The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 19, 2440

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The team was split, but since there were only five of them now, it was not even. Mateo, Leona, and Olimpia all wanted to reroute the ship, and return to Ex-666, where they might be able to find some allies, specifically Mirage and Niobe. They had to get back to Angela, and since they had no idea where or when she was, seeking out help seemed like the only logical response to this situation. Ramses and Marie, on the other hand, wanted to continue on to Ex-467, where a time tech warehouse was waiting for them to break and enter. The rationale for this was that there had to be something there that could help them instead. Leona didn’t agree. Mirage and Niobe were known variables, while the warehouse could turn out to be completely empty for all they knew, or even just pretty much impregnable. One might think that the result would be obvious, but Marie’s vote held more power, as it was her sister who they were trying to locate. In the end, they kept on course, especially since Angela herself seemed rather excited for this mission, and even though she would like to be here with them, she would be more upset if they skipped it altogether on her account. Marie knew how her mind worked.

When they returned to the timestream in 2440, they immediately learned something about their destination that they could not have guessed before. So far, every Ex- designation referred to either a planet, or a person, with the planetary designations being significantly shorter, and the personal designations including the number of their planet of origin. Ex-467 was either a space station, or a ship. Its design included main thrusters that suggested it could be navigated away from the host star that it was orbiting, but the shape itself implied that it was meant to remain a stationary hub at all times. There were tons of ports on it, but none of them was in use at the moment, at least not the exterior ones. There could be large bays somewhere they couldn’t see. It was difficult for their scans to penetrate the extremely thick hull.

Ramses was able to detect teleportation suppressor field generators, however, they were turned off. Mateo and Olimpia were relieved by this until Leona pointed out that they were probably not there to keep people out, but to trap any thieves inside in the event of a breach. If they were going to break in, teleporting was likely the worst way to do it. “Why wouldn’t we break in?” Marie questioned. “Why did we just travel all this way if not to go in and shake some shit up?”

“Poor choice of words,” Leona said apologetically. “All I’m saying is that no one teleports, okay? Not even internally. It’s too dangerous. We are going in...as long as everyone still wants that.”

Marie stepped forward authoritatively. “Yes, everyone wants that.” She glared at Mateo, who was incidentally the most vocal against this route, since they still had no idea what they would be up against.

Mateo regretted being so adamant in his position, but this development only proved his point. Everything they knew about this world came from people who Vitalie!613 had spoken to on the resort world. But they conveniently left out that it wasn’t a planet at all, which placed all intelligence they had regarding the Goldilocks Corridor in question, especially when it came to this place. “Yes, we do,” Mateo said, hoping to earn back some points with Marie.

Ramses nodded. “All right, the computer calculated the safest, most distant point of ingress that’s still large enough for the Vellani Ambassador to dock. We don’t want it to be too big, or our arrival might be noticed. It still might be. We don’t know a whole lot about their security measures.”

“Right,” Leona jumped in. “That’s why we stick together, no matter what. People say that in movies all the time, and it never works out. We can’t afford to get separated, though. If teleportation is our only escape, we absolutely must do it at the same time. That’s the contingency, and we only get one shot.”

“What are we waiting for?” Marie asked impatiently. “Let’s get on with it. It may take us a while to find an alternate self locator, or whatever might help.”

“Hold on,” Mateo urged. “Maybe we shouldn’t get on with it. I think I have a plan that necessitates us waiting. We’ve done something like it before, Leona and I.”

He explained his idea to them, and then they reformulated it together. It immediately called for a reversal of Leona’s order for them to stay together. It was all about misdirection. The Ambassador’s holographic generators were making them look like one of the ships they saw in guardian orbit over Ex-908, which was the planet that was constantly being attacked to test the Empire’s defensive technology. If they ran into other people, Marie was making herself up to look like someone who could not be denied. She was quickly becoming the best at impersonations. Olimpia would remain quiet and invisible the whole time unless they ran into trouble. Ramses and Leona made themselves look like random people that they knew from their pasts, who were not likely to be in any Exin historical records. Mateo was still particularly bad at all the powers, so he was just wearing a physical disguise of a beard and glasses. He was also going to keep his head down, and look like he was the lowest man on the totem pole here. He essentially was, so it wasn’t that great of a stretch. Then again, he was the one who was noticing everyone else’s strengths, and came up with this division of labor in the first place, so he wasn’t totally useless.

A group of guards filed into the room, pointing weapons at them as Leona, stepped out of the ship, alone at first. “State your business, strangers,” the leader demanded of them.

Leona stood tall, and inspected the guards with a cold look on her face. It was the face of a girl she knew in elementary school, aged up to her twenties. “Lower your weapons for the Oaksent,” she commanded.

Ramses appeared from the darkness first, followed closely by Marie to his left, but she no longer looked like herself. She was Bronach Oaksent now, Jacobson-Cline Father of the Goldilocks Corridor, Despot of the Exin Empire, Douchebag of the Milky Way Galaxy. She was their enemy. Mateo followed at her flank in rags as Oaksent’s own personal slave. They didn’t know whether he actually had slaves, but it was a decent educated guess. Plus, they figured that they didn’t have to specify Mateo’s role.

“Oh my God,” the leader uttered. He and the rest of the guards knelt down, but in the worst way they had ever seen. They placed the butt of their respective guns against the floor, and rested their foreheads against the muzzle. They weren’t about to pull the triggers, but it was a horrific sign of deference to an evil leader. Was this what everyone did in the presence of their god-king?

The rest of the team could feel Marie’s reluctance to let them treat her this way, but that wasn’t what the real Oaksent would do. They sent her feelings of support and encouragement, so she composed herself, and pretended like this was all perfectly normal, and not profoundly disturbing at all. She cleared her throat. “Not long ago, I sent a team here to extract an object for me as a test. You failed that test when you failed to report the item missing. Do not feel bad, these were the elites, trained personally by me. And lucky for you, I am now giving you the chance to redeem yourselves. My team did not remove the object from the station. They hid it somewhere else. Search the warehouse now, and bring it to me. The first person to come to me with the correct answer will be rewarded with a permanent life on Ex-613.”

“Sir, if I may,” one of the guards near the back asked, carefully letting his head up. “Many of us have families. Will they be allowed to join the winner on Ex-613?”

Marie waited to respond, trying to decide what Oaksent would say. The most obvious answer was yes. That would only incentivize them even more in this snipe hunt. But that didn’t sound like something the real man would agree to. Remember, he was a ruthless dick. She came up with a compromise. “They will be given their own opportunities to join you. Their place on that world is not guaranteed, but I won’t deny it outright either..”

“Thank you, sir. You are most magnanimous,” the inquisitive one replied.

“Go. Go now. Spread the word to everyone else here!” she ordered as they were running out of the room. “Find me that missing object!” They waited until everyone was gone. “Oh my God, I can’t believe that worked.”

“Ya did good, kid,” Mateo said, throwing an arm around her shoulder.

Just then, a guard came back into the room with a smirk on her face. “I was just transferred here from Ex-42,” she said. “I met you while I was there, sir. Do you remember that?”

“Of course not,” Marie responded. “Why would I recall someone like you?”

She smirked. “Well, you were on your way back to Ex-420. There’s no way you could be here now. You were heading in the wrong direction.”

Marie did her best to look like an offended ruler. “I ordered a change in course. I don’t have to explain it to the likes of you.”

“It’s true, the real Bronach Oaksent would owe me nothing, but you’re not him. There are other issues with your ruse here. For one, Oaksent likes the ladies. He doesn’t own male servants, because he can’t impregnate them with the next generation of servants. So I don’t know who that guy’s supposed to be.” She nodded towards Mateo. “And who’s that crouched on the hull of your ship?” They all fell for it. They spun around to see who the hell she was talking about, only to find that no one was there. When they looked back, the smart guard had her weapon trained on them. “Put your guns down.” They heard a short pounding sound as she lurched, and widened her eyelids. Then her eyeballs rolled out of view, and she fell to the floor, unconscious, but very much alive.

Olimpia briefly made herself visible to the team as she was still holding the gun over her victim, which she had used as a blunt instrument. “Good plan, Matty.”

“Except it’s hard to see how beautiful you are when we can’t see you at all,” Mateo acknowledged. He placed a hand softly upon her cheek as she disappeared again. “Y’all go look for the central database,” he told the other three. “Olimpia, you think you can find the security room on your own? I need to secure this one in a closet, or something.”

“Yes, sir,” her voice replied out of the aether.

They broke into their groups, and went off on their separate missions. What Mateo didn’t tell them was that he wasn’t hiding the guard somewhere on the station. He stuck her in hock on the Vellani Ambassador. A half hour later, midnight central hit, giving the station an entire year to cool down, and relax their defenses.

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Fluence: Magnolia (Part IV)

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Neither Harrison nor Madam Sriav were where the four of them expected them to be. It was still raining when they went back to England centuries ago, but the area was empty. They figured that Harrison took Briar’s mother, Irene to safety somewhere, but when they looked around, they couldn’t find anyone. “Will he hurt her?” Briar asked.

“I really don’t think so,” Weaver answered. “He knew Mateo and Leona back in the day, and helped them with some of their earlier exploits. He wasn’t programmed for violence, nor does he have any reason to cause harm to her.”

They kept searching, but still couldn’t find either of them. Whatever cave was supposed to magically transport them to Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida was presumably pretty well hidden, which would explain why the local villagers didn’t constantly go missing, only to reappear in the timestream a thousand years later. Briar didn’t know much about time travel, so he reasoned that his mother must have survived all of this, or he wouldn’t exist right now. Of course, the other three knew that the cosmos was full of new timelines, sprouting up every time someone went back in time to change history. It was entirely possible that Briar was wildly different in this current version of reality. Just because he was still standing here didn’t mean that everything that happened in the past was identical to what happened where he was from. No one told him all of this, partially because it was a complex and hard-to-teach concept, but also because they were better off not meddling in this time period any further than they already had. If he understood that there was no such thing as fate, they would never be able to get him to leave. He would die of old age in the attempt to locate her again.

They huddled together, and thought of the island of Lorania on Dardius. Here, the weather was a lot less exceptional, which made it difficult to be sure that they had returned to the right moment. Madam Sriav was also nowhere to be found, but Eight Point Seven was pretty sure that little time had passed since they last left. When Madam Sriav was frustrated with having been taken from her home, she kicked flowers, and at one point, sat down to pull pedals apart. Some of this debris was still where she had left it, or nearby. It had not yet been blown away by the wind, or decomposed to the ravages of time. Eight Point Seven estimated that at most, only several minutes could have passed. They were less certain in this case that anyone involved would be safe. They had no frame of reference for predicted events here, nor any clue whether Madam Sriav was destined to do something particular in the future. If she was taken by someone, or otherwise lost, it could be catastrophic, and they would be hopeless to stop it. They didn’t have enough information about it.

“At least we’re navigating pretty well,” Goswin acknowledged. “If we keep this up, we shouldn’t have to worry about ending up in outer space, or anywhere else too dangerous, or even just wrong.”

“That’s still a danger,” Weaver determined. “If there’s no way to put a stop to this, we’ll probably find ourselves trying to use it towards some end. Good luck to us, figuring out what that objective should be, and how to go about achieving it.”

“Are you talking about me?” Briar questioned, offended. “She looked at me when she said that.”

“I was looking at everyone,” Weaver insisted.

“No, you were looking right at me,” Briar volleyed. “I get it, I’m the problem child. You’re all saints, but I’m the no-good dirty murderer.”

“She was looking at you,” Eight Point Seven confirmed.

“Thank you!” Briar shouted. “At least you’re honest.”

“She was looking at you, not because you’re a problem,” Eight Point Seven went on, “but because your motivations are distant from ours. In fact, I’m not sure what they are. What do you want?”

“What do you want?” he asked. “Are you quite certain that the three of your motivations are as aligned as you think?”

Eight Point Seven tilted her head, having been programmed to simulate inquisitive dispositions to better blend in with human cultural communication. “They may not be, but these other two can listen to reason, and they can agree to a decision without necessarily liking it. You were raised alone, in a world of two people. You lack social skills, and I need you to remember, Briar, that that is not your fault.”

Briar blinked excessively, waffling on whether to let the tears welling in his eyes fall to the ground, or somehow suck them back into their ducts. “You’re right,” he realized. He glared at Goswin. “It’s his.” 

“What? What do you mean?”

“We could have saved her,” Briar explained. “We could have kept my mother out of that cave, and away from Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. I could have grown up on Earth, around normal people.”

“I didn’t do that,” Goswin defended.

“Yes, you did. You took us away from there during your little experiment to see who was causing this. By the time we got back, she was gone, having no other option but to seek shelter in that cave. This is all you! You’re why I grew up alone. You’re why I killed Mateo Matic! But I didn’t, did I? You did. You killed him!”

“Briar, that’s not how it works. The timeline has been changed,” Weaver said. “Harrison would not have left her alone to go travel the English countryside. He’s with her on Bida.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Briar argued. “I was there, remember? I never knew the guy.”

“Exactly,” Weaver agreed. “That’s why I said the timeline changed. Our memory of events is different than what happened in this reality. Harrison was probably there the whole time, but none of us recalls that, because we’re the ones who changed it. We originated in a different timeline, and we’re all duplicates now. Our alternate selves are currently somewhere else, having done different things with their lives, if only slightly.”

“So, there’s another me out there, one who didn’t kill Mateo at all?” Briar asked her. “He’s happy?”

Eight Point Seven took a half step forward to indicate that she would field this one. She shook her head. “What you did cannot be undone. They already tried to change it, but you were wearing the hundemarke. That’s why the timeline is likely only slightly different. What happened happened, and couldn’t have happened any other way.”

He frowned and hung his head low. “Oh, yeah. I remember that.”

They all tensed up, waiting for Briar to decide that they should go back to save his mother, and maybe himself, in some other way, but he just stood there. With disaster somehow averted by the truth, they participated in an impromptu moment of silence, each of them lost in their own minds. Goswin stared at the broken flowers on the ground as the wind picked up, and did begin to scatter them down the hill. He ultimately took a breath, and looked up at the others. “Now that we know this about ourselves—that we share some sort of...power—we have to decide what to do with it. What’s our next step? Where and when do we go? This was always a vaguely mandated mission, but I feel like...we can’t just waste this on a beach resort.”

“You mean...what are you going to do with me?” Briar asked.

Goswin took a deep, rejuvenating breath. He got right into Briar’s face, but in a comforting way, rather than a threatening one. “You killed a man. You did it with malice and intent, and you expressed no remorse for it. What I need to know is are you going to do that again, to anyone, for any reason?”

Briar took a long time to respond. He was thinking on it carefully. “I know what you wanna hear, but the truth is that I don’t know. I don’t want to promise you something that I can’t necessarily follow through on.” He looked amongst them. “You three seem to have some idea of what’s going to happen in the universe. You have to understand that I don’t. I imagine that it’s quite easy for you to tell others what you’re gonna do, because you know what you’re gonna be up against. It’s not fair, really, being around such confident people, and being so...ignorant. So small.”

Goswin closed his eyes and shook his head mildly. He could actually relate to this sentiment, having to compare his knowledge of the universe to these other two, especially Weaver, who conceivably knew that all of this would happen, and how it would turn out.

Briar continued, “I can tell you that I don’t want to kill anyone in this moment, and that I have no plans to do it again. And I can tell you that I do feel remorse. I just don’t know how to show it. I think my mother was a little too...patient with me. She did her best to teach me how to feel, but not to make sure that what I felt was clear to others. I’m sorry that Mateo is dead, and that he died by my hands. I really do wish that I could undo it. Now, no matter how many other duplicates of me there are, they’ll always be just as miserable as the real me.”

“Don’t think of it like that,” Goswin told him. “You had good times in your life, I know it. Otherwise, you would be a wild animal. You wouldn’t wish to undo anything, except maybe to make things worse.”

“Maybe,” Briar admitted.

They all looked up to find that they had moved again. They were in a jungle that looked not unlike the one on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida where they tried to experiment with their new joint ability. “Where did we go this time?” Eight Point Seven asked.

Weaver started to work on her handheld device.

“Don’t bother,” Briar said to her. “I know where we are. This is my home. This is where I grew up. I was feeling nostalgic, I guess.” He walked straight for a large tree that had been marked up by tons of hashes. “This is tree eight. It’s my favorite one, because it’s when my mother started letting me mark the calendar unsupervised. I was eleven at the time.” He looked down the line at the other trees with hash marks, which supposedly represented their own years. He appeared to be doing some mental math. “It’s too late. Mom’s dead, and so is Mateo. We can’t change anything now.”

“We should still leave,” Weaver warned. “We don’t want to step back into our timeline. People live here, maybe not in this area, but still.”

Briar nodded, still admiring the eighth calendar tree. “I know, I’m sorry.”

“We all did this,” Eight Point Seven reminded him. “That’s how this works.”

“Yeah.” He nodded again, and managed to tear his gaze away, only to find himself distracted by something else. It was a different tree. This one had no hash marks on it, but there was something very different about it. The branches spread wide despite its currently short stature. The flowers were a stunning shade of blue. It was one of a kind, at least in the immediate area. “What the hell is this?”

“What? What’s wrong with it?” Goswin asked him.

“This shouldn’t be here. I memorized every blade of grass in this area. That tree was never here.”

“As I said,” Weaver began, “we’ve changed things. As we suspected, Harrison was here. He must have planted it a long time ago. Briar, he probably helped raise the other you. I don’t know how you feel about that.”

“I don’t either,” Briar said.

Eight Point Seven stepped towards the tree, and began to examine it closely.

“What is it?” Goswin asked her.

Eight Point Seven leaned forward and licked the bark to absorb some of the mysterious tree’s DNA, which she took a moment to analyze. “Magnolia arthurii. This species was introduced to England by mysterious travelers in the early 12th century, and disappeared from the records shortly thereafter. This is from Earth.” She turned to face the group. “Harrison didn’t just plant it, he brought it here. He might have done it on purpose, or the seed got stuck in his boot.”

“It’s beautiful,” Briar said in wonder. He slowly walked up to it, and reached out. He placed a hand upon its truck, and suddenly froze. The flowers buzzed as if carrying an electric current. Ripples in spacetime emanated from the bark, and into Briar’s face. With each wave, his head jerked back a little from the force, but he never let go of the tree. By the time any of them thought to maybe stop whatever was happening from happening, the ripples ceased, as did the buzzing. Briar fell towards his back, but Eight Point Seven managed to catch him before he crashed.

Is he okay?” Goswin asked.

“I’m okay,” Briar answered for himself. He gently pulled himself away from Eight Point Seven’s grip. He stumbled a bit from dizziness, but he never fell again. “I remember everything now. I remember my life with Harrison. He was my father. That didn’t happen before, but I remember it now. I remember both timelines.”

Weaver walked up to the special magnolia now. “This somehow stores memory, and he activated it for upload.” She turned to face Briar. “Do you have anyone else’s memories, or just those of your alternate self?”

Briar stopped to think about it for a moment. “Just mine, I think. I don’t feel like I’m anyone else.”

“Psychic and at least moderately sentient. This thing is very interesting. Either all magnolias of this particular species could do this, or it changed when it passed through the time cave.”

“Should we...all touch it?” Goswin posed.

“Absolutely not,” Weaver urged. “Don’t go around touching things. That could be one of Leona’s Rules for Time Travel.”

“You wanna stay here, don’t you?” Goswin presumed. “You wanna study it.”

“We could always leave later,” Weaver said out of hope. I don’t think any of the colonizers made it all the way out here. But it’s up to you, Captain.”

Briar seemed to want to stay as well, which made some sense. Eight Point Seven couldn’t care less. “Okay,” Goswin agreed. “We still don’t know exactly what year it is, though, so we can’t be certain how far the colonizers are. Stay vigilant.”

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Microstory 2110: That’s Fair, I Hope

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I took her. I intercepted transport from the group home back to where her kidnappers live, and I put her through what she’s already gone through twice now. Someone took her from her real parents, and then the ID makers took her from them, and now I’ve taken her from them. I honestly don’t know if it was the right thing to do, but I had to get her away from those people. She outed them as her abductors, and even though they’ve reportedly never abused her before, she was living in misery, so this may push them over the edge for all we know. They might kill her, and make it look like a suicide, which would make them my archnemeses. I really don’t know; the level that these people are unpredictable is ten, ya see? We’re both on the run now, and I obviously can’t tell you where, or it might get back to the Ol’ Man, and the Ol’ Miss. My little secure workstation is mobile, though, which is how I’m able to post this without being traced. She is four months from turning eighteen, at which point, she’ll be able to make her own decisions. She says that her first order of business will be to submit to a DNA test, so they can find her true family. We can only hope that she is in the system. If I have to keep her safe, and everyone at bay, then that is what I’ll do, regardless of what happens to me in the end. I can’t really say much about what we’ve been dealing with since last night, because I don’t want to leave any clues about our location. We could be in Mexico by now, or close to it. Or maybe we’re on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, or even a southern state where they like to play golf. All I’ll say is that she is safe with me in every way possible. I never thought I would do anything like this, but I will never hurt her, and I won’t let anyone else hurt her either. She is free to go whenever she wants, and she understands that. If she ends up deciding to just go back to those people, then I’ll drive her there myself, and finally just turn myself in...for everything. That’s fair, I hope.

Microstory 2109: Conflating it With Her Own Life

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This world is so weird. Because the girl is under eighteen, she can’t consent to a DNA test, and since the couple who claims to be her parents obviously won’t consent to it for her, the lazy coppers are just gonna send her back to them. I’m still in contact with her, and she told me that the authorities ran whatever facial recognition system they have access to. They apparently didn’t find a hit in the missing persons database, but that doesn’t mean anything. She was taken when she was a toddler, and their age progression software doesn’t sound very sophisticated. The girl doesn’t have any idea where she was born, or who her real family is, but one thing I do know is that she is backing up my story. There was a chance that she was screwing with me when she told me about her resurfaced memories, but she also insists to the police that she really does remember living with someone else in her younger years. The cops think that she just watched something on TV one time, and she’s conflating the memory with her own life, but she doesn’t think so, and neither do I. So far, no one has found me in my hiding place, but I’m about to put that all at risk yet again. I’m going to do something drastic to solve this problem. It could get me caught, or truly killed this time. I need to focus on planning everything right now, so I’m going to cut this installment short. If I’m able, I’ll detail the undertaking for you tomorrow. I’m scheduling this one to post on my blog for sometime after I start the process, so by the time you read it, I will already be on my way, and they won’t be able to prepare themselves for me. You can wish me luck, if you want, but it won’t help, even if such psychic power were possible here. Temporal psychic powers would do it, if you had those.

Microstory 2108: My Total Withdrawal

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One thing that the couple who set me up with this untraceable computer cage didn’t realize is that I pay attention to the things that happen around me. I watch the cable guy installing my TV and internet. I watch the cashier ring up my items at the grocery store. I even watch the mail deliverer sort and scan the pieces of mail as they approach my door. There is not a single vending machine, janitor’s closet, ATM, car hood, desktop computer, or anything else like that open that I pass that I don’t inspect to the best of my ability. I’m not very handy, I don’t generally know how things work, but I like to have some idea of what they look like inside, because I’m a curious specimen, but I do not like surprises. I’ll never need to know how to load money into an ATM, and if I do, I would receive the necessary on-the-job training, but I might as well take a look while it’s there in front of me. When they installed all this gear, I took notes, some in my head, but some on a paper receipt from my wallet. When you’re on the run, you can’t trust anyone. I built a replica of their handiwork at a second location, and that’s where I am now, in hiding. The only reason I’ve not been living here the whole time is because I didn’t want to be seen going to and from it, but now that I can’t go back to work, it doesn’t really matter. I still had a little cash left over from my total withdrawal in Kansas City, and I received an advance while I was a janitor, so I’ve been stocking up on supplies in preparation for something like this. I will find a way to pay my employers back, but right now, I need to focus on my survival. I still don’t know if I’m going to stay where I am now, or if I’m going to run again. The ID makers have my fate in their hands, just as I had theirs in mine. I made my choice on what to do with them, and I’ll have to live with that. I just hope that the girl they kidnapped makes her way back to her family. Then it will all have been worth it. Signing off now, from my secret location inside a secret location.

Microstory 2107: Freedom at Risk

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As it turns out, the people who helped me with my new identity in this mystery city are a married couple, and they have a daughter. According to them, she’s very irresponsible and hard to deal with. That’s not what I experienced when I met her, and I didn’t get the feeling that she was just manipulating me. My first thought was that the parents haven’t been giving her much attention, because they’re so busy making IDs. As a result, she doesn’t do the chores, because where they live is more her house than theirs, and she doesn’t personally care about that stuff. They basically want to come home to everything being done after spending a string of days in the city away from her. They hired forced me to supervise her, which I did, even though I really didn’t want to. I made sure that she mowed the lawn, completed the laundry cycle, vacuumed the carpet, mopped the hard floors, and made dinner. The daughter didn’t even push back. She just rolled her eyes, and completed the tasks. I helped her out, because I felt like it was too much for one person, and it felt really weird just standing there, barking orders at her. A lot of it involved things that I do for my real job, and I get enough of that stuff there, so I wasn’t ecstatic about the extra work. Here’s the first issue, and it pales in comparison to the real problem, but I’ll get to that in a minute. The first thing is that they were so pleased with my work that they now want it to be a regular thing. So after my eight-hour shift as a janitor, I have to drive out to the outskirts to this new second job? I’m going to be exhausted every day, and annoyed about the whole thing. But I could deal with that. When I was waiting for Cricket and Claire to find me in Moderaverse, I spent twenty years without much of anything to do. So I’ve had it pretty good, working a little harder now isn’t that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. No, the real problem is that this girl isn’t even their daughter.

The first clients that they had in this business were reportedly themselves. They’re cagey about how they got started, which is understandable, but my guess is that they used to work for the DMV, or social security, or something else along those lines. You don’t just jump into this kind of thing without having any frame of reference for what people might be looking for. I don’t think they lived around here for their original lives. After they came this way, their second client was a couple who were trying to escape the law for whatever reason. They needed IDs for themselves, and their very young daughter. At some point, the ID makers came to find out that she wasn’t their daughter either. They had kidnapped her, and instead of contacting the authorities, the ID makers just essentially kidnapped her for themselves. For years, the girl didn’t know where she originally came from, and she still doesn’t have any details. After years of school counseling, and mostly introspection, she figured a few things out, and made some memories resurface. All she knows now is that the parents who she has been living with aren’t her real parents, and nor were the people they took her from. She has not yet tried to get out of this situation, or find out where she came from, but it’s made her less interested in doing these chores, or anything for these people, really. Now I’m in a real pickle. I obviously have to save her, but doing so puts my own freedom at risk. I suppose I’ve already decided to intervene, no matter what ends up happening to me. The two of them have never expressed interest in reading my blog before, but they definitely know about it, so there’s a chance that they’ll read this after it automatically posts later tonight. I’ll have to figure out what to do by then, and put a plan into action. I’ll let you know how that goes, unless I die, like I said before. But just know, whatever the supposed cause of death, it was murder.

Microstory 2106: Die, Or Get Caught

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I’m giving in. I have to do what they tell me. These people set me up with my new identity, a place to live, and a way to protect myself from being found by authorities. Either I pay them back with whatever they want me to do, or they expose my whereabouts. They didn’t specifically say that that’s what they were going to do, but they’ve frequently reminded me what they did for me, so I can read between the lines. I never had any illusions that this relationship wasn’t transactional, but I was under the impression that they were going to let me get on a little payment plan. With my job and simple lifestyle, it would not have taken long to finish paying it off. They never said that the favor they’re asking of me replaces the money, though, so I’m pretty sure that they’re still expecting the cash anyway. I still don’t know what I’m going to have to do for them, but I have a when and a where. I was hired to work second shift for my regular job, which goes from 8:00 to 16:00 now that we only have three janitors on the team. As soon as I get off work, I have to make my way downtown using public transportation. They don’t even want me to stop and grab something to eat, but they say that I will want to be fed. I ate a big breakfast this morning, and I’m going to have an early dinner before my shift ends. We’re allowed to take a thirty-minute lunch now, and it can be at any time, as long as there isn’t something time-sensitive that needs to be cleaned. I think I can hold out until the very last minute. My alternate self back in my home universe fasts for fifteen hours every day. It shouldn’t be too hard for me. Hopefully, whatever the secret job is won’t take too long, and I’ll have time to eat something before bed. I’ll let you know how it went in my post tomorrow. Unless I die, or get caught, then you may never hear from me again. My new “bosses” never actually said that I would be involved in something illegal, but we met when they did something illegal for me, so I guess I’ve been assuming that this whole time. Maybe I’ll get lucky, and they just want me to mow someone’s lawn, or babysit their kid for a few hours.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 18, 2439

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It took a little time, but Olimpia managed to find where Vitalie!811’s stasis pod was buried. It wasn’t hard to convince her to play the role of a new executive hire for this world. Before she started sending her alternate selves to all the inhabited planets in the universe, she underwent extensive training to learn how to blend in with any culture. She could become whatever type of person she needed to be to complete the mission, like a foreign spy on Earth. She even knew how to make disguises to keep from blowing her cover, which was good, because no one on the team knew how to give their illusion powers to others through new temporal objects. It was a thing, they knew this much, but it was a skill that they would have to learn later, and find someone to practice on.

In the meantime, Ramses figured out how to reverse engineer the comms discs, so they could give one to Vitalie!811. They were probably going to keep doing this on each world. The network was as complex as any, and far more secure. The various Vitalies could stay in contact with each other too if they wanted, leaving the team out of it altogether. If they met other people in the future who could be trusted, they could join the network as well. They would have to be kept separate, though. Members of the team should always be able to tap into their respective conversations, without these hypothetical people being able to do it to the team. The team network, the Vitalie network, and the trusted outsider network: same same, but different. Ramses would have to work on that, along with the million other projects he had on his plate right now.

Today, they were on a break. The nearest system to Ex-811 was nearly two light years away, which meant their relativistic ship had not yet arrived. They were just flying through space, with not much to do yet. It was going to be a bottle episode.

“That’s not true,” Angela contended. “We know where we’re going; we know what’s there, so let’s prepare for it. Let’s make a real plan for once.”

“Or we could stop,” Marie countered.

“If we were to stop,” Angela replied, “we would still have time to do what I said, because we’re still in the middle of nowhere.”

“There’s something else that needs to be done,” Marie insisted, which we may be able to assist with. Leona?”

Leona was preoccupied with something, and not paying them any attention. “Huh? What’s that?”

“What was that thing we were talking about this morning, which needed to be fixed, but we can’t do it while we’re at fractional speeds?” Marie pressed.

“Oh, the reframe engine, yeah, it’s cracked.” Leona held up her tablet, but didn’t bother showing them the screen. “I’m running simulations on it now.”

“So maybe we can stop and do that?” Marie suggested.

“Oh, no, not here,” Leona clarified. “No, we don’t have what we need. Besides, that’s not what requires being at drifting speeds or lower. The testing is what demands it, but we can’t test it unless we seal that crack, or just replace the whole engine.”

“Can we replace the engine?” Olimpia questioned. “Do they have one here?”

Leona did the Indian head bobble. “They have reframe tech, yes. Do they have one that specifically fits the Vellani Ambassador? I sure as hell hope not, because I don’t want them to know anything about it. It would just be easier to fabricate it if we had access to parts and equipment that’s used to make them.”

“Where can we find that?” Marie asked. “The dockyard, Ex-741 was destroyed.”

“Well, we know that they build some ships on Ex-182 too, according to Vitalie!324’s intel, as well as the rebels on Ex-666. In fact, we believe that some more advanced tech is kept there, since it’s so heavily protected. We specifically avoided it because it’s probably the absolute most dangerous one, and we decided that Niobe and the Ex-666ers would be responsible for it. If we wanted to go there instead, it would be a pretty long detour. We kind of sidestepped it.”

“No, I don’t think we should do that,” Olimpia reasoned. “You’re right, that sounds entirely too dangerous to so much as approach, even with my ability to turn invisible.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Angela decided. “We’re already on our way to Ex-467. That should be all we’re thinking about right now.”

“What’s there to think about?” Marie poses. “It’s a warehouse that holds secrets.” She threw up airquotes. “The person from there who Vitalie!324 spoke to barely told her anything about it. He either doesn’t know, or didn’t wanna say. There’s no way for us to prepare for that. All we can do is wait until we get there to see what’s what.”

“I think we’re going to have to break into it,” Angela posited. “Between the six of us, we have lots of experience breaking in and out of places, so let’s formulate some strategies ahead of time. They probably have one of those teleportation dampening field things, or whatever they were called. We need to be prepared for that. How does this ship do with surface landings? Do we have a shuttle? Escape pods?”

“We know all the answers to these things,” Leona said.

“Great,” Angela retorted. “Who’s we? You and Ramses? I’m saying that we all need to talk about it, so everyone understands what we have at our disposal. If we’re about to do a heist, I want to be as prepared as possible, so when we finally do get there, we’ll already know what tools are in our toolbag.”

“Okay, okay, okay. That’s fair,” Leona recognized. “And you’re right that it’s more pressing. I’ll stop what I’m doing, and give you the grand tour. We probably should have been more focused on that before, we just had so much going on. Once we’ve done that, we can talk about the techniques we have to get in and out of places. We can’t rest on our laurels with our special powers, because they may not work everywhere, especially not in a place that’s designed to be off-limits.”

“Let’s start with the reframe engine,” Marie recommended.

And so Leona started to show the majority of the team around, including a disgruntled Mateo, who was desperately trying to practice his illusion skills. He never thought he would be as good as any of the others, but he needed to be good enough to fool an enemy. Ramses wasn’t there, of course, because he already knew all of this stuff, and he had plenty of work to do in his lab. They spent hours on this, but it wasn’t boring for most. Leona was so articulate and informative with her lessons, it was as if she had known that this would be requested, and had rehearsed it. But that was a sign of being a true authority on something. She knew it so well, talking about it was an effortless task.

She went over the basic specifications of this reframe engine, which was more fuel efficient than any they had used until now. She also explained why it couldn’t be used, even though the crack running down the side was almost imperceptible to the human eye. She showed them the multipurpose pods, which could be used for stasis, virtual reality uplink, emergency escape, or even just sleeping. She took them to the bridge, where there were hidden compartments that Mirage had to give them access to. There were a few weapons here, but the vessel itself was not armed for space combat. Nor did anyone ever want it to be. As decided, that was the Ex-666 rebellion’s job. They had come full circle now, back to the Delegation Hall. This was modular, able to be modified to different sizes and configurations, but at full size, it took up the majority of the space on the vessel. After all, that was why it was called the Vellani Ambassador in the first place. This was all part of a larger vessel. Mirage thought that it had the potential to be used for diplomatic discussions and heated arguments between warring parties, and she wanted to be able to have it separate from everything else. The Mediator Stateroom was the only one fit for personal living here, designated for a peacemaker to be able to separate themselves from the factions while remaining close by. The team still needed the dimensional generator for their own living quarters, affixed to a door what was otherwise a storage closet.

“You may have noticed that we can walk all the way through on either side of this room, as well as above and below. It’s in the exact center of the Ambassador, and there are no viewports. This was done for strategic reasons as much as for symmetry, in order to protect parties from an external attack from one side or the other. These windows you see here are not real, but displaying the feed from exterior cameras. They can just as easily be changed to display an ocean view...” She hit a button on the remote to prove it. “...or a TV show, if you wanted.” She hit another button to reveal an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which was famous for its many, many diplomatic storylines. “So if you’re bored, you—”

Before Leona could finish her sentence, four people appeared out of nowhere. She recognized them, as did Mateo, but Angela, Marie, and Olimpia did not. It was Goswin Montagne, Holly ‘Weaver’ Blue, Eight Point Seven, and Briar de Vries. The last time they saw this group, an older roster of Team Matic was leaving Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida in the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the same time that these four were going in the opposite direction in the X González. Goswin held his hands up, almost defensively, but more so confusedly. “What year is it? I mean...report! I keep forgetting to say report!”

“It’s 2439,” Leona replied. “May 18,” she added.

“How the hell is that man alive?” Briar asked accusingly, pointing at Mateo.

“Don’t worry about it,” Mateo replied. Briar was the one who killed Mateo the first time. Well, technically Horace Reaver killed Mateo in a completely different timeline, but that didn’t count, because any number of others could have done it in any other of the infinite timelines that came before, of which they were not cognizant.

Briar’s volume increased by the syllable. “No, I am going to worry about it, because if you’re alive, then that means I didn’t kill you, which means I’m exonerated!”

“I suppose that’s true,” Mateo admitted.

Briar was fuming now, back to a lowered volume, but still intensely threatening. “Oh my God, you have been alive this entire time? You understand how they have been treating me? You need to tell them to leave me alone. I don’t have to power The Nucleus anymore. I don’t have to stop the Reality Wars, because I don’t care! I am free! I’m free!” He paused for half a moment. “And I’m out of here!”

“No, wait!” Goswin cried, but it was too late. All four of them disappeared just as quickly as they had arrived.

Leona winced. “That was weird.”

“Hold on,” Marie said, looking around fearfully. “Where’s my sister?” She was right. Angela was gone too now.

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