Microstory 2781: Oh, He’s Gonna Take the Job

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The atmospheric black hole definitely could have happened at a worse time. The busy season is now over, and many of the crops aren’t growing anyway. The eyren are a year-round event, however. The uquira and uquirapods adapt well to the changing climate, and in fact, as it cools down, there are more chances to plant eyren. The trick is being able to find the clumps amidst the fallen leaves, and later, the precipitation. That takes manpower, or technology, which sort of goes against the community’s practices.

Everyone is struggling. Jande’s story is not unique as many farms suffer attrition. There are tens of billions of organic people in this galaxy, so it’s not hard to find someone willing to take a century out of their lives to farm on Bida, but it’s hard to keep them. Quiratan has shrunk in recent years because of it, mostly with smaller farms being absorbed by neighbors, but a few have shut down entirely. The AKBH, along with the ongoing threat of future singularities, has only expedited the downfall.

Jande has to recruit more people if he wants to keep his culture alive, and not only by finding partners for himself, but also for others. This is the best time to do it. Last season’s dead crops have been tilled back into the land to replenish the nitrogen content, which is best done early so the microbes have time to complete the process before next planting season. It was hard work, but he’s all caught up now, so he can sit down and find more people. But first, his parents want to talk with him.

He’s sitting in front of them now, bouncing his knee impatiently while they half-smile and sip their tea. They have always been like this. Even when there’s a ton of work to do, they drag out the conversation, especially the beginning of it. They come from an era where a legal lifetime was literally about the maximum amount of time a human would live, yet they’re always wasting the minutes on...dramatic effect. “Could we be quite quick?” Jande asks. “I need to get back to the boards.”

“Your father is retired,” his mother begins. “It was unexpected, but it can’t be undone. His body is younger than yours now. How do you feel about that?”

“This is how things are done,” Jande replies. “I knew this was gonna happen one day, I just didn’t know it would be now. He’s been taking it in stride. I mean it, Father, you have accepted your new life admirably. I hope to mimic you when it is my time.”

Mother nods as she’s listening to Jande. “When the shed came down, you were trapped under the entrance. Your body could not move, so you transferred to a bot.”

“You don’t have to recap, we all know what happened,” Jande contends.

“What you don’t know,” Father goes on, “is that we had a forensics expert survey the scene and confirm which of us died first. As I was under a heavy beam in the barn, my body expired instantly. Your body survived long enough for you to induce suicide. For a few seconds, you had inherited the role of Head of Household.”

Jande narrows his eyes, at the both of them, but particularly at his father. “What are you saying, that because of a technicality, I retired immediately after you, and I have no right to continue farming the land? This body is weak. It is not an upgrade. It is not a retirement model, and I have been toiling for the last couple of weeks.”

“Have you noticed the outsider who patrols our perimeter?” Mother asks him.

“You mean the one from the giant metal shuttle, which can be seen even from here?” Jande asks rhetorically. “Yes, I think I did notice him. Why?”

“He’s here to protect us from the Eyrenlanders,” Mother continues. “They want to come in and farm these lands themselves. Meanwhile, you are perusing the network, looking for a spouse or two at a time to fill only a few slots to reach the bare minimum.”

“This is our way,” Jande reminds her. “Quiratan is not an interstellar business. We are family farmers. To work, you must be part of a family. Scale is not the goal.”

“That’s true,” Father agrees. “If the Eyrenlanders were allowed in unconditionally, they would likely expand within the next decade until they reached the same size that Eyrenland was before the black hole showed up and destroyed it.”

Mother places a hand upon her husband’s knee to take the floor. “Perhaps, son, it is time for that. The Eyrenlanders left us alone when they had everything they needed. They were able to provide the eggs for the galaxy’s demand. Now things are different. Now Quiratan has become the single source of authentic eyren. I mentioned the forensics report to give you an easy way out. You retain the honor of not retiring intentionally, but benefit from the accident by accepting it as retirement. No one would blame you for it. We’ll tell them it was your father’s insistence. In his last act as Head of Household, he declared the end of the bloodline, and the end of the farm.”

Jande balls both of his hands into fists and trembles in seething anger, holding himself back from exploding. “You want me to quit, and you have found a bad loophole that, if our ways had been codified into law, would never hold up in court. And you think, after years of raising me to take over your legacy, that I would take this offer?” He stands abruptly. “You do not know me at all, Mother. This farm is mine now. I was going to farm it with you next season, but it is clear that you are planning to retire soon too. So why don’t you just do it and leave? Follow Suki to Castlebourne, or Evers to Varkas Reflex. I will take five, six, seven husbands and wives if that’s what it takes! I’ll not abandon my birthright, and I cannot believe that you of all people would suggest I do!”

His parents stay calm. His father clears his throat. “We were not suggesting that you retire offworld. There is a way for you to gain control over, not only the farm, but all of Quiratan. There is an ancient rank known as the Superintendent. If you reinstitute this role, it would be you who decides who works what farms. Eminent domain, easements, and the like; you would have power over all of it. You would be able to transition Eyrenlanders into more traditional Quiratan obsolescent practices. And once the positions are filled to your satisfaction, you could turn away the excess.”

Jande sits back down. He has spent his whole life learning about this world. He has mostly focused on agriculture, but he studied history as well, and he has never heard of a superintendent. If it’s true, that would be an interesting development. “How would I go about this? Would I walk down main street with the biggest gun, and announce that I’m in charge now, or is there some kind of ceremony or election, or what?” This doesn’t mean he’s gonna do it; he’s just asking questions. There is no harm in asking questions.

Mother smiles, pleased with herself and Father for managing to get through to him. “Superintendents are in charge of elections, placing them above the bureaucracy. There are no guns, and no election. But there is a series of tribulations. It would not be easy, and we would need to find someone to moderate and judge.”

“But, son,” Father begins. “Once you open the floodgates, you will not be able to control what else flows through. Others will surely challenge you for the job.”

Jande nods and relaxes a little in his chair. “Tell me more.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 24, 2139

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“Leona,” Mateo said, “this is Serif.”

“Oh?” she asked, like a mother to a child who’s just brought home that new friend she can tell will be a bad influence.

“Leona,” he repeated, “you met Serif years ago.”

“I did?” she seriously couldn’t remember. “I don’t recall that. Like...at all. Is she part of this...corrupted reality?”

“Well, yeah,” Serif said, “but I’ve been here for longer than that.”

“How long?”

“Since,” Mateo began, trying to remember exactly. He looked to Serif for help.

“2039,” Serif remembered.

“Right,” Mateo said.

“April 15, 2039; I was one of Ulinthra’s guests at the same time you were. In the timeline before Boyce killed Hitler.”

“Of course,” Leona sarcastically agreed.

Mateo sighed. “Oh my God. I’ve been spending this whole time trying to convince people of other people they used to know and love. It was difficult, because Arcadia had removed them from time. But here Serif is standing right in front of you, and you have no clue. Either Arcadia is losing her touch, or it’s just another wrinkle.”

“Well, if we failed to complete Nestor’s expiation, maybe this is part of our consequences,” Serif proposed.

“Not really fair,” Mateo said. “She never said there would be additional ramifications.”

Leona was not super happy about them talking to each other like they were old pals, but that was exactly what they were. Not long after this whole thing got started, Ulinthra had the two of them escorted to her secret base somewhere in East Bumblefork. There they met Serif, another salmon on their exact same pattern. She had been traveling with them ever since. That Leona could forget all of that was just adding salt to an already painful, wide open wound.

While Mateo and Serif were trying to talk things out, Leona was turning her head between them like a tennis match spectator, working the problem in her head. “What of hers am I wearing?”

“What?” Mateo didn’t understand.

She started pointing to her clothes. “I’ve got Lincoln’s belt, and Aura’s engagement ring. What did Serif give me so that I wouldn’t forget her when Arcadia tears her from time? If she’s really always been here, then I should have something.”

They frowned at the sad puppy. “Your ear.”

“What?” She felt her ears with her fingers, finding an earring on one that Serif’s great great grandmother had passed down through the generations. Paige had been given the other.

“I don’t remember this at all.” Her world had been turned upside down.

“It’s okay, love,” Mateo tried to comfort her.

“How could I forget? I am spawn. If she’s here, and I supposedly have her totem on my ears, why can I not remember?”

“Maybe it’s not working,” Mateo suggested, “or Arcadia found a way to alter that.”

“The totems were meant to have sentimental value. Maybe my connection to Leona just...isn’t strong enough?”

“That can’t be true,” Mateo said dismissively. It couldn’t be. “You love each other.”

“We do?” Leona asked.

“Oh yeah, it’s, uh...”

Leona was being impatient. “Mateo.”

“Well...”

“Mateo, are we polyamorous?”

Serif took the reigns. “We are, yes. At least...we were. I guess we won’t be needing the privacy hut tonight.”

“No, probably not,” Mateo agreed. “But we do need sleep. Obviously we’re all tired. Now, I’m not saying you’ll suddenly get your memories back overnight, but we should rest and deal with it in the morning. We shouldn’t try to argue with Arcadia after the day we had.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” Serif said.

In the middle of an awkward breakfast wherein they discovered that none of the other island dwellers could remember Serif either, Arcadia teleported in.

“I hear you’re having some trouble,” she said, impersonating a repairman.

“I’m the only one who can remember Serif,” Mateo complained.

“Uhuh,” was all Arcadia said.

“Did you make a mistake?” Serif asked. “Did you take their memories, but forget to actually take me?

She was reluctant to answer, so she avoided it. Instead, she pointed to three of them. “You, you, and you. Come with me right now.”

“Why is Lincoln going with them? Mario asked.

“And why am I not?” Leona questioned.

Arcadia drew closer to Leona. “This is one of those times when what I say is law, and you questioning that can hurt you real bad. Stay here until I tell you otherwise.”

Leona was not afraid. “Okay.”

Mateo, Serif, Lincoln, and Arcadia all stood in a circle just inside of the treeline. The first three waited for the fourth to say something. They could still see the rest of the group eying them from the fire pit.

Finally, Arcadia spoke, “Lincoln, did you have something to do with this?”

“What?” he asked defensively. “No. Why? How?”

“Where is your art project?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said with feeble shrug.

Arcadia pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes. “I know what you were doing with that thing. I didn’t put a stop to it, because I was totally all right with it. Kivi’s disappearance from history was not part of my plan, and I was rooting for you, Lincoln, but it looks like you screwed up.

Lincoln looked Serif over head to toe.

“Yeah, she does look a little like her,” Arcadia said, overexaggerating a head nod. “But not quite enough, huh?”

“Well, I was working from memory. I’m not The Artist, ya know. I was hoping to contact him so he could cut the detail for me.”

“Can someone tell me what’s happening?” Mateo implored them. “What does Kivi have to do with all this?”

“When you went back to the Hitler Tribulation, you altered the timeline. Slightly. That expiation both created Angelita...and destroyed Kivi. Mister Rutherford here was trying to remedy the situation.”

“Lincoln?” Mateo asked simply.

“It was meant to be a gift. When she was ready. When I was...done. I was gonna call The Artist to bring the statue to life, so you could have your daughter back.”

Mateo looked to Arcadia. “Is this possible?”

“It’s what he does,” Arcadia confirmed, “our father.”

“He’s your father?” Serif asked.

“He’s our creator,” she corrected. “He can create entire people; souls, minds, even memories. At one time, he and the Curator had a whole crew of people managing the timeline on a metaphysical level. Then they all left. But those jobs still needed doing. Unfortunately, it was literally impossible to recruit anyone else, so Athanaric Fury took his tools, and built me and my siblings out of clay. Then he gave us life, along with the powers we would need to act as a skeleton crew for The Gallery. Then we were thrown out of The Gallery as well, including Fury. He built the body that my brother, Zeferino ended up stealing. That’s why he had so many different powers, because it was Fury’s last attempt at protecting the timeline from people—well, from people like my brother. And my sister. And me.”

Serif was uncomfortable and worried. “Are you saying that Lincoln failed to make a good enough Kivi...and they ended up with me?”

“Sorry, kid. I know that’s not something anyone wants to hear.”

“So I’m not real.”

“Of course you’re real.” Arcadia was confused. “How do you think Leona has your earring? You had a real effect on history, I’m impressed.”

“I wasn’t born, though. I was just...made. Do I even have a brain, or a heart, or skin? Is this skin?” She started pulling at the skin of her own arm.”

“Serif, stop it!” Mateo yelled.

“Why? I’m not a person. Just a big block of...rock! I don’t know what he used, what did you use? Marble? Granite? What species am I?”

“You’re the same species as Kivi was,” Arcadia answered calmly.

“What?”

“Lincoln knew that Fury could give life to the Kivi statue, because he had done it before. I don’t know why, but I kind of think she was supposed to be a gift for you, even then. Lincoln remembers that, so he was trying to repeat it.”

“I don’t know The Artist’s original intentions,” Lincoln added, “but she didn’t have a past either. She was about a month old when you two first met.”

“Well,” Arcadia said. “The first time you met her.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh yeah, you ran into her on this island. She didn’t know why she was there, so you took her to the Archivist, who reset the timeline far back enough to delete her. I guess she had shown up too early? I dunno, that’s not really my responsibility anymore.”

“Can we get back to me, please?” Serif asked. “What’s going to happen? Are you going to erase me?”

“Do you want me to erase you?”

“Of course not.”

She shrugged. “I don’t really think I need to. I wouldn’t tell the others what you are, though, if you plan on staying. They’re already gonna have a hard enough time accepting you as it is.”

“What can we tell them?” Lincoln wondered.

“Whatever you were gonna tell them before I came here. You have memories of her, right?” she asked Mateo. “And you have your own memories?” she rhetorically asked Serif. “So just go from there. You can say that someone else messed with the timeline, or you can just blame me. It honestly doesn’t matter to me. I just need to know, Lincoln, how you contacted Fury.”

“I didn’t,” Lincoln replied with an honest tone. “I was going to, sure. But I hadn’t made it that far. Like we said, she doesn’t look quite close enough to Kivi.”

“Well, how were you planning to get in touch with him? You don’t have what you need here on Tribulation Island.”

Lincoln just stared at her with his hands in his pockets.

“Oh my God, you were gonna go Bill and Ted on me?”

“What is that?” Mateo asked. They were asking a lot of questions today.

“Retroactive preparation. It’s when you plan to go back in time and do something you can’t do right now. It creates an ontological paradox, which is dangerous as shit.”

“Not if you frame it right, which is something I know how to do,” Lincoln argued.

“Obviously not, or we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

He shook his head. “No, something else is going on here. Maybe I could one day screw this up, but the Artist wouldn’t. There must be a reason. Serif is supposed to exist,” he said before repeating himself directly to her. “Serif, you’re supposed to exist.”

“That’s comforting,” Serif lied.

“Well, no one has been taken out of time today,” Lincoln changed the subject. “Unless you’ve found a way to erase my memories too.”

“No. I was planning on letting you grieve for your loss yesterday. Every single player needed to cross the threshold, Mateo, not just you. I can’t bring Nestor back.”

“We figured,” Mateo said sadly. Through all this drama, they didn’t give themselves the time to be disappointed in themselves for having failed one of the expiations.

“If it’s any consolation, he was a screw up in his own right,” she explained. “His family kept loving him, despite his many mistakes; no one more than his sister, but he never felt like he deserved their forgiveness.”

Mateo nodded. “I can relate.”

Arcadia turned her head like she had heard her name being called. “Oh, I don’t want to be here for this. But good luck.”

“Good luck with what?” What was going on?

“Not even I can stop them from taking you, and I’ve learned not to piss them off.” She disappeared.

“Lincoln, do you have any idea what she’s talking about?” Mateo asked.

“I think maybe that,” Serif said, pointing towards the jungle.

They turned their heads to find a door sticking out of the ground, completely out of place.

“What the hell is that?”

Vearden Haywood opened it from the other side. “Come with me if you want to live,” he said in a thick fake accent. “Nah, I’m just playin’.” After another pause, he added, “but I am gonna need your clothes.”

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 23, 2108

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The first thing that Mateo’s once-mother, Aura Gardner wanted to do was start planning the wedding. She barely let Leona and Mateo tell her the good news before her mind started racing with the color scheme and guest list. All Mateo could think of was how ridiculous that list would be. Leona, however, truest voice of reason, pointed out that it was no time to start preparations. “The average duration of an engagement,” she said in her teacher tone, “was about fourteen-point-five months when we first left our time period. I believe it has gone down since then, but still, that’s several centuries away from now for us.”

“You’re not seriously going to wait hundreds of years to tie the knot, are you?” Aura asked, horrified.

“Of course not,” Mateo said, realizing how normal it was for someone to be playing referee between their parent, and their love interest.

Leona put her foot down. “I’m not going to get married tomorrow just because that’s a whole year for everyone else.”

“No one is saying that either, honey.”

“We’ve never called each other honey. Don’t start now just because of the engagement. Marriage is a logical step, not a transformation of the relationship.”

“She’s right,” Aura agreed. “I mean about the wedding date. Not about her thoughts on relationship dynamics. I don’t know anything about that. I just got overexcited. I get overexcited. You need to take all the time that you need to take. We all understand.”

Leona took a deep breath and composed herself. “It won’t be in four hundred years, though, I promise you that. I just need time. It doesn’t just take months to do the actual planning. A lot of emotional exercises need to be completed.”

“We understand,” Mateo said, and in order to lighten the mood, he added, “honey.”

“Congratulations,” Horace Reaver said to them.

“Yeah, what he said,” Gilbert Boyce added playfully.

The four of them were the strangest group of people fate had ever brought together. Horace and Leona were married to each other in an alternate reality. Then he went back in time, unwittingly entering a reality where she fell in love with Mateo instead. Due to his anger, he tormented and chased after them, creating a tumultuous relationship with Gilbert along the way, and ultimately murdering him. Then Gilbert came back to life as an extremely powerful temporal manipulator, and began to torment Mateo as well, but for different reasons, while under the influence of another person’s soul, and at the behest of an even more evil person.

Gilbert later assisted Mateo in going back in time and killing Adolf Hitler earlier than he was supposed to die, which created a third reality where Mateo was never born, Leona was raised by the couple who were previously Mateo’s adoptive parents—which prevented her from having the chance to meet either Mateo or Horace—and Horace had no memory of their time against each other either. He grew up to become a better person, eventually falling in love with a man named Serkan Demir, who recently sacrificed himself to save pretty much the entire universe. And now they were all friends, their respective memories intact, and presumably all water under the bridge. Congratulations, was not a word he would have expected to hear from either one of these two outside of sarcastic sentiment. But here they were, happy for their loved ones' new lives, even amongst all this death and destruction.

Mateo thought about how, if they were able to learn to love each other, then maybe anything was possible. Maybe everything was going to be all right after all. “How are you holding up?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” Horace said truthfully. “Ask me again in three months, and he will have been gone longer than it was that I even knew him.”

“I don’t like missing your grieving process.” Leona placed a comforting hand on his shoulder, which he pressed against with his cheek. “I wanna be there for you.”

“We both do,” Mateo emphasized.

“It would be worse in reverse,” Horace commented. “Imagine a loved one’s loved one dying, but only seeing the survivor once a year while you move on faster.”

“I remember that,” Leona said, referring to the period of time shortly after Mateo’s parents’ deaths. It was years for her, but only days for him.

Horace slapped his hands together. “Let’s stop rehashing the past. It’s a new day; a new year! We should be celebrating. You two are finally freaking getting married!”

“Hear hear!” Gilbert cried, holding up an imaginary champagne flute.

Shortly after Horace and Serkan met, they encountered a young girl named Paige Turner. She accidentally accompanied them through a time portal, and ended up stranded in the 21st century. With no way of returning home—and no desire to—she remained in their care, as a surrogate daughter. That was decades ago, and though she looked younger than Mateo and Leona, she was practically an old woman. At the moment, she was walking up the beach with a girl who appeared to be anywhere between fifteen and twenty-eight, but she could have been older than all of them combined for all he knew.

“What are we celebrating?” Paige asked, noticing that they had all raised imaginary flutes.

“Hello, my dear,” Horace said. “These two are engaged to be married.”

“How lovely,” Paige said. “However, this is Kivi.”

The girl, who was apparently named Kivi, did an actual real-life curtsy, completely unironically.

“What do you mean, however?” Gilbert asked.

“I can’t speak for you, Leona,” Paige said, “but I would take a beat to consider marrying someone if I found out he had a kid.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Mateo Matic, meet your daughter, Kivi Bristol.”

“That’s insane, I don’t have a daugh—” Oh, no. Time travel. Time travel made everything weird and confusing. It was entirely possible that he had a child. She could be from the future, or the other reality, or by some other weird temporal power that he wasn’t even aware of. He was just about to accept her, knowing that understanding her was not a prerequisite to loving her, when he remembered something. “Bristol. I knew a Bristol.” He reached far into his memory banks. Way back when he was just a young one, Mateo spent a little time as a restaurant delivery boy. It wasn’t a biker bar, or anything, but their schtick was delivery via motorcycle, and so that’s what he did. He met a lot of interesting characters during that time, just as he had in other driving jobs, but one of them stood out. She was a very tall redhead with only her left ear pierced. She carried two cell phones with her, but he eventually learned that only one of them worked. The other was to make people think she was a federal agent, or something fascinating like that. She was always messing with people’s heads.

She was the personal assistant to this fellow who patented a singular and relatively small technological advancement that most calculators were using at the time. This allowed him to be filthy rich, and not have any responsibilities. He had always wanted someone to follow him around and do whatever he said, so that was her job. He also had this thing where he ate the same thing, from the same restaurant, every other day. It was always to be delivered at exactly 2:16 in the afternoon. She even stopped having to call it in, because Mateo just wrote it up on the staffing shift schedule whiteboard. It was on these runs, which occurred during the slowest time of the restaurant, where he got to know her. He told her about his dreams of becoming a hollywood stunt driver, and she talked about her dreams of being the first lawyer on Mars. No, she had no real interest in practicing law, nor any plans to apply to law school. And she knew that Mars colonization was a long ways off. But she hated attainable dreams. If you could actually do something, she would say, then why the hell wouldn’t you just do it?

Several months into the routine, her boss died from a heart attack, she moved away in order to live close to a summit named Bitch Mountain, New York—for what she referred to as “obvious reasons”—and Mateo grew tired enough of his job to just quit. And in all that time, after all those romcom movie moments, there was one very specific thing that didn’t happen. Not once did the two of them have sex. He would have remembered that. “Eseosie is your mother?”

“She was, yes,” Kivi answered.

“Eseosie Bristol,” Mateo confirmed.

“Literally the one and only.”

“Shock Bristol was your mother?” Mateo asked, using a nickname of hers he had never quite figured out.

“That’s right.”

“I can’t be your father then. Not that I’ve met any other Bristol anyway, but it simply can’t be me. She and I...”

“Were never intimate?” Kivi finished, clearly not afraid to discuss sex with a man she believed to be her father.

“We weren’t...no.”

“I know. She’s told me the names of every single person she’s ever been with. Yes, I am aware of how strange my childhood was. But believe me when I tell you that I know for a fact you didn’t make the list. I don’t understand either, but that doctor guy told us that he ran a DNA test.”

“Doctor Sarka?” Leona asked.

“Yeah, that was it,” Kivi replied.

“Gilbert,” Leona began, “do you have any way of contacting him?”

“I have a pager,” Horace piped up instead. “I’ll go look for it.” He started running off, but then stopped. He either realized that the moment did not require urgency...or running reminded him of his late husband, Serkan.

“Thanks,” Leona called out to him.

Mateo looked at her with his sad puppy dog eyes.

She looked back. “Stop freaking out. We’re still getting married. What kind of person do you think I am?”

A few hours later, salmon doctor, Baxter Sarka teleported to them and confirmed that Kivi Bristol was indeed Mateo’s daughter. It was just that no one knew how. If she had been conceived in an alternate reality, how would she be here now? Mateo wasn’t even ever born in this timeline. There were other forces at play, and Mateo couldn’t be sure whether that was good, or bad. The debate was not able to last past the day, though. When Mateo woke up the next day in 2109, he was in an incredibly rustic cabin, complete with no running water, heat, or power. He stepped out of this sort of door thing and looked around. The beach and treeline looked familiar, this was definitely Tribulation Island, but everything else was gone. None of the buildings that The Constructor, Baudin had built for them were anywhere to be found. He started asking people what was going on, but no one knew what the hell he was talking about. They had no memory of anyone named Baudin, nor of these supposed buildings. Something was wrong.

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