Five-Year Special #1: Boundary and Arena

Here's the first of the selected crossover concepts -- which was A.J. Baker of Boundary meeting up with DuQuesne of Grand Central Arena!

A.J.'s at his home, after all the events of Portal...

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"Holy shit!"

A.J. toppled from the stool he'd been sitting at, knocking the half-finished Faerie Dust dispenser off the workbench and sending it clattering to the floor, shedding tiny pieces.

That didn't matter to A.J. at the moment, though, because he was staring up – way up – at the biggest man he'd ever seen, a mountain of a human being who made even General Hohenheim look puny. Two meters tall at least, and from this angle he looked almost that wide. Two hundred kilos at least. He had pitch-black hair, coal-black eyes, dark olive-tinted skin, a black beard with a point so sharp A.J. thought it could probably impale him, and was dressed in some kind of close-fitting outfit that incorporated armor plates, tool pouches, and other accoutrements.

One of those accoutrements was a really impressive handgun; fortunately, the immense stranger appeared uninterested in drawing it. "Sorry about that," he said, in a voice as deep as he was tall. "I admit, I didn't expect to just drop into someone's workshop."

A.J. took a moment to gather his wits as he slowly got to his feet. Ouch. I'll feel that in the morning.  The weird glow that had heralded the stranger's arrival was gone. "Okay," he said finally. "Who are you, and where did you expect to drop into?"

"Doctor Marc C. DuQuesne is the name, and honestly, I wasn't sure. I assumed it'd be somewhere more open, though."

DuQuesne. That name's familiar from somewhere. "Where the hell did you come from?" The situation was finally penetrating. "Holy jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, you teleported in here! How? That's supposed to be impossible! Or at least… maybe the Bemmies knew how, but we've never found any actual evidence of  it."

"Bemmies?" DuQuesne repeated with a faint puzzlement. "Don't know the name. Where am I, exactly?"

Not know the name Bemmie? Where's this guy from? "You're in the house of A.J. Baker and Helen Sutter, in Montana." That ought to get his attention.

"Earth, North American region," DuQuesne said. "Interesting."

No reaction? C'mon, guy, okay, I was only on TV a few times, but Helen was practically the cover girl along with Maddie for like a year."I ask again, where the hell did you come from?"

"Hm? We were working on the Sphere surface, actually. What's wrong with the connectivity here, anyway? I can't hook up to main Earthnet or even the local for the North American district. You on some kind of blackout?"

"Blackout? Dude, I've got a satellite link but I sure haven't given you my WiFi password."

Delayed reaction hit as he processed everything the stranger had said. "Wait, Earthnet? North American District?" he said, even as DuQuesne said "Hold it. WiFi? Satellite link?"

The two stared at each other. "Holy Mother of God," murmured DuQuesne. "Mr. Baker, what year is it?"

"What year?" A chill went down his spine. "It's 2045."

"Twenty forty-five," DuQuesne repeated with a sort of horrified reverence. "Klono's tungsten teeth. Simon, what the hell did you do?"

"What the hell year did you think it was?"

"Twenty-three seventy-nine, my friend, twenty-three seventy-nine."

A.J. would have just assumed the huge man was absolutely insane and quietly sent out a 911 call, but … he had materialized literally out of nowhere, right in front of his lab bench. "And who's Simon, a mad scientist who sent you here?"

"More like a very annoyed one right now, since he's clearly had trouble keeping the portal open. On the other hand… we didn't expect to open a portal to a different time."

"This is nuts," A.J. said after a moment. DuQuesne. DuQuesne. Why is that… Holy crap. "Did you say you were Doctor Marc C. DuQuesne?"

"Yeah. If you're thinking of the book, I'm not that sociopath, just modeled after him. Really goddamn long story, and not the time for it. I'm starting to worry about paradox a lot more than I ever did before."

"Oh, man. You mean you appear here and butterfly effect ripples down the timeline poof!, your futures gone in a puff of probabilities."

"Which would fit really well, by which I mean really badly for me, with the fact that the portal just vanished behind me. I'm an anomaly in time." DuQuesne looked momentarily devastated.

"But maybe not. If I don't do anything that changes your future… right?"

"Butterfly effect, you said it yourself. Just me standing here breathing air I wouldn't have might change something. Still… one would think the universe is a bit more resilient than that." DuQuesne's brows came down. "Okay, look, let's get something established… 2045, you said? What's the most significant thing to happen in the last, oh, ten years or so?"

"Heh, that would be me. Well, me and the whole crew of Nike, later Nebula Storm, discovering ruined alien bases on Mars and Ceres and finally aliens under the ocean of Europa. Can't imagine there was anything bigger in the histories."

A.J. felt a little creeping chill go up his spine as he saw those black brows draw down again. After a moment, DuQuesne shook his head. "Never happened. Not in my timeline."

"You're kidding me," A.J. said, despite the conviction that the big man was absolutely not.

"We didn't encounter one tiny bit of evidence that there were other intelligent species in our universe until the day the Holy Grail first entered the Arena and damn near got us killed," DuQuesne said. "Then we found out we not only weren't alone, we were the babes in arms walking into the wolf-pack. Thousands of species of aliens, thousands of factions, spanning the entire universe. We hadn't a single clue, not one tiny fraction of an inkling, what we were getting ourselves into." The grim expression flickered to an unsettling smile for a moment. "Of course, neither did the Arena."

"Arena? What, was this some bad Star Trek rerun with aliens making you fight for their entertainment?"

"Hah! No. Also yes. A lot bigger and crazier than that." DuQuesne moved over, picked up the fallen dispenser, studied it. "Huh. Proto-nanotech. This is early 21st century? You've jumped a few decades."

A.J. grinned. "My designs, too." He blinked. "Hold on, how the hell could you tell?"

"I may not look it, but I've got quite a bit of nanotech in me right now. Plus a lot of experience in all kinds of gadgetry. I know a nanodispenser when I see one. Your work? Nicely done."

A.J. restrained the impulse to demand a sample of his new guest; not only would that be rude, if DuQuesne objected he could mash A.J. to paste with one hand. He wasn't even sure Maddie could take this man-mountain.

"So… you're from another universe. Not just time, time-dimension travel."

DuQuesne shrugged. "Only thing that makes sense. Well, other than one or the other of us just having eaten way too much cheap Chinese and getting a dilly of a dream out of it."

"Honestly, I count that a lot more likely. I'll have to see if this dream still is so coherent when I wake up."

"Rather not be a figment of your imagination, Baker."

"I'd rather not be a figment of yours, either, so we're even." A.J. looked at DuQuesne speculatively. "So, are you anything like your fictional version?"

"Well, I'm big, I'm loud, I'm smart, and I'm dangerous when I have to be," DuQuesne said with a more relaxed grin. "Why?"

"Wondering if you could somehow tinker together a return portal, or beacon, or something, with what we've got here."

"Stone knives and bearskins, huh? Not the worst idea I've heard. Mind if I take a gander at your whole workshop here?"

"Be my guest. Hey, want a drink? Soda, beer, water?"

"I could do with a beer after being dropped off in another universe, yeah. Thanks." DuQuesne raised the proffered bottle and took a big swallow. "Not bad." He cast his gaze about; A.J. saw an annoyed grimace for a moment.

"Something wrong?"

"It's annoying when your superhuman abilities just go on holiday, that's what."

As DuQuesne moved around the lab, he summarized one of the most over-the-top ridiculous settings A.J. had ever heard of. DuQuesne had been an experiment by what sounded like an overpowered gaming group to make their own copies of fictional heroes. That ended about as well as you'd think, but then the universe had another joke: this Arena, which apparently somehow controlled FTL travel to the point that everyone had to play by its rules. Rules which also ended up meaning that people like DuQuesne – raised to believe he grew up in some weird combo of the Skylark and Lensman settings – got really good facsimiles of the powers they thought they should have. Which would have included a lot of abilities very useful in A.J.'s more mundane world.

"So now you've lost them a second time."

"Yeah, it's a pain. Honestly, that's probably the biggest evidence that I'm in a different reality. My Arena powers worked everywhere – normal space or the Arena. Here, I'm back to merely genetically-engineered human. Mostly human." He sat down, frowning – a pretty intimidating sight. "Damnation. Not saying I couldn't figure out how to kitbash something out of all this stuff, but it ain't happening in an hour or two."

"Wish I could help." A sudden, achingly intense longing filled A.J. "Wish I could visit. Meet aliens. See the stars, or this Arena. Here, we're stuck behind Einstein's wall. We're never getting to the stars."

"Never is a long time, Baker. You say you found evidence of aliens in this system? That doesn't happen. Not unless you've got either FTL or some really cheap way of propelling yourself at almost-light speeds. If they weren't natives –"

"—they weren't."

"—then you can bet they had some kind of FTL, by a thousand rows of little green apple trees."

A.J. looked at him intensely. "Are you that sure?"

"I've seen a couple universes now, and I'll tell you this: the gap between stars is just too damn big to walk across."

A.J. felt a touch of hope inside. "I've said that too. I mean, we're still working on translating everything they left behind for us in their Vault, but everyone's sure there's not going to be anything like that, and I was starting to think they might be right, that we'll never find it."

"You will. It'll be there, probably one of the last things in this Vault, if they left it for people coming after them, but it'll be there."

Abruptly, a cold circle of light blazed out, expanded until it reached from floor to ceiling, and inside that circle…

A laboratory, an impossible, immense laboratory filled with gadgetry that would've been at home in Forbidden Planet and Star Wars and Babylon 5, complex machines blinking lights, crystals shimmering and giving out waves of visible force, more. And standing in the center, a tall man in a white laboratory coat, white hair parted impeccably about a long, intelligent face with brilliant green eyes.

"Marc! Thank God! We'd almost given up!"

"Almost given up? It's been what, an hour or two?"

"For you, Marc, perhaps, but it's been three weeks here!"

"Holy jumping cats! Still, looks like you've got it under control. Let me introduce you to A.J. Baker, been a fine host to a guy who just dropped in out of nowhere. A.J., Doctor Simon Sandrisson, our resident mad scientist."

Sandrisson gave a brief nod. "Marc, come on, no time to lose."

"Right, don't want to get stranded again."

"Worse. This gate's not just my doing; the Arena is helping. And it's worried."

DuQuesne went pale. "On my way." He glanced to A.J. "Sorry about the abrupt departure. Thanks for the beer – and the company."

He leapt through the glowing portal – and it vanished, a soundless shockwave that knocked papers off desks ten feet away.

A.J. stared for a long moment at the empty air where Dr. Marc C. DuQuesne had just disappeared back to the nowhere he'd come from.

Then he activated the internal security feed. "Rewind to … 23:14, yesterday," he said, looking at the clock that now showed it was well past one in the morning."

He saw himself sitting in his chair, working on the dispenser… and then a brilliant flare of light, from which stepped Dr. DuQuesne.

A.J. felt tears flowing down his face, and didn't bother to wipe them away. There was no word for what he was feeling; sense of wonder, an aching longing, but even stronger, a growing brilliant realization of how huge the universe was… and the great vista that this single visit opened up. "More things in heaven and earth, Horatio," he murmured, "than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

FIN.