Consequences

The thin blond woman in a suit entered the room. Simon knew she had to be more deadly than she looked. Yeah, there it was. He spotted her weapon underneath the suit blazer when she turned to close the door. FBI agents went through a lot of different training. Maybe she’d been brought in to put him at ease, get him talking.

Or break him. This was an interrogation, after all.

The woman crossed to where he sat, chained at the table. He waited for her to say something while she set up her recorder. Not that she needed it. There must be at least three more agents observing behind that two-way glass, not to mention the cameras.

 Sitting, the woman adjusted her skirt before she finally spoke. “Agent Jamie Simmons, interrogating Simon Pursleh Adams. Mr Adams, would you please confirm for the recorder that you have waived your right to counsel?”

“I know my rights,” Simon said. “I don’t need a lawyer.”

“Right then. Mr Adams –“

“Simon.”

“Fine. Simon, tell me where Johnny Salvaro is.” Agent Simmons leaned back in her chair like she had all the time in the world, her limbs loose as she studied him. Just like she’d studied him from behind the mirror, probably. He ran his eyes over her neck, following the trail of a delicate necklace that ended in a long, rectangular bar.

“I don’t know,” he said. Simon mirrored her posture, as best he could with his hands chained to the table.

“Based upon your actions, it looks like you do, Simon.” She let out a smile and crossed her legs. “The base is locked down until we find him. Why don’t you save us the trouble? I’m sure we can come to a mutually beneficial agreement.”

“Is anyone ever going to ask me anything else?”

“What would you suggest we ask, Simon?” Her voice was smooth honey, poured hot into perfectly brewed tea. Yeah, she was an interrogator, all right.

“Maybe how all this started.” He realized with a jolt that he wanted to tell his side of the story. Someone ought to know.

Agent Simmons leaned forward, her head tilted to one side, hands clasped in front of her. “Then tell me how this started, Simon.” Her voice purred, and he felt a flush.

“It was all back in 2020,” he began.

Early in 2020, when everybody was in quarantine. It’d been a week or two, and everyone was still scared, but starting to get bored, too. And Johnny had been coding the whole time. He saw opportunities, that kid did. Seventeen years old and a bioengineering prodigy.

A mastermind with one friend in the world, named Simon, who was better at handling money and people. I protected him from the bullies, so Johnny reached out to see if I’d be willing to break quarantine for a good reason. And that reason was genius, too, just like Johnny.

But he was not quite as great at coding. Brilliant, yeah, but you have to understand, the portal discovery, that was all an accident. He didn’t mean to do it. Most people don’t get that. He’s not real coherent in the interviews.

Johnny was trying to merge bioengineering techniques with code, y’see. Make it so that everyone stuck in their homes would be able to experience the places they couldn’t visit in real life.

Johnny laughed at the idea of watching a video. Laughed every time another museum put up a recording of someone walking around. All those VR headsets used to really crack him up. He wanted the experience to be real. Indistinguishable from reality. Not looking like a dork with a headset on. Johnny knew what being a target was like, and that was a prime example.

Just think of the possibilities, he used to say. The blind to see again, the experience of travel without the hassle of TSA and visas. How many people wait until retirement to travel, then realize they can’t for one reason or another? Don’t wait, he’d say. Make it so you don’t have to wait.

After everything those kids did to him, growing up, it’s amazing he didn’t want to burn down the world. But instead he saw potential.

Don’t ask me to explain the portals. The math is way beyond me. Suffice to say, when Johnny tested it and found himself actually at the Louvre, he knew he had an invention on his hands that would change the world. Change everything.

He was so excited, he forgot to tell me. That’s right, Johnny forgot to tell his damn business partner. Because I’d gone home for the night. Ironic, isn’t it?

Nor did he make a business decision. He just uploaded the code. Made it open source. Anyone could edit it, if they understood what it did, and there weren’t many of those. But anyone could also use it, and that didn’t require much of anything at all. Just a little metal wire, injected into your hand, and he released the specs for that, too.

Funny thing was, once the code was released, it was like the whole world paused. You can travel anywhere in the blink of an eye, and it was like everyone was suddenly okay with staying home after all. Maybe it was that people didn’t believe at first, but it was like the opportunity meant people figured they’d get around to it later instead.

The world changed overnight, and everyone got lazy. Who’d have thought?

Oh, but there was interest from the shadows, governments twitching at the implications. Governments wanting Johnny to come work for them, whether he wanted to or not.

The code got pulled down, then reposted. It was back to the early days of the internet, where censorship routed around blockages and information wanted to be free. Hell, they had kiosks at the malls to inject you with the biomech wire, like they used to do pierced ears, only the apparatus went in your finger and hurt more.

Even as it proliferated, it still stayed pretty quiet for a while. Maybe a year or so. Fourteen months. Long enough for Johnny to start hiding from the attention.

And then came the chaos.

Whole economic sectors exploded. Truckers were put out of business, not by the slow-moving automation they feared but was never quite ready, but by code and a shining silver hole in the universe controlled by your phone. Delivery industries were revolutionized. Doctors came to you again, concierge style, while travel agents tried to help you plan your trip rather than book it for you.

Highways grew over with grass and weeds, even as the car companies tried to produce their own personal versions of the portals. Instant transit, from a trusted brand. Some of the hotels just gave up. Why bother, when you can zap yourself home in a few seconds? Others tried to create portal stations, a safe place to step into for a small fee. Most of those went under, too, but at least they tried.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Crime skyrocketed. Murder, theft, everything. The terrorist attacks just kept coming, because we lost all ways to predict targets. But the ability to transit whole armies, each soldier with his own portal? Everything broke down. There’s no way to enforce the law. What was left of the governments had to figure out how to protect nuclear weapons. And don’t get me started on the drug trafficking, sheesh. Or worse. The cartels – I try not to think of all the people who disappeared.

The guilt that comes with having been a part of it doesn’t go away. I’m well aware of the terrible things that happened.

And that generated new economic sectors. Portal safe rooms. Personal bubbles. How to digitize your entire life when anything could be stolen. The size limit made it hard to protect anything bigger than a human.

Johnny said something about the biomechanical limits. He’s always been the only one who really understood the tech.

Personal bubble shields became ubiquitous, and you kept everything you owned in them with you. Rich people hired poor people to form a collective shield with their personal bubbles, trying get around the biomech limits, but it didn’t work. Too many gaps, and a portal could still get through.

As you can see, Johnny wasn’t so great at thinking about consequences.

Everything went digital. Johnny had invented what he had originally tried to achieve, too. Holographic, interactive representations of everything. Nobody knows who has the original Monets after all the crazed art thefts of the first early years, but does it matter anymore when anyone can download a high-fidelity scan and have it for their own?

That one, I at least got him to monetize.

But then we started seeing people mess with the code. Malicious hacking. Malware, ransomware. The portals were too useful to stop using, even after people started showing up bloody, or in bloody pieces.

People paid out the nose to make sure they could keep what they had left. You lose digital, you lose even the illusion that you can own things without them getting stolen by who knows who. It’s such a cat and mouse game of trying to protect your family memories, of being able to travel safely.

The government got involved. Tried to restrict the tech. It was way too late, and they were hanging by a shred of legitimacy anyway. Security was a promise they couldn’t keep.

I lost my taste for it pretty quickly, sold my shares. Tried to think of a place where portals wouldn’t work.

Damn good thing it doesn’t work off planet, right? Or so they hope, since the rich folks are trying to get off planet. Take up farming on Mars, or some such. They made huge investments in the space program. First ship launches tomorrow.

Johnny used to tell me the portal tech was matched to our geomagnetic field, somehow. Our biology, our home planet, combined with code. So none of those folks who disappeared wound up on Venus, at least. Probably at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, I figure.

You ask me, I think he figured out how to get off planet using the portal. Those rich folks, they’re gonna get to Mars, and Johnny will be waiting to greet them with a great big smile, still talking about potential.

So yeah, I was trying to smuggle a gun onto the base. Not because Johnny’s there like you think, but because I’m one of those rich folks now. I’m set for life. I want to get to Mars.

But he’s still my best friend. He trusts me. And if he’s there like I think, well. He won’t be for long.

I don’t think he means any harm, Agent Simmons. Not intentionally. But I really don’t want to see what he comes up with next.

***

This week, Cedar Sanderson challenged me to fill in the blank: “When portals are invented and you can go anywhere you want in the blink of an eye, ____________ will happen.“

My prompt submission went to debut author Becky Jones. “A visceral memory (yours or fictional as you prefer), brought to mind by a scent, taste, song, etc.“

Join the Odd Prompts crew! Submit a writing prompt to oddprompts@gmail.com. There’s no commitment, no genre restrictions, and no word limit. It doesn’t even have to be the written word, just an expression of creativity.