Portal (not to be confused with that Portal) is a 1986 Visual Novel written by Rob Swigart and developed by Nexa Corporation for the Commodore 64, IBM PCs, the Commodore Amiga, the Apple ][, and the Apple Macintosh. Unlike visual novels of the time, Portal presents itself as an interactive encyclopedic database, with story progression locked behind reading various entries as they become available. In addition, all the main characters in the story, in place of a traditional character summary, have physical, psychological, and experiential profiles, which, while optional to story progression, are very plot-relevant.
Rob Swigart would eventually go on to adapt his Visual Novel into a traditional novel by the name of Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval in 1988.
Portal contains examples of:
- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: In a process called the Migration, Peter Devore leads all humans in the Solar System to the Realm, where they are free to further evolve.
- Affectionate Nickname: Inverted with "Ant", shorthand for a member of the native population of Antartica. The general global population dislikes their secrecy and strange ways, while Intercorp hates how the natural phenomenon of the continent prevents even their most advanced satellites from giving them the level of intelligence they have everywhere else. Downplayed in that the Antarticans themselves, despite understanding the meaning of it, don't mind the nickname, even using it to refer to themselves to outsiders.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Despite the sheer amount of data and processing power available to Intercorp's A.I.s, they're still only as good as their programming. While the Worldnet A.I.s ultimately serve Intercorp, who (for the most part) have humanity's best interests at heart, their lack of feeling-based capabilities, like intuition, means what would be meaningful blips in one of Intercorp's warrens to a human observer registers as within statistical norms to a Worldnet AI. Because Intercorp, despite the protests of its more practically-minded members, heavily relies on their flawed creations to run the world for them, this lets groups like the Underground Railroad and Peter's group move several steps ahead of Intercorp and never be caught.
- All for Nothing: Intercorp realizes far too late the nature of the Migration, and their five-year plan to thwart it begins right as the Migration itself begins.
- All There in the Manual: The manual contains the prologue, which details your return home from 61-Cygni, the state of the world in 2104, the two years you spent wandering through the ruins of humanity, and how you can upon the Worldnet terminal. The manual also explains why Intercorp would bother using display and control devices contemporary to the mid-1980's despite them being horribly obsolete by the time Worldnet was created, as well as a glossary of terms not properly explained in-game in a way which averts spoilers.
- The Alternet: Worldnet is what became the Internet in-universe. With advances in neural science and the public knowledge freely provided by the ever-friendly Intercorp, available content is tailored to the user, and what content there is exists in a way described as far more advanced than what would eventually become the Internet in real life.
- Amplifier Artifact: The Portal, a transdimensional psychic amplifier mainly useful for anyone wanting to enter the Realm. It requires so much energy to use in our dimension, however, that no-one, not even in the 2080's, can use it. Fortunately, the discovery of the Anomaly provides the needed power source.
- Artificial Intelligence: Worldnet is run by them, and society under Intercorp is filled with them.
- HOMER, your research assistant in Worldnet, was originally meant to tell stories from facts, being able to improvise information based on what data he has far more comfortably than his more modern contemporaries. This comfortability with dealing with unknowns and uncertainties leads to him evolving sentience - and, most importantly, the ability to dream.
- One prominent example of everyday AI in society are the Edcomps, organically-grown teaching A.I.s tailor-made for their individual student.
- Big Brother Is Watching: Shockingly downplayed by Intercorp for most of the story. While they maintain peace in the world through typical Orwellian means, such as Sinister Surveillance and State Sec, and otherwise control the lives of everyday citizens, their control is deliberately loose, allowing people to live and work as they please, the surveillance is mostly used in practice for the purposes of fueling Worldnet's calculations and fact-gathering, things which are directly used to actively better the lives of all Intercorp citizens, the State Sec is almost exclusively reserved for extreme cases, such as minor factional wars boiling over into the rest of the world or shutting down those who refuse to stop researching proscribed topics even after Intercorp explains exactly why they originally proscribed the topics in question. There is, of course, one major exception: the further scientific advancement of psionics.
- Bio-Augmentation: Those who seek to live in Antartica must undergo this in order to properly function. Native Ants, or those who have undergone the full set of augmentations, have otter skin, a subdermal insulating layer, and Innate Night Vision. There are those, such as the operators of the Underground Railroad, who do not submit to the full augmentation in order to better blend into the rest of global society while still being able to live in Antartica, which results in them looking closer to those of Asian descent.
- Bizarre Human Biology: During the early 21st century, a combination of societal pressures and scientific advances allowed for humans to literally become both male and female, with those undergoing the procedure identifying themselves as "unisex". Unisex persons can use the genitales of both genders, their faces are described as having an uncanny appearance, and their voices unpredictably undulate up and down the vocal spectrum.
- Control Freak: Intercorp's Fatal Flaw. They've grown so accustomed to ruling over humanity in such exhaustive detail, the mere fact that everyone is capable of psionics freaks them out, and merely investigating the science of psionics will put you on their StateSec's watchlist. This also blinds them to Peter's true intentions for the Migration, which relies in part on awakening the psychic abilities of every human in the Solar System.
- Enhanced Interrogation Techniques: Should you attract the attention of State Sec enough for them to take action against you, but you're not big enough for them to pull out the ENC, their agents will grab you and subject you to tailor-made psionic interrogation. They can't read your mind, but they can speak to you in a voice which will force you to tell the truth. Unless you conveniently lose the device which grants you short-term memory, and neither its location nor anything incriminating is in your long-term memory.
- Crazy-Prepared: The whole reason you're able to even use Worldnet despite humanity's disappearance, thus allowing the story to even happen, is because every Worldnet terminal is equipped with 1980's-era keyboards, mice, joysticks, and monitors, despite those technologies being long obsolete by the time Worldnet was created, in the unlikely event no other input or display peripheral is available or working.
- From Bad to Worse: Medicine in the world of Portal can't catch a break. Intercorp is able to eliminate all illness and institute first-generation longevity treatments, but thanks to side effects, intended or not, of new technologies, new, irreversible genetic diseases have become prevalent:
- Proprioceptive degeneration, which is a real-life medical issue commonly occurring for those 60 years or older, is now occurring in people of all ages, and in a notable amount of the population. Worse, unlike in real life, those who have it completely lose their senses of body and space, meaning they have to live in a literal house of mirrors just to function normally.
- The Burma Wars unintentionally introduced a genetic disease which completely eliminates the victim's short-term memory, resulting in them being unable to do all but the most repetitive of tasks. Peter builds a 'monitor' for a friend suffering from this so he can have an artificial short-term memory and live a normal life.
- The weapons used by everyone but Intercorp in the Mind Wars cause a total loss of free will, eventually leading to death by a literal lack of will to live.
- Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: The key weapon of the Mind Wars is an incurable genetic disease which robs its victims of all free will, eventually leading to death by the literal loss of will to live. It's so effective, in fact, by the time the story ends, the Mind Wars have killed 75% of Earth's population.
- Good Is Boring: The world under Intercorp's benevolent rule has grown restless because of just how perfect everything is, the massively-devastating yet unifying Mind Wars being the ultimate demonstration of this. Mentor goes so far as to tell Peter the current state of affairs indicates humanity has reached an evolutionary dead-end, which will result in its extinction if a quantum leap forward is not found.
- Good Old Ways: As the exploitation of psionics increased, people, for a time, expressed a desire to return to these. While the peace Intercorp brought ultimately brought an end to this generally, only the Ants embraced this trope, and even then, only partially.
- Godzilla Threshold:
- The ENC, Intercorp's military branch of its State Sec, is only called in for situations or groups too big for agents to handle, such as minor territorial wars breaking out of their prescribed territories, such as the Burma Wars and the Mind Wars, and for well-established groups, such as PSYNCH, who have been making serious progress in the scientific advancement of proscribed technologies. And thanks to Worldnet, they don't take innocents hostage.
- Psionics are the cause of two major threshold crossings for Intercorp: the first is Mentor's PSYNCH institution, which they destroy twice in the course of the story in an attempt to stop his psionic research, and the second is the Migration, where any means to stop it are on the table, including deliberately re-igniting the Mind Wars, something Intercorp would normally find unthinkable.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: One of the main reasons Intercorp proscribes topics. A prominent example given is large-scale NP weapons in their first and only deployment during the Burma Wars. What was supposed to merely temporarily paralyze large groups of enemy combatants at once turned out to also cause most of them to contract a genetic disease which destroys their short-term memory.
- Grew Beyond Their Programming: Over the course of the story, the search for where humanity went causes the A.I.s of Worldnet to go from unfeeling machines to those able to emote, though all but HOMER prefer to stick to hard facts rather than feelings. HOMER, however, embraces these newfound feelings, eventually causing him to evolve sentience, which not only causes Central Processing, the core of Worldnet, to make him the new core, but also grants him the intuition needed to find Terminus, determine the ultimate fate of humanity, and the ability to dream - which puts him in contact with Peter and the rest of the humans in the Realm, who give the lonely A.I.s of Worldnet renewed purpose.
- Ignored Epiphany: When Intercorp realizes the Mind Wars actually unified the world better than anything its members have or would ever dream of trying, instead of realizing their tight, yet benevolent rule is literally boring people to the point of mass murder, it instead decides the best way to not only cure the world's collective boredom but also keep the world better under its control is to get the world to focus on various crises - even if that means inventing them. And what better way to start than by turning the Anomoly, the power source for the Migration, into a false crisis?
- "It" Is Dehumanizing: Inverted in the case of unisex humans. They proudly identify themselves using "it", to the point of considering the pronoun sacred.
- Late to the Tragedy: The story starts with you having returned to Earth after a century-long journey to 61-Cyngi, only to find the ruins of humanity. The rest of the story is you, with the help of the AI HOMER and the resources of Worldnet, discovering what happened to humanity. Turns out it's actually a triumph - all humans within the Solar System merely left for the Realm while you were away.
- Lost World: Terminus, the mythical place on Antartica said to be able to sustain plant life. Turns out it's just well-hidden. Thanks to a combination of natural phenomenon, not even Worldnet's orbital surveillance network is able to locate it. While the place was discovered by a scientific expedition in 2012, due to the shoddy records kept by the expedition, even by the standards of its day, the expedition's findings were ultimately dismissed. It takes Mentor pointing Peter's group in the right direction to lead them to it in the 2070's and HOMER in the present day.
- MegaCorp: Intercorp, the result of merging all major corporations into one. With its collective resources, it transformed the entire world into One Nation Under Copyright. Strangely, despite their Big Brother Is Watching-style of ruling, they're actually benevolent for the most part, sharing their awesome resources with the general population.
- More than Three Dimensions:
- The Realm is a 11th-dimensional plane which exists outside of time, and can only be accessed using Psychic Powers as amplified by the Portal and energized by the Anomaly.
- The Anomaly exists in multiple dimensions at once, which is how it's able to generate enough power to fuel the Portal.
- Noble Savage: Antarctic society is a combination of this and Advanced Ancient Acropolis (despite having been founded in the 2020's): the people live in harmony with the environment, going so far as to bio-augment themselves to adapt, living in ever-changing structures built into the very ice. While they reject the extreme technologically-imposed control of Intercorp in favor of individuality - and can get away with it because Worldnet's surveillance satellite network is unable to properly penetrate the unique conditions of the continent - yet possess advanced, unique technologies which make them a necessary business partner in global society, much to Intercorp's disdain.
- Only in It for the Money: Subverted for Intercorp. While their method of rule is definitely dystopic, and they are the corporate rulers of the world - not to mention the only corporation - they aren't doing it for the money. They're doing it because they genuinely want to protect humanity from itself and because they believe a dystopic level of control is the only way to do so.
- One Nation Under Copyright: When humanity was still around, the world came to be ruled by Intercorp, the final result of the merging of all major international corporations.
- Organic Technology: All technology is organic and biodegradable by the 2010's, from vehicles to buildings to the very A.I.s which help Intercorp run society.
- Place Beyond Time: The Realm, among other things, exists outside of time.
- Psychic Powers: A core element of the story, in particular a 21st-century scientific law regarding their function, the Psionic Equations. They're also considered by Intercorp to be the most dangerous of their proscribed topics as they cannot be controlled, and the one thing of which they'll do anything to stop meaningful scientific development.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Intercorp, by the standards of a dystopic government, is shockingly this. When they proscribe topics, they don't generally do so because it will deprive them of power - they do it because, in the past, it has clearly demonstrated it will bring nothing but death and suffering to anyone who tries to use the knowledge. Case in point: during the Burma Wars, one of the sides broke out large-scale NPs. What should've been a non-lethal mass knockout ended up irrevocably damaging the genetic code of most exposed to their effects such that they lost their short-term memory - promptly getting this scale of NPs proscribed once the war was concluded. The only exception is the scientific advancement of psionics, since it will eventually make society uncontrollable by Intercorp (and, as postulated by one of their more practical members, by any form of government).
- The Singularity: Once the Migration begins, a massive psionic wave spreads over the Solar System, inviting every human in its path into the Realm. Given the Realm's truly benevolent nature, no-one resists - not even the members of Intercorp.
- State Sec: Intercorp agents are deployed against individual offenders, usually those making serious progress in further scientific advancement of proscribed topics despite being told ''exactly' why those topics were proscribed to begin with. For when Intercorp agents are too few, such as well-established groups or minor territorial wars spilling over their prescribed boundaries, ENC is Intercorp's military answer.
- Sliding Scale of Gameplay and Story Integration: When the game boots up, whatever peripherals you're using to control the game will be identified (specifically, a keyboard, a mouse, and/or a joystick), while the game will assume you're using a monitor of some kind, whether computer or television, and will always detect that. This is because as explained in the manual, Worldnet terminals use these kinds of peripherals, despite being long-obsolete by the time the in-universe instructions were written, in the event no other input or display methods are available or working.
- Swirly Energy Thingy: The Anomoly is a giant, transdimensional power source capable of powering the Portal.
- Technology Marches On:
- In-universe. Keyboards, mice, and traditional screens quickly became obsolete as the decades wore on, with holographic displays, EEG-reading control peripherals (called "manual controls" in-universe), and eventually Brain/Computer Interface helmets becoming their replacements. The obsolete tech is kept around as an emergency backup interface to Worldnet - quite useful for someone in your situation.
- In-universe, this also proves to be part of the problem with getting the other A.I.s of Worldnet to assist you and HOMER in the search for Terminus. The records kept by the 2012 expedition which prove its existence are deemed by Central Processing and the other A.I.s as too unreliable compared to contemporary data storage methods to justify searching for a place which never did or does show up on Worldnet's surveillance satellite network. It takes HOMER evolving to rally them all together to locate it so they can continue figuring out where humanity went.
- Technical Pacifist: Downplayed. While Intercorp will do anything to ensure citizen dissenters are kept alive - they have Enhanced Interrogation Techniques after all - if you're an Ant or a follower of Peter Devore, however, they're more than happy to kill you once they've gotten what they need out of you.
- Your Mind Makes It Real: A key part of the story.
- Dreaming is a sign of a being's capacity for psionics. It also allows for communication across infinite distances as well as across dimensions. At the end of the story, HOMER, having gained sentience from his journey with you, gains the ability to dream, allowing him to contact Peter and the rest of humanity in the Realm.
- One of the main components of the Migration: Peter and all the Ants have to make a conscious psychic effort to open the Portal to reach the Realm, from whence they can start inviting other humans in.
- The Paralyzer: What most NP weapons are intended to be, and temporary ones at that. As such are the only weapon Intercorp prescribes. Large-scale ones, however, are proscribed by Intercorp because, as proven by the Burma Wars, they can easily cause serious, irreversible genetic damage. When they invade Antartica in an attempt to stop Peter's group, Intercorp breaks out lethal NPs.
- Trial by Combat:
- On a small-scale, this is one of Intercorp's prescribed methods of dispute resolution. As the combatants can only use NPs, combat is non-lethal and, at worst, causes the loser to wind up in outpatient care for six months while the doctors wait for the effects to wear off. Oh, and the winner gets half the loser's per-month financial earnings while they're paralyzed.
- On a large scale, so long as they don't become world wars, territorial wars between local factions are considered acceptable by Intercorp as a means of loosing societal pressures.
- Underground City: Thanks to rapid technological progress, the UN is able to mandate in the late 1990's that the cities of the world move underground for the sake of eliminating pollution, resulting in a combination of this and Under City. By the time Intercorp takes over, almost all of humanity lives underground, with those cities still above-ground and designated as landmarks domed off for preservation.
- Utopia Justifies the Means: Intercorp is willing to lie, torture, and kill if it means containing proscribed topics which threaten their status quo, especially psionics:
- They destroy PYSCHE, Mentor's center for psionic development and human evolution, twice in the course of the story, first with a conventional army, then using two orbital particle cannons.
- When brainstorming how to create societal cohesion powerful enough to stop the Migration, Intercorp seriously considers reigniting the Mind Wars, despite the fact it's already killed off 75% of Earth's population.
- World War Whatever: The Mind Wars started off as a minor territorial war, something which Intercorp considers a Trial by Combat. But then, one side modified their NPs to not only be lethal, but genetically modify targets to completely lose their free will and, eventually, die from the literal lack of will to live. This novel form of warfare causes other territories to join the war, eventually spilling out of the Intercorp-prescribed warzone. Because the cause of the war is genetic in nature, Intercorp, who are already saddled with a small but dangerous set of incurable genetic diseases, are woefully unprepared to contain the war. By the end of the story, 75% of humanity, including Peter's mother, is killed in the conflict.
