Thresholder

“I’m just saying that it would make sense for you to be an alien,” said Richter with a laugh. “Not that you are, not that it’s a top candidate for what’s going on, but as a consideration? Heck yeah, it’s possible.”

“I don’t see it,” said Perry. “You know aliens aren’t real, right?”

He was in the power armor, out in the desert, on land that Richter owned. She was wearing a floppy khaki hat and had covered her nose in sunscreen, and looked like almost as much of a dork as she was, curly brown hair around her face, tablet held in one hand.

“I used to know aliens weren’t real,” said Richter. “But then you showed up, didn’t you, and aliens seem a lot less far-fetched.” She snapped her fingers. “You know, maybe aliens are just people from other worlds, coming through in ships that are a hundred times more advanced than anything we have here. There have got to be timelines with better technology.”

Perry looked down at the power armor. “I would say that this timeline has pretty advanced tech,” he said.

“Pft,” said Richter. “This is state of the art though. That suit cost millions of dollars, and was made in a facility that cost tens of millions. This is the absolute best that a person can get, and in twenty years, everyone will have one.”

“I very much doubt that,” said Perry. “And you’re sure that it’s, ah, fine?”

She waved a hand, as though it was nothing. The suit of power armor had been made in her private facility, one part 3D printing, one part bespoke auto-assembly, the costs astronomical, the expertise required to run the facility held by perhaps a handful of people in the entire world.

“It’s a write off,” she said. “A business expense. Because you’re helping me to test, aren’t you, Mr. Alien?”

“I would make the world’s worst alien,” said Perry.

“I don’t think you understand what a revelation that phone of yours is,” said Richter. “An OS that no one has ever seen before, in programming languages that there are no record of, with a whole alternate history? Aliens are more plausible, that’s all I’m saying.”

“Not literally more plausible,” said Perry.

“Literally, no,” said Richter. “But figuratively, yes. And I’m keeping my mind open. If one hot guy can slip between worlds from a random portal with no preparation, then all kinds of things are possible.” It wasn’t the first time she’d called him hot. She was flirty, much more than Perry was used to, and he’d been staying in her guest room, spending almost every waking moment with her. The night before, she’d fallen asleep on his shoulder while they were watching a movie together, and she had a habit of walking around her house half-dressed. “Now, are you ready to crank this toy up to top speed?”

Perry nodded. “What do I need to do?”

“Just run,” said Richter. “Go a mile that way,” she pointed, “And then come back. The suit will track distance on your HUD. It’s not like normal running, you’re so strong that you’ll come off the ground, so you need to make sure that you’re pushing the boot at as much of an angle as you can.” She held the tablet up and placed her hand against it, trying to show him the motion. “You’ll eat it a few times, that’s part of learning, but the suit will protect you.”

“Even if I’m going top speed?” asked Perry. “You said that you can top sixty miles an hour. There’s no crumple zones in the suit or anything.”

“I mean, you might end up bruised if you take a really bad fall, but you won’t liquify against the inside. Besides, if you tumble, you’ll just roll, it’ll suck but you won’t snap a bone.” She waved a hand. “You’re worrying too much.”

“Do football players not get concussions where you’re from?” asked Perry.

“Why would they?” asked Richter, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh,” said Perry. “Let me guess, football is a game played with a black and white ball?”

“No,” said Richter, looking a bit frustrated. “We’ll figure it out later, stop stalling, get to running, I’ll nurse you back to health if you get a boo boo.”

Perry was scared, and thought that he’d be a fool not to be, given that he was in high-end military equipment that had been finished that morning and not really been field tested. This was the field test, which meant that it was where any major issues would be found, but he had no confidence, not even after seeing Richter in her own, much smaller suit.

He ran anyway, and stumbled almost at once, the unfamiliar power his legs were now capable of making it so that every step was virtually a leap. The suit was good about translating his motions when they were small, but when he was putting in full power, there was a disconnect between the inputs and outputs. He thought the problem was mostly in his brain.

It took half a mile of running to get the hang of it, and another half mile for Perry to feel any sense of confidence. By the time the mile was finished and March was giving instructions in his ear, Perry was feeling good about running, and his return trip happened in a quarter of the time as he strained the suit's limits, each footstep with the full power of the legs, launching him over the arid ground. Richter was whooping and hollering as he came back to her, and he had a hell of a time stopping himself as he approached. He ended up skidding and tripping, coming to a stop a hundred feet past her, and she walked over, tablet still in hand, to look him over.

“I knew you could do it,” she said. “Wasn’t that great?”

“Yeah,” said Perry. “You know, maybe everyone will have one of these.”

“I was joking about that,” said Richter. “There’s no way that costs will ever get down low enough. But if you’ve got millions of dollars to blow, there’s nothing better. Just wait until we go diving together, it’s the most fun you can have in a suit.”

“I’m going to worry about drowning,” said Perry. “Sorry, but I am.”

“After a few times, you’ll be a pro,” said Richter with a wave.

“Thanks, for this,” said Perry.

“You’re my man from another world,” said Richter. “I’ll spoil you as much as I can. It’s how a test subject should be treated.”

Perry smiled.

“Are you smiling in there?” asked Richter. “Because I can’t see your face.” She looked down at the tablet. “I should really get some internal cameras put in, but I have no idea where I’d fit them, and they’d have to have their own light source. Hrm.”

“Yes, I’m smiling,” said Perry. He liked being called her man. He even liked being called her test subject. “You think I’m a man? Not an alien?”

She grinned at him. “Even if you were an alien, I wouldn’t hold that against you. Now I think we should go home and freshen up, I have diagnostics to run while March makes dinner, and then we can watch something together.”

Perry felt a bit self-conscious in the skinsuit, which left little to the imagination, but Richter helped him out of the armor without comment, and they rode back to the house in her pickup truck. She lived on the Pacific Ocean, in what would have been southern California in Perry’s world, an arid place with plenty of dust that rose up in a plume behind them. She had her radio on and was tapping her fingers on the wheel, singing along to unfamiliar songs, and he wondered, not for the first time, whether he would ever end up going home to a place where he wasn’t greeted by strangeness at every turn.

The car was a Lentwood, a brand that didn’t exist in Perry’s Earth, and they had strange names for almost everything. Back on Earth, Perry had gotten annoyed when an app updated their icon on his phone, or when a website got a new layout. Now he was in a world where everything was just slightly different, even if most of the same functions were in place. Electrical things used differently shaped plugs, none of the brands were the ones he knew, and it all might have grated at him a little bit more if he hadn’t stepped through to a world without Richter in it.

When they got back to the house, Richter stared at the whiteboard in her living room, which was a crazed scrawl of questions, answers, hypotheses.

She erased a portion of it, which was mostly timeline pontification, and wrote in large letters, ‘HOW MANY WORLDS?’

“Is that important?” asked Perry. “I mean, the answer is yes, but we don’t know how to answer it, so the answer is also kind of no.”

“I was thinking about it on the way home,” said Richter. “Would you like to think with me before we get cleaned up?”

“Sure,” said Perry.

“Pants are coming off,” Richter warned. “It’s hard to think with pants on.”

“Go ahead,” said Perry.

She was wearing shorts, not pants, but she stripped them off, leaving her in a t-shirt and underwear. It was what she normally wore around the house, seemingly without shame, which he’d discovered on his first day there. They had talked about it some, and she’d said that she liked to have a warm trunk and then radiate heat from her legs. At night, when the place cooled, she wore a hoodie but kept her pants off. Perry liked it, because she was cute, but she wasn’t treating it as flirtation, he didn’t think. She seemed more indignant at the very notion — which Perry hadn’t put forward — that a person should be expected to be fully clothed in their own home.

“Okay,” she said. She held up two fingers. “We know, concretely, of two worlds, yours and mine. But it would seem odd to me if there were only two. Right? When I was talking about aliens, about advanced people from other worlds — I mean, why would your Earth and my Earth be unique, if we know that there can be other Earths?” She had a bouncy way about her when she was thinking, shifting her weight from foot to foot.

“They wouldn’t be unique,” said Perry.

“But so far as I know, you’re the very first person in all of human history to have crossed between worlds,” said Richter. “And — forgive me — you’re just some guy.”

“Ouch,” said Perry.

“You’re tall, attractive, educated, you have a lot going for you,” said Richter. “But think about the moon landing, right? On your Earth, apparently it was two guys plus one more, and they were all highly decorated pilots, guys who flew combat missions, or ran tests, or were, you know, best of the best. In my world, same story, right? Luke Wilcox was arguably not the single most qualified individual of all time for a solo trip to the moon, but he had to have at least been in the top five.”

Perry nodded, though he didn’t know much about the moon landings on Richter’s Earth. They’d been engaged in what Richter called ‘comparative history’, which had its own section of the whiteboard, but there was such an enormity of base-level information that was different that a lot of time it was easier for Richter to just give him impromptu history lessons. He liked that better anyway.

“But you’re not particularly suited to world traveling,” said Richter. “You’re nice, personable, a little flummoxed by the whole thing, took to wearing the power armor well, but in the scope of everyone it could have been, why you?”

“Stop, I’m already dead,” said Perry with a groan.

She didn’t get the reference, which Perry hadn’t even realized was a reference until he said it, and they plowed on ahead, which they’d learned to do in these situations. “Hey, I like you, I couldn’t have asked for a better guy to step through a portal in the desert. But, with that said, you’re undistinguished.”

“There’s got to be a better way of expressing that same thought,” said Perry. “I can’t imagine what it is, but just some kind of spin, some massaging, I don’t know.”

“What I’m saying is that it would be crazy for you to be the first and only person to have ever traveled between the only two worlds,” said Richter. “Unbelievably weird, beyond how weird it already is.”

“Right,” said Perry. “But then where are all the other world-hoppers? You’d think there would be historical evidence of them, even if it’s just people who got put in a mental hospital. Though I guess we wouldn’t necessarily know about that.”

“True,” said Richter. “I’m going to try to keep you out of any mental hospitals.”

“Appreciated,” said Perry. She had expressed a number of times that she thought he was on the chopping block if anyone caught wind of him, and he’d agreed, but also thought that she liked being the only person in the world who knew this sort of secret about the deeper workings of the universe.

“We need a bigger sample size,” said Richter. “I have absolutely no idea how we’d ever possibly get it, since you don’t seem to be able to open portals at will, just knowing there were other worldhoppers, that there really are more than just the two worlds? That would be great.”

Perry nodded, but he wasn’t sure that it would be great. He was, at that moment, the only person to have ever traveled between two worlds. Knowing that someone else had done it before him, that lots of people had done it, would be pretty deflating. Going through that portal in the woods had been the single most interesting thing that had ever happened to him, and the whiteboard of Richter’s was fertile ground for speculation. Getting a novel problem dropped in his lap alone would have made his day back on Earth.

“How about this,” said Perry. “I spend the next half hour trying to open a portal, then we get some pizza for dinner?”

Richter narrowed her eyes. “Pi-zza?” she asked.

“Funny,” said Perry, rolling his eyes.

“Hey, I try,” smiled Richter. “And yeah, do your best to open a portal, use the lab where there are cameras, and try not to pop a blood vessel.”

That was the night he made his move. He’d kissed her goodnight, and then that kiss had gone on for an eternity, with her pulling apart from him only slowly, reluctantly.

The next morning, Mordant had shown up.