Microstory 1732: Delphinus

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I am not against science, though my detractors would certainly hope you believe that about me. I believe in medicine, vaccinations, surgical intervention. I even believe in a woman’s right to choose. But I’m not going to let researchers move forward with whatever technologies they dream up without any consideration of the ethical ramifications. A few years ago, a new startup was formed in the valley with one goal. They wanted to create an artificial womb system capable of not only supporting a transplanted fetus, but of fostering life from the very beginning. This would remove the need for a mother and a father. There are some great things about this. Same-sex couples would be able to have their own children, which I’m also not against—I’m not a conservative nutjob who doesn’t believe in the future. I’m an ethicist who focuses on precaution, and isn’t interested in developing everything scientifically possible in the name of supposed progress. It seemed pretty simple to me at first. God, evolution; whatever you wanna call it, decided that we would produce offspring a certain way. A biological male and female come together to conceive the child, and then that child gestates in an organic womb, inside of a human being, who is charged with protecting this new life. I’m all right with surrogate pregnancies. I’m even fine with the concept of an artificial womb. But I can also see how dangerous the technology is, and how many problems it can cause down the road. I have been fighting hard to prevent it from becoming legal, and letting Delphinus Obstetric Advancements win, but a friend recently pointed out an undeniable implication. Even though I am pro-choice, I don’t want anyone to have an abortion. Before focusing on this issue, I regularly went out and informed women about their options. Abortion is not the only way, and we should be working on ways to make it unnecessary. The artificial womb seems to accomplish that.

The problem with abortion is that it’s the destruction of life. However you define when a developing...entity transforms from a group of cells to an actual person is irrelevant. Abortion means death, that’s what it is. If a pregnant person does not want to have their child, that child can be transplanted from the carrier, to an artificial gestation pod. It can then develop in there, and be born in the lab. Of course, this comes with its own ethical problems. What happens to the baby when it’s finally born? Who takes care of it, raises it, teaches it? Who is responsible for finding that person, or those people? The lab? The egg provider? The state? More to the point, who has the right to make such decisions? Furthermore, this complicates the matter of the egg provider’s rights in the first place. Being unable, or unwilling, to raise a child, or even unwilling to birth a child, are not the only reasons to have an abortion. If a state can supersede one’s choice by simply saying “fine, if you don’t want it, we’ll take it, and we’ll do it right now,” then is that really fair to the original carrier? They weren’t necessarily choosing to simply have nothing to do with their offspring. They chose to have an abortion, and an artificial womb is not inherently synonymous with that choice. Ethics is a complicated subject, and I don’t have an answer to any of these questions. But it’s causing me to question my convictions, and stop thinking that I can understand the issues clearly. All I know is that we can’t let the government, or the corporations, take our rights. We must retain our humanity, or all the technology imaginable can’t save us.

Microstory 1731: The Cygness

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We don’t know where it came from, but the disturbing rumor is that someone in our town once lay with a swan. They’re calling it the cygness as a pun. It starts out with a white skin rash. According to reports, scratching it will cause it to grow worse, so family members have bound the arms of their loved ones, hoping to stop the process, but they always fail. It can be slowed, but it can’t be stopped. All succumb to the transformation sooner or later. Once the victim’s skin is completely white, bumps will begin to rise. Out of that, chutes will appear, like seedlings bursting from the ground. These chutes will spread out, and form something that the researchers call powder down. Over time, as this down fills in, the feathers will mature, and eventually become just as beautiful and full as a swan’s real feathers. The victim will not grow wings, nor a beak, nor flat feet, but their shoulders will lock their elbows behind them, limiting movement, their face will blacken, and their toes will become webbed. Lastly, and we still don’t understand how this works—well, we don’t understand any of it, but especially not this—the patient will lose their ability to produce vocal sound. Something about their vocal cords will change, preventing them from not only creating speech, but other sounds as well, like hums or whistles. They’ll still be able to breathe and cough, but that’s just about it. From start to finish, the transformation takes weeks. At times it’s painful, at times it’s uncomfortable. Once it’s complete, however, patients report feeling better than they ever have in their entire lives. Some wish it to never end, but it does. The last stage is death, and it follows the patient’s returned voice. If someone with the cygness begins to talk again, you know that their life is nearly over. I have been fairly lucky thus far, but the condition has recently fallen upon me, so I know that I need to make arrangements.

I experience the same symptoms as anyone else, in the same order, and according to the same timeframe. They place me with all the others who are in the same stage as me, I suppose so we can all die together. As our conditions worsen, I notice something strange about the others. They’re flapping their lips, and moving their laryngeal prominences up and down. It takes a moment for me to realize that they are all trying to speak. Evidently, even though they know that they have become physiologically mute, they cannot help themselves. They don’t even just forget their limitation every once in a while. They appear to be constantly attempting to communicate with each other, hoping that with enough hard work, it will suddenly start working again. I know better. I know that that is not how it works. I sit quietly, and mind my own business. No one else seems to notice that I’m unlike then. I guess I’ve had more practice being quiet, since I wasn’t one to talk much when I was a regular human. One by one, they fall. They make one last call to our people, and then their eyes shut for good. Finally, I’m the only one left. I stay in isolation for a few more weeks, knowing that people are watching me, trying to figure out what makes me different. I can feel that I have my voice back, but I dare not use it, for I remember what happens next. The researchers come in, and demand that I use my voice. They need more data, so they can come up with a treatment, and they don’t care if it kills me. I refuse, but they threaten the lives of my family, so I give in. I speak. Then I sing. And then I survive. I am the human swan.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 5, 2363

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Everything had to happen fast, or the team was going to lose everything. Mateo wasn’t raised to be a fighter. His parents taught him to try to reason with people, and understand where they were coming from. Ever since he became a time traveler, very rarely was he expected to use physical violence to solve his problems. Today was one of those times when it was absolutely necessary. Before this Milford asshole could try to shoot Angela again, Mateo reached back, and took one swing. He clocked him right in the jaw, knocking him out instantly. Angela, meanwhile, gracefully fell to her back as Jeremy collapsed on top of her. She instinctively wrapped her arms around his chest, and applied pressure to the bullet wound. Though Ramses was significantly less hurt, he too required medical attention. Olimpia sat him down to tend to him.

“Do you remember Hammer’s pager number?” Mateo asked his wife.

“I shouldn’t need it. We forget, but Jeremy is salmon. Sarka should come. He has to. I know we were resurrected, but he has to.”

Everyone froze, waiting for a portal to open. They often did that, and were usually met with either disappointment, or relief, depending on what they were expecting. This time, the powers that be actually delivered. A portal did open up, and Dr. Baxter Sarka did appear to them. He too was salmon, which meant he didn’t have very much control over how he ran his practice. The PTB even decided what medical supplies would be available to him for any given case. He never knew what he was going to get until he opened his black bag. “Dammit!” he shouted.

“What the hell is this crap?” Leona questioned as she was examining the contents over his shoulder.

“What year is this?” Sarka asked.

“It’s 2341,” Leona replied.

Dr. Sarka shook his head as he was removing something that kind of looked like pliers from his bag. They may have actually been true pliers. “Nothing is sealed, nothing is sanitary. The nature of my tools is largely determined by the time period in which my patient happens to be at the time. These are not 24th century supplies. Do you have alcohol on this vessel?”

Mateo had already retrieved their own first aid kit, and immediately handed it to him. It wasn’t equipped with surgical instruments, but it did have rubbing alcohol. Sarka got to work, cutting Jeremy’s shirt, wiping the blood away, and disinfecting everything he could.

“It’s 1816,” Leona realized.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Sarka didn’t stop working.

“That man on the floor over there?” Leona tried to begin to figure this out. “He claimed he was trying to send Angela to 1816. He seemed to believe shooting her with his gun would do the trick.”

Mateo had retrieved that too. He knelt down, and presented it to Sarka, just in case he had ever seen anything like it before. It was a gun, absolutely, but it was of an unfamiliar design. It looked like modern tech was attached to an antique artifact. Steampunk was probably the best term for it.

“Never seen it before,” Sarka said. “If it was meant to send him through time, it didn’t do a very good job at it, and this certainly looks like a real bullet wound. As far as I’ve ever seen, transporter weapons begin to dissolve on impact, and only leave superficial wounds. This is a potentially fatal injury.”

“I think it’s working,” Leona continued. “I just think it’s slow. I think he’s supposed to die first, then be transported to the past, and somehow be revived? I don’t know why it would work like that, but it would explain your medical bag.”

“Yes, I would call this early 19th century medicine.”

“Can you fix him?” Angela begged.

“With what they gave me to work with?” Sarka presumed. “It’s a toss-up.” He was nothing if not honest.

Everyone’s cuffs began to beep, indicating that they were going to make their next pattern jump in five minutes. “Oh no,” Olimpia exclaimed. “Will he come with us?”

“The cuffs are linked to the AOC,” Leona answered. “Everyone inside should come with. We’ve seen it before.”

Making an executive decision, Mateo began to drag Milford’s unconscious body to the steps.

“What are you doing?” Leona questioned.

“He’s not coming with us.”

“Good idea,” Leona said. “But you’re never gonna get him all the way up to the airlock. Not alone, not in time.” What the others hadn’t noticed was that Leona had quickly inspected the transporter gun after Mateo set it down on the table in front of her. A dial specified a year. She grabbed it, spun it to a random new destination, and shot Milford in the forehead.

“Whoa,” Olimpia said

“Yeah,” Ramses agreed.

“If he wasn’t crazy, then he was just dispatched to...” She took a look at the dial. “Fifteen-sixteen. If he was crazy, then...I suppose I just murdered the man who shot two of my friends, and tried to shoot a third.” Leona surveyed the room. “Does anybody here think I should be butthurt about that?” No one vocalized a reply, but they didn’t seem to think she should feel butthurt. “How are we doing, Sarka?”

“He’s stable, for now. I don’t think I should be in the middle of a procedure when we jump to the future. I’ll resume in a few minutes. It’s not too terribly deep, so it shouldn’t be hard to pull it out.”

So they waited, and they jumped, and then Jeremy howled in pain. Sarka tried to find the source of the issue, but nothing about his chest wound had changed. Then Angela noticed something. “Doctor, his arm.”

Sarka lifted it up. The skin under and around the Cassidy cuff was glowing red, like it was burning. Jeremy never stopped crying out in pain, but he quieted down a bit.

“He must still be linked to 1816, and that jump did not do him any favors,” Sarka assumed.

“What do we do?” Leona asked.

“If you take off that cuff, and he dies, he’ll jump to the past, and end up in whatever condition this time bullet is designed to put him in.”

“What if we don’t take off the cuff?”

“He could still die, but you’ll jump with him,” Sarka warned. “Like I said, I’ve never seen this tech before. I don’t understand why it needs to be a real bullet. They usually aren’t, because there’s not generally any reason to spirit someone away when they’re just going to die anyway.”

Hoping to find some answers, Leona opened up the gun, and dropped the remaining three bullets on the table. “White. They’re white.”

Mateo approached, and looked for himself. “The color of resurrection.” He was quite familiar with it, as were half the people here.

“These things don’t just send you to the past,” Leona explained. “They send you to Pryce’s afterlife simulation. Either you wake up in the simulation itself with a whitecard attachment, or automatically in a new body.”

“I don’t think you killed that guy, Leona,” Mateo said, just in case she actually did feel butthurt. “Not permanently.”

Jeremy was still in pain, but he was whimpering now. He didn’t want to interrupt their conversation.

“Get that bullet out, doctor.”

Sarka got back to work. He reached into the hole with his pliers, and started feeling around for the metal. Something seemed to be wrong, though. “Shit.” He removed the pliers. There was no bullet on the other, but the tip was covered in a whitish-red fluid.

“Explain,” Leona demanded simply.

“It did dissolve,” Sarka began. “I don’t know if it was the time jump, or if it would have happened anyway, but I imagine instead of collapsing upon impact, it was designed to burrow itself into the target, and dissolve in the body, so someone like me couldn’t take it out. I am now almost sure that the reason he hasn’t jumped back yet is because of that cuff. and it’s connection to all of you.”

“Okay,” Leona said confidently. “All I have to do is modify the settings to make his primary, instead of mine. That should be enough to send us all back with him. We’ll deal with the repercussions later.”

“No,” Jeremy insisted. Without warning, he reached over with his good hand, and removed the cuff from his arm. He disappeared pretty much instantly.

They all just kind of sat there, regarding the space where Jeremy once was.

“That’s okay,” Leona said finally. “All we have to do is get back to 1816. We have friends, we can make that happen.”

“We have to help Ramses first,” Olimpia reminded them. “He was shot as well.”

“I think I’m fine,” he contended. “The bullet went through and through. I’m just glad it didn’t hit Angela after it came out.”

“Still, you need to be treated. I do at least have a sewing ki—” Before Dr. Sarka could finish his sentence, he disappeared as well. Being not salmon, Ramses apparently didn’t deserve the PTB’s medical assistance. Yet they had seen plenty of exceptions before.

“That’s also okay,” Leona said. “I can sew.”

“No,” Angela asked. “Let me do it. I’m the one at fault here.”

“You know that none of us blames you, right?” Mateo asked.

“You don’t have to,” she said.

“Let’s just say it was your turn,” Mateo told her. “We’ve all brought bad juju to the team. It’s like a rite of passage now. I can’t tell you how many bad guys I’ve unwittingly summoned.”

“All right,” Angela allowed, but she wasn’t completely convinced, or relieved. “I’m still going to be the one to sew him up.”

After Angela was finished, Olimpia agreed to stay with Ramses on the ship while he recovered. The other three then went off in search of someone who could send them back in time to 1816 so they could retrieve their lost comrade. If all went according to plan, he would spend less than a day there before being able to return to his rightful place on the team. They decided that their best option would be to go to Dardius, where everyone they met would know about time travel, and they could speak freely. To their surprise, they didn’t even need to find a specific person with time travel abilities. Scientists had long ago figured out how to use the Nexus for such purposes. They even had a pretty good idea of Jeremy’s arrival date. After putting on authentic blending-in clothes, they stepped down onto the platform, and waited for the tech to send them to a settlement in pre-union Missouri.

They spent a few hours searching for Jeremy by canvassing the area with an artificially antiquated photograph of him. They were able to find him working at a tailor. It seemed to be his job to roll up the cloth, and clean the equipment. He seemed to be trying to mind his own business, and not make any trouble. Mateo asked to go in alone while the ladies waited outside.

“Evenin’,” the tailor greeted him at the door.

“I’m lookin’ for a new suit,” Mateo said. He tried to lock eyes with Jeremy, who wasn’t paying any attention.

“What you’re wearing looks to be pretty nice. Get it in New York?”

“That’s right,” Mateo lied. Now he was just staring.

“Well, what were you thinking now?”

“Get me something out the back.”

“Nothing out here is of any interest to you?”

“I want something...different. You must have...patterns that most men don’t wear.” He tried to hit that word pretty hard, but Jeremy didn’t blink. “Perhaps something in salmon.”

“I’ll have my assistant look for you. Boy!”

Now Jeremy finally faced the right direction.

“No,” Mateo said. “I want your eyes. You are the artist, correct?”

“Very good, sir.” The tailor left to find something that Mateo didn’t care about.

Even as Mateo approached, Jeremy still didn’t seem to recognize him. “What’s your name?”

“Job, sir.” He was afraid to make eye contact.

“How long have you worked here?”

At this, Jeremy couldn’t help but chuckle. “All my life.”

“Really?”

“Just about as long as I can remember. I’m touched, you see. I can’t recall a single thing from my life past five weeks ago.”

“You must wonder,” Mateo guessed, “who you were before. You must have left someone you cared about behind.”

“If they cared about me,” Jeremy reasoned, “they could have found me. My story was in all the papers.”

“Perhaps...you come from a distant land.”

“Perhaps,” Jeremy conceded.

“Are you happy..with this life?”

“Happy is the life you make, sir. I believe God took my memories for a reason. The physicians can find no brain damage. As far as they can tell, my mind has chosen to forget. This is my life now.”

Mateo placed a hand on his good friend’s shoulder. Milford wanted to get his ex-wife back to this year, so they could restart their life together. She was never meant to remember anything about the future. In Jeremy’s case, he wasn’t originally in the 19th century, so all of his memories were taken. Philosophically speaking, this wasn’t really Jeremy Bearimy at all. It was a new man, and this new man, Job wanted to stay. Mateo could see it in his eyes. “I’ve been there, brother.”

Jeremy squinted for half a second before letting go.

“You take care, ya hear?”

“Sir.”

Before he left, Mateo placed his purse in Jeremy’s hands. In it were 20 half eagle coins, each worth five dollars. “For the conversation.”

The tailor returned before Mateo could exit the shop. When he asked his assistant where the potential customer was going, Job didn’t have an answer. He took a peek in the purse, and just said, “I quit.”

It was hard, leaving him behind, but Mateo was confident that it was the right thing to do. Could someone like Tertius Valerius, or a version of Nerakali, restore his memories? Probably. But was that ethical? He would never get the answer to that question. He would just have to move on, and hope that it wasn’t all a mistake. When Leona and Angela asked him what was going on, he simply repeated Job’s words, which were a mantra he often said himself, about their own lives. They made their way back to 2363, and never saw Jeremy again.

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Extremus: Year 13

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The election is over, and there is no going back now. Ovan is going to be smart about his takeover of the ship. He isn’t going to suddenly start trying to order the security team around. He drops a few hints here, makes a quippy remark there. Everything he says out loud says fine when you first hear it, but if you think about it too hard, you realize how some people could interpret it to mean that the passengers should become hostile towards the crew, probably without even realizing it. He’ll grow bolder as his plans begin to bear fruit, but right now, Halan has other things to worry about.

“How do we know he’s not one of them? He and Vesper could have been working together,” Omega suggests.

“We don’t, but I’m not getting the sense of that,” Halan says. “I feel like Ovan, and his drive to take over the ship, is completely separate from the people trying to kill me. Getting rid of one Captain is not going to do the passengers any good if they have a problem with the entire crew. I’ll just be backfilled by the Admiral, or maybe even the Bridgers. No, Ovan wants this to become a fully civilian operation. More to the point, he wants to be in charge.”

“Why didn’t he just get on the Captain’s track?” Omega questions.

“He’s not the right age. It’s a timing issue, you see. It’s the reason why the crew shifts in and out at different times. My shift lasts for 24 years, but if everyone was like that, everything would have to change hands all at once. That’s a logistical nightmare. By staggering them, we allow for people to apply for positions even when they come of age in the middle of a cycle. Still, on the individual level, this can potentially exclude a lot of people. There is no law that says a 32-year-old can’t become Captain, but it’s unlikely he would ever get the job, since he’ll be in his fifties by the time he’s done.

“That’s not that old,” Omega argues. “I’m 64 if you count my rapid aging as part of my lifespan, rather than just subtracting this year from the year I was manufactured.”

“True, it’s not,” Halan agrees, “but if there is a single worst character flaw that Ansutahan humans have, it’s probably ageism. Life expectancy used to be a lot lower for us, since medical science was stunted by a number of factors, all stemming from the fact that we were constrained to one continent. Younger people have always been better at securing leadership positions, and then they are strongly urged to step down when they get too old.”

“Why does that same unwritten rule not apply to Ovan’s position as Passenger Chair?” Omega asks.

“It’s a shorter term. Even the term limit is shorter than a captain’s shift. Anyway, he might not have known what he wanted until it was too late. Captain’s track starts in the single digits. There’s a decent chance that my successor was born here. Now let’s get back to Vesper’s co-conspirators.”

Omega nods, but still isn’t convinced that they should be focusing on this. Yes, the extremist group hiding in their midst is a greater threat, but they don’t know where to begin. At least the anti-crew movement has a face. And a punchable one, at that. Even so, he keeps his mouth shut, and concedes to the Captain’s decision. Most problems need to be solved either way. “Indeed,” he says simply.

“So,” Mercer begins after having been silent most of the time. “Omega’s right about one thing.”

Halan gets it. “We still don’t know how to find these true Extremusians.”

“First order of business, I believe, is we should try to come up with a new name,” Mercer decides.

“Agreed,” Halan replies. “We are true Extremusians. If anyone on this ship is under the impression that they are somehow special, and different from the lot of us, then this misunderstanding must be rectified. Henceforth, in all reports, they will be known as...” He trails off, not knowing what would be a better word to use.

It is then that Omega realizes that he already came up with a name for them in his own headcanon. “True Extremists,” he offers.

“Hm.” Halan considers this. “I imagine that could be quite insulting to them. It is close enough to what they apparently call themselves for us to pretend our words are an accident, but different enough for them to know in their hearts that we do not respect them.”

“Perfect,” Mercer says. “To begin again, how do we root out these True Extremists? We must get them to reveal themselves without realizing they’re doing it, and without alarming the rest of the ship.”

“Right,” Omega says. “And why exactly can’t we tell the ship that they’re out there?”

“For the moment,” Halan explains, “they appear to be rather contained. I do not think there are very many of them, and I do not think they are recruiting. Vesper strongly suggested he was from a planet that they consider to be Extremus. I don’t know exactly how they arrived there, but they take a strong disliking to everyone else. Still, we don’t need to turn anyone to their side, and the only way to do that is to prevent any would-be sympathizers from finding out they even exist.”

“Well, it’s not the only way, sir,” Mercer clarifies for him. “It may be the best, but honesty is always an option.”

“I am aware of that, Lieutenant, thank you.”

Mercer knows he’s being sarcastic, and to combat that, he closes his eyes and nods respectfully so as to make it look like he’s taking the response sincerely.

Halan moves on, “any ideas?”

“The Elder Shuttle,” Omega says cryptically.

“What about it?”

“Advanced, powerful, compact. Time travel-capable, self-sustaining...and coded to my DNA.”

“Where would you take it?” Halan questions.

“May 29, 2272,” Omega answers.

“We are nearly 7,000 light years from their position,” Halan argues, “and we still don’t know where they were teleported to. You would have to hunt for them, and who knows how long that could take?”

“That’s the self-sustaining part. It was engineered with something that I haven’t mentioned yet, because it’s dangerous technology, and Veca and I agreed it would be best if no one else knew. But I suppose now is the right time.”

“What?” Halan prompts. “Some kind of highly destructive weapons system that would be capable of taking out our ship?”

“Nothing like that,” Omega assures him. “It has no weapons at all. It does, however, have—”

“A quantum replicator!” Valencia has since retired from her position as the temporal engineer. Unlike other jobs, however, it’s important that she remain available in case they need her for an emergency. Just about anyone can learn engineering, but people like her are rare, so while August Voll has taken over as head of the department, Valencia still helps out. She’s more like a consultant now.”

“How did you know?” Omega asks.

“How did you get in this room?” Mercer asks.

Valencia is the one who designed the teleportation systems on this ship, and all the ways they can control who has access to what sections, and when. If she wants to bypass a restriction, she will, and she’ll do it with her eyes closed while she’s composing a new sonata. Knowing this about her, Omega rolls his eyes, and emphasizes his own question. “Did Veca tell you?”

She smiles, and removes something from her ear to present them with it. “It’s a sangsterbud.”

“What the hell is that?” Halan doesn’t like people inventing things without him knowing about it.

“Simple tech,” she says. “All it does is transduce future soundwaves—in this case, from about five seconds—and plays them for me to hear.”

“Why are you wearing it?” Halan presses. “Knowing what people are going to say just before they say it isn’t that helpful unless you want to prevent them from saying it, or in this case, show off what you can do.”

“I’m just tryna figure out who I am now that I’m no longer Head Temporal Engineer,” Valencia says.

“I offered to extend your shift,” Halan reminds her. “Now that Vesper turned out to be a mole, we’re down one member of the already small team anyway.”

Valencia shakes her head. “August needed the job. She deserved it. I just underestimated how bored I would be. Now I see there’s more for me to do. I can go on this mission with Omega. Together, we can find out what happened to Rita, and those other three people who we don’t really care about personally.”

Omega shakes his head too. “No, the mission could take years. I can go, because I’m immortal. You don’t wanna die out there, in that tiny little ship, with dumb ol’ me.”

“I’m immortal too,” Valencia reveals.

“You are?” Halan asks. “Extremus is generational. We all agreed...”

“Yeah, I broke the rules,” Valencia confirms. “I guess you better kick me out, and force me on the Elder Shuttle.”

“Can we come up with a better name for that too?” Mercer poses.

“What kind of upgrades do you have?” Omega is pleased to finally be around someone else like him again. No one else on this ship understands him, and they never will.

“Cellular countersenescent.”

“How do you accomplish this?” Omega is even more interested now.

“Antintropic technology that I invented myself. I got the idea from my refrigerator.”

“Holy shit. Is it a constant process?”

“As we speak.”

“Holy shit,” he repeats.

“Could you dumb it down for the rest of us?” Halan requests.

Omega opens his mouth to explain, but realizes that Valencia should do it. He gives her the floor.

She begins. “When your cells lose the ability to replicate themselves, they become senescent. They are essentially dead, but they’re a problem, because they sort of just sit there in your body. On the whole, this is what causes you to degrade and age. It’s obviously a complex process, but the most important aspect of longevity treatments is our ability to reprogram the body, and command it to undergo a process called transdifferentiation, which basically means the organism reverts to a less mature state. That’s what allows the vonearthans to live incredibly long lifespans.”

“So that’s what you did to yourself,” Mercer figures.

“No. I’m not allowed to do that. I’m not even allowed to access the research that allows the vonearthans to do that. But I did do something similar. I’m a temporal engineer, so what I do is command my cells to become young again, but by essentially reversing the flow of time for them. This creates issues for the natural laws of entropy, but it’s fine on smaller scales, like my tiny little body. It wouldn’t be okay to do that to the whole universe. Anyway, when a cell of mine begins to deteriorate, it releases a chemical, which triggers something I’ve deemed a tempomere to activate the countersenescence. So you see, I’m perfect for this mission. I don’t belong here anymore, and I won’t age out there.”

“What does any of this have to do with that quantum regulator?” Mercer questions.

“Replicator,” Omega and Valencia correct in unison. She continues alone, “it’s exactly what it sounds like. Place one grape in there, push the button, and you’ll have two grapes. It’s technically the same grape, but one of them was stolen from an alternate reality. Now put those two back in the replicator, push the button, and you have four. Rinse, repeat, and eat as many grapes as you’d like. As long as you got power, and at least one copy of something that you need, you got as many of that thing for replacements.”

“This one has a fairly extensive database,” Omega adds. “We can spontaneously generate an object without ever actually bringing it on board. Evidently, Old Man spent a lot of time encoding everything he could get his hands on.”

“Great,” Valencia says. “Even better. Does it have ice cream?”

“Hold on, I haven’t agreed to anything,” Halan warns the both of them. “If we’re doing this, we have to be careful. We can’t let anyone else know about it, not even Old Man. If you show up in the past to meet him before he has a chance to invent the damn thing in the first place, it could cause a paradox. It could cause one even if he has already invented it.”

“So we’ll modify it,” Valencia promises. “It shouldn’t be too hard to make it look like something completely different, and alter its specifications. I already have some ideas on how I can improve power efficiency, and safety protocols. Old Man obviously didn’t give that sort of thing much thought. It’s a time machine, so it doesn’t matter how long it takes us.”

“I will...remember that when I’m making my decision. For now, we should all return to our duties. Now that you’re in the braintrust, Miss Raddle, I trust you understand not to tell anyone about any of this?”

Valencia zips her mouth shut, locks it up, and throws away the key. Then she leaves with Omega to begin making the modifications. But first, they have to find a way to get the thing out of the cargo bay, and into a secure area.

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Microstory 1730: The Crux

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No one is old enough to remember what happened. It’s always just sort of been this way; a hill in the center of our little doughnut-shaped town where four roads meet. I don’t mean that it’s two roads crossing each other. Each of the four has its own name, and while it’s not impossible to get from one to the other by driving over what we unofficially call The Crux, it’s not recommended for regular cars. The hill is deceptively steep, and for some reason, it’s always rather muddy halfway up, on all sides. It’s a bit of a pain, but it’s much more reasonable to go around it on one of the other roads. It’s not a problem for people who live here. We know the hill is there, and we know heading towards it is going to get us nowhere...unless we’re trying to get to the hill itself, of course. Tourism is already hard to come by for us, and this just makes it harder. None of the internet maps knows it’s there, and don’t know it’s a bit of an impediment, so they direct folks right through it. We keep trying to get them to remove it from their system as a traversable road, but we’ve had no luck so far. Again, with the right vehicle, it’s possible to drive over it, but we’ve had some issues with people who don’t know what they’re doing. We actually have four ways of getting out of such a mess if it happens to you. The auto repair shop is on South Avenue, the county’s largest tow truck company is on Backbone Road, the dealership is on Krouka, and there’s a gas station on Heap Lane. It’s not all that necessary—problems don’t occur all that often—but it’s nice to know that people will have options, so they’ll think twice about saying bad things about us. Crux notwithstanding, ours is a fine town, with good, progressive people, who like to lead the simple life, but understand how the city operates, and why others would prefer it.

Anyway, today I’m sitting on top of the Crux with a bunch of friends. It’s got a good vantage point of the surrounding area, so we hang out there all the time. Flat Kansas being what it is, it’s nice to be above it all sometimes, ya know? So we’re sitting there, watching a small car we don’t recognize come down Krouka. They probably drove in from Great Bend, looking to fish in our world famous pond, where it’s pretty much guaranteed you’ll catch something. As the car approaches, we realize just how tiny it is. I bet only two people could fit in that thing, and maybe one bag each. There is no way it’s gonna make it up the Crux. We don’t even bother picking up our chairs to get out of the way this time. That little thing comes up there, from this perspective, lookin’ like a ground squirrel wondering if the mailbox poll drops nuts. It slows down, but doesn’t stop. Most people get out, and take a look around when they don’t know what the hell is going on here. They’re holding their phones, and spinning around to see if they’re facing the wrong direction. These people don’t even do that. They stop for five seconds, back up about fifty meters, and then gun it. They go towards this hill as fast as they possibly can, and they make it up pretty far. My best friend inches over to the side, afraid we’re all wrong, and they’ll actually go all the way. It doesn’t. It stops midway, and rolls back down, smoothly, though, like they saw it was gonna happen, and put it in neutral to be safe. Some of us laugh, but most are relieved, because we know how bad it can get. We’re about to go down to tell them about the dealership when their car transforms. This...laser gun—I guess you would call it—comes out from under the hood, and blasts a tunnel into the hill. We later see it’s large enough to fit a semi-truck. They even laser the other two roads, before driving off without so much as a you’re welcome.

Microstory 1729: Crater

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I have not been able to get very much sleep for the last few weeks. Really, when I think about it, it’s been a lifelong problem. I have too much stress. At first it was because of my parents’ hostile divorce, then my schoolwork was too hard, then I was trying to get into a good college, then I was looking for a job, then I had to deal with a terrible job. It just never ends with me. I keep thinking that things will get better if I can just solve this one major problem. Then I do, and I find that the grass actually isn’t greener on the other side. It’s mostly more dirt and I have to cross yet another void to get to something better. My therapist says that things actually have gotten better, and that just because some people at my high school reunion are CEOs and city council members, doesn’t mean I’m a failure. She suggests I stay positive. But I was born optimism-blind, and I don’t think there’s a cure. I finally get to sleep when the ground shakes, and the loudest sound that has ever pounded on my eardrums attacks me from all sides. It’s a crash, but there’s also this sizzling electrical sound. I order my smartspeaker to turn on my lights, and watch as my glass figurine collection threatens to topple over, but never does. I swear to God, some of them actually do tip before straightening back up, like some kind of ghost is there to protect them for me. The ground continues to tremble, and a deeper darkness overwhelms my windows. I switch the lights back off as I get out of bed, and move over to look outside. All I see is the black. I stand there for hours, watching it ever so slowly dissipate. It’s dust and debris, and it takes a long time to settle. No one answers the phone, not even the police. The sun comes out, and I can see a crater.

I check every window in my little house. The crater wraps all around me. It doesn’t look like a bunch of different craters, but a single one, of which I rest in the middle. A massive doughnut must have fallen from the sky, and left me unscathed. If there really was a big space doughnut, though, it still shouldn’t have spared me. I mean, the tremors alone should have sent me to hell with everyone else in my neighborhood. The hole is so large than I can’t even make out the houses that weren’t crushed by it. I see the edge in the distance, but everything left above is too far away to discern. I cautiously step outside, and crawl to the edge of my little protected patch of land. I realize, though, that if I were capable of dying, it probably would have happened already. The thing that protected my figures wasn’t likely a ghost, but a guardian angel. I don’t think I have to be careful anymore. I peek over the edge of my patch, and look for the bottom of the crater, but I can’t tell if I see it, for the light does not reach as far down. I check the GPS on my phone. No, I’m not in La Brea, so I doubt there’s a portal below me that will send me to prehistoric times where CGI monsters still roam the lands. I check all around my—I don’t know whether to call this a butte, or a mesa, or a plateau, because it’s as tall as all hell, but narrower than my now-dead neighbor’s political beliefs—patch. I see nothing that would explain what saved me, or whether the theoretical angel is still here. Just then, two helicopters fly over from different directions. One appears to be military, and the other from a news station. As they’re inspecting me, trying to figure out what the hell is going on, their rotors just stop, and they fall out of the sky, into the crater. Others come, hoping to understand, including an AirEvac, but they all suffer the same fate. I was wrong. An angel has not saved me. A demon has doomed me.

Microstory 1728: Jim Crow

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Your Honor, my name is Jim Crow. My first name is not James or Jacob, or anything like that. It’s actually Jim. My parents were named Beckett Crowley, and Geraldine Devlin. When they got married, instead of my mother taking my father’s last name, they decided to shorten it to Crow. When they had me in 1984, they named me Jim. Believe me when I tell you that this was no accident, nor coincidence. My parents are two of the most racist people I know, and they knew exactly what they were doing. They believe in white supremacy, and they believe in segregation. They may even believe that all black people should be exterminated. They’ve hinted at such evil thoughts on more than one occasion. I literally witnessed them spitting on a young black girl just because her family wasn’t around, and no one could stop them. When I was a child, my mother told me a story she made up, about how the people of Africa so displeased the Lord that he glued dirt to their skin, and forced them to live in filth from then on. Their skin isn’t black, it’s that there is actual grime all over their bodies. I never bought into it, obviously. Had I grown up during the actual time of segregation, I might have seen no other choice, but I developed my sense of right and wrong during the 1980s. My relatively small city in Maryland was not at all without its racism, but I had something that some people in the past did not. I had Star Trek. I remember seeing Whoopi Goldberg on The Next Generation. Here was this black woman who had standing on the ship...who people trusted, listened to, and cared about. That very night, as young as I was, I thought long and hard about who my parents are, and what they were trying to teach me. I made a conscious decision to reject their hatred, and come to my own conclusions. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of informing my parents of my intentions.

They started to punish me. They withheld dessert, and when that didn’t work, they took away my dinner, and when that wasn’t enough, they stopped letting me have water. They eventually realized I was going to die if they didn’t do something, so they changed tactics. They developed their own Jim Crow laws. I was allowed to eat, but I had to make it myself, and I had to find somewhere else to do it. An old lady lived next door, so she let me use her kitchen. I did try to explain to her what was happening, but she was senile, so she barely understood, and never remembered. She introduced herself to me every day. She wasn’t abusive, but about as racist as my parents, so I didn’t want to spend much time over there. Still, she had a bathroom I could use too, which was nice, because I wasn’t allowed to use mine anymore. Basically what my parents did was show me what it was like to experience segregation. I can imagine the non-racist parents of a racist child doing the same thing to teach them a lesson, but my parents didn’t see it that way. They figured I would grow tired of the restrictions, and finally admit that it was both easier, and better, to be white. Of course, their methods only enforced my conviction that they were completely wrong about everything. When I was seventeen, they started to see that they were losing me, so they maneuvered the legal system, and had me declared unfit for independence. I was a ward of the state for the last twenty years under false pretenses, and it has taken me this long to get out. That, Your Honor, is why I’m only now getting around—as you put it—to changing my name. I haven’t been allowed to until now. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for you to grant me this.

Microstory 1727: Northern Crown

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I am responsible for the safety of everyone who falls under the protection of the Northern Crown. Throughout all of history, we have experienced much peace. There are some wars in some regions, but they have not spread beyond their borders. Now we face a threat that threatens us all, and the only way we’ll survive is if we come together. But we can only come together spiritually, for it is the closeness that kills us. We may have lost some of the knowledge and technology that our ancestors once used, but we still have a basic understanding of how the world works. There is no such thing as the coldness of an object. Its coldness is simply a measurement of its warmness, or lack thereof, as it were. You cannot make something cold, you can only take away its heat. Someone should tell that to the insidious enemy that has made its way to every corner of our planet; even The Southern Crown. It is true, they have fared better with this problem than we, but nothing can destroy the evil. We can combat it, but it’s going to take a lot of work if we want to get rid of it altogether. We call it The Shudder. It is a darkness, and a coldness that is more than merely the absence of warmth. We have all been touched by it, and though it brings more harm to some than to others, we are all capable of sharing it, and we are all at risk. Much has been done to prevent the Shudder from winning, but it is not enough. Many doubt that it exists at all, and even when they admit that it must be real, they do not want to inconvenience themselves, for they believe they can survive its wrath.

We have built walls to keep the Shudder at bay, but these barriers have created a sense of loneliness amongst our people, the likes of which they have never seen before. They cannot see their neighbors over the walls, and cannot feel the comfort of closeness. It has been so long, and they just want it to magically disappear. Unfortunately, it can’t end soon, because the closer two people get to each other, the more concentrated the Shudder becomes, and the stronger it is. This compression gives it power. Whereas once the touch of a loved one brought comfort and joy, it now only takes the warmth away, and sends it to oblivion. As explained, not everyone is affected by the Shudder as badly as others. It mostly attacks the weak, leaving the strong to go on thinking that they are invincible. But they are not without fault. The strong can still compress the Shudder, and place their neighbors in terrible danger. They can make it deadlier. If they just remained behind the walls, they would be safe. They would be isolated, scared, and sad, but they would be alive, and so would their neighbors. I have been trying to convince people of the risk that they take when they don’t take the Shudder seriously. I have tried to show them how well the South is doing with their walls. They will not hear me. They are tired of following rules that they didn’t have to follow before. They believe the past and the future should be the same thing, but if we allow that to happen, what will become of our world? What would have become of our world if we had held onto this unproductive attitude? What I’ve realized is that it all comes down to fear, even if the detractors would deny that they feel fear at all. They’re afraid of setting a precedent, and of us coming up with even more rules for them to live by. They no longer trust the royal court, and I am not sure they ever will again. We must restore their faith in us, and prove to them that we have their best interests at heart, and we’re trying to help.