Starstruck: Only A Stone’s Throw Away (Part V)

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First Chair of the Extremus, Tinaya Leithe was not the one who was awake. It was the other one, who had fallen on top of her naked. For her safety, it was not possible to exit the medical pod from the inside, but the woman was perfectly calm and patient. Mirage came over to address her, along with everyone else. She opened the pod, and let the patient sit up. “My name is Captain Mirage of the Stateless Private Vessel Iman Vellani.”

“Spirit Bridger of the Void Migration Ship Extremus.”

Lilac gasped. “She’s a Bridger. We’re not allowed to be here. Come on, children.” She ushered the kids out of the room.

“Are they afraid of you?” Mirage asked.

“No, I just know things that they’re not allowed to know about the secrets of our mission,” Spirit explained. “You’re not allowed to know either, so it’s not like I’m going to talk about it here. And anyway, I quit already, so that’s all behind me.”

Mirage nodded, and respectfully waited a beat. “Can you tell us what happened? Did the Exins blow up your settlement?”

“Who? The Exins? Never heard of them.”

“Bronach Oaksent,” Brooke clarified.

“Oh, that asshole. Yeah, no, this had nothing to do with him. It was an internal matter. I shouldn’t talk about it either.”

“Well, the Exins were on your planet. It looked like they were trying to attack,” Mirage told her.

“Wait, what year is it?”

“It’s 2341 by the Earthan calendar,” Sharice answered.

“Oh, I’ve been gone for a year,” Spirit realized. “This explosion you speak of must have been pretty devastating. Did anyone else survive?”

“Just your friend.” Belahkay stepped out of the way to reveal Tinaya in the other pod. “The kids and the mother were elsewhere, I guess.”

Spirit looked over at her friend. “No, those wounds are fresh. Whatever happened to her was recent. As a Bridger, I was part of the Phoenix Program, which can reconstitute a user after they have been completely vaporized. It just takes time. A year sounds about right, I suppose. I’ve never needed it before. She’s not part of it, though, so do everything you can to save her.”

“She’s stable,” Mirage said. “However, evidently the pod is having trouble removing the glass. Each time it tries to remove a shard, it digs in deeper, like it’s alive.”

Spirit was confused. “Glass? As in literal glass? We don’t construct with glass. It’s too much work. We use polycarbonate or transparent metal. Wait.” Her eyes widened. “What happened to the time mirror?”

“Oh, that was destroyed in some kind of powerful explosion,” Mirage replied. “Miss Leithe was right in front of it.”

“Madam Leithe,” Spirit corrected. “She was married. Where’s Arqut?”

“We didn’t find anyone else,” Brooke said.

“Unless he was one of the Exin soldiers.”

Spirit shook her head. “No, he’s not involved in that. Of course, I’ve been gone for a year, so maybe he infiltrated them, but probably not. He serves as the Superintendent.”

The three ladies exchanged a look. Belahkay didn’t understand why.

Spirit chuckled once. “Not that Superintendent. He runs our local government.” She took a deep breath. “Anyway, what is an Alpha Centauri ship built in the 23rd century doing all the way out here?”

“You’ve heard of the Iman Vellani?” Sharice asked.

“You’re a matter of historical record. The books lost track of you, though. I guess now we know why.”

“The IV shouldn’t be famous,” Mirage contended. “That’s why I built it on Toliman, so we wouldn’t be written about.”

“Everything gets written about,” Spirit said dismissively. She tucked her legs up to her chest, so she could roll out of the pod.

“Do you want some clothes?” Brooke offered.

“Don’t worry about it.” Spirit took a breath. “I’m craving fudge, though. Do you have any fudge?”

“I have a food synthesizer,” Belahkay exclaimed. “I’m surrogating right now, but I still have an organic body.”

“That sounds lovely. Go back to your body, let’s eat some together.” She took him by the arm like they were on a first date, and let him begin to lead her out. “Please alert me if and when Tinaya’s condition changes. Do you have a shower too?” she asked Belahkay once they were out in the hallway. “The pod did its best, but...”

“I have a sonic mister, and a soaker.”

Sometime during Spirit’s bath and fudge meal, which may or may not have happened at the same time, she realized that she hadn’t asked the crew why they were here. Belahkay tried to explain it, but he didn’t know all that much about this phase. He was still mostly responsible for the automators, which were doing just fine on their own, which was probably why they were called that. “He said it was a hypercubic crystal?” Spirit questioned? Like, a fourth dimensional crystalline structure?”

“Yes, have you heard of it? Did you know that it was in the core of your planet?”

Spirit looked at each of them one by one with a soft poker face, but then she couldn’t hold her fervor back any longer. She burst into riotous laughter. “The Maramon were students of temporal manipulation. Not one of them was born with time powers, and they were jealous of the humans for this, even though most humans aren’t time travelers either. Their research passed onto the Ansutahan humans living there, then later to the refugees in Gatewood, and later to the Extremusians on Extremus. If there was such a thing as hypercubic crystal, trust me, I’d-a heard of it. Sorry, kids, you got played.”

“I’m sure we’re all older than you,” Mirage argued.

“Heh. Time, right?”

“Why would the Exins demand we come here? They claim that it’s a critical component for the containment rings,” Brooke pointed out.

Spirit shrugged. “Why would it be?” These rings are just penning traps on megasteroids. Do normal containment pods contain this magical substance? And have you ever heard of any material that only exists inside of a single planet? Oh, and I suppose it’s just a coincidence that their bitter rival just so happens to have chosen this world as its Beta Site? Let me guess, the only way to extract it would be to destroy the entire rock. Am I onto something here?”

Mirage simulated a sigh. “They just wanted us to kill you.”

“Which is ridiculous,” Spirit reasoned. “There were only ever a few dozen people on that planet. They kept it a secret from the general public. I didn’t even know about it from the beginning.”

“The mirror,” Sharice began. “You set up a permanent portal with it, and a second one on your ship?”

“Semi-permanent, I believe. I wasn’t involved in that. I was just asked to go through to help Tinaya with the hostage situation.”

“A portal like that, between a planet, and a moving target, would have been difficult to maintain at best. Imagine building a walkway that leads from the street to the train. Not the train tracks, but the train itself. No matter where the train goes, you can walk onto it from the street. That link would have to be pretty robust. Ripping the planet apart may have destroyed Extremus too.”

“That still doesn’t make any sense,” Belahkay jumped in. “They know us well enough. They knew that we would investigate a planet that harbors life before doing anything with it. Finding the settlement was not hard from orbit.”

“That’s why the soldiers came through,” Mirage figured. “It was their Plan B, in case making us do it didn’t work. You’re right, it was dumb to bet on us at all. Maybe they were just hoping we would get blood on our hands?”

“The True Extremists are brutal and advanced,” Spirit said. “But they’re not too organized. We believe that their civilization is riddled with horribly chaotic compartmentalization. No one knows what the hell is going on. It’s entirely possible that Plan A was made from the stew of multiple sub-plans that were, in some cases redundant, and in others, totally contradictory.”

“Hm.” Mirage thought about this. “We can use that.”

That was when Lilac came back into the room. “I need to go back down to the planet. I have to feed the prisoner.”

“You have a prisoner?” Mirage asked. “One of the Exin soldiers?”

“No, the terrorist,” Lilac clarified. “He’s the one who blew up the settlement. I’m the Hock Watcher. I...should not have left my post at all, but the kids were missing...”

“I’ll take you back down,” Brooke volunteered.

“And can Aristotle and Niobe stay up here? They’re old enough to take care of themselves, and they won’t get into any trouble. I know—”

“It’s fine,” Mirage responded. “We’ll be here. Sharice will be most available while I look at your homestone.”

“Room for one more?” Spirit asked-slash-offered before Brooke and Lilac left.

Lilac wasn’t sure.

“As Hock Watcher, you may permit visitors at your own discretion. Of course, you may also deny.”

“No,” Lilac decided, “it’s okay. We may be stuck on Verdemus awhile, so we’re in this together.”

Belahkay jumped up. “I’ll take you!” He was a little bit too excited. Spirit was perfectly capable of teleporting on her own. “I mean, I don’t need to meet the prisoner, or anything. I just wouldn’t mind a nice walk on an inhabited planet.”

Spirit looked to Lilac for guidance.

“Why are you looking at me? I’m not in charge here.”

Spirit tilted her chin to the side slightly. “I think you are. It wouldn’t be Tinaya, if she were awake, and it’s certainly not me.”

“Isn’t that literally your job?” Lilac put forth. “To step in when all else fails?”

“This is out of my jurisdiction, and I am a Bridger in name only now.” Spirit grimaced a bit.

“Okay, anyone who wants to go down to the planet can,” Lilac decided.

Only the four of them ended up returning to the surface. In the meantime, Mirage went back to her lab, and agonized over the homestone. She had strong reason to suspect that there was indeed a person’s consciousness in there, but she couldn’t prove it. It was giving off different energy readings than the other stone was, but that was about all she could determine from her limited tests. There was no conclusive evidence of a trapped consciousness, or anything else. It could just be that different homestones were made slightly differently. A third stone would help come to some better understanding of them. As far as she ever knew from her time in another dimension where all of time and space was laid out before, no one else had ever taken the occasion to study them. They still didn’t know where they were from. Some temporal objects were designed partially through technology. Others were normal objects imbued with power. These appeared to be categorized as the latter, but as a stone with no moving parts, nor complex internal structure, it was unlike even those. Even the Escher Knob only worked when you used it as a doorknob. The stone evidently activated by being squeezed, coupled with psychic intention. What the hell did that even mean?

Mirage leaned back in her chair, as if she needed to rest in a chair, and massaged her chin, as if she could feel it through biological nerves. There was one test that could not be done from here. It would require her to go somewhere else, and she had to go there alone. She didn’t want to do that, though. It could seriously screw things up for everyone; not just the crew, or the Verdemusians, but literally everyone in the universe. Just then, someone who looked very much like Mirage came down the hall, and stood in the doorway. Mirage looked over at her, unshocked at the development. “Yeah, Okay. I’ll do it. Blindspot, I guess.”

The other Mirage smiled, and didn’t speak.

Mirage initiated her internal comms device. “Brooke. I think this is going to work, but in case it doesn’t, you’re in charge.”

“What? What are you going to do?”

“The other Lilac is stuck in a dimension that can only be accessed by this rock, and you can’t access it unless you use it.”

Brooke teleported into the lab. “Wait!”

Mirage squeezed the stone, and thought about her past. Before she knew it, she was falling from a few meters in the air, and into the water. She sank a little before inflating her buoyancy compensator, and rising back up to the surface. The lake was packed with people on boats who were all very confused about what had just happened. She looked around to get her bearings, recognizing the geography right away. This was indeed Sherwood Lake in Topeka, Kansas, which was where she was when she accidentally fell into another dimension while saving Mateo and Leona’s lives.

She looked over, and breathed a fake sigh of relief when she saw someone she recognized. It was Lilac. Her plan worked; no clone body, nor crazy time tech required. All she had needed to do was activate the stone again, and trigger a new point of egress. The problem was, if these stones worked the way she understood them to, it was going to be rather difficult to get back to where they were. It should be the year 2036.

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Microstory 2075: Her Last Period

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Guys, it was a rough day today. It was even harder than yesterday, but it’s no one’s fault. My boss had a family emergency, and had to leave in the middle of the day. On top of that, the other two people who were meant to work the first shift didn’t show up. One of them was sick, so she called in yesterday evening, which we expected to be fine, because even though I’m the newbie, I’m still an extra hand to keep the ship afloat. The other guy just straight up never came in, and we don’t know why. My boss asked me to keep calling him, but he never picked up. She was worried about him, of course, but she also wasn’t super surprised by his absence, so I think he’s just not all that reliable. I also called everyone else who worked there, which isn’t very many people, but none of them could come except for one girl. She’s still in high school, so she couldn’t be there until after her last period. Well, I actually think she skipped it for me. There was a good four hours where I was the only worker in the whole nursery. Fortunately, for a couple of those hours, one of the regular customers helped me out. She didn’t know how the cash register worked, or any of that behind-the-scenes stuff, but she’s an expert in plants and flowers, so she assisted customers for me, which was absolutely amazing. Such a crazy second day. Not boring at all, I’ll tell you that much. As you can imagine, I’m pretty wiped tonight, so I’m going to sign off now, and get back to you on Monday. I suspect that my next post will be pretty long, since I’ll have to recap four days, including this wild one.

Microstory 2074: Those Who Come in Late

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I am super tired, so I’m not going to say much today. It’s okay, but I wish my new boss had told me that I was going to be working whole days for the next four days at least. She wants me to understand how to open, and how to close, but also what it’s like to be immersed in that environment throughout the day. She wants me to get a feel for the difference between customers who come in early, and those who come in late, along with everyone in between. I didn’t get enough sleep last night, so I didn’t really get much out of that yet, but I trust her. I’ll be super prepared for it tomorrow. But I can’t do that unless I pretty much go to bed right now. It’s a good thing there’s never anything good on TV. Back on my home world, I was often too distracted to manage my time well.

Microstory 2073: Heck of a Lot Worse

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Woke up to a gift from my landlord this morning. No, I should say gifts. She knows that I’m starting my job at the plant nursery tomorrow, and she wanted to give me some stuff that I’ll need. I’m sure that some of this will be supplied by my employer, but it was really nice and thoughtful. She got me zip-off cargo pants, a zip-off shirt, which I had never seen before, a water reservoir to go over my shoulders, sunscreen, insect repellent, gardening gloves, a cool hat, boots, and a jacket. I’m so grateful to her for taking me in, and being so patient and understanding with me. I can’t tell her enough how much I appreciate it. I give this universe a lot of crap, but I know that it could be a heck of a lot worse. Boring is good, boring is safe. I could just as easily have ended up in a world without my immortality, and danger lurking around every corner. So this post is for you, residents of Boreverse. I’m not gonna change your name, but I’m not gonna criticize you for it anymore. Cheers, mates. I would tip my glass to you, but I don’t drink alcohol, and neither do you, which I’m really glad about. So I really shouldn’t give you a hard time. Welp, I’m off to bed much earlier tonight. I’m expected to be at work by 06:00, and I have to take the bus, which means getting up at 4:15. I don’t mind, I’ve had early jobs before, but I should have better prepared for it by starting the new schedule sooner, so my body would be used to it by now. That’s some free advice for you, kids. Social jet lag can be a real problem. Don’t let it happen to you if you can avoid it.

Microstory 2072: Turtles

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Yesterday was a long one, wasn’t it? I usually find it harder to talk about myself than to write about fictional characters. I can always keep making things up about them, but it’s not so simple with my real life. But Nick, you claim that your stories are real, and you’re just relating them on your website. Yes, I did say that, didn’t I? It’s sort of a chicken or the egg situation. Except that there’s an obvious answer for that conundrum. A chicken can’t exist unless it was born from an egg, and an egg can’t exist unless it was laid by a chicken, right? That’s the whole thing, which of course ignores how evolution works. So all things being equal, the answer is that the chicken came first since a chicken can survive on its own, but an egg needs to be protected. That’s its advantage for the best answer. I came up with this when I was a little kid, and I’ve yet to hear anyone else make the same argument. Now, you may be wondering why the title of this post is Turtles when it appears to be more about chickens and eggs. That’s because I didn’t want to come up with a title for it, and I always use Turtle as a placeholder until I think of something else. You see, I write these in a word processor, so I can organize them how I like, and then copy each one over to my blog when it’s ready. I have to do a lot of formatting to make it look right, which takes nearly as much time as the writing itself. I tell you, it’s exhausting. Oh, why, do you ask, is Turtle the placeholder? It kind of sounds like the word title. Don’t overthink it. I’m not that complex. For the body of the story, until I’m ready to write it, I use Something.

Microstory 2071: Wake Up Clean

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I just reread my post from last week, and realized that I didn’t really tell you anything about myself, since I started going on and on about how the cosmos really works. So let’s do that now, but you still don’t have to read it. I was born in central Kansas, and moved around a lot in my youth. I suppose I moved around a lot as an adult too. I was a quiet kid, and people hated that about me. Have you ever had to deal with someone yelling in your ear incessantly? It’s like that, except I don’t make any noise, and I guess some people perceive that as just as irritating? My incessant silence: it doesn’t hurt your ears, but it hurts your heart, because you have an incessant need for attention, and if you’re around someone who doesn’t give it to you, it feels like dying. I spent many years pretending to be a regular person, and many years afterwards unraveling most of that so that I could become my true self. Then I started to develop my idea of what my best self would be, and tried to work towards that.

Here are a few random facts about me. I’m left-handed. I once knew a guy who was legit mad at me for wearing my watch on my right wrist. I may be left-handed because I was born with an extra finger on my right hand, which jacked up the joints. All of my fingers are crooked, and my hands hurt literally all the time, especially when I use them, which is why it’s so great that I’m a writer, because it doesn’t require the use of hands. I like baby rhinos, and hate pandas. On principle—but not in practical terms—I don’t believe in war, national borders, money, poverty, the inherent value of work, or religion. I think sex work should be legal, and recreational drugs should be illegal. I would rather lose a competition than win it, because it will always be more important to other people, and I don’t want them to feel bad.

Here are a few random facts about you: if you’re a smoker, you’re an idiot, and a bad person. It doesn’t matter what you’ve accomplished, or what your IQ is. Only a total moron would poison themselves on purpose, and only an asshole would do it in a way that potentially causes harm to others. No matter how you die, as long as it’s not an accident or something, the smoke will either cause your death, or exacerbate it. It will never help you, nor remain neutral. There’s no logical reason for it. Some people like you, and some don’t. No one is hated by all. The human body is beautiful, and you shouldn’t be afraid of it. The toilet paper goes over the top, ‘cause gravity. Some of your food contains bug parts. It’s fine.

Here’s some random advice. Find your strength in school, and focus on that. Work half as hard at the things you struggle with. You’re never gonna be as good at them as you are with your best subject, and normal people don’t need to be good at everything to succeed. If you struggle with a subject for years on end, while doing fine in others, that’s your worst subject, and it’s never going to change. Smart people don’t suddenly become that way in adulthood after being unintelligent before. Some jobs require you to be committed and driven. Most of them, however, come with bosses that aren’t paying enough attention to you to reward good behavior. Your number one job in life is to find happiness, not build profit for your company. Never forget that every company needs you more than you need it. You could survive naked in the woods with nothing but your wits. Without labor and customers, a company doesn’t exist. Life is all that matters.

Shower before bed, so your bed is clean, and you wake up clean. Wash your hands. Clean everything else too. Let your children get dirty to build up their immune system.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 11, 2432

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The next stop on their magical mystery tour of the Goldilocks Corridor was Ex-371. For the most part, the reason it was called a corridor was because the inhabited star systems were roughly in a straight line. This one was a little more out of the way. It was less than a light year away from Ex-548, which was why their ship managed to get there in time for them to return to the timestream, but it was three light years away from the next world after that. Once they left here, they would be spending a little time cooped up with nowhere to land. That shouldn’t be a problem. Depending on what resources they could find here, they were considering pushing their next pit stop even further so that Ramses would have time to build them a better vessel. They needed to investigate this world to find out whether that was a viable option. If the locals decided to attack them with missiles, or cannonballs, or whatever they had here, it might not work out that way. The map of the empire only showed them which planets were inhabited, and where they were in relation to each other. It didn’t say anything about what they were like, and even if it did, the data was already fairly outdated.

“One town?” Leona asked.

“Only the one,” Ramses confirmed. “Based on the energy readings I’m getting, they’re fusion powered, which suggests 2030s-level technology, but their architecture and layout better resemble something out of the 20th century. I think they live simplier than they need to. They have cars. They’re electric. I doubt this planet came loaded with fossil fuels. The rest of it is barren.”

“It looks like Oaksent focused primarily on atmosphere when geoengineering his slave worlds,” Olimpia guessed. “He didn’t put too much effort into any greenery.”

“He didn’t put no effort into it, though,” Leona responded. “He just prioritized some worlds over others. I saw a squirrel on Ex-275. It wasn’t just squirrel-like. It was a squirrel. Anyway, Rambo, does any building down there strike you as a City Hall, or something like that?”

He pointed. “This coin-shaped building right here. It’s unlike any of the others, and it’s right in the center.”

“All right.” Leona cleared her throat as she was holding up her tablet, just a little worried about how the team was going to react to this. “We’re starting a schedule. I hope that’s okay. I’ve assigned Vitalie and Ramses to the Vitalie!371 search. This time, I have babysitting duties on the ship, and I’ll do it alone. Everyone else will go check out that building.” They might obviously realize later that it wasn’t practical to adhere to a duty rotation when the nature of certain worlds necessitated the division of labor to be distributed in a particular way, but for now, it seemed like the most fair way to do it. No one wanted to have to stay up in orbit, but someone had to. Any given world could be hiding secret technology that could ultimately trap them there, or worse.

“That sounds good,” Mateo replied. “Did you think we wouldn’t like this?”

“I don’t know.” The truth was, she still wasn’t comfortable barking orders at people, except in an emergency. When they were in danger, and-or trying to fix a problem, it made sense to her, but just handing out responsibilities like she was middle management in an office was a little weird. It probably never wouldn’t be.

He gave her a kiss on the cheek, and stole the tablet from her hands while he said, “we got this.” He looked over the upcoming schedule. “I couldn’t help but notice that you place yourself up here more than you should. I’m getting better at pattern recognition. Why are you always alone when you do it?”

“Well, I can handle it alone.” She tried to shrug, but it wasn’t convincing.

“So can Ramses, and he’s always with someone else.”

Ramses chuckled. “This wasn’t a bad idea, but let’s all work on it together later, okay? We’ll have plenty of time to worry about it on our way to Ex-586. It’s fine for today, though.” He offered his hooked elbow. “Shall we go, Vitalie!324?”

She took his arm as if they were in a courtship, and they disappeared together.

“Keep in touch, love.” Mateo gave Leona another kiss on the cheek, and the teleported down to the surface, right in front of the entrance to the building. No one was around to see it, except for the receptionist and security guard inside, neither of whom were looking up at the time.

They opened the doors, and started to walk towards the front desk. The receptionist perked up, and stared at them. “It’s them.” He slapped the guard on the shoulder. Hey, it’s them!”

The bored guard was writing something down, or maybe just doodling. “Huh? What? Oh my God, it’s the Matics. Hey, can we get a picture?”

“Of us?” Mateo questioned.

“With you,” she clarified.

“Umm...okay?”

The guard and receptionist turned around to face the inside of the building. The guard held the camera up, and snapped the photo. It wasn’t a phone, so she had to turn it around, and check it with the digital viewer. Oh no, Miss Sangster didn’t get all the way. Could you scootch in more, and try again?”

“Sure,” Olimpia agreed.

They took a second one.

“Ah, man,” the receptionist said with a big smile. “That’s great, thanks. You go ahead through the gates. I’ll open them for you.”

The guard met them on the other side of the optical turnstile. She pulled up her pants a little since her belt was a little heavy on the accessories. “I’ll escort you down to the main lab.”

“Pardon, but may we ask, what exactly do you do here?”

“Oh, I just help greet people when they come in in the mornings, and say farewell to them at the end of the day,” she explained. “The job is pretty easy, we don’t have a problem with people trying to break in, or cause other issues. But theoretically, I would help with that. You’re the only ones who have come in who don’t work here, besides a few people’s spouses who do other things around town. They like to have lunch in our cafeteria, because it’s the best food in the world. I mean that literally. Do you eat? Are you...robots?” She was clearly concerned that she was offending them.

“No,” Marie replied. “Yes, we eat, but we probably won’t need anything for another few days.”

“I understand. Well, it’s back through those doors, if you need it.” She never did answer what the purpose of this building was, whether it was because she didn’t know, or it wasn’t her place to say, or because she didn’t realize that they were never asking about her job specifically. “Okay. Here’s the main lab,” she said after a few minutes of walking. “I’m not allowed to go in unless it’s an emergency.” She pantomimed tipping her hat at them before realizing her mistake, and trying to brush off the awkwardness. “Okay. Bye.” She swiped her access card, and held the door open for them. I love you, Mateo thought he heard her whisper as they were stepping through the door.

They were in a wide expanse, wider than was presumably needed for what they were building here. A football pitch away, they could see the unmistakable design of a machine that they had used many times before. It was missing two walls, and as they drew nearer, they could see some other flaws, but this was definitely a Nexus. “Umm...”

Angela and Marie exchanged a look. “We’ll manage the ship,” one of them said.

“I’ll switch places with Ram,” Olimpia volunteered.

All three ladies disappeared to soon be replaced by Ramses and Leona. Wow, her duty roster was already not working for them. A woman in a pantsuit jogged up to them. “Sorry, I meant to meet you out the doors. You just came through so quick. I thought maybe they would make you badges, since that’s protocol. But, you know, it’s fine. Hi, my name is Ex-371-JM6824.”

Mateo balked. “That’s...” That wasn’t a name. It was a number. She didn’t have a name? Wait, had anyone they had met here ever had a real name? They never bothered to ask, did they? Woof, that was not very nice of them.

She eagerly awaited her response, before guessing what was stopping them. “Oh, ha. We don’t have names like you, we just have numbers. Exin Empire, planet three-seven-one, region JM, resident number six thousand, eight hundred and twenty-four. Of course, we only have one region, but...”

“So there can only be ten thousand people on this world at any one time?” Leona calculated.

“No,” she answered. “We just share names. I’m sure you’re not the only, uhh...you might be the only one, but—let’s see—Angela Walton? That’s pretty common, isn’t it?” That was true enough. Though, how would she know what was and wasn’t common on Earth? This was such an isolated part of the galaxy, and their knowledge appeared to be deliberately restricted.

“Right. So, you’re building a Nexus?”

6824 nodded and sighed. “We’re certainly trying to. I don’t suppose you’ll help.”

“Sorry,” Leona said.

“That’s okay. We have the plans, it’s just...”

“Not as easy as you would think?”

“Right? It’s so detailed, and the alloys have to be mixed perfectly. This is taking us a lot longer than we hoped. But we’ll get there. It’s only our second attempt.”

“What went wrong with the first one?” Ramses asked.

She lifted a device to her lips. “Switch on the lights to sector V-26.” The loud pounding sound of harsh lights flipped on in the back corner, revealing a second Nexus building, this one not missing any sides, though they couldn’t see how completed the interior was. “It’s totally finished. Or rather, we thought it was. It powers up, drawing vacuum energy from wherever that comes from. We can even get objects to dematerialize and then rematerialize. It just doesn’t go anywhere. We can’t access the network, and we have no idea why.”

“Could we see it?” Leona asked her.

6824 presented the finished Nexus to her like a gameshow model, prompting Leona and Ramses to teleport away. Meanwhile, Mateo offered her a hand. She took it tentatively, and then they followed.

“Venus, are you there?”

No response.

“Venus Opsocor, this is your favorite idiot, Leona Matic. Please respond.”

You’re not my favorite, Venus contended.

“Gotcha. Now I know you’re here. Could you tell me why this Nexus has not been assigned a term sequence?”

They’ve not asked, Venus explained. They have to submit a request.

“That wasn’t in the plans,” 6824 argued.

It was implied.

“Can I do that now?” 6824 requested.

“Ignore that,” Leona said quickly. She frowned at the woman. “I don’t know you. Maybe you deserve a Nexus. Maybe everyone in the Corridor does. But I know that Bronach Oaksent does not, and I know that you’re building this for him. Am I right? My guess is the entire purpose of this world has been devoted to getting on the network.”

“It has not always been our purpose,” 6824 countered. “We’re a research town. We’re not the only one responsible for scientific progress, but we are always dedicated to massive undertakings. Our last one before this was the antistar containment rings.”

“What will happen to you if you fail to get on the network?” Mateo asked.

6824 frowned. “We’ll be killed.”

She’s lying.

“Thanks, Oppie,” Leona said gratefully.

“Okay, we won’t,” 6824 admitted apologetically. “There is no time limit to our progress. He doesn’t even come check up on us. He just waits for us to call him. I’ve never called him. The rings were before my time.”

“So you just keep working on it,” Mateo reasoned, “and you can never fail. There’s no risk to you?”

“I suppose not. He has too many other concerns. There’s a lot going on in the empire at any one time.”

“How are the numbers determined?” Ramses jumped in, changing the subject. “This world is Ex-371. Where does that come from? Don’t tell me that it’s random.”

“It’s not random,” 6824 said.

“So, what’s the pattern?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Are you declining to answer, or is it random, but he asked you not to say that, so you can’t answer at all?” Mateo pressed.

She still didn’t say anything, but her expression gave everything away. It was as they thought; totally random. Oaksent seeded life on these planets to be his playthings, and like all children, he eventually gets tired of playing with some of them. They were worth very little thought, even when they were otherwise important to him.

Olimpia suddenly teleported to them. “I’ve always liked the name Floriana. How about Floriana Waltz.”

“I’m sorry?” 6824 was really confused.

“You deserve a name. Everyone deserves a real name. Including your planet. So I would like to start an exponential chain. I’ll give you a name, and then you give a few other people names, and eventually everyone will have their own. Just as it should be. Then together, you can come up with a name for your planet. How does that sound?”

“Hm, I think I like it too,” Floriana agreed.

« < » > Table of Contents

Starstruck: Crystal Clear (Part IV)

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Generated by Google Workspace Labs text-to-image Duet AI software

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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