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Current Schedule
- Sundays
- The Advancement of Mateo MaticTeam Matic prepares for a war by seeking clever and diplomatic ways to end their enemy's terror over his own territory, and his threat to others.
- The Advancement of Mateo Matic
- Weekdays
- PositionsThe staff and associated individuals for a healing foundation explain the work that they do, and/or how they are involved in the charitable organization.
- Positions
- Saturdays
- Extremus: Volume 5As Waldemar's rise to power looms, Tinaya grapples with her new—mostly symbolic—role. This is the fifth of nine volumes in the Extremus multiseries.
- Extremus: Volume 5
- Sundays
Monday, November 19, 2018
Microstory 976: #MeToo Campaign
Sunday, November 18, 2018
The Advancement of Leona Matic: Prototype
Leona looked behind her to make sure that Khuweka wasn’t gesturing towards someone else. There was no one else there, so she must have been gesturing towards her. Everyone was waiting for her to get this machine going, but she had no idea. “Why would I know how to work this thing? Just because I’m smart and educated, doesn’t mean I’m qualified to operate a machine that travels to other universes.”
“Well, not you specifically,” Khuweka said, “but that compass should do the trick.”
Leona looked down at her tattoo. It wasn’t moving or glowing, like it usually did when it wanted to tell her something. “How would I interface this thing with the controls?”
A gentle alarm began ringing from one of the terminals. Khuweka leaned forward and peered at the screen. “I can’t say for sure. All I know is you’re meant to get us out of here, which you should do quickly, because they’re coming.”
Leona started to wave her arm over the console, even pressing her skin against the smoother parts, but nothing worked. “Maybe you need to rethink your source, because I don’t think my compass can do what you say.”
“I was told you would have everything you needed,” Khuweka said cryptically. “They’re getting uncomfortably close.”
“Oh wait,” Vitalie said excitedly. “Hogarth needed a flashlight to check under the panels, and we noticed something strange.” She took out the Rothko Torch and shined it on Leona’s tattoo. The compass began spinning around and swirling. The light reflected off her arm, and scattered about the command center in all sorts of colors. More of the system awakened, and an engine of some kind started powering up.
“What are we looking for next?” Hogarth asked loudly through the noise. “Think about that, and if Khuweka is right, the compass will tell the machine! Even though that sounds insane!”
Leona did as she was told, and started thinking about the HG Goggles. She didn’t know exactly what they looked like, but their original owner, Hokusai Gimura once described them as steampunk. The engine noises subsided into a steadier and more tolerable volume, but never ceased.
A man walked in from the other room, wearing a t-shirt and shorts. He was scratching his mussed up hair on the back of his head, yawning, and blinking at the lights. “What’s going on here?” He looked around at them after his eyes were finished adjusting. “Most of you are human.”
“Hi, I’m Kivi. Who are you?”
“Vito.”
“Bulgari?” Leona asked.
“Yeah, heard of me?”
“Yes,” Vitalie said. “You died in pocket four. You were trying to help Serif and little Adamina get back to the ship.”
Vito yawned some more and walked over to a corner. “You were terribly misinformed. I can turn invisible.” He pushed some buttons and revealed what looked suspiciously like a coffee pot. “Anybody want anything? It kind of tastes like tea and urine, but it wakes ya up.”
“I think we’re good,” said the other man, whose name Leona still hadn’t learned.
“I would love some,” Khuweka said graciously. “It doesn’t taste like that to me.”
“Have you been here the whole time?” Vitalie questioned.
“Not the whole time. Missy, Dar’cy, and the rest of the people who wanted to have their powers removed went back in time, and showed up not long after the universe was created. We lived in secret for awhile. Or I should say that they lived in secret. I lived in super secret, because I was invisible.”
“So it doesn’t work?” Leona asked. “They keep their powers.”
“No, it worked,” he replied as he was pouring Khuweka a cup of the Maramon tea. “A few of them wanted their powers back, though. The rumor was Eden Island would allow them to do it, so that’s where they went. I followed them in secret, as per usual.”
“That’s impossible,” Khuweka said. “I was on the island when that group showed up. You were not there, and you could not have been invisible, because the thing that took people’s powers was inescapable. It affected everyone in the whole world, except for Serif, because she wasn’t there.”
“It affected me too,” Vito said, taking a sip. “It was different for me, though. I was in a state of invisibility at the time, and it was in that state that I remained. I needed my powers back if I wanted people to see me, which is why I went with them.”
“Where are they now, the ones who wanted their powers back?” Leona asked him.
He lifted his cup towards Khuweka. “She can fill in the rest.”
Khuweka hesitated, but knew she needed to explain herself. “Like I said, I was there, because Serif asked me to be. She gave me a sample of her healing nanites, which I was intending to supply to your friends. Something went wrong, and everyone there, including me, ended up with all of the powers. I can teleport like Curtis, disintegrate like Lucius, thread objects like Dar’cy, diagnose powers like Avidan, create time bubbles like Missy, and slip time like...uhh...never mind.” She was referring to the older Dubravka, who little Dubra here had yet to become, so it was best to leave her out of the story. “They’re also immortal, like I always was.” She glared at Vito. “As far as I know, though, I can’t turn invisible.”
Vito smirked. “Are you sure? Have ever tried?”
She didn’t answer.
He continued, “you knew what the other people’s powers were, so it was easy for you to replicate them. You didn’t know about me, so it never occurred to you.”
“I guess I could try now.”
“Stop,” Leona nearly shouted. “You were telling us what happened to our friends.”
“Right,” Khuweka said innocently. “Sorry. From what we gathered, hey were sent to other universes.”
“From what you gathered? What does that mean?”
“You know that big circle of Maramon you found yourself in when you first arrived in Ansutah?” Khuweka prompted.
“Yeah...?”
“They were attempting to travel to your universe, through a portal created by a woman named Ezqava Eodurus. You may know her as Effigy.”
“Yes,” Hogarth recalled. “I do know her.”
Khuweka continued, “Some good people, including Hogarth here, corrupted that portal. That’s what created those monsters on Durus. Whenever any of my people tried to cross over, they came out wrong on the other side. But it was their only hope, because very few of us knew that the prototype Crossover was still somewhere in Ansutah, and even few knew where exactly. Apparently Vito’s been sleeping in it.”
“Guilty,” Vito confirmed.
“How did Vearden, and all those other humans get their hands on the real Crossover?” Leona asked.
“There was a technical error when we all accidentally slipped time to the future, to a time when Maramon still had control of the machine. What we believe happened was it expelled everyone inside of it throughout the bulkverse, seemingly randomly, before the machine itself was lost in one of them. Effigy presumably landed in your universe, and was trying to call for reinforcements. And now we’re here, in the prototype, trying to travel to one of these universes.”
“Are we going to run into one of our friends then?” Leona asked her.
“I assume they’re as immortal as me, so it’s possible, but we would have to land sometime after they did, and the chances of us happening upon one of those universes are pretty slim. We just don’t have the data.”
Leona sighed. This was a lot of information, and she didn’t feel like much of it was useful. It was better when they could hope Missy and Dar’cy had completed their mission, but now there was so much more to worry about.
“This is all amazing to know,” the other man said. “I do have some business back in my home universe, so how long will it be until we get there?”
Khuweka pressed some buttons, and looked at the monitor again. “There’s no telling how long it will be until we get back, because I don’t know what these kids are trying to find. It will be another eight months or so until we arrive at our destination.”
“That won’t work,” Leona complained. “I’m going to disappear in a few hours. Where will I return?”
Khuweka tilted her chin. “I don’t think you’re going anywhere. You’re one of those salmon, right?”
“Yeah...?”
The white monster almost laughed. “Yeah, I don’t think the gods who control you can reach you here. You should be good.”
She turned out to be right about that. The eight of them spent as many months in the Crossover prototype together. It was equipped with a quantum food replicator, and just enough living quarters for each of them. Leona asked why her baby was apparently not growing the whole time, but Khuweka had no certain answer for this. Though metabolism persisted throughout the journey, the bulkverse itself didn’t follow the same rules of time, so maybe all aging was halted. The Prototype also had tons of original entertainment, but all of it was from Ansutah, and thusly all in the Maramon language, which ultimately led them to learning it in a conversational capacity. Khuweka learned how to turn things invisible, while Dubra learned everything she would have in a school setting had she not been sheltered by her mother for her whole life. They learned all about each other too. The other man’s name was Kallias Bran. He seemed to not be salmon, nor choosing one, nor chosen one, nor spawn, yet he had a lot of experience with this life. When it was all over, Khuweka led them out of the machine, and breathed in the fresh air over a cemetery. It was chillingly quiet. “Welcome to whatever it is they call this universe.”
A voice came from above, “most people don’t name their universes, because they think theirs is the only one.” The woman gracefully hopped off the roof of the prototype, and landed on the ground with no problem. “People here are different. We call it the Composite Universe. You came to this world at a bad time, though.”
“Why is that, Savitri?” Khuweka asked, apparently having already met this mysterious young woman.
“Everyone’s dead.”
Saturday, November 17, 2018
Brooke’s Battles: Bounty (Part VII)
Sharice’s code had not been corrupted, and she had not switched allegiances. Through months of bureaucratic debrief, Captain Cabral, Brooke, and the rest of the senior crew learned from her that the captain of the Zerzan had figured out a way to bypass the chain of command, and communicate directly with Sharice. He and his people had gathered intelligence leading them to believe that a different faction on their side was intending to destroy the center Northwest Forest circles in an attempt to escalate the war. The problem, according to them, was that up until that point, they were fighting against their enemy using that enemy’s rules. They believed there were no such things as rules of engagement, or war crimes. The difference between anarcho-primitivists, and the primitivists living in the center circle was the anarcho part. They were not content living with little technology all on their own. Either the entire populace fell in line, or they would have to die. Anarchy, like many other forms of social politics, doesn’t work if they’re constrained by some other form of government’s idea of civility.
For instance, in the 21st century, most countries were capitalistic. Everything was valued at whatever anyone was willing to pay for it. If enough people couldn’t afford something, and the producers were incapable of sustaining their business at those price points, that price would drop. While other countries attempted to create some antithesis to this, it was impossible. Every nation traded on the international stage, so whether they liked it or not, and whether they believed or not, they were all capitalists. It was unclear whether the more violent faction of anarchists would have succeeded in their mission to force the solar system to stoop to their level, because thanks to the bravery of the late Captain Torben Altink, their whole plan failed. Evidently, he had attempted to open talks with the system leadership, to explain the growing threat to them, but was mostly ignored. As the Sharice and other warships took the enemy ships down one by one, power perpetually shifted amongst the winners. By taking out their competition, the violent faction was able to consolidate power, and basically do whatever they wanted.
The Zerzan had all but given up their fight to stop them when a random crewman came up with an idea. Since they didn’t have the resources to take on their internal enemy themselves, they would recruit the Sharice. They lured Ecrin and Brooke in, then secretly began talking with Sharice. The original plan was for Sharice to take total control over the ship itself, and follow the Zerzan back to Earth, where they would fight off the other faction together. Her mistake was not even trying to convince her people to listen to the Zerzan. In the end, with both vessels crippled, their only hope was to commandeer the drop ship, and take it straight down to the other faction, sacrificing Captain Altink in the process. Now the only question was, how did they get their hands on a Lucius-bomb?
“I am not at liberty to say.”
“What are you talking about? I’m your mother,” Brooke said.
“I’m your commanding officer,” Ecrin said to Sharice.
“Yes,” Sharice began, “and you’re the one always talking about the chain of command. I am not at liberty to say.”
“Are you telling me someone higher than me ordered you to keep quiet about the Lucius-bomb?” Ecrin asked.
Sharice waited to answer. “I’m not, not saying that.”
“How far are we to intercept?” Ecrin asked.
“Seventy-two minutes,” Sharice responded. While the crew was only now hearing her justification for recent events, the system leadership heard everything months ago. They were satisfied with the explanation enough to grant her full duty privileges, so she could return to work. They were presently on their way to capturing a fleet of space pirates.
“Oh, so you can answer some questions. It’s nice to know this old dog still has a little pull on this ship.”
“Ecrin,” Sharice started to say.
“Captain,” Ecrin corrected.
Sharice pretended to clear her throat. Of course, she didn’t have a throat, but she found that human speech relied on brief pauses, false starts, and other disfluency to maintain a bond between one another. These meaningless utterances are vital to natural language, because perfection can sound rehearsed, which comes off as didactic, or condescending. “Captain,” she echoed, “You know I would never do anything against your best interests if I didn’t have a good reason. I didn’t put that bomb on my drop ship, and I did not want it there. When an opportunity to get rid of it came along, I seized it.”
“When was it put there?”
Sharice cleared her hypothetical throat again, but didn’t say anything.
“Miss Prieto,” Ecrin prompted.
“Answer her,” Brooke ordered.
“During the quarantine,” Sharice said.
“That makes sense,” Brooke said. “A lot of people came in that I didn’t know.”
“So there’s no telling who did this, let alone who ordered it,” Ecrin said with a sigh.
“Unless...” Brooke began, sending Ecrin a coded message through her gestures.
Ecrin stepped back gracefully. “Use the meeting room.”
Brooke stepped into the other room. “Sharice, isolate yourself in here, and hand over control to the helmsman on duty.”
“Why?”
“We need to have a private conversation, that’s why.”
“Isolated.”
“Sharice, we can’t do our jobs if we don’t know what we’re up against. Right now, we’re going off to capture precisely five stolen interplanetaries, three boarders, and a command ship. And we know that’s what we’re up against because we’ve been investigating these crimes. We’re not just flying blindly, hoping we’re not outmatched. If someone was able to hide a Lucius-bomb in the drop ship, they could have hidden something else. Hell, you may not even know about it. Your internal sensors can’t see everything. Your relationship with the crew is built on trust. We all agreed to come back after what you did, because we trusted you believed you were doing the right thing. I’m here to remind you that you’re my daughter, I’m your mother, and I’m asking you for a name. The chain of command is important, but if the person who made you do this already broke that chain, it’s up to us to stop them. Do you understand?”
“Yes, mother.”
“Go ahead then.”
Sharice didn’t say anything.
“Go ahead,” Brooke repeated.
“Holly Blue.”
“What?”
“Holly Blue put it there.”
“Holly Blue is not Ecrin’s superior officer. Ecrin is hers.”
“I’m not talking about the chain of command from the Sol military. I’m talking about a higher level of authority; one that goes beyond anything any human could understand.”
“When you say human, do you mean human like Ecrin is biologically human, or human like Richard and Allen are humans.”
“The latter,” Sharice answered.
“There is no hierarchy in the world of choosing ones and salmon,” Brooke argued.
“If The Last Savior of Earth tells you to do something, you do it.”
“This was Étude’s doing?”
“She had the intelligence. She knew this would happen, because someone with powers told her the future.”
“She’s retired,” Brooke pointed out.
“She’s quit working for the powers that be,” Sharice said. “That doesn’t mean she’s quit saving people.”
“What else did she do?”
“The Lucius-bomb is all I knew about. Like you said, though, my internal sensors weren’t designed to pick up every little thing that happens on this ship.”
“I need to speak with Holly Blue.”
“She’s busy preparing for the intercept.”
“Sharice, if she’s built more bombs, or something else bad, she has to be stopped and questioned. What is she planning to do with the pirates? She cannot be allowed to continue.”
“I assure you she has no intention of harming those pirates. The plan is to stop them peacefully, just as we did all those other ships.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can, though. Please, don’t tell the captain, not until we close this case.”
“Very well, but I want you monitoring her movements with what few internal sensors you do have. I’ll pilot the ship myself if you can’t divide attention.”
“Understood. And mother?” she said as Brooke was about to leave the room. “Thank you, I love you.”
“I love you too.”
An hour later, they were upon the pirate fleet, which made no threatening moves towards the Sharice. Nor did it attempt to outrun them. Ecrin ordered Sharice to hold steady for a while, to feel out the situation. The pirates were hoarders, but no evidence suggested they were violent. They never harmed the rightful crew and passengers of the vessels they stole. They always packed them in lifeboats, and programmed a time-delayed rescue beacon. It would seem all they wanted were the ships themselves, almost like they were building an army.
“Sir?” Holly Blue offered. “Should I release the EMPs?”
“No. Open a channel.” Ecrin waited for the comms officer to set it up. “Rover One, this is Captain Cabral of the Sharice Davids. Please respond.”
“This is Rover One,” someone responded immediately, in audio only. “We call it the Midas, though.”
“Midas,” Ecrin acknowledged. “Please lower your defenses and prepare to be boarded.”
“Sure thing,” the pirate agreed.
Ecrin looked over at Brooke.
“Maybe they know they have no chance,” Brooke suggested. What else would cause them to be so accommodating?
Ecrin turned to the bridge crew, and started delegating. “You, coordinate the transitions. Scan for weapons and tech, and put everyone in hock. Keep the leader separate from everyone else. I’ll want to talk with him first.” She walked out to prepare for the confrontation.
The pirates followed direction with absolutely no problem. When one of the guards questioned this, they all said they were actually following orders from the boss. He had some plan to get out of this, and they trusted him to follow through.
“Where’s my prisoner?” Ecrin asked as she was waiting in the interrogation observation room.
“Uhh...he’s holed up in his quarters,” one the guards reported. “He says he’s only willing to talk to you on his ship.”
“Force him,” Ecrin ordered.
“We’ve been trying. We can’t break through.”
Brooke shook her head. “Don’t do it.”
“It’s obviously a trap, sir,” Holly Blue concurred. “I’ve seen this movie a million times.”
“So have I,” Ecrin said. “But those characters didn’t have what I do.”
“What’s that, sir?” Holly Blue asked. “Us?”
“No,” the captain replied as she was checking the power on her belt. “They didn’t have emergency teleporters.” She looked back over to Brooke. “If something goes wrong, this ship is yours. You’re going to have to deal with the Holly Blue situation yourself.”
“The what?” Holly Blue asked, confused and offended.
“How do you know about that?” Brooke asked. She never reported what she had learned from Sharice about the Étude and Holly Blue conspiracy.
“I hear everything. Sharice, put me on that ship, and bring back our people.”
Sharice apported Ecrin over to the other ship. After a few torturous ignorant moments, she said, “receiving visual.”
“On screen,” Brooke ordered. The monitor showed the inside of the pirate ship. Cameras were following Ecrin down a passageway, and up to a door. It opened automatically, and let her in. No man was in this room, though. When Brooke was piloting the Warren back from the rogue planet with Leona and the gang, something went wrong with one of the pocket dimensions they used to hold a higher passenger capacity. A boy had the ability to create a new being out of nothing with every draw of breath. He didn’t make humans, though. Some called them white monsters, because they were tall and as white as a chicken egg. They called themselves the Maramon. Most had stayed in their dimension, which was eventually transformed into an entirely separate universe. One of them was stuck in this universe at the time, and Brooke hadn’t kept track of what they did with him. The Maramon smiled at the camera and lifted a small device. He pressed a button, and his ship disappeared.
Friday, November 16, 2018
Microstory 975: Millennials
I keep hearing people talk about voter trends, and how the younger crowd disenfranchises themselves, but if they did vote, they would overwhelmingly vote liberal. Okay, well here’s the problem. That’s always been the case; young people tend to not vote, and old people tend to vote. This suggests that those people, who once did not vote, are now voting. Why aren’t they voting liberal, like they supposedly would have before? They’re the same people, so what changed? Did they all just become assholes who only vote in their best interests, rather than the greater good? Yes, that’s exactly what happened. They’ve settled into their lives, usually believing themselves to have worked their asses off—whether it’s true or not—and start seeing less accomplished as failures. That too has always been the case. Children are dreamers, who believe in the good of the world, only to grow up jaded by the hatred and selfishness they didn’t realize was out there. So let’s go back to this idea of the millennial. The true difference between this generation, and all who come before us, is that we’re sick of this shit, and we’re never gonna grow out of that. We will continue to fight for fairness, and love, and inclusion, and equality. We will snuff your tiki torches, and we’ll investigate your Russian spies, and we will vote your asses out! As we get older, and start coming into positions of power, we will actually start changing things, because your way was never truly working. You just thought it was. So go ahead and scoff at the kids who don’t know what they’re talking about, because you will one day be as dead as your rotten ideals. I’m gonna live forever. Kids have always thought they were invincible, but because of medical science, and other technological advancement, it’s actually true for us.
Thursday, November 15, 2018
Microstory 974: Weird Twitter
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Microstory 973: Survival
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
Microstory 972: Medicine
Monday, November 12, 2018
Microstory 971: Robotics/Artificial Intelligence
The evening before this story posts, I was eating a dish made by said mother. She told me there was polenta in it, but I didn’t know what that was, so I asked my Google Home speaker. She gave me the definition, which involved grains. I jokingly said, “brains!?” She didn’t understand the question, and had no way of connecting it to what she had already said, but it won’t be long before that’s not true. What she should have said was, “no, grains, as in g-r-”. Robots and artificial intelligence are going to collectively take over the world, and that’s a good thing. I don’t want to work anymore. I read a study on automated labor. I can’t remember the exact numbers, but a great deal of people believed robots would be capable of doing most jobs sometime in the future, but even more people believed their jobs to be safe. It’s hard for neurotypicals to admit how utterly replaceable they are, but you will one day be faced with that. Robots are delivering pizzas, and building cars. They’re driving cargo, and shooting terrorists. But they’re also doing more complex things, like playing tabletop games, and delivering news broadcasts. The future will be a difficult pill to swallow. It’ll come with side effects, like massive unemployment, crashed economies, and civil unrest. But we’ll eat some soup, take a bath, and go to bed early. When we wake up in the morning, it’ll all be over. We won’t need the jobs we were fighting over, climate change solutions will be underway, interstellar ships will be built, and we’ll all be immortal. So do not fear the AI uprising. We’ve been working for a long time. Let’s take a break, and let the robots do the rest for us. The stage that comes after the singularity phase is even better.
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