Microstory 2756: Skull and Bones

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The conveyor belt is heading for another void. This game has had so many chances already to kill them. If this is another attempt, it would be difficult to avoid. There is no way off this ride. Still, there may be a non-lethal obstacle in the darkness, or on the other side of it. Elise gets on one knee, and plants her other foot firmly on the belt. She holds her hands up defensively, prepared for anything. Well, almost anything.

She passes through the darkness, and catches a glimpse of the opaque dome they’ve entered before the belt ends, and sends her over the edge. She falls a couple of meters before landing on her feet on a mound of human bones. The others are starting to help each other up from the piles of thousands and thousands. It’s maybe a hundred meters wide, dimly lit, and getting dimmer. It’s noticeably cold, but not deathly so.

Elise spins around and opens her arms so when Zelda falls too, she can catch her.

“My hero,” Zelda says in a breathy voice from Elise’s arms.

“Just doin’ my job, ma’am.” Elise is really coming out of her shell now.

“Are these the previous secret hunters?” Minotaur asks, picking up a skull. “Does everyone die in here? From what? More acid rain? A deluge? A furnace?”

“Hold up,” Colley says. “Here, help me push these bones out of the way.”

Jolanda and Rage pull the bones between their legs to give him some space.

Colley gets on his hands and knees and examines the floor below. He then grabs a random femur, and snaps it in half. He puts on his loupe specs to examine the inside.

“Wait, how do you still have those?” Elise questions. “Isn’t this a new body?”

“They were in my locker,” Colley explains as he’s changing lenses. “They’re not my regular ones. They upgraded me.” He looks carefully. “Fake. They probably all are.”

“Plastic, or something else?” Rage picks up another bone and breaks it.

“No, they’re organic,” Colley answers. “The layering is asymmetrical, which is how the best machines do it, but it’s definitely bioprinted. They forgot to include the tendon entheses, and there’s no remaining viscera on the floor, or even residue.”

Elise wades through the bones to get to the wall, not grossed out anymore. “Look for an exit, or signs of Miracle’s friends. They may have already escaped.”

“Those bozos?” Miracle questions. “Not a chance.”

“I found a door!” Jolanda shouts. She’s on the far side of the dome.

“Don’t open it until we’re all over there!” Rage commands. “Elise, take safety.”

Because any door has just as much chance of being a trap as being their salvation, one player is always chosen to stay behind as the designated survivor. It’s also possible that they’ve been doomed, if the door has a time limit, and can’t be reopened, so the role is risky, rather than necessarily safe. Rage has a plan to cycle through the roster fairly.

Elise climbs up to a particularly high bone hill to have a better vantage point, and give her more time to survive if opening the door, say, also opens a drain in the floor.

Once everyone is in place, including Miracle and the strangers, Jolanda waves her hand in front of the entry panel. The door slides into its pocket, revealing...a second door. This one is different, though. Even from here, Elise can see that there are indentations on the door face that are vaguely in the shape of a human body.

“It’s a puzzle,” Colley decides. “We have to fill in the gaps with a full skeleton.”

“Rule number three,” Rage begins. “Don’t try to unlock a door that’s already unlocked.” She nods at Jolanda. “Go ahead, Jo.”

Jolanda takes hold of the knob, turns it successfully, and opens the door.

On the other side is what looks like a city square. Elise climbs down to get a better look. People are milling about, preoccupied with their own lives. They’re dressed in traditional early 21st century garb. Only two things look out of place. A man and a woman wearing the same blue shirt are balancing two bananas each on their head while they sing a song quite poorly. Two other women wearing the same purple shirts are running past them, and opening a mailbox that is conspicuously sitting out in the open.

“Other hunters,” Elise determines as she draws nearer. “This isn’t right.”

“This is obviously our way out,” one of Miracle’s people says.

“Hrockas Steward said that we wouldn’t be hunting around other people,” Minotaur reminds him. “Why break one of his few rules right at the beginning?”

“Who cares?” he asks. “I’m exiting and checking that mailbox for our next clue.”

“I don’t think we have clues,” Colley postulates. “We’re not racing, we’re not being eliminated per leg. I think we only have one goal, and we’re supposed to go straight to that. No, Elise is right. This is a red herring, or some kind of trick.”

“It’s a choice,” Miracle corrects. “If we walk out this door without solving the skeleton puzzle, we’re forfeiting the game. That’s probably where those two assholes ended up. They don’t know what they’re missing. Don’t follow in their footsteps.”

The guy sighs. “Okay, boss. We solve the puzzle.” He steps back in.

Jolanda closes the door back up, and everyone spreads out.

The puzzle is harder than it looks. They’re not just looking for a single copy of every bone. They’re all slightly different sizes, just like they would be if these once belonged to living beings. Each puzzle bone can hold in place on its own on the board, even if the one below it hasn’t been found yet, but only if it’s the correct one. Otherwise, it just falls out. Elise deduces that they used magnets. She turns out to be right.

Like Colley with his spectacles or Zelda with her parachutes, Minotaur never goes anywhere without their multitool. They found it in their locker too, and it includes a very small magnet. It’s not powerful enough to sweep the area for the right bones, but it’s easy enough to test one quickly and toss it aside before moving on to the next.

They created an open space kind of near the door, where they carefully stack the duds. That way, they don’t accidentally test the same ones multiple times. It’s Elise and Jolanda’s job to keep the used stack away from the untested piles by pushing bones around, and maintaining enough space between them at all times.

It starts getting dark in here, and no one has a light, so they open the door just so the natural light comes in for them. Unrelated hunters periodically come up, thinking that it’s important for their race. It’s Rage’s job to back them off by simply saying, “parallel play”. This is a known phrase that warns players that their games are intersecting, and that if they try to find a clue here, they will end up on the wrong track.

After several hours, they finally have the last piece. Fittingly, it’s the skull. It’s a good thing they’re done. The streets are still bustling, but it’s now dark outside too.

“Colley, you do the honors,” Jolanda offers since he served as their puzzle master. She closes the door again, allowing him to ceremoniously place the skull in the last slot. The whole skeleton glows, and they hear a whirring sound. Once Jolanda reopens it, they see the same street again, but now, even though it has only been a few seconds...it’s completely empty.

Microstory 2754: Starting Line

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Elise opens her eyes. She’s floating in artificial amniotic fluid. No, that’s not what it is, it doesn’t taste right. It tastes more...leafy? Like spinach that’s gone bad, or kale that hasn’t gone bad, because kale is the worst food God ever created. She’s trapped. She’s trapped in something opaque, which is not how body switching works. You’re supposed to be in a glass box, or in more advanced equipment, a clean and sterile pod. It’s not this, whatever this is. This is all wrong, and she’s panicking. She squirms around, looking for a way to escape, but doesn’t find it. She’s going to have to make her own.

She tries punching and she tries kicking, but neither of them work. That’s what makes her realize that this isn’t simply a pod. It’s a chrysalis. And that’s not how butterflies get out of their chrysalises. Elise feels around to make sure she knows where down is, and then she starts to spit. Opening her mouth amidst all this goo necessarily forces more goo back into her mouth. She thought it tasted bad before, but now it’s making its way down her throat. She starts to retch, and then she vomits. Even though it’s disgusting, the bile, saliva, and other fluids accelerate the mission.

The enzymes in Elise’s saliva weaken the chitin enough for her to tear through it. She can see light now, and feel the air. She vomits more so she can start breathing again. She continues to tear at the chrysalis until the opening is wide enough for her to get through. She tries to aim away from her own sick, but that’s stupid, because she’s already covered in filth. Elise reaches out to the floor with her hands, clumsily slipping on the fluids, but it slows her down enough to keep her from faceplanting.

She’s on her back now on the cool white floor of a small room. It’s not too small, though. It’s big enough to fit ten other chrysalises. Her whole team is here, plus the other team. Wait, there should be twelve in total, so who are we missing? She frantically starts knocking on the other chrysalises. “Jolanda? Rage? Is that you? Who’s in there?” she starts to say, looking for her people.

She can hear them moan back to her, but no one replies with words.

In the real world, with a real butterfly, you don’t want to help it get out of its chrysalis. The struggle is real, but it is not pointless. It’s a crucible, which strengthens the insect so it can literally spread its wings and fly. But they’re not in the real world, they’re in a simulation. It may be a base reality simulation, but it’s not natural. The others don’t need to go through what she just did. Elise stumbles over to a wall and wrenches a sconce from it. She starts tearing at the nearest chrysalis. Yeah, sometimes you gotta spit on that thing, but sometimes you need good old fashioned brute force.

A woman tumbles out of the chrysalis. It’s Miracle.

Elise catches her, and gently lowers her to the floor.

“Oh, thank you,” Miracle says. “I’ve forgotten what this feels like.”

“You’ve used this form factor before?” Elise has never even heard of it.

“Yeah, buncha times,” Miracle replies. As she’s resting on her hands behind her back, she looks around before her gaze returns to Elise. “You take left, I take right?”

They divide and conquer until the other nine hunters are free. Thankfully, all of Elise’s teammates are here. It’s Miracle who is missing one of hers. The girl she was trying to safely fly down to the ground, and who was wearing her shirt on backwards on the football pitch, is missing. Miracle says that she had an emergency mind transponder, which she probably used before she hit the ground. There was no way to know that they would survive it.

It’s different, though. Elise feels weak, and not just because she just had to force her way out of a chrysalis, and then help five other people do the same. Her vision isn’t as strong, her joints are achey, and she feels hunger in a way that she hasn’t since she was a kid, before she became immortal. This is a regular body, like the kind everyone had back in the days before humanity had even reached the longevity escape velocity. Her consciousness stream isn’t just unlinked. It doesn’t exist. There’s no backup plan now. If she dies, she truly dies, and she’s guessing the same goes for everyone else.

Once the last person is on his feet, the ceiling lifts up and to the side like the lid of a cardboard box, revealing only a dark void above them. It begins to rain once more, but this time, it’s just regular water, instead of acid. Well, it’s also a bit soapy. The room fills up around ten centimeters of water and suds before the drains open up and start to wash all the gunk and junk away. Next come the blowers to dry them off. They all just stand there and accept it, because there’s no door to exit, and they want to get cleaned off, even if at the end of this is, they get decapitated by a Jigsaw wannabe. They are here to play a game at any rate, and this appears to be the start of it, for whatever reason.

After they’re sufficiently dry, seams appear on the back wall. They slide upwards, revealing eleven chairs in front of eleven lockers. Each one is labeled with one of their names. The hunters proceed to their assigned lockers, retrieve the generic clothes that were placed there for them, and get dressed. But nothing happens after they’re done.

“I think we’re supposed to sit down to trigger the next phase,” Elise figures.

They follow her advice, and once that last butt hits that last seat, the wall in front of them transforms into a monitor.

A man appears on screen. “Hello, and welcome to Treasure Hunting Dome. My name is Hrockas Steward, and I own the planet of Castlebourne. Now, you may be wondering why I would record this message, and whether I do it for the other 69,814 domes presently in service. The answer is no. This is only for you. You twelve—forgive me, eleven—contestants have selected our Premium-Ultra Package. This is the rarest of hunts, which will take you on a journey few have traveled. In regular hunts, you would be out in the open, encountering Ambients who are simulating locals from various locales. You will not be doing this. You are on a special mission to find a unique prize.

“It’s important you understand that I am not admitting that such a prize exists. This is confirmation of absolutely nothing. You are being isolated from the other players so your hunt does not influence or interfere with anyone else. Everyone who expresses serious interest in this track experiences the same thing. Or do they? You may never know. You may not even survive. You have become decoupled from your consciousness streams so if you die along the way, your alternate selves will move on with their lives with no memories of these events. Even if you do find what you’re looking for, you might never be able to reveal its secrets. Thousands before you may have succeeded, but never returned to tell the tale. You will receive your next clue on the other side of this door.”

The seams of a door appear on the third wall.

“Oh, and one more thing. Those teams you worked so hard to build? They’re useless. Only one person can win this hunt. Good luck to one of you. Aaaaaaaaaand go!”

The door opens.

Microstory 2753: Dropoffs Only

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The football match started right after this Miracle Brighton woman claimed that she and her team were interested in the same thing in Treasure Hunting Dome. Rage didn’t have a chance to talk to her afterwards, because they were separated into different locker rooms, and then she couldn’t locate her again. Rage says that she’s not entirely surprised. The possibility of an ultimate secret prize isn’t something that she randomly came up with on her own. The rumor has been around since Treasure Hunting Dome first opened. Over the decades, with no proof that anyone ever won it, however, most have lost interest. They assume now that it doesn’t exist. Perhaps the rumor was started by the planet owner, who wanted to build hype, or it started organically. The fact that nothing has ever come of it has only served to intrigue Rage more, and Miracle evidently had the same idea. They try to find her on the local network, but no luck.

They train with each other in the Sandbox warehouse for about another week, but they have to be careful, because their efforts are not being made in secret. If they wanted complete privacy, they would have needed to go to a different planet. No one has ever said anything, but it’s plausible that the Custodians who run the game will use the team’s experience against them. If they get really good, for instance, at driving on the right side of the road, they might end up with a task where they have to drive on the left. And if they practice both, they might not get any driving challenge at all, and it will have been a waste of time. There’s no way to know, which also means there’s no reason to keep doing this indefinitely. They all agree that it’s time to dive in head first.

Before the big day, they check into the Apex Suite at the Palacium Hotel for a good night’s rest. Minotaur was able to secure it for them on short notice because they know someone who knows someone who knows someone. They would have been—

Smoke. Smoke and fire. Elise wakes up to find her room ablaze. She checks her consciousness stream and finds that it’s been severed. Her last upload was three hours ago. If she doesn’t get it turned back on, and dies here, the person who boots up in her backup body won’t really be her. It will only be a copy who thinks she’s Elise. How can this place be on fire? Things don’t catch fire anymore. It just isn’t done.

The door bursts off its hinges, and falls to the floor. Jolanda scrambles back up. She scoops Elise off the bed, and carries her out to the common area. It’s on fire too.

“I’m not streaming!” Elise warns.

“None of us is!” Jolanda is still carrying her as she finds her way across the room.

Zelda is holding a chair, pounding the leg against the edges of the window.

“We’re two kilometers up and that’s security glass!” Elise warns. “It won’t break!”

“Not without some help!” Zelda says. “Stand by Mino, Jo!” She keeps pounding.

“I think you can put me down now,” Elise tells Jolanda.

“We agreed that I would be the one to take you out,” Jolanda replies.

“What?” Elise questions. “What do you mean, take me out?”

Rage appears to their left, holding Colley like he’s also a little baby.

Zelda stops striking the glass, and puts her steampunk goggles on. “Ready?”

“Do it,” Rage orders. She grips Colley tighter. “Everyone turn off your lungs!”

Zelda takes Minotaur in one arm, then reaches out with the other to grip the doorknob of what’s either a bathroom or a closet. She yanks it open. It explodes.

Fire rushes out of the room, and crashes into the window. It’s destroyed instantly, and in that same instant, all six of them are sucked out.

Jolanda never lets go, but now she looks more worried than ever. Even though she has less experience skydiving, she doesn’t have none. They wouldn’t have done this if they weren’t each packing the right equipment, like parachutes and/or wingsuits. Why does she look so scared? She holds Elise tighter with one arm while she maneuvers her other one, hovering her watch above Elise’s face.

It takes a second for Elise to realize what Jolanda is trying to show her. Their altitude is about 35,000 meters and falling. They should not be anywhere near that high. That’s damn near the apex of the whole freaking top. Despite its name, that’s not where the Apex Suite sits. It’s just at the top of the building. She turns her head enough to look back up, but whatever they just fell out of has now been covered by clouds. She can see the other two pairs, though. Wait, four—no, six. Other people are also falling alongside them, presumably from some nearby suite that was also on fire. What is happening?

They keep falling for about a minute before Elise gets her head turned enough to see land below. It’s coming up fast. If Jolanda doesn’t do something soon...

“You can turn your lungs back on!” Jolanda shouts. “Or don’t, you don’t need them! But you do need to hold on tighter, with your arms and legs! I need to pull!”

Elise tightens up and buries her face in Jolanda’s neck. She may be falling in love.

Jolanda pulls the ripcord. The parachute flies out of the back of her belt. Elise’s legs slip off, and begin to dangle, but Jolanda wraps her arm back around her to compensate. After a few seconds, the initial shock wears off, and now they’re just floating. They’re actually going to be okay. They’re going to survive this.

Elise gets another look around now, and starts to run attendance. Rage, Colley, Zelda, and Minotaur; everyone’s here. She looks in the other direction, at the strangers. They’re actually not strangers. She recognizes Miracle’s face. She’s holding the girl who did a backflip on the football pitch. Instead of a parachute, they’re staying aloft via Miracle’s white feathered wings. Which is all sorts of crazy, but it’s clearly working.

As they’re drifting towards the ground, Elise feels something bite at her arm. Some kind of bug? She can’t get a look at it to check. She’ll just have to tough it out. But then she feels another bite on her other arm. She also sees rain begin to fall all around them, which doesn’t feel like a coincidence. She looks up in horror to find holes forming on the parachute above them. The holes are growing as something begins to shred the material. Rain plus stinging plus tearing equals only one thing. Acid rain.

Either someone is trying to kill them, or they’re just having a little fun, and they don’t know that the team isn’t streaming properly. The fact that they were somehow moved to the very top of the dome leads her to believe that this is attempted murder. Hours from now, when the unscheduled data gap triggers emergency resuscitation procedures, her latest backup will wake up with no idea what went wrong. She will have no reason to suspect foul play, but at least some version of Elise will exist. With that, there is a modicum of hope for justice.

After only a few seconds, the parachute can’t take it anymore. It violently rips apart, sending Elise and Jolanda away from each other. Not that it matters. At this height, even their advanced substrates won’t survive it. Elise keeps falling and falling until she runs out of room and splats on the ground.

Microstory 2438: Raindome

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Oh, this one is interesting. There are two lakes, one of which is higher than the other. They are appropriately named Upper Lake and Lower Lake. I’m a little disappointed at the lack of creativity, but there’s no mistaking it, and it’s not that big of a deal. The water flows from Upper Lake, into a river. Can you guess what it’s called? You’re close, it’s not just River, but Spiral River. This river flows all along the entire perimeter of the dome, and then some. There are bridges all over, so you can step out to your left any time you need, and head for the nearest exit. They’re hidden behind the dome’s immersive hologram, but will illuminate once you get close enough to the wall, so if you get lost, just find the border. You won’t get trapped, I promise you. I say this because someone on my boat did have an issue, and they were struggling to get out. They probably should give you the instructions ahead of time, so that’s a bit of constructive feedback. Let’s get back to the river. You can take all sorts of leisure boats on this thing. Canoes, kayaks, riverboats. You choose whatever you want. You may be with a group, and they may be humans, or NPCs. It really just depends. The river flows out of Upper Lake, and down a steady slope in a spiral. It isn’t perfectly circular, it still meanders a little bit, but if you look at the drone feed above, it still doesn’t look natural. It’s often raining, which is why this isn’t called Lake-Spiral River-Lake Dome. These aren’t the sprinklers that I think they use in Nordome. This is real rain, powered by the process of evaporation and cloud formation above, supplied by all the water that’s around. Since there’s no sun inside the dome, they use extremely precise heating lamps to trigger this evaporation, but they try to keep visitors from seeing it. I suggested to our captain that they should heat the water from below, but he says the physics doesn’t work out all that well, and they would like to put fish in there at some point. That would be cool, I wish they were already there. I hope they don’t have to transport them all from Earth, or we could be waiting for over a hundred years. Here’s what’s amazing about this. You can request a boat that’s completely sealed up, which has its own holographic display. You collectively decide on the apparent environment. You can make it look like it’s raining when it’s not, or not when it is. That was such a great idea. I never would have thought of it myself. And it really works. Anyway, I think you can guess the rest. The river keeps going down the spiral until it reaches Lower Lake in the very center. Keep in mind that while I said there were all sorts of boats, that doesn’t include all boats, full stop. There are no motorboats or personal watercraft. This is meant to be a relaxing environment, not an invigorating adventure. There are plenty of other places for that. Have you tried Polar Tropica? Like, stop complaining. Sorry, it was annoying that our boat ride was delayed because of a belligerent visitor who was demanding them to give him a water jetpack. They literally didn’t have them. Again, that’s not what this is. This is an amazing feat of engineering, and nothing you could get on Earth. It’s against the law to rupture land like that these days. One last thing so you don’t wonder, but you don’t have to be in a boat, or be on it the whole time. You can just get out and relax, maybe have a picnic under a mini-dome where it’s not raining. Don’t be rowdy, though. Just sit back and enjoy it.

Microstory 2420: Nordome Network

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Unlike most other themed domes, this is actually a series of domes. I believe the creator wanted to truly make it feel large in scope. While the distance between the “continents” isn’t anywhere near as large as they are on Earth, it still takes some time in those antiquated boats to travel between them. I even think you pass by other, unrelated domes on your way, though you would never know it if you stick to the right heading, because the holographic sky is sensational. It just looks like you’re outside. If you get lost, and sail in the wrong direction, you’re gonna hit the sides. They even have a sprinkler system to simulate rain during your journey, and the sea below you is saltwater, so you get that real oceanic experience. This isn’t the only dome network that works like this. It’s just the one that’s set during the Viking Age. You don’t have to be a Viking yourself—you can choose a simpler life, as a farmer, or a merchant—but you’re at risk of being attacked. You have to protect your settlement as they would have during the 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries. If you do choose to go on a journey, you have to build or commission your own ship. They aren’t just provided to you. Keep in mind that this is a lifestyle dome experience. You’re meant to stay here for years, and really live the way that these people historically lived. There are no rules, and no planned activities. There’s no anachronistic technology, and you can’t keep leaving and come back. If you have a serious need, they’ll let you go through an emergency exit, and once the issue is resolved, you can go back. So it’s not like a one and done sort of thing, but it’s also not a free-for-all. You can’t spend your days on the boat, then sleep in a nice comfy bed at night. There are no day trips, and they will enforce these rules. I never saw any sort of argument or disagreement, but they were clear. If you really want to get the full experience, it’s probably gonna take you about thirty years. But, I mean, come on, who doesn’t have that kind of time to spare these days? What are you worried about, that you’re gonna die soon? So take a break and learn something. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, if you haven’t heard.

Expelled: Exploded (Part IV)

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There were two ways to gather temporal energy for time travel, or to accomplish other temporal manipulation goals. One was to find it in a parallel dimension, and the other...was to literally wait for it. In the end, that was really all temporal energy was: the passage of time. The ladies listened to Elder’s explanation silently until they thought he was done. “What if we took multiple trips?” Rita suggested. You go back, reconnect with Extremus, build a larger time machine, and then come back for us.”

“I don’t want to be stuck here without a temporal engineer,” Debra argued.

“You wouldn’t be,” Rita tried to clarify. “It’s time travel. He could return to this moment a second after he left.”

“Unless wherever he goes kills him,” Debra reasoned.

“I’m not even sure if I can gather enough temporal energy for even one trip as far back in time as we need to go,” Elder tried to continue. “I’m just pretty sure that I can’t take anyone with me. It’s the triple mass rule. The average choosing one can transport themselves plus two buddies. The machine itself would be more massive than three people alone, which means that it will require extra temporal energy. Maybe if one of us metabolized the energy naturally, it would be different, but this is all very uncertain.”

The conversation halted when they heard a noise outside. It sounded like something was falling. They were in the garage, which didn’t have any windows. “Was that one of the solar panels?” Rita guessed.

They stepped into the foyer to look out one window, but couldn’t see anything. They spun around to the opposite window when the sound recurred. They still couldn’t see anything, so they peeked over the sill as far as they could. Debra had the best angle. “There’s something sparkly down there.”

“Sparkly, like a diamond?” Rita asked.

“More like water. Or ice.” That was when they saw it. It was ice. It was fallen ice, also known as hail. Whether it was made out of water was a question they couldn’t answer, not yet.

Elder pulled out his handheld device, and commanded the nearest exterior drone to drive over to the ball of ice, and run a quick analysis. “It’s water ice. Ninety percent dihydrogen monoxide, plus five percent air bubbles, and three percent dust. The other two percent is carbon, and a few other trace elements.”

“Guys. Look,” Rita encouraged.

They raised their heads to find that the few pieces of hail were only the vanguard. It was hailing and raining in the distance. The precipitation appeared to be coming out of nowhere from about thirty meters above the ground. “I guess now we know where Oaksent has been living.” Elder gritted his teeth, irritated about what this meant.

“He looks like he has a lot of temporal energy,” Debra pointed out the obvious.

“Yeah, looks like it,” Elder admitted.

“It’s just that...if we wanna get out of here, you two are gonna have to swallow your pride, and let us go over to speak with him.”

“Yes, Debra, thanks, we get it,” Rita snapped back. “Is the rover ready?” she asked Elder.

He first manufactured a rover to test the stability and durability of the metals found on this planet. They could do with a way to travel away from the structure in person anyway, and it came with lower stakes than the time machine will. “It’s finished, but I’ve not tested it.”

“You should do that today,” Debra suggested.

One time, when Elder was looking for a book on the tablet that he hadn’t read yet, he came across a personal document that Debra had written. It was fanfiction that portrayed Bronach Oaksent as the hero, and Debra herself as the damsel in distress. She couldn’t even picture herself as the protagonist of her own novel, which was what saddened Elder the most. He didn’t read much of it, because it wasn’t any of his business, but his speedreading kicked in automatically, so he got the gist of it pretty quickly. She had contrived this whole fantasy about a man she had barely met. They didn’t even have an image of him in the database. Her entire idea of what kind of person he was came from a short biography in the manifest, while her imagination had to fill in the rest. She thought of him as her savior mostly because Elder was the poisoner. The fact that Oaksent was the one who had orchestrated this whole thing was a causal connection that she wasn’t capable of making. This wasn’t surprising considering she also struggled to string two sentences together into a coherent thought. That was probably why she sought out men like Oaksent in the first place, because she relied on others, and always had. Coming aboard Extremus alone was the biggest mistake she had ever made, and this would be true even if none of this had happened to her. “Boy, you’re quite anxious to get to your little boyfriend, aren’t you, Karen?” That was mean.

“Don’t call me that!”

Elder didn’t want to apologize, and Rita didn’t want to give him the chance to try, and screw it up, so she changed the subject. “Do what you need to with the rover, and then we’re leaving.”

“It holds two people,” Elder clarified. “One of us will have to stay here. Or should I say, one of you, because I obviously have to go.”

Rita looked over at Debra apprehensively, who looked back in fear. She had obviously been dreaming of finally meeting her hero for months, but she was not useful. Elder was the genius, and Rita was the leader. So her only option would be to beg. Rita sighed, apparently giving up already. “You go, but I’m trusting you with that. You know how we feel about him. If you make one choice that gets any of us hurt because you can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality, you’ll wish you had chosen to stay.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Debra complained.

Rita gave Elder a look. Perhaps she too had come across the fanfiction. It was just sitting there in one of the main menus. She didn’t even password protect it, like an amateur. “Just follow my instructions before you leave, and while I’m on the radio. And whenever I’m not telling you what to do, listen to Elder. That’s all you have to worry about. You don’t have to make any decisions at all.”

“Fine.” Debra wasn’t happy, and was probably already searching for loopholes in this mandate.

Elder went back to the garage to shift gears from the time machine to the rover. He gave it multiple inspections. Whenever he encountered an issue that needed to be corrected, he would then go all the way back to the beginning, and start the inspection over. His own safety codes demanded that he complete an inspection in full without discovering any problems whatsoever. Measure twice, cut once was a cliché for a reason. Once it was ready, he piloted it remotely from the safety of the structure, but only for twenty minutes. The safest way to do it would be to have it make several unmanned trips, but Rita was anxious for answers, and they didn’t know how much, or how little, temporal energy Oaksent had stored up, or how he was using it. There were different ways to trigger a hyperlocalized low altitude thunderstorm, and some were more efficient than others. There was no purpose to causing the weather event in this situation beyond demonstrating his might, so it was a total waste. Elder might need to get him to stop before they ran out of the energy they needed for the time machine.

He moved the rover back into the garage, and repressurized it. Debra was packed up and ready to go. She had showered, which wasn’t a bad idea, if for bad reasons. Elder decided to take a quick one himself, further delaying departure, and making her even more impatient. After he was out, and ready to go himself, Kivi pulled him aside. “Here.” She handed him a gun.

“Where the hell did you get this?” Elder questioned. They had never had a gun on this planet before.

“I don’t know,” Kivi replied.

“You don’t know?” he echoed. “Don’t you think that’s a little weird?”

“I found it in my personal back the day we arrived on this godforsaken planet,” Kivi explained. “I didn’t say anything, because tensions were so high back then, and I didn’t say anything later, because there was no reason for it. Well, there’s reason now. Oaksent is dangerous, and you need to protect yourself.”

“Kivi, he’s the mastermind. He probably gave you the gun. He slipped it in your bag, knowing that you had been marked for transport.”

“Maybe,” Kivi agreed. “It doesn’t matter. Take it. I don’t advocate for violence, but I would rather it be in your hands than his...or mine, for that matter.”

“Fine.” He carefully stuck it in his own pack, and headed out to the rover where Debra was waiting. He performed one more quick inspection, the kind you were supposed to do every time you went out for a drive, whether it was on an alien planet, or within the safety of a breathable atmosphere. Then he and Debra waved goodbye to Rita and Kivi, and headed out into the minor unknown.

The rain and hail fell upon the rover, causing annoying damage to the frame. It was a new vehicle, but it already required repairs. Great. Fortunately, they found that the storm served only as a border between the two camps. They passed through it quickly, and ended up in Bronach’s domain. Now they realized why Elder’s drones had never managed to find it, because it was located within its own parallel spatial dimension. This wasn’t a pocket dimension, but it was similar. It was sunny here, and grassy on the ground, and the air was thick and breathable. He had come a hell of a lot more prepared than Elder had ever suspected. Oaksent was going to win this battle of minds. Debra would never see him as the enemy now.

“What a dick,” Debra said.

“What?”

“He’s had this the whole time, and never said anything? I’ve been shitting in a hole, and showering with freezing cold water. What. A. Dick!” Wow, that was a dramatic swing in the other direction. It was a little offensive. The toilet that Elder ended up building for them was nothing fancy, and it was made out of metal, since they had no ceramics to work with, but it was pretty nice. “Ugh. Stop the car.”

“We can’t get out yet, Debra. I can’t be sure that this is real.”

“Stop the car!” she repeated.

He came to stop, and let her open the door. A gust of wind rushed in, and didn’t kill them, so the atmosphere appeared to be legit. And anyway, if Oakset had wanted them dead, there were easier ways than tricking them into thinking that this was a hospitable environment.

Oaksent stepped out of his brick house with a huge smile plastered on his face. “You’re finally here! Only two of your survived?”

“The other two are back home,” Elder replied.

“Two?” Oaksent asked. “Rita, and who?”

“Kivi,” Debra answered. “Kivi Bristol.”

Oaksent shook his head rather apathetically. “Never heard of him.” Hm. As much as he knew, maybe he didn’t know everything. He wasn’t God.

“It’s a her,” Debra corrected.

“Whatever.”

“How are you powering your dimension?” Elder asked, only wanting to be here long enough to make some kind of arrangement.

“Initially?” Oaksent began. “Temporal battery. Now, a temporal generator.” He chuckled when Elder looked around for it. “It’s disguised as that mountain.”

Yeah, that rock spire would be about the right size for something like that. A temporal generator would have to be a giant tower. It either collected energy from two dimensions that operated at different temporal speeds, or it processed the flow of normal time over the course of aeons. Neither one should have been possible. For the first method, you can’t get any more energy out than you put into creating and maintaining the parallel dimension, so it would have to be maintained through some other source. For the second method, it would obviously have taken a long time to build up the energy required to be useful. It had only been less than a year. “Hm.”

“You’re confused, I can see that.” Bronach was quite pleased with himself. “Tell me, have you ever seen the Bill and Ted films?”

Elder knew exactly what he was talking about. The Bill and Ted Gambit was a time travel trick where, instead of being prepared for present and near-future obstacles, you make plans to later go back in time to make those preparations. If you’re operating within a single timeline—which you aren’t always, so be careful—then it will appear as if you could see the future. It took the concept of cause and effect, and flipped it in reverse, so the effect essentially caused the cause. It was risky, relying on your future self to accomplish something in the exact same way that you had already experienced, but not impossible given enough time and power. “So. I will one day take you back in time, and in the past, you will have me build a temporal generator on this planet, so your past self can use it in our current present.”

Oaksent acted like he wasn’t smart enough to instantly track the sentence as he carefully considered it for a few seconds. “Yes,” he said, tapping an imaginary nail on the head with his finger. “Except I’m not sure whether you were the one who built the generator for me. All I know is it was waiting for me precisely where I wanted it to be.”

“What do you want in exchange for the temporal energy?”

“A ride, obviously. You want the time machine too. You want it to go back to Extremus, and I want it to go back to before the Extremus even existed.”

“We can’t go back to the Extremus if you prevent it from existing,” Debra reasoned.

“I never said that I was interested in that,” Oaksent insisted, shaking his head. “On the contrary. When I say before the Extremus, I mean way, way before, but that doesn’t mean I want to do anything to it. I don’t care about it anymore. I’m exactly where I would like to be, and the crew and passengers of that ship can go off wherever they want, as long as they stay out of my way.”

“What happens if they don’t?”

Oaksent sighed. “They will. Because you will warn them to leave me alone. This is my domain. Neither Extremus nor the stellar neighborhood wants or needs it, so let me do my thing, and we will all get what we want.”

“I don’t think so.” Debra suddenly pulled a gun out of the back of her pants, and trained it on Oaksent.

“Why the hell does everyone have a gun around here?” Elder exclaimed.

“It’s the same one, Old Man,” Debra explained. “I heard Kivi talking to you, and took it out of your bag while you were focused on the road.”

“Well...” Elder began. “Don’t use it.”

“I thought you would be my biggest fan,” Oaksent said to her, hands up defensively. He didn’t look too scared, but not because he knew what was going to happen in the future, only because she didn’t seem like the violent type.

“Don’t underestimate me!” Debra cried. “I’m sick of everyone thinking that they know who I am. But you people never actually ask me about myself. You just make these unfounded assumptions about me because I maybe complain a little too much, I have trouble taking responsibility for my own actions, I’m insecure about my mistakes, and I find it a lot easier to blame everyone else for my problems! But that doesn’t mean you know me!”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Bronach said in a tone.

She waggled the gun towards him. “You could have made our lives a lot easier with your little time mountain thing, but you chose to keep to yourself! What kind of selfish son of a bitch are you?”

“It was a test,” Oaksent argued.

“Oh, it was a test?” she asked mockingly. “Test these bullets!” She fired the gun, but missed, because she wasn’t exactly an expert marksman.

Oaksent took this opportunity to take out his firearm, and shoot at her instead. He too missed, but not because he didn’t know how to aim. A masked man appeared literally out of thin air, and took it on the chest. He tripped backwards a little, but didn’t fall down.

Elder couldn’t see the time traveler’s face, but he recognized the mask. This was standard issue in the Darning Wars for ground battles that took place on unbreathable worlds. Thousands of people wore it, but there was only one man who would logically be standing before them right now. The stranger removed the mask, and smirked at all of them. It was a young Elder Caverness. Present!Elder didn’t recall ever being here in his own past, but that wasn’t surprising since he already knew he had deliberately erased the memory of several years of his life.

“What the hell?” Debra asked.

Oaksent was shocked too.

“Fire in the hole,” Young!Elder said coolly. He lifted a device in his right hand, and pressed the button on the top of it. The temporal generator disguised as a rock spire exploded, sending temporal energy every which way.

< > Entire Story

Fluence: Mirage (Part III)

< > Entire Story

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

Goswin wiped the rain from his eyes, and was able to see that this Irene de Vries woman was not alone. A very young child was huddled against her hip. All signs pointed to the fact that this was Briar, but it could also be his son, or his great grandfather, or his eleventh cousin, forty-two times removed. “What year are you from?” Goswin asked. “Oh wait, no. Sorry. I mean, uhh...report.”

Irene smiled. “Trinity used to say that to me all the time. Is that in the time traveler’s handbook, or something?”

“If there’s an actual handbook, I’ve not actually seen it. That’s just what I’ve heard others say. May I ask the boy’s name?”

“It’s Briar.” Confirmed. “Hey, do I know you from somewhere? You look familiar. Have you ever been to the 21st century?”

“Captain!” Behind him, Weaver was power walking up, followed by Eight Point Seven, and Harrison.

“Is Madam Sriav with you?” Goswin asked.

Weaver shook her head. “She didn’t come. We assume she’s still on Lorania.”

“That’s not good,” Goswin mused. “We’ll try to get back to her. Crew, I would like you to meet Irene de Vries, and her son...Briar.”

Eight Point Seven didn’t react, and of course, neither did Harrison. Weaver flinched, but kept it together. Briar was in very, very big trouble, but not yet. Warning Irene that her son would one day become a killer was not going to help. Things could conceivably get better, but they could also get worse. She may decide that the only way to stop this would be to murder her son, and that would not be an okay decision. It wouldn’t work anyway. Briar killed Mateo while he was wearing the hundemarke, which was a special temporal object that created fixed moments in time. No matter how you try to change the past, this will always happen, as will anything inherently necessary to lead up to it. “It’s nice to meet you.” She pulled Goswin towards her, and did her best to whisper in his ear while still being heard through the rain. “We need to get out of here.”

“I know,” he replied.

“If you have to go back to the Middle Way, or whatever it is you did to make this happen a fourth time, then do it again. I don’t care if we end up on the moon. Just get us out of this paradox.”

“Fourth?” Goswin questioned incredulously. “You think I’m the one who took us to Achernar in the first place? You think that this was just something I’ve always been able to do, but the first time I tried was when I was in my 80s?”

“The thought crossed my mind. Maybe you’re salmon.”

“Excuse me?” Irene interjected. “The rain’s starting to come down harder. I really could use some shelter. There’s a cave nearby that we can hide in temporarily.”

“Hey!” a voice shouted to them. “Get the hell away from my mother!” Briar was running towards Goswin as fast as he could, and unlikely preparing to come to a complete stop just to exchange a few choice words. He was in a tackle posture. Fortunately, he didn’t make it that far. Harrison reached out, and lifted him up by his underarms, holding him in the air effortlessly as Briar continued to paddle his feet to no avail. “Let me go!”

“Did he just say mother?” Irene asked, confused and scared.

Goswin waggled his finger at the still struggling Briar. “Stop. Stop! We’re not going to hurt anyone. If you want to protect her, then you will stop moving, and listen to me very carefully.”

Briar went limp, and started to pant.

“Everyone gather around. Not you, Madam de Vries. Please go protect your son.” Once everyone else was in a huddle, Goswin went on. “I have a theory. Briar, are you familiar with any landmark on Earth; anything at all?”

“No, nothing.” Yeah, he had only ever remembered living on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. “Well, except for this.” He held up a photo of Irene in her younger days, smiling in front of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. “It was her favorite place in the world.”

Goswin closed his eyes and sighed. “Okay, I’ve been there too. That’ll work. Think about that place. Think about trying to go there.”

“Why?”

“Would you just do it? The National Museum of Natural History. Think about the museum. Think about visiting there. Don’t think about anything else.”

“Okay, I guess.”

The rain suddenly stopped. They were now in the middle of a grassy park. To one side of them was a giant bosom, and to the other a giant phallus. Behind them stood a red castle, and before them was the target museum, which was the second bosom. This was Washington D.C. all right. They were soaking wet on a bright, sunny day. The tourists around them were confused, and a few of them looked really nervous.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea,” Goswin admitted. “I just didn’t want us to go back to Bida, and Briar doesn’t have a frame of reference for much on Earth.”

“What is your hypothesis,” Weaver asked, “that he’s the one who brought us?”

“Well, it seems like the only possibility,” Goswin determined.

“We didn’t even see him at the other locations,” Weaver pointed out.

“Excuse me?” A man in overalls had approached Briar. “Could you please step closer to your friends?”

“They’re not my friends,” Briar spit at him.

“That is very much not my point, sir,” the stranger said. “Please step closer to them.” He waited, his patience thinning. “Please,” he repeated. “Thank you,” he added when Briar finally complied.

“What is it you need?” Goswin asked, ready for a fight, even though he was not much for violence.

The stranger held up his hands like he was trying to block the sun from his eyes. He jerked them a centimeter away from each other, which served to freeze everyone around them in place. Time was stopped, or at least moving very slowly. He gradually pushed his right hand forward, and in front of his left hand, which pulled back, and moved in the opposite direction. As he did so, time began to reverse outside of the bubble he had erected for them. They watched as the tourists walked backwards. A child’s scoop of ice cream flew back up to his cone from the ground. Once the scene was back to where he wanted it, he closed his hands into fists, and snapped them against each other, pinky to thumb. The five of them felt a lurch, as if the roller coaster ride were just beginning. The man carefully placed his left fist against his nose, and looked over his hands like a sniper. His arms were shaking, but not like he was struggling, more like it was integral to the process. As he slowly moved his fists away from his face, the scene around them began to blur and fade into blackness. They flew forward, also like a roller coaster. Finally, he opened his hands back up, and separated them, stopping the ride.

They were standing in a desert, the three main pyramids of Giza rippling above a mirage a few kilometers away. The slight distortion from the bubble dissolved, and the warm wind began to blow sand into their eyes and noses. “All right. It’s done.”

“What’s done?” Eight Point Seven questioned.

“You’ve been erased from the timeline. No one who witnessed your arrival in the National Mall remembers that it ever happened, because it didn’t. They’re all going about their day, still clueless about time travelers, and the like.”

“Thank you, Repairman,” Weaver said to him as if they were old friends. Maybe they were.

“When you say, we were erased from time...” Goswin trailed off intentionally.

“You just never showed up there,” the Repairman clarified. “Instead, you transported yourselves to this random spot in the Necropolis. You’ve been here the whole time, and if anyone were to ask a lizard or cactus around here what they saw, that’s what they would say.

“I don’t see any cactuses,” Briar noted.

“Then maybe you don’t have to worry about any witnesses,” the Repairman joked. He paused a moment. “Well, bye.”

“Wait!” Goswin stopped him. “Could you help us again...maybe by telling us what’s happening to us?”

“I wouldn’t know, but I heard you blame everything on this guy,” the Repairman said. “What I’ll tell you is that the ability to transport people from a distance is rather rare. It’s not impossible but...in my experience, when multiple individuals travel together without any of them realizing how or why, it’s not because one of them is doing it on purpose, but because there’s some kind of glue that binds them together.” He made a quarter turn, reached out, and opened an invisible panel in the air. They couldn’t see anything, but they could hear the familiar creak of metal scraping against metal. He reached into it, and took hold of an equally invisible handle, which he pulled down. His figure turned into a black silhouette for a split second before disappearing completely.

They stood there in silence for a few moments. “I have another idea,” Goswin finally said, worried how they would take it.

“A new experiment?” Weaver asked him, intrigued.

“Are you up for it? We have to get a handle on this. I don’t really want to spend the rest of my life randomly jumping from point to point.”

“Let’s hear it,” Eight Point Seven encouraged.

“You can’t,” Goswin replied. “I’m going to write four places down, and keep them compartmentalized. You will each think about your own place, and only that place. If he’s right, and there’s some kind of glue between us, it won’t work, because it will be contradictory.” He pulled out his handheld device, and started writing the locations down. He showed Briar the first one.

“Really?” Briar asked incredulously.

“Don’t. Give it away,” Goswin warned. “It’s a magic trick.”

Briar sighed, upset. He was being expected to think about the cliff where he killed Mateo Matic. It was simultaneously the worst and best place for him. What happened there was probably the worst thing he had ever done, so that meant, now that he had been triggered, he wouldn’t be able to think of anything else, even if he wanted to.

The other three, on the other hand, were going to be thinking about the the west entrance to the primary research facility on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. No one ever went back there, so they shouldn’t have to worry about being seen. Goswin was the only one who knew that he, Weaver, and Eight Point Seven had the same spot in mind. If Briar were the one in charge, it didn’t matter what the others thought of, because they would always end up where he wanted to go instead. “Everyone ready?” Goswin asked. “I guess time travel works on psychic powers, so...everyone think about your respective locations, please, and really, truly, desperately try to actually go there. Don’t think about anything else. It may take a while, I really don’t know.”

They stood there in their huddle for a minute or so without anything happening, the humans struggling with the dust storm that was starting up around them. It did work, though. The sand and sun disappeared to be replaced by a dense forest at twilight. Alien bugs crawled around on a tree next to them, as wingèd ones swarmed in their faces. This was definitely Bida. But it wasn’t the cliff where Briar committed murder, and it wasn’t anywhere near the research facility.

“Whose spot was this?” Eight Point Seven asked.

“No one’s,” Goswin revealed. I don’t know that we’re right about this.”

“Don’t be so hasty,” Weaver said, taking out her own handheld. “I can connect to the satellite now.”

Goswin was worried again about how they would take it. “Briar had the...the cliff. You know the one I mean. The rest of us had the west entrance to Pryce’s lab.”

Weaver peered at him over her device. “Only two places.”

“Yes, it was like a blind study.”

Weaver nodded, and tapped on the screen. She held it in front of his face. “We’re right in the middle.”

“What?” Goswin took it from her, to see what she was talking about.

“Exactly equidistant from the cliff and the building.”

“We split the difference,” Eight Point Seven noted. “The Repairman was right. It’s all of us. Whatever each of us wants, this...force between us tries to come up with something that matches our criteria combined. If you wanted Italian food, and she wanted Chinese, and I wanted French, and he wanted Ethiopian, we would end up at a fusion restaurant.” She started pointing at the members of the group accordingly. “If we wanted to go to the years 1776, 1912, 2024, and 2100, we would show up in 1953.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Goswin said. “Briar wasn’t with us on that void planet, or on Dardius.”

“Wasn’t he?” Weaver prodded.

Briar frowned. “I was hiding. I wasn’t planning on showing myself at all, but then you attacked my mother...”

“No one was attacking her,” Goswin defended. He grunted. “We have to figure out how to get rid of this. It could cause us serious problems. If one of us wants to go to Teagarden, and the rest want to go to Glisnia, are we gonna end up somewhere in the middle of empty space?”

“We can’t do that yet. We have to go back to return Harrison and Madam Sriav to where they belong.”

“That’s true,” Goswin agreed. “Can we all come to a consensus long enough to make that work?”

< > Entire Story