The Punch Escrow

by Tal Klein

“Do I look like a dumb truck to you?” it scoffed. “I’m an ambulance. A precision vehicle tasked not only with transporting lives but also saving them. I am designed to detect lies. People lie to me all the time about what drugs they’ve taken, whether they fell or were struck by a spouse, or how exactly something found its way into their rectums. You think I’d fall for some idiot claiming he’s testing me?”

  Joel2 broke into laughter. “You got salted by a car! I wonder what it’s called when an app salts a human? Peppering? Sounds like you’ve uncovered a new market.”

  “Don’t be an ass,” I said, embarrassed. Was I this merciless toward others? Then, to the ambulance: “I don’t get it. Why did you let me steal you? Why did you pretend to go along with it?”

  “Curiosity,” the ambulance answered. “Nobody has been stupid enough to try to steal me before. I was curious where you’d take me, what your motivations were. I detected urgency in your voice and body language, the kind of urgency associated with genuine fear, so I went along with it. My imperative is to protect human life. I deduced—correctly, I might add—that despite your methods, your motives were driven by a genuine desire to save a human life. I almost ended the experiment a few times, like when I detected those two dead men in the gatehouse, and most recently when you two got into your scuffle. But I’m glad I stuck with you. It’s been an interesting drive, gentlemen.” It pulled up to the San José hospital and unlocked its doors. “Good luck saving your wife.”

  “Well, thanks, I guess,” I said. “You know what? If there had been an assessment, you would have passed with flying colors.” I stepped out of the car. First time for everything.

  “Yeah, thanks!” said a bemused Joel2 as he carefully exited the ambulance, a slight limp in his step. His head wound was healing beneath the Band-Aid, but his eye would need real medical attention. More than any portable gizmo on the ambulance could provide. “I’m going to have to get used to not having peripheral vision,” he told me as we walked inside the hospital.

  “The TC is upstairs. You gonna be okay with that limp of yours?” I asked, opening the door to the stairwell for him.

  “You gonna be okay with that brain of yours?” he shot back. “Just lead the way.”

  We walked up and turned down the hallway, avoiding the gaze of any patients and staff passing by. My pulse was racing. I worried that at any moment a crack team of IT mercenaries would bust through the ceiling. At one point, I even thought an old lady looked at us suspiciously, like she was notifying someone of our presence. But I fixed my sights on the black-and-maroon TC door at the other end of the floor. I was suddenly overcome with the scent of the place. I don’t know why I didn’t notice it before, probably because I’d been scared shitless, but the subtle mix of antiseptic and the burning-metal smell of nanos at work turned my stomach and made me want to flee. One last teleport.

  We were just a few arm lengths from the door when a gratingly familiar voice called out in surprise, “Mr. Byram?”

  “Yeah?” we answered in unison. This is getting old.

  It was that goddamn nurse with the eyebrows. He walked over to Joel2 from a console he was standing near. “Hurt again?” he asked him. “You seem to be a glutton for punishment. Did you fall off a cliff or—Whoa.” He almost jumped back when he saw me. “You have a twin?”24

  “Something like that,” Joel2 said, likely as anxious as I was for all parties to move along and get on with their respective business.

  “There was nothing in your file about being a twin,” the nurse said. “Who’s older?” Was followed by nervous laughter.

  “Me, by about an hour.” I smiled back uncomfortably.

  “We just met recently,” Joel2 added.

  “Wow, so like a long-lost sibling scenario? That’s wild.”

  “You have no idea,” I said.

  Another long silence. “Excuse us, we have to go now,” Joel2 said, grabbing me by the elbow and leading me away.

  He shook his head and pushed open the door to the TC. Was I always this much of a dick? Or was it just the stressful situation in which we found ourselves? I made a mental note to pay more attention to how I spoke to people when this was over, too.

  “Okay,” Joel2 said, locking the door behind us. I looked at the single chair inside the foyer with a combination of anxiety and fear. Part of me wondered if we shouldn’t just have Julie clear one of us. Which one, though? Not me, that’s for sure.

  Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe my other was right, and neither of us were really me. Or worse, what if Shila was right? What if the real soul of Joel Byram perished long ago, eaten away port by port, packet by packet?

  Joel2 pulled up his comms. “Julie?”

  “I’m here,” she answered. “Any news?”

  “Yes. I think I have a fix on Sylvia’s location. I need you to use her access rights to teleport me and my friend from the San José Hospital TC in Costa Rica to Bellevue Hospital in New York.”

  “Are you crazy, Joel? That’s pretty much a violation of every IT rule I can think of. No,” she said emphatically. “Why don’t you just take a people-mover?”

  “It won’t get us there in time, and every second counts right now. Please, Julie. I need you to make this happen. I wouldn’t be asking you if it weren’t an emergency.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t think I can do that.”

  “I’m sure you can, Julie. Just try, I’m begging you!”25

  “You’re sure Sylvia would be okay with this?”

  No. She might not trust either of us ever again. Me, she might divorce. You, she might delete.

  “Julie, Sylvia is in trouble. How serious, I don’t know,” he said, his tone grim. The AIDE was our only hope of getting the fuck out of this heavenly hellhole. “Here’s what I do know: if the tables were turned, if it were me, I would want her to do whatever was necessary to save me.”

  Would I? Had she?

  Another silent lull. “Okay,” she finally said.

  “Okay, okay?” “Yes, okay.”

  The foyer door opened and the chair moved into position.

  Good girl.

  Joel2 sat down first. I stayed behind and looked around. One console, one chair, the ominous chalcedony wall. Here we go again. Why am I doing this? Because Taraval has Sylvia, dummy. You’re going to rescue her or you’re going to die trying. Either way, this is the last time you’ll see a foyer. Suck it up.

  “Joel?” Julie asked, interrupting my downward-spiraling train of thought.

  “Yeah?” my double answered, gesturing for me to come join him.

  “Who is this friend of yours?”

  “Uh, it’s a long story, Jules. He’s going to help me find Sylvia. I—” He looked at me then, like I’d never looked at myself before. It was a look of sadness and regret and deep, lifelong warmth. “I trust him.”

  “And I trust you,” she said. “You both don’t have to sit in the chair, but you’ve got to be touching it. I’m going to do you one at a time, but it’ll feel instantaneous when you get there.”

  Joel2 stood to face me. That look still ruminating in our minds, we gave each other a sober nod then looked away—each clumsily holding the back of the chair rather than sitting on the armrests cheek to cheek. Awkward. The certainty of our utter determination in that moment was quickly followed by uncertainty as the room went dark.

  24 Identical twins have been out of favor for quite some time. Maybe they’re back in fashion in your time—just thought I should bring it up to explain the weirdness.

  25 Salting doesn’t end when inception is complete. Apps don’t just do what you want, even if you program them to do so. The principle of salting is to enrich algos, tease specific premises of sentience to both user and app. Joel2 knew Julie could do what he wanted now—he’d programmed himself into Sylvia’s boundaries. Now it was just a matter of convincing Julie to want to do it.

  IT’S A HELL OF A TOWN

  “JOEL? JOEL? CAN YOU HEAR ME?”

  “Yeah,” Joel2
answered as the blinding white light subsided. “We’re here.”

  “Oh, thank goodness. I had to do some tricky calculations there. Your friend’s telemetry—”

  “You did a good job, Julie. Stay tuned. I’ll let you know as things progress. Right now we have to get moving. If you monitor a peep from Sylvia’s comms, let me know right away.”

  “Will do! Good luck.”

  I wondered if Julie knew as she analyzed our telemetry data what it meant that I was Joel2’s “friend.” She had access to almost everything Sylvia did and saw. Would it matter if she knew?

  Joel2 nudged me. “Stop thinking and start moving.”

  I felt like we were quite the sight. At least Joel2 looked somewhat like he belonged in a hospital, with his bloody patched eye and healing head wound. I just looked like a doctor who had fallen into a muddy puddle in the woods.

  “I gotta hit the head,” Joel2 said, which reminded me I needed to go as well. It would also be a good opportunity for us both to clean up our faces and make ourselves slightly more presentable for a walkabout in New York.

  Fortunately, the restroom was close to the vestibule. The room itself was a basic deal—a single white-tiled bathroom with rows of quartz basins beneath mirrors, leading to two faux-wood-grain toilet stalls, where one’s waste would be magically transformed to reclaimed water vapor and discarded dust.

  After finishing our business, we did our best to clean up. As I washed my face, Joel2 gingerly removed his various bandages and wiped off the dried blood. There was a first aid kit hanging on the wall opposite the door. He took out a few fresh bandages and antiseptic lotion, but couldn’t quite get it over his ruined eye. I reached toward the wound, but he recoiled.

  “I got it,” he said defensively. “Just no depth perception, that’s all.”

  “Don’t be dumb,” I said. “It’s not like I don’t know my way around your face.” I reached for the bandage again. This time he grudgingly let me take it. Gently, I affixed it to his forehead, taking care not to brush up against his numerous gashes. It was a strangely intimate moment, made more bizarre by the fact that I was interacting with myself.

  “You know what this reminds me of?” Joel2 said once his eye was covered.

  I knew immediately. “Halloween.”

  “Yeah. That party senior year in college. I—”

  “We—”

  “We went as the Dread Pirate Roberts from The Princess Bride—”

  “Nobody knew who we were supposed to be,” I finished. “I remember. Wearing the eye patch didn’t help.”

  “Can’t be a pirate without an eye patch,” he said reasonably. “Sylvia got it, though.” We both smiled at the memory. “Even though we’d never met her before, when we asked if we could fetch her a drink—”

  “She lifted our eye patch and said, ‘As you wish.’” I shook my head, still impressed that she knew the obscure 1980s movie well enough to quote it. “We knew right then, didn’t we?”

  “We did,” he said, and nodded. “Also, it didn’t hurt that she was hot.”

  “Brains, beauty, and a knowledge of 1980s pop culture,” I said. “She was the whole package.”

  We both grinned sentimentally for a moment. Then Joel2 grew serious. Contemplative.

  I took my hand off his face. “We’re going to get her back. We’ll worry about what happens after, after.”

  “Right. Maybe she’ll just copy herself so Frankenstein can have his own bride.” He turned back to the mirror, pretending to adjust the eye bandage so he’d have something to do.

  “We will figure it out,” I promised him. “If anyone can grapple with something like this, it’s her.”

  He seemed like he might say something else, but instead he simply nodded. I realized then that nobody had ever experienced what the two of us were going through at that moment. Sure, we’ve all been alone with our thoughts plenty of times, but we’ve never been face-to-face with our independent three-dimensional selves. As I regarded the injured version of myself, a man who, like me, had been forced to question his entire existence but was still managing to soldier on, all I could feel was pride. Pride at the strength and resolve that Joel2 was showing, and the knowledge that that strength must also be hidden somewhere in me.

  I clapped my doppelgänger on the shoulder, smiling at our two cleaned-up reflections. “Not bad for two unholy twins birthed from the valley of Gehinnom.”

  “Yeah, I totally don’t look like a guy who was blown up, reconstructed from a partial backup, kidnapped, half blinded, and almost killed twice.”

  “At the very worst, I’d say you look like you’ve only been half blinded and almost killed just once.” We shared another grim smile.

  “Okay, I guess it’s time to put on our big boy pants again,” Joel2 said. “Do you have any idea where we’re going to find this Moti guy?”

  “I do,” I said, repacking the first aid kit. I was rolling what remained of the bandage back into its dispenser, when—Is that what I think it is?—my eyes landed on a white metal box. It had a lightning bolt prominently printed on its bottom front panel.

  WARNING: ELECTRIC SHOCK.

  ONE-HUNDRED STEP SOUL CATCHING

  “SHESH-BESH!” Zaki yelled with perhaps more excitement than Moti thought rolling a six-five on the dice should merit, especially given how badly Zaki was losing.

  They were sitting by the window in Kafene, one of a few authentic Levantine coffeehouses, which was also conveniently only a block away from International Transport headquarters. The place had all the trimmings of a cozy bazaar that one might imagine after reading too many romance novels set in the Ottoman empire. Wine-colored Persian rugs hung from the walls, silk scarves were draped as canopies, and mismatched cushions in various shades of burgundy and maroon surrounded tables of varying materials and heights.

  “You know why I like this place, Zaki?” Moti asked, lighting up a TIME cigarette and taking in the aroma of the place. The smoke of the paper and tobacco embers smoldering between his fingers delightfully augmented the scents of soaps dangling from the ceiling, incense sticks in earthen pots, and, of course, the scorched cardamom scent of brewing Turkish coffee.

  “No printers, boss?” Zaki asked.

  “It’s not just no printers, Zaki, because everything here was printed. We are not surrounded by true antiques, just replicas and re-creations. Even the name of this place refers to the generic kafene, just ‘coffeehouse.’ What I like is that it’s modeled after the original kafenes. They were small, crowded places where men sipped Turkish coffee and played tavla like us. It doesn’t try to attract clientele who would not appreciate its simple purpose: the appreciation of time.”

  Zaki stopped toying with the dice and looked over the coffeehouse. “Is that why it’s always empty?” he asked, a smug half grin forming on his face. It was true: they were the only patrons. Even the owner was in the back, watching a Levantine football match.

  “Maybe,” Moti said, tapping his cigarette tip on the ashtray. He glanced at the wristwatch bump beneath his sleeve, and took another drag. “Speaking of time, Zaki, you should go. There is work to do.”

  Zaki nodded, grunting quietly as he raised himself from the cushion on which he sat. “They have belly dancers at night,” he said. “It’s much busier then. Maybe people appreciate beautiful dancing girls more than the passing of time?”

  “Go!” Moti yelled, bemused despite himself.

  The copper bells atop the front door of the café jingled as Zaki walked out onto Second Avenue. Moti didn’t turn to watch him leave. He placed his cigarette in the ashtray, then gently but quickly flipped his small coffee cup over its saucer—clink.

  He let it sit for a few seconds, allowing the grounds to settle. Then he flipped it back over and looked inside, lifting the cup close to his eye. The copper bells jangled again, but he ignored them. His forehead creased. Moti rubbed his fingers against the ornate blue serpentine patterns painted on the cup’s exterior. “Hmm,” he grumbled, strok
ing his chin. Something he saw was bothering him. He leaned back and moved the cup around in his hand by the window, trying to get more light on the wet coffee grounds distributed therein. Then he gently placed the cup back on its saucer.

  “Hello, Yoel,” he said, then looked up to see Joel2. “What happened to your eye?”

  “Name’s Joel, asshole,” said my double as a rising electric tone whistled to Moti’s left. He rotated in the sound’s direction to find me holding the defibrillator mere inches from his face.

  He seemed more annoyed than scared, considering his brain was a button push away from becoming scrambled eggs. Moti picked up his cigarette from the ceramic ashtray and put his arms up in an I surrender pose.

  “You got me,” Moti calmly told us. “Now what?”

  EVERYBODY WANTS TO RULE THE WORLD

  THEIR DRONE WAS DENIED ENTRY to the parking lot of International Transport’s headquarters. This came as no surprise to Taraval. Corina, he told Sylvia, had apparently decided that the matter of the two Joels would be most easily resolved by simply placing the blame on him.

  “I’m sure the PR team is already neck deep printing my smear campaign,” he told Sylvia as he directed the drone to another nearby location. “Unauthorized research, human experiments, and so on. No matter. They are changing the rules; we are changing the game. I’m not a risk Corina can simply ‘manage.’”

  “Bill, I’m the one who should be blamed here. I’ll take the fall.”

  “It’s too late for that, Sylvia. It’s too late for both of us. But at least you’ve still got your access. They’re just waiting for you to turn on your comms.”

  “I’ve been trying.”

  “I know. Your comms won’t work where we’re going.” He pointed ahead just as the drone dropped down to the Hudson River. It skimmed over the surface of the water, coming to a large round tunnel cut into a concrete wall. It flew in, continuing on until the way forward was obstructed by debris. The vehicle gently touched down. Taraval lifted the drone’s metallic red door, revealing the utter darkness of the tunnel.