Quite a while back I mentioned a little side project I was pecking away at. Titled The Waygate Wanderer, it's been sitting around collecting virtual dust for some time. While it's still on my radar to get done, I figured I'd put it to use. So, here is the opening chapter. The rest of it I'll release on the site in serial form as I have time to work on it.
My idea with this story is to do something akin to Doppelganger on a much larger scale. If you're a child of the 80s and 90s, you might think of this as something like an erotic version of Sliders. Let's have fun with it.
Chapter One: The Waygate Wanderer
"No," Harold stated, "Absolutely not. If the calculations are off, even minutely, you're not going to come back here. You'll just get stuck… wandering between universes. It's a terrible fucking idea, Kate."
Dr. Kate Maxin nodded along, but she disagreed.
"I didn't build the Waygate," she argued, "so that it wouldn't get used. Harold, I have to see it for myself. I have to be the first."
"No, you don't. Send a monkey, a goldfish, anything else but you," Harold protested.
Kate pretended to consider it, but she already knew she'd go.
"Alright," Kate said, sighing, "Look, I'll sleep on it. We won't make a decision until I've gone over the calculations again."
Harold looked wary, but he nodded, saying, "Okay. I'm shutting it down."
Harold tapped at the controls and the rippling portal hovering in the air in front of them winked out of existence. Kate snatched up her bag and walked out of the lab with him, the door sealing behind them. At the split in the hallway, Kate turned right, Harold left, and then he stopped.
"You're not taking the porter?" he asked.
Kate shook her head, "I'll call Protus. It doesn't hurt to travel by air to get a different perspective on things."
Harold shrugged and said, "See you in the morning, then."
Kate departed, swiping up her HUD and calling the car. She waited, just inside the doors, watching the rain softly patter across the nearly empty street outside the lab, thinking over the calculations. She knew that Harold was right to be cautious. She should be, too. The Waygate had been her life, though, and she'd be damned if she wasn't going to be the first one through it.
The sleek black car descended in front of the building, hovering inches off the ground, the door sliding open for her to enter. Kate pushed through the glass doors and hopped in, taking a seat at the controls.
"Good evening doctor," the AI voice greeted her, "Home?"
"Not just yet," she replied, "let's just fly a bit. Your discretion. Not too fast. I want to look for a while."
"Would you like opacity?" the AI asked.
"Sure."
The interior of the cabin wavered, then became transparent, giving Kate the illusion that she was suddenly flying through open air as the car made its ascent, easing into the air lane and beginning a circuit above the city. There was a time when the feeling had made Kate queasy. Now, she quite liked the illusion of flying through open air.
The spires of the megalopolis went on for miles and miles, tall spikes of gray that shot toward the sky like fingers, illuminated all about in the grayer evening. What would it be like, she wondered for the millionth time, to step through the Waygate, to enter another version of this world and experience it firsthand? Would the same towering buildings still stand in these spots? What sort of divergence would there be? What could she bring back or learn?
All of these questions, she'd asked herself over and over in the years since starting the project, and more frequently as she'd made the breakthrough that had actually created a stable passage into another world. The tethered objects they'd sent through had all come back unharmed. The probe, with all of its cameras and sensors, had revealed a climate and atmosphere identical to their own. The images and video showed a city block, where her lab existed on her own side. That city looked much like hers, complete with shocked and surprised bystanders who had gawked at the little hovering silver ball that had materialized from a portal in the air.
There had been shrieks, fingers pointed, and a few had run. It hadn't made Kate comfortable and so they'd quickly brought the probe back and closed the gate. On the second attempt, they'd done it in a clearing outside the city, in the hopes that the clearing might exist on that side. They'd been fortunate and it had. The second string of images and videos had been longer, and more detailed, the probe having significantly more time to make a flyover of the nearby city. Kate had noticed small differences, which made her giddy, but overall things seemed much as they were here.
Successive penetrations of the other place, a dozen of them in all, had only told them that it was similar, nearly identical, but until someone actually went through and did some firsthand data collection, there was only so much they'd learn from recordings. Kate wanted… no… needed it to be her. Harold's concerns were valid ones. If the Waygate closed, with her on the other side, the calculations to get back again would need to be precise, exact, and incredibly complex without the aid of Google's Mind. Without that supercomputer, Kate wasn't certain that she could get it exactly right on her own. If the calculations weren't right, well, she'd just be hopping to another universe, with no idea what awaited her.
She flew over the city for an hour before instructing the AI to take her home. The car dropped her on the landing to her apartment and departed for its port. Once inside, she swiped up her HUD again and called in Mind.
"Good evening, Dr. Maxin," the supercomputer said, "Resuming work on the project?"
"Yes. Can we go over the return calculations again?"
"Of course. They're in your Haloes," the AI said.
Kate spent another two hours looking over them, attempting to memorize them. Trying to cram them into her head made her, almost, consider having a storage lacuna implanted, just so that she could recall them in detail at a thought. That was too much like moving toward being an Evolver, though, and Kate still liked the idea of being a regular, flawed old human meat sack. She'd met a few people who had opted in for the new tech and there was just something off, something that happened when you had access to all the information from Mind a thought away. Were there advantages? Certainly. Were you still human? The jury was still out.
***
Kate slept only a few hours and awoke with determination. She had to do it. As she showered and dressed, she worked through the calculations from memory again, compared them against the stored pattern in the Haloes, and felt satisfied. Having thought through doing this very thing for months now, Kate thought she was prepared. She slung her pack over her shoulder and took the elevator down to the porter station.
The thought of going through the Waygate made her impatient. She wanted to get there immediately. The porter queue was non-existent at this hour. She fed her destination into the machine, stepped on the pad, and was dematerialized, reappearing on the lab's porter an instant later. She wound through the halls to the lab, the door unsealing and opening on her approach.
Inside, she accessed the locker, removed a dozen AMPADs, and put them into the pack. She strapped another around each of her wrists. Maybe it was overkill, but if the worst happened and she got stuck, it was better to have options. A lot of them. Satisfied, she called Protus. Before leaving the lab, she left a message for Harold.
"Harold," she wrote on the console, "Thank you for believing in me. I'm sorry, but I have to know. It has to be me. Kate."
She departed the office, met the car out front, and took manual control. The car glided through the air, away from the city, toward the site of the second test. Here, she set down and got out.
"Protus, reconfigure for storage," she commanded.
The car shimmered and then seemed to dissolve as it collapsed in on itself, forming a sphere no larger than a baseball. Kate stowed it in the pack. She swiped up her HUD and accessed one of the AMPADs on her wrist, feeding it the calculations that would open the Waygate to the test world. This was it.
Kate activated the Waygate. She'd always thought it would be cooler if there were some kind of sound, but there wasn't. One moment there was nothing, and the next a silver, shimmering portal hovered before her. A timer began in her Haloes, counting back from an hour. At the end of that time, the portal would collapse. If it did, she'd need to be sure that the calculations were exact to open it back to this world. Once she was on the other side, her Haloes would lose connection, and the only copy of those calculations would be in her memory.
Shaking, she glanced quickly around her own world, taking it in. Just in case. A minute had already passed. Holding her breath, though there was no need, Kate stepped through the Waygate.
***
A brief flash of cold was the only sensation, then she was standing in what appeared to be the same clearing, just outside the city. Behind hovered the Waygate, shimmering. Her Haloes showed a lack of network and a message reading, "Local Connection Only."
The timer was counting down. She hefted the pack and began walking toward the city quickly, her Haloes recording every step as she approached. The walk to the city's edge took fifteen minutes, giving her limited time for sightseeing before she had to get back to the Waygate, or risk relying on the calculations to get her home. It was difficult to wrap her mind around, despite having built the gate. She was in another universe! She'd done it! As she approached, she recorded a running commentary.
"Visually, there's little difference in this world. Many of the same structures still exist and are familiar. No noticeable changes in the air. If I didn't know it, I'd think I was home."
The little pocket of nature gave way to a city street, that turned quickly into a dense urban sprawl. The people, though, immediately gave her pause. Something was terribly off about them. The men didn't look all that different. Casual clothes or suits that seemed like anything she was used to, seemed to be the norm. The women, though, were a different story.
Not a single woman wore a suit, nor anything that she could consider mildly workplace appropriate. Every one of them was dressed in slutty tops, miniskirts, heels, or even less. Some of them were crawling on all fours with gags in their mouths, collars and leashes on their necks, and some even sported small tails protruding from their anuses. The crawlers typically wore some kind of kneepads against the concrete. Every one of them, regardless of their stance or dress, though, wore a collar on their necks. When she turned to her right, shocked, there was a woman pressed against a wall and a man vigorously fucking her from behind, while three more men stood around her, laughing. To her left, another woman was being roughly facefucked outside a diner, while a short line of men waited for a turn.
While she was still trying to process what exactly was happening, someone grabbed her arm and put a hand over her mouth. Her cries were muffled as she was quickly dragged into an alley. Her captor spun her around and released her. Dazed, she looked into the face of a woman in a bright green top, her tits spilling over the tight neckline, and she wore only a matching thong and heels below the waist. On her neck was a green collar.
"What the fuck are you doing out without your monitor?" the woman hissed, "Are you trying to get refeminized?"
"What?" Kate stammered.
"Who's your attending male?" the woman asked, "You should call him right now and get your collar back on. Fuck me, but they must have bimbofied you good to make you stupid enough to take it off! And what are you wearing? You can't even see your melons!"
"What the hell is going on?" Kate asked.
"Okay, so they really did stupify you," the woman said, shaking her head, "Who's your attending male?"
"My what?" Kate asked.
"Oh, sweet fuck," the woman cursed, "I'm not getting stuck with a stupified twat. Thought I'd try to help, but apparently, you're beyond it. Don't talk to me!"
She quickly hurried away, leaving Kate alone in the alley. Reeling from the brief confrontation, she made a decision. This place had some serious issues that a brief flyover with the probe, clearly, hadn't detected. Time to go home. She poked her head around the corner, noted no one looking in her direction, and quickly ran back toward the Waygate.
Her obvious difference in attire, though, caused everyone on the street to start looking her way. She continued running.
"You, girl!" someone shouted, "Stop!"
Kate did not stop. She ran faster. The voice shouted again and then footsteps came running after, heavy, booted, fast. She spared a glance behind and saw two men in black uniforms. Jesus, she was being run down by some kind of Nazi misogynists! And they were on her heels. Then, they were grabbing her arms, pulling her back.
"Where the fuck do you think you're going, girl?" one of them asked.
"Who let you out without a collar, and wearing… that? Who's your attending male?" asked the other.
"Please, just let me go. I'm not from here!" Kate pleaded.
The Halo timer showed her twenty-five minutes. She had ten to get out of this fucked situation and run back to the gate.
The man holding her laughed and said, "Let you go? I'm not in the mood to get castrated. Let's go, cunt."
He began to pull her down the street.
"Think we should at least get a look at what's under that ridiculous getup?" the other man asked.
"What if she's owned?" her captor shot back.
"Can't come back on us if she's not collared. That's his problem."
The man holding her shrugged and said, "Okay. I'll hold her for you. She's a struggle."
"Had some good training, then," the other remarked, "Ain't had a struggler for a while."
"No!" Kate shouted, "Let me go!"
"Maybe he sent her out here just for this," the man said as he undid his belt.
"Ha! Maybe," the man holding her said, then asked, "Were you a bad cunt, honey? Did your Master send you out to be rape bait?"
The first man got his belt undone and then gave Kate's breasts a hard squeeze, making her yelp. He slapped her across the face, hard. The man holding her forced Kate to her knees, the concrete biting into her flesh through her pants, and then the first man took some kind of baton from his waist before shucking his pants down. His cock sprang out, half hard in Kate's face. The baton crackled menacingly.
"You gonna do this without fuss?" the man asked, "Or am I gonna have to encourage you?"
Kate, not wanting to see what the baton was capable of, reluctantly opened her mouth. The man with the baton pushed his cock into it and Kate choked as he remorselessly fucked it into her throat in one hard push.
"Blech!" she gagged.
The man holding her loosened his grip on her shoulders, instead holding her head tightly in his hands as the baton-wielder fucked her face angrily. Kate sputtered and spit as his cock hammered her throat, until tears welled in her eyes, and she felt like she might throw up. Then, he released a torrent of cum into her, groaning loudly as he emptied his balls down her throat. Through the haze of tears, Kate saw his arm sag, the grip on the baton loosening.
Some instinct made her react and she reached for it, snatched it out of his hand, and quickly jammed it into his leg, pressing the button. The man immediately pulled his cock from her mouth and crumpled to the ground, jerking.
"Fuck me!" the man holding her head cried, and in his surprise, he loosened his grip. Kate pitched forward, rolling away, and began to run.
"Protus!" she yelled, "Reconfigure for flight! Now!"
The little ball sped out of the pack, growing, and reconfiguring as it flew along next to her. The sound of heavy boots pursuing and more shouts came from behind. She didn't look back. The shouts became angry, and confused, as Protus reformed into a sleek, black teardrop. The side panel slid open, and Kate leaped in. She gripped the seat.
"Go! The gate's going to close!"
The timer showed less than a minute. It wouldn't be long enough.
"Fuck!" Kate spat, "Fucking goddammit!"
Protus' speed put her well ahead of the pursuers, but even the car wasn't quick enough to cover that distance in so little time. She worked through the calculations, even as she asked, "Given their speed, how long do we have before they catch up?"
"Irrelevant," Protus said, "I can take you far from them and give you as much time as you need."
Kate sank to the floor and said, "Of course. Get us away from here."
Protus closed on the Waygate and Kate watched it vanish just seconds before they arrived. The car flew on, well away from the city, until Kate instructed it to land. She'd worked out the calculations from memory and adjusted the AMPAD on one of her wrists. Stepping from the car she sent a command from her Haloes and a Waygate opened, hovering in the air.
"Protus, reconfigure for storage," she commanded, and again the car folded, shrunk, became a floating sphere, and descended into the pack.
"Alright, Harold," Kate muttered, "You were right. I owe you a good fucking dinner for this."
Kate stepped through the gate.
***
The same feeling of cold, a split second, and then she appeared on the other side. Above her, the sky was… wrong. The air itself was wrong, fouler, darker, the blue of the sky tinted red.
"Where the fuck…" she said, to no one, because there was no one here. She stood atop a high hill and down below lay the skeleton of a city, sprawling for miles, a broken thing of metal bones and rubble.
Shaking her head in disbelief, she ran back through the calculations. Everything was right, she was sure. They were exact! They were… they were exact if she'd been coming from her own world.
"Oh, fuck…" she hissed, "No! You fucking idiot!" she shouted at the broken landscape.
The calculations were absolutely correct, in her own world, where she'd been working with constants that she understood. What if the constants were not constant, or even subtly different, in that other place? That would throw it all off. How had she not thought of that?
The sound of something roaring, loudly, cut across the silent landscape, and then the ground shook. The vibrations shot up through her boots. Something big was out there.
"Time to go," she said to herself and shut off the gate, using the AMPAD to immediately open another using the same calculations.
The trees nearby crackled then broke, and a huge, brown head filled with sharp teeth emerged. It roared again and Kate screamed, then dove through the gate. She landed on her face, and it was snowing as she slid down a steep embankment. Screeching, she dug her fingers into the snow, but there was no purchase. The slope abruptly ended and then she was falling, falling fast and far down an ice-covered ravine. She activated the AMPAD again and projected a Waygate just ahead, fell into it, and then came to an abrupt stop against green grass that knocked the wind out of her.
Groaning, she rolled onto her back and saw a blue sky above. For several minutes she lay, catching her breath and allowing her heart to slow. She sat up and looked up a high hill, atop which sat what looked like a medieval castle. She swiped up her HUD and zoomed the Haloes in. Yes. A fucking castle, complete with a village.
With no immediate danger bearing down on her, Kate had time to breathe. Her supplies were limited. She cursed herself again for her idiocy, for her hastiness. The excitement had blinded her to something that was so glaringly obvious that it was nearly unforgivable. Of course, the calculations could have been thrown off by something minute. A slight difference in gravitational forces, or even a shift in planetary alignment, the magnetic field, any one of those factors could have resulted in her opening a gate to the wrong world. Now, she was stuck, just like Harold had feared. Without Mind or an equivalent, how was she going to work out what factor was incorrect and fix it?
Before she could come up with that answer, the more immediate need to survive was the most pressing thing. If there was a town, then there was food and water. Was that town populated with humans? In this world, would this place be dominated by lizard people? Only one way to know. She set off walking toward the town.
The walk took the better part of an hour. As she got closer, she passed a wagon heading out of town, pulled by a couple of horses. A gray-bearded man sat in the seat, holding the reins, as the wagon bumped down the dirt road. The man gave her a curious look and halted the wagon. He said something, that sounded like gibberish, but then the Haloes deciphered it for her.
"G'day," the man said. "You're looking a bit weary. And not from around here, I figure. Coming in from Calperia?"
Having no knowledge of what Calperia was and unsure how to answer in the right language, Kate nodded.
"Been to Trea before?" he asked.
Kate shook her head.
"Just a word of advice, then," he said, "You'll want to bare your breasts before entering, or you're going to look even more out of place than you already do. You're well-endowed, so you'll get respect from the Matron Council."
Kate nodded, unsure if the translation had been correct. Bare her breasts? Was every other world filled with perverts? The old man gave her a polite nod and resumed his course down the road. Kate watched him go, then turned back toward the town and castle. She zoomed the Haloes in again and caught sight of some of the villagers, going about whatever business villagers did. She groaned as she saw that, yes, all of the women had their naked breasts on display.
The men of the town didn't seem to find this the least bit odd, carrying on as though nothing were out of place. In fact, she caught several gestures that seemed to indicate some kind of reverence, especially toward those women with large breasts. Now she had new information to consider. She needed to be able to talk to people, for one. She needed supplies and to get those supplies, she was going to have to show her tits, it seemed. Communication was the first thing, though.
Kate shuffled off of the road and found a small stand of trees, where she set down the pack and went through it. She withdrew her portable fabricator and set it down. Would one of the AMPADs be sufficient material to craft an injector and a vocal processor? She thought it might. She took one of the bands from the pack, unhappy about sacrificing one, but it seemed necessary. If she was going to be wandering worlds, there was no telling what other languages she might run into.
She put the AMPAD into the fabricator, got an indicator in the Haloes that it was connected, and then flipped up the HUD. She swiped and tapped at the menu, selected the two items from the list, and received a confirmation that the AMPAD would provide enough material. She started the fabricator. The little machine hummed as it disassembled the AMPAD, breaking it down into raw components, and then reassembling them into the items she needed.
The process took a few minutes, after which she pulled out what looked like a small gun and a minuscule chip. She placed the chip into the gun and put it against her throat, took a breath, and depressed the trigger. There was an instant of brief pain as it pierced the skin, embedding the chip, but it was minor. A second passed and her Haloes showed a connection to the chip. She set the language filter to the new language detected by the Haloes.
"Hello," she said to no one.
The vocal processor did its work, translating the word in a microsecond, altering the sound out of her mouth, and producing the word in the new language. It was strange, relying on the tech. Back home, it was so uncommon to encounter someone without Haloes that the old piece of technology would have seemed out of place. Now, it might have saved her. She recited a few more phrases, which came out completely alien to her ears, but which the Haloes told her were accurate.
Now, there was the matter of her bare breasts. Sighing, she pulled off her top and unclasped her bra, then stowed them in the pack. The thought of walking bare-titted into some medieval village, after having been roughly face fucked, was not appealing. When in Trea, though…
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