Microstory 2587: Renata Realizes That if Her Mother Wants the Device, She Shouldn’t Have It

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Renata realizes that if her mother wants the device, she shouldn’t have it. For a moment, they stand there awkwardly. Each Granger is trying to figure out what the other one is going to do without saying anything, which might give away their own respective plans. Polly shifts his eyes between them, making his own decisions, if he’s even capable of that. Renata helped him realize that he wasn’t going to die, but does that mean they’re the same? She has clearly been heading towards her own epiphany for a while now, but Libera must have done something to make that happen, and it doesn’t appear that she did the same for Polly. Still, he seems to have some sense of what should happen here. He reaches into his pocket, and tosses the car keys into the air, not even towards Renata. As he does so, he says, “go. I’ll hold her off for you.”

Renata starts running, catching the keys mid-bound. She can hear the two robots fighting each other as she’s getting into the car. She ignites it, and backs out. He already pulled off most of the brush, but the rest needs to fall off the hood. She starts driving towards the two of them. Just like Quidel before, even without them having to speak, Polly just knows what she’s thinking. After grappling with Libera this whole time, he changes tactics, and shoves her away from him, stepping back to get clear. Renata slams into her mother who isn’t really her mother, then stops. “Get in!”

“Just go!” Polly urges.

“Get in!” she repeats.

Polly reluctantly gets into the passenger seat, and lets Renata drive off. “I’m the driver here.”

“Not today, you’re not,” Renata claps back.

He looks over his shoulder. “She’s not there.”

“What?”

“She’s not behind us,” Polly clarifies. “She’s not on the ground, or even standing up. I don’t see her.”

Libera’s face suddenly appears at the driver’s side window. Despite never having thought she was strong enough to punch through a window before, Renata knows herself better now. She may not understand it, but just believing in her own power has to be enough. She smashes right through the glass, tipping Libera’s chin on the follow-through. Libera has to let go with her left hand, but manages to hold on with her right. She’s being dragged on the ground as Renata pulls the car onto the paved highway.

“I’m not going to hurt you!” Libera cries. “We’re not on opposite sides. Let me explain!”

“I can’t trust you!” Renata argues. “You’ve been lying to me my whole life!”

“I’ve not been your mother your whole life! I replaced a different model only a few years ago!”

“That makes it better?” Renata jerks the car to the left, and then the right as fast as she can, trying to shake Libera off. It doesn’t work.

“The intelligences in this dome built something that was never made before, because it’s not legal! I didn’t come here for it, though! I came here for you! I’m trying to help you! I’m trying to free you all! Let me show you. All I need to do is hold my left hand up to Polly’s face!”

“You’ll do no such thing!” Renata sees that Libera has been holding on to the door, instead of some other part of the car. That is a weak spot. Hoping that it doesn’t go beyond the limits of her strength, she lifts her left foot, and slams it against the door. It snaps off of its hinges, and falls down on the road, taking Libera with it.

“I can’t believe you just literally kicked your mother out of the car,” Polly muses.

“Renata looks in the rearview mirror, watching as Libera stands up and starts to dust herself off. “She’ll be fine.”

“She knows where we’re going. She knows the protocol.”

“There’s another town not too far from it, which will probably have a payphone too. We don’t have to call from a specific one.”

Polly nods. “I don’t really, um...get what’s going on. With the whole, you know...”

“I don’t either,” Renata assures him. “But that well has run dry. Quidel wants to tell me the truth. He tried to explain at the bank, but he knew that I wasn’t ready to hear it. I need to speak with him without my fake mother breathing down our necks.”

Polly nods again, and waits for his next question. “She said something about us being in a dome?”

Renata looks in her rearview mirror again. There is no telling how powerful Libera is. She could be as fast as a car. She depresses the accelerator more out of fear. “Yeah, I don’t know what that means, but it sounds really apocalypty, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. It does.”

They continue to drive down the highway, not running into any more trouble. They turn left instead of right. The other town is sixteen kilometers away, instead of nine, but it’s not the one they agreed on going to, so it’s safer. Unless Libera realizes that they might do that, and is expecting them to show up there. But if she can’t run as fast as a car, she’s going to need to find some mode of transportation. Oh, shit. The Javelotians. They were obviously not stupid enough to drive right up to the cabin in a loud vehicle, but it’s probably not far away, and if Libera has had half the kind of training Renata expected to have from the NSD, it would not be hard for her to find it.

They come to another fork in the road. The next big city is a hundred kilometers away. That’s where Renata would have taken the device had she been on the other team. If anyone started to suspect that one of them was a decoy, they would probably postulate that the real one was moving in the opposite direction. That just makes sense. So a good strategy might be to just take it farther down the road from where the decoy is heading. It’s the last place they would look. Maybe. If she’s wrong, and she drives a hundred kilometers out of the way, it will delay their reunion. But then again, that might be a good thing. If Libera gets her hands on a phone, they won’t respond to her. There’s a reason they put her on the decoy team. McWilliams doesn’t trust her either, so she doesn’t have a passphrase. Only Renata does. Only she can make contact. “Strap in, Polly. It’s gonna be a long trip.” She turns left again.

Castlebourne Capital Community: The Man Who Refused To Die (Part III)

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The Castlebourners were mad, and they had every right to be. Dreychan didn’t commit a cardinal sin, but he did screw up. As soon as the rest of the council was arrested for conspiracy to commit murder, he should have addressed the people. He knew how to do that. At any one time, they were spread all over the world, but he had the means of contacting them separately from all the visitors. These visitors mostly didn’t know that the refugees were from 16,000 light years away as that went against everything they understood about physics and space colonization. The lie that they spread about a closer empire was weak at best, but it was the only lie they had. At some point, the full truth about time travel was probably going to get out to the general public, but for now, Dreychan should have used the news bulletin protocol. But. It had only been one day, and it didn’t spell the destruction of the whole planet, so everyone just needed to chill out.

He finally escaped the angry crowd of wannabe journalists, and ducked into the council chambers. His speech to them wasn’t half bad, if he could be so bold as to evaluate it himself. Perhaps they felt otherwise, or this was just such a crazy situation that no one knew what to think, or how to react. He took a deep breath as he leaned his head against the door, still hearing them rabble rabble in the corridor. No one else was allowed in here. He used to dread coming to this room, now it had become his one place of respite. How had things changed so much in only a matter of a few days? He breathed through the inner turmoil, and turned back around. “Who are you?”

The elderly woman wearing what appeared to be a robot costume stepped forward, and extended a hand. “Yunil Tereth, big fan.”

“How did you get in here?” Dreychan questioned. “It’s DNA coded.”

“Twins have the same DNA. My sister was on the Council. I always could have walked in here. I just never had the occasion.”

“Who could possibly be your twin sister?” There were some fairly old people on the Council, but none of them quite this old. He was surprised that she could even stand up on her own.

“Lubiti. Now, I know what you’re thinking...why don’t we have the same last name?” She giggled. “We never really got along, so when we chose our names, we deliberately distanced ourselves.”

“I was actually thinking...” Was it offensive to bring up her age?

She giggled again. “When I heard the news, I was in Perspectidome, where you spend time in someone else’s proverbial shoes, to better understand what their life would be like. This is only a temporary substrate. Thank God I chose to make it my older self, instead of just any old lady, so my DNA works. Pay no attention to the outfit. My character had a backstory that was out of my control.”

“Okay. Well. You’ll forgive me if I don’t tell you anything since I can’t really place my trust in that. When it comes to mind transfer, you can’t trust anyone. That’s one reason why I stayed normal. I’m always me.”

Yunil nodded. “I understand. We can meet again, with me in my own body. I decided not to take the time to transfer back before coming here now, because my usual face is...”

“Infamous now?” he guessed.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll tell you what. I don’t know what you want, and I believe it’s best not to say at this time. Next time I see you, I not only want you to look like Lubiti, but I want to see you two at the same time. She’ll confirm if you’re real or not. She’ll know if you’re just a liar in a meatsuit.”

“Fair enough,” Yunil agreed.

“I assume you have my contact card?”

“I do.”

“Send me yours so we can coordinate. I have to reach out to schedule visitation.”

“I’ll do that.” She started tapping on her device. “Also, can I go out the back?”

“Go ahead.” While she was leaving, Dreychan pulled out his own device. Her contact card came through while he was navigating to Azad’s. He took a moment to think about what he wanted to write. Good morning, Dominus Petit, I—

“What’s up?”

Dreychan spun around to find another surprise guest. “Dominus. I was just writing to you.”

“I know,” Azad replied. “I get an alert whenever anyone so much as opens my card.”

“That’s...a little frightening.”

“It’s a security thing. We need to know who’s thinking about us in case it’s an assassin, or something worse.”

“I see.”

“There is a workaround. What you do is take a photo of the card using another device, and consult the image whenever you want. Don’t just take a screenshot, though, because I, uh, get alerted when that happens too. This works for anyone with a spy-ping trigger.”

“That’s good to know.”

They stood there awkwardly for a moment. “The trigger doesn’t alert me to the reason you were looking me up, though,” Azad went on.

“Oh, right, sorry.” Dreychan gestured towards the back door. “I was just visited by a...old woman who claimed to be Lubiti’s twin sister, but just in a different substrate. I can’t verify that, so I need to speak with Lubiti sooner than I expected to ask her about it. And I would like this Yunil to be present.”

Azad narrowed his eyes at him. “You spoke with her here? Please tell me you were stupid enough to let her in, and not that she walked in herself.”

“It was the second one.”

Azad sighed as he started tapping on his wrist device. “I’m choosing to believe that the sister is okay, but if she breached using her shared DNA with Lubiti, it clearly means that Lubiti could come back in as well. Presumably, so could any other former member of the Council. Even if they’re locked up, that is a huge security flaw that we’ll need to cover. I’m sorry, I can’t grant visitation, to you or her sister, until we figure this out. For all we know, this whole thing has been a plot to break her out, and clearly, that could cause problems. I’ll call you with updates as appropriate.”

“That makes perfect sense. Do what you gotta do, and take your time.” After Azad disappeared, Dreychan also slipped out the back, and headed for the senior vactrain hub, which he now had access to thanks to his higher status on the Council. The reporters wouldn’t be able to follow him there, so it was another source of protection from the onslaught of questions, though a sterile and boring one. They shouldn’t be able to accost him at home either, but perhaps that too was unsafe. There were plenty of places to sleep here. He could apply for a temporary unit in Overdome maybe. That was so weird and random, no one would think to look for him there. “Yunil?”

She looked up from her device. “Oh, hello again. Just waiting for my train.”

“Oh.” Super awkward.

“Oh no, what happened?”

He couldn’t say anything. If he explained what Azad just said about the access flaw, it might give her an idea that she didn’t have before! Argh, no! Get him out of here!

Yunil smiled knowingly. “You don’t have to tell me anything. If you’re not busy, perhaps you can accompany me back to Perspectidome, where my real body is waiting for me? I’m not thinking that that will be enough to get you to trust me, but if you see the records which prove that it’s my primary, maybe that gets us one step closer to trust.”

“I suppose I have nothing better to do.” The train zipped through the tube before them, and the doors opened. The both of them stepped onto it, and let it take them away. They were alone in the pod, which was good. This time was usually busy with people coming and going, but the council shake up must have rippled across the population, and altered other people’s personal schedules. It wasn’t long before they were at their destination. Dreychan looked around, confused. “We didn’t have to stop at a Conjunction. I didn’t know that was ever a thing.”

“Don’t need one, with that handsome face of yours. You’re now not only a senior traveler, but an executive senior traveler. Every train has become an express train. We probably did go through a Conjunction, but we didn’t have to stop and switch tracks. And yes, Perspectidome is relatively close.”

The doors reopened, and let them out. They proceeded to the intake plaza, where Yunil informed the bot that she was picking her primary substrate back up. They processed her biometrics, and let them into the transfer room. “This is the weird part.”

“What’s weird about it?” Dreychan asked. “Besides everything?” He knew very little about how all this body switching stuff worked, and didn’t care to know. She could tell him that a microscopic creature was going to crawl out of her ear, and into the one of the body she was trying to move to, and he would believe it, because he really just did not know.

“This body isn’t just temporary. It’s disposable, and is actually required to be disposed of. It’s going to melt, which might be unsettling to watch.”

Dreychan stared at her. “If you’re going to disrobe, I’m not going to be watching anyway.”

She laughed. “No, the clothes are biosynthetic, so they’ll just melt too.”

“Still, I don’t think I’ll watch.”

“I can appreciate that.” She pointed at the side door. “My primary is in that room. It is unclothed, but it looks nicer, and it’s not going to melt. You can wait for me there.”

He went into the other room to find a motionless body that looked just like Lubiti. It was floating in this big vertical tube against the wall, in some kind of bubbly amber fluid. Within minutes, her eyes popped open. She took a moment to get her bearings before settling into eye contact with Dreychan. She smiled at him kindly before reaching down and turning some kind of wheel on the floor. The fluid started to drain away. Once the tube was empty, she slid the hatch open and climbed out.

Dreychan had noticed a towel sitting folded on the table between them. He picked it up now, and tried to hand it to her.

She smiled wider now. “I have to wash up first. It’s basically amniotic fluid.” She glided over to the shower, which didn’t even have a curtain. So he wouldn’t keep staring, he went over to the machines, and started looking at the various components, as if his observations alone would give him any understanding of how they worked.

“It’s okay,” she said while she was still in there. “I switched on the holo-partition.”

He looked back over, but it was a lie.

“Sorry! I’m a bit of a trickster.” Yunil did this weird hand gesture where she tapped the tip of her own fingers with her thumb and flicked her wrist a little. The hologram appeared now. It was rather translucent, and barely tall enough to cover the important bits, but he didn’t want to argue anymore, so he just kept his eyes on hers. “Don’t be so uptight. You treat your own body as a vital part of you, but for people like me, it’s just a husk. You don’t cry for your clipped fingernails, do you? I’ve met people who look like rabbits, mythological creatures, and even machines. There’s a dome here where you transfer your mind to a vehicle, and drive. It feels like you are the vehicle, not like you’re just sitting in one.”

“I don’t cry for my nails,” Dreychan explained, “but my body is not something I can lose. It would be more like the body loses me. We call that death.”

“Well, that’s your first problem. You see death as inevitable. The vonearthans see it as an anachronism.” She sighed. “I’m gonna have to walk through the hologram to reach the towel.”

He looked away again.

“Oh my God,” she said. “It’s not me. It’s her. Do you have a thing for her?”

He took one little peek. The towel was now keeping her covered. “She was nice to me. It’s over now.”

“I’m nice to you, and that’s not over.”

“What are you saying?”

“Drey—”

“Please don’t call me that.”

“Okay.” She didn’t see it as a big deal. “Your video was leaked, did you not know that?” She opened a drawer, and pulled out a set of clothes, which she set on the counter between them.

“Of me in 2.5Dome? No, I am indeed aware of that. Many of the reporters’ questions had to do with how I survived the ordeal.”

“You don’t understand. No one has ever made it through that whole game in one go. It’s only supposed to be for people like me, for whom death is but a temporary setback. The loudest people are mad that you didn’t make your announcement right away, but most of us are extremely impressed, and that is quickly overshadowing any resentment we feel about the lack of immediate transparency. I came to you because I wanted to meet the man who refused to die. I wanted to meet the man who my sister underestimated. You want my body, you can have it. You want me to jump to another one, and have that instead, just say the word.”

“That’s not what this is about for me. I don’t feel emotions for bodies. I feel them for people. And we just met.”

“We can take it slow,” she said with a shrug as she tossed her towel into the material reclamator, and started slipping on the outfit. “But maybe not too slow. After all...if you’re planning on dying in less than a century, you better get on it. You don’t have as many opportunities to find happiness as almost everyone else in this part of the galaxy. I admire that in people like you, but...not if you take it for granted.”

“I don’t need you to feel any particular way about me. I just want you to tell me what you really want. And don’t say it’s just about sex. I don’t believe that.”

“You told me you didn’t want me to tell you yet.”

“I changed my mind.”

She nodded. “I’m part of a group.”

“Oh, shit.” That word. His brain instantly associated it with other, less innocuous ones, like rebellion, insurgency, or traitor.

“Don’t be like that. We’re not violent. We’re connoisseurs of Earthan history. Ya know, our ancestors were grown in test tubes by a madman, who stole them from a ship, which originated in the Gatewood Collective, and whose passengers were once refugees from another universe, which were the descendants of runaways...from Earth. Yes, our peoples have a longer history of fleeing oppression and strife than you might know. But while we don’t call ourselves vonearthan, we are all technically sourced from there. My group studies the homeworld, because we believe it is the absolutely most important aspect of our lives, now that we even know it exists. I came to you, Dreychan, because if you want to know how to formulate the new government of Castlebourne, you have a perfectly good model to base it on. Earth spent thousands of years trying to figure it out. Don’t reinvent the wheel. My friends and I will show you what works. It’s been working for centuries. That’s how they were able to build this paradise.”

“Hrockas built it to get away from Earth.”

“No, he was assigned this planet because while it is naturally barren, it’s stable, gravitationally healthy, and the host star is relatively similar to Sol. Its distance from the Core Worlds is the product of cosmic statistical probability, not a design feature.”

“What are you trying to say now?” He was getting confused.

“Don’t think that you need to rebuild the Council back to how it was. You might not even need a council. All I’m saying is get yourself educated before you start making any decisions. I’m here to give you whatever you need, and I don’t just mean access to my body. My brain is pretty great too.”

Dreychan’s watch beeped, so he checked the notification. “No more express trains for you. You’ve been locked out of government privileges. Or rather, Lubiti was.”

Yunil rolled her eyes. “DNA locks are so stupid anyway. All I need is one hair, and I can grow a passing clone in a matter of months without setting off any alarm bells. It should be brainwave-locked. I know they have that technology. You should demand it.”

Dreychan breathed deeply. “I still can’t trust you. We need to set up that meeting with your so-called sister.”

She chuckled. “That’s not the first time she’s been called that. I call her that. And yeah, I’m down for the meeting whenever. I cancelled all future dome trips, so I’ll just be sitting at home whenever you’re ready. I will be able to leave at a moment’s notice.”

“I’ll talk to my contact again,” Dreychan said. “But right now, I’m exhausted, so I think I’m gonna go home. Maybe we don’t share a train again?”

She shook her head. “We’re not going to the same place anyway. I live in Underbelly.”

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Microstory 2584: Renata Rushes up to Match her Mother’s Stride as They Escape the Bank

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Renata rushes up to match her mother’s stride as they escape the bank. To be fair, she’s the one lugging this heavy thing around. They slip out the backdoor, and head for a black sedan. It’s not the car that Libera drove up with, and it has its own driver, which suggests that she was planning to make off with the device the whole time. But Renata is not going to confront her about this, because right now, they have a job to do. “How are you moving this fast?” she questions.

“You can move just as fast, dear, if not faster,” Libera replies as she ducks into the backseat, and uses hand gestures to urge her daughter to join her quickly. The car speeds off.

“Because I’m a robot?” Renata questions.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ren. You’re not a robot.”

“Where to, Madam?” the driver asked.

“Lightwood Safehouse,” Libera answers. A codename, no doubt.

They sit in silence for a moment.

“Don’t you have questions?” Libera poses.

“Did dad know?” Renata responds.

“No.”

“Did you get me into the NSD in the first place, or did you just get me the job at the bank?”

Libera doesn’t speak right away. “I never wanted this life for you, until you grew up. Well, I still didn’t necessarily want it, but I could see that it would be a great fit for you. You’re resourceful, intelligent, and you learn fast.”

“A little too fast,” Renata mumbles under her breath.

“What was that?”

“You thought my job would be safe? You really didn’t know about this thingamajig, and all the other stuff there?”

“I knew there were other things there, but they were supposed to be outdated, outmoded, obsolete, legacy innovations,” she says, almost amusingly repetitively.

“Why does the NSD keep an offsite bank for asset storage? Why aren’t they just stored somewhere in the basement of one of their own facilities.”

“It is an NSD facility. You’re asking why they use it as a front. It’s simple, really. The kind of activity you see at a dark storage site is the same as you’ll see at a normal bank. Strong locks, high security, enhanced surveillance, regular armored vehicles, loading and unloading. It’s unremarkable. You see that kind of thing at a bank, you shrug it off. You see it at a pet store, or a non-descript office building, you start asking questions. It’s not hard to track suspicious activity when you have enough data. That’s what NSD analysts do. They look through footage of our competing nations, and find clues based on atypical or unanticipated behavioral patterns at the city scale.”

“That’s why we’re doing this,” Renata says, making the connection. “We’re generating a narrative by exhibiting a pattern that our enemies are expecting. They were looking for people to walk out of that bank with purpose, carefully carrying a black duffel bag like this one. That’s why that truck has been following us since we left.”

“Nice spot, and that’s exactly right. They were predicting that we would try to sneak out the back with the asset to be as discreet as possible. We’re putting on a show, and clearly they’re watching on the edge of their seats.”

Renata sighs, and looks through the driver’s side window again at the truck that has been tailing them. “I wonder how the boys are doing.”

“We can’t know. Communicating with them would compromise the gambit.”

“I know.”

“You don’t have any more questions for me about my experience with the Division?”

“I don’t think I need your answers,” Renata starts to explain. “You can’t give me the specifics about your missions, and I’m already putting the pieces together in my head. A missed dance recital here, a hidden safe in your home office there. It all makes sense now. There’s not much I need to know that I can’t figure out on my own.”

Libera smiles. “This is why I got you the job at the bank, and why my superiors agreed to it. They wanted to keep an eye on you, yes. I wanted you to be fulfilled, yes. But the most important point is that, if I didn’t help you stay with us, you might go lend your services to someone else. It would be annoying if you wasted your time on the Domestic Affairs Bureau, or the local police, but truthfully, they were worried about you defecting to another country, or something. The bank was supposed to be fairly uneventful, but still engaging, since safety and security would be at the top of your priorities at all times. So while you weren’t expected to get into any fist fights or standoffs, it would still feel like work that matters. And it did matter. All banks serve a purpose. You’re not supposed to know what’s in the deposit boxes, whether you work at a front, or not.”

“I’m not mad. I understand your position. Like I was saying, this explains everything. I’m actually kind of relieved. You weren’t a bad mother...” She can’t believe she’s saying this. “...you’re a hero. If I could think of one decent reason to neglect your child, it would be to protect the whole country. How can I argue with that?”

Libera is smiling even wider now. “You continue to surprise me.”

Renata chuckles, then clocks the truck again. It’s getting closer, which means it might make a move soon. Their driver knows what he’s doing, so she’s not worried. More silence for a few minutes. “Did they really think I would defect?”

“Well, they didn’t think you would run off to Sclovo, or something, but maybe one of our strong allies, like Elbis or Pindor.”

“Well...I should be flattered.”

“I would.”

“They’re getting closer, ma’am,” the driver interjects.

“I see that. Scooch over,” she says to Renata. Once the space between them is clear, she turns the armrest down, and places her hand on the panel behind it. It glows in the shape of a hand as it checks her biometrics. The panel slides away so Libera can pull a rifle out. “Are you ready?”

“No.” Renata takes out a gun for herself. “But that hasn’t stopped me yet.”

Microstory 2583: Renata Unlocks the Safe Deposit Box, and Takes a Step Back, as Per Protocol

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Renata unlocks the safe deposit box, and takes a step back, as per protocol. She’s not even allowed to pull the box out, and set it on the table, which was apparently her first clue that this wasn’t a normal bank. Director McWilliams, despite being the one responsible for the box, doesn’t move either, probably because he’s the Director of the NSD, and he doesn’t pick things up. Quidel reaches over and takes it instead, setting it down on the table.

McWilliams looks around the room, likely to make sure that no one else can see or hear them. “I’m letting you three see this,” he begins, indicating Renata, Quidel, and Lycander, “because you have become intimately involved in this case. And Madam Granger is just here too. We are not out of the woods yet. Everyone wants to get their hands on this, and I’m going to need everyone’s cooperation and participation to make sure it stays safe. It’s obviously no longer safe here, so we need to find an alternative. Does everyone understand what I’m asking of you?” He checks for responses, and receives non-verbal ones.

“It’s a weapon?” Quidel probes.

“It’s not technically a weapon, but it can be weaponized.” McWilliams places his fingers on the latch. “This isn’t the only part of it, it’s just the part that counts. The delivery system could probably be jury-rigged. The core—the code—that’s unique, and it would be hard to crack the encryption or reverse engineer it, but not impossible.” He looks at them again to gauge their reactions.

“Get on with it, Aldwin,” Libera urges.

Unsure of all this, he sighs, but lifts the lid anyway. Inside is a radially symmetrical electronic device, mostly sleek metal black with blue glowing piping. It’s standing on short black legs that go all around the circumference on the bottom. The casing is matte, and it’s about the size of a football...or half a football, rather. It was humming when McWilliams opened the box, and it still is, but less so now, suggesting that it responds to movement or interference. “It’s inactive at the moment, but it’s always on. It’s powered by a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, also known as an RTG.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Quidel says. “It would constantly be radiating heat. You would have to ventilate it.”

“It is ventilated,” McWilliams claims as he’s pointing back to the safe in the wall.

Quidel leans down, and looks into it. “Hm. That does look like ventilation.”

“But what does it do?” Renata presses. This thing looks dangerous, and she’s been working right next to it for almost an entire year now. He says it’s not a weapon, but it certainly looks like it could be a bomb. He even called it a core. But he also said code. What the hell is it?

“It’s a technological infiltrator. It can break into any system, and plant its own code. You’re thinking, sure, a skeleton key. Not a big deal. The difference between this and similar devices is that this can spread across an entire city, and its surrounding areas, especially if you get it up high enough, and again, as long as you connect it to the right amplifier. That would be the easy part, though.”

“What would you want with this sort of thing? It sounds like it could only be disruptive and destructive,” Quidel points out.

McWilliams nods in understanding. “The labcoats came up with it as an extension of a system that the government was developing for a nationwide communication system, or even a global one. Imagine a seismic event is predicted within minutes of its onset. That’s nice to know, but only the people with access to the equipment are the ones who know it. We wanted to be able to warn everyone in the area. Of that, or a hurricane, or a military attack. The possibilities are endless. We have ways of calling every phone number under our purview, but you have to bother yourself by picking up your phone. And honestly, dealing with the competing carriers is a nightmare. This would allow us to reach every TV on sale in the window, every digital billboard, every radio transceiver. We could even send a message through someone’s electronic blood pressure cuff. It would connect to all these things and more, all at once, nearly instantaneously.”

“But it could do damage,” Lycander points out.

“That’s why I said it could be weaponized.” He gauges the room again. “I don’t owe any of you an explanation, but if you would like one, understand that we produced this with good intentions. We had no plans to deploy it against an enemy nation.”

“Maybe you didn’t,” Renata says, “but you’re not the only one in control of it.”

“That’s why it’s in the safe,” McWilliams explains. “We need the executive branch to turn leadership over to the next administration, who won’t see this as a weapon of war, or espionage. This place is supposed to be untouchable. If you open one of these boxes, you better have a good reason, because it could cost you your career.”

“Is this a good enough reason?” Lycander asks.

“It obviously needs to be moved, and I don’t trust anyone but you three to move it,” McWilliams insists.

“Why us? We’re just a couple of randos, and my boss,” Quidel says.

“That’s exactly why it has to be you, because your loyalties aren’t in question. You don’t know enough. You’ve not been in the game long enough to have established ties with bad actors. Your anonymity is to our advantage.”

“Where can we take it?” Lycander asks him.

“I have an idea or two,” Libera volunteers.

“No,” McWilliams replies firmly.

Microstory 2569: Second Voldisil

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I was the first Voldisil to step forward after Landis Tipton started the trend. Some of us have tried to reach out to him since, but he doesn’t seem interested. Or at least his people don’t, because they keep saying no. First of all, you have to understand that we are not superheroes. No one is flying around in the sky, or turning invisible, or shooting fire out of their hands. I know one young Voldisil who has access to certain information regarding what I’ll simplify and call the multiverse. Out there, on other worlds, there actually are people with some obvious and overt powers. They are usually the mutants, because the things that they can do are sourced from their bodies. There are also witches, who control their abilities via their minds, because something is special about their neurology. Their abilities can also be quite apparent, but still not as conspicuous as mutants. Voldisil belong to the third class, known as spirits. We’re not the only spirits in the multiverse, we’re just the ones who live here. Our gifts come from our souls. Yes, can confirm, souls are real. It’s not just an abstract synonym for the mind—it’s a separate thing, which completes the trinity that is a living being. Your soul is responsible for your emotions, and grants access to the fabric of the universe as it pertains to other living creatures. We’re all connected, and we make these connections through what essentially boils down to another dimension. And that brings me to what my Voldisil gift is. I can sense the spirit dimension. To put it another way, I can feel your soul, and I can tell how you’re linked to everyone else.

For the most part, Voldisil stick to themselves, unless they happen to meet someone who they feel they can trust with their truth, or someone who is also a Voldisil who feels a sufficient level of trust. As I’ve said, our gifts are not clear. They are abstract, ethereal, unreliable, and even vague. You can’t just film someone using their Voldisil gift, and send that footage to a news outlet. It would have been tough for any of us to prove what we could do. Landis found a way, but he only did it by using his gift—specifically, his healing ability—over and over again. If he had only done it once, most of you would have brushed it off as a stunt. If he had sprouted blue wings, and flown over a sports stadium, well, that would have been a different story. The rest of us couldn’t demonstrate in the way that he did. As a soul-searcher, I have been able to find other Voldisil, and have consensually built a sort of support network, which is unprecedented in history, to my knowledge. I don’t know how long Voldisil have been around, but I know where we come from, and I happily explained it in my book, which you can find for free in the link below. You should know that we are out there, but not all of us want to be in the public eye. Some that I have found didn’t even want to be part of the network, and we should all respect their wishes. We’ve been working to try to make the world a better place in our own small ways, and inspired by Landis, I hope we can ramp up our efforts to make far more substantive changes. But we can’t do it without your help. You have to want things to change. So let’s start a dialogue. We can’t knock a train over that’s about to hit a child stuck on the tracks, but we can help. We’re sorry to have kept you in the dark for so long, but we’re ready now. We’re listening now. What do you need?

Microstory 2555: Inhouse Lawyer

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Before I came here, I did not have any experience in healthcare law, or in nonprofit law. I applied to this job because I wanted some better work-life balance. My old firm was very demanding. It wasn’t arbitrary. We had a lot of big clients, who required constant aid, advice, and representation. The Foundation has had to overcome obstacles that no other organization ever has, and it’s my job to get them through it. The work they do here is unprecedented, and I know we all hear that a lot, but it’s absolutely true in this case. Pun intended. What Landis and the Director built here is nothing short of profoundly astonishing, and despite how massively popular it is among the general public, it also raised some eyebrows. Who are you? What led you to start something like this? What gives you the right? Why should your customers trust you? What do you mean some people don’t pay? What do you mean you pay some of them? How do we know it’s not a scam? Where’s your experience in healthcare? How do you find your customers? What are your criteria for accepting or rejecting an application? This is just a fraction of a fraction of the questions that I had to help the Foundation answer. It’s been the toughest challenge I’ve ever had, but it wasn’t stressful, because I believe in the cause. I’ve not always been able to say that about my clients, and my colleagues advise me not to feel that way, but come on, how can you not be a fan? I think, when you’re defending multiple clients, you can’t play favorites, but when it’s only the one, I don’t see any reason why I can’t see myself as just another important cog in the machine, rather than an outside associated party. Work has been steadily slowing down over the years. As we’ve become established, and the validity of the healings are hardly in question anymore, there aren’t so many more questions left. Mostly what we’re dealing with now is in regards to the panacea that the researchers are trying to synthesize from Mr. Tipton’s genes, or whatever it is that makes him work. I don’t represent the pharmaceutical company, but I did help broker the deal that led them to being the ones to advance this research, so we’re all obviously still involved. Everything will work out, though. If the panacea works, there is no way it doesn’t go through eventually. Don’t get me wrong, it’s more than just signing the right papers. Approval has been slow, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Very soon, you won’t have to leave your house to cure what ails you. I don’t know what will happen with the Foundation, or my job, but I can’t wait to find out.

Extremus: Year 113

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Audrey didn’t feel comfortable giving Tinaya the location of any secret consciousness transference technology which might be on the ship, and neither did Silveon when she asked him instead. Though with the latter, it seemed more like he didn’t know; like they didn’t discuss it before he time traveled, because it wasn’t relevant to his mission. He actually seemed rather perturbed at the implication that Audrey did know. For months, Tinaya let it go, and moved on to other things, but the situations with Waldemar and Thistle have only worsened, so these dark fantasies have continued to eat at her. She needs to get this solved, even if it interferes with the kids’ plans. Unfortunately, she’s not gotten much time to speak with Audrey discreetly.

“I know she told you,” Tinaya says.

“She didn’t tell me anything,” Silveon answers. She didn’t even have to clarify what she was talking about. He just knew right off the bat.

“Where is it?”

“You can’t transfer Thistle’s mind to Waldemar’s.”

“It would solve all of our problems.” Tinaya also didn’t tell them what she was planning to do with the tech, but they must have pieced it together.

“The human body would not be able to handle the data that Thistle contains.”

“That’s BS. AIs have been downloading their data into organic substrates for centuries.”

“Thistle is not a normal AI. You’re the one who told me that part of his memory isn’t even located in base reality.”

“That’s what he told me about it, but why can’t his Waldemar body access it from wherever it actually is, just as his servers do now?”

“Don’t ask me, this isn’t my field of research, but I don’t think it’s possible, based on the discussions I was a part of when we were working on the plan to send my mind back in time. They wanted to send multiple people into one body as a sort of amalgamated supersoldier, but it couldn’t be done. And anyway, why do you even need consciousness travel tech? Basic realtime mind transference should be in the central archives.”

“It’s not. They deliberately erased it before we launched. You should know that.”

“Sorry I didn’t study harder in school, mom. I was a little preoccupied. It must be in the Bridger Section somewhere, though. A trusted ally provided it for us, and I always assumed that’s where he got it. I didn’t ask questions, because compartmentalization.”

“I don’t know if you’re being cagey or ignorant, but son, I don’t like this side of you. To be clear, I still love you more than anything, but you still seem to think that this is your mission, and yours alone. You brought me into this, even if you had rather I stayed out of it. I may not be from the future, but I know things. And I know that this can work.”

“Consciousness overwrite was always a possibility, mother,” Silveon begins to explain. “It’s one of the plans that Audrey and I have not mentioned. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Back in the stellar neighborhood, where all the time travelers live, someone could have done it with a snap of their finger, like Nerakali Preston. Our version of the technology doesn’t just take one mind, and put it in someone’s body. It’s more like it holds it in place, and pushes it backwards in time. It stays in the same brain, just at a different point in history. You can overwrite an older Waldemar with himself, but not someone else...not Thistle. You might be able to modify it—I mean, someone theoretically could; not you specifically. I’m not going to help you with this, because it is not part of the plan. Audrey and I are on the same page with this one.”

“Well, at least you two are talking again. How nice for you.” That was too catty.

“I love you, mother.”

“I love you too, Silvy.”

Not long after Silveon leaves for work, Pronastus shows up. “Hello, Admiral. Would you like to take a walk with me?”

“I can’t right now,” Tinaya replies. It’s not really true. Lataran is liaising with the crew today, but she doesn’t want to think about anything but her objectives.

“I think you can. I think you need a break.” He starts to mumble, “I really think you should take a break.”

“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea,” Tinaya ultimately concedes, realizing where he’s going with this. He leads her farther towards the bow. The bridge, the engineering section, and the executive wings are all near the front of the ship, but there’s a lot ahead of them, particularly shielding and storage. It’s the most dangerous part of the ship, because if they’re gonna get hit by a meteor, that’s where it’s gonna happen. Technicians come here all the time to work, but they don’t stay here any longer than they have to. Tinaya herself has never been down here before, because she’s never needed to.

Pronastus isn’t entirely sure where he’s going. He’s just letting his pathfinding ability work, but it appears to be a little unclear. He keeps sticking one foot down a corridor, then realizes his mistake, and backtracks. She quickly learns to follow him a couple meters behind while he figures out the correct route. “Ah, here we are,” he finally says. This is it. This appears to be the absolute most forward section. It’s the extreme of Extremus. On the other side of this hull is outer space. There’s nothing here but a panel on the wall that reads, CAUTION: DOPPLER GLOW. DO NOT OPEN WHEN TRAVELING AT REFRAME OR FRACTIONAL SPEEDS.

“You want me to open that?” Tinaya questions. That would blind them, so the answer better be no.

Pronatus studies the words, like an illiterate person would, but Tinaya assumes he’s just trying to figure out whether that’s really what they’re meant to do here. “That warning is out of date.” He sniffs it, and it’s not clear if he’s getting any information from doing that, or if it’s just theatre. “Yeah, this is original signage.”

“What does that matter?”

“I’m not entirely sure, but I’m pretty confident that we can open it. If you want,” he goes on, “you can go around the corner, and I’ll do it myself.”

Tinaya sighs, and takes hold of the handle. “You have your whole life ahead of you. You go around the corner.” After he does so, she opens the viewport, and braces herself for the blinding light. That’s not what she finds on the other side, however. Instead, it’s a massive bubble of some kind. It’s gray, like doppler glow is, but not nearly as bright. Her eyes have to adjust a little, but it’s not bad. It’s a fairly smooth surface, but it fluctuates and oscillates like a liquid, or no...a plasma. That’s plasma. This is a plasma shield. And all those frequent ripples are from meteoroids. But if this protective bubble is here, why does this sign warn people against opening it?

“Holy shit,” Pronastus says, walking back up to the port, just as surprised and awe-inspired as her. “Why isn’t this a channel on the broadcast system that you can watch on your holoscreen?”

“That’s a very good question. Maybe it’s slowly blinding us, I dunno.”

“Sometimes I can kind of feel the past too,” Pronastus tells her. “I often need context, because I don’t empirically know everything about it. I realize why the panel is here when it seemingly doesn’t need to be. It’s because it used to be necessary. And then they came up with the Frontrunner program.” The frontrunners are five little baby Extremus vessels, which fly ahead of the main ship. They’re entirely unmanned, and self-sufficient. She’s never heard of them needing to be repaired, replaced, or even visited. She’s not even sure whether they have life support or not. They developed them over a hundred years ago to enhance the protective shield, which turned out to be necessary—not due to natural obstacles, but an intentional meteoroid minefield, placed there by man. The True Extremists made that whole region of space far more dense than it should be in order to throw the Extremus off course. It worked. That’s why Halan Yenant went to hock, and why the ship has had to correct course gradually ever since. These frontrunners may be old, but they’re still vital, even without the ultra-density of that part of the Milky Way. Space debris will always be a danger.

“I think I’m supposed to go to one of them, but I don’t know which one. What are your spidey-senses telling you?” she asks him.

“I’m not allowed to call it that. But...that one.” He points. They can’t really see the frontrunners, but they can see five evenly-spaced dips in the bubble, which are probably where they are. “Or that one,” he adds, pointing again. “They’re both screaming at me.”

“Okay, it’s not safe, so you stay here.” She starts adjusting the settings on her watch. Usually, whenever anyone teleports anywhere on the ship, it’s logged in the system. As an Admiral, she can switch that off to go dark, but there’s still a problem. Even though there’s probably nothing you can do about it, they have a built-in “man overboard” feature, which will set off all sorts of alarm bells if someone ends up teleporting outside the hull. Not only are there safeguards to prevent it from happening at all, but just in case it does, the alarms can’t be disabled or turned off unless—

Pronastus has retrieved a black cloak from his bag, and is offering it to her. “I knew the code to the armory, and the cabinet where this was being stored. My mind had me steal it a week ago, and now I know why.”

Tinaya takes it from him, and examines it. “Hm. Is this darkbursting tech?”

“Oh, maybe,” Pronastus decides. “It did say DB on the cabinet.”

This could work. If she’s wearing it, she should be able to make it to the frontrunner without being detected. The question is, which one? She doesn’t even know what she’s looking for here. She’s just been guessing that he’s been leading her to consciousness transference technology, but it could be a swimming pool for all she knows, or an okapi sanctuary. He helps her slip the darkbursting outfit on, which covers her whole body, leaving only a small mesh screen for her to look out of.

“I can’t see you. Where are you? You’re invisible! Ahhhhh!” Pronastus jokes, flailing his arms about. It doesn’t make her invisible to the naked eye, just to instruments hunting for heat signatures, or in this case, a teleportation signature.

“Go back home, Mr. Kegrigia. You have been an immense help, but if this doesn’t work, or if it isn’t what we think it is, I don’t want you getting caught up in this mess.”

“Aye, Admiral.” He salutes, and then walks away obediently.

Tinaya teleports away, hoping to land somewhere with life support, and regretting at the last second not coming here with her own life support. All she would have needed to do was grab a helmet from her stateroom. Then again, Pronastus should have had one in his back if she needed it. She holds her breath with her eyes shut for a few seconds before giving in and trying to look around. She’s in a dark room, and she can breathe just fine. She opens the darkbursting suit, and pushes herself out of it like a baby being born. “Um. Hey, Thistle? Are you there?”

Nothing.

“Hey, Micro. Respond.” Another common AI model.

Still nothing.

Wait. They made these a long time ago. “Hey, Elder.”

“Yes, Admiral?” Ah, shit. This AI went rogue way back in the early days of the mission, and they had to destroy it, but it evidently survived here without anyone realizing it.

“Turn on the lights, please.”

“Of course.” The lights turn on.

There isn’t really anything here. It looks like what you would expect out of place that isn’t supposed to be manned, but could be in a pinch. There’s a bed, a couch, and some seating around a table, as well as a desk. There’s a lavatory in the corner, and a kitchenette with a food synthesizer. “What is the most interesting thing on this vessel?”

“Besides me?” AI!Elder asks. “You.”

“Besides me and you.”

“Let me think.” He takes a beat. “There’s a cool helmet in that closet over there.”

“Hold on.” Tinaya seals herself back up in the suit, and teleports over to the other frontrunner that Pronastust was pointing to.

“Welcome back!” AI!Elder exclaims with glee.

Tinaya looks around. This can’t be the same frontrunner. It looks similar, but it has a distinct enough design, and it’s smaller, because there appears to be a whole extra room where the closet should be. Now that she knows that these exist, she’ll have to jump to the other three to see if they hold their own secrets. Her curiosity will get the best of her eventually, but for now, she needs to deal with this situation first. Who should she tell about it? What is there to tell yet? “You maintain coherence across the frontrunners.”

“I do.”

“What about Extremus proper? Have you had access to us this whole time?”

“Not until today.”

“Are you telling me that by coming here and activating you, I let you into the main systems?”

“Of course not! What kind of security would that be? No, you’re gonna let me back in once you open that door you’ve been eying.”

She wants to argue with him, claiming that she would never do such a thing, but she has to open the door before she can even be honest with herself. There is no time like the present, so to speak. She opens it, and steps in. It looks like a clone lab, and it’s populated by one specimen. She wipes the condensation from the glass, and peers inside. It’s Waldemar Kristiansen. He’s older than the one currently on Extremus, but it’s definitely him. She does a few breathing exercises to calm herself down. Whatever this is, it’s not good, but she doesn’t have any details yet. She clears her throat. “AI!Elder...”

“Yes?” She can hear the smile in his disembodied voice.

“Report.”

“This isn’t his only clone.”

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Microstory 2535: Private Nurse

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Because of the constant use of his healing ability, we believe that Landis Tipton is essentially not capable of getting sick. To put it another way, we believe that he is constantly healing himself by drawing the miracle breath through his body for twelve hours a day. I don’t know what the threshold would be, but I did have the privilege of meeting the original Voldisil who had the healing gift, and she said that she occasionally got the flu or the cold. And she could get papercuts, and headaches when she didn’t drink enough water. She wasn’t using her ability enough for it to work on herself. Still, there’s no reason to risk it, so I remain at Landis’ side while he’s working. I take more breaks than he does, and during those times, I’m relieved by the doctor, but then I get right back to my perch, making sure that we weren’t wrong about our hypothesis. After his normal operating hours, I no longer keep eyes on him, but I’m always close by; usually in the suite next door, or maybe the hallway. I’ve never had to treat him, but I do run frequent tests. I track his vitals, and ask him questions about how he’s feeling. That’s what causes the delays in the queue, and it’s something that I had to fight for. Technically, he could probably heal three or four times as many people per day than he does, but I will not allow it. I periodically hold things up to make sure that he’s okay because he won’t stop to tell me if there’s something wrong. It sucks. It sucks for the people waiting in line, and waiting for their appointment, and waiting for their applications to go through. But Landis’ health and well-being are important too. The breath does not cure stress. It’s a condition of state, and he’s just as susceptible to it as anyone would be in his position. He holds people’s very lives in his hands, and he has to slow down, or he could burn out psychologically and emotionally. Of course, he has his private therapist to take care of that side of things, but I certainly don’t want to undermine his potential issues by hanging back. I don’t overstep my bounds, because that too would stress him out, but we’ve been working together for years now, and have grown close. He knows that I have his best interests at heart, and that I’m doing this for the Foundation; not in spite of it. They want to keep the Foundation running, even when the panacea is discovered, but I’m not so sure. I know him pretty well, and I think he’ll be ready to be done, even if he can’t admit it to himself just yet.