The Portal in the Forest (4 page)

"No," they reported in unison.

"So, the book doesn't teleport back to my
possession," I realized aloud. "It's a mental diversion. A trick of
perception and memory."

Steeling myself, I went back into the portal
a second time, and shoved the book into the large purse of a
passing businesswoman.

I pressed myself up against the wall of a
building, waited a few seconds, and then closed my eyes. I took a
deep breath, analyzed my own thoughts, then looked down… yep, the
book was still in my hand. "Son of a bitch."

The damn thing was intent on preventing any
simple method of getting rid of it. I studied the passing oblivious
people, and I soon began walking along with the flow. Could there
be some device, creature, or power here that might help? Experience
told me that, when facing a threat beyond human capability, the
best bet was to find an even worse threat and pit them against one
another; between the balance of two terrors sat a sliver of hope.
It was the same principle as the nuclear standoff between
superpowers during the Cold War - the future of the human race had
been predicated on the careful opposition of conflicting
armageddons far more often than most people would care to know.

A haggard female voice interrupted my growing
panic. "Don't move!"

I'd long ago learned to instantly follow any
desperately shouted warnings. Freezing in place, I waited as the
shouter continued making noise and approaching me from behind. She
might have been coming to attack me, sure, but true human
desperation was hard to fake. Not like that.

"Oh God!" she said again, grabbing the end of
my jacket and pulling me directly backward. "I thought there was
nobody left…"

"Can I move now?" I asked her. "What's the
danger?"

"Yeah, yeah, just don't go that way," she
said quickly. "How've you made it this long?"

Looking ahead surreptitiously as I slowly
turned to face her, I saw nothing ahead on the street except a few
office entrances, a coffee shop, and a sandwich place with a bright
red light out front that shone down on passersby. What unseen
threat lay ahead that needed such warning? The stream of business
men and women seemed to face no threat.

I froze. For a moment, a shadow passed over
my soul.

The girl before me was as haggard as she'd
sounded. Dressed in a tattered suit that had once been grey and
clean, but which now bore dirt and rips in visible testament to
homelessness, she seemed every bit the sole survivor I'd instantly
envisioned upon hearing her desperate voice. Her wild shock of
dirt-smeared hair hadn't been cleaned or combed in some time.
"Christ, Christ almighty, I prayed, but I thought… I thought I'd
never see another person again…"

Wary, I kept my eyes on her. "Are these not
people?"

Underneath a furrowed brow, she narrowed her
gaze. "Do they
seem
like people to you?"

I said nothing.

"They're all in there, still," she stated
after a moment. "I stabbed one or two out of frustration a few
years back. They come out of it just as they die. They're all
thinking the same thing in there."

"In there?"

"In their heads." She looked around with
compassion and fear. "They're screaming. All of them."

So, another apocalypse… this world wasn't
safe and normal after all.

While I hesitated, she looked to her right.
"The hell is
that?
"

Silently, but quickly, I ran a cold-hearted
evaluation of this unknown girl and her situation. The
consideration was thus: how likely was it that a species-ending
threat would remain active and wary long after it'd dominated the
planet? No matter how fantastical, extradimensional, or
incomprehensible a threat, one rule of logic had to remain. Time
was a resource, motivation was a resource, and the combination had
to be right for a threat to remain dangerous. If almost all humans
were dead or controlled, there was no longer any point in
maintaining active surveillance or traps. I'd already recently
blundered through two such worlds where living humans had not been
expected. I'd even read a book for several minutes in a room filled
with invisible animated corpses - and gotten away with it. They'd
been completely caught off guard.

But this girl represented a Catch-22. She was
alive, therefore traps and surveillance might remain. If she was a
trap, though, that meant that there were probably no free humans,
and no need for traps.

"It's a portal to another universe," I told
her, gently holding her back as she eagerly moved toward it. I
decided to only tell half of the truth. "It'll kill you if you try
to cross without me."

She seemed on the verge of tears as she
gauged my unreadable expression. "Please…"

"Quickly help me understand this world, and
leave behind this book if I can," I told her, hefting the tome.
"Then we'll go."

She pulled me into a nearby alley that I
found to be disturbingly like the one I'd run through in the rain
the week before. "It's -" she began, but she opened and closed her
mouth in frustration without making any further sounds. "It won't
let me talk about it."

I nodded slowly. It was never quite that
easy, was it? I lifted the book. "This will tell me, then. I'm
pretty sure it recounts, somehow, the final tales of those who've
died nearby."

She watched with wide eyes as I began reading
aloud. The tale of this unknown person might shed some light on the
situation.

***

I remember the day the first one came out.
People were lined up around the block to be the first to get it. It
was just like any phone or tablet craze, except bigger. Who
wouldn't want to erase the monotony of work from life?

I was never one for the latest trends. I
decided to wait, and maybe save up some money for it.

You could tell the coworkers that were using
it. They had slight half-smiles on their faces as they labeled,
folded, typed, swept, and mopped. Any simple menial task became a
time for lazy daydreaming as the iWorker took over basic motor
functions. All you had to do was program it for the task by
performing it yourself a couple times, and then, you could tune
out, listen to a book on tape, or even sleep while your limbs
worked.

It was a bit off-putting in a way I couldn't
quite explain. Coworkers using the iWorker were zoned out or
asleep, and the work floor got awful quiet awful fast. It was my
job to direct the flow of boxes from our shipping warehouse, but I
couldn't keep up with my unaware coworkers who worked on and on
without getting tired, without smoke breaks, and without pauses for
conversation or mental focus.

My gym, too, got weirdly quiet. People
programmed their iWorkers for workouts, even they weren't supposed
to, and happily got in the best shape of their lives without even
being mentally present for the effort. Of course, a spate of people
up and died who'd set theirs too ambitiously, but… it was their own
fault, or so the television said. The next iWorker would hook a
little deeper and automatically sense when the body was being
pushed too far.

I'd just save up for that one, I decided. I
didn't want to die on the job because some idiot device didn't know
not to carry boxes for eighteen hours straight without rest.

The third generation came out before I even
got halfway to my savings goal. This one integrated wirelessly with
our relatively new driverless cars, and so you could fit your car
into your routines. There were people automating the whole drive to
work and their entire shift
while they slept
, so they could
wake up and have the evening and entire night to actually live.

Now that tempted me. I could have sold some
stuff to join in on the trend.
I
wanted to sleep through
work and have sixteen hours a day to hang out! Sounded damn
pleasing, it did.

It was so pleasing, in fact, that it really
started going global. They made 'em cheaper, and smaller, and less
invasive to your neck and nerves. I would have gotten one then, but
I hurt my back at work, and the medical bill wiped me out and put
me in so much debt I still couldn't afford it. Worse, I'd damaged
my spine, so there was a chance I'd never be able to use one, at
least not any of the current models.

It was about then that the shifts started
getting longer. Sixteen hours a day was quite a lot to hang out and
party and relax, so people started signing on for longer shifts.
More money, more leisure, right?

When I came back from medical leave, I lasted
maybe two hours before my boss came around with that kind of
shit-sorry look. I knew immediately. Everyone else in the warehouse
was iWorking, moving around all silently with half-smiles on their
faces, and they were all working sixteen-hour shifts. Here I was
with a hurt back, moving slowly, working
inefficiently
, and
I wanted the same pay as these diligent types?

I told him he could screw right off, even
though I regretted my rudeness instantly. Still, I was out of a
job, and I would soon have nowhere to go.

I spent the next few months at a shelter,
along with many other injured types in my situation. The divide
between those who could iWork and those who couldn't was huge - we
were useless for modern jobs anymore. Those daydreaming types could
work almost all day long without a word of complaint, and for lower
and lower wages. What did you need money for when you were working
almost all day long? What did you care what you got paid when you
weren't even mentally present for the work? You just woke up for a
few hours each night once you got home, watched a few TV shows,
then clicked out again.

Repeat.

I'd been homeless for maybe a year when we
heard the news: they'd invented an iWorker that anybody could use,
regardless of injury. A lot of us saw that as salvation come to
town.

By then, I hated the whole concept. Passion,
that was me. Passion. I was the one standing on the corner shouting
at sleepwalkers about their idiocies and inadequacies and
iniquities.

Nobody heard.

Well, their ears heard, but there was nobody
at the wheel.

Funny thing, though, this new model. It
worked through the eyes. It was just
light.
You'd walk by
one of these nodes on the street, or in a hallway, or at home, and
it would program you the way you wanted. Visually stimulated
neurons or some such science bullshit.

Well there's the thing. All the previous
models needed to be recharged
eventually.
They were devices,
just like a phone or a tablet, and they couldn't just go forever.
These could. Suddenly, you've got these religious types advocating
going on autonomous mode full-time - that's what they called it,
then, because a bunch of other brands had come out by then, not
just iWorker.

It was virtuous, they claimed, to work
twenty-four hours a day. If you weren't present for the work, you
avoided suffering, and if you were working, you were contributing.
It's free contribution, you see? Perfect virtue. A world without
suffering, but with endless productivity.

One by one, our little homeless community
dwindled. I'd run into Jeff, or Sarah, or Jorge, or Yuya, and
they'd suddenly turned into clean-cut model workers. They didn't
recognize me. Of course not. They were asleep.

At some point, watching these
light-programmers getting installed all over, it occurred to me:
the companies that produced these things were all full of labor
using the devices. Everyone at these goddamn hypno-crafters was
asleep, walking around in bodies that were endlessly toiling away
putting up more light-programmers, marketing light-programmers,
building better light-programmers… it was a thing in itself. The
thing would just keep going and going, and maybe it had been that
way since the start, and we'd all just bought into it like
fools.

Street by street, this city got quiet. I
imagine they're all like that. Nobody talking, nobody interacting,
nobody living - they're all just working. You got to work
twenty-four hours a day to survive on a dollar an hour… and you
can't work twenty-four hours a day without being on the Autonomous
Mode.

I learned to avoid the lights. I don't want
that shit in my brain. I steal whatever I need, because nobody
cares. Nobody's watching. There are no police anymore, because
there's no crime anymore. Other than me, that is. The whole world's
running around with more hustle and bustle than ever before, but
the whole world's asleep and deader than I've ever seen.

Two years. Three? It didn’t snow last winter…
global warming? I can't be sure what day it is anymore. They don't
run on clocks and such anymore. All their Autonomous shit is
wireless now. They sit near computers that don't even have monitors
and just type on keyboards without even seeing.

Another year after that… wandering around in
a zombie city… I must have lost it for a bit.

I saw one die.

He came out of it just toward the end. All he
could do was scream. He just screamed, and screamed, and screamed,
at the top of his lungs…

But it was
what
he was screaming that
terrified me so:
thank you.

He was screaming
thank you.

I saw another one die. Soul-chilling shit.
They're all in there, still, and they can't stop anymore. I don't
even know when that happened, exactly.

But the system, see, it'd gotten self…
perpetuating, that's the word. The cycle I'd recognized had been
true, and growing stronger. And it didn't like people like me
lurking around its edges, stealing things, stabbing people, and
mucking up efficiency.

They grabbed me maybe a week after the second
stabbing. Forced me into one of those bright red programmer lights
on the street. By then it wasn't a choice anymore, and it could
just straight tell you what to do in the name of efficiency.