The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 7, 2459

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Mateo and Angela suddenly appeared in the Third Rail version of Russia on August 16, 2398, standing next to a younger version of Mateo. He wouldn’t recognize his future self, even if he managed to look behind him in time. They were both in full IMS, their faces obscured by their helmet visors. He had just activated a big teleportation machine, hoping to transport him and a piece of timonite to Lebanon, Kansas without having to actually look for the mineral first. He needed this to save their friend, Trina McIver from being lost in time. The plan didn’t really work, though they did end up finding her anyway. The machine reached critical mass a second later, and took them away, along with two Russian soldiers who were trying to stop Past!Mateo. But they didn’t end up in Lebanon, and this fact was apparent immediately upon their arrival. The ground around them was gray, the sky was black, and the air didn’t exist. They were on a moon, or an asteroid, or something. A pinch of atmosphere managed to come with them to this place, but it did not last. The three men not wearing any special suits quickly begin to die. Future!Mateo couldn’t save them all, but he could save one.

Spacesuits in the past were traditionally slow and difficult to assemble. For many years, it was actually impossible for a wearer to accomplish the feat on their own. For emergencies, it was vital for an Integrated Multipurpose Suit to be designed to be put on quickly, without any snags, and without any help. For the most part, when the armor module was needed, the two inner modules were also needed. But it was technically possible for the armor module to function on its own when there was no other option. It was also the easiest to remove, and the fastest. Future!Mateo swiftly disconnected it, and opened it like a lid. He stepped out, and pushed his past self into it, letting it close up automatically. He then gave him the helmet for a complete seal. Past!Mateo could still be dying, though, because he had been exposed to the vacuum of outer space for too long, so Future!Mateo tapped on the arm interface to release a cocktail of exposure treatment drugs. This solved one problem, but created another, because of course, Future!Mateo was now the one at risk of dying. He could survive out here for a little bit, but not indefinitely. They needed to find shelter.

As Future!Mateo was looking around for somewhere to survive, Past!Mateo and Angela appeared to be talking to one other via radio. He had no idea what they were saying, though, so he just kept searching the horizon. Angela started to tap on her own arm interface. She pointed in one direction. Past!Mateo nodded. The both of them walked over to Future!Mateo, and took him by the arms. They teleported away, into a pressurized environment. Future!Mateo blinked, trying to recover. He would eventually, but he wouldn’t say no to his own shot of the treatment drugs. Angela knew this, so she removed her gauntlet, and placed it on his hand to administer the dermal flash. His health began to return to him, and he was able to speak. But before he could, Past!Mateo had something to say. “Did you think that you could survive better out there than I could?” he asked accusatorily.

“Indeed,” Future!Mateo responded. “My body has been upgraded again.”

Past!Mateo looked over at Angela, who nodded back, confirming that to be the truth. “Well...thank you, then. I appreciate your support. Now...report.”

Future!Mateo took a deep breath. “You need to return my suit, so I can go back out there, and hunt for the timonite in all that rubble.”

“No, I can look for it,” Past!Mateo insisted. “It’s my mission.”

“It’s mine too,” Future!Mateo explained.

“So we fail in the first timeline?” Past!Mateo guessed.

“Well, no. I’m closing my loop. I always wondered how we succeeded, though. Your memory will be erased before you go back with it.”

“You must not have had all of your memories erased, because you’re wearing these suits,” Past!Mateo reasoned. “You knew that we would end up here.”

“No, we just kind of wear them all the time now.”

“We would have brought an extra one if we had known that you would need it as well,” Angela clarified. “Buddy breathing doesn’t work in space.” She turned to Future!Mateo. “I’ll go look for the timonite. You stay here with your self to find out what this place is, where we are, and how to get back home.”

“Homes,” Past!Mateo corrected. “You two and I aren’t going to the same place.”

“No, we’re not.” Angela dropped her visor, and disappeared.

“Where are the others?” Past!Mateo questioned his future self.

“They’re fine. They have their own concerns to worry about. There’s no need to give you any details, but we move past this story arc, and into new ones. The parallel realities are just the beginning of our troubles. The way I see it, your life has barely started.”

“I see.” Past!Mateo examined the architecture of this airlock, as if he were knowledgeable enough to glean any information from it. He started walking towards the interior hatch, which was fully open. Lights turned on in reaction to his presence, though there appeared to be no people here. This facility, whatever it was, may have been abandoned. Or they were just out to lunch. He stopped while he was still on the threshold. “Have you noticed, the doorways are pretty high, as are the ceilings? This was made for tall people.”

“Or they just like extra space,” Future!Mateo countered.

“I dunno. This doesn’t feel quite human to me.”

“No, you’re right about that.”

“Yes, you are,” came another voice. A being was walking down the corridor, and she was definitely not human. She was a Maramon. She wasn’t, however, alone. Four human women were walking with her. “Aclima, Balbira, tie them up.”

“Oh, no thank you,” Future!Mateo said, like she was just offering him a second glass of water at a restaurant.

The Maramon looked like she was smirking, but it was hard to tell with her anatomy. “Kalmana,” she said simply.

One of the humans quickdrew a gun, and stunned them in the face. The suits could dissipate—and even channel—most energy blasts, but they couldn’t protect exposed areas. Still, they resisted the surge, and tried to stay awake. She had to fire once more. The lights went out.

The two Mateos woke up in a cell at around the same time. One of the women was sitting guard on the other side of the bars. She seemed nice, but honestly, so did the others. Hopefully they weren’t slaves to the Maramon. Mateo didn’t know enough about their culture to have any clue why they might be working together. “Hi. I’m Lusia.” She wasn’t bubbly, but professionally courteous.

“Hi, Lusia. This is Mateo. I’m Mateo.”

“I know.”

“Can I ask, why are you working with them?” Past!Mateo questioned.

“She is of my people,” she answered plainly.

“Is she? Do they treat you well?”

Lusia smiled. “We are hybrids. Half-human, half-Mar, but loyal to the latter.”

“To what end?” Future!Mateo asked. He had encountered her kind before, on a few occasions. He had gotten the feeling that those others were the only ones, so this was a new development.

“Our purpose has not yet been revealed to us. We are still training. Mother will explain all when we are ready to hear it. Until then, I’m here to watch you.”

“She’s not your mother, she’s just your creator,” Past!Mateo tried to argue.

“What’s the difference?”

“Lusia!” the Maramon’s voice shouted from another room. “Do not speak to them! Remain silent and steadfast!”

“Oh, no thank you!” Lusia yelled back. Now she was really smiling.

“Lusia!” the Maramon complained, holding the final vowel for several seconds.

“The young do not always do what they are told,” Lusia said to the Mateos. “She really is our mother, and not actually our creator. That was someone else. She’s the one who raised us, and cares for us. We do not call the man who engineered us our father. I just want to show you that I can defy her orders, and not be abused, or anything. I can’t imagine what horrors you imagine we experience in this world. But we’re doing okay.”

Future!Mateo stood up from his bunk, and approached the bars. He leaned back a few centimeters when he noticed her trying to hide her mild fear of him. “I do not have a problem with the Maramon. It seems only that they have a problem with us.”

Lusia widened her eyes to process the information. Then she shut them and nodded slightly.

“So we are in Ansutah,” Past!Mateo assumed.

“No,” Lusia replied, shaking her head. “This is Fort Underhill. June 7, 2459.”

“Really?” Future!Mateo asked, very surprised. “How did we wind up here?”

“No idea,” Lusia said. “Ukodenva ‘Underkeeper’ Unedisalk came here accidentally as well, with the rest of her cadet squad. Our genetic engineer was the son of the man who made the other hybrids. Yes, I noticed your sense of familiarity when I said that. I guess he wanted to follow in daddy’s footsteps.”

“Is Hogarth aware that you are here?”

“She found herself the unwilling commanding officer of the cadets, due to some odd laws that they were clinging onto from the Crossover,” Lusia began to explain. “Things reportedly went well for a time, but they fell apart eventually, and became hostile. A truce was later formed, which basically lets us do whatever we want, as long as we do not leave this moon. Hogarth could not stop us from being created.”

“Are there more than the four of you? Does he intend to make more?” Past!Mateo was more curious than he ought to be.

“Hopefully not.”

“What will become of us?” Future!Mateo asked her.

Underkeeper walked into the hock section. “That has yet to be decided. I’m advocating for you to keep your hands firmly attached to your necks, but I’ll be honest, your prospects are not looking good. The others are not as fond of humans as I am.” She looked upon Lusia lovingly. Perhaps she really was her mother.

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Extremus: Year 75

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Eagan Spurrs is not a man, and that is not a derogatory way to put it. Artificial intelligence is a complex subject. There is no clearly defined point when a robot becomes truly self-aware and conscious. There are ways to test this, but no one here is qualified to do such a thing. Not that they would have to anyway. Eagan fully admits to being artificial. Research into the field of AI started in the 20th century, and by the end of the first quarter of the 21st, generative AI was the hottest form on the market. These were extremely sophisticated programs, which could answer unique queries, often in ways that would not inherently give their true origin away. They were used to analyze and synthesize vast amounts of data to organize people’s lives and work, and teach users about various topics, but they couldn’t actually do anything. Humans were still needed to implement any ideas that their collaboration produced. The natural evolution of them was the realization of something known as Performative AI.

PerAI is an offshoot of GenAI, and in fact, requires the latter in order to function. A request is fed into the system, and a response is formulated. This response is sometimes an answer to a question, but it also sometimes requires the manipulation of other systems. For instance, one might ask a GenAI how to write the code for a website. A PerAI could come up with that answer too, but also plug the code directly into the coding program itself, and even debug it. Further advancements allowed PerAI to be incorporated into robotic substrates, so that they could perform physical tasks in the real world; tasks which they hadn’t necessarily ever been asked to do before. That’s when the general population really started taking notice. All of the sudden, all of your chores could be done by someone else. Your handy dandy personal robot could wash your dishes and clothes, mow the lawn, and buy your groceries. This solved a lot of problems in the world, even if it took a little time to be adopted. But in the end, who would bother spending all their time on work that bored them, tired them out, and prevented them from enjoying their life? Only people without the money. Fortunately, that problem was eventually solved too, thanks in no small part to the advent of General Intelligence, but that’s a topic for another time.

Eagan is a PerAI with an android body. It took Tinaya and Belahkay a few frustrating minutes to figure this out, though. Being such an old technology, neither of them was initially aware of Eagan’s limitations. He can tell them why he was created, and what his job is here, but not why, or why anyone built the structure. Who was supposed to live here, and who decided that? It’s his responsibility to welcome new residents, and teach them how the megablock works. Or rather, it was going to be his job. Ever since the time mirror exploded, no one else will be coming here, leaving Eagan without a purpose. He’s not even been allowed to enter the interiors unless accompanied by a human, which is why he’s been staying out of the elements in this wikiup.

There’s another question, which they will likely never get an answer for. When Belahkay’s crew first showed up here, they scanned the surface of the planet. That was how they found the settlement in the first place, and started getting involved in the survivors’ lives. The megablock is the biggest above ground structure across the globe. It should have been easily spotted by the Iman Vellani’s sensors, so why wasn’t it? According to Eagan’s information, construction began eleven years ago, so it should have already been visible a few years ago. Belahkay dispatched a drone scout to explore the buildings while the two of them had lunch together. Once the survey was done, the three of them left the area with the images and specifications to report back to the group. Everyone else was just as surprised, and couldn’t explain it, but it did prompt them to find out whether there was anything else hiding around here.

Most of the visiting starship crew are gone by now, but they left them with a shuttle to use as they wished. The Kamala Khan has been slowly flying all around the world unmanned, looking for energy signatures, right angles, and even lifesigns. For the last several months, nothing has come up, besides a heavy water processing plant under the ocean, which will help refuel their fusion reactors. Today, the shuttle has detected something else. It’s an underground complex, hard to detect with the shuttle’s limited sensors. It’s running on very low power, presumably due to the now absence of a human presence. But that’s just conjecture. The group has not yet uncovered what the purpose of this facility is. They’re going down to the main level right now. It’s a long ride.

More than a kilometer underneath the surface, the elevator stops, and the doors open. They’re immediately struck by what’s been hiding down here. They stare up at it, gradually walking forwards to the guardrails, and then they keep on staring. “It looks like the Extremus,” Lilac points out.

“It’s a battleship,” Tinaya determines. “Look at that exterior weapons array. That down there looks like the entrance to a fighter bay.”

“Why the hell are they building this?” Belahkay questions.

“Who are they?” Aristotle asks.

They all look over at Spirit, who rolls her eyes. “For the last time, I didn’t know everything. SCR&M. Safety, Compartmentalization...” she says, stopping before the last three words of the mantra. The Bridgers were there to maintain order in the event that it was necessary, but we didn’t have our fingers in every pie. That was... Tinaya’s purpose.”

“Lataran was also a spy,” Tinaya reminds her. “Now she’s the Captain.”

“Yes, and either she was keeping this whole thing a secret, or the other Bridgers were keeping it from me. All I know is that I don’t know what this is.”

Belahkay moves over to a console, and starts flipping through the information. “I think I know why we weren’t able to detect this before,” he soon says. “It’s running off of extremely low power, prioritizing frugality over speed.”

“Why would they need to do that?” Tinaya asks. “If this planet, with its abundance of resources, is nothing more than staging grounds, why not get it done?”

“The megablock,” Spirit realizes. “That’s to house, and probably train, an army, and maybe even raise them. That would take time. Getting the ship done quickly wouldn’t be necessary, so you may as well save the hydrogen.”

“Wait,” Niobe jumps in. “Who were they planning to fight?”

Tinaya and Spirit exchange a look, and simultaneously say, “the Exins. We believe this world to be relatively close to where they live.”

“It makes sense,” Aristotle figures, “to find the one world perfectly hospitable to humans to prepare for an attack.”

“Belahkay, keep doing what you’re doing, and report in when anything interesting comes up,” Tinaya orders. She didn’t set out to become the leader here for their tiny little group, but whenever a decision has needed to be made, they’ve routinely looked to her to make it. Everyone just fell into their roles. “Niobe, you can stay with him. Spirit, there are three more levels. Explore with Lilac, stay on comms. There could be people living down here for all we know, or more Eagans. Totle, you’re with me.”

“Where are we going?” Aristotle asks her.

“Into the ship, of course,” she replies.

They step into the second elevator, but this one is fully exposed, and running down the side of the hangar. They then have to get into a third elevator in order to go up into the ship. They begin to search it with flashlights, but the lighting systems turn on by themselves to show them the way. Tinaya was right that there is a hangar bay here, but it’s for transport shuttles, not fighter jets. They are apparently troop transports for ground assaults. The fighters, on the other hand, are designed to shoot out of tubes that litter the hull everywhere there is not some kind of gun to protect the battleship itself. They find the bridge, the engineering section, and a few staterooms, but the rest of it is taken up by stasis pods. Tens of thousands of fighters can sleep here in wait for the long journey ahead of them. Belahkay would be the one to figure out where exactly they were going to be sent, and how long it would take them to get there, but unlike the Extremus, this is not a generation ship. The people who were meant to live here would lie down one second, then wake up the next, but it would be decades later in realtime.

Who were all these people expected to be? The battleship could accommodate the entire current population of Extremus, and still have plenty of room to spare. Even if every security officer and reserve soldier were conscripted into this, there would be absolutely no need for this much space. There was never any reason to build something quite this large unless they had more time to build their army. Or perhaps they had some other means in mind, like cloning. The ethical ramifications of this whole endeavor is making Tinaya’s head spin. Lataran was keeping this from her, and the Extremusian people. This is not what the mission is about. If the Exins were going to attack, then protecting the ship they already had is the only thing that ever made any sense. This thing is new. If it had been built in the past with plans for it to meet up with Extremus before it flew out of range, that would be one thing. But they’re in the present day, with no hope of catching up without a new time travel event. None of this makes any goddamn sense. They need answers. They need to contact their people, now more than ever. This is no longer an extended vacation. Now it’s a mission.

When they’re done searching the whole place, they meet back up with the rest of the group on the mezzanine level. “Anything interesting? Any people?” Tinaya asks.

“Just some labs and offices,” Lilac reports. “Nothing of note. No people.”

“You?” Niobe asks.

“It’s a sleeper ship,” Tinaya answers. “No crew quarters. Everyone in that megablock could fit in here. It was...disheartening to see.”

“We didn’t come all the way out here to wage war,” Spirit agrees.

“It’s fully operational,” Aristotle continues. “We could teleport out right now, and go. The automators are still building a few things, but all vital components are done.”

“Belahkay?” Tinaya prompts.

“I can confirm everything that you’ve been saying. The weird part about it is that it doesn’t have a reframe engine. The Goldilocks Corridor, their destination, is 216 light years from here, straight back down into the galaxy. It was gonna take them 216 years.”

“I didn’t think that we were that close to the Milky Way,” Tinaya remarks. “We should be pretty deep into the void by now, given Captain Yenant’s new heading.”

“We’re not far.” Belahkay acts like he didn’t realize that the rest didn’t know that.

“We also found out the name of the ship,” Niobe goes on, building some suspense. “It’s the Anatol Klugman.”

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Microstory 2205: I Really Need It

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I don’t have much to say. I mean, I do, but it’s hard for me to say it. I got to work okay, but then I started stiffening up while I was just sitting in my chair, and my whole body hurt. Not all at once, but it was rather persistent. I think maybe we underestimated how much my body was damaged from my stair tumble the other day. I had no choice but to go home, and stop working. I literally almost can’t move around. I’m dictating everything here for you, but it is not easy. I probably shouldn’t even be trying to write this post, but now that I’ve begun, I can’t just give up. My voice is starting to feel a little difficult. It’s growing more difficult to speak, that is. I’m sure that it will all be back to normal by morning. I just need to get some extra rest. Jasmine et al. think that I should go to the doctor, but we’re not there yet. Really, let’s just see what things are like tomorrow. I promise, I’ll seek medical attention if I really need it. It’s not another infection. It doesn’t fit with any of the typical signs or symptoms. Okay, the autocorrect is working really hard to fix my slurred speech so I better go.

Microstory 2204: Data Synthesist

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My Data Analyst would like to change his title to Data Synthesist. I was surprised when he came to me with that title, because that’s precisely what I wanted to call it in the beginning, but I was overruled at the time. You see, there’s a difference between analysis and synthesis. An analyst will take data, and break it apart into its smallest parts. They will examine each one, and figure out how it works; how it contributes to whatever it’s there to do. But a system is more than simply the sum of its parts. You, for instance, are not just a collection of organs, bones, blood, nerves, and muscles. You are a full person, and you cannot be rightly defined simply by listing every aspect of your self. What a synthesist does is take the system as a whole, and looks at how those parts work together to form that whole, in all dimensions. There’s an old parable in the systems thinking field that asks whether you would have the best car if you researched the best individual parts in the market, and tried to put them together. The answer is no, you wouldn’t; you wouldn’t even have a car! They wouldn’t fit together correctly, and would not add up to functionality. There is a time and place for analysis, but that time is not now, and that place is not here. I’m all in favor of my team member changing his title, but it’s a lot more complicated than just making the declaration, and printing new business cards. It has to go through human resources, and executives in our company. Our client has to approve it too, because they have the right to decide who they contract with. Compliance and legal have to be involved, as do departments that you might not immediately think of, like payroll and benefits. We don’t need their approval, but they still need to know that it’s happening so they can adjust their systems accordingly. And with all this comes the paperwork. Oh, the paperwork. We went through all this when the process was just getting started, and I was pleasantly surprised at how fast it went, but they might not be interested in undoing their work, and starting over from scratch, even if we’re just talking about one title. It may sound like I’m complaining, but I’m confident that we’ll figure this out. It’s the right move to make, even if it may sound small and inconsequential. It’s important that we state our intentions in all relevant ways, so our clients understand what kind of value we add to their businesses.

Microstory 2203: Supported by Fans

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Okay, I’ve seen some weird stuff in my day, and I actually do believe in coincidence, because I’ve witnessed more variables than most people have, but this is so weird. It was extremely hot in my apartment when I woke up this morning. I was sweating through the sheets, and having trouble breathing. My air conditioning must have gone out pretty early for my thermostat to have been reading 26 degrees. The power seems to be okay. I placed a call with the super, so she’s been working through the problem. I didn’t think that it was too terribly urgent, because I was going to have to spend most of the day at work anyway. But guess what? The AC is out there too. It’s out across the entire jail. Fortunately, everyone in my team has been issued a laptop. When we’re at our respective workstations, we dock it so we can use the external IOs, but we can also carry them around if we would prefer to work elsewhere. The interesting thing about your world is that you’ve championed retractable power cables for your mobile devices. It makes the machine a little thicker, but this cable unit can be pretty easily removed if need be. If not, it makes for a quick getaway. Anyway, that’s not what’s important, because we would have made it work either way. The point of the story was that we were able to go to our Jail Counselor’s house to work there. It was a bit cramped with all of us together, but we’re very grateful for the option. The guests in the jail had no such choice. They spent extra time in communal areas, supported by fans, but all those people so close together made it so that it was more like two steps forward, one step back, at best. Now, I’m not here to discuss prison reform as a whole. Our mandate is to understand group dynamics, and nothing more. But it just goes to show how important it is to treat our incarcerated with respect and care. These people had nowhere to go. The county had plans in place to address it, but unlike you, who can just go to the movie theatre when things get rough, it’s vital to remember that some people have it rougher.

Microstory 2202: Were Still Late

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I’m so embarrassed, I woke up late this morning. I guess my body (and my now broken alarm clock) thought it would be funny if today was the opposite of yesterday. Fortunately, Jasmine and I always go into work together, since we live in the same building. I usually meet her in the lobby, but when I didn’t show, she used her copy of my key to check in on me. She didn’t even wait very long, because she was worried that I was hurt again. I was just still in bed, none the wiser. I rushed to pull my clothes on, and brush my teeth, then we ran out of there. We normally take the bus, since I don’t drive anymore, but if we had waited for the next one to come by, we would have been really late. Jasmine, being the friendly neighbor she is with everyone, knows someone else in the building who has a car, so he gave us a ride. We were still late, but it wasn’t serious. Being the boss, I could just claim that I make the rules, so I can do whatever I want, but I don’t want to be like that. Everyone on my staff is dedicated to their jobs, so I need to be just as committed. I can’t really be fired for being a half hour late, but I still owed them an apology. They understood, of course, and didn’t give me any crap about it. I used to set multiple alarms when I was a kid for safety. I should probably look into that again, placing one in a different room to make sure that I actually get up and moving around. That’s it, bye! You don’t deserve more out of me right now.

Microstory 2201: Understanding of the Data

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I came back into the office today. Actually, I got in really early, before the sun came up, but I just watched a nature show on the gargantuan TV until it was time to “clock in”. What happened was I woke up at the end of a cycle, and couldn’t get back to sleep. I didn’t find myself drifting away during the day, though, so I think it will be okay. Sometimes, fighting insomnia is worse, and it’s best just to accept what your body is trying to tell you, even if you’re better at math, and you know that it’s wrong. I won’t be making a habit of it. After everyone else came in, we put a meeting on the books. My Data Analyst wanted to put the finishing touches on his presentation. He gave us his initial findings. He now understands how jail guests are currently scheduled, and as we suspected, it really doesn’t have anything to do with group dynamics. There is so much data, and so many variables to deal with, this is going to be a difficult task, but I know that my people are up to it. The majority of the rest of the team will begin next week. They’ll be spending time on their training, and getting to know each other, so it won’t be until about mid-August before we start making progress, but that progress will happen. The presentation was interactive, with the other team members asking questions, and already contributing to the understanding of the data. He actually rewrote some of the slides while we were all there together. Right now, I’m consolidating and organizing the information that I’ve received in my brain, and thinking about ways that we can tackle this issue in the future, and I’ll continue to do that after I fall asleep tonight.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 6, 2458

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There was a scuffle in the hock section of whatever this ship was called. A.F. immediately went after Leona, but he never made it all the way. True to her promise to protect her, Marie stepped between them, and started fighting with him instead. It didn’t last very long. Either one of them could have won, and it could have ended in death, and Leona couldn’t take the chance. She unlocked the hock cell door again, and threw him inside by the shoulders. Once she slammed the door closed in his face, she discovered her mistake. She hadn’t patted him down, or knocked him unconscious. All he had to do was send a quick message to his security team that there was a breach. Their plan to sneak around quietly while no one was the wiser was no longer a viable option. They ran out of the room, and into the next so they could change. They chose faces from their pasts again, who no one here would recognize, because pretending to be A.F. himself wasn’t going to work anymore. As for their clothes, they made them look like the standard uniform of the crew, and just hoped that there were enough of them roaming around here—or enough chaos after the alarms started going off—that they wouldn’t stick out for being unauthorized strangers.

They quickly, but not too quickly, ran back down to the room where their stuff had been held, and retrieved Leona’s gear. She got dressed as fast as possible, and then reestablished her holographic disguise, just in time for a team of three to open the door in search of two hot lady criminals. “Secure this area!” one of them ordered. “The fugitives will come here in search of their belongings.”

“Understood, sir,” Leona replied, looking like a boy she had a crush on in college. He was a film student, on the same track as her for a few semesters before he switched to some other major, and she never saw him again. She always thought he would make a great enlisted soldier. He just had that Starship Troopers look about him.

“Stay here with them, Bartok,” the commander barked before running off with his partner. That was an annoying complication.

Now, for the most part, the IMS did not come with weapons, and as a rule, the team didn’t carry them either. They were a mostly nonviolent crowd, made up of people who would rather sneak in with surgical strikes, and leave without anyone knowing that anything had happened. Even the two of them, who possessed years of combat training, preferred peaceful solutions. Much like one could theoretically hit someone over the head with a frying pan, even though the pan was not designed as a weapon, there was a way to use a built-in nonviolent feature of the suit as an impromptu weapon.

It was called a static discharge, and it was meant to protect the wearer from dust and debris in dusty and debris-filled environments. A very low charge was keeping the outer layer clean at all times while medium intensity charges could repel foreign objects when the area was particularly harsh. Safety mechanisms usually prevented extreme discharges, but these safeguards could be subverted in emergency situations. It might be enough to shield the wearer from a fallen or thrown rock, but it had to be done on purpose by concentrating the energy in one spot. This was no emergency, and she didn’t want to have to use it, but it appeared that they had no choice. Leona rubbed her forearms together to build up and focus the charge. Then she released it into Bartok’s back without a word. He slumped towards the floor, but she caught him before that, and laid him down gently.

“What do we do,” Marie asked, “wait for midnight central?”

Leona shook her head. “A.F. will be free by then. He probably is already. He’s quite familiar with our pattern, and will be expecting that gambit. Our only choice is to get off of this ship, and away from the teleportation dampening field. Fortunately, they’re drifting, so it shouldn’t be too rough of a ride.”

“Are we sure that our suits can handle the equilibrium?”

“No, but we can’t steal a shuttle, or they’ll find it.”

“Maybe we do steal a shuttle,” Marie suggested. “Maybe we let them find it.”

Leona didn’t know what she meant by that.

“We’ll require a distraction. How good are you at those external holograms?”

She was pretty good, having gotten even better since she was first given Alyssa’s powers. She leaned into her knack for creating holograms away from her person. She considered it her specialty. Nearly each one of them had their own specialty. The only one who wasn’t all that great with any of the tricks was Mateo. He would hopefully find his place eventually, but there was no guarantee. Sadly, some people were simply not particularly skilled. Using the nearest workstation, they pulled up schematics of the ship, and made their plan. Leona generated an enemy vessel, which appeared out of nowhere only about a couple hundred meters away. Now, this being made of pure light and all, it wasn’t giving off any energy readings. If someone tried to send a photon torpedo towards it, it would pass right through, and fly off into the aether. The only reason it worked as a distraction was because it was so big and sudden that it freaked everyone out before they could determine that it was fake. While everyone was looking at the port side, Leona and Marie went over to the starboard side.

The two shuttles that they tried to open were locked, but they noticed that the fighters were all completely open, which made sense, because pilots needed to be able to jump into them at a moment’s notice. So they stole one of those instead. But they didn’t get inside of it to do it. Leona programmed it to fly off in one direction, and make basic escape maneuvers when the situation arose. It was vital that it managed to evade capture at least until midnight, or the plan wouldn’t work. With that gone, giving A.F. and his crew the impression that the fugitives were attempting to escape, the two of them turned invisible, and stayed hidden. It was annoying, not being able to use their jump to the future to their advantage, as they had often been able to do in the past, but this slight modification would hopefully get the job done this time.

A year later, they returned to the timestream, still in the hangar bay, but hiding in the corner. Perhaps about every single soldier on this thing was there now, pointing their weapons at the once-stolen fighter jet. Their plan had worked. Everyone thought that that was where Leona and Marie would come back.

“Sir?” one of them asked after several minutes passed, and the jet was still empty.

“I know,” A.F. replied.

“Sir, they must have bailed out. They’re probably floating around out there naked.” He didn’t mean unclothed, but unprotected by a hull.

“I know,” A.F. repeated. “Scan the entire kasma for lifesigns. They can’t get through the membrane without the skeleton key.”

This was a big risk, but there were a lot of people here, and Leona could use that to her advantage. Alyssa’s power gave them the ability to turn invisible, but not to go unheard. Hopefully what she said here would get lost somewhere in the crowd, and A.F. wouldn’t care about who specifically said. “Unless they already stole the key last year!” she suggested in a fake voice.

A.F. did look around to see who had said that, as did others, but no one fessed up. It quickly became unimportant to him, because the voice was right. “Lieutenant,” he said to a woman standing nearby. “Go secure the key. I want two security teams left right here in case we missed something. Everyone else, back to your action stations.”

The thing about being invisible to these people was that they were necessarily also invisible to each other. They didn’t have some additional magic power to see through their own disguises. Leona and Marie had to hold hands the whole time to keep track of one another. The former led the latter down the hallway, following the lieutenant to the place of their prize. It was quite a ways away, down a few corridors, into an elevator, and then down more corridors. The farther they went, the fewer crewmembers they saw around until it felt like an eerie ghost town. Presumably no one was allowed in this area for security reasons. The lieutenant punched in the code, unaware that it was being seen and memorized by two invisible girls. They immediately had more respect for her than they ever could A.F. Her code too was composed of eight digits, but they were all different. It was a good thing that they saw it, because she slipped in so quickly that they were unable to tag along. There wasn’t even a little window for them to see what she was doing in there.

Leona pulled Marie away, and felt her up a bit until she found her ear. “When she comes out, continue to follow her,” she instructed in a whisper. “We don’t know that the key is in the same place as the membrane thickener. We don’t even know that the membrane thickener is on this ship. It could be an entirely separate thing. But the key is in there, so once she confirms that, she might go after the machine itself next, just to be safe. I’ll sneak in here after she leaves. You gather all the intel you can. If you need help, send me the feeling of fear, and if you find the jackpot, send me elation.”

“Understood, captain.”

Leona gave Marie a kiss on the cheek, and then let go of her. When the lieutenant came back out of the room, the two of them accidentally ran into each other in their attempt to begin their separate sub-missions. The sound of the collision caused the lieutenant to turn around in confusion, but she didn’t pursue the issue, instead assuming that she was mistaken. Leona hovered her hand over the keypad, preparing to unlock the door once the coast was clear. She could only hope that Marie was doing okay on her own. A few minutes later, she entered the secret chamber, and started to get a look around, expecting to be alone.

A bespectacled bearded man was sitting at a desk in low-lighting. He stood up, and looked around, but didn’t see anything. This could still work. She could still find the key, and she might even be able to steal it. The name was almost certainly metaphorical, so it could be the size of a semi-truck, but at worst, she should be able to steal the plans for it on the computer. She just needed to wait for this guy to calm down, and maybe go out for a smoke break. He just kept staring into the dimness, before apparently coming to a revelation. “Ah. I get it.” Without looking down, he pulled a drawer open, and reached inside to retrieve a part of HG Goggles. He removed his own glasses, and pressed the goggles against his face without wrapping them around his head. “Mrs. Matic. I heard about what you could do. I came prepared.”

Just in case he was bluffing, Leona waved one hand to her side, waxing on. She waxed off with her other hand.

The man smiled, and mimicked the gesture. “Yes, I’m not lying, I see you there.”

Leona revisiblized herself. “I need that key.”

“I know you do.”

“You do?”

“Everybody needs it. It’s a key.”

“Are you going to give it to me?”

“Doubtful.”

“You don’t look like much of a fighter.”

“You have no idea what kind of weapons I have in my arsenal. Yet I know all about those suits. I helped design them.”

“Did you design the key?”

“Yes.”

“And the membrane thickener?”

“Indeed.”

“Is that here too?”

“It may be.”

“Where do your loyalties lie?”

“They lie with science. She has my heart.”

“Yet A.F. has your soul.”

He chuckled. “I guess. He’s not evil.”

“He’s a dick.”

“Isn’t everybody?”

Leona was done with the banter. “The people of Stoutverse need that key.”

“Oh, it’s for someone else? You’re not just trying to take this one down?”

“Not really. It’s not my concern right now. I’m not certain how vital it is for Salmoverse and Fort Underhill to maintain physical connection to each other. But I know that a race of violent antinatalists are intent on wiping out an entire planet. It’s my responsibility to put a stop to that.”

The man lifted his chin, and studied her face. “You’re not lying.”

“You’re right, A.F. isn’t evil. To my knowledge, he’s only ever hurt me and my friends, and we don’t have much use for grudges. We’ve always only been trying to just get away from him. Any sense of hostility he feels is in service to that end, not any real hatred that we feel. I suppose we may have to deal with him one day, but that day is not today. Please. Give me the plans for the machine, and the key, and then we’ll just leave. I won’t even manufacture them in this universe.”

Now he sighed. “Very well.” He reached into his lab coat pocket, and came back out with a data crystal.

“You just carry that around with you at all times?” she asked, but only after she took it out of his hand.

“The second my boss found you in the kasma six years ago, I knew that this was what you were after. My equipment can detect time travel events. You obviously came back on purpose.”

“You’re too smart to be working for him.”

He cleared his throat, and reached up to the wall. He flipped a switch, and Leona could immediately feel her ability to teleport return to her. “People like me...always work for men like him. Now get off my ship before I sound the alarm.”

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