Microstory 2780: Nothing Will Stop Her From Leaving Him

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At the moment, the two most popular planets in the galaxy are Varkas Reflex and Castlebourne. The former handles virtual simulations very well while the latter is the only place with extensive and comprehensive base reality sims. Earth is special because it’s the seed of civilization, but its population is still decreasing. Some are leaving because they want what those other worlds have, others because they want to return Earth to the wild. Incidentally, Gatewood is technically popular too, but only as a pitstop for other colonies. Most other colonies are niche or family-owned; not central hubs.

That leaves Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. It is the only other Core World which naturally supports complex life. A human can survive on the surface in the open air with minimal bioengineering. A baseline human can survive with the right life support tech. That used to be a huge draw, but other breathable worlds have since been found, and it’s just not that important anymore. Life under a large enough dome is indistinguishable from a genuine sky. Virtual constructs are perfect, and can be programmed with any environment imaginable. Bida, despite its recent gravity problems, simply isn’t that special anymore. And those gravity problems are pushing it over the edge.

Everyone is leaving, including possibly Jande’s sister, Laise. She is missing, and it’s highly unlikely that something went wrong with her consciousness transmission. Bida may be known for its minimal use of tech, but they’re not backwards like Proxima Doma. They’re efficient, and death is an inefficient use of thought. That was engraved on the arch over the entrance to the Welcome Center below the primary space elevator, and above the door to the central substrate inventorium. Laise should be back by now.

In the weeks following the destruction of Eyrenland, the community has suffered from all sides. The whole planet has been wrecked. The people survived, but many are choosing not to rebuild their lives here. They’re going to those other places to live out their dreams. Some may end up doing exactly what they were doing before the cataclysm, just elsewhere. Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida is dying. It started quick, but it’s gonna end slow. Their way of life is being threatened by something that was entirely out of their control, and their own laws. Even Jande’s wives can’t take it anymore.

“Evers, please. Don’t leave,” Jande begs. “We’re building a life together.”

“This world is no longer safe,” Evers argues. “The black holes are still opening up all over the star system. I don’t want to be here when the next one shows up. What if it’s in the core of the planet? What if it’s in our backyard?”

“There’s a fancy ship up there,” Jande reminds her. “The Axiom of Astronomy is on it. The galaxy’s top scientists have cast themselves here to figure this out.” He sighs. “They’re gonna figure it out. The farm needs you, more than ever. I need you.”

“I’m not going to ask you to leave with me. I know that you have to stay, especially since your father...” She trails off just so she doesn’t have to finish the sentence. “You have your ways, and I thought I knew what I was getting myself into when I joined this community and married you. But I didn’t sign up for this.”

“There are ways around this,” he insists. “We can get a long-range backup relay. If your body dies, you can be on the other side of the solar system in seconds, clear of any black hole that may or may not open up here. This doesn’t have to be the end.”

Now Evers is the one to sigh. “And what if that deep space backup is destroyed too? I’m not going to risk it. This is an unprecedented threat.”

“Please, just give it another few days. They’re gonna announce something—”

“What are the divorce procedures?” Evers interrupts.

Jande doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t want to answer that question.

“Come on, I know they’re different when the marriage ends entirely, instead of remaining partially intact after only one leaves, so I can’t just utter the dissolution line, like Suki. You either come with me, or it’s over. What do I have to do to divorce you?”

Jande shakes his head. “You’re the one ending the marriage, and I’m the victim. You have to cut down a tree with an axe, and I have to cut one down with a knife.”

Evers stares at her still-husband for a minute. “Is that even possible?”

“Eventually, yes. It will take time out of my extremely busy life, but you can begin leaving before that. It will take hours, if not a day, for you to finish your own tree, get to the elevator, ride it up, and fly off. I promise to be done by then. The tree isn’t gigantic.”

“The trees we planted on our wedding day. We have to cut those ones down?”

“They symbolize our union, so yes,” Jande confirms.

“So older couples have a harder divorce. What if one of the trees is already dead?”

“Well, ours are still alive, and you’re leaving the culture completely, so what does it fucking matter?” Okay, he has shifted his emotions away from sadness now.

“I want to understand what’s happening to us, and I have the right to. I won’t push it, but I do want to know, what of Suki’s tree?” Evers questions.

“I have to take it down at some point, when I have time,” Jande explains. “It doesn’t have to be ceremonial or grueling, though. I can use a laser saw, or whatever.”

Evers frowns at him. “I was hoping to cast my mind to Varkas Reflex. I mean, if I’m gonna become incorporeal anyway, I might as well travel there without this body—”

“Goddammit!” Jande pushes past Evers and walks around to the back of the house. He pulls out his sheath knife and starts to slice against the trunk of his tree, at the narrowest section he can find, grateful that it doesn’t have to be at a particular height. He’s already making good progress, fueled by his adrenaline.

Evers walks up next to him. “I never wanted it to end like this.”

“But you wanted it to end,” Jande points out. “Good, that’s great. I’m so happy for you, you’re finally getting the life you wanted. I’m so sorry that I trapped you on the most beautiful planet in the universe. You must have been miserable.”

“I was never miserable,” Evers begins. “I’m just scared. I don’t think you see how dangerous this has become. Our ancestors prepared for everything—everything!—when they started to explore outer space, but they never thought of this. I know you think what you’re doing is important, but it’s not worth your life. It’s not worth mine, and there was a time when you would have agreed with me. Just...think about it.”

Jande stops working for a second to catch his breath. He looks over at her. “I don’t have time to cut down my tree and help you find the axe in the rubble that was our shed. You better go look for it so you can finish this quick enough to cast away in time to catch that sweet VR wave, dude. Hang ten.” He goes back to cutting.

He can see her nod quietly before she walks off.

She is so inexperienced with the axe, he almost finishes his tree before she finishes hers. They don’t say another word to each other for the rest of time. She takes a shuttle to the temporary Welcome Center tent, and leaves him forever.

Spaghetti West: The Ark (Part III)

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The second black hole turned out to be far more than a coincidence, and far from an isolated event. They just kept coming after that. Now that Sugar’s sensors were tuned to look for them, they started popping up everywhere. They were appearing all over the system in no apparent pattern. Efforts on the development of the orbital defense grid were redoubled multiple times. All energy was going into building them as fast as possible, focusing almost exclusively on the ionic pulse canons, but she was also sharing her unique sensor suite to predict and detect subsequent intrusions. By the time they were finished, this was going to have to be the densest defense array in the stellar neighborhood—probably the galaxy, even though Castlebourne had that war.

Speaking of Castlebourne, through a chain of contacts, Sugar was able to confirm that these singulararities were Kugelblitz, meaning they were made artificially. She learned that they were not weapons, however, but a vital component of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. This was what solved the mystery of the surface gravity. The planet was a high-density, high-mass terrestrial. These numbers weren’t as high as they could possibly go while still being rocky worlds, but they were too high for baseline humans to survive on. Before even one person stepped foot on it, thirty-two transdimensional gravity generators were installed at even intervals across the globe. Sugar still wasn’t sure who was responsible for them, but they must have been incredibly powerful.

These generators were essentially portals that linked to a different region of space. Specifically, it was a kubelblitz black hole, also known as a KBH. They basically just ignored Bida’s real gravity, and stole the gravity from somewhere else. A couple of decades ago, the owner of Castlebourne resorted to moving their entire star system away from its original spot in the galaxy in order to conceal their location from a violent enemy. They just so happened to move it within spitting distance of the KBH, which disrupted gravity on Bida. They ultimately fixed it, but something was going wrong now. They either didn’t do it correctly, or this was inevitable. Sugar put a call in to the time traveler who solved the problem, but had yet to receive a response.

There were not dozens of KBHs threatening the lives of the Bidans. There was only one, and that one was somehow being duplicated over, and over, and, and over again. She had to believe this was an accident. It was probably how Mirage Matic chose to save Bida, but it had evidently triggered a runaway chain reaction. And Sugar had no idea how to stop it. Her only hope was to keep deflecting them. It had been going on for weeks now, and they were getting pretty good at it. Could they hypothetically do this forever? Probably. While they didn’t appear predictably, their appearances had plateaued. But that didn’t mean it would stay this way. What happened when the duplicate KBHs exceeded the number of lasers in too short a time? What if in all the chaos, they accidentally deflected one of them towards one of their neighbors? What could they do if—

The sensor alarms started to blare. They would go off pretty frequently, but they were particularly urgent this time. The system knew that something was unusually wrong; that it had changed, and she had to shift all focus to the latest problem. “Oh my God,” she whispered as she stared at the screen in disbelief.

“What is it?” Liselot asked. She spent a lot of time up here, having chosen to move her base operations to Sugar’s ship. They now had a crew of dozens.

“We should have been worried about this the whole time. The next KBH. It’s not going to be in space. It’s going to be in the atmosphere.” Sugar desperately started to turn part of the array. They weren’t designed to fire towards the planet, but it was technically possible, as long as the angle wasn’t too steep. The computer was still narrowing down the entry point to a smaller area. The KBH was only millimeters in diameter, so it was hard to know exactly where it would appear. That normally wasn’t so critical, but in this case, it was more important than ever. They only had a few minutes.

“Where?” Liselot began snapping at her people. They knew what she was saying.

“What is this region here?” Sugar asked, pointing at the map. “It looks pretty heavily populated, and unusually densely so for your intentionally minimalistic world.”

“That’s...Eyrenland,” Liselot answered. “It’s the hub for our primary export, eyren. I don’t have time to explain it, but that’s where your friends from Doma Tertia are currently being housed while they figure out exactly what kind of life they wanna lead.”

“It’s about to be destroyed,” Sugar said as she pivoted to something else after syncing the sensors with the canons. They could fire at the right spot if that was what it came too, but if it was as close to the surface as it looked like it was going to be, it wasn’t the right way to handle it. And either way, the people down there were gonna die unless someone did something about it...unless she rescued them first.

“Thousands of people live and visit there every day,” Liselot explained.

“The rest of the planet isn’t safe either,” Sugar warned. “This is going to cause bidaquakes and general tectonic instability all around the world. Send that emergency broadcast over the air. They only have a moment to prepare, at best.”

“Where are you taking us?” Liselot questioned.

Sugar was at the helm now. “We have to position ourselves just above the entry point. I have two things to do. I have to pull everyone down there up here, and then I have to force the KBH back to where it came from.” She flipped switches and tapped on the console.

“What are you talking about?” Liselot pressed. “How can you do that?”

Sugar programmed the route, and made the jump. They still didn’t know the exact altitude, but it would be somewhere around here. “It’s something I’ve been working on since we found out that the KBHs were coming here through portals, and not simply wandering through realspace.” She made a short-range teleport over to the transport workstation. “If this works, I can push it backwards, but as of yet, my ship is the only thing equipped with the right hardware, which...makes this next part tricky, and I need your authorization.”

“You have it,” Liselot replied. “Do what you need to do.”

Sugar shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. The only way to save those people down there is to teleport them all at once. The ship is already remodularizing to prepare for maximum capacity, but once they come up here, they won’t necessarily be safe, because this is also the gun. I’ve not had time to test it, so if I do this, and it literally backfires, it could kill everyone anyway. My emergency transporters can’t move people to anywhere else. It doesn’t have the data to make sure some of them don’t end up in the middle of rocks, or at the bottom of the ocean. They have to come here, but this could quickly end up the most dangerous place to be.”

“Besides the surface, where the black hole is about to show up?” Liselot pointed out. “They’re gonna die if they stay down there, so get them here, and hope for the best.”

“Okay.” Sugar looked over at the sensor readings. “They were now showing how high above the surface the marble-sized singularity was going to appear. It...wasn’t going to be high. She tapped on her comms. “Van! Open the pocket dimensions. Open them all! We can’t fit everyone in realspace!”

“You got it, boss!” Van replied.

While Sugar waited for the internal portals to be activated, she widened the capture radius. Thirty-one seconds from impact, regardless of what the unsuspecting inhabitants were doing on the ground, Sugar teleported every single one of them into the ship, mostly into the pocket dimensions. They would be confused, but they would be alive, and she would try to explain things later.

“Now that they’re clear, can you not just close the portal so the black hole doesn’t come here at all?” Liselot hoped.

Sugar shook her head as she went over and hovered her hand over the button. “If I tried, it would probably make things worse. Think of it like a swarm of biblical locusts trying to fly through a doorway. If you just close the door, they’ll congregate against it until it buckles. You have to slam the door shut so it expels them backwards.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Liselot argued. “A bunch of the locusts would get in anyway.”

Sugar sighed. “Exactly.” She watched the timer count down. Eleven, ten, nine, eight... “This hasn’t been tested. If it doesn’t work...that’s the end of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida.” Three, two, one—

The Kugelblitz black hole popped into existence in the sky. The planet, which up until this point always tried to pull everything towards the barycenter near the core, suddenly had a competing mass to contend with. The trees, the water, the mountains; everything was pulled up towards the singularity. The objects closest to the event horizon were being tugged on more, resulting in them being strung out like spaghetti. The rest of the world tried to implode like a deflating football. The black hole was the heaviest thing around now, so it didn’t stay in one place. It began to fall towards the barycenter. If Sugar allowed that to happen, the whole planet would collapse in a matter of hours, if not minutes.

Sugar fired her new machine directly towards the black hole. It came from somewhere. They still hadn’t traced the source, but it had to form somewhere else in space, and she needed it to go back. As the energy wave reached critical mass, the biomass and geosphere continued to head towards a single moving point. It only took seconds for the KBH to disappear, but the devastation didn’t need long.

In this short amount of time, a land mass the size of a large country was reduced to a crater. All of the plant and animal life there was destroyed nearly instantly. The tremors continued to plague the surface all around as the gravitational disruption’s effects persisted beyond the initial shocking event.

“What did we just lose?” Sugar asked. “What did they use that settlement for?”

Liselot stared at the satellite images showing the barren landscape that once thrived. “Eggs. We lost the eggs.”

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Spaghetti West: Moonfall (Part I)

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Decades ago, a star called Proxima Centauri underwent a cataclysmic magnetic shift, which created a coronal mass ejection that decimated the orbiting planet of Proxima Doma. Proxima Doma was tidally locked, which meant one side always faced the sun, and one side always faced away. Only a narrow band was ever habitable, but as it turned out, not for long. What researchers now believed was that this event was the culmination of a centuries-long cycle. Over time, the habitable zone along the terminator line will stabilize, and become survivable once more. It had already begun to do that. There was still no atmosphere, so it required intelligent intervention, and for some, this was enough, but not for most. They wanted something permanently safe.

While the cycle was meaningfully long for a baseline human, it was a flash in the pan for an immortal, and unsustainable for a community. Why put down roots when you knew they were going to be destroyed eventually? People died in that tragedy. Many stayed on the poles, which were the only permanently safe regions, but this made space commutes unreasonably costly. So the majority of the survivors left.

They went all over the stellar neighborhood, but the primary destination was the Gatewood Collective. Gatewood was a materials depot, which was designated to provide colonists with the resources they needed to go wherever their final destination was. No one was meant to live there who didn’t work as the managers of the depot. One faction from Proxima Doma wasn’t happy with that. They wanted to stay, so they tried to lay claim to one of the extremely inhospitable planets. These were more stable and consistent than Doma, but still harsh. And anyway, they were about to be annihilated.

After some political turmoil, the captain of a transport vessel agreed to relocate these holdouts to another planet. They wanted one to call their own, but if they didn’t want to die, they would compromise for their own secluded region of a preexisting colony. This one orbited Tau Ceti, and was called Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. It wasn’t the only planet in the system, but it was the only habitable one, and that was thanks to a particularly uninhabited world called Qishra.

Sugar Delgado stood on the bridge of her ship with the Axiom of Astronomy, Liselot Olteanu. They were regarding a terrible sight through the viewscreen. “Magnify more,” Sugar instructs the computer.

That was definitely a moon, and it was definitely far too close to the planet.

“Not to blame or criticize,” Sugar went on, “but you didn’t see it coming?”

“Qishra orbits the star slowly, and the moon is moving fast. For the majority of the time, the moon was behind the planet. Even if we had seen it coming, there still isn’t anything we could have done about it. Some researchers think that it’ll be a near-miss.”

“You don’t,” Sugar stated.

Liselot held both of her fists up and presented a crude demonstration. “If Qishra were the eightball, and the moon was the cueball, yes, the geometry says it would miss.”

Sugar nodded. “But the Roche limit.”

“The Roche limit,” Liselot echoed. “You have to account for the gravity. The two bodies are being drawn together, and they will crash into each other. Now, it’s not a Theia event, but it will be enough to cause chaos. We can’t model what will happen to the planet once the rogue moon strikes. The most widely accepted model has the majority of the moon being ejected from the system while Qishra begins to form a ring.”

“But it won’t stop there,” Sugar deduced.

“The collision will add mass to the planet, which will only help it do its job to protect us, but over time, the chaos will increase, and it could start to shoot us.”

“But you don’t know.” Sugar wasn’t arguing, Not knowing was the scary part, because, given their technology, there was nothing they could do to protect themselves besides leave. And that will be logistically difficult, even if the first impact took months.

This world was a haven for those who wanted to live on a planet, but still wanted the simple, isolated life. There was only one city, mainly for coming and going. Nearly everyone lived in villages or homesteads. Some areas had such perfect weather that they didn’t even have permanent structures. A nomad might walk around with their tech and a tent, and that was it. People moved here because they liked to be alone with nature.

“No, we don’t know. It could take years, or it could take decades, but either way, I would not want to live here if I were a Domanian refugee,” Liselot reasoned.

Sugar shook her head. “You don’t know these people. They were fully cognizant that their new planet, Doma Tertia, was going to intentionally be destroyed, but they refused to leave. We only finally got them off of it because they are fiercely loyal to their leader, so we only had to convince him to stop being stubborn and stupid.”

“Then tell him to tell the others to get right back on your ship and leave here too.”

Sugar sighed. “He’s not here. He persuaded them to leave, but had somewhere else to go. Now they can only operate on his most recent orders. It’s bizarre.”

“For a group of isolationists, they sure are dependent,” Liselot pointed out. “Sorry to be blunt about that.”

“No, you’re right. I don’t like them, I just got stuck with them,” Sugar explained.

“Some Bidans have packed up and left because of this threat,” Liselot added. “I mean, our population was already dwindling because people want to check out Castlebourne, or because they’re choosing Varkas Reflex over VR around nature. Some, however, report being afraid of Armageddon. It’s my job to give them the facts, and the fact is that we don’t have enough information yet, and once we do, it may be too late.”

“You called it a rogue moon,” Sugar pointed out. “Which planet is it from?”

Liselot smiled. She was actually rather excited about this. “We think it’s from Qishra. We think the planet ejected it millions of years ago, and it’s been rogue ever since, wandering the outer system this whole time. Which means it’s—”

“Coming home,” they said simultaneously. Then they were silent for a moment.

“I hope you weren’t thinking that we could help with evacuation efforts,” Sugar said, breaking the ice. This was a transport vessel, but it didn’t have unlimited capacity. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. With enough power, they could expand inward into pocket dimensions. But it could still not support the whole population of this planet, and none of them was authorized to know about that kind of tech in the first place.

“No,” Liselot assured her. “We may prefer nature, but the reason the city exists, and why my job exists, is because we understand that the universe is a dangerous place. Most who do want to leave are transferring their consciousnesses through the quantum network. We’re building deep underground shelters for those who want to stay, and constructing exodus ships for those who wanna leave in their own bodies with their own possessions. What we were hoping was that you could prevent the chaotic ejections that will follow. New ring systems are violent and unpredictable. With your weapons—”

“I don’t have any weapons,” Sugar argued.

“Forgive me, captain,” Liselot said. “Our sensors clearly indicate one.”

Sugar painted a puzzled look on her face. “Oh, that’s a hot pocket purge.”

“I’m sorry?” Now Liselot was the one who was confused.

“It’s a stealth feature,” Sugar began to explain. “You store your waste heat in a special contained environment, then you can purge it all at once when you’re, say, on the other side of a star, or something. You’re practically invisible in between purges.”

“That sounds like it could be used as a weapon,” Liselot contended.

“Yeah, but not for what you’re asking,” Sugar insisted. “It’s not anywhere near as powerful as the kind of nuclear bombs you would require. It can’t hold enough energy to accomplish that. I’m sorry. If I had realized your intentions, I wouldn’t have wasted—”

“No, it’s my fault. I listened to what my experts said they detected on your ship.” Liselot frowns and breathes through her nose. “Thank you. I’ll leave now.”

“Hold on,” Sugar said. “It will take months for the ring to form and become a real threat. Just because I don’t have what you need, doesn’t mean I can’t build it. At the very least, you need to construct orbital defense platforms with ablation lasers. Earth has been using those for centuries, and it’s worked out for them.”

“Earth has never faced the kind of onslaught we could have on our hands,” Liselot said. “Jupiter has always been stronger than Qishra. That’s why intelligent life was able to evolve on it in the first place. And their monitoring infrastructure is leagues beyond ours simply by its age. We knew what we were getting into when we colonized. Tau Ceti is a volatile system. This should come as no surprise. We were foolish.”

“Still,” Sugar urged, “you need ablation lasers, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right. I just don’t know that we have time.”

Sugar smirked. “Well...we store time in the stern.”

“Huh?” Liselot questioned.

Sugar had already said too much. “I have the design for an excellent defense platform in my privilege vault. It’s got a lot of bells and whistles that you don’t need right now, so I’ll take a day to modify it. All I’ll need are the raw materials.”

Liselot held a minute to think about it. “We’ll accept anything we can get.”

“Great.” Sugar tapped behind her ear. “Van. Come to the bridge please.”

Van teleported there instantly.

“Whoa. How did you do that?” Liselot asked him.

“Uh, he’s only a hologram,” Sugar lied. “Van, I need you to be able to make physical contact, so please turn off your imager and come back in person.”

“Sorry, boss.” Vantu disappeared.

“I could have sworn that I could feel his physical presence,” Liselot claimed. “Maybe even the warmth of his core.”

“Magnets!” Sugar joked.

Liselot breathed deeply and looked back over at the impending collision. “You really think we can do this? I know we don’t have to worry about something happening tomorrow, but we’re intentionally obsolete. We should have made the city bigger.”

Sugar watched the event too. “I can do this. Trust me, it’s no big deal.”

It was a big deal. The moon itself was nothing, but it turned out to be hiding something much, much worse. No laser could destroy a black hole. But it could move it.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 22, 2566

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When Mateo, Angela, and Ramses landed on this new colony planet, the latter immediately started trying to figure out how to get back home. It wasn’t right for Romana to make this decision for them. He was completely locked out, and embarrassed by that. He guessed that the invisible probe he had orbiting this planet were monitoring their progress. Once they satisfactorily completed the assignment, it would automatically unlock the recall program, and send them back home. Until then, they were forced to help the locals come to an agreement regarding their grape conflict.

Romana didn’t send them off with nothing. Ramses had the equipment he needed to sample the soil himself. The colonists had their own ways, but they weren’t very sophisticated. They came here with personal tech restrictions. They wanted to be as organic as possible, so while they happily maintained their transhumanistic enhancements, they shunned powered tools. They weren’t against them in general, they had just decided that they wouldn’t use them. They were perfectly content with Ramses doing it for them. He discovered that the south side of the river had better soil. The grapes would be happy there, and they would also be able to expand the farm as needed.

After the locals agreed to follow Ramses’ suggestion, they hoped to be slung back to Ramosus, but no such thing happened. Romana may have been waiting until midnight central, but there could have been some other issue. Maybe she needed to see that the colonists would indeed follow the new plan, and not just a pinky promise. So they helped till the land manually until midnight central approached, at which point they snuck off to a remote part of the forest. There they waited for their time jump.

It was now a year later. The vineyard was absolutely thriving. It had grown bigger than they thought it would in the short amount of time. Ramses guessed that the sun was emitting more desirable wavelengths of light, but he did not care to test it. They were ready to go. They should have been returned by now. Maybe Ramses wasn’t right about how it worked, or Romana was keeping an eye on them, and simply controlling it manually. Or maybe something was seriously wrong somewhere else, like the team’s other assignment site. Or Romana herself was in trouble.

“Are you sure you can’t bypass it?” Angela questioned. “Can you proverbially reverse the polarity, and undo the lockout? Or find some kind of backdoor in the system? We have our own slingdrives. We should maintain full control over them.”

“You’re right, we should,” Ramses agreed. “Rather, I should. I don’t know how she did it. Our onboard slingdrives are non-negotiable, but they’re missing a component. It’s...if you know anything about guns, it’s essentially the firing pin. The process won’t trigger without it, unless it has some external trigger, like the Ramosus base.”

“Can you build a new one?” Mateo proposed. “Just the new trigger.”

“Hmm,” Ramses said. “I didn’t think of that. It shouldn’t be too hard, as long as she didn’t sabotage anything else. I don’t even know how she gained access to our catalyzers in the first place.” He pulled out his tablet, and started tapping on it. “I can’t promise it’ll be done in a day since I’m away from my lab, but I’ll work as fast as I can.”

“Take your time,” Angela encouraged. “It’s better to get it right than do it rushed.”

“In the meantime, should we go back and help in the vineyard?” Mateo suggested.

“Let’s leave them alone,” Angela decided. “They need to learn their own limits. They will probably eventually bring external tech back, and just become normal. I think we did all we were obligated to. I just wish I understood why Romana doesn’t agree.”

Ramses was unable to finish. The next year, the vineyard was burnt down.

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Microstory 2724: Report Back

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As far as the Teaguardians—and everyone else, for that matter—knows, Pribadium is dead. She died in the destruction of Doma Tertia, along with the Doma Tertians. That’s quite all right. She doesn’t need anyone looking for her, or watching her as she travels to her secret laboratory. It takes them a long time, since they have to teleport there without a ship, but since they’re about to go back in time, it’s fine.

“If it’s a secret, does that mean no one knows, or just not the public?” Sora asks.

Pribadium looks at him with a side eye. She’s going to be taking him with her into the past. He can’t know about the hot pocket—how she stores up waste heat in another dimension, and purges it periodically, perfectly timed with the transit of neighboring and distant stars. “Only you and I know about this place. Will I have to kill you later?”

Sora laughs. “Honey, if you can travel through time, I’m not stupid enough to get on your bad side. I just thought you were immortal, like Tertius and Aeterna. I had no idea that there was so much more out there. No, you won’t have to kill me.”

Pribadium starts running her preflight checks. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. Did you name that planet after him? Was he a friend of yours, or...?”

“It’s a coincidence,” Sora responds. “I didn’t name it myself. Proxima Doma means next home. Doma Tertia means third home. I tried to argue, but I didn’t want to tell anyone about the immortals I met, so I didn’t have a leg to stand on.”

Pribadium nods, then flips the time machine on. She hoped never to use this thing again. She doesn’t take any of this lightly. It’s only for emergencies. Messing with the past is dangerous, which is why she rarely does it. It’s also why she doesn’t spend much time with other travelers. She will manipulate time and space all day, but she would rather do it in the present. The circumstances call for an intervention, though.

“It is exactly as I pictured it,” Sora says. “A sleek, well-lit chamber, about the height of a normal ceiling, wide enough for several people. Like the old movies.”

Pribadium sometimes gets ultra excited, talking about her science. She can’t trust very many people. “This works differently than the ones you see in films, which are powered by radioactive materials or phlebotinum. This is powered by vacuum energy, which means as long as the universe exists, so does this machine. Except not for long,” she explains. “Since you know about it, I will have to destroy it on the other side.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Sora reasons. “I don’t even know where we are.”

“I can’t take that risk,” she says. “You know enough. I shouldn’t even be showing you at all, but I need you. If I try to go back and replay the scenario, it will probably end about the same. The Teaguardians have their own access to certain advanced technologies. Going against their plans requires finesse. Can you do this, Mr. Shimizu?”

“It depends on what happens to the other me when I go back in time,” he decides.

“I can’t describe the exact process, because I genuinely don’t know it, but one of you will simply stop existing. The way I understand it, the one with fewer memories usually disappears, but I’ve heard of cases where they sacrifice for their younger selves.”

“That is not always what happens,” a voice from behind her points out.

Pribadium turns around to find an alternate version of herself standing there.

“Whoa. Did we already do it?” Sora asks. “Did we go back in time?”

“No,” both Pribadiums reply to him simultaneously.

There is a protocol for this. “Report,” the Pribadium who belongs here instructs.

Microstory 2723: Not Part of the Plan

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Pribadium always keeps an excess of nanites for such occasions. She releases enough to encompass Sora in a vacuum suit, as well as herself. When he takes her hand, she teleports them into orbit. The two Teaguardian ships here are powering their weapons, and it will do enough damage to the planet to still kill the two of them. She has cleared the signal jammer, so her consciousness has begun streaming to her backups again, but it will take some time before the update is complete. Besides, she has to protect this dumbass. So she keeps teleporting them until they’re far enough away.

From this vantage point, they watch as the weapons reach critical mass and converge on a single spot on the world below them. They seemed to have been aiming for the settlement, so everyone living there is already dead. The Teaguardians don’t have to keep going. Yet they do. In minutes, it’s quite clear that they’re planning to obliterate Doma Tertia. But there’s a reason Pribadium chose not to do it this way in the first place. It might be quicker, but it won’t last. The gravity well is too strong.

Every celestial body holds something known as gravitational binding energy. If you want to break it apart, you need any amount beyond that binding energy. If you don’t reach this threshold, it may still break apart, but then it will just come back together. Even if it takes years, it will recoalesce because the total mass has not changed. That’s why they constructed a stellar shotgun on Ross 154, because they needed a shit ton of energy to get it done. What the Teaguardians are doing here is only making things worse. The whole point is to get at all of the raw material without having to dig themselves out of the gravity well every time they want to redistribute it. Now that’s what they will have to do. But there’s an even greater problem. It’s all about safety.

You can’t just go blowing up planets without any regard for what else is around. The energy beams are coming from several light years away. They knew exactly when they were going to deploy, and what the Gatewood system would look like when that energy finally arrived. In order to protect the people who needed to live and work here during the blasts, they determined where the safe zones were. For the last several months, in preparation for the demolition, everyone was moved to a handful of little pockets of safety. These were calculated, recalculated, verified, and reverified by literally thousands of independent entities. All of those precautions are no longer viable. If she doesn’t undo this, the entire star system will have to be abandoned for decades.

Pribadium sighs. “I really have never heard of Tertius or Aeterna,” she begins, “but I am not surprised. A number of people were born with the ability to manipulate time or space in various ways. Others became that way later in life. I had to discover the power through years of science and exploration. Time travel is real, Sora.”

“You can go back and undo this?” Sora asks. “You can save my people?”

“No,” she answers. “But you can. The only way to stop the Teaguardians from shooting the planet is by not giving them a reason to. Only you can do that.”

“Was this all part of the plan?” Sora questions. “Was it nothing more than an elaborate ruse? Were you just trying to trick me into changing the past?”

“You think I blew up a planet just to get you to help me undo it? Mr. Shimizu, that makes no sense. I could have teleported you all offworld whenever I wanted. I was going for diplomatic avenues. I never wanted you to know the truth. So how about it? You wanna help me save the world? Or are you gonna be, like, a dick about it?”

Microstory 2722: People in Glass Houses

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“Go ahead and ask your questions,” Pribadium encourages. She’s a good liar, so he can ask whatever he wants, it doesn’t mean he will get the answers he expects.

“How many like you are there out there?” Sora asks as if it’s a complete thought.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Pribadium says. “Asset managers, or Chief Asset Managers? I’m the only CAM. There are a few other asset managers below me. There are other chiefs. Would you like me to list them?”

“I’m not talking about chiefs or asset managers!” Sora cries. “I want to know how many immortals there are! Stop dancing around the subject! I know what you are!”

Pribadium is confused. “How many immortals? Billions, I guess. I don’t have the numbers. Did you check the aggregate records? Those stats are probably in there.”

Sora shakes his head, growing even more frustrated. “Not people who became that way through life extension consciousness digitization. I’m talking about real, totally unkillable immortals who can survive being thrown into the air by a pyrotornado, and later falling several kilometers down a giant chasm in the planet.”

Pribadium stares at him. She has no clue what he’s going on about. “That’s not possible. No substrate is strong enough to survive what you’re describing.”

“Well, I saw it happen.” He sighs, seemingly working through a debate in his own head. “Tertius. Does the name Tertius mean anything to you, or Aeterna?”

“I have never heard of them. Are they bands, errr...?”

“Quit joking, and quit lying,” Sora whines. “They’re real immortals. They survived the impossible. I know you know them. I heard them whispering about you in the north dome. They said that survivors of Proxima Doma would end up here, and that you would be able to help. They acted like they knew you, and now here we are on Gatewood.”

She continues to stare. She isn’t lying. She genuinely doesn’t know who that is. The number of people in the timeline who have temporal abilities is a low fraction compared to the total population, but it’s still too many for everyone to know everyone. She has never cared to meet more. “Maybe they knew me, but I didn’t reciprocate.”

Sora buries his face in his palms. “You have to help us. You have to fix this.”

Before Pribadium can ask exactly what she wants him to fix, one of the other hostage-takers bursts into the room. “Shimizu. A Teaguardian is here.”

Sora’s eyes widen. He stands up, and paces frantically. “Shit. Get everyone to the tunnels. Hide. If they can’t find you, they can’t make you leave. I’ll watch the prisoner.”

A soldier suddenly teleports into the room. “Chief Asset Manager Pribadium Delgado? I’m here to rescue you.” She raises her gun when Sora moves a single muscle.

“Wait!” Pribadium orders. “I need him alive. He’s undigitized. In my domain, killing him would be a crime. We had a deal with Teagarden. You shouldn’t be here.”

“I just go where I’m told, CAM Delgado. We need to leave now.” They are about to glass this planet.

“That is not necessary,” Pribadium starts to explain. “We’re already doing it.”

“We know, but my superiors believe that there is not enough time for that. They’re going to do it the hard way. It will recoalesce, but that won’t help these people.”

Pribadium actively stops the soldier from teleporting her out of the room. “I’m sorry, but I’m not done here yet. And you gotta go.” She pushes the soldier into a portal, then turns back to Sora. “You can either come with me, or go with her. Your choice.”

Microstory 2720: They’re Not Afraid Anymore

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Chief Asset Manager Pribadium Delgado is sitting across the table from the seemingly self-appointed leader of the so-called Doma Tertians. His name is Sora Shimizu, and he has already proven difficult for her. He doesn’t like what she’s wearing, claiming that the shine offends his eyes. She does tend to favor the sleek and glossy aesthetic, and this is the sort of thing she normally wears, but she can be flexible. She taps on her wrist interface to shift her outfit to a matte purple.

Sora looks down at the purple scarf around his ankle. “That won’t win you points with me. I wear this in honor of a loved one. It was her favorite color, not mine.”

Pribadium has her limits. Without saying a word, she taps on her interface again, reverting back to her usual shiny suit as she folders her arms. Now she’s in his head.

Sora grits his teeth. “Whatever you’ve come to say, you should know that I know my rights. I know that we are legally allowed to settle on any celestial body massive enough to coalesce into a meaningfully spherical shape. No party may stake singular claim to an entire legally categorized terrestrial planet at the expense of other settlers—”

“I know the law,” Pribadium argues. “I helped write the most recent amendments.”

“Did you know that these laws apply to all neighborhood planets, and that the potential for sole ownership only begins outside of the bounds of a fifty light year radius from Earth?” Sora presses.

“Of course I know that,” Pribadium reiterates. “I wrote them! You obviously didn’t read or comprehend them. Those laws only apply to colony worlds. The Gatewood Collective was not categorized as a colony world. It was a military outpost for centuries before being released to a special asset distributor, which I run. The planet that we are on right now was deemed excessively inhospitable, and unfit for colonization. Squatter’s rights do not apply, because no one is allowed to settle on it. We are not settling on it either. It has been scheduled for obliteration. The process has already begun, and cannot be undone. If you stay, you will die when the pulse arrives.”

“We do not accept that decision,” Sora contends. “We might have landed after you fired your big gun, but we are here now. We know that there are ways for you to deflect the beam. You either do that, or count yourself responsible for the permanent deaths of hundreds of colonists who are also refugees. You will lose your job.”

“First of all, it’s a job, not a calling. If I lose it, then fine. In a few thousand years, no one will remember this. Secondly, we won’t come out looking bad. You were informed of the facts. You chose to stay. Everyone will know that. I’ll be fine. Gatewood will be fine. Thirdly, we can’t deflect it. It’s moving at the speed of light.”

Sora folds his arms now. “I know you have your ways. You can’t fool me.”

Oh, he’s just crazy. She knows that she shouldn’t use that word, which is why she doesn’t say it out loud. He’s clearly not mentally well, though. He might have been born that way, or the horror he faced on Proxima Doma changed him. This is gonna be tough either way. Then again, she does have the ability to manipulate time. There’s no way he knows that, right? I mean, if he were a time traveler, he would just speak with her honestly about it. He has to be bluffing, and her status is a complete coincidence. Right?

Sora chuckles softly. “Take all the time you need. We survived the destruction of our planet. It turned to soup underneath my feet. We are not afraid anymore. Are you?”

Microstory 2719: Previously...on Gatewood

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About six light years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus, there is a small red dwarf named Barnard’s Star. Four planets orbit the host, and since they are all so close to it, they are affectionately known as hot rockies. Due to its local inhospitability and its proximity to Earth, it was assigned a very special job. Earth is the seed and heart of life and civilization. Everything in the Sol system belongs to those who live there. Until Castlebourne came along, it was assumed that Sol would remain the central hub of the galaxy. It only makes sense. In order to preserve their resources, early colonial coordinators decided that Barnard’s Star would be a giant celestial junkyard.

For centuries, the Core Worlds have enjoyed a post-scarcity economy, where every basic need is met, along with many not-so-basic needs. It is entirely plausible and easy to live quiet comfortably without spending a proverbial dime. But it is still an economy, and it is based on a currency of energy credits. Every day, each citizen accumulates a baseline amount of credits, just by existing. Many leave these credits in their private accounts, and don’t do anything with them. Others donate to those in need—not those who need it to survive, but those who want something more.

If you find someone to donate their credits to you, or if you contribute positively to society, you can earn extra credits. Citizens elect the legislators who determine how much a contribution is worth, but it doesn’t really have to have all that much technical value. You could be, hypothetically speaking, the worst painter in the world, but if you paint a piece of art, and provide it to the public, you have made a positive contribution. Even if no one likes it, it is something that you created and provided, so it counts, and you will receive credits for that. It probably won’t be much, but it will at least blip above the baseline. Bigger contributions lead to bigger payouts, and importantly, combining credits with others results in a total that is more than the sum of its parts. Because sharing and cooperation are, on their own, considered positive contributions.

Since most amenities are provided by the state for free, what do energy credits give you? They can pay for two major things: building something at significant scale, or traveling somewhere of significant distance. That is precisely why Barnard’s Star was chosen as the junkyard. It is relatively close, so getting there is fairly easy, and once you’re there, you can go just about anywhere else. There is always an interstellar cycler on its way there, so you won’t have to wait long. You spend your credits on a ticket to the junkyard, and then you’re free to apply for your own transportation. Upon approval, rather than using up Sol’s resources, you take what raw materials you need from Barnard’s Star. The celestial bodies which orbit it are called the Gatewood Collective.

Very few entities live in the Gatewood Collective on a permanent basis. Most are waiting for their applications to go through, or are actively engineering their vessels. These parties may range from an individual to entire fleets of colonists. Only the staff stick around. It’s there job to decide who gets what, and to make sure colonists are doing what they’re meant to be doing. They are the coordinators and the police. All of this stuff is mostly free, so there is no reason to be greedy, and more to the point, there is no reason to stay for any longer than you have to. Build what you need, then bug out.

Not everyone follows these terms, even if they agreed to them before they left their prior homes. That is where the police contingency comes in. So far, it’s been mostly okay; just a few conflicts. Definitely nothing major. There are hundreds of billions of stars in this galaxy alone. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect one of them to be limited to this one use. As previously stated, the planets are far too difficult to colonize. It’s not entirely impossible, but it’s fundamentally ludicrous. And yet, some are trying.

Another six light years from Barnard’s Star is another red dwarf called Ross 154. There is nothing special about it either, so there wasn’t any interest in colonizing it. In the middle of the 25th century, construction began on a stellar shotgun around Ross 154. This was no weapon, though. It was designed to harvest the violent forces of the flare star, feeding into a massive capacitor. It took about half a century to build, and about another half to charge. Once the energy was at its peak, they fired the weapon, not towards Barnard’s Star, but those four hot rockies. The pulse is traveling at the speed of light, which means it will take years for them to arrive. In preparation for this, all other shipbuilding has been relegated to safer regions of Gatewood.

Once the pulses hit their marks, each target will break apart in a matter of only a few days. Anything attempting to live on it will be utterly destroyed. The whole reason it took so long for them to build the stellar shotgun in the first place is so they could run extremely extensive tests on the possibility of life on the hot rockies. They found none. Even extremophiles don’t want to live here. But some humans do. A group of refugees from Proxima Doma made their way to the Gatewood Collective after their own planet suffered a world ending cataclysm. They came to find a new home, and they didn’t want to go far. They were told that Barnard’s Star was the perfect destination, but they failed to recognize or respect the rules. They want to stay here, which would already set a dangerous precedent, but not only that; they want to live on a planet, as they had before.

It’s not everyone. Plenty of migrants from Doma have come, and started work on their ships. Many didn’t bother coming this direction at all. Gatewood is more for people who want to leave the stellar neighborhood. The majority of the refugees wanted to stay close by, and since the destruction of their homeworld was not their fault, the government agreed to ferry them anywhere within 25 light years.

This one small group of rebels, however, don’t like that Barnard’s Star is only meant to be a pitstop. They think that the legislators should treat it like any other Core star. But if they had, there would be no conflict. If they had given it the same colonial designation, no one would have wanted to live here; not if they were so gung-ho on planets. They are all uninhabitable, and the star itself is nothing special. They only want it because they can’t have it. And that is no good reason at all.

The pulses have been sent, and there is no stopping them. The reason it’s taking so long is because of how powerful they are. They’re designed to obliterate planets. Even if the government wanted to back out of this mission, they would be physically incapable of it. The process has already begun. They’re just waiting for the results to come in, and it will not be long now. Chief Asset Manager, Pribadium Delgado should not be entertaining these people’s complaints. If they don’t leave Barnard’s Star e in the next few weeks, they are going to die. That is a certainty. Now, she could remove them forcibly, but that would be a PR disaster. Squatter’s rights were a thing back on Earth when there was such a thing as homelessness, and they still exist today, just on greater scales. Simply landing on their tiny little settlement is incredibly taxing thanks to the heat and terrain. But here she is, trying to negotiate a peaceful solution. The former Domanians are not having it. And now, they’re trying to take her hostage. Hilarious.

Microstory 2711: Dropping the Hammer

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Isavet strides right through the mercenary camp. Little by little, the men notice her and stop what they’re doing. They’re mostly cleaning their spears, polishing their spears, and sharpening their spears. They’re doing a lot with their spears. Isavet asked her father for a sword, but he promised that his friend in the city would forge her a better one, and that she wouldn’t need it until she got there. That is one thing she is missing out on. But it’s in the wrong direction, and she doesn’t want to waste precious time on formal lessons. She wants to get into it. She has already fought before when she had to defend her home. She understands the mechanics; she just needs more practice.

As Isavet is walking through, she’s looking for a target. She isn’t going to go after the biggest guy here. She may be a fighter at heart, but she’s wise enough to know her limits. She doesn’t want the lankiest, least muscular guy either, though. She wants someone right in the middle; preferably one who thinks he’s the cock of the day. Maybe it’s him? No, he looks like he may be soft, like Isavet’s brother. There’s definitely something different about him. They are all leering at her with lust, but he looks like he wants to court her first. Which is obviously not what she needs right now. Moving along.

There he is. There’s her man. He’s stepping out from his tent area, arms folded. He is leaving plenty of room for her to pass, but he will close any gap she tries to walk through. She can tell that he’s at the ready. So she plays into it. She pretends to try to walk by so he can reach out to stop her. She was going to insult his status, and demand to speak with the leader, but his hand lands right upon her breast. Now she has to take him down without warning. She twists his wandering thumb, and then his wrist, and once he’s good and in pain, she pushes him the rest of the way down to his back. He’s big enough where she cannot remain standing, so she literally rolls with it, right over him, so she can let go and stand back up on his other side. No one moves to stop her.

As she is trying to pivot to hit him while he’s down, he grasps her ankle. She doesn’t like that, so she pulls out her knife and slashes him on the inside of his elbow. That makes him let go. She slams the handle against his eye socket, and slashes his cheek, but very shallowly. It shouldn’t leave a scar if he’s careful with it. “Try anything, and I’ll go deeper next time.” She moves her blade over to his manhood. “Or maybe I’ll just make a clean cut. How does that sound?”

The man shakes his head as he’s holding pressure against his injuries.

“Does anyone volunteer to fight for this man’s honor!” she cries. The crowd still doesn’t move. Isavet places the tip of her dagger against the palm of her hand. She digs in and twists back and forth a few times. Once her blood has pooled, she reaches down, and squeezes it around the wound on her victim’s arm. “Now we are bonded for life.” She pulls as hard as she can to help him back up to his feet. “What is your name?”

“Hamarr,” he answers, “son of Stein.”

“I don’t want to join your clan, Hamarr, but I do want someone to teach me. I took you down with hardly any experience at all. Imagine what I could do with a little training. While I’m with you, I will fight by your side, but when I’m ready to go, I go.”

“That is not my decision.” Hamarr points to the man who looked at her funny.

The apparent leader walks up with what Isavet’s mother once called swagger. He holds his hand out towards her. “Welcome to my camp. My name is Caleb. I’m from a planet called Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. Ever heard of it?”