Portals

  Portals

  Into The Galaxy: Book One

  by Ann Christy

  Copyright © 2018 by Ann Christy

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, nor may it be stored in a database or private retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author, with the exception of brief quotations included in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses as permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and events appearing or described in this work are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events, is purely coincidental and the product of a fevered imagination.

  Cover art created by:

  Illustration © Tom Edwards

  TomEdwardsDesign.com

  Works by Ann Christy

  The Silo 49 Series

  Silo 49: Going Dark

  Silo 49: Deep Dark

  Silo 49: Dark Till Dawn

  Silo 49: Flying Season for the Mis-Recorded

  The Between Life and Death Series

  The In-Betweener

  Forever Between

  Between Life and Death

  The Book of Sam (Prequel)

  Christmas Between Life and Death

  Dead Woman’s Journal (VIP Free Exclusive)

  Strikers Series

  Strikers

  Strikers: Eastlands

  Into The Galaxy Duology

  Portals

  Portals: Saving Earth

  Perfect Partners, Incorporated Series

  Robot Evolution

  Hope/Less

  Anthologies with Stories by Ann Christy

  Wool Gathering: A Charity Anthology

  Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel

  The Robot Chronicles

  The Powers That Be: A Superhero Charity Anthology

  The Z Chronicles

  Alt.History 101

  Dark Beyond the Stars

  The Future Chronicles – Special Edition

  The Time Travel Chronicles

  The Doomsday Chronicles

  Dark Beyond the Stars 2: A Planet Too Far

  Dark Beyond the Stars: New Worlds, New Suns

  Chronicle Worlds: Tails of Dystopia

  Bridge Across The Stars

  Best of Beyond the Stars

  One

  My brain cells are dying of frustration. I can hear tiny screams as they try to comprehend the gibberish falling out of my AP Calculus teacher’s mouth. How I qualified for this class, I’ll never know, but I’d happily trot myself over to Geometry if I thought I could get away with it.

  What’s worse, my phone is blowing up in my back pocket, making it hard to concentrate. Notification vibrations are coming fast and furious. I have zero idea why, but it worries me.

  I haven’t done anything lately that would get me into trouble and I’m not involved in any sordid high school scandals, so it must be some sort of emergency. Did my mom get into an accident? Is the house on fire? It’s only after calculating the odds that I might peek without getting caught that I realize I’m not the only one with this problem.

  The guy in front of me is lifting one side of his butt as his phone vibrates against the plastic seat. The girl next to me—who is ridiculously good at this calculus thing—has her hand pressed to the front of her backpack to muffle her phone noises as well. When the alert tone sounds out from a slew of phones, including one inside the teacher’s desk, I decide I simply must look. Something is definitely wrong. Slipping it out of my pocket, I hold it below the edge of my desk and hope for the best.

  “Lysa! No phones,” Ms. Blanchette calls. As usual, she pronounces my name wrong, making the y long so that it sounds like Lice-ah instead of like a regular old Lisa. Why did my mom choose to spell it so uniquely?

  Before I can correct her, or hide my phone, all the phones in the room send out a tone simultaneously. It’s the one used for Amber Alerts or Emergency Broadcasts. Her eyes flick toward her desk, then she waves her hand and reaches for her drawer.

  “Let me look first,” Ms. Blanchette says, but her expression says she’s worried. I don’t blame her. She probably thinks it’s a school shooting or something equally horrible. Like everyone else, I watch her. Her face crinkles a little, like she can’t believe what she’s seeing, then she mutters, “What the heck?”

  Apparently, the class is done waiting for her signal, because I’m not the only one to put my face to my screen. My notifications are crazy. The last text from my mom is the one I hit first.

  Are you alright? Text me right now!

  Since I have basically no idea what’s going on, I text back a nice and generic: Fine. At school.

  It doesn’t take long to see what’s up, but even so, I’m not the first one to see it. Voices start rising. Combined with the sound of videos playing on different phones, a confusing mish-mash of noise makes focusing difficult. Glancing up at the teacher, I make sure she’s not looking before I click. If phones are a no-no in school, then using them to watch videos is beyond a no-no. My school has a really strict policy on that.

  I’m confused by the alerts because they’re clearly building on some earlier story. It looks like something weird has come to earth, which can’t possibly be accurate. I click back to the video referenced in the story and wind up at one of those stalker-azzi sites, the kind that make their money by spying on celebs and getting bad pictures of them with hamburgers shoved into their mouths.

  The video is a few hours old, and in it a reporter is standing on a New York City sidewalk doing a live report about a nasty traffic accident involving someone famous for being famous. While going over the gory details of the accident—probably hoping to get a good shot of the ambulance and lots of blood—a window opens on the street behind him. It isn’t really a window, not the kind with a sash and some glass, but it’s a window all the same. The oval glows in shades of iridescent purple, with beautiful threads of deep blue swirling around inside, the two colors broken by swoops of white that make the edges of the purple seem almost pink. It really is stunning to behold, the light of a nebula brought onto a dirty, litter-strewn sidewalk.

  The reporter shuffles back a step or two, his face suddenly nervous, the hungry glee at potentially seeing a smashed up semi-celebrity vanishing from his heavily-powdered face. After a beat, he grins and remarks that it looks like they’re going to get a visit from a street magician, or maybe an illusionist that freaks out crowds for fun.

  The crumpled vehicle now forgotten by whoever is manning the camera, the image shifts until the oval of light nearly fills the frame, the laughing people nearby on the sidewalk crowding the edges. I pause the video to look at the spectral window more closely. It’s almost mesmerizing, the kind of thing you can look at all day and see new patterns emerge, each more stunning than the last. I wonder how a street magician could even dream up something so beautiful, let alone project it into the air like that. It looks real.

  Hitting play again, the video catches one of the bystanders leaning toward the newsman. He grins and says, “Hey, that’s more creative than yet another accidentally-on-purpose leaked sex tape.”

  That comment garners a few giggles from the crowd, and even I smile a little. The laughter hitches and a few gasps sound out when a man hops out of the glowing oval of light. He looks just like any other man. Actually, he looks exactly like one of the men on the sidewalk watching the show. He’s wearing a tan overcoat buttoned over a suit and a pair of nice shoes. His sandy hair is far too perfectly tousled to b
e the product of the wind alone. He’s like a twin taking the concept of dressing like their sibling a little too far.

  And what that man does when he pops out of the window of swirling color is kind of surprising. He grabs the man who looks exactly like him, his hands firmly around the man’s upper arms. For his part, the man being grabbed does nothing. He seemed to freeze when the new man hopped out, like a switch had been flipped on his motor reflexes, though I’d guess it’s shock at seeing his twin.

  The duplicate says something too low for the microphone to catch, all the while considering the face of the original man with a vague intensity. And then he tosses the original man straight into the oval of light. As if to finish the performance, the window winks out of existence without a sound or any other disturbance. The man who came from the window tugs down his coat sleeves and proceeds to walk down the sidewalk as if nothing happened, his hand absently smoothing that perfectly tousled hair as he steps past the crowd.

  The camera jerks back to the reporter, who is standing there gaping at the retreating man just like everyone else. He puts his hand to his ear and startles a little, as if someone just told him to wake up and smell the coffee because he’s on live TV. He gives a small, nervous laugh, reorienting himself and plastering that newscaster look back onto his face.

  Everyone else on the sidewalk looks a little unsettled too. I mean, they seem entertained, but also confused. Where were the flourishes? Where was the illusionist, who should now come out and take a bow, then make a grab for some bonus media coverage? A few people shake their heads or purse their lips, as if they find something so frivolous distasteful while the sound of ambulances fills the air with warbling urgency.

  I’m still not sure how this video relates to an emergency big enough to disturb class. I mean, it’s a magic trick. I click off the video and return to the news site. Almost immediately, I understand. A different newscaster is showing a snippet from a security camera overlooking a large kitchen loaded with industrial stainless steel. People are busily working, then the edge of a window just like the one on the street pops into existence. A man wearing a chef’s cap and holding a clipboard stands with a woman in an apron near a counter. Both jump back in alarm when the window opens just feet from them. Then, like the man on the street, the woman freezes with her hands raised to her chest and a look of fear on her face. Again, like the street scene, someone exactly like her steps from the light.

  Unlike the street scene, the duplicate woman doesn’t shove her counterpart through without opposition. Instead, the chef whacks the new woman with his clipboard and starts pushing her away, using his clipboard like a weapon. It’s raging up to become a brawl as he shouts, people running from off camera to join the fray.

  None of it works though. The new woman straight-arms the chef backward with barely any effort, then grabs the still-frozen original and tosses her into the light. Just like on the street, the oval winks out immediately, but the scene doesn’t end with laughter. This time, the chef gets up, crouching a little and wary of the woman. Suddenly, this new woman puts her hands to her temples, as if struck by a sudden migraine. I see her mouth opening in a pained shout, or maybe even a scream. Then she shakes her head and looks around like she doesn’t know what’s going on. The chef lets her know by grabbing one of the big knives from the counter and plunging it into her chest, while everyone else stares at the pair in shock.

  The video flies up into the corner of the screen and the newscaster resumes talking, telling eager viewers that the same sort of scene is being reported in many locations, both in the U.S. and abroad. No one knows the precise nature of the phenomenon, or why it’s happening, only that it’s not right. A word normally avoided by reporters of any repute is relayed in a near hushed tone: aliens.

  When I look up from my screen, my teacher’s face has gone pale and her fingers are tapping away at her phone like a pro. I can’t even text that fast. She drops it when the school speaker comes on and a voice tight with nerves announces that school is cancelled.

  It looks like I won’t have to finish today’s AP Calculus class after all.

  Two

  When I get home, my mom is sitting on the coffee table, which is as close to the TV as possible without standing in front of it. She looks sweaty and nervous, biting at one of her fingernails. A few wisps of her almost-black hair have begun to frizz out of her up-do. There’s even a run in one of her stockings, which is weird. My mom is one of those women who believe bare legs in a business skirt over the age of forty is gauche, and she always carries a spare pair in her purse. To say she’s normally the buttoned-up type would be an understatement.

  She hops up from the table as soon as I walk in and wraps me in a hug. A relieved breath whooshes out of her, as if she’d been holding her breath until I got home. It’s one of those hugs so tight it almost hurts, like the one she gave me when I went to summer camp for the first time, convinced I’d catch a tropical disease or get bitten by a rattlesnake.

  “Mom! You can let go. I’m right here. Everything is fine,” I say, my voice constricted.

  She gives a soft, nervous laugh and releases the hug, but only so she can grip me by my upper arms and stare at me. “You’re really okay? None of those things came to your school or anything, did they?”

  Judging by the way she’s staring at me, I wonder if she thinks I’m one of the duplicates. I grin and point to the scar on my chin where I took a header skating. “Nope, still me.”

  She rolls her eyes a little, but lets me go, so I’m betting she was wondering exactly that, even if only a little. Flapping her hand toward the TV screen, she says, “They’re talking about aliens.”

  Tossing my backpack onto the seat nearest the door, I answer, “That’s stupid. What would be the point?”

  “The point?”

  “They’re taking people to put another person right back in their place. Why would any alien do that?”

  She’s already standing in front of the screen—apparently the coffee table isn’t close enough after all—but she shoots me a look. “Clearly, it’s something. Who knows what an alien might consider reasonable? I’m pretty sure no one on this planet can do that. Bring those light windows and create duplicates, I mean.”

  Joining her in front of the TV where two guys are almost shouting each other down instead of talking, I shrug. “You’re the one that works at the Pentagon. You tell me if anyone can do it. You’d know, right?”

  She snorts and says, “I’m an office manager.”

  “Still.”

  “Still, nothing. It’s a big place with a lot going on, but if anyone in the world could do something like teleportation then it would have leaked out. No, this isn’t us.” Before I can respond, she puts up her hand, a cue to pay attention to the TV. The two men have calmed down a bit, but only a bit.

  The one with the slightly reddened cheeks of the very irritated purses his lips like it’s taking real effort not to start yelling again. He motions for the other guy to talk and says, “Go ahead. Your turn.”

  The little banner on the screen indicates he’s from NASA, which is sort of funny since there are no spaceships involved. He’s also got a little gleam in his eye, like he’s pretty sure their funding won’t be cut for the umpteenth year in a row.

  He takes a deep breath and says, “What I’m saying is that panic isn’t called for. We need calm heads and thoughtful reasoning. Until we know what this is, we can’t react appropriately. For all we know, this is a natural event…or even something being done by humans right here on earth. We just don’t know.”

  The red-faced guy looks a little less red, but he’s still irritated. The banner below him says he’s a national security consultant. He doesn’t interrupt, but there’s not a microsecond between the end of the NASA guy’s sentence before he starts in.

  “We don’t have time for that. Less than five minutes ago, another report came from inside a movie theater. One of those things popped up during t
he movie! And there are more, we’re getting calls and video from everywhere. It looks like these things…these portals as the government calls them…are showing up every fifteen minutes or so, and no one knows how many are showing up each time. It could be dozens. Or hundreds! People need to act fast and decisively. If they see one, they should use any and all means to avoid being taken. Any force necessary—”

  “Do you hear yourself? I mean, are you actually listening to the words that you’re saying?” the other guy interrupts, his expression incredulous. “What if this is being sent by our future selves? That makes more sense than aliens. I mean, if any alien species can go to the trouble to create these portals, then they can probably do a lot more. Why bother with this if they mean harm? And why replacements? You saw the report on the man taken while waiting in line at a bank. The duplicate had no idea he was a duplicate. He didn’t even appear to remember tossing himself through a portal! I ask you again; What would be the point? It would be the stupidest invasion ever!”

  “Stupidest invasion ever,” my mom whispers, then shakes her head and looks at me. “What’s going on?”

  I can tell she wants to hug me again. She’s got that mom-needs-a-hug look on her face. I lean in and let her squeeze my shoulders until my collar bones hurt. The things I do for my mom. When she’s done squeezing, I say, “Don’t worry, Mom. We’ll just wait and see what happens. It will all work out.”

  *****

  Have things worked out? Not so much. It’s been two weeks and our world has changed drastically. We live in the world of the Portal Invasion, though there’s still no way to prove anything as far as I know. Even school is sketchy now, with more of my classmates not showing up and the halls less deafening between classes every day. The whole thing is too weird to be believable. Is it aliens? Is it the future? Is it bad…or is it good?

  Is there a way to be sure?