Surprisingly, it wasn’t raining. New York City was having one of its rare clear summer nights, meaning there weren’t enough hydrocarbons in the air for the mosquitoes to metabolize.6 Usually the Manhattan skyline was obscured by the haze of a billions-strong swarm of mosquitoes that ate pollution and pissed water. All part of the magical dance of chemistry and genetic engineering that kept us humans alive despite our very best efforts to destroy ourselves.
I hope that by the time this gets read, we’ll have found a more elegant solution for air synthesis than noisy, disgusting bugs that have been genetically modified into flying steam reformers. I’m fine with them eating methane instead of blood and excreting water in lieu of spreading disease, but they’re still annoying as hell.
I crossed the street over to the Washington Square TC on West Fourth Street. Unlike several other places around the world where TCs were still lightly sprinkled with picketers harboring resentment at teleportation’s upheaval of the transportation industry, or religious kooks trying to convince people the technology was murder, New York had instantly embraced porting for its obvious benefits. Prior to this, most religious types had been ambivalent to teleportation. It was a form of freight, not transportation. The very notion of organic teleportation was considered a fool’s errand until 2109—technically impossible, owing to the fidget problem: living things are fidgety. Back then, a good real-time atomic model that could accurately predict and transmit what living things would do next was still a scientific wet dream.
But in my time, that problem had been solved twenty years ago. Porting had almost become too popular for some tastes as of late. For those who wanted to teleport across town, sometimes the length of the queue at the local TC might lead to a longer commute than a drone or a bus ride. IT kept promising the next generation of TCs would be able to teleport more than one person at a time, but gave no indication to when these promises would become a reality.
TC stations were hard to miss. They were small red rectangular buildings of concrete that popped out of the ground like a pox infection on the face of their immediate surroundings. The ingress and egress doors were adorned with the iconic International Transport lettering, and always flanked by public toilets. Why were all TCs next to public toilets? Well, there’s no good physiological explanation for it, but teleportation tended to do curious things to the human bladder.
When scientists first began porting living things, they discovered that complex organisms, starting with animals the size of cats or dogs, seemed to lose a few grams of weight every time they were transported. Interestingly, this was not the case when the same animals were euthanized and then teleported. Some religious types tried to spin the weight loss as evidence of soul separation, but since the ported beings seemed unaffected by the change, there were only two possible conclusions.
Either the soul was a regenerative thing, meaning creatures bigger than small cats just grew new ones. Or—much more plausibly—the weight loss had nothing to do with the soul and could be attributed to garden-variety packet loss.7 Pretty much everyone sided with packet loss.
I ambled onto the conveyer, which took me down into the belly of the station, gliding past gray cement overhangs and brushed gold pillars to the misters. As I passed through the gray fog bank, I felt the familiar tickle of floating nanos against my skin. I’d ported countless times before, but something about the ocean-spray-like, metallic sensation of teeny tiny robots scanning my body still gave me goose bumps. The nanite mist not only cataloged every cell, clothing fiber, and arrangement of molecules inside every person who entered it, but it also checked for any contraband. Somewhere in some database, the nanite mist’s telemetry calculations and biological checksums merged to create my last-known full—my meta-image backup. The whole process took about five seconds. At the end of the moving walkway, a little arrow pointed me forward to the shortest line. As there were a dozen teleportation chambers and it was the post-rush-hour lag, there were only two people ahead of me.
Less than three minutes later I stepped into the compartment. The TC conductor already had my travel manifest dialed in, synchronized, and validated against my comms. A short, yellow-striped black barrier in front of the small Punch Escrow chamber lowered—my signal to enter. Beyond the barrier was a single, magnetically suspended chair, not unlike a passenger drone seat, but bordered in shiny metallic gold. I imagine the abundance of gold everywhere in TCs was intended to impart a perception of luxury.
Once I sat down, an automated conveyor silently ushered the levitating chair into the adjacent Punch Escrow chamber, the wall of which was marked with the universal symbol for staying put: a stencil of a person sitting on a chair, a clock on the wall beside them.
The Punch Escrow chamber itself was entirely painted light beige except for one black chalcedony wall that my chair pivoted ninety degrees to face. The word FOYER appeared on the wall. Teleportation origin rooms are marked FOYER, and destin rooms are marked VESTIBULE.
Underneath the FOYER sign, a stream of the conductor appeared on the wall to, once again, verify my identity and destination. He was a bald Asian guy who looked like he spent most of his life in a chair and wasn’t particularly happy about it. In a monotone, he reminded me to read and then tap the nodding emoji under a bunch of legal small print that holographically appeared in front of my face.
Teleportation was a rather head-trippy experience. There you were, by yourself, in a little room in one place. Then, all of a sudden, there you were, by yourself, in an identical room in another place. From the outside, it looked pretty much like people imagined it would back before it was feasible, only it happened in reverse order. The person being teleported got to where she was going about four seconds before she left. It was kind of a mind fuck.
Even weirder, nobody knew what it felt like to teleport. I mean, sure, we knew what it felt like to arrive somewhere, but the actual traveling part happened so fast, it didn’t really feel like anything. All we knew was that when the lights came back on, we were already on the other side.
When human teleportation was first introduced, there were plenty of streams that demonstrated the Punch Escrow process.8 One moment someone would be sitting in the chair; the next they’d be nothing but vapor and dust. It looked shocking, but it was harmless. As IT explained it, the brief, ghostly outlines of the teleportees were simply the layer of dust left behind when we were zapped away. The process was so quick that the water molecules, dead skin cells, and other particles on your clothing and body that didn’t get sent to the destin hung in the air for a beat, kind of like the bird-shaped cloud of dust the Road Runner left when he ran away from Wile E. Coyote in those old-school 1950s Warner Bros. animated shorts. I know, you probably think I’m lame for watching two-hundred-year-old cartoons, but what can I say: I liked the finer things.