by Tal Klein
“How many drinks are you on?” I said as we migrated toward the bar.
She pretended to calculate a large number on her fingers. “Somewhere in the logarithm of eight hundred and sixty-four. Time for you to catch up.” She motioned to the bartender, Richard, then faced me. “Is there anything you’d like to say to me, husband, on the occasion of our anniversary?”
Sylvia’s lips naturally curved upward at the corners, giving the appearance she was always thinking about something funny. But right then I didn’t feel like laughing. Yes, I was the one who was late, but I didn’t like being called out on it. I know, I was a jerk.
“You know me,” I said lightly. “‘I don’t believe in apologies; I believe in actions.’” The phrase was an old joke between us, something our college physics professor would say whenever someone was late to class.
“O-kay then. Richard,” she said as the bartender arrived, “can you please bring my truant spouse a lubricant for his rusty sense of decorum?”
“Gibson?” Richard raised his eyebrows to me, his look confirming my suspicion that I was a complete fuckup. I shrugged. He turned to Sylvia.
“While something in the ‘sour grapes’ varietal would be apropos, I will have another lemon drop, but on the rocks this time, Richard,” she said. “I don’t want to be seeing double.”
Richard nodded—likely reckoning too late—and went about his business. Sylvia smiled at me, her fingers tap-tapping on my leg. “So I have some good news. It looks like my project might be ready for regulatory approval sooner than we thought. I was thinking we might be able to start on our own little project. Iterate Byram dot next?” She gave me a sidelong glance, that mouth of hers twitching upward.
“Seriously?” I said as Richard set down our drinks. “You know, parenthood actually works a lot better with two parents in the same physical space at the same time. They’ve done studies.” I took a sip of my Gibson, the gin burning on its way down my throat.
“I just told you—it won’t be like this forever. In six months you’ll be looking at a changed woman. Much more bandwidth for you and me and others.” She took a sip of the translucent yellow concoction in her tumbler, fixing me with a flirty stare.
“I don’t know. I realize it’s good for the species and all that, but the thought of little copies of me running around, it sounds—”
“Cute? Adorable? Naughty?” she said, moving her hand farther up my leg.
“I was gonna say ‘creepy.’”
I wasn’t entirely opposed to having kids. A year ago I likely would have jumped in with both feet. But since Sylvia got promoted, we’d grown distant from each other, throwing ourselves into work and other distractions. Lately I’d been wondering if the mom and dad we could have been were still inside us. “I just think right now’s not a good time to bring another human being into the equation.”
“You sure about that?” said Sylvia, leaning forward to breathe a lemon-vodka-scented whisper into my ear. “Cause I have some proofs I can whip out right now.”
“Now now?” I asked. “I’m not sure I’m in a theorem-proving mood.”
“I’ve got plenty of data. We’ll port home and I’ll show it to you.” She gently bit my ear, her words hot on my cochlea.
“I’m not against it,” I conceded. “But I think before two people have children, they at least need to be honest with each other.”
She sighed and sat back. “Do you really want to do this again? I barely snuck out of work as it is, and Bill’s been riding me for the last month so our project will be finished on time. So please, can we just enjoy what little time we do have together? We both knew what I signed on for when I took this job.”
“Did we? And, remind me, what is it you’re almost done with? Oh, that’s right. I can’t know. So please excuse me if I don’t take IT’s word for it.”
This had been an ongoing argument between us for the last year. Since she’d moved to her new department, security was so tight that Sylvia couldn’t even talk to me on comms while she was at work. If we needed to communicate with each other, she had to walk across the street to a coffee shop. “Babe, you know the work I’m doing, it’s classified….” She smoothed out a pleat in her skirt, then looked back at me. “But what we could accomplish with it, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Maybe several lifetimes. Once Honeycomb is in production, I promise, I will refocus on us.”
“Super,” I said, ladling on the sarcasm. “I’m sure by then, the reveal will make it all worth it.”
Sylvia took a big gulp of her cocktail and crunched on the ice cubes. “You know it kills me that I can’t talk to you about it. It’s driving me crazy. There’s so much to figure out in so little time. It’s kinda breaking my brain.”
“Well, if it’s breaking your brain, it’ll probably fry mine.” I took another swallow of my drink.
She blew out a drunken breath. “Oh, I doubt that. It’s actually not the science that’s hard.”
“What do you mean? Isn’t that what you’re in charge of? The science?”
“Kind of. Oh, it’s hard to explain.” She closed her eyes, massaging her temples. “Okay, think about it like this: You remember the transporters on Star Trek?”
Throughout our final year together in college, Sylvia and I had spent many a night bingeing the classic TV show as a respite from our studies. The special effects were delightfully archaic, as was a lot of the science, but that was part of its charm. I answered in a terrible impression of Kirk, “Beam me up, Scotty!”
“Exactly. Well, they had the science all wrong with the transporters.”
“As you’ve never failed to mention every time it comes up, yes.”
“Shhh!” she said, adding a few more h’s than necessary. “So, like, imagine every time Scotty beamed up Kirk, there was a gap of time between the moment Kirk got scanned on the Enterprise, and the time he arrived wherever he was going, a gap of traveling time relative to the distance he was being teleported. So, the farther the distance, the longer the wait. During which, Kirk would just sort of hang out on the Enterprise, toying with his tricorder.”
“Is that a masturbation euphemism?”
“Ha!” she laugh-snorted loudly. “No, but that’s funny. Okay, so, like, my question is, how long is it okay for Kirk to wait?”
“I dunno. Seconds? A minute?”
Sylvia took another big swallow of her drink. “Let’s go with that. A minute. My problem is, while Kirk’s waiting, what if he gets a little bored and suddenly has this life-changing epiphany?”
“You mean, like, ‘Holy shit, I’m in love with Uhura!’”
She rolled her eyes, but continued. “Sure, I guess that could work. So he realizes he loves Uhura, and he sends her a message asking her to marry him or something. He sends her this message and then zap! He’s on the Klingon ship drinking bloodwine with Khan. Except he doesn’t remember ever sending the message because what happened between the time he got scanned and the time he arrived doesn’t sync. Kirk never had the Uhura love epiphany.”
“Oh. Oh damn. That could have been a great plot for an episode!”
“Right? Totally!” Sylvia only said totally when she was wasted. She carried the o, which I always thought was adorable. “Let’s bring it back home, okay? Let’s say we put a TC on a satellite and send it to a habitable planet in the Aquarius constellation. So now we have a TC on some planet eighteen light-years away and we want to teleport someone there. Let’s call her Astronaut Billy.”
“Is she hot?”
“Yes, but I’m hotter. Stay with me. So it takes hours to transmit and confirm the teleportation data to Aquarius. Not seconds. Several hours of Billy sitting in the foyer, waiting. And what if during that time she does or thinks about something important that doesn’t make it to the destin?”
I shrugged. “Then she shouldn’t teleport to outer space and assume the risk of losing time. If she doesn’t like it, she can do something else, like hang out with her husband and not talk about wor
k.”
She downed the rest of her cocktail. “You know what? Forget it. I’m trying to explain why I’ve been so wrapped up in this, but if you’d rather be snarky—”
Shit. This is the most in-depth conversation we’ve had in weeks and you’re blowing it.
“Okay, okay,” I said, placing a hand on her leg. “I think it’s really just a semantics thing. She’s still her, right? Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that while she’s slowly being teleported to the Aquarius constellation, Foyer Billy somehow cheats on her husband with the conductor. If you ask me, Billy’s still guilty of infidelity, even if Vestibule Billy never actually did it. You are who you are. Boom!” I finished off my Gibson in triumph.
Sylvia nodded, but I could tell she was a little upset by what I’d said.
“What?” I joked. “Is IT gonna come after me now?”
She shook away whatever thoughts she was having, half smiling. “Doesn’t matter. In a matter of months, it’ll be off my plate. We will have our lives back, Mr. Byram.” She kissed me again, lingering this time. “Once that happens, I’m going to—Shit.” Sylvia sat back, her demeanor completely changing as she looked off somewhere over my shoulder. She was getting comms.
“You’re going to shit?” I joked, but she waved a hand sideways, clearing whatever message she’d just gotten, and silenced me.
“I have to go,” she said in frustration. “Bill needs me back at work.”
“What? You just left!”
“I know, I know. I’ll make it up to you. I promise.”
She kissed me one last time and took off.
I looked down at the broken instruments embedded in the bar top. I couldn’t help feeling like they were some kind of metaphor for my marriage—busted, frozen, forever silenced. What the hell? I figured. I’m here already, might as well celebrate.
I motioned to Richard. “Fill ’er up. Looks like I’m drinking for two.”
So yeah, things weren’t great between me and my wife, but we were doing our best. Well, technically, she did her best, and I trailed along behind, living off the scraps of her drive and success like a remora—one of those sucker fish that attached themselves to a shark and ate whatever fell out of their mouths. I, in return, provided the occasional entertainment. Sylvia had always given everything 110 percent, whether it was our relationship, her job, or even planning vacations. She was the one who did the research, built itineraries, then told me when and where to show up. She was also the breadwinner, which I guess made me the bread loser. Some spouses might have been irked by that, but not me. I was content to take it easy.
But to be completely transparent, my lack of drive was one of the main reasons we had been doing so poorly for the last year. Her job at IT took up so much of her time that there was little left over for us. And after a decade of letting her man the wheel of our marriage, I barely even knew how to drive anymore. So I had let things get worse and worse, until our ten-year anniversary celebration was shorter and less enjoyable than a prison visit.
Thankfully, Sylvia was never one to throw in the towel. The morning after our interrupted date at the Mandolin, she broke through my hangover with a comm from the coffee shop across the street from IT.
“Are you on the bathroom floor?” she said, peering at me.
“It’s the one closest to the toilet,” I said blearily. “Are you wearing what you wore last night? Jeez, have you been working this whole time?”
“Clear your calendar for next week,” she informed me. “We are going on a second honeymoon. No comms, no International Transport bullshit, just me and you. You were right. We need to work on us.”
“So you’re ditching work for work,” I said dryly. “What’s the destination, Madame Cruise Director?”
“Costa Rica,” she said. “I just checked. Our honeymoon spot is still there. And according to my research, the cloud forest is one of the most off-the-grid spots in the world. Plenty of time for hiking, R&R, and TLC. Sound good?”
“Sounds great,” I said, though the only thing that sounded good right then was a bottle of aspirin and twelve hours of additional sleep. We said our good-byes and mostly stayed out of each other’s way for the next week, successfully avoiding any more speed bumps until the day of our vacation—July 3, 2147.
HERE COMES THE RAIN AGAIN
ON THAT DAY, I was in the midst of travel-packing procrastination when an audio message from Sylvia showed up on my comms.
“Hi, babe. Listen, things at work are quiet, so I’m getting out of here early while the getting’s good. I’m going to depart directly from the TC here at IT. If you can’t get ahold of me, I told Julie to give you—and only you—my GDS location. I am so ready for this. I love you.”
She sounded hopeful. When she said, “I love you,” I knew she meant, We’ll get through this, but I wasn’t so sure. I wasn’t as convinced that this second honeymoon was going to magically solve our marital problems. Maybe that was why it had taken me all morning to start packing.
After closing the message window, I threw some final items in my suitcase—swimsuit, bug repellant, mouth cleaner. Then, satisfied that I had enough underwear and socks for the trip, I zipped up my bag, scratched Peeve behind the ears, and did a dummy check of the apartment. I put a sticky reminder on my comms to add the dog walker to our apartment’s access list while we were gone.
I took the elevator down and stepped onto the street. A green, blue, and purple rainbow arced overhead, indicating the mosquitoes were hard at work emptying their bladders on us.9 The plan was to teleport to the San José TC, and from there hire a car to drive us to our resort in the mountains of Santa Elena. My wife had scheduled us a full itinerary of hiking in the cloud forest in search of quetzals, drinking terrible local wine, and getting into shouting matches with howler monkeys. Instead of watching the July Fourth Last War memorial fireworks, Sylvia’s plan was to drink Cerveza Imperials in our hotel room hot tub and celebrate our independence from International Transport for a few days. She’d chosen Costa Rica because it was one of the few countries left that didn’t have TCs everywhere, and it was the place where we had honeymooned ten years ago.
Shit. Where did she say we were supposed to meet?
I tried comming Sylvia.
Instead, an animated Rosie the Riveter avatar obscured my field of vision, causing me to trip on the sidewalk and bang my shin on my luggage. “Shit!”
I reduced the size of the comms window, making sure to dial down the background opacity so I could avoid any more obstacles.
The avatar displayed a concerned emoji expression. “Ouch. Are you okay, Joel?” It was Julie, Sylvia’s AIDE, or Artificially Intelligent Digital Entity. Basically, a personal assistant app with extra cruft. They acted as proxies for their owners, doing everything from personal shopping to paying bills to interfacing with coworkers when the owner was indisposed.
Most were fairly businesslike, but Sylvia had put a lot of extra effort toward giving Julie a personality. My wife was an only child, often lonely growing up. Getting her very own AIDE when she joined IT must have felt a lot like being handed a brand-new sibling, only one who would always be there for her, would always support her, and would never, ever ask for money. Sylvia nurtured her new app. She confided in Julie, asked her for advice, pushed her to be assertive and wise and funny. She even taught her to be a feminist, hence Julie’s choice of the Rosie avatar.
There was nothing wrong with the depth of their relationship, per se. Most people had a strong emotional bond with their AIDEs, somewhere on the spectrum between favorite pet and best friend, depending on one’s needs. I, however, always saw AIDEs as buckets of semicognitive code with finite complexity, designed to create the illusion of sentience.
I rubbed my shin. “Ouch is right. There goes my marathoning career.”
“And look, you’re outside! Is this your monthly day of exercise?” Julie’s avatar gave a jaunty wink.
“You know, for a comedienne you’re one hell of a per
sonal assistant. Can we back-burner the hilarity, though? Sylvia unplugged before she told me where we were meeting.”
“Sorry. I’ve been studying up on humor. A lot of research shows it puts you bipedal carbon plasma bags at ease.”
“Oh, it’s definitely working,” I answered dryly, knowing she’d detect the sarcastic tone. This is why no self-respecting salter would ever own an AIDE. Their eagerness to please is practically an invitation to be pwnd, or maliciously salted. But hacking an AIDE is a felony, on the level of grand larceny. To a natural-born salter, it’s like putting a carrot in front of a famished rabbit, then separating the two with an electrified grate. “Now that you’ve put me at ease, can you tell me where my wife is?”
“You betcha! Sylvia’s looking forward to this; she told me to hold all her comms before she left. Except for you, natch. I’ve got a bunch of great canned responses in case any of her program managers try to interrupt her vacation. Do you want to hear ’em? They’re hilarious!”
“I, uh, no. I’m almost at the TC, so I just need to know where she is. I don’t want to spend the evening looking for her.”
“Okay. There’s a rum joint called the Monkey Bar. It’s walking distance from customs. I just sent you the GDS location. Don’t be too late or she’ll be dancing on the tables.”
“Oooh, maybe I should take my time then.”
“Oooh, now you’re the funny one. I should have you salt me. On second thought, no. If you did that, then everyone would just hang up on me.”
“And they don’t already?”
“No, they d—”
I hung up.
Just as I was about to step on the Greenwich Village TC escalator, a young auburn-haired woman stepped in front of me. She looked out of place, even for NYC. She had animated, glowing LED strands of orange and red woven through her hair; they looked like smoldering embers. Her outfit was even weirder: a long, ruffled white gown, olive-green army jacket, and muddy hiking boots on her feet. She clutched a bag that appeared to contain a giant horse saddle and was deliberately blocking the entrance of the TC.