BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
For we do surely die, and are as water which is running down to the earth, which is not gathered, and God doth not accept a person, and hath devised devices in that the outcast is not outcast by Him.
—2 Samuel 14:14
BEFORE I COULD ASK anyone what was going on, a black town car pulled up and the door hissed open. “Welcome, Joel Byram!” it said heartily. All cars went driverless in the second half of the twenty-first century, and I’d been told the riding experience became much more pleasant as a result.
“International Transport headquarters,” I said.
“Already dialed in, sir. Please sit back and enjoy the ride.”
As the car headed down to the southern edge of Turtle Bay, my comms lit up with emergency break-in feeds. Talking heads were trying to maintain their composure while text messages and comments, mostly bomb-related puns, scrolled up my field of vision. On several of my windows, for some reason, was a Bible quote:
And when he opened the Fifth Seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those slain because of the word of God. And they cried out with a great voice, saying, “When, O Master, dost Thou take vengeance for our blood?”
I enlarged one stream to see it was from the Bible’s Book of Revelation. Armageddon stuff. I enabled the audio on one of the more serious-looking news anchors.
“And we’re getting—yes, it appears this quote was delivered via a multitude of titanium dog tags, scattered outward from the blast site. Again, if you’re just joining us, a suicide bomber calling herself Joan Anglicus has blown up a teleportation center.” A helpful infographic underneath the anchor informed me that Joan Anglicus was the name of the first and only female pope.
“Joan Anglicus was a well-known member of the teleportation protest group, the Gehinnomites,” the anchor continued.
I muted the news feed again. Gehinnomites. Buncha religious nutters. They were probably the world’s most vocal opponents of teleportation, and had been since its invention nearly fifty years ago. Their qualms with the technology boiled down to two main arguments.
First, there was something to do with forbidden fruit. People of faith had been generally grumpy about the practical, commercial manipulation of quantum foam. Since quantum foam is the stuff the universe is made of, I guess they thought we shouldn’t have been messing with God’s Play-Doh.
The second bit of umbrage, raised by the Gehinnomites’ leader, Roberto Shila, was a callback to the Tower of Babel story, which professorial types had oft cited as warning against technology. Shila’s interpretation of the story was that the Babylonians had embraced science under the premise of self-defense, or at least an attempt to prevent another forty-day-and-forty-night flood, and felt they should be able to spar with God on his turf. To Shila and his ilk, teleportation was basically a new take on Babel’s stairway to heaven. In other words, porting was worse than our playing with God’s toys: it was us playing God.
Neither of those gripes were particularly novel at the time, nor unique to teleportation, as both had been previously cited in admonition of genetic engineering, connected neural implants, and medical nanotech. So the Gehinnomites were largely ignored by the general public other than a few journalists looking for “both sides of the story.” Also, heretofore their protests had always been peaceful. Now that one of their own had committed an act of terror, I was pretty sure they would no longer be disregarded.
Several of the news feeds put up a picture of the suicide bomber, this Joan Anglicus. A woman so opposed to teleportation that she had been willing to end her life to take down just one of over a thousand TCs. Holy shit. I know her. Or rather, I recognized her. She was the woman I’d ridden behind on the Greenwich TC conveyer. The woman in the brilliant-white tiered ruffle gown and the army jacket. The muddy boots. The intense, penetrating stare.
The smoldering embers in her hair.
The saddlebag. With a quantum bomb in its belly.
Wait, does that say Costa Rica? Costa Rica!
I enlarged one of the news feeds. The video showed a smoking crater and at least a one-kilometer radius of bomb debris. The headline below read: “Terror Attack at Costa Rica’s San José TC—11 dead.”
Holy shit. Holy shit. Okay, keep it together. How far is the Monkey Bar from the San José TC?
I kept trying to comm Sylvia, but got a THE NETWORK PATH CANNOT BE FOUND error message. I pinged Julie, but she was fucking useless. “Get me on the comms as soon as you hear anything!” I yelled at her.
“I understand,” Julie responded. Finally short and to the point. Even her semisentient brain perceived the desperation in my voice.
Reports of a second blast site began to propagate. The Guanacaste geothermal power plant, the primary power source for Costa Rica’s TC and its comms network, had been swallowed in a pool of lava. A small group of Gehinnomites had seized control of nearby Rincón de la Vieja, the Geneva of Central America. They were holding the entire town and various heads of state hostage.
A little boy, shaken and scared, delivered a handwritten note to one of the emergency responders. The moment was recorded and streamed on all the news aggregators. It read:
The beginning of life was first open to destruction with abortion, and soon followed the end of life with euthanasia. Like a vice that closes from either end, how many of those in the middle must fall prey to the depravity of man’s moral relativism and love affair with sin that always brings death?
We will show you Our signs in the horizons until it becomes clear to you that they are the Truth. Our Creator has endowed Us with certain inalienable rights, and primary among those is life. Life is the first right. Without this one, any others are without effect. You cannot legislate away the Creator’s will.
We have watched as Our society has progressed toward a culture of death, and corporations have usurped religion and government. Be it foretold, then, all those who would teleport, who would willingly engage in the unnatural acts of suicide and re-creation, and those who aid them, who create doppelgängers and golems to walk the earth in their place: We will save your souls; We will fulfill your pact with the Creator, your obligation to live one life and die one death.
Pulsa D’nura.
#pulsadnura
It was already trending. They might have been religious kooks, but they knew how to captivate an audience. I looked it up: a Pulsa D’nura is apparently a curse from some old book of Jewish scripture in which the angels of destruction are invoked to block heavenly forgiveness of a subject’s sins, causing all the curses named in the Bible to befall them at once, which unsurprisingly, results in their death. Great, I thought. Religious crazies who manifest curses via suicide bombs.
Think, think, think. That’s your job, Joel. Do your fucking job and think. Your first task is: get to Costa Rica. The sooner you get there, the sooner you find Sylvia.
“Can you go any faster?” I said to the car. “I’ll pay for any extra charges.”
“Sorry, sir,” the console said cheerfully. “My rate has been given a strict cap.”
I spent the next twenty minutes getting more and more freaked out as I scanned the news feeds. International Transport issued a statement confirming what I already knew: all human teleportation was suspended until they could figure out if any other TCs were in danger. Did that include the TC at IT’s headquarters? If Taraval couldn’t port me to Costa Rica, I supposed I could hire a drone to fly me there. A quick check told me that surge pricing was in effect, and any future children Sylvia and I had probably wouldn’t go to college because of the debt I would incur. But there wouldn’t be any kids if I couldn’t get to my wife.
When we drew within sight of the IT HQ, I decided to run the rest of the way. Panicked people were crowding the street, the various public security company officers doing their best to disperse them. My black car was doing a fine job navigating around them, but I couldn’t sit still. I had to move, to run, to do something to find Sylvia. I got out despite the vehicle’s protests, and began sprinting the last three blocks to IT’s headquarters. It was easy to spot, the towering, blackish-gray reinforced-cement citadel that loomed over everything nearby like a squatting giant.
As I sped toward it, droplets of mosquito piss hit my face like glass beads. I wiped away the moisture, startled when my 1980s music playlist somehow kicked off, blaring at full blast on my comms. An upbeat melody of synth drums and electronic harmonica accompanied the rhythm of my footsteps, an eerie contrast to my desperation. Usually I loved Culture Club, but now was not the time.
At this point I feel like I should mention my verboten love for 1980s music. Especially New Wave. Here might feel like a strange place to discuss this topic, but bear with me. In 2147, 1980s New Wave was a genre more obscure than Tuvan throat singing. Sylvia didn’t share my penchant for the stuff. She, like most of our friends, was into mainstream music, which in my time was something called redistro. It worked by sampling ambient sounds from around the listener in real time—footsteps, voices, alert tones, that kind of stuff—then rearranging those sounds into a unique musical composition. I know—I didn’t get it, either. It certainly wasn’t as fun as New Wave, which you really should go check out.
Anyway, that’s what started playing as I was running down the rainy streets of New York. Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon.” The lyrics kicked in as I frantically dodged pedestrians and cars, fruitlessly wiping skeeter piss off my face:
Desert loving in your eyes all the way
If I listen to your lies, would you say
My mind was a zoetrope of panicked, looping thoughts: She’s alive. She’s okay. Fuck, why are the comms still down? Why is she not responding? Stay positive. She’s alive. She’s okay. I can’t think with this fucking music in my head.
But before I could do anything about it, the music cut out and my comms display vanished.
What the fuck?
I tried Sylvia again.
UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS. INVALID USER.
Huh. That’s new.
I gave it another shot.
UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS. INVALID USER.
I tried to pull up anything. The news, the weather. Nada.
What the fuck, now my comms aren’t working?
I figured maybe everyone’s comms were down.
How could the Gehinnomite attack cause this much damage? Forget about that; focus on the goal. Costa Rica, then Sylvia. Run.
Several fruitless repetitions of this mantra and a few minutes later, I reached the five-story-tall entrance of International Transport headquarters. There were no signs or logos; there didn’t need to be. Everyone in New York City knew who owned the joint. The entryway design borrowed notes from government buildings created right before the Last War: sharp, forty-foot barricade doors designed to withstand violent protests, though these were more for show than function. The structure was so massive, all of IT occupied only the lower third. The rest they rented, at the most exorbitant rates in Manhattan, to other companies who hoped to bask in the reflected glow of one of the world’s most powerful corporations.
Oh, a word about corporations in my time: in 2147 governments still existed, but they were mostly for show, like the royal family in Great Britain had been for several centuries. This began in the twenty-first century, when the US Supreme Court ruled that corporations had the same rights as people. Then a handful of countries tanked their economies, and multinational companies swooped in to save the day—with a few conditions, of course. Finally the Last War brought down most of the remaining government superpowers. What was left after the dust cleared were companies: nonpartisan, multinational, and clinically efficient. It was easy for them to take over most governmental operations. Elections, infrastructure, legislative services, and law enforcement were all privatized. Most people who remembered the old days said things ran much smoother now that there was a real bottom line. And since IT was among the world’s most powerful corporations, the piece of land on which their headquarters stood had more influence than the White House, the Kremlin, and the Zhongnanhai combined.
I ran down the moving walkway that led to the building’s lobby, angrily contemplating how absurd it was that all of Costa Rica had only one commercial TC, and here, just in Manhattan, we had eleven.
Reaching the front door, it was obvious security was on high alert. A small army of imposing, muscular uniformed fellows blocked the doorway. Like most corporations of its scale, IT had its own police force, but generally it was less overtly placed. IT preferred to convey a welcoming presence. That was certainly not the case today, as the entire building was surrounded by heavily armed guards.
“May I help you?” the one standing closest to me asked. Water droplets had just begun to collect on his golden IT SECURITY cap.
“Yes. Joel Byram, here to see William Taraval.”
The guard’s unflinching face towered a head’s length over me. Still, I noticed an eyebrow rise on his perfectly chiseled face. “Why are your comms disabled?”
“They’re not. They’re acting up or something. Are yours working?”
“Sir, I must inform you that disabling or modifying your comms to prevent authentication is against the law. Please stay here.”
Not content to leave it a suggestion, he put a heavy hand around my upper arm. It felt like a steel manacle. “Look,” I said. “I’m sure if you just ping William Taraval and tell him I’m here … It’s an emergency.”
“I would be happy to do so, sir. But I can’t take your word that you are who you say you are. I assume you’ve heard about the incident in Costa Rica. We can’t take any chances.”
“This is ridiculous. I just spent half an hour getting here in a car your guy ordered, because he told me to. Now, please, just let him know I’m here!”
“Sir, please moderate your tone.”
Grow a pair, Joel. These guys only understand authority.
“Look, you rent-a-cop, whatever fucked up my comms is your company’s fault,” I said, summoning every ounce of bravado I could muster. “Now, I’m going to step inside and speak to your boss’s boss’s boss’s boss, William Taraval. So either let me through or arrest me.”
The guard emotionlessly contemplated my statement a moment longer than I would have liked. Perhaps he was comming someone. Perhaps he was going to hurt, then arrest me. “Roger that,” he finally said, then returned his gaze to me. He released my arm and held the door open. “Go right ahead, sir.”
It worked? Holy shit, I can’t believe it worked.
As casually as possible, I walked past him and entered International Transport. The building’s totalitarian exterior was in complete contrast to its interior. The lobby was cavernous and lavishly adorned with gold accents. A few burgundy velvet sofas were arranged in a semitriangular formation, almost like an arrowhead, leading to a gold elevator bank at the lobby’s rear. All in all, the place resembled a well-appointed palace. Sharply dressed businesspeople and scientists in lab coats moved through it like ants in a colony, each seemingly knowing their task and destination.
I started toward the building directory when someone or something grabbed my arms from behind and pinned them together. “Ow!” I yelled. “What the hell?”
I turned to face my assailant, but there was no one there. Still, my hands were cinched together like they’d been zip-tied. Something nudged me in the back. Two light pokes against my shoulder blades. The pressure escalated to a push, and then a shove. Something was edging me forward. I tried resisting, but the more I struggled to hold my ground, the more forceful whatever it was pushed me forward. I fell to the floor. People turned to look.
“Stop! I can’t breathe!” I yelled, feeling a crushing pressure on my chest as I was smothered to the ground. My legs kicked in panic. A sinking, cold feeling began to fill my gut. For some reason I was reminded of seventh grade, when I hacked the age restriction on one of my school’s cafeteria printers. I thought I would be a hero, supplying my classmates with contraband cupcakes and warm cheese-filled pretzels—until the lunch lady caught me. She marched me to the principal’s office, all of my classmates staring in silence as I was dragged to meet my fate.
Just like back then, no one came to my aid. I squirmed on the floor like a trapped, dying fish, while everyone around me went about their business. Nothing to see here. Better him than me.
The last thing I remember before the lobby went black was trying to comm the police. The very people I’d hoped to avoid mere moments ago.
UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS. INVALID USER.
Joan Anglicus’s bomb exploited the nature of teleportation to activate a quark trigger for a muon-catalyzed d-t nuclear fusion that bred and then split a Francium atom. It was utterly undetectable. They called it a quantum bomb, but really it was just an improbable bomb with a quantum trigger. In order to effectively teleport something from one place to another without invoking the teleportation paradox, there must be an absolute certainty that the correct object had indeed arrived at the destin. What the Gehinnomites had done was build a quantum switch that exploited the fact that all possible future states of an object must be calculated in order to effectively teleport it. This means that if someone who’s teleporting is in the midst of licking a Tootsie Pop, there’s some amount of probability that their next lick will reach the Tootsie roll center. Joan’s quantum trigger didn’t need her to reach the Tootsie Roll center in order to go off; it just needed the possibility to exist. And as we all know, every time that fucking Tootsie Pop enters your mouth, there’s an increasing likelihood of biting that goddamn disgusting candy center.