06 Dec Priority Access: Open Portal

Dane McBride stared at the glow of his monitor, the tab count creeping upward in a scatter of job searches, overdue bill reminders, and half-finished troubleshooting logs. Midnight had passed an hour ago, but his clients expected things fixed before sunrise, and the invoices he’d sent out that month hadn’t coaxed a single payment yet.

He scrolled absently through X, which he admitted he still called Twitter, letting his eyes skate across strangers arguing about things that never seemed to matter beyond the moment. He was about to close the browser when a new DM appeared at the top of his inbox—sent from an account he didn’t recognize.

The profile picture showed a smiling young woman, her features polished and symmetrical in a way that somehow seemed unnatural. The message itself carried a clipped formality:

PRIORITY ACCESS: OPEN PORTAL — Early Admission for the 2025 Window. Limited to 200 registrants. Reserve your place now.

A shortened link sat beneath the text, pulsing in a soft neon gradient.

Dane leaned back, exhaling through his teeth. “Right. This again.”

He saw phishing attempts every other day—cryptomining scams, impersonation ploys, fake invoices. But something about this DM didn’t fit the usual template. There were none of the usual grammatical mistakes. No aggressive call-to-action. No promises of money, and no one demanding any.

Just those words: Open Portal.

Curiosity pushed past caution before he could argue with himself. He spun up a virtual machine, chained a VPN through TOR, and opened the link.

Instead of crashing the browser or triggering a malware warning, the website loaded cleanly. Too cleanly. A sleek, retro-futuristic interface appeared, washed in monochrome blues. At the top of the page, it read:

WELCOME TO THE 2025 WINDOW
PRIORITY ACCESS EVENT
SATURDAY — 2 HOURS ONLY

Beneath it, a video played. Grainy, early-2000s footage showed a cavernous warehouse where a strange, shimmering geometric structure hummed in the center. A line of people stepped toward it one by one, disappearing through some sort of luminous threshold.

Upon completion of the first clip, a second video played automatically. In it, two participants—one man, one woman—stood smiling before the camera. Their speech was calm and enthusiastic. They described worlds “untouched by scarcity,” landscapes “richer than imagination,” opportunities “without limit.”

Dane frowned. Something about the way their mouths moved didn’t sync naturally with the cadence of their voices. And their expressions… they didn’t relax. Not once.

The final frame lingered with a single message:

Next access window: 2045. Secure your place now.

Dane closed the tab, scrubbed his face with his palm, and tried to swallow the discomfort that stirred in his stomach. It was absurd—obviously fake—but the imagery clung to him. He clicked back and rewatched the warehouse clip, his pulse ticking faster as he noted details he hadn’t seen the first time: a woman in the line hesitating, turning as if to run, only to be gently nudged forward by someone off-screen. A man nearby clutched something metallic before stepping into the threshold.

And at the very end, the camera panned briefly toward someone tall and hooded standing near the portal. Their proportions were off by just enough to seem unsettling.

The site claimed the portal would reopen this Saturday, for just two hours.

That was only three days away.

It was ludicrous. Impossible.

But Dane couldn’t bring himself to close the video.

* * * * * *

By morning, exhaustion had dulled Dane’s skepticism just enough to make room for curiosity. Between remote support calls, he replayed the videos and examined them more carefully. Metadata showed legitimate 2005 timestamps. The footage itself showed no signs of deepfake manipulation—at least, not the kind he knew to look for.

The audio, however, raised questions. The waveforms were almost too uniform. Synthetic speech often carried a telltale smoothness, an unnatural consistency, and these samples hovered right on the edge of it, as if someone had used real human voices but ironed out their imperfections.

He paused on the testimonial frames and opened a side-by-side comparison. The man and woman in the video looked exactly as they did in the thumbnail images: same jawlines, same uncreased foreheads, same posture. If this footage genuinely came from 2005, they hadn’t aged a day.

A reverse image search turned up nothing. No hits on social media. No matches to stock image libraries. No references in public records.

He dug deeper into archive sites and local news databases. Buried in a 2005 blurb from a regional publication was a mention of a “scientific demonstration” in an industrial park warehouse. Police responded to a noise complaint. Nothing further was written.

It should have been enough for him to close the laptop and walk away, but that single phrase from the testimonials—a place “untouched by scarcity”—rooted itself in his mind.

His thoughts strayed to the bills piled on his desk. To his nearly-empty refrigerator. To the two voicemails his landlord has left that morning, asking yet again about his late rent. Dane sighed.

He returned to the portal site and clicked Register.

The confirmation page appeared instantly. A QR code filled the screen, accompanied by coordinates directing him to a warehouse on the far edge of the city.

Dane stared at the glowing block pattern until the screen dimmed on its own.

* * * * * *

Saturday arrived colder than expected, a dry wind sweeping through the industrial district as Dane parked his aging sedan near the warehouse. The structure loomed like a forgotten husk, metal siding streaked with rust, windows opaque with grime.

And yet the lot wasn’t empty.

Half a dozen cars sat scattered around, their doors cracked open, interior lights still glowing. A few headlights remained on, shining weakly across the asphalt as if their owners had stepped out only moments before.

Dane’s breath caught in his throat. He closed his car door quietly.

The warehouse doors stood half open. LED strips lined the floor inside, illuminating a narrow path toward a deeper glow. A low hum vibrated under his shoes, seemingly emanating from the concrete itself.

With a bit of trepidation, he stepped inside.

Phones littered the ground near the entrance—recording devices angled upward, screens frozen on abandoned camera apps. He crouched to examine one. The last captured frame showed the interior of the warehouse, a sliver of the glowing structure beyond it, and the blurred silhouette of someone tall standing in front of it.

A soft scrape echoed behind the glow.

Dane straightened.

The Portal Attendant stood motionless near the threshold ahead, a hood covering their face, their limbs hanging at slightly unnatural angles—as though the joints bent a few degrees further than human anatomy allowed. The Attendant raised one hand in a slow, beckoning gesture.

Dane’s stomach knotted.

This is a mistake, he thought. I should leave. I should get in my car and—

His thoughts meandered and fell away, derailed entirely as the warehouse pulsed with an expectant rhythm, its glow deepening, washing the walls in soft, impossible hues. In spite of everything in his gut telling him to run while he still could, the promise of a life beyond the grind tugged at him with the force of gravity. He felt helpless to resist.

He took a step, and then another.

The portal’s light swallowed him whole.

* * * * * *

Dane stumbled forward into a world drenched in sunlight—too bright, too even, the sky’s gradient immaculate and unnaturally smooth. A city stretched around him, complete with clean sidewalks, pristine glass towers, and empty streets washed in a calm, golden haze.

Silence settled across everything, a stillness so complete it reminded him of muted video footage rather than reality.

Two figures approached him with perfectly synchronized steps.

The returnees. The same ones he’d seen in the video clips earlier, who had gone through the portal and come back to tell of their wondrous experiences on the other side.

They looked precisely as they had in the videos, down to the same clothing, posture, and unbroken smiles. Dane’s skin prickled as they drew closer, their movements unnervingly fluid.

“Welcome,” the woman said, tone bright and weightless.

“We’re glad you made it,” the man added in the same cadence, as though the two shared a single breath.

Dane forced a wavering nod. “Is this… real?”

“It is everything you were promised,” the woman replied.

“Everything you desire,” the man echoed, the last syllable landing exactly as hers ended.

Their heads tilted at the same angle. Their smiles widened at the same pace.

Dane stepped back instinctively.

Beyond, the city shimmered.

A second later, however, a building across the plaza flickered, its façade temporarily losing texture. For a brief moment, it collapsed into a gray wireframe, jagged and incomplete, before snapping back into a clean reflective exterior.

Dane’s heart thumped hard in his chest, and he turned in a slow circle.  Something was wrong.

Across the street, a row of trees repeated in perfect sequence, with the exact same branches, leaf placement, and shadows. Everything was identical, far too perfect to be real.  It couldn’t be real.

This isn’t a world, the thought occurred to him. It’s a set. A simulation struggling to maintain its integrity and continuity itself under scrutiny.

The woman’s smile faltered for the first time. Before his very eyes, her cheek twitched with a static-like jitter before smoothing again. The man’s expression flickered in the same pattern.

Dane swallowed hard. “What’s happening to all of this?”

“You arrived,” the woman whispered.

“The Maw is pleased,” the man finished.

They froze mid-step. Their bodies straightened sharply, movements stiffening into mannequin-like rigidity as the air around them—if it even was air—thickened with a low vibration and grew heavy.

The ground trembled beneath Dane’s feet.

Seconds later, a rupture peeled through the city like a tear opening along invisible seams. Structures dissolved into cascading shards of fractured geometry. The sky warped, colors bending inward until the entire horizon twisted into a spiraling vortex of blinding white.

Dane stumbled as the pavement liquefied beneath him, then hardened again, forming metallic rails that snapped into position under his body. He fell onto a surface that shifted and locked into a conveyor platform, angling downward toward a rapidly widening gulf.

The two returnees melted into pools of shimmering fluid that retracted along the nearest fractured wall and vanished into the landscape’s exposed understructure.

The ground beneath the world—the real ground—waited below.

It was not earth, nor store or metal, but composed of flesh, threaded with organic conduits and biomechanical struts that pulsed like the arteries of a colossal organism. The false city had merely been a veneer, draped thinly across a living architecture.

The conveyor mechanism lurched, pulling Dane deeper.

He clawed at the rails, fingers scraping against surfaces that shifted like a hybrid of steel and cartilage. His voice cracked as he shouted, but the air swallowed the sound as though the space refused to carry it.

Beneath the shifting layers of the chamber, a sound rolled through the vastness—wet, rhythmic, deliberate chewing echoing like industrial machinery fused with something both alive and ravenous.

Ahead of him, a glow emerged.

The Maw revealed itself gradually, as though savoring the anticipation. A cavernous mouth yawned open, lined with rings of mirror-like teeth. Each reflective surface showed distorted versions of Dane, each of them stretching, twisting, and aging, splitting into fractal duplicates that dissolved upon eye contact.

The chewing paused, and The Maw inhaled. To his horror, the air rushed toward it, pulling Dane helplessly forward along the conveyor. Restraints grew from the platform, clamping around his wrists and ankles as if the machine were molding itself to fit him.

The chamber vibrated with an eager resonance, as though the entire dimension leaned closer in anticipation of his arrival.

Dane’s mind raced with screams he could no longer voice. Oh, he tried, but speech, he discovered, was an impossibility in this place, his vocal chords either disabled or eliminated, he wasn’t sure which. Unable to to shout for help, he tried to wrench free, but the restraints tightened, shifting subtly beneath his skin, gripping him more intimately than any known metals ever could.

Before him, The Maw’s teeth rotated slowly, glinting with reflected fragments of his own panicked face. Tendrils extended from the inner ring, brushing the air in his direction like sensory feelers savoring a scent.

The conveyor dipped, gravity tilted, and Dane’s world narrowed to a single trajectory.

He closed his eyes, not in acceptance, but in the final exhaustion of terror.

The Maw, undeterred, surged forward to meet him, its hunger insatiable.

In the walls of his mind, Dane let loose a blood-curdling scream, which echoed uselessly within the confines of his consciousness.

In this place, there would be no help. No mercy.

In this place, there was only hunger, raw and unsympathetic.

And though Dane had never before encountered The Maw, he knew intimately, with every tortured part of his soul.

Even as he begged for salvation from a God far removed and indifferent to his plight, he knew—

He was not the first, nor would he be the last.

And the Maw would not go unsatisfied.

* * * * * *

On Monday morning, a new DM appeared in thousands of random inboxes across X.

The message began: PRIORITY ACCESS: OPEN PORTAL — Early Admission for the 2045 Window. Limited to 200 registrants. Reserve your place now.

The sender’s profile picture showed a man in late thirties, with faint freckles, holding a smile a bit too long, standing unnervingly still. A man that looked an awful lot like Dane McBride.

Each of the recipients clicked, and were presented with a video of the same man. His speech was calm and enthusiastic, and the movements of his mouth and lips didn’t sync naturally with the cadence of his voices.  And yet, somehow, everyone that received the message was intrigued, drawn to it as if by unseen forces, lured in by the promises of access to realms “untouched by scarcity” and of “limitless opportunities.”

And somewhere, far beyond the limits of human perception, in a world altogether vast, horrific, and hungry, the Maw was pleased.