Microstory 2100: All Over the City

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Counting my alternate self, but only counting work on my original Earth, I have had 17 jobs for 42 companies at 48 locations. How is that even possible? Well, keep reading, and I’ll explain it to you. But first, let’s start at the beginning; a very good place to start, as they say. When I was in my twenties, I took a personality test. (Okay, I guess we’re not starting at the beginning, are we?) What I learned is that I exhibit traits from all sixteen personality types, but least of all Performer, and most of all Protector. When I see someone crossing the street, my instinct tells me to watch them to make sure they make it all the way to the other side. My head is constantly on a swivel, looking out for threats, and keeping an eye on people who may be in danger. Now, I’m not saying that I would easily jump between an innocent person and a bullet, but I do believe that I wouldn’t ever use someone as a human shield. I’m always worried about people’s safety. Somehow, my dad intuited this, and he made me get my lifeguard certification when I was fifteen years old. I think the class began the day after my birthday, or something really soon, so I could not have begun any earlier. The course translated well into a job, with my teacher becoming my boss, so that’s what I did for three years. I was young and frustrated with it, but when I look back, it was probably one of my best jobs. I just didn’t know how good I had it. As I explained in the previous post, I started doing volunteer work right after high school, and when I came back, I fell into a job working for a maintenance contractor. I don’t remember much about it, including how much I made, but I know that I took a business trip to build workstations at the client’s new site in Wichita. The other guys in the car were smokers, so that was pretty much hell for me. They were so inconsiderate, and disgusting, and I hope they live in misery now. In 2008, however, I started to work as a projectionist at a small movie theatre while I was already in college. There were actually a few different locations owned by the same people, but you couldn’t really call it a chain. I was the only projectionist the place had ever had, and probably ever did have after that. Most staff members who handled that were also managers, but I didn’t want that kind of responsibility. My bosses asked me repeatedly to be a supervisor when I was a lifeguard too. I eventually regretted declining both of those jobs. I would have made a little extra money, which could have come in handy later. I just didn’t trust my leadership skills yet. I only worked at the theatres for about fifteen or so months, and I hated every second of it. My bosses were all republicans, and they had this warped view of reality, which made them conflate busyness with productivity. It didn’t matter if you had already cleaned the counter fifty times in a row today. If there’s nothing else to do, then wipe it down fifty more times!

Whew, I’ve only talked about three jobs, and I’m already in the second paragraph. The time after I graduated from college was really tough on me. Years later, it may not sound like I spent that much time out of work, but when I was in the thick of it, it was torture. I applied for a ton of jobs, but no one was biting. Even when I could get an interview, I did poorly, because of my autism. I started volunteering at the elementary school where my sister worked, in the library. I also branched out to other libraries at the same time. I took a brief job in the mail department at the IRS, which only lasted a few weeks, then went right back to the libraries. Finally in 2012, I got my first big boy job at a tax preparation corporation, editing training documents for other employees. It was temporary, but it paid a whole ton of money; enough to let me move out of the house! It was over after several months. But then they called me back the next year! But that only lasted two months. They put me in charge of even temporarier temps, but paid me less than the last job. And then they never called me back, so screw ‘em! It was probably a few weeks before I secured another job, this time working at a warehouse for a computer manufacturing company. I had some six-degrees of Kevin Bacon connection going on, but I ended up not liking the guy on the other side of the separation, and I still don’t know how we were connected. That only lasted about fifteen months too. I went on vacation, came back for less than a week, and then the FTC raided the offices, and shut the whole company down. They were selling preorders to customers before they had engineered the product, and never making good on their promise (read:fraud). They tried to start up again after all the legal stuff, but ultimately didn’t survive. Maybe if they had asked me to return too, things might have turned out differently. Lol, no thanks.

I spent about a year unemployed, trying to take some classes to become a web developer, but I’m not smart enough for that, so it super backfired. I ended up taking a part-time job as a package sorter for a worldwide courier. It obviously didn’t exactly pay six figures, so I tried to get a second job at a grocery store, but it sucked. I was looking to add a few extra hours every day, not work twelve hours straight some days of the week. Plus, the boss was another guy who thought being busy was the same thing as being productive. If there was no bad produce to turn over, then he expected you to throw away perfectly good fruit, just so you’re doing something. What a dick, I hope he’s miserable too. I hate wasting food. I didn’t even ever put that job on my résumé. I lasted two weeks, and only gave him a few hours notice. Finally, here’s where the real work begins, and also where my numbers begin to rise. I worked for a temp agency, for a contractor, which had a contract at an engineering firm. I was on the mail team, and often moved around to a few different sites. I even drove the van. I was basically a floater. When someone was out, I would fill in for them, so while everyone else specialized in their own thing, I knew everything. Unfortunately, they ultimately decided that they didn’t need an extra person, so they dropped me after a year. I was only off work for a month before a replacement came along, though, working for their primary competitor. I was actually at the unemployment office when I got the call for an interview. The guy who would become my boss said that the reason he hired me, despite my many, many jobs up until that point, was because I said that I just wanted a chance to prove myself. Most other interviewers didn’t like that much honesty, but he did.

Now the company number is going to skyrocket. I was even more of a floater than I was before. Like the previous contractor, this one also had contracts all over the city, but unlike that one, I was assigned to most of them, instead of just the one. I went to over a dozen different places, sometimes staying there for a week, and sometimes only a few hours. I went to a few sites only once, but many sites a whole bunch of times. That’s how I’ve worked for so many companies, but only with a handful of jobs. A few of the sites were about an hour away, so I got a lot of money from the mileage reimbursement, especially since we would always subtract the distance where we lived from the “home office” even though I literally never stepped foot in there, and didn’t even know exactly where it was. Anyway, it was just like the job before, but more formal. When someone was sick or on vacation, or just if a site needed extra help, they would send me, or someone else on my team. One of the site supervisors was being hired by the site themselves, so I interviewed to replace him, and got the job. It was at a law firm, so I learned a little bit of law there. Three years later, the site was shut down when a competitor secured the contract with a lower bid, but my company didn’t let me go. They moved me around a couple times, technically in the position I was just before, but that only lasted a couple of months before I found another site. I wasn’t the supervisor anymore, but I told my then-boss that I wasn’t going to accept anything lower than my wage at the time, so it came with a raise, which was what really mattered to me. This was the best job that I (my alternate) ever had. The work is really hard to learn, but very easy to do once you learn it, so he’s actually happy there. So there you have it, all those jobs, with even more companies, and even more locations. I wonder what’s next...

Microstory 2099: That Slacking Pays Off

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Like I said in the last post, I moved around a lot as a kid, as well as into adulthood, and it had an effect on my schooling. For kindergarten, my parents sent me to a hospital academy in Springfield, Missouri. They had some sort of connection to someone there, but as I was so young, I don’t know much about what it was all about, nor whether it was any better than a regular public school. I ended up moving on to that public school the next year, though, for first and second grade. We moved to Lawrence, Kansas before third grade, so I attended a school where we would walk through a tunnel underneath the street, which is not all that common in Kansas, since we tend to have more space. We moved to Overland Park a year later, so I switched schools yet again. Then for fifth grade, they built a brand new school in the district, and I was zoned there, while most of my peers were not. Notice how I said peers instead of friends. The last person I could confidently call my friend was in Springfield, and he grew up to become a republican, so that relationship was doomed to fail eventually. Anyway, most of the kids in my fifth grade class went to the middle school right next to it, but they rezoned the district again, and I ended up going to the middle school that was generally fed into from the elementary school that I went to for fourth grade, which placed me back with all the kids I thought I would never see again, and in many cases, hoped I wouldn’t. Funny enough, three years later, they built a brand new high school, and most of the kids from my middle school didn’t go there with me. I actually think we technically lived closer to the older high school, but somebody was apparently gerrymandering the school district. I guess it can happen in all levels of government, eh?

After I graduated from grade school, I took a gap year. I didn’t call it that; I doubt I even knew that that was a thing that some people did. My parents didn’t think that I was ready for college, and they were probably right. We didn’t know at the time that I had a diagnosable learning disability, which led to a lack of skills in maturity and socialization, which teachers don’t get paid enough to focus on, especially not since their funding is often dependent upon their students’ standardized test performance. Instead of continuing my education right away, I flew to California, where I volunteered on a farm. The greater organization provided livestock to developing regions of the world, and this particular location was designed to promote awareness of their mission, and educate visitors. My autism bit me in the ass when I was having trouble getting along with the other volunteers, so they kicked me out. I won’t tell you what the organization is called, but they made up these lies about how lazy I was, and how I didn’t do any work, which anyone could see were lies, because they kept changing their reasons. So they’re assholes, and I hate them. I’m the type to hold a grudge, and the only reason I don’t hold more of them is because I have a terrible memory. But I remember this traumatic experience. I’ll never forget how they treated me, and I’ll never support them again. It turned out to be a blessing, though, because Hurricane Katrina destroyed the gulf states soon thereafter, and I decided to take classes with the American Red Cross, and fly down there right away. That’s why I’ve been to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. I went home after one round, developed my first staph infection, got it cleared up, and then went back, this time being assigned to Florida, so I finished out the southern row.

After that second stint with the Red Cross was done, I enrolled at my junior college for a few classes, only one of which ultimately transferred properly to my four-year school, which I started the following summer. It’s annoying, really. When you do the math, I am quite certain that I could have graduated from college in three years, extremely plausibly in two. I kept taking summer classes, and took a full load for each term, plus I failed out an entire semester, plus several other classes after that. If everything had gone well, I’m really sure it could have taken me less than three years, I just had too many credits when considering how much I had from dual enrollment during my high school career. I failed too many courses, yet still made it in four years, for that not to be true. If I could go back in time, I would have graduated by the time I turned 21, I’m sure of it. In the real timeline, I graduated in 2010 with a degree in Linguistics, barely eking by with the minimal requirements. For the final semester, I was taking a geography class, because I thought it would be fun, but it turned out to be too technical, so I dropped it, and switched what I thought would be an extra linguistics credit. I literally signed the paper on the very last day allowed, and had to take a test with everyone else on my first day of the new class. I aced it, by the way, even though I had zero time to so much as open the book, so don’t act like you’re not impressed. A few weeks later, I was talking to my advisor when I learned that I needed an A in one of my linguistics classes and a B in the other in order to make the minimum GPA for graduation. If I had not switched classes at the last minute, that would have meant an entire extra term there. Thank God Geography 101 was so boring.

I didn’t learn a whole hell of a lot in school, if I’m being honest. I know that people will argue that I’ve retained more than I realize, but I dunno. I did a lot more studying in the decade afterwards than I did in the four years I was there. I did learn a valuable lesson once. In one of my linguistics classes, I was notoriously absent. I only showed up for tests, and other students’ presentations, because I wanted to be respectful. I didn’t do well on the assignments, and only kept myself afloat with my superior writing skills. That’s a bonus lesson that I learned; that teachers’ standards for writing had to be so low that I could get an A on a paper even if I phoned it in. Give me enough time to craft my words, and I could probably figure out a way to convince you that liquid water was dry. But that’s not the lesson I learned in this class; I already knew that I was a writer by then. No, what I learned there was far more valuable, because it applies to everyone. The other students were more interested and focused, so they formed a study group that I was not a part of. I would like to think that they would get up to entertaining shenanigans like the characters on the show Community, but I will never know. Still, I benefited from their hard work. The final exam was an open notes test, and someone in the study group let me have a copy of their study sheet. I can’t remember how well I did, but it was well enough to pass the class, when really, it should have been another failure. So what did that teach me, that slacking pays off? No. It taught me to trust and believe in others, and to accept help when it’s needed. I don’t have to do everything all on my own, and I shouldn’t want to. Humans are a tribal species, and community—there’s that word again—is the only reason we have managed to advance to the point of dominating this planet. So instead of ignoring people, or dismissing them, try to listen, surrender to their expertise when warranted, and let’s all work together to build a better tomorrow. No one gets through this life alone, and it would suck if they had to.

Oh, PS, I took a few more classes over the years after getting my degree, but we’ll talk more about that in the next post, because I signed up for some of them in the pursuit of figuring out what I could do for a living.

Microstory 2098: Where I was Living

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I was going to crack a joke about being born “at a young age” but it seems that joke has already been made. Or maybe it wasn’t a joke, but written by someone incredibly, incredibly dumb. Either way, it’s as true for me as anyone. My family lived in a small town called Derby, Kansas, which was a suburb of Wichita, which is where the hospital was. I’ve asked my mother multiple times where else exactly we lived after that, but I don’t think I wrote everything down, and besides, I don’t have that information with me, do I? But I know that we moved around a little before I was old enough to retain memories. I was three years old when I first became self-aware. I recall playing in the leaves at my house in Springfield, Missouri, which was where we lived for about five years. My father’s time as a teacher was ending, so we moved back to Kansas. I learned years later that he was applying to jobs in both Topeka and Kansas City, so we lived in Lawrence for a year while we waited to find out which it would be. Once his employment was settled, we moved to Overland Park, and we stayed in that area up until the day I disappeared, though not always in the same house. Overland Park is probably the largest suburb of KC, and they’re all sort of mixed together. You can drive on the highway for less than half an hour, and pass eight different cities without realizing it. This has all complicated my education history, and been complicated by it, but I reckon that I’ve lived in eleven places. That’s not even counting the two months I volunteered on a farm in California, the five different dorms and apartments I was in during college, or the two months that I house-sat for my aunt in Michigan.

I didn’t always get that most people don’t move around this much. As adults, they can return to their childhood bedrooms to find them just as they were. The last room I slept in before leaving the nest is my dad’s home office now. I never stopped moving. Once I was making enough money at work, I moved to a studio apartment.A year later, my parents invested in rental property, and I was their first tenant. It was a two-bedroom house with a yard for a future dog, though it was never a great setup, because the only way to the backyard was through the garage, or from the side yard. So I moved again, this time to a four-bedroom house. That’s where I was living when I got my dog, Daisy. Since I’m a temporal alternate, I’ll just tell you that my other self lives in yet another house now. It only has two bedrooms, but the den (living room) has a door that leads to the backyard, which is perfect for Daisy. She hangs out right by the door, and never dirties up the rest of the house, which is important, because we’re allergic to animal dander, and we have OCD. This is only about my original life, so I won’t even get into all the different worlds I’ve visited since becoming a bulk traveler, but that’s all added a lot too. As I mentioned, I moved schools a lot too, and not always because I moved houses, but won’t get into that until tomorrow. Here’s a list of other states that I’ve visited, in the order that I remember them: Michigan, Colorado, Illinois, Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Florida, Ohio, Minnesota, Indiana, California, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Iowa, Tennessee, Washington, Alaska, New York, and Hawaii. Here’s a list of other countries that I’ve visited, in definite chronological order: Japan, France, Canada, Egypt, Panama, and Peru.

Microstory 2097: I Even Did Poorly in English

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What have I done with my life? Well, a lot of things. I have a ton of interests, but I’ve never really wanted to be an expert in anything, save for writing. But first, here’s a list of things that I’ve done that I didn’t like, or at least don’t anymore. I was a gymnast from childhood, up until my senior year of high school. I didn’t like to compete, and eventually only kept going because that’s what I was used to doing. I regret not being more self-aware, and realizing how it was a really good excuse to work out. Maybe then I would have continued to do something to keep my fitness up after graduating. I played baseball for a few years too, but I absolutely hate sports, and I quit as soon as my parents let me. I took golf lessons later, and ran a mile outside of a school program. Apparently, my parents were trying to find my skills and passion, and I was not smart enough to tell them that these things weren’t it. I would go on to run a 5K as an adult, but that was to lose weight, and I never wanted to do it again. I was on the dive and swim team all through high school, which my parents considered a natural extension of my experience as a gymnast, but I hated that too. After my first practice, I got in the car, and asked to let me quit right away, because the coach was making all divers swim to fill out the team. By the time my high school career was over, I preferred to swim, but I was literally the only diver on the team by then, and I guess I had to finish what I started anyway. I’m not a musician either. I played the piano for several years, and quit when my teacher died. My excuse at the time was that I didn’t want to think about trying to find a new teacher, but I think I can admit now that I always hated it as much as anything, and I was never good at it. I severely regret the amount of money my parents spent on a piano that’s no longer used, however much that was.

I was terrible in school, and that was annoying, because I wasn’t cool either, so everyone assumed that I was a nerd, but I wasn’t anything. I even did poorly in English, and related subjects. The way I see it, I’m more of a storyteller than a wordsmith. Words are just my medium, because I also have an ugly voice, but I think I would prefer to produce movies on the creative side than literally write the screenplays. After I graduated from college, in pursuit of my writing career, I started to do a lot more research, and branch out into subjects that I never thought I would try. I like architecture. Before I ended up here, I would use software to design spaceships, and other structures, from my stories, even though I never planned to release these illustrations publicly. I found it to be a soothing task, even when it was frustrating. I like to watch educational videos online for futuristic and technological subjects, and also some more grounded topics. Power generation, conversion, and storage; engineering; anatomy, physiology, medicine, psychology, and neurology; especially evolutionary biology; and even economics are some of my other random interests. I’m particularly invested in ethics, because I see bad ethics all the time, and also logic, because neurotypicals are so wrong so much of the time. I like to study these subjects, and pretend that I can retain the information presented to me, but honestly, I don’t remember hardly any of it, so they’re mostly good for killing time. Of course, I’ve done lots of other things, but these are the basics. Join me tomorrow, where I’ll discuss where I’ve lived, and where I’ve been.

Microstory 2096: Before I Came Out

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When I was pretty young, my dad told me that he once jumped off a cliff in Boy Scouts. I think he said it was a hundred feet or something, which may or may not have been an exaggeration. Because of the way my brain works, I interpreted this to mean that jumping off a cliff was some kind of a requirement, which immediately took me out of the running, because I’ve always been afraid of heights. That’s not a phobia, by the way, because it’s not irrational. You fall down, you could die. It doesn’t even have to be that high. You could fall from your own height, and still crack your head wide open. Some time later, I either learned that it wasn’t really a requirement, or I forgot all about it, because I did join Cub Scouts, and eventually moved up the ranks as appropriate. I graduated to Boy Scouts with a group of other boys, and we stuck together for a little while. Over the course of the next several years, almost invariably, when one of them would attain the highest rank of Eagle, they would stop coming to meetings and camping trips. I started noticing this throughout the whole troop. If they didn’t quit sometime before, they ended up seeing reaching Eagle the end of their journey. By the time I turned 18, I was one of only a few kids my age left. Everyone else was younger, placing me in a de facto leadership position in many cases. Despite the fact that I initially ranked up faster than most of my peers, I was the last to finally get Eagle. In fact, it was four weeks before I turned 18. I don’t think there was a rule that said that I was disqualified at that age, but I definitely wanted to finish by then either way.

Shortly thereafter, we went on a canoe trip, which we would do every year. It was set to be my last. I knew that I wasn’t going to be involved in the organization for much longer. Since all of my “friends” were gone by then, I shared a canoe with my dad. In the middle of the trip, we came across a cliff that looked like we could climb up to from the side. It was not a hundred feet up, but it wasn’t six feet neitha, I’ll tell ya that much. I was still afraid of heights—which, like I said, is rational—but older, stronger, and more confident in my abilities. So we got out, checked the depth of the water below the cliff, and then made the short trek to the top, where we jumped off together. I dunno, I think it’s rather poetic that the one thing that almost stopped me from experiencing those ten years of my life was one of the last things I did for my scouting career. I left the scouts, and I never looked back. I don’t regret the activities that I participated in, but I can’t look back on the whole experience fondly either. Those people suppressed my sexuality for many years beyond that. I just got so used to being someone that I wasn’t, and it took a lot for me to decide to live as my true self. I was in my 30s before I came out as omnisexual, and I will never forgive them for that. I could have been so much happier. How many others went through something similar? I’m still attracted to women, so at least I wasn’t lying about everything, but there are those who can’t express themselves at all, and that was never okay. I do not tolerate the excuse that it was a “different time”. A part of me wants/wanted them to change, but another part of me just wants to see them destroyed. I’m vengeful like that sometimes.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 16, 2437

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Finding the Vellani Ambassador was easy. Mirage had programmed it to follow her wherever she went while invisible with a space-warping generator on the hull, but something must have undone that at some point, because it was out in the open, and available to the public. The locals of Ex-666 had never entered the ship, but it was not clear yet whether they had ever tried, or if they deliberately stayed out of it. Because they had begun to revere it as a religious icon.

The government was a little too busy to return Mirage’s ship to her right away, though they did want to respect her ownership over it. They just really had to worry about preparing to go to war. The team was busy too, helping them take control of the eye in the sky. It was surprisingly easy. They were worried that there was some kind of catch that would come back to bite them in the ass, but the Chief Ascendant was convinced that no escape attempts had been made in the last 150 years, which probably caused some level of complacency.

Not much had actually changed about the world over the course of the last year. The armada from Ex-182 was not yet here. Some of the so-called prisoners were former fleet members, who knew enough about the ships that the empire used to tell them that they were mostly powered by reframe engines. They had built their vessels to be quite large, however, and scaling of the technology came at a cost. While regular fusion reactions were perfectly suitable to make the engine work for a smaller ship, like the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, capital ships demanded too much power. Not even a larger fusion reactor could compensate for the loss. The only way they could get up to maximum reframe speeds was to use matter-antimatter reactions. No one here knew enough about it to understand why that was a problem these days, but Mirage did.

“It was us,” she shrugged.

“You stole their antimatter reserves?” Leona asked her.

“Far as I know, it’s still there,” Mirage began to explain, but it’s hard to get to. It exists as a fully formed antistar, sitting out there alone in the void. Getting close enough to it to extract only as much antimatter that they need when they need it is a delicate dance. My team and I were tasked with engineering a containment megastructure. We were on schedule to completing that mission when I was separated from them, and captured. I knew that it was going to happen, so I made arrangements to halt all production and construction. If they returned to the project themselves, it’s going to take them a hell of a long time. I scattered my barges in all directions. Just getting them back would probably take longer than starting over from a new source of raw material.”

“Why were you helping them in the first place?” Mateo questioned. “Did you not realize that you were working for the bad guys?”

“We suspected from the beginning,” Mirage replied. “But we weren’t sure, we weren’t sure what level of technology they had—though it could have been vast considering their remoteness from the Earthan stellar neighborhood—and also we felt bad. We were the ones who destroyed their first antistar. For reasons I still don’t fully understand, they maintained a link between this region of the Milky Way, and Alpha Centauri. That’s how we ended up this far out in the first place. We were just going to Toliman to pick up my ship, which I had programmed to build itself years prior. There was something very wrong with that whole star system, so we blew up our asteroid to prevent anyone else from trying to investigate, and that’s what destroyed the star. It and the antistar annihilated each other.”

Leona winced. “Toliman has not been destroyed.”

“No, it had to have,” Mirage insisted. “What else could have happened?”

“I don’t know,” Leona contended, “but if Alpha Centauri B didn’t exist in this day and age, I would have heard about it.”

“Someone must have gone back to fix it,” Mirage guessed, “maybe me.”

“I don’t know how you would do that,” Ramses said.

“I have some ideas,” Mirage responded. She looked forward again, and sighed. “Looks like they’re nearly done.”

While Mirage was in the sixth circle of hell, the natives had transformed the site of the Vellani Ambassador into a sacred one. They didn’t worship the ship, nor whoever may have brought it here, but they conceived stories about how it might one day open for them, and a great savior would step out of it to rescue them from their damnation. It was only hitting them now that this was their very first sign of religious doctrine in this sector of the galaxy. The team hadn’t even noticed before, because vonearthan culture had managed to transcend its superstitious origins, so religion wasn’t much of a thing anymore. But the Goldilocks Corridor was apparently seeded with life thousands of years ago, and many of the worlds were severely underdeveloped. So it seemed rather odd, not that some evil religious order wasn’t controlling the masses alongside the evil empire, but that no one on the planets they had been to so far had taken comfort in the mystical. Was this agnosticism enforced...or incidental?

The religious leadership was dismantling the decorations and offerings that had been placed on and around the ship.  Some of them believed that Mirage was indeed their savior, and that their belief that she would literally come out of the Hope Chariot, which was what the worshipers called it, was just a matter of detail.

Why didn’t you have them do this before?” Angela asked. “You could have left before.”

“I figured I would give them one more year with it,” Mirage answered. “I knew that you would need that whole time to come back, and that kind of waiting means little to me in the long-run. I’ve developed high patience. Now they’ve had time to say their goodbyes.”

“Did you explain that it was just a regular ship, and not god, or whatever it is they believe?” Olimpia asked her.

“I don’t know if they believe me. Some think I am indeed the savior they’ve been waiting for, and others think that I’m just the one who is going to unlock it so the true savior can be released from it. This is a prison world, and while they’ve thrived here, they have not forgotten that. So if there’s a god of Ex-666, perhaps they’re a prisoner too, and maybe they’re trapped in the...Hope Chariot. It would explain why this deity hasn’t saved them yet.”

They had an interesting way to express respect here, at least as far as the religious people went. They would stretch their arms out wide, dip their nose down towards the ground as low as possible, and balance themselves out by raising one leg behind them as high as possible. Only the elderly members no longer flamingoed, but they still airplaned their arms, and lowered their head into a regular bow. The younger ones made the move with the most enthusiasm, and they did not care if they fell over in the attempt. “Hmm, it’s basically Warrior 3,” Marie noted, having tried yoga in the afterlife simulation in the early 19th century, before it was cool in the western world on Earth.

The Elder Priestess was the last in line to pay her respects to Mirage and the team. She made no attempt to bow, but smiled as wide as Mona Lisa, and nodded. As she passed by, she placed a comforting hand on Mirage’s shoulder, and walked down the hill to join the rest of the main group, who were watching from there. A huge crowd had convened behind them to witness the magic. Not everyone in the world believed, but surely there were plenty here who just wanted to see what happened. Fortunately, they were in an open expanse in the desert, which fit the instructions for the Ambassador to avoid populated areas, so something like this wouldn’t happen. The settlements here only sprung out as a result of its sudden appearance.

Mirage lifted her hand, and said in reference, “allons-y.” She snapped her fingers, prompting the back hatch of the ship to engage and lower. To her surprise, someone actually did step out. It was a young woman, perhaps in her early- to mid-twenties. She was completely ready for this, coming into the light with confidence and self-assuredness. The crowd went wild. A lot of them dove to the ground in a full Downward Facing Dog bow of intense unwavering loyalty and faith. The woman walked right down the hill, and approached Mirage. “Do you recognize me?”

“Niobe. You’re older now. How long have you been in there?”

This was the girl who was with Maqsud Al-Amin and Lilac’s son, Aristotle. She was a slave-child on Ex-324, but she originated on the Extremus planet of Verdemus. She smirked, and looked over at the team. “A few minutes.” She winked.

“Why?” Mirage asked.

“These people need someone to follow. They’re never going to let go of their convictions, at least not until they win the war. The Chief Ascendant is going to continue to run the state, but they are transitioning from peacetime, and they are severely underestimating what that is going to do to their culture. Someone else needs to be there to guide them. Now, I’m not going to explain why I’m the best person for the job, but it has to do with what I’ve experienced since we last saw each other. Just know that this is the right thing to do, and I’m not going to abuse my power. If you would like to be sure of that, you can stand by my side, Mirage. This team needs your ship more than you do.”

“What about...”

“Ex-10?” Niobe guessed. “Let it go, he means nothing. Do not be fooled by his low numerical designation. It’s a trick. Everything that Oaksent does is a joke, a smokescreen, or a mistake. So, how about it? Are you with me?”

Mirage looked back at the crowd, and let out her signature emulated sigh. She switched her gaze to Leona, who had made herself look like the real Iman Vellani. “Leona’s Rules for Time Travel, Number Fourteen, do not form, or inspire, a religion.”

“Leona is just a person,” Niobe reasoned, “not a god.”

“Nor are we.”

“We won’t act like one,” Niobe continued. “We’re there to help. They understand where we come from, but you were about to open this ship, and I saw an opportunity. I won’t apologize for that. I really am trying to help. The Empire must fall, and while I have limits to what I’m willing to do to accomplish that, this does not cross the line. You have to decide where your line is.”

Mirage shook her head as she thought about it. “Give me the rest of the day.”

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Fluence: Saga (Part I)

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The date was November 21, 2259 by the Earthan calendar. The new crew of the X González starship just launched from the planet of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. Superpowered inventor, Holly ‘Weaver’ Blue; career government administrator, Goswin Montagne; and superintelligence, Eight Point Seven left friends both back on that world, as well as on another ship going in a different direction. Coming along with them was prisoner Briar de Vries, who was accused of, and admitted to, murder. The nature of his crime was too complicated to let him be processed through any standard judicial system in the stellar neighborhood. The crew didn’t know what they were going to do with him yet. The leadership of the planet where the incident occurred wanted him gone, so this was the best way to accomplish it. For now, he was being limited to his cabin.

They didn’t know where they were going either. They made a few jumps, but dropped down to drifting speed until they could decide on a vector, or at least a direction. There was no point in firing up the fractional engines until they had some clue what they were doing. They were still within the Tau Cetian heliosphere, watching the host star get smaller and smaller as they slipped farther away from it. Goswin and Weaver were doing this anyway. Eight Point Seven’s consciousness was uploaded into the ship’s systems itself, and Briar’s cabin did not have a viewport, nor was he going to be involved in the decision-making process.

“How far has the galaxy been colonized by now?” Goswin asked.

“To varying degrees,” Weaver began to answer, “Earth has begun to explore most systems within fifty light years. That’s the bubble of the stellar neighborhood, and Earth is going to be focused on that for a while. Of course, Gatewood has launched a set of modular ships that will spread across the entire galaxy, but it will be tens of thousands of years before that’s all over.”

“So that limits where we can practically go,” Goswin posed. “Unless, I suppose, if we want to go somewhere that no one has been before. That sounds boring, though. If there aren’t any people, it’s probably not all that interesting yet.”

“Mostly, you’re right.”

“I have a suggestion,” Eight Point Seven announced through the speakers.

“What is it?” Weaver asked.

“Thirteen and a half light years from here is Alpha Centauri B,” Eight Point Seven continued.

“Also known as Toliman,” Weaver added, nodding. “I’ve heard of it.”

“Did you hear that it was destroyed?” Eight Point Seven asked her.

Weaver took a moment to respond. “No. Destroyed how?”

“Unclear, but my guess would be a matter-antimatter annihilation.”

“How would it be possible to annihilate an entire star?” Goswin questioned.

“An antistar,” Eight Point Seven answered.

“If antistars exist,” Weaver started, “they’re nowhere near regular stars. The chances of one drifting close enough to hit Toliman before hitting something else are approaching zero.”

“Maybe then it’s worth checking out?” Eight Point Seven offered.

Weaver sighed. “You’re the captain.”

“I am? Oh, I am. Well, that was...” Goswin had leadership skills, but did that make him qualified to captain a starship? It was a tiny little crew, with only a pilot and an engineer, so he didn’t feel much pressure taking it on as a role, but now a real decision had come up, so he needed to start thinking about what his job truly meant. “That does sound interesting. How far away did you say?”

“It’s 13.5 light years,” Weaver answered him. “It will take us 13.5 years to get there, but for us, it’ll feel like a week.”

“Eight Point Seven suggested it, which suggests that she’s in favor of it. I’m in favor of it. That leaves you, Weaver.”

“This isn’t a democracy,” she argued.

“I don’t see why it can’t be, at least for now. We’re not in any big hurry, are we? Let me make the decisions in the heat of the moment, but if everything’s okay, I’ll want to hear your respective opinions.”

“Sounds fair to me,” Eight Point Seven agreed. She too had leadership experience, but has since retired, and she just wanted to fly the ship now.

“Very well. Let’s go to Toliman...or not, as it were.”

“Pilot,” Goswin said. “Lay in a course, and engage at maximum warp.”

Eight Point Seven laughed, and started the fractional engines.

A few days into the trip, everything was going fine. They had passed several light years already, and were on track to making their arbitrary deadline. The ship was perfect, running on its own, with Eight Point Seven only having to make a few minor course adjustments, and repairs from micrometeoroid strikes that the EM and TK fields were unable to handle. This was all about to change. The great thing about moving at extremely high fractional speeds is that you get to where you’re going much faster, but it does come with its downsides. First, those micrometeoroids can become a real problem if the power shielding and the hull fail. Secondly, you could encounter—or even pass—something without even realizing it. For the most part, space is empty. The chances of running into a celestial body are rather low, which is why it’s generally okay to move so quickly. There are some things that cannot be predicted, however, nor detected. Eight Point Seven processes information rapidly, and can see a lot beyond the doppler glow that blocks views from the ports, but even she isn’t omniscient.

Something came upon them; some kind of force, and they never saw what it was. Normally, the internal inertial dampeners would prevent them from feeling that the ship was even in motion. The humans would be splattered red against the walls if this safety feature didn’t exist, which was why the redundancies for the redundancies on all of these interstellar ships had multiple stages of redundancies on top of their redundant redundancies. It was the one thing that almost no one could survive. Even the loss of life support could be okay, as long as it was brief, and not too extreme. Even so, failures did happen, and it was what happened here. Fortunately, it was not as bad as it could have been. Everybody survived, but the humans were severely injured when the ship X González suddenly lurched to the side.

This was when weird things started to happen. As they were each trying to get back to their feet, they started to see other versions of themselves, standing, crouching, or lying in different places around the bridge. Even a few versions of Briar were there with them, when he should have been still locked up in his cabin. A nearby console would spontaneously transition from being whole to being damaged, and then back again. The lights changed colors, and the space around them warped and stretched to a point of infinity. Feelings of profound dread were met with feelings of elation, and even euphoria. At one point, the whole ship cracked in half, and then reassembled itself. Finally, after all this tumult, everything stopped, and they started to drift at normal subfractional speeds again.

“Eight Point Seven!” Goswin and Weaver cried at the same time. When the latter conceded to the former, he repeated himself, and went on, “Eight Point Seven, report!”

“I...I don’t know,” Eight Point Seven admitted. “The data in my memory indicates conflicting information, including that the incident took place over the course of a few moments, that it took 141 years, and also that we’ve been gone for an eternity. I cannot rectify the discrepancies.”

“All right, don’t worry about the past. Let’s just focus on our present circumstances. Can you find our location?”

“We are roughly 135 light years from our original position. I’m afraid that I don’t have an exact number, due to an uncertainty regarding our starting point, but based on astronomical data, I can pinpoint our location at the outer edge of the Achernar system, also known as Alpha Eridani.”

Goswin looked to Weaver for guidance, who shook her head. “Never heard of it. I’m an inventor, not an astronomer.”

“I don’t suppose it’s populated,” Goswin asked.

“It appears to be,” Eight Point Seven answered.

“You mean, it appears to not be,” Goswin figured.

“No,” Eight Point Seven insists. She turned the main viewscreen on to show them the star that they were approaching. It had been surrounded by a Dyson swarm. There were definitely intelligent entities here. How they managed to cross the vast distance in such a short amount of time was unclear. Then again, they didn’t quite know what year it was anyway.

“Do they see us?” Goswin pressed.

“Absolutely, they do,” Weaver replied.

“I’m receiving a message. Text only.” Eight Point Seven displayed the message on the screen. X González, please rendezvous with Intake at the below coordinates for debrief. Klaatu barada nikto. And then it provided the coordinates.

“They know who we are,” Goswin pointed out the obvious.

“Time travelers.” Weaver nodded. “The ship has no weapons, captain. I suggest we rendezvous, and I recommend we do so at subfractional speeds.”

“Do you know what those last three words mean?”

“No idea.”

“It’s hard to know their intentions,” Eight Point Seven began, “but it’s a pop culture reference from the 20th and 21st centuries that could mean stand down.”

“Uhh...” Goswin had been learning a lot about this ship, but at relativistic speeds, he had not had that much time with it. “Maximum subfractional to the coordinates, or whatever. Just...go as fast as possible while operating under the assumption that these people actually don’t know anything about time travel and teleportation.”

“Understood.” Eight Point Seven piloted the ship into the asteroid, and docked where the lights indicated. The two humans stepped out, and approached a small group of other humans who were waiting for them on the pier. A man took a half step forward, and offered his hand. “Captain Montagne, my name is Intake Coordinator Pontus Flagger. Let me be the first to welcome you to the Parallel.”

“It seems you have us at a disadvantage,” Goswin responded. “We don’t know who you are, or what this parallel is.”

“You’ve heard of alternate timelines?” Pontus assumed.

Goswin was determined to remain cagey. “Maybe.”

Pontus smiled. “This is like an alternate timeline, except that it happens at the same time. It’s a parallel reality. There are other parallels, but ours was the first, so it earned the most on-the-nose title.”

“Do you know how we ended up here?” Weaver asked him.

Pontus started casually doing finger tuts with one hand. For the last movement, he slid his index finger horizontally, allowing a holographic screen to appear between them. It started to show them images from a very, very old TV show. “Do you recognize this?” he asked.

“It looks like something out of The Verge Saga, perhaps Crusaders?” This was a multiseries franchise that took place in a far away galaxy, a long time ago.

“That’s right,” Pontus confirmed. “The premise is that there is a single point in space at the center of the fictional galaxy where all interstellar travel meets. It doesn’t matter where you wanna go, you can only move in two directions; either towards the Verge, or away from it. This place is like that, except it’s not so unilateral. In a few months, people, objects, and even individual particles, will find themselves here. In addition to preparing for these arrivals, we’ve been studying the phenomenon for decades, trying to figure out what causes it, and whether it can be controlled. You appear to be some kind of vanguard. If you explain what happened before you arrived, it might help us understand. Perhaps you’re just early to the party, for whatever reason, or there’s a chance that you caused it.”

“You know who we are,” Goswin reminded him, “and the name of our ship.”

“Your story is a matter of historical record to us,” Pontus clarified. “It would be like you knowing who was on the boat that crossed the Delaware on Christmas 1776.”

“Do you also know who else is on our ship?” Goswin questioned.

Pontus waited a moment to respond. “Besides the pilot, we are aware that you are transporting some kind of prisoner, but we do not know who.”

Goswin looked over at Weaver, not for help navigating this situation, but because she may not approve of the direction that he wanted to take. He decided to make his first executive decision as the Captain. “Yes, we’re transporting him, because there is nothing else we can do for him. He is the man who killed Mateo Matic. If you’ve heard of us, I’m sure you’ve heard of him. To my knowledge, time travelers do not have any formal legal institution, and we believe that he would be unfit to stand trial within any court system in our...reality. Do you suppose someone here would be equipped to take this challenge on?”

Pontus did not expect this development, but he was showing signs of patience, as well as a hint of curiosity. “We have nothing like that here, and due to the nature of our research, we couldn’t install a Nexus for instantaneous interstellar travel. We would be willing to transport him elsewhere, but you should first learn how our legal system works. You may not be so keen on it if it’s sufficiently different from what you know.”

“Yeah, I think that would be best. Something should be done about him. He can’t stay in his cabin forever,” Goswin decided.

“Very well. Come with me.”

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Microstory 2095: Not Thick Enough

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My parents were pretty tired when they flew into town. There was this whole issue at the airport. I didn’t know this before, but they just built a new airport for Kansas City, and it’s not my favorite. I preferred the older concept, with the circles. People hated that, but my thing is, it can be a great thing, if you do it right. They designed those specific ones poorly, I’ll admit, but the idea is perfectly sound. These are rings, which allow your driver to pull up pretty much right to your gate. There are multiple security entrances, which means that you only have to contend with the people who are getting on your flight, or one of a handful of others. If they staggered the flight schedule right, though, and assigned the gates wisely, they could actually make it so that the only people who are in line for security at any one time are on the same flight. The other flights in your sector have already left, or don’t need to get through yet. Anyway, the issue was that the original ones were not thick enough, which left less room for bathrooms, and almost no room for restaurants, and other shops. Everything was on the outside of security, which I didn’t have a problem with. Since getting through security was so much faster than at other airports, it was fine. You didn’t have to get there three years early, because you’re already just right there! Ugh, I could go on and on about airport layouts, including the fact that you can squeeze more planes in the same area, because the curve is constantly dropping away from the fleet, but let’s get back to the story. I spent a lot of time in the new one, waiting for my parents to land. They’re still figuring out how to coordinate all this foot and car traffic, it was a mess to know where you can pick up your family, and when, then there was a glitch, so everyone was waiting at the wrong baggage conveyor belt. I think it will be fine, they just need time to work out all the kinks. I was going to take them back to my landlord’s house to meet her, and share a meal or two, but they just wanted to get to the hotel, order room service, and then go to sleep. They’ve both been retired for years, so they’ve grown used to their days not being so busy. I decided to spend the night with them. Fortunately, the hotel made its own mistake, and assigned them a double room, so there was a bed there for me. I don’t post on my blog on the weekends, so I’ll catch you all up on Monday. That’s when they’ll be flying back out, so I’m sure we’ll run into more trouble.