The Punch Escrow

by Tal Klein

  “Glad to hear it!”

  “Bottoms up, Mr. T.” I popped the berry into my mouth, chewing a couple of times before swallowing the overly sweet thing. “Just one last request.”

  “Yes, Joel?”

  “Would you please fetch Moti and let him know you’ve just poisoned me with belladonna? I think I’ve only got a few more minutes to live.”

  22 Despite the advent of nanomedicine, NSAIDs, or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, were still quite popular in my time for treating minor aches and pains. Tiny robots don’t necessarily do everything better. Also, I was lying to the room.

  CURST BE HE THAT MOVES MY BONES

  MOTI WAS PISSED. No, he was furious. Standing in a hospital room, overlooking the East River, he yelled at Zaki, “That stupid room almost killed him!”

  It had taken a lot of effort in a very short amount of time to get the man-with-no-comms who’d been administered a poison-nobody-ever-heard-of admitted to the Bellevue Hospital Center. Fortunately for me, the Levantine Intelligence Directorate was well versed in the sort of clandestine payoffs, elbow rubs, and tit for tats required to bypass the usual procedures.

  Moti beckoned Zaki out of the almost-featureless room in which I lay unconscious. The belladonna poison had felt like lava-coated knives in my stomach, but thankfully, I had passed out quickly. Now my Levant captors were seeking out a doctor to get a prognosis on my condition.

  They found one near the elevator. He was a young sandy-haired man dressed in paisley scrubs. He sat in a glass-walled, aquarium-like room, watching an array of telemetry and video streams. Pulling up my data, he informed Moti that my unevenly dilated pupils had initially led to some concern that I had sustained brain damage. But now that the nanites were dialyzing my blood, I was out of the woods.

  “You know, I actually studied this poison in school,” the doctor said, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet uses it to poison herself to death when she can’t be with Romeo.”

  “Yes, very romantic,” said Moti. “Tell me, what is the time frame for my colleague’s recovery?”

  “Actually,” the doctor’s console chimed in, “Juliet was only feigning death to escape her family. Romeo was supposed to know that. They were meant to elope when she woke up, but he didn’t get the message. So when he found her—”

  “What?” Moti interrupted. “What do you mean, ‘feign death’?”

  “The ruse was that a small amount of belladonna would leave the ingestor only comatose for a brief period of time, whereas a larger dose might end their lives. Poisons were a favorite of Shakespeare.”

  But Moti wasn’t there to hear the end of the console’s lecture. He and Zaki were already running down the hall to my room—to find my bed empty.

  “He tricked us!” Moti yelled at his subordinate, whose face was impassive. “Why, Zaki? What’s his plan?”

  My “plan”—and I put it in quotes because it was less of a plan and more of a haphazard string of ad hoc last resorts—was to find the hospital’s TC and port to Costa Rica. Every major hospital had a teleportation chamber, a gesture of goodwill from those benevolent helpers of humanity, International Transport.

  As soon as Moti and Zaki left my room, I hopped off my gurney and went the opposite direction down the hallway, hiding my face to avoid detection while searching for a janitorial bot. I ended up finding one near the printer vending area. It was a semisentient quadruped plunger with a trash-can-shaped body about half my height.

  I ran a rudimentary salt on the janitor, telling it there was an organic spill in the TC—in other words, that someone had pissed themselves—which, as it turned out, was not too far-fetched. “Happens all the time,” the plunger told me in a gravelly New Jersey accent. Either someone had been having fun reprogramming the little guy, or he’d seen a lot of construction workers come through the halls. “I’ll hop on it lickety-split.”

  Janitors had the best security clearance because nobody liked cleaning other people’s messes. As it motored off, I followed it into an elevator and down three floors to the hospital’s TC, breathing a sigh of relief when it was granted access to the foyer. Having arrived, it scanned the spotless concrete floor, inspected the unsullied chair, then looked at me with what would have been a quizzical look, had it possessed a face.

  “Guess someone else cleaned it up,” I said.

  “Okay,” said the janitor, and it motored out of the room.

  As the door hissed closed, I turned to the TC console. I’d watched conductors work such consoles while standing in TC queues, so I figured it would be something I’d be able to pwn in a few pokes. Unfortunately, I figured wrong.

  I know, you’re probably thinking, Some salter you are, Joel. Can’t even figure out how to work a TC console. Well, smartass, there’s a huge difference between salting and hacking. It’s like the difference between a con man and a pickpocket. Yes, both take stuff from you, but they’re two completely different skill sets.

  Still, I attempted to give it a shot. The interface was a scrum of strange icons, like a puzzle in which none of the pieces made sense.

  I was so preoccupied with trying to understand the user interface that I missed a nurse walking by. It wasn’t fully my fault; the scrubs covering her generous frame were almost the exact shade of the hallway’s teal walls. It also didn’t help that nearly everyone in the place was wearing either a lab coat or green scrubs. At a certain point, my mind had just started filtering them out. In the nick of time, I found the lock door icon on the console and pushed it.

  “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the nurse asked, pounding on the TC door. She was broad-shouldered, a full foot taller than me, with thick black braids.

  “Oh.” Shit. “Hi. I’m fixing this console. Someone broke it.”

  “What? Since when do IT employees wear hospital gowns?” It was a fair point. She tried to scan me on her comms, then looked alarmed. “Hey, why aren’t you registering? What’s going on here?”

  I had nothing. Stall. “Do you know what an ayah is?”

  “Stay right there! I’m calling security.”

  Double shit. If the cops get here, IT will be on me in moments. May as well stick to my guns. I’m not getting out of here any other way. I slowly rotated my body away from her as I worked at the console.

  “Code Yellow,” reverberated an announcement throughout the hospital. “Security to TC chamber.”

  I hit a few more icons, but the user interface might as well have been in hieroglyphics. The chair levitated back and forth, then a wall nozzle sprayed it with disinfectant foam. This wasn’t going well.

  Upstairs, Moti heard the announcement. “Shit. Zaki! That idiot is going to get himself killed!”

  “Maybe that’s what he wants?” suggested the big man.

  “You stay here,” said Moti, then he went scrambling down the fire stairs. As he ran, he pulled up a map of the hospital on his comms and located the TC.

  He reached the chamber to find me facing off with the red-faced nurse, two hospital security guards, and the janitor bot, which had been notified there really was a mess now in the TC.

  Moti stepped in front of them, his back to me. He began talking in a low, urgent but reasonable voice. I had been on the receiving end of that voice for the last day, and I knew what it could do. Whatever he said caught the nurse by surprise. With a glass wall between us, I couldn’t hear what they were whispering to each other. Eventually, the nurse shook her head, and said, “No, that’s impossible.” To which Moti merely shrugged, and made a Go comm somebody who cares gesture. The nurse took him up on the challenge, making a few gestures of her own.

  The look on her face indicated she was rather disgruntled by whatever it was whomever she’d commed had told her. She looked at Moti incredulously, then shot an icy This ain’t over glance at me, then leveled a warning finger at Moti. He simply shrugged as the irate nurse and the security guards walked off down the hallway. The hospita
l alarm stopped before they were around the corner.

  Moti turned back to me. I expected him to be angry, but he was smiling. “Yoel. So you want to be an Aher, not a Job, eh?”

  “Shut the fuck up, Moti,” I said, continuing to scan the TC console. “I’m going to get my wife.” I found a destination icon, but it seemed like it wanted me to enter three dimensions of coordinates.

  Fuck, how do you work this fucking thing?

  “You don’t even have a working comms. What will you do in Costa Rica?”

  “I’ll figure it out. I’m not sure how, but I’ll figure it out. She’s my wife; I’m not leaving her in the hands of a bunch of Costa Rican terrorists.”

  The door opened and Moti walked inside.

  “How the hell did you—” He came at me at a brisk, aggressive pace. I braced myself, anticipating violence. Instead he grasped me by both shoulders.

  “You do not understand how this works,” Moti said, his eyes piercing me like twin machetes. “The enemy you would attack is everywhere, global. You need to be quick and invisible. Until today, you lived in a world where the worst thing that could happen was an app not wanting to pay you when you bullshit it. Or your wife doesn’t give you enough attention because she’s too busy with work. These are the kind of problems you can solve. This, well…” He sighed.

  “Ayah don’t give a shit. You can take me back, lock me up again, but I’ll keep finding ways to escape, even if I have to salt every app you’ve got. My wife has been kidnapped. What would you do?”

  At this, Moti smiled wide. As I huffed in anger, I noticed a distinct change manifest in him. Where once there was pity, the kind one might feel for a dumb pigeon that kept flying into windows, there was now a tinge of respect. I guess I had said the right thing. Or I’d flown into enough windows that he realized helping me would be easier than dealing with my flattened corpse.

  He turned and went to the console, hitting a few icons. The TC powered up, and the chair levitated into position. Moti made a few comms-related gestures. “I will give you something that will help.”

  “Is it a weapon?”

  “It is bread crumbs, Yoel.” As I stared blankly, he picked up a dry-erase marker from underneath a room-cleaning roster board. He took ahold of my left wrist and begin to ink numbers onto my forearm. “A trail. These are the last known GDS coordinates for your wife, and most likely your ‘other,’” he explained. “The numbers will lead you to them.”

  “I’d still rather have a weapon,” I said, but studied the numbers grudgingly. Why is this guy helping me all of a sudden? I’m not one to kick a gift horse in the nuts, but I didn’t see what he was getting out of the deal.

  “I am pretty sure I am sending you to die,” he said, “but you have earned my respect. If this is what you wish, I will honor it. Even if my superiors will probably, as you say, ‘rip me a new one.’” He gave a wry grin, then was back to business. “But at least you will die with honor, and that is something worth living for. Now, have you ever driven a car?”

  “Yes. I mean—not in real life, just in video games.”

  “Even better!” he said, clapping his hands. “You will need to steal an ambulance. You don’t have your comms, which is a good thing right now because people are hunting you. But not so good for driving. The good news is that ambulances have a manual mode you can switch to in case they have to drive somewhere strange to save somebody. So use manual mode plus the GDS coordinates, and drive the ambulance to your wife. Got it?”

  “I think so. Thanks, you know, for your help.”

  He waved me off. “Sit in the chair,” he instructed.

  I turned to face it. It was identical to every chair I’d ever seen in a Punch Escrow room, except for the color scheme. Traditionally, Punch Escrow chairs are maroon and gold, whereas this one was black. Now that I was finally on my way, I found myself hesitating. Thinking about all the vapor and dust I was about to leave behind. Being cleared.

  “Don’t worry, Yoel,” said Moti, laying a heavy hand on my shoulder. “You have done it many times already.”

  I nodded, then sat in the chair to face him.

  “Also, find some clothes when you arrive. Your ass is hanging out.” He went to the console, tapping a few commands. I saw SAN JOSÉ HOSPITAL CIMA appear on the destination screen. My hands gripped the armrests.

  “One last question for you,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “How did you convince my room to poison you? It is not every day an app breaks the First Law of Robotics and almost kills a man.”

  I gave a half smile. “I’m a salter, remember?”

  Moti harrumphed. “Good luck, Aher.”

  As his fingers toyed with the conductor console and the room darkened, the most disturbing thing occurred to me: How the fuck does Moti—a man whose nation is fundamentally opposed to the very notion of teleportation—know how to operate a TC console?

  Then there was a white flash.

  THE CRETAN LABYRINTH

  THE LIGHTS DIMMED back to normal. Moti’s disappearance reassured me I had made it to the vestibule in the San José hospital. Better yet, there was no Costa Rican security force awaiting my arrival.

  I ambled out of the TC and into the hallway. My first task: find some sort of staff locker room. Somewhere I could change out of my ass-revealing—

  “Mr. Byram!”

  Are you fucking kidding me? Had IT tracked me down already?

  Adrenaline coursed through my veins. After everything I’d been through, I was surprised my glands were still able to make the stuff. I turned and saw a nurse coming toward me. He had a pleasant face and super-thick eyebrows.

  Act cool. It’s just one guy. You can overpower him. That’s first. Second, you take his scrubs and get to the parking lot. Third is you find an ambulance and drive it straight to Sylvia. Even though you’ve never actually driven anything outside of video games.

  I curled my right hand into a fist, ready to clock him if need be, but his expression was one of concern, not apprehension.

  “I’m really glad you came back,” he said. “You know, I felt a little guilty that I didn’t work harder yesterday to make you stay. Kept me up a little last night. I never saw injuries like that.” He looked me up and down. “Looks like you got some new ones since then.”

  Shit, my bruises. “I—uh—fell,” I said. “Off a cliff,” I added unnecessarily.

  He blinked, unsure if I was kidding or not. “Is your wife around, by any chance? Some IT people came by yesterday to fix the TC, and they had some questions for her. They’ve been talking to everyone after that attack.”

  My wife? I thought. How does he—Oh. This guy must have met the “other” me. “Yes. She’s—um—outside. I’ll tell her.”

  “Okay,” said the nurse with a cheerful smile. “Glad to see you’re feeling better.”

  Guess other me wasn’t looking so hot.

  He walked off, and I wandered the halls until I found a directory that led me down to the basement laundry. It was occupied by bots, who kept offering to help me find the exit. I salted them with some story about my clothing accidentally being sent down for cleaning. Getting around without comms was already proving to be a pain in the ass. Even the most basic tasks required either salting my way past an app or explaining why my comms weren’t working. I couldn’t even operate a printer on my own.

  “I can’t go back out there like this. Can’t you print me some clothes? Or point me to a lost and found?” I kept asking the bots, until finally one handed me a clean pair of scrubs and a lab coat. It ushered me back out through the exit, leaving me to change in the hallway. Thankfully, no one walked past.

  It felt weird to walk around like a half nurse, half doctor, but at least I was fully clothed again. I wiped my sweaty forehead on my sleeve. In fact, my whole body was sweaty. I began to suspect Moti had me pegged. I wasn’t cut out for this shit.

  I took the stairs up to the ground floor, avoiding both the elevator and as m
any security cameras as I could see.

  Outside, the late-morning Sun was glaring, and the piss-warm rain was unpleasantly piss-like. Something buzzed by my ear, and for a moment I was certain it was some IT nano carrying synthesized venom. I looked around for the man Moti told me I wouldn’t see coming but couldn’t find him. It’s just a bug, Joel. Keep it together.

  I took cover under an awning. I had no idea where to find an ambulance. Was there a dedicated ambulance garage? Man, I’d give anything to have my comms working right now. I circled the entire circumference of the hospital to no avail. Fuck. Moti hadn’t told me what to do if there were no ambulances to steal.

  After a second tour around the cluster of buildings that made up the hospital, I ended up settling on the emergency room entrance as my perch. My assessment was that sooner or later an ambulance would show up there. I scanned the white-and-green skyline of San José. The column of smoke from yesterday’s explosion was gone, and the jungle-covered mountains were clear in the distance. Everything looked pretty normal. And to think, less than twenty-four hours ago, the city had been in chaos.

  A siren wailed, drawing my attention back to the road. It was an ambulance, coming straight for the hospital. Finally some good luck. I stepped behind a concrete column as the white-and-orange-striped vehicle pulled into the circular driveway in front of the emergency room entrance. A crew of paramedics popped out—one from each door, and another from the rear. With the aid of a fourth paramedic in the cabin, they extracted a rolling gurney upon which lay a poor bastard who had cracked his head open like a bloody coconut. Two of the paramedics took the patient into the ER, but the other two stayed outside. Damn it. I didn’t know if they were getting ready to go on another call or shoot the shit; I only knew they were in between me and my best chance of getting to Sylvia. Who knew when another empty ambulance would show up?

  Confidence, Joel. I stepped out from behind the column and walked briskly toward the ambulance. The rasp of my slipper-covered feet on the asphalt sounded deafening. But I kept going, pretending I didn’t see the paramedics, even though they were less than three meters away. One of them—a blond woman who looked young, maybe midtwenties—called after me. “¡Doctor! Estábamos a punto de irnos. ¿Viene?”