Microstory 2756: Skull and Bones

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The conveyor belt is heading for another void. This game has had so many chances already to kill them. If this is another attempt, it would be difficult to avoid. There is no way off this ride. Still, there may be a non-lethal obstacle in the darkness, or on the other side of it. Elise gets on one knee, and plants her other foot firmly on the belt. She holds her hands up defensively, prepared for anything. Well, almost anything.

She passes through the darkness, and catches a glimpse of the opaque dome they’ve entered before the belt ends, and sends her over the edge. She falls a couple of meters before landing on her feet on a mound of human bones. The others are starting to help each other up from the piles of thousands and thousands. It’s maybe a hundred meters wide, dimly lit, and getting dimmer. It’s noticeably cold, but not deathly so.

Elise spins around and opens her arms so when Zelda falls too, she can catch her.

“My hero,” Zelda says in a breathy voice from Elise’s arms.

“Just doin’ my job, ma’am.” Elise is really coming out of her shell now.

“Are these the previous secret hunters?” Minotaur asks, picking up a skull. “Does everyone die in here? From what? More acid rain? A deluge? A furnace?”

“Hold up,” Colley says. “Here, help me push these bones out of the way.”

Jolanda and Rage pull the bones between their legs to give him some space.

Colley gets on his hands and knees and examines the floor below. He then grabs a random femur, and snaps it in half. He puts on his loupe specs to examine the inside.

“Wait, how do you still have those?” Elise questions. “Isn’t this a new body?”

“They were in my locker,” Colley explains as he’s changing lenses. “They’re not my regular ones. They upgraded me.” He looks carefully. “Fake. They probably all are.”

“Plastic, or something else?” Rage picks up another bone and breaks it.

“No, they’re organic,” Colley answers. “The layering is asymmetrical, which is how the best machines do it, but it’s definitely bioprinted. They forgot to include the tendon entheses, and there’s no remaining viscera on the floor, or even residue.”

Elise wades through the bones to get to the wall, not grossed out anymore. “Look for an exit, or signs of Miracle’s friends. They may have already escaped.”

“Those bozos?” Miracle questions. “Not a chance.”

“I found a door!” Jolanda shouts. She’s on the far side of the dome.

“Don’t open it until we’re all over there!” Rage commands. “Elise, take safety.”

Because any door has just as much chance of being a trap as being their salvation, one player is always chosen to stay behind as the designated survivor. It’s also possible that they’ve been doomed, if the door has a time limit, and can’t be reopened, so the role is risky, rather than necessarily safe. Rage has a plan to cycle through the roster fairly.

Elise climbs up to a particularly high bone hill to have a better vantage point, and give her more time to survive if opening the door, say, also opens a drain in the floor.

Once everyone is in place, including Miracle and the strangers, Jolanda waves her hand in front of the entry panel. The door slides into its pocket, revealing...a second door. This one is different, though. Even from here, Elise can see that there are indentations on the door face that are vaguely in the shape of a human body.

“It’s a puzzle,” Colley decides. “We have to fill in the gaps with a full skeleton.”

“Rule number three,” Rage begins. “Don’t try to unlock a door that’s already unlocked.” She nods at Jolanda. “Go ahead, Jo.”

Jolanda takes hold of the knob, turns it successfully, and opens the door.

On the other side is what looks like a city square. Elise climbs down to get a better look. People are milling about, preoccupied with their own lives. They’re dressed in traditional early 21st century garb. Only two things look out of place. A man and a woman wearing the same blue shirt are balancing two bananas each on their head while they sing a song quite poorly. Two other women wearing the same purple shirts are running past them, and opening a mailbox that is conspicuously sitting out in the open.

“Other hunters,” Elise determines as she draws nearer. “This isn’t right.”

“This is obviously our way out,” one of Miracle’s people says.

“Hrockas Steward said that we wouldn’t be hunting around other people,” Minotaur reminds him. “Why break one of his few rules right at the beginning?”

“Who cares?” he asks. “I’m exiting and checking that mailbox for our next clue.”

“I don’t think we have clues,” Colley postulates. “We’re not racing, we’re not being eliminated per leg. I think we only have one goal, and we’re supposed to go straight to that. No, Elise is right. This is a red herring, or some kind of trick.”

“It’s a choice,” Miracle corrects. “If we walk out this door without solving the skeleton puzzle, we’re forfeiting the game. That’s probably where those two assholes ended up. They don’t know what they’re missing. Don’t follow in their footsteps.”

The guy sighs. “Okay, boss. We solve the puzzle.” He steps back in.

Jolanda closes the door back up, and everyone spreads out.

The puzzle is harder than it looks. They’re not just looking for a single copy of every bone. They’re all slightly different sizes, just like they would be if these once belonged to living beings. Each puzzle bone can hold in place on its own on the board, even if the one below it hasn’t been found yet, but only if it’s the correct one. Otherwise, it just falls out. Elise deduces that they used magnets. She turns out to be right.

Like Colley with his spectacles or Zelda with her parachutes, Minotaur never goes anywhere without their multitool. They found it in their locker too, and it includes a very small magnet. It’s not powerful enough to sweep the area for the right bones, but it’s easy enough to test one quickly and toss it aside before moving on to the next.

They created an open space kind of near the door, where they carefully stack the duds. That way, they don’t accidentally test the same ones multiple times. It’s Elise and Jolanda’s job to keep the used stack away from the untested piles by pushing bones around, and maintaining enough space between them at all times.

It starts getting dark in here, and no one has a light, so they open the door just so the natural light comes in for them. Unrelated hunters periodically come up, thinking that it’s important for their race. It’s Rage’s job to back them off by simply saying, “parallel play”. This is a known phrase that warns players that their games are intersecting, and that if they try to find a clue here, they will end up on the wrong track.

After several hours, they finally have the last piece. Fittingly, it’s the skull. It’s a good thing they’re done. The streets are still bustling, but it’s now dark outside too.

“Colley, you do the honors,” Jolanda offers since he served as their puzzle master. She closes the door again, allowing him to ceremoniously place the skull in the last slot. The whole skeleton glows, and they hear a whirring sound. Once Jolanda reopens it, they see the same street again, but now, even though it has only been a few seconds...it’s completely empty.

Microstory 2755: Please Don’t Hold the Handrail

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Two of Miracle’s guys don’t hesitate for a second. As soon as that door cracks, they’re running right for it. They evidently have no loyalty to their teams. Elise doesn’t know how long they’ve been training together, but she’s not finding it so easy to leave them behind. She didn’t even always want to do this. The only reason she agreed is because of the team. If they’re going to take that from her, what reason does she have to go on? She’ll have to think about this first, and ignore that door in the meantime.

Minotaur jumps out of their seat too. They only manage to intercept the second guy, body-checking him against the wall as the first one slips over the edge right on the other side of the door and plummets to his death. Minotaur stands up and catches their breath. They’re not used to an analog body either. “You’re welcome.”

Miracle stands from her own seat and casually walks towards the lethal exit. She stands before her former teammate as he’s catching his breath too. She slaps him hard.

“I’m sorry, boss. You just talked so much about the prize. He and I started coming up with what it could possibly be. We think it’s unlimited energy credits. We could go anywhere. We could do anything. You know what, I’m not sorry,” he goes on as Miracle spins around and places her back to him. “What did you expect, pulling me out of Bloodbourne like you did? Running for my survival is what I do best. That’s why you—”

Since she turned around, Miracle has been mocking him with her facial expressions, and by mimicking mouth movements with her hand. She suddenly donkey kicks him in the chest, sending him over the edge to fall to his death too. She takes a deep breath, and half a step forward. “Does anyone in this room need me to define the word alliance for you, or are you at least slightly smarter than a panda bear?”

Rage calmly stands now, in just the same way Miracle did before. She approaches her slowly before suddenly jamming her forearm against Miracle’s clavicle and pinning her to the monitor, cracking it. “I know what an alliance is, but I don’t work with killers. You stay out of our way, and we’ll leave you alone too, but if you ever treat any one of my people like you did your own friend, you will wish you had jumped out too. Savvy?”

“Savvy?” Miracle echoes in an accent. “Are ya lost, love? This isn’t Piratedome.”

“Do. You. Understand me?” Rage reiterates, squeezing her chest even harder.

“Ooo, buy me dinner first, and I’ll understand whatever you say, Mistress.”

Rage angrily lets go and turns away from Miracle. She has spoken about this with the team before. It is absolutely crucial for her to temper her anger so her nickname remains firmly ironic, rather than simply not technically accurate. She centers herself with her eyes closed for a moment. “Zel, you’re up. Remember, they know what we’ve done. The tricks you used last time probably won’t work in this place.”

Zelda gets out of her seat and picks the sconce that Elise used to free her up from the floor. “I need silence,” she announces before she drops it into the pit. “Fifty meters.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Elise determines. There was something wrong about the way the sconce sounded compared to the way the men did. Their shouts actually didn’t sound right from the start, but she initially shrugged it off because she doesn’t know the acoustics of this room, or the pit. Now she suspects they’re vastly different than they appear to be. The void before them might not exist at all.

Elise takes her shirt back off, and uses it as a glove to remove a shard from the monitor that Rage broke. She sets it on the floor, reflective side up. She then gently nudges it towards the blackness to get it in the right place. Once it’s partway into the dark, she pays especially close attention to the way the light bounces off of it at the threshold. She bends down and starts to retie her shoes while she speaks. “A few years ago, I took a course on volumetric emitter placement. These days, an AI will decide where to place them for optimal image projection, so it’s become a lost art, but designers, architects, and engineers used to have to plan it carefully.

“Which of you has seen the movie Thunderbolts*?” Elise asks the whole group.

Colley raises his hand. “It’s a perfect example of combatting historical superhero fatigue in the early to mid-21st century media by actually lowering stakes.”

“Remember the elevator scene?” Elise presses.

“You don’t mean...” Colley begins.

“I need you,” Elise encourages. “You’re the only one who doesn’t need me to say it out loud, which might skew the results for us. Get over here, we’ll be fine.”

Colley walks over to join Elise. “Up or down?” he asks, sighing.

“Sideways,” Elise answers him. She turns him around then turns around too so they’re back to back. “Leading foot is one, trailing foot is two. Ready...one.”

Colley plants his left foot against the wall while Elise plants her right one.

“Now two.” They both step fully off the ground, holding themselves up by applying pressure to the walls with their feet, and each other’s backs. They begin to chimney walk through the darkness. One of them always makes sure their leading foot has something to press up against before the other tries their side. They could always end up with a wider hallway, or some sort of opening that completely destroys their plan, at which point they would have to go back. They can see nothing in this void.

They don’t end up having to go too terribly far, though. After only a couple of meters, they are out of the holographic void, and into the hallway on the other side. A people mover is running at incredible—and incredibly unsafe—speed below them. That’s what it was. The men who were sent over the edge merely fell on this, and they cried bloody murder because they were being suddenly dragged away into the unknown after believing that they were gonna fall to their deaths. This doesn’t explain the sconce, and it doesn’t explain why their friends aren’t responding to their shouts now.

“We’re gonna have to go back,” Colley determines when they give up.

He’s right. The belt is moving far too fast for their puny human legs to carry them the wrong direction to explain it to the others. If they don’t chimney walk back, their friends will assume that they fell to their deaths too. They prepare themselves mentally, call upon a second wind, and make the hard return journey to the chrysalis chamber.

Once they reappear from the void, Jolanda and Minotaur help them get off the walls safely so Elise and Colley can explain the situation. Rage then conceives the plan.

Elise should feel tired, but she’s wired, so she volunteers to be on carrying duty. She and Zelda hold each hunter by the shirt and pants, low to the ground. They toss them into the void from that position, allowing them to fall onto the belt with a far lower center of gravity. It isn’t painless, but those first two guys probably had it much worse.

Finally, only the two of them are left. “How do you wanna do this?” Elise asks.

“I’m strong enough.” Zelda picks Elise up and drops her onto the belt on her own.

As Elise is flying down the hallways on her ass, she looks back to see Zelda surfing on it like a pro. What a total badass. Elise may be falling in love.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 2, 2546

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Mirage and Ramses worked closely together. They had to design something that had never existed before; an onboard bulk energy weapon. A quintessence gun. The obvious choice was to reroute all that raw power from the slingdrive to the heat shunt. They were already halfway there—the hot pocket was made to pull in energy from the drive. The only difference was that it used to only be for waste heat, and now it had channel quintessence. As per usual, Ramses developed all of the procedures to make these changes by the end of the day, and then disappeared. When they returned a year later, it was done. “It’s all done?” Ramses questioned.

“All done,” Mirage confirmed. “The original planetary-scale black hole was pushed clear of the gravity well of Castlebourne’s recently moved-in solar system, so it shouldn’t cause any more issues for them. I made the new black hole about 690 light years from here, in the intergalactic void, where no one will bother it. Just in case, however, I left a buoy nearby with a copy of Thistle on it to monitor for any traffic within the next several billion years while there still might be some organics who need a certain threshold of gravity. I figured out how to switch the gravity regulators on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida and Varkas Reflex to the new source, so both planets have returned to normal gravity. The inhabitants are starting to delocalize again, though they seem to be a little gunshy about it since they still don’t know what happened.”

Members of Team Matic exchanged looks with one another. Once again, they had been rendered obsolete. Their apparent job now was to go in, spot a problem, then find someone else to fix it for them. Looking at the math, this should have always been their modus operandi, but they had already discussed all that. Leona nodded respectfully at Romana. “Okay. You’re up. Where do we go now, Navigator?”

Romana held her finger upwards and in front of her, as if showing the way to their new destination. “We’ll go,” she began melodramatically, “inside.” She disappeared.

Ramses turned back to Mirage. “Thank you for...” He trailed off before restarting, “well, I was going to thank you for your help, but I suppose I should thank you for letting me help.”

Mirage smiled sincerely. “You’ll figure out your place in this post-Edge universe. There are still some worlds that you have not returned to in a while.”

They said their brief goodbyes before teleporting into their interdimensional habitat. They had no reason to believe that anyone in Castledome would mess with their belts, but still, before Romana could give them a real answer, Leona activated burst mode. The whole stack rapidly jumped over and over again until they were at a safe distance from all others. She then sat down at her usual place on the circular couch. “Are we just taking a break?”

They all looked at Romana. Romana looked at Ramses. “What?” he asked.

“The thing,” Romana egged him on.

“I genuinely don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ramses said.

“The big thing you were working on,” Romana said, still vaguely. “I think you called it Operation Starframe?”

“Oh,” Ramses said. “That’s just an idea. I wasn’t keeping it a secret, I was just weighing the pros and cons. I’m not sold on the utility of it.”

“The utility of what?” Marie asked.

“Well, Project Stargate and Operation Starseed left Gatewood before the reframe engine was invented. Well, it had technically been invented by then, but there was only one ship, and Team Keshida didn’t integrate the technology into the modules, even though time travel could have given them that. Anyway, at this point, those modules have not yet made it even 300 light years. Operation Starframe would realize that alternative, but...I was thinking...only for us.”

“No one called it Starframe specifically,” Leona began, “but we considered that possibility at the Edge meeting. Kestral and Ishida were neutral on the proposal, but we ended up voting against it. There was only so much we were willing to give the public, and that...that was just too much. Colonization should be a controlled effort, happening gradually, so you don’t end up with a bunch of Linwood Meyers out there. Statistically, some would end up building something abhorrent on the other side of the galaxy before anyone realized it.”

“You mean like an oppressive empire run by an immortal megalomaniac?” Olimpia offered.

“Yeah, just like that,” Leona agreed. “We hadn’t heard of the Oaksent at the time, but we were worried about the possibility.” She looked back over at Ramses. “But this would be just for us? For what?”

“Exactly on that last question,” Ramses agreed. “It would be to get us around the slingdrive’s main limitation. We can only sling to where there is already an established presence. A fleet of beacons would let us go anywhere, and we would only have to wait about seven months to cover the Milky Way. But why would we do that? What would we need that for? One secret place for us, maybe, I can see there being a benefit, or maybe a few sanctuaries, but we don’t need the whole galaxy. That’s why I’ve not brought it up. I’ve been trying to determine the mission statement.”

“Plus,” Mateo said, “once the colonists do end up on those worlds, they’ll be confused about why there’s already a competing quantum terminal in the system.”

Ramses shifted in his seat a little. “Well, we don’t need a terminal to reach it, and I don’t even think it needs to be that big. I still don’t know the threshold. What does a presence even mean? Could we leave a 20th century digital watch there to serve as the beacon? What if one of the Al-Amins was there with no technology at all? Could we map onto another person instead?”

“So let’s do that,” Romana suggested. “Let’s spend the rest of the day running those tests. Send a bunch of reframe probes in all different directions, at different distances. One will be carrying the watch. Another will have a smartphone. One can have, like, an electric car... And so on, and so forth. I guess we would be doing the tests next year, instead of today, but still, you could start today.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Ramses countered. “We’ve still not figured out the point.”

“Options,” Leona said. “It gives us options. What if there’s a threat out there that’s below the threshold, so we can’t get to it, but it can get to us, or someone innocent? Or what if we learn that the beacon does have to be electronic, and can’t just be people, and an anti-tech cult of cannibals forms on a colony a thousand years from now, but they’re so remote, no one can get to them...except for us. Because we left a digital watch on their planet’s moon 700 years before that?”

“You want us to be the stewards of the galaxy?” Ramses pushed back.

“Well...guardians is taken.”

Ramses blinked a few times before taking a couple deep breaths. “All right,” he said with the enthusiasm of an entry level worker who didn’t want to lose his job, but also had his limits. “I’ll get started on it.”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Leona insisted. “This isn’t an order. I thought you wanted it, but you can reject the idea, or delay it, or whatever you need.”

“No, I want it, but it’s gonna take some time,” Ramses warned. “I don’t think it will be too much work for me—the automators should take care of the fabrication while we’re gone—but it took Team Keshida years to develop the original Project Stargate. To be fair, that was 300 years ago, but clanking replicators can’t break the laws of physics.”

“Take your time,” Mateo told him. “We’re all here for you, even if that means staying out of your way.”

Ramses returned to his lab to develop yet another project. The rest of the team was useless for the rest of the day. They didn’t have nearly enough reframe-capable vessels, and wouldn’t for another year, if that. Romana still wanted to sling somewhere.

“I have an idea of where we could go,” Mateo began, “but I don’t want to overstep my bounds.”

“No, please, ideas welcomed,” his daughter encouraged.

“There’s an island back on Earth. I went there—well, I may have time traveled, so I don’t know when it was—but it had all sorts of fun things to do. Scuba diving, boating, parasailing, hiking, E-T-C. The whole thing was artificial, but looked natural; just perfect. They called it Star Island.”

“Yes, I heard about that,” Romana replied awkwardly. “Boyd, uhh...”

“He talked to you about it,” Mateo guessed. “It’s okay, I know that he changed from that time when we first met. I think you would like it there as much as I presume he did. There must have been some reason why he summoned us there, instead of literally anywhere else.”

“Then, if that’s what everybody wants,” Romana said, trailing off to wait for others to respond.

“This is your choice, remember?” Leona said.

“And I’m not a dictator, remember?” Romana volleyed.

Leona just smiled at her and nodded.

“Okay, we go to Star Island,” Romana decided, trying to be self-assertive and commanding.

While most of the group was transitioning to their swimsuits, Leona took the liberty of initializing the slingdrive array, jumping them all to Earth. Their belts were floating on the surface of the sea now, magnetically linked, but not in a stack. Ramses teleported out of his lab, into the common area. “Where did you just bring us?”

“Moku Hoku,” Romana answered him. “Have you heard of it?”

Ramses seemed annoyed. “I didn’t know we were gonna sling. I kind of needed the quintessence to conduct my work.”

“Oh, we didn’t think of that,” Romana said apologetically.

“It’s my fault, I should have known,” Leona contended.

“I’m the navigator,” Romana argued. “I’m responsible for this decision.”

Ramses breathed again. “No, it’s okay. I just need two of you to stay behind so I can run my tests somewhere remotely. Or we can have fun today, and delay the project.”

Leona walked up to Ramses. “Let’s delay it. You should enjoy yourself too. You have certainly earned the vacation. It’s gonna take a few centuries to get it done anyway, right? What’s one extra year?”

Ramses considered it before shaking his head, and walking away. Just as they were frowning, he spun back around, and transitioned to his own swimsuit. “Let’s show these hedonistic Earthans how to really cut loose!” They cheered in unison, and might have popped the champagne to get the party started if any of them drank.

They first teleported out into the water to make sure the belts were securely invisible, then left them floating around out there to go have fun on the island. They would come to regret their carelessness when three of them turned up missing at the end of the day.

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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.”

Microstory 2634: In the Doghouse

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Mandica is less than four weeks into her trip, yet 48 years have passed for the rest of the universe. She thinks about that sometimes. If she had never latched onto this relativistic ship, she would be 76 at this point. A couple of centuries ago, had she died at that age, people would have said that she lived a good, long life. Now 76 is still quite young, even for the undigitized. It’s not like she doesn’t accept any medical intervention. For the less enhanced, it’s still unusual to not make it to at least 100. But that means in about 15 or 20 days, she will have passed her own expected lifespan. Her parents were already pretty old when they had her, and she was only 22 when they died themselves. She spent the next six years carrying on their nomadic legacy, but alone...except for Mordred and her bot pack. It is finally time to move on from that. By the time this arkship comes to a full stop, it will be the 26th century. Who knows what the world will look like by then? She doesn’t even really know what it looks like now. Castlebourne isn’t open to the public yet. They only announced it early to build hype, and give ship travelers like her time to cover the expanse.

Most people have no use for the ships. Once Castlebourne does officially open, they will simply transmit their consciousnesses through the quantum network, and arrive in a matter of days at worst. She doesn’t know if they will have facsimile substrates waiting for them or skeletal android bodies, or what. She doesn’t pay attention to that stuff because it doesn’t apply to her. She has chosen to not be able to do it. Those are the values that her family instilled in her. You’re born, you live, you die. That is the cycle. That is how humans have been doing it for millions of years. That’s what life is. She honors her ancestors by becoming one of them one day. Going on this trip isn’t changing the plan, it’s just delaying it by a century, and making it happen on a different planet. If someone had invented faster-than-light travel like they have on the TV shows, she would have absolutely done it that way instead, and stayed on the schedule that her parents predicted for her. But this is what she has. She has a 108-year wait, experienced as 56 days. Then, for the next 80 or 90 years after that, she will lead the kind of life that she wants, and die peacefully on her terms.

Mandica set herself up with exigent alerts. While she can’t see outside—which is normally no problem, because there’s usually nothing to see—the pod has external sensors, keeping tabs on the environment. That environment is always shifting as they’re shooting through space at luminal speeds. That’s a new word she learned. Luminal is for those extremely high relativistic speeds that allow her to survive the journey in a reasonable amount of time. Any slower, and it’s not worth it given her lifespan. That gift isn’t enough now, though. There’s a breach in the hull. Nothing in the ship is going to die, but it needs to be dealt with, and they will send a bot out here to do that. Since there are live specimens on board, most of the vessel has to be spun to simulate gravity using centrifugal force. They don’t spin that whole thing, though. The spinning section is fully enclosed, and kept separate from the hull using electromagnets. The spinning cylinder is fine for now, but they can’t just leave that gaping hole there like that. Someone will come eventually.

The alert told that there was a problem, but it didn’t give her the whole story. A deeper dive into the “local news” explained it further. A micrometeoroid, probably the size of a grain of sand, managed to make it through the shielding, and puncture a hole in the front of the arkship. The EM shield surely slowed it down, after the plasma shield ionized it, but wasn’t enough to deflect it, and definitely could not have stopped it. Since the space between the spinning cylinder and the hull is also a vacuum, it was able to continue to fly backwards like a bullet. It then blasted another hole in the back as an exit wound. Right now, the automated systems are prioritizing that entry wound, because it makes them more vulnerable, but it’s only a matter of time before they head this way. It’s close enough to where Trilby attached the barnacle that a bot would spot her. She doesn’t know exactly how it will react, but it won’t ignore her. It will report the intrusion to a higher tier intelligence at the very least. She has to act.

But what can she do here? She can’t just move the barnacle somewhere else. This entire back section is exposed, and she is visible to anything nearby. She might be able to slowly walk around the engine nozzles, and hide behind them, but that’s a long-ass walk, and dangerous. Trilby said there’s a reason he chose to stick her in this spot. Even though the ship is coasting, and the engines aren’t on full right now, they still generate heat. Her suit, the tether, the barnacle; any of things could suffer damage during transit. She has to think, and she has to think fast. The port side maybe? That might be fine for now, but she’ll then be exposed to the kinds of micrometeoroids that just ruptured the hull. Again, that’s why Trilby put her right here. The way she sees it, she only has one choice at this point. It’s incredibly risky, but the worst that could happen is the bots finally do apprehend her. If she tries any alternative she could die instead.

Mandica gathers everything she can, namely the half-complement of dayfruit growers. After a quiet goodbye to her temporary home, she untethers herself from the barnacle, initiates the release procedures, and watches it fly off into the nothingness. Now she’s staring into the black. It’s haunting. Nothing on Earth is as black as this. No stars, no debris, just endless void. Everything is completely redshifted and invisible to the naked eye. They are simply moving too far away from it all. She shudders and turns away. It shouldn’t be her concern right now. There is no way to know how soon the repair bots will come. She trudges across the hull as fast as she can, which isn’t very fast. Her magboots have to be on maximum, unlike they would be if she were on the inside since a misstep out here could cost someone their life. She sees it with her flashlight now. It’s the hole. Man, is it huge. She was worried about being able to fit, but it’s not going to be a problem at all. You could send a truck through this thing if you had to.

She carefully contorts her leg to magnetize against the edge. To a giant, it would be an edge, but to her, the hull is so thick, it’s like its own wall. She walks along it until she’s fully inside. Now she’s looking at the rotating cylinder, moving at about one rotation every two minutes. It seems to be holding up. She watches it go by, looking for something—anything—to grasp onto. There, that’s it. It’s some kind of access panel. Hopefully, it grants her access to the inside, and not just wiring, or something. She leaps. The microthrusters on her PRU are designed for helium and neon, so they’re not particularly powerful, but they keep her pointed in the right direction. She grabs the handle, and holds on. Then she turns it and pulls. It’s unlocked, which makes sense, because who would they be worried about breaking in? Pirates? Insane human stowaways? She crawls up the tunnel, and comes out through a hatch in the ground, surrounded by timber wolves. “Hm. Could be worse.” It is here that she spends the next four weeks trying to figure out how she’s going to get off the ship unnoticed.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: December 11, 2279

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The team was suddenly floating in outer space, next to a three-dozen kilometer tower that was once standing on the surface of Proxima Doma. All they could see was the faint outline of the lightly self-illuminated looming structure. The rest was utter darkness. They could survive like this for now, but they couldn’t communicate well, so they activated their EmergentSuits, and sealed themselves up. “Checking for injuries,” Leona declared. She scrolled through her list, which reported no issues with the team, but it did display something else. “Extra lifesign detected. Or...maybe two. Sync up and jump.” She selected the coordinates, and they all teleported there.

They found themselves in the penthouse of the tower. Aeterna was lying unconscious on the floor. Mateo scooped her up, and set her on a table. “Where’s the infirmary?” he asked, gently brushing Aeterna’s hair away so he could pull her eyelids open to check for a response. He wasn’t a doctor, but it seemed like the right thing to do. He shone a light into each eye, and saw the pupils shrink, which made sense to him.

“There is none,” Ramses replied. “Tertius and Aeterna are both immortal.”

“Obviously not,” Mateo argued. “She’s also pregnant...I don’t know if you noticed. That’s a pretty big change from when we last saw her a few minutes ago.”

Marie unzipped Aeterna’s outfit, and started to feel around on her belly. “It’s as hard as a rock. I don’t know what that means, but it can’t be good.”

“Keep unzipping,” Leona ordered quietly. “I think I’ve seen this before.”

Marie did as she was asked. “Is that what I think it is, or just urine?”

Leona bent over and sniffed. “It’s sweet. It’s what you think it is.”

“She can’t give birth if she’s not awake,” Romana reasoned.

“Oh yes, she can,” Leona contended. “Because we’re gonna help her. Get that thing all the way off of her.” While they were doing that, she held her arms out, and receded her sleeves. She then instructed her nanites to configure into a sanitizer dispenser, connected to the reserves in one of her pocket dimensions. She squirted it all the way, up and down her arms and hands, rubbing them together. She then turned her nanites into exam gloves, and did it all again to sanitize those too. She took one breath, but decided that it wasn’t enough, and continued into a breathing exercise. She lifted one hand again, and apported a sterile knife into it.

“You can’t be serious,” Olimpia said.

Leona continued to look down at the patient as she spoke. “Ramses is right. Aeterna is immortal, just like her father. She told us about it, and demonstrated it. She is injured now specifically because she’s pregnant. The baby is suppressing her immortality because it has to in order to grow. I don’t have to know how to do a proper c-section. I just have to get the child out of her, and she will heal herself.”

“What if she doesn’t?” Olimpia pressed. “What if she needs surgery to...kickstart the healing?”

Leona looked at her wife. “Then I’ll access the central archives, and find out how to do that.”

Olimpia shook her head disapprovingly.

“If we do nothing,” Leona went on, “both of them die. We don’t know where or when we are. We’re not detecting anyone else around. We are all that mother and baby have. Stand back, it might squirt blood. I don’t really know.” Leona just went for it. She cut Aeterna’s body from side to side, then without any instruments, she reached through the seam, and pulled the skin apart. It wasn’t pretty, but she knew she was right. Aeterna would come back from this. She reached further into Aeterna’s womb, and carefully picked up the baby. It was...floppy. That was the only word to describe what the baby looked like. And blue. She was also very blue.

“Oh my God.” Romana started to tear up, and look away.

“I need to lie her down to perform CPR. Someone cut the cord, please.”

Mateo apported his own knife into his hand, and severed the umbilical cord. Leona turned out to be right. Immediately after the connection was severed, Aeterna’s body started to return to normal. Her c-section was beginning to seal itself up right before their eyes.

Leona looked at her, then back at the baby, then back at Aeterna again. “Get a syringe. I need a blood sample.

“What?” Mateo questioned.

“Isn’t there a first aid kit in one of our dimensions?” Leona urged. “Come on! Hurry, hurry!”

“Yes, I got it. Hold on.” Ramses thought about what he needed, then materialized the syringe. He reached down, and tried to poke Aeterna’s arm, but the needle broke on contact. “It didn’t work.”

Leona understood the stakes. “The c-section. It hasn’t closed up yet. Take it from there. Now!”

“I don’t have a second syringe,” Ramses explained.

Angela apported one from her own medkit. She deftly stuck it into Aeterna’s wound, and drew some blood out of it. The needle broke too, and the skin forced it out, letting it fall to the floor.

Aeterna gasped as she sat up, then settled back down, but only for a second. “My baby!”

“This is your blood,” Angela said, shaking it at her. “Will it heal your child? We don’t know what’s wrong with it.”

“Yes, please. Do it now!” Aeterna shouted back.

“The needle’s gone,” Mateo reminded them.

“Use mine.” Marie apported her syringe. She twisted the needle off it while Angela twisted the bad one off of hers.

They put the two good parts together, then Angela tapped on the syringe, and squirted a little bit of the blood out to clear any air bubbles. She carefully slipped the needle into the baby’s vein, and injected her with the crude serum. They waited there for a moment, breathless and scared. More of them started to tear up. Finally, after about a minute, the apparent cure had circulated throughout the child’s bloodstream. Her skin turned pink, and miraculously, she started to cry. Oh, it was so loud and grating, and the most beautiful thing they had ever heard.

Aeterna burst into tears herself as Leona handed her wee girl to her. She continued to cry, but was smiling at the precious life in her hands. Then she started to blink and look a little bit confused. She adjusted her position a little. “She’s moving her arms, but not her legs. Why isn’t she moving her legs?”

“I...I,” Leona eked out. “The blood should have worked. It did work!”

“She’s not moving her legs!” Aeterna repeated.

“Aeterna,” Mateo began. “What is the baby’s name?”

“What? What does it matter?”

“Tell us the name,” Mateo reiterated.

“We hadn’t decided on a first name yet,” Aeterna began. “She was gonna take her father’s surname, and I was gonna surprise him with the idea to name her after his late mother, Delara.”

“Dilara Cassano,” Mateo said.

Aeterna had been staring at her baby girl this whole time, but now jerked her head up. “You know her. You know her in the future.”

Leona solemnly glided over to the wall, and opened the viewport, revealing a black void. No stars whatsoever. “I know where we are. This is The Fifth Division.” She turned back around, and took one step towards Aeterna. “I’m sorry to do this to you right now, in your darkest hour, but...report.”

Aeterna swallowed, but recognized that she had to catch them up. “You failed. You didn’t have the strength to spirit the rest of the tower away, and it crushed you. But you were lucky. The shockwave blasted its way through the dome, and killed everyone. The massive destruction accelerated the instability of the planet just enough to prevent any hope of evacuation. The poles were the only safe places to be, but most couldn’t get to them. And there certainly weren’t enough ships to get them all off planet. Since I was pregnant, I had a pass. I used what little time I had to make contact with the choosing one network, and found someone willing to send me back. He had his limits, unfortunately, so when I returned, I only had enough time to use the tower’s power reserves to give you the energy boost you needed to finish the job. It looks like we succeeded.”

“So there’s another Aeterna back in the main sequence,” Marie realized, “and another Dilara.”

Mateo looked at her. “That’s why she didn’t recognize us. She was a dupe, like you.” They both looked over at Angela.

“So she never walks,” Aeterna asked. “My baby never walks?”

“I’m sorry,” Leona said. “I wanted to go for the bone marrow, but we didn’t have the equipment, and definitely not the time. Once she was separated from you, your body decided that it was ready to be invincible again. That’s what makes you and your father special. You have layers of death defiance.”

Aeterna nodded somberly. “I wasn’t supposed to be able to get pregnant. I always have unprotected sex, because I didn’t think it mattered. Even if my partner had an STD, they couldn’t give it to me, and I have nothing to give to them.”

“How did Tertius have you in the first place?” Ramses asked. He then recoiled, worried that it was an inappropriate question.

“He had some kind of legacy loophole,” Aeterna answered. “It was some special serum that gave him one shot at conception, which he used to make me.”

“Maybe it was lingering in your system,” Leona guessed. “That’s how you have her.” She gestured towards the baby.

“That was our assumption too,” Aeterna agreed.

“Were you pregnant when we met?” Olimpia asked.

“No. I was pregnant when you came back, but that was a year later, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“I just...didn’t think it was relevant,” Aeterna defended.

“You don’t owe us an explanation,” Mateo assured her.

Just then, a beam of light appeared. They turned their heads to see a crack in the far wall, right where it met the floor. It looked like someone was trying to break through using a thermal lance. The beam split in two, and each one began to travel up the wall at roughly the same speed. As they moved upwards, more cracks of light began to appear between them, in random, wavy curves. It looked rather familiar. They just needed more information to win this game of Pictionary. Knowing that it could be dangerous, everyone suited up. Mateo figured that it would be unsafe to donate his nanites to a baby, like he had with Boyd years ago, so he stood between her and the mysterious intrusion. The others bunched up to do the same. Mateo commanded the nanites on his front to turn into little cameras, and the ones on his back to become monitors so Aeterna could still see what was happening.

The beams continued to move up in straight lines, and accelerated, until beginning to split off into branches. Oh, it was a tree. The first two lines had formed the trunk, and the curves between them was the bark. Finally, the beams met back up with each other to complete the full image. The light became saturated, and began to fill the room. After one final flash, the light and the tree disappeared from the wall, but left a lingering image in the air. Behind it were two figures, holding both of each other’s hands. As the hologram faded, their eyes adjusted, and they were able to see who it was. Well, they were able to see one of them. The other was covered by a hood.

“Romana?” Leona asked.

“That’s not Romana, Mateo determined.

“Miracle,” Romana said. “Why are you here?”

“I think you know why.”

“Who’s your friend there?” Romana asked.

“I know who it is,” Leona said. “Show yourself. You’re not fooling anyone.”

Adult!Dilara Cassano pulled her hood back, and stretched her lips into a polite, but fake smile. “I didn’t wanna come, but I had no choice.”

“What is the meaning of this?” Leona demanded to know. The team hadn’t budged. There was no reason to relax, and think that Aeterna and Baby!Dilara weren’t still at risk.

“It has nothing to do with the kid,” Miracle began. “It’s mostly a coincidence that Miss Cassano here was the person we found to come pull you back into our reality.”

“We,” Mateo echoed. “We who?”

Miracle smirked. It was quite unsettling, seeing her look like Romana, but realizing that she wasn’t their friend anymore. “I think you know who. You broke out of negotiations way too soon, and Pacey is not happy. You need to get back to the main sequence, and back to the Goldilocks Corridor, so you can get back on mission, and assassinate Bronach Oaksent.”

“We have decided not to do that,” Leona retorted.

Miracle laughed. “Oh, I forget. You keep thinking you have choices. That’s enough of that.” She turned her head to face Adult!Dilara. “Do your thing.”

Adult!Dilara hesitated.

“Do it,” Miracle insisted.

Adult!Dilara reluctantly released creepy light vines from her ankles, and sent them out towards the team.

The vines reached their legs, and started climbing up their bodies. They couldn’t be removed. “Your escape modules!” Ramses yelled. “Release them! For the baby!”

They all did it, leaving behind seven caches of supplies to keep the baby alive until Aeterna could find civilization, and then they disappeared in a flash of branching light.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: July 27, 2509

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Boyd managed to convince the group to stay one more day so he could shore things up with his people. It wasn’t that tall of an order, and they figured it was the least they could do. This was some kind of alternate version of Castlebourne, and once they were gone, what would become of it? Would Pacey make an effort to keep it running, or would these AI androids just start to degrade and wither away? Ethics demanded them to do what they could while they were still around to try.

Come midnight central, everyone jumped forward to the future, including Romana and Boyd. They immediately made their way back down to the vactrain, and navigated it to Castledome. Unlike last time, nothing went wrong, and they actually reached their intended destination. It wasn’t flooded or on fire. They just stepped out, and waited for Octavia to find what she was looking for. The way she was feeling around on the tiles of the train station made it seem like a platform nine and three-quarters type of situation. If there was a way to cross back and forth between these two versions of Castlebourne, it couldn’t be something that any rando could stumble upon accidentally. She couldn’t seem to find the right tile, though, so she started tapping on every one of them one by one. Perhaps the special sequence was different on either side.

While they were waiting, Mateo, Leona, and Olimpia wandered over to the other side of the ring, and fully into the dome. Mateo hoped to have a personal conversation about their relationship, but Leona tilted her head clear down to her shoulder, struck by something surprising. “What is it?” he asked.

She kept staring at the castle in the distance. Finally, she said, “it’s a mirror.”

“What’s a mirror, honey?” Olimpia asked.

“I can’t believe I didn’t notice it in any of the other domes. Look at the castle. It’s flipped.” Leona pointed. “That spire should be on the other side.”

“Oh yeah, you’re right.”

Leona’s eyes widened. She powerwalked right back through the ring, and into the station where Octavia was still trying to find the secret entrance. She went over to the opposite wall, and tapped the tiles in the same order that Octavia had when she made her first attempt.

The tube sealed up, and they heard the rush of wind indicating the train that they had taken here was now gone. Then the weird part happened. With more rushing wind, the two halves of the vacuum tube separated from each other, split down the middle where the doors once met. As a cloud of gas filled the space left behind, a second set of doors materialized, identical to the first. They then opened, triggering the rematerialization of the tube as well. Inside the pod—which was much smaller than the usual train car—was Pacey, standing there as cool as an autumn day.

“Can we go?” Mateo asked Pacey.

Pacey smirked. “I dunno. Can they?” he posed to Octavia.

She separated herself from the group, and stepped closer to Pacey, but did not step into the vacpod. “I think we’ve made our main point, but they’re not done learning.”

“Ah, crap. Really?” Mateo questioned. “Friends become enemies? What the hell did we ever do to you?”

Octavia smirked now too. “It’s not about friends becoming enemies, Matt. It’s about enemies becoming friends.” She nodded ever so slightly towards Boyd.

Mateo turned his head towards Boyd quite dramatically. “This whole thing has been about this guy?”

“You need him,” Pacey explained. “Bronach is too powerful to defeat without someone equally powerful.”

“But him?” Mateo pressed. “I mean...maybe Arcadia, or something.”

“Arcadia is not that big of a deal,” Octavia contended. “She gets most of her power by conscripting others, and keeping them behind the proverbial curtain, so it looks like it’s all her. Boyd operates on his own.”

“That’s the problem,” Leona countered. “He’s not a team player.”

“I know hundreds of homo floresiensis bots who would beg to differ,” Pacey reasoned.

“I was being tested too,” Boyd realized.

“Did it teach him to stop being such a pervert?” Mateo asked.

“Oh,” Octavia said dismissively. “Your daughter’s hot. Stop acting like everyone should pretend that they don’t see that. Plus, she’s well into adulthood. She just aged, like two years, right before your eyes. She makes her own choices.”

“Paige would never do this,” Leona said. “Who are you?”

“I am Paige,” Octavia insisted. “I’m just one who’s been through some shit. You’ve led multiple lives. You know what I’m talking about. I did this for you, so you could end it. Soon enough, the Exin Army is going to find their way to Castlebourne, and everything that Team Kadiar worked for will be wiped out in an afternoon, along with millions of totally unsuspecting visitors from Earth, and the rest of the stellar neighborhood. You can’t stop their advance, but you can end the Oaksent regime. The empire is a mess of factions, not because they disagree with each other, but because it’s designed to be compartmentalized. Use that to your advantage. Confuse them, and neutralize them.” She took a breath, and glanced around at the station. “This world is a playground. Some of the domes that we mirrored from the original are dumb, like Heavendome. Others are for relaxation, like Raindome, so you can take your breaks there. The rest are training facilities. That crystal goes both ways. Instead of putting someone else on your pattern, it can take you off. Stay here, keep practicing. Prepare yourselves for the Ex Wars. The train will still be waiting for you when you’re ready.”

“I don’t like to be tricked,” Ramses said to her.

“A necessary component of the lesson,” Octavia claimed.

“A faulty one,” Ramses argued. “We didn’t go looking for Boyd because we wanted him on our team. We went there because your boyfriend told us that we had to. So what’s the real lesson? That you’re the powerful ones here? If that’s true, then okay, but...I’m not sure how that would help us end a war.”

Octavia and Pacey seemed decidedly stumped. “However flawed our plan might have been,” Pacey said, “he’s here now, and I don’t see you ringing his neck.”

Ramses winced. “Well, we can be civil; we’re not savage animals.”

“That’s all it is?” Octavia asked. “You don’t see any good in him, even now?”

“I didn’t say that,” Ramses replied.

“All right, all right, all right. Your pitch is over,” Leona determined. She turned to address the team. “We’re gonna vote on what we wanna do. Will we stay here and train?” she asked with airquotes. “Or will we get our powers and patterns back, and go back out to do whatever we want in normal space?” She looked over her shoulder at Pacey. “Including everything we need to use our tandem slingdrives.”

Pacey shrugged his shoulders, closed his eyes, and nodded.

Leona went on, “all in favor of staying here for an indeterminate amount of time?”

No one raised their hands.

“All in favor of leaving this place behind with our respective toolboxes.”

Everyone raised their hands, except one.

“Boyd, are you abstaining?” Leona asked him.

He’s surprised that she even said his name. “I get a vote?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Yeah, I—I wanna go. I don’t need to stay any longer.”

“Okay, cool.” Leona clapped her hands. She bent over to take the crystal out of her bag, then held it out between herself and Pacey. “I don’t care how this thing works. Just undo what you did. Put us back the way we belong.”

Neither Pacey nor Octavia made a move.

“Are you still holding onto our agency?” Leona questioned.

“No,” Pacey said, disappointed. “But it can’t be done here. Turning off the crystal is fairly simple, though not necessarily obvious. It holds a tremendous amount of temporal energy. You need to block that energy. What do you know blocks that?”

“Lemons?” Olimpia suggested.

A few of them kind of laughed.

Pacey smiled. “She’s right. Dunking it in a bowl of citrus juice would do it. But if you want to exercise some control over what it does—and you don’t want an explosion—you need the harmonic equivalent to citrus.”

“The sound of lemons?” Olimpia pressed.

“Yeah, in a way. Boyd knows what I’m talkin’ ’bout.”

They all looked at Boyd who was a little awkward about it. “There was music involved in one scenario when I was trying to find a way to transport the Buddha’s hand citron to the future. It’s hard to explain, but they converted the genome sequence to sound, and that allowed it to be...it doesn’t matter. All DNA can be translated to music. You just need to pick a reasonable method, and be consistent with it. There are multiple methods, though. Dave had to find the right one for—Pacey, do you want us to use the same method, or what?”

“That’s up to you to decide,” Pacey answered.

“Does that mean that any method will do,” Angela pressed, “or is this another challenge?”

“That’s up to you to decide,” Pacey repeated.

“Great. Boyd, you’ll be our expert,” Leona said. “These two are no help.”

Boyd scoffed. “I wasn’t actually involved in generating the music,” Boyd started to clarify. “I was the boss. Making someone else figure it out for me was part of the thrill. I just heard the highlights afterwards. Which is how I know that playing the entire piece from start to finish will take something like two years.”

“You mean...two days?” Marie asked with a smile.

“Let’s just get back to the real world, and then we’ll make a plan,” Mateo suggested. “There’s nothing for us here.” He then looked directly at Pacey, and added, “if you wouldn’t mind...”

Pacey obliged, stepping out of the vacpod, and off to the side.

“Are you two, like, a thing?” Mateo went on while everyone else was stepping into the pod.

Pacey and Octavia exchanged a look. “Just because we work together, and have the same goals, doesn’t mean we’re hooking up.”

“That’s why I asked,” Mateo retorted. “Because I didn’t know the answer. Don’t be so defensive. You’re the antagonists in this situation, you know that, right? If someone were to write this tale down in a history textbook with any semblance of accuracy, the students would not be rooting for you. Whether the ends justify the means or not, most people don’t like dirty means.” Amidst their silence, he deftly stepped backwards into the pod too. “Just remember that the next time you come across someone you think needs to be taught a lesson.” The doors closed with perfect timing, sending them away and home. Hopefully, that is.

The pod stopped, and the doors reopened. A blackness came flooding in. Dark particles immediately swarmed all around them. Now that Octavia no longer needed Mateo’s protection, he redirected it. He wrapped his arms around Boyd’s body, and endowed him with his EmergentSuit nanites. Everyone else was able to just activate their own suits. They couldn’t talk, though—not in this world. They had to rely on their long histories with each other, and their empathic connections. The other six huddled around Mateo and Boyd. They engaged their tandem slingdrives, and dispatched them all to real, normal space.

Mateo fell straight to the floor, coughing uncontrollably. It felt like the dark particles had entered his body, which didn’t sound possible. According to Ramses, they were just neutrinos, which couldn’t interact with regular matter. Whatever was causing it, he couldn’t stop it, and neither could anyone else. He just kept coughing and coughing until he either passed out or died. He couldn’t tell which.

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