The Punch Escrow

by Tal Klein

He opened his eyes, fixing Joel2 with an intense, sympathetic stare. “Thus my daughter found you, Mr. Byram.”

  Shock and anger duked it out in Joel2’s brain. As per usual, anger won. “You’re saying this whole thing was a fucking setup? That I was a target?”

  The old man nodded. “However, you were never meant to be killed. Our aim was to disable your foyer in New York so that you wouldn’t be cleared. But my daughter had other plans.” Tears formed in his eyes. “She did not trust that you could become our ayah. That you could stand before the world and proclaim the truth. She wished to make herself an example instead.”

  He passed a hand over his eyes. “What she didn’t know, what none of us knew, was that IT had another, more devilish trick up its sleeve. One your wife used to return you from Gehinnom.”

  “She told me, and she wouldn’t have done it if weren’t for your daughter,” Joel2 said defiantly. “I mean, if you knew what your daughter was doing, why didn’t you stop her?”

  Shila smiled sadly, his eerily perfect teeth gleaming. “You’re not a father yet, my boy. I can’t expect you to understand the implications of your question. However, I will say that most of the Friends held your position. I acted selfishly when I prevented them from imprisoning her then. And for that I am sorry.”

  “Enough with the religious psychobabble history lesson. So you’re sorry your daughter fucked up my life. Great. Tell you what: let me and my wife go free and consider us even.”

  “Don’t be glib, child. All I want is to set you free. To set your wife free. To set the entire world free from this evil. I want to show everyone that you are not the only Joel Byram! That just as you sit here, another you, the real you, sits in New York.”

  The roiling sea of questions in Joel2’s mind went flat. His stomach began to slowly fill with a cold, heavy dread. “What do you mean, ‘another me’?”

  “Did your wife not confess the full truth to you?” The Gehinnomite’s eyes were sad. He took no joy in relating this. “The original you, the one from New York, was never destroyed. He is alive at this moment. You, my boy, are but a copy, a replicant hastily cobbled together by your wife in her desire to play God.”

  Joel2 shook his head. It was too much to absorb. He was a ship taking on water, the holes and questions too numerous to plug. He had already begun to sink when Shila explained how teleportation worked, but learning there was another version of him, the original version, one who hadn’t died and been resurrected by computer, that sent him straight to the ocean floor. He sagged in the chair.

  The wheelchair whirred as it came around the table to him. The old man reached out with a trembling hand, placing it on Joel2’s shoulder. It weighed no more than a few dry twigs. “It may be small comfort, but the fact is, the real Joel Byram died the first time he stepped into that place you call the Punch Escrow.” He patted Joel2 lightly. “That elevator to Gehinnom. An elevator your wife helped build. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Byram?”

  Joel2 whipped his head around. In the doorway stood Sylvia, her hands bound and held by Felipe. Her mouth was gagged and there were fresh tears streaking down her cheeks. She had heard everything.

  THE BUMMOCK

  JOEL2 AND SYLVIA STARED AT EACH OTHER. Though they’d only been apart for half a day, it felt like nearly a year had passed since they were last together.

  He shook his head, trying to clear his mind of all the madness Shila had just heaped upon him. He directed his words at the Gehinnomite leader but kept his eyes fixed on his wife. “You want your proof? Well, so do I. Let Sylvia speak for herself. I trust her much more than I trust any of you assholes.”

  “Go ahead!” A different cold robotic voice came from the darkness in the back of the room. It had a feminine quality with a heavy Tico accent. “Take off her gag.”

  “Danielle—” Roberto turned to the empty spot in the room where the voice had come from. “You are here only to observe. Please—”

  The head of a stoic silver-blond-haired woman was suddenly unveiled, floating about two meters off the ground. “Let her speak,” she said.

  As she moved, camouflage LEDs rippled up and down her robe, recording and displaying whatever was behind her such that her body was rendered practically invisible. “Or do you fear the bruja might prove me right?” she said to Roberto in a mocking tone.

  Joel2 couldn’t grok whether bruja was meant to insult Sylvia by calling her a witch, the literal definition, or a bitch, the Costa Rican slang interpretation. Either way, this woman was not making a great first impression.

  The old man sighed. “Mr. Byram, allow me to introduce Danielle Julious. My wife.”

  “His better half, he means. The one who knows that this”—Danielle glanced at Sylvia with disgust—“this devil’s engineer knew and was intimately engaged with every facet of Honeycomb. The one who wanted to share this evidence with you from the moment you stepped into Monteverde, but my impotent husband here insisted you be brought down the path of goose feathers. Your bruja is not who you think she is.”

  Danielle’s LED robe switched from camouflage to a bright white glow. Everyone squinted as their eyes adjusted. She crossed the room, towering over everyone present, statuesque. Her movements, however, were none too gentle as she nudged Felipe aside and pulled the cloth gag out of Sylvia’s mouth. “Go ahead,” challenged Danielle. “Defend yourself, bruja.”

  Sylvia coughed. She shook her head, but then, making eye contact with her husband, she found she could not keep silent. “Joel, I—I wasn’t being completely honest with you. I couldn’t be. But I swear, for me, Honeycomb is just an evolution of the cache we use for the Punch Escrow. I never thought—” She stopped talking and just sort of gazed forward.

  Joel2 was in free fall.

  There was no denial in her words. And in that moment he knew that everything Shila had told him was true.

  The parachute he had been waiting for never opened.

  “Never thought what?” Joel2 asked. “That you’d ever have to use it on me? That you would replicate me?”

  Sylvia spoke plaintively, like a child who knew she’d done wrong. “I was just researching the science of it! The possibilities.” She shook her head. “I know that’s not an excuse. I know I should have waited. I should have waited to hear from New York. But you…” She looked at her husband again, her eyes shining with tears. “When I knew you were gone, I couldn’t process it. I didn’t think. I’m so sorry.”

  Joel2 hit the ground at terminal velocity.

  She took a shuddering breath. “This past year, I don’t know what’s happened to me. Everything we’ve been doing at IT, it just got more and more out of control. Honeycomb was just an idea we were toying with, but Bill, he became obsessed. He thought it was the game changer. The next phase of human evolution. He immediately put it into production. I kept voicing my concerns—that we had no idea what the impact of such profound time gaps would do to the human psyche, to say nothing of the moral questions. But Bill kept experimenting. He said he was doing it to prove that it was safe.” Her face contorted. “I should’ve stopped him! But I was thinking of things like colonizing other planets. Preserving our species. Meanwhile Bill kept encoding himself, staying in the glacier for longer and longer periods. At first a couple of minutes, then hours, then days—”

  “What about me?” Joel2 said sourly. “When were you gonna tell me what you did to me?”

  “I’m getting to that! Stop interrupting me!” she shouted.

  “Sorry!” he yelled back defensively.

  She took another calming breath. “Bill told me not to worry about it. He programmed a fail-safe in case something went wrong. The system would automatically restore an encoded person after a defined period of time.”

  “So is that what—” Joel2 began.

  “Joel, please!” She closed her eyes, collecting herself. “I need to get through this. We don’t have an internal affairs department at International Transport. Corina says we’re all one another’s consciences. A m
onth ago I discovered something even more disturbing about Project Honeycomb. IT … They were militarizing it. Researching the use of teleportation as a weapon.”

  Danielle looked triumphantly at her husband, but Joel2 was confused. “Militarize teleportation? How would that even work?”

  “I wondered the same thing. When I learned about these experiments, I escalated directly to Corina Shafer. She pretty much admitted the whole thing. Said it was just a trial program. Mobile teleportation was an easy way to extract dangerous people, saving a lot of lives in the process. She said Bill was handling the temporal disassociation problem. There were apparently some side effects to being kept in the glacier, and the severity of them was directly correlated to the amount of time a person spent inside. But Corina felt comfortable proceeding with the project, since Honeycomb could be spun as a morally superior alternative to weapons. Rather than kill a threat, you could freeze them in the glacier, where they could be extracted for interrogation or civilized punishment.”

  “Or imprisoned there forever,” pointed out Roberto. “Removed from time itself and held in Gehinnom.”

  “I didn’t like it,” Sylvia said defensively. “But I admit, I wanted it to make sense. I hate violence, and this sounded more humane than killing people. And … I wanted to keep working on Honeycomb. In spite of everything, I knew it could exist for the betterment of society. It will let us explore the most distant reaches of space. Our planet is dying. We keep patching it, engineering ways to extend its life, but sooner or later we will run out of time. I was trying to give us—humanity”—she looked back at Joel2—“our children … a chance. So I stupidly rationalized my concerns away. I told myself a lot of our greatest, most beneficial scientific breakthroughs had been militarized—nuclear energy, genetic engineering, wake transduction—but ultimately they did more good than bad.”

  Danielle grabbed Sylvia by the chin. “So for that, you would decide who lives and dies? Who is resurrected and who is gone forever? How many husbands will you print? How many would satiate your hunger, súcuba?”

  Sylvia shook her head loose of the old woman’s grip. “No! It wasn’t like that.” She looked at her (other) husband. “Joel,” she implored him, “none of this was planned. I really thought I lost you. I swear.”

  Joel2 knew that his wife had kept secrets from him. Not just because her job required it. Still, he had no idea how deep and dark her hidden life had been. Every time she’d been distant or distracted, her mind had gone to her own personal Gehinnom. While he’d been deciding what to have for dinner or which movie to watch, she’d been grappling with the future of humanity. No wonder they had grown apart over the last year.

  “Don’t you dare talk about losing people, bruja,” Danielle said. “My daughter’s blood is on your hands!”

  “And mine is on your daughter’s!” Joel2 retorted.

  “The tree of life is sacred to all,” Roberto rasped. “It is not our place to take or alter its fruit. To make another human being,” he admonished Sylvia, “is to usurp God’s place. It cannot be done!”

  “I disagree,” stated Danielle. “This bruja used her desgraciado, and she will do so again.” She stroked the side of Sylvia’s face. Felipe gripped the back of my wife’s head, holding her for a slap, but Danielle just gently moved her bangs away from her eyes. “She’s going to bring back our daughter, mi amor.”

  CHEKHOV’S GUN

  “ENOUGH!” Roberto’s vocal implants struggled with the volume of his shout, the latter half of his word becoming static. “Put such heretical thoughts out of your mind, Danielle.”

  “But that is the clever part, husband. It will not be us who partakes in such heresy.” She turned her eyes to Sylvia. “She will do it for us.”

  Joel2 looked at his wife. She tried to hold his gaze, but her eyes kept falling to the floor, unable to face her shame reflected in his pupils. Fearful that anything he might say could push the terrorists toward more violence, he uncharacteristically opted to remain silent.

  Roberto’s bony hand took his wife’s and held it. “To solicit unholy industry is to partake in it. Our daughter is dead, mi amor. It pains me as it pains you. We would not tarnish the sanctity of—”

  “Hypocrite!” spat Danielle. “‘Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?’ That is Luke thirteen, husband,” she said, pulling her hand from his grasp.

  “I know the scripture, wife. And do you dare compare our work to our Lord’s? We have before us the ayah. Joel and Sylvia Byram shall destroy International Transport by exposing the truth. Why veer from that plan in pursuit of a soul who is gone? Look at this poor empty vessel before us. He is not a man, but a puppet. His wife, the puppet mistress. This is what the world must know. When the other is found, we will have all the pieces we need. The world will not be able to think of teleportation without remembering their tragedy.”

  “Untie me and you’ll see how much of a puppet I am,” said Joel2.

  Felipe smiled from behind Sylvia. “Jes, untie him. Let’s see the puppet dance!”

  Shila ignored them both. Then, lowering his voice to a mere whisper akin to the sound of a fork scraping a stone, he asked his wife, “Would you cast aside all our years of work? Our beliefs, our service to God? Would you sever your commitment to our people?”

  “What do you know of commitment?” Danielle asked coldly. “You are like these seculars. They shake hands, exchange chits, give someone their word. What do these things mean? They change their minds five minutes later and the world goes on as if nothing happened. You want to know the words of commitment?” She raised her arms, her glowing robe making her look like an angel. “Pulsa D’nura. That is a commitment. Our daughter, she was the ayah we sought all this time. And her foolish father is too old and blind to see it.”

  “No, mi amor. The Pulsa D’nura is a curse, not a miracle.”

  “El que no cree,” she uttered scornfully, confounding Joel2, who was wishing now he’d paid more attention in Spanish class. “Suddenly everything can only have one meaning. You want a question?” Turning to Sylvia, she asked, “Tell me, bruja, what is the difference between a curse and a prayer?”

  Sylvia continued staring at the floor.

  “Tell me!” Danielle yelled.

  “Don’t you fucking yell at my wife!” Joel2 shouted back.

  Sylvia shook her head. Though he couldn’t see her eyes, he knew that she didn’t want him to aggravate the situation.

  “Answer,” said Danielle, grabbing a fistful of Joel2’s hair. “Or I will dash out your creation’s brains on this table.”

  “Intent,” Sylvia said, meeting her captor’s eyes.

  “Sí, intent. And who determines intent?” Not waiting for an answer this time, she let go of Joel2 and pivoted to face her husband. “The Pulsa D’nura is a compact between creation and creator. It compels both to act. The request needs power, like fuel, like gravity. The more penitent the creation, the cleaner the fuel. In old times people sacrificed animals when they asked God for things. The more valuable the animal, the more public the display, the more fuel for their prayers. Personal sacrifice is a great fuel. Martyrdom, however, that is the greatest fuel of all.” Her eyes shone, bright and distant. “It wakes up the hibernating devout, the Gehinnomites who have been asleep for a generation or more. They have seen my Joanna’s sacrifice for a selfless cause. And when they see her rise again, a female Christ, they will be compelled by God to act!”

  “Danielle,” Roberto pleaded. “Do you truly believe Joanna would—”

  “Lo que haces se te devuelve, Roberto!” Danielle cut him off. “While you idled away your time with plots and strategies, our daughter planned her sacrifice. She delivered unto us the bruja and her puppet. What we do with them is up to us.”

  “I won’t do it,” said S
ylvia. “Honeycomb was a mistake. I shouldn’t have used it on Joel and I never will again.”

  A mistake, thought Joel2 bitterly. Is that what she sees me as now? Before he could go further with that dark thought, Danielle gripped a handful of his hair again, yanking his head back to expose his throat.

  “I do not care if he is the ayah or not.” She spoke quietly, keeping her eyes fixed on Sylvia. “Felipe will torture him just the same until you bring back my daughter. Judging by your resistance so far, he may end up losing a few teeth. Maybe a finger, an ear. But I suspect you will break before we take his eyes.”

  “No!” Sylvia said.

  “I agree,” said Roberto in his metallic voice. “No more. Felipe, please take Danielle away and confine her to her room. She is unwell.”

  Felipe did not respond. Both of the ancient Gehinnomites looked to the guard. There was a rumble in the ground, like a low-magnitude, short-lived earthquake. Before anyone could comment on it, Danielle gave Felipe a single curt nod—

  And the guard let go of Sylvia. He stepped forward, swinging a heavy red brick into Roberto Shila’s cheek. The strike was so powerful, it knocked the frail old man clear out of his wheelchair. As he fell, Roberto’s foot became tangled in the armrest, pulling the heavy chair on top of him. His small jamming weapon clattered across the floor.

  Sylvia jumped as some of the old man’s blood splashed her face. Joel2 pulled against Danielle, but she removed a hunting knife from underneath her robe and held it under his chin. Her eyes were ringed with tears, but fierce.

  “I thought you were supposed to be pacifists!” Joel2 yelled.

  The old woman jerked her head toward her limp husband. “He was. And look where it got him. For decades we have peacefully protested your technology, and nothing changed. My daughter destroys one TC, and in a day we have both of you. You will do what we ask or continue to suffer the consequences.”

  Her threat was delivered matter-of-factly, more a promise than a warning. She just ordered a hit on her own husband. Pretty sure she won’t go easy on me. He unconsciously found himself feeling his teeth with his tongue, imagining what it would feel like to have them ripped from his jaw one by one while his wife watched and begged them to stop. It wasn’t a pleasant prospect, but they couldn’t give in to these assholes, either. “Fuck you,” he said to Danielle.