Extremus: Year 30

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This is a new timeline. Olindse didn’t change her own past, but she changed the future when she skipped over however long it was, and came here. Thatch asks what’s going on, but she ignores his questions. She steps out of the extraction room, and looks at the keypad, because it’s the closest thing with accurate temporal data. “It’s February 26, 2299,” she says.

“Why?” Thatch asks.

“We were about to get caught. Future!Me showed up to save me. Now she’s gone, and I’m here, and I’ve been missing for the last eight months.”

“Oh boy,” he says. “We’re going to have to come up with a good lie.”

“Not we, me. You have to go back home.”

“You’re asking me to go back to my death.”

“You’re gonna die anyway...in seven years, and three months. That happens whether it’s in 2294, or 2306. It’s up to you whether you want to do it in hock, or if you’re going to have one last nice conversation with Halan Yenant before your nurse turns off your life support. Go back and do some good, or stay here and ruin everything.”

He frowns. “Do he and I really have a nice conversation?”

“The best,” she says, not really knowing exactly what went down that day. “The way he tells it, he wishes you two had had more like it.”

“Well...one is better than nothing, I guess.” He nods gracefully. “Do it.”

Olindse sends the only person on this vessel who understood what it was like to be a Vice Admiral whose advice nobody cares about back to the past. Alone again, she returns to her stateroom to take a shower. She’ll have to explain her absence eventually, but there’s no reason she can’t be well-rested and clean when that happens. When she wakes up from her nap, she forces herself to get dressed, and go out to face the music. She thinks she’s come up with a pretty decent lie. The only logical possibility is that Yitro secretly showed up and recruited her for the mission, and for whatever reason, deposited her back on the Extremus months later. Once the time shuttle finally does return, and Yitro is actually back to dispute the lie, things could get complicated, but she’ll burn that bridge when she comes to it.

It’s pretty late, so Captain Leithe probably retired to her own stateroom for the night. Even so, Olindse takes a quick look on the bridge to make sure, then she heads over to get this over with.

The Captain commands the computer to open her door. “Vice Admiral, hello. What can I do for you?”

“I would like to explain.”

“Explain what?”

“My absence.”

“You were gone?”

“What?”

“Olindse, if you need a break to go to the simulator, or the park, that’s fine, you don’t need to ask for permission, or apologize. I’ll find you if I need you.”

“You didn’t notice that I was gone?”

“Well. I’m a little busy.”

“Yeah, but...”

“Seriously,” Kaiora says, “you served your time as captain. Sure, it wasn’t a full shift, but you still deserve to be retired. You experienced the same rigorous coursework the rest of us did, and you were in charge during some of the most insane and stressful years this ship has seen. Just have fun and relax. Don’t feel bad about it.”

Olindse can’t help but grimace. Wow. Just...wow. “Um. ‘Kay.”

Kaiora nods. “So, I’m gonna work on my Quantum Colony planet for a little bit and then head to bed. You’re welcome to join, if you want...on the game, not...the bed.”

“That’s all right, Captain,” Olindse replies. “I’ll see you later.”

“For sure.”

Olindse steps away from the door to prompt it to close, and begins to hyperventilate. She teleports herself back to her stateroom so she can have her panic attack in peace. Eight months. Eight whole fucking months. She was gone for all that time, and no one noticed! How is that even possible? Do they really think that little of her? Is she really that expendable? All that bullshit Kaiora just tried to feed her about deserving to retire because of her prior work was just a lie. If she really felt that way, she would have realized that she hadn’t seen Olindse for the last eight goddamn months!

Olindse paces the room, trying to let go of her anger, but it won’t leave her alone. No, this will not do. Great, she doesn’t have to explain her absence, but that also means she can’t confide in anyone about this. She has to keep it to herself completely, and bottling up her emotions has never served her well. Resolved to get past this, she activates her teleporter again.

The journey to the Extremus planet will ultimately take 216 years. In that time, the population could grow as much as thirteen times its original complement. Until then, there are tens of thousands of unoccupied cabins that won’t see a resident move in for a long time. Some may never be inhabited, as the engineers obviously constructed more than they thought they would need to accommodate the full breadth of the mission. While spreading out is fine, there is a limit to where civilians are allowed to live. When children move away from home, they can put some distance between them and their parents to exercise some independence, but they can’t go all the way to the stern. Many sections are closed off for use, and will remain that way until such time that they are needed. One block of cabins is the furthest from anybody, and is being used for rage rooms.

Virtual reality is generally considered to be indistinguishable from base reality, but people still like being where physical laws are immutable, and where most of their actions cannot be undone. It’s possible to design a simulation where users can destroy objects without fear of consequences, and then logoff, and go about their day. That program probably does exist somewhere on the servers. People don’t really want that, though; not for this. They want to know that the things they’re destroying are real, and that there’s a chance that something they do in one of these rooms could potentially lead to someone having to go to the infirmary. It’s dangerous, and that’s what makes it so therapeutic. The bylaws did not originally account for this section to exist, so for now, it’s not illegal. For the most part, the government and crew turn a blind eye to it, but they could change their minds later, especially as the administration changes hands.

Olindse walks up to the counter, and demands an arsenal of blunt instruments, such as bats, golf clubs, and metal pipes.

“Okay, you’ll need some protective gear too,” the clerk says.

“No,” Olindse insists.

“I’m afraid it’s policy.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Of course, Vice Admiral.”

“Then you know that I can have this place shut down by this time tomorrow. So go over there, grab me some instruments, and stay the hell out of my business.”

He hesitates to answer, but not too long. “As you wish, Vice Admiral.” He hands her the duffel bag.

“Thanks,” she says as she’s taking it from him. “Oh, and I was never here.”

“Of course, sir.”

Olindse walks down to her assigned room, and walks in. It’s full of absolutely ancient technology—some from Earth, and some from Ansutah before the evacuation. Computers, clocks, old media, objects so old that Olindse doesn’t even know what they were used for. There’s a piece of drywall leaning against the real wall, along with an uninstalled glass window. Bottles, cans, pots, and pans. Clothes to rip, and paper to shred. She looks the room over to see what catches her fancy. All of it. Every last object here is about to meet its end. When she’s done, nothing will be even moderately recognizable. She just has to decide where to start. “This’ll do.”

The door opens, and the lights come on. Olindse wakes up abruptly, covered in cuts, and feeling sick. She must have raged herself to sleep.

Captain Kaiora Leithe walks in and offers a hand. “What are you doing here, Admiral?”

“I don’t have to answer that,” Olindse contends.

“Can you at least let me help you up?”

Olindse squints at the hand. She reaches up as if to accept it, but slaps it away instead. “Go to the devil.”

“Are you drunk?”

“I think I found a bottle of something with alcohol in it last night. I don’t know why it’s illegal, I feel so good right now.” She throws up on her own chest.

Kaiora picks a bottle up from the floor. “Damn, Olindse, this liquor stuff is 277 years old. It was poisonous when they made it, and it’s even more poisonous now. It’s probably from the history museum.” She tries to take control of Olindse’s teleporter.

“What are you doing?” Olindse complains, fighting back.

“You need to go to the infirmary. I don’t know what’s gotten you so upset, but you’re gonna die if you don’t receive proper medical treatment.”

Olindse makes one last pull away from the Captain. “And who will care?”

“I will.”

“I was dead for eight months and you didn’t even notice.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Exactly.”

Kaiora looks away, and accesses her brain’s memory archives. “I probably haven’t seen you in eight months. Were you gone that whole time?”

Olindse shoves a finger in Kaiora’s face. “Bingpot!”

“Oh my God. What happened to you? Were you taken?”

“I think we’ve established that you don’t give a flailing fuck.”

“We’ll talk when you’re sober.” Kaiora remembers, as Captain, she has the ability to transport anyone she wants to anywhere she wants, without their permission, and using her own teleporter. She sends them both to Dr. Holmes.

Since alcohol is illegal and rare, alcohol poisoning is not something that happens on the ship very often. It does happen occasionally, and the medical team believes they encounter nearly every single time someone tries to drink, because the moron doesn’t usually have any experience, so the consequences are not something they can sleep off on their own. Admiral Thatch was perhaps the only exception. Earth once made a serious effort to develop a hangover cure to relieve drinkers from some of the harmful side effects of intoxication, but this was around the time that a state of abstinence was sweeping the world due to its rejection by younger generations. Legislatures quietly made the medical treatment itself illegal, so as to not encourage anyone to regress. A different administration may have handled things differently, but research halted, and the world moved towards the recreational drug-free condition it’s in today. The research was picked up again several decades later, and the dream was ultimately realized. By then, there weren’t many people around to need it, but it did come up sometimes when alcohol was forced upon a victim as a weapon, or a form of torture. Dr. Holmes keeps a stash of the stuff on hand.

She injects Olindse with the treatment, causing her to begin to fall asleep within seconds.

“How long will this take?” Kaiora questions.

“A few hours.” Dr. Holmes pulls Olindse to her side, and places a body pillow against her back. “If she were simply drunk, it would be quicker, but she’s on the verge of death, drinking something that old. You could not have brought her in too soon.”

“Call me when she’s awake,” Kaiora orders. “I’m going to retrace her steps.” Privacy is important on Extremus, but so is security. The ship logs the movements of everyone on board. It erases most people’s histories after a month, but VIPs are kept indefinitely for safety reasons. They’re harder to access, though, even for the Captain. She’ll have to file a formal request with current Head of Security, Ramiel Krupin.

“Are you sure about this, sir?” Ramiel asks. “I mean, an Admiral. That’s...”

“She disappeared for eight months, I need to know where she was.”

“Can’t you just ask her?”

“She’s sick. She’s...lost credibility.”

“All due respect, sir, that sounds like a contrivance. I’m going to need you to spell it out for me.” He hands her a tablet. “And I’m going to need you to do it in writing.”

“This is a matter of ship security. I need that information.”

“You need to have a good reason, or you’re not getting it.”

Captain is the highest rank on the ship, even against admirals, even against the civilian government. If anyone is in a position to declare this to suddenly become a dictatorship, it would be Kaiora Leithe. No one else comes close to having the power to pull that off, not even First Chair. She wouldn’t do it obviously, and neither will any future captain, or they would never be selected in the first place. That’s why Halan Yenant’s decision to alter course was such a terrible crime, because he abused his power to do it. Still, even with all this clout, there are precisely two ranks on this ship with the power to overrule anything a captain says. One of them is the Chief Medical Officer, and the other is Head of Security. “Fine. I’ll investigate this myself.” She storms out.

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Microstory 1815: No Contact

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My people have always been aware that the world is larger than just our one little island. We even have a history of trading with some of our neighbors. Many generations ago, however, we decided that we didn’t need anything from anyone else anymore. Our former trade partners accepted this, and moved on, but then my ancestors discovered that there were others who were less used to being told no. As our oral history tells it, one of the first major interactions we had was with an army of men who wanted to take everything that we had. They wore clothing made of rocks, and threw fire at my ancestors. They must have assumed that they were superior warriors. But this is our home; we will always defend it, and we will always be better. The survivors attempted to retreat, but my ancestors only let one of them go so he could warn all others to stay away. Apparently, some people did not get the message, so a few more attempts were made to conquer us. We lost a lot of lives to the wars, but we won every time. After that, a small group of men and women, who appeared to be a family, showed up on our shores. They had books in their hands, and they drew in the sand, and they pointed to the sky. We speak our own special language, so communication would have been rather difficult for them. After much time, the ancestors realized that these strangers were trying to convey the meaning of God. They showed images, and used other symbology, which my people did not recognize, so I believe that they had a very different idea of who God actually was, and what she could do for the world. They too left the island, but much more peaceably, for we are a reasonable people, and we recognize surrender.

The first interaction I remember was when I was only a small boy. I remember them being less hostile than the fighters, but less peaceful than the storytellers. They were trying to take something from us too, but they obviously preferred us to give it to them without bloodshed. I was very young, I don’t know exactly what the white men wanted. They seemed to think that there was something special about our land. We always considered it sacred, but that was no business of theirs. I think they eventually got the message...somehow. My mother led the battle that fought them off. There was less death than in past conquests. No one died on our side, and it was clear that some of the invaders didn’t want to fight at all. They actively tried to pull the more aggressive of their group away, and we let them. We are less violent than we once were. A few suns later, a single woman arrived on the shore. I remember thinking she was pretty, but we still couldn’t tell what she was saying. By her hand gestures, my father believes that she was attempting to apologize for the recent invasion. We let her go, hoping that she understood that it could not happen again, or we would kill without question. One morning many seasons later, after a storm, a girl I hoped to one day marry shouted from the shore. We ran down to find her hovering over a white man who was lying on his back. My mother tried to spear him, but my friend and I stopped her. This man was cold and blue. Pieces of wood and other things had washed up alongside him. It was evident that he did not come on purpose. We begged them not to kill him, and they eventually agreed. We were lucky. A few months later—after the man had given up hope on rescue—my wife-to-be fell into a deadly fever. He gave her some of his medicine, which he did not seem to think was a big deal. Today I’ve learned that she will outlive me.

Microstory 1814: Walking on Water

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My parents owned a ship-building company—specifically, barges—so I’ve been around the ocean my entire life. I know how to row, sail, tie knots; everything that’s associated with ships and boats. It pretty much consumed my being. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I started to get into hiking. I was kind of sick of the water, so I wanted to do something land-based, and that was the best I could come up with. I loved it, so I started doing it more and more. Meanwhile, my parents were trying to put themselves on the map by constructing the longest barge in the world. At 500 meters, it surpassed all others by a great deal, and they were proud of themselves for it, even if there weren’t many uses for the darn things. They were also faster than most ships of the day. With no cargo, they could reach a cruising speed of nine knots, which was pretty impressive. Oh, and they could move on their own, so that was cool. The company spent most of its money on these three giants, and they weren’t shaping up to give us much return on the investment. They needed to show the world what they were capable of. They needed to market themselves. They needed a big show. So I came up with a plan. It was ridiculous and silly, but if I could just get people to hear about the company, it would have been worth it. I decided to try to walk from my home country of Russia to the Nation of Alaska. Crazy, I know, but with these barges under my feet, I figured that there was no reason I couldn’t get this done. It’s good that there were three of them, because I don’t know if it would have worked with just two. They could be attached to one another back to front, allowing travel between them. They weren’t meant to move across the water like this, but they could stay together just fine for long enough to allow me to step from one to the next. Again, we were all well aware of how crazy the plan was, but it worked.

After I stepped onto the second barge, the first one would be detached, and propelled past the next two. By the time I reached the end of the third barge, the first one was attached in front of it, and the second one was already on its way to getting in front of that one. It took a lot of fuel to make this happen. The idea was for me to walk all the way from the Easternmost tip of Russia to the Westernmost tip of Alaska by foot. If the barges moved  significantly forwards, it would have defeated the purpose. The drivers had to be really good at not letting them drift too much, and keeping the undertaking as authentic as possible. In total, I walked over 83 kilometers. I probably walked farther than that actually, because the rule was for the drivers to err on the side of Russia, meaning that if the ships drifted at all, they would have to compensate, and usually that meant they were overcompensating. The distance itself was obviously not that big of a deal. Fifty miles is a relatively easy trek for even an only moderately experienced hiker. Still, the barges weren’t the most comfortable surfaces to walk on, and it was pretty boring most of the time. Even so, I’m proud of myself for having accomplished it. The barges themselves didn’t get much use after that, since they were still so absurd, but the publicity stunt worked. I mean, just hearing about it put my parents’ ship-building company in people’s minds, and when they were in need of a ship, they thought of us before all others. The company thrived after that, and they were able to sell it off for a pretty penny. They knew that I didn’t want to inherit it from them, but I still got a decent cut of the sale, because they considered me so instrumental in its value.

Microstory 1813: Niche Market

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I don’t know why my parents chose to live in a neighborhood with so many old people, but it inspired a business opportunity that taught me the skills that I would need later in life. We were rich, so that wasn’t a problem, but I wanted to make my own money without their help, and I didn’t want to do that just by flipping burgers at a fast food restaurant. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but growing up with my lifestyle, it would have looked like I was just trying to rebel. I also needed to do something interesting, so I could put it on my college application. When I said we were rich, I didn’t mean that we were one of the families that ruled the world. My dad couldn’t just write a check to an Ivy League school, and get me into any program. I still had to prove myself, and my academic record was average to slightly above average. One day, I was watering the flowers in my mother’s front garden when I noticed the old lady next door receiving a pizza delivery for the third time this week. She didn’t seem like the type to like that kind of food; not that much anyway. I hadn’t seen any teenagers come and go, so it just looked really weird. I thought about asking her about it, but that could be embarrassing for her, so I just tried to put it out of my mind. A few days later, the delivery boy was back, so I decided to confront him about it. He told me that he didn’t really know, but she made it sound like she couldn’t get her own food because of her mobility issues. When she was having trouble with her hips, she just ordered in, and since she didn’t like Chinese food, pizza was the only choice. The only choice? That was a travesty. Someone ought to do something about that, I figured. I was technically someone.

I had just turned sixteen, and had my own car. I could have easily been a delivery boy, but working for one store would not have solved the problem that this woman was facing. So instead of going to the restaurants, I went straight to the people in the community. With help, I compiled a list of the oldest and least mobile people in my neighborhood. Then I just knocked on their doors, and pitched them my business plan. It was simple. When they needed food—and they didn’t want pizza or Chinese—they could call me with their order. I would drive to the restaurant myself, and bring it back to them. I charged them fifty cents for the service, which was a lot more than the pizza joints were charging for it in 1964, but I was providing them an unprecedented convenience. I could travel to any place in a twenty-mile radius that had a pick-up option. I even later expanded my partner list by convincing sitdown restaurants to make an exception for me. I mostly worked by myself, but my older sister helped me out when her school was on break. If any of this sounds familiar, that’s because this sort of thing happens all the time now. There are a handful of companies that provide the same thing with an application on your phone. It’s so common now, it’s hard to believe that it ever wasn’t. I laugh when people ask me whether I think all those companies stole my idea. No, I wouldn’t say so. I was in such a niche market, and before all that technology. You can’t really say they were much alike. I never would have thought to grow that large. It was just about making a little cash, and giving me an edge for college applications. I shuttered my small business when that actually came to fruition, but that experience gave me insight that my business school classmates didn’t have. I did well, and learned everything I needed to know to start my nationwide flower delivery service.

Microstory 1812: Civic Duty

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I was alive for the turn of the 20th century, but I obviously don’t remember it. I was only a few months old at the time, but I still get people asking me what the 19th century was like. I suppose it wasn’t much different than the early 1900s. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 122 years on this Earth, it’s that things don’t change dramatically. They’re drastic. It’s not like January 1, 1980 hit, and everyone who was listening to disco at the time turned it off all at once. Life is a journey, and it’s hard to see the path while you’re on it. Living all these years, I can see my pattern; where I’ve been, and whether I made the right choices. I made a lot of mistakes, and I die with a lot of regrets. We didn’t have much money growing up, but my parents saved so they could send me and my two sisters to college. They wanted us to get ourselves educated, so that we could choose whether we wanted to work or not. Some women didn’t have a choice back then. If you didn’t continue school, you had to find a man to take care of you. Well, those weren’t the only two options, but they were the only two society told you about. I was the middle child. My younger sister didn’t go, and married the widower who lived a few streets down. Our parents were tight-lipped about our financial situation, so it wasn’t until decades later during a fight when my sister let it slip that she actually did want to go, but I had taken her tuition for myself. I was smart enough to get accepted into a really good school, but unfortunately, it cost a bit more than my parents could afford. Their future son-in-law helped make up some of the difference for me, but that left nothing for my poor baby sister, who ended up being—let’s face it—the prize for his generosity. Reportedly, he would have been willing to shoulder the burden of her higher education too, but I suspect that he strongly discouraged it. He was an old man, and she was a pretty seventeen-year-old trophy. He wanted her to be dependent on him.

As far as I could tell, he wasn’t abusive, even for the time period, which saw more blatant inequality than 2021. And when he died, she inherited all of his money, so maybe she was the one with the last laugh. I’m certainly not laughing. I went on to find my own problems. I met a nice girl in college. By then, homosexuality was all right on principle, but there was this unfair unwritten rule that you didn’t go down that path unless you were infertile, or had already given the country at least two more children. You see, we had just suffered a massive population decline from a nasty pandemic, and a lot of propaganda came out, urging people to do their part by having as many children as possible. Gay people weren’t deviants anymore, but they weren’t productive. I could have my girl on the side, but I was expected to find a man, so we could do our civic duties together. It was a war, really, against a neighboring country. Both were vying for global domination, but instead of amassing weapons, or developing technology, they figured that growth in all sectors meant prosperity. The man I married ended up not being able to have children, which of course, defeated the whole purpose. Still, neither he, nor the love of my life, were willing to share, so we all lost. Divorce was frowned upon back then, even when it could help the population problem. I wasn’t miserable my whole life, though. He wasn’t nearly as old as my brother-in-law, but he died long before me, and I was free to be myself. By that point, the population was fine, but my love had moved on without me. So I die here today, as alone as I always have been.

Microstory 1811: Overwhelming Emotion

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I never wanted to have children until I became pregnant, and my entire outlook suddenly changed. I heard stories of people like that, and things seem to always change once they lay eyes on their child. It was seeing those two pink lines that really got me. The pregnancy test didn’t look anything like a baby, of course—and of course, I always knew that pregnancy was, like...a thing—I just didn’t think it would happen to me. It became real in that moment, and I fell in love with this little person growing inside of me who I wouldn’t be able to meet for the next nine months. What I didn’t know back then was that she and I would actually never meet. I was scared to tell my husband the news. We weren’t stupid; we got married knowing each other’s feelings on the matter. We discussed a lot of things about the future before we agreed to set a date. Both of our families and friends were so upset when we told them about the wedding, but didn’t have a cutesy story to go along with it. He didn’t ask me at a sports competition, or hide a ring in my dessert. He didn’t even get down on one knee. We were responsible and thoughtful about this decision, and I honestly can’t think of anything more romantic. There is no doubt in my mind that, had I survived, we would have grown old together. I didn’t wait a really long time to tell him about the baby, like they do on TV. That’s like asking for people to find out some other way while hilarity ensues. I sat him down next to me on the couch, took a deep breath, and just said the words. I remember him staring into my eyes, darting his own back and forth, looking for the truth written across my face. He was shocked, and worried, and then his face changed the same way I felt mine change when I found out myself. He felt overwhelmed by his emotions, but one thing was for certain, it all added up to joy. He was excited. We had both changed our minds.

Our family and friends were so excited for us as well when we started spreading the news a few months later. It was like they had forgotten what we had put them through with the whole marriage proposal thing. These reactions started to change when they learned how we were handling the process. No baby shower, no gifts, no opinions about how I should give birth, or who I should choose as my doula. We especially didn’t have a gender reveal party. We let the technician tell us what the sex would be at birth, but we weren’t going to assign a gender to an individual without their say-so. We would call her a she for the first several years of her life until such time that she figured out who she really was. My mother was not happy about this. She wanted to have a party, and she wanted to have another party where people gave us things that were either pink or blue. My husband and I painted the nursery with monster trucks, sports balls, and volcanoes just to piss her off. Don’t worry, we painted over it with a nice neutral green afterwards. As you might have guessed, we still got a lot of gifts, even though we didn’t have a registry. We didn’t need charity regardless, but I kind of always liked the idea of risking getting two of the same item. That’s how they did it in the olden days, and ya know what, people survived the emotional trauma of knowing that their particular gift was returned to the store. I will never know what gender my child would ultimately choose, or what toys she would end up liking the most. I’ll never know how great a father my husband is, or how good a mother I could be. I know one thing, I’m enormously grateful that I chose to give birth in a hospital. Because if I hadn’t, my child probably would have died too.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 21, 2379

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The Cassidy cuffs that they were still wearing—even though everyone on the team was bound to the same pattern, and no longer needed an unnatural way to stay connected—came with a lot of handy features, including a teleporter. They could not simply transport to wherever they wanted, though. When within range, they could only make jumps to each other. At least one of them had to physically be at a particular location in order for the others to come without dealing with that annoying realspace. This was why Mateo had to jetpack over to Xerian’s ship, but Leona didn’t once he had arrived for her.

Mateo was about to exit the no longer operational shower room when he realized how long he had been gone. He didn’t want anyone on the team to know quite yet that he had found a way back to the main sequence, but he also couldn’t explain why he just spent the last fifteen minutes standing naked in a portal closet that was also not supposed to be working. The cuff teleporter was his only hope. Everyone was already right there within several meters of him, but maybe he could fudge with that a little. Maybe he could jump to the other side of this floor, and come out of the working tub so he wouldn’t have to explain to Ramses what took him so long to figure out that the other one was useless. Did he just stand there like an idiot? Or had he realized his mistake right away, and Ramses simply hadn’t noticed him walking by a second time earlier?

Mateo gathered his belongings, but didn’t put his clothes back on, in case the AI had ended up filling up the tub for him. Again, the teleporter wasn’t designed to transport someone to a specific location, but just close enough to a teammate without appearing inside of a wall or floor. He was going to have to kind of do his best. He pressed the button, and jumped.

It was darkish, and he didn’t know where he was. Gravity suddenly took hold of him, and knocked him to his back. He landed on something smooth and soft, and then rolled off onto something soft and cushiony.

“Ouch!” cried a voice. Was that Olimpia?

“Where am I?” Mateo asked in a panic. For a split second he had thought maybe he was in outer space, and in that time, his heart decided to try to burst out of his chest in response. His brain knew he was safe, but his body was still freaking out.

“You are in my grave chamber,” Angela explained. Oh, it was her, not Olimpia. Then she switched on the light. It was both Angela and Olimpia. They were as naked as he was.

“Well,” Mateo said awkwardly. “I guess now we know the teleporter isn’t that precise.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Olimpia replied.

“I’m gonna go,” Mateo declared, sitting up, and fumbling for the hatch.

“Up to you,” Angela said.

They just went right back to what they were doing while he was climbing out of there, desperately trying to hold onto his clothes. Leona was sitting at the table, watching him. “It’s not what it looks like,” Mateo defended. “I mean really, it really isn’t.”

“Why wouldn’t you put on your clothes first, and then test the teleporter?” Leona questioned. Smart as a whip. “And why would you ever test it on a spaceship this small?”

“That’s why you wear the pants in this relationship?” he tried to joke.

“Well...maybe you ought to...try it yourself.”

“Yeah.” He started putting his clothes back on. “Everything okay in engineering?”

“It’s fine,” she answered. “I want us to be geared up by midnight when we arrive near the Nexus planet. We don’t know what we’re walking into, so you should get some sleep now.”

“Okay.”

“In your own grave chamber,” Leona added.

“I know.” He started walking towards it.

“No, not ours...yours.” She gently jerked her head towards the one that Jeremy used to sleep in.

“Leona...”

“We’re fine, I know you weren’t cheating on me, but...I need to be able to sleep here in a minute too, and I know how you get when you’re...because of what you saw.”

That was true, he was in the mood now. “Okay.”

Nobody talked about what happened to them. Ramses could sense some tension, but he ignored it. He was probably still thinking about the last chapter he read in his book. Leona, meanwhile, was making sure that the AOC was programmed correctly. They wanted it to come out of reframe speed about sixty astronomical units from the destination, and find a place to hide on an object out there. The star system may be equipped with defenses capable of detecting it, but this was as far out as they wanted to be. It would take about an hour to complete the journey from there, making maximum range rapid burst jumps, and then pausing to let the vessel cool down and recover. Most of the time, when they tried something like this, they would end up getting caught anyway, but they still had to try every time.

This time, it worked. When they returned to the timestream a year later, they found themselves sitting on a comet in a highly elliptical orbit around a class IV subgiant. No other vessels were around, and no one had fiddled with their ship while they were gone. According to data it collected for them, the single terrestrial planet was orbiting in the habitable zone, and was, in fact, inhabited. The locals were a group of resistance nonfighters. They didn’t want to bring down the system, but they wanted to live outside of it. The Nexus served as a means of ferrying refugees from the Andromeda galaxy, where the war was raging. Out here in the void, it was harder for the Security Watchhouse Detachment to find them. Detachment, Leona noted upon hearing this. If the matrioshka-class SWD was a detachment then they needed to be very afraid of the sheer scale of whatever it was detached from. It could be the largest object ever created across the four known realities. Wanderer was apparently a nickname they used in a pathetic attempt to fool the refugees into believing they weren’t truly the enemy. No one was buying it. The Fifth Division was a ruling force, and not everyone wanted to be ruled by them.

The Investigator was like a police cruiser, scouting around for signs of life. The planet here, Paz was the biggest prize, but they scooped up anyone who rejected the Fifth Division’s sovereignty. The theory now was that the SWD was actually being rather cordial with the team, and that the tactic was meant as a means of learning the whereabouts of this intergalactic star system.

“They’re probably going to be quite concerned about us,” Olimpia figured. “We can’t just teleport to the surface, and expect to be welcomed with open arms. We have to warn them that we’re here, and assure them that we come in peace.”

“Agreed,” Leona said. “Computer, send a message. Tell them exactly where we are, and that we seek sanctuary.”

“Acknowledged,” the computer returned.

“Take off the tactical gear,” Leona ordered. “We don’t want to look hostile.”

“Do I have permission to clarify our power systems?” the computer requested.

“Say nothing about the reframe engine. Tell them we use antimatter for propulsion, fusion for internal systems, and have an AU range teleporter drive, or whatever it is they call it here.”

“Understood,” the computer replied. Before too long, it went on, “they’re sending a light year drive to retrieve us.”

“Very well,” Leona said. “How did they sound?”

“Human,” the ship answered.

“I mean tone, demeanor, emotional mood.”

The computer waited a moment. “Human.”

“Does it not understand the question?” Angela asked.

“No, it’s just recognizing its own limitations,” Ramses explained. “Humans are emotional, and it’s not. We programmed it without such things to avoid creating another Sasha or Imzadi. It’s just telling us that the person or persons it conversed with are emotional beings, but it can’t tell us which emotions. It just doesn’t know.”

They sat there for a moment, waiting to be picked up. The computer then finally responded to Ramses’ last words, “correct.”

“We can tweak the language cadence later,” Ramses said. “I think it thinks that it was pausing for effect.”

They waited another moment before the computer said one last thing, “correct.”

A ship suddenly appeared above them. “Crew of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, this is the captain of the Paz Rescue Vessel Ataraxis. We’re here to take you to the inner system. Do we have your consent to transport you to our docking bay?”

“This is the captain of the Stateless Private Vessel AOC. We consent.”

They never met anyone on the ship. It was fast enough to jump them into their bay, jump themselves all the way over to the planet, and then drop them off on the surface before they knew it. The team exited the airlock, shocked by the bright light from the sun. How long had it been since they had seen something like this? It was dark and cloudy on Pluoraia, which was the last planet they had been on that was habitable without human intervention. Before that, they spent a little bit of time on 1816 Earth to say goodbye to Jeremy. They just didn’t do much on planets anymore. Perhaps they would wait to make the trip to Andromeda. This looked like a nice enough place. Sure, they were stumbling on the stairs—because they always kept the AOC at slightly lower gravity than Earth, and this world was reportedly slightly higher than Earth gravity—but they would get used to it quickly. This could be their new home. Maybe.

 “Greetings,” said a woman at the bottom of the stairs. “I’m Florida Telano.”

“Florida, like the state?” Olimpia asked.

“I’ve never heard of that,” Florida said.

“The U.S. doesn’t exist here,” Leona whispered.

“Right. My mistake.”

“Where do you come from?” Florida questioned. The name must have been a linguistic coincidence.

“We would rather keep that private,” Leona said. “We still have family there, and we don’t need any targets on their backs.” Really good lie.

“Understood,” Florida said surprisingly. “Let me give you the tour.” She lifted her arms up to project a hologram of the planet between them. “We are primarily a pitstop on a refugee’s way to their new home. The void consists of millions of minor celestial bodies, which we spread out to avoid detection. Every one of them is hydrogen-rich, and powered by at least one fusion reactor, depending on capacity. It’s capable of self-propulsion at subluminal speeds, but not faster-than-light travel. The idea is to radiate the least amount of heat possible in order to remain hidden. In contrast, Paz is orbiting a Stage Nu subgiant rogue star. It’s hard to find out here in the black, but still rather visible. People do live here, but it’s more dangerous. We are always at risk of being discovered. It’s up to you whether you’re willing to take that risk.”

“We were told that we could go to Andromeda,” Leona said. She showed Florida her handheld device. “A friend gave us these coordinates.”

Florida tilted her head, and frowned. “This is the capital of the Andromedan Consortium. It’s the number one opposing force to the Fifth Divisional Denseterium. It’s safe from the latter, but you’re at the mercy of the former. Some say they’re no better.”

Leona frowned back. She looked over to her team. “We’re not much for hiding anyway, are we?”

“No, not really,” Mateo concurred.

“All right,” Leona decided with a nod, “unless there are any objections, I think we’ll just stay here.”

“Great!” Florida exclaimed with sincerity. “We have a number of options for habitation. You’re welcome to stay on your vessel, or we can place you in a home. The price of the latter is some form of contribution, even if you choose privacy mode—which means we never go to you; you come to us—over community engagement mode.”

“Privacy mode,” they all said in unison.

“And we’ll stay on our ship,” Leona added.

« < » > Table of Contents

Extremus: Year 29

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Every day at 16:15, Olindse Belo sits down at her desk, and has herself a cup of tea. She’s done this since she was promoted to admiral, thinking it was the perfect time to not be needed elsewhere. She ended up not being needed much anyway, but it feels right to keep to a routine, so she’s continued doing it. Apparently knowing this about herself, Past!Olindse wrote a note, and then she burned it with a special lighter that Vice Admiral Thatch left in his desk, which she used for a time when she was first trying to figure out her new role on the ship. The lighter is designed to send messages across time and/or space. As the fire destroys the paper, the quantum configuration of that paper—including its text—is logged into an internal data drive. It then transmits the information to the calibrated destination, and rebuilds the message as it was stored. Past!Olindse scheduled this to happen when she knew her future self would be there to see it transpire. Watching the note materialize was as important as the message itself, or Future!Olindse may have had a harder time trusting the authentication.

The note is cryptic and short so as to preserve the secrecy. It simply reads, Extract Thatch pre-illness. Investigate Bridger section. Tell no one else. Authentication code ΔΟ-5456456. Okay. Well, it’s in her own handwriting, so it seems to be legit. She decides to trust her Past!Self, and follow the instructions. It could be a trick, yes, but there’s a bit of logic to it. She can recall once waking up with scattered memories of the previous day. That potentially fractured day was exactly one year ago. If she had her memories erased, for whatever reason, she probably had a pretty good reason for it, and this mysterious note strongly supports her assumption that the procedure was completely consensual.

Time travel is mostly illegal on Extremus. They don’t want anyone to be able to go back and mess things up, or jump to the future, and gather secret information. There are major exceptions to this. The time shuttle, which has been named the Perran Thatch, was specifically designated to do just that. The drones they occasionally send off to mine raw materials on worlds as they pass by don’t work without it. For the most part, though, it can’t be done without risking severe punishment. It’s not really clear why an extraction mirror was installed on the ship in the first place, given that the engineers never intended anyone to manipulate time at all. Perhaps they wanted later captains to be capable of seeking advice from past captains following their deaths, though that does not alleviate the reality-bending dangers of time travel, which is the whole reason it’s usually illegal. Still, it’s the most likely explanation since the only people who are allowed to even enter the extraction room must be a captain or an admiral. Not even a First Lieutenant has authorization. If Corinna so much as attempts to cross the threshold, even accompanied by Captain Leithe herself, she will supposedly endure terrible pain, and a swift banishment to the other side of the ship. Olindse is all but the only person who can do this, and Thatch is the only person she can extract.

She teleports down to the area, and enters her code into the pad. She could have been deauthorized at some point, since she was only ever an interim captain, and isn’t now a full admiral, but Kaiora would have had to make a point of doing that, and it seems unlikely she bothered. Still, she stands there at the entryway in fear, because she’s never tried this before, and precisely how much it hurts for any would-be trespassers is not a matter of record. Finally, she works up the courage, and steps through. She’s fine. It doesn’t hurt, and she’s not spirited away. She closes the door behind her, and walks up to the mirror. Ah, she should have written down the magic words. There’s a particular sequence a user has to say to activate the mirror. In the fictional source material, which is a book written in the 18th century, it seems to actually be magic. In this case, it’s just a passphrase that the creator employed after being inspired by said book. It’s equally important regardless. “Umm...I stand at the door of life and death? Come forward, spirit. Here’s life. Vice Admiral Perran Thatch of the TGS Extremus, smell blood! Smell life! I summon thee!”

Nothing happens.

“Oh, right. Uh.” She takes out her pocket knife, and cuts her finger, wiping it on the glass. Now it finally works. She doesn’t think she uttered the passphrase exactly as she was taught, but it was evidently close enough.

A youngish and healthyish Thatch is sitting at his desk, right hand cupped around a glass of liquor, while his left hand is working the holoscreen. It takes him a moment to realize that Olindse is there. “Am I about to die?”

“Depends. What is the date?”

“October 2, 2286,” he answers.

“Then no, you’re fine. You die of natural causes, but I need you mobile for a mission in the future, so I’m extracting you while I’m sure that’s still the case. I am Vice Admiral Olindse Belo, and you can’t tell anyone about this; not in my present, or yours.”

“Why is there another vice admiral on this ship?” he questions.

“It’s a long story, and by long, I mean classified.”

He sighs deeply, and downs the rest of his drink. “Very well.” He stands up, and walks through the mirror. “What can I do ya fer, Admiral?”

“While we’re both Vice,” Olindse begins, “you’re the only one authorized to enter the Bridger section. I was an interim captain, so while I’m afforded most privileges that come with my promotion, I do not enjoy them all. It was decided that I did not need access to that part of the ship. However, I actually do need to get in, because there’s something fishy going on.”

“Does this have something to do with that god-awful First Chair of the civilian government?” he asks.

“No.”

“Does it have to do with—”

“Please, no questions. This is about me finding answers to protect the future of this vessel; not about you gathering information to leverage against your friends and enemies.”

“Fine, but you’ll owe me.”

“I already paid,” Olindse lies, suggesting that he goes back to his own time, and collects something from her in her past, and if he has to believe that to be agreeable, then she’s not going to try to clarify.

The both of them look around to make sure no one is watching them, which is a little silly since they’re leaving a highly restricted area in order to travel to a different highly restricted area, but it just seems like the right thing to do. They teleport away.

There’s every chance that someone who works in the Bridger section will send them away and report them for access, but they can’t get in trouble for unauthorized access. Thatch has every right to be here, even though he’s supposed to be dead at this point in time, and he has the right to use his discretion to decide Olindse also has a right to be here. At worst, Olindse is stripped of her rank, but seeing as how she doesn’t do much around here, that doesn’t sound like too great of a loss. They won’t file charges, or place her in hock.

“Last chance. Are you sure about this?” Thatch asks as his hand hovers in front of the keypad.

“I need to know,” Olindse replies.

“Okay,” Thatch says. He punches in his code, and the door opens.

They walk inside. No one is there to greet, or protest against, them. That’s not surprising, though, since they deliberately chose to enter through a sort of back door. They carefully peek around the corners, and quietly begin walking towards the stern. They want to find a terminal to connect to that is as far from human activity as possible, because they won’t want any questions until—what the hell is this?

“What the hell is this?” Thatch asks, not expecting Olindse to know.

She answers the obvious, but still doesn’t get it. “Stasis pods.”

“Stasis pods for who?” Thatch continues. “And are they all full?”

She steps over to the terminal, and tries to look up information, but she has no authorization. Thatch has to enter his own codes to access it, but even he’s limited. “Is that...the number of pods, or somebody’s quantum sequence?”

“That is the number of pods,” Thatch confirms. “And that is the number of pods that are in use.”

“They’re the same.”

“Yes.”

“There are 60,000 secret people on this ship?” Olindse presses.

“It looks like it.”

Olindse looks down the deep corridor, knowing that there are more just like it in other subsections. “A quick bit of math in my head, this means that the Bridger section runs quite nearly the entire length of Extremus, and also most of the width.”

Thatch looks around for answers, but he’s really just working through it in his head. “It’s another ship.”

“A ship inside of a ship?”

“Yes,” he says. “We always knew that this was made as a contingency, we just didn’t know the extent. If everything else is destroyed, they’re supposed to be able to move on. And they would do this by physically separating from us.”

“We have 8500 people on this ship right now, and they still outnumber us three and a half to one.”

“I don’t think it’s a competition.”

“Isn’t it, though? I mean, think about it. “What makes them so special? Why do they get to reach the planet, while the rest of us have to die before the ship makes it all the way? This was meant to be a generational vessel. We voted for that. We agreed to it. We did not agree to this.” She turns towards him angrily. “Why have you not been down here before? Why didn’t you know about this?”

“It didn’t seem to be my place. They only gave me access so Halan wouldn’t be the only one outside of the Bridger crew.”

“Oh my God, Admiral Yenant knows about it, and so does my captain!”

“Probably.”

Olindse fumes for a moment, and then composes herself. “How did my past self find out about this, and why didn’t she let herself remember?”

“Wait, your past self?” Thatch questions.

“Yeah, she used your special lighter, and wrote me a note.”

“And then erased her memories?”

“Apparently.”

“Maybe she knew that someone was going to attack her, but couldn’t stop it.”

She was becoming angry again. “Well, she didn’t say that! Maybe if her note had been a little clearer, I would know what she wanted me to do with this information!”

“That would certainly be nice to know,” he agrees. “Why don’t we ask her?”

“Ask my past self?”

He shrugs. “It’s working for me.”

“That seems like it could turn into a bloody mess.”

“I’m just brainstor—” Thatch freezes in place.

As per protocol, Olindse waves her hand in front of his face. He does not react. She looks over to find a portal. Someone who looks exactly like her is on the other side of it, in the extraction room. “Umm, that is the wrong direction,” she complains. “I need answers from the past.”

“Well, you’re going to get them from the future,” Future!Olindse explains. “And you’re going to get them in the future. You’ll need a lot of patience for this one, honey.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“Sorry, but this is important,” Future!Olindse says. “In about five seconds, a Bridger is going to walk down here to perform her regular maintenance on some of the pods. She’s going to catch you, and while you eventually learn what you truly came down here to find out, you end up in hock before you can do anything about it.”

“But that’s you, you’re talking about yourself,” Present!Olindse points out.

“Yes, it’s me. I did those things. I got caught. I managed to convince Caldr to sneak me to the extraction room. And unless you want to become me one day, you’ll step through this portal right now, and change the past.”

“That’s illegal,” Present!Olindse states the obvious.

“Sometimes you have to break the law to protect it,” Future!Olindse claims, “but you won’t get that chance if you don’t come now and ask Halan about Operation Nova.”

“But...”

“There’s no time!”

“Time is frozen,” Present!Olindse contends.

“No, it’s not!” Future!Olindse argues. “It’s just going really slow!”

“What about him?”

“Bring him too, and then send him right back to his own time period.”

Present!Olindse takes a breath, and goes over her options, of which there is probably only one. Teleportation does not work down here, or they would have used it to get in. It’s a security measure. “Fine,” she growls. As soon as she takes Thatch by the shoulders, perceived time begins approaching the speed of realtime. Just as she’s pushing him through the portal, she hears the hatch opening up behind them.

“—do what I say.” Thatch tries to finish his sentence. “Why’d you bring us back?”

Olindse looks around for her alternate self, but there’s no one else here. “What was that about me having to do what you say?”

“No, I said, I’m just brainstorming. We don’t have to do what I say.”

“Oh.” But she’s preoccupied by her own confusion. Then it hits her. By coming here, she just erased her future self from the timeline, and replaced her.

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