Portal Jumpers

by Chloe Garner

  It was strange having a brilliant child who could escape her at any moment.

  And yet.

  It worked. For a few days, she picked him up at the curb - whether or not she had stayed with Troy - and drove him in to work, where he would have an assignment waiting for him. He was like temporary labor, a floating resource that the departments, within hours, learned to clamor for. The bids came in at night and went through a mysterious sorting process, and by morning, he had a new job.

  He never suggested it was stimulating, but he seemed happy enough. Cassie did her job, he did his; they got lunch together most days, though in a few of the groups, he found other kindred spirits that he went to lunch with, one day, or out for drinks, another. Cassie tried to pretend like she wasn’t jealous, but Troy called her on it.

  “You thought you’d be his special little friend, the only one he could stand,” he teased one night. “Turns out, he just hasn’t met enough people yet.”

  “I’m not listening to you,” she answered.

  “Don’t worry; I’m sure he’ll still take you on a couple of jumps before he makes a new best friend.”

  “Shut up, Troy.”

  He laughed.

  “It’s normal,” he said. “He’s a nice guy. People like him. They’re going to want to hang out with him. Don’t let it bother you.”

  “Thanks. That helps a lot.”

  He snorted.

  “Hey, if I didn’t make fun of you, you’d start to worry if I still liked you or not.”

  “Shut up, Troy.”

  Jesse even did a turn in Troy’s lab, doing high-level synthesis of some protein compound that Cassie would only learn about if she needed to. It wasn’t secret; she just had plenty of other things to focus on instead of obscure proteins. Jesse seemed energized at lunch that day.

  “It’s like using sticks and leaves would be to you, but it’s breakthrough work that he’s doing,” he said, slurping down noodles.

  “I’m glad you like it,” Cassie said. “We’re not all idiots.”

  Jesse sighed.

  “I never said you were. I said you were like six-year-olds. There’s nothing wrong with a child acting like a child. It doesn’t make them stupid or immature or anything. They just aren’t…”

  He was pulling the punch, and she resented it.

  “Your peers,” she said. She gave him a crooked smile. “I keep hoping we’ll prove you wrong.”

  Troy came to talk to her that afternoon and she mentioned the conversation to him, explaining that he seemed to be enjoying himself despite his ego.

  “Cassie, have you thought about what he had to do to get away?”

  “Hmm?”

  “A digital artificial intelligence was wiping out his planet. Anything with a computer, it was in. And he got into an escape pod and he beat a computer. He out-thought it. He was faster and smarter than a machine with the entire world’s processing capability. He really isn’t like us.”

  “Kind of a pathetic computer, though, huh?” she said, shrugging to show that she conceded the point.

  “You know, you’re the only one that he bugs like that. The rest of us, best I can tell, he’s a fun guy to work with. Freaking genius, but a blast to work with. It’s like having the best mentor of your life, but he’s in his twenties and wants to go party later.”

  “Party?”

  Troy grinned.

  “We don’t let him get into any of the hard stuff, Mom,” he teased.

  “You let it be known that if anyone gets him in trouble with the MPs, I will find something very creative as their punishment.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Troy answered, grinning. “I’m going to go check in on him. You up for dinner tonight? All three of us, maybe?”

  “We hung out last night, and the night before,” Cassie said. “I’m not complaining, but… aren’t you…”

  “Going through withdrawal? Sure. But it feels like I’m not going to get a lot more time with you. Taking what I can get when I can get it. Don’t worry about it. Dinner?”

  “Yeah. You want to call me when you guys wrap up tonight?”

  “Might be late. I won’t get him tomorrow.”

  “No problem. I’ve got a report from the advanced guard that I need to get through and write my own synopsis.”

  “Later,” Troy said, kissing her cheek and darting away on his chair. She grinned, looking at her computer. Happy.

  Troy and Jesse were deep in conversation when she met up with them later, something about an unexpected exothermic reaction.

  “You blow something up?” she asked. Troy frowned.

  “No, we…” he started, defensive.

  “Not interested.” She winked. They kept on with their conversation, speculating which of the intermediate molecules had spawned the reaction. Troy’s team’s original theory was wrong, and Jesse insisted he knew why, but Troy said that they had run a sister reaction exactly as expected just last week. Jesse’s theory was unsupported by the evidence from the other trial. Jesse was trying to explain why the parallel was unsupported.

  Cassie understood more than she let on.

  “What do you want to eat?”

  “What do you want for your last meal on Earth?” Jesse answered. She looked in her rearview to find his stark blue eyes watching her. She swallowed.

  “There’s a tradition,” Troy said, filling the pause carefully. Cassie nodded.

  “Are we going?”

  “Tomorrow,” Jesse answered. “Eleven o’clock or noon.”

  She swallowed again.

  “It’s a tradition,” she said. “You don’t get Cal’s unless you’re jumping the next day.”

  The blue eyes were steady, unblinking.

  “I give you my word, Calista. We’re going.”

  And that was the first moment she believed it. Troy watched her, seeing the thoughts unfolding in her head in real time. She nodded.

  “Cal’s.”

  She turned, switching on the windshield wipers.

  “What’s Cal’s?” Jesse asked.

  “Local farmer,” Troy said, turning in his seat, but mostly watching Cassie. “Hand-raises cattle and sells them to Cal’s, and the only people who can order them are agent jumpers and their last-meal companions.”

  “How does he know when to butcher the cows?” Jesse asked. “I presume you don’t announce a schedule ahead of time.”

  Troy shook his head.

  “He delivers steaks fresh every morning. Takes the ones from the day before. Story says he and his family eat them, but it’s a lot of meat. I wonder if he doesn’t just throw it out.” The electric lights came into view - Cal’s was only a few blocks from the portal building, on base - and the chemicals finally kicked in for Cassie. Cal’s made it real. Her breath caught. It was going to happen. Troy glanced at her again, then looked back at Jesse. “Keeps it special, anyway.”

  A set of passing headlights illuminated Jesse’s face. He was watching Cassie, too.

  “Traditions like that are good. Make important things important.”

  She turned into the parking lot and shut off the engine.

  “Where are we going?” she asked as she got out. Jesse shook his head.

  “Not going to tell you that, even after we get there.”

  “Keeps you in charge, huh?” she asked.

  “No, just like surprises.”

  Troy made his way through the crowd of people waiting for a table and caught the hostess’ attention.

  “We’ve got jumpers,” he said. The woman’s eyebrows went up.

  “Just the three of you?”

  “Small jump, late notice,” Troy said. The woman got a good look at Cassie and gave her a sideways smile.

  “Thought we’d seen the last of you,” she said. “You’re going?”

  Cassie nodded. She hadn’t eaten here since the last time she jumped.

  “Good for you, honey,” the woman said, then pulled a special set of menus from under the desk, cream-colored an
d plain, compared to the high-gloss, commercial ones they normally used, and led the way to an empty table.

  “All this for doing a jump?” Jesse asked, looking over his shoulder at the waiting crowd. “People jump all day every day.”

  “Civilians,” Cassie answered. “They don’t take on any of the risks. The agents go ahead and create a landing zone.”

  “Yeah, I remember,” he said, putting his hands in his pockets and shrugging. “Just don’t think it should really be that big a deal.”

  “You said…”

  “Important things should say important,” he said. “Yeah. But they’re restricting something that there’s no reason to restrict.”

  “We’ve had this fight,” she said, her good mood spoiling quickly.

  “You people make everything harder than it needs to be,” Jesse muttered, sliding into the booth across from Troy and smiling at the hostess as she handed him the menu.

  “You’re the one who’s being difficult,” Cassie said, sitting down next to Troy.

  “What’s that?” Troy asked. Cassie shook her head.

  “Nothing.”

  “Disagreement we haven’t managed to get past,” Jesse said. “Where did you find your lab staff?”

  “Here and there,” Troy answered. “Why?”

  “It’s not so much that they’re uniquely gifted, though there are some bright stars in the group, but they think right. You can see them pass an idea around the room and bring it back better.”

  Troy laughed.

  “Agents they aren’t.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Cassie asked.

  “You lot are lone wolves,” Jesse said. “I can walk into the analysts’ room and pick out the ex-agents with a photo.”

  “You can not,” she said.

  “You kinda can,” Troy said. “You’ve all got a look.”

  “What?” she asked. “We’ve seen things.”

  Jesse laughed.

  “No, that’s not it. It’s not what you’ve seen, it’s that you think you accomplished it all by yourselves,” Jesse said.

  Cassie swallowed the ‘do not’ that threatened to jump out of her mouth unbidden.

  “Are you saying we haven’t?” she asked. Jesse held up his hands.

  “Far be it for me to judge how much you have or haven’t accomplished on your own,” he said. “It’s just a look. Everyone else looks at you like you might be useful. Agents look at you like… an obstacle.”

  Troy laughed.

  “You know, you’re totally right.”

  “You’re an obstacle,” Cassie muttered. Troy put his arm over her shoulders, still laughing.

  “You’re good, babe. One of the best.”

  “A mind in a generation,” Jesse said, something in a deep undercurrent there. Hadn’t she called him that?

  “A mind in a generation,” Troy said, “but you do look at everyone like they’re just threatening to get in your way.”

  “I do not,” she protested, unable to contain it this time.

  “They do, though, don’t they?” Jesse asked, calm now. Intense. “You say something and you expect them to see it, and no one does. You spend your whole life trying to convince someone to see what you see.”

  Troy went still.

  “That’s her,” he said.

  “Shut up,” Cassie said, shrugging out from under Troy’s arm. The waitress showed up and took their drink orders, and Jesse made a show of reading the menu. Troy clearly wanted to say something, but didn’t want to be that personal in front of Jesse. Cassie tried to soften her mood, rolling her eyes and shrugging. Later, he mouthed and she shrugged again, then nodded. The waitress came back seconds later.

  “Three steaks?” she asked.

  “Of course,” Jesse answered.

  “What else can I get you?” the girl asked. Jesse leaned his elbows on the table and lowered his head confidentially.

  “If you were going on a long trip and you weren’t sure when you were going to be back, what would you want to make sure you ate before you left?”

  “Oh,” she said brightly, leaning over the table to walk through the menu. She had good taste, Cassie thought, and a better appetite. She and Troy ordered what they always got the night before one of her jumps.

  “Too many habits with you people,” Jesse said.

  “Habits are the first, last, and most important trait of a scientist,” Troy answered. Jesse nodded.

  “But most of the best scientific discoveries happen by accident.”

  “We can’t always sit around waiting for an apple to hit us on the head,” Troy said. “Sometimes we have to eliminate all the other fruit first.”

  Jesse frowned, then his eyes lit up.

  “That’s your gravity story, isn’t it?”

  “An important physicist,” Cassie said. “That’s the story, anyway.”

  “The story is always better,” Jesse said. “We had a couple of king’s advisers get in a fight over why rocks come back down after you launch them at your enemies. They hired one of the king’s mages to explain it, and that was the first physicist.”

  “I suspect your story is older than ours,” Troy said. Jesse winked.

  “Just a little. But the apple is good, too. Lot of apples in your myths, aren’t there?”

  “Who have you been talking to?” Cassie asked. Jesse shrugged.

  “Some stories are easier than others to pick up from… things.”

  Cassie shook her head.

  “So you won’t tell her where you’re going. Would you tell me?” Troy asked.

  “Sorry to say it to you, but it wouldn’t mean anything to you,” Jesse said. “We ever go someplace you’ve heard of, I’ll tell you.”

  “How do you pick?” Troy asked. Jesse grinned.

  “Trade secret,” he said.

  “It involves darts, doesn’t it?” Troy asked. “And a giant map of the universe.”

  “You broke into my apartment,” Jesse said. “You like how I managed to fit a map of infinite three-dimensional space on a wall like that?”

  “Genius,” Troy said.

  They continued to talk until the food arrived, and then they were generally quiet, enjoying the quality of the food and, for Cassie, the excuse for silence for a few minutes.

  “Why noon?” Troy asked at one point.

  “Trying to hit the right city at the right time of day, same as you,” Jesse said.

  “So you’ve been there before?” Troy asked.

  Jesse wiped his mouth.

  “I would rather not say,” he said, not coy or playful at all, but distant for a moment.

  “I’m sorry,” Troy said. “I just…”

  “No, this is a day for celebration,” Jesse said. “Tomorrow I go free again, and Cassie gets her wings back. No place for me to be moody. You didn’t mean anything.”

  He wiped his hands off and slid to the edge of the booth.

  “With your leave, I’m going to walk back to the apartment. Give you two the rest of the evening to yourselves.”

  “We’re just friends,” Cassie warned.

  “You make each other happy,” Jesse said. “You should stay with him tonight.”

  “Just. Friends,” she growled. There was a flash of humor across his face and he grinned.

  “I didn’t say that you made yourselves physio-chemically satisfied,” he said. “You should think about why you take suggestions otherwise so personally.”

  He stood and gave them a little bow, then hesitated, and Cassie nodded. Technically, he did have to ask her permission. He left, and Cassie slid around the table to face Troy.

  “He drives me crazy,” she said. Troy was grinning.

  “You love it,” he said. She twisted her mouth to the side and shrugged.

  “Whatever.”

  “You want to split a dessert?”

  She looked down at her plate and up at him again.

  “You’re a crazy person,” she said, then, with only a moment o
f hesitation, grabbed the menu.

  She did stay with him that night, despite being sore at Jesse for calling her out. They sat up with beers until late, talking about school and her first jump and all kinds of silly nostalgic things, and then they went to bed. When Cassie woke up, he was still there.

  “You know I always miss you when you’re gone,” he said when he noticed she was awake. “Even when I was still in school and you were off on jumps for months.”

  “You never stay in bed after you wake up,” she said. “Are you feeling okay?”

  He hugged her.

  “I’m fine. It’s just that…” there was a long pause, and she waited, listening to him breathe. “Okay, you can hate me if you want, but I always knew you’d be back after a few years. You’d be done, and we’d be us again.”

  “There is no us,” she said.

  “Not like that,” he said. “Us like we were in school. You’re my best friend. I miss you when you’re gone, and I always thought there would be a point where we’d work together and hang out whenever we wanted, and… I don’t know. That’s all.”

  “I’m not dying, Troy.”

  “I know. But now there’s nothing to stop you from jumping for the rest of your life, really. As long as you can manage the jumps and Jesse thinks you’re interesting. I’m not going to get you back, like I thought I would.”

  She sighed.

  “I wish I could want something else,” she said. He was all she had, really. She had other friends, more or less, and she loved her job, mostly, but after her parents died, he’d been the one constant thing. She wondered if she were being unfair to him, expecting him to just always be there, waiting for her to get back.

  “What do you need to do today?” he asked.

  “I need to go out to the house and get my kit, then I’ll take Jesse in and… we’ll go.

  “You nervous?”

  She searched for nerves, looking for feelings she’d grown familiar with over the years, but didn’t find any of them.

  “No,” she said. “Just excited.”

  “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be on your jump team than him.”