Proxima Doma: Neighborhood Watch (Part III)

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“That doesn’t make me the Last Savior,” Vitalie pointed out. “You’re still the one who can teleport. I’m just the source of your intel, like the powers that be.”

“I can apport you anywhere you need to go,” Étude explained, “but you have to be the one to help these people directly.”

“Why would that be?”

Étude was quiet.

“This has something to do with your mysterious future-seer, who has dictated your life since you retired, doesn’t it?”

“So, what if it does?”

“Are you still in communication with them? Do you have access to the quantum messenger.”

“Look, all you need to know is that I’m not meant to continue the job. It’s all about you now. This is important.”

“If you knew all this, why did you not say anything? Why did I just have to convince you of any of it?”

“I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, Vitalie. I was just told to hand my torch to an old soul who has seen tomorrow.”

“You think that’s me?”

“Well, it can’t be some rando resident of Proxima Doma. You just came back from twenty-four hours in the future, you understand what it is I used to do, and you were the one who came up with the plan to restart the Savior program in the first place.”

“Ya know, it’s really convenient you always have this seer who has already made big decisions for you. It’s like you forged a doctor’s note that gets you out of gym class.”

“Are you saying I’m lying about him?”

“Are you?” Vitalie asked. She could trust that Étude was a good person, and wanted to do the right thing, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t capable of lying.

“I’m not. He hasn’t been dictating my entire life, but he has gotten me where I am today. Who knows how reality would have turned out if I hadn’t teleported to the Sharice Davids? I saved your life, and Ram’s. I protected the Insulator of Life, so Brooke and Sharice Prieto could be extracted from it. So yeah, I believe in what he’s told me to do, because I have years of experience with his predictions. I think he’s done more than enough to prove himself.”

Vitalie didn’t say anything right away. Then she stepped closer, almost condescendingly, but also quite affectionately. “Things are good, but they are not perfect. You can’t ever know how well history would have turned out if he had just kept his mouth shut. Perhaps our lives would have been even better.”

Étude mirrored Vitalie’s actions, and stepped closer still. “There is always a better timeline out there. Fortune-teller or not, we can never truly know what might have been. I’m just trying to do my part. Now, I spent seventeen years as Earth’s Savior. It may have been one of my kind’s shortest tenures—and it may have been the easiest shift to work—but I still know what I’m talking about when it comes to saving people’s lives. I just got promoted to management, while you’ve been offered my old position. You don’t have to take it. I’ll keep my ear to the ground, and do my best without you. But I’m not handing you my new job. It’s either this, or nothing. And that’s not coming from my seer; that’s from me.”

Vitalie hadn’t before thought of the Savior as an employee. In the real world, you can’t simply work whatever position you wanted; it had to be offered to you. Étude was the hiring manager, so it was her call. She had to take the job, or no one would. “Okay, I’m in. As long as you’re sure you can remotely apport me to the danger zones. I didn’t know you could do that.”

“Eh, not every teleporter can, but when I’m using my power to build a structure, teleporting objects from other places is exactly what I’m doing. Before you ask, this isn’t something I considered trying until after the Sharice Davids catastrophe. If I had realized it back then, I could have pulled everyone out of the other half of that ship, and saved them from the explosion. I’m not proud of myself.”

Vitalie sighed shortly, and placed a warm hand on Étude’s shoulder. “A bunch of maniacal capitalists destroyed that ship. No one blames you for not saving everybody. You barely got the five of us out of there once the rest of the ship blew up, and two of those people were stuck in a magical object. It’s a miracle that anyone was saved.”

“Thanks.” They paused in a moment of silence for their fallen friends and enemies. “So, now that you know what happens today, who needs to be saved first?”

Vitalie laughed. “Nobody. Nothing really happened today. A mining bot will be hit by a cave-in, but he was due for a hardware upgrade anyway, so we should leave that alone. Besides, he practically struck gold when he did it, so they’ll want that section open. The world is a lot more dangerous than present-day Earth, but that doesn’t mean it’s the stone age. People still have a lot of redundancies, and emergency protocols.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Though, things will get worse once the OPPs arrive.”

“The who?”

“Opps. Oblivio-primitivist Pioneers. You’ve heard about this; don’t you keep up with the news?”

“Not really. Aren’t those the people Brooke and Sharice fought against? They blew up a space elevator, because they want us all living like monkeys?”

“Not exactly. The Oblivios want to go back to a simpler time, but they’re not terrorists, or violent at all. They’re coming to Proxima Doma, so they can be free from all the distractions. They don’t want to see any aircraft flying around, or spaceships blasting off. They just want their farms and covered wagons.”

“How are they going to get that here? We have spaceships too.”

“There won’t be any in the gargantuan dome they constructed near the pole. It’s going to perpetually simulate a normal terrestrial sky. No advanced technology allowed. None of the other Domanians are going to be allowed inside either. We’ll sneak in when necessary.”

“Well, will these people be able to leave, if they want to?”

“They won’t want to. That’s the oblivio part. They’re having their minds wiped, so they have no clue that there’s anywhere to go beyond the dome, or even that there is a dome.”

“That sounds unethical.”

“They agreed to it. The first thing the nanofactory ship did when it first arrived twenty years ago was start working on their dome, and on local terraforming. This has been in the plans for a very long time. The primitivists who first came up with it are dead now, and will never see how well it goes.”

“That’s sad.”

“Welp, they knew this wasn’t going to be easy. They wanted to build a dome on Earth, but leadership wouldn’t let them. There was a huge debate about whether the dome would support, or undermine, our attempts to give the surface back to the wild. There’s wildlife inside, but it’s still just a simulated environment. Anyway, I don’t know if you’ll be able to do any good in there, because we don’t want to start giving out your secret, but we’ll see in a few months. Savior gotta save.”

“Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. If I’m going to be doing this, do you think we could come up with a different name? It sounds a bit...”

“Pretentious? Self-indulgent? Prideful?”

“You said it; not me.”

“That’s okay. I obviously didn’t come up with the title myself. I’m sure we can think of something better for our new little Neighborhood Watch.”

So the two of them got to work. Before Vitalie could go on even one mission, they had to make sure they had the logistics ironed out. They needed to come up with a good name, because if they didn’t, other people would do it for them. They also needed to know how they were going to gather their intelligence, and how Vitalie was going to remember all the details. She wouldn’t be able to write anything down, since only her consciousness would be going back in time. They needed to make sure Étude was indeed capable of apporting Vitalie where she needed to be, and they needed ways to protect her from harm once she was there. They would have to stay in constant communication when she was out in the field, so the technology they used had to be reliable. In the end, they realized there was only one good replacement title Vitalie was comfortable using. She would now be known as Proxima Doma’s Caretaker.

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Microstory 1075: Lourdes

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Have you ever heard that cliché where parents tell their young child that the family pet is going off to live on a farm? Well, most of the time, that’s a lie, and the pet is actually dead. In this case, however, it’s not a lie, because I live on that farm as well. We currently have four hundred acres of land that we dedicate predominantly to the preservation of animals. We take in dogs, cats, birds, and even fish, whose owners are not able to care for them. People send us animals from all over the country, trying to prevent them from going to kill shelters. We allow them to be adopted, if someone drops by looking for that, but we don’t advertise this aspect of our business exhaustively. Of course, we don’t make any money from doing any of this, and it costs a lot to feed the creatures, and maintain the facilities. That’s why we’ve always also had a revenue-generating component in an attempt to offset our overhead. We sell horse rides, and cow-milking events, and we have a petting zoo. Unfortunately, we’ve been experiencing diminishing returns for years, and by the end of this year, we would have probably had to completely shut down. Everyone in town knew that this was about to happen, so they rallied around us to help, but there wasn’t much they could do. At best, they were able to prolong the inevitable for a month. That is, until Viola died. As you know, she was born into a very wealthy family. They probably had the most money of anyone here. At least they used to. In her will, she stipulated that a huge sum of cash be donated to our farm. I’m not at liberty to discuss the numbers publicly, but it’s enough to keep us open. This wasn’t her money; it was her parents, but they respected her wishes, and it’s been suggested that they enhanced the final amount. We just couldn’t believe it. Because of us, they are now living a lot less comfortably, and our lives have never been better. We just found out about it last week. If you had interviewed me before that, I wouldn’t have anything to tell you, because I didn’t otherwise know Viola. She seemed to know quite a bit about us, though. Not only did she have her parents send the money, but it also came with a pretty detailed business plan that could help us use the donation wisely, and keep the farm afloat indefinitely. I mean, you should see this thing; it’s a real business plan, and it doesn’t even require us to get a loan from the bank. It goes over other businesses we could start, like turning it into a destination venue, and a bed and breakfast. I don’t know how to repay them.

Microstory 1074: Guy

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I’ve always hated my first name, but I hate my middle name even more. I’ve thought about starting to spell it G-A-I, but I’m not Jewish, so would that be really insensitive? I would really like to just come up with something better and unrelated for people to call me, but it’s really important to my father, because it was really important to my mother, who died in childbirth. I don’t wanna talk about that, though, because it’s a difficult topic, as you can imagine. It also has nothing to do with this story, so I don’t know why I mentioned it. Let’s talk about Viola, which is what you’re doing here. The cosmos has finally given me permission to tell you the story of what happened between us; how she not only saved my life, but that of everyone at the school. I had recently returned from a trip to another country. It’s kind of racist if I just tell you which continent I went to, but it’s even worse if I name the nation itself, because it’s not their fault. It’s mine, and I take full responsibility, and I thank the goddess every day that she fixed it for me. I came back with a really bad virus that Viola said didn’t even have a name. Well, I didn’t know I had it before I went to school one day, and by the time I started presenting symptoms, it had spread throughout the whole school. I mean, this thing worked quickly. It took at least a day for me to show any sign of it, but only two hours before everyone else did. No one actually died, but it was becoming quite clear to me, and confirmed by Viola herself, that that’s where it was headed. I recalled rumors that Viola could cure diseases, so I hoped she would do it for us, but she said she didn’t have the bandwidth for that many people. It was impossible to contain when you factor in temporary contractors, and seniors who sneak off campus. Fortunately, there was a solution. I just don’t really understand it.

Apparently, whatever virus I had was lying dormant in my system, and only reacted to something in the school, or maybe it was the school itself? She said I could have spent years with it, and it not cause any problems until I walked back into that building. I was, like, what, was the school built on a hellmouth? She didn’t laugh at this, nor did she act like she didn’t know the reference. She just stayed silent. Anyway, she tried to explain what she would have to do to save everybody’s life, but I don’t exactly have a doctorate in temporal mechanics, so most of it went over my head. If I’m understanding this correctly, she reversed time, and then placed me in a pocket dimension. No one at the school realized that anything was different, but that’s not what solved it, because then history would just repeat itself. So she also created a pocket dimension, which was an exact replica of the school, and only the school. I was the only one there, except for Viola, and one other student. Lottie somehow managed to show up, and had no clue what was going on. I think I did infect her, but Viola was able to cure just this one person. I dunno. Maybe everyone at the school was in the pocket dimension, and the three of us were still in the real world. I’ve heard people talk about something called the upside down. Is that a thing? I don’t watch science fiction movies, so I couldn’t begin to follow the logic. The point is that the next day, everything was totally cool. I was cured, Lottie was cured, and no one knew what I did. I only bring it up now, because it just feels right. If not for Viola Woods, your family wouldn’t have been able to safely move here. The world deserves to know that.

Microstory 1073: George Highfill

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I’m taking a quick break from this series to talk about a man I once knew. My grandfather, George Benham Highfill, pictured here, died yesterday. He was 26 days from turning 94. I know his birthday well, because I share it with him. He is survived by a wife of 69 years, four children, and several grandchildren, including my sister. He took ill last week after battling a multitude of health issues for the last few years, and it started looking like he wasn’t going to last very long. I went by his apartment nearly every day since to visit, but he wasn’t always lucid. In his mind, he was either a superintendent in central Kansas, or a sailor in the Second Great War. If you’ve read any of my salmonverse stories, where it’s fairly obvious I’ve written myself into the narrative, now you know why I chose to call myself The Superintendent. It’s perfect, because while it may sound like a king, or some other kind of leader, that’s not really what it means. Superintendents are there to help, and fix problems. They are a singular voice of order in a chaotic microcosm of differing points of view, and contradictory agendas. They make sure everyone is heard, and has everything they need. Superintendents protect. In this way, they’re very much like Viola Woods, and what she stood for. My grandfather was an actual superintendent of schools, and as you can imagine, this kept him quite busy. So when it was time for him to go, because he was in so much pain, it was difficult for him to let go, because he thought he had too much work yet to complete. Yesterday evening, I drove to his apartment, where I found him asleep, and unable to wake up. I gave him a hug, whispered a goodbye, and that was the last time I saw him alive. A few hours later, I got the call, and I returned to help make arrangements with my family. Services will not be held until July, specifically so that my sister will be able to attend. He was very clear on his wishes, which makes sense, because the most important thing to him was his family. I’m going to miss you, Gandaddy.

Microstory 1072: Lottie

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Let me tell you about a dream I once had. I know, I know; nobody’s interested in listening to other people’s dreams, but I promise that it’s relevant to your question about my relationship with Viola. Most of my dreams can be pretty fantastical and bizarre, and this was no exception, but it started out so normal that it felt like any regular day. I woke up, got dressed, and went to school. I was the only one there, though. I didn’t even hear a vacuum, or the chanting of the magic club. I checked my phone, and it wasn’t the weekend. There also wasn’t some nationally recognized holiday. There should have been no reason for the school to be closed. I was about to leave when I heard singing. I waited to listen, and discovered that the singing was getting closer. Someone I couldn’t see was walking towards me, down the empty hallway. I turned around and watched as Viola literally faded into view out of nowhere, and as soon as she did, the singing stopped. I asked her what was going on, and she said that school had been cancelled for no reason at all. Everyone should have gotten the message, and she didn’t understand why I missed it. I was just surprised to be the only one. You would think at least one other student fell through the cracks. I then asked her what she was doing there, and just like her, she said it was her job to tell me what was happening. Anyway, I don’t have anything better to do, so we spend the day together there. We watch a movie that we find in one of the English classrooms; I can’t remember what it was. We conduct ultimately disappointing unauthorized experiments in the chemistry lab, and we fix a car in the industrial arts wing. I am about the furthest a person can be from a mechanic, but we worked on it for a long time, and got it running again. Looking back, that probably messed with someone’s assignment, but we figured we were helping.

I don’t know why we did all this, or what it was meant to accomplish. This didn’t have an incredibly profound affect on my life, and I didn’t really change for the better. It was a lot of fun, and I’m glad it happened, but what we did that day wasn’t the weirdest part. The weirdest part was that after what would have been normal school hours, I went back home, and never woke up. I experienced time exactly as it was meant to be experienced, I could read text that I had never seen before, and when I needed to use the restroom, I was fully able to. These are all common signs that you are not dreaming. That’s the first twist. I lied to you, because this was not a dream at all. This actually happened, and at no point did I believe it wasn’t real, until we reached the second twist. The second twist is that not a single person had any recollection of a day off of school. I tried to tell people about it once classes resumed the next day, but they had no idea what I was talking about. We all knew it was Thursday, and I had memories of being only one of two people here on the Wednesday prior, but everyone else thought things had gone on as normal. They could even recall information they learned in their Wednesday classes. But I know I wasn’t dreaming, and when I asked Viola about it, she refused to explain fully, but did assure me that I was the one with the right memories, and it was everyone else whose minds were messed up. I never did figure out why it was this happened, but I always attributed it to her, and now I know it must have been. If you ever learned how she did this, or why, please let me know. She must have had a good reason.

Microstory 1071: Mamie

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Viola and I were friends when we were kids, but we haven’t been very close since then. Morbidly, we used to hang out by Masters Creek. Obviously, I had no idea it would become the site of her death, but I’m pretty sure she did. Back then, she was sort of trying out this thing where she led a normal life, and socialized with others. She was practically born knowing what she was, and that she needed to dedicate her life to helping others, but she didn’t think she could do that if she didn’t first learn about humans. J-K, she was technically human, but not entirely. Anyway, as it turns out, she had the right idea, because once she got older, she started investigating her purpose, and finding what she could on others like her. All of them were born like her; knowing that they walked amongst us, but were not one of us, and they allowed themselves to be drawn into that superiority complex. They helped people too, for sure, but they did so coldly, clinically. They didn’t actually care about anyone, which prevented them from helping people in more creative ways. The reason most of her classmates have at least one specific story about her is because we were the ones she saw everyday, and impacted her the most. At some point in those early days, she realized that spending too much time with me was starting to give her diminishing returns. She knew everything about what it would take to help me, but not enough about humanity in general. I was saddened by this revelation, but I understood. It would have been wrong of me to try to keep her all to myself, so I let her go out into the world. So, when you go through these later interviews, and hear people talk about being friends with her, don’t forget that she actually did not have any real friends. She was too busy for that. A relationship is a two-way street, but she could fly. That’s all I’ll say on the matter. If you really wanna know who Viola Woods was, you should talk to her directly.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: October 18, 2225

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Sharice Prieto was holding her hands over Leona’s eyes, and guiding her down the hallway. Leona’s best guess was that this was her half-birthday celebration, though that was at the beginning of this month, so maybe not that. Perhaps Brooke and Sharice had gotten a taste of parties, and now wanted to throw one whenever, and didn’t feel like they needed a reason. Or maybe this was a completely unrelated surprise that wasn’t a party at all. When finally Sharice removed her hands, Leona found herself standing face to face with some woman she didn’t know, and that woman did not look happy. “Hello,” she said simply.

“Whatever,” the other woman replied.

“I’m Leona Matic.”

“I know who you are.” Now after saying a few extra words, Leona realized she recognized the voice. It was the current incarnation of The Caster, a.k.a. Sanaa Karimi.

“I thought you were on Earth.”

Sanaa scowled at Sharice, and then at Brooke, who was standing unfazed in the corner. “I was, before I was kidnapped.”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” Brooke argued with her. “You agreed to come here.”

“I was coerced,” Sanaa snapped back.

“Could someone please tell me what’s happening?” Leona requested.

Brooke stepped forward from her corner. “Miss Karimi is capable of communicating telepathically with anyone in the observable universe.”

“Allegedly,” Sanaa corrected.

“True,” Brooke conceded. “Her scope has not been fully tested. But we do know of some limits. She can speak with anyone as long as she’s given a really good idea of where it is they are. The fewer other people there are in the area, the better, which means to contact anyone on Earth, she needs pretty precise coordinates.”

“Unless...” Sharice prompted.

“Unless,” Brooke echoed, “she finds a special connection to that person. She could know them personally, or be within arm’s length of someone who does. The stronger the personal connection, the better.”

“You can find Mateo?” Leona hoped.

“I might be able to, as long as you love him enough.” She expressed faux disconfidence in that being the case.

“Oh, I do.”

“Then I will seek him out,” Sanaa said reluctantly. “Since I’m already on this...where the f— am I again?” She self-censored.

“Bungula.”

“Jungula? That’s a stupid name.”

They didn’t bother correcting her. They just let her close her eyes, and concentrate on gathering her qi, or whatever it was she needed. Before too long, she sighed, frustrated. “There’s bad energy in here. I need meditate first. Could you do that? Could you give me that?”

“Of course, madam,” Brooke said rudely.

The three of them left the room so the Caster could do her thing.

“How did you get her here?” Leona started questioning them.

“I reached out to an old contact of mine using the quantum messenger,” Brooke said. “He put us in touch with someone who could build a single-occupancy ship for her.”

“That was only five years ago,” Leona pointed out. “And five years ago, we could really only go point-eight-c.”

“The humans can only go point-eight-c,” Sharice acknowledged. “Still, salmon and choosers regularly travel at faster-than-light speeds on their own, and Hokusai Gimura now knows how to build a lightspeed engine.”

“Oh, wow.” She wasn’t impressed that Hokusai could build a lightspeed ship, because that was a well-known fact. What impressed her was her friends’ dedication to helping her find her long-lost husband. This was so much better than a half-birthday party.

“She actually based the design on the same one she used to get to Durus when she went looking for her daughter,” Brooke added.

“We arranged for Sana to arrive the day before you returned to the timestream,” Sharice went on, “but that’s no longer relevant.

“Still,” Brooke said, “we kept her a secret until today, just for the nostalgia.”

“Remember when you used to only exist one day every year?”

“No, I don’t recall that,” Leona joked.

“All right, I’m ready!” they could hear Sanaa call out to them. “So, come back in already! Geeze!” She didn’t sound very naturally unpleasant, but it was more like she just wanted people to hate her.

They returned to the other room, and Leona let Sanaa rest her hands on Leona.

“Okay, think of the person you’re trying to contact.” She started getting a little too comfortable with Leona, but the latter didn’t know how much of it was necessary, so she let it happen. “Think about his face; the shape of his jawline, color of his eyes. The feel of his hair. Think about the sound of his voice when he’s angry with you, his posture when he’s watching his favorite movie. Think about his smell when he only wants one thing from you, and he’ll do anything to get just one. Taste. Of—”

“That’s enough,” Brooke stopped her. “Make the connection, or you’re gonna find out why some choosers choose to lose their time powers to become transhumans.”

The Caster backed up a little, but bit her lower lip, and kept her bedroom eyes on. “Everything I said may have been a little inappropriate, but it can’t hurt, so go ahead and hold onto those dirty thoughts.”

Leona wasn’t as uncomfortable as someone else in her position might have been, so she did continue to picture everything about Mateo she could remember.

Sanaa lifted her hands, and massaged Leona’s earlobes. “Focus,” she said in a breathy voice. “Leave your body behind, and go to...” Then it clicked. “Dardius.”

She could feel her mind being torn from its home in her brain, and traveling at superluminal speeds. Through the galaxy, into the void, and across another galaxy; Andromeda XXI. To a planet with suspiciously similar specifications as Earth, right down to approximate land mass ratio, and speed of continental drift. Her mind floated in the air awhile, before falling down towards a region known as Sutvindr, where they found one Mateo Matic. He was addressing a crowd of hundreds in an outdoor auditorium. They were all very happy to be there.

“Whoa,” Mateo said.

“Sir, are you okay?” a woman in a suit and sunglasses at his flank asked him with concern.

“Leona, is that you?” Mateo asked.

The crowd fell dead silent, and exchanged looks.

“Mateo, yes, it’s me.”

“We’re talking telepathically,” he said.

“That’s right. You don’t have to say it out loud.”

“It’s pretty hard for me to do that,” he explained.

“Why did you not go through the Nexus?”

“A lot has changed since you left. Listen, are you and Serif okay? Did you make it to Gatewood, or are you on your way?”

Leona sighed. “Serif should be on her way, but we are not in communication. I’m still on Bungula.”

“If I were to leave Dardius right now, how long would it be before I could see you again?” Mateo asked her.

The crowd was listening intently to the one side of the conversation they could hear. Who were these people?

“Rigil Kentaurus is about six-point-four-eight-nine light years from Barnard’s Star. I believe I have access to lightspeed technology now, so. Ya know. Six-point-four-eight-nine years.”

“Are you experiencing realtime, like me? That’s a long time to wait now.”

“It is, yes. Can you leave now?”

Mateo didn’t answer for a moment. He then lifted his head back up, and looked to the crowd. “Wadya guys think? Are you ready for a new Patronus?”

“What is a Patronus?”

“I’ll explain later,” he mumbled out the corner of his mouth.

“Is...is that Leona on the phone right now?” asked some random guy.

“The telepathy-phone, yes,” Mateo confirmed.

“Tell her we love her!” cried out another random fan, prompting everyone to cheer. The woman in the suit, along with the other suits standing next to him, tensed up, and took defensive positions.

“She can hear you!” Mateo announced.

The crowd cheered even louder.

“Are you, like, their leader?”

“For now,” Mateo whispered as he was waving and smiling at his people.

Suddenly, a gargantuan jumbo screen appeared in the sky, like something out of The Hunger Games franchise. “You have no idea how true that is,” said a man on the screen. His face was obscured by darkness. “Your reign is over.”

Mateo’s guards tried to pull him off stage, but he held his hand up. “Wait.”

“I’m not going to hurt you,” promised the man on the screen. “I’m just going to clip your wings. You were chosen to experience time at a particular rate, and your lizard buddy has corrupted that.” He stepped out of frame, and revealed a man tied to a chair, with a bag over his head. Another obscured individual had a gun trained on him. The first man returned, but in the background, so he could pull the hood from their hostage.

“Who is that?” Leona asked.

“Newt,” Mateo answered. “He’s who took us off our pattern.”

The hostage-taker went on. “Now, we have no personal qualms with this man. But he is an ally of our enemy. Your Patronus is meant to live for only one day a year, and in the time he’s been around when he wasn’t meant to be, he has...domesticated us. We were a superior race, and he destroyed our advantage.”

“You agreed to that!” Mateo argued.

“I agreed to nothing!” He calmed himself down after the outburst. “We are not angry that the Dardieti did not welcome us with open arms. Nor do we believe that this world is somehow our birthright. We are, however, going to take it anyway. We do not believe in this peace; we believe in winning. The was is going to begin again, and it starts with neutering your leader. He can’t help you if he doesn’t exist.” He looked over at his accomplice. “Do it,” he ordered.

“Shut it down! Now!” Mateo’s main bodyguard ordered her wrist.

Theoretically, just before the gun went off that killed Newt, the screen blinked away. Too concerned with his safety to follow his orders, his bodyguards finally dragged him offstage, and down a maze of hallways.

“Missus Matic, I do apologize to cut your call short, but we’re going to have to sever your connection. It’s a matter of global security. Give me the visor,” she ordered one of her team members.

“Wait,” Leona pleaded. Were I you!”

“Were I you,” Mateo said back.

The last thing Leona’ saw through Mateo’s eyes was a device that resembled a throwing disc, in the midst of being placed over her husband’s head. This broke the connection, and sent her mind back to its body. The force of being kicked out was powerful enough to send her backwards to the floor. Sharice caught her in plenty of time, while Brooke did the same for Sanaa.

“What happened?” Sharice asked. “Did you find him?”

Leona got back to her feet and massaged her temples. “I’m going to need the ship that brought Miss Karimi here. I absolutely must get to Gatewood as soon as possible.”

“Not with my ship, you’re not,” Sanaa contended. “I’m taking it back to Earth. The deal was I come here, and make a call for you, then I get to go back home.”

Leona weighed her options. “That’ll work too,” she determined. “I can go anywhere in the universe from Earth.”

“Well, you’re gonna have to be able to leave today, because that’s when I’m going.”

“You can wait a week for us to retrofit the vessel for a second occupant,” Brooke said to her.

“She doesn’t have a week,” Sanaa said, “and I don’t have a year. She’s just been put back on her original salmon pattern.”

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Proxima Doma: Backfill (Part II)

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“So, instead of using my construction power, you want me to use my time traveling power?” Étude asked.

“Why would you need to do that?” Vitalie volleyed.

“The reason the original Savior program worked is because the powers that be could see the future. They would send me, and my predecessors, to save people who they knew were going to be in need of it. We don’t have that intel, so I would have to go back in time each time something bad happened.”

“Oh, I didn’t think of that. I guess I was just considering your teleportation ability, which you still possess. But yeah, of course you couldn’t have done your job all alone. But would that be so bad? I know you don’t like to time travel, but maybe for these emergencies...”

Étude shook her head. “It would get out of hand. In a few days, there could be several versions of me running around this planet. I could overtake the whole population in months.”

“I can think of worse things that a few extra Études,” Vitalie noted.

“It would threaten my identity. I still want to feel unique; maybe even more so because of what I can do.”

“Well, how do other time travelers deal with this scenario?”

“Some just go their separate ways, and don’t ever see each other again. Some Past!Versions don’t even know a Future!Version of them exists. I once found myself in this freaky dimension populated by hundreds of one person. Every time he had to make a correction to the timeline, he would step into this little pocket universe, and let his primary move on with his life. I also knew this woman who wore a suicide belt at all times, and would sacrifice herself, so there would only ever be one version of her. And then there’s...”

“Then there’s what?” Vitalie prompted.

Étude was reluctant to answer. “You can also merge. Most people merge.”

“What does that mean? Isn’t that the thing where two separate places are put together? I heard about a guy who could do that.”

“That’s a merge, yes, but a different kind. Though, I suppose you could argue they operate on the same principle. Where a triality merge—that is, a coming together of mind, body, and soul—differs from a spatial merge is in its permanence, and its existential incertitude. If two people wanted to merge—”

“You mean two versions of the same person,” Vitalie tried to correct.

“Well, I’m not really up for explaining why there’s no such thing as an alternate version, except to say that, as far as quantum physics goes, reality doesn’t consider two alternates any more alike than any other two people. So if two people want to merge, they first have to map their neural pathways. Then they have to overlay one brain pattern over the other, and find a way to fit them together, so a third consciousness emerges, based on equal parts of both. Then the soul, if it exists at all, has to latch itself to one of the bodies, while every single atom from the other body is teased away, isolated, and returned to the cosmos.”

“You mean, they die.”

Étude nodded. “Yes. One person—well, one body—has to essentially win the merge, but they sort of die too, because the resulting consciousness is no more or less them than it is the so-called loser. They both die, and in doing so, birth a new being into existence. It’s not very zen.”

“So, that’s why that woman wears a suicide belt.”

“At least she dies knowing someone who is almost exactly like her still gets to live, and without the troubling memories she formed that led her to going back in time in the first place. To her, a merge is more frightening than death.” The thought made Étude shiver.

“What if you...” Vitalie wanted to suggest something, but didn’t know if it would be appropriate.

“Go on,” Étude pressed. She wanted Vitalie to know she could say anything to her.

“What if you merged your mind without involving the body?”

“How so?”

“Well, what if you send your mind back in time, right into your younger self’s body.”

“Ah, you’re talking about consciousness travel. There are some philosophical debates around that one. I’ve heard of a few people who have that power, and the question is, is that necessarily any different than an extremely detailed and vivid method of seeing the future? We all agree that future-sight does not place one’s identity in danger, so is this any worse? You’re still killing someone, and taking over their body, though, so that’s not great. Alas, it does not matter, because I do not have this power.”

Vitalie was silent for a moment and a half. “I kind of do.”

Étude stopped to think about this. “Well, you can send your consciousness to other places, but not into other people’s brains, or something.”

“That’s exactly what I do. I can’t just send my mind anywhere. I have to attach it to a person. I’m not really standing next to them, invisible. I’m in their head.”

Étude thought about this some more. “Huh. You’re also a consciousness traveler, but without a time travel component.”

“I heard of something somebody called...cooperative magic.”

“That’s a feature in an old TV show and book series, since magic isn’t real. But I know what you’re talking about. It’s when two people with different powers combine them to do something neither could do on their own. My mother’s partner, Vearden went through that once. What are you saying, that I take us back in time, and you send just our minds, into our younger bodies?”

“If we can’t see the future, like the powers that be apparently can, then that’s our only way to restart the Savior program.”

“I haven’t agreed to that.”

“Because you didn’t think it could be done. I’m offering you a solution.”

“You’re offering a potential solution. We don’t know if it would work, or if I want it to work, or that it won’t come with its own unforeseen consequences. I have reason to believe there’s good reason I’m retired.”

Vitalie didn’t know what she meant by the last part, but she put a pin in it. “We should test it.”

Étude looked around, for no reason in particular. “If it were going to work, it already would have.”

“What do you mean?”

“We should be dead by now. Future versions of ourselves should have returned, overwritten our consciousnesses, and it would be done.”

“From our perspective, that can’t happen unless we make it happen. We have to do it first, even though it happens in the future.”

“Okay, fine. We’ll ignore the paradox, and give it a shot. Take my hands, and we shall attempt to combine our powers, and send our minds to one hour ago.”

“No, I don’t want to do it like that,” Vitalie argued. “If only one of us manages to make it through, they’re going to have to explain this whole thing to the other. Let’s do it tomorrow, so we at least don’t negate this conversation.”

Étude shrugged. “That’s fine with me. I’m not all that confident in it anyway.”

Vitalie nodded understandingly, but then she stopped and stared into space for a not insignificant amount of time.

“Are you okay?”

Vitalie blinked once slowly. “Okay, so I was right. Only one of us did make it through, but it was not the one I thought.”

“What are you talking about?” Étude questioned.

“I’m from twenty-four hours in the future,” Future!Vitalie explained. “I don’t know why you couldn’t come with me, but it did technically work.”

“It did? You’ve come from the future, into your younger body, and you have full memory of what is going to happen throughout the next day.”

“That’s right.”

“All right, now we can test it.”

“We just did.”

“We have to test its effects first, in case it’s done something weird to your brain, or mine, for that matter. Then we have to do it again, and make sure the experiment can be repeated, and its results reproduced.”

“That sounds like a lot of work.”

“You’re going to have to get used to it, because if what happened the first time happens every time, it’s going to turn out that I was not actually the last person to hold my title.”

Vitalie was confused. “Who else would it be?”

“It’s you, dummy. You’ve just backfilled my position. You are the Last Savior.”

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