Lunch Break With Portals by Emmie Christie
Deana’s favorite time was 12:34.
She spent most of her time at a cramped desk typing cramped numbers that stressed over if they could open the portals or not. The number creatures—the Ints—wiggled on her screen, wringing their serifs, and shuffling in the small spaces between themselves. Deana knew how they felt.
“Deana, can you line up the next pass before ten?” Adam, her supervisor, stepped out of the portal with a carryout bag from Lucky’s. He’d used the portal for his lunch break again. It cost her at least two hours to order each portal pass.
“Sure.”
“You don’t have to sound so snippy about it.” He dropped his Lucky’s bag on his desk and stretched. “Ugh. Traffic is so bad today.”
She clenched her jaw. She had to direct another training meeting in ten minutes, when she would fall behind in the portal passes. The Ints wiggled on her screen, catching on to her agitation. She took a deep breath. “How was Purple Sky?”
“Purple. Getting boring if you ask me. I can’t wait till Corporate okays the next batch of world ports.”
They hadn’t even finished de-bugging the portals they’d sent last month, and he was bored? Had he visited all the world ports already? She hadn’t even gone to one yet!
She gritted her teeth and set to work on the next pass. She didn’t have time to complain. She rolled her shoulders to try and loosen them and the Ints mirrored her. She organized them into sets, parsing through those that didn’t add up, that needed rearranging, that tried hiding behind its fellows.
The training meeting started. Adam left again in the middle of it, stating he had “something to take care of.”
Deana directed the trainees’ attention to the number creatures on the projector, pointing at two that tried to climb out of their ordered set. “This means they are agitated. You won’t be able to sequence them if they stay this way, and the pass will fail.”
“How do you calm them down?” One trainee asked.
“They mirror you. Check your own emotions and try to soothe them that way.” She tapped the visual of the Int hanging off the end of the code. “If that doesn’t work, you put them in order. They like patterns. Most of them were born into a pattern and it makes them feel safe to be predictable.”
The time on screen read 12:34. Deana smiled. She could understand the need to order herself. The simplicity of patterns soothed the restlessness inside. She wished she could take a lunch break to enjoy it without distractions.
Ten people portaled in—or tried to. What? She didn’t have enough passes for ten! Two got stuck in the space between, and Deana rushed out of the meeting room and pushed the lever to send them back, but the Ints wouldn’t let her. They squirmed and writhed out of their sets, mixing up the patterns, tangling up the paths so the portals could function.
“I told you to have more ready!” Adam shouted, brushing off in-between lint from his suit and flicking his gaze over to the CFO, his boss, who’d also portaled in.
Deana hissed through her teeth, but she didn’t have time to argue, as usual. She tried to coax the Ints back in line and arrange them into their patterns, but they wouldn’t comply. They kept shifting into impossibilities, into painful contortions of unpredictability. Deana closed her eyes. They were too stressed. She was too stressed. “12:34,” she said, striving for a soothing calm of her favorite pattern.
But they wanted more than just order, they wanted to sequence somewhere, to explore where they always sent others. She did, too.
“I’ll take you to Purple Sky,” she said, and the Ints sighed in unison and ordered themselves, smiling and standing straight. The two people stuck in the in-between came through, shaken and gasping for breath.
“What just happened?” The CFO asked. “Deana. Talk to me.”
Deana breathed in deep. “Adam left my meeting and said he had to take care of something. That’s all he said.”
“That’s true,” one of the trainees said. Adam shot him a look and the young man clicked his teeth together.
“Adam, see me in my office,” the CFO said.
Deana applied for time off the next day and visited Purple Sky, bringing her screen along. She even tried Lucky’s and wandered around the world port for a while. “I think I need to take more lunch breaks. What do you think, guys?”
The Ints wiggled in agreement and arranged themselves into repeating patterns of 12:34.
—
Emmie Christie’s work tends to hover around the topics of feminism, mental health, cats, and the speculative such as unicorns and affordable healthcare. She has been published in Intrinsick Magazine and Allegory Magazine and she graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2013. She also enjoys narrating audiobooks for Audible. You can find her at www.emmiechristie.com.
