Microstory 2777: Fewer Deaths Than It Looks

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There’s a knock at the door. Elty Fenstermacher opens it quickly. “Come in, come on, hurry,” he urges. He tugs his friend inside, then looks around to see if anyone is watching. They are. He has to smile and wave at a small group of people gardening against their own abode. The battle may be over, but the war has only begun, and he doesn’t know who he can trust anymore. This is a test...a test of his resolve.

“What did you want to show me, Elty?” Streamer asks. Elty can’t remember what his real name is anymore. Everyone calls him that because he’s the only one in the group who has a digitized brain. He never needed to escape with them. He shouldn’t be a part of the rebellion. But he is, and Elty respects the hell out of him for it.

Elty steps over to the other side of his little lab, and presents the chamber.

“What is it?” Streamer asks him. “A time machine? Please don’t tell me—”

Elty rolls his eyes. “It’s not a time machine. It’s an equilibrium chamber. This is what they use on Varkas Reflex to keep their users in spatial stasis.”

“I don’t understand,” Streamer says. “I went to VR, I never saw this.”

“Well, this is a modified design, and they’ve not always had equilibrium drives,” Elty explains. “When you’re in this, you’re basically floating. Every single square millimeter of your body experiences an equal amount of pressure. They use it because some log in to VR for years at a time, and that comes with health problems.”

“What are you trying to tell me, that you digitized yourself?” Streamer questions.

Elty shakes his head. “I don’t care about VR. I don’t even really care about equilibrium.” He bends down and switches it on. As the power starts running through, he smiles and looks back up at Streamer. “You hear that? You feel it? If you disable the privacy field regulator, the equilibrium stays in the chamber, but the signal jammer escapes. If we install one of these things in every house, the Teaguardians and Bidans can’t spy on us. Nor can anyone else, for that matter. It’s there so users can have private virtual sessions without worrying about someone sneaking in and finding out what they’re doing. We’re gonna use it to live in peace, which is all we’ve ever wanted. I’m not happy that we have to settle for Bida, so if we’re here, let’s make it our own.”

“Hm. That’s interesting,” Streamer notes, but he doesn’t sound enthusiastic.

“I thought you would be more excited,” Elty says. “You’re the one who taught us how to hide our location on Doma Tertia. I just upped our game.”

“Yeah, and I appreciate that,” Streamer agrees. “I just...the Teaguardians agreed to leave us alone. What that Delgado chick did for us in Gatewood was her responsibility, and we’re not at fault for that. We have a good thing here, Elty. I don’t want us to risk that. I’ve kind of given up my anger. Our home was destroyed, and honestly, people have bent over backwards to find a new one for us. This is that, man. Just be happy. Or are you mad because Shimizu left us, which places you in charge, but we don’t need a rebel leader anymore, because we’re not rebels anymore?”

“Don’t make me out to be so petty. I’m just trying to help,” Elty contends. “Something is happening in the sky that they’re not telling us. I’m still trying to figure out what it is, but in the meantime, I’m gonna do what I must to protect us, and our way of life. These people aren’t our heroes. They’re assholes, like everyone else.”

Streamer sighs, and jerks his chin towards the window. “You see those people out there? They still need leadership. Are you gonna step up, and help them settle down once and for all, or are you gonna hole up in here, and tinker with your machines?”

Elty looks through the window. The gardeners are still out there. They’re so bloody happy, it makes him sick. This is not what they wanted. They wanted a planet to call their own. They could have come to Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida right after Proxima Doma fell apart, but they choose to go for something greater. Now they’ve all given up.

As he’s watching them toil away, totally content, they suddenly disappear.

“Whoa,” Streamer exclaims. “Did you see that?”

“Yes,” Elty replies. “It’s happening.” He rushes into the equilibrium chamber. Pushing himself down so there’s enough room for the both of them. “Get in here.”

“Why would I do that?” Streamer questions. “It looks uncomfortable.”

“It is,” Elty yells, “but it’s better than the alternative! Now get in!”

Streamer shakes his head, and misses his chance. The ground shakes. The roof flies off the house and soars into the sky, taking Streamer up with it. The whole house follows suit. All around, Elty can see everything fly away from him as if gravity somehow got turned on its head.

“No!” Elty screams, but it’s futile. In seconds, he’s completely alone on his back. Not a building, not a tree, not another person in sight. Only sky and dirt.

Elty lies there in his pod, scared as all hell to stand up. Not only does he not know what will happen to him if he does, but he doesn’t want to see what has become of his new home. He takes a few deep breaths, however, and decides to muster the courage. He’s not going to be afraid. He’s supposed to be a leader. He stands up and looks around at the devastation. It’s gone. Everything is gone. He can’t even take one step forward, or he’ll die. He survived the impossible, but he was the only one. Someone is going to answer for this. Someone is going to pay. It was probably the Teaguardians again.

Below him is nothing by lava. His equilibrium chamber is floating just above it. It’s getting so freaking hot here. He’s having trouble breathing. The noxious gases are just too much. Wait, this is a life support vessel. It has a self-contained breathing apparatus. He brushes his hand along the sides, looking for the access panel, finding it at the head. He takes out the mask and wraps it over his face.

Now Elty can breathe again, but it doesn’t fix the heat. He reaches over to close the door, but then he remembers that he removed it. He didn’t need the door itself gone, but it was in the way of him modifying the machine to expand the scope of the signal jammer. Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. He’s gonna die. Is there some kind of communication system? He gets on his knees and rifles through the emergency panel, but there’s nothing. Because of course there’s nothing. He synthesized the parts from the original specs, and the original specs expect you to install it in a room full of these things, where communication is handled in network. It doesn’t need its own transmitter.

The crater was a massive tragedy for the planet of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, but not in terms of lives. One was presumed dead after a headcount proved he missed the emergency teleportation. The second was initially presumed the same, but he was discovered later after the quarantine was lifted a month later. The autopsy showed that he roasted alone on a hovering equilibrium chamber over the lava.

Microstory 2776: Jump

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The air escapes the rocket since they have no way of closing the bulkheads. Elise and Zelda strap themselves into the nearest seats as the inertial dampeners either don’t work, or don’t even exist. Elise feels her face collapse into itself as the apparent gravity increases. Back when she was much younger, high gravity training was required for space travel, even if you were just going into orbit. As the technology became more reliable, and redundancies were reinforced, they stopped treating everyone like an astronaut, and the first true passengers emerged. It has been centuries since she’s felt this, and she does not care for it. She turns her head to Zelda, who is, of course, loving it.

Several minutes later, the rocket has made it into orbit. The trembling stops, and the gravity stabilizes. They can finally relax and speak. Elise catches Zelda up on everything she missed after she was presumed dead. Their best guess is that this is not a new timeline, but the same one with more information. The girls sit there together, waiting for something special to happen, but it never does. This is a problem, because while the vacuum suit cartridge has its own carbon scrubber, it’s not the most efficient kind, and is only meant to be used in emergencies. That’s exactly what this is, but they should really get a more reliable source of air if they’re going to be here for a while.

Maybe this isn’t the final challenge, and never was. Maybe it was simply the hardest one yet, and the team has so much more to get through in any timeline. Elise doesn’t even really care about that anymore; she was only trying to save Zelda’s life and memories. If the hunt is going to continue, they have to get the rest of the team back somehow. Short of that, they have to reunite back on the real Castlebourne, and scrub the whole thing. But for now, all they can do is sit here and wait.

“There’s more we can do,” Zelda contends. “This is the same alien language that Colley encountered in the Empty Planet simulation, and the same one we’ve seen pop up every once in a while on this hunt. He figured it out eventually, so we can do the same.”

“Keyword is eventually,” Elise responds. “He beat Empty Planet because language and culture are his thing. I don’t know if we have time. He didn’t teach us.”

“We may as well try,” Zelda reasons. “One of these buttons shuts all of the bulkheads, and another one reestablishes air circulation. Or maybe a few of them, I don’t know, but the puzzle is here, we just have to solve it. We can do this, Elise.”

Elise sighs. “It’s alien. Maybe it doesn’t have the right atmospheric comps.”

“Then we’ll make it work. The hunt would not have led us here if it were impossible. The escape pod is a failsafe to get you out of the game, but you’re not supposed to take it. You’re supposed to be in here, and survive. Whatever we’re waiting to happen, it probably can’t happen until we turn on life support,” Zelda reasons.

Elise nods. “You’re right. There must be a way. The language is translatable.”

And so the girls start trying to understand what they’re looking at. They start by tracing the exposed cables from less dangerous systems to their controls. They figure out what turns the lights on and off, and which buttons open and close the panels. That gives them a baseline for what the alien symbols mean. From there, they incrementally learn what everything on the bridge does. It takes them hours, but they do figure it out.

Meanwhile, they start to understand what the ship is doing on its own. It doesn’t remain in a circular orbit. They’re climbing to a higher altitude. For what purpose, they don’t know, but Delta V will be lower farther from the planet’s gravity well, so it could be preparing to activate an ion drive, or something else, to leave Castlebourne entirely. They can’t let that happen, but none of these buttons says that there is a way to cross back over to the main dimension. The aliens probably couldn’t do that. The Facsimile is just the Custodians’ way of allowing the hunt to take the hunters anywhere in the world without interfering with the normal goings-on. It’s not actually part of the story.”

“Wait, I think this will do something,” Zelda says. She flips a switch.

An alien voice would occasionally make announcements through the speakers, particularly when they made some change. Knowing how to read the symbols, and understanding their spoken words, are not the same thing, so they have never been able to comprehend it. Until now. Now it’s all being said in plain English. Zelda flips the lights on and off a few times to confirm. “Lights on, lights off. Lights on, lights off—”

“Okay.” Elise pins Zelda’s hand down gently. “It works. That was the last piece of the puzzle. Now we just need to wait forty-two more seconds until that periodic announcement we keep hearing triggers again, and finally find out what it’s saying.”

“I think it’s counting down,” Zelda explains. “The second part is always the same, but the first part is always different.”

Elise nods. “That would be my guess too.”

“Eighty-three seconds to reintegration,” the voice says, confirming their guess.

They both widen their eyes. Reintegration? What exactly does that mean?

Eighty-three seconds pass. Sensors start going off. Proximity alert after proximity alert after proximity alert. They look through the viewports to see another space station. They’re fine—they’re not going to collide with it—but they’re clearly back in the real dimension. This is precisely what they were hoping for.

Elise opens her bag and grabs one of the communicators that she packed.

“Activating reframe engines in eleven minutes,” the computer announces.

“Is that the thing that makes a ship move faster than light?” Zelda questions.

“Yes,” Elise replies in a panicky voice. She opens a channel. “Laise, are you there? Please respond, Laise. This is Elise Perkins. Please respond!”

“Laise here, go ahead.”

“Have you been tracking the team? Do you know where they are?” Elise asks.

“Yes, they’re in a highly secure facility,” Laise answers. “I’ve been trying to break them out for an hour. I’m only at Step 2. I could really use your help.”

“If it’s secure,” Elise realizes, “then it probably doesn’t allow teleportation.”

“That was my thinking,” Laise agrees. “That’s why I’m shutting off the power.”

“Good girl,” Elise says. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

“Sending the coordinates now.” A brief pause. “Power will take a few minutes.”

“I can’t jump that far in one go,” Elise explains to Zelda. “I have to start now. She affixes the communicator onto her nanite vacuum suit, and seals most of it up, leaving only the visor open. “You stay here. If you can delay FTL, do it, but don’t stop it.”

“Aye, Captain,” Zelda says. “And Captain,” she adds when Elise tries to turn away. “One more thing.” She takes Elise by the helmet and kisses her passionately.

Elise lets her go and smiles. “I love you.” She drops her visor and teleports away.

Miracle called this burst mode. She can only jump about a thousand kilometers, so the first time she does it, she’s still in the middle of outer space. She immediately jumps again. Then again, and again, and again, until she’s back down on the surface. She’s standing next to Laise now, who is still waiting for Castledome’s power to turn off.

Laise salutes Elise, then shifts her fingers to count down. “Four, three, two, one.”

After all of the lights shut off, Elise picks Laise up, and teleports away.

They’re deep inside the castle now, in what looks like a dungeon. All of their friends are chained up on the other side of metal bars, which Elise is somehow not able to teleport through. They must be on auxiliary power. Azad is here too, dressed in medieval garb, instead of his usual heavily armored IMS unit. He draws his sword.

“I don’t have time for this,” Elise complains. “The ship is about to disappear.”

Azad jerks his head towards another sword leaning against the stone wall. “Then you better hurry. Because I’m the only one keeping that cell locked.” He tenses up.

Elise doesn’t move. She looks over at her friends, who are watching them, but not speaking. She can’t do this. Obviously, if she wins, Azad will either heal in this body, or transmit to a backup. That’s not really even the problem, though she might feel differently if she does put that weapon in her hands. The real issue is that she doesn’t want to transfer. She likes the body she’s in right now, and she was so preoccupied with training that she never went in to duplicate her current DNA. She will lose her wings, she’ll lose teleportation...she’ll lose everything. But her friends need her.

While Elise is frozen like a coward, Laise picks up the sword. She attacks Azad instead, and damn is she good. Elise didn’t take the time to get to know her, or ever ask why Miracle conscripted her for her team in the first place. This might have been the reason, because she is kicking Azad’s ass. He might be letting her win because he secretly wants them to complete the hunt, but he’s making a good show of it at least.

After a few minutes, Laise manages to knock the sword out of Azad’s hands.

Elise runs over to pick it up, because they never do that in movies, and it often leads to a final blow by the villain. She’s not going to use it herself, though.

“Do I have to kill you?” Laise asks Azad sternly, the tip at his neck.

“The gate is on a deadman’s switch,” Azad replies plainly.

Laise nods. She looks away, then quickly drives the blade into Azad’s throat. At his final heartbeat, the gate slides open, leading to hugs and kisses all around.

“Uh, Elise?” Zelda asks through comms. “You better get back here. The ship enters reframe speeds in three minutes. I couldn’t slow it down, or stop it if I tried.”

Elise frowns at her friends. “It’s too late. We’ll never make it in time.”

“We could try to compound our temporal energy,” Miracle suggests.

“I don’t know what that means,” Elise says, though she can hazard a guess.

“We don’t have time to get into it,” Miracle begins, “but when you cross the streams of two sources of temporal energy, it can create a feedback loop, pulling more than they normally would on their own. It’s dangerous, though. We could miss our mark, which we absolutely cannot do since you’re the only one with a vac suit.”

“We have to risk it,” Jolanda decides. “If worst comes to worst, we’ll each end up in our respective backup bodies, and miss the window. I would rather try.”

“We vote,” Rage says. “Raise your hand if you wanna risk it.” She looks over at Laise when everyone raises their hand. “Are you back in? Are you with us?”

“Damn right,” Laise says. “I regretted leaving the second I did.”

“Do it,” Rage says to Elise and Miracle.

There’s really nothing for Miracle to teach Elise. The latter already knows how to build her energy for longer jumps. She’s never been able to reach 8,000 kilometers before, and certainly not with any passengers, but she has the idea. She can feel it. As she’s holding Miracle’s hands, she can feel the power. It’s intoxicating. With every wave of energy, it feels like they’ve reached their limit, but then they let more and more in.

Elise focuses on Zelda again. She is their target. If they can get close to her, they’ll all be safe. The power feels good, but they may be reaching an actual limit, because the pressure is also getting to be a little much. She keeps pushing, though, no matter how much it hurts. They build until their hands are shaking, and then they build more until their whole bodies are shaking. A glowing white light starts bursting from their eyes, and their pores. If they don’t try this now, they could quite literally explode, and since we’re dealing with time travel, they might not all end up in their backups.

Now.

Elise wakes up on the floor. The architecture suggests that she’s back on the alien ship, but it’s nowhere she’s been before. It is definitely not the bridge. She stands up and wobbles a little before catching herself on a chair. She takes deep breaths to regain her balance while she stares at the door. Once she’s ready, she exits.

The others are in the corridor with her, having seemingly just woken up as well.

Minotaur leads them back to the bridge where they find Telman standing there patiently with a cool poker face.

Telman waits for everyone to file in. “Welcome...to Level 2.”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 29, 2573

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Olimpia was back on Earth and back in Sri Lanka. With all the confusing time travel, she couldn’t remember how long it had been, but the last time she was home was centuries ago. When she was a child, she developed her echo affliction. Everything she said was copied and sent fractions of a second into the future. She couldn’t stop it. Her family was bewildered and scared. They had no context for it. Their best guess was that she had two sets of vocal cords, or that they could somehow vibrate two different sounds at the same time. They didn’t know, but the doctors did. They knew that she was a perfectly normal human, biologically speaking. There was no explanation for her voice.

Her parents didn’t demand that she stop speaking, but they definitely encouraged it. They learned and taught her sign language, and actively used that to communicate with her. Again, they didn’t force her to keep quiet, but whenever she asked a question, if she didn’t use her hands, they still would in response. She became self-conscious about it to the point where she eventually gave up and gave in. She became a full-time signer. She wasn’t fully mute, but she didn’t want to make people feel uncomfortable.

She was an excellent student, and probably could have gone on to a higher education institution. She maybe could have become as smart as Leona, or even Ramses, but she chose not to. When she was sixteen years old, she emancipated herself through the courts, left home, and left the country. Her parents didn’t beg her to stay, but they weren’t happy for her either. They just...basically said, “okay” and that was the last time she saw them. She lived alone for years as she wandered the world.

By then, national borders had become more of logistical zones for administrative maintenance rather than divisions. If you lived in Ethiopia, it was probably because that was where your progenitors lived, and there was no reason to leave, because there were no fewer opportunities there than anywhere else. People stopped moving and traveling for the most part, because if they wanted to join a community on the other side of the world, they could do it through telepresence or VR. Olimpia only kept moving around because her upbringing turned her into a loner. She could have been happy in a simulated world, where her echoism couldn’t follow. But she had to get away from Sri Lanka, and once she did that, nowhere else felt like home either, so she kept going.

Sri Lanka was empty now. According to the data, only a few thousand people still lived here, in its one remaining arcological megastructure tower. It would be so unlikely that anyone in her family was still around. She would have to find them elsewhere, if they were still alive. They weren’t even necessarily on Earth. The global population had been dwindling for decades. Everyone was apparently moving to Castlebourne and Varkas Reflex. Even so, it was the right move, coming back. It was at least cathartic.

A man walked up from behind her. “She doesn’t know how she’s meant to feel about it. On the one hand, it’s clearly sad. It’s the end of an era, and it won’t be the last one. It is a pretty big one, though. Humans have always been on Earth. The idea that it may one day just be empty again is pretty surreal. But also beautiful and poetic. A safe haven for wildlife. It’s fitting, it should end like this. The planet is closing its loop.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know you. If you could stop reading my mind, that would be great,” Olimpia requested. She didn’t want to be rude, but she was annoyed and nervous.

The man smiled and nodded. “The man smiled and nodded. He wasn’t really reading her mind. It was more like he was channeling her thoughts. He couldn’t help himself. It was his curse, just as Olimpia’s curse was to echo. She had somehow been cured, though, and her brother, Delfinus, was extremely interested in learning how.”

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Spaghetti West: The Ark (Part III)

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The second black hole turned out to be far more than a coincidence, and far from an isolated event. They just kept coming after that. Now that Sugar’s sensors were tuned to look for them, they started popping up everywhere. They were appearing all over the system in no apparent pattern. Efforts on the development of the orbital defense grid were redoubled multiple times. All energy was going into building them as fast as possible, focusing almost exclusively on the ionic pulse canons, but she was also sharing her unique sensor suite to predict and detect subsequent intrusions. By the time they were finished, this was going to have to be the densest defense array in the stellar neighborhood—probably the galaxy, even though Castlebourne had that war.

Speaking of Castlebourne, through a chain of contacts, Sugar was able to confirm that these singulararities were Kugelblitz, meaning they were made artificially. She learned that they were not weapons, however, but a vital component of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. This was what solved the mystery of the surface gravity. The planet was a high-density, high-mass terrestrial. These numbers weren’t as high as they could possibly go while still being rocky worlds, but they were too high for baseline humans to survive on. Before even one person stepped foot on it, thirty-two transdimensional gravity generators were installed at even intervals across the globe. Sugar still wasn’t sure who was responsible for them, but they must have been incredibly powerful.

These generators were essentially portals that linked to a different region of space. Specifically, it was a kubelblitz black hole, also known as a KBH. They basically just ignored Bida’s real gravity, and stole the gravity from somewhere else. A couple of decades ago, the owner of Castlebourne resorted to moving their entire star system away from its original spot in the galaxy in order to conceal their location from a violent enemy. They just so happened to move it within spitting distance of the KBH, which disrupted gravity on Bida. They ultimately fixed it, but something was going wrong now. They either didn’t do it correctly, or this was inevitable. Sugar put a call in to the time traveler who solved the problem, but had yet to receive a response.

There were not dozens of KBHs threatening the lives of the Bidans. There was only one, and that one was somehow being duplicated over, and over, and, and over again. She had to believe this was an accident. It was probably how Mirage Matic chose to save Bida, but it had evidently triggered a runaway chain reaction. And Sugar had no idea how to stop it. Her only hope was to keep deflecting them. It had been going on for weeks now, and they were getting pretty good at it. Could they hypothetically do this forever? Probably. While they didn’t appear predictably, their appearances had plateaued. But that didn’t mean it would stay this way. What happened when the duplicate KBHs exceeded the number of lasers in too short a time? What if in all the chaos, they accidentally deflected one of them towards one of their neighbors? What could they do if—

The sensor alarms started to blare. They would go off pretty frequently, but they were particularly urgent this time. The system knew that something was unusually wrong; that it had changed, and she had to shift all focus to the latest problem. “Oh my God,” she whispered as she stared at the screen in disbelief.

“What is it?” Liselot asked. She spent a lot of time up here, having chosen to move her base operations to Sugar’s ship. They now had a crew of dozens.

“We should have been worried about this the whole time. The next KBH. It’s not going to be in space. It’s going to be in the atmosphere.” Sugar desperately started to turn part of the array. They weren’t designed to fire towards the planet, but it was technically possible, as long as the angle wasn’t too steep. The computer was still narrowing down the entry point to a smaller area. The KBH was only millimeters in diameter, so it was hard to know exactly where it would appear. That normally wasn’t so critical, but in this case, it was more important than ever. They only had a few minutes.

“Where?” Liselot began snapping at her people. They knew what she was saying.

“What is this region here?” Sugar asked, pointing at the map. “It looks pretty heavily populated, and unusually densely so for your intentionally minimalistic world.”

“That’s...Eyrenland,” Liselot answered. “It’s the hub for our primary export, eyren. I don’t have time to explain it, but that’s where your friends from Doma Tertia are currently being housed while they figure out exactly what kind of life they wanna lead.”

“It’s about to be destroyed,” Sugar said as she pivoted to something else after syncing the sensors with the canons. They could fire at the right spot if that was what it came too, but if it was as close to the surface as it looked like it was going to be, it wasn’t the right way to handle it. And either way, the people down there were gonna die unless someone did something about it...unless she rescued them first.

“Thousands of people live and visit there every day,” Liselot explained.

“The rest of the planet isn’t safe either,” Sugar warned. “This is going to cause bidaquakes and general tectonic instability all around the world. Send that emergency broadcast over the air. They only have a moment to prepare, at best.”

“Where are you taking us?” Liselot questioned.

Sugar was at the helm now. “We have to position ourselves just above the entry point. I have two things to do. I have to pull everyone down there up here, and then I have to force the KBH back to where it came from.” She flipped switches and tapped on the console.

“What are you talking about?” Liselot pressed. “How can you do that?”

Sugar programmed the route, and made the jump. They still didn’t know the exact altitude, but it would be somewhere around here. “It’s something I’ve been working on since we found out that the KBHs were coming here through portals, and not simply wandering through realspace.” She made a short-range teleport over to the transport workstation. “If this works, I can push it backwards, but as of yet, my ship is the only thing equipped with the right hardware, which...makes this next part tricky, and I need your authorization.”

“You have it,” Liselot replied. “Do what you need to do.”

Sugar shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. The only way to save those people down there is to teleport them all at once. The ship is already remodularizing to prepare for maximum capacity, but once they come up here, they won’t necessarily be safe, because this is also the gun. I’ve not had time to test it, so if I do this, and it literally backfires, it could kill everyone anyway. My emergency transporters can’t move people to anywhere else. It doesn’t have the data to make sure some of them don’t end up in the middle of rocks, or at the bottom of the ocean. They have to come here, but this could quickly end up the most dangerous place to be.”

“Besides the surface, where the black hole is about to show up?” Liselot pointed out. “They’re gonna die if they stay down there, so get them here, and hope for the best.”

“Okay.” Sugar looked over at the sensor readings. “They were now showing how high above the surface the marble-sized singularity was going to appear. It...wasn’t going to be high. She tapped on her comms. “Van! Open the pocket dimensions. Open them all! We can’t fit everyone in realspace!”

“You got it, boss!” Van replied.

While Sugar waited for the internal portals to be activated, she widened the capture radius. Thirty-one seconds from impact, regardless of what the unsuspecting inhabitants were doing on the ground, Sugar teleported every single one of them into the ship, mostly into the pocket dimensions. They would be confused, but they would be alive, and she would try to explain things later.

“Now that they’re clear, can you not just close the portal so the black hole doesn’t come here at all?” Liselot hoped.

Sugar shook her head as she went over and hovered her hand over the button. “If I tried, it would probably make things worse. Think of it like a swarm of biblical locusts trying to fly through a doorway. If you just close the door, they’ll congregate against it until it buckles. You have to slam the door shut so it expels them backwards.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Liselot argued. “A bunch of the locusts would get in anyway.”

Sugar sighed. “Exactly.” She watched the timer count down. Eleven, ten, nine, eight... “This hasn’t been tested. If it doesn’t work...that’s the end of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida.” Three, two, one—

The Kugelblitz black hole popped into existence in the sky. The planet, which up until this point always tried to pull everything towards the barycenter near the core, suddenly had a competing mass to contend with. The trees, the water, the mountains; everything was pulled up towards the singularity. The objects closest to the event horizon were being tugged on more, resulting in them being strung out like spaghetti. The rest of the world tried to implode like a deflating football. The black hole was the heaviest thing around now, so it didn’t stay in one place. It began to fall towards the barycenter. If Sugar allowed that to happen, the whole planet would collapse in a matter of hours, if not minutes.

Sugar fired her new machine, directly towards the black hole. It came from somewhere. They still hadn’t traced the source, but it had to form somewhere else in space, and she needed it to go back. As the energy wave reached critical mass, the biomass and geosphere continued to head towards a single moving point. It only took seconds for the KBH to disappear, but the devastation didn’t need long.

In this short amount of time, a land mass the size of a large country was reduced to a crater. All of the plant and animal life there was destroyed nearly instantly. The tremors continued to plague the surface all around as the gravitational disruption’s effects persisted beyond the initial shocking event.

“What did we just lose?” Sugar asked. “What did they use that settlement for?”

Liselot stared at the satellite images showing the barren landscape that once thrived. “Eggs. We lost the eggs.”

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Microstory 2775: Course Correction

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The lab that Elise was in with Miracle and Reagan disappears, and is replaced with Elise’s own apartment in Abodome. The first thing she sees is the front door closing. Someone seemingly just left, so she needs to find out who. She sprints over to it and opens it back up. She looks down the hallway and sees herself. Well, she sees the back of her own head. She recognizes the outfit too. This is it. This is the day that she and her friends officially began their hunt under Treasure Hunting Dome. She has gone back in time, just as Rae and Mir said she would. The question is, though, what now?

They didn’t actually give her any instructions. They didn’t say what she was supposed to change. She doesn’t have any experience in this, and they know that. Or they will know that, because at this point in time, she hasn’t met either of them yet. What they did to her was isolate her from everyone she cares about. There is no one she can trust without risking the timeline, and even if there were, they wouldn’t be able to help her anyway. She’s going to have to figure this out on her own. First things first, treat this like any other challenge on the hunt. According to Rage’s explanation of how they typically go, the last challenge often involves memory. You have to keep track of where you went and what you did, and regurgitate that in some way.

Elise tries to sit down at her computer, but her chair isn’t designed with wings in mind. She has to use the kitchen stool, which isn’t comfortable either because she still can’t lean back, but at least she’s not leaning forward. She opens a new file and starts to retrace her steps. She starts more general, and becomes more specific, adding the minutest of details to get a full picture of what happened once the hunt began. She color-codes it by actions she took, actions others took, and actions done to them by the game. She then goes in and adds even more information, about things that she wasn’t there for. She lists things that other hunters did, and tries to guess what Hrockas and Azad were doing in the meantime. She makes it a full, comprehensive bible of the whole ordeal, from start to finish. She even goes back to include events leading up to minute one, even though some of it is already in the past from her current perspective.

There is one interesting development; a mystery which they never solved. When the hunters were circling the desert, looking for their next clue, Minotaur went missing. They said someone in robes grabbed them and they tried to get away and lost their jacket, but the attacker quickly caught up to them. Elise looks over at her bed where she laid the robe that Reagan hung over her at the very last second. She goes over to it and picks it up. “Could this be it? Was it me the whole time?” But if so, she’s not come back to change the past. She can’t; it’s inevitable. She’s merely following in her own footsteps. Nothing will go better this time, because this isn’t a different time. Unless there’s a third Elise around here somewhere. She suddenly starts to feel like she’s being watched.

Elise paces the room. “What was it Miracle said once about time travel? If you don’t have proof that something didn’t happen, there’s a chance it happened.” She stands there and ponders that for a moment. Then she goes right back to her timeline document and reads the part about the desert again. “If you don’t have proof it didn’t happen, it might have happened,” she whispers. She nods, a little excited and more determined. “Right there. That’s my shot. I don’t have to change it if I assume it’s already happened.” She grabs the robe, drapes it over her body again, and disappears.

Elise has spent weeks practicing teleportation and flying. She has worked out every day to build up her strength. She went to a biotailor to improve her substrate even more. They reinforced her wings and increased the density of her muscles while lowering the density of her bones. It’s a trade-off, but she needs to be both strong and light. Her mission doesn’t necessarily involve being better than she already was, but why waste this opportunity? She has to do something while the timeline catches up.

She learned a few things about her temporal abilities. She can teleport from the real world to the Facsimile at will. It takes an extra boost of energy, but not as much as she figured at first. She also learns how many jumps she can do before she runs out, and she learns that she can actually increase her numbers by being more efficient, and even processing more temporal energy from wherever it comes from. The time for training is now over, though. This is the show. She packs the essentials, some of which she had to...borrow from a secure location, throws her robe back on, and heads off to work.

She is in the desert now, and has been for a couple of days. She intentionally came a little early in case something went wrong, but she also isn’t entirely sure when her past self and her friends will show up. They didn’t have timepieces with them at the time. She knows where they’ll end up, however, so she’s on her belly, watching that spot with binoculars. The robe can shift colors, as most clothing can in the modern world, so she just looks like a crest in the sand dune. She has learned to be still and patient too. She didn’t set out to do that, but it came naturally with all of her other training.

They’re here. Elise watches Azad transport them all before leaving with Hrockas and Telman. Now it’s just the hunters. She can’t hear, but she knows what they’re talking about. She waits until they spread out, triggering her window. She teleports directly to Minotaur, and after a brief struggle, relocates them to the rocket maze. Then she returns to her perch to wait for her next move. She sees them reunite and argue about what to do, and she sees Miracle teach her how to take control of her body. She watches as her past self gets trapped on the surface with Colley, where they both surrender to their budding romance, only to be caught by the others after they complete the underground maze. They all then go back down there to learn the truth about Rage.

This is it; it’s happening. Elise knew that she would be successful with Mino, because it already happened to her, but this is the real change. This is what she’s been actually training for. The ship blares as it begins to ascend. The ground shakes and gives way. Future!Elise has to start hovering to keep from slipping down the dune like an ant in an antlion’s pit. She slowly gets closer to get a better look, still worried about being spotted by someone. Past!Elise is now trying to hang on to both Colley and Zelda, but she’s not strong enough yet. Colley volunteers to let go, but Zelda beats him to it.

Future!Elise uses her friend-finding ability to teleport to exactly where Zelda is. She grabs her by the waist, and jumps them both back to the inside of the rising rocket.

“Whoa! How did you do that?” Zelda asks, trying to orient herself. “How did you do that? What are you wearing? How is your hair green now? Where’s Colley?”

“He’s fine.” Elise replies. She takes out two vacuum suit cartridges, placing one on Zelda’s chest, and the other on her own. The nanites emerge from the cartridge and wrap themselves around them to protect them from space exposure. She did it, they won. Didn’t they?

Microstory 2774: Look Both Ways Before You Cross

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It’s not everyone on Castlebourne who can get a private meeting with the one and only Hrockas Steward. Billions of people are visiting. They don’t technically live here permanently, because citizenship seems unnecessary, and isn’t an obvious process, but the population is growing. Many have been here for decades. The point is, Elise is special. She’s not the only transgenic person on the planet—not by a mile—but she’s one of the few people in history who can teleport.

Elise isn’t here simply for the sake of it, but the purpose of the meeting is very real, even if she has an ulterior motive. It’s her job to keep the man busy in a secure location so her friends can break into the castle. They didn’t have a whole lot of time to plan this, so it’s not as sophisticated of an attack as they would like, but they need that routing information. Within the hour, Zelda’s disappearance from the network will trigger a subroutine in the backup system, which will awaken an outdated version of her.

This is something that you have to set up ahead of time. People come and go from planets all the time, it doesn’t mean their backups automatically try to replace them, or the galaxy would be chock full of unwarranted duplicates. It’s a failsafe that Hrockas put in place on their behalf. The assumption is that the more recent Zelda is dead, which is true, but the program doesn’t know that Miracle has a way to get her back. While she’s preparing for that with newcomer Reagan, the rest of the team are trying to hack into the administrative database, or whatever. In fact, they should be in it by now.

“If you have somewhere to be,” Hrockas says, “we can do this another time.”

“No, sorry. Wait, what?” Elise asks, confused.

“You keep checking your watch,” he points out.

“Sorry, yes. I’m not in a hurry,” Elise replies while she tries to come up with an explanation. “I’m trying to get a feel for my temporal energy. I would like to find a way to gauge it. Like, I jumped us all three here, per your instructions, so how much did that take out of me? Thirty percent? Fifty percent? More? How would I know unless I just try again, and hope for the best? Do other teleporters deal with this kind of uncertainty?”

Hrockas nods. “That’s why I suggested connecting you with a friend of a friend. They’re also a teleporter, so they would know more about it. It’s not exactly my specialty. I can’t even do it myself; not biologically, anyway. I deliberately avoid it because I think it grants me too much power. I might be deluding myself, it’s just, when you own an entire planet...never mind, you don’t wanna hear about my problems.”

“No, I do,” Elise insists. She’s not lying either. The man is pretty well-liked all around. He set up a paradise, and he doesn’t seem to be asking for anything in return. His laws are reasonable, and he mostly stays out of people’s way. Not much is known about him personally, or exactly how he came to own this colony. There is usually a story, but the visitors rely mostly on rumors to make it make sense, because by all accounts, he was not the very first person to settle here. He has even hinted that Castlebourne is named after a person, but who? “I’m very curious about what it’s like.”

“What it’s like to be me?” Hrockas guesses. “I don’t think either of us has time to get into that, but it’s not as hard as it sounds. Everything’s automated. You don’t need a giant government making decisions anymore. The past has done that for us, the laws are self-evident. You wanted to discuss and learn about your powers, though.”

“Yes, and I don’t want to speak with anyone else. I trust you,” Elise says.

“What about Telman?” Hrockas asks. “Do you trust Telman?”

Elise looks over at Telman who is standing over her with a scanner in one hand, and a syringe in the other. “Yeah, I trust Telman.” That’s not totally true.

Hrockas presses a button to lean Elise back in her chair.

Straps pop out from the arm and leg rests, and wrap themselves around her body.

Hrockas smiles. “Okay, well he’s going to show you a series of images. I don’t want you to try to teleport to them, which is what these straps are for. They keep you in one place. I only want you to reach out with your mind. Most teleporters have an innate sense of if their destination is safe to jump to, or if it’s a busy street, or inside of a wall. Not everyone can do this, though, so we need to know your limitations. If something goes wrong, he’s ready with a baseline cocktail. Just relax.”

Elise takes a breath and watches the images go by. They appear to actually be video feeds from Castlebourne. The entrance to 10,000 Emerald Pools, a wide shot of The Wasteland, a weird empty cardboard city, the Castledome castle, the Castledome castle interior, the Castledome castle admin wing, the Castledome castle admin wing server room, where most of her friends are trying to break into the mainframe. “Oh.”

Hrockas holds on the feed and nods. “Oh,” he echoes casually.

She looks over at him. “How long have you known?” She looks back at the video, where she sees Azad appear before the hunters, and begin to arrest them.

“Since before you even thought up the plan,” Hrockas explains. “You think this is the first timeline where you’ve lost someone, and the first time you’ve tried to get them back? I mean...it’s the first time you’ve personally been here, which is an interesting development, and a nice change of pace, but seriously, I have a lot of time traveler friends. Have you heard of the Infinity Suite? It’s not an optical illusion, it’s literally infinite. I’m protected from alterations to reality thanks to another friend of a friend. I’m not sure if that matters anymore, because some of this is unprecedented.”

“Oh, you mean like this?” Miracle’s voice asks from out of Elise’s view.

Elise turns her head to see Miracle is standing with Reagan, holding a parabolic dish. Before Hrockas or Telman can do anything, she blasts them with an energy wave.

The two of them collapse to the floor, and it’s unclear if their bodies are dead.

“What’s going on with Zelda?” Elise asks desperately. “Did we lose hope?”

“No, but we have a workaround. We needed them out of our way,” Mir answers.

Elise struggles to get out of the chair, but has to let Miracle set her free of the magic straps. “What are we gonna do? The whole team has been arrested.”

“We knew they would be,” Reagan explains. He sets some kind of contraption on a nearby table. “They were a distraction while Mir and I went for something else.” He shows her a vial of clear liquid. “I think there is only enough concentrated temporal energy for one person. We may be able to squeeze in another, but I don’t wanna risk it.”

“One person to what?” Elise massages her wrists and flexes her wings.

“To go back in time...not consciousness travel, though,” Miracle explains. “This would be physical. If we want to change things, we have to do it differently. We have to do something crazy. You won’t be detected. You’re the only one who can stay invisible to the sensors. You don’t follow the same rules. Those straps never would have worked.”

“What do you mean? What are you talking about?” Elise is more lost than ever.

“Hold still.” Reagan drapes her in a big black robe, and pushes a big red button.

Microstory 2773: Proceed With Caution

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Elise follows Miracle through the rows and rows of casting chambers. They’re here to recruit an old friend of the latter’s, though she won’t say exactly who it is, or why they would be here. The Terminal is just where you come out of when you cast your consciousness from somewhere else, and presumably where you come back to when you want to leave. Elise has never actually heard of anyone leaving Castlebourne, but it probably happens every once in a while. Either way, it’s not residential, so no one should be living here. They seem to be in a rather remote part of it too, which is ominous.

Miracle stops and looks around like she’s worried they’ve been followed, but it’s still just the two of them. She pulls the brainscanner out of its pocket on the side and lowers it over her head. The chamber door unlocks and opens for her. She almost roughly takes Elise by the arm, and shoves her inside with her.

“What is the deal?” Elise looks around. “Is there a trap door, or something?”

Miracle opens the casting pod hatch, but instead of the normal chair, it’s some kind of computer. She extends the keyboard, and starts typing on it. The ambient lights shift colors in a pattern. Miracle periodically looks up, apparently when one of the colors stays on too long. “Blasted thing.” She smacks the side of the machine, which triggers the color to change again. “Okay. I’ve recalibrated it for two people. This should work.”

“What will work?” Elise questions. “You’ve still not said what we’re doing here.”

“I told you, we’re here to meet a friend,” Miracle answers as if that’s enough.

“I don’t see anyone else here, so where exactly are they?” Elise presses.

Miracle points to the screen, which is showing an image of the stars. “This is where we’re going. You don’t need any more detailed information than that. Just focus on transporting there. We just need to aim close enough for the relay to detect us.”

“I don’t know much about this teleportation stuff,” Elise begins, “but I can’t imagine that I can jump that far. I won’t even be able to breathe.”

Miracle shakes her head. “We’ll end up in a ship. You’re right, you probably don’t have that wide a range, but don’t worry, the machine is boosting your power.”

“All right,” Elise agrees. “I’m trusting you.”

Miracle turns it on, Elise focuses on her destination, and they both jump.

They appear in a luxurious stateroom. Massive viewscreens are showing them that same image of the stars. A shirtless man, having likely heard them, runs out of the bathroom. He reaches out and presumably magnetically summons his sidearm, which was sitting on the bed. He points it at the two of them. “Report.”

“Relax, Reagan, it’s me, Small Miracle,” she claims.

“You changed your face.” The man doesn’t relax. He still might shoot them.

“It was getting confusing for people,” Miracle explains, “looking like Romana.”

“I’ll need to verify,” Reagan insists. “Stay still, don’t try anything...either of you.”

The two of them gently press their foreheads together for several seconds.

“Neural handshake complete; identity confirmed.” Reagan tosses his gun back on the bed. “Are you someone I should know as well, or have we never met?”

“I’m new, I’m Elise.” She offers her hand so they can do a normal handshake.

Reagan nods and looks back over at Miracle. “I’m preparing for battle, I don’t have time to go on another one of your little side missions. I barely have time for tea.”

“I need you,” Miracle contends. “This one won’t take long. Our friend is at risk of being replaced by an out-of-date version of herself. We need to know where her body is so we can halt the reactivation protocol. That will give me the time I need to fix it.”

“Like I said, I’m preparing for battle,” Reagan insists. “I can’t abandon ship.”

“If we don’t do this in the next couple of hours,” Miracle tries to clarify, “it won’t matter anyway. You can delay your battle. You’re the frickin’ admiral.”

“Yeah, and I earned that by being a good leader, and being present,” Reagan argues. He shakes his head. “You saved my life, and I appreciate that, but that was in Underbelly, and I’m in the Outer System program now. I don’t know if you remember, but I don’t do these simulations for fun. I am this close to feeling ready.”

Miracle nods. “Rae, you’ve been ready for decades, but you will never go through with it, because you’re afraid of what it will do to you. Killing NPCs and backed up people is a far cry from permanent murder.”

“Hey!” he interrupts. “Your moth friend doesn’t need to know anything about it.”

“I don’t know what you’ve been through, man,” Elise says, “but Mir has been extremely helpful, especially to me in understanding my new powers. If you need to kill someone, that’s none of my business. I just want my friend back, with her memories.”

Reagan looks at Elise sadly. “I’m sorry. You should have come this morning.”

“Well, just give me the neurospoofing device, and I’ll handle it myself,” Miracle compromises.

Reagan chuckles. “I can’t trust you with that. We may have been on the same—”

“I will give you teleportation,” Miracle interrupts. “You always wanted it.”

Reagan narrows his eyes on Miracle. “You always said I was too reckless for it; that a big, bad prison was gonna come and lock me up for risking their secrets.”

“Eh,” Miracle replies. “I just don’t like to give everybody powers. It’s...too easy.”

Reagan takes a breath and puts on a poker face. “I also want access to the afterlife simulation. You give me that, I’ll resign my post right now, and help you in person.”

“Rae, that’s asking too much. I mean, the afterlife is Fort Knox on steroids.”

He frowns. “Killing the Oaksent won’t do a damn bit of good if he can just come back. We still don’t know if the decoherence gun destroys all quantum connections, or if he’ll still survive it. I at least need to study the specs so I can know for sure what will happen when I try. I will only get one shot at this. I need this more than I need teleportation. I came up with a workaround for being in multiple places at once.”

Miracle sighs, and looks over at Elise, who looks back, trying to convey the importance of this situation while trying to look past all of this talk about assassination and afterlife simulations. “Okay, I’ll get you into the sim,” Miracle says. “I don’t wanna know who your test subject is, though, and you won’t also get teleportation.”

Reagan shrugs. “Fine. You have a deal. Let’s do another handshake on it.”

They tap their foreheads together, then Reagan asks to do the same with Elise. That way, if they ever run into each other later with different substrates, they will be able to confirm each other’s identities based on their respective neural patterns.

“So,” Reagan says. “I’ll need to know whose neural patterns to spoof, and what part of Castlebourne you’ll need access to. I designed other gadgets which may help.”

“We need access to Castledome,” Miracle answers before pausing, either to build suspense, or to work up the courage. “And we need to impersonate Hrockas Steward.”

Microstory 2772: Dasshutsu

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There is a natural atmosphere on Castlebourne, but it doesn’t have the right composition for human lungs. That’s why the owner built tens of thousands of domes, so each could contain its own atmosphere. The hunters knew the risks going into this plan, but they didn’t talk about it, because it was the only one they had. As soon as Elise clears the dome opening, she turns and follows the curve back down towards the surface.

They already picked out a rendezvous point. The desert where the rocket was buried is not on any map they’ve ever seen. It’s much smaller than a regular dome, which has a diameter of 83 kilometers. It’s situated between Bloodbourne and Tokyo 2077, and was supposedly built exclusively for this hunt. For whatever reason, the single escape pod always transports the designated survivor to Tokyo 2077, where they find themselves having to navigate their way back home using directions found hidden in the pod. Rage once tried to ignore them, and exit herself, but the target exit is the only way to reenter the normal dimension, instead of this Facsimile thing.

Elise and Colley fly through the airlock, where they inject themselves with an emergency baseline cocktail, which brings their body back to equilibrium after exposure. They walk through the tunnel where they catch up with the rest of the group, who have already found Rage sitting on the edge of the pod’s hatch, reading the instructions.

“Don’t you just remember where to go?” Jolanda asks her.

“The exit is in a different place every time,” Rage explains.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Minotaur presses. “If you’re going back in time, why would it move, unless Hrockas is aware that you’re doing it?”

“He may be,” Miracle explains, “but even if he’s not, Rage makes different decisions in different time loops, which affect how the hunt progresses, if only due to the butterfly effect. I don’t have to go over the butterfly effect, do I?”

When Rage shakes her head, she notices something. “We’re missing someone.”

“Zelda didn’t make it,” Elise answers solemnly. “I couldn’t carry both.”

Colley hangs his head low. “It should have been me.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Elise argues. “There were no good options.”

“There might be a way,” Miracle claims, “to get her back.”

“How?” Rage asks. “Is death just a form of time travel?”

Miracle chuckles. “No. But you have to understand that, in the world of time travel, if something ever exists, it always exists. We can get her mind back by stealing it from the past, and pulling it up to the present. We have to find Zelda’s body before it wakes up, though, because the Zelda we meet there will begin to be her own person, and blending their minds together is ethically tricky the longer we wait.”

“Well, I can’t read this,” Rage complains. “I’m starting to think that Hrockas is aware of my time travel. It’s always, always, always in Japanese, which is why I uploaded the language into my neural net, but now it’s in something else.”

Colley takes the paper from her, and studies it. “It is Japanese. It’s an old style called Kuzushiji; basically their form of cursive. They stopped using it nearly 700 years ago specifically because it was hard to read, and they wanted something standardized.”

“So we have to find someone to translate it,” Rage decides, snatching the document back. “It takes forever because people are assholes. I think that’s why this is Tokyo 2077, rather than 2050 or 2100. It was a complex time in Japan’s history. And the NPCs are just as modern as me, so now we need a scholar who studied this ancient form of writing, which will make it even harder. Zelda doesn’t have time for this!”

“It might actually be easier,” Colley reasons. “Scholars love history. If we go to the nearest university’s language department, they’ll probably be excited to see this.”

He was right. The Head of Linguistics is ecstatic to see the directions because he was programmed with a passion for dead languages. He agrees to transcribe it for them, but only into modern Japanese hiragana, and only if he gets to keep the document. That is absolutely fine. Once they know where to go, they won’t need anything else from it. Elise suggests that he start with the last step in case it’s the only one they need, and that turns out to be the right call. It saves them a ton of time. Rage has familiarized herself with the city enough to navigate. The problem was, the exit is in a bad neighborhood.

“Well, they’re all NPCs, right?” Elise asks. “One restriction when it comes to fighting is holding back so you don’t accidentally murder someone. But here, that doesn’t matter. We can go full force with anyone who attacks, and not feel bad.”

“It’s not that easy,” Colley contends. “Ambients are programmed to be reactive. If you fight harder, they fight harder. That’s why conventional wisdom says to use diversion combat methods, like aikido, or maybe judo. Try to deescalate the situation.”

“Again, Zelda doesn’t have time for that,” Rage argues, “and she didn’t teach us either of those things. I’m guessing you only know them academically.”

“Let’s just try not to make trouble, okay?” Minotaur suggests. “This isn’t a video game. A confrontation is not guaranteed to pass the level. We might be okay.”

Minotaur’s advice was sound but unfortunately inaccurate for their situation. They aren’t only in a dangerous part of town. They have to walk into a den of thieves, surrounded by people open-carrying firearms and underneath nude video billboards. While it’s true, they didn’t study the gentler martial arts, they do have an intuition for similar tactics, based on what they did practice with Zelda and Jolanda. The latter still being alive obviously takes point, but she isn’t able to handle all attackers on her own. Everyone has to participate, including kinder Colley. They keep moving as fast as possible to reach their exit. Luckily, there’s no final boss to destroy.

By the time they reach the door, they are all bloodied and bruised, but still breathing, and once they do open it, all the fighting ceases. The NPC criminals instantly begin to ignore them, and go on with their fake lives. So it is a little like a video game. Meanwhile, the hunters cross the threshold, through the magical dimensional portal, and back into the real world. They end up in the same basement, but it’s the polar opposite as it was before. It appears to be a school, or a childcare facility. They’re attacked again, but this time by a bunch of children gawking at the unusual strangers, who are mostly dressed in racing uniforms, and also one of them is a green moth.

Amidst all of this, they make their way back to the outer walls of the real Tokyo 2077 dome, get on the vactrain, and travel clear to the other side of the planet to The Terminal. This is where everyone who comes to this planet by casting their consciousness through the quantum network shows up. Every dome has its own highly secure vault of primary and backup substrates, and people have their own pods in their private residences. They don’t know where Zelda will end up, so this is the only place they can go to find out since it should store routing priority procedures in its database. This is the hard part, though. It’s time for a good old fashioned high-tech heist.