Voice Commands Not Supported

"Some people accept their fate with grace and dignity. I prefer to scream profanities at transparent barriers until the universe changes its mind."

The colours had barely settled from Luke's departure when Paul's gaze found mine. He didn't need to ask—the question was written across his face in letters large enough to read from orbit.

"He's gone back for supplies," I said, the words arriving before Paul could give voice to his confusion. The explanation tasted like surrender, and I hated the way it sat in my mouth.

"Oh." Paul's response was barely a sound—more exhalation than word. His shoulders curved inward, a physical manifestation of the defeat I felt spreading through my own body. For a moment, neither of us moved. We just stood there in the Clivilius dust, two abandoned things waiting to see what would happen next.

"What now?" Paul asked, his voice carrying a hollowness that seemed to echo off the endless landscape around us.

I had nothing to offer. No plan, no strategy, no reassuring words that might pretend our situation was anything other than catastrophic.

"No idea."

The admission hung between us, stark and unadorned. Paul nodded slowly, as if he'd expected nothing more, and then began walking toward Luke's pile of boxes—the supposed foundation of a shelter neither of us had asked for.

"What are you doing?" I called after him, the question reflexive rather than genuinely curious. I knew what he was doing. He was doing something, anything, to fill the void where purpose used to live.

Paul's answer drifted back over his shoulder, tired and aimless. "I don't really know." His hand rose to rub at his forehead, a gesture of exhaustion that spoke louder than words.

I scoffed, the sound escaping as a loud snort that surprised even me. Watch him try to assemble Luke's bloody tent. Watch him accept this fate as if it were something we should just accommodate, like an unexpected houseguest or a cancelled flight. As if building shelter in this wasteland was the reasonable response to inter-dimensional imprisonment.

Fuck that.

I turned away from Paul's retreating form and fixed my gaze on the Portal. It hung in the air before me, its surface dormant now—no swirling colours, no dancing lights. Just a large, transparent screen rising from the dust like some kind of alien monolith, roughly three metres wide and five metres tall. In its inactive state, it looked almost mundane. Like a window someone had installed in the middle of nowhere and then forgotten about.

But I knew what it could do. I'd seen it swallow Luke whole. I'd felt it reject me with enough force to strip the hair from my arm and melt my shirt to nothing. This thing—this piece of shit masquerading as a doorway—was the key to everything. If I could understand it, control it, force it to acknowledge my existence as something other than refuse to be expelled...

Paul could build his tent. I was going to find a way home.

"This is shit."

The words escaped as a whisper, a private declaration of war between myself and the transparent barrier that stood between me and everything I'd lost. The Portal offered no response. It just stood there, impassive and infuriating, its surface catching the sunlight in ways that made it difficult to tell where screen ended and air began.

I approached it with the caution of someone approaching a sleeping predator. My earlier encounter had taught me to respect its capacity for violence, but caution wasn't the same as fear. I wasn't afraid of this thing. I was fucking furious at it.

Up close, the Portal's dimensions seemed even more impressive. The screen rose from the dust with an architectural confidence that suggested purpose, intention—someone or something had built this with a plan in mind. The surface was smooth, unblemished, offering no obvious controls or interfaces. No buttons. No switches. No helpful instructions etched into the frame. Just endless, mocking transparency.

I reached out and tapped the screen with my fingertips. Gently at first, testing. The surface felt solid beneath my touch—neither warm nor cold, neither soft nor hard. It simply was, as unyielding as glass but somehow different in ways I couldn't articulate.

Nothing happened.

I tapped harder. Still nothing. The silence around me became a presence of its own, a witness to my futility. The Portal absorbed my efforts the way sand absorbs water—completely, indifferently, leaving no trace that anything had occurred at all.

Fine. If gentle didn't work, maybe violence would.

I slammed my palm against the screen with everything I had. The impact sent a shockwave of pain racing up my arm, the kind of jarring sensation you get from punching a wall and discovering that walls don't care about your feelings. The only sound was my own soft grunt of discomfort. The Portal remained utterly unchanged.

At least I know it's something physical. The logic was simple enough—if my hand couldn't pass through, the barrier was real. Solid. Made of something, even if that something defied identification. This wasn't a hologram or an illusion. It was an object, and objects had mechanisms. Switches. Vulnerabilities.

I began a circuit of the screen's perimeter, my eyes scanning every centimetre for anything that might indicate a control point. The base, where the Portal met the dust. The edges, rising toward the sky. The top, too high to reach without climbing something. Every surface smooth, featureless, aggressively unhelpful.

There had to be a way. There fucking had to be.

Desperation bred experiment. I planted my feet, straightened my spine, and addressed the Portal with the commanding tone of someone who'd watched too many science fiction films.

"Portal activate!"

My voice rang across the empty landscape, absorbed by the silence without echo or response. The screen remained dormant. Transparent. Mocking.

"Take me back home!"

Nothing. Not a flicker, not a shimmer, not the slightest indication that the Portal had heard or cared about my demand.

"Take me to Earth!"

The specificity made no difference. The Portal was as indifferent to geography as it was to my growing panic. I was shouting into a void that had no interest in shouting back.

Something snapped inside me. The rage that had been building since Luke's disappearance, since the first rejection, since the moment I'd realised I was trapped in this fucking dust bowl—all of it erupted at once.

"Activate, you fucking piece of shit!" The scream tore from my throat, raw and primal. My foot swung in a vicious arc, sending a cloud of red dust spraying through the air like a curtain of dried blood. The particles hung for a moment, suspended in the warm air, before drifting slowly back to the ground they'd never really left.

The Portal remained unmoved. Unchanged. Utterly fucking indifferent to my tantrum.

I stood there, chest heaving, my throat raw from screaming at an object that couldn't hear me. The silence that followed felt like judgement—not from any intelligence, but from the simple, brutal fact of my irrelevance. I was one human, raging against forces I didn't understand, in a world that had never asked for my presence.

Then a thought cut through the fury. A thread of logic in the chaos of my frustration.

"The dust." The whisper came unbidden, a hypothesis forming before I'd consciously assembled it. The Portal rose from the ground. What if the ground held the answer? What if whatever controlled this thing was buried beneath the surface, hidden in the soft earth that surrounded it?

I dropped to my knees beside the screen's base and began to dig. My hands plunged into the red-orange dust, scooping and pushing with frantic urgency. The particles were fine, almost silky, slipping between my fingers like something halfway between sand and flour. If there was a mechanism down here, a power source, a wire—anything that might explain how this thing worked—I would find it.

The dust yielded nothing. No cables, no controls, no hidden switches waiting to be discovered. Just more dust, and beneath it, more dust, the layers extending downward without apparent end.

But I kept digging. What else could I do?

"Jamie!"

Paul's voice shattered my concentration like a rock through glass. My head snapped up, irritation creasing my forehead as I spotted him silhouetted against the sky atop a small hill in the distance. His arms were waving in that universal gesture of attention-seeking, the kind of performance that suggested he'd found something he considered important.

What does he want? He's interrupting me!

I glared at the Portal, willing it to feel the weight of my frustration. It didn't, of course. Transparent screens don't have feelings, and if they did, this one had clearly decided that spite was its primary emotion.

I am going to find a way home. The thought was a promise, a vow sealed in dust and desperation. Whatever Paul had discovered could wait. The Portal couldn't.

"Come over here," Paul called again, his arms still flailing against the empty sky. His voice carried an undertone I couldn't quite identify—excitement? Hope? Some combination of the two that his usually measured personality rarely permitted?

The curiosity worm its way through my resistance despite myself. Paul wasn't given to unnecessary enthusiasm. His approach to life was generally more measured, more careful—the product of years spent managing a household and a business in a town that didn't reward dramatic gestures. If something had captured his attention badly enough to interrupt my assault on the Portal, maybe it warranted investigation.

Then again, it was Paul. The bar for what counted as exciting in Broken Hill was probably somewhere around "discovered a new type of rock."

With a heavy sigh, I pushed myself to my feet. The dust clung to my hands, coating my palms in a layer of red-brown grit that seemed determined to become a permanent feature of my skin. I brushed at them absently, achieving nothing but the redistribution of particles, and began the trudge toward Paul's position.

Each step felt longer than it should have. The weariness that had settled into my bones during the previous hours seemed to intensify with movement, as if my body was reminding me that I'd been through more than any reasonable day should contain. The Portal receded behind me—a silent sentinel, still holding all the answers I couldn't access.

"Hurry up," Paul urged, his voice carrying a note of impatience that seemed out of character.

"What is it?" I called back, my pace quickening despite myself. The gentle incline of the hill rose before me, Paul's figure outlined against the endless blue above. Whatever he'd found was on the other side, hidden from view by the modest rise of dusty earth.

"There's a river."

The words landed like unexpected rain in a drought. A river. Water. In this wasteland of dust and heat and impossible isolation, Paul had found a river.

My face betrayed me before I could stop it, a flicker of something that might have been hope or might have been relief or might have been the first genuine positive emotion I'd experienced since Luke had activated that bloody device in our study. A river meant water. Water meant survival. Survival meant time—time to find answers, to understand the Portal, to force my way back to the life that had been stolen from me.

I climbed the hill faster, my legs suddenly capable of effort that had seemed impossible moments before. Paul had already disappeared over the crest, eager to share his discovery, and I followed him into whatever lay beyond.

The river was nothing like I'd expected.

In my imagination—the brief seconds between Paul's announcement and my arrival at its banks—I'd pictured something murky. Brown. A barely-there trickle of moisture carving its way through alien soil, offering just enough water to sustain life without providing any comfort. Another cruelty from a world that seemed designed for disappointment.

What I found instead took my breath away.

The water was crystal clear. Not just clean—actually transparent, the kind of clarity you see in photographs of tropical springs or mountain pools fed by glacial melt. It flowed with a gentle confidence, wide enough to be called a proper river rather than a stream, its surface catching the alien sunlight in patterns of dancing silver. The banks sloped gently to the water's edge, the ever-present dust giving way to smoother stone that seemed designed for kneeling.

I dropped to my knees beside Paul, the soft dust cushioning my landing. Leaned forward, drawn by the impossible beauty of this unexpected gift. The river stretched in both directions, curving out of sight around distant rises, suggesting a permanence that felt almost reassuring in this otherwise desolate landscape.

"It's so clear," I heard myself say, the transparency offering a stark contrast to the omnipresent red-brown that defined everything else about Clivilius. Looking into the water was like looking into glass—I could see the riverbed beneath, smooth stones arranged in patterns that seemed almost deliberate.

"Do you think it's safe to drink?" The question came before I'd properly considered it, hope overriding caution in a moment of vulnerability.

Paul's shrug was both expected and disappointing. He had no more expertise in alien hydrology than I did. We were both just men kneeling beside water in a world that made no sense, hoping that something wouldn't kill us.

I chided myself silently for the oversight. This wasn't Tasmania, where rivers were just rivers and the worst thing you might encounter was a leech. This was Clivilius—a place that defied every law of physics I'd ever learned. Who knew what might be dissolved in that pristine-looking water? What alien organisms might be waiting to colonise the first Earth body stupid enough to provide them access?

But the water was right there. Clear and beautiful and promising something beyond mere survival. My body ached with the accumulated stress of the day. My hands were still coated in dust from my futile excavation around the Portal. And despite every rational objection I could muster, curiosity demanded its due.

I dipped my fingers into the river.

The sensation that shot through me was unlike anything I'd experienced. Coolness, yes—the water was refreshingly cold, a balm against the warmth of the Clivilius air. But something else as well. A tingling that seemed to bypass my skin and go straight for my bloodstream, spreading through my veins like carbonation through liquid. It was invigorating in the truest sense of the word—not just pleasant, but actively energising, as if the water itself was charging some internal battery I hadn't known I possessed.

"It feels cool and fresh," I managed, my voice betraying the astonishment I felt. The understatement was absurd. The water didn't just feel cool and fresh. It felt alive, somehow. Sentient in a way that water shouldn't be.

Paul reached in beside me, his hand breaking the surface and submerging to the wrist. The shiver that ran through him was visible—a full-body tremor that seemed to start at his fingertips and radiate outward. His eyes widened with the same surprise I'd felt, the same unexpected delight at discovering something genuinely wonderful in this place of dust and imprisonment.

The smile that broke across my face was involuntary. I'd been clinging so tightly to my resolve—my determination to find nothing good in Clivilius, to treat every aspect of this exile as a personal insult requiring resistance. But this river, with its strange and beautiful water, was making that resolve harder to maintain.

"I could totally jump in right now," Paul mused, his voice carrying a lightness that had been absent since his outburst at Luke. The idea was tempting—a full immersion in whatever magic this water possessed, a brief escape from the weight of everything we'd lost.

"Well, you'd have to do it skinny," I found myself saying, laughter bubbling up with the words. The joke emerged from some reserve of humour I'd thought exhausted, a reminder that even in impossible circumstances, the absurd remained absurd.

Paul's face scrunched in confusion. "Huh?"

"Well, we don't have any towels or spare clothes," I explained, the practical concern grounding our momentary whimsy. We'd arrived in Clivilius with nothing but what we were wearing—and in my case, what remained of what I'd been wearing, given the Portal's assault on my shirt.

"Oh. Of course." Paul's gaze drifted back to the water, the fantasy of a carefree plunge dissolving in the face of reality. We were still prisoners here, however beautiful the river might be. Still trapped, still separated from everything that mattered, still dependent on Luke's goodwill for supplies and shelter.

But for this moment, kneeling beside water that defied explanation, the weight of our predicament felt slightly less crushing.

The river held us in a kind of trance. We sat beside it, hands trailing in the water, letting the strange energy of it flow through our fingertips and ease some small portion of the tension we'd been carrying. The silence between us was different now—less heavy, more companionable. Two men sharing an unexpected gift in the midst of catastrophe.

"Do you really think we're stuck here?" Paul's question broke the spell gently, his eyes meeting mine with a mixture of concern and hope. It was the question I'd been avoiding, the one that lurked beneath every other thought I'd had since the Portal rejected me.

My immediate response was physical—a tightening across my forehead, a frown that gathered like storm clouds. The worry that had been simmering beneath my anger surfaced briefly, demanding acknowledgment.

"I don't know," I admitted, the words heavy with the burden of our unknown fate. Then, because honesty required it: "I hope not."

It was the truth. A simple, profound wish that we might find our way back to the world we knew. That this exile might prove temporary rather than permanent. That somewhere in the machinery of the Portal or the mysteries of Clivilius, an answer waited to be discovered.

"But what if we are?" Paul pressed, his question hanging between us like a blade waiting to fall.

The frustration flared instantly, pushing me to my feet in an irritated surge. Standing, moving, anything to channel the energy that Paul's question had unleashed.

"If Luke can get out, I don't see why we can't too."

The words came out sharper than I'd intended, barbed with the injustice of our situation. Luke could traverse the Portal without consequence. Luke could come and go as he pleased, returning to our home, our dogs, our life, while we rotted in this alien wilderness. If the mechanism worked for him, surely it could work for us. We just had to find the key, unlock the secret, force the fucking thing to recognise our right to pass.

I didn't wait to see if Paul followed. Turning on my heel, I strode back toward the Portal, the large screen visible even from this distance, rising from the dust like a monument to my failure.

Behind me, Paul remained by the river. I could feel his optimism at my back—that relentless, Broken Hill cheerfulness that saw silver linings in every cloud and possibilities in every setback. He'd spent years encouraging Luke, supporting Luke's dreams, enabling the very kind of unfocused enthusiasm that had landed us in this disaster. The brothers fed off each other's fantasies, building castles of hope on foundations of wishful thinking.

That wasn't going to get us home. Optimism wasn't going to unlock the Portal or reveal its secrets or find the weakness in its defences. What we needed was a plan. A strategy. Something grounded in reality rather than faith.

The Portal waited for me, patient and impervious. I marched toward it with renewed determination, leaving the river and its momentary peace behind.