The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 18, 2398

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Curtis shrugs, and claims that he didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to be able to teleport. He was born with the ability, so why wouldn’t he still have it? He evidently knows that he’s in a different reality, but has no idea how he got here, and he certainly doesn’t know how to leave. That’s when Cheyenne climbs back down from the lavatory in the upper level. She stops cold when she sees their visitor. “Curty Birdy.”

“Chey-Chey?” Curtis steps away from the group.

“Are you...are we...?”

“We must be, right?”

“How would we ever know?”

“What’s going on here?” Arcadia interrupts this cryptic conversation.

Cheyenne is still in shock. “Mmm...Arcadia, Vearden, I would like you to meet my husband, Curtis Duvall. I think.”

“I know,” Curtis contends. “We are the same versions of each other.”

“There’s one way to find out.” Arcadia looks over at Ramses. “Do you have a simpatico detector in your bag of tricks?”

“No!” Cheyenne insists, more worried than she maybe should be. “We don’t need to test for simpatico. He believes that we’re from the same timeline, and I believe it too.”

“I don’t have one of those anyway,” Ramses says. “It hasn’t come up.”

“We’re learning more about you everyday,” Vearden points out.

Curtis approaches Vearden and Arcadia, sizing them up. He looks down at her belly. “You be sure to take care of your little girl, Papa Bear and Mama Bear.”

“Am I already showing?” Arcadia starts pawing at her belly.

“You’re glowing,” Curtis clarifies, but not really. He looks back at Cheyenne. “How much do they know about you, and where you’re from?”

“Almost nothing,” she answers. “I would like to keep it that way.”

Curtis nods as he’s turning back to the happy couple. “Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?”

“Jury’s still out,” Arcadia replies. “These people are helping me.”

Curtis sighs. “Is it still 2398?”

“November 17,” Marie says.

Curtis points at her. “Are you Angela?”

“Close enough.”

“That must make you Ramses Abdulrashid, and this the infamous AOC.”

“Yes.”

Curtis starts to look around like a fraud at an art gallery. “She wasn’t a politician in my timeline, though I did know her. We volunteered for Michelle Obama together, along with Leona Delaney. I told her that should run for office herself, I heard that she took my advice, though only in the next timeline.”

“I really would like to study you,” Ramses says, seeing no better opportunity to bring that up again.

Curtis looks to his wife for guidance, who nods. “Fine. Wadya need? Semen?”

“Blood will be enough for now,” Ramses assures him.

Curtis agrees to help with whatever is required for the rest of the day, and into the next. There is only so much that can be done up in orbit, though. Ramses has asked to take Curtis down to his lab for more tests. Cheyenne wants to come too, which would leave Vearden and Arcadia up on the ship alone. It’s highly automated, so that would be fine, except that she’s pregnant, and that doesn’t seem wise. Marie can’t take care of them, because she returned to her team in Paris. If they could only reach Leona, one scientist could be up above, and the other down below, but she’s still missing. So the AOC is empty right now, programmed to orbit the Earth on its own, keeping the place warm for them for whenever they decide to go back. For now, this is where they belong.

“I still can’t believe you finished it.” The last time Ramses was here, this facility was set up for epidemiology research. He asked Winona for certain equipment to be added to the retrofit, and laid out his plans for a few machines, but he didn’t expect anyone to build them in his absence. They went above and beyond. In particular, he’s eying the glass chamber that they constructed in record time according to his very specific specifications. Again, he didn’t ask anyone to do that, he just let them know that he would be building it himself, so they could account for building codes and fire safety.

“I didn’t do anything,” Winona responds. “He did.”

A man wearing a white lab coat underneath a reflective construction vest walks up to them, and shakes Ramses’ hand. “Hi, I’m Niven Murdoch.”

“Murdoch, as in, Baudin?”

“He’s my father,” Niven confirms, “not by blood. I don’t have any time powers myself, but I grew up around them, so I know how to build a simple temporal containment chamber. She’s a beaut, though, ain’t she?” He admires his own work.

“Bridgette’s father, Senator Morton found him.” Winona explains to Ramses. “This was long before your fancy brain scanner. He was trying to get found; put a cryptic classified ad about choosing salmon in the paper every single day for years.”

“Finally got a bite, so to speak,” Niven muses.

Curtis and Cheyenne walk back in. He’s wearing the special underwear that Ramses asked him to put on, and nothing else. “Are you trying to humiliate me, errr...?”

“I promise that it’s all in the name of science,” Ramses tells him. “No one’s going to watch the footage, except for me and Leona, and maybe a few other team members.”

Curtis shrugs. “Eh, whatever. It’s nothing she hasn’t seen already. Oh, didn’t you know?” he asks when Ramses looks at him funny. “We were together for a few years in the 2020s, after she graduated from college. This was before you, Cheyenne.”

“I know,” Cheyenne says.

“We’ll, uh, leave you to your work,” Winona says as she’s stepping away. “Niven?”

“Yes, coming.” His gaze lingers on Curtis a little too long.

“Thanks for the chamber, and everything else you did,” Ramses calls up to him.

“No prob, Bob!” Niven and Winona supposedly leave the lab.

Ramses opens the door to the chamber, and motions for Curtis to step inside. “Full disclosure, this locks from the outside, and if it works properly—”

“It does!” Niven shouts, having apparently not really left.

Ramses kind of ignores him, and moves on. “If it works, you won’t be able to escape, even by teleporting. I didn’t design it for you, but if you’ll trust me, I would like you to help us test it. At the same time, I’ll be taking readings on your abilities.”

“I’m down with that,” Curtis says. “Just tell me what to do.”

Ramses shuts the door, and goes over the computer. “Let’s start with a simple jump from one side of the chamber to the other.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 17, 2398

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Marie has gotten a lot of steps today, already more than she had yesterday, and it’s not even evening yet. With every orbital pass, the map of the brain scanner errors updates, providing them with a new location of their current target in Paris, France. Whoever it is has been moving around a lot, and they cannot catch up to them. There is no pattern to their movements. Some of the places are good tourist traps, but others are just a random alley, and people’s homes. They appear to be on the move with great purpose. The distance from one location to the next is always short enough to reach within the timeframe, but in some cases, only if they’re being evasive. They never spend too much time in one place, suggesting that they know someone is on their trail, and they’re trying to stay one step ahead. The team is exhausted, and everyone agrees that they need a new tactic. Marie has come up with a plan, but it’s best done after nightfall, so they ignore the next two pings, and wait it out in their small Parisian safehouse.

Three hours later, Marie takes the auto-injector out of her pack. Ramses was embarrassed that they were still using regular syringes up until this point for emergency jolts of temporal energy, but it’s fine. She has it now, and it’s time to use it, even though it’s not technically an emergency. For some reason, she feels like this is going to be a bigger deal than the other times she’s used the stuff. It’s not. She jams it into her leg, presses the button, and feels the usually temperate surge of electricity all over her body.

“Tell me again why you can’t just give us one of those too?” Esmé asks. She just won’t let it go. She’s not a very good diplomat, which is annoying, but Marie isn’t in charge of choosing her own team. Perhaps if she had stayed with the organization fulltime, she might have more pull.

“This doesn’t give me the ability to teleport,” Marie explains once more. “My body was designed with the power. This injector reactivates what’s already there. If I gave you one, it would do nothing. At best, it would add a whopping one hour to your lifespan.”

“I’ll...take it,” Esmé declares. She pretends to not notice Marie rolling her eyes.

“It’s almost time.” Agent Filipowski holds the tablet in front of Marie’s face.

Specialist Cleary and Officer Sharrow take their positions on either side of Marie. “Keep an eye on our realtime pins,” she instructs Doric. She can only carry two other people with her. “I may have to transport our target to a third location.”

“Understood.”

The tablet beeps. “Shit.” They’re at the Eiffel tower. Ramses’ scanner can’t accurately distinguish elevation. They could be on the ground, at the top, or anywhere in between. Plus, even this late, there are going to be tons of people there. They can’t just jump around a few times to look for them. Marie has to make a split second decision, and the rest of her team isn’t going to like it. “I’ll stay in contact, I promise.”

“What are you going to do?” Esmé questions.

“It’s too risky to move in a group.” Marie pulls herself away from the other two, and makes the jump. She’s on the ground underneath the tower. It’s one of the many unusual things about this reality, which is strikingly similar to the main sequence, even with a profoundly altered historical timeline. The primary difference here is that the beams are made of steel, rather than iron. She calls Ramses. “Hey, are ya busy?”

“No, what’s up?” Ramses replies.

“Can you see where I am?”

“Gotcha right here.” The scanner has always picked up on the rest of the time travelers in the group, as they qualify as temporal errors. They have always filtered out and ignored each other, but it’s useful now. “Who’s that with you, Leona? We can’t get a hold of her.”

“No one is with me. The second dot is our target. I lost access to the map. How far away are they?”

“About twenty meters southwest. You better hurry. They’ll go out of range again within ten minutes at the most.”

Marie starts to run. There’s a larger group of people over there, so she could really do with an investigator, but she’s alone, and that was her choice.

“Stop!” Ramses warns. “Two hundred meters directly south of you.”

“They’re a teleporter.”

“Yes.”

“Just like me.” Marie focuses on visualizing the distance, then covers it with another jump. There are fewer people around here, but she still has no idea who she’s looking for. She starts to scan them, hoping to see someone suspicious. She does in a man who’s staring right back at here. Now she has a face. If she doesn’t get him today, she will later. He can’t hide forever.

He teleports away again.

“Jump to the ship,” Ramses tells her.

Marie looks up to the sky, and jumps to the main level of the AOC.

Ramses is waiting for her. He tosses her a handheld device. “He jumped another five hundred meters. Go get him.”

Five hundred meters. That’s an increase, but still not very far as teleporters go. He clearly realizes that he’s being tracked, and he doesn’t want to be caught. That’s fair, he doesn’t know that she could be a friendly. She doesn’t know that either, but she hopes she is. If he’s so worried, though, there must be a reason he’s not bailing to Madagascar or Argentina, or something. Either something is keeping him in the city, or his power has limited range. Regardless, they have to find him. If Ramses can learn why this reality isn’t suppressing his abilities, it will take them one step closer to solving the problem for everyone. She looks at the map, and focuses on the dot. She jumps down to him, and without giving him any chance to react, wraps her arms around him. She then makes one final jump, back to the AOC.

“Curtis Duvall.” Arcadia smiles at him.

“Oh, Leona.” The man goes over and gives her a big hug. “If I had known that you were involved, I never would have kept running.”

“Yes, Leona is involved,” Arcadia confirms, “but I’m not her. I was accidentally placed in this body. I’m Arcadia Preston.”

He nods like that makes total sense. “I don’t know who that is.”

Arcadia narrows her eyes at him. “Which timeline are you from?”

“I don’t know,” Curtis argues. “Why would I know that? What do you want me to do, give it a random designation, like Six-One-Six or Earth-X? I’m from the timeline where I’m from!” That’s a fair point.

“I don’t care about that,” Ramses says dismissively. “I wanna know how you can teleport when no one else in the world still has their time powers.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 16, 2398

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Leona wasn’t calling Marie and Kivi because she wanted them to try to find her husband in the Mariana Trench. She just wanted to record a census of all the versions of Mateo that they’re currently aware of. The one down there appears to be the only one at the moment, which makes things simpler. The two SD6 teams are free to go off and do their own thing. She’s going to handle this herself, but she needs more data. The global brain scanner that found him operates on two axes. They can get some idea of elevation by measuring the strength of the signal, but it’s impossible to pinpoint a precise location. If she’s going to teleport down to him, she needs to know precisely how deep to go, and where to land, or she’ll end up drowning in the ocean while being crushed by its unyielding thousand atmospheres of pressure.

Ramses has been working on a temporal energy detector capable of surviving the stress of reentry into Earth’s top atmospheric layers, and he’s finally finished. They have decided that this is a perfect opportunity to feed two birds with one worm. The detector will fall to the surface of Earth, measuring the temporal energy fields along the way, as well as hopefully whatever is suppressing that field. It should land in the ocean over the trench, then detach itself from the parachutes, and sink down to look for Mateo.

“About how long will all that take?” Cheyenne asks.

Ramses is monitoring the exterior maintenance robot—or EMR—that’s readying the probe for launch. The ship wasn’t designed for this, so he’s had to improvise a lot of the process. If they’re in a time crunch, that’s all the more reason they can’t rush. “Forty-two minutes and eleven seconds.”

“Oh, so you know exactly how long?”

“Well, I couldn’t tell you how quickly the probe will find Mateo, because the whole point is we don’t know where he is, but if it has to sink all the way to the bottom, it will take forty-two minutes and eleven seconds from launch.”

“If your bot ever finishes building the launch brackets,” Leona says impatiently.

Ramses peels himself from the central hologram to look at her. “I hope you know that there is no guarantee—”

“I know,” she interrupts, frustrated.

“Sorry, what were you gonna say?” Vearden asks.

“He was going to remind me that we can’t be sure Mateo is the one down there,” Leona answers instead. “It’s true, were I you is not, like, this secret phrase that no one else would know. I just don’t think anyone else would think to use it in this situation.”

“Okay,” Ramses says passive-aggressively. “We’ll find out in about forty-two minutes.” He starts heading back down to engineering. “The EMR is finished with its work just in time for our launch window. You can all watch from up here.”

A few minutes later, the probe is through the miniature airlock that Ramses built in engineering, sacrificing what was once used as storage space. It’s now a little bit more difficult to walk around downstairs. The probe flies away from the AOC, and heads for Earth. It screams across the sky, exciting all amateur astronomers who were not expecting such a large piece of orbital debris to decay today. The truth is that it’s not all that large, but it’s built with materials not found in the modern world, so it would be assumed to be the size of a tiny home. Let the conspiracies begin.

The probe is through the rough spots now, so the parachutes deploy to slow its descent. Ramses frowns as he’s watching the data come in. Velocity, temperature, pressure, pollution levels. It’s picking up all of these things, but the one thing it’s not sensing is temporal energy. This is incredibly odd, even for the Third Rail. After it lands on the water, he goes back up to the rest of the group.

Leona shakes her head. “You see these numbers?”

“Yes, they don’t make any sense,” Ramses notes.

“Forgive me, but...” she begins awkwardly

“I didn’t screw it up. The detector is working fine. There is something seriously wrong with this world, and it’s bigger than we ever imagined.”

“I don’t understand,” Vearden says, worried that they’re going to roll their eyes at best, or chew his head off at worst.

“If I’m reading this right—and I’m no scientist, so I might not be—but it says here that you’re not sensing any temporal energy whatsoever,” Arcadia says.

“That’s right,” Leona replies. She reaches forward to play with the interface, but stops. There’s nothing to adjust or calibrate. It’s all laid out before them. It’s all wrong.

“Didn’t we kind of expect that, though?” Vearden presses. “We already know there’s no time travel, at least not down on the planet.”

“There’s always time travel.” Arcadia starts to talk with her hands. “For most people, time moves at a one to one ratio, which means that for every second that passes, one second passes. Temporal energy isn’t this magical substance that we use to manipulate time and space. It’s simply the transfer of excited particles from one moment in time to another, as a function of entropy.”

“Huh?”

“Temporal energy is just what happens when time passes,” Arcadia clarifies. “You can’t have no energy, because that would mean you have no time. It’s either balanced or unbalanced, and as time travelers, we exploit the unbalanced levels, but you can’t just have nothing. If you have nothing, you don’t exist. This world...doesn’t exist!”

The computer beeps. Leona looks back up to the hologram. “The probe is close enough to the source of the were I you signal. I know where to go.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Ramses offers.

“No, stay here and...deal with this.”

Leona puts on her wetsuit, which is a half-measure, since it’s not what’s going to keep her safe down there. It just seems dumb to go down in her civies. She inserts the rebreather in her mouth, nods to the group, and then teleports to the signal. She can instantly tell that she’s standing inside of the Bridgette. She hears someone shuffling behind her, so she turns around to find Alyssa in a defensive position. Alyssa doesn’t loosen up, since Leona doesn’t look like herself with the mask on. “It’s me, it’s me.”

“Oh, okay. I guess it’s 2398 again.”

“Where were you?”

“Billions of years ago.”

“Tell me everything.”

Alyssa shakes her head. “I can’t. My memories are on a detonation mechanism. As soon as we surface, they’ll disappear, and I don’t have time to relay them to you.”

“I understand,” Leona says with a nod. “Is Mateo here?”

She hesitates to answer for a beat. “No. He’s never coming back.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 15, 2398

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Marie gets out of the shower with a yawn. She looks around to make sure that no one saw it. Fortunately there’s no one else in the room, except for one person making some noise in the locker area. She wraps her towels around herself, and heads that direction, where her locker is anyway. Esmé is going through a lock-and-load montage. “Officer Sharrow, what are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m gearing up.”

“Gearing up for what, war?”

“We don’t know what we’re going into. I like to be prepared,” Esmé reasons.

“You’re our diplomat, did no one tell you that?”

Esmé sighs, annoyed. “You haven’t been with the division in a while. I don’t trust Nero anymore. He’s lost his edge.”

“Specialist Cleary has passed all of his recent evaluations. I asked him to tone down the weaponry. Perhaps that’s what you’re picking up on.”

She shakes her head. “It’s more than that. It’s before you came back. ”

“He was—forgive me—cleared by his superiors, and that’s good enough for me. It should be good enough for you too. Respect the chain of command.”

“Like I said, you weren’t there. He made a bad call in the field, almost got his partner killed. I don’t expect you to understand since you’ve obviously gone soft as well.”

That was out of line. She’s the team leader here, and the expert on their targets. Esmé can’t talk to her like that. She slams Esmé’s face against the locker in front of her, denting the metal. Esmé tries to elbow Marie back, but she sees this coming, and ducks. They continue to fight for the next minute, Esmé trying to pull all of her weapons back out, only to be disarmed immediately. Finally, Marie slams Esmé’s back against the bench, and knocks the wind out of her with a heavy blow to the chest. She puts her lips right next to Esmé’s ear as she’s trying to regain her breath. “You wanna go work as a disposable in the Military Authority, I’ll put in the transfer papers myself. You wanna do something that matters, you’ll follow my orders. This is my team, this is my mission, these are my people we’re approaching. Some of them are bad, but most of them are good, and if you go in there guns blazing, they will freak out! You may find yourself sitting next to your internal organs if one of them has the power to teleport them there, so don’t give them a reason. You’re the diplomat, so be diplomatic. Am I understood, Officer?” Disposable is an offensive term for an enlisted officer in any military branch, particularly someone who fights in the infantry.

Esmé continues to struggle with her breath, but she manages to eke out the affirmative. She stands up, and starts to gather the scattered weapons for armory return.

“I’ll see you in the briefing room.” Marie puts on her clothes, and then leaves shortly after Esmé.

Specialist Cleary is already waiting for them in there, as is Kivi, who Marie goes up to. “You’re not joining us, are you?”

“No, but sort of,” Kivi answers. She takes out a tablet that’s showing a map of the world, indicating all the last known location of the errors from Ramses’ global brain scanner. “Winona wants us to always be nearby, in case you need backup. I’ll be using my psychic power to find whoever it is my mind wants to find, but if you need me, we’ll be there. All you have to do is decide where we’re going first.”

Marie doesn’t look at the map. She’s unsure about all of this.

“I won’t be there to babysit you. It really is just a contingency. My team’s mandate is to find people. The orders don’t say anything about who to find. People go missing everywhere, so they figured we might as well work in the same city at the same time. We won’t even be sharing a safehouse.”

“Okay.” Marie looks down at the map. Any destination seems fine, they have little reason to choose one place over another. Someone appears to be in Giza, which makes sense, given what they know of the pyramids. There’s a whole diplomatic issue with Egypt, though, especially if they’re going to be shadowed by a tack team. One target appears to be on an island in the Philippines, while another is just in the middle of the water. Unless, is that...? It is, it’s the Mariana Trench. That makes sense as well, but unless they’re at or near the surface, it’s a no-go at the moment. They just recently asked for a submarine, and it didn’t work out so great for the people who loaned it to them, so asking again would seem heartless. It would probably be met with a belly laugh, and a resounding NO. Perhaps they could ask someone else.

Their investigator, Agent Doric Filipowski comes in. “Where are we headed? I may need to prep field assets.”

Marie looks up with a stalling smile. She quickly takes one more glance at the map, feeling the need to make a decision before it starts to look like she doesn’t know what she’s doing. “Paris. We’re going to Paris.”

“Mais bien sûr!” Doric declares. He pats Esmé playfully on the shoulder.

Esmé winces.

“Are you okay?” he asks her.

“It’s fine, I slept on it wrong,” Esmé answers. “J’ai toujours du mal à dormir avant une mission.”

Marie almost feels bad about their fight. Almost. Before she can dwell on it, her phone rings. She looks at it. “Holocall from the AOC.”

“Let’s go in here,” Kivi suggests, pointing to the executive office.

As Kivi is closing the door behind them, Marie magnetizes her device to the wall, and answers. She steps back to get in frame. “Leona, what’s going on?”

“Have you spoken with Mateo?” Leona asks.

“Not since he told me about Fairpoint’s transfer. Why, haven’t you?”

“You have the map of the errors handy?”

“Right here,” Kivi says, stepping forward.

“Zoom into the Mariana Trench, go back two days in the data timeline, then step through the history.”

“Okay.” Kivi does as she’s asked, letting Marie see the screen. They watch as the error appears, disappears, stays gone, and then reappears. The AOC passes over the spot every ninety minutes. Sometimes it detects this specific error, and sometimes it doesn’t.

“This error wasn’t there before,” Leona says after they step through history a few times, “back with that first scanner. It only showed up two days ago.”

“Is this a pattern?” Kivi questions. “It’s not every other orbital pass, or...”

Marie looks away to think. “It’s morse code. Every time the error appears means a dot and every time it’s gone means a dash.”

“What does it say?” Kivi asks.

“Were I you,” Leona replies. Mateo is the error.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 14, 2398

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Marie teleported down later yesterday to take over the brain scan error investigations. She’s going to prep her own small SD6 team. This isn’t a tactical team, like the one Kivi works with. One of them is an operative who specializes in combat and weaponry, yes, but another one is an agent, like Marie, with investigative experience. The third is an officer with diplomatic skills that she uses to turn foreigners and other civilians into government assets. They have all been read into the whole thing about time travel and alternate realities, so they’re ready to go on these missions. Alyssa doesn’t need to be involved in that anymore, and Mateo can’t, because whenever he approaches one of these people, they’re accidentally banished to another universe. While that’s happening, there is something that he always thought they should do, but weren’t able to.

The Olimpia was a submarine, but it had limited depth capabilities. The Bridgette has its own limits, but it can dive far deeper, which they’ll need in order to get to the bottom of Danica Lake. It’s located on the McIver farm outside of Lebanon, Kansas, and the McIver’s still technically own that land, but they still don’t need anyone seeing them go down there. As the saying goes, it’s always darkest before the dawn, and though that’s wholly inaccurate, that’s about when they arrive in the area. That way, they’ll still benefit from some of the daylight filtering through the water. There may be nothing down here, but then again, it may be everything,

This vehicle is far more automated than their last one as it’s equipped with the AI that Ramses rescued from The Constant before it was flooded and destroyed. Mateo is capable of operating it himself without the help of one of the team’s smart people. They dip into the water, and hang out near the surface for a little bit, shining the giant lights on the exterior around in case they see anything interesting right off the bat. They do. There are tons of fish down here. “Were you aware of people stocking this lake with life?” Mateo asks.

Alyssa shakes her head. “If they did, it would have been illegal. Not only would they have needed permission from the owner, which is me, but they would have had to negotiate a lot of bureaucratic red tape. A team of scientists would have needed to come out and test the area for pH, salinity, and other environmental variables. You can’t just randomly introduce a species to an ecosystem. Not enough time has passed for all of that, and we still have friends in the area. I’m sure I would have heard something.”

“Hmm. You seem to know a lot about how it works.”

“We considered doing it,” she explains. “We could have charged people to fish. I decided not to, because all this stuff was going on, and I didn’t want to deal with that red tape. I doubt it would have been worth it, especially since we would have either had to move back, or employ someone to manage the licenses.”

Mateo nods. “So this may be a clue. These fish here came from somewhere. I guess we don’t know where the water itself came from. I saw a movie where an isolated species of carnivorous fish were living in an underground lake until something broke, and they ended up in the regular lake, where they started eating people.”

“Sounds awful.”

“It was.” They continue to dive down as the sun rises. The natural light is never bright enough to do them much good, but it does make it seem less scary, being able to look up and see that they’re not trapped in a watery grave. They continue to see fish, though the population is not as dense down here, which they guess is typical of any body of water. They don’t see any other things, like frogs or octopodes. Mateo had a thought that they might, and that they were about to be transported to somewhere else in the world. These sorts of missions usually end up like that, but it doesn’t happen. No coral, no sharks. It’s looking like someone really did just drive up here with a tank of unauthorized fish, and dump them in here, for whatever reason.

Just as they’re reaching the limits of the sub’s capabilities, they also reach the lakebed. They expected to see the twisted ruins of the Constant, but there’s nothing. It’s just dirt and particulates, and a few adventurous fish. They go back up a little bit, because this water did have to come from somewhere, but they don’t see the pipes. “They must have been designed to disintegrate after use. The Constant must have been designed to do the same.”

“Surely the walls will have gotten wet at some point,” Alyssa reasons.

“Yeah, so water wouldn’t have caused them to fall apart. There must have been something in the water, like a...enzyme, or whatever, I don’t know.”

“Ha, are you just using fancy words you’ve heard before?”

“Pretty much.”

“Let’s call it an enzyme, which destroyed all evidence that there was once an underground complex down here. The question is where was that enzyme stored before it was needed, and why don’t we see evidence of that?”

Mateo sighs. “Neither of us is smart enough to make any real guesses in this matter. This was a nice idea, but we’re not qualified for this work.”

“Yeah.” Alyssa leans forward, and looks up through the viewscreen, where she sees nothing remarkable. “Let’s call it a day.”

“If we surface now, someone may see us.”

“I don’t really care anymore,” Alyssa decides. “This is still my land, I can do whatever I want with it.”

“Fair enough. Hey Constance, please surface.”

“Surfacing,” the computer responds.

They keep looking through the viewscreen as they go higher and higher. It’s going pretty fast, which Mateo would think would be dangerous, but Constance knows best. Something weird happens when they’re almost at the surface. The water becomes clearer, and light comes in through the glass. It almost looks like there’s a wall in front of them. An alarm starts going off outside, but it’s not too loud, and not too obnoxious. “Constance, report!”

“Status normal,” she replies simply. She doesn’t see anything wrong with this. The Bridgette breaks the surface, and starts to just float there. Now they can really see the walls. It looks like they’re in an Olympic-size pool.

“What happened?”

“I’m pretty sure we just went back in time.” Mateo reaches up to the emergency ceiling hatch, and pulls himself through it. He then helps Alyssa up as well.

They stand on the roof, and get a look around. It’s definitely a swimming pool, and it looks familiar. The double doors open, and Mateo’s cousin, Danica power walks in. She looks surprised to see him, but more annoyed than anything. “What the hell are you doing back here?” she questions.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 13, 2398

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Everest disappeared shortly after their conversation, which was probably one of the major reasons he cut it so short in the first place. He acted like he saw it coming. He lasted much longer than Erlendr and the old man in the pocket dimension, though, suggesting some level of control that one can wield over the process if they know to do so. It’s hard to tell how much Everest does or doesn’t know, but there is no guarantee the next error they encounter will be just as strong-willed. To be honest, it’s been so long, Mateo forgot about that whole thing. He’s the cause of their banishment from this realm, meaning he is still the worst person for the job. If they want to pursue this endeavor further, someone is going to have to come back down from the AOC so Alyssa doesn’t have to shoulder the burden alone. Marie has tentatively agreed, but she’s finishing some work up there at the moment, so she definitely won’t be returning today.

It has ended up being a good thing, because a certain prisoner of the federal government has asked to see her, and Mateo doesn’t want her to deal with that. He’s on his way to visit Fairpoint Panders himself. He tried to escape into Canada after he took a bunch of people hostage, and tried to kill Marie. Normally, the Canadian courts would handle the trial, since that’s where he was when he was caught, and the crime went down in Palmeria, but the Canadians don’t want to touch it, plus all non-Palmerian victims were Usonian citizens. This was likely disappointing news to Fairpoint as the Canadian judicial system is known for being highly respectful to prisoner’s rights.

Mateo sits down on the good side of the glass, cleans the phone with a disinfecting wipe, and puts it to his ear. Fairpoint doesn’t have any wipes on his side, because this isn’t Canada. “I can only see one visitor at a time, and I’m only given thirty minute sessions, so say whatever you wanna say, then leave, so I can speak with Marie.”

“I’m not here to warn you about how you’ll treat Marie. She’s just straight up not coming. You’re dealing with me today, and only me.”

“You’re not on my approved list. They shouldn’t have even let you in the building,” Fairpoint spits.

“I work with SD6,” Mateo reasons. “I can get into any building I want.”

“I want to talk to Marie.” He’s desperately trying to keep his temper in check, because he knows they’ll yank his visitation time if he gets too riled up. He’s rattled...flustered even. He has spent the last month in his cell, planning every word he wants to say, preparing contingencies for every possible response out of her. This is wrong. It’s all wrong. Mateo’s ruined it, and Mateo couldn’t be happier.

“She’s not coming. She never will. Over the years, we’ve had a lot of enemies—”

“I’ll tell them about the baby.”

“What?”

“She was going to have a baby, but now it’s gone, which I know was something she wanted, so either she’s incredibly lucky, or she figured out how to get a secret abortion. Not even her position within the government could get her out of this, so you tell her that if she wants me to keep quiet, she’ll come here and give me thirty minutes!”

Mateo is foaming at the mouth. He takes out his phone, which a normal visitor would not be allowed to keep. He keeps staring at Fairpoint as he’s dialing Winona. “On second thought, I’ll take that transfer. I want him moved to the black site immediately.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 12, 2398

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Boots on the ground, that’s what Leona called them. Ramses installed a new global brain scanner on the AOC in orbit, and since they own it themselves, they don’t have to worry about losing control over it. While they’re up there, Mateo and Alyssa are down below. It will be their job to approach the so-called errors, and ask them if they would like to be brought into the fold. The scanner doesn’t operate in real time, since it’s not joined by a constellation of satellites, but their information is never more than ninety minutes out of date.

Ramses didn’t equip their ship with a particularly powerful camera, so they don’t have eyes on the surface. There is nothing particularly distinctive about one error versus another. They’ve decided to go to Venice, Italy first, mostly because both of them want to go there. Mateo was there once, very briefly. This was at the beginning of The Rogue’s Tribulations, which would turn out to be commissioned by The Cleanser. Mateo and Leona still didn’t know what was going on yet, they were just trying to survive. In that timeline in the main sequence, Venice was mostly underwater due to climate breakdown. That hasn’t happened here. The land is perfectly dry, and a great place for a vacation. Of course, that’s not what they’re doing here, but that doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy themselves while they wait for updated intel.

The last ping came from one of the bridges over the Grand Canal, but their target could be anywhere by now. In the meantime, they rest their elbows on the stone railing, and watch the gondolas go by. It’s quite romantic here, he wishes Leona could join. Maybe she can. No one’s going to be looking for her face here, right? They expect her to be somewhere in North America. Eh, she’s smart enough to come up with that option herself, and for all he knows, she’s the only thing keeping the other residents from going crazy up there. Alyssa is pretty good company too. Besides, this isn’t really for fun. It could be dangerous in its own right.

After a few minutes, Mateo looks into the distance, and sees a gondola passenger standing up in the boat as its moving towards them. He’s waving to someone on the bridge. There are other people here, but none of them is waving back, or paying him any mind. As the gondola gets closer, the man points excitedly, then goes back to waving. He starts calling up to them once he’s within earshot. “Hey, Mateo! You’re here!”

“I am!” Mateo replies. “And you are...here too!”

“You don’t recognize me!” He seems pretty offended.

“Of course I do, you’re, uh...why am I lying? Sorry, I don’t!”

“Everest! Everest Conway! I delivered your eulogy!”

Of course! he repeats in his own head, but this time he means it. He died on the planet of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida a long time ago, and it’s largely considered his true death, even though it’s not the one that landed him in the afterlife simulation. Thousands of people attended his funeral, including himself, and millions—if not billions—watched on TV. It was a surreal experience, he kind of tries not to think about it anymore. “Sorry, it’s just that I meet so many people! What are you doing here?”

“Why don’t you come down and take a ride?” Everest offers. “People are staring!”

“Okay.” Mateo starts to lift his leg over the railing. A few people gasp and freak out, making him feel like he’s Eric Andre. He pulls their hearts back up into their respective chests when he gets back on two feet, and assures them with hand gestures that it was just a joke. He and Alyssa cross the bridge all the way, and meet the gondola on the dock. He pays the fare in Usonian money, and they get on board. The gondolier adjusts their seating to account for weight, and then they head off.

“Don’t worry, he doesn’t speak English,” Everest explains. “Hey, Alyssa.”

She presents her hand. “Alyssa McIver of the Lebanon McIvers.”

“Everest Conway of Fistula Crisium-Tranquillitatis Conways.”

“Pipe of the Tranquil Crisis?” she questions.

“You speak Latin?” Mateo asks her.

“A little.”

Everest laughs. “It’s a lava tube on the moon, located between the Sea of Crises and the Sea of Tranquility. I lived my childhood underground.”

“I see.”

“If I remember correctly,” Mateo begins, “you were on a tour of my personal history. Have you been here the whole time, watching us, not helping?”

“I’ve not been able to watch via observation dimension,” Everest explains. “They don’t exist here. I had to keep my distance, but this is a loophole.”

“Why?”

“I’ll explain what I can in a few minutes. Go as fast as possible, Italo.”

“Are you being racist, or is that his real name?”

“Real name. An Italian named Italo. It’s very common.”

“I thought you said he didn’t speak English,” Alyssa reminds him when she realizes that they are indeed moving faster.

“He knows that one phrase.” Minutes later, they’ve passed under the highway, out of the canal, and into the open water. They go under the highway again at a different point, and now they’re really in the open. There aren’t any other gondolas around now, just other, larger boats. “It’s the water,” Everest goes on. “It dampens the signal. They can see that we’re together, but they don’t know what we’re talking about.”

“Who are we talking about?” Mateo asks.

“It will put you more at risk if I give you that information, but this is my first and only opportunity to drop a little bit of truth on you. I was dishonest in your eulogy. We’re not friends. We’re not enemies either. It’s hard to explain, because I want to tell you that I don’t know you well, but the truth is that I know everything there is to know about you. The real problem is that you don’t know me. I never joined your group. I was sent to observe you by a third party, and while I’m not cognizant of their endgame, I can’t imagine it’s good. I came up with this lie about us being future friends in case we ever ran into each other during my mission.”

Mateo nods. “Were you hired to do this, or...?”

“Coerced. They have my family. Or rather, they strongly suggested that they do. That’s another reason I don’t think their intentions with you are honorable. But to my knowledge, they haven’t actually ever hurt anyone. That’s why I couldn’t go to the authorities, or anything. My only choice was to do what they asked, I’m sorry.”

“How can I get this information to my team? Do we need open water?”

“If you absolutely had to, yes, but you have to be there for a good reason, or they’ll get suspicious. I was hoping at least Leona and Ramses would be here with you, but that’s not what happened. Sorry, I can’t answer any more questions. This is all I can say. Now go back,” he orders the gondolier. “I taught him that phrase too.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 11, 2398

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It’s been a month since Angela, Carlin, Moray, Petra, and a small crew of scientists started their relativistic journey to the Oort Cloud. For them, however, it’s only been an hour, and nothing interesting has happened. The four of them are in the middle of a game of Bridge, but that’s about it. Now Angela’s bladder is yelling at her, so she’s taking her break and heading for the head. When she opens the door, she runs into someone she assumes to be one of the research scientists. She doesn’t even look up at his face. “Oh, apologies. I’ll go find another facility.”

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, madam,” the man says as she’s trying to walk away. That voice. She would recognize it anywhere, even a thousand years from now. It’s the man who put her in prison, Tamerlane Pryce.

She spins around, a little too whimsically than she would like, given the tone she wants to present. “They were right. You’re here.”

He’s genuinely confused. “Someone told you I would be on the rocket?”

“No, I mean, this reality. I don’t know why you’re on the rocket.”

“I’m here to save your life,” he says cryptically.

She folds her arms. “How? Did a seer four million years ago tell you that it would blow up?”

He chuckles. “We don’t have seers. That’s by design. No time travel, no fortune telling, no temporal manipulation of any kind...except for the thing that controls all of that, of course.”

“Of course,” she mocks. “I would love to continue this conversation, but I really do have to go.”

“I meant what I said,” he calls up when she tries to turn away from him again. “You shouldn’t use the toilet.”

“Excuse me? You’re trying to tell a woman what to do with her body?”

He nods as he’s preparing his explanation. “Exactly four months ago, Earth realtime, you imbibed three cups of water while stranded in the village of Vertegen, on the Svalbard archipelago.”

“Yes, we surmised that they were three types of immortality water. That’s why I’m here, to buy time for my friends to find the rest, so Marie isn’t killed.”

“That’s not why I had the villagers give you the water,” Pryce says. “Something worse happens in your future, and I feel responsible for you, so I didn’t want you to die, but that event cannot be changed. What I mean is, the sequence of events leading up to it can’t, but I could alter the outcome. Fortunately, you came to my reality, and provided me with the perfect opportunity to do just that.”

“Okay. Let’s say I believe you. Why won’t you let me pee now?”

He shrugs with both his shoulders, and his chin. “Isn’t it obvious? The waters don’t last forever. Your body purges them from your system, just as they purge anything else you consume...unless it’s permanently detrimental, like a pathogen. If you pee today, Marie will die. Actually, she’ll already be dead, because the whole point is that you would be trying to save her life in the past. You don’t have much time left. I calculated incorrectly, and didn’t give you very much time to reach all eleven immortality waters before the first ones expire. You can do it, but you have to hold on for the next several hours. Your friends are already on the path that will lead them to a permanent solution.”

“We don’t need any solution that you came up with,” Angela contends. “I lived in your world for centuries, but I eventually broke out, thanks to my new family. We’ll break out of this one too, especially now that I know it’s yours.”

Pryce smiles sadly. “The afterlife simulation is not my world. Now, before you argue, I really mean it. I’m a different version of the man you know. He went back in time, and created a new timeline, one in which no one ever really dies. I was born in that one. I never did any of the stuff that he did.”

She’s taken aback by this, but his story isn’t completely implausible. He certainly wouldn’t be the first alternate self she’s met. There have been so many in the Third Rail alone; it’s like a magnet for them. She herself has an alt who goes by their middle name. “You just said you felt responsible for me.”

“I do. I feel personally responsible for all the people he’s hurt. If he’s not going to make up for his mistakes, then I guess I have to.”

She takes a deep breath. “Horace Reaver was a serial killer in one reality, then a rich douchebag in the next, and a hero in the next. I want to trust that you’re like that, but there’s no reason to believe versions of people in subsequent timelines are always better than their Past!Selves. It could just as easily go the other way. Maybe you’re not the man I knew, but that doesn’t mean you’re an improvement.”

“You’re right, but I can give you this.” He pulls a water bottle from behind his back like it’s Excalibur. “Energy water isn’t the most difficult kind to procure, but in the political climate surrounding the Dead Sea and Birket, I would prefer it if you didn’t risk your freedom by trying to go back there to steal more.”

Angela peers at it. “How do I know that isn’t just tap water from a suburban house’s kitchen sink?”

“I went through a lot of trouble to get you the three first immortality waters. The first one is from billions of years ago, the next is from another universe, and the next is from another galaxy. If I couldn’t even sneak into Birket to get this one, I certainly couldn’t have gotten the others, and the whole endeavor is moot.”

She keeps her eyes narrowed, but accepts the gift. “I can’t drink this yet. If I remember the order, I need waters from the Bermuda Triangle and North Pole first.”

He nods. “The others will handle that. This is a good faith gesture, don’t drink it until you get back to Earth. But remember, you can’t go pee. I haven’t had a doctor examine you, so I can’t say for sure it would purge your system of what you need to keep, but if I were you, I wouldn’t risk it.”

Now that he’s been talking about it so much, it’s all that she can focus on. The pressure is worse than ever, though that’s clearly only a psychological reaction. Assuming she believes him in the first place, how long can she last before she explodes? “Thank you...I think.”

He smiles, “that’s as much as I can ask. I better go hide again. I’m a stowaway, after all. Try to keep yourself busy. Maybe activate your acute stress response. When your body is in a hurry, it shuts down digestion, because it knows that it can’t take a break when you’re running from a saber-toothed tiger."

Angela watches him disappear, then she returns to her cabin to stash the Energy water in her refrigerator. Then she goes out for a jog. It doesn’t work.