Grounded

Teleportation was a public relations nightmare for eight years before it entered mass production: ripped torsos, missing fingers, bodies remapped on top of each other. It’s a miracle that it ever caught on, but Oracle still stipulates that more Americans die in hovercar accidents each year than teleportation malfunctions.

And with climate crises destroying new regions each year, it was easy for Oracle to paint itself as a hero. It used portals to transport refugees to the remaining parts of the world unravaged by tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Rumor had it that Oracle was even working on a lunar colony that could save millions of people from the planet crumbling around them. Well, the millions who could afford it. I bet a ticket to the fucking moon would be even pricier than the GEN-3 gauntlets that dropped in 2090.

But the lunar colony is still in development, so humans do what we’ve always done: turn a blind eye. Why worry about wildfires and coastlines crumbling when you can teleport to a piece of untouched paradise?

Of course, it’s harder to pretend that the world’s not on fire when you can’t dematerialize your atoms. As soon as the ankle bracelet snapped into place, my user gauntlet became a useless hunk of metal, cold against my wrist. I am under house arrest for six months at my aunt’s house until my scheduled court appearance, which will determine if I am banned from portal use for the rest of my life.

And listen, it’s not like I’m a thief or a murderer. Sure, he lost a lot of blood, but he’s still alive. I just re-wired the panel on his portal interface. I didn’t plan on his left arm getting left behind in a twitching mass of blood and skin.

And this doesn’t help my case, but it will come out in court anyway, so I might as well say it.

Last week I was charged with the attempted murder of Kessler Caldwell.

Thirteen hours after we broke up.

Kessler was perfect. He was like a beautiful home in an upscale neighborhood, and for years I wanted to pry a crowbar underneath his floorboards and reveal the writhing grubs below. Someone that friendly has to have something rotten underneath the surface.

We circled each other for years in our hometown, always waving hello in hallways but never really exchanging words. He invited me to class-wide birthday parties for one exotic destination after another, all portals paid in advance. I mean, what kind of asshole holds their eighth-grade birthday in Bermuda?

It didn’t help that his mother was Melinda Caldwell, the CEO of Oracle. He came from the type of family that could never spend their money in a thousand lifetimes. That lavish display would curdle anyone’s goodwill, especially someone like me who came home to empty cupboards and broken heaters.

I didn’t even buy my own gauntlet. For my sixteenth birthday, I inherited a partially defunct GEN-1 gauntlet from my cousin Lennon. It had a nasty habit of materializing me in the wrong location. Luckily, a few coding tricks got it back on track so I didn’t live in constant fear of teleporting into the Indian Ocean.

Kessler asked me out on a Friday in a crowded auditorium. I was in the thick of reading Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code when he said my name. You know, light reading.

“Hey Mose…”

I blinked up at him, detangling my brain from a paragraph on conditional expressions.

“Would you like to go to Yosemite with me tomorrow?”

“What?” I replied blankly. “The National Park? I thought it flooded five years back.”

“That was the Grand Canyon.”

I snorted and pointedly returned to my book.

“I thought you might want to come,” he said. Words were falling out of his mouth with an unease that I found surprisingly endearing.

“Why would you ask me?” I said back before I could think. His eyes squinted in confusion.

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve never really talked,” I said. “I think the last words we exchanged were in Bermuda for your 13th birthday when you asked how I was handling my dad’s death. Hardly an ice breaker.”

“Well, we worked together on that climate report last semester,” Kessler said, a tinge of red flashing across his face. “In Elton’s class. Don’t you remember?”

“Listen, that’s...school,” I said faintly. “That doesn’t count.”

“It’s okay if you’re not interested,” Kessler shrugged. He took half a step back, ready to spring away from the conversation at a moment’s notice. I suddenly felt powerful.

“Alright,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yeah. Does it look like I’m ready to hike right now?”

Dimples lit up his face as he grinned.

I hit the ground hard, my back beneath me. For a second I lay there, stunned, my breath knocked out of me from one cruel smack against the canyon floor. I heard the sound of rope on metal and suddenly Kessler was beside me.

“Are you okay?”

I moved my face a few muscles at a time, confirming that everything was in order. “I think so.”

I proceeded to sit up but Kessler put a warning hand up just as my head started swimming.

“You should probably lie down for a bit longer. Here, drink some water.”

A cap unscrewed as he gently lifted my head up a few inches.

I gulped down some water and lazily wiped my mouth. It was only then that I realized my head had found its way into his lap. “Am I dying?”

“No,” he laughed. “You’re just stunned. I think you’ll be okay.”

I looked up at him. Even in the darkness of the canyon a sliver of sun was hitting the side of his face, highlighting his freckles. His hair, dark and shiny, hung down in loose spirals. It suddenly dawned on me that someone this handsome had no business being in the bottom of a canyon in Yosemite with someone like me: angry and difficult, all ridges.

“Why did you ask me to come?” I said, forcing myself to sit up further and lean my shoulders against the canyon wall.

“I wanted to get to know you better, and this seemed like a fun place to do it,” he replied. “Well, fun until you almost died. But all things considered…”

“You’re not supposed to like me,” I said, my eyes daring him to challenge me.

“Why?”

“I know the types of people you usually date. Models and valedictorians. I’m...nobody.”

My flash of insecurity suddenly shamed me, and I picked up a nearby rock, squeezing it in my hand as if I could leech my embarrassment into a third-party object. Kessler didn’t say anything. The silence unnerved me, and I finally looked up to find him inches from my face.

“How do you know what I like?”

And then he placed one hand on the side of my face, the other on the back of my neck, and kissed me as the sun disappeared over the lip of the canyon.

The day before I was arrested and accused of attempted murder, Kessler and I had been dating for almost six months. Not a long time for an adult, sure, but months are like dog years when your brain is still forming. Especially when you’re not sure if you’ll live past thirty.

We were set to graduate high school the next day, so Kessler wanted to celebrate. I put in the code for a kid’s arcade in New Ohio. I would rather pay for pizza slices with skeeball tickets than squeeze into a fancy dress for caviar along the Caspian Sea.

We were finishing off our pieces of pizza when I noticed that something was off. An animatronic band of animals was playing country music on a nearby stage, and the bear was stuck mid-dance. Kessler didn’t even clock it. He would usually tease me mercilessly for choosing a place like this, but tonight I could barely pull two words out of him.

“Are you nervous for the graduation ceremony?”

He glanced up, but his eyes looked far away.

“Do you still get to make a salutatorian speech, or do you think the pre-recorded Tom Hanks hologram will eat into your stage time?” I smiled weakly at my own joke.

Kessler swallowed his last bite and pushed his paper plate away from him.

“I think we need to break up.”

My heart dropped through the floor.

“What?”

“I’m sorry, Mo. I can’t do this anymore.”

“Are you joking?”

He stood up, already punching in a code on his gauntlet. My mind was racing. He walked over to a portal that was squeezed in between a claw machine and an ice hockey table. I yelled his name as he vanished into thin air.

I could argue in court that I wasn’t in a rational place when I broke into Kessler’s mansion that night. But I was completely lucid when I re-wired the coding on his portal. I swapped the computer’s coordinates for our high school football field with Yosemite Valley. I punched in a mock parental code so that he’d be trapped at his next destination for sixty minutes.

I wanted him to suffer. I wanted to be sure he would miss his graduation ceremony and think about our breakup in the exact spot where we first kissed. Dramatic? Sure. Murderous? No.

When Kessler stepped onto the telepad the next morning in his cap and gown, he’d noticed something was wrong with the coordinates as the system was booting up. He reached out to stop the teleportation process and was blipped to Yosemite. His left arm didn’t travel with him.

Seconds later he was sprawled on the canyon floor, hemorrhaging blood. He might have died if his gauntlet wasn’t tied to his vitals. EMTs were immediately alerted to his location, but the damage was done.

It was all over the morning news: ORACLE CEO BEGINS MANHUNT FOR SON’S ATTEMPTED MURDERER. I was arrested within thirty minutes.

Which brings us back to my aunt’s house, curled up in bed as rain lashes at the window. I have no friends, no high school diploma, no place to go. At least Aunt Margo sneaks home wine for me on Sundays--

A frantic knock against my window almost made me leap out of my skin. I looked towards it, frozen, as it sounded again. Cautiously, I reached over and pulled the curtain back.

“Kessler?”

My ex-boyfriend balanced precariously on the roof outside my bedroom, his hair slick against his forehead in the pouring rain. I unlocked the top of the window pane and pulled it upwards. I barely had time to digest what was happening before he landed in a wet puddle on my carpet.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Dripping, Kessler pulled himself up to his feet.

“We need to talk.”

“No shit. Have you heard of a phone? Or a holo-projector?”

“No jokes, Mo.” Kessler said, pulling something shiny from his pocket. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

“What are you--”

A necklace dangled from his hand, a heart-shaped locket spinning from the chain.

“That’s my dad’s locket,” I said, dumbfounded. I reached for it instinctively and undid the latch. Inside was a faded picture of my parents and me when I was just a baby. Every morning my dad would slip the locket into his shirt pocket and kiss my mother and I on the cheek before leaving for work. I hadn’t seen it in five years, since my dad teleported to an Oracle manufacturing plant in Colorado to oversee a new line of portals.

“They said they didn’t find it at the accident site.” My voice was barely a whisper. “Where did you get this?”

“My mother’s office.”

My head snapped up, alarmed.

“I don’t think the factory explosion was an accident,” Kessler said grimly. “I think Oracle killed your father.”