Sic Transit...Tempus (Part IV)

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Image credit: NASA / JPL / SSI / Gordan Ugarkovic

Treasure felt bad about holing herself up in her train car, and not doing even a little bit to help them all escape this place, or at least find out where they were. She had all this power, and she should have thought to use it. It just didn’t occur to her that she could do any bit of good for their situation. She was sixteen years old, and had yet to figure out what she wanted to do with her life. Explorer was the best that she could figure, because of her bulk traveling abilities, but that wasn’t a job; not really. “I’m sorry,” she felt compelled to say, as they were all making the trek to the front of the train, where the main engines were.

“I hope you’re not worried about it,” Azura said. “You couldn’t have known you would magically be able to activate the computer systems. If anyone should have realized that, it should have been me. Now I realize that the reason the computers worked sometimes is because of residual bulk energy that my body has absorbed. It also explains why it gets less and less reliable each time, as the energy dissolves like nitrogen. You, on the other hand, probably produce bulk energy, which is why you’re able to spontaneously open shatter portals. I’m sure your father does as well.”

“Does that mean I don’t actually need to scream to make it happen? Could I just do it on my own, maybe by punching?”

“It’s possible. I’m no expert, I just have experience. It’s also entirely possible that producing bulk energy isn’t enough, that you need some way to harness it. It could be like visual processing and interpretation. Your brain is the thing that’s capable of processing the light it receives from external sources, but you still need eyes to receive that light. The brain wouldn’t be able to do it on its own. My guess is that your scream is like the organ that can actually use the energy in your body.”

“What’s wrong with my voice now? My neck is healed, but I can’t speak louder than a whisper, let alone scream.”

“You suffer from vocal cord paresis. I patched you up, and your body is healing, but I don’t have the skills or tools to make a sufficient prognosis. So...you might continue to improve. I’m sure there are exercises you can do with your throat that aid recovery, but I’m not cognizant of them, so for now, keep using that tiara, and rest.”

“It’s weird that this tiara was in the medkit,” Treasure pointed out. “Do people get shot in the throat a lot?”

Azura laughed. “That’s not designed for people who can’t speak. Vertean is the primary language in their universe during that time period, but there are a few planets who developed mostly independently, and created their own languages. That tiara lets Olkan communicate with others. It reads brainwaves, instead of translating voices.”

“Who’s Olkan?” Treasure asked.

“That guy right there.” Azura gestured towards one of the men behind them. He didn’t speak English but he recognized his own name, and knew they were talking about him.

“Oh. I should give it back,” Treasure said, hoping to not actually have to do that.

“It’s fine. He knows a little Vertean, and is getting by. He knows you need it more. They’re good people, once you get to know them. We were on the opposite sides of a war that should never have begun, but their cause is not without its merits. I even agree with them on principle, just not with their methods.”

They were finally in engineering. The systems, including the engines, finally booted up, and Treasure could feel the sense of relief in the room. They had been working on this for so long, and now they had hope. They all went their separate ways, and started working at their respective stations. Apparently, Azura taught the Verteans some Maramon, so they could get going. They were all clearly getting stuck, though.

“Okay,” Azura said. “I could use your tiara just temporarily, though. If we interface it with the computer, it will be able to—”

“Translate to their native tongue,” Treasure finished. “Of course.” She removed it from her head, and handed it over. Then she stood in silence, and watched them work. It was then that she realized that one young man was still back by the entrance, not doing anything. He was just watching everyone, like she was. She was about to introduce herself, which she realized she could neither speak, nor understand him. It had only been a few minutes, and it was already getting to be too frustrating. Azura said that it would be about fifteen more minutes before she figured out how to connect the tiara with the computer, so Treasure decided to go grab some water from the dining car. As soon as she crossed the threshold to the next car down, everything shut off. She could hear the cries of irritation in the others. She immediately hopped back in, which powered the systems back up.

“Apparently, you can’t leave if we want to keep these on,” Azura realized. “I was not aware of this either. What did you need?”

Treasure mimed drinking water from a glass.

Azura said something to the boy who wasn’t doing anything, prompting him to leave. Treasure waved her hands in front of her chest. “It’s okay,” Azura said. “That’s what he’s there for. He’s like a roadie, but for soldiers. He carries extra weapons and ammo, and sends messages to other units. The closest thing to it on your world would probably be the quartermaster, but I think I would translate it to Valet, because Quino garners a lot less respect than a quartermaster. He was born on a fairly poor planet, so he doesn’t have all that much education, and he’s meant to just feel lucky he has a purpose in life. Only a couple people here are actual engineers, but the rest are decades old, and have studied lots of different things. He’s closer to your age.”

Treasure frowned. That didn’t sound very fair.

“He’s getting refreshments for all of us,” Azura clarified.

A little while later, another soldier got Azura’s attention, and showed her something on the screen. They exchanged words in their language, and everyone else started listening. Azura sighed, and prepared to explain it all in English. “Okay, so you’re constantly emitting low levels of bulk energy. You, at all times, straddle the dimensional membrane, and let energy pass through freely. Don’t worry, I doubt it’ll cause you any problems, or cause anyone else any problems. Microscopic tears in the membrane form and heal all the time. Most worlds call it dark energy or vacuum energy, and it’s what causes the expansion of their respective universes. It just so happens that your tear never heals. The Transit was designed to run on multiple power systems, and apparently, the guy who stole it removed almost all of them. He couldn’t remove any of the bulk transistors, though, or he would have just destroyed the whole thing. I don’t know why he chose not to do that, but perhaps he knew we would be coming? It would explain why he left the dining car with the food synthesizers intact.”

Treasure tried to ask what that meant for her, but the gestures weren’t conveying the information clearly. Azura noticed that the tiara was done syncing, so she handed it back. “What does this mean?” she asked. “What does it mean for me?”

“It means that we can take this thing wherever we want to go,” Azura said, “as long as you’re with us. To free us from our reliance on you, we would need to replace the other power systems, like the antimatter drives, fusion reactors, and fuel cells. The good news is that that’s totally doable. I can think of three universes off the top of my head that could accommodate our needs.”

“What are you, uhh...what are you gonna do with this thing?” Treasure questioned. She knew what The Transit was. Her parents spoke of it. It was her mother’s intention when she first left her friends to find The Transit, and use it in the oncoming fight against the Ochivari. She and her partner at the time, Zektene switched gears by joining a crew that planned to stop the Ochivari from existing in the first place. This was where they met her dad, Limerick. When their mission failed, they got sidetracked from having to raise their daughter. Surely they would still want this, and surely Treasure had a high claim to it since this was her universe. The problem was that Azura had a higher claim, since it originated in her universe, and that could create some conflict.

Azura was very good at reading people, and understanding subtext. “I’m going to get these people home, and then I’m going to take you home, so your mother and I can fight over who maintains control over it. Yes, I know what her mission was. Yes, I know that this vessel is crucial in the Darning Wars. No, nobody really knows who’s in charge of The Transit Army. It might be her...but it might be me.” She looked next to her at one of the soldiers. “It might be this guy right here.”

“I’m sure it’s not me,” that guy said.

Both Treasure and Azura were surprised by this. “Whoa. Hadron, you speak English? How is that possible?”

“I speak every language in Vertea,” Hadron answered. “I’ve always been very good at picking new ones up quickly. I’ve been studying English and Maramon since we got here, since I’m not good at much else.”

“How, though?” Azura pressed. “I can’t get anything to stay on for more than a few minutes at a time.”

“I’ve been sleeping in the car next to hers.” Hadron pointed to Treasure. “Before you get huffy, I didn’t know that that was why. I figured that particular car happened to have its own power source. I looked through it, though. It only contains entertainment and cultural research. It has no information about the ship itself, so it wouldn’t have done us any good.”

Now someone else got Azura’s attention, and showed her something on her screen. They talked a little bit. The others weren’t that fascinated.

“Hyperion,” Azura said. “It’s a moon around Saturn, and has an orbital period of about twenty-one days, that checks out. It’s very small, and we are presently seven thousand years before the common era. That makes sense too, because the man who put this here didn’t want to have to worry about someone stumbling upon it. Not even a trotter would think to come to a place like this in a time like this.”

Treasure was concerned. “What about communications? If the Maramon computer can tell where we are, does that mean we’re connected to some kind of network?”

“Nah, that’s all gone,” Azura promised. “That’s the first thing we checked. The comms array has been utterly removed. The thieves likely left it in Ansutah, because they wouldn’t have wanted to be tracked either.”

Quino returned with a cart full of drinks and snacks. Everyone took a break to eat. Everyone...but one. The woman who figured out they were on Hyperion chose to keep working at her station. She seemed very determined to figure something else out. Curious, Treasure looked over her shoulder. The woman didn’t seem to mind it. Some of it appeared in Vertean, but it was also still in Maramon. Treasure spoke Maramon quite fluently, but she didn’t read all that well, and the data on the screens was all very technical. It contained a lot of words that Miss Collins wouldn’t have thought to teach her, so she had to make a few assumptions based on her intuition.

“Treasure, what are you seeing over there?” Azura asked after a few minutes.

“She can explain it better,” Treasure replied, “but I think we have to spend another twenty-one days here.”

Azura thought about it. “There’s a little bit of logic to that. You can only enter or leave at a particular moment, and it’s the moment that the time loop first began. That’s why the grenade brought us here exactly when it did.” She translated the explanation into Vertean, so everyone else would understand. They all seemed fine with it. Three weeks wasn’t that long, and they knew that it didn’t matter how long they spent outside of their universe, they could return to any moment, including the one right after the one they left. Of course, they could die before ever making it back, but it didn’t look like that was going to happen. As long as the synthesizers kept producing food, they should be safe here.

So they waited. Treasure’s role on the ship was wildly different than it was during the first half of their vacation. Where once she was isolated and unhelpful, now she was vital to the mission. She was getting a lot of exercise, running back and forth from the front of the ship, to the middle, to the back. It felt like punishment, but at least it was keeping her fit. Did this thing have to be so long, though? Most of the cars were designed to accommodate soldiers and their cargo, but three of them were used to keep the ship running. It was modular, as one might expect. Each car was capable of traveling through space on its own, but only the first and last could pierce a portal through the universal membrane. They needed to both be in operational order, to maximize their chances of escaping this universe, and accumulating the right resources. Treasure tried to expand the breadth of her power, but was only ever able to power systems from one car over. One of the crew was a medic, and was able to help her come up with some recovery exercises. She still couldn’t scream, but she was eventually able to speak at a very low volume, which was enough to allow her to return the tiara to Olkan.

When they weren’t maintaining the engines, the crew was taking a page out of Hadron’s book, and learning English. They didn’t do it for Treasure’s benefit alone. Though they were supposedly going back to where they were, they wanted to know the dominant language in the bulkverse, in case something like this ever happened again. While they weren’t all particularly adept at learning languages, most of them were a couple centuries old, and had a lot of experience with gathering new skills. Lifelong education was kind of the defining characteristic of their galaxy. That didn’t mean everyone had access to it, but the longer someone was alive, the more chances they found to add to their repertoire. By the time they left Hyperion, all of them had a working proficiency, and were speaking English exclusively for practice.

When their forty-two days were up, they gathered in the engine car again, and took off.

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Microstory 1645: Omegaverse

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The Omegaverse Earth was totally normal and boring in the beginning. It didn’t even have its own name until a particular object from another universe randomly appeared, and started making changes. It’s called the Omega Gyroscope, and it has the power to do just about anything. It can’t alter multiversal physics, but it can change the proper physics of whatever universe it happens to be in at the time, but only while using the original proper physics as a foundation. Needless to say, it’s incredibly dangerous, and probably best left unused. A not so great person was in pursuit of the Omega Gyroscope, and in order to protect it, this person’s opponent threw it into a portal, hoping to pass it off to someone he knew he could trust. Unfortunately, the portal closed just as the gyroscope was crossing the threshold, which trapped it in the outer bulkverse. It floated around aimlessly for an infinite amount of time, before making its way to the brane that would come to be named for it. Of course, you wouldn’t know how powerful or dangerous the thing was if you looked at it. It’s just this dinky little thing that was never designed to do what it does. It was a regular toy that became imbued with its power afterwards. So it’s not like a cabal of scientists had to get together to study the thing once it was discovered. A random underemployed man on an urban hike after his four hour shift stumbled upon it, and sold it at a pawn shop for a few bucks. It changed hands several times over the years; other pawn shops, attics, storage compartments, an antiques store, and finally a museum. The curator still didn’t know that it had magical powers, but she felt compelled to put it on display, and make up a story about its history. The museum was struggling, you see, and she just needed to get people back in the doors for the real artifacts.

Her plan did not work for the majority of the population, but the Omega Gyroscope has a passive power that only certain people can detect. Some people are just more in tune with their universe. They are not full witches, and probably never will be, but they do have a greater sense of the interconnectedness of reality. When they encounter something as profound as the Omega Gyroscope, they know it. They don’t necessarily know why they feel what they feel, or what it means, but it will most likely leave them with the urge to take ownership over it. The curator’s lie was so good that the gyroscope was heavily secured in its display case, so they couldn’t just steal it, and run away. They conscripted a would-be cop to steal it for them. He had a reputation for doing anything short of murder for the right price, for not asking questions, and for getting the job done quickly and efficiently. This job went south when his former best friend, and current rival, went after him, and foiled the plot. He didn’t get the chance to haul the criminal off to jail, though. The Omega Gyroscope—after all this time—finally reactivated. It turned back time, and changed everything about how the world would develop from there. What followed was a series of adventures, precipitated by persistent use of the gyroscope. Different people kept getting their hands on it, figuring out how it worked, and rewriting reality to their whims, if only subconsciously. One of these alterations resulted in the worst damage to a planet in any local group universe. This forced the Ochivari to forgo the sterility virus, and engage in total warfare. These humans had to die, and in the most violent way possible. But they underestimated their enemy.

Microstory 1644: Fickle Fortune

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Time is pretty complicated, and time travel makes it more complicated. There are those who don’t see linear time, or who have no use for it. Some can go back, some can skip, some can slow it down. Some can enter spatio-temporal dimensions, or even spatial dimensions. Some universes take this to insane levels, like Salmonverse, or parts of the Composite Universe. But there is one general constant, and that is that time still does move forward, one second...at a time. It’s just certain people that are manipulating it, or moving about in some weird way. You can probably kind of see where I’m going with this, and it’s that this universe today is not like that. If you’ve read enough comic books, or listened to/watched soap operas, you’ll notice some funny things going on. One particular superhero was a high school sophomore when he was introduced, and even though later stories could take place after decades, he’ll still be a sophomore. Or maybe they show him in college, but a new writer will come on board, and want to go back to those high school days, and no one in the story will acknowledge these discrepancies. It’s called the sliding timescale, and it’s generally used to maintain the general concept behind a character whilst being able to introduce real-world developments, such as technological advancements, or topical global conflicts. Superhero A didn’t have a cellphone when his first issue came out in the 1950s, but he does in the 2020s, even though he would be an old man by now, if not just dead. The point is that this is done for practical reasons. The artists want to keep the story going, and they want to keep revisiting the same characters, but they don’t want to be stuck in a particular time period, and they don’t really want anyone to die...at least not permanently.

Fickleverse is like that, except it’s real, and the residents are fully aware of it. They’re so aware that it doesn’t even seem strange to them. Time does not flow linearly, and it does not flow at the same rate—or even always in the same direction— for everyone, and this doesn’t generally bother them. Some children stay young for an extended period of time. Others will age too fast, often because some profound moment in their lives has transformed them into a different person, which only the illusion of the passage of time can meaningfully express. For some, they’re still driving around in petrol automobiles, and not presently cognizant of the fact that people in the next town over have hovercars. There are some other consequences too. In other universes, shows and movies will cast actors to pretend to be their character, but something will change, and that role will have to be recast. That will happen in fickleverse too. Your daughter might not just age before your eyes, but may even become a completely different person overnight. She’ll have the same name, and she’ll believe she’s your daughter, and you’ll believe she’s your daughter, but you will notice that she’s not the same daughter you had yesterday. You’ll just accept this, and you’ll love her just as much, because that’s how the world works. The interesting part about this, and how it pertains to the bulkverse, is that it’s unclear how time will affect a visitor, so it’s best to just avoid it. The Ochivari, in particular, can’t make heads or tails of how it works, and what their environmental potential is. Can the world be saved? Are the humans destined to destroy their Earth? When time can go in reverse as easily as it moves forward, there’s no way to know what has happened, let alone what will happen. So they just leave it be, and chalk it up to a hopeless cause.

Microstory 1643: Fighting Fire With Accelerant

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Like a lot of human cultures that manage to evolve, and survive past their early Great Filters, the people on one version of Earth figured out how to defeat death. They did it both biologically, and technologically, which is standard. The outcome wasn’t as favorable as it is for others. While inventing immortality is in no way inevitable, it’s pretty hard to miss unless you’re deliberately trying to avoid it. If you do, there is every chance that you will run up against your next Great Filter, and die out as a species, so be careful. Still, some people don’t think that death is something that should be overcome, and this side of the argument wins about as often as it loses. This is about an Earth where that didn’t happen initially, but it became that way after they already started to walk up the path of immortality, and actually go pretty far along it. Right around the time that scientists and engineers were coming up with the right solutions, the world was suffering sociopolitically. Leaders were being elected in multiple countries who did not have the best interests of the public at heart. Fascists, is what they were, but unlike their predecessors, they were a lot less obvious about it, and a lot more insidious. They started manipulating laws slowly and quietly, so as not to sound any alarms. While they were doing that, they instigated social unrest, which led voters to believe that the secret fascists were their only hope. Eventually, they just did away with voting altogether, first by postponing it due to extenuating circumstances, and then simply refusing to let go of their power. Meanwhile, longevity researchers were allowed to keep working, but when their work was sufficiently complete, there were significant downsides to releasing it.

Once the rich took notice of the new technology, they took control. The wealth disparity increased drastically, raising the richest of people to almost godlike status, and dropping everyone else to ants. It was bad before, where tyrants could pass their unearned power on to the next generation of tyrants, but now the threat was insurmountable, for the original tyrants could conceivably be able to maintain their power literally forever. A great war began, and nearly resulted in the destruction of the human race. They survived, but everything changed. Instead of finally making longevity treatments and upgrades free for public use, the victors simply made all such enhancements illegal. The standard lifespan was eighty years, and it was against the law to live past it, even if one managed to be healthy enough to surpass it. All seventy-nine-year-olds were executed, and many people were executed before that if the new government felt threatened by them in some other way. They weren’t about to let a fascist plutocracy rule the lands again, and their anger clouded them to the fact that the only way to enforce their will was to become the fascists. Anyone who attempted to show them this reality was—you guessed it—executed. Of course, once a given technology exists, you can’t put that toothpaste back in the tube. Another resistance rose up in response to the consequences of the first one. They lost, and were wiped out, but this only served to galvanize a third resistance to try again. They won this time, and were able to make immortality free for all. Unfortunately, when they looked around, they realized that almost everyone was dead, and it didn’t really matter anymore. Most of the few immortals left standing would later find ways to let themselves die, and leave the uninhabitable world behind.

Microstory 1642: Infinity Drive

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I think it’s about time I talk about the universe where bulkverse travel originated. Right now, I won’t say a whole lot about how they first ventured out into the bulk, but I’ll give an overview of the universe itself, and why they felt the impulse to explore beyond their borders. The humans of this universe originated on multiple planets simultaneously, and destroyed them all. Every global civilization did so much damage to the environment that they had to leave, and settle on new worlds, except for one of them, which didn’t survive their apocalypse. This was how the survivors found each other. They all had faster-than-light travel, but two of them independently invented something they would later call an infinity drive. It allowed them to jump anywhere in the universe instantaneously. It wasn’t technically instantaneous, but with a little bit of time travel, it felt that way, and it resulted in that. In order to travel from one universe to another, one must be able to pierce the membranes that hold them together. These membranes are semipermeable, like cellular membranes, so microscopic tears open up all the time, which is what allows bulk energy to leak through. That’s not the hard part, though. The hard part is navigation, which is why bulk travel is so rare. The precursor to this technology is the infinity drive, which pierces the universe’s membrane about halfway, allowing a vessel to slip in between the layers of that membrane, and slide wherever the crew wants to go. Even here, time operates as a spatial dimension, rather than a temporal dimension, which is what makes it feel instantaneous. Travelers can go wherever they want to, and arrive whenever they want to, even in the past—though both cultures decided long before the technology was viable that time travel was irrational, and dangerous. They only used it to explore, map, and seek out others in present-day.

In order to find the best new world to call home, those with the infinity drives dispatched probe factory ships all over their galaxy, and a little beyond. They dropped their probes in key locations, which automatically went around, and started generating a map of the universe. These probes detected the other wanderers and settlers, which served to bring everyone together under one umbrella, as a megacivilization. They pooled their knowledge, and unanimously agreed to do things better than their ancestors did. They found more efficient ways to live, which protected planets, and the wildlife upon them. They focused heavily on gathering as much information about the universe as they could, while making little impact on it. They sent more probes, now even further out in the universe, but encountered no other lifeforms. Everyone was here, and everyone was either human, or descended from humans. They were disappointed and bored because of this. How could they be so alone? Why were humans the only intelligent species, and how was it even possible that they evolved separately on multiple planets? This is what drove them to expand the scope of the infinity drive, and explore other universes. They sent one more batch of probes, this time completely through the membrane, and into the outer bulk. Powered by bulk energy, and designed to last forever, they were essentially aimless; just floating through the bulk, collecting whatever data they could find, and sending it back home. It took millennia to synthesize this data, so a real and usable map could be drawn from it. Once they were ready, the crew of a ship with an upgraded infinity drive called The Besananta took off. They didn’t get far.

Microstory 1641: Moderation

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Not unlike the Cythereans of Universe Prime, the humans of Moderaverse chose a very different technological path, and it has kept them off of the Ochivari’s radar. Instead of developing more powerful computers, or faster spaceships, they internalized everything. They figured that the only point to technology was to make their lives better, easier, and infinite. They didn’t much care to learn about the universe, unless it directly impacted them. They didn’t even feel the need to research animals, because they believed it best to simply leave wildlife alone. This gave them time to focus on their main goal. They called it biological optimization, and it involved genetically engineering themselves to be able to survive in a multitude of environments, all without the aid of external tech. No implants, no wearables, not even any handheld devices. Different people have different optimizations, so I won’t get into the details, but there are a few commonalities. They can extract energy from any number of environments. They can communicate with each other telepathically. They can go for long periods of time without stopping, and they don’t have to sleep, though they quite often do as a natural component of relaxing. Relaxation is the most important aspect of their lives. They don’t perform work unless they have to. Their ancestors put so much effort into perfecting their bodies that they don’t have to work anymore. This is not because automation takes care of everything, like it does in other advanced cultures. They don’t work, because little needs to get done. They don’t need to eat a lot, and they don’t generally value the culinary arts, so people just consume what they find in nature, during the rare occasion that it’s necessary. Most of them are solar powered, so they only need to eat to gain certain chemical nutrients.

The Moderaversals do not limit themselves to a single planet, and in fact, their way of life would not be conducive to such a thing. While other environmentally-conscious civilizations build great megastructures to lower the amount of space they take up, the Moderaversals stay on one story, but live quite sparsely. They separate themselves into small villages, which restricts their impact on any one area just as well as—if not better than—an arcology-based society. Instead of using ships to travel to other worlds, they harness the power of natural wormholes. In their universe, wormholes open and close all the time, even on the surface of planets. They’re microscopic, and just as unstable as they are anywhere else, but there’s a fix for that. There are pretty much only two types of advanced tech that these people use. One is a series of artificial satellites that look like nanomoons, and ground arrays that look like trees, to predict, detect, and map the wormholes on any inhabited world. The other is a wormhole stabilizer that will allow a traveler to pass into the wormhole’s event horizon, and slide to their destination. These wormholes are not rare, but the right wormhole is. They pop up constantly, but if you’re trying to go to a specific location, you’ll have to wait until one that satisfies your needs appears. This could happen tomorrow, or in a few years. There’s no way to know, as the predictive models can only guess a day or two in advance. Fortunately for the immortal Moderaversals, time ain’t nothin’ but a thang. It’s perfectly reasonable to schedule an event with others for whenever, sometime in the future, and just wait until everybody finds the right wormhole, and makes it there at some point. The Moderaversals live easy, and they live free. We could all probably learn a thing or two from them.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: Tuesday, October 18, 2225

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Mateo sat on the bench, pressing his forehead against the palm of his hand so hard, it nearly punched a hole in his leg with his elbow. Nerakali stood before him, patiently waiting to make sure that his rant was over. “I can’t help you, Mateo,” she finally said somberly.

“I know,” Mateo replied. “No one can.”

“I don’t mean that,” Nerakali said. “I can’t help you, because I’ve never been in a relationship before. My siblings and I were all created with two powers. I have the ability to travel through time. Zef had the ability to be an asshole. Arcadia is the one with the ability to fall in love with humans. She has an unhealthy, and let’s face it, twisted way to show her love, but it’s there.”

“Are you saying I should talk to her instead?”

“Oh, absolutely not, don’t do that. You’re the target of her obsession. If you don’t get Leona back, my sister will seize her opportunity, and come after you again.”

“Great, so it’s pointless.”

She reached down, and forced his chin up to make eye contact. “I can’t help you, but I know someone who can. You should talk to her first, but I’m certain that she’ll want to do some couples counseling.”

Mateo looked away, and searched through the version of his notebook that listed all the people he knew that he kept in his mind. “Mallory Hammer?”

Nerakali smiled. “That’s right.”

“Leona won’t go for that.”

“Leave that to me. You talk to Dr. Hammer today, and I’ll make sure Leona gets there tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay.”

“All right, I’ll summon her.”

They were finally on their way to the stellar neighborhood. A lot of their transitions involved them crossing back into their own timelines, but that wasn’t so common anymore. It appeared that they were doing that again by going to Bungula, Alpha Centauri, which was where Leona was the first time she experienced 2225. At this point, both she and Mateo were off of their pattern, and living one day at a time. They weren’t together, though. While she was here, he was millions of light years away, on Dardius. This older and wiser version of Leona could remember pining after him, wanting desperately for them to reunite. That seemed so stupid now. She still loved him, sure, but their time apart probably did them good, and it would again. Either way, she was grateful right now, because if she had to meet her alternate self today, at least he would have no chance of also being there.

They connected the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to a Nexus, and jumped away to Bungula. When the transition beacon first appeared on their screens, it said that they had two hours to get there, but once they landed, the countdown started dropping rapidly. They ran out of their ship, and over to where the window was meant to be. The timer got all the way down to thirty seconds before it went back to normal speed. “What the hell was that?” Leona questioned. “Were we in a time bubble, or something?”

“I don’t know,” Jeremy said, “but there’s something different about this window.” He was looking around in AR mode.

“What is it?” Leona questioned, looking around herself. Bungula in the main sequence looked exactly as it did in The Parallel, which didn’t make any sense. While it was entirely possible that the people in this reality would deliberately recreate the design of their main sequence counterparts, the ones in the main sequence would not have done the same on their end, and this was of clear Parallel design. There was something wrong with the cuffs, or the transition window, or both.

“Uhh...Leona?” Olimpia said. “I see what’s different.”

“What?” Leona asked.

“It’s you,” she replied vaguely. “You’re the one flickering.”

“I’m flickering?” That didn’t sound good.

“Yeah, I see it too,” Angela confirmed. “What does that mean? Are you going to transition to the other side?”

“Oh, shit,” Leona realized. “I know what this is; it’s an ambu—” All of her friends disappeared, leaving her alone in what looked like a waiting room.

Dr. Mallory Hammer peeked her head through a door, and smiled. “Mrs. Matic? We’re ready for you now.”

Leona frowned. “I did not agree to this.”

“Still, you need it.”

“I wouldn’t think a reputable doctor would try to give someone counseling without their consent,” Leona argued.

Dr. Hammer sighed. “There are two doors in this room. You choose. Do you want things to get better, or do you wanna be a whiny little asshole? One of you has taken the first step, but this is a three-legged race, and he can’t go anywhere with you.”

“Oh, great metaphor,” Leona said sarcastically.

Dr. Hammer ducked back into the room, but left the door open.

Leona looked over to the exit, and then back to the first door. “Goddammit,” she muttered under her breath. She walked into the room to find Dr. Hammer just sitting down on her chair, holding her tablet. Mateo was on the couch, sitting as far from the door as possible. He somehow inched even farther away upon seeing her. He was recoiling. “Okay, you make it look like I’m an abusive partner.”

“Is that how you see yourself, Mrs. Matic?” Dr. Hammer posed.

“No, of course not,” she argued. “He’s being dramatic. I kicked him out of the house, because he was acting crazy, and I didn’t feel safe. Now he’s projecting that onto me, like I’m the bad guy.”

“No one said you were the bad guy,” Dr. Hammer assured her. “Why don’t you have a seat? Yes, right there, it’s fine. You don’t have to cuddle, but if you weren’t both trying to make this work, then instead of talking to me, you would be speaking with The Officiant about a divorce.”

“Is that even possible?” Leona asked.

Mateo twitched.

“I mean academically,” Leona clarified. “Sort of. No, I mean—” She was this close to hyperventilating.

“It’s okay,” Dr. Hammer said. “Take your time.”

Leona composed herself. “The Officiant made it sound like divorce wasn’t a thing. I don’t want to bring her into this, because I’m worried I misunderstood, and divorce actually is possible, and that she’ll force it upon us.”

“Okay,” Dr. Hammer said. “That’s good. Mr. Matic, do you agree? Do you not want to get divorced?”

“I don’t want a divorce,” he stated.

“So, we’re all on the same page. I don’t want you to divorce either. Now, we all know each other. My name is Dr. Mallory Hammer, but please just call me Mallory. I don’t say that just to sound friendly. I really do prefer my first name. Can we all use first names in here?”

“Yes,” both of them said.

Mallory straightened her skirt, and considered that path forward. “I would like to open the floor for each of you to...tell me where you believe this tension in your relationship is coming from. You will do this by taking turns, and will not interrupt each other. I spoke with Mateo yesterday, and I don’t want to poison the discussion with what I already know about what he believes, so Leona, you should go first.”

“It’s just been tough to be around him,” Leona began to explain. “He’s so unpredictable now. Ever since he and Angela had that run-in with the Ochivari, he’s been different. He had to literally lose his soul to save lives, and even when we got that fixed, he’s been weird. I just never know what’s going to happen. Truthfully, it scares me.”

“That wasn’t my fault,” Mateo argued.

“What did I say about interruptions?” Mallory questioned.

“I’m sorry.”

Leona wanted to respond to his claim anyway. “I know it wasn’t your fault. Maybe none of this is. Maybe that psychic woman who fixed you didn’t do it right, or maybe this is just an unavoidable side effect. It doesn’t really matter, I still feel unsafe.”

The two of them waited in case Leona wasn’t finished, but she was, so Mallory prompted Mateo to tell his truth. “I think she’s been just as unpredictable. She used to be so patient and understanding. And not just with me. She would meet someone knew, and always give them the benefit of the doubt, and wanted to help. I’m not saying she doesn’t help anymore, but she just looks so...tired of it. Do you want out of this pattern?”

Leona didn’t answer.

“I don’t want to do this opening statement thing,” he complained. “I want her to answer my question.”

“I don’t have an answer,” Leona said. “That’s not true, I do. Because I don’t. I don’t want off this pattern. For the first time, I feel like I am helping people. Maybe we did it a little in the beginning, but it wasn’t our purpose. We didn’t have a purpose. Now that we’re finally free of the powers that be, I feel like we’re putting some good into the universe.”

“That may be true,” Mallory jumped in. “Of course, I mean to say that it is true, you’re doing good things. But the question is, do you have to be on the Bearimy-Matic pattern to do it? Do you have to be on any pattern to do it? Plenty of people do great things with their lives, and they live one day at a time. They don’t travel through time, or go to other planets. Do you think it’s possible that you actually are perturbed by the new pattern? It used to be that you showed up every year, but now it’s sometimes three years, and sometimes it’s twenty. That must be hard”

She hadn’t been so mindful of this, but yeah. When Jupiter was in charge, it was somewhat antagonistic. He didn’t give them a choice. Now that Nerakali was the boss, it did seem a little weird that they were still bound by the same arbitrary limitation.

“That’s true,” Mateo said. He appeared to have been thinking the same thing. “Why do we skip so much time? That’s not necessary at all. Do we even need to skip any time? Couldn’t we just take off our cuffs?”

“No,” Leona replied. “Thanks to Tamerlane Pryce. When he resurrects people, he doesn’t—or maybe can’t—give people powers, but he can replicate patterns. Or maybe he can just replicate ours, because skipping forward in time isn’t the same thing as going into the past, and creating a new reality, or manipulating time in some other way.”

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot,” Mateo mused. “Still, we can suppress our pattern. Or we can just suppress Jeremy’s. Our cuffs give us those options, and Nerakali gives us access. She hasn’t limited us, as far as I know.”

“Is that what you want to do?” Leona offered. “Do you want to switch off the patterns? I suppose these cuffs are exactly what Missy, and all those people in Ansutah, were looking for. We’re using them to share, but that’s only one use.”

“Are we doing this? Are we going to try to change the game?”

“We’ll have to ask the others what they think.”

“First, what do you think we should...” Mateo looked around, but there was no sign of Mallory. “Dr. Hammer? Where did you go?”

“She disappeared,” Leona revealed. “I saw her out of the corner of my eye. It looked like she did it on purpose. She picked up her phone and cup of tea just before.”

“Why?” Mateo wondered.

“I think we’re back on track. Or at least we’re on two tracks that are about to connect with each other.”

“The question is, when we do reach the railroad switch, will we slip onto the same track seamlessly, or will we crash into each other?”

Leona stood up. “I suppose that’s for us to decide. One of us will have to get there first to avoid a collision.”

He nodded.

She reached a hand out to him. “Let me be the one to speed up. If you keep going as fast as you have been, we’ll miss each other.”

« < » > Table of Contents

Sic Transit...Vox (Part III)

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This was it. This was exactly what her parents were so worried would happen to her. She was shot, and bleeding out on the floor of an unfamiliar universe. If her father was going to find her here, he would have to do it quickly. Azura grabbed the medkit from the wall, and started wrapping gauze around Treasure’s neck, but this wasn’t a hospital, and she wasn’t a doctor. There was no guarantee of survival. Worst of all, without a throat, she couldn’t scream. She couldn’t escape. Something was pounding on the door.

“Can you leave?” Azura asked. “Can you jump from here?”

Treasure shook her head, but obviously couldn’t answer. She started pantomiming again. She pointed to her throat.

Something pounded on the door again.

“You have to be able to talk?”

She mimicked air coming out of her mouth.

More pounding.

“You have to sing?”

She shook her head again, and widened both her mouth, and her eyes.

Something struck the door so hard, dust flew in from the edges.

“You have to scream.”

Treasure nodded.

The door dented inwards.

“Okay. That’s okay. I just need time to program it.” Azura just as carefully as before removed the grenade from her bag, and placed it on the floor. “I don’t know the coordinates to voldisilaverse. That’s loci non grata for us. Where else do you feel safe? Where should we go?”

Treasure removed one hand from her neck, keeping the other in place. She waved her finger down, into a curve, then back up, and into a complementary curve, before finishing off the tail.

The dent in the door grew deeper.

“That looked like a fish. Salmoverse, really?”

Treasure nodded.

Light from the hallway peeked in through a little hole in the dent.

“All right, well, I definitely have those coordinates.” She started messing with the gears and tiny buttons, and whatever, on the grenade. When she was done, it opened itself up, releasing a glow. The door broke open too. Just as the enemy soldiers were coming in to kill them, the whole room filled with technicolors, and spirited them away. It spirited all of them away.

Luckily, Azura knew what had just happened, so she wasn’t as confused as the soldiers. As she lay there dying, Treasure watched Azura make the first move. She started fighting the enemies on her own, switching opponents easily, always knowing which one was the greatest threat that second. She got shot herself a couple times, but just kept going. In the end, they were all on the floor, and she was left standing. “Hold tight,” she said to Treasure. Not only had all the people come through the transport grenade, but the weapons and other gear did too. She found cuffs and chains, and used them to bind the soldiers to the seats. Yes, seats. This looked like a really big train car.

Now that the enemies were disarmed and no longer a significant threat, Azura felt she could drag Treasure to the next car up, and start getting back to treating her neck. Treasure tried to speak, but still couldn’t.

“Just rest. I’ll get you patched up.” Azura removed a syringe from the medkit. “This...is gonna hurt.” She jammed it into Treasure’s neck, and knocked her unconscious.

Treasure woke up after a good night’s rest. She was no longer on the floor, but in a bed that looked like a sleeper car. It didn’t just look like a train. It legit was a train. The windows were weird, though, and it was far too big to fit on a regular set of tracks. Was this—? No, it couldn’t be. What were the chances...? She sat on the edge, and started testing her throat. She could swallow, and she could cough, but she couldn’t speak. Well, she could eke out some really pathetic sounds, but not enough to convey information, and she absolutely couldn’t scream. Was this permanent? It was then that she realized that there was something on her head. It kind of felt like a tiara. She accidentally tapped the jewel in the center of it, which apparently powered it up. “What the hell is this thing?” a voice came from the tiara. “Who said that? Was that me? That sounds like me.” It was her own voice, but instead of coming out of her mouth, it was through a little speaker. The tiara was evidently converting her brain signals to an audible voice. She didn’t even have to move her lips.

Treasure left the sleeper car, which was actually just one section in a whole car of other sleeper rooms. While looking for Azura, she ended up finding the first car instead. The soldiers were still chained up to the seats, but their arms were now free, so they could eat. They regarded her with fairly noticeable indifference, probably having realized that she didn’t know anything about them, and had no stake in their war. One man didn’t have any food yet. Azura was just coming in from the other side to hand it to him. She changed tactics, and handed Treasure the food instead. “How do you feel?” she asked.

“Like a robot,” Treasure’s brain answered.

“Oh, good, the tiara is working. I’ve yet to find an exit,” she began to explain, “or a control room. We may be floating in space, for all I know. I know what this is, though.”

“The Transit,” Treasure said first. “The missing bulk travel ship.”

“That’s right,” Azura confirmed. “My people made it, but never used it, and then it disappeared. They always suspected it ended up in Salmonverse, but I don’t think they spent much time looking. It, uhh...never worked that well. Elegant design, but half-assed engineering. If we want to use it to get you back home, we’ll need someone smart enough to get it running.”

“Can’t we just use your grenade thing?” Treasure presumed.

“It was a one-time thing,” Azura said. “That’s why I was being so careful with it. I was trying to figure out how to reprogram it for multiple crossing, but only ever figured out how to change the destination. It kind of...exploded after we used it.”

“My true voice. Will it ever come back? I doubt this thing will let me...”

Azura hesitated to answer. “Medically speaking, it’s possible for your vocal cords to repair themselves. With anyone else, I would be hopeful. Realistically, historically, futuristically, probably not. You might heal, but I think you probably aren’t destined to. It would explain why you weren’t on our list of people and machines capable of crossing over. You only did it once, so...it wasn’t in our records.”

“It happened more than once, but that wasn’t the point. Now her only hope of getting back home was this machine, and no one here would know how to fix it.”

Azura turtles her head forwards. “You just said that out loud. And you said it in Vertean. Why did you use third person past tense?”

“What’s Vertean?”

“That’s their language.” She indicated the soldiers.

Treasure looked down to find the soldiers looking at her funny. “I think I need to practice using this thing. Alone.”

“I’ll keep looking,” Azura said. “The ship is pretty big.”

Treasure went back to her sleeper car, and started talking to herself. She complained about her parents, and how this was their fault. They should have taken her on trips early on, so she could get used to being on other worlds, and better understand how to use her powers. Perhaps there was a workaround. Maybe she didn’t really need her voice after all, but now she couldn’t test that theory. Now she was stuck. They should have let her learn. But it wasn’t their fault. They laid out the rules, and they were clear, and they were reasonable. This whole thing was exactly why those rules existed, and she should have respected that. She should have trusted them, and honored them. They were going to help her learn when she was an adult, and that should have been good enough for her. She should have been patient. This was her fault, she was such an asshole.

“I don’t think you’re an asshole.” Azura was at the door with one of the soldiers.

“What do you want?” Treasure asked.

“Treasure,” Azura said from behind him. “Siphon would like to say something to you. Go ahead, Siphon.”

“I’m sorry for shooting you.” The tiara was both translating her thoughts into his language, and his voice, into her tongue. It wasn’t that hard to use, now that she knew the difference between a stray thought, and one that she wished to vocalize. “I realize now that you were never my enemy, and...we should have been more careful. We should have kept our war to ourselves. I apologize. I know what it’s like to be silenced.”

Treasure stared at the man with a blank expression. Then she reached over to the sliding door handle. “Get the fuck out of my car.” She slammed the door shut. Hopefully that word translated well, so he would fully grasp how angry she was. She half-expected Azura to come in, and try to talk to her, but she didn’t. They both left, and Treasure went back to hating herself for getting her into this mess.

Hours later, a simple knock on the door indicated that there was another food tray waiting for her on the table outside the bedroom. This was how they started doing things. Treasure would stay in her personal train car alone, mostly in the bedroom. Azura would come by every once in a while to switch out her food trays, and update her on the goingson. She and the enemy soldiers drew up a truce, and then came to an understanding, and then became friends. They weren’t so different after all. It was only Treasure who didn’t belong, even though she was the only one actually born to this universe. Of course, she crossed over to volidisilaverse within seconds of her birth, but her mother was from here, and spoke of it often. If they ever figured out how to get this train back down to Earth, she would know who to contact.

Yes, the train ship was in space, probably in some kind of lava tube on Pluto, in order to keep it out of the hands of those who would exploit its power. Based on gravitational readings, that was as much as Azura could determine, but even that didn’t seem right, based on what she thought she knew about Pluto. The windows were there, but they were opaque, so it felt like living in an underground bunker. There was plenty of space for the small group of them, and they spent the entire time trying to power it up completely, if only to send a message to Earth. Treasure spent three weeks almost completely alone before something happened that forced her to leave. There was a jolt, and a surge of energy throughout the walls. It didn’t hurt much, but she definitely felt something, and she had to go out to ask about it.

Azura and the rest of this brand new crew were in an auxiliary control room. She was pounding on the inputs, trying to get them to work. “Come on, you were doing something before. You’re alive sometimes.”

“What happened? I don’t mean to interrupt, just curious,” Treasure added.

“I believe we went back in time,” Azura replied.

“Why?”

“I can only get any screen to give me any information for a moment. My guess is that the ship is quantum locked. It exists exclusively during a fixed period of time, probably according to the orbital period of whatever rock we’re on. That narrows down the list of suspects, but I still don’t know where we are, because I don’t have that data, because I can’t turn on most of these damn interfaces!” She was frustrated with all the time it was taking to work on this, but not mad at any person. The crew understood.

Treasure stepped forward to comfort her, and maybe apologize for being such an insolent little child this whole time. As she did so, the nearest computer booted itself up, as if responding to her presence. They were all very surprised.

“What did you just do?” Azura questioned.

“Nothing,” Treasure claimed. “I’m just standing here.”

“Walk over towards that computer over there.” Azura jerked her head farther down the car.

Treasure did as she was asked. That computer turned on as well.

“Oh my God, it’s you,” Azura complained. “This ship senses your power. I can’t believe you were the key to our salvation all along. Come with me. I need you to activate the engine room.”

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