by Eddie Patin
Jason Leaper of Universe 934 frowned down at his OCS—his Omniversal Cosmic Scanner—as he tried to interpret the data running over its screen. It was cold in the garage from the snowy day outside, and the metallic edges of the tablet-shaped device were cool on his fingers.
"What the hell?!" he asked, scrolling over the touch screen. Jason had tried to open a portal to a universe parallel to his own, and by all means should have been looking into another garage just like his. He should have seen the otherworldly technology of his friends' portable gate near the back of the extra-deep garage, along with the stainless steel tables, shelves, and large sinks along the back wall where his father used to process wild game meat. But instead, he looked out over a large, rolling hill of tall, waving grass under a deep blue sky with wispy clouds seeping across the air.
Jason looked into the other universe—another Earth from who knows where—and glanced down at his OCS again. This contraption was very confusing and complicated. As the roar of the swirling rift enveloped the man's senses—he'd opened the gateway right in the middle of Riley and Gliath’s portable gate—Jason muttered to himself and looked over all of the settings and slider controls on the screen. Did he simply find another Earth without his house again? He figured he’d set everything to the right—
The rift suddenly collapsed in on itself with a pop.
He’d stopped concentrating.
Looking over all of the data—trying to figure out which of the higher dimensions he'd used to shift from his world to another—Jason saw that the slider for the seventh dimension had been left on. "Okay..." he said to himself. So he'd tried to open a rift to a world along the fifth dimension ... but went through the seventh instead? There was a read-out of data involving gravity variances, lifeforms, and lots of things Jason didn't comprehend. He scanned through lists and lists of genus and species names that he mostly recognized until realizing that he could just collapse the near-infinity list and minimize it into a single bar that he could open again if he wanted to.
"A lot of stuff on here," he muttered, playing with the different settings and readouts.
With the rift snuffed out, the garage instantly became a lot darker again, even with the two hanging fluorescent lights below the ceiling. Those sparks and the whirlwind of light that erupted from an open portal was positively brilliant! The Reality Rifters’ portable gate stood quiet in front of him, its terminal off, but still tall and ready to open a rift if needed. The large planeswalking structure was a relatively thin ring of a metal of some kind standing like a huge hula hoop, supported by metal braces and hooked into another world’s version of a computer. Several dense power modules were wired into it, stacked on the garage floor. Riley had said that they were ... fusion cores? They looked like huge, cylindrical batteries with slick, plastic exteriors. Earlier, Jason had picked one up out of curiosity, and the fusion core was a lot heavier than it looked—it was as if those things were full of lead shot.
The portable gate was like something out of that Stargate movie from the nineties...
Jason didn't need to open his own rifts within the large metal hoop, but it sure looked cool when he did.
He sighed and looked back down at the OCS.
I have to learn how to use this thing, he thought. That would be his job in the Reality Rifters; the interdimensional monster hunting group started by other Jason Leapers.
The man scoffed. The other Jasons that Riley had worked for in the past were apparently much more competent and experienced in this rifting stuff than he was. Well—any knowledge at all would be 'more experienced'. Jason didn't know shit about rifting...
Doing his best to set the OCS target coordinates to another Earth parallel to his own in what Riley called universe 934, Jason messed around with the sliders. He made sure to turn the seventh dimension off this time. He did remember Riley mentioning that they’d reached the Wilderlands—that crazy dinosaur world he'd been in for the last two weeks—through the ninth dimension. Did he need to have the ninth on in order to connect to another world that wasn’t his own universe? Jason was still completely in the dark about how the OCS worked, for the most part.
Play with it, Riley had said. Just don’t get into any trouble...
Jason laughed, recalling the worlds. What’s the worst that could happen? he thought sardonically. So far, he’d seen and been through portals to a savage dinosaur world with a wyvern and reptilian cannibals and spider people, as well as other versions of his own world where he saw some really weird shit—one where he saw his parents alive, even. There was another universe where his house was on fire, the world was red and full of poison, the sun was a giant eyeball and the bushes were made of black snakes! So far, messing around with coordinates and sliders, Jason had seen multiple versions of his own garage and occasional other different places that didn't have any houses in sight.
As Jason adjusted the sliders and took another look up at the portable gate’s ring, he stretched. The various cuts and holes in his shoulders and neck—countless wounds from fighting dinosaurs and engaging in desperate escapes up primordial pine trees—pulled and stung.
Jason turned on the ninth dimension then looked at the coordinates, focusing on opening a rift at that particular point, centered on the metal ring in front of him...
He felt something in his head and his guts when he focused like that—a strange sensation that he didn’t fully understand. It was like flexing a new muscle he didn’t realize existed before Riley had recently slipped him that infinity crystal. Such an odd new feeling was like the time many years ago when Jason tried to teach himself how to arch his own eyebrow. He never totally took control of that little, twitching muscle that he could feel moving weirdly on his forehead as he tried; staring endlessly at a mirror and willing his eyebrow to move. When Jason did manage to finally make that eyebrow rise like Spock’s, he felt the oddest sensation of something moving up there that shouldn’t. His mind felt the same way now...
There was a fluttering sound like a huge flag whipping in the wind, then a snap like a .22 rifle going off, and another rift opened up in the center of the portable gate. A spot of light appeared like a small, orange fireball. It rapidly began swirling then expanded outward like a whirlpool in reverse. As the rift unfurled, its swirling edges remained as a rim of orange fire, shooting harmless sparks all over the garage, while the gateway—the fluidic window to another universe—shimmered and smoothed out into a four-foot-wide disc. The realm on the other side eventually came into view...
Jason squinted against the blazing light and peered into the other world, hoping to see another version of his garage...
Instead, there was some sort of boggy swamp on the other side. It was choked in mud and mist, everything grey and ... blue.
"A blue swamp...?"
Jason reached out and touched the surface of the rift, marveling at how the surface shimmered and rippled out from his fingertip like water.
Pieces of colorless trees and drooping branches crisscrossed the landscape and Jason saw the whirring shapes of large bugs hanging in the sodden air, traveling lazily through the mist. They were almost like birds, by the size of them, but were clearly some sort of insects by the long, mosquito-like legs trailing behind them. Their gossamer wings buzzed with immense energy, propelling the fat creatures low through the swampy air. Jason assumed that they were buzzing. The tremendous roar and sputtering sounds of the portal were so loud that he couldn’t—
Jason gasped when one of the big, hovering bugs suddenly appeared right in front of him, dashing into the window of the rift from out of sight to the left. In the next second, he realized that it was coming right for him—the creature slowly flew through the shimmering surface of the rift and into the garage!
"Holy shit!" Jason cried, leaping back. The healing raptor-wound in his left leg complained as he moved.
The invading thing was a lot like a bug, but it also wasn’t. The closest thing Jason could figure as the little monster flew at him—sl
ow and easy with its loud buzzing wings, which he could hear now—was to think of it as a huge, fat mosquito with long legs and an extra-large head and proboscis. That’s where the similarities ended, though. The bug-creature had soft, mottled-grey skin instead of an exoskeleton with a throbbing red color under its abdomen, and it was fat like a baby—the whole creature as long as Jason’s forearm. Spindly legs previously hanging down together now stretched out, reaching for the man with tiny, hooked claws. Its eyes were faceted like a fly’s, but the long, complex mouth of tubes and antennae opened, and Jason saw a thin, blade like a needle flexing in and out of the fleshy orifice as the thing flew at him...
"Gah!" he exclaimed, feeling a sudden rush of adrenaline as he scrambled backwards and to the side. Jason crashed into a few boxes, sending random junk he’d had sitting there for years clattering to the concrete floor. He felt the OCS swinging on its strap against his side, its flat back flopping against him.
The bug monster hovered at him steadily, quick enough to catch Jason if he held still for an instant. The man ducked past it, running around the raging portal and the portable gate sitting around it. He leapt over the array of fusion cores, tripped, then turned just in time to see the creature descending on him again.
With Jason’s concentration broken, the spinning rift rapidly shrank down and closed with a pop.
"Holy crap! Help! Help!" Jason cried, scrambling away from the bug. He jumped to his feet again, scanning the garage for anything that could help. Jason took control of his panic for a moment and thought about pulling the full-size Beretta 9mm from his belt—it was a lot bigger than his Glock 26 he’d lost in the Wilderlands, and its weight reminded him that it was there almost all of the time—but then his eyes darted to the wall of tools next to him.
In the quiet after the portal's roaring disappeared, Jason heard his heart pounding over the loud, low buzz of the creature's wings...
Jason frantically made for the tools and pulled a shovel off of the wall, grabbing it with both hands. He turned to face attacking bug-creature, who came in at him steadily like a slow-moving basketball of legs, wings, and vampiric intentions.
He swung the shovel straight at it...
The metal tool bashed into the fleshy flying bug with a clang and Jason felt a rush of elation when he felt the weight of the creature on the other end of his strike. Then he frowned when the bug was only knocked off course for an instant. It continued, unfazed...
"Shit!" Jason cried, running across the length of the deep garage to the front, watching the creature advance with lazy but inevitable speed, its black, faceted eyes the size of walnuts focused on him, its creepy needle-like sucker flexing in and out like a sewing machine needle. The deep buzzing of its wings brewed a growing dread in Jason. What if the thing was poisonous? What if it paralyzed him? It was from another world—what if it warped his human physiology somehow when it slipped that needle into his skin...?
Jason growled, rushed up—winding up for a heavy hit—and swung the shovel at the bug as hard as he could. Perhaps it swayed a little to the side, or maybe Jason just sucked at fighting with a shovel, but the man missed.
"Riley!" he screamed. "Gliath! Help!"
Just then, as Jason dodged the descending bug, pulling the shovel up to swing again, he heard the inner garage door that led to the house swing open. Riley stepped through. The soldier wasn’t wearing his hellhound-hide duster since he’d been relaxing in Jason’s home ever since they’d returned from the Wilderlands, but—like always—he was still armed.
"Move, Jason," Riley said, immediately going for the low-slung blaster in a drop-holster at his side. The man—or was he considered a cyborg?—drew his pistol like lightning and Jason threw himself down to the side as Riley fired.
There was a snap and a hiss of something happening in the strange weapon as a flaring red beam of light sizzled through the room, striking the hovering bug monster dead center. The bug’s body immediately burst. Foul steam and bits of its fleshy form erupted from where Riley had hit it and the creature fell back against the garage door, bouncing once before landing charred black and smoldering on the ground.
Jason stared at it for a moment, then the terrible smell of its burning body invaded his nose. He looked up in alarm when some of its burning goop made a panel of his old, wooden overhead door burst into flames.
"Shit!" Jason cried, immediately running for an old wool army blanket he had stacked up against one wall with various shooting range gear. He rushed over to the garage door with the blanket and snuffed out the small fire.
The gently burning bug-thing smelled terrible.
Jason looked back to Riley, who stood leaning against the wall near the doorway. The soldier smirked and scratched his dark beard then returned his blaster to its holster.
"I told you to be careful," Riley said, walking up with easy grace. Gliath followed, almost too large for the doorway, big and black and sleek like a blend of a panther and a seven-foot-tall barbarian.
Jason scowled down at the burnt-up bug creature then gave it an experimental kick with the toe of his boot. The creature was unexpectedly dense and hardly moved. No wonder he hadn’t hurt it with the shovel.
"What the hell is that thing?!" Jason asked, looking down.
"Eh ... I dunno," Riley replied, crouching down close to it as if he was as limber as a kid. "Some kind of weird bug. What universe did you rift to?"
Jason picked up the OCS that had been hanging at his side. Looking at the screen, he couldn’t tell.
"I ... I don’t know how to tell. Is there some sort of history or something on this thing? Whatever was open before is closed now."
"Scan the bug," Riley offered.
"How?"
"Lemme see..." Riley said, holding his hands out for the OCS. Jason unstrapped the device from his body and handed it over. The soldier scrutinized the screen for a few moments, dragging one calloused finger over the screen as he flipped around through the data. "I don’t really know how to ... um ... you had this thing set to the ninth? No wonder you let some weird fruking thing through." He looked up at Jason. "Hey, I might not have told you, but once you break the surface of a rift, it becomes visible on the other side, and it’s a two-way portal, you know?"
"So that bug-thing...?"
"Yeah, that nasty fruker saw your rift and just flew on through I reckon? You’ve gotta be careful. There’s some crazy shet out there..."
Jason crossed his arms and ran a hand through his hair. He expected to feel his longer dark-blonde hair in his fingers and it surprised him to feel it so short. After all of that crazy survival shit in the Wilderlands, there was no way he’d be able to get all of the tree sap, bark chunks, bug pieces, and other crap out of his hair. The clippers had been the way to go...
"So," Jason said, "What about scanning?"
Riley nodded, aiming the OCS at the dead bug. He pressed a button on the side of the device.
The Omniversal Cosmic Scanner didn’t make a noise, but Jason knew that something happened because he saw the light of something popping up on the screen reflected in Riley’s dark eyes. The soldier looked down at the screen.
"Unknown," Riley said. "I guess you opened a rift to a universe that Jason 113 never catalogued."
"Great..." Jason replied, looking down at the foul-smelling, charred bug again.
Stupid, he thought. This was no way to learn. And Riley didn’t seem all that inclined—or able—to teach him much about so-called rifting. Jason had a feeling that he was on his own for the most part. Riley and Gliath were apparently just the hired muscle of the Reality Rifters. It was Jason Leaper 113 who knew how to manipulate the OCS and the portals, and Jason 47 before him. Now, all that remained of the Reality Rifters was a smirking mercenary gunslinger and his shapeshifting leopardwere companion. And now him—Jason Leaper 934.
He took the OCS back from Riley and sighed...
Chapter 2
Jason wasn’t a physicist like the other versions of himself. And
he wasn’t an adventurer either. Not yet.
Hopefully, he wouldn’t get Riley and Gliath killed trying to fill the role of his predecessors.
The OCS was chock-full of information—Jason knew that he had barely even scratched the surface of it. The thing was like an encyclopedia. It reminded him a little of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, except this wasn’t a comedy. One false step, and he could end up in a universe where their air was mercury, or the world was the stomach of a giant monster; who knows? And Riley and Gliath ... they expected him to just figure it out. They wanted to get right back to monster hunting.
Jason knew that he could get it. He was smart and knew computers. He knew machines. He just ... needed time.
He looked down at the OCS. Why did using the ninth dimension send him to a weird world with killer bugs instead of opening a portal to another garage on another normal Earth? Wasn’t he supposed to use the ninth to go from one universe to another?
It was so confusing. Riley had mentioned ten dimensions. Jason didn't have a clue how they worked, or how they worked together...
Jason used the shovel to pick up the dead, smoking bug. It must have weighed at least fifteen pounds! He carried the disgusting body to his trash tote and dumped it inside as Riley followed and raised the lid for him with a smirk. Then, Jason hung the shovel up on the wall again.
"Riley," Jason said. "There’s a lot of stuff in this OCS—all written in there by the other Jasons, right?"
The cyborg nodded. "Mostly from 113. There's some from others."
"From 47?"
"No. Jason 47 had his own OCS."
"But I thought you said that Jason 113 and Jason 47 both had this one..."
"Nah," Riley replied, scratching his beard. "Jason 47 brought us to 113 when he had ... his accident ... and had to retire for a while. Jason 113 already had one. There are infinite Jasons, and maybe infinite OCS's. Their databases are all different. You've been looking through notes?"
