The Punch Escrow
Tal Klein
AB INITIO
IF YOU’RE READING THIS, then you’re officially in charge of figuring out what to do next. I’m off the hook, probably because I’m dead. Consider the baton passed. Hooray for you.
The problem for me is trying to figure out how much you know, and more important, how much you need to know—because you’re in the future, and I’m in the past. Maybe it’s a good idea for us to start with the past past, like stuff that happened in my past that is relevant to my present, which is still your past, but now possibly relevant to your present.
Do they still teach you guys about the da Vinci Exhibition? Maybe that’s a good place to start.
STICK!
TELEPORTATION KILLED THE MONA LISA.
More specifically, a solar storm during the teleportation of da Vinci’s masterpiece was to blame. It happened on April 15, 2109. The painting was being teleported from Rome to New York City for an art exhibition when a huge flare erupted from the Sun, sending something called a coronal mass ejection on a collision course for Earth. Think of it like a zit popping on the Sun’s forehead, only the zit was about the size of Venus and the pus inside was an electromagnetic shit storm. Okay, that’s a pretty gross visual, but now it’s in your head and out of mine.
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.
1 Quantum 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.