Tal Klein - The Punch Escrow

That solar storm hit Earth with such force, it ionized the sky, creating a vast cloud of hyperactive electrons that bounced around inside the atmosphere above Italy. Anything electronic in Rome got fried. That included thousands of implants, automobiles, drones, city buses, and those cute little Italian scooters zipping through the city. One hundred and thirty-five people died. Hundreds more were injured in collisions and fender benders. But the greatest loss, as perceived by the worldwide community, was the disappearance of a six-hundred-year-old portrait of a woman with a mysterious smile.

Back then, freight teleportation had been around for about four years. The process worked pretty much like you might have seen in vintage movies—an item was placed into a chamber in one location, scanned, and then instantaneously zapped to a receiving chamber in another location. There had been very few mishaps since the technology went commercial, mainly because the procedure took place in such a short amount of time.

But during one crucial moment on April 15, 2109, the frayed threads in the process unraveled all at once. There was no fail-safe. No backup. The plasma cloud struck Rome at the exact moment some poor technician started teleporting the Mona Lisa . A globally cherished artifact was scanned, beamed into the ether—and never showed up on the other end. Rows of atoms arranged to create centuries-old master strokes suddenly evanesced into nothing. The painting dissolved into a cloud of worthless gray quantum foam. 1

It wasn’t the technician’s fault. Nor was the teleportation process itself to blame. It just so happened that an incredibly unlikely solar event occurred at the same instant as an exceedingly rare painting was being moved from one place to another. Statistically, it was in the neighborhood of one in 3.57 quintillion. But as the universe continually likes to remind us, black swans don’t play by the rules. And this was one particularly petulant pen.

Sure, accidents happen all the time. On that unfortunate day, boats sank, drones crashed, trucks collided—all with valuable cargo and precious souls on board. Any vessel in which the Mona Lisa could have otherwise been traveling might have also been downed by the solar flare. But witnessing a one-of-a-kind, globally precious masterpiece fade into nothing—that had a lasting effect on people.

The da Vinci Exhibition meme, more than anything else, led to the creation of the Punch Escrow. And the Punch Escrow, of course, is what made human teleportation possible. Not only possible, but avowed as the safest form of transportation yet. Beaten into our collective consciousness was the fact that not once since the commercialization of human teleportation in 2126 had any person been maimed, altered, vanished, or otherwise mistreated by teleportation.

Not until me.

But we’ll get to that. For now, let us pay our respects to that enigmatic Renaissance lady, La Gioconda —who was visited more than any other painting in the world, whose rapture led to human teleportation becoming the great success it is today.

Ciao, bella .

1Quantum foam (also referred to as space-time foam) is the stuff that makes up the fabric of the universe. It was theorized by John Wheeler in 1955, thought to be officially discredited by Kristina Wheeler (no relation to John) in 2055, and then finally “discovered” by Suzanne Wheeler (no relation to John or Kristina) in 2105 with her invention of the scanning tunneling microscope. Quantum foam is essentially a qualitative description of subatomic space-time turbulence at extremely small distances (on the order of the Planck length). At such small scales of time and space, the Heisenbergs uncertainty principle allows energy to briefly decay into particles and antiparticles and then annihilate without violating physical conservation laws. As the scale of time and space being discussed shrinks, the energy of the virtual particles increases. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, energy curves space-time. Wheeler (the Suzanne one) conclusively proved that, at the time crystal level, the energy of these teeny tiny fluctuations in space-time are large enough to cause significant departures from the smooth space-time seen at larger scales, giving space-time a “foamy” quality that can be definitely measured and discretely manipulated. In other words, scientists were able to get their hands on God’s Legos and start building whatever they wanted.

SYMMETRY BREAKING

COMING TO WAS A BITCH.

Not sure how many volts I took. Conservatively speaking, enough to power my apartment for an hour or two.

Mumbles were the first sounds I heard.

What the hell happened? Did I get struck by lightning or something?

More mumbles.

A feminine voice. I’m not sure what it was saying, but yes, it was definitely female.

My confusion was too debilitating to focus on the words or their owner’s identity beyond that. There was just this awful ringing. And purple.

In my childhood, when I got angry, I’d clench my eyes shut as hard as I could. Eventually, the pitch black would become dark purple.

Open your eyes!

My eyelids weren’t responding. All I saw was purple.

I remembered reading that a blind person’s brain rewires itself to use the visual cortex, essentially hijacking it to improve the processing of other information such as sound and touch. Because of this, some blind people learn to use echolocation—reflected sound waves—to build a mental picture of their surroundings, like bats or dolphins.

Abe, one of the guys I worked with, could do this. He was born blind, but his parents were Three Religion Fundamentalists, so they didn’t allow him to get implants as a kid. When he got older, he gave up religion and ran away from home. In his secular twenties, he finally got his comms installed but opted out of ocular implants. Being blind was just a core part of his self-identity. I recalled him claiming to be able to tell an object’s distance, size, texture, and density by clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth about three times per second. I’d seen pictures of him hiking and cycling, so maybe he was right. But he was a smartass like me, so there’s also a good chance he was full of shit.

Just for kicks, I tried clicking my tongue against the roof of my mouth.

Click. Click. Click .

It worked! Not the echolocation thing, but my tongue worked! Progress .

I tried blinking my eyes open. Too bright!

The voices were becoming clearer. I could hear mutterings in a Middle Eastern–sounding tongue—one of the Levantine languages, I thought.

I had no idea where I was, and no idea who the out-of-focus head trying to communicate with me belonged to. Now someone else shined what looked like an interrogation light in my face, blinding me and catalyzing an even more painful headache.

“Hey! Cut it out.” It appeared my vocal cords worked, too.

“ Ahlan habibi ,” the blurry face greeted me. I smelled cardamom and jasmine. “My name is Ifrit. Are you okay?”

“No, I’m not okay. Could you please stop shining that thing in my eyes?”

The bright interrogation light blinked off.

She asked me if I was okay again.

I rubbed my temples and groaned. “Well, I’m not dead.”

Ifrit’s blurry face started to come into focus. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, with attractive Middle Eastern features—coffee-colored hair, dark almond-shaped eyes, and olive skin.

“I’m sorry we had to shock you, but our security system doesn’t like unauthorized visitors.”

“Well, thanks. I guess.”

I looked around. Other than the woman tending to me, there was nothing remarkable about the room I found myself in. Why did she send me here? It was another conference room, like the one I had just escaped, although the comparatively sparse decor indicated whoever occupied this space had significantly less of an aesthetics budget to work with. For example, the table on which I was lying was made of plastic, not wood, and the chairs were less “comfortably ergonomic” and more “painfully pragmatic.” There was a medium-sized printer by the door, though. A very recent model, taking up most of a desktop, and a rather expensive accessory for such an otherwise scant room. 2