What you need to know about 2213

The Gate is travel from city to city, run on the airport principle: it connects city with city, never two points in the same city. A large city has one gate station per district, with tickets, checks and waiting times. Gates only lead to places on Earth. The worldwide network was built between 2178 and 2205; since then, travel has been taken for granted. Where there is no gate, you drive. LIMEN has its own service portal at every branch.

Forty years after Mecca. Cities lie on three levels: on the ground, in sky cities and under water. Everything runs on electricity; paper has all but disappeared. Blood tests are mandatory. Religious sites have airlocks, guards and lists; above many doors it says “Humans only”. Every phone gets an Ori alert, like a disaster alert. People buy charms that do nothing and have got used to the rooms the way they have to traffic deaths: you know it happens, just never where.

Ori is Japanese and means both cage and fold. The room closes around people without warning. No one falls in; they are standing inside it, mid-step. The Ori copies the place and warps it: a bus becomes a slaughterhouse, a classroom a labyrinth. Impossible space, reliable rules. It is set off by a person with Omega blood, usually without them knowing it. The Ori ends when its carrier dies, when the task is completed or when all the players are dead.

Above the centre of every Ori floats a die, large enough to read the rules from the ground. It turns slowly, in the language and script of whoever is reading. All rules apply at once. It states conditions; it explains nothing. What a violation costs is not written there; you learn it from whoever gets it wrong first. Every Ori rolls its own rules. And there is always a task: the rules tell you how to lose, the task how to win.

Omega is a blood type, not a title; the correct phrase is “to carry Omega”. The change got its name – the last letter of the Greek alphabet – years after Mecca, when blood could be tested for it. Since then, blood tests have been mandatory, and they almost never find anything. A positive test means arrest, which is exactly why anyone who suspects something stays away from testing. Omega cannot be cured. No amulet, no ritual, no device helps against an Ori. At LIMEN, such a person is called a carrier.

LIMEN distinguishes three forms. Triangle and rectangle are small rooms and the usual case: a train carriage, a basement, a stairwell. The funnel is the rare large, unfolded room that opens downward and pulls everything in. The form depends on strength, not on the carrier’s level. It can only be seen from inside; from outside, a device measures only the edge. A closed Ori takes only the people in the room where it began: five in a car, twenty in a carriage.

“In training, everything that lives in an Ori and didn’t fall in is called Flotsam.” The word means wreckage adrift and has no plural; you don’t ask how many, but how much Flotsam. It is built from whatever the room has to give: bicycles, pipes, sheet metal, lanterns. No two look alike. It runs over walls and ceilings, not through them. In the language of the Rivers, the Harvester is the place Flotsam comes from. Not every Ori has one.

An Ori is a sphere. From outside, you only see its rim in our world, the edge; you can walk along it and measure it. While the game is being played, blood runs from the walls outside, from the stone itself. At the moment it closes, it runs from every wall at once, and at the cordon someone calls out: “The Ori’s shut!” Then the survivors are standing outside, all at the same time. From some, nothing comes back; their families receive an urn of sand.

LIMEN is Latin and means threshold. The worldwide organisation was founded around 2178, about five years after Mecca. It is not a military and not a police force. It sends people into Oris who are meant to win the game and, if possible, bring everyone out. If that fails, the carrier is killed, because that closes the room. The motto: “Better one dies than many.” Day to day, LIMEN is an agency with a lot of paperwork on tablets. Civilians and the press dismissively call its people “the Jackets”.

A troop carries a letter, not a number – short enough for the radio and for the jacket. The letters belong to the branch; every city has its own A. Yuu’s troop is M, known as “Tokyo M”, the youngest troop in Tokyo. If a troop is wiped out, it is rebuilt with new people under the same letter. The duty jacket is black, with a pale stripe across the chest and a single large letter. Wearing it open is against regulations.

Every River carries a weapon that belongs to them, not to the service. It is their key: with it, they cut a hole into the Ori from outside – the Cut, a violet line that gives off no light but takes it in. Behind them, it closes again. From inside, nothing works; you only get out when the game ends. Blades, not calibres. Anyone who loses their weapon in an Ori is out of the service, because without it they can never get back in.

The Beacon measures the Ori from outside and never goes in. Their device sees only the edge; depth, corridors, rules and creatures stay black. From the unrest at the edge, the device infers the carrier’s level: a Drift doesn’t know what they are – the usual case. A Breaker knows and uses it. Undertow and Surge are the severe cases. It is an inference, not a measurement: “The device says Drift. It’s been wrong before.”