“He didn’t want to hurt us,” Joel2 said. Again, I wondered what was going on in his head. One minute he was ready to kill everyone; the next he was somber and forgiving. Was I this schizophrenic?
“Thank you,” said Roberto Shila, his voice crackling meekly. He leaned back in the chair, the color continuing to fade from his face. He didn’t seem long for this world. “I take comfort that my wife’s and daughter’s deaths were not in vain. You two are the ayah, the miracle I’ve been waiting for all these years. Proof that teleportation is evil. None could classify your circumstance as anything else. I would only ask that you promise to deliver this message to the world, so that God may once more…” But his voice demodulated into static, then white noise. His lips quivered and his head dropped forward. After 171 years, Roberto Shila exhaled his last breath.
“He’s gone,” I said. When Joel2 didn’t respond, I continued, “Look, Syl is still out there somewhere. The longer she’s gone, the harder it might be to find her.”
Joel2 nodded silently, but still didn’t move.
“Look, man, I know you’ve been through a lot today, but we really need to—”
“Let’s go,” he said, finishing my sentence as he limped toward the door.
23 Shots are active polydrugs. They are a mix of nanites, adrenaline, vitamins, clotting agents, diluting agents, and polymorphic antibiotics. Once in the body, the nanites perform diagnostics and activate whatever components they deem necessary.
DON’T YOU WANT ME
ON THE WALK BACK down to the ambulance, in the midday light of the vineyard, I got a good look at my doppelg?nger. The Band-Aids were doing a decent job cauterizing Joel2’s forehead gash, but his right eye looked like a crushed grape. I put a bandage on it. “To keep it from getting infected,” I told Joel2. But really it was to keep it from grossing me out.
“Okay. You’ve performed exceedingly well in your assessment!” I enthusiastically commended the ambulance as we strapped ourselves into the front seats. “You haven’t been cheating, have you? Third-party APIs still disabled?”
“Ambulances don’t cheat,” said the vehicle.
“Just one final task, then you’ll be cleared for service,” I said. “Drive us back to the San José hospital as fast as possible.”
“Very well,” said the vehicle. “It appears Mr. Byram needs medical attention. That eye injury is quite serious.”
“Shit,” Joel2 said, putting a hand up to the bandage.
“Just leave it,” I suggested. “Let the Band-Aids do their work.”
The ambulance pulled away from the winery. We drove down through the cloud forest, siren wailing, leaving Roberto Shila and the other Gehinnomites behind to rest eternally in their mountaintop wine cellar.
“It appears something is amiss with my sensors,” said the ambulance as we pulled onto Perro Negro Road. “Your genetic profiles identically match each other’s. Perhaps I should pull over.”
“No, uh, it’s a simulation,” I improvised. “His head wound isn’t real. It’s intended to convey a patient in stage two trauma.” I shrugged at Joel2, unsure whether stage two trauma was a thing or not.
“Very well. I anticipate arrival in approximately one hundred and ten minutes.”
Not fast enough. “Really?” I said. “Because the other ambulances have completed this part of the assessment in less than ninety.”
“And they did it without being noticed by anyone,” Joel2 egged it on.
There was a short pause. “Doable, but expensive,” it responded.
“Spare no expense. Remember, you’re delivering a trauma patient to the hospital!”
“And don’t forget to turn off your sensors. Even the auditory ones,” Joel2 said.
I eyed him. Why are you going on about sensors?
“But then I won’t be able to communicate with you.”
“We’ll unmute you if we need to talk. I don’t want any malfunctions throwing off this test.” Joel2 squinted his left eye at me in what I soon realized was an attempt at a wink.
“Very well. I shall resume communication upon arrival or should an emergency present itself.”
“Thank you,” Joel2 and I said in unison.
Jinx.
“Can you jinx yourself?” we both asked at the same time, then followed up with concurrent and eerily identical laughter. Then we simply stared at each other. There aren’t enough synonyms of the word awkward to explain our situation. What was one supposed to say to one’s self upon meeting him? Like, was there some sort of thing I could ask him that would reveal something about myself? I wondered if he was thinking the same thing. Probably so, I decided.
I want to say that there was a Holy shit! moment where he and I acknowledged the paradox we were in and reached some synchronized epiphany. But at the time, maybe from the shock of everything that had occurred, or maybe because I couldn’t process our sameness, I couldn’t come up with anything. Even with the eye patch, it was awkward to look him in the face. Every time we tried making eye contact, we’d both look away, embarrassed.
“So,” I said, trying to start somewhere, “how did you manage to get yourself caught by the Gehinnomites?”
He told me about waking up in the hospital, and Sylvia’s urge to leave San José as quickly as possible. “She kind of freaked out after this woman Pema commed her.”
“Pema?” I asked, perturbed. “Waifish, slanted eyes, James Bond–villain pantsuit?”
“Yeah. Did you run into her too? I was just waking up from this crazy dream. Get this: my comms started randomly playing ‘Karma Chameleon,’ so I woke up singing—”
“God damn it!”
“What?”
“Karma fucking Chameleon. That’s how she knew it.” “I don’t get it.”
I explained that Pema had used the obscure song as a way to break me out, which led to my fevered escape to Moti’s office and my subsequent electrocution by his security system.
“They’re definitely working together. That was only an hour or so after my comms went on the fritz. Shit.”
“When my comms came on, yours went off?”
“Yep. Fuck! Her escape plan sent me right into Moti’s lap.”
“Again, who is this Moti guy?”
“A Levantine spy who’s been playing us. He thinks he’s going to win this weird control game he’s playing with IT. I think he’s using us because we’re the players nobody expects to win. He probably convinced the Gehinnomites to target us in the first place.”
“That motherfucker!”
“Exactly,” I said.
“But at least you were lied to by strangers. I got betrayed three times by my own wife.”
The venom in his voice was chilling. “Take it easy, man. It’s not a competition. I’m sure she had her reasons.”
“You think you know her so well? That bullshit she fed me after she spoke with Pema was only her first lie,” he said, going on to tell me of Taraval’s visit the night before, and what Sylvia told him then. “That was betrayal number two. I mean, she seemed to truly regret it. Or at least, she said she hated lying to me—us—for the last year. But then, the next morning, she was gone.”
“She took off?”
“Yeah, but I was dead asleep after we had—”