IGMS Issue 7

by IGMS

  Now he understood why.

  "For the last five years," Ferrara said, "we've been working on teleportation technology suited to living beings. Until now, this has been impossible. But we've recently teleported mice, rats, pigs and, a year ago, a chimpanzee."

  "You're looking for human volunteers, aren't you?" Drogan asked.

  "Yes, sir. You are . . .?" Ferrara said.

  "Jacob Drogan."

  "Yes, Mr. Drogan, we are."

  "Why us?" he asked.

  "That's none of your business, Drogan," Chapelle said. "You just . . ."

  "No, Mr. Chapelle, he has a right to know. Mr. Drogan, what do you know of teleportation technology? Anything at all?"

  "I know it gets stuff from one place to the other. I don't know how."

  "I'll . . . uh . . . I'll try to keep this as simple as possible. When a person or a thing is teleported, a machine scans the item -- anything, a bar of soap, a crate of car parts, what have you. It records the item down to its smallest particles. The system then transmits that information to the target system -- the place we want to send it -- and creates a replica of it there on the other end bit by bit."

  "Does it always get there? To the other side? I've heard that shipments get lost sometimes," big blond Mitchell said.

  Drogan wondered if Ferrara knew Mitchell had raped and murdered a 10-year-old girl. If they were handpicked for good behavior, though, she probably knew everything about them: shoe size, inseam, sperm count.

  Ferrara shifted in her seat. Her mouth twitched. "We have a ninety-eight percent success rate with transmission," she said. "Every now and then something gets lost in transit, but it doesn't happen often."

  "I heard about something like that a couple of years ago," Mitchell said. "Was it, what, Cheviot Automotive, lost something like 50 or 60 million bucks in one shipment?"

  "That was an extraordinary case," Ferrara said.

  She clutched the briefcase on her lap; her knuckles blanched. She pressed her lips tightly together. We're pushing a button, Drogan realized.

  "Helluva screw up," Villanova said. "So how'd you do with the rats?"

  Ferrara reached up and resettled her glasses on her head. "So far, with living subjects, we've had slightly less success."

  "How much less?" Mitchell asked.

  "Our success rate, right now, is . . . about sixty percent."

  Pasco barked out a laugh.

  "Isn't that a little low?" Mitchell said.

  "The numbers are skewed by our early results. The last year or so, our success rate has been much higher."

  "This is bullshit," Pasco said. That was Pasco all over: all or nothing. Then he seemed to remember himself and spoke respectfully. "I'm ready to go Warden Chapelle, sir." He stood slowly and deliberately, dropped the booklet on his seat, and waited for a guard to escort him out. He and the guard left.

  Ferrara was hiding something; they all knew it.

  "What, exactly, happens when a transport fails?" Drogan asked.

  Ferrara adjusted her glasses again. She put her briefcase on the floor beside her chair and looked him straight in the eye. "In the process of reading the item to be transported, the item is destroyed. Failure usually occurs at the receiving end."

  Drogan's stomach went sour. He swallowed. "The item? You mean us, don't you? So, if you're alive when it starts, you die as you're being read and if transmission fails, you're gone for good?"

  "That's correct, Mr. Drogan, yes." So businesslike.

  "That's why you came to us, isn't it? Because we're going to die anyway."

  "Yes, Mr. Drogan."

  "You don't mince words."

  "If you're going to participate, then you deserve the whole truth."

  "What's in it for us?" Villanova asked.

  "Well, the process destroys the item it scans. For a human, this means death. The state has agreed that by undergoing the process your sentence will be fulfilled, so if you're successfully transmitted, you'll be given a year's retraining with the potential for hiring by TransLumina or one of its affiliates, and released into society. It's a fresh start."

  One of the other men -- Drogan wasn't sure which -- said, "Whoa." Drogan, however, was looking at the floor -- chipped, tan aggregate tiles that looked a hundred years old. One way or another, it meant death for certain -- no cancellation of his death penalty after all, but then Harville had said it would change his penalty, not commute it. Lawyer talk. If it worked, like she said: new start.

  The warden pursed his thin lips. His pale eyes narrowed as he watched Ferrara. This must really chap his ass. There's got to be something in this for the state, otherwise the governor would never have signed off on it.

  "I'm sure this is a lot to consider," Ferrara said. "Look over the booklets. Talk to your attorneys. I'll be back here day after tomorrow to answer any questions you may have. Thank you for your time."

  Drogan spent the afternoon sitting on his thin mattress leaning against the cold concrete wall reading the TransLumina booklet. A lot of it was technical, describing things covered in school courses he never took or never passed: terms like "entanglement" and "spooky action" that made no sense to him. What he understood was that the process would be enormously expensive to test, and that TransLumina hoped it would revolutionize travel the way it had revolutionized shipping.

  The last few pages in the booklet talked about what TransLumina called "Volunteer Compensation." Housing, training. Neither Ferrara nor Chapelle had mentioned that the volunteer wouldn't be a free man post-transport, at least not immediately. He'd be on a sort of extended parole during his training and under medical and psychiatric supervision until TransLumina was sure that the process left no residual effects. But he'd get a clean slate and a new life. Sort of like a witness protection program.

  But would it be him? Ferrara said that the machine destroys the original and creates a replica. It was death, wasn't it? Whoever came out at the other end would be someone so much like him that no one could tell the difference. Or could they? Would he -- the replica -- know the difference? He, the original, would be . . . where? Dead. Gone.

  Drogan put aside the booklet, pulled the half dollar out of his pocket, lay down and rolled the coin back and forth over his knuckles while he thought.

  A new life. Part of him wondered if that was what he wanted if it meant living with the memories he had. A year ago he'd relinquished his fight to have his execution commuted because the life he'd lived on death row was killing him anyway: a windowless cell no larger than a walk-in closet, no visitors but his lawyer, little time in the rec yard on the rare occasion he chose to go, and defeat after defeat in appeals he didn't want anyway. He often had days when even waking up in the morning was a rude, unwelcome surprise.

  He could remember a time, years ago, when waking up each morning was a gift, another day to get out into the sun and work the earth. Make love to his wife. Play with his boy.

  But that was before Lainie had changed things.

  Sweet Elaine. Red hair, blue eyes. Curvy hips. A curl at the corner of her lips when she smiled. Slim fingers, tiny feet. They'd married. She'd given him Sean.

  When she started to badger him about money, he started calling her Lainie, which he knew she hated. He worked longer hours; at one point he'd taken an extra job to be sure everything was covered. She wanted them covered and then some. It was never enough for her.

  And in the end, when Drogan caught her with Tyler, the guy from Morrison's Video downtown with the grin, the sports car and the too-perfect hair, he knew it had all been for nothing. She made it simple for him to keep track of their meetings. It was as if she'd wanted him to know where they would be, what they were doing. She'd blown up their lives.

  When Drogan rigged his little firebomb that winter, built of household chemicals and fertilizer from the nursery where he worked, he was sure it would be Lainie and Tyler alone in the house.

  But he'd been wrong.

  Sean got caught in the blaze, had suffocated
before the flames consumed his small body. He'd been found under the remnants of a blanket, charred, prone on the floor, his light brown hair curled into ash.

  Drogan still remembered Sean's hair in his hands, thick and straight and sleek. His enormous brown eyes. His upturned nose so like Lainie's. Still remembered the weight of him when they'd curl up on the couch on a Sunday night to read the comics. The clean smell of soap and baby powder on him after a bath.

  No more.

  There were holes in his memory around the building of the bomb, around the actual explosion as he'd seen it from down the block. He owned what he'd done, pled guilty to it all and had gone to prison for it willingly in the end.

  But Sean's death left him hollow. Raw. His chest still tightened as he thought of his little boy in the fire. His throat ached with it. He couldn't breathe. He squeezed his eyes shut.

  In the days afterward, he'd yearned for death. He'd all but asked for the death penalty at trial. Once in custody, he was put on a suicide watch. He'd dreamed of pistols. Craved the taste of gunmetal in his mouth.

  There were days, every now and then, when he woke and didn't regret the morning light, the taste of a chocolate bar or a juicy autumn apple. But he always thought that someday soon, long before his body gave out, death would come with deliberate speed.

  Part of him longed for it. Most of him longed for it.

  He rolled the coin back and forth.

  Before he went into the blue room, Drogan stripped for inspection. Standard procedure: opening every body part for examination by three guards. He'd long since come to expect the humiliation, though he never got used to it.

  He was meticulous in dressing again, buttoning his shirt carefully, rolling his sleeves neatly. He never received visitors. Appearance was important now.

  A card table had been set up with chairs on opposite sides.

  Dr. Ferrara wore a navy blue blazer and a white silk blouse. A gold chain with a small gold cross around her neck. She greeted him by name and with a little smile.

  "What do you think of our proposal?" she asked. He seated himself opposite her. She wore a floral scent: tea rose and . . . something else. Something musky. He wondered what she was thinking, putting on perfume for a visit to death row. Or maybe it was her shampoo.

  "Pretty thorough deal," Drogan said.

  "We wanted to make sure that you understood the risks and the compensation. Do you have any questions?"

  She folded her hands on the table before her, and Drogan thought she looked like a schoolgirl. Being brainy was her strength, he suddenly understood. She probably looked this way before every test she'd ever taken: so ready, so smart, so sure she was going to get an A. He would bet she was like that in all her business meetings. She wanted to prove . . . something. She wore no wedding ring. He wondered if she had a boyfriend. He'd bet good money that she didn't.

  "What happens to me when I go through the process?"

  A little crease formed between her eyebrows. "We did talk about the process the other day. The booklet thoroughly explained . . ."

  "That's not what I mean," Drogan said. "I mean me, who I am. My memories, my personality. What happens to that?"

  "If the transmission works properly, it should all remain intact."

  "So the version of me that comes out at the other end would know everything I do now."

  She hesitated.

  He wondered if she knew how transparent she was. A little part of him, the part that remembered what it was like to be eighteen, to meet a beautiful woman full of possibility, found her exposed frankness charming. The bigger part of him, the part that knew death and betrayal and ten years in the company of men who'd done things that, once, he could never have dreamed of, marveled at how earnest, almost naïve, she seemed.

  "Are you asking me what happens to your soul?"

  That took him aback. He hadn't thought about it in those terms. He wasn't really a religious man. He shook his head, shaking off the question.

  "Will I be who I was after this is all over?" he asked. But that wasn't what he meant to ask either.

  He watched as she rubbed one polished thumbnail between two other fingers.

  "I can't answer that in the way you mean. Some of the replicas have materialized with no discernable difference in their knowledge and abilities. The person who comes out at the other end will be who you are but not you per se. Most of the mice could run the same mazes . . ."

  "What about the chimp?" Drogan interrupted, leaning forward in his seat.

  "Chimps," she corrected him. "We've tested five." She paused, pulled her dark-rimmed glasses down over her eyes. Drogan wondered if she'd been able to see him clearly before this. "Two came through just fine. One didn't make it. One manifested a palsy we couldn't treat. One was . . . almost like a blank slate. She seemed normal, healthy, but it was as if her memory had been wiped clean." She clutched her hands together, white knuckled once more. "She was like an infant . . . no, less than an infant. Her eyes would track moving objects but she wouldn't react to them otherwise. She didn't seem to recognize the lab techs who'd raised her. It was like she was . . . gone."

  "So even if my duplicate comes through this perfectly healthy --"

  "There could be some unforeseen damage."

  "I -- I mean he -- could come out a vegetable," Drogan said.

  "We don't believe that will happen. The last subject came through just fine after some equipment changes, some adjustments . . ."

  "But you don't know for sure," Drogan insisted. "Your equipment fixes might build a better monkey, but they might not build a better human."

  She didn't answer him. She looked at her hands folded in front of her.

  "Why are you telling me all this?" he asked. "You could just as easily lie and say 'Oh yes, we're all ready, easy as pie.'"

  She didn't answer.

  "You're not comfortable with this," he said. She lifted her eyes to face him, a hard expression he hadn't believed she was capable of giving.

  "My comfort has nothing to do with this. It's my job," she snapped.

  Drogan leaned back in his chair. This was the first fire he'd seen in her, and he found that he liked this Dr. Louisa Ferrara better than the straight-A student.

  "Your comfort has everything to do with it," Drogan said.

  "Why are you asking me these questions? All Mitchell wanted to know was how much he'd get paid on the other side."

  "That's Mitchell all over," Drogan said. "But you're smart enough to have thought of all this long before you got here. I think you're uncomfortable with this because you understand very well what this process is, what it does to the person you put through the machine. The reason the governor bought into this is that it looks like research but it's really just a clean execution at TransLumina's expense. If it works, everyone comes out looking like a hero. But you're not sure you like the thought of that.

  "You know TransLumina won't be able to sell this, right? When people learn what it really does, no one will want to travel this way."

  Her face was red. Her whole expression had darkened. Part of him wanted to push her buttons, see what would happen if he pulled the lid off that temper.

  "Dr. Ferrara, I'd respect you a lot less if this didn't bother you just a little," he said.

  She deflated in that instant. Laid her hands flat on the table. She looked like she wanted to say something, but wouldn't. Or couldn't.

  "What?" he asked.

  Her forehead crinkled and she said, "What are you doing here?"

  "I committed arson and killed my wife and son with malice aforethought," he said without hesitation. She must have known that.

  "That's not what I mean. You're not . . . what I expected."

  "What, I'm not like Mitchell or Villanova? Dr. Ferrara," he said, "anyone can end up on death row."

  She looked at her hands on the table and didn't speak for a moment. Then asked, "Have you spoken with your attorney about this?"

  "My attorney's going to tell m
e not to do this. I don't have to call him to find out. It's not his decision."

  "Does that mean you're in or out, Mr. Drogan?" she asked then.

  In or out. To be or not to be. The thought almost made him smile.

  He thought of Sean, of apples and chocolate, of brown earth moist in his hands. Of fire licking a downy cheek.

  "I'm in," he said, pushing that thought away. He looked forward to pushing it away forever.

  Three days later, they moved Drogan and Villanova to the TransLumina lab two hours away. The adjacent cells were larger than at the pen, still concrete and metal but white and clean. He had a small, high, square window, too small for his body to fit through, but it was there, showing blue sky and, every now and then, a bird. He discovered, two days in, that at a certain time of the day, he could lie on his cot and feel the sun on his face.

  What he hadn't expected was the regimen of examinations that followed his arrival: C-T scans, x-rays, encephalograms, examinations not unlike strip-searches but somehow more invasive, more personal for the remoteness exuded by the doctors who conducted them. Then there were aptitude tests, a psychological profile the likes of which he hadn't been through since just before his trial.

  During their recreation hour out in the yard, he and Villanova shot hoops, Villanova smoked, and Drogan looked at the trees beyond the fences: a thick stand of spring maples sprouting electric green leaves. The other man didn't talk much, and Drogan was okay with that. They'd never known each other well, but somehow, with a finite count of days ahead, they suddenly seemed to know each other intimately. No words were necessary.

  Dr. Ferrara -- in his thoughts he called her by her first name, Louisa, though she kept things formal between them -- came almost every day. Whenever Villanova was off undergoing work-ups, often for hours at a time, she'd set up a chair on the other side of the bars along with a little folding table, put a digital recorder out and just talk with him.