Dardius: Hogarth and Hilde (Part VI)

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The only way Hogarth Pudeyonavic was going to repair the planet-hopping machine called the Nexus replica, and make it back to Dardius, was to study a working version of the machine. They were rare, though. The first one created in this universe was thought to have been built by a special choosing one named Baudin Murdoch; also known as The Constructor. This turned out to be untrue, however. No one actually knew where they came from. They were always just discovered on a planet, and there seemed to only be six total.

The question now was where they would go to study one of these Nexus replicas. The one on Dardius was out of the question, of course, because if they could get there, all their problems would have been solved anyway. That only left four possibilities, one of which was rumored to be extremely dangerous, and they didn’t know where it was in normal space anyway, so that wasn’t that helpful. Earth, Gatewood, or Durus. Hogarth had to pick one out of these three to travel to. She didn’t know anything about the Earth Nexus replica. She didn’t know where it was, or who was in control of it, or what. Gatewood was technically the closest of all, but only by a small margin, and if Hogarth was successful with her plan, that probably didn’t matter much. She and Hilde had been to Durus a couple times, and each time was a unique experience. All signs suggested that things were a lot better there than before, and even with the bureaucracy, whoever was now in charge was the most likely to be willing to help them. It wasn’t a certainty, but they were better off taking  a chance on them than anywhere else.

“How far is it?” Hilde asked as she was standing just outside the chamber.

“From here? Roughly eighteen-point-four light years.” Though Durus was once a rogue planet of unknown origins, it somewhat recently found itself attached to a star system called 70 Ophiuchi, which was about sixteen and a half light years from Earth, and enjoyed no terrestrial planets of its own.

“This thing can take us there?”

“I don’t see why not,” Hogarth replied.

“It’s a teleporter,” Hilde began to argue. “It can definitely take passengers to the other side of the planet, but that doesn’t mean it can go farther than. My car was never able to travel to the stars.”

“True,” Hogarth agreed, “but your car didn’t have this.” She stuck her hand outside the chamber, and shook it around. “Or this.” She pulled her hand back in, and returned to shake something else at her.

“I don’t know what those are.”

“The first one is a power cell from the Nexus replica. Most of them were damaged beyond repair, but this one is more or less intact. It should give us the boost we need to make one jump.”

“It should?”

“The second one is a navigational module. I don’t technically need it, since I can find out exactly where Seventy Ophiuchi is, but I might as well use it since the calculations have already been done for me.”

“If you put find a way to put those things in this teleportation machine that Pribadium built, then why do you even need to repair the Nexus at all?”

Hogarth climbed out of the access panel, and stepped over to hunt for a particular tool in her box. “First of all, it’s not a Nexus; it’s a Nexus replica.”

“Why do people keep calling it that? Where are the original Nexuses?”

“Nexa,” Hogarth corrected again. “The real Nexa were built in another universe. These just look like them, but they used this universe’s physical laws.”

“Another universe?” Hilde questioned. “You mean a fictional universe.”

“Way I hear it, it ain’t so fictional. Anyway, to answer your question, I still need to fix the Nexus replica. This one is too small, and it’s unique. I’ll be able to jump to Durus, but I’ll have no way to jump back. Pribadium never created a retrieval function, and she obviously didn’t build a companion on the other side.”

“Okay, but...” Hilde began, “don’t we have to jump back anyway? We have to come back here to repair this one.”

“Well, that’s not really what I meant. That’s one reason I’m choosing to go to Durus. I know there will be someone there who can help us come back, but it won’t be a permanent solution. The Nexus replica is.”

“Are you sure we should do this? I’m not convinced the Nexus replica needs to be repaired. I mean, who is using them? Who, for instance, both needs to instantaneously travel from Gatewood to Glisnia, and is allowed to?”

“That’s not my call,” Hogarth said. “Someone thought it should be a possibility, and I’m honoring that by fixing what broke.”

“Someone,” Hilde reiterated. “We don’t know who it was, or why they did it. Maybe it’s part of an alien invasion, or uh...a time invasion. We just don’t know. You’re presuming benevolence with no evidence.”

“I choose to believe,” Hogarth said as she was crawling back into the access panel.

“I think I know what this is.”

“What what is?”

“You don’t like to feel useless. This has always been your problem. You gotta keep moving, like a shark. I never could get you to relax, and think things through.”

“Well, when you can literally explode at any time, and be unwillingly transported anywhere in time and space, you don’t really have the luxury of being cautious. If I see an opportunity, I have to take it, because there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to change my mind tomorrow.”

“Well, maybe you could slow down now. You said your explosive time power-slash-affliction thing is gone.”

“I said I feel like it’s gone. I don’t know for sure. That’s why I never let you out of my sight. I can’t risk leaving you behind, not even now.” She worked in silence for a moment. “There.”

“It’s done?” Hilde asked. “That seems fast.”

It did seem fast, but it wasn’t difficult at all for Hogarth to adapt the few parts she salvaged from the Nexus replica wreckage to the teleporter Pribadium that invented a few years ago from scratch. It was pleasantly intuitive. What Pribadium built, and how she built it, made so much sense—and so elegantly exploited known properties of physics—that it was actually shocking no one had invented time travel before her. Hogarth was finished in a day. It should have taken weeks. “Yes. Are you okay doing this? Maybe you’re right, and we could survive being separated for a little bit. You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to.”

“No. We’re a package deal. I’m in.”

“All right. Let’s get packed up. Proverbial wheels up proverbially in five.”

By the time Hilde was finished making sure they had enough provisions to survive something going wrong, Hogarth was already looking through the system at the interface terminal. “What is it?”

“There’s something funny here,” Hogarth answered.

Hilde didn’t bother asking for an explanation. She wouldn’t understand it, even at its dumbed-down level, so she just waited for her wife to figure out what she needed to on her own.

“I’m looking at the navigation, and there’s something here that wasn’t there before,” Hogarth went on. “Or maybe we just couldn’t see it while it was still hooked up to the replica.”

“You mean, like, an extra location?”

Hogarth tilted her head a little as she was looking through the data. “More like an extra set of locations. There’s a hidden partition here. I mean, it’s not a partition, since it’s not a disk, but you know what I mean.”

“No, I have no idea what you’re talking about, Piglet.”

“Oh my god.” Hogarth stopped and turned to Hilde. She held one fist up in front of her. “Imagine this is a hard drive. There’s data on it, and we can read that data, because that’s what it’s designed to let us do. She placed her other fist next to the first one. “This is like a hidden section of data that we couldn’t read before, because they’re not even connected to each other.” She shook her fists to illustrate the space between them. “When this thing was hooked up to the Nexus replica, you could only see the first section, because there was a physical separation between them. Basically, Hilde, I screwed up when I adapted it to Pribadium’s machine. I...I hooked it up wrong, and it gave us access to all this new information.”

“What does that mean?”

She pulled up a cosmic map, which showed dozens of destinations that weren’t there before. “It means there are a lot more Nexus replicas out there. This is still just a fraction of them. We may even be able to reach the original network...ya know, the one that’s in a different universe?”

“Are we going to do that?”

Hogarth revealed a sinister smile, and pointed at one of the destinations. “No, we’re going to go here. This was hidden behind a virtual protective layer of its own. I think it’s the origin of the replicas. That’s where we’re going to find what we need. Durus doesn’t have to be involved at all.”

“If you think it’s safe enough...I’m down.”

“Let’s go.”

Hogarth queried the destination, confirmed the power requirements, and set the timer. Then she and Hilde stepped into the transportation chamber, and waited for the countdown to be complete. Ten seconds later, they were standing in a Nexus pit, be it a replica, or a real one; Hogarth could not yet be sure.

Hilde looked around, but didn’t move. “Are we okay?”

“You’re okay,” came a voice from a dark corner. A figure stepped forward. “How did you get here?”

“We found the hidden partition,” Hogarth explained.

The woman stared at her a moment. “Oh,” she realized. She didn’t seem too terribly impressed. “Okay.”

“Where are we?” Hilde asked her.

“This is my workshop. You didn’t ring the doorbell.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m kidding, it’s fine. I’ve not had visitors in...a couple million years, probably.”

“How are you that old?” a wide-eyed Hilde questioned.

“Old?” the woman asked. She laughed for a good solid minute. “Honey, someone who’s only a couple million years old would be, like, a week old in my terms. You two have been alive for, what, ten seconds? Ya got about ten left.”

“My name is Hogarth Pudeyonavic.”

“That’s a mouthful.”

“This is my wife, Hilde Unger.”

“It’s nice to meet you. I’m Engineer Azure Vose.”

“Engineer? You engineered the Nexus replicas,” Hogarth guessed.”

“Yes, well, we automated the process in my home universe, so it just seemed like more fun to move on to somewhere else.”

“Two of ours were destroyed, at least. One was repaired, but the other still needs it.”

Azure shook her head at medium speed. “They’ve all been destroyed.”

Hogarth was surprised. “What?”

“Come on,” Azure said. “You’re time travelers, right? Everything that will inevitably be already is right now, and already was a long time ago, and won’t be for awhile? They all get destroyed at some point...multiple times, actually. There’s no such thing as the present, so I repair them now, or later; in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter.”

“It matters to us. We need it repaired now, in case someone needs to use it soon. And by soon, I mean from the time it was destroyed, onwards, as perceived through linear time.”

“Well, where do you wanna go?” Azure asked. “I will send you wherever you want, to do whatever you want, and then I will go back to whichever replica you’re talking about, and do whatever I want with it, whenever I feel like it.”

Hogarth wanted to argue more, but Hilde could tell it wasn’t going to do any good. She was ripped from her life before she had the chance to go to college, so she didn’t understand a lot of this stuff, but one thing she was always good at was math. She wasn’t able to make a full calculation, but she could come to a decent enough estimate. This Azure Vose person was claiming to be billions of years old. In fact, she seemed to be more than twice Vitalie’s age, which was already insanely old. This wasn’t the kind of person you messed with. If she made a decision, you just kinda had to accept it. “We were hoping to get to a planet called Dardius. It’s in a galaxy called Andromeda Twenty-One, but the natives call it Miridir.”

“Oh yeah,” Azure said. “I know what you’re talking about; I can do that.”

Hogarth still wouldn’t let it go, so Hilde had to interrupt her yet again. “November 25, 2263, by the Earthan calendar. That would be great.”

Azure started walking towards the control room. “All right. Give me a minute. You’re lucky. The original Nexa can’t travel through time. Well...except occasionally, when the story calls for a time adventure.”

“What?” Hilde asked.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Wait,” Hogarth said. She didn’t let Hilde stop her this time. “I have so many questions...about so many things.”

Azure smiled sincerely. “The answer is yes; this is my natural hair color.” She winked, and slipped through the doorway.

A minute later, they were back on Tribulation Island. Pribadium, Cassidy, and two Vitalies were already there. A woman walked in and introduced herself as Meliora Rutherford Delaney-Reaver. Then she escorted them halfway across the world.

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Microstory 1295: The Birds and the Seeds

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An eclectic colony of birds was once hopping about the ground, pecking at the seeds that lay in the soil. This was a great place for them to live, for there was always plenty of food around, and the humans who tended the crops did not pay them any mind. They just kept hopping joyfully, and partaking in the seeds. “Careful,” said one of the birds to the others. She was a raven, which meant she was a little bit smarter than all the others. “Those brown ones there; those are hemp seeds. Be sure to pick up every single one, or you will be sorry later.” When they asked her why it was so important they take all of those particular seeds, she replied, “hemp is a very important plant for the humans. They make many things out of them, but what we’re most worried about are the nets. Other humans will use these nets to catch the birds.” The other birds heeded the raven’s warning, and did not leave one single hemp seed on the ground. Months later, however, the birds found themselves being swept up in a hemp net. They asked for the raven to explain, but she did not understand. “The humans should not have been able to make any hemp ropes without the seeds to grow the plants,” she said. “This shouldn’t be possible.”

The crow was even smarter than the raven; so much so that she did not get caught in the net at all. She landed next to the poor birds, and said one thing before she flew away. “These are not the only hemp plants in the world. Danger lurks everywhere.”

This story was inspired by, and revised from, an Aesop Fable called The Swallow and the Other Birds.

Microstory 1294: The Flies and the Gnats

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A business of flies was so tired of having to hunt for food. They wanted to find a consistent and endless supply of resources, without having to work for it. Meanwhile, a cloud of gnats would scold them for thinking this way. “You should want to work for your food,” the gnats would say. “You will feel better for it.” But the flies were not convinced. They knew there was something else out there, so they sent scouts out to the unknown lands, in search of exactly what they were looking for. Finally, they found it in the form of a dumpster behind a restaurant. This was where the business of flies decided to live. The restaurant always dumped their leftovers at the end of the night, without fail, and it was always full of tasty treats. This went on for generations to come. The gnats, on the other hand, continued to travel from house to house. Whenever they exhausted the resources they had found there, there was nothing else they could do but move on to the next. Some houses were kept cleaning, and were no good. One night, the cloud thought it had discovered a great source of honey. “This is amazing,” the said. “We worked hard, and did not give up, and this is our reward.” But the honey was a trap...literally. While they were busy applauding themselves for their work ethic, a human came by and sucked them all up into a vacuum cleaner.

This story was inspired by, and revised from, an Aesop Fable called The Flies and the Honeypot.

Microstory 1293: The Predators and Their Spoils

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A tiger, a wolverine, a hyena, and a black bear once became a hunting party. They decided to join forces, so no prey would be able to escape their grasp. The tiger was sort of considered their leader, even though the team-up was more or less the wolverine’s idea. The tiger was the largest, and this was her territory, so she determined which animals they were going to go after, and what strategy they would use to catch them. Though they were hunting together, they were not eating together. The general rule was that each predator still got to keep for themselves whatever they caught, just as it would be if they were operating separately. They really just stuck together to instill more fear in their targets, so it would be easier to take them down. This seemed to have a side effect, however, when they eventually found that the animals figured out how to steer clear of this fearsome four. They learned how the the predator group hunted, and more importantly, how to avoid them. This quite nearly caused the group to disband, and head their separate ways, but the black bear had an idea. All they needed to do was travel north, to a land where the animals knew nothing about them. They needed to regain their element of surprise. This seemed like a good idea, so they packed up, and moved out. What the black bear failed to mention, however, was that there were fewer animals in the north, because it was always sparsely populated. They continued to struggle to find food, until one day when the hyena was able to run down a moose who had been drinking by a stream. It was quite large, but it was also alone, so if they followed their own rules, only the hyena would get to eat. “We can change the rules,” the tiger said after a long pause in the argument about it. “We are the ones that made them up, after all! We shall divide the moose into four equal parts; one for each of us.” And so they did, and it was fair, and they were full.

This story was inspired by, and revised from, an Aesop Fable called The Lion’s Share.

Microstory 1292: The Coney and Her Ears

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A lion was trying to eat the meat of a goat he had captured when the goat’s horns scratched his face up. One of them nearly took out his eye when he leaned over, and this angered the lion greatly. Not wanting to risk anything like this happening again, the lion stood on top of his proclamation rock, and proclaimed that all animals with horns of any kind will be banished from the lands. Anyone fitting the description was required to leave within one day. Now, of course the coney did not have horns, but she did have long ears on top of her head, which the lion might take offense to. She could not sleep that not for fear of the lion becoming angry with her for staying. He did say that anyone with horns of any kind should leave; perhaps her tall ears were close enough. When she stepped out of her hole the following morning, the sun’s light fell upon her head, and cast a long shadow on the ground before her, making her ears look even larger than they normally did. She even convinced herself that they were horn-like. Now she was certain that it wasn’t worth the risk to stick around. She was so upset about having to move, but she did not want to suffer the lion’s wrath. He was such a fearsome creature, and she was such a little thing. “Goodbye,” she said to all her friends. “I do not want to go, but I have no other choice.”

“Good for you,” said the badger.

“How is this good?” the coney asked.

“Why, all the horned animals are looking at this development the wrong way,” the badger tried to explain. “Sure, you have to move, but you should be happier than anyone. After all, you’re not supposed to want to be eaten by a predator. It is the rest of us who must continue to live in fear.”

This story was inspired by, and revised from, an Aesop Fable called The Hare and His Ears.

Microstory 1291: The Rooster and the Wolf

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A wolf was walking through the woods when he came upon a farm. He was so hungry, and hadn’t found food in days, so he thought this was the perfect spot. Unfortunately, the farmer had placed traps on the edge of his property, and one of them caught the wolf before he was able to even get close. This was very early in the morning, so only the rooster was awake, patrolling the grounds. When the wolf saw him approach, he knew he had to come up with a story. If he freely admitted his intentions, the rooster would cause a ruckus, and the wolf would surely be done for. So he spun a lie about how he hadn’t even noticed the farm, that he was just passing by on his way to a watering hole, and that he had no plans to harm anyone there. As convincing as the wolf was, the rooster knew that he was lying. He did what he believed to be his job, and woke the whole farm, particularly the farmer. Well, the wolf, knowing this would be the end of him if he didn’t do something, focused all of his attention on the line he was tied up in, and gnawed it apart as quickly as he could. He didn’t make it into the treeline before the farmer managed to fire his shotgun, though, and hit him with a couple shots. It wasn’t enough to kill him, but it did damage his right ear enough to cause permanent hearing loss. And that was enough to anger him greatly. Yes, the wolf was indeed planning to invade the farm, and take some chickens. But he wasn’t going to be greedy about it. Now things were different. Now he had a vendetta, and he felt that he had no choice but to make things so much worse at the farm. At the time, he was a lone wolf, but that didn’t mean he was an omega, or that other wolves wouldn’t help him. So he gathered up all the others he could find in the area, and galvanized them into warriors. Then they attacked the farm together, and killed nearly everything there. But they left the rooster alive.

This story was inspired by, and revised from, an Aesop Fable called The Cock and the Fox.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: December 1, 2269

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It  was still 2268 when Mateo woke up from having been knocked out. He asked what had happened, but no one answered. As he was massaging his head, he struggled to get to his knees, and looked around. All three of the others were lying on the floor as well. He crawled over to Leona, and checked for a pulse. She was alive, but unconscious. He checked Nerakali too, and she was the same way. He might have checked on Arcadia, but he couldn’t bring himself to care enough about her. Besides, it wasn’t long before they all started to wake up as well. The first thing Nerakali did was slither over to the now dead body of the man they were talking to. She felt around his neck, but came up short. “Where the hell did it go?”

“The hundemarke isn’t there?” Arcadia questioned, turning herself over to her back.

“It’s gone,” her sister confirmed. “It can’t just disappear, though. Someone has to physically move it from place to place.”

“Maybe our mother placed a temporal enchantment on it. Maybe it will always go back to her after each time it’s used.”

“No,” Leona said. “Though she was the last to reawaken, she was the strongest of them, and was recovering fastest. She was up on her feet, and looking around. “Someone was here. Someone slipped in while we were unconscious, and stole it. It probably wasn’t your mother. I imagine she would have stayed, if only to figure out what you were doing here.”

“What happened to us?” Mateo was finally able to ask.

“The hundemarke, when activated, won’t allow its own history to be altered,” Arcadia began to explain. “It does this by whatever means necessary. Sometimes that means redirecting your teleportation destination. Sometimes it just means creating a spatial barrier between it, and anyone who would interfere. Mateo, when you tried to stop this dude from killing himself, the dog tag reacted, and literally kept you from reaching him.”

“That doesn’t explain what happened to all of you,” he said. “Did you all try the same thing, even knowing it wouldn’t work?”

“We’re connected, remember?” Nerakali asked. “You hit the barrier, so we did too.”

“Wait, so if I run into a door frame, you’ll feel the pain?”

“No,” Leona answered. “It’s not a magic spell. Door frames are just regular things, but the barrier was beyond three-dimensional space.”

“That’s comforting,” Arcadia noted, “since he obviously intends to throw himself into a bunch of door frames.”

“That was just an example,” Mateo tried to defend himself. After a few moments of silence, while they reoriented themselves, he spoke again. “Does anyone have any clue who he was?”

“No idea,” Nerakali said. “He was apparently from the future, though.”

Leona was clearly working things out in her head, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the mysterious suicidal man’s identity. “I thought this was meant to be the first step.”

“Huh?”

“You suggested we were playing the long game here, and that this was just going to give us a clue to the hundemarke’s location.”

“Yeah...”

“We almost had it, though,” Leona pointed out. “If one of you had stopped Mateo from trying to stop the suicide, we wouldn’t have struck the barrier, and we would have been able to take the hundemarke after he was done using it.”

“Well, that’s not what happened,” Arcadia said.

“Yes, but you couldn’t have known that.” Leona rethought what she said. “I mean, of course you could have known, but if that’s the case, then why didn’t you tell us what was going to happen, and why didn’t you warn us someone was going to sneak in and steal it out from under us, and why didn’t you try to stop that?”

Nerakali yawned. “Those are a lot of questions, so I’ll skip them all, and just try to explain myself. I’m not trying to find the hundemarke as much as I’m trying to find my mother. This is the last known location where the dog tag was used. I didn’t know how it was going to be used, but I knew it would lead us to Savannah, which is the real mission here. It’s still going to do that. All we need to do is jump to two more years, and find our next clue. Nothing here went wrong. It wasn’t pleasant, but it couldn’t have happened any other way. I wouldn’t have been able to stop Mateo from trying to stop this guy’s death. Nor would either of you have been happy with me if I had. To preserve our relationship, I made a call. The good news is that this is obviously not the last time we see him. The bad news is we can’t change today. We all know that; it’s why we’re here.”

Leona might not have wanted to admit it, but Mateo understood. The hundemarke was a terrible and dangerous thing. There was no way they were going to complete this mission without seeing at least one person die permanently from it. “We’re all hungry, and tired,” he mediated. “I assume there is nothing we can do today, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Then let’s move on from this, and try to make things better next year.”

A year later, they found themselves in a very different place, but also the exact same place. In the interim, someone must have come in here, and repaired everything. They somehow restored it to its former glory. It looked like a very large basement now, mooded with purple lights, like maybe it was always meant to be underground. Who would do this, though, and why? “How is it like this now?”

“Do not be alarmed,” came the distinctive voice of the man they just watched die. He rounded the corner, and came into view. “This place is suffering from a temporal anomaly. Sometimes it’s whole; sometimes it’s ramshackle. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to it.”

“You know us,” Leona said, rather than asked.

“I do, yes.”

“We still need an introduction,” Nerakali told him.

“Forgive me. I’ve still not gotten used to you not knowing me very well.” He stretched out his hand, towards no one in particular. “I’m Matt Cameo.”

“Matt Cameo?” Leona asked in disbelief. “That sounds made up.”

“Don’t be rude, love.”

“No, she’s right, Matt said. “They started calling me Cameo, because of how infrequently I show up. My real last name is Caimeo.”

“You expect us to believe that’s a coincidence?” Leona asked, still suspicious.

“It’s absolutely not a coincidence.” Matt tapped on a device that was wrapped around his arm, and let a hologram of the name MATT CAIMEO appear above it. He then used his other hand to rearrange the letters in the air.

Well before he was finished, Leona gasped. “Holy shit.”

She ended up being right about the holy shit. His name was a perfect anagram for Mateo’s. The hologram now read MATEO MATIC. No letters needed to be removed, or added. “That’s your real name?”

“Afraid so,” Matt claimed. “My parents didn’t even name me Matthew. Matt is what’s on my birth certificate.”

Nerakali chuckled. “Lemme guess, you only live for one day every year. At the end of every day, you jump backwards in time three hundred and sixty-six days?”

“That’s exactly right,” Matt said. He looked back over to Leona. “No, it’s not a coincidence at all. The powers that be specifically chose me to be his opposite.”

“They do like their games and poetry,” Nerakali rationalized.

They continued to talk to their new...friend? He explained that he preferred to go by Cameo now, but would say little about his life. He refused to reveal what year he started this, or how long he had been doing it. Mateo had met lots of time travelers before, but no one quite like this. He wasn’t just generally going in the opposite direction, but very precisely so, and it had repercussions. This meant that every time they encountered him, they would know him a little bit more, and he would know them a little bit less, so Mateo couldn’t help but feel that that was just a little bit sad. No one else seemed to have strong feelings about it. It didn’t seem to bother them at all. While they were still trying to get something out of them, Arcadia suddenly blurted out, “Deana Noelle!”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you know someone named Deana Noelle?” Arcadia pressed.

“Oh,” Leona said. “That name is missing the y.”

“Your name’s not Leona Delane?”

Leona rolled her eyes.

“I do this alone,” Cameo explained.

“You don’t do it with us?” Mateo asked.

Now Cameo got all sad. “Our paths do not intertwine as much as you would think. We do not become close.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Mateo said. “Perhaps that can be changed?”

“Please don’t try,” Cameo requested.

“Could we..possibly...have a sidebar?” Leona asked as she was gently tugging at Mateo’s sleeve.

“Not a problem,” Cameo said. “I’ll be in the jail.” When they widened their eyes, he realized that he needed to clarify. “This place has a tiny little jail. Do you not know where we are?”

“It looks like the Arrow bunker,” Mateo said, looking up at the televisions hanging from the ceiling. “One of them, anyway.”

“Not a bad guess, but wrong franchise. It’s probably for the best if I don’t say anything more.”

When he was hopefully out of earshot, Leona started to vocalize her concerns. “This guy is hiding something.”

“Everyone is always doing that all the time,” Arcadia mused.

“How optimistic of you.”

“I’m serious,” Leona continued. “Does he look like he’s about to kill himself?”

“Are you saying that didn’t happen?” Nerakali questioned.

“No,” Leona replied, “I’m saying he must be lying about his temporal pattern. I mean, something really bad would have to happen today to make him want to end his own life tomorrow. The only logical explanation is that it’s not really going to happen tomorrow for him.”

“That’s not the only explanation,” Mateo argued. “You don’t know what’s happening in his head, or what he’s gone through. I mean, he just implied that he lives in a jail, and I find it hard to believe he has to. Lots of suicidal people keep their feelings locked away deep inside, and don’t show any signs that anything’s wrong. What you see on TV, with the loner wearing the beanie, and drawing disturbing pictures of his classmates—those are the ones who are asking for help. People who end up actually going through with it often don’t let anyone know what they’re planning, because they truly want it to end; not to just get better.”

“The only question is what we should do with him now,” Nerakali determined. “How do we interact with him, knowing what we know?”

“Well, surely he knows that we know,” Leona reasoned, “because he knows, and he knows when we’re from.”

“He may not,” Mateo said. “Or it may not matter. Or he may not be planning to do it tomorrow, but that’s what becomes inevitable over the course of the next thirty-six hours for him. It’s like Nerakali said, we can’t change the past. All we can do is move forward, and maybe make him feel a little less alone during his final days.”

“Jesus.” Arcadia rests her shoulder against a pillar, and places her forehead in her hand. “This is rough, even for me. I mean, I’m sadistic, but I don’t like knowing this much about his future. How can we not warn him, or try to stop him? Hundemarke or no, how can we just go on like everything’s fine?”

“Maybe we don’t have to,” Nerakali said, a bit cryptically.

It took them a minute to realize what she meant, and as always, Mateo was the last to figure it out. He did manage to get there on his own, though. Nerakali was suggesting that she manipulate their memories, so that they no longer remembered Cameo’s future. It was entirely possible; definitely for Mateo and Leona, presumably for Arcadia too, but maybe not so easy for Nerakali herself.

“I can make you recall meeting him yesterday, since that’s what he likely assumes happened. I can make you forget what he did, though.”

“What about you?” Arcadia asked. The fact that she was asking implied that Mateo was right, and her sister was incapable of screwing with her own mind.

“I can get through it,” Nerakali answered. “I can carry the burden. It’s the only way, anyway.”

“No, it’s not,” Mateo said. He lifted his arm. “These connect us. You said we have your brain blending powers. You don’t have to be the one to do this.”

“Not technically,” Nerakali agreed, “but I still do.”

“No, you don’t, sister,” Arcadia said. “I can do it.”

“Or we can draw straws,” Leona suggested.

“No,” Mateo said. “It’s just been decided, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. I’m sorry.”

“What is that, love?”

He didn’t bother answering her. Before they could stop him, he figured out on his own how to use Nerakali’s brain blending time powers, and erase everyone’s foreknowledge of Cameo’s ultimate fate. Only he would remember, and that was a weight he would never be free of. That was okay, though, because it probably wouldn’t be very long before he had to go back in time, and greet his own fate at the bottom of that cliff on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. After it was done, they freed Cameo from jail, and tried to get to know him a little better.

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Dardius: Pribadium Delgado (Part V)

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Pribadium Delgado never saw herself becoming a parent. She was still pretty young when she found herself introduced to the world of salmon and choosers, but the plan was always to become transhumanistic. Given enough upgrades, an individual will be incapable of conceiving or gestating a human. Their body will just no longer be hospitable to new life. Of course, this didn’t mean she couldn’t raise children, or even that she couldn’t have them before she received these upgrades, but it was still never in her plans. This did not change when she was forced to mother baby Brooke Prieto-Matic, but it did give her an idea. In the year she spent taking care of this precious little thing, Pribadium did form a bond, and it was unclear whether the woman who forced her to care for someone else’s child, Arcadia knew this was going to happen, or not. That didn’t matter, though. The point was that she could use this situation to her advantage. There was something she needed to get done, and convincing Arcadia, and all the others, that she felt compelled to continue raising Brooke was the best way to do it.

The year was 2129, and Leona was preparing to take Brooke home to the 21st century. The latter was incapable of experiencing nonlinear time, so the only way to get her to Earth was with the relativistic ship that Pribadium had built. It would take millions of realtime years, and thousands of years from the perspective of anyone inside the ship. Brooke was set to be placed in stasis, while Leona had to pass the time in an unusual way. Arcadia set things up for her to stay awake the entire time, but unable to hold onto short-term memories. She would recall enough to maintain the ship, and correct issues, but would not be totally aware of the passage of time. Technically, she could have been placed in a stasis pod as well, but Arcadia wasn’t allowing that. As terrible as that was, it was what gave Pribadium her big idea.

“What are you doing here?” Arcadia questioned. “I thought I let you cross back over to the other side of the merge border.

A man named Kayetan Glaston had the ability to put two different points in spacetime together, so that one could walk back and forth at will. He had merged modern-day Tribulation Island with ancient Tribulation Island. Pribadium, Vitalie, and Cassidy were sent over to the other side, so they could make their way back to the future, but the other two agreed to do things differently. They had formed a bond with Brooke as well. So when Arcadia wasn’t looking, they snuck back over to the ancient side. “We want on that ship,” Pribadium demanded.

“Who are these people, Arcadia?” Leona asked.

“You’ve not met them yet,” Arcadia explained to her, before turning her attention back to Pribadium. “This wasn’t part of the deal.”

“It’s a new deal,” Vitalie said. “We’re going back to Earth with the two of them. There’s plenty of room. It was built with three pods that you’re not even using. It’s perfect.”

“Do you even need a pod?” Arcadia asked.

“I’m immortal,” Vitalie replied, “but I still get bored.”

“Why do you want to do this?”

“I can’t let Brooke go,” Pribadium said. “I want to be there for her.”

“Really?” Arcadia wasn’t so convinced.

“You’re the one what made me nurse her,” Pribadium tried to explain. “What did you think was gonna happen? That I could just walk away?”

“Say what?” Leona asked.

Arcadia pointed to the ship. “This thing is going to arrive on Earth in the year 2025. That’s essentially random for you. None of you has been there before, and it’s not anywhere near when and where you need to be.”

“I was close once,” Cassidy noted. She first disappeared from her old life in 2019.

“Don’t you need to get to Mateo’s memorial?” Arcadia questioned.

“Mateo’s memorial?” Leona asked, upset. “What are you talking about?”

“This is many centuries in the future,” Arcadia lied to her, which only seemed to make her feel a little bit better. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you don’t remember any of this when you get to Earth.”

“There’s no reason to not let us do this,” Pribadium said, trying to get back to the matter at hand. “Not only does it not hinder your plan to make Leona stay awake for thousands of years, but it reinforces it. Now there really aren’t enough stasis pods for her.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Arcadia had to agree. “But what do you plan to do when you get there? I’ve already set things up so that Leona takes care of her on her own for a little bit, and then Brooke’s cousin, Mireille takes over. How do you plan to insert yourself into her life, and how long do you intend to remain there?”

“You let me worry about that,” Pribadium said. “Again, this has nothing to do with you. What do you care where we go, when we go there, and whose child we raise while we’re there?”

On paper, Arcadia obviously knew that Pribadium was right, but she was the kind of person who didn’t like being dictated to. She liked to come up with the rules, and the plans, and she didn’t appreciate when someone came along and changed things on her. Her face transformed as she was considering the options. When at first she was annoyed, now she was apathetic. “Whatever. Do what you want. I don’t care. It’s your responsibility to return to your own time period when you’re ready. That ain’t got nothin’ to do with me.” She started to walk away. “You best get on your way, though. That does have to do with me.”

Leona gently took Arcadia by the arm. “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know who these people are, but they seem really nice, and I’m happy to see that you have a heart...even if you won’t admit it.”

Arcadia scoffed. “You don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about.” She reached down to the ground, and lifted the fabric of space like it legit was indeed fabric. She slipped under the magic curtain, and let it fall back into place behind her.

Fifteen minutes later, Brooke, Vitalie, and Cassidy were safely tucked away in their stasis pods. Pribadium was meant to be the only one left, but she had other plans. Leona and her husband, Mateo were always very kind to her. They immediately accepted her into their group without question. She felt that she had made a lot of mistakes, and still felt responsible for them all becoming trapped in the past. This version of Leona had no idea who she was, but she was still herself, and she deserved something good to come to her. There was really only one gift that Pribadium could give, and it came in the form of the last stasis pod.

“This is not meant for me,” Leona argued.

“No,” Pribadium agreed, shaking her head. “Arcadia wanted you to be awake, so you’ll end up around the same age as your husband. But who cares? Arcadia’s not here, and neither you nor Mateo is going to fall out of love with the other because of the age difference. It’s not even really an age difference. Mateo hardly thinks about the time he was stuck in that crazy spatio-temporal dimension. He’s not four thousand years old, and you don’t need to be either. So this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to sip on this Youth water, and sit here in the pilot’s seat. You’re a great physicist, Leona, but I built this ship. I know how it works, and how to fix any problem we come across. You just need to go to sleep, and forget about all this. When we get to Earth, no one will know what happened. I’ll wake you up first, and tell no one that we switched places. The worlds will keep turning.”

“I don’t know if I can let you do this for me,” Leona lamented. “You’re a stranger.”

“No,” Pribadium said with a kind smile. “I’m not.”

“Are you sure?”

“Hundred percent.”

Leona agreed to the new plan. She crawled into the stasis pod, and let Pribadium put her to sleep. Pribadium went on to live for thousands of years, but she didn’t do it the same way that Arcadia had planned. She switched off the temporal distortion feature, and passed the time in a totally different way. Stasis pods served two primary functions. First, they were designed to keep the subject alive and young, so they could actually survive long enough to see the end of the journey. They were also made to put the subject in a dreamless sleep, so that they woke up however much time later with no memory of it. To the four of them, the whole thing would last mere seconds; not centuries. But that was a human necessity, and Pribadium Delgado wasn’t entirely human.

Transhumanistic upgrades were not black and white. At no point did someone transform from human to android. It was a gradient, full of complicated choices and variables. While Pribadium was predominantly a biological entity, she was also a little something more. The Youth water that was meant for Leona was more than enough to keep her alive like suspended animation would, but that was easily rigged up as an IV fluid. In order to capitalize on that second function, all Pribadium needed to do was program her brain to experience time differently. Arcadia was wanting to do this for Leona using magicks, but Pribadium was capable of it through technology, and she could exercise her own control over it. The ship was going to be traveling through space for 2.83 million years, and her body was going to be sitting in the ship for just a hair over four thousand years, but her mind was only going to be there for twenty-four days. She could have sped time up for herself even more, but this made it easier to snap out of it for any maintenance issues. Hopefully, when this was all over, she would feel better about everything she had done, even if it didn’t really make up for it.

Millions of years later, they were on Earth in the year 2025, and no one discovered what Pribadium had done. She didn’t wake her friends up until Leona and Brooke were exactly where they were meant to be. When Vitalie and Cassidy asked why it was she wasn’t helping take care of baby Brooke, she said she didn’t want to talk about it. This was easier than coming up with a lie, and it seemed to be good enough for them. Now the only question was how the hell they were going to get back to Dardius in 2263. Surprisingly, it was Cassidy who came up with a good plan to accomplish this.

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