by Tal Klein
“Excuse me,” I said, attempting to maneuver around her.
“Is this the Greenwich Village Teleportation Center?” she asked, looking me up and down like I was an extraterrestrial. Her delivery was curt, dismissive. I couldn’t place the accent, somewhere Latin.
“That’s what it says on the sign, lady,” I said, responding in kind.
She nodded, and without another word stepped onto the moving walkway.
I got on right behind her. Weirdo.
I saw her stiffen as we went through the nanite misters, but the moving walkway continued, depositing us before the bank of outgoing teleportation chambers. She looked around as if unsure where to go next. I pointed her toward the shortest queue, then joined my own line. The woman went into her chamber right before I did, giving me one last sidelong glance. I figured it was her first time teleporting.
The barrier to my chamber lowered. I stepped into the foyer, dropping my luggage in the prescribed compartment and sitting in the chair that levitated into the Punch Escrow chamber. There, the conductor confirmed my destination, and I agreed to the displayed legalese. As the lights dimmed, I began to debate whether my first drink at the Monkey Bar should be a mojito or a zombie.
Then—nothing.
Nothing happened.
There was no blinding white flash to indicate my arrival in the San José TC vestibule. No alarms, no announcement. Just darkness. I didn’t think much of it. I assumed there had been a brownout in Costa Rica; they still happened occasionally in non-thermal-powered countries. I got up and felt my way toward the exit, promptly slamming my nose into the concrete wall. Ow.
I heard muffled voices outside, and monkey-walked my way toward them, grasping on to the chair’s magnetic guides against the wall to orient myself. Finally, after a few more painful bumps, I fumbled my way to the exit barrier. I pushed and pulled on the hard plastic until it lowered. I stepped over it, into the light, and found myself face-to-face with the conductor. The Greenwich conductor. He had orange hair, a purple birthmark on his face in the shape of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, and an open mouth. He gaped at me like he was seeing a ghost.
Son of a bitch. I’m still in New York.
“I think there’s been a mistake,” I said. Behind him, people were milling about in confusion and checking their comms. A red light blinked above each teleportation chamber.
“Hold on a sec!” The conductor’s forehead was creased. “Shit. How the hell did you get out?”
“Door was open.”
“Hold on.” He was apparently on the comms with someone. “Yes, sir.”
The conductor made a quick gesture, moving the conversation from his comms to a holographic projector somewhere in the wall. A man in a tidy IT lab coat appeared between us. He had gray hair that had fallen victim to male-pattern baldness, a paunch around his middle, and glittering pale-blue eyes. The only thing to indicate he wasn’t in the room was a video refresh bar that went up and down his body.
“Is this him?” the projected man said to the conductor.
“Yes, sir,” the conductor answered quickly, as if he were being questioned by a cop.
“Mr. Byram.” The man paused, as if to afford the next thing he said some additional heft. “My name is William Taraval. I’m Head of Research and Development at International Transport. It appears we experienced a malfunction during your teleportation. We’re still trying to get to the bottom of it.”
This guy is Sylvia’s boss? Isn’t he a bit of a muckety-muck for this? He sounded formal but sincere. His eyes sported the longest crow’s feet I’d ever seen. “We’re shutting down this TC until we can complete our investigation. In the meantime, I have instructed the conductor here to refund your transport chits.”
The conductor nodded eagerly. “Already done, sir. Like it never happened.”
“Mr. Byram,” Taraval continued, “may we speak privately?”
“Uh, sure.”
“Thank you, James.” He nodded to the conductor, who turned his back on me as if I were getting dressed. I gestured to invite Taraval into my comms. He went from standing a couple of meters away to suddenly being in my face. Too close. I quickly minimized his window to a less-intimate size.
“Thank you. A modicum of intimacy yields a plethora of dividends, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Byram?” Taraval asked.
“A what?”
“Never mind. I know you do not recognize me, Mr. Byram, because we’ve never formally met. But I work with your wife. Sylvia.”
The jerkwad boss who wrecked our anniversary last week. Yeah, I know who you are.
“Right, she’s mentioned you.”
“Always in a positive light, I’m sure.” He winked like a dorky uncle. “Naturally, she’s mentioned you as well, Joel. I know this jaunt you were embarking upon is very important to her. However, we’ve just sustained a rather significant attack on our systems. Telemetry is being gathered. But this will require shutting down all TC operations for some time.”
“Shit! Sylvia already ported down to Costa Rica.”
“Yes, exactly. But we are not out of options.”
“We’re not?”
“Fortunately, there are some TCs that are always operational. One of them is our development TC here at IT. I could send you from here to a hospital in San José. Unfortunately, all comms in Costa Rica are down, but once there, I’m sure you and Sylvia will be able to find each other.”
“I guess membership has its privileges, huh?”
“Indeed. Sylvia’s happiness is paramount to us.”
“Uh-huh. So I just head on over to IT HQ?”
“Yes, I’ve already flagged a car to pick you up outside the Greenwich TC. We’re at Eight Hundred Second Avenue, as you know. Everything will be arranged by the time you get here. See you soon.”
The comms window vanished.
Shit always goes wrong when Sylvia and I go on vacation. We’ve always referred to these mishaps as adventures, because we don’t want to call them vacation fuckups. Besides, who wants to have a textbook holiday anyway? Half the fun is partaking in some ridiculous misadventure that you can later tell your friends over drinks.
Our last vacation in Hawaii came to a premature end when we had to be airlifted by drone from the side of the Kilauea volcano after some work emergency that absolutely could not be solved without Sylvia came up. I was pretty pissed about it at the time, but these days it makes me laugh. I already imagined her cracking up at my retelling of this particular event, especially the part about me slamming my face into the wall.
“Okay, change of plans,” I told the conductor, and turned back toward the Escrow room. “I’ll just get my luggage.”
“Well, uh, that’s the good news, sir,” said the conductor in an earnest, non–New York accent. Maybe he actually was from Michigan. “Your baggage was successfully ported. That’s the last piece of information we got before the comms went dead. We always move inorganic before organic. Little-known fact: your clothes get to where you’re going before you do. Good thing you’re not naked right now, ha-ha.”
I hate it when people who aren’t funny attempt to be funny. “So how do I find my stuff?”
“Yes. Yes,” he answered someone on his comms, then focused on me. “Uh, as soon as things get back online, I’ll personally get in touch with the San José conductor and ensure they deliver your bags to your final destination,” he assured me.
“Okay, thanks.” At least I won’t have to haul my luggage across town.
As I headed out of the TC, I could see more people milling around and murmuring to their comms and one another. At first I thought they were grumbling about having to make alternate travel arrangements, but once I got outside, I saw everyone seemed to be doing it. I could overhear snatches of urgent conversation.
Wait. Did someone say there was an explosion?
9 Steam reforming is a method for producing hydrogen, carbon monoxide, or other useful products from airborne hydrocarbon fuels such as methane an
d propane, liquids such as hexane and benzene, or polymers such as polyethylene, polypropylene, and polystyrene. This is achieved via a processing mechanism called a reformer, which binds kinetically generated vapor with the fossil fuel to generate hydrogen. The steam methane reformer is widely credited as the most important invention of the twenty-first century, as air quality had deteriorated to toxic levels. Initially, a significant percentage of the energy needed for continuous operation of the reformers came from the hydrogen they generated, so they were relegated to use in only the most affluent civilian zones. Eventually, genetic engineering was brought into the mix, enabling the conversion of airborne insects into organic flying steam reformers—since insect flight muscle is capable of achieving the highest metabolic rate of all animal tissues. The most efficient of these were mosquitoes—swarms of which have become a fixture in our skies, akin to clouds. Since they urinate water, their presence creates a permanent rainbow during sunlight hours. A glorious, lifesaving, mosquito-pee rainbow.
BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
For we do surely die, and are as water which is running down to the earth, which is not gathered, and God doth not accept a person, and hath devised devices in that the outcast is not outcast by Him.
—2 Samuel 14:14
BEFORE I COULD ASK anyone what was going on, a black town car pulled up and the door hissed open. “Welcome, Joel Byram!” it said heartily. All cars went driverless in the second half of the twenty-first century, and I’d been told the riding experience became much more pleasant as a result.
“International Transport headquarters,” I said.
“Already dialed in, sir. Please sit back and enjoy the ride.”
As the car headed down to the southern edge of Turtle Bay, my comms lit up with emergency break-in feeds. Talking heads were trying to maintain their composure while text messages and comments, mostly bomb-related puns, scrolled up my field of vision. On several of my windows, for some reason, was a Bible quote:
And when he opened the Fifth Seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those slain because of the word of God. And they cried out with a great voice, saying, “When, O Master, dost Thou take vengeance for our blood?”
I enlarged one stream to see it was from the Bible’s Book of Revelation. Armageddon stuff. I enabled the audio on one of the more serious-looking news anchors.
“And we’re getting—yes, it appears this quote was delivered via a multitude of titanium dog tags, scattered outward from the blast site. Again, if you’re just joining us, a suicide bomber calling herself Joan Anglicus has blown up a teleportation center.” A helpful infographic underneath the anchor informed me that Joan Anglicus was the name of the first and only female pope.
“Joan Anglicus was a well-known member of the teleportation protest group, the Gehinnomites,” the anchor continued.
I muted the news feed again. Gehinnomites. Buncha religious nutters. They were probably the world’s most vocal opponents of teleportation, and had been since its invention nearly fifty years ago. Their qualms with the technology boiled down to two main arguments.
First, there was something to do with forbidden fruit. People of faith had been generally grumpy about the practical, commercial manipulation of quantum foam. Since quantum foam is the stuff the universe is made of, I guess they thought we shouldn’t have been messing with God’s Play-Doh.
The second bit of umbrage, raised by the Gehinnomites’ leader, Roberto Shila, was a callback to the Tower of Babel story, which professorial types had oft cited as warning against technology. Shila’s interpretation of the story was that the Babylonians had embraced science under the premise of self-defense, or at least an attempt to prevent another forty-day-and-forty-night flood, and felt they should be able to spar with God on his turf. To Shila and his ilk, teleportation was basically a new take on Babel’s stairway to heaven. In other words, porting was worse than our playing with God’s toys: it was us playing God.
Neither of those gripes were particularly novel at the time, nor unique to teleportation, as both had been previously cited in admonition of genetic engineering, connected neural implants, and medical nanotech. So the Gehinnomites were largely ignored by the general public other than a few journalists looking for “both sides of the story.” Also, heretofore their protests had always been peaceful. Now that one of their own had committed an act of terror, I was pretty sure they would no longer be disregarded.
Several of the news feeds put up a picture of the suicide bomber, this Joan Anglicus. A woman so opposed to teleportation that she had been willing to end her life to take down just one of over a thousand TCs. Holy shit. I know her. Or rather, I recognized her. She was the woman I’d ridden behind on the Greenwich TC conveyer. The woman in the brilliant-white tiered ruffle gown and the army jacket. The muddy boots. The intense, penetrating stare.
The smoldering embers in her hair.
The saddlebag. With a quantum bomb in its belly.10
Wait, does that say Costa Rica? Costa Rica!
I enlarged one of the news feeds. The video showed a smoking crater and at least a one-kilometer radius of bomb debris. The headline below read: “Terror Attack at Costa Rica’s San José TC—11 dead.”
Holy shit. Holy shit. Okay, keep it together. How far is the Monkey Bar from the San José TC?
I kept trying to comm Sylvia, but got a THE NETWORK PATH CANNOT BE FOUND error message. I pinged Julie, but she was fucking useless. “Get me on the comms as soon as you hear anything!” I yelled at her.
“I understand,” Julie responded. Finally short and to the point. Even her semisentient brain perceived the desperation in my voice.
Reports of a second blast site began to propagate. The Guanacaste geothermal power plant, the primary power source for Costa Rica’s TC and its comms network, had been swallowed in a pool of lava. A small group of Gehinnomites had seized control of nearby Rincón de la Vieja, the Geneva of Central America. They were holding the entire town and various heads of state hostage.
A little boy, shaken and scared, delivered a handwritten note to one of the emergency responders. The moment was recorded and streamed on all the news aggregators. It read:
The beginning of life was first open to destruction with abortion, and soon followed the end of life with euthanasia. Like a vice that closes from either end, how many of those in the middle must fall prey to the depravity of man’s moral relativism and love affair with sin that always brings death?
We will show you Our signs in the horizons until it becomes clear to you that they are the Truth. Our Creator has endowed Us with certain inalienable rights, and primary among those is life. Life is the first right. Without this one, any others are without effect. You cannot legislate away the Creator’s will.
We have watched as Our society has progressed toward a culture of death, and corporations have usurped religion and government. Be it foretold, then, all those who would teleport, who would willingly engage in the unnatural acts of suicide and re-creation, and those who aid them, who create doppelgängers and golems to walk the earth in their place: We will save your souls; We will fulfill your pact with the Creator, your obligation to live one life and die one death.
Pulsa D’nura.
#pulsadnura
It was already trending. They might have been religious kooks, but they knew how to captivate an audience. I looked it up: a Pulsa D’nura is apparently a curse from some old book of Jewish scripture in which the angels of destruction are invoked to block heavenly forgiveness of a subject’s sins, causing all the curses named in the Bible to befall them at once, which unsurprisingly, results in their death. Great, I thought. Religious crazies who manifest curses via suicide bombs.
Think, think, think. That’s your job, Joel. Do your fucking job and think. Your first task is: get to Costa Rica. The sooner you get there, the sooner you find Sylvia.
“Can you go any faster?” I said to the car. “I’ll pay for any extra charges.”
“Sorry, sir,” the cons
ole said cheerfully. “My rate has been given a strict cap.”
I spent the next twenty minutes getting more and more freaked out as I scanned the news feeds. International Transport issued a statement confirming what I already knew: all human teleportation was suspended until they could figure out if any other TCs were in danger. Did that include the TC at IT’s headquarters? If Taraval couldn’t port me to Costa Rica, I supposed I could hire a drone to fly me there. A quick check told me that surge pricing was in effect, and any future children Sylvia and I had probably wouldn’t go to college because of the debt I would incur. But there wouldn’t be any kids if I couldn’t get to my wife.
When we drew within sight of the IT HQ, I decided to run the rest of the way. Panicked people were crowding the street, the various public security company officers doing their best to disperse them. My black car was doing a fine job navigating around them, but I couldn’t sit still. I had to move, to run, to do something to find Sylvia. I got out despite the vehicle’s protests, and began sprinting the last three blocks to IT’s headquarters. It was easy to spot, the towering, blackish-gray reinforced-cement citadel that loomed over everything nearby like a squatting giant.
As I sped toward it, droplets of mosquito piss hit my face like glass beads. I wiped away the moisture, startled when my 1980s music playlist somehow kicked off, blaring at full blast on my comms. An upbeat melody of synth drums and electronic harmonica accompanied the rhythm of my footsteps, an eerie contrast to my desperation. Usually I loved Culture Club, but now was not the time.
At this point I feel like I should mention my verboten love for 1980s music. Especially New Wave. Here might feel like a strange place to discuss this topic, but bear with me. In 2147, 1980s New Wave was a genre more obscure than Tuvan throat singing. Sylvia didn’t share my penchant for the stuff. She, like most of our friends, was into mainstream music, which in my time was something called redistro. It worked by sampling ambient sounds from around the listener in real time—footsteps, voices, alert tones, that kind of stuff—then rearranging those sounds into a unique musical composition. I know—I didn’t get it, either. It certainly wasn’t as fun as New Wave, which you really should go check out.