4338.213 · August 1, 2018 AD
They Walked Through Hand in Hand
A son returns to the family home in Craigmore and offers his parents a vision he knows they have been preparing to believe. The framing fits an existing dream too cleanly to be argued with. Within the hour, three members of the Smith family have walked through a Portal opened against the study wall, in the clothes they had been wearing when the doorbell rang, and the eldest of them is greeting them at a Drop Zone in Bixbus where he had been waiting for a video call.
The doorbell at the Smith family home in Craigmore rings on a morning of light drizzle, and Noah Smith opens it in his dressing gown to find the son he has not seen in years. Luke has come north from Adelaide Airport with a Portal Key in his pocket and a pitch he has been working on the entire taxi ride. The pitch is calculated to land in exactly one shape, and that shape is the New Jerusalem. Noah's first reaction overshoots even Luke's planning. The vision Luke is describing is one Noah has already had. The family had been preparing to relocate to Salt Lake City on the strength of it. They clear the study wall together, and Luke activates the Portal against the bare plaster, and Noah pulls his son into a fierce embrace and tells him he had always known.
A few minutes later, in a landscape of red dust on the other side of the Portal, Paul Smith is waiting at the Bixbus Drop Zone with a laptop in his hands. The laptop has been prepared for a video call. What arrives instead is his mother in pyjamas printed with happy Jesus faces, his father in a dressing gown, and his nineteen-year-old brother who has not been told anything at all. The Portal is still alive in the air behind them. The connection to the house in Craigmore will close within minutes, and none of them will be told that it has.
