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.