The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 7, 2398

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Mateo, Angela, and Ramses can’t wait any longer. Angela had the bright idea to crack open the LIR Map, and see if it could give them any answers. They were all shocked that they hadn’t thought of it before, and not just for this situation. It could have been really helpful before they got into this mess, and might even help them find Danica Matic, or other answers. As Leona described it, the map worked like a comic book strip. Future or present events could be seen illustrated on the page, allowing the viewer to make certain decisions with an advantage. That’s not what is happening here. Each of them sees something different when they look at it.

Angela is seeing moving compasses with numbers on them. Some of these numbers are going down, and some are going up. As she turns her body around, the compasses rotate, and are not always pointing North. Interim deadlines, she presupposes. These are the places that she’ll be going, and when she’s going to get to each one, or maybe how long she has before time runs out. It’s annoyingly cryptic with the details.

When Ramses is in charge of the map, he sees an actual map. There is no legend, so it takes him a minute to decipher, but he realizes that some of the points of interest are places that he’s been, and some of them are probably places that he has yet to go. A couple of them have both kinds of markings, suggesting that he’ll return to those places. A few really important places that they frequent, such as the loft, the lab, and the tasty taco restaurant down the street have their own special markers.

Mateo doesn’t see anything at all when he tries to look at it, which he’s choosing to believe is because he just so happened to try it last, and the other two have the plan covered, so he would have only seen what’s already been seen anyway. Yeah, that’s probably it. “Why do you think it stops here, though?” he asks. Somehow, Ramses and Angela managed to take possession of the LIR Map at the same time, which combined what they were seeing into one image, which Mateo actually can see, and so could likely anyone else in the room.

“What do you mean? That’s our goal,” Ramses decides.

“No, our goal is to get our friends back, and come home safely. This stops at the Dead Sea. What do we do after that?”

“Maybe the map doesn’t know what happens after that,” Angela suggests.

“The map knows literally everything,” Mateo argues. “I once saw Lincoln flip out when he went to another universe, because he was suddenly seeing an entirely different timestream than the one he normally does.”

“What are you saying?” Ramses questions.

“The map doesn’t show us what it knows. It shows us what we’re allowed to know. It’s psychic.”

Angela stands up straighter, and looks away from the console of The Olimpia. “Or it shows us decisions.” She pauses, but the other two don’t bother asking for more information, because they know she’ll go on. “We know to go to the Dead Sea, instead of the colony blocks, because our friends have already chosen to go there. Yeah, they’ll arrive in the future, but it’ll be part of the plan. They’ve not come up with a plan beyond that, and neither have we, so we can’t see it. It’s like The Oracle in The Matrix films.”

“That’s not how Lincoln’s power worked,” Mateo contends. “He could see everything, including alternate paths. He saw all timelines, even ones that hadn’t been created yet.”

“Well, it’s like you said,” Angela continues, “we’re not allowed to see all that. It’s restricted. I don’t know why, but I can make an educated guess.” It seems unlikely that the limitation would be built into the document when it was created. It probably has more to do with it presently being in this reality, which they know handles time and time travel in weird ways. Still, this should help enough. They know where they need to go at this very moment, and that’s more than most people get.

“So it can never tell us the future unless someone has already decided upon it,” Ramses laments. “Who has to decide? Obviously not just the map user, because we didn’t know we needed to go to Birket until today.”

“Didn’t we?” Mateo poses. “We all wanted to go to Birket. The map didn’t tell us that, it just proved that we got some follow-through. This reality; it’s different. Nothing and no one is all-knowing...or someone is, and they always squash their competitors.”

“It doesn’t matter what we don’t know,” Angela determines. “We have to go to Birket, we’re going to Birket. We spend most of our time understanding the future, but not knowing too many details. I’m sure we’ll get through this too, even with the limitations.”

Angela was right, but barely. They make it all the way to the Dead Sea, just in time to find Leona, Marie, Kivi, and Heath by water’s edge, along with another guy. As soon as they land, sirens go off, and a squadron of fighter jets starts heading their way. Leona throws a jug of Energy Water through the hatchway, but she doesn’t step in herself. She orders them to take off vertically, and teleport under the cover of clouds. Mateo frowns at her, but she doesn’t explain any further. Ramses reluctantly agrees, and takes off again, leaving the team on the ground. Angela monitors the computers so Ramses can inject the temporal hydroxide into the engine. After they successfully escape without the air force firing a single shot, they find a stranger in their midst.

Microstory 1694: Constant in Life

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If looking at a normal universe from the outside—as I do on the regular—is like staring at a still painting, looking at Fickleverse is like trying to spot one particular mosaic tile that’s glued to a powered up chainsaw...in a room full of powered up mosaic chainsaws. I have an idea of how it works, but it’s incredibly difficult to make out the details. It’s too chaotic, too unpredictable, too messy. So I can’t give you many specific stories that took place on this world. I can’t even be a hundred percent sure whether the only populated planet is an alternate version of Earth, or some other place. I had to work really hard to find one interesting story by digging deep, and trying to find the most linear of proverbial needles in the haystack. Like I said in an earlier installment, people in Fickleverse know that they’re in Fickleverse. They recognize that time moves in more than one direction, and events almost never add up to an inevitable conclusion. I found one woman who kind of seemed immune to the sort of temporal changes that most people experienced here. Her name was Corain Flint, and she lived a pretty standard life; or at least, as standard as it could get. She was born in one year, and died 74 years later. In that time, technology in her immediate area advanced 74 years, and she aged along with it. Her parents remained the same throughout her entire life, until they passed when she was in her forties. She never had any siblings, but she had two children with a consistent husband. They all stayed as they were until she was gone. Like everyone else, she too could see that time was fickle, but she was more perturbed by it than most, because she felt more like an observer, and less like a participant.

It was tough for her, trying to convince the people around her that some things didn’t make any sense. Her neighbor’s first name kept changing, and while everyone else automatically adapted to each transition, she could never keep it straight. She had to actually ask what his new name was, and when she did, he would be confused and upset, because to him, it seemed obvious. Yes, his name changed, but how could she possibly not know that that was the next logical step in his nominal development? Most films played in the right temporal direction, but not all, and though everyone else was able to comprehend a story out of the backwards dialog, she didn’t have any idea what the hell was even going on. They usually wouldn’t give her her money back. Corain eventually gave up, and realized that she was pretty much alone in her feelings about time and reality. She just tried to live her life in the best way possible, and ignore the discrepancies unless impossible. Several years later, she started thinking about it again when a friend she had known her entire life simply disappeared. No one else who knew this person believed Corain when she claimed he was real. They had no recollection of this man, and no reason to suspect that something had been done to their memories. Nonlinear time was one thing, but a whole person spontaneously being completely removed from the timestream was unfair, and the last straw. She decided to go against her friends’ advice, and start a support group for others like her. She didn’t know if such people even existed, but she had to try. There had to be someone out there who could see where she was coming from. There was. There were many someones. As it turned out hundreds of people around the world also experienced time more like her. A chapter sprang up in every major city, and no one else ever understood what their deal was.

Microstory 1670: Diplomacy First

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I’m going to be honest with you. I was very wrong when I made the claim that there was nothing interesting about Limerick Hawthorne’s universe, except for Limerick Hawthorne. Imagine looking at a painting. In the bottom left corner, the first thing you see is a creature made of fire, fighting against his water foes. Keep staring at that fire creature, and that’s kind of all you’ll see. You don’t notice at first how vast the canvas is, and how many other things are happening in that painting. You might eventually, but that’s you seeing in three dimensions. I see in four dimensions, which is more like looking at an infinite number of paintings, and trying to decipher a full story from them. When I saw Limerick, the metaphorical fire creature, he took all focus. As I told you, people who travel the bulkverse are more clear to me than other events across the branes. What I didn’t realize then was just how fascinating Limerick’s universe was, and what it would become after he left. All I could see was him, but I see a bigger picture now. This is another story about aliens. They evolved from source variants all over this version of the Milky Way galaxy. They’re based on human DNA, but they developed independently and spontaneously for reasons I don’t understand. Some universes just have aliens, I guess. When Limerick disappeared, he left behind a tear in the spacetime continuum that didn’t close completely. It wouldn’t cause anyone to become lost in the outer bulkverse, fortunately, but it was still there, and still dangerous. Scientists from all over the world showed up, hoping to figure out what it was, and what, if anything, they could do with it. As it turned out, quite a bit. The rift ultimately sent a group of volunteers to another world, where they came face to face with their first alien race.

These aliens would end up becoming the real threat, but they weren’t the only ones in the galaxy, and it was only a matter of time before they met some new allies. Things seemed okay at first on the alien planet, but the volunteers learned some things they didn’t like, and it sparked a philosophical divide with the natives. Both sides tried to keep the peace, but they failed. That was when the humans knew they had to escape. The natives weren’t evil, but they felt dishonored, and in their minds, the only response was war. In their culture, once diplomatic discussions passed what they considered to be a point of no return, domination was the only way forward. Someone had to win, and prove the other side wrong. I’m simplifying all this, of course, but you get the idea. The explorers managed to get out of there when they found that planet’s Nexus machine, but the conflict was not over. The good thing about how Nexa work is that you can block travel from any one machine, so Earth was safe for the time being. But there were other Nexa in the network, and the aliens would keep looking for a way to continue the war. The scientists knew that they couldn’t just leave it at that. What followed was a series of missions from Earth designed to establish relations with other cultures, determine which others could pose a threat to them, procure useful technology and knowledge, and generally protect the galaxy from these warmongers. The aliens, meanwhile, went on their own missions, now that they had a working Nexus. They couldn’t go to Earth, but they went to other planets first, and tried to gain some kind of advantage. This proved to be more difficult than they thought it would, and it eventually made them start seeing everyone as just as much of a threat to their honor as they thought Earth was.

Microstory 1644: Fickle Fortune

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Time is pretty complicated, and time travel makes it more complicated. There are those who don’t see linear time, or who have no use for it. Some can go back, some can skip, some can slow it down. Some can enter spatio-temporal dimensions, or even spatial dimensions. Some universes take this to insane levels, like Salmonverse, or parts of the Composite Universe. But there is one general constant, and that is that time still does move forward, one second...at a time. It’s just certain people that are manipulating it, or moving about in some weird way. You can probably kind of see where I’m going with this, and it’s that this universe today is not like that. If you’ve read enough comic books, or listened to/watched soap operas, you’ll notice some funny things going on. One particular superhero was a high school sophomore when he was introduced, and even though later stories could take place after decades, he’ll still be a sophomore. Or maybe they show him in college, but a new writer will come on board, and want to go back to those high school days, and no one in the story will acknowledge these discrepancies. It’s called the sliding timescale, and it’s generally used to maintain the general concept behind a character whilst being able to introduce real-world developments, such as technological advancements, or topical global conflicts. Superhero A didn’t have a cellphone when his first issue came out in the 1950s, but he does in the 2020s, even though he would be an old man by now, if not just dead. The point is that this is done for practical reasons. The artists want to keep the story going, and they want to keep revisiting the same characters, but they don’t want to be stuck in a particular time period, and they don’t really want anyone to die...at least not permanently.

Fickleverse is like that, except it’s real, and the residents are fully aware of it. They’re so aware that it doesn’t even seem strange to them. Time does not flow linearly, and it does not flow at the same rate—or even always in the same direction— for everyone, and this doesn’t generally bother them. Some children stay young for an extended period of time. Others will age too fast, often because some profound moment in their lives has transformed them into a different person, which only the illusion of the passage of time can meaningfully express. For some, they’re still driving around in petrol automobiles, and not presently cognizant of the fact that people in the next town over have hovercars. There are some other consequences too. In other universes, shows and movies will cast actors to pretend to be their character, but something will change, and that role will have to be recast. That will happen in fickleverse too. Your daughter might not just age before your eyes, but may even become a completely different person overnight. She’ll have the same name, and she’ll believe she’s your daughter, and you’ll believe she’s your daughter, but you will notice that she’s not the same daughter you had yesterday. You’ll just accept this, and you’ll love her just as much, because that’s how the world works. The interesting part about this, and how it pertains to the bulkverse, is that it’s unclear how time will affect a visitor, so it’s best to just avoid it. The Ochivari, in particular, can’t make heads or tails of how it works, and what their environmental potential is. Can the world be saved? Are the humans destined to destroy their Earth? When time can go in reverse as easily as it moves forward, there’s no way to know what has happened, let alone what will happen. So they just leave it be, and chalk it up to a hopeless cause.

Microstory 1441: The War Ends

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Twelve years after she was born, Jayde Kovac was ready to take on the world, and prove herself at the fourth Mage Selection Games. Unfortunately, something went screwy with the spacetime continuum, and she was unable to make it to the competition. It would ultimately not matter, however, as she was born with time powers of her own, and never needed one of the source mages to give them to her. Once she learned this about herself, she went on a little adventure. She met friends and enemies, got a more detailed diagnosis about what specific powers she possessed, and unwillingly got proverted. When the source mages first asked the proverters to make them look older, the proverters had some stipulations, and one of these was that every person born like them would also find themselves in their debt. This was one of the reasons the source mages chose to not have children, because they didn’t want to impose that burden on anyone else. Of course, Jayde didn’t know anything about this, but she did go looking for answers about who she was, and where she came from. While she was indisposed, hell broke loose for the rest of the planet. The truth was that this was all a very unlikely coincidence, but it was indeed a coincidence. It just so happened that Jayde manifested her powers as the final battles of the war with the time monsters were beginning. Poorly researched history books would attribute her actions to the influx of enemy activity, but she didn’t have anything to do with it, and without her, the human race on Durus would have surely fallen, and Earth would have gone down next. That didn’t mean she made the best choices. While she looked like an adult, she was still only twelve years old, and could not foresee the consequences of her actions. Still, even though a lot of people got hurt, she did end the war once and for all, and she deserved to be commended for her bravery.

With the intact Maramon as their leader, the monsters came out in full force, and hit the towns hard. He was smart enough to get past their defenses, and go for the weakest points first, instead of just running around aimlessly, as the other monsters usually did. They leveled Forts Salient and Frontline on the first day. Then they went after the other towns, knocking them down pretty much simultaneously, so the humans couldn’t concentrate their forces. Even Hidden Depths wasn’t protected enough to avoid detection. While there had never been more mages alive at the same time before, most of them were either new, or retired. This being just after the Mage Games meant that the newbies didn’t know everything about how the military operated, and they didn’t understand the scope of their abilities yet. Many of the older retirees were called back into action, but they were out of practice, because they never thought they would have to work again. It was up to the recent retirees, from the 2070 Games, to step up, and suffer the majority of the weight of the war, but even they weren’t enough to go against the monsters. Seeing what they believed to be the writing on the wall, the source mages retreated to another dimension. They had already been living there for some time, but now they closed the gates, and kept everybody out. There were enough people inside to restart civilization, but thousands would still die if no one could do anything about it. Enter Jayde Kovac, who ultimately had to realize that she was the only person who could handle this, and she would essentially have to do it alone.

After a failed attempt at being trained by the source mages, including her parents, Jayde was told that she had a very rare power. Like Escher Bradley before her, she was capable of harnessing temporal energy itself. She had many specialized powers of her own, but she could also absorb the energy that other people had, and use it to boost her abilities. This wasn’t, strictly speaking, illegal, but the source mages decided long ago to never allow anyone else to have this ability. They figured the most altruistic of candidates could still be corrupted with this amount of power, and they didn’t want to risk it. Even Madoc Raptis agreed to make sure he never sourced anybody energy absorption. Jayde was the child of two source mages, though, and no one had any control over what powers she ended up with. Nonetheless, this was arguably the best thing that ever happened to them. Seeing no other options, Jayde left the hidden dimension, and returned to normal space. The monsters had defeated all the mages by now, and were primed to go after the rest of the humans if they didn’t agree to serve the Maramon. Fortunately, the one Maramon there didn’t want to kill anyone, because he assumed someone on this planet would be able to repair the portal ring, and bring the rest of his people there. They never found out whether this was true or not, because Jayde didn’t give them a chance. She absorbed the temporal energy from everyone in the whole world. She waited to release this energy until she traveled to the center of the portal ring. The resulting explosion quickly turned into an implosion, and sucked everything in its path into the portal. She effectively switched the portal’s directions, so anyone could travel through it to the monster universe, but none of the monsters would be able to come to Durus. Without the constant energy from the ring, most of the monsters still around were left without any powers. Unfortunately, the same went for all the humans. And thus began the four year period known as the Interstitial Chaos.

Microstory 1401: Premature Fledging

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In 1980, there lived a little girl in Springfield, Kansas named Savitri. She was only three years old at the time, and just barely starting to become aware of herself as an independent being, who was capable of observing and making judgments about her surroundings, and of maintaining memories of the past. She recognized her family, though she was later unable to recall how many siblings she had, but she was pretty sure the number was higher than zero. She couldn’t remember anyone’s names, or her own surname, for that matter. She was playing in the backyard one day when a random tear in the spacetime continuum swallowed her up, and dropped her onto another world. These sorts of temporal anomalies happen all the time, and all over the place, but rarely are they large and stable enough to allow an object to pass through; let alone an entire person. She would come to discover that she was born with a time power, and actually belonged to a special class within the choosing one subspecies called metachoosers. She could boost the power of anyone else with powers, which some have suggested was what caused the rift in her backyard to be so much more accessible than most. When she first arrived on the dark and lifeless rogue planet of Durus, she brought with her a little bit of breathable air, but this did not last long. Once it was depleted, she spent about thirty seconds unable to breathe until the atmosphere kicked in. She didn’t know where it came from, because she was too young to understand how planets had atmospheres anyway, or what they were made of, but she could finally survive, at least for the moment. In the beginning, she was starving. Never before had she been required to prepare her own food, let alone forage for it in the wilderness of an empty planet. Her instincts sent her underground, where she found moss that experts would later figure survived the void of interstellar space through some kind of natural electrolysis process. Of course, she didn’t know any of that. She just hoped the moss was edible. It was. She spent ten years alone on this world, eventually growing old enough to go out and explore more of the planet. She never really could be sure that she wasn’t simply still on Earth, but in some remote pocket of it. Again, she was too young to understand any of this. She lost most of her language, and had to relearn it when the next unsuspecting child finally showed up in 1990. He was four years younger than her, so while he possessed more social experience, he wasn’t that much more capable of survival. He had it easier, though, because throughout the years before his arrival, the planet became host to more and more life. The atmosphere that spread over the surface brought with it seeds that grew into a thicket. No one would have ever called it lush, but it was alive, and it did help Savitri stay alive along with it. This was only the beginning of her story, though.

Varkas Reflex: Time (Part I)

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Pribadium Delgado, Hokusai Gimura, and Loa Nielsen were standing awkwardly in the hallway. The former hadn’t seen the latter two in however long, and they didn’t know what to say to each other. It was ridiculous, though, because they were all friends. “It was a lovely service,” she finally blurted out. Mateo Matic was dead, and being honored on a very distant planet called Dardius. He was still alive, though, because...time travel. So he was around as well, though far too popular at the moment for them to have any hope of catching up with him.

“Indeed,” Hokusai replied.

“Yep,” Loa agreed.

“So, where have you been?” Hokusai decided to ask.

“Lots of places,” Pribadium answered. “It’s been a whirlwind. Do you know who Arcadia Preston is?”

“We do,” Hokusai answered. “Not well, but we know of her.”

“She’s the one what took me from Varkas Reflex, and transplanted me to a ship called the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”

“That’s Leona’s ship.”

“Yes, I met her at some point. Two versions of her, actually. We jumped through time quite a bit. I went back to Earth in the past. Now I’m here.”

They nodded their heads. It wasn’t much information, but they could discuss the details later, if there was going to be a later.

“So, what year is it for you?” Pribadium asked.

“It’s actually 2263 for us,” Loa said. “We came here across space, but not time.”

“Well, time and space aren’t really all that different.”

“Yes, dear,” Loa said jokingly.

“Do you wanna come with us?” Hokusai asked. “I mean, it’s where you were, which theoretically means that’s where you wanted to be when you stepped onto the colony ship. But if too much has changed since then.”

“Ya know, I’ve spent all this time just trying to get through the next hour that I haven’t thought about what I want to do in the future. Things have finally slowed down, and I don’t really know what to do with myself. I suppose I would like to see how Varkas has changed in the last seventeen years.”

“Quite a bit, actually,” Loa said. “We would love to have you see it.”

“How did you arrive here? Would I be able to latch on?” Pribadium asked.

“Invitations,” Hokusai began. “It’s just like with Mateo and Leona’s wedding. We just have to press this return box right here.” She held up the piece of paper that allowed her to shoot across space at speeds far exceeding the speed of light.

“I should be able to latch onto one of you,” Pribadium said. “That’s what Mateo and Leona did to go to their own wedding.”

“Are we ready then?” Loa asked.

Hokusai held onto Pribadium tightly by the shoulders. Then she initialized her return protocol. They went right back to Hokusai’s lab together.

“Everything looks the same,” Pribadium pointed out.

“Has as much time passed for everyone here as it did for us at the memorial?” Loa asked.

“According to the invitation, this should be a mere second later; just enough to avoid a temporal paradox,” Hokusai explained. “Hey Thistle, what is the current time?”

“Eleven-fifty-seven Earth Central Standard,” a voice responded.

Hokusai went over to inspect her desk. Things looked slightly different than they had when they left. It wasn’t enough to make her think that she had been robbed, but perhaps someone had come in, searching for a pen. Though, if it truly had been only one second, that shouldn’t be possible. “Thistle, what is the standard Earthan year?”

“Two-two-eight-seven,” the computer replied.

“Thistle, using all available resources, including stellar drift data, please confirm that the year is indeed twenty-two-eighty-seven.”

“Working...” It took nearly twenty seconds for her to continue, but this was an illusion. The computer’s response should be immediate. This data was easily accessible, and while it was certainly possible for there to be some kind of error, it was unlikely, especially when it came to a question such as this. Hokusai was simply exercising her right as a flawed human being to deny the truth as it stood before her. Asking for confirmation was nothing more than an attempt at psychoemotional comfort. Artificial intelligence, at its core, felt no such desire, nor did it appreciate this kind of need in others. To make them easier to communicate with, AI programmers coded these entities, however, to at least approximate human emotion, and respond accordingly. Inflections, pauses in speech, and in this case, a delayed response to pretend it was searching more thoroughly for a solution to the problem, were all about making the human requester feel better about the inevitable conclusion. “Confirmed. The year is twenty-two-eighty-seven.”

It’s been twenty-four years,” Loa noted the obvious. “We’ve been gone twenty-four years.”

“Why?” Hokusai wondered out loud. “Why did the invitation return us to the wrong point?”

“It’s me,” Pribadium said. “I’m the variable that the invitation didn’t account for.”

“Is that what happened when Mateo stowed away to witness his own wedding from the audience?”

“No,” Pribadium answered, “it took us back exactly when it should have once it was over.”

“Well, in that case...no valid conclusion.”

“All things being equal, Madam Gimura, I’m the culprit. We can’t deny it. I screwed this up for you.”

Then Loa just started laughing her head off. “We’re all immortal here. We spent nine years on a scouter ship to get here in the first place, while you were spending slightly less on the colony ship. Time ain’t nothin’ but a thang.”

“Well, that was only four years from our perspective,” Pribadium pointed out.

“Exactly,” Hokusai agreed. “And just here, we only lived for a few hours, and now it’s over twenty years later. I don’t see the problem. When you’ve got eternity, this is shorter than an eye blink of time. Let’s assume you’re the thing that caused the delayed return: whatever, I don’t care.”

Loa was still laughing a little bit. “Let’s go outside, and find out what we missed.”

“See?” Pribadium began. “You even say that you missed it.” She couldn’t bring herself to not feel guilty about this, even though she didn’t purposely make them late.

“We’ve also missed everything that’s been happening on Earth, and Gatewood, and Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida,” Loa argued. “FOMO is a state of mind, but you’re always missing something, because you can’t be in two places at once.”

Hokusai stopped, and tilted her head ten degrees.

“Oh no, I know what this look is,” Loa said.

“Is she thinking?” Pribadium guessed.

“She’s inventing,” Loa clarified.

They waited about three minutes for Hokusai to step back into the real world. She was like a sleepwalker in that it would be dangerous to try to pull her back to reality before she was ready.

“Maybe you can be in two places at once,” Hokusai finally spoke. Though, she remained in her thinking position.

“How would you do that?” her wife asked.

“Extended consciousness,” she answered. “We’re already built for it. Project Stargate is building surrogate substrates for us as we speak. Right now, a mind can only be in one place at once, but that’s a very deliberate limitation. We could change it.”

“There’s a reason that limit is there,” Pribadium contended. “Hive consciousness muddies identity. You can move your mind from substrate to substrate all you want, and as long as you’re using a neurosponging technique, there’s no issue. If you want to spread that out amongst multiple separate substrates, though, who are you really? Are you everyone, or any one of them?”

Hokusai fully snapped out of her mind. “We can debate the ethics all day, as well as the technology necessary for it. That’s not what we’re here for, though. We want to see what Varkas Reflex looks like now.”

They stepped out of the lab, and prepared to climb onto a special hover platform Hokusai and Pribadium had invented together many years ago. It and the lab were both designed with artificial gravity. The mass and density of Varkas Reflex were very high, making it impossible for an average human being to stand on their own two feet. Transhumans were more capable, though it was still uncomfortable. Colonists instead lived in a special O₂-rich water, which they could breathe through their skin. They essentially turned themselves into water-dwelling creatures.

Unlike most people, Hokusai had knowledge of time travel, and parallel dimensions. She used her skills to generate lowered gravity for a given area by placing a different dimension underneath the regular one. A user wasn’t quite in one dimension, or the other, but simultaneously in both. She had built these dimensional generators in only a few key locations, however, including the hover vehicle they were intending to use as transport. It was gone, and seemingly unnecessary. The ground below them was perfectly fine, evidently calibrated for Earth gravity.

Loa was no scientist, but she understood what was happening, and why it was a problem. She was worried for her wife. “How is it like this?”

“I didn’t give anyone else the technology,” Hokusai answered. “Leona has some idea how it works, but the reason she couldn’t learn all of it is the same reason she couldn’t have done this; because she skips so much time. I also gave it to Pribadium, but she’s been gone as well.”

“Maybe you underestimated the people here,” Pribadium offered. “You left the tech unattended for two decades. They probably figured it out.”

“You mean, they stole it,” Loa said.

“It’s fine,” Hokusai said. “I didn’t want anyone to have control over it, because it could endanger natural technological progress. But I’m not Captain Picard, and this isn’t the Enterprise. The fact is that other dimensions exist, and let us do wondrous things. Time travelers have been hoarding these properties of physics since the dawn of man, but things are different now. We’re approaching the 24th century. Perhaps it’s time the vonearthans catch up. Perhaps...it was inevitable.”

“Do you think they placed generators all over the surface of the planet?” Loa asked. “Has there been enough time for that?”

“It depends on how long it took them to break into my second lab,” Hokusai answered. While she genuinely believed what she said about letting them have this technology, it was still going to be hard for her to come to terms with it. It had more to do with the damage already being done anyway, and less to do with real acceptance.

They ventured out to find answers.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: Tuesday, March 26, 2019

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It was unclear whether Arcadia overshot their destination by two years, or if she fully intended to arrive back in Fletcher House in 2019. Fortunately, Declan was still living there, and currently attempting to help Nerakali and Serkan remove their Cassidy cuffs.

“Okay, this is the last time you people can do this,” he said when all the others showed up in the bunker. “I mean it. Adelaide Fletcher is going to buy this place with her reparations in a couple months, so we gotta be out of here. I was trying to strike my lab, and move on.”

“I’m glad you haven’t taken it down yet,” Mateo told him as he was helping a weak Zeferino into the isolation chamber. “We need this to contain and kill a psychic. We don’t have the Insulator of Life anymore.”

Declan stood up, and walked over to make sure the chamber was secure. “I told you that I’m not killing anybody.”

“You don’t have to,” Mateo said. “This is just the safest place for everyone until he can kill himself.

“What are you goin’ on about?” Zeferino questioned.

“How old are you right now?” Mateo asked him.

“Ballpark?” Zeferino asked rhetorically. “Three or four thousand years.”

“That’s like...” Mateo began. He turned his head to elicit Leona’s help.

“Thirty,” she helped.

“Thirty or forty times longer than the average human lives. You’ve traveled up and down the timeline, seeing an unknowable number of things more than most people do, and throughout it all, you were a stone-cold killer.” Mateo stepped back to address both him and Declan. “We have one chance to get Erlendr Preston out of our lives before he does something wildly dangerous. I’m not very smart, but if there’s one thing I learned from all those time travel stories I used for research, it’s that paradoxes are bad. Avoid the paradoxes. I’m sick of all this bloody time travel. I can’t stop it, but I sure as hell can alleviate it. So if you’re not on board, then get out of this basement!”

“This is my basement,” Declan argued.

“No, it’s a community basement,” Mateo insisted. “Several disparate groups use it for their needs over the years. Your mother moved you here after we made her feel unsafe at the old place; you used it to train to become a vigilante; Gunbender, Armbreaker, and Fairware use it for their base of operations; two separate groups use it to help put right what once went wrong. Do you know who built it? It was a man by the name of Baudin Murdoch, who designed it specifically with all these different future people in mind. He’ll even be the one to install the bank vault door when it’s time for that. I need it for a special purpose right now, so I’ll ask you again, to get out! Go climb up a salmon ladder, or something. This has to be done.”

The group was silent, like they knew Mateo wasn’t quite finished yet.

He looked back to Zeferino. “This is called a sacrifice. I was prepared to make it myself, but I am beholden to the powers that be. This is your last chance to do something good. I don’t know what you know, but the man inside your head raped your mother. He probably felt entitled to it since they were married. You may be evil, but you would never do something that bad, and we all know it. I don’t think you would be happy knowing your body might be used to hurt someone like that. You’re dying either way, so at least try to go out a hero. I’ll personally see to it that The Historian writes favorably of you.”

Wow. It almost looked like Zeferino was actually considering letting himself be killed. Then it happened; the biggest shock of them all. “Just so we’re clear,” he begins, “this doesn’t undo anything I’ve already done to you, and I don’t regret a single choice I’ve ever made, including this one. I always win...Flash.” After his one last pop culture reference, his pulled a knife from his boot, and stuck it through his neck, all the way into his brain. “You were right. Turns out, I’m a hero after all. That’s not what I wanted to be.” Then he died.

“That was very noble,” Jupiter said. “Unfortunately for you, if you were trying to prevent the creation of The Parallel, then you didn’t kill enough people.” It was only then that Mateo realized Jupiter had secretly placed Erlendr’s primary cuff on his own wrist. He was now in control of all of them.

“What are you doing?” Arcadia questioned, anger building.

Jupiter tapped on his cuff screen. “I’m saving our sister.” He executed a program, sending the cuffs that were on Nerakali and Serkan flying through the air. They landed around both of Declan’s wrists. “And also Mr. Demir, even though he gives my friends huge headaches.”

“Why am I cuffed now?” Declan asked.

“Wait, did they both just transport themselves to you? I didn’t do that on purpose. Weird, I guess I don’t know how this works. What does this button do?” He selected another program. Three cuffs appeared out of the aether, and wrapped themselves around Ramses, Leona, and Mateo’s formerly free wrists. “No, that’s not what I meant either.” Jupiter was just screwing with them now. “Hm. Ah, here it is.” He pressed one last button, which summoned J.B. to them. He was also wearing two Cassidy cuffs of his own. Now all eleven were accounted for.

Before Jupiter had the chance to say anything else, Daria Matic appeared in the room.

“Why did you have to bring her into this!” Mateo cried.

“I didn’t do that,” Jupiter replied defensively. “I certainly wouldn’t have brought her here with what I assume is vomit on her shirt.”

“I just came from Vegas,” Daria explained. “I’m not sure what I’m meant to do here.”

“Him,” Leona said, pointing to Serkan. “Get him to safety.”

“You got it.” Daria slipped her arms underneath Serkan’s, and spirited him away.

“Noooooooooo!” Jupiter screamed, arm outstretched towards the emptiness where Serkan just was. “Just kidding, I don’t need him.”

“You don’t need J.B. either,” Ramses suggested.

“Oh, him? He’s vital to the plan. You, on the other hand, are just a hangeron. I could take you, or leave you, but then I would have to give someone else your handcuffs. I don’t want them in this reality anymore, so I’m trying to get rid of them all at once.”

“What’s your plan...brother?” Arcadia asked.

“It’s the same as Erlendr’s, for the most part. The main difference is I’m going to be the one in charge. The other main difference is that I know what the hell I’m doing. He may understand the flow of time, but I know people.”

“Why do you care about any of this?” Nerakali interrogated. “You have your own life going with the Springfield Nine.”

“Can someone get her up to speed, please?” Jupiter requested. “Sherwood, go ahead and set it up whenever you’re ready.”

The half-brother, Sherwood stepped into the isolation chamber with his duffel bag. The first thing he did was drag Zeferino’s dead body out, and leave him carelessly in the corner. He pulled out a little tripod table, and a huge canister of what looked like paintballs, but of dozens of different colors. He then removed what looked like a bomb. But no, it couldn’t be a bomb. Could it?

Jupiter carried on explaining himself as Sherwood was working on setting up his apparatus. “I didn’t always know everything about our species’ history. Athanaric kept us very sheltered, and then when I joined up with the other Springfielders, my focus was...well, too focused. It wasn’t until recently—which I recognize is a relative term—that I started branching out, and learning about what everyone else has been doing. I discovered this obsession the other Prestons had with the Matics. Why was it? What is it about the two of you that draws people in; gets them to sacrifice themselves for you, and give you everything? Well, I never figured it out, but in my trying, I realized that I too was obsessing over you. I was just becoming another twisted stalker. I was stanning you, Mateo. I wasn’t happy with doing this from afar, though. To free myself from this, I realized the only thing I could do was echo my estranged siblings. They toyed with you, forced you into harrowing challenges. Then I learned what our illustrious father was planning, and that helped me come up with my own plan.

“I’m going to challenge you too. Don’t worry, though. Most of the time, it probably won’t be deadly. You’ll probably even want to do the work; you’ll just wish it wasn’t necessary. If you fail any one of these challenges, the consequences will be whatever they are. I won’t actually be controlling anything you do. I’ll be transplanting people from this reality, to the Parallel; one at a time. Your mission will be to get them back home. You could always go back with them, but then you would be sacrificing however many people in the timeline you haven’t gotten to yet. Oh, and you’ll be on a brand new pattern, courtesy of those Cassidy cuffs. It’s a perfect blending of Mateo’s and J.B.’s. I’ll let the smart one explain what that means. Are we ready?”

“It’s ready,” Sherwood said as he was standing back up from a crouch. “I’ve set the timer for fifteen seconds.”

“I thought I asked you for a trigger,” Jupiter asked in an audible whisper. “I wanted to push a button.”

Sherwood stepped out of the chamber, and sealed the door behind him. “I don’t work for you. A timer is fine.”

A few seconds later, the bomb went off, spreading the paint all around the glass. It was actually quite beautiful.

“That was cool,” Jupiter said with a genuine smile. “I’m gonna need this, dear,” he said to Arcadia. He lifted the hundemarke from her neck, and placed it around his own. “I need to be the one who makes sure it’s actually activated. I’m not clear on your loyalties.”

Arcadia appeared too shocked to go against him, which was unlike her.

He continued, “sisters, you can watch from outside. The rest of you, get on in. It’s a tight fit, but there’s enough room for eight, and there are only six of us.”

No one moved.

Jupiter sighed. “Very well. I’ll do it myself.” He tapped on his cuff, and transported all of his prisoners into the chamber. It was even more beautiful from the inside. Jupiter was in there with them, but Sherwood was not. “Boot it up, brother!”

The pain swirled around, and reformed itself. Where once it was chaotic and random, colors began to organize into deliberate shapes. Shapes sharpened into discernable images, and the images began to move. They were watching dozens of movies at once. Mateo had heard about some of them before, others he had been there to see, and some were completely unfamiliar. The one thing they had in common was the hundemarke. These were all moments when it was used to create a fixed moment in time.

“My God,” Declan said. “All these people are gonna die.”

“Not if I can help it. All right!” Jupiter said happily. He took a gun from the back of his pants, and held it up like one of Charlie’s Angels. “Everybody ready? Only shoot the red-shaded moments. The blue moments are meant to stay put. We want those to happen in both realities.” He looked around at the rest of the group. He relaxed his arms in feigned frustration. “Ugh. Where are your guns? Did you not bring the guns? I’m sorry, I thought this was America. Okay, fine. I’ll shoot ‘em all myself. Here..we..go!” He started shooting at the images. Each time a bullet went through, and planted itself in the head of a future killer. He was killing real people all throughout time and space, but treating it like a video game. Mateo was just surprised he wasn’t literally keeping score.

Mateo watched him a little, but his eyes wandered to a very specific moment. This one was shaded purple, unlike any of the others. Also unique to it was that it kept playing over and over again in the same spot, while the other moments had to come back in the next cycle, because the chamber walls weren’t large enough to fit all of them at the same time. They only turned black and disappeared for good once Jupiter had paradoxed his target successfully. He had an idea to fix all of this. There was a reason the Prestons were obsessed with him and Leona. They would always ultimately lose, and they were never happy with that. It really was a game to them, and they absolutely despised losing. Perhaps Arcadia had the right idea, even if she was coming from the wrong place. Anyway, it was the only way Mateo could think of to stop all this. Even if it was a bad thing on its own, it at least went against their enemy, and sometimes, that just had to be enough.

Before Jupiter could finish shooting all the hundemarke killers, Mateo body slammed him. That was one good thing about close quarters. Jupiter had no room to fight back fast enough. Knowing he didn’t have long, though, Mateo grabbed the gun for himself, rolled back to the other side of the chamber, and aimed the best he could.

“Hey,” Jupiter said jovially. “You want in on this? Oh wait, no; not that one. That is the worst one you could pick.”

Damn, his target was gone. The GIF started back at the beginning, but he didn’t have a clear shot at Anatol Klugman. He didn’t really want to kill the guy, but it was his only move, and The Warrior was the one man he could trust to understand and appreciate the dilemma. Jupiter got up and tried to attack Mateo, but Leona and Ramses held him back. Just a few more seconds. Three..two..one..fire.

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Firestorm: Bhulan Cargill (Part X)

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Image cropped and filtered, but credit due to Tormod Sandtorv / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)

My life’s story can be told in four chapters. I was born in a timeline that I didn’t like. People were dead who deserved to survive, and two worlds were destined to destroy each other. I needed to fix things, so I went back to key moments in time for chapter two, and altered history to realize better outcomes. The third chapter was the shortest, and was only there to serve as transition to my fourth and final chapter. You don’t need to understand the first few chapters to really get who I am, so I’ll start my story on the cusp of the transition. This is the day I attempt to sacrifice myself for the greater good. Things did not go as planned.

I can travel through time at will, but that’s not all I can do. My brain works differently than most people’s, which is probably why sacrificing myself for the greater good doesn’t feel like suicide to me. I don’t just move through time, but I see how it moves. I understand causality on a level experienced by few others. It may take me a long time to study history, and I usually still have to gather the data somehow, but I’m an expert at processing it, so I can make the right changes at the right moments. If I surrender to this power, however, and more let time take control of me, it often takes me exactly when and where I need to go. This allows me to bypass all that research, and take a leap of faith. I’m kind of a control freak, so I don’t do this feature very often, but it does save time, and it’s seemed to work for me here. A man I admire named Mateo Matic has asked me to find Horace Reaver in 2027, so that’s where I’m trying to go.

I find myself standing in what I immediately recognize to be the Bran safehouse. I’m not sure why they call it that, though. Four people are evidently living here at the moment: Slipstream, Alexina, Alexina’s son, Alexi, and Agent Nanny Cam. That last one is presently petting some kind of weird creature that looks like a cross between a hare and a dog. Hare of the dog. Hm.

Alexina is the only one I’ve met personally. “Yay, Bhulan!” she exclaims, both jokingly, and unironically.

“McGregor. I’ve come for Horace Reaver.”

“No, it’s okay,” Slipstream says. “Ace is good in this reality.”

“No, I don’t mean I’m gonna hurt him,” I clarify. “I’ve been told we can help each other.”

“We don’t know where he is,” Slipstream explains to me. “We’ve come here to regroup, and try to figure that out.”

Suddenly, the front door opens. “Well, wonder no more!” Horace Reaver announces.

“How did you hear that?” Alexina questions. “The door and walls of this safehouse are literally soundproof.”

“Hear what?” Ace asks.

“Where were you?” Slipstream asks. She slides over to give Paige a hug, followed by Serkan.

“We were in another timeline,” Paige answers. “It took us some time to find our way back.”

“Where’s the agent?” I’m not sure who Alexina is referring to here.

“Huh?” Agent Nanny Cam asks.

“Not you,” Alexina says. “The other agent.”

“Hello Doctor is still in there,” Serkan answers. “He nobly sacrificed himself, so we could return.” Yeah, I don’t know who Hello Doctor is.

“Be honest,” Ace scolds. “We sacrificed him. He didn’t wanna do it.”

“He’ll be fine,” Serkan dismisses. “He wanted to be there anyway. That’s why he opened the portal to it in the first place.”

“That’s misleading,” Ace tells him.

The door opens again. Jupiter Fury walks in. “Well, wonder no more!”

Everyone just looks at him.

“Oh, was that someone else’s line?” he jokes. “Shit.”

Alexina sighs. “You’ll always find us. Goddammit.” She holds her watch up, turns a dial, and presses the button. I see immediately that she’s just reset time a few seconds.

“Be honest,” Ace repeats, just as he did before. “We sacrificed him. He didn’t wanna do it.”

No one else is aware of the time reset.

“Go home, son,” Alexina instructs.

“What?” Alexia asks. “I thought you wanted me here.”

“It’s too dangerous. Go. Now.”

Alexina takes his future wife, Agent Nanny Cam by the hand, then presses a button on his belt. They teleport away.

“What just happened?” Paige asks.

Jupiter barges into the condo, just as he did before. “Well, wonder no more!”

“Jupiter?” Ace asks. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m here for the Omega Gyroscope! I know you’ve brought it here. I can track it anywhere, so there’s no point in trying to hide it from me.”

“Oh, this?” Slipstream reaches into her bag, and pulls the gyroscope out. Word is, it can do nearly anything. It can rewrite reality with a single thought. I considered seeking it out for my purposes in chapter two, but decided it wasn’t the route I wanted to go.

“Give it to me,” Jupiter orders. “I need it.” And then, in the blink of an eye, he’s on the floor. He was badly hurt, as if having just finished a fistfight. “What the shit was that!” He tries to stand back up, but something forces him back down. It isn’t like there’s some invisible person stopping him. It’s more like falling back down happened, but then someone erased all of our memories of it.

I turn to Alexina. “Someone is altering time. They’re making us forget. You can push through that.”

“You want me to get myself out of a memory block?” Alexina asks.

“Yes.”

“I’ll try.” She closes her eyes, and breathes out deliberately and slowly. “There’s a man, and a woman. He beats Jupiter up, and we just watch. We’re confused, but we just watch, like we trust him.”

“Why don’t they want us to remember?” Paige asks.

“Remember what?” Alexina asks back. She’s lost her memory again.

I look around. Everyone has lost their memories again. I’m the only one strong enough to recall the moment that Alexina described, though I still can’t actually recall the moment itself. I sigh, frustrated. I ask her to do it again, this time trying to get a name of these mysterious memory-wiping individuals. She gets more than that. Kallias Bran and Aeolia Sarai are not wiping memories on purpose. They’re stuck like this, unable to truly communicate with anyone. They can impact reality however they please, but no one will ever remember them. Apparently this happened because of a coin. When it’s done, Alexina feels taxed, though of course, she has no idea why. I’m still the only one who has any clue what’s going on. I also feel a lump in my pocket. When I take a peek, I see this whole purse of coins. If these can remove anyone from the global consciousness, I have to keep them safe, and away from others.

I look back over to Jupiter. He looks worse than before, suggesting he’s suffered further beating. “Whatever you do, I’ll always find that gyroscope. Sooner or later, it will be in my possession, so you might as well hand it over now.”

“I don’t understand,” Serkan says. He kneels down to get on Jupiter’s level. “We’re friends. Why are you acting like this?”

“We’re not friends.” Jupiter spits some blood on Serkan’s shoes.

Serkan’s not fazed by the blood. “Yes, we are.”

“You’re thinking of Jupiter Rosa. I’m Fury. He’s my alternate. I’m the real one.”

“He’s right,” Alexina confirms. “This isn’t the man you know. It’s just like you’re not the same Serkan who still lives with his mother and little brother.”

Serkan frowns.

“You’re gonna have to kill me,” Jupiter says. “It’s that important to me.” In another blink, he’s lying unconscious on the floor. Kallias must have knocked him out for us.

“We have to get rid of it,” Slipstream decides. “Can it be destroyed?”

“No,” Alexina replies. “Not something this powerful.”

“Yes, it can,” I disagree. I step towards Ace. “The hundemarke can do it”

“No,” Ace says, shaking his head. “I know the only way to destroy the hundemarke, and I’m not letting it happen.”

“What way are we talking about?” Paige asks.

“Someone would have to kill themselves,” Ace is disgusted at the prospect.

“No one’s ever been willing to do that,” Alexina adds. “I don’t know anyone who would.”

This was always meant to be the last chapter of my life. I tried to start a new life once my mission was complete, but I’m finding myself very unhappy. This is my chance to end it on my terms, in a way that cannot be changed. “I would,” I say plainly.

“No,” Ace decides.

“You don’t know me,” I say to him, “but this is what I want. I’ve been thinking about it for a very, very long time.”

He just keeps shaking his head.

“Please.”

“I can’t be responsible for someone’s death. It’s not fair for you to ask me to do that.”

Suddenly, the hundemarke is hanging around my neck.

“Holy crap,” Alexina says, stunned. “How did you do that?”

“Thanks, Kallias,” I say with a smile.

“Who’s Kallias?” Paige doesn’t like not being in the know, and based on what I know of her future, she’ll dedicate her life to the pursuit of knowledge, so she never feels ignorant again.

“Okay, great,” I say with an air of finality. “Now the gyroscope.”

“No!” Ace cries. He runs over, and takes it from Slipstream’s hand. Then he steps back defensively. “I’m not letting you kill yourself! Violence is never the answer. I’m putting my foot down. We’re gonna find another way to stop Jupiter from getting his hands on it...to stop anyone from getting their hands on it, or the hundemarke.

Paige walks over to him. “Dad. Let’s talk about this.”

“No,” he says. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

Suddenly, there’s another unexpected appearance. A portal opens up, though most of us aren’t at the right angle to see where it leads. It looks like there are stairs though. Something in it catches Ace’s eye. “Protect this thing!” he yells. Then he reaches back, and hurls the Omega Gyroscope into the portal. It snaps shut.

“Where did you just send that?” Serkan asks him, stepping forward himself. “Who were you talking to.”

“Mateo Matic; A trusted future friend.”

I nod. “That’s about as good as you’re gonna do. I still need to use the hundemarke, and I could do with your help.”

“I’ve already helped you,” Ace spits.

“Mr. Demir,” I go on. “I would like you to come with me. The hundemarke should prevent anyone from stopping me from doing this, but it can’t hurt to have a little extra help in the way of some power suppression.

“I can do that,” Serkan agrees, “if this is what you really want. And I don’t have to say, there’s no going back.”

“I’m ready. And Ace, if you could protect me from physical threats? What I’m doing will save lives.”

It looks like he’s finally resigned. “All right.”

“I’m going too,” Paige declares. If this messes with reality, I need to be in the same place as my dads.

Her fathers want to argue, but they see the logic.

We all four hold hands, and I transport them to the Darvaza gas crater in Derweze, Turkmenistan. It’s not the only place where it can be destroyed, but it’s a good one. To the average human, the fires burning here are like any other, but the flames are of special temporal significance. They can actually kill a time traveler better than they would anyone else. It’s reportedly instantaneous. It’s not been studied much, so we don’t know why, but they’re just particularly more dangerous to our kind.

“Do you need a minute?” Serkan asks reverently.

I smile. “No time like the present.”

Arcadia Preston suddenly appears a few meters away. Both Serkan and Ace fall into defensive positions. “It’s okay,” Arcadia says in a sincere voice. “I hope you appreciate what I went through to get this. She hands me a parchment of paper.

I take a quick look at it. “The LIR Map?”

“I decided life isn’t fun when you have all the answers. Just...get rid of it.”

“Okay,” I respond.

As soon as Arcadia disappears, she reappears, but she’s dressed in different clothes, suggesting she’s from a different point in time. “I have one more thing for ya,” Future!Arcadia says. Then she hands me the Insulator of Life.

“Is someone in here?” I ask her.

“Would you believe...no?”

I reject her with my eyes.

Arcadia gives in, “it’s my father. He’s incredibly dangerous. I need you to do this, not for me, but for everyone.”

“Is he the one using the hundemarke to assassinate people all over time?” I ask.

“Yes,” Arcadia says.

I’m not a murderer, but...okay. “Okay.”

A third—or second?—person wants in on this action. At first all we see is the business end of a knife, appearing out of nowhere. It slides down, like it’s cutting through the fabric of spacetime. It opens enough for the feminine figure of what looks like a futuristic astronaut to slip through. She stands there a moment, sizing us all up. Then she smashes a button on the back of her neck, which acts to retract her helmet. “My name is Zoey. I’ve been all over the bulkverse, looking for this. I finally found it in omegaverse.” She removes the Omega Gyroscope from the hardback backpack on her back. “If I had known that’s what they called it, I probably would have started there.”

“Um. Thank you?”

“I need someone to get a message to Lucius and Curtis,” Zoey requests.

“I just saw them,” Ace says. “In prison.”

“It’s important that you find them again,” Zoey continues. “They said, if there was one thing they regretted, it was how they treated Yatchiko. Tell them to be nice to her.”

“We can do that,” Serkan agrees. “Should we tell them the message comes from you.”

Zoey shakes her head. “They won’t know me yet. Say it’s from their future selves.” She takes her knife back from its magsheath, and jams it into a new portal. She tears it apart, and slips herself back through.

I wait for a moment. This is not what I expected. I look around. “Does anyone else wanna give me somethin’ to destroy?” I call out to the aether.

Nothin’.

“All right, good! Then I’m gonna do this,” I go on with my outside voice. “Here I go!” I continue waiting, and still nothing. I take one last look at the Reaver-Demirs. “Something profound and poetic.” With that, I throw myself into the fire pit.

Before I reach the flames, gravity shifts, and pulls my feet down to a floor.

“Oh, hi,” a woman behind me says. “Are you my first guest?”

I turn around to find none other than Danica Matic, Concierge to The Constant. “Something went wrong.”

“All right. Well,” Danica begins. “Let’s figure it out together.”

This was how chapter four of my life began.

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