AD FINEM
For our transgressions have been multiplied before Thee, and our sins have testified against us; for our transgressions are with us, and our iniquities—we have known them.
—Isaiah 59:12
JUST A FEW FINAL HOUSEKEEPING ITEMS I need to get down before ending this transcription.
For seven days, Sylvia stayed in the hospital. She refused all replacement legs, mechanical or printed, choosing to regard her missing limb as a reminder of the guilt, anguish, and self-loathing she felt. After a week, she finally consented to accept a simple jointed titanium prosthesis. Whether she gave in to my gentle badgering or didn’t want to go through life in a wheelchair, I don’t know. I do know our turn on the ride is over. I think it’s safe to say we’re both ready to get off.
God gave Adam and Eve unfettered access to the Garden of Eden. “Don’t eat the fruit of these two trees,” he commanded. We know how that turned out. Some blame Eve; some blame Adam. Some blame the snake. The salter blames the coder: God. Why make a game with spaces on which players aren’t allowed to land?
I never bought Moti’s explanation of Taraval’s and Joel2’s disappearance. That’s why this document exists. Technically, the grenade couldn’t just make them disappear. Unlike what happened to the Mona Lisa, there was no coronal mass ejection event over New York that night to disrupt their passage to the glacier. At worst, they should have arrived there in a deformed state, but their arrival would have been logged. Moti or IT would have found them.
So, either they did arrive deformed, and Moti tried to save us from the gory details, or they arrived perfectly intact. The problem with the latter outcome, the only thing allowing me to even consider that Moti and IT were telling the truth, was the reactivation of my comms. The moment they were turned back on, Joel2’s brief history, his telemetry and metadata and recordings, merged with mine. Every single thing he saw, heard, and said filled the gaps in my existential amnesia with his escapades. That’s what keeps me sane: the knowledge that even with all of IT’s might and all the Levant’s technological prowess, there’s no way my comms could have been active on two people at the same time. The Theseus paradox is real because we programmed reality that way.
In exchange for our sworn silence, Corina and the near-infinite powers of International Transport’s counsel saw to it that none of the details of our escapades were reported. Sylvia was allowed to “retire” from her job with full benefits, and—after some legal wrangling—my full identity was restored. We were both granted leave to go on with our lives.
Still, I think about Joel2 a lot.
It’s been hard chronicling his part in this story. Please understand that whenever I expressed any of his emotions, it was guesswork. To make things sound less wooden, the chapters of this memoir featuring Joel2 were edited here, embellished there, and somewhat dramatized, as I could only imagine what must have been going on inside his mind.
Sometimes I perceive others incorrectly by transposing my feelings onto them. It’s hard to vet that statement because I’m the one making it, and I’m not a very good judge of what’s going on in my head. Even if I were capable of gauging my state of mind objectively, I could only determine such things in retrospect.
In replaying his history, which is now my history, occasionally I’d see Joel2’s reflection in a mirror or a window, and venture a guess as to what he was thinking based on the gestures or expressions I had made in similar contexts. Sylvia also helped fill in some missing pieces, like what happened between her and Taraval at the hotel and in the abandoned subway tunnels beneath New York.
Joel2 would probably take umbrage with my characterization of him. Hell, I know I would if anyone did the same to me. But he was me during that time, or we were us, and to that end, I feel somewhat entitled to such poetic license.
I’ve inhabited every emotional and existential state a human being could fathom. More than anything, I was angry. Some of that was anger was mine, for being made the duped (pun intended) pawn in some techno-ideo-geopolitical war. Some of my anger was Joel2’s anger. I have all his comms recordings, and in some ways they now feel realer to me than my own memory. Though I still can’t feel what he felt, sometimes I can feel him in the gap between me and Sylvia. I don’t know how we would have lived in the same world, but I was angry that he was gone. And some of that anger was for all of us, for every unknowing person still porting every day. I wanted to blast the truth across the world’s comms like a righteous Gehinnomite or one of those long-ago whistle-blowers from a century ago.
In other moments I was afraid or selfish, or both. With Joel2 gone, I knew I had no leverage: I could no longer be the ayah that IT feared or the Aher the Levant valued. And I knew that although I had changed, the ways of the world did not. I could be cleared in some clandestine TC by IT or disappeared by the Levant, stuck in some room with only Moti and his clipboards and Turkish and tasseography. No surprise to you, not-a-hero Joel won out.
Which brings me to you. Remember the first chapter of this account? It was entitled Stick! It’s what relay racers yell when they’re passing the baton during sprint relays. See, it costs a runner time to look back, so they do blind handoffs, wherein the second runner stands on a spot predetermined in practice and starts running when the first runner arrives at a specific pace mark on the track. The second runner opens their hand behind them after a few strides, by which time the first runner should be caught up and able to hand off the baton. The first runner yells, “Stick!” repeatedly several times, alerting the recipient to put out their hand to receive the baton. It requires faith, and trust.
So teleportation, Project Honeycomb, International Transport, and all their subsequent issues are your problem now. Brand me selfish, lazy, supine—I’ve been called worse. I’ve known since the moment I kicked that boxer in the nuts that I wasn’t much of a fighter. A year ago I was just a guy paid to play games with apps in his underwear. Sure, I may have found myself at the center of a massive international conspiracy affecting every person on this planet, but I don’t want to be responsible for giving anyone who’s ever teleported an identity crisis.
We rode in trains and drove cars that nearly killed the planet. We flew in planes with only a rudimentary and practical understanding of the physics of flight. We humans have an innate need to get from A to B faster so we could do C sooner. We’ve never gotten too caught up in the means or consequences of transport. So who am I to stand in the way of humanity’s progress? It’s not my place. Not today.
But maybe it’s yours. Maybe in your time, some other corporation figured out how to make teleportation actually work the way IT told us it would. Maybe it’s still the same copy-paste-delete mechanism, but everyone knows the truth of the Punch Escrow and doesn’t give a shit.
Or maybe the Gehinnomites were right, and it’s time for the truth to be told.
So, dear reader, stick!
Oh, and if you ever do see Joel2, tell him I said: Thanks, hermano.