“Very well,” Taraval said stiffly, and took a step back.
Corina looked right at me this time. “I’m going to give it to you straight, Joel. Because of the explosions at the TC and the power plant, all the systems in Costa Rica went offline. We did our best to track you, but your status was stuck in progress. None of our systems could confirm whether you’d successfully arrived at the San José vestibule or not, so the Greenwich foyer was never cleared, and the conductor there did what he was supposed to: he escalated. The matter quickly reached Bill here. Without definitive knowledge of your arrival, and with all the commotion, no one had taken into account that you might find your own way out of the Greenwich foyer. You shouldn’t have been able to leave that room until your status changed to unsuccessful. But somehow, an error cascading from the issues in Costa Rica reset the room. That’s when you first spoke with Bill today. He concluded there was no harm in releasing you out of the Escrow in Greenwich and bringing you here so you could port to Costa Rica and be with Sylvia.”
Pema nervously began to nibble on her left thumbnail.
“Regrettably,” Corina said, and sighed, “once the San José systems came back online, your local status was reported as arrived. Sylvia believed you had teleported successfully and then died in the blast. She panicked and did the unthinkable.” She paused, looking at both Pema and Taraval before bringing her kind eyes back to me. “She brought you to Costa Rica.”
IT’S MY LIFE
Depersonalization-derealization disorder (DDPD) is thought to be caused largely by severe traumatic lifetime events.
The core symptom of DDPD is the subjective experience of “unreality in one’s sense of self” or detachment from one’s surroundings. People who are diagnosed with DDPD experience an urge to question and think critically about the nature of reality and existence. They may feel divorced from their own personal physicality by sensing their body sensations, feelings, emotions, and behaviors as not belonging to themselves. As such, a recognition of one’s self breaks down.
—Excerpt from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders entry on depersonalization-derealization disorder
“DID YOU KNOW Corina Shafer’s not even a scientist?”
It was about fourteen months before I’d find myself held prisoner in an IT conference room. Sylvia and I were drinking at the Mandolin, celebrating the possibility of her promotion into the upper echelon of IT. She had just come from her final-round interview, during which she’d met the woman credited with solving the human teleportation problem, and my wife was buzzing with adrenaline.
“She’s not?” I said in surprise. “Then why the lab coat?” In every photo I’d seen of Corina Shafer, she was always wearing one, so I had assumed she was an egghead.
“I don’t know; it inspires trust or something. But no—she was an actuary.”
“You’re kidding me. The folks who set insurance premiums?”
“Yep. She says her philosophy is to hire the brightest scientists and engineers so that she gets smarter by proximity. One of whom is William Taraval. He’s, like, the godfather of quantum microscopy! If I get this gig, he’ll be my boss!”12
“Never heard of him. That’s funny about Corina, though. I always assumed she was a nerd of some kind.”
“Nope. You should hear the two of them talk about the future of teleportation. The possibilities. I mean, imagine if IT had been around during the Last War.”
“You mean, we could have teleported weapons or something?”
“I mean, we could have saved people. Thousands. Millions!” Her eyes were glowing with passion. The Last War was a touchy subject with Sylvia because her grandfather had died shortly before it ended. He was a medic, fresh off his residency when he was commissioned. A medical tent he was working in on the outskirts of the Mediterranean got hit with a drone missile and, although he was rescued, he died en route to the hospital. Her dad had been nine years old back then, and as my wife had said many times, Granddad was gone in a moment, but his loss hovered over her family for decades. It was, in her view, the primary reason her parents were so emotionally distant. “Imagine if there had been a TC at every field hospital. Soldiers with life-threatening injuries, immediately ported—televac’d—back to hospitals in London or Dubai. I would have known my grandfather. My father wouldn’t be so…” She shook away whatever unkind-but-no-doubt-true adjective she had in mind. “Anyway. That’s why this technology is so important. We can literally save lives. Hell, we can save humanity.”
I took a sip of my drink, a bit overwhelmed by her enthusiasm. “Yeah. How much Kool-Aid did they give you at this interview, again?”
She whacked me on the shoulder. “Shut up! It’s amazing! I mean, Taraval is smart, but Corina? She’s on a whole other level. Did you know she named the Punch Escrow after an Irish philosopher? John Punch.”
“Ha. No, solid piece of trivia, though. Feels like I should have known that.” I could tell we were entering lecture territory because of the way she was swirling her beverage in the air.
“He’s the guy we should be thanking for Occam’s razor. You know when we say the simplest possible explanation is usually the correct one?”
“Of course. Me and Occam, we’re like this.”
“Then you should know, husband, that that’s not what Occam’s razor really was! In fact, there was no razor; it was more like a couple of really long, dull saws. Occam should have heeded his own advice, because actually he was pretty long-winded when it came down to it.”
“Thank God no one we know is like that,” I said with a wink.
Ignoring me, she kept explaining, “So Occam actually had two different principles: one about plurality, that basically said to ‘stick to one hypothesis at a time,’ and another about parsimony, which—well, have you ever heard of the KISS principle? ‘Keep it simple, stupid’?”
“That’s, like, my whole philosophy of life.”