Dr. Hammer. That was against the rules, but if it could improve his mental health, the Center might make an exception. And anyway, once he made sure that Romana was better, Mateo probably wouldn’t need the support group anymore.

He gave the two of them space, and went back to the bridge. “What’s the word with this thing? Are we in danger of another tangent?”

“Probably,” Leona replied. “But the risk can be mitigated with some careful planning.”

“Two jumps,” Ramses added. “I can probably only muster two good jumps a day, though it’s best that we spread them out by several hours. And I’m only guessing that due to our past experiences. We’ve obviously pushed the limits before, but it hasn’t always worked out, so for the sake of a successful jump, we should probably consider that the safety margin. That doesn’t mean I know what’s causing it. It could be a design flaw, an inherent limitation from the ship that the slingdrive has been retrofitted to, or it could be because of the quintessence itself. Perhaps it doesn’t like people to mess with it until it’s had time to settle down. I need more time, and more tests...again.”

“Before, when we were testing the navigation function,” Mateo began, “it was to save Romana’s life. Now we’re okay. Now we can afford to take a little time. Do what you need to do, but take the pressure off.”

Ramses nodded with a frown.

“And don’t feel bad about what happened,” Mateo continued, noticing that this was not his friend’s real concern. “Buddy is an antagonist who took advantage of an accident that you even predicted. We all knew the risks, including her. I’m not holding it against you, and I would like to see the day when you don’t hold it against yourself. Romana will be fine. She’s back now, and the tethers are holding. We’ll never lose her again. I love you, man.”

“Love you too,” Ramses replied.

“There’s something else,” Leona said, now that the serious conversation was over. “It’s about the Insulator. While he was getting us back, I was conducting my own research.” She stepped to the side to reveal the glass object sitting on the console. “As you can see, it’s missing the dome that’s supposed to go on top. Glass insulators have no moving parts, yet it’s been removed as if it could be popped off like a snap fastener. We scanned for the dome out in the black while we were at our last pitstop, but it might be lost forever.”

“Cool,” Mateo said. “I don’t care about it, though.”

“You should,” Leona insisted. “I was able to make minimal contact with the inhabitant. I can hear her, but she can’t hear me. Mateo, it’s Dubra.”

“My sister?” Romana was here, totally naked, but not worried about it.

Olimpia rushed up, and wrapped a towel around her body. “Sorry, she suddenly hopped out of the tub, and ran off.”

I could hear their conversation in their minds,” Romana explained. “If Dubra is in there, I can turn that minimal contact into a real conversation.”

“Be my guest,” Leona agreed, moving away even farther.

Romana stepped up to it, took a deep breath, then lifted her arms, apparently to prepare to touch it. Her towel fell right back off of her.

“Maybe you should get dried off and clothed,” Mateo asked.

“I got this.” Olimpia was wearing a splash tunic, which was a hydrophobic garment caregivers used to aid someone in bathing, whether as a family member, friend, or medical professional. She pulled it off of her own body, and dropped it over Romana’s, since the latter didn’t seem to be bothered by the mixed company. Now Olimpia was the one without clothes on, but that was fine.

Romana adjusted the shoulders of the tunic, then refocused on the task at hand. She placed fingers from both hands upon the Insulator. She stood there for a few minutes, occasionally showing mild signs of active listening. She nodded definitively, and separated. “Okay.”

“Okay, what? Is she all right?” Mateo asked.

“Yeah, she’s fine.”

“Is that all she said?” Leona pressed.

“No, she said quite a bit.” Romana was acting like these were perfectly complete responses.

“Such as what?” Ramses asked.

“Oh, uh...sister-sister confidentiality.”

“That’s not a thing,” Mateo argued.

“Yes, it is.” Marie was walking onto the bridge, followed by her own sister.

“I’ll just talk to her myself. How do we get her out?” Mateo questioned.

“I’ll have to build her a new substrate,” Ramses reasoned, “but I don’t have her DNA, so I can’t make her look as she did.” He consulted his watch. “And it will take me a real year.”

“Go on and get on it,” Leona said. “Just give her something temporary, and we’ll transfer her to something else later. She might know how we can acquire a sample of her DNA somewhere in the past.”

“Let Romana ask for consent first, please,” Mateo suggested.

“Yes,” Romana said. She went back to briefly speak with Dubravka. “She’s in. Something temporary is fine. It will take some effort to make her the real thing, and she wants to be involved in that. I’m so glad I won’t have to wait a whole year to meet her for real. I really don’t care for telepathy.”

Romana had to wait an entire year before she even had a chance to meet her half-sister in person. She was sixteen years old when Mateo and the team returned to the timestream. Instead of jumping forward like she was used to, she found herself stuck in realtime. She spent that year trying to stay busy by helping Hrockas to prepare for the Grand Opening. There was nothing else she could do. Ramses and Leona were the only ones with any hope of figuring out what might have gone wrong, and more importantly, how to fix it. She certainly couldn’t understand it herself. She didn’t have a whole lot in the way of a formal education. She knew what little she knew thanks to books that her family was able to procure for her over the years, but her unstable lifestyle was not conducive to studying in a classroom. She didn’t have access to Ramses’ ground lab either, or she might have tried to initiate Dubra’s download process herself.

She was depressed, and feeling left behind, but she had all year to come to terms with missing the bus, and the delay in the big family reunion. She also grew up hearing stories of Team Matic’s fantastical adventures, with their top-notch engineer and captain. Together, they could fix anything. So she was confident that they would solve the problem quickly.

“You noticed these, right?” They were back in the realspace infirmary on the Vellani Ambassador. The patient was sitting on the exam table, legs hanging off the edge. Leona was no doctor, but she had a penlight, and she knew how to point it at someone’s eyes.

“Yeah,” Romana replied. “I’ve tried to flush them out, but they’re not exactly...tangible.”

“What are you talking about?” Mateo was standing off to the side, arms crossed, and thinking about the most painful way to tear Buddy’s limbs off of his body.

“The dark particles,” Leona answered. “There are still some in there, floating around. I can’t tell exactly where; behind the cornea, maybe? Or they’re in another dimension...”

“Then figure it out!” Mateo cried.

“Stop it,” Leona instructed. “We’ve talked about your anger.”

Mateo took a deep breath. “I know it’s not your fault, I’m sorry.” He pulled the rendezvous card out of his sleeve pocket. It was red, just as anyone would expect out of someone this angry.

“What are you thinking?” his wife asked.

“I’m thinking that Dr. Hammer is not just a psychiatrist. She has diagnostic equipment that Ramses wouldn’t be able to develop, or know how to use properly. She may have even seen this before.”

“That’s not what that card is for,” she reminded him.

“My daughter’s back, I don’t need therapy anymore. I need her to be healthy.”

“Maybe it’s a good thing.”

“No,” Romana jumped in. “I know what you’re saying. But Matics are time-skippers. It’s what we do. I don’t wanna lose that.”

“I’m just making sure you understand your options,” Leona told her.

“My options,” Romana began before a pause, “are to find the man who did this to me, and make him fix it.”

Mateo shook his head. “I get the impulse. Believe me, I want to ring his neck. But Rule Number Fifteen is probably the most important one when it comes to us, so if you’re going to be a part of our team in any capacity, you will need to learn to follow it. Buddy is powerful, fragile, and whimsical. In my experience, that combination equates to sudden outbursts of excessive retaliation. His objective is to bring a fruit from the past into the future. He has the power to simply go back to the past, and pick one whenever he feels like it. He’s going to extreme lengths to accomplish something stupid and pointless. You can’t reason with someone like that, and we certainly can’t fight him. We try to handle this on our own. Locating him is a last resort.”

“Okay,” Romana agreed. “Then can someone help me get back down to the planet? I want to be there when Dubra wakes up.”

“Okay, but then we’re talking about Snake Island,” Mateo called to her as she was trying to leave.

“Whatever, just let me get this gown off!

Leona sighed. “We’re not going to Snake Island.”

“Leona...”

“We’re not going to Snake Island. We like Dr. Hammer, but we don’t know her all that well. Your own cousin became an adversary in the Third Rail. We need to be cautious, and follow the rules. Now go get your daughter, and go down to see your other daughter.”

Ramses’ ground lab was a lot bigger and better than the one he had in the pocket dimension attached to the ship. He had been wanting this forever, and finally found a place to build it. Starter nanites constructed it for him while they were gone, with the first room being dedicated to the Insulator of Life, as well as the equipment necessary to produce a new body.

Mateo peered at it, floating there in its amniotic tank. “What DNA did you end up using, since we don’t have hers. I assumed it would just be one of those public-use template things.”

Ramses was running through his tasklist before the download procedure. “Uh...don’t worry about it.”

“I wasn’t too terribly worried before, but now I really am. What did you do?”

“It’s fine, don’t—it’s fine.”

“Ramses Abdulrashid,” Mateo enunciated like a disappointed parent.

“Yours,” Ramses answered. “Yours and Leona’s. I mixed them together, like what would happen if you had your own kid.”

The room grew extremely tense. “Oh,” Romana said quietly and accidentally.

“Ramses. Leona and I did conceive twins. She lost them.”

“This isn’t either of them,” Ramses reasoned. “Couples have multiple kids, they don’t look the same. The DNA always combines differently.”

“Ramses,” Mateo said once more. “You can’t give my daughter that I had with Serif a body created from what might have become the daughter that Leona and I had together. It will remind her of that trauma.”

“Well, I can’t undo it.”

“Make her a new one.”

“What?”

“Make a new body.”

“Well, what am I meant to do with this one?” Ramses questioned.

“Whatever you do with it, don’t tell anyone; least of all my wife. Start over, and just use one of the templates.”

Ramses breathed deeply, and looked over at Romana as if she would somehow be able to alter the outcome of this situation. It didn’t matter how either of them felt about it. This was Mateo’s decision, and nothing was going to change it. Mateo shut his eyes and nodded. “Okay. It will be another year for us. I’ve obviously developed a method of accelerating time to expedite the maturation process, but I still don’t have it down to less than a day.”

“Sorry, kid,” Mateo said to Romana. He then looked back over at Ramses. “Get it going, and automate the process. Then focus on my other daughter. Let her jump with us. She shouldn’t have to wait a whole other year.”

Ramses got to work on the second major project, but couldn’t figure it out. The team jumped forward without her, and came back to a seventeen-year-old. Fortunately, she wasn’t alone. Now with access to the lab, she was able to initiate the download process herself, and meet Dubravka for real. They had grown quite close over the last several months.

« < » > Table of Contents

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 30, 2482

« < » > Table of Contents

Generated by Google ImageFX text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 3

The technicolor web encompassed them as it did every time they used the quintessence drive. They faded into blackness before the stars and other celestial bodies reappeared. It didn’t look like anything had changed, though. They seemed to still be orbiting Dardius. Had something gone wrong? “Has something gone wrong?” Marie asked. “It looks the same.”

“Not exactly the same.” Her sister pointed through the window, at the terminator line that separated night from day. “We should see lights from the cities.”

“Lee-Lee?” Mateo asked.

She looked at her watch, knowing what he wasn’t saying. She stared at it for a moment before dropping her wrist, and regarding the group. “It’s June 30...2082.”

“I’ve never been to this year before.” Mateo shut his eyes, and concentrated. “I can feel her. She’s nearby. But...it’s weird. She’s still...”

“In flux?” Ramses guessed. “I feel that too.”

“What was this world like in this time period?” Olimpia asked.

“It wasn’t populated yet,” Leona began to explain. “I think these are the beginnings of something known as The Sanctuary. I suppose the whole planet ends up being thought of as a sanctuary, but back then, it was just one hotel. There could be no one down there besides Romana, or only a handful of people. If Meliora’s around already, she’ll be able to help us figure this out.”

“I can figure it out,” Mateo decided. “I’m just going to teleport down to her.”

“Don’t be reckless,” Leona warned.

“Helping or hurting, honey. Helping or hurting.” With that, he disappeared.

He was standing inside of a construction site. By the looks of the architecture, it appeared to be a hotel, but it was nowhere near ready for people to move in. This probably was indeed Sanctuary, just in its very early days. There could be enemies nearby, or not. There was no way to know, and the only rational reaction was to be cautious and quiet. He was standing in front of a door, which was where the tethering signal was coming from. He reached for the knob when one footstep gave him pause.

“What are you doing here?” Holy shit, that was a face he hadn’t seen in a good long while. It was Dave, a.k.a. The Chauffeur.

“Where should I be, if not here?” Mateo questioned.

Dave sized him up and down. “You hold yourself differently. You seem more comfortable. You’re not the same man you were when we last saw each other.” He was right. It had been centuries.

“You didn’t notice the spacesuit I’m now wearing?”

“That too.” Dave looked around for other threats. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but if you have plans for that young woman in there, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to ask you to take a step back.”

This surprised Mateo. “You’re protective of her?”

“She needs protection.”

Mateo flicked the door open. Romana was standing in a lit reading nook of the hotel suite. She was surrounded by a swirling swarm of dark particles. They made her disappear for a couple of seconds, only to return her for a couple more before sending her away again. It was unending. Her eyes were closed, as if trapped in some form of stasis. “That’s my daughter. I’ve been looking for her.”

“Are you lying?” Dave asked.

“Don’t you know me well enough?” Mateo asked him. “I’m the good guy. No, I’m not lying. Her name is Romana Nieman.” He watched as she disappeared and reappeared over and over and over again. This was Buddy’s doing, just as he suspected.

“I’ve been trying to get her out of there for years,” Dave explained. “Every time I get close, those black fly things attack me, and send me somewhere else. Sometimes it’s just to the other side of the room, but I have had to claw my way back from decades in the past. I’m afraid they will one day zoicize me.”

“This is my fault. The man who has her captive and I did not part ways well.”

Dave lifted his chin in realization. “That sounds about right. Can you help her?”

“Tell me where Buddy is.”

“I’ve never even heard of him.”

“Yeah, he’s new, for whatever that’s worth in our world.”

“There’s been no one at the construction site, besides me, The Builder, and Meliora Reaver.”

“Rutherford,” Mateo corrected. “Her name is Meliora Rutherford.”

“Indeed.”

“Give me a second,” he said with a finger up. “Why has no one come down here with me?” he asked through comms. “To stop me, or help?”

“We don’t see Dave Seidel as a threat,” Leona responded. “Do you need help?”

“I may. I’m going to try to take her by the hand. Come find me if I end up back in dinosaur times.”

Leona appeared from the other end of the hallway. “I’m here. We’ll battle the dinosaurs together.”

“A lot of changes with you too.”

All three of them stepped into the room. The dark particles menacingly expanded from Romana’s body, like bees protecting the hive, but they weren’t attacking yet. “I keep forgetting the rule, don’t antagonize the antagonist.”

“Not everything is about you,” a voice came from nowhere. A second swarm of dark particles appeared in a corner from which Buddy materialized. “The truth is, I didn’t even know you knew this woman. I took her to test Dave’s resolve.”

“My resolve?” Dave asked. “I don’t understand.”

“You’re special,” Buddy claimed. “Your powers are special. And I need them.”

“He wants you to get him a fruit,” Mateo said, jumping right to the end of this dumb spiel. “A citrus, to be exact.”

“Oh,” Dave said, knowing the limitations of time travel. “I can’t do that.”

Buddy laughed. “Temporal Citrus Explosion Syndrome is just another time illness, except instead of a person getting sick, it’s a fruit. You can protect organisms traveling through time. That’s your whole deal.”

“I’ve already tried,” Dave contended. “That was, like, the first thing Meliora had me attempt after she turned me into this. She too thought I was a loophole. And she didn’t have to kidnap anyone for it. She just asked, asshole.”

“As I said, it was a test. You failed to free her from her prison, and so here she shall remain forever. Sorry, Mr. Matic. I harbor no ill will against you, or her. I am aware that you had nothing to do with Superintendent Grieves’ betrayal a few years back. You weren’t even there!”

“Wait,” Dave said. He really needed to save the girl. “Perhaps there’s something else I can do for you. Let the girl go, and I’ll try my best. I can make no promises, but I may come up with an alternate solution that you haven’t thought of. My powers are not all that define me. I’m pretty clever.”

Buddy considered the offer. “You’ll have to do everything I say, no arguments. You have to make a genuine offer to get me that citron, even if it’s not exactly pleasant.”

“Okay,” Dave conceded.

“Thank you, Dave,” Mateo said sincerely.

“Just take care of her.” The way Dave said that, as if it was personal for him. He had never met Romana, but perhaps she reminded him of someone else.

Buddy reached out, and shook a reluctant Dave’s hand. “We got a deal.” He moved his hand over towards Romana. The dark particles broke orbit, and sped towards their master.

After he had reabsorbed them all from her, Romana’s knees buckled, but Mateo made a short jump, and caught her in time. “It’s okay, I got you.” She was still unconscious. He lifted her up in his arms, and looked over at Buddy. “If she doesn’t recover, you’ve become a real enemy, and that is not something you wanna be.”

Buddy titled his head and shrugged, apparently accepting the possibility.

“Dave,” Mateo went on. “Don’t lose yourself.” He exchanged a look with Leona, then they both disappeared.

“Get us out of here as fast as you can,” Leona ordered.

Ramses was hovering over the console, ready for this, having been listening to the brief but charged conversation. He engaged the machine again, and sent them away. It was a rocky trip this time. The technicolor web engulfed them on all sides, as usual, but it was uneven. The whole ship shook like it was experiencing turbulence. When it spit them out at the destination, they were sent tumbling through space, and were still feeling it here on the inside. Ramses first made sure that there weren’t any objects nearby that they might collide with. Then he shut off the viewscreens, so they wouldn’t be so dizzy anymore. The internal inertial dampeners were still shuttering a little bit, but holding together.

“The watch is having trouble calibrating,” Leona announced, bracing her hip against the wall. “Something went wrong.”

“All that matters is we’re together,” Mateo said. “I’m taking her to the realspace infirmary.” There were three infirmaries on this vessel. Two of them were in pocket dimensions, but one was just built on the ship itself.

“Good idea,” Leona replied to him before addressing the group. “No teleporting, and stay out of the pockets. They may be compromised.”

Ramses worked on the console to stabilize the ship. After a minute, it was still having attitude problems, but the shaking stopped. While he was trying to fix the rest, Leona sat down, and fiddled with the watch. She tapped on her comm disc. “June 30, 2182. We only jumped a hundred years.”

“That’s not where I was trying to take us!” Ramses complained.

“We’ll figure it out,” Leona assured him.

They did figure it out, and it didn’t take them very long either. The slingdrive was very sensitive, and could only make one jump before it needed some time to rest. It was all too technical for Mateo to understand, and he didn’t care to learn the details anyway. It needed a break in between uses. Whatever. That changed nothing about Romana’s condition. She was okay, though, and he needed Olimpia’s comfort to remember that. According to the medical pod’s diagnosis, she was only sleeping. Her EEG suggested that she would wake up on her own, and it was safer to just wait for that to happen than to try to wake her up some other way.

There was a little bit of news while Mateo sat by his daughter’s side. While seemingly random at first, their arrival at this particular point in spacetime led them to a discovery. The Insulator of Life was just floating in the middle of space. There was no telling what it had been through, but Ramses seemed to think that someone’s consciousness was being stored inside of it. He was forced to put the investigation on the backburner while he sorted through the slingdrive issues. They must have solved the issue one way or another, because by the end of the day, they were able to make another jump. Leona announced that they were where they wanted to be, orbiting Castlebourne on June 30, 2482.

He never left the infirmary, and neither did Olimpia. He ran through the past couple of weeks in his head, replaying the events that led him here. What could he have done differently? Could he have handled the Buddy situation differently? Could he have urged Ramses to exercise caution, and wait on trying to tether the group. It seemed like a good idea at the time, to prevent any of them from getting lost, but their plan backfired, and this may have lasting consequences. One of those consequences was staring him in the face. Rather, she would have been if her eyes were open. “Have you noticed?” he asked after a long time in the silence. “She looks older.”

Olimpia cleared her throat. “I believe she is. If she’s been off of the pattern since she disappeared, it’s been five years for her.”

“That’s not entirely true,” Leona said, stepping into the room to check on them. “I didn’t stop to make precise calculations, but just working from memory, I would say that she existed in the timestream for about four seconds at a time before jumping forward two seconds. I don’t know if it was exactly that, or what, but I did notice her being present for around twice as long as she was gone. I think Buddy knew more than he admitted. He obviously did this to disable our tether’s ability to track her location. She never had to jump forward very far in the future; just enough to clear the last ping before it reset.”

“So, how old is she?” Mateo pressed.

“At a two to one ratio, that’s about three and a third years.”

He looked back down at her. “She’s eighteen.”

“Her body is,” Leona clarified. “I don’t know how it subsisted this long in the dark particle temporal bubble, but we don’t know what happened to her mind in there. Age isn’t about how long you’ve been alive. It’s about how much time you’ve experienced.”

“I wish I could look at it that way, but all I see is five more years that I could have spent getting to know my daughter.”

They wanted to keep talking it through, but he just wanted to return to the silence. A couple of hours later, while Mateo and Olimpia were eating their feelings out of a dayfruit that was programmed to taste like chocolate cake, Romana finally woke up. It seemed, however, to be a double-edged sword. He was relieved for a moment when the EEG alerted them that her brain activity was increasing, then very concerned when she opened her eyes, and several dark particles wafted out of them before fading into nothingness.

« < » > Table of Contents

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 29, 2481

« < » > Table of Contents

Generated by Google ImageFX text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 3

It took Leona a hot minute, but she came to realize that they were no stranger to the ship looming over them. Well, they were still strangers, but they had seen it before. Seventy-two years ago, it appeared to them near Earth while they were still getting around on the Phoenix shuttle, Dante. It pulled them into its cargo hold, and either held them in place for a whole year, or attached itself to their pattern, and only had to keep them for a day. They were never entirely sure of the truth, but all evidence suggested the latter. How did it get all the way out here, and what did it want now? Its cargo hold opened up again, apparently beckoning them inside.

Leona reached over to the console, tapped a few buttons, then typed in a message that read NO THANKS.

“How are you sending that?” Mateo asked.

“Hologram,” she answered. “They didn’t respond to our calls before, but as long as they can read English, they’ll see this, plastered on the hull of our ship.”

The mysterious other ship used its maneuvering thrusters to draw nearer.

“Ram, do you detect any lifesigns in that hold?” Leona asked.

“Negative.”

“Then fire a warning shot right down its throat.”

“We don’t have weapons, sir.”

“The hot pocket,” Leona reminded him. “Purge it.”

Ramses sighed. “There’s not much energy in there.”

“Good, I don’t wanna kill them.”

“Purging hot pocket.” Ramses expunged the heat from the dimensional reservoir, and lit the potential enemies up.

“What the hell was that for?” a voice asked through the speakers.

“Oh, so it speaks!” Leona exclaimed with an attitude.

“We figured you were derelict, and in need of assistance.”

“Last time we met, you kidnapped us, and then spit us out without a word.”

There was a pause. “We have never encountered your vessel before.”

“We were in a different one back then,” Leona clarified. “April 18, 2409 Earthan Common Era.”

Another pause. “Oh.” He cleared his throat. “You’re Team Matic.”

“What do you want?” Leona questioned.

“Nothing. We only attached ourselves to your pattern back then to outwit our pursuers. They’re long gone. Now we’re back on mission.”

“Which is...?”

“Classified.”

Olimpia’s voice suddenly took over to say, “Captain, there are only a handful of people on this thing, and I think you should come over to see it.” She was apparently on the ship right now.

“Who the hell is that?” the stranger asked. “Where are you?”

“Stay on board, Rambo. Anyone else is welcome to come.” Leona disappeared, to be followed by Mateo and Angela.

“You’ve never heard of invisibility before?” Olimpia brought herself back into view. “You’re not as informed as we guessed.”

A man was sitting at the communications console, still shocked and nervous. “That’s not my department.” He pointed timidly. “I just push the button and talk.”

“I am Captain Leona Matic of the Castlebourne Sanctuary Ship Vellani Ambassador.” Wow, they were no longer a stateless private vessel. “Who is in charge?”

“That would be me.” A thin, busty woman in a tank top and tight pants came in from the hallway. There were numerous tattoos and scars on her body. Her hair was too short to reach her shoulders, and buzzed to a fade on the sides. “Captain Lusine Cross of the Astral Military Force Fireship Lusine.”

“You named your ship after yourself?” Mateo questioned.

Lusine laughed. “Every fireship is named after the person who is to die on it.”

“Fireship,” Angela began. “Historically, these were obsolete vessels that were literally set on fire, and steered into the enemy fleet to cause disorganized destruction. No one was supposed to die on them, though. A skeleton crew always escaped on a smaller vessel.”

“That’s not how we did it where I’m from,” Lusine said. “Any one hundred percent unmanned vessel could be deflected or outmaneuvered by the enemy one way or another. I was sent off to keep my foot on the gas until the very last second.”

“How are you standing here?” Leona asked. “How is this ship intact?”

“Our enemies ran,” Lusine recounted. “We pursued. They opened one of their little portals, and we found ourselves falling through it. That’s how we ended up here.”

That was enough for Leona to figure out what she was talking about. “The Ochivari. You’re from another universe.”

“I didn’t know you would understand the concept,” Lusine said with a nod. “We’ve been trying to get back ever since, and those damn bugs keep trying to stop us, because we have vital information that the Stalwart Porter needs to know to defeat them. We have to strike the enemy where it lives, but we can’t do it alone.”

Leona nodded, understanding more that Mateo couldn’t catch. “You think this brane is their base of operations.”

“It is,” Lusine said with a laugh. “We’ve been to Worlon. That’s where they retreated to.”

“That’s the homeworld. They don’t operate out of there. However many you discovered living in that system is a rounding error compared to their numbers in their new universe.”

Lusine frowned. “You’re lying. You’re lying because you think your own worlds will be destroyed if we bring our war here to your front.”

“Nah,” Leona began, “we can protect our people from that. There’s a reason the Ochivari don’t come after our version of Earth. We’re time travelers, they know they’d lose. They’d lose in any time period, in any reality. So will you if you threaten the safety and security of our most vulnerable and innocent. I suggest you go home. The Transit Army will handle the Ochivari from here on out.”

“I don’t know what the Transit Army is,” Lusine argued. “But it’s meaningless. We’ll protect our people as fiercely as you. I signed up for a suicide mission. You think I’m worried about what you’ll do to me?”

“You are not the first person to feel that way, and you will not succeed where the others lost,” Leona reasoned. “Turn around. Go home.”

“Not until we know where the Ochivari come from. If you’re right, and it’s not this universe, then tell us where it is.”

“I don’t have the coordinates. All I was able to learn from the interrogation logs in Stoutverse was that they call it Efilverse. Trust me, the only thing capable of doing real damage there is the Transit. It’s best you leave it to them.”

Lusine was frustrated, but appeared to be processing what Leona was saying. “We can’t go back anyway. We need the bugs to open another portal.”

“Let me see your Nexus. You may have to leave your ship behind, but I know someone who can return you to your world.”

“We don’t have a Nexus,” Lusine claimed.

“I know how to detect them. It’s here.”

“Part of it is,” Lusine confirmed. “We use it for power.”

Now Leona was frustrated. “Vacuum generator. You’re the one who stole it from Antarctica. Why would you do that?”

“We needed it.” Lusine was not apologetic about their thievery.

Leona’s watch beeped. “Crap, we must be too close to a black hole.”

“Yes,” Lusine said. “We’re hiding out here on purpose, again to avoid detection.”

We only have half an hour until we make another jump. Will you be here in a year?”

“We don’t stop moving,” Lusine explained. “If you’ll allow it, we should like to absorb your energy again, and jump with you. But you’ll have to come inside again, so we can sync up.”’

Leona weighed her options. “Vote.”

Everyone said aye—in person, or through comms—except for Ramses. He didn’t want to get involved. According to him, this one Fireship posed no significant threat to either galaxy, and could only waste their time when they should be trying to find Romana. He felt so bad for losing her. He had to get her back, and as quickly as possible, to make up for that mistake.

Mateo jumped back to the Ambassador, even though the vote didn’t have to be unanimous. “Do you have the data you need?”

“I’ve not had any time to look over it,” Ramses replied. “We’ve been dealing with this since we arrived ten minutes ago.”

“Then do it,” Mateo encouraged. “We’ll deal with this other thing, and meet back up on the other side.”

“I’ll need an assistant,” Ramses said just as Mateo was trying to walk away. “Who in the group can you spare?”

Mateo turned back around. “Who we can always spare...me.”

Shortly thereafter, they jumped to the future, their pattern having been interfered with by the black hole they were orbiting. To free themselves from the gravity well, Leona piloted the VA into the cargo hold of the Lusine, and allowed their new friends to fly them out of the singularity’s relativistic grasp. They used a weird engine, which wasn’t surprising seeing as they were from another universe, but it reportedly didn’t operate the same as it did back where they came from. The laws of physics were different here. Leona was surprised that it still functioned at all. They didn’t have a name for their brane, or of course, the path back. Hopefully Venus Opsocor, Keeper of the Nexus Network, would know what to do.

Once they were sufficiently free from the black hole, they decided they needed to wait for Ramses to study the results from their last jump. Jumping again could throw off his conclusions if he was still in the middle of formulating his hypotheses. Luckily, they didn’t have to wait too terribly long. Unluckily, he turned out to have been wrong before. He could still not find Romana with what he had here. One final, highly directed, jump to a new location could do it, though. Luckily again, they needed to go somewhere anyway. They synced the Vellani Ambassador up to the Lusine’s systems, just as the latter had done before with the Dante. Then the Ambassador took over, and initiated the slingdrive. They made it, all the way to Dardius in the Beorht system.

The planet owners were busy with affairs of the state, but Vearden was available. He saw nothing wrong with granting them access to the Nexus building, as long as they didn’t make any attempt to address the public, or engage with anyone besides the Nexus technicians. They also needed to limit their numbers, so Leona and Lusine teleported to Tribulation Island alone, leaving most everyone else up in orbit. While they were waiting for that, Mateo continued to be Ramses’ guinea pig. As instructed, he teleported to various points on the surface of the planet, and through space. He carried sensors with him sometimes, but not always, which apparently generated some sort of map of the region of space where they appeared.

“Come back in,” Ramses said.

Mateo was currently on Lohsigli. While Dardius remained as the seat of power in this solar system, Lohsigli currently boasted a population of tens of thousands of people. Many had emigrated here over the last several decades, following an enemy invasion that the team didn’t have time to learn about right now. It seemed to match up with what Romana told them about her own past. They accepted a data drive as a gift, so they could update their central archives. They would read about what happened when they had more time. Mateo finally returned, tired from all the jumping, and needing some water.

“I’ve figured it out,” Ramses said, quite pleased and relieved.

“Did I help?” Mateo asked, trying to lean back in his chair, though unable to with his armor module still on.

“Immensely,” Ramses answered. “So did the, uhh...alien people. The Ambassador has been stealing information from their computers, giving it insight into a realm of physics that I never knew existed. They use quintessence where they’re from too, though only as a raw power source, not as a shortcut from Point A to Point B. That’s what I was missing; perspective. I can’t go into detail about what I learned, because you wouldn’t understand it, but to simplify, we have all the tools we need; we just have to put them all together, like ingredients. First, we need Romana’s biometric data, which the ship absorbed passively the first time she stepped on board. Second, we need her quantum signature. Every object, or living thing, vibrates at a certain quantum frequency. The ship doesn’t automatically log that for everyone who comes here, but my machine picked it up from her specifically when we linked to each other through the Livewire tethers. Third, we need a way to measure her signature across vast distances. It would be easy if we knew she was on the same planet as us, but she could be anywhere in the universe, which is why the slingdrive is so important. Now, there’s a bit of an issue, which is that a person’s quantum signature shifts over time, but I should be able to write an algorithm that predicts what it’s become since we lost her.”

“I still don’t understand why we couldn’t find her before. We’ve had all those ingredients the whole time, even before her signature had time to shift. What exactly has changed?”

“Well, our jumps have given me a clearer picture of how to navigate; that’s one. Also, perhaps I’m downplaying how much the Lusine contributed. I still don’t understand it, but based on what I was able to glean, it comes from a galaxy where you can’t just fly in any direction you want. You’re limited by these sorts of...shipping lanes, which control their routes, even through the ocean of outer space. Again, I don’t really know why it’s like that, but the Lusine is different. It can subvert that limitation. It can go wherever it wants. My impression is that it’s illegal. Anyway, I turned their exploit into my exploit. Obviously, we don’t have those crazy cosmic shipping lanes here, but I was going about the search all wrong. Now I know how to head straight towards Romana, and find precisely where she is. Give me just a tiny bit more time, and I’ll be able to isolate her signature from the cacophony of noise vibrating between us and her.”

They gave Ramses more time, which Leona spent dealing with a rather difficult Venus Opsocor. She did agree to help, though, when Leona reasoned that the crew of the Lusine didn’t belong in this universe. It was logical to help them return home to maintain a kind of multiversal balance. Hopefully this gambit didn’t come back to bite them in the ass, such as when they found themselves in need of traveling to a different brane. But for now, it was necessary. The Dardieti agreed to hook the ship up to their Nexus for a peripheral transport, allowing Team Matic to check this tangent mission off the list, hopefully for good.

“Are you sure?” Leona asked in regards to the search for Romana.

“Certainty is one of those abstract concepts that doesn’t exist, but which we can draw nearer. Am I sure? No. Am I as confident as I can get? Yes.” Ramses nodded, satisfied with his own CYA response.

Leona looked over at Mateo, who nodded too, but for a different reason. “Very well,” she said before a pause to make sure there weren’t any objections. “Yalla.”

Ramses pushed all the buttons, and sent the slingdrive soaring through the quintessential firmament.

« < » > Table of Contents