Portals

 In the middle of the 21st century, scientists created the first teleportation device, and twenty years later, portals became commonplace, like microwaves. They were installed in houses under the guise of cabinets, opening the doors of which one could step directly onto the sea coast or, say, to an undeclared dacha of an official somewhere in Switzerland.

True, there was a minus: at each opening, the portals connected the cabinet with a random place on earth's land, so the method was not suitable for purposeful travel. Sometimes it was snowing or a scorpion crawled out of the door. Sometimes the portal would open somewhere in the mountains and create a draft of the house.

But portals became fashionable anyway. On a good day, opening the door, you could conquer hilly Scotland or enter the Louvre through the toilet, bypassing the ticket office. Friends often sent messages to each other: "The Maldives has opened, take a brazier, fishing rods, Uncle Venya and come to us faster."

However, life did not last long. The authorities of different countries began to catch illegal tourists. In addition, the portals worked in both directions, therefore, leaving the door unattended, it was possible to find forty persons in the pantry of a Hindu family.

Moreover, having installed sun loungers far from the portal, one could get lost. A typical picture has become when at Naypyidaw airport a half-naked man proves his Russian citizenship to a Myanmar passport control officer, showing the Made in Kostroma label on the back of his family panties.

Contemplation came into vogue: having opened a portal in a good place, people sat at the entrance to breathe fresh air or, melting from the heat somewhere in Gabon, cooled the room with Siberian frosts. If the portal opened in the wrong place, someone preferred to smoke and throw a cigarette butt on the Arctic glacier, while someone simply took out the trash so as not to run to the garbage chute.

Banana skins, condoms, annoying cats, and old iPhones, which lost their relevance a week after their debut, began to be thrown into portals. Everything that was crushed with its mass and reminded of the bad was sent to the portals. Sometimes they were relieved of their needs. Special firms for a reasonable fee disposed of cars and even slag heaps in them. Enterprises poured poisonous waste and auditors into portals.

The world is incredibly cleansed. Garbage chutes stopped stinking. The trash disappeared in the courtyards. Industrial pollution has decreased. People have become more fun and free. A sign has appeared: if you throw the unnecessary into the portal, the soul will be cleansed and open the doors to a new one. Photos of exes, manuscripts of unsuccessful novels, bad contracts, and those lovers that in the old days would have been hiding in the closet were sent to the portals. Portals ate everything without a trace and were relieved of remorse. There were so many empty spaces on Earth that the probability of getting to one point, where a hungry lover was waiting, tended to zero.

Ten years later, people began to notice that behind the portals more and more often there is a garbage dump with sour smells and hordes of flies. Sometimes I had to open the portal fifteen times before I could find a more or less suitable place to take a piss on a full moon overlooking a waterfall or at least the wall of an institution. And then there were no such places at all: there was only rubbish all around, shaggy cats and wild inspectors.

Then people hammered the doors of the portals with boards and sealed them with construction foam. They began to take out the garbage to the bins and pour the waste, as before, into the nearest river. The stench in the entrances and garbage dumps in the courtyards returned. Only now there was nowhere to escape from them.