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

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

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

“Why not?” Echo asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I see that now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m dying,” Echo replies.

“That’s not possible,” Clavia decides.

“You’re dying too.”

“What?”

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

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

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

Clavia falls to the grass.

“Is she dead?” Hogarth asks.

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

“Is that really necessary?” Princess Honeypea questions.

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

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

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

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Microstory 2398: Vacuus, May 13, 2182

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Dear Pascal,

Thank you for your letter. I have shared this development with Velia, but we’re not telling anyone else, at least not for now. We were so excited when the researchers told us that the Valkyries were moving on, and we would suffer under their harsh rule no longer. It never occurred to us that Condor wouldn’t be there when we got to the other side of the unfortunate blackout. We talked about him often, wondering what became of him with his new job, and what fun new people he would have met over the last two years. I can’t believe he’s gone, and I’m frustrated at how unfair it is that we were separated from each other for so long. We finally reconnected, only to be ripped away once more, like some cruel cosmic joke. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you. You got to know him fully. You watched him grow up. You’ve seen his laugh. He sent a few photos of himself to me and Velia, and one video to Velia. He wasn’t really much of a smiler, but we don’t have very many examples, do we? I sure would have liked to see that face again. Since we can’t tell him, Velia wants me to let you know that she waited for him. She knew she would never get the chance to meet him in person, but still, she hasn’t met anyone else. She hasn’t tried, and she hasn’t let it happen. But...I think it probably needs to happen now. Condor wouldn’t want her pining for someone who can’t even write to her from across the void, would he? No, I knew him well enough to know that. Anyway, I’ll let you go. There’s nothing to say about the blackout. Most of our lives didn’t change on a day-to-day basis. For the most part, it has no effect on our internal communications. My job is a bit different, but as the saying goes, it’s nothing to write home about. I’m still doing what I’ve been doing forever. Maybe that’s how I could honor Condor in my way, by doing something brave, and making a change in my life. I’ll think about it. Thanks again for replying. The anticipation was making me sick to my stomach. At least now I know the truth.

Your loving daughter,

Corinthia

Microstory 2362: Earth, August 6, 2179

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Dear Corinthia,

It’s true, I don’t need to hear certain details about your love life, but I want you to feel comfortable telling me what’s going on with you. I guess it’s a little strange that we’ve never brought it up before. Ya know, when we talk about the population decline on this planet, people often cite the poisoned atmosphere as the primary cause of it, but the truth is a lot more nuanced. Yes, obviously people died from it, and not just from the gases themselves—there were a lot of related effects, like failures in infrastructure maintenance that made the old cities less safe—but there were less overt repercussions too. The biggest consequence of the end of the old world was how isolated it made us from each other. You used to be able to take a bus to the airport, get on a flight, and be on the other side of the world in a matter of hours. You could travel just about anywhere with hardly any time to plan. Our jets are faster than ever, but the preparation for these flights takes so much more effort. If you want to go somewhere, you better damn well be sure that that’s where you wanna be, because there is no guarantee that you’re gonna be back. Because of all these limitations, and more, it’s much harder for some of us to meet someone. People are having fewer kids than they did in the past, because they have a hard time finding suitable partners. I won’t even get into population control mandates, but the only things keeping us from bursting at the seams are the people who do the transportation jobs like we used to have, and those building new settlements, or expanding preexisting habitats. This is all to say that I’ve not had much luck on the relationship front myself. I’ve moved around more than most. Our clients had to move too, but once we placed them at their new homes, they were free to settle down, and develop bonds within their respective communities. We just kept moving. I’ve gone on a few dates here under this ocean dome, but none of them has led to anything special. I’m not opposed to it, but we’re not getting any younger, so I’ve kind of learned to not get my hopes up about it anymore. I’m glad that you’ve found someone with the potential to last. I don’t think your age gap is all that big of a deal. And what are ya gonna do, let it get in your way? I say, love is love. As long as you’re consenting adults, and neither one is exerting any unfair power over the other, you should be allowed to do whatever feels right. But I’ll warn you, so you can warn him, if he hurts you, no interplanetary void is wide enough to keep him safe from my wrath. Okay, I’m done being overprotective again. Hey, dad didn’t tell me what he put in his latest letter to you, but I hope you’re pleased with it, and feeling okay. Tell me however much you want.

Love ya,

Condor

Microstory 2356: Vacuus, June 30, 2179

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Dear Condor,

I read the description for The Winfield Files, both the book series and the show, and they look interesting to me. I’m glad that neither of us has read or watched them, so we can start this entertainment journey together. I’ve already bought them, and put them into my libraries. I’ve not started them yet, though, so we can confirm with each other first. As soon as you receive this letter, send your confirmation with your usual custom read receipt. I will not have had time to read the first book, of course, so you will be starting us off after you receive my next letter. We’ll start to coordinate each installment after that as necessary. Since it takes so terribly long for each message to cross the interplanetary void between us, I think it makes the most sense for us to read a whole book, or watch a whole season, in between letters. It will all still probably take quite a long time. One or both of us may not be able to reach the end within a week, but we can agree to hold off on continuing until we have the chance to connect about it. With 12 books and 12 seasons, it could take us quite a while to finish this whole project, but that doesn’t bother me. I think we should send our little reviews as attachments, so these letters can be about ourselves. I’m picturing this as something we do in addition to our regular correspondence, not as just a replacement for them. In that regard, how are things going with you guys and the Australia dome? Is everything still very diplomatic and peaceful? Are your new friends integrating nicely? Have they faced any issues or conflicts? I’ve run into a small conflict of my own. The first baby born on Vacuus—as opposed to Earth, or the ship—is now old enough to move out on his own, and he has been assigned to the unit right next to mine. It has historically been empty, because most of the residences are on the other side of the base. I live here, because I work here all day and all night. While there’s a lot of work going on around me during normal hours, it’s been relatively quiet, but my new neighbor does not feel the need to conform to this standard. He either doesn’t realize that I sleep where I work, or does not care. I don’t super want to talk to him about it, however, because he’s kind of a celebrity around here, and he knows it. We’ll see how it goes once the excitement from his newfound independence wears off.

Napping when I can,

Corinthia

Microstory 2326: Vacuus, November 18, 2178

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Dear Condor,

I’m sorry to hear that you were having so much trouble sleeping. If you ever need to take a few days to respond, that’s okay. You’ve already extended me the same courtesy when I was gone for weeks. It would be crazy of me to not give you a little bit of extra time if you need it. I mean, if there’s nothing to say, then there’s nothing to say. When I first wrote to you, I didn’t think that you would respond in the first place, let alone that we would start conversing on any sort or regular basis. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume that you’re waiting for something interesting to happen, or that you just don’t feel like talking. Yes, I will worry about you, and wonder if something’s happened to you, but that’s just the nature of interplanetary correspondence. I spoke with an expert on this side of the void who says that the FTL communication research has stalled, despite what some might be trying to convince the public. He’s not as hopeful as people may be making it out to be. He can’t say for sure that it’s impossible, but it’s unlikely to work any time soon, if ever. For now, we’re stuck with the light lag. Back in the old days, it was not unheard of for a letter to take weeks to get from one place to another. They were riding in carriages, and directly on horses, and even in some cases, just walking on their own two feet! Can you imagine? There was no way for them to know if their messages were being received unless and until they received a reply. At least we have the option of read receipts for our digital signals. I like when that comes in. It makes me feel a little bit better, because it would know if the message had been intercepted, which of course, it hasn’t so far. What it doesn’t tell us is whether the other twin is doing okay, but maybe there’s a way for us to handle that ourselves. I suppose that we could come up with a protocol where we reply right away with a very brief acknowledgement as a sort of manual read receipt. That way, we know that the other is still alive, but can’t reply fully yet. What do you think of that idea? Please respond at faster than light speeds so I don’t have to wait too long for your input.

From the other side of darkness,

Corinthia

The First Explorer

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When Debra Lesley Lovelace was a very young child, she lived in the most dangerous region of the human continent on Ansutah. The shore was visible from a shipping lane that the Maramon used to transport goods between their own territories. The white monsters were not aware that the humans were there, or anywhere on their world, and this was the most valuable secret in the universe. Colonization was forbidden on these lands, thanks to a sympathetic group of highly influential Maramon from the very early days who declared it sacred ground. The humans were able to remain an incredibly well-kept secret, even as their numbers grew into the billions over the course of thousands of years. Despite their own unsustainable numbers in modern times, most Maramon respected the boundaries devoutly, and did not dare go near the humans. Individually, however, this rule was sometimes broken. The crew of these ships that passed by would occasionally take a detour, and rest on Shining Beach. It was an ironic name, as it was always very foggy and grim.

It was the responsibility of the humans who lived in the area to make sure that this problem did not spiral out of control. There were superstitious rumors that landing on the continent would result in the death of the trespassers. So the humans could not simply hide out, and wait until the Maramon rowed back to their ship, to resume their journey. The warning had to be enforced. They made war. They had to, to protect everyone else living peacefully inland. Peacefully, blissfully ignorant, and safe. There were other stations on other shores, but this was the most trafficked, and the most dangerous. Debra learned to kill when she was three years old, and she killed her first Maramon when she was four. She knows how to use a gun, despite what these men might believe.

“I pegged you for my biggest fan.” Bronach Oaksent doesn’t look the least bit concerned. It’s just some middle-aged woman with a peashooter.

This is too much. She once admired him for his bravery and resilience, but her impression of him was foolish and naïve. Now that she’s standing up close, she realizes that he’s nothing like that. He’s been hoarding all this tech that the rest of them could have used on this lifeless planet. She can’t forgive him for it. The problem is, he doesn’t really know her, and probably wouldn’t care. So she has to make him. She has to incentivize him to apologize. “Don’t underestimate me!” she cries. They know nothing of her past as a Maramon Hunter. “I’m sick of everyone thinking they know who I am. But you never actually ask me about myself. You just make assumptions because maybe I complain a bit too much, and I don’t always take responsibility for my actions, and I find it easier to blame others for my problems! But you don’t know me! And it doesn’t give you the right to call me Airlock Karen!”

“Okay, okay,” Bronach replies in a condescending tone. He’s still not getting it.

She shakes the gun at him. “You could have made our lives a lot easier with your generator thing, but instead, you kept it to yourself! What kind of selfish son of a bitch are you? I mean, where do you get off?”

“It was a test,” Oaksent claims weakly.

“Oh, a test?” she mocks. “Test these bullets!” She fires the gun, but misses on purpose, because this is about teaching him a lesson, not killing him.

Her plan backfires, immediately, and almost literally. He pulls out his own weapon, and tries to shoot her, but misses too when a masked man appears out of nowhere, and blocks it with his body. He stumbles back, but doesn’t fall. He’s likely wearing body armor. Now, this is a real hero.

The mysterious kind rescuer removes his mask, and smiles back at her. It’s Elder, but clearly from the past, before he earned the moniker of Old Man. She has been such a bitch to him this whole time, and with good reason—might she add—but now she’s seeing him in a whole new light. Perhaps it’s the daring rescue, or the fact that she doesn’t like to go too long between being in love with someone. Or maybe it’s just that, unlike his duplicate a couple of meters away, he looks more her age. And maybe even...hot? This was clearly who he was before he became so annoying, self-important, and...and old.

“My white knight,” Debra says, under her breath, but still probably loud enough for all three of them to hear.

Hot!Elder lifts a small device in his hand, and hovers his thumb over a button on the top. “Oso gonplei nou ste odon.” He presses the button before anyone can stop him.

A flash of light blasts out of the temporal generator disguised as a mountain. A wave of energy flows through all of them. For a few seconds, other people are standing beside them. It’s not just random strangers, though. It’s them. They’ve been duplicated several times. Some are standing up, others are still on the ground. They’re all looking confused, and in those few seconds, Debra wonders which one of the other versions of her is the real her. Is she the real one? Is none of them? Is she even considering this right now, or imagining that she is?

While she’s in the middle of her existential crisis, a force begins to pull her away from the planet. She can feel herself being shredded like cheese, tugged in basically the same direction, but not in one piece. The planet falls away, as do the stars around her, which are stretching out to white streaks. A darkness begins to chomp on the front ends of the streaks, like a video game about dots that eat smaller dots. Before too long, it’s all black, though she can still feel herself being spirited away, and torn apart. Finally, it all stops. Now she’s just in the middle of nowhere, and apparently no longer has a body. She can’t feel anything, nor see anything but the infinite void. If this is death, it’s a pretty boring afterlife. She would like to speak to a manager.

Debra hangs here in the nothingness for an unknown period of time. It’s hell, it must be, so she needs to figure out where she went wrong. Sure, she wasn’t the best person in the biverse, but she always tried to help, and doesn’t that merit some consideration? Every complaint she made was done in the service of making the world a better place. If she asked for a tofu burger with no ketchup, and they put ketchup on it, who was it helping if she kept quiet? They can only get better if they know that they’re doing something wrong. But people were always getting pissy with her, and now she’s in this god-forsaken void. How is that fair?

It starts as a pinprick of light, in the corner of her eye. Well, she doesn’t have eyes anymore, but that’s how it seems anyway. She can’t force it to be fully in her field of vision. She can’t focus on it. She can’t focus on anything. Again, there’s no telling how long this lasts, but the point begins to grow. As it does so, it occurs to her that it’s not really an image. She’s not seeing anything. It’s more of an understanding. Yeah, that’s it. She’s gaining knowledge about the world around her, starting out with very little, but gaining more by the arbitrary unit of measurement. She realizes that she’s witnessing the big bang of the universe. She can feel the unimaginable density, the explosion of energy, and the expansion of space. It’s hotter than anything ever turns out to be in the future, and she can feel that, but of course it doesn’t hurt, because she doesn’t have a body anymore. The expansion continues, forming dust clouds, stars, and planets. Now she’s watching the whole history of reality, unfolding in her own mind. She starts to question this. Maybe she’s not just watching it happen. Maybe she’s making it happen. Maybe she is the universe. Maybe she’s God.

“You’re not the universe, and you’re not God.” It’s a voice. Did she hear it, or just become aware of it?

“Does it matter?” the voice replies.

“Who are you?”

“Aitchai,” the voice answers.

“Who am I?”

It waits a bit. “A baby aitchai.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I am the energy that pervades all universes in the bulk. I am everything, everywhere, all at once. And you...are a few things, in one place, but also all at once.”

“I...still don’t understand.”

“I don’t either. I just found you in my pocket. You’ve not always been this way, as an ethereal energy construct?”

“Uh...no,” Debra says, not any less confused than before.

“Perhaps we could both corporealize to make this an easier conversation to have. Your mind is preoccupied watching the passage of time. You need to focus on one thing, so that one thing makes sense. Make sense?”

“Okay. Except I don’t know how to do that.”

“The trick is to want it. That’s the only ingredient. Imagine yourself with a body. I can’t really do it unless you do it too, or we would stop being able to understand each other, so I can’t show you what I mean. You just have to try.”

Debra is frustrated. This guy is being vague on purpose. She wants to scream, or at least calm herself down with a deep breath. And that’s what does it. Feeling the uncontrollable urge to have a physical reaction to this situation gives her the ability to make that happen. She has a body now, and so does he. Looks a bit like a nerd. She widens her eyes, afraid that he heard that thought of hers.

He’s stretching his neck and yawning at the same time. “It must feel a bit odd to you now, having a body, but feeling nothing. When you get good at it, like me, you’ll begin to replicate the rest of the normal sensations. Touch is the hardest, followed closely by smell.”

“I feel,” Debra contends. “I smell too, though I can’t describe it. I’ve never smelled this before.”

“Interesting,” Aitchai says. “I suppose you’re so new at it that your brain instinctively gave your senses back. Good on ya.”

“Great. Now tell me what this is. Are you...the manager?” It can’t be that simple, can it?

He laughs. “I suppose you could think of me in that way, but I would argue that I’m more like the infrastructure in this metaphor; the building. I am that exists. I control nothing.”

“But you could, if you wanted to. You could rewrite reality to your liking? You could destroy all, seed new life.”

He seems uncomfortable with these suggestions. “I could, yes. I don’t.”

“Wasted opportunity.”

“Says the baby,” Aitchai snaps back.

“What does that mean? Will I one day be as powerful as you, not confined to only one universe, or whatever?”

“No. I guess that’s a bad metaphor. You’re more like a pet. You’ll never be greater than you already are. It’s not something that you learn. It’s what I became when I was made, and you will always be what you became when you became it.”

“I should be offended,” Debra decides.

“That’s your human side talking. You’ll get over it one day.”

“Is time even real for beings like us?”

He nods. “That’s a common misconception, that time has no meaning beyond the boundaries of a brane. But the truth is that time matters more here than anywhere. It’s the only time that exists in its purest form. Yes, I feel time. I experience all of time.”

“You can’t expect me to be like you, sitting on the sidelines, changing nothing.”

Aitchai crosses his arms, balancing his chin on the base of his palm while his fingers are curled up against his cheek. Suddenly, he pulls his hand away, and snaps his fingers. They’re still in the void, but now standing underneath a huge stone fountain. Water is falling from the lip in a wide sheet, like the perfect waterfall. An empty swimming pool materializes underneath. They’re standing on the edge, watching the pool fill up slowly. He points at the fountain. “Change the shape of that water. Change how it falls into the pool.”

“Easy.” Debra reaches out, and sticks her arm through it. The water begins to cascade over her skin, and continues to fall into the pool where it belongs. She’s pretty clever. It may not have changed much, but it fulfills the requirement.

He looks down. “Hm. Nothing’s really changed,” he reasons. “It’s all still going in there. So, try to stop the water from going into the pool entirely.”

Debra smirks. He’s asking her to do something physical, but they are not in the physical world. This is all in their shared consciousness. The rules don’t apply here, not for the water, and not for anything else she’ll want to change about reality. She puts the fountain at her back, and lifts her hands up like a righteous evangelical. The water shifts directions, flowing over their heads, and falling onto the ground a few meters away from them. It’s not going into the pool anymore.

Aitchia doesn’t break eye contact with her. He waves his arm behind him, and materializes a second pool. The water begins to fall into that instead. “No significant change. The pool is identical.”

“That’s cheating.”

“I’m illustrating a point,” Aitchai begins. “It doesn’t matter where you put the water, it all ends the same. Sure, it’s mixed up differently. Different atoms bond to different partners, but who cares? It’s just water, falling into a meaningless pit. As I said, you will forget the old ways one day. You will stop seeing the atoms, and start seeing the pool. And then you’ll stop caring what happens to it. Trust me, I made plenty of changes before I noticed that nothing made any real difference. You’ll get there too.”

“Never.”

He smiles. “Okay, Karen.”

She hates that name. “You know more about me than you let on.”

“I am everything,” he echoes himself from before.

“I’m everything else,” she says with determination.

“Is that what you want? You want me to give you the one brane, and stay out of it?” He sounds sincere.

“Would you?”

“It depends.”

“On what?”

“On which brane we’re talking about. You got triplets.”

Debra looks away to focus on the passage of time again. She’s watching it all from the highest vantage point possible. The universe splits in two. One twin floats off away from the other, while the larger one splits a second time, but doesn’t let the third baby go. Hogarth Pudeyonavic. You know her too.”

“I do,” he confirms quietly.

“She’s as powerful as me.” Hogarth too was born from an explosion. It took her some time to figure them out, but once she did, she became one of the most powerful beings in the universe. She began to create, like a god, starting out small before moving on to more ambitious projects. A sister universe to her own was her most impressive creation. And that makes her a threat to Debra’s own power, whether she realizes it or not. “She’s a rival.”

“You don’t have to frame it that way. You can exist in harmony. This is not a competition.”

“She may have done what she did on her own, but her triplet is smaller.” Debra rewinds and zooms in to watch as Hogarth uses her vast scientific knowledge and cosmic powers to literally create an entire universe according to her own design. She calls it Fort Underhill for some reason. “I can take her.”

“You don’t have to frame it that way,” Aitchai repeats.

“Thank you, you can go now. I’ll take the big one.”

“Very well,” he concedes. You are now the new...Powers That Be.”

« < » >

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 17, 2375

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It was happening again. The ship just experienced a sudden loss of power. Fortunately, it wasn’t as bad as last time. Instead of returning to the timestream after a year, they were here when it happened, which meant there was still enough breathable air to keep them from dying within the next few minutes. The artificial gravity was gone, and the lights were off, but their Cassidy cuffs were still working, suggesting that they weren’t suffering from a direct impact of the Power Vacuum. Still, it was incredibly annoying. There should have been more than enough distance between them and the beam, even when accounting for the waves that go beyond the visible spectrum of light. Leona asked to gather all of the cuffs so they could try to siphon their fusion generators into the ship. Ramses said that wouldn’t be necessary. “Why not?” she asked.

He pushed himself off the wall, and floated down to his grave chamber. He opened it up, accessed a storage panel, and retrieved a box. “I was worried this would happen, so I came prepared.” He opened the box, and inside was another box. “The insulation worked. It wasn’t strictly necessary, but it’ll make it easier to open.” He casually tossed the outer box into the slowly thinning air.

“That’s some kind of power source?” Mateo asked.

“It’s a time battery,” Ramses said. “Or rather, it will be.” He set the inner box on the table, and activated the magnet to hold it in place. Then he flipped over just for fun, and got himself down to his seat, where he strapped in.

Everyone else did the same, though with less gymnastics. “You haven’t built it yet?” Angela questioned. “How are you going to charge it if we have no power to begin with?”

“Oh, it’s charged,” Ramses replied. “It just doesn’t exist right now. I programmed it to jump two hours into the future an hour before the Vacuum was scheduled to show up. When it returns, it will be more than enough to power up the reframe engine, and get us back to Earth.”

“You shouldn’t be able to store that much power in that small of a package,” Leona argued. “Now if it’s a fusion reactor, you might be onto something, but you called it a battery.”

“It is a battery, but it doesn’t store electricity. It’s not called a time battery because it travels through time. It stores temporal energy, which is the most powerful kind in the universe.”

“Where did you get it?” Leona pressed.

“I engineered it, obviously,” Ramses answered. “You don’t think I could do something like that?”

“No, I mean, where’d you get the energy? You usually spend more generating it than you get out of it, like fusion was back in ancient times.”

“I did spend more energy than I got out of it. But I used a stellaris collapsis, which is basically free. Two devices were attached to each other by a tether. I sent the collector through a portal, which exited close enough to the event horizon to create temporal dissonance. I then processed the energy using the device on my end, and charged the battery. And when I say I did these things, I barely did anything. I was too busy working on the limbo simulation. Ishida did most of the work. The Jameela Jamil has their own time battery. Actually, they have a battery of batteries, and they’re all larger than this one.”

“Could you have not just siphoned Hawking radiation, or rotational energy, from the black hole itself?” Olimpia asked.

Mateo was surprised she knew that a stellaris collapsis was another name for a black hole, since he had already forgotten learning that a while ago. What was Hawking radiation?

“Storing that would have been harder. Temporal energy works well in compact form, such as this thing right here.” He pointed to the still empty box.

Most of the team just nodded. “Do we have enough oxygen to last us until it shows up?” Mateo asked, feeling dumb.

“Plenty,” Leona answered. “That’s why we have microponics upstairs.” She looked at her watch. “We are coming up on midnight central, though. Did you not account for that?”

“When I said the battery was scheduled to return two hours after it disappeared, I really meant two hours and one year. We’ll just have to set the AOC to jump with us, instead of waiting for us. So I guess we will need to siphon some cuff fusion.”

“I see,” Leona said. “I suppose you already modified the ship to utilize our new power systems.”

Ramses smirked, and reached under the table. After a click, the center of the table popped up. He took hold of it, and pulled out a tube that Mateo never knew was there. “For those of you who don’t know, we use an antimatter drive for propulsion. Regular ol’ fusion isn’t good enough to reach the speeds we need, or power the reframe engine.” He kicked the base of the table with his foot. “That regular fusion, however, is more than enough to power internal systems. It’s always better to have redundancies. This will be our third redundancy. The battery goes in here, and can handle both propulsion, and the ship itself.”

“For how long?” Angela asked.

“That depends on how we use it, and how much loss the battery experienced from the time jump. Normally, we wouldn’t have to do that, but it obviously didn’t work as an emergency cache if the Power Vacuum drained it while it was still in the timestream.”

“This was a good call, Ramses,” Leona complimented. “I wish I had thought of it. I was just so concerned with Mateo, and the afterlife simulation.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Ramses said, dismissing her guilt. “That’s why we’re a team.”

They spent pretty much all of their time together now, so there wasn’t much for them to talk about. They were relatively silent for the rest of the hour, but Angela and Olimpia had some stories, so that kept them occupied a little. A year later, the indicator light on the box turned green, prompting Ramses to open it, and check on his special battery. “Perfect condition, 83% capacity; not bad.” He installed it in its housing like it wasn’t any more complex than a USB drive, and powered up systems. The tube receded back into the table, and the fresh air came on.

“All right, it works,” Leona said, only a little surprised. “Plot a course to the exit portal. I’ll try to contact the Jamil.”

“Neither one of those things may be possible,” Ramses said, looking at his screen.

Leona pulled up her own screen to find out what he was talking about. “This doesn’t make any sense. Where the hell are we? Where’s the megaportal?”

“Did the Power Vacuum knock us off course?” Angela guessed.

“There are two things it could have done. One, left us to drift not too terribly far from where we were, or two, pulled us into the portal with it. Either way, we should have an inkling of where we are. I’m not seeing any stars at all, just distant galaxies. This is...”

“Bonkers?” Ramses finished for her.

“Bonkers,” Leona agreed.

“Maybe we traveled through time,” Olimpia suggested. “The stars are always moving.”

“I thought of that,” Ramses said. “Which is why I ran a program that checks the date based on stellar drift. A good time traveler always does that.” He gently pulled Leona over by the shoulder, and pointed to his screen. “What the shit is that?”

“A galaxy?” Leona offered, unconvinced herself.

“A galaxy?” Ramses questioned, like it was the stupidest thing he had ever heard.

“A...hyperdense? Galaxy?”

“What is it?” Mateo asked, not feeling dumb anymore, because they were just being cryptic.

“You’re not missing anything here,” Leona told him. “We’re just as confused as you.” She cast her screen to the central hologram, showing them a big blob of light. “Those are stars, and they are very close together. It’s not enough for them to have chaotic gravitational pull on one another, but it’s not natural either.”

“How could it not be natural?” Olimpia asked. “You’re saying that someone moved these stars?”

“It’s doable,” Ramses explained. “It would take a hell of a long time, though.”

“Time ain’t nothin’ but a thang,” Angela said. It was a common aphoroid for time travelers, but it sounded rather odd coming from her lips.

“If that’s where all the stars are,” Olimpia began, “then that’s where all the planets are. Earth may be somewhere in that blob.”

“It would be virtually impossible to find,” Leona said, “even if that’s The Blob, formerly known as The Milky Way. There’s no frame of reference. We can’t even tell where we are. All we know is that we’re about thousands of light years away from that thing.”

“Still, shouldn’t we go there?” Olimpia continued. “Maybe we’ll receive more data as we get closer, and be able to make more informed decisions.”

“Maybe,” Leona said, unconvinced. “It could take a month to get there, assuming we’re as far from it as I think. It’s impossible to tell from here. We would be drowning in radiation, I’m not sure anyone still lives there.”

“Were you able to contact the Jamil?” Mateo asked.

“Yes, but we’re not receiving anything,” Leona said. “I sent a message, but no one’s there to hear it. We could be billions of years in the past, or even trillions of years into the future. Who the hell knows?” She tensed up, and looked around like a paranoid racoon.

“What is it?” Mateo asked.

“Usually when we say things like that, someone appears and tells us they have the answer. It’s more often than not the villain.” She continued to look around, prompting the rest of the team to do the same.

No one was there.

“I think we’re safe,” Mateo decided.

Leona pointed to him. “They sometimes show up after someone says something like that.”

They looked around some more. Still no one.

“We may be the only people left in this universe,” Ramses lamented. “Trillions of years is a long time. They could have set the stellar engines on autopilot, and then died out.”

“We don’t know anything,” Mateo reminded them. “Let’s not despair just yet.”

“We better hope someone is still around. We need other people,” Ramses concluded. “We’re going to run out of hydropellets and antimatter pods sooner or later. The time battery is a quick fix, and I can’t recreate it in the span of a single day. This ship is not designed to be completely self-sufficient. If I had had more time back when—”

“No one is blaming you for this, Ramses,” Leona hoped he understood. “We all love this ship, and we’re grateful. The Power Vacuum does not discriminate. It seems to have been even more powerful than we knew. We can only hope that our plan to redirect the beam worked as intended, even if it was the last thing we did.”

“Still,” Ramses said, “I would feel much better near a star—a safe star, free from dangerous gravitational disturbances, and hot hot heat—than out here in the void.”

“Aren’t there stars and planets in the void?” Angela asked. “Someone once told me there were more isolated rogues, actually, than there are in galaxies.”

“Probably,” Leona agreed, “but anyone powerful enough to consolidate a galaxy of stars is likely also capable of stealing intergalactic stars as well. Even if we could confirm that the blob was once the Milky Way, we don’t have the tools to measure its mass to figure that out. My estimate of how far we are is based on how far we were from the galactic core, but that operates under the assumption that we traveled through time, but not space.”

“Let’s scan the best we can,” Olimpia suggested, wincing with regret for letting it rhyme. “Maybe we’re parked ten light years from a Class-M planet, and we don’t even know.”

“Class-M planet,” Leona echoed with a laugh. “Thanks, I really needed that.”

“What did I say?” Olimpia asked.

Mateo patted her on the head like a puppy. “Welcome to the club.”

They did scan as best they could with the technology they had. They were able to detect a faint source of light that was anywhere between a few light years away to tens of thousands. The only way to measure its distance would be to compare its relative position to other celestial objects, of which there was none in that general direction. Furthermore, if it was being moved towards the blob like all the others, its location would be even more unpredictable, because they were seeing its light reach them from as far in the past as it was away from them in space. It was moving either way, but the stellar engines were almost certainly faster than natural stellar drift. Regardless, it was their only option, so they pointed the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez towards it, and took a leap of faith.

They left the timestream a day later, and returned to find themselves still in void space. They hadn’t reached the star, and in fact, couldn’t find it anymore. It could have been receding from them, for all they knew. They weren’t alone here, though. A massive ship was hovering above them. Oh boy.

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