The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 7, 2398

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Leona is sitting in her wheelchair while Mateo is sitting up in her bed. He’s mindlessly flipping through channels on the TV, but it’s impossible to find something good. He’s sure there are plenty of great programs here, but they always make him a little uncomfortable. It feels like Third Railers are on a slightly different frequency than normal people. Their idea of entertainment isn’t wrong or even weird, it’s just a little too different than what he’s used to. It’s hard to explain what he doesn’t like about it, but he can only stomach about ten minutes of it before it makes him shiver, and he has to change it to something else.

“I’m getting hungry,” Leona notes.

Mateo checks her watch. She’s not allowed to wear jewelry while she’s checked in as a patient, in case they need to take her out for tests. It shouldn’t matter now since no one is running any tests of the sort, but they don’t want to piss the hostage-takers off any more than they already are. “Rations were meant to come an hour ago.”

“I hope they’re late because patients in critical need of nutrition are taking priority, and not that they’ve decided to starve us.”

“Want me to go out there and check?”

She shakes her head vigorously. “Nope. I don’t want you to draw attention to you or us at all. Maybe you could sneak back over to Cheyenne’s room again, though?”

“Okay.” He peeks his head through the doorway. The coast is clear—too clear, like a scene in a horror movie that you think is maybe a dream sequence, but it turns out the killer’s not dead, and he’s found her, and the hospital floor is totally empty only to increase tension, despite how unlikely that is. Mateo slinks down the hallways, and slips into Cheyenne’s room.

Marie is in there with her. They’re playing a card game across the bed. “Problem, or is she still just worried?” Marie asks.

“The second thing,” Mateo answers. “Have you heard anything? Are they going to let us out anytime soon?”

“It depends on what you mean by soon,” Cheyenne replies. “Santiens are pretty hardcore. They won’t stop until they’ve purified everyone they deem to be unclean.”

“Yeah, and you’re sure that doesn’t mean they’re going to kill them, right?”

“Positive,” Cheyenne assures him.

A group of heavily armed people belonging to a religion called Santienism took over the hospital when they learned that a group of Suiliens were involved in a bus crash, and were brought here for treatment. According to Carlin and Moray’s research, the two sects were once one, but Santiens broke away when they became obsessed with using natural remedies to cure disease. This caused the Suiliens to both metaphorically and literally dig into their own beliefs. They sleep in the dirt, and don’t ever bathe, believing that nature is the closest thing to divinity. Neither one of them believes in real science, and members of both sides get sick a lot because of their unhealthy habits. When their medical issues become too much for them to bear, they will go against their convictions with real doctors, but they are not meant to visit the same facilities due to a self-imposed policy of segregation. These are extenuating circumstances.

They have locked the building down so that no one can come in, and no one can leave. They have installed signal blockers to prevent communication to the outside world, which is why Mateo and Leona were unable to make their rendezvous with Ramses. They don’t know if he and Alyssa left without them, or if they’re still waiting in that park upstate. All they would have had to do, though, would be to check the internet for current events in the area. This isn’t national news by any stretch, as things like this happen from time to time, but it’s noteworthy enough to be reported on locally.

It’s been two nights since this debacle began, and now it’s early morning. How long exactly does it take to purify a bus full of your enemies, whether that means killing them, or not? Mateo looks towards the door, but that’s not what he’s thinking about. This is a team of action. They don’t do well just sitting around, waiting for other people to make things happen. His instincts are telling him to go out there, and make the situation better...or maybe make it worse instead, but brief.

“Don’t do it,” Marie urges him, knowing him well enough to predict his impulses. “This isn’t our problem.”

“We’ll be out of here by the end of the day,” Cheyenne believes.

“No, you won’t, and it’s your problem now.” One of the hostage-takers is standing in the doorway, aiming a gun at them from his waist like a buster in a film noir.

“We’re not doing anything wrong,” Marie protests.

“What religions are you?” the man with the gun asks, stepping closer menacingly.

“Unaffiliated,” she replies.

“The marker on your door indicates that you’re Caducean.”

Cheyenne leans forward to look at the faith indicator, but she can’t read it. “I hadn’t noticed. My friends must have put that there. Caduceans tend to receive priority treatment.” Caduceans do believe in science, and most medical professionals affiliate.

“Lying about your faith is an offense.”

“It’s not illegal.” One might think it would be, but not as long as the lie isn’t accompanied by other crimes. Still, some find the practice irreverent. In this case, he should just let it go as he obviously has more important stuff going on right now.

He relaxes his hand, but keeps his gun at the ready. “There are too many people in this room. One visitor at a time. One of you has to go back to your room, or downstairs with the other non-patients, depending on which one agrees to leave.”

“I’m going,” Mateo says.

“No, I’ll go,” Marie insists as she’s standing up. She gives Mateo a look that hopefully means don’t bring Leona into this, just stay here, because that’s how he’s interpreting it.

Ramses suddenly appears out of nowhere. “Oh. You have company over. I’m so sorry to disturb you.”

“Where the hells did you come from?” the gunman questions angrily.

“Umm....the bathroom?”

“The bathroom is behind me.”

“We don’t have time for this.” Ramses takes Mateo and Cheyenne by the hands, and teleports them to the rendezvous point in the park. Leona is already there, as are Winona and the AOC. Ramses makes one more jump to the hospital for Marie.

“What’s going on?” Mateo asks Winona.

She shakes her head and sighs. “Those guys who bombed the studio; they only did it to steal money, but nobody knows that yet. Someone was inspired to try to fix what they thought was a mistake. There is a bounty on Leona’s head. We had to act.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 22, 2398

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The agents are on the case. Cheyenne’s murder was a terrible tragedy, but in the end, it hasn’t changed anything. They still need to find Meredarchos, who is hiding out in Andile’s former body, and they still don’t know where he’s going. His motives are difficult to understand, to say the least. Why sneak into the Lofts, and how did he do it? Why kill her? For the Insulator of Life? If he’s as powerful as he sounds, death is probably not something he’s really ever had to worry about.

Angela calls Leona, Mateo, and Ramses into the security room. She’s been studying the footage, and might not have slept last night. At first, she was focused on making sure that Ramses didn’t do anything, or his body, anyway. After she cleared his name, though, she apparently wanted to go back through, and look more closely at the feeds. “How did he get in the building?” she poses.

“We don’t know. How?” Leona asks right back.

“I’ve seen every frame from every camera,” Angela begins, “and he doesn’t. He doesn’t step one foot in this place.”

“Okay... Do you need to sleep?”

“I’m fine, I’ve had some coffee,” Angela says. Coffee indeed, the trashcan is full of coffee pods. She takes another sip from her current cup of the stuff. “The reason I didn’t see him enter the building is because he was already inside.” She switches the monitors to the feeds from the fifteenth of this month, which is the day Rothko broke out of the blacksite, and—probably unintentionally—freed Meredarchos. It is here where they see him pick the lock on the side door, and enter the building. “I looked into the operation records from SD6. He came straight here. He knew exactly where we lived and worked, and he knew exactly what he wanted to do.”

“What did he want to do?” Mateo asks.

Angela begins to step through the timeline. They see Meredarchos walk right up to the lab, let himself in using a badge that shouldn’t exist, and which he definitely shouldn’t have, then approach the Insulator of Life. He touches the top of it, and disappears in a flash of life.”

“Where did he go?” Alyssa asks. She wasn’t in the room before.

“That I don’t know,” Angela answers, all jittery. She tries to take another desperate sip, but Mateo takes it away from her.

“Okay, that’s enough.”

“Whatever, you can’t control me, I’ll just wait until you leave. Now, that’s not the interesting part. Here’s the interesting part.” She jumps back to the feed from two days ago, dragging one particular camera over to the main screen, so they can see it better that’s showing the outside of that side door. “Okay, so watch her—I mean him—leave.” Meredarchos does indeed leave the building, and walk out of frame. “Right quick, look at the distant viewer...there. Did you see that? His arm—well, I mean, Andile’s arm—appears in frame for a second, and then he goes back out. So it looks like he’s leaving, right? Wrong. He comes back. Now, we don’t see him coming back, but I know that he did. Because look at this camera.” She switches to the loading dock camera, where nothing happens. “Uhuh. See it right? Right?”

“See what?” Mateo questions. “Nothing happened.”

“Run it again,” Leona asks, leaning forward, and squinting at the screen.

Angela nods. “Okay.” She does so. “There! Aaaaaand there! And there, and there, and there.”

“Yeah, I see it,” Leona acknowledges.

“I see it too,” Ramses says. Of course the three smartest people in the room see what the other two don’t.

“What is it?” Alyssa asks them.

“There’s a leaf on the pavement. The wind picks up, and pushes it maybe a centimeter to the left. It’s barely noticeable, but it’s there. And it keeps repeating. This footage is on a loop. In fact, it loops the same five seconds over and over again for twenty-five minutes. That’s enough time to step out of the blindspot, and into the dock through the regular door.”

“I thought that’s why you guys put those lava lamps all over the place,” Alyssa points out. “Don’t they prevent loops from happening?”

“There are none outside. It’s not a mistake,” Leona tells her. “We made a conscious decision to not put them on the exterior.” Having lamps on the outside would draw too much attention. It seemed safer to assume that anyone wishing them harm from the outside, would try to make their way inside, where cameras would be waiting. That seemed good enough...unless they had explosives. “They would look suspicious. People would be asking why the hell they’re out there.”

“So, what does this mean?” Mateo poses. “Meredarchos snuck in here to kill Cheyenne for the thing he already had in his possession a week ago?”

“It’s all about Erlendr,” Leona realizes. “He knew that he wouldn’t be able to keep Ramses’ body forever, because we would figure it out, and we would spend untold resources to get him back if he escaped with it again, so he came up with a plan to get himself into Andile’s body, which is extra, and thusly less important. Because apparently Meredarchos has the ability to store full substrates in the Insulator, which we were to understand is not something it’s capable of.”

“So both Meredarchos and Erlendr are in Andile’s body?” Alyssa guesses.

“Either that, or Meredarchos just took the Insulator with plans to use it on some other poor unsuspecting soul later,” Leona suggests.

“That doesn’t explain why he came back into the building,” Angela reminds her. “What did he need in the basement? We swept the whole place, nothing was taken.”

“You didn’t sweep everything,” Ramses reveals solemnly.

“What are you talking about?” Leona asks.

“Okay, don’t get mad, but I found something in the basement when we first got here that I decided to keep secret in case I needed to store hazardous materials. I don’t have all my memories of when Erlendr was in my head, but I get fragments back. I think he put something in there.”

“Something, like what?”

“Something like...Trina’s body?”

“Oh my God,” Alyssa exclaims.

They all take a field trip to the basement to see whether what Ramses believes is true. He remembers digging in the dirt, and coming down here with something approximately human-sized, so he just put two and two together. Now he needs proof. He removes the false panel, and opens the secret refrigerator door, but they don’t find Trina’s body in there. Instead, they see Andile’s.

Microstory 1771: Arrow

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I know what they want; what they’re expecting. They have obviously done this before, and they know how it goes, because all of their victims have been predictable. They want to get as deep in the woods as possible as fast as possible. But I don’t know where I am, or how far I am from civilization. I could wind up heading straight for some kind of secondary base camp, where an entire regiment is waiting to finish the job. Things used to be a lot easier for me. I had a pretty cushy life, and I didn’t worry myself with the state of the rest of the world. I’m sure that’s why they chose me, because they’re angry, and I’m an easy target. Well, I’m about to show them just how wrong they are. I am not going to make it easy on them. I’m not going to run as far as I can. I’m going to hide, and find an opportunity to hunt them right back. They’re counting on the fact that I’ve been so sheltered. They think it gives them some kind of advantage over me, like they’re the only ones who are all right with getting their hands dirty. I may have less experience than them, but there has been a darkness inside me since I was a boy, and they just gave me permission to let it out. If I manage to kill any of these people in my pursuit of freedom and safety, no one will blame me for it. It was self-defense. They may have all the weapons, and probably even the skill. But I have something they could never understand: the ability to shut out my feelings, and turn feral. I’m no straight arrow, but I don’t drink all that much, because if I want to lose my inhibitions, all I have to do is let go of my grasp on the moral code that I developed to avoid getting in trouble. That’s the only reason it’s there. I don’t really value human life, and I certainly don’t value these people’s lives. If they want violence tonight, they’ll get it, and they’ll be sorry they asked.

Just as I’m crossing the tree line, an arrow nearly catches me in the ankle. They promised they would wait five minutes before they began the hunt. I don’t think they have their eyes on breaking that promise. They’re clearly a cocky bunch who have no reason to suspect that I might actually survive this. I think that was just one of them showing off his bow and arrow skills. That’s good to know. When I think I’m out of eyesight, I speed up. I run as fast as I can, as far as I can, using up nearly all the energy I can muster at once. Once a minute has passed, I stop. I turn around, and head back towards the barn, but at an angle. I walk slowly and carefully, avoiding every fallen leaf on the ground. I spend the four minutes I have left getting right back to the starting point without alerting anyone to my presence. They’re going to walk straight into the woods, thinking that I’ll be a kilometer away before they catch up to me. I start to hear their voices as I get closer. I can’t tell what they’re saying, but their tone doesn’t sound like they know what’s up. My plan is working. What I’m gonna do is make it back up to the barn, kill whoever they left behind to guard it, steal their weapons, and then go after the rest, one by one. I stay low, and peek around a tree. Hm. I don’t see anyone there at all. Did they really all go off on the hunt? What a bunch of morons. I wait for a moment just in case before bolting towards the barn, getting myself drenched in the floodlights, but not staying visible too long. I find an old pickup truck inside. Perhaps there are some weapons stored in here. There aren’t, but the key is in the ignition. This forces me to admit to myself that they left me with no excuse to fight back and kill people. So I reluctantly get in the truck, and drive to the police station two counties over.