The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 11, 2524

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It wasn’t until the next year when Mateo, Leona, and Angela could safely reactivate their tandem slingdrives. They technically could have left shortly before midnight, but they decided it was for the best. They left a message with the Vitalie who lived on Vitalemus, to relay to the Vellani Ambassador if she ever heard from again. She hadn’t, but had kept apprised of Goldilocks Corridor news, and no one had reported seeing them lately, so no one knew where they were at this point. With nothing left for them here, they made the jump, and returned to the beacon floating around in the space where Castlebourne once was. They weren’t alone. They quickly picked up comms from Ramses, Marie, Olimpia, and Romana. They only had to make a few jumps to rendezvous with each other.

“Gang’s all here,” Mateo mused.

“How did you get back here?” Angela asked the other half of their team.

“You were taking too long,” Ramses began to explain. “We decided to come back here to see if you were stranded after failing to track Castlebourne’s new location. The rest is obvious. We were just about to come find you on Vitalemus.”

“Did you put a pocket dimension in the buoy thinking Romana would be able to use it?” Leona asked.

“No, that didn’t occur to me,” Ramses replied. “It was just a failsafe if something went wrong. With no other habitable structure around here, there needed to be some way to survive, like if you had a stranger in tow with a less advanced vacuum suit, or no suit at all. As it turns out,” he went on while tapping a piece of the buoy that he had separated from the rest, “it was necessary.”

“Is someone in there?” Leona questioned.

“You’ll see.” That was a weird way to put it.

“Can we all go back to Castlebourne together now?” Mateo asked.

Ramses shook his head. “I’m afraid this was a one-way trip. Hrockas scrambled the tracker from his end. Where they are by now is a mystery. I could probably write an algorithm that could predict their movements using their last known location. The choosing one he’s using to push the host star around is powerful, but she has her limits. They can’t be all the way to the outer arm of the Milky Way, or something. But we would have to leave something behind to keep trying to track them...”

“Or I could do it again,” Romana volunteered.

“No,” Mateo countered decisively. “I don’t want you breaking your pattern ever again.”

“Do we really need to find Castlebourne at all?” Marie asked the group. “We were trying to leave it at one point.”

“That’s true, I remember that now,” Mateo affirms. It was the closest thing to home they had ever had, but it was always going to end eventually. It was supposed to end a long time ago, but they got sidetracked with all that Pacey-Underburg stuff, which kept them tied to Castlebourne for a bit longer.

“Do you want to try another aimless jump?” Romana offered.

“And end up back in that hellhole?” Leona added. “No, thanks.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Romana reminded them. “I liked the outfits.”

“You could always wear that kind of outfit, whenever you want,” Leona said.

“True,” Romana replied. She shed her suit, and shifted her nanites to a 1950s-esque dress, not exactly like the kind she wore when they were oblivious and trapped in Underburg, but similar.

“Put your suit back on,” Mateo shouted.

Romana couldn’t reply in the vacuum, but she could still hear via conduction, yet she pushed the back of her ear forward as if she couldn’t even do that. After her father pointed at her with stern determination, she switched her suit back on. “Geeze, Papa Bear,” she joked. “Rambo’s got me covered. That man knows his way around a woman’s body.”

“Goddammit!” Mateo complained. “Don’t say things like that!”

“Okay, okay,” Leona jumped in, as she usually had to do when those two were at it. Romana knew how to push her dad’s buttons, and Leona knew how to put a stop to it, which was to change the subject as quickly as possible. “Let’s just go back to Earth. I’m feeling a little homesick. And it was home for all of us at some point, though not technically the same version of it.”

“That’s a good idea,” Marie concluded.

Ramses looked at his forearm readout. “My coherence gauge is in the Orange, where are you?”

“We just arrived, so it’s still Red,” Leona answered. “We won’t be ready to jump until nearly the end of the day, probably.”

“I’m doin’ a bottle episode!” Olimpia suddenly shouted.

“I was just thinking about that,” Angela said. “Not the bottle episode thing, that’s nonsense. “We should call it slinging. Why are we calling it jumping?”

“Seconded,” Romana agreed.

“All in favor,” Mateo posed. They raised their hands. “Motion passes. New lingo established.” He paused for a moment. “Great, that entertained us for all of ten seconds. What do we do in the meantime? And don’t say RPS-101 Plus. I don’t like playing in my suit. I can’t control my objects right.”

“You just say that because you consistently lose!” Olimpia teased.

“Mah-ri?” Angela began, “why are you looking around?”

“Oh, we just made a decision to go to Earth,” Marie replied. “That’s usually when God laughs and intervenes.

That was true. Everyone started to look around too, but found only space. The sudden intervention she was talking about didn’t usually happen when they were actively looking for it...kind of a watched pot never boils sort of thing, but it was still prudent to check.

“Do you guys realize there are three wars?” Angela offered. She opened the floor up to anyone, but no one responded. “The Exin Empire, the Sixth Key conflict, and those dragonfly aliens. I don’t know if you’ve realized this, but we’ve been switching between them. Once we close one chapter of one book, we start the next chapter of one of the other two books.”

Ramses glanced down at the piece of the buoy he attached to his chest. Only Mateo noticed, and he chose not to address it.

“Yeah, you’re right about that, aren’t you?” Leona asked rhetorically. “We just closed one of the books, but we don’t know which one we’re about to open, if either of the others.”

“I am curious about what’s going on with the Sixth Key,” Marie admitted. “It’s been a long time. I spent some years in one of those worlds.”

“So did I,” Romana said, referring to having grown up in ancient Third Rail.

“But the Ochivari are so fascinating,” Angela insisted. “We could end up in any universe, dealing with any new, unfamiliar culture.”

“Well, we might be able to trigger the Transit to show up if one of us makes a declaration that we want to fight in a cosmic war, or join the military,” Marie suggested.

“Let’s not do that,” Leona volleyed.

“Then the Sixth Key it is,” Angela responded. “Raise the sails! Navigate us to the aperture!” She pointed in a random direction. It was a little funny, but nobody laughed. They just fell silent for a time.

“That lasted us another five minutes. How’s everybody’s coherence? Mine’s still in the Red. Do we all have to be Green, or...”

“Maybe not,” Ramses explained. “I would feel safer if we were, though. I would feel even safer with Violet.”

“If you’re bored, we could just go into stasis for a few hours. It’s not bad in here. I found it easy to wake back up when they found me.”

“Well, yeah, Rambo knows his way around a woman’s body,” Olimpia echoed Romana from earlier.

“I want a divorce,” Mateo said, joking, but...clearly not happy for real.

The seven of them continued to hang out there while they waited for their coherence gauges to rise up to acceptable levels. They mostly held onto the buoy to stay close to one another, but occasionally, one of them would push off and float around. They could always return by utilizing their maneuvering thrusters, or just teleporting back. That was what gave Romana the idea to play hide-and-seek. It was a dangerous version of the game, which not everyone in the galaxy would be able to play. Because space was empty and black, the chances of finding someone just by the naked eye were incredibly low. They could use their heat signatures instead, but then detection would be incredibly easy. The only way to do it was for each hider to shut off their own life support systems, and stay in one place for long enough for the seeker to find everyone else first. They could still use their comms, but they would be untraceable. Some of them could withstand the cold for longer, and were better at hiding. Others were caught when they just couldn’t take it anymore. At this point, they could try to teleport away, but the seeker could always jump right to them wherever they ended up.

They played the game for a couple of hours before noticing that the same people were winning each time. It was always either Mateo or Ramses, which made this whole thing feel very unfeministic. Even though Ramses supposedly built their superstrates equally, it seemed as though the women got colder faster, just as they would if they were simply wearing business clothes in an office. The coherence gauges still weren’t Green for everybody, but they were sick of playing around, so most of them just took naps. They floated aimlessly there in the black, mostly apart, though Mateo and Olimpia held together like the two lovers they were. Leona was working on the self-destruct sequence for the buoy. Instead of bringing it with them, they were just gonna blow it up, so no one could have any hope of finding any information on it. It took a lot of time and work to engage the explosives. This was by design, so it couldn’t be switched on incidentally, or when the user wasn’t thinking rationally.

Finally, the last of them turned Green, and it was time to leave. Ramses woke everyone up with a calm, but crescendoing, song. They teleported back into a group, and magnetized their suits so they could watch the explosion together. It was a bit anticlimactic because of how fast and efficient it was, but still something worth seeing. They synced up their slingdrives, and with one final goodbye to the Castlebourne that was no longer there, they slung away.

They landed on the surface of what they assumed was Earth. They quickly detected a breathable atmosphere, and were able to recede their nanites into regular clothes. This did look like Earth, but perhaps one from long ago. Earth didn’t really have any cities anymore. They just lived in arcological megastructures, and some seasteads, if they weren’t just orbiting from space. They were on a street, though. The buildings were sleek and advanced, but just too dense for Earth in this time period. People were staring at them, including parents trying to hold their children close. A man approached them cautiously. “Do you mean us harm?” he asked.

Leona stepped forward. “Absolutely not. We’re travelers, attempting to return to Earth.”

The man looked over his shoulder at the crowd, and then back at Leona. “Never heard of it. How did you do that thing with your clothes?”

“Have you heard of other...” Leona trailed off. She slowly darted her eyes side to side, looking for the right way to word this. Unfortunately, the beginning of her sentence might have painted her into a corner. No, she could figure this out. The Prime Directive applied here until she determined otherwise. “...other cities.”

“You mean on the other side of the tunnels?” the man guessed. “Yes. We don’t interact with them, except to exchange some technologies sometimes.”

Tunnels. Leona looked up at the sky, or what appeared to be a sky anyway. She pulled a small swarm of nanites over her eyes, and used them as sensors. “Yeah, that was definitely a hologram, and they were under a dome. Goddammit, they were back on Castlebourne, and in some kind of simulation. Wait.

The man looked up at the sky too, trying to figure out what she was so baffled by.

The dimensions were off. This wasn’t one of the Castlebourne domes. It was too small. Not by much, but other than the ocean caps, and a few rare exceptions, all Castlebourne domes were pretty much the exact same skeletal design. Where would they be where people would be living under a dome, but alarmed by their use of nanite technology. She looked back at the stranger and breathed. “Have you heard of Proxima Doma?”

“Yes,” he replied. “We don’t know what it means.”

Leona looked back at the rest of the team. She just regarded them for a moment, trying to decide the best course of action. There was really only one. They couldn’t teleport, and they couldn’t explain their odd behavior. The locals wouldn’t understand, and it would break their worldview. “Run.”

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Microstory 2467: Tagdome

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This is a funny one. It’s several giant games of tag, each one made up of a lot of other subdivisions of tag. You can come in here with just about any substrate you want, but you’ll be grouped according to strength and speed. We can’t have superstrong mechs barreling through normal organics, now can we? There aren’t too many of what they generally call weight classes, but you stay in your respective sectors, and don’t interact with the others. But you do interact with everyone else in your sector. That sector is further divided into regions, zones, districts, territories, and neighborhoods. I honestly couldn’t tell you how they decide where you’re assigned beyond the weight class for fairness. But whatever it is, the divisions are based upon the modern standardized Dunbar grouping system. Your neighborhood will have 21 people total, which is a fairly normal and manageable number of contestants to contend with. You will ultimately compete with other neighborhoods. Seven neighborhoods makes a territory of 147 people. There are three territories in a district of 441 people, then four districts in each zone of 1,764, and four zones in each region of 7,056 players. Finally, there are seven regions in the whole sector. Sorry if that was confusing, but this game is confusing, by its nature. The best players are the ones who can figure it out. How about gameplay? You play a simple game of tag in your neighborhood for some period of time, based on your sector’s weight class. Higher classes theoretically have more stamina, and can go for longer. Don’t worry about those. Only consider your own. We’ll use the example of a normal organic human sector, which is only expected to play for half an hour. As you play against each other, your points start racking up. The longer you avoid becoming a Pursuer, the more points you end up with, and the longer you are the Pursuer, the more points you lose. At the end of your neighborhood’s allotted time, your points will be tallied up. It’s entirely possible that the entire game only ever had one Pursuer who never managed to catch anybody. That’s okay. They’re always watching you. Some people got closer to being caught than others. There will be leaders on the leaderboard, who will move on to compete at the territory level. The top seven will represent their neighborhood in a game of 49 players and begin to run as a team. Things start getting more complicated here as you can work together to build enough points to open gates to other territories. If you invade them, you can get in on their game as an opposing force, and start taking away their points while making some more of your own. The games get progressively more complicated, with more intricate environments, obstacles, and even vehicles like bikes and cars. Everyone wears special clothing, which color-coordinates the teams and alliances in realtime, but it’s not uncommon to get lost and confused. That’s part of the game, and your intelligence is factored into those weight classes I was telling you about. I know this was less of a review, and more of an overview, but I don’t really want to give you my opinion. I want you to see it for yourself. If you’re not much of a runner, or you don’t feel ready for the competition, there is a spectator component, so you can just check it out to get a better sense of what I’ve been talking about.

Microstory 2407: Zombie Dome

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Zombies! Get your zombies here! We got fast zombies, slow zombies, zombies who are still a little bit intelligent, zombies who mindlessly continue on with the jobs that they supposedly had when they were still alive. You choose your environment, and you choose your level of difficulty, and then you just try to survive. They have some pretty crazy scenarios. I love zombies, so I’m biased, but I think you could have an entire planet just designated for this, and it would be great. Here’s what’s interesting about it, and the kind of unique thing about Castlebourne over all. They really lean into the fact that human bodies are completely expendable these days. They put a lot of work into building them for us. They have some fancy new technology that can grow a clone of you in a matter of minutes, I don’t understand it. Or you can choose your own creative avatar—like a bunny, or an iron giant—though that’s not really allowed in Zombie Dome. You’re supposed to be a human running from humanoid zombies. That’s the thing. But here’s a choice I never thought I would get to make. You can turn into a zombie in certain variations. When they bite you, if you don’t die, you continue as one of the undead. They’ll pump you full of drugs, and impair your brain processing. You’ll start walking around trying to bite other people. It’s a trip. I wanted to see what it was like, so I intentionally got bitten. Don’t worry, there are fail-safes in place. No matter how stunted your mind is, there’s always this part of you that is aware that none of this is real, and that you can break out of it if you need to. You can force your real consciousness back to the surface, and start being a normal person again. You’re dead, so you can’t keep playing like that, but you can make your way to an emergency exit, and quit playing. At that point, you can request a respawn into a normal body again, and start all over. I never felt unsafe in there even though that’s the point. It’s true, as I said, I love this stuff, so I kind of went into it really prepared. You might have a different level of preparation, but they’ll take care of you. They won’t let things go too far. Even when you’re still alive, you can put a stop to a zombie attack by uttering your safeword, which you will choose ahead of time. It can’t be too obvious, like, help, or no, stop! but I’ve seen it work. I had a bunch of buddies who were there specifically to test these systems. They chose different safewords at different times, and they always worked. We were there to test the boundaries, and make sure that the safeguards were sufficient, and never faltered. Highly recommended, but bear in mind this is not for everyone. It takes a certain kind of constitution, and most people should know whether it will be good for them or not, and again, if it’s not, you can just leave.

Microstory 2112: Been Burned

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Sorry to worry you. The ID makers who were looking for the girl didn’t hurt me. As they were closing in, I slammed my laptop shut, and took off. That’s why I didn’t get a chance to technically finish yesterday’s blog post. I then forgot to stop the scheduled social media post where I imply my demise from going out. Those kind of time-delayed messages might work great for other people, but with my terrible memory, it’s just a dumb idea. So from now on, if I die, you won’t see one final post that suggests that’s what happened, you just won’t ever hear from me again. In reality, everything turned out okay. The girl is safe, and on her way to finding her real family. She agreed to an emergency DNA test. They still don’t know who her parents are, but it was enough to determine that the couple who raised her were not related to her at all. They were a thousand miles away, in pursuit of her. They only found me, which I thought would indeed result in my death, but it obviously didn’t. One flaw in this plan is that it gave the two of them a head start on their escape from being caught by the authorities themselves. In luring them away from her fake daughter, I necessarily kept them away from anyone who might hold them responsible for their despicable actions. I reached out to the federal government, but they might never find them. And anyway, it’s not my problem anymore. I’ve done all I can for the situation. Now I have to figure out what I’m going to do with my own life. I’ve been burned. The Kansas City cops know that I had been hiding in Iowa, and that I ended up in Alabama, so I can’t stay here, or go back to either of those places if I want to stay free. I could try to sneak down into Mexico, or wind my way up north to hide in Canada instead. Neither option sounds particularly appetizing to me. The U.S. has strong extradition policies with both neighbors in every version of Earth that I’ve been to. I think the best thing I can do now is turn myself in. I’ll do it, but I have some conditions. You can punish me, or make me pay, for what I’ve done in any way that you see fit, but I refuse to acknowledge your belief that I’m not from another universe. You can think whatever you want about me, but you’re not going to brainwash me into falling in line. Even if that means that my punishment is enhanced in some way, then fine. As Selena Gomez says, I won’t apologize—why should I apologize? No, I won’t apologize for who I am. I’m done running, though. No need to come pick me up. I’ll be there soon.

Microstory 2111: I Did Not Kidnap The Girl

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It’s been a few days, so I can finally be honest with you. I did not kidnap the girl. Her so-called parents are the ones who did that, but I’m not the one who got her out of that situation. As soon as she told me what she remembered about her past, I reached out to my old social worker for guidance on my secure network. I told him that I didn’t think that she was safe, and later that local law enforcement was not doing their due diligence to help her. I can reveal to you now that this was all happening in Iowa. I’ve been to Chicago several times in my life, and more than once, I got there via train. So I couldn’t tell you when this specific instance was, but basically, I would have to pass through Iowa to get there, and one time, I stepped off the train for maybe thirty seconds when we made a stop, and then got right back on. Besides that, my only prior experiences with Iowa have involved driving behind incredibly frustratingly slow drivers. I hate Iowa, I never ever wanted to come here, and even though you didn’t know that about me, I felt like it was the best place to hide. Maybe psychic powers really do work to a very low degree, and you could sense that in me. Who knows? Anyway, when I started worrying about what would happen to this teenage girl if she had to go back to her captors, I asked my social worker for help. He has a lot of contacts, many of whom work in various government departments. He called a friend of his who works in the FBI. They have a special program for this very thing. To my knowledge, it’s not used very often, but it’s quite important when it’s needed. They are the ones who took the girl, and I agreed to pretend that it was me in order to throw the ID makers off the scent. My ability to stay secure and hidden from them was deliberately flawed, so they would follow me instead of her. And it worked. I made it all the way to Alabama, which is another state for which I don’t have a lot of love. They’re outside right now, sniffin’ around, looking for my exact location. I normally like to write these in a word processing program, and then copy it over to my blog, but I’m working right in the blog this time, so it can post automatically, even if they find me before I have a chan

Microstory 2110: That’s Fair, I Hope

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I took her. I intercepted transport from the group home back to where her kidnappers live, and I put her through what she’s already gone through twice now. Someone took her from her real parents, and then the ID makers took her from them, and now I’ve taken her from them. I honestly don’t know if it was the right thing to do, but I had to get her away from those people. She outed them as her abductors, and even though they’ve reportedly never abused her before, she was living in misery, so this may push them over the edge for all we know. They might kill her, and make it look like a suicide, which would make them my archnemeses. I really don’t know; the level that these people are unpredictable is ten, ya see? We’re both on the run now, and I obviously can’t tell you where, or it might get back to the Ol’ Man, and the Ol’ Miss. My little secure workstation is mobile, though, which is how I’m able to post this without being traced. She is four months from turning eighteen, at which point, she’ll be able to make her own decisions. She says that her first order of business will be to submit to a DNA test, so they can find her true family. We can only hope that she is in the system. If I have to keep her safe, and everyone at bay, then that is what I’ll do, regardless of what happens to me in the end. I can’t really say much about what we’ve been dealing with since last night, because I don’t want to leave any clues about our location. We could be in Mexico by now, or close to it. Or maybe we’re on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, or even a southern state where they like to play golf. All I’ll say is that she is safe with me in every way possible. I never thought I would do anything like this, but I will never hurt her, and I won’t let anyone else hurt her either. She is free to go whenever she wants, and she understands that. If she ends up deciding to just go back to those people, then I’ll drive her there myself, and finally just turn myself in...for everything. That’s fair, I hope.

Microstory 2108: My Total Withdrawal

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One thing that the couple who set me up with this untraceable computer cage didn’t realize is that I pay attention to the things that happen around me. I watch the cable guy installing my TV and internet. I watch the cashier ring up my items at the grocery store. I even watch the mail deliverer sort and scan the pieces of mail as they approach my door. There is not a single vending machine, janitor’s closet, ATM, car hood, desktop computer, or anything else like that open that I pass that I don’t inspect to the best of my ability. I’m not very handy, I don’t generally know how things work, but I like to have some idea of what they look like inside, because I’m a curious specimen, but I do not like surprises. I’ll never need to know how to load money into an ATM, and if I do, I would receive the necessary on-the-job training, but I might as well take a look while it’s there in front of me. When they installed all this gear, I took notes, some in my head, but some on a paper receipt from my wallet. When you’re on the run, you can’t trust anyone. I built a replica of their handiwork at a second location, and that’s where I am now, in hiding. The only reason I’ve not been living here the whole time is because I didn’t want to be seen going to and from it, but now that I can’t go back to work, it doesn’t really matter. I still had a little cash left over from my total withdrawal in Kansas City, and I received an advance while I was a janitor, so I’ve been stocking up on supplies in preparation for something like this. I will find a way to pay my employers back, but right now, I need to focus on my survival. I still don’t know if I’m going to stay where I am now, or if I’m going to run again. The ID makers have my fate in their hands, just as I had theirs in mine. I made my choice on what to do with them, and I’ll have to live with that. I just hope that the girl they kidnapped makes her way back to her family. Then it will all have been worth it. Signing off now, from my secret location inside a secret location.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 27, 2399

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Mateo is closest to the window. He looks out of it to see whether it explains why no one else is here. Based on what they’ve learned from Heath and Imani, even on the off hours, the auditorium is never empty. Whether the speakers are rehearsing, or worshipers are praying, this place is never as dead as it is now. It’s also falling apart, as is everything outside, which can really mean only one thing. “We’re in the Facsimile. Did we just skip over the entirety of Saturday?”

“Why did you bring us here?” Leona demands to know from Dalton.

“I just reset the timeline,” Dalton begins to explain. “Anyone who was still in the Third Rail has forgotten everything that’s happened in the last few days. Well, they didn’t forget. To them, it never happened. I brought everyone here so you will remember. This is not a gift. I did this so that you will know for the rest of your few remaining days that you did this to yourself. When the Reconvergence comes, you will have no hope of escaping. Reality will collapse, and you’ll just blink out of existence.”

“We’re supposed to be friends,” Leona reminds him. “Why are you doing this?”

“We’ve  not been friends for a long time,” Dalton argues. “As for why I’m doing this, I’m not. I told you, you brought this on yourselves. All you had to do was build your little satellites, and save your little refugees, and leave the rest to me.”

“So you’re just going to kill us,” Leona states.

“Alternate versions of most of you will remain. For the rest, you’re collateral damage. I’m sorry it had to come to this.”

“We know how to get out,” Mateo contends. “You’re not dooming us.”

“I am, though. The door in the un-Salmon Civic Center has been closed. It’s technically still there, but I filled it up with cement. You could try to chisel through, I guess.” Dalton looks at his watch. “I don’t like your chances.”

“There’s still time,” Leona pleads. “Don’t do this. When we get out of here another way, and we will, because we always do, you’re going to regret it.”

“Whatever. I’m not too worried about it.” Dalton reaches out towards Alyssa. “Come dahling,” he says in a British accent.

“I’m not going with you,” Alyssa spits back. She takes Mateo’s hand, but she’s not doing it just because they love each other. She’s slipping him a note.

“This is non-negotiable. You’re gonna give them false hope that all they have to do is teleport to the Constant, or something.” He takes her by the hand, and whisks them both away.

“I don’t understand,” Senator Morton says. “What is this place?”

Leona explains to all those not already in the know where they are. If they don’t find the exit by midnight, they will be stuck here for another week, and that’s assuming they can make it by the time it hits midnight again. That may be what Dalton wants. His primary objective seems to be getting people out of his way. As far as they know, though, he doesn’t kill people. This seems very unlike him, and unless he’s just another version of Constance, there is another way out of here.

“There is,” Mateo jumps in after Leona’s done. He holds up Alyssa’s note. Scribbled quickly in god-awful handwriting, it says BACK DOOR. “There’s another exit.”

“Great.” Aldona throws up her hands. “There’s a back door somewhere, but we have no clue where.”

“Aldona,” Leona begins, “if you know something about the future that will help us, now is the time to ignore my rules of time travel, and just tell us.”

“I would tell you if I did,” Aldona replies. “I was not aware that this would happen. If Dalton has the power to reset the timeline, maybe nothing I knew of the future has done us any good. I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore.” She’s distraught.

“We don’t have time to search the whole planet,” Leona complains, “even if he let us keep our trusty teleporter. I have access to an aircraft. Ramses specifically designed it to be duplicated into this dimension, and be ready to go if and when we ever needed it, but where are we going to take it?”

“I know where we need to go.” Tarboda looks at Mateo. “We’ve been there.”

Mateo looks puzzled. Then he starts to think. “The antipodes,” he realizes.

“Which antipodes?” Leona asks.

“What is an antipode?” Labhrás asks.

“Kansas and Madagascar,” Tarboda answers Leona. “I don’t know for sure that it’s right, but there’s a weird dimensional thing out there, and if I were to install a back door, the first place I would think is the opposite of where I put the front door.”

“That makes some sense,” Winona encourages.

“It’s our only hope. Can everyone walk? Our aircraft will fly, not none of the other vehicles in this dimension are operable, and the Lofts are about an hour away.”

The group starts the hike northward from the Plaza to the Crown Center area. They don’t slow down, and they don’t make any stops. Their destination being very intentionally the farthest point on Earth from where they are now, it’s pretty much the longest flight they could possibly have to take. The jet is small, and barely big enough to fit all of them. Not everyone has a seat, but they’re not exactly worried about federal regulations at the moment. There is not enough time to make more than one trip. Ramses engineered it to be fuel efficient, and that meant sacrificing speed. It takes them the entire rest of the day, placing them within minutes of their midnight deadline. They don’t even have time to find a landing spot in all this dense vegetation. There aren’t enough parachutes for everyone either, so they have to triple up, which is also extremely dangerous, but they don’t jump from very high. Leona and Tarboda go last after gaining some altitude, and making sure the jet flies off into the distance.

“Leona takes out her phone. “There’s no GPS here, but the terrain is the same as it is in the Third Rail, so I can get us there.”

“I can get us there,” Tarboda insists. “They were walking before, but now they’re running. With only a few minutes to spare, they find the half-hut. From the looks of it, it’s the other half. This is obviously not where Cheyenne and her key friends are living, though, because they were able to access the portal on a day other than Salmonday.

“Okay,” Leona says. “I’ll go first, and if I don’t come out in one minute, assume this is a one-way trip, and just follow me. If it’s killed me, well...you would have died in a matter of weeks anyway, right? All right, see you on the other side!” She runs through. Thirty seconds later, she peeks her head back through. “It’s two-way. Come on in.”

Everyone files in, with Mateo as the caboose. They’re in a world of white, like the Construct from The Matrix. A vague blur appears before them like a TV with a bad signal, then solidifies into Cheyenne. “You’re back.”

“Yeah, sorry,” Mateo begins. “We wouldn’t have come, except—”

“I was just gonna say that you’re right on schedule.” She points. “Walk that way.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 24, 2399

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There is something wrong with Alyssa’s brain. Or her body. Or both. Or maybe there’s something wrong with Leona’s body instead. Ramses’ current theory—with no evidence—is that whoever wants Leona Matic to die had a two-fold plan to accomplish it. Step one: get her into Leona Reaver’s body. Step two: prevent her from leaving that body, or coming back to her real body. To put it another way, they locked her in, and just in case she ever found a way to break free, they also locked her out of her own body. Alyssa is just kind of caught in the crossfire of that. Now that she’s here, she is unable to leave, because it would open a vacancy for Leona’s return, and their enemy does not want that to happen.

Ramses also believes that it’s possible for Alyssa to look more like herself before he comes up with a permanent solution. Time powers are apparently more mental than they are physical, meaning that there’s a chance she can create illusions from here. He said that it can’t hurt to try, so she did a few times, but she never even came close. It didn’t feel like it did when she used her ability before. The way she sees it, it would be like transferring the mind of someone with legs into the body of an amputee, and expecting them to walk again just because they remember what it was once like. Still, she doesn’t want to give up, so when he urged her to meditate in order to reactivate that side of herself, she decided that she might as well. She’s been spending most waking hours doing it, if awake is even the right word. In the darkened room there are only candles, a pillow to sit upon, and a mirror in front of her. She has to force herself to concentrate and not check it every ten minutes. When she does check it, the result is always the same. She still looks like Leona, and that is probably never going to change.

“Okay,” Alyssa says to herself. “You can’t look for another hour. How am I meant to know when it’s been an hour? Well, people who are good at meditating probably develop the magical power to automatically know things like that, so you’re off to another bad start. Just close your eyes, and stop thinking.” She holds there for what may be the hour that she was waiting for, or just another ten minutes. “Stop. Thinking. You think too much.”

“I agree,” comes a voice.

She’s scared to check. Was that in her head, or is someone else in the room? It didn’t sound like Ramses, or anyone else she knows. “Is that you, God?”

“Close. I’m a hawk. Majestic creatures.”

Alyssa opens one eye. She’s not in the meditation room anymore. She has no idea where she is. She opens the other eye. “What just happened?”

“I brought you back. Your reality needs you,” the mysterious stranger claims.

“Who are you?”

“You don’t recognize me? No, I suppose you wouldn’t in this body. It’s Dalton.”

“Nice to meet you, Dalton...I think.”

“No, we’ve met. I traced your location. This is where I sent you, and it’s where you’ve been. I mean, it was where you were in the future, but it’s the past now.”

“What the hell are you talking about? How far back in the past are we?”

“About four and a half billion years.”

“This again? Goddammit!” Alyssa laments. “Okay, I have power, but I’m not that powerful. You’re telling me I ended up here just because I was meditating?”

“Must have been a coincidence,” Dalton says. “I’m the one who brought you back here, using the temporal translocator.”

“What do you want with me? I’m telling you, we’ve never met. Perhaps there’s another me in another reality, or something? I don’t know, I’m still learning this stuff.”

“Leona, I know that you—”

“Wait, Leona? That’s who you think you’re talking to? Well, that’s your problem, dude. I’m not really Leona. My name is Alyssa McIver. I’m just stuck in her body.”

“Pshaw. I’m the master of switching bodies. You don’t think I would be able to tell? I did my research. I know who you are.”

“Maybe that’s just who the assassin wants you to think. Something went wrong with the switch. We can’t switch back. Maybe it’s, like, masking our neural signatures; making me look like Leona, even from a brain scan. Honestly, now I’m just pulling words I’ve heard Ramses say.”

“So, you admit you’re lying, Leona.”

“That’s not what I meant!” She tries to remember what the internet said about meditating and centering one’s self. “Look, Mr. Dalton. I’m sure you have perfectly reasonable intentions, but you got the wrong guy. Why don’t we both just go to 2399, and get this all sorted out, okay?”

“No, I can’t. I can’t use the machine again,” he contends. “Even if you’re not really Leona, you’re close enough. If she switched bodies with you, it means she trusts you, which means you can do this job. I found you by hacking into the Omega Gyroscope, so it thinks you’re Leona too, and in the end, that’s all that really matters.”

“What job are you talking about? What’s the gyroscope thing again? I’ve never seen it, so I can’t remember what they said about it.”

“The Gyroscope is a thing that you own, but you’ll lose possession of it in 50,000 years. I can’t let that happen. Someone has to be in charge, or it won’t work. So I’m going to close the door, and leave you in here. You’ll reconnect to it every 49,000 years.”

“What? No. Don’t do that. What the hell are you doing? Let me out!”

“Don’t worry. The toilet and sink are in the corner. Those shelves are stocked with enough food for a month, but you won’t need it. You’ll only be inside for about five days. Try to get some rest, and don’t let yourself go crazy. It looked like you were meditating. You’ll have plenty of time to perfect your technique.”

“Stop!” Alyssa pleads, trying to keep the door open, but ultimately no match for his strength. “Please! I don’t want to be locked in! Please let me out! Dalton! Dalton!” He wins out, and gets the door closed. She starts to bang on it, and the walls, but receives no response. If anyone can hear her, they don’t care, can’t help, or won’t try. Though, if the time bubble activated immediately, it’s already been over a hundred thousand years for that guy. So she gives up, and just tries to teleport to the other side of the door. It doesn’t work. She spends the next hour-slash 36,000,000 years trying again, and looking for any other way out, but this is a cell designed to keep people in, and is probably inescapable. So she gives up on that too.

Four and a half billion years later, the door pops open on its own, and blinding light floods in through the crack. Alyssa tries to open it more, but there’s something blocking it. She pulls the door in, then back out, then it, then out. It’s going a little farther each time, and the sound it makes sounds familiar. Once her eyes adjust to the sunlight, she can see that it must be snow. It’s all over the place, part of which must be preventing her from getting out. She keeps working at it, though, and eventually shaves off enough to slip out. Wait, no, it’s freezing out here. She goes back inside, and retrieves a heated suit from the emergency kit. They’re thin overalls, but warm enough to handle the coldest of conditions. She takes the rest of the kit with her, and slips out again.

Alyssa comes face to face with a bear, growling at her. At least it looks like a bear, but unlike any kind she’s ever seen before, even in pictures. She realizes that she’s in a cave, and this big fella is the one what lives here. She presses her back against the ice wall behind her, and tries to inch her way to the side, but he doesn’t like that. He doesn’t want her to be there, he doesn’t want her to leave; why can’t this guy make up his mind? That’s when she remembers that she can teleport now. She tries to make a jump to the cave opening behind the bear, but it’s not working. Whatever was preventing her from escaping the stasis chamber is still doing its thing.

The emergency kit. It has a signal pistol. She carefully sets it on the ground, not wanting to make any sudden movements. She opens it slowly, and sticks her hand inside. She starts feeling around for the gun, maintaining eye contact with the bear. He hates it even more when she tries to look away. There it is. She quickly pulls it out, aims it, and shoots. The flare goes towards the bear, but doesn’t hit it. Instead, its lodges itself in the ice wall, and starts spewing out sparks. This is enough to scare the animal into running away from it. Alyssa takes this opportunity to run past it, and out of the cave. She’s not out of the woods yet, though. When the bear recalls that there’s no backdoor, it follows her, and starts to charge. She has to keep running, but she knows that she’s no match for its speed. She can practically feel its breath on the back of her neck when it suddenly disappears. She instinctively spins around, causing her to trip on a rock, and fall to her ass.

The bear is on the ground a few meters down the hill, a wooden pole sticking out of it. No, it’s not a pole. It’s a spear. She turns her head. A man still has his arm forward in the follow-through. Like the bear, though, there’s something very wrong with his face. He looks unlike any man she’s ever seen. It’s sort of flat and uglyish. He has one brow, instead of two, sitting upon a more pronounced forehead. He’s short and wide, but not fat. He does look like he’s smiling at her, though, so he probably was trying to save her life, instead of just wanting to kill the bear. As he approaches, Alyssa instinctively recoils, so he gives her a wider berth, and goes over to retrieve the spear from the bear. It’s still moving a little, so he serves it a death blow to the neck to put it out of its misery.

“Umm...thank you,” Alyssa says to him, still nervous.

He looks at her quizzically, and faces the direction he came from. He grunts something loudly in a language that she doesn’t recognize. A woman appears from behind the hill, carrying a child. He’s maybe four or five years old. She looks more like a regular person, and the child looks like a cross between the two of them.

“Oh! You’re a primacean!” They’re an ancient relative of humans who lived tens of thousands of years ago. Some believe they interbred with modern humans, while others do not. “I guess this proves those people wrong.”

He looks at her quizzically again, as does his mate as she draws nearer.

“The door opened too early,” Alyssa says to herself. “Oh no, this isn’t good. There’s no telling how far off the mark I am; I’m not a historian.”

The massive language barrier made it difficult to communicate, but she was able to determine that they wanted her help transporting their kill back home. She does, and eats with them that night. What else is she gonna do, fix the stasis chamber?

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: December 16, 2398

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Angela is sitting on her bed, trying to do breathing exercises. Why does she need a bed? She’s only going to be here for six hours. No, don’t get distracted, that doesn’t matter. Breathe in slowly. Breathe out slowlier. Sit up straight, and puff up your chest. Give as much room to your bladder as possible.

There’s a knock at the cabin. “Angela?”

She finishes exhaling. “Yes, Moray?”

“Are you okay?”

“Open the door, Moray.” She’s speaking in that calm, meditative voice that people use to sound relaxed and unintrusive.

Moray does so, and asks again, “are you okay?”

She opens her eyes, and turns to face him. “I’ll be all right. Did you need something?”

“We’re just worried about you, you never came back to the game.”

“Right, I forgot. I’m sorry about that.” She turns back to the wall, and breathes deliberately again.

“Are you pregnant?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You look like our cow did when she was pregnant with a calf.”

Angela smiles, which turns into a yawn. “I’m not pregnant, Moray. I’m just meditating.”

“Oh.” He’s silent for a moment. “Can I join you?”

“One day I can teach you, but uh...that day cannot be today.” She breathes again.

Moray stops speaking as she continues her exercises with her eyes closed, but she can still feel his presence. That’s okay, if he just wants to watch, she’s not going to get angry about it. Or maybe she should, because this isn’t helping control her bladder very much. Jogging didn’t work either. Nor did pelvic floor exercises, though she probably misread the database, which would have likely gone on to say that that’s more of a recurrent process than a quick fix. Perhaps what she really needs is medical intervention.

Angela sighs, and hops off the bed. “Do you know where the infirmary is?”

“Yeah, we saw it on our tour, before you arrived. Are you hurt?”

“That’s a personal question,” she says.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

He leads her down the hallways and ladders. “It’s over there. I won’t disturb you any further.”

“Hey, Moray...”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

He nods, and walks off.

Angela steps into the infirmary. Only one person is in there with a lab coat, implying that he’s the doctor. “Hello, can I help you?”

She sighs again. “I feel the need to urinate, but I’m not allowed to, for reasons that I can’t really explain to you, but it’s a matter of life and death, and I know that sounds really weird, and I can’t say any more about it, but just know that I’m telling the truth. It’s really important that I hold it in until after the trip, because—”

“Madam Walton, it’s okay. I think I know how to help you.” He steps over to a refrigerator, and starts looking through it. “Ah, here we go.” He takes the vial out, and shows it to her. “Gonagozole. Now, this is not a safe medication, and I would not prescribe it for prolonged use, but if you just need to get through the day, it should be fine, and we can treat the side effects afterwards. Are you okay with that?”

“If it works, I should be able to recover on my own, but...what does it do?”

“It does a number of things, but the result you’re looking for is that it shrinks the uterus, which will alleviate your bladder. But that may not be enough” He takes out another vial. “This will enlarge your bladder, so there’s less pressure to urinate.”

“What are the side effects of these two things?”

“Nausea, diarrhea, headache, dizziness, fatigue, hot flashes, increased heart rate. You could contract a UTI, but I don’t see that happening with one dose.”

“I can deal with most of those, even the UTI, but not the first two. It’s not just urine. I cannot expel anything. The water in my system has to stay there.”

He sighs, and goes over to another fridge to retrieve a bottle of over-the-counter medication. “This will stop the nausea, and cause constipation. You won’t release any fluids, you probably won’t even cry.”

“I didn’t think about crying.”

“Madam Walton—”

“Angela.”

“Madam Angela, I cannot recommend you take these three medications in tandem. The side effects are mounting. Now, I will give them to you, because I have been instructed to literally give you and the kids whatever you ask for. This will work, but you’re going to be in an incredible amount of pain. It’s going to make you unbearably miserable.”

“I only need to last a day.”

“Still...I’d like to talk you out of it.”

Angela looks between the three medications. She has to do this. If there’s even a tiny chance that Alt!Tamerlane isn’t lying, she has to do everything she can to protect Marie. They’re two separate people now, it’s not a selfish act. “Will they still work if I’m unconscious, or would I just soil myself?”

“No, they would still work.”

“Then I need you to give me a fourth drug.”

“A sedative,” he guesses.

“Yes.”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

He doesn’t want to, but he apparently has to. “Follow me.” He leads her to the back of the infirmary, and into a nook with a somewhat private bed. “Lie down and get comfortable. You may remove your clothing, if you would prefer; I’ll close the curtain.”

“That won’t be necessary.” Angela stips down to her bra and underwear, and gets under the covers. She adjusts herself, and restarts her breathing exercises.

“Are you certain that you want to go through with this? You can still back out.”

She looks up at him with her most genuine facial expression. “Do it.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: December 12, 2398

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Mateo is up to his old tricks, though with a new twist. Every twenty-four hours, he and Danica are spirited away from their current position, and returned to a version of the time machine in the Constant. Instead of jumping a year into the future, though, they end up in a different parallel reality. They believe they have made their final jump now. They first went to the Fourth Quadrant, then the Parallel, then the main sequence, and finally the Fifth Division. There are only five of them total, so this ought to be the Third Rail again. Right? It has to be.

They leave the room, and head down the dimly lit passageways for Danica’s office. She tries to summon Constance, but she never replies. She tries to speak to whatever personality the AI in charge of this version may be, but no one else responds either. Either they’re in the right place, and there’s something wrong with the systems, or it’s a reality they were not previously aware of. “There’s one way to find out,” Danica says as they’re entering the office. “Help me move this.” She sticks her fingers underneath the edge of the back table.

Together, they carry it away to reveal nothing but an empty floor, and a papered wall. “Odd choice, I must say.”

She rolls her eyes, and peels most of the wallpaper away. Behind it, written on the wall in permanent marker, is a long-ass series of numbers and letters. “Yeah, that’s right. We should be home. So where is everyone?”

“This is some kind of code?” Mateo asks, mildly kicking the wall.

Danica starts to point at each number to explain them. H for heads on a coin, eleven for the outcome of a roll of two dice, six for the roll of one die alone, Queen of Hearts.” She takes a half step to finish. “I pulled six numbers for the lottery, five balls for bingo, and this...” She rips the rest of the wallpaper off to reveal a photograph of a lava lamp. “This is what that lamp over there looked like from my chair once I was done with all the other randomizations.”

Mateo nods. “So all of these variables are correct? This is indeed your version of the Constant?”

“It must be,” Danica decides. “The chances that every single outcome is the same in any other reality, especially when accounting for the lava lamp, are profoundly low. I’m not just talking about parallel realities, but other timelines.”

“Got it. So where is everybody?”

She regards him with distrust for a moment, having a debate in her own head, no doubt. Then she nods, and concedes. “Okay, follow me.” She leads him to a secret section of the facility, where they end up in a stasis chamber. This must be where she and the people she actually cares about were staying. It’s empty, as are the individual pods.

“There was always room for me in here with you,” Mateo notes.

She frowns. “You were never supposed to be here.”

He clears his throat. “Does the Omega Gyroscope prevent time travel?”

“Yes, that’s how I wanted it. That’s how we wanted it,” she corrects herself.

“Does it prevent time travel,” Mateo repeats, “or does it prevent altering the timeline?”

She looks away, clearly starting to see his point, but she doesn’t want to admit it.

He continues, “as long as that thing was working, I was always destined to travel back in time, and meet up with you. Your insistence that I’m not worthy of your time because of my intrusion is bullshit. You just don’t like me.”

“That’s not true, I don’t know you. No version of me knows any version of you very well. We’re salmon, the powers that be designed it that way.”

“The powers that be don’t have any jurisdiction in this reality, or over me anymore anywhere.”

“I know,” Danica acknowledges.

He sighs. “Can you get a time and date from one of these things?”

Danica taps on the screen a few times. “It’s dead.” She looks around. “Everything is dead. This is emergency lighting.”

“We seem to have life support.”

Danica looks towards the door, and thinks. “Or we don’t need it anymore.”

They jog down the hallways, and up to the main area for more information. They stop when they see the elevator shaft, which is no longer a shaft. Well, it still may be a shaft, but the wall behind it is gone. It leads to a short hallway, and a set of doors. “Has that always been there?” Mateo asks.

“Definitely not. This has been remodeled.”

They shrug at each other, and exit the building together, opening the double doors in sync. They have to blink when sunlight flies down to attack their eyes. They can obviously tell immediately that they’re in a breathable atmosphere. It’s the future. When they regain their site, they find themselves on a concrete trail, surrounded by lush vegetation, under a blue sky. A waterfall splashes pleasantly into the river or lake below. They’re not alone. Others are enjoying the day, casually strolling around the valley. Mateo notices an interesting symbol on a fencepost sign. It’s five keys in a 3D circle, with a sixth key in the center, larger and more prominent than the others. Danica spins around, and pushes the vines out of her way to try to open the doors again. “Locked.”

“That’s okay, I think I can teleport here, which implies that your precious gyroscope doesn’t last forever.”

“Well, prove it,” Danica suggests.

“There are too many people around,” he says. “We don’t know what they know.”

“It’s okay,” a familiar voice begins. “If you need to teleport somewhere, no one around will mind.” It’s Cheyenne. She’s smiling at them like a local before a couple of tourists. “As long as you take care not to disrupt the plants.”

“I’m sorry, have we met?” Mateo asks her.

“No, I don’t believe so. I have a pretty good memory.”

He nods. “Could you—and this may sound odd—tell us what year it is?”

“It’s December 12, 2398, according to the new Clavical Calendar.”

“Never heard of it,” Mateo says. “But it’s nice to meet you.” He offers his hand, which Cheyenne shakes. This seems to be when and where she’s from.”

“Even if you’ve spent your whole life on this world,” Cheyenne continues. “Surely you would have heard of the Clavical Calendar.”

“Why do you say that?” Danica asks. “What’s so special about this world?”

“It’s close to a black hole,” Cheyenne explains as she’s still shaking Danica’s hand. “A minute here is equal to about an hour out there.”

They disappear. They all disappear.