by Tal Klein
“You killed him?” Sylvia said, looking up from the floor, her eyes blazing.
“That was the plan. But somehow legal got wind of his existence and they alerted the executive leadership team. Things needed to be dealt with by the book. Corina and Pema insisted we convince him to go gentle into that good night. We were forced to tell him what occurred, and, for all our good deeds, unfortunately, somehow, he managed to elude us.”
“He’s alive?” said Sylvia, getting back to her feet.
“Alive and running around without comms. Capable at any moment of exposing us. And therein lies your saving grace. We can still make this right.”
“What are you talking about, Bill?”
“It’s simple. You take your little creation in there, drive him back to the San José Hospital TC, teleport to New York, and IT will take care of the rest. You’ll arrive alone, Joel Byram’s comms will reactivate, and all of us shall live happily ever after, provided you both agree to put this matter behind us.”
“Bill,” she said, struggling to stay calm, “you’re asking me to clear my own husband.”
He pointed a fleshy finger toward the bathroom, in which Joel2 was still singing loudly and off-key. “That is not your husband, Sylvia! Your husband is somewhere in New York right now. He can’t have gone far without working comms. What do you think will happen if the Gehinnomites find him first? Imagine for a moment a world in which the public knows the truth of what we’ve been doing. Of what you have been complicit in. Tell me how that story ends, Sylvia. Tell me!”
“I didn’t mean—” she began, but he didn’t let her finish.
“It ends one of two ways, Sylvia. Either you come back to New York with him in tow, or everything we know, perhaps our entire society, unravels. This is the best and least painful solution we have. Clear him. Life will return to normal for all immediately—and for you as well, in time.”
“Normal,” she repeated with a hollow laugh. Then she shook her head, tears springing to her eyes. “You can’t make me do this, Bill. I’ve already been lying to him for a year, I can’t—” She put her face in her hands just as Joel2 entered from the bathroom and exposed himself.
TAKE ON ME
SOON AFTER Sylvia got her promotion at IT, we moved to our new apartment in Greenwich Village. Her first few weeks in her new executive-level status were filled with orientations and legal briefings and late-night welcoming cabals to which I wasn’t invited. She’d been distant and preoccupied. Grappling with the new stresses of her job, I thought. Unpacking boxes was meant to be our first bit of quality time since she’d started the new gig. But still, she was distracted.
I came back from unpacking various artsy trinkets in the bedroom to find her staring at her matryoshka doll—one of those Russian doll-within-a-doll-within-a-doll toys. Each one had the same shiny red dress with a black polka-dot pattern on it. She was toying with the dolls, putting them side by side, then nesting them within one another.
“Can we play with the dolls later, babe?” I asked with my typical flair for completely misreading the mood of a room. “These boxes ain’t gonna unpack themselves.”
She didn’t even look up when I spoke. She just continued to methodically line up each of the dolls on the windowsill in order from largest to smallest. When she got to the final tiny doll—remarkably the size of a grain of rice—she paused, sat down on the floor, and placed it in the palm of her hand. There was something profoundly sad about her actions. She rubbed the tiny doll with her finger and looked up at me, tears in her eyes.
“Syl? What’s wrong?” I gently asked.
“There’s something I never told you, Joel.” She didn’t immediately offer additional information and I knew better than to ask, but the pain in her eyes was killing me.
I sat down beside her and took the tiny rice kernel doll from her hand. “What is it, babe?” I gently rubbed her back.
She sat for a moment, tracing her finger along the other dolls, comparing their size. “At what point is a life a life?” she finally asked. “Look at these dolls. They’re all the same, right? I mean, aside from their size. Do all of them together make one whole doll, or do you think each one represents a different stage in life? And that tiny one”—she pointed at the smallest doll I was still holding—“is that supposed to represent conception, like the first divided cell of an embryo, or death, like a grain of ash in the wind?”
I wasn’t sure what had brought on these deep philosophical questions, so rather than answer, I remained silent—giving her the moment to contend with her thoughts. This wasn’t our first place together, so I reckoned she wasn’t having fear of cohabitation. Something else was eating at her. She gently nested the dolls together again before turning her attention back to me, taking a deep breath before speaking.
“I had an abortion, Joel.”
I was rendered speechless. Before I could formulate a response, she continued on. “It was during sophomore year, before I met you. I had too much to drink at a party. I ran into an old boyfriend, and one thing led to another. I was on birth control. Nothing’s a hundred percent, I guess. About a month later, I realized I was pregnant. Keeping it was never an option. I had career plans, and my dad wasn’t doing well, so I…” She paused and looked at me. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to read my reaction or expecting me to react. “I’m sorry I never told you.”
“Wow. I don’t really know what to say. Are you okay? That came out wrong. I mean, I really don’t know how to respond.”
“Yeah, I’m okay. I definitely don’t regret my decision. That’s not it. I still feel like it was the right thing for me to do—”
“Syl, what’s going on?”
She shrugged, wiping a tear from her eye. “Work stress? I don’t know. I’m having to deal with some big decisions, stuff I can’t really get into. And there’s this part of me that always remembers, that always questions the what-if of what I did, and I guess the moral implications. I did it so early, Joel, that it was no bigger than this grain of rice.” She held up the tiniest doll for me to see again. “It was really just a cluster of cells.” She paused, looking down at it. “But I guess I’ll always wonder, if I’d waited longer—would I have made the same choice?”
Tears began to run down her face. I pulled her into my arms. Seeing my wife in pain was harder than anything I could ever endure. “I love you, Syl. You made the right choice.”
“Thank you,” she whispered as she buried her head into my shoulder.
“I’m sorry.”
“‘I don’t believe in apologies; I believe in actions,’” she said, then wiped her face and gave me a kiss. “Let’s get back to unpacking. This doll’s not pulling its weight.” She smiled, then we kissed again.
Joel2 didn’t remember any of this as he came out of the bathroom in his birthday suit, but it seems pertinent to include now. I would learn later that that was the day Sylvia had been briefed on the truth behind teleportation—that it was a process of replication and destruction—but she was forbidden from discussing it with me. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her, to carry around that kind of toxic secret for nearly a year. And now William Taraval stood before her in Costa Rica, demanding she abort her husband. She was shaken, barely able to look at my unfortunate doppelgänger.
“We were just talking about you, my boy,” Taraval said after Joel2 failed to respond to his introduction. “My apologies for the interruption, but I’m afraid with the terrorist attack on IT, Sylvia must return to New York. Desperate times, measures, you understand.”
Joel2 turned to Sylvia and asked, “This is your”—he left out the jerk—“boss?”
Sylvia shook her head, still unable to acknowledge her husband.
“Quite right. I run research and development at International Transport. Sylvia is the principal scientist on my team. Which is why we need her back. To help clean up this … mess. I have transportation ready to take us to San José, but it’s late and I can see you’ve had a lo
ng day. Perhaps first thing tomorrow? What do you say, Sylvia?”
She ran to the bathroom, slamming the door shut.
Joel2 ran to check on her. “Syl? You okay?”
Heaves, coughs, and whimpers were all he could hear.
“Yes, well, unfortunately I was the bearer of some bad news,” Taraval continued, moving to the door. “Some of our peers perished in the explosion. I can’t tell you what a relief it was to learn Sylvia wasn’t among them.”
“Well, she’s doing great now!” Joel2 said sarcastically. “Thanks a lot for that.”
“Yes, it seems she has taken their deaths more viscerally than anticipated. Still, there remain other matters of life and death, with which we need her assistance. I truly hope you two can salvage your holiday some other time. First thing tomorrow, then!” he called toward the bathroom door, then started down the stairs.
“¡Hasta luego!” chimed the door behind him.
Joel2, still scantily clad in his towel, went back to tap on the bathroom door. The wind outside had picked up and could be heard rustling the tree branches. He sat down on the floor beside the bathroom, his back leaning against the wall.
Eventually Sylvia opened the bathroom door and pensively sat beside Joel2, sniffling. He put his arm around her, kissing the top of her head. She smelled of soap and mouthwash.
“Syl, I’m so sorry about your friends.”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said. Her body was shaking or shivering, he couldn’t tell. “I did something really bad, Joel.”
“A bunch of crazies who think teleportation is the devil blew up a bunch of people to prove their point. Is what you did worse than that?”
“I don’t know,” she said, finally looking into his eyes. “I honestly don’t know. When it happened earlier today, I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you. I panicked. I—I couldn’t reveal what I was working on, not specifically, but I told you the basics last week at the Mandolin—extending the range of teleportation, exploring outer space, that kind of thing?”
Joel2 blinked. “That wasn’t a drunken hypothetical?”
“No. The thing I’m working on, Project Honeycomb—really it’s just an evolution of the Punch Escrow. But I never thought—” She stopped talking and just sort of gazed forward.
“Never thought what?” Joel2 gently prodded.
“When Corina Shafer invented the Punch Escrow, it was a fail-safe feature. She knew that the biggest risk of teleportation was data loss or corruption. The Punch Escrow was brilliant, if only for its simplicity: an ephemeral cache of the thing being teleported.”
“That’s the four-second time delay?”
“Sort of,” she said, now averting her gaze. “The glacier storage costs for a single scan of a teleported human—twenty years ago they were astronomical. After each teleportation, successful or not, the … data needed to be cleared immediately to get ready for the next object. Honeycomb is a project that investigates the use of a backup instead of a cache. It’s the only way we could initially send people to a planet in another solar system, for example. Humans wouldn’t survive the flight, and even if we put them in torpor, the mortality rates go through the roof. The probability of something going wrong in transit and killing the crew increases exponentially with time, making such missions untenable. But if we didn’t have to worry about hundreds of years of life support, if we could just put a TC on a spacecraft, then—”
“So you just keep the astronauts in the glacier until the craft arrives. And then, what—you print them out like a hamburger or a cup of coffee? God, Sylvia—this is some pretty messed-up shit you’ve been working on.”
“Think of what we could do though, Joel. Imagine if we could send a self-contained TC, like a glacier in a box on a space probe, and it could spend as long as necessary hunting for habitable planets. Once we found one, we could put an entire team of explorers or colonists onto that planet immediately. That kind of stuff could ensure the survival of the human race even if Earth is a barren rock. Even if we ourselves will have been dead for centuries!”
Perhaps the word made him ponder his own near-death experience, I don’t know. Or maybe it was the nurse’s parting comment combined with the way Sylvia had been treating him, as if he were made of glass. Maybe, on some deep molecular level, he just knew.
“Is that … what you did to me?” he asked, uncertainty dotting his voice.
She didn’t speak. Didn’t look him in the eye.
He hesitated. “Did I … die?”
Sylvia closed her eyes, and lowered her head onto his shoulder. “I … restored you from the Honeycomb backup. But it was missing your comms and some stuff around those areas. I told the nurses you were injured in the blast, so the hospital—the doctors, they filled in the gaps.”
I don’t know exactly what he was thinking. But since he was me, and I’d been through a similar situation with Corina and co., I can make a pretty good guess. Joel2 was confused and angry and grappling with some pretty unique existential issues. But somehow, in that moment, he rose above it. I’m not sure I could have. I guess he understood that what she’d done, she’d done for love.
Joel2 took his wife’s face in his hands. He looked deeply into her eyes. “I want you to listen to me right now, Sylvia. I am here. Me. Your husband. Whatever happened today, I can’t imagine life without you.” He pressed his forehead to hers. “You know what I remember from that Star Trek discussion?”
She shook her head, half laughing and half crying.
“Kirk and Uhura. I had my epiphany a long time ago, Mrs. Sylvia Byram.” Joel2 kissed her. “I love you. I’m not going anywhere.”
Their kiss wasn’t passionate; it was desperate. He wanted her to know he was her husband. That he was, body and mind, every bit the man she had married. He needed her to be absolutely, vehemently sure—because if she was, then he might believe it, too.
THE FIRST NOBLE TRUTH
SHORTLY AFTER DAWN, Joel2 woke up alone in bed. It was July Fourth, the ceremonial celebration of American independence and, more important for the world at large, the day the Last War21 ended.
In case it’s been edited or filtered out of human history, you should know the Last War began in 2074. It was started by a group of folks calling themselves the Architects, whose stated goal was to be raptured into heaven by bringing about Armageddon. Seems convoluted, but they were taking their cues from various religious doctrines. Others among them just wanted a war to reboot a world economy that had almost entirely been taken over by automation. When the Architects tried to erect a Third Temple in Jerusalem, it catalyzed a global conflict that went on for twenty-two years and killed 10 percent of the population. It was so devastating, it forever altered how people viewed themselves and their forms of government.
So, in 2098, the world decided that corporations would do a better job running things than traditional politicians. This led to the elimination of borders and the establishment of a new, truly global economy. Costs of things were based on algorithms of supply, demand, and value to the purchaser. Infrastructure, federal institutions, and the legal system were all privatized. Minimum basic needs were created and provided for everyone free of charge. That way, the corps reckoned, nothing would be out of reach for anyone. The rich could still be rich, but things like food and shelter would always be available.
The Levant, a region spanning from Turkey to Iran, was the only holdout. The only nation to eschew corporate rule not just for “classical” government but theocracy. A theocracy of peace, built on the fundamentals of the three religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). The three religions all agreed to cast aside the embellishments of testaments and prophecies, and focus on the crux of each faith, then bind themselves under a single philosophical umbrella. Any group trying to break off as a different faction would be excommunicated and deported. The Levant were not fundamentalists. They believed in progress and technology. But above all, they believed that God was real and all were bound to abide by him.
&
nbsp; July Fourth, the day the Last War ended, was now a day of peace and remembrance throughout the world. A holiday created to recognize how close the human race had come to extinction, and how far we had progressed since then. Also, there was always a gratuitously huge fireworks celebration in memoriam.
As Joel2 woke on that day, he felt as though he had a new lease on life. Yesterday he could have been dead, asleep forever. Now he had a second chance. He vowed to make the most of it. Starting right now.
“Sylvia?” he called out, but no answer came.
Did she go for a walk outside? he wondered. He got out of bed, stretched, and went to the front door. It silently swung open for him. It was clear and sunny outside, the light sparkling off the fresh raindrops coating the vegetation.
She muted the door. Maybe she just didn’t want to wake me.
“Syl?” he called into the cloud forest. Nothing.
At least the view was spectacular. The lush canopy below was interspersed with fluffy clouds. The forest was alive with monkey howls and quetzal calls. He scanned the parking lot below, but there was no sign of their rented RV or Taraval’s people-mover. The gravel lot was empty.
He tried her on the comms with no success.
“Huh,” Joel2 pondered aloud.
He commed Julie. “Hey, did you hear anything from Sylvia lately?”
Her avatar made an animated Hmmm face. “Yes, this morning she checked in.”
“Did she send any messages?” “Just one.”
“To who? What was it about?”
“Joel, you know I can’t tell you that. It’s confidential.”
“Jules, it’s an emergency! She disappeared sometime between last night and this morning. Our RV’s gone, too. I think she might be in some kind of trouble with IT.”
“Oh my gosh, that’s terrible! But, Joel, you know I can only divulge personal information to my owner.”
“Fine! If something happens to her, then it’s on your head, Jules. I hope you can live with that.”