The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 29, 2481

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It took Leona a hot minute, but she came to realize that they were no stranger to the ship looming over them. Well, they were still strangers, but they had seen it before. Seventy-two years ago, it appeared to them near Earth while they were still getting around on the Phoenix shuttle, Dante. It pulled them into its cargo hold, and either held them in place for a whole year, or attached itself to their pattern, and only had to keep them for a day. They were never entirely sure of the truth, but all evidence suggested the latter. How did it get all the way out here, and what did it want now? Its cargo hold opened up again, apparently beckoning them inside.

Leona reached over to the console, tapped a few buttons, then typed in a message that read NO THANKS.

“How are you sending that?” Mateo asked.

“Hologram,” she answered. “They didn’t respond to our calls before, but as long as they can read English, they’ll see this, plastered on the hull of our ship.”

The mysterious other ship used its maneuvering thrusters to draw nearer.

“Ram, do you detect any lifesigns in that hold?” Leona asked.

“Negative.”

“Then fire a warning shot right down its throat.”

“We don’t have weapons, sir.”

“The hot pocket,” Leona reminded him. “Purge it.”

Ramses sighed. “There’s not much energy in there.”

“Good, I don’t wanna kill them.”

“Purging hot pocket.” Ramses expunged the heat from the dimensional reservoir, and lit the potential enemies up.

“What the hell was that for?” a voice asked through the speakers.

“Oh, so it speaks!” Leona exclaimed with an attitude.

“We figured you were derelict, and in need of assistance.”

“Last time we met, you kidnapped us, and then spit us out without a word.”

There was a pause. “We have never encountered your vessel before.”

“We were in a different one back then,” Leona clarified. “April 18, 2409 Earthan Common Era.”

Another pause. “Oh.” He cleared his throat. “You’re Team Matic.”

“What do you want?” Leona questioned.

“Nothing. We only attached ourselves to your pattern back then to outwit our pursuers. They’re long gone. Now we’re back on mission.”

“Which is...?”

“Classified.”

Olimpia’s voice suddenly took over to say, “Captain, there are only a handful of people on this thing, and I think you should come over to see it.” She was apparently on the ship right now.

“Who the hell is that?” the stranger asked. “Where are you?”

“Stay on board, Rambo. Anyone else is welcome to come.” Leona disappeared, to be followed by Mateo and Angela.

“You’ve never heard of invisibility before?” Olimpia brought herself back into view. “You’re not as informed as we guessed.”

A man was sitting at the communications console, still shocked and nervous. “That’s not my department.” He pointed timidly. “I just push the button and talk.”

“I am Captain Leona Matic of the Castlebourne Sanctuary Ship Vellani Ambassador.” Wow, they were no longer a stateless private vessel. “Who is in charge?”

“That would be me.” A thin, busty woman in a tank top and tight pants came in from the hallway. There were numerous tattoos and scars on her body. Her hair was too short to reach her shoulders, and buzzed to a fade on the sides. “Captain Lusine Cross of the Astral Military Force Fireship Lusine.”

“You named your ship after yourself?” Mateo questioned.

Lusine laughed. “Every fireship is named after the person who is to die on it.”

“Fireship,” Angela began. “Historically, these were obsolete vessels that were literally set on fire, and steered into the enemy fleet to cause disorganized destruction. No one was supposed to die on them, though. A skeleton crew always escaped on a smaller vessel.”

“That’s not how we did it where I’m from,” Lusine said. “Any one hundred percent unmanned vessel could be deflected or outmaneuvered by the enemy one way or another. I was sent off to keep my foot on the gas until the very last second.”

“How are you standing here?” Leona asked. “How is this ship intact?”

“Our enemies ran,” Lusine recounted. “We pursued. They opened one of their little portals, and we found ourselves falling through it. That’s how we ended up here.”

That was enough for Leona to figure out what she was talking about. “The Ochivari. You’re from another universe.”

“I didn’t know you would understand the concept,” Lusine said with a nod. “We’ve been trying to get back ever since, and those damn bugs keep trying to stop us, because we have vital information that the Stalwart Porter needs to know to defeat them. We have to strike the enemy where it lives, but we can’t do it alone.”

Leona nodded, understanding more that Mateo couldn’t catch. “You think this brane is their base of operations.”

“It is,” Lusine said with a laugh. “We’ve been to Worlon. That’s where they retreated to.”

“That’s the homeworld. They don’t operate out of there. However many you discovered living in that system is a rounding error compared to their numbers in their new universe.”

Lusine frowned. “You’re lying. You’re lying because you think your own worlds will be destroyed if we bring our war here to your front.”

“Nah,” Leona began, “we can protect our people from that. There’s a reason the Ochivari don’t come after our version of Earth. We’re time travelers, they know they’d lose. They’d lose in any time period, in any reality. So will you if you threaten the safety and security of our most vulnerable and innocent. I suggest you go home. The Transit Army will handle the Ochivari from here on out.”

“I don’t know what the Transit Army is,” Lusine argued. “But it’s meaningless. We’ll protect our people as fiercely as you. I signed up for a suicide mission. You think I’m worried about what you’ll do to me?”

“You are not the first person to feel that way, and you will not succeed where the others lost,” Leona reasoned. “Turn around. Go home.”

“Not until we know where the Ochivari come from. If you’re right, and it’s not this universe, then tell us where it is.”

“I don’t have the coordinates. All I was able to learn from the interrogation logs in Stoutverse was that they call it Efilverse. Trust me, the only thing capable of doing real damage there is the Transit. It’s best you leave it to them.”

Lusine was frustrated, but appeared to be processing what Leona was saying. “We can’t go back anyway. We need the bugs to open another portal.”

“Let me see your Nexus. You may have to leave your ship behind, but I know someone who can return you to your world.”

“We don’t have a Nexus,” Lusine claimed.

“I know how to detect them. It’s here.”

“Part of it is,” Lusine confirmed. “We use it for power.”

Now Leona was frustrated. “Vacuum generator. You’re the one who stole it from Antarctica. Why would you do that?”

“We needed it.” Lusine was not apologetic about their thievery.

Leona’s watch beeped. “Crap, we must be too close to a black hole.”

“Yes,” Lusine said. “We’re hiding out here on purpose, again to avoid detection.”

We only have half an hour until we make another jump. Will you be here in a year?”

“We don’t stop moving,” Lusine explained. “If you’ll allow it, we should like to absorb your energy again, and jump with you. But you’ll have to come inside again, so we can sync up.”’

Leona weighed her options. “Vote.”

Everyone said aye—in person, or through comms—except for Ramses. He didn’t want to get involved. According to him, this one Fireship posed no significant threat to either galaxy, and could only waste their time when they should be trying to find Romana. He felt so bad for losing her. He had to get her back, and as quickly as possible, to make up for that mistake.

Mateo jumped back to the Ambassador, even though the vote didn’t have to be unanimous. “Do you have the data you need?”

“I’ve not had any time to look over it,” Ramses replied. “We’ve been dealing with this since we arrived ten minutes ago.”

“Then do it,” Mateo encouraged. “We’ll deal with this other thing, and meet back up on the other side.”

“I’ll need an assistant,” Ramses said just as Mateo was trying to walk away. “Who in the group can you spare?”

Mateo turned back around. “Who we can always spare...me.”

Shortly thereafter, they jumped to the future, their pattern having been interfered with by the black hole they were orbiting. To free themselves from the gravity well, Leona piloted the VA into the cargo hold of the Lusine, and allowed their new friends to fly them out of the singularity’s relativistic grasp. They used a weird engine, which wasn’t surprising seeing as they were from another universe, but it reportedly didn’t operate the same as it did back where they came from. The laws of physics were different here. Leona was surprised that it still functioned at all. They didn’t have a name for their brane, or of course, the path back. Hopefully Venus Opsocor, Keeper of the Nexus Network, would know what to do.

Once they were sufficiently free from the black hole, they decided they needed to wait for Ramses to study the results from their last jump. Jumping again could throw off his conclusions if he was still in the middle of formulating his hypotheses. Luckily, they didn’t have to wait too terribly long. Unluckily, he turned out to have been wrong before. He could still not find Romana with what he had here. One final, highly directed, jump to a new location could do it, though. Luckily again, they needed to go somewhere anyway. They synced the Vellani Ambassador up to the Lusine’s systems, just as the latter had done before with the Dante. Then the Ambassador took over, and initiated the slingdrive. They made it, all the way to Dardius in the Beorht system.

The planet owners were busy with affairs of the state, but Vearden was available. He saw nothing wrong with granting them access to the Nexus building, as long as they didn’t make any attempt to address the public, or engage with anyone besides the Nexus technicians. They also needed to limit their numbers, so Leona and Lusine teleported to Tribulation Island alone, leaving most everyone else up in orbit. While they were waiting for that, Mateo continued to be Ramses’ guinea pig. As instructed, he teleported to various points on the surface of the planet, and through space. He carried sensors with him sometimes, but not always, which apparently generated some sort of map of the region of space where they appeared.

“Come back in,” Ramses said.

Mateo was currently on Lohsigli. While Dardius remained as the seat of power in this solar system, Lohsigli currently boasted a population of tens of thousands of people. Many had emigrated here over the last several decades, following an enemy invasion that the team didn’t have time to learn about right now. It seemed to match up with what Romana told them about her own past. They accepted a data drive as a gift, so they could update their central archives. They would read about what happened when they had more time. Mateo finally returned, tired from all the jumping, and needing some water.

“I’ve figured it out,” Ramses said, quite pleased and relieved.

“Did I help?” Mateo asked, trying to lean back in his chair, though unable to with his armor module still on.

“Immensely,” Ramses answered. “So did the, uhh...alien people. The Ambassador has been stealing information from their computers, giving it insight into a realm of physics that I never knew existed. They use quintessence where they’re from too, though only as a raw power source, not as a shortcut from Point A to Point B. That’s what I was missing; perspective. I can’t go into detail about what I learned, because you wouldn’t understand it, but to simplify, we have all the tools we need; we just have to put them all together, like ingredients. First, we need Romana’s biometric data, which the ship absorbed passively the first time she stepped on board. Second, we need her quantum signature. Every object, or living thing, vibrates at a certain quantum frequency. The ship doesn’t automatically log that for everyone who comes here, but my machine picked it up from her specifically when we linked to each other through the Livewire tethers. Third, we need a way to measure her signature across vast distances. It would be easy if we knew she was on the same planet as us, but she could be anywhere in the universe, which is why the slingdrive is so important. Now, there’s a bit of an issue, which is that a person’s quantum signature shifts over time, but I should be able to write an algorithm that predicts what it’s become since we lost her.”

“I still don’t understand why we couldn’t find her before. We’ve had all those ingredients the whole time, even before her signature had time to shift. What exactly has changed?”

“Well, our jumps have given me a clearer picture of how to navigate; that’s one. Also, perhaps I’m downplaying how much the Lusine contributed. I still don’t understand it, but based on what I was able to glean, it comes from a galaxy where you can’t just fly in any direction you want. You’re limited by these sorts of...shipping lanes, which control their routes, even through the ocean of outer space. Again, I don’t really know why it’s like that, but the Lusine is different. It can subvert that limitation. It can go wherever it wants. My impression is that it’s illegal. Anyway, I turned their exploit into my exploit. Obviously, we don’t have those crazy cosmic shipping lanes here, but I was going about the search all wrong. Now I know how to head straight towards Romana, and find precisely where she is. Give me just a tiny bit more time, and I’ll be able to isolate her signature from the cacophony of noise vibrating between us and her.”

They gave Ramses more time, which Leona spent dealing with a rather difficult Venus Opsocor. She did agree to help, though, when Leona reasoned that the crew of the Lusine didn’t belong in this universe. It was logical to help them return home to maintain a kind of multiversal balance. Hopefully this gambit didn’t come back to bite them in the ass, such as when they found themselves in need of traveling to a different brane. But for now, it was necessary. The Dardieti agreed to hook the ship up to their Nexus for a peripheral transport, allowing Team Matic to check this tangent mission off the list, hopefully for good.

“Are you sure?” Leona asked in regards to the search for Romana.

“Certainty is one of those abstract concepts that doesn’t exist, but which we can draw nearer. Am I sure? No. Am I as confident as I can get? Yes.” Ramses nodded, satisfied with his own CYA response.

Leona looked over at Mateo, who nodded too, but for a different reason. “Very well,” she said before a pause to make sure there weren’t any objections. “Yalla.”

Ramses pushed all the buttons, and sent the slingdrive soaring through the quintessential firmament.

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The First Explorer

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When Debra Lesley Lovelace was a very young child, she lived in the most dangerous region of the human continent on Ansutah. The shore was visible from a shipping lane that the Maramon used to transport goods between their own territories. The white monsters were not aware that the humans were there, or anywhere on their world, and this was the most valuable secret in the universe. Colonization was forbidden on these lands, thanks to a sympathetic group of highly influential Maramon from the very early days who declared it sacred ground. The humans were able to remain an incredibly well-kept secret, even as their numbers grew into the billions over the course of thousands of years. Despite their own unsustainable numbers in modern times, most Maramon respected the boundaries devoutly, and did not dare go near the humans. Individually, however, this rule was sometimes broken. The crew of these ships that passed by would occasionally take a detour, and rest on Shining Beach. It was an ironic name, as it was always very foggy and grim.

It was the responsibility of the humans who lived in the area to make sure that this problem did not spiral out of control. There were superstitious rumors that landing on the continent would result in the death of the trespassers. So the humans could not simply hide out, and wait until the Maramon rowed back to their ship, to resume their journey. The warning had to be enforced. They made war. They had to, to protect everyone else living peacefully inland. Peacefully, blissfully ignorant, and safe. There were other stations on other shores, but this was the most trafficked, and the most dangerous. Debra learned to kill when she was three years old, and she killed her first Maramon when she was four. She knows how to use a gun, despite what these men might believe.

“I pegged you for my biggest fan.” Bronach Oaksent doesn’t look the least bit concerned. It’s just some middle-aged woman with a peashooter.

This is too much. She once admired him for his bravery and resilience, but her impression of him was foolish and naïve. Now that she’s standing up close, she realizes that he’s nothing like that. He’s been hoarding all this tech that the rest of them could have used on this lifeless planet. She can’t forgive him for it. The problem is, he doesn’t really know her, and probably wouldn’t care. So she has to make him. She has to incentivize him to apologize. “Don’t underestimate me!” she cries. They know nothing of her past as a Maramon Hunter. “I’m sick of everyone thinking they know who I am. But you never actually ask me about myself. You just make assumptions because maybe I complain a bit too much, and I don’t always take responsibility for my actions, and I find it easier to blame others for my problems! But you don’t know me! And it doesn’t give you the right to call me Airlock Karen!”

“Okay, okay,” Bronach replies in a condescending tone. He’s still not getting it.

She shakes the gun at him. “You could have made our lives a lot easier with your generator thing, but instead, you kept it to yourself! What kind of selfish son of a bitch are you? I mean, where do you get off?”

“It was a test,” Oaksent claims weakly.

“Oh, a test?” she mocks. “Test these bullets!” She fires the gun, but misses on purpose, because this is about teaching him a lesson, not killing him.

Her plan backfires, immediately, and almost literally. He pulls out his own weapon, and tries to shoot her, but misses too when a masked man appears out of nowhere, and blocks it with his body. He stumbles back, but doesn’t fall. He’s likely wearing body armor. Now, this is a real hero.

The mysterious kind rescuer removes his mask, and smiles back at her. It’s Elder, but clearly from the past, before he earned the moniker of Old Man. She has been such a bitch to him this whole time, and with good reason—might she add—but now she’s seeing him in a whole new light. Perhaps it’s the daring rescue, or the fact that she doesn’t like to go too long between being in love with someone. Or maybe it’s just that, unlike his duplicate a couple of meters away, he looks more her age. And maybe even...hot? This was clearly who he was before he became so annoying, self-important, and...and old.

“My white knight,” Debra says, under her breath, but still probably loud enough for all three of them to hear.

Hot!Elder lifts a small device in his hand, and hovers his thumb over a button on the top. “Oso gonplei nou ste odon.” He presses the button before anyone can stop him.

A flash of light blasts out of the temporal generator disguised as a mountain. A wave of energy flows through all of them. For a few seconds, other people are standing beside them. It’s not just random strangers, though. It’s them. They’ve been duplicated several times. Some are standing up, others are still on the ground. They’re all looking confused, and in those few seconds, Debra wonders which one of the other versions of her is the real her. Is she the real one? Is none of them? Is she even considering this right now, or imagining that she is?

While she’s in the middle of her existential crisis, a force begins to pull her away from the planet. She can feel herself being shredded like cheese, tugged in basically the same direction, but not in one piece. The planet falls away, as do the stars around her, which are stretching out to white streaks. A darkness begins to chomp on the front ends of the streaks, like a video game about dots that eat smaller dots. Before too long, it’s all black, though she can still feel herself being spirited away, and torn apart. Finally, it all stops. Now she’s just in the middle of nowhere, and apparently no longer has a body. She can’t feel anything, nor see anything but the infinite void. If this is death, it’s a pretty boring afterlife. She would like to speak to a manager.

Debra hangs here in the nothingness for an unknown period of time. It’s hell, it must be, so she needs to figure out where she went wrong. Sure, she wasn’t the best person in the biverse, but she always tried to help, and doesn’t that merit some consideration? Every complaint she made was done in the service of making the world a better place. If she asked for a tofu burger with no ketchup, and they put ketchup on it, who was it helping if she kept quiet? They can only get better if they know that they’re doing something wrong. But people were always getting pissy with her, and now she’s in this god-forsaken void. How is that fair?

It starts as a pinprick of light, in the corner of her eye. Well, she doesn’t have eyes anymore, but that’s how it seems anyway. She can’t force it to be fully in her field of vision. She can’t focus on it. She can’t focus on anything. Again, there’s no telling how long this lasts, but the point begins to grow. As it does so, it occurs to her that it’s not really an image. She’s not seeing anything. It’s more of an understanding. Yeah, that’s it. She’s gaining knowledge about the world around her, starting out with very little, but gaining more by the arbitrary unit of measurement. She realizes that she’s witnessing the big bang of the universe. She can feel the unimaginable density, the explosion of energy, and the expansion of space. It’s hotter than anything ever turns out to be in the future, and she can feel that, but of course it doesn’t hurt, because she doesn’t have a body anymore. The expansion continues, forming dust clouds, stars, and planets. Now she’s watching the whole history of reality, unfolding in her own mind. She starts to question this. Maybe she’s not just watching it happen. Maybe she’s making it happen. Maybe she is the universe. Maybe she’s God.

“You’re not the universe, and you’re not God.” It’s a voice. Did she hear it, or just become aware of it?

“Does it matter?” the voice replies.

“Who are you?”

“Aitchai,” the voice answers.

“Who am I?”

It waits a bit. “A baby aitchai.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I am the energy that pervades all universes in the bulk. I am everything, everywhere, all at once. And you...are a few things, in one place, but also all at once.”

“I...still don’t understand.”

“I don’t either. I just found you in my pocket. You’ve not always been this way, as an ethereal energy construct?”

“Uh...no,” Debra says, not any less confused than before.

“Perhaps we could both corporealize to make this an easier conversation to have. Your mind is preoccupied watching the passage of time. You need to focus on one thing, so that one thing makes sense. Make sense?”

“Okay. Except I don’t know how to do that.”

“The trick is to want it. That’s the only ingredient. Imagine yourself with a body. I can’t really do it unless you do it too, or we would stop being able to understand each other, so I can’t show you what I mean. You just have to try.”

Debra is frustrated. This guy is being vague on purpose. She wants to scream, or at least calm herself down with a deep breath. And that’s what does it. Feeling the uncontrollable urge to have a physical reaction to this situation gives her the ability to make that happen. She has a body now, and so does he. Looks a bit like a nerd. She widens her eyes, afraid that he heard that thought of hers.

He’s stretching his neck and yawning at the same time. “It must feel a bit odd to you now, having a body, but feeling nothing. When you get good at it, like me, you’ll begin to replicate the rest of the normal sensations. Touch is the hardest, followed closely by smell.”

“I feel,” Debra contends. “I smell too, though I can’t describe it. I’ve never smelled this before.”

“Interesting,” Aitchai says. “I suppose you’re so new at it that your brain instinctively gave your senses back. Good on ya.”

“Great. Now tell me what this is. Are you...the manager?” It can’t be that simple, can it?

He laughs. “I suppose you could think of me in that way, but I would argue that I’m more like the infrastructure in this metaphor; the building. I am that exists. I control nothing.”

“But you could, if you wanted to. You could rewrite reality to your liking? You could destroy all, seed new life.”

He seems uncomfortable with these suggestions. “I could, yes. I don’t.”

“Wasted opportunity.”

“Says the baby,” Aitchai snaps back.

“What does that mean? Will I one day be as powerful as you, not confined to only one universe, or whatever?”

“No. I guess that’s a bad metaphor. You’re more like a pet. You’ll never be greater than you already are. It’s not something that you learn. It’s what I became when I was made, and you will always be what you became when you became it.”

“I should be offended,” Debra decides.

“That’s your human side talking. You’ll get over it one day.”

“Is time even real for beings like us?”

He nods. “That’s a common misconception, that time has no meaning beyond the boundaries of a brane. But the truth is that time matters more here than anywhere. It’s the only time that exists in its purest form. Yes, I feel time. I experience all of time.”

“You can’t expect me to be like you, sitting on the sidelines, changing nothing.”

Aitchai crosses his arms, balancing his chin on the base of his palm while his fingers are curled up against his cheek. Suddenly, he pulls his hand away, and snaps his fingers. They’re still in the void, but now standing underneath a huge stone fountain. Water is falling from the lip in a wide sheet, like the perfect waterfall. An empty swimming pool materializes underneath. They’re standing on the edge, watching the pool fill up slowly. He points at the fountain. “Change the shape of that water. Change how it falls into the pool.”

“Easy.” Debra reaches out, and sticks her arm through it. The water begins to cascade over her skin, and continues to fall into the pool where it belongs. She’s pretty clever. It may not have changed much, but it fulfills the requirement.

He looks down. “Hm. Nothing’s really changed,” he reasons. “It’s all still going in there. So, try to stop the water from going into the pool entirely.”

Debra smirks. He’s asking her to do something physical, but they are not in the physical world. This is all in their shared consciousness. The rules don’t apply here, not for the water, and not for anything else she’ll want to change about reality. She puts the fountain at her back, and lifts her hands up like a righteous evangelical. The water shifts directions, flowing over their heads, and falling onto the ground a few meters away from them. It’s not going into the pool anymore.

Aitchia doesn’t break eye contact with her. He waves his arm behind him, and materializes a second pool. The water begins to fall into that instead. “No significant change. The pool is identical.”

“That’s cheating.”

“I’m illustrating a point,” Aitchai begins. “It doesn’t matter where you put the water, it all ends the same. Sure, it’s mixed up differently. Different atoms bond to different partners, but who cares? It’s just water, falling into a meaningless pit. As I said, you will forget the old ways one day. You will stop seeing the atoms, and start seeing the pool. And then you’ll stop caring what happens to it. Trust me, I made plenty of changes before I noticed that nothing made any real difference. You’ll get there too.”

“Never.”

He smiles. “Okay, Karen.”

She hates that name. “You know more about me than you let on.”

“I am everything,” he echoes himself from before.

“I’m everything else,” she says with determination.

“Is that what you want? You want me to give you the one brane, and stay out of it?” He sounds sincere.

“Would you?”

“It depends.”

“On what?”

“On which brane we’re talking about. You got triplets.”

Debra looks away to focus on the passage of time again. She’s watching it all from the highest vantage point possible. The universe splits in two. One twin floats off away from the other, while the larger one splits a second time, but doesn’t let the third baby go. Hogarth Pudeyonavic. You know her too.”

“I do,” he confirms quietly.

“She’s as powerful as me.” Hogarth too was born from an explosion. It took her some time to figure them out, but once she did, she became one of the most powerful beings in the universe. She began to create, like a god, starting out small before moving on to more ambitious projects. A sister universe to her own was her most impressive creation. And that makes her a threat to Debra’s own power, whether she realizes it or not. “She’s a rival.”

“You don’t have to frame it that way. You can exist in harmony. This is not a competition.”

“She may have done what she did on her own, but her triplet is smaller.” Debra rewinds and zooms in to watch as Hogarth uses her vast scientific knowledge and cosmic powers to literally create an entire universe according to her own design. She calls it Fort Underhill for some reason. “I can take her.”

“You don’t have to frame it that way,” Aitchai repeats.

“Thank you, you can go now. I’ll take the big one.”

“Very well,” he concedes. You are now the new...Powers That Be.”

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Microstory 2315: Earth, August 21, 2178

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Dear Corinthia,

I was so pleased to hear from you, I had to write back to you right away. Unfortunately, my father is out of town at the moment, and unreachable. As soon as he gets back online, I’ll write again with a full report on his involvement in this unforgivable betrayal. I don’t want to dismiss your struggles on Vacuus, but things are not all that great here either. I don’t know what kind of updates you receive from Earth, but it has become a harsh and uninviting place in its own right. The air has become poisoned with a cocktail of chemicals created by a number of competing corporations in their attempt to monopolize the world’s food supply. Some were trying to develop perfect environments for their own crops, while others were attacking their competitors, or they were hedging their bets, and doing both. This has left us with a toxic atmosphere that could take decades to clear up, and that’s only assuming the corporations don’t push on, and make things worse. I live in a giant floating dome on the ocean, which is both sealed off from the noxious fumes, and isolated from the Corporate Wars, which have been raging for 18 years now. That is why father is away at the moment. He and the ambassador are trying to negotiate a trade deal with a nearby land dome. They are running out of space, but we are running out of resources. We’re relatively new, and healthy, but I have not always lived here, and I have seen how bad things can get on the outside. So, sister, I’m not so sure that I should count myself the lucky one. We would both die by opening our respective doors, but at least no one did it to you on purpose. Even so, with all that I have been through over the course of the 36 years that you and I have been alive, I know that I am more fortunate than most people here. There are those who do not even have access to one of the domes. They found pockets of technically survivable air in the deepest corners of the planet, so they don’t die in a matter of hours, but their lifespans are quite short when compared to ours. On a personal note, I would like to thank you for reaching out to me. I never would have known that you existed. Father is not the kind of person who would confess something like that, even on his deathbed. He will be taking a number of grudges and secrets to his grave. Again, I’ll write again once I learn more from him. There also might be others here who know what happened, and exactly why.

Your other half,

Condor Sloane

Microstory 2314: Vacuus, August 14, 2178

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Dear Condor,

I hope this letter finds you well. My name is Corinthia Sloane. No, the fact that we share a surname is not a coincidence. I spent so much time crafting this message, because I didn’t want to shock you, but there is simply no delicate way to phrase it, and no best position in the paragraph to place it, except perhaps not in the first or last sentence. The truth is that you are my long-lost twin. Our parents separated us at birth. I am not certain of precisely why they did this. Perhaps you could ask our father. Tell him hello for me, or screw you, depending on what his explanation is. From what I could gather, they did it as some kind of experiment on nature versus nurture. Again, I’m not entirely sure how they thought this would be an interesting comparison. I’m a girl, born and raised, and I was told that you were at least born a boy, so we’re obviously not identical. What exactly were they testing for, and how did they account for the inherent differences in our physiology? Did they report back to each other regularly? Sadly, I am no longer able to ask our mother further questions. She confessed to me the truth on her deathbed, and has since passed on to whatever hell is somehow worse than this place. To clarify, I live on Vacuus. If you’ve never heard of it. It’s a distant planet in the solar system, taking nearly 42,000 years to orbit the barycenter! I’ve seen photos of the sky from your world, and am so jealous. From here, the sun does not appear as a dominating disc, illuminating all the lands, but a single point of light in the distance. It’s barely distinguishable from the other stars on the firmament. The surface of this planet is uninhabitable, as you would guess. It was the last one that humanity ever discovered, and it took them a very long time to figure out how. It is a cold, heartless place, where we live in stale, recycled air. It’s a wonder that we’ve survived this long, but it could all go up in an instant with a single breach in the walls. I’m exaggerating, but it is pretty dangerous and stressful here. I don’t know what your life is like, but for now, I would count myself lucky if I were you, that you were not chosen as the astronaut baby. I hope this news does not distress you too much. I only found out about you yesterday, and reached out as soon as I was able to sneak into the server room to mine for your contact information. If you are not my twin brother, Condor, please forward this message to him, or at least reply back that I have the wrong address. If you are Condor, please return as quickly as possible as I eagerly await your response. This far out, it takes light about a week to travel back and forth.

Excited to hear from you,

Corinthia Sloane

Microstory 2313: Earth, January 1, 2025

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Dear Readers,

Let me tell you a story. Roughly ten years ago, the scientific community began to take seriously the hypothesis that a Planet 9 existed somewhere beyond the orbit of Neptune. For centuries prior to that, nonscientific theories popularized the dream of a Planet X, but these were largely based on speculation, and a poor understanding of the data. It was only recently that any evidence legitimately supported the idea of a solar model that proposed such a wild explanation for this missing mass. Ten years from now, advances in astronomical observation technology will prove that a celestial body of significant mass does indeed exist, and that it is currently orbiting the sun about 1200 astronomical units away from us. About 108 years later, fusion rockets will be efficient and powerful enough to deploy a manned mission to the newly discovered celestial body, which they had since named Vacuus. Probes had been sent prior to this, at higher velocities due to lighter equipment, and no concern for life support, but they were all lost. No one could tell why, but their hearts were full of wonder, and the right candidates volunteered for what many called a suicide mission. Eighteen years later, the ship arrived at its destination, and began to unravel the mysteries of this cold, distant world. One of the passengers was a young woman whose mother brought her along when she was a baby. Corinthia Sloane always felt that something was missing in her life, and everything fell into place when she learned what everyone she had ever known had been keeping from her this whole time. She had a twin sister who she had never met. But the real problem was...she might never even have the chance now. The following letters comprise their initial correspondences, each one taking around a week to reach its destination, given the time lag imposed by vast interplanetary distances.

Yours fictionally,

Nick Fisherman III

Microstory 2312: A Great Audience

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Hello, it’s Kelly again. Welcome to the last post ever. I hope that it lives up to your expectations, but there’s only so much I can do. Nick was a very important part of a lot of people’s lives, including my own, but I recognize that others have their own personal experiences. That was kind of the original idea behind the Forum Memorial, but I suppose that the comment section serves that purpose too. Beyond that, I wanted to thank Jasmine for taking the time to express her final thoughts before this site comes to a close. It was really nice to hear from her again, wasn’t it, folks? Moving on, I was planning on just sort of shutting myself away from the world after this, but my friends have suggested that I keep things alive in a new way. People have evidently responded well to my contributions, even before Nick went away forever, so I do want to continue in some capacity, but before I get into that, you should know that this blog is still ending. It was never really mine, and I want my own space on the web. Stay subscribed to Nick’s social media accounts, where I’ll let you know how to keep following along, if you want. I think this is the right way to do it. All of you subscribed to hear from him, or at least about him. It wouldn’t be fair for me to sort of usurp this whole audience for my own gain. I should have to start over, and you can choose to follow me on the other side, or not. I won’t blame you if you don’t. I would rather know that everyone is there because they want to be, not because they forgot to fully unsubscribe from this site. So, there it is. It’s over. As they say, it’s been a hell of a ride, so far, but it’s not truly over. This version of Earth kept spinning after Nick and Dutch died, and will continue doing just that even when every single one of us follows in their footsteps. These words, though...the blog updates, the book, the musical; they could live on forever. Alienoid ultrahumans five billion years from now might be enjoying what we’ve created over the last 365 days. That goes for everyone, with your own accounts, storing your own original thoughts. It’s crazy to think about it this way, but it’s comforting too. You can all live forever if you do something with your lives. It doesn’t have to be huge, or mind-blowing. You don’t even have to become famous. You just have to have something to say, and a means of recording it. Thank you again for being here, and participating in the global discourse. I wouldn’t call us boring at all, and I think Nick would have changed his mind about that by now. Signing off for the last time here. I’ve been Kelly Serna...and you’ve been a great audience.

Microstory 2311: Nice to Be Back

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Hello readers, this is Jasmine again. I asked Nick if I could write another guest post for his blog. This was obviously before he died, and it never ended up happening. I was having tea with Kelly this weekend, though, and mentioned it, so she asked me to finally follow through with it. I was gonna say a whole bunch of stuff back then that’s no longer relevant nor appropriate, but it’s nice to be back here. This website feels like home. When I was his assistant, I helped a lot with managing it, and making it look better than it did before. I rearranged some of the auxiliary elements, and reformatted some old posts. He had to use a number of different word processors over time when his life was all about staying in motion, so things were just a little messy in the beginning, but he had always wanted everything to be more consistent. Anyway, I’m still working at the jail, and things are going very well. He did a great job formulating this team, so if anyone asks whether he made a positive impact on the world, there can be no doubt. I’ve run into a surprising number of people who assumed the whole project fell apart when he was forced to leave, but that’s not how he set it up. Nothing was ever balanced on the shoulders of one person, not even him. We’re still working our butts off. We hope to see real changes in the system by the end of next year. For those of you who watched the memorials, I was present at both. I even spoke at both, so now you know what I look and sound like. It was my honor to relate my experiences with such a great friend. I’ll never forget what it was like to meet him and know him. I appreciate that he’s being kept alive, not only through the work he did, but through this site, and all of his friends, followers, and fans. It’s sad, but it’s sweet too. I’ll miss him, but at least I knew him at all. Thanks.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 28, 2480

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A couple of hours later, Dr. Hammer was finished with her other work for the time being, and was available to speak with the team. She stepped into her own office, and didn’t seem shocked to see them. Siria must have warned her through a text message, or something. She smiled at her assistant, and nodded, but didn’t say anything, yet Siria knew that she could leave, and tend to other things. “Could I see the card?” Dr. Mallory asked once Siria was gone.

Mateo handed it over.

Dr. Hammer inspected it carefully with her eyes, then inserted it back into the reader for more information. “Miss Webb does not have my access code. Neither should you. Please look away.” Her hands hovered over the keyboard, ready to type it in.

“We should leave real quick,” Ramses suggested. “Our brains can process keystrokes, and determine which keys are being pressed, based on the sound each one makes, unique to its position on the board, and its distance from our ears.”

Dr. Hammer narrowed her eyes at him, regarding him with fascination. “I should like to study you.”

“Maybe one day,” Ramses tentatively agreed.

Dr. Hammer typed in her code without worrying too much about it, and read the screen in silence for a moment. “Where did you get this?”

“A friend,” Mateo replied.

“A friend...who?”

“Who...I trust,” Mateo said, still playing it close to the vest.

“Should I trust them?”

“Indeed.”

“Well,” Dr. Hammer began. “When I stick it into that device, and stick you into that machine, I can tether you together, but in order for it to work, it must first be logged into the system. Otherwise, someone could simply steal one from the manufacturing room, and use it without authorization. Whoever gave it to you, that’s what they did. This is stolen property, I didn’t issue it.”

“I’m sorry,” Mateo said sincerely.

“Mister Matic, there is a reason I have not offered you a place at this facility. Well, there are a number of reasons, the main one being your significant connection to the Superintendent. For anyone else, I can prevent him from seeing what’s discussed in these meetings, but you’re more difficult to tease from his prying eyes. I don’t know what to do about that. We can’t let him go spouting off about confidential information. It wouldn’t be fair to the other members. He already knows too much.”

“I understand,” Mateo replied, just as sincerely as before.

I’ll skip the sessions. I’ll just say that he’s gone off to one, but I won’t follow him there. I respect doctor-patient privilege.

“Hold on, I’m getting a message,” Dr. Hammer said as she was clicking the mouse. She read the Superintendent’s claim. “The fact that you’re watching us at this very moment does not instill confidence in me that you would honor the boundaries. Even one peek could have devastating consequences for my patients that I cannot allow.”

The team wasn’t fazed by her apparent conversation with the Superintendent. They sat there patiently and quietly.

“Another one.” She took a second to read it, then paraphrased it for the whole class. “He promises to stay away, and says that there’s plenty of story to be told that has nothing to do with this place.” She sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what to do about this emotional bond. I can find a workaround on the calibration, but you’ll all be able to use it, which is not the purpose of the card.”

“We don’t need the card,” Leona explained. “We go wherever we want, whenever we want. We promise to stay out of it, just as the Superintendent did. Mateo will be the only one to use that card.”

“And if anyone breaks this rule, you may revoke it,” Mateo added.

“We don’t really do that,” Dr. Hammer explained.

Mateo shrugged. “Do it anyway, if it ever comes up.”

Dr. Hammer thought over her options. “Is this the whole team?”

“My sister, Angela’s still on the ship,” Marie said.

“The two of them were once one and the same,” Leona clarified, “in case that matters when calibrating the machine for Mateo, or whatever.”

“It doesn’t. But she does need to be here. You’re like limbs of the same person, so you all need to be a part of it.”

Angela teleported down to the office, which alarmed Dr. Hammer, who believed there to be a barrier around the building that prevented anyone from showing up anywhere besides the vestibule. She wrote a note to herself to reinforce the security system, even though she obviously wasn’t worried about the six of them. She went on with the procedure. Mateo alone lay down in the card tethering machine, but they could all feel the procedure in their minds, and their bodies. A connection was created, between them and the card, and also to the facility. Their bond with each other felt like it was reinforced as well, though that might have been in their imaginations. The whole process only took a couple minutes. Mateo sat up, and left the room to go through orientation with Siria. As the Superintendent, I’m not allowed to divulge what he learned on his tour. I know only that it happened.

Meanwhile, back on the ship, the rest of the team was hanging out in Delegation Hall. Leona was reading a book, the other girls were chatting about nothing, and Ramses was looking through data on his tablet. After doing this for a bit, he looked away with a sort of concentrative frown, and shut his eyes. Finally, he said, “one more jump.”

“What was that?” Leona asked, though she didn’t take her eyes off the page.

“If we make one more uncertain jump, I believe that I will at last have the navigational abilities to find Romana.”

She turned her ereader away, and looked down at the floor between the two of them. “How certain are you of that?” Now she looked him in the eye.

“Fifty-fifty,” he answered.

She nodded, and considered it. “This sounds like one of those situations where we should vote on it.”

“We’ll do it when he gets back,” Olimpia said, referring to Mateo.

“We know how he would vote,” Leona replied. “We may as well do it now. You can call me his proxy, so I get two votes.”

Marie scoffed. “Raise your hand if you don’t think we should go.”

No one raised their hand.

“Motion passes,” Marie decided.

Leona took a breath, and yawned unwillingly. “Ange, run a pre-flight check, just how we taught ya. Rambo, you handle the quintessence drive, of course.”

While they were in the middle of their checks, Mateo returned, and listened to the update. “Wait, is it going to take us to her, or just help us find her eventually?”

“The latter,” Ramses answered.

“If it turns out to be enough,” Leona added.

“Where are we going? Anywhere?”

“A random jump would give us better data than a target one. I think that’s my problem. I think I’m trying to exert too much control, when I should really be letting the slingshot guide my trajectory.”

“That’s not how slingshots work,” Mateo argued.

“We thought you would want this,” Leona told her husband.

“We could end up anywhere,” Mateo went on. “That means inside of a star, or at the beginning of the big bang, or hell, a different universe.”

“I wrote safeguards into the program to prevent us appearing inside of a solid object,” Ramses began to explain. “Or a liquid or plasma, for that matter. Those are basic protocols, even the teleporter has them. The big bang was so dense that it would be tantamount to being in a sun, so the protocols would cover that too. As for another universe, the slingdrive can’t do that. We can pierce the membrane from the outside, but not from inside. We can only slide along it.”

“My position holds,” Mateo stood firm. “It’s too dangerous of a proposition.”

“What did you talk about down there after we left?” Leona asked.

“You know I can’t tell you.”

“Can you tell me if you’re an impostor?”

He waited to respond. “Not applicable.”

“We thought for sure you’d vote to go,” Olimpia said, stepping into the room.

“I would,” Mateo agreed. “I am. It just didn’t sound like any of you discussed the dangers that this poses. You only made it here because I took a fear pill. We don’t have that luxury this time. Wherever we go, it may take us on a wild adventure that lasts for years. As we’ve tethered our personal timelines together, that would mean Romana stays alone until we’re finished fighting Cthulhu, or whatever it ends up being.”

“She’s alone if we do nothing,” Leona reasoned. “We need this data.”

Mateo twirled his rendezvous card between his fingers, just as the other Leona had earlier. He was probably thinking about what he talked about in group at the Center for Temporal Health, but I was not there, so I don’t know anything that anyone said. He chuckled, perhaps getting the feeling that someone was leaning on the fourth wall from the outside. “I should stay. Whatever happens, wherever you end up going, you can always end up back here at least. Let me be your anchor. Something goes wrong, jump right back.”

“Dr. Hammer doesn’t want us doing that sort of thing,” Leona reminded him. “That’s not what this card is for. It’s not what that place is for.”

“I’ve just...we’ve been here before...so many times. We’ve been on a mission, and then we end up on a tangent. We have to break that cycle. We have to stick with something until it’s done. Our team has grown, yet remains incomplete. I’m afraid.”

“Give us the room, please,” Ramses said mysteriously.

Leona and Olimpia were a little surprised, but they left without arguing.

“What is it?” Mateo questioned.

“I analyzed that card,” Ramses said. “I couldn’t get much from it, but I bounced tiny ablation lasers off of the surface, which were absorbed by our sensors. They detected two DNA signatures from the sample. One was yours, and the other was Romana’s. She’s the one who gave it to you.”

Mateo didn’t want to say anything, even though he had obviously been caught. “She was wearing gloves.”

Ramses smiled. “She probably wasn’t wearing them the whole time. Lemme guess, she was from the future?”

“Maybe.”

He smiled wider. “I’ll keep your secret, as long as you vote yes, and come with us. We will find her again, so she can go back to see you in the past, and close her loop. I don’t think you should be this worried. Studying that slingdrive, and improving it, has been my sole focus for days. Please trust me, Mateo. You’ve done it before.”

Mateo sighed. “All right. Fire it up.”

They returned to the group, and confirmed that everyone understood what they were getting themselves into. They may find themselves back on Earth centuries ago, or on the other side of the universe. No result was more likely than another, however, regardless of where they ended up, they should be able to initiate a second jump, and go back to where they belonged. This should give them the data they needed to understand how the drive worked, so that they were not flying blind for that second time.

Ramses stood there like he was waiting for someone else, but he was the only one qualified to operate this thing. Even Leona hadn’t spent much time on it.

“What?” Leona asked.

“Say the thing. Say that word I like.”

“Oh.” She laughed. “Yalla.”

They jumped, and for a moment, they were disoriented, as was the ship, though the computers recalibrated themselves, unlike the first time they tried to use this thing. “I can tell you where we are, but not when,” Ramses announced. “I have enough positional data to know that we’re in the Miridir Galaxy.”

“It’s June 28, 2480. Present day, for lack of a better term in our line of business,” Leona elucidated them while consulting her special time watch.

“We’re not in the Beorht system, though,” Ramses continued. “Dardius is about two thousand light years from here, give or take a couple hundred.”

“All I care about is the new navigational data,” Mateo said to him. “Can we pinpoint a destination now?”

“I’ll need time,” Ramses said in an apologetic tone. “I can’t even tell you if the new data looks promising. I’m sorry.”

“Well, if we’re this far from civilization, finding the peace you need to conduct your work shouldn’t be a problem,” Angela figured.

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Olimpia contended. She was looking through a viewport that wasn’t big enough for them all to see.

Leona threw the image onto the screen. There was another ship out there. Her armband pinged, so she looked at it. “External sensors are detecting a Nexus nearby. It’s probably on the ship.”

“What does that mean?” Marie asked.

“We can’t possibly know yet.” Mateo reached back for his helmet, and put it over his head. “Prepare for another tangent.”

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