Varkas Reflex: Identity (Part VII)

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First order of business as Superintendent of Varkas Reflex was to figure out what it meant to be the Superintendent of Varkas Reflex. Hokusai knew she needed help, and the best place to get it was from someone with experience. Even better than that one person with experience was an entire council of them. Several people had held the position on Earth, while each of the colony planets only had one, with the exception of Sujo. Its first superintendent couldn’t handle the responsibility, and fled into the void with a stolen interstellar vessel, never to be heard from again. Of course, that wasn’t much help, because Hokusai would not be able to communicate with him, which was sad, because understanding what went wrong could have resulted in invaluable advice. Not everyone agreed to become part of Hokusai’s council, which was fine. She wasn’t looking to run a survey about them with a large sample size, but gain insight and guidance. There were eleven of them, ready to help in any way they could.

Hokusai built quantum surrogate substrates for the visitors, so they could arrive much faster. The former superintendent of Teagarden was unable to use one, since she never installed the necessary transhumanistic upgrades to accomplish this, so she appeared as a hologram. Hokusai wasn’t sure what she was expecting out of these people. Were they going to be helpful and supportive, or balk at her inexperience and naivety. They had all dedicated their lives to public service, and were presently serving in other ways. She was just a scientist, living on a planet that elected her because she was cool, and there wasn’t anyone else. Would the council believe that was enough? As it turned out, some did, while others were not so convinced. They weren’t nasty or pretentious about it, though. They applauded her for having the wisdom to form the council in the first place, and recognized that Varkas was unlike any of the planets they had dealt with themselves. Their formal approach wasn’t going to work well in this case, and they would all have to tap into their creative side in order to make this work.

After months of discussions, they decided that they had come up with something reasonable, and appropriate for this world. Hokusai realized on her own that she was never the only superintendent at all. By forming the council, she had outsourced a lot of the decisions. It went swimmingly, and if it could work for this, it could work with the actual government. So there would be no congress, no delegators, no advisors, and no administrators. This world’s government was going to be a council democracy. Councils would be formed as needed, and disbanded when the problem they were trying to solve was over, which could potentially mean never. If the council wasn’t trying to solve anything, but was there to maintain harmony, then that council would simply continue on. The question then was how to form any given council in the first place.

Would they be elected? Selected? Earned? Completely open? Yes, all of those things. Hokusai decided that the people had the right to decide how any new council was formed—making the entire populace one gigantic council in its own right—and they didn’t have to do it in the same way previous councils were done. Some councils may require particular expertise, and would only be available to certain people, who exemplified certain criteria. Others could impact the entire population, and didn’t necessitate specific competencies, so anyone who wanted to could join. If this resulted in an unmanageably large council, then it could be broken apart into smaller subcouncils. This flexibility made things really complex, but it also prevented the system from getting bogged down by its own procedural regulations. The technocracy that the majority of the stellar neighborhood used was great. Everyone had a role, and the only people allowed to make decisions were those that knew what the hell they were talking about. But it was also a slow process—often slower than the highly bureaucratic democratic republics that dominated Earth in the 20th and 21st centuries. Councils got things done, and they did it efficiently, as long as they were supervised by someone who could make sure the councilors weren’t getting sidetracked, or wasting time. This was the problem that Hokusai needed to solve now, and Pribadium thought she had the solution.

“Here me out,” Pribadium said, “we upload your mind to multiple substrates.”

“Why would we do that?” Hokusai asked.

“You say these councils need leaders. In fact, you say that each council needs one leader. This crowdsourcing is good and all, but it won’t work if they spend so long discussing the possibilities, that they can’t ever come to a conclusion. Someone needs to protect them from themselves, and who better than you?”

“First of all,” Hokusai began, “lots of people. Secondly, why would we have to upload anyone’s mind to multiple bodies? All you’re asking for is a singular entity that oversees the proceedings.”

“Eh, no one has time to be in more than one place at once.”

“Right, but why can’t each council just have its own leader.”

“Because the profusion of leaders is just going to lead to the same problem. I’m not sure if you’ve thought this all the way through. You think councils can be fast-acting, but they could be slower than republics. At least the technocracy is efficient. Most consequences to any action are predicted at some point down the assembly line. With a council, everyone might have some great idea, but they won’t say anything, because no one else is, so they may think it’s actually not that good.”

“What are you saying, that this should be a monarchy?”

Pribadium knew that Hokusai didn’t actually think that’s what she was saying. “A real democracy is perfect when you have a few dozen people. It doesn’t work in the thousands, millions, or, God forbid, billions. That’s why most healthy governments operate under representation, to varying degrees of success and moral honesty. People hate to think about it, but power must be consolidated. That’s just the way it has to be. It’s your job to make sure that consolidation is fair and reasonable. A soviet democra—”

“Don’t call it that. It has negative historical connotations that predate your birth.”

“Very well. A council democracy is fair, but it is not reasonable. You’re gonna run into problems, and in order to fix them, you’re going to form more councils, and that’s just going to add to the problem, and it will never end. The councils need a single voice. And when I say single, I mean single; not one each.”

“So, you are kind of promoting a monarchy.”

“All monarchs are tyrants, so no. I was using you as an example of the voice, but perhaps that is how it should remain, as an example. This overseer can take any number of forms. It can be elected any way you want, and remain in control however long you want. You worried about checks and balances? They’re built right in. Let’s say the overseer poses some existential threat to the planet. No problem, form a council to get rid of them. The overseer doesn’t have to run every single meeting for every single council, but they have to have the potential to be involved in any council, except for ones that would come with a conflict of interest. That’s why I suggested you copy yourself—or rather, whoever we choose for this—so each one gradually loses identity. You see, what we need is a good leader with a good history, but that’s only necessary as a foundation. Once that’s established, the copies can go off and start living other lives, but at least they all came from the same place.”

Hokusai was shaking her head. “I think you’re looking at it the wrong way. Good governments are based on diversity. Each leader should be separate, and have always been separate. Then they can serve to check and balance each other.”

Loa stepped into the room, having been listening from the hallway for most of the conversation. “Why don’t you take the best of both worlds?”

“How so?” Pribadium asked.

“Mind-uploading, councils, single voice. Put them together, what do you have?”

Neither of them answered for a while, not sure if it was a rhetorical question, or a sincere inquiry.

“Amalgamated consciousness,” Loa answered herself.

“Where did you hear that term?” Hokusai asked her.

“My mind-brain,” Loa replied. “You want fast government, but you want the people to have a say. So. Upload their minds into a system, but don’t just keep them isolated, like we normally do. Merge them together. Create a new entity. This entity won’t have to discuss how to deal with the issue. They’ll immediately know what that council would have said about it. The answers will just be right there. That’s how a normal brain works. If I asked you how to keep this door from being opened, you’ll have an answer right away. You’ll say we should install a lock on it. If I asked Pribadium, she would say let’s drag a bookcase in front of it. Ask someone else, they’ll say we should murder everyone who might try to open it. But if we put these brains together, the council-entity would say we should install a lock, plus a deadbolt, and then ask everyone who might want to open it to not do so, so we don’t have to kill them.”

“Amalgamated consciousness,” Hokusai echoed, thinking it over. “That’s a pretty big departure from how we decided to do it.”

Loa brushed this away. “The superintendent council is not the superintendent of Varkas Reflex; you are. You don’t have to consult them. You were just using them for advice, never forget that. It is still your responsibility.”

Pribadium didn’t approve. “I’ve seen this show. This is The Borg. You will be assimilated.”

“Assimilators in fiction are evil. We won’t do this to anyone who does not wish for it, and we won’t be neurosponging them. These will be copies, which leave the original contributors both independent, and intact.”

“The only reason we would do this,” Hokusai began to explain, “would be to increase the speed of decision-making. It doesn’t actually help with proving the sensibility of the decisions themselves.”

Loa disagreed. “No, it’s like Pribadium said. People might be afraid to speak up. If we copy their perspective—which is really what we’re after; not people’s episodic memories—they won’t have to worry about sounding foolish. They will have good ideas.”

“There are a hell of a lot of ethical considerations no one thought they would have to make. If we were to do this, we would be the only government to do so. All eyes will be on us, and we will have to make sure we don’t screw it up. Like, what happens to the entity we create when we amalgamated the council? Is that a person in their own right? Do we dissolve this creature later? Do we keep them on retainer for later decisions? Do we let them run off to lead their own lives? Do we let them leave the planet?”

“Now you’re getting into science that you know I don’t understand,” Loa said. “And ethics isn’t my forte either. This is an idea, which I came up with after hearing your ideas. I can’t be expected to have it all figured out.”

She was right. This was just the start. They spent the next year working on the new plan. And then they instituted it.

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Microstory 1410: The Deathfall As Seen On The Surface

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Since Savitri’s first trip to Durus, the city of Springfield, Kansas had been slowly crumbling away, into the portal. Almost none of it stayed whole, and no one back on Earth could remember these parts of the city had ever existed. By 2016, it was no larger than a small town, with only around twelve hundred people. Nearly all residents survived the last transition through the portal, which acted to erase the existence of Springfield altogether from the collective consciousness. This process was not instant. By the time all of the last remnants of the town made its way to the rogue planet, days had passed. No one in town realized this, though. There was no good way to record the passage of time on Durus, since there was no sun, and no way to communicate with Earth and match it up. From the perspective of those on the surface, however, they could see this process. Buildings would blink into existence, then blink back out, like a burrowing animal who wasn’t quite sure if she wanted to come all the way out of her hole yet. Even people would appear, and disappear, but they were unmoving, which meant time was all but completely stalled for them. This gave Escher, Rothko, and Hark time to formulate a plan. They were pretty sure they were going to have a huge influx in people after this was all over, because nothing like it had ever happened before. They were aware that Springfield had been slowly shrinking for years, because their respective accounts of its size didn’t quite match up with each other. They couldn’t be certain of this, though, since Escher had only lived there for a matter of hours, and Rothko didn’t have a full grasp of how large it should have been when he was living there, so Hark had little means to compare it. Unlike people back on Earth, however, they did each manage to hold onto their memories as they were when they first left. So when the remnants finally fell all the way through the portal, they already knew that this was all that was left. They weren’t sure what to do about this development, but they figured they ought to keep themselves secret. It looked like a normal town that could use The Trident’s help, but they had been gone from Earth for so long, there was no telling what had changed. No, it was safer to observe the townies from a distance, and keep their guards up. They knew this planet better than anything, since there wasn’t much to do on the daily, but explore, and map out the lands, so it wasn’t hard for them to remain hidden. It did not last forever, though. Shortly thereafter, the Trident was broken, and the Triumvirate was no more, when Hark was flung into the future. Escher and Rothko then found themselves much more involved in Springfield’s goingson than they ever thought they would, and they were not prepared for the social conventions, since they had been so isolated for so long. A new form of government was beginning to take shape, and it was worse than anyone could have predicted.

Microstory 1409: The Trident

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The fourth person to take up permanent residence on the rogue planet of Durus was a man by the name of Paul Harken. He came from family money, which gave him the resources he needed to look for a way to somehow undo his wife’s miscarriage. Due to a bit of time travel he once witnessed, he became obsessed with figuring out how to reverse time, and fix the worst thing that had ever happened to them. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t have all the facts, or really the qualifications, for this endeavor. He happened to be living in a very special house; one that was built in the exact same place as another. The First House, as it will come to be known in historical records, served as the gateway to Durus. Savitri lived there with her family, Escher lived next door, and one day explored it, and it was just behind the street where Rothko lived when his adventure began. This house was a focal point of temporal energy, but it was also corrupted, and unreliable. It sometimes existed on Earth, and sometimes Durus, and it was impossible to predict when it would be where. And so something was always destined to happen to Paul, just from living in his new house for long enough. When he became trapped on Durus in 2008, he had mixed feelings. He was relieved that he had never been crazy, and temporal manipulation was a real thing, but heartbroken that he had not actually succeeded in his goals. He didn’t let it get him down, though. He wanted to survive, and there wasn’t much back on Earth that would drive him to try to return. Plus, unlike with his predecessors, his entire house had come through with him, which gave him a nice place to stay protected from the elements. His new friends would appreciate it as well. While the Springfield portal had been taking people over the course of the better part of three decades, the three humans still around were all about the same age, because they had been taken at different stages of their lives. Hark, as he liked to be called, filled Escher and Rothko in on what they had missed since leaving Earth. He spoke of the new technologies, and the political developments. In turn, they taught him how to live on a rogue world, which was becoming increasingly easy, and not just because of Hark’s intact house. When Savitri first arrived, it was all but a barren wasteland. Over time, seeds magically made their way from Earth, and added life. There were still no animals, but there was always plenty to eat. Runoff from Watershed continued to irrigate more than enough farmland to support all three of them. Things were all right. By then, Escher and Rothko’s relationship with Effigy had faded away; not because anyone did anything wrong, but more because they drifted apart, and the humans saw no benefit to sticking with her. So Hark became the third in the new, new Triumvirate, which they colloquially referred to as The Trident, because they were in their twenties, and thought it sounded cool. Their reign lasted for about eight years before the Deathfall suddenly added nearly thirteen hundred people to the world’s population.

Microstory 1408: Dogs and Cats, Living Together

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Escher and Rothko were devastated at the loss of their good friend, Savitri. They didn’t know if she was dead, or just somewhere else, but they felt they needed to memorialize her either way. They decided to honor her at a particular cliff she used to frequent. They didn’t realize that this was where she had once considered committing suicide, and returned often to remind herself that her life had value. Effigy asked to attend Savtri’s memorial, and they let her, because even though she was indirectly responsible for all of this world’s problems, it didn’t appear as though she had set out to do them harm. They were mostly just in her way. This was the first time she had thought to sit down and explain herself. Yes, an army of white monsters were trying to  come through the portal, and yes, she wanted to bring them through intact, rather than broken and damaged. The army, however, was just there to make sure the world they landed on was safe. Most of the people who would be making the trip were civilians, looking for a better life. She explained to them how the universe, as the humans saw it, was either infinite, or might as well have been. There was plenty of space and resources for everyone. Her universe of origin, however, was very finite. It barely went past the orbit of their moon. They could see stars in the distance, but they seemed to be holographic illusions, as a great impenetrable wall prevented them from traveling anywhere close to them. Several of her people had died in the attempt. Unfortunately, the threat of overpopulation wasn’t enough to stop that population from growing. People just kept having kids, and they were already so great in numbers that it was nigh impossible to coordinate a way to prevent them from continuing to do so. Scientists worked tirelessly, trying to solve the problem, and they did find a solution. They built a gigantic machine that could transport thousands of people to other universes. Sadly, this machine was all but destroyed before it could ever be used for this mission, and while time travel did suggest that didn’t matter, the remnants of this machine made its way into human hands, which was where it stayed throughout multiversal eternity. The machine was first built using stolen technology, and there was no way to get it back. They simply did not have the resources, or political backing, to try this again. The portal was the only way, according to Effigy. Escher and Rothko listened to her politely, and after hours of discussions, they formulated a truce. The two of them would no longer interfere with the time monsters coming through, but neither would they let her repair the portal, so the full beings could cross over. Effigy had to be all right with this, because it was really her only choice. Even without Savitri, the humans here were unbeatable. Besides, she was immortal, and they were not, so she figured she could just wait them out. After a while, the three of them formed a deeper working relationship, and eventually, there was no denying that they were kind of nearly  the approximation of friends. She even ended up joining them in a more formal way, which served to reconstitute the Triumvirate.

Microstory 1407: I Of the Portalcane

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After defeating Effigy for the upteenth time, and solidifying themselves as a loyal and true Triumvirate, things seemed to be going okay. They developed a nice system of defeating the time monsters that came through the broken portal. Escher would steal power from the monsters themselves to use against them. He would donate this power to Rothko, who would destroy them anyway necessary. Savitri would supply a boost of energy as well. It didn’t last very long, though, as the consequences of their actions would eventually catch up to them. Time travel, and other forms of temporal manipulation, was tricky. It was usually pretty safe to do, because it was usually fairly controlled, and minimal. A teleportation jump here, a seer making a prediction there; the energy used in these interactions with time dissipated so easily that no one had to make sure it happened. But it was possible for all this to get out of hand. Had the time monsters been allowed to exit the portal, and go on their merry way, things would have been all right. It would have all been structured and safe, at least on the grander scale. But the Triumvirate always wanted to destroy them, and they used a lot of temporal energy to do this. Since they were acting in such close quarters, this constant transfer of power started to do some real damage. Reality was going haywire around them, causing the past, present, and future to be layered upon each other. They saw things that would not come to pass for decades, but it was all so chaotic that there was no way to gather any real information from it. Either way, it needed to be stopped, and there was seemingly no way to do that. They spent days trying to work the problem, but with every attempt, the problem only grew worse, because they were simply adding more and more energy to the convergence. There was one particular incident that kept coming back and seemed to be at the heart of the matter. They were witnessing a future event, wherein another small group of people were trying to fix their own energy problem. It generated a massive explosion that vibrated all across the globe, and when it was finally over, the portal was finally closed for good. They figured, if there was any way to stop their problems today, it involved somehow tapping into this future moment. What they didn’t realize was that the moment they were watching actually took place over the course of decades alone, and they were simply watching it on fast-forward. It took a long time for that portal to close completely, and a lot of people were taken in by it before that would happen, whether they wanted to go, or not. The Triumvirate paid their own price when they got too close. Savitri was pulled in to what was later called the portalcane, and dispatched to the universe where the monsters originated. This should have only been accessible any time after the event occurred. Even with time travel, the portalcane generally only had an impact on the future. As far as anyone knew, Savitri was the only exception to this. Her friends would never see her again. And they would never forgive themselves for it. Savitri, however, did fine without them. She lived a decent life—though, not without heartbreak. She just did it somewhere else.

Microstory 1406: Triumph of the Triumvirate

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Only weeks after Rothko arrived on Durus, Effigy came back, hoping to use a different tactic to get what she wanted. She had had just about enough of Escher getting in the way of her plans to bring all of her people into this universe, and she thought she finally had an advantage over him. On the outside, Rothko was a really good person. He was compassionate, thoughtful, and ready to help anyone who crossed his path, whether he knew them or not. Yet he carried a darkness inside of him that he was only beginning to discover, and being a master manipulator, Effigy believed she could exploit these two sides of him at the same time. She could turn him over to her side, both by appealing to his instinct to be helpful and understanding, and to his inner demons. She began to communicate with him when he was apart from the other two. She didn’t whisper in his ear, or claim that his friends weren’t good for him. She didn’t even charge him to keep their new relationship a secret. She just became friends with him, and taught him how to use his time powers, and let him decide for himself whether he was going to reveal the truth to the rest of the Triumvirate. Most choosing ones develop an instinct for their abilities. They don’t know exactly how they work, but they know how to use them, just like a baby will learn to walk, pretty much no matter what, even if you try to teach them not to. Rothko, however, was particularly unskilled with his, and he needed Effigy’s help. He was a lot smarter than she gave him credit for, though. He could see what she was trying to do to him, and as long as he stayed grounded, he felt he could overcome any psychological poison she tried to use on him. He let her keep thinking that they were becoming real friends, but it was all just an act, so he could learn from her. He recognized that she was his best hope of figuring out how to use his gifts. He proved his loyalty months later; to himself, to his friends, and to Effigy. One thing he had always wanted to do was restore Escher’s hand. Now, the range of his powers was limited. While it was indeed called reality-warping, it didn’t give him free reign over the whole universe. It was localized. He could only make small changes, and only within the immediate area. He was disrupting physics, but not quite breaking any laws. The energy he used had to come from somewhere, and a lot of his work were more illusions than real alterations. There was a way, however, for him to give Escher his hand back. There was a reality out there where Escher didn’t lose his hand at all. This reality was unstable, and short-lived, but that didn’t matter when it came to  time travel. He could still access that timeline, and take from it what he needed. He stitched events from this microreality into the real one, and returned the hand, as if it had never been removed at all. This was great; the Triumvirate had beaten Effigy yet again, and she was furious, because it meant she hadn’t really found a weakness at all. Sadly, their new, happy, and intact life together was not destined to last forever. In utilizing his powers in this way, Rothko had unwittingly opened the world up to much larger changes in the future, and none of them would prove to be powerful enough to stop what was coming.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: Tuesday, April 29, 2053

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Before anyone could so much as begin to guess what the hell was going on, a pod appeared a few meters away from them, and opened up to reveal what Mateo could only describe as a future-cop. He smiled at the group apprehensively. “Hello. Reports indicate that some unusual temporal activity has been occurring in this area. Where, and/or when are you from?”

Hmm. He seemed to be a deveiled human, who used time technology on the regular. Mateo checked his wrist. Yes, it was honest hour, so he resolved to take the lead on this one, and not worry about whether anyone disagreed. “We apologize if we have broken any laws.” He showed the cop his Cassidy cuff. “We are not in control of our temporal movements. We do the bidding of someone who is very powerful. He’s trapped us here in your reality, though to be fair, all we’ve done so far is help people, so he may not be as bad as he wants us to believe.”

The time cop looked to the rest of the group, not because he didn’t believe Mateo’s story, but to see if anyone else had anything to add. “You’re from the main sequence.” It was a half-question.

“If that is what you call it,” Leona confirmed. “We just call it the main timeline, and we call this The Parallel.”

“Indeed,” the cop agreed. “You have been foretold.” He looked at his own watch, but literally. “No point in transporting you into the heart of the city, and alerting anyone else to your presence. I’ll be right here to pick you up in three years, two days.” He climbed back into his pod, and teleported away. Ninety minutes later, midnight central was quickly approaching.

Sanaa knelt down, and picked up what were formerly Ramses’ cuffs.

“Don’t touch those!” Leona warned.

“Why not?” Sanaa asked. “Will they magically wrap themselves around my wrists, and trap me on your hyphenated pattern?”

“Yeah, they might,” Leona warned further.

Sanaa smiled, and gracefully strapped them onto her wrists. “Well, what the hell else am I gonna do?” The damage was done now, and could not be undone, unless they forced someone else to take her place, or Kalea returned to explain how she removed Ramses from them in the first place.

Just as the man said, he was waiting for them three years later, but this time with a larger transport vehicle. He ushered them into it. “We’ve requested an audience with the Tanadama.”

“The whatnow?”

“The gods who created our galaxy. They’re very busy, but I’m optimistic that they will come here to speak with you.”

“They created the galaxy?” Leona asked.

“Well, not literally. The stars form naturally, of course. They saved our species, so that we almost never die. We only experience the occasional suicide from someone who’s just over it, or an AI malfunction that cannot be repaired.”

“You never die,” Leona continued the questioning. “How long have you been like that?”

“About twelve thousand years,” the cop answered. “I’m Officer Tynosey, by the way, but everyone just calls me Tyno.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Tyno.” Now Leona was just going to take over the conversation. “I assume that you are an interstellar civilization.”

“We’re an intergalactic civilization, but the majority of our population still lives in the Milky Way. We’re at K3.”

“My God,” she said. “How many people is that?”

“A couple undecillion,” Tyno said, like it was nothing. Mateo had never heard that particular prefix attached to -illion, which meant that it was probably pretty damn big. “Each host star houses around five septillion people. We could go higher than that obviously, but we like to spread out.

“That’s insane.”

“Yeah,” Holly Blue concurred. “Do you have faster-than-light travel?”

“We do,” Tyno replied. His watch beeped. “Oh. That’s confirmation. I’ve been authorized to return you to Earth, where your friends are waiting for you.” He closed the hatch behind him, synced his watch with a panel on the wall, and transported them to Earth.

The hatch opened from the outside as soon as they arrived. Ramses was there with his big fat smile. They were on the side of a mountain, overlooking a valley. “Man, we had always planned on being there, waiting for you when you arrived, but the timeline is complicated. We weren’t sure which timeline you would remember, so we just decided to let the locals handle it until this year.” He gestured towards Tyno.

Tyno hopped out of the transport, and closed his eyes. He placed three fingers loosely on his forehead, and then moved them down to his lips. He kept switching back and forth between these two positions, occasionally spending several seconds in one stop, and changing speed erratically. It reminded Mateo of how the Catholics did the sign of the cross. Catholicism probably didn’t exist in this reality.

“That’s enough, my child,” Ramses said to him.

“It is such a deep honor, Father. I am so humbled in your presence. I’m not worthy to breathe from the same atmosphere as you—”

“All right,” Ramses stopped him. “What does it say in the Book of Ramses, Chapter Eleven, Section Twenty-Four, Paragraph Forty-Two, Line Fifty-Six?”

“When the Mother or Father appear to you, they will be human, and they will be accessible, and you will respect them, but you will not worship them,” Tyno recited. “Sorry, sir.”

“It’s all right. Just don’t forget that I’m only a person.”

The group looked at him in disapproval.

“It got away from us,” Ramses tried to explain to them. “We didn’t write the books, but we did edit them, adding lines like that so they wouldn’t kill themselves out of reverence every time we showed up.”

Leona rejected this response. “You formed a religion. That’s time travel one-oh-one. In fact, I better make it Rule Number Fourteen, do not form, or inspire, a religion.”

“It’s a lot more complicated than that,” Ramses argued.

“Clarify,” Mateo said. “Report.”

So Ramses began to explain where he and Kalea had gone, and what they had done. “This isn’t the first new timeline that we created. At first, we followed the plan. We got everyone off of Durus, and back to Earth. We continued on the pattern, and things were okay when it came to us. It wasn’t okay with the rest of the world, though. Earth was still devoid of nearly all human life. There was us, and the people that Jupiter transitioned. Kalea didn’t like that. Her whole purpose as a source mage on Durus in the main sequence was to protect people using time powers. So the lot of us went back to the cataclysm that destroyed the species, and fixed it. Now things were even finer, but not great. Technology was incredibly slow. They were building castles when they should have been working on the first rockets. So we went back again, and saved more lives. Every time we went back, we made the timeline a little better; a little safer. Kalea was never happy, though. She needed to fix everything, and to do that, we needed help. We created more mages, and used them like the powers that be use salmon in the other timeline.

“I don’t even remember how it happened, but the last thing we did was go back thousands of years, and turn everyone immortal. I tried to explain to her the repercussions of such a thing, but she wouldn’t hear it. She would not listen to the math. I told her that over a hundred billion people had ever lived on Earth, and also that Earth could indeed support that many people, but I also told her that in a timeline with virtually no death, you can’t just go by that number, because those people are going to have children. Over time, the number has grown so large that we are now a Kardashev 3 civilization, occupying every star system in the entire galaxy.”

“Yes.” Leona nodded. “Tyno did tell us that. You made a galaxy of time travelers. I can’t imagine how problematic that has become.”

“No,” Ramses contended. “Time travel is against the law, galaxy-wide. It’s not technically necessary, since the only way to have time powers is to get them from me or Kalea, but it’s a redundant system. People don’t die, and they can move across the galaxy at superluminal speeds. That’s all we gave them. They developed the rest of the technology they have.”

Leona shook her head continuously. “Two undecillion people,” she said quietly. “I don’t even know what that means.” She wasn’t the only one wondering this. Leona and Holly Blue were two of the smartest people Mateo knew. If even they had trouble fathoming the vast number of people presently alive in a galaxy with a millennia-long history of nearly no death, then he would have no hope of understanding it. “You couldn’t maintain a homogeneous system with that, even with ubiquitous FTL. That’s just too many people.”

“Each solar swarm has its own governmental body, yes,” Ramses said. Saying we’re K3 is a bit of a misnomer. We’re more like a bunch of separate K2s. But there’s a lot of collaboration, and we don’t allow war. Half the Book of Kalea is about living in harmony.”

“People keep talking about these K-numbers,” J.B. complained. “What does that mean?”

Sanaa chose to explain this one, “a K1 civilization can harness all the power on its planet. K2 can use its whole sun. K3 can use the whole galaxy. What Ramses is saying that, since the galaxy is so big, they’re not really K3, because they’re not all one civilization anymore.”

“What are you?” Mateo asked Ramses, not bothering to ask Sanaa why she understood this scale the scientists were talking about.

“I’m a source mage now,” Ramses answered. “Most of the time, the source mages in the main sequence only create lesser mages. There was a theory, however, that they could effectively make more, just by giving someone the power to give other people powers.”

J.B. giggled. “It’s like using one of your three wishes to wish for more wishes.”

“Kind of,” Ramses admitted. “She only did it once, though. She made me, and we’re it.”

“The Dadamama, that is,” Mateo put forth.

“Tanadama,” Ramses corrected, but you were on the right track. Ta, da, ma, and na are all used in various languages to mean father and mother, respectively. We put it together, because parents didn’t seem to do our role justice. It was Alt!Jeremy’s idea.”

“Sounds like me,” J.B. decided.

“So, it’s over,” Holly Blue presumed.

“What’s over?” Ramses questioned.

“The Matic-Bearimy pattern. The only reason we were on it was because Jupiter was too powerful to go against. That can’t possibly be the case anymore.”

Ramses deafened them with his silence.

“Ramses?” Mateo began. “Can’t you just put a stop to this...or make somebody who can?”

“It’s complicated,” Ramses told them, but did not elaborate.

“Keep going,” Leona urged.

“The Book of Ramses clearly states, To maintain temporal integrity, no native of The Parallel may interfere with the actions of those from the main sequence.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Sanaa argued. “You’re from the main sequence, and Jupiter is interfering with the Parallel. It doesn’t go both ways? Seems irrational.”

“The line I recited is taken a bit out of context. If you read more of it, you would understand that I can’t help you. I’m not really from the main timeline anymore. I’ve been here for tens of thousands of years. I couldn’t be The Father if I didn’t integrate myself fully into this reality.”

“Leona,” Mateo interrupted her before she could argue again. “This is not the friend who left us yesterday. He is an entirely different person, who has been through more than we will ever understand. You won’t be able to convince him to help. We just have to accept the fact that this is how it is. I tried arguing with The Superintendent, and it got me nowhere.” He turned to the man who looked like his best friend. “Thank you for rescuing us from Durus, and thank you for your time. We will let you get back to your galaxy, as we return to the mission. We would be grateful, however, if you could find us a ride to Australia.”

“He’s right,” J.B. said, looking at his own cuff. “Now that we have a satellite feed, we can see exactly where we need to go.”

“I’m sorry,” Ramses told him.

“I firmly believe that we’re saving lives,” Mateo said. “I don’t know why Jupiter wants us to think he’s evil, or why he thinks the only way to save these people’s lives is to temporarily pull them into another reality, but I’m going to keep going until we run out of people to help.”

Ramses nodded in understanding. “I’ll get you to that transport. It’s not far from here; right where you left it in the underground hangar. I don’t know when it transitioned.” He was talking about the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which was the closest thing they had to a home these days.

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Varkas Reflex: Vacuum (Part VI)

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Hokusai didn’t know what was wrong with this planet, or why it suddenly needed her help. She made a point of staying out of its business, requesting that Pribadium not bother her with such matters while they were working, or visiting. She was worried, though, that someone had decided to use her technology for evil, or maybe even just something misguided, which could have similar negative results. Katica led her down the hallway, out of the lab, across the way, and into the Capitol building.

Councilor Gangsta Dazzlemist was waiting for them in the lobby. “You were right. She got here fast.”

“May I ask what this is about?” Hokusai looked around at the walls, as if this were a trick, and the building would collapse in on her like something out of a space war movie.

Gangsta breathed in deeply, and Hokusai wasn’t sure what he did with the air, because it never seemed to come out. “I’m retiring from public service.”

“Congratulations,” Hokusai said to him sincerely.

“We need a replacement,” he went on.

Hokusai nodded. Now, she was literally a genius, and her intellect wasn’t limited to knowing how to calculate the Roche limit, or observational time through relativistic speeds. She picked up on social cues much easier than the average person, allowing her to tease out an individual’s subtext, and know when someone was lying. So when Gangsta told her they were looking for a replacement, she immediately understood he wasn’t just posting an update about his life in person. His microexpressions, coupled with the fact that they had lifted her exile, meant that she was here for a very specific reason. They were asking her to be that replacement. She didn’t know why, though. “I don’t know how I could do it. I live twenty-two parsecs away.”

He pointed at her with an upwards-facing palm. “Obviously not.”

“It’s this whole thing.”

“I understand,” Gangsta began, “that you did not simply stumble upon dimensional gravity, Madam Gimura. No one has ever done anything like it. They weren’t even looking for it. I don’t know what you are, and I don’t know how many others there are like you. I don’t really care. You’ve given us so much, and we gladly accept it. But please, do not think me a fool. I know you’re more than just a scientist, and that your expertise goes far beyond artificial gravity. I am in so much awe of you, and I will not tell anyone what little I know of your secret, including your ability to teleport between star systems.”

“It means a lot, hearing you say that,” she said, again, sincerely.

“You are not only my choice to replace me. You’re almost everybody’s.”

“How’s that?”

“Someone leaked your trial,” Katica explained. “They know who you are, and what you’ve done for them.” Leak was a strong word. The governments decided a long time ago that court cases should no longer have audiences. They were still mostly public record—unless the transparency endangered lives—but without the spectacle, those involved generally found the process to be fairer. Still, the information didn’t need to be leaked. It just required someone with the motives to raise their voice loud enough for people to hear it. Combined with artificial intelligences, there were now tens of billions of “people” in the stellar neighborhood. So being a loud voice was pretty hard. A public figure with as many fans as the most famous on Earth in 2016 would be barely considered a local celebrity by today’s standards. Any rando capable of getting a whole planet—even a low-populated colony—to listen was impressive.

“They’re asking me to become a councilor?” Hokusai questioned. “Because they think it was unfair that I was exiled? That’s a bit of a stretch.”

“It’s not because you were exiled, though that does help your popularity factor,” Katica said. “It’s because they know what you did for them decades ago. They know you’re responsible for artificial gravity, and for repairing our habitats before the colony vessels arrived.”

“That wasn’t me; that was my friends, Leona and Eight Point Seven.” The first human to set foot on Varkas Reflex was Leona Matic, when a mysterious quantum force commandeered her ship, and brought her here to fix some problems with the nanofactory.

“Close enough,” Katica contended. “You’re a hero, regardless, and the people want you to lead them.”

“That’s not really my thing.”

“We know,” Gangsta said. “We think it should be, though.”

She sighed. “I don’t even like how you run the government. Don’t get me wrong, to each their own, and I’ll gladly come back to live here, but it’s too informal. I appreciate that you wanna be laid back, but you could be so much more, if you were more motivated.” She repeated her point with an exaggerated accent that a high school math teacher she once had used to get his students interested in algebra, “motivaaation. Motivaaaaation.”

Gangsta smiled. “That’s what we’re counting on. The people aren’t looking for a new councilor. They want you to be Superintendent.”

Hokusai caught half of a chuckle before it escaped her mouth, but couldn’t stop the first half. The Superintendent was essentially the term choosing ones used to describe God. It was more metaphysically complicated than that, which was exactly why the word god was avoided in the first place. In this case, Gangsta was referring to a governmental position for someone who possessed questionable decision-making scope. A superintendent wasn’t responsible for running the state, but for managing the people who were responsible for running the state. They were staff managers, human resource representatives, the occasional conflict mediators. On the surface, they appeared to have the most power of all, since they were in charge of everyone, but they still answered to the people, and they couldn’t just fire and hire other leaders willy nilly. They had to remain reasonable, and accountable. Every colony but Varkas Reflex started out with a superintendent, but most stepped down after two or three full election cycles, because they were useful when starting out, but usually obsolete once the engine got going. Only Earth held onto their superintendent, because theirs was the highest populated world. It was just funny that Varkas was finally deciding to get on board with convention.

“You’ve been in your head for a good long while,” Katica pointed out. “Do you have a response?”

“My initial thought is no,” Hokusai answered.

“That makes sense,” Katica said. “It sounds like you. But you’re the one who hates how they run the government. What better way to fix it than to be the one in charge of coming up with a new one?”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” Hokusai admitted. “While I believe what you’re doing now is not sustainable, I know that you don’t want to convert to a full mediatorial tetracameral legislature, and that’s the only one I know, because it’s the most common.” This type of government was composed of four parts. The population representative congress was there to speak for the needs of the civilians. They expressed their grievances to the two delegators, who met with separate advisory boards in order to come to decisions. Much like separate arbitration panels in the adjudicative system, the idea was, if both delegation boards came to the same conclusion, without talking to each other about it, it was probably the right one. The delegators then delegated the implementation of their decision to whichever administrators were in charge of whatever this change impacted.

This was all really complicated by design. Complexity often equaled more exploitable weakness, but also greater overall resilience. Maybe you could bribe one delegator to do what you wanted, but the other? Even if you did that, their irrational behavior would alert the mediator between them, so you would have to convince them to fall in line as well. Even so, the advisors would question why the delegators and mediator weren’t heeding their advice. The administrators would question their orders, and finally, the people would rise up against the injustice. And those people had the power to make swift changes to leadership personnel. It was practically impossible in Hokusai’s time to impeach a president, let alone remove them from office. Here, not so hard. If they wanted someone gone, they were gone. No one was entitled to power, and no one was entitled to maintain that power, once it was granted. These changes were positively unavoidable in modern times. No matter how good a leader was, there was too much risk of their control growing, well...out of control, over time. When accounting for immortality, this control could theoretically last for literal aeons, and that was probably not a good idea.

“You’re in your head again,” Katica warned her.

“Sorry, I was just going over what I would do if I were superintendent, and it always ends in disaster.”

“I don’t believe that,” Gangsta argued. “We’re not asking you to have all the answers today. Nor are the citizens. We just want you to get the process started. We all have immense faith in your ability to be fair, thoughtful, and sensitive to this planet’s unique needs.”

“Of course you may decline,” Katica started to add. “I urge you to give it some thought, though. Remember what happened the last time you made a rash decision, without knowing the consequences.”

Hokusai had never asked Katica to take responsibility for her own involvement in the memory wipe that was accidental from Hokusai’s side, but not from Katica’s. She glared at her now to remind her of this truth telepathically.

“Someone has to take care of us, and I can’t be the one to do it. Nature abhors a vacuum,” Gangsta quipped.

“Why do people always say that?” Hokusai questioned. “Nature loves a vacuum. It’s called entropy, and it’s kind of where everything in the universe is trying to get to.”

“Just think about it,” Katica requested. “In the meantime, you’re expected on the balcony.”

“The balcony?” Hokusai didn’t know what she was talking about. “Who’s on the balcony?”

“No one,” she answered. “You’re the one who’s expected. They’re waiting for your fence speech.”

“What the hell is a fence speech?” Hokusai asked.

“You’re on the fence, right?” Gangsta asked her.

Not really, but Katica was right that she should at least think about it. “You want me to go out there, and tell people I might consider maybe starting to almost kind of theoretically think about one day possibly entertaining the idea of hypothetically accepting a potential offer to perhaps, perchance, try to run for Superintendent?”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but yeah, I guess,” Gangsta confirmed. “As I said, they’re expecting you.”

“You shouldn’t have told them I would be here.”

“We didn’t,” Katica said. “Like we’ve been trying to explain, it wasn’t our idea; it was theirs. They have been waiting for you.”

“Demanding, even,” Gangsta corrected.

“Yes.”

Hokusai massaged the bridge of her nose. “They’re expecting a...fence speech?”

“Yes,” Katica confirmed. “They are not anticipating that you will announce your intention to run today. If you go out there, and humor them for five minutes, they’ll finally go away, and move on with their lives. They will want you to make a final decision within the week, though, so keep that in mind.”

“Fine. I’ll go talk to them, but I promise nothing.”

“That’s all we ask,” Katica said gratefully.

“If it’s a five-minute speech, I will need ten minutes to write it.”

“That’s okay,” Gangsta said with glee. “I’ll go back out and stall them with another attempt at playing the gravity organ.”

By the time Hokusai finished delivering her fifteen-minute long speech, she had already decided to run. She did so unopposed, and obviously won.

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