“Well, KISS is Occam’s parsimony principle.” She was about to take a drink but then continued: “Anyway, John Punch is the guy who simplified Occam’s principles of plurality and parsimony into one easy-to-understand sound bite: ‘Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.’ That is the essence of the Punch Escrow. It’s brilliant. Corina is super brilliant.”
Pretty much every scientific and unscientific mind in my time agreed with her. For almost a decade following the Mona Lisa disaster, insuring anything that was teleported became prohibitively expensive. And no human would even think to try it. When Corina Shafer invented the Punch Escrow, she essentially solved for the risk of loss by ensuring that anything teleported would be held in a proprietary, patented “escrow” until it was confirmed to have arrived completely at its destination. No one quite knew how it worked, as the procedures were a proprietary secret, but we were told it had something to do with quantum entanglement. Once a person stepped into the foyer, his or her body was scanned. A calculus was made of every single one of his or her quark’s next quantum phase, followed by a transmission of each quark in its future phase to the teleportee’s destination.13 Lastly, a checksum verification of every quark’s state as well as the person’s overall atomic state was made. If the two scans didn’t match, the teleportation process would revert. In other words, if something ever went wrong with your teleportation, the worst thing that could happen is that you’d walk out of the foyer having only lost a few seconds of time.
The Punch Escrow was such a resonant idea that Corina Shafer immediately raised the necessary venture capital for a startup called International Transport, based on the simple premise of instant, safe, and reliable transport. Early IT advertising claimed their version of teleportation was “foolproof” and “exponentially safer” than any other form of travel. They initially even used “John Punch,” a jolly man dressed in a seventeenth-century friar’s cassock, as their spokesperson. Shafer’s actuarial research was often quoted in the marketing materials for International Transport:
It has been established that the number of nonstop flights a passenger could take before perishing in a fatal crash is one in seven million. Hence, a traveler who took one jet flight every day would, on average, go nineteen thousand years before succumbing to a fatal crash. By the same arithmetic, the number of times a passenger could teleport before perishing during the process is practically infinite.
—Excerpt from Teleportation Safety, International Transport Center of Excellence in Transportation Operations Research
Who couldn’t love a miracle like teleportation? If it came packaged in the form of a gifted, well-spoken actuary, and was underwritten by the all-stars of venture capital, all the better. The confluence of phenomenon, brand perfection, and commercial appetite had produced a shining entrepreneurial superstar worthy of the Nobel Prize that would ultimately be bestowed upon her.
Once third-party testing confirmed her claims, the world went nuts for teleportation. For less than the cost of a drone ticket, people could travel anywhere in the world instantly and safely. The only people who resisted Corina Shafer’s vision of the future were a few jealous scientists and religious zealots like the Gehinnomites. Offering the not-small promise of “a world in which all see travel as a delight,” Shafer marketed International Transport as the ultimate heir to George Stephenson, Nikolaus August Otto, the Wright Brothers, Elon Musk, and every other transportation pioneer in history. From 2127 on, moving anything from here to anywhere was a matter of mere moments, provided you went through IT. Forever clothed in her pure-white, angelically lit LED lab coat, Shafer changed the course of humanity, and gave it a new slogan in the process:
Departure, Arrival … Delight!
Which is why it was so odd to see a projection of Corina Shafer herself before me, with tears in her eyes. The woman who had stuck a fork in the road of human history, now crying over spilled milk.
“I don’t understand,” I said slowly. “How could Sylvia bring me to Costa Rica if I’m here right now?”
“Joel, we’re not on solid ground here,” Corina said. “The post-mortem is going to take longer than we have. Sylvia has been working on a project, an augmentation of the Punch Escrow. We call it Honeycomb.”
Pema closed her eyes. IT’s CEO continued, “We’re exploring the use of teleportation technology for things like, say, space exploration. We believe that in a moment of panic, she may have utilized Honeycomb to—brute-force your arrival in Costa Rica.”
“Brute-force?” I blinked, not understanding.
The other three looked at one another uncomfortably. “Joel…,” Corina began delicately. “There are some aspects of teleportation that, for safety reasons, we keep from the general public.”
“For God’s sake, enough prevaricating around the bush,” Bill interjected. “Teleportation is printing, Mr. Byram. They’re the exact same technology. An object is scanned on one end, printed at the other end, and the original is cleared. Recycled in our ecophagy14 cage.”
My thoughts were forking a billion ways. I grabbed for the one that was most abstract, hoping it might buoy me. “Ecophagy cage?”
Pema thinned her lips. “It’s a basic safety measure for any nanotech work. Think of it like a bubble that prevents nanos from replicating infinitely. Every TC foyer has one, set to the dimensions of the room. It’s what controls the clearing process and prevents our nanos from leaving the Punch Escrow chamber and clearing—”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Taraval interrupted impatiently. “The point being that once a teleportee’s arrival is confirmed, everything inside the ecophagy cage—the detritus—is destroyed. Poof,” he said, snapping his fingers.
Detritus. Destroyed.
The words echoed in my brain like pebbles down an empty well. Definitely not an abstract concept now.
Definitely not buoyed.
I shook my head. “But that’s not how it—I thought you—”
“It’s how it works,” he stated.
I tried to tally how many times I myself had teleported. One hundred? One fifty? It felt as if icy cold lead were filling my intestines. “But … what about the Punch Escrow?” I asked weakly.
“Yes. Well,” said Corina Shafer, “focus groups informed us that people couldn’t abide the thought of being ‘cleared,’ no matter what we called it. So we left it out. The Punch Escrow is an insurance mechanism. It vets that the person printed at the vestibule matches the object in the foyer, and if so—”
“The foyer is—cleared?” I shook my head, unable to comprehend the implications of what was coming out of my mouth. “But all those people—we’re just copies? Copies of copies?”