The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 20, 2398

« < » > Table of Contents

Everything worked perfectly yesterday. Leona injected herself with a boost of temporal energy, which allowed her to transport herself and Alyssa out of the Mariana Trench, and back to the lab. There, Ramses provided her with a can of Bermuda Triangle water, which she poured into the engine of the Bridgette. She then commanded the whole vessel to make a jump to the surface of the ocean, and from there, she was able to fly back to Kansas City. It was a circuitous way of getting the job done, but it worked, and now she’s here, so she can focus on getting her husband back yet again. After all of this, she was exhausted, and she knows her body and mind well enough to know their limits. She went to sleep, and didn’t wake up until the next morning.

Leona generates a map over the holotable. This facility was originally equipped with a 3D scanner that would allow medical professionals to examine a patient infected with whatever disease they’re studying. That scanner is still in the infirmary they set aside for themselves, and this one is the backup, which the government team who retrofitted this place modified to be a regular computer display. “Vulcan Point. It’s an island inside of a crater lake on an island in a lake on an island in the ocean. It’s not the only land mass that’s like this, but where we’re from, it’s the most famous. It’s very small, you could maybe build two houses next to each other there, or a single home of decent size. No one has, it’s completely undeveloped, and protected as a wildlife refuge.”

Curtis walks into the room. “Oh, hey, Leona, you’re awake. Can we talk?”

“I’m in the middle of something right now,” she replies.

“Just...do you remember me? Do you remember us?”

“Yes. You and a version of me were partners in more ways than one for three years before she met Horace Reaver in a very old timeline, but I try not to think too much about that reality, because I didn’t ask for those memories to be blended into my brain, and I feel very distant from them.”

“Okay.” Curtis seems to be in a very vulnerable place right now, but taking care of his mental state is not their priority at the moment. It’s certainly not hers.

“Anyway. These are the most recent satellite images of Vulcan Point Island. Like I said, it’s a refuge, so they don’t allow tours, which is why there’s no activity. No boats, no planes, no hiking trails. If we want to go there, we’ll have to teleport, and probably at night, because it may be monitored. If it’s as important as I believe, it may even have some high level deterrence, like Palmeria does.”

“Didn’t Alyssa say that we’re supposed to go there last, like after all the other errors have been found?” Ramses asks.

“That’s what Danica told her, which means that’s what she wants us to do, and I’m not inclined to follow her rules. If she truly wants me to do that, then she can show her face, and tell us in person.”

Ramses stares at her, and doesn’t speak, but Leona can tell that he has more.

“What, Ram?”

“In any movie, when the bad guy gives the good guy a choice of doing it the way he normally would, or going against his instincts, and following the bad guy’s directions, the good guy chooses his instincts, and it always backfires. Leona, it backfires every time. Danica may be expecting you to skip straight to Vulcan Point, knowing full well that one of the errors we find elsewhere would have been helpful in our pursuit of that final destination.”

“This isn’t a movie,” Leona reasons.

“Well, with the Superintendent in the mix, it kind of is. Our lives follow TV tropes, and the most genre savvy amongst us are the ones who do well. That’s why you keep winning, Leona, because you understand how your opponent thinks. Don’t forget that now. Don’t get emotional.”

Leona wants to get mad at Ramses for calling her emotional, like he’s a 1950s boss who can’t recognize the potential in his secretary, but that would be frustratingly ironic. She can’t give in. She just sighs, and looks away.

“I don’t remember saying what I said,” Alyssa begins to break the silence. “But you relayed it to me. I was clearly about to say that Vulcan Point was not going to lead us to Mateo, and I evidently had already said that he would never be coming back. Something must have convinced me of that.”

Leona nods, acknowledging Alyssa’s words, but not quite agreeing with them. “I think Vulcan Point leads us to Danica, and Danica knows when and where Mateo is.” She swipes the map away, and replaces it with the map that’s showing the last known location of the errors as plotted by the brain scanner on the AOC. “She is in this reality. She’s one of these dots. And if she doesn’t want us to go to Vulcan Point, then that’s exactly where we should go.”

“She may not be one of the dots,” Ramses points out. “Alyssa is not a dot, because my scanner doesn’t detect people with powers, just people who have a weird relationship with time, which she hasn’t really experienced yet.”

“Danica definitely has a weird relationship with time,” Leona argues. “She’s billions of years old.”

“I know, but Alyssa was the only person on the Bridgette, wasn’t she? This means that my scanner wasn’t picking up a real error. It just thought there was an error, because of the tech that was installed on the bridge. Surely Danica has a way to shield herself from being seen.”

“Then build another scanner,” Leona suggests. “Build one that detects temporal energy instead, or something like that.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” Ramses tells her. “That’s why I’ve been studying Curtis’ active abilities. It’s...not going well. So far,” he adds, not wanting to plunge her deeper into depression. What he doesn’t do is reiterate the fact that Danica may still be able to shield herself from that. Enemy or no, she’s one of the most powerful people they have faced, if only due to her age. No one else comes close, not even all the Prestons combined.

“I’m fine,” Curtis says, jumping back into the conversation. “I’ve rested enough, so I can get back into the machine.”

“Are you sure?” Ramses asks.

“Put me in, coach.”

Ramses starts running more tests on Curtis’ presumed unique ability to maintain his powers in this reality. Leona, meanwhile, goes back to her room. It was a quarantine cell, so there’s not much here, but it’s good enough. She doesn’t spend much time there before she gets an idea. She has combat experience, and she isn’t doing much good in the lab. They would all probably be better off if she left, and joined Marie out in the field.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 19, 2398

« < » > Table of Contents

Leona pulls the gear off of her head. “What do you mean, Mateo is never coming back? Where is he?”

Alyssa is discernibly frustrated that she had to say anything, but if she wants this to move along, she can’t ignore Leona’s questions completely. “He stayed in the past. Danica made him. She said it was too dangerous to erase his mind a second time.”

“How far in the past were you?” Leona presses.

“There’s no time for these questions,” Alyssa argues. “Every minute we spend down here is another day up top.”

Leona shakes her head, and starts to pace. “No point in time makes any sense for you two to randomly jump back to, however you did it. If you were with Danica, the only non-random point in time would be when The Constant was first built, which was four and a half billion years ago. But that can’t be right. If a minute here is a day of realtime, that means you have observed over three million years. Are you three million years old?”

“Time wasn’t always moving at this speed. It used to be a lot faster.” Alyssa is growing very impatient. “You weakened the bubble just by coming here, but we still aren’t matched with realtime.”

“You’re just trying to avoid telling me what happened with Danica in the past.”

“No. Danica wanted to avoid that, so she put my memory on a timebomb, and she’s forcing you to either learn her secrets, and lose a lot of time with the rest of the team, or cut your losses, and pop the bubble for good.”

“Argh!” Leona looks around for clues to overcome the dilemma, like she’s just in a simple escape room. If there’s a solution, she can’t see it, and if she really is losing time, that could cause a whole lot of problems for their friends. “How do I break the bubble?”

“That box on the console that doesn’t belong. It tears tiny holes in the bubble, and sends out the distress signal that is probably what brought you here. If you can program it to open a hole permanently, the bubble will burst. At least that’s what she said.”

Leona goes down to the bridge, and inspects the box that she’s talking about. The first thing she has to do is figure out how to open it. She slides her fingers around the edges and the corners, but she doesn’t feel a release. It’s not made of adamantium, though. She takes out her knife, and jams it into the seam, then she pries the top open to reveal the guts of the machine inside. She scans the inner workings a little before understanding what she needs to do. Flip this switch to temporarily cut power to the oscillator. Pull the wire, and reattach it to the contact permanently. Reset the power. Boom. Done.

They watch through the viewport as the translucent bubble slides away like rainfall on a windshield. “I have time to tell you one thing,” Alyssa begins. “What you’re looking for is on Vulcan Point, but you’ll want to go there last. And it’s gonna take you longer than you think. You’ll be really tired by the end of the maze. But before you get any ideas, that’s not where Ma...” She trails off, and goes to la-la land.

This is what happened to Mateo just before he lost his memories in Lebanon. The trigger for him is hypothesized to have been the filling of Danica Lake. In this case, it was the bursting of the time bubble. This seems to be different, however, because he passed out—and there she goes, right to the floor. Damn, Leona could have caught her.

Leona drags the sleeping Alyssa up to the main loft, and lays her on the bed. Then she returns to the bridge, and tries to make contact with the team on the AOC. They don’t respond, but she gets a time announcement back, informing her that it’s November 19, 2398 at 15:05. A minute later, the announcement says that it’s 15:06, which means that the bubble is indeed down, and the urgency is over, as long as her friends aren’t in any danger. She uses their ship as a relay point, and manages to get a hold of Ramses. He’s in the lab with Cheyenne and—funny enough—Curtis Duvall. She hasn’t seen that guy in forever. She tells Ramses that she’s still at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and just needs to figure out how to surface.

She postulates that there were two bubbles around the vessel. One altered the rate of time, and the other just protects The Bridgette from the pressure of the ocean above them. In submarine mode, it can dive deeper than its predecessor, The Olimpia, but not this deep. This is Constant magic at work, and she can’t be sure that it will persist through an attempt to rise back up to their safe depth. This little box was only designed to handle the time bubble, so the force field must be somewhere else. The most likely location is down in engineering. In the Olimpia, that could be found in the back. It was a tight space, but one could stand. Here, the ceiling is 75 centimeters up, making it a crawl space, and she has to get there by opening the steps that lead to the fuselage like a cellar door. Ramses sacrificed comfort for more beds to sleep passengers.

“Hello?” Leona can hear as she’s still working on the engine. She figured out right away that the pressure field will last as long as they don’t try to go anywhere. If they attempt to surface, it will collapse before they have enough time to go all the way up. It’s almost like it was designed that way. The issue is that she is this close to running out of power. A time bubble that can last billions of years would have taken enormous amounts of temporal energy. Not even the tanks on the Bridgette could store enough after being concentrated from immortality water. Yet it all runs out today; not a day too soon? Either Danica is trying to kill them in the most roundabout way, or there’s a way out of this that Leona hasn’t thought of.

Leona slides on her ass back towards the bridge. “I’m down here!”

Alyssa gets on her stomach, and sticks her head over the edge like a reverse prairie dog. “Is everything okay?”

“I don’t suppose you have any idea how we’re supposed to get out of here without the pressure of the ocean crushing us to death?”

“Where are we?”

“What is the last thing you remember?” Leona asks.

“Mateo and I were diving to the bottom of Danica Lake, just in case there were any clues left down there.”

“Were there?”

“I don’t remember.” She takes a beat. “I found this in my pocket when I woke up, though.”

Leona slides farther up to get a better look at what Alyssa is dangling in front of her. It’s an auto-injector. “This is probably temporal energy, and probably enough for me to teleport us to the surface, but not enough to get the whole craft up there.”

“So we have to leave it here?”

“No,” Leona says. “We’ll get more in the Bermuda Triangle, and then come right back. I’m not losing another home.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 18, 2398

« < » > Table of Contents

Curtis shrugs, and claims that he didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to be able to teleport. He was born with the ability, so why wouldn’t he still have it? He evidently knows that he’s in a different reality, but has no idea how he got here, and he certainly doesn’t know how to leave. That’s when Cheyenne climbs back down from the lavatory in the upper level. She stops cold when she sees their visitor. “Curty Birdy.”

“Chey-Chey?” Curtis steps away from the group.

“Are you...are we...?”

“We must be, right?”

“How would we ever know?”

“What’s going on here?” Arcadia interrupts this cryptic conversation.

Cheyenne is still in shock. “Mmm...Arcadia, Vearden, I would like you to meet my husband, Curtis Duvall. I think.”

“I know,” Curtis contends. “We are the same versions of each other.”

“There’s one way to find out.” Arcadia looks over at Ramses. “Do you have a simpatico detector in your bag of tricks?”

“No!” Cheyenne insists, more worried than she maybe should be. “We don’t need to test for simpatico. He believes that we’re from the same timeline, and I believe it too.”

“I don’t have one of those anyway,” Ramses says. “It hasn’t come up.”

“We’re learning more about you everyday,” Vearden points out.

Curtis approaches Vearden and Arcadia, sizing them up. He looks down at her belly. “You be sure to take care of your little girl, Papa Bear and Mama Bear.”

“Am I already showing?” Arcadia starts pawing at her belly.

“You’re glowing,” Curtis clarifies, but not really. He looks back at Cheyenne. “How much do they know about you, and where you’re from?”

“Almost nothing,” she answers. “I would like to keep it that way.”

Curtis nods as he’s turning back to the happy couple. “Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?”

“Jury’s still out,” Arcadia replies. “These people are helping me.”

Curtis sighs. “Is it still 2398?”

“November 17,” Marie says.

Curtis points at her. “Are you Angela?”

“Close enough.”

“That must make you Ramses Abdulrashid, and this the infamous AOC.”

“Yes.”

Curtis starts to look around like a fraud at an art gallery. “She wasn’t a politician in my timeline, though I did know her. We volunteered for Michelle Obama together, along with Leona Delaney. I told her that should run for office herself, I heard that she took my advice, though only in the next timeline.”

“I really would like to study you,” Ramses says, seeing no better opportunity to bring that up again.

Curtis looks to his wife for guidance, who nods. “Fine. Wadya need? Semen?”

“Blood will be enough for now,” Ramses assures him.

Curtis agrees to help with whatever is required for the rest of the day, and into the next. There is only so much that can be done up in orbit, though. Ramses has asked to take Curtis down to his lab for more tests. Cheyenne wants to come too, which would leave Vearden and Arcadia up on the ship alone. It’s highly automated, so that would be fine, except that she’s pregnant, and that doesn’t seem wise. Marie can’t take care of them, because she returned to her team in Paris. If they could only reach Leona, one scientist could be up above, and the other down below, but she’s still missing. So the AOC is empty right now, programmed to orbit the Earth on its own, keeping the place warm for them for whenever they decide to go back. For now, this is where they belong.

“I still can’t believe you finished it.” The last time Ramses was here, this facility was set up for epidemiology research. He asked Winona for certain equipment to be added to the retrofit, and laid out his plans for a few machines, but he didn’t expect anyone to build them in his absence. They went above and beyond. In particular, he’s eying the glass chamber that they constructed in record time according to his very specific specifications. Again, he didn’t ask anyone to do that, he just let them know that he would be building it himself, so they could account for building codes and fire safety.

“I didn’t do anything,” Winona responds. “He did.”

A man wearing a white lab coat underneath a reflective construction vest walks up to them, and shakes Ramses’ hand. “Hi, I’m Niven Murdoch.”

“Murdoch, as in, Baudin?”

“He’s my father,” Niven confirms, “not by blood. I don’t have any time powers myself, but I grew up around them, so I know how to build a simple temporal containment chamber. She’s a beaut, though, ain’t she?” He admires his own work.

“Bridgette’s father, Senator Morton found him.” Winona explains to Ramses. “This was long before your fancy brain scanner. He was trying to get found; put a cryptic classified ad about choosing salmon in the paper every single day for years.”

“Finally got a bite, so to speak,” Niven muses.

Curtis and Cheyenne walk back in. He’s wearing the special underwear that Ramses asked him to put on, and nothing else. “Are you trying to humiliate me, errr...?”

“I promise that it’s all in the name of science,” Ramses tells him. “No one’s going to watch the footage, except for me and Leona, and maybe a few other team members.”

Curtis shrugs. “Eh, whatever. It’s nothing she hasn’t seen already. Oh, didn’t you know?” he asks when Ramses looks at him funny. “We were together for a few years in the 2020s, after she graduated from college. This was before you, Cheyenne.”

“I know,” Cheyenne says.

“We’ll, uh, leave you to your work,” Winona says as she’s stepping away. “Niven?”

“Yes, coming.” His gaze lingers on Curtis a little too long.

“Thanks for the chamber, and everything else you did,” Ramses calls up to him.

“No prob, Bob!” Niven and Winona supposedly leave the lab.

Ramses opens the door to the chamber, and motions for Curtis to step inside. “Full disclosure, this locks from the outside, and if it works properly—”

“It does!” Niven shouts, having apparently not really left.

Ramses kind of ignores him, and moves on. “If it works, you won’t be able to escape, even by teleporting. I didn’t design it for you, but if you’ll trust me, I would like you to help us test it. At the same time, I’ll be taking readings on your abilities.”

“I’m down with that,” Curtis says. “Just tell me what to do.”

Ramses shuts the door, and goes over the computer. “Let’s start with a simple jump from one side of the chamber to the other.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 17, 2398

« < » > Table of Contents

Marie has gotten a lot of steps today, already more than she had yesterday, and it’s not even evening yet. With every orbital pass, the map of the brain scanner errors updates, providing them with a new location of their current target in Paris, France. Whoever it is has been moving around a lot, and they cannot catch up to them. There is no pattern to their movements. Some of the places are good tourist traps, but others are just a random alley, and people’s homes. They appear to be on the move with great purpose. The distance from one location to the next is always short enough to reach within the timeframe, but in some cases, only if they’re being evasive. They never spend too much time in one place, suggesting that they know someone is on their trail, and they’re trying to stay one step ahead. The team is exhausted, and everyone agrees that they need a new tactic. Marie has come up with a plan, but it’s best done after nightfall, so they ignore the next two pings, and wait it out in their small Parisian safehouse.

Three hours later, Marie takes the auto-injector out of her pack. Ramses was embarrassed that they were still using regular syringes up until this point for emergency jolts of temporal energy, but it’s fine. She has it now, and it’s time to use it, even though it’s not technically an emergency. For some reason, she feels like this is going to be a bigger deal than the other times she’s used the stuff. It’s not. She jams it into her leg, presses the button, and feels the usually temperate surge of electricity all over her body.

“Tell me again why you can’t just give us one of those too?” Esmé asks. She just won’t let it go. She’s not a very good diplomat, which is annoying, but Marie isn’t in charge of choosing her own team. Perhaps if she had stayed with the organization fulltime, she might have more pull.

“This doesn’t give me the ability to teleport,” Marie explains once more. “My body was designed with the power. This injector reactivates what’s already there. If I gave you one, it would do nothing. At best, it would add a whopping one hour to your lifespan.”

“I’ll...take it,” Esmé declares. She pretends to not notice Marie rolling her eyes.

“It’s almost time.” Agent Filipowski holds the tablet in front of Marie’s face.

Specialist Cleary and Officer Sharrow take their positions on either side of Marie. “Keep an eye on our realtime pins,” she instructs Doric. She can only carry two other people with her. “I may have to transport our target to a third location.”

“Understood.”

The tablet beeps. “Shit.” They’re at the Eiffel tower. Ramses’ scanner can’t accurately distinguish elevation. They could be on the ground, at the top, or anywhere in between. Plus, even this late, there are going to be tons of people there. They can’t just jump around a few times to look for them. Marie has to make a split second decision, and the rest of her team isn’t going to like it. “I’ll stay in contact, I promise.”

“What are you going to do?” Esmé questions.

“It’s too risky to move in a group.” Marie pulls herself away from the other two, and makes the jump. She’s on the ground underneath the tower. It’s one of the many unusual things about this reality, which is strikingly similar to the main sequence, even with a profoundly altered historical timeline. The primary difference here is that the beams are made of steel, rather than iron. She calls Ramses. “Hey, are ya busy?”

“No, what’s up?” Ramses replies.

“Can you see where I am?”

“Gotcha right here.” The scanner has always picked up on the rest of the time travelers in the group, as they qualify as temporal errors. They have always filtered out and ignored each other, but it’s useful now. “Who’s that with you, Leona? We can’t get a hold of her.”

“No one is with me. The second dot is our target. I lost access to the map. How far away are they?”

“About twenty meters southwest. You better hurry. They’ll go out of range again within ten minutes at the most.”

Marie starts to run. There’s a larger group of people over there, so she could really do with an investigator, but she’s alone, and that was her choice.

“Stop!” Ramses warns. “Two hundred meters directly south of you.”

“They’re a teleporter.”

“Yes.”

“Just like me.” Marie focuses on visualizing the distance, then covers it with another jump. There are fewer people around here, but she still has no idea who she’s looking for. She starts to scan them, hoping to see someone suspicious. She does in a man who’s staring right back at here. Now she has a face. If she doesn’t get him today, she will later. He can’t hide forever.

He teleports away again.

“Jump to the ship,” Ramses tells her.

Marie looks up to the sky, and jumps to the main level of the AOC.

Ramses is waiting for her. He tosses her a handheld device. “He jumped another five hundred meters. Go get him.”

Five hundred meters. That’s an increase, but still not very far as teleporters go. He clearly realizes that he’s being tracked, and he doesn’t want to be caught. That’s fair, he doesn’t know that she could be a friendly. She doesn’t know that either, but she hopes she is. If he’s so worried, though, there must be a reason he’s not bailing to Madagascar or Argentina, or something. Either something is keeping him in the city, or his power has limited range. Regardless, they have to find him. If Ramses can learn why this reality isn’t suppressing his abilities, it will take them one step closer to solving the problem for everyone. She looks at the map, and focuses on the dot. She jumps down to him, and without giving him any chance to react, wraps her arms around him. She then makes one final jump, back to the AOC.

“Curtis Duvall.” Arcadia smiles at him.

“Oh, Leona.” The man goes over and gives her a big hug. “If I had known that you were involved, I never would have kept running.”

“Yes, Leona is involved,” Arcadia confirms, “but I’m not her. I was accidentally placed in this body. I’m Arcadia Preston.”

He nods like that makes total sense. “I don’t know who that is.”

Arcadia narrows her eyes at him. “Which timeline are you from?”

“I don’t know,” Curtis argues. “Why would I know that? What do you want me to do, give it a random designation, like Six-One-Six or Earth-X? I’m from the timeline where I’m from!” That’s a fair point.

“I don’t care about that,” Ramses says dismissively. “I wanna know how you can teleport when no one else in the world still has their time powers.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 16, 2398

« < » > Table of Contents

Leona wasn’t calling Marie and Kivi because she wanted them to try to find her husband in the Mariana Trench. She just wanted to record a census of all the versions of Mateo that they’re currently aware of. The one down there appears to be the only one at the moment, which makes things simpler. The two SD6 teams are free to go off and do their own thing. She’s going to handle this herself, but she needs more data. The global brain scanner that found him operates on two axes. They can get some idea of elevation by measuring the strength of the signal, but it’s impossible to pinpoint a precise location. If she’s going to teleport down to him, she needs to know precisely how deep to go, and where to land, or she’ll end up drowning in the ocean while being crushed by its unyielding thousand atmospheres of pressure.

Ramses has been working on a temporal energy detector capable of surviving the stress of reentry into Earth’s top atmospheric layers, and he’s finally finished. They have decided that this is a perfect opportunity to feed two birds with one worm. The detector will fall to the surface of Earth, measuring the temporal energy fields along the way, as well as hopefully whatever is suppressing that field. It should land in the ocean over the trench, then detach itself from the parachutes, and sink down to look for Mateo.

“About how long will all that take?” Cheyenne asks.

Ramses is monitoring the exterior maintenance robot—or EMR—that’s readying the probe for launch. The ship wasn’t designed for this, so he’s had to improvise a lot of the process. If they’re in a time crunch, that’s all the more reason they can’t rush. “Forty-two minutes and eleven seconds.”

“Oh, so you know exactly how long?”

“Well, I couldn’t tell you how quickly the probe will find Mateo, because the whole point is we don’t know where he is, but if it has to sink all the way to the bottom, it will take forty-two minutes and eleven seconds from launch.”

“If your bot ever finishes building the launch brackets,” Leona says impatiently.

Ramses peels himself from the central hologram to look at her. “I hope you know that there is no guarantee—”

“I know,” she interrupts, frustrated.

“Sorry, what were you gonna say?” Vearden asks.

“He was going to remind me that we can’t be sure Mateo is the one down there,” Leona answers instead. “It’s true, were I you is not, like, this secret phrase that no one else would know. I just don’t think anyone else would think to use it in this situation.”

“Okay,” Ramses says passive-aggressively. “We’ll find out in about forty-two minutes.” He starts heading back down to engineering. “The EMR is finished with its work just in time for our launch window. You can all watch from up here.”

A few minutes later, the probe is through the miniature airlock that Ramses built in engineering, sacrificing what was once used as storage space. It’s now a little bit more difficult to walk around downstairs. The probe flies away from the AOC, and heads for Earth. It screams across the sky, exciting all amateur astronomers who were not expecting such a large piece of orbital debris to decay today. The truth is that it’s not all that large, but it’s built with materials not found in the modern world, so it would be assumed to be the size of a tiny home. Let the conspiracies begin.

The probe is through the rough spots now, so the parachutes deploy to slow its descent. Ramses frowns as he’s watching the data come in. Velocity, temperature, pressure, pollution levels. It’s picking up all of these things, but the one thing it’s not sensing is temporal energy. This is incredibly odd, even for the Third Rail. After it lands on the water, he goes back up to the rest of the group.

Leona shakes her head. “You see these numbers?”

“Yes, they don’t make any sense,” Ramses notes.

“Forgive me, but...” she begins awkwardly

“I didn’t screw it up. The detector is working fine. There is something seriously wrong with this world, and it’s bigger than we ever imagined.”

“I don’t understand,” Vearden says, worried that they’re going to roll their eyes at best, or chew his head off at worst.

“If I’m reading this right—and I’m no scientist, so I might not be—but it says here that you’re not sensing any temporal energy whatsoever,” Arcadia says.

“That’s right,” Leona replies. She reaches forward to play with the interface, but stops. There’s nothing to adjust or calibrate. It’s all laid out before them. It’s all wrong.

“Didn’t we kind of expect that, though?” Vearden presses. “We already know there’s no time travel, at least not down on the planet.”

“There’s always time travel.” Arcadia starts to talk with her hands. “For most people, time moves at a one to one ratio, which means that for every second that passes, one second passes. Temporal energy isn’t this magical substance that we use to manipulate time and space. It’s simply the transfer of excited particles from one moment in time to another, as a function of entropy.”

“Huh?”

“Temporal energy is just what happens when time passes,” Arcadia clarifies. “You can’t have no energy, because that would mean you have no time. It’s either balanced or unbalanced, and as time travelers, we exploit the unbalanced levels, but you can’t just have nothing. If you have nothing, you don’t exist. This world...doesn’t exist!”

The computer beeps. Leona looks back up to the hologram. “The probe is close enough to the source of the were I you signal. I know where to go.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Ramses offers.

“No, stay here and...deal with this.”

Leona puts on her wetsuit, which is a half-measure, since it’s not what’s going to keep her safe down there. It just seems dumb to go down in her civies. She inserts the rebreather in her mouth, nods to the group, and then teleports to the signal. She can instantly tell that she’s standing inside of the Bridgette. She hears someone shuffling behind her, so she turns around to find Alyssa in a defensive position. Alyssa doesn’t loosen up, since Leona doesn’t look like herself with the mask on. “It’s me, it’s me.”

“Oh, okay. I guess it’s 2398 again.”

“Where were you?”

“Billions of years ago.”

“Tell me everything.”

Alyssa shakes her head. “I can’t. My memories are on a detonation mechanism. As soon as we surface, they’ll disappear, and I don’t have time to relay them to you.”

“I understand,” Leona says with a nod. “Is Mateo here?”

She hesitates to answer for a beat. “No. He’s never coming back.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 15, 2398

« < » > Table of Contents

Marie gets out of the shower with a yawn. She looks around to make sure that no one saw it. Fortunately there’s no one else in the room, except for one person making some noise in the locker area. She wraps her towels around herself, and heads that direction, where her locker is anyway. Esmé is going through a lock-and-load montage. “Officer Sharrow, what are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m gearing up.”

“Gearing up for what, war?”

“We don’t know what we’re going into. I like to be prepared,” Esmé reasons.

“You’re our diplomat, did no one tell you that?”

Esmé sighs, annoyed. “You haven’t been with the division in a while. I don’t trust Nero anymore. He’s lost his edge.”

“Specialist Cleary has passed all of his recent evaluations. I asked him to tone down the weaponry. Perhaps that’s what you’re picking up on.”

She shakes her head. “It’s more than that. It’s before you came back. ”

“He was—forgive me—cleared by his superiors, and that’s good enough for me. It should be good enough for you too. Respect the chain of command.”

“Like I said, you weren’t there. He made a bad call in the field, almost got his partner killed. I don’t expect you to understand since you’ve obviously gone soft as well.”

That was out of line. She’s the team leader here, and the expert on their targets. Esmé can’t talk to her like that. She slams Esmé’s face against the locker in front of her, denting the metal. Esmé tries to elbow Marie back, but she sees this coming, and ducks. They continue to fight for the next minute, Esmé trying to pull all of her weapons back out, only to be disarmed immediately. Finally, Marie slams Esmé’s back against the bench, and knocks the wind out of her with a heavy blow to the chest. She puts her lips right next to Esmé’s ear as she’s trying to regain her breath. “You wanna go work as a disposable in the Military Authority, I’ll put in the transfer papers myself. You wanna do something that matters, you’ll follow my orders. This is my team, this is my mission, these are my people we’re approaching. Some of them are bad, but most of them are good, and if you go in there guns blazing, they will freak out! You may find yourself sitting next to your internal organs if one of them has the power to teleport them there, so don’t give them a reason. You’re the diplomat, so be diplomatic. Am I understood, Officer?” Disposable is an offensive term for an enlisted officer in any military branch, particularly someone who fights in the infantry.

Esmé continues to struggle with her breath, but she manages to eke out the affirmative. She stands up, and starts to gather the scattered weapons for armory return.

“I’ll see you in the briefing room.” Marie puts on her clothes, and then leaves shortly after Esmé.

Specialist Cleary is already waiting for them in there, as is Kivi, who Marie goes up to. “You’re not joining us, are you?”

“No, but sort of,” Kivi answers. She takes out a tablet that’s showing a map of the world, indicating all the last known location of the errors from Ramses’ global brain scanner. “Winona wants us to always be nearby, in case you need backup. I’ll be using my psychic power to find whoever it is my mind wants to find, but if you need me, we’ll be there. All you have to do is decide where we’re going first.”

Marie doesn’t look at the map. She’s unsure about all of this.

“I won’t be there to babysit you. It really is just a contingency. My team’s mandate is to find people. The orders don’t say anything about who to find. People go missing everywhere, so they figured we might as well work in the same city at the same time. We won’t even be sharing a safehouse.”

“Okay.” Marie looks down at the map. Any destination seems fine, they have little reason to choose one place over another. Someone appears to be in Giza, which makes sense, given what they know of the pyramids. There’s a whole diplomatic issue with Egypt, though, especially if they’re going to be shadowed by a tack team. One target appears to be on an island in the Philippines, while another is just in the middle of the water. Unless, is that...? It is, it’s the Mariana Trench. That makes sense as well, but unless they’re at or near the surface, it’s a no-go at the moment. They just recently asked for a submarine, and it didn’t work out so great for the people who loaned it to them, so asking again would seem heartless. It would probably be met with a belly laugh, and a resounding NO. Perhaps they could ask someone else.

Their investigator, Agent Doric Filipowski comes in. “Where are we headed? I may need to prep field assets.”

Marie looks up with a stalling smile. She quickly takes one more glance at the map, feeling the need to make a decision before it starts to look like she doesn’t know what she’s doing. “Paris. We’re going to Paris.”

“Mais bien sûr!” Doric declares. He pats Esmé playfully on the shoulder.

Esmé winces.

“Are you okay?” he asks her.

“It’s fine, I slept on it wrong,” Esmé answers. “J’ai toujours du mal à dormir avant une mission.”

Marie almost feels bad about their fight. Almost. Before she can dwell on it, her phone rings. She looks at it. “Holocall from the AOC.”

“Let’s go in here,” Kivi suggests, pointing to the executive office.

As Kivi is closing the door behind them, Marie magnetizes her device to the wall, and answers. She steps back to get in frame. “Leona, what’s going on?”

“Have you spoken with Mateo?” Leona asks.

“Not since he told me about Fairpoint’s transfer. Why, haven’t you?”

“You have the map of the errors handy?”

“Right here,” Kivi says, stepping forward.

“Zoom into the Mariana Trench, go back two days in the data timeline, then step through the history.”

“Okay.” Kivi does as she’s asked, letting Marie see the screen. They watch as the error appears, disappears, stays gone, and then reappears. The AOC passes over the spot every ninety minutes. Sometimes it detects this specific error, and sometimes it doesn’t.

“This error wasn’t there before,” Leona says after they step through history a few times, “back with that first scanner. It only showed up two days ago.”

“Is this a pattern?” Kivi questions. “It’s not every other orbital pass, or...”

Marie looks away to think. “It’s morse code. Every time the error appears means a dot and every time it’s gone means a dash.”

“What does it say?” Kivi asks.

“Were I you,” Leona replies. Mateo is the error.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 14, 2398

« < » > Table of Contents

Marie teleported down later yesterday to take over the brain scan error investigations. She’s going to prep her own small SD6 team. This isn’t a tactical team, like the one Kivi works with. One of them is an operative who specializes in combat and weaponry, yes, but another one is an agent, like Marie, with investigative experience. The third is an officer with diplomatic skills that she uses to turn foreigners and other civilians into government assets. They have all been read into the whole thing about time travel and alternate realities, so they’re ready to go on these missions. Alyssa doesn’t need to be involved in that anymore, and Mateo can’t, because whenever he approaches one of these people, they’re accidentally banished to another universe. While that’s happening, there is something that he always thought they should do, but weren’t able to.

The Olimpia was a submarine, but it had limited depth capabilities. The Bridgette has its own limits, but it can dive far deeper, which they’ll need in order to get to the bottom of Danica Lake. It’s located on the McIver farm outside of Lebanon, Kansas, and the McIver’s still technically own that land, but they still don’t need anyone seeing them go down there. As the saying goes, it’s always darkest before the dawn, and though that’s wholly inaccurate, that’s about when they arrive in the area. That way, they’ll still benefit from some of the daylight filtering through the water. There may be nothing down here, but then again, it may be everything,

This vehicle is far more automated than their last one as it’s equipped with the AI that Ramses rescued from The Constant before it was flooded and destroyed. Mateo is capable of operating it himself without the help of one of the team’s smart people. They dip into the water, and hang out near the surface for a little bit, shining the giant lights on the exterior around in case they see anything interesting right off the bat. They do. There are tons of fish down here. “Were you aware of people stocking this lake with life?” Mateo asks.

Alyssa shakes her head. “If they did, it would have been illegal. Not only would they have needed permission from the owner, which is me, but they would have had to negotiate a lot of bureaucratic red tape. A team of scientists would have needed to come out and test the area for pH, salinity, and other environmental variables. You can’t just randomly introduce a species to an ecosystem. Not enough time has passed for all of that, and we still have friends in the area. I’m sure I would have heard something.”

“Hmm. You seem to know a lot about how it works.”

“We considered doing it,” she explains. “We could have charged people to fish. I decided not to, because all this stuff was going on, and I didn’t want to deal with that red tape. I doubt it would have been worth it, especially since we would have either had to move back, or employ someone to manage the licenses.”

Mateo nods. “So this may be a clue. These fish here came from somewhere. I guess we don’t know where the water itself came from. I saw a movie where an isolated species of carnivorous fish were living in an underground lake until something broke, and they ended up in the regular lake, where they started eating people.”

“Sounds awful.”

“It was.” They continue to dive down as the sun rises. The natural light is never bright enough to do them much good, but it does make it seem less scary, being able to look up and see that they’re not trapped in a watery grave. They continue to see fish, though the population is not as dense down here, which they guess is typical of any body of water. They don’t see any other things, like frogs or octopodes. Mateo had a thought that they might, and that they were about to be transported to somewhere else in the world. These sorts of missions usually end up like that, but it doesn’t happen. No coral, no sharks. It’s looking like someone really did just drive up here with a tank of unauthorized fish, and dump them in here, for whatever reason.

Just as they’re reaching the limits of the sub’s capabilities, they also reach the lakebed. They expected to see the twisted ruins of the Constant, but there’s nothing. It’s just dirt and particulates, and a few adventurous fish. They go back up a little bit, because this water did have to come from somewhere, but they don’t see the pipes. “They must have been designed to disintegrate after use. The Constant must have been designed to do the same.”

“Surely the walls will have gotten wet at some point,” Alyssa reasons.

“Yeah, so water wouldn’t have caused them to fall apart. There must have been something in the water, like a...enzyme, or whatever, I don’t know.”

“Ha, are you just using fancy words you’ve heard before?”

“Pretty much.”

“Let’s call it an enzyme, which destroyed all evidence that there was once an underground complex down here. The question is where was that enzyme stored before it was needed, and why don’t we see evidence of that?”

Mateo sighs. “Neither of us is smart enough to make any real guesses in this matter. This was a nice idea, but we’re not qualified for this work.”

“Yeah.” Alyssa leans forward, and looks up through the viewscreen, where she sees nothing remarkable. “Let’s call it a day.”

“If we surface now, someone may see us.”

“I don’t really care anymore,” Alyssa decides. “This is still my land, I can do whatever I want with it.”

“Fair enough. Hey Constance, please surface.”

“Surfacing,” the computer responds.

They keep looking through the viewscreen as they go higher and higher. It’s going pretty fast, which Mateo would think would be dangerous, but Constance knows best. Something weird happens when they’re almost at the surface. The water becomes clearer, and light comes in through the glass. It almost looks like there’s a wall in front of them. An alarm starts going off outside, but it’s not too loud, and not too obnoxious. “Constance, report!”

“Status normal,” she replies simply. She doesn’t see anything wrong with this. The Bridgette breaks the surface, and starts to just float there. Now they can really see the walls. It looks like they’re in an Olympic-size pool.

“What happened?”

“I’m pretty sure we just went back in time.” Mateo reaches up to the emergency ceiling hatch, and pulls himself through it. He then helps Alyssa up as well.

They stand on the roof, and get a look around. It’s definitely a swimming pool, and it looks familiar. The double doors open, and Mateo’s cousin, Danica power walks in. She looks surprised to see him, but more annoyed than anything. “What the hell are you doing back here?” she questions.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 13, 2398

« < » > Table of Contents

Everest disappeared shortly after their conversation, which was probably one of the major reasons he cut it so short in the first place. He acted like he saw it coming. He lasted much longer than Erlendr and the old man in the pocket dimension, though, suggesting some level of control that one can wield over the process if they know to do so. It’s hard to tell how much Everest does or doesn’t know, but there is no guarantee the next error they encounter will be just as strong-willed. To be honest, it’s been so long, Mateo forgot about that whole thing. He’s the cause of their banishment from this realm, meaning he is still the worst person for the job. If they want to pursue this endeavor further, someone is going to have to come back down from the AOC so Alyssa doesn’t have to shoulder the burden alone. Marie has tentatively agreed, but she’s finishing some work up there at the moment, so she definitely won’t be returning today.

It has ended up being a good thing, because a certain prisoner of the federal government has asked to see her, and Mateo doesn’t want her to deal with that. He’s on his way to visit Fairpoint Panders himself. He tried to escape into Canada after he took a bunch of people hostage, and tried to kill Marie. Normally, the Canadian courts would handle the trial, since that’s where he was when he was caught, and the crime went down in Palmeria, but the Canadians don’t want to touch it, plus all non-Palmerian victims were Usonian citizens. This was likely disappointing news to Fairpoint as the Canadian judicial system is known for being highly respectful to prisoner’s rights.

Mateo sits down on the good side of the glass, cleans the phone with a disinfecting wipe, and puts it to his ear. Fairpoint doesn’t have any wipes on his side, because this isn’t Canada. “I can only see one visitor at a time, and I’m only given thirty minute sessions, so say whatever you wanna say, then leave, so I can speak with Marie.”

“I’m not here to warn you about how you’ll treat Marie. She’s just straight up not coming. You’re dealing with me today, and only me.”

“You’re not on my approved list. They shouldn’t have even let you in the building,” Fairpoint spits.

“I work with SD6,” Mateo reasons. “I can get into any building I want.”

“I want to talk to Marie.” He’s desperately trying to keep his temper in check, because he knows they’ll yank his visitation time if he gets too riled up. He’s rattled...flustered even. He has spent the last month in his cell, planning every word he wants to say, preparing contingencies for every possible response out of her. This is wrong. It’s all wrong. Mateo’s ruined it, and Mateo couldn’t be happier.

“She’s not coming. She never will. Over the years, we’ve had a lot of enemies—”

“I’ll tell them about the baby.”

“What?”

“She was going to have a baby, but now it’s gone, which I know was something she wanted, so either she’s incredibly lucky, or she figured out how to get a secret abortion. Not even her position within the government could get her out of this, so you tell her that if she wants me to keep quiet, she’ll come here and give me thirty minutes!”

Mateo is foaming at the mouth. He takes out his phone, which a normal visitor would not be allowed to keep. He keeps staring at Fairpoint as he’s dialing Winona. “On second thought, I’ll take that transfer. I want him moved to the black site immediately.”