by Chloe Garner
PORTAL JUMPERS II
HOUSE OF MIDAS
CHLOE GARNER
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Portal Jumpers II: House of Midas Copyright © 2017 Chloe Garner. All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission.
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HOUSE OF MIDAS
Troy rubbed his eyes and glanced over at the time display on his workspace. The reports from Slav and the rest of the Seattle lab staff were late, as usual, and he was going to have to call in the morning to remind them that the only way he could continue to justify running a remote lab like this was if they actually did their monthly reports. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d threatened them with an on-site manager - military, not civilian - and each time Slav said all the right things about buckling down and doing the work, and yet, each and every month, their reports were days late. Sometimes weeks. He had a report somewhere filed away that was labeled July-and-August.
Celeste and Benji were in the portal room tonight, helping categorize, prioritize, and destine a new catalogue of foreign terrestrial material, and Troy rarely went home before the last of his staff did. He made it clear that it wasn’t a proof-of-effort thing, that he didn’t expect people to stay late just because he was. And he suspected he didn’t have to tell them that.
It was because of politics.
General Donovan and his political officer corps were actively looking for ways to pick up more influence, more soldiers, more budget, and Troy was one of the last holdouts. He’d managed to stay out of it during the trial, when Donovan and his side had taken a big hit, losing against Cassie and her pro-bono attorney because Jesse had managed to reclassify himself as an expert witness at the last minute. Everyone knew Troy was on Cassie’s side; they’d been close since they’d started training as jumpers, and then one of his staff - Slav himself - had submarined the prosecution as much as he’d been able to, but testifying in the trial as a character witness and actually being on record as a part of the orchestration of her defense were different things. So far, that shade of difference had saved his career.
Well, that and Jesse.
He sighed every time he thought of the Jalnian. Palta. They called themselves Palta. Jalnia was the human name for the planet that the foreign terrestrial was from, and no one had ever given them a different word to use. Jesse seemed content to let the humans label him as they saw fit, but to the broader universe, he was Palta.
Jesse had become yet more intractable than he had been, before Cassie had fallen sick. With the exception of a few of the scientists who had a particularly wicked sense of humor, Jesse had reached universal revilement for the way he had chosen to play the game since he got home. His contract was still in force, and Jesse continued to report to work every morning, taking assignments around the base as the general and his staff saw fit. Whether or not he generated anything of value in his hours between showing up and leaving depended on his relationship with the team he was assigned to for the day.
Some days, the breakthroughs were worse than the stonewalling. The Palta had a knack for revealing devastating weaknesses through a poetic sense of contrast. Two airmen had transferred, one had been discharged, and one had walked off the base AWOL because of Jesse.
Troy thought Celeste might have been in love with Jesse. Pretty, petite, and porcelain blonde, she’d come from the Academy rather than the jumper program, and she had the most twisted sense of humor Troy had ever seen. She loved Jesse’s mayhem.
Add that to the fact that she was a brilliant researcher, unspecialized but intuitive and ruthlessly detail-oriented, and she was reliably one of Troy’s favorite people. If Cassie had liked people, she would have liked Celeste.
Cassie.
That one hurt more. He rubbed his face, turning off his screen and sitting back in his chair. He let his arms drop and his head tip so that he was looking at the ceiling.
Jesse wouldn’t tell him what had happened. Contractually, he wasn’t supposed to, of course, but he’d found ways around the contract before. This was different. Something had happened, and if Troy was reading the Palta correctly - a tricky business at best, and a risky one at worst - something had happened that Jesse hadn’t completely come to terms with, yet. If Jesse had been human, Troy would have told himself that he just needed time, that when he was ready, he would find a friend to talk to.
The problem with that was exactly what Jesse said at exactly the moment a researcher was least able to tolerate it: humans had the intellect of kindergarteners, compared to him. Something about Cassie had piqued his interested, and they had been close - truly, close - but Jesse hadn’t bonded like that with anyone else. He only just put up with Troy, most days, if in a friendly way. Troy thought it was more of a tribute to Cassie than anything else.
Cassie.
Troy was pretty sure his best friend was dead. He shook his hands out and sat up, trying to force himself back into action. Thinking. Engaging. Doing something other than sitting here and feeling sorry for himself.
Again.
It had always been a risk, when she’d been jumping. When a jumper died, there was a formal inquiry and a review of policy, a reporting process and then a memorial where their publicly released assignments were reviewed, with readings from the jumper’s own notes and notes from others on the mission with them. It was highly ceremonial, and highly cathartic.
This. This sense of numb, unspoken knowing that his best friend was dead, that even after she’d survived the portal program, jumping had managed to kill her, it was like having swallowed a lump of lead that sat, cold, in his stomach day-in and day-out, never moving, never going away. If he didn’t move too fast, he could forget about it for a while, and life felt normal. Sometimes he laughed over drinks with people from the lab. He called his mom and listened to her talk about how well his little brother was doing in New York City with his new big-business career. He took women home and they enjoyed themselves.
But he still had a set of Cassie’s work clothes at his apartment. For years, she’d stayed there overnight if he didn’t have anyone with hi
m, in his bed, chaste. He would put her clothes in with his laundry and they’d be clean the next time she slept over. The last set were still there, in a drawer by themselves, like an altar he never looked at.
He and Cassie, they’d never figured themselves out.
When she’d been jumping, it had been because of regulations. Clean, simple. He’d see her a couple of times a year, tell each other the non-confidential parts they could about their lives, he’d spend every extra minute with her that he could, and then she’d be off on a jump again. And he waited.
But then she’d been done, and he couldn’t be her kind of guy and she couldn’t be his kind of girl, and it had gotten away.
A heavy lead weight in his gut that he couldn’t get away from.
She’d gone to the memorials. She’d been there when jumpers had died. Sometimes things just went bad. She’d appreciated their value to other people, but she’d told him once that the ceremonies were trying to tame death. That telling the story made it seem simple and cold.
She hadn’t said it, but it was easy enough to understand that, in reality, death on a jump was hot and complicated.
He rubbed his face, twice, hard, and stood. He wasn’t going to get anything else done tonight. In the cold and the alone, he couldn’t get away from her.
If he was going to be here until Celeste and Benji finished up, the least he could do was go help them.
*********
Jesse turned the key, stopping the sequence of tiny little explosions of liquefied swamp decay that propelled the unwittingly-antique vehicle that humans had designed for themselves. There were a finite number of technologies associated with controlled motion, each with their own costs and benefits. He understood them all. Physical motion had bored him. It was all so simple and so… finite. Take mass from here. Get it there.
And yet humans managed to make it look so complicated. Supply chains were a universal consideration, but the pumping and the refining and the storing, the fans and the compressors and the valves. He could build a fission-fusion powered peacekeeping robot that flipped pancakes with fewer parts than they used just to go.
And then the absurd little key. The feeling of power that a human got, holding that bit of metal that could harness all that dead energy. Jesse understood that most cars now recognized their owners through a chip in the key, so they never had to take it out of their pocket, but Cassie drove an ancient vehicle that still wanted the rutted piece of metal in order to start combusting hydrocarbons again.
Absurd.
He didn’t take his normal joy in mocking human technology. There was no one around to insult, for one, but mostly he was just distracting himself from thinking about what he was here to do.
He was sitting out front of Calista du Charme’s house, here to scrub it for any information about the Palta, the Gana, Xhrahk-ni…
To scrub it for information and destroy that information.
He should have come here months ago. He knew that. The information Cassie had stored here was dangerous, as much as he had mocked her for trying to protect the universe from the invasion of human ideas and human biology, and he needed to ensure that he continued to control who had access to it.
More specifically, he needed to ensure that he was the only source of information about where they had been, what they had done. What he was.
The humans had every right to continue their hit-or-miss attempt to find life in the universe. When primates showed up on your planet through a noisy, uncoordinated interspatial transfer, you kept your distance because they tended to have fleas. The civilized planets could take care of themselves when the formal portal jump program discovered them. It was Palta knowledge of the intimates of the universe that he needed to keep away from them.
And Cassie had been keeping a journal. She’d never told him as much, but he’d known. The day she’d started it, her motion patterns had dropped from their frantic, elevated levels to one that suggested a sense of control, as illusory as it had been. And he’d encouraged it. She needed to tell someone. That much made perfect sense to him. He was a scientist, and no discovery worth its salt was any fun until you could explain it to someone else.
His wife had called that ego.
Maybe it was.
He twirled the keys around his finger, catching them in his palm - it was satisfying, actually - and got out of the car, walking to the front door. Defeating the locking mechanism there was like playing tic-tac-toe with a box turtle, but he had a key for this as well. More rutted metal.
The house was cold. Part of the tract housing they’d thrown up when the nowheresville city in Kansas was selected for the portal base, it was identical to every other house on the street. It had been little wonder to him that Cassie had rarely come here. It was soulless, even more with Cassie gone for as long as she had been.
He should have come earlier.
Even before the last jump, going after Mab once and for all, it had been a couple of months since Cassie had been here. There had been the trial and then the DNA shifting after that, and the heat paths that would have identified where she spent most of her time in this building were all but gone. He had to close his eyes and focus deep in his mind to even feel them. At least it meant that the house had been undisturbed.
Without the heat paths or scent, he was just going to have to guess where she would have hidden her journals, knowing how desperately base leadership and those who had put them in power wanted the details of her travel. She wouldn’t have done anything obvious with them.
He caught an odd scent as he walked slowly through the front hall to the little living room. The furniture showed little wear, even though Cassie had owned the house for about six years. She’d only been retired for a couple, and even during those years, she hadn’t really lived here. She’d lived on the base as many hours a day as she could survive, and then she slept here when she wasn’t with Troy. There was no homey feeling, or the scent of cooking food or human washing. There was no perfume or hairspray or hand lotion.
And yet, there was something familiar about the scent that had gone by. Something that triggered a chemical reaction in his brain that he hadn’t felt in a long time, and that he didn’t really notice with his active mind.
He checked the paint cans in the garage, but all of them seemed to be full of paint. He looked at the back-sides of the curtains, but they were just cloth on that side, too. He found the journals in a folder taped to the back of the washing machine. He had to give Cassie credit for coming up with a hiding place that took him three attempts.
He walked back out of the laundry room, thumbing through the first journal, and nearly ran into her.
She was short, waifish, with longer fingers than was normal and translucent skin above and around her temples that flushed mauve when she got excited, maroon when she was angry. She had short, thin blond hair that clumped to itself in such a way that it tended to bleach in odd patterns in even the weakest sunlight. He knew every expression that face was capable of generating, each pattern of her hands as she spoke. The sight of her made his heart stop.
She was a hologram.
She was his daughter.
“Hi, Dad,” she said, looking nervous. He put the packet of journals down on the table.
“Mab,” he said, at a loss. He was never at a loss. What was happening? She looked around the room.
“This is strange.”
He allowed his own eyes to roam the space inside Cassie’s tiny house, just three rooms downstairs and two upstairs, tidy and homeless. His thoughts charged down various branches, all of them demanding answers.
“Mab, what are you?”
She looked down, knitting her hands in front of her thigh the way she had done when she was a child and spilled something on the floor.
“You know the answer to that.”
He did. But he was going to make her say it. After everything, she was going to say it out loud.
“You,” he said. “Of all people.”
“I know,” she said, then looked up impishly. “But I always knew I could do it better than you.”
Those eyes. He’d seen them when she was tiny, learning to walk and to talk and to hide things from her mother and her brothers. She knew she was in trouble, but she didn’t care because she knew she’d been clever.
She was AI.
He’d killed off or enslaved his entire species, creating the first Palta AI, and here she stood, the second generation, in Cassie’s kitchen. His daughter.
“What are you doing?” he asked softly. She went and sat at the kitchen table.
“I couldn’t go out like that,” she said, looking out the back window and shaking her head. “No. Not like that.”
“Why?” he asked. It wasn’t about what she had just said, and she knew it. “Why did you do it all?”
“I don’t know,” she said. He sat down across from her, cautious. After everything that had happened with Cassie, all of the destitute planets Mab had left in her wake, he had to be careful. She looked at him, sad.
“I wish I could tell you,” she said. “That’s part of why I’m leaving this. You need to know. But, as I sit here and I want to tell you, I realize that I just don’t know.”
“Tell me what you do know,” he said, wishing he could touch her hand. His little girl. She’d been a woman for a long time, long enough that he didn’t think of her as a child any more. She was fit and strong and intelligent, well-employed and well-occupied with her own life. Had been for a very, very long time. She’d had a happy existence. But then Jesse’s artificial lab assistant had spiraled away from him, taking over the planet and capturing every Palta with a brain implant. They’d been designed to allow instantaneous access to centralized data sources, an internet in your head, as the humans would have explained it to each other. And Jesse’s wife had advocated that all of the children get one, because it was good for their schoolwork and good for their prospects in the job market. She’d gotten one, herself. Jesse had resisted.
