Microstory 2590: Quidel Tears Through the Sac and Crawls Out Like a Monotreme

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Quidel tears through the sac and crawls out like a monotreme. He’s all alone, but he’s been through this many times before, and will be able to acclimate to his new body just fine. Of course, in most of those instances, he has had an institution to fall back on if he needed it, but it’s better than the alternative. A few months ago, he saved the “world” from a terrorist attack, almost single-handedly. As reward for his heroism, he was given an egg-shaped crystal trophy. In-universe, this was only symbolic; something to place upon his mantel, and lie about when in the presence of someone who didn’t know that he was a spy. In reality, it was an extra life. Spydome has a bunch of these little rewards scattered throughout the environment. You can’t just find them, though. You have to earn them, and most of the people operating inside of the storyline don’t understand their value. It just looks like a tchotchke.

After solving the secret puzzle by refracting light through the trophy in just the right way, a holographic message appeared on the base, telling him what he now had in his arsenal. It also gave him instructions for how to use it. He emptied the organic starter nanites into a sterile pee sample cup, and mixed it with the other ingredients, which included his own blood. What formed was an actual egg. A human egg. Of course, as a spy, he had safehouses and storage lockers all over the dome, so he chose a remote one to store his egg in a freezer, where it grew on its own from there. It has been sitting here ever since, preserved in its own self-contained stasis field, and kept cool by the freezer, which gathered dust in his absence.

Quidel flicks the interior safety mechanism, and climbs out. “Ugh, gross. I should have stored a shower in here too. This is basically amniotic fluid.” This locker isn’t heated, because that would just make it easier to find, and it wouldn’t help preserve the clone sac. It’s freezing outside, and probably windy. The device. The device is giving off waste heat as the RTG transmits power. He punches in the code to the cabinet, takes out the case, and starts hugging it. It would be better if he had the code unlock the case as well, but that’s probably not super safe anyway. Okay, he’s gathered a little bit of warmth. He only has two sets of clothes here. One of them is a tuxedo, and the other is jeans and a t-shirt. It’s unfortunate, but he’s got to clean himself off, so he uses the tux like a rag. Then he puts on the regular clothes, and hugs the case for a little bit longer.

Okay, he has to leave now. He didn’t store a phone, not because it wasn’t safe, but because he didn’t think he could trust anyone with this location, especially not given its rare contents. And when he came here to stash the device yesterday, he just didn’t think about it. He went into this experience with plans to be a lone wolf, and so far, that has played out as expected. He opens the door, and sticks his head through. The coast is clear. The storage lot is closed right now, because consciousness transference takes so long due to all the safeguards, so they’re not expecting anyone to be in here right now. He didn’t check in, with his alias, or anything. He’s going to have to sneak out, avoiding the cameras, and any guards who might be lurking about. This is what he trained for, though. This kind of thing is precisely why he signed up for Spydome in the first place. It was only his second choice.

He came here in the year 2500, which was when the planet opened up for non-beta exploration. Before this, he spent nearly twenty years in Empty Planet, and then another few months just relaxing in Polar Tropica. He likes adventure, and he likes to relax. After this is done, he still isn’t sure if he wants to switch to Underbelly or the Nordome Network. Maybe Baumrealm. That’s so many years away, though, unless this latest mission ends up cutting his spy life short. Not only does he have no more extra lives, but all of this has become super meta, which the Custodians may not like. This little ragtag team might be making huge problems for the entire system. They might shut them down at any moment.

Holding out hope, he calls upon his lessons, and sneaks over the fence, sticking to the shadows, and making no sound. He’s clutching the device case, still for the warmth, but also because it’s clearly quite valuable. While Quidel didn’t have the foresight to store a burner phone in his locker, he is aware of his surroundings, which means he knows that there is a no-tell motel just down this hill. He walks inside and slaps a hundred dollar bill on the counter. “I need your phone...and your discretion.”

The night manager lifts up the receiver of the corded phone, and punches in a code; one that Quidel recognizes from his training. “Carrier call log has been switched off, but you only have five minutes.”

“I only need one,” Quidel says back in a gravelly voice. God, that’s so cheesy, but back in the 1990s, that’s exactly the kind of thing the hero would say in a spy movie. As the manager is putting on his noise-cancelling headphones, Quidel dials, using his own code to prevent any local tapping. It adds an extremely annoying background screech to the call, but the voice will come through well enough, and it’s better than risking an eavesdropper. When the human Marshal answers, Quidel says, “I’m alive. Meet me at the northern border.” The country in this dome is called Usona, but it’s an analog of more than just the 21st century United States. There are four distinct regions, which also include a series of dome layers that are more like Canada, one series like Australia, and one like New Zealand, which is a bunch of islands. To get to one of these other regions, it doesn’t matter if you take a plane, train, or automobile. You’re gonna end up in an elevator. He really is standing by a border. He doesn’t actually need to get to the Canada-analog, though. Right next to the elevator is a maintenance tunnel that will lead them to Osman, which is this mythology’s analog for Pakistan.

Microstory 2481: Treasure Hunting Dome

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This is like a cross between a race and a treasure hunt, but multiplied by a thousand. Obviously, if there was only one hunt going on at once, it would immediately become impossible to complete, like a million or more players trying to golf on one course. The surface under this dome has plenty of room, so they take it up. Of course, there are different levels of difficulty, and different lengths. You can choose a hunt that only typically takes a couple of hours, or one that can last for days, or even weeks. Like a real treasure hunt—or one you might find in media—you solve clues, or solve puzzles to get more clues to solve. Like a challenge competition, some of the clues can be earned through otherwise unrelated tasks. You might have to complete a Rubik’s Cube in order to unlock a secret hidden inside, or you might have to figure out how to milk a genetically engineered cow that’s as big as a house before an android will hand you your clue. One of them necessarily leads to the reward, while the other is arbitrary, and could theoretically be anything. This isn’t a criticism, just a clarification that there’s a healthy mix of tasks to complete, and while some of them might seem silly, or make you feel embarrassed, they’re all meant to be fun. It gets even more complex, because you’re sometimes working alone, and sometimes with a team, and sometimes against others, and you don’t always get to choose your team. If multiple people arrive at the same challenge or puzzle, you may be required to work with them, or compete against them. It really just depends. And those other people may be on the same treasure hunt with you, or on an entirely different one, which just so happens to intersect at this same point. You can also select a hunt that involves being on a team already, and even that sometimes goes up in the air, because they may make you compete with each other for individual rewards. They always tell you what you’re meant to do, though, so don’t worry about getting overwhelmed by the rules. They obviously won’t tell you how to complete a given challenge, but they’ll make sure you understand it well enough to at least make an attempt. As I said, there are all sorts of different ways of going about this, and you have the power to choose your own destiny. I’ve run four hunts at this point, and I can recommend all four, but I can’t recommend any hunt that I’ve never been on. No one can. I doubt there’s even time for any given person to try every single variation, because I think they’re intending to retire some to make space for brand new ones. It changes all the time, just like life itself. One final note. There are some out there who believe that there is some sort of overarching plot here, and a secret hunt which will lead to genuine, valuable riches. I don’t know anything about that, but my advice would be to stick with what you’ve been given. You can’t get into this dome without choosing a particular hunt, and they’re gonna keep you on task. Even though you’re expected to figure things out on your own, it’s not a free-for-all, so don’t even try.

Microstory 2473: Empty Planet

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Are you ready for an adventure? What about an adventure mystery? I don’t wanna say too much about this place, because finding out what’s going on is the entire point of it. I’m sure that if I did give away the ending, the system would autoreject it, so you wouldn’t see it anyway. Instead, I’ll just say that it’s a gorgeous, eerie setting. The premise is that you wake up on an alien world, and you’re all alone. This was obviously once a civilized and populated planet, but they’re all missing, and it’s up to you to figure what happened to them. Sometimes you’re outside, and sometimes you’re locked in a room. They don’t erase your memories (because they don’t have to) but they come up with a backstory for your character, and part of the mystery is also unraveling how you ended up here. If you play the game right, you get those memories (or for the in-universe explanation, you get them back). There’s a waiting list for this dome, and it’s only getting bigger. Without going into detail, it is possible to run into another player, but they do try to keep you pretty far apart. Unlike Threshold, if you wanna figure out how to hotwire an alien vehicle, and drive to the other side of the dome, you can do that, and you might encounter others while you’re there. So if you want some help solving the puzzles, that’s always technically an option. What they don’t want is to have thousands upon thousands of visitors stepping over each other. It would kind of undermine the concept of an empty planet, even though it’s mostly about finding the truth about the alien race that once lived here. There are multiple levels, so the sky above you is closer than it appears, and that keeps people more separate, but there’s obviously a limit to that, and I don’t know how many levels there are. It doesn’t specify on the prospectus, or during the very brief orientation. Speaking of orientation, there’s not much to it. They ask you a few questions, they give you a little bit of info about how to exit the game if you wanna quit in the middle of it, and then they give you a sedative so you can wake up at the starting point. That’s about all I can say. As I said, the design is magnificent. It really does feel alien. As for the story? Eh, I think it could be better, but your mileage may vary. You’ll just have to see for yourself, and test your reasoning skills.

Microstory 2428: Escape Dome

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I’m a little bit biased here, because I’m obsessed with escape rooms. I’m old enough to remember when that was a fitting name for them, because they were mostly only one room. Some of them had different sections, but you didn’t unlock a door, go through it, and start on an entirely different set of puzzles. I watched as they grew and grew, both in popularity, and in scope. Escape rooms became escape buildings, which became escape districts, which have now become escape cities. I always loved puzzles, even as a kid, so this became my thing. I didn’t have a whole lot of friends, and that was on me, but I still wanted to do this. I remember regularly going in alone, and them having to group me with strangers. They were sometimes annoyed by this, but for the most part, they were welcoming, and they quickly realized either way that I was more of an asset than a burden, even though we didn’t have a preexisting rapport. Eventually, I wasn’t going in alone anymore. I finally found my community. The most passionate of us started a little club. The reason I’m giving you all this background is that every single member of this club is still alive, and still together. I don’t know how rare that is, to have eleven friends stay connected after all this time. None of us wanted to move to another planet without the others. No one’s marriages and families broke us apart—though, the rest of us would have understood if they had, and been happy for them. The point is that we’ve been doing escape zones for nearly 500 years, so we know what we’re talking about. I doubt we managed to try them all, but we certainly did the majority. It’s our passion, and I don’t think that’s going away anytime soon. Escape Dome is the largest adventure we’ve ever played. Of course, it’s not just one game that goes across the entire area, but each game is still immersive and impressive. I think I saw that they did have the traditional kinds, which were just the one little room each, and we might do that when three or four of us have an hour to kill. I should clarify, we started out with a club of eleven people, but over time, it’s nearly doubled, thanks to those marriages and families. Not everyone wants to be a part of it, which is fine, but the cool thing about some of these games under the dome is that all twenty-four members can play at the same time. We’ve never been able to do that before, even with the escape districts. Twenty has always been the absolute max until now. Our first two adventures were extraordinary. We kind of thought we had seen everything, but even beyond the larger scale, there were puzzles that blew our mind. The great thing about this concept is that anyone can have fun with it. I’ve heard people say, “oh, I’m just not a puzzle person” but we put them in one of those rooms, and they have a blast. Don’t count yourself out until you give it a try. If you end up not enjoying it at all, hey, you don’t have to do it again. Some of the adventures are designed to potentially take weeks, so don’t start with one of those. Be smart about your choice—which the staff will gladly help you make—and I’m sure you won’t regret it.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 10, 2399

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Leona sent a message to Alyssa yesterday, but she hasn’t responded. She could be busy running around with her brainwashed brain, or just chilling on a beach in Tahiti. What would one of the only two people in the whole world with time powers do with their day? Does she have an agenda? It sure seems like she’s reached her goal by now. Rather, she’s reached Dalton Hawk’s apparent goal. Or maybe this was just the beginning. Maybe temporal energy was getting in the way of some other objective, and now the real work starts. If only he would come talk to them, they would know whether they should try to stop him, or help. He presumably sent them here accidentally, and then arrived himself in an attempt to remedy the issue. How that ended up leading him to creating a religion with multiple branches thousands of years ago is anyone’s guess, but they have met him a few times, and he didn’t seem evil before. They’re going to give him the benefit of the doubt until he gives them a solid reason not to.

The team had completely forgotten that the only reason they sent Angela on a relativistic journey in the first place is because her alternate self, Marie was terminally ill. As Angela had already taken some of the immortality waters, they figured it was their only shot to retroactively save her sister. It appeared to have worked, but time is a fickle thing, and their success in this pursuit is not necessarily inevitable. They have to actually find the rest of the waters, and give them to her in the right order. The hardest to get will be Activator, which can be found anywhere on Earth, but only at the end of its life. That won’t happen for billions of years. They should have been focused on this for the last few months. Now it may be too late. It may be pointless while they’re still under the rule of the Omega Gyroscope, which is suppressing temporal energy. If the restrictions are even tighter than before, then none of the waters will do what they’re meant to do anyway. To get this done, they’re going to need more exceptions, and barring finding Dalton, there’s only one person they can talk to about that. Why isn’t she answering?

“Argh!” Leona huffs. “How hard is it to reply to a text? It takes two seconds to say, get back to you soon. Love ya!”

“Maybe she doesn’t have cell service,” Mateo offers, trying to stay positive. “It hasn’t really been that long, when you really think about it.”

“Nowhere in the world does not have cell service. The Global Council made it illegal to manufacture a phone without satellite capabilities for emergencies. Every satellite data provider agrees to eat the cost of such calls.”

“If she’s not responding...” He decides not to finish that sentence.

“Yes, Mateo, go on.”

Okay, he’ll say it. “If she doesn’t respond, then we have to find Dalton. We were probably always going to do that anyway. He is the last piece of the puzzle that we’ve been trying to put together for the last year. He’s at least a piece.”

“Great,” Leona says sarcastically. “Where do you suggest we start looking? Do you want to try to find the Constant again? That always works out so well for us.”

Mateo sighs, and holds up a pamphlet for Daltomism. “If you wanna climb to the top, you gotta start at the bottom.”

Leona looks at her husband with a look of repulsion. “It looks like we’re going to church. Can’t wait, I love those kinds of people. They’re always so rational.”