Riftfall

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

A courier fell through the rift.

Perhaps fell is the wrong word for it, given he was ascending when it occurred. It was the sort of thing that shouldn’t have been able to happen, given his extensive on-the-job experience. He looked young, with sharp features, clean shave, rangy build, and that tousle of dirty blonde hair that crowned his head. His apparel furthered that youthful look. A periwinkle blue T-shirt, black jeans, and flat-soled shoes gave an appearance that declared skater and slacker far more than it did courier, but such was the deceptive nature of appearances.

How did this even happen? The jump should’ve been routine. After delivering the package to the client far below in Sunset City—he had no idea what was in it, it wasn’t his job to know, but it reeked like old fish and sour milk—he took a couple minutes to grab lunch along the waterfront, sampling the local fare. Galrehk eggs, whole and leathery with pale yellow shells speckled with flecks of blue and purple, floated in a spicy brown broth with herbs and some kind of plant protein mash.

Everything but the eggs tasted familiar and recognizable, reminding him of a lentil dahl he had the last time his route took him to Earth. Rather, to a recognizable version of Earth. There were so many copies of the little blue ball across the rifts, just as there were copies of all the various stars, solar systems, and galaxies. Weirdly that rule didn’t extend to people, but did extend to food in some cases. Such as this one, where the soup reminded him of that spicy dahl he ordered in New Delhi years back, save the leathery eggs. Had the people of New Delhi ever tried their dahl with raw eggs of an alien turtle before? Likely not, and he supposed the galrehk were alien to him because he was alien to the people of Sunset City.

He slurped his lunch, trying and ultimately giving up on swallowing the eggs whole as his serpentine server suggested. He couldn’t help chuckling at how places that seemed so similar could be so very different. New Delhi was full of people like himself. Excluding their darker complexion and a number of cultural differences, they were every bit as human as he. Well, according to them, anyway. He wasn’t actually from their world, either, but his version of Earth was similar enough to theirs that he acclimated 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.

The serpentine people of this world were much harder to connect with. Friendly enough, he supposed, but he got plenty of uneasy looks for his scaleless body and wider frame. Couldn’t say he was a big fan of their local delicacy, either. Loved the soup, but those leathery eggs? A hard pass. Too rubbery to bite through, and he wasn’t about to dislocate his jaw to gulp them whole as per custom. Even if he did the golf ball sized eggs would catch in his throat and suffocate him. Better to stick to the soup and leave the eggs aside, displeasing as that was to the cook.

With belly full and his next package secure, the courier left the city for the bluffs overlooking it, the highest natural point locally available. The true highest point in the region was one of the downtown skyscrapers, but he didn’t expect to hitch a ride to the roof when most of those floors were home to private offices. It was just as well. The bluffs being at the city’s edge was a good thing, more scenic and better for ensuring a safe jump. Large structures came with risks of interference where rift travel was concerned.

As he approached the top of the bluff, the courier smiled. Beyond its edge was a ripple in the air, imperceptible to anyone untrained in the skill of rift jumping. A dimensional updraft, an indicator that a natural seam was nearby. A perfect spot to punch through to his next destination. Taking a seat on a nearby rock, he slipped a package out of his pack and reviewed the delivery information.

Destination Code: 101137.8895-AZ
- Rupture Parameters -
Puncture Strength: 3.11 (Light)
Draft Pressure: 7.75 (Moderate)
Pitch/Yaw: 13.77°/21.995°
Angle Vector: 31.235°
Suggested Velocity: 21.83mB (Low Speed)

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

That was always his favorite part. The jump-belt whirred as he started to fall, its machinery humming and vibrating to life. Weightlessness followed. Afloat in the air, he ascended hundreds of feet over the skyline. His hair and clothes whipped in the dimensional updraft, and as he neared the seam he placed his finger over the trigger for his riftshear device. Destination code set, all he needed to do was activate once he was close enough to the seam and–

Gravity yanked him. With a jolt that sucked his heart, stomach, guts, and bladder all the way up to his throat, the courier suddenly fell away from the seam. In a panic, he pressed the riftshear trigger over and over, praying it would punch through so the updraft could pull him where he needed to be. No such luck. A tear opened beneath his feet. He was already tumbling through.

Tears and punches—rifts of any kind, really—weren’t anything like what the people of most worlds imagined. Movies, books, comics, games, they varied a bit in the details, but tended to depict the same basic idea: colorful portals that gave you a glimpse at the world on the other side, like looking through an open door. In reality they were barely visible, even to people trained to spot them like himself. To the layman? Fat chance of seeing one at all, and the few who could rarely recognized them for what they were.

The rift that opened beneath his feet was long and narrow, silvery like the bright lining of a dark cloud. Where it was taking him? How far up would he be when he breached? His gear had no answers, dials and meters spinning wild.

Without highly specialized equipment rift travel was a gamble that could land you in 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 he careened through six rifts before he stabilized and corrected course.

Those incidents happened over fifteen years ago, and he hadn’t experienced a riftfall since. 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. Jumpers didn’t go fifteen years error free without double checking their gear before each jump. That left answer, the one in a billion chance professional jumpers never saw but always feared: a natural rift.

Where would it lead him? Wherever it was, he could already feel bitter cold wafting through. He wasn’t prepared for that. His entire route took him to locations experiencing summer weather. Cold weather gear wasn’t packed because it shouldn’t have been needed. But what about altitude? He was still in the rift, the destination world not fully materialized, but his equipment should still be able to pinpoint his exit height.

Fumbling with his belt, he opened a utility pouch on his right side and removed a circular dial. It spun wildly back and forth, trying to settle on a number. When it did, his heart sank.

Eight Bartell units, the altitude commercial airliners flew. Spitting curses, the courier reached for the pouch on his left side and desperately tried to unclip it. If he could just get his oxygen mask before the rift dumped him…

The silvery white surrounding him blinked away, revealing wide, bright blue skies lined with clusters of thick clouds that stretched in all directions. A yellow sun shone over the tops of those clouds, bright and beautiful, revealing a gorgeous world below. Gorgeous, but freezing and suffocating. The courier fought with his pouch, already choking due to the lack of sufficient oxygen. The air was so thin up here that he felt the blackout coming.

No! If you blackout now, you die. Get that fucking mask on!

But his body wouldn’t listen. He punched through a cloud, darkness filling his vision. The last thing he saw before it all went black were mountains and valleys spanning countless Bartells. Some of the mountains were short and rolling, moving effortlessly into the green hills of the valleys. Others were towering and snowcapped. There were forests among them, and rivers, too. Waterfalls cascaded over large cliffs leading into the valley directly below, and far to the east, the glimmer of an ocean. The very last thing he would see.

His body was discovered by a local, though it was hardly recognizable after the fall. The local was a primitive man of rough cultural equivalence to the middle ages, his clothing a mixture of heavy wool, thick leather, and furs. He couldn’t make heads or tails of the smashed dials and gauges scattered around the pulverized smear that was the courier’s remains. The only thing he found intact was a thin white rectangle roughly half the size of his palm. Scrawled with strange script under the mud and blood, it was backed with two thin sheets of metal that stuck together without the aid of visible bindings.

The primitive fled when the cleanup crew arrived, likely spooked by their white and orange hazmat suits.  They couldn’t understand what he was shouting, but it didn’t really matter. This world was off-zone and not developed enough to make any good use of their services. A shame they lost a good employee to it. Courier #133753-XY showed promise as a potential team lead and could’ve been on the fast track to promotion after his years of good service. Now he was just another puddle of gore on an undeveloped world in a backwater dimension.

As the cleaners tidied his remains, vacuuming them into sealed cleanup canisters, one of them noticed the white nametag the primitive dropped as he fled. Picking it up, he wiped some of the mud and blood away.

“Hey Richardson, check this out,” he said.

“Brad Jacobs? Ha! Didn’t know I was working cleanup with a dead man!” Richardson said as he vacuumed the victim.

“Right?” replied Brad Jacobs, Cleaner #86753-O9 of RifTek Interdimensional Transit. “Hopefully the name’s all we share, though. Not the way I wanna go into retirement.”

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

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

Something was standing there, silhouetted by the setting sun. A damn big animal, and it looked like someone was riding it.

“That a wolf?” Brad asked.

“Seems that way,” Richardson said as the big animal and its rider started off in the direction of the sun.

“Weird world,” Brad huffed as he sank down to one knee, bagging the remains of his pulpy namesake’s shattered jump-belt.