Three years ago, Leona and Marie finally escaped the Angry Fifth
Divisioner’s ship, and returned naked to the kasma. Leona asked Marie to
insert the data crystal into the interface drawer on her PRU, which allowed
her to download the information, and display it on her HUD. She began to
look through the technical specifications for the machine that could thicken
the membrane of a universe, and also the skeleton key that would allow a
ship to pass safely through it, despite its great thickness. She had spent
the last three days studying the manual. They were surviving on the recycled
air and water contained in the pocket dimension inside of their PRUs. They
were just stuck here in the equilibrium of the kasma for now, because there
was no way to travel to one universe, or the other. She had the means to
understand the skeleton key, but no way to construct one for themselves.
“Quintessence!”
“Eureka!” Marie replied. She had spent this time reading some of the books
stored in her helmet, because there was no way she was grasping the high
level mathematical concepts that Leona was working on. It was taking her
longer than it should have to finish Rules for Fake Girlfriends due
to all these interruptions.
Leona laughed. “Sorry again. I didn’t mean to say that out loud. It’s just
that Ramses is gonna love this stuff. Up until now, we’ve just been thinking
of the universe as being contained by a membrane. That’s how brane cosmology
works. But we never really knew what this membrane was made out of, just
that you have to break through it if you want to travel through the bulk.
Now we know that it’s called quintessence. For centuries, scientists have
referred to it as dark matter, because we didn’t know what it was. But here
it is. It’s what’s responsible for the repulsive fifth fundamental force,
and explains why bulk travel is so difficult. It’s like trying to place two
positively charged electromagnets together, except instead of being
separated by an EM field, it’s a quintessential field.”
“Oh, that?” Marie began to joke. “I’ve always known about quintessence. You
should have just asked.
“Lol. Some have theorized that quintessence is what explains dark energy,
instead of dark matter, but we know that dark energy is just bulk energy
that has leaked into our universe to become vacuum energy, and the
work that it completes is what explains the accelerating expansion of the
universe. These three things are just the same thing in different states,
like the difference between a meteoroid, a meteor, and a meteorite.”
“Yeah, it doesn’t matter how much you try to explain it to me, or how many
analogies you try to use, I’m not gonna understand it. All I need to know is
can it get us out of the kasma?”
“Yes,” Leona replied.
“What? Really?” Marie didn’t expect to get such a good answer.
“Yes, because quintessence repulses baryonic from within its field.
We may not be able to get out, but we can go back in just fine. That’s what
lets bulk energy leak inside in the first place. If it didn’t, the universe
would be static.”
“Oh. Well, then...let’s go.”
“We can’t.”
“You just said that we could,” Marie reminded her.
“We can’t...yet. What is the one thing that’s more powerful than bulk
energy, or quintessence?”
“I’m sorry, why do you think that I can answer that question?”
“The answer is temporal energy. Now, a normal person—or even a
choosing one—will not usually ever have enough temporal energy to
disrupt the quintessential field in order to pass through the membrane, but
you and I are special. Every single day, for a few seconds, our bodies
overload on the stuff, and generate a burst of energy that sends us forward
in time. That’s one advantage that salmon have over choosers. We
don’t have to build the energy ourselves. It always comes to us.”
“But you’re not a salmon anymore. Tamerlane Pryce just recreated your
pattern.”
“I was never technically salmon, but the fact holds true for us, even after
what Pryce did when he gave us our new bodies, and what Ramses did when he
upgraded us twice after that. Come midnight central, we’ll release enough
temporal energy to break though. Now, if we don’t actually try to
break through, then we won’t. It would be like being strong enough to open a
door, but still not reaching for the doorknob—”
“What did I say about your analogies?”
“Teleportation. At exactly midnight, teleport into the universe. That’s what
we’ve been missing; timing.”
“Okay. Good.” Marie looked at her wrist display. “That should be just enough
time to finish my book.”
“All right.” Leona closed her eyes, not to sleep, but to give her brain a
short break from all this research.
“Wait.” Marie stopped reading. “Which universe are we going into?”
“Whichever one is closer.”
“Which one is that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t?”
“There aren’t any landmarks out here, it’s easy to get turned around. Based
on Ramses’ modifications to our onboard sensors, I can tell you that we are
sufficiently near the outside of the nearest membrane, but I couldn’t tell
you which one it is. It’s our only hope, though. If it’s not the one we
want, we don’t have time to teleport to the other side of the kasma, even if
we knew which direction that was. Besides, which one do you wanna go to?
They both contain friends who can help us get back to Stoutverse, but this
task will be no easier from one than the other.”
“True. Okay. Back to my book.” She literally turned herself away to
concentrate.
About an hour later, midnight struck, and they jumped to the other side of
the year, and the other side of the membrane. Now they were in a vacuum,
rather than the kasma. They could feel themselves in freefall, and could see
stars all around them. They still had no clue where they were, but they
could see a host star relatively close in the distance, so they began to
teleport towards it little by little, hoping to spot a rocky celestial
object to land on. The armor module of the IMS was equipped with mechanical
assistance, which made movement less fatiguing than earlier models of
spacesuits, but they were still tiring to use for an extended period of
time. They were both ready to be locked down by gravity again. That was how
humans evolved, and not even Ramses’ upgraded substrates were immune to the
negative effects of microgravity, or equilibrium.
There it was, a planet, but there was more to it. Their suits also detected
friends nearby. Mateo and Angela were here already. What a lovely
coincidence. Leona pinpointed their exact location on the planet, and made
one final jump. “Boo!”
“I saw you coming,” Mateo said. That made sense. His suit had its own
sensors.
Marie and Angela tried to give each other a hug, but it wasn’t particularly
satisfying with their armor modules on. “Report,” Angela said after they
gave up.
The two parties caught each other up on everything they had been through
since they parted ways for their respective missions. They hadn’t known how
they were going to come back together, but they had been confident that it
would turn out to be something like this; totally coincidental, and barely
within their control. Well, this was only the first step out of three, and
the easiest one, at that. Their next order of business would be figuring out
how to get Past!Mateo back to where he needed to be. Only then could
they find a way back to their own place in Stoutverse. But first, one of the
Maramon had something to say about it.
“Now that you’re here, you can help us.” It was the guy who had genetically
engineered the new human-Mar hybrids. He was still not happy that Mateo had
spirited him away to this planet without even trying to transport his
gestational pod too.
“Help you with what?” Leona asked.
Mateo smiled, glad to have their group’s leader back, if only to be the bad
guy in situations such as this.
“My equipment. Your husband made me leave it on the moon. I must have it
returned to me. I am to understand that your carrying capacity is roughly
300 kilograms. Being 800 K-G in mass, the four of you should, therefore, be
able to teleport it together, even with your suits.”
Leona stared at him for a moment. “I’m not doing that.”
“You must!” the Maramon insisted.
“Actually, I must not. This is not my universe, it is not my
decision. If you would like help in this regard, you will have to take it up
with Hogarth Pudeyonavic, or perhaps Ellie Underhill. It has nothing to do
with us. You don’t need teleporters, you need authorization. I’m afraid that
this conversation is now over, so speak of it no further.” She knew that he
was just going to keep hounding her about it, so the longer she waited to
put her foot down, the harder it was going to be to land it flat upon the
ground.
“I have what you seek,” the Maramon claimed vaguely.
“What does that mean?” Leona asked.
“Well, the truth is that I do not have it in my possession, but I know where
you can find it. If you retrieve my pod from the moon, I will tell you where
to go.”
“Where to go...for what?” he obviously could be lying, so in order for her
to even consider trusting him, she had to know that they were at least on
the same page.
“The timonite. That’s what you came here for, right? You expected to find it
in that cave in the Third Rail, but it was nowhere to be found, was it?
That’s because you weren’t looking in the right place.”
Past!Mateo took a step towards him. “Are you lying just to get what you
want?”
He laughed. “I could never. You’re Team Matic. You famously don’t take
kindly to betrayal. I could never send you far enough away from me that you
could not find a way to return, and exact your revenge upon me. I speak the
truth. In fact, as a sign of good faith, I will give you a hint.”
“Okay, go ahead,” Future!Mateo urged.
“No. The hint comes after you agree, but before you get me my pod. Once you
do get the pod, then you get the exact location.”
Past!Mateo gave the rest of the team puppy dog eyes. “Please.”
“You don’t have to convince us that you need it,” Marie told him. “We
already know that you do. We were there, remember? Our reluctance in this is
helping him, and in trusting that he’s telling us the truth.”
“I am,” the Maramon said. “If I didn’t have this leverage, I would probably
just threaten one of your lives to coerce the others.”
“Fair enough,” Leona decided. “We agree to help. Where is the timonite?”
He took a breath, and prepared for the big reveal. “Verdemus.”
“Is that a band, errr...?” Past!Mateo joked, but then he looked at everyone
else’s face. No one was surprised to hear this. “Oh, you’ve heard of it?”
“Yes,” Leona answered. She took Past!Mateo’s hand in hers, and Angela’s in
the other. Angela then took Future!Mateo’s, who took Marie’s, who took
Past!Mateo’s to complete the circle. They did the same thing around the
gestational pod once they were on the moon, and transported it down to the
planet.
“Okay, you have your little pod,” Future!Mateo said to the Maramon. “Now
where exactly is the timonite on Verdemus?”
“The Miracle Plains,” he replied, almost as if it should be obvious. “Don’t
worry, the locals will know what you’re talking about. But you better hurry,
they’re set to abandon the whole planet soonly.”
Angela sighed. “How the hell are we going to get all the way to Veremus? We
can’t even get out of this universe.”
“Quintessence!” Marie shouts, echoing Leona from earlier.
Leona chuckled. “I’ll need time, but uh, I’ll build something. It could take
a couple of years to complete construction.”
“There’s no way to be sure that it remains undisturbed during our interim
years,” Future!Mateo lamented
“I’ll set up a lab in secret.” She reached over and took a dish of starter
nanites out of Marie’s PRU. Then she looked up at the Maramon. “If any of
you find it, and disturb it, while we’re gone, I cannot guarantee your
safety.”
“We’ll leave it alone,” he promised to the best of his ability.
While she buckled down to make a plan to build a temporary ship equipped
with what could now be called a quintessential skeleton key, the rest of the
team started to teleport kind of randomly around the planet to search for a
good spot to set up a new lab. It had to be rich in minerals, so the nanites
would have a lot to feed on, and preferably somewhere beautiful, so they
could return to a pleasant scenery. But of course, it had to be remote, and
hard to find. They could not trust the Maramon, nor their hybrids. They
returned with several candidates each for Leona to inspect for herself. She
ultimately chose one of Past!Mateo’s picks. It was inside of a sea cave that
looked like something that could be found on the rocky beaches of Iceland.
Leona programmed the nanites to begin building the ship, as well as the
deuterium harvester in the ocean to power it. The design of the vessel was
based on the shuttle that was already built for the Iman Vellani proper,
since it was readily available in the database, but with less cabin room, to
accommodate the skeleton key. When they came back a year later, it was done,
but occupied by one of the hybrids.
