2 - MereboldAt the age of twenty, Liya Merebold had achieved so much she had lost all sense of direction in her life, as if at some point, after so many academic awards, after so many years studying everything and above the curriculum, she was obligated to plummet into the ground as she was forced to look within herself for a path beyond the textbooks.

  Born in a small town West from Tatsubo, her parents (her father, rather...) always intended for her to eventually nd a pce at the accimed Tatsubo Academy of Pure Sciences and Research. Through a moderate incline in their raising of her, she eventually developed her own interest in learning, tracing a knowledge tree from any stupid question into its root through a rabbit hole of research. From the colour of the sky to the wave-particle duality, and from trying to stick a fork into an outlet (she was four...) to memorizing the differential equations at the base of electromagnetism. So she became the first candidate for Empire-level competitions in mathematics and other sciences, allowing her town a chance at a spotlight, and a growing pressure that followed her as she, indeed, easily earned herself a pce at the TAPSR, through which she moved to a small ft in downtown Tatsubo.

  Once she was nineteen, as the youngest Ibraleshi to have completed a PhD (in her case, in Particle physics), she had both the accim of a child genius and the incredulity of older schors. After a temporarily grieved, never expined rejection by the Khani Astronomical Team (KAT, not pronounced as the domestic feline commonly seen in northern regions but rather as an acronym— each letter separately), Liya accepted a consotion prize whose implications she ignored: a job opening at Laia Laboratories, then a short-term start-up sparingly financed by the Empire to improve the digital infrastructure of Ibraleshi and Khani services.

  Soon enough she was grateful to have chosen it: the environment was a new home for her, keeping the warmth while lowering the condescension of living with her parents. Ytrima Nonimos had offered her a thorough welcome to the boratories and made a best friend out of her, and soon she was inserted into the social life of Laia Laboratories while working with them efficiently on whatever was at task.

  And yet, while she had found a pce to work she was highly satisfied with, back then there was no Bio-Telemate, nor Telemate at all under their sleeve, and the Empire's budget had less than a humble amount of chips from their budget to offer Doctor Muias' company; Laia Laboratories had basically no pennies to pay its researchers past living wages, let alone to get an ambitious project running. A representative had promised more money would come once they'd proposed something that was 'worth it'.

  Initially, the newly employed Liya could shrug it off and pretend vocation was all she needed to smile from ear-to-ear in her 9-to-6, but a few weeks into brainstorming unnamed, purpose-less revolutionary projects and Liya Merebold found herself searching for a way to step-stone Laia Laboratories beyond its economic limitations.

  The reputation she'd earned (as in, one article by the TAPSR highlighting her young talents in physics and a recognition by the Mayor of Tatsubo's Western district: the picture shows her, with dishevelled hair smiling dishonestly while shaking the hand of a man that was clearly not briefed on whose hand he's shaking) gave her the idea of doing conferences in certain universities, starting at the one in which she earned the PhD to begin with.

  But the conference that interrupted Salih's css was not Liya's first, no, it took some time for them to 'take off' and get a higher number of attendants.

  The Pannek approach to teaching was something Liya Merebold could never even try to learn. She had no authority over those listening to her, nor could she even try to seize the silent respect of the masses. Her first talk showed how atrocious her crowd control was; her voice was eventually drowned by the chit-chattering of uninterested students and disrespectful professors, manifesting in forced coughs their hateful desire to quieten the bright. She'd grown seeing her masters be humble and quiet— how could she try to capture the audience while remaining true to herself?

  Research on good speaking piled up alongside the mistrust of academia toward Liya Merebold, or at least against her reliability as a conference host. She'd arrive with a bright (increasingly forced) smile, only to be ignored from the moment her slideshow was projected onto the white screen, and for her plead to be listened smelled by those who indulge in the fear of the insecure.

  A dozen mediocre presentations ter, and the facade of a professional orator begun to fade away. Middle-way through a two-hour dissertation on the feasibility of travel past the fifth atmospheric yer, she would mumble to herself, but the microphone on her would capture her frustrations anyway: "... Ah, whatever. You don't seem to give a shit either way. Does it even matter if this is proven or not. It's not like they'll pay a dime to get us out of this sphere. It's not like any of you is going to be chucked to space any time soon, either! We're trapped here!"

  This rant would extend itself for several minutes, if interrupted by short attempts at resuming her presentation. Pictures of the fated day (Creon the 62nd, year 790, to be precise) show tired eyes and a diminished passion, at least in comparison to the optimism with which she approached previous conferences (optimism whose absence was all-the-more noticeable after her undoing.)

  And yet that very comment, despite its ck of formality; despite its direct defiance of the audience she was meant to convince... it lured them in. It started with some earnest chuckles from the most stubborn members of the room, and Liya Merebold would ter admit being one prone to enabling by comedic approval regardless of the approval's source. And it opened the door for an experiment: to drop all formalities and throw a little zest into her speech. "My mother's gift", as Liya would call it ter on, a charisma she had then reserved only for friendship, now dispyed as she traversed extended mathematical formus with quips and sng, though one would argue that their fiery, rant-like nature is more reminiscent of her father's way of speech. It not only allowed her to finish that one conference with a sense of satisfaction, but it increasingly started filling amphitheatres with enthusiasts of confusing science and decent comedy.

  The theatrics, lukewarm as they might have been, gave accessibility to her talks, and rapidly she became a figure of the academic world, domestically and abroad, for better and for worse. At the same time as the rooms filled in and stood in ovation to the now-recognised brilliance of her ideas, jealousy birthed in the media circles disapproving of her rhetorical tactics, and the slightest concern, in Imperial agencies, as they saw this girl attracting the masses while, every once in a while, being subtly political in ways distasteful to them.

  Some weeks in, and Liya Merebold's schedule had grown packed, around the Tatsubi campus, but also at different schools and universities around Ibralesh, and even one conference day in the Costan capital. She did not want to sacrifice her job at Laia Laboratories to become a full-time entertainer/science expositor (the exposition was for the company's sake, she recalled), so all of her day was spent at either position, the tter financing the former by pcing more investing eyes around the boratories services. She had, in essence, become the mascot of the boratory, one of its major scientists, and a key investor. And the pacing was all she craved. Running from building to building, always with a task to fulfil.

  Nonetheless, as previously mentioned, Liya Merebold joined Laia Laboratories when it had seemingly hit rock-bottom in many aspects. And while she had somewhat curbed the economic woes of the company, money was not the only roadblock in their way.

  The director and co-founder of the boratories, Trekkos Muias, had sketched the concept of the Telemate in his teenager years. In present day he cims that he does not remember how it got inside his head, but that once it did, it spread like a disease, turning every research he did into a step toward teleportation. Not human teleportation, mind you. That, he deemed decidedly impossible on the first few weeks of his obsession. Just, the teleportation of dead matter.

  He had only thought of a potential way to reduce the hyperbolic energy consumption that such a machine would use, and now had to find a way to turn his mathematics into a product.. At the age of nineteen, such a task appeared trivial—and if it took him all his life, then so be it. Once he was past the half-way point through his twenties he was a doctor in engineering with mentions in physics and business, and that same year he built Laia Laboratories, alongside Psio Heggard, a statistician he met on his st year of studies.

  But he would not spend all of his initial investment on a dream, no. Muias knew to be a little patient, and they worked on analytics and optimization, offering services to the most neglected public sectors, most notably their rehash of the railroad system that would become the Imperial standard starting Creon 783.

  In a year, the two ambitious men managed to get the attention of the highest ranks — earning gradual recognitions for their academic and technological work (with the help of a very small team of employees) that eventually nded Muias, alone, a meeting with the crown— the first of many.

  Laia Laboratories became one of the many scientific companies absorbed by the Empire that decade. Some of the newly hired left, but many more joined, and they had the funds and the people for Muias to keep focusing his energy on the teleporter, which, in his meeting at the Royal Pace, was called, 'intriguing' by an important element of the chain of power, an adjective powerful enough for him to hope madly.

  Five years ter, and that female voice saying 'intriguing' was all he had. He had sketches, concepts, and theory scattered in his office but no way to join it all to make a real machine exist. Investors mocked his fantasy and struggled to believe in its actual efficiency compared to other forms of transport. What they had was not enough. And they could no longer rely on promises. The device Muias dreamed of became a folder hidden in a sad drawer only to be accessed by his cold hands every Friday evening.

  Since her arrival at Laia Laboratories, Liya had heard all of this mysterious, long-abandoned project, sometimes with fake hope, sometimes with mockery, but very often pitying the man supposed to lead them.

  Her access to the folder itself was an accident on Muias' part, but many considered it as a subconscious effort on his end to get Liya to help his most desired project become reality. The man would initially regret giving her access to such a privileged, intimate failure of his. She would enter his office many times a day, asking questions about the sketches, finding little mistakes on his reasoning and questioning approximation choices he made, little by little piecing together his work into something feasible.

  "Don't you have, like, some conference to be in? Research to do?" He would ask her, especially annoyed that she was making changes to his project, but also somewhat thrilled to know there was a fix to his mess. If it weren't for his pride, he would have quickly joined her and asked her to expin in detail what changes she was making, so he would feel at the very least somewhat included in the perfecting of the teleporter. But as, he stayed in his desk, ruminating and ruminating on his failures, and how humiliating it was for somebody else to come, find his terrible blueprints and make them into decent blueprints.

  The weeks passed, and Muias remembers little of them, up until the day in which Liya had determined enough polishing had been made to Muias' sketches, and that she was prepared to take most of the lead for the first time, in the Telemate. It was one sunny-yet-chilly morning of the early winter 790: Liya decided it was finally time to work on a fantasy again.

  She had grown to believe in every single member of the Laia team with the utmost faith. All birthdays memorised, family members and pets' full names known by heart. Doctor Merebold greeted her colleagues by requesting updates on bits of their story that even they themselves had forgotten Liya knew about. She knew of Muias' tendency to drum his nails against fsks, Siliam's preference for working with their eyes closed, not to mention the friendship she'd developed with Ytrima... without being director of the boratories she had become its heart and a well-beating heart was all it needed to get back on track with the dream project that hadn't yet come to be.

  The few veterans still working at the Laboratories remembered how it was to pretend the Telemate was feasible, and watched with pity as the newcomers tried to get it to existence, with the young, naive prodigy at the helm. That is to say, the early days were tough, even for Liya Merebold, or perhaps especially for an overconfident Liya Merebold who, despite her winning streak, was also known for turning to despair once she didn't find an immediate solution to an undetected problem — or when somebody else didn't.

  Jil Gren, a former employee of the company, would decre, "I used to work with Liya Merebold. I quit Laia Laboratories because of Liya Merebold. She often threatened to kill herself and then me (in that order, she insisted) whenever I failed to find a particur tool she needed from the storage room." Liya's erratic behaviour early in the second attempt at developing the Telemate tends to be associated with a number of factors. Some argue that it was simply the culmination of the st two seasons of her life, an overscheduled woman suddenly having all of her time concentrated on a sole, less trivial task. Her constant success at conferencing cshed with the more frustrating, patience-requiring nature of the Telemate's development. Others (a perspective shared by her parents) say that Liya's mood swings were a key component of her personality that were simply attenuated once she met Salih Pannek, more than a year ter. More creative individuals point out the fact that erratic emotional responses are a characteristic of Trekkos Muias, that could have been transmitted to Liya as she took on the Telemate's development, as if they were a curse to bear. Whether Liya Merebold is cursed, mentally ill, or just a busy woman is left up to reader interpretation.

  Different aspects of the Telemate were produced in stages, included the teleportation protocol, its interface, and the physical design of the machine itself, which they wanted to be "ideally smaller than the first computer ever made" — the Ghundan Leirmaxx X720, which spanned half the floor of an office building. Sacrifices were made throughout development, and they watched their budget burn and the stakeholders urge for updates as they all fell into small periods of despair in which they doubted Liya's improvements to Muias' model of teleportation were enough to make the concepts a reality. But eventually, through the synergies of its members, the Telemate project went from Liya's joined blueprints to a very real and tangible prototype — one that worked just barely, yes, but a prototype nonetheless, that would be ironed out for the next few months before its official inauguration in front of the stakeholders.

  The first successful, unofficial test of the Telemate happened on the 34th day of 791's Fall. Dr. Siliam was scheduled to finish a sketch-up of the device's graphic interface that very day, though he admitted that it was 'miraculously functional code that is illegible to just about anyone of any technical level who reads it.' After some time click-ccking on his keyboard everyone gathered round for the moment of truth.

  On the Telemate's release speech, Liya spoke of the testing of that first prototype.

  "Funnily enough, we didn't really think of 'what' we'd test the Telemate with. So when it was the time we just shrugged our arms and had to think for a moment. Knowing that the principal application that the device could have was the shipping of grains, we made out first tests with Yaalet's grano bar. He was fine with it, I think."

  In an interview that same day, Muias admitted his characteristic pessimism prevailed that day.

  "For a moment I thought I would die. I am certain there were others thinking the same thing. 'This machine is going to explode and we are all going to die.' But then it didn't. Instead, it took Doctor Garadan's grano bar from one boratory to another in differing floors, all in a matter of seconds. We all were silent once the thing had left the room, but Liya immediately.. burst out of the boratory to go check it at the other end. She came back with the very same grano bar, intact, just as it had left, wrapper and everything. She had tears in her eyes and couldn't stop giggling. Everyone cheered, most ughing in stunned surprise. Like 'Oh, fuck. We just teleported a grano bar across two separate rooms.'"

  Yaalet Garadan, the grano bar's owner, was invited to a regional te-night show to speak of his participation on the event.

  "Did I [eat the grano bar after the teleportation]? Well, I didn't just eat it. We had to give it some serious thought. We had made sure during the conception of the Telemate that it wouldn't make food inedible, of course. Still, we kept it frozen for a bit while Liya triple-checked that nothing was wrong with it. She promised that I would not get sick after eating it. We bet 20 Rubies on it, and I ate it. I am almost certain it tasted just like any normal grano bar. I would know, I eat like, two of them daily. But I guess the mere thought that it had been teleported away fucked with my taste buds for that moment. [...] And for as long as the Telemate has been deployed, there have been no reports of illness after consuming teleported food, excluding cases of technical negligence."

  Laia Laboratories had succeeded. In a small building only named through a cheap sign reading "Laia Laboratories", teleportation had been achieved for the first time in the world. Less than two years since Liya Merebold joined the company, they had made history.

  Nevertheless, against their better faith, news of the TELEMATE's near-completion leaked thanks to a member of the Laboratories whose identity was never revealed nor known. It was then that the Laboratories first entered relevance in the media, and that Liya Merebold went from a somewhat recognised science expositor to a star discussed even by those uninterested in the consequences of an inorganic teleporter. Liya reflected once or twice on that time period, in an interview between the Telemate and Bio-Telemate's inaugurations, te 792.

  "The Telemate days... stacks of paper in random tables of the boratory, a small team working for hours without interruption, no need for meetings with businessmen (save for a pesky interview every once in a while, [no offence!]), and the frequent little conversations on what would come next. Yes, we were still finishing up the original Telemate, but the surge of motivation kept forcing us into the future. Muias —Doctor Muias was prepared from the start to give me the reigns of the next project, whatever it would be. Well, at least, he... seemed prepared? I can't say I know for sure..."

  As investments in Laia Laboratories piled up, and renovations started to transform the building into a scientific complex, rare would be the days when no journalist waited outside the main entrance to try an interview any of the stars of the rumoured Telemate project. Muias spoke of this with the investors present at the Telemate's announcement.

  "We had to keep Liya hidden before today's reveal. She used to be a little too chatty for our own good."

  Her media presence was characterised by a whimsy that was not often seen in other figures of the field. One can easily refer to the famous colge of portraits of scientists having been awarded the 'Scientist of the Year' award by the Academy, almost every picture dispying men and women of often advanced age, with wrinkly faces (studies suggest a staggering 78% of Kharetti post-doctoral scientists smoke a packet of cigarettes or more a day), bnk expressions in a dark background, except for the st one showing a cheery Liya Merebold smiling from ear to ear while waving at the camera in a picture that was reportedly taken in a park near what was then her apartment block.

  So prominent had become her presence that media both nationally (e.g. The Ibraleshi Times) and internationally (e.g La Nouvelle Trinité, major North-Primman news outlet) often referred to Laia Laboratories as Liya Laboratories, whether mistakenly or purposely. The scientist generally proceeded to humbly correct interviewers and highlight the importance of Muias in the work environment. Muias himself, however, spoke little with the media during that time.

  The public awaited Laia Laboratories' revolutionary announcement. Not yet known as the Telemate, but rather as a vast number of nicknames ranging from press-friendly to colloquial: the teleporter, the Laia dispcer, the Laia scam, etc. Muias and Merebold, having become partners-in-crime and the tter being the unofficial leader of the project, spent an afternoon wandering about how the Telemate should be unveiled. "A public demo — just outside the b, without any anticipation or announcement. Whoever sees it, sees it." Liya proposed at first, but eventually Muias led them toward a more conventional strategy. "Something simple. I don't think anyone needs the details. I don't think we need to show it to that many people either. A small inauguration in front of eighty or so people, mostly stakeholders, a few Imperial appointees, and, Sun knows, maybe the Emperor himself—" According to Liya herself, she was drinking a bottle of Eastern-Ghundan filtered water that she choked on when the Emperor's hypothetical presence was mentioned.

  "The Emperor?" Liya said, brushing the side of her hand past her lips to clean them.

  Muias nodded. "His adjunct contacted us yesterday. His highness wanted to know whether the rumours were true."

  Liya turned her head, slightly. "What did you say?"

  "I gave him the bottom line. That we have an initial prototype which will be shown to the world sometime by the end of the month."

  Liya's hands were opened, for some reason, and her expression conveyed fbbergast. "So you just told him. You just gave away that information ahead of time to the crown?"

  Muias sighed. His elbows rested on his desk, and his palms rubbed his face, presumably calming him down, but also dishevelling his beard, preparing him for what he sometimes described as 'another one of her outbursts'. "Liya. What else did you want me to do?"

  Liya shrugged, so quickly it might as well have been a spasm. "I don't know. Lie? Anything but potentially tear apart years of work?"

  "Many more years for me, for Laia, than for you. You've been on this project for little more than one."

  Liya raised a finger, and her tone was raised. "That is not the point! Don't deviate this. We're talking about a man that has shut down decade-long projects in a blink. Researchers not purely aligned with the crown have been taken down in minutes. I can give you a thousand examples. The Sun taker?"

  Liya appears to reference "The Sun Borrower Case", a.k.a. the "Acid Waterboard", a.k.a. "The Day The Emperor Wore Gloves", a.k.a. "The Ptamis Nordez Execution", or the highly-publicized, detainment and alleged but highly-probable disappearance of Ptamis Nordez, scientist associated with the University of Paraiso who had developed the first electrically viable sor panel— at the time a novelty, but also an act of heresy as it "defied the Church by attempting to harness He who harnesses us all." according to the Khani Church of the Sun. Having grown paranoid in the weeks preceding his arrest, all blueprints and prototypes of his invention had been thoroughly hidden, so much that, having given up in searching for them, high security officials of the Crown proceeded to torture the man incrementally: First by starving him, then through forced sleep deprivation... and, once all methods had failed, by recurring to the man himself to finish the job. His majesty YRATAK would have, according to leaked reports, approached the man offering him one st chance to reveal where his research was stored before abruptly lifting him by the neck and submerging his face in a recipient of cold (9oC) water, releasing him roughly twenty seconds after. But Ptamis refused to speak, so the waterboarding continued intermittently, each time with a slightly increased water temperatures. An (also alleged) picture taken of Ptamis shows his face once the water was well past boiling point, with a deformed visage but resilient eyes — behind him, the image only shows a pair of extra-rge red rubber gloves holding the back of his dark brown hair, which sparked the rumour of the Emperor himself being who tortured the scientist. Regardless, once boiling water had failed to bring forth any revetion, and with the torturee as conscious as ever, somehow capable of mustering the words "Fuck you" to the Emperor and spitting boiling water to his shoe, YRATAK smiled to the man and pointed his burnt face to the st recipient, one that contained not water but semi-diluted sulphuric acid in which he would be submerged for less than a second at a time, more than enough to bring Hellish agony upon the prisoner but not sufficient to free his consciousness of the suffering (which, if true, would be the most pain endured by a Kharetti in recorded history, before the Undoer on Dr. Merebold.) And The Emperor would ask him to "Speak or die" in between submersions, his deep voice echoing in the small, metallic room. Ptamis Nordez reportedly lost consciousness on the sixteenth acid dip, though others argue he made it past the twentieth. His body was never found, and the Royal Press denied all allegations, ciming Ptamis was detained for a day and then released.

  Muias knew of him. Not personally, but the case was highly spoken-of while he was in college. "Do you really think that we're working under his nose, here? That I'm ignorant to YRATAK's ways with scientists? We are financed by the crown, do you think they wouldn't find out on their own? That I am not mandated by w to report on almost all of our work?"

  Liya responded quick. "They give us chips. They gave us less than chips. They 'finance' us with less every month. The Telemate will pay in a day what they didn't in years."

  "It won't pay us a dime if the Empire shuts it down. And it would do it if I didn't speak with them in advance. They'll come see the inauguration — it's non-negotiable."

  Liya breathed in, grabbing strands of her hair with her fists. Then she exhaled, after a while, and crossed her arms. "Will I have to bow?"

  Muias looked at her silently. His eyebrows were raised and he blinked twice. But he didn't answer.

  "Will I have to bow, Trekkos." Liya repeated.

  "You might have to bow, Liya."

  In any case, the Laia Laboratories leaders eventually decided that the best way to introduce the Telemate to the world was where Liya's speeches flourished the best: Back where it all started, the main amphitheatre of Tatsubo's Academy, on a Monday afternoon where the logistics just would so happen to line-up for the announcement to happen directly after Professor Pannek's course, bringing us back to that aforementioned day when they first met.