The Punch Escrow

by Tal Klein

  —Isaiah 59:12

  JUST A FEW FINAL HOUSEKEEPING ITEMS I need to get down before ending this transcription.

  For seven days, Sylvia stayed in the hospital. She refused all replacement legs, mechanical or printed, choosing to regard her missing limb as a reminder of the guilt, anguish, and self-loathing she felt. After a week, she finally consented to accept a simple jointed titanium prosthesis. Whether she gave in to my gentle badgering or didn’t want to go through life in a wheelchair, I don’t know. I do know our turn on the ride is over. I think it’s safe to say we’re both ready to get off.

  God gave Adam and Eve unfettered access to the Garden of Eden. “Don’t eat the fruit of these two trees,” he commanded. We know how that turned out. Some blame Eve; some blame Adam. Some blame the snake. The salter blames the coder: God. Why make a game with spaces on which players aren’t allowed to land?

  I never bought Moti’s explanation of Taraval’s and Joel2’s disappearance. That’s why this document exists. Technically, the grenade couldn’t just make them disappear. Unlike what happened to the Mona Lisa, there was no coronal mass ejection event over New York that night to disrupt their passage to the glacier. At worst, they should have arrived there in a deformed state, but their arrival would have been logged. Moti or IT would have found them.

  So, either they did arrive deformed, and Moti tried to save us from the gory details, or they arrived perfectly intact. The problem with the latter outcome, the only thing allowing me to even consider that Moti and IT were telling the truth, was the reactivation of my comms. The moment they were turned back on, Joel2’s brief history, his telemetry and metadata and recordings, merged with mine. Every single thing he saw, heard, and said filled the gaps in my existential amnesia with his escapades. That’s what keeps me sane: the knowledge that even with all of IT’s might and all the Levant’s technological prowess, there’s no way my comms could have been active on two people at the same time. The Theseus paradox is real because we programmed reality that way.

  In exchange for our sworn silence, Corina and the near-infinite powers of International Transport’s counsel saw to it that none of the details of our escapades were reported. Sylvia was allowed to “retire” from her job with full benefits, and—after some legal wrangling—my full identity was restored. We were both granted leave to go on with our lives.

  Still, I think about Joel2 a lot.

  It’s been hard chronicling his part in this story. Please understand that whenever I expressed any of his emotions, it was guesswork. To make things sound less wooden, the chapters of this memoir featuring Joel2 were edited here, embellished there, and somewhat dramatized, as I could only imagine what must have been going on inside his mind.

  Sometimes I perceive others incorrectly by transposing my feelings onto them. It’s hard to vet that statement because I’m the one making it, and I’m not a very good judge of what’s going on in my head. Even if I were capable of gauging my state of mind objectively, I could only determine such things in retrospect.

  In replaying his history, which is now my history, occasionally I’d see Joel2’s reflection in a mirror or a window, and venture a guess as to what he was thinking based on the gestures or expressions I had made in similar contexts. Sylvia also helped fill in some missing pieces, like what happened between her and Taraval at the hotel and in the abandoned subway tunnels beneath New York.

  Joel2 would probably take umbrage with my characterization of him. Hell, I know I would if anyone did the same to me. But he was me during that time, or we were us, and to that end, I feel somewhat entitled to such poetic license.

  I’ve inhabited every emotional and existential state a human being could fathom. More than anything, I was angry. Some of that was anger was mine, for being made the duped (pun intended) pawn in some techno-ideo-geopolitical war. Some of my anger was Joel2’s anger. I have all his comms recordings, and in some ways they now feel realer to me than my own memory. Though I still can’t feel what he felt, sometimes I can feel him in the gap between me and Sylvia. I don’t know how we would have lived in the same world, but I was angry that he was gone. And some of that anger was for all of us, for every unknowing person still porting every day. I wanted to blast the truth across the world’s comms like a righteous Gehinnomite or one of those long-ago whistle-blowers from a century ago.

  In other moments I was afraid or selfish, or both. With Joel2 gone, I knew I had no leverage: I could no longer be the ayah that IT feared or the Aher the Levant valued. And I knew that although I had changed, the ways of the world did not. I could be cleared in some clandestine TC by IT or disappeared by the Levant, stuck in some room with only Moti and his clipboards and Turkish and tasseography. No surprise to you, not-a-hero Joel won out.

  Which brings me to you. Remember the first chapter of this account? It was entitled Stick! It’s what relay racers yell when they’re passing the baton during sprint relays. See, it costs a runner time to look back, so they do blind handoffs, wherein the second runner stands on a spot predetermined in practice and starts running when the first runner arrives at a specific pace mark on the track. The second runner opens their hand behind them after a few strides, by which time the first runner should be caught up and able to hand off the baton. The first runner yells, “Stick!” repeatedly several times, alerting the recipient to put out their hand to receive the baton. It requires faith, and trust.

  So teleportation, Project Honeycomb, International Transport, and all their subsequent issues are your problem now. Brand me selfish, lazy, supine—I’ve been called worse. I’ve known since the moment I kicked that boxer in the nuts that I wasn’t much of a fighter. A year ago I was just a guy paid to play games with apps in his underwear. Sure, I may have found myself at the center of a massive international conspiracy affecting every person on this planet, but I don’t want to be responsible for giving anyone who’s ever teleported an identity crisis.

  We rode in trains and drove cars that nearly killed the planet. We flew in planes with only a rudimentary and practical understanding of the physics of flight. We humans have an innate need to get from A to B faster so we could do C sooner. We’ve never gotten too caught up in the means or consequences of transport. So who am I to stand in the way of humanity’s progress? It’s not my place. Not today.

  But maybe it’s yours. Maybe in your time, some other corporation figured out how to make teleportation actually work the way IT told us it would. Maybe it’s still the same copy-paste-delete mechanism, but everyone knows the truth of the Punch Escrow and doesn’t give a shit.

  Or maybe the Gehinnomites were right, and it’s time for the truth to be told.

  So, dear reader, stick!

  Oh, and if you ever do see Joel2, tell him I said: Thanks, hermano.

  LA GIOCONDA

  IT’S JULY 4, 2148. We’re in Florence, just leaving the Uffizi art museum. Second honeymoon, take two—eleventh-anniversary edition, and the first time I’m acting as cruise director. Okay, I cheated a bit and asked Julie for help in finding the places most likely to overlap with our needs, but the planning and booking were all me. I even splurged on the rooms.

  There’s a bittersweet smile on my wife’s face, possibly echoing my own. We’re happy. Do I care if I’m impressing some glass-half-full bullshit upon her, or on me? We’re having a moment, so, no.

  We’re talking about a bunch of stuff as we stroll onto the Ponte Vecchio, the old stone bridge that spans the Arno. The Sun has just dipped below the horizon, giving the bridge shops a burnished copper glow.

  Sylvia notes we’ve been standing outside for a full two minutes and I haven’t complained about the rain. I tell her that seeing the Mona Lisa reminded me of Superman. She laughs and demands an explanation. I say I’ve been wondering about the glacier. How Honeycomb was like the Phantom Zone in the Superman comic series: a prison dimension used by Kryptonians as a more humane form of incarceration. Although the zone was a barren wasteland, people trapped in it could
never get old or die.

  “Except that was someone’s idea of a dark, dystopian future. Not a desirable outcome,” she says.

  I respond, “I don’t know. Does that really sound any more dystopian than uploading people to the glacier for arbitrary periods of time?”

  “It might sound that way, but maybe it’s because we’re not ready for it now.” Her voice loses its brightness. “I don’t think it’s fair to say we’ll never need it. Eventually Earth will stop supporting life and we’ll need to find someplace else to live.”

  She’s getting upset. I’m losing points. My gut tells me to keep up the argument, to remind her that that’s not even the problem. That it’s not okay to back up people without their permission. My gut wants to win. My gut is an idiot.

  I realize I shouldn’t have brought it up, but I also feel like getting it out will start the healing. Neither of us has talked much about what happened on this day a year ago. That particularly painful part of our past. Maybe this is Joel3 thinking—the new, mature Joel. A derivative of two previously failed prototypes, a superior version of me who recognizes and owns up to a mistake when he’s made one. I’d like that.

  I place a hand on the bump in her belly. “Let us look forward, not back,” I intone. “I feel like that’s a quote from someone. Although, about four months from now, we might wish we could—”

  “We’ll be fine.” She smiles, putting her hand over mine. “People have been doing this for millennia.”

  “And look how humanity turned out,” I can’t help but snark.

  She rolls her eyes.

  We stop at an open spot in the bridge. The sky sparkles here and there as floating LEDs are calibrated.

  “Weird,” I remark, taking off my hat. “The raindrops feel like they’re getting bigger. Can we go watch the show inside somewhere? One slip on these stones and I go straight into the Arno. Then you’re a grieving widow and a single mom, all because of an oversized mosquito bladder.”

  “Aaaand there it is,” she said, apparently stopping a timer on her comms. “Two minutes and forty-seven seconds. A new record.”

  “Syl, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who can avoid thinking about the fact that they’re getting pissed on by mosquitoes every time they step outside, and those who can’t. You should know conclusively by now that you married a man of the latter variety.”

  She plants a quick kiss on my lips, assuring me there are no hard feelings. “Actually, I think there’s a third group: those of us who are cognizant of the rain and its provenance but are ambivalent about it. I mean, it really is just water. Who cares if it’s coming from the bladder of an insect?”

  “I do. I know we need bugs to breathe, but I don’t want to think about it. Just like I also know that almost all of our protein comes from bugs, but I could never be one of those entomophagists. I like my grasshoppers and mealworms molded and flavored to taste like meat, not wriggling and hopping on my plate, thank you.”

  “You know that eating cattle is what nearly destroyed the ozone in the first place.”

  “Exactly! But I still need to maintain my suspension of disbelief. I just wish we could do something similar with the skeeters.” A mosquito lands on the back of my hand. I raise my arm so Sylvia can see it. “Look,” I say, staring contemplatively at the living steam reformer. “Millions of years of evolution have led her to instinctively know that she wants to be on my hand. Sure, she’s getting all the energy she needs from the carbon fumes emanating from my skin, but I can tell there’s part of her, somewhere deep in her DNA, that just desperately wants to poke me and eat my blood.”

  The mosquito flies off into the glowing darkness.

  Sylvia bumps me with her shoulder, smiling. “I think more likely there’s part of her that instinctively knew you were thinking of smashing her. Anyway, even if she somehow managed to get a bloodmeal, it would kill her.”

  “Huh. Well, it’s nice to see you smile, even if it means we have to talk about bloodmeals.”

  “We wouldn’t be talking about bloodmeals if you would have just let me enjoy my fireworks.”

  “Where would be the fun in that?”

  She rolls her eyes again. I’m really pushing my luck, I know it. “Can’t you just shut up and enjoy the moment? Look, they’re starting!”

  Indeed, the LEDs hovering above the Arno start their Technicolor animated display while synchronized audio explosions match their movements.

  I shrug, having never really cared for pyrotechnics. “Another thing I’ve always wondered about is where all the dead mosquitoes go.” I point at the centuries-old cobblestones of the Ponte Vecchio. “Shouldn’t the ground be covered by millions of dead skeeters?”

  “I never really thought about that,” Sylvia says as she looks up. She bites her lip in contemplation. “Maybe the wind just blows ’em all over the place?”

  “Or maybe they all get eaten by birds and mosquito hawks?”

  Sylvia grins, shaking her head. “Mosquito hawks don’t eat mosquitoes.”

  “What?” I ask, genuinely surprised.

  “Yeah, they’re actually called crane flies. They really don’t eat much of anything after they emerge from their pupae.”

  “You’re blowing my mind right now! In fact, I just had to look it up because I thought you were messing with me. I can’t believe it.”

  “Yup. It’s the world’s smallest identity crisis.”

  I don’t respond. Instead I drop my shoulders, suddenly overcome with sadness.

  As we gazed upon the Mona Lisa earlier, I realized something. The charm of the masterpiece was never due to the beauty of the sitter—a woman experts seem to agree was Madonna Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine merchant. Nor was it due to da Vinci’s masterful brushstrokes or composition. The painting’s magic was in the itch she made us scratch, that one eternal, unanswerable question: What’s behind that smile?

  The Mona Lisa’s mystery only grew when we lost her. Had we lost a water lily or starry night, we would have moved on. We wouldn’t have scoured the world and found an earlier version that we could claim was the real her, igniting a debate that took the mystery from What’s behind her smile? to Which Mona Lisa was real? We would not look at her and ponder, Who was she? or in my case, Who am I?

  After our ordeal last year, I got prints of both Lisas and hung them on our bedroom wall. I stared at them endlessly at night while Sylvia slept. Which one was me? Was I the Isleworth Lisa rather than the vanished Lisa, the earlier and less interesting of the two, only achieving my authenticity through the destruction of my other, better self?

  I hoped, in coming here to look her in the eye, that I could figure out what made this version different from her predecessor. I hoped I might find an end to my own enduring existential pain. Ultimately, I realized it didn’t matter which one I was. I was real, like the Giaconda was real, not because we were the originals, but because we were here.

  Sylvia notices my sudden change of temperament and pokes me in the arm. “What’s wrong?”

  I peer down at the dark river. “You look at me and you think, ‘That’s my husband, Joel Byram.’ But is that who I am?”

  “What are you talking about?” she asks, concern building in her eyes.

  I scratch my cheek uncomfortably. “I used to think it was incredibly vain of the Gehinnomites to believe we can mess with our souls. That we could…”

  But I trail off as Sylvia’s expression quickly morphs from concern to terror. A look I haven’t seen since that night. She’s not looking at me anymore; she’s looking through me. Her neck tilting back as she looks to the heavens.

  Suddenly my comms fill with urgent updates. #LookUp is trending.

  Are you watching this, guys?

  What the hell?

  Lame. Bring back the fireworks!

  Are they doing commercials now?

  I look up.

  The LEDs in the sky, which moments ago had been projecting a beautifully choreographed fireworks disp
lay, have instead converted the heavens into a giant POV stream of someone making their way through a TC. As they stand before the vestibule, the streaming person puts their hands out in front of them, fingers wrapped tightly together, bowing their head up and down. There are about six other people, also wearing LED-lined robes, clasping their hands together and standing around the Punch Escrow chair. A strand of glowing hair enters the frame.

  Like embers in a flame.

  “They’re praying,” Sylvia utters.

  The captions beneath the stream confirm her assessment: the words BEHOLD GOD’S WILL appear beneath the clenched hands. The camera pans sideways briefly, and I spot the International Transport logo above the conductor’s blood-splattered console.

  “It’s the R and D vestibule at IT headquarters,” Sylvia says, real fear in her voice.

  I remain silent.

  The camera pans back to the empty chair. There’s a familiar white flash, momentarily blinding the POV stream. The camera lens adjusts to reveal a human sitting in the Punch Escrow chair. A naked male figure. His silhouette is familiar. He rises and walks toward the camera, balding and pudgy and coming into focus as the chanting around him increases. A smile splits his newly printed face.

  It’s him. He’s back.

  “Don’t look!” I urgently say to Sylvia. I try shielding her eyes, but she shoves me away.

  The stream goes white and the caption PULSA D’NURA appears, illuminating the night sky like a thunderbolt from the heavens.

  Fuck.

  AFTERWORD

  WHEN ONE IS dealing with hard science fiction, I’m told it’s particularly important to get the facts right. For example, one of the best and most well-known hard science fiction writers, Larry Niven, got a very important fact wrong in his first story, “The Coldest Place.” In it, the coldest place concerned was the dark side of Mercury, which at the time the story was written was thought to be tidally locked with the Sun. However, Mercury was found to rotate in a 3:2 resonance with the Sun before the story saw the light of day, meaning it was published with known scientific errata. Oh well. Didn’t seem to hurt his career much.