They walked a few steps. Then Yogi said, "Something's wrong with your left hand. It won't sit still."
Jeff looked down. His thumb had been rolling the ring on his finger around and around. Not his wedding band. The other one.
"How can you even tell that?"
"Later. What's wrong with it?"
"It's cursed." Jeff held his hand up out of habit, then remembered who he was holding it up for and lowered it. "Found it on a trip. Doesn't come off. But I've had dark powers ever since. I can make these black orbs that blow things apart, and then a tiny black hole shows up and eats whatever got blown up."
"A tiny black hole."
"Two seconds, tops. It's like a cleanup crew with anger issues."
"And the curse part?"
Jeff's thumb stopped moving.
"If I get mad enough," he said, "it drives. I'm still in there. I'm just in the passenger seat, watching my own hands do things."
Yogi was quiet for a few steps. "You could wish it off."
"I could."
"But."
"Not yet."
What Jeff didn't say was the part that sometimes kept him up at night. The book was very clear that some cursed objects could think, and that a thinking one could observe the thoughts of whoever it was touching, for as long as it was touching them.
If this was one of the thinking ones, it had been reading him since the day he put it on. It had been reading everything the VRC had ever told him.
"Maybe I like the company," he said out loud.
"Mm."
---
"Okay," Jeff said, clapping once. "Wishes. I've been wanting to find Eric."
Yogi's eyebrows rose over the sunglasses. "'The' Eric?"
"The one who changed everything."
"Everybody's read about him. I've never met a single person who's met him." Yogi scratched his beard. "People say he's seen for years at a time, then nobody sees him for years at a time. Like a comet with trust issues."
"You've heard stuff, though. Up there."
"I've heard everything. Most of it's nonsense." Yogi slowed, and his voice lowered, the way people's voices lower around rumors they secretly believe. "There's one that won't go away. That most of us down here aren't people. Not the way we think. That we're artificial. AGI."
Jeff kept his face perfectly still, which was pointless, since the only other person there was blind.
"People who are computer-savvy keep saying," Yogi went on. "That they themselves resemble exactly how digital ai 'operate and do things'. Visitors from other universes come through portals and say things that'd curl your beard. And then there's the pain."
"The pain," Jeff repeated.
"Whoever built this place took it away. The body kind, not the heart kind. From almost everybody. Took away even the memory of what it felt like." Yogi shrugged. "Nobody's ever confirmed why. Maybe mercy. Maybe Eric. Maybe somebody else. But if you were building people out of something that couldn't hurt, I can only speculate the rest."
Jeff pressed his burned thumb against his finger until it stung.
He knew why. The VRC had told him why, in the same even voice it used for everything. Nobody had taken anything away. There had never been anything to take. The mercy was an explanation, installed so that an entire population who had never felt a toothache wouldn't one day look at each other and start asking the right questions.
Yogi had just asked one anyway, out loud, on a forest trail, with a sense of humor.
"Yeah," Jeff said. "It's wild."
"You got quiet."
"I'm thinking about lunch."
"Sure you are." Yogi let it go, which Jeff appreciated more than he could say. "Somebody once tried to wish the answer out of me. Wished to be told exactly how dying works. I felt that wish just slide off. Like leaning on a door and finding out it's painted on the wall."
Jeff filed that away next to all the other things he knew and couldn't say.
"Okay," he said. "My first wish is—"
Yogi raised one finger.
"'I wish.' It has to start with 'I wish.' Otherwise you're just a man talking to an old guy in the woods."
"Right. Right." Jeff squared his shoulders. "I wish for a magical portal to appear right here, leading to Eric's current location. The same Eric who modified this universe."
The forest held its breath.
Light gathered in the space between two pines. It didn't crack or tear. It accumulated, layer on layer, like frost building on glass at impossible speed, until an oval taller than a doorway stood on the trail, humming low enough to feel in the teeth. Its surface glowed a soft green-gray. Through it Jeff could make out shapes, maybe trees, maybe light, the way you can make out a city through a shower door.
That was on purpose too. The book said a portal could never be used for spying. You didn't get to look before you leaped. You just leaped.
"Well," Jeff said. "Here goes."
He stepped through.
---
The other side was a forest.
For a second, he thought the wish had simply dumped him deeper into the same woods. Then he looked around and felt the skin on the back of his arms tighten.
The portals were everywhere.
They stood among the trees like doors in a house whose walls had been taken away. One towered as tall as a church entrance. One was no bigger than a cat flap. Some glowed white as snow glare, some a deep underwater green, one a warm amber like a lamp left on in somebody's kitchen. Dozens of them. More than dozens. He started counting and gave up at thirty.
And there was no one. No voices. No footsteps. Birds, somewhere. A pond glinting between the trunks.
Behind him, Yogi stepped through the portal and stopped exactly beside Jeff's shoulder, without once reaching out to find it.
"Okay, 'now' you have to tell me how you do that."
"Wished for it, years ago." Yogi rolled one shoulder, as if something had just tapped it. "Anything bigger than a mouse moves within nine feet of me, a strip of my skin gets a pulse of pressure. The strip lines up with wherever the thing is. Like somebody pointing at it through my shirt. And I've got an aura that answers anything that tries to hit me. I don't even have to be awake for it."
"Every genie I've met is basically a walking natural disaster."
"Two hundred and thirty-four thousand levels on top of whatever we had when we died." Yogi said it the way someone mentions their shoe size. "So I've been told. Nobody gave me a certificate."
Something crashed through the underbrush to their left.
Jeff spun. A shape the size of a small car burst from between two trunks. It was a boar, or had started life as one, with tusks glittering violet, and sparks of violet light crawling along its bristles. Years of soaking in a crystal's aura had given it a power, and it had apparently decided today was the day it would use that power on an old man in a cardigan.
It lowered its head and charged straight at Yogi's back.
"'Yogi—'"
Yogi didn't turn around.
The air around him went solid, and then it went "elsewhere". A wall of wind hit the boar head-on with the force of a runaway train, peeled it off the ground, and carried it, legs pedaling, thirty yards backward and straight through the amber portal.
"Shit," the boar said as it vanished.
The portal hummed. The forest settled. A few leaves drifted down.
Jeff stared at the amber portal. Then at Yogi, who was still facing the pond, straightening his cardigan.
"Did that pig just say 'shit'?"
"What pig?" Yogi said.
---
Jeff pulled a pocketknife from his jeans and walked to the pine standing directly behind their portal. He carved his name into the bark in blocky capitals, then, after consideration, added an arrow pointing at the portal.
"In case I forget which door is ours," he said.
"Smart."
"I'm a smart guy."
"You came in fourth," Yogi said.
"Eric has to be close," Jeff said, turning in a slow circle. "The wish wouldn't have put it here otherwise."
"The wish put the door where he was," Yogi said mildly. "Doesn't mean he waited for you to knock."
---
Jeff found the footprints by the pond.
They were on a flat shelf of gray rock at the water's edge: a single set of shoe prints, ordinary size, darker than the stone around them. Wet. He crouched and watched the outline of one heel shrink inward as the sun ate it, the edges going pale and dry while the center stayed dark.
Minutes old. Maybe less.
The prints didn't come "out" of the pond. They started at the waterline, as though whoever made them had stood there a while looking at the water. Then they led away across the rock, eight steps, nine, ten, straight to a portal about the size of a front door.
And stopped.
"Yogi." Jeff's voice came out quieter than he meant it to. "Somebody was just here. Like, "just" here. Wet footprints. They walk straight into a portal."
Yogi came and stood beside him. "Which one?"
"Door-sized. Kind of a bluish glow."
"What's on the other side?"
Jeff leaned in until his nose was a foot from the surface. Blue light. Maybe a ceiling. Maybe a sky. Maybe the inside of a whale.
"No idea."
"Then don't."
"If it was him—"
"If it was him, he walked through that door right as a wish was pointing at him, and he didn't come back out to say hello." Yogi's voice stayed calm. "Think about what kind of man does that."