Sylvia notices my sudden change of temperament and pokes me in the arm. “What’s wrong?”
I peer down at the dark river. “You look at me and you think, ‘That’s my husband, Joel Byram.’ But is that who I am?”
“What are you talking about?” she asks, concern building in her eyes.
I scratch my cheek uncomfortably. “I used to think it was incredibly vain of the Gehinnomites to believe we can mess with our souls. That we could…”
But I trail off as Sylvia’s expression quickly morphs from concern to terror. A look I haven’t seen since that night. She’s not looking at me anymore; she’s looking through me. Her neck tilting back as she looks to the heavens.
Suddenly my comms fill with urgent updates. #LookUp is trending.
Are you watching this, guys?
What the hell?
Lame. Bring back the fireworks!
Are they doing commercials now?
I look up.
The LEDs in the sky, which moments ago had been projecting a beautifully choreographed fireworks display, have instead converted the heavens into a giant POV stream of someone making their way through a TC. As they stand before the vestibule, the streaming person puts their hands out in front of them, fingers wrapped tightly together, bowing their head up and down. There are about six other people, also wearing LED-lined robes, clasping their hands together and standing around the Punch Escrow chair. A strand of glowing hair enters the frame.
Like embers in a flame.
“They’re praying,” Sylvia utters.
The captions beneath the stream confirm her assessment: the words BEHOLD GOD’S WILL appear beneath the clenched hands. The camera pans sideways briefly, and I spot the International Transport logo above the conductor’s blood-splattered console.
“It’s the R and D vestibule at IT headquarters,” Sylvia says, real fear in her voice.
I remain silent.
The camera pans back to the empty chair. There’s a familiar white flash, momentarily blinding the POV stream. The camera lens adjusts to reveal a human sitting in the Punch Escrow chair. A naked male figure. His silhouette is familiar. He rises and walks toward the camera, balding and pudgy and coming into focus as the chanting around him increases. A smile splits his newly printed face.
It’s him. He’s back.
“Don’t look!” I urgently say to Sylvia. I try shielding her eyes, but she shoves me away.
The stream goes white and the caption PULSA D’NURA appears, illuminating the night sky like a thunderbolt from the heavens.
Fuck.
AFTERWORD
WHEN ONE IS dealing with hard science fiction, I’m told it’s particularly important to get the facts right. For example, one of the best and most well-known hard science fiction writers, Larry Niven, got a very important fact wrong in his first story, “The Coldest Place.” In it, the coldest place concerned was the dark side of Mercury, which at the time the story was written was thought to be tidally locked with the Sun. However, Mercury was found to rotate in a 3:2 resonance with the Sun before the story saw the light of day, meaning it was published with known scientific errata. Oh well. Didn’t seem to hurt his career much.
As The Punch Escrow is set in the mid-twenty-second century, I expect history will show I’ve gotten a lot of things wrong. I did my very best to avoid such missteps, but since I am only a fan of quantum physics and not a quantum physicist myself, I leaned on my friend Joe Santoro, a real-life medical physicist, to vet—and sometimes invent—the science necessary to make this world scientifically plausible. Joe is one of the nicest, smartest guys I know. He’s probably blushing, reading this. Still, without him, there never would have been a Punch Escrow.
In April of 2016, after I was sure this book would be published, I conducted a short interview with Joe.
Tal: Let’s get the obligatories out of the way. Please state your name and what you do for a living.
Joe: My name is Joe Santoro, and I am a medical physicist. I work in a radiation oncology clinic at a hospital on Long Island. We’re the guys who make sure the medical linear accelerator is delivering the correct radiation dose to patients undergoing radiation therapy. We also come up with the treatment plans for patients that dictate where the radiation will get delivered. We’re responsible for routine quality assurance of most of the various components that comprise the radiation delivery chain, i.e. the CT scanners, LINAC, on-treatment imaging, et cetera.
Tal: What made you want to get into physics?
Joe: Now you’re making me use my way-back machine. I guess I would have to narrow it down to three things at a really early age: astronomy (just looking up at the sky), magnets (which are cool at any age), and a fascination with things just crashing into one another. I subsequently became obsessed with meteorology to the point where I was making weather reports daily and posting them on the classroom door. Incidentally I didn’t end up “specializing” in either meteorology or astronomy, but these early interests were springboards into studying (particle) physics and mathematics later in life. To this day I still love a great meteor shower, looking up at the moon, or spending hours a day on Wunderground.com
Tal: In science fiction books, scientists are often presented as characters with no sense of humor. I think that’s why Andy Weir’s The Martian was so beloved by the scientific community, because it presented hard science side by side with toilet humor. It was something I wanted to capture in Sylvia. She’s a quantum physicist, but one who’s also happy to drop a fart joke at any given moment. As a professional physicist, how much of a role does humor play into your daily work life? Can you cite any examples?
Joe: It’s funny you ask that. When I think back on the influences that shaped my personality as a scientist (and just a regular person), I think of Peter Venkman (Bill Murray’s character in Ghostbusters) and Chris Knight (Val Kilmer’s character in Real Genius). Perhaps it was just a function of watching and rewatching these movies at a really mentally malleable age, but both characters made the prospect of being a scientist seem like something really cool to aspire to.
???I think having a good sense of humor allows you to deal with the absurdity, randomness, beauty, and cruelty of the universe in a way that complements science’s attempt to establish some sort of framework for all that. I think taking oneself too seriously is a hazard in both scientific pursuit and life’s pursuits. After all, what’s the point if you can’t have a good laugh every now and then?