Tal Klein - The Punch Escrow

“You know me,” I said lightly. “‘I don’t believe in apologies; I believe in actions.’” The phrase was an old joke between us, something our college physics professor would say whenever someone was late to class.

“O-kay then. Richard,” she said as the bartender arrived, “can you please bring my truant spouse a lubricant for his rusty sense of decorum?”

“Gibson?” Richard raised his eyebrows to me, his look confirming my suspicion that I was a complete fuckup. I shrugged. He turned to Sylvia.

“While something in the ‘sour grapes’ varietal would be apropos, I will have another lemon drop, but on the rocks this time, Richard,” she said. “I don’t want to be seeing double.”

Richard nodded—likely reckoning too late —and went about his business. Sylvia smiled at me, her fingers tap-tapping on my leg. “So I have some good news. It looks like my project might be ready for regulatory approval sooner than we thought. I was thinking we might be able to start on our own little project. Iterate Byram dot next?” She gave me a sidelong glance, that mouth of hers twitching upward.

“Seriously?” I said as Richard set down our drinks. “You know, parenthood actually works a lot better with two parents in the same physical space at the same time. They’ve done studies.” I took a sip of my Gibson, the gin burning on its way down my throat.

“I just told you—it won’t be like this forever. In six months you’ll be looking at a changed woman. Much more bandwidth for you and me and others.” She took a sip of the translucent yellow concoction in her tumbler, fixing me with a flirty stare.

“I don’t know. I realize it’s good for the species and all that, but the thought of little copies of me running around, it sounds—”

“Cute? Adorable? Naughty?” she said, moving her hand farther up my leg.

“I was gonna say ‘creepy.’”

I wasn’t entirely opposed to having kids. A year ago I likely would have jumped in with both feet. But since Sylvia got promoted, we’d grown distant from each other, throwing ourselves into work and other distractions. Lately I’d been wondering if the mom and dad we could have been were still inside us. “I just think right now’s not a good time to bring another human being into the equation.”

“You sure about that?” said Sylvia, leaning forward to breathe a lemon-vodka-scented whisper into my ear. “Cause I have some proofs I can whip out right now.”

“ Now now?” I asked. “I’m not sure I’m in a theorem-proving mood.”

“I’ve got plenty of data. We’ll port home and I’ll show it to you.” She gently bit my ear, her words hot on my cochlea.

“I’m not against it,” I conceded. “But I think before two people have children, they at least need to be honest with each other.”

She sighed and sat back. “Do you really want to do this again? I barely snuck out of work as it is, and Bill’s been riding me for the last month so our project will be finished on time. So please, can we just enjoy what little time we do have together? We both knew what I signed on for when I took this job.”

“Did we? And, remind me, what is it you’re almost done with? Oh, that’s right. I can’t know. So please excuse me if I don’t take IT’s word for it.”

This had been an ongoing argument between us for the last year. Since she’d moved to her new department, security was so tight that Sylvia couldn’t even talk to me on comms while she was at work. If we needed to communicate with each other, she had to walk across the street to a coffee shop. “Babe, you know the work I’m doing, it’s classified….” She smoothed out a pleat in her skirt, then looked back at me. “But what we could accomplish with it, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Maybe several lifetimes. Once Honeycomb is in production, I promise, I will refocus on us.”

“Super,” I said, ladling on the sarcasm. “I’m sure by then, the reveal will make it all worth it.”

Sylvia took a big gulp of her cocktail and crunched on the ice cubes. “You know it kills me that I can’t talk to you about it. It’s driving me crazy. There’s so much to figure out in so little time. It’s kinda breaking my brain.”

“Well, if it’s breaking your brain, it’ll probably fry mine.” I took another swallow of my drink.

She blew out a drunken breath. “Oh, I doubt that. It’s actually not the science that’s hard.”

“What do you mean? Isn’t that what you’re in charge of? The science?”

“Kind of. Oh, it’s hard to explain.” She closed her eyes, massaging her temples. “Okay, think about it like this: You remember the transporters on Star Trek ?”

Throughout our final year together in college, Sylvia and I had spent many a night bingeing the classic TV show as a respite from our studies. The special effects were delightfully archaic, as was a lot of the science, but that was part of its charm. I answered in a terrible impression of Kirk, “Beam me up, Scotty!”

“Exactly. Well, they had the science all wrong with the transporters.”

“As you’ve never failed to mention every time it comes up, yes.”

“Shhh!” she said, adding a few more h ’s than necessary. “So, like, imagine every time Scotty beamed up Kirk, there was a gap of time between the moment Kirk got scanned on the Enterprise , and the time he arrived wherever he was going, a gap of traveling time relative to the distance he was being teleported. So, the farther the distance, the longer the wait. During which, Kirk would just sort of hang out on the Enterprise , toying with his tricorder.”

“Is that a masturbation euphemism?”

“Ha!” she laugh-snorted loudly. “No, but that’s funny. Okay, so, like, my question is, how long is it okay for Kirk to wait?”

“I dunno. Seconds? A minute?”

Sylvia took another big swallow of her drink. “Let’s go with that. A minute. My problem is, while Kirk’s waiting, what if he gets a little bored and suddenly has this life-changing epiphany?”

“You mean, like, ‘Holy shit, I’m in love with Uhura!’”

She rolled her eyes, but continued. “Sure, I guess that could work. So he realizes he loves Uhura, and he sends her a message asking her to marry him or something. He sends her this message and then zap! He’s on the Klingon ship drinking bloodwine with Khan. Except he doesn’t remember ever sending the message because what happened between the time he got scanned and the time he arrived doesn’t sync. Kirk never had the Uhura love epiphany.”

“Oh. Oh damn. That could have been a great plot for an episode!”

“Right? Totally!” Sylvia only said totally when she was wasted. She carried the o , which I always thought was adorable. “Let’s bring it back home, okay? Let’s say we put a TC on a satellite and send it to a habitable planet in the Aquarius constellation. So now we have a TC on some planet eighteen light-years away and we want to teleport someone there. Let’s call her Astronaut Billy.”

“Is she hot?”

“Yes, but I’m hotter. Stay with me. So it takes hours to transmit and confirm the teleportation data to Aquarius. Not seconds. Several hours of Billy sitting in the foyer, waiting. And what if during that time she does or thinks about something important that doesn’t make it to the destin?”

I shrugged. “Then she shouldn’t teleport to outer space and assume the risk of losing time. If she doesn’t like it, she can do something else, like hang out with her husband and not talk about work.”

She downed the rest of her cocktail. “You know what? Forget it. I’m trying to explain why I’ve been so wrapped up in this, but if you’d rather be snarky—”