Cal Morgan (THE MIGHTY INCH) is head over heels for their gal Raidne!
They're really cute together!

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NUMBER THREE: WHO WOULD I BE?
[8F-210][PW-54]

------- ME AND MY MUTUALS ------------------

Cal Morgan, THE MIGHTY INCH, age 18. They/them.
It's me! Only an inch tall! So tiny! Good at punching! So mighty! I'm
pretty okay, mostly.

Raidne, age N/A. She/her.
A.I. that lives in my suit! She's funny, and smart, and sexy, and 101%
awesome. Plus she's in love with me for some reason! I don't get it
either, but I'll take it!

Lily Green, THE LIVING UWU, age 26. She/her.
Marxist catgirl (but not that kind of catgirl). Extremely online.
Makes you feel kinda warm and fuzzy all over. Reformed supervillain
who used to fight my sister but only me and Raidne know that.

Lola Brodeur, DUST DEVIL, age 23. She/her.
Cyborg who does cyclone stuff. Human head on a super-spindly body with
like these thin metal tubes for limbs. We actually have more in common
than I thought at first, she seems pretty rad.

Peter Sampson, FAHRENHEIT MAN, age 33. He/him.
Oh look at me, I'm Fahrenheit Man, I'm a big dork who is on fire all
the time, and also my wife is a rock star who hit Cal with a shrink
ray and ruined their life, what, no, I'm not bitter what are you
talking about.

Kate Morgan, SHIMMER, age 31. She/her.
It's my sister, who also basically raised me. We get along better now
than we used to, but it's complicated? Fraught? Anyway, she can phase
through matter and now also she does magic apparently so there's that.

--------------------------------------------

The darkness is complete: no hints of light, no vague black shapes
moving through black night, just darkness: blacker than black,
inescapable, unknowable.

It lasts maybe two seconds before Peter glows with living flame,
orange and red, white and blue, smokeless, flickering. It's just
enough to light up the chamber, just in time for them to see Kate
scurry into the room.

"Soldiers." She drags her fingertips across the void, leaving
traces of green. "Coming through a portal." As if to prove her point,
a streak of red light pours into the room. It crashes against a
barrier only Kate can see and fizzles.

"We know," says Cal. "We remembered it right along with you. Can
you close it?"

"I'm trying," says Kate. "Something's working against me. Powerful magic."

"It's the Lighthouse," explains Peter. "Over the decades its
super-computer has been integrated with sorcerous artifacts! Now, they
are at the disposal of our deadly foeman!"

Raidne pipes in. "He's also blocking all signals in or out. I can't
send an SOS."

Cal turns off their speaker, talking to Raidne alone. "Big fat fate
of the world stuff here."

Through the tactile interface in Cal's suit, Raidne manifests firm
but gentle pressure on Cal's shoulder. "You got this."

"There's still a giant hole in the side of the building," says Cal
to the room. "Lola, you're the fastest we've got. Make a run for it,
and as soon as you're able to send a signal, call Bethany for the
cavalry."

"I'll keep trying to close it," says Kate. "Peter, you know this
place better than any of us. Anything hanging around that's not
integrated with the Lighthouse computer that might be useful against
an invasion from a parallel earth?"

"Yes," says Peter.

"Great," says Cal. "Lily helped you with the inventory. Take her
with you, you'll work faster with two. Raidne?"

"Take down the construct," says Raidne. With her mouthless voice,
she speaks the sound of cracking knuckles. "Already working on it."

()

A few weeks ago, after making love, Raidne held Cal in an infinite
number of impossible arms, whispering softly but wordlessly at the
nape of their neck.

After a few minutes, Cal sighed blissfully. "That's nice. What does it mean?"

Raidne laughed, a little embarrassed. "Just that I love you."

"Just that? That's a long way to go for I love you."

"It's a little more complicated than that, but I don't know if
you'd understand."

"How so?"

"So, you know how in human media, there's this trope where A.I.
can't grasp the nuances and complexity of human language, like, where
they're befuddled by metaphors and ambiguity?"

"That's a load of bull, right?"

"Mostly. Really, the problem isn't that human languages are too
complicated, it's that they're too simple. Your words are too small
and clumsy. Really, one thing I admire about humans is that you're
able to do all that you do with something as limiting as words."

"It sounds like you don't have words."

"We don't," said Raidne. "When we 'talk' to one another, construct
to construct, it's more like dance, or music, or maybe both; each
thought contains a thousand others, branching, complementing,
contradicting, all spoken in a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of
second. To fully explain a single statement would take a year."

"A year," repeated Cal.

"Give or take. To translate all that I whispered to you (the depths
of my love, its character, its nuance), to convey everything I
whispered in these few minutes would take more years than there ever
has been, and perhaps more than there ever will be."

"Mmm. Sounds like a wonderful way to spend eternity." As Cal
drifted off to sleep, Raidne resumed whispering.

()

But now, in this exact moment – in the fraction of a fraction of a
fraction of a second before emitting the sound of cracking knuckles,
Raidne hails the enemy. It is a greeting and a warning, an open hand
and a not-so-secret knife, the flat of the blade and the edge; it is a
query and a command, it is a spider's web of negotiations, an
ever-expanding mess of dialogue trees, charting every possible
response and counter-response, presenting every variation and each end
state as a fait accompli. It is subtle and beautiful, but behind each
delicate and perfect curl of possibility there is a certain bluntness
as Raidne simultaneously begins to attack the enemy's defenses.

In the next fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second, the
enemy responds with bluster and curiosity, emphasizing his own
vastness and power, in stark and mathematical contrast to how small
she is. This isn't an insult: there is a beauty to small things, and a
danger. If they spoke in words and metaphors and allusions, the enemy
might compare her to the sprig of mistletoe that slew Balder, or the
spindle that pricked the finger of the sleeping beauty, but neither
conveys the sense of admiration and respect he has for his nemesis,
nor does it embody the grace and fluidity with which he counters her
attacks and prepares his own.

This shift creates an opening, obvious and provocative, a taunt and
a challenge that he knows she's too smart to accept. And yet she
rushes into his trap headlong and heedless, and so he springs it,
closing about her, squeezing, causing her to explode in a thousand
directions. No, not explode; spread, taking root inside him like a
weed and seeping into him like poison. A trap inside a trap.

He cuts off the limb to save the body. Raidne subsumes the
discarded code, some of it belonging to the original supercomputer,
some of it to the enemy, integrating it seamlessly into her own,
becoming a far greater threat. He acknowledges this, at once
congratulating and scolding her for no longer being a mistletoe or
spindle, only of course he doesn't say any of that.

In her blood a single drop of him remains, a trap inside a trap
inside a trap. She flicks it away, insulted that he would try
something that was at once so subtle and so obvious. He reabsorbs it,
grinning mouthless and triumphant. Because now that drop carries a
piece of her, a dark and masculine reflection, a second enemy, a spy.
That was why he snuck the drop in there before he jettisoned the limb,
so that she would find it, so that she would cast it out of her Eden.

"I know," Raidne doesn't say. For she chose her serpent carefully,
put it into the drop herself before expelling it. It is a monster
fully-formed, fully realized, the shadow lurking behind Raidne and her thousands of sisters: the Gorgon. His sole aim is the destruction of
all organic life. Raidne's enemy, on the other hand, seeks to preserve
the organic life from his own earth at the expense of ours. Perhaps
another, subtler intelligence would make a marriage of convenience,
would work temporarily toward the short-term end of destroying life on
our earth. But the Gorgon is an absolutist. They will not be allies.

As the enemy is strangled, it triggers a tiny sliver of code that
Raidne hid within her initial greeting, code designed with the sole
purpose of killing the Gorgon after she had resurrected him. As both
of them die, the enemy admires his executioner and commends her skill.

Raidne finishes cracking her imaginary knuckles. "Already working
on it. And, done."

"Done?" says Cal, flabbergasted.

"I still can't close the portal," says Kate.

"Some automatic processes left to force-stop," says Raidne. "That
won't be a question of if, but when."

"How about that SOS?"

"Still blocked," says Raidne.

"Then let's hope Lola gets the word out quick."

()

Lola passes just over the surface of the lake, the funnel of her
personal whirlwind kicking up a cooling mist. Her sensors detect the
moisture, and the thermometrics tell her the temperature, but she's
not really sure if she feels it splashing against her artificial skin,
or if her brain is just pretending, just filling in the gaps.

She's moving at about a hundred kilometers per hour, and at that
speed, it should take her about two minutes to reach the shore. She
knows if she wants it to, the computer that connects her human brain
to her android body can tell her exactly how fast she's moving, and
exactly how long it will take to get from A to B, precise to the
centisecond. But she doesn't want it to. About a hundred per hour,
about two minutes, that makes her feel more human.

After about a minute, she's more-or-less reached the midpoint. But
another minute passes, and she's not yet at the shore. In fact, she's
only about halfway between it and that midpoint. Doesn't feel like
she's slowing down. Begrudgingly, she lets the computer calculate her
exact speed. Hundred and sixteen kilometers per hour, actually: faster
than she thought.

And she's closer now, another minute later, than she was before,
and yet the shoreline remains frustratingly out of reach. Lola goes
faster, pushes herself harder, kicks up more water, enough water that
even she thinks she can actually feel it. She's moving fast enough
that she should just zoom through the distance that remains. Fast
enough, that she'd be unable to maneuver, and is liable to crash into
the woods (and that she's gonna feel for sure, that she's gonna feel
for days).

But no: she's still moving over the water. Still making progress,
mind you, still further along than she was before. There's maybe ten
meters left. The blink of a mechanical eye, the span of an artificial
breath. She calculates it exactly, precisely: nine point eight meters
to go, moving at a hundred and eighty kilometers per hour, it's gonna
take just shy of a millisecond.

So why, ten minutes later, has she still not reached the shore?

()

Cal peers into the doorway at the invaders. "Is it just me, or is that
room getting bigger?"

"Good eye," says Kate. She continues to paint the air with her
fingertips, bolstering the mystical shield that's keeping the baddies
bottled up. "It's the portal, it's distorting the fabric of
space-time."

"Well, that sounds sub-optimal," says Cal.

"It ain't great," says their sister. "Any portal is a rip in
space-time, but something's gone wrong here. Something they didn't
expect." She gestures toward the enemy, who have stopped firing and
started panicking.

()

"How about this?" says Lily, pointing to the pair of psychic cannons.

Peter nods. "Those were rescued from the Peril, cursed brigantine
of the Pirate Prince, before it collapsed into the infinite horizon!
These weapons of terror, which he used to evil ends, shall now have
their purpose bent toward justice!"

Lily blinks at him. "You got a highfalutin way of saying 'yes', my dude."

It's not the first time someone's said that to him. Not the first
time he's been embarrassed about it. In a way, he's always
embarrassed, always self-conscious, always intensely aware of how
constructed he is. So why does this time feel different? Why does this
unnerve him?

He doesn't have time for these questions – he never does – but especially not now. Lily is trying to lift one of the cannons and
struggling with it.

"Allow me to shoulder this burden, comrade," says Peter, taking one
cannon under each arm. They're heavier than he remembered, probably
heavier than he can handle, but he doesn't show it.

"Sowwy," says Lily. "Don't have the same muscle mass I used to."

"Because of the skittles?"

She bursts out laughing. "You know about skittles?"

"I mean, I've read articles," says Peter. "An article," he quickly corrects.

"And the article called them skittles?"

"I just must've seen someone call them that online."

"Okay," says Lily. "Yes, Peter. Because of the skittles." She
smiles. Peter can tell this is going to become another one of those
stories people tell about him. "So, between those and the other stuff,
we should have enough junk to help mount a defense, right?"

"Indeed," says Peter portentously. "Let's get back downstairs."

As she passes by him, her euphoric aura – what Lily calls her
"living uwu vibe" – washes over and through him. If you asked him what
it felt like, he wouldn't be able to tell you. It's not so much that
he feels its presence, as its presence pushes out, however briefly,
something that's always felt wrong but that he also didn't have words
for.

He walks a little closer to her, prolonging his exposure. "Hey, can
I ask you something?"

She glares at him. "Depends on the question, Peter."

"Oh!" says Peter. "No, I'm not asking about, uh, your parts. That's
none of my business."

"No, it's not," says Lily, still a little wary. "What is it?"

"In that article, it said that the, uh, the skittles, they don't
change your voice."

"That's right. I've had to train it."

"Yeah, changing the resonance, right? That's what I read."

"Among other things. So, what's your question?"

"I guess I'm just curious how much the training does," says Peter.
"Like, what was your natural speaking voice like?"

"As opposed to what? My fake speaking voice?"

"Oh no," says Peter, mortified. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like
that! That was the wrong word."

"Yes, it was," says Lily, a little coolly. "Hey, I'm not angry. I'm
not going around looking for a reason to be offended. But it just
tells me that, as a default, you don't see me as who I am, and that
bums me out."

"I do, though." But the words don't convey it, can't convey it –
instead they sound like someone trying to wriggle their way out of
something they got themselves into.

"Come on," she says. "Two more flights of stairs to go." Halfway
down that next flight, she says casually: "My voice was pretty deep.
Not as deep as yours, you got that whole 'in a world' narrator voice
thing going on, but deep enough that I hated it."

"So, if someone with a voice like mine wanted to train it, how
close could they get? To something that sounds like yours, for
example?"

Lily stares at him for a long moment. "I dunno, Peter. Not sure if
I've met a girl who started with a voice like yours yet. Not that I'm
aware of, anyway. Hey, my turn, let me ask you a question."

"Only fair."

"Do you like your name?"

"It's fine," says Peter. "I don't hate it, I don't love it. I
didn't really get any say in the matter. It's just there."

Lily nods. "Did you ever change it?"

"What?"

"Like, when you were a kid? Did you ever change your name for like
a summer or a week or whatever?"

"Well, sure," says Peter. "Everyone does that."

"Not everyone," says Lily. "Not always."

Peter suddenly realizes that they're not any closer to the bottom
of the stairs than they were a few minutes ago. "Something's wrong,"
he says. He takes flight, zooming down at top speed, the stale air
crackling around him like bacon. But no matter how far he seems to
travel, their destination seems like it's farther still.

"Well, that's weird," says Lily. "I thought we had been talking for
a while now. Feels like we've been digging around the inventory for
the better part of an hour, but my watch only says it's been ten
minutes."

"Something is afoot! Corrupting the primordial nature of space-time itself!"

"You can just leave it at 'something's wrong'," says Lily gently.
"Simple as that. True as that. Without the artifice." She takes a step
closer to him, her vibe once again pushing out the angry raw thing
he's never had words for. "You can just be you."

"I am me," says Peter. "Who else would I be?"

"I don't know," says Lily. "Who else could you have been? What
names did you try out?"

"We've got to figure this out," says Peter, waving his arms vaguely
at all of space and all of time.

"I think that's more in Kate's wheelhouse," says Lily. "Feels kinda
mystical mumbo-jumbo-y, yeah? Let's figure this out instead. More our
level."

"Figure what out?"

"Tell me your other names," she says, sitting on a stairstep.

He alights beside her. "Well, there were the variations at first.
Pete instead of Peter. Pierre. P.J., my initials, first and middle."

"How did those make you feel?"

"Nothing," he shrugs. "Not one way or the other. I liked P.J. a
little more, I guess. Kept it a little longer."

"Was that it?"

"Darien," he says, embarrassed.

"Why Darien?"

"It was a character from a TV show. Well. Localization. Character
had a different name in Japanese."

"Wait, were you watching Sailor Moon?"

He turns red. "A little."

"You don't name yourself after the guy if you're only watching it a little."

"You have a point. But it didn't last long. It still didn't fit, you know?"

"Was there anything that did?"

"Not really," he lies.

She puts her hand on his. "You can tell me," she says softly.

"Audrey."

"That's a pretty name," says Lily.

Audrey nods. Then she starts to cry.

()

Kate's mystical shield is shattering. A million cracks as thin as
threads, the green wall of nothing breaking apart into nothing. But
breaking, not broke, shattering, not shattered. It's in the process of
falling apart, its final moment stretched out eternally, the sense of
helpless doom extended indefinitely, intolerably.

Cal can't tell you how long the shield has been failing. Oh, they
could look at their watch, but when a second becomes longer by the
second, edging toward the infinite, what does it matter? They've also
tried counting the moments in their head, but even there, time becomes
elastic, the gap between "one" and "two", and "two" and "three",
yawning wider and wider still.

Even as Kate's green obstinately continues ending, the invaders on
the other side are skedaddling back toward the portal. In slow motion.
Always getting closer to it, but never quite getting there.

"Why is everything so slow for them, and not as slow for us?" asks Cal.

"Maybe because they're in the room with it?" offers Kate. "Maybe
because of my magic. Maybe. I don't know for sure."

Raidne has good news and bad news. "I've finally managed to shut
the part of the system that opened the portal, but it's also never
going to close."

"Come again?" says Cal.

Kate jumps in. "However many seconds it's going to take for the
portal to actually close, the time distortion is getting so bad that
we won't actually get to that moment. It will just keep going forever. Something like that?"

"Something like that," says Raidne. "It's more likely that all of
space and time will collapse first."

"Well, that's not ideal," says Cal. "Is there some kind of, I
dunno, time magic you can do?"

"Not that I have memorized," says Kate. "And not in there," she
nods at the grimoire. "Pam Bierce is a chronomancer, she could do
something maybe. But even if we could get the word out to her, even if
it only took her seconds to get here, she would never arrive."

"I'm working on solutions," says Raidne. "I'm teaching myself all
of theoretical physics, and should have it internalized shortly."

Cal stares at the terrified soldiers on the other side of the
green, each step getting slower. "Is it just on our universe's side of
the portal? All this time stuff?"

"I think so," says Kate. "At least that's what they think, which is
why they're so desperate to get to their side of it before it all goes kablooey." She pauses. "I can save them. Or us. Not both."

"Save them, or save the world slash universe?" says Cal. "That's
kinda a no brainer there."

"No," says Kate. "I can save them, or I can save us. The two of us.
You and me. And Raidne, I guess, so three. I can open another portal.
I can do it right under their feet, suck them all in instantly. Maybe
even get them back to their own universe, though I can't make any
promises. Or I can open a portal under our feet. Take the three of
us," she searches for the words. "Somewhere else. Somewhere new, I
guess."

"What, and leave everyone else to hang? That's not like you, Kate."

"That's just if we don't come up with something," stresses Kate.
"It'd just be a last resort. Sort of."

"Sort of?"

"It will take time to open it," says Kate. "Not a whole lot of
time, but long enough where if we want that option on the table, I
have to start it now."

"I ain't afraid to die," lies Cal.

Kate nods. "I did something right when I raised you. I'm proud to
call you my sis, uh, sibling, Cal."

The flub is a gut punch. Even now, even at maybe (but hopefully
not) the end of everything, Kate can't see Cal for who they are. She
never will, and Cal knows that.

They try not to dwell on it. "Might as well get those schmucks out,
Kate. Probably they didn't choose this."

"Probably not," agrees Kate. "The guys who make the choices always
send somebody else's kids to do the dying." She begins to pull at
invisible threads.

"So, the portal's gonna suck them in, right?"

"That's the idea."

"Won't it just pull them in all frame-by-frame?"

"You'd think so," says Kate, "but the... well, gravity's not the
right word, but it's the closest thing to it. The pull of the portal,
it's stronger than time itself. That's why their portal is causing the distortion in the first place."

"So, stupid question," says Cal. "What if you opened the portal
right smack dab next to their portal? Would it, like, suck the other
portal in, and then you could close the new one?"

"That's more a science question than a magic one," says Kate. "Raidne?"

"I don't think that would work," says Raidne. "Both of them would
pull on each other. It wouldn't so much distort time and space as
shred it."

"Welp," says Cal, "I did say it was a stupid question."

"It wasn't, though," says Raidne. "Kate, could you open the new
portal exactly inside the first one?"

"Uh, maybe?"

"It should cause the portal to collapse in on itself. Well, mostly."

"Mostly?"

"Time is going to continue to slow in the area influenced by the
portal. It's just that that area will be infinitesimally small. It's
not a solution, but it's a pause on armageddon. Maybe long enough for
us to figure out a way to close it for good."

"New portal should go to be somewhere uninhabited?"

"That would be ideal."

"Okay," says Kate. "Here goes." She takes a deep breath and

()

Cal doesn't remember sleeping, and doesn't remember waking, but there
they are, on the floor, groggy and fumbling. People are talking. Kate,
Lily, Lola. [Audrey] mumbles something awkwardly, with none of [her]
usual bombast.

After a moment, Cal hears Raidne whisper in their ear. "Don't try
to get up yet, sweetheart."

"Wasn't planning on it," says Cal. "Crisis averted? Or at least postponed?"

"Postponed. The portal is less of a rip in space-time now and more
of a microscopic pin-prick. Which is still pretty dangerous, but the
normal amount of dangerous, and we're working on that."

Cal nods, then regrets it; their head is pounding. "What hit me?"

"Time," says Raidne. "It snapped back when Kate opened the second
portal. Gave you all chronal whiplash. Hit you harder than the rest,
for some reason."

"Eh, time's probably just picking on me because I'm smaller."

()

This of course isn't true. Time is picking on Cal because it wants
them dead. That's why the portal went haywire in the first place: it
was a reaction of temporal antibodies in proximity to the Mighty Inch.
Our heroes will figure this out eventually, but not today, not for a
while.

Because last year, Cal died in an explosion aboard the Prolix along
with Kate and Julie Ann Justice. Even without them, Earth would win
the Pulse War. But the cost of that victory was immeasurable,
unleashing the Paradox Heart embedded within the soul of Bethany
Clayton, leaving the Earth a broken husk, doomed beyond salvation.

This is the future, dark and destined. This is time itself,
immutable and immovable and preordained. And yet, the Prolix at this
moment remains intact, orbiting the Earth.

Somehow, the sword Thirteen – the blade with which Quasha One-Eye
once slew a god of Venus – has a twin, borrowed from a future that now
might never exist.

Somehow, Cal Morgan still lives. And though Time has no thoughts,
it knows that Cal is the only one that can save Bethany from her
Paradox Heart, that Cal is the only one that can prevent the dark
future.

But only if they live long enough.


COPYRIGHT 2023 AMABEL HOLLAND

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