Microstory 2050: Minnesota

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Now, some of you may say that my papa never made it to all fifty states. He died in Oklahoma before he ever got the chance to see Minnesota. But my family and I don’t feel the same way that you do. After he died, we had a funeral service for him in Florida. My grandma has a hard time moving around. She doesn’t have ALS, but she’s old, and that’s just what happens. My aunt, uncle, and cousins all flew down to be there too. All of papa’s friends from college, the Navy, and his co-workers from the submarine company were there. Papa met a lot of people as he was going to every state. I didn’t talk a whole lot about that, but he didn’t just step over the borders, and take photos. He became involved in people’s lives, and they remembered him later. People heard of his accomplishment, and because of my dad’s work with the news, it made it into national news. Everyone knew that he had died, and they knew when the funeral was. They even had to move the service to a bigger room, because there wasn’t enough space in the one we had booked. When it was all over, we took papa’s cremains up to Minnesota. When you die, you might be buried in the ground, but they also may turn your body into ashes. It may be scary, but a lot of people want this to happen to them, and that’s what my papa wanted. We spread his ashes in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. Papa loved forests, so we thought that it was a good place to do it. Don’t worry, we asked for permission first. Some of the ashes are still in a little urn on our mantel. We had the special map framed, and it’s hanging on the wall right above it. The rest of the ashes will stay in Minnesota forever. I think that’s fitting. My papa went to all fifty states in the United States of America. I think that’s pretty amazing. Thank you for watching and listening to my presentation about my papa.

Microstory 2029: Michigan

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Papa’s bosses must have heard me from the past, lol, because they ended up taking one of their submarines on a trip. They took a ferry to get to that island in Connecticut, but they didn’t do it like that when they all went to Michigan. They worked in Chicago, which is on the southern part of Lake Michigan. I don’t know if it was a new sub, or what, but in 2011, they all crammed into it, and took it all the way up north, to the other side of the giant lake. They ended up in a city in Michigan called Mackinaw City. It was the first time anyone had done anything like that. That wasn’t the point of the trip, though. They actually wanted to get to the city. Well, they were outside of the city. It was for something called a corporate retreat. It was summertime, so once they landed at the docks, they took cars into the woods. That’s where they played games, and learned how to work with each other. At that point, the company was over ten years old. A lot of people wanted to work there, so there were new workers who weren’t there before. Most of the people at the retreat didn’t know each other very well. A company built the camp to help other companies’ teams work together better. My papa was in charge of it for his team, but he also participated in the games and exercises. When it was over, most of them just flew back home, but papa got to go back in the submarine again. He stopped at other cities in Michigan along the way, because he had always wanted to see them. Then he took it back to the submarine base, and went home.

Microstory 2027: Connecticut

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A couple years after the business trip that my papa took to Georgia, he had to go on another one. There were probably more in between, but they weren’t to states that he hadn’t been to before. This time he had to go to Connecticut. It wasn’t for testing a new submarine this time, though. This time, he went to the annual New England Submarine and Submersible Conference and Symposium. Wow, that was long, wasn’t it? The one that my papa worked for wasn’t the only company that designed and built submarines. There were a bunch of others, and they liked to come together to talk about the things that they do. I didn’t hear my papa talk about this trip, but my dad remembers him saying that parts of it were interesting, but parts of it were boring. They would hold the conference every year all over the USA, but he wouldn’t normally go, because he was too busy with the actual work. It didn’t actually take place on the mainland in Connecticut. It was on Fishers Island, which is a part of Connecticut. It’s about two miles away over the ocean, so he took a ferry to get there. It’s funny to me, I would have said they should take submarines instead, but maybe they just didn’t think of that.

Microstory 2026: Georgia

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I don’t know much about it, but even though my papa quit the Navy, and started working for a private company, he wasn’t totally done with the military. The company had things called government contracts, which meant they were building things for the military to use. The Navy still needed submarines, and they wanted the kind that my papa was designing. One of these special subs had a special ability. It could be used in different kinds of water. It could survive really deep water, and also really shallow water without getting caught on the ground below. I think what they were thinking was to have something that could go just about anywhere on Earth without ever having to be moved on land. Of course there are plenty of bodies of water that aren’t connected, but even the ones that are connected are hard to get to unless the ship is small enough. Submarines are apparently even more difficult to make this work. Back in 2007, papa’s brand new submarine was done, and it worked well in Lake Michigan, but they didn’t know if it could handle the deep ocean yet. He took a business trip down to Savannah, Georgia so the company could test it in a different environment. This was all pretty secretive, so we’re not allowed to know exactly what the submarine was like, but when he told me and my dad about it, he didn’t seem upset, so we guessed that it went well. It’s possible that a bunch of subs that my papa built are being used by the military right now, protecting our country, and helping people all over the world. That’s a pretty cool thought, don’t you agree?

Microstory 2023: Kansas

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In September of 2004, my papa had worked for the private submarine company for more than two years, and he had not taken any vacation. His boss, who was his friend, was worried about him, so he asked him to take the time off, or he would lose it. But papa didn’t like to just sit around, doing nothing. He wanted to be accomplishing something. One of the hobbies that he picked up was bicycling. Whenever he had the time, he liked to ride his bike from his house to his sister’s place, which was about 20 miles away. It took him a couple of hours, and it was a workout, and he really enjoyed it. He decided to take his longest ride yet. Instead of just going a few towns over, he wanted to go a few states over. He plotted a route that went all the way from Chicago to Kansas City. What a lot of people don’t know is that there are two Kansas Cities. One is in Missouri and the other is in Kansas, of course. They’re right next to each other, and the one in Missouri is actually larger. He had already been to Missouri, because of his friends who lived in Independence, which is considered part of the whole Kansas City area. The distance from where he started was over 630 miles, and it took him two weeks to ride the entire way! He rode about 45 miles per day, which is pretty impressive, I must say. He couldn’t really explain to me why he chose to go there. He just wanted to. Once he made it to Kansas City, Kansas, he spent one night there. He donated his bicycle to a charity for kids. Then he took a plane back home. I think this was a pretty cool thing that he did, and I’m so proud of him. Maybe one day, I’ll do something like it, but probably not to Kansas City, since it’s 1,700 miles from here!

Microstory 2022: Illinois

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After he was done with the Navy, papa needed a place to live. He thought about just staying in Arkansas, or even going all the way over to Montana. He said it would have been a full circle, since that’s where he first grew up. He narrowed his decision down to two choices, which was to move back closer to his parents in Idaho, or to Indiana, where his sister lived with her family. The two of them had grown even closer over the last few years, and he loved his nephews. They had just had their second son, so he decided to choose Indiana. He needed a job, though. Most people who need jobs have to go out and look for them. These days, they will go on the internet, and search for anyone who is hiring, but this was back in 2002, so people weren’t doing that very much yet. And anyway, my papa didn’t need to look himself. Companies were actually calling him to offer him a job. He had a really good education, and his time in the military made bosses know that he would be loyal and trustworthy. He ended up reconnecting with a guy who he knew who once worked for the Coast Guard. They also work on the water, but have different jobs. This former Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander had started his own business that wanted to build new kinds of submarines, and he would be testing them in Lake Michigan. My papa was perfect for the job, because that’s exactly what he learned in school, and in the Navy. He ended up living in Chicago on the Illinois side of the border, but he was still less than a half hour away from my Aunt Cooper. We’re still a Chicago family. I’ve gone there myself many times, even though I live in Massachusetts.

Microstory 2021: Tennessee

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Papa was only an active member of the Navy for four years. He thought about staying in, but ended up not. It’s all because of something he did as his required time was ending. He was still in the reserves after this, but he wasn’t working on the sub anymore. While he was trying to make a decision, friends of his from college called him up, and asked him if he wanted to work with them on a mission trip in Tennessee. They were Mormons, and they were doing it for their church, but that wasn’t going to be what the trip was about. There was an old folks home in a small town outside of Memphis. He was in Arkansas at the time, so he wasn’t very far away. That’s probably why they called him. He took a bus to the home, and got to work. The people who owned it didn’t have very much money, and they were having trouble keeping their residents comfortable. Don’t worry, they all always had their medicine and stuff, but there were other issues. They couldn’t afford plants, or nice paintings for the walls. The biggest issue was the courtyard, which is a space that is outside, but it has walls around it. Residents can go and sit down and enjoy being outside, but it wasn’t very pretty at this place. I don’t think my papa spent much time on that, though. He basically became a volunteer handyman. While the others were planting trees, he fixed things around the building, because he was an engineer. What he said was that this was an eye-opening experience. He wanted to spend more time doing things like that. Of course he was helping people when he was serving this country, but he decided that there were things that he should do outside of it. That’s what led him to leaving the Navy, as an active officer at least.

Microstory 2020: Indiana

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My Aunt Cooper has three children, who are all boys, and they’re my cousins. Her first was born in the year 2000. She was 29 years old, and she lived with her new husband in a city called Gary, Indiana. Even though it’s located in Indiana, it’s really close to the border with Illinois, so it’s considered part of Chicago, which is a really big city next to Lake Michigan. While my papa was in the Navy, he was busy with his work most of the time, but he didn’t have to spend all the time working. Officers get to take time off just like regular people, except unlike them who get vacations, people in the military take something called leave. Specifically, since he was in the Navy, he was on shore leave. He decided to fly up to Gary to spend some time with his sister, and their new baby. My cousin is 12 years older than me, but we’re really close. After my papa was done with his required service, he retired and moved to Chicago to be closer to his sister. And years later, when he decided to move to Massachusetts, they all did the same thing he did, and moved with him. They lived in separate houses, though. But I’m getting ahead of myself, because none of that has happened in the story yet. My cousin’s name is Nash Ruskin. His father’s name is Currian Ruskin, and I love him too. My other cousins’ names are Osmond and Thatcher, but they haven’t been born yet. My papa was only allowed to spend five days there, since two of them were spent traveling to and from Indiana, but he enjoyed it, and he got to go back a few times before moving closer anyway.

Microstory 2019: Arkansas

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It makes sense that papa lived in Texas, because it’s next to the ocean. He worked on a submarine, so Corpus Christi was the perfect location. That’s why it’s so weird that he was later moved by the Navy to Arkansas. Arkansas is what’s called a landlocked state, because it doesn’t border the ocean. Most of the states in the United States are like this. But that doesn’t mean there’s no water, of course. It has lakes, and the really long Mississippi River, which is between it and Mississippi. We don’t have much information, because like I said, the military has to be really secretive, but after papa died, my dad and I were looking through his things when we found something interesting. It was a photo of him and some of his Navy buddies when they were young. They were smiling in front of the river, and what looked like a boat behind them. Except that the boat wasn’t above the water very much. It actually looked like a submarine! The Mississippi River is pretty deep, but not really deep enough for a normal sub. Again, no one can tell us anything, so shh, be quiet, but we think that he was testing special technology. They might have come up with a submarine that can move in shallower waters. It would be interesting to know if they could get something like that to work. *winky face*

Microstory 2018: Texas

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After my papa was finished with his education at the Naval academy, he didn’t go back home. He was stationed in Corpus Christi, Texas. He couldn’t tell me exactly what he did while he was there, because the military keeps all of that secret, so this is going to be another really short slide. He was able to say that he lived there for only a year before he was moved somewhere else, which he said was unusual in the Navy. I don’t think that he was always on a submarine. I think that maybe he spent a lot of time carrying out missions on dry land. I even think they sometimes sent him out of the country, but he hadn’t met his husband yet, so he didn’t have to lie to anyone about it, since his parents still lived in Idaho anyway.

Microstory 2017: Rhode Island

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After my papa was finished with college, instead of going out to get a job, he decided to attend a place called Watch Hill Naval Academy. He had to take more classes in order to learn how to be an officer in the Navy and work in a submarine. From the records that my dad found, papa first took a 3 month course to teach him what it’s like to be a military officer. After that, he spent another 6 months learning about nuclear power, which sounds really scary and cool. Then after that, he spent another 6 months using what he learned working at an actual nuclear power plant. Finally, after all that, he got on a sub to learn to operate it with a crew of other officers. Submarines are really dangerous, and hard to use. That’s why he had to spend so much time learning these skills, because if someone messes up on a submarine, it could mean everyone on it dying all at once. Unlike the way it is on a ship, if something goes wrong in a sub, you can’t jump off and swim away. Not only can you not breathe underwater, but the water is really heavy, and it hurts for it to be on top of you when you go deeper and deeper. My papa was really smart, and he also cared about people, which is why he wanted to use his engineering degree to protect this country, and make the world a better place. I’m so proud of him, and I wish I had known all of this about him before. The military is a noble and difficult profession. Probably no one in our class will join the military, but if it turns out to be true, it will only probably be one of us, according to the math.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 26, 2398

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Bhulan bolted as soon as the coast was clear. Leona and Ramses hoped that she would stick around to answer more questions, which they were prepared to ask gradually, instead of in the form of an interrogation, but she wasn’t into it. This is why Leona chose not to tell her anything about the seed of her plan to retrieve Mateo. She is probably on her way to her little secretive cabal to share information. That’s fine, as long as they don’t go anywhere near Lebanon. That is where Leona’s plan begins.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you?” Ramses asks. They’re parked on the far side of Danica Lake, waiting for the sun to go down more.

“The fewer the better,” Leona replies with a shake of her head. “Standard transportation rules, you can only take two people with you.”

He nods.

“Besides, I’m sure you have to get back to the lab. I know you have a thousand things on the agenda.”

“Not really, now that Curtis is gone. I have no idea where he’s getting his temporal energy, or why The Officiant was able to just swoop in and disappear.”

“Then just rest,” Leona orders affectionately. “It’s been a hard...” Her first thought is to say that it’s been a hard week, but that doesn’t seem like enough, so she starts thinking about the whole month, but that’s not enough either. It’s been difficult since they first got here, but not just that. There’s only one reasonable way to put this. “...since however long we’ve known each other.”

He nods again. “Come on, Lys.”

“Be careful,” Alyssa says to Leona before she turns back towards the road. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.”

“I don’t blame you for a thing,” Leona tells her honestly.

Once the two of them have gone, Leona climbs back into the Bridgette. She knocks on the bridge steps. “They’re gone.”

Marie opens the hatch, and crawls out. “I’m kind of surprised that he didn’t come here to check on his engine, or something.”

Leona shrugs. “The teleporter wasn’t necessary. Mateo is four and a half billion years in the past, there’s not exactly a sense of urgency.” She removes the floor plans from her bag, and unrolls them on one of the seats. They’re crude drawings based on what they were able to gather while they were down there for a brief time, but not official, and absolutely not to scale.

“Regular paper; old school,” Marie muses.

“Computers can be hacked. I’ll burn these pages.” She points at the plans as she’s discussing them. “Okay, the Bridgette reported still having trace amounts of chlorine in its systems, which most likely means that Mateo and Alyssa came up in one of the pools. Technically, two of them are big enough to hold this thing, but I’m guessing they appeared in the Olympic-size one. That’s right here. If we appear in the same one, Alyssa will probably have already been sent to the Mariana Trench. Well, the trench won’t exist yet, but...I don’t know how Danica does it, but the point is that the past version of our sub will be out of our way. If it is there, we’ll either be floating right next to it, or we’ll end up over here. It’s smaller, but still large enough to accommodate this whole thing. ”

“Okay, and where do I want to go?”

“Energy generation chamber. I think they called it The Cave. It’s made of partially naturally walling, because of how the vibrations work. Ramses explained this before. A long-ass tube runs from the Constant, all the way down near the core of the planet, and generates energy from the gravitational differences between the bottom of the tube and the top. Due to the magnetic field, if you’re in that room, the artificial intelligence that runs the facility won’t be able to detect your presence. If you can teleport there on the sly, and do it immediately upon our arrival in the past, I believe that the system will just think the temporal energy you use to do it is just residual energy from that arrival. Does that make sense?”

“You want the time travel to mask my jump to the energy room, and then you want me to hide in there so the AI can’t see me. Got it.”

“Right.”

“Then what do I do?”

Leona sighs. “Danica Matic is powerful because of how old she is, but back then, she won’t be that old. She’ll really just be another person, without access to all that knowledge. So what I want you to do is be your badass self...eventually.”

“Eventually, like how long?”

Leona removes a box of this reality’s version of meal bars from her bag. “These will last a normal person a month. Due to Ramses’ upgrades, you should be able to stretch them out to about a year. So all you have to do is hide in there somewhere for that long, and then you can come out after their guard is down.”

“See, that’s my problem,” Marie says. “You talked about how little power Danica will have back then, but Bhulan is a different story. Plus, we think Dalton was there...”

“I don’t think Dalton will be there yet,” Leona says. “I think he shows up later. His is not an important religion, suggesting marginal connection to the original ones.”

“Okay,” Marie says.

“I can’t promise that we’ll win, or that things will turn out okay. You might get caught immediately. But I don’t think you’re going to get hurt, or I wouldn’t send you in. These are not our enemies, they’re just...being dicks right now.”

“I understand. Let’s do it.”

“Okay.” Leona goes over to the controls, and commands the Bridgette to roll itself into the lake, and submerge. They start to float around, looking for signs of temporal energy, or anything of note. They don’t know exactly where to go, so they’re trying everything. Whatever portal first sent Mateo and Alyssa into the past was probably not placed there on purpose, making it a bug of sorts. It’s not just a bug, but something called a heisenbug, which is one that is unreliable to reproduce. The conditions that led to it happening the first time may no longer be present, or maybe it was just a one time thing, and the portal has since closed. It would require tons of temporal energy, and that may be all there was left.

A few hours later, they have scoured the whole bottom of the lake, and investigated every nook and cranny. Nothing has happened. No portals, no spikes in temporal energy. They don’t want to give up, so they decide to try again from the beginning. Leona commands the Bridgette to surface, and that’s when everything changes. They’re no longer in the lake, but the middle of outer space.

“Should I teleport now?” Marie asks as they’re staring at the stars below them.

“No, definitely not.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 20, 2398

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Everything worked perfectly yesterday. Leona injected herself with a boost of temporal energy, which allowed her to transport herself and Alyssa out of the Mariana Trench, and back to the lab. There, Ramses provided her with a can of Bermuda Triangle water, which she poured into the engine of the Bridgette. She then commanded the whole vessel to make a jump to the surface of the ocean, and from there, she was able to fly back to Kansas City. It was a circuitous way of getting the job done, but it worked, and now she’s here, so she can focus on getting her husband back yet again. After all of this, she was exhausted, and she knows her body and mind well enough to know their limits. She went to sleep, and didn’t wake up until the next morning.

Leona generates a map over the holotable. This facility was originally equipped with a 3D scanner that would allow medical professionals to examine a patient infected with whatever disease they’re studying. That scanner is still in the infirmary they set aside for themselves, and this one is the backup, which the government team who retrofitted this place modified to be a regular computer display. “Vulcan Point. It’s an island inside of a crater lake on an island in a lake on an island in the ocean. It’s not the only land mass that’s like this, but where we’re from, it’s the most famous. It’s very small, you could maybe build two houses next to each other there, or a single home of decent size. No one has, it’s completely undeveloped, and protected as a wildlife refuge.”

Curtis walks into the room. “Oh, hey, Leona, you’re awake. Can we talk?”

“I’m in the middle of something right now,” she replies.

“Just...do you remember me? Do you remember us?”

“Yes. You and a version of me were partners in more ways than one for three years before she met Horace Reaver in a very old timeline, but I try not to think too much about that reality, because I didn’t ask for those memories to be blended into my brain, and I feel very distant from them.”

“Okay.” Curtis seems to be in a very vulnerable place right now, but taking care of his mental state is not their priority at the moment. It’s certainly not hers.

“Anyway. These are the most recent satellite images of Vulcan Point Island. Like I said, it’s a refuge, so they don’t allow tours, which is why there’s no activity. No boats, no planes, no hiking trails. If we want to go there, we’ll have to teleport, and probably at night, because it may be monitored. If it’s as important as I believe, it may even have some high level deterrence, like Palmeria does.”

“Didn’t Alyssa say that we’re supposed to go there last, like after all the other errors have been found?” Ramses asks.

“That’s what Danica told her, which means that’s what she wants us to do, and I’m not inclined to follow her rules. If she truly wants me to do that, then she can show her face, and tell us in person.”

Ramses stares at her, and doesn’t speak, but Leona can tell that he has more.

“What, Ram?”

“In any movie, when the bad guy gives the good guy a choice of doing it the way he normally would, or going against his instincts, and following the bad guy’s directions, the good guy chooses his instincts, and it always backfires. Leona, it backfires every time. Danica may be expecting you to skip straight to Vulcan Point, knowing full well that one of the errors we find elsewhere would have been helpful in our pursuit of that final destination.”

“This isn’t a movie,” Leona reasons.

“Well, with the Superintendent in the mix, it kind of is. Our lives follow TV tropes, and the most genre savvy amongst us are the ones who do well. That’s why you keep winning, Leona, because you understand how your opponent thinks. Don’t forget that now. Don’t get emotional.”

Leona wants to get mad at Ramses for calling her emotional, like he’s a 1950s boss who can’t recognize the potential in his secretary, but that would be frustratingly ironic. She can’t give in. She just sighs, and looks away.

“I don’t remember saying what I said,” Alyssa begins to break the silence. “But you relayed it to me. I was clearly about to say that Vulcan Point was not going to lead us to Mateo, and I evidently had already said that he would never be coming back. Something must have convinced me of that.”

Leona nods, acknowledging Alyssa’s words, but not quite agreeing with them. “I think Vulcan Point leads us to Danica, and Danica knows when and where Mateo is.” She swipes the map away, and replaces it with the map that’s showing the last known location of the errors as plotted by the brain scanner on the AOC. “She is in this reality. She’s one of these dots. And if she doesn’t want us to go to Vulcan Point, then that’s exactly where we should go.”

“She may not be one of the dots,” Ramses points out. “Alyssa is not a dot, because my scanner doesn’t detect people with powers, just people who have a weird relationship with time, which she hasn’t really experienced yet.”

“Danica definitely has a weird relationship with time,” Leona argues. “She’s billions of years old.”

“I know, but Alyssa was the only person on the Bridgette, wasn’t she? This means that my scanner wasn’t picking up a real error. It just thought there was an error, because of the tech that was installed on the bridge. Surely Danica has a way to shield herself from being seen.”

“Then build another scanner,” Leona suggests. “Build one that detects temporal energy instead, or something like that.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” Ramses tells her. “That’s why I’ve been studying Curtis’ active abilities. It’s...not going well. So far,” he adds, not wanting to plunge her deeper into depression. What he doesn’t do is reiterate the fact that Danica may still be able to shield herself from that. Enemy or no, she’s one of the most powerful people they have faced, if only due to her age. No one else comes close, not even all the Prestons combined.

“I’m fine,” Curtis says, jumping back into the conversation. “I’ve rested enough, so I can get back into the machine.”

“Are you sure?” Ramses asks.

“Put me in, coach.”

Ramses starts running more tests on Curtis’ presumed unique ability to maintain his powers in this reality. Leona, meanwhile, goes back to her room. It was a quarantine cell, so there’s not much here, but it’s good enough. She doesn’t spend much time there before she gets an idea. She has combat experience, and she isn’t doing much good in the lab. They would all probably be better off if she left, and joined Marie out in the field.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 19, 2398

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Leona pulls the gear off of her head. “What do you mean, Mateo is never coming back? Where is he?”

Alyssa is discernibly frustrated that she had to say anything, but if she wants this to move along, she can’t ignore Leona’s questions completely. “He stayed in the past. Danica made him. She said it was too dangerous to erase his mind a second time.”

“How far in the past were you?” Leona presses.

“There’s no time for these questions,” Alyssa argues. “Every minute we spend down here is another day up top.”

Leona shakes her head, and starts to pace. “No point in time makes any sense for you two to randomly jump back to, however you did it. If you were with Danica, the only non-random point in time would be when The Constant was first built, which was four and a half billion years ago. But that can’t be right. If a minute here is a day of realtime, that means you have observed over three million years. Are you three million years old?”

“Time wasn’t always moving at this speed. It used to be a lot faster.” Alyssa is growing very impatient. “You weakened the bubble just by coming here, but we still aren’t matched with realtime.”

“You’re just trying to avoid telling me what happened with Danica in the past.”

“No. Danica wanted to avoid that, so she put my memory on a timebomb, and she’s forcing you to either learn her secrets, and lose a lot of time with the rest of the team, or cut your losses, and pop the bubble for good.”

“Argh!” Leona looks around for clues to overcome the dilemma, like she’s just in a simple escape room. If there’s a solution, she can’t see it, and if she really is losing time, that could cause a whole lot of problems for their friends. “How do I break the bubble?”

“That box on the console that doesn’t belong. It tears tiny holes in the bubble, and sends out the distress signal that is probably what brought you here. If you can program it to open a hole permanently, the bubble will burst. At least that’s what she said.”

Leona goes down to the bridge, and inspects the box that she’s talking about. The first thing she has to do is figure out how to open it. She slides her fingers around the edges and the corners, but she doesn’t feel a release. It’s not made of adamantium, though. She takes out her knife, and jams it into the seam, then she pries the top open to reveal the guts of the machine inside. She scans the inner workings a little before understanding what she needs to do. Flip this switch to temporarily cut power to the oscillator. Pull the wire, and reattach it to the contact permanently. Reset the power. Boom. Done.

They watch through the viewport as the translucent bubble slides away like rainfall on a windshield. “I have time to tell you one thing,” Alyssa begins. “What you’re looking for is on Vulcan Point, but you’ll want to go there last. And it’s gonna take you longer than you think. You’ll be really tired by the end of the maze. But before you get any ideas, that’s not where Ma...” She trails off, and goes to la-la land.

This is what happened to Mateo just before he lost his memories in Lebanon. The trigger for him is hypothesized to have been the filling of Danica Lake. In this case, it was the bursting of the time bubble. This seems to be different, however, because he passed out—and there she goes, right to the floor. Damn, Leona could have caught her.

Leona drags the sleeping Alyssa up to the main loft, and lays her on the bed. Then she returns to the bridge, and tries to make contact with the team on the AOC. They don’t respond, but she gets a time announcement back, informing her that it’s November 19, 2398 at 15:05. A minute later, the announcement says that it’s 15:06, which means that the bubble is indeed down, and the urgency is over, as long as her friends aren’t in any danger. She uses their ship as a relay point, and manages to get a hold of Ramses. He’s in the lab with Cheyenne and—funny enough—Curtis Duvall. She hasn’t seen that guy in forever. She tells Ramses that she’s still at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and just needs to figure out how to surface.

She postulates that there were two bubbles around the vessel. One altered the rate of time, and the other just protects The Bridgette from the pressure of the ocean above them. In submarine mode, it can dive deeper than its predecessor, The Olimpia, but not this deep. This is Constant magic at work, and she can’t be sure that it will persist through an attempt to rise back up to their safe depth. This little box was only designed to handle the time bubble, so the force field must be somewhere else. The most likely location is down in engineering. In the Olimpia, that could be found in the back. It was a tight space, but one could stand. Here, the ceiling is 75 centimeters up, making it a crawl space, and she has to get there by opening the steps that lead to the fuselage like a cellar door. Ramses sacrificed comfort for more beds to sleep passengers.

“Hello?” Leona can hear as she’s still working on the engine. She figured out right away that the pressure field will last as long as they don’t try to go anywhere. If they attempt to surface, it will collapse before they have enough time to go all the way up. It’s almost like it was designed that way. The issue is that she is this close to running out of power. A time bubble that can last billions of years would have taken enormous amounts of temporal energy. Not even the tanks on the Bridgette could store enough after being concentrated from immortality water. Yet it all runs out today; not a day too soon? Either Danica is trying to kill them in the most roundabout way, or there’s a way out of this that Leona hasn’t thought of.

Leona slides on her ass back towards the bridge. “I’m down here!”

Alyssa gets on her stomach, and sticks her head over the edge like a reverse prairie dog. “Is everything okay?”

“I don’t suppose you have any idea how we’re supposed to get out of here without the pressure of the ocean crushing us to death?”

“Where are we?”

“What is the last thing you remember?” Leona asks.

“Mateo and I were diving to the bottom of Danica Lake, just in case there were any clues left down there.”

“Were there?”

“I don’t remember.” She takes a beat. “I found this in my pocket when I woke up, though.”

Leona slides farther up to get a better look at what Alyssa is dangling in front of her. It’s an auto-injector. “This is probably temporal energy, and probably enough for me to teleport us to the surface, but not enough to get the whole craft up there.”

“So we have to leave it here?”

“No,” Leona says. “We’ll get more in the Bermuda Triangle, and then come right back. I’m not losing another home.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 15, 2398

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Marie gets out of the shower with a yawn. She looks around to make sure that no one saw it. Fortunately there’s no one else in the room, except for one person making some noise in the locker area. She wraps her towels around herself, and heads that direction, where her locker is anyway. Esmé is going through a lock-and-load montage. “Officer Sharrow, what are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m gearing up.”

“Gearing up for what, war?”

“We don’t know what we’re going into. I like to be prepared,” Esmé reasons.

“You’re our diplomat, did no one tell you that?”

Esmé sighs, annoyed. “You haven’t been with the division in a while. I don’t trust Nero anymore. He’s lost his edge.”

“Specialist Cleary has passed all of his recent evaluations. I asked him to tone down the weaponry. Perhaps that’s what you’re picking up on.”

She shakes her head. “It’s more than that. It’s before you came back. ”

“He was—forgive me—cleared by his superiors, and that’s good enough for me. It should be good enough for you too. Respect the chain of command.”

“Like I said, you weren’t there. He made a bad call in the field, almost got his partner killed. I don’t expect you to understand since you’ve obviously gone soft as well.”

That was out of line. She’s the team leader here, and the expert on their targets. Esmé can’t talk to her like that. She slams Esmé’s face against the locker in front of her, denting the metal. Esmé tries to elbow Marie back, but she sees this coming, and ducks. They continue to fight for the next minute, Esmé trying to pull all of her weapons back out, only to be disarmed immediately. Finally, Marie slams Esmé’s back against the bench, and knocks the wind out of her with a heavy blow to the chest. She puts her lips right next to Esmé’s ear as she’s trying to regain her breath. “You wanna go work as a disposable in the Military Authority, I’ll put in the transfer papers myself. You wanna do something that matters, you’ll follow my orders. This is my team, this is my mission, these are my people we’re approaching. Some of them are bad, but most of them are good, and if you go in there guns blazing, they will freak out! You may find yourself sitting next to your internal organs if one of them has the power to teleport them there, so don’t give them a reason. You’re the diplomat, so be diplomatic. Am I understood, Officer?” Disposable is an offensive term for an enlisted officer in any military branch, particularly someone who fights in the infantry.

Esmé continues to struggle with her breath, but she manages to eke out the affirmative. She stands up, and starts to gather the scattered weapons for armory return.

“I’ll see you in the briefing room.” Marie puts on her clothes, and then leaves shortly after Esmé.

Specialist Cleary is already waiting for them in there, as is Kivi, who Marie goes up to. “You’re not joining us, are you?”

“No, but sort of,” Kivi answers. She takes out a tablet that’s showing a map of the world, indicating all the last known location of the errors from Ramses’ global brain scanner. “Winona wants us to always be nearby, in case you need backup. I’ll be using my psychic power to find whoever it is my mind wants to find, but if you need me, we’ll be there. All you have to do is decide where we’re going first.”

Marie doesn’t look at the map. She’s unsure about all of this.

“I won’t be there to babysit you. It really is just a contingency. My team’s mandate is to find people. The orders don’t say anything about who to find. People go missing everywhere, so they figured we might as well work in the same city at the same time. We won’t even be sharing a safehouse.”

“Okay.” Marie looks down at the map. Any destination seems fine, they have little reason to choose one place over another. Someone appears to be in Giza, which makes sense, given what they know of the pyramids. There’s a whole diplomatic issue with Egypt, though, especially if they’re going to be shadowed by a tack team. One target appears to be on an island in the Philippines, while another is just in the middle of the water. Unless, is that...? It is, it’s the Mariana Trench. That makes sense as well, but unless they’re at or near the surface, it’s a no-go at the moment. They just recently asked for a submarine, and it didn’t work out so great for the people who loaned it to them, so asking again would seem heartless. It would probably be met with a belly laugh, and a resounding NO. Perhaps they could ask someone else.

Their investigator, Agent Doric Filipowski comes in. “Where are we headed? I may need to prep field assets.”

Marie looks up with a stalling smile. She quickly takes one more glance at the map, feeling the need to make a decision before it starts to look like she doesn’t know what she’s doing. “Paris. We’re going to Paris.”

“Mais bien sûr!” Doric declares. He pats Esmé playfully on the shoulder.

Esmé winces.

“Are you okay?” he asks her.

“It’s fine, I slept on it wrong,” Esmé answers. “J’ai toujours du mal à dormir avant une mission.”

Marie almost feels bad about their fight. Almost. Before she can dwell on it, her phone rings. She looks at it. “Holocall from the AOC.”

“Let’s go in here,” Kivi suggests, pointing to the executive office.

As Kivi is closing the door behind them, Marie magnetizes her device to the wall, and answers. She steps back to get in frame. “Leona, what’s going on?”

“Have you spoken with Mateo?” Leona asks.

“Not since he told me about Fairpoint’s transfer. Why, haven’t you?”

“You have the map of the errors handy?”

“Right here,” Kivi says, stepping forward.

“Zoom into the Mariana Trench, go back two days in the data timeline, then step through the history.”

“Okay.” Kivi does as she’s asked, letting Marie see the screen. They watch as the error appears, disappears, stays gone, and then reappears. The AOC passes over the spot every ninety minutes. Sometimes it detects this specific error, and sometimes it doesn’t.

“This error wasn’t there before,” Leona says after they step through history a few times, “back with that first scanner. It only showed up two days ago.”

“Is this a pattern?” Kivi questions. “It’s not every other orbital pass, or...”

Marie looks away to think. “It’s morse code. Every time the error appears means a dot and every time it’s gone means a dash.”

“What does it say?” Kivi asks.

“Were I you,” Leona replies. Mateo is the error.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 14, 2398

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Marie teleported down later yesterday to take over the brain scan error investigations. She’s going to prep her own small SD6 team. This isn’t a tactical team, like the one Kivi works with. One of them is an operative who specializes in combat and weaponry, yes, but another one is an agent, like Marie, with investigative experience. The third is an officer with diplomatic skills that she uses to turn foreigners and other civilians into government assets. They have all been read into the whole thing about time travel and alternate realities, so they’re ready to go on these missions. Alyssa doesn’t need to be involved in that anymore, and Mateo can’t, because whenever he approaches one of these people, they’re accidentally banished to another universe. While that’s happening, there is something that he always thought they should do, but weren’t able to.

The Olimpia was a submarine, but it had limited depth capabilities. The Bridgette has its own limits, but it can dive far deeper, which they’ll need in order to get to the bottom of Danica Lake. It’s located on the McIver farm outside of Lebanon, Kansas, and the McIver’s still technically own that land, but they still don’t need anyone seeing them go down there. As the saying goes, it’s always darkest before the dawn, and though that’s wholly inaccurate, that’s about when they arrive in the area. That way, they’ll still benefit from some of the daylight filtering through the water. There may be nothing down here, but then again, it may be everything,

This vehicle is far more automated than their last one as it’s equipped with the AI that Ramses rescued from The Constant before it was flooded and destroyed. Mateo is capable of operating it himself without the help of one of the team’s smart people. They dip into the water, and hang out near the surface for a little bit, shining the giant lights on the exterior around in case they see anything interesting right off the bat. They do. There are tons of fish down here. “Were you aware of people stocking this lake with life?” Mateo asks.

Alyssa shakes her head. “If they did, it would have been illegal. Not only would they have needed permission from the owner, which is me, but they would have had to negotiate a lot of bureaucratic red tape. A team of scientists would have needed to come out and test the area for pH, salinity, and other environmental variables. You can’t just randomly introduce a species to an ecosystem. Not enough time has passed for all of that, and we still have friends in the area. I’m sure I would have heard something.”

“Hmm. You seem to know a lot about how it works.”

“We considered doing it,” she explains. “We could have charged people to fish. I decided not to, because all this stuff was going on, and I didn’t want to deal with that red tape. I doubt it would have been worth it, especially since we would have either had to move back, or employ someone to manage the licenses.”

Mateo nods. “So this may be a clue. These fish here came from somewhere. I guess we don’t know where the water itself came from. I saw a movie where an isolated species of carnivorous fish were living in an underground lake until something broke, and they ended up in the regular lake, where they started eating people.”

“Sounds awful.”

“It was.” They continue to dive down as the sun rises. The natural light is never bright enough to do them much good, but it does make it seem less scary, being able to look up and see that they’re not trapped in a watery grave. They continue to see fish, though the population is not as dense down here, which they guess is typical of any body of water. They don’t see any other things, like frogs or octopodes. Mateo had a thought that they might, and that they were about to be transported to somewhere else in the world. These sorts of missions usually end up like that, but it doesn’t happen. No coral, no sharks. It’s looking like someone really did just drive up here with a tank of unauthorized fish, and dump them in here, for whatever reason.

Just as they’re reaching the limits of the sub’s capabilities, they also reach the lakebed. They expected to see the twisted ruins of the Constant, but there’s nothing. It’s just dirt and particulates, and a few adventurous fish. They go back up a little bit, because this water did have to come from somewhere, but they don’t see the pipes. “They must have been designed to disintegrate after use. The Constant must have been designed to do the same.”

“Surely the walls will have gotten wet at some point,” Alyssa reasons.

“Yeah, so water wouldn’t have caused them to fall apart. There must have been something in the water, like a...enzyme, or whatever, I don’t know.”

“Ha, are you just using fancy words you’ve heard before?”

“Pretty much.”

“Let’s call it an enzyme, which destroyed all evidence that there was once an underground complex down here. The question is where was that enzyme stored before it was needed, and why don’t we see evidence of that?”

Mateo sighs. “Neither of us is smart enough to make any real guesses in this matter. This was a nice idea, but we’re not qualified for this work.”

“Yeah.” Alyssa leans forward, and looks up through the viewscreen, where she sees nothing remarkable. “Let’s call it a day.”

“If we surface now, someone may see us.”

“I don’t really care anymore,” Alyssa decides. “This is still my land, I can do whatever I want with it.”

“Fair enough. Hey Constance, please surface.”

“Surfacing,” the computer responds.

They keep looking through the viewscreen as they go higher and higher. It’s going pretty fast, which Mateo would think would be dangerous, but Constance knows best. Something weird happens when they’re almost at the surface. The water becomes clearer, and light comes in through the glass. It almost looks like there’s a wall in front of them. An alarm starts going off outside, but it’s not too loud, and not too obnoxious. “Constance, report!”

“Status normal,” she replies simply. She doesn’t see anything wrong with this. The Bridgette breaks the surface, and starts to just float there. Now they can really see the walls. It looks like they’re in an Olympic-size pool.

“What happened?”

“I’m pretty sure we just went back in time.” Mateo reaches up to the emergency ceiling hatch, and pulls himself through it. He then helps Alyssa up as well.

They stand on the roof, and get a look around. It’s definitely a swimming pool, and it looks familiar. The double doors open, and Mateo’s cousin, Danica power walks in. She looks surprised to see him, but more annoyed than anything. “What the hell are you doing back here?” she questions.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 6, 2398

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Ramses tries to deliver The Bridgette back to the park in New York, but it seems that Winona has managed to lock him out of all systems. That’s impressive. These Third Railers are more resourceful than he thought. He’ll have to remember that moving forward. He doesn’t like being surprised, or the one beholden to someone else. He’s always meant to be in control, and once he clears the override feature that Winona installed on this craft, he’ll get back to that. For now, he has to do what she says. They need their starship back, and this is the way they’re getting it. It’s not the first time their plans didn’t go as planned. They always figure out a workaround to the obstacles.

Winona sets her tablet on the console, and lets it sync with the Bridgette. “Constance, please navigate us to these coordinates in realspace.”

“Prepare for liftoff,” the AI replies.

“I’m sorry I had to do that,” Winona says to Ramses. “I like Leona; I consider her one of my own. But I had to make a call. We will get her up into space, I promise you.”

“You can’t promise that,” Ramses says, “but I can. I can also promise you that getting on my team’s bad side never works out for people. You live in your own little reality, but we always win. You apologized with words, now do it through action.”

Winona nods. The computer beeps. She looks down at the console. “We’re here.” She activates the radio. “Amberjack, this is Pelican. Come in, Amberjack.”

“Amberjack Actual here, go ahead.”

“Permission to land and come aboard. Three visitors total, limited equipment.”

“Permission granted.”

“Constance, please land. Once we’re aboard the Amberjack, dive to a depth of thirty meters, and travel three hundred kilometers to the Northeast, avoiding detection along the way. Once there, resurface, launch, and return to base.”

“Understood,” Constance replies.

She regards Ramses’ expression. “The Bridgette will be fully yours after today.”

“Clearly.”

They land the Bridgette, and board the sub. They’re surprised to see what must be a full crew waiting for them. It’s hard to walk through, there are so many people. They were to understand that there would only be a few left around, while the rest rested and relaxed in Bermuda. Winona and Executor Ongaro go into his office to have a chat about it. When they come out ten minutes later, Winona explains to Ramses and Alyssa that rumor spread about what kind of mission they were going on, and everyone wanted to be a part of it. She questioned why he didn’t just order them to go on shore leave, being the Executor and all. He claimed that his own curiosity made him feel like he couldn’t rob others of the opportunity. Bad leadership, if you ask Ramses, but nothing can be done about it now. They have already begun the dive.

By the time they reach the bottom, Ramses has started to receive a signal from the AOC. So not only is it close, but it’s on and operational. That’s good, it strongly suggests that life support is still active. Even if it’s not, it shouldn’t be too hard to re-engage it. Once they’re close enough, the sub’s lights shine upon the vessel. It’s sitting neatly on the ocean floor, right between two little rocky cliffs. Either it was damn lucky to have fallen right in the perfect spot, or the AI is still on, and navigated it well enough to protect hull integrity.

“Wow. This is yours?” one of the crewmen asks.

“Yes,” Ramses replies, not super happy about having all these eyes on his ship.

“It can fly to the stars?” another asks.

Ramses looks over to Winona. “You have some leaks to plug up.” He’s not referring to the sub, or the ship.

“A lot of people had to be read in for this, Winona defends.

“How do we dock with it?” Executor Ongaro asks them.

“We don’t.” And now for the hard part. There are more people here than Ramses was led to believe. Keeping the secret amongst a smaller group would have been easier, but they probably know enough already anyway. He’s just gonna teleport in, now that he has a target. “You have a torpedo room, right?”

Executor Ongaro laughs. “Yeah, but you’re not going to be able to fire one from there, if that’s what you’re thinking. That’s just where they’re loaded.”

“That’s not what I was thinking. I just need privacy. Can you give me that, or are we gonna have a problem?”

Ongaro sizes him up, but decides to agree. “That will be fine.” He doesn’t think there’s anything he can do in that room that they won’t be able to find out about.

The torpedo room offers them a plausible way off of the sub, and onto the AOC. It’s ridiculously impossible at this depth, but they will probably assume that Ramses used some kind of crazy supersoldier serum that allowed him to traverse the distance safely. What he won’t guess is that he can inject himself with a magical formula that will allow him to teleport over there without getting a single drop of water on him. Ongaro leads him down to the other side of the vessel, and shows him into the room, ordering the crew manning their stations to leave. He makes a mistake, though, when he accidentally looks up to the security camera in the corner. That’s fine, disabling basic surveillance is incredibly easy for Ramses with his trusty mission kit.

Winona closes the door behind them. “They’ll still be watching.”

“They’ll try.” Ramses presses the button on his signal scrambler, and shuts off the cameras and microphones. Then he places a magnetic lock on the door, in case going blind pisses them off enough to try to get back in here.

“You’re not going to try to stop me from coming with you?” Winona asks.

“I can’t leave you here with these warmongers,” Ramses tells her. “I’m mad at you right now, but we’ll get through this. That’s what it means to be on our team. Isn’t that what you want?”

“Yes.”

Ramses injects himself with the Existence Water. “Then hold onto me tightly.”

Both Alyssa and Winona take him in a bear hug, and let him transport them into the AOC. He was right, life support is fine. A cursory glance at the diagnostics screen shows that everything is fine. The hull did suffer a few scrapes on the way down, but it repaired itself without any prompting. Ramses takes out the data drive where he keeps the base code for the AI that he got from The Constant. He plugs it into a dataport, and uploads it as an upgrade. “Constance, can you hear me?”

“Five by five,” Constance replies.

“Run full diagnostics on yourself, please.”

Once the perfect diagnostic finishes, Ramses says, “okay, then. Please teleport to the last New York coordinates where the Bridgette was.”