The Advancement of Mateo Matic: Tuesday, June 15, 2100

« < » > Table of Contents

They were happy to confirm the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had become like one giant Cassidy cuff. Anyone inside of it during the jump to the future would be swept along with it. This was important, because it would allow them to take people with them, in case something was wrong with the date they were already in, as it was with Ariadna Traversa. It would also theoretically let them remove their own cuffs somehow, and still have a way to escape any given time period. For now, they weren’t going to do that, but it might come in handy in the future, or even be quite necessary. Now in the year 2100, the cuffs were directing them back to Kansas, where they were scheduled to encounter the next transition window in several hours. This gave them time to get some more sleep, and some breakfast, before the job began.

At 8:15 in the morning, the transition began. The images started flickering around them. Sometimes they were in what looked like a hospital lobby, but other times they could only see a hospital bed hovering several stories above them. “Oh, no,” Mateo said. “It’s happening again. But we don’t have a teleporter to rescue them this time! What are we gonna do? They’re gonna fall!”

“I got this,” Sanaa said. She tapped a few buttons on her interface. Once she was finished, the flickering stopped, but the building didn’t disappear, and no one fell from up in the air. Everything just stayed as it was.

“What did you do?” Leona asked her, trying to find answers on her own cuffs, but they were frozen on one screen. It was a nine-minute, fifty-four second countdown. Fifty-three, fifty-two...

“Can I help you?” asked a nurse, who hopefully hadn’t just witnessed them suddenly appear out of thin air.

Sanaa ignored her. “Like I said, these gadgets are more powerful than they seem,” she nearly explained. “We’re in the main sequence right now, but we apparently only have ten minutes before the transition completes. It’s a failsafe, exactly for situations such as this. We have nine minutes to get up to the room, pull our refugee from their bed, and get them down to ground level.”

“Do we even know what floor that was?” J.B. asked. “I mean, it was high, but we don’t really have a frame of reference.”

“It was the sixth floor,” Jericho answered. When everyone looked at him funny, he said, “what? I have an eye for these things. I can picture what one foot looks like, so I just add them up until I get nine for one story, and then I divide the space I have left.”

“Fine, sixth floor, let’s go.”

“If you just tell me who you’re looking for,” the nurse began to call out to them as they were running for the elevators, “I can give you a room number.”

“We don’t know who we’re rescuing!” J.B. shouted back politely.

Once they were on the sixth floor, it was a little more difficult to figure out where they were meant to go. Jericho had an understanding of how to calculate the Z-axis in his head, but now that they were impeded by hallways, and counters, it was a little more difficult for him to know which room they were looking for. As the minutes ticked by, they were growing more and more worried. If they didn’t find their target soon, not only was this person going to fall to their death, but so would everyone else. They still didn’t even know who they were looking for. No idea.

“Everyone come back to the elevator bay!” Jericho shouted. Though he was not their leader, they all met back up. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. The cafeteria is on the second story. The ceiling is probably higher. I think we should be on floor five.”

J.B. pressed the call button. For a normal person, the amount of time they waited for the elevator to come was no big deal, but here, every second counted. When it finally arrived, they jumped in, and J.B. pressed the button for the fifth floor.

Then Leona pressed the button for the lobby. “Everyone else go all the way downstairs. Don’t argue with me, just do it. If you try  to come with me, you will die. I’m the only one who can save her.”

“Her who?” Mateo asked.

Leona bolted out of the doors without answering. He wanted to do what she said, but he couldn’t let her be alone. If they were going to die, they would do it together. He stepped out as well, and only stayed back long enough to make sure no one else followed. He then found Leona at the nurse’s counter.

“X. Voss,” the nurse was saying. “Room six-thirty-one.”

“Leona?” Mateo asked simply.

“I took a gamble,” she replied, “based on what year it is.”

They ran off for 631, and found Young!Xearea asleep in her bed. She looked very badly hurt, which didn’t make any sense, because even though they first met her in 2099, and didn’t know exactly what happened to her shortly thereafter, they knew it wasn’t this. “We have forty-five seconds,” Mateo said to Leona. “We can’t get back down ourselves, let alone with her.”

Leona started unplugging Xearea from the wall. “I have a way to get us to the AOC. I was able to get past the timer, and back into the cuff’s systems. There’s an emergency teleport function. I’ll be able to take two people with me. I’m just glad you’re the only one who decided to go against my orders.”

They both stopped for a few seconds to look over at the door, believing that to be the moment one—or even all—of their friends would show that they made the same bad call. They were shocked to see that someone was indeed just stepping through the door. It wasn’t one of their friends, though. Mateo actually recognized him as one of the men that attacked Xearea in 2099. Again, though, Xearea survived that onslaught unscathed last year when he, Horace, Gilbert, and even Darko showed up to protect her. They called it the Terminator 2 Tribulation, because this man had come from the future to kill her, because he was pissed off about something she hadn’t done yet.

“Who the hell are you?” the man asked very impolitely.

Mateo checked his cuff. Twenty-five seconds. “Go.”

“Mateo...” Leona said.

“Just because I went against your orders, doesn’t mean you should go against mine. Get her out of here, for the both of us. I can’t die, remember? My fate’s been sealed.” If anything were to try to kill him, the universe itself should automatically transport him back to 2256, so he could die on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. This was how it worked with Nerakali anyway. She often let herself be almost killed, so she could escape a situation, and get another chance. She had several opportunities to do this, but Mateo probably had none. He was a lot closer to his death than her when someone swooped in to rescue him. It would be worth it, though. He had to protect Leona, and especially Xearea. The latter was destined to grow up to be the Savior of Earth, so her death was absolutely not an option.

Mateo charged the attacker, and pushed him back out into the hallway. He wasn’t exactly a trained fighter—like Darko, or his students, Slipstream and Declan—but he knew he would be able to keep this man at bay until the timer hit zero, and his chance to get to Xearea passed. He was going to die anyway, so it wasn’t like he needed to protect his own life. That gave him the freedom to fight hard, and without hesitation. His cuffs started to beep near the end. Five-beep, four-beep, three-beep, two-beep, one. No flickering this time. The building simply disappeared from under their feet. The attacker came with him back to the Parallel, so he was going to die too. It was good that he wasn’t going to get a third chance to murder a lovely person. They dropped through the air. Mateo determined there was a small chance Xearea herself would show up and teleport him to safety, or someone else like her. But no, that wasn’t going to work here. The powers that be did not have control over this reality. That was kind of the whole deal. If Leona or Mateo ever took off their cuffs, they would be off their pattern, and free from them forever. Though this also meant that no one was coming to rescue him. This was finally it. He kept falling until he hit the ground. And then he woke up.

He was submerged in a liquid; possibly just water, but he couldn’t tell. He wasn’t drowning, so it was probably the special kind of water they used on Varkas Reflex that let people breathe through their skin. He was freaking out, though. He looked over, and saw the glass of his tank, as well as two figures on the dry land beyond it. He pounded on the glass. Upon noticing this, one of them rushed over, and slammed her palm against the side of the tank. This released the water onto the floor, and him along with it. He coughed on instinct, even though he wasn’t really in any danger. He was actually feeling fine; maybe just a little weak and tired. Once he felt stable enough, he stood up, with a little from... “Paige Turner?”

“Trinity,” she corrected. She was indeed Paige, but a specific alternate version of her.

“And I’m Abigail Genifer Siskin,” another young woman said. She handed him a towel that was large enough to help him get a little dried off, but not really large enough to cover his bits.

He patted himself down. It was only then that he noticed how wrinkly his skin was. He was old. He was real old. “Report.” 

“Hm. Well, I suppose the truth will do,” Trinity said. “You’re alive.”

“What year is it?”

“2340.”

“Is this...does this have something to do with Ellie rescuing me with the extraction mirror?” he asked.

“I didn’t use the mirror.” Ellie was walking into the room.

After they dried him off more thoroughly, and dressed him in some clothes, they sat him down, and explained themselves. The extraction mirror had had nothing to do with saving him from his death. What they did was clone his body, and transfer his mind into it. That was the body he used to travel back to 2258, and get back on track, having only missed a day of his life. The body Mateo was inhabiting right now was a failed attempt at this process, before they knew how to do it right, and had to start over. That was why it was so old; because they had just left it in the tank all this time.

“It was a failsafe,” Ellie continued. “I honestly didn’t think it would work, but if something ever happened to you again, your mind was supposed to be sent across time, into another clone. I didn’t plan for it to be this clone, in this moment, but I guess I never had that much control over it. How did you die?”

“I shouldn’t tell you about that,” Mateo said. They were finally being honest with him, but that didn’t mean he could reciprocate.

“Okay,” Trinity said.

“Mmmmmmm...” Old men groan a lot, for now apparent reason. “Mmm, what should I do now?”

“Well,” Trinity began, “I can make you young again, and send you back to 2014 while I’m at it.”

“You have a homestone,” Mateo guessed.

“Yes, but I will need it back, so...”

“Can I send it through the mail?” he asked.

“Hm,” Ellie said. “Yeah, we can contact Ennis, and he’ll return it to us.”

“Okay, cool,” Mateo said.

“Yeah. The problem is, once you’re in 2014, how are you going to get back to where you belong, wherever that is?”

“That’s not your problem,” Mateo assured them. “You let me worry about it.”

“Mateo...”

“Seriously,” he promised. “I have a plan, and it’s best I don’t tell you. You let me borrow the stone, and teach me how to contact The Courier, and I’ll send it back to you. That’s all you need to know.”

Trinity and Ellie looked at each other, and seemed to have a telepathic conversation, or something. “All right, we’ll trust you.”

“Great. Now help an old man up. I’m a little shaky.”

Trinity ran off to retrieve the stone, but came back quickly, and handed it to him.

“Oh my God,” Ellie said, “I almost forgot. There’s a reason we didn’t use this clone for you before. It’s defective. You’ve fallen off of your pattern.”

“That’s okay,” Mateo responded with a wink, and a smirk. “I don’t need it anymore.” He squeezed the stone, and disappeared.

The Courier, Ennis was waiting for him in the graveyard, having received a message from Ellie, who was capable of communicating with people across time. He opened a small box, and let Mateo drop the stone into it. “Can I help you with anything else, sir?”

“Yes, I was wondering if you could point me in the direction of the Interagency Alliance Commission. More specifically, can you get me a meeting with Demcov Sands?”

« < » > Table of Contents

Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida: Cloned (Part II)

< > Entire Story

I can’t travel through time on my own. I can send messages through the timestream, but I can’t actually travel to these places unless I have help. Fortunately, my ability gives me access to people who can give me that help. Throughout my travels, I’ve learned to endear myself to others, so they do what I need them to without question, or compensation. I’m not evil, so I’m not trying to manipulate people, or anything. I just want people to be nicer to each other, and the best way I know to teach them that lesson is to make it personal. I’ve kept a lot from them, though. You see, one thing I learned about my abilities is that they’re a lot more complicated than I knew at first. Yes, I can teleport sound, and yes it also allows me to carry on conversations across time. That’s not all, though. I can also teleport my entire consciousness. Theoretically, I would be able to do this to take over someone else’s mind, but that’s always been very distasteful for me. So I only do it to myself.

I periodically send my mind back to my younger body. I don’t do this to make myself youthful again, since I drank a couple bottles of water once to stay young anyway. No, I just don’t want people to know how old I am, and what I’ve been through. When I go back in time, I prevent myself from doing all the things I did. So I can recall those experiences, but they never happened to anyone else in this timeline, so they don’t know that. I’ve given people my age every once in a while, and it’s always a lie. I’ve kept really good track of how long I’ve truly been around. At the moment, it’s been 24,425 years, across an ungodly number of timelines. Most of the timelines have been about the same. It’s not like I go back and make a bunch of changes to history. I just wanna see it all, and I need time to do that.

Anyway, I’ve just stepped into a time chamber in 2300, and ended up back in 2256, because not everyone has the luxury of reversing their timelines. I have to save a very important man’s life, and I’m going to do it in a different way than anyone knows. I’m standing at the bottom of the cliff, back pressed against it. Mateo Matic is dying a couple meters from me, but I can’t help him quite yet. His murderer is still watching him, not to make sure Mateo dies, but because he isn’t a natural-born killer, and he’s freaking out about what he just did. I’ve seen this moment a few times, so I know exactly what happens. Four, three, two, now.

I dive down to Mateo. I don’t have long before he expires, and it’s too late. Briar killed him while wearing a special temporal object called the hundemarke, which means that this moment absolutely cannot be changed. If I don’t do this right, I won’t be able to go back and try again. This is it. I place my hands on his head, and concentrate. He coughs blood onto me. Man, I really wish I had more time. I have never tried this before, but I know I can do it. If I can do it to myself, I can do it to someone else. I close my eyes, and breathe deeply. I’m almost there. He’s in a vulnerable position, which is actually good, because it makes it easier for me to enter his mind. Just a few more seconds. There. I grab his consciousness from his brain, compress it, and teleport it all into my own brain.

Before anyone can come down to retrieve Mateo’s now completely dead body, I activate the recoil protocol, and jump back into the future. Trinity and Abigail are standing there, waiting for me, but they both look older. They look much older. I grit my teeth, and stare at them. “How long has it been?”

“Eleven years.”

I tap on my tablet, trying to figure out what went wrong. I should have only been gone a few seconds, just like Trinity when she went back in time to reyoungify herself. “Are you joking with me, err...?”

“No, you have been gone eleven years.”

“Why are you in this room right now?” I ask them. “How did you know I would finally return today?”

“A little bird told us,” Abigail answered.

I watch her a moment. “Do you mean that literally...?”

“Yes,” Abigail began, “a flying creature came to us, and told us to come back here on this date, because you would be returning. They flew off before we could find out who they were, or how they knew it. We chose to take their advice, and it looks like they were right.”

I look back at my tablet. “I don’t understand what happened.”

“It could be sabotage,” Trinity offered, “or a malfunction. The point is you’re here, and I assume you have the crown.”

I growl, and take the device out of my bag. It’s little more than a paperweight with pretty lights around it. I claimed that it can absorb someone’s consciousness, and store it, and that it’s what I’m using to save Mateo. Again, I don’t know for sure why I lie about my powers; it just makes sense to me. “I do. I was successful, but...”

Trinity peers at me. “But what?”

“The clone body is in its fifties now. That’s way too old. When he goes back to his friends in 2258, they will see that he’s aged, and our lie won’t work. We’re supposed to make them think someone rescued him with an extraction mirror.”

“I don’t understand that,” Abigail said. “Why didn’t you just use an extraction mirror? It sounds easier.”

“Mateo’s death cannot be undone. An extraction mirror would allow us to take him out of the moment he died, nurse him back to health, then put him back into his old life. He would one day have to go back through the mirror, and experience his death, which we don’t want him to have to do. But that’s not the biggest problem.”

“His body cannot be saved,” Trinity answered before Abigail could press it. “Your father performed the autopsy, and I got a second and third opinion. Once Briar pushed him off that cliff, it was over. Not even the extraction mirror could save him from that. We tried to use it before he was pushed, but the hundemarke blocked us. The clone body is our only hope.”

“Except it’s not anymore,” I complain. “We let it grow too long. I’m too late.”

“How long will the crown house his consciousness?”

“What?” I question.

“How long?” Trinity presses.

“Forever, I guess, until the parts degrade.”

“So, twenty-nine years should be a piece of cake.”

“You’re growing another clone?” Now who’s keeping secrets?

“The bird came to us the day you left,” Abigail explains. She walks over and presents me with a second tank, right next to the other one. “We started Plan B immediately.”

I smile. “I’m glad you two are here to sweep my mistakes away.”

“It might have been necessary,” Trinity says to me. “Tamerlane examined the first clone for us. I don’t think it would have worked.

“Why not?”

“He thinks he screwed up the sequence,” Abigail answers instead. “The first clone wouldn’t be on Mateo’s original pattern. It would have just been a normal guy.” Mateo Matic is a salmon time traveler. He only lives one day every year. At the end of that day, he jumps forward in time, and this aspect of him is critical to our plan.

I nod. “Someone from the future is pulling strings. That’s who the bird was.”

“Yeah,” Trinity says. “It’s possible. I’ve seen it done, just not with birds.”

“No one else is supposed to know we’re doing this,” I preach to the choir, “or how we’re doing it.”

“I know,” Trinity agrees. “Perhaps that’s being a little too optimistic, though. I want you to check that crown, and make sure he’s in there. Keep checking it for the next three decades, until we can finally finish this mission. We’ll need time to work out the kinks in the time chamber anyway.”

That’s a long time to keep a second consciousness dormant in my head, but I think I can swing it.

Twenty-nine years later, it’s finally time to complete this mission. The second Clone!Mateo has aged in his growing tank enough to return to his time period, and make everyone think it was due to an extraction mirror. We could have increased the speed of development using any number of techniques, including time travel itself, but that’s problematic for the endgame. In order to force this clone to experience time in the same way the original Mateo did, it was best to let it grow at a normal rate beforehand. Of course, when it comes to time travel, it doesn’t really matter anyway. When I insert his consciousness into the new body, and send him back in time, it will be the same 2258 as it would have been had we tried it twenty-nine years ago.

Speaking of Mateo’s consciousness, I can still feel it rattling around in my brain. It’s not awake, and he will hopefully never know he was ever in there, but as far as I can tell, he’s completely intact, and ready for his new life. Mateo 2.0. I’ll have to call upon my acting skills to convince him of the lie, so he can convince everyone else without having to lie himself. There’s a chance it’s pointless. If the truth ever, ever comes out, everyone will always have known. Because time travel.

I tell the others that it’s best if I do this alone. When he wakes up, Mateo is going to have to interact with someone, but there’s no need for him to know too much about the future, or who else is involved. They have plenty of things to do on their own, so they don’t argue with me about it. I place the clone body on the bed, and inject a sedative, so he doesn’t wake up while I’m still in the room. Right now, the body doesn’t have a consciousness, but it still possesses its autonomic functions, like breathing, and pumping blood. As for the brain, it only has one thought. I implanted a memory in there, which will remain even after I teleport Mateo’s mind into it. Like I said, I have to make him think that he was rescued with the extraction mirror. So he should have a vague recollection of that happening. He’s going to remember time slowing down as he was dying, and being dragged from his place of death, and pulled through the mirror. The memory doesn’t have to be perfect, or detailed. After all, when you’re dying, your ability to make accurate observations about the world is limited.

After I’m finished reversing the consciousness teleportation process from forty years ago, I check his vitals, and wrap him in bandages, to make him think he simply received medical treatment, even though his body is fine. We talked about giving him a pain inducer, so the idea that he has to recover from his injuries is believable, but decide against it. He’s going to think a man named Dr. Baxter Sarka treated him, and being from even deeper into the future, Sarka has access to untold resources. Mateo’s going to be perfectly accepting of the idea that it’s possible to remove someone’s pain without leaving them with side effects usually experienced from narcotics.

He awakens a few hours later, and falls out of bed. I’m right. “Baxter!” he calls. “Are you still here?”

I calmly but quickly walk back into the room. “Hey Thistle. Set the lights to twenty-four percent, please.” The lights turn up, but not too brightly.

“Report,” Mateo says after he’s certain that he recognizes me.

“I’m sorry to tell you that you died,” I answer professionally. “We used an extraction mirror to bring you back to life, if only temporarily.”

“Do you know how I died?” he asks.

“Yes. Do you?”

“I remember everything. I’m just worried about saying something that messes up the timeline. Where’s Briar?”

“He died long ago.” This was either a lie, or true. I don’t actually know what happened to him. A few of our friends took a ship to some unknown location, and Briar went with them as a prisoner. We’ve not heard from any of them since. Briar ages strangely, so he could still be alive, but it’s not guaranteed, and I don’t want Mateo thinking he has any hope of going after him. I don’t want any more violence.

“What year is it?”

“That I cannot tell you.”

He understands. “What can you tell me?”

“Only that we’re returning you back to your life. It’ll be 2258, after your memorial.”

“I appreciate it. I think it would be weird to attend my own funeral.” He switches gears. “Is Sarka still here?”

“He had to go to another appointment.”

“Thank him for me, if you get the chance.”

“Will do.” I pause a moment. He lies back down to work off the sedative. “Are you okay, emotionally speaking? I can’t imagine what it’s like to survive your own death.”

“I’m all right. I’m grateful to you, and him, and anyone else involved, who I presume I shouldn’t know about, at least not right now.”

“Do you want a hug?”

“Please.”

After the hug, I remove a syringe from my bag, and place it on his nightstand. “You’ll need thirty more minutes to recover, so don’t take this yet. Once you do, it’ll give you enough energy to stay awake for about twelve Earthan hours. Take it just before you leave, so you can reunite with your friends without falling asleep on them.  When it wears off, though, you will fall asleep, and you’ll stay that way for almost a whole day. Just go to bed, and let it happen.”

“Got it. What can I tell them? More to the point, what can I say to the younger version of you?”

“Tell them someone extracted you, but you don’t know who. You don’t have to worry about telling Past!Me anything. I never saw you back then. You must sneak past me, or I erase my own memories, I don’t know.”

An hour later, Mateo injects himself with the stimulant, and just hangs out in his recovery room until the crash. He doesn’t explain why he does this, but when he reawakens, I usher him down the hallway, and into the time chamber, so he can go back to where he belongs. It’s true that the past version of me never saw him alive after his death. I think he slips into their spaceship while I’m not looking, and doesn’t come out before it leaves for a new destination. At some point later, he’ll actually go back in time, to a very distant planet called Dardius, so he can attend his own real memorial service in person. Thousands of people are, were, and will be there with him, including me, Trinity, and Abby, while billions more watch on television. Then it’s time for us to go back to work.

< > Entire Story

Microstory 1425: Parade

< > Table of Contents

Now that there were more than eleven mages to protect the humans living on Durus, some people decided it was time to expand. When Springfield came through the Deathfall, it landed in a random spot on the rogue planet. Perhaps due to rotation, or just because the universe is chaos, it didn’t even end up in the same place as other people who fell through the portal previously. They were fortunate to be as close to the only water source, Watershed, but they still wished they were closer. It took a lot of work, piping all that water all the way to Springfield and Splitsville. Since there was no longer anything holding them back, some in the population decided it was time to move closer, and live easier. The process of getting to this point wasn’t going to be easy, though. Building an entirely new town from scratch without the plentiful resources that could be found on Earth was going to be a very involved ordeal. Fortunately, there was someone who could help. For the last ten years since the Mage Games, Madoc Raptis had been selecting one person on his own to be transformed into a mage. These people were mostly there to keep the peace within Springfield’s borders, but there were plenty of other possible applications for their powers. One in particular would be useful to them. He could make their new town faster. He couldn’t make it easier, but it would at least get done in a fraction of the time. He created a time bubble over a massive area of land, nearer to Watershed, where workers could build the infrastructure at extremely high speeds. Those inside the bubble would feel as if time was moving at a normal rate, but as they looked outside, everything else would appear to be frozen in place. In total, the construction workers spent ten years in the bubble, building everything they would need to support a significant population, before anyone else even moved there. They didn’t need to be protected from the time monsters, because the bubble itself was impenetrable while it was standing. Once they were finished, it was taken down, and the people were able to reenter normal time, of which only ten months had passed.

They called this new place Parade, inspired by the idiom rain on one’s parade. That didn’t mean that it rained there. Watershed, though flush with clean water, was an inhospitable place to actually live inside. The rain never stopped, so the soil was unstable, and the excess moisture prevented crops from growing. Water always had to be taken out, and transported elsewhere. The point of Parade was to just make that easier. While the workers were proud of what they had accomplished, it was not without sacrifice. They were ten years older, even though they should have aged less than one, and they had been away from their families for months. Fortunately, there was a way to remedy this. All it took was a little bit of de-aging, and a timeloop. There were some issues with this. First, no human had ever been granted the power to make someone young again. It was certainly possible, and some people on Earth were capable of it, but no one had received this gift after the Mage Games, and Madoc always randomized his sources, to remain honorable and honest. To undo all the aging the workers had experienced, they needed to strike a deal with the retroverters, and the verters would not agree to do it for free. They were intelligent, and reasonable, but not altruistic. Still, what they asked for was a price they were willing to pay, in order to repay the workers for their hard work. Even after this, however, they had still missed out on time they could have spent with their loved ones, but there was a solution for that as well. Madoc had managed to source someone with the ability to travel back in time. Now, a long time ago, the source mages secretly gave backwards time travel to one of the townsfolk. This person attempted to go back in time, and undo all the heartache the Springfielders had experienced. He was completely unsuccessful, and ultimately suffered under Smith in the early years. The source mages knew this man from their past, but hadn’t realized he was the same person until it was too late. There appeared to be no way of undoing the Deathfall altogether, and altering the past afterwards was just too dangerous. So it was outlawed. Any mage who ended up with this ability was charged never to use it. But Madoc’s associate was exempt from this rule, and was free to create another time loop, especially since the time bubble was cut off from the rest of the world anyway, so there was little risk of screwing up the future. So the workers jumped back in time, and lived their lives as they would have if the bubble had never been created. Once their Past!Selves had completed their jobs, they all moved to this new town, and enjoyed the fruits of their efforts.

Microstory 1424: How to Protect a Town With Pointless Powers

< > Table of Contents

Some of the source mages wanted the process of gifting people with mage powers to be fair. They wanted to randomize it, so that a selectee could ultimately end up with anything. That seemed fine on paper, but it could cause a lot of problems down the road. No amount of competitive scoring was good enough to measure precisely what an individual would do with their powers once they actually received them. A given person might be incredibly noble and brave with the ability to repulse time monsters, but end up gravely dangerous with the power to manipulate reality itself. Same person, different powers, wildly different outcomes. Still, it would be irresponsible to leave it up to chance. They ought to be trying to tailor powers towards the mage’s innate abilities. There were also countless powers that wouldn’t be very helpful for a mage at all. For instance, it might be cool for someone to have the ability to see what an object will look like in the future, to measure the effects of wear and tear over time, but they wouldn’t be able to fight a monster with that. By the time the first sourcing ceremony began, the source mages had reached a decision, though some were not happy about it. They didn’t feel like they had any choice but to control what power someone received. They would do their best not to play favorites, but making it random was just too risky. It was not, however, so simple. No matter how unbiased they were, or thought they were, people would accuse them of being unfair. They could claim it was random, but some would not believe it, and even if these were only a minority voice, a small group could grow. To protect themselves against this backlash, they decided that someone needed to be sacrificed. His name was Vaion Newport, and he hoped to end up the most powerful town mage of all, but his excellent scores in the Mage Games were exactly what made this impossible.

Source mage Madoc Raptis was tasked with giving Vaion a pointless power. They wanted to show that anyone could end up with any gift, and there was no guarantee they would like it. It was particularly important to use Madoc for this, because he hated the inequity of some of their decisions, and he was considered the lucky one. If even he could source someone a power that wasn’t good for them, then it could happen to anyone, and the source mages must not have been lying when they claimed it was completely out of their control. After being sourced, Vaion learned that he now had the ability to freeze time in place. That kind of thing happened all the time in movies, but in real life, it was practically impossible, and no one had ever heard of it before. If time were to stop completely, then nothing would be moving. Photons couldn’t bounce off of objects, and show an observer what they looked like. Air couldn’t reach people’s lungs. Nothing could move, not even Vaion himself. And of course, that was the whole problem. While technically time wasn’t totally stopped, it was slow enough, and did not really give anyone an advantage, or disadvantage. While this was active, Vaion was able to continue thinking, and even process oxygen in his blood, but once time restarted, everything pretty much just continued as it was, without anyone having detected a change. It was interesting to be able to essentially stop time—and no one in histories enjoyed this same power—but since he also couldn’t move, it was useless in the war against the monsters. If he wanted to help the town, he had to contribute in some other way. Madoc was sick to his stomach that he had to do this to Vaion. None of the winners would have deserved this, but especially not him. Madoc resented his friends for making him do it, and vowed to never do anything like it again. He walked another path, and subverted the Mage Games by sourcing those who did nothing to earn powers at all, every year, and everyone let him do this. Meanwhile, the rest of the source mages continued as they were, and in order to maintain the lie, they always sourced at least one person with a power that was pointless against the monsters.

Microstory 1423: The First Mage Games

< > Table of Contents

Later Mage Selection Games would come with better organization, and a better understanding of how to measure a competitor’s potential to become a great town mage. That didn’t mean, however, that the first one went terribly. Well, at least it could have been worse. There were some bumps, and some mistakes they wish they could take back, but in the end, it got the job done, and all the winners went on to prove to be good choices. The source mages were careful to plan it out, so things wouldn’t just fall apart. They spent a great deal of time working on coming up with appropriate challenges, because they were going to have less help with it than they did for other aspects of the new government. While the Mage Protectorate was definitely going to be a democracy, that didn’t mean everyone had to be able to express their opinion about everything. They chose not to ask the people how they wanted to handle this competition. They didn’t even consult their experts all that much. If they alone couldn’t figure out what made someone worthy of being a mage, then they were not worthy of being mages either. Besides, letting a regular person design a challenge could put the entire process in danger. If the fastest runner on the high school cross country team, for instance, suggested every town mage had to be able to run a mile in five minutes, well, that person was obviously just setting themselves up to win. The source mages were the only ones entirely ineligible to compete, so they were the only ones capable of engineering it.

The contest would last the whole day, and be composed of a series of challenges, each testing various aspects of character. They didn’t come up with a list of character traits, though, and try to match each challenge with one trait. A given challenge could allow a competitor to exhibit multiple traits, and in different ways from each other. Some of them were physical in nature, while others were academic, and some were psychological or emotional. The scoring system proved to be, by far, the most difficult component to specify. Was athleticism more important than intelligence? Maybe, maybe not. They needed experience to understand which influenced time power aptitude the most, or if neither of them mattered. They didn’t have very many examples to go on, and they didn’t want a bunch of test subjects running around with powers, who had never gone through the competition. So, without this data, their best guess seemed to be their only option. They kind of had to surrender to the fact that the second time they tried this, in twenty years, was going to be better than the first. The town had to understand this as well, that nothing was going to be perfect. Even ignoring these issues, they didn’t know if they ought to only award points to the winner, or winners, or if losers simply received fewer points. The answer was obvious to most of the mages; just because a competitor wasn’t the best, didn’t mean they weren’t good at all. Few should be so bad at something that they received zero points for their effort. Still, how many points was a challenge worth, and how would they determine the increments of scale, and how they would rate a competitor’s performance with very little in the way of comparison? Standards. How would they set a standard, and how exactly would they know when someone reached, or surpassed it, and if someone surpassed it too greatly, did that just mean they needed to reexamine the standard? All of these questions took months to answer, and even then, as previously mentioned, the system proved to be less than ideal, and more importantly, not entirely fair. So the first Mage Games actually took place over the course of two days, which were separated by a month of repreperation time. They should have known that the best way to see how well the competition would go was to do a dry-run ahead of time. Even though history would remember the Mage Protectorate as having held four games total before it fell, there were technically five, but most agreed that the first one didn’t count.

Microstory 1422: Proto-Protectorate

< > Table of Contents

Now that the source mage children looked nearly twice as old as they really were, they decided it was time to assume full control over Springfield, and possibly Splitsville. The Adhocracy was nice while it lasted, but it had come to an end, and times needed to change. People had spent their whole lives since the Deathfall hoping that it would all lead them back to Earth, but the source mages knew this was not possible. The last time they were there was nearly thirteen years ago, and as the members of the Triumvirate had explained to them, no one there could even remember that they existed. Durus was their home now, and they needed to make sure everyone knew that. They weren’t just going to survive, and hope the monster never took them out eventually. They were going to make this place safe and prosperous, so that if the Earthans did learn of their existence, some might even want to move. They thought they had their plans all figured out, but when Orabela showed them they were capable of gifting other people with special temporal powers, nothing they first thought of made any sense. So they started over, and spent months working on a brand new system. They called it the Mage Protectorate. They would give other people powers, so they could shoulder the burden, and protect the towns collectively. With more people, what was formerly called the Baby Barrier would be able to grow, and give the Durune people more space. The only question then was how to choose who received these gifts, and who didn’t. They couldn’t just let anyone run around with powers, doing whatever they wanted. Sure, they could regulate them with laws, but what if insurgents banded together, and rose up against their leaders? No, it was too dangerous to make the job available to just anyone. This required some way of weeding out potential bad eggs. This sparked the idea of the Mage Games.

Anyone could apply to be a town mage, but that didn’t guarantee they would be selected. The new leaders called upon their best statistician, and other experts, to gauge how many people would want in on this, and how many winners they needed to keep things running smoothly. This was a very involved process, which demanded help from lots of other people. This was perfect, though, because by including non-source mages in the decision-making processes, they only made themselves look better. This was going to be a fair government, where everyone’s voice was heard. They were going to call it a protectorate, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t also be democratic. The initial assumption was that the Mage Games would be held every year. Maybe there would actually only be one winner each time, and that one person would go on to join the ranks of the many veterans before them. This didn’t sound so unreasonable, but it came with risks. First of all, the source mages didn’t really want to have to go through this every single year. And, if the competition was annual, they worried it would be too accessible, easily corrupted by inequality, and fraught with logistical issues. A vicennial competition, however, would make turnover slow, and hopefully discourage mages from trying to quit early. Plus, most people would end up too old to compete a second time if they failed once; though neither impossible, nor against their rules. This fostered a group composed of committed competitors, who were not taking this lightly. If they didn’t manage to get in, they might not get another chance, and if they did get in, trying to get out of it would put the whole population in danger, so it was important that they understood what it was they were signing up for, and what it would mean for their lives. This was not a car dealership, though. The standards were flexible, and sensible. If they determined, for instance, that every town mage had to be able to do a hundred pushups, and their strongest competitor could only do ninety-nine, then they would just end up with no mages, and that wasn’t helpful at all. They wanted everyone who was worthy, and if that meant everyone who applied was ultimately accepted, then so be it. The point was to prevent the wrong people from having too much power, but if those people didn’t exist, or didn’t even try—and there was enough offensive work to justify the numbers—then fine. Armed with this wisdom, it was finally time to decide what the Mage Games entailed.

Microstory 1421: Sourced

< > Table of Contents

Somewhat early on after the Deathfall sent Springfield to Durus, the first ever non-source mage received a special temporal power from one of the sources. Aimo Lahti gave his older sister the ability to separate liquid molecules from each other. On a small scale, she could pour a bottle of fruit juice into a beaker of acid, and then teleport them away from each other. This could be very useful, but her family didn’t want anyone to know about it. They didn’t even know that it was Aimo who accidentally gave it to her in the first place. They kind of just thought she later developed a power of her own. It wasn’t until 2029 that the fact that these children were capable of doing this to others came to light, and it was less of an accident. Aqil may have been considered the intelligent one, but Orabela was the wisest. She was always underestimated intellectually, because of her physical beauty, which was—not only inappropriate for a twelve-year-old—but harmful to her self-esteem, and standing within the community. She was worried that the way people treated her would only get worse if she were to strike a deal with the proverters. If they made her look 23, then people would start looking at her like she was an adult, but no amount of rapid aging would make her actually an adult. That was something that came with time, experience, and maturity. She did not fault the other children for making this deal, but she wanted no part of it. They were tired of being treated as children, and figured this would help them, but it would most likely just give people the wrong idea about her. Ecrin Cabral was several years older than the source mage children, and had only recently turned 18 when the proverters aged them to look older than her. She found herself quite protective over Orabela, and her choice to remain as she was. After the deal was done, the other sources decided they were no longer okay with letting Orabela make her own choice. They thought they knew better, and that she would thank them later. They tried to force her to go visit the proverters, and she was helpless to refuse. She couldn’t take on all of them at once. But Ecrin could. At least that’s what she felt she had to do. She fended them off, even though it went against everything she was taught to believe about the divinity of the powerful children. The fight caused pretty severe injuries on her part, and left her combatants completely unscathed. She could have died if their parents hadn’t intervened, and put a stop to the fight altogether.

Ecrin spent weeks in recovery. During this time, the town decided the children would have a lot of authority over Springfield, but still wouldn’t be allowed to pressure anyone to do anything against their will. They could lead, and they could protect, but they did not rule unilaterally. Smith tried that years ago, and it didn’t work out for anyone; not even him. Once Ecrin was better, Orabela admitted that she understood what her real power was. Yes, she and the others all had abilities of their own, but their true purpose was to give other people their own gifts. She knew what Aimo had done for his sister, and she realized that they could all do the same, to anyone. So she chose Ecrin as her first receiver. She bestowed upon her the gift of agelessness. Ecrin would be able to be hurt or killed when attacked, or from an accident, but barring that, she would never get older in appearance, decline in general health, or die. As the wisest among them, Orabela determined it would be best that no one knew this particular gift was given on purpose. If they were to ever do it for anyone else again, people would have to believe that it was random, and beyond the giver’s control. In fact, she saw that it was entirely possible to make it random anyway, to promote fairness and harmony in the society. While Leena Lahti would later be outed as the first true sourced mage, Ecrin held the title for a good long time. But it would not end there. This gave the other source mages an idea, and it changed everything about how they planned to run Durus from then on. This was the beginning of the beginning of the Mage Protectorate.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: Tuesday, May 27, 2081

« < » > Table of Contents

Mateo and J.B. were placed in highly advanced medical pods. In a matter of minutes, the minimally invasive nanobots had repaired all of their bodily injuries, and restored them to perfect health. In fact, Mateo hadn’t realized he hadn’t been feeling great for the last week or so, but all that was gone too. He was feeling better than ever before. Unlike Leona, he was easily able to forgive Sanaa for what she had done, though he could tell that all his wife needed was time. Jericho, on the other hand, was not so merciful. He was pissed, and while the two of them were recovering, he had caused so much of a stir, that Parallel natives had to step in, and place him in a holding cell, so he wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone. It was here that he spent the rest of the day, and when the next time jump came, he made the trip with them to May 27, 2081.

By then, the AOC had been returned to them, so they could continue their mission, which was apparently taking them to Egypt. Shortly after they arrived, their next target did as well. Ariadna Traversa, also known as The Escapologist, had been living in the Great Pyramid of Giza on May 27, 2081. She wasn’t alone there. Others were staying there with her, along with an alternate version of Leona. Though Aridna was the only one who was sent through the transition window.

“Jeremy,” Ariadna acknowledged.

“Do we know each other?” J.B. asked her.

Ariadna looked around. Her pyramid was gone. They were standing in a rainforest. Some deserts did exist on this planet, because certain living organisms thrived there, but there was a lot more greenery on this version of Earth than their homeworld. The humans put a great deal of effort into insulating and seeding life on the worlds they conquered. They considered protecting the environment their sacred duty, even though their whole deal was being able to go wherever they wanted in the observable universe, and not worrying about the habitability of any one place. Ariadna didn’t know where she found herself now, but J.B. not knowing her was still not a surprise. She breathed in and enjoyed the particularly clean air. “Report.”

“Have you ever heard of The Parallel?” Leona asked.

“No, what is that?”

“It’s an alternate reality that runs concurrently to our own,” Mateo answered.

“It’s halfway between a different timeline, and a different universe,” Leona started to clarify. “Each can be changed by time travelers, but neither led to the other, and any changes to one have no impact on the other.”

Ariadna nodded her head. “I understand the concept. What am I doing here?”

“Jupiter Fury,” Sanaa said.

Ariadna rolled her eyes. “You guys are mixed up with the Springfield Nine?”

“Really just the one,” J.B. said.

She was still nodding. “How do I get back?”

Mateo consulted his cuff. “You can go back in an hour, right where you came through. Sometimes we have to get people to different places, but you can just stay here and wait.”

“Then I can go through too,” Jericho suggested. He had long ago calmed down, but they were still controlling his movements through proximity settings. He couldn’t be more than ten meters away from at least one of the others, and he couldn’t stand within one meter of any of them. “It’s only been three years, I can still go back to my life. I won’t tell anyone about this place, I promise.”

“We’re not worried about you exposing us,” Leona assured him.

Sanaa continued, “the prison will lock you up if you try.”

“You can’t go through the window either way,” Leona finished.

“Why not?” Jericho demanded to know.

“Yeah, why not?” J.B. questioned. “Is it because he still has a chance to stop the changes to the judicial system?”

“It’s not that,” Leona replied. “Ariadna, when did Adolf Hitler die?”

“I don’t know,” Ariadna answered, “like 1949, or something.”

“You sure it wasn’t 1945?”

She thought about it a moment. “Yeah, because he had that scandal involving the Argentinian ambassador that definitely happened after the war ended. Why?”

“That’s why you can’t go through, Jericho,” Leona said to him.

She was right. It wasn’t going to work. If they tried to send Jericho back with The Escapologist, he would end up in the wrong version of 2081. In fact, she shouldn’t return either. This was the last day of reality before it collapsed to make way for a new timeline. Since Mateo was the one who killed Hitler, and created the new timeline in the main sequence, he chose to be the one to explain this to both of them.

“Well, fine,” Jericho said, still frustrated. “Then I’ll go back in 2084. Will that work?”

They looked to Leona, who shook her head. “The next window won’t be until 2100. I’m sorry.”

“This is bullshit!” Jericho cried. “I didn’t ask to be here!”

“Yeah, that’s the deal,” Mateo volleyed. “Sanaa is the only one who came here on purpose. The rest of us are salmon, and aren’t given a choice of how we experience time. Except for Ariadna, who’s basically been kidnapped, just like you.”

“Well.” Jericho didn’t understand. “Can’t you just make the window go back to the other, other 2081?”

“Can you?” Sanaa asked of him.

“That guy,” Jericho pleaded. “That guy I saw you talking with. He’s the one in charge, right? He can do it. He’s in total control of these window things anyway, isn’t he?”

Now everyone looked to Sanaa, who had spent the most time exploring her Cassidy cuffs. She probably knew more about them than Leona did. “There’s a Help feature, just like you would find on a regular computer.” She started to tap on her cuff. “When I select it, it shows me the options for Call, Chat, and Summon. But they’re all grayed out, as if we need to wait until business hours. I’m sure that’s how we would contact Jupiter, but he would have to clock in to work. I’m glad he’s not there, though.” She addressed Jericho alone, “I wouldn’t want you to go back to the main sequence. Hell, I don’t even want you going back there in 2100. Don’t worry, I won’t stop you guys, but I won’t help you either. I vote we find a way to strand him here.”

Leona sighed. “We’re not doing that. We will send you back on June 15, 2100. Until then, you will both have to stay here. Miss Traversa, I’m afraid I cannot allow you to return to a reality we know is about to collapse.”

“Of course not,” Ariadna said. “I’m glad you have a choice, and Jupiter isn’t forcing you to do it.”

They stood there awkwardly for a moment. J.B. broke the silence, first by casually sucking his teeth as if it were a music instrument, and then with words. “So...do you want a tour of the ship?”

“Sure, why not?” Ariadna asked rhetorically.

“Perhaps you can tell me about this other version of me you evidently met.”

“Yeah, all right.”

“Mr. Hagen, I know that you are angry. What my associate did to you is unforgivable. I hope you will one day understand why it is she made her choice, as dangerous as it was. I believe that you would benefit from a little history lesson. Our ship possesses the repository of human knowledge within its memory storage. I can show you what the world goes through up until 2100, especially in adjudicative related topics. I can even show you beyond that, though it may be best you don’t learn anything about the future. Would you be interested in that? It might help change your mind.”

“I don’t want to change my mind,” Jericho argued.

Leona nodded. “A lot of people have held the same conviction. I’m not saying you’re evil, but it’s unquestionably the reason we had the Crusades, and the Spanish Inquisition, and the Witch Trials, and the Great Wars, and all the other wars, and McCarthyism, and all the other bad things that our world has experienced!” She didn’t yell too loudly, but she was impassioned. “The inability to surrender to the possibility that one is wrong has led to so much death and heartache that it is quite literally impossible to quantify. If you’re not open to learning more information, and becoming a better person, then you’re not a real lawyer...you’re just a walking law book. And a book is no better than a paperweight if the lessons inside it aren’t used to make the world a better place.

“So you can sulk until you go back, and you can plan your revenge against time travelers, which puts you at risk of being placed in a prison no human could escape. Or. You can come with me back to the AOC, and find out how to practice law in the new system.”

Jericho took a moment to reply, but it was clear he was about to, so no one interrupted him. “Very well.”

Mateo and Sanaa watched them head for the ship as well. “Wow, she said. Remember what I told you about us never having a threesome? I’m actually considering it now.”

“Keep it in your pants, Karimi.”

Nothing interesting happened for the rest of the day. J.B. and Ariadna proved to be fast friends, which wasn’t that weird, since the latter already knew some other version of the former. Jericho studied what was originally meant to be his past, and while no one would have said he had some kind of revelation, he was a little more flexible about the law by the end of the day. They let the transition window come and go, once again without having anyone actually use it to go back to the main sequence. From now on, people would only be coming from the reality that existed after Mateo assassinated Hitler. That was what most of them thought, anyway. Leona explained that it was more complicated than that.

People were regularly going back in time and changing history, and since the main sequence was less a separate reality, and more of a series of realities, it was entirely possible someone would come through the window with a slightly different recollection of events than they had. These differences would most likely be imperceptible, like what color shirt they wore when they first met, or whatever. It could theoretically cause problems with causality, however. So Leona recommended they really do try to send people back through the windows, if at all possible. Keeping the main sequence separate from the Parallel was something they ought to be striving for. Hopefully that would start to feel as easy to do as said.

« < » > Table of Contents