THE BUMMOCK
JOEL2 AND SYLVIA STARED AT EACH OTHER. Though they’d only been apart for half a day, it felt like nearly a year had passed since they were last together.
He shook his head, trying to clear his mind of all the madness Shila had just heaped upon him. He directed his words at the Gehinnomite leader but kept his eyes fixed on his wife. “You want your proof? Well, so do I. Let Sylvia speak for herself. I trust her much more than I trust any of you assholes.”
“Go ahead!” A different cold robotic voice came from the darkness in the back of the room. It had a feminine quality with a heavy Tico accent. “Take off her gag.”
“Danielle—” Roberto turned to the empty spot in the room where the voice had come from. “You are here only to observe. Please—”
The head of a stoic silver-blond-haired woman was suddenly unveiled, floating about two meters off the ground. “Let her speak,” she said.
As she moved, camouflage LEDs rippled up and down her robe, recording and displaying whatever was behind her such that her body was rendered practically invisible. “Or do you fear the bruja might prove me right?” she said to Roberto in a mocking tone.
Joel2 couldn’t grok whether bruja was meant to insult Sylvia by calling her a witch, the literal definition, or a bitch, the Costa Rican slang interpretation. Either way, this woman was not making a great first impression.
The old man sighed. “Mr. Byram, allow me to introduce Danielle Julious. My wife.”
“His better half, he means. The one who knows that this”—Danielle glanced at Sylvia with disgust—“this devil’s engineer knew and was intimately engaged with every facet of Honeycomb. The one who wanted to share this evidence with you from the moment you stepped into Monteverde, but my impotent husband here insisted you be brought down the path of goose feathers. Your bruja is not who you think she is.”
Danielle’s LED robe switched from camouflage to a bright white glow. Everyone squinted as their eyes adjusted. She crossed the room, towering over everyone present, statuesque. Her movements, however, were none too gentle as she nudged Felipe aside and pulled the cloth gag out of Sylvia’s mouth. “Go ahead,” challenged Danielle. “Defend yourself, bruja.”
Sylvia coughed. She shook her head, but then, making eye contact with her husband, she found she could not keep silent. “Joel, I—I wasn’t being completely honest with you. I couldn’t be. But I swear, for me, Honeycomb is just an evolution of the cache we use for the Punch Escrow. I never thought—” She stopped talking and just sort of gazed forward.
Joel2 was in free fall.
There was no denial in her words. And in that moment he knew that everything Shila had told him was true.
The parachute he had been waiting for never opened.
“Never thought what?” Joel2 asked. “That you’d ever have to use it on me? That you would replicate me?”
Sylvia spoke plaintively, like a child who knew she’d done wrong. “I was just researching the science of it! The possibilities.” She shook her head. “I know that’s not an excuse. I know I should have waited. I should have waited to hear from New York. But you…” She looked at her husband again, her eyes shining with tears. “When I knew you were gone, I couldn’t process it. I didn’t think. I’m so sorry.”
Joel2 hit the ground at terminal velocity.
She took a shuddering breath. “This past year, I don’t know what’s happened to me. Everything we’ve been doing at IT, it just got more and more out of control. Honeycomb was just an idea we were toying with, but Bill, he became obsessed. He thought it was the game changer. The next phase of human evolution. He immediately put it into production. I kept voicing my concerns—that we had no idea what the impact of such profound time gaps would do to the human psyche, to say nothing of the moral questions. But Bill kept experimenting. He said he was doing it to prove that it was safe.” Her face contorted. “I should’ve stopped him! But I was thinking of things like colonizing other planets. Preserving our species. Meanwhile Bill kept encoding himself, staying in the glacier for longer and longer periods. At first a couple of minutes, then hours, then days—”
“What about me?” Joel2 said sourly. “When were you gonna tell me what you did to me?”
“I’m getting to that! Stop interrupting me!” she shouted.
“Sorry!” he yelled back defensively.
She took another calming breath. “Bill told me not to worry about it. He programmed a fail-safe in case something went wrong. The system would automatically restore an encoded person after a defined period of time.”
“So is that what—” Joel2 began.
“Joel, please!” She closed her eyes, collecting herself. “I need to get through this. We don’t have an internal affairs department at International Transport. Corina says we’re all one another’s consciences. A month ago I discovered something even more disturbing about Project Honeycomb. IT … They were militarizing it. Researching the use of teleportation as a weapon.”
Danielle looked triumphantly at her husband, but Joel2 was confused. “Militarize teleportation? How would that even work?”
“I wondered the same thing. When I learned about these experiments, I escalated directly to Corina Shafer. She pretty much admitted the whole thing. Said it was just a trial program. Mobile teleportation was an easy way to extract dangerous people, saving a lot of lives in the process. She said Bill was handling the temporal disassociation problem. There were apparently some side effects to being kept in the glacier, and the severity of them was directly correlated to the amount of time a person spent inside. But Corina felt comfortable proceeding with the project, since Honeycomb could be spun as a morally superior alternative to weapons. Rather than kill a threat, you could freeze them in the glacier, where they could be extracted for interrogation or civilized punishment.”
“Or imprisoned there forever,” pointed out Roberto. “Removed from time itself and held in Gehinnom.”
“I didn’t like it,” Sylvia said defensively. “But I admit, I wanted it to make sense. I hate violence, and this sounded more humane than killing people. And … I wanted to keep working on Honeycomb. In spite of everything, I knew it could exist for the betterment of society. It will let us explore the most distant reaches of space. Our planet is dying. We keep patching it, engineering ways to extend its life, but sooner or later we will run out of time. I was trying to give us—humanity”—she looked back at Joel2—“our children … a chance. So I stupidly rationalized my concerns away. I told myself a lot of our greatest, most beneficial scientific breakthroughs had been militarized—nuclear energy, genetic engineering, wake transduction—but ultimately they did more good than bad.”
Danielle grabbed Sylvia by the chin. “So for that, you would decide who lives and dies? Who is resurrected and who is gone forever? How many husbands will you print? How many would satiate your hunger, súcuba?”
Sylvia shook her head loose of the old woman’s grip. “No! It wasn’t like that.” She looked at her (other) husband. “Joel,” she implored him, “none of this was planned. I really thought I lost you. I swear.”
Joel2 knew that his wife had kept secrets from him. Not just because her job required it. Still, he had no idea how deep and dark her hidden life had been. Every time she’d been distant or distracted, her mind had gone to her own personal Gehinnom. While he’d been deciding what to have for dinner or which movie to watch, she’d been grappling with the future of humanity. No wonder they had grown apart over the last year.
“Don’t you dare talk about losing people, bruja,” Danielle said. “My daughter’s blood is on your hands!”
“And mine is on your daughter’s!” Joel2 retorted.
“The tree of life is sacred to all,” Roberto rasped. “It is not our place to take or alter its fruit. To make another human being,” he admonished Sylvia, “is to usurp God’s place. It cannot be done!”
“I disagree,” stated Danielle. “This bruja used her desgraciado, and she will do so again.” She stroked the side of Sylvia’s face. Felipe gripped the back of my wife’s head, holding her for a slap, but Danielle just gently moved her bangs away from her eyes. “She’s going to bring back our daughter, mi amor.”