Once again, I’m about to disappoint the cinematically literate among you. My preparations for insertion would barely fill out a 50 second montage, and certainly wouldn’t merit a strident power ballad. Not for me the manful stride to the crew bus, pressure suit gleaming like plate armour, while flash bulbs popped, the world looked on with hungry wonder and the endless heavens gaped above it all.
I would have settled for a free quart of squirt at Social, rather than the reverent distance which suggested everybody thought I’d agreed to donate my brain to science. When I stepped off the levtrain at Portal’s bunker, I gave a clipped salute and a manful wink to the receptionist but it just made a choked sound somewhere between hilarity and incomprehension.
Portal is at least as exo-culturally literate as I am, so did at least pretend to be amused when I showed it a mocked up, beautifully crude 2D image of Mary-Lou who was waiting for me back home. We were, I insisted, letting my eyes drift to dewy pastures far away, going to settle down and raise llamas after the war. Portal didn't correct me; perhaps it was obeying the rule that veteran pilots don’t get close to replacements, or else it was reassessing my psych profile.
Once it had tox-screened me and satisfied itself my system was clean of squirt, bliss or bolster, it invited me to check my inventory again. I knew I didn’t need to; had anything been amiss, Portal would have told me so in precise terms. I went through the motions anyway, but I was happy with my suit as I’d been wearing it and playing with all its functions for months. I’d even been allowed access to an island city scheduled for deluge to test some of its more exotic capabilities. My bodily enhancements had been embedded for years and their use had become as innate as thinking and blinking.
Portal insisted the journey would be instantaneous, or would certainly seem that way to my mammal brain. I asked if it would refrain from suspending my consciousness during the transition. I wanted to look upon the void with my own senses, to truly see the space between. How could it deny me a glimpse of the interstice at the edge of existence, where colossal energies coiled and uncoiled, and galaxies blossomed and died in fabulous densities? Or was it afraid my mind would recoil from the void and allow primitive race memory to paint a purgatory of gnawing demons, blood-quenched fires and engines of torture?
Portal chose to emit a sigh, eloquent and final. From this I understood that my grasp of physics had once again disappointed, that I should spend less time dabbling in medieval art and that my questions didn’t therefore deserve a serious answer. Like a chimpanzee in a capsule, I didn’t need to grasp the science to do my job. Portal chose this moment to show off the acuity of its thought-mapping by offering me a banana, then assuring me I needn’t reply as it already knew where to stick it.
TBC
