Starstruck: Crystal Clear (Part IV)

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Over a half century into Phase Two of the project, Ex-10 messaged the crew of the Iman Vellani with the additional plans for the antistar containment rings. When Mirage asked him why the plans were changed, he told her that they weren’t. He just chose not to divulge everything all at once. She asked whether there was anything else that he wasn’t telling them yet, but he refused to respond. What a dick. Hopefully, any further changes wouldn’t disrupt their progress, or force them to alter course. Fortunately, they had not yet begun Phase Three, which involved actually building the structures using the materials that they were procuring from the nearby star systems. Even if they had, it would have probably been okay. The new plans called for an extra layer of material on the inside of the rings.

“Hypercubic crystal lattice?” Belahkay asked. “Forgive me for my ignorance, but what the hell is that?”

“No,” Mirage assured him, “you’re not the only ignorant one. I’ve never heard of it either. I know what a hypercube is, and I know what a crystal lattice is, but a hypercubic crystal lattice? Sharice, what does it say?”

“It’s a special material. Incredibly rare. They’ve only found it in two planets.”

“In two planets?” Brooke echoed.

“It’s evidently only located deep in the core,” Sharice replied. “It doesn’t form naturally anywhere else. We’ll have to rip the whole thing apart to get to it.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard. What exactly is it?”

“It doesn’t say,” Sharice explained, “but if it’s what it sounds like, my guess is that it manipulates time in some way? Maybe it protects it from future or past tampering? Damn, I don’t know. There’s barely anything in this document.”

“Well, how far away is the nearest world that has this stuff?”

“Uhh, 707 light years,” Sharice answered.

“It will take us exactly one year to get there with the reframe engine. How convenient. Belahkay, how are the automators?”

It was his job to manage all of the machines that were spread throughout this sector of the galaxy. He synthesized error reports, and coordinated arrangements to get the project back on track. “It’s been four months since the last issue, and that one wasn’t that big of a deal, we just lost a chunk of one planet. It wouldn’t have slowed down the project.”

“You can keep an eye on the progress on the ride. We’ll all go to this magical fourth-dimensional planet, and see what we see.”

A year later, the Vellani was in orbit over the planet, which they discovered to be inhabited. Ubiquitous plant life was visible with the naked eye. There were billions of bodies of water, and evidence of seasonal shifts. The surface gravity was decently suitable for human life. Oh yeah, and there was human life there. A small settlement was found, and a closer look proved that people were currently living there. Something had happened somewhat recently, though. Most of the buildings had been severely damaged in an explosion. A few of the structures, which had been built farther from the apparent epicenter, managed to stay whole, including a perimeter fence. There was also one more thing that they saw when they zoomed in.

“It’s a time mirror,” Mirage noted.

“People are coming out of it, one by one,” Belahkay noticed.

“They’re armed,” Brooke pointed out. “They’re either about to attack the settlement, or protect it from someone else’s attack.”

“Can they see us? Do they think that we’re a threat?” Sharice asked, worried.

“I see no sign of space observation technology. We’re shielded by the daylight.”

Belahkay pointed at the screen. “Oh, look at that.”

A figure was running out of the ruins of the bombed out settlement. It ran straight through the gate of the fence, and towards the mirror. Just before it could make it through, the mirror exploded. “Whoa!” they all shouted in unison. The explosion sent everyone flying in all directions, no one farther from it than the person who had been running towards it. They were thrown all the way across the field, over the fence, across the interior field, and then back into the ruins of the settlement. There was no way that person survived that.

“Oh my God, what did we just witness?” Sharice asked, horrified.

Determined, Mirage stepped over to the corner, opened a secret compartment, and revealed a cache of weapons.

“Those have been here the whole time?” Brooke scolded.

“Yes, mom. Here’s yours.” She tried to hand her one of the rifles.

“No. Never again.”

Mirage tried to hand it to Sharice, who also refused, as did Belahkay. She growled. “If you don’t arm up, you’re not going down to the surface.”

“Stop us,” Brooke goaded. Then she disappeared.

Sharice looked at Mirage awkwardly, and then followed her mother. Belahkay stepped over and reached into the cache. He took out a handgun, and hid it inside his vest. “I got your back.”

They teleported down together, meeting the other two in the crowd of bodies near where the mirror once stood. They fanned out, and approached a body each. “Ex-088-GL0821,” Mirage called out.

“Ex-088-GL0403,” Sharice returned.

“Where I’m from,” Belahkay said, “this patch would be for the wearer’s name.”

“Yeah. I think it’s the same for them. These people belong to the Exin Empire, almost surely some kind of military force.”

“Ex-10 must be pretty important if he’s as low a number as he is, and these guys are named in nine figures,” Sharice decided.

“I imagine it’s far more complicated than just one through a billion,” Brooke guessed.

“I don’t have your fancy sensors. Are they all dead?” Belahkay asked.

“Yeah, they are,” Mirage confirmed. “No human lifesigns. So unless one of them is an alien, we should go into the ruins, and see if anyone there is still alive.”

They teleported away to find four people. The woman from the mirror explosion was lying on her back on the ground, just as they saw her. They thought that she had landed on the other side of a statue, but it was gone, and another woman was lying face down on top of her. She was completely naked. They were both breathing, but cut up from the glass that they shared, embedded in their skin. Two children were huddled together nearby.

“Sharice, take the wounded up to the infirmary, and place them each in a medical pod. Then you can come back. I’ll keep an eye on them from here.”

Of all of them, Brooke was the softest. She cautiously went over to the children. “Hey. It’s okay. We’re not gonna hurt you. Are these your parents?”

The kids were six, maybe seven years old, but they didn’t seem too terribly scared. The boy shook his head. He gently elbowed the girl in the arm. She pulled something out of her pocket, and held it up. It was a rock.

“You want me to have this?” Brooke asked. She carefully stepped forward, and took it from the girl.

“My mom’s in there,” the boy said.

Brooke moved it around in her hand, and then reached back to hand it to Mirage.

“It’s a homestone.” Mirage bent over, and looked the boy in the eyes. “Did you use this to get here, or were you going to use it to go somewhere else?”

“She used it to get here,” the boy explained. He took a rock out of his own pocket. “I used this one. I came alone. She came with my mom.”

“Don’t mix them up,” Mirage advised. “Homestones are identical. We’re not even sure that it’s not just the same stone at different points in spacetime. If one of them contains his mom, we have to work with the right one.”

“It could contain his mom?” Brooke questioned. “How’s that?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never heard of it, but I believe him. If he says that the girl and her mother came together, then something must have happened to the mom.”

“She’s not her mother,” the boy corrected. “She’s my mother, but we’re not siblings. It’s just that we both first traveled through time at the same time.”

“I see,” Mirage said. “You sound older than you look.”

“It’s been several years for me,” the boy—or rather, the young man—explained. “She’s older than she looks too, but even when she was older, she looked young.

Mirage nodded, and turned to the other three. “The homestone takes you back to where you were when you first experienced nonlinear time. It reyoungifies you to the age that you were, but it doesn’t undo history. It potentially gives you a second chance at life, but whatever originally happened after that moment still took place in the timeline.” She sighed, and looked over the girl’s stone. “You can take passengers with you, but it’s not the safest way to travel. Again, I’ve never heard of someone getting stuck, but I can’t rule it out.” She turned back to the young man. “Can I take this to test it?”

He nodded.

“What are your names?” Brooke asked.

“I’m Aristotle. This is Niobe Schur.”

Niobe cupped her hands over Aristotle’s ear.

“She can talk,” he told the crew. “She just doesn’t like to meet new people. When she gets to know you, she’ll warm up to you.”

“Well, what did she say?” Belahkay asked him.

“She doesn’t go by a name anymore. She goes by a number. I’m trying to fix that.”

“So this planet is in the Exin Empire,” Mirage reasoned.

Aristotle’s eyes narrowed. “No. This belongs to the Extremusians. The Exins are just the ones who kidnapped us, and forced us to live in the Goldilocks Corridor.”

“My mistake,” Mirage said apologetically.

“The women you took up to your ship,” Aristotle went on. “One of them is First Chair Tinaya Leithe. She’s very important. I don’t know who the naked one is.”

“Aristotle! Niobe!” A third adult woman was running towards them from a path that went through the forest behind the settlement. “Oh my God!”

The crew stepped back instinctually to make themselves look less like a threat.

The woman hugged the children, and frowned at the crew, trying to stop crying. “I saw the patches. You’re Oaksent’s people.”

Mirage shook her head. “We’re not part of them. Well, to be fair, we work for them, but we had no idea they came here. We were not told that this was a populated planet. They asked us to procure a rare component for something we’re building for them due to a debt that must be paid.”

“Another weapon of theirs, no doubt,” the woman spit.

Mirage sighed. “It’s possible. It’s possible in the way that a car can be used as a weapon if the driver chooses that.”

“We mean you no harm,” Brooke added. “Your friends are healing on our ship.”

The woman wiped tears from her eyes, and looked at the young man. “I thought that they had taken you. I couldn’t find you. No more hide-and-seek. It’s too dangerous.”

“We were taken, mom,” Aristotle said to her sadly. “The Captain rescued us, but when she tried to take us back through the mirror, we didn’t end up on the Extremus.” He paused. “We’re from the future. He handed her his homestone.”

“You’re his mother?” Mirage asked.

“She’s my Past!Mother,” Aristotle explained. “My Future!Mother, from the other timeline, she is indeed in that stone. I can feel her.”

The mother stood up straight, and composed herself. “My name is Lilac. Can you get my alternate self out of there?”

“I can try,” Mirage answered. “ I promise nothing, but I have cloning tech in the Vellani. Your DNA would do us a lot of good in that department if your alt has lost her original substrate.”

Lilac pulled her sleeves up. “Take however much blood you need.”

They all teleported up to the ship in orbit. While Belahkay monitored the other women’s progress in the medical pods, Mirage started to take readings from the homestone. They needed to find out if a consciousness really was trapped in there, and whether it was intact. Sharice took her own mother aside for a private conversation. “It’s clear to me that we can’t take this hypercubic lattice stuff out of the core of this world. The only way to extract it is to destroy the whole thing.”

“I know,” Brooke agreed. “I just accessed the updated records. The Extremus launched from Gatewood, and is moving at maximum reframe. It’s literally impossible for us to ever catch up to it. I think they had a time mirror on board, and were using that to travel back and forth through a portal. If these people don’t want to leave with us, they’ll have to stay here. This is their world, we have no right to it. More to the point, the Exins don’t have any right.”

“What do we do?”

“We protect them, at all costs. If Mirage’s explanation of how the homestones work is right, those military guys connected to this mirror from a different point in time. That’s probably what blew it up; they got the wires crossed. If we can stop them from ever attempting to override the original connection—”

“We can prevent the attack on the settlement,” Sharice guessed.

“That woman,” Brooke began, “the...First Chair. She knows something. She was running for that mirror for a reason. We need to talk to her when she wakes up.”

“She’s awake,” Belahkay announced.

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Microstory 2070: Godlings All The Way Down

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I’m sorry about bummin’ you all out yesterday. I’ve just been thinking a lot about my past, and my life. Why don’t I tell you a little bit about it? ‘Kay? You can read it or not. Like Superman, I grew up in Kansas. And like Superman, I had superpowers. But unlike Superman, these powers weren’t useful for flying around, rescuing people. They gave me glimpses into other worlds, which allowed me to write their stories down, and pass them off as fiction. I eventually realized that some of these stories were taking place in a universe that was located inside of my very soul. You see, that’s what all inhabited universes are; the complex development of a person’s soul, who you might call a god. We are all gods with godlings, and all godlings are gods. It’s godlings all the way down. No one knows where it ends, and no one knows where it begins. Some may want to answer such profound philosophical questions, but I am not one of them, because it would not change the way I live my life, which has always been a little less than the best I can. I’m not what you would call responsible or productive. I’ve not written any stories for a long time, because that’s not me anymore. I no longer have access to those worlds. If I did, I would be able to find Cricket and Claire. My alternate self could. He probably knows exactly where they are, and I bet he’s telling their continued story without me. He used to be able to send me messages, which we called updates, but your boring planet locks all those out. My own story is still getting out to him, but I’m lost. Alone. With all of you.

Microstory 2069: There Are No Winners

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I’m feeling bad again, but it has nothing to do with my recent infections. I’m a week away from my first day on the job at the garden, and I’m getting really nervous about it. I’ve been worshiping the porcelain god, as they say. Can you imagine what a real porcelain god would be like? Of course you can’t, you gave up religion a long time ago, because it was too interesting. That’s one upside to living on this Earth, I guess. You somehow lost the curiosity gene, but at least you don’t believe in a flying spaghetti monster. I was hoping that I would be less anxious, since I’ve not encountered very many surprising people, except for those two alien believers, but my stomach has a different idea. When I’m not running from my life, like I was when Cricket, Claire, and I were hopping all over the multiverse, I’m anxious all the time. That’s me, I’m full of anxiety. Well, that and depression. I hear “brave” people in the public eye talking about how their mental health issues are things that they’ve been battling. But for me, it has always just been suffering. It’s not a fight, it’s survival. There are no winners. All I can really do—after the medication wears off, and the therapists close the door—is get through the day. Then I get five or six hours of sleep, and wake up to get through the next day. Listen to me, being all moody and broody about life. It’s not all that bad. It’s not like I can remember every bad thing that has ever happened to me, and I can’t remember many of the good things. That would be crazy, right? Ha. Right? Who could survive that?

Microstory 2068: Tongueball It

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I’m feeling much better, thank you very much. It’s been pretty hard to get to sleep, which has sometimes been all right, because I’ve not had anywhere to go, but that hasn’t been true every single day since I got here. I’ve had an itchy and sore throat, so I cough, and then just make it even more sore. I believe that my landlord can’t hear me all the way up here, but I don’t know that for sure, and I’m afraid to ask her. I probably should ask her, though, since she would be able to explain it. My guess is that, when I lie down, fluids start moving in different directions, which is why it hurts more, but I don’t really know. She’s been off work for the last few days, and as a medical professional, in a particularly high need of a real good night’s rest every time, she should be able to expect me to work hard to put a stop to my constant disruptions. I generally don’t like to take drugs, but I’ll do it when I have to. When I was in my mid-twenties(?) I didn’t know the difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. I thought I was taking twice the recommended amount of nighttime cough syrup, but it turned out to be six times. It’s the only time I was ever intoxicated. I did not like it one bit, and I’ve never repeated the incident. Until last night, sort of. The tiny bottle of the strong stuff that my landlord had didn’t have any sort of fill cup. There wasn’t much left, so I figured I could eyeball five milliliters—or rather, tongueball it—but I was wrong. I ended up with twice the amount, but didn’t get to sleep any easier, and I never felt drunk. I probably really should have asked her about it, huh? It’s not my fault, I took too much cough syrup!

Microstory 2067: Something Less Monogamous

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Another one answered my ad in the paper, even though I only bought space on the one day. I left my new email address, though, so strangers could be emailing me over the course of the next few centuries if they wanted. Since I’m not a real person, I’ve not built up enough history to be getting many other emails, so I’m not worried about being inundated, or anything. It’s not like it will clog up my inbox, and make it harder to keep up with interesting news articles. Since, ya know, you don’t really have those here. Moving on, the woman I spoke to on the phone isn’t an alien, and doesn’t think she is. She’s just kind of an alien groupie. This was an apparent truth from the start, that she wants to meet me in person because of who I claim to be, but I kept talking to her, because what if I’m not the first? If she’s already done the work of finding people like me, I might as well nurture this relationship. I don’t want to lead her on, though. Cricket is in another universe right now—hopefully a very safe one, but cheating is cheating, and I am no cheater. The way I see it, if you’re committed to someone monogamously, and you want to connect with someone else, either turn your current partnership into something less monogamous, or leave them. It’s not fair that you get to have whatever you want at anyone else’s expense. Your happiness is not all that matters. I don’t want to be with anyone but him, in any capacity, and even if I did, I couldn’t do anything about it, because I’m not capable of having a conversation with him about it first. And anyway, I don’t know who this woman has met, or if they’re the real deal. Will stay in contact with her just the same, just like with the guy before.

Microstory 2066: Just Backpedal a Little

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Had a good meeting with my social worker today. I was coughing a lot, but we were both wearing masks, and he apparently always walks around with this foldable clear plastic partition. I’m not the only client of his who has health issues. I just hope I get over mine soon, and adapt better to this world. I didn’t tell him any of this, but I’m just now realizing that I told him that I’ve been keeping a blog, and gave him a link, so he’ll be able to read all of this. I’ve already talked a lot about how I believe I’m from a different universe. Maybe I could just backpedal a little, and tell him that it’s fiction, and this is all nothing more than a creative outlet. But he would be able to read this installment too, which apparently negates that explanation. Maybe I’ll just schedule this to post near the end of the evening. I don’t expect he’ll read this far anyway. It’s not like this is brilliant writing. Then again, the newest post will always be at the top, and I’ve spoken to people back when I was writing my fictional stories who just read that most recent one, and then stopped. So the newest one always has to be the best. But even then, it’s often taken completely out of context. I am trying to paint you a picture here. You can’t start in the middle, and expect to form a reasonable opinion on my skill, can you? No, that would be unfair. Start at the beginning, or don’t start at all. No, don’t do that. That’s what most people do. Five billion people in the world, and the number of people who actually read my ish adds up to a rounding error. Just kidding, it’s zero, with a margin of error of zero also. Yay, me! Whatever. Anyway, I got a second hit on my ad. She doesn’t claim to be an alien, but she hasn’t said she isn’t yet. I’m calling her tonight. Audio only.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 10, 2431

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Once everyone was back in the ship, Ramses plotted a course to Ex-42, and launched. As they were standing there, Mateo looked over at Vitalie!324, who seemed to be deep in thought. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking, or even what she was feeling, since she wasn’t part of the empathy circle, but he took a guess. “We’re going the wrong way.”

Ramses was taken aback. “Leona, could you check my math?”

“No, your math is fine,” Mateo started to clarify. “I mean, I don’t know that it is, but it always has been. I just mean, I think we’re going to the wrong place. How many populated planets did you say were on the way to Ex-42?”

“Thirty-one,” Leona reminded him.

“That’s thirty-one planets who could all do with a little extra...vitality.”

Vitalie hadn’t been paying that much attention, but she recognized the play on her name. “Wait, what? No, you don’t have to stop at all those other worlds on my account. Let’s go find your bad guy.”

“Hm,” Leona said. “Thirty-one worlds means an extra seven days on our mission. That’s not that big a deal.”

“Well, who knows what you’re gonna run into on the intervening planets?” Vitalie argued. “One of them might end up stopping you from being able to reach it. No, the safest course of action is to go straight there.” She shoved her open hand forwards from her nose.

“It could be a trap,” Angela reasoned. “Maybe that’s not where the archive is at all. Maybe it’s an inescapable prison planet. Going to the other worlds is strategically logical. We can’t lose the information that we have. We can only gain more.”

“That’s true,” Leona agreed. “So we wouldn’t be going just for the other versions of you, Vita. There are other reasons to make stops. Again, it’s a week out of the way.”

“It’s seven years,” Vitalie argued. “I think you lot tend to forget that. Everyone else moves on without you, and a lot can happen in that extra time. Ex-42 might be destroyed by the time we make it there if we go on every detour available. Hell, the Prime Minister might have sent a relativistic kill missile to beat us there.”

Marie shrugged. “If he sent a missile tomorrow, it would beat us there anyway. Hell, he could be on the quantum phone with them right now, instructing them to detonate their self-destruct, and then we would end up the whole twenty-four years too late. Time jumps or not, it’s a risk.”

Mateo placed a hand on Vitalie’s shoulder. “We’ll make one stop every day. There, we’ll resupply, if needed, maybe help a few people, and yes, we’ll also find your alternate self’s stasis pod, and let her out. If not us, then who?”

“Don’t think of it as being selfish,” Olimpia reasoned. “They’re not really you anymore. You’re helping your sisters.” She gestured towards Angela and Marie, who were also alternates of the same person, but now thought of each other as twin sisters.

Vitalie nodded in concession. “Okay. Where are we going instead, then?”

Ramses pulled up the map. “Ex-548. Gah, I can’t figure out the pattern here. It’s buggin’ the shit out of me,” he lamented

“Ex-548 ho!” Mateo declared, standing tall, and pointing towards the back wall.

They all stared at him. Leona glanced over at Ramses, and nodded slightly. Ramses went over to the controls, and altered course. The Goldilocks Corridor was named such that the stars with habitable planets were all laid out in a relatively straight line, so he only had to adjust a little bit.

A year later, they were in orbit over Ex-548. During the interim year, the ship took readings of the surface. No signals were being sent out into space, or within the atmosphere. There were signs of civilization, but no sign of movement. This planet was either abandoned, or the inhabitants were living underground.

“Or they’re all dead,” Olimpia offered.

“Yeah,” Leona agreed. “They could be dead. Mateo, you found Vitalie!908, so I’ll look for her this time. Olimpia, you wanna come with me?”

“Sure,” she answered.

“Hubby, it’s your turn to stay on the ship. Marie, you know enough about this stuff to stay with him in case something goes wrong up here. The rest will go down and see what’s up with what apparently used to be populated areas.”

“There are-slash-were five major settlements here,” Ramses reported. “We can split up, and—”

“Nope,” Leona interrupted. “Ram, Vitalie, and Angela, go together, and stay together. You have the most dangerous job, so I don’t want to shrink the numbers any more than they already are. We’re getting faster at finding the stasis pod, so I’m sure we’ll join you pretty quickly.”

“Ready...” Olimpia began, “...break.”

A couple of hours in, Leona and Olimpia were still trying to triangulate the stasis pod, having underestimated how difficult it would be. In his spare time, Ramses had been trying to figure out how to track them directly, but they weren’t designed to be located like a GPS beacon. It was also possible in this case that word had gotten around about the team’s interference in the goings-on of the Exin Empire that someone decided to dig her up, and do something else with her. Maybe they tossed her into the host star, or just released her, and then shot her in the head. They would keep trying all day either way.

The settlement group was on the ground too, looking for an explanation for why no one seemed to live here anymore. When they were last here, the natives were living under turn of the 21st century Earth conditions, though they weren’t anywhere near that population size. Each settlement was the size of a town small enough for rumors to spread faster than sound, but large enough for a resident to meet someone as an adult who they had never heard of before. They were thousands of kilometers apart, on separate continents. None of the homes appeared to be locked, so they entered a few to get an idea of what may have happened here. There wasn’t any rotten food on the dinner table, or showers left running. There were also no signs of struggle, or hurried packing. Whatever the cause, it wasn’t sudden. The people had time to leave the lights off, and the doors closed. They left on purpose, and based on the level of dust, the computer estimated that it happened about a year ago. The interesting part was that all of the settlements were left in the same state, which meant that they all agreed to leave at the same time. The team just kept looking for answers.

Meanwhile, up on the ship, Mateo and Marie were in realspace, instead of the pocket dimension. They were lying down back to back in the tiny habitable section, admiring the view through the ports. “Hey, are your comms off?” Mateo asked.

“Output is off. Input is in cocktail mode.” Cocktail mode kept the conversations silent for the user unless someone else on the network used any out of a list of preselected keywords, like their names, or emergency.

Mateo didn’t continue right away. “Do you ever think about...?”

“Think about what?”

“Heath?”

“Oh.”

“Sorry, if that’s too sensitive of a topic.”

“No, it’s okay. I know I don’t talk about him enough. I mean he’s still my husband, and I should think about him more. I just...I don’t. I don’t know why. I know we left things in a bad place, but I think if I let myself dwell on it, I’ll see that I’m the bad guy. I left him long before he left me. I was never really committed to that relationship. I just never realized it until he had the courage to walk away. Don’t get me wrong, I still love him, but I’m a part of this team, and he’s not. He never wanted to be. He stayed as long as he did for me, but he has his own life to live. Could we have reconciled, and gotten back together?” She sighed. “Probably. Neither one of us tried very hard, and then we both all but died. It just seemed...like that chapter was over. I wanna be here, with all of you. I have no clue how he feels about it at this point. I hope he’s okay.”

“I hope so too.”

“Sometimes I wish I had just been alone during the four years before you showed up. It would have been easier. No attachments, no complications. I’m not blaming him for anything, but how would things have turned out if we could have just come back together as a team?”

“It could have been worse,” he pointed out. “I mean, I know it would have been worse if you had been alone. If you had ever recovered from that isolation, it still would have weighed on you for the rest of your life. I think, in the end, it was a good thing that you met him, even with the complications. I doubt our shared experience in the Third Rail for that year would have been improved by deleting him from the roster.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” she agreed.

“You’ll see him again. We always do.”

“Really?” She chuckled. “When was the last time you saw—I dunno—your mother, or that nanobot intelligence who tried to kill you near the beginning of your time traveling?”

He laughed with her. “Mirage? It’s been about since back then. I suppose you’re right; we don’t see everyone from our past again.”

“Is everyone on?” Olimpia asked through comms.

Everyone confirmed according to a predetermined order, so they would not talk over one another.

“Jump to our location, including Group Breakthrough. The ship will be fine on its own. There’s no one here. Not anymore.”

Leona and Olimpia were found standing next to Vitalie!548’s stasis pod in the middle of nowhere. It was leaning slightly to the left, open and empty, with dirt and sand piled up inside. “Now we know why it took us so long to find it.”

Ramses nodded. “It’s inactive, which incidentally shrinks its networking capabilities to a smaller radius. No reason to place two empty pods in sync.”

“Why were you able to find it at all?” Angela asked them.

“It’s still powered on, just enough to maintain coherence for this message, of which we only watched the beginning.” Leona reached in, and pressed a button.

At first, nothing happened. Then a hologram of Vitalie appeared from outside of frame, and turned around. She composed herself, running a finger through her hair as if she had intended to edit the very beginning out before uploading the final cut. “My name is Vitalie Crawville. I came to this planet long ago, and placed myself in stasis while I waited for the world to be populated. Unfortunately, someone else got to me before the population could. He overpowered me, and put me back in permanently. At least, I think it was supposed to be permanent. Later, probably due to geological activity, my pod was exposed enough to be discovered by the natives. They figured out how to free me, and I explained to them that my purpose here was to be their Caretaker.

“This was a peaceful world. For the most part, they didn’t need me to take care of them. Yet I stayed, and did what I could. It’s not like I had anywhere else to go. This was my only purpose. As it turned out, I was not the only thing that the Leighstens had found. They were a curious bunch, and as it happens, every inhabited world in this sector contains a hidden central computer, regardless of the level of advancement they are allowed to attain. Apparently, the Leighstens were an early experiment to make sure that the seeding process was viable. I have reason to believe that the godking who did this started a couple of similar experiments before he got it right, so you may encounter those during your travels. Once an experiment was over, he would abandon the project, because to him, the survivors were insignificant. We do not contribute to the Empire in any way, not anymore. I suppose we should be glad that we weren’t simply exterminated. Most of the details that would illuminate the full story were encrypted, but the computer was made to receive some news from other worlds, so we were able to keep up with current events.

“Team Matic, I know that you’re the ones watching this. Only you would have been granted access to this file. Out of concern for the Leighstens’ safety, I have made drastic arrangements for their protection. You will not find us, and more importantly, neither will Bronach Oaksent. Do not look into this matter further. I am doing my job. I am taking care of them. It hurts my heart to say that I would not be able to accomplish this if I didn’t keep them away from you. You are...irritants. You shuffle shit up and you make changes. You do it everywhere you go. Sometimes you succeed, and sometimes...you just make things worse. The Exins will retaliate, and that may result in a scorched policy. Honestly, Oaksent is nothing if not unpredictable. We’re not the only ones getting the news feed. They know you’re here now, and each next world will have one year more than the world before to prepare for your arrival. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do whatever it is you’re trying to do, but I can’t let the Leighstens get caught in the line of fire. Please leave now. This pod will self-destruct in five seconds.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Leona assured the team. “The first thing I did was disable the triggering mechanism. We’ll still blow it up, but I know that Ramses likes to scavenge for parts.”

“No,” Vitalie!324 insisted. She turned away. “Destroy it all please.”

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Starstruck: Phase Two (Part III)

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The year: 2283. After traveling at maximum reframe speeds for 33 years, they were at the new antistar. Like the first one, it was located in the intergalactic void, which was the safest place for it. If any particle from it encountered any particle of regular matter, they would annihilate each other. Fortunately, there is really no such thing as an antiphoton, or simply seeing the light emanating from an antistar would destroy you. They were orbiting at a safe distance, but keeping their EM shield up at all times for safety. They sacrificed less essential systems, like lighting and life support. Belahkay could survive by limiting himself to a small section of the ship, and he was posthuman enough to manage with less than an OG human. The other three didn’t need much at all.

Photons were not the only particles that came out of stars, and those would be quite dangerous. That was why the antistar was so lonesome. Any one that tried to form closer to other celestial bodies would end up being annihilated sooner or later. Being that the universe was created over fourteen billion years ago, the chances of an antistar surviving inside of a galaxy were low, and the probability would only decrease.

During the ride over here, all four of the crew stayed in VR stasis pretty much the whole time. This left their normal substrates in dormant, energy-saving mode—or in Belahkay’s case, metabolic suspension—but their minds active. They spent most of that time constructing new simulated worlds in a shared virtual environment. They could theoretically connect themselves to the quantum grid, and interact with other people in the galaxy, but they didn’t want to risk leading people to this region of the Milky Way. Yeah, anyone capable of traversing these vast distances in any reasonable amount of time would almost certainly be a part of the time traveler underground anyway, but there was no reason to put anyone in any unnecessary danger. The Exins had the ability to form portals between stars, like the one they used to maintain a connection between the original antistar, and Alpha Centaurus B, so that was another reason to leave everyone else out of the line of fire.

As far as the Exins themselves went, the crew tried to learn more about them, and how they came to be this far out from Earth, but they were not able to learn much. They tried to hack into their communications system, but there didn’t appear to be one. Surely their escort vessel has some way to maintain contact with the rest of their empire, but their means of accomplishing this was not readily apparent. That escort ship occasionally pinged the Iman Vellani to make sure that it was still on course, and of course, it always was. They made no attempt to escape, and that was partly due to the fact that none of them had seen an antistar before, and this may be the only opportunity to get up close and personal with one. One thing that their escorts did decide to tell them was that both of the two antistars they managed to locate were incredibly unstable. This could be for any number of reasons, ranging from the possibility that antimatter itself was inherently unstable in mass quantities, to just the fact that some stars were less stable than others. On cosmic timescales, a star dying out after a few millions years would certainly be something to write home about, but it could be quite common in the world of anti-celestials. There just wasn’t enough known about them.

“Yep. That is an antistar,” Mirage said admiringly. “I can’t believe I’m seeing one. She’s beautiful.”

Belahkay pointed to a blip on the screen. “What’s that over there?”

Sharice stepped forward, and zoomed in. “Holy shit, it’s a planet. It’s a gas giant.”

“That’s so unlikely,” Mirage noted. She looked through the data as well. “I think...I think it’s made of antimatter too.”

“An antiplanet,” Brooke mused. “In every sense of the word. You could send that hurtling through space, and completely annihilate any target you wanted.”

“By you,” Mirage figured, “you mean these Exins.”

“We should be quite worried about that,” Brooke confirmed. “They might be able to do it with the star itself anyway, but it’s so powerful, I think they probably want to keep it on hand for their regular needs. An antiplanet might seem like a tolerable sacrifice as a single projectile against a major enemy. It could decimate an interstellar-based civilization. How would you stop it once it was on its way?”

“What are we talking about here?” Sharice asked. “Are we going to destroy it?”

“We could throw it into the sun,” Belahkay suggested. “We would just be adding to their antimatter stockpile, not taking anything away. They appear to be more interested in staying hidden than picking a fight with outsiders. If we do this, and they argue, how might they explain why they’re so mad about it if not to use it as a weapon?”

“As Mirage has pointed out, they’re holding the cards,” Brooke began. “They may not feel obliged to explain why they wouldn’t want us to destroy the antiplanet, or they might go ahead and admit that they would like to keep it as a weapon, because they don’t think there’s anything we could do to stop them.”

“They’re wrong,” Mirage declared.

“We know that, but how could we convince them that we’re not just going to roll over and do whatever they want without making any decisions?” Brooke questioned.

Mirage nodded slightly as she was thinking about it. “Destroying the antiplanet. That will send the message that, just because they’ve demanded we do something for them, and that we’re actually going to do it, doesn’t mean we’ve lost all agency.” They spent much of their time during the last 33 years debating whether they would go through with this at all, and they settled on doing it, instead of running. Again, this might be a once in an eon opportunity, and while the Exins may have control over it now, that might not be so true in the future. Based on Mirage’s once-godlike knowledge of the future, other, far more powerful civilizations, would be stepping on stage relatively soon. The Exins were probably still nothing compared to the likes of the Fifth Division, and the Parallelers.

“The Iman Vellani is impressive,” Sharice admitted. “But I’ve been up and down its systems, and it can’t move a planet, let alone an antiplanet.”

“This isn’t something that’s going to be done tomorrow. While we’re constructing the containment rings, we’ll also construct a modified stellar engine, fitted with a forward-facing EM generator to push the planet.”

“Ah, it’s a test,” Belahkay realized.

“What? They’re just testing us?” Sharice asked him.

“No, moving the planet can be a test. It’s small, we can argue that it’s insignificant. We need to make sure that it’s both possible and feasible to engineer the rings, and one way we could do that would be to build this modified stellar engine first. So when they ask us why we’re doing it, that’s our excuse.”

“They already know that it works,” Mirage explained. “They devised the rings in the first place, for use around the first antistar.”

“We didn’t see that,” Belahkay contended. “They didn’t send us any data from the operation of the original rings. All we have to go on are the specifications for the rings themselves. Nothing about that proves that they actually function properly. I don’t think it’s too much to ask to let us test the technology out with a prototype first. It shouldn’t take up any extra time. Like you’ve said, this is all going to be automated. It’s not like we’re building it brick by brick. We’ll program some robots to build the rings, and others to build the prototype simultaneously.”

A call came in. It was Ex-10. “That’s enough gawking. Now that you know we’re telling the truth about the antistar, please proceed to the nearest regular star system for your raw materials, and begin processing immediately. You only have about a century to get it done.”

“We have a hundred and fifty years,” Mirage argued.

“That’s not what we agreed upon.”

“The time hasn’t started until now, upon reaching the star for initial inspection and observation,” Mirage insisted. “You’ll agree to this, or you’ll have nothing. We’re prepared to die on this hill, and we’ll take as many of you with us on our way down. Then you’ll have to build it yourselves. Sounds like a lot of work. You’ll still be over two hundred years ahead of schedule, so stop complaining, and let us do what we do.”

There was a long pause before Ex-10 replied. “Very well. Be finished by 2434. I tacked on an extra year as a sign of good faith.”

Mirage took a beat before responding too. “We appreciate that.”

“Sending you the coordinates to the nearest second star system. We recommend you cannibalize it for your self-replicating machines. We assume that’s how you’ll gather the reset of the raw materials for the rings. That’s how it was done the first time centuries ago.”

“I’m sure we’ll do something similar,” Mirage agreed, “but faster.”

“We look forward to it,” Ex-10 said before he hung up.

“All right!” Mirage clapped her hands together. “Do work, son.”

It took them about three weeks to get to the staging star system using the reframe engine. The yellow dwarf that was not unlike Sol was located on the outer edge of the Milky Way galaxy. It was here that they built more than two thousand nanofactory ships out of an orbiting asteroid field. Each of these ships had their own reframe engine, so they could go out to other nearby star systems. Some of them had to travel as far as fifteen light years, but that only took them around a week. Bringing all of the materials back was going to be the big chore here. The reframe engine was not something that could be scaled very well. It wasn’t constrained to a single size, but there was still a limit to it, and the mass of a terrestrial planet was well beyond that limit. Even so, each was only responsible for that one system, so the automators only had to build celestial thrusters for themselves. These were giant rockets that propelled the planets through space. While they couldn’t get back to the crew in only a week, they were able to accelerate to high relativistic speeds. The whole second phase of the project only took 50 years, which wasn’t too bad considering. This would leave them with 100 years.

Since the specifications for the rings were already done, this plan was decided upon over the 33 years that it took them to arrive in this region of space. Everything was correct, and ready to go. Those automators worked smoothly on their own, sending back periodic updates, and error reports. In the meantime, they learned that they needed something else. There was one component that could not be found around any old star. In fact, it was only on one planet. And that planet...was inhabited.

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