Portal Jumpers

by Chloe Garner

  “Yes, sir.”

  The general paused, glancing at his computer again.

  “I have an hour,” he said. “Have you ever done an interview?”

  “Not here,” she said. Out there, things were the wild west. Agents did what they had to. Here, there were rules.

  “You think you know how?”

  Ask questions, listen to the answers. She didn’t say it, because it would have been the wrong answer.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He nodded.

  “Then I’d like to watch. You drove?”

  She paused.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He nodded.

  “Good. I’ll ride with you. Could use the walk back.”

  His eyes twinkled with just the hint of the prankster he had been, as a soldier, and she stood.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He stood and she followed him out of the office, pointing to her car parked halfway down the lot from his spot. She turned the radio down before she started the car.

  “How did you figure it out?” General Thompson asked as she pulled out of the parking spot.

  “Unusual portal activity,” she said.

  “But you don’t have access to the real data,” he said.

  “I pulled the energy consumption,” she said, swallowing.

  “And then?”

  “The manifests.”

  “And then?”

  She looked over at him. What did he know?

  “Badge access.”

  “You cross a line, Lieutenant?”

  A direct question.

  “Maybe,” she said. “They’re awfully sketchy, just there.”

  “You hack data you weren’t supposed to see?”

  “No.”

  She tried not to take the question personally. She knew analysts who would do it, for the right reasons, but she didn’t respect it.

  “You learn things you shouldn’t know?”

  She pressed her lips, pausing at an intersection.

  “Maybe.”

  “About portal operating technology?”

  “No, sir.”

  He nodded.

  “Anyone asks you about it, you direct them to me,” he said. “I don’t want my analysts castrated by damned rules no one can figure out.”

  She looked at him, and he winked.

  “You break the wrong one, though, I’ll cut off your balls and use them as a paperweight.”

  She looked back at the road, swallowing hard to avoid smiling. She parked outside of the technical building, still early enough in the morning to get a decent spot, and walked in. She swiped her badge and nodded at the guard, then led the way up to the interview rooms. A man with a clipboard nodded at General Thompson.

  “Room five,” he said. The general clapped Cassie on the back.

  “All yours,” he said. She waited as he went into the observation room, her heart rate rising. She’d always wanted to do this, but her unwillingness to avoid sensitive subjects and her specific eagerness to know all kinds of unrelated things had kept her from ever being recommended for it. It would have taken an override all the way up at the general’s level to get her in. She took a breath and badged the door open.

  Jesse sat at the table with his head on curled arms. He was freakishly human looking. Cassie had a meme-driven assumption that foreign terrestrials would look alien. Most did. She had never been to a planet with humanoid inhabitants, but even given the existence of those, Jesse’s humanness was uncanny. It took close inspection to see the differences, and even then, her human-normative brain explained them away as genetic variation or illness. His fingers were too long and his palms too short, such that his fingertips would reach his wrist with his hands folded closed. His skin had slight purplish hues just around his eyes and his ears, and his ears were set slightly too far back on his head. His eyes, though, were stark blue, and piercing. He looked up at her.

  “Do you speak English?” she asked. He blinked and nodded, coy. She nodded, once, sharp, and took the seat across from him. She wouldn‘t need sample language for her translator to adapt.

  “Good morning,” she started. “I’m Lieutenant Calista du Charme and…”

  “That’s not your real name,” he interrupted.

  “Pardon?” she asked.

  “You heard me. That’s not your real name.”

  “I assure you it is.”

  His eyes narrowed and the corner of his mouth turned up. It was eerie, how humanesque he was. His file said he’d learned most of it in his first few days on the planet, but some of it was native. They had facial interpreters and videos to study cultural affectations.

  “It may be your given name, but it isn’t your name. Tell me what the man whose bed you shared last night calls you.”

  She hoped the blush didn’t make it to her face. She made a decision.

  “I’m Cassie.”

  He smiled, satisfied, and leaned back in his chair.

  “And what do you want from me, Lieutenant Cassie?”

  “Lots of things,” she said.

  “You caught me, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded.

  “You do want lots of things from me, don’t you?”

  He was watching her hard, like a snake.

  “Why are you here, Jesse?”

  “What do you think?”

  She was breaking all of the rules. She wasn’t supposed to answer questions. She was supposed to deflect them and control the conversation. She was supposed to assert dominance and make it clear that the only easy path was by doing what she wanted. She tried to ignore the knowledge that everyone in the next room watching her.

  “I think you barely escaped with your life,” she said. “I think that you wanted a place to hide and make a new plan, and I think you picked us because you’d be comfortable enough here, and when you chose to get away, you’d blend in enough. If you had blue skin, six arms, and gills, we wouldn’t have any problem finding you.”

  “Why would I need to get away?” he asked. “Am I a prisoner?”

  Another rule. Never admit a prisoner was a prisoner. Assure him that his comfort and safety was primary, and it was out of concern for him that his freedoms were limited.

  “Yes.”

  He grinned. She paused, waiting for a knock on the window behind her, but none came.

  “We’ll keep you comfortable and healthy, but the more often you get away, the tighter the shackles are going to get, until we understand you.”

  “You can’t hold me.” He paused and leaned forward, holding her eyes. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “I suspect it,” she said. “We can take extreme measures, label you a security risk, and we could hold you for a while, but…” she tilted her head slightly, not looking away, “that kind of escalation goes both ways, doesn’t it?”

  “Do you think I’m a sociopath?” he asked.

  “Are you?”

  That put him on his heels.

  “I don’t know,” he murmured. “Does a sociopath ever know what he is?”

  “I expect so,” she said. “Where do you go when you use the portal?”

  His eyes returned to her, not so cocky or coy, but just as intense.

  “You’d love it,” he said. “None of your silly rules. Just go. See.”

  “Is that why you go?”

  He crossed his arms.

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  He narrowed his eyes, then looked away.

  “Pass.”

  “Let’s say I let you out of here,” she said. “Walked you out to the parking lot, gave you money for a cab, turned around and went back to work. What would you do?”

  “Can you do that?”

  “No.”

  He gave her a little smile, appreciation, then sighed.

  “I don’t know. Figure out what you people call a decent meal and eat one. Get together some money, get a place to live.” He paused. “Come
back here and break in to use your portal.”

  “Why?”

  He shook his head.

  “Move on.”

  “Okay, do you have contacts with any individual or individuals who might have nefarious intentions against the human race?” she asked. The sparkle of humor in his eyes was charming.

  “I wish I could answer that in kind, but out of an interest in my own liberty, no, I have no such contacts.”

  “How do I know you aren’t lying to me?” she asked. He grinned, then the humor vaporized.

  “Because I have no one,” he said. “As you know, they’re all dead.”

  She nodded.

  “I do know. What do you plan on doing with your life, now?”

  He turned away, morose, his too-long fingers playing on the table.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does,” she said. His eyes swept over her and away again.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  She took a long pause at that. She was enjoying talking to him, but she didn’t have much expectation of real answers from him on the morning after they caught him using the portal. What was she hoping he would tell her?

  “What do you want from us?”

  “Leave me the hell alone,” he said.

  This took Cassie aback. He’d never been outright rude in his transcripts. Evasive and bored, certainly, but never rude. She stood.

  “All right.”

  He cast one last glance after her as she badged herself back out, but was staring at the corner when she turned to close the door behind her. She went next door into the observation room. The lead interrogator was livid.

  “Sir, she’s undone months of work that I’ve done to establish a rapport with him. Months. I need access to him right now to even try to salvage any of that.”

  “He liked her,” General Thompson said.

  “He’s manipulative,” the man answered. “He’ll do anything to wring information out of us, and you put him in a room with her. Do you even know what he could have taken from that?”

  “You’re dangerously close to insubordination,” the general said, glancing at Cassie. She leaned against a wall, waiting.

  “Sir, I need to go back in. As lead on his case, I insist.”

  “Then you aren’t lead any more,” the general said. Cassie caught the look in his eye and drew breath. He looked at her.

  “Sir, I have other work,” she said.

  “Nothing more important than this,” he said. “He’s been on the base with us for six months, and he’s been able to come and go as he pleased. Up until yesterday, I thought it was an extremely bright child showing off his superiority, but you tell me that he’s using our portal to jump God only knows where, and I say that’s our highest security issue. And you’re the one who caught him, in the first place. He’s your problem now.”

  “She told him he was a prisoner,” the interrogator said.

  “Well, isn’t he?”

  “But we don’t tell them that.”

  “You think he’s dumb enough not to notice?” Cassie asked. The scrawny man shot her a death glare, and she rolled her eyes. The man wrote good reports, but he was completely lacking in imagination.

  “Sir, I must emphatically express how bad an idea this is,” he said.

  “How bad an idea you think it is,” General Thompson said. “How many times did he get away from you?”

  “Eight,” the man said. Cassie had to give him marks for not looking away.

  “That you know of,” the general said. Cassie sighed, then started for the door.

  “Make that nine,” she said.

  Despite having badge access to every door between here and there, bypassing the security line at the portal, and having the general with her to keep anyone from trying to interrupt her, Jesse still beat her to the portal. She spotted him between pallets of two-by-fours on their way to one planet and board games on their way to another. He was looking at the back of his wrist.

  “Wait here,” she said to the general. Hitting an unexpected jump, especially if you’d never jumped before was extremely unpleasant, and could be fatal in the wrong circumstances. She ran across the floor of the portal room, giving the stacks of goods and groups of people wide berth in case they jumped as she went past, sprinting toward Jesse. Whatever he had for manipulating the portal, he was done, and he dropped his hand, looking up to find her running at him. He gave her a shadow of a smile and she charged into him, feeling the jolt and landing in a pile on top of Jesse on dusty ground.

  He coughed and she spun to her feet, looking around. He got up and brushed himself off.

  “Take us back,” she said.

  “No.”

  “That’s an order,” she said. He raised his eyebrows.

  “Do you know where you are?” he asked. She glanced at the sky, but the sun was up, and there were no constellations to help. She pulled out her phone and looked at it. It had converted to a location device during the jump, as designed.

  “We’re nowhere near your home planet,” she said.

  “So you can tell me, geometrically, where you are in the universe, but can you tell me where you are?”

  She looked around. The architecture was unfamiliar, the light spectrum was unfamiliar and, there, in the distance, she could see foreign terrestrials executing their lives. They were completely unrecognizable to her.

  “No.”

  “And do you know how to get back?” he asked. She checked her hips. She wasn’t carrying a weapon.

  “No.”

  His eyebrows wiggled.

  “Then it would appear that you are not in charge here,” he said.

  She stared for a second, then conceded. He grinned and turned away.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Dunno,” he called over his shoulder.

  “You know I’m going to get you arrested when we get back,” she said, not working too hard to catch up.

  “You know that isn’t going to stop me,” he answered.

  She shrugged and plodded on.

  “We just played,” Cassie said, leaning against Troy in bed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He made a bet with a guy at a bar, and so we ended up staying with him and his family for the whole time, and we just… wandered. And saw things. I learned games with children. He performed with a couple of adults in the street.” She sat up. “It was like going on vacation with a twelve year old who has never had anything bad happen to him in his life.”

  “Cass, he could have left you there.”

  “I don’t think he ever even considered it. Even when I told him I was going to get him taken into custody when we got back.”

  “Why would you trust him that much?”

  “Because… I do.”

  “You know they’re affectations. Cassie, I shouldn’t be the one telling you this. You should be telling me. Everything he does is lying to you.”

  She lay back down, putting her head back on his shoulder.

  “There’s a difference between speaking my language and lying to me. He’s playful. You don’t just fake that. He juggles.”

  “And you didn’t figure out why he was there?”

  “I don’t think he was looking for survivors; I don’t think he was contacting anyone for tactical reasons; I don’t even think he chose the place for specific reasons. We went to a place neither of us had ever been before, and we just… were there.” She rolled onto her side and looked Troy in the eyes. “I got to be on the advance guard, but without objectives. We just went.”

  “And who knows what the consequences could have been. We follow the sequence for a reason.”

  Cassie sighed. She knew the reasons. Advance guard establishes first contact and evaluates the tactical, economic, and social consequences of prolonged contact. If any of a host of conditions were met, bail out and consider the planet burned. After the advanced guard, small tactical squads set up an embassy using population studies d
one by the advanced guard, trying to stay away from the biggest and most unstable population centers, but close enough to more modest ones to ensure optimum results, based on the objectives for the planet. Expand the embassy’s radius of influence until a green zone is established in which humans will be free to trade and interact with the foreign terrestrials without unreasonable fear of violence. At this point, the tactical force expanded to a host force that coordinated trade, political interaction, and social observation. The entire enterprise was designed to be able to collapse back through the local portlet in a matter of hours. That’s what had happened on Jesse’s planet.

  “You ever wonder what it would be like to just go be around other terrestrials?” she asked. “Not to focus on creating an our-side and a their-side of some line, but actually just be with them?”

  “I’ve wondered what it would be like to see them at all,” he answered. She sighed.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It isn’t your fault.”

  “It just wasn’t like anything I’ve ever done before. And it was fun.”

  “Look, you know I’m all for you enjoying yourself. You know that. But a lot of people have thought long and hard about the rules, and there are good reasons for them.”

  “Yes, culture is an organism, and we are a virus,” she said, unable to contain the jab of sarcasm.

  “And if we call attention to ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, we run the risk of endangering the planet,” he said. “We don’t know what’s out there, Cassie.”

  “They play a game like hopscotch,” she said. “And they ferment sugars to make alcohol. And they laugh.”

  Troy sighed.

  “All right. Tell me about it.”

  They stayed up half the night talking, but he still woke her at dawn.

  “Your phone keeps ringing,” he said.

  “What kind of freak are you?” she asked, rolling over.

  “It’s the general,” he said.

  “Of course it is,” she muttered, sitting up. She put her hands out and he threw her phone at her, making for the kitchen. She called the missed number back and waited as it rang.

  “Lieutenant,” the general answered.

  “Sir.”

  “I need to see you this morning,” he said. “It’s urgent.”