Microstory 836: Goodbye Children

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I’m standing in the corner. I’m the one who first discovered the message, but I’m nobody, so I just need to leave it to the professionals to deal with all this, and figure out what’s going on. When I noticed it, I thought it was some kind of hoax, but it still meant someone had tampered with one of the most precious documents in our nation’s history, so I had to alert my superior. She didn’t understand it either, so she reached out to her own boss. He didn’t know what it was about, so he went up the food chain, and on and on it went. No one knew what to make of it. We hear footsteps out in the hallway, and this feeling that we’re in the presence of darkness. A man walks into the room, immediately commanding it, even though no one seems to know exactly who he is. “What does it say?” he asks. The woman with the highest clearance there steps back from the table, and hands him the magnifying glass. “Goodbye, children. Please pretend you’re fighting for our cause,” he reads aloud. “Hm.” He’s thinking these words over. In the more than two hundred years that the United States Constitution has existed, no one has ever seen this. These words suddenly just appeared, right before my eyes, like they had been written in invisible ink. But I was just selected to place the document in a new encasement. Was that it? Was exposure to the air in the lab what revealed these words? Or was it something else? The mysterious man continues to think over what he read, then he nods. “So it’s time.” He leans over to someone in his entourage, and issues some kind of order, which prompts the lackey to leave. Then he scans the rooms, ensuring that he’s made eye contact with everyone here, but he misses me, because like I said, I’m nobody. “In May of 1836, President James Madison requested access to this copy of our Constitution. His petition was granted, not only because he was a former president, but also the Father of the Constitution, so it belonged to him. Acting as the last surviving member of Constitutional Convention, he encoded this message, designed to appear at a grave time in the future, when the country was at a turning point. The reëlection of a black man to the presidency seems to have triggered this event, and called my people to action. We were created decades after Madison’s death, interpreting his words to mean that our country must remain great. It will take the world four years to fully understand, but we are in charge now.” Then he takes out an assault rifle, and kills everyone here, but misses me, because I’m nobody.

The Advancement of Leona Matic: September 1, 2178

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Leona returned to the timeline with Dubravka on August 31, 2177, which was even better than the end of the day in 2176. Hanging there in the closet was the emergency teleporter. Hokusai had managed to send it back to them sometime during the interim year. She took it down and placed it back in its rightful place on her shirt, then jumped back to the ship with her new friend. Once there, she learned that no one knew anything about the note about Dubravka scratched on the door, nor was Hokusai able to aim the teleporter to the right location. It somehow just worked itself out, aided by some unknown angel.

The two of them rested until the end of the day, then both squeezed into the entrance for pocket two. Dubravka still needed somewhere to live, and pocket two was likely the safest. There were no concerns about some sort of angry mob or rebellion starting up there. She could have stayed on the ship, but she didn’t want to. It was getting cramped anyway, since their janitor was deemed innocent, and the man who stole Leona’s teleporter had to be kept locked up. They had to guess that Dubravka being the chooser version of Leona and Serif was enough to allow her to jump into the pockets, and this turned out to be right. They landed there together, a full five years after Annora’s murder. Leona was determined to continue the investigation, despite everything that had happened. Based on what little criminal profiling she was able to perform just by being an intuitive human being, she guessed that the chances the killer was back in pocket one were pretty high. Still, it wasn’t safe to go back there, at least not yet, so she might as well move forward, just hoping she hadn’t encountered the culprit yet.

The people of pocket two were actually quite welcoming to them. They all appeared to have been wide awake before the sun flipped on as a side effect of their arrival, like they were waiting. When she questioned this, a preteen or early teenaged girl stepped forward with a smile. “I’m an astral projector. I can visit anyone or any place. I can observe, or I can communicate with others, but I cannot interact with the world physically.”

What appeared to be the girl’s fathers stepped up behind her, each placing a hand on one of her shoulders. One spoke, “she has been using her gift to monitor the goings-on in the other dimensions, and on the ship itself. We are fully aware of your investigation, and are proud to announce that the killer is not amongst us.”

“How do you know this?” Leona asked.

“We’ve been conducting our own investigation.”

Now another man stepped forward. “I am no police detective, but I’ve watched a lot of public court cases on LoaTV. I know what kind of questions to ask. I interviewed every single one of the residents of this world years ago, multiple times. And I’ve been watching them ever since...for any suspicious activity.

Leona looked back to the astral projector. “You can only witness present events.”

“Thank God,” her other father said. “Otherwise, we would have had to accept her witnessing the murder itself, for the sake of the truth. Though we recognize the unfortunate fact that this makes your job much harder.”

Leona nodded understandingly. “Can you take people with you?”

“One or two,” the girl answered. “It’s a little harder.”

“I would have asked her to take me to the other dimensions for more interviews,” the self-professed investigator began. “Her fathers and I agreed, however, that it would not be appropriate for the girl to participate in that.”

“We hope you understand,” the first father said. “We allow her to watch from a distance, and make her come back to her body as soon as things become too...mature. She was only eight when this all happened.”

“Of course,” Leona said sincerely, before stepping back so she could address the whole crowd. “I want to thank you all for your cooperation. I understand that this has been a difficult time, being trapped in here. Others have not been so...” she trailed off looking for the words.

“Enlightened?” someone suggested.

“Humane? Civilized?” another offered.

Leona cracked a smile. “It’s just nice to know that I’ll be leaving my new friend here in good hands, and that I don’t have to do any work today,” she joked.

They laughed.

“Three years,” the astral projector said, to her fathers’ unease.

“What’s that?”

Her tone was more serious now. “In my culture, we become adults at sixteen. Life’s harder on Durus than on Earth. We don’t have the luxury of waiting to mature. In three years, I will catch this killer, because I’ll have been freed from my leash.”

“All right, that’s enough, Vitalie,” a father warned.

“Vitalie,” Leona said, “you’ve done so much. I can take it from here. You’re not on Durus anymore. This is a nice dimension. You should just enjoy your life.”

“But I can help,” Vitalie claimed. “And I have an obligation to; to use my powers for others. It’s not for long-distance calling. It’s to connect people, and with people.”

“That’s very honorable of you, and once you’re on Earth, maybe you can find your calling. While you’re on this ship, though, I think your fathers and I can agree that you should try and stay out of trouble.”

Leona was about to say some final words to the group, then enjoy the simulated sun for a while before returning to The Warren, when Vitalie stopped her. “You can talk to Serif again.”

“Vitalie, no.”

“That would actually be lovely,” Leona said.

“I’m afraid...” her father began. He then gave the crowd this look, and it caused them to disperse, and go back to their lives. “We can’t go to that planet.”

“It’s not a planet, it’s—”

“It is,” he interrupted. “We’ve seen it. We don’t let her go often. Only to monitor its growth. And it is growing. Fast.”

“Faster every day,” his husband added. “Come next year, it probably will be a full-fledged globe.”

“And there are people there,” the first one continued. “Thousands of people, and some of them might have powers. Some of these people with powers might be able to cause Vitalie harm.”

“If this is true, I do need to see it. She said she can take two, so one of you can come with me, and at the first sign of trouble, we’ll jump right back. We’ll go there as observers.” Leona directed her attention to Vitalie, “you can be invisible, right?”

“Right.” Vitalie was ready.

“Please, Mister...”

“Crawford. Wayne Crawford. This is my husband, Raphael Neville.”

“I know it’s asking a lot, but the safety of this ship, and every dimension attached to it, is at risk the larger that thing grows. Your daughter will be in danger whether she projects there or not, but I can stop it, as long as I’ve seen it.”

“Wayne,” Raphael said calmly. “She’s not a baby, and we have no real reason to believe anything can hurt her in there. Let her help.”

“She has helped,” Wayne argued.

“Let her help some more,” Raphael returned, just as calm.

“Okay,” Wayne agreed. “But I’ll be the one going with her.”

“As you wish, love,” Raphael said to him.

Leona took Vitalie’s left hand, and Wayne took her right, while Raphael went off to show Dubravka to her new quarters. Just before Vitalie projected them away, they saw the sun turn off.

They were standing on top of a butte, which was high enough to show mountains in the distance, and a city below. “They built all this that quickly?” Leona asked.

“We don’t know how they’re doing it. Somehow the space and vegetation increase seems rather normal, but yeah, the buildings are strange.”

“Serif!” they heard Saga’s voice behind them. “I see them!”

When they turned around, they could see Saga and Serif on the other side of the butte. The former was holding binoculars, while the latter was jogging towards her, holding a portable radio, which she spoke into, “Camden, they’re on their way to you.”

“This is pretty isolated,” Leona noted as the three observers were making their way across. “Do you feel comfortable letting me speak with them?”

Wayne wasn’t so sure, but Vitalie was. “I would be happy to open communication,” she said sternly.

Upon seeing Leona, Serif did that thing where she tried to hug her, only to be met with open air. “Dammit,” she said. “So close, yet so far away.”

“Report,” Leona said simply, trying to make this quick, even though she wanted to tell Serif everything she had been through without her.

“It’s growing exponentially,” Saga said. “The one good thing about it is that Adamina always creates new resources to keep ahead of the people that Esen creates.”

“Do you have any idea how we could stop this?”

“Short of killing two four-year-old children? No,” Serif said.

“Those people down there are interested in it, though.”

Leona was about to borrow Serif’s binoculars, but stopped herself when she remembered she wouldn’t even be able to touch them. “And you’re here to stop them?”

“We have no choice. The children are gods, even more dangerous than the original Durune sourge mages. They die, the world is thrown into chaos. We’ll have to protect them their entire lives. Right now, Camden’s keeping watch in the city they’re visiting.”

“Why do the people down there want them dead? This world ain’t big enough for all of them?”

“They’re humans,” Saga explained vaguely. They weren’t created by Esen’s power. They’re the original passengers of Warren pocket four, and they have no place in this new world, so they’re pretty upset.”

“Esen doesn’t create humans? He only makes paramounts?” Leona assumed.

Serif shook her head. “They’re not human at all. Esen doesn’t make scion in his own image. His...subconscious preschooler mind, I guess, has come up with something different. They’re an approximation of a human, but definitely not like us.”

Leona looked to Wayne and Vitalie, who each abashedly indicated that they knew all about this, but just hadn’t said anything.

“It gets worse,” Saga said. Then she sighed, hesitating. “Esen creates a new one of these...Maramon he randomly chose to start calling them with each passing breath.”

“What?” Leona was astonished. “How long has he been doing that?”

“One hundred and eight days. I was right, the girl developed faster.”

Leona quite nearly gulped, starting to do the math, but not having enough information. “Every breath?”

“I’ve been using my nursing skills to get his breathing under control, so he breathes less, but it’s still quite a bit. I estimate twenty breaths per minute.”

Wayne didn’t really know what that meant. “How many...Maramon would that mean there are?”

Saga ceded the floor to Leona, who had already completed the math. “Three million, one hundred and ten thousand, four hundred people...give or take a few thousand, depending on breathing fluctuations.”

Saga nodded, having already calculated this with pen and paper. “In a year, there will be over thirteen million. More, actually, because he creates them as adults, so they’ll be having their own children at some point soon.”

“By the time we reach Earth,” Leona pointed out, “there will be forty-five million of them. The good news is that their birth rate is actually lower than what we have on Earth.”

“That’s assuming he doesn’t grow up to be a power-hungry dick who wants as many people under his control as possible. He’ll start hyperventilating just to build more followers. Meanwhile, based on the curvature that I’ve done my best calculating, the size of this world is shaping up to be comparable to Earth. If this doesn’t stop eventually, they’ll just run out of usable space.”

“All right,” Wayne finally said. “We’re leaving.”

“Wait, not yet,” Leona pleaded.

He took his daughter by the hand, and urged her to take Leona’s.

“I love you,” Serif said quickly.

“Tell Hokusai what’s going on, and that she needs to get us the hell out of here ASAP,” Saga added.

Vitalie took her hand, and spirited them away.

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Missy’s Mission: The Future is Written (Part V)

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There was a dichotomy for Missy and Dar’cy as they stepped out of Westland Rehabilitation Center, after having spent one year in decent prison conditions. On one side were the cheers and smiles from their fans, accompanied by a group of protesters using this whole incident as a vehicle to open discussion on legal reform as a whole. On the other side were angry protesters, adamantly opposed to their release at all, or their move to a more lax facility. A few believed they should be put to death, or at least that their deaths should moved up on the schedule, like their victim’s was. But after the scandal that landed them a greater sentence than they supposedly earned by Durune law, no deathwatcher in their right mind would risk their own freedom by being involved with the two of them, in any capacity. Others harbored less violent thoughts against them, believing they deserved nothing short of life in prison, perhaps even back in the considerably less hospitable Silversmith Pen. Most of the protesters just thought they owed the full original sentence of eleven years, possibly with parole.

They stood in between these two groups, wondering exactly how far their house was, and how they were going to get there. A car pulled up from the side, and stopped right in front of them. A man stepped out of the driver’s side, and opened the backseat door for them. “Please come with me.”

“Who are you?”

“I work for The Librarian,” he answered. Maybe now that they had faced the consequences of their actions, she had decided to help them with their quest for the cure for chooserism.

They crawled inside, but before they could put their seatbelts on, the driver was opening the door on the other side of the car. “We’re here.”

Missy stopped and looked around. The prison, and all the people around it, were gone. They were parked right next to the main library branch. “This is a teleporting car,” she noted.

“Yes,” the driver answered.

“Why would you need a car at all, if you can teleport?” Dar’cy questioned.

The driver took her hand, and helped her out cordially. “I cannot teleport,” he explained. “The car can.”

A woman they didn’t know stepped out of the building and greeted them. “My name is Keuhla Derricks. I am The Sublibrarian.”

“Oh, so you’re on duty when the Librarian is busy?” Missy guessed.

“Or dead, as is the case now, yes. My family has been passing the torch for decades, waiting for the need to take responsibility.”

“The Librarian is dead?”

“Yes,” Keuhla said. “They all are. Come inside, we will discuss it.”

Such a good day suddenly turned terrible. Once they were inside, they found the place to be deserted. Apparently, few people saw the use for it now that it was back in the right dimension. Or perhaps they were just scared.

“When you pulled the building out of its temporal dimension, time started catching up with it. I told you that everyone was dead, but that is not entirely accurate. A few had entered the dimension at a young enough age to still be alive today.”

“They aged rapidly?” Missy asked, knowing the answer.

“Indeed. But do not feel guilty about this. You could not have known this would happen, nor would there have been any way to bring the library back without this side effect.”

“But all those people,” Dar’cy disagreed. “They’re gone now.”

“True, but I hold no sympathy for them. They came in here to escape. They didn’t escape the horrible abuses of a loved one, or the tyranny of a harsh ruler. They came to escape reality. They came to stick their noses in books, so they wouldn’t have to deal with the little inconveniences of life in the real world.”

“But they were doing research,” Missy cried, feeling again that guilt she was told she didn’t need. “They were learning. What is more noble than learning?”

Keuhla looked at them over her glasses, which always made Missy uncomfortable and agitated when people did that. “What is learning but a precursor to application? The people here contributed nothing to society. They were selfish and closed off. They would have died here having accomplished nothing beyond their own enrichment.”

“And the Librarian? Was she just as bad?”

“It was her job to protect the library. As you’ve expressed, the purpose of knowledge is to share it, and what you did was in service to the spirit to the exchange of ideas. She died proud of you for doing something she had forgotten she should have been working towards figuring out. Do not mourn our loss of her, for she was much older than she looked. The only thing that matters is the library, which is now my responsibility.” She started ruffling through some papers in a bag that was leaning against her chair. “As praxis demands, I will honor her deal with you, by providing the necessary tools for you to find what you’re looking for.” She placed a book on the table between them. There was nothing drawn or written on the cover. Nor was there anything written on the inside.

“It’s blank,” Dar’cy pointed out.

“Do we need lemon juice, or something?”

“It’s a time book.”

Was that supposed to mean something to them?

“It hasn’t been written yet,” she added. “You’re going to have to find someone invoke the text from the future.”

“You wouldn’t happen to kno—” Dar’cy began to ask.

“No,” Keuhla interrupted. “Last I heard of someone like that, who could do something like that, they lived seventy years ago.” She stood up with finality. “I’m just the one who gives you the book.”

Dar’cy looked like she was about to fight her on the imprecision of her help, but Missy stopped her. “Thank you very much. I’m never going to stop being sorry about your boss, or all those people.”

“I know someone who can remove those memories from your brain,” Keuhla said as the other two were turning away.

“But can they remove the scar on my soul?”

The driver ferried them to the house that Andromeda built. He took them the long way around, without using the teleportation feature, so they could get used to being on the outside again. In an odd role reversal, he gave them a silver coin, instead of the other way around. They tried to refuse it, but he said it was important that they take it. When they walked in, they found the place to be immaculate. They hadn’t needed to cover any furniture with blankets, or anything. The appliances switched on without issue, and the faucets worked perfectly. Either someone had come in occasionally to affect maintenance, or the wards that one guy placed on their home had preserved it. Even the food they had left there was still good.

That evening, they stood the book up on end, and placed it at the head of the table while they ate dinner, almost like it was their guest of honor, who just wasn’t hungry right now. They both stared at it, independently trying to decide how they might go about finding someone to make the thing legible. The obvious option was to petition for access to the paramount database, but their relationship with the government was rather awkward at the moment, so that didn’t seem like the absolute best idea.

“Why don’t we just find someone to take us to the future, and read a copy of the book after it’s written?” Dar’cy suggested.

“Time travel trips are expensive ‘an hell. We ain’t got no money. Besides, she never said when it was written. Could be a year, could be a millennium.”

The silence returned for a few more moments.

“We could hold it up to a time mirror,” Missy offered. “Not the easiest way to read text, but not impossible.”

“Do you know anyone who owns a time mirror?” Dar’cy asked. “Besides Leona?”

“Wait, why don’t you just thread it to the future?”

“I thought you didn’t want me to use my powers.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Solidarity.”

“This mission is to find a way to get rid of my powers, not yours. Go ahead and give it a shot.”

Dar’cy took the book in her hands, and concentrated on threading to some future point in time, not really worried about exactly when in the timeline. Missy watched Dar’cy’s body shudder around a little, but it never disappeared completely. She stopped and tried a few more times, but never went anywhere. “My God, it’s like this thing doesn’t exist in the future, or even the past. It’s perpetually stuck in the present.”

Missy shook her head. “This was all worth a try, but there’s a reason the Sublibrarian gave this to us, and why she told us how we can read it. We have to do it that way, or not at all.”

“If we can’t talk to the government, I don’t know how we’ll find someone with the right powers,” she said, like a defeatist.

“They’re not the only people on this planet. There’s also a reason we pushed for voluntarily staying in jail for all that time. We have friends now.”

“We don’t have friends,” Dar’cy clarified. “We have fans.”

“Even better. They tend to be more loyal. Let’s reach out, and see what people know. If they don’t know anyone, they probably know someone who does. We’ll talk to as many people as it takes to get to the bottom of this.”

“Okay,” Dar’cy said, nodding. “I’m down.”

They did as they said they would, and they did it for weeks. They traveled all over the globe, finding people willing to help them any way they could. Many had never heard of anybody who could do anything like that, and couldn’t even lead them to someone who might. Instead, they helped by providing them some good home cooked meals, and places to stay, when they were too far away from home. Of course there were those who denied them from the start, because of Oskari Belker’s death. What would they say if they knew quite how many people Missy had killed? More importantly, how was the Sublibrarian keeping that all under wraps.

They started out with enthusiasm, and twinkling eyes, but as time went on, the tedium wore on them. They became depressed and hopeless. But like a prime minister searching for the love of his life on the longest street in the world, just before they were ready to give up, a pretty brunette answered the door, and knew who they were asking about. The man with said power evidently lived right next door.

He opened up, not with disgust at seeing them, but not with any level of joy either. By all accounts, he was an extremely apathetic person, with an unfathomable poker face.

“Do you know who we are?” Dar’cy asked him.

He shook his head lightly, and shrugged.

“No matter,” Missy said. “We have this book.”

“What’s it about?” he asked.

“We don’t really know.” She presented it to him, and showed some of the pages. “It’s supposed to help us, but the words haven’t been written yet.”

He put on some reading glasses, and peered at the book. Then he took it from her, and examined it closer. “How did you know how to find me?”

“We’ve been at this for over a month,” Dar’cy replied. “Your neighbor seems to think you can do something about this.”

“That woman’s an idiot. As is whomever told you this was a time book.” He swung his arm, and tossed it right into the flames squirming in his fireplace. “It’s just a journal with blank cover.”

“What?”

“I imagine you were conned. How much did they make you pay for it?”

“Nothing. She just gave it to us. It was...it was a present.”

“Hm. It was a bad present. Maybe she’s the one who overpaid for it. I guarantee it’s not a time book.”

“How do you know for sure?”

He ushered them into his house, and set them down on the couch while he went in the back. Dar’cy grabbed a rice bag from the coffee table, as well as Missy’s hand. “Just in case he comes back with a shotgun, and I have to thread us the hell out of here,” she whispered.

He returned quickly, holding a book of his own. “I know the burning journal isn’t a time book, because this is the time book; the only one of its kind. And I know this...because I created it.”

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Microstory 835: The King and the Scourge

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Games. My whole world is about games. Our scientists long ago predicted this concept of the singularity, wherein technology goes so far beyond what we believe it can do, that it’s impossible to know what will come of it. Science fiction writers and futurists tried to come up with their ideas of what would look like in the future, but they were always off the mark. It’s understandable; no one was expecting them to be perfectly accurate, because they were interesting and entertaining. The truth is that the future is boring. Technology, as it turns out, was always working towards one thing: making life easier to live. We have nanites swimming through our blood, constantly monitoring our health, and alerting us to what we need to improve, or to fix an issue they can’t handle on their own. They tell us what to eat, which exercises to do, and how long to sleep. Meanwhile, other nanites are surging through our brains, allowing us to connect with each other on a telepathic level, or experience the limitless possibilities of a virtual construct with no rules. But these constructs are just that; not real, and after a good decade of this, people starting signing off, because what was the point? Life was boring inside cyberspace, and outside of it, and since we figured out how to subvert death, nothing held any weight. There was no danger, so we had to find ways of creating this ourselves, and doing so in a world where physical laws are immutable. Hence the games. Some are voluntary, some are forced. Some are deadly...most are deadly. For some games, you even have to forego any of your transhumanistic abilities that normally prevent your life from ending permanently. I am technically in one of those games now. Fortunately, it is by no measure the most dangerous one.

Centuries ago, children would play a fairly simple game called King of the Mountain. The object was to be the one person at the top of a hill, and the only way to maintain that position was to fight off any comers. The rules varied, according to how rough the players wanted to be, but they never killed each other, because murder was pretty frowned upon in those days. In the new world, however, it’s normal. We are not just playing a deadlier version of the original game though. Ours focuses more on those left at the bottom of the hill, which is why the creators call it Scourge of the Valley. As with the original, the goal is to get to the summit, but you can’t get there just by running up, and resisting anyone who’s trying to keep you back. It’s more deliberate and methodical than that, combining elements of strategy games, such as the ancient chess. It gets pretty complicated, but the idea is to move as far as possible by killing as few competitors as possible. Sure, you can massacre everyone, and get to the top quickly, but once you do, you’re in real trouble, because every player whose death you were responsible for, now has the opportunity to take your summit for themselves. And if they win, you die for good. No one has ever gotten out of this game having never died at all. Ghosts are incredibly difficult to destroy, and they’re very good at killing others. I’ve always been convinced that the only way to survive unscathed is to make it to the top without killing anyone else to get there. I’m about to prove it. Wish me luck.

Microstory 834: Insight

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“Now remember,” the scientists says, “you can’t change the past. It has already happened for us. All you are there to do is recon. Find out exactly how the world ended, and hopefully how we can make life better moving forward. Anything you try to do while you’re there will have an effect on the future, but only in that reality. Time travel within a single timeline is impossible, because just by traveling to an earlier moment in time, you create a new timeline. You can’t save your family; not your real family.” I nod, because I understand this truth fully. She has me remove all of my clothes, then she takes my measurements and vitals again. It’s important for the machines to calibrate the trip according to my specifications. If they’re just a little bit off, I could wind up rematerializing without a finger, or the part of my brain responsible for remembering my daughter’s name. I volunteered for this mission, and I can think of no greater honor. It’ll be strange being back in a world before everything turned to shit, but I can’t take it for granted. Those aren’t my people, and if I don’t get back in time, those I actually care about will never see me again. She submerges me in the solution, letting me suck on some oxygen with a rebreather, but I won’t be able to take it with me, which means I may have to hold my breath for up to four minutes, once the process gets underway. It feels so good to be in water again. After the shortage began, baths and swimming became illegal. It took years for this team to procure enough of it for their experiment, wasting a lot of it along the way as they worked towards perfecting it. The project leader is a brilliant woman, who reminds me of my late wife. I feel so fortunate to be part of this endeavor.

She holds up the okay scuba diving hand signal, and waits for me to return it. Then she removes the rebreather, and activates the machine. The water tenses up, almost like it’s become solid. I can feel an electrical current surging through me. It’s painful, but not debilitating. Bubbles form at the bottom of the tank, and start shooting up towards the surface. It’s getting hotter and hotter, and I’m thinking I’m going to pass out, but I don’t, because I can’t. For a moment, everything stops, and all I see is darkness. Then light begins filtering back to my eyes, and I feel myself moving. The electrical current is gone, replaced by a river current. I pop out of the water, swim over to the bank, and crawl onto dry land, cry-laughing uncontrollably for having survived the journey. After a decent walk, I find out that I had surfaced in the Yangtze River, upstream of Shanghai, China. I start studying the problem there, remembering the water shortage began in this region. It would seem some mysterious contaminant made its way into one of the largest drinking water reservoirs in the world, by population served. Shanghai needed to source their water elsewhere for a long time, which caused strain the world over as the dominoes continued to fall. It was me. I caused the end of the world. Distraught, I make my way to Russia, where the scientist I meet in the future now lives, and break a rule of time travel by telling her that I think I actually did land in the same timeline that I came from. She just smiles at me and says, “good. Now I know for sure that my plan works.”

Microstory 833: Cold War

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Long-distance skiing isn’t exactly my forte, and I positively hate the bitter cold, but it’s not like I have any choice. There aren’t any roads way out here, but something up ahead is luring me towards it. So I continue, stopping only when I need to pee, or melt drinking water. After hours of trekking, I see a wooden building of some kind, peeking out from the snow. As I move nearer, I realize it’s actually a few little cabins clumped together. If I didn’t have this intense feeling of accomplishment, I would think to stop and rest here, but this is it. This is where I’ve been trying to go this whole time. I keep trudging into it, and recognize it as a ski resort. The world no longer has any need for a ski resort, so this place has been completely abandoned, left to provide shelter for the birds, and other animals. I’m alone. At least no one responds when I call out. As I approach the bottom of the hills, I can see a giant red crystalline structure, floating a couple meters over the ground, slowly turning counter clockwise on a vertical axis. I get as close as I feel comfortable with, worried about disturbing its position, and causing it to fall on top of me. It looks like I’m supposed to see through the crystal, but smoke is billowing around inside, like an oversized lava lamp. I’ve never seen anything like it, in this new world, or in the time before the fall. “Here, boss!” I hear on the other side of the resort. A man with nicer equipment than I have has spotted me, and the crystal. He’s waving to someone I can’t see yet, to come and check out this magnificent technological mystery. I see a head appear from behind one of the cabins, then another, and another. Nearly a dozen men and women appear, some on skis, but most just with snowshoes. They walk towards me, defensively, but not with a great deal of fear, and I quickly see why. It’s the Dowder Gang, and they’re afraid of nothing. They were once my rivals, but since they killed my entire survival group, they don’t consider me much of a threat anymore.

The leader, Shabel Dowder grins when she sees that it’s me, and promises not to kill me. I’m neither surprised, nor concerned that she’s lying. The Dowders always leave one alive, to tell the tale of their misdeeds. They don’t kill for no reason, mind you, and they don’t torture people. They come in with purpose, and get it over with quickly and painlessly. They’ve done a lot of good in this world too—I give them that—about as good as good gets, since the bombs dropped. We were even allied for a time, but a personal quarrel led to an accidental death, and the Dowders couldn’t let that go unpunished. I don’t know why we’re all here now, but once we’ve all gathered around the crystal, it begins to speak, glowing brighter according to the speaker’s volume. “Survivors of Earth, herein lies the souls of your fallen comrades. Inside Oakleaf Cabin, you will find a reserve of replacement substrates. You must bring the bodies here to transfer your friends’ consciousnesses. But be warned, if any one of them dies at the hands of each other, or one of you, you will all die. In order to continue living, you must find peace amongst you. You must learn to work together.” Shabel and I look at each other. The others in her gang might not agree with her choices, but their opinions are irrelevant. The only two people whose positions had any impact on what would happen today were her, and me. She asks me if I can set aside my animosity, and I say it’s possible, if we break the country in three; our third, their third, and a neutral zone. The crystal voice informs us that no individual may be beyond ten meters of someone from the other gang. We discuss terms for a few more minutes, but the voice urges us to finalize a deal. So we agree to form a new gang, proud of one undeniable certainty: the Sherlee-Dowder Family will be an unstoppable force.

Microstory 832: Doesn’t Kill You

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Two days ago I died. I remember it remarkably well. As soon as I woke back up, I could recall even the smallest of details. The circumstances don’t matter all that much, though, because I have more pressing issues to deal with. I sit up from the table, finding myself face to face with my killer’s sister. She’s holding up her hands defensively, unsure if I’ll react poorly to being killed, or to being resurrected, or just because I know exactly who she is. I have no intention of doing her any harm, so I nod politely with my eyes closed, and relax my muscles. She slowly reaches for a newspaper sitting on the table, but she’s anxious and impatient, so I tell her she doesn’t have to snail around me. She begs me to hold the paper under my chin, and let her take a picture of me, which I oblige. I know what she’s doing, and it doesn’t seem like I would be okay with it, but I am. Though my murder to me feels like it just happened, I’ve already lost my anger about it, and I’m not the kind of person to hold a grudge. She earnestly crops the photo, and adjusts the lighting, then sends it on its way. While we wait for the response, I continue to remain calm, asking her questions about what I’ve missed in the world over the last couple days. Not much, as she tells me. She’s worried about going to prison for bringing me back to life, which isn’t on its own illegal, but the procurement of the ingredients is. The solution requires a number of various chemicals, many of which can be interchanged to accomplish different “flavors” of resurrection. She was nice enough to afford me standard health rejuvenation, making me feel better than I ever did when I was first alive. It’s also possible to just bring back a rotting corpse, or a head in a vat, but she went above and beyond, even though she didn’t have to. The two active ingredients are concentrated bladapod blood, and plant life that grew in a place unaffected by the global bladapod gases that now cover almost our entire world. I know this woman isn’t authorized to procure any sample from a bladapod, let alone a living one. There is also no way she qualifies to enter Iceland’s borders, which is the only place the gases don’t reach. I’ll do my best to prevent her from being convicted of these crimes, but I’m obviously pretty biased, so my word can only go so far.

She didn’t resurrect me out of the kindness in her heart, of course. She did it for her brother. They tell each other everything, so she knew he had killed me immediately after he did it. This gave her time to mix the solution for me, before the investigation could lead the authorities to follow the right lead. While the ancillary crimes generally render resurrection an untenable option, there are still laws governing its use. The one she’s trying to exploit now precludes the culprit in a murder from suffering legal consequences for their crime if they’re not caught before the resurrection takes place. I watch her face as her phone rings, and she receives the news. The volume is up loud enough for me to pick up some keywords. From what I gather, the police caught up with her brother before she sent my proof of life to them. But that’s not what the law says. The law says the resurrection itself must come before an arrest, not the proof of it. I whisper this loophole to her while she’s holding her hand over the mouthpiece. This gives her hope, so now they have to somehow prove they moved against my killer first. They’re gonna have a hard time doing this, though, especially since I intend to fib the timeline as needed, to back her up. I’m not doing this out the kindness of my heart either. Her brother, my killer, has something I want, which was why he killed me in the first place. Now that I’m back, I have some leverage over him, and as soon as I get him out of this mess, he’s going to deliver, whether he likes it or not. He won’t have much of a choice either, because the only kind of murder that’s legal these days is when you kill someone who killed you first.

Microstory 831: Devil and the Deep Brown Sea

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People think I hate everybody, but that isn’t entirely accurate. I only hate certain types of people; generally those who aren’t self-aware, or aware of how others feel about them. I’m talking about people who smile because they’re awake, or volunteer so they can tell all their friends about how much they volunteer. I’m talking about the phonies, the hypocrites, the judgmental jerks masquerading as empathetic altruists. The douchebags, elitists, oversharers, good ol’ daydreamers, emoji-users, PETA donators, hunters, and Trump voters. I don’t like fist bumps, anyone who says yaaaaas, Nazis, or climate change deniers. And worst of all, I hate talk shows. Being on, or even having to sit through, a talk show would be my worst nightmare, my hell. I guess it’s no surprise that when I found myself on my way to an actual hell dimension, that’s exactly what it was. I’m in a transparent bubble, floating around in what I guess you could call limbo. On one side of me is the real world. All those things I’ve listed are there, but it’s also got things I love. My family, my favorite music, and the greatest city in the world. Alyssa Milano and Emma González are there, fighting the good fight, along with millions of bright millennial activists, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. To the other side of me is actual hell. I can see it playing, and hear the muffled voices of the hosts, growing clearer and clearer. They’re talking about some “lifehack” that doesn’t make things any easier than traditional methods. One of them is taking a sip of her coffee, and giving the audience a thumbs up, which causes an uproar in clapping and cheering. The other is shaking his head, pretending that one of these days...right in the kisser. I keep trying to swim towards the real world, but it’s becoming more difficult the harder I try. The coffee talk hell wants me, and it’s not going to stop until it gets me. I have to get out of here. I have to escape. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about anything bad I ever said about the world I live in. From now on, God, if you promise to send me back, I’ll only focus on the positive things in my life, and try to accept the things I cannot change, or whatever. Just please don’t make me experience even one more second of this show. Then my bubble bursts, and I begin to fall away from both worlds, into the empty void, forever denied my wish for a second chance. But it sure beats a talk show, and for this, I will literally be eternally grateful.