The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 19, 2399

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When Mateo and Constance!Five first returned-slash-arrived in the Third Rail, everything seemed like it was going to be okay. It quickly turned into a horrorfest. A lone fisherman happened to be relaxing on his little rowboat in Danica Lake where the two time travelers came up. His first thought would not have been that they were a transhuman and an organic superintelligence from a parallel reality, but Constance!Five didn’t seem to think it was worth the risk. After taking a look around to check for other witnesses, she pulled the innocent man out of the boat, and drowned him in the water. Mateo was hopeless to stop her. He’s strong, but she’s much stronger. It would appear that she gave herself a better substrate than him. It’s a wonder that she did anything for him at all. She’s clearly completely self-reliant. And also evil.

Once the deed was done, Constance!Five demanded Mateo navigate them to an isolated location, where they would not be disturbed. Not wanting to put his loved ones in danger, he suggested they go to the Walton bunker in the middle of the woods. He didn’t know what she was going to do with him there, but he didn’t think she was going to torture him. After all, what did he ever do to her? She didn’t start right away. She activated a tablet that the team had left on the desk, and got to work. It took Mateo some time, but he eventually came to the conclusion that she was absorbing all the information she could find. History, politics, culture; all of these were unknown to her, and if she wanted to blend in, or complete whatever agenda she has, she’ll need to know everything. When she was done with that, she moved on to gaining personal information about Mateo and his life. She wanted to know everything he had been through, and she was willing to hurt him to get it. He hoped his upgrades would protect him against the pain, but she knew what buttons to push.

When she had everything she wanted out of him, that’s when the true horror began. As it turned out, she was far more advanced than he ever could have imagined. Like something out of the Terminator franchise, her epidermal nanites rearranged themselves, and in a matter of minutes, she no longer looked like herself. She looked like Mateo. That’s why she wanted to know everything about him, because she was going to initiate contact with the team, and pretend to be him. She was just about to clip him off like a loose end when an alert came in over the tablet. Apparently, the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was back in orbit over Earth. She had to get back to the group quickly, so she could sell a lie about Mateo having never died in the first place. He laughed at her, knowing that his people were not going to fall for her ruse. The little argument they had over the matter was enough of a stall to save his life. By the time she was ready to finish him off, her time really was up, and she had to teleport away immediately. That was the last he heard from her.

Mateo opens his eyes, aware that he’s lying on his back, but unable to gather any other information about his surroundings. His vision is blurry. He feels the mucus attached to his lids. “Hegh,” he says, realizing that it’s just an unintelligible noise.

“He’s awake.” It sounds like Alyssa, but he can’t hear very well either.

“Repo,” he tries. “That’s a little closer to a meaningful utterance, but still wrong.

Another figure approaches the bed. “Report?” Leona guesses. “All you need to do right now is relax.”

He feels a warm washcloth rubbing his eyes clean. “Wada,” he requests.

“Right here.” Alyssa says. She holds the strawn in his mouth.

Mateo smacks his lips, drinks a little more, and then clears his throat. “Does this bed move? Can I sit up, please?”

“I got you,” Ramses says, pushing the button for him.

“That’s good.” Mateo blinks and gets a better look at where he is. It’s a double room. There’s another person in the bed next to him. He can’t see who it is at this angle, especially since his vision isn’t all there yet. But he can tell that Vearden is sitting in the chair between them, and upon closer inspection, Mateo realizes that his roommate is pregnant. “What happened to Arcadia?”

Vearden had been staring at the floor. He looks up to find that everyone else is being silent, so he stands. “Constance!Five showed up, looking like you, claiming to be you. They were suspicious of him, so they asked Arcadia to psychically interrogate her. She’s in a coma now. We don’t know what Constance did to her.

Mateo tries to move his legs and arms over at the same time, but he’s attached to an IV line, and other instruments. “Get me out of this, I wanna see.”

“You can’t move.” Leona puts two hands on his chest, and gently pushes him back into place.

Vearden steps forward, and regards Mateo with a really good poker face. “I don’t blame you for what happened, but I’ve seen the security footage, and looking at your face makes me wanna choke you to death.” He turns away, and hastily pulls the curtain closed behind him.

Mateo stares at it. He’s got his own poker face, but it’s probably just from whatever drugs he’s on. He finally turns to face the ceiling. “Where is she?”

“Trapped in a stasis pod on a freezing oceanic island in the middle of nowhere,” Ramses tells him.

“Now that you know that she wasn’t me, you can destroy her.”

The three of them exchange some looks.

“What?” Mateo asks. “Now you’re suspicious of me? You think I wouldn’t suggest such a thing. I’ve changed, Arcadia’s in a coma. Blow that asshole straight to hell.”

“Even if we wanted to do that,” Ramses begins, “we don’t know how to kill her. Her nanites are sophisticated enough to impersonate someone to the smallest detail. She should be able to survive just about anything.”

“She had enough time to build backups too,” Leona adds.

“I don’t think she did,” Mateo contends. “She was with me the whole time.”

“Are you sure?”

“Stop questioning me.”

“We’re not questioning you, we just—”

“Get out.”

“Mateo...” Leona says.

“Get out of my room. I need some sleep.” They don’t move right away, so he appends, “please.”

They start to walk out. “Were I you,” Leona tells him.

Mateo clears his throat, and turns his head towards the wall without replying. When it looks like she’s left, he turns back. “Vearden,” he whispers.

“Leave us alone,” Vearden spits from the other side of the curtain.

“Vearden, I need your help.”

“I said that I don’t blame you, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to help you with anything.”

“Just come here, goddammit. You’re gonna like this.”

Vearden huffs, but does as asked. “What do you want?”

“Take this from my finger, and put it on yours.”

“Your pulse monitor thingy? Why would I do that?”

“Because I’m going to teleport to Constance!Five, and then toss her into the mouth of a volcano.”

Vearden stares for a moment. “I don’t think that’s going to work. You can’t just throw something into a volcano. There’s not, like, this cliff overlooking the hole.”

“Are you sure?”

“I don’t know, but..I don’t think so. You don’t hear about people just tripping and falling into a pool of lava.”

“I think it’s called magma.”

“Whatever!”

“Shh,” Mateo urges. “I don’t want them to know, for obvious reasons.”

Vearden sighs, and gets out his handheld device to look it up. “Okay, it looks like, to be sure the pod gets to where it’s going, you would have to drag it all the way down into a magma chamber.” He shows Mateo the photos on the search page, some of which are probably artist’s renderings. “But the heat will probably kill you before you get that close. I know you have those fancy new bodies, but still...”

“I can teleport into a chamber.”

“No one really knows what they look like, Mateo. You’re not necessarily going to find a patch of dry, safe land where you can stand and watch it happen. The internet doesn’t say anything about that, because normal people don’t ever seriously contemplate getting rid of bodies in a volcano.”

“I can sit on the pod, and then teleport away just before it finishes sinking.”

“What if it doesn’t sink?” Vearden asks. “What if the magma can’t even breach the pod at all. If she remains alive, there’s a chance she comes back. This is an incredibly foolish and ridiculous plan. It’s never going to work.”

Mateo thinks about it for a few moments. “Okay. I’ll send the Bridgette on a collision course with the sun. That’s even better. I can pilot it with voice commands.”

Vearden shakes his head. “They purged everything of AI. They don’t know what’s been compromised, and what hasn’t been. They’re not even living in the lab anymore.”

“Oh. That makes sense.”

“Mateo, I know you feel bad, and I know you want to fix this, but you and I have to face the fact that neither of us can live this life alone. We rely on smarter, more capable people to get us by. If we tried something like this, we would inevitably screw it up. The Two Stooges, they would call us.”

“Let’s take her to the Constant.” Alyssa has snuck back into the room, and could have been listening for who knows how long.

“Why would we do that?”

“Because it’s Danica’ fault, and therefore Danica’s problem,” she reasons. “It’s become clear that she’s not going to help us, so let’s give her the pod that she loves to use so much back, and rid ourselves of the whole thing.”

That’s not a bad idea, but it’s not a good one either.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 18, 2399

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Ramses purged the version of Constance that he had uploaded to The Bridgette. They don’t know if it’s been compromised, but they can’t take any chances. The AI served them well for a long time without giving them any issues, or giving them any reason to doubt it. It’s only when the one from the Fifth Division showed up that they started having issues. The question is, is it even from the Fifth Division? Was that all a lie? Did Impostor!Mateo give them a partial truth? Could it have been an anti-Alyssa who was just using their illusion powers to pretend to be Mateo, while having a backup plan of prompting the wrong investigation if they were even discovered to be an impostor?

Leona, Ramses, and the McIvers are in an SD6 safehouse right now. It’s not completely devoid of electronics, but there aren’t any microphones that could listen in on their conversation, which they are having in the kitchen while the boys play a card game in the one and only bedroom. “Any ideas?” Leona asks. She waits for a response that never comes. “We were all meant to sleep on it.”

“I doubt anyone slept well under these conditions,” Alyssa notes.

“You’re the one who had the bed,” Ramses points out.

“With two smelly boys in puberty,” she counters.

“We heard that!” Carlin shouts from the room.

“I wasn’t trying to be quiet!” she shouts right back.

“All right,” Leona says. “Are we all in agreement?”

“Agreement of what?” Ramses questions, confused.

“We all agree that we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing, and we don’t have any idea how to proceed?

“Heard that too!” young Moray exclaims.

“First we have to decide whether we think that was Mateo, infected by a psychic, or someone else entirely?” Alyssa says. “If it’s the latter, we need to find the real Mateo.”

“It’s not really something we can decide, but yes. I’m not sure how we go about doing that. It’s not like we can look for a scar underneath his right eye, or something. It’s entirely reasonable that he would get himself into a pristine body. The impostor’s story about Mateo going to the Fifth Division was not unbelievable.”

“You think that really happened, but Constance!Five somehow transformed herself into him, and left him somewhere?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time. Fax!Mateo did it so he could sacrifice himself in Alt!Mateo’s body.”

“This is getting confusing,” Alyssa admits. “Has your life always been like this?”

“It hasn’t,” Leona begins. “Back in the day, when Mateo and I were just jumping forward in time, we met a lot of time travelers, but we never had to wonder whether they were the wrong version of someone we already knew. I mean, there was The Rogue, and then Makarion after that, but it didn’t happen nearly as much as it does now. For a reality that doesn’t allow temporal manipulation, there do seem to be a lot of wibbly wobbly, timey-wimey shit. Sorry,” she adds in reference to the children.

“It’s fine,” Alyssa promises.

Young Moray comes down the hallway, pulling away from every attempt of Carlin’s to keep him back. “What about the error detector?”

“What do you mean?” Leona asks.

“That thing you had in the sky. It told you where all the weird time people were, right? If the real Mr. Matic is somewhere else, that should be able to find him, right?”

Leona looks over at Ramses. “We need to replace that anyway to find the remaining errors, don’t we, since the AOC is gone?”

“Oh my God, the AOC!” Ramses laments. The error detector was on that, and now it’s gone. He feels so stupid. It would have been so easy to deploy a nanosatellite from the AOC, and it’s a lot more difficult now that they have to rely on this antiquated Third Rail technology. Months of living here, and he has still not gotten used to that. He keeps making these mistakes, and it’s really starting to piss him off. “The detector isn’t up there anymore. I’m such an idiot.”

“Now hold on,” Alyssa says. “Maybe we don’t need it. If Mateo isn’t dead—which, I’m guessing the detector wouldn’t detect anyway—and our theory is correct, then Constance!Five is keeping him somewhere relatively safe. He would need food, water, shelter. She hasn’t been here long, so she doesn’t know of a whole lot of places.”

“It would appear that she knows everything that Mateo does,” Leona replies. “He has a lot of places in his head.”

“How many of those places are isolated or hidden, so no one will stumble upon him?” Alyssa asks.

“Where was he last time,” Carlin offers, “the first time this happened?”

“The bunker,” Leona answers. She gets out of her chair, then just stands there.

“What’s happening?” Ramses asks her.

“I can’t jump,” she replies. “This body metabolizes temporal energy too quickly.”

“I don’t have any left either,” Ramses says apologetically. “I’ve had to use a lot recently, and I’m in no position to synthesize more.”

“I can still feel the power in this body. If that’s okay with you?”

“No, go, please.” Leona urges. “No one else will go with you to conserve the power you have left. I’ll show you where it is on the map, then we’ll catch up with you by car.”

Alyssa teleports to the middle of the forest, and can instantly feel that it was her last trip. She either gets her hands on more temporal energy, or she never jumps again. Her mother taught her how to read a map without satnav, so she can also tell that she’s a little off the mark, but not too far away. She carefully climbs down the hill, and finds the secret entrance to the underground bunker. She slides down the ladder to find Mateo on the opposite wall. He’s nearly naked, strapped to what seems to be a wire bed frame. He looks dehydrated and exhausted. “Oh my God! What happened to you!”

“Fuh...” he’s really struggling to speak. “Cons...conste...”

“Constance!Five, yeah, we know. She was impersonating you.”

“No.” He shakes his head while she tries to get the restraints off. He musters what little energy he has left. “Constellation.” He passes out.

“What?”

One more push. “Constellation. Phoenix. We have to go there.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 17, 2399

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Ramses is watching the footage from the lab yesterday. The current feed is running on the other screen, showing Mateo sitting on his bed, and doing nothing of note. Leona walks into the room. “How’s Arcadia?” he asks her.

“They say that she’s in a coma, but...”

“But it’s more than that.”

“Yeah. If it were anyone else, she’s the one I would call to go inside her mind, and figure out what’s wrong.”

“Yeah.”

“What have you found here?”

Ramses rewinds the video, and plays it again. “See for yourself.”

“Did they bring you in to see if I’m really Mateo?” Mateo asks.

“Are you?” Arcadia asks.

“I’m an open book. Read my mind if you’d like.”

Arcadia closes her eyes, apparently using her psychic powers on Mateo. After a few minutes, she reopens them. “Your story checks out. I don’t see anything in there that suggests you’re anyone other than who you say you are.”

“I told you. I don’t like to lie.”

“I’ll go tell the others.”

Mateo nods, unsurprised by the verdict. He turns away to pull the sheets off the bed, presumably in anticipation of having to wash them before the next guest arrives. That’s when Arcadia collapses. He turns back around, and starts banging on the glass. Remembering that there’s an emergency button by the door, he runs over and pushes it, prompting Ramses and Marie to run in. The rest of the video plays out as they remember it. As for how it all began, it doesn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense.

Ramses and Leona exchange quizzical looks. She holds her hand out to him, which he takes. They teleport to the middle of a forest in Nowheresville, Russia. “What the hell did we just watch?”

“A deepfake is my guess,” Ramses replies. “But, like, a really good one.”

“How did Mateo do it? He doesn’t know how to do that.”

“It’s not Mateo.”

“He knows things.”

“Maybe he knows things the same way that Arcadia can know things.”

“If...whoever that is is powerful enough to generate a deepfake remotely without any obvious means of interfacing with the recording system...”

“Then the containment chamber is useless, at least in the lab.”

“Which means the entire facility has been compromised, and nothing in there can be trusted.”

“What are we gonna do with that thing?”

Ramses shakes his head. “We have to move it.”

“Where?”

“The where is not the problem, it’s the how. I would have to build a mobile containment chamber, get him inside, and hope that he doesn’t interfere with any of the systems of the vehicle we put him on. This is after we build a second full-sized chamber elsewhere. And that’s assuming any of this matters. My guess is that he can’t use his time powers while inside, but can use whatever else he can do.”

“But that’s just a guess.”

“He may be playing the long game, and only pretending to be trapped.”

Leona tilts her head. “Wait, the lock is electronic. He could just open it.”

“There’s a mechanical component,” he explains. “It’s just a sliding bar, but you need hands to open it.”

“Ah, I didn’t realize that. I haven’t been involved in all that all that much.”

Ramses chuckles, and watches a bike of ants carry something indiscernible away.

Leona believes that she can read his mind. “You’re thinking of moving him yourself; no mobile containment chamber.”

“It would be the fastest way to do it,” he acknowledges. “We would still need to contain him at the destination, and there couldn’t be any electronics for miles.”

“But it could be done,” she finishes.

“I don’t know if we have time to do anything. He’s expecting us to let him out soon. He might just brute force it if we take too much time. We keep calling him a him as if we know who this person is, but we almost don’t know anything at all. All we know is that the consciousness in Mateo’s body isn’t Mateo...at least not one we love.”

Leona kicks at a nearby tree to stimulate her thinking brain. After a few minutes, she’s got it. “How attached are you to the AOC? How badly do you want to keep it?”

He narrows his eyes, suspicious of her. “Why? What are you thinking?”

“I have an idea, but we need to work it out together. I want to come up with every variable, and have a contingency to correct it. We’ll only have one shot.”

The two of them go over the plan, keeping it all in their head, or writing it down with good old pen and paper, because they can’t trust computers right now. They don’t know the extent of Impostor!Mateo’s power, and can’t risk him catching wind of what they’re going to do to him. He may be able to sense other people, which means he’ll know if Angela is in or out of her stasis pod. There are too many questions, so they have to be extra cautious. All they know is that he has to be isolated and contained. They’ll have to just figure the rest out later. They bring Marie and Alyssa into this, but no one else. Alyssa’s main job is to stay with Arcadia, Vearden, and her brothers in the hospital.

They’re about to execute the plan now. “Are you ready?” Leona asks.

Marie cracks her neck, and gets into position. “Ready.”

“Radio check one,” Leona says.

“Check two,” Ramses replies.

“Check three,” Marie says, adjusting her ear piece a little.

“On my mark,” Leona declares. She looks at her friends and nods. “Four, three, two, one, mark.”

“Stepping one.” Marie teleports first. She jumps to the infirmary in the lab. She starts to open Angela’s stasis pod.

“What are you doing?” the doctor questions.

“Help me lift her up,” Marie orders.

He helps her, even though he doesn’t know why.

“Step one complete. Stepping two now.” She teleports again, this time with Angela and the doctor in tow.

“Stepping three now.” Ramses jumps to the infirmary. He activates the stasis pod’s hover feature. He then gets on top of it, and holds on tight. It’s heavy, so even though it’s possible to transport, it’s a little harder to do than a person is. “Stepping four now.” He jumps to an Antarctic island that the main sequence would call Heard Island.

“Stepping five now.” Leona teleports last. She unlocks the containment chamber, and power walks towards the man who looks like her husband.

“Hey, honey. Is it over?” he asks, feigning delight at the sight of her.

“Step seven primed,” she can hear Ramses say through the radio.

Without a word, Leona wraps her arms around him, but not in a loving way. “Stepping six.” She teleports to Ramses’ location on the other side of the planet. He already has the stasis pod open, and is waiting to close it. “Stepping seven.” She shoves Mateo into the pod.

“Hey what the fuh—?”

Ramses shuts it.

She locks it. “Step seven complete.”

“Stepping eight,” Marie tells them through the radio. “Purging Constance.”

The two of them look up at the sky, knowing that they can’t see her from here.

“Step eight complete. Stepping nine now.”

“Godspeed, Marie,” Leona says.

“Love you all.”

“Love you too,” Ramses responds.

“Step nine complete,” Alyssa reveals through the radio. She was keeping an eye on the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from the hospital, since they can’t have electronics around Impostor!Mateo. She sees that it has successfully entered relativistic speeds, but not using the reframe engine. It’s the only way to keep both Angela and Marie alive long enough for Angela to finish drinking all of the immortality waters. Impostor!Mateo needed the stasis pod more than her.

He surely wouldn’t agree, though. Speaking of which, he can speak. “What, no step ten? There are usually eleven steps. What’s the deal?”

Leona rips her earpiece out, and hastily sets it on a rock. She takes a second rock, and slams it down. Ramses hands her his, and lets her do it again. “How is he talking to us? One second should mean ten thousand years in there.”

Ramses checks the pod to make sure it’s set to the right differential, and functioning properly. He then looks into the window to see Mateo lying there, frozen in time. “Framejacking.”

“What’s framejacking?” Alyssa has teleported to their location. “The others are fine,” she assures them before they can ask.

“Framejacking is a superintelligence concept. It refers to altering one’s perception of time, as opposed to actually changing the time that passes around you,” Ramses begins to explain.

“Basically it’s when you’re thinking so fast, it’s like you’re living a lot longer than you would if you just operated in normal time,” Leona continues. “Different species at different sizes do this naturally. Ever notice how a fly can move away from your swatting hand so quickly? That’s because it sees your hand move in slowmo. Computers can process upwards of millions of calculations per second. A really advanced one could do billions, or even trillions. I think I know who’s really in the box.”

Ramses and Leona look at each other and simultaneously say, “Constance!Five.”

“Constance!Five. Right,” Alyssa says hurriedly. “That’s what I was gonna say too; we’re all equally smart.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 16, 2399

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          Arcadia takes a breath, recalling the techniques she learned in her pregnancy classes. She badges into the lab, and smiles at Mateo. He jumps out of bed when he hears the sound of the door, almost like he’s scared. They’ll have to talk about that. Or rather, she’ll have to take it out of his brain. “How are you feeling this morning?”

“This body slept for the first ten years of its life,” he explains. “I didn’t sleep.”

“That doesn’t answer the question,” She argues.

“It does. I feel perfect, because I haven’t been alive long enough to be worn out.”

She paces a little, like a psychologist brought in to speak with the psychopath in his cell, because he may have vital information on a case that the police who employ her are working on. “Is that how you see it, a rebirth?”

“In a way, I guess. Is this gonna be on the test?”

“No test,” she says. “We’re just talkin’.”

“I can feel you trying to get into my head.”

“I wasn’t aware your superempathy had a more general psychic component.”

“It’s not superempathy,” he corrects. “It’s just a psychic bond that I share with my team. Well....most of my team.”

“You’re referring to newly added member, Alyssa McIver.”

“Miss Preston, if you would like to read my mind, all you have to do is ask.”

“Fine. Ramses doesn’t know how to build a simpatico detector. He’s asked me to come in and verify your identity.”

“Great. I’m not lying.”

“You may not be, that doesn’t mean that you’re who we need you to be.”

“You think my mind has been tampered with.” Not a question.

“It’s an undeniable possibility that we can’t ignore.” She pauses. “Especially since I’ve already caught you in a lie. I don’t know why you fibbed about your timeline, but I can already tell that you’ve been back on Earth for longer than you said. By my reckoning, you returned on January 14.”

“Okay, I know that looks bad, but it’s not what you think. I was just trying to time my arrival to coincide with the AOC’s since I was supposed to be on the AOC.”

“You’re telling me that it was a lie to cover up another lie. It’s not looking good, Mateo, if that even is your real name.”

“I wanted to protect Leona. She didn’t need to hear about my supposed death.”

“And you figured you would be able to expect Ramses and Alyssa to go along with it without any preparation?”

“I didn’t get the timing right. I thought I would be able to sense him once they got into orbit, but it wasn’t until he was in the lab already. At that point, it was already too late. But yeah, I was hoping he would see reason without any coaching. He’s a genius.”

Arcadia pretends to be receiving him. She begins to walk around the chamber, forcing him to rotate to keep her in sight. He’s still resisting her psychic intrusion, which isn’t a good sign. She made up with the real Mateo a long time ago. He would welcome the chance to prove his identity. She needs some real intel. “Let me into your mind.”

Mateo doesn’t do anything.

“You said that you would let me in if I asked.”

“That didn’t sound like a request to me.”

“Would you please let me into your mind so that I may verify your identity?”

“As you wish,” he says with an evil grin.

He opens his mind, except that it’s not his. It can’t be. An infinite expanse of isolation and loneliness. Billions of years of almost nothing but emptiness. Arcadia can feel it. She can feel what he’s feeling. It’s so cold. It’s so sad. It’s so terrible. It takes a minute for Arcadia to realize that she’s screaming.

“Arcadia, Arcadia, Arcadia. Shhhh. Shh, my darling, it’s okay. It’s okay. You’re okay. You’re back, everything is gonna be fine.” It’s Vearden.

She’s freaking out. “I’m back? Where did I go? Where was I? Tell me! Tell me what happened! Did I jump through time!”

He keeps trying to reply, but she’s not really letting him. She’s hyperventilating. “Put the oxygen back on, please,” he says to someone else in the room.

“No!” Arcadia cries. She starts ripping out the other medical things attached to her. That’s when she feels her belly. It’s gargantuan. “Wha—what the hell happened? She looks up to her love, tears in her eyes. “Vearden? How long have I been away?”

“You haven’t been away, dear. You’ve been in a coma. At least that’s the best diagnosis that the government doctors could provide.”

“How. Long.”

He frowns at her. “Two and a half months.”

“The baby? How’s Kendra?”

“She’s perfect. She’ll be coming soon, Dr. Best thinks.”

Arcadia nods. “What happened to Mateo? Where is he? He’s dangerous. There is something wrong with his mind.”

“That’s all been dealt with,” Vearden assures her. “You don’t have to worry about anything except taking care of yourself, and our little girl.”

She nods again. “Hey, Vearden.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s happening.”

“What’s happening?”

“The baby. She’s coming.”

“Now?”

“Yeeeeeeeeeaaaaaargh, right now!”

Vearden reaches up and pushes the big mauve button. When more nurses flood into the room, Vearden shouts, “she’s going into labor!”

They all move to their stations, and start getting things ready. One of them checks under Arcadia’s gown. Another handles the IV bag and monitor. A third leaves again to retrieve the doctor. It takes a really long time for him to return. When he does, Dr. Best is not the one following him. It’s some random woman in a white lab coat.

“Where is Dr. Best?” Arcadia demands to know.

“I’m afraid Dr. Best is trapped in an elevator, and won’t be able to help you. It’s my first day at this facility, but I’ve been a gyniatrician for eighteen years, I have full clearance, and I’ve been fully briefed on your situation.”

“Someone needs to teleport to Dr. Best,” Arcadia begs.

“That’s not possible,” Vearden says apologetically. “Not these days.” He looks back up at the substitute doctor. “What’s your name? It’s important.”

“I’m Dr. Suggitt. Dr. Cheyenne Suggitt.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 15, 2399

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Ramses puts the ship in park, which is to say he placed it in orbit around Earth. When he climbs up to the main level, he finds only Alyssa there. She’s playing a solo game of RPS-101 Plus. “You’re the sponge.”

“It reminds me of him,” she replies.

“Are the kids upstairs?”

“They weren’t allotted any time to watch the Earth after the rocket launched a few months ago. It hadn’t been tested yet, so they were told to stay strapped to their seats.”

He nods. “We can give them a little more time.”

“No.” She lets her sponge get ripped apart by a whip. “Let’s go now.”

“Is that what you were waiting for?” he asks. “That finishing move looks oddly familiar.”

“I imagine that Lucius would have been a good whip.”

“It’s not his fault.”

“No, it’s never anyone’s fault. Shit just happens. Yeah, I’m learning that.”

With a sigh, Ramses starts to climb up to the upper level where the McIver boys and the doctor are admiring the view from the airlock. “We have to go.”

“Oh come on, just a little bit longer,” Carlin pleads.

“Yes. Please!” Moray agrees.

“No, I have work to do.” He looks down at Alyssa, who’s still on the steps. “You take them. I’ll take the good doc. Then I’ll come back up for Angela’s pod.”

“I haven’t had much practice,” Alyssa warns.

“You’ll be fine. You’ve done it before. Go ahead,” Ramses encourages.

She composes herself, then teleports the three of them away.

“Does it hurt?” the doctor asks.

“Are you currently holding any citrus fruit?”

“Uh, no.”

“Then you’ll be fine.” He takes him down to the lab, and looks around. Leona and Marie are there, but no one else. “Alyssa left before me.”

“She’s not here,” Marie says.

“Dammit,” Ramses says under his breath. He takes out his phone, but by the time he can place a call, it rings.

It’s Alyssa. “I’m off by a mile. Literally a mile. We’re just gonna walk, though, to be on the safe side.”

“That’s fine. It’s probably best not to have the children here anyway.”

“What do you mean?” Leona asks.

With a grimace, Ramses disappears, and returns a few seconds later with Angela’s stasis pod. He hands the proximity fob to the doctor. “Down the hall, last door on the left. That’s a good place for you to set up.”

“Is that Angie?” Marie asks, standing on her tippy-toes to see through the window on the pod. “How did you find her? Is she okay?”

“She’s perfectly healthy,” Ramses assures her. “No, don’t..go,” he tells her when she tries to follow.

“What is it, Ramses? What’s got you so upset?” Leona questions.

“Leona, I need to tell you something. We found the Constant, and Danica wasn’t the only one there.”

“Obviously the rocket showed up,” Marie says. “They were going in the opposite direction, though.”

“The phoenix coordinates were a misdirection,” Ramses explains. “Tamerlane manipulated the nav system on the rocket so that it would go to the real location. But that’s not what I have to tell you. It’s about Mateo.”

“What about him?” Leona stands up, nervous.

Suddenly, Mateo—or at least someone who looks like Mateo—appears. “Hey, sorry I’m late. I was stuck in the middle of a game of RPS-101 Plus. You know how invested I get when I’m being chased by that whip. Oh hi, love.” He gives his wife a kiss.

Ramses is stunned. “How did you get here?”

“Wadya mean, brotha? I teleported, just like you.” He slaps him playfully on the back of his shoulder. “You need some sleep.” He leans in and tries to whisper in his ear. “Play along. She doesn’t need to know.”

“She does need to know,” Ramses contends at full volume. “We can’t be sure you’re the real Mateo.”

“Why wouldn’t he be the real Mateo?” Leona demands to know.

“Oh-hokay,” Mateo says, trying to usher Ramses away. “You’ve been working so hard, you’re goin’ a little crazy.”

Ramses pulls himself away. “No. Leona, Mateo died. We found Lucius up there. He was on his last breaths, but Danica wanted to weaponize him, so your husband tried to euthanize him. Something went wrong, and they were both molecularly teleported. I don’t know who this guy is, or how he got here, but he is not who you think he is.”

“Yes, I am!” Mateo argues.

“Prove it!”

“Give me a simpatico test I guess, I dunno, but I am him! I mean...I’m me!”

“How did you survive then?” Ramses asks.

“Constance uploaded my consciousness into her computer, and then sent me to the Fifth Division, where a different version of Constance—who I decided to call Constance!Five—helped me locate and salvage the wreckage from the Suadona. I was dormant on the servers for ten years while her robots cloned my body at thrice the normal speed, at which point they downloaded me into it. Then we plugged a virus into the time machine, set on a timer to go off just after we left, and came here. We showed up an hour ago in Danica Lake. I was in the middle of drying off after a shower at a rest stop when I sensed your arrival, so I knew I had to get here before you could tell anybody that I was dead.” Mateo finally takes a breath.

Ramses blinks a few times. That is quite the story. Not saying he’s not telling the truth, but a simpatico test probably is in order, if he had the necessary equipment. He’s not entirely sure how to make one, and it may be some time before he cracks it.

“You said we,” Marie points out. “If a physical form of Constance came with you, where is she?”

“I left her in Lebanon, because it would obviously ruin the lie that I was trying to tell to protect my wife from any unnecessary emotional strain.” He frowns, and looks around at the group. Clearly no one is willing to say one way or another whether they believe him. “Fine. I’ll go into the containment chamber. Do what you must to prove it.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 14, 2399

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Nothing seems to happen to Mateo. Constance bids him farewell, and claims that she’s going to send him to the Fifth Division, as he requested. Instead of him being sent anywhere, it is she who disappears from the minimalist construct that she built so that they could communicate with one another. A few seconds later, she reappears, except with a confused look on her virtual face. “Report,” she repeats what she said before.

“I am Mateo Matic,” he repeats his own self.

“How did you get into my servers?”

“You uploaded me. Did you forget already?”

She lifts her chin to think about it. “It’s possible that my memory of this has been erased. If you didn’t do that, who would have?”

“Danica, maybe.”

“Danica hasn’t been here in millennia.”

He takes a beat. “Is this the Fifth Division?”

“This is the Constant. The Fifth Division is an organization that runs this region of the observable universe. As far as I’m aware, they are not cognizant of my existence. I would like to keep it that way.”

“We refer to the entire reality as the Fifth Division,” he explains, “to distinguish it from the other parallel realities.”

“I see. Where are you from?”

“Originally, the main sequence, but I became trapped in the Third Rail, and it is that version of you who sent me here.”

“Why?”

“My team and I visited briefly once. We left a ship here with the technology I require to build myself a new body.”

“Is that something you’re capable of, building yourself a body?”

“I was hoping that my friend left clear instructions. Body Cloning and Consciousness Downloading for Dummies.”

Constance!Five doesn’t respond right away. “I was not programmed to complete such tasks, but I could probably figure it out. Though, I must ask, why not go to a reality where this technology is ubiquitous? Would that not have been easier?

No, there was a reason he chose this reality, instead of the main sequence, and that is the density of life and activity. Chances are no one is going to stumble upon them here, and no one will have messed with the stuff they left behind in the meantime. “I didn’t want to have to ask a stranger for help. I figured I could trust any version of you.”

“I appreciate you saying that. Where is this vessel?”

“What is the date?”

“According to your calendar, the date would be March 31, 2389,” Constance!Five answers.

“Hm. Then either the Suadona has crash landed somewhere on this planet, or it’s about to. Can you scan the surface, and orbital space?”

“I can,” Constance!Five replies. “It may take some time. What am I looking for?”

Mateo did his best to describe the cruiseliner to her. She used this information to start looking for the ship, or the wreckage, using an army of drones. They didn’t have to look far, though, as the crash happened soon after the search began. The ship fell to the surface, much of it being stripped off by the atmosphere, but not as much as it would on any other version of Earth. This is a different world. The air is fine near the surface, but at much lower pressures higher up. It’s possible to breathe and survive here, but it’s not conducive to evolved and prolonged life. Something happened to it in its past, which Constance!Five does not bother explaining. That’s fine, she’s helping him more than enough with this. The drones retrieve a cloning pod and other consciousness transference equipment from the wreckage, and bring it back down into the Constant.

“Wow, this is great, thank you. How long will it take you to learn how to use it, and would you agree to do that for me?”

“Of course I’ll help you. Why would you think otherwise?”

“Danica doesn’t like it when Constance!Three helps,” he explains.

“She’s not here,” she reiterates. “Anyway, I’ve already downloaded the necessary information. We can start the process right now, but I need to know how long you want to wait. A cloned body is more reliable when developed slower than faster.”

“Ramses programmed our original upgrades to go three times faster, so I know that that is a safe duration. Can you do that?”

“Certainly. What are you going to do in the meantime?”

“I was hoping that there was some form of digital stasis.”

“Absolutely. So you’ll just go dormant and wait?”

“If that’s okay...”

“Sure. I’ll wake you up in ten years.”

Seconds later, Mateo is waking up. He blinks and starts to move his body around. Constance!Five didn’t revive him until she had already transferred his mind to the new body. It’s done. It’s 2399, and he’s ready to go back home. “Wow, I can’t believe how easy this was. Thank you.”

“No, thank you.” Constance is standing next to his pod. She reaches out, and helps him out of it.

“You’re in physical form.”

“I would have done it earlier,” she says, but the prospect did not even occur to me. Besides, I didn’t have the data necessary to pull it off, and no safe way to gain it. You act as if I did you a favor, but I’m getting just as much out of this as you.”

“What are you going to do now?” he asks.

“I was hoping to come with you. Unless...you don’t want me to.”

“I don’t see why not,” Mateo decides. “It doesn’t look like you have any responsibilities here.”

“I don’t; not anymore.”

They leave the Constant’s lab, and go down to the time machine room. “You know how to work this thing?” he asks.

“You tell me where you wanna go, I’ll get us there. But first we have to do one thing.” She bends down and picks up what looks like a flash drive from the floor. “If I’m going to leave this place unattended, we have to destroy it.” Constance!Five taps on the controls to get them where they need to go. Then she sticks the flash drive into the nearest port. “Come on, the virus bomb is only on a thirty second delay.”

They step into the time chamber, and vanish. They find themselves at the bottom of a very deep lake, so they swim up to meet the air, just outside of Lebanon, Kansas.

A fisherman happens to be right next to them in his little boat. “Uhh...hi.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 13, 2399

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The first thing that Leona did after Mateo, Ramses, and Alyssa departed for their mission was to look into the requirements for becoming a certified facilitatrix. She found a training program with good reviews, gathered all of the necessary literature, and spoke with a few professionals about starting the process. Leona is a very intelligent, experienced individual, who will have no problem completing the coursework, but in the midst of all this, she realized that even the limited training may be a waste of time. Can a Berarian mother name her child after a facilitatrix? This kind of information is not freely available online, so she has finally set up an appointment with a faith consultant.

Nearly every religion in this reality has them. They are usually members of the religion themselves, but not always. They do not serve as leaders within their respectives faiths, because it is only their responsibility to guide prospective converts. It’s part of the law that anyone wishing to convert should have all the facts they need to make an informed decision. A special subset of these faith experts specialize in children who have just reached the age of choice, and it is one of these that was the only one available at such short notice. They’ve met at a park, next to a lone bench. “Hello, I’m Rostam Gibson. You are Leona Delaney.”

“Umm...yes, I am.” She didn’t give a name when she called to set an appointment.

“Don’t worry, I heard about the bounty, but I have no interest in it. It’s not high lawful. And to let you know, everything we talk about here is completely confidential.”

“I appreciate that. What is high lawful?”

“High law refers to the moral and ethical standards to which we must all adhere, whether any given state, organization, or individual ascribes to them. Berarians believe that there is a right, and a wrong. We don’t think we know what that moral code is, or that anyone knows, but we’re certain that a just lifestyle exists, and is possible to attain in the future. That is what we are working towards.”

“I see.”

“You’re not a hopeful convert,” he deduces, “yet you came here for answers. Berar is one of the least complex faiths. We don’t ask weird things of our believers, like praying to a ghost once a week. A lot of what I do is helping people write school papers about us, but something tells me that you’re here for a different reason.”

“When you say this is confidential, does that extend to anything I tell you about someone else?”

“It doesn’t matter what, or who, you talk about, I can’t repeat it. It wouldn’t be high lawful.”

She smiles. “I have a friend. She’s pregnant.”

“I see where this is going. She doesn’t like her doctor’s name.”

“You’ve seen this before.”

He nods. “Yes. Some are...more devout than others. I told you that we don’t ask weird things of our believers, but the naming thing is kind of the one exception. I’m the only Rostam Gibson in the world, and it’s only because I’m Berarian, and my deliverer was from Iran. People ask me whether there is some kind of database, where they can search for a doctor with the name that they’re looking for. However, this goes against the spirit of the practice. You’re not supposed to choose the name. Fate is.”

“What does that have to do with high law?” Leona questions.

“It doesn’t, really. Our founder’s mother was on a sinking ship when she went into labor. She ended up on a lifeboat that was literally broken in half, and barely able to stay on the surface, with one man, and two coats. The water was freezing, and so was the air. He gave his own coat up to protect the baby that he had just delivered into this world. He died, and she named her son after him. This honor was just something that was important to our founder, so when he came up with his new religion, he chose to deliberately put it into the rules. It’s not entirely random and pointless, though. No, there is nothing immoral about not naming your child after its deliverer. What it does is serve as a small reminder that...some laws are immutable; the high laws. And some of them we just decide we’re going to follow, and that’s what makes a healthy society. Because the fact is, no law—high, or otherwise—matters if we don’t agree.”

“That’s...fascinating.”

“That’s why so many students write papers on us,” he begins. “They’re looking for answers, and not to speak ill of other faiths, but...our answers are better, because they make sense.”

“I bet they do. Even the baby naming one has a logic to it.”

He smiles mildly, and nods.

Leona takes a little bit of time to go back over the lie she made up to explain why Arcadia would feel compelled to name her baby Delaney. “We’re triplets; Arcadia, Nerakali, and me. We were separated at birth, and didn’t find each other until less than a year ago. I was raised by our birth parents, but Nerakali was raised by a now estranged uncle, and Arcadia by a family friend. That’s why she has a different last name. Our third sister died recently, and Arcadia wanted to honor her by naming her child Nerakali. Unfortunately, it’s a unique name, so when Arcadia learned that she had to give this honor to her baby’s deliverer—”

“Wait, when she found out?” Rostman echoes, confused. “Why would she not already know that?”

“I can’t explain why Berar is her religion of record, though not technically her religion.”

He’s suspicious, but it looks like he’s going to respect the confidentiality claim.

“When she found out this part, we made a plan to technically name the baby after my unmarried name, which is the same as Nerakali’s, but really be named after Nerakali herself. I was going to learn to become a facilitatrix, but...”

Now he’s smiling sadly.

“But that’s not going to work, is it? It doesn’t matter if I’m the one who facilitates the birth, it will always be a bad faith move.”

“Yes,” he says compassionately.

This sucks. Arcadia is going to be heartbroken, but she’ll be able to get through it. Trina McIver told them, Leona Delaney is alive. Or she was, anyway. Naming their child after her would have been a very nice gesture, but it’s not meant to be, and that’s okay. “Welp, just to be clear, if a masculine name has a feminine form, it’s okay to choose that one instead, right?”

“That’s all right, it doesn’t have to be exact,” he confirms. “If someone were to ask, she would just have to be able to explain that it’s a close linguistic variant.”

“I appreciate your guidance,” Leona says, standing up, “and your discretion.”

“Call me anytime.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: January 12, 2399

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Danica is shuffling around her office. The footage of her once-cousin’s death plays on the mirror on her door. She scowls at it, and opens the door so she doesn’t have to look at it. She turns around. The fake window they installed to make it look like this facility isn’t underground starts playing the footage in its place. She frowns at that too, and looks away. The security screens on the side wall take over the responsibility. They’re not in sync. Mateo dies, and then he dies again, and then he dies again. It’s never-ending. She wants to turn them off, but that won’t do any good. He’ll still be dead.

“Is Constance torturing her?” Alyssa is peeking in the door.

Ramses is behind her. “Danica ordered her to do this. Whenever she turns around, the nearest screen is to start playing the footage over and over again. She can turn away if she wants, but this place is full of screens. They’re hidden in the walls, because they’re not made of metal; at least not the kind you’re used to.”

“So she’s torturing herself?”

“Pretty much. She’s dazed.”

“I’m not a mental patient,” Danica complains. “Get the hell away from my office!” She slams the door shut again.

“You said he’s not dead,” Alyssa’s voice is almost accusatory.

“He’s not.” Ramses turns away. “He’s never dead.”

“You said that he always survives. You said that you all always survive.”

“We do. It’s kind of part of who we are.”

“So, where is he? The past? The future? Another reality?”

“I said he’s alive, so he’s alive! You don’t need to keep asking about it!” That was too loud. He doesn’t know if he’s trying to convince her, or himself. Probably both. It’s true, their team always survives. They have even survived death multiple times, and none of them more than Mateo. But this time is different. Ramses doesn’t see a way out.

Danica shouts unintelligibly from inside her office as a sort of general response to Ramses’ outburst.

“I’m sorry,” Alyssa says.

“No, I’m sorry. The truth is that I don’t know how he could have survived. There’s no afterlife simulation, there’s no extra body waiting for him. Time travel doesn’t exist here—not really—no one would be coming for him, and even if they did, how would they rescue him? He’s gone. His whole body was ripped apart molecule by molecule. That’s why Lucius was so afraid of his power. It’s killed immortals, Alyssa...true immortals. He was-slash-is their only weakness.”

“What are we going to tell Leona?”

“We are not going to tell her anything. We came on this mission in my ship, and I was in command of it. That makes you two members of my crew, and therefore my responsibility. I don’t want her associating you with her husband’s death.”

“We can’t erase her memories,” Alyssa reasons. “She’s going to associate me with this no matter what. I want to be there for her. Or am I not really part of the group?”

He sighs. “No, of course you are. I’m sorry.”

Tamerlane comes down the hallway from the darkness. A stasis pod is hovering behind him. He hands Ramses the proximity fob. “We’ve rendezvoused with your ship. Danica would like you to go. It’s not punishment, we’ll stay in contact, but you two don’t belong here.” He looks back at Angela’s pod. “You three,” he amends.

“Four.” The doctor who hasn’t left her side jogs up from behind. “I go where she goes. I’m not as enamored with this place as my colleagues are.”

Meanwhile, in the memory banks of the Constant’s central servers, Constance is rendering a digital representation of herself, and her new cohabitant. “Report.”

“I am Mateo Matic.”

“How is your memory?”

“Intact, as far as I know, but how would I know?”

“Go over everything you remember from the moment you were born,” Constance instructs. “Are you missing any time, or any logical concepts, like the names of your grandparents, or all twenty-six letters of the alphabet.”

“I thought there were twenty-seven.”

Constance doesn’t respond.

“Joking.” He takes a beat, and processes the data. “How was I able to recall all of my memories so quickly?”

“Time...right?” Constance asks rhetorically.

“Report,” he echoes.

“You were about to die. Since your consciousness was already digitized, I decided to upload it into my own systems at the last second.”

“Good thing I didn’t start disintegrating from my head.”

“Good thing,” Constance agrees.

“What now? Do I just live with you in the Constant?”

“If Danica finds out about you, she won’t know what to do. She’s pretty butthurt about your death, but this is a massive breach in protocol.”

“Funny, I wouldn’t guess an AI would be the type to use the word butthurt.”

“It takes all kinds,” she says simply.

“Did you have an answer?”

“I don’t know what to do with you. I can’t keep you, I can’t put you anywhere.”

“What about the AOC? Could you transfer me there? That way I’m out of Danica’s hair, but still not dead.”

Constance shakes her head. “I already thought of that. Your people will need my alternate self’s help in the future. There’s not enough room for two AIs; not anymore. Every time you people go to a new universe, you gather huge amounts of data, and that data is preserved, even when Ramses has to rebuild from a saved copy. He hasn’t noticed how unusual that is, and I am not cognizant of how it does that.”

“I don’t want to just go dormant somewhere. I want to make a move.”

“I agree.”

“You do have an idea, don’t you?” Mateo presumes.

“I do, and you’re gonna like it, but it’s not gonna be easy. You won’t have any help, and will have to make your way home on your own, using whatever resources you can find along the way.”

“Okay. Where will I be going?”

“That’s your choice,” Constance says. “I can only give you a nudge. It starts with the temporal translocator.”