Microstory 887: Surge

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After the bioweapon that caused sudden onset intracranial pressure, the world was never the same. The war was so devastating that that the planet was no longer suitable for life. It technically could continue to support life, but only via small pockets of untouched nature. If we wanted to truly rebuild civilization, we were going to have to do it somewhere else. A private organization had been working for years on a sleeper ship capable to transporting thousands of people to an extrasolar colony. All they needed now was a final destination, and a group of passengers to get there. All were welcome, though there wasn’t an infinite number of seats, so it was first come, first serve. I was one of the last people to show up, looking for tickets, and should have missed out, but I got lucky. I happened to be walking up the muddy road towards the facility next to a surgeon. I wasn’t with her at all. We even came from opposite directions, but we arrived at the same time. Evidently not enough medical professionals had come for the trip, and a certain number of seats had been set aside to accommodate them. I was about to bow out with grace, when she stopped me, and informed the men with guns that I was her surgical assistant, and that she couldn’t do her job without me. Fortunately, there were still a few stasis pods left, so I secured passage, but I owe my life to her. Who knows what happened to Earth after we left?

We didn’t spend the whole time in pods. They would wake up essential personnel on a regular basis in order to assess our mental acuity. The hibernation process never had time to be thoroughly tested, so it was imperative we be able to wake up safely. The surgeon spent her waking time teaching me everything I needed to know to do the job she had convinced the people on the ship that I already had. She was surprised to find out that I did have some medical experience, and had seen field medicine performed on a number of patients during the war. So I wasn’t starting from scratch, but that didn’t mean I could just jump into any medical emergency, and execute my job effectively. I soaked in all of my crash courses, confident that, by the time something bad happened, I would have learned enough to help. Centuries later, we arrived at our new home planet, having only aged maybe a year. We continued to live on the ship for the next couple months, though. A different team was sent off to survey the surface, and environmental factors, to make sure it would be safe. Our bodies evolved to deal with a lot of diseases on Earth, but if an alien visited and tried to walk amongst us, a bacterium we would take for granted could kill it instantly. The same goes for us, since we are the aliens here. If there were any issues with the air, or plant life, we needed to survive to help anyone affected by it, so we weren’t allowed to leave until such an incident. To my new boss’ surprise, there were no problems at all. Edibility tests, and other scientific assessments determined a bunch of plants and animals that were not safe to eat, and others that weren’t even safe to be around, but our services were never required. The other teams disembarked with a plan, and tons of safety protocols, and came out on the other side better for it.

When we finally were able to leave the ship, we found ourselves trekking towards camp in the middle of an abrupt thunderstorm. Our guide and protection detail assured us that the rain was perfectly harmless, but we still needed to find shelter, just like we would have back home. We found a nice little cave that was about twice as large as we needed to fit everyone. We huddled together for warmth, and tried to get some sleep. When we woke up the next morning, we found ourselves next to this human-sized pool of water that wasn’t there the night before. Strange sounds were coming from the water, as if something inside of it was moaning in pain. A slight electrical current was running through the edges, and it pulsated with positively beautiful lights. It was a mesmerizing experience, and hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t there to see it for themselves. One of the others in our group claimed he could feel that it was alive. The water itself was alive. None of us believed him, except for my boss. He said the sentient water was in pain, and that he could feel what it was feeling. My boss believed this as well, and decided to help in any way she could. She took out her bag of medical instruments, and started performing tests on the pool, hoping that one of them came back with useful information, even though we were reportedly dealing with an alien species. She worked on that thing all day, and I helped her as I could. Finally, using the modest amount of communication the one guy managed to do, we realized that the water was full of parasites that were swimming around, and stealing its nutrients. So we rigged up an extremely fine net, and started scooping them up, careful to let the water that came up with it drip back into the pool. After an hour, the job was done, and the water-entity supposedly thanked us with a few mathematically suspect ripples. Maybe it really was an alien, and this guy wasn’t just crazy. We never did find out for sure, though, because after that day, we never saw anything like that ever again.

Microstory 886: Fish Out of Water

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I’ve always been fascinated with the past. History was, by far, my favorite subject in school, and I never really liked learning about anything else, except in the context of history. I even taught myself Old English, just for the hell of it. I guess someone upstairs was paying attention, because I woke up one morning on the ground, and it was the middle ages. At first, I thought I was the victim of a practical joke. I couldn’t have known right away that I had traveled through time. I thought I was just left in the middle of the woods. Then I thought maybe I was at some weird renaissance faire without the Renaissance. I eventually realized that this had to be the past, because the kind of architectural structures I was seeing just didn’t exist anymore in my time, and to recreate them would have been prohibitively expensive. The more I walked around, the more I could remember about where I was the last time I was in my own time period. I wasn’t asleep at all, but walking back from the store. This left me with a few provisions, including some healthy snacks, and a vitamin-enhanced flavored water that I drink, because I don’t like regular water, and I don’t drink high fructose corn syrup any more. I would have expected people to look at me funny, because of my modern backpack, and strange garb. They didn’t care, though, because their lives were total crap, and they didn’t have the energy to worry about anyone else. They just kept going with their chores as I passed by, looking for shelter. I found an inn that gave me a room for a few nights in exchange for a box of gluten-free cookies.

After about a day there, I realized that as much as I enjoyed studying the past, I didn’t really like actually being there. Like I said, these people’s lives sucked. Even though they had never heard of video games, or good hygiene, they could recognize that they lacked basic comforts, and of course, this feeling was more acute in me. I went back to the place I woke up, hoping to find a magic coin, or a rift through time and space, or a wizard, but there was nothing. If there was a way back home, I had little hope of finding it. I was thirsty on my way back to the village, so I started drinking the second to last bottle of my flavored water. The first person to really speak to me was a woman who happened to be hunting for truffles. She immediately saw how odd my plastic bottle was, and wanted to know everything about it. I told her that I came from a land of magic and fairies, who had exiled me for being too tall. It was a dumb lie, but people these days are easy to trick. I could be a god in this world, like the wizard of Oz, if I wanted to. Anyway, she asked to have my last bottle, and I gave it to her. It wasn’t like I would be able to go get any more, so I might as well just end it now forever. A couple weeks later, I was completely out of the food I brought back from the future, which meant I could no longer keep my room. I packed up and left to look for work that was reported to be abundant out East. As I was walking back through the woods, the woman I gave my water to walked up to me, like she had been waiting for me to return. She handed me a jug with a wide smile, and asked me to drink. I was surprised to find that it tasted just like my water. She told me she had studied my bottle, and reverse engineered it. She said if I stayed with her, I could have as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted. I asked her how she did that, and how she knew the term reverse engineering. She smiled again. “I’m from the year 1954, and I’ve also been working on a way to get back.”

The Advancement of Leona Matic: September 11, 2188

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Vitalie was hyperventilating as midnight central approached. Ecrin was doing better, but appeared to be keeping her anxiety bundled inside. They had both traveled through time before, but always by their own will. They had to sit down from the fatigue, which was a symptom of Leona’s flavor of time travel, but something that she learned to overcome after the first dozen or so jumps. Three...two...one, and it was over. They were suddenly now standing in September 11, 2188. They looked over to the corner where Brooke’s Snow White pod was just opening up. It jolted her awake with an accelerated recovery serum, which was only designed for certain crew on sleeper ships that needed to react to a dire cataclysmic event. It wasn’t meant to be used for standard revival, even after only one year in hibernation, and it definitely wasn’t meant to be used over and over again. The best recuperation regimens called for at least one day of limited activity, and no operating of heavy machinery. If Brooke had to go through this for more than a few days, her body could be permanently damaged from the stress, and her organs might eventually give up on her. Her upgrades may give her an advantage to combat those medical issues, but the downgrades Ulinthra performed on her more than likely ruined all that. They needed to end this quickly.

“I think I have an idea,” Vitalie said as they were eating breakfast after a good night’s sleep. “I was thinking about it all yesterday, but I didn’t want to say anything until I had it all worked out.”

“And what would that be?” Ecrin asked.

“Okay, so you—wait, is she surveilling us?”

“Probably.”

“No,” Brooke said. “I installed a communication blocker on my body after Ulinthra’s doctors downgraded my systems. I also placed an anti-tampering device on it, so even if they figured out how to turn it off, I would know. If we were being streamed or recorded, I would know.”

“Where did you install it?” Leona asked. “Did they not find it while they were preparing you for your first time in the stasis pod?”

Brooke cleared her throat. “Ya know, even at the turn of the 23rd century, there are still some places that people are too embarrassed to search.”

“Oh,” Leona said.

“What? I don’t get it,” Vitalie griped.

“It’s in her vagina,” Ecrin explained.

Brooke cleared her throat again. “Vitalie, you were saying something?”

Vitalie couldn’t help but let her eyes drift downwards when looking at Brooke, but she composed herself, and moved on with her plan. “So Ulinthra can repeat the day?”

“That’s right.”

“At the end of everyday, say midnight, she goes back in time in her own body, and does it all again. But since she knows what’ll happen, she can make changes at will.”

“Yes.”

“Which means that we can never know whether we’re living in the day she does this first, or the day she does it for the second time.”

“Well, since she’s the only one with memories of what she calls her Round Ones, we are—for all practical purposes—always living through her Round Twos. We always have to assume that she has the advantage of knowing what we’re gonna do.”

“Okay,” Vitalie continued. It was clear that she understood all this perfectly, but the others needed to follow her all the way to understand what she was proposing they do. “That makes her the only variable. She’s the only one who changes things, so everything we do, we already tried the first time around, but just don’t remember. Our choices are only affected when we interact with her.”

“All right...”

“We can use that. We have to talk to her every day. We have to call her, summon her here, or go to her evil lair. The way she speaks to us, the things she says, will determine whether B.F. Skinner’s cat is dead or not.”

“Schrödinger,” Brooke corrected.

“Huh?”

“Schrödinger was the one with the cat in the box that could be dead or alive, so it’s both until you open the box and find out. Skinner was the one with pigeons and rats.”

“Then who’s the guy with the dog?”

“Pavlov.”

“Whatever. But yes, that’s what I’m talking about. She, and she alone, determines how the day plays out.”

“But what does that matter?” Ecrin asked. “So we talk to her everyday. What, are we going to ask her whether we’ve had that conversation before, or not?”

“It doesn’t matter what we talk about,” Vitalie said, smirking. “We just need her to have an affect on the coin toss.”

“What coin toss?”

“We flip a coin. Everyday, after our talk with Ulinthra, we flip a coin. Heads we go after her, tails we just hang out all day.”

Leona winced. “Well, that means fifty percent of the time, we flipped the same side on her Round One, and whatever we do, she’ll be prepared for, just like always.”

“True,” Vitalie said. “But that also means fifty percent of the time, the coin toss on any given day ends up differently, because we only toss it after Ulinthra does something. She can’t help but be informed by her yesterdays, just like normal people. Even something so innocuous and minute as saying the dog jumped over the fence instead of the dog hopped over the fence will alter exactly when we toss the coin, and how it lands.”

“Like Leona said,” Ecrin began, “half the time we, quote-unquote go after her, she already sees us coming, and has a way to best us. And even if she doesn’t see us coming, we still have to contend with her army. Power or no, she’s too powerful for the four of us.”

“Again, that’s true,” Vitalie said with a sort of nod-shake hybrid. “Look, if you want to scrap any offensive moves against her, and just try to find a way to escape Panama, I’m all for it. Just recognize that she still has her time power. The coin toss plan still helps with that.”

“She’s right,” Brooke finally spoke again. “If we have any hope of fighting her, or leaving Panama, we need to not repeat the same mistakes—whatever they may be—that we made on these Round Ones. Ulinthra is our only way of doing that, since we don’t know anyone who has her same power.”

Ecrin still wasn’t convinced. “I just don’t think we should be talking to that woman any more than we have to. If we can sit in this unit all quiet-like until she gets bored, and moves on, that’s the ultimate outcome. I’m not saying that’s gonna happen, but I just hate that bitch, and I want to avoid her.”

“We all do,” Leona said. “As do many others in this world. We are in a position to stop her, even if that means we escape to Kansas City, and tell some people what we know. I like the coin idea. Let’s start now. I’ll call her, then we’ll flip. Heads we decide what we’re gonna do. Tails, we hold a service for Paige. Ecrin, are you okay with that?”

Ecrin hesitated. “Yeah, we have to do something. Chance is our only...chance. At least now we have a little control over it. Make the call.”

“Brooke?”

“Do it.”

When Leona called Ulinthra that evening, she asked if they could speak with Harrison. She acted as if they thought they could reason with him, and get him to switch sides. Ulinthra giggled, and indicated that they had tried this before, but it didn’t work. The Harrison she knew from an alternate reality no longer existed. This was evidently an entirely different program that she simply gave the same name as her original android assistant. That was good. This time was easy. She had revealed not only that they had called her during her Round One, and that this was her Round two—which prevented her from going back in time and changing it yet again—but also that Vitalie had flipped tails. If they had landed on heads, and done what they were planning to try now, Ulinthra probably wouldn’t be letting Harrison come again.

“All right, Brooke. He’s on his way. Vitalie flips that coin, and it’s heads, you should probably go. We don’t know how this thing will affect you.”

“I understand.”

“Ecrin. Your upgrades have been...”

“Removed completely. I’m human, and safe.”

“This is ready, so flip, Vitalie.”

Vitalie flipped the coin, which they had to manufacture in the synthesizer, since coins weren’t really a thing anymore. They chose a standard United States penny, since that was Vitalie’s calling card. “Be the penny,” she said as it rose and fell in the air. Heads. Brooke left.

Fifteen minutes later, when Harrison knocked on the door, Ecrin and Vitalie hid in the other room, so they wouldn’t be seen. Leona backed herself against the wall, so the door would hide her when she opened it. Harrison immediately realized she was there, though. He pulled the door away from her, and grimaced.

“Hey, toaster!” Brooke’s voice shouted from the hallway. Then they heard her pull back the hammer of an old projectile gun.

Harrison frowned and opened the door again.

“I’ll be fine,” she said to him with sass, but that wasn’t meant for him. She was sending a message to Leona.

Leona decided to accept the possibility that she was about to hurt her friend. She activated the device, then peeked out from behind the door. Harrison was standing there, and not moving. She looked over his shoulder at Brooke, who was holding her head and chest. “Brooke.”

“I’m fine,” she said with a hoarse voice. “I’ll be fine. Just do what you need to do, and make it quick. I don’t know how long he’ll last. Or me.”

“Come back out!” she order to the other two. They came out with tools, and started working on Harrison’s hand, removing what they were looking for faster than they thought they would. They still needed to scan it, though, and they weren’t sure if the synthesizer was working perfectly. The device Leona used to freeze Harrison might have had unintended consequences on anything else electronic.

They placed the tiny little weapon he had embedded in his hand in the synthesizer, and programmed the machine to scan it, so they could make one of their own later.

“Is he gonna wake up?” Ecrin asked with a worried look. “This is goin’ pretty slow.”

Leona looked back at Harrison, still frozen. “If he wakes up, we’ll just kill him. Ulinthra will never know what we took, until it’s too late.”

Once the scan was complete, they put the piece back in Harrison’s hand, and everyone got back into position. Brooke’s job was the hardest. Harrison was an artificial intelligence, capable of measuring his surroundings to the precision of a millimeter; possibly even more. If Brooke didn’t return to the exact state she was in when Harrison was frozen, he would notice that she moved, and realize that he had lost time. That was why Leona had to reprogram his internal chronometer while the device they stole was being scanned. This was also why Brooke distracted him. If he had been looking at Leona when time stopped for him, her puny human brain wouldn’t have been able to get her back to the right place.

Brooke breathed in and out deeply, so she could push down her pain long enough to get back to where she was. “I’m ready,” she finally said.

“Are you sure?”

“Do it now, please. Goddammit.”

Leona deactivated the device, restarting Harrison’s functions. Leona could hear a tussle in the hallway. When she came out from behind the door, she found him hovering over Brooke, pointing the gun at her head.

“Please don’t,” Leona begged.

He grimaced at her again. “I couldn’t if I wanted to.” He helped Brooke up from the floor, almost like a gentleman. “Ulinthra programmed me with the three laws of robotics, like an asshole. Anyway, I guess our conversation is over. You just called me here to kill me.”

“You’re her greatest weapon,” Leona lied.

“Quite.” He adjusted his jacket with the Picard maneuver, and headed for the elevators.

“Are we good?” Brooke asked after he’d gone, having recovered from the device.

Leona went into the synthesizer’s memory, and found the plans for the teleporter gun that they had just taken from Harrison. “We have it.”

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Fervor: Five Woman Band (Part II)

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“Who the hell are you people?” I ask of these two women who just appeared in my house, and wrecked the place. I don’t feel bad about, they’re not supposed to be here.

Slipstream easily catches up, and creates a human barrier between me and the strangers.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” One of them holds her hands up defensively. “We’re not here to hurt anyone. We must have missed our mark. We were meant to land somewhere in the middle of Kansas, since Springfield doesn’t exist anymore.”

“What do you mean, it doesn’t exist anymore? My great uncle was born there.”

The strangers give each other a look. “She must be a chooser.”

“I was born in the 1960s,” I explain, because I just don’t give a fuh.

“She must not have been in the timestream when the city started disappearing,” the other postulates.

“Well, I’m glad we ended up here, instead of a house full of humans. That would have been hard to explain.” She presents her hand. “My name is Hogarth Pudeyonavic. This is my partner, Hilde Unger.”

“Paige.” I tilt my head towards my new best friend. “This is Slipstream. What year is it for you?”

“It should be 2025. We were on another planet.”

“Oh.” I’ve never heard of people going to other planets, but nothing surprises me anymore. “Yeah, it’s 2025. “By the way,” I say to Slipstream, “some people have special temporal powers.”

“I gathered,” Slipstream replies. “I’ve seen some things that make a bit more sense now.”

“Well, this isn’t awkward,” Hilde says after a silence.

“Yeah, I guess we should leave,” Hogarth says. “Sorry for invading your...” she trails off as she’s looking around at the mess they made made. It looks like a mad scientist generated a miniature tornado that broke free of its containment field. “We somehow have to fix this, even though I doubt I have any money...since it was all tied to the Springfield Central Bank.”

I shake my head. “We live in Countryside, we’re rich. Don’t worry about it.”

“No, we’ll find a way,” Hogarth insisted. “Come, love. We have to find jobs, and figure out what we’ve missed these last eight years.”

“Universal basic income,” I say before the two travelers could leave the room.

Hogarth stops. “What was that?”

“It’s actually a negative income tax,” Slipstream clarifies. “If you don’t make enough money to live on your own, the government subsidizes your income. If you do, you get nothing, and if you make more than enough, you pay taxes, just like before. President Clinton pushed for total universal basic income, but had to make a compromise with the Republicans. The new system started at the beginning of this tax year. If you don’t have any money, you would qualify, except...”

“Except that we don’t qualify for anything, because we don’t exist. Even if the records rewrite themselves, now that we’re back on Earth, we’ve been missing for the better part of a decade. Neither one of us has an identity.”

“The Forger,” I remember.

“Who?”

“A family friend, Detective Bran was telling me about the guy who gave him a new identity; an actual one, not just fake papers. He can rewrite your whole history. He might even give you money to start off.”

“There’s a guy who does that?” Slipstream asks me.

“There’s someone for everything,” I say, prideful of what I know about the world.

“Did this detective tell you how to find the Forger?”

I frown. “No. But I can ask him. I never went to his place, but he told me he lived at...uh, the Leon?”

“The Ponce de Leon?” Slipstream asks, impressed. “That place is pretty swanky.”

“He’s rich too.”

“You don’t have to help us,” Hogarth says with a worried look on her face. “We came here by accident, so you have no obligation to us.”

I smile. “If there’s one thing my dads taught me, it’s that a person in a position to help someone else..has a responsibility to do just. Bran protected me when I was in danger of a winter-making maniac, even though he didn’t have to. That’s what being a human is.” I step into the hallway.

“Is this all true?” Mireille asks me.

“Mireille,” I exclaim. “I, uhh...forgot you were here. But I guess there’s no rule that stops me from telling anyone this stuff. Did you hear everything?”

“Pretty much. You’re going to the Ponce?”

“We are.”

“Well, Slippy travels on foot, you can’t drive, and these two don’t have a car.”

“Oh, that’s true.”

“I’m glad I bought that SUV,” Mireille says. “Let’s go,” she offers the whole crowd.

Slipstream balks at the larger-than-necessary vehicle. “It’s not even two miles away,” she half-complains as we’re climbing it. I imagine she never takes motorized transportation, except maybe to get to the airport, or maybe not even then.

Five minutes later, we’re parking next to Mendoza Park, and walking the rest of the way to the condominium. We take the elevator up to what’s probably the most expensive unit in the complex, and knock on the door.

A woman answers, and she looks exhausted. “Yeah? Can I help you?”

“Um, we must have the wrong apartment,” Slipstream apologizes. “We were looking for, what was the name?”

“Kallias Bran,” I reply, upset. “I know he lives here.”

“Paige?” The woman squints her eyes at me. “Holy shit, it’s little Paige.”

A giggling kindergartner runs straight into the woman’s hip. “You’re it!” she cries.

“Brooke, pause on the game. We have company. Please, come in,” she says cordially. “I think you’re in the right place. When they gave this to me, they called it the Bran Safehouse. I didn’t know what that meant.”

“How do you know a fourteen-year-old girl?” Slipstream questions protectively.

“She wasn’t fourteen last time I saw her.”

“She’s a time traveler,” I whisper to Mireille.

The woman offers Slipstream her hand. “I’m Leona Matic, and I am from the future.”

“Told ya,” I say.

“Why are you and your daughter in a safehouse?” Slipstream continues the interrogation.

“She’s not my daughter. I had to take her when her mother...disappeared. I brought her to this time period, and I’ve been waiting for further instructions.”

“Where’s Kal?” I ask her.

“I have no idea,” Leona says seemingly truthfully. “The Repairman just set me up here and told me all he knows is that I’m meant to wait. Maybe I was waiting for you. I don’t suppose any one of you would be related to an Angelita Prieto—oh, you wouldn’t remember her. Goddammit! Or does the corruption have an effect on the past? How does this work?”

“I..don’t know,” Slipstream answers tentatively.

“Prieto was my mother’s maiden name,” Mireille says quietly. “My father’s French, but she’s Spanish.” She looks down at little Brooke, who is cautiously attached to Leona’s waist.

Yet another woman suddenly appears in the middle of the condo. A bubble of warped spacetime that was surrounding her dissipates. “Good, you’re all here. You have no idea what it took to get Mrs. Voss here to be your babysitter.” She gestures towards Mireille. “She can take care of Brooke while the rest of you are working.”

“My last name’s Travert,” Mireille says, confused.

The new woman chortles. “Right. For now...”

“What’s the meaning of this.” Slipstream; ever the leader, and protector. “You act as if you brought us all together.”

“I did,” she says. “I assembled a team of ragtag elites to take me on.”

“Take you on?”

“Well, not me. Past!Me. I like to call her Asshole!Jesi.”

“What are you talking about?” Hogarth asks.

This Jesi person prepares herself for a story. “In the other timeline, I killed a bunch of people with a virus from the future that I did not understand. I was trying to inoculate the human race, so they wouldn’t be affected by it later, when the virus shows up naturally. But it mutated, and got out control. I need you to stop me from making that same mistake again. Bozhena, I convinced Jupiter to have you deliver the transdimensional jacket to Horace, so he could go get Serkan back, and you could meet Paige.”

“The what jacket?”

Jesi continues, “Hogarth, I brought you and your lovely assistant here so you could provide the Book of Hogarth.”

“The what?”

This time, Jesi stopped. “The Book of Hogarth. Your book, that you wrote? It codifies the principles of time and space? Shit, do you not have the book?”

“What book are you talking about? I didn’t write any book.”

Jesi pinches the bridge of her nose. “Jesus Christ. I need to figure something out. You didn’t actually write anything. You...birthed it, for lack of a better term. I thought you’d find it on Durus. Well, you’re just gonna have to find it now. You can do that tomorrow.” She gestures to Leona. “Leona’s gonna need it in the future, so it’s kind of important, okay?” She’s looking pretty frazzled. “Okay, um. Let me rework the timeline to account for that hiccup. I would have contacted you earlier, but you two were still on Durus, and Ace was still here. We don’t need him in our way. Miss Travert, please stay here with Young!Brooke. I’m sending the rest of you someone who can help. She probably won’t be part of the band permanently, but she can lead you to the Book of Hogarth.” She opens a new mostly transparent bubble, and disappears.

“We’re not gonna do what she wants us to do, are we?” Hilde sounds confident.

“Never do anything without having an answer why,” Leona recites, like it’s her credo, or something.

Hogarth is staring at the space that the cryptic woman from the future was once occupying. “When I was about Brooke’s age, I witnessed a group of older children being pursue by a giant monster. It’s what inspired me to build my machine, so I could study the portal they disappeared through.”

“I remember you telling me about that,” Hilde says, taking Hogarth’s hand.

“There were ten children. One of them was named Jesimula Utkin. Everybody called her Jesi.”

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Microstory 885: Evitable

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The thing about programs like this is that you’re not meant to know you’re in a program. They hook you up, and load your consciousness into the servers, while simultaneously temporarily blocking the last day or so of your life. There won’t just be a chunk of time missing, however; you’ll have a blurry sense of being alive during that period of time, but since you don’t remember what happened, your mind fills in the blanks, to explain why you are where you are when the program begins. Most of the time, this doesn’t come up anyway, because people don’t run around rehashing their yesterdays, unless something noteworthy happened, or someone else asks about it. But for me, it doesn’t remember, because I always retain my full memories. The point of these exercises is to behave the way you would in the real world, where your actions have lasting consequences on your and others’ lives. The belief that this is all just as dangerous as anything is generally vital to the purity of the system. I never thought that I needed that, though, because the fact of the matter is that I’ve always believed virtual realities to be nothing less than parallel dimensions of reality. I’ve always cared about what happens to these people, even though they’re so-called non-playable characters. To me, just because they’re programmed to believe they are real, doesn’t mean they aren’t. Hell, we’re all programmed, in one way or the other. I’m not saying we’re living on the thirteenth floor, and just a virtual reality that happened to create its own virtual reality. I’m saying everyone grows up being taught to follow societal norms, or to rebel against those conventions. While we all decide our own morality, those decisions are—every single time—informed by our past experiences, particular our interactions with others. This is just a different form of programming. So when I walked into the mall, knowing that I was part of a simulation, that didn’t mean I didn’t care.

Everything seems normal in the mall. People are browsing the shops and eating in the food court. Kids are playing on the train, and couples are resting their heads on each other’s shoulders. A janitor walks down the promenade pushing a big, gray cart. He’s bobbing his head to his music, causing passersby to smile and dance a little with him. Then he just stops and casually walks away, leaving his cart in the middle of the rotunda. As if on cue, random people from all over the mall assemble upon the cart. Children are widening their eyes, for they’ve seen things like this before. This is a flash mob, and they’re all about to dance. But they don’t. Each of the random people reach into the cart and pulls out a gun. They start spraying bullets all over the place, shouting things like, “Trump for four terms!” and “illegals go home!” And “hashtag-NRA-Lives-Matter!” I take out my sidearm, which my current persona is fully licensed to carry as the head of a private security firm. I start shooting the maniacs in the heads, retargeting as fast as humanly possible, and desperately trying to finish them off before any more innocent people get killed. I do pretty well. Nineteen injured and twelve dead.

The programs starts over, without telling me whether I succeeded in the mission or not. I go right back to where I started at the entrance of the mall. Again, the programmers have tried to wipe my memories, so I won’t have the benefit of forethought, but my brain just doesn’t accept that. Still, in order to preserve this concept, I watch the janitor head for his mark with as much patience as before, determined to not react any earlier than any other agent-in-training would. The murderous flash mob converges on the gun cart again, but when they pull their arms back out with the weapons, they start moving in slow motion. I reach for my hip, ready to end their lives before this gets bad. All the innocents are moving in slow motion too, so it’s not like they have time to escape. I’m the only one with the ability to stop this, but I have to do it right. I look closer, and realize that this is an entirely new set of killers. They didn’t just restart the program, and they didn’t only change the speed of motion. They also changed the characters, which only cements my conviction that these people are no less real than you or me. I couldn’t save the victims in the last round, but I also couldn’t save any of the killers. I only had one choice in that scenario, but this one is markedly different. This time, I can save everybody, and I have a moral obligation to do so. I race towards the crowd of killers. As I pass by a security guard, I steal the taser that she was reaching for. I take out my own taser, and then I just start shocking the shooters in the neck. I return to my memory archives to recreate the scene from before. While the faces are different, and they’re moving at a different speed, they’re still staged in comparable positions, and acting in the same order as before. I can exploit that weakness in the program, and end this all before it starts. I keep tasing the gunmen, one by one, starting with the one I know will shoot first, and working my way down the list. My arms are outstretched, so I can disable two of them at once. By the time the program ends, all of my opponents are incapacitated, affording me the time to disarm them completely, but I never get the chance. The technician releases me from the program, and sits my chair up. I’m sitting in a circle, with all my classmates, who have all presumably been through similar, if not the exact same, thing. They’re disoriented as their full memories come back, and I do my best to fake those symptoms. Our instructor steps forward. “Yours were the worst ratings in the history of the program. You all failed.” She looks directly at me. “Except for you. You will be our only recruit. Congratulations. The rest of you can go get your memories of this organization removed from your minds.”

Microstory 884: Sap-Tinted Glasses

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A few years ago, I was wandering the Maze Market, which is this monthly event some organization puts up in the middle of Freelake Park. It looks just like a marketplace you might find in Egypt, or some other Middle Eastern country. It’s hard to navigate, and it’s always packed for the whole day. I spot this booth where no one else was buying anything. The woman working there is watching people go about their business, not attempting to draw any customers, but also not completely over it, and reading a book. She looked like she was just content with the view, and was good either way. She had very few things to sell; a few hats, some jewelry, and this pair of glasses that really caught my eye. They kind of looked like the kind Ringo was known for wearing, but they were also unique. I just had to have them. As the clerk was completing the transaction, she didn’t even look at me, and I realized that she was waiting for someone else. I almost felt bad about giving her a measly five dollars, like maybe she was so distracted, she didn’t realize what I was buying. But after I started walking away, she said one thing; that the glasses would show me the truth. I turned around to ask for clarification, but she was gone, as was her booth. I was so freaked out that I never put on those glasses; not even once. But then my friend noticed them hanging on my bedroom mirror earlier today, and suggested I bring them with us to a new club called Pandemonium tonight. By now, all of my reservations had been vanquished, so I shrugged, and agreed.

We walk up to the club, and she reminds me that I need to stand out if I want to get past the bouncer, which explains why she has a long scarf tied around both of her thighs. Apparently you don’t get into this place by being pretty or rich, but by being interesting, and memorable. I playfully scoff at how silly this all his, but put the glasses on, just the same. It’s the only noteworthy thing about me, except maybe that my top is a little tight, and it seems to work. The bouncer totally digs it, and opens the door for us. I’m horrified when I walk in. The entire place is covered in, like, this green fungal sap. Some people have maggots crawling all over their faces, but that’s nothing compared to what I see front and center. A monster twice as tall, and three times as wide as any man is standing in the DJ Booth. His eyes are on his neck, and there are several rows of teeth in his mouth, which never seems to close. He doesn’t have horns, per se, but his head turns up on the sides. My God is he ugly. He’s got headphones on, but only one ear is covered, like you would expect from any normal DJ. He’s hyping up the crowd, and promoting his radio station, 66.6 The Pit. How is everyone okay with this, I think, but then I remember the glasses. I tip them down with my finger, and look above the lenses. Everything appears perfectly normal. The monster is gone, replaced by just a regular douche, and the walls look clean. I look through the glasses once more, and then without them, and then with them again. The woman must not have been lying; these things show me the truth. They do something else to me, though. The more I stare at the monster DJ, the more I have the urge to commit great violence against him. My rage doesn’t subside, even when I take the glasses off completely, and I know that the only way to satiate my need is to just get it over with. After an hour, he leaves his booth for a break, and is followed by two bouncers, which look like miniature versions of him when I’m wearing the truth glasses. I realize that the glasses also give me this strength the more I wear them, so I have to keep them on. Killing all three of them is the most effortless thing I’ve done in my whole life. I can’t believe how quickly they go down, and it’s exhilarating. Once it’s over, though, the shame and guilt set in. And the fear. I take the glasses off, and see that the monster disappears, just as before. He still looks entirely human to everyone else. No one would believe me if I claimed that he was the Devil, and these were his two demon assistants. I’ve heard of people like that, and they always end up between four padded walls. I drag the bodies into the janitor’s closet, and try to sneak back out of the bathroom. The club owner suddenly walks up to me and says, “where have you been? You get two minutes for the bathroom, like we agreed. Hey, where’re your goons? Whatever, just get back up there. The people want those beats!” Now I’m the monster.

Microstory 883: Forced Perspective

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You are all here because you understand what we’re doing, and what’s at stake. This job will not be easy. We are investing heavily in counseling services, and while we’re still working out the details, one thing we do know is that witnesses will be limited to the number of cases they’re allowed to work over the course of a yet-to-be established duration of time. This is extremely dangerous technology; it can have lasting effects on a person’s psyche. Anyone who finds joy in their work will be immediately removed from the program, with zero compensation. I expect you to have trouble seeing the horrific things you will undoubtedly see, but at the same time, I expect you to do your job. One thing we haven’t explained yet is that there is an unusual component to the memories that we can’t seem to figure out. Has anyone ever heard of the medical condition known as prosopagnosia? Well, it’s also known as face blindness. It’s a less rare than you would believe cognitive disorder wherein the patient has trouble recognizing faces. They could conceivably be standing right next to a loved one that they’ve known their entire lives, and not have any idea. They interact with other individuals using context clues, like fashion, and hairstyle. Out of all of the survivors who have agreed to this program, not one of them suffers from this condition, so it has nothing to do with them personally. For some reason, when the memories are fed into the image interpreting software, it doesn’t come out right. You will be able to see through their eyes, as clear as they could; better, even, because you will not be experiencing the same shock and trauma as they did. You will not, however, be able to discern the face of their attacker, even if they weren’t wearing some kind of cover. Again, we don’t understand why this is, and we haven’t found a workaround to include this data into the system. If we could, we wouldn’t have to hire most of you, because we would be able to solve these cases with nothing more than a few memory fragments. It will be your job to look for clues from these scenes. You’ll still be able to see distinguishing marks, like tattoos, or moles. Think about how the attacker smells, how stronger they are, their balance of rage, resentment, and feelings of inadequacy. If you do manage to see their face, please let us know, so that we can further study this problem. This is important work, and if the pilot program succeeds, it could be a great boon to our justice system. No one in the world deserves to experience rape, which is why you will have every opportunity to back out of this program at any moment, with no legal consequences. You can even quit in the middle of a procedure, if you just cannot take any more of the pain. If no one has any further questions, then we will begin. We only have one machine at the moment, so who’s first?

Microstory 882: This is Your Rifle

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I’m not trying to keep anything from you, officer, but you have to understand that, after what happened to me, I’m not so keen on the police. I understand that not all of you are like him, but since law enforcement in general tends to turn the other way, and pretend things like this don’t happen, you can’t expect me to be eager to tell you anything. But if you want me to start at the beginning...again, and relive the worst experience of my life, then I will. So, I was on my daily walk, and before you ask that same dumb question, yes, I take walks. It’s good exercise that a lot of people do, so it wasn’t suspicious that I was out there without a dog. I looked over to the other side of the street, and I noticed a man hovering over the trunk of his car. No big deal, right? He’s probably just getting groceries, but then I saw the barrel of a gun, or whatever you call the long metal part where the bullets come out. Now, just because I’m not entirely confident on the vocabulary doesn’t mean I couldn’t be sure it was a gun. And besides, it doesn’t matter, does it? Because when he shoved it in my face later, there was no doubt it was a gun, so there’s no issue with probable cause, or whatever. So it looks like he’s putting it together, and I don’t see him wearing a vest, or a badge, and I definitely don’t see any other cops. He’s either coming back from hunting in a freaking Geo Spectrum, or he’s about to hurt someone. Naturally, I assume the latter, because if not true, then no harm done. On the other hand, if it is true, then it’s best to be cautious.

Anyway, I notice there’s some kind of party going on in the backyard of the house he’s parked in front of, and as he’s gathering his murder supplies, he’s eyeing the gate. So again, I assumed he was headed that way. I couldn’t call nine-one-one, because I don’t take my phone with me. I may look young, but I spent a lot of years without a cell phone every second of the day, and I’m usually fine without it now. Since I was the only one around, I was the only one who could do anything about this danger, so I snuck around to the party, hoping to warn them. Fortunately, the first person I came across was a dedicated lifeguard, so she didn’t question me, or just think it was a prank. She sprung into action, and started ushering the guests through the back gate, to the neighbor’s yard. I stayed back to distract the gunman. No, sir, I don’t have a death wish, and I never thought of myself as a hero. What I am is in service to others. Ya see, I’m always the one who suffers to make other people happy, because I can take it. I accept the crappy jobs at work, and I stand up on the bus. I don’t do this to punish myself, or because of my power. I do it because other people’s happiness is more important to them than mine is to me. So when I stayed back, I didn’t think I could actually take this guy on—I’m not bulletproof—but if I could keep him from catching up with the crowd for even thirty seconds, I’d’ve done my part. I don’t want to die, but if I do, the world is at no big loss. But there was kids at that party, and one of them might one day cure cancer, so they deserved it more.

Seeing his plan foiled, only then does he take out his badge, and make this claim that some terrorist was there, and I had ruined his sting operation. Like I said, I don’t know much about how you people do things, but I know you don’t take down a terrorist with one cop, so I immediately knew he was lying, and didn’t regret what I had done. For some reason, this guy takes me down to the station, telling me he’ll throw me in jail for obstruction, or some other such nonsense. The man actually chains me up like those serial killers who eat people. Well, what he didn’t know was that I have superhuman strength. I don’t like to use it in front of others, because they’ll start asking me to help them move, or threaten their abusive boyfriends, but this was a desperate situation. We pull into the driveway of a house right next to the station. I guess he lives there, I dunno. I tear those chains right off my body like they’re made of paper, and inform this self-proclaimed officer of the law that I will be walking into the station alone to report him. This freaks him out, and we get into it. He starts whaling on me with the butt of his rifle. Man, he’s just goin’ to town. Now, I do feel pain, mind you, but as I’ve explained, I’m okay with a little discomfort. Still, I get tired of it, so I start fighting back. Seeing no other option, he takes this stone out of his pocket and tells me it’ll let him control the concrete. The driveway starts liquifying and boiling, basically turning into quicksand right under my feet. I wade through the sludge and catch up with the guy, then I take the stone from him. I didn’t mean to drown him in the water from the now-liquid concrete. I just didn’t know how the stone worked. If defending myself is a crime, though, then I guess you oughta lock me up. Either way, I’m not saying another word without a lawyer.