IT’S MY LIFE
Depersonalization-derealization disorder (DDPD) is thought to be caused largely by severe traumatic lifetime events.
The core symptom of DDPD is the subjective experience of “unreality in one’s sense of self” or detachment from one’s surroundings. People who are diagnosed with DDPD experience an urge to question and think critically about the nature of reality and existence. They may feel divorced from their own personal physicality by sensing their body sensations, feelings, emotions, and behaviors as not belonging to themselves. As such, a recognition of one’s self breaks down.
—Excerpt from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders entry on depersonalization-derealization disorder
“DID YOU KNOW Corina Shafer’s not even a scientist?”
It was about fourteen months before I’d find myself held prisoner in an IT conference room. Sylvia and I were drinking at the Mandolin, celebrating the possibility of her promotion into the upper echelon of IT. She had just come from her final-round interview, during which she’d met the woman credited with solving the human teleportation problem, and my wife was buzzing with adrenaline.
“She’s not?” I said in surprise. “Then why the lab coat?” In every photo I’d seen of Corina Shafer, she was always wearing one, so I had assumed she was an egghead.
“I don’t know; it inspires trust or something. But no—she was an actuary.”
“You’re kidding me. The folks who set insurance premiums?”
“Yep. She says her philosophy is to hire the brightest scientists and engineers so that she gets smarter by proximity. One of whom is William Taraval. He’s, like, the godfather of quantum microscopy! If I get this gig, he’ll be my boss!”
“Never heard of him. That’s funny about Corina, though. I always assumed she was a nerd of some kind.”
“Nope. You should hear the two of them talk about the future of teleportation. The possibilities. I mean, imagine if IT had been around during the Last War.”
“You mean, we could have teleported weapons or something?”
“I mean, we could have saved people. Thousands. Millions!” Her eyes were glowing with passion. The Last War was a touchy subject with Sylvia because her grandfather had died shortly before it ended. He was a medic, fresh off his residency when he was commissioned. A medical tent he was working in on the outskirts of the Mediterranean got hit with a drone missile and, although he was rescued, he died en route to the hospital. Her dad had been nine years old back then, and as my wife had said many times, Granddad was gone in a moment, but his loss hovered over her family for decades. It was, in her view, the primary reason her parents were so emotionally distant. “Imagine if there had been a TC at every field hospital. Soldiers with life-threatening injuries, immediately ported—televac’d—back to hospitals in London or Dubai. I would have known my grandfather. My father wouldn’t be so…” She shook away whatever unkind-but-no-doubt-true adjective she had in mind. “Anyway. That’s why this technology is so important. We can literally save lives. Hell, we can save humanity.”
I took a sip of my drink, a bit overwhelmed by her enthusiasm. “Yeah. How much Kool-Aid did they give you at this interview, again?”
She whacked me on the shoulder. “Shut up! It’s amazing! I mean, Taraval is smart, but Corina? She’s on a whole other level. Did you know she named the Punch Escrow after an Irish philosopher? John Punch.”
“Ha. No, solid piece of trivia, though. Feels like I should have known that.” I could tell we were entering lecture territory because of the way she was swirling her beverage in the air.
“He’s the guy we should be thanking for Occam’s razor. You know when we say the simplest possible explanation is usually the correct one?”
“Of course. Me and Occam, we’re like this.”
“Then you should know, husband, that that’s not what Occam’s razor really was! In fact, there was no razor; it was more like a couple of really long, dull saws. Occam should have heeded his own advice, because actually he was pretty long-winded when it came down to it.”
“Thank God no one we know is like that,” I said with a wink.
Ignoring me, she kept explaining, “So Occam actually had two different principles: one about plurality, that basically said to ‘stick to one hypothesis at a time,’ and another about parsimony, which—well, have you ever heard of the KISS principle? ‘Keep it simple, stupid’?”
“That’s, like, my whole philosophy of life.”
“Well, KISS is Occam’s parsimony principle.” She was about to take a drink but then continued: “Anyway, John Punch is the guy who simplified Occam’s principles of plurality and parsimony into one easy-to-understand sound bite: ‘Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.’ That is the essence of the Punch Escrow. It’s brilliant. Corina is super brilliant.”
Pretty much every scientific and unscientific mind in my time agreed with her. For almost a decade following the Mona Lisa disaster, insuring anything that was teleported became prohibitively expensive. And no human would even think to try it. When Corina Shafer invented the Punch Escrow, she essentially solved for the risk of loss by ensuring that anything teleported would be held in a proprietary, patented “escrow” until it was confirmed to have arrived completely at its destination. No one quite knew how it worked, as the procedures were a proprietary secret, but we were told it had something to do with quantum entanglement. Once a person stepped into the foyer, his or her body was scanned. A calculus was made of every single one of his or her quark’s next quantum phase, followed by a transmission of each quark in its future phase to the teleportee’s destination. Lastly, a checksum verification of every quark’s state as well as the person’s overall atomic state was made. If the two scans didn’t match, the teleportation process would revert. In other words, if something ever went wrong with your teleportation, the worst thing that could happen is that you’d walk out of the foyer having only lost a few seconds of time.
The Punch Escrow was such a resonant idea that Corina Shafer immediately raised the necessary venture capital for a startup called International Transport, based on the simple premise of instant, safe, and reliable transport. Early IT advertising claimed their version of teleportation was “foolproof” and “exponentially safer” than any other form of travel. They initially even used “John Punch,” a jolly man dressed in a seventeenth-century friar’s cassock, as their spokesperson. Shafer’s actuarial research was often quoted in the marketing materials for International Transport:
It has been established that the number of nonstop flights a passenger could take before perishing in a fatal crash is one in seven million. Hence, a traveler who took one jet flight every day would, on average, go nineteen thousand years before succumbing to a fatal crash. By the same arithmetic, the number of times a passenger could teleport before perishing during the process is practically infinite.
—Excerpt from Teleportation Safety, International Transport Center of Excellence in Transportation Operations Research
Who couldn’t love a miracle like teleportation? If it came packaged in the form of a gifted, well-spoken actuary, and was underwritten by the all-stars of venture capital, all the better. The confluence of phenomenon, brand perfection, and commercial appetite had produced a shining entrepreneurial superstar worthy of the Nobel Prize that would ultimately be bestowed upon her.
Once third-party testing confirmed her claims, the world went nuts for teleportation. For less than the cost of a drone ticket, people could travel anywhere in the world instantly and safely. The only people who resisted Corina Shafer’s vision of the future were a few jealous scientists and religious zealots like the Gehinnomites. Offering the not-small promise of “a world in which all see travel as a delight,” Shafer marketed International Transport as the ultimate heir to George Stephenson, Nikolaus August Otto, the Wright Brothers, Elon Musk, and every other transportation pioneer in history. From 2127 on, moving anything from here to anywhere was a matter of mere moments, provided you went through IT. Forever clothed in her pure-white, angelically lit LED lab coat, Shafer changed the course of humanity, and gave it a new slogan in the process:
Departure, Arrival … Delight!
Which is why it was so odd to see a projection of Corina Shafer herself before me, with tears in her eyes. The woman who had stuck a fork in the road of human history, now crying over spilled milk.
“I don’t understand,” I said slowly. “How could Sylvia bring me to Costa Rica if I’m here right now?”
“Joel, we’re not on solid ground here,” Corina said. “The post-mortem is going to take longer than we have. Sylvia has been working on a project, an augmentation of the Punch Escrow. We call it Honeycomb.”
Pema closed her eyes. IT’s CEO continued, “We’re exploring the use of teleportation technology for things like, say, space exploration. We believe that in a moment of panic, she may have utilized Honeycomb to—brute-force your arrival in Costa Rica.”
“Brute-force?” I blinked, not understanding.
The other three looked at one another uncomfortably. “Joel…,” Corina began delicately. “There are some aspects of teleportation that, for safety reasons, we keep from the general public.”
“For God’s sake, enough prevaricating around the bush,” Bill interjected. “Teleportation is printing, Mr. Byram. They’re the exact same technology. An object is scanned on one end, printed at the other end, and the original is cleared. Recycled in our ecophagy cage.”
My thoughts were forking a billion ways. I grabbed for the one that was most abstract, hoping it might buoy me. “Ecophagy cage?”
Pema thinned her lips. “It’s a basic safety measure for any nanotech work. Think of it like a bubble that prevents nanos from replicating infinitely. Every TC foyer has one, set to the dimensions of the room. It’s what controls the clearing process and prevents our nanos from leaving the Punch Escrow chamber and clearing—”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Taraval interrupted impatiently. “The point being that once a teleportee’s arrival is confirmed, everything inside the ecophagy cage—the detritus—is destroyed. Poof,” he said, snapping his fingers.
Detritus. Destroyed.
The words echoed in my brain like pebbles down an empty well. Definitely not an abstract concept now.
Definitely not buoyed.
I shook my head. “But that’s not how it—I thought you—”
“It’s how it works,” he stated.
I tried to tally how many times I myself had teleported. One hundred? One fifty? It felt as if icy cold lead were filling my intestines. “But … what about the Punch Escrow?” I asked weakly.
“Yes. Well,” said Corina Shafer, “focus groups informed us that people couldn’t abide the thought of being ‘cleared,’ no matter what we called it. So we left it out. The Punch Escrow is an insurance mechanism. It vets that the person printed at the vestibule matches the object in the foyer, and if so—”
“The foyer is—cleared?” I shook my head, unable to comprehend the implications of what was coming out of my mouth. “But all those people—we’re just copies? Copies of copies?”
“Certainly not!” exclaimed Corina. “Above all else, there’s one critical thing you have to understand: once a teleportee arrives at his or her destination, the source ceases to exist. Comms privileges are transferred from guest to host. The moment Joel Byram emerged from the San José Hospital TC in Costa Rica, you, Joel Byram in New York City, no longer had an identity. Therein lies our problem.”
If reading these sentences feels ridiculous to you, amplify that effect by a trillion, and maybe you’ll be scratching the surface of my out-of-fucking-body experience at the time. Her words had gone into my brain and detonated like a nuclear warhead. But it’s amazing how pragmatic we can be, even at the worst points in life. “My problem, you mean,” I heard myself state in as calm a voice as I could muster. “So, what happens now?”
Corina was obviously prepared for the question. “Joel, this is new territory for me, and for all of us here at International Transport. There is one element that strikes me as more significant than all the legal ramifications, though.” She took a measured breath. “Right now Sylvia doesn’t know that you, New York Joel, are still alive. She’s with Costa Rica Joel—who, in the eyes of the law, this company, and your wife—is currently the only Joel Byram. It’s important you understand this, because at this moment, we can still right the ship.”
“What ship?”
Taraval, clearly pissed that a man of his stature had to endure explaining anything to a plebeian like myself, made a sweeping motion with his hand. A vid stream projected over the conference table. “This was recorded a few minutes ago, Mr. Byram,” he said.
The stream was from a hospital security camera. A large high-end RV was parked out front. A woman and a man were walking out of the lobby. The man was moving uncomfortably, the woman aiding his progress. As the stream zoomed in on the couple, it became clear that the two people were me and Sylvia. My wife was ushering me into an RV in Costa Rica.
Anxiety. Colors in the room turned pastel, then grayscale. Time became a snail. The cold lead in my guts, poison. Keep your shit together.
But I couldn’t find the horizon. The room was spinning out of control. It took every ounce of restraint to keep my hands behind me because I really needed to hold on to something. Various vital organs argued over which would give out first. I felt bile tickling my uvula.
Oh fuck.
My stomach finally threw in the towel, and I threw up my guts. The vomit went straight through the holographic stream, splashing onto the nice wood conference table.
Taraval attempted to jump backward, but his chair had a firm, ergonomic grip on his buttocks. My puke went right into his lap.
“Disgusting!” he shouted, attempting to shake the sick off him.
I felt mildly better. I had also managed to keep up the charade of having my hands held behind my back throughout my body’s brief revolt.
“Room, please clean up this mess,” Pema said.
“Happy to, Miss Jigme,” the room chimed.
In an instant, the mess was digested by an invisible horde of ravenous, self-replicating robots. The smell on Taraval’s clothes, unfortunately, remained.
Pema edged away from her soiled coworker. “Joel, there are alternatives,” she said. “But each would likely be more devastating than what Corina is proposing.”
“No, Pema.” The CEO quickly shut her down. “There are no alternatives. Not really.” She gave me her best, most grandmotherly twinkle. “Joel, think of what happens to poor Sylvia when she learns of this. Do you fancy she’ll simply settle into a happy, polygamous marriage with two Joels? No. If this comes out, Sylvia will go to prison. You will be a pariah. We’ve run the models, imagined every possible outcome, and not one of them came up roses. Not one! There’s over a ninety-percent chance that one or both of you die—most likely by suicide. In thirty-four percent of the sims, widespread knowledge of your existence triggers a political domino effect that leads to revolution, deterioration of society, and chaos. Armageddon, Joel. Believe me, I have seen the data. I’ve spoken to the scientists and double-checked their findings. Every permutation of this scenario indicates that the best possible resolution for everyone, including yourself, is to get you cleared as soon as possible.”
Holy shit, they really do want to kill me. Or clear me. Isn’t it the same thing, especially when there’s already a “me” walking around? I can’t deal with this. It’s too much.
Focus on Sylvia.
“The Gehinnomites are right,” I muttered, still in disbelief. “You guys are evil.”
“They’re not right; they’re Luddites,” Taraval said, taking care not to get too close lest I vomit again. “Nobody wants to kill anyone. When you teleport, it is you who comes out the other side. The thing in the foyer isn’t a person anymore; it’s just leftover biomass, waste material. Does the butterfly keep its chrysalis? Think about it reasonably, boy: How many times have you teleported in your life? Do you really believe we killed you each time?”
Good question. How many times have I teleported? Surely over one hundred. Have I copied and killed myself a hundred times?
My anxiety and confusion were being replaced by a steady flow of simmering rage. I didn’t know if I was sick of being sick, or if I’d just had enough and wanted to get this over with. “Oh yeah? If I’m just waste materials—detritus—then why haven’t you killed me already?”
“Good question,” he said. “Corina?”
“We’re not murderers, Joel,” the CEO said soothingly, shooting a brief death stare at Taraval. “This is your call. Yours alone. I’m happy to make any of International Transport’s resources available to you in making your decision, but I assure you, whether we sit here mulling this over for a minute or a year, there can only be one logical conclusion for the betterment of everyone’s lives. Think of Sylvia. Even if we were to magically establish some dual identity for you, do you expect she would accept that she now has two husbands? Which one would she choose to be with? If not for the rest of humanity, then at least consider your wife’s well-being. Consider making a small sacrifice for her, and for the rest of us.”
“A small sacrifice. But it’s my choice, huh?” I said. Then why are my hands still ostensibly tied behind my back?
They weren’t going to release me. Not knowing what I knew. The kidnappers had taken their masks off. We would sit in that room for as long as it took for me to decide to kill myself, that much had become clear. Maybe, given enough time, especially with the benefit of hindsight, I might have even broken down and agreed.
Keep it simple, stupid. Do you want to die?
I didn’t even have to think about it. The answer was no. There might be some guy down in Costa Rica who looked like me, but he wasn’t me. I wanted to live. I wanted to see my wife again. I.
There’s a solution to this problem, but it’s not in this room.
But I couldn’t just tell them to fuck off. Were I to do so, it was obvious they’d just find a less elegant way of “clearing” me. A fake terrorist attack, perhaps, maybe even risk admitting a teleportation “accident.” Trade one giant PR disaster for a smaller one. I found myself opening my mouth.
“Yes, Joel?” said Corina expectantly. “Is there something you’d like to say?”
This is it. You always wanted to be a rock star.
“I think so,” I said. “You see, I’m a man without conviction.” My voice was calm, unemotional, on the verge of monotone. “I’m a man who doesn’t know how to sell a contradiction.”
They blinked, looking at one another in confusion. Probably wondering if I’d lost my sanity, Corina said, “I’m not sure I understand.”
“I’ll explain,” I said as my mind’s eye began to visualize my escape path. I wasn’t sure how much time I would have.
“There’s a song,” I continued, my voice calm as my brain raced. “It’s an old song. Some people may call it an ‘oldie but a moldy,’ but it’s not. It’s legit.”
First thing’s first. Jump on the table. It’s got the clearest path to the door. Jump up, pivot left, jump down to the right of Taraval.
“The song is about the fear of being alienated, of standing up for your essence.”
Tell David to open the door. Can apps control their rooms when they’re disabled? Did Pema think of that?
“Basically, if you aren’t true to yourself, if you don’t act like you feel, then nature will get back at you. Karmic justice.”
Once you’re in the hallway, walk briskly, but don’t run. Don’t make a scene if you don’t have to.
Taraval smiled, but not in a nice way, looking at Shafer’s holographic presence. “It’s a no. I told you as much.”
Pema leaned forward, concerned. “Are you saying no, Joel?”
Look for the green door. Run up, not down. Get to Floor Thirteen.
“I’m saying that this was Culture Club’s seminal song. Definitive of young optimistic angst in the 1980s. A battle cry to break from the shackles of an oppressive society.” My voice was involuntarily rising in volume.
I started humming the intro, the song still fresh in my mind. Taraval looked at Pema like I was nuts. Corina Shafer lowered her head.
“Just listen to these lyrics, guys,” I said, and then started to croon: “I’m a man without conviction. I’m a man who doesn’t know…”
I had the world’s worst sense of direction, but this wasn’t a fucking pirate treasure map. I kept coaching myself. Just go left out the door, four doorways on the right, look for the green door. I made it my mantra: Up/Left/Down/Elbow like a boss/Left/Right/Up/Up/Up/Up.
Thirteenth floor. Lucky number thirteen. Great. I don’t even know who’s going to be saving my ass when I get there.
“Joel, I think that we—” Corina began, but I cut her off with song:
“You come and go, you come and go… oh, oh, OH!”
No turning back now. Sing it like you’re in the shower.
I closed my eyes, belting it out: “Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma chameleon!”
Silence.
There was no indication that anything had happened.
It didn’t work.
“Okay,” said Corina. “I think we should call—”
Her hologram paused. Taraval and Pema froze.
It did work! Go, go, go.
I un-pretend-handcuffed myself, and jumped onto the table.
Unfortunately, that was the extent of my grace. As I went to pivot left, I became disoriented going through Corina’s hologram, slipped, and inadvertently head-butted Taraval with the full weight of my body as I dropped to the floor.
He didn’t move from his position. He couldn’t even open his mouth, but he moaned in pain.
Fuck! That hurt.
I didn’t have time to worry about whether I’d just concussed myself. I can only thank the adrenaline pumping through my veins for surviving what should have been a first-round knockout. As I painfully lifted myself off the floor, I said, “David, please open the door.”
“With pleasure, sir,” said the room.
I stepped into the empty hallway. Literally, it was devoid of any semblance of life. They didn’t want witnesses, I thought darkly. The emptiness was a perfect mirror for how I felt in the world at that point. Alone. Hollow. Joel Byram cannot come to the comms right now.
I decided to wallow later. I turned left and speed-walked down the hall, counting off the doors on my right. Beige, beige, beige, green!
There it was before me. The familiar, emergency-exit green. I only had to open the door, go up four floors, and throw myself on the mercy of whomever I found there. Pema had promised they would help. I certainly needed some.
I put my hand on the doorknob and pulled, but there was a problem.
It was locked.
Quantum microscopy is the science of using a scanning tunneling microscope to look at and determine the future state and location of atoms. This is key in human teleportation because it addresses the “fidget problem,” that living things have a tendency to move. Quantum microscopy enables the atoms within an object to be analyzed without damaging its exterior structure, or shell. It’s what makes scanning and sending incredibly complex things like the human body possible. The scanning tunneling microscope operates by taking advantage of the relationship between quantum tunneling and distance by using femto nanos called “piezoelectric sensors” that change in size when voltage is applied to them.
An important aspect of quantum entanglement, and therefore teleportation, is that statistical correlations between otherwise distinct physical locations must exist. These correlations hold even when measurements are chosen and performed independently, out of phase from one another. Meaning that an observation resulting from a measurement choice made at one point in space-time instantaneously affects outcomes in another region, even though light hasn’t yet had time to travel the distance. In other words, when you teleport, you arrive before you left. The Punch Escrow protocol examines the state of each quark as it arrives and validates it against a checksum of its past state. In some ways it’s like looking up at the Sun: light travels rapidly—as far as we know, it’s the fastest thing in the universe—but it’s not infinitely fast. At three hundred thousand kilometers per second, it takes light more than eight minutes to get from the Sun to Earth; so when you see the Sun in the sky, you’re actually seeing the Sun eight minutes ago.
Ecophagy literally means “eating the environment.” An ecophagy cage stops nanos from devouring everything around them, including us humans, the earth, and eventually themselves. Self-replicating nanos need a source of energy to drive their replication. The nanos are equipped with an electric and mechanical flagellum that generates tiny currents by swinging through the ambient magnetic fields generated by Earth. Perhaps the earliest-recognized and best-known danger of molecular nanotechnology is the risk that such self-replicating nanos capable of functioning autonomously in the natural environment could quickly convert that natural environment into replicas of themselves on a global basis, a scenario usually referred to as the gray-goo problem, but more properly termed “global ecophagy.” Since gray-goo replication is self-limiting based on the availability of an energy source, then the more organic material that self-replicating nanos consume, the less remains available for further consumption. An ecophagy cage is a mechanism that regulates the availability of energy sources for self-replicating nanos within a three-dimensional grid, defined by longitude, latitude, and altitude. Should a self-replicating nano find itself outside its ecophagy cage boundaries, it and its replicants would simply expire. In the case of oxidation-powered nanos, expiration would happen naturally after exhausting all available organic material, and without the ecophagy cage creating more, the nanos would “starve.” The electromagnetic nanos, however, rely on the ecophagy cage to amplify the ambient magnetic field currents into usable kinetic energy, meaning that once the ecophagy cage stops doing so, the nanos simply run out of juice. You still awake after reading that? Gold star!
The international green exit sign was settled on with no shortage of controversy among the escape industry. All the way back in the 1970s, the Japanese fire safety department held a national competition, encouraging people to submit their drawings and visions of what an exit sign should be. The purpose of the competition was to find an exit sign that could be implemented throughout Japan. After testing exit signs that were submitted as part of the competition, the winner was chosen—a gentleman by the name of Yukio Ota. His design was of a green exit sign that showed a man running toward a door. Then around the same time “Karma Chameleon” hit the charts, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ultimately chose Ota’s sign for international usage. The green running man pretty much remained unchanged for centuries, until eventually its unique color signature became so familiar, that the need for the iconic man was deemed unnecessary. A green sign with a white arrow became the ISO standard for directional paths to emergency exits in the 2100s, and green doors were exits.