Microstory 1848: Rehabilitator

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Everyone believes that Landis Tipton was the first open voldisil in the world, but that’s not true. He’s not even the first healer, though we could argue semantics all day. Landis became famous because he knew how to leverage a business opportunity, and grow his brand. But the man I want to talk about to you today didn’t have that. He wasn’t flashy or sexy. What he did was painful, and comparatively slow, and it was a thankless job. It also wasn’t necessarily permanent. His patients had to work very hard to prevent themselves from falling into the same old habits. He cured them of their affliction, to be sure, but whatever caused them to walk down that path in the first place, it could happen again, or something else could do the same. He didn’t have control over their actions. I understand that, in my final moments, I’m meant to talk about myself, but I feel obligated to tell his story since apparently, no one else has before. As I’ve said, he didn’t become famous, and that’s a damn shame. Still, it’s probably reasonable for me to start the tale from a personal place. I was always very curious and experimental. According to my mother, I burned each hand on the stovetop two days in a row. A normal person—even one so young—will not be fooled twice by the same consequences. But I guess I couldn’t help myself. Sure, it burned me the first time, but why would that mean it would burn me again? In the era that I was growing up, it was perfectly normal for a child to go off on their own, on their bicycle, or whathaveyou. I was particularly bad about this, though, getting much farther away from the safe zone than I really should have. I loved to explore, and I never got lost, but my personality is what got me into trouble. I fell into the world of drugs when I was thirteen years old. I didn’t surrender to peer pressure, or need to destress. If I hadn’t tried a drug before, I figured I might as well, because what was the worst that could happen? Obviously, a lot. I was an addict.

Notice that I say that I was an addict, because I’m not anymore. Normally, that wouldn’t be accurate; someone like me would be in recovery, but would live the rest of their lives with that mark, and at a greater risk of backsliding. I don’t have to worry about that, because I rid myself of all temptation. Rather, I should say, The Rehabilitator did it for me. He had the special spirit ability to alter the neural chemistry of a client, as well as any physical dependence that they were experiencing. He could remove any addiction from you. I would know, he did it for me. I won’t tell you how I hit rock bottom, because I like to focus on the positive, and he positively fixed me. No more urges, no more second nature routines. I wasn’t disgusted by drugs, like other addiction therapies try to do for you, but I felt no need for them anymore. I returned a few weeks after my very cheap session to thank him for what he did for me. My life was on track. I was rebuilding relationships with people I had pushed away, and I had just gotten the perfect job. We were never great friends, but I stopped by to say hello and chat over the years. He kept doing his thing for other people. He would charge them pennies for a service that literally only he could provide. He could barely make ends meet, but the way he explained it to me, his clients were at their lowest, and charging them a premium would have needlessly made it harder on them. He died a few years ago. His obituary was short, but hundreds of people went to his funeral. The paper didn’t bother investigating why. He was a great man who deserved so much better. I owe him the last forty years of my life.

Microstory 1847: First Husband

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Let me preface this by saying that I’m not a slut. I try to tell people how I met my first husband, and they get hung up on the first part of it, which sort of throws off the flow of the rest of the story. Did I have relationships prior to him? Yes. Did I have relationships after him? Yes. I would ask that you kindly hold all questions until the end. I would rather just not bring it up at all, but it’s kind of important, because you’ll otherwise wonder what I was doing in that hallway in the first place. So. I don’t remember the guy’s name. It was Brad, or Gad, or something dumb like that. He had to go to class, but he said it was cool if I slept there. I knew it wasn’t going anywhere, but I’m really bad about waking up, so I took him up on his offer, and stuck around for the next couple of hours. When I was finally ready to go, I stepped out of the door at the same time as the guy across the hall. We smiled politely—I recall it being quite obvious what I was doing there, but also how totally nonjudgmental he was about it. We kind of had this moment when we didn’t quite realize how hard it was going to be to get down the hallway at the same time. We happened to be moving at the same pace, so right there, I would say it already would have been a meet-cute. Except, like I said, I wasn’t ever going to see the other guy again, so maybe we wouldn’t have even exchanged information. We certainly had time, though, after the next development. We both froze when we saw the same thing. There was a giant snake in the middle of the hall, blocking our way. I don’t know what kind it was, but it was one of the ones that wraps itself around its victims, instead of biting them. Or maybe it bites them too. Or maybe they all bite; I don’t know. I’m just saying it was freakin’ huge. It was surely someone’s pet that got loose and got lost. So we probably weren’t in too much danger, but neither of us knew one way or the other.

The only safe way to react was to get ourselves on the other side of a door. I remember thinking days later how strange it was that there wasn’t an emergency stairwell at the end of the hallway. It just ended at someone else’s room, and I don’t think he was there at the time. Neither was the dude I had just spent the night with, and the locks were the kind that automatically pop into place when you close the door, key or no, so I couldn’t get back in. Being the gentleman that he always was, my future husband, of course, let me sit in his room. You might ask why we didn’t try to call for help, but first, yelling down the hallway seemed counterproductive, because what if that freaked the snake out? He seemed pretty chill, but again, we couldn’t know that. Secondly, this was the early eighties. Lots of dorms installed phone lines in individual dorm rooms by then, but not all of them shelled out the money for it, and my school really wanted to budget for academics. I admired that back then, and I still admire it now. We generally didn’t need phones. The payphone by the front desk was good enough for the era, because most hallways weren’t infested with snakes. We got to talking, and found out what we had in common, and what we didn’t. It was nearly an hour before we heard a commotion outside. A couple of guys were a lot less nervous about it than we were. They picked it up, and carried it up to the third floor together. Evidently, they knew who it belonged to. And us? Well, as you know, we eventually got married. He will always be my first love, and if there’s an afterlife, I honestly hope we meet again, because I know that he and my second husband would get along so great.

Microstory 1846: Antinatalist

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I was invisible in grade school, which is how I liked it, I guess. It did get weird a few times. At least once a semester, a “really cool person” would ask me if I was new. I lived in the same place, and went to the same feeder schools, my whole childhood. No, I wasn’t new. I have never been new. I didn’t care about my grades, or socialization, or my future. I could always see how petty and unimportant everything was. Literally everything. There was no point to any of our actions. I’ve heard people tell stories about how they’ve helped people by their good deeds, but so what? Who cares about helping those people? The only reason to make people’s lives better is if they make other people’s lives better, but if you follow that logic trail far enough, you’ll find out that it’s turtles...all the way up. It doesn’t actually amount to anything. It’s just a pointless chain of meaninglessness. It wasn’t until junior year of high school in philosophy class where I first heard the term antinatalism. I was honestly blown away by it. Everything the text said about it felt like I was the one who wrote it. I came up with the concept all by myself, I just didn’t know someone had done the same before me. There must be others like me, right? We could be spread out and quiet, but they had to be there somewhere? I discovered there was this whole online community of like-minded individuals who saw the world as I did. I learned more about the movement from them, and for the first time in my life, I felt seen. I felt like I wasn’t crazy. It legitimized my whole everything. I had to know more. I had to know how we could get the word out there. Other people needed to understand that the things we said made sense, and it wasn’t just nihilistic bullcrap. Needless to say, any efforts I made to spread the word were as fruitless as life itself is.

There’s a lot of misinformation about antinatalism that I felt obligated to clear up. We don’t advocate for murder, for suicide, or even abortion, though some might be leaning towards that. I suppose I can only give you my perspective, but others come to it from different angles. There is so much suffering in the world, and there are so many people who could be easing that suffering, or who are actively causing it in the first place. So basically if you do that math by eliminating not only all the bad, but all the causes of the bad, the equation amounts to zero. The only way to reach a state of zero war, zero hunger, and zero pain is...wait for it, zero people. There will always be conflict, and hatred, and strife unless we discontinue the human race. To our knowledge, no one has ever even once asked to be born. It is always forced upon us, and what results is a life of sadness and disappointment. I can’t say whether the good outweighs the bad, or the other way around, but the way I see it, it doesn’t matter. I know that the bad is too much; it weighs the goodness down enough to warrant getting rid of it. And like I said, the only way to get rid of it is to not exist. Nothing else has worked so far, and I see no reason for it to start working now. As I mentioned, we’re not about suicide. If you’re suicidal, and you want help, you should go seek that help. I’m not personally going to help you, but I will neither stop you, nor encourage you. But I’ve always been reckless, because living my life with such care when I don’t believe anyone else should ever be born from this moment on would feel like hypocrisy to me. I came to these woods to see the beauty, because being away from people is the only time I ever feel moderately content. But as the hypothermia slowly takes over, all I can think is, I don’t wanna die.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 28, 2386

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Rátfrid was an astounding entity, composed of something that he referred to as computronium gas. Disparate particles maintained cohesion with an electromagnetic field, and communicated with one another much like neural synapses, as Leona had surmised. He was capable of processing information at a speed that none of them could fathom, and not just because it was so amazing, but because they didn’t recognize the system of measurement. For as great as he was, he was not capable of spaceflight. He just sort of floated there, letting gravity take him wherever it would. Fortunately, the Suadona was, for some reason, equipped with a holding tank capable of housing a compressed form of him for transport. They plotted a course to the neutral zone in the Andromeda galaxy, not even bothering to alert the other detachments what the new plan was. It would take about a month for the ship to get there, so the team had to leave at the beginning of the journey. When they returned to the timestream, they were already back at the summit spot with the detachments. Apparently, Rátfrid had let himself out of the ship, and then programmed it to leave. It would seem they would never be too close to the war.

“Please come in,” Xerian’s voice came in on the radio shortly after midnight central, whatever that meant in this reality.

“This is Captain Leona Matic. Please report.”

“What happened last year?” Xerian questioned.

“We spoke with Rátfrid. He went off to stop the war on his own terms.”

“We cannot proceed without his vote,” Xerian tried to warn her.

“I hate comms talking,” Leona said. “Could you please come here?”

About an hour later, Xerian was back on board. “We really needed him to be here,” he reiterated. “We have gone as far as we can with our strategy. It now requires a unanimous agreement.”

“I understand that,” Leona said. She was prepared for this. It was part of their own strategy discussion that they had even before meeting the RFD. “Tell me about your other attendance policies. What happens if one of you is destroyed? What happens if one of you is so out of control that the rest have to vote on what to do about that detachment? Surely you wouldn’t have them vote on whether to be kicked out of the committee, or whatever it is you are.”

“Actually, we would,” Xerian contended. “If, say, the Warmaker tried to stage a coup, and destroy the rest of us, the other seven would vote on certain repercussions, and so would the Warmaker. They would probably vote to not be punished, but we see no reason not to include them because of that.”

“There are eight of you,” Leona reasoned. “What do you do in a tie?”

“We have never had a tie.”

“But you have a protocol for it.”

Xerian took an uncomfortably long time to respond. “In the event of a tie, the two detachments most at odds with each other choose champions, who will fight to the death.” He seemed to think they would have a problem with this, and it was true, they did, but they were not surprised or shocked by it. It always comes back to violence.

“Champions,” Leona echoed, “proxies.”

“Yes.”

“Could someone theoretically vote as a proxy?”

Xerian smiled, and shook his head. “You can’t vote for the RFD, if that’s what you think. I mean, he would have to give you the power, and we would have to vote to accept you. It would be this whole thing. Besides, you’re not cognizant of the issues.”

Leona stood there a moment, thinking it over. They hadn’t gotten this far with their strategy meeting, because it was true, they needed Rátfrid here for something. They needed him to vote for whatever the detachments were voting on, or they needed him to request abstention. He made it absolutely clear that he was utterly disinterested in ever participating in one of these proceedings ever again. He was done with the group, but he also refused to show up, and formalize this decision, because that would defeat the purpose of making it. They were in a real pickle here, so the way she saw it, there was only one way out. “I’m commandeering the Suadona, and I hereby demand to be admitted into the group.”

“What?” Xerian questioned. “You can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“The detachments aren’t this growing group that admits new people,” he tried to explain. “We were once fully integrated into the Fifth Division, and in some ways, we still are. None of us is new. We all broke off at the same time, and we maintained a system of self-governance in order to protect ourselves from retaliation by Fifth Division proper.”

She reached into her bag of holding, and removed her sword. She lifted it up, and trained it on Xerian’s face. “Then I’m taking over the detachment group as a whole. Bow to me.”

“You can’t do that either.”

“Oh, I’m telling you that I am,” Leona said, determined to get through this. “And this blade tells you that I can.”

“It’s impossible. You’re declaring a new war, which we’re all trying to stop.”

“True,” Leona said. “So either we can fight a war—with me on the Suadona, and you on your pathetic little overcompensation machines—or we can fight a literal proxy war. We’ll all choose champions. I’ll fight for me, and the rest of you, whatever. I don’t like your chances, though.”

“This is not our way,” Xerian insisted. “This will not work in your favor.” he wasn’t doubting her ability to fight, but the likelihood of her defeating seven opponents.

Leona nodded disagreeably. “One of my heroes once said, if brute force isn’t working...you’re not using enough of it. I’ll go as far as I need to take control off this bullshit. You still have bulls in this reality?”

“I recognize your meaning.”

“Good.”

“I notice your crew has been silent, and unargumentative. Do they back you?” Xerian asked.

“They’ll do what they need to do,” Leona replied confidently, and she was right.

“Give me another hour.” Xerian disappears to relay the information back to the...they still didn’t know what this collective was called.

A half hour later, Xerian was back, but he was not alone. He was joined by six other people. They were all dressed differently, suggesting that each was a representative of one of the detachments. They did not bother to introduce themselves. “We have agreed to your terms, but we have some of our own, because this is our supercluster, and we won’t allow you to make all of the demands.”

“That’s fair,” Leona admitted.

“You threaten to wrest control of every detachment here. Most of us have taken you up on that offer.” He pointed to the woman on the far end of the line. “The representative from the OCD is abstaining from the fight. She believes that it is vital that she maintain power in order to destroy the Andromedans, should we be left with no other choice. The rest of us reserve the right to fight for ourselves, or to choose our respective champions.”

Only seven people teleported here. There were no others. Either five champions had yet to arrive, or they had something else in mind. It was hard for Leona to believe that the leaders would choose to fight for themselves. That wasn’t usually how it worked. These people were responsible for billions of lives, if not more. That tended to make them feel above engaging in physical violence personally.

Xerian went on, “these champions will have no choice but to be placed in battle. It is up to them to fight, but if they don’t, they will die.”

“I understand,” Leona said.

“In keeping with tradition, participating representatives will now simultaneously point to their respective champions of choice. Again, the champion will have no choice once chosen. Either fight or die.”

They stood in silent anticipation for a moment.

“Now,” Xerian ordered. The man—who was a very large man, they all noticed—next to the OCD rep pointed to himself. The rest pointed to other people. Angela, Marie, Ramses, and Olimpia were all marked as champions, as was Mateo, who would be fighting on Xerian’s behalf. The leaders grimaced, wholly expecting the team to be horrified at this development. But they weren’t, leaving the leaders baffled.

“Well, let’s go,” Ramses said with a shrug.

“You would fight against each other?” Xerian pressed. “You understand it’s to the death? The fight does not end until all but one have fallen.”

“Yeah, let’s get on with it,” Marie argued.

That was not what any of them expected. Together they walked down to the recreation area, where a large dome was constructed with a holographic sky to resemble an outdoor sports stadium. The team didn’t recognize the configuration of the lines painted on the turf. It must have been designed for a sport that people didn’t play in the main sequence. This whole situation reminded Mateo of the epic battle that The Cleanser forced him to watch in the Colosseum replica on Tribulation Island. He could remember being so scared back then, but a lot had changed since. Now they were ready. Now they had a plan. Now they had a contingency. And this was their idea, even if the detachment leaders didn’t know anything about it.

Once they were in the center of the field, Xerian reached up, and snapped his fingers. The stadium was suddenly packed with an audience, and camera drones were flying over their heads to broadcast the spectacle to all with access to the feed. The team didn’t know who that was, or how many of them there were. They couldn’t think about that, though. They had a job to do, and it wasn’t going to take long. Xerian spoke into a microphone for all to hear. He explained what they were doing, and why, as well as the rules, possible outcomes, and consequences. The winner would immediately take control over all of the detachments, except for the Offensive Contingency, and Rátfrid. He also made a point of revealing that Mateo and Leona were married, and no matter what happened here today, that relationship was over.

Once everyone understood the situation, fighters chose their weapons, and took their positions. The OCD rep stood in the center, and held both hands over her head. She looked around to make sure that everyone was ready. Then she pulled her arms down, indicating that it was time to begin. The big man took off. He went for Ramses first, taking his head clean off with his battleaxe. Ramses barely tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t have been able to anyway. The man took out Angela and Marie at pretty much the same time before moving on to Olimpia. They all fell quickly and painlessly which was a nice touch. These people weren’t brutes, they had to give them that. Mateo was a little more difficult. He had to be. It was his job to provide a distraction while Leona set herself up for the finishing blow. Mateo held him off as long as he could with a large shield. Unfortunately, the man was smarter than they realized. He turned around, and smacked Leona against the side of the head, having known she was there the entire time.

Mateo had to act quickly, or they were going to lose everything. He lifted his shield, and jammed it into the back of their opponent’s head, right in the spot where it met his neck. This didn’t kill him, but he was severely damaged. He started stumbling around with his arms outstretched, like a moron with a trashcan over his head. This gave Mateo the opening he needed to pick up the axe, and drive it into the man’s back. The man fell down to his face, and stopped moving. If he wasn’t dead, he soon would be.

Breathing heavily, Mateo turned around, only to be met with a knife in his gut, placed there by his lovely wife. He smiled at her warmly, and she smiled back. The crowd gasped. She didn’t even hesitate, and they did not know what to think of it. That was good. The fact that no one seemed to have guessed their plan was still pretty important at this point. “Were I you,” he said to her before planting a passionate kiss on her lips, holding it for a long time to please the crowd. He died while they were still interlocked, and slipped away from her to the ground.

“Were I you,” she echoed.

The audience didn’t cheer like she expected them to. She was a more ruthless and merciless leader than they ever thought they might have, and they were probably too afraid about what she would do with all her power to react with anything but petrification. A woman murdering her own husband without a second thought was not something they had ever seen before, which was just another piece of information that would help the team end this war once and for all to the best of their ability. This reality was so technologically advanced, but there were still a lot of things they seemed not to have. AI, yes, but not androids. And consciousness transference had evidently not even crossed their minds...pun intended.

The winner threw her knife into the dirt, bloodsoaked blade downwards. As she started to walk off the field, she tapped on her Cassidy cuff to suppress her pattern. She needed to stay in the timestream for at least a full year to understand the sociopolitical state of the supercluster. She didn’t want to keep her power forever, but she had to do a good job in the meantime. She approached the leader of the Offensive Contingency Detachment, standing on the sidelines with a satisfied smile of her own. She was, in fact, the only one not positively outraged by the outcome. Leona shook her new partner’s hand. “I look forward to working with you.” She didn’t break eye contact with her as she added, “the rest of you can go now.”

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Extremus: Year 36

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At first, it was obvious what Captain Leithe needed to do. Dr. Holmes lied to her, claiming that she was trying to help her fix her memory problem when really she was the cause of it, at least part of the time. She had to go. People had to know that she was bad news so the dismissal process could be completed. It was going to be neither easy, nor simple, but it simply had to be done. As Kaiora pondered the proceedings that would follow should she choose to put this on the agenda, however, she had to acknowledge a big issue. Nearly everything would come out about her practice. Every procedure she performed, every medication she prescribed; it would all be out in the open. This information would not be attached to any names, of course, but it had to become evidence, because while it wasn’t all relevant, any of it could be relevant, and it was going to take a specially formed committee time to sort through it. At the very least, this was needlessly humiliating to a well-respected medical professional whose motives Kaiora was not fully cognizant of, and at worst, it placed Olindse in more danger, which defeated the whole purpose.

As it turned out, Kaiora didn’t know that much about what happened to Admiral Olindse Belo. She circumvented a direct order from her Captain to jump into a portal to the future. That’s really all she knew. She didn’t know why she had to go, or when she would arrive. Best practices suggested the best way to handle the situation, since the memory wipe didn’t really take, was to ignore the topic as much as possible. Throwing Dr. Holmes under the bus was not ignoring it, and it was not discreet. Temporal theory states that doubt about the path to reach a known future is tantamount to an unknown future. That is, Kaiora doesn’t know what the timeline is like when Olindse shows up in it, which means she has to assume that every choice she and the people around her make will lead to that future, rather than some random alternative. She’s not free to make any decision she would like, but she’s pretty safe making the reasonable ones since she has no reason to believe they would go against her hypothetical fate.

Still, trying to get rid of Dr. Holmes was a risky move by any standard, so she decided to let it go. The two of them didn’t talk about it for almost three years after that. When they passed in the corridors, or sat across from each other in the executive crew meetings, they exchanged knowing glances, but they did not address the elephant in the room, which they could both see. It was in both of their best interests to pretend it never happened, so that’s what they did. Unfortunately, as the time since has illustrated, it has not been that easy. The tension between them has proved to be a lot more obvious to everyone else. Apparently, there have been two elephants in the same room all along, with neither being mutually visible. It’s affected their work. Surely without coordinating, they’ve both begun to delegate a lot more work that they would traditionally do themselves, worrying their fellow crew members and friends. They never staged an intervention, but independently of each other, the head of surgery spoke with Dr. Holmes, and the Second Lieutenant spoke with Kaiora. That’s when the latter knew she was at her lowest, because if Lars Callaghan thinks there’s something wrong with you, there’s something wrong with you.

Something has to change about this dynamic, and if Kaiora isn’t going to step away from the captain’s seat, there is only one other option. They’re in a meeting now to discuss the future of this crew, and their respective responsibilities on it.

“I’m not going to do it,” Dr. Holmes says before Kaiora has a chance to speak.

“You’re not going to do what?”

“I’m not going to retire.”

While Hock Watcher can effectively be a lifetime appointment, Chief Medical Officer actually is. Dr. Holmes would have to do something pretty bad to lose her job. Premature retirement is even harder. If Kaiora wants to do this, she has to be careful. She has to convince her to make this decision for herself. “I never said that.”

“You were going to suggest it.”

“And how would you know that?” Kaiora questions. “Are you aware of future events in the timeline to which the likes of me are not privy?”

“Oh, here we go again.”

“What do you mean, here we go again? We’ve never talked about this!”

“I see the way you look at me.”

“I see the way you look at me!”

“Are you just going to echo everything that I say?”

“Are you not going to explain yourself? I want to know why you did it. Why did you fuck with my memories?”

“Why did you not question me before?”

Kaiora takes a moment before responding. She sips her tea in the meantime. “Do you know what this room is?”

Dr. Holmes looks over at the walls. “I’ve never been here before. I stay mostly in the medical section.”

Kaiora nods. She places a headband over her forehead. Then she reaches over to a gadget on a table next to her, and flips a switch. Everything changes. They’re still in the same room, but they’re joined by infinite copies of it now, along with infinite copies of Dr. Holmes herself. Kaiora is safe as she’s wearing the headband, but the doctor can see her own duplicates, sitting around her, above her on the ceiling, and below her under the now transparent floor. They’re all looking around at each other too, equally as confused, but each reacting differently to an infinitesimal degree. As time goes on, they begin to pop out of existence, only to be replaced by new copies.

“What is this?” Dr. Holmes asks, and as she does so, an infinite number of others do the same, each in their own special way, at slightly different times, tones, and speeds. The sound echoes unbearably throughout the infinite cosmic expanse. They continue to disappear.

Kaiora clears her throat, and switches off the machine. “This. is the Infinitorium. It’s sometimes known as the quantum duplication room, but to some, that implies the ability to cross dimensional barriers where that function does not exist. You can see and hear your alternates, but only one of you will survive any given moment. The rest are constantly being destroyed. You are dying an infinite number of times every moment of your life. This is the fact of reality, and what this chamber does is show you that, whereas most of the time, you’re free to move on with your life, blissfully ignorant of all the versions of you that didn’t make it. This was an experiment of Old Man’s. He thought the criminals on this ship might find it unenjoyable to be tortured in. See, now you’ve seen. You’ve watched yourself be wiped from existence over and over again, but here’s the catch.” Kaiora leans in. “That’s not what you learned today. What you really saw...is that the next possible version of you to die...could be you.”

Dr. Holmes shifts uncomfortably. “What do you want?”

“I want the goddamn truth. What did you do to my memories? This has been a long time coming.”

Dr. Holmes takes a breath, and does everything to recover from her recent traumatic experience, recognizing that she’ll probably need therapy after this regardless. “I did it to protect the Admiral. You came to me, and told me what happened, and together, we pieced together what you were missing. The memory drops were perfectly fine when they were manufactured. They’re a prescription drug, and I don’t know where Olindse got them, but like any consumable, they go bad. It was expired, Captain Leithe, and you should not have taken it. I keep telling my patients, read the label. Analgesic doesn’t mean what you think it means! Anyway, what your videos don’t mention is that the drug was having a negative impact on other parts of your memory, not just episodic. They were interfering with your ability to walk, and to remember words. You were making yourself look like an idiot, and people were strongly considering recalling you as the captain.

“I found myself incapable of fixing you permanently. The best I could do was give you that nose spray. What it does is sort of consolidate the apparently reproductive memory solution in your system, so it does what it was supposed to do, and only erase your episodic memories. It was a temporary solution, obviously. I never meant to keep you like that. I was working on something that could flush all of it from your body, but that was proving to be more difficult than I thought it would. I delegated my duties, and focused solely on the permanent solution.”

“I didn’t need you to synthesize a system flush,” Kaiora argues. “All I needed to do was stop taking the nose spray.”

“Yeah, I see that now, but since we kept having the same conversation every other day, and the same other conversation every other day, that didn’t occur to me!”

Kaiora took another beat before responding. “Once you realized I was back to normal three years ago, why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because you didn’t say anything. Your past self was trying to protect the Admiral, and I wanted to do the same. Yeah, it sucked that you kept erasing the day you just lived, but I believed you would agree that to be the lesser of two evils. I still don’t know what you know; what you remember about it. You never came to me to run tests, and I didn’t want to...do any more damage to your psyche.”

Kaiora reaches up to massage her forehead, only now realizing that the control headband is still there. She pulls it off, and carelessly throws it across the room. “Shit,” she says loudly, but voicelessly.

“What was that a reaction to, the headband?”

“No,” Kaiora contends. “I messed up. I assumed the worst, and I didn’t talk to you about it.”

“I nearly retired because of what happened, Captain. I’ve never made a mistake like that. I’ve never been so reckless with someone’s neurology; someone’s life. I didn’t wanna say anything because...I was afraid to lose my job, and my reputation. As soon as they posted this position for the Extremus mission, I dreamed of dying at my desk. I wanted to outlast everybody, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a doctor it’s that patients benefit from continuity. What I did to you...and what I didn’t do, it threatened all of that. It threatened my legacy, and I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” Kaiora echoes. “I jumped to conclusions, and that’s not the sign of a good leader. Halan Yenant would never have done that.”

“Yenant is not without his faults. I mean, he’s the one in hock.”

“He shouldn’t be.”

“Yes, he should, and not because he broke the law—his actions saved the lives of thousands on board, and tens of thousands of our ship’s descendants, and countless generations beyond the realization of our mission. But the next guy won’t have such good intentions, and we can’t let that guy think that we’ll just forgive and forget. That was Halan’s true sacrifice, and we can’t rob him of it. I know you and Olindse have always wanted to get him out, but it can’t be done. He’ll die in there, just like I’ll die at my desk...assuming you aren’t still trying to get me out.”

“No, doctor. I was wrong.”

“Welcome to the club.”

While they’re sitting in silence, the doorbell rings. It’s excruciatingly annoying, and needlessly echoey. Kaiora stands up, and looks at the screen. It’s Lieutenant Seelen. “What is it, Corinna?”

“If you’re done with, uh..whatever it is you’re doing in there, the resupply team found something.”

“I’ll be right there.”

“Thanks, Captain, for understanding.”

“Thanks for protecting the timeline. That’s what I was trying to do too.”

They both teleport out of the room, but go to different places. Kaiora lands in the cargo bay. Nearly three decades ago, this team’s predecessors sent the first drones out to nearby planets in the past to mine precious resources, and return them to the Extremus. They’ve continued to do this on an as-needed basis, but the process has become more difficult since Halan sent them into the intergalactic void. There are worlds out here, but they’re incredibly dispersed, and hard to find, which makes every mission that much more important than before. If they run out, the mission will be a bust, and they will probably all die.

“I was told you found something.”

“Yes, Captain,” the cargomaster tells her. He escorts her over to a stack of raw materials that were in the middle of being sorted. He points down at a block of metallic hydrogen. On top of it is a clear box, not larger than a tall man’s fist. There is a life inside of it, which Kaiora has to lean in and squint to make out.

“Oh my God.”

“That’s what we were thinking.”

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Microstory 1845: Home

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When I was a young lady, a group of mostly white people came to my village to tell us about their religion. We did not understand why they felt the need to do this, and we did not understand their words, but we listened to them patiently, and then went back to our business. A boy around my age caught my eye, and seemingly I his. He was quiet, and did not speak, and he was not white, but he was from the West. It appeared that he did not want to be there, doing this. Now, I’m not saying that these missionaries were bad, but they were not wanted, and we were happy when they moved on to the next village. The following night, the boy snuck out, and crossed the bridge to see me again. It was hard for us to communicate, but we figured it out. I was able to piece together that he was from Africa. I could not tell back then which country, but I know now that it was Gambia. The missionaries had once come to his home too, speaking their words. While they were there, a warlord came through, and tried to recruit all of the young boys to fight in a war that they did not believe in. His parents did not want him to fight, so they asked the missionaries to take him away. That sacrifice possibly saved his life, but he never found out what happened to his family. Back then, you could not simply look someone up on the internet. He always assumed the fighters found out what they did, and killed them for it. Two of the white missionaries raised them from then on, and he had felt indebted to them ever since. But he did not believe in their religion, and he did want to try to convince others to either. He could see that there was a difference between his group and the warlord, but he could not help but also see the parallels. They weren’t being violent, but they were being intrusive, and he did not want to do it anymore.

He was about to turn eighteen years of age, and in their culture, that meant he was a man. Together, we came up with a plan. It was clear that my village and our neighbors were not going to have anything to do with the white man’s God. The missionaries were respectful of this, but they did not like to give up if they did not have to. They had intentions to travel on, and continue spreading their words, but the boy told them that he wanted to stay. He thought my people only needed more time to learn the language, and see the light. This was his special way of getting out of his responsibilities without letting the group know the truth. It took him some time to persuade them, but they eventually saw it as a sort of rite of passage. He was ready to go off on his own, and this was the perfect opportunity for him. When they left, the boy was glad for a moment, but then he realized he had nowhere to go. He was in the middle of a strange country, and he did not know anyone but me. He wanted to go back to Usonia, to start his new life, free from the burden of proselytization, but he had no means of accomplishing this. He had no money, and no connections. I was able to explain to him that it was perfectly fine if he stayed with us. He could work in the fields, and build his own dwelling. One day, he might be able to return to North America, or anywhere else he wanted to go. He never did end up doing that, but not because he was unable to. We eventually fell in love, and after he finished constructing that dwelling, we lived in it together. We had three beautiful children, and seven grandchildren so far. He died a few years ago, and I have missed him dearly. I do not know what happens after death, if anything. Were his adoptive parents right, or are we? I do not care, as long as he is there waiting for me.

Microstory 1844: Extra

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People often ask me what made me want to be an actor, but I can’t point to anything. There wasn’t a moment when I was enthralled with a character on screen. There wasn’t an emotion I had never felt before. I don’t remember the first three years of my life, but it was that version of me who made the decision for the both of us. As far as I know, I have always been an actor, and I never could have been anything else. I begged my parents to move to Los Angeles, but they refused. I honestly believe they would have agreed to it if we had lived in, I dunno, Tennessee, or something. They were so supportive of my dreams, but we were in New York, so I guess they looked at it as a lateral move. “If you want to act, you can do it here,” my mom would tell me. I didn’t want to do stagework, though. I wanted to be on the screen. I wanted to shoot something once, and have anybody in the world be able to see it again forever and ever. As the years went by, I didn’t let my living situation get in my way. I went to auditions for things that were shooting in the area, and while I didn’t get any roles, I think I gained a lot of great experience. That’s how I saw it. Every failure was just a step towards success. Then I got the audition that changed my life. I can’t remember what the role was exactly. I think I was a little too old for it, but the casting director was handing out little flyers calling for extras. There were going to be huge crowds in the movie, so they were trying to fill out the streets. It was an alien invasion, so we had to run from spaceships flying down to kill us. I thought, all right, it’s just more experience, right? It was so great, being on set around all those people. We were all there for the same thing; to support the main cast, and we all understood our jobs.

I had to join a talent agency to get more parts like that, and I found myself preferring it. I suddenly realized that I no longer wanted to be an actor. Yeah, that’s how I got started, but I ended up enjoying staying in the background. I wasn’t getting noticed, but I met a lot of really cool people, including celebrities, and it was always fun. It was pretty steady work too. Film crews always needed people like me to make it look like their story took place in the real world, instead of a snowglobe, like Waiting For Godot. Then my career changed again. I was in a movie about a demon who could possess recently deceased bodies. In one scene, he was having a menacing conversation with the hero on the battlefield, so there were plenty of fresh bodies to possess. Several of the extras were elevated a little bit to actually say a few lines before crumpling to the ground, and making way for the next possession. Luck of the draw, mine was the last body used before the protagonist realized how to kill the demon permanently. So instead of just falling down like the others, I had to pretend to die. I was given no direction for this, I had to figure it out myself. Everyone on set was extremely pleased with my performance. We nailed that thing in one take, and the audience received it well. People were talking about it online, trying to figure out who I was, because I wasn’t credited for it. This was my big break, and I didn’t even see it coming. Talent agencies started reaching out to me, hoping to book me auditions for speaking parts, and I ended up choosing one out of L.A. By then, I had enough money to get out there on my own, and get back to what I originally wanted. I die today with 56 titles on my résumé, the last of which will have to be released posthumously. My agent says she’ll get me a dedication credit.

Microstory 1843: Granddaughter

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I don’t want to talk about my life, nor my death. I would rather gush about my granddaughter. That is a grandmother’s job. Thack Natalie Collins was born in 1988 in Tāmaki Makaurau, as was her mother, as was I, and as was my mother. We didn’t know about the voldisil back then, but we all felt it that day in the maternity ward. The whole hospital, in fact, felt something change. When she came into this world, she brought with her a light that no one had ever seen before. Most kept to themselves about it, but people reported gaining new perspective on the universe, and their place in it. They could sense how we were all connected, and how everything mattered. There was no purpose to our reality, but there was an order, and it all fit together. As she grew older, she proved herself to be quite the storyteller. Before she could write, she was telling us about a young man fighting for peace on a chain of islands, and a pair of dolphins who tried to help humans survive a pandemic. We were so enamored with her, we didn’t understand where she was coming up with these stories. If pressed, she could answer nearly any question we threw at her. Where was this character born, and what was their middle name? What was their favorite school subject? She responded immediately, not like she knew we would ask it, but like she already knew everything about this person, so it didn’t matter what we asked. Occasionally, a follow up question would give her pause, but she didn’t look like she was trying to come up with an answer. You know what I mean, that look that people have when they’re contemplating something. No, her eyes looked more like she had to find the information from a book laid before her, except there was no book. She was getting the answers from somewhere, though, and we realized later how literal this was. All of her stories were actually true.

She witnesses events across time, space, and dimensional barriers. She can see the entire multiverse. I don’t claim to know how her ability works, or how she came to possess it. The way she tells it, she has three parents. My daughter and her husband share her with a third entity, who keeps themselves hidden from the rest of us. Thack’s father felt violated by this, but sex seems to have nothing to do with it. Evidently, a human being is normally given their soul by their god, but for some reason, voldisil receive theirs from someone living on a lower plane of existence; one that is closer to ours. Thack doesn’t know much more than that, but she knows just about everything else. Except about our universe. That appears to be rather hazy for her, which is probably for the best. Knowing what’s going to happen in the future for people around you would be an incredible burden that I can’t fathom. It’s much safer to stay distant from them, and just let them do their thing. Thack doesn’t live like that, however. She injects herself into the stories, guiding the right people to the right decisions to make the cosmic puzzle look the best that it can. She doesn’t interfere too much, bolstering herself up to be a god herself, or anything. She just communicates with those who need her the most, and she knows who these particular people are, because they stand out, and their paths aren’t completely clear to her. When I was young, our teacher asked us to write a paper about a person who we admire the most. Most chose historical figures; scientists and leaders. I think I did mine on a protester who died in prison. If I could start that all over again, I would choose my granddaughter, because she’s that amazing.