Microstory 2441: Power Crystal Factory (PCF)

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Not to be confused with scifi examples of power crystals, or examples in fantasy where crystals have magical properties. Disclaimer over. For the most part, ships and orbiting stations in the system fleet are manufactured in outer space. The only reason we ever did it on Earth was because we were not capable of space manufacturing in the early days. Once we built up some infrastructure, and bolstered the industry overall, we were able to free ourselves from the gravity well. We still needed ways to actually get up to these vessels, but that was easy after everything. There doesn’t seem to be a name for the host star, or the star system as a whole, so we’ll just call it a Castlebourne thing. They build their ships on a secret moon base, which is easier for them to take off from. I caught a peek from a telescope once, and saw the mass driver that they use for launching. That’s all I know about that, and the crystal regulators. Every ship, no matter how big or small, or what powers it, or what it’s used for, has a need to distribute its power. Our ancestors used to use various technologies, like adapters, to control the flow of electrical power. These were crude by today’s standards, but the principle remains vital to the safe and efficient operation of a moving vehicle. Crystals have a variety of uses in this regard. I won’t bore you with the details, but some of them serve as conditioners, which maintain the smooth transference of power, where it’s needed. It makes sure that everything, no matter how remote, is powered at all times. But sometimes it’s too much power, so you also need crystal capacitors, which can buffer the power temporarily, and release it more gradually. If it’s buffered too much, then they can also redistribute it safely, if only to a waste heat ventilation system. Crystals are also used as nodes, redirecting or splitting the power when powering multiple independent systems at once. I say all this so you understand why this dome has to exist. So now you know why the crystals themselves are important, but that doesn’t explain why they need to be manufactured here, instead of the moon, where nearly everything else is made. It has to do with gravity. Crystals aren’t made, they’re grown. They start small, and build themselves from there, almost like a plant. For some types, this process requires 1G surface gravity, or close to it. There’s some evidence that Castlebourne’s slightly lower gravity is beneficial to the process, but they’ve not completed enough studies on this phenomenon, and there are a lot of other variables to account for. What we do know is that Castlebourne-grown power crystals are at least as good as any others. You may be asking, why don’t you just grow them in a cylindrical habitat? And I’ll tell you, that’s not real gravity. It’s only simulating gravity. For everyday living, if the spin is programmed correctly, everything feels normal. But crystals are more finicky. They also need to be still, and they can tell when they’re in motion, which is presently the only way to fake gravity. So for now, they’re grown on the surface of a full-sized planet. That’s what we do here in this dome, and we do it well. Most of this is automated, as one would expect, but I still have an important job to do here. They still like to have humans inspect the merchandise. If you ever ride in a ship that uses my power crystals, you can rest, assured that it’s been created using the highest of standards, and you’re safe. At least from crystals. Any other components, I don’t know...that’s not my department.

The Seventh Stage: Painting Rocks (Part V)

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Echo is standing in front of the blue wall, painting wispy white clouds on it, paying close attention to details. It would look complete to anyone else, but to him, the work is never done. He can always add one more curve...one final flourish.

Clavia walks up to him. “There you are. What are you doing?”

“Painting this wall. It ain’t gonna paint itself,” Echo replies, still watching what he’s doing.

“It’s literally going to paint itself,” she counters.

He smiles. “I know. Sometimes I just need a break to unwind. Like you with your little headplays.”

She nods. “Fair enough.”

“What’s the count?”

“Three thousand, seven hundred and four.”

He drops his elbow, and looks over at her. “Technically at quota. We’re ready for move-in.”

“Like you said, in the technical sense. We still need to figure out how to convince a supermajority to do it, or it’s not really helpful.”

“We also need to figure out how to do it without loading everyone onto a proverbial bus, and driving them here.”

“It’s time to talk to Cedar,” Echo realizes. They have been dreading this day for a long time. They like him, but they don’t know how he’s going to react or respond to this news. There are whispers that the Cloudbearer twins are building something, but no one knows what, and all of their guesses are wrong; though off by varying degrees. Cedar ran his campaign for power on a foundation of intercivilizational unity. He believes that the only way to keep the Reality Wars at bay is if there’s no one to fight against, because everyone is on the same side. The amount of space between people in this universe could tear them apart. It’s the distribution. Cedar is probably gonna have trouble with the distribution.

“Yeah, we have no choice. Do you think he’ll be mad we didn’t read him into the situation earlier?”

“He’s serving as Head Advisor to our parents,” Echo replies. “He was too preoccupied to worry about this. That can be our excuse for keeping it a secret from him.”

“Good idea.” Clavia takes her brother’s hand, and transports them both to what essentially amounts to a holodeck, though on a much grander scale. They’re standing on an island floating in the air. At least, that’s what it looks like to them. It’s just an illusion. The “air” around them is clear purplish water. They can still breathe, of course, and talk just fine. The sky above is much more unambiguously an ocean. It’s upside down. Waves jut down, and spray a sweet misty rain down towards them. Some of it tastes like chocolate, other drops like honey. Their feet are planted firmly on the ground, though they feel like they could float away at any second. All around them are crystalline structures, also purple, since that is the theme. A stream gives way to a waterfall that slips over the edge, and disappears into the oblivion below, though again, it’s just invisible floor. Between them and the sky are giant turtles, swimming around. One of them nods and winked before moving on.

They aren’t alone on this floating island. They summoned Cedar, and are currently patiently waiting for him to get his bearings in this new world. “This breaks the laws of physics,” he notes. “I’m assuming it’s not real?”

“No,” Echo replies. “Our powers do have some limits.”

“You’ve been gone for nearly a month,” Cedar points out.

Clavia smirks. “We’ve been gone longer than that.”

“Framejacking, or temporal acceleration?”

“Both,” Echo answers. Time is moving faster in this universe, so more gets done in a shorter amount of time in comparison to the Sixth Key, but their own minds are also operating at much higher speeds, allowing them to think and act more quickly.

“This is what you’ve been working on?”

Echo laughs. “This took only a few seconds to construct. We got the idea from Castlebourne. Most of the domes on that world are physical, except for the holographic sky. One of them is nearly all holography. You can make it look like anything. We chose this today. Isn’t it cool?”

“Yeah,” Cedar agrees. “What am I doing here, though?”

Echo clears his throat. “What is the number one cause of tension and conflict in the Sixth Key?”

Cedar dismisses his words with a wave of his hand. “Don’t pitch me. Just tell me what you’ve done, and what you want. You’re gonna need to learn this for when you take over in a more meaningful sense. We’re in charge of undecillions of people back home. No one has time to beat around the bush or be polite about it.”

“Very well,” Echo decides. He reaches up and pantomimes pulling a stage curtain open. As he does so, a tear in the hologram appears in the far, far distance. Behind it, they see what looks like regular outerspace, but as the curtains separate even farther, a figure appears. It looks like a big metal statue of a humanoid, or perhaps just a big robot. It’s hard to tell what scale they’re working with here, so Echo has to explain. “Have you ever heard of the matrioshka body?”

“I have,” Cedar confirms. “I went to a sort of school like you did. That’s where the afterlife simulation was housed, before it collapsed, and everyone was transported into Fort Underhill. The Sixth Key shares interdimensional space with them now. I never knew what happened to matrioshka body, though. That it?”

Echo shakes his head. “That. Is MB-3704.”

Cedar laughs. “You made your own? That’s impressive.”

Echo and Clavia exchange a look. “He said it was three-seven-zero-four.”

Cedar is confused, but only for half a second. Then his face drops into a frown. “You made 3700 of these things?”

“Yeah,” Echo says.

Cedar starts to pace around and shake his head, almost in disappointment. “Why? What do they do?”

“Well, they...have people live in them.”

“Who lives in them?”

“No one yet, that’s what we’re asking you for.”

“Asking me for what?” Cedar questions. “I told you, get to the point. Stop trying to be dramatic.”

“We need you to transport everyone from the Sixth Key who wants to live here. Send them all to their new homes...all at once.”

“I can’t do that!” he cries.

“We’re gonna let them consent,” Clavia defends. “We’re not gonna make anyone move, but this will be better, and I think there will be a ton of interest.”

“Think about it,” Echo begins before Cedar can make another argument. “There are hundreds of billions of stars, but we don’t have enough resources for everyone. How is that possible? Because stars radiate a ton of their energy away, even with dyson swarms. Matrioshka brains are more comprehensive, and more efficient. And matrioshka bodies are just stylish and cool.” Honestly, I don’t know why no one ever thought of it before. I thought that was the point of the original matrioshka body, and its successor, Big Papa.” There ought to be far more than two of these in existence. The Parallel was more than capable of doing it, but they chose not to. They still orbited stars. Even the interstellar settlements were quite literally few and far between. Why? Why keep the stars? Aesthetics? Safety? Ethics? Probably all of the above. Or. Echo and Clavia are just that clever.

“That’s not my point. I literally can’t do it. I don’t have that kind of power.”

Echo and Clavia are both confused. “What are you talking about? You already did it. You moved them all from their original realities, to the Sixth Key.”

“No, I didn’t.” He starts to look around on the ground. Guessing at his needs, Echo manifests a chair for him to sit in. Cedar hunches over and stuffs his face in his palms. “That wasn’t me. I didn’t do any of that.”

“What? It had to have happened,” Clavia argues. “Everyone’s there.”

“I’m not saying that it never happened,” Cedar tries to explain. “I’m telling you that I didn’t do it. I have powers, but not like that. That’s insane.”

“Then who did?” Echo asks him.

Cedar looks up to meet Echo’s gaze. “I have no idea. They didn’t tell me. They have to keep it a secret, even from me and my family, even now that it’s done. We were...a misdirect. It’s like sleight of hand. We were the left hand that distracted everyone so no one would see what the right hand was doing. I don’t know if anyone knows who saved everyone during Reconvergence. All I know is that it wasn’t me.” He pauses before adding, “I just took credit, per my instructions.”

Echo and Clavia manifest their own chairs to sit in. They sit there in silence for a good five minutes before Echo decides to speak again. “Time is not linear. If something exists at any moment, it exists in all moments. If you know something about the past, you can change it. Keeping it a secret was smart. Even if someone were to go back and kill you as a child, it wouldn’t stop the creation of the Sixth Key. You’re like a bodyguard, there to take a bullet if one ever comes flying through. That’s how I would have done it if I were there.”

“Maybe you were,” Cedar reasons. “Maybe you two are the ones who created the Sixth Key; you just haven’t done it yet from your own perspectives.”

They exchange another look. Clavia decides to explain. “There’s a small group of people on a planet in the Sixth Key who are aware of what we’ve been up to. Just a few billion people. They were our test group. We’ve already tried to transport them to our new universe. We don’t have that kind of juice either. Stars are easy. Giant metal statues are easy. Moving people? That requires a level of precision that we do not possess; not with hordes anyway. We could probably move them a couple thousand at a time, but that’s all but useless for our needs. That’s a meaningless rounding error compared to the total population.”

“What about Ellie Underhill?” Echo asks after another bout of silence. “I don’t remember how many she transported into Fort Underhill.”

“It was only 120 billion,” Cedar replies. “Not quite a rounding error, but still not good enough. Besides, she gave them all new bodies; it was a whole different animal.”

“So what we’re saying is that we need to find the person who actually did move everyone from the five realities to the Sixth Key. We need them to do it again.” Clavia starts to pace. Finding someone out there in the abstract is not something that she’s ever done before. She always knows who she’s targeting, or roundabouts where they are. This is a mystery individual, who might be in either of two universes—or, hell, maybe neither of them. They could have also done it subconsciously, like how Echo lived before he became self-aware and realized his true potential. Maybe it’s not just one person. Maybe it was a group, or somehow everyone. Maybe through the spirit of survival every single living organism consolidated their untapped collective power into one brilliant miracle. Ugh, Clavia doesn’t know, but you know who would?

“Hey, boys!”

Echo nearly falls out of his chair, but catches himself by spreading his feet apart. He stumbles away from her. “Debra. How did you get out?” She still looks like his sister. She’s still occupying that body, and nothing about it has changed. But Echo knows. He would always know. “What did you do to Clavia?”

“Relax, she’s still in here; on the first stage. She gave me control of the body, because you need me.”

“I need you for what?”

“I can find your mysterious god-being,” Debra spits back like he’s an insignificant little ant on the ground. “I found you, didn’t I? You were alone on a nothing planet in the middle of the universe. I knew exactly where you were. I intuited that you existed in the first place.”

“We can’t trust you,” Echo contends.

“Believe it or not, I’ve changed. Living with those people, doing those plays...it’s changed me. I’m no hero, but I’m not a villain anymore either. Clavia maintains full veto power. She can come back whenever she wants.”

“Prove it. Let me talk to my sister again. And don’t try to trick me, I’ll know.”

“I know.” Debra actually does what is asked of her, and temporarily returns control of the body to Clavia.

“She’s not exactly right,” Clavia says. “She doesn’t need my body, she needs my brain.”

“Can’t you just do it? You have all her power, don’t you?”

“It’s more complicated than that. You would understand if you could be inside my head. You would get it if you could see the construct that I’ve constructed.”

Echo steps forward, and places a hand on each of Clavia’s shoulders. “I bet I can. Show me. I think it’s about time that I meet your little brain buds.”

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The Seventh Stage: Rocking the Boat (Part IV)

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Clavia is taking a break to meditate. It’s not just for her mental health in the abstract sense. In her case, it’s non-negotiable. She has to do it or parts of her will overwhelm the others; usually the not-so-great part. One of her constituent personalities was told a story once. It’s not so much a story as a brief metaphorical anecdote. Well, it can be boiled down to that anyway. The gist of it is that everyone supposedly has two wolves inside of them. One of them is good, and the other is evil. The one who wins is the one you feed. It’s not so simple with Clavia, though. She actually has six wolves inside of her. Debra, a.k.a. The First Explorer is definitely the alpha. She’s the strongest, and the one who had initial total control over this body. When Echo Cloudberry regressed her back to youth, and tried to erase her memories, the balance of power shifted. Clavia became more of an amalgamation of all six identities. Yet those six original people are still technically in here, and in order to maintain the balance, she has to sort of commune with them every once in a while. She has to assure them that the choices she’s making are righteous, and that she won’t let Debra take over again. It brings a whole new meaning to being greater than the sum of one’s parts. Because if “Clavia” can talk to the seven people that she’s composed of, who even is Clavia at all? Is she a seventh person, or what?

“I would like to call this Meeting of the Seven Stages to order,” Clavia says from her perch on the topmost stage. She could have created a mind palace that looked like anything, but this seemed fitting. The stage area is in the shape of a hexagon, with the six lower stages surrounding the central stage. Curtains divide the six audiences from each other, and can be pulled further up so that each audience can only witness what’s happening on their particular stage. As it is situated much higher, however, the seventh stage is always visible to all audiences. Of course, there is no audience; it’s only a metaphor, but it works for their needs. Right now, the curtains are all pulled back, so everyone can see each other, including the one underneath the seventh stage, allowing the others to see each other. Clavia herself stands in the middle. Around, in clockwise order, we have Ingrid Alvarado, whose body Clavia is occupying; Ingrid’s love interest, Onyx Wembley of The Garden Dimension; Ingrid’s rival before the Reconvergence, when they lived in the Fifth Division parallel reality, Killjlir Pike; Ayata Seegers of the Third Rail; the dangerous one, Debra Lovelace; and finally, Andrei Orlov of The Fourth Quadrant.

The play that they would be performing this year—if any of this were real—is about a prisoner transport ship on the high seas of a planet called Earth. Clavia is obviously the captain, with Debra as their one prisoner. Andrei and Ayata are her guards. Ingrid, Onyx, and Killjlir serve as helmsman, navigator and quartermaster, and boatswain respectively. Again, the acting troupe is just the premise of the scenario, but Clavia felt that it was necessary to come up with some sort of fictional background to stimulate their minds. Their old lives are over, and there is no going back. They don’t even have bodies anymore, so it’s best to have something new to look forward to every day. They didn’t have to pretend to be stage actors—it could have been anything—but the name of their pocket universe made the concept essentially inevitable. They rehearse a new play every year. This one is called Rocking the Boat. These meetings allow Clavia to regain the memories that Echo took away from her, but before that happened, she had the mind of a child, so you can’t expect anything too complex or cerebral, even now that she’s older. Though, this one is indeed a little bit more mature. It still has that classic Clavia tinge of humor as Debra is playing the notorious evil pirate, Karen the Unappeasable.

“Can I get out of these chains?” Debra requests.

“I didn’t put you in those today,” Clavia answers.

“We did a dress rehearsal without you,” Ayata explains. She steps onto Debra’s stage, and unlocks her manacles.

Clavia tears up. “Without me?”

“Wait, look over here,” Ingrid requests. She goes on when her double turns to face her, “you did it. You cried on command.”

“I’ve been practicing in the real world,” Clavia explains proudly.

“I hope that doesn’t mean you’re using it to manipulate people,” Onyx warns.

“No people, just stars,” Clavia responds. “They are unmoved by my tears.”

“So the project is going well?” Killjlir assumes.

“Quite,” Clavia confirms. “We’re ahead of schedule. We’re more powerful than even we realized.”

“I knew your parents were keeping you restrained,” Debra says with disgust. “You had to get away from them to reach your potential.”

“We don’t know that they were doing anything,” Onyx reasons. “She’s older now—it’s natural for her to come into her own. Maybe it’s like a stage of puberty.”

“I chose them as my surrogate parents as a reason,” Clavia speaks up for herself. “I love them both. Echo and I are doing this in honor of them, not in spite of them.”

“Whatever,” Debra says.

“Aww, is someone a sad panda because I took away her solo?” Clavia asks.

Don’t get her started. “The story is about how we’re all feeling about our place on the boat, and how we’re dealing with those emotions without telling anyone about it. I have to sing, or my story’s not getting told.”

“No, the story is about how prisoners are silenced, and how the general public doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. That’s the whole point. The way your character keeps being interrupted and dismissed should be shocking and annoying to the audience. Karen lives in the subtext, and the negative space.”

“That’s another thing, I don’t like her name,” Debra says. “It’s what people actually used to call me.”

“Well, I admit, that one came from a place of pettiness,” Clavia tells her. “I kind of like it now, though. I can’t imagine calling her anything else.”

“I won’t say another word about it if I can play the hero in the next one.” Debra pitches this every year, and she has been denied every time except for the third year. In it, she did portray the protagonist, and she absolutely sucked at it. She’s the main character in her own story. Everyone feels that way, but she really feels it, and that came out in her performance. The rest of the cast may as well have not even been there the way she was chewing up scenery. If an audience really had seen it, they would have closed down on opening night.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Clavia says. She’s switching between smiling and frowning, because she doesn’t know whether she should even bring this up. They contemplated doing it a long time ago, but the technology is too unreliable and messy. Consciousness transference is very good about moving a digital mind from one substrate to another. It works by scanning an entire brain all at once. It doesn’t understand the concept of an amalgamated mind. Why would it? That doesn’t exist in nature. If two people are occupying the same body, they’ve probably been allocated entire independent partitions in the brain. The Seven Stagers are too entangled with each other. When they’re on these platforms, it’s very easy to distinguish them, but the mind uploader can’t enter this memory palace. It has no way of recognizing them as multiple units, which should be uploaded separately. The other concern is Clavia herself. They still don’t know how much she relies on the six of them to even be her own person. Perhaps she only thinks that she’s her own entity. Perhaps if they were to leave, she would cease to exist.

“Did you decide what the next play is going to be about?” Ayata asks.

“It’s not about the play at all,” Clavia begins to clarify. “There may not be one. There may not need to be one.”

The others look at each other across their stages. “Did you figure out how to transfer us out of your avatar?” Killjlir guesses.

“I think I did.”

“Technology doesn’t advance that fast,” Onyx decides. “Not even the Parallelers can do it.”

“To be fair,” she didn’t talk to any of them,” Ayata says to him. “She couldn’t, or it would give us away. Maybe she found someone to trust who has a new idea.”

“I already have someone to trust,” Clavia explains before anyone can come up with their own theories on what’s going on. She takes a breath before continuing, though. “I think that Echo can do it.”

Everyone has their own way of reacting to this, but some common threads are groans, throwing up their hands, and shaking their heads. It’s not that they don’t like Echo. They love him. They just don’t think that he can do this. He’s conjured little critters out of nothing before, but that was back when he wasn’t consciously aware that he was doing anything, or had any power. He’s proven himself to be too in his head since he wiped his own mind, full of self doubt and fear. As far as they know, unlike Clavia, he never got his old memories back, and he may never have been strong enough to create human bodies.

“Now, why do you think he can’t do it? We’re starscaping out there. We’re building an entire universe out of dark matter and elementary particles. You think he can’t build a few puny human bodies for you? With his help, I could guide each of you out of my brain, and into your new ones. That’s what the conventional technology is missing. It was designed to dump everything in all at once, but Echo will have the context and intuition that it lacks.”

“You’re missing something too,” Onyx begins to use his experience and expertise from the Garden Dimension. “Stars are somewhat uniform balls of plasma, composed of hydrogen, helium, and metals. You can just toss in all the ingredients, and the laws of physics will take over, particularly gravity. I’m not saying what you and Echo are doing isn’t incredibly impressive, but the complexity will come out of the imagination you have for how your new universe is arranged, not by the inherent nature of the individual celestial bodies. Human bodies, on the other hand, are extremely precise entities, with complexities on a smaller scale. But just because it’s smaller, doesn’t mean it’s easier. Sure, it requires vastly fewer resources, but one tiny mistake could lead to catastrophe. You’re talking about creating something that took billions of years to evolve naturally, and unlike stars, it only happened once.”

“Wait,” Killjlir interrupts. “He doesn’t need to conjure the bodies. Those can be bioengineered using the normal techniques. We would just need a way to transfer us into them from Clavia’s head.”

“He wouldn’t be transferring them,” Clavia contends. “He doesn’t have the power to upload digitized minds. These would be true organic bodies, imbued with your respective consciousnesses through interdimensional pathways.”

“I don’t understand,” Ayata confesses.

“When you bioengineer a human body,” Onyx begins again, “there are only two ways to do it. Either it’s an empty substrate waiting for a mind to be uploaded into it, or it’s a regular person. An empty substrate is inherently digital in regards to consciousness transference. Even if it’s organic, it’s encoded with neural formatting compatibility. It can read a mind from another digitized brain, or a computer server. A normal body can’t do that. Back in the old days in the main sequence and the Parallel, they had to first figure out how to convert people’s brains into the right format since they didn’t evolve that ability.”

“So let’s do it like that,” Killjlir offers.

“We can’t,” Ingrid counters. “Like he was saying, that would be a regular person. It would have its own mind already, right?”

“Right,” Clavia agrees. “However smart or dumb that person is, or how competent they are to learn new things, the body would be ocupado, just like someone born from a mommy and a daddy. You would be stealing their body. Only Echo can make something both undigitized and empty.”

“Then why can’t we just use the digitized kind?” Ayata questions.

“Because you’re not digitized,” Clavia answers. “Our minds came together through completely different means, using a rare if not unique metaphysical process, catalyzed by the magnolia tree fruit that Ingrid ate just as you were all about to die. And digitizing us can’t be done as an aftermarket retrofit, because like we’ve been struggling with, the computer can’t differentiate between our seven discrete consciousnesses.”

Ayata nods, getting it, then looks over at her love. “Andrei, you’ve been quiet this whole time. Thoughts?”

Andrei takes a long time to respond, but by his body language, it’s clear that he’s going to, so no one else speaks instead. “I don’t wanna leave. It’s too risky. We would likely only get one shot at trying something like that, and if it fails, our minds could become totally decorporealized, or we might just die. I think we should revisit the idea of rotating control of the Clavia body.” He looks up at her. “I wanna stand on the seventh stage.”

“Same,” Debra concurs.

She obviously just wants all her power back, but does Andrei have the same aspirations?

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Microstory 2351: Earth, May 25, 2179

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Dear Corinthia,

I’m glad that you have friends, even if you’re not the absolute closest to them as you could possibly be. I envy you, actually. A bunch of people attended our party, but they were almost all my dad’s friends. I haven’t really connected with too many people here. There’s one guy who I was really glad could make it, so I wouldn’t be left alone in the corner. Dad always talks shop at these things. Every time he attends an event, he promises himself that he’s just going to socialize, and not discuss his work, but he always ends up failing. I really prefer to leave my work at work, so I stay out of the little circles that he forms with others. People really like him, because he usually has fairly interesting things to say (from their perspective) but he doesn’t hog all the attention either. He makes sure that others are heard. He’s really good at knowing when someone wants to speak, but is too afraid to interrupt, and will in fact interrupt other people to give the quieter ones their chances. I wish I could be more like him in this regard, always charming and fascinating. Then again, I don’t think I would like to have an audience all the time. The guy I was telling you about is pretty cool, but he works the night shift at the water treatment plant, so we don’t find many opportunities to hang out. Plus, he has a family that he needs to spend that extra time with. His wife was there too, and I like her, but they talked mostly about their children. I don’t mind it, but there’s nothing that I can contribute to the conversation since I don’t have any of my own. Part of my inability to connect is due to my lifestyle and experiences. I spent so much time meeting people that I would probably never see again after the end of the trip. I would occasionally see someone I knew before for a second move, but then I would leave again. My mind grew very accustomed to that, and hasn’t really felt at home here, even though I’m pretty sure that I’ll die here one day. There I go again, being all depressing. It makes it sound like I hated the party, but it’s not true. I had a lot of fun, and I’m glad that we were looking at Libra at the same time, just for the symbolism of that moment.

Trying to feel at home,

Condor

Microstory 2350: Vacuus, May 18, 2179

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Dear Condor,

Happy belated birthday! I decided to wait a few days to send you my next letter, so it could be after the party, but you ought to already know that, since I sent you the custom read receipt about it immediately after receiving your last one. This was a really good reason to use that system, so thank you for coming up with it. The party went great on my end. We had food and cake, and everybody was wearing the same thing. That’s right, I decided to pass along your cool, fashionable garment design to all invitees, and encouraged them to print and wear one of the options themselves. The garment fabricator liked them a lot herself, so it was her idea to really lean into the theme. She was there too, along with several other people. I’m sorry if I gave you the impression that I didn’t have anyone to invite, or that I didn’t have any friends in general. We’re in fairly cramped quarters for logistical and practical reasons, so everyone knows pretty much everyone. I don’t like them all, and they don’t all like me, but we get along pretty well. We have to, or it could lead to catastrophe. Animosity does not mix well with a planetary base on an airless world. One person gets mad at another, and decides to open an airlock out of anger, and it’s bye bye half the living people on Vacuus. No, we obviously compartmentalize the sections, but you get what I mean. We place great emphasis on counseling and mental health. So I do have friends. It’s true that I never developed relationships as strong as the ones I sometimes see on TV, but I would still consider them my friends. I don’t know why I’ve never talked about them to you, but they were there, and we had fun. Who else was at yours? We don’t really do much with constellations here, so we’re not all that familiar. We found Libra, and everyone looked at it, trying to figure out why they’re called “the scales”. It wasn’t until someone had the bright idea to turn the image slightly then we were all, like, “ooooohhh. Kinda!” It was fun, though, and I thought of you the whole time. I wish we could have been in the same room. How did it go on your end?

All partied out and not alone,

Corinthia

Microstory 2346: Vacuus, April 16, 2179

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Dear Condor,

I think it’s a lovely idea for us to celebrate “together” and to be looking at the same stars at the same time. From where I’m standing, Libra is as good of a selection as any. I don’t otherwise have any favorite stars or constellations, and it sounds like you don’t either. I do like to look at them, and didn’t even think about the fact that you can’t unless someone gives you access. So I guess the toxic gases in your atmosphere sit low enough that there are pockets of clean air above it. According to my research that I just did ten minutes ago, Mauna Kea isn’t even the highest peak in the world, so there must be a decent number of these undomed safe zones. Did you and your father transport people to and from these places too, or just the domes? To answer your question, we do have our own observatory that I can access through a tunnel. If we time it right, I won’t have to worry about registering for remote viewing, or anything. There will be a sliver of time where no one’s using it, and I’m sure I could ask for permission. It was one of the first things they built, so they could track the Valkyries, but it’s not as good as the one you’ll be seeing through, and isn’t all that important anymore. I never said, but our settlement is not the ideal location for a large telescope, so our main one was built at an outpost several kilometers away. A small team operates there in person while researchers use the data as needed, and allowed, remotely. Since our local observatory doesn’t serve that much purpose, I doubt I would have much resistance if I just ask to set up my little one-person birthday party there. As far as the clothing goes, send me the design for the outfit, and I’ll have it made. I’m in need of some new clothes anyway, so it won’t break my budget to buy something. In fact, I usually get myself something special around my birthday anyway. I obviously get a discount if I return material for recycling, and I’m done with some of my old stuff.

Searching for Australia through the telescope,

Corinthia

Microstory 2345: Earth, April 9, 2179

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Dear Corinthia,

I got so wrapped up in the explanation of my experiences outside of the dome that I forgot to respond to your questions about our birthday. Thanks for not throwing that oversight in my face. I was talking to dad about it, and we couldn’t come up with very many ideas, but he thought that maybe we could indeed try to coordinate our celebrations. We don’t really have any specific traditions, but perhaps we could agree to a specific time, and maybe wear matching outfits? That might sound stupid, because I doubt that we would do that if we lived on the same planet, but that’s just what we came up with. You do have fiber synthesizers there, right? And do you have access to a telescope? Perhaps we could be looking at the same stars at the same time, to sort of symbolically connect to one another. In real life, there is no part of the firmament that holds any significance to the both of us. At least, I don’t think there is. But there is this sort of religion called astrology. Have you heard of it? People basically think that the alignment of celestial bodies has some sort of impact on their lives and personalities. It’s bogus, of course, but I say that anyone can create a psychoemotional connection to it in any way they see fit, and ignore the rest. According to astrology, our sun sign should be Taurus, because 2,000 years ago, when you were looking at the sun on May 17, the constellation Taurus would be behind it. But as we all know, everything in the universe is constantly on the move, so some people believe that our sun sign should instead be Aries. Obviously, this is all nonsense, but I was thinking that we could use it anyway. We can’t stare at the sun, though, so instead of looking at the stars in Aries, let’s look in the polar opposite direction, which would be Libra. What do you think of that? It might sound dumb to you, but because of our separation, and because of the vast expanse between us, we’ve never seen or done anything at the same time. I just thought that we could try it. There’s no harm, right? Unless you can’t get to a telescope, I don’t know. It wasn’t automatic for me, because the pollutants hide the stars, but it just so happens to be that one of the Mauna Kea observatories will already be looking in the right direction on May 17, so all I’ll have to do is register for remote viewing. Let me know what you think, and also let me know how I can help with your fear of the outside. I do have a lot of experience with it, but only on Earth. Death would not be instantaneous for me, but I want to help in any way I can.

Namaste and all that,

Condor

Microstory 2335: Vacuus, January 31, 2179

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Dear Condor,

Father has not yet written to me. It’s fine, I’m not disappointed. I don’t know him at all, so I can’t know what I should expect out of him. I just wanted to give you an update before it happens that I’m going to be out of communication range again. It won’t be too long, but it’s out of my hands. You see, when researchers first discovered Vacuus, they thought to send probes here before they sent people. Unfortunately, they lost contact with these probes, and were never able to gather much information about the planet. They obviously decided to just send a manned-mission without enough information, and that’s because the ship they were using was self-sustaining. If, for some reason, it wasn’t possible to reach or land on the surface, it wasn’t like a death sentence. We could have been living on it this whole time. It’s still orbiting us right now, and people regularly go back and forth. I could have gotten a job up there instead. In fact, I told you that I’m the only one doing what I do, but that’s not technically true. Someone is up there right now, using their own instruments to track nearby cosmic events. They just don’t do it for the same reasons, and have other responsibilities. It’s not for safety, they’re mostly studying the effects of deep space survival as it pertains to remoteness from the host star. I kind of forget about them, because we don’t really interact. Anyway, that’s not really important. The point is that, once we arrived here, we discovered why communication with the probes stopped working. It’s because of a periodic meteoroid shower called the Valkyries, which causes a blackout. These meteoroids are very close to one another, and interconnected via weak, yet still impactfully disruptive, electromagnetic fields. It has to do with the ferromagnetic composition of them, and the occasional electrostatic charge that builds up when they scrape against one another. This can last for years, but it’s a relatively rare event, and has only happened twice since Earth sent the probes. What’s not all that rare is when one of these meteors becomes dislodged from the shower, and we end up between it and all its friends. If we’re in the right position, it’s pretty as it’s streaking across the sky, but it’s problematic too. We don’t always know when it’s going to happen, and we don’t always know when it’s going to affect us, but it too knocks out signal transmission, though for a much shorter period of time. Our astronomers have devoted most of their careers to studying these phenomena. At first they thought that the shower was falling apart, but they now believe that the stray meteoroids eventually find their way back to the shower. Earth is aware that this is going to happen, and have upgraded their protocols to account for it. So if you send a message, it will end up being stored in a nearby buffer until the relay station receives word that signal transmission has been restored. I’m sorry to spring this on you so last minute, but if you reply, I doubt that I’ll receive you for a while. Please let your father know as well, thanks.

Hopefully not for long,

Corinthia

Starstruck: Only A Stone’s Throw Away (Part V)

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First Chair of the Extremus, Tinaya Leithe was not the one who was awake. It was the other one, who had fallen on top of her naked. For her safety, it was not possible to exit the medical pod from the inside, but the woman was perfectly calm and patient. Mirage came over to address her, along with everyone else. She opened the pod, and let the patient sit up. “My name is Captain Mirage of the Stateless Private Vessel Iman Vellani.”

“Spirit Bridger of the Void Migration Ship Extremus.”

Lilac gasped. “She’s a Bridger. We’re not allowed to be here. Come on, children.” She ushered the kids out of the room.

“Are they afraid of you?” Mirage asked.

“No, I just know things that they’re not allowed to know about the secrets of our mission,” Spirit explained. “You’re not allowed to know either, so it’s not like I’m going to talk about it here. And anyway, I quit already, so that’s all behind me.”

Mirage nodded, and respectfully waited a beat. “Can you tell us what happened? Did the Exins blow up your settlement?”

“Who? The Exins? Never heard of them.”

“Bronach Oaksent,” Brooke clarified.

“Oh, that asshole. Yeah, no, this had nothing to do with him. It was an internal matter. I shouldn’t talk about it either.”

“Well, the Exins were on your planet. It looked like they were trying to attack,” Mirage told her.

“Wait, what year is it?”

“It’s 2341 by the Earthan calendar,” Sharice answered.

“Oh, I’ve been gone for a year,” Spirit realized. “This explosion you speak of must have been pretty devastating. Did anyone else survive?”

“Just your friend.” Belahkay stepped out of the way to reveal Tinaya in the other pod. “The kids and the mother were elsewhere, I guess.”

Spirit looked over at her friend. “No, those wounds are fresh. Whatever happened to her was recent. As a Bridger, I was part of the Phoenix Program, which can reconstitute a user after they have been completely vaporized. It just takes time. A year sounds about right, I suppose. I’ve never needed it before. She’s not part of it, though, so do everything you can to save her.”

“She’s stable,” Mirage said. “However, evidently the pod is having trouble removing the glass. Each time it tries to remove a shard, it digs in deeper, like it’s alive.”

Spirit was confused. “Glass? As in literal glass? We don’t construct with glass. It’s too much work. We use polycarbonate or transparent metal. Wait.” Her eyes widened. “What happened to the time mirror?”

“Oh, that was destroyed in some kind of powerful explosion,” Mirage replied. “Miss Leithe was right in front of it.”

“Madam Leithe,” Spirit corrected. “She was married. Where’s Arqut?”

“We didn’t find anyone else,” Brooke said.

“Unless he was one of the Exin soldiers.”

Spirit shook her head. “No, he’s not involved in that. Of course, I’ve been gone for a year, so maybe he infiltrated them, but probably not. He serves as the Superintendent.”

The three ladies exchanged a look. Belahkay didn’t understand why.

Spirit chuckled once. “Not that Superintendent. He runs our local government.” She took a deep breath. “Anyway, what is an Alpha Centauri ship built in the 23rd century doing all the way out here?”

“You’ve heard of the Iman Vellani?” Sharice asked.

“You’re a matter of historical record. The books lost track of you, though. I guess now we know why.”

“The IV shouldn’t be famous,” Mirage contended. “That’s why I built it on Toliman, so we wouldn’t be written about.”

“Everything gets written about,” Spirit said dismissively. She tucked her legs up to her chest, so she could roll out of the pod.

“Do you want some clothes?” Brooke offered.

“Don’t worry about it.” Spirit took a breath. “I’m craving fudge, though. Do you have any fudge?”

“I have a food synthesizer,” Belahkay exclaimed. “I’m surrogating right now, but I still have an organic body.”

“That sounds lovely. Go back to your body, let’s eat some together.” She took him by the arm like they were on a first date, and let him begin to lead her out. “Please alert me if and when Tinaya’s condition changes. Do you have a shower too?” she asked Belahkay once they were out in the hallway. “The pod did its best, but...”

“I have a sonic mister, and a soaker.”

Sometime during Spirit’s bath and fudge meal, which may or may not have happened at the same time, she realized that she hadn’t asked the crew why they were here. Belahkay tried to explain it, but he didn’t know all that much about this phase. He was still mostly responsible for the automators, which were doing just fine on their own, which was probably why they were called that. “He said it was a hypercubic crystal?” Spirit questioned? Like, a fourth dimensional crystalline structure?”

“Yes, have you heard of it? Did you know that it was in the core of your planet?”

Spirit looked at each of them one by one with a soft poker face, but then she couldn’t hold her fervor back any longer. She burst into riotous laughter. “The Maramon were students of temporal manipulation. Not one of them was born with time powers, and they were jealous of the humans for this, even though most humans aren’t time travelers either. Their research passed onto the Ansutahan humans living there, then later to the refugees in Gatewood, and later to the Extremusians on Extremus. If there was such a thing as hypercubic crystal, trust me, I’d-a heard of it. Sorry, kids, you got played.”

“I’m sure we’re all older than you,” Mirage argued.

“Heh. Time, right?”

“Why would the Exins demand we come here? They claim that it’s a critical component for the containment rings,” Brooke pointed out.

Spirit shrugged. “Why would it be?” These rings are just penning traps on megasteroids. Do normal containment pods contain this magical substance? And have you ever heard of any material that only exists inside of a single planet? Oh, and I suppose it’s just a coincidence that their bitter rival just so happens to have chosen this world as its Beta Site? Let me guess, the only way to extract it would be to destroy the entire rock. Am I onto something here?”

Mirage simulated a sigh. “They just wanted us to kill you.”

“Which is ridiculous,” Spirit reasoned. “There were only ever a few dozen people on that planet. They kept it a secret from the general public. I didn’t even know about it from the beginning.”

“The mirror,” Sharice began. “You set up a permanent portal with it, and a second one on your ship?”

“Semi-permanent, I believe. I wasn’t involved in that. I was just asked to go through to help Tinaya with the hostage situation.”

“A portal like that, between a planet, and a moving target, would have been difficult to maintain at best. Imagine building a walkway that leads from the street to the train. Not the train tracks, but the train itself. No matter where the train goes, you can walk onto it from the street. That link would have to be pretty robust. Ripping the planet apart may have destroyed Extremus too.”

“That still doesn’t make any sense,” Belahkay jumped in. “They know us well enough. They knew that we would investigate a planet that harbors life before doing anything with it. Finding the settlement was not hard from orbit.”

“That’s why the soldiers came through,” Mirage figured. “It was their Plan B, in case making us do it didn’t work. You’re right, it was dumb to bet on us at all. Maybe they were just hoping we would get blood on our hands?”

“The True Extremists are brutal and advanced,” Spirit said. “But they’re not too organized. We believe that their civilization is riddled with horribly chaotic compartmentalization. No one knows what the hell is going on. It’s entirely possible that Plan A was made from the stew of multiple sub-plans that were, in some cases redundant, and in others, totally contradictory.”

“Hm.” Mirage thought about this. “We can use that.”

That was when Lilac came back into the room. “I need to go back down to the planet. I have to feed the prisoner.”

“You have a prisoner?” Mirage asked. “One of the Exin soldiers?”

“No, the terrorist,” Lilac clarified. “He’s the one who blew up the settlement. I’m the Hock Watcher. I...should not have left my post at all, but the kids were missing...”

“I’ll take you back down,” Brooke volunteered.

“And can Aristotle and Niobe stay up here? They’re old enough to take care of themselves, and they won’t get into any trouble. I know—”

“It’s fine,” Mirage responded. “We’ll be here. Sharice will be most available while I look at your homestone.”

“Room for one more?” Spirit asked-slash-offered before Brooke and Lilac left.

Lilac wasn’t sure.

“As Hock Watcher, you may permit visitors at your own discretion. Of course, you may also deny.”

“No,” Lilac decided, “it’s okay. We may be stuck on Verdemus awhile, so we’re in this together.”

Belahkay jumped up. “I’ll take you!” He was a little bit too excited. Spirit was perfectly capable of teleporting on her own. “I mean, I don’t need to meet the prisoner, or anything. I just wouldn’t mind a nice walk on an inhabited planet.”

Spirit looked to Lilac for guidance.

“Why are you looking at me? I’m not in charge here.”

Spirit tilted her chin to the side slightly. “I think you are. It wouldn’t be Tinaya, if she were awake, and it’s certainly not me.”

“Isn’t that literally your job?” Lilac put forth. “To step in when all else fails?”

“This is out of my jurisdiction, and I am a Bridger in name only now.” Spirit grimaced a bit.

“Okay, anyone who wants to go down to the planet can,” Lilac decided.

Only the four of them ended up returning to the surface. In the meantime, Mirage went back to her lab, and agonized over the homestone. She had strong reason to suspect that there was indeed a person’s consciousness in there, but she couldn’t prove it. It was giving off different energy readings than the other stone was, but that was about all she could determine from her limited tests. There was no conclusive evidence of a trapped consciousness, or anything else. It could just be that different homestones were made slightly differently. A third stone would help come to some better understanding of them. As far as she ever knew from her time in another dimension where all of time and space was laid out before, no one else had ever taken the occasion to study them. They still didn’t know where they were from. Some temporal objects were designed partially through technology. Others were normal objects imbued with power. These appeared to be categorized as the latter, but as a stone with no moving parts, nor complex internal structure, it was unlike even those. Even the Escher Knob only worked when you used it as a doorknob. The stone evidently activated by being squeezed, coupled with psychic intention. What the hell did that even mean?

Mirage leaned back in her chair, as if she needed to rest in a chair, and massaged her chin, as if she could feel it through biological nerves. There was one test that could not be done from here. It would require her to go somewhere else, and she had to go there alone. She didn’t want to do that, though. It could seriously screw things up for everyone; not just the crew, or the Verdemusians, but literally everyone in the universe. Just then, someone who looked very much like Mirage came down the hall, and stood in the doorway. Mirage looked over at her, unshocked at the development. “Yeah, Okay. I’ll do it. Blindspot, I guess.”

The other Mirage smiled, and didn’t speak.

Mirage initiated her internal comms device. “Brooke. I think this is going to work, but in case it doesn’t, you’re in charge.”

“What? What are you going to do?”

“The other Lilac is stuck in a dimension that can only be accessed by this rock, and you can’t access it unless you use it.”

Brooke teleported into the lab. “Wait!”

Mirage squeezed the stone, and thought about her past. Before she knew it, she was falling from a few meters in the air, and into the water. She sank a little before inflating her buoyancy compensator, and rising back up to the surface. The lake was packed with people on boats who were all very confused about what had just happened. She looked around to get her bearings, recognizing the geography right away. This was indeed Sherwood Lake in Topeka, Kansas, which was where she was when she accidentally fell into another dimension while saving Mateo and Leona’s lives.

She looked over, and breathed a fake sigh of relief when she saw someone she recognized. It was Lilac. Her plan worked; no clone body, nor crazy time tech required. All she had needed to do was activate the stone again, and trigger a new point of egress. The problem was, if these stones worked the way she understood them to, it was going to be rather difficult to get back to where they were. It should be the year 2036.

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Starstruck: Crystal Clear (Part IV)

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Over a half century into Phase Two of the project, Ex-10 messaged the crew of the Iman Vellani with the additional plans for the antistar containment rings. When Mirage asked him why the plans were changed, he told her that they weren’t. He just chose not to divulge everything all at once. She asked whether there was anything else that he wasn’t telling them yet, but he refused to respond. What a dick. Hopefully, any further changes wouldn’t disrupt their progress, or force them to alter course. Fortunately, they had not yet begun Phase Three, which involved actually building the structures using the materials that they were procuring from the nearby star systems. Even if they had, it would have probably been okay. The new plans called for an extra layer of material on the inside of the rings.

“Hypercubic crystal lattice?” Belahkay asked. “Forgive me for my ignorance, but what the hell is that?”

“No,” Mirage assured him, “you’re not the only ignorant one. I’ve never heard of it either. I know what a hypercube is, and I know what a crystal lattice is, but a hypercubic crystal lattice? Sharice, what does it say?”

“It’s a special material. Incredibly rare. They’ve only found it in two planets.”

“In two planets?” Brooke echoed.

“It’s evidently only located deep in the core,” Sharice replied. “It doesn’t form naturally anywhere else. We’ll have to rip the whole thing apart to get to it.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard. What exactly is it?”

“It doesn’t say,” Sharice explained, “but if it’s what it sounds like, my guess is that it manipulates time in some way? Maybe it protects it from future or past tampering? Damn, I don’t know. There’s barely anything in this document.”

“Well, how far away is the nearest world that has this stuff?”

“Uhh, 707 light years,” Sharice answered.

“It will take us exactly one year to get there with the reframe engine. How convenient. Belahkay, how are the automators?”

It was his job to manage all of the machines that were spread throughout this sector of the galaxy. He synthesized error reports, and coordinated arrangements to get the project back on track. “It’s been four months since the last issue, and that one wasn’t that big of a deal, we just lost a chunk of one planet. It wouldn’t have slowed down the project.”

“You can keep an eye on the progress on the ride. We’ll all go to this magical fourth-dimensional planet, and see what we see.”

A year later, the Vellani was in orbit over the planet, which they discovered to be inhabited. Ubiquitous plant life was visible with the naked eye. There were billions of bodies of water, and evidence of seasonal shifts. The surface gravity was decently suitable for human life. Oh yeah, and there was human life there. A small settlement was found, and a closer look proved that people were currently living there. Something had happened somewhat recently, though. Most of the buildings had been severely damaged in an explosion. A few of the structures, which had been built farther from the apparent epicenter, managed to stay whole, including a perimeter fence. There was also one more thing that they saw when they zoomed in.

“It’s a time mirror,” Mirage noted.

“People are coming out of it, one by one,” Belahkay noticed.

“They’re armed,” Brooke pointed out. “They’re either about to attack the settlement, or protect it from someone else’s attack.”

“Can they see us? Do they think that we’re a threat?” Sharice asked, worried.

“I see no sign of space observation technology. We’re shielded by the daylight.”

Belahkay pointed at the screen. “Oh, look at that.”

A figure was running out of the ruins of the bombed out settlement. It ran straight through the gate of the fence, and towards the mirror. Just before it could make it through, the mirror exploded. “Whoa!” they all shouted in unison. The explosion sent everyone flying in all directions, no one farther from it than the person who had been running towards it. They were thrown all the way across the field, over the fence, across the interior field, and then back into the ruins of the settlement. There was no way that person survived that.

“Oh my God, what did we just witness?” Sharice asked, horrified.

Determined, Mirage stepped over to the corner, opened a secret compartment, and revealed a cache of weapons.

“Those have been here the whole time?” Brooke scolded.

“Yes, mom. Here’s yours.” She tried to hand her one of the rifles.

“No. Never again.”

Mirage tried to hand it to Sharice, who also refused, as did Belahkay. She growled. “If you don’t arm up, you’re not going down to the surface.”

“Stop us,” Brooke goaded. Then she disappeared.

Sharice looked at Mirage awkwardly, and then followed her mother. Belahkay stepped over and reached into the cache. He took out a handgun, and hid it inside his vest. “I got your back.”

They teleported down together, meeting the other two in the crowd of bodies near where the mirror once stood. They fanned out, and approached a body each. “Ex-088-GL0821,” Mirage called out.

“Ex-088-GL0403,” Sharice returned.

“Where I’m from,” Belahkay said, “this patch would be for the wearer’s name.”

“Yeah. I think it’s the same for them. These people belong to the Exin Empire, almost surely some kind of military force.”

“Ex-10 must be pretty important if he’s as low a number as he is, and these guys are named in nine figures,” Sharice decided.

“I imagine it’s far more complicated than just one through a billion,” Brooke guessed.

“I don’t have your fancy sensors. Are they all dead?” Belahkay asked.

“Yeah, they are,” Mirage confirmed. “No human lifesigns. So unless one of them is an alien, we should go into the ruins, and see if anyone there is still alive.”

They teleported away to find four people. The woman from the mirror explosion was lying on her back on the ground, just as they saw her. They thought that she had landed on the other side of a statue, but it was gone, and another woman was lying face down on top of her. She was completely naked. They were both breathing, but cut up from the glass that they shared, embedded in their skin. Two children were huddled together nearby.

“Sharice, take the wounded up to the infirmary, and place them each in a medical pod. Then you can come back. I’ll keep an eye on them from here.”

Of all of them, Brooke was the softest. She cautiously went over to the children. “Hey. It’s okay. We’re not gonna hurt you. Are these your parents?”

The kids were six, maybe seven years old, but they didn’t seem too terribly scared. The boy shook his head. He gently elbowed the girl in the arm. She pulled something out of her pocket, and held it up. It was a rock.

“You want me to have this?” Brooke asked. She carefully stepped forward, and took it from the girl.

“My mom’s in there,” the boy said.

Brooke moved it around in her hand, and then reached back to hand it to Mirage.

“It’s a homestone.” Mirage bent over, and looked the boy in the eyes. “Did you use this to get here, or were you going to use it to go somewhere else?”

“She used it to get here,” the boy explained. He took a rock out of his own pocket. “I used this one. I came alone. She came with my mom.”

“Don’t mix them up,” Mirage advised. “Homestones are identical. We’re not even sure that it’s not just the same stone at different points in spacetime. If one of them contains his mom, we have to work with the right one.”

“It could contain his mom?” Brooke questioned. “How’s that?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never heard of it, but I believe him. If he says that the girl and her mother came together, then something must have happened to the mom.”

“She’s not her mother,” the boy corrected. “She’s my mother, but we’re not siblings. It’s just that we both first traveled through time at the same time.”

“I see,” Mirage said. “You sound older than you look.”

“It’s been several years for me,” the boy—or rather, the young man—explained. “She’s older than she looks too, but even when she was older, she looked young.

Mirage nodded, and turned to the other three. “The homestone takes you back to where you were when you first experienced nonlinear time. It reyoungifies you to the age that you were, but it doesn’t undo history. It potentially gives you a second chance at life, but whatever originally happened after that moment still took place in the timeline.” She sighed, and looked over the girl’s stone. “You can take passengers with you, but it’s not the safest way to travel. Again, I’ve never heard of someone getting stuck, but I can’t rule it out.” She turned back to the young man. “Can I take this to test it?”

He nodded.

“What are your names?” Brooke asked.

“I’m Aristotle. This is Niobe Schur.”

Niobe cupped her hands over Aristotle’s ear.

“She can talk,” he told the crew. “She just doesn’t like to meet new people. When she gets to know you, she’ll warm up to you.”

“Well, what did she say?” Belahkay asked him.

“She doesn’t go by a name anymore. She goes by a number. I’m trying to fix that.”

“So this planet is in the Exin Empire,” Mirage reasoned.

Aristotle’s eyes narrowed. “No. This belongs to the Extremusians. The Exins are just the ones who kidnapped us, and forced us to live in the Goldilocks Corridor.”

“My mistake,” Mirage said apologetically.

“The women you took up to your ship,” Aristotle went on. “One of them is First Chair Tinaya Leithe. She’s very important. I don’t know who the naked one is.”

“Aristotle! Niobe!” A third adult woman was running towards them from a path that went through the forest behind the settlement. “Oh my God!”

The crew stepped back instinctually to make themselves look less like a threat.

The woman hugged the children, and frowned at the crew, trying to stop crying. “I saw the patches. You’re Oaksent’s people.”

Mirage shook her head. “We’re not part of them. Well, to be fair, we work for them, but we had no idea they came here. We were not told that this was a populated planet. They asked us to procure a rare component for something we’re building for them due to a debt that must be paid.”

“Another weapon of theirs, no doubt,” the woman spit.

Mirage sighed. “It’s possible. It’s possible in the way that a car can be used as a weapon if the driver chooses that.”

“We mean you no harm,” Brooke added. “Your friends are healing on our ship.”

The woman wiped tears from her eyes, and looked at the young man. “I thought that they had taken you. I couldn’t find you. No more hide-and-seek. It’s too dangerous.”

“We were taken, mom,” Aristotle said to her sadly. “The Captain rescued us, but when she tried to take us back through the mirror, we didn’t end up on the Extremus.” He paused. “We’re from the future. He handed her his homestone.”

“You’re his mother?” Mirage asked.

“She’s my Past!Mother,” Aristotle explained. “My Future!Mother, from the other timeline, she is indeed in that stone. I can feel her.”

The mother stood up straight, and composed herself. “My name is Lilac. Can you get my alternate self out of there?”

“I can try,” Mirage answered. “ I promise nothing, but I have cloning tech in the Vellani. Your DNA would do us a lot of good in that department if your alt has lost her original substrate.”

Lilac pulled her sleeves up. “Take however much blood you need.”

They all teleported up to the ship in orbit. While Belahkay monitored the other women’s progress in the medical pods, Mirage started to take readings from the homestone. They needed to find out if a consciousness really was trapped in there, and whether it was intact. Sharice took her own mother aside for a private conversation. “It’s clear to me that we can’t take this hypercubic lattice stuff out of the core of this world. The only way to extract it is to destroy the whole thing.”

“I know,” Brooke agreed. “I just accessed the updated records. The Extremus launched from Gatewood, and is moving at maximum reframe. It’s literally impossible for us to ever catch up to it. I think they had a time mirror on board, and were using that to travel back and forth through a portal. If these people don’t want to leave with us, they’ll have to stay here. This is their world, we have no right to it. More to the point, the Exins don’t have any right.”

“What do we do?”

“We protect them, at all costs. If Mirage’s explanation of how the homestones work is right, those military guys connected to this mirror from a different point in time. That’s probably what blew it up; they got the wires crossed. If we can stop them from ever attempting to override the original connection—”

“We can prevent the attack on the settlement,” Sharice guessed.

“That woman,” Brooke began, “the...First Chair. She knows something. She was running for that mirror for a reason. We need to talk to her when she wakes up.”

“She’s awake,” Belahkay announced.

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