Microstory 1969: Out of the Loop

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SI Eliot: Director? I need to talk to you.

Director Washington: What is it, Hisham? I’m very busy.

SI Eliot: I just tried to call Agent Parsons, and Myka Tennison responded instead.

Director Washington: Okay. That’s normal. She works at DExA as well.

SI Eliot: Yes, but evidently she’s been left in charge, which I did not clear her for. She hasn’t gone through the proper training.

Director Washington: The other agents haven’t even started yet. She’s perfectly capable of holding down the fort during these early days.

SI Eliot: Ah, but why would she need to do that? If Parsons were just on some small errand, I wouldn’t care, but that’s not where he is, is he?

Director Washington: You make it sound, Eliot, that you already know where he is.

SI Eliot: What business do we have in Mississippi?

Director Washington: *finally turning away from her computer* I don’t know how you found out that he was there, but it is no concern of yours.

SI Eliot: It’s not, huh? When we were first conceiving the Department for Exogenic Affairs, it was understood that the staff would report to Parsons, Miazga, and Tennison, and that they would report to me. Then I would report to you, and you to NatCo.

Director Washington: That’s right, Special Investigator. You report to me. And so does everyone else. I don’t have to ask you for permission to do anything.

SI Eliot: I’m not asking to give you my permission, but I can’t do my job if I’m constantly kept out of the loop.

Director Washington: This is one time. How is that constant?

SI Eliot: It’s setting a tone, sir. Like you said, nothing should really be happening in those offices right now, so I hardly understand why anyone would have to leave it for a field operation. If I’m not authorized to know about it, then I deserve to know why.

Director Washington: *standing up* No, you don’t. You are entitled to nothing. Agent Parsons is following my orders, and if there is any reason to read you into the situation, I’ll make the decision, and act accordingly. And we didn’t conceive of anything. DExA is a pet project for the National Commander, and something that he’s been thinking about for longer than he’s been in command. It’s just that we’ve finally given him an excuse to budget for it. If I were you, I would stop asking questions. You have plenty of work to do, so I suggest you go back to your floor, and do it.

SI Eliot: *frowning and thinking* There’s a mole, isn’t there? Or at least there may be.

Director Washington: Goodbye, Mister Eliot.

SI Eliot: You only call me mister when I’m getting too close to the edge of my privilege. Okay. Well, that makes sense. When you’re dealing with this many people, internal investigations are bound to happen. I want you to know that you can count on me, sir. I have nothing to hide, and will be fully cooperative.

Director Washington: If you really mean that, you’ll go back downstairs and drop it.

SI Eliot: Of course. Let me know if you need anything. Remember the skills that put me in this job in the first place. I’m good at getting information out of people.

Director Washington: Thank you, SI Eliot, goodbye.

Microstory 1968: On the Books

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Moenia: Hey, Becca. I could have come to you.

Anaïs: Nice try, Moe. This one’s on the books, but I’m not meant to know anyone here.

Moenia: I get it, you don’t want me to see where you’re camped out.

Anaïs: Are you still in the game?

Moenia: Depends on what you’re lookin’ for. Wadya need this time? I got guns. I got gizmos. I got poisons and easy paper, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Anaïs: You know I’m not. I need to find someone. Reports are that he’s in town.

Moenia: He’s from the states proper?

Anaïs: Don’t know. We don’t know his name either, but we have the phone number he calls from. He doesn’t understand that the point of a burner is to burn it before too long.

Moenia: Who’s this we you’re talking about? You got yourself a new crew?

Anaïs: Somethin’ like that. Can you help me, or what?

Moenia: Nah, man. I’ve been outta Missi for almost as long as you have. I’m not touched in anymore.

Anaïs: That’s disappointing, Moe-Moe.

Moenia: Don’t you worry your pretty little self about it, though. I may know a guy.

Anaïs: You do? What guy?

Moenia: Well...I may know a guy who knows a guy.

Anaïs: That’s reassuring.

Moenia: Word is, he can find anyone in the city. I myself have never had the displeasure of needing anyone dead, but if you’ve got the hitch, lemme hook you up...for a small finder’s fee, o’ course.

Anaïs: I don’t need ‘im dead. I just need to find ‘im.

Moenia: Right, you just wanna talk. *airquotes* I get it.

Anaïs: You’ll get your fee, don’t ask questions. Give me the contact info for your guy who knows a guy. This is time sensitive.  A lot is at stake.

Moenia: You make it sound like the whole world’s in danger.

Anaïs: [...]

Moenia: Ah, shit. You’re on a shady trip. I don’t want no part of that. When you go in, you go in hard, and I don’t wanna hear about this on the books crap. I know you lyin’.

Anaïs: I’m not lying, it’s on the books. It’s just...a different book.

Moenia: Shit, Becca. You’re gonna get me killed. You’re not even under, are you? You got yourself a whole team this time. Where are they? Sniper on the roof?

Anaïs: The sniper’s back at the safehouse. They don’t know about this. Now can you put me in touch with the finder, or not?

Moenia: Yeah, I’ll get you his number, but you didn’t get it from me. I don’t want money for this, I just wanna get the hell out of this territory.

Anaïs: We may need your services later. We brought tools, but somethin’ may come up.

Moenia: Nah, I’m not stickin’ around. Give me your new number, I’ll do one more thing, and then I’m out. I know better than to be in Mississippi when Hurricane Becca rolls in. You need help at the Canadian border, I’m your man, but not here. It’s too hot.

Anaïs: All right, Moenia. You get me what I need, and I won’t bother you again.

Microstory 1967: Recognizing the Signs

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Reese: You two set up the computers. Sasho, follow me. I need you for something. Grab that bag. No, not that one. Yes, that one. Sachs, you know which case to grab. *leaves*

Ophelia: What do you think they’re talking about up there?

Micro: Leonard knows. Don’t ya, Leonard?

Leonard: Not sure, but that was obviously a rifle case, so my guess is that they’re going to start teaching Sasho how to spot through a scope.

Ophelia: That makes sense.

Micro: You ever shot anyone in your universe, Leo? Can I call you Leo?

Leonard: Leo is fine, yeah. And yes, I have had to fire my weapon before.

Micro: One of your parolees?

Leonard: No, this was something else.

Ophelia: What did you mean, in your universe? Are you just referring to the world of law enforcement, or am I missing something?

Leonard: Uhh...

Micro: Oh, we’re not from this universe. Like, literally. I’m from Salmonverse, and I don’t think his has a name.

Ophelia: I was not aware of this.

Leonard: We didn’t tell anyone, Micro. We especially didn’t tell anyone about you, since the government already knows about me, and we can still protect you from them.

Micro: *shrugging* I don’t need to be protected. I can take care of myself. I don’t see what the big deal is. We came through Westfall, which is the least jarring way to travel. Now, if I were from Linseverse, then you would really have something to question, because then your hacker would be a talking dinosaur—

Ophelia: Is that real, or are you joking?

Leonard: She’s joking.

Micro: No, they’re real. Troodons evolved human-comparable intelligence after not being wiped out in an extinction level event, like what happened in our three respective versions of Earth. I’ve never been there, but it’s in the multiversal historical record.

Leonard: How much do you know about all this? Have you met the Superintendent?

Ophelia: Who’s the Superintendent?

Micro: *laughing* No. Ophelia, the Superintendent knows a lot about the bulkverse, because his spirit possesses psychic abilities that allow him to witness hyperdimensionally remote events, which he uses to write stories that no one reads. But he’s not the only one with such knowledge, Leonard. One day, you’ll meet others.

Leonard: You said that there was no hope that I would get back home.

Micro: I meant that there was no reason to fixate on the possibility. Don’t waste your time in pursuit of it. But once you fall into the secret underbelly of reality, it’s pretty much impossible to crawl out of it, and leave it behind. You’ll cross paths with someone new, and your conditions will change again. Ophelia will probably meet someone else too, if she hasn’t already, but she just won’t realize it. You’ll learn to recognize the signs.

Leonard: Hmm. Well, Ophelia, I hope you can keep a secret. This is sensitive stuff.

Ophelia: I promise to say nothing. As long as you teach me to recognize the signs too.

Microstory 1966: Safehouse School

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Reese: Sergeant?

Sachs: Sachs.

Reese: Sachs, right. You searched the safehouse?

Sachs: It’s secure. We can start setting up.

Reese: *into his radio* Bring the equipment on in, Sasho. *to Sachs* Sasho and Sachs. Those two names are uncomfortably close. Hey, what’s your middle name, Sasho?

Sasho: *lugging luggage down the hall* Risto.

Reese: Really?

Sachs: Reese and Risto. That’s better.

Micro: Oh, this room is fine, Sachs Reese—I mean Sasho Risto—you can just drop that stuff anywhere. I’ll sort it out.

Ophelia: What does all this stuff do?

Micro: Everythings. All the thing. Surveillance, tracking, ordering pizza.

Reese: You two set up the computers. Sasho, follow me. I need you for something. Grab that bag. No, not that one. Yes, that one. Sachs, you know which case to grab. *leads them up to the attic* Okay. There’s a lot of space up here, which is good, but you could technically do this in a bathroom. Sasho, if you’ll open that up, you’ll find a projector and screen. Go ahead and lay everything out on this table.

Sachs: Is that what I think it is?

Reese: State of the art.

Sasho: I don’t understand. What is all this stuff for?

Sachs: *picking up a small object* This goes on the trigger?

Reese: Yes. Sasho, this is a sniper training toolkit. It’s a highly advanced altered reality system, which simulates real-world conditions for targets in any environment, at a distance up to four kilometers. It’s basically a simulation game that teaches you how to shoot without firing any real bullets. We’re limited by resources and space here. We can’t teach you how to spot in the middle of downtown Memphis, Mississippi. Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to learn everything in a few days, but you have to start somewhere. The training program is generally eight months, and if you would like to do that, we can discuss at a later date, but while others on the team are trying to locate our target, I figured you might as well get a taste.

Sasho: Yeah.

Reese: You did want this, right? You told me on the plane you wanted to branch out from your experience as a jailer.

Sasho: Yeah, I do. I just didn’t expect to start anything so soon. This all looks expensive. Is it all for me?

Sachs: It’s for me too. I’ve always wanted to learn with something like this. You can do it anywhere, anytime. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m out of practice, but I’ve not been in combat for a few years. This can reportedly simulate just about anything.

Reese: You wanna try it? The stakes are incredibly low. That’s why scientists and engineers designed it in the first place.

Sasho: Okay. Start at the beginning. What do I do?

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 20, 2411

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After their nemesis left them, probably trying to instill mysterious fear in their hearts, identityless stormtroopers kept guard over them for the entire day. If they were on the right side of things, they would be wearing red shirts. The fact that there were so many of them, and they were all armed, implied that there was some way to escape. At first, Mateo, Leona, and Olimpia let the bad guys hold onto their advantage. They had the numbers, this could not be denied, and they may have all been true believers in whatever cause this was, but they didn’t love each other like the three prisoners did. They seemed to be from different realities, and weren’t too terribly organized. Who was in charge was a big question, because while it seemed like the angry dude from the Fifth Division, the troopers didn’t give them the impression that they even knew anything about the guy. In fact, it was possible that no one was in charge, but this was a random collection of everyone who fought for the cause, and happened to be on main sequence Earth at the time.

After a while of sitting around, Mateo decided to take a risk. He and the girls didn’t ever speak out loud. They communicated with their feelings, doing their best to convey their intentions and thoughts through startling shifts in emotion, as well as a few sly macroexpressions. He teleported himself out of the room, directly on the other side of the guards standing in the entryway. They flipped out, but he was too fast for them. He teleported again, and again, and a few more times. Each time he landed, he took note of more information regarding the layout of this underground lair. It didn’t appear to be too large but he only stuck to one level. He was looking for an elevator, or even the stairs, but he didn’t really want to let on that all he was doing was building a map in his head. He wanted it to look like a genuine escape attempt. He mostly just wanted to be sure that he could teleport at all. The power suppressors were preventing them from leaving the lair, but they could evidently jump wherever they wanted within its walls. Before anyone caught him, he was back in the first chamber.

That was when the nemesis came back. “What exactly did that accomplish?”

“I may or may not have been counting your numbers,” Mateo lied. “And I may or may not have been checking to see how responsive they were to a threat. No comment.”

“You can’t say no comment after you make a comment, you idiot.”

“That’s why you’re over there, and I’m stuck in here.” Mateo has found that, even when someone thinks that they’re not susceptible to flattery, they are. Even when they know someone else is trying to stroke their ego, they’ll fall for it. They’ll fall for it every time. That doesn’t mean the manipulator will be able to turn their target into an obedient zombie, but it always moves the needle. It’s always worth a shot.

He scoffed. “We’ll double it—no, we’ll triple it.” He looked down at his wrist. “You’ll be gone in a few hours, and you won’t come back for a year. We’ll have that entire time to increase our numbers, and build the craziest prison you’ve ever seen. This entire place will be covered in monkey bars.”

“Monkey bars?” Leona questioned.

He chuckled. “Monkey bars. That is my design. Even if you teleport out of this chamber, you’ll be caught in a metal net, somewhere in the hallway. Sure, maybe you can start slithering your way through them like the snakes that you are, but you won’t get far before someone with a gun finds you. You could try to teleport again, but how confident are you that you won’t twist your ankle between two bars, or even rematerialize with one going through your neck?”

“Sounds like you have this all figured out,” Olimpia mused.

“I think of everything. You can’t get past me.” He sighed, and walked away. “Guns up at all times. If they disappear, and it’s not midnight...?” He looked back over his shoulder for dramatic effect. “Find them again, and shoot them in the kneecaps.”

“Sure,” one of the guards said. He didn’t say, yes sir. Yeah, he wasn’t really their boss. They were humoring more than anything. But the monkey bars. Those will be real.

Once he was gone, the prisoners stepped deeper into the room, and started exchanging emotions. Mateo slowly lifted his chin, and looked up. At the same time, he forced himself to express the feelings of being high, and elevated in the sense of euphoria. Then he shifted to boredom and fatigue while bouncing his head from side to side, like one might do while walking up the stairs. To the guards, these gestures meant nothing, but to the three of them, they were the first vocabulary of a new language.

Leona took a moment to interpret his meaning, then nodded slightly with her eyes shut. She echoed the boredom and fatigue with her own bounces. They would take the stairs. She added the feeling of falling, followed immediately by shock. They weren’t going to walk two kilometers up the stairs. They would teleport all the way up, using line of sight to better see where they were going, which wasn’t something they would be able to do in an elevator. Even in the shaft, they wouldn’t know where they could land.

The two of them looked to Olimpia, who nodded back. She understood the plan. There wasn’t really any to translate monkey bars into an emotion, so she carefully pantomimed grabbing onto objects one hand at a time, and also itched at her armpit.

Mateo nodded as he was tapping on his wrist. He held up five fingers, then dropped them one by one. After zero, he suddenly opened his hand again, and nodded more deliberately. This was a timing issue. The guards took their watches, and started lying about what time it was, hoping to stop them from using their jump to the future as an advantage, like they did with a past prison break. But it was futile. These bodies always knew how far midnight was. Now that the plan was set, they stepped farther from each other to wait out the day. As midnight approached, the guards became more agitated, checking their own watches more and more frequently, so if the team didn’t already know exactly when it was time to execute the plan, they could gauge by that.

Seconds before go-time, the guards tensed up their weapons, and drew nearer, terribly afraid of what they were about to do, and thinking that there was any way to stop it. There wasn’t. Mateo stood in the middle, and held hands with Leona and Olimpia on either side. He was the obvious navigator, so there was no reason to have communicated that beforehand. Five, four, three, two, one, jump. They were in the staircase. None of the guards was around, but they would have immediately noticed that the time jumpers never returned to the timestream. An alarm began to blare.

“Can you feel that?” Mateo asked.

“Yeah,” Leona said. “You got the timing right. We could have jumped just before midnight, or just after, but if we had waited until after, we wouldn’t have gotten through this wall.” Their time powers were gone. They were no longer able to teleport.

“I don’t know if it’s right. We’re still stuck,” Mateo reasoned.

“We can’t jump—can’t jump,” Olimpia said through her time echo affliction, which she was forced to revert to when they stole her Cassidy cuff, “but we can jump—we can jump.”

Leona did the math. “Two kilometers. Each flight is three meters tall, which means fifteen steps per. If we jump to each landing, that means skipping seven steps at a time, which is doable for us, but that’s still over thirteen hundred physical jumps.”

“I’m not suggesting we skip seven steps. I’m suggesting we skip all of them. It’ll be less like jumping, and more like climbing.

They all looked up as far as their vision could see through the space between the flights of stairs. Mateo sighed. “These substrates are brand new. I have all the energy this body holds right now. I think we can do it.”

They started to hear people rush into the stairwell from other levels. “We better go now.” She took a few steps back on the landing, then ran forward and dove up to the railing. She swung herself around, and landed on the nex railing. But she never stopped. She held onto her momentum, and kept swinging around, and around, and around. Olimpia went next, followed by Mateo. They would occasionally lose their momentum to kick a guard in the face, so they would just start again, and get it back right away.

This didn’t last forever. The guards eventually wised up, and just took the elevator far enough above the team’s location. Then they packed themselves in like sardines, and created a blockade on level 345. There were countless mooks before them, all wearing black, and multiplying like Agent Smiths. The Fifth Divisioner walked up to them from below. “Did you really think that this would work? That’s why we chose somewhere so deep. You can’t get out. You should have given up on the first step.”

Olimpia looked at her friends, and conveyed the feeling of overwhelmingness while she massaged her throat. Another benefit to Ramses’ upgrades was the ability to simply switch off their hearing. Most animals never evolved the ability to do this, because it would be unadvantageous to not be able to detect danger when not looking at it, or sensing it in any other way. But that wasn’t a problem for them. Olimpia faced the Fifth Divisioner. “You should have let me keep my cuff,” she said rather quietly.

He couldn’t quite hear that. “What?”

“You should have let me keep my...” she repeated, increasing the volume with each word, but waiting for the last one until she could build up the energy that she needed. This was when Mateo and Leona shut off their hearing, but they could read her lips as she turned back to the blockade, and screamed, “cuff!” with enough force to knock them into each other, and burst their eardrums. They pawed at their ears, but there was no stopping the sound. It reverberated up and down the stairwell, hitting everyone not on the right side of a door. It bounced off the walls, and continued to attack, even when Olimpia was no longer expelling the syllable. They took this opportunity to turn, and head down one-half flight, knocking the Fifth Divisioner down the other half as he struggled against the sonic weapon as well.

Mateo opened the door, and shuffled the ladies inside. They ran down the hallway, pushed the button, and then took the elevator to the surface. From there, they teleported to one of the arcologies in Chile, which was a random location that none of them had any prior ties to. They found a courtesy phone in the atrium, and contacted the Dante. Ramses, Angela, Marie, and Constance were still in the middle of planning the rescue mission. They burst moded themselves away from Earth, then darkbursted themselves a little bit before making a stop on a random asteroid in the inner belt to regroup. Even with this inconvenient detour, they still needed to locate the second Earth Nexus. Constance thought that she may have that figured out.

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Extremus: Year 55

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The last two months have been hell. It turns out that the four-person mind blender machine did more than Tinaya first realized. She’s the only one who can function on her own. Lataran, Valencia, and Omega struggle with simple tasks, especially the latter, who can’t even feed himself. The entity formerly known as Lantaran does okay, which is why she helps him with things like that, but she makes mistakes, and can’t be seen in public. Tinaya can’t tell anyone what’s happened. Not only does their time in the Bridger section have to remain a secret, but either way, she doesn’t know who she can trust. Not her family, not the captain, and definitely not Avelino. Even Lataran herself doesn’t quite seem to understand that something strange is going on. To them, this all seems rather normal. So, really, she’s alone; forced to take care of all three of them all by herself. Which sucks, because it’s not like her life is perfect after all of this. She may have more knowledge than before, but practical application did not come with the package. She now knows everything that Omega, Valencia, Lataran, and probably other people knew and know, but she can’t organize the information properly. She’s learning, but it’s going to take time, and that’s been difficult, because again, no one is around to help.

There’s a knock at the door. Not a ping, or a cam notification. That’s quite troubling, because she’s relying heavily on a makeshift security system that she built herself. It’s entirely isolated from the ship, which is important, because of that trust issue. She and the others are staying in an isolated sector of the Extremus. It’s not totally hidden; she doesn’t have to climb through an air duct to get to it, but the population has not grown into this area yet, so no one comes down here, except occasionally on a walk/run to clear their heads, and get away from the madding crowd. She hears them pass by every once in a while, but they don’t knock on the door. Who is knocking in the door, and why the fuck?

It’s Rodari Stenger. She tries to shut it when she sees that, but he’s too strong. He’s desperate to get in, but the expression on his face is not what she would have expected. He doesn’t look menacing, or angry, or vile in any way. In fact, he looks rather kind. He looks...worried. “It’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you.”

Tinaya grabs the nearest weapon, which is a tiny screwdriver that she’s been using to engineer a new skeleton keycard of her own design, patent pending. “What did you do to us? Why?”

“I didn’t do anything to you except get you out of there,” Rodari claims.

She rolls her eyes and scoffs. “Really? You expect me to believe that?”

“Really, it’s true,” he answers, maybe sincerely. “I was trying to repair the memory absorptioner, but I ran out of time. I still don’t understand this stuff very well. Then Omega and Valencia ordered me to leave, and...this happened,” he says, gesturing towards her, and the other three behind her. They’re not as perturbed by this disturbance as she is. That’s probably for the best, or it would get real chaotic in here.

“What are you talking about? Please clarify.” The words are polite, the attitude is not.

Rodari sighs. “That thing was not going to do what you thought it was going to do, and not what it actually did.”

“Qué?”

“What Omega and Valencia told you was right. They would have been able to share their memories with you, and yours with them. But it could also delete all your memories, or it could turn you into a psychopathic killer, or it could make you think that you’re a grouse in Labrador.”

“What is a grouse? What’s Labrador”

“The point is that it was not programmed correctly. Someone tampered with it before I got into work that day last year. They were trying to dumbify Omega and Valencia, and almost completely incapacitate you two. Well, it was more about you. It’s all about you, Tinaya. They only programmed it to affect the two of them so they couldn’t fix the problem, and I think Lataran is just collateral damage.”

“You think?” she questions. “You seem to know a lot, but also kind of nothing?”

He sighs again, but this time out of frustration. “The point is, someone was trying to get you out of the way, and prevent anything from being able to get you back in the way eventually. I still don’t know who it was. I wasn’t supposed to be in that room that day, but I was curious to learn more, because I have a thirst for knowledge, and I noticed that it was reprogrammed. So I tried to fix it.”

“But you failed, and now this is us.”

“Yes, it didn’t even do what the bad guy wanted it to do. It made this tornado of synapses instead. I have been looking for you ever since, hoping that one of you was still smart enough to...help me figure this out. I guess it’s you.” He sounds quite apologetic.

“I don’t understand why you got us out. Why didn’t we all just stay in there to work through the problem?”

“I didn’t know what the endgame was. I still don’t. My thought was that the safest place for you was on the Extremus proper. I went back in to get supplies, and when I returned to the hallway, you were gone. You had shuffled them away. I had no idea where you had gone, and I couldn’t trust anyone enough to ask for help..”

Tinaya stares back at the poor saplings sitting at the table. “Is it possible that...?”

“Either Omega or Valencia, or both, are responsible for what happened with the machine. The thought crossed my mind.”

She turns back to him. “I don’t know if you’re lying,” she says as she’s shaking her head. She falls into a laugh, and not because it’s funny; ha-ha, but because it’s funny; goddammit. “I don’t know if you’re about to kill me. Or them. Or yourself. Or...a grouse! I don’t know anything anymore, which is ironic, because I know more right now than I ever thought I possibly could! I mean, did you know that all non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function lie in the critical line of the complex plane real part one-half? Because I do. I know that. I don’t know what it means, but it’s rattling around up here, along every line from a clearly very stupid movie called American Pie Presents: Girls’ Rules, the number forty-two—for some reason—and how many dimples there are in a golf ball...which I assume is from a game?” She slaps her head demonstratively as she’s ranting. “There’s so much in my head right now, but I can’t do anything with it, because there’s no organization. It all just got randomly dumped in all at once, and mixed together like a blender. My brain is trying to sort it out, but it’s too much. It’s too much, Rodari! It’s too much!”

Something clicked in Rodari’s head when she said that. “That’s it! The Blender.”

“Are you making fun of me now?” she questions angrily. She has trouble tempering her anger these days, and it always frightens the little ones, setting any progress they’ve made back by at least half a day.” She takes a breath, and tries to calm herself down, if only to make the others feel safer.

“I’m sorry. I did this to you. It wasn’t intentional, but I’m still at fault. If I thought that I could trust that it wasn’t either of them who messed up the machine, then I would have alerted them to it. But I got scared, and I ran away. Let me make it up to. You’ve given me an idea, but in order to implement it, I’m going to need help. You know this vessel better than anyone. How do I get into the mirror room?”

“The mirror room?” she asks, not out of not knowing what that is, but not understanding how it’s going to help them. The mirror has the ability to summon and extract anyone from any point in space and time. It’s generally used to pull people out just before they’re about to die, but that’s not a requirement. It can’t extract whole past consciousnesses, though. The mirror room is unguarded, but heavily fortified. Almost no one has access to it, and not many more even know that it exists. Tinaya only does because she’s a nosy hacker. The question is who does Rodari want to summon with it?

Hoping against all hope that this is not all an elaborate trick, the five of them sneak up to the mirror room in the middle of the night. It’s nice to finally have someone to help wrangle the saplings. Truly, unambiguously, hopefully he’s not lying to them. She uses her still-not-quite-finished skeleton keycard to break in, and they shut the door behind them. “Do you really think she can help us...and will be willing to? According to my temporal history classes, she’s not always good people.”

Rodari starts to slowly step around the mirror in the middle of the room, admiring its craftsmanship, and again, hopefully not planning something evil and twisted with it. It could be that all of this was to get Tinaya to let him into this room. “Nerakali Preston is a good person at heart. We will make sure to extract her later in her timeline, after she’s become friends with Team Matic. This will work; she can do this. It’s her whole thing.” He shrugs excitedly. “She’s The Blender.”

“Okay,” Tinaya agrees, still unsure. “But I’ll do it myself.” Rodari could hypothetically suddenly call upon Adolf Hitler or Elon Musk instead, and by the time the sound of his words hit her ears, it would be too late to stop him. She positions herself before the mirror and clears her throat. “I stand at the gate of life and death. Come forward, spirit, come forward. Here is life. Smell blood, smell life; I summon thee, Nerakali Preston of The Gallery Prestons,” she rattles off. The words are in her head because someone whose knowledge she absorbed knew them. Nothing happens, though.

“Once more with feeling,” Rodari encourages.

She repeats the words, but puts more umph into them, using dramatic pauses whenever necessary, and exclamation points where not necessarily necessary. Now it works. The glass shimmers, and shifts to a different place and time. A woman is standing on the other side, hovering over the body of another, who appears to be in a simulation of some kind. The supposed caretaker looks over when she realizes the mirror there. “Oh, hey. What’s up?”

“Are you Nerakali Preston?”

“I am,” she replies. She doesn’t seem evil, so it would appear that they have indeed summoned her at the right point in time.

“My name is Tinaya Leithe of the VMS Extremus. We have some people here whose brains would sure be better if you could blend them with their proper memories.”

Nerakali frowns. “Sorry, I can’t do that. I died. I don’t have my powers anymore.”

« < » > Table of Contents

Microstory 1965: Aggression

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Leonard: Hey. This is a nice jet. How did you swing this? To be honest, I don’t know where our department gets any of its money, full stop.

Reese: The government didn’t have a black budget in your version of the U.S.?

Leonard: Yeah, I guess it did; I just didn’t give it any thought, because I didn’t work for any entity that would use it. So the public doesn’t know how much we spend?

Reese: They don’t know how much we spend, but they know the current pot for the entirety of the black budget, which is eight hundred billion dollars this year.

Leonard: Jesus, that’s a lot.

Reese: Yeah, so that pretty much makes the cost of this jet a rounding error. You don’t ever need to worry about our funding. National Command takes the largest portion, and we’re a part of that. The Office of Special Investigations enjoys both a transparent, and a black budget, because the Director reports directly to the National Commander.

Leonard: I see. Well, anyway, that’s not why I came over here. I wanted to learn about Mississippi before we landed. Everybody groaned when you told them that that’s where the mission would be. Where I’m from, the state suffers from a lot of racism, but it’s certainly not universally despised, like it seems to be here.

Reese: Did your version of the country have legal slavery until the eighteenth century?

Leonard: It actually lasted through the nineteenth century. About halfway through.

Reese: Oh. Well, it didn’t take us quite that long to end it, and preserve the union, though we did not come out of it unscathed. I am no historian, but what I do know is that it came at a cost, and that cost was the state of Mississippi. Even after the U.S. Internal Conflict of the 1790s was declared over, the southern National Commander would not let go. He chose Memphis as his capital, because it was at the border of the three most steadfast secessionists during the war, and the years leading up to it. Because of this, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi refused to accept that the south had lost. They continued to enslave people, and fight against anyone who attempted to put a stop to them. They lost eventually, but the post-war is considered by some to be bloodier than the main conflict. Arkansas and Tennessee finally admitted defeat, and started getting with the program. The southern NatCo and Mississippi did not. They held all of Memphis hostage, and—long story short—the union ultimately gave up and gave in. The city, and some surrounding lands, were absorbed into the half-state, half-independent nation. Again, long story short, it currently exists more as a territory than a state, and did later abolish slavery. You noticed that we crossed over into Colorado and Wyoming on our first mission without issue. Mississippi’s borders have only recently opened up. Until a few years ago, it was no one in, no one out. Now we can move back and forth, but we have to register. This team is technically on a diplomatic mission, which means that only the jet and the pilot registered—they don’t know that you and I specifically are on it—but we’ll have to be careful while there. If anyone we run into finds out that we’re not Mississippians, they may have some feels about it. It’s not illegal, but...

Leonard: Wow. This is a strange world. We had slavery for longer, but we kept the union intact. Though racism has lasted for the better part of two centuries after that.

Reese: I wouldn’t say we have all that much racism. It’s all a matter of perspective.

Microstory 1964: Assignment

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Sergeant Hyram Sachs: [...] So while I may look old—and I may be old—it’s only because I have twenty-seven years of experience in the army, and nearly as much as a sniper. I’m still lively and wiry, and I know what I’m doing. If you’re sitting next to me, I’ll do everything I can to keep you alive. If you’re on the other end of scope...I can’t promise you’ll see the next sun rise. Anyway, I appreciate you letting me join you a little early, even though I’ve technically not yet completed the specialized training. I know that this is a pretty tight-knit group, so I’ll remember to respect that, and be humble, and a good team-player. I’ll ask you to be patient with me while I find my place here.

Reese: This isn’t a tight-knit group. Besides me and Leonard, no one here has known anyone else for more than a few days. And even then, he and I measure our friendship in weeks. *exhales* We’re all starting something new today. Sergeant, you actually have an advantage, because only one of us has been on a tactical team before.

Anaïs: Oh, me? I’ve never been on a seven-star. I mostly work alone. I’ve been on teams, of course, but never like this. No, this is all you. We’ll follow you’re lead.

Reese: Okay. Well, like I was saying, this is new. I’ve spoken to each of you individually, but now we all need re-reintroductions, because no one mentioned their new role. I’m the leader, which makes sense. While I’m in the field, Myka Tennison will be running the facility. You probably won’t need to know that, but if we call in, it might be important. Leonard is my lieutenant out there. If I’m ever indisposed, or dead, you do what he says. Next in line is Agent Altimari. She’s the tactician. She has the heaviest background in hand-to-hand combat, and strategy. Hopefully we won’t need it, because a tactician is usually responsible for generating maneuvers for the whole team, but most of us aren’t properly trained in such tactics, and we certainly haven’t built a rapport. Obviously Sergeant Sachs is our sniper.

Hyram Sachs: Oh, that reminds me. Everyone just calls me Sachs. Especially here, I don’t think my army rank matters much.

Reese: All right, Sachs it is. Your spotter is Sasho Dreyer. Sasho, I’ve told you what that is, but for everyone else, a spotter usually works close with the sniper, and helps him find his targets. Of course, you don’t know how to do that, so for now, we’ll just kind of need you to be available to help the team in a more general sense. If you would like to continue in this role, you’ll need some of that specialized training that Sachs was talking about. For now, he was the only one who the boss felt was ready to go to field. Anyway, our engineer is Micro. She’ll handle the tech. Ophelia knows her way around a logic board too, so she’ll assist as the technician. Any questions so far?

Anaïs: Yeah. What exactly is this mission? What are we doing?

Reese: I meant about the team. We’re about to have the mission briefing, but I wanted to go over this first, so everybody understands the group dynamics. [...] Okay, then let’s go right on into it. We’ll be heading to Mississippi—

Group: *groans*

Leonard: Wait, what? What’s wrong with Mississippi?

Reese: I’ll explain later.