Three Green Lights and a Severed Cable

The experiment that Paul and Nial conceived over a dying campfire rested on a premise no telecommunications engineer had ever been asked to evaluate: that a WiFi signal, designed to travel from a plastic router to a laptop within the confines of a suburban house, might also travel through a hole in reality and be detected by the same laptop positioned in the dust of another dimension. The theory required no understanding of how either technology functioned. It required only the observation that Portals transmitted people, light, sound, and apparently shattered picture frames — and the hope that radio waves would prove no more discriminating about the boundary they were asked to cross.

Beatrix arrived in Clivilius that morning without Luke and with the particular tension of a woman whose co-Guardian had failed to follow her through a Portal. Paul intercepted her worry with enthusiasm — the specific, relentless variety that operates at a frequency most people eventually stop resisting. Nial held a laptop whose presence in Clivilius was as incongruous as a kayak in a desert, which was fitting, since the settlement had already acquired one of those. The proposition was simple. Beatrix would open a Portal in her parents' house. They would position the laptop as close to the shimmering boundary as possible. And either the laws governing electromagnetic radiation would extend their jurisdiction across dimensional boundaries, or the settlement would remain as isolated from Earth's information infrastructure as it had been since its founding.

The bedroom produced nothing. Signal strength, already diminished by the ordinary obstacles of walls and distance, did not survive the additional obstacle of a membrane between realities. The living room — closer to the router, closer to the source — produced a framed landscape painting ejected through the Portal at velocity, which shattered on Clivilius soil and opened Nial's hand in several places. The experiment's first data point was not a WiFi connection but a lesson in Portal displacement: anything occupying the wall space where a Portal opened would be relocated, instantly and without consultation, to whatever waited on the other side. Paul's shirt became a bandage. Nial's blood decorated the laptop casing. The picture frame, which Wendy Cramer considered a prized possession, lay in shards among the ochre dust of a dimension its owner would likely never visit.

The router crossed the boundary unplugged, was sent back, and returned connected — three green indicator lights blinking with the patient indifference of a device performing its designated function, unaware that its designated function now included inter-dimensional signal relay. A network appeared on the laptop screen. The connection established. For a period measured in minutes — perhaps ten, perhaps fewer — a laptop in Clivilius accessed the internet through a Portal that opened into a living room in Claremont, Tasmania, while the homeowner's mother conducted a private war with bathroom plumbing one room away. The achievement was extraordinary. It was also, by any measure of technological sophistication, held together by a power cable stretched through a hole in a wall and the hope that nobody's mother would wander into the living room and ask questions about the shimmering rectangle where her landscape painting used to hang.

Nial ordered fencing materials through his business accounts with bloodied fingers and the focused efficiency of a man who understood that the connection's lifespan was unpredictable and that every second spent not typing was a second the settlement remained unprotected. Local suppliers. Priority delivery. The Owens property in Collinsvale — the same address accumulating inter-dimensional freight like a post office for a world that didn't officially exist. He mentioned expansion. Beatrix recoiled. More people, drawn deliberately into a dimension whose predators they had barely survived. Nial's rebuttal was a few words that carried the weight of every separation the settlement contained: he didn't want to be alone forever. Paul's eyes glistened. Nobody in Bixbus had left Earth voluntarily. Everyone had left someone behind.

The cable tore back through the Portal with the force and precision of a deliberate act. Not a plug gradually working loose from a socket. Not a mother tripping over a cord. A yank — sudden, violent, aimed — that whipped the router's power cable through the dimensional boundary fast enough to nearly strike Paul and that severed the internet connection with the finality of a decision made by someone who knew exactly what they were ending. Beatrix closed the Portal from the Clivilius side. The order's status remained uncertain — Nial thought it had gone through, his confidence undermined by the blood on the keyboard and the abruptness with which the session had terminated. The router lay in the Clivilius dust, disconnected, useless, a piece of domestic technology stranded in an alien landscape like everything else the settlement had acquired from a world it could access but not inhabit.

Beatrix instructed Paul to send Luke to her bedroom when he returned. The directive carried the urgency of a woman whose home had just been identified as compromised. She stepped back through the Portal. Paul remained at the drop zone with a laptop whose battery was dying, whose screen bore the smeared evidence of the morning's casualties, and whose brief, improbable connection to Earth had accomplished one fencing order of uncertain status, one picture frame's destruction, one man's lacerated hand, and the confirmation that the settlement's isolation was not the only problem. Someone on Earth was watching. Someone who understood the technology. Someone close enough to Beatrix's living room to reach the cable before anyone on the Clivilius side could react.