I’d ported a whole bunch of times, so I wasn’t sure why I was thinking about all this just then. It’s like remembering that sudden unexpected nocturnal death syndrome is a real thing right before going to sleep.
Sometimes my brain was just an asshole.
Quickly, I scrolled through the small-print, holographic legalese floating before me. Then tapped the head-nodding emoji—I agree.
The room went totally dark for about three or four seconds, there was a bright white flash, and then the lights came up and I found myself in an identical room, with one difference—the wall before me read VESTIBULE.
“Welcome to the Times Square TC,” said the new conductor on the wall’s stream. Maybe she was a new hire or something, because her apple-cheeked face and genuine smile were much more welcoming than the lifeless gaze and dreary greeting of the previous conductor. Or maybe it was just more fun to see people arrive.
The levitating chair retreated to the antechamber. The barrier was lowered, and I stepped out into a TC around two kilometers from the one I’d just left. The trip had cost me almost a full day’s pay, but I got where I needed to be only seven minutes after I was supposed to meet Sylvia, as opposed to thirty-plus.
I jogged out of the TC into Times Square, dodging through the crowds of selfie-taking tourists and giant flashing holograms, then cut through a side alley to find myself in front of our old college haunt, the Mandolin.
The bouncer checked my comms, waving me through the front door. The place had gotten its name from its varnished antique bar counter. It was composed of discarded, broken string instruments frozen in lacquer. Mandolins mostly, with the occasional remnant of ukulele and guitar thrown in for artistic measure. The rest of the establishment had an early twenty-first-century brewpub feel, complete with actual beer taps, made-to-order cocktails, and quaint handwritten menus on real chalkboards.
I scanned the mostly empty interior. This being a Tuesday, only the serious drinkers were present. As I double-checked the ten or so faces, trusting my comms to recognize Sylvia even if she was facing in the opposite direction, I began to formulate a witty-but-plausible explanation for my tardiness.
Unfortunately, my brain was unable to come up with one before I was attacked from behind.
4 The term salting has its origin in cryptography, and it was originally used to protect against code-breaking by extending the length and complexity of a password. If the computer being utilized to crack a password did not have the password’s length or complexity of the salted password, then the password could not be found. Ultimately, password salting became obsolete as code-breakers pivoted their efforts from cracking technologies to more sophisticated methods of AI-enabled phishing (attempting to acquire passwords by masquerading as a trustworthy entity). Information security eventually evolved into battles among sophisticated AI engines, as users turned to AIs to protect them from being phished, and attackers created more and more sophisticated algos to dupe them. This led to security becoming the root of our currency: the owner’s demand for protecting data and the attacker’s demand for stealing it. The salt block-chain economy eventually became what is known as chits, and salting became the act of engaging with AI engines in order to improve their ability to protect or deceive. Because we had so many Als, salting also became a means of steady, gainful employment. Or not so gainful, if you asked my in-laws.
5 In 1928, a mathematician by the name of David Hilbert posed a challenge to the mathematical community—create an algorithm that takes a statement of first-order logic and answers yes or no as to whether it is universally valid. Having such an algorithm would mean that there is no such thing as an un-solvable problem. So the Entscheidungsproblem (which, surprise, surprise, is German for “decision problem”) is this: Does there exist an algorithm for deciding whether or not a specific mathematical assertion does or does not have a proof? The answer was no. But if you asked a computer scientist, they might answer “not yet.”
6 In the early twenty-first century, scientists at a company called Oxitec patented a mechanism for genetically modifying cells to produce a protein that stops mosquitoes from functioning normally. This technology was a precursor to modern gene-editing techniques that enabled the eventual conversion of mosquitoes, specifically the genus Aedes aegypti (known as the yellow fever mosquito prior to its genetic rehabilitation), into vaccine carriers, and more recently into living steam reformers.
7 Packet loss during teleportation was common and controlled by the Teleportation Control Assurance Protocol (TCAP). TCAP was a zero-loss sliding window protocol that provided an easy way to ensure reliable compression, delivery, and expansion of packets, so that individual TCs don’t need to implement logic for this themselves. Zero-loss was actually a misnomer because TCAP utilized packet-loss concealment, such that in the event that any data was lost, various interpolation or extrapolation algorithms were utilized to fill in the gaps. In other words, filling in what was missing by averaging the stuff before and after the gap. The acceptable packet-loss rate was less than 0.0000005%. Any teleportation that exceeded that rate was deemed a failure and the process was reverted. The origin conductor then determined whether to reattempt or cancel teleportation. Scientists eventually decided that packet loss was the reason large organisms lost a few grams of mass after teleportation. Think of it like a very expensive, very small diet.
8 Invented by the enterprising Swiss actuarial engineer Corina Shafer, the Punch Escrow was a patented, active-active fail-safe redundancy for the teleportation workflow. The Punch Escrow adds two checksum spaces, defined as “foyer” at the point of origin and “vestibule” at the point of destination. The role of these chambers was to safely cache each quark of a teleporting person at the foyer until his or her journey was confirmed a success at the vestibule. If unsuccessful, the person stayed in the foyer, unmoved. In other words, if something went wrong during your transport, then you never left.
SITUATION
THANKFULLY, MY WOULD-BE ASSAILANT turned out to be my wife and not some death-squad assassin she sent after me for being late. She wrapped her arms around my chest, her chin resting on my shoulder. “Guess who?” she said breathlessly into my ear.
“Marie Curie?” I turned around, trying to gauge how much trouble I was in. I might be biased, but Sylvia was good-looking—and I don’t just mean for a physicist. She had a pale heart-shaped face, a curvy figure, and catlike hazel-green eyes. Her long, straight hair was chestnut blond—not dirty blond, she’d tell you—and, as always, parted down the middle. Every movement she made was done with intention and confidence. In her hand was a near-empty cocktail glass, which may have accounted for the flirty expression on her face. My wife was usually a Happy Drunk.