The Punch Escrow Read online

  All of a sudden the room became more illuminated. Generic video streams of remote beachfront resorts played on the walls of the otherwise plainly appointed room.

  “Café?” he offered, placing his cigarette down at the edge of the table.

  I nodded and sat down in an uncomfortable nonadjustable chair wedged between the table and the wall.

  “Turkish,” he told the printer, his Levantine accent lingering on the u like it was four o’s long.

  Soon, a small copper pot with a long wooden handle coalesced out of nothing. Next to it were two small ceramic cups atop tiny ornate saucers. He placed those on a small tray and then started back toward me.

  He placed the coffee tray down on the plastic table. Then, confidently holding the pot by its handle, the man filled each cup about three-quarters full, the size of a shot.

  “Back home, far away from here, there is a small man with a small cart who makes these the real way,” he said. “It took me a long time and a lot of chits to convince him to let me copy it, but now I can print it whenever I want.”3

  He sipped slowly. I wondered if he thought it truly tasted the same as the original from his memories.

  He picked up his cigarette from the table, took another drag, then sat down on the chair opposite me, signaling it was time for business.

  “My name is Moti Ahuvi. You are a guest of the LAST Agency. Land, Air, Sea Travel.” He spread his hands, indicating the small room around us. “That’s where you are. We cater to Levantines and other peoples for whom teleportation is not an option. I am responsible for security here.”

  Well, at least I won’t be teleporting anywhere.

  “My name is Joel. Joel Byram.” I paused to see if my name elicited any reaction. It didn’t. Hopefully that meant my face wasn’t all over the comms yet. “If you don’t mind my asking, why does a travel agency need security personnel?”

  He half smiled. “The world is a dangerous place, my friend. People don’t want bad things to happen to them while they’re traveling. You would agree, yes?”

  “I’m realizing that in spades today.”

  He nodded knowingly. “Yoel, I have some questions for you.” His brown eyes were focused but calm.

  I adjusted my posture fruitlessly. Interrogation by travel-agency security might be a pointless proposition for most, but for me it was definitely a positive changing of the tides. I nodded for him to continue.

  The Levant are a curious breed, known for several millennia of regional conflict prior to the Last War. Most significant to my situation, their now-shared culture prohibits human teleportation. An artifact of religious edicts still in practice from the old days before the war.

  Moti took another small, considered sip of his coffee, then swallowed. “Your fingerprints and irises match a man named Yoel Byram.”

  “Yes. Joel Byram,” I corrected him. “That’s me.”

  He disregarded my correction. “But your comms come up unregistered. Do you understand that I am curious why?”

  Something about his broken English and calm demeanor terrified me. But I was also somewhat relieved that we didn’t have to beat around the bush.

  Remember your goal: reach Sylvia.

  “Uh, yeah,” I answered. “My comms seem to be on the fritz.”

  “What is this word fritz?”

  “My comms aren’t working. One minute they were working fine, and the next”—keep things close to your chest, Joel; you don’t know who you can trust—“I found myself at your doorstep.”

  “Are you in trouble? Would you like us to call the police?” Moti asked.

  “Yes, but—no! Don’t call the police!” I yelled, then quickly checked myself. Calmly, I said, “Look, there was this woman. Her name was Pema. She told me to come here. That you guys could help me.”

  Moti took my answer in and reflected upon it for a few seconds. “Please, finish your coffee.”

  I nervously sipped the rest of the warm black syrupy beverage, careful to avoid the grit at the bottom. I had briefly dated a Levantine girl in college who had taught me how to drink Turkish coffee. Since the drink is boiled rather than filtered, you have to drink at a specific angle and pace, lest the sediment in the bottom of the cup end up in your mouth—

  As it just had in mine. “Ugh!” I spat out the bitter grit on my tongue—to the wry amusement of my host.

  Ifrit reentered the room, placing a glass of water in front of me while Moti briskly yanked what remained of my coffee from me, then covered the cup with its saucer and flipped it upside down.

  What the hell is he doing?

  As he moved the cup around in his hand, I noticed his focus was on the sticky residue at the bottom of it.

  Tasseography.

  I’d heard of it before from my ex-girlfriend, but never seen it done. Reading coffee is one of the oldest cultural practices in the Middle East, dating back to the eighteenth century. One examines the coffee grounds left after someone has consumed a cup, studying the shapes and images that form in the dark grounds. From this, they can supposedly divine information about the drinker’s past, present, and—most relevant to me—future. Very cool, although one of the last people I might have expected to read my fortune from the bottom of a cup was the head of security at a travel agency.

  Moti put the cup down and tsk-tsked. “Zaki!” he shouted. “Zaki, come. Bring the clipboard!”

  Clipboard? What are we in, medieval times?

  Almost immediately, another guy walked through the wall to my left. The seemingly solid barrier molded and bent around him like water as he passed through it. At first I thought he was a projection, but there was no telltale flicker. I was also curious why Ifrit bothered to use the door if she could just have walked through the walls.

  Theatrics, maybe. What sort of travel agency is this?

  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 w
ife, 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.”

  2 Replication 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.

  3 In 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.

  I jumped up from the couch, sweeping aside several gaming windows on my comms with a wave of my hand. In case you guys in the future all speak telepathically or something, comms were neural stem implants that pretty much everyone got on their second birthday. Constructed of a hybrid mesh of stem cells and nanites that our bodies treated as a benign tumor, they interfaced with the aural and visual centers of our brain, augmenting our eardrums with audio and our retinas with video. A comm is also what we called any remote communication. We had so many ways of communicating with one another that we just referred to any virtual conversation with someone else as a comm, the plural of which is also comms—and, yes, it was confusing at times, since we received comms on our comms.

  The video games vanished, affording me a fairly uncluttered view of my cluttered apartment. Sylvia and I owned a nice two-bedroom in Greenwich Village—exposed brick and steel beams, charmingly gouged hardwood floors, ten-foot windows that looked out onto Houston Street. Right now I ignored all that and speed-walked to the master bedroom closet, searching for a suitably clean button-down to put over my WHAT WOULD TURING DO? T-shirt.

  As I tucked and buttoned, I silently cursed myself for not setting an alarm. True, my marriage had been trending downward for the past year, but the last thing I wanted was to initiate the Big Talk. And to be fair, we were both to blame for our relationship bottoming out.

  Sylvia had been hired at International Transport—IT—almost eight years ago. She was a quantum microscopy engineer, a field that I only grokked in the most superficial way, and had diligently worked her way up the corporate megalith’s food chain. Around a year ago, she’d been promoted to a new, hush-hush position. She warned me it would mean a lot more time at the office, but the salary bump had also made it possible for us to move out of our subterranean one-bedroom closet on North Brother Island and into the actual city. At the time, it seemed like a belated birthday gift from the gods. But as the months progressed and we saw each other less and less, the new gig seemed more of a curse than a blessing.

  I checked my comms again: 9:21 p.m. Shit, shit, shit. No way would I make it to the Mandolin in time, even if I took a car. I’d have to teleport there. As a way to cover my last-minute splurge, I decided to pick up a salting gig.4

  Salting is what I do for a living. This doesn’t mean I spen
d my days harvesting salt from ancient water beds, though it’s just about as exciting. A salter’s job consists of enriching various artificial-intelligence engines. I imagine in your time, salting will have become as extinct as riverboat piloting, chauffeuring, or teaching, because apps will have outsmarted and replaced us in every conceivable way.

  But in my present, there was still a fundamental problem with the way computers thought. Without getting too geeky about it, it was called the Entscheidungsproblem. Try saying that three times fast.5

  Because of the Entscheidungsproblem, computers couldn’t make an original decision. Every choice they came to could only be based on data and algorithms that had been preprogrammed into them. That’s not to say computers couldn’t get new ideas, but every new idea they got could only come from remixing old ideas, or external input from other computers, or through human input—which is where I came in.

  We salters spent our days coming up with arbitrary puzzles that AI engines couldn’t grok. Every time a salter’s gambit was not anticipated by an app, that app got smarter by adding the unanticipated random logic set to its decision algorithm, and the salter got paid. Essentially, I made my living by being a smartass to apps. In my field, one rose through the ranks based on the quality of one’s accepted salts. The Mine, where we work, kept track of our acceptance ratios on a public leader-board. The better your ratio, the more desirable you were, and the more cheddar you made. Most salters didn’t get the nuances between being a smartass to an app and being an idiot to an app, so they tended to work harder and longer to earn a passable living wage. Taking into account that I was an inherently lazy person, I did fairly well for myself. I had found a way to distill the craft of salting into a repeatable formula of humanity, complexity, and humor. I’m definitely not the best salter there ever was, but the worldwide leaderboard consistently had me in the top 5 percent.