Chapter 21: The Portal Ate My Drone

The next steps Scarlet took would come down to a simple question. Was the portal a ‘right now’ type of problem, or an ‘after a meal and a nap’ type of problem. Unfortunately, she had no prior experience with massive distortions in the fabric of space and time. Experience that would be helpful right about now.

Gritting her teeth she took a single step towards the boundary of the clearing. She wasn’t even sure-her toe had fully crossed that invisible barrier – hadn’t even known there was a barrier there – when a prompt popped into her field of view.

[Enter Tier 1 Portal? ]
[Yes | No]

She startled herself with just how quickly she pulled her leg back.

The prompt disappeared.

She stared at the distorted clearing for a while. Probed at it with her senses, old and new. It wasn’t a large clearing, perhaps three, three and a half meters in diameter. In the centre was the most obvious distortion, that lattice of colour that she had naively assumed was the portal itself. However, she had come to realize that the portal was the clearing. She hadn’t missed this place in earlier scans because it hadn’t existed before. A terrifying and awe-inspiring concept.

She’d felt the force of the portal, the way it warped the world, the way those spatial energies had pressed into her, around her. It had turned ‘space’ from a concept into a palpable force in a way she hadn’t felt before. If it hadn’t been for the prompt, for whatever failsafe the System had in place to prevent people from just being at the whims of these anomalies Scarlet couldn’t imagine the kinds of chaos that could bring.

She looked over at Maus, the Spatial Mouse. The little guy was grooming his face nonchalantly on her shoulder, and Scarlet had to wonder just what kind of force he’d grow into. She went to give his head a little scritch until she realized she was holding the drone.

Her eyes went from the drone to the portal, and back again perhaps three or four times before – made up her mind.

Sending the drone into the distortion would help her answer the question about her next steps.

Scarlet lowered the drone into position with a practiced motion. Instead of letting it fly freely, she routed the video feed into her phone through a direct link. It was a very long cable. Then, she activated it with a flick of her thumb before guiding it forward. Though the device was low to the ground, it moved smoothly through the air, its small frame steady as it approached the boundary.

Scarlet watched its progress through the feed.

Just like when it had been flying overhead the cameras weren’t picking up any of the distortion that Scarlet could see. However, the video wasn’t static. Through the screen she watched as the camera appeared to fisheye before stuttering and snapping back to normal, then zooming, or ballooning the picture in a single corner, or point of the frame. It wasn’t pleasant to watch, but it mostly just looked like something in the software was glitching disturbingly, or that the hardware was malfunctioning.

The drone made it almost a meter into the clearing, the feedback getting worse as it went before suddenly, nothing. The screen went black; the drone just disappeared.

It wasn’t crushed, or warped, or thrown out of the clearing. It was just… Gone.

The slackened cable dropped to the grass with a muted thud Scarlet couldn’t hear over the pounding of her heartbeat.

The portal ate her drone.

No wonder anything that could get the hell out had fled. As she contemplated what this meant she began absentmindedly coiling the now ruined cable. It hadn’t gone far, and so it didn’t take long for the distorted end to come into view.

She brought the mutilated blob of what could now only charitably be called ‘wire’ to her face. Unlike the clean cutaway point she’d been expecting, the cable looked wrong. Warped, and pitted, like it had been burned, and frozen, and inverted. Simultaneously.

“Yeah,” Scarlet drew out the word. “Nope.”

She turned and began to walk away. No way on this green Earth was she about to enter that portal before she had a meal, a sleep, and a think.

<-…->

Scarlet had re-entered the bunker, showered again, twice, reheated a meal for herself and her bond, and settled in the control centre to eat it. She would have loved a meal in leisure, but there was a giant, gaping hole in reality, literally in her own backyard. It really put a damper on any thoughts of relaxation. So, instead of letting her mind rest, she did the healthy thing and got to work.

She ate with one hand as she took another look at the quest in her Interface. With the other hand she pulled out the notebook she had dubbed ‘Preliminary Plans Post-Apocalypse’.

A safe zone, based on what she could deduce, was more than just a monster-free area. If administrative rights meant what she believed they meant, then safe zones were established settlements. Settlement meant order, government, bureaucracy, and it meant dealing with the headache that unironically called itself civilization. Not only that, but the System would be – incidentally or by design – pitting her against the powers that be. Governments were known as ‘administrations’ for a reason. Not that she believed the status quo would last too long, however in the short term she had no interest in spearheading that type of conflict. Not when she had other, better, options.

Could Scarlet deal with people? Sure she could. Would Scarlet deal with people? Certainly. There were many situations in which there was no real other choice. Was Scarlet inclined to deal with people? Was she enthusiastic to take on a role that would so obviously expose her? Absolutely not.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

She had no desire to be a politician. She was no champion of humanity. She had no feeling one way or another about how random strangers handled the rapidly changing world on an individual level. Sure, on a collective level she cared. She wasn’t cheering on mass casualties, and she wasn’t unsympathetic to some of the horrors people were sharing in real time that were caused by the Integration. Would that make her stick her neck out? Not on the lives of millions more.

It might seem callous, however dying to save ten meant she wouldn’t be alive to save hundreds. More importantly to her, she wouldn’t be alive, period. She wasn’t okay with that.

She opened the backend of STAR and found that the engagement had ballooned. Her site was filling a gap; for information, for communication, for connection. More than how to get new skills, or grind stats, it looked like most people just wanted to know they weren’t alone. To share, to be seen, to be heard.