The Advancement of Mateo Matic: Tuesday, May 2, 2056

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While still in 2053, the group took the AOC to Australia, where they encountered another person from an old timeline. Allen Tupper worked for a dark version of Horace Reaver, and did not enjoy a very happy life. It would seem Jupiter intended for him to stay in The Parallel, because he did not provide a transition window back to the main sequence. They decided to let him live on the ship while they jumped to the future, but this was a miscalculation, because the ship jumped right with them, bringing Allen along. Someone was waiting for them just outside which illuminated Jupiter’s logic, and gave further evidence that he was not as bad as he wanted others to believe.

Mateo hopped over, and gave Richard a bear hug. They didn’t know each other for too terribly long, but they weren’t simple passing acquaintances either. This was the Richard Parker, of the Life of Pi and Gulliver’s Travels tribulations.

“How did I get here?” Richard asked.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Mateo asked him.

“We were pushing the Rogue into the magic mirror. Reaver was helping us. But I got pulled through too. Then I saw a bright light, thought I was gonna die, but opened my eyes here. Well, it wasn’t exactly here. I was still on Easter Island, but it’s very different now. Some cops showed up, and brought me here to Australia.”

Mateo smiled, and stepped to the side. “I believe you’re here for him.” He gestured towards his soulmate. “Richard Parker, this is Allen Tupper. You’re meant to be together in every timeline.”

They approached each other cautiously, and shook hands. While Mateo knew these two were destined for each other, that didn’t mean something magical would spark between them, and form an unbreakable bond instantaneously. Developing a relationship would take time, assuming they even chose to try. This was not how normal people met each other, and that might be enough to prevent things from progressing. That was sad, but at least Richard survived the fateful day that Gilbert pulled him to his death. The question now was what they were going to do with their second chance.

Leona stepped forward, and looked at her cuff. “A transition window is coming from Bend, Oregon. I don’t know if it’s ingress, or egress, or if they’re two-way, or what. If you want to try to get back to the main sequence, that’s your first chance. There may be a second. I don’t know. I don’t even know which timeline you’ll end up in. We just don’t have enough information.”

Richard nodded, and politely asked, “what information do you have? The people here haven’t told me much, like it was all a big secret. This looks like my world, but it’s clearly not.”

“Yes, it does,” J.B. agreed. “If it’s as God-Ramses said, and the whole galaxy has been conquered, why does this look so much like the mid-twenty-first century in a regular timeline?”

“Oh, that’s right,” Leona said, “you weren’t there for that conversation. Holly Blue and I did manage to get someone here to talk. They have technology in this reality that’s more advanced than we’ve ever seen, but Earth is different. It’s like a sanctuary for people who want to live semi-normally. They’re still immortal, but they don’t teleport, and they don’t extract all of their energy from the sun with a Dyson swarm. They run on basic fusion reactors, and lead relatively simple lives. They don’t hate technology; they just don’t need it. This is not the only world like that, but it’s the world we’re gonna stay on for awhile, because the transitions will be letting out here until people in the main sequence start their own interstellar colonization process.”

“The point is,” Holly Blue jumped in, “Richard and Allen, you can either stay in this reality, or risk trying to go back. Based on what we know of your personal histories, there should be no reason you have to go back. You have both already done everything we know you do there. It just depends on what you want.”

“Is Horace Reaver in this reality?” Allen questioned.

“He may come through a later transition,” Leona answered, “but it will have to be a nice version of him. The one you know—the one who caused so much grief—died last year in an old timeline. There is no version of him living in the Parallel, however. There are no duplicates here. History is too wildly different to let anyone you know be born again.”

Sanaa wanted to put in her two cents, “you will have to start brand new lives. All of your financial debt has been wiped clean, and you won’t have to help your proverbial neighbor move, but you’ll also never find out how your favorite TV series ends, or see your families again.”

Richard and Allen looked at each other with the same unfamiliarity.

“To add more,” Sanaa continued, “it’s like Holly Blue said. History in the main sequence timelines thinks you’re done. Richard, you died, and Allen, you just sort...faded away into obscurity. I’m thinking now that’s not because you weren’t important, but because you came here. I can’t tell you what to do, but I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to stay here.”

“I don’t have any more family,” Allen said.

“I’m dead,” Richard gave his own answer in the same tone.

“You people are going to the future, though?” Allen asked.

“We have to,” Mateo replied. “You don’t. Just don’t be on this ship when midnight central hits, and you’ll be left behind.”

“If we do that,” Richard began, “if we stay here, when would our next chance to change our minds be. Theoretically.”

Mateo looked to Leona, who responded with, “twenty-two years. It’s our biggest jump yet, and I believe our maximum. I have not yet done all the math.”

Richard and Allen both nodded.

“I might as well stay.”

“Yeah, same.”

“All right.” Holly Blue clapped her hands. “We have to get to Bend. Do you want to come with, or stay in Australia, or go somewhere else. Literally anywhere in the galaxy is accessible.”

“Here’s fine for me,” Allen decided.

“Same,” Richard agreed.

“Good luck, boys,” Leona said.

Mateo gave his friend one last hug, and then boarded the AOC, never to see him again. Hopefully things would be better here.

“Has anyone ever been here before?” J.B. asked. “Who might be coming through the window?”

“I don’t know who would be doing it in 2056,” Holly Blue started to say, “but this was where my son trained with Darko.”

“Why did he come to Bend from Kansas City?” Mateo asked. “My once-brother was a time traveler, who could have met you anywhere.”

“Yes,” Holly blue concurred, “but Darko felt his students would be better off learning together, rather than one-on-one, and it saved him time. Bozhena and her family didn’t know anything about time travel back then, so we jumped here for his classes. Again, that was back at the start of the 21st century. That’s the only connection I know of. Perhaps some random Horvatinčic descendant we don’t know is coming, or someone else entirely.”

Images from the main sequence began to flicker around them. Mateo lifted his cuff to get a better look at it through the augmented reality feature. “Somehow I doubt that’s the case. Nothing is random when it comes to Jupiter Fury.”

The flickering stopped, leaving a young girl standing before them, holding a boomerang. How Australian of her. She was frightened of them, but not crying.

“Hey,” Sanaa said, approaching the girl slowly. “It’s okay. We’re not gonna hurt you.”

“Where am I?” the girl asked.

“Have you ever heard of time travel before?”

“Like Minutemen?”

Mateo perked up. “That’s a kids movie. I think I saw it, even though I was kind of old. Yes, like that. What year is it?”

“It should be 2008.

“That’s weird,” Leona said. “She should have come from 2056. What’s the last thing you remember?”

“I followed my teacher, even though he told me not to. I can never find him when he’s not training us. I can’t ever find Declan either. I just wanted to know where they went every day. They separated, so I chose to follow Mr. Matic. I saw him pick up this boomerang, and then he disappeared.”

“Hmm.” This was obviously Young!Bozhena, but where was Darko? “You saw him disappear in front of you, but you weren’t touching him?” Holly Blue asked her.

“No,” Bozhena said. “He was, like, a swimming pool away.”

What the hell? “Then you picked up the boomerang, and it brought you here?” Leona continued the interview.

“Yeah.” Bozhena turned it over in her hands. “It’s some sort of time device.” That was not how it worked. The object itself could not control time. Darko just used it to slide up and down its history. This should not have worked. At all.

“Where was your teacher when you jumped to the future?”

Bozhena shrugged. “I dunno. I looked around for a few minutes. Then I ended up here. How do I go back home?”

Mateo shook his head. “If Darko’s gone, there’s no telling where he went. The other side of the window could be his home, or just a waypoint. He may never return. How do we get her back to the main sequence in 2008?”

“Aren’t these people time travelers?” J.B. offered.

“Backwards travel is illegal,” Sanaa reminded him.

“They should be able to make an exception for us,” J.B. figured.

“That would be nice,” Sanaa agreed. “Can your ship do it?”

“No,” Leona replied. “It’s not built for that either. It can’t even jump to the stars as fast as these people can. It still takes days to get anywhere.”

Mateo looked at his cuff. “I don’t see a window coming up.”

“There has to be a way to get her back,” Holly Blue pointed out. “Bozhena Horvatinčic goes on to have a very adventurous life. She is extremely vital to the timeline; more than most people could hope to achieve. And we have to make sure she gets back to where she belongs. We can’t just throw her in a window, and hope someone on the other side finds her.”

“Nobody’s throwing me through a window,” Bozhena said precociously.

“It’s just a metaphor,” Holly Blue clarified. “It’s what we call the portals we use to travel through time.” That wasn’t entirely the truth, but it wasn’t totally wrong either, and it was good enough as an explanation.

“I may have a solution,” Leona said, “but you’re not gonna like it.”

“Tell me,” Holly Blue demanded.

“Sanaa, could you please stay out here with Bozhena?”

“Gladly,” Sanaa said. She smiled at Bozhena. “What do kids your age like to do, Bo? Do you still play peek-a-boo?”

“How do you people know my name?”

The rest of the group climbed back into the AOC. Leona was adamant that they close the outer hatch behind them, as well as the airlock, and then climb all the way down to the engineering level, closing all hatches between them and the outside.

“I think I know what this is,” Holly Blue determined because of all those hatches. “You’re gonna try to get someone’s Cassidy cuffs off, but you don’t want them flying off and attaching themselves to poor Young!Slipstream’s wrists.”

“Not just anyone,” Leona revealed. “She needs a time traveler, and only one of us here is capable of that.”

“I would have to invent something,” Holly Blue argued. “It doesn’t matter a whole lot that I’ve already done it before. I kind of have to start from scratch every time. Recall that I’m not a real scientist.”

“Again, you’re the only one who can do it. When you removed your son’s cuffs, we discovered that they just wrapped themselves around someone new in response.” Leona lifted both her arms, and shook them around. “If I’m the one who tries to remove them, then it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

“Maybe they’ll just reattach themselves to me,” Holly Blue guessed. “I would be the only choice, and perhaps Jupiter programmed them to never be without a host.”

“That’s not what happened when Ramses lost his,” Mateo reminded her. Sanaa had to pick them up on purpose. I think they can just be paperweights.”

Holly Blue wasn’t going to stop arguing. “How do we even know there’s going to be a transition window in 2008?”

“We don’t,” Leona said as she was reaching into her bag. “It’s irrelevant if you’re a time traveler, though.” She lifted the HG Goggles out of her bag. “This can help you find one. I have some ideas where you could look; ones that we didn’t use.”

Holly Blue didn’t want to agree to this plan, but she never wanted to be part of this pattern either, so they finally convinced her to stay behind, and get little Bozhena back to where she should be. She even thought she could erase her memories of the day, because she wasn’t destined to learn about this stuff until she was older. They said their goodbyes, and went their separate ways. The group would never know how well it went, or even if the plan worked at all. They would just have to have faith.

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Varkas Reflex: Identity (Part VII)

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First order of business as Superintendent of Varkas Reflex was to figure out what it meant to be the Superintendent of Varkas Reflex. Hokusai knew she needed help, and the best place to get it was from someone with experience. Even better than that one person with experience was an entire council of them. Several people had held the position on Earth, while each of the colony planets only had one, with the exception of Sujo. Its first superintendent couldn’t handle the responsibility, and fled into the void with a stolen interstellar vessel, never to be heard from again. Of course, that wasn’t much help, because Hokusai would not be able to communicate with him, which was sad, because understanding what went wrong could have resulted in invaluable advice. Not everyone agreed to become part of Hokusai’s council, which was fine. She wasn’t looking to run a survey about them with a large sample size, but gain insight and guidance. There were eleven of them, ready to help in any way they could.

Hokusai built quantum surrogate substrates for the visitors, so they could arrive much faster. The former superintendent of Teagarden was unable to use one, since she never installed the necessary transhumanistic upgrades to accomplish this, so she appeared as a hologram. Hokusai wasn’t sure what she was expecting out of these people. Were they going to be helpful and supportive, or balk at her inexperience and naivety. They had all dedicated their lives to public service, and were presently serving in other ways. She was just a scientist, living on a planet that elected her because she was cool, and there wasn’t anyone else. Would the council believe that was enough? As it turned out, some did, while others were not so convinced. They weren’t nasty or pretentious about it, though. They applauded her for having the wisdom to form the council in the first place, and recognized that Varkas was unlike any of the planets they had dealt with themselves. Their formal approach wasn’t going to work well in this case, and they would all have to tap into their creative side in order to make this work.

After months of discussions, they decided that they had come up with something reasonable, and appropriate for this world. Hokusai realized on her own that she was never the only superintendent at all. By forming the council, she had outsourced a lot of the decisions. It went swimmingly, and if it could work for this, it could work with the actual government. So there would be no congress, no delegators, no advisors, and no administrators. This world’s government was going to be a council democracy. Councils would be formed as needed, and disbanded when the problem they were trying to solve was over, which could potentially mean never. If the council wasn’t trying to solve anything, but was there to maintain harmony, then that council would simply continue on. The question then was how to form any given council in the first place.

Would they be elected? Selected? Earned? Completely open? Yes, all of those things. Hokusai decided that the people had the right to decide how any new council was formed—making the entire populace one gigantic council in its own right—and they didn’t have to do it in the same way previous councils were done. Some councils may require particular expertise, and would only be available to certain people, who exemplified certain criteria. Others could impact the entire population, and didn’t necessitate specific competencies, so anyone who wanted to could join. If this resulted in an unmanageably large council, then it could be broken apart into smaller subcouncils. This flexibility made things really complex, but it also prevented the system from getting bogged down by its own procedural regulations. The technocracy that the majority of the stellar neighborhood used was great. Everyone had a role, and the only people allowed to make decisions were those that knew what the hell they were talking about. But it was also a slow process—often slower than the highly bureaucratic democratic republics that dominated Earth in the 20th and 21st centuries. Councils got things done, and they did it efficiently, as long as they were supervised by someone who could make sure the councilors weren’t getting sidetracked, or wasting time. This was the problem that Hokusai needed to solve now, and Pribadium thought she had the solution.

“Here me out,” Pribadium said, “we upload your mind to multiple substrates.”

“Why would we do that?” Hokusai asked.

“You say these councils need leaders. In fact, you say that each council needs one leader. This crowdsourcing is good and all, but it won’t work if they spend so long discussing the possibilities, that they can’t ever come to a conclusion. Someone needs to protect them from themselves, and who better than you?”

“First of all,” Hokusai began, “lots of people. Secondly, why would we have to upload anyone’s mind to multiple bodies? All you’re asking for is a singular entity that oversees the proceedings.”

“Eh, no one has time to be in more than one place at once.”

“Right, but why can’t each council just have its own leader.”

“Because the profusion of leaders is just going to lead to the same problem. I’m not sure if you’ve thought this all the way through. You think councils can be fast-acting, but they could be slower than republics. At least the technocracy is efficient. Most consequences to any action are predicted at some point down the assembly line. With a council, everyone might have some great idea, but they won’t say anything, because no one else is, so they may think it’s actually not that good.”

“What are you saying, that this should be a monarchy?”

Pribadium knew that Hokusai didn’t actually think that’s what she was saying. “A real democracy is perfect when you have a few dozen people. It doesn’t work in the thousands, millions, or, God forbid, billions. That’s why most healthy governments operate under representation, to varying degrees of success and moral honesty. People hate to think about it, but power must be consolidated. That’s just the way it has to be. It’s your job to make sure that consolidation is fair and reasonable. A soviet democra—”

“Don’t call it that. It has negative historical connotations that predate your birth.”

“Very well. A council democracy is fair, but it is not reasonable. You’re gonna run into problems, and in order to fix them, you’re going to form more councils, and that’s just going to add to the problem, and it will never end. The councils need a single voice. And when I say single, I mean single; not one each.”

“So, you are kind of promoting a monarchy.”

“All monarchs are tyrants, so no. I was using you as an example of the voice, but perhaps that is how it should remain, as an example. This overseer can take any number of forms. It can be elected any way you want, and remain in control however long you want. You worried about checks and balances? They’re built right in. Let’s say the overseer poses some existential threat to the planet. No problem, form a council to get rid of them. The overseer doesn’t have to run every single meeting for every single council, but they have to have the potential to be involved in any council, except for ones that would come with a conflict of interest. That’s why I suggested you copy yourself—or rather, whoever we choose for this—so each one gradually loses identity. You see, what we need is a good leader with a good history, but that’s only necessary as a foundation. Once that’s established, the copies can go off and start living other lives, but at least they all came from the same place.”

Hokusai was shaking her head. “I think you’re looking at it the wrong way. Good governments are based on diversity. Each leader should be separate, and have always been separate. Then they can serve to check and balance each other.”

Loa stepped into the room, having been listening from the hallway for most of the conversation. “Why don’t you take the best of both worlds?”

“How so?” Pribadium asked.

“Mind-uploading, councils, single voice. Put them together, what do you have?”

Neither of them answered for a while, not sure if it was a rhetorical question, or a sincere inquiry.

“Amalgamated consciousness,” Loa answered herself.

“Where did you hear that term?” Hokusai asked her.

“My mind-brain,” Loa replied. “You want fast government, but you want the people to have a say. So. Upload their minds into a system, but don’t just keep them isolated, like we normally do. Merge them together. Create a new entity. This entity won’t have to discuss how to deal with the issue. They’ll immediately know what that council would have said about it. The answers will just be right there. That’s how a normal brain works. If I asked you how to keep this door from being opened, you’ll have an answer right away. You’ll say we should install a lock on it. If I asked Pribadium, she would say let’s drag a bookcase in front of it. Ask someone else, they’ll say we should murder everyone who might try to open it. But if we put these brains together, the council-entity would say we should install a lock, plus a deadbolt, and then ask everyone who might want to open it to not do so, so we don’t have to kill them.”

“Amalgamated consciousness,” Hokusai echoed, thinking it over. “That’s a pretty big departure from how we decided to do it.”

Loa brushed this away. “The superintendent council is not the superintendent of Varkas Reflex; you are. You don’t have to consult them. You were just using them for advice, never forget that. It is still your responsibility.”

Pribadium didn’t approve. “I’ve seen this show. This is The Borg. You will be assimilated.”

“Assimilators in fiction are evil. We won’t do this to anyone who does not wish for it, and we won’t be neurosponging them. These will be copies, which leave the original contributors both independent, and intact.”

“The only reason we would do this,” Hokusai began to explain, “would be to increase the speed of decision-making. It doesn’t actually help with proving the sensibility of the decisions themselves.”

Loa disagreed. “No, it’s like Pribadium said. People might be afraid to speak up. If we copy their perspective—which is really what we’re after; not people’s episodic memories—they won’t have to worry about sounding foolish. They will have good ideas.”

“There are a hell of a lot of ethical considerations no one thought they would have to make. If we were to do this, we would be the only government to do so. All eyes will be on us, and we will have to make sure we don’t screw it up. Like, what happens to the entity we create when we amalgamated the council? Is that a person in their own right? Do we dissolve this creature later? Do we keep them on retainer for later decisions? Do we let them run off to lead their own lives? Do we let them leave the planet?”

“Now you’re getting into science that you know I don’t understand,” Loa said. “And ethics isn’t my forte either. This is an idea, which I came up with after hearing your ideas. I can’t be expected to have it all figured out.”

She was right. This was just the start. They spent the next year working on the new plan. And then they instituted it.

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Microstory 1410: The Deathfall As Seen On The Surface

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Since Savitri’s first trip to Durus, the city of Springfield, Kansas had been slowly crumbling away, into the portal. Almost none of it stayed whole, and no one back on Earth could remember these parts of the city had ever existed. By 2016, it was no larger than a small town, with only around twelve hundred people. Nearly all residents survived the last transition through the portal, which acted to erase the existence of Springfield altogether from the collective consciousness. This process was not instant. By the time all of the last remnants of the town made its way to the rogue planet, days had passed. No one in town realized this, though. There was no good way to record the passage of time on Durus, since there was no sun, and no way to communicate with Earth and match it up. From the perspective of those on the surface, however, they could see this process. Buildings would blink into existence, then blink back out, like a burrowing animal who wasn’t quite sure if she wanted to come all the way out of her hole yet. Even people would appear, and disappear, but they were unmoving, which meant time was all but completely stalled for them. This gave Escher, Rothko, and Hark time to formulate a plan. They were pretty sure they were going to have a huge influx in people after this was all over, because nothing like it had ever happened before. They were aware that Springfield had been slowly shrinking for years, because their respective accounts of its size didn’t quite match up with each other. They couldn’t be certain of this, though, since Escher had only lived there for a matter of hours, and Rothko didn’t have a full grasp of how large it should have been when he was living there, so Hark had little means to compare it. Unlike people back on Earth, however, they did each manage to hold onto their memories as they were when they first left. So when the remnants finally fell all the way through the portal, they already knew that this was all that was left. They weren’t sure what to do about this development, but they figured they ought to keep themselves secret. It looked like a normal town that could use The Trident’s help, but they had been gone from Earth for so long, there was no telling what had changed. No, it was safer to observe the townies from a distance, and keep their guards up. They knew this planet better than anything, since there wasn’t much to do on the daily, but explore, and map out the lands, so it wasn’t hard for them to remain hidden. It did not last forever, though. Shortly thereafter, the Trident was broken, and the Triumvirate was no more, when Hark was flung into the future. Escher and Rothko then found themselves much more involved in Springfield’s goingson than they ever thought they would, and they were not prepared for the social conventions, since they had been so isolated for so long. A new form of government was beginning to take shape, and it was worse than anyone could have predicted.

Microstory 1409: The Trident

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The fourth person to take up permanent residence on the rogue planet of Durus was a man by the name of Paul Harken. He came from family money, which gave him the resources he needed to look for a way to somehow undo his wife’s miscarriage. Due to a bit of time travel he once witnessed, he became obsessed with figuring out how to reverse time, and fix the worst thing that had ever happened to them. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t have all the facts, or really the qualifications, for this endeavor. He happened to be living in a very special house; one that was built in the exact same place as another. The First House, as it will come to be known in historical records, served as the gateway to Durus. Savitri lived there with her family, Escher lived next door, and one day explored it, and it was just behind the street where Rothko lived when his adventure began. This house was a focal point of temporal energy, but it was also corrupted, and unreliable. It sometimes existed on Earth, and sometimes Durus, and it was impossible to predict when it would be where. And so something was always destined to happen to Paul, just from living in his new house for long enough. When he became trapped on Durus in 2008, he had mixed feelings. He was relieved that he had never been crazy, and temporal manipulation was a real thing, but heartbroken that he had not actually succeeded in his goals. He didn’t let it get him down, though. He wanted to survive, and there wasn’t much back on Earth that would drive him to try to return. Plus, unlike with his predecessors, his entire house had come through with him, which gave him a nice place to stay protected from the elements. His new friends would appreciate it as well. While the Springfield portal had been taking people over the course of the better part of three decades, the three humans still around were all about the same age, because they had been taken at different stages of their lives. Hark, as he liked to be called, filled Escher and Rothko in on what they had missed since leaving Earth. He spoke of the new technologies, and the political developments. In turn, they taught him how to live on a rogue world, which was becoming increasingly easy, and not just because of Hark’s intact house. When Savitri first arrived, it was all but a barren wasteland. Over time, seeds magically made their way from Earth, and added life. There were still no animals, but there was always plenty to eat. Runoff from Watershed continued to irrigate more than enough farmland to support all three of them. Things were all right. By then, Escher and Rothko’s relationship with Effigy had faded away; not because anyone did anything wrong, but more because they drifted apart, and the humans saw no benefit to sticking with her. So Hark became the third in the new, new Triumvirate, which they colloquially referred to as The Trident, because they were in their twenties, and thought it sounded cool. Their reign lasted for about eight years before the Deathfall suddenly added nearly thirteen hundred people to the world’s population.

Microstory 1408: Dogs and Cats, Living Together

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Escher and Rothko were devastated at the loss of their good friend, Savitri. They didn’t know if she was dead, or just somewhere else, but they felt they needed to memorialize her either way. They decided to honor her at a particular cliff she used to frequent. They didn’t realize that this was where she had once considered committing suicide, and returned often to remind herself that her life had value. Effigy asked to attend Savtri’s memorial, and they let her, because even though she was indirectly responsible for all of this world’s problems, it didn’t appear as though she had set out to do them harm. They were mostly just in her way. This was the first time she had thought to sit down and explain herself. Yes, an army of white monsters were trying to  come through the portal, and yes, she wanted to bring them through intact, rather than broken and damaged. The army, however, was just there to make sure the world they landed on was safe. Most of the people who would be making the trip were civilians, looking for a better life. She explained to them how the universe, as the humans saw it, was either infinite, or might as well have been. There was plenty of space and resources for everyone. Her universe of origin, however, was very finite. It barely went past the orbit of their moon. They could see stars in the distance, but they seemed to be holographic illusions, as a great impenetrable wall prevented them from traveling anywhere close to them. Several of her people had died in the attempt. Unfortunately, the threat of overpopulation wasn’t enough to stop that population from growing. People just kept having kids, and they were already so great in numbers that it was nigh impossible to coordinate a way to prevent them from continuing to do so. Scientists worked tirelessly, trying to solve the problem, and they did find a solution. They built a gigantic machine that could transport thousands of people to other universes. Sadly, this machine was all but destroyed before it could ever be used for this mission, and while time travel did suggest that didn’t matter, the remnants of this machine made its way into human hands, which was where it stayed throughout multiversal eternity. The machine was first built using stolen technology, and there was no way to get it back. They simply did not have the resources, or political backing, to try this again. The portal was the only way, according to Effigy. Escher and Rothko listened to her politely, and after hours of discussions, they formulated a truce. The two of them would no longer interfere with the time monsters coming through, but neither would they let her repair the portal, so the full beings could cross over. Effigy had to be all right with this, because it was really her only choice. Even without Savitri, the humans here were unbeatable. Besides, she was immortal, and they were not, so she figured she could just wait them out. After a while, the three of them formed a deeper working relationship, and eventually, there was no denying that they were kind of nearly  the approximation of friends. She even ended up joining them in a more formal way, which served to reconstitute the Triumvirate.

Microstory 1407: I Of the Portalcane

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After defeating Effigy for the upteenth time, and solidifying themselves as a loyal and true Triumvirate, things seemed to be going okay. They developed a nice system of defeating the time monsters that came through the broken portal. Escher would steal power from the monsters themselves to use against them. He would donate this power to Rothko, who would destroy them anyway necessary. Savitri would supply a boost of energy as well. It didn’t last very long, though, as the consequences of their actions would eventually catch up to them. Time travel, and other forms of temporal manipulation, was tricky. It was usually pretty safe to do, because it was usually fairly controlled, and minimal. A teleportation jump here, a seer making a prediction there; the energy used in these interactions with time dissipated so easily that no one had to make sure it happened. But it was possible for all this to get out of hand. Had the time monsters been allowed to exit the portal, and go on their merry way, things would have been all right. It would have all been structured and safe, at least on the grander scale. But the Triumvirate always wanted to destroy them, and they used a lot of temporal energy to do this. Since they were acting in such close quarters, this constant transfer of power started to do some real damage. Reality was going haywire around them, causing the past, present, and future to be layered upon each other. They saw things that would not come to pass for decades, but it was all so chaotic that there was no way to gather any real information from it. Either way, it needed to be stopped, and there was seemingly no way to do that. They spent days trying to work the problem, but with every attempt, the problem only grew worse, because they were simply adding more and more energy to the convergence. There was one particular incident that kept coming back and seemed to be at the heart of the matter. They were witnessing a future event, wherein another small group of people were trying to fix their own energy problem. It generated a massive explosion that vibrated all across the globe, and when it was finally over, the portal was finally closed for good. They figured, if there was any way to stop their problems today, it involved somehow tapping into this future moment. What they didn’t realize was that the moment they were watching actually took place over the course of decades alone, and they were simply watching it on fast-forward. It took a long time for that portal to close completely, and a lot of people were taken in by it before that would happen, whether they wanted to go, or not. The Triumvirate paid their own price when they got too close. Savitri was pulled in to what was later called the portalcane, and dispatched to the universe where the monsters originated. This should have only been accessible any time after the event occurred. Even with time travel, the portalcane generally only had an impact on the future. As far as anyone knew, Savitri was the only exception to this. Her friends would never see her again. And they would never forgive themselves for it. Savitri, however, did fine without them. She lived a decent life—though, not without heartbreak. She just did it somewhere else.

Microstory 1406: Triumph of the Triumvirate

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Only weeks after Rothko arrived on Durus, Effigy came back, hoping to use a different tactic to get what she wanted. She had had just about enough of Escher getting in the way of her plans to bring all of her people into this universe, and she thought she finally had an advantage over him. On the outside, Rothko was a really good person. He was compassionate, thoughtful, and ready to help anyone who crossed his path, whether he knew them or not. Yet he carried a darkness inside of him that he was only beginning to discover, and being a master manipulator, Effigy believed she could exploit these two sides of him at the same time. She could turn him over to her side, both by appealing to his instinct to be helpful and understanding, and to his inner demons. She began to communicate with him when he was apart from the other two. She didn’t whisper in his ear, or claim that his friends weren’t good for him. She didn’t even charge him to keep their new relationship a secret. She just became friends with him, and taught him how to use his time powers, and let him decide for himself whether he was going to reveal the truth to the rest of the Triumvirate. Most choosing ones develop an instinct for their abilities. They don’t know exactly how they work, but they know how to use them, just like a baby will learn to walk, pretty much no matter what, even if you try to teach them not to. Rothko, however, was particularly unskilled with his, and he needed Effigy’s help. He was a lot smarter than she gave him credit for, though. He could see what she was trying to do to him, and as long as he stayed grounded, he felt he could overcome any psychological poison she tried to use on him. He let her keep thinking that they were becoming real friends, but it was all just an act, so he could learn from her. He recognized that she was his best hope of figuring out how to use his gifts. He proved his loyalty months later; to himself, to his friends, and to Effigy. One thing he had always wanted to do was restore Escher’s hand. Now, the range of his powers was limited. While it was indeed called reality-warping, it didn’t give him free reign over the whole universe. It was localized. He could only make small changes, and only within the immediate area. He was disrupting physics, but not quite breaking any laws. The energy he used had to come from somewhere, and a lot of his work were more illusions than real alterations. There was a way, however, for him to give Escher his hand back. There was a reality out there where Escher didn’t lose his hand at all. This reality was unstable, and short-lived, but that didn’t matter when it came to  time travel. He could still access that timeline, and take from it what he needed. He stitched events from this microreality into the real one, and returned the hand, as if it had never been removed at all. This was great; the Triumvirate had beaten Effigy yet again, and she was furious, because it meant she hadn’t really found a weakness at all. Sadly, their new, happy, and intact life together was not destined to last forever. In utilizing his powers in this way, Rothko had unwittingly opened the world up to much larger changes in the future, and none of them would prove to be powerful enough to stop what was coming.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: Tuesday, April 29, 2053

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Before anyone could so much as begin to guess what the hell was going on, a pod appeared a few meters away from them, and opened up to reveal what Mateo could only describe as a future-cop. He smiled at the group apprehensively. “Hello. Reports indicate that some unusual temporal activity has been occurring in this area. Where, and/or when are you from?”

Hmm. He seemed to be a deveiled human, who used time technology on the regular. Mateo checked his wrist. Yes, it was honest hour, so he resolved to take the lead on this one, and not worry about whether anyone disagreed. “We apologize if we have broken any laws.” He showed the cop his Cassidy cuff. “We are not in control of our temporal movements. We do the bidding of someone who is very powerful. He’s trapped us here in your reality, though to be fair, all we’ve done so far is help people, so he may not be as bad as he wants us to believe.”

The time cop looked to the rest of the group, not because he didn’t believe Mateo’s story, but to see if anyone else had anything to add. “You’re from the main sequence.” It was a half-question.

“If that is what you call it,” Leona confirmed. “We just call it the main timeline, and we call this The Parallel.”

“Indeed,” the cop agreed. “You have been foretold.” He looked at his own watch, but literally. “No point in transporting you into the heart of the city, and alerting anyone else to your presence. I’ll be right here to pick you up in three years, two days.” He climbed back into his pod, and teleported away. Ninety minutes later, midnight central was quickly approaching.

Sanaa knelt down, and picked up what were formerly Ramses’ cuffs.

“Don’t touch those!” Leona warned.

“Why not?” Sanaa asked. “Will they magically wrap themselves around my wrists, and trap me on your hyphenated pattern?”

“Yeah, they might,” Leona warned further.

Sanaa smiled, and gracefully strapped them onto her wrists. “Well, what the hell else am I gonna do?” The damage was done now, and could not be undone, unless they forced someone else to take her place, or Kalea returned to explain how she removed Ramses from them in the first place.

Just as the man said, he was waiting for them three years later, but this time with a larger transport vehicle. He ushered them into it. “We’ve requested an audience with the Tanadama.”

“The whatnow?”

“The gods who created our galaxy. They’re very busy, but I’m optimistic that they will come here to speak with you.”

“They created the galaxy?” Leona asked.

“Well, not literally. The stars form naturally, of course. They saved our species, so that we almost never die. We only experience the occasional suicide from someone who’s just over it, or an AI malfunction that cannot be repaired.”

“You never die,” Leona continued the questioning. “How long have you been like that?”

“About twelve thousand years,” the cop answered. “I’m Officer Tynosey, by the way, but everyone just calls me Tyno.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Tyno.” Now Leona was just going to take over the conversation. “I assume that you are an interstellar civilization.”

“We’re an intergalactic civilization, but the majority of our population still lives in the Milky Way. We’re at K3.”

“My God,” she said. “How many people is that?”

“A couple undecillion,” Tyno said, like it was nothing. Mateo had never heard that particular prefix attached to -illion, which meant that it was probably pretty damn big. “Each host star houses around five septillion people. We could go higher than that obviously, but we like to spread out.

“That’s insane.”

“Yeah,” Holly Blue concurred. “Do you have faster-than-light travel?”

“We do,” Tyno replied. His watch beeped. “Oh. That’s confirmation. I’ve been authorized to return you to Earth, where your friends are waiting for you.” He closed the hatch behind him, synced his watch with a panel on the wall, and transported them to Earth.

The hatch opened from the outside as soon as they arrived. Ramses was there with his big fat smile. They were on the side of a mountain, overlooking a valley. “Man, we had always planned on being there, waiting for you when you arrived, but the timeline is complicated. We weren’t sure which timeline you would remember, so we just decided to let the locals handle it until this year.” He gestured towards Tyno.

Tyno hopped out of the transport, and closed his eyes. He placed three fingers loosely on his forehead, and then moved them down to his lips. He kept switching back and forth between these two positions, occasionally spending several seconds in one stop, and changing speed erratically. It reminded Mateo of how the Catholics did the sign of the cross. Catholicism probably didn’t exist in this reality.

“That’s enough, my child,” Ramses said to him.

“It is such a deep honor, Father. I am so humbled in your presence. I’m not worthy to breathe from the same atmosphere as you—”

“All right,” Ramses stopped him. “What does it say in the Book of Ramses, Chapter Eleven, Section Twenty-Four, Paragraph Forty-Two, Line Fifty-Six?”

“When the Mother or Father appear to you, they will be human, and they will be accessible, and you will respect them, but you will not worship them,” Tyno recited. “Sorry, sir.”

“It’s all right. Just don’t forget that I’m only a person.”

The group looked at him in disapproval.

“It got away from us,” Ramses tried to explain to them. “We didn’t write the books, but we did edit them, adding lines like that so they wouldn’t kill themselves out of reverence every time we showed up.”

Leona rejected this response. “You formed a religion. That’s time travel one-oh-one. In fact, I better make it Rule Number Fourteen, do not form, or inspire, a religion.”

“It’s a lot more complicated than that,” Ramses argued.

“Clarify,” Mateo said. “Report.”

So Ramses began to explain where he and Kalea had gone, and what they had done. “This isn’t the first new timeline that we created. At first, we followed the plan. We got everyone off of Durus, and back to Earth. We continued on the pattern, and things were okay when it came to us. It wasn’t okay with the rest of the world, though. Earth was still devoid of nearly all human life. There was us, and the people that Jupiter transitioned. Kalea didn’t like that. Her whole purpose as a source mage on Durus in the main sequence was to protect people using time powers. So the lot of us went back to the cataclysm that destroyed the species, and fixed it. Now things were even finer, but not great. Technology was incredibly slow. They were building castles when they should have been working on the first rockets. So we went back again, and saved more lives. Every time we went back, we made the timeline a little better; a little safer. Kalea was never happy, though. She needed to fix everything, and to do that, we needed help. We created more mages, and used them like the powers that be use salmon in the other timeline.

“I don’t even remember how it happened, but the last thing we did was go back thousands of years, and turn everyone immortal. I tried to explain to her the repercussions of such a thing, but she wouldn’t hear it. She would not listen to the math. I told her that over a hundred billion people had ever lived on Earth, and also that Earth could indeed support that many people, but I also told her that in a timeline with virtually no death, you can’t just go by that number, because those people are going to have children. Over time, the number has grown so large that we are now a Kardashev 3 civilization, occupying every star system in the entire galaxy.”

“Yes.” Leona nodded. “Tyno did tell us that. You made a galaxy of time travelers. I can’t imagine how problematic that has become.”

“No,” Ramses contended. “Time travel is against the law, galaxy-wide. It’s not technically necessary, since the only way to have time powers is to get them from me or Kalea, but it’s a redundant system. People don’t die, and they can move across the galaxy at superluminal speeds. That’s all we gave them. They developed the rest of the technology they have.”

Leona shook her head continuously. “Two undecillion people,” she said quietly. “I don’t even know what that means.” She wasn’t the only one wondering this. Leona and Holly Blue were two of the smartest people Mateo knew. If even they had trouble fathoming the vast number of people presently alive in a galaxy with a millennia-long history of nearly no death, then he would have no hope of understanding it. “You couldn’t maintain a homogeneous system with that, even with ubiquitous FTL. That’s just too many people.”

“Each solar swarm has its own governmental body, yes,” Ramses said. Saying we’re K3 is a bit of a misnomer. We’re more like a bunch of separate K2s. But there’s a lot of collaboration, and we don’t allow war. Half the Book of Kalea is about living in harmony.”

“People keep talking about these K-numbers,” J.B. complained. “What does that mean?”

Sanaa chose to explain this one, “a K1 civilization can harness all the power on its planet. K2 can use its whole sun. K3 can use the whole galaxy. What Ramses is saying that, since the galaxy is so big, they’re not really K3, because they’re not all one civilization anymore.”

“What are you?” Mateo asked Ramses, not bothering to ask Sanaa why she understood this scale the scientists were talking about.

“I’m a source mage now,” Ramses answered. “Most of the time, the source mages in the main sequence only create lesser mages. There was a theory, however, that they could effectively make more, just by giving someone the power to give other people powers.”

J.B. giggled. “It’s like using one of your three wishes to wish for more wishes.”

“Kind of,” Ramses admitted. “She only did it once, though. She made me, and we’re it.”

“The Dadamama, that is,” Mateo put forth.

“Tanadama,” Ramses corrected, but you were on the right track. Ta, da, ma, and na are all used in various languages to mean father and mother, respectively. We put it together, because parents didn’t seem to do our role justice. It was Alt!Jeremy’s idea.”

“Sounds like me,” J.B. decided.

“So, it’s over,” Holly Blue presumed.

“What’s over?” Ramses questioned.

“The Matic-Bearimy pattern. The only reason we were on it was because Jupiter was too powerful to go against. That can’t possibly be the case anymore.”

Ramses deafened them with his silence.

“Ramses?” Mateo began. “Can’t you just put a stop to this...or make somebody who can?”

“It’s complicated,” Ramses told them, but did not elaborate.

“Keep going,” Leona urged.

“The Book of Ramses clearly states, To maintain temporal integrity, no native of The Parallel may interfere with the actions of those from the main sequence.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Sanaa argued. “You’re from the main sequence, and Jupiter is interfering with the Parallel. It doesn’t go both ways? Seems irrational.”

“The line I recited is taken a bit out of context. If you read more of it, you would understand that I can’t help you. I’m not really from the main timeline anymore. I’ve been here for tens of thousands of years. I couldn’t be The Father if I didn’t integrate myself fully into this reality.”

“Leona,” Mateo interrupted her before she could argue again. “This is not the friend who left us yesterday. He is an entirely different person, who has been through more than we will ever understand. You won’t be able to convince him to help. We just have to accept the fact that this is how it is. I tried arguing with The Superintendent, and it got me nowhere.” He turned to the man who looked like his best friend. “Thank you for rescuing us from Durus, and thank you for your time. We will let you get back to your galaxy, as we return to the mission. We would be grateful, however, if you could find us a ride to Australia.”

“He’s right,” J.B. said, looking at his own cuff. “Now that we have a satellite feed, we can see exactly where we need to go.”

“I’m sorry,” Ramses told him.

“I firmly believe that we’re saving lives,” Mateo said. “I don’t know why Jupiter wants us to think he’s evil, or why he thinks the only way to save these people’s lives is to temporarily pull them into another reality, but I’m going to keep going until we run out of people to help.”

Ramses nodded in understanding. “I’ll get you to that transport. It’s not far from here; right where you left it in the underground hangar. I don’t know when it transitioned.” He was talking about the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which was the closest thing they had to a home these days.

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