Riftfall

An Iron Age Media submission for the November prompt, "The Leap"

A courier fell through the rift.

Well, perhaps fell was the wrong word for it, given that he was ascending when it happened. It was also the sort of thing that really shouldn’t have been able to happen, given his extensive on the job experience. Oh he may have looked youthful with his sharp, clean shaven features, rangy build, and the spiky tousle of dirty blonde hair that crowned his head, but appearances were very much deceptive in this case, even if the periwinkle blue T-shirt, black jeans, and matching shoes made him look more like some skate punk than a proper courier.

How did this even happen? It should’ve been another routine jump. After delivering the package to the client in Sunset City, far below - what the package was he couldn’t and didn’t say, because it wasn’t his job to know or tell - he took a couple minutes for some lunch along the waterfront, sampling some of the local fare. Galrehk eggs, whole and leathery with pale yellow shells speckled with flecks of blue and black, floated in a spicy brown broth with herbs and some kind of plant protein mash. Everything other than the eggs tasted familiar and recognizable, reminding him of a particularly memorable dinner he’d had the last time his route took him towards Earth.

Rather, to a version of Earth that he recognized. There were many copies of that little blue ball across the rifts, just as there were many copies of the different stars and solar systems and galaxies. Weirdly, that rule didn’t seem to extend to people, though it did still extend to food in some cases. Such as this one, where the soup very much reminded him of a spicy lentil based soup he’d tasted in New Delhi a few years back. It was called dhal, a fairly common food as he understood it, and one that could be prepared numerous ways. He wondered if the people of that city ever considered preparing it with raw alien turtle eggs, the way these people did? Though, he supposed the galrehk had only been alien to him because he was to the people of Sunset City, to say nothing of their world.

As he slurped his lunch, trying and, ultimately, giving up on gulping down the whole eggs as his serpentine server suggested, he couldn’t help but chuckle to himself over how places that seemed so similar could also be so very different. New Delhi was full of people like himself. Save for their darker complexion and a few cultural differences, they were every bit as human as he. Well, according to them, anyway. He wasn’t actually from their world, either. It was more that his homeworld was similar enough to Earth that he was able to acclimate easily. He really did love it when his route took him to that bustling little ball of blue and green. Always a lot to see there, and a lot of good food to try.

By contrast, the serpentine people of this world were quite a bit harder to connect with. Friendly enough, though he certainly got weird looks for his scaleless body and generally wider frame. Couldn’t say he was the biggest fan of their local delicacy, though. Loved the soup itself, but the whole galrehk eggs? Not for him, especially considering he couldn’t dislodge his jaw to gulp them whole as was the custom. Even if he could, the golf ball sized eggs would probably catch in his throat and suffocate him. No, better to stick to the soup itself and leave the eggs aside, even if that was thoroughly displeasing to the cook.

With his belly full and his next package secure, the courier made his way out of the city to the bluffs that overlooked it. They were the highest natural point he could find locally. The actual highest point was one of the skyscrapers downtown, but he didn’t expect to be able to just hitch a ride all the way up to the roof when most of those floors were home to private businesses. Besides, the bluffs being somewhat removed from the city would give him a better chance of safely jumping to his next point. Large structures had a tendency to interfere with rift travel.

As he approached the top of the bluff, the courier smiled. There was a ripple in the air just beyond the edge, imperceptible to anyone who hadn’t been actively trained in the skill of rift jumping. The dimensional updraft indicated a natural seam was nearby, the perfect spot to punch through to his next destination. Taking a seat against a nearby rock, he slipped his next package out from his pack and reviewed the delivery information.

Destination Code: 101137.8895-AZ

- Rupture Parameters -

Puncture Strength: 3.11 (Light)

Draft Pressure: 7.75

Pitch/Yaw: 13.77°/21.995°

Angle Vector: 31.235°

Suggested Velocity: 21.83mB (Low Speed)

He dialed all the necessary information into the navigation system built into his red jump-belt. Then, with a stretch and a huff he took two steps back, then dashed forward and leapt off the cliff!

This was always his favorite part. The equipment whirred as he started to fall, the machinery in his belt humming as it vibrated to life. Then, just like that, he was weightless and adrift in the current. He floated hundreds of feet above the city. His hair and clothes whipped in the dimensional updraft, and as he ascended towards the seam he placed his finger over the trigger for his riftshear device. The destination code was set, all he needed to do now was activate it once he was close enough to the seam and-

Gravity suddenly took hold again. With a jolt that sucked heart, stomach, guts, and bladder alike all the way up to his throat, the courier suddenly found himself falling away from the seam! In a panic, he depressed the riftshear trigger over and over, praying it would successfully punch through the seam so the updraft could pull him where he needed to be! No such luck. A tear had already opened beneath his feet, and he was already tumbling through.

Tears and punches, really rifts of any kind, were never like what the people of any world always imagined them to be. Movies, books, comics, games, they might vary a bit in the specific details, but they all depicted the same basic idea. In those the rifts were always colorful and usually gave you a glimpse at whatever lay on the other side, like you were looking through an open door. In reality they were barely visible, and that’s to the people who were trained to spot them like himself. To the layman? Fat chance of seeing one and recognizing it for what it was.

The rift which opened beneath his feet was long, narrow, and silvery like the bright lining of a sunlit cloud. Where it was taking him, he couldn’t begin to guess. How far up it would drop him from? Same thing. Without highly tuned specialized equipment, rift travel was a gamble that could land you all sorts of inhospitable places. He learned that the hard way early in his career, first when he drunkenly went jumping with a couple friends and they quite literally landed themselves in prison, and second when a faulty vector gauge misaligned his approach angle and sent him careening through about six rifts before he was able to restabilize.

Those incidents had been over fifteen years ago, though, and in all the time since then he hadn’t experienced another riftfall until now. So what went wrong? Had his gear gone faulty? Did he mistype the destination code? No, he double checked all of that before he even thought to jump! A jumper didn’t go fifteen years without an error without double checking his gear before every jump! There was only one possible answer, a one in a billion chance that almost no professional jumpers saw anymore - he stumbled across a natural rift.

Where would it lead him? Wherever it was, he could already feel it was very cold. Damn it, all the destinations on his route were planned for summer weather! He wasn’t prepped with cold weather gear! But what about altitude? He was still stuck in the rift itself, the destination world not yet fully materialized, but that didn’t mean his equipment wouldn’t be able to figure it out for him. Fumbling with his belt, he opened a utility pouch on his right side and pulled up a circular dial. It spun wildly back and forth, trying to settle on a number. When it finally did, the courier’s heart sank.

Eight Barthell units.

That was the height commercial airliners flew at! Cursing repeatedly, the courier reached for the pouch on his left side and desperately tried to undo the latch! If he could just get his rebreather before the rift dumped him…

Too late.

The silvery white that surrounded him blinked away, revealing a wide, bright blue sky lined with thick clouds that stretched in scattered clusters in all directions. The sun shone over the tops of these clouds, bright and beautiful, and it revealed a gorgeous world below. Gorgeous, but freezing cold, and suffocating. The courier still tried to grab his rebreather, even as he choked thanks to the lack of sufficient oxygen. This high up the air was so thin that he could already feel the blackout coming on.

No! If you blackout now, you die! Get that damned rebreather on!

His body wouldn’t listen. As he punched through the bottom of the cloud, the darkness was already filling his vision. The last thing he saw before it all went black were mountains and valleys that stretched on for countless Barthells. Some of the mountains were short and rolling, and moved effortlessly into the green hills of the valleys between them. Others were tall, majestic, and snowcapped. There were forests among them, and rivers, too. A couple waterfalls cascaded over large cliffs that lead into the valley that stretched out beneath him, and far to the east he could just see the glimmer of an ocean. The very last thing he would see.

His body was discovered by a local, though at the height he fell from it was hardly recognizable. The local was a primitive man. Culturally just past the equivalent of the iron age and dressed in a mixture of clothing tailored from heavy wool, thick leather, and furs, he couldn’t make heads or tails of the smashed dials and gauges scattered around with the pulverized parts of the near liquefied corpse. The only thing he found intact was a small, thin white rectangle backed with two little plates of metal that seemed to want to stick together without the help of nails or tar or fusing them on a forge.

The primitive man fled when the cleanup crew arrived on the scene, clearly spooked by the white and orange full-body hazmat suits they wore.  They couldn’t understand what he was saying, but it didn’t really matter. This world was off-route and clearly not developed enough to make any good use of their products. It was a shame, though. This courier had been promising and was well on his way to a promotion after so many years of good service. As they tidied up his remains, sucking them up into a vacu-sealed transport chamber, one of them took notice of the nametag the primitive dropped as he was fleeing. The cleaner picked it up and brushed the dirt and some of the blood away.

“Brad, huh?” he said.

“Body shares your name, does he?” Richardson asked as he vacced up the vic.

“Hopefully that’s all he shares,” Brad chuckled. “Not the way I wanna go into retirement.”

As Brad slipped the tag into his cleanup bag, along with more of the busted equipment from his jump-belt, Richardson tapped him on the shoulder.

“Hey Brad, check that out,” he said, pointing to a hill in the distance.

Another local was standing there, silhouetted by the low sun. They couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman, but whichever it was, it had a damn big animal with it.

“Is that a wolf?” Brad asked.

“Looks like it. Never seen one that big, though,” Richardson said as the stranger and the big animal started trotting off in the direction of the sun.

“Man,” Brad huffed as he sank down to one knee, picking up a couple more pieces of shattered plastic. “What a weird world.”