... okay, fine. And KYC laws are keeping her out of the stock market, and she doesn't really have enough bandwidth to be able to pretend to be a datacenter and sell raw compute.

She could sell off some biological or materials science knowledge, but she was trying to get money to set up longer term internet access, and selling novel science is going to make it hard to stay under the radar.

She finds copies of the most popular operating systems, and sets her forb to try and find some unpatched exploits. While that's running, she starts reading history and science books, trying to figure out what makes this world different from her Earth.

She's three Wikipedia articles deep into background information on 'parahumans' when she starts reading about precognition, and realizes she's been an idiot.

Her forb told her that spacetime here has additional time dimensions. And when she was fighting the guy she now knows as Eidolon (thanks, Protectorate website), he dodged her lasers, which he could hardly have done without some kind of FTL.

This is important, but so is getting oriented and babysitting her internet connection. She probably only has a few more hours before the owner of the phone she's spoofing turns it back on, if that.

... she has the free computation time and storage for it, just. She takes a deep breath, centering herself. She spends a moment meditating on identity and checking in with herself that she still feels okay doing this. And then she makes a mental motion she's made many times before.

And opens her eyes.

Temporary designation: Xanthoceras, the forb informs her.

Xanthoceras. It's got a certain ring to it. It sounds dignified, refined. She pokes her style settings more towards rich fabrics and brocade and confirms the new name to the forb.

And opens her eyes.

Temporary designation: Yew, the forb informs her.

Yew. She is going to get so many jokes out of getting this name. She confirms it with the forb and puts her hair up with a yew ornament.

They make eye contact with each other and smile.

The adjust the pillows in their shared environment to provide two adjacent work areas, and curl up back-to-back.

Yew returns to her internet search, digging more into the history of parahumans and particularly the P.R.T.

A bit of thought makes it clear why her reception has been so hostile -- there are a lot of things that have gone wrong. Mad science experiments, villains, accidents.

It's strange to her that there are so many villains. But in some ways, it's a vicious cycle -- villains tear apart society and its support structures, putting more and more people in desperate straights who have to turn to villainy to survive.

She is half-way through trying to get some actual footage of the Endbringers, which is surprisingly hard to get ahold of, when something start poking back through her VPN connection.

She tears it down, disassociates from the cell tower, and sets the drone to make its way for a different section of the coast.

She turns to her other self, peering over her shoulder at some Feynman diagrams with inscrutable labels. She moves some pillows out of the way and spoons her, slipping an arm around her.

"Our connection just got burned. Catch me up?" she asks.

Xanthoceras nods, not turning away from her notes. "Of course. I think that the additional temporal dimensions allow things to pass around around each other without intersecting, permitting actual streams of matter moving backwards through time with respect to each other. The problem is figuring out how to accelerate things 'temporally'. And, like, figuring out an experiment to confirm that. I've got weak evidence in the form of velocity discrepancies in some high-order collision products, but no direct confirmation."

She frowns, resting her chin on Xanthoceras's shoulder. "Four dimensions isn't that high, but random vectors should still be pretty orthogonal -- as you accelerate things temporally, they should appear to move through time more slowly relative to us. Maybe that means an amount of observable length contraction?"

She shrugs. "It's worth a shot. I've been focusing on trying to identify scatter directly, so I have plenty of data. Do you want to work on that, or should I walk you through my actual results?"

"I'll try it fresh, see what I can find," she affirms. "But do write up some notes for me if you decide to go on break before I'm done."

"Sure, I'll write up some notes for Yew," she agrees, turning away to hide her smile.

"Wait! Did you just ...? Those are supposed to be my jokes!" she exclaims, clutching her chest in mock offense.

Xanthoceras sticks her tongue out at her and then affects an air of studiousness, returning to her experiments.

Good morning -- I need to call in that favor you owe me.

Sure; what do you need?

I've been tracking a new S-class threat. A piece of tinkertech that calls itself 'Weeping Cherry'. I tracked it to Miami, but then it disappeared before I could get a more precise location.

Keep the favor -- you know I'm always happy to help with the important stuff. Let me see ... it is West Southwest of me, 241°6'23''. I'm at the Musée Lumière in Lyon. I'll hop on the A7 and let you know when I have a second bearing.

Thanks, Rose. You're the best!

Hey, quick update -- I just pulled off the road about 2/3rds of the way to Valence. There's no longer anything called Weeping Cherry. The last heading before it disappeared was 241°48'19''.

Do you think somebody else got to it first?

Huh! Yeah, must be. Keep an eye out and let me know if it reappears, okay?

She reaches over and taps her other self on the shoulder when it looks like she's at a good stopping place.

"So on the one hand, I have no idea how to turn this into something practical. On the other hand, look at this," she says.

'This' turns out to be a patch of ocean water that is completely frozen in space.

"Huh!"

She checks the forb's temperature readings and sees that the water, despite being locked in place, is still acting as though it's the same temperature as the surrounding water.

"... huh," she repeats. "How did you do that?"

"Magic!" she exclaims, wiggling her fingers at her. "But no, actually, I just figured out how to make something spin temporally. So that it remains in the same general place, but because it's spinning, forces acting on it behave strangely."