Microstory 1180: Beth-Anne McAlister

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Beth-Anne McAlister, who didn’t allow anyone to just call her Beth, or Anne, was a normal human being, born in a very old timeline. She remembers watching the news when it was reported that a man with the power to temporarily erase obstacles to his path was using his ability to rescue miners trapped under a cave-in. He didn’t physically move the earth from on top of them. He just made it so that it wasn’t there, but only long enough to allow a pulley system to be lowered down, and all the survivors to be lifted up. Then he put it right back. After that, more people with special time powers started appearing. A woman who claimed to be a Savior of Earth came into the spotlight, and her apparently inherent side ability to erase people’s memories of her good deeds was suppressed. A couple of magicians finally outed themselves, revealing that they weren’t just using tricks, but actually instantaneously transporting volunteers across the stage. As it turned out, the world was full of these people; some good, some not so great. New legislation was passed in most countries to deal with these new possible crimes that most did not know was possible before. Though the world changed dramatically, it was hard to determine whether it had gotten better, or worse. For every good deed, there was a bad one; just like it always was, even before the secret got out. Beth-Anne was not in a position of power, but she chose to create a platform for herself, warning the world of what could happen if these people were not heavily regulated. She turned out to be right, when a particularly angry time traveler went back to before she was born, and killed her mother as a child, Terminator style. Fortunately for Beth-Anne, she had followers from all walks of life. Not everyone with time powers felt the same way about how they should be handled, and relatively few would have condoned the killer’s actions. One man, who could make himself aware of alternate timelines, sought help from an ally, and still in Terminator fashion, sent himself backwards in time to stop the killer, thus creating yet another new timeline.

The protector continued to keep watch over Beth-Anne, making sure she survived through adulthood, and he allowed her to voice her concerns to the public, just as she had before. At all times, she wore a bracelet that has since been lost to temporal changes, which prevented her personal past from being altered too significantly. But the protector could see that this would not be enough. The world just kept getting worse. War broke out between the two sides, and the humans stood no chance. Any sufficiently violent time traveler could wipe out any opposing force before it could even begin to gather. So he used his ability on Beth-Anne, transforming her into a different kind of person. Beth-Anne would always be born, no matter what any temporal manipulator tried to do in the past. She would always be able to remember her alternate lives, and she would always be free to make her own decisions. The biggest decision she made was to prevent that first choosing one from choosing to save those people in the mine. She explained to him why she had to do this, and he accepted it. He wanted to help people; not break reality. Unfortunately, Beth-Anne knew that his position was not shared by all. There was too much of a risk of it happening again, and not all timelines would benefit from at least getting its start with an example of a choosing one who wanted to do good. She built a prison, called it Beaver Haven, and became its warden. She didn’t care about time traveling criminals, per se. She was only worried about exposure. Good or bad, if any chooser or salmon risked the prosperity of the world by revealing their power to a high enough degree to risk everyone’s secrecy, she would lock them up. There was a little bit of trial and error with this. She eventually devised a decent system of monitoring for exposures, reversing time, and changing the recent past, and because she was protected, no one could stop her. She knew not everyone would agree with her goals, and certainly not her methods, but she was convinced this was the only way to keep members on both sides safe. The world of humans, and the world of temporal manipulators had to stay separate. Perhaps she was right, but not all of her choices would be good. Her ability to recall events from alternate realities had terrible consequences for her mind, and over time, it made her lose her sense of morality. That was still hope, though.

Microstory 1179: The Archivist

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Nick Fisherman IV’s name came from Nick Fisherman III, who unwittingly took it from Nick Fisherman II, who adopted it in honor of the original. He didn’t much like the name, or rather he didn’t like that his parents felt they had no choice but to give it to him. He was pretty much always aware that he was a character in a story. That didn’t mean he wasn’t real, but it made him feel like he wasn’t in control of his life, which he wasn’t. For some reason, most people he met just assumed that he was a choosing one, who volunteered to keep track of all the temporal manipulators, and their associates. In reality, he was nothing more than a salmon; bound to his duty. His only escape from this responsibility, he felt, was alcohol. Unfortunately, from his perspective, it took a lot for him to get drunk, and even more for him to wake up hungover. As a salmon, the powers that be protected him from certain threats to his wellbeing, including intoxication. He could do it, but he had to drink a lot more than other people with his metabolism for it to have any effect. When he wasn’t drunk, he actually preferred to be hungover, because focusing on the physical pain distracted from his psychological pain. It was his job to create and manage every file for every individual, and he hated it. It was dismally tedious, and people didn’t take him seriously. He had this idea in his head that they were enamored by The Historian, but the truth was that few cared enough about either of them. For most, history and staffing just weren’t sexy. The Archivist chose to do his work poorly, hoping the powers would get frustrated with him, and replace him with someone else. They never did, though, because as it turned out, his incompetence was quite entertaining. Many problems could be solved with the right intelligence, so if it was too easy to gather this intelligence, then the universe wouldn’t be very interesting. He had no choice but to make the best with what he had, as boring as that was.

Microstory 1178: Dr. Mallory Hammer

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Mallory Hammer was a time traveler. While other people had interesting niches or limitations, her power was pretty simple. She could move back and forth through time at will. She also had pretty good aim, which was good, because when she did jump through time, it was very important when and where she landed. The only use she found for her ability at first was to get a really good education, or rather, more like an array of education. She was born in the late twentieth century, which meant she could easily receive an early twenty-first century medical degree. She did not believe this was enough, however, if she wanted to be the best doctor in histories. She couldn’t just rely on future medical advancements either, though. For one thing, much of medicine in the future is done by nanotechnology, and other forms of automation. Future doctors just don’t know a whole lot about the practice of medicine. They mostly know how to operate the machinery, and even further in the future, human medical professionals do not even exist at all. So her education was done in three waves. She learned what she could in her own time, then jumped to the future with a new identity to learn more, and find a source of highly advanced tech. Then she went into the past, to learn the ways doctors did it long ago. This was the most difficult for her, being a woman, and also having to listen to people claim ridiculous things could be used to cure ailments, like like leeches. Still, she felt it was important to understand their misconceptions, not just for the sake of it, but also for practical reasons. If she wanted to help people in the past, she couldn’t exactly use a handheld MRI machine, or something. She had to do it in a way they were familiar with. Of course, that didn’t mean she couldn’t sneak in pills that wouldn’t exist for years. If she didn’t find a clever way to help them, then there was really no point in not just letting normal doctors take care of it. After spending an unknown amount of time as a time traveling doctor, Mallory started realizing this wasn’t doing the world much good. No matter how much she traveled, she was still only one person, and could only help so many others. She ended up just becoming a doctor for other temporal manipulators; aiding in both their physical, and psychiatric needs. She commissioned The Switcher to make her a communication system, so that anyone, anywhen, with her number could contact her for help on a special time pager. She didn’t really have a home base, but she would sometimes spend a significant amount of time, stationed in one place. She also did a fair amount of research into time travel, and its effects on the human body, because apparently, no one had thought to look into that before.

Microstory 1177: Ildemire Lorenz

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Ildemire Lorenz was a writer, but more than that, he was a researcher. He was obsessed with gathering and organizing information. He was born on the wrong planet, though, because Earth had been working on such an endeavor since at least 1998. Ildemire was a Durune, and while he enjoyed a vague connection to all information in the multiverse, he didn’t really have access to it. There was just so much information, and it was so fuzzy, that he couldn’t actually use it. Unless he wrote it down. He realized he could channel the secrets of reality by externalizing it. Now, he could do this via spoken word, if he wanted. If someone were to ask him a question, the answer to which was locked away somewhere remote, in the head of someone far removed from Ildemire’s present, he could answer correctly. But if he wanted to just reflect on this truth, he would not be able to. He had to let it out, or his brain couldn’t process it at all. This made his life quite frustrating. He didn’t much like talking to himself, let alone anyone else, not that he wanted to necessarily involve other people in his precious secrets anyway. He couldn’t write it all down either. Even if he were immortal, there wasn’t enough time in any given universe to create an encyclopedia for all universes. He had to find a way to take all this information at once, and put it all in one place. He scavenged the First Town for old technology, hoping to cobble together a means of maintaining a database. He didn’t really understand how any of it worked, though, which meant he was neither able to create even a small operable storage device, nor fathom how much memory that would require in the first place.

After years of failing at everything he tried, an associate suggested he go at it from a different angle. There was no need to bring all that information to one place; it was perfectly fine where it was. All he needed was a way to call upon that information on an as-needed basis. Basically, the information network was already there. He just needed to build a computer that could connect to it. He drove himself deeper into his work, unavoidably isolating himself from everyone who knew him. He developed a reputation of being a recluse, a nihilist, and even possibly a sociopath. Some called him autistic. None of this was accurate, nor fair. He wasn’t as apathetic as people thought. People actually only assumed this about him, because he was so passionate about his ideas, that he didn’t have the bandwidth to care about anything else. When he started a project, he had to finish. This was his greatest project ever, because it was finally going to work. After years of searching his own mind’s link to the cosmos, for anyone’s insight into this matter, he completed the first draft of what he called the Time Book. This book was limited in scope. He couldn’t figure out how to codify all the knowledge ever, but he did find a way to do so with all the other written words. Many more things are known that are not authored, but at least this was a start. He didn’t know what he was going to do with this book, or if he would ever let anyone else read it, but he knew that it wasn’t enough. Now knowing that at least part of his dream was possible, he almost immediately started working on the second edition. He died without ever having finished it, but his final thoughts were of peace, because he came to realize that no one needed to know everything anyway.

Microstory 1176: Limbani Arendse

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Source mage, Limbani Arendse was known as the strong one. She was physically stronger than a lot of her peers, sure, but what made her truly strong was her resilience. Her childhood may have been the hardest out of all the source mages. There were severe complications during her birth, which ultimately killed her mother, and nearly took Limbani before she could even open her eyes. She continued to have problems as a newborn, which probably would have been easy to correct back on Earth, but this was Durus. The medical facilities that made it through the Deathfall were limited in scope, and the medical professionals who survived the harsh environment long enough to see the pregnancy through were not very well equipped to handle the situation. Still, little Limbani kept fighting, and of course, came out on top. She was the least receptive to Smith’s grooming, and could see him for what he was, even when she was young. She made sure the other source mages could think for themselves, and didn’t just trust everyone who told them what they wanted to hear. There were always plenty of people to take care of her, since Springfield was isolated, and everyone sort of had to come together and pitch in, but she stopped needing it early on. She was exceptionally independent, and self-taught in a number of skilled fields. She liked to stand sentry on the town’s borders, and hike the Scarside Mountains in her free time, even though they were forbidden. She wasn’t the leader of the other source mages, but if there was ever a disagreement, whichever side she backed was usually the winner. When they were older, she was the one who came up with the idea of the mage games. She always had to fight for what she felt she deserved, so she thought it was only fair that candidates for time powers would have to do the same. She worked with some of the brightest minds to engineer effective and tolerable challenges for the competition. She never let a single one of these challenges move forward unless she personally made her way through it, and ensured that it surpassed her standards. She passionately believed in the rules, as long as they didn’t interfere with her self-growth or independence, and she never wavered in her convictions.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 8, 2246

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When a future version of Arcadia Preston—who was evidently good now, and using her not-so-gentle nature to protect various other universes from the white monsters of Ansutah—asked Mateo if he could handle tricking her past self, he was confident he could. The crew of the Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez had this whole plan lined up. They didn’t know when she was going to show up on their ship, but they were pretty sure she’d time it to not be there until Mateo returned to the timestream. She would be focusing all of her attention on Mateo, and perhaps Cassidy, since she was a pretty perceptive person, and would likely pick up on the tension between them. She would be wary of Weaver too, since Holly Blue could theoretically invent something to defeat Arcadia. No one really knew if she had any limits. Goswin and Thor were thusly the safest. Neither of them would be on Arcadia’s radar, but since Thor had some experience kicking ass, he was the obvious choice.

Surprisingly, Thor agreed without question to be the secret attacker. He didn’t much like Mateo, nor anyone else really, but he might have had a bit of a hero complex. He knew that, if anyone was strong enough to get the jump on someone powerful enough to alter reality with a thought, it was him. He was free to choose his moment, but once he decided, he had to commit. He was to sneak up behind her while her attention was on Mateo, and jam the memory-altering drug into the back of her neck. It apparently worked a little bit like the flashy thingies in the Men in Black franchise. The solution contained Arcadia’s sister’s sweat, so it could draw memories from alternate realities, but in order for that to take hold, they had to get rid of the real memories. And the only way to do that was to reinforce the false ones with spoken word. After Thor did his thing, Goswin was going to use his diplomatic experience to weave a story about how Arcadia had come here to punish Mateo for having crashed his own wedding in the past. He didn’t have to be too specific about what she thought she had done to him, because her brain would fill in the rest, but he had to be convincing.

None of this truly worked, and it was almost as if Arcadia knew all of it was coming. Once she appeared, she was immediately drawn to Mateo, and started asking him about who Cassidy was. So she didn’t seem to know everything about the timeline, which was at least a small miracle. Thor came up behind her, quiet as a mute mouse, and stuck the jet injector into her neck. She did indeed act like she felt it, but Nerakali’s sweat wasn’t the only ingredient in it. There were also good old narcotics, which caused her to be loopy and agreeable, and also immediately forget having received the injection at all. Goswin spun his tale, and she accepted it. Then she smiled triumphantly, and declared victory over Mateo. He would never do anything like that again. They never did learn what she thought she had done to him, but it was not anywhere not over. Following her obnoxious gloating, Arcadia tipped an invisible hat, and disappeared. Then she reappeared, from the ladder that led to the engineering section.

Arcadia climbed all the way up the ladder, and started clapping. “Brilliant performance. You had me completely fooled. I really moved on, believing I had punished you, when really, nothing happened at all.”

Dammit. “You get your memories back, sometime later,” Mateo guessed.

Arcadia shook her head. “No. The Arcadia that whoever that guy over there is assaulted really did get false memories. She will never get the right ones. She is going to move on with her expiations on Tribulation Island. Then she’s going to be recruited into the Prototype team, and start killing Maramon with her bare hands in other universes throughout the bulkverse.”

“But she’s not you?” Cassidy asked.

“Quiet,” Mateo whispered. The target on Cassidy’s back was there, simply because Arcadia knew she existed, but they didn’t need to paint another coat, and make it easier to spot.

Unfortunately, of course, Arcadia also picked up on Cassidy’s concern. She didn’t do anything about it yet, though. She just moved on, for now. “No. I was worried. I honestly don’t know what’s happening here. What is this ship? Where are you going? How did you come back into existence after the Superintendent wrote you out of the story? These are the questions I have no answer to now, but I’m not super worried about it either. I didn’t know you would do what you did, but I thought you might try something. Weaver is what tipped me off. I can tell she’s not from this reality, which means she’s not the same naïve young woman who doubts her every move. This Weaver,” she said, pointing to the subject, “is dangerous. She could hurt me, which means I didn’t know what I was walking into. I figured my best bet was to create a quantum duplicate of myself, and watch her initial interaction with you from a safe distance.”

“You’re telling me there are two Arcadias in this reality?” Mateo asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “I never really wanted to do that. People who know me know that I like to be unique, so I’m not in love with the idea of there being some shittier version of me running around here, but fortunately, she doesn’t last much longer. I intend to never return to any time period any other version of me has experienced before. I don’t know what I plan to do with my life, or how you fit into that, but I can tell you that we’re going to have a nice little expiation for you. At least one.”

Arcadia snapped her fingers, and they were suddenly standing on the ground. They didn’t stand for long, though, before gravity overwhelmed them. Mateo felt heavier than he ever had before. “What is this?” he struggled to ask. “I’m being crushed.”

“This...” Arcadia said, still standing, “is Varkas Reflex. It is a super-Earth, and unless you jump into some water, or stand in a mesh dimension, like I am, you’re gonna have a bad time. Right now, your hearts are working overtime to pump blood throughout your respective bodies, and you’re all alive, because those hearts are presently moderately successful at this. Sadly, they will experience diminishing returns, and eventually give out. Your brains will run out of oxygen, and you will die.” She stood in silence for a moment.

No one could speak.

Arcadia waved her hand, and released them from the torture. “But..I don’t want you to die yet. Maybe never. I still need to find out who you are.” She eyed Cassidy.

“Leona is here,” Mateo slipped. Arcadia already knew this, but he didn’t need to point it out.

“Yeah, but you won’t see her. Before you get your hopes up, not being able to see Leona today is not your punishment. It’s just a pleasant bonus for me. No, this will be just like any other expiation, except you’ll only have one day to complete it. Plus, I’m making you choose. Don’t argue, or I’ll make it worse. Whose expiation do you want to complete? Who do you want me to rip out of time, possibly forever?”

This was an impossible choice, but Mateo knew he had to think quickly, or she would get bored, and a bored Arcadia is a scary Arcadia. He cared about everyone here, even Thor. He didn’t know any of them incredibly well, but that didn’t make it any easier to choose. He had to think, though—not who he would rather never see again, but whose challenge would be the easiest to complete. He couldn’t choose Cassidy, because Arcadia would have to look into who Cassidy was to come up with a challenge. Sure, she would probably only make Mateo give everyone else a lapdance, which they would survive, but he wanted to keep Cassidy as safe as possible, for as long as possible. Thor was a runner, but he also helped build colonies on other worlds in Earth’s solar system, so that could get complicated. Weaver was too damn smart, so Arcadia would probably want them to engineer some crazy, complex device from scratch, like when she made them create a map of time and space. They would too easily lose that challenge. What would they have to do to get Goswin back? Give a speech? Moderate a peace summit?

In the end, there was only one good answer, and Mateo hoped she would allow it. He had already not existed for a long time, and knew he could do it again. If his friends weren’t able to succeed in the expiation, this was the least of many evils. It was the least by a lot, because Mateo rarely existed anyway, and when he did, he couldn’t contribute positively to the AOC’s operation. This whole thought process took about ten seconds for Mateo to go through. “Mine.”

Arcadia was only half surprised by this. “I kind of thought you might say that. I considered excluding you as a possibility, because I don’t want you to disappear for good. As you know, I’m not a great person, but I do follow my own rules. If I don’t account for everything, and you find a loophole, I have always honored that, haven’t I?”

She was right; she always had. She never punished them for finding a way to let Leona and Paige use sentimental objects to remember loved ones who were taken out of time. She didn’t separate Mateo from Lincoln, when she realized he too kept his memories. Arcadia was a jerk, but she didn’t lie, and she didn’t go back on her word. “You have, so I expect you to retain that honor. You gave me the responsibility to choose, and you never said I couldn’t choose myself...so I choose myself.”

Arcadia took in a deep breath, and let it out. “Very well. Your friends will have to do something for the entire year, until you return to the timestream. Unlike other expiations, I won’t judge their success or failure myself. You will come back on November 9, 2247, regardless of what they do. The challenge is that they have to last long enough for you to survive when you come back. Their failure could even mean the destruction of your ship, because I won’t just be making them all forget who you are. They won’t even know that someone is missing, or that something is expected of them. They won’t know goddamn anything. I’m going to erase all of their memories. I’m going to make them practically as dumb as you. Let’s see how they fare.”

They fared beautifully.

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Gatewood: Project Topdown (Part II)

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The year is 2240, and it’s time to send the galaxy-class telescope arrays into the void. Eleven telescopes will work in tandem with each other to develop and deliver a clear picture of the entire Milky Way from one side of the relatively flat spiral galaxy. Another array of eleven will be on the other side, doing the exact same thing. This is all necessary so that the Project Stargate ships that are being sent in the next ten years have an idea where they’re going, and where they will be landing their seed plates. The two twin gamma ray detectors are responsible primarily for identifying obstacles, like supernovae, neutron stars, and black holes. These pose a danger to the ships, and might prompt course corrections to avoid them. The X-ray detector’s sole job is to catalogue the galaxy’s pulsars, by which the ships can navigate. If you can find the nearest pulsar, you always know where you are. Three optical telescopes, and two ultraviolet telescopes, work together to seek stars and their orbital bodies, so the quantum network can be mapped. The microwave telescope and radio telescope can help map the Milky Way too, but will mostly be looking for signals that could indicate the presence of intelligent life. The Stargate ships themselves are armed with such equipment as well, in case a particular star system needs to be ignored, or studied more thoroughly. The infrared telescope is the only one that isn’t really part of any of this. It’s going to be facing the opposite direction, just checking out the other galaxies, and relaying this data back to Gatewood.

Kestral, Ishida, and Saxon were not the ones who came up with Project Topdown. Nor did they even design the original plans. The public would be completely all right with the idea of mapping the galaxy from the outside, so the only reason they don’t know about it is because it’s too connected to Project Stargate, which is less socially acceptable. That’s why this is all being done on Gatewood, rather than back home. As Team Keshida was looking over the designs, they realized there were a few flaws. Long ago, Earth came up with the four pillars of spaceflight, which were Safety, Compartmentalization, Redundancy, and Modularization. The engineers for Topdown did not appear to have taken these to heart, so Keshida needed to make some adjustments. Every telescope in both arrays is important to the mission. Take one away, and the whole endeavor could be lost. The idea is to send these into quite empty space, with the nearest celestial body being thousands of light years away. If something goes wrong, there is no way to affect repairs, and this is not an acceptable possibility.

To solve these problems, Ishida practically scrapped the plans they were given, and engineered new ones. Companion ships will fly parallel to the telescope ships, equipped exclusively with replacement parts, raw materials, and mega-format industrial synthesizers. These will also deposit specialized seed plates on the border systems, so if all else fails, at least the project can go on eventually. She wasn’t the only one who worked on this. Their friend, Weaver, who had gone off with Mateo on the AOC, helped build special temporal components. She invented a teleportation shield, so that any debris in one of the ship’s paths will be instantly transported hundreds of meters away, safely away from the vessel. It appears that everything is ready to go, and today is meant to be the launch date, but Kestral isn’t so confident.

“Are we sure everything’s done?”

“I went over the checklist a million times,” Ishida assures her.

“I checked a million more,” Saxon adds. His arrival prompted them to rename themselves Team Keshidon.

“We have no time for hyperbole,” Kestral complains. “How many times did you each go over every single thing in the preflight book?”

Ishida sighs. “Over the last year? Seven and a half.”

“Why half?”

“I had to poop.”

“Be serious, Ishida.”

“I am serious, Kestral. This isn’t just your baby; it’s all of ours.”

“Less so mine,” Saxon admits. He only just arrived a few years ago.

“I understand that,” Kestral says to Ishida. “I’m not trying to diminish your contribution. Far from it. I’m the one who only went over the list twice, and I’m kind of freaking out about it.”

“Do you wanna wait another year?” Ishida asks.

“Could we?”

“No,” Ishida answers plainly. “This is happening. I can’t promise you that we’ve thought of everything, but I can tell you we added a hell of a lot more redundancies than the dumbasses who came up with this.”

“Yeah, I know,” Kestral acknowledges. “Do you feel like there are too few people here?” She looks around the command center. “I mean, there are only three of us. This is the biggest thing humans have ever done, and we don’t have a team? Why don’t we have a full team?”

“You’re spiraling, love.” Ishida places a hand on Kestral’s shoulder. “Our full team is humongous. We had three artificial general intelligences working various problems, and making calculations. Still more AI entities have been uploaded into the ships. They’re going to take care of everything en route. Our job is done.”

“What about the AI? Did we check the code? Are we sure there isn’t some huge bug? Or a virus. What if there’s a virus?”

“Who would have written a virus, and how would they have gotten it here?”

“Don’t look at me,” Saxon says defensively, even though they made no indication that they suspected him of anything nefarious.

“The refugees,” Kestral poses. “There are billions of them. We don’t know who they are.”

“The refugees?” Ishida asks. “These are the same refugees who came from a universe where they lived partly underground, and couldn’t even have electricity, or the evil white monsters that also lived on the planet might detect their presence? You think one of them is a hacker?”

“Okay, well what about the Maramon refugees? They were here awhile before they flew off to colonize a new home world.”

“Kestral,” Ishida says. “Stop making dumb suggestions.

“There is no such thing, my mother always said.”

“Your mother was stupid,” Ishida reminds her. She isn’t being mean. Kestral’s family was what the Earthans would call noncontributives. After money was abolished, and automation took over the world, people no longer needed to work. A citizen has the right to certain amenities, like a place to live, and food to eat. They do not need to do anything to earn these rights. They’re simply provided. Anyone who chooses to work—in some capacity—which may be nothing more than occasionally helping to design virtual constructs or simulations—is afforded other conveniences. They have access to any of these authorized virtual realities, they can travel anywhere in the solar system, and they can apply for relocation to an exoplanet, among other things.

Kestral’s parents chose to do nothing. They spent their days sitting around their arcunit, watching virtual entertainment that was converted to basic holography, and sometimes going for walks outside. Kestral had to seek out higher education, and eventually had no choice but to estrange herself from them. Plenty of noncontributives were perfectly fine individuals, but they at least got out and socialized. The McBrides didn’t even vote for their governmental representatives. Even noncontributives have the right to longevity treatments to give themselves very long lives, but the bare minimum requirement is first exercising their right to vote. They both died of age-related diseases several years ago, according to an automated quantum message Kestral received, but of course, she couldn’t have attended a service if she wanted to.

“I’m sorry. What were we talking about?” Kestral is the poster child for the absent-minded professor. She regularly gets lost in her own thoughts, and people around her either have to pull her back to reality, or just wait for her to come back on her own.

“You were really excited about launch day,” Saxon jokes, knowing she’s not an idiot, and doesn’t actually believe this. He continues, “you wanted to push the big red button yourself. I could get you one, if you want; it won’t do anything, but you can time it so it’s like you’re controlling the launch.”

“Ha-ha,” Kestral says in monotone. “I’m just doing my due diligence. I don’t think I’m asking too much.”

“You have been incredibly reasonable during this entire process,” Ishida says. “We have all done a great job here. Though it will be centuries before anything really comes of this, we should be proud of ourselves; you included,” she says preemptively, before Saxon can remind them yet again that he’s the new kid on the block. “A great writer is no good without a great editor to check their work. Your due diligence, and attention to detail was incredibly helpful. My God, you polished a lens once with a handrag.”

“I was bored, and wanted to see how difficult and tedious it would be,” Saxon explains.

“What was the verdict?” Kestral questions.

“Guilty on all charges,” he answers.

Ishida smiles, and takes a look at her watch. “The ships are scheduled to leave in eighty-three minutes. We need to depart in eleven if we want to get good seats.”

“Has anyone done a preflight checklist for our observation vessel?” Kestral asks in feigned urgency. She’s finally starting to feel like she can relax. The ships are indeed leaving in an hour and a half. If something were to go wrong, it’s pretty much impossible to stop it now. They have no choice but to wait, watch, and hope.

Saxon recognized it was a joke, but replies with the truth anyway, “I did, yes.”

“Does anyone want popcorn?” Kestral offers.

“Gross. No, thanks.”

They boarded their little ship, which was mostly clear, so as to see nearly all sides out of it. They flew away from their centrifugal cylinder, and headed towards the midway point between it, and the shipyards. From here, they watched all ships for Project Topdown fly off to the intergalactic voids. One went for the top...and the other went down. Everything went flawlessly, and for the next four years after that, they reported nothing but smooth sailing. Then something strange happened.

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Microstory 1175: Tonya Keyes

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The powerful Prestons, originally living in a different dimension, were born to serve the timeline. They weren’t helpless salmon, but they were created for the purpose of protecting the timeline from paradoxes, and other inconsistencies, or just because certain butterfly effects were considered undesirable in the new timeline. Until Zeferino rebelled, they didn’t really have that much understanding of what it would mean to make their own choices, so they never tried. Tonya Keyes possessed similar abilities to loose cannon, Arcadia, but she was a choosing one, which meant she never had to do anything she didn’t want to do. The first few years of Tonya’s life were pretty normal. If any inconsistencies popped up in that time, she might have ignored them as a typical feature of reality, or simply didn’t notice. Once she was old enough to realize that people weren’t seeing things the way she saw them, she started to question this reality. She discovered that people were going back in time, and making changes to the timeline, yet her memory remained intact. If they, for instance, with knowledge of how a given company was going to do, shorted a company’s stock, she could tell how that impacted the market. She wasn’t the only temporal manipulator with what’s known as multi-real perception, but other than Arcadia, she was the only one who could do anything about it. It took some practice, but she developed the ability to access those old realities. Not only that, but she could extract parts of an old timeline, and splice it into the current timeline, without having to accept the entire thing. She wasn’t just undoing the changes the time travelers made; she was making more changes. She was picking and choosing which changes took hold. Let’s say, because of how terrible that stock did, the president of the company commits suicide. Well, there’s a reality out there where he didn’t do that, because some other time traveler created a reality where the stock did okay, which was only later negated. Remember, these people are making these changes all the time, and it’s almost impossible to track all of them. Tonya could retain the bad stock, but bring in the reality where the president survives. She could even alter the president’s perception, so he doesn’t question the disconnect between the current outcome, and his memory of it. She came to be known as The Stitcher, and she made a lot of pretty random alterations to the timeline before anyone approached with the idea to do something good with her power.