Tal Klein - The Punch Escrow

The man named Zaki reached the table. He was tall and he had big hands and shoulder-length sandy-brown hair. He wore all black, a casual black button-down shirt tucked into tight black jeans, and shiny black loafers on his feet. His face was round and flat like a pancake. There was a gentleness to it, even through his stiff, thousand-yard stare, which didn’t waver as he handed Moti a thin metal clipboard. I had never seen one of those analog antiques in real life.

Moti grinned at my obvious surprise. “Sorry. We are a bit old-fashioned here.” He stroked the clipboard with a boyish fondness, his eyes sparkling. “I do love the older things. Paper and pen. Much harder to steal than bits and bytes.” He paused before continuing. “Did you hear what he said, Zaki?”

Zaki casually replied in a deep baritone voice, “Yes. I hear.”

Moti reiterated anyway, “He said people are trying to kill him.”

Zaki shrugged. He walked over to the printer and said, “ Cigariot .” A pack of TIME cigarettes appeared, a Levantine retro cigarette brand coming back into fashion with the hip professional crowd. Zaki removed a cigarette from the pack, then twirled it in his hand.

Moti kept his eyes on me. “Yoel, I believe you.” Then, without shifting his glance, he asked, “Zaki, do you believe him?”

Zaki seemed to consider the question just long enough to make me shift uncomfortably. He twirled the cigarette in his hand once again. Fidgety people make me nervous. “Yes,” he said. The guy’s voice was so heavy, he might have been an operatic bass in another life.

Moti flipped through a few scribbled-on sheets of actual paper until he found one devoid of writing. “Zaki, pencil!”

Zaki didn’t seem affronted as I imagined someone of his build might be after being shouted at so forcefully. He reached into the long hair behind his ear, manifested a tan pencil, and rolled it across the conference table to Moti, who stopped it with his index fingertip and picked it up. “Beautiful. The origin of planned obsolescence,” Moti said, gazing at the writing utensil. “A sucker for old things, I guess.” He paused before continuing: “So today, where were you going?”

“Costa Rica.” He made a note on his clipboard. “My wife, Sylvia, was already there—”

“Your wife?” he interrupted. “So your trip was for pleasure?”

“Yeah. I mean, it’s a vacation with my wife.” Another note. “She left a couple of hours before me.”

“Trouble in paradise?” Moti winked.

“What?” I asked, taken aback.

“I’m sorry, we travel agents, we see a lot of folks go on vacation, and you get a—shall we say sense —of these things.”

“Yes. I mean, no. I mean—shit, man, people are trying to kill me, and you’re asking me about my marital issues? Look, I’m supposed to be in Costa Rica right now with my wife. I went to the TC, sat down in the foyer, and the next thing I know, people are trying to kill me!”

He cocked his head at me, curious. “Yoel, I have two questions. First, who is trying to kill you?”

All right, Joel, focus. Right now your needs are pretty basic. Don’t get killed. Get to Sylvia. The longer this guy interrogates you, the more time you have to think of how to do that. But think fast .

“You’re not going to believe it.”

Moti took another puff of his cigarette. Exhaling smoke, he said, “Try me. I hear many crazy things.” He polished off his Turkish coffee and put the tiny ceramic cup back on its saucer, upside down. “But make sure that the crazy things you say are the truth,” he continued with a smile, “because I will know if you are lying.”

I had a feeling he wasn’t referring to the room nanos that were no doubt scanning me while we sat there talking. “Okay.”

“So, first question, Yoel Byram . Who is your would-be assassin?”

“International Transport,” I said, gulping. “That’s who.”

Moti stared at me, his gaze all business. After a few seconds he made a note on his clipboard and asked, his voice nonchalant, “Second question. Why? Why do you think International Transport is trying to kill you?”

Shit. What do I say? Better come clean, I guess. Nobody else left to help me .

“This is going to sound crazy.”

“ Yoel , we have already established that I am okay with crazy as long as it is the truth.” He peered closer at me. “Please, tell me.”

A cold sweat started down my neck. “Teleportation. It doesn’t work the way people think it does. I can prove it, and if I tell anyone, if people find out about me, then International Transport is fucked. That’s why they want to kill me,” I answered.

“Interesting,” he said, his pencil seemingly checking another box.

Wait, he has a box for Huge International Corporate Conspiracy?

“Okay, Yoel . I think maybe we can help you.” Moti ran his right hand over the crisp white collar of his button-down shirt, leaned back in his chair, then put his left hand in the pocket of his neatly creased navy slacks. “But first tell me more about this woman, this Pema. You say she sent you to us? What did she tell you, exactly?”

Might as well come clean on this, too. I need to build trust. Then maybe I can get some alone time with this room .

“I guess we should start with my pet peeve.”

2Replication printing, originally known as “synthetic manufacturing” but then quickly and less-accurately renamed “organic manufacturing” (OM) for what I can only assume was better marketability, referred to the various processes used to create objects out of seemingly thin air. It is widely believed that replication printing ushered in the fourth industrial age, as molecular blueprints of any product could be sent to any place in the world, and then be perfectly reproduced by any printer with “carbon inks.” So basically, everything became available anywhere, provided you had the plans, printer, and ink. Replication of valuable or patented items was prevented through multiple safeguards such as unique molecular signatures, blacklisting, and devaluation. For example, if someone managed to illegally replicate a gold bar, it would have an identical signature to the original “blueprint.” Any piece of gold with that signature could only be sold once, hence branding any other copy a fake.

3In case you’ve devolved back to barter or evolved to something else, chits were the elastic global block-chain cryptocurrencies that underpinned our global economy. They were secure and unforgeable by design and made most financial crime obsolete. Of course, one could always be swindled out of their chits the old-fashioned way—social engineering. Standard chits were created and linked to individuals for services rendered. There were also unique types of chits that were traded on niche exchanges. Those chits still map to normalized chit values but at different multipliers than base chit rates. For example, a local municipality’s food chits might be valued at 0.8x (or 80 percent) of the standard chit rate in order to discount for local economic conditions and keep everyone fed. But most work chits held value in direct correlation to the supply and demand of a given trade, as well as the value of the entity using them to procure things. The idea being that the “price” of something was a moving target based on real-time demand, the wealth of the procurer, and the percentage of the procurer’s wealth that the procurement transaction represented. It sounds complicated, but it ensured nobody went hungry and no one person or corporation could manipulate the market beyond its natural elasticity.

NEARLY INFINITE

I WOKE UP on my couch.

A quick check of my comms told me it was 9:12 p.m. on June 27, 2147. Shit . It was our tenth wedding anniversary, and Sylvia and I had made plans to meet at our favorite college bar at nine thirty. I had dozed off playing video games, not an uncommon occurrence for a weeknight. Usually it didn’t matter, as Sylvia didn’t get home until after midnight, but even I recognized that being late for one’s aluminum anniversary was bad form.