NULL ROUTE
A GENERATION AGO, Chelsea Piers had been one of New York City’s most popular destinations for water transportation. Once teleportation became the norm, very few businesses wanted to spend their time dealing with tides, storms, and seasickness to reach a destination. The only boats still in use were for hobbyists and competitive sailors. So the docks at Chelsea Piers had been purchased by IT and converted to a large-scale teleportation “shipping” yard. Several warehouses, stacks of containers, gantry cranes, and idling freight trucks populated the area. Each crane housed a console and a conductor to operate it, and was positioned over a concrete portal, which was basically a reinforced, container-sized hole three meters deep. There were twenty or so of these in the yard, interspersed several container lengths apart.
Taraval led Sylvia to the nearest crane, then stuck a piece of heavy foil tape on her mouth and wrapped the same around her legs, making sure to bind her several times. “Assurance demands prudence, I’m afraid,” he told her by way of apology.
As he sat her next to a metal container, a blaring alarm jolted them both. Blinking yellow lights spun on the crane arm. They watched as a shipping container was lowered into the portal and scanned, and then disappeared in a puff of dust as it was teleported.
“Never gets old, does it?” said Taraval, then walked off and vanished behind the ladder that led to the crane’s operation booth. Three stories above, the conductor, a goateed man in workman’s overalls and a yellow hard hat, went out to check something on the crane’s catwalk. Sylvia yelled, trying to get his attention, but the din of the shipping yard and the metal tape on her mouth drowned her out. A tear of frustration rolled down her cheek as the conductor ambled back to his control console. Shortly thereafter, the magnetic crane began to move, lifting another container and guiding it toward the portal.
Sylvia braced her feet against the ground, pushing herself to a standing position. She could now plainly see the conductor at his console, but his head was turned away. She hopped up and down, yelling as loudly as she could, trying to get into his line of sight. If he’d only look her way! She tipped over and fell to the ground, flopping and wiggling around like a fish out of water. It was embarrassing, but he actually glanced down in her direction. She increased her movements and screamed, feeling the strain on her vocal cords. The conductor looked at her quizzically, his eyes going wide—
Then he wasn’t looking at all; he was slumped over the railing. Taraval stood behind him, waving to Sylvia, a large wrench in his hand. She saw him wipe the bloody tool on the poor man’s overalls, and tasted vomit in her mouth.
Her kidnapper stepped up to the console. He lowered the shipping container back to the earth, detached the magnet, then positioned it right above her. She heard the hum of the magnet as it turned on. Her feet, bound in metal-bearing tape, slowly rose to meet it. She tried pulling her legs free, but it felt as if she had been cast in concrete below the knee. Taraval raised the crane, dangling Sylvia upside down like a prize catch at a weigh-in. Blood rushed to her head as the distance between her and the hard cement below became ominously greater. She began to feel dizzy. Soon enough, the dead conductor appeared in her field of vision, Taraval standing behind him. He tapped the console, halting the magnet so that they were eye to eye, though on opposite ends of the vertical axis.
He reached up and gently removed the tape from her mouth. It flew from his hands to the hook, drawn by its immense magnetic pull. He smiled at this.
“Impressive, isn’t it? Simple, yet powerful.” He gently patted the crane. “Like teleportation. Our life’s work—it shall set us free.”
Sylvia spit—out of disgust, and to clear her mouth. “Is this really your plan, Bill?” she asked. “You’re going to port us like a piece of furniture? This is an inorganic TC—without the right calculations, we’ll end up as heaps of flesh and bone on the other side. You may as well just drop me from here; I’ll have a better chance of surviving that than what you’re proposing!”
“Flesh and bone. Sylvia, you have the poet’s flair. Your presence in the future is optional, my dear. I’m content to borrow your access privileges to Honeycomb, since Corina has so ungraciously locked me out. I simply have to enable your comms and the magic shall commence.”
“And then what? They’ll just find you in the glacier, Bill.”
He chuckled, as if indulging a child. “Is teleportation not the literal manifestation of God’s gift to mankind? A human disappears from his burial tomb, then appears somewhere else. Mary Magdalene can’t believe her eyes. Luke is dumbfounded, he thinks Jesus is a ghost, and so Jesus challenges him, ‘Look at My hands and My feet; it is I Myself. Touch Me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones.’” Taraval stared out at the rainy shipping yard, and the river beyond it. “Not quite the Garden Tomb outside Jerusalem, my dear, but one generally does not get to choose the site of their resurrection. They won’t find me until I reemerge. For that, I took a page out of the Gehinnomites’ book. When I researched this Pulsa D’nura, I discovered gematria. Ever hear of it?”
Thanks to me and my love of trivia, she had. Gematria was an old Jewish system of assigning numerical value to letters and words, for the purposes of divining a thing’s “essential power.” “You’re going to encrypt yourself, Bill?” she asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Clever girl!” He laughed. “None shall find me until the day, many months or years hence, when I shall reappear, resurrected from the glacier. My very own Second Coming.”