Microstory 1427: Hardtland

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By the year 2048, there were over 4,000 people living on Durus. Some were in Springfield, some were in Splitsville, and some were in the still new town of Parade. There were pretty evenly divided too, which seemed to suggest to people that there was some kind of population standard for a town. Maybe there ought to be about a thousand to twelve hundred people together, and no more. Of course, that wasn’t necessarily true. Everyone could have easily lived in the same area, and any further space they needed, they could have found simply by expanding outwards. Still, a lot of people alive in the middle of the century remembered what it was like to be on Earth. The Springfield they could remember was a small town, and most of them chose to move, or stay, there for that reason. By building more towns, they were better simulating what life should be like for them. They wanted to be able to live in one place, but visit another, instead of just having everyone and everything within reach at all times. It just made sense. So they founded a fourth town, which they called Hardtland, in honor of their late leader, Councilwoman Hardt. Calling it a town, however, was a bit of a misnomer. It was more of a rural sprawl, as buildings were spread out, and only placed inside natural clearings in the wooded area where it was located. This was a major operation, which required the cooperation of a lot of people who were not even planning to move there once it was finished, which they hoped would be within a year. They chose not to expedite the process with temporal powers, like they did with Parade, instead relying on dozens of independent construction crews. They now had plenty of mages to protect them while they worked, and planning was so detailed that they easily managed to complete the project according to schedule. The first families officially moved into their new homes in the summer of 2049, and town mages were temporarily assigned to keep guard. Now that there was an entirely new border to protect, plans would have to be adapted, so that enough mages were selected in the next Mage Games, but some realized that it couldn’t stop there. This development also prompted an overhaul of the whole system. Experts did some math, and realized they even needed to be thinking further in the future than that. The next competition would be held in a year, and the next one after that wouldn’t be for another twenty. By the time that rolled around, the number of towns would likely double. This was a truth they confirmed with two separate seers, who knew a little about the future of the Durune population. If more people were going to be selected as mages than ever before, the source mages would have to reexamine their criteria for acceptance. More importantly, they decided they needed to help people prepare for this time, so they weren’t only depending on natural talent. They quickly threw together a training regimen, so hopefuls would already have an idea of what would be expected of them when the contest was held. Worried it wouldn’t be enough, this contest was also pushed back three months. People would later say that it probably should have been delayed a year, though, because of what happened.

Microstory 1426: Mad Dog’s Growing Army

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By the year 2042, Madoc Raptis had transformed thirteen people into mages. Most of them decided to join his little army, but not all of them. Vaion Newport, his first one, was determined to prove himself worthy of protecting the border against external threats. Maybe his powers wouldn’t help him do this, but there were plenty of other ways to fight. Some time monsters even responded better to physical combat, rather than special temporal abilities, and that was how people handled them long ago, before they fully understood how special some of the unborn children were. Two others chose to use their gifts in other ways; neither for the border, nor Madoc, and that was fine. Madoc wasn’t expecting anyone to be particularly loyal to him. He just wanted them to be honorable, and productive members of society. Ageless Ecrin Cabral—having been sourced by Orabela before the first Mage Games—had a choice of where she operated. She became a bit of a floater, helping people wherever she felt she was needed the most, and this often meant sticking with Madoc’s group. So in total, there were now eleven, which brought their number up to the same as the source mages themselves. Vaion was the only person who Madoc gave what boiled down to a useless power. Being the lucky one, he only ever sourced powerful and formidable abilities, even though he randomized them, and never controlled who received what. So his army was now almost evenly matched with the sources. This didn’t mean they were going to war against each other, but it was still an important occasion. The source mages were not perfect people, or gods. They were fallible, dangerous, and at risk of becoming corrupted. Madoc knew that this could become a problem, so in 2042, he released them from their attachment to him. He would continue to source one new mage every single year, and encourage them to join what was being called Mad Dog’s Army, but he made no requirements of them. He did not give them orders, or ask them to protect the source mages’ interests. In fact, he didn’t want them to do that at all. They should be there to protect the balance. They kept his name, but anything more could be considered a conflict of interest. This army was a lot more versatile than a simple military outfit. No single title would describe it thoroughly, and unambiguously, so the word army was good enough. They went on offensive missions against the time monsters, yes, but they also handled internal affairs in the same way a police force on Earth would. Much of what they did was completely nonviolent too, like when they used their powers to construct buildings, or complete other acts of public service. They even helped protect the towns’ borders, though they generally preferred to leave that responsibility to the other mages. This group continued to grow over the years, and when the Mage Protectorate fell, there were over fifty of them, all of which were considered to be the elites. It was a much coveted role, and almost no one who wanted to be part of it was selected.

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

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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?”

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Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida: Cloned (Part II)

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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.

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Microstory 1425: Parade

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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

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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

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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

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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.