Microstory 2636: Don’t Forget To Bring a Towel

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Gemini Pro text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3.1

Trilby throws a silky towel at her. “I hope you understand that I removed your clothes to provide you with medical treatment. I would have been waiting for you on the landing pad, but you showed up way too early. Why didn’t you go down on a slower trip, with the animals? That would have been a lot safer for your fragile human body.”

“They would have caught me,” Mandica explains briefly. “What is this?”

“Temporary,” he says. “I call it the cloak of invisibility. You will be perfectly visible to the naked eye while we’re out there, but the identity sensors won’t spot you. You will appear as an infrared aberration, caused normally by too many people beaming data to each other’s devices at the same time. We will take a particular route to where we’re going so that sort of thing doesn’t stand out.”

She frowns at the towel. Yeah, it isn’t a cloak, it is a towel. No hood, no draw string. It is see-through, but still just a big cloth square. “Will I not look a little odd, walking around with this thing over my head?”

Trilby laughs heartily. “Odd? Sweetheart, you’re on Castlebourne now. My next door neighbor is a giant beetle, and is probably smarter than me. They might as well call this world Substrate City. You’re not going to stand out. There is no way to stand out on this planet. Everyone is here to formulate their unique identity, and they change by their whims all the time. Now. Functionally, you’re rare. There are a few communities here who are just as unenhanced—less unenhanced, in fact—and they are not insignificant, but most people change bodies like you might change your hairstyle. But don’t worry, you can’t tell, and people are careful around each other, because there’s no way to know. No one’s gonna shoot you with a gun under the assumption that you’ll survive.” He taps his middle finger on a screen. “I took the liberty of building you your own modified prospectus. The green domes are fine. You’ll be safe in any of those. I’m talkin’ your residential areas, your museums, your educational historical recreations.

“Yellow, a little more dangerous. They have ways of protecting visitors. If they’re a normal human, the Custodians will make accommodations. They might even separate the unenhanced from the enhanced so there’s never any question. Red are no-go zones. Most of them are specifically designed for people who have disposable substrates. A visitor might even end up getting a whole fleet of bodies to switch to one by one. If someone like you without the spoof lenses were to try to sneak in, the sensors would flag them so fast, their head would spin off. Apparently, there was one guy years ago who got stuck in a dangerous game and nearly died because the people who were trying to murder him hacked the system. They won’t let that happen again. They installed new sensors all around the world, and are constantly checking. You will be walking around basically as an admin. They’ll let you in anywhere, but that’s why I made this list for you, so you can decide what you’re willing to risk. You need to understand your options.”

“You said something about spoof lenses?”

“Yes, it’s not just those. They have multiple ways of tracking identities, the most common of which is an eye scan. They also—”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Mandica interrupts. “If people are changing bodies, and your neighbor is an insect, how would a retinal scan even be possible in a place like this?”

“It’s not only a retinal scan. The retinal scan is a second stage identifier that the system will only perform if the first stage scan turns up blank. Everyone capable of transferring their consciousness is given a unique watermark, placed upon their optic nerves. I don’t know if you know this, but humans have a natural blindspot in their eyes due to where the optic nerves connect to the eyes. Your brain fills in the blanks, but you can’t see light that hits that spot. Fortunately for optic void scanners, though, light does still hit that spot. They shoot an invisible laser into it to read someone’s watermark, to know who they are. They don’t even have to keep their eyes open. It can pass through eyelids, and many other materials. For a normal person, if it doesn’t detect that watermark, it will default to the retinal scan, and register your preferences and restrictions.” He points at the invisibility towel. “The scanner can’t pass through that, so it will see infrared interference, and not see your unregistered eyes.”

“Why do I need the towel if I have these spoof lenses?”

“You don’t have the spoof lenses yet. The woman who’s getting them for me is on the other side of the planet. We have to travel to her first. Before you ask, she can’t come to us, because she’s also protecting you from brainwave scanners. That’s another thing you need in order to be a ghost. They’re becoming more common. They’ll never do away with the optic void scanning system, but spoofing an authorized watermark is easier than fooling a brain scan. Don’t tell anyone, but about zero-point-zero-zero-one percent of the time, a cloned or bioprinted body doesn’t produce the watermark correctly, and it has to be fixed, either with a new replacement, or a visit to the optomeger.”

“This woman with the brain scanner—”

“The baseline imager. A brain scanner verifies your brainwaves. The baseline imager is the thing that inputs in the data. It’s highly regulated. There are only a few of them in the world. People would notice if she borrowed it and took it on a vactrain.”

“I see. The baseline imager woman; can she be trusted?”

“She’s already done for me what she’s about to do for you,” Trilby explains. “She holds a special office in a special government for a special community. They were refugees fleeing oppression, and live here permanently, not simply as visitors. Apparently, her now-husband initially refused to be enhanced, so she’s sympathetic to that sentiment, even though he’s now just like her, and I am too. The only reason she’s keeping him out of it is so that he can have plausible deniability, but I told her about you, and she thinks you and the Superintendent would get along.”

“Okay, I think I have all the information I need. I should say, I trust you. Let’s go out there and walk around like ghosts, me moreso than you.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

And so the two of them leave the apartment. Trilby already has his spoof lenses on, but Mandica has to stay under the towel the whole time. He seems to have been right. People don’t even just ignore her. They smile and greet her as if she is just another regular person on this bizarrely accepting planet. She doesn’t see any giant beetle people, but a few who look decidedly unhuman. A lot of animals, but also alien-like beings that don’t match to something that ever existed on Earth. She’s starting to feel more comfortable here, like she can actually breathe and live a life. 

After only a few hours, they have made it to a dome that’s just called Capital. They enter a gorgeous woman’s office, who holds her hand out, sporting a very kind smile. “Hi. I’m Deputy Superintendent Yunil Tereth. I hear you would like to stay unregistered. Why don’t you have a seat?”

Microstory 2214: With an Autopsy

< > Table of Contents

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

There was a bit of a misunderstanding. Due to Nick’s sleep issues, the EEG test needed to be able to measure his brain activity while he was awake, and also while he was asleep. I asked if we should reschedule it for the nighttime, but Nick was confident that he would be able to fall asleep given the right conditions. To make it happen, they packed his hospital room with a number of medical staff who weren’t too busy with other things. For almost thirty minutes, he was the center of attention. They asked him questions, mostly not about his medical issues. He had to talk about the universe where he’s from, and all the adventures he went on after he left it. It didn’t matter whether they believed him or not, or even if they were listening. Being around crowds of people is exhausting for him, and it’s even worse when they’re paying all their attention to him. By the end of it, he had little trouble sleeping. The doctor rechecked the electrodes, shut off the lights, and left the room. I asked to stay by his side, but he insisted that Nick be alone, which admittedly made sense. I don’t want to say that these results were inconclusive, like all the others, but they were. Best guess at the moment is that he’s suffering from some form of dementia. The MRI would seem to support this possibility, but only as a possibility. That is to say, it doesn’t rule it out. Unfortunately, the best way to know for sure that that’s the case is with an autopsy, which is obviously not in the cards at this stage. I suppose it might one day give his survivors some sense of closure, but it doesn’t help Nick now, and I’m still holding out hope for a turnaround. As for the lumbar puncture, we have only received a few preliminary results so far. His cell count and glucose levels are totally fine. The diagnostician said that his protein levels were suspicious, but he couldn’t elaborate on that. My schooling did not go over any of this kind of stuff, and he’s aware of that, so he didn’t bother elaborating. He did seem pretty cryptic about it, though. He said that he needed to send the data off to a special lab, but that it could take up to a week to get more answers. I’m really worried about it, so I’ve decided to not tell Nick about that just yet. It will only cause him more anxiety, and it might also end up being nothing. That’s it for the tests for now. We have nothing planned for tomorrow, but I’ll probably get him back to his physical therapy to help him stay as independent as possible for as long as possible.

Microstory 2213: Calming Environment

< > Table of Contents

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

Negative. Negative or inconclusive, that is. All of the blood test results came back, and none of them told us what Nick might have. We woke up to no answers today, just as we have every morning in recent days. He was scheduled to have an MRI in the early afternoon, so we were still hopeful that that would turn up something, but it didn’t tell us anything either. Well, I’m sure it told the doctor something, but it goes over our heads. All we know is that Nick is sick, and there is no apparent treatment for it. While we were waiting for the ultimately unhelpful MRI analysis results, I took him for a walk in the arboretum. This is precisely why they built the hospital at this location, so patients and loved ones can have a calming environment in some of their darkest times. There are trails in there that are somewhat difficult to walk on, or at least which require two legs, but for the less mobile people, there are also paved paths. We stayed on those, but were still able to enjoy a lot of beauty. I think it was really great for him to be out there. If you go deep enough, you stop being able to see the ninety degree angles of the buildings and roads, and hear the sounds of the cars. He told me that he likes either being inside with the conditioned air, or in nature, but not in between. He doesn’t like the urban world, with all its loud artificial noises, and crowds of people. Due to all the jail time he experienced, and the work he did during and after that, he hasn’t been able to spend much time in places like that. He agrees that it did him good, but there was a downside to it. I pushed him in the wheelchair, which is not the same thing as walking it himself. He regrets not going on one more hike, but of course, he had no idea that things would turn out like this. He may never be able to once again walk on his own, but I’ll take him to places like this every day if he wants. Nature has been scientifically proven to be emotionally and mentally beneficial to all, but especially for someone like him, and for someone in his condition. EEG, and maybe a spinal tap, tomorrow. Yikes!

Microstory 2212: All the More Alarming

< > Table of Contents

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

We met with a diagnostician today who normally works out of New Jersey, but he flew down here, because he’s an apparent avid reader of this site, and is fascinated by Nick’s case. Nick laughed when he heard where he was from, but he wouldn’t tell us what that’s all about. He promises that his laugh is not a symptom, and that he had genuine reason to find the news humorous. The diagnostician was inclined to believe that, though he does not believe him about much else. He has to operate under the assumption that Nick’s belief that he’s from another universe is a part of this mysterious disease. If that’s true, then he’s had whatever this is for several months now, which would make his decline all the more sudden, and all the more alarming. He’s scheduled a bunch of lab work and scans to perform over the course of the next few days. Today only involved a comprehensive examination. It included everything you get from your periodic physical exam, plus a whole bunch more. He had him hold his arms out to his side, and try to keep them still, which Nick found difficult. He had trouble walking in a straight line, and reciting simple prompted phrases from memory. Now that I write it all out, I realize that it sounds like a sobriety test. But obviously that’s not the cause as Nick doesn’t drink. The diagnostician had him walk on a treadmill, and ride a stationary bike. They weren’t measuring stress, or anything. This all seemed to be about his motor skills. So far, the doctor can’t come to any conclusion, which frustrated Nick, even though he understands that this was never going to be a quick or easy fix. It’s only the first of several tests. The doctors and techs have to start at the beginning, and move forwards from there. Even if one of them doesn’t diagnose the right disease, it will give us more information than we had before. We need to be patient. After a couple of hours of this, Nick was tired, and ready to go home, so it was good that we were done for the day. I drove him back to his apartment, and made him some dinner. His former personal assistant ate with us, and told us how the work has been going at the jail. They have kept the spirit of his vision alive, and are making real progress on their prison reform ideas. It saddened him to hear it, since he expected to be there working on all that himself, but he’s pleased that the project is still very much alive. I think the dinner gave him a boost of positivity, even if he would never admit it. I don’t know Jasmine very well, so after I tucked him into bed, she and I stayed up to get to know each other a little bit. We have more tests to get to tomorrow, so I turned in too before too long.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: February 9, 2399

« < » > Table of Contents

Leona, Tarboda, and Roeland ate at a sidewalk restaurant that reportedly serves the best adobo in the country. It was the first time Leona ever had it, so she has nothing to compare it to, but it was really good. Roeland talked about himself during the meal. Back in the main sequence, he was known as The Stillness. He could travel forwards or backwards in time, but only after standing in one place for a long period of time. The longer he waited, the further he could go. His record is two weeks, during which he found himself severely dehydrated, but he didn’t do that on purpose. As the story goes, he experienced a miscommunication in a not-to-be-named wartorn country, which resulted in his incarceration in an extremely inhumane prison. He was given no food, and no water the entire time. He couldn’t even sit down in the cage. He had only recently discovered his ability, so he didn’t know what he was doing. More specifically, he didn’t know how far back in time that amount of stillness would take him.

Roeland ended up millions of years in the past, stuck in the mesozoic era. He could either stand around for another two weeks to get back, or make multiple, shorter jumps. But there was a problem with the second option, because he had no way of knowing what year it was, and more to the point, when the extinction level event that would inevitably end the reign of the dinosaurs would come about. While he was confident that he would not need the entire two weeks to clear the death, destruction, and mayhem, he didn’t know the minimum amount of time. He wasn’t particularly good at math, and there were too many variables anyway. It’s not like he could look at the creatures around him, and find out what period that was. Jurassic and Triassic; the only two words he knew that had any relevancy, and they were unhelpful. Funny tangent, based on his description, Leona is pretty sure he ran into Siria Webb while he was back there. This was before a dinosaur tried to eat him, forcing him to jump early.

He wasn’t quite fast enough, and Roeland was severely injured in the attack. Plus, he didn’t make it anywhere near civilization. His best guess is that he landed about 50,000 years ago. A family consisting of a human woman, a neanderthal man, and their child, tended to his wounds. Neanderthals are evidently called primaceans in this reality, which he only learned later once he had recovered enough to continue on his way back to the future, and discovered that everything was different because he was no longer in the main sequence. He has found no way to return home, but has made a life for himself here for over sixty years, the most recent of which he’s lived in this beautiful place to enjoy his retirement. He reiterated the lie that he’s here alone, insisting that no one else is on the recursive island, even though the satellite is still registering a time traveler there.

At the end of the night, Roeland returned to his isolated home, and the other two checked into a regular hotel for the night. The next morning, they walked to the Talisay Municipal Hall to see about getting permission to visit Vulcan Point. The people in charge were extremely hesitant to even entertain the idea. Roeland and his daughter—she knew it—went through a lot to convince the government to let them become residents there. The whole reason they eventually agreed is because the Harlows agreed to have no visitors over, even for a few hours. They live in a little hut with no running water, and no electricity, and they do not disturb the wildlife. They boat and walk to the city once a week for supplies, carrying all of their waste with them, including what would normally go into a toilet. The fact that they could not honestly say that they were friends with the Harlows did not help their case. In the end, they had no recourse. These people do not want them here, so they have to leave.

They’re on their way back to the airfield when Leona stops. “Wait.” She swipes through the screens to make sure that she’s seeing this right. “I can’t believe this.”

“What? What is it?” Tarboda asks.

“There’s a missile heading for my satellite. At least that’s what...yep, there’s no other object that it could possibly be on course to intercept.”

“You have a satellite?”

Leona dials her phone, and waits for Aldona to answer. “You didn’t know anything about this?”

“I don’t know anything, ma’am. I’m just the pilot,” Tarboda says.

She believes him. Aldona answers. “Hey, Al. You’re tryna shoot me down.”

“I’m sorry, it’s out of my hands. They told me they were going to refuse to let you put it up there, but I guess they found out that you deployed it anyway. They didn’t even tell me they were sending a high-orbit missile, or I would have called you. I imagine we detected it at the same time.”

“When you were talking to them about it, did you tell them that I’m a great friend...and a terrible enemy?”

“I...didn’t know that myself,” Aldona replies.

“Welp, you’re about to find out...and so are they.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to initiate the satellite’s defenses.”

“Leona, if you go to war...”

“They started it,” Leona contends.

“Okay, but they didn’t.”

“I’m trying to help them. I’m trying to help you. I went on vacation, and kept working. The updated design for the lunar H3 refinery should have crossed your desk about an hour ago.”

“It did, and it looks perfect, but that doesn’t mean—”

“Goodbye,” Aldona.

“Don’t do this.”

“Goodbye,” Leona repeats right before hanging up. She sighs as she’s accessing the satellite’s secondary protocols. She releases the decoy, then teleports the rest of it to the other side of the planet, turning it into a darklurker for a time until she can figure out a more sustainable solution. It’ll keep orbiting using a relatively hard to see EM drive, but it won’t be doing any scans for the foreseeable future. Still, it’s better than losing it altogether.

Tarboda is grimacing. “What did you just do?”

“I released something called a leechcraft. It’s going to find one of their satellites, latch onto it, and lure the missile to destroy it instead. Go ahead and call someone to warn them. It won’t matter, they can’t stop it.”

“Nope. I’m good. I’m with you,” he assures her.

“If that’s true, then we’re both gonna need to go somewhere to hide out.”

“I have some friends in a nonextradition country. You ever been to Croatia?”

They don’t make it one meter towards Croatia before they’re hooded and sedated.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: February 8, 2399

« < » > Table of Contents

Roeland’s little outburst alerted the authorities to his presence at the quarantine hotel. They ran over right quick to place him in his own quarantine, which will only partially overlap Leona and Tarboda’s. It isn’t until late the next night that they’re able to reconnect in the post-transition lobby. “Mr. Roeland. Do you have time to talk?”

“I do if you have time to tell me what this is.” He pulls his shirt away to show the timonite stain again.

“We’re not sure how it works, or really why. My husband was infected with that—that’s not really the right word, he wasn’t infected. It started out as a rock, and he somehow...absorbed its power. It’s what fueled his ability to teleport to orbit, and install something I now call a leechcraft on a preexisting satellite. The leechcraft was designed to scan the entire surface of the Earth, looking for time travelers. Well, it was only meant to find a specific person, but we think it found everyone, including you and...”

“Go on. Including me, and who?”

“And whoever you’re living with on Vulcan Point.”

“I told you, I’m not living with anyone. I’m alone. Your scanner is wrong. And you’ve still not explained why this thing is on my shoulder.”

“It must have gotten on the scanner, and then got transferred to you during the scanning process. It was entirely unintentional, but as long as you don’t step within proximity of my husband, you’ll be fine.”

“What happens if I do get too close to him?”

“It would transport you to another universe. There you would find all sorts of objects that were randomly dropped there from the multiverse.”

“How do I prevent this from happening accidentally? What if we end up sitting next to each other in a couple of bathroom stalls without realizing it?”

“You don’t have to worry about that.”

“Why not?”

“He’s dead.” She doesn’t believe that, but all evidence points to it, and admitting her true feelings undermines her argument that Roeland is safe, so she’s not going to mention it.

He nods. He’s old, and has seen death, so likely he no longer feels the need to pretend to be butthurt over the death of a complete stranger, like most people do. He’s more honestly indifferent. “So you have one too?

“A timonite stain? I don’t.”

“Why not. Were you not on Earth when it was scanned?”

“No, I was, but...” That’s a good question.

He turtles his head out when she doesn’t finish her sentence.

“You’re right. Why weren’t we also marked? We found eleven errors, but that number was in addition to the people we already knew about, so we disregarded them.” That’s a good goddamn question.

“This kind of implies that it actually was intentional,” Roeland points out. “Who’s the we in this scenario? Who helped you build the thing?”

“No. Ramses would never do something like that.”

“Ramses Abdulrashid? He’s one of us?”

“He’s a time traveler, but he doesn’t have a power or pattern. Or rather, he does have a pattern now, but he wasn’t born that way. He turned himself into it. How do you know him?”

“I don’t know him personally, only by reputation. In my timeline, he was a famous engineer for the Freemarketers in the early 23rd century. Legend has it, he defied them, and defected to the mainstream. They consider him the first domino to fall. The movement did not last long after that.”

“That’s a wholly inaccurate story. The truth is he didn’t defect to the mainstream, he defected to us. How you would have heard about it at all, but not known that part, is bizarre, especially since a great deal of Freemarketers were reportedly killed in an interstellar ship cataclysm, but were rescued by Dardius.”

“Then you and I are from different timelines, because the Ramses Abdulrashid that I learned about in school went on to become an activist for the post-scarcity lifestyle, focusing on educating and rehabilitating the most violent of antiestablishment insurrectionists. He refused most life extension advancements, considering him unworthy of immortality since he rejected handouts prior to his epiphany, so he eventually died. I don’t recall the details of his life; I was born in the 24th.”

“Yeah, that’s definitely different.”

“Is he here? I would not mind meeting him, even if it is an alternate version.”

Leona is staring into space. “No, he’s lost, I can’t find him.”

“Can’t your satellite scanner do it?”

“He designed the thing. I’m sure he has a way to shield himself from it.”

This piques Roeland’s interest even more than the news about Ramses. “Really? How would one go about doing that?”

“Are you hoping to keep us from finding the other ping that we’ve detected on Vulcan Point?” Leona guesses.

“I’m telling you, there is something wrong with it. I live alone. I chose that spot because it’s beautiful and remote.”

She takes out her handheld device, and shows him the data. “My satellite scans every ninety minutes. Whoever was there with you during the first pass is still on the island. See? This is you, this is me, and that is the other person.”

“I don’t know what to tell ya. If there’s another time traveler in the area, maybe it’s, like, a rabbit who unwittingly ate some—what did you call it?—timonite, and ended up there. It’s not a human. I would know. It’s a very tiny island.”

Leona shakes her head. He is showing all signs of lying, through macro and microexpressions alike. If she knew him prior to this, she might be able to give him the benefit of the doubt, but he could be keeping Alyssa prisoner. She could be trying to get away as they speak. It would be irresponsible of Leona to just walk away without investigating. If the other error is fine, she’ll leave without further questions, and try to forget it ever happened, but until then, she is getting on that damn island. It’s up to her to find Alyssa. She’s the only one who can. No one else is capable, and no one else cares. Ramses made that quite clear when he abandoned them. Roeland is looking at her with puppy dog eyes, so she can’t just keep arguing with him about it. “Okay, I believe you.”

“Good. Are ya hungry? I found the quarantine food to be no bueno. Perhaps you and your bodyguard would like to join me for a late night snack. I know a great place.”

She laughs. “He’s not my bodyguard. If anything, I’m his.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 25, 2399

« < » > Table of Contents

Alyssa went into the panic room to meditate in the dark yesterday. There’s only one way in, and one way out. It wasn’t designed for a criminal to get away undetected. It’s there to protect the homeowners from intruders while they wait for help to arrive. If she had left through the door, he would have seen her, and if she had teleported out, she would have said something. She wouldn’t have just disappeared. If for no other reason than to be here for her brothers, she would never have done something so irresponsible. Something happened to her, and Ramses is determined to remedy the situation. Since the Bridgette is already in Southeast Asian Oceania, he requested transport from the government. The McIver boys are here too, because now there’s no one else left to take care of them. Vearden has gotten everything he needs from the house by now, so he’s able to stay with Arcadia at the hospital permanently.

Mangrove One. Ramses thought the team had contributed a hell of a lot to this world’s development, but it’s nothing compared to what this Aldona woman has done, and she did it in a fraction of the time. He knows how to build nanofabricators, but he made a deliberate choice to withhold such technology. It’s not exactly the Prime Directive, but he didn’t think that these people deserved quite that level of sophistication, so he never bothered. He didn’t even want them to know that it was possible. Welp, the cat’s out of the bag, and he’s going to take advantage of it. There’s a spaceship at this ocean facility capable of reaching orbit, and sustaining life. There are other space agencies, of course, but gaining access to them would require reading too many people in to the whole time travelers situation, and would be a political nightmare. Ramses needs to deploy a new temporal error scanner, and this Mangrove Program is his only reasonable way of accomplishing that.

While Mateo stays with the kids, Ramses pleads his case to the little committee they formed here. It consists of Winona, Aldona, Leona, and a couple of other people, whose names may or may not also end in -ona. They never introduced themselves, and they have yet to say a word. Aldona is speaking now. “I’m sorry, we can’t do it.”

“And why is that?” Ramses questions. “It’s just a little satellite. All I need is a means of getting it up there.”

“You’ll just have to do what you need from the ground,” Aldona insists.

“The point is to get in orbit, so it scans the entire planet,” Ramses argues.

“Yes,” Aldona says, “and I do not feel comfortable with that. Honestly, if I had been aware of the last time you scanned literally every human brain on the planet, I would have tried to stop you back then.”

“Winona?” Ramses asks. “You let her push you around like this?”

“She’s...helping us,” Winona defends.

“More than we are,” Ramses says. “Got it.”

“It’s not like that,” Winona claims.

“No, no, I get it,” Ramses begins. “What you’re trying to say is that she has you over a barrel, and the water’s freezing. No, I understand perfectly. You lost your balls.”

“Watch it, Ramses,” Leona warns.

“Do you not want to rescue Alyssa?”

“Of course I do,” Leona contends, “but we’re not even sure she’s gone. It’s barely been a day.”

“Funny how differently you react when it’s not your husband,” he condemns.

“Watch it, I say,” Leona repeats.

Ramses sighs. “If you’re not going to let me take Mangrove One, then I need some temporal energy to make a few jumps up to Mangrove Zero. The equipment is too heavy to carry all at once, so I’ll have to partially disassemble it, and take multiple trips.”

“Why is it any heavier than the one that Mateo took up to the AOC the first time?” Leona asks.

“This one does a little more than just scan for temporal errors,” Ramses says. “I figured I might as well feed two birds with one worm while I’m up there. I didn’t know that I would get so much pushback.”

“Well, if you won’t even tell me what else that thing does, then I’m definitely not letting you go up there. Permission to enter Mangrove Zero is also hereby denied,” Aldona decides.

“You can’t stop me,” Ramses tells her.

“Do you have the temporal energy it would require to make it up there?” Aldona asks, annoyingly confident that she knows the answer, and feeling no need to wait for it. “I thought not. Permission to procure more is denied as well. I’m not telling you that you can’t go look for Alyssa, but you won’t do it by invading the privacy of everyone in the world. It’s my job to protect then, and I won’t have you undermine me.”

Ramses can’t accept that. He will find her. He doesn’t care how many bridges he has to burn. There may not be enough time to synthesize more temporal energy, and he doesn’t have a lab anyway. Here’s hoping he’s right that Mateo doesn’t run out anymore. He fumes at Aldona for another few seconds, then does the same for Winona, and especially Leona. “I don’t know if you and I will ever be okay.” He doesn’t lead them to believe that he’s going to go over their heads. He just tries to walk out of the room. He nearly runs into Mateo in the process.

Mateo places a finger in front of his lips.

Ramses has already faltered at the surprise, so he tries to cover with a cough. “Harrumph. I’m fine. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer,” he spits at them unconvincingly. He nods like that was a good save, and then leaves with Mateo.

“I was listening in,” Mateo says once they’re safely out of earshot.

“I gathered that.”

“I can’t believe that Leona isn’t backing you up. She must know something that we don’t. But if that’s true, we can only go on the information we have at the moment, and at the moment, it looks like the right thing to do is get you up to that ship.”

“I’m glad that someone around here hasn’t lost their mind yet.”

“No, the reptilians can’t catch me; I’m too fast for their chemtrails,” Mateo jokes in a conspiratorial tone.

After a laugh, Ramses takes Mateo to the hangar, where the new satellite has been set aside in the back corner. Together they disassemble it into more manageable parts. It takes them the rest of the day. It’s a surprise that no one surmises what they were doing all this time. Ramses accesses the blueprints for Mangrove Zero, so Mateo  knows where the cargo bay is. It’s only upon his last jump that something happens that they didn’t plan for. Aldona claimed that Mangrove Zero was completely unmanned. She was either lying, or mistaken.

“Hey,” the teenager says. “Are you here to kill me?”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 18, 2399

« < » > Table of Contents

Ramses purged the version of Constance that he had uploaded to The Bridgette. They don’t know if it’s been compromised, but they can’t take any chances. The AI served them well for a long time without giving them any issues, or giving them any reason to doubt it. It’s only when the one from the Fifth Division showed up that they started having issues. The question is, is it even from the Fifth Division? Was that all a lie? Did Impostor!Mateo give them a partial truth? Could it have been an anti-Alyssa who was just using their illusion powers to pretend to be Mateo, while having a backup plan of prompting the wrong investigation if they were even discovered to be an impostor?

Leona, Ramses, and the McIvers are in an SD6 safehouse right now. It’s not completely devoid of electronics, but there aren’t any microphones that could listen in on their conversation, which they are having in the kitchen while the boys play a card game in the one and only bedroom. “Any ideas?” Leona asks. She waits for a response that never comes. “We were all meant to sleep on it.”

“I doubt anyone slept well under these conditions,” Alyssa notes.

“You’re the one who had the bed,” Ramses points out.

“With two smelly boys in puberty,” she counters.

“We heard that!” Carlin shouts from the room.

“I wasn’t trying to be quiet!” she shouts right back.

“All right,” Leona says. “Are we all in agreement?”

“Agreement of what?” Ramses questions, confused.

“We all agree that we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing, and we don’t have any idea how to proceed?

“Heard that too!” young Moray exclaims.

“First we have to decide whether we think that was Mateo, infected by a psychic, or someone else entirely?” Alyssa says. “If it’s the latter, we need to find the real Mateo.”

“It’s not really something we can decide, but yes. I’m not sure how we go about doing that. It’s not like we can look for a scar underneath his right eye, or something. It’s entirely reasonable that he would get himself into a pristine body. The impostor’s story about Mateo going to the Fifth Division was not unbelievable.”

“You think that really happened, but Constance!Five somehow transformed herself into him, and left him somewhere?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time. Fax!Mateo did it so he could sacrifice himself in Alt!Mateo’s body.”

“This is getting confusing,” Alyssa admits. “Has your life always been like this?”

“It hasn’t,” Leona begins. “Back in the day, when Mateo and I were just jumping forward in time, we met a lot of time travelers, but we never had to wonder whether they were the wrong version of someone we already knew. I mean, there was The Rogue, and then Makarion after that, but it didn’t happen nearly as much as it does now. For a reality that doesn’t allow temporal manipulation, there do seem to be a lot of wibbly wobbly, timey-wimey shit. Sorry,” she adds in reference to the children.

“It’s fine,” Alyssa promises.

Young Moray comes down the hallway, pulling away from every attempt of Carlin’s to keep him back. “What about the error detector?”

“What do you mean?” Leona asks.

“That thing you had in the sky. It told you where all the weird time people were, right? If the real Mr. Matic is somewhere else, that should be able to find him, right?”

Leona looks over at Ramses. “We need to replace that anyway to find the remaining errors, don’t we, since the AOC is gone?”

“Oh my God, the AOC!” Ramses laments. The error detector was on that, and now it’s gone. He feels so stupid. It would have been so easy to deploy a nanosatellite from the AOC, and it’s a lot more difficult now that they have to rely on this antiquated Third Rail technology. Months of living here, and he has still not gotten used to that. He keeps making these mistakes, and it’s really starting to piss him off. “The detector isn’t up there anymore. I’m such an idiot.”

“Now hold on,” Alyssa says. “Maybe we don’t need it. If Mateo isn’t dead—which, I’m guessing the detector wouldn’t detect anyway—and our theory is correct, then Constance!Five is keeping him somewhere relatively safe. He would need food, water, shelter. She hasn’t been here long, so she doesn’t know of a whole lot of places.”

“It would appear that she knows everything that Mateo does,” Leona replies. “He has a lot of places in his head.”

“How many of those places are isolated or hidden, so no one will stumble upon him?” Alyssa asks.

“Where was he last time,” Carlin offers, “the first time this happened?”

“The bunker,” Leona answers. She gets out of her chair, then just stands there.

“What’s happening?” Ramses asks her.

“I can’t jump,” she replies. “This body metabolizes temporal energy too quickly.”

“I don’t have any left either,” Ramses says apologetically. “I’ve had to use a lot recently, and I’m in no position to synthesize more.”

“I can still feel the power in this body. If that’s okay with you?”

“No, go, please.” Leona urges. “No one else will go with you to conserve the power you have left. I’ll show you where it is on the map, then we’ll catch up with you by car.”

Alyssa teleports to the middle of the forest, and can instantly feel that it was her last trip. She either gets her hands on more temporal energy, or she never jumps again. Her mother taught her how to read a map without satnav, so she can also tell that she’s a little off the mark, but not too far away. She carefully climbs down the hill, and finds the secret entrance to the underground bunker. She slides down the ladder to find Mateo on the opposite wall. He’s nearly naked, strapped to what seems to be a wire bed frame. He looks dehydrated and exhausted. “Oh my God! What happened to you!”

“Fuh...” he’s really struggling to speak. “Cons...conste...”

“Constance!Five, yeah, we know. She was impersonating you.”

“No.” He shakes his head while she tries to get the restraints off. He musters what little energy he has left. “Constellation.” He passes out.

“What?”

One more push. “Constellation. Phoenix. We have to go there.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: December 9, 2398

« < » > Table of Contents

Arcadia has her own life, so she hasn’t had time to learn how to use the equipment in the lab. She and Ramses came up with a code phrase in case he ever suspected himself of being psychically compromised again, but that’s about as far as they got with the protocols. She and Vearden drove there from their house yesterday, and they’ve been here ever since, reading the manual that Ramses prepared in case he was ever indisposed. He didn’t write all of himself. He got a lot of help from their new AI, Constance. Actually, it was more like him helping her. The text is well organized, and easy to understand for the less educated, like Arcadia, but it’s still a lot, so she didn’t want to rush this. “Okay, I’ve found Alyssa’s most recent scan.”

“Okay,” Ramses replies, still inside the containment chamber with Alyssa. It was awkward after their conversation, but they took turns on the cot, and made it work. He might install multiple cots after all this, but on the other hand, he doesn’t want to plan for another crisis.

“And I see her history. It’s definitely changed.”

“Good, can you look at my history?”

“Yeah, I see it right here.”

“Okay, run a scan on both of us, it’s fine, just make sure you tell the scanner that it should be expecting two consciousnesses, instead of one.”

“No, I think I know how to scan you and you alone.”

“All right.” Ramses grimaces. That’s not a very high level function, but it’s not completely obvious either.

“Just please go to your separate corners,” Arcadia requests.

Ramses stays near the front while Alyssa goes behind him, thinking she’s getting out of the way.

“No, um, different corners.” The chamber is more circular than it is round, but Alyssa figures it out, and ends up catty-corner to him. Now that the two subjects aren’t too close to each other, the machine scans Ramses’ brain. Arcadia watches the data come in. She’s seen enough already by comparing the new scan with his scan history. “Constance, sequestration wall.”

A wall comes down from the ceiling, physically separating Ramses from Alyssa. “What? Why did you do that?” Alyssa questions.

Ramses sighs. “I’m not infected. She’s trying to protect me from you.”

“I still need to keep you contained,” Arcadia says. “I’ve only run one test, so you can’t leave, but I don’t want to risk further cross-contamination.”

“It’s gonna be okay,” Ramses says to Alyssa.

“Get it out. Get it out of my brain,” she begs.

“It’s not that bad,” Ramses assures her. “Erlendr can’t control your actions. It’s more like he extracted a piece of his consciousness, and implanted it in you, so everything you’ve experienced since then can be his. But don’t worry, you only uploaded yourself into the Insulator once to see if he would respond better to you asking for help with Leona’s bounty. You haven’t been back, which means he can’t have downloaded anything from you yet.”

“How do you know he didn’t download anything from me from my life before?”

“We would have seen that,” Ramses tells her. “We would have seen him doing that as it was happening. He hasn’t gotten anything from you, and we’re gonna figure out how to get the infection out before it can do any harm, right?” He turns to face Arcadia at the last few words.

“Yeah, I can do this,” Arcadia replies confidently. “With my new knowledge of this tech, combined with my naturally psychic abilities, this will be easy. I just need to know more about what we’re dealing with. I have to analyze Alyssa’s scan history.”

“Synthesize,” Ramses corrects. “You need to synthesize it. It’s far more complicated than just pointing to an area of the brain, and saying, that’s been taken over by Erlendr.”

“I know, I just...don’t know all the lingo yet,” Arcadia says. Yikes, she thinks. Is she going to be able to do this?

After Arcadia completes one more scan for good measure on Alyssa’s brain, Alyssa sighs, and plops herself down on the cot to wait. Arcadia works on the problem for the next few hours. She scans her own brain with an external unit to figure out why it is that her mental defenses weren’t able to protect Alyssa from this intrusion. She asks Ramses for a little guidance throughout, but doesn’t want to involve him too much as she’s not one hundred percent sure that he’s not also secretly infected. Vearden, unable to do anything, becomes the errand boy for all three of them. He goes out to get them food, and other amenities. He also dotes on Arcadia, and tries to make sure she has everything she needs to be comfortable, like a lumbar pillow, and ice chips. She’s fourteen weeks pregnant, not in hospice, but if he can’t stop her from working, he’s at least going to make sure she doesn’t overexert herself. She accepts the support, because arguing would make it worse, and it is helping her focus on Alyssa.

Finally, Arcadia is certain that there is nothing wrong with Ramses, which is probably what she should have been most worried about the entire time. With him back in commission, she doesn’t need to be responsible for Alyssa’s psychic restoration. She lets him out of the containment chamber, and steps aside so he can take over. She doesn’t want to leave while he’s working, though, because now she’s invested.

“Hold on,” Ramses says. He pulls up Alyssa’s scan history again, and puts them all in a row. “Constance, loop these images in rapid succession, chronologically.”

The AI performs the request.

“What is it?” Alyssa asks.

“It can’t be.” Ramses peers at the screen, and watches the loop a few more times while Arcadia watches it over his shoulder, not sure what she’s seeing. He stops, and looks inquisitively up at Alyssa. “This is going to be an odd question, but I need you to really think hard about it. Before you met this team, did you have any other interaction with someone who may have been a time traveler, or a psychic, or something? Thinking back, was there someone who you now realize may have been a little...different?”

“Not that I can think of,” she answers. “Why? Have my scans always been weird?”

“Well, I first scanned your mind a long time ago, when we were figuring out how to do your illusion powers, and I always took the data as what we in the business call baseline, but maybe they never were. I don’t think this is Erlendr. I think someone else put something in your head, and it could have been a long time ago.”

“What do we do about that?” Arcadia questions.

Ramses takes a breath. “More tests.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: December 8, 2398

« < » > Table of Contents

Ramses and Mateo decided to not talk to each other too much for fear of disturbing the timeline, which feels more fragile than the ones in other realities. Ramses is grateful to know that his best friend is safe...for now, but worried more than ever for Leona. He can’t help either of them right now. He has his own problems to deal with. Erlendr initially declined his offer to loan him Leona Reaver’s body so they can fake Leona Matic’s death to get the bounty off her head. As promised, Ramses let him stay in Bhulan’s field of daisies simulation in the Insulator of Life anyway. The next day, Erlendr called to say that he had changed his mind, and he would help them with their ruse. The next day after that, he called again to change his mind again. He’s been flip-flopping ever since, and it’s only now that Ramses has realized that it doesn’t matter what they do now. They can never trust the man to follow the script. Team Matic has turned a number of people to the light side over the ages, but Erlendr Preston will never be one of them. Some people are just broken, and they can’t be fixed, because too many pieces are missing. In his case, it’s any concept of selflessness.

“I’ll do it,” Alyssa says.

“You’ll do what?” Ramses questions.

“Transfer my mind to Reaver’s body. I’ll play the part that Erlendr was going to.”

Ramses brushes the idea away from himself. “You can’t do that, it’s too dangerous.”

“Are you saying I’m not capable? You were gonna trust that man, but not me? I’ve heard the stories.”

“It’s not that we trust him,” Ramses explains, “it’s that we don’t care what happens to him. If it doesn’t work, and that Reaver body is on its last life, it would be no great loss to the world. That’s not something I’m prepared to risk when it comes to someone I actually care about.”

“You care about Leona more,” Alyssa forthputs.

“What makes you say that?”

“You’ve known her a lot longer.”

Ramses winces. “Love isn’t measured on a sliding scale. You’re one of us, I thought we had already convinced you of this.”

“The danger she’s in is real. Someone is going to kill her, or Arcadia. It’s just a matter of time, in my opinion. I only might die if I do this. I’ll take those odds.”

“Like I said, I love you, but I’m the one who understands the odds. We still don’t know who placed the extraction mirror underneath Alt!Mateo and Leona Reaver. They may have always been trying to kill you, and have been waiting for you to do what you’re proposing the whole time. You’re still not accustomed to envisaging motivations that don’t exist yet...of people who may not even exist yet.”

“Everyone else has risked their lives to help each other. If you truly think of me as part of the group...” She places a hand on his thigh, “and you truly love me, you’ll let me help.” She slides her hand a couple of centimeters up, extinguishing all ambiguity.

He’s never going to agree to this. They’ll just have to find another way. This whole plan was never foolproof, nor inherently necessary. There’s every chance that, even if it goes off without a hitch, Leona and Arcadia will still be in danger. No need to put Alyssa in the same position. Ramses gently removes her hand from his leg. “It’s hard to calculate how much older I am than you.”

She leans in. “I’m sorry, I stopped listening after you said that you were hard.”

“Not what I meant, just like I didn’t mean it that way when I said I love you.”

“I’m almost twenty-two. Where I’m from, when you turn nineteen, there’s no maximum age for your chosen partner.”

“Where I’m from, there is. I think of you as a little sister.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Look—”

“Perfect,” Alyssa interrupts. “Now you’re gonna condescend to me.”

“Look around, Lyss. We’re the only two people left. Angela’s on a spaceship with your brothers, Leona and Marie are missing, Mateo is in another reality. Arcadia and Vearden are...ya know, not really part of this anyway. I don’t even wanna talk about Cheyenne. We’re both feeling lonely, I’m sure, but I’ve seen this happen before, in another life. These sorts of relationships that are just about boredom and escapism don’t just not work out; they turn sour. If we were normal people, I might not think it’s that big of a deal, but we’re going to leave the Third Rail one day, and we could be stuck on a tiny spaceship together. Trust me, it’s not a good idea, age gap notwithstanding.”

“I’m not asking for a boyfriend,” Alyssa spits. “Jesus, get over yourself.”

“What did you just say?”

“I said get over yourself.”

“No, who’s Jesus?”

“It’s just an expression.”

“No, it’s not, he’s a real person from history, but as far as I know, not your history. Why would that be an expression in this timeline?”

“I dunno, man, I’m not a linguist. Stop trying to change the subject. This isn’t one of your crazy time travel mysteries. If you’re not going to let me help you protect Leona, then we need to focus on coming up with a new plan.”

“No, this is the only thing that matters right now. If you really wanna help, I need you to get into that containment chamber, and stand in the center.”

“Are you going to hurt me?” she asks.

“Only if you refuse. Alyssa would not refuse.”

“I am Alyssa.”

“Great!” He nods at her, because she already has her orders.

Confused, she steps up into the chamber, and waits as he closes the door, then goes over to fiddle with his gizmos. “Are you seeing anything?”

“Don’t move, please,” he requests. He engages the scan, and watches the data. She looks mostly like herself, but not entirely. There’s something wrong with her brain, and in all likelihood, his own as well. He grabs his phone, and dials Arcadia. When she answers, he utters the emergency code, “media mavens mount surgical strikes from trapper keeper collages, and online magazine racks.”

“Get in the chamber,” Arcadia demands. “I’m on my way.”

“What the hell is wrong?” Alyssa asks Ramses after he steps into the chamber with her, and commands the lab to go into lockdown.

“Your mind is infected with psychic energy, most likely Erlendr’s. I’ve been in the Insulator more than you; I must assume I’m infected too. Don’t worry, help is coming.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 22, 2398

« < » > Table of Contents

Marie called it in, and confirmed her suspicions. A spy satellite feed showed that a small speedboat-like watercraft was moving at top speed from the shores of Panama, while a fleet of larger ships were in pursuit. They could have overcome it at pretty much any time. There must be a reason that they want to maintain distance. The most likely explanation is that there is something dangerous on board, like a bomb, or a deadly chemical. Leona and Marie don’t want to teleport there if they don’t have to. According to Ramses’ research, their ability to metabolize the Bermuda Triangle water is diminishing. If they keep using it to reactivate their powers, it eventually won’t work anymore. Theoretically, they can’t overdose on the stuff, but also theoretically, they can. It’s here in case of an emergency, though, if the pursuing ships change tactics, or if either party reacts to their arrival. To be safe, by the time they make their interception, the SD6 team will put on their hazmat suits, just in case that’s what the problem is.

It took the team a long time, but they’re here now. They have the boats in their sights, and nothing has changed from the last satellite view that they saw. The pursuing ships are still 900 meters from the speedboat. It’s been on the water for so long, it has to be running out of power. It was going all night, so it had to rely on its battery reserves, and those things are not designed for overnight trips. The driver is running out of power, and it will probably happen soon. When it does, that could be enough to cause the ships to make bolder moves. The team has to get to it now, and figure this out. They don’t know if they’re target is good or bad, dangerous or harmless, so they’re not going to take any chances. Leona and Marie have their immortality water boosters inside their hazmat suits, ready to take the other three members of the team with them, plus the target, if necessary. Then again, they’re still not close enough to know if there even is only one person on the vessel. It’s the only one they can track using Ramses’ scanner, but that doesn’t mean that person is alone.

Once the team breaks the 900-meter radius, that’s when the ships start to change direction. They all move at the same time. “Oh, no,” Leona laments. “They’re coming in to attack us. Get your auto-injector ready.”

“No,” Marie says with a shake of her head. “That’s not what they’re doing. They’re leaving.” She’s right. They’re not getting into attack formation. They’re turning. It’s going to take them a long time at their sizes, going at their speeds, but they’re definitely turning away. From what, them? That is even weirder. What are they so afraid of? Why did they spend all this time and effort going after this little boat, only to bail when a three crew-sized tactical amphibious vessel shows up? Surely they have their own satellites, and would have seen them coming from literally miles away.

They’re not going to spend too much time dwelling on it. They get closer to the speedboat, which is being maneuvered into parallel position. Once they’re tied together, the hatch from the cabin opens. Bhulan Cargill climbs out of it, except it’s not Bhulan. It’s Mateo’s once-sister, Aquila in Bhulan’s body. “Why are you wearing those things?”

“We didn’t know what to expect,” Leona says. “This whole mission has been bizarre. Why were they coming after you, and why are they giving up now?”

Aquila looks back at the fleet. “Oh, they weren’t coming after me. Those are my escort ships. They were making sure no one attacked. We need to talk...about Mateo.”