Part 1 - The Old World

Xelajú, Central American Union.

12th March, 2062.

[Formerly Quetzaltenango in pre-cascade Guatemala, the current capital of the Central American Union could be considered one of the few 'winners' of the global catastrophe.

Having ballooned from a population of one hundred and eighty thousand, the city is now home to seventy million, nearly half the population of the entire Central American Union. Nestled in a mountain valley near what I am assured is a now dormant volcano, Xelajú is a marvel of natural barriers and manmade defenses.

It is also several thousand feet above sea level, which has left me more than a little winded during my walk and talk interview with Colel-Ir-Masa. Given that I am perhaps a quarter her age, the gray haired Mayan woman is more than a little amused.]

I would have been seven? Maybe eight. Old enough for my parents to no longer be watching me like a hawk, but young enough that they probably should have been. Never in a million years would I have let my daughter get away with half the stupid things I thought were all in good fun. Even if the woods were as safe as they used to be.

Safe is not a phrase I think most people would ever associate with a rainforest. Then, or now.

I suppose not. But then again most people don't live near rainforests. I'd compare it to being in a bad neighborhood in an American city before the cascades. A local knows what streets or what paths to avoid and which ones are safe to tread. They know who they can lock eyes with, and who is going to pounce the moment they show weakness.

Still stupid of me, but I was a child, after all.

This would have been 2021, correct?

Early 2021, yes. I remember because my cousin had been making jokes about the fires. About how all the hopes we'd had about 2021 being a better year had proven false.

Those would be the Lacandon Jungle fires.

Yes, though I didn't know the area by that name. To us it was Petén, and to me it was just 'the jungle'.

The first real sign of them for me was that I woke up coughing. My family lived off the grid. Not hermits, luddites or uncontacted tribes, nothing like that. We were just Maya in a country that, historically was not very good to our people, to put it mildly. We didn't trust the central government, and if you went far enough out into the countryside there really was no central government to speak of. We protected ourselves.

We still had telephones, radios and other connections to the outside world, so looking back I think it had less to do with us being out of touch and more with our community not trusting the news we were getting. They'd set fires to smoke my father out in his youth, so there was a lot of distrust and fear that the reports were illegitimate. That the government, or some corporation were just trying to drive communities out so they could claim the land out from under us.

The fire came fast. So fast. It was dark out when I woke, draped like a sack over my uncle's shoulder, my younger brother opposite me, crying and rubbing his eyes over and over, trying to get the smoke sting out of his eyes. To this day, after everything I've lived through, the only nightmare I ever have is of waking up to a roaring inferno at my back and my lungs full of acrid death.

But you survived.

Obviously. Look if you want I can just skip to what you're interes-

No, no. I'm sorry. This is the exact sort of story I am looking for. Please, continue. [1]

Not much more to it than that, from what I remember. We were thrown in the truck like so much luggage and we started driving to outrun it. My whole family made it out. I think everyone in our community did, come to think of it, but I doubt they'd have told me if someone had died.

They didn't really pay attention to us on the trip. Too much on their minds, too many kids to wrangle on the best of days. The oldest had chores when we stopped the following afternoon to make a camp, but I was too little to do much more than be in the way. So while others were cooking, cleaning, playing I went out into the woods.

Not far, you understand. These weren't my woods, like the ones near our home had been. But even fifty feet into the woods was probably too far.

I had no idea what it was when I first spotted it. Just an unusual flicker of light that looked completely out of place amongst all that green. Have you seen one before?

A few drawings, but never in person.

You should hire a guide at some point. Might be good for your book, in order to help you get the description just right.

Not really a book. Or that kind of project really. Maybe you could give me your description anyways?

Well my memory is colored with how many I've seen since, but this one was... pink? What is the word, magenta? Not a hot pink or anything, the jungle was too dim for that, but in all that green it stuck out like a sore thumb, dim pink, a thin ring of shadow around the edges of it.

It was so small in any other color I probably wouldn't have seen it. Definitely a fresh one, maybe hours old at most. The size of a baseball, a little interdimensional portal floating three feet off the ground.

Not that you had any idea what it was.

Oh no, I thought it was a mirage, or some kind of rainbow, a weird trick of the light. I got a bit closer, moved my head around, this way and that trying to figure out what it was, what it was reflecting off of. I circled it twice before it really sunk in that it had a physicality to it, that it wasn't just a trick of the light.

Then what did you do?

What all kids do. I poked it with a stick.

[She briefly pauses to laugh and after a point I cannot help but laugh along with her.]

I was a fairly dumb child. Fortunately, it didn't matter. I poked and I prodded, but I couldn't get the stick to touch the color itself. Anytime I got to within an inch, just at the dimmed edges of the thing, I felt pushback. Now I know it is the reverse gravitic pressure, at the time the closest thing I could compare it to was like trying to press two opposing magnets together. It just deflected off along the side, again and again.

Eventually I worked up the nerve to try to touch it. I remember getting goosebumps, not out of fear but because it was so chill to the touch. You can probably imagine how hot it was, out in the jungle in the middle of the warmest season on record. But the color was soothing to the touch, like taking a soda can out of the fridge and running it across your forehead.

You didn't.

I did! I'd spent the morning terrified and exhausted in the back of a pickup truck with no air conditioning. If I'd found a stream or a marsh I'd probably have dove right in and brought back some new and interesting bacterial infection, or ended up as alligator food. As far as I was concerned this was a floating ice cube. I think I even tried to lick it at one point.

The fun came to an end when someone back at camp decided to do a head count. I might not have been able to see them through the foliage, but by god I could probably have heard my mother screaming for me from all the way back home.

Was this when you...?

No, that came much later. I'm not sure if I was too young, or if the gate itself was still too fresh. Probably for the best, I can't even begin to imagine how insufferable I would have been during my teenage years if I'd been attuned.

I ran back to the road and tried to explain to my parents what I'd seen, but they were so livid with me that they wouldn't hear a word of it. My siblings made fun of me, and I more or less dropped the topic after a few days. Kept it as my own little secret, a little truth I held that no one believed.

If only it had stayed that way.

[During my stay in Xelajú I was able to locate a cache of local newspapers that display a pattern consistent with reporting from other contemporary first site locations. Disappearances, strange wildlife sightings and animal mutilations were reported all throughout the region during the early months of 2021.

Xelajú was is not considered to be a first site by most historians, but it seems plausible (to me at least) that the most obvious telltale signs were hidden by the wildfires themselves. If true, then this could very well make Colel-Ir-Masa the first human being to ever lay eyes on a gate.]

[1] Bad form of me to try and hurry her along. In my defense, I was seventeen and this was my first out of country interview. I was still new at this.