Microstory 2776: Jump

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The air escapes the rocket since they have no way of closing the bulkheads. Elise and Zelda strap themselves into the nearest seats as the inertial dampeners either don’t work, or don’t even exist. Elise feels her face collapse into itself as the apparent gravity increases. Back when she was much younger, high gravity training was required for space travel, even if you were just going into orbit. As the technology became more reliable, and redundancies were reinforced, they stopped treating everyone like an astronaut, and the first true passengers emerged. It has been centuries since she’s felt this, and she does not care for it. She turns her head to Zelda, who is, of course, loving it.

Several minutes later, the rocket has made it into orbit. The trembling stops, and the gravity stabilizes. They can finally relax and speak. Elise catches Zelda up on everything she missed after she was presumed dead. Their best guess is that this is not a new timeline, but the same one with more information. The girls sit there together, waiting for something special to happen, but it never does. This is a problem, because while the vacuum suit cartridge has its own carbon scrubber, it’s not the most efficient kind, and is only meant to be used in emergencies. That’s exactly what this is, but they should really get a more reliable source of air if they’re going to be here for a while.

Maybe this isn’t the final challenge, and never was. Maybe it was simply the hardest one yet, and the team has so much more to get through in any timeline. Elise doesn’t even really care about that anymore; she was only trying to save Zelda’s life and memories. If the hunt is going to continue, they have to get the rest of the team back somehow. Short of that, they have to reunite back on the real Castlebourne, and scrub the whole thing. But for now, all they can do is sit here and wait.

“There’s more we can do,” Zelda contends. “This is the same alien language that Colley encountered in the Empty Planet simulation, and the same one we’ve seen pop up every once in a while on this hunt. He figured it out eventually, so we can do the same.”

“Keyword is eventually,” Elise responds. “He beat Empty Planet because language and culture are his thing. I don’t know if we have time. He didn’t teach us.”

“We may as well try,” Zelda reasons. “One of these buttons shuts all of the bulkheads, and another one reestablishes air circulation. Or maybe a few of them, I don’t know, but the puzzle is here, we just have to solve it. We can do this, Elise.”

Elise sighs. “It’s alien. Maybe it doesn’t have the right atmospheric comps.”

“Then we’ll make it work. The hunt would not have led us here if it were impossible. The escape pod is a failsafe to get you out of the game, but you’re not supposed to take it. You’re supposed to be in here, and survive. Whatever we’re waiting to happen, it probably can’t happen until we turn on life support,” Zelda reasons.

Elise nods. “You’re right. There must be a way. The language is translatable.”

And so the girls start trying to understand what they’re looking at. They start by tracing the exposed cables from less dangerous systems to their controls. They figure out what turns the lights on and off, and which buttons open and close the panels. That gives them a baseline for what the alien symbols mean. From there, they incrementally learn what everything on the bridge does. It takes them hours, but they do figure it out.

Meanwhile, they start to understand what the ship is doing on its own. It doesn’t remain in a circular orbit. They’re climbing to a higher altitude. For what purpose, they don’t know, but Delta V will be lower farther from the planet’s gravity well, so it could be preparing to activate an ion drive, or something else, to leave Castlebourne entirely. They can’t let that happen, but none of these buttons says that there is a way to cross back over to the main dimension. The aliens probably couldn’t do that. The Facsimile is just the Custodians’ way of allowing the hunt to take the hunters anywhere in the world without interfering with the normal goings-on. It’s not actually part of the story.”

“Wait, I think this will do something,” Zelda says. She flips a switch.

An alien voice would occasionally make announcements through the speakers, particularly when they made some change. Knowing how to read the symbols, and understanding their spoken words, are not the same thing, so they have never been able to comprehend it. Until now. Now it’s all being said in plain English. Zelda flips the lights on and off a few times to confirm. “Lights on, lights off. Lights on, lights off—”

“Okay.” Elise pins Zelda’s hand down gently. “It works. That was the last piece of the puzzle. Now we just need to wait forty-two more seconds until that periodic announcement we keep hearing triggers again, and finally find out what it’s saying.”

“I think it’s counting down,” Zelda explains. “The second part is always the same, but the first part is always different.”

Elise nods. “That would be my guess too.”

“Eighty-three seconds to reintegration,” the voice says, confirming their guess.

They both widen their eyes. Reintegration? What exactly does that mean?

Eighty-three seconds pass. Sensors start going off. Proximity alert after proximity alert after proximity alert. They look through the viewports to see another space station. They’re fine—they’re not going to collide with it—but they’re clearly back in the real dimension. This is precisely what they were hoping for.

Elise opens her bag and grabs one of the communicators that she packed.

“Activating reframe engines in eleven minutes,” the computer announces.

“Is that the thing that makes a ship move faster than light?” Zelda questions.

“Yes,” Elise replies in a panicky voice. She opens a channel. “Laise, are you there? Please respond, Laise. This is Elise Perkins. Please respond!”

“Laise here, go ahead.”

“Have you been tracking the team? Do you know where they are?” Elise asks.

“Yes, they’re in a highly secure facility,” Laise answers. “I’ve been trying to break them out for an hour. I’m only at Step 2. I could really use your help.”

“If it’s secure,” Elise realizes, “then it probably doesn’t allow teleportation.”

“That was my thinking,” Laise agrees. “That’s why I’m shutting off the power.”

“Good girl,” Elise says. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

“Sending the coordinates now.” A brief pause. “Power will take a few minutes.”

“I can’t jump that far in one go,” Elise explains to Zelda. “I have to start now. She affixes the communicator onto her nanite vacuum suit, and seals most of it up, leaving only the visor open. “You stay here. If you can delay FTL, do it, but don’t stop it.”

“Aye, Captain,” Zelda says. “And Captain,” she adds when Elise tries to turn away. “One more thing.” She takes Elise by the helmet and kisses her passionately.

Elise lets her go and smiles. “I love you.” She drops her visor and teleports away.

Miracle called this burst mode. She can only jump about a thousand kilometers, so the first time she does it, she’s still in the middle of outer space. She immediately jumps again. Then again, and again, and again, until she’s back down on the surface. She’s standing next to Laise now, who is still waiting for Castledome’s power to turn off.

Laise salutes Elise, then shifts her fingers to count down. “Four, three, two, one.”

After all of the lights shut off, Elise picks Laise up, and teleports away.

They’re deep inside the castle now, in what looks like a dungeon. All of their friends are chained up on the other side of metal bars, which Elise is somehow not able to teleport through. They must be on auxiliary power. Azad is here too, dressed in medieval garb, instead of his usual heavily armored IMS unit. He draws his sword.

“I don’t have time for this,” Elise complains. “The ship is about to disappear.”

Azad jerks his head towards another sword leaning against the stone wall. “Then you better hurry. Because I’m the only one keeping that cell locked.” He tenses up.

Elise doesn’t move. She looks over at her friends, who are watching them, but not speaking. She can’t do this. Obviously, if she wins, Azad will either heal in this body, or transmit to a backup. That’s not really even the problem, though she might feel differently if she does put that weapon in her hands. The real issue is that she doesn’t want to transfer. She likes the body she’s in right now, and she was so preoccupied with training that she never went in to duplicate her current DNA. She will lose her wings, she’ll lose teleportation...she’ll lose everything. But her friends need her.

While Elise is frozen like a coward, Laise picks up the sword. She attacks Azad instead, and damn is she good. Elise didn’t take the time to get to know her, or ever ask why Miracle conscripted her for her team in the first place. This might have been the reason, because she is kicking Azad’s ass. He might be letting her win because he secretly wants them to complete the hunt, but he’s making a good show of it at least.

After a few minutes, Laise manages to knock the sword out of Azad’s hands.

Elise runs over to pick it up, because they never do that in movies, and it often leads to a final blow by the villain. She’s not going to use it herself, though.

“Do I have to kill you?” Laise asks Azad sternly, the tip at his neck.

“The gate is on a deadman’s switch,” Azad replies plainly.

Laise nods. She looks away, then quickly drives the blade into Azad’s throat. At his final heartbeat, the gate slides open, leading to hugs and kisses all around.

“Uh, Elise?” Zelda asks through comms. “You better get back here. The ship enters reframe speeds in three minutes. I couldn’t slow it down, or stop it if I tried.”

Elise frowns at her friends. “It’s too late. We’ll never make it in time.”

“We could try to compound our temporal energy,” Miracle suggests.

“I don’t know what that means,” Elise says, though she can hazard a guess.

“We don’t have time to get into it,” Miracle begins, “but when you cross the streams of two sources of temporal energy, it can create a feedback loop, pulling more than they normally would on their own. It’s dangerous, though. We could miss our mark, which we absolutely cannot do since you’re the only one with a vac suit.”

“We have to risk it,” Jolanda decides. “If worst comes to worst, we’ll each end up in our respective backup bodies, and miss the window. I would rather try.”

“We vote,” Rage says. “Raise your hand if you wanna risk it.” She looks over at Laise when everyone raises their hand. “Are you back in? Are you with us?”

“Damn right,” Laise says. “I regretted leaving the second I did.”

“Do it,” Rage says to Elise and Miracle.

There’s really nothing for Miracle to teach Elise. The latter already knows how to build her energy for longer jumps. She’s never been able to reach 8,000 kilometers before, and certainly not with any passengers, but she has the idea. She can feel it. As she’s holding Miracle’s hands, she can feel the power. It’s intoxicating. With every wave of energy, it feels like they’ve reached their limit, but then they let more and more in.

Elise focuses on Zelda again. She is their target. If they can get close to her, they’ll all be safe. The power feels good, but they may be reaching an actual limit, because the pressure is also getting to be a little much. She keeps pushing, though, no matter how much it hurts. They build until their hands are shaking, and then they build more until their whole bodies are shaking. A glowing white light starts bursting from their eyes, and their pores. If they don’t try this now, they could quite literally explode, and since we’re dealing with time travel, they might not all end up in their backups.

Now.

Elise wakes up on the floor. The architecture suggests that she’s back on the alien ship, but it’s nowhere she’s been before. It is definitely not the bridge. She stands up and wobbles a little before catching herself on a chair. She takes deep breaths to regain her balance while she stares at the door. Once she’s ready, she exits.

The others are in the corridor with her, having seemingly just woken up as well.

Minotaur leads them back to the bridge where they find Telman standing there patiently with a cool poker face.

Telman waits for everyone to file in. “Welcome...to Level 2.”

Spaghetti West: The Ark (Part III)

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The second black hole turned out to be far more than a coincidence, and far from an isolated event. They just kept coming after that. Now that Sugar’s sensors were tuned to look for them, they started popping up everywhere. They were appearing all over the system in no apparent pattern. Efforts on the development of the orbital defense grid were redoubled multiple times. All energy was going into building them as fast as possible, focusing almost exclusively on the ionic pulse canons, but she was also sharing her unique sensor suite to predict and detect subsequent intrusions. By the time they were finished, this was going to have to be the densest defense array in the stellar neighborhood—probably the galaxy, even though Castlebourne had that war.

Speaking of Castlebourne, through a chain of contacts, Sugar was able to confirm that these singulararities were Kugelblitz, meaning they were made artificially. She learned that they were not weapons, however, but a vital component of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. This was what solved the mystery of the surface gravity. The planet was a high-density, high-mass terrestrial. These numbers weren’t as high as they could possibly go while still being rocky worlds, but they were too high for baseline humans to survive on. Before even one person stepped foot on it, thirty-two transdimensional gravity generators were installed at even intervals across the globe. Sugar still wasn’t sure who was responsible for them, but they must have been incredibly powerful.

These generators were essentially portals that linked to a different region of space. Specifically, it was a kubelblitz black hole, also known as a KBH. They basically just ignored Bida’s real gravity, and stole the gravity from somewhere else. A couple of decades ago, the owner of Castlebourne resorted to moving their entire star system away from its original spot in the galaxy in order to conceal their location from a violent enemy. They just so happened to move it within spitting distance of the KBH, which disrupted gravity on Bida. They ultimately fixed it, but something was going wrong now. They either didn’t do it correctly, or this was inevitable. Sugar put a call in to the time traveler who solved the problem, but had yet to receive a response.

There were not dozens of KBHs threatening the lives of the Bidans. There was only one, and that one was somehow being duplicated over, and over, and, and over again. She had to believe this was an accident. It was probably how Mirage Matic chose to save Bida, but it had evidently triggered a runaway chain reaction. And Sugar had no idea how to stop it. Her only hope was to keep deflecting them. It had been going on for weeks now, and they were getting pretty good at it. Could they hypothetically do this forever? Probably. While they didn’t appear predictably, their appearances had plateaued. But that didn’t mean it would stay this way. What happened when the duplicate KBHs exceeded the number of lasers in too short a time? What if in all the chaos, they accidentally deflected one of them towards one of their neighbors? What could they do if—

The sensor alarms started to blare. They would go off pretty frequently, but they were particularly urgent this time. The system knew that something was unusually wrong; that it had changed, and she had to shift all focus to the latest problem. “Oh my God,” she whispered as she stared at the screen in disbelief.

“What is it?” Liselot asked. She spent a lot of time up here, having chosen to move her base operations to Sugar’s ship. They now had a crew of dozens.

“We should have been worried about this the whole time. The next KBH. It’s not going to be in space. It’s going to be in the atmosphere.” Sugar desperately started to turn part of the array. They weren’t designed to fire towards the planet, but it was technically possible, as long as the angle wasn’t too steep. The computer was still narrowing down the entry point to a smaller area. The KBH was only millimeters in diameter, so it was hard to know exactly where it would appear. That normally wasn’t so critical, but in this case, it was more important than ever. They only had a few minutes.

“Where?” Liselot began snapping at her people. They knew what she was saying.

“What is this region here?” Sugar asked, pointing at the map. “It looks pretty heavily populated, and unusually densely so for your intentionally minimalistic world.”

“That’s...Eyrenland,” Liselot answered. “It’s the hub for our primary export, eyren. I don’t have time to explain it, but that’s where your friends from Doma Tertia are currently being housed while they figure out exactly what kind of life they wanna lead.”

“It’s about to be destroyed,” Sugar said as she pivoted to something else after syncing the sensors with the canons. They could fire at the right spot if that was what it came too, but if it was as close to the surface as it looked like it was going to be, it wasn’t the right way to handle it. And either way, the people down there were gonna die unless someone did something about it...unless she rescued them first.

“Thousands of people live and visit there every day,” Liselot explained.

“The rest of the planet isn’t safe either,” Sugar warned. “This is going to cause bidaquakes and general tectonic instability all around the world. Send that emergency broadcast over the air. They only have a moment to prepare, at best.”

“Where are you taking us?” Liselot questioned.

Sugar was at the helm now. “We have to position ourselves just above the entry point. I have two things to do. I have to pull everyone down there up here, and then I have to force the KBH back to where it came from.” She flipped switches and tapped on the console.

“What are you talking about?” Liselot pressed. “How can you do that?”

Sugar programmed the route, and made the jump. They still didn’t know the exact altitude, but it would be somewhere around here. “It’s something I’ve been working on since we found out that the KBHs were coming here through portals, and not simply wandering through realspace.” She made a short-range teleport over to the transport workstation. “If this works, I can push it backwards, but as of yet, my ship is the only thing equipped with the right hardware, which...makes this next part tricky, and I need your authorization.”

“You have it,” Liselot replied. “Do what you need to do.”

Sugar shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. The only way to save those people down there is to teleport them all at once. The ship is already remodularizing to prepare for maximum capacity, but once they come up here, they won’t necessarily be safe, because this is also the gun. I’ve not had time to test it, so if I do this, and it literally backfires, it could kill everyone anyway. My emergency transporters can’t move people to anywhere else. It doesn’t have the data to make sure some of them don’t end up in the middle of rocks, or at the bottom of the ocean. They have to come here, but this could quickly end up the most dangerous place to be.”

“Besides the surface, where the black hole is about to show up?” Liselot pointed out. “They’re gonna die if they stay down there, so get them here, and hope for the best.”

“Okay.” Sugar looked over at the sensor readings. “They were now showing how high above the surface the marble-sized singularity was going to appear. It...wasn’t going to be high. She tapped on her comms. “Van! Open the pocket dimensions. Open them all! We can’t fit everyone in realspace!”

“You got it, boss!” Van replied.

While Sugar waited for the internal portals to be activated, she widened the capture radius. Thirty-one seconds from impact, regardless of what the unsuspecting inhabitants were doing on the ground, Sugar teleported every single one of them into the ship, mostly into the pocket dimensions. They would be confused, but they would be alive, and she would try to explain things later.

“Now that they’re clear, can you not just close the portal so the black hole doesn’t come here at all?” Liselot hoped.

Sugar shook her head as she went over and hovered her hand over the button. “If I tried, it would probably make things worse. Think of it like a swarm of biblical locusts trying to fly through a doorway. If you just close the door, they’ll congregate against it until it buckles. You have to slam the door shut so it expels them backwards.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Liselot argued. “A bunch of the locusts would get in anyway.”

Sugar sighed. “Exactly.” She watched the timer count down. Eleven, ten, nine, eight... “This hasn’t been tested. If it doesn’t work...that’s the end of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida.” Three, two, one—

The Kugelblitz black hole popped into existence in the sky. The planet, which up until this point always tried to pull everything towards the barycenter near the core, suddenly had a competing mass to contend with. The trees, the water, the mountains; everything was pulled up towards the singularity. The objects closest to the event horizon were being tugged on more, resulting in them being strung out like spaghetti. The rest of the world tried to implode like a deflating football. The black hole was the heaviest thing around now, so it didn’t stay in one place. It began to fall towards the barycenter. If Sugar allowed that to happen, the whole planet would collapse in a matter of hours, if not minutes.

Sugar fired her new machine directly towards the black hole. It came from somewhere. They still hadn’t traced the source, but it had to form somewhere else in space, and she needed it to go back. As the energy wave reached critical mass, the biomass and geosphere continued to head towards a single moving point. It only took seconds for the KBH to disappear, but the devastation didn’t need long.

In this short amount of time, a land mass the size of a large country was reduced to a crater. All of the plant and animal life there was destroyed nearly instantly. The tremors continued to plague the surface all around as the gravitational disruption’s effects persisted beyond the initial shocking event.

“What did we just lose?” Sugar asked. “What did they use that settlement for?”

Liselot stared at the satellite images showing the barren landscape that once thrived. “Eggs. We lost the eggs.”

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Microstory 2775: Course Correction

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The lab that Elise was in with Miracle and Reagan disappears, and is replaced with Elise’s own apartment in Abodome. The first thing she sees is the front door closing. Someone seemingly just left, so she needs to find out who. She sprints over to it and opens it back up. She looks down the hallway and sees herself. Well, she sees the back of her own head. She recognizes the outfit too. This is it. This is the day that she and her friends officially began their hunt under Treasure Hunting Dome. She has gone back in time, just as Rae and Mir said she would. The question is, though, what now?

They didn’t actually give her any instructions. They didn’t say what she was supposed to change. She doesn’t have any experience in this, and they know that. Or they will know that, because at this point in time, she hasn’t met either of them yet. What they did to her was isolate her from everyone she cares about. There is no one she can trust without risking the timeline, and even if there were, they wouldn’t be able to help her anyway. She’s going to have to figure this out on her own. First things first, treat this like any other challenge on the hunt. According to Rage’s explanation of how they typically go, the last challenge often involves memory. You have to keep track of where you went and what you did, and regurgitate that in some way.

Elise tries to sit down at her computer, but her chair isn’t designed with wings in mind. She has to use the kitchen stool, which isn’t comfortable either because she still can’t lean back, but at least she’s not leaning forward. She opens a new file and starts to retrace her steps. She starts more general, and becomes more specific, adding the minutest of details to get a full picture of what happened once the hunt began. She color-codes it by actions she took, actions others took, and actions done to them by the game. She then goes in and adds even more information, about things that she wasn’t there for. She lists things that other hunters did, and tries to guess what Hrockas and Azad were doing in the meantime. She makes it a full, comprehensive bible of the whole ordeal, from start to finish. She even goes back to include events leading up to minute one, even though some of it is already in the past from her current perspective.

There is one interesting development; a mystery which they never solved. When the hunters were circling the desert, looking for their next clue, Minotaur went missing. They said someone in robes grabbed them and they tried to get away and lost their jacket, but the attacker quickly caught up to them. Elise looks over at her bed where she laid the robe that Reagan hung over her at the very last second. She goes over to it and picks it up. “Could this be it? Was it me the whole time?” But if so, she’s not come back to change the past. She can’t; it’s inevitable. She’s merely following in her own footsteps. Nothing will go better this time, because this isn’t a different time. Unless there’s a third Elise around here somewhere. She suddenly starts to feel like she’s being watched.

Elise paces the room. “What was it Miracle said once about time travel? If you don’t have proof that something didn’t happen, there’s a chance it happened.” She stands there and ponders that for a moment. Then she goes right back to her timeline document and reads the part about the desert again. “If you don’t have proof it didn’t happen, it might have happened,” she whispers. She nods, a little excited and more determined. “Right there. That’s my shot. I don’t have to change it if I assume it’s already happened.” She grabs the robe, drapes it over her body again, and disappears.

Elise has spent weeks practicing teleportation and flying. She has worked out every day to build up her strength. She went to a biotailor to improve her substrate even more. They reinforced her wings and increased the density of her muscles while lowering the density of her bones. It’s a trade-off, but she needs to be both strong and light. Her mission doesn’t necessarily involve being better than she already was, but why waste this opportunity? She has to do something while the timeline catches up.

She learned a few things about her temporal abilities. She can teleport from the real world to the Facsimile at will. It takes an extra boost of energy, but not as much as she figured at first. She also learns how many jumps she can do before she runs out, and she learns that she can actually increase her numbers by being more efficient, and even processing more temporal energy from wherever it comes from. The time for training is now over, though. This is the show. She packs the essentials, some of which she had to...borrow from a secure location, throws her robe back on, and heads off to work.

She is in the desert now, and has been for a couple of days. She intentionally came a little early in case something went wrong, but she also isn’t entirely sure when her past self and her friends will show up. They didn’t have timepieces with them at the time. She knows where they’ll end up, however, so she’s on her belly, watching that spot with binoculars. The robe can shift colors, as most clothing can in the modern world, so she just looks like a crest in the sand dune. She has learned to be still and patient too. She didn’t set out to do that, but it came naturally with all of her other training.

They’re here. Elise watches Azad transport them all before leaving with Hrockas and Telman. Now it’s just the hunters. She can’t hear, but she knows what they’re talking about. She waits until they spread out, triggering her window. She teleports directly to Minotaur, and after a brief struggle, relocates them to the rocket maze. Then she returns to her perch to wait for her next move. She sees them reunite and argue about what to do, and she sees Miracle teach her how to take control of her body. She watches as her past self gets trapped on the surface with Colley, where they both surrender to their budding romance, only to be caught by the others after they complete the underground maze. They all then go back down there to learn the truth about Rage.

This is it; it’s happening. Elise knew that she would be successful with Mino, because it already happened to her, but this is the real change. This is what she’s been actually training for. The ship blares as it begins to ascend. The ground shakes and gives way. Future!Elise has to start hovering to keep from slipping down the dune like an ant in an antlion’s pit. She slowly gets closer to get a better look, still worried about being spotted by someone. Past!Elise is now trying to hang on to both Colley and Zelda, but she’s not strong enough yet. Colley volunteers to let go, but Zelda beats him to it.

Future!Elise uses her friend-finding ability to teleport to exactly where Zelda is. She grabs her by the waist, and jumps them both back to the inside of the rising rocket.

“Whoa! How did you do that?” Zelda asks, trying to orient herself. “How did you do that? What are you wearing? How is your hair green now? Where’s Colley?”

“He’s fine.” Elise replies. She takes out two vacuum suit cartridges, placing one on Zelda’s chest, and the other on her own. The nanites emerge from the cartridge and wrap themselves around them to protect them from space exposure. She did it, they won. Didn’t they?

Microstory 2773: Proceed With Caution

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Elise follows Miracle through the rows and rows of casting chambers. They’re here to recruit an old friend of the latter’s, though she won’t say exactly who it is, or why they would be here. The Terminal is just where you come out of when you cast your consciousness from somewhere else, and presumably where you come back to when you want to leave. Elise has never actually heard of anyone leaving Castlebourne, but it probably happens every once in a while. Either way, it’s not residential, so no one should be living here. They seem to be in a rather remote part of it too, which is ominous.

Miracle stops and looks around like she’s worried they’ve been followed, but it’s still just the two of them. She pulls the brainscanner out of its pocket on the side and lowers it over her head. The chamber door unlocks and opens for her. She almost roughly takes Elise by the arm, and shoves her inside with her.

“What is the deal?” Elise looks around. “Is there a trap door, or something?”

Miracle opens the casting pod hatch, but instead of the normal chair, it’s some kind of computer. She extends the keyboard, and starts typing on it. The ambient lights shift colors in a pattern. Miracle periodically looks up, apparently when one of the colors stays on too long. “Blasted thing.” She smacks the side of the machine, which triggers the color to change again. “Okay. I’ve recalibrated it for two people. This should work.”

“What will work?” Elise questions. “You’ve still not said what we’re doing here.”

“I told you, we’re here to meet a friend,” Miracle answers as if that’s enough.

“I don’t see anyone else here, so where exactly are they?” Elise presses.

Miracle points to the screen, which is showing an image of the stars. “This is where we’re going. You don’t need any more detailed information than that. Just focus on transporting there. We just need to aim close enough for the relay to detect us.”

“I don’t know much about this teleportation stuff,” Elise begins, “but I can’t imagine that I can jump that far. I won’t even be able to breathe.”

Miracle shakes her head. “We’ll end up in a ship. You’re right, you probably don’t have that wide a range, but don’t worry, the machine is boosting your power.”

“All right,” Elise agrees. “I’m trusting you.”

Miracle turns it on, Elise focuses on her destination, and they both jump.

They appear in a luxurious stateroom. Massive viewscreens are showing them that same image of the stars. A shirtless man, having likely heard them, runs out of the bathroom. He reaches out and presumably magnetically summons his sidearm, which was sitting on the bed. He points it at the two of them. “Report.”

“Relax, Reagan, it’s me, Small Miracle,” she claims.

“You changed your face.” The man doesn’t relax. He still might shoot them.

“It was getting confusing for people,” Miracle explains, “looking like Romana.”

“I’ll need to verify,” Reagan insists. “Stay still, don’t try anything...either of you.”

The two of them gently press their foreheads together for several seconds.

“Neural handshake complete; identity confirmed.” Reagan tosses his gun back on the bed. “Are you someone I should know as well, or have we never met?”

“I’m new, I’m Elise.” She offers her hand so they can do a normal handshake.

Reagan nods and looks back over at Miracle. “I’m preparing for battle, I don’t have time to go on another one of your little side missions. I barely have time for tea.”

“I need you,” Miracle contends. “This one won’t take long. Our friend is at risk of being replaced by an out-of-date version of herself. We need to know where her body is so we can halt the reactivation protocol. That will give me the time I need to fix it.”

“Like I said, I’m preparing for battle,” Reagan insists. “I can’t abandon ship.”

“If we don’t do this in the next couple of hours,” Miracle tries to clarify, “it won’t matter anyway. You can delay your battle. You’re the frickin’ admiral.”

“Yeah, and I earned that by being a good leader, and being present,” Reagan argues. He shakes his head. “You saved my life, and I appreciate that, but that was in Underbelly, and I’m in the Outer System program now. I don’t know if you remember, but I don’t do these simulations for fun. I am this close to feeling ready.”

Miracle nods. “Rae, you’ve been ready for decades, but you will never go through with it, because you’re afraid of what it will do to you. Killing NPCs and backed up people is a far cry from permanent murder.”

“Hey!” he interrupts. “Your moth friend doesn’t need to know anything about it.”

“I don’t know what you’ve been through, man,” Elise says, “but Mir has been extremely helpful, especially to me in understanding my new powers. If you need to kill someone, that’s none of my business. I just want my friend back, with her memories.”

Reagan looks at Elise sadly. “I’m sorry. You should have come this morning.”

“Well, just give me the neurospoofing device, and I’ll handle it myself,” Miracle compromises.

Reagan chuckles. “I can’t trust you with that. We may have been on the same—”

“I will give you teleportation,” Miracle interrupts. “You always wanted it.”

Reagan narrows his eyes on Miracle. “You always said I was too reckless for it; that a big, bad prison was gonna come and lock me up for risking their secrets.”

“Eh,” Miracle replies. “I just don’t like to give everybody powers. It’s...too easy.”

Reagan takes a breath and puts on a poker face. “I also want access to the afterlife simulation. You give me that, I’ll resign my post right now, and help you in person.”

“Rae, that’s asking too much. I mean, the afterlife is Fort Knox on steroids.”

He frowns. “Killing the Oaksent won’t do a damn bit of good if he can just come back. We still don’t know if the decoherence gun destroys all quantum connections, or if he’ll still survive it. I at least need to study the specs so I can know for sure what will happen when I try. I will only get one shot at this. I need this more than I need teleportation. I came up with a workaround for being in multiple places at once.”

Miracle sighs, and looks over at Elise, who looks back, trying to convey the importance of this situation while trying to look past all of this talk about assassination and afterlife simulations. “Okay, I’ll get you into the sim,” Miracle says. “I don’t wanna know who your test subject is, though, and you won’t also get teleportation.”

Reagan shrugs. “Fine. You have a deal. Let’s do another handshake on it.”

They tap their foreheads together, then Reagan asks to do the same with Elise. That way, if they ever run into each other later with different substrates, they will be able to confirm each other’s identities based on their respective neural patterns.

“So,” Reagan says. “I’ll need to know whose neural patterns to spoof, and what part of Castlebourne you’ll need access to. I designed other gadgets which may help.”

“We need access to Castledome,” Miracle answers before pausing, either to build suspense, or to work up the courage. “And we need to impersonate Hrockas Steward.”

Spaghetti West: The Three-Body Problem (Part II)

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When Pribadium Delgado’s father was seven years old, he was staying with his grandparents while his parents went on a boring business trip in Iowa. Valde loved staying over there, especially since they lived two hours away, making it a rare treat. He was particularly close with his grandfather, because he was a young soul. One thing they loved to do was have the grandfather hold Valde’s hands and spin him around like a helicopter. They would do it all the time in the park across the street. Not everyone was happy about it.

A neighbor was fed up with their fun, so she called family services, citing the danger. Of course, this did not constitute abuse or neglect, but it still meant they had to stop, because the grandfather did not want to antagonize this woman. This saddened Valde, so he begged the grandfather to do it again. They knew the busybody would be watching, though, so they decided to give it a shot in the house, and it did not go well.

Their hands slipped from each other, and Valde went flying through the air. His head slammed against the wall, cracking them both open, and giving Valde permanent brain damage. He got through it, and ended up having a fairly happy life, growing up to have a family of his own. He couldn’t be alone with his own kids until they were old enough to kind of take care of themselves, but he wasn’t abusive, just easily distracted. The grandfather, on the other hand, couldn’t deal with the guilt. After years of heavy drinking, he either fell, or jumped off, a cliff. They were never sure which.

Pribadium’s mother was an astrophysicist, which was what got Pribadium interested in science. Her mother always called the tragedy the three-body problem, likening the grandfather, the grandson, and the wall to celestial bodies. She noted the wonder in the universe, and used the story to teach Pribadium a valuable lesson. Well, multiple lessons, really. The first was social and behavioral, which was obvious. The deeper lesson, however, was about gravity.

Outer space was monumentally huge. Most of it was made up of dark energy, which was basically just another word for space. Baryonic matter only took up a small fraction of the composition, yet...objects struck each other all the time. Galaxies were literally colliding. Thanks to gravity. Gravity was responsible for making life possible. It held things together, where otherwise there would just be a bunch of random particles flying individually through empty space. But it was still good to have space. If Valde and his grandfather had been allowed to swing around in the park, they would not have been so restricted, and Valde would not have crashed into a wall.

Now Pribaidum was grown up, and had been for centuries. Her parents were long dead, and she didn’t know where her brother was. She went by Sugar now, and had an entirely new face, in order to distinguish her from the Pribadium native to this time. Even though she had all of Pribadium’s memories up to a point, she sometimes felt like a brand new person. She could be too blunt about things, and even a little emotionally attached. It wasn’t her fault, news didn’t surprise her as much as it did to others. And she always preferred to just get right down to the point.

“A black hole?” Liselot asked. “A stellaris collapsis?”

“No. Planetary-mass; possibly primordial,” Sugar clarified. She had gone ahead and started constructing the defense platforms to orbit Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, but now she was going to have to halt the process and reprogram them. The basic design was just fine, but ablation lasers weren’t going to work for this situation, and they needed a denser solution to the spherical covering problem; probably dynamic.

“Possibly?” Liselot questioned. “What do you mean? What else would it be?”

“It could be a Kugelblitz,” Sugar answered. “Have you never heard of them?”

“I’m an astronomer, of course I have. It’s only recently become feasible for humanity to make one, though. If someone made it, we would have noticed, because in order for it to be passing through our system right now, it would have needed to form practically in our backyard. So unless you’re suggesting aliens are real... Wait, are you suggesting that aliens are real?”

Sugar had to ignore that question. “I need more time to study it. I still don’t know if it’s charged yet. That will tell me how we deal with it. I need to get closer.”

Liselot shook her head in disbelief. “Oh yeah, sure. Get closer to the singularity that just destroyed a moon and a planet in one fell swoop. Have fun, try not to get spaghettified, don’t forget to bring a towel. Will you be home in time for dinner?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll stay a couple hundred kilometers out. We’ll park, fire a few procession probes, and gather the data. Yes, we will be home for this proverbial dinner.”

“I’m coming with you,” Liselot insisted.

“No, that’s okay,” Sugar offered, knowing that it wasn’t really a request.

Liselot winced. “This is my planet, my responsibility. If you kick me off of your ship, I’ll just get my own, and pilot fish my way alongside you. They’re not expensive.”

Van was walking back on the bridge. “Read her in,” he encouraged. “It’s not illegal for non-travelers to know about this stuff, or I wouldn’t know. Read her in.”

Sugar breathed through her nose and considered it. Liselot was correct, this wasn’t their world. They needed help and approval from someone who lived here, and the Axiom of Astronomy was their best option. It already appeared like they could trust her. So Sugar nodded and cleared her throat to be blunt and aggressive again. “Time travel is real. Some people are born with the neurology necessary to hack the universe to manipulate timespace in one way or another. Others, like me—and now you—fell into the time traveler community.”

“Oh, she’s being modest,” Van says. “Sugar here invented her own, unique form of time travel. It’s entirely incompatible with how everyone else does it. Which means it’s protected from their vulnerabilities.”

“That’s not entirely true,” Sugar argued. “I...my brain connected to a primordial knowledge floating around the universe, from a different universe. It’s like—that’s what the cosmic microwave background radiation is. Someone else invented it, I found it.”

“Like transcendentalism?” Liselot asks. “You know that Bidans are essentially transcendentalists, right? We worship knowledge and science.”

“I didn’t give it much thought,” Sugar replied. “I try to stay away from religion.” She paused in a brief silence. “So you’re not freaking about learning the truth about reality. Do you just not believe it?”

Liselot smiled softly. “Many in our culture suspect that it’s real. In the year 2400, the collective knowledge of the known galaxy exploded unpredictably. I mean, just look at how fast a new substrate can be built on Castlebourne, and the artificial gravity on The Tangent. Actually, it must be the reason for the artificial gravity on our planet. Time travel would explain a ton of these leaps in understanding, wouldn’t it? It vindicated a lot of our beliefs about secret a priori knowledge, and now I’m in the inner circle.”

“Hm,” Van says. “I think she’s all right with it.”

“This is what you were afraid to tell me?” Liselot questions. “I’m sure if you spent time in Victorian England, you might be afraid to out yourself, but I think you’ll find if you’re honest with people in the modern world, they’ll be more receptive and calm.”

“It’s more complicated than that. Telling one person isn’t illegal,” Sugar explained. “Telling everyone is, because it’s a unilateral decision which robs others of consent. There’s a prison. If I were to make a broadcast announcement, they would undo that, throw me in prison, and potentially never let me out. I don’t even have to be the one to make that announcement if there’s a risk that you will, or if you go blabbing to your therapist, and they do it.”

“I understand, I know how to keep a secret,” Liselot assured them. “I’m sure there’s a lot more to know, but I’m guessing you needed to quote-unquote read me in because you’re not just gonna throw procession probes at the singularity.”

“Uh, no,” Sugar confirmed. “We’re gonna get a lot closer than I said. This ship was built with transdimensional shielding, which will protect us from the dangers of high gravity, though we could end up experiencing minor time dilation.”

“I’ve experienced relativistic dilation before,” Liselot says. “I went on a cruise around H-Gimura-11 in my youth. Lost eleven years.”

Sugar smirked. “I personally know Hokusai Gimura, from before she discovered HG-11. She was my mentor; introduced me to all of this.”

“Small world,” Liselot decided. “So are we going?”

Sugar looked over at Vantu and nodded lightly.

He teleported the ship away. “Now orbiting S-Delgado-1.”

Sugar rolled her eyes. “We are not calling it that.”

“We have to,” Van reasoned. “You discovered it.”

“If it’s a Kugelblitz,” Sugar argued as she was calibrating the sensors, “That means they discovered it.”

“I don’t see them here,” Van fired back. “We’ve still not proved it yet anyway.”

Sugar shook her head. “Would you just open the exterior spectrometers?”

They ran the sensors and gathered the data, ultimately confirming that it was indeed Kugelblitz. They didn’t know who made it, or where it came from, but now Sugar knew how to deflect it. Unless it was sent here intentionally as a weapon, they could fire ionic pulses at it, and get it to move out of the system. It only took a few weeks to complete the array, and that was all they did. They scrapped the full orbital defense complement, which was something this planet should have had the whole time. A Kugelblitz black hole was more dangerous than a primordial one. They didn’t have time to protect the globe against all threats. They needed to be offensive, and concentrate their efforts in one spot on the celestial firmament.

It took a couple of days for Sugar to be confident that they had pushed the object clear, so it didn’t cause further damage. If they had shot the black hole head on, each shot would have taken an immense amount of energy to make it reverse directions. By constantly striking it on the edge, they conserved that energy, and used it more wisely. They just wanted to change its course enough so that it moved out of Tau Ceti space. Now that that was done, they could focus on the debris from Qishra. That was their ongoing, long term problem, but it was possible to keep them at bay, especially once they did finally cover the sky in those defenses.

The world rejoiced and partied, and Sugar was happy for them, but then something new came up on their sensors. “This is impossible.”

“What is it?” Van asked.

“It’s the black hole. It’s...back.”

“So it is a weapon,” Van determined. “Someone’s controlling it.”

“I don’t see how,” Sugar argued. “We should be able to detect them, and what would be the motive?”

“Should we call Liselot?”

Sugar sighed. “She has a right to know. Just give me one moment to check something.” She frowned at the screens as she waited for her long-range sensors to respond. Her eyes widened when the information came in.

“What? I don’t understand what I’m seeing here.”

Sugar looked up at Van hovering over her shoulder. “That’s what you called S-Delgado-1.”

“Oh, okay.”

“It’s moving away.”

“Oh, so false alarm. We’re good.”

While still staring at him, Sugar reached up and tapped the screen to switch to a different readout. “If we’re sticking with the same naming convention, we might have to name this one S-Delgado-2.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 23, 2567

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For space colonization purposes, the galaxy was divided into regions. The closest regions had an obligation to maintain some semblance of cohesion with the other colonies, and Earth. Even a charter world couldn’t secure a charter if they wanted to go out there and do bad things. And you did have to have a charter, however small it might end up being. You couldn’t simply say, we found a star system that’s only fifty-six light years away, but we don’t need any help. But we’re gonna purge every year, okay?

In order to gain that level of freedom, the boundary lay 200 light years from Earth. They devised several other divisions wider than that, but the rules did not change, which was that there were no rules. If you made it that far, you could do whatever you wanted, and the state couldn’t and wouldn’t stop you, no matter how bad it was. That didn’t mean you were free from consequences. If necessary, you would have to defend your way of life. Because anyone who showed up was also in the Extended Bubble or beyond, meaning they didn’t answer to the Core Colonies or Earth either.

It was Team Matic’s intention to travel throughout these distant colonies, and help where needed. They were naïve. They didn’t think they would have to harm them. But as it turned out, the Exin Empire wasn’t a fluke. It was just the most blatant example of human nature because the creator used time travel to establish itself a long time ago. The people who colonized Tarantella had the same idea, just more recently.

Tarantella was barely over 200 light years away, but it didn’t start out that way. They were originally in the Charter Cloud, but two years ago, something changed. They had constructed a massive stellar engine, which pushed the star farther out. It was already moving pretty fast on its own, but they gave it a boost. Why did they do this? Well, because their charter gave them a huge inventory of donated embryos, as well as the resources needed for that stellar engine. Gatewood didn’t think anything of it, them being this close to the border. The exact distance was impossible to prove, but they had to come up with a number, and both parties agreed to it. Now the Core was regretting it, because it locked them in to a number that had since changed, and that could be proven.

The colonists told Gatewood that they were wanting to move their star system to a more hospitable region of space, but in reality, they wanted to cross that border. They wanted to use those embryos as a slave labor force. Ethics didn’t count out here. There were probably a lot of things happening this far from the neighborhood that the team wouldn’t like. These colonists didn’t have to follow any rules. Literally nothing was illegal. That was why they traveled this far. At last, they were free to make their own choices, and the Teaguardians could do nothing about it.

Team Matic could do something about it and had been working on it for two years.

Leona sighed. “I really wish Ramses were here to check my calculations for me.”

Olimpia hugged her wife from the side. “I’m sure you did everything perfectly.”

“He’s never done anything at this scale before,” Leona pointed out.

“He’s never had you before,” Olimpia argued. “Look at his face. He’s ecstatic.”

Kayetan noticed them looking at him. Without a smile, he gave them a thumbs up.

“You’re right.” After the ding, Leona reached over and pressed the comms button. “Power threshold achieved. Merge whenever you’re ready. Focus on the coordinates.”

He took a deep breath as he closed his eyes. He reached out to the other side of the border, within the Charter Cloud. It took over 100 years for the hopeful slavers to move the star two-tenths of a light year, and moments for Kayetan to force them back. Now they were committing a crime. Now the Teaguardian could step in and arrest them all.

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Microstory 2723: Not Part of the Plan

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Pribadium always keeps an excess of nanites for such occasions. She releases enough to encompass Sora in a vacuum suit, as well as herself. When he takes her hand, she teleports them into orbit. The two Teaguardian ships here are powering their weapons, and it will do enough damage to the planet to still kill the two of them. She has cleared the signal jammer, so her consciousness has begun streaming to her backups again, but it will take some time before the update is complete. Besides, she has to protect this dumbass. So she keeps teleporting them until they’re far enough away.

From this vantage point, they watch as the weapons reach critical mass and converge on a single spot on the world below them. They seemed to have been aiming for the settlement, so everyone living there is already dead. The Teaguardians don’t have to keep going. Yet they do. In minutes, it’s quite clear that they’re planning to obliterate Doma Tertia. But there’s a reason Pribadium chose not to do it this way in the first place. It might be quicker, but it won’t last. The gravity well is too strong.

Every celestial body holds something known as gravitational binding energy. If you want to break it apart, you need any amount beyond that binding energy. If you don’t reach this threshold, it may still break apart, but then it will just come back together. Even if it takes years, it will recoalesce because the total mass has not changed. That’s why they constructed a stellar shotgun on Ross 154, because they needed a shit ton of energy to get it done. What the Teaguardians are doing here is only making things worse. The whole point is to get at all of the raw material without having to dig themselves out of the gravity well every time they want to redistribute it. Now that’s what they will have to do. But there’s an even greater problem. It’s all about safety.

You can’t just go blowing up planets without any regard for what else is around. The energy beams are coming from several light years away. They knew exactly when they were going to deploy, and what the Gatewood system would look like when that energy finally arrived. In order to protect the people who needed to live and work here during the blasts, they determined where the safe zones were. For the last several months, in preparation for the demolition, everyone was moved to a handful of little pockets of safety. These were calculated, recalculated, verified, and reverified by literally thousands of independent entities. All of those precautions are no longer viable. If she doesn’t undo this, the entire star system will have to be abandoned for decades.

Pribadium sighs. “I really have never heard of Tertius or Aeterna,” she begins, “but I am not surprised. A number of people were born with the ability to manipulate time or space in various ways. Others became that way later in life. I had to discover the power through years of science and exploration. Time travel is real, Sora.”

“You can go back and undo this?” Sora asks. “You can save my people?”

“No,” she answers. “But you can. The only way to stop the Teaguardians from shooting the planet is by not giving them a reason to. Only you can do that.”

“Was this all part of the plan?” Sora questions. “Was it nothing more than an elaborate ruse? Were you just trying to trick me into changing the past?”

“You think I blew up a planet just to get you to help me undo it? Mr. Shimizu, that makes no sense. I could have teleported you all offworld whenever I wanted. I was going for diplomatic avenues. I never wanted you to know the truth. So how about it? You wanna help me save the world? Or are you gonna be, like, a dick about it?”