Gates

Ocelot engineer Sandy Nelson’s job has gone from dream to drudgery. But when one of the company’s last pure research experiments—generating wormholes in space-time—accidentally connects into a network of intergalactic gates and teleports a surprised and angry giant, four-legged vixen into the middle of the laboratory building, things suddenly become far too exciting. All Amarylis the Gatekeeper wants is to go home, and she can help them reconstruct the gate temporarily in order to do it. But both the company’s management and the federal government want to use Amarylis’s knowledge for their own ends. Can Sandy and some of his coworkers help Amarylis before her patience runs out—and before the powers-that-be create an intergalactic incident they won’t be able to handle?

Gates started as a never-finished submission to “Megamorphics,” the quasi-legendary macrophile APA. When I picked it up again, I kept the two main characters, the premise, and the inciting incident, and threw out literally everything else. Sometimes that’s what you have to do. The new (finished) version, running about 32,000 words, was serialized on my Patreon in 2024.

Contents

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12