Spaghetti West: Strange New Worlds (Part VI)

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While Sugar was talking into the microphone, trying to appeal to the masses, she was quickly generating a network portal for them to access. Though their systems were not entirely interoperable, everything was technically built on the same architecture. Computers were invented on Earth, so every civilization that spawned from it should be compatible with that technology, even if it required some tricky integrations. With Desulforudis, it was relatively easy, almost as simple as sending a web link for them to click.

Sugar wanted their input. She wanted them all to respond to her queries, and tell her how they felt about Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, the Milky Way Galaxy, and just sort of everything, including their own government. Their answers were surprising. They weren’t just isolationists. That didn’t even begin to cover it. They were hateful, mean-spirited, and if Sugar and Liselot could be so bold, potentially downright evil. The AI which aggregated their responses reported a great deal of comments that it interpreted to be racist, though their vocabulary was just a little different than standard English.

It was heartbreaking and hard to read. An entire civilization of misanthropes. How did they ever manage to survive together? If they bonded with each other over hating everyone else, she couldn’t see a common thread. There had to be something deeper...something preventing them from imploding. The two of them stood there for a moment, trying to think of a solution to this. How could they get through to the Desulforudisians?

Liselot’s face suddenly looked puzzled. “Wait. Why would we need to do that?”

“Why would we need to...try to understand these people?” Sugar assumed. “Oh, um...you’re right. We can just write these people off. They live in the sticks of a distant galaxy, and an examination of their technology shows that they are not capable of reaching anyone we care about, not even Dardius. Though, we do need to find out if they have any enemies. Maybe someone else is trying to attack them, and Bida just got caught in the cosmic crossfire. The detectives call it victimology.”

“All right,” Liselot said with a shrug. “Punch it in.”

Sugar said it out loud as she was typing, even though she could have plainly used voice-to-text. “At the risk of the answer being literally everyone in the universe, who might have reason to attack you with charged Kugelblitz black holes?”

They waited for everyone to input their respective answers. The whole world had stopped for them, like an extremely cynical and depressing remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, which was saying a lot.

Liselot rolled her eyes and took it upon herself to command the aggregator, “filter the answers that say some variation of everyone. They’re either trolls, or stupid.”

Then there it was. After removing every result that just basically blamed every non-Desulforudisian, only one remained. They don’t care about the Desulforudisians, or the Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bidans. They’re trying to kill me. If your planet is being attacked, it’s because there must be another dupe of me hiding out there too. I’m surprised he made it that far, but I suppose it proves our enemy has intergalactic range.

Sugar and Liselot exchanged a glance. Sugar then zeroed in on that one reply, cancelling the global address. She used voice-to-text this time. “Where are you?”

What are you going to do with me? the mysterious target asked.

“I’m going to get you off this world, for one. My ship can handle a black hole or two. We need to get you away from these, uhh...innocent people, and then we’re going to find your Bidan dupe to pick him up too.”

The next response took a long time to come through. “Oh, no thanks.”

“Ah,” Liselot said. “He’s hiding out here on purpose. He probably knew the KBHs were coming, and chose certain planets specifically because they were more likely to have the means of combatting the attacks.”

“Yeah, that’s my guess too,” Sugar agreed. “I don’t know if he thinks we can’t track him, or what...” She started fiddling with the console to trace the pings. She sighed.

“Problem?” Liselot asked.

“Maybe it’s that he knows we can’t track him.” Sugar growled.

“If he’s the type of guy to get an enemy to send countless singularities after every version of him, no matter who gets in the way, we shouldn’t be surprised.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Sugar violently rubbed her eyes. “Okay. We’re goin’ nuclear.” She opened the global address again. “This is happening because of one person. We don’t know who they are, or where they are, but they do not belong on your planet. They’re a foreigner. It sounds like you don’t like those. If you have any information, tell us, and we’ll be on our way. If we never find them, we never leave, so there’s your incentive.” She slammed the microphone toggle off, annoyed at having to resort to this.

Liselot peered at the screen. “Lots of different coordinates. They can’t all be our guy. They’re turning on their neighbors, trying to get us to do their dirty work.”

“Yeah, we found the keystone holding this all together. This could end the world,” Sugar mused, “eventually. Thistle, synthesize all tracing data we were able to gather from the target. Cross-reference it with the tattle-tales. Isolate the most likely coordinates. Re-ping our mystery man if you have to.”

“Processing...” Thistle reported. “Coordinates locked; dead zone.”

“Why would it be him if it’s a dead zone?” Liselot asked, noticing Sugar’s smile.

“He doesn’t wanna be caught, so he blocked all signals, and out of every patch of land on this God forsaken world, it’s the only area like that. If you want to hide, you don’t go somewhere remote, you get lost in a sea of people who look just like you. Stay here.”

Sugar teleported herself to the dead zone. Under her feet was a broken device. It was still slightly warm from having recently been in use. She looked around. She wasn’t the only person here. It looked like some kind of homeless encampment. So they did have some hate left over for internal use.

She switched her watch to megaphone mode. “I’m looking for someone who doesn’t belong here. Anyone who tells me which one it is gets a minishuttle, fully stocked with a bed, hygiene amenities, and a food synthesizer.”

Everyone pointed to the same guy. When he realized he had been caught, he disappeared.

“Do you all have teleportation abilities?” Sugar asked the unhoused.

They shook their heads.

“Your prize will be here in a moment.” Sugar adjusted her watch to breach-scanning mode as she was walking over towards the spot where the target was standing. Her watch locked onto the next coordinates, so she jumped away. She had to jump a few times, but she kept following his trail until she caught up with him.

“Just leave me alone!” the man screamed, not bothering to escape again.

“You answered my question! You obviously want this to end!” Sugar shouted.

“You can’t make me go,” he argued. “It would be a death sentence.”

“I’m the only one who can save you,” Sugar reasoned. “These people are holding back the KBHs for now, but how long do you figure it will be before one of them gets sick of it, and turns on the others? What happens when a KBH threatens a competing nation, or whatever it is? This is not a sustainable sanctuary for you. Come with me willingly.”

“They...they can always find me,” he explained. “If I leave, these people will be safe, but I’ll be more exposed. Are you sure your ship can survive that?”

“I’m quite certain,” Sugar confirmed. “It doesn’t have to exist in realspace.”

He tried to wrap his brain around it. “Fine.”

She took his hand and teleported them back to the ship. “Thistle. Did you already prepare that minishuttle I promised?”

“I’m preparing a full-sized shuttle,” Thistle answered, “based on the scope of aid.”

“Thank you,” Sugar said as she was dragging the stranger into the cell. “Once it’s ready to go, stripped of its flight capabilities, go ahead and dispatch it to ‘em.”

“They’re going to kill each other over it if there’s not enough for everyone, or if others come to take it,” Liselot warned.

Sugar watched the shuttle disappear from the hangar. She just kept staring at its now-empty dock. “That’s not our problem anymore. We’ve done enough for these jerks. Thistle, take us back into orbit, and activate a trans-ejection burn in any random direction. Get us away from this fly speck on the ass of the universe as fast as possible.”

A duplicate, by all philosophical measures, was their own unique self. Sure, the two versions could share a lot of the same memories, but their neurology was different, and every second that passed following their split increased the divide between them. Even so, on the quantum level, there was enough similar data to match them. It was like the modern version of a paternity test, which was perfected in the 21st century. They weren’t 100% the same, but close enough within a margin of error, and that was all it took to find the target’s other dupes.

Now that Sugar’s ship had experienced passing through a wormhole safely, it was better at it. It learned how to compensate for the gravitational perturbations during transit, allowing for a much smoother trip. None of these wormholes ever took them to the point of origin, as far as they were aware, and no pattern emerged. Each time they pushed a KBH back, and tried to follow it, they ended up in a random star system, quite often doubling back to worlds they had already been to, thanks to a likely tracking delay.

Most of the planets were in the Miridir galaxy. None of them was welcoming. Some were almost as hostile towards visitors as Desulforudis. It sounded like they specifically left because they didn’t like how soft Dardius had become. It wasn’t Sugar’s place to judge or help. She just fired up her quantum locator, scooped up the alternate hiding out there, and bounced. None of them gave her his name, but they all looked like the same guy, so it wasn’t hard to be sure that she had found the right one.

Finally, they had some evidence that they had rounded all of them up. They were back in the Tau Ceti system. She beamed up another human target, and waited for another attack to give them another window out of here. It never really came. Sure, more KBHs appeared, but every time she pushed one back and entered the wormhole, it spit her out somewhere around Tau Ceti again.

“This must be it,” Liselot decided. “We have them all, and now the KBHs are coming because this is where they all are.”

“Well, I don’t want to overload the defense grid, so we should leave. I must say, I’m rather glad it at least brought us back to the Milky Way, so we wouldn’t be so far from home. I don’t know what it’s going to take to find that damn source, though. It could be in Miridir, for all we know.”

“Well, where are we gonna go?” Liselot questioned.

Sugar stared into space for a moment. “Three hundred years ago, a seer asked me to personally colonize Waizidi, and set up a facility there. No one is allowed to go there but me, which I was able to accomplish using an ungodly amount of energy credits, and a colonial law loophole that allowed me to install defensive measures back then which are illegal today. Honestly, I forgot it was a thing. They didn’t tell me what to do with it. They just had me set the trap, and I moved on with my life in other places.”

“That’s only about one and a half light years away,” Liselot pointed out.

Sugar nodded. “It will take us less than a day to get there using the reframe engine.” She took a deep breath and started tapping on the console. “Thistle. Plot a course. I’m also uploading a hazard map into navigation which will show you the path to avoid my booby traps.” Sugar looked back at Liselot. “If my traps have held, it should be empty. They can send as many KBHs as they want; it will hurt no one. But I need to know something.”

“You need to know who those men in hock are,” Liselot figured.

Sugar went back down the corridors where the cells were packed with human targets of unknown origins. “The first man to tell me his name gets to go free. I will make contact with friends of mine who can get you tens of billions of light years away in an instant, but I need to know who I’m saving. Because the way I see it, if you’re all dead, the KBHs stop coming, no matter where your bodies happen to be.”

“Denver Strong!” they all cried at the same time.

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Microstory 2790: Spoiler Alert: It’s a Parachute

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They’re moving everything out of the backyard. It’s the only space big enough for what they need to do. Lawn chairs, the table, the cornhole game things; it all has to go. Jande asks Ersence if she can go around stripping everyone’s bed. Some might not be so happy with that, and she doesn’t care what people think, so she can still get it done. Jande carries the sewing machine downstairs himself and sets it on the patio. The point where it gets the best faux sunlight is too far from the wall outlet, so he has to go around looking for an extension cord too. He sets everything up, Ersence gets all the bedding in a pile, and they should be ready to go. He doesn’t know how long it will take, though.

“Why are you asking me?” Dare questions. Everyone’s looking at him.

“You’re the sewing expert,” Jande tells him.

Dare winces. “What the hell gave you that idea?”

“The sewing kit was under your bed,” Jande points out. “Aren’t you a sewer?”

Dare rolls his eyes. “I took the kit because I wanted to learn how to sew. I didn’t even get a chance to try because we got wrapped up in getting rid of the smart dust.”

“Well, shit,” Jande laments. “This whole plan is contingent upon someone being able to sew all these sheets together.” He lifts his head. “So who here can do it? Come on, don’t be shy. Even if you’ve only done it once, at least that’s somewhere to start.”

Ximena raises her hand. “Um...no, not me, but, uh, Mayor can.”

“Mayor,” Jande echoes. “The guy currently playing footsie with Death. He’s the only one with any experience sewing? How did that happen? Was this all planned?”

“Haoran, how is he doing?” Ersence pushes. “Can he move? We could set him up in a chair so he only has to move his arms and hands. There’s a pedal. If he needs someone to hold a pedal down, well, I can certainly volunteer for that.”

Haoran stares at her blankly. “There is a torn shirt in his stomach that reads Y2K Princess. No, Ersence. He can’t move. Best I can do is carefully drag him to the patio.”

“That might be enough,” Jande decides. “He can instruct one of us how to do it.”

Haoran shakes his head, very annoyed. “If he needs to sleep, he needs to sleep.”

“We’re doing this for him,” Tamerlane reminds him. “If he wants to live, he’ll stay awake long enough to teach the sewer. I saw an epinephrine injector in the med kit—”

“You are not giving my patient epinephrine, you fucking psycho. He’ll bleed out in minutes.” Haoran makes himself calm down a little. “Though...I could theoretically...crack it open to control the dosage myself, and get some lucidity out of him. But only for a crash course. We’re talking about a sewing machine here, not a quantum terminal. Once he’s done teaching, he goes back on the sedative to recover.”

“Don’t use too many sedatives,” Kool warns. “We probably won’t get more.”

“And who else needs them?” Haoran questions. “They’re not recreational.”

“I’m not talking about myself,” Kool reacts. “I’m just saying...”

“I’m just saying,” Jande interrupts, “that we need to decide who is the best person for the job. It should be someone with nimble fingers who picks up new skills quickly.” He scans the crowd again. “Really? Still no takers. Do you all want Mayor to die?”

Still no response. No one is guilted into volunteering. They probably don’t want something to go wrong and be blamed for someone’s death. Death is so rare these days.

Jande sighs. “Fine. As a farmer, I guess I have decent hand-eye coordination. But we all have to contribute. Nap time’s over, people. Someone other than me or Mr. Gao, go get our patient, and carefully carry him out here so he can see the machine. There’s a lot of fabric here. I’m going to need help wrangling it. I’ll sit at this little chair, and control the section I’m working on as needed, but it will be a group effort.”

Jande sits down while everyone else is getting ready. He wants to study the sewing machine before he tries anything to maximize the time he has with his injured teacher. It looks relatively simple, but the real danger could be messing up after Mayor falls back asleep, and not knowing how to fix it.

Once Jande actually begins, he soon finds that it’s not as simple as moving the fabric and thread in the right way, and pushing the right buttons. It’s tiring. After twenty minutes, his body has kind of already had enough. He doesn’t keel over and pass out, but he starts making little mistakes which could cost whoever uses this thing their life. It doesn’t have to be pretty, but they only have so much thread, so they have to make sure it holds. Fortunately, he wasn’t the only one paying attention.

A few others tag in so they can cycle the responsibility. It’s like a firing squad. If it tears somewhere, they won’t know whose fault it was. In fact, realizing this, Tamerlane suggests that everyone gets a turn on the machine, so they don’t end up being able to zero in on one person. Of course, they hope it holds together anyway, which is why everyone’s work gets checked and stress-tested, but it has to be fair.

Now comes the time when they have to decide who the hell is gonna use this thing. Van declared that whoever showed up would get the antibiotics that Mayor needed, but also that there would be a second prize. Of course, to maintain that tension the producers love so much, he didn’t say what the prize would be. It could be as simple as a slice of pizza, or the chance to name an opponent to be kicked out of the race entirely. That was Zanele’s random idea, and she shouldn’t have said it, because now the producers can use it, assuming they didn’t think of it before.

Jande has been the de facto leader throughout a lot of this, but not all of it. He literally has the loudest voice, except for Mayor. That’s really the only reason. Right?

“Wait, why would I be in charge of deciding?” Haoran asks.

“You don’t have to decide,” Jande says, “but you have to at least decide how we decide. You’re the doctor. You’re the only one who can’t go. The rest of us are fair game.”

“It sounds like you still wanna lead, like you did the sewing challenge,” Haoran reasons. “Candidates vote for themselves every election. So get on up here, big guy.”

“Hold on.” Pryce shakes his head with a chuckle. “We don’t need a moderated debate. We can just vote. All in favor of Jande being the one to go, raise your hands.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. How did I suddenly become the only one in contention? That’s not fair. Who votes for Pryce instead?”

No one raises their hand, not even his literal wife. So Jande has to trust the parachute that he was primarily responsible for putting together. Which actually is somewhat fair. It’s not as bad as he thought. The ride down is cold as hell, but mostly boring. The annoying part is as soon as he lands, the house does too, having been lowered safely on the hydraulics. It was timed perfectly to make him look like a chump.

Van walks over with his microphone. “Welcome to the next challenge! We lied. Before you get the antibiotics, you have to compete in our Sudden Death round. Whoever kills Jande Ter Avest before the timer runs out becomes the Superintendent. If Jande survives the day, we keep going. Okay, three, two, one,” he rattles off, “go!”

Microstory 2789: Well...They Will Sew Him Up At Least

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The candidates created something called a chore wheel. Every time they clear the entire house of smart dust surveillance, the producers replace them. They are spending a great deal of time hunting for the dispensers. That is one of the jobs, but there are others. First, the dust has to be blinded and grounded. That takes oil or glue, which can be found in their cooking spray and hairspray. Once the spies are coated, they fall to the ground, but they can still hear. They have to be mopped or shampooed up. Any dust that was already on a surface has to be wiped up too. The rags are then microwaved to destroy the miniature electronics. The rags are cleaned, inventory is recounted, and the whole process starts over again the next day.

They can’t figure out why the producers are doing this, though it might be because of how cheap the dust is to replenish. They don’t have to come out and argue about it because it’s not a big deal to put things back how they were. But for a few hours every night, it’s quiet. Or it’s not. Some are starting to get paranoid that the producers have plenty of other ways to keep the broadcast going, and that it doesn’t matter what they try. The dispenser hunters are also responsible for searching for other surveillance equipment. They have so far found nothing, and they’re running out of time.

Jande stops hearing the hissing sound of the nearby spray bottle. He looks over.

Kool is shaking it, looking at it, shaking it again, and trying to spray again.

“I told you that we were using too much,” one of the Eyrenlanders argues. “It doesn’t take a lot. We should have been more conservative with it.”

“We only have one flashlight, and we’re out of batteries too,” Dare argues. “We couldn’t hold it in place while we sprayed the entire house. Wide spray; cover the whole space. That was the only way to do it, and we all agreed. You said nothing before.”

The Eyrenlander woman plops down in the egg chair. “Well, now it’s over, and my hair looks like a mess. And we’ve not had a decent meal in days because we can’t cook with oil anymore. How did our ancestors survive without synthesizers?”

Jande sits on the ottoman’s edge. “We need to consider the possibility that we were never meant to overcome this as a challenge.”

“Why have they not given us any challenges since day one then?” she asks.

“To make us stew,” Ersence offers. She tosses her own spray bottle in the trash. “They want tension, they want conflict. Well...they’re getting it. Just now, you’re complaining about it, and I bet the audience is eating it up.”

“Oh, so it’s my fault?” the Eyrenlander spits at Ersence.

“You have an amazing ability to make everything about you,” Ersence responds.

The Eyrenlander woman leans forward and vigorously talks with her hands. “You literally just blamed me!”

“It was one example, ya scratchcather!” Ersence cries.

“All right, let’s try to not be so ironic here,” Jande suggests. “We’ve decided that that’s what they want, right? So let’s not give it to ‘em, and maybe they’ll have to intervene. We might hate what they do next, but at least we’ll get some feedback.”

An Eyrenlander man comes in from the fake backyard. “You want feedback?” He aggressively powerwalks through the room. “I’ll get you feedback.” He picks up one of the wooden dining room chairs and starts to bang the leg against the window.

Jande stands up to put a stop to it, but Ersence holds him back. “No. You can’t help him. You would only escalate the issue. The best thing we can do is sit back and stay out of his way. He’s like an animal right now. I’ve seen it in my men. They get cabin fever, and they won’t listen to reason. Don’t give him ammo. Don’t give them footage.”

“This isn’t actually the 21st century,” Dare reminds him. “The glass won’t break.”

The glass breaks.

As it turns out, their ground level house is actually high up in the air. The open window reveals not open sky, but clouds. The sudden change in pressure tries to suck the Eyrenlander man out. Jande jumps up and manages to catch him by the ankle at the last second. It’s out of the frying pan and into the fire, though, because not all of the glass fell away from the frame. The man has fallen right on top of some shards. They cut deep into his stomach. Blood spills out of him like a torn bag of milk. They lift him off.

“Haoran!” Jande takes off his shirt and desperately tries to plug the wounds, but some of the glass is still in there. “Haoran! Get down here right now!”

“He can’t hear you in all this wind!” Ersence explains. She runs off.

Haoran shows up and dives down to the floor. “Move your hands,” he orders. “Do you have any medical training, Mr. Ter Avest?”

“Not really,” Jande answers truthfully. People don’t die. In his world, if someone gets hurt this bad, you just let them pass on and come back in a new body.

“Okay, good instincts with your shirt.” Haoran starts to make adjustments. He takes off his own to add to it. “But you were applying pressure. That’s just gonna squirt out more blood. We can still stop the bleeding. I’m gonna need you to put your hands right here. Yes, right there, but don’t push down or forwards. Kool?”

Kool kneels down without hesitating.

“Kool,” Haoran goes on, “do what he’s doing, but below the glass. Once you’re both in place, push towards each other, carefully but not delicately. Good. Very good.” He looks up. “Dare, get that squeeze bottle that Pryce uses. Wash it with soap and water, inside and out. Fill it with one of those vodka bottles from the freezer, then dump it out, rinse it out again, and fill it with room temperature water. Got it?” After Dare leaves, he shifts his gaze. “Ersence, go find that sewing kit. The last I saw, it was in the girls’ room.”

“No, it’s under my bed!” Dare yells from the kitchen.

“Understood!” Ersence runs off yet again.

When Dare comes back, Haoran uses the water to flush bits of glass and blood out of the wound. Now that he has a better look at what they’re dealing with, he frowns and scans the crowd, which has since been filled out with the rest of the candidates. “None of our bedsheets are good. Kool, is that shirt cotton?”

Kool takes it off and checks under the collar. “That’s what the tag says.”

“Hold please.” Haoran takes the shirt and stands. He waits for a moment. “If ever there was a time for medical intervention, this would be it!” he calls out to the aether. “If you don’t come in with a medical team, you know what I have to do. It’s not safe, and it’s not pretty, but I’ll do it. You have until the cloth finishes boiling.” He starts walking.

Haoran returns with a long strip of Kool’s former shirt. After Pryce pulls the last shard from the wound, Haoran stuffs the cloth in to replace it as it’s the only way to stop internal bleeding while they wait for clotting. Then he sews the guy up, saying he’ll need another surgery later if he makes it that long. What he really needs now...are antibiotics.

Microstory 2788: You Can See Smart Dust With a Flashlight in a Dark Room

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When they’re not running through challenges or going to funerals, the candidates live in a single house together. They’ve not actually competed in anything else since the platform event, but more are theoretically coming. Until then, Tamerlane Pryce believes that the house itself is just as much part of the contest as any formal game.

“Back even before my time, reality shows were blowing up,” Tamerlane explains. He’s standing in front of everyone in the communal living area like a college lecturer. “They weren’t documentaries that maintained boundaries to adhere to cinéma vérité rules. They were money-making machines, designed to get viewers hooked, and advertisers drooling. The primary purpose was to put a bunch of people together in stressful scenarios, and generate friction. Some shows didn’t even have challenges. People were just there, letting their conflicting personalities produce the entertainment.

“These kinds of shows died out—not because broadcast networks decided to be more ethical, or because viewers wanted more intellectual programming—but because tensions gradually died out naturally. It’s a cliché for a reason. Transitioning to a post-scarcity economy didn’t only end poverty overnight. It took away a lot of perfectly healthy societal conflict too. It’s okay to argue with your neighbors about whether your trash bins should be left on corners of the driveway, or on the curb, partially in the grass. But when everyone moved to megastructure arcologies, those problems disappeared, because now everyone has the same trash chute in the same place.”

He’s right about that. People mostly don’t have little personal problems anymore because everything they genuinely need is provided. Things only get hairy when your ambitions call for something greater, like, say, a ship, or the superintendency of a whole planet. So why is it that they’re being filmed when they’re just trying to live together in this big—but still, paradoxically, a little too small—house? Or even are they? The candidates can’t say for sure, because the whole point of smart dust is that it’s hard to spot. They have been stripped of more than their advanced substrates. They don’t have access to the kind of technology they would need to be certain of anything. They need to find the exact text of whatever contract the coordinators think they signed.

“Are you on your way to reaching a point, or are we trapped in a circle?” one of the Eyrenlanders snarks at Pryce.

Pryce smiles like he appreciates the question. “The point is, I think the smart dust question is just another challenge, which is why we’ve not been pulled out for something else in the last few days. I don’t know what they had planned for the funeral. I’m guessing no one predicted that little Pickpocket would crash the party, but we have to assume that everything is a test. We can’t move on unless we solve this.”

“Well, you’re the genius, aren’t you?” a different Eyrenlander asks. Jande is refusing to learn any of their names. If any of the non-Eyrenlanders gets the job, it could be okay, but he doesn’t trust any of the five—or rather, the four remaining. “I mean, that’s why you were in prison, because even before people could download knowledge into their brains, you became the father of consciousness transference, right?”

Tamerlane nods. “I admit, this is a blind spot for me. I was hyperfocused on that technology, and essentially ignored all other fields, such as covert surveillance. So if there’s a way to detect smart dust without a literal smart dust detector, I don’t know it.”

Dare Finnian has been slouched on the couch as he’s listening to this, drinking a beverage known as a soda. Van and the other producers must really be getting their cues from 21st century broadcasting because soft drinks haven’t been popular since pretty much back then. He sighs, downs the rest of his drink, and crushes the can against his forehead before standing up. I’m gonna get another. Anyone want one?” He pivots on his hips back and forth. “Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Cool.” He walks off.

“Like nanotechnology, smart dust has to be powered by something.” It’s the blonde girl who tried to leave, and had to complete the first task on one leg. Her name is Priscilla Kool, but everyone calls her Kool. “You can’t make a fusion drive small enough. The containment components alone would be at least the size of a fingernail. Something in the house has to be providing wireless power. All we have to do is shut that off.”

They can hear Dare bangaranging in the kitchen.

“It’s probably just powered by the house,” Ersence reasons. “Even if they gave us access to the main power source and any auxiliary sources, we need that power. I need light to shave. I’m not going to stop shaving. There are some transhumanistic enhancements that even my people don’t shun. That was one of them. I hate body hair.”

More banging around from the kitchen.

“Can we help you find something?” Jande shouts. “Did you forget which one was the refrigerator? It’s the big silver one.”

Dare starts coming back into the room. “No, I hope what I’m looking for isn’t in the fridge. It would be a stupid place to put it. Though, looking at you lot...” He runs back out to the kitchen, then runs back fairly quickly. “No, not in there.”

“Perhaps if you told us what it was?” Jande offers.

Dare starts to open drawers and cabinets in this room now, which are mostly empty, though some contain boardgames or extra blankets. “Did I ever tell you why I became a hermit? Why did I leave society to go live in an asteroid all by myself?”

“You did it for the same reason everyone else does, I’m guessing,” Ersence says. “The individual no longer requires help from the tribe to survive. If you have the common core elements and at least one nanobot, you can make anything.”

Dare nods as he’s continuing to look. “There you are.” He takes out a giant flashlight, and starts to mindlessly hit his palm with it as he talks. “It’s not that I didn’t require people; it’s that other people are a danger. They are uncontrollable variables, which threaten each and every one of us. I ran away from people because I suffer from extreme paranoia, and the drugs didn’t work. They just made me paranoid that I wasn’t being paranoid enough to protect myself. I never felt safer than when I was alone.”

“So why come back?” Kool presses. “Why sign up for this competition?”

Dare smiles. “That’s a story for another time. Right now, we have to find that smart dust. That’s where this thing comes in.”

“The problem is that it’s small, not dark,” an Eyrenlander argues. “It’s not hiding behind corners, or in the carpet. It’s floating all around us...if it exists at all.”

“The darkness, my good man...is precisely what we need! I believe in a thing called love. Madam Tridali, would you please do me the honor?”

Ersence realizes where he’s indicating. She reaches up and switches off the light.

“Regular dust is dull. Smart dust...sparkles.” Dare sweeps the area with the torch.

Okay, there’s the smart dust. Now. What are they going to do about it?

Microstory 2787: It Happened First in Eyrenland

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Uquirapods, and even uquira, are intelligent. They’re not going to be inventing the wheel any time soon, but they do exhibit traits of complex cognition. They recognize human faces, recall shared experiences, and even seem to grasp societal organization structure. They can tell who is in charge, and that may not be a good thing, depending on how much respect they receive from that person. A new farming family, for instance, showed up a few decades ago, and failed to appreciate the value of uquirakind. They didn’t abuse the critters under their purview, but they didn’t treat them particularly nicely either. They didn’t smile or hum in their presence. It was only a job to them.

Their uquira stopped procreating, and simply let their generation die off. The uquirapods moved over to another farm. The family tried to take them back, but that’s not how things are done in Quiratan. Humans serve the land, not the other way around.

A uquirapod can spot the distinctions between a Quiratani, an Eyrenlander, another Bidan, and a non-Bidan. Researchers are trying to figure out how exactly they do this, because scent doesn’t even seem to begin to cover it. Quiratan uquirakind don’t hate Eyrenlanders, but they can definitely tell the difference, and they know that Eyrenland was run differently. The two communities started out about the same, but the uquirakind population was greater in Eyrenland, so scaling up was too tempting to stop.

Since the dead Eyrenlander cannot be buried in his homeland, the burial is happening in Quiratan. His family and friends are all here, along with the Superintendent candidates. As they’re gathering around the grave for the service, uquirapods begin to walk out from the trees and tall grass. Despite not having humanoid faces, they undoubtedly smile, and it doesn’t look like they learned it from the humans. It’s a fascinating example of convergent evolution. They can smile, and they can frown, and while they normally go about their days exhibiting the former, they are right now frowning. They understand that it’s a funeral.

But why join them? Why come to lay an Eyrenlander to rest? Again, they didn’t hate them, but non-Quiratani bodies have died in the area before, and uquirapods never show up for them. Do they know that death usually isn’t final, but it is today?

“They are not here for the Eyrenlander,” Zanele whispers to Jande. Zanele is the only other Quiratani vying for the job. He doesn’t know her that well, but he hears good things. Her family has roots in an Earthan region called Kansas, so they farm a lot of wheat. He’s not aware of her intentions for this job, but it wouldn’t be the worst outcome. “They’re here for us. Specifically, the two of us.”

She’s right. The two of them separate themselves from the group, making it much more apparent that the uquirapods are primarily here to comfort the Quiratani. There is a roar in the forest. All the uquirapods roar back. Two more roars, they return in kind. They do have some kind of language, though it’s hard to parse. Scientists figured out dolphinspeak centuries ago, but this vocabulary still eludes them.

Anyway, Jande knows that roar. He’s never heard it before, because they only do it when they’re in mourning, but he’s heard this uquirapod’s voice, and it’s unmistakable. Pickpocket comes lurching out of the woods. He is ginormous. It’s the largest one Jande has ever seen before. The largest uquirapods don’t even reach an adult human’s knees, but Pickpocket is as big as a Clydesdale. There have been claims that this could happen, but it’s never been proven. Jande doesn’t know what it means.

“I know what this is,” Tamerlane says, loud enough for all to hear. “No matter what you see, you have to let this play out. It knows what it’s doing, and it made its choice. You’re lucky to bear witness to this. It’s quite a rare event.”

The oversized uquirapod continues to lumber towards them.

“Should the cameras be rolling?” Dare questions.

“No, they shouldn’t,” Tamerlane realizes. He steps over to Van. “If you have any respect for this planet, this culture, this species, you will shut them down. Go to a commercial break.”

Jande steps forward now. “Pickpocket was my sister’s pet. Please, Van.”

Van looks between the two men, and at the rest of the audience, including the dead Eyrenlander’s family. He reaches into his pocket and takes out a remote. After he clicks a button, all the drones hovering around power off and drop to the ground.

Tamerlane smirks. “And the smart dust. Don’t think I didn’t pick up on it.”

Van stares at him for a moment, then presses another button. Nothing happens.

“I suppose we’ll have to take your word for it.” Tamerlane walks back to his spot.

Pickpocket makes his way over to the Eyrenlander’s grave, and begins to roar again, triggering all the little uquirapods to do the same. Uquira don’t usually make sounds unless they’re mating, but now the ones nearby sound almost like wind chimes. The air starts to feel different too; heavier. It suddenly becomes hot and humid. The Eyrenlander’s family backs away as Pickpocket drops down into the grave, chin first. He can’t fit all the way in, but that doesn’t seem to bother him.

In a horrific turn of events, the other uquirapods start biting Pickpocket on the neck. Jande’s instinct is to rush over there to stop them, but Tamerlane holds him back. “I told you, this is what has to happen. You say this was your sister’s friend? They must have had a pretty powerful bond. He’s grieving. They’re a communal species. They don’t even know who their progenitors are, and they barely understand the concept of family. But it can happen, in rare instances, though I’ve never heard of it happening with a human, which is an interesting development. There’s a reason the eyren stock fell significantly while we were dead. Pickpocket was taking them all for himself. He was eating them, like we do.”

Jande shakes his head. “He’s dying because he’s lost Laise. Okay. I’ve never heard of that, but okay. But why do it like this? Why desecrate this man’s grave?”

“Something will grow here, won’t it?” Ersence asks. “Something new.”

“Something rare; not new,” Tamerlane corrects. “Some in the past have called it the uquiratree, but that’s just what it looks like on the surface. The real magic will happen underground, starting at the grave, but expanding far beyond it. I’m honestly not sure how the boy factors into it, because we’ve never actually seen this happen ourselves. A very early settler named Irene de Vries recorded it, and she never mentioned a dead body, though she was only one of two humans, so the uquirapod at the time might have selected some other animal’s carcass.”

“I’ve never heard of this tree, or the underground stuff you claim,” Jande points out, “and I know everything about uquirakind. Where did this supposedly happen?”

Tamerlane chuckles softly as Pickpocket stops groaning, having succumbed to his wounds. “That’s the reason we’re here. The last known place this happened no longer exists. They used to call it Eyrenland.”

Microstory 2786: The First to Fall

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Tamerlane Pryce. That is the name of the mysterious last-minute addition to the candidate pool. Jande knows that name. Everyone on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida knows it, and probably beyond. In the early days of colonization, he was responsible for an ambitious—but ultimately abandoned—planetary project. Back on Earth in the ancient days, they used to have these things called zoos. They locked animals in cages, and let people gawk at them. Over time, various state regulations attempted to make these facilities more and more ethical, and that pattern never really stopped.

Zoos were eventually outlawed, replaced with less harmful methods of using animals as entertainment, but these weren’t all that great either. They were a lot better, but still dangerous, and in some cases, still exploitative. Space colonization sat on the cusp of basically doing away with the animal entertainment industry altogether. It was ultimately replaced with simulated environments, but the early Bidans didn’t know that at the time. They figured the best way not to disturb animals was to pretend to be them.

Pryce was placed in charge of cataloging every species on the planet, and developing the mind transference technology that would allow a user to become whatever creature they wanted, and live amongst the native population. The project didn’t last long. There was such fierce backlash that they shuttered the program, and transitioned the world to a less invasive culture. Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida is what it is today because early settlers were very deliberately trying to avoid Pryce’s vision. They live in harmony with the fauna now. Many believe they owe Pryce everything, but that’s a bit of a stretch. The question is, where has he been all this time?

“I’m not the Pryce you know,” Tamerlane explains as Van is introducing the rest of the contenders. “It would be hard to explain to you, but in your terms, I’m a dupe. I never did what the history books said I did. That was all someone else. But I was informed that I have always been entitled to a piece of the pie, so I’m here now.”

“And finally,” Van announces, “Jande Ter Avest!”

Jande steps forward and waves at the crowd and cameras. What is he doing?

“As you can see folks,” Van goes on, “they’re all very confused. To them, it has only been a few hours. That is by design. We want them to be disoriented. We want them to be a little shaky. It will make them want it more. And what is it they want?”

“Oversight!” the audience yells, as if they rehearsed it, which they probably have.

Jande is getting the feeling that this is not the first episode of this reality show. They probably produced a whole introduction while the candidates were dead.

“Oversight, that’s right!” Van agrees. “They wanna be the fabled Superintendent. Now, lots of cultures have this rank. It scales however high you want. But from what we read in the charter, Bida does things a little differently.” He’s a lot more charismatic than he seemed when Jande first met him. “Most Superintendents are there just in case. They’re all about staffing. If someone gets out of line, and bureaucracy is too slow to correct them, they can step in and push them out. This means that a Superintendent has to be above reproach, so it’s pretty important that deciders get it right.

“It’s even more important for us, because the Bidan Superintendent will have a great deal of responsibilities, and even more power. We’ll get to that as the competition heats up. Hint-hint, wink-wink. But for now, candidates...we need to see where you stand.” He waits a moment. “Seriously, look down. Where do you stand?”

Jande looks down at the floor. A glowing number 1 is now under his feet.

“Say it out loud! Say it proud! Where do you stand!” Van encourages.

Most of the candidates call out their numbers, and they are all weird. They don’t go from 1 to 11. They go as high as 815, which is where Dare Finnian sits.

“This is your qualified rating, or QR. Now, we’re really excited about the QR, because it’s not actually in the charter. It was very vague about this, but we came up with a scoring system between one and eight-fifty. Everyone is starting in a different place, because you all have pasts. As you can see, the Quiratani are ranked significantly higher, but they won’t stay that way for long.” He lowers the mic and looks over at the closest drone camera, which is of a different design than the others. “Can we drop ‘em?”

Part of the floor starts collapsing into nanites, leaving only circular platforms underneath everyone. One of the Eyrenlanders is too far away from his number, and he slips over the edge. He has to grab on for dear life, or he’ll fall to his death.

Dare hops over to Pryce’s platform, then to the Eyrenlander’s, and helps him up.

“Ah, look at that!” Van notes. “They still think they’re friends!” He nods, and looks up at a leaderboard that has appeared in the sky. “Survey says...850! This is a competition, people. If you die, you’re done. There is no helping. There is no empathy. There is no mercy,” he adds in a grittier voice. “Hey, I don’t make the rules.”

Dare jumps back over to his own platform, head literally held high, unashamed.

Van waits for him to finish up. “Okay. That will not be the last time we see someone go over. The first challenge has just about begun. Candidates, I recommend you move to the centermost spot. It’s simple, but deadly. The game is called Still Hunter. The more you move, which doesn’t include blinking, swallowing, or facial tics, the more your platform will fall away. Eventually, you run out of platform, so don’t...move. The challenge doesn’t end until our first death. I’ll give you a few minutes to scratch your itches and do a little stretching, and then we’ll start the clock. Oh, wait, what’s this?”

A woman who is neither Quiratani nor Eyrenlander has jumped off of her platform, and grabbed onto someone else’s shaft. She survived, and is now sliding down.

“Looks like we have a runner,” Van explains. “I’ll have to confer with my associates so we can figure out what we’re gonna do here. In the meantime, I hope you’re all situated, because the clock starts in four, three, two, aaaaaand go!”

Jande does not remember the escape artist’s name, but he’ll learn it because she never leaves the arena. She walks back in an hour later with her head hung low. “They won’t let me quit. I failed to read the fine print.” She goes back to her post to suffer a penalty for trying to leave. She has to stand on one leg for twice as long as she was gone.

The gamemakers probably expected the challenge to last a lot longer than it does, which is what you get for only making it last until the first person falls. One of the cocky Eyrenlanders cannot stop moving. He appears to be particularly not well-suited for a baseline human body. He unwillingly chips away at his platform little by little. It turns to dust and sloughs off in inconsistent volumes. Only five minutes after the attempted quitter’s return, he loses his footing, and plummets to his death.

The competition has taken its first casualty. At the end, Jande has retained his rank, having barely lost any of his platform. Dare, on the other hand, lost none of it at all, and jumped up to second place with a new score of 24. He is the biggest threat now.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: October 1, 2575

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Olimpia didn’t go straight to Sri Lanka after she came back to Earth. She spent one night in a guest unit in an Egyptian arcology so she could start fresh in the morning. In the room, she laid out all her supplies because she didn’t like the way she had it organized. That was when she discovered Mateo’s rendezvous card for the Snake Island medical facility. He must have slipped it in when she wasn’t looking. It was good for her to have a special place to go if she needed it, but she didn’t think that she actually would.

She and her brother, Delfinus, spent all day in the waiting area. She would think the magical card would have spirited them there during an open slot, and her guess was that it wasn’t that smart, but it turned out, it was just because it wasn’t truly her card. It was a waste of time anyway, because Dr. Hammer specialized in temporal issues. Apparently, Delfinus’ problem was on the psychic level.

That made sense, that it wasn’t really a time power. Olimpia never understood why this world had both time travel and psychic powers, but not any other things, like vampires or talking animals. Why only these two seemingly completely unrelated things? She never got the chance to ask Dr. Hammer about it because she was too busy to see them. Instead, they spoke with her associate, Siria Webb.

Siria took it upon herself to reprogram the rendezvous card to do more than just take them back to where they were before. When they reactivated it, they ended up making a big loop to 2575, but now at an unknown location, seemingly underground. Before them was a door, so Delfinus knocked, because what else would they do?

A twentysomething woman opened the door. “Oh,” she said, gently placing her three middle fingers against her forehead. “Your thoughts are bouncing around his head, and flooding into mine.” She looked at Delfinus. “It must be so much worse for you. Come in, come on in.” She stepped to the side and stood there to close the door herself.

“Delfinus was nervous as he looked around the room. His sister was more used to finding herself in new places, but this was only the second time he had traveled, and so far, he wasn’t a fan. Plus, the bunker was just scary and dark, like this woman wanted people to feel uncomfortable when they came here. He didn’t know, though. He could convert anyone’s thoughts into narration...but not hers. She could block him somehow.”

Olimpia looked over at the psychic. “You see what we’re dealing with, and I’m assuming you know why we’re here, so you already know if you can help us or not.”

“I do, and I will try to help him,” the psychic said, “but it may take some time. He doesn’t have mental wards, but don’t think that means I can easily diagnose him. Imagine a hose. You can’t see inside of it without a light, but even if you have a light, the hose has to be turned off first. His hose is on full blast. All I’m getting is the...the contaminated water, to maintain the analogy. I need to shut it off before I can determine what is contaminating it. I don’t need to ask you if that makes sense, because I already know it does. First step is giving you, Mrs. Matic, your own mental wards.”

“That will stop him from narrating my thoughts,” Olimpia pressed the stranger, “but will it stop you from reading them too, or are you immune to your own powers?”

The psychic smiled. “I’m Leida, and I have no interest in your thoughts.” She gestured around the room. “That’s why I live under a battlefield. I hate my powers because I can’t turn them off. Believe me, giving you wards is more for me than for you.”

“All right, then.” Olimpia stepped towards the stranger. “I’m trusting you.”

“I appreciate this.” Leida pinched her index and thumb together before placing them against Olimpia’s forehead. She increased pressure until Olimpia passed out.

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Spaghetti West: Childhood’s End (Part V)

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The mysterious local ship or space station was wasting time and resources trying to fire on Sugar’s ship. She had no offensive measures of her own, save for the hot pocket, which was currently empty because up until this point, they had no reason to conceal their heat signature. The defensive measures, however? Well, those were stacked to the ceiling. It was designed with an EM shield, a TP field, and a GD yield. The first one was the most common. Every interstellar vessel needed to have it, or compensate for it with an extremely robust—and costly—physical hull. The teleportation field was simple enough, but at the very least, it required knowledge of temporal manipulation in the first place. The geodesic yield was a different story altogether, and these strangers instantly assumed that Sugar’s ship would not be equipped with it.

The first two defensive methods were no match for extremely high-energy particles, which were sometimes known as exotic particles. They were just too small and too fast. Even an endless supply of power would make the task an improbable proposition. There was an entire star system called Toliman, which colonists avoided due to an unusually high concentration of ultra high-energy cosmic rays. To protect against them, you don’t just have to know about time travel, you have to have an intimate understanding of advanced spacetime mechanics.

The GD yield didn’t deflect these particles, it basically just moved out of their way. It warped spacetime around the ship, so that when particles attempted to collide with it, they instead passed around the breadth until reaching the other side. From the particles’ perspective, nothing happened—they simply maintained their respective constant vectors the whole time. This was the best way to handle it without going the transdimensional route because it prevented energy exchange, which would be the inevitable result of any means of deflection. Again, even if you had the power to simply swat the particles away, doing so would generate subatomic reactions that could result in secondary damage, especially at scale from trillions of these collisions.

The first thought these strangers had was to beam them with exotic particles. They didn’t ask questions, they didn’t assess the threat, they just fired. And instead of starting small, they went straight to one that most vessels would be powerless to survive. Whoever these people were, they were not nice, and they were not messing around. Someone would have to do something about that.

Sugar could have just stood there and waited them out, but now she was just pissed off. If they wanted to play dirty, she could get creative.

“So what are you doing?” Liselot asked her after Sugar quickly explained how they were able to protect themselves from the onslaught.

“I’m dialing down the GD yield,” Sugar explained.

“Won’t that hurt us?” Liselot pressed.

“It would,” Sugar said, “if I turned it off entirely, but I’m just creating a few billion collisions, the irony being that if they didn’t ever fire, I wouldn’t have any ammo against them. Until they showed up, we had no reason to mask our heat signature, so the heat shunt was off. I’ve now turned it on, and I’m diverting the energy to it. Once it builds, I’ll purge it and fire right back, targeting their weapons array as a warning. Every time they hit us, we’ll hit them back just as hard, like Sebastian Shaw.”

“Is that a band, errr...?” Liselot asked, trailing off.

Sugar stopped. “Where did you hear that?”

“I told you, I’ve never heard of him.”

“No, that phrase, is that a band, errr. That’s a common time traveler phrase. We say that all the time. I didn’t know it had made its way into the general population.”

“I don’t know that it has,” Liselot replied with a shrug. “It’s just something I said. Is it a secret code, or something?”

Sugar sighed and shook her head. “No. Never mind.” She looked back at her screens. “Hot pocket is full; that was fast.” She leaned over the console. “Unless you have any objections, I’ll fire it.”

“Do what you gotta do,” Liselot encouraged.

Sugar pushed the button. Their own energy beam was released from its hold all at once, hitting the supposed enemy so hard and fast that it didn’t have time to protect itself. That was what happened when engineers designed for offense; they sacrificed defense in service to it. They had diverted all of their power to the energy weapons so that their own EM shield was severely underpowered, and practically useless. In seconds, the weapons were disabled, leaving the strangers as sitting ducks.

A console began to beep. Liselot looked over to it. “I think they’re calling.”

“You’re my comms officer now. Go ahead and open a channel,” Sugar requested.

After Liselot did as she was asked, a woman appeared on the main screen. “This is Supreme Chancellor Gentry Ruvow. We attempted to end your lives quickly and painlessly, but you have chosen the difficult route. Please switch off all defensive and offensive systems, and prepare to be boarded. In exchange, my operatives will no longer make it painless, but we will still make it quick. If you resist or attack again, the full force of the Desulforudisian Guard will descend upon you, and nothing will keep them at bay. Respond now with your surrender.”

Sugar smiled. “Supreme Chancellor, we will not be surrendering—”

Gentry immediately closed the channel. The viewscreen turned black.

“This, kids, is why it’s sometimes necessary to bury the lede.” Sugar sighed. “Okay. The global address system we installed so we could reach out to all of Bida. Do you think you could modify it to address the planet down there, whether they call it Desulforudis, or whatever? I need to work on a few other things.”

“Yeah, if you could do it, I can do it,” Liselot agreed.

Meanwhile, a number of ships launched from their space stations, or even from the surface, all heading towards Sugar and Liselot. They would not be able to take them all on. Orbit was no longer a safe place to be. Sugar didn’t understand what these people had against Tau Ceti, but she was going to find out, no matter how much they resisted.

After a few minutes, Liselot said, “I’ve done it.”

“Great. Just in time.” Sugar flung the hardware identifier code over to Liselot’s workstation. “Route communications to this buoy. It’s equipped with its own miniature hot pocket, and can scramble regular radio waves on a quantum level, so they will not be able to trace it.”

“Where are we gonna be?” Liselot asked as she was uploading the new program, and taking the initiative to launch the buoy.

“On the surface. I have a nice little patch of land picked out for it. Well, it’s a building. Brace for minor atmospheric disturbance.” They didn’t need the equilibrium generator again this time, though entering an atmosphere always did throw off the artificial gravity controls, especially if done so quickly. This planet came with a protective teleportation barrier, but she rather easily bypassed it. The natives still didn’t understand who they were up against, and continued to underestimate the two of them.

In a moment, they were parked on top of the Capitol Building, which was where Ruvow was talking to them from. “Reopen the channel to that asshole first, not the whole planet yet.”

Liselot tapped on her screen, then nodded at Sugar.

“Supreme Chancellor? Supreme Chancellor, are you there?” Sugar asked. “Supreme Chancellor, I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re no longer where we were before. If you attempt to fire on us again, you will literally only be hurting yourselves. I suggest you answer so we can work this out. I realized my mistake when I first responded to you. I tried to be nice. I should have started with...I’m not fuckin’ around! Answer the goddamn phone, or I poison the well with your own people!”

Ruvow’s face reappeared on screen. “You insolent little—”

“No, you’re gonna listen to me now,” Sugar interrupted. “You have been sending us black hole after black hole after black hole, and when we show up to put a stop to it, you don’t even apologize? You just try to kill us? What kind of monster doesn’t even take a second to find out if they’re murdering innocent children on a school trip, or a hospital ship? That’s ignoring all the people you tried to kill on my home planet in the first place. I want an explanation, and I don’t want any more threats out of your little mouth.”

Ruvow narrowed her eyes. “We have not been sending you black holes. You have been sending them to us!” She started out calm before devolving quickly by the end.

Sugar shut her eyes in frustration. “Did you ever think that maybe that wasn’t us, and you should ask us about it first? Again, what kind of monster are you?”

“We don’t ask questions,” Ruvow replied. “If someone invades our space, we destroy them. That is our way. We have established ourselves in this system, and that should be enough. Merely being present makes you a threat. I don’t know if I believe the black hole weapons aren’t from you, but it doesn’t matter. Now exit your vessel and surrender to the operatives who are now surrounding you on the roof.”

Sugar pantomimed turning down the volume, prompting Liselot to do it for real. “I’ve heard of these people...total idiots. I thought we sort of bred them out of the population because they kept putting their hands on hot stoves and eating glass, but I guess some managed to survive long enough to invent the aerosol can.” She glanced over at navigation. “I know where we are now. We’re in another galaxy. My people call it Miridir, but you may know it as Andromeda XXI.”

“That is millions of light years away. How is it colonized?” Liselot questioned.

“It’s a long story,” Sugar began, “but this isn’t Dardius, which is the only planet I’m personally cognizant of as being populated here. I’m guessing this is some kind of offshoot faction from there...isolationists in the dark forest.”

“The dark forest hypothesis was virtually debunked centuries ago. If you want to keep people out of your home, you tell them that it’s your home, you don’t make it look available.”

“I know. Like I said, they’re stupid. But they’re also under attack. If they’re getting their own procession of KBHs, our conjecture of natural causes no longer sounds viable.” It wasn’t just happening to Tau Ceti, which meant the black holes were no accident. Only happening at one location? A tragedy, but at least it followed a plausible natural pattern. Many locations, each only experiencing one black hole? Okay, that would be even more believable because of the randomness. But two systems—constant bombardment? That was a directed attack. Someone wanted to hurt Tau Ceti, as well as the Desulforudisians, and perhaps understanding their common thread would tell them who. Who would have motive to destroy them both when the two worlds were millions of light years apart, and had not even heard of each other?

“Volume back up, please,” Sugar ordered. She looked back at the Supreme Chancellor, who was still sitting there, surprisingly patient. “Someone is attempting to hurt us both. We have a saying where I’m from. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

“We have a similar saying. It goes, the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy. I can have more than one enemy, and do. All are enemies.”

“Well, that’s quite a mouthful but... Suit yourself.” Sugar turned her head. “Lise, open a global channel now. I wanna talk to everyone who lives here.”

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