They Only Play Minor Chords In Hell
The Victorians had been the first to connect the ideas of climate change with the growing instances of natural wormholes appearing around the world. Small, organically occurring rectangular portals which would periodically appear in lush rainforests and remote wilderness, and contain the ability for humans to travel thousands of miles away in a single step. Explorers deep in the jungles of Borneo would discover such windows, and find themselves miles from anywhere in the Australian outback. Lost in the darkest bamboo forests of Southern Japan, those brave enough to enter the portal would be transported to the outskirts of an Inuit tribe’s homestead. Mathematicians and physicists attempted to make sense of what was happening, but attempts to reproduce the effects fell consequence to the unknown destinations the travelers found themselves in, and the length of time it would take to tell anyone who cared about it.
Over time the portals became understood with some predictability and repeatability. Even though their destinations continued to be randomized, their occurrence was able to be mapped with precision and foresight. The deeply curious would find themselves camped out overnight in the depths of a remote rainforest hoping for a glimpse of the exceptional phenomena, which had only ever been recorded by the tales of those who had taken the trip through and lived. Humidity and temperature became supporting variables in being able to predict when the portals would appear, and as the planet warmed, the portals increased in frequency but also in volatility. They became more unstable in where they would deposit those who entered. Sometimes fatally placing them in the middle of the ocean, or inside the certain death of a collapsing volcano. Those who entered had always been risk takers, but once the planet had surpassed the one degree celsius threshold of oceanic warming, the portals ceased to place humans on land.
The portals’ increasingly erratic behavior then began to move off-world, depositing humans on the moon. In the few seconds they had left of life, the portal travelers would find themselves gripped in the agony of gasping for air as the vacuum of space consumed them, and their tracking vitals fell silent. The planet warmed. However, humans were to take advantage of the gruesome outcome in being able to finally create a viable shortcut between earth and the moon. With predictability and repeatability, humans were now able to begin the process of colonizing the lunar surface by using the portals to transport resources from earth to outer space with the minimum of time and effort. Over the next decade, the initial explorers transported to the moon had become thousands of colonists now inhabiting it. Thousands grew to hundreds of thousands, and by the turn of the next century, the moon had become a viable destination for the next step in human habitation as the earth’s climate became increasingly unstable. As the lunar communities looked upon the scorched earth above them from their gravity-controlled homes, they encouraged those left to take the one-way ticket in joining them on the new frontier.
Except it wasn’t a one-way ticket. The portals had also begun to appear on the moon. But it wasn’t the humans who were going through them. It was an unfamiliar civilization using them to arrive.
