The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 2, 2026

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As soon as Mateo jumped back into the timestream, Leona was ready with a needle. She injected him with a substance that she claimed to not know, but that would apparently clean his system of the virus for good. He began to feel sick during the car ride, but they had a bag ready for him. He was sweaty and dizzy, but was still able to understand as they told him about how the virus that he brought back from the future spread throughout the entire world. Almost everyone showed symptoms at some point, and to some degree, but they only ever lasted for a few days. His mother was the only one who died from it, presumably because she made skin-to-skin contact with Mateo. He was responsible for the deaths of both of his parents, and he couldn’t tell whether the vomit was from that guilt, or because of the injection.

The car drove them up to the small airport where they got into a private jet that evidently belonged to a close friend of Duke’s who owed him a favor. He spent the next few hours vomiting, shaking, and sleeping. He had nightmares about what his mother must have gone through, and was grateful for having been given the gift of feeling a fraction of that pain. They first took him to Leona’s father’s home in Topeka. He wanted to go straight to the cemetery to pay his respects to his mother, but they refused. He was in no position to argue, especially not after passing out on Leona’s bed.

When he woke up, he was still sweating the toxins out, but he felt much better. It was fairly late in the evening. A young boy was staring at him at the foot of the bed. “Are you doing okay?” the boy asked.

“You must be Theo. All grown up.”

“Not grown up enough,” Theo sighed. “I am sorry about your mother. She was a fine lady, and I wish I could have known her when I was more myself.”

“How are you not now yourself?”

“I’m getting there,” Theo admitted. “But I still need a little more time. The memories are returning quicker now. Soon, I shall have them all back.”

“How did you lose your memory?”

“I died,” he answered mysteriously before standing up. “Come on. It’s near time to go see your family.”

“All right.” Not feeling up to pursuing a line of questioning, Mateo got out of bed, took a shower, and followed everyone to the cars.

Duke, Leona, her little brother, her father, and her step mother all stood in front of the graves of Carol and Randall Gelen. There was another man there too. When Mateo asked Leona who he was, she explained that he was a doctor, and had treated Carol while she struggled with the virus. Each of his friends spoke words of kindness about his parents. He was surprised to find out how close Carol had gotten with Leona’s parents. He was missing a lot, and was growing more frustrated by the fact every day. He chose to not say anything about them, preferring to keep it all to himself. But it wasn’t much. He didn’t know what to think. For the first time in his life, he was seriously considering killing himself. The main thing that stopped him was the likelihood that the powers that be would not allow it to happen. They were going to force him to watch everyone he loved die. What he did wrong to deserve this curse, he couldn’t say for sure.

While the crowd headed for the cars, he remained behind to be alone. He desperately wanted to pray, but he was losing his faith, and the part of him that doubted the existence of God was presently winning. Instead, after only a few moments, he stood up and turned around. But he was no longer in the cemetery. He was in a different one. He was in the small graveyard outside the city’s borders. Everyone was gone; everyone, except for little Theo Delaney. “What just happened?” He looked around. “Daria!”

“She’s not here,” Theo said.

“How did we get here then?”

“You needed to be here.” He pointed behind Mateo’s back. “And so did they.”

Mateo turned back around and saw that his parents’ graves were still there. They had been moved here to the other cemetery. “But why?”

Theo smiled. “This place is for us. It’s for salmon. But, I suppose the powers that be made two exceptions. You must be pretty important to them if they allowed your parents to be laid to rest here.”

“What are salmon?”

“You and I. And Daria, and Mario, and your birth mother. That’s what we’re called. Well, that’s what I like to call us, at least.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re going the wrong way.”

“Aren’t you a little young to have a pattern? Leona hasn’t so much as hinted that you’re one of us.”

“Leona has been keeping a lot from you, but of this she knows nothing. Right now I don’t have a pattern. Before I died, I was moving forwards in time according to the Fibonacci sequence.”

“You died and came back to life?”

“As Theo Delaney, yes. Like I said, I have to regain my memories. I don’t remember everything yet, but I remember dying.” He paused for a bit. “And I remember your birth mother.”

“You knew her? When?”

“We were...friends, for a long time. At different times.” He nodded his head. “She’s over there.”

Mateo looked to where he was indicating. He saw two small gravestones buried deep in the ground that were not there before. He knew this for a fact, because the markers were older than he had ever seen. “Laurel and Samuel. 1744. You’re telling me this is my mother, Lauren?”

“Yeah, she used different names for different jumps. We spend a lot more time in one place than you do.”

He fumed. “Will I ever see her again?”

“It’s not likely. Her and her boyfriend’s pattern is to go back in time in a geometric progression with a ratio of two. One year, two years, four, eight, etcetera. My records suggest that she survived her death, like me, and continued backwards. I have no idea how you would encounter her again. But you know what they say...stranger things have happened. For instance, this graveyard. It doesn’t exist just outside of Topeka. It doesn’t exist anywhere. It moves to when and where it’s needed; a sanctuary for us when we are at our worst. So, you see, Mateo, you were born a salmon. Even before your 28th birthday, you were part of the plan. That’s why the graveyard has always been there for you.”

The doctor from the other cemetery appeared. “Teddy? Is that you? Why didn’t you tell me who you were?”

“Dr. Sarka,” Theo said with a smile. “They let you come back here? No one is hurt, far as I know.”

The doctor pulled out a device from his pocket and looked over it. “I’m here for a consult with a...Mateo Matic.” He looked up. “That’s you.”

What the hell was going on? “A consult for what?”

“Kidney transplantation.”

“My kidneys are fine.”

“Yes, exactly. You’re a donor.”

“I never agreed to that.”

Theo looked like he finally understood. “You’ll agree to this one.”

“Why? Who is it for?”

The doctor scrolled through his device. “I don’t have that information at this time. I just need some samples now that you’ve had time to push the virus out of your system.”

“I do,” Theo said. “It’s for my sister. She is very ill, and has been waiting for a kidney for about three years. They can make certain organs with 3D printers, but kidneys are extremely complicated, very expensive, and at the highest demand.”

“How do we even know I’m a match?”

“I wouldn’t have been sent here if you weren’t. My machines probably checked your compatibility in the cretaceous period while I was stitching you up from the explosion, but I don’t see that data until the powers that be disclose it. Need to know, and all that.”

“So you’re a...what did you call us, Theo? Salmon?”

The doctor laughed. “Yes, I am. I’m the resident doctor. They send me in when one of the others gets hurt.”

“What about when I broke my leg?”

He shook his head. “I wasn’t vital. I’m sure whatever treatment you received for that injury was good enough. I only go where I’m needed.” He looked back at his scheduler. “And I’m needed for a transplantation in one year’s time. It’s technically illegal, so they can’t just have any surgeon perform it.”

“Do you know anything about salmon deaths?” he asked of Dr. Sarka. “Theo here says he was reincarnated. My parents were moved here with all the other salmon. Is it possible that they will come back to life too?”

Sarka walked over and examined the gravestones thoroughly. He even took out another device and scanned the ground. “They appear to actually be here, and not just part of the transition between jump points.”

“What does that mean?” Mateo asked.

“It means that it is entirely possible that your parents were salmon their entire lives without knowing it. I make no promises, but you may very well see them again.”

Later that night, Dr. Sarka prepared Mateo for surgery. As soon as he jumped forward to the year 2027, they were ready for him. He looked over and saw Leona next to him, under anesthesia.

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Seeing is Becoming: Champions (Part III)

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What the last Orothsew native had said to them was more of a joke than a threat. But it was still partly true. The first thing they did was take baths and change into new clothes that resembled Ancient Greek togas, but were a little bit more form-fitting. They were led to a great hall full of delicacies. Each food they tried resembled, in more ways than one, something from Earth. The grape-looking fruit tasted somewhat like grapes. The pinkish meat with white veins tasted remarkably like ham. The bread tasted exactly the same. Saga voiced her concerns about edibility, but the natives assured her that many a human had sampled the food, and there had been no problems.

“How many of us have you encountered?” Vearden asked during lunch.

Their liaison, Fanelius, put down his drumstick and wiped his mouth with a napkin. He was assigned to answer questions and keep them safe. “Over the centuries? A few hundred, I would estimate. They don’t all come from the same time. There doesn’t seem to be a temporal link between the other planets and ours. An Earthling will show up from the 20th century, and then another from the 17th. We know very little of how it works, and none of them have a clue.”

“But aliens from other planets, besides Earth, also appear?”

“Yes, it happens quite often, actually,” Fanelius said with excitement. “It would seem as we are some kind of focal point for spontaneous space travel. People from all over the universe come and go on a daily basis, but none of them report such a high degree of visitors to their home worlds.”

“You say they come and go? At some point, do they just disappear again?” Saga asked.

“Yes. As soon as they complete their mission. Sometimes they know exactly what they’re supposed to do, like it’s just their jobs to travel around, and they’ve been given instructions. Others need to use their instincts. One thing we’ve learned, though, is that each visitor who spends their time only trying to leave, never succeeds. Several of them have died here, never having discovered their purpose.” Fanelius said that with a purely intellectual tone, but Saga and Vearden couldn’t help but interpret it as a warning. They weren’t going home, unless someone else decided that they were allowed to.

“Even if we did get back,” Saga began once they were left alone for a period of time, “what year would it be? It could be 2004, or it could be 4666. What year is it right now? How long does it take to travel across space? To us, it felt instant, but maybe that was an illusion. Maybe we’ve been gone for thousands of years!”

“Yes, that may be. But what do you want me to do? Not hope we find our way back? We have to keep going either way.”

“No I know, Vearden. I’m just...trying to get things straight.”

He took her hands in his and looked into her eyes. “I promise you this, Saga. If we never get home, or if we do, we will always stick together. We will get through this...together.”

That gave her some comfort, until later that day when they were headed for the capital and they were ambushed by the Gondilak. Saga survived, mostly unscathed, but Vearden was captured. A native who also survived the attack took her to the capital to speak with the Magistrate.

“Did they head North, or East?” he asked.

“I was knocked out cold,” the fellow survivor admitted.

“If by East, you mean away from the setting sun, then it was that.”

“That’s promising,” the Magistrate said. “He may be alive yet.”

“What are they going to do to him?”

“If he’s the one who somehow inherited their healing abilities, then they will experiment with him, and test his limits.”

“We have to get him out of there,” Saga pleaded. “Please. I know that to you we are nothing but humans, but he’s important to me. There must be something that we can do.”

“We already know that you two are important,” the Magistrate said, surprised that she would feel the need to beg. “You were already scheduled to come here. Another human told us that you would, and said that we must conscript you into our army.”

“What?”

“You were being brought to me because you are our new Champions. We need you to lead us so that this war may finally end.”

“I see.”

“You will have the full force of Orothsewan resources at your disposal so that you can return to us your partner.”

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Microstory 75: Kjirygenos

Thousands of years ago, Earth was a fairly advanced planet. We shared technologies with a race called the Kjirygenos. We taught them everything they knew. We lifted them up from obscurity so that we could together be the two most powerful forces in the galaxy. At some point, we fell out with the aliens. It is unclear exactly what happened, but we believe that it had something to do with an Earthling King’s son, and a Kjirygenosian peasant boy. The feud lasted for many years, ending with the aliens plunging Atlantis, our mightiest nation, into the depths of the ocean. Over the course of the next several centuries, our planet recovered. We built monuments and tributes to those we lost in the Kyrij War. Every single fountain you see that’s larger than a common land vehicle represents the life of one who was lost in Atlantis. But we also built other things. The Egyptian Pyramids, Great Wall of China, Leaning Tower of Pisa, Eiffel Tower, and the The Vice President's Residence & Office, among a few other things, were all created with intent. They are a mathematical message to the Kjirygenosian peoples that we cannot read, but is quite clear to those who truly need to see it; a great big architectural middle finger to the douchebags who sunk our island. Eff you, Kjirygenos!

Microstory 74: Artemis and the Stag

Artemis was the goddess of the hunt. She was often seen with bows, arrows, deer, and hunting dogs. She was also very beautiful. One day, she was bathing in a sacred spring when a human hunter named Actaeon accidentally came upon her. As Actaeon was a rival of Artemis’ father, Zeus, she felt particularly slighted for this invasion of privacy. As punishment for his transgression, Artemis turned Actaeon into a stag. Actaeon’s hunting hounds fell into a frenzy, and began snapping and barking at their master, not knowing that it was he who was once in charge of them. Actaeon began to run, and Artemis led the pursuit of him with his, as well as her own, hounds. They say that the chase lasted for days. When he could finally take no more, and stopped to rest in a clearing, his hounds caught up to him. They circled him and waited for instructions, until one of the dogs stopped. She sniffed at the stag, and licked his nose. She looked right into his eyes, realizing that it was Actaeon, and not prey. The clever hound relayed this new information to the rest of the pack, and they turned their attention to the Artemis and her pack. When the pack arrived, Actaeon’s dogs attacked them, fiercely protecting their master. As a result of their loyalty and love, Actaeon shifted back into human form. He called his hounds back from the fight and apologized to Artemis who walked away a bitter and unsatisfied deity.

Microstory 73: Salmon Doctor

There is an unknown number of people in the world, being moved throughout time and space, each with their own missions to carry out. One such of these people is a medical doctor by the name of Baxter Sarka. Born in the 21st century, he was first pushed back to the year 1926. He was met there by the middle management of salmon, one whose responsibility it was to set other travelers on their respective courses; and to ensure that they stay on task. Every salmon will, at some early point in their journey, meet this manager, and he will point them in the right direction. Likewise, every salmon will run into some medical issue at least once. If contemporary medical assistance is not possible, or logistically impractical, Dr. Sarka will be deployed to provide treatment. He carries with him a bag of highly advanced medical paraphernalia, capable of treating virtually any injury or condition. Upon meeting him, the manager gave him a pager of sorts that he referred to as the scheduler. On it are his upcoming appointments, including dates and other pertinent information. Despite having no foreknowledge of salmon, or any other form of time travel, Dr. Sarka took to his mission immediately. It was his instinct to help those in need, whether they lived in the past, or otherwise. I tell you this because the salmon Mateo Matic is soon to be introduced to Dr. Baxter Sarka for the first time.

Microstory 72: Aglets of Conversation

The other day, my shoelace broke. I pulled it out and tried relacing it, but found myself doing it horrifyingly wrong. How I managed that, I will never know, but it reminded me of the concept of aglets of conversation. An aglet is a small piece of plastic that is fitted around the end of a shoelace to keep it from fraying. You’ve seen them. You know what I’m talking about. Much like a literal aglet, an aglet of conversation is something that is very important to one that owns it, but means very little to others else. It is a story, or a piece of information, or a musing that is only relevant to the person who expresses it. A certain microblogging social media service is full of these. We all have our own aglets, but the trick is to keep them to ourselves. Every time you try to bring other people into your aglet crisis, you will lose them. Let’s say you try to tell a story about how your shoelace broke. In the middle of it, you realize how disinterested the person you’re talking to is. That’s because it’s your shoelace, and it must remain yours alone. Don’t bring up your aglets in a conversation. Don’t talk about aglets of conversation, because aglets of conversation is an aglet of conversation. Can you imagine an entire paragraph that talks about nothing else but aglets? Why, it would be no better than a paragraph with only a few words, repeated over and over and over and over and over and over.

Microstory 71: The Address

There has been a dip in applications to work at the postal service after a package bomb killed everyone in three houses. The supervisor tells me that I’m hired, but she looks more grateful for me than I for them. It’s the first day on my route, and I’m so excited that I forget my headphones. They tell me that it can get really boring, so pretty much everyone has music. But that’s okay with me. When I was a child, I would write short notes to my family and deliver them on a wooden horse. Call me crazy, but I’ve always wanted to work at the post office. As I’m about to head out, one of my new coworkers asks me if I’m doing the Purple Rose route. When I confirm, he chortles a bit and says ominously, “just go through the gate.” Things are going well, until I find a letter with an address that doesn’t make any sense. The houses on Purple Rose Lane start at 4200, then on to 4204 and 4208, but then the next house is 4400. The address I’m looking for is 4256. I cannot mess up on my very first day, so I pull out the map, but it’s completely unhelpful. I seem to be on the right street, on the right part of town, so where is it? Then I see it. A gate. Between two houses. Exactly where the discrepancy lies. I laugh, because my coworkers are clearly hazing the new guy. Which is awesome since it means they already accept me. When I walk up and open the gate, I find myself in a pocket dimension. There is an entire slew of houses that are invisible from the main street, waiting for their mail. That makes more sense. I just hope that I can easily get back out when I’m done. The last time I was in a pocket dimension, I had to solve a riddle before they let me leave.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 1, 2025

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Mateo was under the impression that when he returned to his regular pattern, he would find himself back in the Snow White coffin; under automatic quarantine. But he was wrong. He was standing up, but it was pitch black, so he had no idea where he was. He could be thousands of miles from home for all he knew. His father was quite obviously a time traveler, but they had jumped through so many years that there was no way to know whether they had also moved through space or not. He waved his arms around, looking for a lightswitch, but accidentally knocked a glass off of the counter.

When the light came on, the room looked familiar. He was almost completely certain that he was in his mother’s new house in Colorado. He turned around and found confirmation. His mother, Carol was standing in front of him. He tried to get away from her, but she quickly wrapped her arms around him.

“Mateo, you’re back! My God, what happened to you?”

He pulled himself away from her. “We both need to be quarantined. Separately.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve been infected with a virus of some kind. I’ve probably already passed it on to you, but we have to try.”

She stared at him for a few seconds before showing determination. “Get into the room at the top of the stairs and to the left.” She left for her own room. “I’ll call Duke. He’ll know how to do this.”

Professor Duke Andrews came over with Leona. Together, they constructed barriers with plastic sheeting. It freaked him out a little. He knew it was for everyone’s protection, but there was a television character years back who would build rooms like this in order to kill people without leaving evidence.

Once they were all finished, Leona came back in with her hazmat suit. “I’ll need to take more samples.” She got to work.

“Leona.”

She looked annoyed with him.

“I didn’t run away this time. I was thrown into the future. That’s where I got this virus.” He waited for a reply but nothing came. “Leona, I’m sorry.”

“Tell me what happened,” she finally said.

He went about explaining everything he went through in 3118; from the dome to the robot, to the self-destructing message, to his father. She then relayed the information to Duke and his mother.

She shook her head. “The files were corrupted. We received almost no data from the machine, except for a series of unfinished equations regarding hyperspheres. But we didn’t think that meant it did something to you. When you didn’t come back a year later, we thought...we figured that you were dead.”

“I’m here now.”

She stopped working for a second and looked him in the eye. “Yeah, but for how long. I’ve always known, but with each passing year it sinks in more that you and I are destined for failure.”

“Well, maybe we can stop it. Tell me about the data. What’s a hypersphere?”

“We believe that the powers that be exist within five dimensional space. That allows them to see time all at once,” she explained. “Or so we think. Like I said, we didn’t get much from it. Which makes sense now that we know the way it disrupted your—what did he call it—pattern?”

“How would someone be able to see time all at once?”

“Imagine a beetle, crawling on the ground,” she began. “You pick up that beetle with a sheet of paper, and you carry it somewhere else; maybe hundreds of miles away. You set the beetle down, and what does it do? It just keeps crawling. It knows it’s moved, but that doesn’t matter. It has no choice but to keep going with its biological imperatives: to find food, and a mate. That’s what the powers that be are doing with you, your aunt, and your father. They’re picking you up and setting you down somewhere else. The difference is, since they see time from an outside perspective, they can move you back and forth within the timestream.”

“So we’re just game pieces to them? Moving us around on a board. For what reason?”

“If these people have any motivations, they would be so far beyond our comprehension that no analogy would sufficiently account for them. Again, it would be like the beetle trying to guess why you moved it from its original spot.”

Mateo nodded, knowing that if Leona couldn’t fully understand what was going on, there was no way for him to. He would have to surrender to the idea that this was his life now. There was nothing he could do about. Trying to figure it out would be impossible without access to the people controlling it. He decided to change the subject, “hold on. Is it April first?”

“It is, why?”

“Happy birthday.”

“That is yet to be determined.”

“Come on, don’t be like that. It’s gonna be okay.”

Professor Andrews entered the room without protection and directed Leona to stick Mateo back behind the zipper. “He needs to stay in there, but it’s pointless for you to wear that. We’ve all been exposed.”

“Leona took off her headgear. “What’s that now?”

“It’s a quick little bugger. It began spreading through the air as soon as Mateo arrived.”

“Oh my God,” Mateo said. “I’m here to destroy the world.”

“I don’t think that it will destroy the world,” Duke argued.

“The robot in the future called it a pandemic.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “you are a surprisingly effective delivery system. Whoever designed this thing had access to genetic data that we are nowhere near achieving. But my guess is that it was deployed on a massive scale, using some kind of weapon. You’re just one guy, and the virus has almost certainly mutated since then.”

“Mutations should be worse,” Leona said. “If anything, the strongest attributes have survived while weaknesses were stripped away.”

“Normally that would be true, yes, but you said that this was first created decades before your arrival?”

“That’s what the robot claimed,” Mateo confirmed. “He played it pretty close to the chest.”

“Like I said, this was designed with a very specific purpose,” Duke continued. “It was likely extremely aggressive on the outset. But once everyone was infected with it, the virus no longer had a purpose. There were no more hosts to attack; no more cells to hijack. But it didn’t die. So, it just sat there, quietly and slowly degrading and losing some of its attributes.”

“Are you saying that the virus would have eventually just disappeared?” Leona asked. “It seems like they would know that, and didn’t have to bother with Mateo.”

“They needed a cure for the virus because it caused infertility. If it ever died off—and I can’t be sure that it would, without more data—humanity might have died off before.”

“Please tell me you’re saying that it’s less dangerous to us,” Mateo begged.

“We have made great strides in medical technology since you’ve been gone, my young friend. It cannot yet predict the future, but it can come damn close. I suspect that the world’s gonna get sick. But it will survive. You have not destroyed us.”

He stayed behind quarantine for the remainder of the day, but the four of them still celebrated Leona’s 25th birthday together. Andrews was correct that the virus Mateo introduced did not destroy the world. As it turned out, it spread like a flu. A heavy majority of the population showed fever, sweating, cold flashes, and a loss of appetite as symptoms. But nobody became infertile as a result. In fact, Duke hypothesized that Mateo had immunized the entire human population so that, if it were ever to be created in the future, it would do little to no harm. Only a single person died from the infection; Mateo’s mother. He shouldn’t have hugged her.

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