4338.206 · July 25, 2018 AD
A Doctor for Bixbus
On the afternoon of 25 July 2018, a Guardian walked into a medical practice seeking help for a dying man. A doctor whose father had spoken of other worlds recognised the signs of someone who knew too much. A Portal opened against an examination room wall. A warning arrived: We've been compromised. Run. Within minutes, Bixbus had gained something it desperately needed.
Luke Smith had not come to Hobart Family Doctor's Practice for medical attention. His name was on the appointment list, his file unremarkable, but the consultation he sought had nothing to do with symptoms or prescriptions. In a tent on the other side of a dimensional threshold, his partner Jamie Greyson lay dying from an infected wound. What Luke needed was a doctor willing to step into the impossible.
Dr Glenda De Bruyn called his name from the waiting room door and led him into her examination room—the same space still carrying the tension of what had transpired minutes earlier. The consultation began with pretence, a physician asking routine questions, a patient offering routine answers. It did not remain routine for long.
Luke asked about The Testing. Glenda's reaction told him everything he needed to know. Here was someone who understood, who recognised the shape of secrets kept and networks hidden. Two people who should have been strangers found themselves suddenly bound by dangerous knowledge.
The Portal Key emerged from Luke's pocket—a metallic object that defied easy description. When he activated it against the examination room wall, light bloomed across the surface, colours folding into colours, the sterile space transformed into something that should not have been possible. For Glenda, who had grown up listening to her father Gebhardt speak of doorways between worlds, the sight carried the weight of confirmation rather than shock. The stories had been true. They had always been true.
The choice to cross might have taken longer under different circumstances. Pierre De Bruyn's message ensured it did not. The text arrived as the Portal pulsed against the wall: We've been compromised. Run. Glenda surrendered her phone to Luke—the device too dangerous to carry, the life it represented already receding—and faced the threshold her father had described but never shown her.
She stepped through. The crossing was instantaneous, the sensation beyond language. Dust met her feet instead of linoleum. Air that hummed with strange resonance filled her lungs. The world she had known all of her life was gone, replaced by something vast and unfamiliar and utterly irreversible.
Bixbus, though she did not yet know its name, had gained a physician.
