Microstory 2609: No One Can Agree When the World is Divided by Design

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August 20, 2526. Premier Xaovi Rue can’t stand sitting anymore. There’s something about its new substrate that makes it feel uncomfortable to bend its legs, and distribute its weight upon its buttocks. Still, it doesn’t have the luxury of being comfortable in this situation, because it makes others uncomfortable instead. This is the most important meeting of its life, likely surpassed only by every meeting it ends up being involved in from now until its latest term as North Premier ends in three years. The people aren’t going to reëlect it again, if there’s even a colony to inhabit at all at that point. In fact, they may vote it out of office entirely, depending on how it handles the current crisis. “Report!” it demanded.

“The thixotropic liquefaction,” Environmental Administrator Gerver began. “It started at the equator, but is spreading rapidly.” EvAm Gerver did not technically answer to Premier Rue, but both Delegator teams are currently missing, so Xaovi has stepped up to deal with all this.

Xaovi was elected as a representative of hundreds of millions of people, who all live in the Northern Pole domes. It needs to know if the cataclysm that is killing people near the equator is going to kill them eventually too. “Are we safe?”

Gerver hesitates.

“Are we safe!” Xaovi cried. It didn’t like to repeat itself.

“From the liquefaction, yes,” Gerver confirmed. The poles are the safest place to be right now, which brings me to the real problem. Residents of the more central domes are on their way here. Some have already arrived in the first wave, having simply come in as visitors. But soon, those vactrains are going to pile up as they become refugees. We need to know what to do with them, and as neither Delegator can be reached—”

“I will make the decision on that, and the decision is that we let them in. We let them all in. If they’re dying out there, bring them all to safety. If I have to, I’ll send emissaries to the intentionally unadvanced domes if they’re afraid to use technology to come here.”

“That hasn’t so far been the problem,” Gerver goes on. “Some of the tunnels are warped or cracked, but most of them have been able to take alternate routes.”

The Foreign Policy Administrator clears his throat. “According to our Science Admin, who was too busy to join us, the issue is life support. Our carbon scrubbers were not designed to keep this many people alive. Our waste heat ventilation system would not be able to handle the influx. Quite frankly, each polar dome is currently at capacity. We always build new ones to accommodate population growth.”

“Please do not refer to the polar domes as ours,” Xaovi warns. “In your role, you represent the entire planet, not just the dome where you chose to live. We are not elites, people,” it says to the whole room. “The pioneers at the equator are just as valuable. In fact, we must place greater emphasis on their well-being, as they are less equipped to defend themselves against these threats.” It refocused its attention to the Foreign Policy Admin. “And FpAm Pletcher, do not forget that your job is to facilitate communication with other worlds, such as Bungula and even Earth. The equatorials are not a foreign peoples. Please stop othering your countrymen.” It takes another pause. “There is no question of whether we will open the doors. There is no question of whether we will upgrade our carbon scrubbers, and ramp up food production. The only questions are about how we do such things. Please raise your hand if you disagree.”

A lot of people raise their hands. The Transportation Administrator is a deer, and does not have a hand to raise, so he hops up to rest his forelegs on the conference table.

Xaovi smiles, but not kindly. It nests its fingers together upon the table. “Now. What if I told you that I will have any dissenters escorted out of the capitol building. Who would keep their hand raised?”

Nearly everyone who needs to lowers their hand. The Transport Admin gets back down on four legs. Only Pletcher keeps his up. He looks around, disgusted. “Cowards.” He stands. “You do not have the power or the right to remove any of us from office! We were duly elected, and obligated to serve the best interests of our people!”

“The best interests of all our people,” Xaovi corrects, annoyed that he still isn’t grasping the concept. This has bothered Xaovi for so long. The domes on Proxima Doma are probably the most unregulated and fragmented of any colony. It makes sense. Some of the first colonists left Earth because they wanted to separate themselves from the establishment, and that sentimentality has held. The first settlers of Doma didn’t just want to leave, they felt like they had to, and back then, every light year was exponentially more difficult to cover than the last, so they naturally targeted the closest exoplanet. They agreed to be governed by an advisory-administrative model, but to many, it’s more of a formality. Multiple domes reject what they consider outside governance, and for the most part, that’s been okay. The domes inherently keep them isolated, and insulated from each other. But in this case, the disconnectedness is unacceptable. It’s going to get people killed.

Xaovi believes that they are all Domanians, and this is no time to preach or practice the nuance in that. They just have to save lives. It was one of those first settlers 300 years ago. It only stayed hoping that Proxima Doma would reach the level of unity that made it possible for humanity to even achieve interstellar migration in the first place. It took a long time for it to realize that one reason there was so much interest in such unprecedented migration was because it allowed people to break from the unity. Getting back to it has been a long road. They have definitely made progress, but not nearly enough, especially considering what’s happening now.

“I will have my voice heard!” Pletcher goes on. “I will not let you take over this government! Together, we’re stronger!”

“Security Administrator Matterhorn,” Xaovi says, “I will not order you to escort Pletcher out, but I would ask.”

“I will take care of it,” the Military Admin volunteers.

“Thank you, Chu,” Xaovi says. It never wanted it to come to this, but there is honestly no time for bureaucracy. There just isn’t. “Two more major things. Domestic Affairs Administrator Moffett, with Pletcher gone, I would say it falls on you to ask for help. If consolidating the population is going to cause problems, we may need to evacuate some people. As all of our launch infrastructure has been destroyed, please reach out to Bungula for potential rescue options. I don’t know who else we could turn to” It turns its head and sighs. “Adjudicator Okeke, I have just relieved a rightfully elected administrator of duty. Please explain the consequences of that, and also...the procedures for officially declaring martial law.”

The Seventh Stage: Painting Rocks (Part V)

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Echo is standing in front of the blue wall, painting wispy white clouds on it, paying close attention to details. It would look complete to anyone else, but to him, the work is never done. He can always add one more curve...one final flourish.

Clavia walks up to him. “There you are. What are you doing?”

“Painting this wall. It ain’t gonna paint itself,” Echo replies, still watching what he’s doing.

“It’s literally going to paint itself,” she counters.

He smiles. “I know. Sometimes I just need a break to unwind. Like you with your little headplays.”

She nods. “Fair enough.”

“What’s the count?”

“Three thousand, seven hundred and four.”

He drops his elbow, and looks over at her. “Technically at quota. We’re ready for move-in.”

“Like you said, in the technical sense. We still need to figure out how to convince a supermajority to do it, or it’s not really helpful.”

“We also need to figure out how to do it without loading everyone onto a proverbial bus, and driving them here.”

“It’s time to talk to Cedar,” Echo realizes. They have been dreading this day for a long time. They like him, but they don’t know how he’s going to react or respond to this news. There are whispers that the Cloudbearer twins are building something, but no one knows what, and all of their guesses are wrong; though off by varying degrees. Cedar ran his campaign for power on a foundation of intercivilizational unity. He believes that the only way to keep the Reality Wars at bay is if there’s no one to fight against, because everyone is on the same side. The amount of space between people in this universe could tear them apart. It’s the distribution. Cedar is probably gonna have trouble with the distribution.

“Yeah, we have no choice. Do you think he’ll be mad we didn’t read him into the situation earlier?”

“He’s serving as Head Advisor to our parents,” Echo replies. “He was too preoccupied to worry about this. That can be our excuse for keeping it a secret from him.”

“Good idea.” Clavia takes her brother’s hand, and transports them both to what essentially amounts to a holodeck, though on a much grander scale. They’re standing on an island floating in the air. At least, that’s what it looks like to them. It’s just an illusion. The “air” around them is clear purplish water. They can still breathe, of course, and talk just fine. The sky above is much more unambiguously an ocean. It’s upside down. Waves jut down, and spray a sweet misty rain down towards them. Some of it tastes like chocolate, other drops like honey. Their feet are planted firmly on the ground, though they feel like they could float away at any second. All around them are crystalline structures, also purple, since that is the theme. A stream gives way to a waterfall that slips over the edge, and disappears into the oblivion below, though again, it’s just invisible floor. Between them and the sky are giant turtles, swimming around. One of them nods and winked before moving on.

They aren’t alone on this floating island. They summoned Cedar, and are currently patiently waiting for him to get his bearings in this new world. “This breaks the laws of physics,” he notes. “I’m assuming it’s not real?”

“No,” Echo replies. “Our powers do have some limits.”

“You’ve been gone for nearly a month,” Cedar points out.

Clavia smirks. “We’ve been gone longer than that.”

“Framejacking, or temporal acceleration?”

“Both,” Echo answers. Time is moving faster in this universe, so more gets done in a shorter amount of time in comparison to the Sixth Key, but their own minds are also operating at much higher speeds, allowing them to think and act more quickly.

“This is what you’ve been working on?”

Echo laughs. “This took only a few seconds to construct. We got the idea from Castlebourne. Most of the domes on that world are physical, except for the holographic sky. One of them is nearly all holography. You can make it look like anything. We chose this today. Isn’t it cool?”

“Yeah,” Cedar agrees. “What am I doing here, though?”

Echo clears his throat. “What is the number one cause of tension and conflict in the Sixth Key?”

Cedar dismisses his words with a wave of his hand. “Don’t pitch me. Just tell me what you’ve done, and what you want. You’re gonna need to learn this for when you take over in a more meaningful sense. We’re in charge of undecillions of people back home. No one has time to beat around the bush or be polite about it.”

“Very well,” Echo decides. He reaches up and pantomimes pulling a stage curtain open. As he does so, a tear in the hologram appears in the far, far distance. Behind it, they see what looks like regular outerspace, but as the curtains separate even farther, a figure appears. It looks like a big metal statue of a humanoid, or perhaps just a big robot. It’s hard to tell what scale they’re working with here, so Echo has to explain. “Have you ever heard of the matrioshka body?”

“I have,” Cedar confirms. “I went to a sort of school like you did. That’s where the afterlife simulation was housed, before it collapsed, and everyone was transported into Fort Underhill. The Sixth Key shares interdimensional space with them now. I never knew what happened to matrioshka body, though. That it?”

Echo shakes his head. “That. Is MB-3704.”

Cedar laughs. “You made your own? That’s impressive.”

Echo and Clavia exchange a look. “He said it was three-seven-zero-four.”

Cedar is confused, but only for half a second. Then his face drops into a frown. “You made 3700 of these things?”

“Yeah,” Echo says.

Cedar starts to pace around and shake his head, almost in disappointment. “Why? What do they do?”

“Well, they...have people live in them.”

“Who lives in them?”

“No one yet, that’s what we’re asking you for.”

“Asking me for what?” Cedar questions. “I told you, get to the point. Stop trying to be dramatic.”

“We need you to transport everyone from the Sixth Key who wants to live here. Send them all to their new homes...all at once.”

“I can’t do that!” he cries.

“We’re gonna let them consent,” Clavia defends. “We’re not gonna make anyone move, but this will be better, and I think there will be a ton of interest.”

“Think about it,” Echo begins before Cedar can make another argument. “There are hundreds of billions of stars, but we don’t have enough resources for everyone. How is that possible? Because stars radiate a ton of their energy away, even with dyson swarms. Matrioshka brains are more comprehensive, and more efficient. And matrioshka bodies are just stylish and cool.” Honestly, I don’t know why no one ever thought of it before. I thought that was the point of the original matrioshka body, and its successor, Big Papa.” There ought to be far more than two of these in existence. The Parallel was more than capable of doing it, but they chose not to. They still orbited stars. Even the interstellar settlements were quite literally few and far between. Why? Why keep the stars? Aesthetics? Safety? Ethics? Probably all of the above. Or. Echo and Clavia are just that clever.

“That’s not my point. I literally can’t do it. I don’t have that kind of power.”

Echo and Clavia are both confused. “What are you talking about? You already did it. You moved them all from their original realities, to the Sixth Key.”

“No, I didn’t.” He starts to look around on the ground. Guessing at his needs, Echo manifests a chair for him to sit in. Cedar hunches over and stuffs his face in his palms. “That wasn’t me. I didn’t do any of that.”

“What? It had to have happened,” Clavia argues. “Everyone’s there.”

“I’m not saying that it never happened,” Cedar tries to explain. “I’m telling you that I didn’t do it. I have powers, but not like that. That’s insane.”

“Then who did?” Echo asks him.

Cedar looks up to meet Echo’s gaze. “I have no idea. They didn’t tell me. They have to keep it a secret, even from me and my family, even now that it’s done. We were...a misdirect. It’s like sleight of hand. We were the left hand that distracted everyone so no one would see what the right hand was doing. I don’t know if anyone knows who saved everyone during Reconvergence. All I know is that it wasn’t me.” He pauses before adding, “I just took credit, per my instructions.”

Echo and Clavia manifest their own chairs to sit in. They sit there in silence for a good five minutes before Echo decides to speak again. “Time is not linear. If something exists at any moment, it exists in all moments. If you know something about the past, you can change it. Keeping it a secret was smart. Even if someone were to go back and kill you as a child, it wouldn’t stop the creation of the Sixth Key. You’re like a bodyguard, there to take a bullet if one ever comes flying through. That’s how I would have done it if I were there.”

“Maybe you were,” Cedar reasons. “Maybe you two are the ones who created the Sixth Key; you just haven’t done it yet from your own perspectives.”

They exchange another look. Clavia decides to explain. “There’s a small group of people on a planet in the Sixth Key who are aware of what we’ve been up to. Just a few billion people. They were our test group. We’ve already tried to transport them to our new universe. We don’t have that kind of juice either. Stars are easy. Giant metal statues are easy. Moving people? That requires a level of precision that we do not possess; not with hordes anyway. We could probably move them a couple thousand at a time, but that’s all but useless for our needs. That’s a meaningless rounding error compared to the total population.”

“What about Ellie Underhill?” Echo asks after another bout of silence. “I don’t remember how many she transported into Fort Underhill.”

“It was only 120 billion,” Cedar replies. “Not quite a rounding error, but still not good enough. Besides, she gave them all new bodies; it was a whole different animal.”

“So what we’re saying is that we need to find the person who actually did move everyone from the five realities to the Sixth Key. We need them to do it again.” Clavia starts to pace. Finding someone out there in the abstract is not something that she’s ever done before. She always knows who she’s targeting, or roundabouts where they are. This is a mystery individual, who might be in either of two universes—or, hell, maybe neither of them. They could have also done it subconsciously, like how Echo lived before he became self-aware and realized his true potential. Maybe it’s not just one person. Maybe it was a group, or somehow everyone. Maybe through the spirit of survival every single living organism consolidated their untapped collective power into one brilliant miracle. Ugh, Clavia doesn’t know, but you know who would?

“Hey, boys!”

Echo nearly falls out of his chair, but catches himself by spreading his feet apart. He stumbles away from her. “Debra. How did you get out?” She still looks like his sister. She’s still occupying that body, and nothing about it has changed. But Echo knows. He would always know. “What did you do to Clavia?”

“Relax, she’s still in here; on the first stage. She gave me control of the body, because you need me.”

“I need you for what?”

“I can find your mysterious god-being,” Debra spits back like he’s an insignificant little ant on the ground. “I found you, didn’t I? You were alone on a nothing planet in the middle of the universe. I knew exactly where you were. I intuited that you existed in the first place.”

“We can’t trust you,” Echo contends.

“Believe it or not, I’ve changed. Living with those people, doing those plays...it’s changed me. I’m no hero, but I’m not a villain anymore either. Clavia maintains full veto power. She can come back whenever she wants.”

“Prove it. Let me talk to my sister again. And don’t try to trick me, I’ll know.”

“I know.” Debra actually does what is asked of her, and temporarily returns control of the body to Clavia.

“She’s not exactly right,” Clavia says. “She doesn’t need my body, she needs my brain.”

“Can’t you just do it? You have all her power, don’t you?”

“It’s more complicated than that. You would understand if you could be inside my head. You would get it if you could see the construct that I’ve constructed.”

Echo steps forward, and places a hand on each of Clavia’s shoulders. “I bet I can. Show me. I think it’s about time that I meet your little brain buds.”

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Microstory 1611: The Psychics

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Every human is born with telepathic potential. The ability to communicate with others using psychic signals is built into our species, and that is not something that can be removed from someone without killing them. It’s just part of who we are. You might be wondering how this is possible. You personally may have never experienced anything resembling telepathy in your life, and you’ve never heard of other people doing it either. How could it be true? Well, there are a number of factors that are operating against you, if you are such one of these people. Some universes are more hospitable to these psychic signals than others. They facilitate the transmission of them easily, whereas some just straight up block it. In other worlds, the signals transmit just fine, but there’s some sort of suppressant in the residents’ biology, neurology, or genetic makeup. There’s also a psychological factor. You have to know that you’re capable of it, and truly believe in yourself, and the people around you have to believe. They have to believe in you, and in themselves, and convincing a significant enough population that it’s all real is a real challenge. Because it has to start somewhere, and there’s no decent way to prove it to them unless they’re inclined to trust in it in the first place. These restrictions can be limited to whole planets, or even regions, and many places never get over them. Earth Prime, for instance, has little problem with psychic signal transference, though it’s certainly not the smoothest. The real issue is that these humans, in particular, don’t generally believe in any of these things. Even those who do only do so out of hope, but you have to have some understanding of the true mechanics, rather than simply relying on your intuitions, and exposure to fictional representations of such phenomena.

Like I said, some universes are better with this than others, and this is no truer than it is for a little place that I like to call Psychoverse. It’s a bit of an offensive term, yes, and I would never say it in front of someone who is from there, but it’s not entirely untrue either. This Earth has a major problem with what essentially boils down to racism. Some people are psychic, and some people aren’t, and those who are enjoy an unreasonable and unfair advantage over the lower class normal people. Attempts at regulation have always been met with heavy resistance, and often end in bloodshed. The psychics consider themselves to be superior to all others, and eventually decide to start referring to their supposed inferiors as The Braindead. Now that really is an offensive term, on multiple levels, and of course, it’s also completely untrue. Psychics aren’t smarter, or better. In fact, they lack a lot of very normal human skills, like independence, critical thinking, and true leadership. The Ochivari are antinatalists, but they only go after populations that are destined to destroy their own planet. The Psychoverse residents were bound to die out, which would have allowed their Earth to thrive, so I’m not sure why the Ochivari invaded. It’s, I guess, a good thing that they did, because the humans adapted quickly, and completely transformed their way of thinking, in order to combat this external threat. They shed their bigotry and injustices, and rose up against their attackers. Luckily, the Ochivari are not immune to psychic attacks, and this is a case of one of the few times when a planet managed to push back the invasion without the help of any of the teams dedicated to winning the Darning Wars across the bulkverse.

Microstory 1547: Common Enemy

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Aliens are real, and I’m one of the few ________ who know about them. When they first ________ in our solar ________, they were ________ and quiet. Invisibility is impossible, but they can ________ themselves as space debris, and otherwise manipulate our ________ to prevent anyone from finding out about them. I run a conspiracy theory ________, and before you roll your ________, it’s not as bad as you think. I only spread the harmless theories. I don’t claim that the ________ is a lizard, or that black Jewish people are trying to take over ________, or what other nonsense ideas people have. I talk more about ghosts and burn victim-killing fairies and, of course, ________ visitors. I never believed any of this ________, but I found I can make a decent living pretending that I ________. I know, I know, you think I’m exploiting vulnerable ________, but they’re going to buy into this stuff whether I’m the ________ they’re buying from, or ________ else. So I might as well be the one to make ________. At least then, I can keep my prices ________. I broadcast a ____ly AM radio show, I sell the occasional tee-shirt, and I run ________ on my website. I’m not making ________ of dollars, but I do all right, and I still ________ coupons. Anyway, I’m certainly not the most famous ________ out there, but perhaps that’s what the aliens were ________ for. They may have even realized that I haven’t been entirely truthful about my ________, and that’s precisely why they chose me. Whatever the reason, after all their ________ into our species, they’ve decided they need ________ help to help everyone else. You see, they call themselves a steward race. They have taken it upon themselves to foster the ________ of younger civilizations. This ________ comes in many forms, but what they’ve found is that our ________ problems are our internal ________. We just keep ________ each other, for stupid things, like religion, and ________, and skin color.

Before we can be welcomed into the interstellar ________, we have to come together. We have to unite into one peoples, and sure, they could wait for us to do that on our ________, but they think there’s a ________ way. The only way to create an ally, they’ve learned, is to first have an ________. Individuals can become friends, but on grander ________, people don’t unify unless it’s necessary to fight some other ________. Now, this might not necessarily be an actual enemy that you can literally ________ against. We’ve teamed up to battle hunger, depression, homelessness, drugs, terrorism and fascism. It’s a lot more compli____ than two sides at war. People just need to have something to fix if they’re going to bother working with ________. The issue with this ________ is that not everyone is as concerned with any given ________ as others. Racists will never become not racist in order to end racism. I mean, some of them might turn, but it will still be a ________. Some people don’t care about ________ because they’re not poor, so why should they worry about others? No, a real enemy to go up against is the only way the stewards are going to ________ effectively. They have to purport themselves as a threatening ________, so humans can rise up against ________. Unfortunately, the stewards aren’t as ________ about that plan as me. It will take too many ________ that they don’t want to spend, so they’ve come up with an ________. Instead, they’ve chosen to release a deadly ________. It won’t wipe out the entire ________, which would defeat the purpose of this exercise, but it will kill thousands—millions if we don’t start getting our ________ together. They’re calling it the corona____. I don’t know why they wasted their time talking to me about it. I can’t ________ them, and I didn’t help them, I swear. This is not a theory, it’s real this time.