PORTAL by Gareth Clegg

London to Sydney used to be a full day's travel. Even though the flight was down to twenty hours, all the time spent getting to the airport and through customs at each end was still significant.

So when Portal arrived on the scene it echoed the death knell for the major airways. Even with the suborbital providers still threatening a two-hour transit time to the other side of the globe, even they couldn't compete with instantaneous matter transferral. Step into a PORTAL_TM Arch and step out of the corresponding one at the other side of the world. No waiting for luggage collection at the far end, it was the utopia for long-distance travel. Just like stepping through a doorway. The final frontier of Star Trek was finally in our hands, and the airlines were crapping themselves.

I am paid more than most of the top international consultants around the world put together. And that includes the big hitters that work for Disney, Google, Amazon and the financial wizards working for the Russian Oligarchs—you get the idea.

Who do I work for? Good question. I am employed by an independent private consortium, who just happen to be run by the top CEOs and owners of big names, such as Airbus, Boeing, and the other multi-billion dollar Aircraft manufacturers and Airlines.

My name is Jeff Curtis, and it's my job to find a flaw with PORTAL_TM and keep the airline industry from going belly up. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't give a shit about the airlines, but they'd just landed the biggest mystery on the planet at my doorstep—and I was a sucker for a mystery.

I'm a scientist and a bloody good one at that. I could have been a surgeon, but it was too restrictive for my tastes. You see, I get bored easily, so dedicating my life to just human anatomy and fixing that one series of intricate biochemical machines didn't push my skills far enough.

I haven't got time to go into my academic history, but suffice it to say I have a double first in Chemistry and Biology and I graduated at the tender age of fifteen. By sixteen, I had several PhD's and numerous international papers published on chaos theory. I have a knack for mathematics and an eidetic memory. It's maybe not what most people think. I don't just remember everything I see—I see it in my head, like on a TV screen, and can manipulate everything with correlating graphs and integrated data from other sources. It's sort of a superpower really.

So, the upshot is I'm barred from pretty much all the casinos that know about me around the world. It didn't help that I took a few in Vegas for a ride after I graduated. I made a small fortune, but also a lot of unpleasant enemies in the gambling business.

Though card counting and statistical analysis in your head isn't illegal, they make you pretty aware of how nasty things could become for you if you ever return, while they talk to you in the back room. It's proper hardcore Tarantino stuff—forget The Godfather and Goodfellas, this is Resevoir Dogs, tie you to a chair and pour petrol on you while dancing around flicking a lighter, shit.

Anyhow, it didn't take long for me to get the picture loud and clear, and also to get headhunted by the big boys in the collapsing airline business.

So, how do you go about finding a flaw in the most lucrative and secret business on the planet? You might think the evil Disney Empire plays their cards close to their chest, well that's child's play compared with PORTAL_TM.

Almost all their research was hidden behind secret patents, and their employees never leave to work for other organisations, it just didn't happen. I needed to get at that information if I was to find any minor flaw that could be exploited, anything at all to throw the airlines a lifeline before they sank below the waves gurgling their last.

My opportunity arose through a friend I met through some mega-math cryptography forum. Sally was an elite hacker OR Leet Haxor, as she preferred to be called.

It was all a bit lame if you ask me, but still the done thing in the hacking community, and who was I to complain, uber-geek that I was? I once checked out pi to a million decimal places and, due to my weird brain, could recite it back verbatim. I reached about a thousand before I got bored with the idea and walked off the TV show, much to the amusement of the presenter, and the screaming disbelief of the director. I couldn’t be arsed with all that shit. I was just a freak to them, and I had better things to do with my time.

So one dark winter evening I connected with Sally, and we chatted about hacking crypto-currencies and other polymorphic cryptography algorithms. Yeah, I can see you nodding off back there. Yes, you at the back, in the red sweater.

Bottom line—Sally is one of the best "Leet Haxors" in the biz, and she had found something she needed to tell me about. Something she was desperate to tell someone who might understand what she’d discovered.

“So what’s up, Sal?”

“You’re never gonna believe what I did.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Go on, hit me.”

“What?”

“Tell me.”

“You’re not even going to guess?”

“Am I likely to get anywhere close?”

“Not a chance,” she replied.

“So why bother guessing?”

She sighed and fired me a couple of poo emoji’s. “You’re no fun with this sort of stuff, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I get that a lot. Just spill already.”

“Okay. So I only went and cracked a corporate email system.”

Her grin stretched from ear to ear as she leant back from her monitor, hands clasped behind her head. The bright, yellow smiley face on her green tee winked at me from under a blood splat.

“Is that it?” I asked. “I thought you had something impressive?”

She bent forward, pointing directly at me through the screen. “Yeah, but this was PORTAL’s email server.”

I nearly fell off my chair. “You fucking what?”

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s more like the reaction I expected.”