Microstory 2363: Vacuus, August 9, 2179

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Dear Pascal,

I relate to your situation of not having access to certain foods. I’ve never had a simple apple before, nor any other tree fruits or roots. We only use vertical farming as of yet, but there’s a whole team dedicated to figuring out how to grow in Vacuan soil. I guess I shouldn’t say that they’re figuring anything out. They know exactly what they need to do, but it’s a massive undertaking, and they have to play the long game. I never told either of you, but we actually have our own domes! They’re much smaller, and not for habitation, though. They basically installed giant space heaters to thaw the frozen regolith. I think they’ve stuck warming pipes into the ground too, but it’s not my area of expertise, so don’t quote me on that. The ground is well thawed by now, but the soil is still not ready for crops. It’s really gross, but this is where pretty much all of our human waste goes. We used to use some of it for radiation shielding in our habitats, but we almost exclusively use a special fungus for that instead now, though that does feed on our waste. The majority of it is tilled into our new soil, so organic matter can provide nutrients to our future plants. They estimate that it’s going to be another few years before we can try root vegetables, and a whole decade before the fruit trees grow to maturity. We obviously took all sorts of seeds with us when we came here 37 years ago, even though we didn’t know what the environmental conditions would be like here, and I can’t wait until we get to use the ones that we’ve just been sitting on this whole time. Tell me what an apple is like. It kind of looks like a tomato, but the books don’t really describe the difference in taste. As far as our correspondence goes, I’m happy with whatever you feel comfortable saying, and with however often you want to send a letter. Just write to me when it strikes you. Condor and I have a weekly thing going, but I don’t think we have to force the same schedule just for the sake of it. I don’t blame you anymore, but I’m still hurt by this whole thing, and I find it easier to converse with someone regularly who I know had nothing to do with it at all.

Eat an apple for me, if you can find one,

Corinthia

Extremus: Year 83

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It only took Omega and Valencia a couple of weeks to figure out what went wrong with the Nexus, and solve it. Apparently, Vitalie’s use of the network while traveling through time did screw things up, but she wasn’t the only one responsible. A Mark II Nexus, being one that was constructed by the people who invented them in the first place, could handle this complication. It would have been able to compensate for the temporal interference, and sort of reboot itself. The one that Omega built is just as good as these in most respects, but there are some notable differences; differences which the average person would not be able to detect. After careful examination of all the parts and systems, they were able to correct the issue, but only for this particular machine. They’re trying to get to the one on Extremus, which never received the correction. If they could just establish contact with someone on board, the current temporal engineer could probably get it done if they walked them through it, but even their communications are down. They need a creative solution. In three months, they’ve yet to come up with one.

“We can go to Earth first. From there, we can make contact with someone who can help us,” Spirit suggests.

“Do you know of anyone in particular in this day and age?” Tinaya questions.

“No,” Spirit admits. “The historical records don’t go this far.”

“What about Team Keshida?” Belahkay offers.

“Gatewood isn’t in the directory,” Omega explains as he’s pointing to the screen. “I don’t know why not. Maybe they cloaked themselves, or...they moved. A few of these Nexa are in weird places in the galaxy, which could be controlled by friends; maybe even Keshida, but maybe not. I wouldn’t feel comfortable reaching out to them. The Exins think that Verdemus was destroyed. We cannot disabuse them of this misconception, so we cannot risk connecting with any mysteries.”

“I can do it,” Aristotle volunteers for the umpteenth time.

“Remember what happened the last time you tried?” Lilac asks.

Aristotle nods. “I was young, and ignorant.”

“It wasn’t that long ago,” Niobe reminds him.

“I have the tools that I need now,” Aristotle insists.

“The timogramen,” Tinaya realizes. “You’ve learned something about it.”

“Not me,” Aristotle clarifies. “Vaska never stopped studying it. She understands how it works now. It interferes with temporal manipulation when not accounted for, so all you have to do is account for it. You have to know how much timogramen radiation is in your system, how much there is nearby, the temperature and barometric pressure,  the position of the sun and celestial bodies, the precise distance of the destination, and a few other minor factors. But she thinks she can do it. She’s been building something.”

“She’s been building what, a timogramen detector?” Valencia asks him.

Aristotle bobs his head. “She calls it a temporal radiation compensator, but like I said, it has to include a whole lot more in the calculations. Plus, it has to be calibrated for what you’re actually trying to accomplish. If you’re just trying to teleport, it’s one thing, but where I’m going, it’s a whole different thing.”

“Wait, but that’s true,” Tinaya begins. “We teleport on this planet without issue.”

Valencia sighs. “It’s not without issue. The relays just seem to work okay, because most of the time, people are only making short, simple jumps. But we’re doing a lot of maintenance on them. The old relays, before the explosion, were no better.”

“What do you mean, did something happen?” Tinaya asks.

“The Captain. I don’t have the whole story, because I’m not in the loop anymore, but just before the mirror exploded, she tried to hustle the kids through. They evidently didn’t make it to where they were going. I’m not sure how Lataran eventually made her way back, but she was gone for a year. The Ship Superintendent has to step in.”

Tinaya looks over at her husband. “Arqut, is this true?”

“I guess I forgot to tell you about that. The second lieutenant assured me that it was only temporary. She seemed to know something, and it seemed better not to press it. A year later, she showed up.”

“Without the kids,” Tinaya figures. She looks at Aristotle and Niobe now, who are also hiding the truth. “Why does it feel like I’m the only one in the dark here?”

“I am too,” Spirit assures her.

“As am I,” Belahkay agrees.

She’s kind of used to it at this point. There were a ton of things that Lataran didn’t tell her about while she was First Chair, even though she initially expected to be privy to everything upon being elected. Their persistent link to this planet was one of those secrets. Full transparency has never been assumed on the ship, and in fact, would be a dangerous goal to seek. Ignorance Tolerance is a subject that students study nearly every year. When it comes to time travel, no one is entitled to know everything, and children have to learn to deal with it maturely. This is where they memorize Leona’s Rules for Time Travel. She decides to let it go. “Where’s Vaska?”

“Her lab is in the megablock,” Lilac replies. “She likes to work near a lot of other people, like she did on Gatewood.”

Tinaya grabs Aristotle by the hand, and teleports him back down to Verdemus without a word. She sends a quick message to Vaska, who drops a pin. The two of them walk across the courtyard, and enter the lab.

“Miss Leithe, it’s been a while. How have you been?”

“I’ve been all right. Just trying to get home.”

Vaska’s gaze darts over to Aristotle.

“I told her about what you’ve been working on,” he divulges.

“Well, it’s ready. I mean...it’s ready to be tested.”

“Show me,” Tinaya requests.

Vaska opens up a cabinet behind her, and takes out a fairly large box. “It’s just a prototype, so it doesn’t look pretty, but I’m confident in its functionality.” She sets the box down, and removes the lid to reveal a plethora of gadgets, gizmos, and innerworkings. In addition to the expected wires and antenna, there are gears turning each other around, like a timepiece. Tubes are ready to transport fluids between an exposed logic board, and some other apparatus. Two buttons that kind of look like they were originally from a mechanical computer keyboard are rhythmically going up and down in an alternating pattern. LEDs are blinking, and a small display is showing status data. Vaska extends a tiny spyglass to have it standing straight up towards the ceiling. She lifts up what kind of looks like a tiny microphone, but Tinaya recognizes it to be a portable radiometer, probably full-spectrum, in this case. The familiar crackling sound that a radiometer makes when it’s picking up radiation begins to overwhelm the soft buzzing sound that’s been coming from somewhere inside.

“Well,” Tinaya says. “I don’t know what I’m looking at. I don’t know why I thought coming here would be helpful.”

“I can take a look at it.” Valencia turns out to have been behind them. “I’ll make sure it works, and if it doesn’t, make it so it does, or maybe just improve upon it.”

“It’s certainly big enough,” Vaska acknowledges. “I would love to streamline it. What if Mister Al-Amin could wear it on his wrist at all times?” She proposes.

“Does he need that?” Tinaya wonders. “I thought the only issue is when he’s coming from Verdemus. If he’s anything like his father, he’ll be doing a lot of traveling.”

“He is standing right here,” Aristotle states the obvious. “And he considers this to be his home, so he’ll probably frequently return.”

“You’ll need this at any rate,” Vaska explains. “As you said, it’s your home. The temporal radiation that our respective bodies have been exposed to would eventually dissipate given enough time away. But you’re both a choosing one, and you were born here. “It’s a part of you, and it always has been. You probably can’t survive without it. I imagine you’ll have to return here whether you want to or not, or grow the timogramen elsewhere. I hesitate to suggest the latter.”

“Why is that?” Valencia questions.

Vaska is reluctant. “It’s not harmful. It’s time. Temporal energy and radiation are properties of time, and time isn’t harmful. Except that it is. Time leads to entropy. It’s what kills us, and destroys what’s not alive. The timogramen is dangerous. It could be weaponized, and abused...misused. It would probably serve as an invasive species if allowed to spread to other worlds.”

“How did it evolve in the first place?” Valencia presses. “Is it just a coincidence that it grows here?”

“That I don’t know yet, but I’m pretty sure that you did this. You may have created it when you came here. All the teleportation, and the parallel dimensions...Tinaya’s glass skin thing. Plus, the way I understand it, this planet was annihilated years ago, and then someone went back in time to prevent it. That may have had unforeseen consequences, I really don’t know. Fittingly, I need more time for my research. One thing I know for sure is that it’s not perfectly natural, but there has to be something here, or we would already find the stuff on Earth, and anywhere else that time travelers have visited.”

“This is all fascinating,” Aristotle interjects, “but what does it have to do with me, and the job that I need to get done? I have to travel to Extremus, and get that Nexus working, so we can reconnect. Does this do that; that’s all I need to know.”

“That’s not all that I need to know,” Valencia contends. “You will be taking me back, and I need to feel comfortable and safe with that. The questions that I’m asking now are directly related to me reaching that level of trust in your abilities.”

“Fair enough,” Aristotle relents.

“Can that thing make him more precise and reliable?” Valencia goes on, pointing to the contraption.

“On a planetary level, yes,” Vaska answers. “What happened to him before, when he went back in time, and landed way off course, that shouldn’t happen again.”

What does that mean, on a planetary level?”

Vaska clears her throat, and starts touching things on the compensator, and moving some things around as she’s explaining. “The spyglass is a modified form of the Jayde Spyglass, which is why it has any hope of seeing thousands of light years away. But relative to other stars, planets don’t really move. Of course they do—everything moves—but compared to the reframe speeds of the Extremus? It’s nothing. These tubes here feed clarified timogramen juice into the contaminant filter to capture and counteract the temporal radiation that’s bombarding the compensator while it’s in this environment. There’s a limit to that, which is dependent upon its size. The pure timogramen juice can’t absorb enough background radiation to protect the other instruments for the precise targeting that you’re looking for. Therefore, we can shoot for a planet, but not a ship.”

“What if you built a bigger one?” Tinaya decides to suggest. “You could be more precise then, couldn’t you?”

Vaska winces. “With the bigger one, you can specify a more precise target on the planet, but still not a ship traveling at reframe speeds away from us. At a certain point, size doesn’t matter. A larger surface area means more radiation, which means more clarified timogramen juice is necessary, and you end up with diminishing returns.”

“You didn’t say a bigger one,” Aristotle points out. “You said the bigger one. Did you already build it?”

“That’s what I built first,” Vaska answers. “This one is the prototype portable model. I didn’t think that you would want to use the other one, because it’s a power hog, and for my part, I don’t know why it would be necessary.”

“It still needs his temporal ability, right?” Valencia poses. “It just helps people do what they already do?”

Vaska shakes her head. “No, this one only works with him. The bigger model too. It would be useless for anyone else’s power. But yeah, he still gotta do what he does.”

Valencia nods. “We need the precision. Aristotle has to aim for a mining site in one of the star systems where the Extremus deploys a fleet of resource automators. We’ve been getting a lot of data from Project Topdown, so I know where those are going to be.” She consults her watch. “But if we’re gonna intercept them, we have to leave today. The next proverbial gas station isn’t for another proverbial hundred miles.”

“It’s ready when you are,” Vaska promises. “It’s in my garage, and it’s on wheels.”

“Do you wanna say goodbye to your husband first?” Tinaya asks Valencia.

Valencia taps on her neck. “Omega?” She waits for a few seconds. “Bye.”

Vaska leads them into the garage. Aristotle uses his manly strength to pretend to pull the giant temporal radiation compensator out, and onto the sidewalk while the electric motor does the actual heavy lifting. The pallet jack drops the machine onto the grass. A few of Omega’s clones approach out of curiosity. Vaska and Valencia hook it up to the grid, run through a diagnostic, and a form of a preflight check. She and Aristotle agree to take the risk, knowing that it could kill them, and then they unceremoniously turn on the machine, gather the necessary data, and have Aristotle interface with it. Once it’s at full power, he receives the literal green light, and they both disappear.

“I hope it worked.”

“Let’s go find out.” She takes Vaska by the hand, and teleports up to the moon base. They walk into the Nexus lab to find Valencia and Aristotle waiting for them.

“Welp,” Valencia begins. “It technically worked, but we were off schedule by about four hundred years, and needed to build a couple stasis pods.”

Vaska frowns. “I must have missed something. I’m sorry.”

“It’s quite all right, right?” Lataran says as she’s coming out of the control room, eying Valencia. “Now. I’ve been cooped up on that ship forever, and I haven’t been here in a long time. Who here is gonna give me a tour?”

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Extremus: Year 79

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It took a long time for the medical staff in the Gatewood Collective to realize that there must be something quite unusual about the planet that Tinaya and Aristotle were living on, and even longer to realize that Tinaya’s whole glass skin condition was making things worse. As it happens, Verdemus emits an unusual form of radiation, which sticks with everyone who steps foot on it. It doesn’t appear to be harmful, but the Gatewooders—is that what they’re called?—didn’t want to take a chance, so they needed time to remedy the issue. It appears that it will happen on its own given enough time away from the environment, but in the interest of expediency, they found a way to dissipate it quickly, but still safely. The primary physician postulates that it’s the result of a form of communication. The plant and animal life on Verdemus have indeed been noted to enjoy some level of harmony. It’s nothing quite as dramatic as Pandora from that one franchise, but it does seem to be there to support its idea of homeostasis. If true, it’s the Gaia Hypothesis made real, just not for Earth. The doctor is fascinated by this possibility, and is very interested in visiting Verdemus to study it.

Captain Kestral McBride is not okay with that. “Doctor, the deadline to apply for passage on the Extremus was weeks ago. You’re not getting on that ship.” It’s July of 2270, and the TGS Extremus is days from launch.

“What are you talking about?” Dr. Norling questions. “I’m not asking to get on the ship. I want to go to the planet, and I have to do that seventy-eight years from now. I have to go back with Miss Leithe and Mr. Al-Amin.”

“That’s not how I’ve made the new recall device work, Vaska,” Lieutenant Ishida Caldwell tries to explain. “It will send the two of them back to where they were before they traveled through time. They can’t take someone with them.”

“Well, then modify it so it can,” Vaska suggests.

“That would be a supertemporal transporter,” Ishida argues. “That’s so much harder, if not impossible given the parameters. Now, you give me a collapsar, and I’ll send you into the next galaxy, but—” She interrupts herself to stare into the corner as if she’s just given herself a new idea.

“You don’t have to worry about all that,” Maqsud contends. “I tried telling you, I’m just having trouble with accuracy, but the power is in me. All you have to do is devise a device that taps into my temporal energy. I certainly can take people with me.”

“That will not be necessary,” Kestral insists. “Dr. Norling will not be going anywhere.” She faces the doctor. “We need you here.”

“Oh, don’t give me that. I’m not the only doctor here. But I am the foremost expert in Verdemusian radiation.”

“Oh, you are, are you?” Kestral asks sarcastically.

“Name one other.” Expert is a definite exaggeration in this case, but she is indeed the closest thing they have. The problem is that Keshida doesn’t care. They don’t need to know how the planet works, so they’re not properly incentivized to sign off on this mission. Vaska has to come up with a good reason why anyone should go, not just that she should be the one. That’s probably going to be a pretty tall order.

“I’m sorry,” Kestral says simply.

Vaska steps over to gaze out of the nearest viewport. Many stars can be seen from this angle, but they fade away closer to the edge where just a hint of the sunshine from Barnard’s Star peeks out from behind the hull. “Do you remember what your lives were like before we came to this universe as refugees...before every moment—waking or unwaking—was consumed by your responsibility to our health and safety? Do you remember what you were doing, and why? Do you remember your dreams? Why are you such brilliant scientists?” She turns back around. “Did you study because it was easy? Because you were bored? Or did you do it because you wanted to learn, to discover? In the last couple of centuries, humanity has encountered a handful of exoplanets. We’ve gone right to them. Each one is special in its own right. Proxima Doma is the closest. Bida is the most Earth-like, albeit naturally a deathtrap for all Earth-born organisms. Hell, even this system right here, with no fully coalesced planets, is interesting enough. But Verdemus sounds like a paradise. It’s like nothing we’ve seen before. And you just...couldn’t give a shit? What would Past!Kestral and Past!Ishida have to say about your attitudes?”

For Tinaya’s part, that’s a pretty decent argument, but it doesn’t have to resonate with her. It has to change Team Keshida’s mind. The two of them exchange a look, and then they gently press their foreheads together. It looks like more than just a familial bond, but a genuine means of communicating with each other without other people hearing, or having to leave the room. This is all but proven when they separate, and suddenly agree to Vaska’s request. Ishida retires to her lab where she modifies the recall device. It was originally designed to send Tinaya and Maqsud back to a place where they had already been, but since Vaska has never been there, that plan will no longer work.

Six days later, they reconvene to explain the new situation, and give them a chance to back out. Ishida holds up the device. Unlike the first one she created, which was only a relatively small sphere, this is three hoops connected to each other by a larger sphere. “Interstellar teleportation is very difficult to accomplish. It’s hard to do it at large scales, and it’s hard to do it at smaller scales. Recall technology, like homestones, get around this using a branch of mathematics that even I don’t understand. But basically if your quantum signature has already been to a place, it’s easier for it to get back there. Going somewhere new that’s so far away is a whole different ball game. I think I’ve figured it out for a one time trip, but I cannot guarantee the results. It’s still based on your recall point,” she explains to the Verdemusians. “And Vaska is still a hanger-on. Most of the time, when something goes wrong, navigation is what gets thrown off, rather than, say, coherence. This is actually a good thing, because while you may end up in the wrong place, at least you end up in one piece. Or three, as it were.”

“What’s the margin of error?” Tinaya asks.

“A few years, plus or minus. Though, from where I’m standing, due to the added mass of Vaska’s presence, my guess is that you’ll be late instead of early. It’s up to you to decide which is preferable.”

Tinaya looks over for Vaska’s guidance.

“No, no, no,” Kestral says. “She doesn’t get to decide this for you. Since this affects all three of you, it must be a unanimous decision. She’s not the only one taking a risk here. If even one of you doesn’t want to take that risk, we go back to the original plan, and Dr. Norling will have no choice but to return to her pathetic job as the Primary Physician for billions of people.”

“I’m in,” Tinaya agrees with no hesitation.

“For what it’s worth, so am I,” Vaska confirms sheepishly.

They all turn their eyes to Maqsud, who waits a moment. “I still think I can do this myself.” He doesn’t look as confident as he wishes. Verdemus is 16,000 light years away, and they’re trying to get there eight decades in the future. Those numbers do not match up with each other. A Trotter can travel through time given the right conditions, and these aren’t them. It’s clearly possible for him, since he’s the one who got them here in the first place, but that doesn’t mean he’s ready to transport them in that way intentionally, and accurately. “But this sounds like a safer bet. Let’s do it.”

Ishida holds the sphere and hoops in front of her. She presses four buttons on the sphere, which release a single leg that extends to the floor, holding it up. “It’ll be here when you’re ready. Its range is unpredictable, so I’ll activate it remotely. Take the suits on your back, and one carry-on. That’s all it can handle. Any questions?”

“We’re ready now,” Tinaya decides, seeing Vaska with her carry-on. She’s the only one with any belongings.

“All right. Give us a minute to get out of here,” Kestral says. “Goodspeed.”

As Team Keshida are leaving, the three passengers get in place. The hoops open, and allow them to step inside to wrap around their torsos. Since they’re not perfect circles, the only way to fit into them is to either face the center, or the outside. The former seems more awkward, so they all end up looking away from each other. A couple of minutes later, they feel the power vibrating through the metal. They instinctively grab onto their respective hoops as the leg retracts itself. A translucent bubble forms, and expands around them, then a few meters beyond. But its borders are undefined. The Captain and Lieutenant were right to bug out.

Once the power reaches critical mass, the bubble suddenly collapses again, and zaps them with a painful—but not overly painful—electrical shock. The room they were standing in disappears, transplanting them to a different one. Tinaya recognizes it immediately, even though she only saw it for a second years ago. This is the mess hall on Verdemus, which exploded when Tinaya unwittingly triggered it by teleporting Ilias away from the hostages that he had taken. Ishida was wrong. They didn’t show up a little too late, but way too early. They’re at risk of changing the timeline. Then again, maybe they should. Then again, how could they have any hope of doing that? This isn’t a few days prior to the tragedy. This is that very moment. Ilias is here, as are his hostages. He’s holding onto one of them tightly. That’s as much as Future!Tinaya is able to garner before Past!Tinaya appears out of nowhere, and takes hold of him. She teleports him out of here, and into the woods.

In one more second, the deadman’s switch is going to obliterate this entire settlement. Dozens of people are going to die, leaving only one survivor who was graced with phoenix resurrection powers. There is not even enough time for Future!Tinaya to remove her suit’s gauntlet to reach her watch, which is the only way she can teleport out of here herself. Even if she did, at best, she can save the other two travelers. Everyone else is still going to die. They’re going to die all over again, and she’s going to have to relive that pain, that loss.

Something is happening. An energy is surging through her again. A bright light is breaking through her suit, melting it along the way. Time appears to slow around her. Only Maqsud and Vaska are moving at a normal rate. The hostages are standing up to run away, but have barely made it to standing positions. The suit slips all the way off of her, leaving only her shining naked glass body. The light expands faster than the bomb explodes, and they begin to battle each other. The glass light wins out, and fades away. Everyone is alive. She has just successfully changed the past. Or has she?

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 9, 2461

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Ramses had it figured out. Through a lot of experimentation and trial and error, he was able to come up with a device that measured an individual’s cosmic frequency. This was all taking place on the quantum level. Normal samples, like blood, did not give him any useful information about them in this regard. They needed an EEG. He theorized that every brane in the bulk vibrated at a unique frequency of its constituent particles and waves. Each one had some form of the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from its inception event, and the collection of subatomic particles that made up any individual or object from that universe harmonized with that radiation. When something was removed from its universe, and placed in another, it exhibited a disharmony with its environment. By sampling the brainwaves of thousands of people in Stoutverse, Ramses had been able to come up with a baseline, and then write an algorithm which compared that baseline to visitors, such as himself and Olimpia.

The three men who came through the Westfall doors each disharmonized with the environment in a different way, as did their current group of Ochivari prisoners of war. By comparing the three men’s cosmic frequencies to the Ochivari, Ramses was able to determine that they were not from the same universe. Unfortunately, that wasn’t inherently good enough as the human allies were suspected of originating from somewhere other than the Ochivari homeworld anyway. He needed more data, and more time, to dig deeper into the subatomic properties. He now believed that he could also determine whether an individual had ever been to another universe, even if they had only stayed there for a few minutes. Each brane evidently left its signature upon their quantum consciousness. A cosmic imprint, he called it. It didn’t seem to work with inanimate objects, but he was able to detect a number of these imprints on himself and Olimpia, as well as the Ochivari. They were not present in the other three visitors, nor the natives of this universe. They were probably not spies, or they likely would have traveled to other universes before.

It was now required for all residents of this version of Earth to submit to a cosmic frequency test to make sure that they were all from this brane, and had spent their entire lives here. That was beyond Ramses’ control. He invented the machine, and the local researchers had reverse-engineered it while he was out of the timestream. Primus Mihajlović probably would have told them if they had discovered any spies using the new test, but his mind was preoccupied with something else. After using other interrogation and investigative techniques to decide whether the three Westfallers had good intentions or bad, an attempt was made to assimilate them into society somehow. It did not last very long. Last year, Dutch Haines—the gardener who was rather apathetic about all this—was bored enough to ask to meet one of the Ochivar in person. Naraschone granted this opportunity. If he turned out to indeed be an evil spy, seeing how he interacted with the POW would only give them more information.

Shortly after Dutch left the prison, the Ochivar fell ill, and ultimately succumbed to a mysterious disease that doctors could not explain. It was apparently airborne, so the rest of the prisoners contracted it too. The first one to get sick was the closest to Patient Zero, and the last one was the farthest, but they all suffered from it, and they all died. Dutch was carrying some kind of pathogen, even though he wasn’t exhibiting any signs or symptoms himself. Other humans appeared to be just fine too, for he had been free to move about the world before they placed him back in quarantine. Several months ago, another Ochivar came through a portal to complete his nefarious tasks. They sicked Dutch on him, and he too died. They had all but proved the viability of a new weapon against this multiversal threat. A biological weapon. They began to research it.

“We could wipe them all out,” Elder suggested.

“You can do what?” Ramses had heard him, but he couldn’t believe it.

“All we have to do is infect one Ochivar, and then let them try to go home. The pandemic will spread from there.”

Olimpia shook her head. “You can’t do that.”

“Oh, but we can.” Elder was apparently the biggest proponent of this project, believing that it would save human lives, and render the Transit Army obsolete. His reasoning was not without its merits. The Ochivari operated by intruding on other people’s universes, making judgments on their lifestyles and cultures, and deploying their own virus, which sterilized the entire population. Fighting fire with fire was how he justified this plan.

“Did Primus Mihajlović agree to this?” Ramses questioned.

“This is a military operation,” Elder explained. “It would not be completely out of her hands, but the Generals can override her decision in such matters, especially since it’s not taking place on her world.”

“The hell it’s not,” Olimpia argued.

“The initial infection is, but the latter deaths will happen on the Ochivari homeworld,” Elder explained. “It’s foolproof. Humans are totally unaffected.”

“You don’t know that,” Ramses contended. “Pathogens mutate. If you were to dispatch this to the major Ochivari population, it could change and evolve, and eventually maybe become a threat to humanity.” This was wrong; probably a war crime. They had to do everything in their power to stop it, which was easier said than done. They were powerful, yeah, but they still didn’t exist most of the year. That gave this new program a lot of freedom to continue. If Naraschone didn’t know about it, then it was his responsibility to tell her while he still had the chance.

This actually seemed to resonate with Elder a bit. “Well, we can’t stop it now.”

“Yes, you can. Don’t let Dutch infect anyone else. It’s immoral,” Olimpia began. “There is a reason that biological weapons were declared illegal worldwide where we come from. Besides the logistical issues with targeting and containment, they are a profound human rights violation.” She dismissed Elder’s argument with a waggle of her finger. “It doesn’t matter that the Ochivari are not humans. We are. Humanity is not about how you’re treated, but how you treat others. This. Is. Wrong.”

“You don’t understand. Dutch has already infected two more Ochivari, and they’re about to leave. I wanted you to watch.” He pressed a button underneath the window, which raised the curtain. Two clearly weak Ochivari were heading towards each other, coughing and heaving. Each one was being escorted by a human in a hazmat suit, forcing them to keep walking using cattle prods. “We asked Carlin to just send them back for us, but he refused. He said that you would not condone it,” Elder explained. “He appears to have been right about that.”

“The torture devices alone are immoral,” Olimpia pointed out.

Ramses lurched, but Elder took him by the wrist. “If you’re really worried about the disease mutating, then I wouldn’t teleport in there if I were you. That’s why they’re wearing suits. We’re careful.”

Ramses was still angry, but he recognized how powerless he was here. It didn’t look like it was going to work this time, but these people were going to try again, and they just had to wait a day. Someone had to be here to talk them out of it. The Primus was their best option for that. He did teleport away, but not to stop the Ochivari from trying to return to their home universe. He instead retrieved Naraschone from her meeting in one of the South American bunkers, and brought her to the observation room.

She looked at everyone present. “You told me you would wait until I could be here,” she said to Elder.

“It was too important to wait a year,” he replied. “I wanted these two to see it too.”

“I thought she didn’t know,” Olimpia complained.

Elder shook his head. “I never said that.”

“Madam Primus, you cannot let this go on,” Olimpia begged her. “Put a stop to this. Please.”

“Pia. Trust me, it’s fine,” Ramses said calmly.

Naraschone narrowed her eyes on him. “What do you have planned?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I don’t have to do anything. This isn’t going to work.”

“Why not?”

“Just look.”

They watched as the two Ochivari drew nearer to each other. The hazmat prison guards grabbed them by the shoulders, and turned them around, slamming their backs against each other until they were locked up. At first, they seemed to be refusing to open their portal, but the cattle prods came out again. So they relented. Their skin rippled, and glowed with a slight increase in temperature. Their wings stiffened up, and they began to struggle against each other in a battle of wills and biology on a level that the humans could neither see nor truly fathom. After a few minutes of this, they both disassembled, with their body parts falling to the ground. According to the research, when a group of Ochivari wanted to create a brane-hopping portal, they would perform this back wrestling ritual, and it would end with one of them exploding into a million pieces while the other was pulled into the resulting portal. This time, no portal formed, and they only exploded into maybe a couple dozen pieces. Ramses was right to believe that it wouldn’t work. The infection was just too much for them.

“What happened?” Naraschone demanded to know.

“They’re too sick,” Ramses figured. “You need strength to form a portal, whether you’re an Ochivari, or a human choosing one. Neither of them had it. You and Dutch made sure of that.”

A few hours later, they tried the experiment again, but instead of waiting for the subjects to exhibit symptoms, they made them do their wing fighting right away, and just hoped that they did end up getting sick, and eventually began to spread the disease. But it didn’t work either. They were too sick and weak immediately upon infection. The fifth subject died in this universe, same as all the others. Ramses and Olimpia were pleased, but they should not have been, because Elder and Naraschone came up with a new plan. Instead of infecting an Ochivar here, and then sending them home, they would just send Dutch there. That came with its own questions on morality, so Ramses had to stop it this time. He teleported Dutch away, and hid him somewhere on this planet where hopefully no one would find him.

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Starstruck: Lie Low and Sing Small (Part VIII)

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

Brooke nodded, understanding at least the facts of the story, but not necessarily the subtext. “So where is the Elizabeth Warren now?” she asked.

Mirage and Lilac were back where they belonged in the timeline. The latter was currently having a discussion with her alternate self, trying to figure out how they would raise Aristotle and Niobe. That was between the two of them, and the crew of the Iman Vellani had no say in it. Their trip back here was uneventful, albeit long and convoluted. They stole the ship from where Mirage knew it would be sitting unattended, docked at the top end of the space elevator leading two multiple points on Earth, including Panama. After she placed Lilac in stasis to keep her alive, she plotted a course to Alpha Centauri B. During the eleven-year journey, Mirage regrew her skin, retrofitted their ship with some upgrades, and then placed herself in stasis too, so she wouldn’t be bored the rest of the way. Once they were at their destination, they still had to wait another thirty some-odd years before it was time to literally jump ship.

Mirage’s past self sent a nanofactory to Toliman in the year 2225, just in case they ever needed to make a quick getaway from the planet of Bungula. They did end up needing to do that, though it wasn’t as urgent as she was originally worried it would be. This was where the Iman Vellani was originally built. The crew wouldn’t board it for another two decades. Until then, it sat dormant in its asteroid, protected from the ill effects of the Toliman Nulls that will essentially freeze any sentient entity that attempts to draw near. To protect themselves from that, Future!Mirage placed the Warren in an extremely high orbit from the host star. This kept them at a safe distance at all times until they were ready to head for the asteroid, and enter the Vellani.

“I left it in its orbit to automatically warn anyone else off of trying to get to the solar system. Just because the star was annihilated, doesn’t mean that the Toliman Nulls aren’t still a thing there.”

“Yeah, about that matter-antimatter annihilation,” Sharice began, “are we ever going to do anything about it? Aren’t people going to be surprised that a star in the neighborhood suddenly just disappeared one day?”

“That is the elephant that lives in the room, isn’t it?” Mirage posed.

“It’s a problem for tomorrow,” Brooke decided.

“You mean yesterday,” Belahkay mused.

“Anyway,” Brooke went on, “you two have just been hiding on this ship the whole time? You never came out? You never tried to change anything?”

“Too risky,” Mirage said. “The timeline is complicated enough as it is.”

“No, you’re right,” Brooke agreed. “But perhaps you...made preparations that could help us now that you’ve closed your own loop?”

“Yes,” Mirage said. “I finally understand who reprogrammed the Vellani. It was me. I just hadn’t gone back to the past to do it yet.” She swiped a specific pattern on the wall next to her, which released a hidden compartment. Inside was a secret quantum terminal. She pressed a few buttons, causing a crystal to pop out of the storage drive. She took it out, and held it up. This should contain proof that Verdemus was completely destroyed.”

Belahkay looked down through the viewport on the floor. “No, it’s still there.”

Mirage smiled. “It ought to be.” She shook the crystal a little. “If my plan worked, this should have footage of Toliman b being destroyed instead, and with a little tweaking of the metadata, we can use it to make the Exins believe that it was Verdemus. We’ll even burst in there, and scream at them for making us do that when there is no such thing as a hypercubic crystal lattice.

“You don’t think they’ll come check?” a skeptical Brooke asked.

“Radiation,” Sharice offered. “We’ll say that this whole region of space has been irradiated. You can’t exactly tear a planet apart with a giant space knife.”

“Don’t their ships have shielding, same as ours?”

“No, I once got a quick look at their hull coding. They’re gamma rated for zero-point-five-l. They don’t have an e-rating. I doubt they’ve even heard of superenergetic particles. All we have to do is claim that the process we used necessarily emits exotic particles, and they’ll stay away.”

“How could they have not heard of SEPs?” Mirage questioned. “They have time travel, don’t they? That’s why come they’ve been a civilization for thousands of years, even though they were founded only a few decades ago.”

“I think that technology was lost,” Sharice argued, “perhaps intentionally. The Exins we met could be just as oppressed as the rest of the empire.”

“We’re banking a lot on that idea we brought up a while back about how disorganized they are,” Brooke warned. “We may be wholly misinterpreting that. They could have e-rated shielding, but we’ve just not seen it. Shari, you didn’t get a look at the hull coding for even every vessel in the fleet.”

“I’m confident on this,” Sharice insisted. “They won’t go near it, especially if we sell the lie. We know that there is no hypercubic crystal lattice in the core of this planet. How could we know that if we didn’t do as they asked?”

Mirage and Brooke both shook their heads, unsure if this was all worth the risk. The bad guys wanted the Verdemusians dead, whether by the crew’s hands, or someone else’s. They could have a backup team lying in wait. “What if the crystal lattice does exist? What if Spirit is wrong about that?”

“I’m not.” Spirit was leaning against the doorway. “But if you feel more comfortable, why don’t you test it? See for yourself if it’s there.”

“We can’t destroy a whole world on the off-chance,” Sharice contended. “That would defeat the purpose.”

“It doesn’t have to be permanent,” Spirit reasoned. “Tear it apart, and then go back in time to stop yourself from doing it. All the humans will be up in space, just in case something goes wrong, but you might as well check for yourself, right?”

“Are you suggesting we used the homestone to reverse it?” Mirage asked her.

“No, you don’t just have a rewinder on this thing? It has everything else.”

“We’re less time travelers, and more associated with time travelers,” Mirage explained. “I mean, we’ve all broken the conventional laws of physics, of course, but...no, I didn’t engineer a time rewinder on the Iman Vellani.”

“Yes, you did.” Someone else was there, standing against the other doorway. It was Mirage. It was some other version of Mirage.

Present!Mirage sighed, more annoyed than shocked. “What the hell?”

Future!Mirage glided over to the opposite wall, and swiped a pattern on it to reveal a secret control terminal. “This is preprogrammed to reverse time by one year, but you can adjust it as necessary. You still need to build the planet-destroying machine, but I’m sure you already have an idea or two about that.”

“Yeah, I’ve never been worried about that,” Present!Mirage confirmed. “It’s just a simple transdimensional gravity beam. I just don’t know about this. I don’t like fudging with time, or gravity. What’s to stop us from going back, and avoiding all of this?”

“If you weren’t here,” Spirit began, “you would not have been able to save my friend, Tinaya’s life.”

“Or mine,” Lilac said, also coming into the room. “And who knows what would have happened to the children? You can’t undo anything.”

“Except for destroying the planet,” Present!Mirage countered.

“Except for that,” Future!Mirage agreed. Without another word, she gradually faded away until she was completely gone.

“I think you just erased her from the future,” Belahkay guessed.

“Whatever,” Mirage said. “It’s not up to her anyway. We vote. Everyone votes, including Tinaya. We’ll stick her mind into the virtual construct, and get an answer.”

“Everyone?” Lilac pressed.

“Yes,” Mirage replied, “including your alternate self.”

“I don’t have an alternate self,” Lilac revealed. “We are one now.”

“How did you manage that?” Brooke asked.

“I don’t know. It just happened.”

Mirage smirked. She knew how it was done.

“No, I’m talking about the prisoner, Ilias Tamm,” Lilac clarified.

“Prisoners have rights,” Brooke said adamantly. “This is his planet too, and he has the right to have a say in what’s done with it. We’ll explain the stakes to him, as well as to the children. I agree, everyone votes, and it must be unanimous.”

A year later, Verdemus was torn apart by transdimensional artificial gravity, which supposedly released exotic particles in the region that rendered a radius of fifty light years too dangerous for normal ships to survive. Exotic particles were actually just very, very, very energetic particles that were extremely difficult to shield against. They were capable of passing through an entire planet, kind of like neutrinos, but destructive to baryonic matter. They aided in time travel tech so the only way to shield against them was by manipulating spacetime, essentially forcing them to pass along the shielding on a new vector, rather than through it, and then letting them go once they were on the other side. They were rare, and the crew didn’t think that the Exins understood them enough to have what was called an e-rating, so it was safe to make this claim.

Only the crew plus Spirit Bridger was on board the Iman Vellani Proper. The rest were on the Vellani Ambassador, which meant that they did not go back in time. Once the timeline was reset, they had no recollection of the past year, because they had never experienced it. They knew that it had happened, but now they were able to move on with their lives from here, safe on Verdemus, protected by a fake bubble of exotic radiation. Belahkay and Spirit got to know each other for the course of that undone year, and both could remember the relationship that was kindled by it. They wanted to see where it was going, so he left the ship and stayed behind on Verdemus. Mirage gave them and the rest of the Verdemusians a shuttle that could be used for interplanetary travel, or very slow interstellar travel, if they ever needed to evacuate. It could not reach fractional speeds, and definitely didn’t have a reframe engine, so their options were limited. But at least they weren’t singular, which was what they were facing without the crew’s arrival and intervention.

Brooke and Sharice took the ship off into the black, and quite deliberately told no one where they were going. They had to do this, because the Vellani needed to stay off the radar for the foreseeable future. Its discovery would ruin the lie that Mirage was about to tell Ex-10 regarding the fate of Verdemus, the Verdemusians, the ship, and her crew. At the rendezvous point, she teleported over from the Vellani Ambassador, and just started to wail on him for killing her crew. It took nearly twenty faceless stormtroopers with chains to get her off of him. She was pulling her punches, though. She didn’t want to kill him, she just wanted to sell the rage that she was supposedly experiencing due to what happened. They stuck her in hock while they healed their leader, and let her stew a bit.

A few days later, he came to visit her, as calm as ever, and apparently not vengeful from her attack. “Start at the beginning. What happened?”

Mirage prepared herself to solidify the cover-up. “We did what you asked. We went to the planet in question. There were people on it, but not too many, so we pulled them up to our ship, and got back to work. They protested, but we were there to do a job, so we ignored them. I built a machine that uses transdimensional energy to manipulate gravity, which ripped the planet apart, and do you know what I found there?”

“Nothing?”

“Oh, so you know. There’s no such thing as hypercubic crystal lattice.”

“No. We just wanted you to destroy the world. It is of utmost importance that the people you found living there did not multiply. They are our sworn enemies, and they were in a position of great strategic advantage. They were too close to the new antistar, and we couldn’t have that. It’s fine that you saved the ones who were already there, though. We don’t have any strong feelings about them as individuals.”

“Oh, I didn’t save them, you asshole. Have you ever heard of exotic particles?”

“Yes. But I admittedly don’t know what they are.”

“I don’t either, but they’re deadly. I was in charge of supplying the power, so I was far enough away, and naturally shielded, when we turned on the machine, but my crew was not so lucky. They were bombarded with highly energetic particle radiation, and killed. They didn’t die right away. No, it took time, but all of their cells were split, their DNA unraveled, and their inorganic parts degraded extremely rapidly. They may have been able to transfer their consciousnesses to new substrates, but those would have been destroyed too. They insisted that I escape to get my revenge before too much of the radiation could get to me on the other side of the host star that we were using as a power source. You let me out of here, and that is exactly what I will do. Or you could come in here, I’m not picky.” She was doing a pretty good job in this role. It didn’t hurt that if any of this were true, she probably would actually react this way.

Ex-10 smiled, almost kindly, likely because he felt that he was in a position of safety and power. “Well, then I suppose I will have to never let you out, except to transfer you to our penal colony.”

Mirage suspected that this might happen, which was why she programmed the Vellani Ambassador to turn invisible and escape under certain conditions, such as her absence for a week. “I will get out eventually, even if it takes me a hundred years. I’m gonna live forever.”

“And I wouldn’t be surprised, but I’ll be dead by then. I decidedly won’t live forever, so I’m not worried.” He lifted his radio. “This is Ex-10. Plot a course to Ex-666. Warn them too, so they have time to make arrangements for a special new prisoner.”

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Starstruck: The Toliman Nulls (Part I)

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Generated by Google Workspace Labs text-to-image Duet AI software

When Brooke Prieto, Sharice Prieto, Mirage, and the newest member of their group, Belahkay Teal arrived inside the heliosphere of Alpha Centauri B, they immediately figured out why the vonearthans had chosen not to colonize it. All stars and other celestial bodies are valuable. They contain hydrogen, helium, and other elements, which can be used to produce energy and/or construct useful structures. Lots of science fiction stories only care about worlds that are naturally habitable, but that doesn’t really matter. With sufficiently advanced technology, anything can become habitable, even if that only means breaking it all apart to make enclosed spaceships. Nothing in the universe is completely useless, including Toliman, except that there’s something different about it. There’s something eerie about it. The closer they got to the star, the worse they felt, and there was no escape from this. Mirage was an early general intelligence turned transdimensional observer god turned android. Sharice was an unregulated AI turned android. Brooke was a human turned android. Out of the four of them, only Belahkay was alive with nearly all biological components. They were all capable of manipulating their sensory inputs to varying degrees, but not in this case. The sickness took hold of them all, and made them all feel the same.

According to the exploratory records, a single probe was sent to the star system. This happened at the same time that they were being sent to Proxima Centauri and Rigel Kentaurus. These were the three closest stars to Sol, so it made perfect sense. While the first two received later vessels, as well as passengers, Toliman was abandoned after the first probe. The reason for this was never publicized, but since there were hundreds of billions of other stars in this galaxy alone, no one really bothered to question that decision. Not even Mirage knew the answer, but her educated guess was that a time traveler had something to do with it. Travelers come from all time periods, and while the majority of history can be attributed to normal people making whatever decisions they feel they ought to, a few events were ultimately caused by someone who knew how specific decisions would turn out. Of course time travelers made certain decisions all the time, but in this case, we’re talking about deliberately driving the course of the future with profound and more obvious choices, or with big nudges.

For instance, to travel at something called fractional speeds—which is to say, a significant fraction of light speed—an object in motion must accelerate from a stopped position. This works with anything. A car can’t just suddenly go from zero miles per hour to 60 miles per hour with no intervening speeds in between. Except it can, as long as it can manipulate time and space properly. It was a time traveler, or perhaps a team, who first introduced the humans to this concept, and vonearthans have been taking the feature of interstellar travel for granted ever since. It’s not instant, but it’s impossibly fast. They don’t have to accelerate or decelerate at nearly the same rate as normal physical laws would suggest, which cuts down on travel time. Mirage was sure that Toliman was just like this. She thought a time traveler needed the star system for something, and made sure that no one would come here until they were ready. That might still be the case, but there was more to it. There was something wrong with it. There was something wrong with people when they came here.

Every atom in each one of their bodies was telling them to leave. They felt nausea, chills, muscle fatigue, dizziness, and fear. This place was frightening in an indescribable way. If they were on a planet, they would say that there was something in the air, but in this case, maybe it was in the radiation? They couldn’t tell, and they didn’t want to spend too much time trying to figure it out. Unfortunately, fate had other plans for them. They couldn’t leave, because one of the symptoms was a complete loss of motivation. Had Belahkay waited even one more minute, he may not have made it to the stasis pod, which saved his life. Because the other three stopped where they were, and didn’t move for the next five years. In that time, the little jumper ship they took from the planet of Bungula drifted throughout the star system until it finally happened to come close enough to the nanofactory that Mirage sent there years ago. Their real ship dispatched a tugboat to tow them into the hollowed-out asteroid. It wasn’t until the hatch was sealed behind them that they were released from the spell.

Brooke stood up, and emulated a deep breath. “What the hell was that?”

Sharice couldn’t stop shaking her head. “It was bad, it was bad, it was bad, it was bad. We can’t go back out, we can’t go back out, we can’t go back out.”

“We have to,” Mirage reasoned. “We can’t live here forever.” She composed herself, and approached the console to get some answers. “Whatever was doing whatever it was doing to us can’t reach us through the walls of the asteroid, but that might not always be enough. We have to take our new ship, and get the hell out of here.”

“Is the ship even finished?” Brooke questioned.

“Of course it is.” Mirage tapped the button to open the forward shutters. Before them was the interior of the asteroid. A shipyard was built here, and in the center was a beautiful shining vessel. It was small for a transgalactic ship, but it wasn’t possible to look at anything else in the room. The hull was a dark royal purple, with perfect curves, and no sharp edges. “Ladies...say hello to the Iman Vellani.”

“Unique design,” Brooke noticed.

Sharice was admiring the ship as well before looking over her shoulder. “The human. Is he okay?”

The Prietos ran down to the other side of the jumper to the stasis pod. “Vitals are okay,” Brooke said as she was looking through the interface screen. She released the door, and had to catch Belahkey before he fell to the floor.

He took a moment to catch his breath, and shake off the feeling of dread. “At the risk of sounding like a cliché, are we there yet?”

“Yes,” Sharice replied, “and now we’re leaving.”

“Good.” He shivered again. “What the hell is wrong with this star?”

“Mira?” Brooke asked. Belahkay was still having trouble walking, so she was carrying him down towards the control area. “What’s wrong with Toliman?”

“I don’t know, but...it affects everything. The Vellani, it’s...damaged. There are parts of its operational code that I didn’t write.”

“Can you repair it?” Sharice asked her.

Mirage sighed. “Not here. The effects of the...” She didn’t know what to call it.

“The Nulls,” Belahkay suggested. If it affects you as well as me, it’s not a real disease. It’s something new.”

“The Nulls,” Mirage echoed. “The shielding of this asteroid appears to be protecting us from the symptoms, but it’s really just suppressing them. I can already feel myself losing motivation again. We can’t stay here for even a day.”

“But if your ship is broken.”

“It’s not broken, it just needs to be reprogrammed” Mirage contended. “I’ll fly it manually until we can do that. This will work. We’ll just point ourselves away from the star, and go. But just to be safe, Belahkay, you should go back into stasis.”

“No. I’m with you.”

“It’s your choice. I’m not your boss.”

“Aren’t you, though? Sharice asked as Mirage was walking away.

Mirage didn’t answer. While she went off to prepare for things in their shiny new ship, Sharice teleported Belahkay over, and then started to ferry all of their belongings. It thusly fell to Brooke to distribute antimatter bombs in key places in the asteroid. They weren’t really bombs, but antimatter was inherently unstable, so if you wanted to turn some of it into a bomb, all you had to do was find a way to disrupt the magnetic field that was keeping it from touching matter, and preferably do so remotely. They could imagine some intrepid explorers in the future, who couldn’t understand why this star system was off limits, coming here to figure things out. They too would become trapped, but if they were organic, it could result in their deaths. This could still happen, but at least there wouldn’t be anything left around here to make it more interesting and inviting.

Once everything was done, they convened on the Vellani, and prepared to launch. They left the jumper where it was, because it was no longer of any use to them. They had everything they would ever need right here. Mirage commanded the airlock doors to open, and then shot out of there as fast as they could. They immediately started to feel the effects of the nulls again, but now that they knew what they were up against, they were able to fight against it. If they were to stick around much longer, the sickness would probably win again, but they weren’t planning on doing that. Even if they did lose all hope, and become unable to escape, they wouldn’t last much longer. The antimatter containment pods were programmed to fail on a timer, rather than be detonated remotely. It had to be this way, because what if Brooke lost her motivation to trigger the chain reaction while she was out here. And anyway, there should have been enough time to get sufficiently far away. The resulting explosion would be large, but still mostly limited to the scope of the asteroid. The pods they used weren’t full to the brim with antimatter, and it’s not like they needed to destroy the whole solar system. So the question was, why did that happen?

They were more than far enough away from the asteroid when it exploded, but the annihilation didn’t stop there. Bursts of energy started to pop up in all directions, much farther than they should have. It was like there was more antimatter in the area than they expected. But that couldn’t be possible? Antimatter wasn’t just floating around all over space. It was short-lived, because whenever it came into contact with ordinary matter, they would annihilate each other, particle by particle. How was this still going on? How could they stop it?

“We can’t stop it,” Mirage explained to Belahkay, who probably should have been placed back in stasis. “But we can protect ourselves.” She tapped on the controls, and boosted the EM shield. It was a simple enough feature that every starship had. While time travelers had access to things like a teleportation field for dust and micrometeoroids, that wouldn’t help them with things like solar wind and cosmic radiation. Still, the electromagnetic shield wasn’t usually turned up to eleven, because it didn’t need to be. In this case, it did. The Vellani was made out of matter, and if those explosions got any closer, they would all be vaporized instantly. The EM shield held, but it wasn’t enough to protect them from the devastating effects of what they had done. Something started to pull them back towards the host star, and they couldn’t do anything about it.

“Can you boost the propulsion?” Belahkay offered. He was holding onto the center console since artificial gravity had been turned off. The other three could magnetize their feet at will.

“All available power is being diverted to the shield!” Sharice replied. “We would be destroyed if we started using it for anything else.”

“If we fall into that sun,” he reasoned, “we’re gonna be destroyed anyway.”

Mirage was watching the screen as the explosions all began to approach the star. It too was made out of ordinary matter. “There is no reality where we’re not destroyed! Everything living on Bungula is dead too! It’s over! We fucked up!”

The ship continued to fall into the sun at an accelerated rate, and soon, the four of them lost all will to care about it. They just sat there, not worrying about anything, not willing to do anything to fix it, which was okay, because there wasn’t anything to do except accept their fate. In the blink of an eye, Alpha Centauri B was gone, as was the newborn starship Iman Vellani, and its crew.

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