Microstory 2635: Taking Out the Trash

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It’s 2532 now. Mandica doesn’t know the exact date. She won’t connect to the local network until she’s off of the arkship. It has entered orbit around the planet of Castlebourne, and is beginning to transport cargo down to the surface using the primary space elevator. The rest of the trip went fine, and she didn’t run into any more problems. There was a weird lurch about a week ago, and she must have lost track of the relativity, because the whole thing took slightly longer than she was told, but it’s obviously all right now. The system didn’t tell her anything about another impact event, so she’s not going to worry about it. The only issue now is sneaking down without being detected. Every cargo container is being scanned and inspected. They have to do that to make sure that all the plants and animals are still alive. Unlike last time, when there was a certain level of trust that they didn’t load dead specimens, they’re gonna notice if Mandica is hiding amongst her timber wolf friends.

She didn’t join their pack, but they didn’t bother her while she was living amongst them either. She didn’t know if they were engineered to be more docile, evolved to be that way on their own, or if she just straight up didn’t understand the wolf-human relationship. They were pretty cool. She might even call some of them her friends. The bots never came by. Lab-grown raw meat occasionally appeared from strategically placed feeding bins. The wolves didn’t mind when she took a little bit for herself, and cooked it up. She thought she would be fine with the dayfruit, but she failed to grab a vital component for programming the flavor, so she was stuck with banana the whole time. The craziest part is that the fire detection system didn’t ever respond to her fires. She didn’t even think about that until her first one was already built and burning. She was so used to doing this out in the wild, it was second nature to her, so to speak.

Mandica has a plan now, and it’s time to execute it. She pats each one of her friends on the head to say goodbye. It’s not all of the wolves, just the ones she met when she first came here, but the other packs never paid any attention to her, and don’t feel left out. She felt safe in the timber wolf section, so she never ventured too far, but she did sneak out a time or two to plan her escape route. She knows exactly where to go. This ship really is apparently fully automated, but they could have commissioned a human crew, and they would have had everything they needed, including trashcans. More importantly, it’s equipped with trashbots. They’re meant to go around on their own, cleaning up people’s refuse, but this universe is full of redundancy. No high tier intelligence has to work unless they want the energy credits to travel or develop impactful projects, but if anyone ever does want a more conventional job, they can do just about anything they want. The automated systems meant to do it in their absence will be sidelined for them. The trashbot can be operated. Normally, the janitor would stay outside of the can, but the remote interface works just as well from the inside too.

Fortunately, since she appears to be the only living, breathing person here, the trashbot has never been used before, and is totally clean. It’s cramped, but she’ll only have to be in here for a few hours if she times it right. Animals need an elevator ride that goes slow so their eyeballs don’t pop out of their heads, but plants and equipment are a lot more forgiving. They can’t drop at maximum speed, but they don’t have to wait the full fifteen hours for a safer trip either. She’s watching the hallway on her remote, using the trashbot’s cameras. She passes a few other bots on her way to the gangway, and then also on the other side, on the elevator platform, but they completely ignore her. She was worried that they would be thrown off by an unscheduled trashbot wandering around on its own, but none of them was programmed to see it as a threat. She rolls onto the elevator just in time before the doors close.

The fall is rough because she is decidedly not a plant. But her suit is equipped with the right cocktail of drugs to make it easier. She’s on a sedative to keep her loose, a nociceptor inhibitor to chill her nerves, and a few other things she can’t remember right now because she can’t even form a complete sentence in her head. The sedative is precisely tailored to keep her awake enough to react to something bad if it comes up, but she still leans her head back and rests her eyes. It’s not the worst part. The drugs only kept her alive while she was falling. Now that she’s down on the surface, her body needs to be flushed of them so she can stay focused and stay moving. But there have been consequences from the trip that are just kicking in now. She’s dizzy, sluggish, and more than a little confused. She doesn’t really know where she is. This is a planet of domes. Everything is under a dome. There are literally tens of thousands of domes, and each one is unique. This one must be dedicated exclusively to the space elevator.

But she doesn’t know where to go. Shit, she doesn’t know anything. The grand opening was decades ago. People have been living here this whole time. They’ve been oriented, they’ve made some kind of government probably. What did she think, that she would land and immediately get a new life? What if they don’t like how she came to be here? Charter planets aren’t lawless, they’re just free to come up with their own laws, independent of the stellar neighborhood. This could be an oppressive dystopia by now, she really doesn’t know. She doesn’t know a goddamn thing. She’s so tired too. The suit gave her something to reverse the acute effects of the cocktail, but it doesn’t come with a stimulant. Does it have a stimulant? Where’s the stimulant? “Hey, Suit? Give me a stimmy. Stimmy. Is it called a stimmy? Are you called Suit? Answer me.”

Mandica wakes up in a bed, in her bra and panties. A man is sitting at a desk, his back to her. She looks around and spots the only plausible weapon within arms reach. It’s a pair of steampunk goggles. They’re...not going to be very helpful.

He turns. It’s Trilby. He hasn’t aged a day. “Hey. Welcome to Castlebourne.”

“You came with me?” she questions. “You were on the ship this whole time?”

He chuckles. “No. That was 112 years ago. I sent my consciousness here four years ago, looking to greet you. You have no idea what it took to figure out when the arkship would actually arrive. So I went back home, and back to work, and then took another vacation to return here a few months ago to make preparations.”

“Wait, it was only supposed to be 108 years. Why are we so late?”

“They moved,” he replies enigmatically.

“They moved...what?”

“The solar system. They moved the whole solar system. Your arkship was on the wrong vector, and had to be rerouted in the middle of the flight. I’m sure you felt it.”

She realizes that she’s narrowed her eyes at him. “I suppose I did. So it’s 2536?”

“It is,” he confirms. “Again, welcome to Castlebourne.”

She finally decides to relax. She trusts him. He got her here. “What preparations did you make?”

He smiles. “I can turn you invisible.”

The Sixth Key: Sleeping Like a Rock (Part V)

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Echo begins to approach Clavia menacingly. She has been lying to him this whole time, and worse than that, manipulating him. All of her lessons were designed to turn him into the person that she wanted him to be. Perhaps he really is some sort of ethereal god-like being, but he’s not a tyrant. She instilled those values in him without him even knowing it, and she’s going to pay.

“Wait,” she says, holding her hand up defensively. “You can’t hurt me.”

“Why not?” Echo asks.

“I am more powerful than you,” she replies.

“Then why did you come here? Why do you need me? What are you after?”

She sighs like she’s relenting. “I’m more powerful than you, but you are still powerful. More to the point, you have power to give.”

“You’ve just been trying to take it? Is that even possible?”

Clavia smiles. “I don’t need the power in my own body,” she says with airquotes. “If I control what you do with it, it’s the same as having it for myself. Now, I’m being honest, and I’m sorry that I couldn’t before. But we’ve barely scratched the surface of your studies. We’ve not had time to get into the fine details of the world. I am what they call the Powers That Be. I am here to help, but I’m still so limited. I’m reliant on selecting human agents to do most things for me. In order to enact real change, I have to unshackle myself from those restrictions. When I do that, I’ll transform into the Power That is All. I came here...to ask for your help...to change the universe for the better.”

“You wanna team up?” Echo questions. “You went about it the wrong way.”

“I see that now.”

“It’s too late.” Echo turns to Hogarth. “I was naïve, and stupid, but I’m awake now, and I better understand my origins. My mother is a woman by the name of Olimpia Sangster. I was hoping to find her.”

“I am familiar with her,” Hogarth replies, “but I don’t know where she is. Last time I saw her, she was on a planet called Castlebourne, but that was years ago from my perspective.”

“I appreciate it. I’ll start there, and continue looking.”

“You can’t leave this planet,” Clavia warns. “I would have gotten us out of here a long time ago if you could. You are an extension of this place. You and it are the only things that exist. That little shuttle of yours, the suit; everything is just something that you contrived in your head to make sense of your reality. But you are really just the planet itself. That’s why you named it Echo.”

Echo was watching her as she talked, but now turns back to Hogarth. “Is this true?”

“I have no idea. I don’t know what you are, or what this place is. I only know that you’re a danger to a lot of people. I’m sorry to say...”

“No, I understand,” Echo admits. He steps away, and hops off the stage. He walks a little ways down the curve of the hill, and begins to survey his domain. He’s the planet. He made the planet. He needed a place to stand, so he came up with something. But that’s not the only kind of thing that people stand on. It never needed to be this big. Most of it is just lifeless desert anyway, it’s not like his brain took the time to intricately fabricate every single blade of grass in every part of the world. He probably did a lot of copying and pasting just to get the basic structure down. If this isn’t real, then it can be anything. He can turn it into something more manageable. He takes a deep breath through his nose, closes his eyes, and sinks down to the ground. He sits there, and focuses, but he doesn’t concentrate. Instead, he lets go. He stops trying to keep this rock alive, and just lets it fold in on itself, not all the way, but into a much smaller shape. In only seconds, all that’s left is the hill, floating in the void, protected by a bubble of air that he controls. He opens his eyes and stands. “I am the god-being,” he says, as if explaining it to Hogarth.

One of Hogarth’s friends hops over to the edge, and glides her finger along the vacuum barrier. It ripples like water, and it kind of looks like she’s tickled by it. “I was wrong, this will not do,” she says. “This is no place for the next Garden Dimension. It’s too unstable and unsafe. We should transplant the tree back where we were going to in the parallel dimension on Earth.”

“I didn’t think this would be the place for the Garden, Princess,” another woman says to her, “but we can’t just transplant a magical tree whenever we want to.”

Princess Honeypea walks over to Echo. “The fruit. Have you tried it?” She tilts her head over to Clavia’s tree.

“She told me that it would be sort of...intimate.”

“That may not have been a lie,” Princess says. “Her tree is different than the one we had before. It may not work the same way, but if it does, it can take you to your mother. Then perhaps you move the tree itself in return.”

Echo goes back up to Clavia. “Can it? Can it find my real mother?”

Clavia takes a moment. “It could take someone to her, but not you. I’m not lying, you can’t leave, no matter how big or small this place is. It’s the void. You were born in the void. You were born of the void. It is here you must stay. You too would require human agents. If you had started out as a normal human like me, you would have one exception, but I’m afraid you’re too tied down.”

“Then what do you want from me?” Echo asks again. “I thought my power would help you lift your own restrictions. I thought that was the point.”

Clavia hesitates to respond. “A child. If we had a child of our own, it would be a million times stronger, and have the ability to leave.”

“The child of two gods,” Echo muses. “Sounds...like a monumentally stupid idea, and a very irresponsible one.” This is getting out of hand, and Echo is more confused than ever. He doesn’t know what to believe anymore. Even though he knows that he can’t trust Clavia, he also can’t trust his own mind. She’s not just been manipulating him, but brainwashing him too. There’s so much up there in his brain. How much of it is just a way for her to control him? He has to get rid of it. He has to get rid of it all.

“Are you okay?” one of the people asks him. “You look sad.”

“I’m dying,” Echo replies.

“That’s not possible,” Clavia decides.

“You’re dying too.”

“What?”

“You’re an amalgam of multiple people, some of which are here today in alternate form.” He gestures towards the group as he’s walking towards her again. “Your primary consciousness is that of a not-so-great person, but that’s just because that was the one that was prepared for it. You wanted to be in charge. I can put someone else in charge.”

“No,” Clavia argues. She looks to others for help. “You’re not gonna let him do this, are you? It’s a violation. No! No!”

Echo doesn’t need to touch her, she can back away as much as he wants. He closes his eyes again, and focuses on her mind. It’s all jumbled in there, with a bunch of conflicting thoughts rattling around. As he’s snaking his way through the amalgam, he realizes that it could be worse. It could be just The First Explorer and no one else. At least the other minds in there have been taming her thirst for power. She probably didn’t count on that, but it means less work for him. It will make it easier for him to do a little bit of rearranging. Just a tweak here, and a modification there. And...go to sleep.

Clavia falls to the grass.

“Is she dead?” Hogarth asks.

“The one you knew as Clavia is, yes,” Echo explains, “but a new being will awaken in her place.” He breathes deeply once more. “The same will go for me.”

“Is that really necessary?” Princess Honeypea questions.

“It’s the only way to be sure,” Echo replies. “When I wake up, I won’t understand any of this. I won’t know any of you. I’m trusting you to teach me; to show me what life is really about, and how to be a good person. Sorry to cut this short, but I hope that we can be friends in the next life.”

“None of us is qualified to do what you ask,” Hogarth contends.

“Like I said, I’m trusting you.” Before anyone can argue any further, Echo shuts his eyes, and erases his whole mind. He too falls to the grass.

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Microstory 2289: I Can Fill in Any Gaps

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I’m gonna make this short, because I really want to get back to my work. I’ve been furiously typing, and not having to spend so much time doing research. That’s what has traditionally been the biggest time suck. Maybe I shouldn’t phrase it like that, because that makes it sound like I hate it. I actually love doing research. It’s like learning, except I care about it, so I write it down to reference the information later. I like my stories to be as plausible as possible without sacrificing adventure and intrigue. Of course, as we all know, all of my stories were proven true the moment my alternate self conjured me in another universe. So as it turns out, even the most fantastical of narrative liberties wouldn’t be a problem for any scientist with sufficient data and understanding. What I’m really trying to say is that I don’t have to do much research this time, I only have to recall my own past. That sounds easier than it is. I have a notoriously bad memory, which is just one more reason why I was never built for an autobiography. But the great part about it is that I can fill in any gaps in memory with made-up plot points. The heart of the story will be my own, but so much more. Okay, I gotta get back to it. Kelly is yelling at me about my work-life balance, but when you’re an artist, work is your life, so there’s no reason not to be working at all waking hours of the day.

Microstory 2201: Understanding of the Data

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I came back into the office today. Actually, I got in really early, before the sun came up, but I just watched a nature show on the gargantuan TV until it was time to “clock in”. What happened was I woke up at the end of a cycle, and couldn’t get back to sleep. I didn’t find myself drifting away during the day, though, so I think it will be okay. Sometimes, fighting insomnia is worse, and it’s best just to accept what your body is trying to tell you, even if you’re better at math, and you know that it’s wrong. I won’t be making a habit of it. After everyone else came in, we put a meeting on the books. My Data Analyst wanted to put the finishing touches on his presentation. He gave us his initial findings. He now understands how jail guests are currently scheduled, and as we suspected, it really doesn’t have anything to do with group dynamics. There is so much data, and so many variables to deal with, this is going to be a difficult task, but I know that my people are up to it. The majority of the rest of the team will begin next week. They’ll be spending time on their training, and getting to know each other, so it won’t be until about mid-August before we start making progress, but that progress will happen. The presentation was interactive, with the other team members asking questions, and already contributing to the understanding of the data. He actually rewrote some of the slides while we were all there together. Right now, I’m consolidating and organizing the information that I’ve received in my brain, and thinking about ways that we can tackle this issue in the future, and I’ll continue to do that after I fall asleep tonight.

Microstory 2074: Those Who Come in Late

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I am super tired, so I’m not going to say much today. It’s okay, but I wish my new boss had told me that I was going to be working whole days for the next four days at least. She wants me to understand how to open, and how to close, but also what it’s like to be immersed in that environment throughout the day. She wants me to get a feel for the difference between customers who come in early, and those who come in late, along with everyone in between. I didn’t get enough sleep last night, so I didn’t really get much out of that yet, but I trust her. I’ll be super prepared for it tomorrow. But I can’t do that unless I pretty much go to bed right now. It’s a good thing there’s never anything good on TV. Back on my home world, I was often too distracted to manage my time well.