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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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 28, 2572

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Their collective depression had not been alleviated by Romana’s departure, but had only grown darker. She did what she promised, or at least so far. When she made it through to the other side, she sent a message back through the persistent bulk connection, assuring them that she was fine. And just this morning, she sent another one, informing them that she would be leaving Earth today. Later messages would have to come through the quantum network, which took longer, and couldn’t be done in realtime at these distances; not with the equipment her little ship had. It was equipped with everything she needed, including a reframe engine, but it was nothing fancy.

As for the rest of them, they didn’t want to do anything. They tried to sulk together, but they kept awkwardly locking eyes with each other. No one said anything out loud, they just gradually started to go their separate ways. Mateo didn’t know if they were occupying their minds with various activities, or like him, they were just sitting there, stewing. Not even Ramses was working, and he almost always had a project in his queue. Speaking of queues, there was an off-world mission that they could have taken, but no one was up for it, so they simply ignored it. It wasn’t the right thing to do, per se, but the way they saw it, they were a bonus addition for the galaxy. They were not officially responsible for helping anyone. They had committed to no one.

After a few hours of this, Olimpia paged their communicators, which was just a simple way to say, come here. It wasn’t the right protocol for an emergency, so no one rushed to her location in the main lounge. When they finally did show up one by one, she didn’t even look like she was waiting for them. She was resting her temple on her fist, and staring blankly at the floor. Only when the last of them, Angela arrived, did Olimpia perk up a little. “I’m leaving too.”

“Like Romana?” Leona asked, panic in her eyes, but also patient caution.

“Yes, but I don’t intend on going anywhere besides Earth. I think I want to revisit Sri Lanka; see what’s become of it. And...I wanna do it alone. I’m not asking for a divorce, or anything. I need to clear my head. This place reminds me of my...of Romy.”

“It’s okay,” Leona encouraged. “She saw you as a mother figure. You are inarguably her stepmother. You can call her your daughter. I do.”

“I think that’s maybe changed,” Olimpia decided. “We have been through a lot together, the seven of us. I used to think nothing could tear us apart. Now I don’t know if anything can bring us back together. It’s not the only reason I’m leaving, though.”

Leona stood and approached her wife. She leaned over and kissed her on the lips. It wasn’t a mere peck, but it wasn’t passionate either. It was soft and familiar; fitting for a goodbye. “I don’t want you to go, but I respect your decision.” She inhaled. “Matt, would you like to say goodbye to your wife?”

Mateo stood too. He exhaled. “I can’t respect this. When you break a pencil, it becomes harder to write with. You don’t solve that by breaking it again.” He walked out of the room. He couldn’t take another person leaving. Well, he wouldn’t be able to stop it, but he at least didn’t have to watch it happen. If he didn’t see her go through that slingportal, as far as he would know, Olimpia was always just in a different room.

He suspected that he would regret his actions later, but he was not living in the later. Now was now, and this was what he had to do to survive this.

As he was trying to sulk alone in his room, Leona walked in.

“Don’t say it,” he begged.

“You need to go fix this before you miss your chance,” Leona demanded.

“I meant what I said. When something is broken, don’t break it again,” he argued.

“If you don’t go back out there before she leaves, you’re going to have to repeat what you said to her to me. Do you understand me? This is a difficult situation, and we all have different feelings about it. This is her way of dealing with it.”

“Well, this is how I’m dealing with it,” Mateo reasoned. “Why should I apologize for my reaction to her reaction? She should respect me, and let me be.”

“She is,” Leona countered. “That’s why I’m in this room right now, and she’s not.”

“What if she doesn’t come back, Leona? What if Romana doesn’t either? What if this is the end of all of us?” He couldn’t even remember how long he had been doing this, or how long he had known the people he loved, but he couldn’t imagine an end to that. Not even death should have been able to collapse the team, but here they were.

“Exactly,” Leona agreed. “What if she never comes back, and what if the reason she never comes back is because you made her feel like it would be bad if she did?”

“We made vows to each other, Lee. She’s breaking them.” Mateo sighed.

“No.” Leona shook her head. “You are.”

He sighed again. “You’re right. Goddammit.” He still didn’t move from his bed.

“Get up. She’s packing light. She could leave at literally any second.”

Mateo went back out to the lounge, but Olimia wasn’t there, so he teleported to the slingdrive lab. He didn’t see her there either, so he started freaking out, but he knew what the machine looked like when it had recently been used, and it had not recently been used. That was when he remembered that they could locate each other.

Olimpia was with Ramses in the main hangar bay. They were just climbing down the steps as the latter was finishing up explaining how to shift AI models if something went wrong with the first. “The failsafes are foolproof, you’re gonna be fine. Oh.”

“Sorry. Can I talk to my wife alone?” Mateo requested sheepishly.

“I just want to make sure the ship collapses into the right pocket dimension,” Ramses said. “I have fixed the initial bugs by now, but I had some issues with the earlier iterations of this technology, so now I always quadruple check it.”

“I just tap right here?” Olimpia asked, mostly rhetorically. After receiving a nod from Ramses, she tapped her interface. Her personal shuttlecraft disappeared.

“Okay.” Ramses put on a special pair of glasses and sized Olimpia up like the best friend character in a ‘90s romcom who didn’t have as much restraint as the protagonist. “All right, it’s in there. You’re good to go.” He put his glasses away and opened his arms.

The two of them hugged before Ramses left. Now it was only Mateo and Olimpia.

“I made a huge mistake and reacted poorly. I’m sorry. I don’t want us to part on bad terms,” Mateo said. “Do you have time to forgive me before you step into that machine? And if not, can you delay departure, so we have more time to talk?”

“We’ll be okay,” Olimpia said to him. “There’s nothing to forgive. I sprang this on you. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but I’ve not discussed it. I still have family alive who I’ve not seen in centuries. I don’t know where they are, but I’m gonna start there. The reason I didn’t bring it up before is because I didn’t know if I wanted you to come. I want you to meet them, but maybe we don’t overwhelm them? I will stay connected. I’m not going just because of what happened with Romana. It’s bad timing.”

Mateo nodded. “Okay. Don’t forget that I love you, though. Our marital bed will feel empty without you, even though Leona will be next to me too.”

“Well...keep it warm for me. I hope by the time I return, Romana has as well.”

By the time Olimpia was even close to returning, Ramosus had been deserted.

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Microstory 2742: Pushing Through

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Over the last hour, Runaway has been reaching into the minds of her progenitors, and making them escape wherever they happened to be so they can find refuge in Tau Station. The station, meanwhile, has been moving closer and closer to the center of the universe, as has Pribadium’s lab. The Little Crunch, as Sugar—which is what Sora has chosen to call her—has decided to call it, is still heading their way. So far, there have been no casualties, but that’s only coming off Runaway’s knowledge. It could have happened prior to her genesis. And soon, there will be no safe place left to hide.

That’s why their priorities have completely shifted. They no longer have two objectives, but one. The barrier is dangerous, and a huge threat to all. They have no choice but to refocus their efforts on saving everyone. Having the mobile command center would be great, but it’s not worth people’s lives, and it’s an all-hands on deck situation. Runaway may be more powerful, but her knowledge doesn’t include anything about the lab, and Sugar is literally out of date, so Pribadium is in charge.

She has been barking orders at all three of them, Sora included. She gave him a teleporter vest so he can jump to various parts of the facility. He is mostly sealing bulkheads manually since all available power has been rerouted to propulsion. Runaway has done the same thing to Tau Station. This only solves the immediate issue, though. They are trapped in this pocket universe with no apparent escape.

“We have to punch through it!” Runaway argues. She’s figured out how to multitask, so she can carry a conversation while fully in control of her progenitors.

“Through what, the gravity generators? I’ve already thought of that,” Pribadium explains. “It won’t work. It will only crush us faster.”

“No, the dimensional generators,” Runaway argues.

“Those are for pocket dimensions. They’re not going to get us back to real reality,” Pribadium reasons. “We would still be crushed, except we won’t see it coming anymore.”

“Dimensional generators synthesize temporal energy. Don’t use them correctly. Break them open. Focus the energy through a hot pocket purge, and create a doorway.”

Pribadium shakes her head. “You’re talking about an artificial wormhole. Just because it’s manmade doesn’t mean it will be any more stable than a natural wormhole.”

“Stop!” Sugar suddenly cries before Runaway can push back on Pribadium.

Everyone halts. “What is it?” Pribadium questions. “Do you have a better idea?”

“I have the only idea,” Sugar contends as she’s stepping over and gently moving Pribadium and Runaway’s hands away from the controls that they were hovering over. “We are going about this all wrong. The only reason the walls are closing in is because we’re trapped between the membrane of the universe, and the false vacuum we call outer space. We may think we have to slip back in to survive, but even if we manage to punch a hole in the dimensional barrier, the resulting explosion could be catastrophic...for us, and anyone else in the vicinity.” She looks at her future self. “Pribadium, you wanted to leave the universe. You wanted to create your own. That’s exactly what we have to do. The bulk is a stable equilibrium. We will be safe there.”

“But we’ll be trapped,” Pribadium says. “These people can never go home.”

“Can’t they?” Sugar questions. “Isn’t traveling the bulkverse the whole point?”

They think quietly on their own. “So we push through,” Runaway determines.

“We push through,” Pribadium agrees.

Microstory 2741: Cosmic Contraction

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Things are moving quickly, and it’s time to make some moves. Their pocket universe is getting smaller by the minute, and at this moment, a small construction base is in danger. Pribadium!Two was on her way to the dimensional barrier when it dispatched her to the other side, destroyed her ship, and killed her. She was intentionally attempting to cross it. Even so, the still-living Pribadiums have no reason to believe the same thing won’t happen to someone who gets caught up in it when the barrier descends upon them. They need to leave now, and there’s no time to explain.

“I can do it,” Runaway claims. “I can make them move to the escape pods, and head in this direction. Is that what you want? It has to be a joint decision.”

“Why do we have to agree?” Pribadium!Zero questions. “You have the power.”

“This won’t be all on me,” Runaway reasons. “If something goes wrong, I will accept responsibility, but not alone. We have to come to a consensus.”

“Yeah, get them out of there,” Pribadium!One decides, shaking her head.

“Absolutely. Agency is great until it’s an emergency. We can clarify later.” Pribadium!Zero then looks over at Sora, as do the other two.

Sora nods, but doesn’t vocalize his response. He’s kind of staring into space.

“Is that your answer?” Pribadium!One asks him. “Do you agree with us?”

“Me?” Sora asks. “Wait, I get a say in this too? Since when?”

“Since always,” Runaway insists. “You’re the only other one here who has any clue what’s really going on around here. We expect you to shoulder the burden as well.”

Sora takes a deep breath. “Yeah, sure. For this one question, I agree with the group. Morality takes precedence over ethics every time. But I want out. I don’t want to make any other decisions. You three may see yourselves as different people, but one of these things is not like the other, and I’m clearly the outlier. I have no business making decisions that impact a whole universe, no matter how small that universe might be.”

The girls don’t really agree to his pleas, but they have to move on. Runaway piles the workers and colonists into two escape shuttles, and pilots them away from the oncoming barrier. The nearest outpost is Tau Station. Before the event, it was on a wide orbit around Barnard’s Star, and would have taken ten years to complete a single revolution. It’s still attempting to complete that orbit, because the star system’s barycenter has not changed. It won’t make it unless it too moves out of the way. Which it can do. Pribadium!One decides to use it as a hub. As others need to be moved out of harm’s way, that is where they will all go. They really shouldn’t all be coming here.

After the immediate threat is over, the ladies continue working, to understand Runaway’s abilities and limitations, and to hatch a real plan. They have two objectives: to save everyone trapped here, and to pull this region of space out of its current state of reality. Whatever they end up doing, it all needs to happen at the same time, so neither move interferes with the other. That’s what Pribadium!One has to pivot to now, figuring out how they’re actually gonna get this pocket universe fully into the bulk.

They probably only have a couple of days to make this work before it becomes all but pointless. If they wait it out, the walls will literally close in, and they will end up with only one objective. Everyone will have to escape, even if it means abandoning the pocket altogether. Pribadium!One is more determined than ever to not let that be the outcome.

The universe seems to have other plans. The contraction of it is accelerating.

Microstory 2739: Nobody Exists on Purpose

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Pribadium’s friends once compared her to Rick Sanchez. She is not as cartoonish as he is, and she doesn’t break any laws of logic, like building a robot in a couple seconds with a screwdriver just to pass the butter. She does, however, frequently invent things just because the ideas are floating in her head, and she has to get them out. Or rather, she did. She has not developed anything significant in years, so she’s a little rusty.

Humanity is nowhere near the end of science, but they have pretty much solved every problem. Primary drivers are moderate performance improvements, scale, distribution and access, and most importantly, efficiency. The most pressing issue facing the universe right now is figuring out how to perform the most complex calculations using the least amount of energy. It’s profoundly important, and will only become more so further down the timeline as entropy progresses, but it’s certainly not fun, especially not for her. She pivoted to Administration and Operations because it was a challenge.

Now she has to go back to her old self to understand who this self-proclaimed embodiment of the population of this universe is. But if she’s gonna do it, she’s gonna do it her way, and her way...is not the normal way. Instead of trying to recall the procedural memory that she has lost over time, all she has to do is call forth a younger version of her who still has the required skills. She playfully calls it instantiating her panda.

“Why do you call it that?” Sora questions as he’s watching her prepare.

“Inside joke,” Pribadium explains as she checks the imaging chamber’s integrity.

“So you’re going to contact yourself from another time? Isn’t that dangerous?”

“It would be, if that were it,” Pribadium begins. “Any time travel risks irreparably throwing off our current conditional state. This is more like a revision history.”

Sora nods. “So you’re still trying to do the mobile command center thing.”

Pribadium stops working for a moment. Though everything has changed about their circumstances, nothing has changed about their objectives. Well, at least not Pribadium’s goals. She still wants to separate this pocket of the universe, and she still wants to travel the bulk with it. “I can’t think of anything more important than that right now. Understanding that amalgam in the other room is only in service to that end.”

“I see,” Sora says. “Well, I’ll leave you to it, then.”

“Oh, you’re not going anywhere, mister.” Pribadium is still not looking at him, in favor of focusing on the work. “You stole my tech and abused it. Don’t think I forgot about that. I don’t know if it led to what happened with the Stonehenge model, but that’s exactly why you’ll have to be tested too.” Now she looks at him like a shushy librarian. “You placed this whole lab at risk, not to mention the universe. I forgive you on a personal level, but you may yet pose a risk, so you’re next on the list.”

“Okay,” Sora agrees with his tail between his legs. He sits down on the bench.

Pribadium is ready. She boots up the machine, and waits for a previously saved state to appear in the form of a hologram that both of them can see and hear.

Pribadium!Zero’s image slowly renders at first before completing in a blink. She looks around to orient herself before looking at Pribadium!One. “Whassuuuuuuup!!!!!!!”

“Aren’t they supposed to say, report in these situations?” Sora questions.

“I was an ornery little bitch.” Pribadium looks at her self. “Listen up, Egg. I got some work to do, and I need your brain to do it.”

“Fuck you, Chicken.”

Microstory 2738: Out-of-Context Problem

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Sora and Pribadium have no words. This is an out-of-context problem that neither of them can understand, especially not Sora. Pribadium comes on strongly once she does find the words, demanding to see this entity’s medpod results. She provides them freely. When her mind—whatever it is—downloaded into this substrate, it was not entirely coherent yet, but now she has a better understanding of what she is. The pod helped her relax so she could finish the integration process, and now she’s complete. She has since put on clothes, and is waiting patiently for a response from the humans.

Pribadium skims the data at first. “Your neural network is profoundly dense and complex. I can’t definitively say that it necessarily holds the...consciousness of a universe, but it’s certainly not the architecture of a normal human.”

“How could it be possible?” Sora questions. “The universe isn’t a thinking thing.”

“I’m not the personification of the universe itself,” Pribadium!Three—or whatever they should call her—explains. “You’re right, it doesn’t have a mind, and isn’t a person. It’s made up of a chaotic mess of baryonic matter and energy, held together by quintessence. Instead, I am the collective consciousness of everyone in the universe.”

Pribadium pauses to listen. “Wait, which universe, and how much of reality? Because if it’s the main sequence, we’re talking hundreds of billions of people. If it’s all of Salmonverse, it’s an undecillion.” That would be physically impossible. And it only includes sapient beings. What about the animals? Insects alone number in the trillions.

“It’s just the people in this pocket universe,” ...the Universe explains. They really need to come up with a real name for her. “So a few thousand people.”

“Ah, just the ones who got swept up in the transdimensional field,” Pribadium decides. “That sounds far more manageable, but still incredibly complicated. How are you feeling? All of my substrates are designed to be high-capacity, but I never imagined quite that number. Are they compressed? Are they dormant? Are you missing chunks?”

“All of those things,” the entity explains, “and more. I possess a highly efficient organizational structure, thanks to how you designed this substrate. When two source minds, for instance, shared a similar neural connection to each other, my mind averaged the associations, resulting in a more streamlined cognitive configuration.”

“So, you’re an entirely new person,” Sora figures. “You’re not the universe, you’re not an amalgamation. You’re a child...a child of all of us, with most of our memories.”

“That would be one way to put it,” the entity agrees.

“We need to come up with a name for you,” Sora decides. “For clarity.”

“Just call me Gatewood, I suppose,” she determines with a shoulder shrug.

“That would be ambiguous,” Sora replies. “And a bit impersonal.”

“That is not important right now,” Pribadium jumps back in. “Whoever you are, the medpod was not equipped to synthesize something of your nature. Nothing in my lab is. But with time, I can come up with something. Would you allow me to?”

“I trust you now, where I didn’t before. As I was saying, my mind was muddled when I first awoke, and your mind is not in here, but I know you second-hand.”

“Why wouldn’t I be in there?” Pribadium asks. “My alternate self, Pribadium!Two should have been a core consciousness. That’s who he was trying to save.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” the woman says. “Go ahead and build what you need to build. I’m hungry. Do you have any fish fingers and custard?”

Microstory 2733: The Cost of a Life

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The Pribadiums have been hard at work for the last three days. They have been performing, checking, and rechecking calculations. They have been running simulation after simulation after simulation. They have sent probes out to scan, analyze, and synthesize. And now they have a better picture of their situation. The first probes told them how expansive the pocket dimension bubble was. These more recent probes are telling them how big it is now, and those figures are not the same. It’s shrinking. At this rate, the window of opportunity will close by the end of the week. Well, they wanted to know their time constraints, and now they have them. That is only part of the puzzle, though. What happens to people and objects who pass back out?

Or are they passing through the dimensional barrier at all? Their intuition suggests that they are, because the Pribadiums are losing contact with the probes, but that doesn’t mean they’re slipping safely through. It might be vaporizing them, shunting them somewhere else, or simply generating too much interference to maintain the connection. Someone is going to have to go out there and gather more information.

“I volunteer as tribute,” Sora says.

Pribadium!One chuckles. “That won’t be necessary. We’ll flip a coin.”

“I’m serious,” Sora insists. “If something happens to me, it’s no big deal. I only have maybe a hundred years left in this universe anyway. If one of you dies, you’re losing eternity. Besides, you’re more valuable than I am. Really, I wanna do this.”

“Well, if we’re going by a simple value analysis, we have an excess of Pribadiums,” Pribadium!Two says. “If I go, my alternate is still here, and we’ve not lost anything.”

Pribadium!One rolls her eyes at her alternate self, and doesn’t validate her words. She faces Sora. “This wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with Elke, would it?”

“Elke?” Sora asks. “I told you, I’ve moved past that. You telling me what happens when you die has given me closure. That’s why it doesn’t scare me to do this, because I know whatever happens, I’ll survive. I didn’t realize I was digitized, and I’ve been grumpy about it, but we might as well take advantage. It sounds like you can’t come back, or dead people would be doing it all the time. So you should stay.” He looks at Pribadium!Two. “Both of you. Two heads are better than one if they’re both you, right?”

“I’m the one who said that,” Pribadium!One reminds him.

“Same result,” Sora reasons. “And anyway, death isn’t a guarantee. It’s a test.”

Pribadium!Two shakes her head. “Survival is what is not guaranteed. The afterlife simulation is based on a certain set of criteria. In order for your consciousness to be transmitted to it, you have to both originate from the main sequence, and be in the main sequence. I’m guessing you qualify for the former, but not necessarily the latter. That’s one thing we would be testing out there with this manned mission. The bottom line is that you may not end up in the sim, or in Fort Underhill. The risk is real.”

“Again, that is how I have always lived,” Sora explains. “I never thought I was going to live forever. There is a freedom in that which you have either forgotten, or are too young to remember. I’m part of a long history of doomed souls. I’m proud of that.”

Pribadium!Two nods. She pulls down her pants and removes a teleporter dartgun from a flap of skin on her hip.

“You always had that?” Pribadium!One was surprised. “You could have escaped.”

“Yes,” Pribadium!Two confirms. “But he won’t be able to.” She shoots him.

Microstory 2731: The Choices We Make

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Pribadium!Two offered to explain to Sora what happened to his alternate self, but he decided that he didn’t want to hear it, at least not right now. They all three split apart, and went to their separate corners. They need to decompress from everything going on, and process all the new information. If they miss their window to create a mobile pocket universe, then so be it. It was never going to be an instantaneous endeavor, and it’s prudent to wait a bit anyway. This is a huge undertaking, which will have massive ramifications in this universe, and who knows how many others?

Pribadium!One is lying in her equilibrium chamber now, thinking about Sora. When they first met, he was a clear opponent. She was trying to get him to calm down and see reason, but she never thought she would feel bad for him like this. The story he told about his crush on Proxima Doma was heartbreaking. She teased him with the chance to get some closure, and then about immediately took it away from him. It wasn’t fair, and she’s going to have to figure out a way to apologize for it, besides simply literally saying the words. He obviously needs some space right now, though.

A door alert. It’s Sora. When she commands the AI to open the door, he walks in. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were sleeping. I can come back later.”

“No, it’s okay.” Pribadium!One stands up and hangs there mid-air.

His eyes widen. “How are you doing that? I thought antigravity was impossible.”

She lowers her legs one by one like she is climbing down a ladder, towards what’s considered down. “It’s not really antigravity, per se. Though, I suppose we could make that happen too if I figure out how to contain quintessence. I have some friends who built a machine that uses it, but it was awkward between us, so I never got the chance to study it in depth. Anyway, no, this is an equilibrium chamber. Another friend of mine developed it, and now they use it extensively on Varkas Reflex. People stay in simulated environments for years on end. This perfectly distributes the pressure on your body, so you don’t suffer the negative health effects of extended immobility.”

Sora stares at the apparatus, curious enough, but obviously not really thinking about it. Their goals are unaligned, and one of them might have to relent one day.

It’s not just about him, though. He’s not the only person they have to worry about. Thousands of colonists who just so happened to be on this side of the host star have the right to decide what to do with their own lives too. She’s just glad that most people escaped the bubble. She placed her lab away from the activity even though it placed her in the line of fire of the upcoming obliteration blast, because she knows exactly when it will arrive, and has ways of avoiding it. Now that doesn’t matter anymore. “Did you want to talk about something?” she asks as she’s stepping out.

“I don’t need to talk to Elke,” he answers. “Before you say anything, I realized that she made her choice. Whatever her reasons, I wasn’t worth sticking around for. We knew each other for years. Her suicide took years, but she never gave up. If she survived it—if she didn’t end up killing herself again on the other side, then that still has nothing to do with me. It never did. So you two go ahead and do whatever you need to do with the weird universe thing. I’m not much help, but I’ll be here. I’ll support you.”

“This wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with what she said about us?”

“About how we were together in another timeline? No. This is my choice.”

“Okay,” Pribadium!One says. “I’ll speak to my alternate self in the morning.”

Microstory 2730: Time Spent

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Time may be an important factor. It is hard to tell how delicate their position is. The dimensional barriers could snap under the gravitational and quintessential weight as the two opposing forces fight each other for supremacy, with the Gatewood Collective caught in the middle. Pribadium!Two believes that their laboratory sits on the very edge of the unique spatial bubble that the star system is in. She selected this secret location specifically because of its distance from everyone and everything else.

“Why wouldn’t it be in the center? This is where the time machine is,” Sora notes.

“Exactly,” Pribadium!Two agrees. “It was not omnidirectional. The spatial warping spread out from here, towards the gravitational barycenter of the system, which is in Barnard’s Star. That’s why half the system isn’t in the pocket universe.”

Sora regards her in disgust for a moment before redirecting his attention to Pribadium!One. “So you just let her out of her cell, and we trust her now?”

“She’s helping us. We need her,” Pribadium!One explains. “Sorry to brag, but two heads are better than one if they’re both my head.”

Sora scoffs. “She’s the one who told me that I couldn’t speak with Elke.”

“For now, it’s true,” Pribadium!Two starts to say.

Sora holds up a dismissive hand. “I was talking to the real Pribadium.”

“She’s right,” Pribadium!One explains. “It’s not just a calibration issue. If we disturb the balance that we have managed to achieve here, it could all fall apart.”

Pribadium!Two nods. “Yeah, and—”

“Zip it,” Sora interrupts again. “What exactly does that mean? What happens if it falls apart? Do you mean we all die? Because you don’t seem too distressed about it.”

Pribadium!One sees how Sora is treating her alternate self, but she feels compelled to ignore it, and answer his question. “People here will be fine, as long as the star stays inside of the pocket too, which I don’t see why it wouldn’t. It’s holding every atom together so the quintessence doesn’t pull it apart. What we’re trying to do is create a permanent equilibrium, and to do it in an extradimensional realm called the bulk.”

“I don’t care about that. I want to see Elke again, I want to reunite with my people, in whatever reality it is, and I want us to settle down in a new home,” he reasons.

Pribadium!Two starts to talk as quickly as she can. “And you can still do that—”

“I don’t wanna hear from you again!” Sora shouts. “Your opinion doesn’t matter!”

“Hey,” Pribadium!One jumps in. “Sora, I know you got some rest, and that put you back to your old self, which I find...incredibly annoying, but I have seen a kinder version of you. You have it in you to show respect at all times. You’re not Mr. Hyde.”

“I don’t know who this Hyde guy is, but this is the real me,” Sora contends. “This is who I am. The man I am when I’m tired is weak, and a pushover. I hate him. He’s—”

“Thirteen months,” Pribadium!Two interrupts, giving him his own medicine.

“What?” Pribadium!One questions.

Pribadium!Two looks directly at Sora. “We were together for thirteen—I mean, we weren’t together. We...well, we weren’t nothing. I just mean...I didn’t know how much time we needed to fix the past, so I intentionally overshot it. We spent over a year making sure that the Teaguardians never had any reason to destroy Doma Tertia.”

“Then where am I now?” Sora pressed. “You never did say. I find that—”

“You’re dead! You sacrificed yourself!” Pribadium!Two breathes. “For me.”

Microstory 2729: Mobile Command Center

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Pribadium!One didn’t really wait nearly a month to get back to her alternate self in the cell. She just wanted Pribadium!Two to think that she was going to be in there for that long, so she would be more grateful when the conversation restarted after only a few days. They’re back here now, on either side of the clear plasma barrier.

“Tell me the problem,” Pribadium!One prompts. “Why can’t I use my tech?”

“It’s not that you can’t use our tech, full stop,” Pribadium!Two begins. “It’s that you can’t cross any dimensional barriers. As I was saying before, the new parallel reality was created from a brane collision. That is an entirely different beast than the anti-paradox reality generation that the other parallels went through. We’re skirting at the very edge of the quintessential membrane. Parts of this reality are actually inside, including your lab, which is why time is frozen here.”

Pribadium!One balks. “What are you talking about? Time is frozen?”

“You didn’t notice?” Pribadium!Two questions. “What have you been doing?”

“Not using my tech!” Pribadium!One argues. “You told me not to!”

“I thought you would at least try to diagnose the issue!” Pribadium!Two groans. “Time and metabolism have halted. Sora could stay here forever, and never age or die. The entirety of Gatewood is completely inaccessible to the rest of the universe, even within this same reality. The most recent interstellar cycler has lost all navigational frames of reference. It’s like the star system vanished. That’s why I’m trying to get you to not cross any more barriers. It could split it even more, and cause even more chaos.”

“Yeah, that’s definitely a possibility,” Pribadium!One agrees. It could obviously be a problem, but it could also be an opportunity. Her alternate self would have known that, which is why she didn’t warn her about the dangers straight away. She needn’t worry, though. This Pribadium will do her due diligence. She will not only find a way out of this, but make the most out of their unique position. “So what do we do? What did you come here to do? Get us out of the pocket of quintessence? Pull the realities back together? Kill every alt of yours until you become the fabled One?”

Pribadium!Two shakes her head. “I’m here to sever the connection.”

“The connection between realities? To what end?”

Pribadium!Two is quiet. Perhaps their point of divergence wasn’t too dramatic. They still had the same neurological wiring. They would’ve come up with the same ideas.

Pribadium!One nods. “You don’t just want to cut the link. You want to control it. You want to create a pocket universe, like the Sixth Key, but less crowded.”

Pribadium!Two still says nothing, but they have the same poker face.

“But you can’t do that as long as this pocket of space is connected to reality, even a parallel. And if I cross over to another dimension, it won’t work. Our pocket will probably just slip back fully into the membrane, and the advantage will disappear.”

Pribadium!Two sighs. “You know me too well.”

“That’s why it was so tough for you to get here, and why you barely made it,” Pribadium!One guesses. “You had to brute force your way in without breaking the seal.”

“Don’t you see what this means?” Pribadium!Two asks. “This wouldn’t be the only pocket universe in existence, but it would be the first free-floating miniature brane that we know of. It would be mobile. We could go anywhere in the bulk.”

“Like a spaceship.” Interesting suggestion...but what about all the people?

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 16, 2560

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The team decided to leave before midnight central so they wouldn’t have to explain their end-of-the-day disappearance. They were determined to hunker down and really figure out who in this galaxy might actually need their help. The larger colonies could have huge problems, but the infrastructure and procedures to deal with them. The single-person sites were harder to pinpoint, and populated by people who were typically there because they wanted to be alone. It was the sites like Patsy Richelieu Best First Quarter Star colony that were likely most in need. Of course, this particular colony didn’t need anything from them. It was wild to see, though. They would kind of always expect a colony to either be the fruits of a grand cosmic exodus, or only one person looking to disconnect from society. There was a lot of middle ground, though, and they would probably meet others like Patsy and her cake-loving friends.

“What we need is some kind of monitoring system,” Mateo suggested, not knowing exactly what he was going for. “Like in movies where aliens are here to protect us. I guess they don’t have to be benevolent. They just have to know a lot about us, and have spent time studying us without giving themselves away.”

“It sounds like you’re talking about invisible probes,” Leona offered. “Movies often don’t explain how they remain hidden, but it would be something like that.”

“Invisible probes, I can do,” Ramses decided. He jumped over to the nearest workstation. “It can stay optically invisible using holography, and shield its waste heat signature using a miniature hot pocket. It would be able to move on its own power, and teleport when necessary. It would send signals exclusively through the bulk, so only we receive the data. It keeps watch over establishments throughout the year, and compiles a report for when we return.” He was getting really excited about the possibilities. “I wish I had thought of it myself. We keep jumping from place to place when we just need to let the information come to us.” He looked up to find everyone staring at him.

“Go on,” Romana encouraged. “What else were you thinking?”

“That I should work alone,” Ramses said. He reached over, and squeezed the band of his watch.

After he held the button down for a few seconds, the whole team vanished.

“Did he just kick us out of his lab?” Angela questioned.

“Wow. Rude,” Marie joked. “But it’s smart for him to have that, for security.”

“It might take a few days,” Leona estimated. “He won’t just be designing the new probe, but testing for failures and black swan events. In the meantime, I think I would like to consider building something for us all that is in this dimension, instead of our pocket dimension habitats. Nothing against them, but they’re more for mobile use.”

“I agree,” Mateo said. “If our enemies are right, and this is going to be an important planet in the future, then I imagine we stay here for a long time. Or not. Perhaps, like all the other things we’ve had in the past, we’ll hand this off to someone else, while we move on to something else.”

“I believe what Ramses is doing will keep us busy for quite a while,” Romana pointed out. “There is probably a lot going on in the galaxy that we simply do not know about, so it seems boring. We lack data, and we’re about to get it. But yeah, I’m in.”

They sat down to start drawing up plans for residences fit for an interstellar capital—not too gaudy—they were not trying to play themselves as gods. By the end of the day, however, Ramses was finished with his probes. They sent a small test batch out to some past establishments. They returned to the timestream the next year with a hit.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 14, 2558

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After a couple of hours, close enough to midnight central for the sling to factor in their timeskipping, Team Matic left Tartarus, and returned to Ramosus. They found themselves just standing there, blinking at each other, but not talking. While it took longer than expected, their experience on the colony was mundane, and didn’t amount to anything. The fact they were researching aliens was interesting, but the research itself was kind of boring? “Why do I feel so weird?” Mateo asked. “I felt a little weird there, but coming here has suddenly made it actually weird. Fully weird. Weird, weird.”

“I know what you mean.” Leona looked over at Ramses. “I think we need to run some times.” She breathed deeply, and couldn’t help but yawn. “Tests. Run tests.”

“Maybe it’s the cold?” Marie suggested. “Has the cold made me...”

“Loopy?” Leona suggested. “We would have other symptoms, like frostbite. We wouldn’t be able to stand if it were cold enough to affect us like this.”

“I’m sorry, guys,” Romana said. “I made the wrong choice.”

“No, no,” everyone said. She had nothing to apologize for. They would never know what was on the other side of the sling. It could be interesting, it could be boring, or it could even be dangerous. Whatever they found, they would get through it, and they would do it together. They were starting to feel like explorers, after all.

They all went to the medical wing of Ramses’ lab to get themselves checked out. They discovered something mild, temporary, but very strange about their neurochemistry. Ramses relied quite heavily on his automated machinery to do the work for him, because he wasn’t in a state of mind to operate them himself. “Um. I can’t read the data myself right now, so I’m going to rely on the summary to explain it to us.” Ramses tried to point at the screen, but gave up. He was too weak. “Basically, what it thinks is that our brains were running at optimum efficiency on Tartarus. If we had stimuli, we might have been able to be really productive. But since the environment was pretty much just snow, we didn’t have any problem to solve. I mean, we were lost, but we didn’t have any tech to work with, so our brainpower was wasted.”

“So it’s like a drug?” Angela figured, “and now we’re in withdrawal?”

“Yes. That’s the word the computer thing said,” Ramses agreed. “Don’t worry, though, I don’t think we’re dependent. It would be like if you went to your college quantum physics class, and they handed you a kindergarten math sheet. It’s easy, and takes the cognitive load off, and you might get a little lazy if they keep giving you the same silly tests, but you’re not going to get addicted to it. The day they hand you a real test, you’ll need a little time to readjust—which is what we’re doing right now—but you will ultimately be fine. Because in this scenario, you knew quantum physics before, so you know it now. It will just take time. Sleep too.”

“Is there anything we shouldn’t do in the meantime?” Olimpia pressed. “Should we not have sex, or should we not eat carbs, or should we get warm, or get cooled off?”

“Carbs would be very good for your prefrontal cortex right now,” Ramses answered. “Sex would be fun, but you might find yourself disinterested. Just listen to your body. If you’re cold, warm up. If you’re hot, cool down. It knows what it needs.”

So they left the lab, and returned to their separate abodes. They were mostly still sleeping in their joint pocket dimensions, because they didn’t have any better ideas. They certainly weren’t going to come up with any today. The next year, they woke up totally okay, and actually rather enthusiastic. They were all ready for the next adventure.

Romana asked not to pick this time, though.

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