Microstory 2336: Earth, February 3, 2179

< > Table of Contents

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

Dear Corinthia,

This is your birth father, Pascal. I’m terribly sorry that it has taken me this long to send you a message. I could make something up about how much work I’ve had to do, but we would all know that it doesn’t work like that. It’s probably going to take me ten minutes to write this thing. What’s taken me weeks is working up the courage to even start with the first character. As I explained to your brother, I was complicit in the separation scheme that led you to living out half of your life on a ship, and the other half on a dark world beyond the orbit of Neptune. I didn’t want to let you go, but your mother forced my hand. I’m sorry, I don’t want to bad mouth her, but I feel like I need to defend myself. What you may not know—what I have not yet explained to Condor—is that the original plan was to have both of you leave Earth in separate voyages. For medical reasons, I’m not fit to travel in space. At least, I wasn’t. The restrictions have gradually been eroding, due to excessive need for planetary exodus, and advances in space travel which make it easier to treat at-risk patients off world. As much as it pains me that I never got the chance to know you, I know it would have been worse if I hadn’t gotten to know either of my children. So I made a choice, and it was the hardest one of my life. They would have taken Condor away from me, and I would have had no legal ground to stand on. Your mother had powerful friends who I believe were manipulating her into carrying out this unethical social experiment. She wasn’t like that when we first met. She was loving, kind, and loyal. That’s why I married her, and honestly, it’s one reason I never married anyone after she left. There’s also a law that prevents people from divorcing their spouses when they’re separated by at least one astronomical unit, yet not presumed dead. I regret not fighting harder for you, and for not trying to follow you later. Your mother and her friends could have stopped me and Condor from getting on that ship, but they wouldn’t have been able to stop us from getting on another one. It would have cost me everything I had to commission a new journey, but now I realize that it would have been worth it. I hope that you can forgive me one day, but I don’t expect it anytime soon, or ever. And I also hope that I’ve not ruined the impression you’ve had for your mother this whole time. She really thought that what she was doing was right. She wanted science and psychology to progress, and she thought she had to make the sacrifice of never knowing her son. If you’ve not already, perhaps you could one day forgive her too.

Hoping you write back,

Your loving father,

Pascal Sloane

Microstory 2335: Vacuus, January 31, 2179

< > Table of Contents

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

Dear Condor,

Father has not yet written to me. It’s fine, I’m not disappointed. I don’t know him at all, so I can’t know what I should expect out of him. I just wanted to give you an update before it happens that I’m going to be out of communication range again. It won’t be too long, but it’s out of my hands. You see, when researchers first discovered Vacuus, they thought to send probes here before they sent people. Unfortunately, they lost contact with these probes, and were never able to gather much information about the planet. They obviously decided to just send a manned-mission without enough information, and that’s because the ship they were using was self-sustaining. If, for some reason, it wasn’t possible to reach or land on the surface, it wasn’t like a death sentence. We could have been living on it this whole time. It’s still orbiting us right now, and people regularly go back and forth. I could have gotten a job up there instead. In fact, I told you that I’m the only one doing what I do, but that’s not technically true. Someone is up there right now, using their own instruments to track nearby cosmic events. They just don’t do it for the same reasons, and have other responsibilities. It’s not for safety, they’re mostly studying the effects of deep space survival as it pertains to remoteness from the host star. I kind of forget about them, because we don’t really interact. Anyway, that’s not really important. The point is that, once we arrived here, we discovered why communication with the probes stopped working. It’s because of a periodic meteoroid shower called the Valkyries, which causes a blackout. These meteoroids are very close to one another, and interconnected via weak, yet still impactfully disruptive, electromagnetic fields. It has to do with the ferromagnetic composition of them, and the occasional electrostatic charge that builds up when they scrape against one another. This can last for years, but it’s a relatively rare event, and has only happened twice since Earth sent the probes. What’s not all that rare is when one of these meteors becomes dislodged from the shower, and we end up between it and all its friends. If we’re in the right position, it’s pretty as it’s streaking across the sky, but it’s problematic too. We don’t always know when it’s going to happen, and we don’t always know when it’s going to affect us, but it too knocks out signal transmission, though for a much shorter period of time. Our astronomers have devoted most of their careers to studying these phenomena. At first they thought that the shower was falling apart, but they now believe that the stray meteoroids eventually find their way back to the shower. Earth is aware that this is going to happen, and have upgraded their protocols to account for it. So if you send a message, it will end up being stored in a nearby buffer until the relay station receives word that signal transmission has been restored. I’m sorry to spring this on you so last minute, but if you reply, I doubt that I’ll receive you for a while. Please let your father know as well, thanks.

Hopefully not for long,

Corinthia

Microstory 2313: Earth, January 1, 2025

< > Table of Contents

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

Dear Readers,

Let me tell you a story. Roughly ten years ago, the scientific community began to take seriously the hypothesis that a Planet 9 existed somewhere beyond the orbit of Neptune. For centuries prior to that, nonscientific theories popularized the dream of a Planet X, but these were largely based on speculation, and a poor understanding of the data. It was only recently that any evidence legitimately supported the idea of a solar model that proposed such a wild explanation for this missing mass. Ten years from now, advances in astronomical observation technology will prove that a celestial body of significant mass does indeed exist, and that it is currently orbiting the sun about 1200 astronomical units away from us. About 108 years later, fusion rockets will be efficient and powerful enough to deploy a manned mission to the newly discovered celestial body, which they had since named Vacuus. Probes had been sent prior to this, at higher velocities due to lighter equipment, and no concern for life support, but they were all lost. No one could tell why, but their hearts were full of wonder, and the right candidates volunteered for what many called a suicide mission. Eighteen years later, the ship arrived at its destination, and began to unravel the mysteries of this cold, distant world. One of the passengers was a young woman whose mother brought her along when she was a baby. Corinthia Sloane always felt that something was missing in her life, and everything fell into place when she learned what everyone she had ever known had been keeping from her this whole time. She had a twin brother who she had never met. But the real problem was...she might never even have the chance now. The following letters comprise their initial correspondences, each one taking around a week to reach its destination, given the time lag imposed by vast interplanetary distances.

Yours fictionally,

Nick Fisherman III

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 13, 2434

« < » > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Gemini Advanced text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 2

Ramses wasn’t lying, nor even exaggerating. This particular pocket dimension was the smallest any of them had ever experienced. No, that wasn’t true. The one that Olimpia was trapped in between the two halves of The Sixth Key was even smaller than this, but to be fair, it was just for her. This was a very short hallway. Each of them had enough room to stand, but not outstretch their arms, if they wanted to. At one end of the hall was a storage closet with food and other necessities. At the other end was a stasis pod. Ram was glad that he installed that much, or Vitalie would have to find a way to survive over the course of the next year alone. They still had no clue how they were going to get out of this mess, but they were alive and together, and that was all that they could hope for for now. They were essentially living in a tiny little dimensional generator, which was floating alone in outer space. An EM field protected it from impacts, but there was no form of propulsion, not even for station keeping. There was no way of knowing where they would end up after a year, or what the former planet would look like after the dust settled.

Everything was completely different when the six of them returned to the timeline in 2434. Their living quarters were a lot larger. It had somehow grown while they were gone. It still wasn’t as big as the main one, which had been destroyed in the missile attack on Ex-741, but there was some breathing room now. “How the heck did this happen? Rambo?” Leona asked.

“It wasn’t me.” He ducked into one of the few rooms. “But my lab is back. It looks exactly as it did before, including all the stuff that I was working on.”

“How is that possible?” Marie questioned.

Mateo reached up to the console, and disengaged the stasis bubble of Vitalie’s pod. “Hey, do you know anything about this?”

Vitalie looked around. “Yeah, I built it while you were gone,” she answered as if they should have known that she would do that.

“How did you manage that?” Ramses asked her.

“Well, I’m a builder,” Vitalie said, just as casually as before.

“You are?” Leona asked.

“Yes. Newt Clemens transferred all of Étude Einarsson’s powers to me. As the Last Savior of Earth, she had teleporting abilities. As the daughter of Saga Einarsson, she had doorwalking abilities. As the daughter of Camden Voss, she had century-hopping abilities. And as the daughter of Andromeda Mercari, she had builder abilities. Now they’re all mine.”

They stared at her, only now realizing that none of them had bothered to ask her about this before. They had just gotten so used to being around people with special time powers that they didn’t question where they came from anymore. But Vitalie didn’t have any of that stuff before. She was born with the ability to astral project, which they hadn’t witnessed in a very long time. Actually, Leona was probably the only one who had ever seen her do it, since Mateo had a bad case of not being in existence at the time, and none of the others were part of the team yet.

“You’re welcome,” she said.

“No, no, no,” Leona said apologetically. “I meant to say thank you. We’re just shocked. We’re all grateful for you, though. Really. Thank you.”

They all agreed using their own words.

“How did you rebuild all of Ramses’ inventions?” Angela asked her.

“She used my master key,” Ramses answered instead. He held up a virtual storage device. “Everything I’ve finished, am working on, or plan to work on is on here, as is the current state of my lab. If you load a pack of starter nanites with my Bookmark program, it will start to rebuild everything from scratch. I told you about it in passing,” Ramses noted to Vitalie.

She shrugged. “I listen.”

“So, you’re a builder, huh?” Olimpia asked, stepping forward. “Can you build us an entirely new ship?”

“Not from in here,” Vitalie said apologetically.

“It’s been a year,” Leona began to reason. “Whatever the results of all those planet-destroying explosions, this system has surely fallen into some kind of equilibrium again. We just need to find the nearest celestial body. Then one of us can take a spacewalk, and teleport us to it.”

Ramses looked ashamed. “Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. There are no sensors on the exterior of the dimensional generator. There’s a single 180 degree camera, so you can hypothetically see if someone’s standing in front of the door, but that’s it. If one of us jumps out of the generator right now, and sees an object that we could teleport too, they wouldn’t know how far away it was. It could be beyond our range. Mateo, you’ve spent the longest in space? How many jumps did you make?”

“I made 48,” Mateo answered. “Well, it was technically 49, but the last one was to the other side of a door. I barely made it in before I would have died, though.”

“Yeah, so if it’s too far to see with the naked eye, we may all need to pitch in, teleporting along the route one at a time until the next person’s turn,” Ramses suggested.

“Could you build sensors now?” Olimpia offered, grimacing a tiny bit, worried that she was overstepping.”

“Oh,” Ramses said, “I suppose I could just print one of my new probes. It’s not designed for outerspace, but it wouldn’t take too terribly long to modify it.”

“I’ll help you with that,” Leona volunteered. “Everyone else, just relax. There’s nothin’ else to do. There’s no one to help, no bad guy to fight.”

“There are plenty of people to help,” Mateo muttered to himself after everyone separated into different parts of the pocket. The seven of them were people too, and right now, they were the ones in need. He didn’t want to say anything before, because he wasn’t used to being right, but Leona and Ramses made a mistake. They jumped onto the idea they had of trying to solve this problem through technology. But the explosion of Ex-741 only happened a year ago, and it happened right here. Remember, the tiny little instrument they were hiding in had no form of propulsion. It could only move due to drift, and gravitational disturbance. They were not swimming through a vast empty sea of space, like the asteroid belt that was between Mars and Jupiter. They were still within a densely packed field of objects. There was no way that they weren’t close enough to something. Ramses needed raw materials, and that was all around them. They just needed to get a look at it.

Mateo first tried to check the camera, but the cosmos was swirling by it too fast to gauge anything. They didn’t have attitude control, so nothing was stopping the generator from spinning and spinning and spinning. He decided that he would just make one jump out there to get a look at things. He would do it totally in secret from the storage closet, in case somebody wanted to give him some advice about it, or try to talk him out of the attempt.

Just before he could leave, Vitalie stepped in. “What are you doing in here?”

“Nothing. I’m—stealing food,” he stammered.

She rolled her eyes. “Really. Tell me.”

So he told her about how he was going to check outside before they spent all this time on a new probe. It was like breaking into someone’s house. You always try to doorknob first. It might be unlocked anyway.

“I had the same thought,” she admitted, “but I assumed the smarties had already thought of that.”

“Maybe they did. But it can’t hurt to check for ourselves, in case they didn’t.”

“It could hurt, Mateo. I know you people can survive in space, but you shouldn’t do it if you don’t have to. If all you need is a good look, then...” she offered her hand. “Let me take you.”

“Okay, cool.”

She projected them outside the generator. They were floating in space, but still breathing the air that was being recycled inside the pocket dimension. He was right. The majority of Ex-741 remained intact. Massive chunks had been dislodged, and were now orbiting it like moons, but they were all totally visible, which means that they were close enough to reach. In fact, it would not take more than two jumps. He looked over at Vitalie next to him, but didn’t say anything. She laughed. “You can talk. We’re not really here, remember?”

“Thank you, Miss Crawville.” He jerked his head down towards the generator.

She pulled them back inside.

“Let it be a surprise.”

Vitalie smiled. “Okay.”

Mateo went back out there alone, but corporeally this time. He grabbed the generator with his hands, and teleported to the nearest chunk. He walked around and jumped a little to make sure that it was solid enough to hold together. Then he set the generator down, and piled some space dirt over the handle so it wouldn’t fly off. Then he dove back into the pocket, calmly walked into the lab, and took Leona and Ramses by the hands.

The two of them looked at him funny. “Are we going on a date?” Ram asked.

“Just hold your breath.” He jumped out yet again so he could show them where they were.

A few seconds later, the girls all appeared too, including Vitalie, who was in her astral form, so she could still breathe. Ramses reached down, and scooped some dirt up with his hand. He let it filter back down through his fingers. Like Mateo before, he nodded affirmatively, and disappeared. Everyone else followed, meeting in the common area that Vitalie had built for them.

Ramses sighed, and plopped himself down on the couch. “Well, I feel like a right fool,” he lamented in a British accent.

“I didn’t see it either,” Leona concurred.

“We all lack perspective sometimes,” Vitalie tried to reassure them. “That’s why you make such a great team, because you’re not just one person in six bodies.”

“I keep telling you, you’re part of the team,” Leona claimed.

Vitalie shook her head as she was smiling. “No, I don’t belong with you. There are dozens of planets in the Corridor, and not all of them have a Caretaker. I didn’t know how to calculate the error rate when I started duplicating myself, but I knew it wouldn’t be zero. I need to fill in the gaps.”

“You could duplicate yourself again,” Olimpia put forth.

Vitalie shook her head again. “No, I work alone. I appreciate you taking me in, but I gotta go.”

“Well, you can’t leave yet anyway,” Angela reasoned. “The smarties haven’t built us a new ship yet.”

Vitalie let out that sweet knowing smile one last time. “I never needed a ship.” She looked towards the exit. “I just need a door.” She stood up, and grabbed the knob before looking over her shoulder at them. “Whose birthday is coming up the soonest?”

“Ours is June 19th,” Marie said, indicating herself and Angela.

“Happy birthday.” Vitalie checked her wristwatch as she was opening the door. There was a hallway on the other side of it, but it wasn’t the one in the pocket dimension. It was in another time and place. “Your gift is outside.” She closed the door behind her, and when Olimpia opened it up seconds later, she was gone, and it was back to the regular hallway.

They teleported outside once again to find a ship waiting for them, still powering down from having just landed.

« < » > Table of Contents

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 16, 2398

« < » > Table of Contents

Leona wasn’t calling Marie and Kivi because she wanted them to try to find her husband in the Mariana Trench. She just wanted to record a census of all the versions of Mateo that they’re currently aware of. The one down there appears to be the only one at the moment, which makes things simpler. The two SD6 teams are free to go off and do their own thing. She’s going to handle this herself, but she needs more data. The global brain scanner that found him operates on two axes. They can get some idea of elevation by measuring the strength of the signal, but it’s impossible to pinpoint a precise location. If she’s going to teleport down to him, she needs to know precisely how deep to go, and where to land, or she’ll end up drowning in the ocean while being crushed by its unyielding thousand atmospheres of pressure.

Ramses has been working on a temporal energy detector capable of surviving the stress of reentry into Earth’s top atmospheric layers, and he’s finally finished. They have decided that this is a perfect opportunity to feed two birds with one worm. The detector will fall to the surface of Earth, measuring the temporal energy fields along the way, as well as hopefully whatever is suppressing that field. It should land in the ocean over the trench, then detach itself from the parachutes, and sink down to look for Mateo.

“About how long will all that take?” Cheyenne asks.

Ramses is monitoring the exterior maintenance robot—or EMR—that’s readying the probe for launch. The ship wasn’t designed for this, so he’s had to improvise a lot of the process. If they’re in a time crunch, that’s all the more reason they can’t rush. “Forty-two minutes and eleven seconds.”

“Oh, so you know exactly how long?”

“Well, I couldn’t tell you how quickly the probe will find Mateo, because the whole point is we don’t know where he is, but if it has to sink all the way to the bottom, it will take forty-two minutes and eleven seconds from launch.”

“If your bot ever finishes building the launch brackets,” Leona says impatiently.

Ramses peels himself from the central hologram to look at her. “I hope you know that there is no guarantee—”

“I know,” she interrupts, frustrated.

“Sorry, what were you gonna say?” Vearden asks.

“He was going to remind me that we can’t be sure Mateo is the one down there,” Leona answers instead. “It’s true, were I you is not, like, this secret phrase that no one else would know. I just don’t think anyone else would think to use it in this situation.”

“Okay,” Ramses says passive-aggressively. “We’ll find out in about forty-two minutes.” He starts heading back down to engineering. “The EMR is finished with its work just in time for our launch window. You can all watch from up here.”

A few minutes later, the probe is through the miniature airlock that Ramses built in engineering, sacrificing what was once used as storage space. It’s now a little bit more difficult to walk around downstairs. The probe flies away from the AOC, and heads for Earth. It screams across the sky, exciting all amateur astronomers who were not expecting such a large piece of orbital debris to decay today. The truth is that it’s not all that large, but it’s built with materials not found in the modern world, so it would be assumed to be the size of a tiny home. Let the conspiracies begin.

The probe is through the rough spots now, so the parachutes deploy to slow its descent. Ramses frowns as he’s watching the data come in. Velocity, temperature, pressure, pollution levels. It’s picking up all of these things, but the one thing it’s not sensing is temporal energy. This is incredibly odd, even for the Third Rail. After it lands on the water, he goes back up to the rest of the group.

Leona shakes her head. “You see these numbers?”

“Yes, they don’t make any sense,” Ramses notes.

“Forgive me, but...” she begins awkwardly

“I didn’t screw it up. The detector is working fine. There is something seriously wrong with this world, and it’s bigger than we ever imagined.”

“I don’t understand,” Vearden says, worried that they’re going to roll their eyes at best, or chew his head off at worst.

“If I’m reading this right—and I’m no scientist, so I might not be—but it says here that you’re not sensing any temporal energy whatsoever,” Arcadia says.

“That’s right,” Leona replies. She reaches forward to play with the interface, but stops. There’s nothing to adjust or calibrate. It’s all laid out before them. It’s all wrong.

“Didn’t we kind of expect that, though?” Vearden presses. “We already know there’s no time travel, at least not down on the planet.”

“There’s always time travel.” Arcadia starts to talk with her hands. “For most people, time moves at a one to one ratio, which means that for every second that passes, one second passes. Temporal energy isn’t this magical substance that we use to manipulate time and space. It’s simply the transfer of excited particles from one moment in time to another, as a function of entropy.”

“Huh?”

“Temporal energy is just what happens when time passes,” Arcadia clarifies. “You can’t have no energy, because that would mean you have no time. It’s either balanced or unbalanced, and as time travelers, we exploit the unbalanced levels, but you can’t just have nothing. If you have nothing, you don’t exist. This world...doesn’t exist!”

The computer beeps. Leona looks back up to the hologram. “The probe is close enough to the source of the were I you signal. I know where to go.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Ramses offers.

“No, stay here and...deal with this.”

Leona puts on her wetsuit, which is a half-measure, since it’s not what’s going to keep her safe down there. It just seems dumb to go down in her civies. She inserts the rebreather in her mouth, nods to the group, and then teleports to the signal. She can instantly tell that she’s standing inside of the Bridgette. She hears someone shuffling behind her, so she turns around to find Alyssa in a defensive position. Alyssa doesn’t loosen up, since Leona doesn’t look like herself with the mask on. “It’s me, it’s me.”

“Oh, okay. I guess it’s 2398 again.”

“Where were you?”

“Billions of years ago.”

“Tell me everything.”

Alyssa shakes her head. “I can’t. My memories are on a detonation mechanism. As soon as we surface, they’ll disappear, and I don’t have time to relay them to you.”

“I understand,” Leona says with a nod. “Is Mateo here?”

She hesitates to answer for a beat. “No. He’s never coming back.”

Microstory 1692: No Signal

< > Table of Contents

After the Besananta left its home universe in an attempt to explore the bulkverse, those left behind eagerly awaited their return. They waited, and they waited, and still no one came back. They tried looking for data that the ship might have sent, or that a probe picked up at some point, but there was nothing conclusive. As far as they could tell, the mission was a huge failure. There were some theories, like that travel outside of a brane was possible, but back into one was impossible. However, signals could clearly penetrate the membrane, so that didn’t seem too likely. Perhaps the destination universe was so amazing that the crew decided to stay there, and forget about everyone else. That seemed strange too. They might have encountered some terrible threat that forced them to cut off all contact with Infiniverse. That wasn’t entirely unbelievable, but in the end, these theories didn’t really matter. They had no way of knowing how the mission turned out. Did they make it to another universe? If so, why did they not return? The chances were too high that the ship didn't survive, for one reason or another. They decided to stay, and never try again. Answering those questions weren’t going to do them any good. Just because they could tell that other universes existed, didn’t mean that they were any good, or worth traveling to. They didn’t find any other life here, so they were going to have to make do. That was what they did. They chose to expand back out into the stars, so that before too long, aliens did exist, because a civilization that started from a colony a thousand years ago was no more similar to them than one that had evolved on its own. Here they remained for the rest of the age of their universe. Some cultures died out, while others thrived, while more rose up. This was the way things were supposed to be. People weren’t really ever meant to explore the bulkverse at all. It wasn’t designed for travel, which is why it was such a fluke. The Infiniversals just had to recognize this truth.

Microstory 1642: Infinity Drive

< > Table of Contents

I think it’s about time I talk about the universe where bulkverse travel originated. Right now, I won’t say a whole lot about how they first ventured out into the bulk, but I’ll give an overview of the universe itself, and why they felt the impulse to explore beyond their borders. The humans of this universe originated on multiple planets simultaneously, and destroyed them all. Every global civilization did so much damage to the environment that they had to leave, and settle on new worlds, except for one of them, which didn’t survive their apocalypse. This was how the survivors found each other. They all had faster-than-light travel, but two of them independently invented something they would later call an infinity drive. It allowed them to jump anywhere in the universe instantaneously. It wasn’t technically instantaneous, but with a little bit of time travel, it felt that way, and it resulted in that. In order to travel from one universe to another, one must be able to pierce the membranes that hold them together. These membranes are semipermeable, like cellular membranes, so microscopic tears open up all the time, which is what allows bulk energy to leak through. That’s not the hard part, though. The hard part is navigation, which is why bulk travel is so rare. The precursor to this technology is the infinity drive, which pierces the universe’s membrane about halfway, allowing a vessel to slip in between the layers of that membrane, and slide wherever the crew wants to go. Even here, time operates as a spatial dimension, rather than a temporal dimension, which is what makes it feel instantaneous. Travelers can go wherever they want to, and arrive whenever they want to, even in the past—though both cultures decided long before the technology was viable that time travel was irrational, and dangerous. They only used it to explore, map, and seek out others in present-day.

In order to find the best new world to call home, those with the infinity drives dispatched probe factory ships all over their galaxy, and a little beyond. They dropped their probes in key locations, which automatically went around, and started generating a map of the universe. These probes detected the other wanderers and settlers, which served to bring everyone together under one umbrella, as a megacivilization. They pooled their knowledge, and unanimously agreed to do things better than their ancestors did. They found more efficient ways to live, which protected planets, and the wildlife upon them. They focused heavily on gathering as much information about the universe as they could, while making little impact on it. They sent more probes, now even further out in the universe, but encountered no other lifeforms. Everyone was here, and everyone was either human, or descended from humans. They were disappointed and bored because of this. How could they be so alone? Why were humans the only intelligent species, and how was it even possible that they evolved separately on multiple planets? This is what drove them to expand the scope of the infinity drive, and explore other universes. They sent one more batch of probes, this time completely through the membrane, and into the outer bulk. Powered by bulk energy, and designed to last forever, they were essentially aimless; just floating through the bulk, collecting whatever data they could find, and sending it back home. It took millennia to synthesize this data, so a real and usable map could be drawn from it. Once they were ready, the crew of a ship with an upgraded infinity drive called The Besananta took off. They didn’t get far.

Exemption Act: Stable Time Loop (Part VIII)

< > Entire Story

The two of them struggled to stand up as they rubbed their various wounds. Freya felt heavier than before, and was quite off balance. It wasn’t impossible to get upright, but not easy. They were in the middle of a forest. Limerick breathed deeply through his nose. “Wow. Is it easier to breathe?”

Freya took a breath as well. “It’s much easier. Perhaps...almost twice as easy?” She bounced her knees a little. “Surface gravity higher, oxygen level higher. Trees look a little short. This is Worlon.”

“We jumped back to the planet? I thought we weren’t ever going to the surface.”

“Maybe some kind of emergency teleport. Zek should have brought us all together, though, if the ship was destroyed.”

“What destroyed it?” Limerick asked.

Freya started pacing, not so it would help her think, but so that she could get used to the new gravity.  She did need some time to think, though. “Backwards. We were backwards.”

“How’s that?”

“I don’t know how. That’s just what happened, it’s the only explanation.”

“I haven’t heard an explanation yet.”

Freya got back down on her knees, and found some visual aids; a leaf, and a pebble. She tore a hole in the middle of the leaf that was large enough to fit the pebble. “This is what we were supposed to do.” She slowly swung each object in front of her, parallel to each other. After a few seconds, she quickly pulled the leaf in closer to her, so it was encapsulating the pebble, just like they did up in space with The Cormanu, and the probe. “But this is what I think happened.” She started out just as before, with the objects flying parallel, but this time, when she teleported the leaf over to the pebble, she turned it around, and pulled it in the opposite direction, serving to tear the leaf all the way open. “The probe kept going forwards, but since it was facing the wrong direction, it shot right through the back of the ship, and back into space, where it either continued on its journey, or was damaged enough to start drifting. We were almost sucked into that hull breach, except we ended up here.” She looked around some more. Then she reached into her back pocket, and removed two sticks of gum, one of which she handed to Limerick. “This is gravity gum. It will help your body acclimate to your increased weight. If it’s just us, and we stay on schedule, the pack will be enough for us to adapt, and not need it anymore.”

“And if it’s not just us? Where are they?”

“Zek? Zek?” Freya spoke out loud, but was really just trying to send a psychic signal.

“Could she have transported all of us, but not herself.”

“She could have done that, yes, but why would she have? We could have gone back to the ship later, if that’s all she wanted to do; save it.”

“Well, you said it was going the wrong direction. It would have eventually flown out of her teleportation range, right?”

“I guess.” Freya took out her device. “But I don’t see anyone else.”

“Is that a tricorder? Does it show life signs?”

“No, that’s stupid. It can ping other devices, though. I know Carbrey had his, and Khuweka would too. I would say about half of the others would happen to have kept it on their respective persons.” She kept pinging the others, waving her hand around, looking for a good signal. Nothing.

“Maybe she just saved us, because we were the only ones in danger.”

“So was Carbrey, and she should have just transported us to a safe section of the Cormanu.”

“He might have flown out of range, through that hole.”

Freya dropped her arm in sadness. Then she decided to try one more thing. She switched to a different menu item, and held the device back up towards the sky to measure stellar drift. Preliminary data came through pretty quickly. “Oh, no.”

“What is it? What do you see?”

“It’s still calculating a date, but...”

Limerick figured out where she was headed. “We didn’t just teleported, we traveled through time.”

“The past.” She kept watching the screen. “The deep, deep...deep, deep, deep-deep past. It’s still going.” She dropped her arm back down. “It’s slowing down, and it won’t be exactly accurate, because it requires more data, but millions of years. A few million, at least.”

Limerick smiled, and cracked his neck. “That doesn’t matter to us, though, does it? When I shatter this portal, we can go to any time period we want, in any universe.”

“In any universe touching ours. That limits you. You see, in the outer bulkverse, time is not a temporal dimension, but a spatial dimension.” She held up her fists as more visual aids. She placed her right index knuckle against her left pinky knuckle. “They have to be touching at the right point, which for us, is a moment in time. Now in the future, it’s constant. All the universes you could ever need to get to, are touching each other. I think someone did that on purpose, they call them bridges. Back in this time period, though...I don’t know. Do you detect any thinnies? Do you sense any nearby universes? Or are they all too far away?”

He held up his hand, and searched for a place he could make a portal. He stopped moving and closed his eyes to focus his senses. “I can feel one, but you’re right, I think it’s too thick. Or too far away, or whatever.”

“I don’t suppose you have an ETA on when that gets closer, if ever. It could be drifting away from us.”

“No, it’s getting closer. It hums a certain way, but I can’t predict the time table. We’ll just have to wait and hope, I guess.”

Freya shrugged her shoulders and sighed.

“Wait.” He seemed excited. “Can’t you get a message to them?”

“No, not from the past. That’s just impossible.”

“But why did we end up here, in this moment? You said, millions of years, but you’re not sure exactly when? Aren’t you, though? The probe was supposed to start sending its data to the past. That room is designed to send time messages.”

“Oh, you’re right. That’s why we ended up here. I mean, it doesn’t explain why we were able to make a physical jump, but it must be the exact same time period that we chose. Oh, but no, we’re not on Earth. The message is going to prehistoric Earth, not Worlon. It doesn’t matter that we’re closer, it’s quantum communication. It’s actually really weird we’re on Worlon. It doesn’t make much sense.”

He placed his hand back up to the invisible barrier. “Then we’ll just wait and see.”

The two of them grew closer over the three years that they were alone together. They continued to look for others, but there was no sign that anyone else came with them. This had something to do with the quantum Faraday cage, rather than Zek, and they were the only ones within its boundaries at the time. The other universe continued to draw nearer, according to Limerick’s beliefs, but it was hard to tell because of how faint the connection was, and how slow it moved, if it was doing so at all. He just kept measuring it as best he could, waiting until it was close enough for it to be useful to them. They made a life for themselves here, and as the only two people on the planet, of course, they had sex regularly. They had no birth control, but they were extra careful about it, because they didn’t want to raise a child in this environment.

It wasn’t the worst possible place to live, but it wasn’t civilized either. They built a latrine in the ground, and wiped themselves with leaves, and no matter how intricate they made their Crusoe dwelling, the toilet situation wouldn’t ever get better. There was plenty of food to eat, and infinite fresh water, and none of the animals gave them any significant trouble. They chose not to eat them, partially because they couldn’t effectively estimate any given creature’s intelligence level, but mostly because they didn’t need to. Their vegetarian diet was doing them well. What passed for insects were larger here due to the greater oxygen content, so that was a lot of fun; not creepy at all. Today, everything changed. Like cicadas did on Earth, Freya and Limerick woke up to find giant flying bugs crawling up out of the ground. There was no telling how long they had been there beyond the three years they had never seen them before. They looked a lot like dragonflies. Shit. This was it. This was where their enemies came from. Five million years in the future, these little fuckers would somehow transmit their DNA into the developing human scions that Operation Starseed planted here, and create a source variant species capable of raining hell down on countless other worlds.

They were witnessing the early evolution of evil, and there was nothing they could do to stop it. The bugs ignored the humans at first, or perhaps didn’t see them. But one took notice, and then they all did. They started flying towards their prey, forcing the couple to seek refuge in their hut. They were able to keep the mega dragonflies out for a few minutes, but the walls were buckling, so they had to fall back to the little panic room they built. It was stronger than the rest of the place, though not fit for anything but this kind of situation.

“We should have run. They’re gonna get in here eventually,” Freya lamented as the creatures bashed themselves against the walls.

“They would have caught up with us. We live longer in here. Maybe they have a really short memory. Best to keep ourselves out of sight for as long as possible.”

The wood started cracking. “Not long enough.”

Limerick regarded her. She felt like such a pathetic little nothing, sitting there so frightened and hopeless. He apparently had an idea. He grabbed her wrist, and held it up to his mouth. “Hey, Thistle...where’s my hex phone?”

“Pinging hex phone,” the watch announced.

The bashing stopped, and they could hear the little song Freya’s device was playing on the nightstand. The sound of wings flapping grew fainter.

“Stay here,” Limerick told her.

“No. We do this together.”

“Better they get one of us than both. If you find an opening, then run. Otherwise, please stay here.” He took a beat. “Please.”

“What are you going to do?”

He literally rolled up his sleeves. The Maramon promised me I would get to punch someone. Here’s my chance.”

Freya connected her watch’s hologram to the camera on her device outside, which allowed her to see what Limerick was doing. He really was punching them, like some kind of The One in a sea of well-dressed agents. They kept flying at him, and he kept knocking them away. He always knew which one was the most pressing target, and exactly where it would be. It was a magnificent show, but Freya knew that it couldn’t last forever, because he would grow tired, and there would always be more, waiting in the wings, so to speak. But then something happened.

He punched one of the cicada-dragonflies, and it disappeared, almost as if it had been sucked out of an airlock. He punched another, it did the same. The more he tried, the clearer things became. He was creating small fractures in the universal membrane, sending them out into the void, where nothing could survive. They were not yet close enough to another universe, so they were just...lost. The survivors started taking notice, and even though they obviously weren’t as intelligent as their descendants would become, they were able to take the hint. They rose up from underground to breed, and this fight was both a distraction from that goal, and not doing them any good. They flew off before they could kill Limerick.

Freya came out of the panic room, and dove down to help him.

“I’m all right. I just need to rest. Water?”

“Of course.” She retrieved some water from the barrel, and handed him the drinking gourd.

He took his drink, and caught his breath. “Whoo! That was amazing. You have no idea how good it feels to fight an enemy you’re allowed to destroy. I’ve been in a lot of brawls, but I’ve never actually wanted to kill any of my opponents. They were human. I know I’m not supposed to think this, but so far, it’s been the best day of my life.”

She smiled. “It’s okay to feel that. It’s your truth.” She stood up to look out the window, where the evil dragonflies were starting to perform their mating rituals in the distance. “We’re both alive, and that’s what matters.”

Out of nowhere, a flash of darkness overwhelmed Freya’s eyes, and grappled onto her face, knocking her to the floor. She was being attacked, presumably by a cicada-dragonfly that didn’t want to give up. She reached up to get the facehugger off of her, but it wouldn’t budge. It just wrapped its whatevers around her tighter. Freya could taste some kind of disgusting fluid forcing itself down her throat. It didn’t last forever. Limerick managed to stab it with his walking stick, and tear the corpse off of her. Together, they wiped the viscera away as much as possible.

Without warning, he jammed two fingers into her mouth, and pulled out as much retch as he could. “You swallowed something. In thirty minutes, we’ll do that again.”

“That’s not science,” Freya argued.

“We don’t have medicine, so inducing vomit is the best option available.”

“Okay.”

Freya drank a lot of water, and then a half hour later, retched it all up again, hoping that cleared whatever it was the cicada-dragonfly put in her. Like they had both said, this was not necessarily going to solve their problem, but without any means treating a disease, or even diagnosing one, this was all they had. They spent the rest of the day building a ring of torches around their entire hut, hoping the fire scared the creatures enough to keep them at bay. Tomorrow, they would try to break a thinny one last time, and then move out somewhere else. Perhaps there were places where the cicada-dragonflies didn’t thrive.

Until then, Limerick wanted to have sex, as they did every night.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

“I thought you were feeling better.”

“Oh, I’m totally fine. I could be infected with something, though.”

“I’m not worried about that.”

“Better it gets one of us than both,” she echoed him from earlier.

“If you give me a space STD, then so be it. If you die, what am I gonna do without you anyway? We might as well get in the same boat. If you’re not up for it, that’s fine, but I am, and I’m not afraid.”

She was into it too, and the risks seemed worth it, what with this world looking more and more like the place where they would die regardless of when that ended up happening. “All right, let’s go to bed.”

Seven months later, literally about a thousand baby cicada-dragonflies flew out of her vagina, and off into the world. No, this was it. This was where her enemies came from. The Ochivari never had anything to do with Operation Starseed, but were spawned by Freya herself. She was the mother of evil.

< > Entire Story

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: October 29, 2236

« < » > Table of Contents

Mateo went to bed early that night, so he could be awake and alert come midnight central, and the next year. Cassidy was a bit claustrophobic, and didn’t like closing the sliding hatch of the grave chamber when she slept, which was a good thing, because then he could make sure she was there and safe. A lone private security guard was standing still against the bulkhead, shrouded in darkness. When he stepped out of the ship, he saw a right army of guards protecting the whole vessel. “Have there been any incidents since I was gone?” he asked the nearest one.

“All safe, sir,” the guard answered. “No incursions, whatsoever.”

“Do you happen to know where Weaver is? Her grave chamber was empty.”

“She likes to work late, in her lab.”

“Thank you.”

He tipped his hat.

Mateo went off to Weaver’s lab, where he found her engrossed in her work. She didn’t even seem to notice he had walked in. He peered at a model on her computer screen. “That doesn’t look like what I thought it would look like.”

“Oh, this?” she asked. “No, this isn’t it. That was done months ago. This here is a prototype of this idea I have for a teleporter shield.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, the void telescopes are going to be flying through interstellar space at ninety-nine percent the speed of light. We can send navigational probes to alert the telescope ships to any impediments in their paths, but each course correction slows progress. Plus, the probes themselves can be damaged, and replacements can’t really be manufactured to compensate, because then the telescope would have to slow down, just so that replacement can get ahead.”

“So instead, any debris that tries to crash into the telescope will run into the force field, and be teleported away?” Mateo guessed.

“Right, but I’m having trouble with the vector calculations. Every time I try to model it, about point-oh-three percent of debris ends up being teleported inside the field, which defeats the purpose.”

“I wish I could help, but I barely understand what you’re talking about.”

“So do I,” Weaver admitted. “I’m not really that educated. My power doesn’t simply allow me to invent things with temporal properties. It’s the powers themselves that engineer the inventions. I’m more like a vessel, so when I run into an issue, like this one, I don’t know right away how to fix it. That’s why come it takes me so long to make something new.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. Most people can’t ever do it ever. I don’t care how long you give me, I wouldn’t be able to invent a single thing.”

She smiled at the praise. “Anyway, that’s not what you’re here for.” She removed a key from around her neck, and used it to open a drawer. She removed a small box from inside, and presented it to him.

“That’s the thing?”

She opened the box, and pulled the device out. It looked a whole lot like jewelry. “The absorption regularizer.”

“Why has it not yet been implanted? Honest question.”

Weaver placed the regularizer in his hand. “You need to calibrate it first. If it’s going to match with your pattern, it needs to know what that pattern is.”

“What does that involve?”

“I just need some blood,” Weaver said.

He lifted his sleeve, and let her draw blood from his arm. “Would this work for anyone else?” he asked as she was doing whatever it was with his blood. “Like, if Goswin wore it, could he be on my pattern too? Did you just invent a way to give humans powers or patterns?”

“That’s not what I did,” she answered. “I spent weeks studying and testing Cassidy. She’s the one with the ability to absorb powers. This thing is just designed to make sure she keeps the pattern we want her to have, in case she comes across someone else. If I wanted to give one random human some random chooser’s powers, I don’t think this would do us much good.” She connected Mateo’s blood to her computer, and initialized a program.

“What if we need Cassidy off my pattern temporarily? Can the regularizer be switched off, or switched to a different pattern?”

She rifled through some papers, and removed a sheet phone from the table. “There’s an app for that.”

“I don’t think I’m allowed to carry a phone. Leona called it marginally transhumanistic; extensions of the self.”

“Well, Cassidy is the one who needs to maintain possession of it anyway. Still, I’ll code your DNA for access, should things go south. We can’t let it fall into the wrong hands, though. Anyone who controls the app controls her.”

He nodded listlessly, and turned the device over in his hands. “Why does it look like a belly button piercing again?”

“So it can hide in plain sight,” she answered.

It did look like the one Cassidy already had, which Mateo wished he didn’t know. He stuck it back in its box, and cleared his throat. “Weaver, am I doing the right thing?”

“You mean, are we? Do we have a better choice?”

“It looks like she has pretty good protection,” Mateo noted, referring to the dozen guards assigned to protect her, and the countless others who would protect her too if someone attacked.

“Time is complicated. It can be both bane and boon. You just have to know how to use it to your advantage. We don’t know how many people are going to come after her, or how many times they’re going to try. If we don’t do this, they’ll have three hundred and sixty-five days a year to try something, and they’ll just keep getting better at it. I would rather reduce their chances than have to protect her twenty-four-seven. Yeah, Mister Matic, I think we’re doing the right thing.”

“Good.” It was Cassidy herself. She was gliding into the room. “I don’t want ‘round the clock protection. It’s asking too much of others.”

“No one’s complained,” Mateo pointed out to her.

“They shouldn’t have to do it either way.” Cassidy nodded towards the box. “If it’s ready, I’m ready.”

Weaver’s computer beeped. “Perfect timing. It is indeed ready. Go ahead and lie down on that table over there. Lift up your shirt.”

Cassidy did as she was asked. She reached out and stopped Mateo as he was trying to leave.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he answered an unvocalized request.

“Please.”

“I assure you,” Weaver said as she was preparing for the simple procedure, “this is perfectly safe. I’m just going to take your original one out, and replace it with the other. You might feel a pinch, but it shouldn’t hurt like it did when you first got the piercing.”

“Please,” she repeated to Mateo.

No one really knew exactly what had happened between Mateo and Cassidy a few years ago, but everyone knew that it was something. Weaver was trying to be polite, but the patient needed to feel safe. “It couldn’t hurt to have the donor present—to make sure that the absorption takes hold.”

That surely wasn’t necessary. They didn’t know if the power or pattern Cassidy absorbed at any one time eventually wore off, but they knew it wouldn’t happen in the next five minutes. Still, he had little room to argue. It wasn’t like she had to take her clothes off.

It didn’t take long at all. Mateo held her hand all through the ten seconds it took for Weaver to remove Cassidy’s piercing, and the twenty seconds it took for her to replace it with the high tech version. Then she started fiddling with the sheet phone. Once she was finished, she spoke to Cassidy like a doctor. “This is to be used in emergencies; in an extreme emergency, that is. You are now, more or less, permanently on Mateo and Leona’s pattern. If you run across, say, somebody with the ability to see the future, and you want their power, use this.” She unscrewed the tiny fake pearl from the bottom of the piercing, and revealed it to serve doubly as the handle for a needle. “You just need a drop of their DNA. The app will recalibrate your regularizer. But you still can’t have more than one power or pattern at the same time, so you will fall back into realtime, until you switch back. You can also suppress the pattern, and turn it back on at will. Do you understand how dangerous this phone, and your piercing, are?”

“I do, yes,” Cassidy said with a nod.

Weaver was worried. “Mateo can use the app too, but you are administrator, so you can remove permissions whenever you want, or add other people. Again, though, use discretion. This thing is like your heart in a box. It can turn you into a weapon.”

“I get it,” Cassidy took the phone, and tucked it away. “Heart in a box,” she echoed. “Well, more like my pocket.” She looked between her friends. “You two act like I’m the first person in the world to be in danger.” She hopped off the table. “Your lives are filled with danger; why are you so obsessed with me?”

“We both knew your father,” Mateo said. “He was a good man, and he died for it. We know he didn’t want you to suffer the same fate.”

“You don’t know that he’s dead. Weaver’s told me that story a million times over the past year. You didn’t see him die.”

Mateo frowned. “We kinda did.”

“You don’t know what you saw. One day, a bunch of smart scientists are going to turn the Dardius Nexus replica back on, and we’ll find out. Until then, I have to pretend like I’m salmon. I would appreciate it if you didn’t place such a stigma on that.”

“We can do that,” Weaver said.

Kestral McBride walked into the room, staring at her tablet. “Weavey, I was hoping you could double check my math on the—oops, sorry. I didn’t realize you had company. Mateo, it’s that time of the year; I lost track of the calendar.”

“It’s nice to see you, Captain. We’ll get out of your hair.”

“Did you do the procedure?” she asked.

Cassidy lifted her shirt to show her.

“Looks good. Keep it clean. Don’t want an infection.”

Mateo and Cassidy left the room.

“All right,” she said with a deep breath. “I guess this is it. It was nice knowing ya.”

“What does that mean?” he questioned.

“Now that I’m on your pattern permanently, we don’t have to be anywhere near each other. It’ll never wear off.”

“Is that what you want?”

“It’s obviously what you want.”

“I never said that.”

“I can see the guilt in your eyes, Mateo. It doesn’t exactly make me feel great about myself. I’ve danced for dozens, if not hundreds, of people. I never have to meet their spouses. Well, there have been a few couples, but something tells me Leona wouldn’t—”

“I’m sorry I put you in this position,” Mateo said. “It wasn’t fair, and it’s not fair how I’ve been treating you. We can get through this, and remain friends.”

“We can be social media friends, you mean.”

“You have a home on the AOC.”

“I also have four gigantic cylinders, and my pick of the empty units. Hell, Goswin tells me they never filled the one I was using when I first got here, so I could just go back.”

“You’re still in danger, and I don’t mean to stigmatize you, or whatever. It’s just...I would rather keep you close. This doesn’t give you superpowers; it just lowers your chances of being attacked by making you harder to find.”

“They’ve set up great security here; I’ll be fine.” She tried to walk away.

“Please,” Mateo said. “It’ll be worse for my marriage if you leave. Like you’ve said, it was one dance. That’s not illegal, but if it ruins our friendship, Leona will think it meant something more.”

“Did it?”

“Did it what?” He knew what she was asking.

“Did it mean something to you?”

He stammered, “wull, I—just because...”

“That’s what I thought. It’ll be worse if I stay. It’s not like it matters anyway. You have to get to Varkas Reflex, and I have no business there.”

“Ishida said it’ll take twelve years to get to Varkas Reflex, and we’re still not a hundred percent certain Leona even went there.”

“Then you better get going.” She turned and walked away.

He stared at the space where Cassidy once was. Things were extremely complicated. He was in love with Leona, but he also loved Serif, who wasn’t exactly real, and now in another universe. Now this new woman shows up, and he doesn’t know what to feel. Were all his caveman friends right? Were humans just not built to be monogamous? Or was he just a bad person?

« < » > Table of Contents