The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 18, 2398

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They’re sitting in the bunker again, just as helpless as they have been most of this week. Fairpoint has not gone back on his word, but it’s Saturday now, so he can’t get in to see Heath and Angela-slash-Marie until Monday. All they can do is wait and hope. God, Mateo hates relying on other people to get things done. Fairpoint is not part of the team, and he can’t be trusted. In the future—and Mateo isn’t sure if he remembers why he knows this already—there will be a new member of this team that can disguise others using her temporal power. When they look at each other, they’ll see their real faces, but when others look at them, they’ll see whoever the team wants them to see. They will be able to turn themselves into anyone, which is a power that he could use right now. He would waltz into that police station, looking like the president of the United States, and order them to release his friends. Then he could end religious war, racism, and all the other global issues. Yeah, it would probably be that easy.

“He doesn’t want kids,” Marie says out of the blue, breaking the silence. She doesn’t look anyone in the eyes, though. She stares straight ahead.

“Heath?” Leona asks.

“It’s like Fairpoint said, Heath is not a zealot,” Marie goes on. “But that doesn’t mean he isn’t religious at all. In his culture, certain people are allowed to have children, and certain people aren’t.”

“What’s...the criteria?” Leona asks tentatively. Is that okay to ask?

Now Marie faces her friend. “Skin color. He’s too light. His bloodline ends with him, because it’s been diluted.”

“That’s...not okay, Marie,” Leona says.

Mateo and Ramses decide to stay out of the conversation.

“I know. Believe me, it was rough learning that about how he was raised. Lighter skinned people have a place. They have responsibilities. So it’s not like he was shunned. Genetics is really complex. It’s not as easy as saying, you can’t have a baby with a white person, though they do say that. And before you think they’re the worst of the worst, plenty of white denominations have similar rules, and some of them are pretty horrific about it. There’s been a history of...I don’t even wanna say the word.”

“It’s okay, we get it,” Leona assures her.

“Anyway, light-skinned babies come from dark-skinned parents all the time, and they just have to assign them certain roles because of that, and disallow procreation to keep the rest pure.”

“How do they feel about you?”

“They’re fine with me,” Marie insists. “They don’t have a problem with white people—though, they would change their minds if they knew my father was a slave owner, as was my arranged betrothed. He promised them he wouldn’t have any kids, and they accepted the risk.”

“What will happen to your baby?”

Marie is silent for a long time, and nobody tries to force her to continue. “I do not have a baby,” she explains. “I have a clump of cells in my uterus.”

“Marie...” Leona doesn’t know what else to say. There is probably nothing she could say.

“I’m not going to carry it to term. I’ve told you I’m happy, but that’s only because of him. I’m not happy here. This is the worst reality we’ve been to. At least the warmongers in the Fifth Division were honest about who they were. They didn’t hide behind divine mandate, or passive aggressive pseudo-tolerance. You’ll see. Stay here for another few months, and you’ll see.”

“We can get you out,” Leona told her. “You and your baby, we’ll get you out of here.”

“And then what?” Marie questions. “Heath can’t come with me down the fourth dimension, so I’ve lost him. There is no guarantee the baby will be like me either. I wasn’t born like this, and we don’t really understand how all that works. I didn’t even think I could have children. I told him as much. I didn’t lie, but I suggested he would have nothing to worry about. Now I have this thing inside of me, and I can only think of one halfway decent outcome.”

“I’m not going to try to convince you to make any particular choice,” Leona begins. “But I’m going to tell you that if you decide to have that child, I’ll love and protect it to my dying breath. Mateo and Ramses can make the same assurance, as I’m sure Olimpia would. Angela has already proved as much. It’s important you know this.”

“Thank you,” Marie says. “I’m pretty convinced already, and I plan to make an appointment with the doctor once I get my identity back, but it’s nice to know you’re by my side.

Leona leans forward, and opens her arms, but doesn’t initiate the hug. She waits for Marie to make that choice too. “I love you.”

“I love you.”

“Were I you,” Mateo says to all of them.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 17, 2398

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Fairpoint Panders is a consultant. Marie isn’t quite certain what that entails, or exactly what kind of projects he consults on, but she knows he has to travel a lot to do it. He usually goes out on a Monday morning, and comes back on a Friday afternoon. She doesn’t have his exact schedule, so the team has to sit in front of his house all afternoon, watching for activity. They have a creepy white van, which they hope neighbors won’t call in as suspicious. Finally, Fairpoint’s classic car pulls up to the driveway. Classic might not be the right word for it. It’s easy to forget that this is 2398, so this thing is positively ancient. Either somebody worked really hard to restore it to working order, or history is a lot more bizarre than any of the newcomers can fathom.

They move the van farther down the block, but still keep an eye out in case he leaves again. They then wait another hour to walk up to the house, because they want to give him time to settle back in, and they don’t want it to look like they’ve been staking out his place all day.

“How long have you been waiting out there for me?” Fairpoint asks.

“We just arrived,” Marie lies.

“I saw you there when I came home,” he reveals. “I didn’t realize it was you, but we’ve had a few break-ins in this neighborhood, so I notice things like that now.”

She gives in. “We just wanted to give you time to get some dinner, or take a shower, or whatever.”

“How thoughtful,” Fairpoint says sarcastically. “Now what the hell are you doing here?”

“Did you hear about Heath?”

His face drops. He looks devastated.

“Oh, no. He’s not dead. He’s just been arrested.”

“Your fault, no doubt,” Fairpoint assumes.

“It was mine,” Mateo blurts out.

“Can we come in?” Marie asks. “I’ll explain everything.”

He thinks about it. “Just you two, and only because I want him to be doing most of the explaining.”

Leona glares at her husband. He apologizes with his eyes. She and Ramses go back to the van to wait.

“Are you thirsty?” Fairpoint asks as he’s gesturing them towards the chairs in the parlor.

“We’re fine, thank you.”

He shrugs and grabs his own beer as he’s sitting down across from them. “Go.”

Mateo looks to Marie for guidance, but they don’t have the telepathic connection that came with his marriage to Leona, so he realizes he’s going to have to handle this himself. “Heath and...Marie’s twin sister were arrested for trespassing and disorderly religious conduct the other night. We need your help advocating for their release.”

“Why can’t you do it?” Fairpoint questions.

“Fair point,” Mateo jokes.

He rolls his eyes. “It was my mother’s name, I’m not ashamed of it.”

“As you shouldn’t be,” Mateo said. “Anyway, the authorities don’t think she’s the sister. They think she’s Marie. So Marie can’t go to them and get her out.”

“What about you and the other two?”

“We have no one that we’re capable of pretending to be.”

“Why do you need to pretend to be anybody?”

Mateo’s gotten better at lying over the years. In one form or another, he usually has the advantage of being a time traveler, or more specifically, of them not knowing this about him, but it doesn’t feel like that’s going to help him here. “We’re deeply embedded, and our true identities must remain a secret...for now.” Vague, not too nefarious-sounding, and altogether meaningless.

Fairpoint takes a sip. “You never mentioned a twin sister.”

“Now you know why,” Marie answers.

“No, I really don’t. You haven’t told me anything.”

“Don’t do it for me,” Marie begs. “Do it for him. Don’t worry about the details.”

“Heath Walton is not a zealot. That’s why I love him.” Fairpoint addresses Mateo. “You see, sir, I’m an atheist, and the only people that religious people hate more than competing religious people are people who don’t believe in anything. If he was arrested for zealotry, it’s because he was covering for something else...or someone else.”

Mateo waits to answer for an appropriate amount of time. “I’m an asset. I know things. More than anything, I can’t be discovered.” Also vague and meaningless, but maybe a little too intriguing. “Please, Mr. Panders, help me make this right. He wasn’t supposed to get wrapped up in this. An—” No, no names. “Marie’s sister said she knew someone in town who could protect us.”

“And she sacrificed herself to protect my baby,” Marie interrupted.

Fairpoint darts his head back over to her. “I just...” He’s seething a little. “Since I know what kind of person you are, I need to know...is it his, or do you even know?”

“There is zero chance that it’s not his,” Marie promises. “I just found out, so I’ve not had time to talk with him about it. Get him back for me so we can have that discussion. And don’t tell them anything about who my sister really is, or that her friends are involved.”

Fairpoint looks at Marie’s still flat stomach. “You always knew what buttons to push. I’ll do it, because I know that one day, he and I will be the couple with the baby, and you’ll just be—”

“A forgotten mistake,” Marie recites. “I recall.” She sighs.

He chuckles, and downs the rest of his beer. “I’m gonna need another, and you’re gonna need to get the hell out of my house before I start thinking of ways to trade you for him.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 16, 2398

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It was annoying to spend a whole other day just sitting around, waiting to do anything to fix this problem. If even one of them had an identity in this reality, they could have gone to check on their friends, but it wasn’t worth the risk. Marie actually wasn’t sure if the authorities would ask for identification or anything, but they most likely would, so there was nothing they could do. They watched the news, which wasn’t reporting the incident. It was a minor infraction, all things considered, so they wouldn’t expect anything to be up there, but there was a small chance, so it was nice to see this was all being kept fairly quiet. The downside was they weren’t entirely certain where Heath and Angela were being held. Based on the location of the arrest, they could guess, but that wasn’t a sure thing either. It should all be resolved in the next couple of days, but they’re finding it hard to wait.

Marie is sitting at the kitchenette table, chin resting on the palm of her hand. “What do you think Olimpia is doing right now?” The two of them had a thing back when there was only one version of Angela. Mateo is unaware how serious it was, or if they had time to attempt to navigate the duplication that complicated matters. She has Heath now, but obviously still feels something.

“Hopefully she doesn’t exist,” Leona decides. “If Dalton accidentally created a shortlived pattern, then we were each delivered to our respective realities a year and a day apart. That would put Olimpia on April 9, 2398.”

“That was a week ago,” Marie laments.

“Yeah, but she should have only been alone for a day,” Leona figures. “We can try to retrieve her in 2399. That gives Ramses and me a lot of time to solve the issue. I think our main obstacle is a lack of accessible temporal energy. But we are still living in salmonverse, and salmoverse still has time travel. If somebody has a way of suppressing it, then they have to be using it for themselves.”

“What does that mean for us?” Mateo asks.

“It means that there is a source of temporal energy, be it a person, a special object, or even a location. If we find it, we can just take the energy we need for ourselves. We’ll have to rebuild the devices that Ramses got from the Parallel, but like I said, we have a year. We will probably want to try it on April 10, 2399.”

“How do we know that Olimpia isn’t on our same non-pattern, wherever she is?” Marie complains. “Maybe she’s been alone for as long as you’ve been here, or as long as I’ve been here.”

“We just can’t think like that,” Mateo tries to say in a comforting voice. “Let’s try to be positive.”

“Well, I’m A-negative,” Marie argues. She stands up, and tries to climb up the narrow steps, but Ramses happens to be coming back down.

When he gets to the bottom, he doesn’t realize right away that she’s trying to get past, so he just stands there for a moment, looking amongst the others to gauge the tone of the room.

“Please!” she says plainly in a raised—but not yelling—voice.

“Sorry.” He steps to the side, and watches her leave in a huff. “Is everything okay?”

“No,” Leona answers, “but...she just needs some time alone.”

“It is safe up there, right?” Mateo asks him.

“I didn’t see any activity. They chose this site well.”

Ramses sits down where Marie was, bored after his forest walk. “What are we gonna do now? We can’t even play RPS-101 Plus.”

“No,” Mateo agrees with a smirk, “but we can play regular RPS-101.” He pulls the wheel from his bag, unfolds it, and presents it to the two of them.

“Where did you get that?” Leona questions.

Mateo shrugs. “I had the industrial synthesizer print it out forever ago. That’s why it’s made of metal instead of paper.”

“How would one even go about playing?” Ramses asked.

“You search the wheel for the gesture you want. Then we pound and shoot just as we would for Rock, Paper, Scissors. Then we consult the outcome list to find out who won. It’s etched on the back.”

Leona stares at the wheel. “I can’t believe you’ve been lugging that thing around this whole time.”

“It’s made of graphene, so it’s light,” Mateo contends.

“That’s not metal.”

“Whatever. Do you wanna play a game?” Mateo offers.

She stares at it some more. “Whatever. Just be careful of choosing Sponge every time, like you usually do.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 15, 2398

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Finding out where Heath and Marie live would be a trivial task for the authorities of the Kansas City Police Department. The rest of the team can’t go back there, and if they manage to break Heath and Angela out of the holding cells—or even if they fail in the attempt—they never will again. Fortunately, while Marie never had any intention of breaking the law before, she devised ways of protecting her assets. The two of them are basically survivalists, and they own a small patch of land on the outskirts of town where they buried a secret bunker. Once the other four reunited at the rendezvous point, they traveled there together to discuss recent events, and formulate a plan. Marie asked Mateo not to mention anything about feeling the pull of their pattern until they could solve this first problem, and he agreed to that with no controversy.

The laws in this reality are very different. It’s been a long and deadly road that got civilization to this point, and they’re paranoid about going backwards. Many separate religions have similar ideas. In fact, a cursory glance at each one might lead an outsider to believe that they all originated from the same few ancient events, and branched out from there. This may be true, but it’s caused hostility either way. One might think that these cross-denominational similarities would help people find common ground, but historically, they’ve only stirred up resentment. It would be unthinkable and impossible to combine their faiths into one, so the fact that they all think they’re right, and they’re right about the same thing, just means that this town ain’t big enough for the both of us. Because one of the major things they have in common is that a select few elite should be in charge of all others, and the crux of the competing religions is that everyone thinks they’re that elite.

While Heath works in information technology, religious studies is a passion of his on the side, and he dedicates his free time to finding a way out of these conflicts. WWVII is perpetually around the corner. Each peacetime is met with another war, and a lot of people want to put a stop to it. Even significant instigators of war don’t really want to do it anymore, they always just feel compelled to compete against the others, who they think aren’t as enlightened and peaceful as them. Scholars came up with a term to describe it, which is Radical Defensivism, noting that it leads to some form of offensivism if left unchecked. But don’t let anyone hear you say that, because suggesting to an individual or group that they’re morally wrong for wanting to protect themselves is considered, on its own, an act of offensive aggression, and will only give them the excuse they were looking for to retaliate.

According to current religious laws, freedom of religious pursuits is protected above all else, but there are limits. Religious practice cannot involve speaking ill of someone else’s beliefs, nor overly promoting one’s own beliefs. That’s what Heath did that has got him in so much trouble. And because he is known in certain circles as someone who attempts to solve the antagonism from a practical and academic standpoint, it’s going to be so much worse for him. And it could put his scholarly peaceful movement in danger, so if his colleagues don’t denounce him and his actions as ironic, they risk destroying their own reputation. They can’t allow one of their own to be labeled a hypocrite, so they have to excise him from all association. Whether he is freed or not, his dream of being a meaningful force for good in this way is over. But there is some hope, because there’s a way to get him out, and it has to do with that first class of religious laws.

By arresting him in the first place, the authorities also risk their reputation. They are not meant to be above the laws, so if they deliberately antagonize someone for their beliefs, they enter a gray area. In fact, the entire thing is a gray area. It might be one’s belief that they ought to be able to demean and argue against other people’s beliefs. There is no way to satisfy some kind of moral imperative when it comes to something like this. The concept itself is self-contradictory. You can’t be intolerant of religiously intolerant people that claim their intolerance is a tenet of their religion. The team could make the case that the cops were being the hypocrites. Heath was shouting his intolerance in the middle of the night in an industrial area where no one else was around. Only the authorities heard his words, so they would have to testify against him in a personal capacity in order to make the arrest stick. If they choose not to—which would be in their best political interests—he should be free to go. He’ll still have to be shunned by his community, but he’ll be able to go home. Angela should be able to go home too, as long as she can successfully convince them that she’s actually Marie.

“So, we’re not breaking them out?” Leona asks.

“We should do this the right way,” Marie replies.

“There’s a problem,” Ramses points out. “None of us has an identity. That’s why Angela took your place, instead of claiming to be herself. You can’t argue on behalf of either of them, because one of you isn’t supposed to exist.”

Marie nods, “that’s why I’m not going to be the one going down there to argue on their behalf. We’re going to need outside help, from someone I hope we can trust.”

“Hope?” Mateo questions.

“Nothing in life is certain, Mateo, not even death or taxes. We should have all learned that by now. I will say that this guy is our best chance, and he has a...”

“A what?” Leona presses.

“He and Heath have history.”

“What kind of history?”

Marie takes a breath. “They were married before us. He believes that I stole Heath from him, and he’s been trying to steal him back ever since. He won’t want to help me, but he’ll want to help Heath. I just hope that side of him overpowers the other.”

“Great,” Leona declares, “let’s go now.”

“He travels during the week for work,” Marie explains. “I don’t usually know where, but I know he won’t be back until Friday.”

“What happens to our friends in the meantime?”

“The holding cells are actually rather comfortable; it’s a religious thing, so they’re not being tortured in there, or anything. This reality does not guarantee speedy due process. I doubt the pigs will do anything with them until next week. You take the good with the bad.”

“One day it will all be the good,” Mateo muses. He didn’t mean to say it, it just came out, and no one has the heart to dispute it. Though many strange things have happened over the years. It could happen again.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 14, 2398

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He felt it. He felt that pull he was so used to, and even the nausea he eventually got over. He had almost forgotten it was even a thing, but yeah, back when Mateo first became an unwilling time traveler, he could sense it coming when his stomach felt a little upset. It was always brief, and of course, not usually useful because of a little invention they call a clock, but it was specific to him, and later Leona. He stops running, but doesn’t let go of Marie’s hand. “Did you feel that?”

“Feel what?” she asks.

“Ah, you didn’t.”

“No, I felt something, but you need to tell me what you’re talking about, so we can compare.”

“I felt like I was about to jump to the future. I was a little queasy, and—”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I felt that too,” she elaborates. “I figured it has something to do with how shitty I feel about leaving my husband with those pigs.”

“You call them pigs here?”

“Not the point, Mateo!”

“Sorry. I don’t think you ever felt the nausea, though, once you became one of us?”

“No, is it because I had a resurrected body before this, and now Ramses’ upgrade? I think I kind of remember Leona mention in passing how it once felt in the beginning.”

He slowly turns back towards that empty parking lot. “There is something about this place. If we come back here, I think we’ll jump. I think it’ll happen. I just think we have to be closer. It is midnight, right?”

“Yeah.” Marie double checks her watch. “Yeah.”

“We have to come back. We have to get the other two, break Angela and Heath out of jail, and then return to that lot just before the following midnight that comes. I did that once. I broke out of a holding cell, and—well, I tried to run into the treeline so they would never catch me, but then my cousin caught up to me; it was this whole thing.”

“Mateo, I wouldn’t be able to do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because Heath isn’t one of us.”

“Crap. Oh, no. You’re stuck here forever. This...this is the only world where you can be happy now.”

“I think so, yeah. It was uncomfortable at first, but now it’s a gift. I’m not a time traveler anymore, and I don’t wanna be.”

Mateo breathes deeply, and sits up against a mostly fallen tree.

“We have to get to the rendezvous point. You can still do what you want. You can still get out of here, if that’s even what’s happening. Maybe it’s just a glitch, so don’t get your hopes up. But I’ll be fine. You’ll still have Angie.”

“No, we’re a team. We keep having to promise you that you’re part of that, and so is your husband, and so is that baby...”

Marie reacts to this reminder in a way that shows she doesn’t know how to feel about it.

“I’m sorry that’s...that’s a private matter. I can’t speak to it.”

She sits down next to him. “It’s okay. I found out right before you showed up, and I was going to tell him, but then we were dealing with all of this, and...”

Mateo sighs again, but more contently this time. “We’ve been looking for a home. We keep saying that that’s what the main sequence is, but who cares? I mean, I have people that I love back there, but I haven’t seen most of them in ages anyway. My own mother doesn’t remember me. Most of the people that I love are right here, and that can be enough. We always wanted to be free, which is why we sent our alternate selves to Havenverse. Why can’t we just make this our own haven?”

She stands back up, brushes the dirt off her hands, and extends one back down to him. “We can, but we have to get out of here before they find us, or we won’t be able to tell Ramses and Leona what happened. We’ll need them to put the team back together.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 13, 2398

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The whole gang is here, but with different jobs. Ramses and Leona are affixing the secret cameras to the lamp posts, while Heath is assisting them. He’s not as educated or experienced as they are, but he works in IT, and has a better grasp of this reality’s technology. It’s not too different from what the other two are used to, but there are some key learning points. Marie is on lookout. She’s listening to a police scanner with her headphones, and literally walking the perimeter, looking out for activity all around them. It’s the middle of the night, so there’s no one around, but every car they hear zipping down the highway less than a kilometer away freaks them out. They’re wearing black, because they have to assume that at least one night security guard is doing periodic rounds in the surrounding buildings. The installers are switching off each light that they work on so they won’t be seen by such an individual, but they’re worried someone will notice that this keeps happening, so the risk is nowhere near zero.

Mateo and Angela are not here for the cameras. They’re just hunting for clues. Every manhole cover, every oddly shaped tree, every unique rock, could be some way into a secret underground base run by time travelers who are in control of this reality. There is something special about this spot, and they want to know what it is. “Anything yet?” he whispers loudly.

“I can’t see a goddamn thing,” she whispers loudly back.

“Well, we can’t do this during the day,” he reminds her.

“Yes, we can,” she argues. “They can’t do what they’re doing in the daylight, but we could probably get away with it.” She tosses a stick back to the ground. “We could kick a football around as cover.”

“What’s a football?” Heath whispers to them.

“It’s a kind of bird,” Mateo jokes. It’s not everyday he meets someone who isn’t orders of magnitude smarter than him.

“Heath, I need more of that tape,” Leona requests.

“Right.” He hops to it. “Here ya go.”

“Look,” Angela tries to begin again. “I’m just saying that we’re probably not gonna find any—”

“Beetlejuice,” Marie announces. She’s whispering too, but louder than the others. “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice,” she adds. Once means trouble is on the way, pack it in. Twice means they should run. Three times means it may already be too late.

Leona and Ramses scoop their parts and equipment into their bags, and prepare to take off, but they wait for the others.

“No, just go,” Mateo orders. “If they catch you with all that, we’ll have no excuse, and the whole thing will have been a waste. We’ll meet at the rendezvous.”

She and Ramses take off.

“You three need to go too,” Heath says, stepping towards the corner of the parking lot facing the most likely direction the cops would come. “If they come here and find no one, they’ll just keep investigating.”

“The guard reported seeing multiple figures in this lot,” Marie explains.

“Then I’ll stay too,” Mateo decides.

“You don’t even have a real identity yet,” Heath argues.

“I do,” his wife reasons. She takes off the police scanner, and hands it to Mateo. 

“So do I,” Angela states. “I’ll take your place.”

“What difference does it make?” her alternate asks.

“The difference is I’m not pregnant,” Angela says.

Heath perks up, clearly unaware of this claim.

“How did you...?”

“Go!” Angela almost screams.

Mateo takes Marie by the hand, and leads her into the trees at full speed. The police cruiser pulls up, and hopefully doesn’t see them. As they’re continuing to make their escape, they hear Heath screaming some nonsense about Daltomism being the only true path to God. They’re going to get in big trouble, but at least he’s diverting attention away from what they were really doing here. It’ll be okay, Mateo decides. They’ll figure out how to break their friends out of jail. They always do.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 12, 2398

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They could spend a lifetime comparing every little difference between the Third Rail, and the main sequence. The Beatles don’t exist, just like a certain movie, except no cognizant singer is going to revive the catalog. Geography is shockingly similar after considering how deep in the past the point of divergence must have taken place. They have evidence of this from the completely foreign botanical world. The trees and plants may look like the kinds they could find back home, but upon closer inspection, they’ve clearly evolved and been bred differently. Even the buildings have a slightly discrepant architecture. It took them a little time to recognize this, because they’ve seen variations before. Every world they go to—be it a planet, a virtual construct, a parallel reality, or even another universe—has had unique design schemes, and this one is no different in that it’s also unique. Now that the team has been here for a few days, they see that technology isn’t as stilted as they once thought. The people here seem to have advanced in some ways faster than others. You couldn’t call it steampunk, but it’s in that same vein.

As far as energy goes, the culture managed to pretty much skip over fossil fuels, and focus on renewable sources. Different regions have different strengths, but wind power is pretty popular. They also have no apparent problem with nuclear power. You’re never more than fifty miles from the nearest nuclear power plant. Despite these developments, space travel is practically non-existence. There are tons of satellites in orbit around Earth, but they haven’t even put a rover on Mars. From what little Angela was able to gather in her capacity as self-appointed team historian, war has been the number one issue globally. Civilization just survived World War VI not thirty years ago. Why haven’t they destroyed themselves in a nuclear holocaust? Religion. Yes, it’s religion that saved them, if you can believe it. All ancient religious texts speak of some kind of sun that’s compressed and trapped in a box, and the venerated few charged with containing and protecting it from evil. While atheism and agnosticism are recently on the rise, superstition regarding these sunboxes only increased once scientists realized that real sunboxes were within their grasp. Never before had a faith been so spot on in regard to something that might happen in the future, with certain sects being eerily detailed with their descriptions of how a sunbox might work.

Unfortunately, there was a major downside to this. Even though multiple religions provided people with the same prophetic warning about nuclear bombs, they failed to generate any other reason for unity. Different kingdoms, nations, and races glommed onto different denominations, and dig their heels in deeper when they perceive a threat from some other. That’s why they keep fighting, and why racism may be worse today than it was in the main sequence circa early 21st century. Angela and Mateo are even more convinced now that they are not the only time travelers here. At least one of them either created the reality itself, or capitalized on an opportunity to mould it to their liking. They may have always wanted society to be like this, or things just got out of hand. Regardless, the team feels compelled to fix it. It’s going to take them longer than any mission has, so they better prepare themselves, do their research, and take their time.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 11, 2398

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Anxious, and needing to feel useful, Mateo took time in the morning alone, coming up with plans. He reorganized his list of all the places he had visited at some point, in some timeline, into a list by proximity to the team’s current location. Some of the more distant places would be more difficult, but surely doable. Then again, he didn’t know that much about this reality, so maybe they would turn out to be impossible. Now that it’s complete, he’s presenting it to Leona.

“Well, Antarctica is going to have to wait.”

“Why?” Mateo asks.

She stares at him in that face she displays when she wants him to figure it out on his own.

“Because it’s cold.”

“Because it’s cold,” she confirms. “You really can’t go until the summer, which for the southern hemisphere...”

“Is winter for us.”

“That’s right. That being said, maybe there are different rules here. It doesn’t turn into the moon, it’s just more treacherous. As for Easter Island, I dunno. For these people, it may just be another random island in the middle of the ocean, or a nature preserve. These are all special temporal locations for us, but who knows what things are like here? Think about what your life was like before you became a time traveler. These were mounds of dirt, and grass, and flora. There were animals, and roads, and precipitation, and bodies of water. It really feels like this is the manifestation of that original assumption about the world. Nobody here knows that time travel exists, partially because...it doesn’t.”

“Somebody knows something,” Mateo reasons. “Obviously what we need to do first is go to Lebanon.”

“I think you should go back to the parking lot.” Heath has entered the room, holding a tray of assorted breakfast beverages. “At first, it seemed random that Marie should show up there, but your arrival at the same place changes the math. Maybe it’s special. Maybe it is for your reality too, but you never knew it.”

“Maybe,” Leona concedes. “It’s certainly closer than the Center of the U.S.”

“The center of the U.S. isn’t in Lebanon,” Heath declares as if it should be obvious.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s Gothenburg.”

“Is that a band, errr...?” Mateo jokes.

“It’s a small town in Nebraska,” Heath tells them.

“Lee-Lee, how is this possible?” Mateo questions.

She thinks about it for a moment, then faces Heath. “Could you show me a map of the United States?”

“Yeah, here.” He takes a phablet out of the pocket of his cargo shorts, and pulls up a map service neither of them are familiar with.

“Whoa,” Mateo notes, staring at it. “What the hell am I looking at here?”

“It’s just a south-up map,” Leona explains.

“But why? It’s freaking me out.”

“Why would north have to be up?”

“Because most of the world is in the northern hemisphere,” Mateo reasons, thinking he’s so clever.

“Eh, whatever. Besides, that’s not even the point here. Look at that. Most of Texas belongs to Mexico. Some of Canada is in the United States. Geography is a human construct, not an inherent one. These incongruent borders are more than enough to change the location of the center of an arbitrary geographic mass.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mateo says. “My cousin lives in The Constant, which is underneath Lebanon. They didn’t move it two centuries ago, or whenever the borders were created. It’s been there for billions of years. That’s still where we need to go.”

“I would check both places,” Heath suggests. “Might as well. You’re gonna be here for a while. Money’s not an issue, if that’s what you’re worried about. We can support everyone here, in whatever venture you need.”

“Thanks,” Leona says. “I do have one question, but I’ll probably have more.”

“Shoot,” Heath allows.

“Ya know what, I have two questions actually,” she amends.

Heath nods

“What is this drink?”

“Hagadesfām juice. It’s a fruit from the Arabian Garden.”

“I’ve never heard of it. Have you ever heard of The Beatles?”

“Is that a band, errr...?”