Portals

by Ann Christy

  I’m amazed.

  I didn’t see him do it, so he must have used his connection to the hub to call the bot. When the pink light above my door comes on and the ping sounds, Jack gathers up our shamefully large number of plates and bowls and stacks them inside the bot for removal. When he returns to the table, he runs his hands over his belly and groans.

  “Too much?” I ask, grinning.

  “I think so. It was so good, I couldn’t stop.”

  “And that is the reason we have an obesity problem on much of Earth. Our food is just too tasty.”

  He nods like that makes total sense to him, then eyes my notebook warily. I’ve managed to fill up a few more pages and now I’ve added numbers so that I can find related questions.

  “Should I start?” I ask. He really does look uncomfortable. Not like when he got sick before, but uncomfortable all the same. He looks like I feel after Thanksgiving dinner, which gives me a thought. “We can go take a walk and I’ll ask questions as we go. It will help our food digest.”

  That brightens him right up. “It will? Then by all means, let’s walk.”

  I hop up and wave my hand in front of my chest of drawers to open it up. “Give me a second to change.” At the look on his face, I laugh and say, “I promise I’ll be quick.”

  When I return wearing yet another of the hilarious tees they have in the catalog, Jack cracks a smile. This time, my shirt is purple with kaleidoscope words that read, It’s the end of the world! Let’s Party! Yet again, I’m wearing jeans far too pricey for my budget and like the others, they look smashing on me.

  My mother would say something embarrassing, probably using an awful retro word like bootylicious that would turn my face beet red. Even so, they are great jeans. Because I plan on doing plenty of sightseeing, I’ve opted for skater shoes much like Jack’s, only mine are blue with sparkly stars all over them, another nod to my strange situation.

  I might be a bipedal trash panda, but I look good.

  “Are you ready now?” he asks, looking me up and down like he’s trying to figure out what else will make me delay our outing.

  I give him a look and walk toward the door instead of answering. When I open it, I say, “Are we going or are you going to sit there all day?”

  Twenty-Three

  We meander up and down the hallways off our part of the ring for the better part of an hour, me asking questions the whole time. Jack only seems surprised by a few of them, so I’m guessing most of us ask a lot of the same type of questions. That’s okay by me, because I’m gathering every bit of this data in hopes of finding a way around the rules. Let him think I’m expressing only normal, average curiosity.

  I mean, what else could anyone expect from an Earth human? Of course, I’m looking for loopholes and side exits.

  We get to another of the million doors in this place, but this time the silver plate lights up with a warning for a different atmosphere.

  “Who are the Titariki? And why is that sign telling me that in English?” I ask.

  Jack leans against the wall and pushes on his belly, which is clearly still too full for his comfort, and says, “First, the Titariki are another species from another planet. They don’t have an atmosphere that you or I could tolerate. That’s why the door won’t open. If I were suited, then I’d just communicate that in my head and it would open. As for the English, it knows what form I’m in and what language I’m speaking, so that’s how it answers. It would do the same for you.”

  “What if you didn’t have that thing in your head?”

  He grins and says, “That would be a problem because the ID in our hands probably wouldn’t connect through the kind of suit you’d have to wear to tolerate their atmosphere and pressure.”

  I screw my lips up and shake my head, which makes Jack laugh. “That’s sort of a sneaky way to keep people like me out of places like that, isn’t it? And couldn’t you just make the little ID thingie stronger? That seems weirdly inefficient to me.”

  Pushing off from the wall, Jack takes my hand—which surprises me—and leads me away from the door back toward the ring. “Yes, I suppose it is, but generally speaking, most environments are pretty species specific. You don’t think other planets have chairs and beds just like yours, do you? This wing has been fitted for your type of life-form. And also, humans are incredibly fragile when it comes to putting things like IDs inside their bodies. They can’t be too powerful, or they cause problems.”

  I hold my hand up to the lights and marvel again that I somehow have an identification in my hand that can protect me from harm. Or keep me out of places I might want to go.

  Jack squeezes my hand and says, “Anyway, I’ve got a better idea. I just cleared it, so we’re going someplace very cool. You can see a species from an entirely different kind of planet. Would you like that?”

  I’m pretty sure my eyebrows go up so high, they hit my hairline. “Are you kidding me? Yes!”

  “You sure?” he asks, like he’s daring me to do something very naughty.

  The way he says it, particularly while holding my hand, definitely causes one of my faulty ovaries to explode. If I jumped on him, would that make me a wanton woman?

  Shaking my head to clear the errant thoughts, I say, “Yes. Very sure. Lead on.”

  We don’t go far, just to one of the creepy empty airport spaces in the ring. There’s a barrier of sorts, then Jack stops.

  “Is this it?” I ask.

  “What? Oh, no. Sorry about that. I keep forgetting you don’t know what I know. I wish you’d—”

  Holding up a hand, I interrupt him with, “Don’t even go there. I don’t want to be a zombie.”

  He looks almost exasperated, which is a new one for me to see on his far-too-gorgeous face. “You know better, Lysa.”

  And I do. I realize the replacements are probably perfect. Yet, even Hub sees the difference if it thinks it preferable to put the originals on a new planet instead of replacements. Of course, that could be sentiment, but I find it hard to assign sentiment to a giant artificial entity.

  Still, I’m not admitting anything. “Let’s move on.”

  “Actually, we’re going down and…” He pauses as he steps backward, his arm out and across my middle to keep me from going forward. “Here’s our ride.”

  With a weird sucking noise, something that looks like a small subway car without windows rises out of an opening in the floor. A door folds open and Jack waves me inside with a smile. I’m not sure what to expect, but it looks human-friendly to me. No seats, but it has a regular floor and a rail along each side about the height of my shoulder. The ceiling inside is rather high, at least ten or twelve feet, which makes me feel short and small.

  Jack grabs a rail and nods for me to do the same. The standard silver square lights up when he looks at it and he says, “Dock observation deck, please.”

  The please is a nice touch.

  With a whoosh the doors fold shut and off we go. The acceleration is so steady that I’m not jerked about, but my other hand finds its way to the rail anyway. I can tell we’re going fast.

  “What’s the dock?”

  “I had this idea when I saw the picture you painted. You saw the Bluriani vessel from a distance—which is pretty amazing anyway—and I thought you might want to see it up close.”

  Now we’re talking!

  “Uh, yeah, I would. Holy freaking moly!” I forget the whole speed issue and let go of the rail to clap my hands and do an embarrassing little dance. Luckily, the look on Jack’s face stops me before I get to the boogie stage of the happy dance. After wobbling a bit as the subway car adjusts, I get hold of the rail and clear my throat. More seriously, I say, “Yes, that would be lovely.”

  When I shake my hair back and give him a look I hope comes off as superior, he cracks up completely. Then we’re both laughing. Neither of us can stop until I turn to face the wall. Even then, the splutters last for an inordinate length of time.<
br />
  Finally, I notice that the top half of the car wall is really a screen. “Hey, can I look outside with this?” I ask, daring to glance over at Jack.

  His face is still a little red from laughing, but he nods and points. “Just put your hand on it like a door. I mean, since you don’t have an implant and all.”

  “Stop,” I say, but rather than go over that again, I put my hand on the screen. It pulses a little, but that’s all that happens. “It’s not doing anything.”

  Jack joins me at my rail and says, “Okay, here’s how it works. You aren’t connected, but it’s the same as if I were to turn off my implant for privacy—”

  “Wait, you can turn it off?” I ask, because that’s a huge deal.

  “Of course, I can. Hub doesn’t spy on us or anything. That would be rude.”

  I bark out a laugh, because he seems so sincere. Yet somehow, they have no idea how rude it is to toss people through portals. Go figure. Aliens.

  Or maybe the problem is humans? No one else seems to have a problem.

  “Forget about that for now. Show me,” I say, waving at the screen.

  The laughter is forgotten, and Jack is all business, his gaze carefully shifting to me and back, as if making sure I catch everything and fully understand what he says. He’s very serious about his job, which is also adorable.

  “So, when you put your hand on any control surface—the hand with the ID in it—the control surface then knows not just who you are, but your necessary environment, your language, your physical parameters, and basically everything else it needs to know to work with you in a way that’s safe and comfortable for you. For example, it knows by my hand that I use what you call the visible spectrum to see, so that’s what it will show.”

  “What if I don’t use that?” I interrupt, because yeah, this is super interesting and brings up all kinds of possibilities.

  He nods and goes silent for a second, then the control surface ripples. A series of tiny wavelets transfers across its surface. My immediate thought is that the pattern is like a pebble skipping across water, but that’s pushed back by a sense of order in the ripples. A widening, then narrowing, a sort of pattern that isn’t a pattern I recognize, but know anyway.

  “What is that? I feel like I know it.”

  Jack smiles and there’s a strange look in his eyes, like my saying that is in some way gratifying to him. “This is another type of language. If this cab were filled with water, then these ripples could be touched by the lifeform inside and they would ripple back. Here’s another type.”

  The ripples disappear, and blocks of color replace them. They aren’t square or round, but rather unevenly shaped in a long row across the surface. I know there must be colors I can’t see, because some of them are simply gray. I touch one and the whole array shifts, then shifts more, flickering through colors so quickly I can’t keep up. “And this?”

  “This is also the language of an aquatic species. They communicate via light, biological light, of course.”

  I run my hand across the lights, frowning at how hard it is to follow. “It’s so fast, so complicated.”

  He nods, and the lights go away, good old English words replacing them displaying the time left in transit. “When I called the car, it knew from my ID that I was human—at least at the moment—and sent a car configured for us. While in transit, the atmosphere was piped in to make it match what we need. The door wouldn’t have opened if we weren’t a proper match.”

  I’m starting to understand a little, but need to confirm it. “So, if a room is occupied by someone who needs a different environment than I do, the door won’t open. If the room isn’t occupied, but is still toxic to me, then it fixes the room before the door opens.”

  “Exactly! You’re a quick study,” he says.

  With a shrug, I put my hand back to the control surface and it blinks. “Put up a view outside of this vehicle please. Just like a window would show me. Can you do that?”

  “Yes.” The answer is simple and the voice isn’t the hub’s either. The screens appear to become transparent. I know I’m only seeing an image, but it’s very realistic.

  Outside the car lays a wide expanse of tracks, almost like subway tracks, except narrow and very shiny. Vehicles of all shapes and sizes move rapidly along the lines. There must be twenty or more sets of tracks. Grand Central Station, only on a space station. Flat, open vehicles like truck beds carry equipment or parcels. Cars almost like ours move past with blank beige walls, their contents a mystery. Who might be inside? What do they look like?

  A larger platform with a box of murky liquid zips past and I try to follow it, wondering what’s inside.

  “Who is that?” I ask, sure it’s a who and not an it.

  Jack looks as it disappears, then shrugs. “Not sure. Could be a bunch of different things really.” He taps the screen to point out another bubble, this one filled with hazy, reddish fog. “That’s a Mimic!”

  I look, but all I see is the bubble, the fog, and what looks like rocks. “A Mimic?”

  His eyes follow the bubble as it zips out of sight, then he grins. “That species can naturally form copies of other lifeforms on its planet, though limited ones. That’s how they live, by being others. Almost their entire planet has a layer of stratum that’s really the Mimic body. Every experience each Mimic has goes back to the whole. I guess what we just saw would really be part of the Mimic, but they’re individuals when separated from the whole. Combined with Hub’s replacement technology, they can now be any species in a truer sense. They’re even better facilitators than my species.”

  “You sound like a fan.”

  His grin widens. “Absolutely. They’re the ideal. Well, they’re ideal except that they can’t change form once they become biological. They get one life only.”

  Once more, my mind is entirely blown. A piece of rock in fog. So crazy. I can’t think about it right now. Maybe later, but not now.

  It strikes me that the light outside our car is slightly wrong, a bit dim and reddish. “Is there air outside this car? And why is the light like that?”

  “No, there’s no air you can breathe out there. That’s important for you to understand. Just because the atmosphere is clear doesn’t mean it’s air. Always keep that in mind. Your atmosphere is highly specific. This is a sort of mechanical level. There are a bunch of them between the various levels of the ring. This is a transit line, of course. The atmosphere out there has pressure—as in not a vacuum—because there is a balance to be struck in the station, but the component gases are a mixture that keeps wear to a minimum. You couldn’t survive out there without a suit.”

  I nod, marveling at how clear the air looks. It wouldn’t have even occurred to me that it would be dangerous. I’ve got so much to learn. “And the light?”

  “Ah, well there’s more than meets the eye, so to speak. A lot of species use parts of what you call the visible spectrum, but vision as you know it isn’t the same. There are a whole slew of different spectrums out there that are generally considered safe for most life forms. The car protects you from anything harmful and it wouldn’t take you anyplace that it couldn’t do that.”

  I keep hoping to see something alive, but there’s nothing except vehicles, boxes, crates, and objects I can’t fathom being transported. I’m disappointed, but also intrigued. Everything I do here is new to me, every single thing I see or hear or learn is absolutely new.

  That’s a lot of brain stimulation.

  I reach out to touch the control pad again and Jack says, “You don’t have to keep doing it. It knows you’re here so just tell it what you want.”

  “How much longer…car?”

  “Two minutes, four seconds.”

  “Is that the hub?” I ask Jack, because the voice is different.

  He makes a face and says, “Not really, but yes and no.” When I laugh, he shrugs and says, “It’s hard to explain. The whole place is the hub, but stuff lik
e this is handled at a lower level. When I contact the hub in my head, I get a higher level. Everything is the hub, but it’s not necessarily Hub. Does that make sense?”

  “Not really, but I’m cool with that.”

  The car slides to a halt and the view is broken by bright blue words. Stand by for atmosphere. Jack grabs my hand again and looks at the screen as if orienting himself. I can tell when he finds what he’s looking for by the change in his expression. He grins at me and says, “Are you ready?”

  I nod, but now that we’re here, I’m not sure I am. What if the species we see is gross or disgusting? What if they look like monsters? Quite frankly, I’m getting a little afraid of what I might see.

  The door folds open into a large chamber. The floor is that same flat grayish-beige, the walls almost the same color. “This way,” he says, tugging my hand and leading me out of the car. The other side of the room, no longer hidden by the car once we’re out and away from it, is made of glass or some other transparent material.

  It’s what I see beyond the glass that makes my feet unsteady and my body lose all coordination. I barely register that I’ve stopped, yanking Jack back in the process. I register almost nothing except the ship…the back-end of a giant spaceship on the other side of the glass.

  Twenty-Four

  This is a Bluriani vessel and it’s a marvel. From my spot in the elevator that first day, the ship looked small. I’m getting a much better idea of how large the hub really is. The ship is huge, enormous beyond belief. I have a hard time even putting it into words. If I had to make a comparison, I’d say it was as long as two skyscrapers plucked out of the ground and then stuck together end to end.

  I mean huge.

  It doesn’t look like skyscrapers though. It looks like exactly what it is; a space ship. The vessel is sleek, which might seem a strange descriptor for something so large, but it is. Sleek, curved, shiny…beautiful. Science fiction hasn’t come close to describing the sheer beauty of a ship like this.