Dardius: Pribadium Delgado (Part V)

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Pribadium Delgado never saw herself becoming a parent. She was still pretty young when she found herself introduced to the world of salmon and choosers, but the plan was always to become transhumanistic. Given enough upgrades, an individual will be incapable of conceiving or gestating a human. Their body will just no longer be hospitable to new life. Of course, this didn’t mean she couldn’t raise children, or even that she couldn’t have them before she received these upgrades, but it was still never in her plans. This did not change when she was forced to mother baby Brooke Prieto-Matic, but it did give her an idea. In the year she spent taking care of this precious little thing, Pribadium did form a bond, and it was unclear whether the woman who forced her to care for someone else’s child, Arcadia knew this was going to happen, or not. That didn’t matter, though. The point was that she could use this situation to her advantage. There was something she needed to get done, and convincing Arcadia, and all the others, that she felt compelled to continue raising Brooke was the best way to do it.

The year was 2129, and Leona was preparing to take Brooke home to the 21st century. The latter was incapable of experiencing nonlinear time, so the only way to get her to Earth was with the relativistic ship that Pribadium had built. It would take millions of realtime years, and thousands of years from the perspective of anyone inside the ship. Brooke was set to be placed in stasis, while Leona had to pass the time in an unusual way. Arcadia set things up for her to stay awake the entire time, but unable to hold onto short-term memories. She would recall enough to maintain the ship, and correct issues, but would not be totally aware of the passage of time. Technically, she could have been placed in a stasis pod as well, but Arcadia wasn’t allowing that. As terrible as that was, it was what gave Pribadium her big idea.

“What are you doing here?” Arcadia questioned. “I thought I let you cross back over to the other side of the merge border.

A man named Kayetan Glaston had the ability to put two different points in spacetime together, so that one could walk back and forth at will. He had merged modern-day Tribulation Island with ancient Tribulation Island. Pribadium, Vitalie, and Cassidy were sent over to the other side, so they could make their way back to the future, but the other two agreed to do things differently. They had formed a bond with Brooke as well. So when Arcadia wasn’t looking, they snuck back over to the ancient side. “We want on that ship,” Pribadium demanded.

“Who are these people, Arcadia?” Leona asked.

“You’ve not met them yet,” Arcadia explained to her, before turning her attention back to Pribadium. “This wasn’t part of the deal.”

“It’s a new deal,” Vitalie said. “We’re going back to Earth with the two of them. There’s plenty of room. It was built with three pods that you’re not even using. It’s perfect.”

“Do you even need a pod?” Arcadia asked.

“I’m immortal,” Vitalie replied, “but I still get bored.”

“Why do you want to do this?”

“I can’t let Brooke go,” Pribadium said. “I want to be there for her.”

“Really?” Arcadia wasn’t so convinced.

“You’re the one what made me nurse her,” Pribadium tried to explain. “What did you think was gonna happen? That I could just walk away?”

“Say what?” Leona asked.

Arcadia pointed to the ship. “This thing is going to arrive on Earth in the year 2025. That’s essentially random for you. None of you has been there before, and it’s not anywhere near when and where you need to be.”

“I was close once,” Cassidy noted. She first disappeared from her old life in 2019.

“Don’t you need to get to Mateo’s memorial?” Arcadia questioned.

“Mateo’s memorial?” Leona asked, upset. “What are you talking about?”

“This is many centuries in the future,” Arcadia lied to her, which only seemed to make her feel a little bit better. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you don’t remember any of this when you get to Earth.”

“There’s no reason to not let us do this,” Pribadium said, trying to get back to the matter at hand. “Not only does it not hinder your plan to make Leona stay awake for thousands of years, but it reinforces it. Now there really aren’t enough stasis pods for her.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Arcadia had to agree. “But what do you plan to do when you get there? I’ve already set things up so that Leona takes care of her on her own for a little bit, and then Brooke’s cousin, Mireille takes over. How do you plan to insert yourself into her life, and how long do you intend to remain there?”

“You let me worry about that,” Pribadium said. “Again, this has nothing to do with you. What do you care where we go, when we go there, and whose child we raise while we’re there?”

On paper, Arcadia obviously knew that Pribadium was right, but she was the kind of person who didn’t like being dictated to. She liked to come up with the rules, and the plans, and she didn’t appreciate when someone came along and changed things on her. Her face transformed as she was considering the options. When at first she was annoyed, now she was apathetic. “Whatever. Do what you want. I don’t care. It’s your responsibility to return to your own time period when you’re ready. That ain’t got nothin’ to do with me.” She started to walk away. “You best get on your way, though. That does have to do with me.”

Leona gently took Arcadia by the arm. “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know who these people are, but they seem really nice, and I’m happy to see that you have a heart...even if you won’t admit it.”

Arcadia scoffed. “You don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about.” She reached down to the ground, and lifted the fabric of space like it legit was indeed fabric. She slipped under the magic curtain, and let it fall back into place behind her.

Fifteen minutes later, Brooke, Vitalie, and Cassidy were safely tucked away in their stasis pods. Pribadium was meant to be the only one left, but she had other plans. Leona and her husband, Mateo were always very kind to her. They immediately accepted her into their group without question. She felt that she had made a lot of mistakes, and still felt responsible for them all becoming trapped in the past. This version of Leona had no idea who she was, but she was still herself, and she deserved something good to come to her. There was really only one gift that Pribadium could give, and it came in the form of the last stasis pod.

“This is not meant for me,” Leona argued.

“No,” Pribadium agreed, shaking her head. “Arcadia wanted you to be awake, so you’ll end up around the same age as your husband. But who cares? Arcadia’s not here, and neither you nor Mateo is going to fall out of love with the other because of the age difference. It’s not even really an age difference. Mateo hardly thinks about the time he was stuck in that crazy spatio-temporal dimension. He’s not four thousand years old, and you don’t need to be either. So this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to sip on this Youth water, and sit here in the pilot’s seat. You’re a great physicist, Leona, but I built this ship. I know how it works, and how to fix any problem we come across. You just need to go to sleep, and forget about all this. When we get to Earth, no one will know what happened. I’ll wake you up first, and tell no one that we switched places. The worlds will keep turning.”

“I don’t know if I can let you do this for me,” Leona lamented. “You’re a stranger.”

“No,” Pribadium said with a kind smile. “I’m not.”

“Are you sure?”

“Hundred percent.”

Leona agreed to the new plan. She crawled into the stasis pod, and let Pribadium put her to sleep. Pribadium went on to live for thousands of years, but she didn’t do it the same way that Arcadia had planned. She switched off the temporal distortion feature, and passed the time in a totally different way. Stasis pods served two primary functions. First, they were designed to keep the subject alive and young, so they could actually survive long enough to see the end of the journey. They were also made to put the subject in a dreamless sleep, so that they woke up however much time later with no memory of it. To the four of them, the whole thing would last mere seconds; not centuries. But that was a human necessity, and Pribadium Delgado wasn’t entirely human.

Transhumanistic upgrades were not black and white. At no point did someone transform from human to android. It was a gradient, full of complicated choices and variables. While Pribadium was predominantly a biological entity, she was also a little something more. The Youth water that was meant for Leona was more than enough to keep her alive like suspended animation would, but that was easily rigged up as an IV fluid. In order to capitalize on that second function, all Pribadium needed to do was program her brain to experience time differently. Arcadia was wanting to do this for Leona using magicks, but Pribadium was capable of it through technology, and she could exercise her own control over it. The ship was going to be traveling through space for 2.83 million years, and her body was going to be sitting in the ship for just a hair over four thousand years, but her mind was only going to be there for twenty-four days. She could have sped time up for herself even more, but this made it easier to snap out of it for any maintenance issues. Hopefully, when this was all over, she would feel better about everything she had done, even if it didn’t really make up for it.

Millions of years later, they were on Earth in the year 2025, and no one discovered what Pribadium had done. She didn’t wake her friends up until Leona and Brooke were exactly where they were meant to be. When Vitalie and Cassidy asked why it was she wasn’t helping take care of baby Brooke, she said she didn’t want to talk about it. This was easier than coming up with a lie, and it seemed to be good enough for them. Now the only question was how the hell they were going to get back to Dardius in 2263. Surprisingly, it was Cassidy who came up with a good plan to accomplish this.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 21, 2259

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Leona didn’t wake up from what was meant to be a nap until thirty minutes to midnight. Of course, by then, it was way too late to launch the AOC. The safest place to be for a time jump was either on the ground, or in outerspace. Somewhere in the middle just wasn’t worth the risk. She kissed Mateo goodbye, then left the grave chamber. Cassidy was there as well, getting out of her own grave, having also apparently slept for longer than she wanted. They crawled out of the ship, and jumped to November 21, 2259 together. The first people they saw when they arrived were Étude and Vitalie. The last Leona saw them was on Proxima Doma, when she and Mateo had to take the Insulator of Life to Bungula to revive Brooke and Sharice Prieto. Cassidy seemed more surprised than anyone. “Mom?”

Étude took Cassidy in a heavy embrace, which they held for minutes on end. While they were waiting, Vitalie and Leona shook hands, all professional-like. She seemed to know who Leona was, but didn’t have any strong feelings about her.

Cassidy finally breaks the hug. “Wait, mom, you’re so young. How do you know who I am?”

Étude sported a smile-frown hybrid. “I’m technically not the woman who birthed and raised you. I had to go back in time once to save a lot of people from disaster. My slightly younger self was the one who went to Earth on a mission, made a quick detour on her way back to Dardius to have you, and then took you back to Earth, in the past.”

Cassidy wasn’t afraid, but she was confused, and it was enough to make her take a half-step back. “If that’s the case, then you still shouldn’t know me.”

“I had my brain blended,” Étude explained.

Cassidy looked to Leona. “That’s the thing where someone gives you memories from an alternate reality?”

“Yes,” Leona answered.

This was all big news. They spent the next few hours catching up with each other. Vitalie wasn’t really Vitalie anymore. She too had been through a lot. Both of them had to take the immortality waters to survive certain death when they ended up trapped in another universe. Vitalie made the choice to stick around while Étude and a man named Tertius Valerius went back home. Vitalie spent four billion years there as an immortal, until finally coming back to this universe through The Prototype. She was only capable of retaining memories from the last fifty-six years of her life, however, which explained her somewhat distant reaction to encountering Leona.

While they were doing this, Leona was apparently not made aware that Pribadium was assigned to make sure the AOC was launch-ready. Mateo didn’t know what to say when she opened the hatch to grave chamber four, and found him still very much alive in there. She had experienced a lot of time travel stuff by now, but she had never seen anyone come back from the dead. She freaked out.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Mateo tried to promise her. “I can explain.”

“How are you here?” Pribadium asked. “Was your death a lie?”

“No, it wasn’t,” Mateo said. “The preservation coffin you’ve seen me in, that’s real. It’s future me...hopefully very, very, very far in the future, but my death is inevitable. Someone brought me back and saved me at the last second.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she argued. “Then how do you have a body at all?”

“One day,” Mateo started to explain, “I will have to go back and actually die. It’s predestined. It’s already happened.”

“Why, though?” she pressed. “If they could go back in time and rescue you at all, why didn’t that just change the past?”

“Briar was wearing something called the hundemarke. I don’t know how it works, but the past can’t be changed when it’s involved. It prevents it. The extraction mirror is just kind of a loophole.”

Pribadium took a moment to digest the news. “Why aren’t we telling anyone?”

“Leona thought it was best, and I agree. The hundemarke is very delicate. What we know about the future, and what we tell people, can have really bad consequences. The less people know, the better. Everything has to happen how it happened. For as important as it is to not actively interfere with the inevitable, it’s equally important that we don’t try to force the inevitable. We just have to let fate take over.”

“I understand,” she said. “I have to check this chamber, though. Something weird happened.”

“You mean Étude and Vitalie? Leona kept the mic on her tablet open, and has been relaying the entire conversation to me, so I already know.”

“No, not that. I don’t know who those people are, so while it sounds like a strange story, their arrival doesn’t surprise me. What does interest me, however, is how Leona and Cassidy slept for nearly a whole day, and I suppose you as well. I was led to believe that we didn’t leave Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida last year because Leona and Cassidy didn’t feel like it yet. If I had known that it was actually because the stasis features of these grave chambers had possibly acted up, I would have taken a look at them earlier, but I was on a side mission on Waizidi.”

“The stasis features acted up?” Mateo popped the appropriate panel open, revealing the equipment that went over his head. “Ooo, I think that might have been me.”

“How so?”

He popped open the storage panel too. “I didn’t know about all the things that are in here, so I was familiarizing myself with them. I tried my best to avoid the stasis stuff, but I must have punctured a tube, or bumped a switch?” Mateo carefully looked around like a gopher, then crawled out, still not wanting anyone else to know he was there. “You should take a look at it.”

“Okay, you can hide in chamber six while I’m working. No one will be using it.”

Mateo did as he was told, and just went back to his Batwoman marathon. Halfway through his current episode, the new hatch opened up. The first thing he heard was Pribadium saying, “no, not that one!”

Three people were looking down on him: Leona, Étude, and Vitalie.

“Oh,” Étude said.

“Why are you in this one?” Leona asked.

“Hi, I’m Vitalie.” She showed him her hand.

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” he echoed a character from the show he was watching, who was quoting from Lewis Carroll.

“Are you still watching that show?” Leona asked.

“So...” Étude hesitated, “can I use this one, or no?”

“Why did you move?” Leona reiterated.

“Pribadium found me, and needed to check some things, so I hid in here.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone about him,” Pribadium assured Leona. She was standing up from grave chamber five, which was Cassidy’s.

“I won’t either,” Étude said.

“I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care,” a sassy but apathetic Vitalie added.

“All right, yes,” Leona said. “Let’s not let it get any further than this.”

“Let what get further than what?” Thor had come in. Mateo wasn’t worried, though. He was really good at keeping people’s secrets, because like Vitalie, he didn’t care.

“All right, no further, though. Jesus.” Leona was growing impatient.

“Do you guys want to hear about the stasis features?” Pribadium offered.

“It’s not something I did?” Mateo asked.

“No,” Pribadium answered. “They were both leaking, though. It’s not enough to put you out completely, but since you were already asleep, you didn’t wake up until the leak was fixed.”

“How was it fixed?” Leona questioned.

“I don’t know,” Pribadium admitted. “I think it was programmed to turn off.”

“Someone wanted to keep us in here?” Leona asked. “Who? Briar? Arcadia?”

“Oh, no,” Mateo realized. “It was Mirage. She knew Étude and Vitalie were coming, and that we would miss them if we left before today. She wasn’t trying to keep us in here, per se. She just wanted us to stay on the planet.”

“Oh, so it’s okay?” Pribadium hoped.

“Make sure it won’t happen again,” Leona instructed. “I’ll work on the rest of the pre-flight check, because I do still want to leave today. You two are still okay with coming?”

Étude and Vitalie nodded. The former elaborated, “Cassidy is safer with you, and I want to be with her, so yeah.”

“I go where she goes.” Vitalie jerked her head towards Étude.

So it was decided. Leona and Mateo would be going off to Glisnia to send off the latter’s future dead body. Cassidy would be going with them, along with her mother, Étude, and her friend Vitalie. Pribadium was going as well, as a much needed engineer. That didn’t mean that everyone was staying on Bida, however. A couple people were interested in starting a brand new adventure.

“This is the Emma González?” Leona asked, marveling at the vessel.

“Yeah,” Étude confirmed. “Kestral and Ishida gave it to us when we went to Gatewood for Cassidy.”

“So the two of them were doing okay?” Cassidy asked.

“They were going through some stuff,” Vitalie replied, “but I think they were going to be fine. We’ve not spoken to them since we left at sublight.”

“If you’re going on the AOC,” Goswin began, “then I suppose you won’t be needing this anymore?”

“What were you thinking?” Leona asked him.

“We don’t know,” Weaver answered instead. “We were kinda just gonna choose a random direction, and start flying.”

“To what end?” Thor questioned.

“The future,” Goswin said. “We’ve decided to not have a plan at all, but only if we have the means of doing so.”

“Fine with me,” Étude told him. “That there ship is yourn.”

“Anyone else wanna come?”

“We’ll come.” Eight Point Seven was walking towards them with a chained up Briar in tow. “Trinity wants him off this planet. Nowhere is as good a place as any. I’ve outlived my usefulness with Pryce’s animal tourism testing, so I’m a free agent too.”

“Were you guys gonna leave without saying goodbye?” Ellie and Trinity were now walking up. The former was likely at a music break. It was her last radio show ever. She had by now racked up thousands of hours of programming, which was enough to last a lifetime for her listeners. She never needed to fill time for the average radio listener, but for very busy time travelers who managed to carve out a little bit of time for relaxation and entertainment.

They began to say their goodbyes. People hugged those they were comfortable enough with to feel at ease doing that. They shook hands with those they weren’t as close to, but these often transformed into hugs as well. They were all friends here, except for Briar, and a little bit Thor. He let his guard down for a moment, and got in on the action as well, though. Mateo wished he could have been there in person, but he was able to watch from the security feed, and that was better than nothing. When it was all over, everyone took their places. Eight Point Seven’s consciousness was uploaded into the González, with Weaver serving as her humanoid engineer, and Goswin as the captain. Briar was stuck in one of the rooms, since the ship was never designed with a hock. Mateo was back in grave chamber four, which Cassidy was told was the culprit for the stasis malfunction. This gave her a good reason to not open it, though come next year, there was probably no reason she wasn’t allowed to know the truth, especially since everyone else on the ship already did know.

Trinity, Ellie, and Thor were the only ones to remain on-world as the two ships launched at the same time, but flew off in different directions. DJ Mount Alias was just closing her show for good as the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was breaking orbit, and preparing to engage the Radiant Lightning reframe engine. “For my last song ever, I’ve chosen something special. This is for a man I once knew, who’s being delivered to his final resting place after a hard, but far too short, life.” Easy Street started playing on the speakers, but stopped after a few seconds. “Just kidding. Friend, if you’re listening sometime in the past, I know what that song means to you.” She started playing Heat of the Moment, which was another traumatic song from Mateo’s past, as well as Leona’s. The Cleanser had tortured him with it during the Tribulation days. She stopped this as well. “That’s also a joke. I hope he appreciates it, or would have. This is the real last song. It’s not technically a single piece, however. It’s eight and a half hours long, and is perfectly designed to induce sleep. Hm. I just now realized that’s probably how it got its name. Live from the Reading Room on September 27, 2015, this...is Sleep, by Max Richter.”

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The Advancement of Leona Matic: August 18, 2164

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Late in the morning of 2164, Dar’cy came into Leona and Serif’s room and gently woke them up. “We let you sleep a little, but we need you. Serif, specifically you.”

Serif was still groggy. “What is it? What happened?”

“A lot. Since you’ve been gone. We lost Missy.”

Leona shot up out of bed. “What? What do you mean, lost her?”

“Acute radiation poisoning. She was exposed. Well...” she lifted her shirt to reveal radiation burns on her chest. “We were all exposed, but hers was the worst. She didn’t make it a week, even with treatment.”

Leona found Serif’s shirt while she was looking for her own, and threw it over to her. “The micrometeoroid. I scrubbed afterwards.”

“It was too late for us,” Dar’cy explained. “Symptoms appeared just after you left. We all thought we just ate a bad batch of meal bars.”

“How much treatment do you have left?” Leona asked.

“None,” Dar’cy answered. “We ran out months ago, and now everybody looks like me. We were hoping Serif’s special healing powers could help us.”

“Of course,” Serif said. She couldn’t get her pants all the way on without her morning coffee, so she just gave up. “Take me to them.”

The rest of the crew was sitting in the lounge area, except for Nerakali, who was sprawled out on the floor. They all had vomit buckets. Paige noticed them come in, and checked her watch with her eyes closed. “You’re back. I didn’t realize it was your day.”

“Brooke, Paige, your upgrades. They’re not protecting you?” Leona asked while Serif was assessing everybody’s condition.

Paige laughed. “I didn’t get the antirad upgrade. I didn’t think I would need it.”

“I did,” Brooke said lethargically. “But I bought the bronze package. I need regular doses, or I lose it, which are heavily regulated, and supplied by my employer, who has no control over this mission.”

“Dar’cy?” Serif asked. “You seem the healthiest.”

“I threaded two months after the incident, when my dermatitis appeared. I only came back yesterday. Obviously we needed to save treatment for the people who couldn’t jump through time.”

“I still don’t get why you couldn’t take us with you,” Nerakali griped from the floor, head buried in a throw pillow.

“I don’t really either,” Dar’cy admitted. “I guess radiation poisoning makes it difficult for me to take passengers.”

“You barely tried!”

“Enough,” Paige demanded. “She’s back now, along with...Serif.” She clearly just wanted to go to sleep. “Please start with our pilot.”

“I’m the worst one!” Nerakali complained.

“She’s right,” Serif said. “She has to go first.”

Paige shook her head. “I can’t have that. She may be the sickest, but she’s also the most expendable. If Brooke goes, we lose control of the Warren.”

“Why does it matter?” Brooke questioned. “We’re all getting cured? She can go first, I don’t mind.”

Paige struggled to sit up straighter. “What if Serif can only save one of us? What if she can only save one of us per day? No, Brooke, it’s you. I make the decisions around here, and with Miss Atterberry gone, you are our best bet.”

“You’re wrong,” Leona said. “If Nerakali dies here, it will create the paradox I was telling you about. We don’t know when she goes back in time to seal her own fate, but one thing I do know is that she wasn’t at all sick when it happened. She has to get the cure to protect the timeline.”

“Leona Matic. Unlikely voice of reason,” Nerakali said.

“Shut up,” most of them barked at her in unison.

“Dar’cy,” Brooke said.

“What is it, hon?” Dar’cy asked her, coming over and kneeling down at Brooke’s side, ready to help.

“No, you. You get the cure. This is a logical problem, like that one where you and a...and like a, sheep and a wolf, or something, have to cross a river. You’re the piece of the puzzle that solves everything.” She was having trouble concentrating, but pushed through it. “Serif cures you, and say...say she can only do it once a day. Days don’t matter if you’re alive. If the rest of us die, you can go back in time and pull us out of the timestream to stop it from happening, meeting up with Serif after she recharges.”

“And what if she can only do it every week? Or every year, from her perspective?” Paige posed. “What if she can only do it once ever? What if the illness is so bad that it drains her of all her power?”

The room had no answer to this morbid riddle.

“Twelve hours,” Leona finally said.

Paige slumped back into the couch. “To what?”

“I never got a chance to study her ability. Give me twelve hours to do so. You think you can all make it that long? More importantly, Brooke, can you make it? Because Paige is right about one thing, you’re the most valuable crew member this boat has, with Missy gone.”

“Yeah, I can make twelve hours. I can make sixteen.”

“Ten,” Paige amended. “You have ten hours, and regardless of what you find out, Brooke goes first.”

“All right,” Leona accepted. “I’ll make a list of things I need. You’re all more familiar with the inventory.”

Eight hours later, Serif walked into Leona’s lab. “Anything?”

“Lot of things,” Leona answered. “Come here and take a look.”

Serif put her eyes on the microscope. “What am I seeing here?”

“Nanobots,” Leona said with a grin.

“Nanobots?”

“Nanobots,” she repeated. “Organic nanobots. Your body makes them. It converts the chemicals you eat in everyday foods into programmable machines. Programmable..by your brain. You can expel these through your breath, instinctively programming them to treat wounds.”

“Don’t the Earthans have this kind of technology anyway? Aren’t they part of transhumanistic upgrades?”

Leona shook her head, even though this wasn’t technically wrong. “You can’t just..give someone medical nanites. They have to not only be programmed for specific tasks, but be customized to the individual.”

Serif just stood there.

“The only nanites that can treat a patient are the ones that were made especially for them. They’re non-transferable.”

“Well, then why are mine?”

“Because you’re a miracle,” Leona said, no doy. “We already knew that. When you donate your nanites to others, they automatically become compatible with their blood, organs, and microbiome.”

“You say I create them when I eat.”

“Yeah, basically. They die eventually, just like any cell, and your body discharges them, probably through urine, and replaces them simultaneously. That’s why your patients don’t suddenly start carrying nanites themselves. They lose them after the job is done, and they don’t replicate.”

“If I create them when I eat, and lose them after a period, then I only have so many.”

“At any one time, that’s right. But theoretically you’ll just keep producing them, like man’s sperm. I still don’t know why you can do this. If you were born with it, or what. It’s not really a time power, and those are the only kinds we’ve ever seen, but I guess it’s possible tha—”

“Leona!” Serif interrupted her. “Come back to me.”

“Yeah, sorry, I get carried away. This is a major discovery.”

“If I have a limited number, maybe I really can be drained. Maybe I can only save one. Maybe two. Hell, maybe even three, which means I don’t just have to decide who lives, but also who dies.”

“Paige is making that decision. It’s her job.”

“She can make all the decisions she wants. It all comes down to me.”

“Look, I need more time. I need you to heal someone, and then I can test your refresh rate. We can’t know that if you don’t use it.”

“You’re not getting it. You were supposed to tell me I can heal everyone, with absolute certainty.”

“Science doesn’t work like that.”

“This isn’t science. It’s magic. What we do is magic! There’s a way out of this, and you need to figure it out!”

Leona shut down and turned herself into a statue.

Serif composed herself. “I’m sorry. I’m under a lot of stress. I can’t wrap my head around the possibility that something I do—or don’t do—could lead to someone’s death. I can’t pass that off to Paige. I’m the one with the power.” At last, she inhaled.

“No you’re not.” Leona said, coming to an idea.

“What?”

“You are now, but you don’t have to be.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Allogeneic HSCT.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“A transplant. Transplants can transfer powers.”

“That works with time powers, but you said you don’t know if that’s what this is.”

“True, but it shouldn’t matter anyway. Cancer patients receive marrow transplants when their body can no longer produce certain cells on its own. Your nanites are probably made in the marrow, originating as stem cells, like all your others. If we transplant these stem cells to all the patients, they’ll start producing nanites on their own, for a short time.”

“For a long enough time?”

“There aren’t any studies on this, Serif. I know that’s a shitty answer, but it’s all I have. That certainty you were looking for doesn’t exist, not in ten hours.”

“Can you perform a, uh...an allergic CT?”

“Allogeneic HSCT. Probably.”

“What?”

“Yes, I can,” she clarified, though she wasn’t really so confident.

“Paige isn’t gonna like this. A lot can go wrong in surgery, even I know that.”

“Well, if we had five days, and growth factor, I could give you growth factor, and it would be totally noninvasive.”

“Helpful remark.”

“I just need a blood centrifuge, and some needles,” Leona said, as if that wasn’t asking a lot. “And anesthesia.”

“And a sterile environment, surgical tools, time to practice the procedure, oh yeah, and the years it takes to become a surgeon.” Paige had hobbled into the room, and was resting against the door frame.

“You shouldn’t be up,” Serif said, trying to help her stand.

Paige refused the help. “And you shouldn’t be indulging in your girl’s fantasies.” She turned back to Leona. “You’re not performing surgery on five people, Leona. Jesus Christ, who do you think you are? I’ll be the first to admit that you’re an amazing woman, but you cannot do this. Time is up.”

“I have two more hours,” Leona argued.

“I’ve decided you don’t. Brooke’s health is too important, so Serif, you’re saving her now. We can only hope she isn’t your last.”

“Love,” Leona called out when Serif started following her out of the room.

“I’m sorry. If I can only save one, let me at least save one. If I jump forward in time to find nothing more than a pile of rotting corpses, because we wasted these last few hours on the off-chance you find out how to make this work, will the try have been worth it?”

“We can try to contact The Crossover,” Leona begged as they were walking away. “They know doctors, and they can be here in a flash!”

No one answered.

Leona remained to stew in her defeat, praying that someone from the Crossover randomly decided to show up without prompting. Then she realized that that was it. The Crossover. Serif was badly injured by the Sword of Assimilation. She must have absorbed the powers from someone else; someone from the other universe. She ran out to stop Serif, hoping her epiphany could be enough for them to rethink their plan. Only when she saw Serif breathing deliberately all over Brooke’s body did she realize the news didn’t matter.

As midnight approached, Brooke showed no signs of improvement, and the conditions of the others were deteriorating. In a desperate attempt to save the crew, Serif breathed on everybody, including Leona, just in case. Come 2165, they found everyone in perfect health. The nanite treatments apparently just needed a few days to work. Unfortunately, they realized that their exposure to radiation was not due to the meteor strike itself, but the contamination of most of their water supply. They had been forced to get creative with the recycling system, especially since no one knew how to repair the atterberry pods following Missy Atterberry’s death.

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The Advancement of Leona Matic: August 17, 2163

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Leona and Serif jumped out of bed and opened the door. Lights were blinking, along with the alarms, but in a recognizable pattern. Paige’s voice was echoing through the passageways, “please proceed to the atterberry pods. Please proceed to the atterberry pods.”

“Where are those again?” Serif asked.

“Follow the lights,” Leona said. She could remember exactly how to get to the pods, but lights on the walls were directing their path, just the same.

They climbed down the steps and hopped over to the wall of pods. Brooke and Dar’cy were in two of them, the third being empty. “Can both we fit in one?” Serif asked, her panic intensifying.

“There’s another empty one on the other other side,” Leona explained. “You get in this one.” She helped her love step into the alcove, and programmed it to release her at the same time as the others. She then went over to the other side of the ship where three more pods were waiting. Missy was in one, Paige in another, and Nerakali Preston was in the third. “Son of a bitch,” she exclaimed. There were only six pods total, and they were all taken, one by an evil psychopath. She closed her eyes for two seconds, and took a deep breath. The air was thin, though, which was a clue. “Computer, report!”

“Speed, nominal. Course correction, functioning. Hull integrity, eighty-three percent. Automated repair, damaged. Life support, near failure. Please enter atterberry pod,” the artificial intelligence responded in Paige’s voice.

“There are no more pods!”

The computer took a beat. “Please enter atterberry pod.”

“Computer, personality at a hundred percent!”

“Morning,” the computer now spoke with a far more casual tone. “How ya feelin’?”

“What happened?”

“You don’t remember?”

“I wasn’t in the timeline!”

“Really?”

“I’m a time traveler!”

“Oh, gotcha.”

“So, can you tell me what happened to the ship?”

“A micrometeoroid struck the forward viewport in the cockpit.”

“When was this?”

“Two-hundred and sixteen days ago.”

“Why wasn’t it patched up? That’s an easy fix!”

“Repair contingencies were damaged.”

“Well—” Christ, that’s annoying. “Computer, silence alarms!”

The alarms shut off. “Better?”

“What about repair redundancies, don’t we have those?”

“I don’t have that information.”

She tried to take another deep breath, but it was not easy. “Find me a maneuver suit,” she ordered.

“Follow the lights,” the computer replied, lighting up the walls once again to illustrate her path.

         Leona opened the equipment panel and removed a special kind of vacuum suit that provided her more maneuverability, so that she could repair the damage herself. She then commanded the computer to open the hatch to the cockpit. It closed immediately behind her, to protect the rest of the ship. Had the micrometeor struck the bulkhead itself, the material would have been able to heal itself. The polycarbonate window, however, was a different story. Viewports were few and far between, to lower the chances of something like this happening, but it was obviously not impossible. A robot should have been dispatched to correct the issue, resulting in maybe a day of the crew being in stasis, but that apparently failed too.

About an hour later, though, Leona had the problem corrected, with a little good old-fashioned human tenacity. She ran a complete diagnostic of the ship’s systems, ordered an environmental radiation scrub, replaced the air recyclers, and disengaged the atterberry pods. She wanted to be waiting for Serif, to comfort her immediately, since temporal bubbles could be disorienting, but she needed to do something else. As soon as Nerakali stepped out of her pod, Leona sucker punched her in the jaw, and bound her wrists with a zip cuff.

“I told you she’d be pissed,” Nerakali said, wiping the blood off her chin.

“You were meant to stay in your room,” Paige said.

“It’s not my fault the ship went haywire,” Nerakali complained.

“I know,” Paige said.

“What the hell is she doing here?” Leona demanded to know.

The other three crewmembers came around the corner.

“She’s our...” Paige began, at a loss for words.

“She’s like a psychologist,” Brooke jumped in. “This will only be eight days for you, but for us, it’s more like seven and a half years. We need something to keep us entertained. Nerakali creates virtual worlds in our minds for us.”

“Humans have that technology already,” Leona argued. “You didn’t need her!”

“The powers that be did not allow VR. We don’t know why, but they wanted her with us.”

Leona got all up in Nerakali’s face. “I suppose you know what happens to you in the past.”

“Of course I do. I also know that my killer was wearing the Hundemarke. I can’t stop it. But...I can put it off, and I can do some good before it happens.”

“Can you?” Leona asked rhetorically.

“Right now,” Nerakali started, “no one knows when in my personal timeline I go back to to 2107, and get myself killed. It could be in a century, or in a minute. If I try to harm you, fate will intervene, and send me right to that moment. You are perfectly safe around me.”

“I’m not worried about you hurting us,” Leona said, almost sinisterly. “I’m worried about creating paradox when you piss me off so much, I kill you before fate gets its chance.”

Nerakali tried to calm herself down with a deep breath. “It’s hard to breathe.”

“I had to replace the cardio brooms,” Leona informed her, rather professionally. “It’ll take some time to get LS back to full operation.”

“Thank you for fixing the ship,” Missy said graciously. “Had I realized how bad it was, I never would have entered my pod. I should have known.”

“It’s okay. “It’s fixed now, and we didn’t miss a beat. We’re still right on time.”

“I should have seen it coming anyway,” Brooke said in sadness. “What we didn’t realize is that Durus, as it moves away from Earth, is leaving behind tons of debris. We’ve had to adjust heading to avoid them, but one still got through.”

“I failed as well,” Dar’cy said. “I shouldn’t be here. I need to be able to help when we get to the planet, but I’m wasting resources by being on the vessel during its journey. You should have had your own stasis pod,” she apologized to Leona.

Leona approached her. “I would have had one, if that asshole weren’t here. But if that asshole has to be here, then I need a badass like you to protect everyone from her. No way am I letting you thread an object to the future.”

Dar’cy looked to Paige for guidance.

“You heard the lady,” Paige said in her captain voice. “This is my crew. It may not be the best, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. The Warren is lucky to have every single one of you—even Nerakali, in her own way—and even Leona and Serif, despite how little time they can spend with us. I want you all to understand that violence and animosity will not be tolerated here. While you are on the roster, you are under my care, and anyone who threatens that, threatens the mission. The Savior, as exceedingly unimportant as the role is becoming, is one of Earth’s greatest assets. We were given the honor, and the responsibility, to bring her home safely. Anyone who has a problem with that, can spend the rest of the journey in a pod.”

Of course, no one wanted that, they all wanted to contribute. Still, Leona intended to keep as much distance between her and her girlfriend, and a very dangerous Nerakali, while still being able to maintain vigilance over the others.

After a nap, Leona let Serif stay asleep, while she went down to grab a meal bar. Each pack—known as a brick—comes with three bars; one each for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They’re stuffed with every nutrient a human needs to function throughout the day, according to standard macro ratio. Since it’s composed of the chemicals themselves, it’s almost completely tasteless. Boxes come with little flavor strips to put on the tongue before eating, which can make the bar taste like literally anything. Without these strips, astronauts would suffer from space madness after having to eat bland nothingness day in, day out.

Missy must have seen her go into the mess hall, because she followed soon thereafter, somewhat ardently. “I need your help.”

“With what? Ship going okay?”

“It’s fine right now, but as you saw first hand, that’s not always the case. I’m worried this mission comes with danger we cannot predict. Something else you might have noticed is that we lack redundant systems. We have one bot to repair hull damage, and when that failed, we were SOL. We have one extra pod should something go wrong, as long as you or Serif don’t need one. And there’s only one engineer. If I’m incapacitated, and something else goes wrong, there will be no one there to help. I need you to be my backup.”

Leona wiped her mouth. “You’ve just brought up the fact that I can’t help. Honestly, we got lucky that the ship sealed off the damaged section, and kept going without a crew. One false move, and it’s flying in the wrong direction. If I’m your backup...what if that hypothetical crisis happens literally tomorrow? Do you think the ship will survive an extended period of time until I can return?”

“Maybe not,” Missy said. “But you’re our only hope. You were a scientist in another timeline, and you’re an artist in this one, so you have a rare gift of synthesis, and creativity. I know the odds of you being around at the right time are low, but they’re better than zero. Brooke dies, who’s gonna pilot the ship? Paige dies, who can lead us? You can do anything and everything. Even if it’s just one day, that’s better than no day.”

Leona finished her bar and scooted closer to Missy. “It sounds like you need some cross-training. What you’re looking for is an easy solution, and that doesn’t exist here. I am a terrible backup plan. If Brooke...if she can’t pilot, then you have to learn how to do it. If your special pods lose power, Dar’cy needs to be able to fix them. And if Nerakali goes crazy, and tries to kill everybody, Paige needs to slit her throat. There’s a reason Serif and I weren’t given jobs. Whatever they are, we can’t do them. You have to pretend like we don’t exist, because most of the time...we don’t.”

Missy nodded her head. She already knew all this, but didn’t know what they could do about it.

Leona got an idea. “Start a school. You want something to do everyday, because it’s bored without Nerakali’s virtual realities—which I didn’t know she could make—then spend that time educating each other.” She stood up and threw her bar wrapper into the material reclamator. Before she left, she turned back once more, like a wolf. “You’re women. Get it done.”

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Microstory 627: A Day of No Business

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The concept of a holiday set aside to observe the Sacred Savior’s rest after his journeys has been considered for the better part of the last few centuries. It’s been through a few different iterations, with the most recent being known as a Day of No Business. The idea is to halt all business transactions for the duration of a standard twenty-hour day. Every time it has been proposed, it has been shut down by all major faction leaders, and their constituents. Only a few minor and irrelevant cultures in the galaxy make use of this practice to any degree. One of the biggest problems with the realization of these taikon, is that many of them are difficult to achieve in a galaxy full of nonbelievers. The reason the holiday observance has never been accepted before is because our religion, though the most dominant, is not the only one here. Too many people reject the Book of Light’s teachings, making it nearly impossible to get everyone on board with something as far-reaching as this. It’s even difficult for devout Lightseers to accept the possibility of spending one day with no transactions. The economy is the source of this galaxy’s power. Without it, we might as well become dirty communists, just like our enemies. There is just no telling what kind of impact a break from labor, even for one day, would have on civilization. According to the taikon, however, this would have to happen...whether people wanted it or not. Yet, scholars have always been baffled as to how it could ever happen. Even now that it has, scientists are unsure exactly what allowed the holiday to work this year, but Lightseers are grateful. On the anniversary of Sotiren Zahir’s return to Earth—when he revealed to his followers that he had found our home galaxy—the first annual Day of No Business came to pass. But it was not what anyone had expected. An unseen force—as of now, being referred to as The Freus—not only prevented people from working, but from doing anything. For a full twenty hours, every single person in the entire galaxy of Fostea was frozen in place, unable to do anything more than blink, as if frozen in ice. Since no one was able to move at the time, no reliable research has been done on the matter, so no one knows that the Freus is, where it came from, or whether invoking the Day of No Business was its intention. The pangalactic suspended animation phenomenon seemed to have no ill effects on anyone, leaving everyone to rejoice in the fulfillment of yet another taikon.

Microstory 535: Suspended Animation Essentially Achieved

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For decades now, many science fiction stories have attempted to tell stories about the unreal through a lens of realism. Writer take a hard position on what’s possible, and try to include real scientific data as much as they can. Sure, for every realistic portrayal of advanced technology, there is an example of something ludicrous. I think we all don’t remember the short-lived series Thunderriders, wherein the characters travel to other planets using inexplicably instantaneous interstellar lightning. Bear in mind that this wasn’t released in the seventeenth century, or something. This was only about twenty years ago, when such nonsense would have been easily debunked by any preliminary school student. There is some fiction, however, that is so revolutionary and innovative that they inspire real inventions. Some have been minor, like the fact that television sets themselves used to be perfect squares, until the primary director of the android matriarch series Motherboard, Osildr Herro—no scientist herself—pointed out that human eyes are evolutionarily designed to see the horizon. She’s famously [mis]quoted as saying, “kaida are too dumb to watch TV...why do we design it for their vertical eyes!” Other fiction-inspired inventions include the use of radar for driverless vehicles in the Whirly Anthology, flexible computer screens from Red Balm comics, and the prediction of a particle accelerator in the 1175 epic, Two Hearts by a River.

The most recent of these extraordinary advances comes in the form of something called suspended animation. While certain astrophysicists are working hard on both discovering, and developing, faster-than-light technology, others are solving the problem of isolation without it. Instead of traveling to an exoplanet using a tensor drive (or with interstellar lightning) a team of researchers at Pathelay-Alben University propose remaining within subluminal speeds. Travelers could theoretically reach the stars in a more realistic timeframe, but not have to actually experience the time it takes to do so. It’s called a sleeper ship, and it keeps its passengers in a deep state of hibernation. While in stasis, travelers do not age, or metabolize. They do not exercise, or interact with each other, or do anything other than sleep. Perhaps they dream. This concept has been a staple in harder science fiction for decades, and the truth is that we’ve been able to put humans in stasis for awhile now. The only problem...is getting them back out. “Cryopreservation,” according to lead scientist Haxel Jones, “is just a fancy way of saying death. That’s the easy part. Our kind has been killing since literally the very beginning. What we couldn’t always do was prevent tiny ice crystals from forming in the body’s system, which ultimately ruptures tissue, and leads to irreversible damage. Now we can.”

Though the team is keeping details secret for now, so as to protect their intellectual property, there are a few things that we know. They have created a perfect formula that places the traveler in suspended animation. One vital role it plays is protecting the body from ice using an otherwise completely harmless new chemical antifreeze. But that can’t be all there is. Different parts of the body will freeze at different rates, and simply injecting the formula into the traveler would never work. And so the team has also devised a delivery system ,with very little room for error, that transforms the body at the exact right pace. While travelers are asleep, an artificial intelligence (one that does not yet exist) would carry the vessel on the journey on its own, and revive them at the right time. More information will be published scientific journals starting next month.

Microstory 81: Eternal Fall

If you are going to travel faster than light, then you’re going to need a few things. First, you’ll need a vessel capable of withstanding and protecting you from the plex radiation. Next, you’re going to need a machine called an astral collimator. This will tilt your ship over into the desired simplex dimension. Gravity is much, much stronger in the simplex dimensions than it is in mithgarther (where you live). As soon as you enter one, you’re going to start falling, and the only way to navigate to the location you want is to use gravity transfunctioners to direct your fall. You can fall towards any degree of a sphere, because there is no up or down. If you don’t want nature deciding which direction you’ll go, you have to control it. One amazing thing about simplex dimensions, is that they’re full of energy. If you have a tuplodeler, then it will gather this ambient energy, and essentially keep your vessel in working order indefinitely. This is important, because crossing dimensions will potentially use nearly 100% of any energy stored. This is why travel to a complex dimension—which will have no ambient energy—is a one-way trip unless you have a power source on the other side.

One day, a ship named Tresteria was making a journey between galaxies when they suffered a cataclysmic failure. Their collimator was overheating, and needed to be jettisoned, so they were unable to tilt back into mithgarther. Their gravity transfunctioners were damaged, so they were unable to navigate. Their communications were down, not that it mattered; no one was around to receive a message anyway. To save lives, they decided to enter stasis pods, and wait for help. But there weren’t enough pods for everyone. After plex travel was discovered, suspended animation was largely considered unnecessary. Those left out sacrificed themselves so that others could live, but they perhaps were the lucky ones. The Tresteria has been uncontrollably falling through astral red for the last few billion years.