Microstory 1780: Triangulum

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My parents hate each other, but they claim they can’t get divorced. My little brother is very sensitive, and they don’t think he could handle it. Unfortunately, they can’t stand to even be in the same room as each other, so I don’t think that’s really helping him. They parent him separately, and I’m expected to fill in the gaps. He may be too young to be consciously aware that he never sees the two of them at the same time, but it’s almost certainly affecting him, and eventually, he’s going to grow up. I guess they’re hoping they’ll be able to finally walk away from each other by then. I think it would be far less traumatizing to the kid if they just took care of it now, but they won’t listen to me. I’m just the older brother in the middle. My therapist calls it triangulation. In order to put up a united front for my brother, both of our parents have to agree on whatever decision needs to be made. But since they can’t talk directly to each other, they go through me. My mom sleeps on a pullout couch in her home office, while dad stays in the master bedroom. They coordinate their schedules so they don’t end up in the bathroom at the same time, and mom still needs to keep some closet space up there. Again, I don’t know that their youngest doesn’t notice all of this, but again, I’m actually the one coordinating it for them. I’m responsible for knowing who is going to pick him up from soccer practice, and which is available for the next game. Both of them have pretty flexible schedules, and could theoretically watch him play together, but one will always pretend to be busy, and it’s up to me to decide which, making sure that he doesn’t feel too neglected by either one. It’s such a pain. It’s also not fair. I’m 17 years old, I’m not supposed to be responsible for their relationship. My therapist says I need to stand up for myself, and he wants to have a conversation about that with all three of us, but that is just this side of completely impossible. I gave up on trying to fix them a long time ago.

It wasn’t always like this, and even after it started, it wasn’t always this bad. It’s not like they had a meeting at one point, and contrived this plan to triangulate their fourteen-year-old son. It started out small. They would fight about the baby, and one of them would sleep on the couch that night, but then they would work it out, and come back together. This happened more and more until they realized that they sometimes hadn’t spoken for two straight days. I was brought in to relay their messages, but if that got to be too complicated, they would step in, and finish the conversation themselves. But then they stopped doing that altogether, I guess because I got better at anticipating their responses, lessening the amount of back and forth necessary. I became half my father, and half my mother, so that I could act on each one’s behalf to the other without actually speaking to them about what they would choose to say under normal circumstances. It was too late before I noticed that I had lost my whole self in that chaos. I’ve been trying to get the real me back for a year, but it can’t be done unless we break the triangle. So that’s why I’m here today, Your Honor. I know it will be a long process, but it must be done, and I was advised by my counsel to begin now. I turn 18 in six months, and when that happens, I need to have full custody of my brother, so I can take him out of that toxic environment. Our parents are not going to like it, but I’m confident that I will prove myself to be the most mature person in the family. I have filled out all of the requisite paperwork, and I’m ready to plead my case, whenever you are.

Microstory 1779: Telescope

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I forgot my telescope on the bridge. It’s this hopelessly useless little thing that can’t see the sun on a clear day, but I still wanted the Captain to autograph it for me, and I’m so proud of myself for having been brave enough to ask. She signed it with a smile, and didn’t even blink out how difficult it was to write on a cylinder. It was an honor just to be there, but the fact that she spoke to me personally was more than I could ask for. I can die happy now. I was so relieved that it all worked out, and excited to be up where the action was, that I left the telescope on top of an auxiliary console. By the time I realized my mistake, something had gone terribly wrong in the ship. I don’t have access through the doors myself, but an engineer was running out just at the right time, so I slipped back in and hoped not to bother anyone. I just wanted to grab it, and get out of everyone’s way. Things escalated quickly. We had apparently come out of plex too close to the planet, and were unable to compensate. The ship was being torn apart by the tidal forces, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Our vessels are at their weakest when they collimate back to realspace. The strain from faster-than-light travel is not enough to vaporize us, or anything, but couple it with the sudden gravitational pull of a celestial object, and you have yourself a recipe for disaster. I’ve always hoped to be a pilot one day, so I’ve been studying all of this stuff. I really shouldn’t be here right now, though. I try to leave, but the doors are blocked by the hustle and bustle. I think it’s best if I just try to stay out of the way. I grab my telescope, and stick myself in the corner, where nobody notices me. It’s not long before they all begin to evacuate. They’re heading for the escape pods, as are the rest of the passengers like me. Meanwhile, I’m frozen.

I can feel the ship cracking from the gravity, and I know that I have to get out of here too. Hopefully I can squeeze in one of the pods before they all leave. I don’t make it. This ship’s bridge was designed as an actual bridge, which overlooks the crew observation deck below. As I’m running along the railing, an explosion from the side pushes me over the edge, and I begin to fall towards the floor below. I watch it crumble, and escape into the vacuum of space before anything hits me. I’m sent into the black as well, where I expect to die quickly...except I don’t. I’m still alive, for some reason. I’m not breathing, but my blood isn’t boiling either. I’m just there, conscious and watching the debris flying chaotically around me. I don’t hang around for long before I fall towards the atmosphere of the planet. I was supposed to live here for the next year while I finished school. Now I’ll die here. It doesn’t happen yet, though, as I continue to fall. I can see the fire around me, but I don’t burn up. This doesn’t make any sense. This is not what’s meant to happen when an object falls from space. I’m not built to survive. What the hell is going on? I feel like I’m suspended in place while the ground flies upwards to greet me. As it becomes larger, I see more detail. The indistinct terrain, the road that cuts through it, the vehicles, the people walking to the beach, their eyes. As fast as I was moving, and as quickly as I stop, I don’t even die on impact. I land, awkwardly but safely, as if I simply hopped out of bed a little too hard. I still don’t understand this. Then I look up and see a flat piece of debris falling down right over my head. It’s too large for me to get out of the way. And then I crash onto the floor of the observation deck, and die as the rest of the ship is ripped apart around my body, telescope still in hand.

Microstory 1778: Bullsh

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I was a terrible liar when I was young. I would keep doing bad things, and trying to hide it from my parents, and they always realized right away that I wasn’t telling the truth. I just kept trying, and they kept seeing right through it. My father would get angry about it, and my mom was always disappointed, but not in the way you think. She too was a liar, but an expert at it. Over the years, I learned more about who she was, and what she did behind everybody’s backs. She shoplifted, pulled mean-spirited pranks on complete strangers, and cheated on her husband more times than want to think about. I was basically just like her, except that I wasn’t good at keeping secrets. Seeing my potential, she took special interest in me, but you wouldn’t know it if you were looking from the outside. She treated our lessons just like she did anything else, as nobody else’s business. Mother was a grifter before she met dad. He was the first man she met who she didn’t want to screw over, so she gave up that life, and settled down. She couldn’t let go of her compulsive habits, but she was no longer taking thousands of dollars from her victims. He provided them both with more than enough money, and that was really all she cared about, unlike the con artists you see in the movies, who apparently mostly do it for the thrill. She couldn’t be sure I would grow up to be a functioning member of society with a decent job, so she felt that she needed to teach me her old ways so I would have something to fall back on no matter what. It wasn’t normal, and it wasn’t moral, but she taught me that everyone has to come up with their own set of morals, and I believed her without question, because I couldn’t tell when she was lying. I’m better at spotting it now that I’ve gone through all my lessons, so I know that she legitimately believed that. Before she passed, she lived her life with no regrets, and she wanted me to live mine the same way. I have, but not as she imagined. I use my powers for good.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has an entire division dedicated to fraud, and that’s all well and good, but they don’t do what I do. They investigate crimes with forensics, by hunting for, and searching through, evidence. They don’t know what a grifter looks like. They just know what their victims look like when they’re done with them. It’s really obvious too, when a corporate executive turns out to have been embezzling, or cheating their customers out of the product or services they paid for. How do you find out which ones are bad, and which ones are good? Simple: they’re all bad. Every single one of them is a devil, and they’re not even in disguise. What I do is go after the people that are in disguise, or who work in the shadows. They make small scams here and there, which add up to a lot, and ruin a lot of people’s lives without anyone ever knowing their true identities. I can practically smell when someone is getting scammed. There’s a certain lightness in the air that most people can’t detect. I can teach you to find these people too. I believe everyone at this continuing education seminar can help me grow my team of investigators, which focuses on stopping the fraudsters that aren’t out in the open, and don’t ever end up in the news. I know I can do this for you, because I...do not even work for the FBI. I made this badge in the bathroom this morning, after waking up and deciding on a whim what I was going to do today. I’m that good. Your real teacher will be coming in soon, but don’t tell her that I was here. She’ll ground me for a month if she finds out that I snuck into her building yet again. Parents just don’t understand, right?

Microstory 1777: Cosmic Sextant

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The Cosmic Sextant, like many other special temporal objects in the universe, was not made, but born. It’s possible to create a piece of technology that exhibits reality-bending properties. You can engineer a spaceship that is capable of traveling faster than light. You can make a pair of binoculars that shows you what the area you’re in will look like at some given point in the future. Many of these technologies were created by a particular person, and her alternates. Her name is Holly Blue, but in some realities, she goes by the nickname The Weaver. Her time power is to make objects with their own time powers. It’s easier for her to do if she’s seen the power in action, and even easier if she has long-term access to the subject for study, but she’s been known to intuit her inventions on occasion. She’s not the only temporal engineer in the timeline, but she’s perhaps most famous for it, at least across multiple circles. Holly Blue did not invent the Cosmic Sextant, nor did anyone else. It didn’t happen for no reason at all, but it wasn’t done by anyone’s intentions either. These special special objects are rare, and demand a particular set of circumstances to coincide. It’s not always obvious which is which, but there is a way to make a good guess. Typically, the simpler an object, the more likely it is that it was imbued with its power, and not an invention. You don’t design a stone that can send people back to the moment they first experienced time travel. Such a form would be too capricious. Instead, what most likely occurred was that a person with the ability to return others to the beginning of their respective temporal journeys was holding a rock while they were in the middle of working, and enough temporal energy flowed into it, and stuck. Home stones are very old, so no one knows who this person could be, but it’s probable that a time travel event erased them from the future, but left the stones they once created intact. Again, no one knows.

Maqsud Al-Amin is a choosing one with the ability to transport himself, and others, across the largest distance ever covered by a teleporter. He can make the trip to the nearest galaxies in a matter of seconds. Anyone with access to Shimmer, which is channeled by The Great Pyramid of Giza, can do the same, but not as quickly, and not as far. Maqsud is an explorer, who enjoys going to other worlds, and learning about new cultures. When he was first starting out, he did so before a telescope with sufficient range was invented, so it was actually better for him to use a sextant, and measure his destination manually. He happened to do this in what would come to be known as Bryce Canyon, in what would come to be known as Utah. The temporal energy from him passed through the sextant, and flew off to collide with one of the hoodoos, where it bounced off, and collided with another. This energy just kept bouncing all around the geological formation, until it all landed back into the sextant, where it remained for future use. Maqsud was long gone by then, having dropped the sextant in the initial energy release, and ending up in the wrong star system, where he would have to make his way back on his own. He didn’t find out what the sextant could do until later, and felt no ownership over it, so it began to trade hands from there. For whatever reason, travelers can’t take it with them when they use it, so they always have to find some other means of departing from the destination planet, if they so wish. This has necessarily limited its use. It’s powerful, but risky, because it was not made on purpose.

Microstory 1776: Serpens Novus

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Star Mountains rainforest, Papua New Guinea. The mysterious unidentifiable snake stares at me like I just ate his squirmy little children. I’m normally good with snakes, and for a special reason. I can commune with them. They don’t have complex brains, so they can’t talk, but I can convey my intentions to them, and they to me. I’m a herpetologist, which means I love them, so they always know that I never mean them any harm. I don’t know if this particular species is immune to my wiles, or if simply the fact that it has never been studied before means that it’s not in the database. I don’t understand why that should make a difference, though. When I first realized I could do what I do, it’s not like I had ever looked at that list. I actually had to switch majors in the middle of my higher education career to account for it. I didn’t grow up having any strong feelings about snakes. I try to move backwards half a centimeter, but have to stop. He doesn’t like that—or she. I don’t know how to tell, but that obviously doesn’t matter right now. It doesn’t even matter why I can’t get this snake to relax. All I can do is call upon the training I’ve never needed before, and get myself to safety. Unfortunately, I ignored a lot of what my teachers tried to teach me about dealing with wild animals, because it didn’t apply to me. That was stupid, it was so stupid. What did I think I was, invincible? Just because I’ve been able to handle myself in the past, doesn’t mean that’s going to work in the future. Why, my situation right here just proves that. Stupid. Stupid me. I wish one of my colleagues were here now. They would know what to do. They’re used to it.

Lots of people know how good I am at my job as a snake wrangler, but they don’t know why. They don’t know that the best word I’ve come up with to describe it is supernatural. Perhaps it runs in my family, but I was always too afraid to bring it up to my parents, so it’s just been something I’ve lived with on my own. I think I did a pretty good job at maximizing my abilities to their full potential. That may all be coming to an end, though. This new snake doesn’t give a crap what I can do, if it can even tell that I’m special at all. Maybe it can. Maybe it knows exactly what I am, and does not appreciate it. Maybe it thinks it’s offensive, in some way. No, that’s dumb. It’s not that intelligent. It may be the smartest reptile in the entire world, and it still wouldn’t have any prejudices against me. I am in its territory, and I am a threat. That is all it knows. That is all it’s worried about. I try to back up again, but it’s not having it. It’s not going to risk the possibility that it’s a trick, and I’m about to attack first. It snaps at my ankle, and before I even feel the pain, it snaps at the other one. I falter, and fall down. I can feel the venom flowing through my veins, headed quickly for the rest of my body. Before it can reach my arms, I reach behind my back, and retrieve my camera. If I’m going to die, at least people can find out why. The snake is still there, like some kind of psychopath who needs to watch the life flicker from my eyes. I snap the photo. Now it doesn’t seem bothered by my sudden movements at all. I guess it’s pretty confident in the efficacy of its own venom. It has good reason to. Man, that’s a good shot. If anyone ever finds my body, they’ll find this picture too, and see how scary it looks. I carefully tuck the camera away in its case to protect it from the elements. If I have truly discovered it, I get to name it too. It will be my last act in this world. I take out my voice recorder, and speak the first name that comes to mind, “Star Mountain Purple Viper.” That’s not half bad.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 14, 2372

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Like all the various shuttles in the Orvilleverse, the Tahani looked like a smaller version of the Jameela Jamil. It was just as exquisite and powerful, but with a lower capacity. The four not-so-qualified people on the team waited until the next year showed up before making the jump to their destination. Or series of jumps, rather. Burst mode topped out at one jump per second, but it was possible to make it go slower to protect the integrity of the engine. The ship was fully capable of piloting itself, which meant no one on board needed to understand how it worked, but it was still safer to be cautious. If something went wrong, there would be no one around to effect repairs. Still, it took them less than a half hour to make their way out of the intergalactic void, and into orbit around a planet called New Earth. When Mateo questioned the unoriginality of the name, the computer informed them that it was just a placeholder until a real name could be conceived.

Operation Starseed was launched alongside Project Stargate in order to plant new human-based life on various exoplanets. There were all sorts of ethical and logistical considerations that dictated which worlds would become part of the program, and which would be left alone. The complexities of this went beyond any single entity, even a general artificial intelligence. Technically, any celestial object capable of accommodating a ship landing on it could be modified to harbor any life necessary. This ruled out stars, blackholes, neutron stars, magnetars, and the like. It did not rule out planets, moons, asteroids, meteoroids, and comets. Even a house-sized object could be terraformed in the loosest sense of the word. Spin gravity and pressurization allowed for just about anything to become habitable. Even so, not every single object was a candidate, again for a multitude of reasons that no single individual understood in its entirety. Every seed plate responsible for its particular region of interstellar space held within it the ingredients for starseeding, but not every one of them will ultimately be activated. It all depended on what Teagarden and Earth decided through their complicated flavor of socio-political and scientific discourse.

New Earth was a perfect candidate for starseeding, because it demanded very little modification. It enjoyed a 0.989 ranking on the Terrestrial Habitability Similarity Index. It didn’t really get better than that without getting as good as Dardius, which they only found in another galaxy. After some thoughtful research, leadership chose New Earth as the home for a special initiative. There were a number of ways they could play it when they seeded life on a world. How involved, and how protective, they were yet again depended on factors no one could hope to comprehend. The people of Pluoraia, for instance, were aware of their alien origins, but were not in communication with the homeworld. That had yet to change, even after Mateo and the team made first contact. Other outposts would not even be that connected. Perhaps the rarest of these would be New Earth protocol. The first generation of humans, which were expected to undergo no genetically adaptive source variant, would be raised by skinjob androids, and once they matured, would be left completely alone. No quantum terminal, no access to historical records, no rumors of space colonization. They would have to come up with their own language, their own customs, their own governing system. If they failed and died out, then they failed and died out, and no one would be allowed to interfere in any way.

No one would be allowed to intervene with the New Earthans—or whatever they ended up calling themselves—unless they became a Class IX Threat, which meant they compromised the prosperity of the entire galaxy. That won’t happen for a long time, if ever. Until then, the B-team was being charged with protecting the future of New Earth from what appeared to be a measly Class VI Threat, while the A-team continued to solve the issue of a Class VIII. That was not to undersell it, though. The first generation of New Earth hadn’t even begun developing in their little gestation pods yet. This wasn’t scheduled to begin for another 27 years or so. Whatever the Quantum Colony players who found this place first were doing now, it could endanger that population. They had to be stopped, and the B-team were the only ones who could do it. The Tahani AI scanned the surface of the planet, and found no signs of technology. That was all relegated to the quantum terminal, which had set up shop on the moon.

“Are we ready,” Mateo posed, “to find out what’s going on?”

“Are you the leader?” Olimpia asked.

“I should be,” Mateo answered in perfect deadpan. “I’m the smartest one here.”

They all tried to hold out as long as they could, but the laughter fell out of them like a waking volcano.

“Between Angela and Kivi,” Mateo went on as he was securing his shoe tighteners.

“No thanks,” Kivi said quickly.

“Nose goes,” Olimpia said to Angela.

“We’re all in charge,” Angela contended. “Let’s just get to the quantum terminal to find out who is here, and what they want.”

“Good idea, boss.” Mateo dropped his face shield, and hovered his hand over his teleporter. He made eye contact with everyone, making sure they were ready to go. They nodded accordingly, and then simultaneously jumped into the facility.

It wasn’t long before they had to use their sonic disruptors. In the next room, several people attacked with projectile weapons. Their bullets never landed where they were meant to. Everyone on the team was wearing a banish-suit. It produced a teleporter field around the wearer. Anything moving at sufficient velocity was instantly transported to the farthest point possible from dense matter. If they were on a planet, that might be the open sky, but here, it meant the vacuum of outer space. Banish-clothing was nothing flashy. As far as the attackers were concerned, their bullets simply missed. Teleportation arrival notwithstanding, the team wasn’t authorized to reveal the truth about salmon and choosers to these people.

Once they were all disabled and unconscious, Mateo was assigned the role of tying them all up to the console. He could say this much about himself, he was the physically strongest in the group, whether that was his only useful attribute, or not. The other three searched the rest of the facility to make sure no one else was here. Then they returned, and waited for the prisoners to wake up.

In the meantime, Kivi got to work on the quantum terminal to see if she could get it back online. Angela was old, and had a lot of experience, but little of it involved computers. They were available in the afterlife simulation, but difficult to learn accurately, since the only reason the art of programming existed was because it was the closest thing people could get to adapting their world to their whims, which the simulation itself provided. It was kind of like sticking your straw in a shot glass that was dropped in a picture. Not really any point to it.

A few hours later, the first of them awakened. They didn’t say a word at first, and neither did the b-team. Mateo watched them, though, to see what information he could gather from their body language. One of the prisoners regarded the b-team with such disgust that he had to be the enforcer of the group. Most of the others couldn’t help but drift their gazes towards one man, while he looked around at them to make sure they were okay. Him. Mateo reached down, and pulled the leader up from his collar. He set him down in a chair, and rolled him away from his friends. “What are you doing in this terminal?”

“This is ours,” the leader guy replied. “What are you doing here?”

“Official business from Teagarden,” Mateo responded.

“Hmph. You don’t look like a strike team. You don’t move like one either.”

“Why would they send a strike team?” Mateo asked. “They don’t want to hurt you. Why did you not return when you were recalled?”

“This is our home now.”

Okay. “What is Quantum Colony?”

“A lie.”

That was probably enough for Mateo to guess that he understood it wasn’t really a game. “Are you aware that the terrestrial planet in this star system has been chosen as the birthbasket of a new race of humans, and is to remain untouched by vonearthans for the foreseeable deep future?” He worked very hard to memorize that argument, so he wouldn’t look like an unqualified idiot.

“If they wanted it to remain untouched, they should have excluded it from the game,” the leader argued with airquotes.

“I do not believe that they were aware of their own plans until it was time to make them. Either way, you broke the rules, you tampered with the quantum terminal. That alone is enough to ban you.”

“Ban us from what, the game? We established that it’s not a game at all. Only morons believed that.” The truth was far easier to glean than Teagarden seemed to have given their players credit for. “We don’t have the right to stay here because we claimed it for some make believe immersion reality game. We have the right, because we got here first, and we established lives here.”

Kivi stopped what she was doing for a moment. “No, you didn’t. The terminal itself was here first, and it didn’t just build itself out of magic, did it? No, it was constructed by an AI, which would have first claim above all others. You had to take this place from it. The fact that it probably didn’t fight back is irrelevant to the property law.”

The leader guy smirked. “I would never fight against my friends.” With that, he split his skull in several parts, revealing gear, wires, and other such computer components inside where his brain would be if he were an organic entity. Once they saw his guts, he closed everything back up. He made no move to free himself from the chains, even though he was surely strong enough to do so.

“Don’t lie to us,” Angela insisted. “Are you the artificial intelligence that landed on this world, and engineered the technology in the solar system, including the quantum terminal, and the satellites?”

“That’s me...self-aware me.”

“I don’t know how to tell if you’re lying,” Angela reasoned.

“I don’t think he is,” Kivi said. “Like Sasha, I’m seeing a record of the AI uploading itself into a mobile substrate. I can’t say that this is it, but...”

“What does it matter if he’s an AI?” Olimpia questioned. “He’s still just a person, and Teagarden says he’s not supposed to be here.”

“They can’t say that,” Kivi began to explain. “Colony law. Realspace travel supersedes all other forms of colonization. Teagarden once communicated with this system using a quantum link. The players, which I assume these other people are, arrived here via quantum cast. Since they came in physical form, their rights would override any orders that Teagarden gave, except that they accepted the terms of service for the Quantum Colony game, which states that all worlds fall under Teagarden jurisdiction, and they don’t actually own anything. That’s how the military was able to recall even people who refused to cast themselves back. But none of that matters, because the AI—whether this man who claims to be said AI is telling the truth, or not—came here on a seed plate via Project Stargate. It came here physically, through real space. If it claims to be capable of expressing its own desires, then it is necessarily capable of experiencing its own desires. Therefore, if it desires to own this solar system, the proverbial flag that it stuck in the ground must be honored. If the four of us had come, and they weren’t here, the planet would have been ours, if we wanted it.”

“So, that’s it? There’s nothing we can do?” Angela asked.

“We can report back to Teagarden, and the government can either fight diplomatically, or start a war,” Kivi said. “That’s not really up to us. They are free to make their own decisions, and the colonists are free to do the same. If we can confirm that this man is telling the truth about his nature, then this inquiry will be over.”

“Okay, how do we do that?” Angela asked.

“Well,” Kivi started. “If he’s eager to prove himself, he’ll use his authorization codes to open the quantum terminal for casting. Then one of our people can cast their consciousness here, and...they’ll know what to do. We are not educated enough for the level of Turing testing that this situation calls for. I assume Leona isn’t either.”

“If I open casting,” the leader argues, “Teagarden will be able to send whoever they want, including an actual strike team.”

“That’s true,” Kivi relented.

“What about...?” Mateo began, not wanting to give anything away, and hoping that Kivi would realize he was suggesting they open another sustained transport closet.

“Out of range,” Kivi apologized. “At least it is if they want to keep the one between the JJ and the AOC open at the same time, which they kind of need to.”

“What about the Tahani?” Olimpia suggested vaguely.

“There are no casting terminals on the ship,” Angela reminded her.

“But there are us,” Olimpia began. “And we’re still wearing these.” She showed them her Cassidy cuff.

Mateo didn’t understand it completely, but he knew what they were saying. “I’ll do it. I’ll switch with Kestral or Ishida.”

“We’ll let them decide that,” Angela said. “You and I will be the ones who go back up there, and apprise them of the situation.”

In the end, Mateo was indeed chosen to make the switch. He was already on the Tahani, and it didn’t really matter. Kestral put on one of the extra Cassidy cuffs, and swapped bodies with him. It was weird for him, being inside of a female substrate. She wasn’t a hundred percent organic, but she sure felt like it. He might need to get used to it too. Something went wrong, and they found themselves unable to switch back.

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Extremus: Year 22

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Olindse Belo and Yitro Moralez were two of the middle of the roadest candidates on the captain’s track. They weren’t great, but they weren’t bad, which made them perfect to serve as Interim Captain and Interim Lieutenant until the first shift ended in four years. Neither of them expected to be chosen for a permanent position on the executive crew, which means it will be easier to expect them to step aside once former Captain Yenant’s real replacement begins the second shift. They understood the situation when they accepted their new positions. They aren’t radicals or tyrants. They’re not particularly popular, nor divisive. They’re fine. They’re just fine, and they should continue to be this way until it’s over. The problem is they’re only good as peacetime leaders. If they find themselves having to make the hard decisions, they may struggle with it. Halan has to take his admiral duties quite seriously, so things don’t fall apart when the True Extremists make their move. And that is coming, there is no way it’s not.

There was a larger reason why Halan and Mercer were asked to abdicate that both of them should have seen coming. As Halan’s parents, and the other elders, were coming up with the plan to form this mission, they decided upon a rule. This would be a generation ship. It was very important to them, and it’s unclear why, but it excluded a lot of hopefuls. People who never wanted to die ended up not being able to come, because they wouldn’t be allowed to undergo longevity treatments. Omega was an exception that they did not foresee, and everyone was very aware that it was the fault of no one on this vessel, so they didn’t complain. Valencia definitely broke the rules when she joined him as a transhumanist, but as a temporal engineer, she enjoyed a level of respect and adoration that would make any captain envious. People just sort of let it go, and when both of them disappeared for a secret mission, they stopped bringing it up.

Old Man broke the rules as well, and turned both Halan and Mercer into transhumanists without them even knowing it. It was their staterooms. He secretly modified their rooms to absorb their consciousnesses in realtime, even when they weren’t in those rooms. Had either of them been in a relationship, and invited their partner to spend a significant enough time in their stateroom, the same would have happened to that hypothetical person. When the two of them were murdered by Ovan, their minds were automatically uploaded to the ship’s computers, preserving them until Dr. Holmes could clone their bodies, and download their minds into them. She claims to have not known this was happening, and only received an alert about their survival a few weeks after they were declared dead. She should have been punished for having gone through with it, but political conversations not even Halan was privy to saved her job. Perhaps she has something on the Consul that has insulated her.

So none of this is Halan or Mercer’s fault, but it doesn’t change the fact that their survival threatens one of the first rules of the Extremus mission. It’s not that the people don’t trust them. It’s more that the executive crew, the legal department, and the civilian government, don’t want people to trust them. If the passengers start getting the idea that maybe it’s okay to break the rule, and become transhumanists, it will cause whatever problems they think could result from the transition. The two of them couldn’t be allowed to remain in power, whether the government and crew thought they were still fit for duty, or not. Belo and Moralez would have to do...for now.

Even after sixteen months, it’s still weird, being on this side of the desk, but Halan has accepted it, and there is no going back now. As the Consul agreed, he’s been much more involved as the Admiral than he let Thatch be. Captain Belo has been incredibly gracious and grateful for it. Her main character flaw is that she lacks self-confidence, and constantly questions her own decisions. The crew and passengers need to see someone who believes that what she says to do is the right call, even if she’s in the wrong. Surprisingly, from a sociological standpoint, people would much rather see a leader who apologizes for their mistakes than one who doesn’t make any, but always plays it safe. On a psychological level, they’re disappointed, but people don’t giveth or taketh away their support based on their personal opinions. They tend to stick with the crowd, and the crowd says take risks.

She’s been doing well, listening to the Admiral’s advice. She relies on it a bit too much, though, and that should probably stop. “I’m glad it’s Friday. I really need to talk. My Second Lieutenant has been so infuriating. He just can’t accept that he’s not in the running for captain anymore. He still thinks he has a chance. I mean, he’s not interim, like me and Yitro, so his job is safe. Not that I feel like I should keep my job. I’m fine with stepping down when it’s time. But he just keeps holding that over my head. So he’s mad that he’ll never be captain, but he basically thinks that he outranks me, because my shift is shorter. It’s like, yeah, it’s shorter, buddy, but it’s still higher. You report to me. I mean, right?” She’s a pretty fast talker too, which some might consider a character flaw, but Halan just sees it as a cute quirk.

“We have to talk.”

“Oh, no,” Olindse says. “Last time you said that, we changed from our daily meetings to these weekly meetings. What, now you only want to hold them once a month? There aren’t enough hours in the day for us to discuss everything that happened from the last month.”

“No,” Halan answers simply.

“Oh, good.”

“We need to stop having regular meetings altogether.”

“What? No. What? No. You can’t abandon me, Not now, I need you. I would have voted for you to stay as captain, if we voted for crew members. I think we can all agree that you’re still pretty much in charge, and I’m just carrying out your orders. I can’t do this without you. I have no clue what I’m doing. I don’t know why my parents put me on the captain’s track. They shouldn’t have done that. It was stupid, it’s stupid. This is stupid.”

“Captain...”

“Please don’t leave me.”

“I’m not leaving you.” He can’t help but laugh a little. “I said we need to stop regular meetings; not meetings, full stop.”

“But you said regular meetings altogether. I heard you. You said—”

“I know what I said, Captain.”

“You don’t have to call me Captain. Just call me Olindse. I keep telling you that. Friends call each other by their first names. We’re friends, right? You said we were friends. I remember that too. You said—”

“Olindse.”

“Right, motor mouth.” She zips her lips shut, and throws away the key.

“I misspoke. I want you to come to me when you’re having problems, but I want you to use better judgment for what qualifies as a problem that you can’t solve on your own. We shouldn’t need to talk every week. I trust that you can handle most issues without assistance now. Last year, Consul Vatal—”

“Consul Vatal.” She spits it out of her mouth like it’s poison. A lot of people were not happy at the announcement that Halan and Mercer were relieved of their positions. The transition would not have been smooth had they selected an interim captain that didn’t agree with the majority on this matter. Both the crew and passengers follow her because she’s genuine and real. When Halan gives her a look, her eyes widen in horror. She starts scanning the floor.

“Don’t look for the key, that’s only a metaphor. Just listen.”

She nods respectfully.

Halan returns to what he was saying, “when Consul Vatal told me he made a short list for backfill, I was concerned. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know if I could trust his judgment. Before I even looked at the list, I figured he probably pooled from the civilian population. I thought he would try to merge the government and crew. The law does not specify who is eligible for the job. Hell, he could have appointed himself. Every single person on that list was studying to become captain, or join the crew in some capacity. I was impressed, but I was most impressed by the order. You and Lieutenant Moralez were literally at the top of it. It’s one of the few things that he and I have actually agreed on over the last few years. You..belong here. You deserve this, and we all believe in you. All you need to do is believe in yourself. Neither I nor he would have allowed you to sit in that seat if we didn’t think you could fill it. When you rely too much on my advice, it’s a bit of a paradox. By not relying on yourself, you’re questioning my decision to appoint you, but if you question that, why are you listening to me at all?”

“Well, when you put it like that...”

“Olindse, I’m here for you, but not every day; not even every week. You never told anyone that you requested these periodic meetings, correct?”

“Yitro knows. Everyone else thinks they were your idea. I call it my apprenticeship.”

“Good. I’m glad that has held up. So what you’ll do now is tell them that you put a stop to it. You made the decision to stop coming to me weekly, and I accepted it. This is important, because it would be rather odd if you were still an apprentice while you had your own apprentice.”

“What do you mean?”

Admiral Yenant presses a button on his teleporter. He retained full teleportation rights when he was promoted, but he technically should have lost his summoning abilities. Only the captain should be capable of transporting someone to their location against that person’s will. The Consul partially let him keep it because he didn’t give it much thought, but also because, in the nineteen years he was captain, Halan never used it once, so he probably wouldn’t abuse it now. Besides, Kaiora knew this was coming. “I’m not sure if you two have met. Captain Olindse Belo, allow me to introduce you to Future Captain, Kaiora Leithe, Third of Ten.” She was supposed to be Second of Nine, but everything changed when Halan became a clone. The whole interim thing has thrown off the math, and this is the change that Halan insisted upon. It was an unpopular choice, but Olindse should feel that she really is an actual captain, and not simply the closest thing they have. It’s about respect. There will now be ten captains, unless something else like this should happen, at which point, it will fall to that day’s leadership to make their own choice.

“Captain,” Olindse says.

“Captain,” Kaiora echoes.

“I didn’t realize the choice had been made.”

“Ehhhhhh,” Halan begins awkwardly, “people don’t really know how we choose captains. There’s been a lot of confusion about it, but in the end, I get to just decide whoever I want. Again, I don’t have to source from the captain’s track. I did, but it was all up to me. Consul Vatal and I—”

“Consul Vatal,” Kaiora says with disgust, mirroring Olindse’s attitude from earlier, even though she wasn’t here for that.

“I think I’m gonna like you,” Olindse says.

“Consul Vatal and I,” Halan repeats himself, “weren’t sure whether the decision should be up to the Interim Captain, or me. We had a long discussion about it, and determined that I was still more qualified.”

“That’s true,” Olindse admits, “but just so you know, I would have made the same decision.”

“I figured.”

“Future Captain Leithe will be shadowing you for the next three years, and that is her official rank. The crew will be expected to show her just as much respect as they will come transition day in 2294.”

“Understood,” Olindse says. “Happy to have you.”

“I appreciate your support,” Kaiora replies.

“Great. Now come in close, the two of you.”

The three of them huddle together, and then Halan teleports them to the mess hall, which has been once again restored to its rightful place as a respite for the crew from the passengers. No one was left to argue against it. Right now, the room is full of key crew members, including Eckhart Mercer, who transitioned to the Bridger section last year; Consul Vatal; Dr. Holmes; and Second Lieutenant Lars Callaghan. He really is annoying. Even now, while everyone is smiling, and congratulating Captain Leithe on her appointment, he’s bitter and scowling. Fortunately, unlike Ovan, Halan doesn’t get the sense that he’s a threat to the safety of this mission. And he does his job well enough, which is what’s really important. After the clapping and hugs are over, the party gets underway, and it goes all night.

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Microstory 1775: Shield Ring

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I think the first hint I had that the stories I was writing were real came in 2010 when an object from my stories fell into my lap. Three years prior, I started working on a story about a group of people with special abilities. My computer contracted a virus at college, and was completely nonfunctional for at least a week, so I had a lot of time on my hands to work on the story manually. Coming up with the characters was the easiest thing to do in this manner, because it didn’t require much research, and it was mostly just a list. I ended up with one character who wasn’t born with abilities, but used found technology to complete her missions. In particular, she wore a ring that protected her from physical attack. It wasn’t something that other people could take from her, and use for themselves. It demanded constant charging from another dimension, so she had to keep injecting herself with something called indigo therapy, which kept her connected to this other dimension. Maybe about a year before my maternal grandfather died, we were at his house, looking through some of his possessions. I found a few things of his that I liked, including a basketball necklace, an Eagle Scout ring, and the shield ring that my character wore. It looked exactly as I described it, and it’s just so unlikely that I had ever seen this thing before. His mother reportedly gave it to him as a gift when he graduated from high school, but it didn’t fit his fingers anymore, so I would have never seen him actually wear it. Still, I figured that it must be a normal ring, and a coincidence, because what else would I think? I started to wear it, and it pretty soon became a part of me. It felt wrong whenever I took it off, so I never did. Remember that this thing was useless on its own, so I was fully capable of jamming my toe, and suffering a paper cut with no intervention. Otherwise, I would have realized what I had long ago. It wasn’t until 2016 that evidence really came to light, and to say the least, it was a shocking revelation. I would have died if not for this little ring. What might have killed me is actually what gave the ring the power it needed to work, and prevent the incident from killing me.

January 18, perhaps the coldest day of the year. I’m up by 6:00, and decide to go for a walk, because I guess I’m insane. I was working as a sorter for a package courier, and while I didn’t work Monday mornings, I was used to being awake that early. I also had a habit of going on urban hikes alone, because I didn’t have my dog yet. I decided to go in a different direction, and essentially let myself get lost. I could always pull up the GPS on my phone if I really needed to find my way back. I ended up at this sort of pond that looked more like a puddle. To my surprise, it wasn’t frozen over. I sat myself on a rock to rest, and enjoy the quiet. And it really was quiet. I couldn’t hear trains in the distance, or cars driving by. The only reason I could tell I was still on Earth was because of the power lines that hung overhead. There was no precipitation, so I still don’t know what happened, but one of those lines snapped, and started flailing about like it was trying to sell me a used car. I leaned back, hoping to avoid getting hit by it, and slipped. I slid and rolled right into the puddle pond. I remember it not feeling cold at all, I imagine because of all the adrenaline flowing through my veins. Hypothermia likely would have gotten me in the end, but I incurred a huge boost in temperature when that powerline decided to land itself in the water, right in front of me. The electricity burst out of it, and tried to wrap itself around my body. I didn’t have time to fear for my life. All that energy found itself channeled to a single point. My ring. My shield ring was absorbing it all for me, stopping it from stopping my heart. The amount of power the ring needed to shield me was exactly as much as it was getting from the powerline. Not knowing whether this would last, however, I didn’t just sit there in awe. I stood up, and got myself out of the water. Then I ran. I ran back to my house the long way around, because the water and the shock damaged my phone beyond repair. I never told anyone what happened to me, and to this day, I cannot find that pond, or the power lines above it.