The Advancement of Mateo Matic: Tuesday, October 12, 2219

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Mateo and Leona returned to salmonverse on Tuesday, October 12, 2219. They didn’t know how it happened, or who had done it for them. One minute they were somewhere else, and the next they were back. Serif was still around, which was great, along with the rest of the current transition team. They got them up to speed on what happened during their absence, but the two of them didn’t talk about what had transpired in the other universe, because of copyright reasons, or some other legal something-or-other.

Now that everyone was where they were meant to be, hopefully things would stay the way they were. They kept meeting great new people, yes, but they also kept losing them, and that was becoming exhausting, if not heartbreaking. It really needed to stay consistent. Unfortunately, Mateo had a bad feeling about that. He was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen. It had never been like that before, even long before the transitions. Nearly everyone from his past was still alive, having been young enough to reach the longevity escape velocity, or through some other means. Even dead people could return through the afterlife simulation. They mostly hadn’t, though. As the two of them pushed forward to the future, they kept leaving people behind. Most didn’t die like Mateo assumed they would in the beginning; they just went off to their own adventures, but they were still gone. Would that ever end? Would they ever find more people like them? Or were they fated to be the only constant in an ever-changing landscape of characters?

It wasn’t time to think about that right now. Their Cassidy cuffs were directing them to their next mission in Antarctica. At first, Mateo figured a researcher was going to be trapped in a blizzard, or a crevasse, but then he remembered that the continent became more temperate over time, thanks to climate breakdown. There were people living there, and calling it home, so any number of reasons could lead the team here. The AOC powered up, and teleported them there, where they waited for the window to open. As they watched the augmented reality flickering, they saw something they recognized. It was a Nexus machine. They had encountered many of these before, but it only occurred to Mateo now that he never knew where the Earth Nexus was. They had always gone off-world via other methods.

A middle-aged man was standing next to it, not really doing anything. Once the transition was complete, he looked around at his new environment, and shivered. Antarctica was still just as cold as it was meant to be in this reality.

Jeremy took off his jacket, and gave it to the man. “Thank you,” he said. “Where am I?”

“The Parallel,” Leona answered. “It’s a concurrent alternate reality. Did you just come through the Nexus?”

“I did,” the man confirmed. “I was on Durus.”

“You got the Durus Nexus working?” Leona was interested.

“Just for me,” he said. “I have the ability to absorb and release temporal energy. I guess it responded to my presence, and sent me back to Earth. Why would I end up here afterwards, though?”

“That we don’t know,” Angela replied. “Before we get too deep in the conversation, I’m Angela Walton. This is Jeremy Bearimy, Leona and Mateo Matic, Serif, and Olimpia Sangster.”

“I’m Escher Bradley.”

“Oh, we know you,” Leona realized. “The Escher Knob and Escher Card are named after you.”

“I don’t know what those are,” Escher said. “I do remember there being some kind of weird door knob when I was first getting trapped on Durus. Is that what you’re talking about?”

“Yes,” Leona said. “You imbued it with power.”

“Oh, cool.”

“Were you on Durus in the year 2219?” Leona pressed.

“Yeah, I think that was the year,” Escher imagined.

“That doesn’t make any sense.” She thought about it, trying to understand how this was possible. “You escaped Durus back in 2021. You and Rothko.”

“Nah, that wasn’t me,” Escher insisted. “You were probably seeing Effigy. She was the one who trapped me in the time crevice, and she can make herself look like anyone.”

“I see.” She understood now. “Well, I’m sorry you went through that. Let’s get you to our ship where it’s warm.”

The seven of them made the short trek to the AOC, and climbed inside.

“Was your life in danger?” Jeremy asked. “We usually receive people who need to get out of wherever they are.”

Escher yawned. “I don’t know that I was in any immediate danger, but I couldn’t leave. No one was operating the Earth Nexus, so I found myself just out here alone. Perhaps all I could ask from you is to transport me back to civilization?”

“That’s easy,” Olimpia said. “Is it possible for the mission to be so simple?”

“Definitely,” Mateo said. “Sometimes that’s all people need. Antarctica is more populated than ever, but I would think they put the Nexus in a very remote region of the continent, so no rando could stumble upon it.”

“Well, I would much appreciate it. I don’t suppose you can get me back to my time period? It’s not a big deal if you can’t,” Escher assured them. “I wouldn’t mind catching up with my friends, but I’m sure they did fine without me.”

“I don’t have the timeline memorized,” Leona began, “so I don’t know what you know, but Savitri is gone. She was transported to a different universe, and went on to become a very powerful immortal.”

“Yes, I suspected she survived. That’s quite interesting,” Escher said. “And Rothko?”

“Rothko...” she started, but couldn’t finish it.

“He became evil, didn’t he?” Escher guessed. “I’m not surprised. I could see the sickness in him as we were trying to survive on pre-civilization Durus. I ignored it, because...I didn’t want to be alone.”

“It’s okay,” Leona assured him. “He didn’t get a chance to hurt anyone permanently, and they put him where he belonged.” Mateo didn’t know all this about history, and of course, no one else did either. Why did she know so much? “He died a long time ago,” Leona went on. “We could ask Nerakali to send you back, so you could speak with him once more, if you want.”

“That’s okay,” Escher said, shaking his head. “I just want to start over, where no one knows who I am. Earth in 2219 seems like as good of a place as any. Will it be difficult to conjure a new identity for me?”

“We know a few people who can do that,” Leona promised. “It won’t be a problem.”

“I appreciate it,” he said gratefully. Olimpia was right, this was an easy transition. It was nice, though, after everything they had been through. They teleported to Kansas City, where a transition window would be waiting to deliver him back to the main sequence. They gave him the tools and instructions he would need to summon help from The Forger, Duane Blackwood. He thanked them again, and went on through.

Mateo’s bad feeling worsened, compelling him to look over at Serif. “You’re leaving too, aren’t you?”

“I have to,” Serif said. “My baby...our baby is special. She can help a lot of people, and I have a responsibility to let her do that.”

“Where will you go?” Leona asked.

“Wherever they take me,” Serif decided.

“Wherever who takes you?” Mateo asked.

“Me.” Thack Natalie Collins was behind them with another young woman. Serif recognized her, but never caught her name. “We know where she can do the most good. It’s not as easy as it seems. The baby is a vaccine, not a cure.”

Big surprise, Serif was leaving yet again. It would seem that the universe was working against them, always coming up with new ways to keep them apart. It wasn’t the universe, though, it was something else. It was someone else, and he was unbeatable. “Serif, was this your decision?” Mateo asked. “Or was it someone else’s?”

“I know what you’re asking,” Serif said, “and I don’t believe it to be the case. Dubra has a destiny. She was born with the ability to heal that was given to me, which makes her stronger. We can’t just not do something with that.”

“She is only a baby,” Leona argued. “Not even that, she hasn’t been born yet. You could stay with us for a very long time before you would have to leave.”

“I don’t wanna skip time anymore,” Serif contended. “I want to raise my child in realtime. I want to teach her to believe in tomorrow. You can come too; all of you. Nothing is forcing you to remain in this universe. The powers that be can’t stop you.”

“I think we all know that it’s not the powers that be that we’re worried about anymore,” Mateo clarified.

Serif nodded. “I know. I’m going just the same. I love you.” She hugged Leona, and then Mateo. “You’ll see us again, and I don’t just mean our alternates. I, myself, will return one day, or we will meet up somewhere else. We keep being pulled apart, but we also keep being pushed back together.”

Regression towards the mean,” Leona added.

“I assure you that she will be in good hands,” Thack claimed as she was leading Serif away.

“Who are you?” Leona questioned. “You can see things happening in other universes. Why have you not helped us before?”

Thack smiled. “Who says I haven’t?” Without another word, she left, along with the other woman, and Serif.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” Olimpia comforted.

Mateo turned away from the group. “She was more than a friend.”

“Mateo.” Leona could tell that an anger was bubbling up in his soul. “You make bad choices when you’re mad. Think about you and Cassidy.”

“He can’t get away with this,” Mateo complained.

“He most certainly can,” Leona said. “He’s more powerful than anyone else we’ve ever met. Arcadia, Nerakali, The Rogue, even The Cleanser. Everything that happened to them happened because he decided it would. They have powers because he wanted them to, and those powers work and don’t work, according to his whims. Likewise, our pattern has changed because of him. Our missions have changed because of him. If we try to go after him, he’ll just write a story where we fail. This isn’t like Supernatural, where a nephilim will show up as a loophole. The Superintendent didn’t create us, he dreamed us. And dreaming people always wake up. We can’t exist if he doesn’t.”

Mateo wouldn’t hear it. “There’s a way. He’s not invincible. He may be our God, but who is his God?”

“Someone none of us will ever meet,” Leona reasoned.

“We’ll see...”

Yes, we will.

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Sic Transit...Labor (Part I)

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Freya and Limerick watched in horror as her mega dragonfly babies flew away. He reached up, and prepared to start plucking the strays out of the air, but was hesitating. “I...uh.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“Do you want me to kill them, or...?”

“Yes, of course!”

Limerick grabbed one, and smashed it in his hands. It was a hell of a lot larger than a regular dragonfly, but as a newborn, still small enough for him to destroy in one move. He was able to snatch five more, but the rest managed to escape. “Sorry, I just...”

“Do you think that I think of those as my babies?” Freya questioned.

“Well, I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Freya said, shaking her head. “It’s not like you could have killed them all. And we both know what becomes of them. This is where the Ochivari begin. We did it. We created them.”

Limerick frowned. “Stable time loop. Engineers of our own fate.”

“Yes.” She frowned as well. Then she winced. Then she screamed.

“What? What is it?”

“It feels like a contraction.”

“There are more in there?”

“It’s different. That was incredibly uncomfortable, but not really painful. This is pain. It’s starting to be the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced.”

“Okay,” Limerick said, calming himself with some deep breathing. “I remember what you taught me when we thought you were just pregnant with a human baby. We have to assume this is that human baby, and work from there.”

“Whatever it is, get it out of me!”

She had technically been in some form of labor for the last several hours, so the real baby came out in a matter of minutes. She was crying and screaming, as any good baby should. Ten fingers, ten toes, and most importantly, no wings. The problem was that she wouldn’t let up. She just kept screaming and screaming. Both of them had heard babies before, but imagine the loudest baby in the world, and then turn that up to eleven. Finally, the scream seemed to reach some kind of apex. It was so powerful that it tore a hole in the fabric of spacetime, and sent all three of them to a different universe.

Once the technicolors faded, the baby’s cries stopped, like she knew she was in a safe place, or even knew how to navigate here. They found themselves in a very small clearing in the woods. It was beautiful and peaceful. Limerick rested his chin on his fist, and admired his little girl. “She must get that from you,” he joked.

“You make light of it, but this could be a problem.” Freya was still in a lot of pain, but being here made her feel safe and comfortable.

Limerick kept smiling. “She knows what she’s doing.”

“I don’t doubt it.” A young woman appeared from behind a tree. “You should name her. It’s bad luck to travel without a name.”

Now Limerick was defensive. “Who are you?”

“Thack Natalie Collins. I’m the one what brought your little team together. I see the goingson in other universes. This is where Landis is from.”

“Voldisilaverse,” Freya uttered.

“Your baby is a hundred percent safe here,” Thack claimed. We will always protect her.”

“We?” Freya questioned.

Thack reached up, and twirled her finger in the air. Other people started coming out of the woodwork, and approached nonthreateningly. They kept a little distance, though, presumably out of respect. “We are all voldisil. I foretold your arrival, and I gathered only the best, and most virtuous, among us, to help me create a haven for the little one.”

“They look like they’re waiting for something,” Freya pointed out.

“We’re waiting to take you to your new home,” Thack explained. “You really should name her first, though.”

Freya looked down at her precious love. She recalled a personal conversation she once had with Diamond Zek. Zektene was a teleporter Freya met a couple years ago, who was accidentally transformed into a diamond in the attempt to boost her abilities. They were talking about Freya’s new name, and Zek pointed out that the goddess, Freyja from Norse mythology bore two daughters of lore. One was named Hnoss, and the other Gersemi. Both of them meant treasure. Diamond Zek admitted to thinking it would be a good name for a girl. They weren’t really thinking about Freya having an actual child at the time, but looking back, it felt like destiny. “Treasure.” She sighed blissfully, and looked up at her daughter’s father. “Treasure Hawthorne.”

He smiled gratefully.

“Treasure Hawthorne,” Thack echoed, as if addressing the heir apparent. “This will be your home...for now.” She took a beat. “Come. You should see a doctor. Your physiology may be too different from ours, which could potentially lower the efficacy of the panacea. Once we determine that it will work, you are welcome to start taking it like everyone else.”

“This is the Landis panacea, correct?” Limerick figured. Landis Tipton was another member of their crew on the Cormanu. He had many abilities, but one of them allowed him to heal any wound or medical condition. He used it to cure millions of people on this version of Earth, and only stopped because biomedical scientists were finally able to synthesize a drug that people could take whenever they needed it.

“Yes. We call it Tiptokois.” Thack turned, and started walking away. The others waited until Limerick was able to help Freya up. They formed a security barrier around them, looking out for all dangers. Voldisil was a general term for anyone who was born with some kind of ability in this universe. They could be good, or they could be bad, and some chose to be bad. Neither Freya nor Limerick knew much about the culture here, or how prevalent bad voldisil were, and even if Landis had given them details, they didn’t know how much time had passed since he left to join their crew. These could all, in fact, be bad people pretending to be on their side. They didn’t know anyone here, though, so they had no choice but to trust them, and hope it didn’t backfire later.

They walked for maybe a kilometer before Thack stopped, and turned towards one of her people. “Are these good?”

A man stepped forward, and carefully inspected two trees standing opposite each other. He waved his hand in the space between them. “This will work. Gather inside.” They all crowded around, and waited. The man continued to wave his arms around, this time like he was dancing without his feet, or like he was playing a game with the wind. This wind picked up, and after a minute, blew them away. They instantly transported to a pair of different trees in an urban setting. They were spaced about the same distance apart as the first trees, and as they looked around, Limerick and Freya could see other pairs, at different spacings. It was an interesting form of teleportation that was unmatched by anything in Freya’s universe, despite the fact that a lot of people there could do it in some way, or another. Tree portals, she presumed to call them.

Thack continued to lead them forward, all the way to a small hospital. It looked like something out of an old timey one-horse town, but this was clearly a big city. Freya figured that made sense, because most people here would have access to Landis’ panacea, which mostly negated the need for traditional medical practices. The receptionist greeted them kindly, and then stood up from her chair, showing that she was wearing a lab coat. The others stayed behind while she led Thack, Freya, Limerick, and little Treasure to the back, where she revealed herself to be the doctor as well. Again, with such little need for medical infrastructure, there wasn’t much reason for anyone but a doctor to work in what might very well have been the only hospital on the whole planet.

They spent the rest of the day being examined, and undergoing tests. Blood draws, CAT scans, and urine samples; they were all quite familiar to them. Once it was over, the doctor sent them on their way, saying that the results would be ready in the morning. Thack and the voldisils accompanied them to their new home. It was just large enough for two people and a baby, but very nice and clean. This world was all about simplicity and efficiency. It didn’t need to be luxurious to be comfortable, and to have everything they needed. Their only neighbors were Thack and the other voldisil. There was no telling how long they had been preparing for their arrival. Different universes operated on totally unrelated timestreams. The moment they left salmonverse, and the moment they arrived here felt consecutive, but there was no telling how much actual time these people had to plan for this.

Time was simultaneously important, and not all that important. Freya and Limerick wanted to get back to their friends, but again, it didn’t matter how long they waited. There was no rush to leave when this world was perfect for them right now. So they stayed. They stayed for over sixteen years. All three of them were taking the monthly tiptokois pill, and keeping a stash of emergency class pills at all times. The former kept them young and healthy, and they never found themselves ever needing the latter. According to the history, volidisil once kept themselves hidden, working in the shadows to either make the world a better place, or a worse one. Landis was the first to step into the light, and show people what he could do. It inspired others to use their own gifts out in public. This transformed society, creating a one-world government, and shedding a lot of the pain and suffering that most civilizations lived through.

On a personal note, Treasure was a great child. She was nice, caring, and affectionate. She was disciplined, patient, and interested in learning. Thack taught a special study program at a community college on exoversal cultures. It was generally limited to adults, but they made an exception for Treasure for obvious reasons. Everyone loved her, but she didn’t have any close friends. This world loved and accepted people who were different, but she still always felt so foreign, and never really got over that. People didn’t realize either, or they probably would have tried to help. She was just so popular that no one noticed she didn’t hang out with a specific group, and didn’t have anyone outside her parents who she could trust fully, and confide in. She wasn’t depressed exactly, but she wasn’t super happy either, and that was a realization she had to come to herself. It happened this morning.

“Treasure Lydia Hawthorne, get in here right now!”

She knew what her mother was angry about, but she was going to hold firm. So she took a deep breath, and prepared for battle.

“What is this doing on the table?”

She couldn’t yell, because if she yelled, it would give her mom even more reason to think that she needed it, which she didn’t anymore. She could control herself just fine. “I’m sick of it, and I’m over it.”

“It doesn’t work that way. This necklace is for your own protection.”

“It’s not a necklace,” Treasure argued, “it’s a collar. Your flowery language doesn’t work on me anymore.”

“I don’t understand, you used to be fine with it. You know what it’s for.”

“I control my voice. I’ve taken it off before, and didn’t have a problem.”

“What is this right here?” Freya asked, pointing.

Treasure sighed, realizing her mistake by claiming there was never a problem. “That’s my elbow,” she recited in monotone.

“We left that scar to remind you that if not for the panacea, you could be dead right now. That weird bird creature was this close to eating the rest of you. Your father found you in an uncharted universe after making four—four!—shatter portals. You realize how hard that is for him? It wears him out, he could have died trying to rescue you. He got lucky that time, because of Miss Collins, but if you scream just once, you could end up too far away for even her to detect. If you see a spider, or a boy gets too handsy, that could be it. You could be lost forever. That is why the amazing scientists on this planet built you that necklace, and that is why you can’t ever take it off unless he’s there to go with you. Which you’re not going to do until you turn eighteen, which you agreed to ten years ago.”

“I’m not asking you to let me train with dad. I just don’t want to wear the collar anymore. I’ve spent my whole life not raising my voice, I think I’ve been conditioned enough.”

“Or maybe you’ve been stifled for so long, it’s all just waiting to burst out all at once,” Freya argued.

“All the more reason to let me get used to taking it off!” It wasn’t a scream, but her voice was indeed louder than it had ever been since that time she got stranded. She was still a baby back then, though, and had no memory of that.

Steam came out of Freya’s ears. She held up the collar. “Put this goddamn thing back on this instant, before you do something you regret. I’m your mother, and you’re going to listen to me.”

“I’ll show you,” Treasure claimed. “I’ll show you that I can control it.”

“Yeah, you will, because you’ll be wearing your necklace.”

“Stop calling it that. It’s a collar, and I’ll put it on in five minutes.”

“What are you going to do in the next five minutes?”

“I already told you, I’ll show you that I can learn control. I’ll be back before you know it.” She ran down the hall, and into her room, ignoring the complaints from her mother. And then she screamed.

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Microstory 1630: Virtual Exclusion

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Here is another story about a world that avoided a run-in with the Ochivari and the Darning Wars. It’s also not about a version of Earth. Here, humans evolved on a planet called Olankaran. It was tidally locked with its host star, meaning one side of it was stuck in perpetual brightness, and the other, perpetually nighttime. They could only survive in the terminator zone, which was a thin strip of temperate vegetation that went all around the circumference. Despite this wildly different solar dynamic, they developed about as any other civilization does. They fought with each other, and formed bonds, and progressed science, and were held back by religion. It took them about as long to figure out that some habitable worlds weren’t tidal-locked as it will take a non-tidally-locked planet to hypothesize about them. One thing they had on their side was a deeper appreciation for how precious life was. So much of their planet could not support complex life, so they understood how important it was to protect what little managed to come into existence. They didn’t ever burn fossil fuels, instead moving directly to renewables. It might have taken them longer to start harnessing electricity, but whatever, who cares? Solar was, of course, their number one form of power generation, as there were places where they could install panels that worked throughout the entire day. It was very windy on the nightside, though, so that was useful to them as well. They flourished on this world, and why they were just as curious about outer space as anyone, the majority of them chose to stay right where they were. And that was because they knew, from there, they could go anywhere.

They developed virtually reality constructs, which was a completely normal and natural progression for any civilization. These people took it to an extreme. Once they were ready, just about everyone chose to upload their consciousnesses to the virtual worlds, and live there permanently. To keep them cool, their processors were placed on the far side of the planet, and kept them running using highly advanced solar power on the day side. Robots maintained them from the outside. The temperate zones where their physical bodies once took up excessive space were returned to nature. Within a century, it was nearly impossible to tell that people had ever lived there before. Anyone still using a body was exploring interstellar space. The uploaded people were exploring space too, they just weren’t doing it with their own bodies. They dispatched probes to map the galaxy, and one day reach out to other galaxies. As more data came in from these unmanned exploratory missions, the virtual equivalent world was updated to reflect the new information. They just thought it was a lot safer, because it was impossible to die in the construct unless the servers were damaged, and of course, they came up with safeguards to prevent that from happening. The people here were so good at hiding that the Ochivari weren’t even aware that they existed. When they came to this universe to find out whether any sufficiently evolved life was here in need of being destroyed, they didn’t detect anything, and marked it down as empty. They lived happily ever after. Literally. Because when the universe finally came to a close on its own, they simply transferred all of their servers to a younger one, and just kept going on forever.

Microstory 1629: Legend Has It

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Let’s get away from the depressing Darning War stories, and talk about something unrelated. I don’t want to say that this universe has nothing to do with the war—because sooner or later, the Ochivari find everyone—but the story itself will be about something else. This version of Earth only encountered one instance of time travel. One day, an underemployed twentysomething man living in his recently deceased grandmother’s house heard an explosion downstairs. His name was Legend, but he was anything but. He didn’t have any passions, or goals. He just went to work every day, and came home to his cat in the evening. It was his once grandmother’s cat, and it came with the house as a packaged deal. He was convinced it would outlive them all. When Legend went down to investigate the ruckus, the cat was just sitting in a chair on the back deck, having barely acknowledged the explosion in the kitchen. He didn’t expect her to run to his rescue, but it should have freaked her out. That thing could not be flapped. He crept around the corner, and looked in to find a naked woman about his age, brushing the dust off her skin. “Axel Quincy?” she presumed.

“Is that your name, errr...?”

“I thought you were Axel Quincy,” she said.

“Nope. Sorry. Wrong house. Never heard of him.” As it turned out, the woman was from the future, and desperately needed to find an engineering prodigy whose designs were this close to saving the world decades from now. He was destined to die sometime within the next two weeks, and only he could prevent disaster. He was unable to finish the plans for many of his inventions, and while the time traveler’s people were able to reverse engineer what they needed once the initial plans were discovered, they weren’t able to do so in time. They could have really benefited from having them already exist by the time any of them were even born. She had to find him, and save his life, so he could complete his work on his own, and be prepared to defend the planet against a terrible future. After a little sleuthing, they realized that the time machine had accidentally sent her to the wrong place. It wasn’t even the right country. She didn’t have any money, or a present-day identity, and she didn’t know how to drive, and she wasn’t familiar with the national borders, which were erased from the map when catastrophe struck the first time. Legend was her only hope now, even though he was nobody, and didn’t know anything about how to find some Canadian stranger who wasn’t going to be famously important until after his death. Still, he agreed to help, because it was the right thing to do. So the two of them set off on an adventure, along with the cat, and hijinks ensued. She tried to drive once, because he was too slow, so they had to wait for it to be repaired. Getting across the border was tough, because neither of them had a passport. The people they met along the way either tried to help and failed, or actively tried to stop them. They were running from the law, and a CEO who thought Legend was someone else; evidently someone who was a far greater threat to his freedom and wealth. They bickered and struggled, and of course became friends, and I won’t tell you how it ends. You’ll just have to see it for yourself, if you get a chance.

Microstory 1628: Scared Substrate

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Like Lochanverse, this next universe was sterilized completely by the Ochivari, in an attempt to prevent them from being able to destroy their world completely. Unfortunately for the Ochivari, their plan failed, because it had a weakness. Organic life isn’t the only thing capable of destroying. The truth is that it doesn’t matter what body you’re in, if you don’t care about the environment, you’re not going to go out of your way to save it. It doesn’t matter as much as people think if you could live long enough to see the consequences of your actions. You’re not going to suddenly start recycling, and turning off your lights, and driving electric cars, and donating money to wildlife preserves. You’re going to keep doing whatever it is that makes you happy in whatever way is the most convenient, whether that means polluting, or wasting resources. This is what happened here. Most of the time, the Ochivari don’t reveal themselves to the populations that they sterilize. They do it quietly, and just let the humans figure out what happened to them on their own. Obviously, they always will realize it, but the hope is that it will be too late by that time. The Ochivari don’t just want to make sure no one stops them, because once they release the virus, that’s pretty much impossible anyway. The sooner the humans figure it out, the longer they have to come up with some solution. Now, most of the time, that’s not relevant. The humans spend all their resources trying to cure the virus that they don’t have the time or resources to try anything else. The discovery that no more children are going to be born leads to mayhem and civil breakdown. The mistake that the Ochivari made in this case was to reveal themselves to their victims, and they did it out of anger.

The one requirement they have when choosing a target is the people have to be doomed to destroy their world unless someone intervenes. Generally, this means that they’re greedy, lazy, or just inept. This world, however, was willfully destructive. They reveled in the damage they were doing to their environment, seeing every bad outcome as proof that they were gods of their own planet, and were entitled to do whatever the hell they wanted with it. They were conquerors, and takers. They didn’t want to save their planet, because they were confident the best of them would one day leave, and maintain their lifestyles elsewhere. They weren’t wrong. The Ochivari made a mistake when they chose to lecture them about why they had to sterilize them. Armed with this knowledge, the humans came up with a workaround. They didn’t even bother to cure the virus. They simply uploaded their consciousnesses to new bodies. They were working on this technology already, so it wasn’t all that hard. The technology was made free—which didn’t sound like something they would do, but presumably, they wanted to rob the aliens of the satisfaction of watching even one organic human die. It was an unexpected response. It showed how flawed the Ochivari's ideals were, even within the parameters of their sick and irrational view of the multiverse. Unfortunately, this development did nothing to dissuade them from their crusade. They just needed to devise contingencies. Organic lifeforms were susceptible to organic viruses, which computers were immune to, but computers have their own viruses to contend with. All the Ochivari had to do was program one of these viruses to be as nasty and all-inclusive as their normal pathogen. The people died out anyway, and nothing got better. It was a lose-lose situation.

Microstory 1627: For a Favor

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Most worlds progress in about the same way. Sure, there are plenty of notable differences, but they generally have a lot of things in common, and there are some things that just won’t happen, because they do not support that species’ survival, whether speaking evolutionarily, or socially. A species that can’t, or won’t, protect itself, won’t last very long, because nobody else is going to do it for them...most of the time. Guardian races do exist, and I’ll get to one or two of those in the future. The universe I’m talking about today didn’t have guardians, but the humans of one planet still managed to remain quite peaceful throughout their pre-singularity struggling period. That’s  probably not what you would notice if you went there during that time, though. You would probably first realize that the people of Whrweh never had any standard form of currency. They maintained a barter economy until they no longer needed to exchange goods and services with each other, when automation took over. They managed this by sticking to isolated pockets of civilization. They lived underground, and figured out how to build tallish structures pretty early on, which allowed them to remain confined in a smaller area, and leave more space between each region. They didn’t need to spread out too much, and they didn’t want to. They had recycling, and minimalistic principles, and they did not like waste. Surprisingly, this form of isolationism never led to war. In fact, though they did experience some violence, it was nowhere near what most civilizations had. They had no use for it, because everyone always had their own resources, and left others alone. Each pocket was pretty self-sufficient, and with little occasion to reach out to other pockets for help, there was also less of a chance of encountering conflict.

One thing they did to keep the peace was to have a sort of unwritten policy of sharing knowledge with each other. When a pocket made a breakthrough in science or technology, they wouldn’t be obligated to actually give the results to other pockets, but they would give them the tools they needed to develop it on their own. When someone invented the plow, they told everyone else about it, and pretty soon, everyone had a plow. Then, when someone else realized they could hook a plow up to a work animal, they told everyone about that too, and now they all had better plows, including the person who invented the first version. This had the added benefit of lessening their negative impact on their environment. By giving all new information to everyone, they were assured that someone would quickly discover downsides, and deeper solutions. They skipped right over using fossil fuels to power their vehicles, and other machines, because they soon learned that electricity was cleaner, and more efficient. This all just kept going until the whole planet was so advanced, there was no longer any need to stay separate. Technically, they were living in independent regions, but they were already one peoples, so coming together officially was a no-brainer. Once robots and artificial intelligence were created, everything fell into place. They shed their surface and underground dwellings, and flew off into the sky, to live in something called an orbital ring. It’s exactly what it sounds like, a giant ring that goes all around their planet, like you might find around Saturn or Neptune. Except this is artificial, solid and continuous, and capable of housing their entire population many times over. They did away with the bartering system for the most part, though elements of it are still there. You are allowed to have anything you want, as long as you contribute in your own way. Your peers are responsible for determining whether you contribute enough to be worthy of any given amenity, and for the most part, this works out with no terrible disputes. A second type of bartering was created in order to handle external interactions. Some humans left their home world, and went off to live elsewhere. Humanoid aliens also developed on their own worlds, and formed their own systems of government. When dealing with these people, the Whrwehs always ask for a favor, in exchange for whatever it is they’re asking for. This favor is never something they actually need, but they believe it’s only fair that the other side make some kind of effort, or even a sacrifice, in order to receive something in return. This was all great, and it protected them from Ochivari invasion, but it would not last. While time travel was not possible within the bounds of this universe, that rule does not extend to external forces, and one little mission changed everything about everything.

Microstory 1626: Sterile Conditions

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Perhaps I should have brought this up earlier, but when an Ochivari invasion force arrives in a new universe, they don’t just fire up their weapons, and start killing people. First of all, that would be counterproductive to their goals. They believe that they’re saving the planet, and its innocent animal and plant life, from the evolved species who are doing damage to it. They believe they’re ultimately preserving life, and ridding the bulkverse of the harmful life. They see humans as much of a virus as humans see actual viruses. They do recognize our intelligence, and in fact, hold that against us. If we’re so smart, we should be able to figure out how to live in harmony with our ecosystem. Some planets do figure that out, in various ways, usually by a combination of asteroid mining, and space migration. If they do, and they do it quickly enough for their homeworld to recover, the Ochivari leave them alone. If they don’t—if they can’t break out of their own cycle of destruction—the Ochivari will step in, and take care of the problem. They’ll do this in one specific way, by delivering their own virus, which has been programmed to render every member of a given species sterile. It doesn’t kill them, or hurt them in any way, as long as it goes right. Like I’ve been saying, they are antinatalists, not efilists, and not murderers. An all out war would cause more harm to the planet they’re trying to rescue, and would unnecessarily drain them of resources. That’s not to say that violence never occurs. Sometimes, the world they attack is advanced enough to fight back, and the Ochivari have to do everything they can to pull the battles away from the new sanctuary, or the whole endeavor would be pointless. They could go back in time instead, and end it before that civilization can advance, but there’s always a crossroads, and it leads to a self-imposed rule of theirs. It’s a point of no return, that after passing it, that civilization can no longer undo or repair what they’ve done. Then—and only then—are the Ochivari allowed to intervene. If they were to go back and attack the humans at their most vulnerable, they would consider themselves to be hypocrites, and unworthy of the responsibility.

Lochanverse is so named because of its one survivor. Lochan Madigan found himself immune to the sterility virus when no one else was. What they didn’t know at the time was that he was the only known survivor in the entire bulkverse. His virility was unmatched by any other; off the charts, you could say. When they discovered him, scientists of that world were hopeful. Maybe there was a way out of this. By studying him, maybe they could figure out how to combat the virus. If that had been true, it would have changed everything. It would have helped a lot more people than they knew. Of course, they couldn’t figure it out. He wasn’t completely immune. It was more like the virus wasn’t strong enough to prevent him from potentially having children. Of course, this superpower was useless if he was the only one. Had they found a woman with her own resistance to the virus, they could have had children, and those children might have been the key to solving their problems, but that woman did not exist. I saw him in his universe, and could sense his loneliness. Other people were still around, as the species wasn’t going to die out for another several decades, but he was still unique, and from where he sat, not in a good way. People were envious of him, because even though he too would die one day, he was well-protected, and lived a life of luxury. As you can imagine, the whole world becoming sterile was not without its consequences. Society fell into chaos, and continued to cause harm to their planet. This is the folly of the Ochivari. No matter what they do, they’re killing life, and going against their own ideals. They believe they are doing the bulkverse a great service, but they’re really just making things worse. I rescued Lochan from this world, and took him to one that was pretty much off limits to the Ochivari, regardless of how they advanced. Here he began an immortal happy life, with his new family.

The Advancement of Serif: Tuesday, September 23, 2200

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Lochan Madigan was a refugee from another universe. His world was attacked by an alien force bent on destroying all sufficiently evolved life. Instead of literally starting a war, though, they decided to simply sterilize the entire population. It had a near hundred percent success rate, but Lochan managed to slip past those odds. Scientists and medical professionals tried to figure out what made him different, but never came to any conclusion. His ability to resist the pathogen was completely irreproducible, despite everyone’s best efforts. The theory was that they could find success if they discovered a woman with her own resistance, but they never did. He was seemingly one in a trillion. And so he was rescued from his world, and transported through the bulkverse in an attempt to find him a new home. They couldn’t save anyone from that universe, but they could save him, and that would have to be good enough. Thack and her bulk traveler were on their way to drop him off when they received that call about Adamina and Esen, and decided to make a pit stop. When he was stranded here due to Tamerlane Pryce’s intervention, he asked to just stay in The Parallel. “This is as good a brane as any,” he said. “I just don’t want to watch everyone I love struggle, knowing that their legacy ends with them. If I can find someone to love here, then they all live on, in a way.”

Serif and the crew got him set up with a new life on Earth, and then jumped to the future. When they returned, they found him immensely happy. He did meet someone to fall in love with, and pretty quickly sired a son. The boy, Amulet was fourteen years old now, and eager for his own life. Lochan told him the truth about where he was from, and how he came to be here. He grew up fascinated by the whole idea of having adventure. There were billions of worlds in this reality. He traveled to a few of them, but they weren’t exciting enough. They didn’t have death or danger, and Amulet didn’t think that was living. He begged his parents to one day let him join the crew of the AOC.

They were all standing around the central table of their ship, the crew, and the Madigan family. Here was his problem. He was too young now, but if he didn’t put on a Cassidy cuff today, he would have to wait nineteen years. “I’m old enough,” he argued. “There is no standard definition for an adult in this reality.”

“That’s only because people regularly travel to different planets, with different solar cycles,” his mother, Ilaria reasoned. “According to Earth, you’re only fourteen. And a fourteen-year-old can’t go off on his own on a spaceship.”

“Since when?” Amulet argued. “That happens all the time. It’s not about the number of minutes I’ve been alive. It’s about how mature I am, and I think we can all agree that I’m well-prepared, and well-suited to do this.”

“We don’t even know if Serif would want you to be on this ship at all,” Lochan said.

They all looked to Serif now. “This isn’t, uhh...this isn’t a fishing boat. Our job is unfathomably dangerous, and none of us volunteered. We were all recruited, and while we’re comfortable doing it now, I don’t know that I’m allowed to bring in someone else. I’m in charge of the choices the crew makes, and how we handle our missions, but I’m not in charge of the roster, or what missions we take.”

“Well, who is?” Amulet asked.

“Her name is Nerakali Preston.” Serif lifted her cuff, and spoke into the microphone. “Do you hear me? Care to weigh in on this?”

A message popped up on the screen, reading, No.

“No, he can’t join, or no, you don’t want to weigh in?”

Another message appeared, He can’t join. Kill him, before he kills you.

“Ha-ha-ha. What?”

Nerakali’s coordinates then appeared, prompting Serif to tap on it. “I’ll be back soon, I think. But hear me, Amulet. You cannot join us if your parents do not approve. It doesn’t matter what I say without that, so you’ll have to convince them first.” Serif tapped the link, and jumped to Nerakali’s location on the edge of a foggy mountain.

“What the hell are you goin’ on about?”

“It’s like I said, you have to kill him,” Nerakali ordered. “That’s the mission today.”

“He’s just a boy.”

“That boy,” Nerakali began, “is the destroyer of worlds. He is the sickness that pervades. He is the end of all life.”

“Stop speaking in riddles. Tell me what the problem is, so we can come up with a solution together. Is he supposed to be the next Elon Musk, or something?”

Nerakali sighed quite heavily. “The timeline is confusing, and I don’t have all the information, because our memories have been messed with, but I’ll try to explain. There’s a pathogen in 3117. It renders every biological entity sterile. Sound familiar?”

“Yeah, that’s what happened to Lochan’s world. But he’s immune.”

Nerakali breathed slowly now, trying to figure out the words. “He’s not immune. He’s just very, very virile. It’s more like a game of chance. I can’t tell you how the pathogen works, but it doesn’t stop him, because he’s just powerful enough to overcome it. He’s still a carrier. Fortunately for us, he didn’t start infecting everyone he came into contact with since he left his universe, but he did pass it on to his son, and if that son is allowed to reach sexual maturity, he will start spreading it, and you can’t stop it then.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. You said the pathogen shows up in 3117. This doesn’t line up with him being here today.”

“It does if you give him that Cassidy cuff. He’ll be in 3117 in no time.”

“Okay, so my options are as follows. I can give him the cuff, and by the time we reach 3117, he will have matured enough to spread the pathogen. If I don’t give him the cuff, he’ll mature in a matter of years, and the pathogen will show up a millennium early. Or I kill him now, and stop the pathogen completely.”

“Yes,” Nerakali confirmed. “In some realities, the pathogen appears around this time period. In others, it’s in the future. You have to create a timeline where it never existed at all. You can end this now.”

Serif started to think over her options. Obviously, killing him was totally off the table. She wasn’t going to do that. Having him join the crew was probably never something she was going to agree to either. Why did Nerakali think that happened? In what reality did Serif make that choice? Perhaps people in the Parallel were different, but where she was from, fourteen was too young to do something this insane. Then she remembered what Thack told her just before she left. Let him enter the cave. “Wait, how do you know how the pathogen gets to 3117? How do you know it’s because he wears the cuff?”

“It’s how the math works out. I don’t actually know it, but it makes sense.”

Serif shook her head. “It doesn’t make that much sense. And I don’t think it’s true.” She kept digging into her memory archive, and trying to solve the riddle. “The time cave on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. It goes nine hundred and nine years in the future.”

“No, it goes nine hundred and nine years in the past.”

“Unless you enter the cave on Earth.”

Nerakali frowned, and looked away, now also solving the riddle. “Why would he go through the time cave?”

“Maybe he doesn’t know it’ll take him to the future. Maybe he’ll just try to get there before we go there for our transition missions.”

“That’s absurd.” Nerakali shook the thought out of her hair. “It doesn’t matter, though. You still have to kill him. He’s dangerous no matter what time period he’s in.”

Serif placed her fingers on either side of her nose, and cupped her mouth. There had to be a way to get through this without anyone getting hurt. “I’m a healer.”

“You’re a nanite healer,” Nerakali contended. “You think the people who have been trying to stop this haven’t already thought of nanites? You don’t have a power so much as you’re a walking nanobot manufacturer with a small-scale delivery system.”

“Maybe I can’t cure an entire population of this,” Serif said, “but maybe I can heal this one person before it takes full hold of his system.”

“If you try that, and it backfires, it could kill you.”

“I thought it didn’t kill people, it just sterilized them.”

“It’s killed before, if it’s too concentrated. It killed Leona’s mother.”

“I have to try,” Serif maintained. “It’s who I am. I was created...for...”

“That’s something you’ve forgotten. Why were you created?”

“Maybe for this. Maybe this has been my purpose all along.”

“In no reality has this happened,” Nerakali claimed. “In every reality, the pathogen takes hold somewhere, somewhen. If this were going to work, I would have heard about it already.”

“Maybe. Or maybe there are some things that even you don’t know.”

“Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. There’s too much at stake here for you to do anything if you’re armed only with a bunch of maybes.”

“Are you ordering me to stand down, Nerakali, or are you warning me that you’re gonna try to stop me? Because I can ignore the first of those, and I can fight against the second. Either way, this is happening. So all you need to do is decide if you’re gonna hold me back, or back me up.”

Nerakali was still reluctant. She didn’t want to kill a fourteen-year-old boy, but she didn’t want to let the whole species go extinct when she had the power to stop it. But that was true either way, wasn’t it? She had the power to stop it no matter what.

“If it doesn’t work, you can always go back in time, and change things. But if you do, then just take him to an unpopulated universe. Don’t kill him.”

This seemed to satisfy her. “Very well. Go make your attempt.”

Serif returned to the ship. Surprisingly, Amulet’s parents finally agreed to let him join the crew in a limited capacity. He would not go on any missions that were too dangerous, and— “It doesn’t matter. Stop talking about this.” She turned towards the boy. “You’re sick. You have the same disease your father’s people had. I might be able to cure you, but if it doesn’t work, you could be responsible for the end of the human race in this universe. If you think you’re old enough to join the crew, then you’re old enough to hear the truth.”

Amulet was frightened, but desperately didn’t want to show it. “Do it.”

Serif stepped forward, and inhaled to prepare to breathe on him, so her nanites could enter his system, and cleanse him of the lingering and dormant sterility pathogen. As she was trying to exhale, a pair of hands appeared between their faces, blocking the air from reaching him. The hands gently pushed Serif away, and she could see who it was. It was an alternate version of herself.

“Whew!” the other Serif said. “That was a close one. You have no idea what I just saved you from.” She started walking around the room, shaking everyone’s hand. “Hi, it’s nice to see you again. I’m Future!Serif.”

“What did you save me from?” Present!Serif demanded to know.

“Not you. Like, us, I guess. All of us, as a species. Your nanites are a key ingredient. Not only do they not cure him, but they exacerbate the problem. The pathogen makes the victim’s body turn on itself, like a cancer. They would attack your nanites, take them over, and use them to spread. You’re immune. Uh, I am immune. And that’s only because I’m...well, at the time, I was—”

“Pregnant,” Present!Serif interrupted. “I’m pregnant.”

“That’s right.”

“And the baby is Mateo Matic’s.”

“Right again,” Future!Serif said.

“Yeah, I’m starting to remember him. It’s all coming back to me.”

“Yes,” Future!Serif noted, “very..interesting. The point is that you’re not a cure. Your baby is the cure. We don’t need your breath, we need your amniotic fluid.”

“And then I’ll be cured?” Amulet hoped. “And then I can join the crew?”

Future!Serif laughed. “Ha! No, that would be stupid. Roster’s full now. You’ll find your place. You’re a second generation spirit, after all.”

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