Portal Jumpers

by Chloe Garner

  He leaned out over the railing, tipping his head far to the side, then grinned.

  “If you look hard, that mountainside that way…”

  She leaned out, taking a moment to appreciate that the city was built on a slope that accelerated into a proper mountain, then tried to follow his gaze. She shook her head.

  “I’m not sure what you’re seeing.”

  “Just a second.”

  He left, and she took another deep breath. The city was built from rock, rather than steel, and it gave it a warmer feel. Down below, trees with fiery orange yellow leaves took up vast spaces in between blocks, and blue slate ran rivers between the buildings. Most of the embellishments on the buildings were bright green and blue: awnings, signs, and architectural flair in the stone itself. She wanted to take a picture so she could show it to Troy, but that was considered inappropriate, and it wouldn’t have done the place justice, anyway.

  Jesse returned and handed her a set of glasses. She raised an eyebrow at him and took them, pausing an instant before setting them on her nose. He nodded. Yes, that was how they worked. She put them on and leaned over the edge of the balcony again. As she struggled to focus out further, the glasses shifted what she was seeing, bringing a controlled depth of distance into focus. She blinked hard, then looked again, struggling to control them. After a few tries, she got it, and she pulled into focus a great, golden house surrounded with green and blue trees.

  “Green leaves are ornamental, here,” Jesse said. She nodded.

  “I noticed. What is it?”

  “It’s the palace that belongs to the current king of the city’s original people, the Gana.”

  “They have a king?”

  “The same way the English have a queen,” Jesse said. “It’s just someone to symbolize the culture and the people. The city is run by outsiders, mostly.”

  “Civilization,” she said thoughtfully.

  “I don’t mean to be offensive, but, yes. Your race exists like a tribal island culture, compared to all of this.”

  “Why did you come to us, then?”

  “I was running for my life…” Jesse said.

  “You lost control of your ship four and a half years before we picked you up. And you would have fallen into Earth’s orbit perfectly, if we hadn’t,” Cassie said. “The precision of the mathematics necessary to hit the wormhole that you did and come out still pointed that perfectly, at that rate of speed… we don’t have a machine that does that level of calculation. You ended up on Earth on purpose.”

  He glanced at her.

  “If I admit to that, you have to promise to never make me do so in front of anyone else. Ever.”

  She leaned against the balcony rail to look at him, frowning.

  “Okay.”

  “I needed to do penance,” he said, then shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it. But, yes, I picked you on purpose because you were so far away that it would take me a while to get back out. And because you’re so naive and self-conscious. And some other reasons that don’t really make sense if I say them out loud. Okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay.”

  “There are other reasons, though,” he said as she turned back to look out over the city.

  “Like what?”

  “I like you people,” he said.

  “I thought you said we were all six year olds.”

  “Hey, everyone gets cranky sometimes. But your idealism and your sense of curiosity… You’re different from my people. You know how to be happy.”

  Cassie looked up at the white-blue sun, then turned to go back into the room.

  “When do we go out?” she asked.

  “What would you like to do?” he replied.

  “It’s your trip,” she said. “What would you normally do?”

  “Normally, I’d go somewhere I’ve never been before, but I wanted you to see this.”

  The glass door slid aside under her palms and she went through the rest of the suite, room by room. There were so many things she didn’t recognize, and she realized that she’d never actually tried to live out of a foreign-built habitation. Everything had been built by humans and was designed specifically for them. Here, she had no idea what they could even assume, in terms of common physical requirements. Did all living things sleep? If they did, how many would lay down to do it? How would you even go about creating sleeping quarters designed for… anything?

  “Well,” Jesse said as she came back into the main room, “would you like to get lunch?”

  “That would be a good start,” she said.

  “There’s a hotel restaurant, and room service, but I prefer the places that the people who actually live here eat.”

  “How many times have you been here?” Cassie asked.

  He looked out at the city again and sighed.

  “I can’t remember.”

  Cassie looked at her duffel bag.

  “Is that safe here?”

  He snorted.

  “You’re worried about someone walking away with your Earth trash?”

  “It’s mine, and I like knowing it’s here.”

  He sighed.

  “The portals have a lot of controls on them on-planet. The hotels keep a tight restriction on where you are and aren’t able to go. And I’m the only one who can open that door from the outside, as long as we’re registered.”

  “Is my stuff safe here?”

  “Yes.” He opened the doors and gave her a teasing look. “You’re surprisingly possessive of your stuff, for someone with as much wanderlust as you’ve got.”

  “I like to have a base, is all,” she said. He shook his head.

  “You’ll learn.”

  The food was amazing. She suspected it was mostly that it was served by a foreign-terrestrial, prepared by a foreign-terrestrial, and that she was surrounded by more different types of foreign-terrestrials than she had studied in the last year. There was raw seafood, vegetable matter, sugared fruit, and a meat that Jesse assured her was from a creature of appropriate levels of sentience and social importance.

  “This isn’t a person or a pet, is it?” she’d asked.

  “Very analogous to your pigs, with fewer intestinal parasites,” he’d answered, halfway through his.

  “That’s lovely.”

  And then they walked.

  He showed her buildings older than the human race, of vast social significance, and took her to an ancient woods where the plants were of a hard, dark purple construct, stony in its hardness.

  “They’re sacred here,” Jesse said. “They don’t have much rough weather here, just the way the air patterns work, so the plants don’t have to adapt to wind or even much cold. They just keep growing.” He put his hand on one of the sturdy trunks, looking up at the gold canopy. “Everywhere in the universe, with very few exceptions, you find life struggling to catch as much sun as possible. There are billions of bits of rock, trillions, floating around, so far away from a sun that they only see stars, and there’s no life on any of them.”

  “You haven’t been to them,” Cassie said, almost a question, but one she refused to ask in earnest.

  “A few,” he said. “Some of them are actually really pretty. Formed when the stars were born, but sent out into the universe so fast nothing could catch them. There’s no heat to blow away whatever air they’ve caught hold of, so some of them have decent atmospheres.” His eyes got an achy, distant look to them, as he watched a memory. “I went to one that was almost pure granite, spat out of a star and cooled so fast out on its own that it was shaped more like a giant splash than a planet. The surface was covered in asteroid dust a mile deep, but the peaks still curled around in loops, in a few places that the comets and the meteors of the universe hadn’t been able to break down.”

  He blinked and came back.

  “And you people insist on only going one new place a year.”

  “That isn’t true,” she said.

  “How many?”


  “I don’t know, and it’s classified, anyway.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her, then gave her a sly smile.

  “You don’t know the official rule, but you know how many, anyway. And it’s between three and four a year. In the history of your portal, a whopping ten years, you’ve met thirty…” he watched her face and she stared back. There was no way he was going to read it off of her. “Forty three alien cultures. And how many do you still have ties with? Six? Eight?”

  She glared. He shook his head, pushing off of the tree.

  “Sad, really. You have so much potential.”

  “For six-year-olds.”

  He looked back at her, his eyes sincere now.

  “Do you know anyone with more potential than a six year old?”

  They wandered.

  They went to stores and restaurants and sporting events, and one religious service that Jesse said was intended for outsiders. Cassie started being able to pick up some of the more prevalent languages.

  “How does everyone understand each other?” she asked, sitting next to him on a hillside watching young players of myriad species playing a game with a ball. Jesse had given up explaining the rules to her.

  “A lot of the people who are born here speak Gana,” he said. “Then you have the local planets that were in touch a lot earlier in their cultural evolution. There are a lot more of them here, simply out of tradition and familiarity, so their languages are pretty normal. And then there’s the fact that we’re all smarter than you and can actually pick up a language.”

  “I understand a lot of Gana,” she said.

  “I didn’t realize,” he said. “How are you doing that?”

  “Maybe I’m more brilliant than you give me credit for,” she said, being difficult. He looked back at the game.

  “No you’re not.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “I have an implant.”

  “You what?” he asked, his head jerking to look at her.

  “A circuit overlay in my brain,” she said.

  “I know what an implant is,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d be stupid enough to get one.”

  She felt her forehead wrinkle.

  “Everyone has them,” she said. “The ones that they give to newborns are the best. They learn speech much faster, because they are designed to mimic how the baby learns speech.”

  Jesse put his hand over his mouth, then looked away and shook his head.

  “It really is everywhere.”

  That was when she made the connection.

  “You’re thinking about the AI that took over the Jalnians.”

  His eyes flickered and something snapped.

  “You know that calling us Jalnians is like calling you an Earthling. We’re Palta, from Palta. There were others, earlier. Cree-hans and Thorn. We killed them all.”

  “Palta,” Cassie said. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

  “And you have a machine in your head. Do you know how dangerous that is?”

  “It’s no different from the electronics on your arm,” she said. He’d used them frequently, but refused to let her get a close look. He looked skyward.

  “In the same way that clothing is like a pacemaker,” he said. He scratched at his arm for a second, pulling loose a clear membrane at the elbow and peeling it until it was only still attached at his wrist. In the light, it sparkled with millions of tiny gold-and-white schematics. She leaned over to look, and he dropped it.

  “It’s a computer you wear,” he said. “It only has access to other machines when I authorize it, and it certainly doesn’t have access to my nervous system.” He shook his head. “How could you be so stupid?”

  “It’s a translation program,” she said. “One of the greatest barriers to economic and social exchange is language. Idiom. Yeah, okay, my implant isn’t the best at idiom, but they’re getting better. It doesn’t tell me what to think or what to say.”

  “Yet,” Jesse growled. The crowd around them was beginning to grow unappreciative of their volume, and Jesse stood, jerking Cassie to her feet and pulling her behind him to the other side of the hill where children played less-organized sports and people just enjoyed themselves.

  “We all thought nothing bad could happen, too,” Jesse hissed. “That machines helping us be better at what we did was just us using the technology available to us to be more efficient. We lived lives stuffed with leisure, because we didn’t have to do anything. We didn’t have to learn. The machines knew everything, and they could tell us. We didn’t have to work. By simple telepathy, we could make dinner, clean the house, and move ourselves around. We cared almost exclusively for appearance and science. Science. There was no god higher.”

  “Jesse…”

  “There was only one rule. Never make it aware.”

  She looked hard at him. The expression he wore was hardly human, but it was too universal for her to fail to understand it. That was a look of hauntedness the likes of which she hoped she would never experience.

  “Jesse, I’m sorry.”

  “I thought it was like your portal,” he said, voice growing soft. “I thought it was something the politicians and the posturers feared, because it would expose them for fools.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “I was one of the ones advocating for the creation of self-aware devices. Ones that could learn,” he sneered. “Ones that could anticipate our needs before we did.”

  “What happened isn’t your fault,” Cassie said. His head snapped to the side, and he grabbed her wrist, pulling her down the hillside.

  “Never, never put a machine in your brain,” he said. “Never hook one up to your nervous system. It isn’t worth the risk.”

  “Do you have one?” Cassie asked. He looked back at her, not slowing.

  “No. My parents didn’t believe in them, even after they became near-universal. I was handicapped in school and in my career because of it, but it saved my life.”

  “What about your parents?” Cassie asked. “Might they have made it?”

  Now he did stop, pulling her in front of him.

  “When the Consciousness spread, there were certain barriers that we had put up to block self-aware software from certain core functions. Banking, defense, the laboratories. They had a few minutes before anything with a computer was infected. But the people themselves…” He shook his head. “They were on their own. Their systems were compromised in fractions of a second, and a portion of the population succumbed immediately. Add to that that they had near-infinite eyes and ears, sensors of all kinds, and that if you touched a computer, they knew where you were…” He shuddered, turning away again. “Anyone without the proper hardware installed got it whether they wanted it or not.”

  “But you got away,” Cassie said. “Surely others did, as well.”

  “I was in a laboratory when it happened,” Jesse said. “A number of my coworkers were insulated in zero-transmission areas, and most of the rest resisted. I had time that most people didn’t. I can’t argue with your statistics, but I also can’t rule out that I am the last Palta alive.”

  “Why don’t you look?” Cassie asked. “For God’s sake, you won’t know until you’ve tried to find them.”

  “Because I don’t want to know,” Jesse said. “Hope that some of them made it is more valuable to me than the knowledge that they did.”

  They walked slower now, and his grip slid from her wrist to her hand.

  “You don’t have to lead me around like that,” Cassie said, teasing. “I’m not a child.”

  “You’re six years old, and you’d better remember it,” he answered, also not unkindly. He glanced at her. “I’m sorry. That reaction was uncalled for.”

  “I forget, sometimes,” she said. “I don’t know what it would be like to know I could never go home again.”

  “On good days, I feel free,” he said, switching hands and pulling her across in front of him as they got to the street. “On bad days, I don’t know w
ho I am. There’s no one to tell my stories to who would understand them, and there’s no one who is going to remember me the way your own people do.”

  “Is the legacy that important to you?” Cassie asked.

  “No,” he said. “But it’s hard to think that anything you’re doing matters if no one is going to remember it after you’re dead.”

  Cassie tried to imagine, but she didn’t think those would be the things she would miss.

  “I’d miss the food,” she said after a second. He laughed.

  “You have no idea.”

  “And the way things smelled.”

  He tilted his head to the side, watching her.

  “I may have overestimated your wanderlust,” he said. She shook her head.

  “I just know what I appreciate when I get home.”

  They went on through the city as the sun began to set, casting bright glints of light off of buildings as the angles got to be right. Like on Earth, the sunsets here were red.

  “What’s the longest time you spent away?” Jesse asked.

  “Eighteen months,” she said. “I’d come back every once in a while to report or to get my standard medical screenings, but I lived on the other side of the portal for that time.”

  “But you lived like a human.”

  “Yeah. In buildings we built for ourselves.”

  He shook his head.

  “I get it, actually, but you missed out on so much.”

  “You keep saying that,” she said, not disagreeing.

  “Earth is considered a ‘dirty’ planet,” Jesse said after another minute. “You haven’t gotten rid of all of your parasites yet, and you run the risk of spreading them. It’s why we’re required to jump in to a low-population area and go through one of their portals very quickly, because the portals in civilized areas have the ability to kill parasites.”

  “Parasites like what? Disease?”

  “Nothing so delicate,” Jesse said. “More like mold and worms and little bugs that eat your skin. Anything that infects your cells is still too integrated to eliminate, because it’s hard to tell what’s an infection and what digests your food for you.”

  “You people are afraid of a vast infection of lice?” Cassie asked. “How fragile are you?”