The Punch Escrow

by Tal Klein

  Now, imagine taking that feeling and applying it not to a mirror but to a real version of yourself, who also happens to be dead. Multiply that by a thousand, and it still won’t come close to the horror I felt as I stared at my own dead body.

  No.

  I froze, uncertain of my place. So many emotions elbowed their way to prominence in my mind as I stared at him, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. I’d been so focused on getting to Sylvia, I hadn’t dared to consider what it would be like to meet—him. Me. Especially now that he was dead. Was this what happened when you died? If so, I wasn’t ready for it. I wasn’t ready to look upon the ruined, bloody face of myself. My… remains.

  At the same time, part of me felt relief. He’s already gone. There wouldn’t have to be any existential crises to unpack, no painful discussions to decide who would end up with our wife. I could just leave. No one would ever need to know he existed. Only me, Sylvia, Taraval, Corina—okay, a few people would know. All I had to do was find my wife, reactivate my comms, and our lives could return to semi-normal.

  I heard a drop of his blood hit the gray stone floor.

  Wait, was that movement? Did he just flinch?

  I raced to check his carotid pulse, then paused. Is it okay to touch him? I decided I didn’t have a choice.

  Is he alive? Why didn’t I check his pulse before?

  My fingers touched his neck. The universe did not explode. Instead Joel2’s left eye snapped open, scaring the crap out of me. I instinctively jumped back.

  Holy shit, he’s alive.

  “Sylvia?” he mumbled.

  “Did you see her? Is she alive?” I sputtered back. But he just moaned softly and closed his eye again.

  I nearly broke my neck sprinting back down to the ambulance outside. I collected all the medicinal supplies I could carry: Band-Aids, shots,23 a bunch of other stuff I had no idea how to use. I even kept my defibrillator spooled around my hand—just in case.

  Back in the basement, I affixed the biggest Band-Aid I had to the gash in his head, then administered one of the shots into his thigh.

  Almost instantly, his face twitched and his knee spasmed. I could never properly express in words how surreal it was watching my copy convulse uncontrollably like that. Seeing him in pain made me twinge. Talk about your out-of-body experience.

  “Don’t you fucking touch her!” His good eye was wild, straining to focus on what he thought was his attacker. He pulled at his bindings like a trapped animal. “I’ll kill you, asshole!”

  “Hey, hey!” I yelled back, then lowered my voice. “Calm down. You’re okay.”

  A little color came back into his face, though his left eye, the intact one, still seemed vacant. His pupil dilated, seeing me. “Who the fuck?” He tried again: “You’re—”

  “Me. Yes.”

  He looked me up and down. I knew what he was going through, and “confused” didn’t begin to cover it. He was waking up from the most existential nightmare you could conjure to find out it was reality. I opened my mouth to explain, then decided there was too much to go over. Keep it simple, stupid. “Is there a knife or something around here?” I asked him.

  “On the ground”—he indicated with his ruined head—“next to the dead bruja.”

  Realizing he meant the old woman with the hole in her chest, I scooped up the hunting knife and cut through the ropes binding his wrists to the chair. He winced in pain as the blood flowed back into his hands.

  “Where’s Sylvia?” I said. “What happened here?”

  “Sylvia.” His eye was fully focused now. He tried to stand, but didn’t yet have the strength. “Taraval. That motherfucker, I thought he came here to rescue us. Guess he had other plans.”

  “Taraval was here?” I asked in disbelief.

  “Yeah, it was a real party for a second. Me, Sylvia, and the Gehinnomites. Then Taraval showed up with an antique shotgun he stole from that asshole and shot everyone. Then he bashed in my head. I think he took Syl.”

  “You think?” I said angrily. “You were right here. How can you not know?”

  “Maybe because he didn’t tell me his plans before he bashed my head in.”

  “Shit. The people-mover!” I said, putting two and two together.

  “What?”

  “At the bottom of the hill, I almost got killed by a people-mover when I drove up. That was probably them. They could be anywhere by now!”

  “Shit!” spat Joel2.

  We glared at each other, our expressions a perfect symmetry of anger. Then, remembering we were each other’s copy, an uncomfortable silence occupied the space between us.

  “Do you mind?” said Joel2, holding out a hand.

  “Oh! Sorry, yeah, of course.” He hissed in pain as I helped him to his feet. “Are you okay?”

  “What do you think?” he snapped.

  Before I could snap back, a wet, metallic coughing sent me reeling, almost taking Joel2 down with me.

  “Guess I’m not the only one who made it,” he said, limping over to lift the wheelchair off the incredibly old man. “Joel, meet Roberto Shila. Founder of the Gehinnomites, oldest man in the world. He might know where Sylvia is.” Joel2 kicked the wheelchair aside. “Well, do you?”

  Roberto Shila gazed up at the two of us. One whole side of his face had swelled and turned purple with blood. He was clearly in very bad shape, though one wouldn’t know it from his oscillating cold, robotic laugh.

  “Look at the two of you,” he said, then stopped midsentence to cough up some blood. “The perfect evidence of the inhumanity created by the devil’s ultimate invention.” He looked at Joel2. “You, the golem, and he”—he looked at me—“the reanimated corpse. Husbands of the harpy.”

  “What’s he talking about?” I asked Joel2.

  “It’s how he is,” Joel2 remarked. Then he said coldly to the old man, “At least our wife didn’t try to kill me.”

  Shila’s ruined face became an ugly mask of sorrow. The old man shook his head. “I do not understand any of your kind’s motives. You, who would so willingly destroy the soul and usurp the powers of resurrection—”

  “Save it,” said Joel2. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but I saw he was angry. Maybe angrier than I’d ever been about anything.

  A thought occurred to me. “Wait, what does he mean ‘resurrection’?”

  Shila coughed feebly. “Tell him. He deserves to know the same as you.”

  “Know what?” I said. “Will someone just tell me the truth? She’s my wife!”

  My doppelgänger snorted. “Oh, she’s your wife now? Okay, Joel, let me tell you what your wife did, because, yes, it definitely falls under the category of resurrection. I take it you remember Project Honeycomb?”

  Sylvia mentioned it. Moti mentioned it. I should have paid closer attention. “It’s what Sylvia was working on at IT?”

  “And I assume you already know the Punch Escrow is a bullshit smoke screen, and you’ve been copied and killed a hundred times?”

  “Seriously, what the fuck crawled up your ass? You want to stand there and be a jerk, fine. But I’m going to finish what I came here to do, which is save my wife and fix my life. Maybe you can bring me the fuck up to speed so we can figure this shit out together.”

  “What life?” Joel2 said bitterly. “I wouldn’t even be here if she hadn’t printed me from a backup. An incomplete backup. I wasn’t supposed to make it, and for that matter, neither were you.”

  “I’m fine, asshole. You’re the copy!”

  Shila gurgled a metallic laugh. “Don’t be so hard on each other. You are both puppets. You,” he said, nodding at me with his ruined, bloody skull, “have you not considered what clockwork brought you to my doorstep?”

  “What the fuck do you know about anything?” My tone was just as aggressive and belligerent as my other’s. “Has anybody ever told you that you sound like an evil robot on acid?”

  Shila took a rattling breath. “I may be an old man, but the Friends ar
e not without friends. Friends who foretold your arrival. You, poor thing, are a pawn. An expendable piece in a game played among International Transport and the Levant. Your role was to manifest chaos, manipulate an outcome to tip the scales such that one party gains an edge and another loses.”

  “The Levant?” I said. “How do you know them?”

  “Our beliefs are aligned on some matters. Their concerns are our concerns.”

  “So you planned this together?”

  The old man shrugged. “We share information when we find it useful.”

  Information… “Moti?” I said. Shila’s lack of response confirmed my suspicion. That dick, I was really starting to believe his “Aher” crap. “Yeah, well—you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.” It was a lie, but I hoped it sounded true.

  “You,” the Gehinnomite said, and nodded to Joel2, “a puppet created by your wife’s desire to play God. And you”—back to me—“a catalyst for a nation seeking to usurp power.”

  Joel2 looked at me. “Okay, now I’m lost. Who is Moti? What’s he talking about?”

  The gambit unraveled in my mind: Moti’s coolness when we first met, the questions he asked me: I’ll know if you are lying. It wasn’t a spymaster’s sixth sense. Moti knew the truth—everything—all along. Why did Pema send me to Moti when I showed up at IT? She must have been working for him, another one of his pawns. He wrote down the GDS coordinates, told me to steal an ambulance, gave me everything I needed to find my way here. No wonder he knew how to operate a TC console!

  We’re his blackmail. The Gehinnomites want us to be their miracle; the Levant want us to be their bargaining chips.

  I growled. “That Turkish-drinking, cigarette-smoking son of a bitch. I’m going to kill him!”

  “Would you please tell me what is going on?” Joel2 pressed.

  I gripped my weaponized defibrillator. Game on, Moti.

  “There’s an ambulance I stole outside,” I offered, by way of an answer. “I’m not sure if it’s figured out I stole it yet, but just to play it safe, we should get out of here. I’ll tell you everything on the way.”

  “What about him?” Joel2 asked, glancing at Shila.

  “Please. Help me into my chair,” the Gehinnomite said, reaching out his bony hand.

  Joel2 bent to help the old man up. His wheelchair was covered in blood, but Shila didn’t seem to care. Joel2 tried to adjust his body so he’d be more comfortable.

  “Why are you helping the guy who kidnapped our wife?” I asked, annoyed. “Just leave him!”

  “He didn’t want to hurt us,” Joel2 said. Again, I wondered what was going on in his head. One minute he was ready to kill everyone; the next he was somber and forgiving. Was I this schizophrenic?

  “Thank you,” said Roberto Shila, his voice crackling meekly. He leaned back in the chair, the color continuing to fade from his face. He didn’t seem long for this world. “I take comfort that my wife’s and daughter’s deaths were not in vain. You two are the ayah, the miracle I’ve been waiting for all these years. Proof that teleportation is evil. None could classify your circumstance as anything else. I would only ask that you promise to deliver this message to the world, so that God may once more…” But his voice demodulated into static, then white noise. His lips quivered and his head dropped forward. After 171 years, Roberto Shila exhaled his last breath.

  “He’s gone,” I said. When Joel2 didn’t respond, I continued, “Look, Syl is still out there somewhere. The longer she’s gone, the harder it might be to find her.”

  Joel2 nodded silently, but still didn’t move.

  “Look, man, I know you’ve been through a lot today, but we really need to—”

  “Let’s go,” he said, finishing my sentence as he limped toward the door.

  23 Shots are active polydrugs. They are a mix of nanites, adrenaline, vitamins, clotting agents, diluting agents, and polymorphic antibiotics. Once in the body, the nanites perform diagnostics and activate whatever components they deem necessary.

  DON’T YOU WANT ME

  ON THE WALK BACK down to the ambulance, in the midday light of the vineyard, I got a good look at my doppelgänger. The Band-Aids were doing a decent job cauterizing Joel2’s forehead gash, but his right eye looked like a crushed grape. I put a bandage on it. “To keep it from getting infected,” I told Joel2. But really it was to keep it from grossing me out.

  “Okay. You’ve performed exceedingly well in your assessment!” I enthusiastically commended the ambulance as we strapped ourselves into the front seats. “You haven’t been cheating, have you? Third-party APIs still disabled?”

  “Ambulances don’t cheat,” said the vehicle.

  “Just one final task, then you’ll be cleared for service,” I said. “Drive us back to the San José hospital as fast as possible.”

  “Very well,” said the vehicle. “It appears Mr. Byram needs medical attention. That eye injury is quite serious.”

  “Shit,” Joel2 said, putting a hand up to the bandage.

  “Just leave it,” I suggested. “Let the Band-Aids do their work.”

  The ambulance pulled away from the winery. We drove down through the cloud forest, siren wailing, leaving Roberto Shila and the other Gehinnomites behind to rest eternally in their mountaintop wine cellar.

  “It appears something is amiss with my sensors,” said the ambulance as we pulled onto Perro Negro Road. “Your genetic profiles identically match each other’s. Perhaps I should pull over.”

  “No, uh, it’s a simulation,” I improvised. “His head wound isn’t real. It’s intended to convey a patient in stage two trauma.” I shrugged at Joel2, unsure whether stage two trauma was a thing or not.

  “Very well. I anticipate arrival in approximately one hundred and ten minutes.”

  Not fast enough. “Really?” I said. “Because the other ambulances have completed this part of the assessment in less than ninety.”

  “And they did it without being noticed by anyone,” Joel2 egged it on.

  There was a short pause. “Doable, but expensive,” it responded.

  “Spare no expense. Remember, you’re delivering a trauma patient to the hospital!”

  “And don’t forget to turn off your sensors. Even the auditory ones,” Joel2 said.

  I eyed him. Why are you going on about sensors?

  “But then I won’t be able to communicate with you.”

  “We’ll unmute you if we need to talk. I don’t want any malfunctions throwing off this test.” Joel2 squinted his left eye at me in what I soon realized was an attempt at a wink.

  “Very well. I shall resume communication upon arrival or should an emergency present itself.”

  “Thank you,” Joel2 and I said in unison.

  Jinx.

  “Can you jinx yourself?” we both asked at the same time, then followed up with concurrent and eerily identical laughter. Then we simply stared at each other. There aren’t enough synonyms of the word awkward to explain our situation. What was one supposed to say to one’s self upon meeting him? Like, was there some sort of thing I could ask him that would reveal something about myself? I wondered if he was thinking the same thing. Probably so, I decided.

  I want to say that there was a Holy shit! moment where he and I acknowledged the paradox we were in and reached some synchronized epiphany. But at the time, maybe from the shock of everything that had occurred, or maybe because I couldn’t process our sameness, I couldn’t come up with anything. Even with the eye patch, it was awkward to look him in the face. Every time we tried making eye contact, we’d both look away, embarrassed.

  “So,” I said, trying to start somewhere, “how did you manage to get yourself caught by the Gehinnomites?”

  He told me about waking up in the hospital, and Sylvia’s urge to leave San José as quickly as possible. “She kind of freaked out after this woman Pema commed her.”

  “Pema?” I asked, perturbed. “Waifish, slanted eyes, James Bond–villain pantsuit?�
�

  “Yeah. Did you run into her too? I was just waking up from this crazy dream. Get this: my comms started randomly playing ‘Karma Chameleon,’ so I woke up singing—”

  “God damn it!”

  “What?”

  “Karma fucking Chameleon. That’s how she knew it.” “I don’t get it.”

  I explained that Pema had used the obscure song as a way to break me out, which led to my fevered escape to Moti’s office and my subsequent electrocution by his security system.

  “They’re definitely working together. That was only an hour or so after my comms went on the fritz. Shit.”

  “When my comms came on, yours went off?”

  “Yep. Fuck! Her escape plan sent me right into Moti’s lap.”

  “Again, who is this Moti guy?”

  “A Levantine spy who’s been playing us. He thinks he’s going to win this weird control game he’s playing with IT. I think he’s using us because we’re the players nobody expects to win. He probably convinced the Gehinnomites to target us in the first place.”

  “That motherfucker!”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “But at least you were lied to by strangers. I got betrayed three times by my own wife.”

  The venom in his voice was chilling. “Take it easy, man. It’s not a competition. I’m sure she had her reasons.”

  “You think you know her so well? That bullshit she fed me after she spoke with Pema was only her first lie,” he said, going on to tell me of Taraval’s visit the night before, and what Sylvia told him then. “That was betrayal number two. I mean, she seemed to truly regret it. Or at least, she said she hated lying to me—us—for the last year. But then, the next morning, she was gone.”

  “She took off?”

  “Yeah, but I was dead asleep after we had—”

  He blushed. They did the deed. “Oh.” I said, turning red myself. Awkward.

  “Anyway,” he said, trying to restock the oxygen in the cabin, “I woke up and she was gone. I don’t know how the Gehinnomites managed to disable her comms. They left her GDS on, though—I guess because they wanted me to find her. All so we could reunite and she could tell me from her own mouth that I was a copy of you.”