Point B (a teleportation love story)

by Drew Magary

  “Lara Kirsch gave you this?” he asked Anna.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “None of your business.”

  “I’ve been looking for this for a very long time. You’re an A student, indeed.”

  Stokes handed Anna a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle of disinfectant cleaner.

  “Clean up the oil, please. I hate messes.”

  “Clean it up yourself,” Anna told him. “I’m not your maid. I wanna know what those notes mean. I wanna know how porting works.”

  “It’s beyond your feeble grasp.”

  “What’s in there that you didn’t already know, Doctor? Or are you the fraud everyone thinks you are?”

  Stokes knelt down to spray away the oil stain.

  “Look,” he told her, “there is a portionality to this. It was my team that cracked the process. Without my innovation and leadership, PortSys would be nothing. We were already close, testing the formula on whatever losers and urchins Jason brought us. Some of them disintegrated in the process. Some of them are stuck in the wormholes for infinity.”

  “So it wasn’t just Jason who experimented on people.”

  “Who cares?” Stokes asked. “Do you care about the poor Taiwanese laborer who made your little PortPhone when you go zooming around with it? People never say it, but in their every waking action, they endorse the human cost of things. So yes, we accepted that as the cost of changing the world for the better. And I’d wager you’ve accepted it, too.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “You’re a teenager. You don’t even know yourself.”

  “PortSys experimented on me, too.”

  “So?”

  “So I deserve to know how PostSys works from the inside.”

  “No you don’t. You’re unnecessary. Besides, how should I know how they operate now? They fired me, remember? And do you know why?”

  “Because you’re an asshole.”

  “Funny girl. We hit a wall in development, until a colleague of mine, an underling, had a breakthrough and helped complete the formula.”

  “So you didn’t invent porting,” Anna said.

  “If anyone invented it, it was I.”

  “But someone else finished the job.”

  “And then I was cast out before I could see it made whole! Don’t you understand? It was my idea.”

  “Ideas are overrated.”

  “Says a girl who’s probably never had a good one. The Kirsches fired me the second they knew they had a working product, so that only they would be privy to the final working process. The underling? Dead. Murdered in Turkey. The only reason PortSys kept me on call before the Grann article posted was to ring me up anytime they had bugs that the Kirsches were too stupid to sort out on their own.”

  Anna looked at the sheaf of legal notes in Stokes’ hand.

  “So those complete the formula?”

  “Together with my files, this is everything,” Stokes said, smiling. “The full picture.”

  “So what will you do with it?”

  “Compete! Everyone thinks I’m a fraud because the Kirsches spew lie after lie after lie. But now, with this, we can take PortSys down. You see? We can make a better porting world. A responsible one.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Anna said.

  “No?”

  “You wanna bring them down, but you’ll be just as bad. You’ll be poisoned, like them.”

  “You make the worst assumptions about people because that’s your generation’s hobby and you have nothing better to do. Maybe you should try seeing both sides of this,” Stokes suggested.

  Anna picked up Stokes’ handgun. She had never fired a gun before. It was a lot heavier than she thought it would be. She hated guns but her hands clearly did not.

  “You’re getting oil on that,” Stokes pouted.

  “That’s your fault, isn’t it? Give me the notes,” she said. If she was nervous, her words didn’t betray her. She was low and calm. She didn’t care enough about Stokes to worry about his opinion of her.

  The doctor gestured all around the river house. True to Grann’s reporting, there was an assault rifle resting against every window. “You’re new with that gun,” he told her ominously. “I am not new with those.”

  Anna shot Stokes. She shot him before she could even consider the consequences, or the fact that the gun had a wicked kickback that sent her reeling into the glass wall behind her. Into that bullet went all of the hatred and fear and guilt and anger that she had dealt with for over a year. It felt great to shoot someone.

  Stokes’ right leg exploded: a great blood bomb sending out shards of hair and bone, soiling his precious floor and leaving him howling to the ground. He dropped the notes. Anna snatched them up and grabbed every other gun in the cabin. Through the window, Anna saw one of his assistants on the riverbank, his own gun drawn.

  “You can’t leave,” Stokes said. “The windows may be bulletproof, but he’ll shoot you dead the second you walk out. And the underbelly of this house is lined with explosives. I can blow it at any time.”

  “How?”

  “With the push of a button, you brat.” People in 2031 could do too many bad things too easily.

  “Good luck reaching it now, pegleg.” Anna stood next to the doorway and slipped the rifles into the river, one by one. Then she closed the door, walked over to the kitchen, pulled two Ziploc bags out of a drawer, and pointed at a sleek laptop resting atop a rattan desk.

  “What are you doing?” Stokes asked her.

  “How much does your laptop weigh?”

  “What?”

  “HOW MUCH DOES IT WEIGH?” she demanded.

  “Three pounds, but don’t—”

  She did. She grabbed the laptop and ejected the hard drive. Then she dropped the hard drive, her phone, and the notes into one of the Ziploc bags. She sealed the bag up, sealed that bag in another bag, and then stuffed it all down her blackened pants. She opened the window facing downriver and looked out at the Stygian waters below. The river was a great serpent tongue, the waterfall at its end the back of a hungry mouth.

  “Where do they experiment on people?” she asked Stokes.

  “They move the lab and the servers around. You’ll never find any of it.”

  “Then tell me where you did the experiments.”

  He sighed. “Outside of Bozeman, Montana. It’s a compound. Unmarked. The smartwall is the best of its kind. Don’t bother.”

  “That’s not for you to decide, Doc. I’m leaving.” But before she did, she peeled off her shirt, kicked off her boots, then walked over to Stokes and stared at him.

  “What are you doing?” Stokes asked.

  “Watching you bleed.” She kicked him in the ribs. His cries of agony bounced crisply off the bulletproof glass.

  She leapt into the river. Stokes’ lackey opened fire from the side, but by then Anna was already so far down the river that it was an impossible shot.

  The river manhandled Anna, overwhelming her anytime she thought she was about to gain control. This is why she wanted to be on a diving team and not a swim team. She reached her toes downward hoping to strike the riverbed, but only found colder waters and tiny biting fish. The river carried her past a rock and it scythed into her arm. The rapids were engulfing her now. Whenever she came up for air, the water nailed her and snatched away the end of every breath. Soon, there wouldn’t be any more breaths to cut off. Soon, the water would flow into Anna’s sinuses and down her throat and flood her system like amniotic fluid. The river would take her.

  So this is what drowning is like. Feels very stupid.

  The dropoff was coming at lightspeed. Back on the Druskin campus, Coach Willamy would have all the girls on the diving team tread water for long stretches, sometimes an entire practice. If a girl tired out and sunk, he would yell at her instead of rescuing her. Anna could hear Willamy now: You’re not even trying to stay alive, Huff. You’re just giving up because you don’t
think you can give more than what you’ve already given, and that’s why you suck. If that was the last voice she ever heard before dying, she would be very angry about it.

  And then, a branch. Sweet glory of life, the river offered Anna a reprieve and she clung to it with a superhuman fury. All she could think about at the moment was everyone she hated: Willamy, Vick, Stokes, two of the three Kirsches. No way Anna could die with all of them still alive and prospering. She wasn’t gonna leave this world without owning all of them first.

  On either side of the anchored branch, the river was waiting to throttle her. Only a few feet in front of the branch were the falls, kicking up a spray that decorated the plunge into oblivion with fleeting rainbows. The branch itself was part of a fallen tree that had gotten lodged behind a rock outcropping in the center of the river. Anna pulled and pulled until, at long last, her feet finally touched something solid. She scrambled up the rocky outcropping and looked down below. A group of tourists had ported into the lagoon to skinny dip. They were having a great time. Anna hated them now, too.

  “MOVE.” she shouted at them. The roar of the falls drowned her out. No matter. She stepped back on the slick black rock to get a running start and then jumped.

  The diving technique came to her automatically, No overthinking it. Core muscles engaged. Legs tight together, as if bound with twine. Neck stiff. Toes pointed straight enough to make a ballerina wince. Anna swept her arms forward as the emerald glories of the Cuban jungle panned up into her line of vision. She joined her brilliant hands above her head and became a human arrow, taking aim as she rocketed toward the lagoon below.

  When she hit the water, there was no pain. No rocks hidden under the surface to sabotage her entry. The dive was so effortless, she started laughing before she had even broken the surface. Flawless technique. It was a 10.0 dive and she knew it. She felt down into her pants. There was still a Ziploc bag full of Big Teleportation’s deepest secrets comfortably lodged in her undies.

  The nudists in the lagoon gasped before breaking out in raucous applause. Anna ignored them and swam for the banks. When she got to the parking lot, she slipped into the Hudson Hornet, in her bare feet and a sports bra, and held out a wet twenty for the driver.

  “Rapido. Por favor.”

  Anna had been in such a rush that she didn’t realize the driver’s seat was unoccupied. She looked back at the beach and saw only naked white people. The paths and surrounding jungle were similarly barren, but the thrill of her dive was wearing off and paranoia was settling back in. Ciaran Stokes and his Cuban Wade would be coming down that path shortly.

  Anna scooted over to the driver’s seat. The key was still in the ignition. Is that what it’s called? The ignition? How does this work? Everything she knew about driving she learned from old Dwayne Johnson movies and from Sarah driving her to the movies in Rhonda. Sometimes Sarah would let Anna sit on her lap and turn the steering wheel.

  Now she remembered. The pedal on the right. That’s the one you mash with your foot.

  She turned the key and the big green boat shuddered and harrumphed its way to life. She grabbed the gear shift and looked at the letters on the dash: P, D, N, R. Rhonda and the Cobra both had manual transmissions. This refurbished Hornet had been blessedly restored with an automatic.

  D stands for Drive, shithead.

  She yanked the gearshift but it wouldn’t move. Twisting it did nothing, either. She yanked again until the stick was nearly ready to break off. Only after nearly destroying the transmission of this fine antique did Anna Huff finally have a breakthrough.

  Push the top of it down first, then shift.

  She stomped on the gas so hard, the car went crashing into a NO CLAVADOS sign that stood between the Hornet and the steep hill down to the beach below. She shifted into Reverse and mashed the accelerator again. Now she was flying backwards and failing to remember the existence of the wide pedal on the left that did the stopping. This looked so much easier when Mrs. Ludwig was doing it.

  “AYYYYY!” That was the driver. He was running out from the jungle, frantically zipping up his fly. Anna found the brake and shifted into Drive. The Hornet made a horrible noise, like she had broken something vital inside of it. She gave the gas a gentle tap and edged the wheel just enough this time to get back on the road to Trinidad. The poor driver’s phone was still sitting on the passenger seat.

  The thing Anna noticed the most about driving was that it was awesome. Here she was, a 17-year-old girl, just a few inches north of five feet, and now she was encased in a steel exoskeleton that could hit 80mph and cut through her enemies like they were weeds. Driving was freedom. Anna owned the road. The bump and potholes and looping curves were hers to conquer. Her stomach felt better than it had in months. And so many fun things to grab with her hands! Her busy little fingers could fiddle all they pleased with the radio and blinker and the headlights. She turned on the wipers and seeing them stand at attention thrilled her like she was a child at a carnival.

  When Anna got back to Trinidad, she eased the Hornet next to a free stretch of curb, stopping in place for five minutes before finally realizing that P stood for park. She tucked the keys above the visor, grabbed the driver’s phone, and tossed it in the glove box. She swore she’d come back to Cuba one day to beg his forgiveness. Then she ran out onto the street—men and women alike gawking at the sight of a wet teenager running around barefoot and shirtless—headed down the alley, found her phone behind the orange crate, and hit PORT.

  The second Anna was back in the Druskin locker room, she saw another person’s shadow. A man grabbed her from behind and wrapped his hand tight around her mouth. Dean Vick had been waiting for her.

  “Where have you been, Annie Huff?”

  DRUSKIN STADIUM

  Vick’s hands were disgusting. Terrible hands. Minor hands. Anna wanted to vomit through the five angry fingers he had firmly clenched around her jaw. He was clamping down hard on her face with his right hand and her bare stomach with his left, the latter mere inches above her precious Ziploc bag. The door to the locker room was slammed shut and all Anna could see were exposed wooden 4x4’s extending up to the bleachers, nails crudely sticking out of them. This room, like Vick’s basement, was a prison. She was gonna die here if she didn’t think quickly.

  He’s hurting you. That means you get to hurt him back.

  “Give me that phone,” Vick hissed, reaching for Anna’s hand. She thrashed around to break free, but it was no use. Vick was too strong, squeezing her belly so hard that her ribs were about to collapse. There was only one way to gain leverage over him. Anna dug her heels in, leaning back and taking him back with her, farther and farther back until she drove him into one of the wooden 4x4’s. A single nail sticking out from the timber sunk into Vick’s back and he squealed in pain as Anna wrested herself away from him at long last.

  Vick was a great bulging vein of a man now. Taut as piano wire. How could anyone be so hateful? What was the point? He charged at Anna and she deftly sidestepped him. Toro! He took another charge and caught her with a shoulder to the hip. A lump as hard as bone formed on contact.

  “You never belonged at this school,” Vick told her.

  “Yeah but you do,” Anna said, giving him her own crooked, evil grin. “You’re a common administrator, Charles. With a head made of wet cement.”

  Vick charged once more and missed, with Anna slugging him in the puncture wound as he passed. He grabbed at his back and fell to his knees, weakened in strength but not in rage. He raised a final angry finger at her.

  “You’ll never get away with this.”

  Before Anna ported out, she made sure to get the final word in.

  “Say hi to my bulldog figurine for me, you psychotic dick.”

  Then she stepped out of the locker room and away from Dean Vick’s poisonous hands.

  CAIRO

  Anna was in the center of downtown Cairo in her bare feet. Men noticed her immediately. She took off running so that no one could gr
ab her. It wasn’t quite yet dawn in Egypt but the capital was still swathed in its signature bustling din, which was there before porting and would remain long after. Vendors lined the street with open carts to sell tea, appliances, cigarettes, vapes, and hair dryers. The asphalt was still clogged with moving trucks swerving around abandoned motorbikes, horses, and drunken port tourists. A guy who ported in near Anna and who had no sense of the city’s rhythm immediately got clipped by a semi when he obliviously stepped into the street.

  The sour tang of burning smoke was everywhere. It clung to Anna as tightly as Vick did back in the Druskin stadium locker room. A flare went off in the distance, followed by a volley of machine guns rat-a-tat-tatting. Cairo went in and out of Red Zone status every hour. While PortSys didn’t ask Anna for two-step verification to go there this time around, that still didn’t make it the safest destination.

  It was strange, how tinny the gunshots sounded to her. Even the gunshot that killed Anna’s sister, and in turn woke Anna up, sounded weak, like a dime store firecracker. She didn’t even realize it was a gun until Sandy started screaming. The sound of gunfire still didn’t frighten her the way it should have. It was everywhere in the free zones. When you live with war, she reckoned, you accept the ambience of war right up until the moment it blows you to pieces.

  Anna ducked into a side alley, dutifully dodging all the stray dogs and cats wandering around. The alley was clotted with old bicycles and garbage left by thoughtless tourists. She slumped down against a cool stone wall and a light rain flicked off the tin roofs, drizzling fresh water onto her grimy feet and legs. She took a photo of a spat-out wad of chewing gum sitting in the dirt, knowing she couldn’t post it ironically to WorldGram but still snapping ironic photos out of habit.

  She had no money. She had an American passport that protected her back on U.S. soil but would do the precise opposite here. A man in camo fatigues with a red armband came walking down the alley carrying a gun. Anna hid her face and pretended to be crying so that the soldier would leave her be. Under present circumstances, feigning distress wasn’t a problem for her. She had been attacked by Dean Vick a second time and had only barely come out unscathed. She had also shot a man, although that should have bothered her more than it did. She wanted a normal brain and she wanted to have normal feelings about the situation, but no. No, normal was an ongoing delusion. The whole goddamn world was psycho, and its psychosis was clearly rubbing off on Anna Huff.