David measured the portal three times.
Once by eye. Once with a laser ruler. Once more just to be absolutely sure, because mistakes like this tend to get people killed.
“Yeah,” he sighed. “Figures.”
The portable reactor was too big.
Not by much—maybe one meter at most—but enough to make it impossible to push through the portal fully assembled. Disassembling it alone wasn’t an option either. The reactor was “portable” but only relative to other reactors, you weren't supposed to take it with you on camping trips.
Which meant one thing.
He wouldn’t be bringing the reactor with him.
“That simplifies things,” he muttered, even as his jaw tightened. “In the worst possible way.”
No reactor meant no unlimited energy. Whatever waited for him on the other side, he would have to power his operations locally.
David glanced up to the portal.
He saw via his robots that plants there had enough sunlight.
“Alright,” he said. “Plan B.”
Solar.
If there was sunlight, there was energy. First priority became obvious: gather every solar panel and every usable battery inside the dome and relocate them through the portal.
He pulled up a city map on his computer, overlays snapping into place from memory more than from data. Rooftops. Civilian setups. Government-funded plants. Stores with the right equipment.
“I know where you all are,” David murmured.
He issued commands through the terminal, fingers moving quickly.
Robots fanned out across the city, their instructions simple and precise: locate, detach, transport. This wasn’t the first time he’d stripped the dome bare of useful stuff.
Next, he opened a second command window and started selecting places on the map while talking to himself.
“Police station, gunstore, military base… and a few citizens with decent stashes of weapons.”
That part was almost boring.
Weapons logistics had long since become muscle memory. Over dozens—no, hundreds—of iterations, David had scoured every building, bunker, and black site within the dome. He knew exactly where each firearm was stored, how many magazines it had, and what condition it was in.
Crates began piling up on his lawn.
Rifles. Ammunition. Launchers. Spare parts. Everything he’d ever bothered to collect, now converging on a single location.
By evening, the other side of the portal already looked lived in.
Through the cameras of his scout robots, David watched as they carefully unfolded the first solar panels in a small clearing beneath the hovering rift. The forest glowed amber under a low sun, shadows stretching long and lazy between the trees. The robots worked with mechanical precision—panels angled, supports locked, cables clipped into place. Beside them, stacks of industrial batteries were connected one by one, their indicator lights flickering to life.
“Good,” David murmured from his chair back in the dome. “At least the basics work.”
For a few hours, everything went according to plan. Energy trickled in, batteries charged, systems stabilized. Then the light began to fade.
Night came fast.
The sun slipped behind the treeline, and the warm orange glow drained out of the forest like someone turning down a dimmer switch. Readings dipped. Solar input fell to zero.
David frowned.
“…Right. Of course.”
He’d known this would happen, but knowing and seeing were two different things. On the other side, the robots slowed, shifting into power-saving routines. If they shut down completely, he’d lose eyes, hands, and—more importantly—control.
“Nope. Not tonight.”
He grabbed a coil of heavy industrial cable and dragged it across his living room floor, feeding it carefully toward the portal. One end went into a power junction tied directly to the dome’s grid. The other disappeared through the shimmering surface.
A moment later, the battery indicators on the far side climbed back into the green.
David exhaled.
“Temporary solution,” he said quietly. “But it’ll do.”
He switched the robots into guard mode.
Weapons were distributed automatically—rifles locked into robotic hands, ammunition loaded, targeting routines enabled. The machines spread out around the clearing, overlapping fields of fire, motion sensors sweeping the dark forest.
David leaned back, waiting.
Nothing happened.
No shrieks from the trees. No distorted silhouettes charging out of the darkness. No system alerts screaming imminent death.
Hours passed.
“…That’s new,” David muttered.
He’d expected monsters. Prepared for them, even. The absence felt wrong—like the calm before a storm that had forgotten to show up.
Morning came without incident.
Once daylight returned and the solar panels resumed their work, David began the next phase.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
Supplies.
He started with food—specifically, anything that could survive without refrigeration. His internal checklist scrolled by automatically:
Canned goods. Dry rations. Rice, pasta, lentils. Beans. Instant noodles. Protein bars. Hardtack. Peanut butter. Jerky. Honey. Sugar. Salt. Flour. Dried fruits. Nuts.
Stuff that wouldn’t betray him the moment power flickered.
“Luxury items later,” he said, loading another crate onto a transport drone.
Still, he didn’t ignore comfort entirely. He sent a pair of robots to haul back a few refrigerators—energy-hungry, yes, but useful. Even a looping survivor got tired of eating the same tasteless sludge.
After food came shelter.
David drove to a tourist supply store and didn’t bother pretending he was browsing.
He took one tent.
Then another.
Then two more.
“Because of course the first one will rip,” he muttered. “And the second will burn. And the third will get eaten.”
He grabbed everything else while he was there.
Camping cookware. Matches. Lighters. Compasses. Waterproof clothing. Thermal layers. Boots. Sleeping bags.
Then, after a brief pause, skis.
He stared at them for a second.
“…Yeah,” he decided, tossing them onto the pile. “Not betting on eternal summer.”
Worst case, he could always dig in.
A dugout wasn’t complicated—especially not with his abilities and a few cooperative robots. Dirt, reinforcement, insulation. He’d built worse things under fire.
By the time he finished organizing the supplies, a small, messy camp had begun to take shape beneath the portal on the far side.
Not home.
But a foothold.
David stood in his backyard, watching the steady back-and-forth of machines through the glowing rift.
“Alright,” he said to no one in particular. “Let’s see what kind of world you are.”
What was supposed to be a quick relocation turned into a week-long operation.
David barely noticed when the first day blurred into the third, and the third quietly became the seventh. The portal stayed open the entire time.
By the end of the week, the other side no longer looked like a temporary foothold.
It was a base.
Crates were stacked in careful rows. Solar panels dotted clearings where the trees had been cut back just enough to let light through. Cables ran across the ground like veins, feeding power into batteries, routers, lights. Tents stood in clusters, some already replaced by more solid, improvised structures. It wasn’t pretty—but it was functional, and more importantly, it was his.
One addition stood out above all the rest.
The cell tower.
David leaned back in his chair and watched the signal strength stabilize on his screen. Bars filled. Latency dropped.
“Finally,” he muttered.
Before that, the robots had been leashed by Wi?Fi range, unable to stray too far from the base without losing connection. That wasn’t acceptable—not in an unknown world. So he’d done the obvious thing.
He dismantled a cellular tower back in the city.
Piece by piece, the steel sections, antenna arrays, and control modules were hauled through the portal and reassembled on the other side. The result was absurd: a modern communications tower rising from an alien forest, blinking quietly against an orange?tinted sky.
But absurd worked.
With stable long?range control established, David finally did what he’d been itching to do for days.
He went exploring.
Not in person—he wasn’t that reckless—but through the eyes of one of his robots. The feed filled his monitor as the machine walked beneath tall trees, their leaves an unfamiliar shade somewhere between amber and rust. The forest was calm. Peaceful, even.
David cracked open a can of soda and took a slow sip, letting the robot’s steady pace set the rhythm. Birds—or something close enough to birds—fluttered between branches. Light filtered down in warm bands.
“Could almost be a vacation,” he murmured.
Almost.
The assault rifle in the robot’s hands slightly ruined the illusion.
Still, nothing attacked. No ambushes. No warning messages. No monsters bursting out of the undergrowth.
That, more than anything, made David uneasy.
His eyes narrowed as something subtle shifted in the video feed. Not movement—absence. A distortion so faint he might have missed it if he weren’t used to looking for impossible things.
“Wait—stop,” he said sharply, hitting the command.
The robot froze mid?step.
A meter ahead of it, there was… stillness.
No wall. No shimmer. No visible barrier at all.
David’s breath caught.
“Don’t you dare,” he muttered, fingers already hovering over the controls.
If the robot had taken one more step, it would have slammed face?first into it.
An invisible wall.
Perfectly clear. Perfectly familiar.
The same kind of boundary that had once defined the edges of his dome.
David leaned forward slowly, soda forgotten, eyes locked on the screen.
“Damn it. Damn it. Damn it.”
David pushed back from the desk so hard the chair scraped across the floor. His hands curled into fists, nails biting into his palms as the realization settled in.
It couldn’t be this easy.
Of course it couldn’t.
Freedom on the other side? A quiet forest, open skies, no loops, no walls? He let out a sharp, humorless laugh.
“No,” he growled. “That would’ve been merciful.”
His gaze snapped back to the frozen image of the robot, standing obediently before empty air that refused to let it pass.
Another cage.
Not salvation. Not escape.
Just a new torture chamber with better scenery.
“Damn the System,” David hissed. “And damn whoever thought this was a good idea.”
The anger burned hot—but beneath it was something worse. Fear. Not the sudden kind that came with monsters and alarms, but the slow, suffocating kind that crept in when he thought too far ahead.
He couldn’t stay here.
The Geiger counter sat on the table, silent for now, but he didn’t need it to know the truth. Radiation didn’t care about loops or rules. Stay long enough and even the System wouldn’t be able to patch him back together.
Sooner or later, he’d start glowing.
“So that’s it,” he muttered. “I survive.”
Again.
But this time was different.
On this side of the portal, he had a city. Concrete, steel, warehouses, power grids, stores stocked with tools and parts made by an entire civilization.
On the other side?
Forest.
No roads. No buildings. No backup plans hidden behind locked doors.
Which meant he had to prepare like he’d never prepared before.
David took a deep breath and forced the panic down into something usable.
“Alright,” he said quietly. “Let’s see how big this new hell really is.”
He issued a command, and the robot he had used to discover the barrier began tracing the invisible boundary. Slow. Methodical. Mapping the perimeter of the dome one careful step at a time.
At the same time, David opened half a dozen control windows and started barking orders—not with his voice, but with rapid keystrokes. The robots on David's side came alive in response.
New directive:
Take everything.
Anything not bolted down—take it.
Anything bolted down—unbolt it, then take it.
Batteries were top priority.
Industrial batteries. UPS units. Backup power banks. Portable generators stripped for parts. Even car batteries were fair game—robots popped hoods, yanked cables, and hauled the heavy blocks of lead and acid away without complaint.
“Every joule counts,” David muttered.
Outside, machines moved with ruthless efficiency, stripping the dome bare.
