The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 30, 2482

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The technicolor web encompassed them as it did every time they used the quintessence drive. They faded into blackness before the stars and other celestial bodies reappeared. It didn’t look like anything had changed, though. They seemed to still be orbiting Dardius. Had something gone wrong? “Has something gone wrong?” Marie asked. “It looks the same.”

“Not exactly the same.” Her sister pointed through the window, at the terminator line that separated night from day. “We should see lights from the cities.”

“Lee-Lee?” Mateo asked.

She looked at her watch, knowing what he wasn’t saying. She stared at it for a moment before dropping her wrist, and regarding the group. “It’s June 30...2082.”

“I’ve never been to this year before.” Mateo shut his eyes, and concentrated. “I can feel her. She’s nearby. But...it’s weird. She’s still...”

“In flux?” Ramses guessed. “I feel that too.”

“What was this world like in this time period?” Olimpia asked.

“It wasn’t populated yet,” Leona began to explain. “I think these are the beginnings of something known as The Sanctuary. I suppose the whole planet ends up being thought of as a sanctuary, but back then, it was just one hotel. There could be no one down there besides Romana, or only a handful of people. If Meliora’s around already, she’ll be able to help us figure this out.”

“I can figure it out,” Mateo decided. “I’m just going to teleport down to her.”

“Don’t be reckless,” Leona warned.

“Helping or hurting, honey. Helping or hurting.” With that, he disappeared.

He was standing inside of a construction site. By the looks of the architecture, it appeared to be a hotel, but it was nowhere near ready for people to move in. This probably was indeed Sanctuary, just in its very early days. There could be enemies nearby, or not. There was no way to know, and the only rational reaction was to be cautious and quiet. He was standing in front of a door, which was where the tethering signal was coming from. He reached for the knob when one footstep gave him pause.

“What are you doing here?” Holy shit, that was a face he hadn’t seen in a good long while. It was Dave, a.k.a. The Chauffeur.

“Where should I be, if not here?” Mateo questioned.

Dave sized him up and down. “You hold yourself differently. You seem more comfortable. You’re not the same man you were when we last saw each other.” He was right. It had been centuries.

“You didn’t notice the spacesuit I’m now wearing?”

“That too.” Dave looked around for other threats. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but if you have plans for that young woman in there, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to ask you to take a step back.”

This surprised Mateo. “You’re protective of her?”

“She needs protection.”

Mateo flicked the door open. Romana was standing in a lit reading nook of the hotel suite. She was surrounded by a swirling swarm of dark particles. They made her disappear for a couple of seconds, only to return her for a couple more before sending her away again. It was unending. Her eyes were closed, as if trapped in some form of stasis. “That’s my daughter. I’ve been looking for her.”

“Are you lying?” Dave asked.

“Don’t you know me well enough?” Mateo asked him. “I’m the good guy. No, I’m not lying. Her name is Romana Nieman.” He watched as she disappeared and reappeared over and over and over again. This was Buddy’s doing, just as he suspected.

“I’ve been trying to get her out of there for years,” Dave explained. “Every time I get close, those black fly things attack me, and send me somewhere else. Sometimes it’s just to the other side of the room, but I have had to claw my way back from decades in the past. I’m afraid they will one day zoicize me.”

“This is my fault. The man who has her captive and I did not part ways well.”

Dave lifted his chin in realization. “That sounds about right. Can you help her?”

“Tell me where Buddy is.”

“I’ve never even heard of him.”

“Yeah, he’s new, for whatever that’s worth in our world.”

“There’s been no one at the construction site, besides me, The Builder, and Meliora Reaver.”

“Rutherford,” Mateo corrected. “Her name is Meliora Rutherford.”

“Indeed.”

“Give me a second,” he said with a finger up. “Why has no one come down here with me?” he asked through comms. “To stop me, or help?”

“We don’t see Dave Seidel as a threat,” Leona responded. “Do you need help?”

“I may. I’m going to try to take her by the hand. Come find me if I end up back in dinosaur times.”

Leona appeared from the other end of the hallway. “I’m here. We’ll battle the dinosaurs together.”

“A lot of changes with you too.”

All three of them stepped into the room. The dark particles menacingly expanded from Romana’s body, like bees protecting the hive, but they weren’t attacking yet. “I keep forgetting the rule, don’t antagonize the antagonist.”

“Not everything is about you,” a voice came from nowhere. A second swarm of dark particles appeared in a corner from which Buddy materialized. “The truth is, I didn’t even know you knew this woman. I took her to test Dave’s resolve.”

“My resolve?” Dave asked. “I don’t understand.”

“You’re special,” Buddy claimed. “Your powers are special. And I need them.”

“He wants you to get him a fruit,” Mateo said, jumping right to the end of this dumb spiel. “A citrus, to be exact.”

“Oh,” Dave said, knowing the limitations of time travel. “I can’t do that.”

Buddy laughed. “Temporal Citrus Explosion Syndrome is just another time illness, except instead of a person getting sick, it’s a fruit. You can protect organisms traveling through time. That’s your whole deal.”

“I’ve already tried,” Dave contended. “That was, like, the first thing Meliora had me attempt after she turned me into this. She too thought I was a loophole. And she didn’t have to kidnap anyone for it. She just asked, asshole.”

“As I said, it was a test. You failed to free her from her prison, and so here she shall remain forever. Sorry, Mr. Matic. I harbor no ill will against you, or her. I am aware that you had nothing to do with Superintendent Grieves’ betrayal a few years back. You weren’t even there!”

“Wait,” Dave said. He really needed to save the girl. “Perhaps there’s something else I can do for you. Let the girl go, and I’ll try my best. I can make no promises, but I may come up with an alternate solution that you haven’t thought of. My powers are not all that define me. I’m pretty clever.”

Buddy considered the offer. “You’ll have to do everything I say, no arguments. You have to make a genuine offer to get me that citron, even if it’s not exactly pleasant.”

“Okay,” Dave conceded.

“Thank you, Dave,” Mateo said sincerely.

“Just take care of her.” The way Dave said that, as if it was personal for him. He had never met Romana, but perhaps she reminded him of someone else.

Buddy reached out, and shook a reluctant Dave’s hand. “We got a deal.” He moved his hand over towards Romana. The dark particles broke orbit, and sped towards their master.

After he had reabsorbed them all from her, Romana’s knees buckled, but Mateo made a short jump, and caught her in time. “It’s okay, I got you.” She was still unconscious. He lifted her up in his arms, and looked over at Buddy. “If she doesn’t recover, you’ve become a real enemy, and that is not something you wanna be.”

Buddy titled his head and shrugged, apparently accepting the possibility.

“Dave,” Mateo went on. “Don’t lose yourself.” He exchanged a look with Leona, then they both disappeared.

“Get us out of here as fast as you can,” Leona ordered.

Ramses was hovering over the console, ready for this, having been listening to the brief but charged conversation. He engaged the machine again, and sent them away. It was a rocky trip this time. The technicolor web engulfed them on all sides, as usual, but it was uneven. The whole ship shook like it was experiencing turbulence. When it spit them out at the destination, they were sent tumbling through space, and were still feeling it here on the inside. Ramses first made sure that there weren’t any objects nearby that they might collide with. Then he shut off the viewscreens, so they wouldn’t be so dizzy anymore. The internal inertial dampeners were still shuttering a little bit, but holding together.

“The watch is having trouble calibrating,” Leona announced, bracing her hip against the wall. “Something went wrong.”

“All that matters is we’re together,” Mateo said. “I’m taking her to the realspace infirmary.” There were three infirmaries on this vessel. Two of them were in pocket dimensions, but one was just built on the ship itself.

“Good idea,” Leona replied to him before addressing the group. “No teleporting, and stay out of the pockets. They may be compromised.”

Ramses worked on the console to stabilize the ship. After a minute, it was still having attitude problems, but the shaking stopped. While he was trying to fix the rest, Leona sat down, and fiddled with the watch. She tapped on her comm disc. “June 30, 2182. We only jumped a hundred years.”

“That’s not where I was trying to take us!” Ramses complained.

“We’ll figure it out,” Leona assured him.

They did figure it out, and it didn’t take them very long either. The slingdrive was very sensitive, and could only make one jump before it needed some time to rest. It was all too technical for Mateo to understand, and he didn’t care to learn the details anyway. It needed a break in between uses. Whatever. That changed nothing about Romana’s condition. She was okay, though, and he needed Olimpia’s comfort to remember that. According to the medical pod’s diagnosis, she was only sleeping. Her EEG suggested that she would wake up on her own, and it was safer to just wait for that to happen than to try to wake her up some other way.

There was a little bit of news while Mateo sat by his daughter’s side. While seemingly random at first, their arrival at this particular point in spacetime led them to a discovery. The Insulator of Life was just floating in the middle of space. There was no telling what it had been through, but Ramses seemed to think that someone’s consciousness was being stored inside of it. He was forced to put the investigation on the backburner while he sorted through the slingdrive issues. They must have solved the issue one way or another, because by the end of the day, they were able to make another jump. Leona announced that they were where they wanted to be, orbiting Castlebourne on June 30, 2482.

He never left the infirmary, and neither did Olimpia. He ran through the past couple of weeks in his head, replaying the events that led him here. What could he have done differently? Could he have handled the Buddy situation differently? Could he have urged Ramses to exercise caution, and wait on trying to tether the group. It seemed like a good idea at the time, to prevent any of them from getting lost, but their plan backfired, and this may have lasting consequences. One of those consequences was staring him in the face. Rather, she would have been if her eyes were open. “Have you noticed?” he asked after a long time in the silence. “She looks older.”

Olimpia cleared her throat. “I believe she is. If she’s been off of the pattern since she disappeared, it’s been five years for her.”

“That’s not entirely true,” Leona said, stepping into the room to check on them. “I didn’t stop to make precise calculations, but just working from memory, I would say that she existed in the timestream for about four seconds at a time before jumping forward two seconds. I don’t know if it was exactly that, or what, but I did notice her being present for around twice as long as she was gone. I think Buddy knew more than he admitted. He obviously did this to disable our tether’s ability to track her location. She never had to jump forward very far in the future; just enough to clear the last ping before it reset.”

“So, how old is she?” Mateo pressed.

“At a two to one ratio, that’s about three and a third years.”

He looked back down at her. “She’s eighteen.”

“Her body is,” Leona clarified. “I don’t know how it subsisted this long in the dark particle temporal bubble, but we don’t know what happened to her mind in there. Age isn’t about how long you’ve been alive. It’s about how much time you’ve experienced.”

“I wish I could look at it that way, but all I see is five more years that I could have spent getting to know my daughter.”

They wanted to keep talking it through, but he just wanted to return to the silence. A couple of hours later, while Mateo and Olimpia were eating their feelings out of a dayfruit that was programmed to taste like chocolate cake, Romana finally woke up. It seemed, however, to be a double-edged sword. He was relieved for a moment when the EEG alerted them that her brain activity was increasing, then very concerned when she opened her eyes, and several dark particles wafted out of them before fading into nothingness.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 26, 2399

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Leona is grateful for the delay. It gave her the time she needed to practice Alyssa’s illusion power. As a bonus, with their relationship with her patched, Alyssa herself was able to teach her what she needed to know. It’s crazy that this is the same young woman they met less than a year ago. She was so ignorant, but so patient and welcoming, and now it feels like she gets this stuff better than they do. How much did Dalton tell her?

The sanctuary is packed. No, they don’t call it that. It’s just the auditorium. This religion thinks it’s different than the others, as if using more generic terminology somehow makes it less demanding of blind devotion. But they’re all the same. This, Mormonism, Christianity, Scientology. The details in their stories are irrelevant and interchangeable. Any wisdom or truth in their claims are overshadowed by their insistence that this is the only path to righteousness. That’s why Leona is choosing to reveal herself to this audience. While anyone will be able to log on and watch, this audience here is going to see what she can do in person, and they will instantaneously switch loyalties. Imani Pettis doesn’t think that’s going to happen. She thinks it will only strengthen their faith in Dalton. That’s just because she’s been too close to it for too long. These people are here because they don’t think for themselves. It’s not that they can’t; it’s that they don’t want to. Leona is going to wean them off of that mentality, but first, she needs their attention.

She’s sitting on the stage, watching the church leaders go over whatever garbage they’re trying to convince of the congregation. This is an introductory meeting house, so there is a lot they don’t know about the faith yet. Most of the agenda involves simply encouraging them to stick around and find out, rather than actually telling them something that helps them live better lives. Anyway, who is Leona to judge their methods? It obviously works. It’s probably not doing much today, though. Everyone knows that Leona is here, and that she’s here to do something big. Some in the audience may have no intention of converting to Daltomism. They just want to watch the big show from up close. A show is what they’ll get.

Now it’s her turn. She swallows her stage fright, and stands when Imani introduces her as the current leader of the new nation of Arvazna. “Thank you, Madam Pettis.” She turns towards the audience. “As she told you, I’m Leona Matic. What she didn’t tell you is that I...am from another world. I mean that literally,” she adds through the muted whispers of the doubters. “We call it the main sequence. Your world is the Third Rail. Over the next week or so, I’m going to be getting deeper into the secret truth, with the help of my new publicist team.” She smiles, and gestures towards two other people sitting downstage. “But I wanted to give you all a taste of it first, because I want you to understand something. Dalton Hawk...is a man.” Apparently, he’s never actually gone by his last name here, but they seem to understand who she means. “He is a man of immense power, but he is not a god. I should know...we were once friends. I honestly don’t know what happened between us. A lot of time has passed since we last saw each other. More for him than for me, I imagine.

“I know that this is hard for you to believe, especially those in the smaller congregations, who are watching from your own meeting houses. Some may have already turned off the feed, and I suppose I won’t be talking to you. I’ll be talking to the rest of you, who are open-minded, thoughtful, and interested in learning the truth. Now. Speaking of those watching from home, and other places, what you see here today is real. You may assume it to be nothing more than camera trickery, but I assure you that these holograms are powered by me, and me alone. What I’m doing is reaching across space and time, even to other realities. I’m copying photons of light from these places, and displaying them before you. The images I’ll be showing you really exist, somewhere, somewhen. Dalton Hawk has a different ability. He can conjure physical objects from these other realities that I mentioned. Again, it’s not that he is not powerful, but be wary of the tales the Word of Dalton tells you. They are not all true. He is trying to get you to believe in something, and he figured that something may as well be him. I’m just trying to show you the truth.”

That said, Leona turns herself into the accepted likeness of Dalton. The audience’s interest is piqued, but a sophisticated enough holograph machine could project such an image. This is why, after showing them a few more images, she recruits some help. Alyssa appears out of nowhere, and takes hold of Leona. She transports them both to a meeting house in New Orleans. This was part of the schedule, so the feed automatically switches to this new stage. She releases a few new holograms: of a giraffe, of a whale, and of the moon. Each time, she turns herself into a different celebrity that anyone from the Third Rail would recognize. She then hops off the stage, and starts shaking people’s hands. All of this could be fake unless tons of people can corroborate that they made physical contact with an individual. Alyssa teleports them again, this time to a meeting house in Vancouver. They repeat the bit all over the continent, and then all over the world.

The last location they go to is the largest meeting house in Kansas City. It’s the one where Heath started when he was a child. The crowd is cheering, ecstatic that their church was chosen to become part of the big show. They’re starting to believe too. It has to be real. It has to. After she’s done shaking hands, Leona climbs back on stage, and prepares to finish her speech from here. The back doors open suddenly, loudly like in a movie. Their ploy worked. She was confident that it would, but she never thought that Dalton would show up this quickly. They all assumed he would try to reach out to them covertly afterwards. But here Dalton is, walking down the aisle in his billowy robes.

He steps onto stage, and approaches her. “You got my attention.”

She tries to hand him her microphone. “Care to speak to your congregation?”

Dalton looks out over the audience, and into the main camera. “Did you notice I don’t have my cane?”

“Yes, Alyssa said she lost it.”

Dalton eyes Alyssa, who’s remained downstage and quiet this whole time, until it’s her cue to transport them to a new location. She’s scared of him. “Yes,” he confirms. “That seems to have led you to believe that I have now been stripped of my power.”

“Well, we know you have some level of mastery over the Omega Gyroscope too.”

He nods. “This is true. but that’s not my power. This is.” He raises his hand.

“Oh, shit.” Leona doesn’t know what’s going to happen, but it won’t be good.

“I am...inevitable.” Dalton snaps his fingers, and everyone in the auditorium disappears, except for him, Leona, and Alyssa. A bunch of new people are here now, though. Some of their friends have come, but so have the resurrected people who are supposed to be locked away in the black site. Heath and Vearden are notably absent. It’s nighttime. “I just undid everything.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: February 8, 2338

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In the year 2008, in one reality, day rewinder, Horace Reaver accidentally killed his best friend, Dardan Lusha. The former was only six years old, and the latter only seven. Knowing he was capable of it, Horace went back in time at the end of the day, and prevented himself from making the same mistake again. This was when he realized that other people only got one shot in their lives, and also when he knew that the two of them could no longer be friends. Dardan moved on with his life, never knowing what had happened to him. But Horace’s future daughter, Meliora knew, and she was worried that Dardan would always be in danger. She built a place called Sanctuary on a planet millions of light years from Earth. Here, normal people who were negatively impacted by time travel could live out the rest of their lives, protected and in peace. A fifteen-year-old Dardan was her first resident, but he was nowhere near its last. Even as travelers continued to change the timeline, Meliora rescued as many people as she could, always starting with Dardan Lusha. In one timeline, soon after him, she agreed to rescue a few more.

Starting with Ramses Abdulrashid, and ending with Jeremy Bearimy, seven more people were brought to the Sanctuary hotel in its very early days. There defeat Anatol Klugman. Though this enemy yet remained, the vacation was over. It was time to leave Sanctuary, and make a jump to over 300 years into the future. Mateo, Leona, and Kivi would be waiting for them to finish this once and for all. It was predetermined that when they arrived in 2338, the final battle would ensue. They could put it off as long as they wanted, but there was no avoiding it altogether. The duel had to take place, and the winner would decide both their own fate, and that of their opponent.

“That’s a beautiful story,” Anatol said in disgust. “Why don’t I remember any of it? I mean, I know how it happened. What I don’t understand is how you managed to overpower me, and let Tertius Valerius manipulate my memories.”

“We didn’t have to overpower you,” Mateo began to explain. “You agreed to forget about the challenge as long as we eventually got to it.”

“Why did I agree to forget about you friends, though?” Anatol pressed. “I still don’t remember those people.”

“We had him take a little bit more from your mind than you agreed upon. We figured you would circumvent the agreement yourself, so we at least wanted to protect them from your wrath.”

“Wait, you’re telling me you were worried I would betray you...so you betrayed me first?”

“Exactly,” Mateo confirmed.

“I know I’m supposed to be mad, but right now, all I feel is respect for your decision,” Anatol admitted.

“Thank you,” Mateo said. “It was actually all my idea. I had to make up for years and years of being all but completely useless, and having to rely on much smarter people.”

Anatol would have done a spit take if he had been drinking. “Do you believe you have accomplished this goal?”

Mateo looked over to his wife, who was on the other side of the sandstone monolith. She was warming up for the duel, supported by their people. Mateo felt bad about The Warrior being alone, and came over to at least clarify what was happening, and why. “Not in the least.”

“Indeed,” Anatol agreed. “Even today she fights for you as champion.”

“She trained for this,” Mateo said. “I never would have made it through that training. She has a knack for learning new things.”

“Do you honestly think that she can beat me? Keep in mind that you are no longer protected by the powers that be, and that I have already demanded Uluru not let anyone else on the battlegrounds. That is the only reason you beat Zeferino Preston, and I will not let you so easily come at me through a loophole.”

“Where is Zeferino, by the way? He was with you at the theatre, and then we never saw him again,” Mateo pointed out.

“I put him back in his reality,” Anatol answered. “He wasn’t fun to work with anymore.”

“Indeed,” Mateo responded simply.

“Is there a point to you being over here?” Anatol questioned.

Mateo placed a hand on his enemy’s shoulder. “Whatever happens today, just know that I still believe in you. I still believe you can be redeemed. All you have to do is take that first step. The second one will be easier, I promise.”

Anatol rolled his shoulder away. “It’s always mind games with you. People think you’re this helpless little moron who hides behind his friends, but I know the truth. I know that you’re the most dangerous of the bunch. But what makes you dangerous isn’t your intellect, or your muscles. It’s your ability to make even the most steadfast of people feel like they’re making a mistake; like you know something that they will never quite understand, not even once the fight is over. I believe that you are an undiagnosed psychopath.”

Mateo chuckled once, like a high school student who knows the middle school student will know better someday. “Catch you on the flippity-flop.”

Unlike the duel he had with The Cleanser those many years ago, there weren’t many people in the audience. Only Leona’s friends would be there to take witness. No other family, no people from their future, no bulkverse travelers. It was a private affair, and it was much simpler, which was why it was taking place on the Uluru rock formation, and not in the Colosseum replica. Uluru, the man, approached the center of the grounds, and began his opening remarks. “This is a physical duel, with swords as exclusive weapons. All temporal powers and patterns are temporarily suspended. Death is not required to indicate defeat, but it is also not against the rules. The winner may spare the loser, but in order to be considered the winner, they must be in a position where a final blow would end the battle, and the loser must be without options. Both of you have been trained...trained under different circumstances, but trained just the same. You know the difference between winning and losing, but if there is a dispute as to who wins, I will step in and make judgment. Does everyone understand?”

The two duelers walked towards him.

“I do.”

“Yes.”

Uluru looked from one to the other, assessing their fitness for the fight, and then he gracefully stepped back. “Have at it.”

The two of them began to clash. Anatol had been training for this sort of thing for more than his entire adult life, which was likely longer than most. They didn’t know if he was immortal, or if he just managed to pack in a whole lot of life during his prime years. He did look older than he did when this first began, but maybe Mateo was just imagining that. No matter what, he was a career fighter—which was what earned him the right to be called The Warrior in the first place—and Leona was not. She only trained for three years; by one of the most skilled fighters in two realities, but practice makes perfect, and Leona’s experience was limited. Still, Anatol was not overconfident, and he did not underestimate his opponent. He went at her with full force, and he clearly respected her. A lot of time travelers were from the past, during a time when women and minorities were considered less than. Yet nearly all of them embraced the wokeness of the future, either because they came to see it as superior, or because they never really bought into the racism and sexism of their day. Dr. Hammer posited that backwards-thinking time travelers necessarily did not exist, because if they were too tied down to the culture of their given day, they would never learn to escape it. Perhaps social responsibility was an important prerequisite. Anatol was evidently no exception, and unfortunately, that only lowered Leona’s chances of winning the duel.

Leona managed to hold her own, though. She just kept striking back, never letting him get any significant advantage over her. They swung and slashed and hit and kicked. The audience could see the fatigue setting in as the battle continued. If a scene in an action film were to go on this long, the audience would grow bored, and probably stop caring who won. They weren’t hopping off of rocks, or sweeping the legs. They were just desperately trying to cut each other with the blades, and never getting close enough. It would seem that Anatol’s advanced age, and Leona’s inexperience, made for quite an even match. Six minutes later, it was still going, which might not have sounded like a long time, but for this kind of combat, it was an eternity.

It was then that Mateo decided to break the rules, and step in. He walked right up to the duelers with his arms up, knowing that either of them could hurt him instead, whether by accident, or with malicious intent. Upon seeing him, they both dropped their weapons, and took a step back from each other. They were both grateful for the break. “Okay, okay, okay.” He smiled, not because it was humorous, but because it was absurd. “What the hell are we doing here?”

Anatol had to speak between breaths. “I made a challenge, and she accepted.”

“That was a long time ago,” Mateo pointed out, “for all of us.”

“Time ain’t nothin’ but a thang,” Anatol replied with the old adage.

Mateo didn’t know what he was going to say, so he just winged it. “The challenge was a duel, which has now taken place. There was no rule about someone needing to win, or how long it needed to go on. So let’s just say it’s done, and move on.”

“Someone needs to win,” Anatol argued, “or how will we decide what happens to the lot of you?”

“Is that really what you want, to be in control of powerless people? Is this the warrior’s way? Is this where you saw your evil plan going? There must be a reason they don’t call you The General, or The Lord High Commander.”

“I haven’t always won my fights,” Anatol began, “but I’ve never had a tie. It cannot end in a tie. This is not football.”

“No, you’re right,” Mateo agreed. “We can’t tie, because in a tie, both teams lose. I’m talking about a win-win situation. You walk away now, and the timeline will remember you as a merciful warrior, who fights with honor. You keep fighting my wife, whether you win or not, you’ll be forever known as a villain, not because she’s a hopeless girl, but because she is indisputably a good person, and everyone loves her.”

“You can’t control that,” Anatol contended. “You can’t decide how people perceive me, especially not in both directions of time.”

“We’ve done it before,” Mateo reminded him. “We restored the reputation of Nerakali Preston, Gilbert Boyce, and Horace Reaver. Hell, I’d like to think we even helped make Zeferino Preston look a little better. The jury’s still out on Arcadia; there are too many conflicting versions of her, and the noblest one doesn’t live in this universe.”

“All I have to do is walk away,” Anatol echoed.

“Might sound too easy to you, but remember where this offer is coming from,” Mateo said. “We are not known for being petty or vengeful, are we?”

“I suppose not.” Anatol considered it for a moment. He had long ago caught his breath, and was standing straight. He could go another round if he needed to, and so could Leona. Chances are, it would last another six minutes, and end just as inconclusively. “Very well.”

The three of them looked over to Uluru, who couldn’t care less about the results for this particular battle, and didn’t seem perturbed by the interruption.

Anatol picked up his sword, and jammed it into a crevice between himself and Leona. Assuming it was her turn to do the same, she followed suit. They shook hands, and then the Warrior dropped his Cassidy cuff, and disappeared. It would be the last time that anyone on the current Matic team would ever see his face.

“Well. That plan worked,” Mateo noted.

“I’m glad you rehearsed the speech,” Leona said, relieved at how well it went.

He didn’t rehearse nothin’. “What do we do now?” he asked. “We didn’t plan anything past the draw, and I imagine it’s only a matter of time before the next antagonist decides it’s their turn to torment us in what they believe to be a new and creative way.”

Leona retrieved her sword, wiped it off, and sheathed it. She picked up the primary cuff too. “Ya know what? I didn’t really like skipping from the 16th century to the 17th, to the 19th, and so on. I grew rather comfortable on the Bearimy-Matic pattern. Let’s put our cuffs on, and go back to that pattern.” She turned, and began walking towards their friends to tell them her idea.

Mateo, meanwhile, reached down and pulled Anatol’s sword out. He turned it up, and admired the craftsmanship. He wasn’t much of a swordsman—or any kind of swordsman at all—but this could come in handy one day.

“Put it down!” Leona ordered without turning back. “You’ll hurt yourself!”

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Microstory 1267: Harlan Baer

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Harlan Baer was a criminal, and he never tried to get anyone to believe that he wasn’t. He was a very low-ranking member of the Business Ends gang of Kansas City in the 21st century. When he was caught selling drugs on the corner, his superiors made no attempt to help him in any way. Nor did they ask him to do things for them while he was inside. He just wasn’t important enough to them, and this lack of mutual loyalty made him a perfect candidate for a new gang. While he was in jail, a very powerful temporal manipulator called The Cleanser pulled him out of his cell, and relocated him to several decades in the future, along with a small group of other guests. He had no strong feelings about these other criminals, and they had no strong feelings about him. The Cleanser had conscripted them for a mission, but because none of them was a salmon or choosing one, the trip itself could eventually kill them. And so the man they were asked to kill arranged for them to be transported to a special place called Sanctuary. There they would be allowed to recover, serve out their likely sentences in more humane conditions, and remain in the hotel forever. Harlan wasn’t interested in this, though. He wanted to go back to the real world, and armed with the knowledge that there was more to life than peddling drugs, do something good. So he asked to go back to Kansas City, where he soon became one of the first members of the Tracer gang. He never intended to start a movement, but more rehabilitating criminals followed suit over the course of the next few years. Harlan had few further interactions with people who could manipulate time, but he did help make the world a better place in his own special way.

Microstory 1245: Merton Casey

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Different people in the world of salmon and choosers were born with different abilities. Some could teleport, others could jump through time. Some could only see the future, or skip time. No one with any given time power was the only one of their kind, but some powers were rarer than others. One of the most coveted of these was anti-aging capabilities. Immortality on its own was possible to obtain, but a difficult series of tasks lie ahead for anyone willing to try for it. The next best thing to this was playfully called reyoungification, and one of the few people capable of this was named Merton Casey. He could alter anyone’s appearance back to how they were at any desired time of their lives. He also necessarily rejuvenated and healed them of whatever age-related diseases they might have contracted. He could make people young and healthy, but it came at great cost to him. Once people discovered what he could do, they started lining up for his services, and most were completely willing to accept the nature of the procedure. The awkwardness was only temporary, and to them, the benefits were too amazing to pass up. Merton couldn’t just wave his hands in front of his patients, and make them young again. He had to physically manipulate their bodies, all over. He had to smooth out wrinkles, and wipe away hair, and in some cases, shorten body parts. Doing this for anyone made him feel uncomfortable, but it was especially problematic when it was for a woman, which, let’s be honest, they made up the majority of his clients. So every case made his life that much more difficult to continue. Somehow being at least a little attracted to the patient made the whole thing worse; like he was violating them, even though they consented to this. A few didn’t consent, and then nothing happened. The worst of it came when he met a young woman named Paige Turner. She was fourteen years old when an antagonist aged her up to her twenties. Her reasons for doing this were her own, but the bottom line was that this woman never returned to reverse what she had done. After a year in this state, Paige decided she wanted to go back to being fifteen, and Merton was the only one they found who could help her. Unfortunately, he had never been asked to do anything like this before. His other patients wanted to be made young again, but never that young, and they were never meant to be that age in the first place. Paige was really just a child in an adult body, so touching her at all was even more offensive than normal. Fortunately, he was rescued from this job, by a woman who ran a special place that was designed to be a haven for people who had been negatively impacted by time travelers. She made an exception for Merton, and let him live in Sanctuary as well, despite having abilities of his own. He was protected from would-be clients here, and finally free of his trauma, so that he could heal, and move on.

Microstory 1233: Dodeka Sarkisyan

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Temporal manipulation of any kind is a dangerous thing, especially for those who have no time powers at all. For the most part, time travelers prefer to stay out of regular human business. Well, that’s not really true—sometimes their whole purpose is to change the past—but they do like to stay in the shadows. They don’t interfere in personal human affairs, unless it specifically has to do with them. Even the so-called bad time travelers stick to their own kind, because causing harm to a human is too easy, so they generally don’t see much point. They could go back in time and kill their enemy’s grandmother before she has any children, and their ultimate target would have no way of protecting themselves. This is where Meliora Rutherford Delaney-Reaver comes in, because this does sometimes happen, along with many other unfortunate things. She built Sanctuary millions of light years from Earth, in a heavily fortified building, to prevent other travelers from hurting the innocent. Dodeka Sarkisyan was one of these humans, though by her own part, she had nothing to do with what transpired. Dodeka’s mother died when she was only ten years old, and her father did not handle it well. His wife made a lot more money than he ever could, and he found it extremely difficult to make ends meet while trying to raise five children on his own. One of them was old enough to be emancipated, but probably not responsible enough to help take care of the rest. The second oldest was incredibly intelligent, and landed a scholarship at a prestigious boarding school on the other side of the country, so she was out before anyone knew what happened. Their late mother’s sister was capable of taking in one of the children, but not all of them, so the middle kid went off to live with her on the other side of the state. This left Dodeka and the baby with their dad, who was still struggling with his demons, even with the lightened load. He surrendered to a life of crime; organized crime, to be more specific. He was nothing special in the organization, but he wasn’t totally blameless either, so when a vigilante time traveler decided to go back in time and eliminate every single member of the crime family from the timestream, Sarkisyan was not excluded.

So now fifteen-year-old Dodeka was alone, and solely in charge of her rambunctious little brother. She might have been sent into the foster care system, but Meliora already knew enough about the future to know that this would not turn out well. So she stepped in, and fabricated distant relatives in Australia who were supposedly going to take care of the two youngest Sarkisyans. Instead, Meliora brought them to Sanctuary, which was at the time, basically a fancy hotel that no one ever needed to leave. Dodeka was grateful, perhaps more so than any other guest, because she understood what a gift this was. During her first week there, however, she noticed something odd about everyone else, and realized that she wasn’t built quite like them. Others were perfectly happy to have their every need catered to, but Dodeka didn’t like to feel useless, and she could see that there was plenty of work to be done at the hotel. Even if Meliora could do it all on her own, she shouldn’t have to. Dodeka needed to contribute, even if only in some small way, not only to justify her own presence in Sanctuary, but also to help protect those in most need. She knew she could have survived in the real world—even with her baby brother—but there were people there who had no choice; whose lives would have been in immediate danger if they ever found themselves back on Earth. She became the hotel’s bellhop. It was her job to check new guests in, and help them with special requests. She wouldn’t be the only employee in Sanctuary for long, though. She set an example for all to see, and pretty soon, more people were offering their various services. The staff, and the population as a whole, was growing at an alarming rate, and Meliora knew she needed to expand. People with the right experience left the original hotel, and built other structures, like houses, restaurants, and recreational areas. Sanctuary turned into a village, and then a city, and then a nation, and eventually, a fully populated world. The growth would have happened anyway, but it was Dodeka’s initiative that allowed for smooth transitions, and made way for a safe and prosperous new society on planet Dardius.

Bungula: Breathing Space (Part IV)

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Brooke, Sharice, and Mirage are sitting around a table solemnly. The fight is over, but they are still feeling the trauma. Brooke is this close to deleting the memory from her brain, but she can’t, because there is work to be done.

Mirage finally speaks, “I think it’s important to—”

“Shut up,” Sharice interrupts.

“Nobody died,” Mirage manages to say.

“If you don’t shut your mouth,” Sharice begins, “you’re going to find out what my namesake did for a living before she became a civil servant.”

“Wasn’t she a lawyer?”

Sharice stands up threateningly.

“It’s fine,” Brooke stops her daughter from doing something else she would regret. “It was a billion to one incident. And Mirage is right. Nobody died.”

“They did die,” Sharice argues. “We’re lucky their respective consciousnesses were uploaded to an underground server. Plenty of fairly normal humans were in that dome. Had they been exposed, they would have been lost forever.”

“We had ample warning time,” Mirage reminds her. “The biologicals were rescued first.”

“You made me complicit in a tragedy,” Sharice complains. “Had this happened to Dome Three, dozens—if not hundreds—of people would have been killed.”

“It didn’t happen to Dome Three!” Mirage’s anger is growing. “It happened to Dome Four! If you would like, we can talk about going back in time to prevent it from happening, but what we’re not going to do is go back in time and make your worst fears come true. There’s no point in worrying about a past that never occurred. Life is dangerous anywhere in the galaxy, but in a colony, on a world that doesn’t naturally support human life, it’s even more dangerous. There is literally an endless supply of bad things that might have happened, or bad things that did happen, but could have been even worse. I take most responsibility for the meteor strike, but I won’t take all of it. I put you in charge.”

Sharice’s anger rivaled Mirage’s well. “You glorified 3D television set!”

Brooke has to hold her back, like this is a rap battle gone awry.

“I’ll disassemble you right now!” Sharice continues.

‘That’s enough!” Brooke declares. “Nobody is disassembling anyone, and nobody is going back in time. As terrible as this was, I don’t allow time travel. I don’t just mean that because I can’t do it myself. No matter your intentions, temporal manipulation is always bad. It’s caused so many more problems than it’s solved, and I stayed here to be free of it. Most of my family is off elsewhere, but Sharice and I made the decision to let them go, because their lives are just too insane and unpredictable. Mirage, if I ever hear you suggest that again, or if I even suspect we’re living in a timeline of your creation, you’re gonna regret ever becoming an avatar. The time you spent in that omniscience dimension has damaged your perspective.

“Now. That being said, there’s a reason humans developed technologies beyond interstellar travel. Our ancestors long ago started realizing how much it sucks to be a standard human. Humans die too easily, and they don’t come back, which is why we decided to improve upon ourselves, so we would be more resilient. Sharice, this could not have happened to Dome Three, because it’s fully encased in a lava tube. Dome Four wanted a better view of the sky, but that’s why there aren’t many fully organics in there, because it’s not safe. All colonists came here knowing their lives wouldn’t be easy. Earth is the safest place for any vonearthan. Or at least it comes with the highest chances of survival. I’m not saying they asked you to lose control of an icy planetesimal, and smash fragments of it into the side of their dome, but they knew you were dropping them in this orthant. Unfortunately, the process of seeding the planet with an atmosphere wouldn’t have worked if we focused our work on only one hemisphere, or something. Right, Mirage?”

“That’s right,” Mirage replies. “That may have worked if we were willing to wait centuries...”

“Why did we not just wait centuries?” Sharice questions. “Why are you so eager to get this done so fast? Is something coming? Is something about to happen. You’re obsessed with 2245, like all is lost if we don’t make it in time.”

Mirage’s silence is deafening.

Brooke nods for no apparent reason. “It’s time, Mirage.”

“What?”

“Yes, what?” Sharice agrees. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s time to tell her,” Brooke says.

“What do you know?” Sharice is feeling offended. “She told you some secret?”

Mirage emotes to Brooke, but they don’t exchange words.

“Fine,” Brooke resolves. “It’ll make her angrier hearing it from me, but if you don’t want to admit it, I will.”

“No,” Mirage stops her. “I didn’t realize you knew. It’s my truth to tell, so I better tell it.”

Sharice folds her arms impatiently.

Brooke actually had no idea what Mirage’s secret was, but she knew she wouldn’t give it up by request. Mirage had to think Brooke figured it out on her own, so she’d finally spill it. It was a tricky gamble, and it’s a miracle it was going to pay off. The problem is she has no way of conveying her gambit to Sharice, but perhaps that’s for the best, so her daughter can authentically express her surprise, and possible outrage.

Mirage prepares to explain herself. “In the year 1815, roughly seventy thousand people die in what history considers to be the most devastating volcanic eruption on record. Over two hundred years later, Meliora Reaver comes in possession of something known as the Muster Beacon. It’s capable of generating a massive portal, or thousands of single-serving portals simultaneously. Before this, Sanctuary was designed to save one person at a time. She would send her employee, also known as The Chauffeur to travel directly between Dardius and Earth, ferrying humans she felt needed to be protected from time travelers. Brooke, I know this is something you can understand. The Muster Beacon, however, was a huge win for her, because now she could save high numbers of people at once, without forcing Dave to cross his own timeline, and risk creating a paradox. Unfortunately, she and her team of scientists did not fully understand the technology. Early attempts resulted in nothing happening, but there was one time where it worked half way. They didn’t realize it at the time—and probably don’t even now—but they did manage to spirit away ten thousand would-be victims of the Mount Tambora eruption.

“Tens of thousands more died of related causes, but they couldn’t be saved, because the world would notice them missing. These closest ten thousand were pulled into a portal, but never made it out to the other side. They were, effectively, dead anyway. The Muster Beacon started functioning properly from then on, but that does the missing Sumbawa people no good.” Mirage closes her eyes in sadness. “I tried to rescue them myself. Bungula is destined to become hospitable in no later than four hundred years from now, so I figured that was the best place to put them. It looks like Earth, it has a good star, and...”

“And what?” Sharice presses.

“The Bungulans abandon it. I never did understand why, but they just up and leave, and vonearthans don’t ever come back.”

Brooke nods again. “It’s the life. They leave so that life can evolve on its own. Those bacteria you discovered are heralds.”

“No, but I told you that the bacteria doesn’t evolve.”

“Yes, you said that, didn’t you?”

“Okay, I didn’t see every single possible future. The point is that something went wrong on my end too. They’re scheduled to arrive in 2245 now, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I came down to your plane of existence, because I need this place terraformed before they show up, or they’re dead.”

“You’re trying to clean up your own mess,” Sharice notes. “And you? You knew about this,” she accuses Brooke.

Brooke sports a sort of hybrid smile-frown. “I did not. That was just my way of teasing the information out of her.”

Mirage should be upset by the trick, but she’s probably just relieved to finally be open and honest. “I should have realized.”

“Why didn’t you just tell us this,” Sharice asks.

“You heard your mother. She hates time travel. It’s bad enough that we accelerated the ammonia bombardment, and used dark algae from the future. If she knew the whole reason we were doing this was to fix a mistake I made when I thought I was a god, she might have put a stop to the whole thing.”

“You severely underestimate me if you think I would let ten thousand innocent people die just to feel morally superior,” Brooke says, saddened.

“I couldn’t risk it. They’re coming, in 2245. This world has to be ready for them. I don’t know how they’re gonna handle it. Will they realize they’re on a different planet? Will they freak out about it? Can we integrate them into society? This is just my only option.”

“Well, maybe it’s not ideal, but Sanctuary was going to reveal secrets about future technology to them anyway, so why didn’t you just build them a special dome?” Sharice proposes.

“I don’t know exactly where they’re going to land; if they’ll be the same distance from each other as they were when the beacon took them, or if they’ll be in one spot. Maybe they’ll be randomly spread across the surface. The whole world needs to be able to support human life.”

“It will,” Brooke assures her. “I don’t know the answer to your questions either, but if we can protect them from physical and emotional harm, then we have to try. The ammonia bombardment and factories are working. The atmosphere is thickening as we speak, the magnetosphere is holding, and the temperature is rising. By 2245, this rock will be ready for life. Though that does leave the question of what we should do with the colonists. I don’t think the Sumbawa would get along well with them. If they realize they’re on a different planet, they’ll probably form a whole religion around it, and the more advanced colonists hanging around would just make it too complicated.”

“Are you suggesting they actually leave?” Sharice asks. “Like they did in the other timeline that Mirage saw?”

“Perhaps.”

“We would have to tell them why,” Mirage reminds her.

“That’s not such a stretch,” Brooke says. “They already know something’s up, and we’re fooling ourselves if we think they remain oblivious. The absolutely most optimistic estimates for terraforming any planet within twenty light years of Earth is two hundred years. Life takes time. Nature does it several orders of magnitude slower. Nothing and no one does it in eighteen years. We have to face the reality that the world is waking up. Many vonearthans already know specifics about salmon and choosers, and more grow suspicious every day. They were never going to stay hidden forever.”

“I guess you’re right,” Sharice acknowledges. “As long as Beaver Haven doesn’t lock us up for our crimes, then things should be fine.”

“Yes,” Mirage agrees. “And the worst of it is over. Now we just wait for the atmosphere to fully form. The next few years will be mostly about monitoring and adjusting. We can start wilding the surface after that, just like they did on Earth a hundred and fifty years ago.”

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Microstory 1120: Amanda Moss

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If there was one thing Amanda Moss would change about this world, it would be its borders. She grew up in a staunchly conservative household. Her parents were extremely in favor of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. They considered themselves to be King Dumpster’s biggest fans, and nearly lost it when he was ousted from his position in 2020, having accomplished nothing positive in his entire political career. When you’re raised by extremists, you can either become helplessly indoctrinated to those same values, or you can use that as fuel to be more reasonable. Amanda chose the second at first, but then she started getting angrier and angrier with how things were going, and wanted to make a difference. She turned out to be extremist as well, though she would fall on the other side of the spectrum. There was nothing in this world worse than inequality, according to her. It was the cause of everyone’s problems. Health issues, environmental concerns, poverty; these were all ultimately sourced from the same thing. If everyone had everything they needed, and the system was designed to encourage this dynamic, no one would suffer. More importantly, no one would choose to be the cause of suffering. Amanda didn’t like seeing people in pain, and she believed everyone had the right to live wherever they wanted. She was always going to go above and beyond to help others, even if that meant breaking a few laws along the way...or a few dozen. Instead of building a wall, she decided to build bridges. She earned her license, and took up a job as a private pilot. She didn’t cater to the richest, instead advertising her services towards low-income people who were seeking to reconnect with loved ones who lived far away. If, for instance, a man could only find work in Georgia, but later learned of his mother’s illness all the way in Montana, Amanda would transport him home at an incredibly low rate. She lived a simple life, and spent the majority of her time up in the air. As she watched the world around her crumble, however, she determined that she wasn’t doing enough. There were refugees from the other side of arbitrary national barriers who needed to find safety. So she became a human smuggler, though she preferred the term specialized relocator. She moved people from all over Central and South America, into the United States, and Canada. She was smart and careful. As far as she knew, there wasn’t even a whisper in law enforcement that she existed. She never felt like anyone was onto her, or investigating her deeds. She was getting away with it. But then she chose two clients on a whim who were desperate for her help, but had no clue that she happened to be in the exact right business. They didn’t mean to expose her. In fact, the man they were running from wouldn’t have wanted her to be exposed either. As bad of a person as he was, his politics aligned with hers pretty well. Unfortunately, once he started on his path to retaliation, no one could stop it; not even him. So, in a turn of the tables, Amanda was rescued herself, and relocated to Sanctuary on Dardius, where she continued to live in peace. She later accepted the role of Transportation Administrator for the whole planet, using her skills to rescue thousands of others from their dangerous lives on Earth.

Microstory 1112: Orson Olsen

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Orson Olsen, who was psychologically incapable of recognizing how funny his name sounded, was a member of the Community of Christ, which sprang from the Latter Day Saint movement. He was indoctrinated into his faith from birth in Independence, Missouri, and never thought to question what he had been taught. When he grew older, he started taking on more responsibility in the temple. One day, he was copying some missionary files when a young girl appeared outside the window, literally out of nowhere. He wasn’t certain he could trust what he thought he saw, though, so he watched her as she snuck in, and approached the podium in the sanctuary. She then conjured a bird from the aether, wrapped a message around its leg, then sent it on its way. This was not the first time he saw this girl, or witnessed her miracles, but it provided him with proof and confirmation. She first appeared to him earlier that morning, in his backyard. He had been so mesmerized and shocked by it that, though he did what she asked of him, he didn’t know what to think of it. She appeared to him a third time later that day, and charged him to change everything about his life. She told him that he should stop believing in the prophets, and to worship the only one real higher power in the whole universe, which she claimed to be time itself. It wasn’t as difficult for him to take on this new task as one might assume. He had believed every single thing his family and church taught him, but they had always demanded faith of him. This girl was the only person to ever show him real evidence of an almighty power. She disappeared from this life, but his drive to seek others like her was not lost. It’s not every day you encounter someone with temporal powers, but once you do, and you have some idea what to look for, it’s a lot easier to spot a second time. He remained in the church for the next few months, but all the while searching the metropolitan area for anyone who exhibited the same kind of abilities as that first girl. He found it in a man who could transport an object from one hand to the other. If he was willing to suffer through a psychic nosebleed, he could send something a meter or two farther, but that was his absolute limit. It wasn’t a very useful ability—but not all of them are. He incorporated it into his magic show, to make a little money on the side, but he was at little risk of becoming famous from it. With this man, Orson had real proof that time really was something to be worshipped. The magician knew of others like him; those with more powerful abilities, and Orson realized this was just the beginning. It would be pointless if this new church consisted only of himself, though. Orson was surprised at how easy it was for him to recruit others. He was smart enough to start with the people he knew were already doubting their faith. Once their numbers were high enough, they started thinking outside the original church. At that point, the new movement was unstoppable, and it was destined to cause more than a few problems for people with time powers.

Microstory 1109: Dardan Lusha

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Horace Reaver was a salmon, born with the pattern of going back to his younger body, and living every day a second time. At first, he didn’t realize other people weren’t like him. He called the first time he experienced a day the practice, and assumed everyone around him went through the same thing. One day, he accidentally killed his friend, Dardan Lusha on the playground. This didn’t bother him much, because he knew he would be able to prevent it from happening after the day reset to its beginning, as it always had. This was when he first learned normal people were not like him at all, and did not perceive time the same way. Dardan lived through that day, totally unawares of what had happened before, and went on to continue living long after that, but his relationship with his only friend was forever changed. While the trauma was completely erased from Dardan’s memories, Horace could remember vividly, and could not get past the fact that he was alone. Dardan would always remind him of that, and he just couldn’t have it, so he purposefully cut ties with him. Though Reaver would go on to become quite the prolific killer, there was no reason to suspect he felt any animosity towards Dardan. In all likelihood, he had all but completely forgotten about the incident. Still, Reaver’s daughter, Meliora didn’t want to take any chances. When Dardan was a young adult, she took him off Earth, and made him the first tenant of Sanctuary, which she built on a planet that would eventually come to be known as Dardius. Then the timeline changed. A traveler went back, and altered history enough to create a new reality, and a new Dardan. She came to realize that this would never stop happening. She couldn’t just rescue people who had been negatively affected by time, then leave their alternates to their own devices. Some people, in these new realities, will have escaped their terrible fates, and that was fine, but someone at constant risk, like Dardan, would have to be saved no matter what. Over the years, she continued to save him from the potential of her father’s wrath. Every once in awhile, a new Dardan will take up residence on the planet named for him. The most recent one was elected Agriculture Administrator, and was responsible for feeding billions of people, including the world’s enemies. And no one beyond Meliora knew why he had been saved, not even Dardan himself.