Point B (a teleportation love story)

by Drew Magary

  She collapsed on Anna’s shoulder as they stood together by a great bay window in the Bamerts’ opulent beach house living room. Everything in the house, except for them, was immaculate.

  “I’m so sorry, mom,” she whispered to Sandy.

  “It’s too late. What do we do, now, Anna? What do we do?”

  “Mom, Jason Kirsch killed Sarah.”

  Sandy let out a scream that shot through Anna like gamma radiation, tearing at her insides. Distending and mutating them. “Everything is broken,” her mom wailed. She kept saying it over and over.

  “Listen to me, mom: they’re after us, but I’m gonna destroy them first. I have a plan.”

  “No.”

  “I have something they want and I’m gonna use it against them.”

  Sandy let go and shook her head.

  “No no no no no. You’re seventeen. You’ve thrown everything away.”

  “I don’t have a choice. They’ve made this world what it is.”

  “You think I want the world to be like this? You think I wouldn’t try to burn it all down and start again if I could? I can’t, Anna. No one can. There is evil in the world, Anna, and it’s its own force of nature. All you can do is build your own life, build your own good to keep the evil out. That’s what I tried to do but you’re gonna let it claim the both of us.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Can you? Look at you. You look like just fell off a cement mixer.”

  “Actually it was a container truck.”

  “Always with the goddamn jokes, Anna. Even now, you can’t be serious.”

  “Mom, you have no idea how serious I feel right now.”

  “You’re not ready for this and I’m not ready for you to try. You had all my faith and all of my hope, Anna. Don’t you understand that? I trusted you with that hope. I trusted you.”

  “You still can.”

  “No, I can’t. You’re a child. You need to accept that and stop this, right now.”

  “No. Not this time.”

  Sandy grabbed her arm, squeezing it like a blood pressure monitor sleeve and setting Anna’s road rash aflame once more. “No.”

  “Mom, I have to.”

  “You’re coming with me. This isn’t up for debate.”

  Anyone can rebel against a shitty parent. Whatever open rebellion Anna displayed as a child had been, up until this point, benign in nature. Common. She talked back. She pouted. She wore things Sandy didn’t want her to wear. It fell well within the parameters of standard teenage revolt. But Anna had never dared venture beyond such acts in front of Sandy, because Sandy was a good mom and, when it came to vital matters, her authority became supreme and their relationship as mother and daughter came to the forefront with a stunning alacrity.

  Like other moms, Sandy also had an appalling knack for being right; for barging into a child’s brain and convincing them at the deepest level that a mother’s truth is the only truth, no matter how much you fight and claw against it. Anna was only seventeen. It was true. Everyone on Earth knew who Anna Huff was now, and what they knew was probably bad. Any kid could rebel against an indifferent jackass like Edgar Bennett. But it took a certain gall—not necessarily admirable gall, either—to rebel against Sandy. Sandy almost certainly knew better. She had given everything to her children and only had one of them left to show for it. Going against her now would be insensitive, disloyal, and ungrateful.

  “I’m not going with you, Mom. Look at me.”

  Sandy looked. Anna had arresting eyes of her own. Growing up is when you go from faking confidence to having it outright. In Anna’s eyes now, there was nothing but the earned confidence and impenetrable resolve of a woman twice her age.

  “I have to go away for a little bit. Stay here for now. Paul’s family has a house outside of Cleveland that they never use, where you’ll be safe. He’ll take you there soon.”

  “I don’t wanna go to Cleveland,” Sandy told her.

  “Few people ever do. Go with Paul and I’ll see you again when it’s over.”

  “When what’s over?”

  “You’ll see. I have to do this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not gonna let the world have its way with me. I’ve got a plan, and no one’s gonna get in the way of it. Not even you. Let me go.”

  “Anna.”

  “Let me go. You can’t hang onto me forever, and you know it.”

  Sandy did as she was told. “You know, when you and Sarah were young, I always complained that you two never listened. But I guess there comes a time where everything flips and it’s the parent who never listens.”

  “Listen to me now,” Anna said. “I can do this.”

  “I just love you so much, honey.”

  “I love you too, Mom. This won’t be the last time you see me. Believe that.”

  “Okay. But one more hug.”

  “One.”

  Sandy took Anna in her arms and squeezed extra tight. When this was over, Anna was gonna hug her mom a lot more than she used to.

  “Meantime," Sandy whispered, "Send your mother a postcard, will you?”

  “I will.”

  Anna ported out and left Sandy Huff alone once more, looking out upon a deserted, frozen shore.

  FOUR MONTHS LATER

  DEAN’S RESIDENCE

  Before being accepted to Druskin Academy, Asmi Naru had never gotten in trouble as a student. Despite her predilection for huffing glue and fighting people, she had never been sent to an administrator’s office, nor ever been denied privileges, nor ever had a teacher send an angry email to her parents regarding misbehavior. She had never been given detention. She was never tardy. She never faked sick. She was a clever troublemaker. When she was fifteen, a stranger online called her a “whore.” Asmi challenged him to meet her in Luton so that she could kick his ass. He agreed, and then she did.

  But no one ever caught her. Her permanent record was spotless. Until Anna Huff came along.

  The investigation had commenced immediately after Anna disappeared from campus. PINE agents stormed into Room 24 and took everything. They flipped over the mattresses, punched holes in the walls, and pried under floorboards that hadn’t been disturbed for over a century. They were no kinder to Asmi’s own possessions, manhandling her clothes, rummaging through her supplies and confiscating her Druskin-issued electronics, all of which scanned clean. They never found the notes. PINE was aggressive but sloppy. If only they had thought to examine the other rooms in Sewell.

  They never found Anna’s doctored PortPhone either, which had its own separate hiding spot. If only they had bothered to raid Gould House. Ah, but Jamie Burton had a pristine reputation among Druskin faculty. Volunteering to walk their dogs only burnished his teacher’s pet rep further, plus it gave him access to his resident faculty member’s mud room any time he wanted, which was useful for stashing contraband where no one might look.

  Asmi didn’t get off so easy. During the raid, one PINE agent asked Asmi where she was from. When she told him, “England, you piece of shit,” he called her a liar, smacked her, and then spat on her.

  Vick was somehow even less kind. He summoned Asmi to his office to hiss and jab at her with his angry finger. He threatened to have her student visa revoked. He demanded to know where Anna had left the notes Lara had given her. Asmi, shaken but unbowed, fiercely maintained her innocence. Vick put her on ‘stricts anyway. He summoned other girls to his office to account for Asmi’s whereabouts the night she saved Anna from drowning. None of them had a clue about anything. Vick put all of them on ‘stricts too.

  The persecution went on for months. Sometimes PINE agents ported directly into Asmi’s room at night. Her parents called Vick to complain about the harassment but Vick, predictably, didn’t give a shit.

  Finally, consigned to the dean’s office for another round of torment, Asmi asked Vick if there was something, anything she could do to end the interrogations. All she wanted was to be left alone. The dean, sporting a
scar on his back from a nasty puncture wound he suffered at the hands of Anna Huff, was more than happy to take out some of his anger on his assailant’s former roommate. Yes, there is something you can do to help remedy the situation, he told her. She was to show up at his residence at 7pm on a Wednesday night, dressed lightly. She was to tell no one.

  When the time came, Vick opened the door of his house with that nauseating half-grin and led Asmi down into his foul and dusty basement. He cracked open the vault-like door to his lab and ordered her to stand on the black X on the floor. Brendan McClear labored away in silence nearby. Vick sat at his laptop and banged away at the keys, leaving Asmi to roast in his silence. The way Vick used silence was impressively cruel. The whole room quivered with his unspoken fury. It was not a silence you could trust.

  Asmi knew what she was getting into when she agreed to Bamert and Anna’s plan, but that didn’t make this moment any more pleasant. Anna didn’t (couldn’t, really) tell Asmi what the experiments felt like, but Asmi had heard enough detail through whispers from other girls, always girls, who had been punished similarly. Everything was going to burn. Asmi had seen a man burning once when she was visiting her grandparents back in Pakistan. One minute she was walking with her grandmother, and the next a living flame was screeching past her. She never forgot his screams. She wondered if she’d scream the same way when Vick did whatever it was he was gonna do to her.

  Vick dialed up PortSys headquarters and told Asmi to grab a four-kilogram kettle bell resting on the floor. The familiar voice of Jason Kirsch came over the video call. Asmi listened intently, trying to divine any specific details of Kirsch’s location. The Chief Creative Officer didn’t have to oversee these tests personally, of course. But he often did. If there was a chance to torture someone, even via remote, Jason Kirsch wasn’t one to pass on the opportunity.

  Vick pointed an external camera at Asmi and opened up the wormhole. She stepped forward and was instantly greeted with scorching pain, the front of her body rendered into hot vapor. Time died off and she was trapped in a quantum hellstate, every particle around her weaponized and digging through her. Then the wormhole spat her out and she fell to the ground, shaking.

  “She failed,” Vick told Jason.

  “We have a year for this, but I don’t want to cut it close. I’ll be in Singapore next week. Bring her back for testing even if I’m not here.”

  “Will do.” He turned to Asmi, who was clutching at her body in a horrible fright. She was intact but shredded on the inside.

  “You can leave,” he told her. “Come back next Wednesday.”

  “And no one will bother me again?”

  He said nothing.

  Asmi slowly rose to her feet and opened up the lab door. As she walked out, she caught a glimpse of Anna Huff in the corner of the unfinished basement, lying in wait.

  Vick, true to character, sat in menacing silence for another twenty minutes, typing up his report summary and firing it back to PortSys headquarters. Then he shed his lab coat and went upstairs with Brendan McClear for a cup of tea, both of them failing to notice Anna along the way. She could have ported in much later to raid the lab, but she still got a twisted thrill from hiding near those two without them realizing it. Part of her prayed Vick would see her behind that door. She had a gun. Nothing would have pleased her more than a chance to use it on him.

  Vick had left the lab door open. Anna slipped past its threshold and grabbed the little white camera she had taped to the inside of Vick’s desk lamp the week before, prying the bug off the blazing hot shade and fastening a freshly charged one back into position. She opened up the live stream of the camera on her new, VIP-enabled PortPhone and rolled back through footage it had just taken. The lab Vick was calling into from his laptop was windowless: a long row of technicians sitting at open desks coding away, with Jason Kirsch calling in from a secondary site, his vile face occupying its own little box. Anna scoured the footage for any hint of the lab’s location, but there was nothing. Then she plugged in a set of cheap earbuds and listened to the replay again.

  I’ll be in Singapore next week but you should bring her back for testing even if I’m not here.

  Two of the techs in the lab were talking while Jason Kirsch was giving directives, but she couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. She closed the soundproofed lab door shut and clapped to Burton’s room.

  GOULD HOUSE/MINNEAPOLIS

  Burton was sitting on his couch crocheting a doggie sweater when Anna blew in.

  “You get the footage?” he asked her.

  “Yeah, can you help me isolate audio?”

  “One moment.” Burton kept crocheting.

  “I’m gonna stab you with one of those needles.”

  “I said one moment, please.”

  She didn’t have a moment. She had just spent four months hiding out in an abandoned apartment complex in Minneapolis, rarely porting despite her VIP privileges. ShareSpaces were too dicey. Squatting out in the free zones was the best way for her to remain a dead girl. PortSys didn’t know she was alive and couldn’t track her, but she kept her guard up.

  The news cycle rebooted hundreds of times in the interim. The story of the deranged prep school gal who assaulted the Chief Creative Officer of PortSys had slipped from the collective consciousness. Vanished, just as Anna had. At first, there were a million stories about her online, all of them unfavorable. She didn’t want to read them, nor the virulent comments below. But boredom and a lack of willpower caused her to pick those digital scabs routinely. Sometimes the commenters would leave flower emojis to pay their respects to her and to rage at PortSys for framing her, and that would make her smile. Someone even photoshopped SAVE ANNA onto a picture of a water tower, which made her laugh out loud. Another group of commenters espoused a theory that Anna Huff was not dead, but in fact still alive and well and hiding out in Argentina. Argentina would have been a better idea than Minnesota. She broke into laughter again when other replies said the theory was absurd.

  But so many more comments celebrated Anna’s death, often in gif form. Those comments left a lasting, insidious sting. The certainty that Anna didn’t do anything wrong was little salve to her when she knew so many others—millions, even—weren’t as certain. You can only laugh so much at all the idiots before you come to realize that they have you vastly outnumbered. At the r/Conquistadors forum, K15 christened the date of her demise as Huff Day to commemorate the occasion. He disappeared online for weeks thereafter, never posting. Maybe he was dead.

  Good.

  Vick sent an email blast to Druskin students and alumni about how the school wouldn’t tolerate hate, and the copy made her boil. She could tolerate hate plenty right now, especially for him. That was a productive hate. So deep and so right. Hate gave her some semblance of control over that black curtain of depression.

  The stories and obits about Anna faded, but she still didn’t want too many people spotting her out in the wild. Not for now, at least. She yearned for companionship: if not Lara or Bamert, then her mom, or poor Sarah, or even an imaginary younger sister. But Anna Huff was on her own, left to softly sing herself to sleep at night for company and for comfort.

  Her daydreams were her only friend. Honestly, they probably made for better company than actual people. Her imagination had grown a touch kinder now, not as eager to sabotage everything. Her brain was behaving itself. Getting stronger. Doing as it was told. She imagined coming out of hiding to destroy PortSys and then sitting down for an in-depth interview with Katy Wagner about it, mouthing her answers while she tossed and turned at night. In this apartment, she was strangely content to listen to her mind. She had gotten better at that nifty trick, with grudging thanks to Druskin. Her mind was now her ideal sanctuary.

  Sandy, hiding out in Cleveland, sent Anna an e-postcard for her 18th birthday. Anna returned the favor by dropping a real postcard of two men ice fishing on Lake Minnetonka—unsigned, with a stamp—into a mailbox for a portcarrier to deliver. B
amert had a full sheet cake delivered to her doorstep, but that was as much “time” with loved ones as Anna got. The best she could do otherwise was to slip into that shadow dimension with her older sister. When Anna was younger and Sandy had to go wash dishes at odd hours, it was Sarah who had to cook Anna dinner, read her bedtime stories, and tuck her in at night. Come morning, it was Sarah who made Anna Bisquick pancakes and walked her to the bus stop, because Sandy Huff was still so exhausted from her night shift. With no one else in the Minneapolis apartment, Anna felt freer to talk to Sarah out loud and not feel self-conscious about it. She told Sarah about Lara and about the terrifying bond between them.

  “I’d tell you that I wish you were here, but you are. I know you are. When this is all over, they’ll make a movie about it. Maybe it’ll premiere at Cannes. Wouldn’t that be some shit?”

  She maintained a tight radius at all times. Apart from the first daring excursion into Vick’s basement toward the end of her stay, she only ported out when she needed a quick charge and/or a computer terminal over at the Minneapolis Central Library, still open and located in the otherwise abandoned Nicollet Mall. The library was a miracle, staffed by a group of elderly women who zealously guarded its stacks, keeping the books locked behind glass to prevent theft. They never recognized Anna, who always popped in with a stolen “Uff Da!” scarf wrapped around her face so that she could tend to her affairs while incognito. No one raised an eye at her keeping the scarf on because the library still let in enough of the Minnesota frost to have its own ambient chill. Everyone at the library was more interested in books than people anyway.

  Anna didn’t dare step outside otherwise, lest she get spotted by PINE agents or taken down by a stray bullet. Bamert had a port delivery service bring her bottled water, a battery-powered space heater, toilet paper, tampons, a portable generator, top ramen, chili cheese Fritos, energy drinks, and other vital snacks that satisfied her stickiest cravings. He also sent her one of Edgar’s handguns along with a deck of cards to shuffle, which she did for hours at a time. No card games. No solitaire. Just swiftly rearranging aces and queens between her busy little fingers. At night, she could hear small bombs going off outside. She was never sure who set them off—Conquistadors, Black Shard copycats, some terrorist sect—but what did it matter? Anyone with a bomb was a bad guy. No one in the free zones was ever safe. She couldn’t sleep with earplugs at night because she needed to be able to hear in case someone else ported in, perhaps with bad intentions. Thus, she heard everything: bumps and rattles and every other trick of the night. Even when it was quiet, she couldn’t relax because she knew it wouldn’t stay that way.