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sweat
with each movement. "We've already run three miles," he huffed.
"They're not going to be up for this."
    I watched exhausted kids of various ages
appearing behind him on the trail, and then I checked my watch.
"Today's hypothetical gas creature moves at four miles an hour and
doesn't get exhausted," I reminded him. "Everyone who doesn't reach
the top here in the next three minutes just got killed because they couldn't run the same distance as the portal back to the
suburb ." As the sweat-drenched children came in one by one, I
recited: "You're dead. And you're dead. And you."
    They groaned and complained, of course.
    "No fair!"
    "Does this monster even exist?"
    I watched them with a stern glare.
"Absolutely anything could come out of those portals. The better
shape you're in, and the sharper your decisions, the better chance
you all have of surviving."
    They quieted, and followed me through the
woods in drained silence. I had no authority other than that they
gave me, but the portals scared them, and they sensed a certain
capability about me.
    We came to the first of the new portals in
short order. I approached several younger boys who were shoveling
dirt ever higher underneath it in order to eventually bury it. "How
wide is it now?"
    "About a foot," a thirteen-year-old girl
answered, one of the smarter ones I was aware of.
    "About?"
    "Thirteen point four inches," she said,
patting the ruler in her pocket.
    I nodded. Slightly larger than a basketball,
and roughly oval in shape, the shimmering rift hovered in the air
around waist height. It had been the first new expanding hole we'd
noticed, but it had not been the last. Space around the main portal
seemed to be fracturing in an increasingly wider radius.
    I led my troop through the next bit of thick
forest, where two boys hammered bits of junk wood around an
inch-wide rift we'd found slowly cutting into the trunk of a tree.
"How's this one?"
    "It doesn't seem to be getting bigger," one
replied nervously. "Yet."
    "Good."
    We moved on.
    The ten-kid crew at the main portal had
accomplished an impressive amount in just a few days. The pile of
dirt, rocks, and boulders now rose slightly higher than the
ten-foot-wide main portal adjacent to it. Carefully layered tree
trunks we'd felled kept the static avalanche at bay. Soon, we would
be able to release the earthen flood and bury the portal if we so
needed.
    I'd thought that would be enough, if we could
get rid of the book, but I now considered the burying trap a last
resort. Tiny rifts were appearing inside boulders, trees, and
hills, only visible once they grew to a sufficient size, so I
doubted burying the main hub would stop the tide.
    All the portals, big or small, showed onto
the same destination each day. The situation was becoming less like
a punched hole in the dimensional barrier, and more like a
dissolving curtain between realities. I had no way of knowing
whether the breaches would grow exponentially, but I had to assume
we only had a few days left before crisis.
    And most of those few days were spent in
stressed frustration, watching as each new daily destination became
worse than the last. The week before the iWorker world, we'd seen
burning and bloody nightmarescapes, but these worlds… these worlds
ran incomprehensible at best, and mentally scarring at worst. I was
considering taking the risky step of ordering the children not to
look into the portals - risky because my authority over them only
extended as far as this strange phenomenon. If they felt cut out of
the process, they'd have no reason to listen to me, and I feared
that might get them all killed.
    In a small clearing near the bury-trap build,
Thomas practiced with a normal book. I watched him place the
iWorker on his neck, stiffen, then pick up the book, carry it
twenty feet forward, drop the book, and then return to his original
location. He took the iWorker off, waited a few moments, then did
it all again, trying to get the needed time down to as few