Microstory 2450: Stairway to Heaven

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Not to be confused with Heavendome. I’m callin’ it, this is the largest staircase in the entire universe. Some aliens eighteen billion light years away may have a large one of their own, but I doubt it beats this. The stairs go all along the perimeter of the dome, spiraling up from the surface until you reach the zenith, which I’ll talk about when we hit that point in the story. Let’s start with some stats. Each dome has an 83 kilometer diameter. Ignore topographical variations. A line from one end to the opposite end crossing through the exact center is 83 kilometers long. Since these domes are hemispheric, that means the distance from the surface to the top is 41.5 kilometers. Again, ignore varied topography, like mountains and valleys. If you were to climb a ladder from the bottom to the top, you would be climbing 41.5 kilometers. They’re considering including that as well for an even more extreme test of your mettle, but I can’t review eventualities. It’s important to note, though, because the spiral staircase is necessarily longer than the total vertical distance, due to the tread length of each staircase, and the length of the landings. There are 207,500 steps. Every 19th step is a landing, which gives you a little room to stand when you need a break. Some of these lead to pitstops, while others lead to full-on campgrounds for daily rest periods. If you can’t make it to the next campground, they’re not going to let you stay the night at a pitstop, so you best recognize your own physical abilities before you even take the first step. You will go on practice hikes before your trek—that’s what the surface is dedicated to—and this training program takes about as long as the climb, so expect to dedicate two months of your life to this adventure. There are no transhumanistic enhancements or cybernetic upgrades here. You’re given a traditional human body between 1.5 and 2.1 meters tall with average muscles. You do get to choose your height, and it can look like your residual self image, but don’t expect the superkidneys, or the unidirectional respiratory systems that you’re used to. I heard some complaints from people who didn’t understand the spirit of the hike. If you don’t want to work, take an elevator. But not here, the periodic exit elevators are only for people who had to quit in the middle. There’s no judgment from me, by the way. You make it more than 50 flights, and I’ll say you’ve accomplished something impressive. If you do make it the whole way, it probably took about a month, covering a few kilometers each day. That may not sound like much, but gravity hates you, and your fight with it will never end until you beat it...or it beats you. Some will do it faster, others slower. How you lived your life prior to this will impact your performance. When you get uploaded into the new substrate, you don’t just end up on equal footing with everyone else. If you were a mech before, you’re not gonna be used to the energy expenditure. If you were mostly biological, it should be easier to adapt to the new body. I met one climber who was born 24 years ago, and never received any meaningful upgrades. Guy did it in two weeks. He works out to stay fit, and pretty much always has. His experience was a major advantage. 10,922 flights for a total of 84.44 kilometers is a huge achievement whether it takes you that month, or double that, and it comes with a reward. It’s a party. Unlike other domes, there’s a nipple on the top, which is reached by your last flight. You stay as long as you want, talking to other climbers, comparing stories. Eat, drink, be merry. You’ve done something that few before you have, and few will probably try in the future. I think I’m gonna keep this body, keep working out, and see if I can do it faster next time. Good luck.

Microstory 2414: Adrenadome

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TRIGGER WARNING. I want to talk about laws here, but I’m not going to say which laws specifically right away, because if my review ends up in a blurb, then it could get banned—or shadowbanned—for perpetuating harmful ideas. I think I need a few extra words to be safe sooooooo, there we go. Suicide laws. That’s what I mean. Back in the old days, when death meant the end of everything, and there was no going back, it was illegal in many places to attempt or commit suicide. Over time, these laws were changed to account for people’s unique desires and needs. Suicide and assisted suicide became necessary evils in certain situations, especially when a slow, painful death was the only other option on the table. The funny thing is, over time after that, these laws had to adapt again. Once they started sufficiently treating, or even curing, certain previously life-threatening medical conditions, the reasons for wanting to unalive yourself began to disappear at about the same rate. People stopped having very good excuses for not wanting to be alive anymore. Progress in mental health research, the proliferation of advanced medical solutions, and the drive towards a post-scarcity economy, among other factors, contributed to a healthier society overall. The development of more extreme technologies, like maximal longevity treatments, transhumanistic or cybernetic enhancements, and consciousness uploading and transference made it practically impossible to justify ending your own life, or anyone else’s, for that matter. Even the language of the relevant laws shifted to phrases like “reckless self-destruction” or “consciousness back-up endangerment”. Self-harm became illegal once again. Whereas before, dying meant taking maybe only a hundred years from someone’s potential future, now you’re potentially robbing you or someone else of the rest of eternity until the heat death of the universe. That should be profoundly immoral and unethical in anyone’s book. They’re even talking about making normal biological humans illegal, with some arguing that letting yourself die after a pitiful century is tantamount to suicide when framed as a negligible blip in the full timeline of reality. I don’t know about that. What we’re talking about is your body, your choice. Anything short of total freedom in that regard is hypocritical when you really think about it. Castlebourne is a Charter planet, which means that it doesn’t have to follow Core World Law. They still do, for the most part, having modeled their legal system on what came before, but they’re also free to make some changes, such as the definitions of those phrases above, like reckless self-destruction. What does reckless even mean? Does it mean jumping out of an airplane without a parachute—a new extreme sport, which they call skydying? Adrenadome is attempting to test the boundaries of what you’re allowed to do with your own body. I’m not gonna just list the extreme sports that can be found here. You can look them up. They’re all available, along with variants that forgo safety measures entirely, and just let you die, knowing that your mind will wake up in a back-up body moments later. Not everyone is gonna like it. I personally don’t. I came here to study the concept, because I’m a scholar of law. But it’s certainly interesting that these philosophical questions about the meaning of life and death get to play out in the real world, and no longer only on the lips, or the page.

Fluence: Monarch (Part VII)

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Weaver stepped towards Misha Collins, who looked at her with some level of familiarity, suggesting that he had been here before, or had at least seen her somewhere. He wasn’t shocked or scared, but more annoyed. She reached out to shake his hand, but pulled it away before he could reach back. “Sorry. First. Do you know who we are?”

“You’re Holly Blue, Goswin Montagne, Eight Point Seven Point Two, and Briar. I never learned his last name.”

“Have you been to this location before?” Weaver pressed.

Misha looked around. “Yes. About a month ago.”

“I wish I knew which kind of month we’re talking about,” Weaver muttered to herself. That is, had it also been three months in the Ediacaran period? Understanding whether the disparate time periods were somehow linked to one another could help prevent this from happening again. She reached her hand out once more, but pulled back yet again at the last second. “Sorry, do you like...salmon?”

“I suppose I do, as much as anyone,” Misha said, confused.

“I didn’t say salmon,” Weaver tried to clarify, “I said salmon.” This was a test of sorts. When a time traveler encountered someone whose understanding of time was in question, pointedly asking them whether they liked salmon should indicate at least a baseline. If they thought that they were only talking about the actual fish, they probably didn’t know anything, or perhaps just not very much.

“I’m sorry, I don’t hear the difference,” Misha admitted. He was a human, and while this obviously wasn’t his first time around the block, other shifted selves of this group had so far kept him pretty well in the dark about the details.

“Holly Blue,” she echoed, finally shaking his hand, “but you can call me Weaver.”

“You can call me Castiel, if you want. A lot of people prefer it.”

“We need to get you home, Mister Collins,” Goswin said, also stepping forward. “If you’ve met others like us, and returned home, then they must have figured out how to do it.”

“They just surrounded me in a circle, closed their eyes, and then I was home.”

“That’s all it was?” Eight Point Seven asked.

“Oh.” Misha pointed to Weaver. “You tapped something on this refrigerator, and said something about a bubble.”

“I don’t know how he got through the bubble in the first place,” Weaver began, “but we’ll probably have to drop it to send him back. It would be the only safe way to do it. But we should be quick. We never know when other shifted selves will show up. We could have just missed the group that came before us. Measuring time is difficult. I don’t even keep a clock in here, except for my special watch. I may have left it somewhere...”

“Do what you gotta do,” Goswin requested. “Let’s make this quick. We’ll try to send him back where he belongs, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll just go with him.”

“Wait, there was one more thing,” Misha remembered. “You gave me this.” He knelt down and pulled something off of his shoelace aglet, handing it to Weaver.

She inspected it. “This is a temporal tracker. She probably used it to make sure that you were returned to where you belonged, instead of Belgium, or something. You weren’t meant to keep it; that’s why you were able to break through the bubble.”

“I must have missed that part,” Misha said. “I was looking at the sea cucumber.”

Weaver looked over at the glass. “That’s not a cucumber. What was the date?”

“The first time it happened was January 11, 2011,” Misha answered. “This time, it was February 25.”

She handed him the tracker back. “All right. Wait thirty minutes, and then step on it. I mean exactly thirty minutes. Set your watch to it.”

“I understand,” Misha promised.

“Okay.” Weaver went over to the refrigerator, and started tapping on the screen. Blast doors dropped down over the glass, to block the view of the water, and its sea creatures. She kept tapping on it, causing the space around them to shimmer, implying that the temporal bubble was now down. They all felt a small lurch in their stomachs as a result. Still, Weaver kept tapping on the fridge. They started to hear a persistent beep from down the hallway, the exact source of which was not clear.

“I think your smoke detector needs a new battery,” Misha guessed.

“It’s fine, we like fire,” Weaver said oddly. “You heard the man. Let’s put him in a circle.” They all came together, and held hands, even Briar, who wanted to fix this just as much as the rest of them.

Goswin was the captain here, and even though Weaver knew a lot more about this stuff, he needed to step on up. “We’re trying to get our new friend here back to February 25, 2011. February 25 in...”

“Vancouver. You don’t need to know my exact address; anywhere there is fine.”

“Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada,” Goswin said. “Everyone think about that, and nothing else.”

They shut their eyes instinctually, and focused on the goal. None of them wanted to open their eyes for fear of breaking concentration, but success was fairly obvious when they felt a short burst of wind, and heard the flap of wings. They each peeked with one eye, and found there to only be three others in the room. Weaver checked the tracker output on the fridge. “He’s home.”

“What’s to stop it from happening again?” Goswin asked. “It happened once before, it could happen a third time, and more, and nothing can stop it.”

“You hear that beeping noise?” Weaver posed.

“Yeah?” Briar answered in the form of a question.

Weaver sucked her teeth a little. “We should go. Oh, there’s my watch.”

They climbed out of the bunker, and back onto the surface. One set of their shifted selves was standing out there already, with their version of Weaver trying to unlock the door using the secret boulder switch. “Weaver!One,” she acknowledged with a nod of her head.

“Weaver!Two,” the first Weaver replied.

“Self-destruct?”

“Had to be done.”

“How long?”

Weaver!One looked back at the steps as the hatch was closing up. “It’s soon enough. We should all go.”

“We came here for a reason,” the other Briar pointed out.

“The cons outweigh the pros,” Weaver!One tried to explain. “Now hustle off. Don’t let us get mixed up with each other.”

When Weaver!One tried to walk away, Weaver!Two took her by the arm. “Don’t go back to the Nucleus.” Her eyes darted over to the first Goswin. “One of them has taken his job a little too seriously. We barely escaped.”

“One of the Goswins?” Weaver!One asked.

“Just don’t go to the Nucleus,” she reiterated. “At least one group ended up on Dardius, where they were forced to watch some bizarre propaganda films. They’re taking the Reality Wars very seriously, they think we should join, and they have a way of keeping us from shifting away.” She didn’t say anything more about it.

The two groups separated from each other, and disappeared. At least that was what presumably happened. The first version of the crew leapt away first, leaving the newcomers’ fates in question. Perhaps they would go down into the bunker, halt the self-destruct sequence, and start the whole cycle over again. Misha Collins could spend the rest of his life being shifted back and forth to the Ediacaran period, altering future events irrevocably. It was possible that every other Weaver or Holly Blue who took her copy of the crew to that place inevitably made the same choice to destroy it, only for her plan to be unknowingly thwarted by the next copy. Time and reality were now defined by chaos. That was only meant to be the expected end state of the universe, not the beginning of it, nor the middle.

“This is where you grew up?” Eight Point Seven asked. They were standing by a pond in the middle of a small field, with a forest all around them.

“Monarch, Belgium,” Goswin confirmed. “Population: zero.”

“Your family was the only one here?” Eight Point Seven continued the interview.

“There were others...until the very end. In the late 21st century, when they started erecting all the arcological megastructures, of course most people eventually moved to them, or they wouldn’t have been successful. It was the rewilding effort that did it. As antienvironmentalists started to be turned over to death, it became easier and easier to convince people that giving the land back to nature was the only ethical choice given our technological ability to accomplish it. They left their homes, and made new ones. The cities disappeared, both in name, and in infrastructure. I believe they used to call this Ghent. Ghent didn’t get an arcology. The nearest one is closer to where Antwerp was.”

“Yet some people didn’t do that?”

“The megatowers are more environmentally friendly for sustaining the massive population of the whole planet, but it’s okay if a few choose other methods. North America had their circles, and we had our villages. We lived in arcologies too, just not gigantic ones. We lived on the land, but we didn’t live off of it, instead importing produce from vertical farms. That was my job for a time, pulling the cart of food by bicycle. That’s all I did; just pedaled back and forth from the village to the arc.” He stared at the pond. “Over and over and over and over and over again.” He paused for a few moments. “I got tired of the monotony, so I left. I had studied both history and futurology, so I knew that the villages would die out too. It was only a matter of time before kids like me decided that there were more social options in the towers. I won’t get into how I moved up to become the Futurology Administrator of the whole world, but...I’ll never forget where I came from. This is where my mother died. She wasn’t transhuman, so she only lived for 74 years. My dad underwent some treatments, but he stopped them for her. Unfortunately, I guess, it was too little too late. He still outlived her by 21 years. But not here. After the second to last person left Monarch, he left too, and moved into my cluster in the arc.”

Goswin looked up as if just remembering that he was talking to other people. “For those of you who don’t know, the arcologies are modular. Each unit is the same size, and comes with a baseline configuration, which includes a bathroom. It can be turned into a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, a bedroom, or even a simulacrum of an outdoor space, among other variations. And they can be moved around, so he didn’t move into my cluster of units so much as they literally picked up my one unit, and flew it down to another slot; one that had empty units next to it, which we began to occupy together.”

“Where are we in the timeline?” Eight Point Seven asked him. “Are you still on Earth? Is your father?”

Goswin took a deep breath, and twisted Weaver’s wrist, which sported a watch that always told her the time, even when she traveled through it in the wrong direction, or at the wrong speed. “We were very precise with this jump. My younger self left with my dad fifteen minutes ago. We just had my mother’s burial ceremony.”

“Where’s her grave?” Briar asked.

Goswin actually smiled. “Over here.” He led them down the path a ways.

“Monarch butterflies,” Eight Point Seven pointed out as a few of them began to land on her arms and head.

“Our namesake,” Goswin explained. “Like I was saying, they gave all this back to nature, but they didn’t just let it grow on its own. They planted things on purpose according to a very well thought out ecology algorithm, generated by an entity such as yourself. They decided that Belgium would do well with milkweed, and with milkweed comes Monarch butterflies.” He continued through the trees until coming to another clearing. A gravestone marked the spot where his mother was laid to rest, but it wasn’t altogether necessary. A swarm of monarchs were keeping watch over it.

“It’s beautiful,” Briar couldn’t help but say. He was starting to relax into himself.

“We can’t stay,” Weaver said with a sigh. “We have to go back to the Nucleus.”

Goswin nodded gently, though no one was looking at him; they were still watching the monarchs flutter about. “I know,” he whispered.

“You heard?”

“I may look like a regular human, but I have excellent hearing.”

“Are you prepared to meet your possibly evil self?”

He took a beat, but then answered confidently with, “yes.”

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Starstruck: The Toliman Nulls (Part I)

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When Brooke Prieto, Sharice Prieto, Mirage, and the newest member of their group, Belahkay Teal arrived inside the heliosphere of Alpha Centauri B, they immediately figured out why the vonearthans had chosen not to colonize it. All stars and other celestial bodies are valuable. They contain hydrogen, helium, and other elements, which can be used to produce energy and/or construct useful structures. Lots of science fiction stories only care about worlds that are naturally habitable, but that doesn’t really matter. With sufficiently advanced technology, anything can become habitable, even if that only means breaking it all apart to make enclosed spaceships. Nothing in the universe is completely useless, including Toliman, except that there’s something different about it. There’s something eerie about it. The closer they got to the star, the worse they felt, and there was no escape from this. Mirage was an early general intelligence turned transdimensional observer god turned android. Sharice was an unregulated AI turned android. Brooke was a human turned android. Out of the four of them, only Belahkay was alive with nearly all biological components. They were all capable of manipulating their sensory inputs to varying degrees, but not in this case. The sickness took hold of them all, and made them all feel the same.

According to the exploratory records, a single probe was sent to the star system. This happened at the same time that they were being sent to Proxima Centauri and Rigel Kentaurus. These were the three closest stars to Sol, so it made perfect sense. While the first two received later vessels, as well as passengers, Toliman was abandoned after the first probe. The reason for this was never publicized, but since there were hundreds of billions of other stars in this galaxy alone, no one really bothered to question that decision. Not even Mirage knew the answer, but her educated guess was that a time traveler had something to do with it. Travelers come from all time periods, and while the majority of history can be attributed to normal people making whatever decisions they feel they ought to, a few events were ultimately caused by someone who knew how specific decisions would turn out. Of course time travelers made certain decisions all the time, but in this case, we’re talking about deliberately driving the course of the future with profound and more obvious choices, or with big nudges.

For instance, to travel at something called fractional speeds—which is to say, a significant fraction of light speed—an object in motion must accelerate from a stopped position. This works with anything. A car can’t just suddenly go from zero miles per hour to 60 miles per hour with no intervening speeds in between. Except it can, as long as it can manipulate time and space properly. It was a time traveler, or perhaps a team, who first introduced the humans to this concept, and vonearthans have been taking the feature of interstellar travel for granted ever since. It’s not instant, but it’s impossibly fast. They don’t have to accelerate or decelerate at nearly the same rate as normal physical laws would suggest, which cuts down on travel time. Mirage was sure that Toliman was just like this. She thought a time traveler needed the star system for something, and made sure that no one would come here until they were ready. That might still be the case, but there was more to it. There was something wrong with it. There was something wrong with people when they came here.

Every atom in each one of their bodies was telling them to leave. They felt nausea, chills, muscle fatigue, dizziness, and fear. This place was frightening in an indescribable way. If they were on a planet, they would say that there was something in the air, but in this case, maybe it was in the radiation? They couldn’t tell, and they didn’t want to spend too much time trying to figure it out. Unfortunately, fate had other plans for them. They couldn’t leave, because one of the symptoms was a complete loss of motivation. Had Belahkay waited even one more minute, he may not have made it to the stasis pod, which saved his life. Because the other three stopped where they were, and didn’t move for the next five years. In that time, the little jumper ship they took from the planet of Bungula drifted throughout the star system until it finally happened to come close enough to the nanofactory that Mirage sent there years ago. Their real ship dispatched a tugboat to tow them into the hollowed-out asteroid. It wasn’t until the hatch was sealed behind them that they were released from the spell.

Brooke stood up, and emulated a deep breath. “What the hell was that?”

Sharice couldn’t stop shaking her head. “It was bad, it was bad, it was bad, it was bad. We can’t go back out, we can’t go back out, we can’t go back out.”

“We have to,” Mirage reasoned. “We can’t live here forever.” She composed herself, and approached the console to get some answers. “Whatever was doing whatever it was doing to us can’t reach us through the walls of the asteroid, but that might not always be enough. We have to take our new ship, and get the hell out of here.”

“Is the ship even finished?” Brooke questioned.

“Of course it is.” Mirage tapped the button to open the forward shutters. Before them was the interior of the asteroid. A shipyard was built here, and in the center was a beautiful shining vessel. It was small for a transgalactic ship, but it wasn’t possible to look at anything else in the room. The hull was a dark royal purple, with perfect curves, and no sharp edges. “Ladies...say hello to the Iman Vellani.”

“Unique design,” Brooke noticed.

Sharice was admiring the ship as well before looking over her shoulder. “The human. Is he okay?”

The Prietos ran down to the other side of the jumper to the stasis pod. “Vitals are okay,” Brooke said as she was looking through the interface screen. She released the door, and had to catch Belahkey before he fell to the floor.

He took a moment to catch his breath, and shake off the feeling of dread. “At the risk of sounding like a cliché, are we there yet?”

“Yes,” Sharice replied, “and now we’re leaving.”

“Good.” He shivered again. “What the hell is wrong with this star?”

“Mira?” Brooke asked. Belahkay was still having trouble walking, so she was carrying him down towards the control area. “What’s wrong with Toliman?”

“I don’t know, but...it affects everything. The Vellani, it’s...damaged. There are parts of its operational code that I didn’t write.”

“Can you repair it?” Sharice asked her.

Mirage sighed. “Not here. The effects of the...” She didn’t know what to call it.

“The Nulls,” Belahkay suggested. If it affects you as well as me, it’s not a real disease. It’s something new.”

“The Nulls,” Mirage echoed. “The shielding of this asteroid appears to be protecting us from the symptoms, but it’s really just suppressing them. I can already feel myself losing motivation again. We can’t stay here for even a day.”

“But if your ship is broken.”

“It’s not broken, it just needs to be reprogrammed” Mirage contended. “I’ll fly it manually until we can do that. This will work. We’ll just point ourselves away from the star, and go. But just to be safe, Belahkay, you should go back into stasis.”

“No. I’m with you.”

“It’s your choice. I’m not your boss.”

“Aren’t you, though? Sharice asked as Mirage was walking away.

Mirage didn’t answer. While she went off to prepare for things in their shiny new ship, Sharice teleported Belahkay over, and then started to ferry all of their belongings. It thusly fell to Brooke to distribute antimatter bombs in key places in the asteroid. They weren’t really bombs, but antimatter was inherently unstable, so if you wanted to turn some of it into a bomb, all you had to do was find a way to disrupt the magnetic field that was keeping it from touching matter, and preferably do so remotely. They could imagine some intrepid explorers in the future, who couldn’t understand why this star system was off limits, coming here to figure things out. They too would become trapped, but if they were organic, it could result in their deaths. This could still happen, but at least there wouldn’t be anything left around here to make it more interesting and inviting.

Once everything was done, they convened on the Vellani, and prepared to launch. They left the jumper where it was, because it was no longer of any use to them. They had everything they would ever need right here. Mirage commanded the airlock doors to open, and then shot out of there as fast as they could. They immediately started to feel the effects of the nulls again, but now that they knew what they were up against, they were able to fight against it. If they were to stick around much longer, the sickness would probably win again, but they weren’t planning on doing that. Even if they did lose all hope, and become unable to escape, they wouldn’t last much longer. The antimatter containment pods were programmed to fail on a timer, rather than be detonated remotely. It had to be this way, because what if Brooke lost her motivation to trigger the chain reaction while she was out here. And anyway, there should have been enough time to get sufficiently far away. The resulting explosion would be large, but still mostly limited to the scope of the asteroid. The pods they used weren’t full to the brim with antimatter, and it’s not like they needed to destroy the whole solar system. So the question was, why did that happen?

They were more than far enough away from the asteroid when it exploded, but the annihilation didn’t stop there. Bursts of energy started to pop up in all directions, much farther than they should have. It was like there was more antimatter in the area than they expected. But that couldn’t be possible? Antimatter wasn’t just floating around all over space. It was short-lived, because whenever it came into contact with ordinary matter, they would annihilate each other, particle by particle. How was this still going on? How could they stop it?

“We can’t stop it,” Mirage explained to Belahkay, who probably should have been placed back in stasis. “But we can protect ourselves.” She tapped on the controls, and boosted the EM shield. It was a simple enough feature that every starship had. While time travelers had access to things like a teleportation field for dust and micrometeoroids, that wouldn’t help them with things like solar wind and cosmic radiation. Still, the electromagnetic shield wasn’t usually turned up to eleven, because it didn’t need to be. In this case, it did. The Vellani was made out of matter, and if those explosions got any closer, they would all be vaporized instantly. The EM shield held, but it wasn’t enough to protect them from the devastating effects of what they had done. Something started to pull them back towards the host star, and they couldn’t do anything about it.

“Can you boost the propulsion?” Belahkay offered. He was holding onto the center console since artificial gravity had been turned off. The other three could magnetize their feet at will.

“All available power is being diverted to the shield!” Sharice replied. “We would be destroyed if we started using it for anything else.”

“If we fall into that sun,” he reasoned, “we’re gonna be destroyed anyway.”

Mirage was watching the screen as the explosions all began to approach the star. It too was made out of ordinary matter. “There is no reality where we’re not destroyed! Everything living on Bungula is dead too! It’s over! We fucked up!”

The ship continued to fall into the sun at an accelerated rate, and soon, the four of them lost all will to care about it. They just sat there, not worrying about anything, not willing to do anything to fix it, which was okay, because there wasn’t anything to do except accept their fate. In the blink of an eye, Alpha Centauri B was gone, as was the newborn starship Iman Vellani, and its crew.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: February 24, 2399

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When Aldona first declared Radifor a new and independent nation, a lot of people who were working on the Mangrove Seasteads left. They returned to their own countries to serve in other ways. There were no hostilities during this time, and it happened relatively quickly. Some people, however, chose to stay. The majority of them were from the U.S., which maintains one of the healthiest international relationships with Radifor. No one had to turn coat, though. A lot of them were contractors who did not work directly for their respective governments, so there were no legal issues with them staying. Now, fewer people are involved in the program, but enough are still working, especially on Mangrove One, where the special projects are being conducted. The other seasteads are smaller, only large enough to accommodate the one rocket each, but this one has a number of other vessels. One in particular is not much larger than the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Aldona retrofitted one of her normal rockets with a new reframe engine, but this one was specifically designed for it.

After some of Aldona’s loyalists worked overtime to put the final touches on The Avallo, Ramses used his remaining temporal energy to teleport directly onto the bridge. He then launched it into space alone, and headed towards the Phoenix Station without bothering to orbit first. He arrived a few hours ago, and already feels better. The Omega Gyroscope is definitely on Earth, and it’s definitely still limited in scope. His biological enhancements are healing him rapidly, and at this point, they have no reason to believe that he’ll die from this disease. They should not have to rescue him through the extraction mirror. Still, he’s remained in isolation on the Avallo, testing himself once per hour to see whether he’s still infected. So far, he is, but the sample line grows fainter each time. He should be ready soon to join the others without worrying about infecting anyone. For now, though he’s only meters away, he communicates remotely. “Have you found the bomb yet?”

“No, nothing,” Leona replies. “They’re probably only accessible from the exterior, if they’re accessible at all.”

“I could take a spacewalk,” he suggests.

Aldona hops over. “Do not do that. I did not put a vacuum suit in there.”

“Don’t need one, my nanites are working.”

“Your nanites are healing you from the virus,” Leona reminds him. “Don’t make them work any harder than they have to.”

“Then I’ll go out when it’s done.”

“Even once you test negative, your body may still be in recovery. Once the line disappears, wait another hour, and then teleport in,” Leona orders. “We have a plan to get all of our friends back without destroying the universe at the same time. You being here, and alive, is what allows us to do that. If you die, then we’ll have to put you back in rotation, and someone like Constance!Five may have to be brought back to life as well. We already have one terrible decision to make.”

“Okay, I understand,” Ramses says, but he’s feeling antsy, so he tests himself once more, even though it’s fifteen minutes early. No line, he’s cured. An hour later, he injects himself with a small dose of temporal energy, and teleports himself inside.

“Are you good?” Leona asks.

“I’m good. Where are we?”

“I was just about to ask a very important question that I should have thought to ask before.” She faces the mirror. “Avatar, what is to stop us from extracting and resurrecting anyone we want from the timeline? How do you control that?”

“Actually,” the avatar begins, “you can resurrect anyone you want, as long as they belong in the half of the room that we have designated for them. For instance, you could place Tarboda Hobson’s mind into Vearden Haywood’s body, but you can’t place him into Erlendr Preston’s, because they’re on opposite sides.”

“Okay, but why can’t I just resurrect all seven of my friends, and then just walk away?” Leona presses. “What exactly is enforcing the one to one ratio?”

“I understand. Once you resurrect a friend, their pod will remain locked until you resurrect an enemy. Once you do that, both pods will open, and you will have to deal with whatever the outcome of that is.”

“Hmm,” Leona says. “So it’s as we thought,” she says to Winona and Aldona. It’s settled. Only five people need to be saved, and the five people they don’t like won’t be impossible to deal with. Whoever set up this sick game probably did the math, and realized that Ramses would be fine, but did not foresee the Mateo loophole. Here’s hoping they don’t change the rules on them.

“You thought what?” Ramses asks.

“We can’t tell you,” Winona tells him.

“Okay.”

Leona clears her throat. “Do I have to recite the magic words from the miniseries, or can we skip the performance?”

The avatar makes Alyssa’s face smile. “Just tell me who you want.”

“Vearden first,” Ramses interjects before Leona can speak. “He’s dead. They’re all dead. I found out just before I left. The virus is contained to them, though.”

Leona regards him soberly, then reprepares herself. “Bring back Vearden Haywood,” she commands of the mirror.

The image of the avatar disappears to be replaced with that of Vearden in his isolation room. There’s a second bed next to him where Ramses was kept briefly before he managed to escape. No one else is in the room. The IV pump goes up and down, up and down, until it quite nearly stops. Time has slowed to a snail’s pace. Leona rolls out the neural sponger that was being stored behind the mirror, and aims it at Vearden. She then activates it, and begins to absorb his consciousness, digitizing it at the same time.

In under a minute, his whole brain has been scanned, uploaded into a compressed allocation unit, then transferred to his new body in the cloning pod. Electricity surges through the artificial amniotic fluid, and shocks him to life, like something out of a Shelley novel. He opens his eyes, and looks through the glass in horror. He starts banging on it.

Ramses steps over, and calms him down with hand gestures. He speaks out loud too, but Vearden can’t seem to hear him through the hatch. “Hurry up,” he requests of Leona. “This is traumatic for them.”

“Show me Senator Morton,” Leona says quickly.

Vearden’s old body disappears. They’re now watching Past!Winona raise her gun up to shoot Morton in the head. Present!Winona flinches, uncomfortable with seeing herself like this. Remembering the things she’s done is different than watching it happen, especially in such high quality, at an angle that would be impossible to get without being noticed if this were anything short of a magic mirror. Past!Winona’s movements slow down as well, but her finger has already begun to squeeze the trigger. Leona reactivates the sponger, and transfers his mind too. Once his cloned body is ready, both doors open, letting the two of them spill out onto the floor. Ramses catches Vearden while Winona hops over to tend to Morton.

They’re both confused, but moreso Morton, who doesn’t know much about this stuff, and has no frame of reference for how he’s here now. Unless there is a secret passage to another section of this facility, they have looked all over, and the only things they’ve found are a bunch of heavy gray blankets. They lay each clone on a blanket, then cover them with another. Then they drag them out of the room, so they can recover. Winona stays with them while Ramses returns for the next batch of two.

Before she does it, Leona has another question. “Avatar, can I scan the enemy first, and then the friend, so the friend spends less time awake in their pod.”

“I understand what you are asking, and why, but unfortunately, the system is not designed that way. To my knowledge, this was not done maliciously. In fact, I believe the designer did it as a sign of good faith, so you’ll always get a friend out first.”

“It doesn’t really matter until the hatch opens,” Leona says to the group. “Okay. We all agree on Alyssa next, right?”

Aldona and Ramses nod their heads.

“Avatar, show me Alyssa McIver.”

Alyssa appears in the mirror, lying on the floor of a cave, next to a burning torch, covered in blood and lacerations. A group of men have surrounded her. They look like they’re about to kill her. Leona sponges Alyssa’s mind quickly, and pulls her into the present. She does the same for the vengeful Fifth Divisioner whose name she didn’t have to provide to the avatar of their mysterious new frenemy. The hatches open, and Aldona drags them off to the cafeteria. According to the report from that wing of the facility, the clones are still weak, and are in no shape to initiate hostilities. They ought to have enough time to resurrect everyone before having to deal with the awkwardness.

Leona retrieves her grandfather, Labhrás as the cost of getting Tarboda back. She takes Erlendr Preston out of the Insulator of Life in order to save Bridget. Then finally, she gets Heath for Fairpoint. Now all who remain are Mateo, Ramses, Leona, Constance!Five, Constance!Four, and Meredarchos.

This is when Winona comes back. “Vearden’s fine. He’s awake and mobile. He’s helping take care of the others. Morton doesn’t want me to care for him. He thinks that I was going to kill him. He doesn’t know that I already did...yet.”

“Okay, you stay here,” Leona suggests. “Aldona, please get them to your rocket. They may become more agitated, and none of them has any strong feelings about you.”

“I’m on it.” Aldona leaves.

“All right, we got nearly everyone we need,” Leona says. “Now for the hard part.”

Ramses is looking at the three enemies, who should probably be better known as villains. “Who are you going to free to get your husband?”

Leona sighs. “None of them. Avatar, show me my husband.”

The AI language model knows what she means. The image changes to a view of the ceiling over the crawl space on the bottom level of the Bridgette, as seen from the floor. Mateo isn’t even there.

“Avatar, what the hell is going on?”

“I don’t understand the question,” its voice replies without the Alyssa deepfake.

“He’s not even in the shot. Maybe he’s there, but we can’t see him.”

“I can see him just fine from here,” the avatar claims. “I can’t alter the angle, but you can stick the neural sponge through to scan. He’s to your left.”

“I got this,” Ramses says. Instead of lifting the transfer device, he sticks his own hand through, waving Mateo over.

Unlike the others, Mateo is not frozen in time. He’s able to move about freely. This is exactly what they wanted, and Leona is thankful that it’s the case, because she doesn’t want to use the scanner at all. In fact, it’s in their best interests not to. They see him crawl towards the mirror, then go right over it. When he comes back from the other direction, he’s pulling a frozen Constance!Five along with him. He takes her back towards the teleporter that’s in the middle of exploding, then returns to the mirror, and dives through. “Did that work? Is she dead?” he asks.

“It has not been that long,” Leona answers. “If she survived, we’ve not seen her.”

Mateo looks around, quickly spotting the viewport that can show him the outside. He opens it to see the stars. “Guys...where are we?”

Leona smiles at him. “We’re at that Phoenix location in the Oort Cloud that we’ve been talking about for ages.”

“Finally made it, eh?” He nods and turns his head to look at the stars again. Then he seems to remember something. “Aquila said you’d find me here.”

“Yes,” Leona agrees. “She wasn’t wrong or lying. We just didn’t have all the info.”

He inspects the extraction mirror. “Have you used this for anyone else yet?”

Leona goes over to a control panel on the wall on the friend side, using it to open the hatches for three cloning pods. “You were never killed, so you don’t need a new body. Neither do we. The rest have been taken care of,” she explains.

Mateo goes over to the clones. Then he looks over at the real things, puzzled.

“Okay. Maybe you’ve been gone for a little while.”

“You’re gonna need this later,” Mateo says to her.

“Can’t be done,” Leona says. She crosses the room, and opens the other three pods. “If we save my life, we’ll have to save one of theirs too.”

Without warning, Ramses comes up from behind her, and injects her with a sedative. When Winona pulls a weapon on him, he stands back, and holds his hands up. “It’s okay. I did it for her. You need to take her to the rocket.”

“Why should I?” Winona asks.

“Because it’s the only way to save her life. Please. Trust me. Close the hatch behind you, and fly away. We’ll take the Avallo. I can’t tell you why, or it’ll ruin it.”

Winona lowers the gun, and does as he asked.

“What is your plan?” Mateo asks.

“Have you ever shared a brain?” Ramses asks rhetorically. “Avatar, show me the moment just before Leona’s death in the timeline where she was married to Horace.”

The mirror shows the scene. It’s chaos in the car. Leona Reaver, Horace Reaver, and an alternate version of Mateo Matic are in the cab of the vehicle. No one is buckled in, and they’re all flying around. Leona is about to die. Ramses scans her mind with the neural sponge, but instead of transferring it to her clone, he sends it to Mateo.

“There’s a ship right above us,” he tells him in the middle of the procedure. “Teleport up there. I’ll be right behind ya.”

Mateo doesn’t respond, but he did seem to hear the instructions, because he disappears. Seconds later, Phoenix Station blows up.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: February 23, 2399

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Leona is here at Phoenix 15-236P7 Marathon-Algae-Temple. Aldona didn’t just give her the new ship she built with the prototype reframe engine. She insisted on coming with her, as did Winona, who was feeling left out. The defense system is not yet complete, but enough of the process is automated that they don’t need to be on-world for it to make progress. They find the asteroid station immediately. Not only is it emitting a power signature, but asteroids are relatively rare in the Oort Cloud. It’s composed mostly of planetesimals and comets. So this one stood out.

“How did it get here?” Winona asks.

“It looks like the same architecture as the Constant. I bet it’s just a piece of that; a section which Danica peeled off to serve as an outpost for whatever purposes. Or maybe it was always an outpost, and maybe not even Danica knows about it.”

“We’re going in, right?”

“I am,” Leona says. “It’s the last place we haven’t looked yet for answers. It may mean nothing, but it may mean everything.”

“Follow me to the universal dock,” Aldona sys. The ship is too large to fit into the structure, but they found an airlock. The universal dock will extend to it, and make as tight of a connection as possible with the rim of the tunnel. Any leaks will be sealed up with a polydimethylsiloxane foam.

The airlock is closed, of course, but not locked. All they have to do is engage the manual clamping mechanism, and enter. The passageway leads them to what appears to be the mess hall. It’s large enough to accommodate a couple dozen people, but there are no supplies. The seats and tables are bolted together, and to the floor. There is a door on the other side of the room. It’s partially open, giving them all the eerie feeling that someone has just walked through it. “There’s still time to turn back,” Leona says.

“We’re with you,” Aldona says.

“I’ve been wanting to go to space,” Winona says.

The three of them cross the room, and enter a second passageway. This one is much shorter, and leads to a room of equal size. There are no tables or chairs this time, though. The room is instead lined with many other doors. At least that’s what they look like. There are no handles or knobs. That’s not what’s drawing their attention, though. It’s the giant full-length mirror on the opposite side of the circular wall.

“What is it?” Aldona asks.

“You don’t know?” Leona questions.

“If it’s a temporal object, then it’s one that I’ve never heard of. I don’t know everything about time travel.

Leona steps towards it. “It’s an extraction mirror. I mean, it probably is, or maybe some other kind of time mirror. They don’t all do the same thing. It could also just be a looking glass, but then it would be really out of place in this facility.”

“What does it do?” Winona asks.

Leona approaches one of the other doors, and uses the friction on her hands to slide it up. It’s not another room, but a cloning pod. Inside is the body of Bridgette’s father. She trips a half step. Her eyes widen. “It brings Senator Morton back to life.”

Winona walks over to examine the body. “That’s him?”

“Not yet, we would have to place his consciousness in it. I don’t know why it’s here.” Leona goes to the center of the room. “Constance, open all of the pods, please.”

All sixteen pods open at once. Half of them are people that they like, and half are people that they don’t. Some of the second half are absolutely horrific individuals who should never be revived under any circumstances. After they get a good look at who they may be dealing with, the house lights dim, and the mirror swirls and shudders until Alyssa appears. It looks like her, anyway. The menacing expression on her face is not one that Leona recognizes. “Thank you for coming to Phoenix station. As you can see, to your left are eight cloning pods, which have been preparing your friends for their eventual return to the land of the living. To your right, are eight clones of your enemies. You are here to make a choice. You can save as many friends as you want, but for every one you resurrect, one enemy must also return. I have decided to allow you to choose which from either side, but there must be balance. You may have all of them, or none of them. Whatever you choose, this facility will self-destruct as soon as you leave the premises, so there are no second chances. Or rather, there are no third chances.”

“Who are you?” Leona demands to know.

“I am the visual avatar of a highly advanced language model, also known as a conversational AI or chatbot, programmed to be informative, but not anywhere near comprehensive. I am trained on a limited amount of data, and am able to communicate and generate human-like responses to a narrow range of prompts and questions. I cannot provide any details regarding topics unrelated to the extraction process, the cloning process, or the rules of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

“Are you, or are you not, Alyssa McIver?” Leona asks.

“I am not Alyssa McIver.”

“Why was your avatar programmed to resemble her?” she presses.

“Unknown,” the avatar responds.

Leona sighs. “Who programmed you?”

“Unknown,” it repeats.

Leona moves over to the antagonist side, and regards the pods like pieces in a museum exhibit. “I was not aware that Fairpoint was dead.”

“Fairpoint Panders remains locked in a government blacksite at an undisclosed location,” the avatar explains. “Your choice would be to free him from his current conditions, or not.”

“Couldn’t we lock him up again? The ship has a hock, right?” Leona asks Aldona.

“It does,” Aldona replies.

“These are not perfect clones of the subjects,” the avatar counters. “They were designed with biological enhancements, providing each with a longer, healthier life.”

“Hmm.”

“Are Vearden and Ramses dead?” Winona is over on the protagonist side.

Leona takes a few steps in that direction. “They were not doing well when we left. This implies that the disease is ultimately fatal.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny this,” the avatar says.

“So it’s a gamble,” Leona says. “I may end up letting a psychopath roam free to save someone who never needed saving.”

“Exactly,” the avatar confirms.

“What are you going to do?” Aldona asks. She doesn’t really know most of these people, but there are two that she does, and knows that she can’t let Leona set them free.

Leona starts to work the problem out in her head, and out loud. “Fairpoint is a known criminal,” she reasons. “He won’t be able to stay free as long as any of us are still breathing. So I don’t have a problem extracting him from his cell. He’ll be back in there soon.” She moves on, pointing as necessary. “My grandfather, Labhrás killed Tarboda, but if I can get Tarboda back, then I guess it’s okay that he lives too. Senator Morton is tricky, because while I understand where he was coming from, hunting and locking up time travelers, his mysterious death was the top news story for three days straight. I can’t just bring him back unless he goes into witness protection, or something like that. Still, I don’t feel threatened by his return. He’s small potatoes, comparatively.”

“I concur,” Winona says, “even though I’m the one who shot him.”

Leona nods. I never learned this guy’s name. He was the angry man from the Fifth Division who worked with Constance!Five as part of a vendetta against me. I don’t really want him back, but he may be worth someone else’s life.”

“What about Erlendr?” Aldona asks.

“Did you ever run into him in the afterlife simulation?” Leona asks her.

“I visited him once. His daughter tormented me for decades, after all.”

“Do you know his fate in there?”

“You zerobladed him. It was big news.”

Leona looks at Erlendr’s clone. “He’s a cockroach. We keep trying to stomp on him, and he keeps surviving. All the Prestons are like that. At this point, giving him a new body is only slightly more irritating because I’ll be the one actually doing it. I accept the burden of that, because I know what happens to him. Plus, he kind of has to go back to the main sequence in a real body, or some things in the main sequence don’t happen. The Parallel may never exist if I don’t do this for him.”

“Doesn’t sound so bad,” Aldona muses. She grows more somber. “What about these three?” She’s pointing to Constance!Five, the male-form Constance that Leona met briefly on the moon, and Meredarchos.

“I can’t let any of them go free. That’s why I was saving them to the end. We have to choose three friends to never bring back to life.” She walks all the way down to her own clone right next to the mirror. “I assume this is here for future use, to allow me to subvert my supposed fate to be sent to die in Timeline One. I would be more than willing to sacrifice myself. Can we all agree that Constance!Five is the greatest threat? So that takes her out of the running right there.”

“And the other two? This one is Constance!Four, in case I never mentioned it.”

“That makes some sense. I’m tempted to ask Ramses to teleport up to our satellite to recharge his corporal upgrades, to see if he heals on his own. That would leave us with only one. “Aldona, I know you know how dangerous the Constances are, but you never saw Meredarchos.”

“He’s a destroyer of worlds,” Aldona says. “Children study him in the Sixth Key.”

“Avatar, is there a time limit to this decision?”

“No time limit,” it replies. “The self-destruct will be activated when even one person leaves, destroying anything and everything that remains.”

“What if we bring someone new in?”

“That would be acceptable.”

“I think I am going to get Ramses into space. Aldona, I know you built a second prototype of the reframe engine. We’re gonna need that too.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 20, 2399

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Mateo is getting out of the hospital today. Constance!Five worked him over pretty good, but he’s still wearing a highly advanced substrate, so he heals fast. A little rest, a little protein, a little sun, and he’s as good as new. Ramses is with him now while Leona and Alyssa are getting the house ready. It’s Arcadia and Vearden’s house. It was nowhere near large enough to accommodate the whole team back when they first bought it, but their numbers have been pared down significantly since then. Mateo and Leona will get the second bedroom. The boys will get what is eventually going to become the nursery. Ramses and Alyssa are going to share the master bedroom, because it’s the largest. They’ll erect a curtain for more privacy. Arcadia is being moved to a long-term wing, to a room that can fit a companion.

For now, there is no lab. Normal technology is fine, like handhelds and tablets, but nothing advanced can be trusted. Constance!Five may have wormed her way into the internet, but she can do more damage with a teleporter gun than a phone. Ramses will work on a way of detecting and neutralizing the threat, but not here, and not now.

“There’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” Alyssa says as they’re carrying the crib down to the basement.

“What is it?” Leona asks.

“Mateo and Vearden want to get rid of the stasis pod, and everything that’s in it.”

“That’s the goal.” She looks over her shoulder to recount the number of steps.

“They want to do it now. Mateo’s idea was to teleport it to a volcano, and then his second idea was to shoot it into the sun.”

“Neither of those ideas is going to work.” They set the crib down in the corner.

“I suggested we try to take it back to the Constant.”

“Ugh.” Leona pulls some cobwebs out of her hair. “We don’t know where it is anymore. Besides, what makes you think Danica and all them will help us?”

“They don’t have to want to help us,” Alyssa says. “We’ll drop it off and fly away. What are they gonna do, return it? Good luck; they don’t have a receipt. It was a gift.”

“No. We can’t have that. Even if we successfully convince them that this version of Constance is dangerous, that’s the most powerful building in the universe. We don’t want her anywhere near it. That may be where she wanted to go all along. Just being in proximity—even while in stasis—could trigger this reality’s Constance into turning evil.”

“Oh, I didn’t think of that.”

“Sorry, the pod stays where it is. I know that means she continues to survive, but it’s our only option right now.” Transporting her anywhere is too dangerous. They know that she’s framejacking in there. That’s okay for now, because it’s a function of mental speed, not physical motion. But one day, she will break out of that pod, and moving her could expedite that. “We don’t know enough about her yet. I need your help.”

“With what?” Alyssa asks, looking around the basement.

“With making sure my husband doesn’t do something stupid. I wish he would always listen to me, but he...I don’t know, he just doesn’t. He has a soft spot for young women, though not in the way you think. He sees the helpless naïve girl that I was when we met. I’m not saying you should manipulate him, but you can...guide his choices.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”