Microstory 2428: Escape Dome

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I’m a little bit biased here, because I’m obsessed with escape rooms. I’m old enough to remember when that was a fitting name for them, because they were mostly only one room. Some of them had different sections, but you didn’t unlock a door, go through it, and start on an entirely different set of puzzles. I watched as they grew and grew, both in popularity, and in scope. Escape rooms became escape buildings, which became escape districts, which have now become escape cities. I always loved puzzles, even as a kid, so this became my thing. I didn’t have a whole lot of friends, and that was on me, but I still wanted to do this. I remember regularly going in alone, and them having to group me with strangers. They were sometimes annoyed by this, but for the most part, they were welcoming, and they quickly realized either way that I was more of an asset than a burden, even though we didn’t have a preexisting rapport. Eventually, I wasn’t going in alone anymore. I finally found my community. The most passionate of us started a little club. The reason I’m giving you all this background is that every single member of this club is still alive, and still together. I don’t know how rare that is, to have eleven friends stay connected after all this time. None of us wanted to move to another planet without the others. No one’s marriages and families broke us apart—though, the rest of us would have understood if they had, and been happy for them. The point is that we’ve been doing escape zones for nearly 500 years, so we know what we’re talking about. I doubt we managed to try them all, but we certainly did the majority. It’s our passion, and I don’t think that’s going away anytime soon. Escape Dome is the largest adventure we’ve ever played. Of course, it’s not just one game that goes across the entire area, but each game is still immersive and impressive. I think I saw that they did have the traditional kinds, which were just the one little room each, and we might do that when three or four of us have an hour to kill. I should clarify, we started out with a club of eleven people, but over time, it’s nearly doubled, thanks to those marriages and families. Not everyone wants to be a part of it, which is fine, but the cool thing about some of these games under the dome is that all twenty-four members can play at the same time. We’ve never been able to do that before, even with the escape districts. Twenty has always been the absolute max until now. Our first two adventures were extraordinary. We kind of thought we had seen everything, but even beyond the larger scale, there were puzzles that blew our mind. The great thing about this concept is that anyone can have fun with it. I’ve heard people say, “oh, I’m just not a puzzle person” but we put them in one of those rooms, and they have a blast. Don’t count yourself out until you give it a try. If you end up not enjoying it at all, hey, you don’t have to do it again. Some of the adventures are designed to potentially take weeks, so don’t start with one of those. Be smart about your choice—which the staff will gladly help you make—and I’m sure you won’t regret it.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 11, 2493

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A web of technicolors appeared out of nowhere, and spat Team Matic out onto the floor. They rolled away from each other like marbles from a jar. It was not only the six of them, though. Romana was with them, as was some guy. “Who are you?” Leona demanded to know, prepared to fight, while Mateo was making sure that his daughter was okay.

The stranger stood up and cracked his neck. He held his arms out in front of him with his elbows bent a little. As he was clearing his throat, he adjusted his nanites, looking down at himself, making sure they were all in working order. It was only then that he acknowledged their presence, though not out of surprise. “My name is Amal,” he answered stoically.

“What are you doing here, Amal?” Leona questioned, almost as if she didn’t believe him.

“What year is it?” he posed.

She kept one eye on him while she consulted her watch. She tapped on it a few times with her fingernail. “No idea, this is broken.”

“Use your other one,” Amal suggested cryptically.

“My other what?” Leona asked, confused, and even more defensive now.

“Uh,” Ramses began, massaging his forehead. “I replicated that watch’s powers. We all have one now.” He receded the wrist of his emergent suit to show his bare skin. The time and date appeared on it, glowing a bright green. “Nanobotic tattoos, tied directly into the timestream.”

Leona looked at her own. Then removed her broken watch. “July 11, 2493. We jumped early from last year.”

“No, you went on a detour,” Amal contended. “You’ve been gone longer than you realize.”

“Where were we?” Marie asked, stepping forward. “When were we?”

“I cannot answer that,” Amal replied. “I honestly do not know.” Agent Smith. That was who he sounded like; Agent Smith from the Matrix franchise. “Our minds have been erased to protect the future. I could not even tell you why I’m here. We have not yet met.”

“It seems that we have,” Angela reasoned.

“Quite,” Amal agreed. “Something must have gone wrong after you were summoned to the future. I should not have come through with you.”

“Summoned by who?” Olimpia pressed.

“That I could answer, but I won’t. But I can promise that you trust them.” He laughed through his nose.

“It was us,” Leona figured. “We summoned ourselves.”

“I never said that.” Amal was worried, which probably meant that she was right.

“How do we proceed?” Mateo asked him. “What are we gonna do with you?”

“What you’re going to do is be patient,” Amal answered. “Until we meet again.” There was no stopping him. He slammed his fists together, crouched down, and stuck his knees between his elbows. Technicolors overwhelmed him, and he was gone.

“Hmm,” Ramses said. He looked around at his lab. “The sensors picked that up. Now I bet they know how to make a miniature slingdrive.”

“Careful, Rambo,” Leona said to him. “That’s what we call bootstrapping.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

“Roma,” Mateo said to his little girl. “How did you end up with us?”

“We were going on a mission,” Romana answered. “I stepped into my Dubra pod, just as we always do, so our temporal signatures don’t interfere with the operation of the slingdrive on the Vellani Ambassador. Then I woke up here.”

“You must have been summoned too. It could take years before we find out where we went, and even then, it may only be from an outsider’s perspective. Then again, I once closed my own loop, and my otherwise paradoxical memories of it finally came flooding back into my brain, like they were just waiting for me.”

Romana shook her head. “I’ve been gone for almost a year. I have to go report in.”

“I understand.” He gave her a hug, and then let her go.

A swarm of dark particles spun her around, and into oblivion.

Olimpia was playing with her new suit. She opened some sort of flap on the top of her wrists, which she pointed around the room with a menacing look on her face. “I have guns. I’m gonna shoot sum’im.”

“Those are not guns,” Ramses said with a laugh. “There are no onboard weapons.” He lifted his own flaps, then switched on the flashlight on his right arm.

“Oh,” Olimpia said, figuring out how to turn her own flashlight on, and looking down the barrel of it. She then did the same with her left arm. “What’s this other one?”

“Sensor suite,” Ramses explained as he was walking towards her, “for more detailed information about your environment. It has a medical array too. You should read up on it. He tapped the center of her chest, just under her neck, with three of his fingers. A holographic computer interface was projected from two emitters on her shoulders. “You should peruse the manual.”

“Why is it called the EmergentSuit?” she asked.

“Because the nanites emerge from the implants in your body,” Ramses said.

Olimpia read a little more of the text, which was probably pretty dry and uninteresting. “Boring, I’ll wait for the movie.”

He put an arm around her shoulders, and used his other hand to control her interface. A video popped up. “Hi. I’m a virtual avatar, presenting in the form of my creator, Ramses Abdulrashid. Let me show you how your new EmergentSuit works!” He muted it. “What a fox,” Real!Ramses mused.

Mateo huffed. “You did not tell me that was there. I had to read pages and pages of that thing.”

“If that’s true, you would have seen the part where it tells you that there’s an interactive alternative.”

Mateo mocked Ramses playfully with his pursed lips as he bobbled his head. He pulled up his own interface, and searched the manual for the exact terms. “Interactive alternative; no results.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot to put that blurb in your version of the manual, and you never received the updated edition. You do have the video, though.”

“Thanks, that’s great,” Mateo said sarcastically.

“This all sounds fun,” Leona said, “but we need to go check in with Hrockas.”

“Wait,” Angela interrupted. “Is that it? We were sent to the future, and brought back to our pattern, and we’re just gonna move on as if that’s normal and fine? We’re not gonna try to get our memories back, or investigate how this could have possibly happened, or anything? Someone summoned us, Ramses, using technology that you have apparently not invented yet. Doesn’t that worry you?”

Ramses was about to answer, but Leona stepped in, starting with, “I—” She took one moment to gather her thoughts. “Before you died, did you believe in God?”

“Excuse me?”

“It was very common at the time, to believe in a higher power.”

“Well, yeah, I did. I was raised to be a Christian,” Angela admitted.

“Did you ever question God?”

“All the time,” Angela replied, like she was winning the argument. My dad was a slaveowner.

“And did you ever get anything out of that? Did God ever...come down, and apologize?  Did he give you answers?”

Angela was not happy, but Marie was even more upset. “The people who took us are not gods.”

“By our standards,” Leona reasoned, “they may as well be. We know nothing. We don’t know for sure that it was Future!Us, though that is the assumption. We can’t go preoccupying ourselves with every little thing that happens to us. We’ll go crazy. The truth will reveal itself in time. Until then, Hrockas needs to know that we’re back. Because we returned later than expected, and we made a commitment to build him a relay network.”

“The relay network is done.” They had left Ramses’ lab, and were now in Hrockas’ office. “Well, it’s not done, but it’s on its way, and will be ready in time for the grand opening in seven years.”

“Team Kadiar agreed to help you with it?”

He shook his head. “No need. Some friends stepped up. They didn’t want us clogging up their own quantum terminals, but they agreed to build us dedicated machines. Most of them will be stored in the corner somewhere on their Lagrange-one stations.”

“I thought you couldn’t do that,” Leona reminded him. “I thought they were unwilling to help.”

“No, the core government was unwilling to help. But the neighborhood representatives finally secured a win for key legislation that gave them more latitude. They’re free to build whatever technology they want—as long as it follows certain criteria, like not being a weapon—and they don’t have to share it with any other world. This places each machine squarely in the local leadership’s control, and I’ve managed to negotiate with all of them, even some core worlds. So we’re good. Thanks for the offer.”

“This sounds risky,” Leona pointed out. “They could revoke the charter whenever they want, right?”

“Absolutely,” Hrockas admitted. “Maintaining strong diplomatic relations will be of the utmost importance to the continuity of my operation. That’s why I’ve hired a Minister of Foreign Affairs to be in charge of all the little ambassadors that I’ll need to liaise with our relay partners.”

“Could we meet this person?”

“She’s not here yet,” Hrockas explained. “I believe that she’s leaving in a few weeks, then it will take her a couple of months to arrive.”

“A couple months?” Ramses questioned. “The only way you can get out here in a couple months is if you use a reframe engine. I mean, that’s if you’re not just quantum casting which is within an hour.”

“Yeah, she has a reframe engine,” Hrockas said. “I guess Earth has done enough work to develop them on their own.”

“I guess,” Leona agreed. “I hope we did the right thing, letting them have that technology.” It had actually been a pretty long time since the Edge Meeting where they granted certain knowledge to certain parties in the main sequence regarding the manipulation of time. It was Hokusai Gimura’s responsibility to actually coordinate with Teagarden and Earth, and Leona didn’t exist most of the time, so she lost track of how that process was faring. It didn’t sound like it was going to be as easy as beaming them the specifications, and walking away. Still, it felt rushed, probably because to the team, this whole thing only started a few months ago. “Well, I’m glad you’re doing okay.”

“Yep,” Hrockas agreed. “So, if you wanted to move on to your next project, maybe fight the bad guy in that Goldilocks Corridor, I think that would be fine.”

“Yeah, we might do that,” Leona said with a nod.

The rest of the team was there, but besides Mateo and Ramses, they were all kind of busy reading up on their new suits. It was awkward, so Leona just disappeared. Mateo broke the others out of their trances, and pulled them out of the office too. “Hey. How are you feeling?” he asked his wife. They were in the replica of Kansas City now, standing in the parking lot where all time travelers were funneled to when they showed up in the Third Rail.

“We never...finish anything,” she mused. “We don’t accomplish our goals. We’re always pulled in some other direction, and all we can do is hope that we’ve done enough for whoever we had to leave behind. I got used to that. I got used to knowing that I did my best, but this new crowd needed me now, and it was time to refocus.” She finally looked up at him. “But do we even need to go back to the Corridor? Niobe’s army is taking the offensive. I even think fighters from Verdemus finally showed up in the Anatol Klugman. Team Kadiar is rescuing defectors left and right. I don’t know what’s going on with the Sixth Key, but the delegates were doing fine the last we saw them.”

Mateo nodded. “We’re aimless again, aren’t we? And we don’t do well when we’re aimless. Ramses needs to invent, you need to lead, the Waltons need to counsel.”

“And the two of us need to be dum-dums,” Olimpia added.

Mateo nodded again. “And the two of us need to be dum-dums,” he echoed.

“Dum-dums with cool flashlights,” Olimpia corrected. She shined it on the asphalt, thought it was daytime under this dome, so the light may as well have been off.

“We may be aimless,” Marie said in a soft voice, “but we’re not useless. We’ll find our place to be. Ramses just needs to get us there.”

“I can finish the mini-slingdrives,” Ramses confirmed, “but someone will need to decide where we go.”

“Are you sure?” Angela smiled. “We’ve used it before without plotting a destination. You could even say that we were aimless.”

Leona smiled too.

“Orders sir,” Ramses requested from the Captain.

Leona took a breath to center herself. “Engineer, build me my new engine. Counselors, find out what you can about this Minister of Foreign Affairs. I don’t want to leave our friends hanging if there’s only one last thing to do. Mister Matic, go see if you can spend some time with your daughters before we leave. And Miss Sangster?”

“Yeah...?”

“I believe we owe each other date.”

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Microstory 2067: Something Less Monogamous

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Another one answered my ad in the paper, even though I only bought space on the one day. I left my new email address, though, so strangers could be emailing me over the course of the next few centuries if they wanted. Since I’m not a real person, I’ve not built up enough history to be getting many other emails, so I’m not worried about being inundated, or anything. It’s not like it will clog up my inbox, and make it harder to keep up with interesting news articles. Since, ya know, you don’t really have those here. Moving on, the woman I spoke to on the phone isn’t an alien, and doesn’t think she is. She’s just kind of an alien groupie. This was an apparent truth from the start, that she wants to meet me in person because of who I claim to be, but I kept talking to her, because what if I’m not the first? If she’s already done the work of finding people like me, I might as well nurture this relationship. I don’t want to lead her on, though. Cricket is in another universe right now—hopefully a very safe one, but cheating is cheating, and I am no cheater. The way I see it, if you’re committed to someone monogamously, and you want to connect with someone else, either turn your current partnership into something less monogamous, or leave them. It’s not fair that you get to have whatever you want at anyone else’s expense. Your happiness is not all that matters. I don’t want to be with anyone but him, in any capacity, and even if I did, I couldn’t do anything about it, because I’m not capable of having a conversation with him about it first. And anyway, I don’t know who this woman has met, or if they’re the real deal. Will stay in contact with her just the same, just like with the guy before.

Microstory 2015: New Mexico

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Papa met a lot of cool new friends when he went to college in Utah. He was still friends with some of them even as an adult. A few of them were at his funeral. One summer, after he was finished with his junior year at Promontory University, some of these friends decided that they wanted to go hiking and camping. Normally in the summer, papa would go home to stay with his parents, but he wanted to go on the trip too. They had done trips like this before, but always somewhere close. A mountain called Wheeler Peak would have taken them twelve hours to drive, but none of them wanted to be on the road for that long, so they bought train tickets instead. The journey was actually longer, because trains have to make a lot of stops, but it was much more comfortable. It was a popular destination for college kids, so a train went pretty close to both places. They still had to take a car to get to the mountain. They didn’t want to spend money on a rental, so they hitchhiked, which means they asked for a ride from a stranger. Dad says never to do that, because it’s dangerous, but papa and his friends were okay. They hiked for several miles up the mountain, and it was really hard, but they enjoyed it. I’ve seen the pictures that he took while he was there. They’re very beautiful. Once they were finished with the hike, they went back to the train station, and took different trains, because they needed to go to different places. Papa did end up going back home to Idaho until it was time for his senior year.

Microstory 1959: My Funny Valentine

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Leonard Miazga: *lowered voice* Hey, can I talk to you for a minute? In private?

Valentine Duval: Sure, what’s up, dude?

Leonard: Here, over here. So, Reese introduced me earlier, but I should reintroduce myself. I’m Leonard Miazga, but you can just call me Leonard. Do you go by Valentine? Or do you have, like, a hacker name that you prefer?

Valentine: It’s Micro, but Val is fine IRL.

Leonard: Okay, Val. I just wanted to ask—and I don’t wanna be presumptuous. I mean, I don’t know what you were going for. Maybe it was random. Maybe it wasn’t anything. I don’t know. Maybe I just completely misread what you did, and actually nothing happened at all. So I’ll sound like an idiot when I finally get this out. Though I suppose, since it’s taken me so long to get through it, I already do sound like an idiot.

Val: Is this about the wink?

Leonard: Yes, it is. You winked at me, right? I wasn’t imagining that.

Val: You weren’t imagining it. Where I’m from, winking is a way to convey emotional information without words, and—if done correctly—without others knowing that any information is being shared in the first place, let alone what it is.

Leonard: Okay, but...why would we be sharing information? We couldn’t possibly have met before today. Let’s just say that I’m...

Val: A traveler? Yeah, Leonard, I know where you’re from.

Leonard: Because you’re a hacker.

Val: Yes, but there are other signs. You sort of...smell a certain way.

Leonard: Oh.

Val: Not a literal smell. The way you hold yourself, and the way you walk. I knew that you were from another universe. I realized that you were cognizant of this fact after observing you myself for all of five seconds. You act like a stranger in a strange place.

Leonard: So you were just winking because you know my secret. Though, it’s not really a secret. It just hasn’t come up yet. I suppose we’ll have to tell the others sometime.

Val: Yeah. And also I’m like you. I thought you realized that.

Leonard: What? You are? Are you from my world?

Val: *shaking her head* No, I’m from Salmonverse.

Leonard: Oh, I’ve heard of that. I can only specifically recall hearing about two universes, and that’s one of them. How long have you been here?

Val: I got here a couple years ago.

Leonard: How? Did you always know you were on the wrong Earth?

Val: Westfall, just like you. I’m aware of it because I already knew about time travel and stuff, so my mind couldn’t be rewired to account for the strange differences, of which there are many. Did you know they don’t even have a word for toads?

Leonard: *doesn’t care* Huh?

Val: They call them creepfrogs. That’s so stupid. They’re a different species!

Leonard: Val, I don’t care about any of that. I want to know about you. You seem very unsurprised by any of this, and I have a million questions, starting with—

Val: How to get home? You can’t. This is your life now. Y’all best get used to it.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 20, 2398

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Andile didn’t want to say much else after dropping that bomb on them about the alternate version of Leona. She said that it wasn’t her place to explain. The other Leona’s flight would come in the next day, and they could ask their questions then. So that’s what they did. They went back to the condo to fill in the rest of the team, and waited. The others wanted to come too, but the other Leona apparently didn’t know them at all, so it would probably just be overwhelming. The next morning Alt!Leona answered the door, not surprised, but yes, unnerved at the sight.

“Thank you for coming again,” Andile says once they’re seated.

“Thank you for having us,” Mateo says.

It becomes evident that Alt!Leona wants to talk first, but she needs them to be patient with her. Lips closed, almost pursed, she stares at the space between Mateo and her alternate. “I trust you’re doing well?” she asks Mateo.

“Yes, I’m fine,” Mateo answers.

“It’s nice to know there’s at least one Mateo out there who didn’t die.”

“Actually, he did die,” Mateo’s wife, Leona clarifies. “A few times.”

Now Alt!Leona purses her lips fully. “Well, at least he came back.”

“Leona, what happened?” Leona asks her self.

“I’m going to tell you my story,” Alt!Leona begins, assuming nothing about what you’ve been through. I may tell you things that you already know, and you’re just going to have to accept that, and be patient. I also don’t want any commentary about how things played out for you, or anything like that.”

“Understood,” Leona says.

Alt!Leona begins. “When I was nearing my sixteenth birthday, a friend of mine suggested I try alcohol, because drinking alcohol is the type of thing that normal teenagers do. So I did, and it went poorly. It made me sick—not enough to have to get my stomach pumped, but I had to go to urgent care just the same. I was sitting across from a man in the waiting area, trying to retch into a bag, when I ended up getting some on him. Long story short, I figured out who he was, and went to his house to apologize. That’s when everything changed. I learned that he was a time traveler, but not in control of his own life. I don’t know who was in control, if anyone, but I, admittedly, fell in love. He and his situation were fascinating, and I couldn’t just let that go.

“I probably would have become a film student in college if not for him. Instead, I pursued a physics degree. I wanted to understand what was going on with him. We met another; a teleporter, and she led us to believe that there were others. There was this one other guy too, but we weren’t really sure what his deal was. Anyway, I learned that an organ transplant might allow a normal person to take on the temporal characteristics of a traveler. Lucky for me, I was suffering from some kidney problems, which I might have been able to deal with, but I didn’t want to, so I started to not take very good care of myself. I needed a kidney transplant, and as luck would have it, Mateo was a match.

“Obviously, this process normally takes a long time, but we couldn’t wait for the bureaucracy. Mateo only existed one day out of the year. Through my connections, I was able to find a surgeon who was willing to perform the surgeries under unusual circumstances. Let’s just say that he had lost his license for a similar infraction years prior. This was the biggest mistake of my life, and seeing a version of Mateo sitting here hasn’t helped, like I hoped it would after Andile called to tell me that he was alive. The surgery went bad, and Mateo died. After a year of mourning, I discovered that his death didn’t prevent me from becoming like him. I guess it just delayed it. I only made one jump before I was approached by a stranger with an offer.

“She told me that it was her job to rescue people from the timeline. She said that I was in a different reality completely, and I could stay here, and not be on my pattern anymore. I only did it to be with Mateo, so that seemed like a good deal. Before she disappeared, she reintroduced me to Andile, and I never saw her again, so I never got the chance to ask her why it didn’t work. Instead of freeing me of my pattern, I just ended up taking Andile with me. I didn’t mean to. It’s not like I gave her my kidney too. At most, I touched her during a hug. Maybe you have an explanation for it.”

Leona and Mateo nod reverently, as they have been during the story.

“Do you?” Alt!Leona asks.

“Oh, sorry, we didn’t want to comment.”

“It was more about not being interrupted,” Alt!Leona straightens out.

It was hard for Leona to hear that story. She has met other versions of people before; even of herself, but this one is a lot different. This Leona didn’t spend hardly any time with Mateo, and never built a team. She and Andile have pretty much been alone this whole time. That changes a person. “Everything happened to me just as it did for you, until the surgery. A time traveling doctor did it for us, probably following what went wrong in your reality. Someone must have wanted things to play out differently, so they altered history. Normally, you would cease to exist as the result of that, but when you’re dealing with parallel realities, that all gets more complicated. Who was this stranger who told you this would free you of the pattern?”

“Her name was Olaya,” Alt!Leona answers. “I don’t know if it was a first or last name, but she didn’t give me any other.”

“Never heard of her,” Mateo says.

“Nerakali did say that there were other teams, but I don’t remember if Jupiter did. That was back during his era,” Leona says.

“So, do you know the answer?” Alt!Leona asks again.

Leona shakes her head. “Olaya should have been right. This place doesn’t have time travel, or at least not much of it. We don’t think it ever did. My theory is that that’s why it was created in the first place.”

“You did eventually lose it, though,” Mateo says. “When did that happen?”

“It was about three months ago,” Alt!Leona replies.

“Three months and twelve days.”

Mateo and Leona exchange a look. “That’s when we arrived. We did this to you.”

“You helped us,” Andile corrects. “We don’t want to time travel. We just want to stay put. I mean, we could do without the shady government people chasing us all over the country, but that could have happened either way. People crave power.”

“Do they know about you?” Leona asks. “If anyone would recognize you, then they probably know that there are two of us. And they know that there are two Angelas, so all in all, they know too much.”

“I don’t think they know about me,” Alt!Leona tells her.

“They only caught me,” Andile says apologetically.

“And you’re one of a kind.” Alt!Leona reaches over to take Andile by the hand.

“Look,” Leona begins, “I know you don’t want to have anything to do with this stuff, so we’re prepared to leave, and never mention you again, but I don’t feel like that’s enough. If you want to be somewhere safe, it’s not in this city. I don’t know where it is, though. I don’t know how to help you.”

“We don’t need your help,” Alt!Leona claims, “but we may be able to help you.”

“How might you do that?”

“I heard them talking while I was being transported to the fishbowl,” Andile says. “They’re looking for someone more valuable than any of us. And I know where he is.”

Microstory 1882: Someone Their Own Size

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I was a wanderer in my youth. I settled down when I got old, and the traveler life was no longer viable. I don’t regret the way I was, and I don’t regret ending it when I did. I don’t care that I can’t afford to be in a nice facility. It’s got a bed, and they feed me twice a day, which is more than I can say for some periods of my past. There was a time when I could go anywhere in the world with no problem. Hiking, hitchhiking, sneaking onto trains; everything was easier before. I suppose I started doing it out of necessity. I had a normal upbringing, and a regular job, but then I lost that job, and couldn’t get a new one, so I sold most of my possessions just to get by, including my car. Once I realized there was nothing left for me there, I skipped town, and began to make my way to other places. Sometimes I found a good job that could have lasted, and sometimes not. If it was the former, I would inevitably quit, and move on anyway. You see, I get bored quite easily. The scenery, the people, the restaurants; I like them when they’re new, but I inevitably eventually lose interest. One time I managed to scrounge up enough cash to get on a boat to the New World. It’s not like I had a dream to make a better life overseas. I just figured things would be different enough, and thus more interesting to me. They weren’t really; things are pretty much the same no matter where you go. But I never went back, because I felt like I was done with Europe by then. I spent a lot of time in the rural parts, which is where our story really begins. My life up to this particular point, and all the time after that, was generic and boring, but I finally got an adventure. I just wish it hadn’t been so bloody. Still, at least I have something to say for myself. I saved lives.

I was wandering through the woods one early afternoon, hoping to find a spot to make camp, when I started to hear a ruckus beyond the trees. It wasn’t my business, but I’ve always been curious—disappointed, ultimately, but curious until I learn the truth. So I kept walking, and found myself overlooking a fighting ring down the hill. It was a huge operation, lookin’ so strange since it was in the middle of nowhere. Three Ring Circus is what they called it, unoriginal as that was. A third of the audience was watching a cock fight, the other third a dog fight, and the final third a human fight. Some people acted like they could smell me—it was weird—they turned around, and gave me the stink eye. A couple of rednecks started to walk up towards me. It was clear that I was unwelcome there. I don’t know how they figured out who was excited for the violence, and who didn’t approve, but they seemed to know right away that I did not like what I was seeing. The humans, I didn’t care about. They made their choices, as far as I was concerned, but the animals were innocent, and were never given any options. I. Went. Crazy. I had been in a number of fights myself over the years. Some places just don’t like strangers, even if you mean them no harm. I was never formally trained, though, so I was kind of surprised at how much I had picked up from experience. I took down the men they sent after me, and then I went after everybody else. Some were afraid of getting caught by the authorities, so they bugged out, but others tried to defend their territory. You might not believe it, but I took on at least twenty men all on my own, including the human fighters whose entire reason for being was hurting others. Once it was over, and I left, having freed the poor creatures, I’m sure the people who ran the show just started back up again, but I still felt satisfied by giving them a taste of their own medicine.

Microstory 1787: Flying Fish

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Sleep and I have always had a love-hate relationship. I love it, but it resists me every single night. I was an adult before I learned that normal people fall asleep within twenty minutes. When my health teacher told us that, I wanted to punch him in the face, and knock him out. Then I wanted him to wake up, and punch me in the face so I would know what it feels like to not lie awake in bed for literally two hours. Over the years, I’ve tried some things to alleviate the problem: meditation, melatonin, stronger pills that put me, and the morning drivers around me, at terrible risk. Some of it has helped a little, but nothing has helped a lot. I would get six hours on a really good night, and I was proud of myself for anything over five. Now that I’m older, I’ve decided to prioritize my time better. Instead of staying up late, and waking up just before it’s time to go to work, I figured I may as well go to bed early, and have more me-time in the mornings. If it’s early enough, it’s still dark, so there’s no glare on my TV. That’s what’s really helped, waking up before sun, instead of fighting for every ounce of rest in those precious final moments. Now I lie awake for an hour, but since I give myself more time overall, I end up with seven hours, and it probably doesn’t get any better than that. I even try to avoid this thing called social jetlag, which means sleeping different hours on certain nights, which for most is due to not having to work on the weekends. Last night was different. It was a Friday, and I was in the middle of a good TV binge, so I decided it would be okay to go to bed at 23:00. That’s 11:00 PM for you people who can’t count past 12. It turned out to be a bad idea...for a bizarre reason. Had I gone to sleep at my new normal time, I wouldn’t have been awake to hear the man outside my window.

At first, I think it must be an innocuous noise. The purr of my refrigerator, the buzz of the street lights, the revving of a distant car. It isn’t so distant, and it isn’t so innocuous. It sounds like someone mimicking the sound of a motor with their mouth, and it only gets worse when he starts talking. “Flying fish,” he says, “flying fish”. Over and over and over again, “flying fish. Yeah, baby, flying fish.” Fuck, what does he want with me? I’m about to die, I’m about to die. What do I do? Don’t turn on the lights, then he’ll see that you’re here. Look out the window. No, not that one, it’s too close. I can’t see anything. What about the window in the study? Still nothing. Can you still hear him? “Flying fish.” Call mom, she’ll know what to do. No, bring the dog in first, and put her in her cage.  Then call mom. Shit, it’s late, they go to bed earlier than I do. Call 911, she says, that’s what it’s there for. Yes, it qualifies an emergency, call them now. Dispatch doesn’t understand my problem fully, but she dispatches a fleet anyway. Firetruck first on the scene. I look back out the window in the study. The firefighter is bent at the hip, hand on the shoulder of a man. He’s sitting in the street, up against the curb. He’s wobbly, and incoherent. He must be drunk. She’s being gentle and patient with him. Ambulance, police cruiser, that red pickup truck the fire station boss drives, another police cruiser. It’s okay, Daisy, go back to sleep. Chew on your cactus if you’re nervous. They load him up faster than I would have thought. I’ve seen car accidents in real life; been in a couple myself. They usually move slower than movies make it seem. They close the ambulance doors, and clear the street. The quiet returns, and it’s like they were never even here. Then a fish flies past my window, followed by another, and another. He wasn’t lying.

Microstory 1592: Literally Can’t Get Out of Bed

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Prompt

I fell asleep in my own bed last night, and I’ve woken up in a stranger’s.

Botner

As I blink and slowly adjust my eyes to the ceiling of the attic room of my new home, I see the bed I’ve been sleeping in isn’t just the bed of my past, but the bed of my future. And I can see that in the corner of the room I’ve been sleeping on for the last two days. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, you dirty rat?”

I open my eyes and recognize the voice coming from my left. I look to the floor, then quickly look up. Shocked, I sit up straight, my jaw gaping. Standing at the edge of the bed is a man in a blood-stained white suit, his black shoes stomping the wood floors of the room, his hands stuffed in his pockets. His black hair hung loose, partially covering his dark eyes, his rough and scuffed shoes seemingly out of place on the soft floors. “I thought you were my husband,” I try to scream, but my mouth has gone dry. My head is dizzy. I can barely see the man standing over me. “Who are you?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead he stares back. I jump to my feet, realizing the...

Conclusion

...immense danger that I’m in. I’m not supposed to be here. He knows it, I know it, and now he knows I know it, and now he knows I’m going to have to do everything I can to get the hell out of here. But first, I must break free. My ankles are chained to the bed post, and since I’m no Houdini, my only hope is to talk my way out of it. I don’t know what this guy wants with me—I never wronged him, as far as I remember, and that’s going to make it much harder. He might not want an apology, but he sure as hell will be pissed off if I can’t acknowledge his pain. Think, I think to myself. Think about the last time you saw him, and try to remember what went down. It was my dog. She pooped on his lawn, and even though I cleaned it up right away, he wasn’t happy. This can’t be what caused him to abduct me, though, is it? That’s an insane overreaction, even if I hadn’t picked it up. No, it has to be something else. That was probably just the proverbial back-breaking straw. What happened before? What is he so upset about? Oh, you know what, maybe he knows. Maybe he’s finally figured out that I’m the one who called the cops on him for having a huge party with strangers in the middle of a pandemic. Yeah, that’s probably it.

Microstory 1591: Everybody Knows

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Prompt

I walk into the warehouse and discover that everyone I have ever known is here...

Botner

...okay, not everyone. All those children that died are haunting me...some are still alive but more haunting than others. I am screaming again, running around and kicking and screaming like a wild animal. But no matter what I do, I am only making myself even more nervous. Every time I scream, I can feel the sharp pains in my body...my bones...my muscles. Every time I try to touch anyone, I only end up hurting myself. “MOOOOMMM!” I scream, standing in front of an old woman wearing a black shirt with blood stains all over it. I run into the woman and sit down on the ground next to her, too scared to cry. I stare at the woman for a long time. I don’t know what is going on, but it looks like she doesn’t want me to scream anymore. “Mommy!” I scream.

“Listen to me. You will find out what you are. But it won’t be easy...I know this,” the woman said. I look at her as she stands up and starts walking away.

“I don’t want to know what I am, mommy...” I say quietly. The woman stops and looks back.

Conclusion

“I am not your mommy.”

She leaves the warehouse, but there are still plenty of people here with me, and they all frighten me. I never realized how comforting I found it to leave all the people I’ve met behind. My elementary school bully, my middle school girlfriend, and the famous second baseman who once signed my baseball, are all in the middle of what must be an uncomfortable conversation. My high school science teacher, and the doctor who delivered me are talking too. I don’t know that I would say I ever really met my doctor, but who knows what kind of weird robot aliens from the future are in control of this, or what their rules are. I never thought I would have to see these people again, and I never wanted to, even those I liked. It’s just weird, they’re supposed to stay in the past. Everyone is pretty much ignoring me. I’m not invisible, but they don’t seem all that interested in asking questions of the man who ties them all together. They don’t want to know why me, or what they’re supposed to be doing, or what’s going to happen. Finally, a young woman walks up to me. I babysat her once a few years ago because there was an emergency at the hospital where both her parents worked, and it was too short notice to get a real sitter. “So,” she begins, “how do you know Mary?”

“Mary? Mary who?” I don’t know a Mary.

“Mary, silly,” she repeats. “Everybody knows Mary. She’s why we’re all here.”

Mary? I look around again, and realize that that’s not my bully, or my girlfriend, or my science teacher. That could be my doctor, for all I know, but I think I only saw his profile picture once. That’s definitely the second baseman, but he probably wouldn’t remember me. And this girl here? I don’t recognize her at all, I was mistaken. I was mistaken about all of these people. They’re all strangers, and none of them is here for me, I have nothing to do with it. A woman appears up on the balcony, and looks over the crowd. She’s shocked, and as frightened of everyone as I was when I first showed up. Oh, that’s Mary. Yeah, I guess I do know her. We met at a bar once, and had a nice conversation, but she rejected my advances. I guess I never bothered to catch her name.

Microstory 1008: Bertha

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Hi, my name is Bertha, and I don’t want to be here right now. Oh, sorry about that, let me try again. Hi, I’m Bertha, and I don’t want to be here. Yeah, still sorry, but I just can’t bring myself to say something that doesn’t ring true. I have a huge problem with the media. Your original job was to report the news; the facts. You’re not meant to investigate crimes, or inject your own flare. Tell me what happened, and that’s it. Look, I can’t tell you whether they solved the crime, or not, because like you, that’s not my job. I’m not saying to never question the system, but at some point, you have to resign yourself to the fact that we may never know the truth. And yeah, that sucks for the person imprisoned for something they didn’t do, but I have to believe that such a thing happens very rarely. Our justice branch was designed to lay everything out, so that nothing is missing. If you have all the facts, and all the witness testimonies, and all the parts of something, you should be able to put it all together into a full story. You want my reaction to Viola’s murder? You want to know what I think? I think that it’s a terrible tragedy, and also that it’s none of my business. I didn’t know Viola, I don’t know Maud, and I don’t know what happened. I can only tell you about myself. I was born in Coaltown, but my family moved here when I was three years old, so Blast City is all I’ve ever known. I’m a fair to middling student, with mostly Bs, sometimes a couple Cs, and one A. I love history, and always excel in the topic. I don’t care if we’re talking about the 1880s, or prehistoric times. Hell, I can get down with some dinosaurs, if you talk about them from an historical standpoint, rather than a biological one. Maybe that’s why I’m so cold with people, because they exist right now. I can’t relate to someone if they haven’t lived their whole lives, and died. Wow, I guess I never realized this about myself. Does that make me a bad person? Or rather, does that make me antisocial? Part of being human is connecting with others, so if I care most about strangers from the past, am I even human? I suppose it’s better than only caring about fictional characters. Yes, I saw your list, so I know you’ll be talking to Ira next. He’s a huge nerd, who I believe reads a book a day. Now, that is someone who can’t relate to others. He’ll have lots of thoughts on the murder, and they’ll all be stupid.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 24, 2109

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Mateo had his face buried in his hands. Literally everyone on the island was standing around in a jagged semicircle.

“It’s not that we don’t believe you,” Leona said. “We just want to understand. What were these buildings?”

“There were several of them,” Mateo tried to explain. Our mansion from Kansas City was here, there was a movie theatre-slash-video store. Téa, you were responsible for a clothing shop where salmon could jump in briefly and get what they needed to blend into their new surroundings. And Samsonite, you...you were a teacher. The Historian and The Archivist moved their operations over here. My God, why doesn’t anyone remember?” Probably more than any other emotion right now, Mateo was feeling furious. He didn’t imagine these last couple weeks. The buildings were real. Baudin was real.

“And one man built all of it? By himself?” Mateo’s once-father, Mario was likely exhibiting a healthy level of skepticism, but it just made Mateo more angry. This was coupled with the fact that Mario never did find a way to remember Mateo from an alternate timeline.

“Yes!” he screamed. “Because he has superpowers! Like so many of us do. I don’t know how he did it. He cut off his leg and jammed the bone into the dirt, and then a building would show up. Maybe he was just creating some sort of temporal bubble, I don’t know!”

“Okay, honey,” his once-mother, Aura tried to say. “You don’t have to yell. We can figure this out.” She didn’t remember Mateo as her son either, so hearing from her wasn’t all that comforting.

“Gilbert, Gilbert.” Mateo thought of an idea. “You have to remember him. You were him once. You possessed his body and you helped Meliora construct The Sanctuary.”

“What’s that?” Gilbert asked.

“It’s a special place that nearly all time travelers can’t enter. It was designed to protect humans who were in danger from people like us.”

They just looked at him.

“Oh, come on, you have to remember Sanctuary!”

“There is no Sanctuary.”

“Good, Gilbert. That’s good. You remember movies. So it’s not like you people can’t fucking remember anything!”

They were clearly not super happy about his use of foul language, but they could all tell that voicing their concerns would not be the best use of their time.

“Darko, you remember The Cleanser at least, right? He’s your brother...kind of.”

“We all do,” Horace confirmed. “Gilly killed him a few years back.”

“And The Warrior killed his sister, Nerakali, right?” Mateo asked. Whoa, that was weird. He remembered that happening, but could also remember experiencing a night without that happening. Maybe his friends’ weren’t the only ones whose memories were being messed with. He was being affected too. What else was he missing? Was this even real life? Does he even exist?

“Yes,” someone responded. He couldn’t even tell who it was since he was deep in thought.

So some things were the same, but others weren’t. “Saga, Vearden.” He stood up and approached the door-walkers. “You remember building the Colosseum, right? I mean, the replica. I experienced three tribulations there. Or was it two? I’m not sure if Glaston’s pocket dimension was part of that.”

“We do remember,” Vearden said. “Was this Baudin guy part of that?”

“No,” Mateo said. “I’m just trying to get a baseline.” He turned around and started pacing. “Xearea, how did we meet?”

“You forced your way into my house and protected me from killers.”

“Why were the killers there?”

“Apparently I piss them off in the future. I never really did learn why.”

“How long have you been on the island?”

She briefly shook her head, not understanding how he didn’t already know. “Well, I’ve been here ever since. That was, what, ten years ago?”

“What are you talking about?” Mateo questioned. “You’re the Savior! You haven’t been on the island, you’ve been teleporting around, saving people’s lives!”

“Mateo,” Leona spoke up again. “She’s been here. We’ve all been here. This is our island. You came her first in 2014. The rest of us followed over the course of the next few decades. Occasionally, they let us leave. Xearea was the last.”

Mateo closed his eyes, trying and failing to find patience. “So we’ve never been to Antarctica? Or Australia? Or Mars, or Iceland, or 1945!”

“You remember us going to 1945?” Leona asked, eyes wide.

“Well, no, I guess only Gilbert and I were there. But that’s what started everything in this reality. I killed Hitler—”

That got some eye rolls. Killing Hitler was not something you just throw out there casually and expect people to trust.

“I can see that you don’t believe me, at least not about that part.”

“Now, hold on,” Aura began, “that’s not fair. We are really tryi—”

“Zip it!” Mateo interrupted. “I can see now that someone somewhere somehow created yet another reality. This is not what happened for me. We’ve not been stranded on an island like...like...”

“Like LOST?” Saga suggested.

“Yes, like LOST,” Mateo agreed. He took a deep breath and composed himself. He was indeed finding his calm once more. If this was another reality, that meant it could be reversed. He didn’t know how, or who would help him, but he knew it could be done. “Darko, if we’re lost on this island, then we had to come with things from Earth. Like our clothes. Can’t you thread someone’s shirt, or something, and take us home.”

“My powers of object threading were turned off the moment I arrived,” Darko explained. “I’m stuck here too.”

So that was out. How convenient for whomever made this all happen. “Paige?” Mateo asked simply.

“I don’t have any pictures. My powers might still work, but there’s nowhere for me to go.”

Strike two.

“Saga and Vearden, these huts have doors.”

“They do,” Vearden agreed. “So what?”

“Have you tried walking through one and ending up somewhere else?”

“Why would that work?”

So apparently, Saga and Vearden weren’t door-walkers in this reality. They must have just been apported to Tribulation Island, and had no memory of being anywhere else. When they built the Colosseum, they did so here, so that explained why some things happened the way they did before, but not others.

Mateo sat back down on his log and scanned the crowd. Darko and Paige were their only hope. Everyone else was a salmon, and had no control over their patterns. Not that it mattered all that much. At best, they could get them back to Earth, but what he needed were answers. He needed to find a way to his reality. Or did he? Was this best? Who was to say say this reality was any worse than the other ones he’d seen? Maybe the only answer to this problem was to stop thinking of it as a problem. There were still a few things he needed to know, though, either way. “Who is Kivi Bristol?”

“You don’t remember me, father?” Kivi asked.

“I just met you yesterday,” Mateo replied.

“You’ve known me for years. I’ve been here the whole time too. I’m your daughter.”

He sighed again. “Same same, but different. Very well.”

She was holding back tears, but did a pretty good job of hiding it. Presumably she had all these memories of getting to know her father, but he had no idea. Was this what it was like to be his parents? Was this karmic retribution for killing Hitler and doing this to them? No, karma wasn’t powerful enough for this, not in the world of choosing ones. It had to be them. But who? Who was angry enough for that? With time travel, it could be anyone, even someone he had not yet met, like with Xearea’s attackers.

Everyone looked around awkwardly, not knowing what to say. It wasn’t until then that he realized that there was one face he didn’t recognize. Was this it? Was this the man who was doing all this? The man caught his eye and made a subtle motion for them to talk alone.

“Okay. Everyone is really stressed out right now, and I can see that the things I’m saying are upsetting everyone. Maybe I’m remembering an alternate reality, maybe I came from one. Maybe someone gave me false memories, or maybe it was just a dream. Regardless of the truth, I’m tired, and I feel like I need to be alone. Please...carry on with whatever you were doing on an island with nothing to do.”

They were hesitant, but everyone did eventually wander off, not quite sure how to deal with his problem. The stranger started heading for the treeline, looking back once more to make sure Mateo understood, but Leona was still there.

“It’s okay,” Mateo said to her. “I really am fine. I just need some time.”

“I’ve seen what these people can do, my love. When I told you that I believed you, I wasn’t just patronizing you. I don’t doubt for one goddamn second that something has been changed, and that the person who did it wants only you to remember. You can tell me anything. I promise that I’m on your side.”

“I can’t tell you how much of a relief it is to hear that from you, Leona.”

“Were I you,” she said.

“Were I you.” As she went for the beach, Mateo went off to catch up with the stranger, grabbing a pointy stick on a whim.

“You got my message,” the man said once he was sure no one else was around.

“You did this. You did this to me! To them! So what do you want from me? How have I slighted you that I don’t even remember, or haven’t even experienced?”

“It’s nothing like that. I’m not the one who screwed with your memories, but I know who did.”

“Oh, do you now? And how might that be? How come you and I are the only ones? I don’t even know you,” he spit.

“You don’t know me, but I know you. My name is Lincoln Rutherford.”

“What did you say?”

“I’m Lincoln. I too hail from an alternate reality. I was Horace Reaver’s security guard, back when he and Ulinthra were working together. My adopted daughter, Meliora accidently sent me back along with him.”

“They say you helped me. They say you stopped Reaver from hurting me many times, and that you protected my family too.”

“I did what I could. I wish I could have done more.”

“Did you ask people not to mention you to me.”

“I did, yes.”

“Why?”

“It seemed appropriate at the time.”

“That was Reality One,” Mateo tried to work out, “so to speak. You ended up in Reality Two, but then I went back to 1945 and created Reality Three, erasing everyone’s memories of Two. How come it is that you remember it?”

“I remember all realities. It’s my chosen one power. I see everything...except when it comes to spawn. That’s why I don’t always understand you, because Leona is in the way.”

“How convenient.”

“I suppose there’s no real way to convince you that what I say is true. I recognize that you’ve been tricked by both Zeferino, and Gilbert.”

“This isn’t about them. This is about me and you, baby. If you can tell me what happened, I may just start to trust you. Who’s responsible for this?

“It’s Arcadia.”

Of course.

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