This one came at me in disjointed segments, as I was fading in and out of sleep.
Portal Technology:
This group of semi-outcaste kids in one world know about portals and play with them the way kids here play with game-boys. hand-held games never caught on there. online games are basically unknown. Computers are boring things that workaholics use to drive their families nuts. Geeky kids have discovered how to use their father’s (usually their father’s) laptops to open portals by controlling energy flow to and around crystals. (Dads have learned to control household appliances, televisions, radios, heaters, air conditioners, etc, through their laptops and have convinced their families that the technology is way too complicated for them to understand how to use it. So the kids figure it out on the sly.)
Older guy in another dimension falls asleep at his computer and wakes up as a twenty something year old kid in a field somewhere. He sat up and pinched himself. “You’re not dreaming.” a young woman says. He turns around and sees her, sitting on a fence (a ranch type fence, like this might be a horse farm or something like that.) They go for a walk, into the woods, come out on a hill, looking over a town, a more or less rural community, with a bunch of houses fairly close together in a grid of streets surrounded by farmland and forests. There is a school, a library, an airport, a couple stores. a post office and two restaurants, (one on each end of town).
The young woman asks the guy a bunch of questions, like, “I bet you’re an outsider, right? everybody thinks you’re weird?” (Yeah, pretty much) “And I bet you’re not really happy with your life the way it’s been going, right?” ( He sighs, shakes his head) “Have you ever heard of interdimensional portals?” He looks at her and then nods. Then she tells the guy that the spot where she found him is a portal that drops people into her world every once in a while. She gets a tingle- it Usually happens on a day when there might be thunderstorms, she points to very dark clouds coming their way and leads him down a road that enters the woods, a pine forest where the trees were obviously planted in straight lines some time ago. He asks if it’s safe from twisters in there and she shakes her head… finds a path and leads in into the trees to a place between low rocky cliffs (maybe 4 or 5 feet high) where a deep rut has been cut into the ground, they go down and around and she opens a hidden door, they go inside to a sort of fallout shelter, where, after she closes the door behind her, the lights come on and she’s got a rudimentary computer lab in there.
“I’m not from this world, not this dimension.” she says and activates one laptop, taps into a series of video cameras around town. “The government here pretty much secretly keeps tabs on just about everybody. If you went into town, they’d know you were here, know you’re not from this world, and they would have one of their agents out here in about five hours to spirit you away to where they would interrogate you and implant you with a mini transmitter, they would know where you were at all times and could record every word you say, know who you’re talking to and what you’re talking about…” she shows him a scar on her arm. “They think I’m dead. I only come out when there’s an electrical disturbance, like the storm-” She points to images that she calls up, lightning and heavy downpours.
“It’s winter where I came from, we’re having a snow storm. and it’s bitter cold.”
“How cold?”
“Fahrenheit or Celcius?”
She looks impressed, “Don’t mention that here. Everything is Celcius, but they call it “Kelshius”
“Minus twenty six,” That’s cold.
“Seven below, Fehrenheit.”
She nods, “You may be from the same world I came from. New York or New Amsterdam?”
“New York, but I’m not from there.”
“Me neither, Ottawa or New Gibson?”
“Ottawa-”
“U.S.A., and Canada; or USA, New France, Canada, and Five Nations?”
“USA and Canada.”
She nods, “Believe me, there are a thousand variations on this.”
He nods, looks around, “You’re using 386’s?”
She nods, “Here they call them “Trilliums’.”
“What’s the electricity like here?”
Both AC and DC. The Five Nations use solar collectors and DC mostly. The US and Canada are waging like economic warfare against the Five Nations. The Five Nations and New France have a shaky alliance, with the US jamming most of their attempts at communications.”
Her lights go out, “It happens…” she then shuts down her computers, “There’s a ring of minerals around this forest that screws up the government’s ability to monitor anything in here, It’s like a five mile square free zone.”
“Where are you? in terms of New York?”
She nods, “Finger lakes region. Five Nations is on the other side of the lake out there.” (she pointed through a wall)
“Ithaca?”
“They call Ithaca, ‘New Leicester’ and they pronounce it “Lie-Kester” That’s about five miles south, only here they call it Kilometers Keel-Oe-Meters.”
She shut down her last computer and lit an lcd flashlight. “I have a guest room.” she leads him through a tunnel like hallway to a closet with a bed built into a wall, mattress, worn looking blankets, “It isn’t much, but it’s warm.”
He sits on the bed, she pulls up a folding chair, “You will probably wake up in your world again, and the chances are pretty good that you’ll find your way back here. This room is especially charged, you will imprint on it when you leave.”
He gasped and woke up back where he came from.
He brought through a newer laptop, and on subsequent trips brought through surge suppressors and more and newer computers. “We’re not supposed to be able to bring any hardware through- not unless it’s organic, or if you actually live in this world?” “What if our dimensions are coming closer to each other?” He also sees things as he’s coming and going, a nasty guy is holding a young woman in a pink ballerina costume tied up in his bathtub. kids, usually as couples, are porting in to the horse field and finding their way into the woods, where they are building a network of tunnels connecting underground homes. They manage to find the ballerina hostage and free her, but then they have this evil s.o.b. trying to find them and torture and kill them one at a time. They send the bad guy through a portal and drop him in front of a truck on a superhighway.
I should say that on one of his trips back to his world he looks at himself in a mirror and sees her reflection there, she says, “wow, you’re old.” “Yeah,” he says, “How can you do that?” he looks around, she is not physically behind him. “I’m dreaming, I thought I’d like to see your world and here I am.” he nods. When he gets back, she’s waiting for him. “I should have told you, it’s almost impossible to keep hopping back and forth between the same two dimensions. Every time you hop, you’re supposed to go to a slightly different world.” he nodded, “Do you remember finding me in my world?” she nods. “And you’re not, like, totally turned off by the fact that I’m so old there?” She shakes her head, “I’m in a degenerative vegetative state back there. I can’t go back, that body won’t let me. I don’t know, when that body dies whether I’ll still be alive here or not.” “What happened?” “Drunk driver, my father, got drunk and forced us to go for a ride with him. nobody had the guts to say no- so he lost control and I’m the only one still alive, besides him. and he spent like five years in jail because when he killed us he killed some senator’s wife. Now he’s back to drinking to forget- he can’t drive, no license, so he walks to the bars. I think he uses insurance money, don’t know how he got it. Really don’t care.-”
And I got the feeling there’s a whole lot more going on, but Mercury’s retrograde and I can’t start anything right now.
—–“Aerendel” Jim
Jim le Cartoon
djotterson
Doug Otterson
Jim Wellington
Light-Workers UnLimited 