Tal Klein - The Punch Escrow

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 Joel 2a 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 Joel 2were 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 Joel 2’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.

Joel 2would 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 Joel 2’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 Joel 2gone, 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 Joel 2, 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 Joel 3thinking—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—”