by Tal Klein
“Going for your second gig today?” Adina the admin said to me after I logged in. “Since when did you become a workaholic?”
“What can I say? I love what I do,” I answered while pulling on my dressiest pair of sneakers. “Actually, I’m late for drinks and need port fare.”
“World’s smallest violin,” replied Adina. “Anyhoo, I got an easy one for you. Another one looking to learn how to be funny.”
“Ah jeez, when will our robot overlords learn that the only thing funny about them is how desperately humorless they are? Shoot it over.”
“It’s already here. So long, hotshot.” Adina laughed as she disconnected.
“Hello,” said a nervous voice. “For the record, I am a he, not an it.”
All I could see on my comm stream was a black box. “If you don’t want people to call you an it, get yourself an avatar.”
“Is that a prerequisite?” it asked eagerly. “For being funny?”
A noob! Easy money.
“No. Look, I’m kind of in a rush. Let’s do something basic. Ask me about my pet peeves.”
My dog, a thirteen-year-old Portuguese water mutt, looked up at me from where she was lying on the front-door mat. Digital assistants had replaced pets for some people. Easier to clean up after, and they lived forever. Maybe it was because of my profession, but I was still a dog guy. I knelt down and gently pulled the mat on which the old girl was sprawled out of the way of the door. A belly rub later, I stepped out of my apartment and made for the stairwell, minimizing my comms to the upper-right quadrant of my field of vision so I wouldn’t trip and kill myself.
“Very well,” the app said. “Please describe one of your pet peeves.”
“My pet peeve is black.”
“You do not like black things?” it asked.
“No, I love the color black.”
“How is it possible for you to love the color black if it is your pet peeve?”
“I didn’t say my pet peeve was black—I said my pet peeve was black.”
“I fail to see the difference.”
“Ready for the money shot?”
“What is a money shot?”
“It’s what happens when I salt you, and you pay me.”
“Oh yes. I am prepared for that. It is the very purpose of this interaction.”
This poor app must have been compiled by a script kiddie.
“Good. Here goes. My pet, Peeve, is a black cocker-spaniel-slash-Portuguese-water-dog mix. Her original name was Eve, but when she was a puppy, she suffered from urinary incontinence. In other words, she peed everywhere. So I called her Peeve, and it stuck.”
“Your pet, Peeve, is your dog?”
“Yes, and Peeve is black.”
“Clever,” the app said emotionlessly. “Salt approved.”
I reminded myself to give Peeve a few extra treats when I got home.
“Great. By the way, you might say dogs with urinary incontinence are also one of my pet peeves.”
“Is that germane to the salt?”
“Well, my wife hates it when I call Eve ‘Peeve,’ so calling my pet Peeve is my wife’s pet peeve. Does that earn me any extra credit?”
“I’m afraid it does not qualify for additional chits.”
“Fine. Bye.”
I closed the comms window just as I pushed open the door to the street. Not my quickest payday, but close. In the early days of cognitive computing, they used to call it neurolinguistic hacking, and I was one of the fastest on the Eastern Seaboard.
Okay, so I wasn’t exactly contributing to the betterment of the human race. But as I’m sure you’re aware, a lot of the things that used to be “work” were taken over by technology a long time ago. Sure, you could build something with your hands instead of having it printed, and some people still chose to, but it was crazy expensive compared to the alternatives, so why bother? Most folks in 2147 spent their days interfacing with AI engines in different ways to earn chits. People rarely had any idea which system they were solving problems for, or to what end—they just knew it paid the bills. I think most of the time the apps just wanted somebody to talk to.
Did it ever bother me that what I did for a living basically made apps smart enough so that they wouldn’t need me anymore? Yes. But I never really thought about it all that much, and anyway, technology didn’t fuck me—International Transport did.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. On that Tuesday evening in June, I half jogged the two blocks from my apartment to the Washington Square Teleportation Center, or TC, in record time. My comms read 9:29 p.m. when I arrived.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t raining. New York City was having one of its rare clear summer nights, meaning there weren’t enough hydrocarbons in the air for the mosquitoes to metabolize.6 Usually the Manhattan skyline was obscured by the haze of a billions-strong swarm of mosquitoes that ate pollution and pissed water. All part of the magical dance of chemistry and genetic engineering that kept us humans alive despite our very best efforts to destroy ourselves.
I hope that by the time this gets read, we’ll have found a more elegant solution for air synthesis than noisy, disgusting bugs that have been genetically modified into flying steam reformers. I’m fine with them eating methane instead of blood and excreting water in lieu of spreading disease, but they’re still annoying as hell.
I crossed the street over to the Washington Square TC on West Fourth Street. Unlike several other places around the world where TCs were still lightly sprinkled with picketers harboring resentment at teleportation’s upheaval of the transportation industry, or religious kooks trying to convince people the technology was murder, New York had instantly embraced porting for its obvious benefits. Prior to this, most religious types had been ambivalent to teleportation. It was a form of freight, not transportation. The very notion of organic teleportation was considered a fool’s errand until 2109—technically impossible, owing to the fidget problem: living things are fidgety. Back then, a good real-time atomic model that could accurately predict and transmit what living things would do next was still a scientific wet dream.
But in my time, that problem had been solved twenty years ago. Porting had almost become too popular for some tastes as of late. For those who wanted to teleport across town, sometimes the length of the queue at the local TC might lead to a longer commute than a drone or a bus ride. IT kept promising the next generation of TCs would be able to teleport more than one person at a time, but gave no indication to when these promises would become a reality.
TC stations were hard to miss. They were small red rectangular buildings of concrete that popped out of the ground like a pox infection on the face of their immediate surroundings. The ingress and egress doors were adorned with the iconic International Transport lettering, and always flanked by public toilets. Why were all TCs next to public toilets? Well, there’s no good physiological explanation for it, but teleportation tended to do curious things to the human bladder.
When scientists first began porting living things, they discovered that complex organisms, starting with animals the size of cats or dogs, seemed to lose a few grams of weight every time they were transported. Interestingly, this was not the case when the same animals were euthanized and then teleported. Some religious types tried to spin the weight loss as evidence of soul separation, but since the ported beings seemed unaffected by the change, there were only two possible conclusions.
Either the soul was a regenerative thing, meaning creatures bigger than small cats just grew new ones. Or—much more plausibly—the weight loss had nothing to do with the soul and could be attributed to garden-variety packet loss.7 Pretty much everyone sided with packet loss.
I ambled onto the conveyer, which took me down into the belly of the station, gliding past gray cement overhangs and brushed gold pillars to the misters. As I passed through the gray fog bank, I felt the familiar tickle of floating nanos against my skin. I’d ported countless times before, but something about the ocean-spray-lik
e, metallic sensation of teeny tiny robots scanning my body still gave me goose bumps. The nanite mist not only cataloged every cell, clothing fiber, and arrangement of molecules inside every person who entered it, but it also checked for any contraband. Somewhere in some database, the nanite mist’s telemetry calculations and biological checksums merged to create my last-known full—my meta-image backup. The whole process took about five seconds. At the end of the moving walkway, a little arrow pointed me forward to the shortest line. As there were a dozen teleportation chambers and it was the post-rush-hour lag, there were only two people ahead of me.
Less than three minutes later I stepped into the compartment. The TC conductor already had my travel manifest dialed in, synchronized, and validated against my comms. A short, yellow-striped black barrier in front of the small Punch Escrow chamber lowered—my signal to enter. Beyond the barrier was a single, magnetically suspended chair, not unlike a passenger drone seat, but bordered in shiny metallic gold. I imagine the abundance of gold everywhere in TCs was intended to impart a perception of luxury.
Once I sat down, an automated conveyor silently ushered the levitating chair into the adjacent Punch Escrow chamber, the wall of which was marked with the universal symbol for staying put: a stencil of a person sitting on a chair, a clock on the wall beside them.
The Punch Escrow chamber itself was entirely painted light beige except for one black chalcedony wall that my chair pivoted ninety degrees to face. The word FOYER appeared on the wall. Teleportation origin rooms are marked FOYER, and destin rooms are marked VESTIBULE.
Underneath the FOYER sign, a stream of the conductor appeared on the wall to, once again, verify my identity and destination. He was a bald Asian guy who looked like he spent most of his life in a chair and wasn’t particularly happy about it. In a monotone, he reminded me to read and then tap the nodding emoji under a bunch of legal small print that holographically appeared in front of my face.
Teleportation was a rather head-trippy experience. There you were, by yourself, in a little room in one place. Then, all of a sudden, there you were, by yourself, in an identical room in another place. From the outside, it looked pretty much like people imagined it would back before it was feasible, only it happened in reverse order. The person being teleported got to where she was going about four seconds before she left. It was kind of a mind fuck.
Even weirder, nobody knew what it felt like to teleport. I mean, sure, we knew what it felt like to arrive somewhere, but the actual traveling part happened so fast, it didn’t really feel like anything. All we knew was that when the lights came back on, we were already on the other side.
When human teleportation was first introduced, there were plenty of streams that demonstrated the Punch Escrow process.8 One moment someone would be sitting in the chair; the next they’d be nothing but vapor and dust. It looked shocking, but it was harmless. As IT explained it, the brief, ghostly outlines of the teleportees were simply the layer of dust left behind when we were zapped away. The process was so quick that the water molecules, dead skin cells, and other particles on your clothing and body that didn’t get sent to the destin hung in the air for a beat, kind of like the bird-shaped cloud of dust the Road Runner left when he ran away from Wile E. Coyote in those old-school 1950s Warner Bros. animated shorts. I know, you probably think I’m lame for watching two-hundred-year-old cartoons, but what can I say: I liked the finer things.
I’d ported a whole bunch of times, so I wasn’t sure why I was thinking about all this just then. It’s like remembering that sudden unexpected nocturnal death syndrome is a real thing right before going to sleep.
Sometimes my brain was just an asshole.
Quickly, I scrolled through the small-print, holographic legalese floating before me. Then tapped the head-nodding emoji—I agree.
The room went totally dark for about three or four seconds, there was a bright white flash, and then the lights came up and I found myself in an identical room, with one difference—the wall before me read VESTIBULE.
“Welcome to the Times Square TC,” said the new conductor on the wall’s stream. Maybe she was a new hire or something, because her apple-cheeked face and genuine smile were much more welcoming than the lifeless gaze and dreary greeting of the previous conductor. Or maybe it was just more fun to see people arrive.
The levitating chair retreated to the antechamber. The barrier was lowered, and I stepped out into a TC around two kilometers from the one I’d just left. The trip had cost me almost a full day’s pay, but I got where I needed to be only seven minutes after I was supposed to meet Sylvia, as opposed to thirty-plus.
I jogged out of the TC into Times Square, dodging through the crowds of selfie-taking tourists and giant flashing holograms, then cut through a side alley to find myself in front of our old college haunt, the Mandolin.
The bouncer checked my comms, waving me through the front door. The place had gotten its name from its varnished antique bar counter. It was composed of discarded, broken string instruments frozen in lacquer. Mandolins mostly, with the occasional remnant of ukulele and guitar thrown in for artistic measure. The rest of the establishment had an early twenty-first-century brewpub feel, complete with actual beer taps, made-to-order cocktails, and quaint handwritten menus on real chalkboards.
I scanned the mostly empty interior. This being a Tuesday, only the serious drinkers were present. As I double-checked the ten or so faces, trusting my comms to recognize Sylvia even if she was facing in the opposite direction, I began to formulate a witty-but-plausible explanation for my tardiness.
Unfortunately, my brain was unable to come up with one before I was attacked from behind.
4 The term salting has its origin in cryptography, and it was originally used to protect against code-breaking by extending the length and complexity of a password. If the computer being utilized to crack a password did not have the password’s length or complexity of the salted password, then the password could not be found. Ultimately, password salting became obsolete as code-breakers pivoted their efforts from cracking technologies to more sophisticated methods of AI-enabled phishing (attempting to acquire passwords by masquerading as a trustworthy entity). Information security eventually evolved into battles among sophisticated AI engines, as users turned to AIs to protect them from being phished, and attackers created more and more sophisticated algos to dupe them. This led to security becoming the root of our currency: the owner’s demand for protecting data and the attacker’s demand for stealing it. The salt block-chain economy eventually became what is known as chits, and salting became the act of engaging with AI engines in order to improve their ability to protect or deceive. Because we had so many Als, salting also became a means of steady, gainful employment. Or not so gainful, if you asked my in-laws.
5 In 1928, a mathematician by the name of David Hilbert posed a challenge to the mathematical community—create an algorithm that takes a statement of first-order logic and answers yes or no as to whether it is universally valid. Having such an algorithm would mean that there is no such thing as an un-solvable problem. So the Entscheidungsproblem (which, surprise, surprise, is German for “decision problem”) is this: Does there exist an algorithm for deciding whether or not a specific mathematical assertion does or does not have a proof? The answer was no. But if you asked a computer scientist, they might answer “not yet.”
6 In the early twenty-first century, scientists at a company called Oxitec patented a mechanism for genetically modifying cells to produce a protein that stops mosquitoes from functioning normally. This technology was a precursor to modern gene-editing techniques that enabled the eventual conversion of mosquitoes, specifically the genus Aedes aegypti (known as the yellow fever mosquito prior to its genetic rehabilitation), into vaccine carriers, and more recently into living steam reformers.
7 Packet loss during teleportation was common and controlled by the Teleportation Control Assurance Protocol (TCAP). TCAP was a zero-loss sliding window protocol th
at provided an easy way to ensure reliable compression, delivery, and expansion of packets, so that individual TCs don’t need to implement logic for this themselves. Zero-loss was actually a misnomer because TCAP utilized packet-loss concealment, such that in the event that any data was lost, various interpolation or extrapolation algorithms were utilized to fill in the gaps. In other words, filling in what was missing by averaging the stuff before and after the gap. The acceptable packet-loss rate was less than 0.0000005%. Any teleportation that exceeded that rate was deemed a failure and the process was reverted. The origin conductor then determined whether to reattempt or cancel teleportation. Scientists eventually decided that packet loss was the reason large organisms lost a few grams of mass after teleportation. Think of it like a very expensive, very small diet.
8 Invented by the enterprising Swiss actuarial engineer Corina Shafer, the Punch Escrow was a patented, active-active fail-safe redundancy for the teleportation workflow. The Punch Escrow adds two checksum spaces, defined as “foyer” at the point of origin and “vestibule” at the point of destination. The role of these chambers was to safely cache each quark of a teleporting person at the foyer until his or her journey was confirmed a success at the vestibule. If unsuccessful, the person stayed in the foyer, unmoved. In other words, if something went wrong during your transport, then you never left.
SITUATION
THANKFULLY, MY WOULD-BE ASSAILANT turned out to be my wife and not some death-squad assassin she sent after me for being late. She wrapped her arms around my chest, her chin resting on my shoulder. “Guess who?” she said breathlessly into my ear.
“Marie Curie?” I turned around, trying to gauge how much trouble I was in. I might be biased, but Sylvia was good-looking—and I don’t just mean for a physicist. She had a pale heart-shaped face, a curvy figure, and catlike hazel-green eyes. Her long, straight hair was chestnut blond—not dirty blond, she’d tell you—and, as always, parted down the middle. Every movement she made was done with intention and confidence. In her hand was a near-empty cocktail glass, which may have accounted for the flirty expression on her face. My wife was usually a Happy Drunk.