by Tal Klein
I had the world’s worst sense of direction, but this wasn’t a fucking pirate treasure map. I kept coaching myself. Just go left out the door, four doorways on the right, look for the green door. I made it my mantra: Up/Left/Down/Elbow like a boss/Left/Right/Up/Up/Up/Up.
Thirteenth floor. Lucky number thirteen. Great. I don’t even know who’s going to be saving my ass when I get there.
“Joel, I think that we—” Corina began, but I cut her off with song:
“You come and go, you come and go… oh, oh, OH!”
No turning back now. Sing it like you’re in the shower.
I closed my eyes, belting it out: “Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma chameleon!”
Silence.
There was no indication that anything had happened.
It didn’t work.
“Okay,” said Corina. “I think we should call—”
Her hologram paused. Taraval and Pema froze.
It did work! Go, go, go.
I un-pretend-handcuffed myself, and jumped onto the table.
Unfortunately, that was the extent of my grace. As I went to pivot left, I became disoriented going through Corina’s hologram, slipped, and inadvertently head-butted Taraval with the full weight of my body as I dropped to the floor.
He didn’t move from his position. He couldn’t even open his mouth, but he moaned in pain.
Fuck! That hurt.
I didn’t have time to worry about whether I’d just concussed myself. I can only thank the adrenaline pumping through my veins for surviving what should have been a first-round knockout. As I painfully lifted myself off the floor, I said, “David, please open the door.”
“With pleasure, sir,” said the room.
I stepped into the empty hallway. Literally, it was devoid of any semblance of life. They didn’t want witnesses, I thought darkly. The emptiness was a perfect mirror for how I felt in the world at that point. Alone. Hollow. Joel Byram cannot come to the comms right now.
I decided to wallow later. I turned left and speed-walked down the hall, counting off the doors on my right. Beige, beige, beige, green!
There it was before me. The familiar, emergency-exit green.15 I only had to open the door, go up four floors, and throw myself on the mercy of whomever I found there. Pema had promised they would help. I certainly needed some.
I put my hand on the doorknob and pulled, but there was a problem.
It was locked.
12 Quantum microscopy is the science of using a scanning tunneling microscope to look at and determine the future state and location of atoms. This is key in human teleportation because it addresses the “fidget problem,” that living things have a tendency to move. Quantum microscopy enables the atoms within an object to be analyzed without damaging its exterior structure, or shell. It’s what makes scanning and sending incredibly complex things like the human body possible. The scanning tunneling microscope operates by taking advantage of the relationship between quantum tunneling and distance by using femto nanos called “piezoelectric sensors” that change in size when voltage is applied to them.
13 An important aspect of quantum entanglement, and therefore teleportation, is that statistical correlations between otherwise distinct physical locations must exist. These correlations hold even when measurements are chosen and performed independently, out of phase from one another. Meaning that an observation resulting from a measurement choice made at one point in space-time instantaneously affects outcomes in another region, even though light hasn’t yet had time to travel the distance. In other words, when you teleport, you arrive before you left. The Punch Escrow protocol examines the state of each quark as it arrives and validates it against a checksum of its past state. In some ways it’s like looking up at the Sun: light travels rapidly—as far as we know, it’s the fastest thing in the universe—but it’s not infinitely fast. At three hundred thousand kilometers per second, it takes light more than eight minutes to get from the Sun to Earth; so when you see the Sun in the sky, you’re actually seeing the Sun eight minutes ago.
14 Ecophagy literally means “eating the environment.” An ecophagy cage stops nanos from devouring everything around them, including us humans, the earth, and eventually themselves. Self-replicating nanos need a source of energy to drive their replication. The nanos are equipped with an electric and mechanical flagellum that generates tiny currents by swinging through the ambient magnetic fields generated by Earth. Perhaps the earliest-recognized and best-known danger of molecular nanotechnology is the risk that such self-replicating nanos capable of functioning autonomously in the natural environment could quickly convert that natural environment into replicas of themselves on a global basis, a scenario usually referred to as the gray-goo problem, but more properly termed “global ecophagy.” Since gray-goo replication is self-limiting based on the availability of an energy source, then the more organic material that self-replicating nanos consume, the less remains available for further consumption. An ecophagy cage is a mechanism that regulates the availability of energy sources for self-replicating nanos within a three-dimensional grid, defined by longitude, latitude, and altitude. Should a self-replicating nano find itself outside its ecophagy cage boundaries, it and its replicants would simply expire. In the case of oxidation-powered nanos, expiration would happen naturally after exhausting all available organic material, and without the ecophagy cage creating more, the nanos would “starve.” The electromagnetic nanos, however, rely on the ecophagy cage to amplify the ambient magnetic field currents into usable kinetic energy, meaning that once the ecophagy cage stops doing so, the nanos simply run out of juice. You still awake after reading that? Gold star!
15 The international green exit sign was settled on with no shortage of controversy among the escape industry. All the way back in the 1970s, the Japanese fire safety department held a national competition, encouraging people to submit their drawings and visions of what an exit sign should be. The purpose of the competition was to find an exit sign that could be implemented throughout Japan. After testing exit signs that were submitted as part of the competition, the winner was chosen—a gentleman by the name of Yukio Ota. His design was of a green exit sign that showed a man running toward a door. Then around the same time “Karma Chameleon” hit the charts, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ultimately chose Ota’s sign for international usage. The green running man pretty much remained unchanged for centuries, until eventually its unique color signature became so familiar, that the need for the iconic man was deemed unnecessary. A green sign with a white arrow became the ISO standard for directional paths to emergency exits in the 2100s, and green doors were exits.
ANOTHER OTHER
BACK WHEN I was a freshman at NYU, I thought I’d make my dad proud and take up boxing. Salting was a bit out of his grasp—whenever someone asked him what his son was studying, he’d say, “He asks computers trick questions,” which was true, but he never really got it. Boxing was something concrete, something that he could understand and we could bond over. My coach was a rather optimistic Italian guy who never really acknowledged defeat, and my sparring partners took it easy on me because they thought I was funny. Eventually my dad, coach, and gym friends all managed to convince me to sign up for a fight.
On my first and only time in the ring, they pitted me against a hairy Slavic fellow twice as big as me. Before the first-round bell rang, I knew I was beat. Boy, was I beat. The Slav knocked me down twice in as many minutes, but rather than throw in the towel, my coach told me something that stuck with me for the rest of my life—which at the time I thought was going to end before the round did.
“Kid, ya don’t gotta beat’em—ya just gotta outlast’em.”
He meant the fight, but right then I decided he meant “in life.”
So I got back to my feet, faced my adversary, and then kicked him in the nuts as hard as I could.
I know, it was a dirty trick. Before you judge, consider the outcome: the fight
was immediately over, and I would never step in a boxing ring again.
Unfortunately, such wisdom didn’t prepare me for something as simple as a locked door. And since there were no gonads I could see, I tried the knob again.
“Please state the nature of your emergency,” the door said. God damn it, did everything in this building have a brain?
“There’s—uh—a fire,” I said.
“Impossible. No fire or smoke sensors have been triggered.”
“They’re broken.”
“I see no error alerts.”
“Look, you stupid door, there’s a fucking fire in Room D. If you don’t believe me, ask it yourself.”
“I cannot seem to reach that room. Nor can I read your comms.” It paused. “Very well. I shall alert the authorities. Please walk calmly down the stairs in a single file.”
“I’ll do that.”
As the door slid open, green lights started pulsing along the ceiling, and an alarm siren bounced off the walls.
Sure, it was a pretty weak con. If I hadn’t been panicked, concussed, sleep deprived, starved, dehydrated, and on the verge of pissing myself, I’m sure I could have come up with a smoother salt. Things being what they were, I was thrilled that anything I did worked.
Up. I hesitated, my natural escape instinct nudging me toward the ground and the freedom of open streets. Remember what Pema said. Her plan has worked so far; now get upstairs and find “them.” Wherever she’s sending me, whatever you may find there, you’ll be better off than you were in the conference room. Move!
I ran up. The stairs themselves were painted the same emergency green, a stark contrast to the unpainted gray cement walls of the stairwell. The perfect echo chamber for the blaring wail of the alarm. Its song served as a wonderful incentive for me to hurry the fuck up.
One down, three to go.
I reached Floor Ten without further incident, which I took as a sign of the turning of the tides. I tried to listen for footsteps coming from downstairs. If there were any, they would have been drowned out by the alarm. I decided that I was being chased. It was a safe bet.
Two.
Still, no sign of life manifested anywhere along the stairway.
I went up another flight. My legs weren’t used to this kind of physical exertion and were filing all kinds of complaints with my nervous system. To distract myself, I imagined reaching the thirteenth floor. It would be a glass door, unlike the others. I’d take a few steps back, and spin-kick through it to freedom. On the other side would be a well-armed militia, weapons drawn. One of them would give me a big glass of lemonade, then we’d charge back down the stairs, fucking up anyone who got in our way. We’d get to Room D, and I’d make Taraval and Corina Shafer delete the extra me, take my ass to Costa Rica via drone (not teleportation!), and Sylvia would be there to welcome me. She’d be so happy to see me, she’d instantly jump my bones, and we’d make up right there on the floor of customs.
There it is. Floor Thirteen.
The door was not glass, nor did it have a whole militia behind it, but I was happy to see it anyway. It was another featureless green emergency exit door, and I just had to get it open. With the fire alarm blaring, it would be a fruitless exercise to engage it in conversation.
Knock it down. It’s just a flimsy metal thing. You can do it.
I stepped back, giving myself some room to get a running start, and went at the door with everything I had, which wasn’t much. Salters are not known for their physical prowess.
God damn!
It hurt a lot. The door didn’t budge.
Again. Get through that door!
I kicked it with my foot, then started slamming my fists against the surface, not bothering to listen for any response, just banging. The only acceptable condition for my silence would be an open door.
I’m losing time. They’re coming.
I started screaming, “Let me in!” on top of the pounding. I knew it was mostly for myself. They—Pema’s friends, whoever they were—probably couldn’t hear me through the soundproof barrier. My screams were born out of desperation, a final throw as the buzzer went off. If International Transport was coming to get me, there was nowhere left for me to go. I couldn’t fight them. This door opening was my only chance of survival—my last opportunity to prevent my doppelgänger, the other me, from going on my vacation with my wife in beautiful fucking Costa Rica!
The door stayed shut. So much for Hail Marys. I leaned my head against the cool metal, letting exhaustion settle on me like a heavy wet quilt. I felt as if I could sleep for a year. My hand rested on the doorknob, which turned under the weight of my body, and click—the door opened.
It must have unlocked because of the fire alarm. Feeling like an idiot, I pushed the door wider to reveal another hallway, only this one was decorated more like an old-fashioned doctor’s office than a plastic spaceship. Stained wood floors, Persian rugs, silk-shaded incandescent lamps.
I quietly stepped over the threshold, eyes peeled for “security,” as a sharp, bright pain stung me somewhere in the back. My ears rang. My teeth chattered like castanets.
For the second time on July 3, I blacked out.
LOVE PLUS ONE
NANOTECHNOLOGY completely changed the health-care industry. Gone was the need for sterilized equipment, brutal surgeries, and physically skilled doctors. Most medical issues could be solved with over-the-counter sprays and bandages and whatnot, but people still had to go to a hospital for major traumas or fixes. Trauma meant you were in mortal danger, whereas fixes meant you didn’t like something about yourself and wanted to change it. A nano cream, for example, might get rid of your crow’s feet, but if you lost an arm, you needed to go see a doctor. I also think it was so people didn’t do weird black-market shit like they did in the early days—adding extra limbs, extra organs, grotesque stuff like that. Nanos still did all the work, mind you, but doctors were there to explain, architect, and supervise the procedures. Surgeries were glass-walled, clean rooms occupied by billions of tiny self-replicating, highly specialized robots, but patient rooms still had the feel of an efficiency motel.
In Costa Rica, at the San José CIMA hospital, Joel Byram lay in one such room. He was dreaming.
(Okay, this is kind of confusing. I can’t call him Joel, but I need to tell you his side of the story. Sorry, it’s just difficult to talk about someone who’s not me like they are me in the third person. Let’s call him Joel Two, or better yet, Joel Too. No? Joel 2.0? Okay, yeah, that’s way too retro. Hmm. How about Joel2? Yes, that’ll work.)
So. Joel2 was dreaming. My wife stood beside him. Eyes puffy, red, depleted of tears. She planted her head on Joel2’s chest, wanting to hear his heartbeat. There were machines that could track it for her, but her faith in technology was exhausted for the day.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump. She had done it. He was alive.
Sylvia lifted her head, looking out the window. Beyond the palm trees and whitewashed buildings, she could see a thin column of black smoke rising into the air from the hole that had been the San José TC. The explosion had occurred thirty minutes ago, but people were still running through the streets and emergency vehicles were still racing past, sirens blaring. No one had noticed a distraught American woman in vacation clothes enter the hospital’s teleportation chamber. Nor did they see her exit a few minutes later, dragging an unconscious American man behind her. When she brought him into the ER on a gurney, the on-calls were too preoccupied with the influx of damaged bodies to wonder why his injuries seemed relegated to the internal brain stem and spinal cord. The tissue surrounding his comms implants had not ported over, since inorganics get scanned, stored, and ported separately from organics, and he’d arrived comms-less. His injuries were deemed not life threatening, and so nanites were set to rebuild, from scratch, his comms and the soft tissue with which they needed to mesh. Then off they sent him to recovery.
It worked. Joel2 was alive. His heart was beating because of her.
B
ecause of what she’d done.
Before she could follow that train of thought any further, there was a power surge. The room lights brightened, no longer running off the hospital’s backup generators. At the same time, Sylvia’s own comms came back on. A jumble of hysterical news feeds, social media alerts, messages from concerned friends and family members, and apoplectic work e-mails filled her field of vision. She closed them all, putting her head in her hands. Sooner or later she’d have to deal with them, particularly the work e-mails, but she couldn’t face any of it just yet.
A different alert sounded, making her open her eyes. “What is this, Julie?” Sylvia said.
“I’m so sorry, Sylvia. I know you said no interruptions whatsoever, not even if the world was ending, but someone found a way to engage my emergency protocols. It’s Pema Jigme from IT.”
Sylvia bit her lip. So much for avoidance. On the upside, if she was going to get chewed out, it could have been by somebody a lot worse. She took a deep breath. “Put her through.”
Pema’s angry compact face appeared in a close-up vid stream. Her overmanicured eyebrows made her look particularly pissed. Sylvia couldn’t stand that much self-righteousness that close to her, so she moved the stream to the room’s hologram projector. Her short coworker stood before her, arms folded, in a green pindot skirt and boxy business suit that definitely fell into James Bond–villain territory.
“What were you thinking, Sylvia?” She sounded exasperated. “Bill and Corina are freaking out. First you use Honeycomb, then you disable the hospital’s TC? Do you know how many laws you’ve broken?”
Sylvia nodded. “Comms were down. My husband was dead. I did what I had to do. And for all my efforts, he’s still barely alive!”
Her voice broke, and again she buried her face in her hands. Pema’s projection watched, her severe eyebrows softening slightly. Soon Sylvia raised her head.
“I made the call. I’m willing to face the consequences. If you’re here to fire me or arrest me, then go ahead. Anyone else in my position would have done the same.”