The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 17, 2399

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Leona has finally come back to the Superscraper after spending days at Homes for Humankind, working on something big. She even made a short trip to Haiti without even telling Mateo about it. She hasn’t given any details regarding their plans, but Mateo has briefed her on what he and the volunteers discovered as they were exploring the sublevels. She wanted to see it for herself, of course. She is particularly interested in the fusion reactor on the very lowest level. She stares for a few minutes, not vocalizing her thoughts. Then she walks over to it, and starts opening panels and hatches. She presses a few buttons, and flips some switches too. When she’s satisfied, she brushes the dust off her hands, and walks back over. “It is more interesting than you thought.”

“Why’s that?”

She points. “See that over there, that collection of tubes?”

“Yeah. Kind of looks like an organ.”

“It’s part of a cooling system.”

“Sounds reasonable to me. Fire hot. Fire burn,” he says like a caveman.

She smirks knowingly. “Let’s go back upstairs. I need to test something.”

They take the elevator up. Leona stops on the main floor, and opens the door to a maintenance closet. She looks around a little bit before finding what she’s looking for, which is apparently a large metal pipe. She smacks it against her other hand to test its strength, then they get back into the elevator to go up a few more floors. She doesn’t say a word this entire time. Mateo doesn’t think she’s going to hurt anyone with it, but he’s very confused, and a little nervous. She usually likes to explain herself along the way.

They get out on the fourth floor, and walk into a random unit. It’s not being used by any of the people they took in. Still silent, Leona pulls the pipe into a backswing, and sends it straight into the window as hard as she can. It’s not too hard, because she never played baseball, or works out, but it should have done at least a little damage. There is not a mark on it. Also silent, Mateo reaches out. She hands him the pipe, and he takes his own shot. Nothing. Impenetrable. “What does this tell us?” he asks.

She takes back the pipe, and hits the glass again, like a pickaxe this time, and not with all of her might. She feels the seams with her fingers, and looks closely at them. “Does this kind of window remind you of anything? Like, when you think back to the times you’ve encountered one that appears to be indestructible, were you in an office building, or were you...in something else?”

Puzzled, Mateo winces, and tries to think. “I mean, they’ve always been like that when I’ve been on ships?” He shakes his head tightly, and widens his eyes. He looks around at the room that they’re in, and slides his palm on the walls. “This is a ship?”

“I think so. In fact, I think that it’s just a giant evacuation vessel. They built them to replace the original arcologies in the main sequence during Project Airtight, but we never saw them. The whole planet could be evacuated in a matter of hours, if need be.”

“Leona, one of our new friends did the math. If some lived up top, and some below, a million people could fit. How many would you need to save literally everyone?”

“At a million per ship, that’s about eight thousand, just like this one.”

Mateo gazes out the window. “Is that possible? Do you think more exist?”

She sighs and watches the sun set upon the city. “That...would be crazy.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 16, 2399

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The building has been inspected, at least with a cursory glance. They didn’t hire a professional to go through the entire thing, and check or mold, or whatever it is they do. All the doors are open now, though, which will allow drones to go through, should Leona deem there to be some need for that. While she’s been dealing with other things, Mateo has been in charge of helping the volunteers check the rooms, and now it’s time to go in the opposite direction. A building this tall has to have a deep foundation, and there should be space down there too. It may not be furnished, or even clean, but there will be potential in it. The elevator turns out to be large enough for all of the now two dozen volunteers, so he invites everyone to join, including the kids. It’ll be a little adventure.

When the doors open, they find themselves in a wide expanse, which may cover the entirety of the building in the first two dimensions. There is nothing here but support columns. It’s made of concrete, but really clean and unused. Maybe this is meant to be used for offices. Underground, though? That seems unnecessarily cruel, especially since there should be plenty of space in the common areas on the bottom floors above the surface. “Come on,” Mateo says. “There’s nothing to see here. Let’s keep going down.”

They go down one story. This one is just as expansive, but it looks different. It’s filled with stuff. As they step onto the floor, and spread out, they find compartments that mirror the kind of rooms up above. Each room is equipped with four bunk beds, and is separated from its neighbors by only half walls. Metal bars come up and go across, suggesting that a modest amount of privacy can be created from curtains. There are rows and rows and rows of these bunks. “What are they for?” a teenager asks.

“Emergency shelter, in case of a tornado?” someone else suggests.

“Look at this sign,” one of them says. “ROOM CAPACITY: 34,768.”

“Okay,” Mateo says, stepping back towards the elevator. “Let’s try one more.”

They get back in, and go down one more story. It’s the same, doubling their current known underground capacity. Mateo looks over at the buttons. There are twelve stories total, numbered zero through negative eleven. “Who here is good at math?” he asks the group.

A girl snakes her way forward.

“Assuming that every floor is just like this one, subtracting that first one that was empty, how many people can fit in the shelter?”

She takes a moment to perform the calculations. “It would fit 382,448 people.”

Mateo shakes his head. I was kind of worried about that. “That’s not much more than half of the population that can fit above. That doesn’t sound like a great shelter.”

“Well, we don’t know what we’re looking at here,” a man pointed out. “The other floors could be bigger, or maybe they can’t make an elevator this big that goes down as many floors as there are, and we’re expected to get off, and get on another one.”

They keep riding the elevator down, stepping out for a moment just to check that it’s equipped with all the same stuff. Floor Negative-10 is different. It’s just a giant open area, like the first sublevel. There’s only one more to check now, and while this is all rather exciting, they don’t expect anything different. They would all be wrong. “I recognize this,” Mateo says. “This is a fusion reactor...a big one.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 14, 2398

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Leona stands on the edge of the field as the helicopter drops from the sky to land on the grass. Leaves, loose blade, and other debris assault her face, but she remains steadfast. Her colleagues are more easily flapped. “Aren’t you nervous?” one of them asks, trying to whisper above the noise.

“Why would I be?” Leona asks.

“It’s a United States senator, coming here to evaluate your work.”

Leona waits until Senator Honeycutt is within earshot, and the bird quiets down a little. “He’s just a man; not someone to be feared.”

Her colleague is even more scared now.

“Thank you for taking the time, Dr. Matic,” Senator Honeycutt says, ignoring her remark in the way a statesman should.

“Same to you,” Leona replies sincerely. She does recognize that he’s busy, and the tour will eat into his schedule significantly. She genuinely appreciates it. “Follow me.”

She leads him across the grounds, and into the building. This is not the underground lab where the rocketship was constructed, nor the little lab that the Honeycutts gave her and Ramses. It’s a decommissioned muscle car factory about an hour from the KC metro, which came ready with the space, ventilation, and powerload operationalization potential that they require for this venture.

Petra is in the lobby, and only didn’t greet the senator on the lawn so she could present all the team leaders in a neat, orderly row, like the children in The Sound of Music before bedtime. They seem to be standing in order of height, though that may be a coincidence. One can only hope. It’s nice that he’s here, but Leona wasn’t being facetious when she said that he was just a man. He nods appropriately as Petra lists off the team leaders’ names, and each time she does, that leader runs off in a show of work ethic that suggests they barely have enough time for even a moment such as this.

“Could I please see the staging area?” Melville asks.

Petra is perturbed. She had more grandstanding and fanfare to go through.

Leona saves it. “Of course, sir. Right this way.” He follows her onto the mezzanine that overlooks the factory floor below. They walk along it, to another section.

Most of the space has been devoted to part fabrication. The area where they will all be put together into the form of a working fusion reactor is small. Early reactors in the main sequence were gigantic because they had to be to get anywhere close to net positive output. Leona has decided to not worry about doing this. She considered starting them off slow, but she promised them a fusion-powered rocket, and she may not be around long enough to see it through if she doesn’t jump right to real progress. Hopefully the Prime Directive isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

All businesslike, with a brilliant poker face, Melville looks down at the space. He snaps a few photos, and nods. “How long does it take to build one reactor?”

“One year for the first one,” Leona replies. “With staff experience, we’ll cut that down to seven months for the next one...should you want another.”

“Oh, we’ll want more,” he says. “We’re currently scouting eighty-two more sites which...” He makes a quick calculation on his handheld, “...based on your estimates, means phase two manufacturing will take less than four years for all major U.S. cities.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 7, 2365

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Total darkness. The team was floating around in it, like the vacuum of outer space, except they could still breathe, so it wasn’t that. Still, the air was thinning rapidly, and about as quickly, the temperature was dropping. Both Leona and Ramses had the good sense to switch on the flashlights on their cuffs, prompting the others to do the same. They were still in the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but none of the systems was working. No lights, no life support, no power whatsoever. The only things that were working were the cuffs. Leona pushed herself off from the table, and dove back into the hole leading to the engineering section. She removed her cuff, and got to work, even as her lungs were tightening. Ramses floated down next to her. He stuffed a rebreather into her mouth. It would increase her time by a few minutes probably, but that was it. There just wasn’t enough oxygen to recycle. Out of the corner of her eye, she could seem him drift off and away. He was sacrificing his own consciousness so she could save them all.

The Cassidy cuffs were powered by a series of nanofusion reactors. In fact, a lot of the bulk was just power generation. They weren’t designed to last forever, but a pretty long time. If she interfaced it with the AOC, it should supply enough power to restart life support systems, if only that, and if only for a short while. They needed to get their bearings, and assess their situation, and for that, they needed to be alive. Fortunately, the AOC had already been retrofitted with interface capabilities. That was how they were able to take the whole ship with them on their time jumps, by basically turning it into one giant Cassidy cuff. Even so, they had never thought to exploit that connection for an alternate power source, because the AOC had its own reactors. Completing this objective wasn’t as simple as plugging the cuff in, but as long as she worked quickly, she should be able to get it done before her friends suffered permanent brain damage. This was all assuming power loss was the reason the ship stopped working in the first place. It was probably what caused Gatewood to lose connection with Pluoraia, and they had just walked into the same trap.

There. For a few seconds after it was done, Leona closed her eyes and quite nearly prayed. That was how long it took for the system to kick in. Emergency lighting flickered on, and the air began to circulate. She didn’t wait to see if Ramses eventually woke back up. She reached into her bag of holding, and retrieved an oxygen injector. This was the quickest way to supply a patient with a jolt of energy when nothing else was available, or not available yet. As soon as his eyes popped open, she dug into her bag for four more injectors, but she only found three. Why did she not even have enough for everyone on the crew to use once? She had to make yet another snap decision. She pulled herself back up the ladder, and went for the ladies first. They weren’t more important than Mateo, but they were the most innocent. Rather, they deserved this the least. Reviving her husband would have felt selfish and dirty.

Once she was finished with the other three, though, there was nothing more she could do for them. They would have to recover from here on their own. They didn’t keep tanks of oxygen on the ship. They had precisely two vacuum suits, which were stored all the way up in the airlock, and required power. She couldn’t give up on getting Mateo back, so she scooped him up, and dragged him to the nearest vent, holding his face against the grate, hoping that would be enough to reoxygenate his brain. The purpose of injectors was to help the patient while they were unconscious, and couldn’t try to breathe on their own. She couldn’t be sure that this would work, and as the seconds moved on without success, she began to doubt it was possible, and also maybe regret her decisions. No, that wasn’t fair. Angela, Olimpia, and Kivi deserved to live. If anyone was going to understand why she did what she did, it was Mateo.

Kivi suddenly crashed into both of them. She had her own injector, which she jammed into Mateo’s neck. He reawoke, and instinctively began to suck down the air on his own. By now, Ramses was back, and there was enough air circulating for him to speak. “Computer, report!”

“It’s not operational,” Leona explained. “I’m conserving power. The engineering console is the only thing on right now.”

“Go,” Kivi told Leona. “I’ll stay with him, make sure he’s okay.”

Leona nodded, and followed Ramses back down to engineering, where they started to search for answers. “Everything seems to be okay so far. Nothing was damaged, so it wasn’t an EMP, or something. It’s like...”

“It’s like whatever this was turned everything off, and drained all energy reserves.” He was seeing the same thing. “Nothing is broken.”

They continued to look through what little data they could summon.

“There,” Leona said, pointing at the screen.

“Yeah, heh. That’s all we need.”

“Turning on propulsion could...”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a little...”

“But not too much.”

“What are you two talking about in your little genius shorthand?” Mateo was down there with them now.

Leona sighed. “Transfer control up to the auxiliary console on the main deck,” she instructed Ramses. Then she floated over to Mateo, concerned. “How are you feeling?”

“Headache,” he answered, “but we all seem to have that.”

She nodded. “Oxygen deprivation. “It will go away on its own, but we can all take pain meds. Let’s go back up so we can explain what’s happening to the whole group.”

Since activating artificial gravity was an unnecessary drain on their energy, the two scientists held onto the railing while the other four strapped into the seats around the table to watch the presentation. Ramses began, “something took all of our power. We can’t find out what, because that would require data, and no data was saved from the moment it happened, because something took all the power. According to the ship’s logs, the trip was going smoothly, right up until it wasn’t. Everything shut off all at once. We were traveling at maximum reframe, which means our momentum carried us most of the rest of the way. Not all of the way, though.”

Leona took over, “we’re presently floating in the middle of intrasolar space, about eleven astronomical units from the host star, at an orbital inclination of about eighty-three degrees. In order to regain full power, we’ll have to cover the majority of that distance. Ramses designed the AOC with multiple redundancies, so solar power should be fine. It’s just not really good enough from this far out, not in a reasonable amount of time, anyway. Now, the great thing about fusion power, is that it’s scalable. The tiny ones that we all wear around our wrists are just as efficient as the ones that power entire cities. Obviously, however, being smaller, they can hold less deuterium. If we tried to bring this ship back to its former glory, it would drain fast, and we wouldn’t have anything to replenish it. That’s why you’re all wearing seatbelts right now, and why it’s still pretty cold, though not as deadly as it was becoming. The problem is that the math doesn’t work out. Using traditional means, we won’t make it close enough to the star to power up by the end of our day.”

“Can we use the ship’s teleporter to cover that distance more quickly?”

Ramses pointed to emphasize his words. “Yes, that will be faster. No, it won’t use less power. It’s like your petrol-powered car.”

Leona cleared her throat suggestively. “Uh, Ramses, none of these people drove cars, except for Mateo and me. Not even you!” she reminded him affectionately.

“Well, the analogy stands. They all know what cars are. My point is that if you drive slowly, you use less fuel, but it takes you longer to get there. If you drive faster, you spend less time using up your fuel, but you use a lot in a shorter time period. What we need to do is go right in the middle; find that happy medium.”

“So teleport part of the way, and propel the rest?” Kivi figured.

Ramses smiled sinisterly. “I’ve come up with something even better, which will use our power more efficiently than that.” Now he cleared his throat, but not suggestively; to prepare to wow them with his brilliance. “The whole idea behind teleportation is getting you from A to B instantaneously. You’re not supposed to fall down when you get there, which is why momentum is not part of the equation. I mean, it is, but it’s a safety thing that I won’t get into. What we need to do is not simply conserve momentum, but multiply it. I can rig this thing to teleport us one AU at a time, and every time we do, it will propel us another AU very quickly. This allows us to use what little power we have left more efficiently.”

“Why can’t we just use more of the cuffs?” Olimpia offered.

Ramses and Leona gave each other a look. “We could do that, yeah, but we don’t really want to, because we’re not sure if we’ll be able to refuel. This endeavor could also burn them out. Leona’s original cuff may never be usable again. It wasn’t designed for something like this.”

“Isn’t it worth it?” Olimpia pressed. “We don’t need the cuffs, we just like them.”

“If you lose your cuff, Olimpia, you’re going back to the echo.”

“I can think of worse fates,” she replied.

“This will work,” Ramses tried to assure them. “We just need to get to that star and then we’ll be good. I promise you.”

Mateo tried to stand up to comfort his friend, but the seatbelt got in the way. He didn’t undo it, because floating over would have been more awkward than staying put. “We trust you. If you both say the math works, it works. Who are we to argue?”

It didn’t work. But in the end, they decided as a group that it was good enough. The Cassidy cuff ran out of deuterium faster than they calculated it would. It wasn’t really anything Leona and Ramses did, but the battery projections on the cuffs themselves turned out to be slightly inaccurate. Based on even more math, the smart people were able to calculate that the ship could make the rest of the journey on its own, gathering solar energy little by little. The closer it drew, the more power it used, but also the more light the panels were able to absorb. It would be a fairly steady recharge, and by the time they returned to the timestream a year from now, it will have been orbiting the star for the last several weeks. That was when they would finally reach the planet, and figure out just what the hell was going on.

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