Microstory 2760: Heave Ho

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The way Laise described the traditional means of lifting a sunken ship sounded exhausting and time-consuming. Their ancestors would have sunken barrels and tied them to the bottom. To make them buoyant, they would push buckets down and transfer air pockets little by little until the last barrel was enough to lift the boat. They didn’t have time for that. They had no freshwater, and as it turns out, no food. The barrels weren’t airtight. Each had a hole on the side, presumably to let air through, but when the boat sank, they all flooded with seawater. Most of the fruit had spoiled before they even showed up. The coconuts were okay. They floated on their own, so once that barrel was opened, they were easy pickings. That was what they ate during their break periods.

The first thing they did was rip all of the heavy metal and other unnecessary pieces off of the vessel. They pushed them over the side, and let them drop down to the shelf that the boat was on. This made it as light as it could possibly be.

After clearing the spoiled fruit mush, they tied ropes around the barrels one at a time, and created a makeshift pulley system around the bulwark and other parts. Then they stood on the crow’s nest and pulled the barrel up. Once it was on the surface and full of air, they closed it back up and plugged the bunghole securely. Now they had to reverse the process, which was even harder. The air-filled barrel wanted to float, so five of them had to stand on—or even hang off of—the crow’s nest. That was as many as they could fit before they ran out of leverage. The sixth person freedove down with the barrel, and held it in place so it didn’t wobble around like a watermelon.

While the pullers tied off the rope to hold it in place, the freediver came back up to recapture air for themselves. Then they would go back down with the seventh person to tie the barrel to the bulwark, and untie the original rope. Each barrel took about an hour, factoring in break times and errors. They were so tired, blistered, achey, hungry even with the coconuts, and absolutely thirsty. Rain would make their job harder, but it would at least give them something to drink to survive another day. They were able to learn from their mistakes and get into a good rhythm, but they were also losing energy with each one, so they never ultimately sped up the process. It took them two days to get through the lifting phase, but man was it worth it. As soon as that sixteenth barrel was in place, before the pulley rope could even be removed, the boat let go of the shelf, and rose. The people who were on the crow’s nest all jumped off to make it that much lighter, and watched the mast fly up above them. It was  glorious to behold.

Now the boat is close enough to the surface to stand without drowning. It’s still totally filled with water, but bailing it out will be the easy part. At least they think it will. They obviously start with the wet deck, which is the most appropriate term for it today. They think it’s going pretty well. Some water is splashing back in since the surface is so close to the railing, but it seems to be working. Then they realize their mistake. The boat didn’t simply sink on its own. There must be damage. Sure enough, when they swim down to a small storage room, they find the hole. It’s not particularly big, but it has to be patched first. That isn’t even their biggest problem, though. They’re about to tip.

“Three people on starboard side and three people to port side!” Rage orders.

Five of them run to one while Elise is alone on the other. Rage stays in the center.

Rage points. “That’s starboard, and that’s port. Minotaur, Zelda, join Elise. Okay. The water is out but the boat is unstable. Does anyone have any idea why?”

Jolanda raises her hand. “I don’t have any sailing experience, but I’ve been on more than one boat. One thing they all have in common is this thing called a ballast. You don’t actually want it to be super light, unless it’s a speedboat or jetski. You want some weight to keep it in the water so you don’t tip over. Modern boats use water itself. Don’t quote me on this, but I believe in the olden times, they used metal.”

Rage looks over at the water. “We just sank our metal to make it lighter.”

“I did not want to do a seventeenth barrel,” Minotaur contends. “Dumping our heaviest stuff was the right call. We just need to bring some of it back up. I wouldn’t mind having some chains anyway. Chains come in handy in mazes all the time.”

“Well, I’m glad we dumped everything onto the shelf, instead of the depths.” Rage sighs and centers herself. “Okay. We did this once, we can do it again. Zelda, Colley, please stay on the boat on opposite sides to maintain balance. Hopefully that will be enough. The rest of us need to get in the water so we don’t literally rock the boat.”

“Our pulley rope has been through quite a bit by now,” Laise says. “I don’t think it’s gonna make it. It might snap. We need to use a different rope.”

“We don’t have more rope,” Rage points out. “We’ve already snapped two.”

Elise looks up. “Take it from the sail. It’s long enough that we can double up and distribute the stress. Then we’ll put it back up where it belongs.”

“So many concessions and compromises,” Rage laments. “Very well. Do it.”

So they add another phase to the work even though they thought they were done. They pull up the bars and grates, but they leave the cannons. Their combined strength isn’t enough to make that happen, and the rope probably isn’t strong enough either. They’re into their third day before they feel like they’re ready to learn the ropes, so to speak. Laise knows some history of sailing, as does Colley, but none of them knows how to sail. They spend the rest of the day trying to figure it out methodically. They still don’t have any regular water, but they’ve been drinking coconut water, and it won’t matter how long it takes to find land if they sink or crash before they even get there. It’s smarter to take their time, and do this right. Everyone is drained, but they’re not stopping.

“We don’t even know where we’re meant to go,” Minotaur reasons. “I’m not used to that. I mean, of course I’m used to being lost, but I always have something to orient myself. This dome has a diameter of 3,300 kilometers, and we could be in the very center of it. Sure, if we sail in one direction, we’ll eventually hit the wall, but that’s assuming we don’t die of thirst, starvation, or exposure before then. Everything else is ocean or an island, and those are notoriously hard to target, even with a map.”

“I have a map.” Jolanda is climbing up from below deck holding a piece of paper.

Colley doesn’t have to ask, she hands it to him. He examines it a little before looking up at the sky. “We’re gonna need to orient ourselves again. For that, we need the stars back.” He returns to the map. “Narratively, I know where this thing set sail, and I know where it’s going, but it may have gotten knocked off course. Even if it didn’t, I have no idea how far the original crew supposedly made it before they sank.”

“Rest up,” Rage instructs. “We set sail tonight. Once again, I hope it rains.”

It doesn’t rain, but that night, they are given an opportunity to find out what happened to the original crew when their ghosts appear. Or they’re zombies, or something else like that, because they can make physical contact with the living. That’s exactly what they do by attacking too, because as one might expect, they were pirates.

Microstory 2759: Sunk Cost

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Elise is the last person to emerge from the depths. She practically begged one of the other hunters to come with them, but they refused. They said they didn’t want this anymore, and would be finding a way back or out. The implication was that they would kill themselves, but Elise didn’t ask any more questions. It is not her job to protect strangers. Suicide isn’t impossible these days, but it’s much harder for most than it used to be. A version of them will survive out there somewhere unless they don’t want it to.

So she went into the fountain behind the others. She didn’t have to put any effort into swimming. It was like the water sucked her down before pushing her back out at full speed. It was really hot for a minute there too. Now she’s in the torrent of the open water with no land in sight. She appears to be completely alone.

She feels a pair of hands on her chest. “Elise! We thought you were lost!”

Elise can’t even tell who it is amidst the chaos of the storm raging above them. She turns around to find Colley. “Where are we? Where are the others?” she cries.

“Get on my back!” he shouts back. “We found something!”

After she climbs on and straddles his hips, he breaststrokes away. They end up traveling pretty far. It’s a wonder, really, how he managed to find her at all.

At last, she sees the others. They’re huddled together, and staying together, which must mean they’re holding onto something. It’s too dark to see it. Only when Colley pulls her right up and helps her get a handhold does she realize where she is. Or she can guess, anyway. It appears to be the crow’s nest of some kind of wooden ship. Minotaur and the Bidan girl are standing in it, on either side of the pole thing. Everyone else is holding onto the railing thing so they at least don’t have to waste energy treading.

The irony is that Elise was just about to start learning how to sail one week after Rage found her in Skilldome. She saw underwater basketweaving as a cute transition to it. After she mastered a regular basket, she was intending to weave a model of a ship, and then she would take it with her to the docks. It was going to be this whole thing. To be fair, she was going to learn 21st century sailing at first, and only maybe make her way down the centuries after that, but it doesn’t matter, because now she knows nothing. It’s a pole thing and a railing thing until someone tells her exactly what they’re called.

They spend hours there, because there’s nothing else they can do. Before Elise arrived, Zelda reportedly climbed up to the very tippy-top to get a look around, but the waves were too big and the moon too obscured by clouds. There are some waterfronts in Treasure Hunting Dome. There are plenty of challenges to be completed involving the water. But it doesn’t have anything like this. Elise knows that because Rage made them memorize as much of the layout of the dome as is publicly available. You need space to make the kind of storm and angry sea that they’re dealing with right now, and where they were before simply doesn’t have it. But two domes have exactly that. One is called Polar Tropica. It’s a gargantuan resort. The other...is Aquilonian Deep.

Miracle must not have been lying. Time travel is real, and they just came out of a portal. They didn’t simply jump into the fountain and sink to another level of Treasure Hunting Dome, or even the next dome over. They were sent halfway across the planet in the short amount of time they could hold their breaths. Now anything’s possible.

The seven of them take turns standing up while everyone else holds onto the sides. They are able to yell a few things at each other, but it’s too loud to have full on conversations. Elise explains that she stayed behind to try to convince the other hunter to come with them. Zelda confirms the time travel when she explains that she was here alone for a few minutes before the next person bobbed up. Each time someone new appeared, they reported that only seconds separated them at the fountain, even though minutes passed for those already here. They ultimately waited almost an hour before Elise came. When she asked them how they knew she was there in the first place, they said lightning would strike the spot where they were just about to come up. But Elise knows the truth. The lightning wasn’t marking the spot. They were riding the lightning.

The storm passes, and the sun rises in the sky, no doubt programmed or controlled by Hrockas or his Custodians. They’re dead tired, but still alive, and everyone here still wants to fight. This whole time, ever since the locker room, no one has brought up the fact that only one person can win. What’s the point? Except for one person now, they’re all friends. And the Bidan, Laise LeMaire, is quickly becoming part of the team too. Whatever the prize is, they can surely share it one way or another. It doesn’t help to become cutthroat now, especially not since it will take all of them to survive this.

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” Laise says. “I’ve been trying to remember the stories I was told from my home planet. I lived in a particularly advanced region, but many others were intentionally rustic. Some had boats like whatever we’re on top of right now. They never sank, because while they looked antiquated, the underlying structure was more modern. But I used to date one guy who grew up on one of these ships, and he talked about the real past—I’m giving you way too much background. I’m saying they had ways to lift sunken boats. It wasn’t easy, but it didn’t require gizmos or gadgets either. But we do need a lot of barrels, and even more patience.”

Without even asking for Laise to elaborate, Zelda volunteers to dive down to see how many barrels the boat has, if any. They don’t know this woman yet, but they trust that she wants to survive as much as they do, even if she has stopped caring about winning. Elise volunteers to go down too, because while she never had the chance to learn to sail, she absolutely knows how to freedive. It was one of the first things she practiced when she came to this planet. They search all over, but only find twenty.

“That’s not enough,” Laise says, shaking her head. “You said there were cannons down there too? That’s not enough. We would need at least twice that.”

“What if we got rid of the cannons,” Colley suggests. “While we’re at it, get rid of the chains and the big metal grate thing. Take out everything unnecessary.”

“I am not good enough at math to know whether that would work,” Laise admits. “The guy said forty. I guess I don’t really know what kind of boat he was talking about.”

“What exactly do we do with these barrels?” Rage asks her.

Laise sighs. “We attach them to the bottom of the boat, and then we pump the water out. Once they’re all filled with air, they should lift the boat out of the water.”

They stare at her like they can’t believe their ears. It sounds insane, and insanely grueling. Elise saw where they are, though. They’re sitting on the edge of a sea shelf, and there is no other land in sight. Their only hope is to get this bucket out of the water so they can stand. They’ll figure out how to move it after that. If this doesn’t work, they could die from exposure. But not starvation or scurvy. The barrels are evidently filled with fruit. There’s no drinking water, though, so they take a vote. Either they go for it, or let themselves die just to escape and give up. It’s unanimous.

Microstory 2758: Headwater

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The survivors look up at the sky, expecting Hrockas to reappear to announce Miracle’s death, like this is some kind of dystopian survival game. He doesn’t do that, though, and doesn’t need to. They all saw it. Miracle’s first teleportation could have been a weird trick of the mind, but it’s harder to explain it away this time. It looks like various forms of time travel are possible, and that one of these forms killed her. She will survive, or at least one version of her will. She will have no memories of her life after she was taken from her hotel room, and thrown out the window at the start of this. It’s unclear what she’ll think happened, or what she’ll do now. She may try to fight her way back, but if they really are in another dimension, that might be impossible.

The stakes have officially been raised. Death is plainly on the table, and the traps might be unpredictable, and even inexplicable. They have no idea where any other mines could be hiding. Hrockas wouldn’t have let them get this far if there were no way out, though. If he actually didn’t want them to find the treasure, he probably would have simply erased their memories. That’s not illegal here in the Charter Cloud of the galaxy.

“This is another escape room,” Rage determines. “I’ve even played one very similar to this before. They were regular land mines, of course, but the trick is finding the only safe path between them. We need to get to higher ground.”

“I will take care of that,” Zelda volunteers. She tries to jump up to a beam attached to the outside of the dome, but she can’t get that high in her tiny frame.

Minotaur helps her up. They’re taller, so they follow on their own with less issue.

They can’t climb up too far because they’re constantly curving away from the street, eventually reaching a point where they would lose the perspective advantage.

“See anything notable?” Rage shouts up to them. “Darkened squares? Anything?”

“There’s nothing!” Zelda cries back. “Minotaur is getting nauseated!”

“Come on back down!” Rage tells them. “It’s not safe!”

Everyone has been looking up at them, of course, but Elise has just now realized that Colley has been looking in the wrong direction. His eyesight is darting back and forth across the sky, and he sometimes turns completely. “What is it?” she asks.

“Has anyone here been to Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida?” Colley asks.

“I have,” says one of the only two remaining hunters from Miracle’s team. Elise has not even gotten the chance to learn her name yet, even though it would have been plastered on her locker at the starting line. “I was born on a stasis ship that was part of the original fleet because my parents were awake the whole time as Shepherds.”

“Do you know Bida’s constellations?” Colley presses. “Because I don’t...except for that one.” He points. “That’s the feather duster, which is how I know this is a clue, because we’re a hundred light years from Tau Ceti. It has to be on purpose.”

The girl looks up as well. “Umm...I think you’re right, but I’m not much into the astrology. Unlike Earth, my ancestors never needed stars to navigate. Colonists contrived constellations for fun, according to what I remember. I think that might be the River Dhel, though. It’s the most important one for many of the world’s superstitions because it reflects the real river for a brief window every night.”

“When is the window?” Elise asks her. “And does anyone have a watch?”

“I have a watch on my multitool,” Minotaur says as Jolanda is helping them back down to the ground. “Why do we need it? What did we miss while we were up there?”

“The window depends on what day of year it is,” Colley explains. “We would need a Bidan calendar, and we would need to know what time it is—”

“We don’t need a Bidan calendar,” the Bidan girl argues. “I know we don’t need it because we don’t have it, and had no chance of taking one with us. I just need to know what time it is right now. It doesn’t even have to be the right time according to anyone in the outside world. Hrockas would have accounted for that when programming it.”

“She’s right,” Elise agrees. “You have a timekeeper because he wanted you to.”

“It’s 20:42,” Minotaur answers. “It’s true, I don’t know what planet.”

“For now, it’s Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida,” the Bidan decides, “and we’re too late. The reflection happens at the same time as the lunar culmination every year on the same night between 20:24 and 20:31. It’s a holiday. We took too long to figure out the clue.”

“Point out the river again,” Colley says. He moves over to stand next to her. They quietly work out exactly which stars make up the constellation while he looks down at the ground, a little off to the side, away from Miracle’s still dead body. “We got it.”

“You remember where the stars were fifteen minutes ago?” Rage asks him.

Colley clicks his tongue and taps on his head. “Hrockas can force me into any substrate he wants, but he can’t stop me from having an eidetic memory,” he echoes Miracle from before she hit an apparent teleportation mine and fell to her death.

Rage takes a breath. “Okay, we’ll draw for lead. Colley, you’re out of the running this time since you have the map. Our new Bidan friend is too for the same reason.”

“No, please don’t draw,” Jolanda says. “I’ve not been contributing anything to the hunt, and need to feel useful. I’ll take lead. I had a conversation with myself shortly before my consciousness stream was cut. I’m prepared to wake up without memories.”

“Okay, we have a volunteer.” Rage looks around at the group. “Any objections?”

No one objects, so Jolanda stands in front. Colley stands behind her, but far enough away to be hopefully safe from the blast of a land mine. It will hopefully not happen at all, but they’re not too naïve to be prepared for it. Everyone else walks in a single-file line behind him and the Bidan. Colley directs Jolanda slowly. The assumption is that the river mouth ends at the fountain in the center of the square. It’s less likely that they would have to walk the entire length of the river in order to perfectly replicate what the believers on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida would do during their special annual holiday. They seem to be correct once they reach that fountain and no one has died yet. Assuming this will lead them further down the path to their prize, there’s now another puzzle to solve, though. And they don’t know where to begin.

Zelda sticks her face in the dark water. She then slowly starts diving deeper and deeper until only her feet remain, which Rage and Elise have to hold onto so she doesn’t sink to the bottom. After a few more seconds, she taps on her own hip, which they take to mean it’s time to pull her up. “It’s bottomless.”

“You don’t know that,” the other non-team member contends.

“I think we’re supposed to get in,” Zelda figures. “A leap of faith.”

The Bidan nods. “In my planet’s origin story, which we all know someone made up, the creator God takes a leap of faith in the River Dhel where she finds the energy she needs to conjure the star.” She points to a sculpture. “She is represented by a fish.”

That’s all Zelda needs. She jumps in headfirst. Nearly everyone else follow.

Microstory 2714: No Holding Back

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Caleb gave Isavet some money so she could hitch a ride on a boat headed for Saxony. It takes her a week to make it to the shore in the first place. The men on the vessel pay her no mind. They don’t care that she is a woman, or that she is traveling alone. It gives her time to think, and draw up plans in her head. She is confident in her skills, but she still needs to make sure that she does this smartly. If she waltzes into the enemy camp, and starts trying to slaughter them all at once, they might lose a few men, but they’ll figure it out, and swarm her before she can finish. She has to be stealthy and methodical; still quick, but not hasty or sloppy.

Not too long into the journey, she sees something in the water that she recognizes. When she was a little girl, her mother showed her and her brother future world imagery. It explained that they were under a big dome made of diamond, and that the sky itself was like these images, but grander in scale. Her mother said that when you approach the walls, you can see the illusion begin to break down a little, especially if you look at where it meets the water. You will start to see the right angles that shouldn’t be there. That’s what Isavet is seeing now. She realizes that they are passing through a tunnel, and traveling to a new dome. The men on the boat don’t seem to notice. They were made not to. She ignores it too. That is not the point of the journey.

She makes it to Saxony. She knows who she’s after, but she doesn’t know where they are. She begins to ask questions and follow trails, and after another few weeks, she finds them. She’s hiding in the bushes now. She has to watch first, and take note of their routines. Particularly, she is looking for moments when they are most vulnerable, and when they peel off as individuals. As she’s watching, she hears a twig snap behind her. She unsheathes her sword, and swings it as she’s spinning around. She ends up slicing right through Caleb’s spear, and quite nearly Caleb himself.

“Whoa, there! I’m on your side, remember?” Caleb questions.

“Hey!” one of the members of the Vargstoth clan cries. “Intruders!”

“We need to run,” Isavet tells Caleb. There’s no way they’re taking on an army.

“We got you,” Caleb replies. He lifts his hand and gives the signal.

His warband raise their heads up from the brush, and run towards the enemy.

Isavet doesn’t understand. He said that they wouldn’t help. Why are they here? She will have to think about that later, because the fight is on. She turns back around, and runs forward. She starts killing the Vargstoth in droves, but she doesn’t do it alone. After her, Hamarr takes down the most Saxons. He’s laughing all the way; he loves this stuff. But everyone else is very enthusiastic too. No one is holding back. Not all of them make it in the end, but they’re not real anyway.

The fight doesn’t last long. Many of their opponents were not near enough to their weapons, and none of them was expecting a fight fight. They have a lot of experience raiding other camps, but little in being raided. They were arrogant, and it got them killed. After the last enemy is dead, Isavet catches her breath, as the others are checking for stragglers. Now that the dust has literally settled, they can talk. “What are you doing here? You said you wouldn’t help, and wouldn’t make an exception.”

“I meant it when I said it, but then I got to thinking about how vulnerable you are,” Caleb replies. “Don’t worry about authenticity. I’m their leader. I make the rules.”

Isavet continues to breathe, not knowing what to say. She starts with, “thanks.”

Microstory 2692: Little Orphan, Vith

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Ronan and Mayumi, along with the rest of the players who came up with them, start taking stock of their supplies. It isn’t much, but the fruit could float, so that’s great. It is under someone else’s control, though. Most everyone has something which they are still holding onto for dear life, even though the storm is over, and they are out of the water. The two of them have the door. It’s large and heavy; not something that belongs on a ship. Ronan’s best guess is that someone somewhere on Danmörk commissioned it from some other region, and had it shipped there. If the players were supposedly on that ship, it would have likely been carrying other supplies that didn’t belong to them. They didn’t really know the story, though. The Custodians didn’t tell them that that would happen at all. And even if the story goes that someone did buy this door, they would probably be an NPC who isn’t looking for it at all, because it isn’t real. Even if they are, they’re not liable to find it. That’s their justification for keeping it. When they finally build their home somewhere around here, they’ll hook this door to it. They’ve earned it.

They’re not sure where they’re gonna go, though. Should they stay close by, or is this where all players begin their journeys? If that’s the case, it’s not a good place to start a life. At some point, they want to all but forget the way things were. If every time they try to immerse themselves in the lifestyle, someone new shows up who isn’t used to not talking about spaceships and computers, it’s going to ruin the experience. Ronan is not even sure if they want to stay close to anyone who is here right now. Yes, there is safety in numbers, but they can trust none of these people to have any honor. Who are their characters meant to be? They have already met a thief, who has been avoiding them, probably believing that Ronan might retaliate. He won’t. That’s not in Ronan’s character, but the thief doesn’t know that, and neither does anyone else.

Having possessions means someone might take them from you, but it also signals that you’re less likely to try to take from others, and that’s a valuable state to be in. Today, they’re in shock, and still full from a breakfast that took almost no effort to procure. Tomorrow, they will be hungry, and could descend into madness quite quickly. That’s why technology breeds civility. There is no need to act like an animal when a food synthesizer can print you anything you want in minutes. But here? There are no rules, and it’s about to get nasty. That’s why Ronan and Mayumi signed up. But they’re not idiots. They know they need to protect themselves. That probably means forging their own path. Once they start building their wealth, they will start to need to defend it, but they will also be able to, and they will feel more comfortable around others because of that. So Ronan picks up the door, and uses it as an umbrella for the both of them while they head into the woods to look for a private place to settle. It will be miles away.

“Wait, can I come with you?” It’s the little orphan Ronan saved from the deep.

“What’s your name, boy?” Mayumi asks him.

“It’s Vith, son of unknown.”

She giggles, and reaches out her hand. “Come on, Vith. You can help me look out for berries. Don’t eat anything, though. It might not be edible.”

“May,” Ronan argues, “we cannot keep him. You already have one on the way.”

“I’m not going to leave him to starve to death on the shore. I believe we were brought together for a reason. He stays.”

He stays. Then nine months pass.

Microstory 2691: Mettle

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Ronan and Mayumi are at the entrance, waiting for the elevator to lift up to the surface of their first dome. He’s staring at the screen, which is playing footage of the Nordome Network, as if they’ve not already bought into the adventure. He’s not paying attention to the video itself, but the fact that it’s on a screen. They weren’t invented until the 19th or 20th centuries. That seems like so long ago, and they’re jumping so much further into the past than that. But he’s not really thinking about that either. He’s thinking about that screen; about how it’s the last one he’ll ever see for decades. His character is 29 years old, and Mayumi was made to look about 18. Historically, she probably would have been younger, but there are limits to how authentic they’re going to be. This is wild west of the Charter Cloud. Castlebourne’s laws don’t care how old someone appears to be, as long as the totality of their experiences make them an adult. He’s never heard of any substrate-play which—he doesn’t want to think about it. They’re both adults. Their characters have been married for a year. She’s pregnant. That screen.

They’re sitting here with a couple dozen other people who are entering the simulation at the same time. The walls are gray and metallic in a very rustic way, almost like their means of bridging the gap between the modern era, and the Viking Age. Or maybe it’s just a cheap way to build since all this thing has to do is take you up to a forest that’s meant to look like one you would find in Danmörk on Earth. As he’s still watching that screen, getting a little bit of cold feet, Ronan starts to realize that the only reason the metaphor is creeping into his mind is because of what’s actually happening to his feet. At first, he thinks someone spilled their water, but then he sees that there’s way too much of it. The walls are leaking, and the pod is filling up fast. Others have noticed as well, and start to get worried. There are rules about what your substrate has to be. You can’t come in here as a condor, or have advanced physical traits, like the kind of strength a true Norsemen wouldn’t have ever been physically capable of achieving. And you can’t have gills. His and Mayumi’s consciousnesses are still streaming to the remote servers, and he suspects everyone else’s is too, but they still don’t want to die.

They’re floating now, the water is so deep. People are trying to find some kind of emergency hatch, or a way to contact help. Ronan looks over. The display is still showing the hype video, but it’s starting to shutter and shake. The lights are flickering, they’re about to die. Something bad must be happening on the surface, like a simulated hurricane so powerful that it’s breaking the fourth wall, and literally leaking into the infrastructure of the dome. All four walls suddenly separate from each other and fall away. The rest of the water rushes in so they’re fully submerged. He finds Mayumi, and holds her close to his chest as he looks up. There’s a light, filtering through the water, showing their way to escape. They kick their legs and breach. Ah, their supplies. Some of it is floating around, but some of it isn’t buoyant. The ocean floor isn’t too far away. He might still be able to reach it. “I’m going down for the tools!”

“Okay!” She yells. It is storming, though it’s probably not a hurricane. Splintered slabs of wood are scattered about, which weren’t in the elevator. It’s a shipwreck.

Ronan takes a deep breath, and dives back down. As he’s searching for their tool basket, he spots the elevator pod. The walls are coming back together as it’s dropping back down into the shaft. This is obviously not anywhere close to being an accident. The Custodians set up an elaborate way to introduce them to the world of the Norsemen, and they did it in spectacularly terrible fashion. He absolutely loves it, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to go back up there with nothing. He spots the basket, so he adjusts his heading, and goes for it. Someone else reaches it first. The stranger starts picking up the tools that fell out, and putting them back. Ronan is about to fight him for it, because that’s what a Viking would do, but then he sees something else. A young man is drifting around. His eyes are closed. He’s clean-shaven, wearing farmer’s clothing.

Ronan can’t vie for the tools and save the boy too. He doesn’t know who this is, but if he’s half as enthusiastic about this simulation as Ronan and Mayumi is, he wouldn’t want to die on his first day. Would they let him back in? Is there a waiting period for screwing up this badly this early? Plus, Ronan isn’t even sure that he’ll survive at all. You do not have to be immortal to come here. You have to sign a bunch of waivers, just like Mayumi did with baby Talus, but they will let you in if you really want to test your mettle. Yeah, he has to save this guy. He adjusts his heading slightly once more, and reaches the kid. He takes him by the underarms, and swims them both up.

“Ronan!” he hears Mayumi call. “Ronan, over here!” She’s holding onto a big wooden door. The guy who stole their tools is trying to find refuge on it too. “Get the hell off!” she demands, physically pushing him away. She wasn’t even there when he stole from them, but she has ver good instincts.

Ronan drags the victim over to the door, and together, they lift him onto it. Okay, back then, no one in the world had any clue how to perform CPR, but Ronan has his own rules and limits. He’s not going to compromise his integrity for what essentially boils down to a game. He went down there, and pulled this guy up, so he’s going to get the water out of his lungs, and make him breathe again, even if it’s not historically accurate. While Mayumi steadies the door, Ronan presses on the victim’s chest, and provides rescue breaths. He only does it for a few minutes, and never needs to take a break.

The boy lives. He instinctively turns to his side, and spits the water up. He coughs and breathes erratically as he fully returns to the land of the living, or rather the sea of the living. “Thank you!” he says when he gets the chance. “I’m an idiot.”

“It’s quite all right, son,” Ronan says. “Are you here with anyone?”

The boy shakes his head. “My character is an orphan who just escaped indentured servitude in search of a better life in Danmörk.”

Ronan smiles, and slaps him on the back, incidentally causing more water to spill out of his mouth. “Well, you’re gonna find it.” He looks over at the thief, who is trying to grab onto a skjöldr. It keeps flipping around, and as the storm starts growing even worse, he ultimately loses the tools to the deep. “Stop!” Ronan orders. “It’s gone! If we’re going to make it to that shore, we have to do it together!”

He continues to lead the participants. He figures out how to bring them all together, so no one gets pulled away by the waves. They make their way towards the land mass, which started out about a kilometer away. Man, these people really know how to make life interesting. He didn’t sign up to start this whole thing with practically nothing, but it’s the best thing that could have happened to him, and is only invigorating him. Now they have to really build something here. Now they have to fight for survival. The first step in their long journey is over, and it’s probably the easiest one they’ll run up against. They’ve made it. They start climbing up the beach. And so it begins.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 12, 2556

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They found themselves an ice cave to hole up in to get out of the wind. They were not going to die anytime soon, but it still wasn’t comfortable. Ramses and Leona got to work, trying to figure out what was wrong with their suits, but really, there was nothing they could do. None of their technology was working. They couldn’t even activate sensors to find out why. Nothing in the natural universe was known to do this. There could be interference, which made certain technologies malfunction, but they wouldn’t simply not turn on, full stop. Marie and Angela volunteered to take a short hike to higher ground to search for any sort of artificial settlement. Their comms devices didn’t work, but they would signal trouble using their empathetic connections. Those were all organic, so they were functioning fine. They didn’t find anything, though.

When they were mere seconds from midnight, Mateo walked outside, threw a rock he found up into the air, and watched it go up. When midnight hit, the rock didn’t fall down. It simply disappeared. He found it near his feet, covered in a layer of snow, which told them that their patterns had not been suppressed. During the interim year, nothing had changed. They couldn’t turn anything on, or access anything from their pocket dimensions. If it required power, it was off limits. Ramses was at a loss, so they decided to go exploring to see if there were any resources here. Their advanced substrates would keep them alive for a while, but not indefinitely. They still needed to find food, as well as fuel to make a fire so they could melt some snow for the water. Except that was dangerous too, because there could have been contaminants, or it wasn’t purely water ice in the first place. No one was panicking, but they were all worried.

“Look!” Romana announced. The sun was setting, and they could see a little bit of the night sky. Flashes of light were appearing in an artificial sequence, proving that they couldn’t have simply been meteors, or some other natural phenomenon. So there were people here, but they were only in orbit, or maybe others were just a few miles out of view. As they were watching, they spotted a fiery object much larger than the others. While they faded into the atmosphere, this one continued to plummet towards them until a parachute burst out of it, and it slowly drifted down to the surface.

 “Wait!” Leona warned as they began to walk towards it. “It could be a trap. It could be an explosive device. It could be anything.” Even if it wasn’t, that didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous. It could be waiting for their approach so it could disperse a toxic gas, or some other creative way to kill them. All the way out here, they couldn’t rely on the afterlife simulation as backup. This could be it for them.

“We have to look at it, Lee,” Olimpia reasoned. “If they wanted to blow us up, they would have sent a missile that we couldn’t dodge. It’s not like there are any police to get them in trouble.” She led the group a few hundred meters away to see what it was.

It was a small capsule, still hot from the descent, but cooling rapidly. Mateo opened the little hatch on the side to find a rolled up piece of paper. There was also what looked like a compass, though of no familiar design. There were no electronics here either. He unrolled the paper, and examined it alone at first. “It looks like directions.” He looked up, trying to get his bearings. “Written in kilometers,” he added as he handed it over to Leona. “About eighty-three of them to the destination.”

“Still could be a trap,” Leona said. “Maybe they don’t want to kill us, but harvest our organs, or something. That’s why they didn’t send a missile.”

“Either way, we’re obviously going,” Olimpia reasoned. “We can escape a trap, but we can’t escape the nothingness. Yalla.”

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Microstory 2671: The View From Up Here

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Resi is on Anchor Island now, as is every Fold Leader in his House. They all came here in a boat, while Resi got to fly in what he initially called a helicopter, but which was apparently known as a shuttle. They are in a conference room of some kind. It’s very sterile and lifeless. They aren’t used to it. Just about everything they do on Yana is outside, even when they’re under a roof. Fully enclosed spaces are mainly for sleeping, and maintaining valuables. That’s what keeps them a unified peoples, and is a core tenet of their sociological philosophy, even if they’re not entirely aware of it. They’re in the tallest building any of them has seen in real life, towering over the surface so high that the view from this side makes it look like they’re just sitting on top of the ocean itself. They’re all looking out the window quietly together. Resi wishes it was showing the island itself. Caprice’s information was out of date. This place is no longer a wasteland.

“Thank you all for waiting.” The invincible shuttle stranger takes her seat at the head, waving her hand across it invitingly. She taps on the wooden table like it’s a device. It turns out to be just that when a trapdoor slides open, and lifts a glass of water up for her. When she notices the way everyone is looking at her, she taps more to activate everyone’s own personal interfaces.

They begin to play with their preferences, but Resi is all business. He’s at the opposite head, and has to raise his voice a little. “How long until the others arrive?”

“The others?” she questions. “It’s just little old me.” She doesn’t look the least bit intimidated, being surrounded by all these crazy kids, with no one to back her up. This isn’t a contentious meeting, though it will be complex and complicated. He wouldn’t want to be alone. “My name is Zenith Gerard. I am the Anchor Island Representative. Only about a thousand people live here permanently. The rest are traveling up the elevators to Anchor Station, or down from it, as well as a few who are transferring from Yana to the mainland. As I am most familiar with the way Yana works, and how it differs from the rest of the stellar neighborhood, particularly Greater Bungula, I’ve been asked to speak with your personally, rather than bringing in a diplomat from elsewhere. Before we begin, are there any customs that you must set up, or rituals that you must perform?”

“No,” Resi says. “I’ve been trying to meet with you for days, and would like to get on with it, so we can come to an amicable understanding.”

She’s confused again. “There is a procedure for reaching out to us.”

“I was not made aware of it,” he explains. “We are exiles.”

“Yes,” she replies with a sigh. “I recognize that, and wish that I could help.”

“You could,” Resi tells her. “You have the room. You said it yourself, only a thousand people live here. We don’t require much. We can build our own infrastructure, we just can’t stay where we are now.”

Zenith nods. “I hear you, but this is a more delicate situation than I believe you know. I’m not saying no, but even if you agree to live as we do, you are facing opposition from your island leadership. You should know, they’re in the other room, fighting against any aid that we might be inclined to provide.”

Resi fumes. “They are the ones who are pushing us out. Where do they expect us to go? The bottom of the sea?”

“I don’t think it’s about that,” Zenith begins. “I think they’re worried that if you leave, others might follow. Your exile is meant to be...undesireable. If you land on your feet, you show that it’s possible to leave Yana.”

“What does it matter, what they want?” Resi questions. “You have the bigger guns. They can’t do anything to stop you. Just make the call, and screw ‘em.”

“Our first thought is never of violence. That is one thing that we share in common with your island. You have to understand, Mr. Brooks. Your way of life is against the law for everyone else in the Core Colonies, and unheard of in the neighborhood.”

“What are the Core and the neighborhood? What’s wrong with our way of life?”

“The Core includes the systems closest to Earth,” she says. “They were colonized first, and are expected to maintain post-scarcity economies. Anyone who doesn’t want that is given the tools they need to travel even farther through space, to the Charter Planets, or beyond. We do not allow capitalism. The stellar neighborhood lies before the Charter Cloud, and don’t have to be post-scarcity, but they all are. Yana is an exception.”

Resi stands back up, and walks over to the corner. At this height, they can actually see Central Mountain in the distance, though only through a sliver of the glass. The rest is opaque, until now. It suddenly turns transparent, so Yana can be seen in its full glory. The other kids stand to get a look, but he looks back at Zenith. “You are more advanced than we realized. Or I should say, we are less advanced than we should be.” He slips through the crowd. “Stay here, look at the pretty island.”

Zenith stands too. “Capitalism does not disallow innovation, but it can slow it down, especially for a smaller population of protected peoples. Necessity is the mother of invention, and we obviate that. We control the weather. We hold back the tsunamis. We cure your diseases. You’ve not progressed much, because you’ve not needed to.”

 “So, where does this leave us?” Resi asks, trying to maintain composure.

“There is one way for you to become integrated into our society,” Zenith tells him, “but only the one. It’s how we’ve been doing it for centuries.”

“The Kidjum.”

“We respect your traditions,” she goes on. “Your Kidjum process is baked into the accord that I signed with your ancestors. It is how someone from your culture becomes one of us. Your leaders are willing to take you back as long as you validate their conventions, and if that ends with a few people coming here anyway, then that’s fine with them, because that is how it always was.”

“There’s something fishy here,” Resi complains. “They gave me this House, and took it away five minutes later because they didn’t like what I did with it.”

She nods. “I would have to agree, but it is not my place to take sides. The accord was with your governing body, and House Kutelin is not a recognized faction of it. In the eyes of Bungula, everything happening between you and your nation is an internal matter. I’m trying to find a way to get you need without breaking that fragile accord.”

Resi turns around to face the other Fold Leaders. He thought they were admiring the view, but they’ve been watching the two of them like an audience. “This has to be a group effort. Do we return to the Kidjum, and risk losing our momentum, or do we stand together, and fight for a home, whether that’s there, here, or elsewhere?”

It starts out slow, but dominos quickly as the other kids sit back down in their seats. “Let’s talk,” one of them says. She looks at Zenith. “Thank you. You can go now.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 8, 2552

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Before calling anyone else about the creep, the twins walked back around the portal building, which they had named The Gatehouse. Angela wanted to call it The Iris, but Marie said that they weren’t allowed to. They stress-tested the structure, and found themselves unable to get in, which suggested that Bronach Oaksent would not be able to get out. They certainly didn’t design it to be that easy. But they had only just now built it, so they were paranoid that it wasn’t enough. Who knows what tricks this guy had up his giant sleeve? They returned to the doors where he was waiting to be let out, and urged him to go back where he came from. He didn’t leave, and he didn’t speak. He didn’t lift his hood either, so they weren’t even able to confirm that it was him. For all they knew, it could have been a troublemaking teen just playing a prank.

Once it looked like their opinions weren’t being respected, they relented, and called in everyone else. The Matics were not happy to be interrupted from what they were doing, but they understood the seriousness. Ramses was fortunately at a stopping point in his work, where the trillions of simulations he was running needed time to iterate and resolve. “I’ll handle this,” he said. He took the forge core back from Angela, and started working on something new, claiming that it would be complete by the time they returned to the timestream. He was right. When they came back a year later, it was impossible to even get close.

It was now surrounded by the largest pyramid they had ever seen. Ramses said that the perimeter was 20 kilometers in total length. He would have built it bigger than that, but that was all the space he had to work with outside of the capital dome. There was actually an entrance that went from the dome, into the pyramid. From there, a maze leading to the portal would make it virtually impossible to find your way through. Even if Bronach returned to where he came from, and flew back through the portal with a stealth bomber, he should not have been able to escape. He kind of went overboard with this one, but admitted to feeling bad for not addressing the issue before. Leona wanted to point out that it was Echo who made the portal in the first place, with no apparent way to shut it off, but that would have been insensitive of him.

“Is he still there?” Leona asked over Angela’s shoulder as Angela was studying the Gatehouse’s feed.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Well, his robes are anyway.” She cast the video to the big screen, and stepped through days and days of footage. “See? He doesn’t move. He’s literally frozen. I’m thinking he teleported out, and teleported a mannequin in to take his place.”

“I though you had the suppression field up.”

“Oh, that doesn’t just prevent people from getting in or out?” Angela asked.

“It should stop it altogether.”

“Oh, then I don’t know,” Angela said. He’s, uhh...a robot? I saw that in a show once. An evil android went too far back in time, so he made himself a little money, bought some infrastructure, then sealed himself up, and just went dormant for decades.”

“That’s absolutely not impossible.” Leona looked back at the screen for a few seconds. It made her shiver. “Ack, that’s so creepy. Turn it off, turn it off.”

Angela exited out, letting it revert to a wide shot of the pyramid from the outside. “I know this was all automated, but it still took a lot of energy for just one little person.”

“It’s not a waste. It’s good to have a pyramid anyway. It helps facilitate interstellar and intergalactic travel.”

“I’ve heard that,” Angela said, nodding. “I don’t understand why, or why it seems like we’ve never worried about it. Most people can’t jump that far anyway. Is it just for people like Maqsud and Aristotle Al-Amin?”

“The way I understand it, it’s specifically not for them. They were born with the ability to cross those distances on their own. There are a lot of things going on that we don’t hear about, from both salmon and choosing ones. They need to cover those distances too, for various reasons. I don’t think that pyramids hold special power. I think it’s more about the size.”

“Also the shape,” Ramses added, having returned at some point from his work on the moon. “It could be a cone instead, but those are harder to engineer, and I personally prefer the former, though I am Egyptian. It’s about funneling temporal energy from a large area to a fine point. But you’re right, the pyramid-builders in ancient days didn’t do anything special to the interior. Energy just concentrates well from this basic shape.”

“Right,” Angela said. She twisted her shoulders back and forth a couple of times between Leona and Ramses. “Am I the only one seeing an issue here?”

“What do you mean?” Ramses questioned.

“We built a megastructure to prevent someone from coming here from far away without our permission. And this new structure is particularly well-suited for helping people come from far away without our permission.”

“Don’t say that,” Leona urged, “because if you say that, something’s gonna happen, and we’re not gonna like it.”

Fearfully, all three looked back up at the live feed. Leona was seemingly correct. A beam of fiery blue light landed right on the tip of the pyramid, releasing a pressurized vhwm, loud enough to be heard by the far camera, but not from inside the dome.

“Everyone report to main control immediately,” Leona ordered into comms.

They all appeared nearly instantaneously, except for Romana.

“Romy!” Leona cried. “Romana, where are you!”

Mateo checked the locator. “She’s in the pool. She likes to float around in there when she’s meditating.”

“I guess that’s okay, as long as she’s not near the portal pyramid,” Leona decided. “We have an intruder. I don’t know who it is. Marie, you’re with me. Ramses, secure virtual systems. Angela, be an extra set of hands if he needs it. Mateo.... Mateo?”

“It looks like he’s at the pool now,” Olimpia notified her.

Mateo reappeared, wet from the waist down, carrying his daughter in his arms. She was breathing, but not opening her eyes, or stirring. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

“I do,” Marie admitted. “She’s in VR. She’s been living a second life.”

“Ram...” Leona began, “deal with that too. Marie, we gotta go.”

They took each other’s hands, and teleported to the benbenet, where they found Bronach Oaksent, as well as some unknown person, who was wearing too much clothing and goggles to recognize. That second guy had some kind of apparatus attached to the balcony floor, and was doing something with a tablet.

“Whoa, hold on, ladies,” Bronach said, holding up his hands defensively. “We’re not here to hurt you. There’s a peace treaty, remember?”

“I remember we can’t trust you. How did you get out?” Leona demanded to know.

“I didn’t,” he answered. “I didn’t have to, because I was never in there.”

The other guy pushed his goggles to his forehead, and looked up. It too was Bronach, but the old version of him, who Mateo rescued from the afterlife simulation. The two of them had a weird relationship since they could both lay claim to the Goldilocks Corridor. “It’s nearly done, then it will need to calculate the return vector.”

“Make sure you make it two-way,” Young!Oaksent instructed. “I don’t want the two of us getting trapped in there too.”

“No, we wouldn’t want that,” Leona said sarcastically.

“Before you get any bright ideas,” Young!Oaksent responded, “there’s a reason we’re wearing these vests. They let us dig tunnels through suppression fields. All he’s doing now is calculating the trajectory so we get a straight shot into the Gatehouse. Without it, we would still be able to get free.”

“I don’t like how much you know about this place,” Marie spat.

“This is the most famous planet in the galaxy,” Young!Oaksent explained. “Or it will be anyway. I don’t have time to tell you everything—”

“I don’t care,” Leona contended. “I just need to know who the hell is down there, and what you want with him.”

Young!Oaksent winced. “It’s Key!Bronach, obviously. Your portal only goes to one place. He’s been searching for a way back here since the Sixth Key was created. He finally found a safe route with the portal that you so graciously created for him. We don’t want him here. We can’t have it. We’re already splitting power in the Corridor. He would only muddle things up.”

“Why is he all weird, and not showing his face?” Marie questioned.

He shrugged. “No clue. We don’t know that much about what he’s been through. We just see him as a threat. I promise, once we get him, we’ll shimmer back home, and not bother you. There’s no reason for us to stay on Ramosus.”

“Not yet,” Old!Oaksent quipped.

“Shut up,” Young!Oaksent scolded.

Leona laughed. “Wow, could you two be more having totally rehearsed that?”

“Huh?”

“Look, I don’t doubt that you have a problem with sharing the wealth, but I don’t believe that you’re going to leave us alone. I’m sure you already know that we’re formulating a plan to shave the top of this pyramid off so it can no longer access Shimmer.”

“That’s your prerogative,” Young!Oaksent agreed. “Either way, I’m getting my alt self, and taking him somewhere so far away, you’ll never see him again.”

“Let me guess, the distant future?”

“N—no,” he protested.

Old!Oaksent’s tablet beeped. “We’re good to go.”

Young!Oaksent put his goggles on. “All right, sweethearts, it was nice to catch up, but we gotta do a thing.” He clicked his tongue and pointed at the girls with both hands.

Before they could tunnel away, Olimpia and Angela appeared behind them with jet injectors, which they promptly stuck into the two Oaksents’ necks. They fell over unconscious immediately.

“Boom, asshole! Wait for her to shoot you!” Olimpia cried. She looked up when she realized her words weren’t landing. “Dredd, 2012. Anybody? Anybody? Whatever.”

A few hours later, they saw on the interior Gatehouse cameras as the two newest Oaksents were waking up in the Gatehouse with the third version of him. The creepy one was still just standing there frozen. “Welcome back,” Leona said into the microphone.

Young!Oaksent looked up at the camera. “You took our vests.”

“Ramses is already looking them over,” she told him. “What a thoughtful gift.”

“I underestimated how ruthless you were,” he said. “A chemical attack. It doesn’t sound like you.”

“I do what I must,” she replied.

“Are you gonna trap us here forever?” Old!Oaksent asked.

“There’s a way out, right behind ya, up the hill.”

They both looked over their shoulders at the portal. “We’ll find a way back. And anyway, our people know what to do in our absence.”

“We’ll be ready,” Leona claimed, not knowing if it was true.

Young!Oaksent shook his head indignantly. He snapped his fingers in front of the supposed Sixth Key version of them. “Simon says, unfreeze.”

The hooded figure slowly turned towards him, but didn’t react too dramatically.

Young!Oaksent took him by the upper arm, and began to walk up the hill. Old!Oaksent followed them both through the portal.

“We need to find a way to close it completely,” Leona determined. “I thought it would be a good idea to have that connection for our own use, but it’s too dangerous.”

“Yeah, I’ll look into it,” Ramses volunteered. “But right now, I’m trying to get Romana out of her virtual environment.”

Leona looked across the room, where Mateo was next to his daughter, stroking her hair gently. Leona breathed deeply. “Yes, that’s priority. Then the portal. Then the Outriders. Then...preparing for anything and everything else. And we thought this world would be boring.”

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