The Punch Escrow

by Tal Klein

  “I’m not here to fire you, Syl.” She looked over at the sleeping man in the hospital bed. “How is he?”

  “It was touch and go for a bit. He was mostly intact, just his comms didn’t quite make it. That caused some damage to his spinal cord.” Focusing on the scientific details helped calm her. “The restore data from the glacier16 was incomplete because the Gehinnomites took out most of the networking infrastructure. I couldn’t access anything remotely. But—I think he’s going to be okay.”

  “Good. Look, we will figure this out. But you need to get out of there. Now. Take your husband, go off comms for a day or two. IT is working up a solution, but it will take some time, and we need to keep this quiet. It is imperative that no one—no one—realize what really happened, do you agree?”

  Sylvia nodded quickly.

  “Good,” Pema said, relaxing her tone. “The Costa Rican police are so overwhelmed right now, you should be able to slip out unnoticed. But if the police find you, I don’t know what they’ll do. And we won’t be able to help. Do you understand?”

  Sylvia nodded, looking from the dreaming doppelgänger of her husband to her coworker. “Why are you doing this for me?”

  “It is my belief that, given the circumstances, anyone might have done what you did. Anyway, no use dwelling in the past. We’re in damage control now. It doesn’t help anyone if you’re not in the loop. Corporations don’t make decisions; people do.”

  While the two women were talking, Joel2 dreamed. He found himself standing on the stony shore of a dark flowing river. He felt as if he were in a cavern, but he couldn’t see the rock walls or ceiling that surrounded him. The ground beneath his feet was made up of small gray pebbles that crunched when he walked. Everything was dark.

  He saw a light shining on the opposite shore. Joel2 felt a strong desire to go toward it. He stepped into the frothy fast-moving water, only to find it wasn’t water, not exactly. It was room temperature, and flowed around him like smoke, or foam. There was something relaxing about it. Soothing. He started to walk toward the light, as if gently nudged by an invisible hand.

  But then a tune began to play from somewhere behind him. A familiar 1980s New Wave song, one of his favorites. Joel2 stopped in the middle of the river, turning back to the synth drums. The gray foam sloshed around him, as soft and quiet as whispers.

  What happened was this: as Sylvia and Pema discussed life-and-death matters, Joel2’s freshly printed brain was being connected to my comms. Once they came online, he started auto-playing my—now his—1980s music playlist. Specifically, Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon.” The song resumed from the point where my comms had been disconnected. The melody filtered into Joel2’s dream, the electric harmonica echoing softly over the dark rushing foam to where he was standing. He knew the lyrics well.

  I’m a man without conviction

  I’m a man who doesn’t know

  Joel2 bopped his head to the beat. Something made him want to sing along. So he did.

  How to sell a contradiction

  As he sang, he began to walk away from the distant, beckoning light. He ran through the gray foam, speeding back to the shore from which he had come. As the breeze ruffled his hair, he increased the volume of his singing.

  You come and go

  You come and go—oh, oh, OH!

  Joel2 drew near the rocky shore and leaped out of the dark, foamy river, landing solidly on his feet and spreading his arms. Embracing the moment, he belted out the words along with the chorus.

  “Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma chameleon!” he shout-sang in the hospital bed, making Sylvia and Pema jump. Joel2 sat upright, arms wide, then froze as he saw his stricken wife and the projection of a woman he didn’t know standing beside his bed.

  He turned off the music on his comms. “Where am I? What happened?”

  Tears sprang to Sylvia’s eyes. They were happy tears, but she was at a loss for what to say next.

  “I’ll leave you now,” Pema told Sylvia quietly, giving Joel2 a once-over. “Remember: be as quick as you can. And no comms,” she cautioned. Then her projection vanished.

  “Who was that? Is this Costa Rica?” Joel2 tried to get out of the hospital bed, but his body wouldn’t cooperate.

  Sylvia rushed to his side. “Yes, but take it easy. They’re still fixing you, babe.”

  “Did something break?” said Joel2, inspecting himself.

  “Yes and no.” Sylvia sat next to her husband-copy, picking nonexistent lint from his bedsheet. “You, um—there was an accident at the San José TC. An attack.”

  Joel2’s comms—previously my comms—filled with a frenzy of news feeds and social media alerts. “Holy crap. Was I in that?”

  Sylvia shook her head, then nodded, then settled for a head motion somewhere in between. “But the important thing is, you’re here now, and you’re gonna be fine. Do you remember what happened?”

  Joel2 blinked. He recalled sitting in the Escrow room in the Greenwich Village TC. He remembered the conductor, a ginger-haired guy with a Michigan-shaped birthmark on his face, and hitting agree on the legalese, and the lights going down in the foyer. But there had been no bright blinding flash, and his next memory was standing on the rocky shore of that dark, foamy river. There had been a light, too; he’d felt drawn to it, compelled—but evidently all that had been a dream. He’d made it to Costa Rica, with his wife, and he felt—actually, he felt pretty terrible.

  “No,” he said, dropping back to the bed in exhaustion.

  Sylvia took his hand, tears still running down her cheeks. “You know, I thought I lost you today,” she said, the corners of her mouth twitching. “I can’t go through that again.”

  “Me neither. Whatever it was.”

  She smiled for real then. He pulled her forward, kissing her full on the mouth. Sylvia stiffened, but soon responded hungrily, her hands roving up and down his arms. I suppose it wasn’t cheating because, technically, she didn’t know I was alive in New York yet. Still, it felt a little wrong. Just as things were starting to heat up, she broke off, wiping the tears from her face. “You wanna get out of here?”

  Joel2 looked his wife—my wife—up and down. “If it means more of this kind of medicine, yes, please.”

  “I’ll go have a nurse clear you—I mean, release you. Sit tight.”

  “As you know, my love, sitting down and resting are my two greatest competencies.”

  Sylvia patted Joel2’s arm and exited, the glass wall breaking apart as she passed through it. As she spoke with a young Costa Rican woman who may have been a doctor or a nurse, Joel2 studied his reflection. The nanos were doing an amazing job. He looked fresh out of the box, not a scratch or a scar on him, except for those he’d already had. This was his first time in a bona fide hospital. He’d been to clinics a few times for minor wounds or broken bones. But those were more like hotel rooms: soothing pictures on the walls, courteous staff, comfortable bedding. The room he was in now was more like a bank. White walls, glowing blue power strips, and a spare, utilitarian bed. There were holographic displays of his vitals on one wall, but the only other indication that he was being worked on was the occasional metallic tickle on his bare skin.

  Outside, Sylvia finished speaking with the young woman. She nodded, pulling up something on her comms. Her fingers pressed a few buttons only she could see, giving Joel2’s nanos a new directive. The tiny robots knocked him out, sending his brain directly to REM sleep. He drifted off into warm, healing darkness.

  16 In the early twenty-first century, a company called Amazon began marketing a storage cloud service called the glacier, which included unlimited storage of data in what they referred to as cold storage. Within the Amazon Glacier service, data was stored in archives. Customers could upload archives as large as forty terabytes (I know, funny that was a lot back then), and once an archive was created, it could not be updated unless it was retrieved, modified, and then restored. The service became the status quo for data storage because it didn’
t charge for the storage of data, but rather for the retrieval of it. This eventually led to the creation of unlimited storage tiers whereby data’s value was directly attributed to its utility and accessibility, a theory known as “Data Gravity.” Basically, the lesser utility a piece of data had, the lower its value, but if it suddenly gained value, then the cost of its retrieval would be directly proportionate to its utility. So useless information could be archived forever, but if it suddenly became very important to retrieve it, then the cost of retrieving it would be based on the speed with which someone wanted it retrieved. Eventually the dictionary definition of the word glacier became amended to include these utility-based data storage services, and the word outlasted the company that invented it.

  THE LAW OF HOLES

  NOBODY SAID ANYTHING.

  A hum of white noise permeated the room after I finished recounting the entire chain of events for Moti and company. It had all played out mere hours ago, but telling it made it feel like ancient history. It made me ill to relive it, but I had spared no detail. The anniversary fight with Sylvia, my own failings in my marriage, the loss of my comms, Pema, Taraval, Corina Shafer, and the ugly truth about teleportation. Now came the part when (hopefully) these guys would help me get out of the mess I was in.

  Moti broke the silence. “IT commed us, you know.”

  “Oh?” I was cautious.

  Moti shrugged. “They said you broke into their office but then ran away. They suggested you may be dangerous.”

  Just as I suspected. Those fucks were going to kill me and cover it up. “That’s absurd,” I said. “I tell jokes to computers for a living.”

  “They said they tried informing the police,” he continued, “but you managed to disable your comms to avoid detection on GDS. They said if we saw you, to immediately turn you over to building security.”

  Shit, shit, shit. “Look, man, they own the building security. If you’re going to cut me loose, at least call an independent—”

  “We did not believe them,” said Zaki, flipping his cigarette.

  “You didn’t?” I asked.

  Moti rubbed his chin with his right thumb. “A thief,” he said, “especially someone smart enough to disable their comms, that kind of person would have run down and out—not up and in.”

  Thank God. “So—what do I do now?” I asked, instantly realizing how vulnerable saying those words made me feel.

  Moti scratched the back of his head, reached into his pocket, and pulled out his pack of TIME cigarettes. He opened the cardboard box, slid one of the sticks out, and placed it in his mouth. He took a puff, and I stared at the smoldering end of the cigarette. “Yoel, there are three things you need to know.” He exhaled, his breath smelling of burnt tobacco and coffee grounds.

  “One.” He raised his eyebrows and drew on his cigarette. “William Taraval, Corina Shafer—these are dangerous people. You think this William Taraval is some administrator, but he is in reality the head of special projects for the most special company in the world, the company at which your wife works—International Transport. Departure, Arrival … Delight!” He breathed out cynically. “As you know, International Transport isn’t just a corporation, Yoel. It’s the centerpiece of our new world order. Unelected, undemocratic—you in the West no longer have the power to vote with your money, despite what they tell you. But I suspect you already know this, Yoel: that they control your lives through commerce, and that it is fine. Maybe even you believe it is better this way. But International Transport is the worst of them, Yoel. They are too powerful, even for this crazy world. They control how we go from A”—he flipped over his empty cup of coffee and in a lightning-fast shuffleboard movement with no care for the china, slid it across the table at me; I barely caught it in time—“to B.” His eyes bore into me. “They had an opportunity to fix this, to clear you. No comms, no evidence, and the perfect alibi: you, happy and alive in Costa Rica. But because of this mystery woman, this Pema Jigme, you have gotten away. You, your existence—it threatens the entire IT empire. They will search for you. They will not give up.” He paused, not yet done. “And they will also go after the other you and your wife. It is most likely they have already done that.”

  Sylvia.

  I couldn’t help but gulp. “What’s number two?”

  Moti reached across the table and grabbed my arm, firmly gripping it beneath his left one. The motion sent the beautiful Turkish coffee cup he’d slid to me off its ceramic saucer. I braced myself for the shattering sound, but Moti nonchalantly caught it with his right hand and placed it back on the table. Moti’s hand then found its way over to his left wrist, and began slowly rolling up his sleeve. I saw something shiny and metallic on his wrist. It was a watch, one of the antique analog models, with both time and calendar functions. He tapped his manicured fingernail against the watch’s crystal face. Against my reflection.

  “Yoel, this man you see here, this is not Joel Byram. That other Joel Byram in Costa Rica? He has been assigned your identity. William Taraval was at least right about this one thing: the man you saw with your wife, he is the real you now. Do you understand, Yoel? You are no one.”

  I shook my head. Maybe I’d been hoping for some kind of magic fix, a do-over, but hearing him state my situation so plainly, something inside me broke.

  Imagine looking in the mirror and not knowing who you are. An empty face staring back. No one. We rarely think about how much air is around us until we can’t breathe. We always imagine what it would be like to be someone else, but when we do so, it’s with the guise that beneath it all, we know who we really are. Take that away, and who are we?

  I opened my mouth, but couldn’t make air enter my lungs.

  “Yoel, are you all right?” Moti said. He sounded like he was at the other end of a cave.

  When a person is drowning, there isn’t time for them to exhale or call out. Their eyes are glassy, unable to focus. It just seems like they’re distracted. The best way to check is to ask if they’re all right. If they just stare blankly, then they’re probably drowning.

  “Yoel, breathe.” Moti shook me.

  “I—”

  “You are hyperventilating. Don’t talk. Just listen. It’s actually much worse than you think. But it will be okay.”

  I was below the surface, water filling my lungs, but I refused to give in. I kicked for the surface, grasping at two words like a life vest: “Third … thing?”

  Moti laughed, slapping a hand on my back as he exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke. “Good boy, you are tougher than I thought. The third thing, I suspect you have already guessed—I am not really a travel agent.”

  He took a long drag of his nicotine stick, the cherry flaring like a warning light. “Yoel, how much do you know about the Big Mac?”

  THE BIG MAC OF THESEUS

  THE MONA LISA, as I grew up to know it, was a painting that was once known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa, the authenticity and history of which was fraught with contention.

  Shortly before World War I, an English art collector discovered a Mona Lisa look-alike in the home of a Somerset nobleman in whose family’s possession it had been for nearly a century. This discovery led to the conjecture that Leonardo painted two portraits of Lisa del Giocondo, aka the Mona Lisa: the infamous one destroyed in the aforementioned da Vinci Exhibition teleportation accident, and the one discovered in Somerset and then brought to Isleworth, where it eventually came to be known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa.

  The story goes that da Vinci began painting Mona Lisa in 1503, but left her unfinished. Then, in 1517, a completed Mona Lisa surfaced in Leonardo’s private possession shortly before his death. This work of art is the same one that was destroyed in the solar storm of 2109. But supporters of the Isleworth Mona Lisa contend that it is the first iteration of the lost masterpiece, begun in 1503, a full ten years before the “real” Mona Lisa was painted.

  More credibility was added to this theory when it was discovered that in 1584, an art historian named Gi
an Paolo Lomazzo wrote about “della Gioconda, e di Mona Lisa”—the Gioconda, and the Mona Lisa. Since La Gioconda was sometimes used as an alternative title for the Mona Lisa, the reference implied that there were indeed two separate paintings, with the Isleworth Mona Lisa being the original version of her more famous sister.

  What I’m getting at is, since 2109, whenever people went to a museum to see the Mona Lisa, they were really admiring the Isleworth Mona Lisa. Even though it’s the only version of the painting people in my generation ever knew, and even though it was probably created first, our knowledge of the other Mona Lisa, the one that vanished into quantum foam, makes the Isleworth portrait feel like a cheap knock-off.

  But is it? Or is the painting formerly known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa now the actual Mona Lisa?

  As Moti explained it to me, that question is best contemplated over a Big Mac.

  Say you go to McDonald’s and order a Big Mac. Pretty much everyone in the place knows what you’re asking for. You could ask the maître d’, the manager, the janitor—hell, you could turn around and ask the person behind you in line what a Big Mac is and they’ll tell you: “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions—on a sesame seed bun.” Right?

  But is every Big Mac the same?

  Well, you might think, they sure taste the same.

  Does it matter which breed of cow the meat came from? What type of soil the lettuce was grown in? The yeast used in the bread? In other words, what makes it a Big Mac?

  You may be surprised to learn that some of the world’s smartest scientific mercenaries battled with this dilemma for centuries: How could they ensure that every time someone bit into a Big Mac, they’d get the same, consistent “Big Mac dining experience”—in my case, fatty protein tinged with a hint of regret?

  My personal feelings aside, it turns out that this replication is much harder to do than you’d think. Sometimes there’s too much lettuce, sometimes the buns are too mushy, maybe there aren’t enough pickles, and so on. There were just so many ways in which one Big Mac could be different from another, and that was a big problem.