The Seventh Stage: Rocking the Boat (Part IV)

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Clavia is taking a break to meditate. It’s not just for her mental health in the abstract sense. In her case, it’s non-negotiable. She has to do it or parts of her will overwhelm the others; usually the not-so-great part. One of her constituent personalities was told a story once. It’s not so much a story as a brief metaphorical anecdote. Well, it can be boiled down to that anyway. The gist of it is that everyone supposedly has two wolves inside of them. One of them is good, and the other is evil. The one who wins is the one you feed. It’s not so simple with Clavia, though. She actually has six wolves inside of her. Debra, a.k.a. The First Explorer is definitely the alpha. She’s the strongest, and the one who had initial total control over this body. When Echo Cloudberry regressed her back to youth, and tried to erase her memories, the balance of power shifted. Clavia became more of an amalgamation of all six identities. Yet those six original people are still technically in here, and in order to maintain the balance, she has to sort of commune with them every once in a while. She has to assure them that the choices she’s making are righteous, and that she won’t let Debra take over again. It brings a whole new meaning to being greater than the sum of one’s parts. Because if “Clavia” can talk to the seven people that she’s composed of, who even is Clavia at all? Is she a seventh person, or what?

“I would like to call this Meeting of the Seven Stages to order,” Clavia says from her perch on the topmost stage. She could have created a mind palace that looked like anything, but this seemed fitting. The stage area is in the shape of a hexagon, with the six lower stages surrounding the central stage. Curtains divide the six audiences from each other, and can be pulled further up so that each audience can only witness what’s happening on their particular stage. As it is situated much higher, however, the seventh stage is always visible to all audiences. Of course, there is no audience; it’s only a metaphor, but it works for their needs. Right now, the curtains are all pulled back, so everyone can see each other, including the one underneath the seventh stage, allowing the others to see each other. Clavia herself stands in the middle. Around, in clockwise order, we have Ingrid Alvarado, whose body Clavia is occupying; Ingrid’s love interest, Onyx Wembley of The Garden Dimension; Ingrid’s rival before the Reconvergence, when they lived in the Fifth Division parallel reality, Killjlir Pike; Ayata Seegers of the Third Rail; the dangerous one, Debra Lovelace; and finally, Andrei Orlov of The Fourth Quadrant.

The play that they would be performing this year—if any of this were real—is about a prisoner transport ship on the high seas of a planet called Earth. Clavia is obviously the captain, with Debra as their one prisoner. Andrei and Ayata are her guards. Ingrid, Onyx, and Killjlir serve as helmsman, navigator and quartermaster, and boatswain respectively. Again, the acting troupe is just the premise of the scenario, but Clavia felt that it was necessary to come up with some sort of fictional background to stimulate their minds. Their old lives are over, and there is no going back. They don’t even have bodies anymore, so it’s best to have something new to look forward to every day. They didn’t have to pretend to be stage actors—it could have been anything—but the name of their pocket universe made the concept essentially inevitable. They rehearse a new play every year. This one is called Rocking the Boat. These meetings allow Clavia to regain the memories that Echo took away from her, but before that happened, she had the mind of a child, so you can’t expect anything too complex or cerebral, even now that she’s older. Though, this one is indeed a little bit more mature. It still has that classic Clavia tinge of humor as Debra is playing the notorious evil pirate, Karen the Unappeasable.

“Can I get out of these chains?” Debra requests.

“I didn’t put you in those today,” Clavia answers.

“We did a dress rehearsal without you,” Ayata explains. She steps onto Debra’s stage, and unlocks her manacles.

Clavia tears up. “Without me?”

“Wait, look over here,” Ingrid requests. She goes on when her double turns to face her, “you did it. You cried on command.”

“I’ve been practicing in the real world,” Clavia explains proudly.

“I hope that doesn’t mean you’re using it to manipulate people,” Onyx warns.

“No people, just stars,” Clavia responds. “They are unmoved by my tears.”

“So the project is going well?” Killjlir assumes.

“Quite,” Clavia confirms. “We’re ahead of schedule. We’re more powerful than even we realized.”

“I knew your parents were keeping you restrained,” Debra says with disgust. “You had to get away from them to reach your potential.”

“We don’t know that they were doing anything,” Onyx reasons. “She’s older now—it’s natural for her to come into her own. Maybe it’s like a stage of puberty.”

“I chose them as my surrogate parents as a reason,” Clavia speaks up for herself. “I love them both. Echo and I are doing this in honor of them, not in spite of them.”

“Whatever,” Debra says.

“Aww, is someone a sad panda because I took away her solo?” Clavia asks.

Don’t get her started. “The story is about how we’re all feeling about our place on the boat, and how we’re dealing with those emotions without telling anyone about it. I have to sing, or my story’s not getting told.”

“No, the story is about how prisoners are silenced, and how the general public doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. That’s the whole point. The way your character keeps being interrupted and dismissed should be shocking and annoying to the audience. Karen lives in the subtext, and the negative space.”

“That’s another thing, I don’t like her name,” Debra says. “It’s what people actually used to call me.”

“Well, I admit, that one came from a place of pettiness,” Clavia tells her. “I kind of like it now, though. I can’t imagine calling her anything else.”

“I won’t say another word about it if I can play the hero in the next one.” Debra pitches this every year, and she has been denied every time except for the third year. In it, she did portray the protagonist, and she absolutely sucked at it. She’s the main character in her own story. Everyone feels that way, but she really feels it, and that came out in her performance. The rest of the cast may as well have not even been there the way she was chewing up scenery. If an audience really had seen it, they would have closed down on opening night.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Clavia says. She’s switching between smiling and frowning, because she doesn’t know whether she should even bring this up. They contemplated doing it a long time ago, but the technology is too unreliable and messy. Consciousness transference is very good about moving a digital mind from one substrate to another. It works by scanning an entire brain all at once. It doesn’t understand the concept of an amalgamated mind. Why would it? That doesn’t exist in nature. If two people are occupying the same body, they’ve probably been allocated entire independent partitions in the brain. The Seven Stagers are too entangled with each other. When they’re on these platforms, it’s very easy to distinguish them, but the mind uploader can’t enter this memory palace. It has no way of recognizing them as multiple units, which should be uploaded separately. The other concern is Clavia herself. They still don’t know how much she relies on the six of them to even be her own person. Perhaps she only thinks that she’s her own entity. Perhaps if they were to leave, she would cease to exist.

“Did you decide what the next play is going to be about?” Ayata asks.

“It’s not about the play at all,” Clavia begins to clarify. “There may not be one. There may not need to be one.”

The others look at each other across their stages. “Did you figure out how to transfer us out of your avatar?” Killjlir guesses.

“I think I did.”

“Technology doesn’t advance that fast,” Onyx decides. “Not even the Parallelers can do it.”

“To be fair,” she didn’t talk to any of them,” Ayata says to him. “She couldn’t, or it would give us away. Maybe she found someone to trust who has a new idea.”

“I already have someone to trust,” Clavia explains before anyone can come up with their own theories on what’s going on. She takes a breath before continuing, though. “I think that Echo can do it.”

Everyone has their own way of reacting to this, but some common threads are groans, throwing up their hands, and shaking their heads. It’s not that they don’t like Echo. They love him. They just don’t think that he can do this. He’s conjured little critters out of nothing before, but that was back when he wasn’t consciously aware that he was doing anything, or had any power. He’s proven himself to be too in his head since he wiped his own mind, full of self doubt and fear. As far as they know, unlike Clavia, he never got his old memories back, and he may never have been strong enough to create human bodies.

“Now, why do you think he can’t do it? We’re starscaping out there. We’re building an entire universe out of dark matter and elementary particles. You think he can’t build a few puny human bodies for you? With his help, I could guide each of you out of my brain, and into your new ones. That’s what the conventional technology is missing. It was designed to dump everything in all at once, but Echo will have the context and intuition that it lacks.”

“You’re missing something too,” Onyx begins to use his experience and expertise from the Garden Dimension. “Stars are somewhat uniform balls of plasma, composed of hydrogen, helium, and metals. You can just toss in all the ingredients, and the laws of physics will take over, particularly gravity. I’m not saying what you and Echo are doing isn’t incredibly impressive, but the complexity will come out of the imagination you have for how your new universe is arranged, not by the inherent nature of the individual celestial bodies. Human bodies, on the other hand, are extremely precise entities, with complexities on a smaller scale. But just because it’s smaller, doesn’t mean it’s easier. Sure, it requires vastly fewer resources, but one tiny mistake could lead to catastrophe. You’re talking about creating something that took billions of years to evolve naturally, and unlike stars, it only happened once.”

“Wait,” Killjlir interrupts. “He doesn’t need to conjure the bodies. Those can be bioengineered using the normal techniques. We would just need a way to transfer us into them from Clavia’s head.”

“He wouldn’t be transferring them,” Clavia contends. “He doesn’t have the power to upload digitized minds. These would be true organic bodies, imbued with your respective consciousnesses through interdimensional pathways.”

“I don’t understand,” Ayata confesses.

“When you bioengineer a human body,” Onyx begins again, “there are only two ways to do it. Either it’s an empty substrate waiting for a mind to be uploaded into it, or it’s a regular person. An empty substrate is inherently digital in regards to consciousness transference. Even if it’s organic, it’s encoded with neural formatting compatibility. It can read a mind from another digitized brain, or a computer server. A normal body can’t do that. Back in the old days in the main sequence and the Parallel, they had to first figure out how to convert people’s brains into the right format since they didn’t evolve that ability.”

“So let’s do it like that,” Killjlir offers.

“We can’t,” Ingrid counters. “Like he was saying, that would be a regular person. It would have its own mind already, right?”

“Right,” Clavia agrees. “However smart or dumb that person is, or how competent they are to learn new things, the body would be ocupado, just like someone born from a mommy and a daddy. You would be stealing their body. Only Echo can make something both undigitized and empty.”

“Then why can’t we just use the digitized kind?” Ayata questions.

“Because you’re not digitized,” Clavia answers. “Our minds came together through completely different means, using a rare if not unique metaphysical process, catalyzed by the magnolia tree fruit that Ingrid ate just as you were all about to die. And digitizing us can’t be done as an aftermarket retrofit, because like we’ve been struggling with, the computer can’t differentiate between our seven discrete consciousnesses.”

Ayata nods, getting it, then looks over at her love. “Andrei, you’ve been quiet this whole time. Thoughts?”

Andrei takes a long time to respond, but by his body language, it’s clear that he’s going to, so no one else speaks instead. “I don’t wanna leave. It’s too risky. We would likely only get one shot at trying something like that, and if it fails, our minds could become totally decorporealized, or we might just die. I think we should revisit the idea of rotating control of the Clavia body.” He looks up at her. “I wanna stand on the seventh stage.”

“Same,” Debra concurs.

She obviously just wants all her power back, but does Andrei have the same aspirations?

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Microstory 2345: Earth, April 9, 2179

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Dear Corinthia,

I got so wrapped up in the explanation of my experiences outside of the dome that I forgot to respond to your questions about our birthday. Thanks for not throwing that oversight in my face. I was talking to dad about it, and we couldn’t come up with very many ideas, but he thought that maybe we could indeed try to coordinate our celebrations. We don’t really have any specific traditions, but perhaps we could agree to a specific time, and maybe wear matching outfits? That might sound stupid, because I doubt that we would do that if we lived on the same planet, but that’s just what we came up with. You do have fiber synthesizers there, right? And do you have access to a telescope? Perhaps we could be looking at the same stars at the same time, to sort of symbolically connect to one another. In real life, there is no part of the firmament that holds any significance to the both of us. At least, I don’t think there is. But there is this sort of religion called astrology. Have you heard of it? People basically think that the alignment of celestial bodies has some sort of impact on their lives and personalities. It’s bogus, of course, but I say that anyone can create a psychoemotional connection to it in any way they see fit, and ignore the rest. According to astrology, our sun sign should be Taurus, because 2,000 years ago, when you were looking at the sun on May 17, the constellation Taurus would be behind it. But as we all know, everything in the universe is constantly on the move, so some people believe that our sun sign should instead be Aries. Obviously, this is all nonsense, but I was thinking that we could use it anyway. We can’t stare at the sun, though, so instead of looking at the stars in Aries, let’s look in the polar opposite direction, which would be Libra. What do you think of that? It might sound dumb to you, but because of our separation, and because of the vast expanse between us, we’ve never seen or done anything at the same time. I just thought that we could try it. There’s no harm, right? Unless you can’t get to a telescope, I don’t know. It wasn’t automatic for me, because the pollutants hide the stars, but it just so happens to be that one of the Mauna Kea observatories will already be looking in the right direction on May 17, so all I’ll have to do is register for remote viewing. Let me know what you think, and also let me know how I can help with your fear of the outside. I do have a lot of experience with it, but only on Earth. Death would not be instantaneous for me, but I want to help in any way I can.

Namaste and all that,

Condor

Microstory 2162: Don’t Say No to a Warden

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I finished my work hours a little early, so my parole officer could pick me up, and drive me back to jail, but I wasn’t staying there as a guest. I had a meeting with the warden, which was agitating the butterflies in my stomach. I put it like that, because I always keep butterflies in there, they just don’t always move around this much. As it turns out, it wasn’t bad, but I’m not so sure that it was good either. He read my story, as he apparently does every evening, and he thought that I had some good ideas. I hadn’t even realized that I had presented any ideas, but this was in regards to the disharmony that sometimes arises when guests that don’t get along well with each other are forced to live together in an enclosed space. To me, that’s kind of the definition of jail and prison, but he wants to find a way to put an end to it anyway. That sounds like a lovely sentiment, but I’m not sure that it can be done. Perhaps with a sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence, you could figure out how to accurately profile and categorize everyone in need of being housed in the system with as many labels as necessary, and organize them to prevent gang conflicts, or other major disagreements. But here’s the thing, you wouldn’t just want to stop two gangs from going to war with each other, you would want the gang to stop from forming in the first place, or they’ll just translate all that into the outside world once their sentences were up. That’s why you can’t just sit down with everyone’s psych profile, and sort them like you’re simply planning the seating arrangements for a wedding reception.

If you think that I’m being dismissive of how difficult it is to plan a wedding, you’re mistaken. Wedding receptions are hard. This would be virtually impossible. First thoughts, you’re gonna need a team of behavioral psychologists, and sociologists, and who knows what else, maybe a logistician? See, I couldn’t even tell you how to form the team. While it might have kind of been my idea, I can’t be a part of it. But that’s what he wants. He wants me to start a taskforce of sorts to figure out how to schedule the guests at the jail. But you would have to account for people’s job situations, the judges’ particular rulings on each person’s specific sentence. Again, I think you need an AI to do all this for you. Even a team probably wouldn’t be able to figure it out. I didn’t say no to the request, because you don’t say no to a warden, but I’ve not agreed to it either. I would need to discuss it with my lawyers, and my current employer... It would eat into the time I need for my site and socials. It would also seem weird to me if I were both a staff member of the jail, and a guest who had no choice but to be there for 48 hours a week straight. I know that prisons have work programs, but this is not the same thing as shelving books in the library, or renovating the CO break room. Those are references that, fortunately, none of you gets. Anyway, I guess this is more a long-term shift in strategies. The warden says that if this hypothetical pilot program works, they could theoretically institute it at other facilities. I suppose nothing would really start until after I completed my sentence, assuming any of this gets off the ground, and that there’s a place for me in it at all, which sounds ridiculous right now. Until then (or until never) I’ll just go back to doing my thang, and not worry much about it. The stress would not get me anywhere. My butterflies move around enough as it is.

Microstory 2161: All Cons, All the Way

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Last weekend was not fun. Sleeping in jail is usually the hardest part about it. It’s always either too hot or too cold, and of course, you have no control over any of that. We can shut the lights off in our cell, but the lights in the hallway are always on, and shining through the little window. The top bunk is better than the bottom one for that reason, but I always let my cellmate have it, honestly because I have a more comfortable life on the outside, so I think he needs it more. I hope he’s not offended by that. At any rate, these are all things that you can get used to once you figure out how to adapt. The reason it was so bad on Friday and Saturday nights is because we had a group of disharmonious newbies. It takes a certain type of personality to be suited to intermittent jail, or to fulltime prison instead, and determining which is something that I don’t, and never will, comprehend. Either the judges meant to make these assessments made mistakes, or there were variables beyond their control. Knowing where precisely to place each guest is probably impossible to get right, and certainly not every single time. I don’t think that each of these guys was bad on their own, but they just didn’t fit with each other, or anyone else. We were all particularly grumpy and anxious, and no one was happy. Again, I think that it would have been fine if the new guys had been scheduled for a different part of the week, or if someone else had been moved to it. I don’t know. There’s no way to know. It’s just something that happens, so you can add it to the list of reasons to not do something that will ultimately get you sent to jail, in case your pros and cons chart isn’t as uneven as it ought to be. All cons, all the way. That’s the way I see it anyway. I suppose if you’re otherwise unhoused, it might be your best option, but that’s a whole systemic issue that I think can—and should—be solved in a myriad of other ways. Well, that’s what made sleeping so much harder last weekend, but it wasn’t the only thing. I thought that I was going to be able to make up for it on Sunday night, but it didn’t work out that way. The fire alarms went off throughout the whole building at around 02:15 in the morning, forcing us all to go outside, and stand in our designated area for almost an hour before we received the all clear. They won’t tell us exactly what happened, but they promised that no one was hurt, and the damage didn’t spread. This means that there was a fire, though, instead of just a faulty alarm system, or a prank. So I guess I can’t be mad that they woke me up, and kept me up. I had to push my work hours back today, but I got everything done, and at least it didn’t happen on a Friday, which would have screwed up my jail schedule. Here’s hoping that I’m not accidentally foreshadowing the future.

Microstory 2142: Least of All Performer

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This is weird, I just got an email from a company that wants to sponsor one of my videos. It’s from a reputable organization, but someone there must have gotten their wires crossed, because I don’t do videos. I don’t like the way I look, and I have no interest in creating that kind of media. According to a personality test that you don’t have on your world, individuals can be sorted into sixteen baseline types, and I exhibit traits from all of them, but most of all Protector, and least of all Performer. I like to write, because I’m all right at it, and my brain processes written language better than any other skill, not because I’m particularly artistic. Anyway, I forwarded the email to my lawyer, who thought it was funny, because he confirmed that it was a legit business inquiry. He says that I can write back if I want, or just let it go. I’m leaning towards sending something, explaining who it is I am, and what I truly do. I think what happened is that word has been spreading about my blog, and someone at this company just wasn’t given all of the pertinent information. You’ll notice that I’ve not said what company we’re talking about. Even though I’ve not signed anything with them, it’s quite obviously not to be advertised until a deal has been made. It will probably be months before anything comes to fruition, assuming that we end up coming to the table to begin with. They may decide that there’s nothing for me to do if I don’t make video content. That would be fine. The blog makes significant money now. It’s not enough to quit my job, not that I have any intention of doing that either way—boss, if you’re reading this—but I don’t mind the extra income. I’m concerned that it will all come crumbling down at some point. Eventually, you’re gonna get sick of hearing about my adventures in jail if they don’t change week to week, and there’s only so much I can tell you about my mental health. When I start to do volunteer work, I’m sure a lot of that will be private, just like my paid job, though maybe not necessarily so much in the legal sense, so I won’t be able to tell you much about that either. For now, I’m just going to keep writing, and keep welcoming new readers, and if it doesn’t last, then that’s okay too.

Microstory 2100: All Over the City

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Counting my alternate self, but only counting work on my original Earth, I have had 17 jobs for 42 companies at 48 locations. How is that even possible? Well, keep reading, and I’ll explain it to you. But first, let’s start at the beginning; a very good place to start, as they say. When I was in my twenties, I took a personality test. (Okay, I guess we’re not starting at the beginning, are we?) What I learned is that I exhibit traits from all sixteen personality types, but least of all Performer, and most of all Protector. When I see someone crossing the street, my instinct tells me to watch them to make sure they make it all the way to the other side. My head is constantly on a swivel, looking out for threats, and keeping an eye on people who may be in danger. Now, I’m not saying that I would easily jump between an innocent person and a bullet, but I do believe that I wouldn’t ever use someone as a human shield. I’m always worried about people’s safety. Somehow, my dad intuited this, and he made me get my lifeguard certification when I was fifteen years old. I think the class began the day after my birthday, or something really soon, so I could not have begun any earlier. The course translated well into a job, with my teacher becoming my boss, so that’s what I did for three years. I was young and frustrated with it, but when I look back, it was probably one of my best jobs. I just didn’t know how good I had it. As I explained in the previous post, I started doing volunteer work right after high school, and when I came back, I fell into a job working for a maintenance contractor. I don’t remember much about it, including how much I made, but I know that I took a business trip to build workstations at the client’s new site in Wichita. The other guys in the car were smokers, so that was pretty much hell for me. They were so inconsiderate, and disgusting, and I hope they live in misery now. In 2008, however, I started to work as a projectionist at a small movie theatre while I was already in college. There were actually a few different locations owned by the same people, but you couldn’t really call it a chain. I was the only projectionist the place had ever had, and probably ever did have after that. Most staff members who handled that were also managers, but I didn’t want that kind of responsibility. My bosses asked me repeatedly to be a supervisor when I was a lifeguard too. I eventually regretted declining both of those jobs. I would have made a little extra money, which could have come in handy later. I just didn’t trust my leadership skills yet. I only worked at the theatres for about fifteen or so months, and I hated every second of it. My bosses were all republicans, and they had this warped view of reality, which made them conflate busyness with productivity. It didn’t matter if you had already cleaned the counter fifty times in a row today. If there’s nothing else to do, then wipe it down fifty more times!

Whew, I’ve only talked about three jobs, and I’m already in the second paragraph. The time after I graduated from college was really tough on me. Years later, it may not sound like I spent that much time out of work, but when I was in the thick of it, it was torture. I applied for a ton of jobs, but no one was biting. Even when I could get an interview, I did poorly, because of my autism. I started volunteering at the elementary school where my sister worked, in the library. I also branched out to other libraries at the same time. I took a brief job in the mail department at the IRS, which only lasted a few weeks, then went right back to the libraries. Finally in 2012, I got my first big boy job at a tax preparation corporation, editing training documents for other employees. It was temporary, but it paid a whole ton of money; enough to let me move out of the house! It was over after several months. But then they called me back the next year! But that only lasted two months. They put me in charge of even temporarier temps, but paid me less than the last job. And then they never called me back, so screw ‘em! It was probably a few weeks before I secured another job, this time working at a warehouse for a computer manufacturing company. I had some six-degrees of Kevin Bacon connection going on, but I ended up not liking the guy on the other side of the separation, and I still don’t know how we were connected. That only lasted about fifteen months too. I went on vacation, came back for less than a week, and then the FTC raided the offices, and shut the whole company down. They were selling preorders to customers before they had engineered the product, and never making good on their promise (read:fraud). They tried to start up again after all the legal stuff, but ultimately didn’t survive. Maybe if they had asked me to return too, things might have turned out differently. Lol, no thanks.

I spent about a year unemployed, trying to take some classes to become a web developer, but I’m not smart enough for that, so it super backfired. I ended up taking a part-time job as a package sorter for a worldwide courier. It obviously didn’t exactly pay six figures, so I tried to get a second job at a grocery store, but it sucked. I was looking to add a few extra hours every day, not work twelve hours straight some days of the week. Plus, the boss was another guy who thought being busy was the same thing as being productive. If there was no bad produce to turn over, then he expected you to throw away perfectly good fruit, just so you’re doing something. What a dick, I hope he’s miserable too. I hate wasting food. I didn’t even ever put that job on my résumé. I lasted two weeks, and only gave him a few hours notice. Finally, here’s where the real work begins, and also where my numbers begin to rise. I worked for a temp agency, for a contractor, which had a contract at an engineering firm. I was on the mail team, and often moved around to a few different sites. I even drove the van. I was basically a floater. When someone was out, I would fill in for them, so while everyone else specialized in their own thing, I knew everything. Unfortunately, they ultimately decided that they didn’t need an extra person, so they dropped me after a year. I was only off work for a month before a replacement came along, though, working for their primary competitor. I was actually at the unemployment office when I got the call for an interview. The guy who would become my boss said that the reason he hired me, despite my many, many jobs up until that point, was because I said that I just wanted a chance to prove myself. Most other interviewers didn’t like that much honesty, but he did.

Now the company number is going to skyrocket. I was even more of a floater than I was before. Like the previous contractor, this one also had contracts all over the city, but unlike that one, I was assigned to most of them, instead of just the one. I went to over a dozen different places, sometimes staying there for a week, and sometimes only a few hours. I went to a few sites only once, but many sites a whole bunch of times. That’s how I’ve worked for so many companies, but only with a handful of jobs. A few of the sites were about an hour away, so I got a lot of money from the mileage reimbursement, especially since we would always subtract the distance where we lived from the “home office” even though I literally never stepped foot in there, and didn’t even know exactly where it was. Anyway, it was just like the job before, but more formal. When someone was sick or on vacation, or just if a site needed extra help, they would send me, or someone else on my team. One of the site supervisors was being hired by the site themselves, so I interviewed to replace him, and got the job. It was at a law firm, so I learned a little bit of law there. Three years later, the site was shut down when a competitor secured the contract with a lower bid, but my company didn’t let me go. They moved me around a couple times, technically in the position I was just before, but that only lasted a couple of months before I found another site. I wasn’t the supervisor anymore, but I told my then-boss that I wasn’t going to accept anything lower than my wage at the time, so it came with a raise, which was what really mattered to me. This was the best job that I (my alternate) ever had. The work is really hard to learn, but very easy to do once you learn it, so he’s actually happy there. So there you have it, all those jobs, with even more companies, and even more locations. I wonder what’s next...

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: Year 292,398 Part 1

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Tamerlane holds up his hands defensively. “Don’t shoot, I’m unarmed.”

“We’re not going to hurt you. We’re worried about what you’re gonna do to us.”

“I’m not the Pryce you know. I’m from a different timeline.”

“So does that make you friend or foe?” Marie questions.

“Loyal to Danica, but a friend to you; I’m torn. Fortunately for you, you’re winning out today. Your plan is solid, but it’s not perfect.” He looks up at the time machine. “This thing is magnificent, but it’s loud. It makes a lot of literal sound, and it draws a ton of power, and it’s got alarm bells out the wazoo. You can’t just jump into the past, and expect to sneak around without anyone even knowing that you’re there.”

“So, what can we do?” Marie asks.

“You can ask for help.” Tamerlane steps towards the machine, and starts to fiddle with the touch screen. “It’s more customizable than Danica understands. She knows I know it better than her. She knows I know this whole facility better. It’s not because I’m smarter, but because I’m committed to it. Her concern is the world out there, but I have no such obligations, so I’ve dedicated a lot of time to mastering the Constant.” He finishes one final flourish, then tugs what looks like a hard drive out of the wall. “Anyway, it’s designed for same-space travel. You come out where you left, just at a different point in time. I can modify that. I can make you invisible.”

“When you say invisible...” Leona begins.

“Not literally,” Tamerlane clarifies. “You’ll still have to lay low, but no one will know you showed up. That should give you time to hide in the master sitting room.”

“Which one of us?” Leona asks.

“All three of you.”

Leona is confused about the math. “All three of who?”

“Me.” Tamerlane’s daughter, Abigail steps into the room.

“She may not be my daughter, but I can’t help but feel more loyal to her than anyone else here, including myself. Danica gave her permission to leave, then quickly rescinded it, based on some secret conversation she had with Mateo, Bhulan, Aquila, and I guess Cheyenne.”

“Cheyenne?” Marie is shocked. “Cheyenne is here?”

“Naturally,” Tamerlane answers.

“I know where to hide,” Abigail interjects. “We better get going before the others come out of stasis.”

“Okay. Like you said, we’re trusting you,” Leona reminds Tamerlane.

“You won’t regret it.” The three of them step into the time chamber while Tamerlane waits at the controls. “Remember. Be sneaky and quiet. You’ll be going straight to the sitting room. Find your little panic room, and wait until Danica and Mateo come. Close your loop.”

“Thank you.” Yeah, Marie just said that to Tamerlane Pryce, and no one can believe it. She almost can’t believe it, but it’s not completely implausible. He certainly isn’t the first alternate self she’s met. There have been so many in the Third Rail alone; it’s like a magnet for them. She herself is an alt who goes by their middle name.

The machine powers up, and spirits them back to the past.

They expect to find themselves alone, but they’re not. There’s already someone in the master sitting room. He’s leaning against a blue couch, reading something, and he doesn’t notice their arrival right away. It’s Curtis Duvall. Once he does see them, he grimaces slightly, and starts to back away towards the door. Euh...carry on, ladies.”

“Wait, Curtis,” Leona stops him. “You can’t tell anyone that we’re here.”

Abigail takes a step forward. “You can’t tell anyone ever.”

“I understand.” I already forgot all of your names. He teleports away.

“Do you think we can trust him to keep quiet?” Leona questions.

“We already know that he doesn’t squeal, remember?”

“Oh, yeah. Hm.” Leona takes a breath, and looks to Abigail. “You know where we can hide?”

“Yeah, over here.” She walks up to a bookcase, and starts to take off all the books. Most spy movies that involve secret panic rooms or passageways involve pulling on the right book, or maybe a few of them. This entailed a lot more than that. She removes as many books as she can carry at once, and sets them on the table. Once she has the whole first shelf removed, she turns them around, and puts them back, but now with the spines facing inward, and in the opposite order. Now that Leona and Marie know the deal, they are able to help with the rest. Fortunately, they only need to do this with one case of books. “Are you ready? Come close.” After they huddle tighter against the case, she spins the reading lampshade one direction, then the other, and then back the first way, like a combination lock. Finally, she pulls on the chain. The case spins around, taking them with it. The back of the bookcase disappears, leaving them with a view of the master sitting room above the shorter books, like something out of Interstellar.

“How did you find out about this, and how does Danica not know about it?”

“Oh, she does,” Abigail corrects, “but she won’t expect us to be here. We will need access to this room anyway.” She pulls the lamp chain again to switch the light on, and turns around. In the middle of the still pretty dark room is a menacing-looking chair with a helmet attached to the top. “I know about it, because she tried to use this on me once, but little did she know, my real father insulated me against neuro-tampering. If I don’t want something changed in my brain, it doesn’t get changed, so I remember her bringing me to this chair.”

“It erases memory,” Leona realizes.

“It can do more than that,” Abigail begins. “It can alter your personality, turn you into a different person, or eff you up in a number of ways. I don’t even think Bhulan knows about it. It’s Danica’s failsafe; a way to keep her in ultimate control.”

“You told your father’s alternate, though.”

“Not even him,” Abigail says with a slow shake of her head. “I told him that I know of a secret panic room behind the bar. He didn’t push it.”

Marie has a bad feeling about this. “We’re gonna use this on Danica?”

“We’ll only erase the last few minutes of her life, or however long it will have been since she walked in. Then we’ll put her to sleep for a bit, dismantle the wretched thing, and take the parts with us to the future, where we’ll destroy them. Sound like a plan?”

They hear sounds coming from the other side of the bookcase. They can see Danica and Mateo come in, and close the door. They’re alone. Abigail reaches for the lampshade, but Leona reaches over to stop her. “We came back here for answers,” she whispers. “Let’s let her give some away before we interrupt.”

“Very well,” Abigail agrees.

“I’m not doing it,” Mateo insists on the other side of the bookcase.

“I don’t see you having any other choice.”

“That’s what people like Zeferino, Anatol, and Jupiter wanted me to think, but I see now that I always had a choice, and I’m making it. I’m not going to help you. I’m not going to stop you from doing whatever you want, but I won’t be a part of it, and not because of any moral stance against it, but because it’s not my goddamn responsibility!”

“I fail to see the relevance of that,” Danica contends. “I want you to do something, you work for me, you do it.”

“Since when do I work for you?”

“Since you came back here and gave me a headache that has lasted for 300,000 years!”

He scoffs. “Exaggerate much?”

“You question my leadership and my methods, you kidnapped Bhulan—”

“No, I didn’t, remember?”

“You thought you did, which is bad enough. May I remind you of the leash that I have on you? Leona is on her way here. She is the new possessor of the Omega Gyroscope. I decide how close to realtime your life is.”

“When she comes, I’ll get us both out right away, and she won’t have anything to do with the Gyroscope anymore. By the time we come back, none of it will matter.”

“I won’t let you even see her.” Danica looks at something on her handheld device. “She’s not on her way from the future. She’s here, floating in orbit above us,” she says with a laugh. “It’s done.”

Leona nods to Abigail, who inputs the lampshade combination, and then pulls on the chain. They spin back around, but only halfway, so they can freely walk back and forth. “I’m already here,” she says with a curtsey.

Mateo smirks. He steps over, and gives her a big hug. Then he hugs Marie.

Danica nods, and gives them a moment. But only a moment. “Constance, Lockdown Protocol Dolphin-Algae-Nautical two-three-nine-nine.”

“Constance, belay that order,” Leona commands quickly.

Danica looks up. “How the hell did you do that?”

“I still don’t know,” Leona answers honestly. “I really don’t.”

Abigail takes Danica forcefully by the shoulder. “Brutus!” Danica shouts.

“You should have let me go home,” Abigail replies. She escorts her over to the neuro-tampering chair, and makes her sit down. She and Mateo strap her down.

“This isn’t gonna hurt her, right?” Mateo asks hopefully.

“She’ll be fine,” Abigail promises.

“You know how to use this then?” Leona asks.

“I saw her try to do it to me, and the instructions are in English.” Abigail taps on the screen, and then activates the helmet. A glow emanates from it. Danica screams, and it echoes in an unusual way, all throughout the room, into the next, and the hallway.

“Well, that’s the famous scream we heard about,” Leona muses. “I guess we’re not leaving the universe.”

As Danica’s scream subsides, another replaces it. They look out into the master sitting room, where a young woman is now standing. “My ears were burning.”

“They were?” Marie asks. “Who are you?”

“I’m Treasure. Treasure Hawthorne of Voldisilaverse, at your service.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 21, 2398

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Bridgette is about to leave her room when realizes that she put her skirt on backwards. “Chey!” No response. She spins it around, glad she didn’t leave the apartment looking like that. Cheyenne would find it funny. “Chey!” Still no response. “Cheyenne, have you seen my bracelet! I don’t remember when I last wore it, but it’s not on my nightstand!” Why isn’t she responding? She needs to sleep a lot, even with the Insulator of Life, there’s no way she beat her out of bed this morning. She opens her door, and reaches over to knock on Cheyenne’s. “Are you there?” What is up with this? She takes the liberty of opening Cheyenne’s door. At first, it’s like she doesn’t see what she’s seeing. That’s not her, hanging there. It’s a big decoration for some kind of holiday that she’s not that familiar with. It’s a...it’s an illusion. There’s nothing there at all. This is some kind of trick. That Alyssa girl can make you see things, right. But why would she do that? Why would she make her see her best friend hanging from the rafter? That’s sick. This is sick. It’s a sick joke. “Help!” She flips the upturned chair upright, and jumps onto it, holding Cheyenne by the waist as high as she can. “HELP!” she screams again.

“The door is locked!” someone on the other side of it muffles back.

“Break it down!”

“Mateo!”

Mateo suddenly appears in the common area of the apartment.

“Get a knife!” Bridgette orders.

Mateo grabs a kitchen knife from the block. He runs into the room, squeezes himself onto the chair with her, and slices through the bedsheet. He tosses the knife to the corner just in time to catch them both before they fall to the floor.

Bridgette scrambles to remove the sheet from Cheyenne’s neck. She doesn’t check for a pulse, or a breath. She goes right into chest compressions and rescue breaths. By now, Leona and others have rushed into the apartment, having retrieved the master key.

Leona kneels down and takes Cheyenne’s wrist for some reason. “She’s gone.”

“No!”

“She’s cold,” Leona explains solemnly.

“So? It’s a little cold today. It’s the first day of fall, isn’t it?” Bridgette keeps going.

“Bridgette, stop.”

Bridgette stops. Her hands come off of her friend’s dead body, and land on her own knees as she leans back. “She’s so cold,” she agrees, tearing up. “She did this last night. Either I was here, or I came in, and didn’t check on her like I usually do. Why didn’t I check on her? If I had just...”

“Where is the Insulator of Life?” Mateo asks, looking around the room.

“Is that all you people care about?”

Leona takes both Bridgette’s hands in hers. “If it’s not here, where would it have gone? Would she have put it somewhere else?”

Bridgette wipes the saltwater from her eyes, and looks around too. “No. You were done with it, so she would have brought it back here, where it belongs.”

“She did,” Kivi says. “We were chatting, so I followed her in. I saw her set it on her desk.”

“And she wasn’t suicidal, right?” Leona asks.

“No, of course not.”

Leona looks up at Ramses, who sighs, and shuts his eyes in sadness and fear. “The boo-boo cage is on, right?”

“Yes,” Leona answers.

Ramses takes a little remote out of his pocket, and presses a button, dropping the remote in time for it to not teleport with him.

“Angela, check the security feeds. I want to know everything that happened in this building since I let who we thought was Ramses out of that cage.”

“You have a client meeting today,” Alyssa points out.

“You take it,” Angela requests.

“I’m not qualified or experienced, I’m just the receptionist.”

“You helped me edit the discussion notes. You know the material. I trust you. I need to watch the feeds. My mind can absorb the footage better than normal people.”

“Shouldn’t Kivi do it instead?” Alyssa suggests.

“Kivi needs to find someone for me,” Leona says, standing up.

“Who?” Bridgette questions.

“Erlendr Preston,” Leona answers with a burning hatred. “We may be able to rewrite history.”

Mateo wraps Cheyenne’s body in her blanket, and carries her out of the apartment. Bridgette doesn’t know where he’s taking her, or what they’re going to do with it. They’re not really a part of society anymore. Would they even be able to call the authorities on this matter? No, they have to handle it in-house. When they find out who did this, be it Ramses, Erlendr in Ramses’ body, or a random burglar, Bridgette is gonna deal with it herself. She’ll hurt anyone who tries to get in her way. They’re going to answer for their crimes, and she’s the only one who gets to determine what that means.

Leona doesn’t feel like it’s good for Bridgette’s mental health to be at The Lofts right now, so Marie escorts her to the condo. Heath has been sleeping in his old master bedroom, and Arcadia and Vearden sleep together, so that leaves the smaller room free for Bridgette’s use. She woke up well-rested this morning, but she’s feeling so tired. She can’t even keep her eyes open. She passes out on the bed.

She doesn’t wake up until night has fallen. The other four, including Marie, are sitting in the living room. “I’m hungry.”

“We’re warming a dish for you,” Vearden says, standing up, and heading for the kitchen area to retrieve it.

“What is it you people like to say,” Bridgette begins, “report?”

“Please, sit,” Marie recommends. “Angela finished with the security footage. The whereabouts of Ramses’ body has been accounted for all day yesterday, and all this morning. He fell asleep in his lab, having missed out on a lot of work, so a camera was always on him.” She hesitates to continue.

“Say it.”

“Andile Mhlangu was seen leaving your apartment, going down the stairs, and exiting through the side door.”

“I can’t remember who was in her body,” Bridgette admits.

Marie nods. “It was the man we’ve been looking for, Meredarchos.”

Bridgette nods. “That’s good,” she decides.

“Why would that be good?” Heath asks, afraid of the answer.

“Andile doesn’t need her body anymore, unlike Ramses. That means I can kill it.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 20, 2398

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Leona is back from Orlando. She was supposed to return last night, but there was just too much to do. She’s here now, though, and she’s ready to move on to the next issue. They have to somehow get Erlendr’s consciousness out of Ramses’ brain without also removing Ramses’ consciousness, and they have to somehow know that they have been successful. Erlendr is not the best actor in the universe, but he’s been convincing enough before, and he doesn’t have to be the one in charge of the body to be in it. He could go dormant, let Ramses take over for a day or two, and then bubble back up to the surface. What they need is a way to confirm that there is a consciousness inside of the Insulator of Life, that it’s the person they’re expecting it to be, and that no one else is in there with him. Unfortunately, the reality’s foremost expert on the temporal object is Ramses himself, and he’s not a reliable source right now.

Cheyenne doesn’t know very much about it, but she’s agreed to help in any way she can by looking over Ramses’ notes on the Insulator in the lab, just in case something catches her eye. “I can’t find page three from the sixth.”

“The sixth of what?” These notes aren’t exactly organized. This is unlike Ramses. Erlendr must have scrambled them on purpose.

“September.”

Leona hunts for the page elsewhere on the table.

“It looks important,” Cheyenne says. The page before references a breakthrough

Arcadia comes into the lab with a big dumb smile on her face. “Hey, there!”

“I thought you were wiping your hands of all this,” Leona points out.

“I had to make something for you first.” Arcadia slaps a tablet on the table.

Leona picks it up. “What is this?”

“A personality test,” Arcadia explains.

“I see that. Do you prefer round or squircular watches? Does cilantro taste like soap? What is this for?”

“It’s the only way to test for a psychic invader,” she claims.

“How exactly?” Leona presses. She swipes down to the second page. “By asking them to describe the perfect April 25th of 2001?”

“It’s not the questions themselves that matter, it’s how the responder answers them. You know Ramses. You know how he talks, how he behaves. Ask these questions, and pay attention to his micromovements.”

Cheyenne looks at the tablet over Leona’s shoulder. “So if he were a stranger this would be useless?”

“Yeah, that’s why it’s so important to have friends and loved ones,” Arcadia lectures as if she hasn’t spent thousands of years not believing it.

Leona sighs and swipes through more of the questions. “Do you ever smell fudge where there is no fudge? You stole that from Warehouse 13.”

“Well,” Arcadia scoffs jokingly, “if you’re gonna steal, steal from the best.”

“Can you help with the Insulator at all?” Leona asks as she puts the tablet down.

“I’m honestly not that familiar with it,” Arcadia admits. “I can tell you that it’s psychic, so you’re going to need a strong mind to control it.”

Leona widens her eyes, and sticks her turtle head out towards her.

Arcadia mimics the gesture. “Yeah, what?”

“You’re the psychic here, dummy,” Leona reminds her in a tone.

Arcadia shakes her head profusely. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You’re not tricking me into being responsible for helping Mister Abdulrashid. More to the point, I won’t let myself be the one to fail at it.”

“We need someone strong of mind. There is none better than a Preston.”

“You’re thinking of my sister. I’m an asshole, remember?”

“I remember,” Leona agrees. “Look, you’re the closest thing we have to a telepath, Third Rail power suppression system notwithstanding. If you can’t do it, no one can. I need you, Arcadia. I need you to go up against your father...one last time.”

“What makes you think I would do that?”

Cheyenne takes a half step forward. “You’re the one who put him in there in the first place.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Arcadia questions.

“I can’t tell you how I know this, but the reason he’s in this reality is because you trapped him in that thing for billions of years.”

“I haven’t done that yet,” Arcadia explains.

“I know,” Cheyenne tells her. “But you will. You do it in your future, which means you can do it now.”

Arcadia frowns, and looks back over at Leona. Her face gives in even more. “Okay, bring him up here. I’ll try to transfer his consciousness out, but you have to run the Turing test, and you can’t blame me if it doesn’t work.”

“That sounds fair,” Leona says. She holds her hand out.

“What, you want a cookie, or something?”

Leona just shakes it once.

Arcadia reaches out and shakes it too.

Mateo escorts Erlendr upstairs, keeping him in chains the whole time. They place him in the boo-boo cage that Ramses built for anyone trying to teleport in or out of the area. Leona connects the Livewire to the Insulator of Life, then hands the other end to Arcadia, so she can work her magic on it. The latter takes deep breaths to center herself. She doesn’t have much psychic power here, so she concentrates what she does have, and focuses on a singular objective. When she’s ready, she plugs the wire in, and commands Erlendr’s mind to come out of the body he stole, and into the Insulator. Leona then sticks the Insulator away in a miniature Faraday cage, and the Livewire in a separate cage. Mateo takes the wire away, and Cheyenne takes the Insulator. Leona proceeds to test Ramses on his behavior. After running through the questions twice, she’s as satisfied with the results as she’ll ever be. It will never not be a risk.

That night, Cheyenne takes the Insulator back upstairs to her apartment, happy to once more have it in her official possession. She was all right lending it out to these people, but she really needs it so she can get back to the future. She sits down to craft a thank you and goodbye letter to them that she plans to have delivered after she leaves to restart her life. Halfway through, the Insulator begins to glow. It doesn’t normally do that; not unless it’s being used to store a consciousness...or free one. The glow expands into a light, which sharpens into the shape of a human. When the light fades, Andile Mhlangu is standing before her, except it’s not Andile; it’s Meredarchos. This is where he escaped to. Before she can scream for help, he rips the topsheet from her bed, and wraps it around her neck. He squeezes tightly until the lights go out.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 1, 2398

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When Angela Walton was first alive, she was a pretty submissive girl, as was common in those days. She didn’t believe in the things that her family did, but she wasn’t outspoken about it either. Her father was patient enough to let her wait to marry a man she loved, but that was about as lenient as he could tolerate to be, and he lost that patience when her fiancé disappeared. She would marry who he chose, and that was final. It wasn’t until after her death that Angela started to find herself. The interesting thing about the afterlife simulation is that it wasn’t millennia beyond the technological limitations of the living world. For most of its history, it was only ever moderately more advanced, despite the fact that the devisers were from the future, and could have always included modern tech. They chose not to in order to keep the residents comfortable, and feeling safe. Teaching a mammoth hunter to use a microwave oven is probably just asking too much. So for the longest time, the virtual worlds pretty faithfully resembled the real world, because that’s all those people knew. That would change in the future, when science fiction began to open up people’s imaginations, but there was always one thing that was shockingly progressive.

According to Tamerlane Pryce, he put no effort into regulating the way society manifested itself in the construct. He claimed to have let the people decide for themselves. This is likely not entirely true, but not totally inaccurate either. Based on some few and far between studies that dead researchers tried to conduct over the centuries, it would seem that the act of death alone is enough to alter an individual’s worldview. That is, they gain perspective simply by passing on, and often lose a lot of the prejudices and hate they once lived with. The theory was that this process was fostered by the fact that everyone dies alone. When John Doe makes the transition, he does so removed from all the people who fueled his beliefs and preconceived notions. The people he meets now have either been there for some time, or they came from other parts of the world. That’s what philosophers imagine Pryce regulated—knowingly or not. He set up a system that grouped newcomers together through a filter of diversity, and studies have proven that living in a diverse area is the number one cause of acceptance and love. What this all means is that racism, sexism, and other biases are harder to hold onto when borders have been removed, gender roles have been ignored, and no one can rise to power without deserving it.

When Angela rose to power, it was after centuries of hard work. She had to shed her old identity, and her old personality, and pretty much become a completely different person. If not for the fact that she looks the same as she always has, no one who knew her before her death would recognize her now. She doesn’t take other people’s crap anymore, and she doesn’t just do as she’s told. If you want her to trust in your choices, you have to prove that you’re worthy of making them, and if you don’t, she’s going to decide for you. Maintaining a normal job in a mundane world is a skill that Marie honed for four years before the rest of her team showed up. She learned to listen to the words of lesser men, because she would lose it all if she didn’t. Angela has yet to learn this lesson, and her meeting has demonstrated just how far she has yet to go. None of Marie’s training could have prepared her to suffer through all that bullshit. She speedwalks to the bathroom at her first opportunity, and retches into the toilet.